We asked a variety of scholars to share their reflections on Elad Lapidot’s new book The Politics of Not Speaking.
“The Politics of Not Speaking” takes us on a journey through decisive “logo-clastic” interventions across the spectrum of 20th century political philosophy and 21st politics. Starting from the right-wing angle of the problem, Carl Schmitt and Martin Heidegger, and moving on to de- and anti-colonial acts of non-speaking in Frantz Fanon, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and the Palestinian BDS movement, Elad Lapidot’s lecture transcripts work through the contradictions of what it means to do politics by not speaking.
Ever since the Greek polis, politics has been ‘spoken’ in the media of language and speech, constitutive of the parliament of con-/dissenting voices. Introducing the neologism of “logo-clasm,” the breaking of logos/speech, Lapidot’s careful close-reading undermines the false binary of speech vs. non-speech and demonstrates how a politics of not speaking can perform most powerful acts. As paradoxical as it sounds, where logos breaks, the political act “speaks”.
This almost dialectical or para-dialectical venture finds it conclusion in Jacques Derrida’s deconstructive take on logos/logocentrism. Quoting from Derrida’s late text Monolingualism of the Other (1996), Lapidot takes the break of language in speech as a possible exit from the binary of speaking/not-speaking. Derrida dixit: “I only have one language and it is not mine” (79). One might be reminded of Adorno and his critique of logos as bourgeois reason and capitalist logic of commodity exchange, which also does not simply denounce the logos of Enlightenment but works through the dialectics of Enlightenment in order to tarry with its negativity. In Lapidot’s certainly more Derridean take, the reader exits the book with a similar insight: “Logoclastic action, disrupting the fiction of pure reason, should not be taken with a view to precluding logos, which amounts to the same absolute truth as its perfection, but with a view to maintaining logos in the state of imperfection, which is the sole way of rendering it humanly possible” (112).
The dialectics and vicissitudes of logo-clastic political action are most impressively observed in the chapter on Spivak and the corollary on the Palestinian Movement for Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS). The BDS movement engages in the struggle against the violence of the normalization of asymmetric power relations (settler colonialism, exploitation, apartheid etc.). To this extent, BDS follows the anticolonial logo-clasm of Frantz Fanon. At the same time, BDS’s politics of not speaking does not resort to armed resistance and still appeals to logos: “the logoclastic operation of the BDS movement is carried out in the realm of discourse: the boycott is a speech act” (55). In other words, the BDS movement is contradictory in the best political sense: while still relying on logos, it destroys the false symmetry of dialogue, revealing the speaker’s positions of power, often hidden under the guise of peace, dialogue and “civilized” conversation.
In the chapter on Spivak’s famous text Can the Subaltern Speak? (1988) such dual movement (logos/logo-clasm) is enacted through a critique of the colonial logic of representation. Calling out the epistemic violence of colonialism, Spivak also criticizes the politics of self-representation of colonized victim groups. The benevolent political subject of the colonizing metropole calls the subaltern to represent themselves in speech, forging a seemingly pure act of solidarity. Indeed, as Lapidot summarizes Spivak, “the most problematic form of epistemic violence is paradoxically perpetrated by creating the illusion that the subaltern can speak, creating the impression, the notion, that those who are structurally subjugated by the order of discourse, by order, by knowledge, are nonetheless part of and have some agency in a system based on their exclusion” (65).
Epistemic violence is perpetuated in the very act of claiming to criticize, undo or remedy the effects of it. Again, the political intervention of logo-clastic action would reject this false alternative of either remaining silent or accepting the flawed invitation to emancipate oneself through partaking in meaningful speech acts of (colonial) logos. But what are the acts of not speaking necessary to expose and criticize the harmful effects of the subaltern’s participation in (colonial) logos? Insisting on the non-purity, fragility or, to quote Adorno once more, “non-identity” of (colonial, bourgeois, humanist, Western) logos does not undo its effects and history of violence.
As demonstrated in the case of Spivak, a politics of not speaking undermines and rejects the binary of either peaceful speech or violent struggle since speaking can be violent just as struggling can be peaceful. Think for instance of Ghassan Kanafani in his interview with ABC (quoted at the end). Lapidot, however, does not shy away from engaging the limit case of logoclasm, the violence of political militancy, resistance and armed struggle. Here, we revisit Fanon’s meditations on violence. If “colonialism is pure violence that will only yield through violence,” then “decolonialization can only happen through violence” (38). Moreover, colonialism itself constitutes not only “the end, death, failure,” but also “the termination of reason, thinking, or logos” (38). Where logos is destroyed by violence, a politics of not speaking has to be violent as well – there is no shared logos to engage in speech. If, within the colonial order, speech and dialogue are already violence (42), the participation in peaceful dialogue, regardless of one’s intentions, perpetuates this state of violence. From this follows that the logoclasm of decolonization is violent for it fights the violent logoclasm of colonialism – in the name of a different (political, metaphysical) anti-colonial logos. It all comes down to situate Fanon’s position on the site of a (coming, emergent) anti-colonial logos rather than that of anti- or counter-logos.
