Author: Ophelia Benson

Harry’s Place is always very good value, you know. Each item posted is one you want to know more about. This one is certainly interesting.

At last week’s NUS conference, the AWL reports that the SWP joined the islamist Federation of Student Islamic Societies (FOSIS) – a Muslim Association of Britain front – in a walkout when guest speaker Houzan Mahmoud addressed the Conference.
Why would the SWP join FOSIS in a walkout?…Her key error appears to have been that she is the UK head of the anti-occupation Organisation of Women’s Freedom in Iraq which is a vocal opponent of Islamism. The fact that she has campaigned to bring human rights abuses by US and UK troops to public attention wasn’t sufficient to save her from the walkout; she evidently blotted her copybook by condemning the Baathist and Islamist terrorists for which the SWP cheerlead.

How repulsive. I wish Trotsky could come back and slap them upside the head. If you want to cheer yourselves up, take a look at the Organisation of Women’s Freedom in Iraq.

Okay, we need a little amusement to cheer us up after hearing the news about the pope. Although some people are pointing out that it’s good news really: that it’s the Vatican shooting itself in the foot, that now people will realize how authoritarian it is after all. But I don’t know – I’m never very convinced by that kind of thing. Partly because it never seems to happen. People seem so happy to say ‘Oh how sweet, a nice authoritarian pope again.’

So we could do with a laugh. I know I could. I’m wrestling with revisions, and I’m finding this patch a struggle. Paragraph by paragraph, sentence by sentence, word by word, I’m having to drag them out by force, one at a time. I much prefer it when I get an idea and just re-write a page or two in one go. But on the other hand, I can always cheer myself up enormously by reflecting that I’m not having to revise such utter unmitigated bollocks as this:

What I will focus on here is Butler’s critique in Precarious Life of Georgio Agamben’s concept of the “homo sacer,” or “bare life,” which identifies the discursive limits of the Foucauldian concept of power as the sovereign exception over biopolitical life. I will argue that Butler, whose concept of the performative subject presupposes power to be the totalizing ground by which human subjects are made intelligible, perhaps unfairly rejects Agamben’s critique. His critique of power, I will argue, is much more in dialogue with Butler than she seems to allow, and arguably raises the stakes of Butlerian identity politics by illuminating the possibility that certain political subjects can be – in fact are necessarily, according to Agamben – erased entirely from biopower relations, or humanity itself, through what Agamben calls the sovereign exception over biopolitical human life.

Good stuff, don’t you think? Notice, just for one thing, how the hapless reviewer uses the identical emptily pompous phrase – ‘the sovereign exception over biopolitical human life’ – twice in the space of two sentences. (Okay not absolutely identical – he adds a word in the second appearance.) But notice more, oh so much more, the way the vocabulary is used as a little invisible pump to inflate some very obvious ideas into something that is meant to sound – like more than that. Like a great deal more than that. Wouldn’t you think people would eventually stop doing this kind of thing? Because people like me see them doing it and point it out and laugh raucously? Wouldn’t you think they would, some day, finally, embarrass themselves? I would. But they don’t. Why is that?

Judith Butler later clarifies Foucault’s theory of power, expanding upon its merely implied strategies for subjective resistance to dominant technologies of power and making the important intervention that subjectivity is not just an expression of the “top down” subjugation of an “individual” but is intrinsically performative. The performative subject is both inaugurated by power relations and at the same time is constantly recreating its discursive, epistemological law in dangerously supplemental, disruptive ways. Butler’s The Psychic Life of Power (Stanford UP 1997) explores in depth what she, after Foucault, sees as the total immersion of the subject in power relations without recourse to an originary “individuality” or essentialized political identity who exists prior to the subject’s inauguration into power.

Right? Right.

Butler’s conceptualization of post-structuralist identity politics, like Foucault’s, relies on a presupposition of “power” as the matrix of intelligibility, or ground by and through which biopolitical subjectivity is inaugurated and “exists.” This grounding in power, for Butler, extends to the very body of the subject. Recent criticism of Foucault’s concept of power by Georgio Agamben in his book Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Stanford 1995), however, convincingly argues that power indeed has an outside – namely its “sovereign exception” over what Agamben calls “bare life,” or the homo sacer.

And so on. It’s all like that. None of it is any different. It’s all the same. It starts like that, and it goes on like that, and it goes on like that some more, and it ends like that. Somebody – a guy named Don Moore, in fact, a nice wholesome name, sounds like a baseball player – wrote it like that, presumably on purpose. Maybe it’s a parody. Only I doubt it, because if it were a parody, it would probably be a lot better, so as not to give the game away. It would be much less repetitive, for one thing. The baseball player is a graduate student in English and ‘Cultural Studies.’ I was just being abusive about the phrase ‘Cultural Studies’ in conversation with my colleague a couple of hours ago, and that was before I read the bottom of this review where it tells us that the writer of it is in ‘Cultural Studies.’ I already hated the very phrase (I have that reaction that Goebbels talked about, you know the one). Now I hate it even more.

