Deconstruction After 911 by Martin McQuillan

Author:Martin McQuillan [McQuillan, Martin]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, General, Anthropology, Cultural & Social, Media Studies
ISBN: 9781135891121
Google: b0GTAgAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2008-10-07T03:38:46+00:00

AN IRREDUCIBLE CONCEPTUAL POLITICS

If, far from falling within the ambit of the New International, anti-capitalism is in fact a return of a certain spectre of Poujade then how might this essay approach its original question, what is the New International? The answer, I think, lies in the structure of this ontological question, ‘what is the New International?’ It would be a mistake to believe that the New International, like any other trope (or quasi trope) within Derridean thought, can be held accountable to the metaphysical concepts of onto-politics because it is precisely these metaphysical concepts that deconstruction wishes to interrogate and displace. Deconstruction cannot account for itself within a traditional political order because deconstruction wants to understand and exceed all and every such order. It is for this reason that deconstruction cannot provide a politics in the way that this term has hitherto been, metaphysically, understood, even if it is the constant desire of metaphysics to drag deconstruction back into a closed order of politics. This is the difference between a desire for ‘the politics of deconstruction’ which places the emphasis on ‘politics’ as preceding and authorising deconstruction, and the ‘politics of deconstruction’ in which politics is always already in deconstruction demonstrating the impossibility of its own metaphysical desire for definitive and quantitative closure. Thus, the New International despite appearances cannot be described in terms of the onto-political characteristics of other communist internationals. The New International will have no manifesto, no congress, no offices, no brigades, no party and no web site. The New International is a ghost. It is hauntological not ontological.

This may appear as something of a disappointment to those looking for a new politics (or even a deconstructive politics) but it is precisely its spectral status (i.e. its inability to manifest itself) that makes the New International ‘new’ in this sense. A deconstruction of politics will require a rethinking, from the ground up, of everything (without exception) that the field of the political has been subject to. The entire political tradition, including the very definition of politics as a certain kind of action and intervention, must be rethought as a conceptual order in, and in need of, deconstruction. In fact, the political field might be thought of as exemplary of the work of metaphysics itself because it is here that the trope of the material grounds itself as the trope of tropes. The material is that concept against which all other concepts must be judged and inevitably be found wanting in contrast. Traditional politics, as in the case of No Logo, secures the material as a fixed point of departure around which it organises its conceptual order (‘class’, ‘economics’, ‘liberation’ etc.). In turn each of these concepts, because they have a defined relation to a fixed point, can seem to acquire fixity themselves and so translate from a conceptual into a material order. In this sense the material, as foundational of politics, is exemplary of the work of any ontotheology. Correspondingly, it would be an error to

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