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Subject: [CTHEORY] Article 143 - Dangerous Philosophy
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CTHEORY THEORY, TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE VOL 27, NOS 1-2
*** Visit CTHEORY Online: http://www.ctheory.net ***
Article 143 04/05/27 Editors: Arthur and Marilouise Kroker
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Dangerous Philosophy: Threat, Risk, and Security
================================================
~Irving Goh~
"We have seen [the State war machine] set its sights on a new
type of enemy, no longer another State, nor even another regime,
but the 'unspecified enemy'; we have seen it put its
counter-guerilla elements into place, so that it can be caught
by surprise once, but not twice... Yet the conditions that make
the State or World war machine possible, in other words constant
capital (resources and equipment) and human variable capital,
constantly recreate unexpected possibilities for counterattack,
unforeseen initiatives determining revolutionary, popular,
minority, mutant machines. The definition of the Unspecified
Enemy testifies to this... 'multiform, maneuvering and
omnipresent... of the moral, political, subversive or economic
order, etc.,' the unassignable material Saboteur or human
Deserter assuming the most diverse forms."
-- Deleuze and Guattari [1]
"We plan a comprehensive assault on terrorism. This will be a
different kind of conflict against a different kind of enemy.
This is a conflict without battlefields or beachheads, a
conflict with opponents who believe they are invisible."
-- George W. Bush [2]
"Words can be turned against me."
-- Jean Baudrillard [3]
Questions of Philosophy
-----------------------
If Deleuze and Guattari were to write and publish their philosophy of
the nomadological war machine today, in the still dark light of the
omnipresent retaliatory and aggressive political discourse that has
emerged from the ruins of September 11, would their philosophy have a
chance? And given that there is always the risk of an irresponsible
reading, i.e., a reading that chooses to omit, conceal, ignore,
forget, gloss over, critical premises of an argument or concept,
would not the "unspecified enemy," which is also the very real and
somewhat invisible ("real and nonactual"[4]) nomadological war
machine in Deleuze and Guattari's philosophy, be terribly and
terrifyingly misread as terrorist material? In that viral vein of
misreading, would the text or philosophy of Deleuze and Guattari be
also charged as advocating terrorism and hence a threat to the
security of humanity? And consequently, would it also not risk its
survivability, its possible public dissemination to a time of reading
in the world, since the "comprehensive assault" by the Bush
Administration is also committed to inflicting military force on
"anybody who houses a terrorist, encourages terrorism"?[5] Is it
still able to hold space within all social and/ or academic
discourses? Or will it have to burrow space, move only in
subterranean fashion by creating holey spaces? And even so, will it
still risk itself being flushed out by "smart" thermobaric bombs --
"They run to the hills; they find holes to get in. And we will do
whatever it takes to smoke them out and get them running, and we'll
get them"?[6] Taking away the innocent chronotropic distance between
the present "time of terror"[7] and the time of Deleuze and
Guattari's writing, should the reading of Deleuze and Guattari's
philosophy be rejected today? Put in another way, would a
contemporary philosophical counterpart of the nomadological war
machine be possible today?
All these questions would not be limited only to Deleuze and
Guattari's philosophy. A reactive or reactionary (mis)reading of
Deleuze and Guattari's philosophy would also incriminate other
philosophies, if not generate a domino effect of witch-hunting of
philosophies, which likewise construct counter-thoughts that refuse
to adhere, accede, or surrender to the dominant thought of the State.
