Powering Down on Authority

Avital Ronell

Witte de With Publishers

Powering Down on Authority Avital Ronell

Paternal Overdrive and Traumatic Invasiveness Sometimes the subject matter with which one engages frustrates the hermeneutic drive. Or it menaces the whole enterprise and plan of judicious approach, undermining all good intentions mobilized toward inviting a sensible dialogue or assuring a purposeful probe. A vexed motif, an unauthorized problem set, threatens to capsize you. Be that as it may, I am a child of the university, an entity whose expressions of ambivalence have not yet destroyed me.

(But how does one know that one has not been destroyed?

I have evidence to the contrary. That is a topic for another occasion. One day I will investigate the tyranny of the university over my own trajectories and dream projects, beginning with the way it has ruled over and overruled my body, beating down any healthy instinct, trampling the least cellule of creativity, but this problem does not move me now and I know too well that I’m rigged to be grateful to that traumatic invasiveness, which, with all its identificatory passes, is also in the end a structuring force.) I mark these coordinates not out of a sense of entitled indulgence or narcissistic complacency, but in order to situate myself near the problem areas that I would like to discuss here.

1 See Hannah Arendt, “What is Authority� in The Portable Hannah Arendt (New Yok: Penguin, 2000)

I intend to ride out a wave that was unleashed quite a while ago by Walter Benjamin, who saw and nailed the demise of aura in the artwork and those regions of existence claiming transcendence. Close by, Hannah Arendt was sizing the demise of authority, located within the political realm or in philosophical and artistic zones of creativity.1 Both Benjamin and Arendt take measure of a loss that affects us all, if only, for starters, in a low burn kind of way. They gauge the vanishing velocities of something we had counted on, gathering together, in an historical

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sense, that which was needed in order for the world of humans to thrive and name and create. I add an unfinished work of Alexandre Kojève to the mix, for he has understood the disastrous consequences of relinquishing authority, be it that of God or nation-state, or of what is insinuated by the trickle-down divinity of the work of art. It would be presumptuous to tie together all these strands, but the charge of presumption has never stopped me before.

I want to consider what happens to our shared and fissured worlds when the auratic claims or mystical foundations on which the power pump of authority depends have been eroded. What happens to the performance of power and diplomacy, to world-running energies, when they are no longer backed by the assured stance of authority? Does one scale back on the way deals are cut, or do new smart powers emerge to fill in for what has gone missing? Or has the breakdown of authority’s long-reigning era—in many ways heralded by art and political forms of steady insurrection— brought us to a portentous standstill? Let us examine the premises behind these questions with patience and a fresh stash of curiosity. I begin by putting our focus on the problem of authority: the way it is carried, undermined, repelled, mimed, embraced, or perpetually questioned. I’ll start with my home ground, with one of my residential addresses, from where I frequently emit signals.

In the university, the exercise of authority, including the often-covert habits of tyranny and evocations of injustice, remain to be studied even as such investigations tend to downscale other, more manifestly distressed experiences of wrongdoing. Itself embattled by the threat of repressive regimes, the university seems in any case small in comparison to frankly pernicious political entities, and in some cases bravely shelters subversive cognitive sprees and intellectual diversity, making room for behaviors and reflections that receive no pass in other sectors of certain

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dominant cultures. Nonetheless, whether or not it mirrors larger social tendencies, the university-as-life form should not escape review, for it also sponsors unfreedom in a number of ways and appears to exhaust the teaching body under the weight of an ever-increasing bureaucratic prerogative. University offices, like all bureaucracies, dispense their toxic dosage of authoritarian rule; and the struggle over what carries authority or what is poised to make one perish (which is not limited to grammars of authorship and the contingencies of publishing) never stops.

2 I am currently completing a book that addresses the structures of narcissism and identification at the joint closure of politics and psychoanalysis, Loser Sons: Politics and Authority. Freud was quite attentive and committed to the problems of political structuration and cultural defeat or widespread discontent. He understood that narcissism had to jump over the processes of identification in order to move the precarious subject off the limited, nearly autistic lane into social existence. In its many (often disturbing) forms, sociality concerns psychoanalysis from the start and entails tracking varying types of aggression and group formation, consistent attitudes of ambivalence, fractured leadership, and political disavowal.

The question raised by Freud at this point involves the individual’s ability to cross over from narcissistic restraints into social commitment by means of identification. Basically, if identification fails us, then humankind is doomed—announcing a predicament that may indeed be the case, and one that Freud and his successors must make in the last analysis.

If I have begun my discursive run by slowing down for an institutional checkpoint, this is happening in part because the very possibility of experience, be it flagged by distress, disaster, scales of exaltation, or even mundanity, must nowadays be faced without the hallmark of truth. Truth was once affiliated with and came after ruin; its disclosure and light often depending on the staging of someone’s or something’s ruinous disintegration. Today, by contrast, disaster is without truth, occurring without a sign cast from the luminous concealment of a “beyond.” Deprived of shelter, pitched on the edge of metaphysics, one is thrown back upon minimal signposts and decidedly modest directives. We are more on our own than ever before, more responsible for locating the incitements of an essentially untraceable call. This condition favors the spread of social narcissism, a problem that I would like to address briefly, with the understanding that it will receive more attention elsewhere.2 In the meanwhile, I offer pledges of truthfulness, even if this gesture must be reduced to situating me in the very modest residential areas from where I write.

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So, here is how I would sum up my philosophical circumstances: I am a creature of the untimely, coached by Nietzschean temporal leaps yet put through my paces by obligatory relapses into what one might call “tradition.”

This is the only way in which I might be considered conservative, or a conservationist—by adhering to the demands of traditional narratives and their silenced partners. That is to say, in part, that I am in my comfort zone when ferreting out the heavily sedated traces and repressed remnants of historical eventfulness. Trained on the sidelines of the master discourse, I advocate a kind of untimely activism, driven home by the joint closure of the philosophical and the political. If something has not been accounted for, I want it.

The least probable cause, the darkest and most unavailable docket, sparks my curiosity (curiosity: itself a philosophically devalued motor for investigation). I scour the peripheries, the often-abandoned sites of ethical reconnaissance.

Given these constraints and the way I curb the so-called object of contemplation, I like to stay away from the dominant trends and approved protocols for reading politics.

Especially where “politics” becomes censorious and inevitable, unconditional (or as Arendt puts it, “total”), and thus, in terms of the way discursive containers are regulated and managed, kind of DOA, as so-called contemplative objects go. (Well, I suppose anything submitted to contemplation arrives de facto DOA. Let me clarify. I mean more mangled or disfigured, more subject to Entstellung, disturbed by displacement, than even language demands— barely recognizable or plainly obsolesced in terms of its presentation. That’s when it comes my way.) I honor and read my colleagues, those known to me and unknown, some of whom have sat on panels with me or have run the other way, who make it their life’s work to put unceasing pressure on the elaboration of social formations, and bravely continue to work through the mires of a relentlessly agonistic politics.

But, for me, whether by default or theoretical perversion, there’s another way of going about things, another hand that

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