Machina et subversio machinae
Ontologías en desobra
domingo, 31 de marzo de 2024
Judith Butler cree que estás exagerando (entrevista NYT, 24 de marzo de 2024)
miércoles, 27 de marzo de 2024
Gonzalo Díaz-Letelier & María Emilia Tijoux / Palestine, humanist democracy and genocide
* Originally published in Spanish in December 2023: «Palestina, democracia humanista y genocidio», in El Ciudadano (December 2, 2023) and in Machina et Subversio Machinae (December 10, 2023). María Emilia Tijoux is doctor in sociology from the Université de Paris and professor at the Department of Sociology at the Universidad de Chile. Gonzalo Díaz-Letelier is a doctoral candidate in Hispanic language and literature, and an associate instructor in the Department of Spanish at the University of California Riverside.
https://www.elciudadano.com/columnas/palestina-democracia-humanista-y-genocidio/12/02/
https://contemporaneafilosofia.blogspot.com/2023/12/gonzalo-diaz-letelier-maria-emilia.html
PALESTINE,
HUMANIST DEMOCRACY AND GENOCIDE
Gonzalo Díaz-Letelier & María Emilia Tijoux
Our days are filled with noise and silence. The horrendous and exhausting noise of the war machines of extermination and their wake of bustle in the media and political speeches in international forums, the flood of propaganda. But in addition to propaganda, censorship proliferates, and this occurs in multiple ways. Not only as an act of silencing, but also as active silence. We are not referring to the sensitive silence we keep when there are no words to express the horror, but rather that silence, that dull thud—when there is something to say and for some reason it is not said. Because there are multiple ways to remain silent. One of them is to keep silent. It can also be holding back the word so as not to be singled out as another enemy. Another one may be to remain in the moralizing discourse that appeals to the dispositive of condemnation to close the issue, either in the general equivalencing of all violence, or, based on the secret judgments from which they condemn: political thinkability of the question is closed, from a support in principle to, a denial of, or a cryptic silence on the genocide.[1]
In the grayest and harshest years of the civil-military dictatorship in Chile, attention to the media interface of those years was directed to programs on State and Catholic television: the Festival de la Una or the Japenning con Ja show were watched at home, as if nothing was happening, while the dictatorship orchestrated the nightly order of disappearance and torture in the streets and poblaciones.[2] Today, the genocide in Palestine appears spectacularized through an expanded media interface (with “Western” propaganda predominating in the official media and the atrocities circulating on social networks and the peripheries of the internet) and, even so, it resonates with a dull sound behind the Netflix screens, as if nothing was happening. Desensitization due to the profusion and saturation of atrocious images? Maybe, at some level. But it seems that desensitization rests deeper, in a naturalization of the atrocity in Palestine, given that the dynamic has been the normalization of a genocide that is not new, that has been ongoing for several decades. If someone has not heard about it, that is precisely the effect of such naturalization.
Another of those thunderous silences is that of a large part of the intelligentsia of the social sciences and humanities. The “fear” of speaking publicly or writing about the genocide envelops a silence that may not only be the result of scholarly prudence regarding the object, or a mere reflection of the fearful positioning of intellectuals in a field where “criticism” is trapped in the machinery of a managerial social science emptied of all critical conatus. It may not be just a prudent or fearful silence, it may not be just a silence to avoid the haste of insufficiently informed judgment or reckless action, but one full of silent, even unnoticed, judgments. At a first level, then, it may be a typical overadaptation of the university teaching bureaucracy, of “mental habits” that induce the intellectual to evade difficult issues and takes of position, as Edward Said described it years ago:
You do not want to appear too political; you are afraid of seeming controversial; you need the approval of a boss or an authority figure; you want to keep a reputation for being balanced, objective, moderate; your hope is to be asked back, to consult, to be on a board or prestigious committee, and so to remain within the responsible mainstream; someday you hope to get an honorary degree, a big prize, perhaps even an ambassadorship. For an intellectual these habits of mind are corrupting par excellence. If anything can denature, neutralize, and finally kill a passionate intellectual life it is the internalization of such habits. Personally, I have encountered them in one of the toughest of all contemporary issues, Palestine, where fear of speaking out about one of the greatest injustices in modern history has hobbled, blinkered, muzzled many who know the truth and are in a position to serve it.[3]
Such “habits of mind” would have to do with taking care of one’s own university career, in the face of “the abuse and vilification that any outspoken supporter of Palestinian rights and self-determination earns for him or herself,” as Said describes. What would be at stake here is the question that Michel Foucault pointed out by referring to the parrhesía,[4] a Greek term that points to the courage to “say everything”, to speak up “without reserve” things before others and before the powerful (in front of whoever it may be, without shutting up, with frankness and without fear).
But this does not mean that the thing is as simple as speaking without fear or remaining silent out of fear. What is at stake, for example, when intellectuals remain silent about Palestine in a “field” where there is so much “critical” talk about colonization and decolonization (of bodies, thought, methodologies, etc.), where a lot of publications deal about injustice, suffering or poverty? Could it be that they only do it so as not to jeopardize their positions on the field? Terms relating to “decoloniality” prevail and circulate as currency on university campuses (from course syllabi to everyday conversations and takes of positions), except, of course, when it comes to Palestine. Then the category is conspicuous by its absence. That something is conspicuous by its absence means that its absence announces something. What does the absence—the silence—symptomatize or reveal in this case?
