Philosopher Profiles, Adbusters #82

"We must beware of those who decry the visible forms of violence such as terrorism while perpetrating the invisible, systemic forms of violence that generate the very phenomena they abhor."

This is the starting point for Slavoj Žižek's recently published Violence, a collection of revolutionary reflections in which he draws two conclusions of particular interest to future activists and culture jammers. First, it is "difficult to be really violent, to perform an act that violently disturbs the basic parameters of social life." Most attempts at revolutionary violence, whether left or right, fail to target the basic social structures underlying the systemic violence, which revolutionary forces strive to overcome. Žižek further concludes that sometimes doing nothing is in itself an act of violence capable of toppling those oppressive social structures. He ends the book leaving us with this revolutionary imperative:

"The threat today is not passivity, but pseudo-activity, the urge to 'be active,' to 'participate,' to mask the nothingness of what goes on. People intervene all the time to 'do something;' academics participate in meaningless debates and so on. The truly difficult thing is to step back, to withdraw. Those in power often prefer even a 'critical' participation, a dialogue, to silence – just to engage us in 'dialogue,' to make sure our ominous passivity is broken. The voters' abstention is thus a true political act: it forcefully confronts us with the vacuity of today's democracies. If one means by violence a radical upheaval of the basic social relation then, crazy and tasteless as it may sound, the problem with historical monsters who slaughtered millions was that they were not violent enough. Sometimes doing nothing is the most violent thing to do."

The essence of existence is being-with. So writes Jean-Luc Nancy in his seminal work Being Singular Plural. A French philosopher in the tradition of Derrida and Heidegger, Nancy believes the key to understanding the world we inhabit is understanding that we share it with others. Individually and collectively we are all singular pluralities and plural singularities. Because for Nancy all existence is co-existence, we cannot accurately speak of an "I," only of a "We." Removing the individual from the center of thought, Nancy creates a fundamental ontology in which our thinking orbits the collective comprehension of togetherness. Far from the dystopic of Ayn Rand's Anthem - where "I" has been banished from language in favor of the totalitarian "We" - Nancy isn't out to obliterate the individual. His vision is of a world in which difference flourishes, where singularities are acknowledged and accepted and where "We" are not forced into false unities of society, community or state.

In the future, it will no longer be possible to speak of ourselves as single, static identities. Instead, our genders, races and cultures will be fluid: ever shifting depending on the music we're listening to, the mood we're in or the friends we're with. We will exist in a state of constant becoming, new identities always emerging.

But how, in this state of perpetual change, can we ever hope to build a cohesive political movement? In Pluralism American political theorist William E. Connolly describes a future political system, in which fluid assemblages of citizens who associate based on shifting allegiances make democratic decisions. The book proposes a political culture that values diversity and a citizenry that, despite its differences, stands ready to unite in militant action should its pluralist nature be threatened. Connolly's notion of pluralism is a challenge to fundamentally rethink politics - urging us not to see difference as the chasm by which we're separated but rather as the force by which we unite.

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"The Birth of Altermodern", Adbusters #88 (Feb/March 2010)

"Philosophy at Zero Point", Adbusters #87 (Jan/Dec 2010)

"Campus Uprising", Adbusters #83 (May/June 2009)

"Philosopher Profiles: Nancy, Žižek and Connolly", Adbusters #82 (March/April 2009)

"The Politics of Youth: Interview with Michael Hardt", Adbusters #82 (March/April 2009)

"Blackspot Poem", Adbusters #80 (November/December 2008)

"Commit Facebook Suicide", Adbusters #77 (May/June 2008)

"Redemption", Adbusters #76 (March/April 2008)

"Blackspot the Future", Adbusters #75 (January/February 2008)