Deep Thought: a politics of the self vs. the state

The sublime object of solidarity by Jodi Dean (from I Cite; she also blogs on the group blog Long Sunday)

Subjective destitution might not seem particularly persuasive as a political rallying cry. Who really wants to shoot themselves in the foot or sacrifice what is in them more than themselves? To my mind, this is precisely the point and what makes the idea of becoming an object crucial for an alternative approach to radical politics.

Central to the problems rupturing the left over the past thirty years have been emphases on identity, fulfillment, personal freedom, care of the self, and individuality. Why? Because all of them make governance a matter of satisfying a self that can never be satisfied. All these approaches privilege a prior sense of a self in need of fulfillment and completion and then determine the worth of government from this prior position. Identity politics demand that specific identities be recognized. For all their gestures to social construction, then, they actually presuppose the existence of specific identities, identities that need to be, strive to become, that demand response. And, of course, government will only fail given these impossible demands.

In this way, left demands overlap with and reinforce right-wing weak state rhetoric, failing to counter the right's strong militarist state with their own conception of solidarity.

Likewise, beginning from the presupposition of a demanding self intertwines left demands with capital. Capital provides--or at least promises to. Beginning with the self in need of satisfaction will never enable the proper break with Capital.

What if we started elsewhere? What if we started with the idea that the state is the form of solidarity, the form of our collective responsibility for each other? Here, there is no I or we prior to the state. Nevetheless, the state remains necessarily non-all, non totalized, not a universality held in place by an exception but the form of an all that cannot be bounded? Here solidarity would be premised on a prior subjective destitution, a giving up of a claim to I, to my demands. Government would be the form through which we mediate our ever incomplete collectivity.