Spike Lee’s Inside Man is about a bank robbery, and one of the many twists in the film is that the
chairman of the bank being robbed, Arthur Case (Christopher Plummer) derived his initial wealth from collaboration with the Nazis during the war. These tainted beginnings are ones which apparently continue to haunt him throughout his life—leading him, on the one hand, to devote himself to philanthropy and humanitarianism in an attempt to assuage his guilt and, on the other hand, to keep the physical evidence of his wartime complicity locked away in a secret safe deposit box in the main branch of the bank. The contents of that safe deposit box, in turn, become a crucial fulcrum point around which revolve questions of the legitimacy of each of the principle players in the drama—including not only bank chairman Case and the head robber (Clive Owen), but also the principle detective (Denzel Washington) assigned to negotiate with the bank robbers, as well as the mysterious power broker (Jodie Foster) hired by Case to try to protect his interests.
The central question posed by Spike Lee’s film, therefore, is an ethical one—in effect, the film asks whether there are situations in which the ethics of robbing a bank might supercede those of founding and running the bank in the first place. In framing in the film in this way, Lee (or script-writer Russell Gewirtz) may have been inspired by Brecht’s famous rhetorical question in The Three-Penny Opera: “What is the robbery of a bank compared to the founding of a bank?”
Zizek is also quite fond of this Brechtian passage, citing it in Sublime Object of Ideology and other texts, and elaborating its implications in perhaps greatest detail in For They Know Not What They Do, where he argues, with reference to Blaise Pascal, that
“At the beginning” of the law, there is a certain “outlaw,” a certain Real of violence which coincides with the act itself of the establishment of the reign of law: the ultimate truth about the reign of law is that of an usurpation, and all classical politico-philosophical thought rests on the disavowal of this violent act of foundation. The illegitimate violence by which law sustains itself must be concealed at any price, because this concealment is the positive condition of the functioning of law: it functions in so far as its subjects are deceived, in so far as they experience the authority of law as “authentic and eternal” and overlook “the truth about the usurpation.”
“Law,” under this reading, is not only constitutionally predicated on its very antithesis (“illegitimate violence”), but furthermore that same legal order relies on a process of collective repression and disavowal of these origins for its very legitimacy. As Zizek argues (with reference to Kant) later in the same discussion, “The absolute, self-referential crime which assumes the form of its opposite describes the very genesis of Law which is “forgotten” (repressed) the moment the reign of law is established.”
This ethical standoff in Inside Man between the bank chairman with a Nazi past and the possibly progressive bank robber (not to mention the police negotiator who is himself under suspicion of embezzling money, and the mysterious power broker who may or may not be willing to sell her soul to the highest bidder), in turn, brings us to the case of political theorist Carl Schmitt (the subject of a virtual symposium at Long Sunday this week).
Like the Inside Man’s bank chairman Arthur Case, Carl Schmitt has a legacy of Nazi complicity, having joined the Nazi party in 1933 (the same year he became professor at the university of Berlin) and retaining both his professorship and his party membership until the end of the war. Schmitt never formally disavowed his Nazi sympathies, and his Nazi past has continued to provide the lens through which many perceive his work—although, ironically, as Craig more observes in his useful introduction, “Schmitt, in English at least, has largely been a phenomenon of the left.”
What interests me here is the trajectory from Schmitt’s theorization of the notion of a “state of exception” in the early 1920s, to his later elaboration of a concept of the “partisan” in the early 1960s. The early Schmitt describes favorably the concept of a juridical “state of exception,” which is to say the ability of an executive power to suspend indefinitely the existing legal order (as, for instance, in the event of a national emergency). The later Schmitt, meanwhile, was attracted to the notion of the partisan—essentially guerrilla forces fighting an illegitimate occupation of their homeland. Both of these concepts point to a liminal zone between the rule of law, on the one hand, and its deliberate opposition or subversion, on the other.
