Resistance and Biopower: Shame, Cynicism, and Struggle in the Era of Neoliberalism and the Alt-Right

December 15, 2021 Posted by Webmaster under Volume 32, Number 1, September 2021

A. Kiarina Kordela (bio)

Abstract

This essay examines the relation between neoliberalism and the alt-right, showing that their shared cynical amoralism elevates irresponsibility to the level of absolute morality, such that the Democrats’ exhortation to shame proves counterproductive. The alt-right’s outrage-inducing effect on the Democrats is due to its double relation to biopower: insofar as biopower governs the society of shameless jouissance, the alt-right conforms to the biopolitical rules and flaunts its own modes of jouissance; but insofar as biopower must hide its political nature, the alt-right breaks the rules by revealing biopower’s hidden (sovereign) underside. This raises the question of whether resistance should operate according to the rules of overt or covert sovereignty.

Politics of Cynicism and Shame

In a 2018 Current Affairs article titled “The Politics of Shame,”1 Briahna Joy Gray explains the Democrats’ practice of shaming the alt-right by noting that “Trump’s policies hurt people,” and

given the easy-to-anticipate consequences of their votes, Trump voters do seem like bad people who should be ashamed. . . . [A] high level of outrage is appropriate to the circumstances. If you’re not outraged, you’re not taking seriously enough the harm done to the immigrant families torn apart by ICE [Immigration and Customs Enforcement].

Whereas in general “we’re often encouraged to engage more civilly with ‘people who disagree with us’,” Gray adds, what sets our current situation apart is that

 the divergent value systems reflected by America’s two major political parties cut to the core of who we are. They are not necessarily mere disagreements, but deep moral schisms, which is why . . . [m]ere fact-based criticisms of various policy positions feel inadequate, as if they trivialize the moral issues involved. . . . [V]arious beliefs, themselves, are shameful. No wonder, then, that the shared impulse isn’t just to disagree, but to “drag,” destroy, and decimate. (Gray)

Gray’s reference to morality points to a tendency toward what we might call the moralization of politics, but we should not misinterpret such a moralization as a slackening of the political itself. Rather, Gray’s reference to the existence of a current “moral schism” between two inimical, belligerent American parties indicates that today’s conflict has become properly political, at least if we follow Carl Schmitt’s definition. According to Schmitt, the “criterion of the political” is “the distinction of friend and enemy” insofar as it “denotes the utmost degree of intensity of a union or separation, of an association or dissociation” (Concept 26). The “friend” and “enemy . . . concepts refer to the real possibility of physical killing,” or “war,” as “the existential negation of the enemy,” which “is the most extreme consequence of enmity” (33). To be sure, as the criterion of the political, war “does not have to be common, normal, something ideal, or desirable. But it must nevertheless remain a real possibility” (33). He continues:

It is by no means as though the political signifies nothing but devastating war and every political deed a military action. . . after all, could not the politically reasonable course reside in avoiding war? . . . War is neither the aim nor the purpose nor even the very content of politics. But as an ever present possibility it is the leading presupposition which determines in a characteristic way human action and thinking and thereby creates a specifically political behavior. (33-4)

“Political” for Schmitt means “polemical”: “a friend-enemy grouping” that couldlead to “war or revolution” (30), but does not need to result in actual war or revolution. If, to repeat Gray, the “shared impulse” in today’s “moral schisms” is to “destroy, and decimate,” then morality too has become political. Indeed, Schmitt notes, “the political can derive its energy from the most varied human endeavors, from the religious, economic, moral, and other antitheses” (Concept 38). Like the economic or religious or other “human endeavors,” the moral does not detract from the political but provides one possible antithesis through which the political emerges. Any human antithesis can “become the new substance of the political entity” if it is “in a position to decide upon the extreme possibility” of war (Schmitt, Concept 39). In Schmitt’s words: “the political entity . . . is the decisive entity for the friend-or-enemy grouping; and in this (and not in any kind of absolutist sense), it is sovereign. Otherwise the political entity is nonexistent” (39). For instance, “a class in the Marxian sense ceases to be something purely economic and becomes a political factor . . . when Marxists approach the class struggle seriously and treat the class adversary as a real enemy and [fight] him” (37). If it were possible, Schmitt continues,

to group all mankind in the proletarian and bourgeois antithesis, as friend and enemy in proletarian and capitalist states, and if, in the process, all other friend-and-enemy groupings were to disappear, the total reality of the political would then be revealed, insofar as concepts, which at first glance had appeared to be purely economic, turn into political ones. (38)

If class is the decisive entity that draws the line between friend and enemy when the political manifests itself as an economic antithesis, then what is the decisive entity that makes the two major American parties enemies in today’s manifestation of the political qua moral antithesis? We should be able to respond to this question by the end of this section.

Despite her reference to Trump’s policies, Gray asserts that the “feature that makes Trump unique, and the focus of a particular kind of outrage and contempt, is not his policy prescriptions or even his several hundred thousand character failings,” but “his shamelessness”—an evidently rampant shamelessness, because “even when it appears as if Trump is on the verge of an apology or admission, he quickly lapses back into shamelessness.” She observes that “Trump is not the first president or popular public figure to be accused of sexual assault—it’s a crowded field these days,” and “God knows plenty of presidents have been horrible people.” But,Gray continues, “he was the first” who, “instead of following the prescribed political ritual for making amends after being caught . . . chose to go on the offensive.” Or, to take another of Gray’s example,

nepotism may be as old as the Borgias, but the boldness with which Trump has appointed family members and their agents to positions of authority still manages to stun. And while nuclear brinksmanship was a defining feature of 20th century presidencies, never before has the “leader of the free world” literally bragged about the size of his big red button and attempted to fat-shame the leader of a rival nuclear power.

And the list of examples goes on. This shamelessness does not accompany unprecedented or extraordinary acts of cruelty or corruption. Rather, these are expectable, quasi-routine acts perpetrated by politicians, but disrobed of the conventional observance of established moral decorum. This practice shares the same logic Peter Sloterdijk calls “postmodern cynicism,” namely the attitude that “takes into account the particular interest behind the [professed] ideological universality,” in Slavoj Žižek’s succinct formulation (Sublime 29). For instance, when “confronted with . . . robbery,” cynicism responds “that legal enrichment is a lot more effective and . . . protected by the law,” as in Bertolt Brecht’s “what’s the robbery of a bank compared to the founding of a new bank?” (30). Postmodern cynicism unreservedly acknowledges the violence, exploitation, and corruption perpetrated by sovereign power, and constitutes a prevalent strategy among the alt-right today.

