Nationalism, Mania, and Specters of Neoliberalism
2023; Michigan State University Press; Volume: 23; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
10.14321/crnewcentrevi.23.1.0053
ISSN1539-6630
Autores Tópico(s)Political and Economic history of UK and US
ResumoThree decades after the publication of Specters of Marx, another death knell is sounding. Three decades after Derrida bemoaned the “manic, jubilatory, and incantatory” neoliberal rhetoric heralding the death of Marx and of communism, the COVID-19 pandemic has ushered in a renewed mania on the left to declare the end of neoliberalism. And yet three decades after Derrida's most public corps-à-corps with Marx, his analysis remains disturbingly timely and hence out-of-joint. Not only does its litany of ways in which “the world goes badly” in the chapter “Usures” still paint a strikingly familiar picture of our own times—of the ravages and global inequality wrought by market liberalism, the protectionist backlash it has sparked, the ills of homelessness, the arms trade, nativist reaction, geopolitical conflict, and oppression of peoples in the Global South through the cruelty of debt. Moreover, the mania with which neoliberalism announces its triumph over the specter of communism finds its echoes today in the repeated, almost feverish assertions by a left—still in a position of weakness and reeling from defeat—that the terrain of struggle on which it has largely failed to assert itself, compared with a resurgent nationalist right, has now passed into the night of history.Are we entering a new era that disrupts or even breaks with the economization of the political and of subjectivity that is the hallmark of neoliberal governmentality? Or do we live among the specters of neoliberalism?Economist James Meadway, who worked in the office of former Shadow Chancellor John McDonell during Jeremy Corbyn's leadership of the UK Labour Party, has repeatedly declared in opinion pieces (2021a; 2021b) and on Twitter that neoliberalism is dying or dead, finished off by the expansion of state powers during the pandemic in many rich democracies where free markets had previously reigned. Meadway's argument hinges on how one defines neoliberalism: as an intellectual movement (whose boundaries are surely contested) or as the actions of national governments and international financial institutions. No doubt, there are more dimensions to the regime that go under the banner of neoliberalism—not least its character as a mode of subjectivation that generalizes market logic through internalization, as Pierre Dardot and Christian Laval (2017; 2019) have argued. Recognizing that neoliberalism is itself not selfsame but composed of heterogeneous, often contradictory elements enables one to dismantle this binary choice between ideas and actions. As economist Adam Tooze has argued (2021a), the pandemic acted as a catalyst for a shift that was beginning to put the economy and general economization in question. When Tooze asks whether the widespread economic experiments of 2020 sounded “the death knell of neoliberalism,” he is more circumspect, suggesting that claim might be advanced more narrowly of neoliberalism “as a coherent ideology of government” (2021a, 13). While neoliberalism as a “body of doctrine” may now be “shot to pieces” and as a practice of government may be eroded (2021c), what remains remarkably resilient for Tooze is a political project consisting of “a series of state interventions in the interests of capital accumulation” that disciplined labor and drove increasing class inequality (2021b).Like a number of scholars, Tooze also recognizes the authoritarian dimensions of neoliberalism (Boffo et al. 2019; Callison and Manfredi 2020; Davies 2021; Slobodian, 2018). One might argue that neoliberalism in its classic Thatcherite incarnation always was an inherently contradictory amalgam of liberalizing market logic and socially conservative illiberalism (Valluvan 2019; Waltham-Smith 2020), or, from a more deconstructive perspective, that liberalism just is always already somewhat illiberal. Its radicalization and generalization over the past 40 years has brought its autoimmune character—its tendency to divide and turn against itself—into sharper relief. What we are perhaps witnessing—both with the rise of so-called “populism” on the right and with the expansion of state powers, interventions, surveillance, and so on—is something like the increasing autonomy of neoliberalism's authoritarian superego.This brings me to the somewhat manic character of the repeated declarations that “neoliberalism is dead,” which might suggest that these death knells are themselves part of neoliberalism's mutant transformation. For Meadway, this death knell serves to dislodge the left from its somewhat complacent fixation with fighting austerity or financialization more narrowly, rather than capitalism as a whole. But in effect Meadway is attached to his thesis precisely because it provides the (arguably false) hope of being able to fight more