In the aptly-titled State of Exception, Giorgio Agamben notes that the “theory of a state of exception” made “a first, isolated appearance” in Schmitt’s Dictatorship (1921), and was then elaborated in more detail in his Political Theology from the following year, where Schmitt defines the sovereign as “he who decides on the state of exception.” Schmitt wrote these two texts immediately following World War I which, Agamben notes, “coincided with a permanent state of exception in the majority of the warring countries.” More specifically, Schmitt was writing in the shadow of the recently established (in 1919) Weimar Constitution, which granted the president the ability to declare a “state of exception.” The most (in)famous invocation of this legal clause, of course, came a decade later when Hitler, upon taking power, immediately proceeded to suspend the articles of the Weimar Constitution concerning personal liberties, a suspension which he never lifted. In spite of this rather dubious pedigree, Agamben nevertheless stresses that this codified possibility of a state of exception is not an anarchic antithesis to the legal juridical order, but rather occupies a crucial liminal zone between legality and anarchy:
In truth, the state of exception is neither external nor internal to the juridical order, and the problem of defining it concerns precisely a threshold, or a zone of indifference, where inside and outside do not exclude each other but rather blur with one another. The suspension of the norm does not mean its abolition, and the zone of anomie that is establishes is not (or at least claims not to be) unrelated to the juridical order [translation slightly modified].
Schmitt returns to this question of the relationship between legitimate power and a sort of codified illegitimacy more than forty years later in “The Theory of the Partisan.” In this essay, Schmitt develops the notion of the “partisan,” or guerrilla fighter, for which he specifies four key characteristics: that they be a) “irregular fighters” possessed of b) “increased mobility” in active combat,” combined with c) “intense political commitment” and d) a “tellurian” attachment to “a patch of earth to which [they have] an autochthonic relation.” Schmitt notes that the existence of these sorts of fighters presents a conundrum for well-meaning international codes such as the Geneva Conventions. International law has different rules for how soldiers and civilians should be treated in combat, but partisans subvert these very distinctions, being “irregular” fighters who carry arms while often disguised as civilians.
Schmitt’s notions of a “state of exception” and of “the partisan” can, therefore, be seen as mirror images of each other, in the sense that they both involve a deliberate suspension of established juridical norms—with the former relating to the super-empowered sovereign, and the latter to the disempowered subaltern. In “Theory of the Partisan,” Schmitt flirts with the possibility of bringing these two concepts into dialogue with each other when he notes that Rolf Schroers, in his Der Partisan (published in 1961, the year before Schmitt’s own “partisan” lectures) “makes the illegal resistance fighter and underground activist the prototype of the partisan.” Schmitt, however, turns out to be critical of this move, noting that Schroers is inspired here by the “particular intra-German situations of the Hitler period,” but is quite critical of this “reinterpretation”:
Irregularity is substituted with illegality, and military battle by resistance. As I see it, this involves a fundamental re-interpretation of the partisan of the national wars of independence, which misunderstands that even the revolutionizing of war does not disrupt the military connection between regular army and irregular fighters.
I must admit I do not quite grasp the distinction which Schmitt is drawing here, and cannot help but wonder whether Schmitt’s abrupt critique of the “illegality” of Schroers’ anti-Nazi resistance fighter (after all, isn’t the concept of the partisan itself explicitly grounded on a blurring or suspension of operative legal frameworks), and his resulting reluctance to grant them the status of true “partisans,” is not perhaps a symptom of Schmitt’s own residual Nazi sympathies?
A more immediate example of the interconnections between a sovereign “state of exception” and a subaltern “partisan” can be seen in the “military order” issued by Bush on November 13, 2001, authorizing the “indefinite detention” of noncitizens suspected of being involved in terrorist activities. This order is significant because it granted the executive branch essentially unlimited powers to detain suspected terrorists while accoording them none of the rights which would otherwise have had had they been either citizens, foreign nationals, enemy soldiers, etc. They are granted no official legal remedy, no chance to challenge the accusations against them, and, in many cases, they have yet to be charged with a crime.
Schmitt, of course, might argue that these “enemy combatants” are not true partisans in his specific use of the term, (among other reasons, because they are not “tellurian” in their goals), the significance of this distinction nevertheless blurs when we consider the case, for instance, of the 22 Chinese Uygurs who were swept up in Afghanistan following 9/11 and have been held without formal charges in Guantánamo Bay ever since. Part of the difficulty is that the US, apparently, cleared them for release some time ago, but is neither willing to allow them to settle in the US, nor is willing to return them to China--on the grounds that there they would be viewed as partisans (in the precise Schmittian sense) of the Uygur’s long-standing struggle for independence, and possibly “tortured or executed.” Viewed as “enemy combatants” by the US government, the Uygurs continue to be held without charges under a post-9/11 “state of exception” prerogative precisely because the US fears that the will be persecuted as actual “partisans” should they be returned to China.