The strategy of postmodern cynicism is also distinct from all other moral systems’ insofar as it claims to lie beyond morality, or—to put it in the terms of one of the first theorizers of this amorality—beyond good and evil. Friedrich Nietzsche’s amoralism is based on the assumption that economy rather than morality constitutes the essence of humanity; morality is a derivative of the human economic essence. In Nietzsche’s words, we find “the first indication of human pride, of a superiority over other animals” at the very moment when man saw himself as the being that measures values, the “assaying” animal. Purchase and sale, together with their psychological trappings, antedate even the rudiments of social organization and covenants. From its rudimentary manifestation in interpersonal laws, the incipient sense of barter, contract, guilt, right, obligation, compensation was projected into the crudest communal complexes . . . together with the habit of measuring power against power. The eye had been entirely conditioned to that mode of vision . . . [and] early mankind soon reached the grand generalization that everything has its price, everything can be paid for. Here we have the oldest and naivest moral canon of justice. (202-03) 

Accordingly, Nietzsche continues, “punishment, being a compensation, has developed quite independently from any ideas about freedom of the will” (194), the latter being the precondition of morality. Rather, “culprits” whose status was originally that of a “debtor” (203) were not

punished because they were felt to be responsible for their actions; not, that is, on the assumption that only the guilty were to be punished; rather, they were punished . . . out of rage at some damage suffered, which the doer must pay for. . . . [as if] for every damage there could somehow be found an equivalent, by which that damage might be compensated—if necessary in the pain of the doer. (195)

In short, the “moral term Schuld (guilt) has its origin in the very material term Schulden (to be indebted)” in the economic sense (194). Out of this “ancient, deep-rooted . . . equivalency between damage and pain”—characteristic of “the basic practices of purchase, sale, barter, and trade” (195), “with the help of custom and the social straight-jacket” (190), and “liberally sprinkled with [the] blood” (197) of violent coercion and discipline—what we now call “conscience” (192) was developed: specifically, “‘bad conscience’” or “the consciousness of guilt” (194). The result is “man . . . tamed . . . but by no means improved; rather the opposite” (216). Nietzsche “take[s] bad conscience to be a deep-seated malady to which man succumbed under the pressure of the most profound transformation he ever underwent—the one that made him once and for all a sociable and pacific creature” (217). In this transformation it is not that the “old instincts had abruptly ceased making their demands”; rather, “they had to depend on new, covert satisfactions” (217) as they had to “turn inward,” which Nietzsche calls “man’s interiorization” (217). In this way, “hostility, cruelty, the delight in persecution, raids, excitement, destruction all turned against their begetter” and “man began rending, persecuting, terrifying himself, like a wild beast hurling itself against the bars of its cage” (218). This is the foundation of the rich array of feelings of remorse, shame, compunction, scruples, and penitence as a reaction to one’s own evil-doings—doings that, if they did not exist, would have to be invented to satisfy the demands of the old instincts. Therefore, according to the amoralist explanation of morality, one is a priori guilty.

            This inference is shared by thinkers as diverse as Augustine of Hippo and Franz Kafka, but the conclusions derived from it differ widely. The cynical amoralist concludes that, in order to free oneself from the cage of guilt and its bad conscience, one would first need to have “relegated both good and evil to the realm of figments” (Nietzsche 216)—that is, to imaginary notions like the ones people construct when they want to explain their fate as the manifestation of God’s will. Nietzsche summarizes Spinoza’s notion of God’s will as “subordinating God to fate,” which “result[s] in the worst absurdity” because God is supposed to be absolutely free (216). If a stone falls on my head and kills me, this accident is neither an evil (unjust or undeserved) occurrence nor a good one (just and deserved as punishment for some wrongdoing of mine) (see Spinoza’s Ethics, Part I, Appendix). Human freedom depends on the recognition of God’s absolute freedom. It would follow that the only person who is truly free—and hence ethical—does not fall prey to the fictions of good and evil constructed by the manufacturers of bad conscience who cater to social norms. According to our current social norms, evil policy prescriptions and character failings include torturing people, separating families, ignoring environmental destruction, committing sexual assault, and practicing nepotism and brinksmanship. These actions are supposed to incite feelings of bad conscience in those caught committing them. But the reasoning of cynical amoralism provides a model through which we can understand how the alt-right may perceive itself as “truly ethical” insofar as it appears to act beyond good and evil by showing no remorse and proceeding without shame. Note also that, as follows from the above line of thought, appearing to act beyond good and evil amounts to appearing to act beyond fiction and ideology—a point to which we shall return below. If this is the case, then the response to Gray’s question (“How effective is shame as a tactic?”)—that is, how effective is the Democratic attempt to instigate shame in the alt-right for its actions?—is clearly negative. The Democrats’ exhortation to shame is not simply ineffective but also counterproductive, because shame or any feeling indicative of bad conscience would be evidence of the alt-right’s defeat in their struggle against (the imaginary construct of) bad conscience. The morality of postmodern cynicism is simply immune to bad conscience, shame, and their cognates because postmodern cynicism deems them all products of ideology and considers itself to be above ideology.

Parenthetically, Gray also argues against the politics of shame for psychological reasons that remain within the framework of a conventional moralism that, unlike both Nietzsche’s and Kant’s, ignores the possibility of morality’s overlap with cruelty.2 Her reasoning is based on the findings of social science that show that “shaming is an ineffective strategy for motivating moral behavior”:

[t]he person experiencing shame thinks “what a horrible person I am,” and searches for a way to preserve [his or her] self-esteem. . . . Feeling their entire self-image under attack, shame-prone individuals are more likely to externalize blame and lash out destructively, including physically and verbally. . . . shamed individuals are prone to “turn the tables defensively” and direct their anger toward “a convenient scapegoat.”

