Before the Law

In the meantime

I have had the blog-itch for months now with no time to scratch, and still don't, unfortunately.  Maybe next month, after I figure out where I live and what I'm going to do when I grow up.  Anyway, in lieu of something more interesting, some self-promotion:  I've posted a paper I just finished here, titled "On Continental Philosophy in American Jurisprudence."  It's a Hegelian reading of the Legal Realist Karl Llewellyn's short essay "On Philosophy in American Law," coming out in an anthology of contemporary responses to that essay.  I also recently posted a new and improved version of "Specters and Scholars: Derrida and the Tragedy of Political Thought" here.  Some other older papers are available here.   More, sooner rather than later, I hope . . . .

Derrida on love

Compliments of Continental Philosophy and MySpaceTV, here's a clip of Derrida trying not to talk about love, but eventually giving in.  No time to expand on this, alas, but I think the distinction he makes between loving "someone" and loving "something" is critical to the question of political motivation that is  Simon Critchley's concern in his recent Infinitely Demanding (see recent posts here and at Long Sunday), as well as, e.g., to the possibility of expanding Levinas's conception of ethics beyond the humanism that people complain about . . . .  On that cryptic note, here's the video, if I can figure out how to get it into this post:

Derrida parle pour l’amour

"It is still, we said, not given to us not to kill"

This post continues a conversation that most recentlyhas been carried on at I cite under the post titled "Kill!  Kill!"  The topic is solidarity; Jodi takes issue, via two quotes from Zizek, with my attempt to formulate a notion of solidarity in Derridian/Levinasian terms (earlier posts here and here).  Leaving the Zizek quotes aside for the moment (I'll return to them below), here is Jodi's account of the difference between her Zizekian notion of solidarity and mine:

One of the first major differences concerns the Levinasian injunction 'thou shalt not kill,' an injunction at the 'level of ethical debt to the Other' (Adam's words). Zizek's position is strictly opposed to this; in fact, he inverts the prohibition entirely: 'it is not permitted to us not to kill.' For Adam, the Levinasian injunction is one of accountability to a Third, an accountability that prevents one from treating killing perversely, that is, by making excuses for killing. In Zizek's version, the Levinasian injunction does not escape obscenity of the superego, however, precisely because of the inability to satisfy or even grasp the injunction under which we come under. To this extent, far from escaping the murderous dimension of Stalinism, the injunction not to kill devolves into kill, kill!

Additional differences appear, I think, when we consider the way that Adam's Levinasian position oscillates primarily between All and One: my accountability to all, becomes, ultimately, MY accountability. What is missing--the mediation of a collective, of a militant, solidarity group. Thus, Adam's examples involve the individual having to deal with getting up in the morning, contributing to charity, deciding whether or not to strike. These are already political, in Adam's view. To my mind, these are personal and ethical matters. They can be politicized. In fact, I don't think that the acts on their own are even ethical; they are meaningless until mediated, interpreted, made part of a collective political practice, or, until interpreted, reflected upon.

Thus, Adam wants to eliminate the partisan divide from his notion of solidarity; to my mind, this takes the notion away from class struggle, from the fundamental antagonism constitutive of the social. The only struggle discernible in Adam's account is that of the individual toward all (or, toward all humans, because division is unavoidable, Adam encounters the opposite of the human and the impulse toward dehumanization). There simply isn't the conceptual space for a partisan, solidary association of those engaged in political struggle. In fact, the Levinasian framework seems to foreclose the very possibility of such a politics insofar as it limits the political field in advance, precluding the possibility that these limitations have been and remain matters of political struggle and determination.