Elizabeth de Fontenay[5] has drawn attention to two terms that during the 20th century were used to refer to situations of sacrificial violence: “hecatomb” (sacrifice of one hundred cattle) to refer to the First World War, and “holocaust” (animal sacrifice by cremation, without leaving traces) to refer to the victims of the genocide of the Third Reich. In the use of such terms, a displacement of their meaning has been practiced from animals to humans: since the scapegoats are human, the displacement alludes to an “animalization” of humanity—or “dehumanization”, or reduction to “bare life” (homo sacer). So, it is considered “natural” that certain members of the community of living beings must be sacrificed in the name of the “spiritualization” of humanity as such. In the name of what spirit is it perceived that Palestinians “die” (as animals—natural language) and Israelis are “murdered” (as people—theological-legal category)? For the genocide to be naturalized, the Gazans must be animalized—from the particular human-animal difference determined westernly in the thread of a certain maximized conception of human language (logos, reason, spirit, technique, history, freedom, etc.) by contrast with “nature”. So here we have a question that today is revealed with the greatest clarity: modern racism is the reverse of humanism. If Western civilization monopolizes the anthropological norm (inclusive/exclusive definition of the human), then its negative side is the animalization of non-Western peoples. Omnis determinatio est negatio (Spinoza, Hegel, Marx). Zionism, Lebensraum, “manifest destiny”: if humanist democracy—today’s (neo)liberal democracy as Lebensraum—monopolizes the production of the world of life (cosmogenesis, anthropogenesis), then its negative or sacrificial reverse is necropolitics and genocide (production of the world of life as a work of death).
The spirit—“in the name of which” animals are sacrificed—seems to be constituted modernly in the equivalence between significance and value: the Euro-North American axis centered in the Atlantic—today in the midst of a turbulent and challenging intra-imperial reaccommodation of global capital, with other relevant actors—, as a (neo)liberal, militarized and spectacularized “Western democracy”, advocating and defending its socio-political values (exceptionalist sovereignty and economic government), aesthetic values (more or less sublimated between the phenotypic and the cultural, between the suprematism of biological whiteness [blancura] and the axiomatics of cultural whiteness [blanquitud]), Christianity (more or less sublimated between the cultural and the guilty-generator ethos), techno-scientific rationality and freedom of capitalist enterprise (deregulated capital or capital anomie).[6] These would be some of the most general features of the consensus within which the imaginary and governmentality of Western democracy moves, the constitution of its constitution. All of this is framed, of course, as a fight for global hegemony of values. In his 2003 preface to his 1978 book, Said wrote:
Even with all its terrible failings and its appalling dictator (who was partly created by US policy two decades ago), were Iraq to have been the world’s largest exporter of bananas or oranges, surely there would have been no war, no hysteria over mysteriously vanished weapons of mass destruction, no transporting of an enormous army, navy and air force 7000 miles away to destroy a country scarcely known even to the educated American, all in the name of “freedom.” Without a well-organized sense that these people over there were not like “us” and didn’t appreciate “our” values—the very core of traditional Orientalist dogma as I describe its creation and circulation in this book—there would have been no war. So from the very same directorate of paid professional scholars enlisted by the Dutch conquerors of Malaysia and Indonesia, the British armies of India, Mesopotamia, Egypt, West Africa, the French armies of Indochina and North Africa, came the American advisers to the Pentagon and the White House, using the same cliches, the same demeaning stereotypes, the same justifications of power and violence (after all, runs the chorus, power is the only language they understand) in this case as in the earlier ones. These people have now been joined in Iraq by a whole army of private contractors and eager entrepreneurs to whom shall be confided everything from the writing of textbooks and the constitution to the refashioning and privatization of Iraqi political life and its oil industry. Every single empire in its official discourse has said that it is not like all the others, that its circumstances are special, that it has a mission to enlighten, civilize, bring order and democracy, and that it uses force only as a last resort. And, sadder still, there always is a chorus of willing intellectuals to say calming words about benign or altruistic empires, as if one shouldn't trust the evidence of one’s eyes watching the destruction and the misery and death brought by the latest mission civilizatrice.[7]
Regarding the materiality of the massacre—of Gazans in the first place, due to the discursive dehumanization of the Palestinians and the genocidal practice in question here, but also of Israelis and foreigners, and of non-human animals, since they are all part of the same battle’s canvas—let us pause for a moment on a phrase by Said regarding the denial of genocide: “as if one shouldn’t trust the evidence of one’s eyes watching the destruction and the misery and death.” Denialism rests on a regime of visibility and sayability. Regarding the materiality of the extermination, it could be said that it has not been “proportionate” to the Hamas attack of October 7, 2023, but it has been completely consistent in relation to the disproportionate extermination that the Israeli Zionist government has systematically and consistently carried out in Palestine over several decades—oriented to ethnic cleansing,[8] the repression of revolts and the “retaliation” of attacks by the armed resistance to the occupation. Regarding the latter, a few days ago, Claudio Aguayo, concerning a political observation that Lev Trotsky made, namely, that in war the methods are symmetrical, but not necessarily the belligerent parties—that is, all methods are symmetrically atrocious, but power relations can be qualitatively asymmetrical, oppressor-oppressed—, he formulated the question like this: that in war there are no good guys with bad methods and bad guys with bad methods, that this Manichaeism only serves to rescue the oppressors when they are suddenly beaten and that, furthermore, ignores the fact that the world’s pity for Israeli bodies and the silence about Palestinian bodies is unconsciously equivalent to saying that white bodies must hurt us twice as much.