Schmitt’s “Theory of the Partisan” was first presented in two lectures in Spain in 1962, which were then published by the University of Saragossa at the end of 1962, and in Germany in 1963 (coinciding with the republication of his Concept of the Political from 1932). The second edition of “Theory of the Partisan” (and the basis of the Telos translation), meanwhile, came out in 1975, and coincided with two events which cast an interesting light on the trajectory from Schmitt’s theoretization of a “state of exception,” to his later interest in a “theory of the partisan.”
First, in Spain (where Schmitt delivered the original “partisan” lectures) Francisco Franco passed away in November of 1975, after having led Spain in a dictatorial “state of exception” lasting nearly half a century. Meanwhile, in China, Chairman Mao Zedong (who would pass away in September of 1976, less than 10 months after Franco) was simultaneously initiating a national movement to “criticize” the Ming dynasty novel The Water Margin 水浒传.This novel, together with the circumstances of the 1975 campaign, in turn, are quite relevant to this question of the relationship between dictatorial power, on the one hand, and partisan resistance, on the other.
The Water Margin is a tale of 108 bandits at the end of the Northern Song (13th century), most of whom have been exiled from their communities on account of their crimes or alleged crimes, and who congregate together into an informal bandit community in the Liangshan marsh region. Originally located on the margins of society, and bound by no law other than loyalty to each other, they eventually, (in one of the versions of the novel) figuratively redeem themselves by allying with the emperor and helping to quash an invasion from the North.
It is well-known that the early Mao was quite fond of The Water Margin, presumably both on account of its narrative appeal, but also because it provided an useful model for communist Red Army during the first couple of decades following its founding in 1927--during time it was essentially an illegal, underground organization reliant on guerrilla tactics. By the late-1960s, however, Mao’s Cultural Revolution (1966-76) had already spiraled out of control, with the youthful Red Guards (deputized by Mao to “destroy the four olds,” seek out Rightists, and generally carry on the revolution) becoming increasingly unmanageable. By 1969 the bulk of the unrest had been quelled, with many of the Red Guards being sent to down to the country-side. The Cultural Revolution, nevertheless, officially continued for another seven years (until 1976), and one of Mao's concerns in 1975 was how the legacy of the Red Guards would be perceived--whether they would be regarded (not entirely unreasonably) as insurrectionists against the Maoist government itself, rather than as simply its loyal deputies. The irony here, of course, is that Mao initially came to power riding on a archetypal partisan insurrection (Schmitt states that we “find the name of Mao Zedong” at the beginning of “an essentially new stage of partisanship”), proceeded to assume essentially dictatorial power through a de facto “state of exception,” mobilized the Red Guards in the mid 1960s in an attempt to reassert his own hold on power, and then was forced to reevaluate his own earlier model of partisan insurrection found in The Water Margin when the Red guards proved to be too insurrectionary.
I will conclude these remarks by returning to the trope of bank robbery with which I began. Jodi, in
response to a comment from Nate on issues of self-interest in Schmitt’s notion of the partisan, remarks that “defending the homeland, say, is not the same as robbing a bank.” “However,” Jodi continues, “one might imagine robbing the bank as a way to get the funds to defend the homeland or as a way to undercut the occupation, but here again the bank robbery is not motivated by narrow self interest.” That may be the case, but what if the motivation for the robbery (as is possibly the case in Inside Man) is precisely to foreground and problematize the dynamics of self-interest at work under the original founding of the bank? What if, that is to say, the robbery is miming an act of self-interest, while in fact attempting to accomplish its precise opposite?
Much thanks for this, Carlos. An entertaining, rather suggestive read, and, will have to see the film.
As regards law-founding violence and various critiques thereof, I do wonder what you, or anyone, may make of Gillian Rose's pointed and brutal polemic (located, among other places, in Mourning Becomes the Law, pp.68-75), against all things Martin/Walter/messianic (she doesn't mention 'messianicity', but naturally lumps Derrida in there as well).
