Between Politics and Antipolitics: Thinking About Politics After 9/11

298 Pages·2016·2.45 MB·English

by  Dick Howard (auth.)

Political Philosophy and Public Purpose
B e t w e e n P o l i t i c s
a n d A n t i p o l i t i c s
THINKING ABOUT POLITICS
AFTER 9/11
DICK HOWARD
Political Philosophy and Public Purpose
Series Editor
Michael   J. T hompson
William Paterson University
New York ,   New York, USA
Aim of the series
This series offers books that seek to explore new perspectives in social
and political criticism. Seeing contemporary academic political theory and
philosophy as largely dominated by hyper-academic and overly-technical
debates, the books in this series seek to connect the politically engaged
traditions of philosophical thought with contemporary social and political
life. The idea of philosophy emphasized here is not as an aloof enterprise,
but rather a publically-oriented activity that emphasizes rational refl ection
as well as informed praxis.
More information about this series at
http://www.springer.com/series/14542
Dick   Howard
Between Politics
and Antipolitics
Thinking About Politics After 9/11
Dick   Howard
State University of New York (SUNY) at Stony Brook
Stony Brook, New York, USA
Political Philosophy and Public Purpose
ISBN 978-1-137-60377-7 ISBN 978-1-349-94915-1 (eBook)
DOI 10.1057/978-1-349-94915-1
Library of Congress Control Number: 2016950216
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S E F
ERIES DITOR OREWORD
The twentieth century has seen a gradual transformation of the concept of
politics. With the collapse of the European imperial powers, of the grand
ideologies of fascism and communism no less than the emergence of new
movements for liberation, the concept of the “political” has become a
catchword, perhaps a kind of amorphous signifi er, for what many want
to see, after popular writers such as Hannah Arendt, as a new kind of
human activity. But as Dick Howard makes clear in this book, we must
keep in view that the philosophical refl ection on politics means keeping
the “political” alive as a core concept of any rationally informed and pro-
gressive understanding of politics more generally. The “political” means,
in its broadest sense, a kind of ceaseless project of justifi cation, of argu-
ment, and of contestation. It means grasping that politics is not to be
captured by any other agency than our own, that it is a self-critical, self-
authoritative enterprise.
Its opposite is “antipolitics,” or the attempt to foreclose just this project
of seeing our social world as necessarily in contestation, as irreducibly plu-
ral. Antipolitics is in play whenever a philosophical system absorbs politics
as a distinctively human activity. Whenever it is captured by the juggernaut
of historical or economic determinism or when it posits some absolute
totality toward which human beings should strive, we witness the eclipse
of politics as a creative, truly democratic enterprise. Antipolitics is the den-
igration of humans from self-governing, self-critical, and creative beings
situated in historical circumstance to that of mere cogs, parts of a larger,
impersonal force determining our good and our destiny. For Howard, the
collapse of communism as well as vulgar Marxism and fascism all represent
v
vi SERIES EDITOR FOREWORD
a gradual opening up for us as contemporaries in that now we can see
that politics is becoming liberated from the clenches of antipolitics. At the
same time, philosophy sheds its role as a purely analytic, contemplative
enterprise and is revealed as having genuine political potential.
Perhaps not unlike Aristotle’s insistence on the notion of citizenship as
action rather than as legal status, we can see each of Howard’s chapters in
this book as different peregrinations through a novel way of framing the
relationship between politics and philosophy, blending together dialecti-
cally, even organically, what has been compartmentalized analytically for
too long. Of course, antipolitics still persists. Amid various and unrelated
social forces from Islamic terrorism, bureaucratic statism, and the techno-
cratic impulses of global capitalism, antipolitics continues to push against
the grain of the political. But Howard’s interesting proposal is that we see
that antipolitics is itself a kind of politics . As such, it therefore deserves our
attention as a force that persists—even after the triumphal fall of the Berlin
Wall in 1989—and which in many ways requires philosophy as a means to
elucidate the constant tension between politics and antipolitics. Howard’s
provocative thesis is that we need to revisit the idea of politics as a practi-
cal, but nevertheless philosophically informed, enterprise and that this is in
danger of being swallowed once again in a post-9/11 context where force,
nationalism, or rigid ideology take the place of real political engagement.
Howard’s insistence on the relation between politics and philosophy
continues one of the core themes of the series of which it is a part: specifi -
cally the notion of philosophy as an engaged form of praxis and of politics
as a form of rational human activity that transgresses the bounds of utili-
tarian and methodological individualist models of man. Howard reminds
