The Politics of Trauma #8: Politics After 9/11 (continued)

For Baudrillard, what took place on 9/11 was not just “another” trauma.  In an important sense it was, so to speak, trauma itself that took place.  The trauma was that there could still, even now, be such trauma at all:  That was the trauma.  That still, in this epoch of the “global world order,” a true event could happen, was what was so shocking.  The epoch of the going global of “order” itself, ushered in with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of “really existing socialism,” which was supposed to have signaled the end of the Cold War in the victory of  “democracy” over Ronald Reagan’s hated “evil empire,” and therewith the dawning of the New World Order and the Pax Americana that Fukuyama would soon proclaim to be the glorious fulfillment and, therefore, end of history—that there could still occur, in this epoch of the going global of “order” itself, such shocking dis-order:  that was what was most truly and fully traumatic and event-ful about “9/11.”

“When it comes to world events,” Baudrillard wrote sarcastically shortly after 9/11, in the opening line of “The Spirit of Terrorism” in the book by that same name (page 3), “we had seen quite a few.”  He then gives the death of Princess Diana and the World Cup of soccer as examples of the sorts of pseudo-events that occurred during the decade preceding the attacks on the Twin Towers, pseudo-events the images of which were broadcast worldwide in the mass media as the real thing, and accepted as such in the popular imagination.  In addition, there were “violent, real events, from wars right through to genocides,” images of which were also broadcast worldwide.   However, it is a very different matter “when it comes to symbolic events on a world scale—that is to say not just events that gain worldwide coverage,” as so often did both such pseudo-events as World Cup soccer competitions and such real ones as the wars in the former Yugoslavia or the mass-murder in Rwanda, “but events that represent a setback for globalization itself.”  Such events are “world-events” not just because they are broadcast “live” worldwide in “real time” while they are happening–which is what Habermas, for one, pointed to as distinctive about 9/11, making it “the first world-event” in that sense.  Rather, what Baudrillard means are events that, far more importantly, happen to the newly declared “one world” itself, the “globe” of globalization.  World-events in that sense are events that break into that supposedly global world and break it apart:  a trauma to the “world” itself, in effect.  During the 1990’s we had plenty of world-events in the sense that the death of Princess Diana was a world-event, but of world-events in the sense that interests Baudrillard, “we had had none.”  Indeed, with regard to any such genuine worldwide events, Baurdillard writes that “[t]hroughout the stagnation of the 1990’s, events were ‘on strike’ (as the Argentinian writer Macedonio Fernandez put it).”

Before proceeding any further with Baudrillard, it is worth noting that the idea that “events” somehow went out “on strike,” as he puts it, during the 1990’s is an idea he shares with Slavoj Žižek.  In his own analysis of 9/11 not long after that day, an analysis published in Welcome to the Desert of the Real:  Five Essays on September 11 and Related Dates (London and New York:  Verso, 2002), the latter draws an unexpected comparison between the Cuba of the experiment in socialism under Castro, on the one hand, and “Western ‘postindustrial’ societies” that trumpet the triumph of the globalization of capitalism and the democracy with which that capitalism is supposed to be yoked, on the other.  First Žižek notes (pages 6-7) how, “[m]aking  virtue out of necessity,” the necessity created by the long-standing American-imposed embargo against it, Cuba “heroically continues to defy the capitalist logic of planned obsolescence” insofar as “many of the products used there are, in the West, treated as waste—not only the proverbial 1950s American cars, which magically still function, but even dozens of Canadian yellow school buses (with old painted inscriptions in French or English, still completely legible), probably given as a present to Cuba and used there for public transport.”  From that observation, Žižek then goes on to remark that “[t]hus we have the paradox that, in the frantic era of global capitalism, the main result of the revolution is to bring social dynamics to a standstill—the price to be paid for exclusion from the global capitalist network.”  Then he makes the comparison mentioned above:  “Here we encounter a strange symmetry between Cuba and Western ‘postindustrial’ societies:  in both cases, the frantic mobilization conceals a more fundamental immobility.  In Cuba, revolutionary mobilization conceals social stasis; in the developed West, frantic social activity conceals the basic sameness of global capitalism, the absence of an Event . . .” (ellipsis in the original, but I have added the emphasis).

Indeed, as both Baudrillard and Žižek suggest, the standardization of culture and the universalization of the system of general equivalencies that are inherent to globalization place the avoidance of trauma–and, therewith, of any true events–at the very heart of the whole process.  Paradoxically, the vested interest of the very “world” that goes worldwide or global with the triumph, at the end of the Cold War, of everything that is symbolized under the name “America,” lies in keeping the very events that allow a world to occur in the first place—allow world itself “to world,” as Heidegger likes to put it—from happening.   Thus, it is far from accidental that just when order itself goes global after the end of the Cold War, events as such “go on strike,” to return to Baudrillard and his way of putting the point.

