Letters

...Editors: I read with great interest the piece by Mitchell Cohen on the book by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri ("An Empire of Cant," Summer 2002...

...But as democratic socialists opposed both Stalinist apologetics and McCarthyism, so it is possible to oppose today's left-wing humbug while defending civil liberties and egalitarianism...

...Rather than speak to this, Cohen's particularly objectionable last paragraphs are sheer polemic, calling Hardt/Negri's argument "postmodern singsong," and seemingly blaming it for the defeat of social democratic parties and even the rise of the populist right in Europe...

...The objective unholy alliance between the postmoderns and the fundamentalist Islamists, and the accompanying tiers mondisme of people such as Jean Baudrillard and Noam Chomsky, are actually dismissed by Hardt/Negri, who clearly attack identity/minority group politics, multiculturalism, and the grim "blame America for all the world's evils" school of antiglobalization politics...

...It may be that Cohen attacks us primarily because, as he says, our book is "in vogue," and I suppose one has to accept such things...

...Michael Hardt wants things all ways...

...I don't know if Cohen would support the demands of a Palestinian Mandela, but he might want to consider what such a man might say if he came on the scene...

...Does Cohen care to name names...

...It was hardly as left wing as many think it was...

...We are not the enemy he makes us out to be...

...To Letter Writers • We welcome succinct letters from our readers...

...In the case of Belleville/Menilmontant, these politicize citizens through movements of preservation of neighborhoods, of historical "memory," of industrial architecture condemned for redevelopment, of helping immigrants to integrate, and so on...

...Cohen dedicates half of his essay to three pages in the middle of our book that deal with contemporary Christian and Islamic fundamentalisms...

...True, no state-founder can behave like Arafat...

...I cited Lukncs telling a conservative nationalist in 110 n DISSENT / Fall 2002 the 1920s that they were not on opposite sides of the barricades since, despite differences, they shared negative judgments of capitalism...

...Letters must be no more than 500 words, typed, double-spaced, and carry the full address and name of the sender...

...So far this is a relatively uncontroversial point: we merely attempt to historicize the contemporary phenomenon of fundamentalisms in the context of globalization...

...It privatized Thomson Multimedia, Air France, and France Telecom, and though it cut the work week to thirty-five hours, it took advantage of this cut to systematically introduce "flexibility," challenging workers' past gains...

...Our primary point, in other words, is that the rise of fundamentalisms and postmodernist theories alike are intelligible as reactions to the formation of a new global order, but that both provide mistaken responses...

...I defend Chomsky's right to say that "Clinton's bombing of the Sudan" killed "unknown numbers of people" and imply it was worse than the attacks of September II...

...Orwell who stands above the hypocrisies of lesser men...

...But you could start by setting a lesser goal for yourself—try telling the truth about what your political opponents, say, and then argue against them in an honest way...

...But because we have a long lead time for each issue, you have to send us your letter within three weeks of getting an issue of Dissent in order to get it into the next issue...

...Perhaps this: "I am not a Palestinian Mandela...

...I think Hardt/Negri, with varying success, at least tried to contribute to this effort...

...After this confusion about fundamentalism and postmodernism, Cohen continues with a series of further misreadings, burdening our book with the guilt of the Bolsheviks, the Palestinians, third-worldists, and others with whom he is angry...

...The whole thing is just crazy, ugly, totally counterproductive . . . The secret is to get the Israelis to side with you...

...Indeed, he demonstrates his expertise on the history of Islam in many more pages than we devoted to the subject...

...We argue that the rise to prominence of postmodernist theories is a symptom of the fact that the world order has been transformed, but that many postmodernists do not recognize or respond to that transformation adequately...

...They hope "Beingagainst" will animate a liberating "multitude...

...Everyone on the left, save perhaps a few leftover Stalinoids, has condemned bin Laden in no uncertain terms, and even Edward Said, whose positions Cohen dislikes, has denounced Arafat's authoritarianism, an authoritarianism that was encouraged by the Israeli government so long as it was directed against the "right" people...

...But look what you have become...

...Cohen's indictment of Italy's Rifonclazione Comunista, in particular, is foolish: it is a left-wing democratic socialist party that is no longer willing to give support to center-leftists who govern no differently than the center-right...

...They think "liberal and socialist big government" brought "repression and destruction of humanity...

...And, yes, these movements also are antiglobalilization ("Being-against" to Cohen, anti-"Empire" to Hardt/Negri) in the broadest sense, meaning they are organized to oppose specific problems raised by cultural conformity, privatization, and thoughtless economic development at any price...

...We criticize in particular those postmodernists who assume that the celebration of differences and the attack on binary divisions will necessarily be liberatory...