For instance, Baudrillard would be treading on a thin red line in his
recent writing on points of resistances -- not unlike the
"unspecified enemy" -- that strike out against the State's
globalizing political, economic, and technological forces.[8] All
these questions would be a question of the future possibility of
philosophy, really. It would especially be a question of the future
of philosophy as mapped out by post-structuralist thinkers like
Deleuze and Guattari, Derrida, Baudrillard, Virilio, etc., who, after
Nietzsche, would like thought to be actively combative, would like
the invention of philosophical concepts and their heterogeneous
interpretations from the outside to cross-swords, not allowing
thought to uncritically accept any monolithic interpretation of the
world, especially that of the State.[9]
We will not forget to make clear that the questions posed in the
beginning are still entirely hypothetical. Philosophy has not (yet)
been interrogated of its risk or apparent threat to hinge toward or
to appear to be in proximity with a discourse made to belong to
terrorism by the State. Baudrillard's essay has not been the target
of counter-terrorism. What could a text of philosophy in-itself, a
mere philosophical argument, do, in any actuality of action, anyway,
really? The right of philosophy, or the right to philosophy, has not
yet been questioned. The hypothetical scenario depicted hence -- the
confrontation of politics and philosophy -- is a pre-emptive strike
indeed. But what is pre-emptive is most often times instigated by an
imminent circumstance (an understanding of the pre-emptive shared by
political discourse as manifest in the Iraq war of 2003, but surely
employed with different means and justifications). In other words,
the questioning of the right of philosophy and the right to
philosophy by politics remains nonetheless a possibility, an
approaching eclipse, given the political climate of the present time.
Furthermore, there is no longer any consolation or security in being
a hypothesis today either. What is a hypothesis is now also a target.
"9/11 showed that threats hitherto belittled as wild speculations or
hypothetical dangers of the remotest possibility are realistic,
indeed actual."[10] Philosophy, in this wait for an imminent
repression if not suppression,[11] would be experiencing something
of a state of emergency -- under siege in its own space, under
curfew, movement (to the) outside prohibited. This surely would not
be unlike the experience of some of us when compelled to make the
decisive non-choice of "either you are with us [the State war machine
of the US], or you are with the terrorists,"[12] when none can
choose, really choose, to be in-between, not thinking in line with
either. Would philosophy likewise be coerced to abdicate and make a
decision from such a non-choice, in order to have a space in the real
world for its present survivability and for its future?
The sense is that there is no security for philosophy, at the
outside, that is. We cannot rely on an anachronistic Kantian belief
in the political practitioner to think that "the theorist's abstract
ideas [...] cannot endanger the state," that it is "safe to let [the
philosopher] fire off his whole broadside, and the worldly-wise
statesman need not turn a hair."[13] We cannot have stubborn faith
in the "saving clause," whereby the "practical politician" "must not
claim [...] to scent any danger to the state in the opinions which
the theorist has randomly uttered in public."[14] No matter how
philosophy is written in "correct and proper style," there is no
fortress to safeguard "against all malicious interpretation."[15]
There will always be the real threat of philosophy, especially the
philosophy of counter-thought, being misread, e.g. misread as a
threat, on paper. That is the risk of philosophy, the risk of the
dissemination of philosophy. It is a risk that philosophy must take,
though. A philosophy like Deleuze and Guattari's nomadological
war-machine must continue to be written, even though it presents or
it risks being mis-re-presented as a risk, a threat, to the security
of global politics and its discourse. Only then will philosophy
secure itself a future. Only by risking being a threat to a
dominating and homogenizing political discourse, risking a war with
the State, risking being a threat to itself henceforth, will
philosophy think anew an armature of counter-thoughts to resist any
monolithic dominant thought and its contemporary modifications that
seek to veil its nonetheless fascistic determinations. That is what
we will argue here, through a (re)reading Deleuze and Guattari's
Nomadology [16] today: that philosophy, as a thought-projectile such
as the nomadological war machine, remains necessary, remains
necessary to be read, re-read, and written, despite its imminent risk
and threat of demise, so as to secure for itself and the world a
future free space of heterogeneous thoughts, so as to secure a space
within which every singular thought can be free to think whatever it
desires.
