EUROPACIFISM OR THE UNCERTAINTY RELATION EUROPE-AMERICA 11TH LECTURE AT THE BIJLMER SPINOZA-FESTIVAL: MAY 12, 2009 BY MARCUS STEINWEG (ABSTRACT)
THE UNCERTAINTY RELATION EUROPE-AMERICA
Diagram by Marcus Steinweg
Diagram by Marcus Steinweg
To love the future, the uncanny, means to receive the present like one receives a namelessness. It means to bear one's subjectivity in the here and now. By loving that which does not admit love, or only admits it as something unknown and uncontrollable, the subject of love goes through the experience of a perhaps typical American precipitancy or rashness. It falls head over heels at the moment of this experience. It finds itself carried over to an indeterminate future. It cannot help but affirm the impulse to reconstitute, i.e. to transgress, surpass and reinvent its ego in this movement of its self falling ahead over heels. "One has not understood pragmatism if one sees in it merely a simple philosophical theory made by the Americans. One understands the newness of this American thinking, however, as soon as one sees in pragmatism one of the attempts to change the world and to think a new world, a new human being insofar as they are made. Western philosophy was the brain or paternal spirit that realized itself in the world as a totality and in a knowing subject as property-owner." Pragmatism allows the subject to enter a new world, a world in which its essence is not yet finally fixed. The subject does not possess itself the way the philosophy of Europe had envisaged for it. It realizes neither its nature nor its essence. It has neither nature nor essence. Its nature is that of a ceaseless becoming, of a movement that cannot be stopped that drives it beyond the limits of all concepts of essence.
Self-knowledge or self-consciousness imply for this new subject that it lose itself in the exterior of the steppe, in the solitude of the desert and the endlessness of the ocean. On the basis of this solitude, this transcendental desolation, the new subject seeks allies. It constitutes the thought of the community of those who are without transcendental 'housing', the community of those who, as Bataille says, do not belong to any community. It is the community of 'subjects' who have fallen out of the space of nature and essence, who have fallen out of 'Europe', the alliance of simple singularities, of pure eccentrics, as Deleuze says, an alliance affirmed in concepts of a new friendship. American literature deals with these new subjects who have to invent their essence in opening up the zones and landscapes they traverse, instead of participating in the transcendental community of European we-subjects — subjectless passers-by, tramps, vagabonds, adventurers and pioneers. "The subject of American literature is the production of relationships between the most varied aspects of the geography of the United States, Mississippi, Rocky Mountains and the prairies, and their history, struggles, love, evolution."
The new subject calls for a new concept of friendship, of a friendship that does no violence to its singularity whilst possessing the qualities of “comradeship” praised by Whitman:
"Comradeship is that changeability which implies an encounter with the exterior, a metempsychosis under the open sky, on the 'endless road'. ... The society of comrades, that is the revolutionary American dream to which Whitman has made a great contribution."
It is a synthesis a posteriori, a late, fragile and contingent, but never arbitrary tie. So much on the connection between English empiricism and the geo-political and anthropo-political constitution of the American 'union'. It has to be struggled for, fought for, suffered and gone through. Whereas Europe repeats the necessity of relationships (the Kantian synthesis a priori is a genuinely European model), American literature and American pragmatism insist on the possibility of first bringing forth the relations of singularities among themselves.
It is a matter of precarious, invented ties that are not subject to the protectorate of a transcendental concept of essence. To create something new, to create itself anew, the subject has to loosen the old ties. With the necessary rigour and violence which every becoming demands, it must update its own outline and its relation to the outline of others. It has to emancipate itself from itself, from its origins, the milieu of its childhood and history, and from the identity-determining factors of society, politics and morality of its times. "'Becoming' is not a part of history; even today, history designates merely the totality of the recent conditions of all kinds from which one turns away in order to become, that is, in order to create something new." Becoming means to tear the veil of history. It demands of the subject that it surrender itself to the current of an incalculable passion, the current of the "great philosophical passion to play" (Alain Badiou), to put oneself at risk in order to produce the brusque evidence of an event. And yet, this trans-historical movement takes place within history without being a product of this history. "The event itself requires becoming as an ahistorical element." Becoming cannot be reduced to history, "becoming is not historical". It includes a kind of unbounded surpassing and transgression. It surpasses history and it surpasses this surpassing in order to build up its own intensity in the here and now, for which there is no vocabulary, no grammar, no syntax, no logic available.
