Radical citizenship

Radical Citizenship as in ‘the belonging, expression and allegiance to multiple and malleable identities’ was first elucidated in the doctoral proposals, and papers written by Bachar Chbib candidate for a Doctorate in Philosophy in the communications department at McGill University in Montreal , Quebec, Canada . Chbib contends that in view of administrative, social, cultural, and political changes that have developed in these latter stages of the modern western nation, it is inevitable that the contracts between the citizen and the nation are past due and need to be re-negotiated in good faith.

He outlines the possibility of an alternative relationship between the 21st century capitalist, liberal, democratic nation and its shareholders, the citizen. Citizens collectively are civically determined persons desiring good public guidelines by purposefully communicating with each other, listening to each other's point of view, and being ready to learn and alter their mind based on such channels of communication as may be available to them. Chbib proposes a return to the roots of the citizen/state relationship as in a radicalization of the engagement between the contenders. In his continuous radical citizenship model, the nation and the citizen are to engage into a more candid and transparent contract that allows for a more connected and responsible citizenry within the public realm and a nation more accountable to its citizens (whether subjects or shareholders) and most notably the neighbor (the other). Nationality remains an exclusive concept devoid of inter-subjectivity and requires a radicalization of its concepts of citizenship and public participation to maintain its continuity.

Chbib’s citizen is defined as an inhabitant, occupant or resident of a particular place contrary to many traditional definitions that nominatively reduce the loyal citizen to seeking the protection of a state or nation in which they are naturalized or native to. Radical Citizenship is exemplary of a stateless nation-building within industrial democracies, represented in the most advanced cases of transnational economic, political, and institutional orders.

Internet based taxation

According to Chbib, the advent of near full penetration of the internet into the homes and institutions of the western liberal, capitalist citizenry, combined with the lack of true ethnic, cultural and religious representation in national and regional governments (as reflected in their subsequent policies and laws), an apathetic western citizen will seek to incrementally improve her/his self-governing participation outside the traditional democratic paradigm. Radical citizenship can in fact be enhanced by internet participation and specifically in the case of capitalism by a pluralistic form of taxation easily accessible on the net. Identity and citizenship are indeed multiple, challenged, and variable and can be expressed outside the present political order.

Psychoanalysis and radical citizenship

Chbib states: “As citizens we can understand that the signifier dictates the signified, the lacking social reality. We are socially condemned to attain an ideal identity with others and ourselves through discourse, round tables, forums, elections, and town hall meetings. Language is however broken, it is not linear but fragmented full of lacking white noise. Words can never liberate the wholeness of the real; there cannot be a signification of being in language.”

In his idea, radical citizenship must strive for a radical identity, in the symbolic realm to construct a real. It is not sufficient to recognize the constructed reality by means of social meaning; a radical citizenship acknowledges the interdependence of social meaning and social discourse in the formation of objective reality.

Therefore, he argues, by understanding the impossibility of mastering the real and by alleviating the craving to identify this impossibility through the disappointment of efforts to symbolize, it may be that an ethically paradox is maintained. That paradox is the main problem facing construction of meaning as in ideology or in institutions. The impossibility of the real is only understood at the moment of catastrophe, rupture and dislocation, etc.…when the suffering understands fantasmically the encounter with the real of nature it becomes a tolerable symbolization of the real capable of recovering the mysterious quality of experience and knowledge.

In a radical citizenship, the subject is to forgo pleasure, which is impossible since humanity is driven by it. To find an appropriate determinant for a more accessible radicalized citizenship the subject must acknowledge the lack in the mechanics for recognizing the ‘real’. By acknowledging and succumbing to an unconscious defence mechanism in which ethically unacceptable instinctual drives persist on ‘realizing’ our being; the subject can assume its radical subjectivity. The radicalization of the engine behind our being, that is the essence of radical citizenship, may help to modify the realm of fantasy that the individual’s personal and social behaviour rests on. The radical citizen must identify with the symptom of the ‘Other’ in order to accept the symptom as his own and not as a lack in the fantasy of the ‘Other.’ Thus democracy is a fantasy congealed in the symbolic realm. The true nature of our human condition prevents an opening of this self- induced aporia. We are a disharmonious and irrational bunch, and we must come to terms with it not in a negative manner, I mean not as deceiving the ‘good’ that we strive for, but by altering the notion of the ‘good’ and accepting the lack of harmony that we create. Recognizing the lack and its spin on our subjectivity allows for a more honest engagement with the social in appropriating the ‘real’. It is for this reason that Lacan and his form of psychoanalysis brings out ideas that are very relevant to an eventual mapping out and deconstruction of a possible/impossible radicalization of citizenship. That is if the word citizenship survives the analysis. The possibilities of a radicalization of the citizen/state binary would create an opening towards a non nation-state based affiliation of the singular in friendship with the community. The concept of a coming of radical citizenship allows the ‘other’ within the individual to be accessible to unhindered political expression.

Bibliography

Agamben, Giorgio, The Coming Community, [1990] trans. M. Hardt (Minneapolis: Regents of the University of Minnesota, 1993).

Anderson, Benedict, Imagined Communities, [1983] (London: Verso, 1991).

Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Pierre F., A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, [1987] (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002).

Derrida, Jacques, Politics of Friendship, [1994] trans. G. Collins (London: Verso, 1997).

Heidegger, Martin, Being and Time, [1927], trans. Joan Stambaugh, (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, c1996).

Lacan, Jacques, The Language of the Self, [1968] trans. A Wilden (Baltimore, Johns Hopkins Paperbacks Edition, 1981).

Nancy, Jean-Luc, "The Inoperative Community", The Inoperative Community, (University of Minnesota Press, 2001) pp. 1–41.

Sartre, Jean-Paul, Being and Nothingness, [1953] Trans. Hazel Barnes (New York: Washington Square Press, 1968).

Shapiro, Michael J., National Times and Other Times: Re-thinking Citizenship. In: Cultural Studies 82000.Vol. 14, No. 1).

Spinoza, Benedict de, A Theologico-Political Treatise and A Political Treatise (New York: Dover, 1951).

Zizek, Slavoj, The Ticklish Subject, (New York: Verso, 2004).

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