#justin e h smith

—Justin E. H. Smith, “Is Everything Political?”

While I’m sure a man as erudite and cosmopolitan as Smith understandably doesn’t want to mistaken for a sadly typical example of his American generation—and see my reflections on the Gen-X conservatism here—it’s probably time to drop the “I’m not a conservative” schtick and either make peace with what the left actually believes or make peace with what kind of conservative you actually are. First of all, “But I’m not…!” is a weak defense against an imputation; better to just own the name, wear it with pride. Second, while different thinkers have thought about it in different ways, and we can probably turn up this or that quote from Engels or somebody as a counterexample, still, overall, “[t]here is a stratum of the human that is deeper than politics” is inconsistent with the left’s fundamental commitments: that existence precedes essence, that history is the work of human hands, that what we erroneously call human nature alters in time through social conflict and contestation (this is the dialectic), that humanly-produced economic and social circumstances shape and delimit the human character (this is materialism). Whether you take this “deeper stratum” to be the nature we share with the animals or to be the eternal breath of God, you still think there’s something that social conflict and contestation can’t reach, that humanly-produced economic and social circumstances can’t alter, or that alter these circumstance from outside the human. And if you think art is more profound and moving insofar as it seeks and finds this limit to our conscious agency, rather than “laying bare the device” by which the merely social is naturalized or divinized as this supposed limit, then you are practically the definition of the aesthetic reactionary—probably worse than a fascist, who is at least properly political in his history-making jackboot swagger, as Adorno’s foremost American critical legatee claims:

What Paul DeMan clearly was, however, as the articles testify, can be seen to be a fairly unremarkable specimen of the then conventional high-modernist aesthete, and the apolitical aesthete at that. This is clearly a very different matter from Heidegger (although it seems unquestionable that the twin Heidegger and DeMan “scandals” have been carefully orchestrated to delegitimate Derridean deconstruction). Heidegger may have been “politically naiive,” as they like to say, but he was certainly political, and believed for a time that the Hitlerian seizure of power was a genuine national revolution that would result in a moral and social reconstruction of the nation. As rector of Freiburg University, and in the best reactionary and McCarthyite spirit, he worked at purging the place of its doubtful elements (although one should remember that genuinely radical or leftist “elements” were very scarce in the German university system of the 1920s, compared to the Hollywood of the 1940s or the Federal Republic of the 1970s). His ultimate disappointment with Hitler was shared by a number of people on the revolutionary (anticapitalist) left within National Socialism, who failed for some time to understand Hitler’s pragmatic position as a moderate or centrist or his crucial relationship to big business. I know I will be misunderstood if I add that I have some sneaking admiration for Heidegger’s attempt at political commitment, and find the attempt itself morally and aesthetically preferable to apolitical liberalism (provided its ideals remain unrealized).

—Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism(1991)