JZ: Your concept of the political makes me think of Lyotard’s notion of politics as ‘the differend’, understood as an encounter between different options, or possibilities. If the political is to be situated at, on, beside, over, and in terms of an imaginary ‘ground of bleeding land; a diasporic ground of space-time; a stain’, what can save it from being appropriated by the liberal-humanist discourse intended to heal the wounds and purify the stains? In other words, how can the political be protected from/defended against politicians? Is such protection necessary?

SG: Again, who is the politician? If you are referring to those that are voted into office as the politicians, or you are talking about people in the media, I think the sense of what’s behind the question is more relevant that the question itself. To answer the question that you’ve actually asked me, no, there is no protection and there is no point in it. But to me the real question is: if you are having people presenting a kind of truth, is there a way of getting the real truth out, or a more nuanced form of truth? The promise that the technological age gives is that things are widely multiple, and, therefore, change becomes the sine qua non of truth. However, it’s a fight right now, and it’s anyone’s guess in this multiple massification, whether or not that will come out democratically. An individual right to practice pluralism will produce either a pluralist system or a kind of fascism, and it’s not clear what is going to happen. It reminds me of what Marx was talking about in relation to how capitalism failed feudalism. I feel very strongly that’s what’s happening with the Information Age: it is failing capitalism in the same way that capitalist relations of production were seen by Marx as being very radical, and then, much to his horror, turned out to be terrible and required a political struggle that was much more practical than what I’m talking about. To get back to the question on politicians, I do think that the political on that level of setting up the regulation of the body, of the corporate bodies, is really what the problem is, and whether or not that can be overthrown or changed or negotiated, is always a problem of how legislation gets organised within the people, whatever we finally mean by this. There is a real tug of war now as to whether nations will exist or whether there will emerge other forms of community. So I don’t think it’s the question of protection, but more the question of how to fight the fight.

JZ: How does technology shape/influence/inform democracy?

SG: If we understand technology as techno, as the logic of different kinds of techniques, it’s the arena around which certain kinds of democracies can emerge. I want to challenge the Frankfurt School and a lot of other leftist readings of the horrible sides of technology with respect to war and bombs. I think that there is a kind of logic to getting on a skid, and I don’t necessarily need to say that that is the logic of capitalism. I do think that tools like acids can be used. The question is, who is to use these tools? Who is going to control the actual enfolding of the technos? The technologies in The Eight Technologies of Otherness were peculiar, they were curiosity and nomadism and skin and cruelty, but not medicine, washing machines, CD players, opera houses, these kinds of things. I think all these technologies can free our brain, but they are often seen as a bogey man coming, so everybody should hide or give up. We should rather take them and play, which to me is a profoundly political act, in a radical and a feminist sense. It is also an aesthetic act, and a new naming of a different kind of democracy. Democracies that I hope will emerge are not the ones we have envisioned right now. These are all modern forms of democracy which will fall as equally hard as the liberal structures that have set them up. We are the breakthrough of an age which is as profoundly different, as I said earlier, as capitalism was to feudalism. And the feudalistic structures fell, as Victor Hugo said, as the architecture falls before the printing press. So, hopefully, will the kinds of democracy that we understand in the modernist sense, as well as fascism, fall as well. That requires dreaming, making certain institutions permanent, and not being too complaisant.

JZ: In your essay ‘Curiosity’ you write that ‘the democratic world towards which we strive and wish to partake, continually, happily, and in perpetuity, just does not seem to be quite "here", at least, not yet.’ Does this ‘not yet’ imply the possibility of its arrival, or were you rather thinking about the constant deferral of its arrival, something like Derrida’s ‘democracy to come’, which can never just ‘come’?