Long Sunday

appropriate background music

If current predictions hold, Republicans will need appropriate background music this coming Tuesday to help them emote in a way consonate with their new status. I would like to suggest the well-loved Albinoni Adagio in G Minor, for Organ and Strings. Turn on the TV, leave off the volume, and watch election returns with that in the background.

But what about other voters who are not Republicans? And even some Republicans who have decided the Bush Presidency has written checks its competence can't cash? Don't they need background music?

The line between the abroad and at home ...

President Bush seized this unprecedented power on the very same day that he signed the equally odious Military Commissions Act of 2006. In a sense, the two laws complement one another. One allows for torture and detention abroad, while the other seeks to enforce acquiescence at home, preparing to order the military onto the streets of America. [+]

Where is the border?

Profile uncertain

Well, since Genet has been looking over Long Sunday of late (by which I mean the picture, fleetingly taking the place of the banner graphic above), here is the the short text eventually published as the first piece in Genet’s L’Ennemi Déclaré: Textes et Entretiens:

J.G. seeks, or is searching for, or would like to discover, never to uncover him, the delicious enemy, quite disarmed, whose equilibrium is unstable, profile uncertain, face inadmissible, the enemy broken by a breath of air, the already humiliated slave, ready to throw himself out the window at the least sign, the defeated enemy: blind, deaf, mute. With no arms, no legs, no stomach, no heart, no sex, no head, all told a complete enemy, already bearing all the marks of my bestiality that now need never be used (too lazy anyway). I want the total enemy, with immeasurable and spontaneous hatred for me, but also the subjugated enemy, defeated by me before he even knows me. Not to be reconciled with me, in any case. No friends. Above all, no friends: a declared enemy, but not a tortured one. Clean, faultless. What are his colors? From a green as tender as a cherry to an effervescent violet. His size? Between the two of us, he presents himself to me man to man. No friends. I seek an inadequate enemy, one who comes to capitulate. I will come at him with all that I can muster: whacks, slaps, kicks, I will feed him to starving foxes, make him eat English food, attend the House of Lords, be received at Buckingham Palace, fuck Prince Phillip, and be fucked by him, live for a month in London, dress like me, sleep in place of me, live in place of me: I seek the declared enemy.

Jonathan Cook: How I found myself with the Islamic Fascists

Here is an excerpt from Jonathan Cook's article in CounterPunch: "America's Best Political Newsletter". I agree with him. I suspect that Israel's atttacks on Lebanon, and US support for them, have more to do with Iran than Hizbollah. The Bush administration has implicitly admitted as much, emphasizing that they want to see a new situation, a change in the status quo in the Middle East.

It's difficult to see what change might mean other than constant war, chaos, and turmoil. But, it's easy to understand how they benefit from this: profits for defense and related industries; fear, anxiety, and a desire for protection and order at home. On the ground, it's a different story. I spoke with a colleague today whose brother just returned from Iraq. Rather than describing 'insurgents' as rag-tagged or crazed, he encountered a well armed, disciplined, and organized set of fighters. So, US troops would 'secure' a town, but the minute they would leave, a counter force would move in. The game was one of endless repetition, endless back and forth. And, American weaponry was stunning, amazingly high tech and functional. The deal is that the even with the weapons, the war can't be won. The weaponry just prolongs the endless engagement with a skilled opponent that knows when to retreat and when to attack.

Likewise, I am suspicious of the entanglements of the language of terror and terroism. I suspect that we will have more 'foiled plots' (2-3 before November) that seek to make us fearful of basic household items, such as liguids and gels, that make us afraid of traveling, that make us afraid of our neighbors, that make us hate strangers. Excitements and exacerbations of this so-called war on terror may cathect more Americans to Israel, making them feel like victims, making them deny their own, our own, complicity in aggression. Israel is destroying a democratic society as it fights what is too easily spun in terms of a war on terror. 

As we approach the fifth official anniversary of the "war on terror", the foiled UK "terror plot" has neatly provided George W Bush, the "leader of the free world", with a chance to remind us of our fight against the "Islamic fascists". But what if the war on terror is not really about separating the good guys from the bad guys, but about deciding what a good guy can be allowed to say and think?

The Enemy Among Us

In our "Post 9/11" world, the enemy is diffuse, using our "freedoms" against us in order to threaten our safety and undermine our way of life.  This is why the New York Times must be stopped!

Continuation, continuation

1. In a recent lecture entitled ‘War as Politics, Politics as War’, Etienne Balibar elegantly locates the central aporia of Clausewitz’s On War: the factor that led to that text remaining unfinished and, to its author’s mind, radically in need of revision. The problem lies in the ‘continuation’ that inhabits the famous definition of war as ‘the continuation of politics by other means’. There is a certain quarantining of politics that occurs here, as if politics remains ‘the logic’ and war ‘the instrument’. But Clausewitz’s formulation can also be read as a warning that ‘the violent means of war remain political means only if their own consequences and, again, retroactive effects on those who use them, their own “logic” do not escape the political rationality or subvert it’. And, with this possibility, there emerges a certain doubling in the definition of war.

