Critique and the Possibility of Radical Politics: Symposium on Sina Kramer’s Excluded Within: The (Un)Intelligibility of Radical Political Actors, Oxford University Press, 2017
| Date | 01 December 2019 |
| Published date | 01 December 2019 |
| Author | Rocío Zambrana,Sina Kramer,María del Rosario Acosta López |
| DOI | 10.1177/0090591719836070 |
| Subject Matter | Review Symposium |
book-review2019
Review Symposium
Political Theory
2019, Vol. 47(6) 864 –884
Critique and the
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Politics: Symposium
on Sina Kramer’s
Excluded Within: The (Un)
Intelligibility of Radical
Political Actors, Oxford
University Press, 2017
Negativity, Multiplicity, Subversion: A Reply
to Sina Kramer’s Excluded Within: The (Un)
Intelligibility of Radical Political Actors
Rocío Zambrana
Department of Philosophy, University of Oregon
Despite growing scholarship on Hegel’s seminal yet unforgiving Science of
Logic, deployments of its main arguments in assessments of contemporary
politics that center the intersections of race/gender/class are rare. To be sure,
we have a body of literature on revisionist and deflationary readings of the
Logic that think through the logic of capital, specifically in its neoliberal
iteration, as well as questions of “culture.”1 Reading the Logic to think the
strictures of white supremacy, cisheteropatriarchy, and other manifestations
of oppression in its distinctively American form is not as pervasive.2 The
obvious reason for such a lack, as many have rightly pointed out, is that
Hegel’s corpus can be seen as complicit with the articulation of these modes
of oppression. Moving from Hegel to radical politics is no small feat.
Sina Kramer’s Excluded Within: The (Un)Intelligibility of Radical
Political Actors is a welcome contribution to such efforts. Hegel’s treatment
of die Verschiedenheit (“diversity” in Miller and Di Giovanni’s translations)
should be read as a discussion of “multiplicity,” Kramer argues. This treat-
ment elucidates the operation of “constitutive exclusion,” which has explana-
tory power for thinking multiple forms of oppression and their intersections
Critique and the Possibility of Radical Politics
865
today. Specifically, Hegel’s logic of multiplicity clarifies questions of the
intelligibility and unintelligibility of political agency. Kramer’s book is thus
composed of three movements. First, it distills a logic of multiplicity in
Hegel’s text, specifying its contribution to conceptualizing constitutive
exclusion. Second, it articulates a “materialist method” that addresses the
modes of appearance/nonappearance of forms of political agency, most sig-
nificantly through a reading of Adorno. Third, it deploys the conceptual
resources developed for reading three models of contestation of exclusion: a
reading of the figure of Antigone, an assessment of the reception of Rosa
Parks and Claudette Colvin, and a discussion of the 1992 Los Angeles riots.
In what follows, I will focus on two moments of the book. I seek to assess
the logic of multiplicity Kramer finds in Hegel’s Logic and its resonance in
her reading of the 1992 Los Angeles riots. Like Kramer, I believe that the
logical underpinnings of ontologies matter a great deal for assessments of
political life. Therefore, like Kramer, I am willing to enter the abstractions of
a text like the Logic to think through the assumptions and implications of the
conceptual tools that become significant in critical theory and praxis. Unlike
Kramer, however, I read Hegelian negativity as a matter of self-negation,
which establishes what I have called the precariousness and ambivalence of
the norms at work in articulating conceptions of nature and Geist.3 I assess
the work multiplicity does in reading the constitutive exclusion exhibited in
the Los Angeles riots, accordingly, in light of an understanding of negativity
as self-negation.
Constitutive exclusion is the founding operation of a text or political
body—of a material-discursive field, one might say—that involves excluding
some difference that it deems “intolerable” (5). It is a founding operation,
since the exclusion of difference is more than a matter of how difference is
managed or treated. It is a defining feature of a text or collective life, inflect-
ing any such management or treatment. Kramer stresses the forms of appear-
ance/nonappearance that constitutive exclusion generates. Constitutive
exclusion is an ontological operation with epistemic effects, producing an
“epistemological block” that presents deep challenges to any radical politics.
This is well-traveled terrain, as Kramer acknowledges throughout her book.