successfully on new terrain. As such, it may be no less symptomatic of the impossibility of mourning than the repetition compulsions seen elsewhere among the Corbynite left. Writing from the other side of the Atlantic, Tooze, who is quick to point out that departures from market-liberal policies have been driven not by class antagonism or by the pressures of right populism but by the internal contradictions of the economic system, dismisses the new direction of travel as “nothing more than escalating plunder” (2021a, 16).This raises the question of whether neoliberalism may in fact exert its greatest influence in the wake of its death—that is, in the guise of a specter of neoliberalism without neoliberal nostrums. This further prompts the question of whether neoliberalism could ever be said to have been self-present. One of the strengths of Meadway's analysis is that it shows up neoliberalism's out-of-jointness: He argues that neoliberalism, far from being already there in the famously combative years of the 1980s with which it is chiefly associated, was not in fact present as such until the completion and triumph of its ruling-class offensive at the end of the 1980s (just as Derrida was collecting his thoughts on this manic triumph) and in the more overtly centrist governments of Blair and Clinton in which its victory was enjoyed. The inevitable conclusion is that neoliberalism has never coincided with itself, ideologically or temporally, and is thus in a way irreducibly marked by a kind of spectrality—which in turn precipitates the need to declare its death. Neoliberalism, we might say, conjures itself (away).But before turning to this conjuring of the ghost of neoliberalism, in the spirit of deconstruction—in the spirit of maintaining a conversation (s'entretenir) with the ghost of deconstruction that continues to haunt us, I would suggest, notwithstanding rumors of its demise in our universities—let us ask: “Is there a present of the specter” of neoliberalism (Derrida 1993, 72 [1994, 48])?1 Writing about Marxism rather than neoliberalism, Derrida describes the temporality of spectrality as a combination of a no-longer and a not-yet, of a past for which this ghost is a threat to come and a present that wants to reassure itself that the threat is past and that its return can magically be conjured away (1993, 72 [1994, 48]).The aim is to establish a clear border between the presence of the present and the phantasm “without present reality, without actuality or effectivity” (1993, 71 [1994, 47]). Yet spectrality, in Derrida's reading, is precisely what points to the irreducibility of the isolated sovereignty of presence, to the impossibility of cutting the self-identical off from the other and opposing it to “absence, non-presence, non-effectivity, in actuality, virtuality, or even the simulacrum in general” (1993, 72 [1994, 48]). How, then, to distinguish actually existing neoliberalism from the effictio of its corpse?Behind the ritual, almost obsessional formulations (1993, 261 [1994, 207]) lies perhaps an anxiety that neoliberalism might not have been banished once and for all. Derrida writes in a passage that could easily be translated to our present times: In proposing this title, Specters of Marx, I was initially thinking of all the forms of a certain haunting obsession that seems to me to organize the dominant influence on discourse today. At a time when a new world disorder is attempting to install its neo-capitalism and neo-liberalism, no disavowal has managed to rid itself of all of Marx's ghosts. Hegemony still organizes the repression and thus the confirmation of a haunting. Haunting belongs to the structure of every hegemony. (1993, 69 [1994, 45–46])It is in this context that Derrida introduces the notion of conjuration in the multiple senses of evoking the ghost, conspiring to silence that apparition, and exorcising the ghost thus convoked. As such—and this is an important point to hold onto—conjuration is a tactic for neutralizing or overturning hegemonic power (1993, 84 [1994, 58]), even if that exorcism or counter-conjuration is no less magical or irrational than the evil it seeks to destroy or disavow and may conceal its own dogmatic or occult force in theoretical formulations. Derrida starts to move here toward developing an argument that all these manic obituaries are psychological defenses against, or repressions of, the horrors of a world that is going to hell, or, otherwise put, disavowals of the failure of the postwar promise of the good life for all.A few pages later, at the start of the next chapter, Derrida will analyze this performative through the lens of Freudian mania. In what follows, I examine this framing against the backdrop of Derrida's deploying a similar framework of mourning, melancholia, and mania to characterize nationalism in the largely unpublished four-year seminar in 1984–1988 on “Nationalité et nationalisme philosophiques,” from which two of the Geschlecht essays are taken. This allows me to revisit Derrida's proposal of