Atrocity Exhibition. Brad Evans

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СКАЧАТЬ each crisis of global circulation marks out a terrain of “global civil war, or rather a tableau of wars, which is fought on and between the modalities of life itself.” With depoliticization therefore occurring when life is primed for its own betterment — that is, within humanitarian discourses and practices — it is possible to offer an alternative reflection on Giorgio Agamben’s “bare life.” Agamben’s notion of bare life draws on sovereign terms of engagement. Life becomes exposed on account of its abandonment from law. The biopolitical encounter, in contrast, denies political quality as the “bare essentials” for species survival take precedence. No longer reduced bare in a juridical sense of the term, life is stripped bare since its maladjusted qualities impede productive salvation. Hence, while this life is equally assumed to be without meaningful political quality — though in this instance because of some dangerous lack of fulfilment — allowing the body’s restitution displaces exceptional politics by the no less imperial and no less politically charged bare activity of species survival.

      9. Liberal wars are intimately bound to the active production of political subjectivities. Security discourses have always had a particular affinity with political authenticity, which sets out who we are as people and defines what we are to become. It places limits around what it means to think and act politically. The liberal approach to security implies that political authenticity is not simply tied to those identity formations defined by epiphenomenal tension. It breaks free of such static demarcations. The liberal subject instead is constructed by living freely through contingent threats to insecurities around its existence. Within a broader and more positive continuum of endangerment, liberal subjectivity has never been in crises if we understand those to be the disruptions to fixed modes of being. Born of the paradoxically anxious conditions of its ongoing emergence, the liberal subject is the subject of crises. It lives and breathes through the continual disruption to its own static modes of recovery. While this subject has gone through many key changes, the disrupted subject is made real today on account of its need to be resilient. Again, this does not infer a static state of ontological affairs. Resilient life must uphold the principles of adaptation and change held true by our radically interconnected age. Since what is dangerous today is seen as integral to the very life processes that sustain liberal life, danger is directly related to the radically contingent outcomes on which the vitality of existence is said to depend. With liberal societies having to endure what Dillon has termed the “permanent emergency of its own emergence,” our predisposition to the unknowable contingency of every new encounter — the event of contemporary life itself — appears at the same time to be the source of our potential richness and the beginning of all our despairs.

      10. Liberal wars are profoundly ontotheological. When Barack Obama reconciled the problem of “evil” with the “imperfections of man” in his Nobel laureate speech, he reaffirmed the Kantian belief that evil is very much part of this world — not that people are born of evil but that unnecessary suffering results from bad or dangerous political judgment. Offering then a humanistic reworking of the story of the fall — one in which life, always assumed to be perpetually guilty of its own (un)making, must continually seek its own recovery from the ashes of its own potential demise — we uncover why sovereignty is not the transcendental frame of reference for liberal power. Kant-inspired liberalism preaches universality but accepts that the universal is beyond the realms of lived experience. It preaches the international virtues of law but accepts that one’s encounter with moral law has to be contingent. It insists on life’s autonomy even though it offers an account of freedom in which humankind has fallen to the guilt of its own unmaking. It promotes human progress yet puts forward the thesis of infinite regress to highlight humankind’s imperfections. And it claims that all life has an original predisposition to good and a simultaneous propensity to evil. Liberal life is forced to endure a self-imposed temporal purgatory — life is always guilty of the moral deficiencies of the past yet incapable of exorcising them in the future. These imperfections are actually demanded so that the antiproductive body can prove its moral and political worth. While this morally deficient default setting invariably moves us beyond any metaphysical attachment to the humanitarian principle (humanity is, after all, too flawed to become the unifying principle) and while the power of law alone is insufficient to overcome the imperfections of modern people, faith is restored by something in the order of the divine economy of life itself.

      One could argue here that contemporary liberalism is, in itself, facing terminal crises. Whatever one’s opinions of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, it is clear that Western populations have no taste for new forms of military interventionism and lasting engagement in the global borderlands. And whether one considers a resurgent socialism in Latin America, the emergence of new forms of capitalization by alternative geopolitical powers, the changing nature of religious movements that have used democratic procedures to their own political advantage, or the continuation of indigenous struggles that challenge any hold over the terms “rights,” “freedom,” “democracy,” and “justice,” liberalism appears to be operating within a declining zone of political influence. As recent events in Libya illustrate, however, we must be wary of signaling its lasting demise. Throughout modern history, liberalism has proved to be resilient when faced with its own crises of legitimacy and authority. Its claims to violence in particular seem to enjoy a remarkable ability to regenerate as the memory of indigenous subjugation and depoliticization fades with time. One could be more cynical and suggest that given the only things that liberal regimes in Western zones of affluence can materially export today are war and violence, rather than write of its demise, the liberal war thesis is only beginning to enter a new retrenching chapter, which will resonate for a considerable time.

      Originally published in somewhat different form as “The Liberal War Thesis: Introducing the Ten Key Principles of 21st Century Biopolitical Warfare” in The South Atlantic Quarterly.

      New Thinking is Needed About September 11

      Brad Evans & Simon Critchley

      Thursday, 31 August 2011

      THE TEN-YEAR DISTANCE from the attacks of September 11, 2001, gives us an opportunity to reflect on the significance of that day’s violence. Common sense asserts that our world is changed forever because of 9/11. But if true, shouldn’t we have spent more time considering the stakes of the event? The attacks were abhorrent and criminal, but our response so far represents a profound failure of the political imagination.

      The many human faces to the tragedy provided a passing glimpse into a genuine ethical response mobilized by grief. But all too quickly the mourning ended as matters turned to the usual militarism. The invasion of Afghanistan, the illegal bombardment of Iraq, the establishment of torture camps and, most recently, the execution of Osama bin Laden.

      Perhaps this shouldn’t surprise. Despite paying lip-service to global security, peace, and justice, the West’s history is marked by violence against those who refuse to capitulate to it. After 9/11, Giorgio Agamben wrote that security was fast becoming the main criterion of political legitimacy. Elections would be won on claims to protect domestic populations from rogue elements. This means taking the fight to enemies who, it seems, hate our existence. But when this happens, the state can itself become a terrorist entity.

      Our political response has been pitiful. The left accuses the right of suffocating politics by taking advantage of so-called “exceptional” conditions. The right accuses the left of blindness to the ideological dangers of Islamofascism. The left condemns the unmediated abuse of power but supports or remains silent on NATO-led violence. The right draws connections between Islam and one of the most shameful episodes in modern history to justify violence.

      Without trying to critically understand why people support the willful oppression and slaughter of “others” — especially within the shallow remit of international “norms” — our justification to control through violence is rarely questioned.

      Modern politics is infected by a utilitarian mindset that bets the future against the present. “Our present actions are СКАЧАТЬ