With the events of 9/11/01, “the strike is over,” according to Baudrillard (pages 3-4):  “Events are not on strike any more.  With the attacks on the World Trade Center in New York, we might even be said to have before us the absolute event, the ‘mother’ of all events, the pure event uniting within itself all the events that have never taken place.”  Moreover, since “fundamentalism” of whatever stripe, as well as the “terrorism” such fundamentalism can engender, are themselves not throwbacks to some supposedly pure condition that existed prior to all the processes tied up under the idea of “globalization,” but are themselves, rather, products of those very processes, inseparable from the very globalization of “Western values” against which fundamentalists take themselves to be resisting, the “pure event,” “’mother’ of all events,” that came to be known as “9/11” was no “class of civilizations,” as Samuel Huntington P. Huntington famously dubbed it.  Thus, Baurdillard writes a few pages later (pages 11-12)–in a passage that is reminiscent of Derrida’s analysis of 9/11, in his interview with Borradori, in terms of “autoimmune” processes–that what is truly brought into issue by 9/11 is not

a clash of civilizations or religions, and it reaches far beyond Islam and America, on which efforts are being made to focus the conflict in order to create the delusion of a visible confrontation and a solution based on force.  There is, indeed, a fundamental antagonism here, but one which points past the spectre of America (which is, perhaps, the epicenter, but in no sense the sole embodiment of globalization), and the spectre of Islam (which is not the embodiment of terrorism either), to triumphant globalization battling against itself.  In this sense, we can indeed speak of a world war—not the Third World War, but the Fourth and the only really global one, since what is at stake is globalization itself.  The first two world wars corresponded to the classical image of war.  The first ended the supremacy of Europe and the colonial era.  The second put an end to Nazism.  The third, which has indeed taken place, in the form of cold war and deterrence, put an end to Communism.  With each succeeding war, we have moved further towards a single world order.  Today that order, which has virtually reached its culmination, finds itself grappling with the antagonistic forces scattered throughout the very heartlands of the global, in all the current convulsions. A fractal war of all cells, all singularities, revolting in the form of antibodies.  A confrontation so impossible to pin down that the idea of war has to be rescued from time to time by spectacular set-pieces, such as the [first] Gulf War or the war in Afghanistan.  But the Fourth World War is elsewhere.  It is what haunts every world order, all hegemonic domination—if Islam dominated the world, terrorism would rise against Islam, for it is the world, the globe itself, which resists globalization.

What Baudrillard calls the Fourth World War is actually the first and only true world war, in the sense that it is only now that for the first time ever the very issue is raised of whether there will be any genuine world at all, and not just the simulacrum of a world that is manifest in the globe of globalization.  In addition, the war at issue is not between nations or nation-states at all any longer.  It is, rather, a war that cuts across all divisions between nations and states, cutting every nation and state right down the middle.  It is, then, a worldwide civil war, in exactly the sense that is at issue for Giorgio Agamben in Homo Sacre:  Sovereign Power and Bare Life (translated by Daniel Heller-Roazen [Stanford, California:  Stanford University Press, 1998]) when he writes (page 180) of the long “civil war that divides the peoples and the cities of the earth.”  Agamben characterizes that civil war, which rages everywhere, as one between the People and the people.  That is, the civil war at issue for Agamben is that between those who can assert their rights as citizens and, therefore, as recognized members of the state or nation (the People), on the one hand, and those who, although they are subject to the state and its laws, do not count as citizens with the standing to assert their rights–what Jacques Rancière (whom Agamben does not cite, at least in Homo Sacre) calls “the part of no part,” which is his definition, much like Agamben’s own, of the demos (“people”) of democracy (“rule by the demos”)—on the other.  Agamben gives this lucid summary (pages 176-177):

Every interpretation of the political meaning of the term “people” must begin with the singular fact that in modern European languages, “people” also [that is, in addiction to the People, a sense he will explain in just a moment, as we shall see] always indicates the poor, the disinherited, and the excluded.  One term thus names both the constitutive political subject [which is what he designates by “People,” with an upper case ‘P’] and the class that is, de facto if not de jure, excluded from politics [“people,” with a lower case ‘p’].

In common speech as in political parlance, the Italiam popolo, the French peuple, the Spanish pueblo (like the corresponding adjectives popolare, populaire, popolar and the late Latin populus and popularis, from which they derive) designate both the complex of citizens as a unitary political body (as in “the Italian people” or “the people’s judge”) and the members of the lower classes (as in homme du peuple, rione populare, front populaire).  Even the English word “people,” which has a less differentiated meaning, still conserves the sense of “ordinary people” in contrast to the rich and the nobility. . . .

