Press Action ::: Reflections on Tsunamis and the State of Exception

Wednesday, December 29, 2004

Reflections on Tsunamis and the State of Exception

By Jordy Cummings

Review of State of Exception by Giorgo Agamben, translated by Kevin Attell. (University of Chicago Press, 2005).

"The Tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the “state of exception” in which we live is not the exception but the rule. We must attain to a conception of history that is keeping with this insight. Then we shall clearly realize that it is our task to bring about a real state of exception.”
-Walter Benjamin, Thesis 8 on the Philosophy of History, Paris, 1939

The state unites nominal and mitigating influences. If the previous sentence seemed to delicate, too synchronistic, it should be noticed by readers that it is making manifest in language of the English spelling of tsunami. Hobbes described the state as a leviathan, like an undersea monster, Moby Dick, the whale of Jonah, Jaws. The State of Exception is when the state unveils itself. No phenomenon more than weather has been experienced and thus codified throughout human existence as both metaphor for and of the variety of human experience that is neither “here” nor “there.” A “sunny” persona describes not someone with a dark tan, yet someone happy-go-lucky. If a woman is described as frigid, she is usually not someone cold to the touch, yet someone who fears eros.

The Islamophobes encircling George W. Bush must not be displeased at the tsunami-driven earthquakes that have devoured more than forty thousand souls—most of them Muslims or other infidels—certainly very few Bush-style Christians, in Southeast Asia. As I received this news a few days back, I was certainly worried for this part of the world. My brother and his fiancée were in Thailand backpacking. We—my folks, my sister and my future sister-in-law’s folks—had absolutely no information as to where Daniel and Tova happened to be. A scratchy phone call a few hours into the quake simply provided a hint, compromised by the like-namedness of many Thai areas. Were they in Koh Phangan, on the east coast of Thailand, which was safe? Were they closer to Phuket, where they had just been, in Phan Nga?

As is usual during intense and gigantic Jewish family holiday experiences, I retreated for much of the last week into a guest bedroom and some heavy philosophy. True philosophy can only be grasped in intensely peaceful, anomalous situations, one form of the state of exception. This is where one can understand Plato’s riddle of the meaning of thing being the thing itself. The very opportunity to be surrounded in family, for all of its negative and positive ramifications, is thus inspiration to be alone in a far different manner than in one’s own abode. The solitude is accentuated by its antinomy, thus I find that I read twice as much in these situations than I do normally, with the caveat being that I read works of imagination—turn of the century novels or philosophy, as opposed to say, my everyday helping of Chalmers Johnson or Bill Blum.

It helps of course that my late grandfather Jack Cummings had a tremendous collection of Marxist and progressive first editions, lined up beautifully in his old study. A fierce intellectual and a capitalist for lack of any other choice for Jews of his generation, I always have been under the impression that his success came from an intrinsic understanding of the inner workings of capital itself, derived from Marx as well as a large collection of John Kenneth Galbraith, Paul Sweezy, Sidney Hook from his radical period and our old friend Max Eastman’s recollections of his friend Leon Trotsky, not to mention issues of radical and liberal magazines from the thirties and forties, including correspondence from Claud Cockburn. In other holidays I have spent with my folks, I’ve leapt into this material, yet this time I was encountering one of the great modern philosophers, Giorgo Agamben.

There is not much that can be linguistically expressed in regards to Agamben’s recent work “The State of Exception.” The (very) Italian Agamben—best known for refusing to travel to the United States over the issue of fingerprinting and human agency—is so obscure, so esoteric that Americans used to lambasting theory may find his work to be “bad writing,” yet looked at from the proper Pythagorean angle, he can be compared quite favorably to those that he is consciously following, in this case most importantly Walter Benjamin. His only real contemporaries are Judith Butler, Alain Badou and Slavoj Zizek. Incidentally, even the most anti-theoretical of radical philosophers Noam Chomsky recently made indirect but obvious reference to Agamben and the state of exception during a talk in Toronto. No postmodern cynic or crypto-capitalist, Agamben’s corpus is as much of an “update” conceptually of the prax is of historical materialism as Benjamin was to Marx, Marx was to Hegel or Hegel was to Bacon.

The State of Exception, as theorized by Agamben, is the German phrase for the Anglo-Saxon concept of “Martial Law” or the more instructive French phrase “State of Siege.” While not writing as a standard historian, Agamben gives the reader a history of how states of exception—positive or negative, as it were—periods in which law-as-it-is-known, are suspended. As with his earlier studies of Jews at Auschwitz and Muslims at Guantanamo, Agamben quite literally wrestles with history to understand how humans can suddenly become “inhuman,” from homo-sapien to “homo-sacer,” a Roman Juridicial concept defined roughly as bare life, a “sacred” criminal who could be killed without the death being considered a homicide. In this sense, one shouldn’t forget Zell Miller’s “outrage at the outrage” over Abu Ghraib, or Trent Lott’s characterization of the prisoners at Gitmo being simply “ones that the bombs didn’t hit.” Extended even further, it can be speculated that the genealogical transfer from homo-sapiens to homo-sacer is but a rehearsal for all of us.

As Agamben, like Hannah Arrendt, has pointed out, this is not unlike the agreement between both Prosecutors and Prosecuted during the Nazi War Crimes tribunal that genocide was a “Crime Against Humanity,” in other words, that while the crime was the killing of 9 million Jews, Slavs, Homosexuals, Gypsies and Communists were denied identity even when being avenged, with Jews being handed the consolation of Imperial-backed Zionism, which, as Eichman predicted, and many realize now, would come to behave not unlike the Nazis. Likewise, a particular anger at the Saudi Royal Family for hiring the Americans as opposed to his guerrillas during the ‘91 Gulf war, by all accounts is what animated Osama Bin Laden to create a state of exception for his American enemies. By not allowing Muslims to defend themselves against tyranny of kleptocrats and Zionists, the status of “homo sacer” among Muslims rich and poor produced its dialectical synthesis as non-state actors fighting a Jihad. Subhumanity produces posthumanity in the laboratory of the profane Earth. A profoundly Gnostic “negative theologian,” Agamben agrees with the Christian concept that the Earth has been profaned, but he prefers—and some people may be aware of this phrase to “immannentize the eschaton.” In other words, the very profanity of the State of Exception, as Benjamin points out, can produce the real state of exception.

