Elliott Gregory - The left hemisphere: mapping critical theory today

This work was published with the help of the French Ministry of Culture Centre National du Livre

First published by Verso 2013
Translation Gregory Elliott 2013
Originally published as Hmisphre gauche. Une cartographie des nouvelles penses critiques
La Dcouverte 2010

All rights reserved

The moral rights of the author have been asserted

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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Keucheyan, Razmig.
[Hmisphre gauche. English.]
Left hemisphere : mapping critical theory today / Razmig Keucheyan; translated by Gregory Elliott.
pages cm
eISBN: 978-1-78168-231-9
1. Right and left (Political science)History20th century. 2. Right and left (Political science)History21st century. 3. Postmodernism. I. Elliott, Gregory. II. Title.
JA83.K4613 2013
320.5019dc23

2013013995

v3.1

Defeat is a hard experience to master: the temptation is always to sublimate it.

Perry Anderson, Spectrum

In his preface to Aden Arabie, Jean-Paul Sartre associates Paul Nizan with the rebellious youth of the 1960s. He suggests a community of revolt secretly linking his fellow-student of the 1930s with those who set out to storm the old world thirty years later. In the post-war period, Nizan had suffered a long eclipse. He had suddenly re-emerged and, more contemporary than ever, his work had been republished at the start of what were to be two revolutionary decades. As the years go by, writes Sartre, his hibernation has made him younger. Yesterday he was our contemporary; today he is theirs. For an oeuvre to go into hibernation in this way, and then attract the interest of new generations, requires precise conditions. It must somehow speak to the young that is, at the very least, cast a special light on the world in which they are immersed.

Determining what is contemporary is central to this book, as is the relationship between what is contemporary and what temporarily or definitively is not. Our subject, however, is not literature but the general theory of emancipation. More specifically, we shall be concerned with the new critical theories.

The term critical theory has a long history. Traditionally often in the singular and upper case it refers to the thinkers of the Frankfurt School, the generations of philosophers and sociologists who have succeeded one another at the helm of that citys Institut fr Sozialforschung. However, it will be used in this work in a much broader sense and always in the plural. In the sense given it here, it covers both the queer theory developed by the North American feminist Judith Butler and the metaphysics of the event proposed by Alain Badiou, as well as Fredric Jamesons theory of postmodernism, Homi Bhabha and Gayatri Spivaks postcolonialism, John Holloways open Marxism, and Slavoj ieks Hegelian neo-Lacanianism.

The new critical theories are new in as much as they appeared after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. While most of them were developed prior to that event, they emerged in the public sphere in its wake. For example, we shall understand nothing of Michael Hardts and Toni Negris theory of Empire and Multitude In its current form, however, the theory only emerged at the end of the 90s. The novelty of critical theories is in part bound up with the renewal of social and political critique that began in the second half of the 1990s, with events like the French strikes of NovemberDecember 1995, the demonstrations against the WTO at Seattle in 1999, and the first World Social Forum at Porto Alegre in 2001.

Obviously, the issue of the extent to which a form of thought is new, and the criteria for assessing such novelty, is itself complex. It is a theoretical and political question in itself. Should we opt for a purely chronological criterion, arguing that what is new is simply what comes after? But in that case the most trifling, uninteresting idea which demarcates itself, however minimally, from existing currents of thought should be classified as new. Chronology is therefore insufficient to define novelty. Is new, then, synonymous with important? But important from what point of view intellectual, political or both? And who judges this importance? The hypothesis advanced in this book is that we are currently going through a transitional period politically and intellectually; and that it is premature to venture unequivocal answers to such questions.

A new critical theory is a theory, not merely an analysis or interpretation. It not only reflects on what is, by describing past or present social reality in the manner of empirical social science. It also raises the issue of what is desirable. As such, it necessarily contains a political dimension. Critical theories reject the epistemological axiom of value neutrality posited by Max Weber in the early twentieth century in his essays on the methodology of the social sciences. In them the descriptive and the normative (i.e. the political) are inextricably linked.

Critical theories are theories that more or less comprehensively challenge the existing social order. The criticisms they formulate do not concern particular aspects of this order, like the imposition of a tax on financial transactions (the Tobin tax) or some measure relating to pension reform. Whether radical or more moderate, the critical dimension of the new critical theories consists in the general character of their challenge to the contemporary social world. This generality is itself variable. Some, like classical and contemporary Marxists, tend to adopt the standpoint of the totality, in the belief that the global character of capitalism requires that critique should itself be global. Others, like poststructuralists, challenge the very possibility of such a standpoint. But in every instance an increase in generality, which aims to go beyond the strictly local to the more global, is evident.

Until the second half of the twentieth century, the centre of gravity of critical thinking lay in western and eastern Europe. Today it has shifted to the United States, either because the relevant authors are natives of that country or, when they are not, because they teach in US universities. This involves a significant alteration in the geography of thinking, which (as we shall see) is not without its effects on the nature of contemporary critical theories.

Only a stubborn cultural bias, however, would have it that the future of critical theories is still being played out in the western countries. As Perry Anderson has suggested, it is highly likely that theoretical production follows the pattern of production tout court, or at any rate that the development of the two is not independent. Not, as an unduly simplistic materialism might think, because the economy determines ideas in the last instance, but because new ideas arise where new problems are posed. And it is in countries like China, India and Brazil that these problems are already arising or will arise in the future.

The historical conjuncture in which theories are formed stamps them with their main characteristics. Classical Marxism initiated on Marxs death by Engels and notably comprising Kautsky, Lenin, Trotsky, Luxemburg and Otto Bauer emerged against the background of profound political and economic turbulence, which led to the First World War and the Russian Revolution. Conversely, so-called Western Marxism, of which Lukcs, Korsch and Gramsci were the initiators, and to which Adorno, Sartre, Althusser, Marcuse and Della Volpe in particular belong, developed in a period of relative stability for capitalism. The themes broached by these authors, but also their theoretical style, clearly register the effects of this. Thus, although they all pertain to the Marxist tradition, a gulf separates Hilferdings