Buddy Politics: From the Compulsion to Identity to the Laughter of Unregulated Experience

Ivo Ritzer engages with the ‘interracial’ pairings of stars in what he terms the aesthetics of ‘buddy politics.’ Ritzer argues that whereas identitarianism disrupts solidarity and creates symbolic hierarchies by romanticizing weakness, buddy politics establishes relations that enable people to meet as equals. And whereas identitarism aims to feel sorry for the minor and oppressed, buddy politics ensures that nobody has to become minor and oppressed in the first place. On the one hand, Ritzer demonstrates that in the context of buddy politics laughter opens up space for a play with the boundaries of identity, tied to the discourses of ‘interracial’ coupling that lie at the heart of the stars’ gendered and racialized bodies. On the other hand, Ritzer shows how the concept of non-identity is not to be mistaken for a poststructuralist fetishization of pure immediacy and difference, but rather hints at the reconciliation between the particular and the general, without sacrificing the former’s irreducible qualities to the latter’s redeeming potential. Finally, Ritzer draws on Theodor W. Adorno’s notion of ‘unregulated experience’ to stress laughter in the context of non-conformist subjectivity. Paraphrasing Negative Dialectics, buddy politics appears the most serious of things, but then again it is not all that serious.