...They are not mere anti-American dismantlers of McDonald's and members of "An Empire of Cant," as Cohen cleverly calls his piece...

...and Edward Said's right to say that the September 11 killers were just insane—which implies that there is no political problem within Islam today, only elsewhere...

...The result of this conceptual void: the "militants" of these associations and their fellow travelers have dropped out of the political process altogether, as in Italy, or have taken to voting for Trotskyist splinter parties, as in France...

...He accuses me of "misreading" the book he co-authored...

...That is good of them...

...They're right, and yet somehow I suspect they would preDISSENT / Fall 2002 • 109 LETTERS fer a corrupt and compliant stooge, as Arafat seemed to be for a number of years, rather than a Palestinian version of Mandela...

...No more settlements...

...Thus Khomeini's victory was "the first postmodernist revolution...

...For all his brilliance of argument, was Mitchell Cohen doing the same...

...Thus the rather eccentric use of Augustine and St...

...You may justify 1967 as self-defense, but settlements have no justification beyond nationalism that is out of control, all while it controls you...

...Hardt, Potofsky, and Donald Johnson reprove me for "cold war liberalism" or the like...

...I didn't say they did...

...Jospin held down public sector wages and social budgets, lowered taxes on those with the highest incomes, and reined in public expenditure in the name of eliminating deficits...

...and Jean Baudrillard's right to find the United States culpable for the September 11 attacks because its "unbearable power" leads to all world violence...

...What might a Palestinian Mandela say...

...I should also point out, by the way, that one can claim a historical passage toward the postmodern (as we do) and still maintain (as we also do) many of the political ideals that were common to some traditions of modernity...

...Our real disagreement is not about slippery terms like "post-modern," but about defining a future left...

...This is the irrepressible lightness and joy of being communist...

...We claim that it is more useful to understand the contemporary religious fundamentalisms, despite their own invocations of tradition, not as primordial resurgences nor even primarily as returns to the past, but as reactions to the formation of the contemporary global order and its hierarchies...

...That is, Cohen is unjust with the central point of Empire...

...I fret that criticism of neoliberalim may be expropriated by a left-that-doesn't-learn, especially from its own history...

...In a world of great ideological confusion, where, sadly, September 11 was celebrated in the banlieues of Islam right here in France, and in the parlors of bourgeoisbohemian Trotskyist voters in Paris, Rome, and Athens, what we need is more audacious and creative political debate, not a return to cold war categories of the "Axis of Evil...

...The Christians do not seem to interest him much...

...I'm sure you could dig up one or two people who'd say something like that, but I haven't seen any prominent leftist in the Nation or Z magazine or the Progressive who would disagree with the opinion that bin Laden was a murderous fanatic motivated by hatred...

...Their joy is my worry...

...Let's get beyond this...

...Note to Allan Potofsky: "Beingagainst" is Hardt/Negri's term...

...Compare him to Kanan Makiya, who insists Muslims regard al-Qaeda as Christians should regard the Ku Klux Klan...

...And in order to make sure that the Israelis get the message, people go into a disco or restaurant and blow themselves up...

...This mistaken impression can be cleared up simply by reading the previous pages of our book in which we criticize postmodernists along with postcolonialists...

...Despite his heated rhetoric, I do not think that Cohen disagrees substantially with the main of our argument...

...That he spends the first few pages rehabilitating the shah of Iran and accusing Michel Foucault and (by association) Hardt/Negri of rehabilitating Ruhollah Khomeni and Islamic fundamentalism seems deliberately perverse, and an a posteriori way of blaming this book for the sins of September 11...

...he has merely taken the occasion to rehearse his rhetoric and vent some of his anger...

...I must also wonder who these leftists are who are supposedly trying to -understand' Osama bin Laden and to turn Yasir Arafat into Nelson Mandela...

...The Hardt/Negri project, for all its excesses, heavy dependence on philosophical jargon, and use and abuse of history (in the Foucaultian mold) is at least trying to fashion LETTERS a raison d'être for activist social action and thereby to rehabilitate this form of politics...

...The most convincing explanation, however, is that Cohen is simply captive to a series of tired polemical alternatives into which he tries to force our argument: modernists versus postmodernists, second-internationalist social democracy versus third-internationalist communism, and so forth...

...He charges "distortion," "name-calling," "post—September 11 opportunism," "confusion"—he forgot "wrecking"—and yet does "not think that Cohen disagrees substantially with the main of our argument...

...It is certainly worth debating whether the transformations of our global system amount to such a paradigm shift and thus deserve a new label, such as Empire, but that does not seem to be Cohen's primary concern...