Regarding the consistency and systematicity of the genocide, at this conjuncture even the problematic question of the “intention” or not of genocide on the part of the political-military command looks pristine: it is not a mere assignment of intention (in the paranoid sense of security law or conspiratorial delirium), but of its explicit declaration in a theological-necropolitical key: the scene of Benjamin “Bibi” Netanyahu revisiting the rhetoric of Amalek in order to biblically justify the military operation and the sacrifice of the enemies of his god and his people).[9] But despite all the facts and statements of the genocidaires themselves, certain expressions of denialism still proliferate in university discussion, if not silence—as can be seen, for example, in the discussion in France between Didier Fassin (who used the concept of “genocide” to refer to the Israeli campaign) and Eva Illouz (who suggested that it was better to speak of “war crimes”, since genocide would imply the “intention to exterminate”, something that according to her there has not been in this case).[10] Jürgen Habermas—a leading man of “critical theory”, the “public sphere” and European “unity”—, for his part, in a letter signed together with other German intellectuals,[11] states that the current situation has been “created” (geschaffen) by “the extreme atrocity of Hamas and Israel’s response to that” (as if the Palestinians had not suffered more than seventy years of ethnic cleansing and forced displacement, occupation of territories, configuration of concentration camps, economic blockade, siege by land and sea, regular massacres and daily repression in a state of exception); they further maintain that “the criteria of judgment (Maßstäbe der Beurteilung) fail completely when genocidal intentions are attributed to Israel’s actions.” Habermas and the other signatories appear “in solidarity with Israel and the Jews in Germany”, concerned about the “anti-Semitism” unleashed by Israel’s actions (as if the Palestinian genocide were not anti-Semitism),[12] and about the threat that looms over the Western values of democracy and human rights; but not a word about the killing of Palestinians. At most, they point out that the way “how these reprisals are carried out, which in principle are justified, is the subject of a controversial debate”, but instead of questioning the way, they start reciting—as if they were fulfilled—the “guiding principles of proportionality, the prevention of civilian casualties and the conduct of a war with prospects for future peace” (even if we leave aside the police-civilizational logic of “pacification” at play here, it is naive to think that the current massacre will leave “peace” as a balance for the coming decades). In this rhetoric, the displacement to formal questions of principle is precisely what makes the historical suffering and extermination of Palestinian bodies invisible (logic of disappearance, erasure machine). As occurs in fascist aesthetics, which based on its (re)invention of the body (subjects, social bodies) abounds in forms and symbols, while erasing the sacrifice of the flesh.
In this sense we are witnessing the conversion of the “public sphere” into a space of propaganda in the context of permanent war: liberalism becomes neofascism—in its figure of neoliberal fascism—and “communicative action” coincides with the propaganda of “democracy” as a representational dispositive occupied by the neoliberal war machine—which affirms itself as “the West” and has one of its spearheads in the racist and theological-necropolitical project of the Zionist State of Israel.[13] In that sense, also, in relation to the apparent bewilderment produced by the attitude of the “international community” towards what is happening in Gaza—active silence, negligent diligence—,[14] remember Rwanda 1994 and Srebrenica 1995, among other episodes. Racism and fascism are not something that happens to the “democratic and liberal West” as a mere historical accident, but rather they are inherent to the logic in which such a geopolitical and cultural entity affirms itself as such. Racism and fascism are involved in their own humanist and civilizational logic, since racism as the sacrificial reverse of humanism, and the police closure of the world that is fascism, are inherent to the teleology of civilizational progress (“Western democracy”, “democracy for Jews” in Israel, on different scales, co-belong each other as logics of inclusion/exclusion and hegemonic vocation).[15]
So, the scenario is ominous. A decisive part of the international community supports genocide “in principle” clearly and profusely, whether by action or omission. Those who are well-thinking and humanistic send discreet amounts of boxes and money of “humanitarian aid” to Palestine and advocate for peace in international political forums, at the same time they do not stop supplying the war machine of extermination by maintaining the validity or promoting enormous technological-military contracts with Israel—humanism fuels catastrophe, and humanists limit themselves to doing damage control accompanied by humanitarian assistance, without questioning their own imagination and political ecology. Military-technological contracts are not cancelled “for security reasons,” it is said. But today more than ever it is evident that we live in a world where it turns out that the greater the “security”, the greater the terror. And so we have to witness one of the most terrifying genocides in history, supported by the “West of democracy and freedom”—once the representational dispositive of hegemonic democracy has been occupied by the neoliberal war machine (that which was previously extreme right, now occupies the political “center”, in the language of “cultural battles”).