Generally, she accuses them all of "baroque melancholia" in "avoiding the work of mourning," and Derrida specifically of "combusting" Benjamin's terms "to an eschatological originary," the result of which is the mere glorification of a sort of "aberrated mourning."
In the same chapter, and at the risk of carrying on with other people's words...as blogs encourage one to do (for both better and worse), tangentially (and naturally, there's no necessary burden to respond), she also ties the question of law into those of alterity and relation, like so:
- - - - - - -
Not necessarily strictly related, this paragraph (of yours) also stood out:
I must admit I do not quite grasp the distinction which Schmitt is drawing here, and cannot help but wonder whether Schmitt’s abrupt critique of the “illegality” of Schroers’ anti-Nazi resistance fighter (after all, isn’t the concept of the partisan itself explicitly grounded on a blurring or suspension of operative legal frameworks), and his resulting reluctance to grant them the status of true “partisans,” is not perhaps a symptom of Schmitt’s own residual Nazi sympathies?
So just to agree (and with John Ransom as well) that yes, it's an anteresting question...and how these definitions of "irregularity" and "illegality" are made to function. And on something of a rhetorical level too (?)
Anyway, sorry to burden the readability of your post with this, but especially in light of previous (ongoing) discussion I thought I'd jump at the empty comments box (sign of dignity as Ray Davis may insist they are).
Cheers.
Posted by: Matt | June 14, 2006 at 01:02 PM
"I mourn, therefore I am.”
Gillian Rose cites Derrida’s (anti-)Cartesian aphorism in her introduction to Mourning Becomes the Law , and suggests that it emblematizes her contention that what Derrida (and “post-modernists” in general) mistakes for mourning actually “cannot work; it remains melancholia; it remains aberrated not inaugurated ” (64).
To illustrate her contention, Rose then develops an extended discussion of Derrida’s “Specters of Marx,” suggesting that Derrida argues that
It appears to me that Rose’s insinuation here represents a significant misreading of Derrida’s argument (Rose was apparently relying only on Derrida’s original 1993 lecture and not the final version published as Specters of Marx, and consequently includes no direct quotes from this particular text to substantiate her claims). In fact, Derrida’s entire argument is explicitly premised on using this concept of spirit as a way of avoiding the need to attribute any concrete and unitary “essence” to Marxism (and, if anything, it is Rose herself who implies that Marxism should remain inextricably linked to such essential components as “[c]lass structure, class consciousness and class struggle, the party, the laws of capitalist accumulation, the theory of value, human practical activity”).
In the passage cited by Matt, furthermore, Rose criticizes “post-modernists” for failing to recognize that
It seems to me, however, that what Rose is arguing for here is actually quite similar to the point which Derrida makes in the second part of the very same passage on mourning which Rose emblematically quotes in the introduction:
Like Rose, Derrida explicitly states here that the constitution of “my relationship to myself….” is predicated on a necessary engagement with alterity and absence.
What I find more interesting than Rose’s critique of Derrida’s failure to mourn, however, is the suggestion which immediately follows her citation with which we began:
The syntax here is rather convoluted, but basically Rose is reason (or the “reassessment of reason”?) can “complete its mourning” by “explor[ing] the boundaries of the soul, the city and the sacred.”
What does it mean to “explore the boundaries…of the city”? Rose develops this connection between mourning and (city) boundaries most evocatively in the chapter entitled, “Potter’s Field: death worked and unworked.” She opens this essay by directing our attention to “Potter’s Field” on Hart Island, off the coast of New York, which she notes has long been a burial site for “unidentified murder bodies, for paupers, and now, for the new category of destitution: those who die of AIDS in the triage wards of the city hospitals.” Rose argues that this act of extra-mural burial essentially forecloses the possibility of mourning which is essential for a new beginning:
The inverse of Rose’s attention to the “political consequences” of this act of extraterritorial burial is paralleled, meanwhile, by Bonnie Honig’s exploration of the political implications of the simultaneously transgressive and transformative potential of the foreigner, in her Democracy and the Foreigner (many thanks, Eileen, for the tip).