. . . .  Such a diffuse and constant semantic ambiguity cannot be accidental:  it must reflect an amphiboly inherent in the nature and function of the concept “people” in Western politics.  It is as if what we call “people” were in reality not a unitary subject but a dialectical oscillation between two opposite poles:  on the one hand, the set of the People as a whole political body, and on the other, the subset of the people as a fragmentary multiplicity of needy and excluded bodies’ or again, on the one hand, an inclusion that claims to be total, and on the other, an exclusion that is clearly hopeless; at one extreme, the total state of integrated and sovereign citizens, and at the other, the preserve—court of miracles or [concentration/extermination] camp—of the wretched, the oppressed, and the defeated. . . .  If one looks closely, even what Marx called “class conflict,” which occupies such a central place in his thought—though it remains substantially undefined—is nothing other than the civil war that divides every people and that will come to an end only when, in the classless society or the messianic kingdom, People and people will coincide and there will no longer be, strictly speaking, any people.

 

The Image of Sovereignty #9: The Sovereign’s Clothes (beginning)

Today, I am finally able to resume my work on a draft of “Trauma and Representation II: The Image of Sovereignty,” which I hope will become a chapter in an eventual book on trauma and philosophy. I pick up below with where I had to leave off two months ago, in my last post.

* * * * *

The Sovereign’s Clothes

“Sovereign is he who declares the exception,” writes Carl Schmitt, the important and influential right-wing legal theorist who eventually used his thought to provide the Nazi state with legal justification.  That is the famous opening line of Political Theology:  Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty, first published in Germany in 1922 (English translation by George Schwab, Chicago:  University of Chicago Press, 1985, page 5).  The exception at issue is to the ordinary norm to and in which the defining laws of the society at issue apply.  Sovereign is whomever is vested with the power to declare a “state of exception” in which there is a suspension of the basic legal principles, the fundamental laws, that in all other, non-exceptional, “natural” and “routine” conditions are always in force and never to be abrogated—such laws as are embodied in the Bill of Rights amended to the United States Constitution, including the right of habeas corpus, for example.

In Political Theology, after that opening line defining sovereignty, Schmitt immediately goes on to observe that “[o]nly this definition can do justice to a “borderline concept” as that of sovereignty.  “Contrary to the imprecise terminology that is found in popular literature,” he continues, what makes such a concept a “borderline” one is not that it is somehow “a vague concept.”  Rather, it is a borderline concept because it is a concept “pertaining to the outermost sphere.”  That is, it is a concept that fixes a border.

Because sovereignty is just such a border-setting concept, the “definition of sovereignty must therefore be associated with a borderline case and not with routine.”  That is not at all to say, however, that the border established by the assertion of sovereignty—that is, the exercise of the definitive power to decide on the exception—is itself exceptional, in the sense of only coming into play under special, rare, or exceptional circumstances.  Rather, it is the very decision that establishes the boundary between what is “inside” and what “outside” the community as such and, therefore, protected by the law.  The exception is precisely what defines what is to count as the rule.

Thus, writes Schmitt, the exception, on the power of the decision and declaration of which sovereignty itself must be defined, “is to be understood to refer to a general concept in the theory of the state, and not merely to a construct applied to any emergency degree or state of siege.”  The border that the sovereign decision establishes between routine and extraordinary conditions is what alone determines the limits of very distinction between the inside and the outside of the “nation” or “national community” as such.  As the drawing of the boundary between what is inside the nation and what is outside it, that decision is the establishment of a legal order as such.

“Like every other order,” writes Schmitt a few pages after his opening definition (page 10), “the legal order rests on a decision not on a norm.”  Indeed, in Schmitt’s way of thinking the norm itself can only be established by a decision that cuts the exceptional away from the normal.  The sovereign is whoever makes that decision with regard to any “legal order,” the very decision that establishes the norm in the first place (page 13):  “Every general norm demands a normal, everyday frame of life to which it can be factually applied and which is subjected to its regulations. . . . For a legal order to make sense, a normal situation must exist, and he is sovereign who definitely decides whether this normal situation actually exists.”

Three-fourths of a century after Schmitt, contemporary Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben attempted critically to come to grips with Schmitt’s analysis of the concept of sovereignty, and to combine that analysis with insights from Foucault.   Above all in two books–Homo Sacer:  Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Stanford, CA:  Stanford University Press, 1998, translated by Daniel Heller-Roazen) and its sequel, State of Exception (Chicago and London:  University of Chicago Press, 2005, translated by Kevin Attell)—Agamben combines elements from those two earlier thinkers to develop his own analysis of sovereignty.

From Foucault Agamben takes the notion of “biopower,” power exercised directly over life itself, rather than only indirectly through the power over death, that is, the power to take life, the power to kill.  According to Foucault, the difference between the “classical,” monarchical sovereignty and sovereignty in a distinctively modern sense, lies precisely in the transition form sovereignty as the power over death, the power to take life,  to sovereignty as power exercised directly over life itself, which Foucault calls biopower.   Agamben and others also develop that Foucauldian notion into that of “biopolitics,” which would be the “politics” that corresponds to sovereignty as the exercise of such “biopower.”