In the concluding chapter, Lapidot adds further considerations to this problematic, again by pointing to the Palestinian struggle:
“Palestinian armed struggle exemplifies decolonial counterviolence insofar as its immediate telos is not to defeat the military power of the IDF but to defeat the democratic peace of mind that this military power enables on the Israeli, Jewish, inner side of the separation. It does violence to reveal violence, it breaches the wall to make the wall visible. Palestinian attacks brought military violence back to the civilian center of Israel – they instilled terror” (110).
Again, violence here is not the symmetric flipside of speech. While destroying the semblance of peaceful normality, the violence of Palestinian armed struggle “communicates” on a political and epistemic level: it violently makes violence visible. Hence, the terror it instills has become the (colonial) name of its actions: terrorism. It does not come as a surprise that in certain political quarters in the West, the signifier of Palestine is almost exchangeable for terrorism.
In its final sections, the book turns to the Israeli genocide against Palestinians in Gaza and its ideological justification. In short, Lapidot shows how the critique of state violence can become its very justification. Even the fight against antisemitism (the meaning of the Holocaust) can be used as the logos of extreme state violence (Gaza genocide).
“In using the Holocaust to justify the destruction of Gaza, the State of Israel – alongside other Western states – appropriates the collapse of European sovereign logos to restore sovereignty to its unlimited power. […] The inversion of the meaning of the Holocaust from critique of state violence to its justification points to a postcolonial condition in which the very discourse that has disrupted the coherence of Western reason becomes one of its pillars: logoclasm turned into counter-logos, which holds the same destructive potential as logos” (110-111).
Although the Holocaust is widely (and rightly so) understood as the eclipse of Reason and collapse of Western logos, it can still be mobilized as its own causa sui to justify the destruction of logos (genocide). It might be worthwhile exploring such reversal further and discuss how the dialectics of a politics of speaking and not speaking do not produce a positive formation as in the case of Hegel’s Aufhebung (sublation as double negation). Speaking out against the genocide in Gaza thus faces a challenge: how to not normalize genocide as the destruction of logos without resorting to either dialogue or counter-logos (fascist, liberal or otherwise). To this degree, we can already draw a lesson from the global movement for Palestine: a decolonial politics of not speaking needs to interrupt its own methods of logoclasm permanently in order to escape the binary of violence and non-violence, logos and counter-logos.
The dialectics of speaking and not speaking, however, is not limited to politics but also extends to the field of political economy. It was Marx who mentioned in Capital, vol. I (1867), the existence of a language of commodities, a Warensprache. “If commodities could speak, they would say this: our use-value may interest men, but it does not belong to us as objects. What does belong to us as objects, however, is our value. Our own intercourse as commodities proves it. We relate to each other merely as exchange-values” (C I, 176). The logos of capital speaks an abstract language of value relations, which are being spoken and enacted by and through actual humans. Commodities speak in a language of value relations (mediated by money) constitutive of social relations in capitalism.
What would be a logo-clastic action capable of disrupting commodity language on the level of its speech acts of buying and selling, exchanging and (re)producing, without resorting to the fantasy of human non-relation, non-mediation and non-alienation? Given the fact that the logos of capital is now spoken globally, how would a politics of not speaking disengage from Warensprache? Of course, the act of burning all money entirely, the abolition of value relations as such (including the destruction of the medium/means of social mediation), sound naïve. A politics of not speaking commodity language still needs a political subject and some sort of social mediation. Moreover, it would need a language capable of understanding, translating and transforming commodity language and its inherent logoclasm of capitalist relations of production (exploitation, the antagonism of labor and capital). In other words, the politics of not speaking also needs to work through the materialist political-economic dimension of its own logoclastic action. Otherwise, the fight against fascist logoclasm is delegated to a political or moral will, anchored in the political goodness of a subject.
*Addendum
On October 16, 1970, ABC News’s Richard Carleton (RC) interviewed Palestinian author and journalist Ghassan Kanafani (GK) who at the time was the spokesperson and magazine editor of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, two years before his assassination in a car bombing in July 1972.
Excerpts from the transcript.
RC: Why won’t your organisation engage in peace talks with the Israelis?
GK: You don’t mean peace talks exactly. You mean capitulation, surrender.
RC: Why not just talk?
GK: Talk to whom?
RC: Talk to the Israeli leaders.
GK: That kind of conversation is between the sword and the neck.
RC: Well, if there were no swords or guns in the room, you could still talk.
GK: No, I have never seen any talk between a colonialist case and a national liberation movement.
RC: But despite this, why not talk?
GK: Talk about what?
RC: Talk about the possibility of not fighting.
GK: Not fighting for what?
RC: Not fighting at all. No matter what for.
GK: People usually fight for something, and they stop fighting for something. So tell me what is it we should speak about.
RC: Stop fighting…
GK: Or rather what is it we should stop fighting for to talk about?
RC: Talk to stop fighting, to stop the death, the misery, the destruction, the pain.
GK: Whose death, misery, destruction and pain?
RC: Of Palestinians, of Israelis, of Arabs.
GK: Of the Palestinian people who are uprooted, forced into refugee camps, starved, murdered for 20 years, and forbidden even to call themselves Palestinians.
RC: Better that way than dead though.
GK: Maybe to you, but to us, no. To us, to liberate our country, to have dignity, to have respect, to have our basic human rights, is as essential as life itself.
