Quote:
Originally posted by roachboy
equality is a legal construct--in the states, this means that all subjects/citizens within a given legal space are endowed with the same rights.
it is the fiction of the bourgeois legal subject.
what it means is a political question: if you are conservative in the states and prefer to work within an image of the world that reduces society to a collection of discrete individuals as a way to avoid questions of class (for example), then this legal subject fiction can be quite powerful; if you work from a political viewpoint that tries to link claims made by the dominant order to the social realities those claims create/obscure/define, then the legal subject tends to revert back to a fiction.
|
So equality is a legal fiction; it seems that on either side of the political question you pose, this fiction has a reality determined by the role it plays in the power networks of the given political situation. That is, even if your viewpoint attempts to do a 'history of the present', to borrow a term, this history must include as a real term the myth of equality that has played such a powerful role in creating the present social reality. And it's worth considering whether or not the story of a 'dominant order' is not itself a fiction created by a class that feels itself to be oppressed, and so invents an oppressor to motivate its own struggle.
__________________
"Die Deutschen meinen, daß die Kraft sich in Härte und Grausamkeit offenbaren müsse, sie unterwerfen sich dann gerne und mit Bewunderung:[...]. Daß es Kraft giebt in der Milde und Stille, das glauben sie nicht leicht."
"The Germans believe that power must reveal itself in hardness and cruelty and then submit themselves gladly and with admiration[...]. They do not believe readily that there is power in meekness and calm."
-- Friedrich Nietzsche
|