I wonder what Ratzinger thinks of Cultural Studies.

I listened to last week’s ‘Start the Week’ yesterday. (I always listen to it late, for some reason.) I like Andrew Marr, but I didn’t realize how much I like him until I heard Sue MacGregor filling in for him. Dang, she made a mess of it. She kept interrupting – no doubt it’s the presenter’s job to keep things moving along and on track, but Marr manages to do that without constantly cutting people off in the middle of a sentence. And worse than that, she kept getting everything wrong, misunderstanding the guests’ books and what they said to her, and saying the silliest thing she could think of. She contemptuously told Jeffrey Sachs, who’s just written a book about how to end poverty, that we were always chucking money at Africa. He was so annoyed he repeated it back to her about eight times during the show, along with some full explanations of why it was bullshit. Come back soon, Andrew. Yes I know there’s an election, but all the same.

One of the guests was Cristina Odone. I wrote a N&C about her once, a long, long time ago. I don’t remember the details, but it was something foolish she said about religion, I remember that much. And she said more foolish things on Start the Week. She’s one of the ‘You may not say critical things about religion’ crowd. She’s very cross with her old colleagues at the New Statesman because of their cover story about the pope. She didn’t actually say that what the NS said – that the pope did more to spread AIDS in Africa than prostitution and the trucking industry combined, I believe – is not true, just that it’s bad to say it. It makes religious people angry, to see that kind of thing. Therefore we mustn’t say it. Oh. So we should just watch in cheerful silence then while the Vatican tells people not to use condoms, and even tells them that condoms don’t block the virus, which is a lie? Well the hell with that. And it’s not the NS that is wrong to point it out, it’s Odone who is wrong to rebuke them for doing so. This kind of authoritarian nonsense is increasing, it seems to me – this self-righteous ‘how dare you criticise religion’ rhetoric. Well how dare you not criticise it? Do you think the pope is right to ban condoms? If so, why? If not, why do you think we should be quiet about it?

Richard Dawkins wrote a terrific article on this subject in 2001. In it he quoted from a terrific speech by Douglas Adams.

Now, the invention of the scientific method is, I’m sure we’ll all agree, the most powerful intellectual idea, the most powerful framework for thinking and investigating and understanding and challenging the world around us that there is, and it rests on the premise that any idea is there to be attacked. If it withstands the attack then it lives to fight another day and if it doesn’t withstand the attack then down it goes. Religion doesn’t seem to work like that. It has certain ideas at the heart of it which we call sacred or holy or whatever. What it means is, “Here is an idea or a notion that you’re not allowed to say anything bad about; you’re just not. Why not? — because you’re not!” If somebody votes for a party that you don’t agree with, you’re free to argue about it as much as you like; everybody will have an argument but nobody feels aggrieved by it. If somebody thinks taxes should go up or down you are free to have an argument about it. But on the other hand if somebody says “I mustn’t move a light switch on a Saturday,” you say, “I respect that.”

Exactly. Just what I’m always saying. You’re just not. Why? Because you’re not!

So popes can get away with murder and we’re supposed to just sit back and take it.

The odd thing is, even as I am saying that I am thinking “Is there an Orthodox Jew here who is going to be offended by the fact that I just said that?” But I wouldn’t have thought, “Maybe there’s somebody from the left wing or somebody from the right wing or somebody who subscribes to this view or the other in economics,” when I was making the other points. I just think, “Fine, we have different opinions.” But, the moment I say something that has something to do with somebody’s (I’m going to stick my neck out here and say irrational) beliefs, then we all become terribly protective and terribly defensive and say “No, we don’t attack that; that’s an irrational belief but no, we respect it.” Why should it be that it’s perfectly legitimate to support the Labour party or the Conservative party, Republicans or Democrats, this model of economics versus that, Macintosh instead of Windows — but to have an opinion about how the Universe began, about who created the Universe… no, that’s holy? What does that mean? Why do we ring-fence that for any other reason other than that we’ve just got used to doing so?

And of course because people like Odone (and even other people, of whom one would not expect it) get indignant or more-in-sorrow-than-in-anger about it, thus making sure that we keep on being used to doing so, keep on shying away from the ring-fenced holy taboo inner sanctum, keep on not saying the pope did a hell of a lot of harm for just one guy without nuclear weapons. It’s a bad arrangement. Ring-fence that.