For this reason, Gray differentiates between shame and guilt, championing the latter because shame “provokes a holistic negative self-evaluation” that “impedes one’s ability to internalize and learn from bad behavior” and “is uniquely hard on the ego,” which can have “disastrous” results. By contrast, guilt “causes us to isolate and rehabilitate a specific ‘bad’ behavior,” and “evokes ‘other-oriented empathy,’” which “is more likely to lead to behavioral change.” Gray concludes that “in practice,” the politics of shame “is a mistake” because the concept of “bad behavior” is meaningful only if the perpetrator of the act and the judging voice that declares the act to be bad share a value system as to what is bad and what good. If I consider what you judge as “bad behavior” to be good based on my own value system, then I can neither think that “I am a horrible person” (the purported effect of shame) nor that “I did a bad thing” (the purported effect of guilt). In fact, even if we share the same value system, I could still deem good an admittedly bad behavior toward somebody if, for instance, I were to perceive it as a just punishment that I inflict on them (the foundation of any legal system). Therefore, the otherwise important distinction between guilt and shame—or any other feelings one could relate to what Nietzsche calls “bad conscience”—is irrelevant in this context.3 Instead, cynical amoralists will give up their actions (policies or behaviors) only if it becomes evident either that they fail to amass more power (Nietzsche’s point) or if the ground of amoralism itself—the assumption of operating beyond good and evil—is destroyed, forcing them to acknowledge that they have never extricated themselves from the realm of conscience (or, put differently, that they never left the realm of ideology).

The fundamental fallacy in this reading of Nietzsche (and, a fortiori, of Spinoza) lies in assuming that there is a political space beyond ideology.4 The false assumption that we are in a post-ideological era governed exclusively by objective laws—primarily those of the market—constitutes the trunk of neoliberalism, of which the alt-right is one branch. The (ostensibly post-ideological) logic that enables the invocation of the “laws of the market” as the last decisive instance of all action also claims the obsolescence of any distinction beyond good and evil in any action. But because of the fallacy in this logic shared by neoliberalism and the alt-right, their pretense to post-ideological amoralism cannot be taken at face value. In fact, if anything can undermine the alt-right, it would be not shame but its own ideological presuppositions. We shall return to this in the last section. For now, we can conclude that the response to our initial question—“What is the decisive entity that makes the two major American parties enemies in today’s manifestation of the political qua moral antithesis?”—is double. One the one hand, as with the case of the economic antithesis, that entity is class, understood to mean different strata of various forms of power (in economy, representation, visibility, virality, etc.). On the other hand, it is the acknowledgment or denial of the ubiquity of ideology. If one denies the ubiquity of ideology, one perceives power as the sole political motivation; and if one acknowledges the ubiquity of ideology, one considers it the means of obtaining not the glorification of a God or a State, but power.

Sovereignty, Biopower, and Enjoyment           

Another aspect of Trump’s uniqueness relates to the Democrats’ frequent comparison of his politics with those of a totalitarian leader of the fascist or Nazi type. When in office, Trump often presented his policies (and his own actions) as those of a sovereign rather than as those of a leader of a properly biopolitical power. As Michel Foucault says, by the nineteenth century, “sovereignty’s old right . . . to take life or let live . . . came to be complemented by a new right . . . or rather precisely the opposite right,” namely biopower, which “is the power to ‘make’ live and ‘let’ die” (History 241). Biopower operates, in Foucault’s words, on the principle that the function of political power is to “exert . . . a positive influence on life,” to “optimize and multiply it,” “to take control of life, to manage it . . . to explore and reduce biological accidents and possibilities” (History 136-40; “Society” 261). In short, biopower’s outmost “object and objective” is to protect and enhance human life as such, unconditionally, when death is proven to be humanly and technologically inevitable. Contemporary political power is marked by a tension between sovereignty and biopower, and contemporary democracy presents itself as operating exclusively through biopower (not sovereignty) the more illegitimate its acts of killing become: “How will the [sovereign] power to kill and the function of murder operate in this technology of power [biopower], which takes life as both its object and its objective?” (“Society” 254). Foucault responds that biopower can legitimately designate its enemy only through a “racism” of an “evolutionist” kind. If racism is generally a “way of introducing . . . the break between what must live and what must die,” evolutionist or biopolitical racism does so through the logic that “‘the more inferior species die out . . . the more I—as a species . . . —can live, the stronger I will be’” (“Society” 254-55). Biopolitical racism segregates inferior from superior species by constructing the former as a form of subhuman life that must die or be banned in order for (superior) human life to continue to live and thrive. This racism is indispensable in biopolitics because when all human life is deemed sacred, the only life that can legitimately be destroyed cannot be human; it must be subhuman. Therefore, Foucault concludes, this racist “play is . . . inscribed in the workings of all . . . modern States” (“Society” 260), because biopower cannot exercise its sovereign right to kill unless its victims—the “enemy”—are constructed as subhuman.5 Indeed, as I argue elsewhere, America’s military targets in the post-Cold-War era are increasingly constructed as the enemies of the values that the same biopolitical discourse presents as constituting human dignity: freedom, democracy, individualism, human rights, etc.6 As the opponents of these intrinsically human values, enemies are constructed as subhuman—“terrorist” being one of the most popular designations. However, Trump and the alt-right do not always seem invested in constructing the “enemy” as subhuman. For example, immigrants must be kept away (or confined) in order to “make America great again”—that is, explicitly for the sake of American sovereignty. The alt-right selects its enemies according to the criteria of sovereignty, which openly disregard human life as such.7 In other words, part of the alt-right’s shameless and shocking demeanor includes revealing what in biopower must remain hidden: the fact that, pace its denial, biopower is a form of political power, which includes the sovereign right to kill (humans). Trump’s tragicomic exhibition of sovereign conduct scandalously exposes the political nature of biopower.8

