Elad Lapidot’s book offers an innovative and creative description of the politics of not speaking as resulting from what it names a logoclastic crisis. The introduction of the term “logoclasm” as the practice of breaking the hegemonic power of logos is the main achievement of Elad Lapidot’s intervention into the field of political theory, especially the one connected to post-colonial and decolonial thought. While the book has no extensive bibliography or footnotes, it is justified by its form which preserves the living speech of the seminars based on the close reading of the selected texts of Carl Schmitt, Martin Heidegger, Frantz Fanon, Gayatry Spivak, and Jacques Derrida.
Lapidot’s book positions itself firmly within the decolonial perspective which brings a strong critique of the violence inherent to logos, but I am not sure what it ultimately recommends as the practical result of the logoclastic crisis that it describes in reference to the thinkers mentioned above: is it merely diagnosed as a problem which calls for a new discursive solution, or is it affirmed as a solution itself? Does it advocate a recourse to the violence of particularistic perspectives which gives up on any universal dimension of mutual encounter and enters into the Schmittian stasis – or does it gesture towards a new universal dimension in which a politics of speaking could still be possible? If the former were true, it would be a worrying consequence. If all “logophilic” attempt to create a universal space of symbolic exchange – even as minimal as the Heideggerian space of Winken, the gestural hints – can be dismissed as essentially colonial and hence particularistic, because representing only the hegemonic side of the alleged dialogue, then we face a complete collapse of all forms of universalism, which can only issue in violence: either the Schmittian war of the friend-enemy realpolitik or the messianic theopolitics of violent reversal, as in Frantz Fanon’s political Manicheanism. If this is to be the lesson drawn from the myth of the Tower of Babel, I would prefer to resist it. To me, the main problem of the book is that it does not try to construct an alternative universalism: a new perspective of the politics of speaking, which would be able to appropriate the postcolonial critique, pointing to the Westo-centric hegemonic practices of establishing the universal logos as a means of hierarchical power over those who cannot live up to the universal ideal, but would also not give up on the common dimension of communication completely. Among the thinkers mentioned in the book, some could be helpful in such reconstruction of alternative universalism (Heidegger, Derrida, to some extent Spivak), and some definitely not (Schmitt, Fanon).
The issue of an alternative universalism, which divides the heroes of this book into two distinct camps (against Lapidot’s intention to see them all as the members of one logoclastic group) is closely connected to the next one. While reading Lapidot’s series of talks, I had a constant sense of an equivocation on the concept of logos which here seems to mean two very different things. On the one hand, the book openly attacks the Logos as the overarching and totalizing system of one perfect truth, which stifles other discourses with a hegemonic violence. On the other hand, however, Lapidot’s argument also makes room for a logos in a minor key, conceived as the practice of speaking, which is executed by the finite subjects aware of their limitations and is thus free of the hegemonic tendency of the One Logos (from this time on I will call it Logos with the capital L as opposed to the finite logos writ small). This equivocation immediately translates into another one, concerning the logoclastic crisis. When logoclasm – the refusal to speak – is directed against the imposition of the hegemonic Logos, but not simply against any form of communication, we deal with the politics of not speaking that interrupts the dominant consensus and allows other – so far subdued and subaltern – voices to come in. Such logoclasm, even if resorting to necessary counter-violence against the systemic violence of the dominant Logos, does not see the condition of non-communication as the ultimate outcome: it treats it as a stage which it hopes to overcome with a new logos that would be more open to the diverse, not readily reconcilable perspectives. Fighting against Logos for the sake of a new logos (or plural logoi), this position is simultaneously logoclastic and logogenic: it attempts to create a new speech that would be able to incorporate the lesson of the logoclastic crisis, similar to what Gillian Rose called the “mourning that becoming the law” – the traumatic loss of speech that gives an incentive to build a new, more just logos on the ruins of the former. But when logoclasm is a tactic employed against speaking as such, the result is very different: the politics of not speaking becomes the final outcome and then there is nothing that can stop us from unleashing the mute violence of absolute mutual enmity, based on the rigid dualism of good and evil. When the “perfect Logos” is broken, a new, less violent logos can still emerge in its place. But when all logos is broken, the result can only be violence as the ultimate state: the eternal combat in which one party, seeing itself as uniquely good, refuses to speak with the other one as the evil incarnate that can only be fought against, never spoken to.
