Saturday, March 12, 2005
(10:45 AM) | F. Winston Codpiece III:
My Sovereign Links
Originally, à Gauche was supposed to cover today, the sixth day of Sovereignty Week. He is busy, and so Anthony has asked me to take his place. Since Kamala has already weighed in with his sparkling prose, one could consider this post a gesture toward that day, much to be hoped for, when The Weblog will have effectively subsumed all the functions and the responsibilities of The H is O.In lieu of a formal post laying out a detailed philosophico-theologico-literary argument on the vissicitudes of sovereignty, I recommend the following links. First, of course, I think everyone should read Marx's classic mad-cap comedy, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. Here's a taste:
Hegel remarks somewhere that all the events and personalities of great importance in world history occur, as it were, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second as farce. Caussidiere for Danton, Louis Blanc for Robespierre, the Montagne of 1848-51 for the Montagne of 1793-95, the Nephew for the Uncle. And the same caricature occurs in the circumstances attending the second edition of the eighteenth Brumaire!As Internet people have long said, "read the whole thing."
Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under given circumstances directly encountered and inherited from the past. The tradition of all the generations of the dead weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living. And just when they seem involved in revolutionizing themselves and things, in creating something that has never before existed, it is precisely in such periods of revolutionary crisis that they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service and borrow names, battle cries and costumes from them in order to act out the new scene of world history in this time-honoured disguise and this borrowed language. Thus Luther donned the mask of the Apostle Paul, the Revolution of 1789-1814 draped itself alternately as the Roman republic and the Roman empire, and the Revolution of 1848 could do nothing better than parody 1789 one minute, and the revolutionary tradition of 1793-95 the next. In a similar way a beginner who has learned a new language always translates it back into his mother tongue, but he has assimilated the spirit of the new language and can freely express himself in it only when he can use it without recalling the old and forgets his native tongue in the use of the new.
If you've wondered what the fuss is about Carl Schmitt, Mr. Sovereignty himself, look no further than: here. That is what the big deal is. That encyclopedia article. Also, Agamben's name has come up (Mr. Sovereignty, Jr.), so you could probably read this article by Agamben on the topic of the most famous Nazi jurist of all -- namely, Carl Schmitt.
And in conclusion, one might wish to peruse The Torture Memo in order to understand the punishments, falling just shy of the pain associated with organ failure or death, that our beloved sovereign Lord and Savior, George W. Bush, reserves the prerogative to inflict upon you. While his agents perform such purgations on the bodies of terrorists and/or liberals, he also reserves the right not to watch, as illustrated below:
He also reserves the right to start off watching, then -- in his empathy with the subject's pain! -- close his eyes and look away, punctuating that motion with a sharp intake of breath through his clenched teeth. Then, perhaps, perhaps, shed a tear -- for the work of justice is work, hard work, but it is the Lord's work.
Thank you for your time.
