Sunday, December 04, 2005
(12:00 PM) | Adam Kotsko:
Truth Hurts
Truth originarily stands in relationship to pain. Honesty, the enactment of truth by a distinct individual, is a matter of inflicting pain, and candor is a willingness to inflict this pain, a lack of fear in the face of the other on whom one is to inflict pain. Even in the innocuous situations of our everyday life, we bear witness to this intimate connection of truth and pain -- to be "honest" is to come out and say that the dress makes her look fat, that I either don't like you or that I like you in a disproportionate and invasive way that cannot expect reciprocation.One inflicts honesty, as a purgative element, dispelling the illusions by which we cover over the truth -- by which we avoid the essential meaning of our humanity. For is not what distinguishes us from the animals the sheer excess of pain and suffering which we inflict and endure? Language itself becomes an entirely novel way of inflicting pain, the "wounds that never heal" -- we are sent to school in order to inflict and receive those wounds from our fellow children, from those who are still most in touch with the essentially human and have not given into the temptations of animality, of mere rationality. Law deploys language in order to authorize and give shape to the infliction of pain, of deprivation, of captivation.
Under liberalism, one loses this relationship to the essentially human -- one attempts to live in the lie and to cover over the essentially human through regimes of politeness, of procedure, of contract. One perverts law into a regime of positive recognition and affirmation, language into a free exchange directed toward rational ends -- one animalizes language and law by submitting them to the law of calculation. The end point of this logic is communism, in which the state form has withered away and all distinctively human meaning is done away with. The human is excessive, and excess is pain. To deny this truth is to deny and ultimately to destroy the human.
The so-called "end of history" was to be an end of meaning in this sense -- the global economy was to administer the goods of the world through a regime of sheer calculation; political decision-making was to be reduced to a mathematical question of deciding between various finally similar options. The liberals in both Europe and America were to direct this world through their knowledge and expertise -- instead of rule, administration; instead of war, police action. What will go down in history as the Bush Revolution stands as a rejection of this logic, a reaffirmation of rule, of war, and of truth.
It is no surprise, then, that the most significant contribution of the Bush regime to world politics is the legitimation and spread of torture -- for if the truth of humanity is pain, any politics of truth must be founded on torture. And indeed, torture is originarily concerned with the production of truth, the attainment of information. Information here functions on two levels. On the first level, there is of course the banal meaning of information as a set of discrete facts that can be acted upon. The practices of the Bush administration clearly illustrate, however, that they are not moving solely or even primarily on this banal, literal level in their use of torture. Rather, they are concerned with in-formation, with shaping the inwardness of the tortured subject and of the society to which he is to return -- with producing the truth of the tortured subject and his society as the material site on which American power is exercised.
This goal is excessive with regard to calculative reason, which cannot abide the abdication of logic that is required to make the leap from torture to truth. There is a necessary level of mystery, mysticism, and even mystification here, to which the liberal mindset has no access -- hence the reference to "information" in the banal sense, meant only to distract the liberal from the qualitative question and lead him down the dead-end road of quibbling over details. Indeed, all apparent conformity to the "formalities" of procedural democracy, every call for "debate," is nothing other than an attempt to maintain the liberals in their illusion that political decision making is still taking place on the level of untruth, that is, on the level of a procedural competition between the two major parties for the right to rationally administer the goods of the nation. Hand-in-hand with this strategy is the devaluing of "politics" in this sense, the accusation that the liberals are finally only interested in "politics," understood as the politics of untruth -- and on the deepest level, the liberals fully identify with the substance of this accusation, convinced that "reality," understood as the realm of calculation disdained by the Bush regime, will "catch up with" the regime and remove it from power more or less automatically. Such a strategy of waiting becomes entirely questionable, however, when it is a matter of a political regime that stands in an active, rather than reactive, relationship to truth.
