Politics of Withdrawal?
Dates: November 8, 22, 29, December 6, 13, 20 (2023)
Time: 13:15-16:00
Location: Pieter de La Court building – SA.29 (Leiden University)
Instructor: Joost de Bloois (UvA)
Contact: j.g.c.debloois@uva.nl
Credits: 6 ECTS
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* This course is fully booked at the moment. If you sign up, you will be placed on a waiting list.
At first glance, a “politics of withdrawal” appears to be somewhat of an oxymoron, as withdrawal entails non-action, inoperativity, dis-engagement. Doesn’t this place withdrawal at the opposite end of politics—generally understood to be, precisely, all about engagement, intervention in real life issues, a struggle over the manifold ways in which to organize society, about agency and direct action? This course investigates ‘withdrawal’ (and related concepts such as ‘exodus’,’autonomy’ or ‘retreat’) as anything but depoliticized: Withdrawal emphasizes and increases antagonisms, but it does so by displacing the terms in which antagonism is conceived.
As a political gesture, withdrawal is often “unexceptional” in so far as it is, as yet, without rubric or concept in political philosophy or cultural theory to think or act with. To withdraw means to take one’s distance, to disinvest in the status quo—that is, to pierce an overture towards alternative modes of being, not by facing the status quo head-on, but rather by removing oneself from it; it signals a longing for a different way of living together. We may withdraw in total disagreement with the present moment, but in withdrawing, at the very least, the hope is expressed that another present is possible, that the present is not yet exhausted, even if we are weary of this particular present, this status quo. To withdraw is neither polemical nor reactionary: it is not a retreat from actuality per se, but from certain of its aspects: from our present-day “always-on” culture, from surveillance capitalism, from neoliberal management, from technology, from modernity, from the demand for immediate political engagement and being socially relevant and so on. Withdrawal disrupts actuality to show—or at least it assumes—that there is more than a single present, that there is a potentiality not yet tapped into, not yet actualized. Withdrawal thus constitutes a significant break with modern and contemporary conceptions of what counts as “(the) political” in Euro-Atlantic thought. Withdrawal is not polemical, it does not engage in the zero-sum game that defines modern politics—i.e. conflict. Withdrawal interrupts the logic of the zero-sum game—the logic of neo-Darwinian discourses of struggle and survival, of “ethnic” and “national” identities, of winners and losers. For scholars and students in cultural analysis, ‘withdrawal’ may also help to identify ways of thinking beyond the poststructuralist, politicized frame (beyond ‘critique’, issues of technological mediation, identity and activist scholarship). But also: what does it mean to withdraw from current academic practices; is there an emerging para-academia to withdraw into?
In this course we’ll have a closer look emerging discourses and practices of “withdrawal” that signal the advent of a potential that resonates in a variety of cultural, social and political texts and practices; the course seeks to assemble withdrawal as a concept that, in turn, may help us to identify, regroup and understand apparently diverging political and socio-cultural phenomena ranging from the digital detox to the im/possibility of dis/connection and fugitive planning; from anarcho-autonomist manifestos to the “subtractive politics” of refusal, sabotage and suspension; from the “melancholic retreat” of the radical left to the retreat from academia in so-called ‘quitlit’; we will also investigate the emergence, in discourses on withdrawal, of an expanding ‘grey zone’ between the traditional left and right where localism and ecology, but also traditionalism and religiosity intersect.
This course is completed with a writing assignment (60%) and a presentation (40%).