"Left-Liberal-Conservatism":
An Exchange with Artemy Magun

by Ardevan Yaghoubi
Comments (0) · Share this · RSS · Email this · (via @telospress): Left-Liberal-Conservatism:An Exchange with Artemy Magun by Ardevan Yaghoubi Tweet this · Print

Artemy Magun's article "What is an Orientation in History? Openness and Subjectivity" appeared in Telos 147. Ardevan Yaghoubi asked him some follow-up questions.

Ardevan Yaghoubi: In the introduction to your article, you explain that the "ideological situation" today between the positions of liberalism, conservatism, and leftism is "characterized by a great deal of disorientation." Political divisions over recent events in Iran, as well as the 2003 Iraq War, would seem to empirically demonstrate the validity of this claim. But in a theoretical sense, could you give an outline of the contours of this "disorientation"? I'm thinking specifically of what you call the "left-wing conservativism" of Alain Badiou and others.

Artemy Magun: The concept of orientation, as I mention, stems from Kant and Heidegger. Kant means by it that in the world of regular experience, as well as in the world of logic, nothing grounds an asymmetry of directions (he mentions the spatial directions of left and right, as a metaphor for the ethical choice of practical orientation). We need this asymmetry, says Kant, in order to act and to judge in a situation.

We can call this a fundamental disorientation inherent in any situation. I use the concept in an even stronger sense: it is not only that all our notions are symmetrical and thus antinomical, but that they dialectically pass into one another in time. The Modern ideological concepts had been mutually interwoven from the beginning (the Enlightenment and/or romantic values shaping liberalism, Jacobinism/socialism/communism, and even conservatism), and it was, first, the French Revolution of 1789–1799, second, the European revolutions of 1848, that actually established the political lines of division among them.

During the Cold War, the ideological divisions between the Western and the Soviet camps gradually ceased to be principled at all. As my teacher Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe once said, it was the collision of the right-wing liberalism with the right-wing Marxism, with the difference that in the West, there still remained a strong left-wing (mostly, left liberal) opposition, and in the Soviet bloc, the opposition took a liberal-conservative stance. But this was in a way hidden, and for themselves, the Soviet bureaucrats were on the left, and the Soviet liberal opposition, for a brief moment at the end of 1980s, also thought it was on the left. Only now, twenty years after the post-Cold War period, this transformation slowly becomes visible. The socialist establishment in the West jumped on the train of neo-liberal privatization. But even where it did not, the mere defense of welfare, multiculturalism, and gay marriages increasingly loses any political meaning and turns into a mere conservatism, which the neoliberals, these conservative revolutionaries of a sort, often justly criticize. This is not to say that there is a clear and pure way out. The serious left, the one that claims the heritage of Modern revolutions, has today to turn to conservatism, too, in its fight against neo-liberalism. But where the social democrats are conservative literally, in the sense that they want to continue with the status quo (but with a good conscience), the left is conservative in the sense that they have to claim "fidelity" to the great revolutionary moments of Modernity, to the Modern subversive subjectivity. For instance, in the sphere of culture and academia, it is the task of the left today (and here I speak of my own position) to fight against the so-called "postmodern" tendencies to destroy the theoretical and cultural canon in schools and universities, to glorify the mass culture, to proclaim the end of "grand narratives," etc.—all this not-so-innocent nonsense has in front of our eyes de-subjectivated masses, made them dependent on the media, turned politics into political technology, etc. (In Russia, in a fluid, post-revolutionary situation, this was a particularly spectacular process.) But then, there is of course a danger to miss actual novelties—new movements, challenges, and claims. And a liberal criticism would here be pertinent.

This is why I'm trying to construct a stance that would be left-liberal-conservative, with an emphasis on the left. Again, in a situation where political positions dialectically flow into one another, or, one can say, are reflected in each other as if in three mirrors, one needs to be able to say: this is leftist conservatism, but it is still leftist conservatism—and this other leftist conservatism is conservatism above all. Revolutionary conservatism is not the same as a conservative revolution!

This is what Gramsci, I think, called hegemony. And this is what, I think, cannot be defined conceptually, but only temporally and practically, via an event of rupture and a decisive collective action that would carry the hopes of the past into the future.

Yaghoubi: You suggest that a reorientation of politics toward justice, and particularly the known unknown of the Other, might alleviate some of the present antinomies described above. I was especially interested in your placement of Carl Schmitt into this intellectual tradition. You trace the genealogy of justice as relating to the Other from Plato onward to Heidegger and Derrida, but you make a good case for including Schmitt. How does Schmitt's work, and his friend-enemy distinction, contribute to our understanding of the Other?

Magun: Well, this is kind of an unexpected thesis, particularly because we know Schmitt was a Nazi. But (see above) you cannot just dismiss the conceptual content of a theory because it went practically wrong—the task is to reorient it. Already Derrida drew attention to this interest of Schmitt in the figure of the Other. But Derrida clearly thought that he was reading Schmitt against the grain, showing how his writing and thinking subvert his explicit agenda, and so on. And I argue that these things in Schmitt have been present quite explicitly: like Plessner and Heidegger, he was a theorist of the open, but from the right. What is interesting is that this is not exactly the liberal openness, since it has to do with the divisive political action, with antagonism. However, in Schmitt this is not, of course, a left-wing revolutionary openness either. First, it is an openness that dialectically turns into aggressiveness, because one is too open and therefore needs to be violent against the intruder. We have seen this logic, unfortunately, in the left-wing revolutions too, in the moments of terror. Second, this openness is still too close to the liberal one, since it led Schmitt to accept just any interesting political development. His conservatism is here (and elsewhere) strongly marked by liberalism. Again, our task is to be aware of this dialectics and to remember for what you need this openness, what are you actually doing.

An interesting topic to develop—I did it a little bit in an article on terror, coming out this year in a Routledge volume on "Law and evil"—is the connection of this receptive openness with the active openness of manifestation, with the drive to reveal, which Heidegger affirms in An Introduction to Metaphysics and then criticizes in "The Question Concerning Technology." I think that his criticism of Gestell would also apply to liberal or conservative openness, which should be balanced, in my view, with a capacity to keep things hidden or latent, if needed (not to discover more atomic bombs, etc.). Openness should not be an absolute, of course.

Yaghoubi: In a footnote, you mention a misreading of Plato's notion of thymos by Francis Fukuyama, who uses the concept to justify his "end of history" thesis. How does this interpretation differ from the more radical idea of thymos as "indeterminate openness"? Further, I was struck by the reference to Fukuyama because it would seem that his "end of history" thesis is in direct opposition to the idea of the event found in Badiou, Benjamin, and other leftists: no more history means no more events (such as the event par excellence, the revolutionary event). Would you consider it an appropriate inference to say that, with regards to the status of the event, Fukuyama and Badiou (and others) are two sides of the coin?

Magun: Well, I think Fukuyama is on a very low-value coin, a five-cent at most, and Badiou should be at least a quarter, so they are not on the same one. Fukuyama thinks that thymos would be satisfied through the recognition by the state. He doesn't see the moment of revolution/revelation inherent in thymos. Badiou has for such "recognition" a special term—"state of a situation": a set that "counts" all the subsets of a given set but misses some "singular" elements. This bureaucratic fixation would not even be an eschatological event of ending all things (which is what you allude to, I guess), but a boring, non-eventful and empty representation.