“It’s difficult to remove intransigence from political thought”

March 25, 2015

Umberto_Boccioni_001
Sketch of The City Rises, Umberto Boccioni, 1910

From Eurozine:

Gisle Selnes: You use the expression “antinomies of fanaticism”, which we might rephrase as the paradoxes or inherent contradictions of fanaticism: on the one hand, fanaticism as the opposite of reason and, on the other, fanaticism as an excess of reason. Fanaticism can be understood both in the sense of the over-political and of the non-political, as a-historical and as excessively historical. Fanaticism thus turns out to be, basically, a polemical concept, evoked to stigmatize a particular position as “illegitimate”. Is there, one might wonder, anything at all that is constant about this concept? One of the recurrent definitions in your book is Hegel’s idea of fanaticism as an “enthusiasm for the abstract”. But would you say that, apart from this, there is a constant in the uses of the idea of fanaticism to produce a fantasy of the other?

Alberto Toscano: You are right that there is a fundamental oscillation or fundamental ambivalence to this idea. Like many other ideological notions its power lies in its ambivalence, which allows a tactical and polemical use. That is why Fanaticism has the subtitle On the Uses of an Idea – the book is a history of episodes of its use rather than a history of its development.

Efforts have been made to find more constant traits in the concept. An American friend who tragically died a couple of years ago, Joel Olson, was working on a book on the phenomenon of fanaticism within the political history of the US, called American Zealot, and he tried to formulate a kind of minimal definition of fanaticism, which I think is serviceable; the notion that fanaticism is – in his words – the extraordinary political mobilization of a refusal to compromise. I think many of the paradoxes in the concept do have something like intransigence – to use a single term to compress Joel’s insight – at their core. For instance, fanaticism was used to describe or to stigmatize the politics of the Jacobin terror, which is viewed by many thinkers, and not least Edmund Burke, as a politics of excessive rationalism. From the perspective of British conservatism, the problem with the French revolution was its excessive rationality, its faith that the world can be organized according to an abstract, geometric or mathematical equality that could then be imposed. That is its intransigence.

In the nineteenth century fanaticism is used as a common operational term in British imperial counter-insurgency or colonial discourse. British administrators writing to each other from the same areas where counter-insurgency operators are working today, like Sudan or Iraq or Waziristan, describe anti-imperial, anti-colonial revolts as unified and rendered intractable by some kind of religious mobilization, sometimes millenarian or apocalyptic, using the language of fanaticism. In all of these cases there is this question of intransigence, of the absence of deliberation, the absence of compromise. The ultimate paradox is of course that those who present themselves as defenders of tolerance and communication can become intolerant, anti-deliberative and non-communicative. As the discourse goes today: We won’t negotiate with terrorists. This is very much like saying we won’t speak to fanatics, so there is a kind of continuity in that respect.

GS: In 2009, you contributed to the conference “The Idea of Communism” at Birkbeck, University of London with a paper that could be read as a vindication of a certain “enthusiasm for the abstract”, viz. that of reintroducing the idea of communism in contemporary political thinking. Is it correct to say that you’re not only a critical historian of the idea of fanaticism, but also one who subscribes to the fanatical option in some of its “uses”? In other words, do you think that we need this intransigence today in order to make a real difference politically?

AT: On a very basic level I don’t think there is any political tradition that doesn’t valorize a moment or at least the possibility of intransigence. Certainly, within a context of twentieth-century European history in countries like Italy, Norway and France, the valorization of intransigence, in the form of anti-fascist resistance, was generationally, intellectually and politically formative. There was a general recognition that under certain conditions, the extraordinary mobilization of the refusal to compromise was not just acceptable but an ethical imperative. One of the most affecting works of writing that comes out of World War II and the experience of the camps, was Jean Améry’s At the Mind’s Limits.

Améry was Jewish but had been tortured and sent to the camps as a resistance soldier. In one of the essays in the book, entitled “On the necessity and impossibility of being a Jew”, Améry reads Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth and his chapter “On violence”, and explains how he experiences an immediate solidarity for the humanizing character of violence asserted by Fanon. He talks of how the moment he realized that his Nazi camp guard was human, was the moment he was able to strike back at him. There has been a general disavowal of that kind of moment of intransigence.