(There's also a very interesting exchange between Jodi and Alain, who holds down the Levinasian end of the discussion, in the comments as well. )

Jodi's objections and her reliance on Zizek (and on his characteristically inflammatory interpretation of the first commandment as, in effect if not intention, "Kill!  Kill!") would be a great stepping off point for a discussion of the relationship between the Lacanian-psychoanalytic account of the relation to the Other and the Levinasian-ethical one, but I don't feel up to that at the moment (in large part because my knowledge of Lacan is so schematic that I'm not the person to attempt it).  But, leaving that general question aside, what interests me is that it's pretty clear to me that Jodi and I don't actually disagree on much.  Thus, Jodi seems to have misunderstood me, or, perhaps -- although for obvious reasons I hesitate to suggest this -- misunderstood Zizek on this point.

The key moment of this misunderstanding is encapsulated in Jodi's citation of the quote from Brecht's "Die Massnahme" that Zizek relies on in articulating his understanding of "thou shalt not kill":  "It is still, we said, not given to us not to kill."  To be clear (I hope):  I agree with this sentiment entirely, precisely as stated.  Which is to say, I agree that it is not, in fact, given to us not to kill, at least not yet ("still"), and that the infinitely long wait for that still-undelivered gift is a matter of melancholic regret (a tonality that (I think) is palpable even in this English rendition of Brecht's original German). 

The full passage from which Zizek (and then Jodi) draws this quotation is as follows, and it seems to me to confirm this reading:

"It is a terrible thing to kill.
But not only others would we kill, but ourselves too if need be
Since only force can alter this
Murderous world, as
Every living creature knows.
It is still, we said
Not given to us not to kill."

It is in fact a terrible thing to kill -- that is all that "thou shalt not kill" means and can mean -- but it's nevertheless, sometimes, a necessary thing.  There is  no inconsistency in those two positions if one accepts that "thou shalt not kill" is an ethical injunction rather than a principle of truth in the philosophical (read: ontological) sense.  Politics, in the essentially Derridian reading of Levinas that I've been defending, is a matter of actuality, the art of the possible, the (always contingent) formation of alliances that are ultimately strategic (in the Schmittian friend-enemy sense) no matter how based they may be in deep-seated structural interests.  And politics is essential, "since only force can alter this murderous world," as Brecht so beautifully puts it.  As such, politics is (as Jodi insists) distinct from ethical responsibility, which however rooted in the singularity of the face-to-face is by that very token owed to all, as well as being subject to the (again, ethical) edict to do no violence to the Other.  Derrida's point, however, is that ethical responsibility itself demands that we strategize, calculate, engage in politics -- in a word, that we kill -- just to the extent that the Other is not an abstraction but an actuality, a singular being that exists in fact in "this murderous world" of ours.  (And the flip side of this demand is that politics cannot be avoided -- the point of my examples of getting up in the morning, deciding to contribute to Oxfam or to let those children starve, to cross the picket line or not, and so on, is that not that they are ethical (they may or may not be), but that they are necessarily political just insofar as they all involve, directly or indirectly, an act of killing.  To put it another way, that this world is "murderous" is not a politically contingent fact but itself an existential-ontological condition.) 

Thus, while it may be true that I want to "eliminate the partisan divide from [my] notion of solidarity" -- and in fact I do, because I think that's the only way to preserve the sense of  solidarity as event per my earlier post -- I certainly do not want to "eliminate the partisan divide" itself; in fact, the point of the Derridian-Levinasian position is that one has to take sides, decide which side that you're on, precisely by virtue of one's ethical  responsibility.  But I do think that it matters that the source of this partisan side-taking is ethical (in the Levinasian sense) rather than something else.  I'm not at all sure that Jodi agrees with this, however (in fact some of the things she says in the comments strongly suggest  otherwise), and it's here that I think she may misinterpret Zizek, at least on this narrow point (Jodi, please correct me on this if, as I expect, you disagree). 

