by Jon Lackman | 15 May 2009 | Conferences, Theory
Patrick Harrison reports on the recent conference, “On the Idea of Communism,” in n+1:
… Nearly the entire emerging canon of (mostly male) contemporary Continental philosophers—including Alain Badiou, Slavoj Žižek, Jacques Rancière, [Terry] Eagleton, and Antonio Negri, [Michael] Hardt’s mentor and collaborator … joined Hardt at the conference … [Hardt's] intellectual performance came straight out of the ramshackle, pleasantly inconclusive manner of American literary studies seminars, where discourse proceeds by dialogue, constructive criticism, and synthesis of a diversity of possible “readings” rather than by the militant “line struggle” favored by the Badiouvians with whom he shared the stage …
The premise of “On the Idea of Communism,” which was hosted March 13-15 by the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities, was to explore the possible positive meanings of the word “communism” for philosophical thinking. The conference would proceed neither by historical analysis of the past failure of “actually existing communism,” nor by speculation on the practicalities of establishing communism in our time, but by a series of philosophical meditations on what Badiou has called “the communist hypothesis,” that is, the hypothesis of an “eternal Idea” of radical egalitarianism that haunts every social order …
Underlying the general good feelings at the conference, however, were uglier traces of elitism and smug passivity. The audience was made up almost entirely of middle class, white academics (or academics-to-be), and if it was well balanced in terms of gender, a certain boys’ club mentality of macho one-upmanship still prevailed … All of the speakers were white European men, with the exceptions of Hardt (white and male but American) and poetry scholar Judith Balso (white and European but female). No history other than that of the French Revolution and Marxist communism was looked to for inspiration in testing “the communist hypothesis” …
Philosophy can’t complete politics, but it can reinvigorate and expand politics, and with this in mind Žižek’s “call to thought” is salutary. For this lesson and for the essential gesture of proposing a single banner under which all those committed to struggling for universal human equality can unite, the Birkbeck conference, for all its sins, represents a step in the right direction.
Someday, if not already, these people will be seen as the equivalent of the angels-dancing-on-the-head-of-a-pin debaters.
The sad part of this is that the project is worthwhile and should be welcomed. It’s the approach (and the nature of the discourse itself) that’s flawed.
I still find it odd that in our time, a time that prides itself on the general equality of the human condition, that philosophy is still dominated by white males. It also seems a little inadequate to have a discussion on communism where the countries that the (ideals more often) apply to are not dominated by white europeans.