Beyond representation?

Parliamentary Affairs

Volumn 60, Issue 1, 2007, Pages 111-126

  Thomassen, Lasse ^a  

^a NONE

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 33846358232     PISSN: 00312290     EISSN: 14602482     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1093/pa/gsl051     Document Type: Review

References (53)

1. Thanks to David Bailey, the participants in the 4th IDA World Workshop at the University of Essex, May 2006, and the reviewers of the journal for their comments on earlier versions of the paper.
2. G. Baker, 'Revisiting the Concept of Representation', Parliamentary Affairs, January 2006; S. Tormey, '"Not in my Name": Deleuze, Zapatismo and the Critique of Representation', Parliamentary Affairs, January 2006 (all subsequent references in brackets in the text are to this article).
3. For an illustration of the affinities between Foucault and Deleuze on representation, see their interview, M. Foucault and G. Deleuze, 'Intellectuals and Power', in M. Foucault, Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, ed. D. F. Bouchard, trans. D. F. Bouchard and S. Simon, Basil Blackwell, 1977.
4. Deleuze and Derrida did not comment extensively on one another's works, although see Derrida's piece on the occasion of Deleuze's death: J. Derrida, 'I'm Going to Have to Wander All Alone', in J. Derrida, The Work of Mourning, ed. P.-A. Brault and M. Naas, trans. L. Lawler, University of Chicago Press, 2001, pp. 192-5.
5. For helpful literature on the relationship between Derrida and Deleuze's respective works, see P. Patton and J. Protevi (eds), Between Deleuze and Derrida, Continuum, 2003;
6. and G.C.F. Bearn, 'Differentiating Derrida and Deleuze', Continental Philosophy Review, October 2000, pp. 441-65.
7. The triangle Foucault, Deleuze and Deleuze may be extended to a quadrangle by including another influential post-structuralist thinker, Jacques Lacan. For an attempt to combine Foucault, Lacan and anarchist theory to support a position close to that of Tormey, see R.J.F. Day, 'From Hegemony to Affinity: The Political Logic of the Newest Social Movements', Cultural Studies, September 2004.
8. I would like to thank Lars Tønder for pressing me on this point.
9. S. Tormey, 'From Utopian Worlds to Utopian Spaces: Reflections on the Contemporary Radical Imaginary and the Social Forum Process', Ephemera, May 2005, pp. 394-408;
10. S. Tormey, 'The 2003 European Social Forum: Where Next for the Anti-capitalist Movement?', Winter 2004, pp. 149-57;
11. and S. Tormey, 'After Gleneagles: Where next?' in D. Harvie et al. (eds), Shut Them Down!, Dissent! and Autonomedia, 2005, pp. 337-49. I recognise that these texts by no means exhaust Tormey's work on radical politics and theory, but they are the most important ones for my purposes in this article.
12. The Zapatistas did have a sort of programme, although not for the seizure of institutions, cf. N. Harvey and C. Halverson, 'The Secret and the Promise: Women's Struggles in Chiapas', in D. Howarth, A.J. Norval and Y. Stavrakakis (eds), Discourse Theory and Political Analysis: Identities, Hegemonies and Social Change, Manchester University Press, 2000, pp. 151-67 at p. 151.
13. Tormey, 'The 2003 European Social Forum', pp. 152-5;
14. and A. Robinson and S. Tormey, '"Horizontals", "Verticals" and the Conflicting Logics of Transformative Politics', in P. Hayden and C. el-Ojeili (eds), Confronting Globalization: Humanity, Justice and the Renewal of Politics, Palgrave, 2005, pp. 208-26 at pp. 209ff.
15. Robinson and Tormey, '"Horizontals", "Verticals" and the Conflicting Logics of Transformative Politics', p. 212.
16. Ibid.
17. Tormey does not use the terms trunk, aborescent and rhizome in his article, but they are central to the argument of G. Deleuze and F. Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. B. Massumi, University of Minnesota Press, 1987.
18. Ibid., pp. 221 and 222.
19. Tormey, 'From Utopian Worlds to Utopian Spaces', p. 395.
20. Ibid., p. 397.
21. Ibid., p. 402.
22. Baker ('Revisiting the Concept of Representation', pp. 166f) makes this point.
23. I am not claiming that the problem is solved with the possibility to object to representations. The one who objects to representations of 'Britishness' as xenophobic, for instance, then faces the dilemma of either rejecting 'Britishness' altogether or rejecting the way 'Britishness' is represented.
24. J. Derrida, 'Sending: On Representation', trans. P. and M. A. Caws, Social Research, Summer 1982, pp. 294-326 at p. 308.
25. For the deconstructive view of representation, see also J. Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. G.C. Spivak, 2nd edn, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997;
26. and E. Laclau, Emancipation(s), Verso, 1996, Chapter 6.
27. We can think of representation in terms of the Derridean notion of supplementarity, that is, as simultaneously external and contingent to what it represents and essential to the constitution of the represented, cf. Derrida, Of Grammatology, pp. 141ff.
