Thursday, March 16, 2006
(7:51 AM) | Old - Doug Johnson:
State Racism, Religion, and the Left
Recent discussion here at the weblog and in response to Zizek's NYT piece over at I Cite on the relationship between the secular and religious left is unfortunate, even if understandable and somewhat productive (at I Cite it has finally morphed into a long backburnered conversation in our blogosphere over Zizek v. Levinas/Derrida). The problem with such conversations, or perhaps just the sad fact of the matter, is that accusations from both sides (you don't give us enough credit/wake up, dude, religion is the problem) merely exacerbate the problem of disunity on the left. What is necessary, in my view, is not neutral ground (as some have suggested secularism to be - no, this is precisely the dividing line, how can it be common ground?) but a common single issue or perhaps, at most, two issues to rally around. Over at I Cite, I contributed to the 'religious war', precisely because the issue of religious wars raised by Zizek got my goat.In short, the role of religion in warmaking in the west has long been exaggerated. It is of course true that religion and religious folks have often been awful loud in clamoring for war, but the discourse of religious wars has been a critical tool used by statesmen for 500 years (and especially since the 'Peace of Westphalia') to mask statist consolidation of power. And truth be told, secular governments have been not a mite better about avoiding warfare. Of course, in a blogpost I have to oversimplify, especially given the symbiotic nature between religion and the state. However, I am convinced by two things that the ultimate locus of modern warfare is in the problem of state racism. The first reason is a damn good article entitled "A Fire Strong Enough to Consume the House: The Wars of Religion and the Rise of the State" (see comments for source and link, I'm having trouble linking from my home computer). Secondly, the modern state, by its very nature, is inescapably racist. Our histories as French, Indonesian, Chinese, Canadian, Brazilian are decidely not the histories of other similarly situated nations. As such, dual quests are in order, internal racial purity (those who don't find their place in the racial narrative are a problem to be expunged) and the ability to wage total war against external competing races (the nuclear situation). In the shift from the sovereignty of the king to the power of bureaucratic peoplehood, the state took into its very structure the form of religio-race wars. This is Foucault's understanding of biopower in a nutshell.
The biopolitics of state racism is what we must find a way to resist together whether 'believers' (for whatever the hell that's worth) or not. This is ultimately why I can't vote democrat in the U.S. Voting in a national election is complicity in the entire system of state racism.