I say this because Zizek himself articulates quite beautifully the significance of the ethical to  the political in the very essay from which Jodi takes that wonderful Brecht quote (a signficance that, as I've tried to suggest, is already nascent in the melancholic tone of the quote itself).  (The essay, on the director Heinrich Mueller, is available on-line here.)  In this passage, which concludes the essay, Zizek distinguishes between the "must" -- the sphere of the Real of "this murderous world," where killing is a political necessity -- and the "ought," the level of the Symbolic order and the obscene splitting of the moral injunction by the superego (which, by the way, operates at a different level of subject-constitution than Levinasian ethical responsibility, something that I think isn't clear in Jodi's post).  He draws from this distinction the need for a politics that  abides by a principle of "Justice with Love," that is, of "killing with pieta," "killing without dehumanizing the enemy," or as I would put it, a politics ("killing") suffused with ethical responsibility:

"Must" and "Ought" thus relate as the Real and the Symbolic: the Real of a drive whose injunction cannot be avoided (which is why Lacan says that the status of a drive is ethical); the Ought as a symbolic ideal caught in the dialectic of desire (if you ought not do something, this very prohibition generates the desire to do it). When you "must" do something, it means you have no choice but to do it, even if is terrible: in Wagner's Die Walkuere, Wotan is cornered by Fricka and he "must" ("cannot but") allow the murder of Siegmund, although his heart bleeds for him; he "must" ("cannot but") punish Brunhilde, his dearest child, the embodiment of his own innermost striving. And, incidentally, the same goes for Wagner's Tristan und Isolde, the Bayreuth staging of which was Mueller's last great theatrical achievement: they MUST, they CANNOT BUT, indulge in their passion, even if this goes against their Sollen, their social obligations.

In Wotan's forced exercise of punishment, Wagner encounters here the paradox of the "killing with pieta" at work from the Talmud (which calls us to dispense Justice with Love) to Brecht's two key Lehrstuecke, Der Jasager and Die Massnahme, in which the young comrade is killed by his companions with loving tenderness. And although Mueller disagreed with Die Massnahme, proposing, in his Mauser, a critique of its political logic, his critique is strictly internal: his reproach to Brecht is precisely that he did not draw all the consequences from the stance of "killing with pieta," of killing without dehumanizing the enemy. And this is what today, in our time in which the abstract humanitarian rejection of violence is accompanied by its obscene double, the anonymous killing WITHOUT pieta, we need more than ever.

Beautifully put, and entirely consistent, I think, with the Derridian-Levinasian take on the ethical status of the political.  Nothing could be more foreign to the singularity of Levinasian ethics than an "abstract humanitarian rejection of violence"; and nothing, sorrowfully, more consistent with Derrida's political interpretation of Levinas than a (Talmudic) notion of killing "with loving tenderness."  "It is still, we said, not given to us not to kill."  Yes, exactly, alas. 

 

On solidarity (II) -- response to a comment

Nate posted a comment at I cite that I want to respond to here.  Nate says, inter alia:

As much as I like the formulation of solidarity as an event between those who don't (or don't need to? that seems an important difference, somehow, and I'm not clear on which you mean) have anything in common... there's also the matter that there are points and places where solidarity should not be extended, or should be only in the most limited of senses (such that extension or full extension of solidarity would be something of a mockery of the word). At a basic level, I mean solidarity with bosses. Class struggle involves hurting people at least emotionally (and more so if we look at a number of historical examples - I hope I don't sound like I'm romanticizing violence against people, I think that's actually quite ill advised). Picket lines hurt bosses profits, and some frontline managers almost always get fired in a successful union drive, in retaliation for not busting the union and because managers don't have (m)any protect labor rights so they make good sacrifices to appease upper management's anger. Of course, you could say that no schema of solidarity (certainly not one I can indicate) contains a decision procedure for who solidarity happens to/between and who it doesn't happen to/between, and I'd have to agree. But solidarity with some minimal limits of belonging does provide at least a very rudimentary compass for that, which the sort of infinite/limitless solidarity with those whom one has nothing in common with doesn't seem to offer or even really to allow the existence of.

