We asked a variety of scholars to share their reflections on Elad Lapidot’s new book The Politics of Not Speaking.
One would be quick to observe that a conversation on a book that advances the notion of not speaking is a reception of the book that simultaneously rejects it. Refuting this observation as too quick is one of things that my book seeks to achieve, by exploring the various ways in which “logoclasm, the politics of not speaking, does not negate logos, it makes it possible” (102). It is for this reason that I am especially grateful for my colleagues and friends, my ongoing interlocutors, partners in speech and logos, for heeding my call to speak about not speaking. This conversation demonstrates one of the basic intuitions underlying this book, namely that even the highly professionalized logos of scholarly discourse does not just suffer from logoclastic dynamics but is positively animated by them.
A sharp polemic against the book is formulated by Agata Bielik-Robson, to whom its publication nevertheless owes a great deal. This fact attests to Bielik-Robson’s deep (to use her own term) “logogenic” commitment, that is to affirming logoclasm for the sake of generating new conversations. Bielik-Robson is unsure whether my book affirms the same commitment. She expresses her doubts as to whether positing the notion of logoclasm, “the break of logos,” aims at the interruption of a given discourse for the sake of generating a new one or at the complete negation of all rational discussion. She suspects that by problematizing the politics of speaking, that is the notion that politics is about rational exchange of ideas (“logos”), I may be calling to renounce all notion of universalism and common rationality for the sake of “mute violence of absolute enmity.”
The “true center” of the book, she suggests, is my discussion of Carl Schmitt and Frantz Fanon. In my analysis of Schmitt, she reads a commitment to politics that is based on the negation of all rational conversation, all logos, such that “there is no point of talking to the enemy – war is the only answer.” This commitment to violence would underlie my discussion of Fanon, which subscribes, as she understands it, to an absolute negation of Western logos, so as to posit anti-colonial thought as a form of gnostic dualism and anti-colonial politics as the declaration of “uncompromising war” between good and evil.
Bielik-Robson’s critical comments, inasmuch as they express a profound adherence to logos and legitimate concerns about the consequences of problematizing rational discussion, also demonstrate the extreme fragility of speaking. Her fear that the message of my book is “mute violence of absolute enmity” seems immune to explicit statements that she quotes from the book, which clarify that my insight about the violence in logos “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” (102).
Bielik-Robson’s reasoning is loyal to the common portrait of Schmitt as the proponent of absolute war and “no point of talking to the enemy” even as she invokes my demonstration of how Schmitt in fact criticizes the demonization of the enemy as arising from the failure to see the logoclastic nature of the sovereign state. Only a polity that acknowledges that it does not represent pure logos can see a point in talking with its enemy. Similarly, Fanon does not affirm but criticizes Manichean dualism, which he considers not as the essence of reason but as the negation of reason. This he imputes not to Western logos in general, but specifically to colonialism. Decolonial struggle therefore does not aim at instating gnostic duality but at ending it, by breaking colonial logos.
As for my own logos, I see how Fanon’s reasoning may justify armed resistance, which I think is sometimes justified. Yet my book is no manifesto, but an attempt to make sense of what seems to elude sense: logoclasm. My readings, also in Heidegger, Spivak and Derrida, make it clear that I do not consider war and violence as the only forms of logoclastic politics. Bielik-Robson’s response exemplifies how a party to a dispute affirms themselves as representing reason and the other party as standing for “mute violence of absolute enmity,” as the enemy of reason. My “alternative universalism,” which Bielik-Robson misses, consists in logoclastic speech, which, as the book does, offers no pure logos, no exhaustive system or firm position, but an imperfect series of readings, reflections and discussions.
Jayne Svenungsson had no doubts that my book “is not about negation – about denying the desirability of peace, unity or rationality – but about interrupting and disturbing discourses that do not recognize their own inherent potential violence.” Western discourse is criticized not for its commitment to rationality but for its abuse of this commitment that conceals profound logoclastic Western politics of state borders. Svenungsson points to the powerful production of “mental compartmentalization,” which allows Europeans to cultivate the feeling that genocidal violence that takes place beyond their borders, such as in Gaza, is external to European political systems, rather than integral to Europe, historically, militarily, economically, politically – and discursively. This numbness is reinforced by a powerful policing of language, and I am grateful to Svenungsson for reminding us of Orwell. Nothing more Orwellian than the current imposition of “definitions,” such as the IHRA one that outlaws as antisemitic calls to end the occupation and genocide of Palestinians.