In her study, Honig poits that
Drawing on a range of examples, ranging from the Biblical opposition between Ruth and Orpah (as “ideal immigrant” and “bad foreigner,” respectively) to current debates over immigration in the US (model minority vs. illegal immigrant), Honig argues that this idealization of the “foreign-founder” actually goes hand-in-hand with a parallel apprehensiveness about the destabilizing potential of the foreigner:
In one interesting discussion of the Book of Ruth, furthermore, Honig draws on D.W. Winnicott’s and Eric Santner’s theories of processes of mourning, Honig argues that one of the factors responsible for this bifurcation or “good” and “bad” foreigner comes down to a question of an inability or failure to mourn effectively. In the context of the Book of Ruth , Honig argues in terms very similar to Rose’s that,
These questions, raised by Rose and Honig, of the location of death and of the transformative founder in relationship to the acknowledged boundaries of the city or community, and of the role of the mourning process in mediating or exacerbating these existing boundaries, returns us to the question of the essentially “tellurian” (territory-based) quality of Schmitt’s “partisan.”
I will conclude by picking up on the theme of AIDS as developed by both Rose (above) and Derrida (in the passage cited at the end of my initial tangential response to Matt’s comment, and linking it back to Derrida’s twist on the famous Cartesian formula. In Notes of a Desolate Man (荒 人手记 )—novel almost precisely contemporary (1994) with both Derrida’s “”The Rhetoric of Drugs” interview (1993) as well as Rose’s essay on Potter’s Field (undated, but written between 1992 and 1995)—Taiwan author Zhu Tianwen’s (朱天文 ) narrates her protagonist’s struggle to recover from the death from AIDS of his close friend. At the center of this mourning process, meanwhile, is her/his existentialist formulation: “I write, therefore I am. “我写故我在
Posted by: crojas | June 21, 2006 at 12:47 PM
At an angle to the discussion of mourning, but nevertheless related - Carlos, have you come across Alexander Garcia Duttmann’s Between Cultures: Tensions in the Struggle for Recognition? Some interesting discussion there on AIDS, mourning and politics.
Posted by: s0metim3s | June 22, 2006 at 12:16 AM
Thanks for this Angela. I actually haven't read Between Cultures, but will definitely look it up.
Posted by: crojas | June 22, 2006 at 05:54 AM
Thank you, Carlos.
Really wonderful, these untimely conversations, and ellipses. Yes, I would venture you are right, that Rose is much closer to Derrida (and Derrida to Athens) than either she or he is willing sometimes to admit (though this would take some time and work to demonstrate; and to my knowledge, nobody has responded–at least not directly...-in the manner her beautiful polemic might deserve).
From ingesting ashes to eating books (from tragedy to comedy?) indeed..
(And what is 'community' without 'cosmopolitanism'? Impossible mourning without dignity of buildings, or architecture as more than prison-house, without some kind of faith..)
Posted by: Matt | June 22, 2006 at 09:26 AM
Matt, many thanks for this.
Speaking of mourning, Rose’s critique of Derrida reminds me, anachronistically (Rose: “if ‘anachronism’ may be taken to mean the relationship between the time one nominally inhabits and the actuality of any other, then is not the future the supreme anachronism?”), of the now-infamous New York Times obituary written upon Derrida’s death, and how it seemed to be parodying a dated caricature of Derrida. Four of the five quoted critiques of Derrida in that text, for instance, were from the early 1990s, which is to say a full decade before his death in 2004. One struck me as particularly curious: Mitchell Stephens, a journalism professor at New York University (and who is cited in three separate paragraphs of the NYTimes obituary, although he has no discernible expertise on Derrida) is quoted as having written in a 1994 New York Times Magazine article that, “Many otherwise unmalicious people have in fact been guilty of wishing for deconstruction's demise -- if only to relieve themselves of the burden of trying to understand it.''
While at some levels this comes across as a simple screed, at the same time it touches on a rather fundamental problem of how to mourn and how to commemorate—how to reconcile the desire to give rhetorical closure to someone’s life with the contrary need to allow one’s understanding of them to continue to evolve. Indeed, I would argue that part of the problem with both Rose’s and Spivak’s critiques of Specters of Marx is that they are attempting to read this text through a prism of preexisting assumptions based on their understanding of the earlier Marx (i.e., effectively memorializing him before his time), rather than being open to the ways in which this new text (and others from the period) might challenge some of those expectations.
Posted by: crojas | June 23, 2006 at 04:01 PM
(sorry, I meant "their understanding of the earlier Derrida...")
Posted by: crojas | June 23, 2006 at 06:20 PM