I disagree -- let me see if I can articulate this.  "Solidarity" in the fundamental sense that I'm trying to develop is in fact inherently unstable, that is, lacking in the kind of limits that Nate (and many others) think are necessary for political action.  That's because although solidarity qua event is a response to singularity -- and therefore "limited" in the extreme -- Nate is correct that there are no theoretical (or ethical) limits on  the singularities (the "faces") to whom one turns one's own face.   But that doesn't render politics impossible (something that I think is a concern of Jodi's as well), it simply humanizes it, if I can use that word.  Again, there's a level-of-analysis elision that seems virtually impossible to avoid with Levinas (a sign, I think, of the genuine novelty and brilliance of his thought) that creates this confusion.  Let me put it this way, using a Levinasian example.  Levinas says, "Thou shalt not kill" is an unbreakable injunction; that is, one quite literally cannot "kill" the Other whom one encounters in the face-to-face.  Yeeesh, you say, how  am I supposed to go about my day-to-day political activities without "killing" at least some Others, if not literally then at least figuratively or indirectly (by causing a front-line manager to get fired, lose her health insurance, fail to get needed medical attention, and die, to use Nate's example)?  The answer is that the unbreakable injunction "thou shalt not kill" is for Levinas an injunction at the (ontologically constitutive, albeit) level of the ethical debt to the Other.   That is, the thing that one cannot kill is one's pre-existing debt (or responsibility) to that Other.  What does this mean in terms of Nate's example?  It does not mean that you should refuse to join the strike because the event of your solidarity with the striking Other will have lethal consequences for some Third (the front-line manager).  In fact every act of solidarity with an Other has quite literally lethal consequences for some Third, in fact a multitude of Thirds (Derrida has some really beautiful and passionate lines on this in The Gift of Death).  What it means is that your act of solidarity with the striking Other cannot and does not relieve you from your ethical responsibility for all those other Thirds, including the  front-line manager.  It precludes you from relying on the political calculation -- "the achievement of the greater good for the union members justifies the sacrifice of certain lackeys of the bosses" -- as a mode of dismissal of that responsibility. 

Does this induce political paralysis?  It does not and cannot, it is never a matter of "choice," of "choosing" to act politically or not.  Every day in every way, everything you do (and every single thing you don't do), is a political action in this sense that, again, to put it hyperbolically but not unrealistically, sacrifices a multitude of Thirds to the (fundamentally political, whether one is conscious of this or not) calculation of the moment.  I get out of bed.  Should I immediately go to my check book and contribute to Oxfam to save the life of three malnourished children?  No, I need to eat breakfast and get to work . . . .  There is no escape from this, and so "political paralysis" is no more an option than eliminating one's ethical responsibility for all those Thirds that you've just killed by deciding to eat breakfast.  That's finitude; politics is not a choice, and what Levinas tells us, I think importantly, is that ethical responsibility isn't a choice either.

So what then?  Given that politics is inevitable and responsibility for that politics is inevitable, where does that go?  What difference do those inevitabilities matter at the level of the political decision?  Two not entirely consistent responses to this:  Initially, this (let's call it) politico-ethical condition of existence determines nothing, at least in terms of normative guidance to the content of the political act (this is the point of Derrida's discussion of the unbridgable split between the ethical injunction to act politically and the indeterminate content of the responsive political act in Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas).  But secondarily, it seems to me, this ethical origin of the political (to give it another name) has at least two consequences.  The first is at the level of discourse about and justifications for the political act.  It seems to me that the underogable responsibilty for the Third puts significant limits on how one talks about one's political opponents -- de-humanization, it seems to me, is right out, inconsistent with that responsibility.  That, I think, is very important in its own right.  But I also think that that limitation will have implications -- indeterminate ones, but implications nonetheless -- for the content of the political calculation itself.  The underogable fact of this responsibility for the Third can -- in fact, arguably must -- itself become a factor to be weighed in the political calculation, and that will -- usually, maybe not always (I don't think you can rule out in advance the possibility that war will sometimes be necessary even from an ethical perspective) -- eliminate certain political options (to take an easy example, the mass slaughter of one's political opponents).  So even at the level of the content of the political decision, "Levinasian solidarity" affects one's political decision.   (This, by the way, is an example of what I mean by the ethical "suffusing" the political calculation in earlier posts here and here.)

