Narrative

Narrative 10.2 (2002) 186-192

Politics, Mortal and Natal:
An Arendtian Rejoinder

John Brenkman

Is there a "space that 'politics' makes unthinkable, the space outside the frame within which 'politics' appears and thus outside the conflicting visions that share as their presupposition that the 'body politic' must survive" ("Post-Partum" 181)? What is that space? What would it mean to embrace or assume or embody the prevailing figuration of that space in order to disturb or refuse the political realm as such?

Having reflected on Lee Edelman's carefully argued response to my criticism of "The Future Is Kid Stuff," I think that the salient issues of contention between us lie in our respective responses to these questions.

There are indeed spaces outside the political realm. The form they take varies according to the nature of the political order.

In Eastern Europe under communist rule, for example, there emerged a significant refusal of politics. The Hungarian writer George Konrad called it "anti-politics." Communist states, particularly after the Soviet crushing of the Hungarian uprising, the invasion of Czechoslovakia, and the suppression of Solidarity in Poland, denied all avenues for citizens to organize or express themselves within the political sphere. Moreover, the mechanisms of one-party rule made every facet of life political by exerting control over intellectual and artistic life, public opinion, even individuals' choice of occupation and housing and their freedom of movement. The repression of conflict within the political realm went hand-in-hand with the omnipresent reach of politics into the nonpolitical realm. Citizens could counteract the omnipresence of the state, Konrad argued, only by refusing politics and devoting their minds and activities to whatever remaining spaces eluded the reach of the state (see Konrad's Anti-Politics). This withdrawal from politics was painful, precarious, and risky, but had unexpected political effects; the anti-political citizens contributed to the eventual [End Page 186] collapse of Soviet-bloc communism by gradually, nearly invisibly, withholding the passive legitimation and motivation that the state had required of them to sustain itself. The communist state, which had wrapped itself from the beginning in the mythology of revolutionary futurism, did not survive.

Decades of dissidence in the Soviet bloc helped resuscitate the concept of civil society for Western social critics, especially those in the Marxist tradition, who had in a sense come to take civil society for granted or merely equated it with "bourgeois" society. Stated negatively, "civil society" designated the realms of human activity Eastern Europeans could not freely pursue. How, then, to conceptualize civil society in Western democracies? I take my bearings from Claude Lefort, who took up this question in a framework relevant to the debate between Edelman and me.

In modern societies, according to Lefort, the "social" is a field of continual "differentiation, internal opposition and change" (218). Divisions actively and perpetually volatilize all social relations. These social divisions include, first, class divisions (which, contrary to Marx's theorization and expectations, do not distill themselves into an antagonistic polarity between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat) and, second, the broader plurality of often-conflicting initiatives undertaken by individuals, communities, and associations pursuing their economic or cultural aims. Just as important as these two aspects of social division is a third: "the differentiation of economic, legal, educational, scientific, aesthetic and other practices, which exist, not simply as given practices (in the pores of society to use the Marxist metaphor), but as practices in which the reality of the social as such is put into play." These various social discourses do not conform to the traditional notion of ideology. First, each social discourse is "concerned to claim a universal truth," but because it is a particular discourse differentiated from the others it cannot lay claim to a knowledge of the social order as a whole. Second, each discourse, as knowledge, exercises power in the social world, but at the same time, as discourse, is susceptible to being contested on account of its tie to some particular force within the general social division; there is an "oscillation . . . between the discourse of power and the power...