richard-day-gramsci-is-dead

200 Gramsci is DeadLike groundless solidarity, the concept of infinite responsibilitycomes from Derridean deconstruction and serves as its necessarycomplement. Simon Critchley, who has been very influential inworking against the reading of Jacques Derrida as a postmodernrelativist, argues that ‘Derridean deconstruction has a horizonof responsibility or ethical significance, provided that ethics isunderstood in the Levinasian sense’ (1999: 236). In this Levinasiansense, ethics takes on a meaning similar to that given in the ethics/morality distinction discussed in Chapter 5, in that it does not seekto impose any universal-normative procedures or codes (255). Rather,the ‘face’ of the other ‘whom I cannot evade, comprehend, or kill’calls forth an infinite responsibility ‘to justice, to justify myself’ (5).Derridean/Levinasian ethics, then, relies upon the claim that the‘deep structure of subjective experience is always already engagedin a relation of responsibility or, better, responsivity to the other’(Critchley 1996: 33). Taking a similar line, but in an explicitly feministregister, Ewa Ziarek has recently argued that the politics of radicaldemocracy ‘cannot be based only on the hegemonic consolidationof dispersed struggles against manifold forms of oppression; rather,it has to be articulated in the gap between the ethos of becomingand the ethos of alterity, between the futural temporality of politicalpraxis and the anarchic diachrony of obligation’ (Ziarek 2001: 9).To put it in less jargon-laden terms, this means that as individuals,as groups, we can never allow ourselves to think that we are ‘done’,that we have identified all of the sites, structures and processes ofoppression ‘out there’ and, most crucially, ‘in here’, inside our ownindividual and group identities. Infinite responsibility means alwaysbeing ready to hear another other, a subject who by definition doesnot ‘exist’, indeed must not exist (be heard) if current relations ofpower are to be maintained. To respond means at least to haveheard something—though one can never hear entirely ‘correctly’ orcompletely—and thus represents a crucial step on the way to avoidingthe unconscious perpetuation of systems of division.Once again, this is a question that is not merely ‘academic’. AsLorenzo Komboa Ervin has argued, ‘movements for social change inthis 21st century will make a decisive mistake’ if they ignore the specificityof struggles that are not directly oriented to state dominationand capitalist exploitation. ‘They will create a middle-class “whiterights” movement which will not elevate the masses of the world’speoples’ (Ervin 2001: 7). In the aftermath of the mass protest convergencesof the late 1990s, and in response to day-to-day problems