One final point and then I'll stop.  Nate says, "solidarity with some minimal limits of belonging does provide at least a very rudimentary compass for that, which the sort of infinite/limitless solidarity with those whom one has nothing in common with doesn't seem to offer or even really to allow the existence of."  Maybe, but hasn't that "infinite/limitless solidarity with those with whom one has nothing in common" in fact always determined the teleology of the great "solidarity-based" political movements, from salvationist religious discourses to Marxism?  Doesn't the Internationale (I think these are words; I ought to know this . . .) look forward to the day when the "working class becomes the human race"?  It seems to me that one of the great advantages of the Levinasian (especially in this regard I should say "Derridian/Levinasian") notion of solidarity is that it provides a way of articulating that traditional teleology with political action in a way that avoids the rather historically disastrous consequences of standing by that teleology as such.  And since this thread is partly about Agamben, too, I should say that one of the most admirable things about  Agamben's onto-linguistic utopian politics of "life itself" is the way it tries to preserve the utopian element of the traditional political teleologies while ridding them of the elements that have led to their demise in premature declarations of their achievement (and the resultant slaughter of those who don't agree or whose existence provides evidence to the contrary).  While I think that Agamben's effort to save the form of the political embodied in these traditional teleologies ultimately fails as a basis for politics, I think he comes closer to succeeding at this level -- that is, at eliminating those lingering elements that allow for the perversions of Stalinism, the Crusades, and so on -- better than anyone else.

On solidarity (I) -- phenomenology of the picket line

(This discussion has already been updated/elaborated somewhat via an exchange of comments at Jodi's most recent I cite solidarity post.  And here.)

I want to try to systematize my thoughts about the recent solidarity thread (or should I say, "meme"?  -- I don't want to, I'm an old-word person like Benjamin rather than a new-word person like Derrida . . . ) wending its way around my blogospheric neighborhood, but this post probably won't be it, so I'm giving it a Roman numeral "(I)" as a commitment of sorts to return . . . .  What I'll try to do here instead, which will end up addressing "solidarity" anyway, is respond to some excellent questions put to me in comments to an earlier post on Agamben and Derrida by Jodi Dean and squibb.  This post is thus really an extended comment-response elevated into post-dom.

Jodi asks: 

Would your Derridean solidarity then be something like the infusion of the Other into a political calculation? If it is, I don't see how that is solidarity in any political sense; it seems to come after, to supplement, the calculation; and, it is hard to tell apart from a general ethical regard. Solidarity should be something stronger, no?

That's the right question, and I'm not entirely sure how to answer it.  This is also the issue that opens up into the more systematic thinking about solidarity that I'd like to come back to later.    Nevertheless . . .  I wrote a paper a couple of years ago that, among other things, attempts to sketch in a very preliminary way something like this Derridean/Levinasian solidarity through a merger of sorts of Levinas with Kantian social-contractarian political theory (abstract and cite here).  The notion that I was trying to articulate was something like (these are not terms I used in the paper but they're accurate enough) Derridean/Levinasian political solidarity as an aufhebung of the (very "strong") solidarity of the classical polis and the extremely abstract, denatured and "weak" solidarity of the modern, Kantian political subject with its fellow rational beings.  In any event, I'll leave that level of response for later (if ever).  For now I just want to think about Jodi's notion of "strong" solidarity on one hand -- behind which seems to be some kind of substantive, shared commitment, whether it's common class interest or some other characteristic or life-situation shared by the party members -- and "weak" solidarity on the other, based (Jodi suggests) on some (abstract, denatured, etc.) "general ethical regard" for the Otherness of the Other in general.  Should solidarity be something stronger than this?