This exposure is a fundamental infringement of biopower—because biopower depends on its ability not to present itself as a form of political power. Jacques Lacan makes this crucial point in seminar XVII (1969-1970), arguing that the modern shift from the “discourse of the Master” (whose form of power is sovereignty) to the “discourse of the University” (biopower, as the form of power proper to capitalism) entails a radical shift in the relation between power and knowledge. The new, modern, or capitalist face of authority is knowledge itself, by which is meant “not knowledge of everything . . .  but all-knowing [non pas savoir-de-tout . . . mais tout-savoir],” that is, “nothing other than knowledge,” not mastery or power, but pureknowledge, which is said to be “objective knowledge” or “science,” or what “in ordinary language is called the bureaucracy” (Le Séminaire. Livre XVII 34; Book XVII 31). Lacan defines biopower as the form of power that denies its political character and presents itself not as the bearer of mastery but as the body of an unquestionable knowledge because it consists of objective, scientific, or purely procedural truths, whether in the form of bureaucracy, science, or the laws of the market. It is a power that hides its nature behind what passes as, in Marie-Hélène Brousse’s words, the “globalizing logic of the market and procedures” (259), whereby, per Alenka Zupančič, “political struggles and antagonisms . . . try to hide behind supposedly neutral laws of economy or intelligence reports” (176). Biopower endeavors to depoliticize the political, both (in the Schmittian sense) by pretending that it has no (human) “enemies”—because all human life is unconditionally sacred—and (in the Lacanian sense) by presenting itself not as a body of power but as a scientifically neutral body of knowledge. Neoliberalism is a natural child of biopower, and here the alt-right branches off from neoliberalism despite their common “post-ideological” trunk insofar as the former flaunts its sovereign rights.9

It is no accident that Lacan’s opposition to biopower pivots around the invocation of shame, specifically the shame that results from the loss of one’s honor. Prior to biopower’s elevation of life as such to the highest value, it was considered a virtue for people to value their honor more highly than their lives. In 1970, Lacan draws attention to the irreconcilability of biopower and shame by opening “his final lesson of The Other Side of Psychoanalysis” with the phrase “to die of shame” (Lacan qtd. in Miller 11). To be willing to die of shame—to be willing to kill oneself or others out of shame—presupposes that one elevates honor over life as such, which is a strictly anti-biopolitical ideal. As Jacques-Alain Miller remarks in his essay “On Shame,” contemporary power places “what is traditionally expressed as primum vivere” (“Live first”) over honor; or, inversely, the shift of power from sovereignty to biopower is accompanied by “the disappearance of honor” insofar as biopower “instates the primum vivere as supreme value,” saving “the ignominious life, the ignoble life, life without honor” (18). One may think that the two phenomena required for the dominance of biopower—the decline (or concealment) of sovereignty and the disappearance of honor—have as their corollary the demise of the aristocracy and the nobility as the primary representatives and bearers of mastery and honor. Yet in that 1970 seminar, Lacan exemplifies dying of shame by referencing François Vatel, who was not a noble but a servant who in 1671 committed suicide by running himself through two or three times with a sword he had fixed to the door handle of his room. His reason for doing so was his sense of dishonor for failing to complete the preparations for a three-day feast that the Prince de Condé had ordered for the entire court, of which Vatel was in charge. Evidently, as Miller notes, Lacan’s choice of Vatel “is there to tell us” that when honor is placed above life, not only the nobility but also “a valet can sacrifice his life for the sake of honor” (18).  

            Clearly the shame invoked by Lacan is not the same as the kind that Democrats would like to instigate among the alt-right. Lacan’s is the shame of putting survival (life as such) above honor, power, or any other ideal an individual (or a group or a society) may have, whereas the shame that the alt-right refuses to show is that of disrespecting human life as such. The fate of shame in biopower is to decline in its Lacanian sense and thrive (through both its absence and the demand for its presence) in the sense of shame for disrespecting human life as such. Indeed, while Lacan argues that, far from being the prerogative of the nobility, honor and shame for failing ideals belong to everybody, his stance toward the 1969 Paris student movement indexes his premonition that biopower eventually deprives everybody of both. Miller pursues this line of thought by noting that Lacan’s position on shame is determined by the fact that his “fundamental debate” is with “globalization . . . Americanization or . . . utilitarianism, that is, with the reign of what Kojève calls the Christian bourgeois” (27), whose characteristics are first defined by Hegel and then elaborated in detail by Max Weber in his Protestantism and the Spirit of Capitalism. When, in his 1959-1960 seminar The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, Lacan says, “without any objections being raised” at that moment, that “the movement the world we are living in is caught up in . . . an amputation, sacrifices, indeed a kind of puritanism in the relationship to desire” (qtd. in Miller 12), his referent is the world of precisely this Christian bourgeoisie. While up to 1960 “it was still possible to say that capitalism . . . was coordinated with Puritanism,” by 1969-1970, in his seminar The Other Side of Psychoanalysis, “this diagnosis . . . is . . . outdated,” for “the new mode . . . is rather that of permissiveness” (Miller 12).  A new era has begun in which “what can sometimes be the cause of difficulty is the prohibition on prohibiting,” all of which makes evident the fact “that capitalism has disconnected itself from Puritanism” (12). Thus, “in the final chapter of The Other Side of Psychoanalysis,” Lacan’s discontent with the capitalist civilization finds expression “in the statement ‘There is no longer any shame’” (12). And in the famous impromptu at Vincennes in December of 1969, Lacan reproaches (and, in fact, attempts to shame) the students of the day for advocating for a world with no shame and for putting themselves “in a place of impudence” (26). Lacan’s diagnosis that by 1970 “there is no longer any shame” means that “we are at the time of an eclipse of the Other’s gaze as the bearer of shame” (15). Instead of making us ashamed, by the end of the 1960s, the Other clearly exhorts us to “Look at them enjoying!”—and by “them” is meant all of us, because in the society of the spectacle “the look that one solicits” is “turning reality into a spectacle” (15). The internet, Facebook, Twitter, and “selfies” today seal what had already transpired in Lacan’s television days: that the society of the spectacle aspires to be a reality show. Fifty years after Vincennes, the death of shame has been sealed for good, as the students’ unconscious motto at the time (“Look at them enjoying!”) has today become “the dominant discourse [that] enjoins one not to be ashamed of one’s jouissance” (Miller 27). The primacy of life as such has as its corollary the demand for universal tolerance of jouissance.