With Schmitt, Agamben defines modern sovereignty as the power to draw the line between what falls under the norm–and therefore under the shelter of the law–and what falls outside the norm–and therefore also outside that shelter.  Going beyond Schmitt, however, Agamben argues that, although sovereignty as Schmitt defines it may really come into its own only in the modern period, it grows from a seed planted long before modernity.  That was the seed planted by the ancient Greeks, when they distinguished between bios, or life in the fully human sense–such as can be captured in “biographies”:  literally, “life-writings”–on the one hand, and zoe, or life in the purely “zoological” sense, which Agamben calls “bare life,” on the other.

In ancient Greek thought, most especially as formulated in Aristotle, bios, life in the supposedly fully human sense, is possible only within the polis, the political community of norm and law.  In contrast, zoe is “bare” life, in the sense of a minimum where there is “just” life, life “and no more,” the “mere” life human beings share with animals and even plants.  It is to life in that minimal, less-than-human sense that those denied any place within the polis would be reduced, according to this Greek line of thought.

The sovereign as such, Agamben argues, is vested with the power to pronounce the ban whereby someone is cast out of the community and marked accordingly.  Whoever is placed under such a ban and thus cast out of the community, is also thereby cast over the threshold separating genuinely human life from bare life.  Accordingly, to be vested with sovereignty as Schmitt defines it, namely, the power to decide what will fall under the norm and what will constitute an exception to that norm, is to be vested with the authority to decide who will be granted the right to live a truly human life, and who will be denied any such right, and reduced instead to a condition of no more than bare life–without even any claim to keep that!

To be placed under the ban, that is, to be cast out of the community and deprived of all shelter under the laws of that community, is to be fully exposed to whomever and whatever one chances to encounter.  Those reduced to the status of bare life can thus be counted as barely alive at all any longer, in the sense that even the minimum of life they retain when deprived of all legal status is thoroughly precarious, without human recourse or defense against whatever acts –however arbitrary–others may choose to commit against them.  Their life—the minimum that remains to them of it—can be taken from them at any moment without any possibility of appeal.  No longer even subjects of the sovereign, and so no longer citizens of the state, members of the community the boundaries of which the sovereign alone can decide, they are cast completely at the mercy of those who remain such subjects and citizens, with all the rights that pertain thereto.

The status of such an outcast, Agamben argues, is that of homo sacer, “sacred man.”  That category was used in ancient Roman law to designate someone who, paradoxically, may be killed, but cannot be sacrificed.   It is the status within the law of those who have been placed altogether outside the law.  In effect no longer counting as human, they can also no longer be offered up to the gods.  Such an offer would be a blasphemy, a violation, an affront, like offering the gods excrement or some other “unclean” thing.  Precisely because they have been cast outside the law, those reduced to the status of homo sacer can therefore not be sacrificed.  However, again precisely for the same reason, there is no legal stricture against taking from them the bare life that alone remains to them.  Thus, designated as unholy and therefore not to be sacrificed, they are by the same stroke marked as those who can be killed without legal consequence, but simply at whim and will by anyone who chooses to do so, and has the means to do it.

The power that defines sovereignty is, accordingly, the power to decide who becomes homo sacer, and when.  Furthermore, Agamben argues, the status of homo sacer is exactly that of the prisoner inmates in the Nazi extermination camps.  According to his analysis, the condition of bare life outside any protection of the law finds its ultimate instantiation in the Muselmänner (“Muslims”) of the camps.  The Muselmänner were those inmates who have been so reduced by the abuse to which they had been subjected that they became a sort of living dead.  They were those who had lost all active will to live, and to whom all that remained was passively to receive whatever treatment was dished out to them moment by moment.  They were so traumatized by their ordeal that they were no longer capable of any degree of effective agency in their own lives, including that of trying to avoid the abuse inflicted upon them.  At most, they could merely cower before their abuser, like beaten dogs.

In Homo Sacer (page 181) Agamben sums up his “provisional conclusions” in three theses:

1. The original political relation is the ban (the state of exception as zone of indistinction between outside and inside, exclusion and inclusion).
2. The fundamental activity of sovereign power is the production of bare life as originary political element and as threshold of articulation between nature and culture, zoe and bios.
3. Today it is not the city [that is, what the Greeks called the polis] but rather the camp that is the fundamental biopolitical paradigm of the West.

Thus, by Agamben’s analysis the emergence under the Nazis of the camp system was no anomaly.  Rather, the Nazi camps represent the culmination and flowering of the whole Western concept of sovereignty as such.  What is more, he argues, insofar as everyone today is subject to such sovereignty, everyone today is at least potentially, by virtue of the decisions of whomever has been vested with the power of sovereignty over one—that is, the decisions of whomever has been designated “the decider,” as George W. Bush notoriously identified himself as President of the Unites States after September 11, 2001–a Muselmann.