28. We can also think of representation in terms of Derrida's notion of iterability, that is, as simultaneously discontinuity and continuity, performative and constative, cf. J. Derrida, Limited Inc., trans. S. Weber, Northwestern University Press, 1988.
29. For an illuminating example of representation understood as iterability, see Derrida's deconstruction of the American Declaration of Independence in J. Derrida, 'Declarations of Independence' in J. Derrida, Negotiations: Interventions and Interviews, 1971-2001, ed. E. Rottenberg, trans. T. Keenan and T. Pepper, Stanford University Press, 2002, pp. 46-54.
30. Cf. also Spivak's critique of Foucault and Deleuze in G.C. Spivak, 'Can the Subaltern Speak?', in P. Williams and L. Chrisman (eds), Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory: A Reader, Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1994, pp. 66-111 at p. 69.
31. José Rabasa follows Spivak in an interesting paper on the Zapatistas, but does not address the problems surrounding representation and the construction of collective identities. J. Rabasa, 'Of Zapatismo: Reflections on the Folkloric and the Impossible in a Subaltern Insurrection', in L. Lowe and D. Lloyd (eds), The Politics of Culture in the Shadow of Capital, Duke University Press, 1997, pp. 399-431.
32. Harvey and Halverson, 'The Secret and the Promise', p. 155.
33. Ibid., p. 163.
34. Laclau, Emancipation(s) provides a way to analyse this.
35. Recounted in E. J. Popke, 'The Face of the Other: Zapatismo, Responsibility and the Ethics of Deconstruction', Social and Cultural Geography, June 2004, pp. 301-17 at p. 310. Unfortunately, Popke does not extend his Derridean and Levinasian argument to consider the problem of representation in relation to the Zapatistas.
36. Quoted in ibid.
37. Harvey and Halverson, 'The Secret and the Promise', pp. 160-2.
38. Tormey, 'From Utopian Worlds to Utopian Spaces', p. 398.
39. Robinson and Tormey, '"Horizontals", "Verticals" and the Conflicting Logics of Transformative Politics', p. 223.
40. Foucault and Deleuze, 'Intellectuals and Power', p. 207.
41. In one place Derrida says something similarly problematic. Although attentive to the place of enunciation and his own role in the process, Derrida nonetheless writes about the sans-papiers in France: 'We are here for this, we are here to protest and to act first by speaking. This means by raising our voice for the "sans-papiers," and as a sign of solidarity with them: for them in this sense, but not for them in the sense of in their place. They have spoken and they speak for themselves, we hear them, along with their representatives or advocates, their poets, and their songsters. To speak here means that the "sans-papiers" have a right to speak: we are here to hear them and to listen them tell us what they have to tell us, to speak with them, and not only, therefore, to speak about them or in their place.' J. Derrida, 'Derelictions of the Right to Justice (But What Are the "Sans-Papiers" Lacking)', in J. Derrida, Negotiations: Interventions and Interviews, 1971-2001, ed. and trans. E. Rottenberg, Stanford University Press, 2002, pp. 133-44 at pp. 134f.
42. Ibid., p. 209.
43. This work of articulation I would like to think of in terms of hegemony as conceived by E. Laclau and C. Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics, Verso, 1985.
44. Baker, 'Revisiting the Concept of Representation', pp. 163f.
45. Tormey, 'Post-Marxism, Democracy and the Future of Radical Politics', p. 126.
46. Spivak, 'Can the Subaltern Speak?', p. 104.
47. Derrida, 'Sending', 326.
48. Ibid., p. 311.
49. Spivak, 'Can the Subaltern Speak?', p. 87.
50. This is not to say that this line of division is the only relevant one to understand the differences between the two positions examined in this paper. The differences between the two positions could also fruitfully be studied according to two other lines of division, even if they do not map perfectly on to these distinctions: immanence/transcendence and abundance/lack. On the former, see J. Derrida, 'Hospitality, Justice and Responsibility: A Dialogue with Jacques Derrida', in R. Kearney and M. Dooley (eds), Questioning Ethics: Contemporary Debates in Philosophy, Routledge, 1999, pp. 65-83 at p. 76;
51. and D.W. Smith, 'Deleuze and Derrida, Immanence and Transcendence: Two Directions in Recent French Thought', in P. Patton and J. Protevi (eds), Between Deleuze and Derrida, Continuum, 2003, pp. 46-66.
52. On the latter, see L. Tønder and L. Thomassen (eds), Radical Democracy: Politics Between Abundance and Lack, Manchester University Press, 2005.
53. On hope and the way activists mirror their own struggles in the Zapatista movement, see Harvey and Halverson, 'The Secret and the Promise', pp. 151 and 163.