a New International in Specters of Marx from the specific perspective of nationalism and thereby to flesh out the limited remarks he offers on nationalist reaction and oppression in the later text by bringing in insights from the earlier unpublished discussions of both Marx and Freud, set alongside Judith Butler's reading of Freudian melancholia.Even more relevant for the linking of mania and exorcism in Specters—even more relevant than the discussion of Freudian melancholia—is the brief suggestion in the second year of the seminar that mania further be theorized through the lens of Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok's notions of the crypt and, more pertinently still for the idea of inheritance so central to Specters, the “ghost-effects” when one inherits the repressions of earlier generations.Moreover, reading this text alongside the nationalism seminar lends an added dimension to the timely noncontemporaneity of Specters mentioned at the outset, for it provides an impetus for reexamining the conjuration in the older sense of conspiracy—a confabulation [conciliabule], as he later puts it (1993, 210 [1994, 164])—between neoliberal and nationalist mania. It thus revises the hegemonic scholarly view of the mimetic-affective and group-psychological dimensions of Trumpism, according to which its manic trumping and trumpeting are a backlash against neoliberal rationality and the contemporaneity of the present. I conclude by noting the political implications of this nexus: that a progressive and anticolonialist exit from neoliberal delirium requires that we not lose touch with the spirit of Marxism three decades after the Derridean séance.The first reference to mania comes in a passage shortly after the discussion of exorcism as a performative incantation and is worth considering at length.Derrida begins with what is ironically perhaps a rather dogmatic statement on the dogmatic coronation of a new orthodoxy—something that he asserts is incontestable. Should we then also suspect Derrida of adopting, unconsciously or self-consciously, something of the manic disposition he then goes on to associate with his newly and dogmatically installed hegemonic discourse? The peroration of what follows, as we shall see, suggests that this point does not escape him.Without directly mentioning melancholia, Derrida associates the manic declarations of the death of Marxism with the trajectory that unfolds when mourning is in fact impossible. It will be necessary to look more closely at Freud's well-known essay on this topic, but for now it suffices to observe that the manic death sentences take on a ritualistic, formulaic, rhythmic quality to conjure up their phantoms. Again, without directly engaging Freud's theory, Derrida then accounts for this mania as a kind of disavowal that seeks to ward off another loss.In terms that are still recognizable three decades later, Derrida ascribes the dominance of this discourse to the alliance of political and intellectual elites, as well as telecommunications—social media in today's terms—and notes that this “techno-mediatic power” (1993, 93 [1994, 67]) can only be analyzed and combatted by recognizing its own spectral effects, its virtual simulacra, its prosthetic character, the speed by which its apparitions travel around the globe. But in noting its dogmatic installation, in ascribing it a status of hegemony, Derrida is heir to the very schema of Marxist analysis with its division between dominating and dominated for which Derrida seeks to substitute a new differentiated conception of power and its forces. To this end, Derrida proposes selectively to filter the inheritance to “continue to speak of domination in a field of forces” (1993, 97 [1994, 68]) while conjuring away its support in the self-identity of social classes and indeed any reference to “the determination of the superstructure as idea” (97 [69]) in the Kantian sense under deconstruction in Derrida's thinking more generally. Spectrality is precisely what irreducibly haunts and ruins from the outset the teleology of the idea, making this suspension urgent, “all the more so since the concept of idea implies this irreducible genesis of the spectral that we are planning to re-examine here” (1993, 97 [1994, 69]).If we are to be the heirs to Marx, this inheritance, Derrida contends, is not a given but an ongoing task—specifically, the task or work of mourning that falls to all inheritors. This work of mourning, he is at pains to argue, is not necessarily conservative or reactionary, which is but one way to respond to the possibility of mourning or rather its impossibility. “There is no backward-looking fervor in this reminder, no traditionalist flavor. Reaction, reactionary, or reactive are but interpretations of the structure of inheritance” (1993, 94 [1994, 67–68]). The thrust of Derrida's argument is that where the work of mourning becomes reactionary, turning into a manic escape from melancholia, it is a question of trying to do away with ghosts, to conjure them