All reservations about the details of Agamben’s argument aside, his account has the great merit of highlighting just how paradoxically precarious the situation of all who are subject to “modern” sovereignty (however ancient the institution of such sovereignty may prove to be) must always remain.  The precariousness of the subject of sovereignty is paradoxical, precisely because the very claim on which sovereignty founds itself is the claim that sovereignty is necessary in order to avert an otherwise inescapable precariousness or insecurity:  As Hobbes first argued, only the institution of sovereignty—that “leviathan”—can offer those who contract with one another to establish that institution escape from the condition in which “man is a wolf to man,” and in which there is never any security against the “war or all against all.”  What Agamben helps us see is that if, in the very name of security one subjects oneself to a sovereign, one thereby actually exposes oneself to an even more radical insecurity–the constant threat that “the decider” may at any time decide to declare one outside the law, that is, outside the normal state in which the law holds sway, having somehow entered, instead, into a state of exception where, by law, the law itself no longer holds.

Ultimately, however, the decisions of the sovereign, “the decider,” can come into effect only if those to whom they are to apply regard them as so applying.  That is, to have any effect the claim to sovereignty must be acknowledged by those very “subjects” over whom sovereignty is to be exercised.  That acknowledgement may be more or less explicitly made, through some public ceremony of investiture, for example.  But even such explicit investiture itself always remains essentially symbolic and, therefore, dependent upon something implicit that can never, in fact, become fully explicit, without undoing sovereignty itself.

Remnant Communities and the Trauma of Sovereignty

2/13/08

Today’s brief entry from my philosophical journal, an entry which I first wrote last May, concerns once again the thought  of Jenny Edkins, whose field is international relations, and about whom I have written before in this blog.  What is at issue in the entry below, as it is at issue in the essay by Edkins I address, is a question raised by the work of contemporary Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben on the concept of sovereignty.  Agamben argues that modern sovereignty grows from a seed planted long before modernity by the ancient Greeks when they distinguished–in Aristotle’s thought especially–between bios, or life in the fully human sense, such as can be captured in “biographies,” which literally means “life-writings,” on the one hand, and zoe, or life in the purely “zoological” sense, on the other.  

Following Carl Schmitt, the right-wing political theorist who eventually used his thought to provide the Nazi state with legal justification, Agamben defines modern sovereignty as that power that draws the line between supposedly fully human life and what Agamben calls “bare life.”  Agamben goes on to argue that the emergence under the Nazis of the concentration camp system, above all the death-camps where the Nazis carried out the “extermination” of the Jews, was the culmination and flowering of sovereignty, so defined.  What is more, he argues that insofar as everyone today is subject to  such sovereignty everyone today is at least potentially, by virtue of the decisions of whoever holds the position of sovereign over one–the position of being “the decider,’ as George W. Bush notoriously identified himself in his role as President–an inmate in “the camps.”

The question that Professor Edkins raises in the article I am considering in the entry below is, in short, that of the form that resistance to such sovereignty can take.  If resistance to sovereignty, as Agamben analyzes sovereignty, is still possible at all, then just how might we make our resistance effective?  Or are we in fact doomed henceforth to trying merely to continue surviving, eking out as best we can one day at a time the “bare life,” as Agamben names it,  to which sovereignty reduces life in “Auschwitz,” ”the camps”?

My own very brief remarks interspersed below within and between citations from Edkins point toward what I have come to call “remnant communities” as places where such effective resistance may occur.  My selection of that name is indebted to Agamben, Franz Rosenzweig, and German and Jewish studies scholar Eric L. Santner, each of whom makes use of the term remnant in a way that has become important for me in my own thought.

One of the  key books in which Agamben himself works his thought of sovereignty and “bare life” is tellingly called Remnants of Auschwitz.  Not only were the inmates of Auschwitz remnants–cast off by-products, as it were–of the Nazi state, but all we have for testimony from those inmates themselves are remnants of what would constitute full testimony to the horror in which so many perished, a testimony that could only be made by those who so perished themselves, but who in being exterminated were denied any possibility of bear their own witness.

Then in The Psychotheology of Everyday Life:  Reflections on Freud and Rosenzweig (University of Chicago Press, 2001) Santner makes central use of the idea of the “remnant,” the “useless,” “good for nothing” cast-off remainder of the processes wherein we establish our “identity.”   It is only as such remnants, or at that level of ourselves where each of us is just such a good-for-nothing, ready-to-be-discarded remnant, that we can be encountered in our pure singularity, our “ipseity” as Santner calls it, to distinguish it from our “identity,” which is always a matter of social construction and what he calls “symbolic investiture” (for example, such investitures as establish my own  identity as a philosophy professor, father, husband, etc.). 

Santner’s use of the idea of the remnant is itself based in part on Agamben’s just mentioned text.  Even more crucially however, Santner’s thought and terminology is grounded in Franz Rosenzweig’s The Star of Redemption.  In that work Rosenzweig traces what he argues is an essential connection between Judaism and the  idea of “the remnant.” For him, the Jewish diaspora community is just a “remnant community” as I have in mind:  a community alongside and within the dominant–we can say the “sovereign”–society, one which does not set itself up as any alternative to that society, any competitor for sovereign power, but which instead lives out its own rich life as a community without reference, we might say, to that environing, dominant,  sovereign society, outside its laws, in that sense, though the individual members of that remnant community continue to play their various roles in that same sovereign society. 

