Identity against Totality: the Counterdiscourse of Separation beyond the Decolonial Turn By George Joseph Ciccariello Maher IV A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Political Science in the Graduate Division of the University of California, Berkeley Committee in charge: Professor Wendy Brown, Chair Professor Mark Bevir Professor Kiren Chaudhry Professor Pheng Cheah Profressor Nelson Maldonado-Torres Spring 2010 Abstract Identity against Totality: the Counterdiscourse of Separation beyond the Decolonial Turn by George Joseph Ciccariello Maher IV Doctor of Philosophy in Political Science University of California, Berkeley Professor Wendy Brown, Chair This project examines the question of identity-production in the work of French syndicalist Georges Sorel, black psychiatrist-turned-revolutionary Frantz Fanon, and exiled Argentinean philosopher of liberation Enrique Dussel. Against predominant philosophical claims of universality and totality and their practical counterparts in the politics of unity and essentialist understandings of identity, I seek to excavate in these thinkers a counterdiscourse which privileges both the centrality of the moment of rupture and conflict in generating and consolidating political identities, as well as the broader process within which this rupture is situated. To do this, I turn first to Sorel’s analysis of class, a markedly non-orthodox account which rejects both the class essentialism Sorel perceived in some contemporary Marxists as well as the politics of unity that such Marxists frequently advocated. Instead, Sorel proposes a politics geared toward the construction of an absolute class identity, forged through conflict, as the first step in his reformulated Marxist dialectic. I then turn to Fanon, for whom the relevant identities—first race and later nation—differ from those of Sorel, but in whose work we can nevertheless perceive a structural similarity. Both race and nation are, in Fanon’s thought, explicitly non-essentialist concepts which rather than merely existing must be constructed, and this construction occurs, as it did for Sorel, through a process of rupture and conflict. Finally, in my discussion of Dussel, I turn to popular identity, or “the people,” demonstrating that in contrast to some prevailing caricatures, many formulations of the concept of the people in contemporary Latin America are neither totalizing nor essentializing, but rather represent a conflictual identity which shares much with the model of Sorel and Fanon. However, whereas Sorel and Fanon framed their discussions in explicitly dialectical terms (albeit heavily reformulated dialectics), I analyze Dussel’s fusion of dialectics with an “analectics” inspired by Emmanuel Levinas, a fusion which embeds itself at the heart of his concept of the people as an alliance of the excluded and the oppressed. ~ 1 ~ Table of Contents Introduction – The Counterdiscourse of Separation 1 Chapter 1 – The Origins of Anti-Jacobin Myth: Sorel’s Trial of Socrates 19 Chapter 2 – Proletarian Violence against Jacobin Force: Sorel’s Reflections on Violence 45 Chapter 3 – Rebuffed from the Universal: Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks 73 Chapter 4 – Separation beyond the Decolonial Turn: Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth 100 Chapter 5 – Exteriority against Totality: Dussel’s Philosophy of Liberation 128 Chapter 6 – The People is Not One: Dussel’s Twenty Theses on Politics 148 Conclusion – Toward an Anti-Jacobin Dialectics 173 ~ i ~ Introduction – The Counterdiscourse of Separation If there was single point of inflection at which the discursive shift from the “Bush years” to this newly birthed “age of Obama” began in earnest, gaining a certain degree of irreversibility, this was certainly Barack Obama’s 2004 speech to the Democratic National Convention. And if there was a moment which cemented not only Obama’s potential electability, but which also structured the parameters for his future mode of governance, it came four years later, in his 2008 “race speech,” suggestively titled “A More Perfect Union.”1 The 2004 speech which catapulted him to national fame as the chosen hope of party and nation rested largely on the oft-repeated claim that: “There is no white America. There is no black America. There is no Latino America. There is no Asian America. There is only the United States of America.” In the midst of the 2008 electoral campaign, Obama would be forced to concretize this vision, distinguishing it from that of Reverend Jeremiah Wright in an effort to calm public concerns over his true intentions. Against those would see him as sharing in Wright’s divisiveness, Obama insisted, his is instead a “message of unity,” but one which emerges dialectically through speech and the airing of discontents rather than through the flat, organic unity of silence that had prevailed with regard to race in other moments. Yes, there is and was racism and—in close correlation—poverty, but we nevertheless move inevitably toward “a more perfect union.” Obama thereby accomplishes a