Yes and no, I think.  Yes, "solidarity" does seem to imply, at first blush at least, some kind of substantive bond that ties party or group members together, something more concrete than their shared status as rational willing beings entitled to respect, or what have you.  But it seems to me that the situation is more complex when you look at it more closely.  Think about a union picket line.  Which of these is the more genuine exemplar of "solidarity" in the sense that (I think) we really mean it when we use it in everyday speech:  (1) the bond between the union members walking the line; or (2) the decision by a non-union member, confronted by a picket line on her way to work, not to cross the line?  It seems to me that the second situation exemplifies solidarity in its highest best sense, and more importantly, in the sense that ultimately underlies all the other senses in which we use it -- including, that is, the solidarity among the union picketers themselves.  That is, it seems to me that true solidarity takes place (and one of the points I'd stress is that it ought to be a "taking place" and not a characteristic of certain groups) when the I encounters another who, prior to the event of solidarity, did not share substantive commitments of the subject, and who (ideally) need not have shared any characteristics or elements of her life-situation, either.  That is, solidarity takes place when the I encounters an Other and is drawn into her stance to the point of being willing to substitute herself for that Other (here, by literally or figuratively joining the union members on the picket-line and on strike, by honoring the line and refusing to work).  Even if the Levinasian terminology is a little strained I trust the point is clear enough.  Solidarity as event in this sense seems closer to Levinas to me than to any analysis in terms of underlying or pre-existing political interest or commitment. 

And in answer to Jodi I guess I would say that the ethical moment does "suffuse" the political calculation (or better, decision, which as Derrida tells us (correctly in my view) is never finally calculable at all); not as an after-the-fact "supplement," however, but as (prior) quasi-transcendental motivation and pre-condition of possibility.  And as I've already suggested, I would also want to argue (but won't here) that "solidarity as event" in this (Levinasian) sense is the presupposition of the more immediately intuitive sense of solidarity as non-event or "thing," as particular shared commitment among members of a party or group. 

Jodi's other question is about the other side of my initial post, Agamben's linguistified ontology and its relation to politics ("it isn't clear to me how he can have a properly destitute subject and still have politics"), as are squibb's questions (e.g., "What is the nature of the relationship between ‘sayability,’ posited by Agamben, and politics? . . . . .  [I]s he saying ‘sayability’ accounts for the possibility of politics? Or for the possibility of a certain kind of politics?").  Given how long this has already turned out and how late it's gotten here, I'll leave that for another time. 

Agamben and Derrida on language and the political

Clark at Mormon Metaphysics has a post on Being in Heidegger and Pierce that triggered a thought on something that's interested me for a while, the different relationships of language to the political posited by Derrida on one hand and Agamben on the other.  Ultimately, I think, this connects up with Jodi Dean's recent post on "solidarity" at I cite (cross-posted at Long Sunday).  If that sounds a like a rather free free association, I guess it is, but . . . . .   

Clark says, interpreting Heidegger:

I'd suggest that perhaps a useful, if not completely accurate, way of thinking Being as beings in totality to consider it as what, in the final outcome, the community of people would understand of beings. That would include not just our feeling of beings as we encounter them, but the discourses about these beings, the relationships the beings enter into and so forth. It would be beings as intelligible in their fulness.

Based on what I know of Heidegger (which is less than I should), I would agree with Clark that this is not a "completely accurate" account of his conception of Being.  (Nor does it sound to me, as Clark seems to be saying, that this is the equivalent of Pierce's identification of Being with the absolute sign -- Being as "the very fact, that is, the ideal sign which should be quite perfect, and so identical, - in such identity as a sign may have, - with the very matter denoted united with the very form signified by it," in Clark's quotation from Pierce.) 

That said, Clark's suggestion that Being amounts to "the discourses about . . . beings, . . . beings as intelligible in their fullness" is reminiscent of (although not identical to) Agamben's understanding of Being, which is another interpretation (I think) of the later Heidegger's turn to language as a, if not the, privileged mode of access to Being.  For Agamben, the Being of beings is their "sayability" in language, the fact that beings only are what they are, as such, insofar as they enter language and thus become subject to the predication of their infinity of uniquely identifying qualities.  (This is not linguistic idealism, by the way -- not the assertion that linguistic concepts or predicates are the real, but that the real is only real-ized in the medium of language, which is something else again.) 