Another model of a “remnant” community is provided by Benedictine monasticism, which is an insistently ”cenobitic” form of monasticism–that is, the monastic life lived out in communities of monks, which is to say communities of solitaries, who live ”alone together,” to use a formulation I find helpful.  Each Benedictine monastic community lives out its communal life in a certain, definite “withdrawal” from “the world,” yet a withdrawal in which the monastery–in the sense of the monastic community as such–always remains connected to, and interactive with, that same ”world” in various complex ways.  The monastery is a community “in the world, but not of the world,” as one common formulation has it.  It is a place where the irrelevancy of what in medieval Christian discourse is called “the world” is made known, simply by the fact of communal  life being lived at such a place “outside” yet “in” that same ”world.”

Yet a third example of what I would call  a “remnant community,” providing yet a third model of the formation and continuance of such a community, would be a “Twelve Step fellowship,” such as Alcoholics Anonymous, as I suggest at the end of the entry below.  Interested readers might wish to refer back to some of my earlier posts, in which I offer further remarks, all relevant to the topic of today’s post, about AA and other such fellowships.

 This is a topic that, in one way or another, will occupy me in many of the entries I will be posting here in the future.

 

Monday, May 19, 2008

Jenny Edkins, “Whatever Politics,” in Matthew Calarco and Steven DeCaroli, editors, Giorgio Agamben:  Sovereignty and Life (Stanford University Press, 2007), pp. 70-91.  Page 73:  “Sovereign distinctions [especially between bios and zoe] do not hold; to refuse them, and to demonstrate being in common, is  not to make a new move but only, yet most importantly, to embrace that insight [namely, the insight that such sovereign distinctions do not hold], and to call sovereignty’s bluff.”  Then, page 76:  “Sovereign power is happy to negotiate the boundaries of the distinctions that it makes; what it could  not tolerate would be the refusal to  make any distinctions of this sort.”

Compare [Alain] Badiou’s summation of the truth that comes to pass/takes place as the Sparticist uprising [in ancient Rome--which Badiou discusses in Logiques des mondes]:  [the simple but incontrovertible truth--incontrovertible even by the eventual rout of the Sparticist troops by the Roman legions sent against them, and the crucifixion of Sparticist and his followers--that, as Spartacus was just the first among the slaves of Rome to realize,] “We can go home.”

Compare, also, Yossarian in [Joseph Heller's novel] Catch 22 [who finally just does "go home," which in his  case means to check out of the insanity of the World War II Allied war enterprise by deserting to a neutral country].

Trauma and Sovereignty — and Alcoholics Anonymous

12/14/08

After the entry posted yesterday, the next entry of significance pertaining to trauma in my philosophical journal occurs almost a month later. As was also true of the first posted entry and will be true for subsequent entries overall, the entry below was occasions by my reflections on the literature about trauma that I was reading at the time. Just as there is something appropriate, as I mentioned in my previous post, about both the delayed posting of these entries from my philosophical journal and the episodic nature of the entries themselves, so is there something appropriate to the general subject of this website–trauma–about the typically responsive character of all the entries: their being occasioned by reflections engendered by earlier experiences, in this case, earlier reading. The truths carried to us in trauma always require just such response for their reception. What is more, if, as I will be arguing in a variety of entries for future postings, truth itself is unavoidably traumatic, then the coming of truth itself must always take place in such responsiveness.

The entry posted below also introduces the reader to another of my long-standing philosophical and personal interests, that of the philosophy of addiction and “recovery.” Readers unfamiliar with my earlier work and interested in pursuing some of my writing on that topic may consult my book Addiction and Responsibility: An Inquiry into the Addictive Mind, which was originally published in 1993 (New York: Crossroad), and which I have recently made available chapter by chapter online at

http://blog.addictionandresponsibility.com/.

Below is the newly posted entry from my philosophical journal.

Sunday, January 20, 2008

Reading Trauma and the Memory of Politics, by Jenny Edkins (Cambridge U. Press, 2003).