The fragment from the Conclusion titled “Not Last Words,” in which Elad Lapidot explains his endeavour, can indeed be interpreted both ways. In the first part, logos is presented as the Logos: a violent apparatus of coercion, which does not oppose animal violence, but rather carries it onto the symbolic level, and as such must be counteracted by the logoclastic politics:
[The book] turns to authors and texts that recognize the violence that is proper to logos, the destructive power of reason, and identify the exercise of logoclasm, the break of speaking, in countering this violence. My claim is that the site of this interruption of speech is politics. According to this conception, politics does not begin with the rise of logos, of rational human speech, against animal violence; rather, it begins with the intervention of logoclasm against the violence of logos (102).
Few lines later, however, the logoclastic intervention of the politics of not speaking is presented less radically: not as the negation of logos but merely its interruption that allows new forms of dialogue to emerge:
This insight does not simply identify logos or reason with violence. Furthermore, it does not negate or dismiss dialogue, nor does it posit politics as the end of all speaking. In fact, logoclasm does not consist in mere negation but in interruption. More precisely, the conception of politics as logoclastic accepts the Aristotelian definition of the human being as speaking, as “possessing logos.” However, it also understands the human condition as possessing logos in a structural state of imperfection, incompleteness, finitude. Human being, as finite, is logoclastic (102).
But, if Aristotle is right and human being is a speaking animal, then the last sentence simply cannot hold, unless we unpack the equivocation. It would then have to mean: yes, human being, as finite, is logoclastic towards the Logos which usurps the position of oneness and perfection, but also equally logogenic in creating new forms of dialogue that would be able to take into account human imperfection and finitude. Only then we can safely arrive at the conclusion, formulated at the very end of the book:
Logoclasm, the politics of not speaking, does not negate logos, it makes it possible […] 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 (102; 112).
I have no problems with this conclusion: this is, after all, the main tenet of late-modern humanities, starting with Heidegger’s strategy of Abbau, then continued by Derrida’s deconstruction which, as Lapidot rightly summarizes, “turned Western philosophy against itself” in order to “salvage the human project of logos by dispelling the fiction of its Western completion, by deconstructing Europe’s own Tower of Babel” (108-9). What I find problematic is the one-sided presentation of those thinkers as logoclastic in a manner that is constantly troubled by the equivocation between Logos and logos. Lapidot’s emphasis falls on the logoclasm at the expense of their logogenic efforts, which results in the series of interpretations that are more radical than the more moderate definition of the “logoclastic action” offered in the Conclusion. The logoclasm as it appears in the chapters on Heidegger, Derrida, and Spivak is more on the side of the negation of speech than on the side of its interruption: instead of opening a new dimension of finite logos, it gravitates towards non-speaking pure and simple.
The lack of concern for an alternative universalism that could replace the old hegemonic form of Western Logos with a new logogenic effort, becomes very palpable in the chapters on Schmitt and Fanon, which form the true center of the book. Here it is no longer a matter of interrupting the Western Logos: what counts is its total negation which exposes it as totally beyond repair – corrupt, irremediably hypocritcal, falsely universal, a pure mask of colonial violence and power. In a bold and controversial gesture, Elad Lapidot enlists Carl Schmitt as an ally of the decolonial critique, by claiming that:
Schmitt’s key observation was that in these conditions, in the political condition of ontic war, the greatest danger is of a specific party to the conflict, who like all parties embodies imperfect, broken logos, nonetheless understanding its position as representing perfect logos and itself as standing for pure and absolute reason (104).
