On Jodi Dean

Solidarity and subjectivity

I used to know Jodi Dean slightly. She was a Zizekian when I first encountered her during the Occupy movement and remained one for some time afterwards, at least on the evidence of a piece of hers called “Why Zizek for Political Theory?” that came out in 2016. Whether she keeps up with Zizek now I can’t say. Any serious interest I had in her politics ended when, a few years after Occupy, she joined the Party for Socialism and Liberation—genetically the legatee of byzantine splits in Trotskyism, in practice the most unflinchingly neo-Stalinist group on the American left. I’m not eager to know the PSL line on Zizek’s current standup routine.

What I can say, from reading the blog post that recently caused her to be suspended from teaching duties at Hobart and William Smith, is that Dean remains loyal to Alain Badiou. I think this is more worth talking about than issues of free speech. On the latter score, the issue seems cut and dried. An academic in the United States who voices support for a group that the US government has designated a terrorist organization can expect discipline. We can argue whether that designation or that discipline is warranted, or if voicing such support might be justified; we can’t, though, be surprised by the university’s actions. There’s no such thing as free speech in academia. I suspect all of us in it self-censor every day for various reasons. Hence the extraordinary richness of academia’s hidden transcripts. This is the uneven field on which anti-imperialists play. Solidarity with Jodi Dean boils down to trying to change the balance of power that makes her chastisement inevitable. A part of this would, presumably, also involve making a world in which communists do not feel obligated to support reactionary forces in the name of anti-imperialism. Being clear about such things is not an excuse for the horrendous McCarthyism that’s descended on universities in America and Europe; I hope, in fact, that it helps us fight it in ways that aren’t liberalism’s.

But let’s return to Badiou. Of the “sense of openness” that “many of us” (many of whom?—more on that later) felt upon seeing images of October 7, she writes:

Our response is indicative of the subject effect the actions unleash: something in the world has changed because a subject has inscribed a gap in the given. To use an idea from Alain Badiou, we see that the action was caused by a subject, thus producing that subject as a retroactive effect of the action that caused it. Imperialism tries to shut these feelings down before they spread too far. It condemns them and declares them off limits.

I’m by no means a Badiou expert, but this doesn’t strike me as a serious misreading; Badiou remains some version of a Maoist, after all. Let’s situate the above in the context of an exchange between Judith Butler and a Harvard student group that provides Dean with some of the meat of her blog post. Dean predictably criticizes Butler for her criticism of students who wrote that “the apartheid [Israeli] regime is the only one to blame” for the violence of October 7. Logically, this statement ought to be anathema to Dean, too, though. As Butler notes in their response, “One could even say that claiming Hamas’ violence is only Israeli violence turned back on the Israelis undermines the agency of those Palestinians who have taken up the position in favor of armed struggle.” In other words, the inscription of a “gap in the given” would then turn out to be an inscription of the given upon itself: an autoimmune response rather than the irruption of a subject.

A little later, Dean writes that we should resist the temptation to “treat Palestine as the symptom of some larger failure—of international law, say, and the human rights regime or of the smooth world of globalized neoliberalism.” From that perspective, “Palestine would mark the point at which these symptoms come into contradiction with themselves, their constitutive exclusion,” which is wrong because “Palestine doesn’t name a symptom, it names a side in the struggle against imperialism.” Dean’s insistence on naming—on solidarity as speech act—is striking. If one splits into two, the content of the resulting camps doesn’t matter very much; the names “imperialism,” “resistance,” etc. do all the work. Hence the generosity of Dean’s “us.” The “many of us” who found the (honestly pretty impressive) Hamas paragliders “exhilarating” is, simply, the us constituted by finding the paragliders exhilarating. Recruitment to a subject effect is all that matters. Such is the sense in which “we are all Palestinians.” This is an idea that’s worth criticism for reasons don’t have much to do with the liberal refrain that both sides are bad. The fact that Dean thinks one side is bad and the other is good isn’t as significant as the conviction, which she shares with her liberal enemies, that there are two sides and that the abstract negation of one side by the other has content. Notable, too, is Dean’s apparent conviction that declaring oneself Palestinian makes one so, even if one’s tax dollars still flow copiously to the Israeli death machine.

Perhaps she gets into it elsewhere, as Badiou does, but I can’t see any reason why the subject Dean is talking about is necessarily communist or, really, necessarily anything. The subjectivation she describes is specular in a precise sense. It’s images of October 7 that interpellate their viewers. September 11 might have done the same. So might riot porn for anarchists. The point is that capital’s assignment of us to one or the other resulting camp is already inscribed in spectacle, as Retort noted quite a while ago; there needs to be further torsion if a subject effect is to become a rational human order, since the “real movement that abolishes the present state of things” is self-abolition or nothing. Absent this, partisanship becomes identity politics of a contentless rupture: Dean insists on the subject’s rights just because it is a subject. Rhetoric notwithstanding, then, Dean’s abstract anti-imperialism results in a rapprochement with liberalism that’s deeper than Judith Butler’s. The attainable, even if, at the moment, distant goals to which anti-imperialist solidarity with Palestine is directed are consistent with a liberal framework of rights and national self-determination. They amount to the baseline humanitarian proposal that people shouldn’t be subjected to mass murder. And there’s nothing wrong with that. The means by which those goals can be met may be radical—they may necessitate the destruction of the world as we know it—but that doesn’t change the content of the goals as such. A communist perspective on Palestine would instead posit a determinate negation.