Pp.188-189: Very good, clear, short summary of [contemporary Italian philosopher Giorgio] Agamben [in such works as Homo Sacer] on how, in the [Nazi concentration/extermination] camps, the zone of indistinction between zoe [Greek for life in the minimal zoological sense] and bios [life in the full, human sense, as involved in a person’s “biography,” for example] is reached. And, even better, she grasps and presents how, for Agamben, testimony bears witness to the inseparability of the two. As she sees it, it is that testimony/witness to their inseparability that truly contests “modern sovereignty.” But she ends by throwing away her own insight, it seems to me, when she goes on to write (p. 189): “The distinction between zoe and bios underlies sovereign power–is fundamental to it.” Her whole analysis shows, on the contrary, that it is not distinguishing between the two that founds sovereignty, but is, rather, the self-dissembling of that very distinction–the engendering of the myth of the natural or original givenness of the distinction, as it it were, rather than the acknowledgment of the artificiality and conventionality of the distinction, [such a mystifying mythification of the distinction being necessary] to get sovereignty up and running in the first place. What testimony/witnessing does is point to the fictional ”nature” of the distinction–its non-”naturality,” as it were: the emperor [of Hans-Christian Anderson's fairytale story, "The Emperor's New Clothes"] never has any clothes! (She ends up saying the same herself, in effect, on p. 232.)

Related: Right after that (pp. 190-191) she discusses the processes whereby the status quo appropriates testimony/witnessing through such devices as memorialization (narratives of rescue and hope), mediatization, etc., thereby diverting, in effect, the potentially disruptive power of such testimony. Well, I’ve long been aware of that precisely as it applies to AA. It could certainly be plausibly argued that AA itself functions as just such a diversion of otherwise potentially disruptive power, by diverting the addict from the angry manifestation of anger itself–that disruptive power–in substance/practice abuse, into “peaceful” channels, so that the addict gets “set straight,” back on the road of socially useful and productive behavior.

Such an analysis is not without power of its own. However, there are two factors about AA, concretely taken in the context of addiction and society in interaction, that tell me the analysis along those lines needs to be thought through into a different analysis, if the analysis itself is to serve any liberating potential. Those two factors are:

1) It is addiction itself–e.g., alcoholism–that actually serves the status quo as a diversion of the potentially disruptive power that the potential addict could otherwise become. Precisely by giving all us social malcontents, us “restless, irritable, and discontented” people [a reference to a well known line from "The Doctor's Opinion" in the book Alcoholics Anonymous], something to keep us occupied, as it were, the power that is–the “status quo”–effectively neutralizes us. That’s why truly to hear [someone in an AA meeting say, as someone often will, especially if there is a "newcomer" present], “You never have to drink again [if you don't want to],” is [potentially] so liberating for the alcoholic, but also carries a hidden potential to liberate the socially disruptive power that till then had been so successfully neutralized.

2) That newly liberated potentially disruptive power, in turn, works–not by encouraging/propelling recovered addicts to organize/mobilize for direct political action. That would not accord with the 10th AA tradition, against having any “opinion on outside issues,” as well as the 5th tradition, on keeping “singleness of purpose” (“but one primary purpose” [namely, "to help other alcoholics to achieve sobriety"].  Rather, the revolutionary potential is AA itself! It is “life together” in AA that marginalizes the very things that, outside AA, marginalize segments of the [larger] society (blacks, gays, women, whomever). In AA [AA members] live together in such a way that all such divisions are set aside. Thus, it is at the level of AA as a border-less, place-less place in the social landscape–a place where, whenever one comes into that place, the fictions of sovereignty are swept away as the fictions they are–it’s as such a place without place that AA simply lets free life occur.

To Begin: Trauma, Truth, Sovereignty, and Philosophy

As I wrote in the text for a talk I was invited to give in May, 2008, to the Political Theory Club at the Korbel School (formerly the Graduate School) of International Studies at the University of Denver, and which I entitled “Trauma, Truth, and the Sovereignty of the Image”:

“Recently, my thinking and research has come to focus on the intersection of a number of concepts or figures/tropes of diverse provenance but sometimes surprising convergence: (1) ‘trauma,’ in the sense at issue–to cite a definitive example–in Freud and psychoanalysis; (2) ‘event,’ as that term comes to be deployed in the works of such continental European thinkers as Heidegger, Derrida, Badiou, and Žižek; (3) ‘truth,’ as used (some might say abused) within that same European philosophical tradition; (4) ‘sovereignty,’ primarily in the political sense at issue in contemporary discussions centering around the recovery of the thought of Carl Schmitt–for example, and especially, in the works of Giorgio Agamben; (5) ‘representation,’ in both the political and the philosophical-literary senses—the ‘image’ of my title; and (6) ‘the political,’ in the sense of that term in which such recent continental European thinkers as Jean-Luc Nancy and Phillipe Lacoue-Labarthe would distinguish between ‘politics’ and ‘the political’.”

That nexus of concepts first began to come into focus in my thought in connection with a class I taught at the University of Denver in fall term of 2005. My work on those themes in conjunction with that class soon resulted in an article which has since been published online in The Electronic Book Review (“9/11 Never Happened, President Bush Wouldn’t Let It: Bob Dylan Replies to Henri Bergson”). Since that time, I have continued to work with the interconnections of the concepts involved. Then, in December of last year, I resumed, after a long gap, the practice of keeping a regular “philosophical journal,” more or less restricting my entries to recording my responses to what I was reading at the time in the relevant literature on trauma, a literature which I have been continuing to explore to the present.