...I said that (1) their treatment of Muslim fundamentalism is as wrong as Foucault's fantasy about the "political spirituality" of Iran's revolution...

...It may be that his insinuation that we support Islamic fundamentalism is merely another instance of post—September 11 opportunism, using the crisis to smear one's adversaries...

...It's easy for Israelis and their right-wing supporters to criticize Arafat as someone not fit to tie Mandela's shoes...

...I argued that this is a political-ontological hallucination...

...In this sense, they are best understood not as "premodern" but as "postmodern...

...The strategy of name-calling, distortion, and misreading that Cohen employs in this essay, however, only leads us in the opposite direction...

...As for Yasir Arafat, no one says he is Nelson Mandela...

...This Hardt/Negri wrote before the official coup d'état of George W. Bush and the electoral rejection of the Italian, Dutch, and French social democrats...

...so do I. But Againstness does not place us on the same side—even of postmodern, decentered barricades...

...foreign policy, of globalization seems to be treated by Cohen with equal contempt as objectively aiding and abetting al-Qaeda...

...Now we can situate more clearly our interpretation of the Christian and Islamic fundamentalists: their rise to prominence, like that of the postmodernists and postcolonialists, is a symptom of the basic shift in world order, but the fundamentalists, too, fail to recognize or respond to it adequately...

...These misreadings are so obvious— for the fundamentalism question above it was sufDISSENT / Fall 2002 n 107 LETTERS ficient simply to read the preceding pages in our book— that one has to ask what is driving them...

...I think the left should be heir to what was best in liberalism—ideas like individualism, political equality, tolerance...

...Jean-Pierre Chevenement's party, mentioned by Cohen, can hardly be considered a party of the left...

...No statist ideology has succeeded in giving a firm ideological core to these diverse and decentralized movements...

...I wholeheartedly support Dissent in its goal of fostering and sharpening productive debate within the left...

...Overall, although I agree with certain of Cohen's points on the pernicious effects of relativism in today's world, I don't think this book is the appropriate whipping boy for that debate...

...I wonder about the place of Dissent in the post—September 11 political climate of the United States...

...Our argument, for example, is entirely driven by the desire for democracy, freedom, and equality, a desire that I assume Cohen shares...

...We'll compromise if you will...

...Postmodernism covers a multitude of sins, but one wonders if in Cohen's mind it isn't confused with poststructuralism, the usual label slapped on Foucaultian theory...

...DISSENT / Fall 2002 •III...

...Our main point in these pages is very simple...

...It would take too much space to counter all of his confusions and distortions so I will limit myself to the point on which Cohen concentrates his energy: the relationship between fundamentalism and postmodernism...

...Francis of Assisi, a thirteenth-century friar—"posing against the misery of power the joy of being...

...Cohen sneers at these associations, using the Heideggerian concept of "Being-against...

...Editors: Mitchell Cohen's editorial in the Summer 2002 issue of Dissent misrepresents the record of Lionel Jospin's Socialist Party government in France...

...Edward Said, for instance, has been criticizing him for years...

...My people has long struggled for its identity...

...Only in the last pages does Cohen actually address, although in contemptuous fashion, the overarching and substantive argument of the book, rather than pick through the particulars— namely, the prophetic disillusionment with politics under social democracy and "third way" Anglo-American style liberalism...

...Although Negri and I criticize "postmodernists," we do maintain that the world has entered a postmodern era in the sense that many of the basic political, economic, and cultural characteristics of modernity have changed...

...I doubt that the man who demanded one man, one vote would be impressed by claims that Palestinians must give up any version of the right of return...

...His real target in taking on Hardt/ Negri with such virulence is a supposed Fifth Column of American Talibans (or rather their intellectual equivalent, the tiers mondiste multicultural relativists), and this drives him into a position of utter intolerance concerning a supposed vast postmodern conspiracy...

...The problem arises, however, when Cohen assumes that Negri and I are "postmodernists" and consider everything "postmodern" to be good—and therefore that we support the contemporary (Christian and) Islamic fundamentalisms...

...Allow me to be a Palestinian Arab who wants peace with my enemy...

...The ideological battles of the past seem to weigh heavily on his mind...

...For this, Negri is considered 108 n DISSENT / Fall 2002 somewhat of an apostate by much of the European extreme left...

...And finally, our imaginary Palestinian peacemaker might tell Israelis: "I've studied your side of the history— how anti-Semitism led to Zionism and your security concerns, how the socialist founders of your state hoped for a just society...

...Why else would he dedicate such disproportionate attention to the question and why else would he elide our joint treatment of Christian fundamentalisms...

...Letters will not be returned to senders unless they are accompanied by stamped, selfaddressed envelopes...

