There are many signs within the realm of art and literature that critique and criticism are under attack by what presents itself as ‘the Left’ today. While there are no doubt profound countervailing tendencies, not least the grass roots movement crystallizing around Bernie Sanders’ nomination bid for the Democratic Party’s candidacy, what we have seen, by and large, in response to its long-standing crisis is a sense of melancholy deepening on the Left.
If, according to Freud, mourning involves the gradual withdrawal of libido from the lost object, then melancholia entails a turning against itself of the subject who guiltily takes on blame for such object loss. What this has entailed is an endless turning of elements of ‘the Left’ broadly understood, against itself – as we saw recently in the demand from certain LGBTQ+ organizations that Bernie Sanders distance himself from the admittedly problematic yet extremely valuable endorsement by MMA fighter and comedian, Joe Rogan. What seems to elude those who make such calls is that the point of electoral politics is to win rather than to lose elections.
In a manner quite consistent with Carl Schmitt’s denigration of the liberal emphasis on discussion and debate as well as the more politically engaged gesture of “critique” enabled by an open and agonistic public sphere, the identitarian Left increasingly seeks to impose a kind of dictatorship of its own as to what is morally permissible and what is not. As with Schmitt, there’s a shifting of the terrain from procedural categories to existential ones, from the argumentative articulation of truth claims and counter-claims grounded in logic and evidence to ontological ones grounded in proprietary claims to ownership of experience and highly questionable categories of “existence.”