I have decided to devote this blog to sharing entries from that journal, beginning with the earliest one pertaining to trauma, which I wrote in February, 2008, and which is reproduced below. As I am able in the future, I will add further entries, until catching up to the present, after which I will continue to add any new entries as I happen to write them. At times, I may also preface an entry with further current reflections such as this one, when that seems appropriate. When it seemed necessary for the reader’s sake, I have provided additional information or explanation within brackets added to the original text of my entries.

There is something appropriate in having a definite delay between the date I originally wrote these episodic entries about trauma, and my decision now to make them available to others. After all, Freud has taught us well that it belongs to how trauma works—how it traumatizes—that there be a certain characteristic Nachträglichkeit or “belatedness” of traumatic impact, a sort of being out of temporal synch with itself, which manifests precisely in episodic recollections and insights that are somehow pushed beneath the surface of the traumatized mind by the traumatizing event itself, only to surface after a delay, sometimes of sizeable duration. Correspondingly, perhaps the most traumatically proper way to write of trauma is episodically and in fragments. Freud’s own writings on trauma surely fit that pattern, at any rate, which gives me a good precedent.

I hope that there is also something traumatically appropriate about dropping the reader suddenly down my entries mid-stream of their current, as it were, without attempting to fill in the thought and reading that led me to make those entries in the first place, or projecting an outline–like a bad fighter telegraphing his punches–of how my thinking has progressed since the date of the given entry. As many of those same entries will at times address, trauma itself has a way of dropping us down in the middle of what seems to be an ongoing story in which we are playing some part, but in which we find ourselves without access to the script, or any clear sense of the storyline.

At any rate, to delay the delay no further, I have reproduced below the first entry from the relevant passages of my ongoing philosophical journal, beginning with its date of original entry.

Wednesday, December 26, 2007

Reading Paul Eisenstein, Traumatic Encounters: Holocaust Representation and the Hegelian Subject (SUNY, 2003).

He does a very nice analysis of liberalism [in the classic sense of that term, not the modern, American one] as sharing [with Fascism] the endeavor to avoid trauma (pp. 42ff). But it strikes me that he fails fully to appreciate what his own analysis shows. I can use a phrase of his to point to what I think that is—what his analysis does show. At the very start of that analysis, he uses the phrase (p. 42) “the prevention of future catastrophes” to name the goal at which he aims his own analysis (he does go on in the next sentence, ‘Or at least, that . . . ,” to weaken his goal statement a bit, but that does not concern what I want to say here).

The argument he advances is that both liberalism and National Socialism end up “disavowing” the traumatic kernel (the Lacanian point de caption, “quilting point”) that is “internal” to any political order (like the point of “decision” from which law/right themselves come, according to Schmitt—though Eisenstein does not draw that connection). They disavow that “traumatic instability/inconsistency” that is internal to social order, by turning it into a definite historical something, rather than keeping cognizant of its “transcendence”—by giving the quilting point (p. 45) “a context, a history, from the beginning” (he writes that of “the figure of the Jew” in National Socialism, but his analysis shows it also applies to the liberal construction of any such starting point as [John] Rawls’ “original position”).

What it seems to me he misses in this excellent analysis is precisely what it brought most clearly to my own attention. That is, that the very endeavor to “prevent” such catastrophes as the Holocaust is itself precisely a move of the sort he so clearly exposes in liberalism and National Socialism. In short, it is precisely the endeavor to secure oneself against a future recurrence of catastrophe that generates just such recurrence—indeed, that requires such catastrophe to found itself and whatever order it imposes, found itself and its order in and as the very disavowal of the un-disavowable occurrence of trauma.

As I noted in the margin of his book on p. 42, the discussion could also be cast in terms of the notion of idolatry as I explore it in Addiction and Responsibility [New York: Crossroad, 1993] and especially in my article on RB 7 [“Humility, Maturity, and the Love of God: Reflections on RB 7,” The American Benedictine Review]. National Socialism, liberalism, and Eisenstein’s own notion of “preventing future catastrophes” are all “idolatrous,” in that they all make the contextualizing, historizing moving whereby a “transcendence” is made into an “object”—to sue the Kantian language Eisenstein himself does here. They all make God into an idol.

Entered a bit later the same day:

Eisenstein himself elsewhere all but sees and says what I write above. Thus, he argues, contra [contemporary American historian] Dominic LaCapra, that “structural trauma” is indeed and clearly the “precondition” for “historical trauma,” and that it is only by remembering/
”repeating” the former that we can lessen the frequency of the latter. But what does that entail, if not that the very focus on “preventing” “historical” trauma engenders that very trauma? Only, as Eisenstein argues, in remembering structural trauma can we not keep on doing “deadly” repetitions/recollections of historical trauma, acting them out again and again (as, for example, the Israeli oppression of the Palestinians can be seen to be a re-enactment of the Holocaust itself, with new victims and with the old victims now become victimizers).