By Lucas Negri and Fabio Akcelrud Durão

There is a type of investigation (and it is for a specific reason that we call it so, and not a “method”, or “scientific approach”) which could contribute to the identification of and reflection on a certain kind of catchwords/phrases: Sylvain Lazarus’s Anthropology of the Name (2015). This type of investigation focuses on subjectivity (more precisely, intellectuality, but we will come back to that) understood as productive agency based on prescriptions, while reducing its main political interest to what Lazarus calls interiority. This takes the investigation away from a scientific idea of objectivity, which would always have roots on what is here classified as exteriority. How to investigate subjectivity without turning it into an object – that is, how to think about it as it is in itself, and not as it may be taken from the outside – is the difficulty and novelty of Lazarus’ work.

Lazarus proposes singular usages of the concepts of politics and contemporaneity (which diverge, for example, from those assumed by Suman Gupta on his study on the “new normal”), particularly when reducing these concepts to the scope of the rare existence of the kind of subjectivity he is more interested in (the ones related to what he calls ‘intellectuality’). This renders this investigation a very particular one, and it probably could not be adopted for a general study of catchwords/phrases. However, one finds there, among its necessary underpinnings, the idea of “unnameable names” (the main reason for ‘anthropology of the name’ to receive its title), a concept that could, in some cases, be recognized as an occurrence of political catchwords/phrases. Bringing this type of investigation to bear on the study of political catchwords/phrases may help us to identify a specific mode of being and use for such words, suggesting fruitful considerations on their prescriptive performance.

The first step for us to grasp Lazarus’ endeavor is to envision how he reduces subjectivity to prescription and interiority, which he indicates with his concept of intellectuality. In short, intellectuality is the category by which Lazarus specifies his concept of subjectivity. He finds the concept of subjectivity rather problematic, as it generates many connotations and, even when close to his theoretical references (Marxism and a progressive socialist agenda), it brings about an idea of dialectics between objectivity and subjectivity which he wants to avoid. In his anthropology of the name, the idea of subjectivity has nothing to do with conscience, phenomenology, or mental representations, not even with dialectics as such. The subject, here, does not understand, know, perceive, experience, suffer, critique; it only produces thought and prescribes, or rather, it thinks -- where thinking is relation to reality. “So I call ‘intellectuality’ the fact that there is thought, without it being necessary that the thought of this thought be stated” (Lazarus, 2015, p. 61). In other words, the category of intellectuality stands for the absolute base of thinking, for the possibility of taking thought as a place of origin, creation, free determination, that does not need to be directed to previous reasons and heterogeneous concepts (that is, concepts that come from exterior fields) in order to be understood.

We need not go deeper into how Lazarus develops this proposal between axiomatic reduction and metaphysical assumption, but it is worth observing that it is less exoteric than it may seem. It just allows the investigator to assume the two basic axioms of the anthropology of the name, which are “people think” and “thought is relation to reality”. These are the axioms that structure his idea of a multiplicity of modes of politics.

According to Lazarus, when we assume these two axioms (and what it means to really assume them is a delicate affair [48-68]), we open up multiple possibilities of thinking what politics is and how it happens. For example, the first axiom, “people think”, is larger than the assumption that “academics think”, thus clearing the ground for considering intellectuality (any thinking) as absolutely independent from scientific explanations of it. Lazarus is not against science, but he is concerned with the possibility of reflecting on what people think as it is thought in intellectuality, that is, in interiority. This is not to be subordinated to any kind of exterior interpretation that would turn this subjectivity into an object for scientific conscience.

It may be easier to understand this with the specific case of politics. Lazarus diverges from theories that take politics as some inherent factor of society, sometimes related to (external or heterogeneous) categories of power, state, economy, or social structure. He proposes an idea of politics which is based upon his concept of intellectuality. This would be politics in interiority, or in subjectivity. As this type of politics refers to people’s thinking and not to academic understanding, it is not necessarily entangled with categories that would be inherent to external theories of power, state, economy or society, although these same politics may use such words for its own purposes. Consequently, a theoretical consideration of these politics should not interpret its ways and determinations as causes and consequences between political events and heterogeneous phenomena (economical or historical phenomena, for example), but simply take them for prescriptions produced by thought as it acts in certain places (these are what Lazarus calls “the places of the names”). The existence of such places (and politics) is not necessary; it is occasional or even rare – politics in interiority is something that may occur in certain moments (Lazarus calls them sequences), in certain places (which are unique modes of politics since they are structured by categories singular to the sequence), where intellectuality produces political prescriptions.

