13 September 2009

I wrote a little critical essay on MacIntyre’s Whose Justice? Which Rationality? last night for one of my courses, whose main purpose was to begin thinking through the significance of MacIntyre’s secret affinity with “liberalism”—an affinity that seems to me fairly clear, despite himself, and seems to me not a superficial tension in his whole project. Reading The Ticklish Subject tonight, it seemed to me that his critique of multiculturalism could map pretty easily onto certain of MacIntyre’s points.

Though MacIntyre is certainly right, Žižek would say, to accuse liberalism of a false universality, of claiming a neutrality that masks their hidden partiality, he fails to recognize the obverse truth, that in championing particular, internally coherent traditions, he himself masks the “universal” excess of his own judgment. He therefore ends up making the opposite criticism of liberalism than is necessary. Instead of insisting that we fill back in the notion of universality with the contents given it by one or another rival tradition—which is, after all, only the reactionary negation of filling it in with a content that transcends traditions—we ought instead to negate the negation, and insist that we leave the concept of universality totally empty, as yet undetermined by any particular political arkhe or all-encompassing concept of “the good and the best.” We should insist that the discovery of such an empty universality constitutes liberalism’s true advance, and that their mistake was to try to “complete” it with some determinate positive content just like the Aristotelians had always done.

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Tags: Alasdair MacIntyre,Slavoj Zizek,Universality