Toward a Post-War Political Philosophy? A Review of Gregg Lambert, Philosophy after Friendship: Deleuze's Conceptual Personae

Abstract

Toward a Post-War Political Philosophy?A Review of Gregg Lambert, Philosophy after Friendship: Deleuze's Conceptual Personae Will Kujala (bio) Lambert, Gregg. Philosophy After Friendship: Deleuze's Conceptual Personae. U of Minnesota P, 2017. Philosophy after Friendship intervenes productively in our contemporary political and philosophical moment. Lambert's central thesis is that the contemporary world, precisely because of its intensification and disorientation of war and violence, has opened a space for thinking after war. For Lambert, Western philosophy has always been silent about the "end of war" (160). He argues that the waning of the political today—defined in terms of a politics of friendship—is an opportunity for crafting the post-war thought of which political philosophy has hitherto been incapable. He carries this out by presenting six conceptual personae—friend, enemy, foreigner, stranger, deportee, and the revolutionary people—as sites for teasing out the limits of the politics of friendship. While Lambert responds primarily to the world of and to central figures in critical theory (such as Agamben, Badiou, Derrida, Deleuze and Guattari, and Žižek) rather than to contemporary scholars, his book makes two main contributions to contemporary political thought and continental philosophy. First, Lambert provides a genealogical critique of the concept of friendship in politics and philosophy, crafting a novel methodology for conceptual history through Deleuze and Guattari and Benveniste. Second, against many contemporary critical theorists, he insists on the need to turn away from the metaphor and practice of war as political paradigm. Using peace as his first principle, he pushes against those who would centre the concepts of animosity, contradiction, antagonism, and conflict, while refusing as impossible a return to liberal management and negotiation. Friendship and the Limits of the Political Lambert argues that contemporary politics exceeds the boundaries, borders, and limits that have been the conditions of possibility for political philosophy. Modern political thought, he contends, gave us a compromise: politics within limits. Internal conflict is muted as debate, negotiation, and rights claims. Conflict that exceeds this limit is displaced, externalized, and therefore preserved as war, bracketed as conflict between two mutually recognized enemies aiming at mere defeat and not elimination. For Lambert, as for many contemporary political philosophers, this compromise is increasingly fragile: "Today we might ask whether polities (from the Greek term politika), which was used to designate a privileged place for the display of civil conflict (stasis), can any longer contain the extreme states of conflict that constantly break out in modern societies" (6). These extreme conflicts are symptomatic of an "extreme opposition between [the] richest and poorest populations that belong to the global polis" (6). A deepening divide between rich and poor has blurred the spatial boundaries that enabled the compromise of modern politics. Lambert's conceptual personae (friend, enemy, stranger, foreigner, deportee, people) come under intense strain in a world in which "all contemporary territorial boundaries have been overrun and made permeable and subject to change, and there is neither a distinctly 'foreign' place nor a central location, or polis" (65). This diagnosis resonates with critical theory over the past twenty years, whether Hardt and Negri's examination of new forms of sovereignty that blur the differences between policing and war, Derrida's analysis of the war on terror, or Agamben's take on the notion that modern politics is the internalization of a state of war within law. Evoking this theoretical work, Lambert argues that we are currently confronted by a "new form of combat" (114) between an unassimilable remainder or surplus of humanity left to the futile defense of its remaining privileges, and the rich who can no longer include or subsume this remainder into the figure of universal humanity. What makes his account different is his assertion that this new form of combat is not a new form of resistance in relation to power. Instead, this new combat marks the limit of combat as a political paradigm, even of the political as such: "this limit to the political dialectic of inclusion and exclusion, power and resistance, is nothing less than the impasse and the final exhaustion of the concept of the political itself" (115). Conflict in the contemporary moment "marks the absolute limit where...