...He knows it was worse even if the numbers are "unknown...

...Analyzing specifically how the world order has changed and how we should respond to it is the task of our entire book and requires all five hundred pages...

...Hardt thinks me trapped in old arguments...

...Still, some of your friends might say that Sharon's victory also reveals that something is unwell in your society...

...and Slavoj Zizek's right to claim that September 11 was "the distilled version of our own essence...

...Hardt/Negri's notion of democratization carves out a conceptual space for associations that flourish in Europe but that are "below the radar" of much "high political" debate...

...I assume that the purpose of the quotation marks is to let us know that these nefarious individuals are really trying to say that it was okay for bin Laden to kill three thousand people...

...Editors: Could you please tell me the names of the leftists who are trying to "understand" Osama bin Laden (Editor's Page, Summer 2002...

...Let's skip unhelpful analogies, even if they appeal to Westerners who don't understand, as I do, that this conflict has rights and wrongs on both sides...

...Could it be that Cohen has pilloried the messengers for an analysis that explained rather than exacerbated the demise of the governmental left...

...Certainly we do not think that all postmodernists are the same or that there is no value in their work, but we are nonetheless critical in some ways...

...I find social suffering a sufficient rationale for social activism, as opposed to Empire's "theurgical" "telos" of the "multitude...

...He protests that he and Negri don't support Muslim fundamentalism...

...Muslim, Christian, and Jewish fundamentalists chastise capitalist consumerism...

...This despite the fact that postmodernists and fundamentalists are in some respects exactly opposite: the one, for example, insisting on the free play of textual meanings and the other on the immutable authority of the text...

...If Arafat were Mandela, he would no doubt try to rein in the terrorists, while simultaneously demanding much more from the Israelis than Ehud Barak ever offered...

...Hardt/Negri argue that postmodernism and fundamentalism are responses to "Empire" from opposite ends of the global order but share, for all their differences, "Being-against...

...and (3) fungible formulations allow them to skirt intellectual, moral, and historical complexities...

...Cohen's piece represents a recrudescence of the worst forms of cold war liberalism...

...Perhaps Hardt/Negri should also historicize their claim that "once again in post-modernity we find ourselves in Francis's situation"—St...

...But it is as a critic of Empire that Cohen has simply missed his target...

...Thus, while the unemployment rate declined about 20 percent over four years, this was because of the expansion of part-time and marginal jobs in all their various forms...

...But there is no reason for leftists to offer automatic loyalty to social democratic parties that do not challenge capital and do not deliver progressive reforms...

...We accept e-mail submissions to editors@dissentmagazine.org, but request that you provide a street address and phone number...

...and Gayatri Spivak's right to say that suicide bombing is "a confrontation between oneself and oneself, the extreme end of autoeroticism...

...What discourages and depresses me most about this essay is that it promotes the kind of unproductive ideological exchange that has plagued the left for decades...

...He might repeat to Palestinians the precise words of Palestinian intellectual Sari Nusseibeh before an Israeli audience last year: "Two states will have to be one for the Israelis and one for the Palestinians, not one for the Palestinians and the other for the Palestinians . . .We're telling the Israelis that we're going to kick you out: it's not that we want liberation, freedom, and independence in the West Bank and LETTERS Gaza, we want to kick you out of your home...

...As is sadly typical of social democratic governance today, Jospin's government offered reformism without real reforms...

...Yes, he elected Sharon...

...In my quartier in Northeast Paris, such associations flourish, thanks to generous laws governing their financing and development...

...The question of the "postmodern," however, needs a little more clarification...

...One can certainly criticize the French far left for failing to get behind a single presidential candidate, and the bulk of the blame goes to Arlette Laguiller and her Lutte Ouvriere party...

...As an American professor teaching at the University of Paris-VIII, I had the pleasure of being a colleague of Antonio Negri during his years of political exile...

...I didn't oppose historicizing—just their historicizing, which reduces Islamic politics, and much more, to their own global theory...

...If Cohen really wants to challenge politically both postmodernists and fundamentalists, perhaps he should not attack our book but embrace it as an allied project...

...Francis of Assisi by Hardt/Negri in order to invent a visionary resistance theory to globalization...

...One character trait that all leftists have in common is the desire to be seen as some sort of moral paragon, a St...

...In any case, "postmodern singsong" is a code by which all criticism of Israel, of U.S...

...We reserve the right to edit letters down to fit our space and to choose which shall be printed...

...2) their wrongheadedness on this issue is a symptom of large problems in their politics...

...We are unable to acknowledge letters...

...It's kind of hard to pull off—I don't think even Orwell succeeded...