Human Condition - Universalmuseum Joanneum

182 — 183
Adam Budak
31 Ibid., p. 173.
32 Boris Buden, “Forever Young.
Negri’s Multitude as Post-Emancipatory
Concept of Emancipation,”
available at:
http://www.republicart.net/disc/
empire/buden02_en.htm
33 Ernesto Laclau,
Emancipation(s), London,
New York: Verso, 2007, p. 18.
34 Boris Buden, “Forever Young.
Negri’s Multitude as Post-Emancipatory
Concept of Emancipation,”
op. cit.
impossibility of identification with the act of engagement: “We are still engaged, we
still raise our voices where we find it appropriate or just, we articulate our protests
and our solidarity, but somehow we only do it half-heartedly. We do it with an irritating
feeling of discomfort, that we can never seem to get rid of. Why is that?”32
According to Buden, we can no longer clearly distinguish our emancipatory interest
from other interests and distinctly separate ourselves from the political positions and
opinions that we do not share. Investigating the logic of emancipation, Ernesto Laclau
claims that we no longer live in an age of emancipation. The philosopher speculates:
“We are today coming to terms with our own finitude and with the political possibilities
that it opens.This is the point from which the potentially liberatory discourses
of our postmodern age have to start. We can perhaps say that today we are at the
end of emancipation and at the beginning of freedom.”33 The end of the Cold War, the
explosion of new ethnic and national identities, the social fragmentation under late
capitalism, and the collapse of universal certainties in philosophy and social and
historical thought had, according to Laclau, changed our expectations of emancipation
and altered its classical notion as formulated since the Enlightenment, leading
towards the failure or rather disappearance of emancipation from the political horizon
of our era. Laclau examines the internal contradictions of the notion of “emancipation”
as it emerged from the mainstream of modernity. Emancipation means at one and the
same time radical foundation and radical exclusion; that is, it postulates, at the same
time, both a ground of the social and its impossibility. The production of an emancipatory
discourse depends too upon the relation between universalism and particularism,
which is inherent in it. As Laclau observes, “Emancipation is strictly linked to the
destiny of the universal (…) without the emergence of the universal within the historical
terrain, emancipation becomes impossible.” Searching for the possibilities of acting
politically “beyond emancipation”, Laclau distinguishes between two dimensions of
emancipation: one radical (grounded in itself, excluding that which hinders its completion
as a radical otherness) and the other non-radical (grounded in common with its
Other, influencing all spheres of society), stating the failure of both as they became
indistinguishable while facing the fact that the society is no longer transparent to
itself and that the ground of this society can no longer be imagined, followed too by
the disappearance of the universal from the historical terrain. Buden, after Laclau,
diagnoses the current crisis of emancipation, pointing out the society’s troublesome
relationship to engagement and empathy and the confusion around sciety’s ambiguous
status: “Today, instead of the emancipation, we can only speak of a plurality of
emancipations. The fact that we can no longer clearly distinguish and separate them
from one another, is due specifically to their fundamental opacity. In fact, we can no
longer find any unified ground, to which all emancipatory struggles could be reduced.
Without this grounding - without the ground of society being postulated - there is no
exclusion, no outside anymore. The societies in which we live, can no longer be imagined
as radically separable, and we can draw no clear line of division, through which
our emancipatory interest excludes something in society that should be excluded. Nor
can we identify with a subject that universally represents the ground of society. This
is the reason for the discomfort that constantly accompanies our current emancipatory
engagement.”34
Yet, Hannah Arendt’s sensing of emancipation as a faculty of thinking, acting (with
each other), and judging seems to correspond closer with still another take at defining
emancipation, the one elaborated by Jacques Rancière. In his The Emancipated
Spectator, Rancière points out: “Emancipation begins when we challenge the opposition
between viewing and acting; when we understand that the self-evident facts that
structure the relations between saying, seeing and doing themselves belong to the
structure of domination and subjection. It begins when we understand that viewing is