Threat / Risk
-------------
Let us say it again: the risk of Deleuze and Guattari's Nomadology is
that it makes itself very likely to be misread as a trajectory of
terrorism because of its counter-State or anti-State posture, and
hence a possible threat to its own survivability amidst today's
global or international anti-terrorism campaign. Saying it again,
that sounds too apologetic. We might not even be hearing philosophy
properly. In our apologia of philosophy like that of Deleuze and
Guattari's nomadological war machine, we will not hold back. We will
not striate ourselves with an apology. That would still constitute
much to be remaining in a state of emergency. With a projectile of
absolute speed and decisive direction, and hearing nomadology fully
in its articulated resonance, we will just say: the nomadological war
machine is anti-State. Forget about the risk and threat of misreading
to philosophy. An understanding of the life-death logic of
dissemination, from Derrida, would have braced us for that risk,
which is the letting fall of the text to the outside, at the outside,
letting it fall also to misappropriation, to misreading. That risk is
but part of philosophy's "artifactuality," such that it paradoxically
guarantees its future outside its own spatio-temporal context. We
have been prepared for that. What is at stake now is another
preparation, another re-reading of Deleuze and Guattari's
nomadological war machine today, untimely as it seems to "social
responsibility," in order to brace ourselves against another risk,
another threat. So, we will just say it, for now: the nomadological
war machine is a threat to the State.
The nomadological war machine is a threat to the State because it
refuses to abdicate the freedom of thought to the State. It refuses
to submit thinking to a function of the State. With regards to
thought, the State limits it, appropriates it. It regulates thought
to a dominant or dominating interpretation. From the point of view of
the State, it is best that no thought deviates from the dominant one
issuing from the State. From the point of view of the State, it is
even better that the political, economic, and techno-scientific
"progress" of the State be left unthought by the subjects of the
State, left archived only by the State as its grand narrative.[17]
"Thought as such is already in conformity with a model that it
borrows from the State apparatus, and which defines for it goals and
paths, conduits, channels, organs, an entire organon."[18] All
thought would have to end with the State, or the ends of thought
should find itself in service for the State. (We can read this in the
case of the present Bush Administration's relation with the
think-tank Project for the New American Century (PNAC) as revealed by
the BRussells Tribunal.[19]) In other words, the State would have
had captured thought, first creating for itself a captivating image
that reaches out to the masses, which then arrests all autonomous and
heterogeneous thinking in place for that singular image-thought of
and by the State. And it would be within thought that the State
creates for itself, and for the spectacle for (the fixation of) its
subjects, an image which grounds itself as the necessary foundation
of the territory's sovereignty -- "operating by magical capture,
seizure or binding, constituting the efficacity of a foundation" --
and which binds peoples together -- "a republic of free spirits
proceeding by pact or contract, constituting a legislative and
juridical organization, carrying the sanction of a ground."[20] It
is as such that it seduces the masses into a captivating thought --
an easy thought, a thought without labor, whereby the security of the
sovereignty of the (thoughts of) peoples within the sovereignty of
their spaces are given to the State. The economy of such capture of
thought gives the State as if a universal right, as if its thought,
discourse, and action are a categorical universal law, carved in
stone on an imperial obelisk at the center of State's territory.
"Indeed, by developing in thought in this way the State-form gains
something essential: an entire consensus. Only thought is capable of
inventing a fiction of a State that is universal by right, of
elevating the State to the level of the universality of law."[21]
With the capture of thought, the State gains "to be sanctioned by it
as the unique, universal form."[22] And consequently, by an apparent
appeal to the mass consensus, it is able to outlaw any form of
counter-thought and fragment the community by separating those with
deviant thought-trajectories: "the State becomes the sole principle
separating rebel subjects [...] from consenting subjects, who rally
to its form of their own accord."[23] All these are still rigorously
evident today, whereby the State war machine of the US takes itself
to be the de jure international force of law against terrorism, as if
given all rights to categorize other states as either supporters of
the anti-terrorism campaign or sympathizers of terrorists, and as if
given all rights too to conduct military violence in its own terms
against those it deems hospitable to terrorism.
