How did we find the strength to go on? In the modern period, ‘‘the people’’, the collective subject and patient vehicle of progressive Enlightenment and historical meaning, became nothing but a pretext for murder, the Volk, the proletariat, the petty bourgeois settler clearing away peoples and cultures as so many obstacles to agriculture, carving out the requisite emptiness for a fantasy-autochthony. In the modern period, while ‘‘the people’’ awaited one humanistic apocalypse or another, aching for the promised final unity, purity or triumph, people themselves were mangled by bureaucratic genocides, brutalised by imperial police actions, photo-spectralised by nuclear experimentalism, shamed by the normativities of bio-power, and disappeared in the silence and night of one political terror apparatus or another, forced assimilations, forced migrations, forced industrialisation, emptied villages in Poland, in Kenya, in Chechnya, Bengal, Vietnam, Algeria, El Salvador, and East Timor, concentration camps, treacherous infiltrations, racial disenfranchisement, liberal complacency and error. In the twentieth century, when politics became art, art became madness, madness became pornography, pornography became murder, and murder became just entertainment, a delirium no subjectivity could make purposeful or more than rhetorically redemptive. Only love was redemptive by 1969. In the twentieth century, nature became simply the passive object of administration, pleasure was re-packaged as science, because science was the only language the newspapers accorded authority. It was the time of the eternal recurrence of the spiritless mind, the eternal poverty of the scandalous minority, the eternal sunshine of the exterminating angel, when the poet said: ‘‘Black milk of daybreak we drink you at sundown/We drink it at noon in the morning we drink it at night/We drink and we drink it/We dig a grave in the wind there one lies unconfined’’ (Celan 1990, 63). ‘‘Was I sleeping, while the others suffered?’’ (Beckett 1965, 90).

As a consequence, our time is a time of shameless defeatism, when we know everything we are told is misinformation, but this knowledge does not protect us, or inspire us to a future freedom, where things will be transparent. We know politicians lie, kill, cheat and dishonour us, but it is not clear what can be done about it, or whether in fact it is to be accepted with a frustrated resignation. We are not ignorant of what they do nor indifferent to it, but we are impelled to trust them by the apparent lack of any other option. This defeatism is not childlike nor naïve, not ignorant nor idealistic. It is wise, split between the wisdom of a cultivated lassitude where knowledge does not lead to the struggle with difficulty, nor to the dangerous decision, and an impatient, but directionless radicalism where the long awaited re-birth of progressive spirit seems further off every day, and the hope for change becomes simply invested in the imminence of first economic, then environmental, then terroristic, and now military catastrophe.

In the West, we pay our governments to do our murders for us, in the crisp hi-tech, neat, logistical, politic, rationalised, well-mannered and eminently reportable, statistical, Christian, way they have mastered these things, leaving the electorate untroubled by the cost on which its luxury depends and who gets to pay it. The legacy of the Reagan/Thatcher experiment: do not frighten the electorate with the spectre of the injustice, torment, dictatorship, starvation, epidemic, exploitation or genocide that it causes or benefits from. The electorate must be kept in a warm cocoon of moralistic platitudes, and homespun economic automaticity, where world-affairs are reduced to the business of an unthinking common sense, and the role of the media is merely to police stereotypes we can all hold in contempt: the cheating tradesman, the paedophile priest, the corrupt politician, the charlatan diet guru, thus creating a pathetic simulacrum of social consensus around injustices that never accumulate into a positive theory of the just itself. The point is Derrida never gave in, never conceded to the platitude, to the easy, reassuring orthodoxies of left or right, of humanism or subversion. No balking at risk, no refusal to recognise difficulty, no pragmatic concession that incommensurables, aporias, incompossibilities needed at some point to be truncated, by-passed, frustrated or overcome. No sense that thinking had a limit beyond which only authority or pragmatism should take us. For Derrida, there was no pragmatics without thought, except the pragmatics that would not admit what it thought. No pragmatics without metaphysics. The pragmatics that disavowed metaphysics simply confessed how bad, un-self-conscious and ill-considered its metaphysics actually was. There was no point for Derrida in a thought that did not think, that refused to think, the ‘‘humanity’’ that settled for rhetorical gestures, the politics satisfied by an educated resignation, nor, above all, did he ever concede to defeatism and its small wisdom.

SOCIAL SEMIOTICS VOLUME 16 NUMBER 3 (SEPTEMBER 2006)

So when will it start being okay for me to introduce my papers with pure unmitigated rage like this…?

Can’t wait!