What seems to be the case is that war, with respect to politics, has to be considered twice, from two different angles. It is not the whole of politics (since politics has other procedures than war, equally necessary), but it concerns and affects the essence of politics, which is revealed and, practically, determined by the ways in which it recurs to war, and the consequences on politics itself of the political use of the violent means of war. Certainly what Clausewitz wants to avoid (and we will see that it is not without difficulties, and that the question keeps haunting his successors) is to assert that recurring to war is the essence of politics, that the use of the violent means of war, with its logical and existential implications (such as the necessity to designate one or several “enemies”), defines the concept of the political, which in turn can lead to the reversal of the initial statement (namely that “politics is the continuation”, or the “consequence” of war). But Clausewitz wants (or needs) to be able to make the question of the use of war as an “instrument”, and the question of the converse effects of this use upon politics itself its crucial characteristic.

For Balibar, what is, for Clausewitz, an undesirable threat, namely, that politics might become the continuation of war, becomes legible only if considered alongside another three axioms that are central to Clausewitz’s argument: the strategic superiority of defence over attack, the distinction between limited and absolute war, and the primacy of moral over strategic factors in the history of wars. Each of these propositions must be read as supporting and qualifying the others but, both individually and in unison, they pivot on an ambivalence by which the ‘politicization’ of war threatens the rationality of politics. Clausewitz’s dilemma derives from his insistence that, at least in modern times, all wars must take the form of national and therefore nationalistic wars. This poses the problem of how to control the new popular power that emerged with modernity, requiring the state to permanently run ahead of its people’s passions. As Balibar puts it, Clausewitz faced ‘the military or strategic equivalent of the political problem faced by national states in general: how to “institutionalize the insurrection”, or harness the multitude’.

Schmitt, at a tangent

What follows are fragments, with some modification, pulled from notes for a longer study on Lucretius, which explains the Latin turns and preoccupations – they barely amount to a reading of Schmitt’s “The Theory of the Partisan”, from which my attention kept veering.

Carl Schmitt is not, I think, the 20th century’s most persistent philosopher of the political but of the mos maiorum – which is to say, politics conceived as the inheritance, codification and preservation of a ‘way of life’. In Schmitt’s writings, as in Lucretius’s time, the mos maiorum ascends to conceptual reverence in the midst of and as a symptom of its crisis.

The Becoming-Partisan of Thought: Fragments on Schmitt and Deleuze/Guattari

(The following is a guest post by Anthony Paul Smith, a contributor to The Weblog.)

First, let me voice my thanks to the powers that be at Long Sunday for allowing me to participate in this event. Reading Schmitt for the first time a few months ago (Political Theology) I had the feeling of aporia, that this was a thinker who causes a pause and then a speeding up of thought if one thinks first with and then past him. I’ve been working my way through Deleuze and Guattari as of late for a variety of projects and Schmitt’s thought kept creeping into my thoughts on their philosophy. I’ve presented some fragments here, as I lack a full picture of the problem currently, that I hope will be interesting for the symposium.

Deleuze and Guattari are famous for making thought political. For attempting bring attention to thought as it was already political. Following the many failures and weaknesses of commentary on Deleuze and Guattari this is usually taken to mean something carrying with it a moral goodness. Deleuze and Guattari resist stratification! Vive le différance! Becomings! The Body without Organs is magic! But it seems that this is preciously what politics is not. Schmitt’s thesis on the political is that it is the distinguishing between friend and enemy; this is the political project par excellence. The political is a stratification and that goes for the micropolitical.  Here I realize my reading may be contested and is not standard in the blogosphere, but let it be said that Deleuze and Guattari in their collaborative work show that the micropolitical is not resistance qua resistance as most people tend to suggest in blog commentary. Rather, the micropolitical is a site where one can resist at a ‘molecular’ level just as fascisms arise out of the micropolitical happenings within macropolitics (and this is why Goodchild’s attempt to create a transformer to wield the power of Deleuze and Guattari thought is appropriate). (Let it be noted that Guattari is less explicit about this in his singular work.) Micropolitics and macropolitics are not a moral binary and they tend to fall into one in the hands of socialists, anarchists, and communists (among whom I count myself).

On Schmitt's "Theory of the Partisan"

(The following is a guest post by Luke Mergner, author of the weblog The Decline.)

The Partisan appears immediately relevant to analysis of the Bush Adminstration’s prosecution of the “Global War on Terror” [sic].  For example, William Scheuerman recently published an article (pdf) in Constellations drawing the parallels from Schmitt to Abu Ghraib.

Multi-culti

An excerpt from George Caffentzis's "Acts of God and Enclosures in New Orleans" (Mute, 2:2):

the contemporary model for managing the working class in disasters is increasingly warfare. Workers in a disaster are increasingly being turned first into right-less beings and then, when they resist, they become the ‘enemy’. In this logic, the refugee quickly turns into the terrorist. [...]

The US military and not Katrina performed the role required in every enclosure: the violent force that separated and continues to separate workers from their community of support and subsistence. True, the soldiers and sailors did save some New Orleanians from the floods at first, but their major long-term role is to be the bailiffs of the enclosures. For the object of the New Orleans enclosures is the opposite of the local ruling class’s goal in the 1927 flood. Instead of fixing black workers to the soil (a plan which ultimately failed, since many of them fled north in the 1930s), the aim now is to remove en masse a black working class population that was ‘too expensive’ and antagonistic to reproduce on site and scatter them throughout the South, further undermining already low wage levels there by intensifying the competition between documented black citizens and undocumented Hispanic immigrants at the bottom of the labour market.

From Mute's Dis-Integrating Multiculturalism edition, of which there are other articles of interest, including Benedict Seymour's "Free Speech as Shibboleth: On the Danish Cartoons", Mathew Hyland's "Proud Scum - The Spectre of the Ingrate", Eric Krebbers' "From Forced Multiculturalism to Forced Integration", and more.