Svenungsson understands that the basic challenge is not simply how to reconstruct logos after its clasmatic interruption. In decolonial terms, the problem is not how after liberation from colonial rule the postcolonial polity would be able to turn from independence war to building new institutions, which may be committed to democracy, the rule of law and the respect of human rights. The question is not how to move from logoclasm to a new, unbroken logos, but, on the contrary, how to avoid the reproduction of claims for perfect logos by maintaining the awareness and practice of living with imperfect logos. How to prevent the victims of violence of colonial logos from reproducing the same violence in their turn?
Svenungsson is particularly concerned by the chapter on Fanon where she is troubled, similarly to Bielik-Robson, by the “lack of distance to Fanon’s rhetoric of newness and purity”. Yet I don’t think Fanon’s notion that decolonization should establish a new, non-colonial order, implies naïve visions of purity. As I noted re Bielik-Robson, he seeks to end dualism and not to establish a new, reversed one. The question of how to maintain logoclastic politics still stands, of course, and I agree with Svenungsson that we could find clearer responses in postcolonial thinkers with explicit sensitivity to the vicissitudes of logos as Spivak and Derrida.
Like Jayne Svenungsson, Sami Khatib too sees clearly that the politics of not speaking is not about affirming violence against reason and war against peaceful dialogue, nor does it seek to posit any binary dualism. On the exact contrary, the logoclastic awareness “undermines and rejects the binary of either peaceful speech or violent struggle since speaking can be violent just as struggling can be peaceful.” Khatib accordingly indicates how the different analyses offered by the book tease out the contradictions and dialectics of speaking and not speaking, so as to show how logoclasm itself constitutes a speech act.
In the case of Fanon, which seems to be the most challenging, Khatib aptly recognizes that the author of The Wretched of the Earth (whose title I should add is a quote from the first, original French line of The International – “Debout! les damnés de la terre” – which sought to “unite the human race”) fights for establishing anti-colonial logos and not a regime of anti-logos. In the case of the BDS, this logoclastic politics is explicitly designed to replace armed resistance and to resist the violence of logos through a speech act, namely the call to not speak. Furthermore, as Khatib points out in my analyses, also the Palestinian armed resistance has a communicative essence, as its goal has not been to defeat Israeli violence but to render it visible beyond the walls of separation, the borders of numbness indicated by Svenungsson.
Khatib is also raising an important question about the operations of logos beyond the purely linguistic and poetic domain, beyond speaking, that is in materiality. As the Frankfurter School indicated, the violence of rationalization manifests itself centrally in economic structures, where logos operates as oiko-nomos, oiko-logos and techno-logos. It is crucial to reflect on logoclastic politics also in these domains. How does logoclasm take place in “the language of commodities,” without negating logos, but on the contrary rendering it possible? It seems to me that any answer to this question would need to reflect on the relations between logos as speech and logos as material existence, to what extent these relations are logogenic or logoclastic, how materiality determines speaking and how, on the other hand, various modalities of logos determine different forms of relations to the material world.
Also Gildas Salmon was able to clearly see that “the aim of the book is not to overturn the dialogical and pacifying conception of politics, but to diagnose its flaws and limitations in order to challenge it and, ultimately, to revive it.” He accurately recognized that the reference to Schmitt in no way seeks to argue for the necessity of whatever “gnostic” war that renders futile any discussion with the enemy. On the exact contrary, by pointing out the abuse of logos, Schmitt argues against the demonization of the enemy and for restoring our ability to perceive the intelligibility of political hostilities. In the colonial context, this means rehumanizing anti-colonial resistance from “terrorists” to rational agents of a political struggle.