It is critical to note that what the State claims to be its
"consenting subjects" are not exactly "free spirits" however, even
though some of them claim to be thinkers or innovators within the
State's territory. There is in fact no real freedom of thought for
them: "The State does not give power (pouvoir) to the intellectuals
or conceptual innovators; on the contrary, it makes them a strictly
dependent organ with an autonomy that is only imagined."[24] To not
resist the dominant thought of the State, or to believe in the false
autonomy of thought, would be close to stepping back into the shadows
of Plato's cave. The thought that comes from these supposed "free
spirits" only disseminates, only repeats, only reproduces the thought
of the State. What has happened is in fact only that the State has
"deprive[d] them of their [autonomous] model, submits them to its own
model, and only allow[ed] them to exist in the capacity of
'technologies' or 'applied science'."[25] This variation on a State
thematic only reaffirms the delimitation of the freedom of thought,
only reaffirms the gravity of the monolithic thought by the State:
"Reproducing implies the permanence of a fixed point of view."[26]
It is the permanence of the State's fixed point of view, the
permanence of the State even, that is reiterated, in total disregard
of other heterogeneous thoughts, other points of views.
The nomadological war machine is that which necessarily resists,
which escapes the capture of a fixed point of view. It "brings a
furor to bear against sovereignty."[27] It is for the re-opening of
thought to a space of freedom, for the opening of a freedom of
thought, for the maintenance of a free space of freedom of thought,
that the nomadological war machine exposes and expresses itself as a
threat to the State. It becomes anti-State. It "impedes the formation
of the State."[28] It carries out war against the State, only
because the State has first incited it precisely by delimiting
thought. It becomes combative against the State only because it wants
to wrest the act, the activity, the activeness, of thought back from
the stranglehold of the State. Physical combat has never been the
primary imperative of the nomadological war machine. It "knows the
uselessness of violence."[29] But it acknowledges that it is what
thought sometimes inevitably calls for as a necessary praxis. "War is
neither the condition nor the object of the war machine, but
necessarily accompanies it or completes it."[30] It projects its
full force of a war machine against the State only because the task
of thinking has to be seriously brought back to a plurality and
heterogeneity of thought, which is but the rights of a plural and
heterogeneous people. "Because the less people take thought
seriously, the more they think in conformity with what the State
wants."[31] It is as such that the nomadological war machine
conducts war and consequently risks its rhetoric taking on the pose
of terrorist material. It does not help, of course, that its modes of
movement make easy parallels with those of terrorism. At times, the
nomadological war machine moves in stealth, taking on a "social
clandestinity."[32] In war, it conducts unconventional warfare --
"without battle lines," "making violence durable, even unlimited" --
in order to displace the sovereignty of the space of the State --
"deterritorialize the enemy by shattering his territory from within;
deterritorialize oneself by renouncing, by going elsewhere."[33]
For the nomadological war machine, combat will be a question of the
future of the freedom of movement of thought, of the space of
heterogeneous thoughts, without needing the homogeneous totality of
all thoughts, without needing the enclosed architecture of thoughts
within an interior like the State-form. What it fights for is a
"thought grappling with exterior forces instead of being gathered up
in an interior form, operating by relays instead of forming an image;
an event-thought, a haecceity, instead of a subject-thought, a
problem-thought instead of an essence-thought or theorem."[34] The
nomadological war machine very well knows that its combat with the
State is a risk of its having annihilated by the State. An absolute
victory against the State is not guaranteed. It risks itself being
captured by the State. But for the nomadological war machine, it is a
necessary risk to take, so as to maintain the freedom of a space of
thought, to insist on the right to the freedom of thought. The
nomadological war machine takes this risk only "to raise or to
sharpen the vigilance of the citizens of the world" as Derrida has
only recently said, so as to secure the world against the State's
delimitation of the free space of heterogeneous thoughts.[35]
Security, and a New International Community?