away. Referring to the dominant discourse, he describes it once more in terms of a mania whose triumphalism conceals an underlying anxiety.By way of example of such jubilant death knells, Derrida cites Francis Fukuyama's book The End of History and the Last Man, calling it “a new gospel, the noisiest, the most mediatized, the most ‘successful’ one on the subject of the death of Marxism as the end of history” and deploying “the frenzied exploitation that exhibits it as the finest ideo-logical showcase of victorious capitalism in a liberal democracy which has finally arrived at the plenitude of its ideal, if not of its reality” (1993, 98 [1994, 71]). Fukuyama exemplifies a conceit that confuses the actuality of what has already come to pass with the promise of what is yet to come, thereby performatively exorcising the ghost. In a “doubly bereaved disavowal,” Fukuyama's performative announcement of death performs a “sleight-of-hand”: With the one hand, it accredits a logic of the empirical event which it needs whenever it is a question of certifying the finally final defeat of the so-called Marxist States and of everything that bars access to the Promised Land of economic and political liberalisms; but with the other hand, in the name of the trans-historic and natural ideal, it discredits this same logic of the so-called empirical event, it has to suspend it to avoid chalking up to the account of this ideal and its concept precisely whatever contradicts them in such a cruel fashion: in a word, all the evil, all that is not going well in the capitalist States and in liberalism. (1993, 117–18 [1994, 87])In short, the euphoria of mania must attach itself to an ideal that is not present lest it sully that evangelistic promise with the cruelties of reality. One can imagine something similar is at work in the almost jubilant relief with which some on the left are today hailing the death throes of neoliberalism. Derrida introduces his litany of “plagues of the ‘new world order’” (1993, 134 [1994, 100]) in the chapter entitled “Usures [Wears and Tears]”—ills we would recognize today as persisting in the face of any new dominant or hegemonic economic paradigm—by pointing to the delusionary element of mania, which flies in the face of the reality-testing that, for Freud characterizes the progress of nonpathological mourning.In an earlier passage, Derrida draws further upon Freud's theory of mania to explain more clearly how the jubilant celebration of neoliberalism stems from a (pathological) defense against loss—specifically, the loss of what the specter of Marx represents: How is it that a discourse of this type is sought out by those who celebrate the triumph of liberal capitalism and its predestined alliance with liberal democracy only in order to hide, and first of all from themselves, the fact that this triumph has never been so critical, fragile, threatened, even in certain regards catastrophic, and in sum bereaved? Bereaved by what the specter of Marx represents still today and which it would be a matter of conjuring away one more time in a jubilatory and manic fashion (a necessary phase of unsuccessful mourning work, according to Freud), but also virtually bereaved for itself. By hiding from themselves all these failures and all these threats, people would like to hide from the potential—force and virtuality—of what we will call the principle and even, still in the figure of irony, the spirit of the Marxist critique. (1993, 116 [1994, 85])It is in this sense—as what failed to come to pass and as what is yet to come—that Marxism haunts neoliberalism, and indeed haunts its own demise as the possibility arises of an alternative to its dogmatically asserted absence of alternative. The ghost arrives as an undecidability between life and death, presence and absence, and thus disrupts the manic closure of neoliberalism (understood as both subjective and objective genitive). As noted in the opening section, spectrality is what decomposes any fictional opposition between the actual, the effective (wirklich), and its virtual ghostly simulacrum. In confusing the two—the reality of liberal democracy and its transhistorical idea—Fukuyama's mania actually creates space for, even “obliges,” through the incipient deconstruction of this opposition, a new thinking of the event and of eventness that would take ghost-effects into account—that is, would be hospitable to the ghost without then conjuring it away.Yet the argument in Specters is that Marx shared with his adversaries a hostility toward ghosts. No less than an arch-adversary like Max Stirner, Marx does not want to believe in ghosts and yet he is obsessed with them and cannot stop thinking about them. He is haunted by them, one could say. In this way, Marx's relationship to the ghost exhibits a trick for keeping close precisely that which one excludes or otherwise loses (we shall see this logic at work in Abraham and Torok's notion of the crypt or cyst). This lends Marx's thought itself a quasi-manic character: Marx tried all the