Content area
Full text
Chad Lavin
University of Illinois Press, Urbana and Chicago, 2008, xviii+164pp., $40.00,
ISBN-13: 978-0252032974
Chad Lavin rethinks political responsibility beyond the familiar 'blame model' (p. xiv) by encouraging liberal individualist 'tendencies' (p. xviii) to realize that their allegedly autonomous subject is actually caught up in a structural 'web of ... relations' (p. 101). As if answering Blanchot's question 'What is this me that I am' (cited by Derrida, 1995, p. 276), Lavin delivers a porous agent: I am constrained by structures, but nevertheless enabled to resist the powers that shape me. He presents individual and collective subjects as the 'consolidation of political forces in unified beings' (p. 25), or 'sites of agency' (p. 36). Part One develops a theory of the subject - 'agency ... is ripped from the grip of liberal individualism and inserted into a postliberal theory of the subject as rooted in a set of conditions that both constrain and enable' (p. 32) - which Lavin illustrates in Part Two.
Chapter One presents liberal responsibility-as-blame as 'retrospective thinking' based on a 'dubious model of individual will' (p. 13). Noting our ability to be 'responsive ' (p. 17), Lavin approaches responsibility as a feature of 'established social relations' (p. 15), as opposed to contractual obligations. In Chapters Two and Three, respectively, Lavin discusses Marx's line that 'men make their own history ... under the given and inherited circumstances with which they are directly confronted' (p. 32) and Butler's 'The one who acts ... acts precisely to the extent that he or she is constituted as an actor' (p. 45). He feels that both authors negotiate between overly individualistic and overly structural extremes.
Chapter Two argues that Marx's Eighteenth Brumaire relies on figurative language because Marx could not adequately come to terms with how subjects such as classes, are constructed. For example, when discussing how the peasantry found a 'hero' in Louis Bonaparte, Lavin's Marx uses figurative language to indicate the way in which particular individuals become consolidation points...