{"resolved":true,"match_type":"uuid","source_type":"original_book","book_id":"e38ef66b-e3ac-494b-b5ea-9cc05b2975d8","title":"Democracy and Other Neoliberal Fantasies Communicative Capitalism and Left Politics","author":null,"edition":null,"publisher":null,"year":null,"isbn":null,"requested_by":"printed_page","book":{"source_type":"original_book","book_id":"e38ef66b-e3ac-494b-b5ea-9cc05b2975d8","id":"e38ef66b-e3ac-494b-b5ea-9cc05b2975d8","uuid":"e38ef66b-e3ac-494b-b5ea-9cc05b2975d8","title":"Democracy and Other Neoliberal Fantasies Communicative Capitalism and Left Politics","normalized_title":"democracyandotherneoliberalfantasiescommunicativecapitalismandleftpolitics","author":null,"edition":null,"publisher":null,"year":null,"isbn":null,"isbns":[],"parsed":true,"ai_readable":true,"document_type":"book","page_count":229,"navigation_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/book/e38ef66b-e3ac-494b-b5ea-9cc05b2975d8","title_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/title/Democracy%20and%20Other%20Neoliberal%20Fantasies%20Communicative%20Capitalism%20and%20Left%20Politics","fixed_page_url_template":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/book/e38ef66b-e3ac-494b-b5ea-9cc05b2975d8/page/{printed_page}","path_api_url_template":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/book/e38ef66b-e3ac-494b-b5ea-9cc05b2975d8/page/{printed_page}","read_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/e38ef66b-e3ac-494b-b5ea-9cc05b2975d8","page_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/books/e38ef66b-e3ac-494b-b5ea-9cc05b2975d8/page","search_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/books/e38ef66b-e3ac-494b-b5ea-9cc05b2975d8/search"},"page":{"printed_page":134,"pdf_page":144,"physical_index":144,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"a7e53095d18af5ea1104ddf11471bd359d0877192c9efc3b6fc08db3d48ba680"},"chapter":"Comunicative Capitalism & Left Politics","content":"In a more persuasive account of the irrational violence accompanying law, Zizek demonstrates how law is split between its public letter and its obscene superego supplement. 15 At the basis of all law is a violent, irrational element, the tautological force inextricable from law's command, from law's claim that it must be obeyed because it is the law. This violent, irrational, superegoistic side appears as the obscene, nightly or underground, dimension oflaw sustaining the public ideological edifice, attaching members to a community as it unites them in a shared, dirty secret. For example, the Bush regime denies that it tortures prisoners in Abu Ghraib or anywhere else. At the same time, it is more than clear from its evasions, from public discussion of the conditions under which torture might be permissible, and from published photographs of victims of torture that, yes, the United States is permitting and performing torture. Far from a new development, this sort of obscene violence has long sufused American prisons and persisted as an aspect of covert U.S. operations abroad. 0 bscene violence is widespread as the set of oficially disavowed transgressions conditioning and staining the law. We might also think of sexual abuse within the Catholic Church and the traditional nuclear family, the everyday harassment of women; sexual, and ethnic minorities, and the brutal rituals of fraternities, secret societies, and sports teams, in short, those unmentionable acts the practice of whi<;h diferentiates members from nonmembers. As Zizek makes clear, this obscene underside \"forms the necessary supplement to the public values of personal dignity, democracy, and freedom:'16 To speak, then, of a resurgence of sovereignty ignores the obscene supplement of violence that accompanies law, the split in law between its public letter and the unacknowledged practices that must be disavowed for law to remain in force.\n\nNon�theless, Butler speaks of sovereignty, of the resurgence of arbitrary, exploitative, and instrumental power through the suspension of law. Governmentality enables this resurgence, this state power that is not of the state, this legal power that is, paradoxically, outside the law. This focus on a sovereignty that operates through the tactics of governmentality might suggest a variety of sites from which to intervene politically (PL, 98). That is, coherence of the argument aside, the left could find political advantage in focusing on a sovereignty operating through governinentality. Butler thinks one such advantage comes from the possibility of recognizing and focusing on the stateless. I would add that any such advantage is lost to the extent that it is not tied to a critical politicization of globalized neoliheral capitalism. Yet Butler, albeit rightly attuned to the complexities of rights claims in international law, not only forgoes the opportunity to condemn U.S. militarism and imperialism as specific governmental tactics but also moves from the issue of political intervention to the ethical question of the \"human:' That is, she takes a key benefit of the notion of governmentality to be the way it opens up \"those discourses that shape and deform what we mean by 'the human' \" (PL, 99).\n\n134\n\nFIVE","previous_page":133,"next_page":135}