seemingly-paradoxical task: holding up and displaying the effects of racism, while ultimately washing the nation clean. It is precisely this which Glen Ford refers to as playing the “race, but not really, card,” whereby Obama appealed to blackness and not-blackness—alterity and sameness—in a way which made his path toward political unity infinitely more complex and effective than the brusque racism and nativism of his predecessor.2 The anger prevailing on both sides of the racial divide (and notably, not merely that of the victims) is understandable, but ultimately “counterproductive,” and rather than focus on that anger (or even its causes), black Americans must bind their “particular grievances… to the larger aspirations of all Americans.”3 “We can accept a politics that breeds division, and conflict,” or… Or? Here rhetoric inundates argument, and we are left with the optimistic gesture of Hegelian synthesis contained within the very title of the speech, at the intersection of “union” 1 This was also, not coincidentally, the theme of the 2009 Gay Pride Parade in San Francisco, whose official organizers represent a similarly assimilationist tendency. 2 Glen Ford, “Obama’s Siren Song: A Knife in Our Hearts,” Counterpunch (June 14th 2007), http://www.counterpunch.org/ford06132007.html. 3 This seemingly-contradictory position also appears in his The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream (New York: Crown, 2006), where he expresses “caution” to those who would see this as a claim about “postracial politics” (137) Instead, according to Obama, we must “see the world on a split screen screen—to maintain in our sights the kind of America that we want while looking squarely at America as it is, to acknowledge the sins of our past and the challenges of the present without becoming trapped in cynicism or despair.” However, such a seemingly-generative view is not borne out in practice, as Obama deploys white privilege— counterintuitively, to say the least—in an effort to oppose a black power approach. Whites can cut themselves off in a way that minorities cannot, and for blacks to protect themselves psychologically is to “surrender—to what has been instead of what might be” (139). “As a result, proposals that solely benefit minorities and dissect Americans into “us” and “them” may generate a few short-term concessions when the costs to whites aren’t too high, but they can’t serve as the basis for the kinds of sustained, broad-based political coalitions needed to transform America” (146). ~ 1 ~ and “perfection”: “This union may never be perfect, but generation after generation has shown that it can always be perfected.”4 These speeches struck a chord among many, and few would deny that Obama’s subsequent political successes reflect a broadly-felt desire for that discourse of national unity to reassume its position as a reality after eight years of perceived strife and division expressed in the oft-parodied dictum of the George W. Bush administration: “you’re either with us or against us.”5 But it would be worth wondering aloud to what degree the Bush and Obama doctrines constitute fundamentally different approaches to understanding the socio-political life of the United States. We should pose the question as follows: do the Bush and Obama doctrines share political unity as an objective? Here, the answer seems to be clearly an affirmative one, as the antagonism contained within the Bush doctrine of “you’re with us or against us” is aimed precisely at the reassertion of an organic unity which distinguished “good Americans” from “terrorists” and a lesser degree “illegal aliens” (the qualifier “good” rendered necessary by the newly-minted category of “enemy combatant,” itself a discursive-juridical reflection of cases such as that of José Padilla, a U.S. citizen). But while Bush sought to create a certain sort of unity—in another frequently-parodied phrase, he sought to “be a uniter, not a divider”—and while this was devastatingly effective in some senses (especially in the days following September 11th), it eventually failed as a project due to the divisions it cultivated within the very organic national unity it sought to reinforce. Here lies the fundamental complicity between the two projects: Obama appears charged with the task of repairing the broken unity of the nation that Bush had failed to consolidate despite his best efforts, seeking to do so by drawing the lines that distinguish inside from outside in different ways (i.e. the “good war” in Afghanistan versus the “bad war” in Iraq, a different view of the ethnic-cultural content of “true” Americanism, and a more accommodating position vis-à-vis immigration).6 The Bush regime had failed not because it sought to cultivate division and conflict, but because it miscalculated the political effects of the enmity and divisiveness it had cultivated in the course of unification, and Obama was propelled to power by the promise of a new equilibrium, his soothing discourse assuring a wary white electorate that he could be trusted with the mantle of unity.