And the paradox of the right to one’s jouissance begins with the fact that extending this universal injunction (for everyone to publicize their own mode of jouissance and, consequently, to tolerate others’ modes) to its logical conclusion permits any mode of jouissance. The same imperative—“do not be ashamed of your jouissance!”—entails as much the demand to respect religious and cultural differences or to legitimize LGBT+ rights as to respect the license to enjoy, say, chauvinism, homophobia, misogyny, racism, nationalism, or any other conceivable mode of jouissance. In this light, what Gray and others describe as Trump’s and the alt-right’s shameless attitude reveals itself as the logical counterpart of the very socio-sexual politics of tolerance and shameless enjoyment supported by the Democrats or, more accurately, by the logic of biopolitics. To be sure, in the eyes of the Democrats, the chauvinist mode of jouissance is as morally inferior as the practice of abortion (or a transsexual or an alien who alloys the purity of the nation) may be for the alt-right. But both the Democrats and the alt-right play according to the rules of biopower and the society of the spectacle: the rules of one’s right to shameless enjoyment. This is an innovative change in the rules of the game, because the traditional Right has always defined itself in opposition to (shameless) jouissance. What infuriates today’s Democrats is that the alt-right no longer plays according to these traditional, moralizing rules, but according to the rules of the by-now dominant discourse—the rules of the shameless enjoyment of one’s jouissance—which the Democrats had in the past taken for their own exclusive prerogative. The paradox of the right to any jouissance reveals the self-contradiction in the politics of tolerance, owing to the fact that jouissance cannot be equally distributed.10 There is a “reservation implied by the field of the right-to-jouissance” for the simple reason that one’s jouissance gets in the way of, restricts, or offends the jouissance of another (Lacan, Book XX 3). To recapitulate, the alt-right’s outrage- and hostility-inducing effect on the Democrats results from its double relation to biopower: insofar as biopower governs the society of shameless jouissance, the alt-right adopts the rules of the biopolitical game and flaunts its own modes of jouissance; but insofar as biopower must hide its political nature, the alt-right breaks the rules of biopower by revealing its hidden (sovereign) underside.

Struggle in Biopower

Perhaps because jouissance cannot become the object of equitable distribution, democracies have traditionally tried to keep any (at least explicit) reference to it outside the domain of the political. But neoliberal populism seems to have effected a shift whereby some commentators speak of the replacement of the political with a discourse on matters reminiscent of jouissance.11 In an article in the German newspaper Die Zeit, Bernd Stegemann writes of the “biopolitical perfecting of everyday life”:

The central purpose of liberal populism is the promotion of subjective optimization and the concealment of all systemic inequalities. For capital does not fear anything more than suddenly becoming visible…. For where capital can no longer be held responsible, the interests of the people can no longer be enforced. The systematic irresponsibility of bankers and politicians is a concrete consequence of this policy. And the compensation for economic inequality takes place in the symbolic order by promoting individual liberties in the field of identity politics. To put it bluntly: the biopolitical perfection of everyday life and the language rules of political correctness have taken the place of class struggle. While the bourgeois middle is pleased with the uplifting of general morality, all others have been robbed of the language to formulate their class interests. (my trans.)

Stegemann’s observations indicate a clear class discrepancy between the “bourgeois middle” and “all others,” but his further analysis complicates things by pointing to a shift in morality that relates directly to cynical amoralism. Unlike the traditional bourgeois morality that we know from Henrik Ibsen’s plays, whose heroes were

culpable for their actions and hoped that their guilt would not come to light, the bourgeois subjects of postmodernism today are frank about their guilt. Of course, everyone knows that slaves need to work for our smartphones and that our wealth is based on the exploitation of the whole world. But the paradox of this knowledge today is that those who most loudly acknowledge their complicity benefit most from public recognition. This paradoxical effect is only possible because the connection between culpable action and personal consequences seems to have been dissolved. (Stegemann, my trans.)

In the face of a radical absence of personal responsibility, the sole remaining moral act consists in the honest acknowledgment of one’s complicity, so that the more complicit one is, the more moral one appears to be.

The key point here is that the dissolution between “culpable action and personal consequences” effectively means the dissolution between complicity and any sense of guilt. This happens in a somewhat convoluted way. First, the (bourgeois) guilt is both universal and a priori because the exploitation is taken for granted, as a state of affairs both necessary and impossible to change. Next, therefore, the bourgeoisie has only two options: either admit that it benefits from this exploitation or pretend that it does not. With sincerity on its side, the former is perceived as moral, the latter as amoral. Moreover, what aggravates things further is the increasingly unstable boundary between “bourgeoisie” and “slaves,” both in the popular imaginary and in historical consciousness. Depending on the perspective, the slave may be some worker in an outsourced factory, an Amazon employee or Uber contractor, one of the 72 million American millennials who “have 4.6 percent of U.S. wealth” or, for that matter, anybody outside the “50 richest Americans [who] hold as much wealth as half of the United States” (Hedges 2020). The haziness of social-class stratification—both organic and contrived—contributes further to the universalization of guilt over one’s complicity (in the exploitation of the whole world) to the point that it ceases to be merely human and becomes superhuman, even divine. As Walter Benjamin (drawing on Nietzsche) puts it in his fragment on “Capitalism as Religion”:

Capitalism is probably the first instance of a cult that creates guilt, not atonement. In this respect, this religious system is caught up in the headlong rush of a larger [ungeheuren] movement. A vast [ungeheures] sense of guilt that is unable to find relief seizes on the cult, not to atone for this guilt but to make it universal, to hammer it into the conscious mind, so as once and for all to include God in the system of guilt and thereby awaken in Him an interest in the process of atonement. . . . The nature of the religious movement which is capitalism entails endurance right to the end, to the point where God, too, finally takes on the entire burden of guilt, to the point where the universe has been taken over by that despair which is actually its secret hope. . . . It is the expansion of despair, until despair becomes a religious state of the world in the hope that this will lead to salvation. (288-89)

Universal guilt is another name for no one’s guilt; there can be guilty people only if there are also innocent people. The burden of guilt has been removed from humanity, which is why—arriving at the final point of this convoluted logic—the ultimate dissolution in question is that of the connection between complicity and guilt: to acknowledge one’s complicity does not mean to assume the guilt of being complicit. Therefore, the acknowledgement in question is not confession as a means of expiation but a straightforward claim to morality that obviates the defilement of guilt by immersing the whole universe in it. The new element that characterizes the neoliberal postmodern manifestation of cynical amoralism is its perceived highly moral attitude. In fact, it is perhaps the sole remaining moral position sanctioned by all branches of neoliberalism, and Trump’s election reaffirmed its prowess as a political strategy. (For example, in an interview with ABC News, Trump cited his claimed net worth of more than $10 billion as one reason for being qualified to run for President—and several other slogans could be invoked in support of this point.) The real peril of the neoliberal dissolution between guilt and complicity (including in, though not limited to, profiteering) lies in its potential to colonize current historical (un)consciousness across the entire spectrum of class interests, so that instead of attempting “to start a reflection that wants to account for the dissolution of responsibility” and “taking this step towards a systemic critique of capitalism,” in Stegemann’s words, we arrive at a situation in which “people demand general values, then complain about the impossibility of following them in their own lives, and then demand moral recognition for their honesty” in admitting that they break these values. This is the generalized paradox of a society that elevates utter irresponsibility to the level of absolute  morality.