The Israeli army intensifies the bombing, the tanks
have entered Gaza and there is a total blackout of the internet and
communications. The world is witnessing a colonial genocide—which is
intensifying today, but which has not stopped occurring for decades, absolutely
naturalized. The so-called “international community” (that is, the Western
international oligarchy led by the American government machine) not only
witnesses, but supports the State of Israel in its carnage. Europe, reduced to
a theme park, lagging behind everything and self-destructing, does nothing but
fall and fall. With this, the 21st century begins to know the depths of its
ignominy. “Freedom”, “democracy”, “civilization”, all the modern concepts that
sustained the “Western” political imaginary today are nothing more than
categorial husks that burn on the barricade of history—of that temporality
whose figuration as “progress” (advance of evangelization over paganism,
advance of civilization over barbarism, advance of neoliberal democracy over
tyranny and underdevelopment) today is revealed as a dispositive of sacrificial
hierarchization of life, as unconditioned devastation, that is, as nakba.
[1] Although one of the symbolic violences usually at play
is the reduction of the Palestinian nakba to stark figures, we
cannot fail to record them. As of November 24, 2023 (day 49 of the Israeli invasion),
according to Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor, the toll is 20,031 murdered (16,460
civilians: 8,176 children, 4,112 women), 36,350 injured, 1,730,000 displaced, a
colossal destruction of urban infrastructure and industrial facilities, and
attacks on hospitals, schools and media buildings.
[2] Pablo Larraín (dir.), “Tony
Manero”, Fábula Prodigital Producciones, Chile, 2008.
[3] Edward Said, «Representations of the Intellectual. The 1993 Reith Lectures», Vintage Books, New York, 1996, p. 100-101.
[4] Foucault
thematizes the question of parrhesía in the course of 1981-1982, «La hermenéutica del sujeto» (1981-1983), as an ethical issue related to the
practices of direction of consciousness and the techniques of self-care; later he
address it as a political issue linked to the birth of democracy, in the last
two courses at the Collège de France, «El gobierno de sí y de los otros» (1982-1983) and «El coraje de la verdad» (1984), as well as in a
seminar he gave in Berkeley, published under the title «Discurso y verdad» (1983).
[5] Elizabeth de Fontenay, «Le silence des bêtes. La philosophie à l’épreuve de l’animalité», Fayard, París, 1998, p. 209.
[6] Claudio Aguayo, “El
odio a los palestinos: Slavoj Zizek, el orientalismo y la masacre”, in Ficción
de la Razón, November 3, 2023 (https://ficciondelarazon.org/2023/11/03/claudio-aguayo-borquez-el-odio-a-los-palestinos-slavoj-zizek-el-orientalismo-y-la-masacre/).
[7] Edward Said, «Orientalism», Penguin Modern Classics, London / New York, 2003, pp. xv-xvi.
[8] Cf. Ilan Pappé, «La limpieza étnica de Palestina», translated
from English into Spanish by Luis Noriega, Editorial Crítica, Barcelona, 12008.
[9] On the night of
October 28, three weeks into the campaign against the Gaza Strip, the Prime
Minister of the Israeli regime, Benjamin Netanyahu, shamelessly tried to
justify the horror by describing the Palestinian Islamic Resistance Movement
(HAMAS) as the repetition of Amalek, the biblical tribe that, according to the
holy books, God ordered them to annihilate. The verses cited by Netanyahu (from
Deuteronomy and Samuel, books of the Jewish Torah and the
Christian Old Testament) are among the most violent and have a long history of
being exploited by Zionists to justify the slaughter of Palestinians. Cf. Deuteronomy,
25:17: “You must remember what Amalek has done to you (…), we must remember”;
“You shall blot out the memory of Amalek from under heaven. You will not
forget”; and Samuel, 15:13, a passage in which God orders King Saul to
kill every person in Amalek, a rival nation of the ancient Jews, and completely
destroy everything that belongs to them: “Now go and attack Amalek, and
completely destroy everything they have and do not forgive them. But kill the
man and the woman, the child and the suckling, the ox and the sheep, the camel
and the donkey.”
[10] See Didier Fassin, “Le spectre d’un génocide à
Gaza”, in AOC, November 1, 2023 (https://aoc.media/opinion/2023/10/31/le-spectre-dun-genocide-a-gaza/); and Eva Illouz, “Genocide in
Gaza? Eva Illouz replies to Didier Fassin”, in K., November 16, 2023 (https://k-larevue.com/en/genocide-in-gaza-eva-illouz-replies-to-didier-fassin/).
[11] Nicole Deitelhoff, Rainer Forst, Klaus Günther
& Jürgen Habermas, “Grundsätze der Solidarität. Eine Stellungnahme”,
in Research Center “Normative Orders” at the Goethe University Frankfurt, November
13, 2023 (https://www.normativeorders.net/2023/grundsatze-der-solidaritat/).
[12] Mauricio Amar, “El
antisemitismo de Israel”, in Revista Disenso, Santiago de Chile, October 31,
2023 (https://revistadisenso.com/el-antisemitismo-de-israel/).
[13] León Rozitchner, “’Plomo
fundido’ sobre la conciencia judía”, in Página 12, January 4, 2009 (https://www.pagina12.com.ar/diario/elmundo/subnotas/117692-37474-2009-01-04.html).
[14] Although frequently, along with this active silence or
inaction, there is also a split in the behavior of the “leaders” of the
countries enrolled in such an “international community”: they display a
humanistic and well-thinking declarative performance that condemns the
indiscriminate bombing of civilians by part of the Israeli army (or that incurs
the equivalencing of all violences, condemning “all of them,” as Chilean
President Gabriel Boric did), propose daring solutions and send “humanitarian
aid”; but, at the same time, in substantive practice they maintain valid
contracts with Israel for the purchase of weapons duly “tested on the
battlefield”… against the Palestinian population. During these days the case of
Spain has come to light; something similar happens in Chile, which also buys
these weapons to colonially besiege the Mapuche people in Wallmapu.
