Thursday, January 20, 2005
(1:19 PM) | Adam Kotsko:
The Terror Continues
George W. Bush has claimed that the United States has the right and duty to remake the world as part of the ongoing quest of freedom:We felt the unity and fellowship of our nation when freedom came under attack, and our response came like a single hand over a single heart. And we can feel that same unity and pride whenever America acts for good, and the victims of disaster are given hope, and the unjust encounter justice, and the captives are set free.Various military music groups then performed "Faith of Our Fathers," introduced by Senator Lott. All the commentators for National Public Radio were duly impressed with the president's sweeping vision and his wonderful (for him) delivery. Ah, liberalism!
We go forward with complete confidence in the eventual triumph of freedom. Not because history runs on the wheels of inevitability; it is human choices that move events.
Not because we consider ourselves a chosen nation; God moves and chooses as He wills. We have confidence because freedom is the permanent hope of mankind, the hunger in dark places, the longing of the soul.
When our Founders declared a new order of the ages; when soldiers died in wave upon wave for a union based on liberty; when citizens marched in peaceful outrage under the banner "Freedom Now" - they were acting on an ancient hope that is meant to be fulfilled. History has an ebb and flow of justice, but history also has a visible direction, set by liberty and the author of liberty.
When the Declaration of Independence was first read in public and the Liberty Bell was sounded in celebration, a witness said, "It rang as if it meant something." In our time it means something still.
America, in this young century, proclaims liberty throughout all the world, and to all the inhabitants thereof. Renewed in our strength - tested, but not weary - we are ready for the greatest achievements in the history of freedom.
To protest this, one could attend the Anti-Inaugural ceremonies at Acme Art Works, aka Blackwater Cafe, at 1741 N. Western Ave. Lauren is planning on attending that event, and I would be attending with her, if not for the reservation I made to attend Michael Naas's Derrida lecture at the Alliance Française tonight; there is only room for 100 people to attend.
Is attending a Derrida lecture an adequate protest against an obscurantist imperialist? Perhaps not adequate, but a protest -- just as a quote from Agamben may well constitute a protest. Here's another, not a quote about our President, but a quote that encapsulates Agamben's project in State of Exception:
The juridical system of the West appears as a double structure, formed by two heterogeneous yet coordinated elements: one that is normative and juridical in the strict sense (which we can for convenience inscribe under the rubric of potestas) and one that is anomic and metajuridical (which we can call by the name of auctoritas).For the quote about Bush, see Mark Kaplan, who just bought the book this morning -- as should all of you. In protest!
The normative element needs the anomic element in order to be applied, but, on the other hand, auctoritas can assert itself only in the validation or suspension of potestas. Because it results from the dialectic between these two somewhat antagonistic yet functionally connected elements, the ancient dwelling of law is fragile and, in straining to maintain its own order, is always already in the process of ruin and decay. The state of exception is the device that must ultimately articulate and hold together the two aspects of the juridico-political machine by insinuating a threshold of undecidability between anomie and nomos, between life and law, between auctoritas and potestas. It is founded on the essential fiction according to which anomie (in the form of auctoritas, living law, or the force of law) is still related to the juridical order and the power to suspecd the norm has an immediate hold on life. As long as the two elements remain correlated yet conceptually, temporally, and subjectively distinct (as in republican Rome's contrast between the Senate and the people, or in medieval Europe's contrast between spiritual and temporal powers) their dialectic--though founded on a fiction--can nevertheless function in some way. But when they tend to coincide in a single person, when the state of exception, in which they are bound and blurred together, becomes the rule, then the juridico-political system transforms itself into a killing machine.