In some traditions this moment of intransigence has been linked to communist, socialist or indeed anarchist movements, all of which had been treated as fanatical in different ways. But couldn’t it also be a part of the radical dimension of liberal political thought itself? Some of the figures who put the unwillingness to compromise as a principle of the will were much more likely to be radical liberals. This was certainly the case of Piero Gobetti in Italy. For communists, on the other hand, the moment of individual intransigence was less significant than the moment of organized party-political and strategic resistance.

So on one level I think it’s difficult to remove intransigence from political thought. However, the fact that it was at the core, for instance, of the radical anti-slavery abolitionist movement in the nineteenth century doesn’t necessarily mean that it characterizes contemporary movements. But you could definitely see that moment of the refusal to compromise at least as crucial to the onset, to the beginning of political movements, including a number of those we’ve witnessed since 2011. Like most of these somewhat universalizing or general concepts, the problem is that there’s nothing necessarily emancipatory, progressive or egalitarian about refusal. You can refuse to compromise for any number of reasons, some of which I might find repugnant and some of which I don’t. This is for instance why Joel Olson, when trying to trace the presence of a fanatical approach within American politics, rightly sees it as being present in the far Right as well as on the left, in all sorts of facets of the political field.

GS: Julia Kristeva recently made a speech at the House of Literature in Bergen, where she talked about the inner or intimate revolt that she sees as necessary to soften a too idealized or homogenized subjective position. She claimed that this is a process that has been accomplished in Europe – perhaps not entirely, yet enough to make a significant difference with respect to other cultures. She even talked about the homo europeicus as the antidote to fundamentalism and fanaticism. I suspect that you have a different take on the history of secularization. In your view, is this just a European fantasy, to make one’s own history a model from which to criticize the radical or fanatical other, or does it contain a modicum of truth?

AT: I admit that I have a kind of… allergy is maybe not the right term, but a sort of reaction whenever political subjectivity or political attitudes are identified with what I consider an ideological concept of Europe. Defenders of co-called European values tend to construct a hygienic and streamlined fantasy picture, and then presume that this reconstructed picture of what Europe is – this European history from the eighteenth century onwards – somehow just followed the precepts of Voltaire and Kant. That vision of history is also thought of as being the property and the privilege of individual European subjects – as though it were a quasi-ethnic or quasi-racial property.

This reveals a real confusion about questions of laïcité, secularism and atheism. I myself am very fond of political and philosophical versions of atheism, but I find it repugnant that it has been hijacked by extremely unsavoury figures, especially in the recent period. In terms of the question of secularism, at a philosophical or political level it is disturbing that there is so little reflection on what the discourse of secularism does or says about the state, though not necessarily in Kristeva’s own variant, which I honestly don’t know that well. A text I find interesting is the rather misread or misinterpreted text of the young Karl Marx on the Jewish question. The text is only understandable as a critique of another critical follower of Hegel, Bruno Bauer, who argued that the Jews had to give up their Judaism in order to become proper citizens. Marx tries to show how a certain conception of anti-religious political emancipation ignores the fact that it’s making the state itself transcendent; the state becomes the arbiter and the substitute of a kind of religious transcendence. Marx says in a prophetic moment that the most modern state and politics we know is that of the United States, yet the United States is rife with religious superstition and sectarianism. There is actually no relationship whatsoever between state secularism and atheism in everyday life. The US variant of secularism proves that; I don’t know the latest statistics, but regularly you read that 40 per cent of Americans believe that the Antichrist will manifest itself during their lifetime, or something to that effect.

All in all, this talk of Europe and secularism is a-historical. That doesn’t mean I don’t find the endemic religious discourses in political spheres worrisome, but I worry for different reasons than the ones put forward by Kristeva. Fanaticism is not about a return of a repressed religious spirit, let’s say in the Middle East or North Africa. A picture like that doesn’t show how religious phenomena are politically manipulated. It allows us to forget that ISIS wouldn’t exist had the US not decided to fire one million members of the Iraqi army while allowing many of them to keep their weapons and jailing their military personnel; these are the military personnel now working for ISIS. None of these groups were necessarily religious or Islamist to begin with, but had an immediate political gain from this particular movement. The idea that they could be understood simply through a mobilization of religious extremism is nonsensical. In saying this, I don’t underestimate the capacity that certain religious, political and military discourses have, to create unities where there is only dispersion.