Powering Down On Authority (English and Dutch) - Avital Ronell

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maybe not so friendly, nor merely discursive (because it’s too close for comfort). Kojève, in any case, proves impatient with the genealogical and Oedipal tracks that psychoanalysis will have laid down—perhaps even with the exorbitant authority of psychoanalysis over political analyses in weighted theoretical settings—and decisively covers over them.

      The one thing I would have liked to have seen the severed pair of political philosophy and psychoanalysis get together on—and here their allied tendencies would have encouraged us to no end—involves new itineraries of pleasure and politics in conjunction with a relentless aestheticization of the political, the historical tendency that both Freud and Kojève have exposed, if not ripped apart. Even though he mutes the psychoanalytic program, Kojève relies on the draw of desire—you may say it’s Hegelian, I say it’s psychoanalysis (and then, depending on the intellectual climate, may whip out a what’s-the-difference-nowadays lecture)—in order to push forward with his political analysis. Kojève insinuates desire into the actualization of justice: his work brings to light the pleasure of judging, a pleasure as acutely felt and specifically rendered as sexual and aesthetic pleasures, emphasizing the blissed-out affect that art evokes. The human psyche is invested in and inspired by the idea of justice and is outfitted with a properly juridical interestedness, which is as personal as it is pervasive (that is why, I’ll venture spontaneously, television offers up so may juridical dramas, to prime and parasite the personal investment in law, the delight in representations of juridical eventfulness). One would have to roll back to Kant to see how the recharging of desire works here, in the sphere of judgment. Kojève puts the pleasure back in judgment whereas Kant directs the explicit thrill of judging to the aesthetic domain, calming it down with disinterestedness, abolishing the privative in order properly to “enliven” judgment and to resurrect it from the numbing fields of the two prior critiques. Jump-started in the third critique (Kritik der Urteilskraft or Critique of the Power of Judgment, 1790), judgment comes to life but within the limits of a safety zone secured by constant philosophical inspection and formal artistic communicability, a prime inflection of Kant’s theory of art. Disinterested pleasure, which is neither privative nor possessive—which cannot put a price on art—instigates the urge to communicate and share the formal experience attributable to the work of art. Art cannot be subjected to any concept (Begriff) or interest, but opens up a field of subjective interplay, encouraging the free-play of the faculties, as the philosopher puts it.

      Kojève carries out a double move when dealing with the primal principle of cohesion that binds the state to a paternal metaphorology, for his aim is both to separate family and state and to disable the foundational myth of family. It is of some consequence for Kojève to disjoin paternal authority from the state and locks it solely into familial structures. The family depends on paternal ontology (Father having been set as cause, author, origin and source of what is) by default. Father, who figures the authority of the past, maintains himself only by means of ontological “inertia.” Kojève attempts to off the Father, who cannot be easily removed, with a silencer. No one will note the big bang of paternal jockeying because Father mutely survives himself. Father stays the execution to the extent that lassitude has overtaken the family “vote” and nothing energetically moves in to replace or refute him. His imputed authority accrues to a default position. Here again one might patch into Freudian circuits where the sons mobilize for the purpose of bumping off the Father. The overthrow of the paternal, according to Freudian patterns, gives rise to even more intense displays of authority squired by remorse. Kojève is perhaps equally as severe as Freud, if less inclined to construe a narrative explication that accounts for the fantasy of paternal demise. The Father only ever held the key to authority by means of a nearly arbitrary shortfall, the type of inert passivity that Kojève ontologizes. Inert and essentially absent (complaints about absent fathers are only empirical derivatives of this essential feature), Father has a lock on the past even though he was ever always on his way out and off the field of familial-social intensities.

      Family and State obey distinct hierarchies of authority to which they are deemed answerable. They belong to different transversals of time, the overlaps of which Kojève deems largely illusory. Still, derivations and signals sent across the divide of regularly disbanding typologies are not uncommon. Father mixes in where he was evicted or merely tolerated, and memory traces of early identifications abound. Kojève uses the notion of authority as a brace against the wages of an inassimilable history, as something that could override the blanking out of representation (where only a neutral gleam can be detected), and a relation to disabled time (when things go into hiding or a lull, when one feels pressed but nothing moves, except for an ominous slo-mo tic-toc of finitude’s metronome). In a sense, we are asked to examine the haunting qualities of a history that cannot be integrated, qualities that resist being simply absorbed and quieted down. Still, one would have wanted Kojève to take a stab at Father Time, to articulate what brings time down upon us in terrifying ways, what makes the past recur and stand before us as the sign of what’s ahead, and so on and back and forth, with childhood crawling through the temporal cracks at moments of extreme vulnerability to said authority. One’s experience of time is not as linear as Kojève would have us imagine: when things make one tremble and one is regressed to voiceless episodes of despair, time flips and turns you into a child without the means to represent your anguish or push against the squeeze of severe proportions. Childhood is never simply behind us, but jumps ahead at times, startling us with its incessant returns and uncontrolled gag orders. Thus traditionally, the figuring of time has been paternalized. These nonlinear riptides of temporality are outside of Kojève’s domain, perhaps for good reason, given his materialist rap sheet, and understandably so if he wants to manifest an intention and a plan without formal or aprioristic or ontological weights. Anyone subjected to time, bound to the temporal destiny on which Hölderlin broke—his extreme experience of sudden endings that had him sitting speechlessly in Mr. Zimmer’s Tübingen tower—is scorched by a notion of “finitude” and left bedazzled by the conspiracy, or authority, of father and time. Let us simply establish a dossier for this area of speculative inquiry and wonder how Father Time tics and tocs to make his offspring lose out to the authority and dissolution of time, a no-doubt-generalizable fate given over to the persecutory invasiveness that Kojève seeks to contain. Hence it is the schedules under which one labors in excess of Kojève’s program—timetables of compensatory aggression, the itineraries of historical payback, the beat of totalitarian return, whether subtle or overt—that I hope to highlight. Let us bear in mind that poetry joins philosophy and theology in attaching the very possibility of time-flow to the paternal, to the godhead as father, or in divine eschatology.

      Authority also turns Arendt toward the vacant lot of divine abandonment, where humankind is left to fend for itself in the draft of monotheistic withdrawal. The gods have fled and the one deity left for us has bailed or retreated into mute indifference. Somehow, authority (whether viewed as a form of liberal democracy or as one profile among several secular totalitarianisms) is summoned to fill in the blanks with an ontotheological arrangement of replacement parts. For both Arendt and Kojève, the distress of losing authority convenes core survival issues that need inventive arbitration as well as, in some essential ways, the recall to the philosophical of the question of the political, allowing the political to receive a fuller range of theoretical considerations.

      To get some traction on the problem of thinking the political and the philosophical precisely where they turn away from each other, one might consider the plight of Jimmy Stewart in Rope (1948). In Hitchcock’s allegory of pedagogical hate crimes, the teacher discovers—weakened and shaking, whisky in hand—that his Nietzsche course has been translated into murderous consequence by literalizing, Nazi-identified students. Or one might revert to the still stinging history of the great majority of the philosophical faculty in Germany, who supported the Third Reich. There is no doubt that Heidegger’s desire for, and enactment of historical praxis, which was promoted in terms of Geschick as a way of making history reinitiate itself, remains unprecedented among philosophers. Not even Plato signed up with, or for, the actualized State. What happens when philosophers or their outsourced affiliates, so-called intellectuals, leave the reserve or relax the gadfly function of which they were relentless practitioners? These instatements and sign-ups invite further discussion and a carefully delivered idiom by which

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