Theory & Event

Theory and Event 9.4 is comprised of a symposium on truth, three essays and four reviews. Although it would be a brave editor who would try to find a common thread within these fecund but disparate publications, they are collectively ripe with criticisms of the dire conditions found in contemporary life. This is exemplified for them by, for example, the Bush administration; lies pedaled to justify the war in Iraq; the state of the American media, and environmental decay. Yet many of the contributors are also eager to sustain rays of hope, whether these lie in repairing a pluralistic public sphere, reconsidering the material and cultural practices of consumer culture or pursuing more symbolically destructive strategies by fragmented subjectivities. Collectively they draw on a rich heritage of political theory and continental philosophy to help them in their critical and reconstructive ambitions.

The centerpiece of this issue is the symposium on truth. As the titles of its main papers make clear, the issues at stake here are not simply (sic) philosophical ones regarding the nature of truth as such or epistemological ones concerning the possibility of true knowledge. Jeremy Elkins (discussing “Revolutionary Politics”), Andrew Norris (considering “Cynicism, Skepticism and the Politics of Truth”) and Linda Zerilli (on “Truth and Politics”) and concerned about the relationship between truth and political life. They are joined in this concern by Richard Flathman and Tracy Strong when they respond to and comment on the papers. As Strong summarizes their general orientation: they are all distressed that truth is becoming a casualty of the American polity and they wonder in different ways whether ‘agonal’ politics is sufficient to bring truth back into politics, as well as worrying about the effects of the media and postmodern tendencies towards relativism that make this such a challenging task. As Zerilli poignantly asks, with help from Arendt and the hermeneutical tradition: even if democratic citizens are able to discover truth, are they in a position politically to do anything with it?

In his essay “Funeral Rites, Queer Politics”, Roy Wagner offers a close reading of Genet’s text interspersed with Freud’s account of mourning and melancholia. From this fertile intercutting he elicits a sense of complex identifications that occur in the gap between desire and grief, when the moment of melancholic identification is deferred and displaced following object loss. It is this gap that forms the crucial and intriguing space for Wagner’s inquiry. It suggests to him a productive political moment, when shattered identities yield a fleeting opportunity for a queer, “psycho-political technique” whereby unstable subjectivities might be reconfigured. (One might perhaps recall here Bill Connolly’s similarly provocative “half-second delay” derived, in this case, from neuroscience.) Wagner cites Genet’s excited, intense and desperate subjectivity, whose fragmented interlude encourages violent disruption of the symbolic order. This is the moment he wants, with help from Genet and Brecht, to emphasize in opposition to what he sees as a therapeutic telos in Freud and Butler. The disruptive technique Wagner describes is then illustrated by and applied to two examples, AIDS and the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, where grief and bereavement suggest that a “complex identification array” can emerge briefly to yield a “sub-subjective nano-politics”. Evanescent, contingent and seemingly doomed, Wagner suggests that such moments might yet proliferate across a mesh of “fine motions” sustained by hope.

In “War and its Other: Between Bataille and Derrida”, Nick Mansfield begins with a discussion of Bush’s 2006 Patriot Act and its elision of the wars on terror and drugs. The collapse of differences between national hostility and social disobedience, or between terrorists and criminals, suggests that common agencies and techniques can be used; that warfare and policing are justified by the same arguments and are analogous or continuous; that domestic life becomes militarized, and that the distinction between war and peace disappears. It is this configuration that interests Mansfield and he asks how we are to conceptualize this new conjunction of war and peace. Although Foucault and Clausewitz are initially helpful in understanding their continuity, he finds them obscure at just the key moment when the relationship needs to be...