[15] See Alberto Toscano, “The War on Gaza and Israel’s
Fascism Debate”, in Verso Books Blog, October 19, 2023 (https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/news/the-war-on-gaza-and-israel-s-fascism-debate); and Frédéric Lordon, “Totalitarian
Catalysis”, in Verso Books Blog, November 2, 2023 (https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/news/totalitarian-catalysis).
lunes, 11 de diciembre de 2023
Gonzalo Díaz-Letelier / Greater the security, greater the terror. Ontological terror and contemporary passage to war
University of California Riverside
The mutation of the sovereignty-form involves a transformation of war.[1] The mutation of sovereignty has consisted for some time in its displacement from the national State-capital ensemble into that of transnational techno-capital,[2] in the midst of a political-social counterrevolution that installs a rationality—“neoliberalism”—that became intertwined with the digital technological mutation. The mutation of war, correspondingly, appears as the passage from its classical modern forms—categorized under the concepts of interstate war, colonial war and internal civil war—to its contemporary forms that express the transnational imperiality-coloniality of techno-capital: managerial war, war machines, paramilitary wars, state terrorism and non-state terrorism tending to be diffuse, territorial processes of environmental devastation, rural dispossession and urban gentrification, governmental—state and non-state—promotion of religious, classist, racist and xenophobic social violence, among other ways.[3]
If what we are witnessing is the mutation of sovereignty and war in the era of political geoeconomics—that is, in the era of the subsumption of State politics and civil subjectivities into the imperial apparatus of the global economy crowned by corporate-financial capitalism—then the phenomenon of contemporary capitalistic war would have to be made visible against the grain of the regime of visibility or legibility that defines, on the one hand, the modern categories traditionally established to think about war—the categories of interstate war, colonial war and internal civil war—and, on the other hand, the imaginary of the classical bourgeois liberal utopia—a utopia that projects the vision of a conjunctural and anomalous relationship, past and surmountable, between capitalism and war.
If what exists today is an imperialism of corporate-financial capitalism (whose original accumulation is still sustained, under its mathematical artifacts, in land and work), such imperialism would have the United States-NATO and China-Russia as intra-imperial poles, in relations of greater or lesser tension—since the imperialism of the United States is subsumed in the dynamics of “integrated world capitalism.” Herbert Marcuse, taking up Heidegger’s former hypothesis, once argued that “Russia and America” are metaphysically speaking “the same,” in the form of industrial society.[4] Consistently, today we could say that the United States and China are “the same” as far as it concerns financial capitalism. Indeed, although China has not deployed itself militarily to the extent that the United States does, it does so through an enormous economic strategy of investments, commerce and financial loans even backed by raw materials. To understand the modulations of violence in the era of globally integrated capitalism, we could look for some clues, precisely, in some passages by Heidegger on war and terror at the consummation of the “technical epoch.”
The technical epoch that is expressed in the “Americanization of the world,” Heidegger maintains, would be the epoch of calculating nihilism that dwells in the pre-understandability of beings as a resource-object of total machination (das Gestell): techno-economic consummation/exhaustion of theo-onto-anthropological metaphysics. That is to say, and thinking about it “unfaithfully” at the intersection with Marx: it is about the late modern times of the deployment of the principle of unconditioned sufficient reason functional to the capitalistic pattern of normalization, equivalent fetishization, destructive production and flexible accumulation, with its wake of devastation of human and non-human worlds beyond “sustainable” destructive production. As far as human lifeworlds are concerned—which, of course, can only be thought of illusorily as separated from the surrounding “nature”—the epoch of globalized capitalism becomes an epoch of terror (Erschrecken),[5] in the midst of the (un)familiar (das Ungewöhnliche) of the event of the total machination (totale Machenschaft) of beings by dispositive reason—phenomenical logification of totality of being as an object of scientific representation (Vorstellung) and resource of technical exploitation (Bestand, natural and human resources).
And here is the first key: only because this total machination operated on beings in the form of a dispositive logic (Gestell, in French dispositif) implies total “security” (Sicherkeit, derived from Gewissheit or modern subjective certainty, moral in Luther and physical-mathematical in Galileo) at the level of its assemblage, precisely is for that reason that there is “terror.”[6] The wizard of Messkirch turning things around. Terrorism would thus be the dystopian expression and, in turn, the mirror reverse of the necro-biopolitical dispositive of modern reason as the agency of the total assurance of beings (government). Terror is unleashed because there is an unleashed government. Terrorism appears, on the one hand, as a dystopian expression of the very agency of the capital/State ensemble, with its machination and violent sacrificiality deployed across the planet in order to be functional to its pattern of economic-political accumulation—on a plane where legality and illegality coexist or they get confused. This transnational and State-national capitalist terrorism has its mirror opposite in the violence of diffuse terrorism that “resists” everywhere its territorialization, but reproducing its necropolitical logic of power. Let’s put it this way: there is terrorism because there is security, and the more security, the more terror. There is imperial-colonial terrorism by the dispositive ensemble between transnational Capital and national State (State terrorism, paramilitary terrorism); terror proliferates in metropolitan populations due to the “insecurity” of one’s own Homeland, spread through the media by the politics of fear (media terrorism); terror proliferates among those who suffer the violence of capitalistic war and State terrorism, who, in addition, among their resistance strategies (defensive or based on their own ideological agendas), can offensively reproduce the terror practices of the necropolitical dimension of the imperial-colonial dispositive against agents of oppressive capital and States, or against metropolitan populations attached to those States, etc.—in war often the methods are symmetrically deadly, although the parties are not so in the power relationship. “Security” is precisely an ontological violence that, by agencying as a disposition of life on life[7] and encountering resistance, materializes and diffracts into a kaleidoscope of see-saw violence, offensive and defensive, defensive and offensive violences.