For a better understanding of the concepts, let us consider some examples. Lazarus identifies four sequences that are political in interiority: the revolutionary mode in the French Revolution (1792-1794); the classist mode between 1848 and 1871; the Bolshevik mode in the Russian Revolution (1902-1917); and the dialectic mode in the Chinese Revolution (1928-1958). In each of these sequences, different places indicate the existence of prescriptive thinking through categories and names whose meaning cannot be traced to heterogeneous references. The name ‘revolution’can be understood in history, it is even used in many different contexts, referring to many different political events. However, Lazarus maintains, it had a special presence during the French Revolution between 1792 and 1794, where it mobilized prescriptions, decisions, turning points and discourses in a unique way (that even the linguistic notion of performative utterances falls short to explain), interacting with categories singular to this sequence (such as ‘National Assembly’, ‘sans-culottes’, ‘people’, ‘rights’ etc.). The same would be true to the name ‘class’ between 1848 and 1871. Through such a simple word decisive and irreplaceable determinations were mobilized, among categories specific to this political mode, such as ‘factory’ or ‘State’ as they participate in this sequence. We could say, with Lazarus, that “class” was there an unnameable name, that is, a word that cannot be grasped by some referent or direct meaning; it was a word through which political turning points were declared and sustained. It must be clear that this word, “class”, here, is specific, is different from the same word as it was commonly used in social thinking throughout the 19th century and afterwards. It is not the concept of class in Marxist historical materialism, for example, although Marx and Engels’ Communist Manifesto was an important object for this political sequence. The existence of the word as a concept indicating an object for science and as an unnameable name for intellectuality is only a case of homonym or of polysemy. Similar cases occur with the names ‘Party’ in the Bolshevik mode and ‘dialectics’ in the Chinese Revolution (it is different from Marx’s and Lenin’s dialectics, see Idem, p. 74-75).

So, for example, when Gupta asks why people start using catchwords/phrases with some frequency over time, or when we ask why people start to use the word “class” to mobilize themselves in particular ways towards possible political horizons, generating political effects in the situation, Lazarus’ anthropology of the name will take “because ‘people think’” as a sufficient answer. And he justifies it as an approach to such phenomena by investigating it in interiority, that is, capturing thought in its intellectual prescriptive nature, rather than as some local case of a general principle. And if, from this standpoint, we mobilize the use of catchwords/phrases as Gupta conceives of them, we can imagine ways of relating them to what this anthropology identifies as unnameable names. Thus we can try to investigate this phenomena from this complementary point of view.

This superposition must be carefully approached. Although we may take some unnameable names as cases of catchwords/phrases, we should not assume that every unnameable name is a catchword/phrase, and even less that every catchword/phrase is a case of an unnameable name. First of all, if the idea of unnameable names in politics is linked to the idea of politics in interiority, then it would only happen in such sequences. And if these sequences are local and rare, if they are not linked to an idea of politics as a constant in society, then it is possible that there simply are no occurrences of these phenomena in contemporaneity. For Lazarus, the idea of politics as something we may assume as always present in History is a mode of politics in exteriority. This is the case when “the thought of politics, if one does exist, requires at least one external referent, such as economy or law. In this way, the thought of politics is subordinated to that of the State” (Idem, p. 75). For Lazarus, the parliamentarian mode of politics in which we live nowadays (be it in Brazil, France, or the United States) is always a case of politics in exteriority. When he published Anthropology of the Name in 1996, he believed the only possible places for politics in interiority were the factories – be it, as he says, the factory as the place of time, under capitalism, or the factory as the place of the State, under socialism. So even when we take movements commonly considered to be political, as the ones linked to the catchwords/phrases “we are the 99%” or “the 1%”, or the Brazilian cases of “O gigante acordou” or “Ele não”, we are still to ask if they really are political in the sense of interiority, or at least to what measure their occurrences can be taken in interiority and to what measure they cannot. Likewise, when we ask ourselves if we are contemporaneous to a sequence of politics in interiority, we must search for places where names are mobilized as unnameable and capable of prescribing possibilities. Perhaps some research on catchwords may reveal this possibility, or the other way around. This is yet to be ascertained.

We could also consider making some adaptations on Lazarus’ system of investigation in order to expand its scope to a wider field of anthropology, considering how such ideas of unnameable names, prescriptive nature and intellectuality could be applicable to other kinds of phenomena, politics in exteriority, economy, and history. But this will demand more time and a more profound consideration of these ideas.

Reference

Lazarus, Sylvain. Anthropology of the Name. Translated by Gila Walker. London, New York, Calcuta: Seagull Books, 2015.

Fabio Akcelrud Durão is Professor of Literary Theory at the Universidade Estadual de Campinas (Unicamp). He is the author of *Metodologia de pesquisa em literatura* (Parábola, 2020), among others.

Lucas Negri is a PhD candidate at the Graduate Program in Literary Theory and History at the Universidade Estadual de Campinas (Unicamp), where he is writing a dissertation on Badiou and literature.

Image credit: Garlifarmtablet, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons