Mario Cutajar

Asked by a liberal:

Why have American liberals acquiesced in President Bush’s catastrophic foreign policy? Why have they so little to say about Iraq, about Lebanon, or about reports of a planned attack on Iran? Why has the administration’s sustained attack on civil liberties and international law aroused so little opposition or anger from those who used to care most about these things? Why, in short, has the liberal intelligentsia of the United States in recent years kept its head safely below the parapet?

The answer (here) remains relevant given that these same liberals are now apologists for President Obama’s seamless continuation of his predecessor’s policies.

In March, the Birbeck Institute for the Humanities at the University of London organized a symposium “On the Idea of Communism.” Speakers included the usual suspects: Alain Badiou, Michael Hardt, Toni Negri, Jacques Ranciere, Slavoj Zizek and others. A summary with videos of the proceedings is available here.

Jean-Luc Nancy’s contribution, “Communism, the Word” merits close reading. Nancy is interested in both the etymology of the word and the sense that exceeds its meaning: “Actually, [the] historical data [about the use made of the word] are unable to give us the origin and the meaning—or, even better, the sense—of “communism”. No history, no etymology either, can produce anything like sense. ” For Nancy, communism is “the ontological truth of the common, that is the relation—which ultimately is nothing else than sense.”

Communism, therefore, means the common condition of all the singularities of subjects, that is of all the exceptions, all the uncommon points whose network makes a world (a possibility of sense). It does not belong to the political. It comes before any politics. It is what gives to politics an absolute requirement: the requirement to open the common space to the common itself— that is neither to the private nor to the collective, neither to separation nor to totality—but without permitting any political achievement of the common itself, any kind of making a substance of it. Communism is a principle of activation and limitation of politics.

In that sense, the “spectre” of communism haunts not capitalism specifically but the very notion of  “common” sense.

Per Martin Puchner in Apr/May Bookforum:

On November 7, three days after Election Day, Alain Badiou gave a lecture at New York University on theater and philosophy. The discussion afterward, conducted in a mixture of French and English, quickly turned to the president elect. “Obama?” Badiou replied. “As actor or as politician?” When the audience laughed, he explained that he did not mean the distinction negatively. While it was too soon to judge Obama as politician, Badiou stipulated, we could already judge him as actor, one who had broken with modern modes of self presentation by returning to a classical style: sober, thoughtful, deliberate.

Above all, the flu that has changed the life (and death) of our country is a cry to the world to denounce the systematic and merciless pillage that we, millions of Mexicans, have suffered over the last 27 years—years that today have turned us into the source of infection for all of humanity. What happened was the logical, catastrophic consequence of the irresponsible policies that day-by-day pushed into poverty one hundred million of us, leaving the hungry majority with no other option than migration or narco-trafficking.

Jaime Avilés