Furthermore, picking up on something I was saying elsewhere, this necessarily shared "sayability" of all beings ("shared" insofar as each "is" what it "is" by virtue of that sayability -- the scare-quotes necessary because it's the Being of Being that's at stake here) is simultaneously the model and condition for the coming community of identity-free "whatever singularities," which is to say, people who exist solely and as such, without categorization -- without being "Italian," "communist," "red," etc.  (These are Agamben's examples in The Coming Community (if I'm remembering correctly), an overarching theme of which is the free political existence of these linguistically liberated beings).  This freedom from identity is simultaneously political freedom for Agamben as well -- in fact, absolute political freedom, insofar as he says (something like; this isn't a real quote but I think captures the sense of the original), "The State can handle anything except someone [i.e., a "whatever singularity"] that exists without relation to any category."  The notion here is something along lines that the State can control anything  through the medium of judgment -- which is to say, law -- as long as the act of judgment is capable of addressing its object (that is, that the object can be categorized, placed on one side of a line or another); but that the act of judgment is necessarily stymied by a singularity that exists beyond (or rather, before) the possibility of linguistic predication, insofar as its only characteristic is to participate in the condition of possibility of linguistic predication in general.   

This then is the main point of contact between Agamben's first-philosophical work and his later, political philosophical work.   On one hand, insofar as it precedes and thereby remains immune from categorization and judgment, such "whatever singularities" exemplify the "form-of-life" -- the life whose form is simply life itself, the pure gesture, habit, the "life for which living itself would be at stake in its own living" as he variously puts it -- that Agamben in Homo Sacer opposes to the pure sovereign function of separating "bare life" from its form.   On the other hand (and  this is what begins to draw the Agambenian paradigm closer to the question of "solidarity" that Jodi Dean raises), by transposing it into the realm of human experience, Agamben also interprets the being's pure being-in-language as the model of the "commonality" that seals the solidarity of the ideal political community.   We are, or can be, members of one big community, Agamben suggests, just insofar as we all share the "pure experience of language" (or as he also calls it, experimentum linguae).  This is an experience which is simultaneously  empty-and-universal -- insofar as it consists of nothing but the originary experience of our existence as individuals in and through the medium of our exposition in language -- yet singular-izing as well -- insofar as it is precisely this bare, empty act of linguistic exposure which is the precondition of singularity as such.  In this sense, I think Agamben provides us with linguistically-turned (and considerably more radical) version of the "subjective destitution" that Jodi Dean suggests is at the basis of political solidarity in her recent post (and at Long Sunday).

Agamben emphasizes that this "pure experience of language" or experimentum linguae is, of necessity, an experience of "language as such," the pure "linguistic-ality" of beings prior to their being spoken in any particular language, or rather, precisely as they are spoken in every particular language, insofar as "sayability" is a condition of beings qua "sayable" at all, in any language.  And thus Agamben writes repeatedly of "language as such" and "the Idea of Language," and argues (in the new preface to Infancy and History, written around the time of The Coming Community) that political salvation can only come after humanity stops its "wandering through traditions" -- which is to say, releases itself from the hold of the particular linguistic traditions which bind our identities and create the political divisions that lead to war, in favor of the pure "being-in-language" that we all share. 

Following on all this, Agamben would also have to say, I believe, that the Schmittian conception of solidarity that Jodi attempts to draw out of Zizek is imperfect precisely to the extent that it retains the "friend/enemy distinction," because this distinction leaves the political subject insufficiently "destitute,"  still burdened by a substantive predicate or quality ("friend" or "enemy") that stands in the way of the experience of oneself in the opening of language as such (to use the Heideggerian idiom).  At the same time, Agamben would have to reject Zizek's belief (in Jodi's summary) "that violence as such liberates, that it draws a line of separation, that it establishes a difference, discards . . .  that this freedom is necessary for the cut of universality proper," because precisely what Agamben is after is a freedom that requires neither universality (in the conventional sense of abstract universality that Zizek apparently intends) nor a "cut" or division of any kind.   And finally, one should consider what this all implies about the political validity of "the party" (which by minimal definition is determined by the "friend/enemy" distinction), and therefore for practical politics in general.  Can politics in the mundane and everyday sense survive this paradigm?   What would it look like?  Something like Hart and Negri's multitude, perhaps, or anarchism in some more traditional form?