The monster curve of technology, by virtue of the techno-capitalist consummation of Western metaphysics, would place us in an epoch in which “Americanism” names a violent project of technological domination and homogenization of the world. As if there were a world—i.e., one world—, securely appropriable through its government—as if the world could be reduced to a home (oikos, oikonomía). It is precisely this presupposition that founds terror as a fundamental mood attunement and mode of production of world. However, as we had already noted, Americanism today would not be something substantial and exclusive attribute of the United States—avant-garde “Western” power—, just as nothing that generally emerges as coloniality is exclusive to the colonizer—that is what the sentence “today Russia and America are metaphysically the same” means, and also Heidegger’s characterization of the United States as an active epistemic vanguard and, at the same time, a patient of ontological blindness,[8] and therefore the first victim of Americanism itself, which is instinctively familiar to it in terms of subjectivation—administrative culture—, at the same time that it surpasses it planetary, and geopolitically disorganizes the board.
Today we live in the transition from the time of the political imposition of a territorialized order (nomos of the earth) to the time of economic administration—calculus, management—of a global disorder (global nomos). And this changes the modalization of the ongoing war. Heidegger tries to open a horizon of understanding for the late modern war phenomenon, beyond the ossified circulating categories of the old German general Carl von Clausewitz: it would be a question of thinking, in the times of the nihilistic consummation of modernity, the mutation of the theater of war beyond the Clausewitz model and its “modernist” subjectivist assumptions. The question today continues to be rethinking war in its drift after the world wars and the neoliberal emergence at the end of the 20th century.
To do this, Heidegger analyzes the conception of modern war according to Clausewitz’s scheme and then breaks and splinters each of the characterizations involved in the concept to clear the field of visibility of war that opens up after the world wars and the totalizing predominance of techno-economic reason. According to Clausewitz, modern war can be characterized as 1) subjectively oppositional war, a kind of “large-scale duel”,[9] either between rational political subjects (i.e., between national States), or between rational political subjects and animals/humans in state of nature (national States versus “savage” inhabitants of “disputed territories” or of not constituted as States territories): “classical” modern war, interstate or colonial, regulated by the Ius Publicum Europaeum (in Schmittian terms, nomos of the earth and nomos of the sea); 2) humanist war based on the imposition of law and of an “order of the human” (humanism carrying a positive content), will to win in the sense of imposing an order to the other in the form of law: war is an act of force that compels the other to do our will,[10] so that it is about breaking the will of the other and “reading them their rights”, of being able to impose a sovereign text on them, for which the will of political subjection of the community itself is required, both at the troop level (“heroic sacrifice”) and the entire “social body” (“total mobilization”, “national unity”); 3) teleological war, subjectively making-real an idea, “putting into work”: attaining an idea, strategy to achieve it despite the “friction” and contingency of the real,[11] because war has a well-resolved goal—a goal that entails its cessation—, a well-defined sense of execution despite obstacles.
So war in Clausewitz’s model also carries with it a certain idea of “peace”: since only a total war to death, absolute and annihilating, can lead to peace, what is “realistically” aspired to is a police peace (pacification and normalization) that protects the political-legal and economic order imposed by war from the threat of latent subversive conflict from now on—indistinction between war and peace: war is politics continued by other means (army) , but at the same time politics is the continuation of war by other means (law and police). In any case, the categorial regime of Clausewitz’s “classical” model for thinking about war implies the order of a modernist subject (identifiable and unitary political subjects, with clear and distinct alliances and goals), an order-scheme that becomes puzzled with the more diffuse and opaque phenomena of a contemporary nihilistic war, no longer articulated by conditioning ideas that would give its teleology a positive content, but rather unleashed by the naked imperiousness of economic-political calculation, unconditioned and flexible, deterritorialized and impersonalized (cybernetic, algorithmic, artificially intelligent).
Heidegger confronts Clausewitz point by point. Following his analysis, after the world wars of the 20th century, war could be characterized as follows:
1) Absence of “true” opposition between “political subjects”.[12] There may be intra-imperial tensions, but deep down the parties share the same logic of political-military and techno-economic calculation based on domination and accumulation: by virtue of this communion, everything is confused in pure calculation, alliances are mobile and tactical, the subjects are equivalent and replaceable fetishes, not centered on their State-national inscription but surpassing it centrifugally, in an ontologically flexible medium within a framework where everything can be functionally disposed to the process of capitalist valorization (everything, in its “distinction” can be “valued”).[13] Everything changes, but without ceasing to be the same. Heidegger: “(…) war no longer admits the distinction between ‘conquerors and conquered’; everyone becomes a slave to the history of Being.”[14] Even the leaders are slaves, because in the nihilism of capital there are no longer subjects in the strong sense, but all its actors supply the same fabric, the same canvas of capitalistic war in the midst of which, whether they win or lose, they “decide” nothing, but only “function.”