            To spell out the paradox philosophically, the core of amoralism, which initially appeared to be a non-ideological aloofness beyond good and evil, is in truth its ostensible opposite: outright moralism. And the root of this paradox lies in the fact that the amoral will to power coincides with the fundamental means of maintaining morality: punishment. This coincidence is already discernible in Nietzsche’s line of argumentation, where the debasement of others and cruelty toward them, which in the development of civilization comes to constitute the moral system of punishment, is conceived as the primary, most authentic characteristic of humans prior to being tamed and confined in the cage of bad conscience and our moral system. Prior to the existence of the “moral universe of guilt,” in the world of purely economic “contracts,” the debtor could settle his debt through suffering. But this is possible only if making the debtor suffer was “a supreme pleasure” for the creditor (197). The “infliction of pain [can] provide satisfaction” because “cruelty constituted the collective delight of older mankind . . . it was an ingredient of all their joys” and the “oldest and most thorough human delight” (197-98). Primary joy in the suffering of others made possible “this entire method of compensations” (196) in which “the moral universe of guilt, conscience, and duty (‘sacred’ duty) took its inception” (197). In “place of material compensation such as money, land, or other possessions, a kind of pleasure” is given to the creditor, a “pleasure [which] is induced by his being able to exercise his power freely upon one who is powerless”: the “pleasure of faire le mal pour le plaisir de le faire [inflicting pain for the pleasure of inflicting it], the pleasure of rape” (196, my translation). In “‘punishing’ the debtor, the creditor shares a seignorial right,” because the most thoroughly human pleasure consists in being “given a chance to bask in the glorious feelings of treating another human being as lower than himself” (196-97). This ultimate “pleasure will be increased in proportion of the lowliness of the creditor’s own station” because “it will appear to him as . . . a foretaste of a higher rank” (196). In short, the desire for morality is the desire for moral superiority. Far from operating beyond good and evil, the neoliberal cynical amoralist position reasons as follows: We are evil, and so are you (because “everybody knows” that the current economico-political state of affairs requires slaves to maintain it), but we acknowledge it, and this makes us superior to those who do not. Thus, the good-evil opposition shifts from whether or not one is an exploiter, to acknowledging or failing to acknowledge one’s (a priori and universal) function as an exploiter—but the fact is that the opposition remains. Nevertheless, this shift indicates that in today’s so-called post-ideological era, ideology no longer functions through the invocation of ideals but through what we should perhaps call affect, such as the affect of moral superiority (which, as we have seen, is obtained through the paradoxical elimination of guilt through its universal deification).12

            Let us recall that the proponent of the alt-right who operates on the basis of sovereignty has no need to see others as subhuman or as morally inferior in order to treat them as an enemy. Nevertheless, the above examination reveals that, because it constructs its enemy as subhuman (morally inferior), the cynical amoralist position can perfectly interpellate not only the person who subscribes to the principle of sovereignty, but also the person who gives primacy to the biopolitical principle of the primum vivere—whence the much wider success of neoliberalism compared to the alt-right’s. Were the sheer recognition of one’s position as exploiter to become the exclusive socially-recognized remaining moral value, then neoliberalism would triumph. Let us also pause to foreground the fact that, because the cynical amoralist position clearly takes the distinction between good and evil as its point of reference, it remains within ideology. This is evident in the logic of cynical amoralism, which serves to reproduce the established hierarchy of social ranks (the given relations of production) by providing “a foretaste of a higher rank” (Nietzsche), an Ersatz on the moral level. Indeed, recalling Louis Althusser’s words, it is in the very definition “of the ideology of the ruling class that the relations of production in a capitalist social formation, i.e. the relations of exploited to exploiters and exploiters to exploited, are largely reproduced” (156). Ideology has always claimed to be non- or post-ideological; it has always been the case that the “mechanisms which produce this vital” reproduction of the relations of production “are naturally covered up and concealed by a universally reigning ideology,” that is, “an ideology which represents” its venues “as a neutral environment purged of ideology” (156). But insofar as cynical amoralism remains within the distinction between good and evil, it also remains to be explained how it is possible that one acknowledges this brutal “exploitation of the whole world” not as something that should cause us remorse but as a desirable or at least inevitable condition. Only a Marxist view of capitalism acknowledges that this brutal exploitation (illegal immigrant labor, underpaid labor, outsourcing, unemployment, and so on) is an integral part of the system itself. As a result, Marxism cannot conceive of the abolition of exploitation without the abolition or fundamental restructuring of the capitalist mode and relations of production. Wouldn’t the sole counter-response to cynical amoralists who feel moral superiority for acknowledging their position as exploiters of the world be this very same acknowledgment accompanied by the demand to end exploitation? Yet, as the Left in the era of global capitalism increasingly withdraws from this demand and is satisfied by the mere gesture of acknowledgment, more and more people turn to the compensatory discourse of individual liberties and betterment, while those who discern the hypocrisy of this move increasingly turn to the alt-right. Thus, both neoliberalism and the alt-right profit from the adoption of the by now largely orphaned Marxist explanatory model, not as a means of challenging capitalism, but as a means of providing a new morality—which is also to say a new ideology—that can best reproduce and sustain the established relations of production.  