Judith Butler’s work, for example, is central to thinking constitutive exclu-
sion and the problem of framing that it generates. Frantz Fanon’s as well as
Lewis Gordon’s work, furthermore, is key to understanding modes of hyper-
visibility that sustain invisibility within the logic of racial oppression. Hegel’s
Logic, however, offers helpful theoretical tools for distilling the logic sub-
tending constitutive exclusion, Kramer maintains. Key here is the notion of
negativity.
866
Political Theory 47(6)
Cursory readings of Hegel often maintain that his work is organized
around the theme of contradiction. However, contradiction is one manifesta-
tion of the logic of negation, more precisely, negativity, at the core of his
corpus. For Hegel, self-negation is constitutive of identity. Negation is always
negation of something, whether a logical category, a philosophical position,
a political institution. Negation, however, yields an alternative determination.
It is never mere negativity, sheer destruction or deferral. It is an exclusion that
posits alternative boundaries and hence a relation of something and its now
established other. Negation, then, requires content. It is always determinate.
It is the work of articulation by the conditions that constitute the thing itself.
These conditions constrain what the thing is and what it could be, thereby
instituting the thing’s identity.
This is the key to Hegelian negativity, in my view. In the Logic, Hegel
works out negativity in reference to a variety of logical/metaphysical prob-
lems. Kramer provides a map of the different articulations of negativity in the
Logic, locating her interpretation in the Doctrine of Essence, specifically in
the section on the determinations of reflection and the discussion of die
Verschiedenheit. The Doctrine of Essence is an especially fruitful moment in
Hegel’s text, given the centrality of positing and its retroactive character. It
centers the irreducibility of mediation in light of the retrospective nature of its
productivity. It is not merely a matter of temporality, however, but of deter-
mining material conditions after the fact.4 Kramer highlights retrospectivity
here, stressing its temporality. However, her main contribution centers on her
reading of the proliferation of difference in the treatment of Verschiedenheit.
At this point in the Logic, Hegel discusses the indifference of identity and
difference. Difference contains itself, difference, and identity within itself.
Likewise, identity is itself in containing difference within itself. We have
diversity in view. The crucial point, as Hegel puts it, is that the two subsist
indifferently toward one another. Identity and difference are self-identical in
their self-relation, yet different in relation to the other, and moreover, in the
indifference to the other. However, as Kramer explains, such indifference is a
matter of external reflection, a realization that will lead to its understanding
in terms of contradiction. The key here is the self-subsistence of each term. In
establishing its nonrelation to the other, each is but an abstraction, a form of
indeterminacy, according to Hegel. They are, however, dangerous abstrac-
tions, confusions in how we understand identity. Identity’s necessary relation
to difference is obfuscated.
Kramer nicely argues for a reading of diversity as multiplicity, first, by
pointing to Hegel’s distinction between indeterminate and determinate con-
siderations of diversity. While the former is a matter of “empirical thinking”
(Hyppolite), the latter is clarified by speculative thought in the exposition of
Critique and the Possibility of Radical Politics
867
contradiction as the truth of the indifference of identity and difference. She
mobilizes this distinction in assessing Hegel’s own attempt to retain these
criteria of assessment, highlighting the ambiguity that arises in his treatment
of internal difference when he sets out to correlate “All things are different”
with “Everything is different from everything else” (49 & 50). The prolifera-
tion of internal difference suggests a plural ontology suppressed in the dis-
cussion of determination.5 This implies, for Kramer, that a negativity beyond
determinate negation and difference beyond contradiction are at work in the
text itself (50). Rather than distinctness and distinguishability, at work is a
logic of “plurality, multiplicity, diversity as manyness” (50).6 This is both a
constitutive exclusion in Hegel’s text as well as a clarification of the opera-
tion of constitutive exclusion in the field of, as Hegel would say, Geist—
social, historical, political life.
Although Hegel suppresses multiplicity, Kramer argues for both multiple
negativities as well as a logic of multiplicitous negativity at work in the
Logic. This informs her reading of the operation of constitutive exclusion in
the 1992 Los Angeles riots. The riots is a model for understanding a complex
multiplicity, one that...
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