On Infinite Criticality

Abstract

Throughout the previous six chapters I have exposed the paradoxical dynamics that involve subject and meaning formation, and the challenges that the logic of exclusion — which accompanies any social identity — poses to subjectivity, intersubjective encounters and social life in general. In front of this aporia, of the vicissitudes of being in language, social theorists and philosophers — embracing different political and conceptual agendas — tend to turn their research either into utopian ethical theories of wit(h)nessing and recognition (which aim to find a secure place from where to assert belonging as prior to violence), or into studies of the insurmountable exclusion which takes place in any social formation. Particularly relevant, within this broad categorization and in conceptual engagement with the topic of my research, are the works of Bracha Ettinger and Giorgio Agamben. In their analysis of the relation between language and being, both authors focus in particular on the ‘vicissitudes’ of the body, and how this becomes the site of models of mutuality (in the case of Ettinger) or of the experience of violence (in the case of Agamben). That is to say, while the former attempts to offer an alternative to the otherwise ‘necessary’ castration-anxiety dynamics which have been described in the previous chapters as pertaining to our being in language (in particular, by drawing a model of mutuality based on the relationship between mother and child before birth), the latter demonstrates how the law is inextricably linked to violence, and how sovereignty precisely refers to the capacity of blurring the distinction between the two of them (in particular, as experienced in the state of ‘exception’).