--------------------------------------------
The free space of a freedom of thought, of heterogeneities, as to be
cleared by the nomadological war machine, is not a simple thought
however -- hence the notion of "problem-thought" to express its
force. The problem with the "problem-thought" of the nomadological
war machine is that it appears to indeed pose as a threat to the
security of existing societal peace. This "problem-thought," contra
Habermas, seeks a space that is "anti-dialogue," "affirming [but] a
noncommunicating force."[36] It seeks a space that interrupts or
fragments speech communities, which commonly presuppose a peace
predicated on an accommodation and/ or assimilation of speech acts.
That is not to say that the nomadological war machine is
anti-community though. Instead, it is always a clearing for an
immanence of community whereby singularities come together through
the sheer forces of desire, without the requisite of speech even, and
hence without negotiating or compromising the full force of a
singular thought or speech through accommodation or assimilation. And
these singularities would have no dispute with neighboring
singularities of differences. Difference, for the nomadological war
machine, so long as it does not delimit the Other, never does
constitute antagonism. Heterogeneous singularities would still share
the same space, without needing any convenient resolution of
differences. The maintenance of fragmentality by a "problem-thought"
is the resonance of a dissonant community (or perhaps the
non-antagonistic dissonance of a resonant community), of a space of
"distribution of heterogeneities in a free space."[37] The force of
"problem-thought" is but the rhythmics of immanent differences of
thought. To wit, the "problem-thought" of the nomadological war
machine is "not harmonic."[38] It is not harmonic in the
homogenizing way as the State has educated us on the imperatives of
communities, but another harmonics whereby rhythmic and dissonant
differences remain without being reterritorialized into a totality.
For the State, such "problem-thought" would be a block to its efforts
of social engineering and peace constructions. But for the
nomadological war machine, "the problem is not an 'obstacle,' it is
the surpassing of the obstacle, a projection,"[39] a
thought-projectile that smashes through any wall of any homogenizing
totality. The fragmental "problematic" "involves all manner of
deformations, transmutations, passages to the limit, operations in
which each figure designates an 'event'" such that the risk of making
all thought homogeneous is averted, such that there is always the
opening to "a heterogeneous smooth space."[40]
With this "problem-thought" for "a heterogeneous smooth space," we
can see that the nomadological war machine is in fact a question also
of the security of a future community to come, a community of
differences without horizons, a community of a freedom of thought and
of a freedom of movement, a new international cosmopolitics, perhaps
even what Derrida at several places calls a "democracy to come," a
democracy without the requisite of citizenship. The question of a
community-to-come lies at the horizon of the nomadological war
machine. The nomadological war machine after all "is in its essence
the constitutive element of smooth space, the occupation of this
space, displacement within this space, and the corresponding
composition of people: this is its sole and veritable positive
object."[41] It works in "social clandestinity," and "attests to an
absolute solitude,"[42] but the smooth space of heterogeneous
discontinuities [43] it combats for looks towards "an extremely
populous solitude, [...] a solitude already interlaced with a people
to come, one that invokes and awaits that people, existing only
through it, though it is not yet here."[44] It seeks to secure a
future free space not only of thought but also the movement of
people. "The nomadic trajectory [...] distributes people (or animals)
in an open space, one that is indefinite and noncommunicating.[...]
It is a very special kind of distribution, one without division into
shares, in a space without borders or enclosure."[45]
It is a distribution that is contra globalization therefore,
something that we cannot avoid mentioning in any discussion that
engages with political, economic, ideological, and even philosophical
dissemination on an international spatio-temporal dimension.
Globalization, as the politico-economic order of the State -- very
much the imperial order of the US too -- allows only the borderless
flow of information, capital, and goods, but not of the movement of
people. Rules and regulations of citizenship still bind peoples
within territorial limits. At the same time it striates certain
people within spaces while it telematically directs transnational
economics, State globalization actually delocalizes these spaces,
these peoples.[46] Localities have no longer any significance. All
thoughts of differences of localities have to be submitted to the
technics of a homogenizing real-time of tele-technology.
Subsequently, all localities are deterritorialized onto a controlled
non-space of hyperspace. Baudrillard calls this "dislocation," an
annihilation of "all forms of differentiation and [...] difference."
