woman by Hollywood, by society, by disease, by systems of waste disposal,
by, in general,“a symbolic order in crisis”^46 in being marked by pervasive
violence and antagonisms and in allowing full identity and freedom to
no one.
Work–whether artistic or critical–that begins from and enacts a sense of
the real as a scene of trauma can be powerful and acutely insightful, espe-
cially against the grain of fantastic wishes for widely shared and deep pleas-
ure in either art or social life. As Foster himself notes, however, this kind of
work can express and collapse into a“posture of indifference”that expresses
both“a fatigue with the politics of difference,”since nothing can really be
done, and even“a more fundamental fatigue: a strange drive to indistinction,
a paradoxical desire to be desireless, to be done with it all, a call of regression
beyond the infantile to the inorganic.”^47 In German literature this is familiar
asSehnsucht nach dem Tod, a longing for death as a release from the inevitable
frustration of desire and aspiration for full human meaningfulness by social
antagonism, as in Kafka’s“The Hunger Artist”or“In the Penal Colony.”Or
the pursuit of accomplished social identity might simply be given up, as in
the disappearance“into the zone”of Tyrone Slothrop at the end ofGravity’s
Rainbow. If artistic and critical work continue to focus on always repeating,
unaddressable social antagonisms, then it threatens, as Foster puts it, to
restrict“our political imaginary to two camps: the abjectors and the abjected,
and [to] the assumption that in order not to be counted among sexists and
racists one must become the phobic object of such subjects.”^48 It is better to
take sides with the relatively powerless than with the powerful, when only
side-taking seems possible.Avant-gardism and contemporary art
A sense that art, if it is to be serious,musttake sides against a specific form of
life is a defining feature of early twentieth century modernism and avant-
gardism. As Peter Bürger puts it,“the European avant-garde movements can
be defined as an attack on the status of art in bourgeois society.”^49 What in
particular came under attack were exactly the apolitical practices of art that(^46) Ibid., p. 165. (^47) Ibid., p. 164. (^48) Ibid., p. 166.
(^49) Peter Bürger,Theory of the Avant-Garde, trans. Michael Shaw (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1984), p. 49.
268 An Introduction to the Philosophy of Art