Difficulties of Ethical Life

6. Engage the Enemy: Cavell, Comedies of Remarriage, and the Politics of Friendship

6 Engage the Enemy Cavell, Comedies of Remarriage, and the Politics of Friendship C Y N T H I A W I L L E T T Introduction: Contemporary Democratic Theory and the Friend–Enemy Distinction Of all the good things that we rely on for individual happiness, few are as important as friendship. This is true not only on a personal level. As Aristotle argues, cooperative bonds in the household and among citizens ground thriving political communities. Of course, modern-day liberals rightly reject Aristotle’s tight, conflict-free communitarianism for a more fluid, egalitarian, and multicultural society, but it is difficult to envision the ideals of politics, including citizenship and justice, apart from some strong sense of social bonds. The ontologically detached and excessively rational agent proposed by some liberal theorists obscures the attachments that bind us to others. These attachments give us our depth as persons. It would be hard to live without them. But then it is also hard to live with them. As any casual study of politics reminds us, passionate attachments can fuel fierce alliances and tragic con- flicts. Post–Cold War tensions in Eastern Europe, Africa, and the Middle East have led to the downfall of states and the rise of global terror. The relentless tensions of the post–Cold War era may have divided the world I am grateful to the audience at a Pennsylvania State University philosophy colloquium on November 11, 2005, and especially Claire Katz, Dan Conway, Emily Grosholz, and Shannon Sullivan for helpful comments on this chapter. 88 along unpredictable lines, but they have also given rise to a curious convergence among otherwise opposed political perspectives. Leftist democracy theorists influenced by deconstruction and democratic imperialists of the Bush administration may not have much in common, but they do agree on at least one thing: the vital role of the friend–enemy distinction for democratic politics.1 Chantal Mouffe and Ernesto Laclau argue that rationalists such as Jürgen Habermas who aim to eliminate conflict as the basis for democracy ignore the subtle forms of coercion behind any appearance of consensus.2 These radical democrats lack faith not only in reason but also in the Old Left’s revolutionary fervor for a perfect utopian world. Instead of reaching out for a romanticized world without conflict and politics, Mouffe and Laclau call on New Left movements to form alliances (what they term ‘‘equivalences’’) to displace the hegemony of neoliberal capitalism. This forging of a leftist hegemony would entail (via the logic of deconstruction) the exclusion of those who do not share equivalent ideas of freedom and equality. There is no politics without the potential for enemies. The radical democracy theorists may be right to point out as part of their political realism the persistence of irrational conflict and to expose the usual appeals for resolving conflict through common reason as the ploy of some emerging hegemon. But these deconstructive democrats have difficulty locating any clear way out of political tensions that are potentially deadly. Mouffe is fully aware of the problem. As she explains, once we accept the necessity of the political and the impossibility of a world without exclusion and antagonism, what needs to be envisaged is how a pluralistic democratic order is possible.3 Such an order could be based, she argues, only on a distinction between ‘‘enemy’’ and ‘‘adversary’’ whose existence is legitimate and must be tolerated. A pluralistic democracy would transform a deadly and antagonistic politics based on enemies to an agonistic politics that allows opponents to be treated as tolerable adversaries who belong to a ‘‘common symbolic space’’ in a ‘‘multipolar’’ world. The question she leaves us with is what kind of political ethics could define this common symbolic space and restrain conflict in a multipolar world so that inevitable conflict does not turn deadly. The conservative liberal theorist Michael Ignatieff puts forth claims on behalf of spreading American-style freedom and democracy that are arguably even more bereft of sound ethical limits. Ignatieff defends the moral idealism in the foreign-policy goals of the Bush administration against the relativism of leftists.4 He acknowledges that such imperial intervention might very well entail the tragic logic of self-deception and hubris, but he argues that Jeffersonian democracy is well worth the risk. He writes: Cynthia Willett 89 What is exceptional about the Jefferson...