In my previous two blog posts I tried, first, to summarize Alain Badiou’s new book Trump, which consists of two lectures delivered in the immediate aftermath of Trump’s electoral victory in 2016; second, as a contribution to the evaluation of Badiou’s analysis, to present the most powerful alternative philosophical account of Trump known to me, namely, a lecture by Hans Sluga delivered in earlier 2017, and subsequently published on his blog. Both philosophers take broadly what Sluga has called a ‘diagnostic’ approach, wherein (a) Trump is treated as a symptom of broader economic, cultural, and even metaphysical processes and conceptions; then (b) the explanatorily relevant background is sketched; and, as Sluga puts it in his book Politics and the Search for the Common Good ((2014), p. 25), (c) the diagnostician assumes “the unity of theory and practice”, and so at the very least rejects theorizing that lacks some practical import. Sluga further notes that the practice of philosophical diagnosis “does not by any means guarantee the correctness of its outcomes.” (p.37) And along with the question of the correctness of each of the two accounts taken individually, one wonders whether both accounts could simultaneously be ‘correct’. Or is ‘correctness’ even the most important criterion for evaluating such accounts? One might rather think that perhaps fruitfulness in indicating and evaluating courses of potentially transformative political action is a more pressing concern for such accounts.
One way to approach these questions is to consider first what Badiou’s and Sluga’s diagnoses share, and then to ask where and why they differ. Their most salient shared characteristic is the claim that our contemporary situation is characterized by ‘disorientation’. What is this? Neither philosopher thinks that is either possible or desirable to imagine that someone can have, as part of one’s cognitive repertoire, a comprehensive theory of how the world is. Now one paradigm or ideal type of having an orientation or being oriented would surely be something of the late Medieval Christian’s sense of life. The Christian is born into a world that offers the person a secure sense of place, not primarily as the product of contingencies of birth as so-and-so’s son or daughter, but as a being whose life has a certain structure and trajectory. The Christian aims for salvation, and life presents itself as a series of challenges and tests leading or blocking access to the goal. The Christian’s orientation resembles to that extent the formula for his happiness that Nietzsche gives in Twilight of the Idols: “A yes, a no, a straight line, and a goal.” Although the Christian’s religious kind of orientation cannot be the counter to our contemporary disorientation, still the term ‘orientation’ does suggest some kind of generality. But if I’m thirsty, see a water fountain, and walk towards it, I am not ‘oriented’ in the relevant sense, I am not oriented in the relevant sense, even though the intelligibility of my action presupposes some ‘general’ knowledge of thirst, water, fountains, etc. Perhaps one minimal sense of orientation would be satisfied if I operated with an implicit map of water sources. So I could pass my days and, when thirsty, have a sense of where to go to get water. ‘Orientation’, then, includes a practical dimension: I must have a sense of where I am (otherwise the map is useless), what sorts of needs, wants, and/or desires I wish to satisfy, and what sort of paths and obstacles there are to attaining my goal.
‘Orientation’, then, involves at least three elements. First, the ‘oriented’ person must grasp herself under some conception that marks her needs, interests, desires, and/or projects. Second, an ‘oriented’ person must grasp herself as aiming at something more general than simply satisfying her needs, desires, etc. This generality might be thought of as single or as some set of values and/or ideals. These values and ideals are grasped by the person as motivating: they are not values and ideals for just anyone, but for that person, and as such they are prima facie attractive. Third, an ‘oriented’ person would have some sense of how to go about exemplifying those values and/or ideals in her actions and in the products of her actions. Additionally, the whole containing these elements must have a degree of stability, for if one or more of the elements fluctuated rapidly and unpredictability the sense of orientation would be self-undermining; the person might no sooner undertake the realization of some value when the value changes, or the person changes so as to no longer find the value attractive, or no route towards realization is on view.
Both Badiou and Sluga aim to counter disorientation with invention in the service of re-orientation. For Badiou “the brutality and the blind violence of contemporary capitalism” (p.45; and similarly at p.15) are evident. For the limited purposes of a diagnostic account of Trump the values and ideals that provide points of orientation are those of universality and equality. Of course it is possible to live, like Nietzsche’s last man, without these; life then would consist of endless consumerist lurching towards whatever products showed up on one’s horizon. The ‘communist hypothesis’ of orientation towards universality and equality is just that, a hypothesis, but the point of which is to generate at least the possibility that one’s individual and collective life has some point and direction. Badiou takes up the more activist interpretation of Marx’s dictum for philosophy: the point of philosophy is to change the world, or at least to transform itself into a kind of reflective activity in the service of such change. Sluga, by contrast, takes a less activist stance towards the activity of philosophy: it is not that philosophical activity is in the service of some determinate direction of change, but is rather more an activity like Foucault’s quasi-Kantian historical ontology. Such philosophy has a two-fold aim: to maintain the sense of the present as a contingent product of various historical processes; but also to provide a map of possible routes out of the miseries and seeming-aporias of the present. As Sluga puts it (2014, p.242): “a map does not tell us how we must travel; it does not give us general rules for traveling; it does not give us rules at all; but it shows possibilities; tells us where we can and cannot go; . . . it is a practical guide to help us with our practical needs.” For Sluga the aim of diagnostic political philosophy is not to provide a Badiou-esque action-orienting Idea, but rather to provide such a map.
If something like this is right, then it seems plausible to think further that there is no deep inconsistency between the two accounts. Sluga could treat Badiou’s account as a proposal for one possible route out of the present, and evaluate it accordingly. Likely Sluga would consider Badiou’s inventions insufficiently attentive to the ways in which our present age is that of “high technology” (Sluga (2014), pp. 205-225). Badiou could grant much of Sluga’s analyses and diagnoses, but would likely think that Sluga has granted too much to Nietzsche’s account of nihilism: the post-Nietzschean lives of Rosa Luxemburg, Lenin, Brecht, C. L. R. James, and countless others show that our nihilistic condition has not wholly blocked the possibility of treating (some) values as fixed and action-orienting.—I am grateful to both philosophers for their contributions to this topic and advancing our reflection on and understanding of the political present.