[47] Again, the nomadological war machine presents itself as a threat
to such simulacrum of globalization [48] by opening a space for the
freedom of movement of peoples, securing a space that sustains its
points of heterogeneity with other spaces. The nomadological war
machine is "the tracing of a creative line of flight, the composition
of smooth space and of that movement of people in that space."[49]
It is always a question of a freedom of movement or "moving" for the
nomadological war machine: "the movable [...] in smooth space, as
opposed to the geometry of the immovable [...] in striated space."
[50] This seems very much like the operation of globalization we are
resisting here already. But (the affects of) the deterritorialization
movement of the nomadological war machine moves in special,
paradoxical ways. It moves by maintaining the space. It moves but at
the same time it "holds space."[51] As such, the nomadological war
machine is open to the sense of differences of the space. It movingly
dwells, and grows, in the full intensity of locality. The
nomadological war machine therefore "does not belong to the relative
global, where one passes from one point to another, from one region
to another. Rather, he is in a local absolute that is manifested
locally, and engendered in a series of local operations of varying
orientations."[52] With it, "locality is not delimited [...] but
becomes a nonlimited locality."[53]
It is not difficult to see, along with Baudrillard and Derrida, that
delocalization by State globalization incites and gives place to
terrorism as a violent response to the indifferent siege of
globalization. With globalization, the State in fact makes itself a
threat to itself. And when terrorism hits hard at the State, as in
September 11, and when the State retaliates with an objective of
total annihilation or total war against terrorism, the State fails
yet again to take time to reconsider its politico-economic
operations, to take time to give critical thought of the
heterogeneous Other that it has left out at the margins through the
speed of delocalization. It becomes a decisive imperative of the
State to secure a peace at all cost without any more irruption to its
status quo. For this peace, and through the contemporary rhetoric of
a "homeland security," it requires all to give up any thought that
deviates from that of the State. It is a peace where all
heterogeneity is homogenized into a totality of the thought of the
State. "Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorist."
Deleuze and Guattari call such peace "a peace still more terrifying
than fascist death."[54] This is a peace that is a threat to a space
of a freedom of thought, a freedom of movement, and a freedom of
difference. It is a threat to the future of the task of thinking, a
threat to the right to heterogeneous thoughts. It is for the security
of such a space, a future, and a right, that the nomadological war
machine risks itself being misread and hence maliciously
misinterpreted, risks itself being captured and smoked out by the
State, by presenting itself as a threat to the State, by conducting
war against the State. That is, to reiterate, the nomadological war
machine's risk of philosophy.
In the opening of Kant's essay on "perpetual peace," Kant speaks of a
signboard with the words "perpetual peace" inscribed alongside an
image of a graveyard. For Kant, it is ambiguous as to "whether it
applies to men in general, or particularly to heads of state (who can
never have enough of war), or only to the philosophers who blissfully
dream of perpetual peace."[55] There is nothing blissful about the
nomadological war machine, of course. But perhaps it necessarily has
to risk a possible death by a misreading, a malicious interpretation,
a State, so that a perpetual peace, whereby the right to a plural and
heterogeneous public opinion or interpretation of the world is
affirmed without reserve, can be secured. Only when there remains
such a chance for a future free space of heterogeneous thoughts in
the world then will philosophy be conducting its task as philosophy,
the task that secures for philosophy and the world a horizonless
possibility of thinking, and the possibility of thinking in
difference, in security. For this perpetual peace, Kant insists that
"the philosopher should be given a hearing."[56] Perhaps, in this
"time of terror," Deleuze and Guattari's concept of the nomadological
war machine, should be once again given an untimely hearing?
Notes:
------
[1] Nomadology: The War Machine. Trans. Brian Massumi. New York:
Semiotext(e), 1986. pp. 119-120.
[2] "Radio Address of the President to the Nation." 15 September
2001. www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2001/09/20010915.html
[3] Jean Baudrillard. "This is the Fourth World War: The Der Spiegel
Interview With Jean Baudrillard." Trans. Samir Gandesha.