Adorno warned against the codification of “genocide,’ since its very codification transfers the thing itself (the piles of dead human flesh) to non-existence, and making the crime against remnant, not the victim. In a recent case of what was described as genocide, as Chomsky points out, Srebenica in Bosnia, the Serb siege was far less barbaric than, say, Fallujah. The very knowledge of all of this, its existence, is unprecedented in the history of the state of exception. This is the dialectical root of the phrase in the Roman concept of “Iustium” meaning the festival in which the emperor is mourned and law is temporarily overturned, or in the more recent examples of Saturnalia, the holiday in which, with full permission of the authorities, Master and Slave switched roles, children could force adults to give them gifts (a hint of which is seen on Halloween now) and all sorts of ribald, sexual and licentious activity was allowed to take place. This itself was inspired by the ancient Jewish practice of “Jubilee” in which whole years were dedicated to role reversal, the clergy becoming the congregation, debts forgiven, etc. The sovereign in this frame is the concept of the two-headed eagle, or the king with two bodies, Agamben asserts by looking at the debate between the Nazi philosopher Carl Schmitt and Walter Benjamin that sovereignty as we know it is, in British philosopher Malcolm Bull’s reading of Agamben.

"If the sovereign is the one who describes the exception, then there must either be no sovereign before that decision is made or a sovereign before the decision whose sovereignty was established some other way. Sovereignty then must originally come from not deciding the exception but deciding the rule stop and start are not always controlled by the same switch....” (London Review of Books, Dec. 16 2004)

In Benjamin’s theses on the Philosophy of History, he portrays historical materialism as the truth behind the puppet of theology (of which is still controversial to invoke from a revolutionary standpoint) that both antagonistic poles’ actions can be predicted through what Adorno later termed “negative dialectics,” yet my own speculation leads me to believe that the (English) language itself, binary terms like positive or negative are insufficient to describe this praxis (practice in action = praxis, roughly). Or to use a more direct example, let us just say that history is a computer that can only be operated by two people, of whom both want to create a completely different program. The antagonism here becomes so intense that it nearly blurs, hence the state of exception. In regard to Schmitt and Benjamin, the argument between them not only threatens to change most conceptions of Weimar German intellectual life, but also provides a hint at the inner core of Nazi, and hence, all fascist ideology, since fascism was never really defeated.

As Agamben notes, Schmitt’s influential and neutral concept of the sovereign was an argument with Benjamin, not an original thought. While many leftists have described the core reason that Nazis attacked the Jews as their involvement in the communist and socialist movements, what is hinted at here is more disturbing. If Schmitt was in reality, as Agamben proposes, providing counterarguments to Benjamin’ idea of pure and divine (revolutionary) violence (not defined as hurting human beings, necessarily, but of decisive political activity) in order to stave off not only revolution, but thought itself, to which Schmitt like his Nazi contemporaries, with the possible exception of Heidegger, were passionately and theoretically opposed - then the inner core of Nazi ideology was indeed the mechanized homicide that would prove to be so irresistible that even its victims would adapt it. Again, as noted by Hannah Arrendt the sub-generis self-hating Jew, Eichman said, sitting in a glass booth in an Israeli court said, if he were Jewish, he’d have been a Zionist. Recently, Barak said that if he were Palestinian, he’d be “in one of the organizations.” The historical result of oppression is teaching victims how to be oppressors. Even the most sophisticated utopian theories involve necessary repression and oppression. The problem with the State of Exception is its fictive quality, the fact that it is not yet recognized as such. Only when we realize that Aleister Crowley’s prophecy of “Do What Thou Wilt” is realized to be operative, will be able to, with iron and fire, forge a new exception.

Not much more can be said about the book, except its vital importance, particularly for activists. These ideas should not simply be the purview of those either practicing or studying law or theology. A revolutionary antiwar movement should be well aware of its ability to create a real state of exception, that is an exception to the exception of global civil war. This certainly entails a rethinking of goals and a shattering of illusions, but it should also entail a culture that places a higher value on knowledge. For too long, leftist activists have been wary of what is labeled “theory,” while “theorists” have been sitting on their asses. Benjamin and Schmitt, like say, former friends forced apart by morality Said and Hitchens, were intimately involved with the politics of Germany during the Weimar period. While he himself has provided intellectually sound and morally ugly rationales for his position on Iraq, it is no mistake to compare “Soft on Fascism” Hitchens with Carl Schmitt, as one who provides rationale for murder among the intelligentsia. In turn, the late Said only became more insistent on the sanctity of life, and the divinity of pure violence (political action) toward the end of his life.

My brother, as it turns out, was in Koh Phangan, safe from the destruction wrought by the tsunamis. Friends he had recently made in Phuket, including families that trace their lineage back millennia are not. The real state of exception is declared by forces that cannot be linguistically or mathematically reduced in language. An earthquake, a ‘”tidal wave,” these are real states of exception. George W. Bush and Schmitt expert Alberto Gonzales are creating simulacra of a real state of exception, and in doing so, are digging their class’s graves.

Jordy Cummings, editor of Pure Polemics, lives in Toronto and can be reached at yorgos33ca@yahoo.ca.

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