In any event, to return to the notion of experimentum linguae, pure experience of language as such, which provides the onto-linguistic support for this notion of politics:  What is most striking to me about this notion is its contrast to a line of Derrida's, who says in passing (in Demeure, I think), something like, "of course there is no such thing as 'language as such,' no one has ever experienced 'language,' only particular languages" (I don't have the text in front of me).  This is really a throw-away line in the context of Demeure (I'm pretty sure that's where it appears), but nevertheless, there is something entirely consistent with Derrida's whole program about it -- the impossibility of the pure Idea, the at-best "quasi-transcendental" (i.e, marked by its historico-empirical context) nature of his governing concepts (and there have to be concepts, and not a concept, for this very reason), and so on.  Moreover, because it articulates so perfectly (albeit negatively) with Agamben's linguistified and then politicized idea of Being, it also seems to me to mark a very important point at which Derrida's own concept of the political intersects with and then diverges from Agamben's.  It corresponds, for example, to why Derrida can say in a footnote in Politics of Friendship, "I have never been able to utter the word 'community,' at least in my own name" (something like that -- again, don't have the book here), whereas for Agamben, "community" is ultimately nothing other than "utterability" itself, as such.  More importantly, I think it casts light on why Agamben's concept of the political, including the more recent onto-biopolitical analysis of Homo Sacer, is set against the background of the "real possibility" (the quotes here are meant to allude to Derrida's analysis of this phrase of Schmitt's in PoF) of a "coming community," a messianic political community that exists at least (this is the "realness" of its possibility) as an eschaton if not a normative ideal of political life, while for Derrida, the political can only begin and concern itself with the messianic call and possibility of the singular here-and-now, which always "exists" within the particularity of a particular tradition or history.  For Agamben, because there is available to us an experience of "language as such" (if we just heed its Call?  this part of his program is hazy to me), there is also available to us -- qua philosophers -- the notion of an ideal political community that language-as-such implies as its end.  For Derrida, by contrast, there is no escape from our "wandering through traditions" and thus no point at which the philosopher can dictate to the politician her true goals.  That's why it seems to me that Derrida's concept of the political is truer to finitude than is Agamben's (and it's also why I think -- although this would take much more to establish -- that Derrida is the true heir to Benjamin's philosophy of the political, and not Agamben). 

Does this mean that there's no notion of political solidarity implicit in Derrida's more chastened version of political messianism?  I think it is possible to draw out such a notion, along the Levinasian lines that dominated his later political thought.  I'm thinking of statements by Levinas like, "[m]y relationship with the other as neighbor gives meaning to my relations with all the others," as well some suggestions in Derrida's writings that, despite the basic structure of his (Levinasian) political thought -- that is, that the ethical relationship to the Other demands political calculation but cannot determine the content of this calculation, which remains singularly tied to the singularity of the here-and-now that it addresses -- the ethical relationship can infuse the (necessarily) calculative political relationships to all the other others (there's a line to this effect in The Gift of Death but it's not coming to me now).  Thus, pace Zizek, and paraphrasing Karl Rufo's excellent comment to Jodi Dean's post (which is also the source of the above Levinas quote), I think that Levinas's "conception of ethics can[] ground an ethical politics" (although, "ground" being a little strong for the relationship between the two, I would prefer the term "infuse" or "suffuse").  Something along those lines would be my candidate for the Derridian/Levinasian stand-in for "solidarity," although it's too late at night for me really to defend that now . . . . .