exorcisms, and with what eloquence, what jubilation, what bliss! He so loved the words of the exorcism! For these words always cause to come back, they convoke the revenant that they conjure away. Come so that I may chase you! You hear! I chase you. I pursue you. I run after you to chase you away from here. I will not leave you alone. And the ghost does not leave its prey, namely, its hunter. It has understood instantly that one is hunting it just to hunt it, chasing it away only so as to chase after it. Specular circle: one chases after in order to chase away, one pursues, sets off in pursuit of someone to make him flee, but one makes him flee, distances him, expulses him so as to go after him again and remain in pursuit. One chases someone away, kicks him out the door, excludes him, or drives him away. But it is in order to chase after him, seduce him, reach him, and thus keep him close at hand. One sends him far away, puts distance between them, so as to spend one's life, and for as long a time as possible, coming close to him again. (1993, 222–23 [1994, 175])One type of ideology, according to Derrida's analysis, that furiously wants to keep the ghosts at bay is nationalism. In Specters, arguing that “there is no nationality or nationalism that is not religious or mythological” (1993, 149 [1994, 113]), Derrida works his way through Marx's “impure history” of spirits in The German Ideology, of which the ninth is “the spirit of the people (Volksgeist)” (1993, 233 [1994, 182]). Derrida suggests that the origin myths of national-populisms always entail a revenant whose future return is promised.Earlier in the unpublished second year of the seminar on “Nationalité et nationalisme philosophiques” (Derrida 1985–1986), Derrida had explicitly linked nationalism to the manic jubilation associated in Specters with the hailing of neoliberalism and its triumphant declaration of the death of the Marxist project.In sessions 2–5 of the seminar's first year (Derrida 1984–1985)—of which only the first has been published to date (as Derrida 1992)—Derrida had set out to establish that, notwithstanding or precisely because of its pretensions to universality and cosmopolitanism, philosophy is no stranger to national(ist) affirmation. Rather, “the affirmation of a nationality or even the claim to nationalism . . . is essentially and thoroughly philosophical, it is a philosopheme” (Derrida 1992, 10). This also requires demonstrating that philosophy's claim to distinguish a “good” cosmopolitanism from a “bad” nationalism is no more secure or sustainable than attempts to oppose a “good” form of national affirmation or patriotism to a “bad” nationalism. Deconstructing this opposition is still very much on Derrida's mind when he comes to address the constitutive role of melancholia in nationalist ideologies in the two sessions in December 1985, in which he proposes that nationalism is structured as a fiction, fable, or myth with its primeval origin in—and thus as a kind of mourning of—“the disappearance of that which could have united the body of the nation, the person of the body of the king, the disappearance of the king's body coming in some way to gather or symbolize this mourning” (December 11, 1985, 1; all translations from this seminar mine).In particular, Derrida associates nationalism with “a mourning which cannot take place” and, reflecting on language as “the ultimate resource, naturally ambiguous, of all national affirmation,” distinguishes between the disappearance of the king and the disappearance of the king's body. This gets to crux of the logic of (national) sovereignty. According to the theory set out in Ernst Kantorovicz's The King's Two Bodies (1957), sovereignty unites the mortal body of the individual monarch with the immortal, idealized body that transcends the former and crucially survives his death. To this extent the disappearance of the mortal body of the king—and the (impossible) mourning this implies—just is the structure of all sovereignty. Even the abolition of the monarchy does not interrupt this spectral character of sovereignty, as Derrida observes in the first year of his final seminar, The Beast and the Sovereign.The upshot of Derrida's analysis in the nationalism seminar may be that it in fact intensifies this structure. This absence of the corpse signifies less mourning than its impossibility and hence what Freud calls melancholia, of which mania is a jubilant phase designed to disavow (the impact of) the loss. Derrida points to the work that is done to the corpse—to monumentalize, present, idealize it—that facilitates the work of mourning, and cites language as something that has the power to unify a nation in the absence of a body: The absence of the corpse not only signifies mourning but the impossibility of mourning, of the work of mourning . . . The disappearance of the body of the dead is at once a moment of mourning and a moment of the impossibility of mourning, the interminable time of mourning. Language would then become, on this hypothesis, that