2. European-Americanism of Freedom
The affirmation of the present must not negate itself in the recognition of its forms of appearance and power arrangements. The new realism demands of its subject, that it accelerate itself in reality beyond reality in order to be more real than (the old) reality. Thinking "is ‘on the spot’, it intensifies itself ... within itself." The subject affirms itself by inscribing itself into the hyperborean zone in order, in the act of this inscribing, to risk the exceeding of its previous Gestalt.
To open oneself up to the here and now without surrendering oneself to it, isn't that the structural peculiarity of a certain Utopia? To what extent is a certain America and the dream that some dream about it, whether they are Americans or not, associated with this impossibility, with the ambivalence of a place which is not a place, but a non-place, an impossible locality? To what extent does the real, relative America, identifiable in space and time, overlap with its own dream, with the American Utopia of an absolute America which, as the motherland of hope, still dominates the European horizon? If America forms the horizon of Europe, and Europe is the repressed origin of America, can the wedding of horizon and origin be celebrated as a becoming (the becoming-Europe of America and the becoming-America of Europe) whose unpredictability is part of the shared history of European and American consciousness?
The transcendental subject is a European invention. Its truth, however, is trans-European. Before the news of the new world reaches Europe, it has already placed itself within the horizon of a certain 'America'. The truth of Europe is 'American' as long as we associate with America, under the ontological structure which we are here calling 'America', the tendency toward deterritorialization and self-unbounding. It drives the subject in the course of its history beyond itself and allows it to go through a chain of indeterminate revolutional experiences. "Was the American democracy not grounded on the democracy of exodus, on affirmative and non-dialectical values, on pluralism and freedom?"
The subject, Deleuze and Guattari say, the subject of this certain 'America', overflies itself. It is an absolute overflying insofar as it associates itself with "what exists in the here and now as real in the struggle against capitalism". Utopia, after it has been distinguished as "libertarian, revolutionary, immanent" Utopia from the "authoritarian Utopias" of transcendence, designates the "ties of philosophy or the concept," i.e. of the overflying subject, "with the existing milieu". To affirm emancipatory discourse in its most elementary form and necessity always means affirming this immanent 'Utopia' (the reticence with regard to this word is well-known and necessary) or hope. It means holding on to a "Messianic experience" about which Derrida says that it takes place "here and now".
Utopia, the revolution and Messianism drive thinking into the complicated heartlands of capital. Capital is perhaps nothing other than the central muscle of the symbolic system. It even provides the means of putting it into question. Who could maintain that they had asserted themselves against capital in a completely headless rashness, without a certain head (caput), without the sovereignty, authority and assertiveness of a certain capital? The principle of the head, of leadership and directed control can be encountered with the necessary lack of principle, headless anarchy and speculative exhaustion. In this encounter, however, it is a matter of an auto-affection, albeit asymmetrical, of the self-alienation of capital that is risked in irreducible undecidability. The poetry of capital has its own harmony for several voices. It cannot be inscribed into the system of calculating investments along with its liberal Utopia without disturbing this system with its boundless tendency toward the speculative annihilation of capital.
Richard Rorty restricts pragmatism to liberal Utopia, whose fundamental concern is to minimize cruelty. In contrast to Deleuze, this has the disadvantage of reducing the pragmatic hypotheses to reterritorialized America, to the United States and the liberal ideology of affluence, the so-called free market, the religious morality of conscience, to social pluralism as the basis of a fateful calculus of winner and loser. Reterritorialized America is not the America of freedom. It is the America of the calculus of the state with its domestic and international politics. It is the America of military, economic, cultural, social, religious and moral self-administration, i.e. police administration in the Rancièrean sense.