Impossible Objects by Simon Critchley & Carl Cederstrom & Todd Kesselman

Author:Simon Critchley & Carl Cederstrom & Todd Kesselman [Critchley, Simon]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Wiley
Published: 2013-04-16T16:00:00+00:00

CC: An important addition to this formula is comedy, more precisely, how humor opens up new avenues for resistance. How does your notion of the comic subject of politics differ from the classical subject of politics?

SC: The classical subject of politics is a virile, active, autarchic, sovereign subject – a subject that can – a subject that is able to act. For me, that goes together with a certain lack of humor, whether that is Bush or bin Laden. They are both active, virile political subjects, engaged in some sort of bloody contest. What interests me about comedy as a form of resistance is that comedy is the performance of powerlessness. The comic subject doesn’t assume that it has power; it doesn’t assume its virility. It performs its powerlessness in acts of nonviolent warfare – it is the power of the powerless. So classical political subjects are capable of acting; they are virile, they are potent, and they are humorless. But most importantly they are “justified” in what they do. What interests me is to think of a political subjectivity that would find itself inescapably involved in acts which cannot be justified. I’ve been doing some work recently on Benjamin’s critique of violence and there’s a fascinating argument in Benjamin where he says that “law is violence, politics is violence, but does violence exhaust the political field?” And his answer is no. There’s a guideline of nonviolence, which to him is expressed in the biblical prohibition of murder: “Thou shall not kill.” The situation in which that prohibition arises is a situation of violence: I know I cannot kill and yet I’m in a situation where I have to kill. The violence that I perpetrate is necessary but not justified. To think about an idea of politics based upon a non-justifiable sphere of violence is fascinating. This is similar to Judith Butler’s claim about mourning. The classical political subject doesn’t want to mourn, but to act. After 9/11, there were 11 days of mourning. Then mourning was declared to be over and it was time for action. The question that Judith Butler asks, which I find enormously interesting, is what a politics of grief and mourning would look like – a politics based around the powerlessness of grief and mourning.

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