Salmon understands that the basic issue in decolonial logoclasm is not to silence or negate Western logos, but to counter the silencing of non-Western discourses and rationality. The point is not to stop the conversation but to stop the unending monologue of one speaker so as to enable others to speak as well. Conversations need silences. Salmon’s subtly indicates that the challenge is how to ensure that after we silence the monologizing speakers they will start listening. The interruption of Western logos should allow Westerners to hear non-Western voices. Salmon notes that Heidegger’s operations of disenabling the dialogue between European and East-Asian thought, to protect the latter from the colonizing power of the former, should nonetheless be wary of becoming a reversed shield that protects Western discourse from critical interventions from non-Western perspectives.
Similarly, Spivak’s insistence that the subaltern have no place in the hegemonic discourse – they “cannot speak” – should not lead us to dismiss attempts to listen. Rather, we should rework the limits of our own intelligibility so as to be able to understand marginalized or silenced ways of making sense. Salmon also formulates a critical observation with respect to Derrida, who is often read as a corrective to the ills perceived in decolonial thought, especially of the Fanonian genre. Salmon points out that Derrida’s essay that I analyse universalizes the dynamics of logoclasm beyond the political condition of colonialism and runs the risk of depoliticizing it, so as to erase the specific violence of colonial logos and reproduce the silencing of subaltern voices. I agree with Salmon’s concerns, as well as with his indication that Derrida’s own operation of logoclasm within Western discourse nonetheless generates the necessary opening towards heterologoi.
Finally, Anoush Ganjipour too has no difficulties to see that the politics of not speaking does not mean politics devoid of any speech for the sake of mute violence, but politics that acknowledges the interruptions, imperfections and limitations of speech. Ganjipour, similarly to Salmon, consequently formulates the challenge of logoclastic politics, as the ability, after the interruption, to restructure discourse through the encounter with discursive alterity. The challenge of politics is not only to respect the distance between divergent orders of speech, but also to maintain communication between them. Logoclastic politics is concerned with the communication between different languages and therefore, Ganjipour suggests, it is based on the principle of translation.
Translation would be the operation of logoclasm that takes place within logos, very much like Derrida’s deconstruction. The status of translation within the violent dynamics of logos raises many problems. Ganjipour mentions two risks that translation should avoid: extreme universalization that erases difference, on the one hand, and on the other hand extreme insistence on the particularities of individual idioms that erases communication, which for Ganjipour (like Bielik-Robson, and see my objection there) leads to the war of all against all. To avoid these risks, Ganjipour’s suggestion is to understand and perform translation as the operation of making one’s voice heard in the language of the other “as a voice from the outside.” Such translation does not construct a dialogue, he emphasizes, rather the outside voice calls into question the hegemonic discourse from within, initiating a process of restructuring.
Ganjipour mentions how he himself endeavored to engage in such a logoclastic encounter of translation in his recently published exchanges with Jean-Claude Milner. There, Ganjipour attempted to make a non-European, Middle-Eastern, Oriental voice heard in French discourse, and more specifically, I think, the French-Jewish conversation. This attempt failed, he estimates, due to the interlocutor’s insistence on keeping their “ears deliberately blocked,” a sort of politics of not listening, which is one way of understanding the deformity of pure logos, and that Ganjipour diagnoses as the pathology underlying the current situation that goes under the name Gaza.
I wonder whether talking, like Derrida does, about making the voice of the other heard in one’s own discourse is not preferable to talking about making one own’s voice heard in the discourse of the other, so as to avoid undesired echoes of colonial invasiveness. Be that as it may, I think that the politics of not speaking arises precisely from the fact that conversation often simply cannot take place, even if one wants it and makes efforts to make it happen, because the others do not want to or are unable to listen. Insistent politics of speaking may in such case do violence. The politics of not speaking is the openness to accept the co-existence of not just different but incompatible and conflicting discourses, without attempting to reconcile them. The figure of translation that I would deploy here would accordingly be the one developed by Derrida as I discuss in the book, namely a translation that does not seek to unite different languages into one, but a translation that operates within a given logos in order to split it from within. Logoclastic translation, we might say, does not seek to overcome the Babylonian diversity of languages, but to keep regenerating it.
