I’m particularly interested in your use of the notion of stupidity here. I’m wondering what you mean by it and whether or not a certain amount of stupidity is necessary to form attachments. Is stupidity, like optimism or desire, necessary for staying close to one’s object whatever other feelings of ambivalence come along?

I particularly liked your comments in reply to Kandace:

“The structure of optimism is *interest*, you might say, and the practice of not giving up. This was what Gramsci was pushing at in the distinction between pessimism of the intellect and optimism of the will, I think, or at least, that’s how I distort it. The practice toward interfering with the reproduction of unjust or infelicitous normativity is optimistic, even if it doesn’t feel that way.”

I think a reworked version of your blog post and comments would be excellent and suitable for the journal.

I am also asking in part because your blog post is congruent with at least how I think of (post-Kantian) enthusiasm. I argue that enthusiasm is defined by the challenges faced by the enthusiast in my research on enthusiasm in subcultural scenes. Basically I argue that enthusiasm is an incorporeal event that is differentially repeated each time an enthusiast translates the open multiplicity at the heart of a problem (the unknowingness), and the negative affects through which a problem is in part defined, into the positive apprehension of contingency as a site of affirmation. This translates the contingency of a problem into the contingency of a challenge. Challenges are essentially a resource of enthusiasm. I go off on much more complex lines of argument regarding the continuum of active to passive affections of enthusiasm.

To bring it back to your post, politics becomes a problem of the ‘visibility’ or apprehension of challenges. This is a defining quality (and, hopefully, efficacy) of Obama’s inspirational discourse of hope and affirmation: “Yes we can…”

The danger on the left is to disavow the potentiality of the discourse in both its ‘hope’ — as a positive relation of futurity (optimism) — and its affirmation — as an combination of will and positive affections. The ‘left’ of which you are critical seems to want to hold on to something like a Kantian position to ward off the popularist stupidity of perhaps what is perceived to be the charismatic (in the Weberian sense) qualities of Obama’s visage. Charisma here mobilises bodies into action but it is a passive enthusiasm, one which does not take part in (re)defining the challenges literally at hand. The problem with assuming this is the only quality of the event of ‘Obama’ is a retreat into a space and time of reflection, which in the context of politics must not (always) remain subservient to action, even if the necessary action is simply to apprehend things otherwise; to once again believe it is possible to…

I wonder, Lauren, if you might talk a bit more about the notion of political silence that you are developing, that you talked about at the ASA. What struck me at the time was they way that your idea of silence as effectively political, or as affectively political, rewrites the Audre Lorde feminist chestnut: Your Silence Will Not Protect You. Instead the point seems to me to: exactly right, your silence will not protect you: that’s why you deploy it instead of inhabiting
it.

On the issue of Obama, it seems to me that when it comes to the left he has been especially deft at constructing a virtual-left Obama. That is, he doesn’t support gay marriage but we assume that that’s a tactical choice, or I did anyway. He supports Israel but we assume that’s because the centrist path to the White house leaves him no choice. It has to do with his rhetorical strategy of always naming the excluded middle, I think, which allows him to inhabit every political position. That’s just initial undigested thoughts.

Ashtor is manifesting some of the difficulty of managing the difference between affect as structure and as experience when she talks about optimism as a structure being hard to maintain in the face of pressures to want emotion to fall in line with attachment. Yup! But I think you’re melodramatizing “estrangement”, since desire always crosses distance. I also think that you must always write counter-transference into the story of the shrink’s impersonality (which is threatened if not obviated by counter-transferential forces). It may be similar to the political subject’s necessary internal intension (necessary for the health of democratic potentiality) between fidelity to the political and the fortune of particular aims and claims. LB