which would give rise to an experience of the body, but the unlocatable or untraceable body. It is what remains of the body when the body is no longer there, when the body of an empirical individual, for example not only that which can symbolize the body of the king but the body of the king himself as individual and singular body, when this body is not there, language keeps in its availability, its mobility, the possibility for it to circulate outside the frontiers of what can symbolize the body of the nation, such that the body of the nation no longer has a body, language is what stays in exile. (December 11, 1985, 1)At this point Derrida refers back to the previous year of the seminar in which he had discussed the ambivalent national(ist) attachments of thinkers in forced or voluntary exile. It was in part language's capacity to traverse territorial borders that facilitated the project of elevating a national particularity (specifically German) into a cosmopolitan and universal principle. Entangled with this generalization is the resistance of the idiom in its singularity, which is a recurring theme of his more generally and of this period in particular. But here Derrida swiftly moves to observe that the loss of the king's dead body also marks the possibility of a rebirth or resurrection—and this is where the nationalist fantasy comes more sharply into view.Insofar as national affirmation is not a statement of fact (there is or is never a nation), it has the character of a performative in the futur antérieur to which one can assent by saying “yes,” thereby projecting an immemorial past toward a promised future to come. For this reason, Derrida will claim that national affirmation not merely presupposes but “draws its principal force from the absence of nation”—whence the appeal to the motif of the king's death and the disappearance of his body (December 11, 1985, 3). It is precisely when the nation disappears, disperses, or its existence is otherwise threatened that national affirmation intensifies, Derrida argues. The force of this affirmation is directly proportionate to the fragility and insecurity of a nation state.At this point Derrida is speaking not about nationalism as such but mere national affirmation, which “is not necessarily nationalist in the sense of strong, militant, marked by imperialism, aggression, potentially the ‘right’ . . . even if it has an irrepressible tendency toward nationalism” (December 11, 1985, 2). In his study of the first year of the seminar, Herman Rapaport suggests that Derrida's thinking on the xenoracist tendencies of nationalism was prescient for discourse on race and structural racism today, especially his analysis of its mythical dimensions in the second year of the seminar: Well before “race theory” became an area study in American universities, Derrida was already developing this line of inquiry in Fantom of the Other as well as in the lecture courses in the following years. In the course Mythos, Logos, Topos, which immediately followed Fantom in the fall of 1985, Derrida was probing the xenophobic foundations of Western nationalist thinking in the writings of the Ancient Greeks, in particular, within the genre of the Athenian funeral oration in which one can detect the problematic ancestors of notions such as Vaterland and Heimat. (Rapaport 2021, 3)It is in a bid to explain what turns mere national affirmation into nationalism proper that Derrida returns later in the session on December 11 to the notion of mourning and specifically draws upon Freud's observation that melancholia on occasion inverts into mania.Derrida notes that, for Freud, such jubilation is pathological when it lasts and stems from a release of libido upon my realization that while the other is dead, I am alive and still here, my sexual power still intact. But if I triumph in my bereavement, this triumph is also bereaved, with a pall cast over it. In a phrase that echoes in advance the claim quoted from Timon of Athens in Specters—“the world's going body [le monde va mal]” (1993, 129 [1994, 96])—Derrida quips: “It ends badly [Ça finit mal] when it lasts. If one transposes this to the project of aggressive and expansionist nationalist movements, it is a fact that it always ends badly [ça finit toujours mal].”The implication in Specters is that the same may be said of the aggressive expansion of neoliberalism around the globe whose jubilant triumph disavows a loss of which Marxism would be a constant reminder. (As I put the finishing touches on this article, the specter of Jeremy Corbyn comes back in the now very familiar tones of The White Stripes’ “Seven Nation Army” to haunt Labour Party General Secretary David Evans when he fatefully asks the conference floor why they joined Labour!)In the next session on December 18, Derrida returns to the theme of mourning and mania when he revisits the question of how to distinguish mere national affirmation from full-blown nationalism. First, this oppos
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