2) Will without a subject “humanistically” ordered to law, but dissolved in the fluctuation of the techno-economic calculation. If the modern will affirmed itself in the person-form as a subject with positive content (humanist will moved by a concrete image of “the human”), its late drift is processed as a nihilistic and unconditionally calculating self-affirmation within the unquestioned and globalized mode of production—the political-legal will for order gives way to the economic will for the administration of disorder. In effect, “humanism”, the “human essence”, today has become a resource, a mere means and not an end[15]—this would account for the contemporary phenomenon of a certain reactivation of the nomos of the earth (nationalist and identity implosion) in contexts of “balkanization” at all levels (strategy of producing civil war through the promotion of religious, racial, ethnic, nationalist, identity sectarisms, etc.). That the political-legal will for order gives way to the economic will for the administration of disorder is also expressed in the contemporary status of the “leader”, who is another functional part of the machine and not a transcendent decision-making instance: the exception is the rule (Walter Benjamin) and not the miraculous and decisive act of the sovereign outside the machine (ex machina).[16] Something similar happens with the figures of the “partisan” or the “patriotic soldier”, who are progressively replaced by the figure of the “mercenary” and the transnational privatization of the military and security forces—today the free market makes it possible for a country like Russia, “opposed to the free market”, to hire the Wagner mercenary company to fight the war in Ukraine. If politics and war are subsumed in the economy of capital, the decision obeys in each case to techno-economic calculations and not to ideological projects of a leader or a sovereign vanguard.
3) Absence of an idea and its teleological “putting into work”. Nihilism involves the abolition of the ideal that, from its remoteness, marks the distance with the real: war is not a means to put into practice an idea, an order as a clearly defined goal, which once achieved would lead to the cessation of war. The ideal has been immanentized and dynamized in contingency and calculation, so that what there is is a total and endless war produced and administered as an unconditioned deployment of means of accumulation, in the midst of the permanent “crisis” and its permanent police “pacification”: total and permanent war, of a poly-dimensional texture—from its geopolitical expression to the war of oneself against oneself in the society of control.
The non-modernist drift of war shows up as
a war without "true" decisive oppositional subjects or humanist orientation to order.
Contemporary war—total, endless, nihilistic—appears as a technical interface in
which we rather inhabit. War is no longer what it was.
[1] In 1989, five U.S. Army and Marine Corps officers
published a paper (cf. Lind, William et al., “The Changing Face of War: Into
the Fourth Generation”, in Marine Corps Gazette, October 1989, pp. 22-26),
where they systematized the phenomenon of modern war for United States military
doctrine in a series of four generations: 1) first generation war, since
the first wars with firearms and the formation of professional armies at the
service of the States (war of Spanish succession, Napoleonic wars, Spanish
American wars of independence, etc.); 2) second generation war, which
begins with industrialization and mechanization, is characterized by the capacity
to mobilize large armies, the use of large-scale, high-firepower war machinery,
and trench warfare (Boer war, First World War, Iran-Iraq War, etc.); 3) third
generation war, which begins with the “lightning war” (Blitzkrieg)
of the German army during Second World War; it is characterized by the massive
introduction of tanks–which break the stalemate of trench warfare–and is based
on the speed and surprise of the attack, not allowing time for the coordination
of the defense, in addition to the technological superiority over the enemy,
coordinating air, marine and land forces, interrupting the enemy’s
communications and producing the logistical isolation of its defenses, causing
an intentional terrifying psychological impact, and massively attacking
civilians to prevent them from supporting the war industry that the enemy needs
to continue the war (Spanish Civil War, Second World War, Korean War, Yom
Kippur War, Gulf War, etc.; Blitzkrieg was used by the United States in
the invasion of Iraq in 2003 and by Israel in the Lebanon War in 2006); 4) fourth
generation war, the technological superiority of State armies implies that
the only reasonable way to try to confront them is the use of hidden irregular
forces that surprise the enemy, using unconventional combat tactics. In these
tactics, the great face-to-face battles between molar forces no longer occur
(Chinese civil war, Vietnam war, armed conflict in Colombia, war against narco,
civil war in Angola, “war against terrorism”, Yugoslav wars, etc.). So that fourth-generation
warfare would include forms such as guerrilla warfare, asymmetric warfare,
low-intensity and high-frequency warfare, “dirty war,” State terrorism, popular
struggles, civil war, terrorism and counterterrorism, etc. (see also Van
Creveld, Martin, «The transformation of war. The most radical
reinterpretation of armed conflict since Clausewitz», Free Press Publisher,
New York, 11991).
[2] It is interesting to see how this transition appears in popular culture
and is reflected in American cinema; see Lumet, Sidney (dir.), “Network”
(U.S.A., 1976). See also Villalobos-Ruminott, Sergio. «Soberanías en suspenso. Imaginación y
violencia en América Latina», Editorial La Cebra, Buenos Aires, 12013,
pp. 23-24; and in a sociological approach, see Katz, Claudio, «Bajo el imperio del capital»,
Escaparate Ediciones, Santiago, 12015, p. 7 et seq.
