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PARTISAN REVIEW
mentioning the political dimension. The intellectual you speak of, should
one call him "left-wing"? Does that phrase have a meaning for you? Are
you, are we, on the left?
JK: One can't brush that question aside, but the answer is far from simple.
Such a bipartition, such alternating between two political and ideological
poles, the "left" and the "right," has long been a safeguard of our
democracies, but I believe that it no longer plays that part. What strikes all
of us is indeed the massive
disinterest
in the political game on the part of
citizens, particularly the fact that they no longer care to vote. Even more
so, politics to a large extent has been reduced to a technocratic setup that
allows a political personality to call himself or herself "responsible but not
guilty" - and this means that all subjective and moral dimensions have
been reabsorbed, eliminated, by the inexorable march of a bureaucracy
which is more and more anonymous and responsible to itself alone. There
are no more culprits, just as there is no crime in Santa Barbara: since good
and evil don't exist, total bureaucracy, another version of totalitarianism,
has trivialized and animalized the human.
Read
The Old Man and the Wolves;
Santa Barbara is where we are.
Nevertheless, I would tend at this moment to maintain the distinction
you have made between left and right by giving it a particular content. In
the history of the West, left-wing thought seems to me linked to an ethi–
cal requirement that includes at the same time the dead ends of revolu–
tionary movements and the Terror and the lessons to be learned from
such dead ends. Basically, I am not concerned with giving the idea of the
left an objective meaning in itself, starting from such and such a content
or principle. I would rather define "the left" as the locus where the
question of politics, and above all of the limits of the political (from the
viewpoint of symbolic formations, that is, the acquisition of culture and
knowledge), can be formulated and dealt with.
One would obviously need to say much more and ask the following
question: what should be, today, the appropriate political approach to so–
cial welfare policies or to the practice of democracy?
It
seems to me that
the traditional practice of democracy through a delegation of power to
political parties, which goes back to the traditional model of voting in the
Greek city-state, is no longer the most appropriate or efficient representa–
tion, when faced with the speed and efficiency of media coverage, on the
one hand, and on the other the polymorphism of the individuals that
make up our societies.
BS: I had a specific point in mind: To say in what manner we are in spite
of everything "left-wing" - isn't this particularly a way of resisting such a