This may be true – that the all-encompassing Logos, feeling too omnipotent in its desire for peace, wages a war on war that must end in the worst kind of colonizing violence – but Schmitt’s own position is certainly not anti-militant. All he wanted was to defend war as the permanent condition of the modern state engaging in the Hobbesian bella omnium contra omnia against the idea of the holy war aspiring to establish an absolute global peace, which, in Lapidot’s interpretation, constitutes the greatest danger. Schmitt, therefore, figures here as the partisan of radical logoclasm: there is no point of talking to the enemy – war is the only answer. The only difference is that such territorially limited war is not the holy “ontic war” which wants to obliterate the enemy for the sake of the one universal harmony, ruled by one global Logos. Just as the opposition of friend and enemy is essentially inherent to the “concept of the political,” so is the logoclastic crisis and the resulting violence. And so be it – all that counts is that this war remains particular, limited by the borders of the territorial state. It is only when it becomes a global war against all wars, then we are in trouble.
This is the aspect that worries me most: radical logoclasm as the license to violence that can establish itself as a permanent stasis, infinitely delaying the logogenic challenge of creating a new way of speaking. The chapter on Franz Fanon is most illuminating in this respect. The theological dimension of Lapidot’s reading of Fanon is fascinating: the Manichean struggle between good and evil, involving a radical messianic reversal in which the last will eventually, at the end of the apocalyptic battle, be the first. Gnosticism is indeed logoclastic in its very essence: the uncompromising war between the forces of liberation and the forces of enslavement – translated by Fanon into the conflict between the colonized “wretched” and the colonizing “powerful” – allows for no universal ground of a new logogenic encounter. Fanon’s position is unflinchingly non-dialectical and one cannot escape the feeling that he is the closest to the author himself.
But then the serious problem arises: has not this very Gnostic perspective been criticized by Elad Lapidot’s in the chapter on Schmitt, which rejected the ultimate combat myth of the forces of good versus evil as the viable model for politics? Here, in the Fanon chapter, the only difference is that such combat is waged from the position of the colonized victim – but does this shift suffice to justify it? Such particularistic distribution of idioms – Manicheanism allowed in the case of the victims of Western colonization, but prohibited as the language of the colonizing West – blocks any future logogenic restitution of a universalist perspective. What Schmitt abhorred as the apocalyptic political theology of the total violence unleashed in the name of an ultimate triumph of the good, delegated into indefinite future, Lapidot quite surprisingly affirms in reference to Fanon. And, just as in any theopolitcs of the apocalypse, the “bright future” (as the Soviet communism called the ultimate outcome of the cosmic battle against all class enemies), the possible messianic consequences of the ultimate triumph of the “wretched” appear as distant and vague when compared to the current state, vividly described as the time of the violent struggle:
Speaking for the colonized, Fanon argued that their only way to counter colonial violence was through counter-violence since reason itself — discourse, knowledge, laws, institutions — had been colonized. Violence breaks colonial logic (107).
Yet, to replace it with what? A constant subversive counter-violence determined to destroy all the traces of the colonial logic inherent in the Western Logos? If so, then the eternalized logoclastic condition sanctions violence as the only permanent outcome: a revolutionary counter-violence as the only possible response to the colonizing violence, where the two forces remain forever rigidly opposed in the holy war of good versus evil, with a very vague quasi-messianic vision of the happy ever after. Now, however, there can be no compromise – and no contamination – with the world of the evil Western Archon, which only deserved to be wholly destroyed. All assimilation is a dangerous illusion: it never effaces the blackness behind the white mask and thus creates an eternal distance between the assimilationist aspirants and the true “whiteness” in power. This essentially Afropessimist perspective, strengthened by the Gnostic absolute dualism, is indeed deeply ingrained in today’s decolonial logoclastic thought, and it is a great merit of Elad Lapidot’s book to reveal its deep politico-theological dimension (even if I disagree with its premises). The decolonial thought emerged from the ethical concern about the epistemic injustice of the colonial process of hegemonization and I endorse its critical thrust. My critical focus on certain deficiencies of the decolonial logic employed in Elad Lapidot’s book is thus not purely external: I would very much welcome an emergence of a truly universalist critique of all forms of imperial power, not only Western. It seems to me that if the decolonial critique were to become philosophically viable, it would have to relinquish its particular obsession with Western imperialism and become more dialectical instead of choosing the dualistic-apocalyptic pattern. Which also means: be able to balance the logoclastic crises with the equally strong logogenic commitment.