Let us return one last time to the common and divergent elements of neoliberalism and the alt-right. First, both claim to be post-ideological; second, only the alt-right openly espouses the principle of sovereignty; third, neoliberalism shares with the Democrats the biopolitical principle of the primum vivere. This means, among other things, that alt-right cynical amoralists do not need to degrade morally or consider as subhuman either their enemies or the “slaves” whom they acknowledge that they exploit. These “slaves” may be one’s equals, including moral equals, who have been defeated in the struggle for power due to historico-political circumstance. And if, for whatever reason, any form of further violence against the “slaves” (or the enemy) is required to maintain this power hierarchy, the alt-right cynical amoralist has no scruples in applying it to these equals (i.e., humans) because their premise is sovereignty, not biopower. By contrast, whoever operates on the primacy of biopower can justify violence only against a subhuman. This in turn means that they have to construct their enemy as subhuman in the first place, which is what the claim to moral superiority endeavors to do (whether in the Democrat or the neoliberal mode). Anyone who denies the political nature of biopower is forced to engage in this moralization of politics and the construction of their opposition as morally inferior, because this is the only political act that remains to them—as long as they follow the rules of biopower. For biopower (the logic of the primum vivere) claims by definition to be a pacifist form of power, and the construction of the enemy as subhuman is the precondition of any division between friend and enemy that a pacifist power could justifiably invoke. To return to Schmitt’s words from 1932, the “particularly promising [besonders aussichtsreiche] way of justifying wars” today is “pacifism” (Concept 36; Begriff 34). That is to say, pacifism is forced by its own logic to present its war as a “war against war,” a war to end all wars, “the absolute last war of humanity” (Concept 36), the assumption being that pacifism constitutes the highest level in the development of human life and that the last war aims to destroy only (subhuman) life that, for whatever reason, has not attained this level of development. In other words, pacifist war aims to destroy those willing to kill themselves and others in the name of some value which, for them, is higher than human life pure and simple. Consequently, Schmitt concludes, “such a war”—the pacifist or biopolitical war—“is necessarily unusually intense and inhuman because” it must “degrade the enemy in moral and other terms and is forced to make of him a monster that must not only be defeated but also utterly destroyed [vernichtet]” (Concept 36; Begriff 35), according to the biopolitical logic by which “‘the more inferior species die out . . . the more I . . . as [a] species . . . can live’” (Foucault, “Society” 255).13

The morality of biopolitical pacifism requires that the ultimate criterion for defining the (subhuman) enemy is the moral inferiority of not respecting human life as such. This would put in the same subhuman boat the alt-right and anyone who takes any antithesis seriously enough to fight in its name. But if a group that supports one side of an antithesis succeeds in constructing its enemy as subhuman (say, on the basis of moral inferiority), then this group’s militancy could appear biopolitically legitimate. Is this what neoliberalism wants to attain by attempting to elevate itself morally, on the one hand above the Democrats by acknowledging its own cynical amoralism, and on the other above the alt-right by denouncing the latter’s sovereign gestures? Is this what the Democrats endeavor to do in attempting to shame the rest for their sovereign gestures and cynical amoralism? Ironically, the acceptance of biopolitical pacifism seems to indicate that the practice of politics (that is, of designating one’s enemy) is possible today only by refusing to acknowledge the political character of power and playing according to the rules of the biopolitical game. Indeed, with the exception of the alt-right, this is largely what is happening.  We have identified here the two current paths of this biopolitical practice. On the one hand, the Democrats shame their enemy for disregarding moral decorum, not because this will change them but because it makes them legitimate targets in the eyes of their opponents. On the other hand, the cynical amoralism of current neoliberal practice also shames its enemy, this time for not being amoral enough to acknowledge evil as the sole remaining moral value. The possibility of resisting biopower’s exploitation of “slaves” (the “whole world”?) thus faces a dilemma. According to which rules should resistance play—the rules of overt or covert moralism? But this question is logically preceded by a deeper dilemma: should resistance play according to the rules of overt or covert sovereignty (or biopower)? The latter question amounts to knowing whether resistance today needs an ideal other than sustaining life as such. In our effort to respond to this more primary question, let us keep in mind that pacifism is not the struggle’s other but merely one way to justify that struggle, whether war or revolution.

Footnotes

1. Current Affairs describes itself as a left-wing magazine edited by Harvard sociology graduate student Nathan J. Robinson. Briahna Joy Gray is Senior Politics Editor at The Intercept, and her article was included in a special issue on “Shame: Its Uses and Abuses.”

2.  Referring to the “beginnings” of “the sphere of contracts and legal obligations,” Nietzsche remarks that they “were liberally sprinkled with blood” because in them “the sinister knitting together of the two ideas guilt and pain first occurred, which by now have become quite inextricable.” To this he adds: “And may we not say that ethics has never lost its reek of blood and torture—not even in Kant, whose categorical imperative smacks of cruelty?” (197). The link between Kant and cruelty has famously been elaborated by Lacan in “Kant with Sade.”

3. For instance, Silvan Tomkins’s conceptual distinction of shame from guilt—even as “they are one and the same affect” (Sedgwick and Frank 133)—on the basis of his observation that, unlike guilt, shame does not presuppose any prohibition, may, as Eve Sedgwick and Adam Frank have argued, be useful in grasping the decentralized character of the self, but remains irrelevant to the political function of bad conscience. Tomkins’s own examples actually point to the reason why. For instance, the shame one may feel when “one started to smile [at somebody thought “to be familiar”] but found one was smiling at a stranger” (Sedgwick and Frank 5) is indeed provoked not because of a prohibition, but because of a sense of improperness—yet this concept is itself based on the very social norms that also constitute bad conscience. That is, the opposition between proper-improper, like that between good-evil, need not depend on a prohibition. More generally, the various and otherwise important accounts of the difference between shame and guilt are irrelevant to discussions of their political function as long as their political effects are indistinguishable. The political exchangeability of shame and guilt becomes evident in the fact that their valorization can be inverted, as in Paul Gilroy’s argument, cited by Karyn Ball,

that among the painful obligations that attend the task of working through the “grim details of imperial and colonial history” is the transformation of “paralyzing guilt into a more productive shame that would be conducive to the building of a multicultural nationality that is no longer phobic about the prospect of exposure to either strangers or otherness.” (Ball 70-1)

Paralysis seems to shift arbitrarily between guilt (Gilroy) and shame (Gray). In her response to Gilroy’s suggestion, Ball offers a psychoanalytically-inflected expression of the common political function of shame and guilt: “I question whether such shame can be detached from a sadomasochistic imaginary that precipitates liberal guilt” (71).