us that political philosophy is best understood as a shared capacity, one
that requires the members of any truly democratic community to adhere
to the values of inquiry and critique. With this in mind, this book is of
real importance at a time when we seem to be falling back into a curious
form of antipolitics: where technocracy expands as a response to economic
crises and moral rage now masquerades as genuine politics—both left and
right. His book should therefore fi nd favor among all who share a vision of
a political community dedicated to the principles of democratic citizenship
and intellectually engaged political praxis.
Michael J. Thompson
New York City
P
REFACE
The fi rst versions of the chapters that follow were written and published
over the course of the past quarter century. I have revised them, sometimes
quite extensively, during the last year as the thesis that unites them became
increasingly clear to me. The chapters are regrouped thematically around
the four types of engagement that have been crucial to the development of
my argument. Because these chapters originated as articles written in dif-
ferent contexts over a little more than a decade, some repetition has been
inevitable. I have done my best to limit it while maintaining the coherence
of each chapter as at once independent and yet interdependent within the
argument as a whole. I have also added some footnotes in order to more
clearly link arguments that relate to one another across different chapters.
Some of the articles in which these chapters originated were written and
published in French, others in English; two of them are based on notes from
talks given for German audiences. The translations are my own, which means
that in addition to the rewriting that was done to preserve the unitary thesis
of the book, the reader who searches out the original will inevitably fi nd dif-
ferences from the present version. I have listed below the publications where
the versions from which I did the last revisions appeared. I thank the editors
and publishers for permission to revise and reprint these materials.
I should thank in particular Olivier Mongin, the director of the journal
Esprit , where I have published a wide variety of essays (including the original
versions of several of those that appear here) over a period of nearly half a
century. It is often the case, at least for me, that writing in another language,
for a different public, encourages the kind of intellectual freedom that and
self-critical perspective that I hope is evident in the chapters that follow.
vii
A 1
CKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Chapter 2
This chapter fi rst appeared as : “ ‘These Petrifi ed Relations Must be Forced
to Dance’: An Interview with Dick Howard” by Douglas La Rocca and
Spencer A. Leonard, The Platypus Review, Issue #50, October 2012.
Chapter 3
This chapter fi rst appeared as the following essay: “Politics and anti-
politics” by Dick Howard in C ritical Theory and Democracy (2012) edited
by Enrique Peruzotti and Martin Plot, Routledge, pp. 29–40.
Chapter 4
This chapter fi rst appeared as the following essay: “Western Marxism,
Morality, and Politics” by Dick Howard in T he Modernist Imagination
(2009) edited by Warren Breckman, Peter E. Gordon, A. Dirk Moses,
Samuel Moyn, and Elliot Neaman, Berghahn Books.
Chapter 5
This chapter fi rst appeared as the following article: Howard, D. (1999).
Toward a Democratic Manifesto. C onstellations , 6: 237–243. doi:
10.1111/1467-8675.00140 .
Chapter 6
This chapter fi rst appeared as the following article: Howard, D. (2001).
Philosophy by Other Means? M etaphilosophy , 32: 463–501. doi:
1 0.1111/1467-9973.00204
ix
x ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS1
Chapter 7
This chapter fi rst appeared in as the following article: Howard, D. (2013).
Andre Gorz and the Philosophical Foundation of the Political, Logos , 12:3
Chapter 8
This chapter fi rst appears as the following article: Howard, D. (2015). Citizen
Habermas. C onstellations , 22: 523–532. doi: 1 0.1111/1467-8675.12190
Chapter 10
This chapter fi rst appeared in English as the following article: Howard, D
(2013). The Actuality of the History of Political Thought, V eritas , 55:1:67–
81. This chapter was originally published in G lobale Rekonfi gurationen
von Arbeitund Kommunikation. Festschrift für Hermann Schwengel , Voike
Rehbein and Klaus-W. West (Eds.), Konstanz: UVK Verlagsgesellschaft,
2009, p. 241–254.
Chapter 12
This chapter fi rst appeared as the following article: Howard, D. (2011).
Claude Lefort: a political biography. C ontinental Philosophy Review . 44:
2:145–150, © Springer Science+Business Media B.V.
Chapter 13
This chapter fi rst appeared as the following article: Howard, D. (2005).
The Necessity of Politics. D anish Yearbook of Philosophy, 40:37–56.
Museum Tusculanum Press.
It has also appears in T he Logos Reader (2006) published by The
University of Kentucky Press.
Chapter 14
This chapter fi rst appeared as the following article: Howard, D (2009).
What is Revolution? L ogos , 8:3
Chapter 15
This chapter fi rst appeared as the following article: Howard, D (2014).
How to Think About the Great War, L ogos , 13:3