Ghost in the Wire

Ghost has been a little quiet - eerily quiet for such a haunted place - mostly because I've been engaged in some fiery fun over at Long Sunday, in an exchange/debate that I actually think is well worth the read-through.

What I'm posting today started as a comment over at LS, and has been expanded and edited below. The whole thing was inspired by a post by Jodi arguing for a notion of solidarity as the fundamental attribute of the political, an argument in which she turns to Zizek for support. Now I think that the investigation of solidarity is well worth the effort, well worth time - even if I am unsure if I can follow it completely (my thoughts were ill-formed, inchoate, and then I realized that Adam Thurschwell was a step ahead of me when it came to thinking my thoughts, which was and is an eerie, phantasmatic phenomenon), but I absolutely loathe the Zizek excerpt that Jodi uses (it comes from his contribution to The Neighbor). Here it is, as he attempts to take down Levinas:

In contrast to love, justice begins when I remember the faceless many left in shadow in this privileging of the One. Justice and love are thus structurally incompatible: justice, not love, has to be blind; it must disregard the privileged One whom I 'really understand.' What this means is that the Third is not secondary: it is always-already here, and the primordial ethical obligation is toward this Third who is not here in the face-to-face relationship. the one in shadow, like the absent child of a love-couple. ...

Every preempting of the Other in the guise of his or her face relegates the Third to the faceless background. And the elementary gesture of justice is not to show respect for the face in front of me, to be open to its depth, but to abstract from it and refocus onto the faceless Thirds in the background. It is only such a shift of focus onto the Third that effectively uproots justice, liberating it from the contingent umbilical link that renders it 'embedded' in a particular situation. In other words, it is only such a shift onto the Third that grounds justice in the dimension of universality proper.

Now I'm sorry, but this is just insipid.

I think we can look at this past weekend's big event - Dick Cheney mistaking his nimble 78 year old friend for a quail and shooting him in the face - and see in it the perfect allegory for this administration: trigger-happy and incompetent.

Having recently involved myself (in a cursory manner) in a conversation that, yet again, grouped the "poststructuralists" together as being idealist or non-materialist, I have started to think that perhaps there's no longer much point in entertaining these critiques, other than to suggest a corrective and let the issue go thereafter. Certainly the anti-materialist label has been tossed around so much when it comes to figures like Derrida that it hardly seems as if having the conversation again is going to be productive.

Still, materiality is a vexing issue. Such a trump card is this term, with all its connotation of concern for the really real world, the world out there, the world in which thought might "matter," where politics happens, etc. It's such a tired fantasy, but like any fantasy its seductive force remains, like a siren. From a safe distance, it's hard to watch (read) over and over again, but you get used to it. Ship after ship, piloted by academics sailing towards the enchanting call of the material, the dream that the Real might be accessible, only to watch them crash and drown on the rocks of representation. And many of them never know they've run aground.

Maybe this ground is precisely what materiality is, the sedimentation of representation, and all the bodies that went with it.