4. I have argued elsewhere that Spinoza’s work explicitly indicates that such a non-ideological space is impossible both practically (as his political writings indicate) and theoretically (insofar as it would be impossible to have the third kind of knowledge [intuition] without it being mediated through both the second [reason] and first [imagination] kinds of knowledge, as his Ethics indicates). See $urplus: Spinoza-Lacan and “Spinoza’s Immanent Sovereignty: Fantasy and the Decision of Interpretation” (authored with Joseph Bermas-Dawes).

5. Foucault’s line of thought regarding the indispensability of racism as the façade under which any modern biopolitical State can legitimize its own killings (i.e., its own exercise of sovereign power) acknowledges that biopower and sovereignty are intertwined, albeit opposite forms of power: “sovereignty’s old right . . . to take life or let live . . . came to be complemented by a new right . . . or rather precisely the opposite right” of “the power to ‘make’ live and ‘let’ die” (“Society” 241, my emphasis). Biopower does not replace sovereignty. Rather, it encompasses it, having to keep it hidden within itself because sovereignty opposes its own principle (of the unconditional respect for human life). This is why Foucault does not consider twentieth-century totalitarianisms to constitute exceptions to the biopolitical modern State: “racism is bound up with the workings of a State that is obliged to use race, the elimination of races and the purification of the race, to exercise its sovereign power. . . . Controlling the random element inherent in biological processes was one of the [Nazi] regime’s immediate objectives” (258-9), “in accordance with the themes of natural selection and the struggle for existence” established by the theories of “evolutionism,” which ensures “war will be seen not only as a way of improving one’s own race by eliminating the enemy race . . . but also as a way of regenerating one’s race,” for “more and more of our number die, the race to which we belong will become all the purer” (257). Accordingly, Nazism, “this universally disciplinary and regulatory society, was also a society which unleashed murderous power, or in other words, the old sovereign right to take life. This power to kill . . . ran through the entire social body of Nazi society,” for it “was granted not only to the State . . . the SA, the SS, and so on,” because “[u]ltimately, everyone in the Nazi State had the power of life and death over his or her neighbors, if only because of the practice of informing, which practically meant doing away with the people next door, or having them done away with” (259). He concludes:

We have, then, in Nazi society something that is really quite extraordinary: this is a society which has generalized biopower in an absolute sense, but which has also generalized the sovereign right to kill. . . . Nazism alone took the play between the sovereign right to kill and the mechanisms of biopower to this paroxysmal point. But this play is in fact inscribed in the workings of all . . . modern States. (“Society” 260)

The tension between biopower and sovereignty becomes a focus in Giorgio Agamben’s work. For my account of the relation between Agamben’s and Foucault’s conceptions of biopower in relation to sovereignty, see my article on “Biopolitics, From Tribes to Commodity Fetishism.” The fact that in biopower the sovereign right to kill humans must be covered up means that biopower must cover up the fact that it is a form of political power tout court, insofar as the political presupposes the friend-enemy grouping.

6. See my Being, Time, Bios: Capitalism and Ontology or “Monsters of Biopower: Terror(ism) and Horror in the Era of Affect.”

7. In this context it should be noted that the alt-right’s alliance in the USA with the Christian right and their shared pro-life position should not be read as motivated by the biopolitical unconditional sanctity of human life—as evidenced by the frequency with which one sees on the same car an anti-abortion bumper sticker side by side with one that invites us to “support our troops.” It is part of sovereignty’s agenda to foster a large army, which presupposes increasing its own population. This having been said, nothing would impede a person of more biopolitical ideological inclinations from also applying both bumper stickers, if the person has been convinced that our embryos are humans worth living, unlike the subhumans killed by our troops.   

8. Or, referring back to the above note on Foucault and Nazism, we could say that while Nazism employed at its maximum the biopolitical strategy of constructing its enemy as subhuman in order to legitimize its exercise of violence (sovereignty), Trump and the alt-right are less invested than the Democrats in doing so. And this is part of what reveals Trump’s administration as a straightforward appeal to sovereignty, and makes it more reminiscent of totalitarian regimes such as Nazism—only because most people associate the latter more with sovereignty than with its bio-racist strategies.

9. Can the alt-right’s infringement of the code of biopower act as a form of resistance capable of undermining that very power? Some consequences of exposing the political nature of biopower, at least in the USA, include a general sense of instability, uncertainty, and fear regarding possible (market, war, and other) catastrophes and the more or less militant re-politicization of life. Whether these are signs of biopower’s faltering or of systemic crises—ostensible crises required for the sustenance and reinforcement of biopower—remains an open question.     

10. Several writers have exposed the contradiction, or rather the hypocrisy, of the politics of tolerance. For instance, Žižek addresses the topic through “multiculturalism,” pointing out that it “is, stricto sensu, ‘Eurocentric.’” In his words: “actual multiculturalism can emerge only in a culture within which its own tradition, communal heritage, appears as contingent; that is to say, in a culture that is indifferent towards itself, towards its own specificity” (Metastases 157). Accordingly, multiculturalism’s call for tolerance is a disguised manifestation of intolerance toward any culture not indifferent to its own specificity, that is, any culture that does not consider culture to be an arbitrary construction. Wendy Brown also foregrounds the fact that self-proclaimed secular tolerance in truth incites an intolerance of religious intolerance (notably, in the face of the militant Islam).

11. This is not the place to address the otherwise important question of Left populism.

12. I elaborate in more detail on this shift in the workings of ideology (and its relation to biopower) in “Monsters of Biopower: Terror(ism) and Horror in the Era of Affect.”

13. Schmitt’s criticism of the “pacifist” degradation of the enemy, and his call to treat the enemy as equal, form an implicit critique of the Nazi agenda to exterminate Jewish people as “lice”—something that may relate to the fact that Schmitt was accused by the SS of fake anti-Semitism and of undermining Nazism’s racial theories (particularly in a series of articles published in the SS newspaper Das schwarze Korps in 1936; see also Bendersky).

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