On Political Derangement
Sense and Critique
Hi everyone.
I am truly grateful to have readers. Like many of you, I struggle to make myself feel relevant, efficacious, “empowered” in a political sense, but also like many of you, I write and think about politics mostly from the sidelines. That is, I am a political theorist, which doesn’t mean that I spin fantasies, but rather that I spectate and critique. But also (and on the other hand), I don’t contend that my work is political science, since that conjures up all sorts of aspirational, prestige-chasing positivist leanings as well as implicit (liberal) notions about the power of truth and the need for value neutrality.
A lot of these disciplinary debates have a kind of grad school-y feel to them, and in any case it doesn’t matter to the average Republican or Democratic political actor what I call my work, and the work of my fellow critical scholars. The activity of politics and the study of politics proceed on separate tracks. In this context, I think of the Foucaultian observation about the birth of social sciences in the 19th century, by which I mean the original trinity of political economy, demographics, and statistics. These were all tied to an expanding state: statistics after all gets its name from the Baconian process of gathering facts necessary for the functioning of the bureaucracies. It’s clear that we’re currently stepping-back from the rationality at the heart of that effort at organization; following the note I just made a couple days ago, perhaps we should think of the current right-wing populist turn as the kind of “acclamatory politics” that Agamben discussed a few years ago, and which Dean and Zamora (invoking Max Weber) placed in the context of a return to “charismatic” authority.
There’s always a bit of slippage — a grinding of the gears, friction and loss of energy — in the translation from ideology to action. To be blunt, ideology is always and everywhere a form of collective delusion, social madness, derangement and one role of the state is to translate this derangement into a rigorous, rational framework.
A really important and neglected project of inquiry has to focus on this translational site and its forms of slippage, especially in a moment like ours, when the charismatic principle has replaced rationality (for example in Trump’s attempt to replace civil servants with loyal toadies and cronies under Schedule F contracts). There have been moments in the recent past — the second Bush administration for example — when the loopy excesses of ideology clearly outstripped the capacity of the bureaucratic state to translate nonsense into sense. We are clearly in new territory here, however, which is precisely what is driving scholars of different generations and inclinations to worry that the rise of so-called charismatic leadership means a dictatorial state. We can complain about the various forms of state-articulated and -imposed rationality, but what happens when rationality is replaced by arbitrary will? When the translation of the nonsense of ideology into the sense of state power ends, we will have entered an age where it’s just derangement all the way down. The need for a hermeneutic will end: system (i.e. the state) will simply mirror environment (ideology).
What’s the proper role of the critic/scholar/activist in this moment? With this question in mind, I wrote something recently in the notes. I am quoting from them directly, here:
Toggling between two texts and animating ideas:
Lefebvre’s Critique of Everyday Life, the rejection of the specifically French “derangement of the senses;”
Foucault’s return to this, via the epreuve or ordeal, discussed in the Dean and Zamora’s book The Last Man Takes LSD. Even the notion that neoliberal austerity can become a kind of “trial” … in a positive sense? I am pushing back against his, obviously.
To place hope in a form of “veridiction” that comes from derangement seems dubious, especially in a society that has become deranged precisely because of neoliberal austerity.
From this, I have developed a rough thesis about the boundary between sense and nonsense that I hope will help us. First, as I said in the quoted passage, I contend that we are in a moment of especially intense collective derangement. This has as specific cause, namely the seemingly endless intensification of neoliberal pressures on both the state and subjects. This builds contradictions that instead of leading to revolutionary/dialectic resolution, merely force both state and subjects into new forms of magical thinking that depart more evidently from real-world solutions.1 Second, the Foucaultian departure or exit to what looks like Mill’s “experiments in living” is a liberal luxury we can no longer afford. Against the mostly sympathetic reading of Dean and Zamora, I lose patience with Foucault on this issue: even at the birth of neoliberal policies in the early 1980s, it’s hard to imagine neoliberalism as an “opportunity.” Following the quote above, I think it’s not only stupid but even cruel to assert that neoliberal austerity has (or had, in Foucault’s 1980s) the capacity to serve as a trial, an ordeal, an èpreuve. By now many of us (and certainly all of us here) have been subject to austerity in one form or another, and the neoliberal narrative of “personal responsibility” has forced us to look inward rather than at material contradictions and the extraction of value. Who hasn’t fallen prey to this? Every apparatus of the state forces us into this corner: in an inversion of Graeber’s famous “act as if one is already free,” we are forced to act as if we are unfree even if we have read our Marx, Adorno and Fanon. And yes, even if we’ve read our Graeber.
In short: does the subject which emerges from the ordeal of austerity emerge stronger, more liberated? Usually, the answer is clearly no. Rather, the pressure of greater contradictions simply leads to a deeper inculcation of ideas, a deeper socialization into one’s role, and one’s set of diminished expectations. Yes it is true, again, that Foucault was living and thinking and making profound connections at the beginning of a long, unfolding logic or process that has reached its apogee only in the succeeding forms of counter-revolution that took place in 2001, 2008, 2016, and 2025. As these successive waves crashed into the social order, in a descriptive sense, there’s no question that many (again, maybe all) of us have faced ordeals of the kind that Foucault discussed, but it’s hard to see anything positive or liberating or prescriptive emerging from the experience.
(Please imagine here a T-shirt that says I survived 40 years of neoliberalism, and all I got was this lousy temp job, precarious connection to all forms of social insurance, a hostile attitude towards self and others, and diminished life expectancy. I am not going to ask AI to produce such an image, lol)
In short, it turns out that burning down social insurance for “free expression,” or “the confirmation of my identity,” or “experiments in living,” was a terrible bargain. (Not that any of us made that decision, of course.) We have known since Marx’s time that bourgeois freedom is merely a new form of slavery; we need to be more savvy in this moment about the need for lucidity, clarity, and insight into conditions and conjuncture. The “derangement of the senses” so lauded in French thought makes sense only against a backdrop of a rational, bureaucratic state. Under neoliberalism, no one has the time to enjoy lunch, let alone become deranged in any creative sense. Or, put differently and more bluntly, the critic who seeks derangement as an avenue to specifically political insight will be abandoning her role. We cannot have derangement (of the self) meeting derangement (of the social order, ideology, and now the state).
On the matter of magical thinking, the biggest contradictions of our own time are clearly: 1. climate and capital, and 2. Zionism and the genocide of Palestinians.