[3] Regarding this imperiality-coloniality of
transnational capital, Rodrigo Karmy has coined the formula of an
“economic-managerial sovereignty”, from which what he proposes as a managerial
war becomes intelligible: “In contemporary times, sovereignty it continues
to operate, but no longer embedded in the properly political form of the
national-State, but in the governmental form of the global economy. In this
light, sovereignty remains what it has always been, namely the hyperbole of
accumulation based on the exploitation of collective human labor, the
chiasmatic point through which capital is deployed. (…). Unlike Marx’s time
when a difference between economics and politics could still be visualized
(surely Schmitt is the last theorist to attempt that difference), the
contemporary drift has positioned economics as a true political paradigm. That
is, the economy constitutes the locus of sovereign decision and, therefore,
defines the character of war in a different way. Because if war was always the
shadow of all sovereignty, today, when it is deployed eschatologically in the
form of the neoliberal economy, what is understood by war must necessarily be
redefined. And if when sovereignty still lavished the State form, war was
limited to the strictly inter-State dimension, today it is emancipated
in the form of what, for lack of a better term, I will call managerial war.
(…). This indicates a radical transmutation in which the sovereign dispositive
has gone from acting as a restraining force (what Carl Schmitt called katechón)
to a force that is consumed at a global level, erasing all borders (what we can
call the assumption of the eschaton). In this way, contemporary
managerial war would account for a true eschatologization of sovereignty in
which, unlike its previous form, oriented towards the containment and defense
of external borders, it is deployed towards the rearticulation and flexibility
of all internal borders.” (Rodrigo Karmy, “La
guerra gestional”, in El Desconcierto, November 8, 2013).
[4] Heidegger: “Russia and America, metaphysically seen,
are the same thing; the same desperate fury of unleashed technics and of the
abstract organization of the normal man” (Heidegger, Martin, «Introducción a la
metafísica (1936)», translated from German
into Spanish by Emilio Estiú, Editorial Nova, Buenos Aires, 11966, p. 75 et seq.).
[5] Heidegger, Martin, «Beiträge zur Philosophie (Vom Ereignis), 1936-1938», Gesamtausgabe
65, Vittorio Klostermann Verlag, Frankfurt am Main, 32003, p. 369.
[6] Heidegger: “Morality, to the extent that
it is a mode of assurance and security, is identical with evil. (…). It may be
that morality, for its part, and with it all particular attempts to put people
through morality within the prospect of a world order and to establish world
security with certainty, is nothing more than a monstrous spawn of evil.” (Heidegger,
Martin, «Feldweg-Gespräche»,
Gesamtausgabe 77, Vittorio Klostermann Verlag, Frankfurt am Main, 11995,
p. 209). At this point we try to point out with Heidegger an issue that Rodrigo
Karmy has raised: that “it will not matter so much ‘who’ the terrorist is but
rather what the conditions of its production are” (Karmy, Rodrigo, «¿Qué es el terrorismo?, o cómo el
imperialismo contemporáneo produce guerras civiles», in El Desconcierto, September
19, 2016; see also Karmy, Rodrigo, «¿Qué
es el terrorismo? Prolegómenos para una “analítica del
terrorismo”», in Revista
Poliética, vol. 5, nº 1, São Paulo, 2017, pp.
20-39).
[7] For a genealogical sketch of securitary logic, see Díaz-Letelier,
Gonzalo, “La cuestión mapuche y el
derecho penal del enemigo como consumación jurídica del ‘humanismo’”, in
Revista Espacio Regional, vol. 2, nº 12, Departamento de Ciencias Sociales of
the Universidad de Los Lagos, Osorno, 2015, pp. 28-62.
[8] Like when in Chile we say, regarding this condition,
that the religious, political and economic right wing has the military and does
not need to think, because it “acts”, with certainty and assertiveness,
security and necessity. It is about the relationship between thought and
action, or the lack of thought when the action becomes nihilistic and
rationally automaton (“instinctive”, in the sense that Samuel Butler once put
it).
[9] Clausewitz, Carl von, «Vom Kriege»,
Dümmlers Verlag, Bonn, 191980, p. 191.
[10] Clausewitz, opus cit., pp. 191-192.
[11] Ibidem, p. 955.
[12] Heidegger, «Introducción a la metafísica (1936)»,
p. 75 et seq.
[13] Heidegger: “being has become value”, cf.
Heidegger, Martin, «Holzwege»,
Gesamtausgabe 5, Vittorio Klostermann Verlag, Frankfurt am Main, 22003,
p. 258.
[14] Heidegger, Martin, «Die Geschichte
des Seyns», Gesamtausgabe 69, Vittorio Klostermann Verlag, Frankfurt am
Main, 11998, p. 209.
[15] Heidegger, Martin, «Überwindung der
Metaphysik», Gesamtausgabe 7, Vittorio Klostermann Verlag, Frankfurt am
Main, 12000, p. 91.
[16] Heidegger: “(…) the leaders [Führer] are the necessary
consequence of the fact that entities have drifted onto the path of errancy, in
which the expansion of the void requires a singular function of ordering and
securitization” (Ibidem, p. 92). Paradigmatic, in this sense, is what was the
relationship between president Donald Trump and the political-military and corporative
apparatus of the United States and beyond.