Maria Kakogianni: Pour une lutte maîtresse

T.N. “maîtresse”: the french word for teacher, or for that which teaches; “l’idée maîtresse” or “la lutte maîtresse”: the key idea or struggle, but not in the sense of essential (and exclusively so), but that idea or struggle which “teaches”. The expression “master struggle” below should be understood against the background of this.


From lundi matin #399, 16/10/2023

To Stand. . .

To stand, in the shadow
of the scar up in the air.

To stand-for-no-one-and-nothing.
Unrecognized,
for you
alone.

With all there is room for in that,
even without
language
.

Paul Celan


A 71-year-old man in Plainfield, Illinois, has been charged with murder and a hate crime after stabbing a child and his mother because they were Muslims.

“Detectives were able to determine that both victims in this brutal attack were targeted by the suspect due to them being Muslim and the ongoing Middle Eastern conflict involving Hamas and the Israelis,” the Will county sheriff’s office said.

Six-year-old Wadea Al-Fayoume was killed and his mother seriously wounded in the attack. Police said they responded to an emergency call made by a 32-year-old woman who alleged her landlord had attacked her with a knife.

The Guardian, 16/10/2023


Pour une lutte maîtresse

October 7, 2023. Hamas commits war crimes. The Israeli state is an occupier; the Israeli government and Israeli army have been committing war crimes for years. One does not justify the other.

As a young teenager, I became active politically – in the sense that the word politics began to have a meaning, a smell of struggle, the desire to transform what is wrong – and the black and white Palestinian scarf was already there. I was far from understanding the characters and symbols of all that. I didn’t know what the colour variations of this same scarf meant: green and black or red and black. I didn’t yet know the word Zionism, but I had heard of anti-Semitism. The Second War, the gas chambers, the rationalisation and industrialisation of killing, the final solution… were not without representation for me. Even if I had started by learning that there was something non-representable in this story.

Soon, I would hear the oracle of the end of History. Soon, we would be banging our heads, tearing out the words, and scratching our brains with this statement: there is no Alternative. TINA was among us, and she had come to stay. In this hubbub, I began to have the feeling, the intuition, but by no means the reason, that the Palestinian question was not one element of the whole among others. Of course, wars, invasions, colonies, atrocities; there were others. But something was at play there – is at play there – which was not of the same order.

Far be it from us the idea of classifying victims and wrongs or prioritising struggles. We were barely getting out of this type of hierarchy where class was supposed to be the essential struggle. From my first politicised steps, I felt that something in the Palestinian question was of the nature of a Gordian knot. It was difficult to separate the good and the bad along a neat, clear line. Yet it seemed equally insensitive, even complicit, not to try to take a stand, to take a position.

For years, the expression “open-air prison” seemed almost abstract to me, or at least distant. Despite the information and data, human beings manage to keep reality at a distance. We can even call this, somewhat distorting the Freudian notion, the “reality principle”: we let it in only if it does not disturb the homeostasis of the psychic system too much. But sometimes reality hits. When my country, Greece, began to be subjected to restructuring programs and bailouts, new open-air prisons appeared, this time close to home. In terrible conditions, migrants who came from other countries and who were fleeing wars were imprisoned. Then we found an even more “effective” practice: systematic push-backs, when it is not simply a matter of letting them drown in the Mediterranean. More recently, this year, existing camps were emptied to bring climate refugees back to their own country, Greek families who had lost everything due to floods. Meanwhile, there as here: the rise of racism, of fundamentalism of all stripes, the normalisation of the extreme right which becomes governmental, the militarisation of the police, the formation of openly fascist militias, harsh repression and flexible surveillance.

Our generation grew up in a false alternative between a soft social democracy and a moderate right, both oriented towards the immoderate consumption of neoliberal reforms. Today the false alternative is displaced, even if “macronie” [the reign of Emmanuel Macron] is hated; there is only the National Front on the horizon, to take only the example of France.

When Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe proposed Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, in 1985, and a little later when Laclau continued with On Populist Reason, in 2005, it was an attempt to reformulate an emancipatory project which took into account the “new social movements” – feminists, anti-racists, environmentalists, etc. – irreducible to the class essentialism of orthodox Marxism. The terrain was therefore that of deconstruction. A major sequence of emancipation politics was coming to a close, deployed for more than a century. It had placed the communist hypothesis at the centre, as well as two modes of vertical organization: the party and the labour union. The class struggle was not enough; an organisation and an intermediary subject were needed, so that the proletariat could play its role in History. A final victory had up until then been thinkable, and therefore it was possible, and with it an end to History too, but a good one, with the great day of the revolution. Between the fall of the Berlin Wall and the early 2000s, we learned to live in the ruins of it all.

Where deconstruction lies, the “empty signifier” arrives. It is a floating signifier which will concentrate and compose the heterogeneity of demands and actors at a given moment. This is the moment that fills it with importance. And if the coordinates of the situation change, the empty signifier around which hegemony can be built can change too. Where deconstruction lies, fighting for freedom or equality are not master signifiers that can bring us together, but instead it enables us to struggle against an increase in the price of petrol, yes (the empty signifier).

Laclau and Mouffe are right. Often, it works like that. But the experiences and political experiments of recent years have also shown that it is because it works like that that it does not work. In the relationship of forces with the borderless bank-cracy, we go backwards and forwards, and yet popular explosions and insurrectional moments come and go, and never stop coming and going. People and dynamics are similar around a “something” that inflames, but with quite different ideological orientations, even opposed within this something itself. An empty signifier can aggregate anger, in occupied squares as well as on occupied roundabouts (from the Arab Spring and the occupy the square movements to the Yellow Vests); we find nationalists, racists, liberal-bourgeois feminists, anarchists, racialised ecologists, queer anti-racists, side by side…; in short, all kinds of possible combinations. The empty signifier is not ideologically oriented, and is absolutely not the privilege of “the left”.

If the master-signifier fixes an orientation, it is in the form of an authoritarian orientation which commands. It commands, in a way, before the scene of the event and for the good of the staging. It is being and emancipation under orders. Those who are not as they should be will be eliminated, imprisoned, trained. By contrast, the empty signifier aggregates almost everything and anything. On its performative stage, the wind blows in all directions, which can be an even more violent way of ordering things where “freedom” is one of its greatest discoveries.

Vertical restoration or pure horizontality? Coffee or tea? Yes, please!

We stop and start again.

The Israeli government is a colonial and imperialist power that has committed atrocious war crimes on a daily basis for decades. This violence is committed against a people who are subject to a colonial regime and apartheid, and who, deprived of a state, are stateless. Not all Israeli people identify with their government, much less all people in this world who identify as Jews. On October 7, Hamas committed a terrifying and revolting massacre of civilians, which must be qualified as a war crime (it has committed others and will probably commit others). It is not a terrorist attack, that is to say, an episode to be placed under and dealt with in and through the narrative proposed now for several years of “the war against terrorism”. Not all Palestinian people identify with Hamas. All concrete resistance to this colonial regime, all the voices and solidarity that rise in the world against this colonial regime do not identify with the path of Hamas, do not have the vocation to be Islamist, Islamo-fascist, Islamo-leftist or serve the causes of the Islamist state. The West is not a civilized alliance against barbarities. It is possible to fight against the Islamist state without supporting the murderous governments of our Western parliamentarisms. To deprive a people of access to drinking water calls for an uprising for water, as much as the construction of mega-basins. There are no civilian deaths that matter more than others.

Neither master signifier nor empty signifier; the Palestinian question is, for our present, a master struggle. It is made up of untenable positions and places to be built. This does not mean that it is more important than other struggles. Or that the destiny of all the others depends on this one. It is not the essential struggle; it is master struggle. It is not a priori, but situated. A master struggle means that it can enable a function of readability in relation to others. Shaking up untenable positions, building a tenable and thinkable place in this struggle allows us to orient ourselves in other struggles: anti-racist, feminist, environmentalist, queer…oriented struggles.

Tell me what your place is in this struggle and I will meet you on other barricades, or not.

Bruno Latour may be right, we need emerging forms of diplomacy. But we will be wrong to think that being inclusive means letting anything and everything in; without being able to decide, at least on something, and not just gesticulate in the void.

We are the struggles in all their wars.

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