Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction: Wittgenstein and the Scene of Contemporary Political Theory
- 1 Theorizing as a Lived Experience: A Wittgensteinian Investigation
- 2 Wittgenstein's Philosophy after the Disaster
- 3 Wittgenstein and Citizenship: Reading Socrates in Tehran
- 4 Why Wittgenstein is Not Conservative: Conventions and Critique
- 5 Aspect-Blindness in Religion, Philosophy, and Law: The Force of Wittgensteinian Reading
- 6 Seeing as it Happens: Theorizing Politics through the Eyes of Wittgenstein
- 7 Bare Life: Comedy, Trust, and Language in Wittgenstein and Beckett
- Conclusion: The Personal is the Theoretical
- Bibliography
- Index
7 - Bare Life: Comedy, Trust, and Language in Wittgenstein and Beckett
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 September 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction: Wittgenstein and the Scene of Contemporary Political Theory
- 1 Theorizing as a Lived Experience: A Wittgensteinian Investigation
- 2 Wittgenstein's Philosophy after the Disaster
- 3 Wittgenstein and Citizenship: Reading Socrates in Tehran
- 4 Why Wittgenstein is Not Conservative: Conventions and Critique
- 5 Aspect-Blindness in Religion, Philosophy, and Law: The Force of Wittgensteinian Reading
- 6 Seeing as it Happens: Theorizing Politics through the Eyes of Wittgenstein
- 7 Bare Life: Comedy, Trust, and Language in Wittgenstein and Beckett
- Conclusion: The Personal is the Theoretical
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
A philosophical problem has the form: “I don't know my way about.”
Wittgenstein (1958b)We cannot listen to a conversation for five minutes without being acutely aware of the confusion. It is all around us and our only chance now is to let it in. The only chance of renovation is to open our eyes and see the mess. It is not a mess you can make sense of.
Samuel Beckett (1961)Dear incomprehension, it's thanks to you I'll be myself in the end.
Samuel Beckett, The Unnamable (2006: vol. 2, 318)Introduction
Unless you accept a generic definition of politics as, for instance, “power” or “the personal,” the idea that you can step out of politics – literally walk away from the conventions that give political language-games their contours into another area of existence – is uncontroversial. I have worked in earlier chapters to explicate the importance of this kind of horizontal movement for perception and creativity, two components of theorizing, in Wittgenstein's work. This is not the only kind of motion I want to talk about here. In this chapter, I want to focus on the vertical drop below the conventions constitutive of politics into the bedrock of what Agamben has described as “bare life,” Homo sacer (life doomed to die; the sacred outlaw of Roman law that anyone was free to kill). This fall from politics is not voluntary; it is, rather, achieved by force and coercion, components of the relation between sovereignty and the body, and the corresponding erosion of superficial trust that exposes what Wittgenstein conceived as the narrow space between surface and depth grammars also described in terms of trust.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Wittgenstein and Political TheoryThe View from Somewhere, pp. 156 - 175Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2009