International Journal of Baudrillard Studies. Vol.1:1. January 2004.
p. 5.
[4] Deleuze and Guattari. Nomadology: The War Machine. p. 117.
[5] Remarks by George W. Bush. "President Building Worldwide Campaign
Against Terrorism." 19 September 2001.
www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2001/09/20010919-1.html
[6] Remarks by George W. Bush. "President Urges Readiness and
Patience." 15 September 2001.
www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2001/09/20010915-4.html
[7] Cf. Giovanna Borradori. Philosophy in a Time of Terror: Dialogues
with JYrgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida. Chicago and London:
University of Chicago Press, 2003.
[8] Cf. "The Violence of the Global" (CTheory. 20 May 2003.
www.ctheory.net): "They do not abide by value judgments or political
realities.[...] They cannot be 'regularized' by means of a
collective historical action. They defeat any uniquely dominant
thought. Yet they do not present themselves as a unique
counter-thought. Simply they create their own game and impose their
own rules. Not all [...] are violent. Some linguistic, artistic,
corporeal, or cultural [ones] are quite subtle. But others, like
terrorism, can be violent." Like Derrida and many other philosophers,
even thinkers of counter-thought against the dominant discourse of
the State surely, Baudrillard in no place in his essay whatsoever
condone the violent acts of the perpetrators of the events of
September 11. But he does acknowledge, as Alain Badiou does, that
there is no doubt the "support [terrorists] receive and the
fascination they are able to exert."
[9] We will not forget Derrida's call for a heterogeneity of
interpretations otherwise of dominant ones coming out of political
and media discourse in The Other Heading: Reflections on Today's
Europe (Trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael B. Naas. Intro.
Michael B. Naas. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992).
[10] Douglas J. Feith. "U.S Strategy for the War on Terrorism." 14
April 2004. www.defenselink.mil/speeches/2004/sp20040414-0261.html
[11] We say "repression" because there is indeed a claim for "social
responsibility" in such times, a responsibility to be sensitive to
the persons, things, and institutions that were destroyed on
September 11. There is a call to restrict all discourses such that
they will not in any way recall or be in any way reminiscent of the
specter of September 11.
[12] George W Bush. "Address to a Joint Session of Congress and the
American People." 20 September 2001.
www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2001/09/20010920-8.html
[13] Immanuel Kant. "Perpetual Peace." Political Writings. Ed. H.S
Reiss. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970. pp. 93.
[14] Ibid.
[15] Ibid.
[16] We will recognize, of course, that the Semiotext(e) publication
of Nomadology is abstracted from a chapter or "plateau" of Deleuze
and Guattari's A Thousand Plateaus. We will restrict our discussion
in this paper to that "plateau" because that would surely be the most
controversial chapter in this context. And hence we will make full
use of the Semiotext(e) publication rather than A Thousand Plateaus.
[17] Cf. Walter Benjamin's "Theses on the Philosophy of History" (in
Illuminations: Essays and Reflections. Ed. and intro. Hannah Arendt.
Trans. Harry Zohn. New York: Schocken Books, 1969. pp. 253-264).
Benjamin speaks of the conformist imperative of State-thought (which
at the same is denigrative of the thought of the social body) that
gives a "conception of the nature of labor [that] bypasses the
question of how its products might benefit the workers while still
not being at their disposal. It recognizes only the progress of the
mastery of nature, not the retrogression of society" (259). In
response to the State's grand narrative of "progress," Benjamin
himself launches his war machine, calling for a "theoretical
armature" (262) of a counter-state-of-emergency such that the
homogenized time of that narrative will be "shot through" (263) with
shards of heterogeneous, immanent, plural Jetztzeit.
[18] Nomadology. p. 40.
[19] See www.brusselstribunal.org 17 April 2004.
[20] Nomadology. p. 41.
[21] Ibid. pp. 41-42.
[22] Ibid. p. 42.
[23] Ibid.
[24] Ibid. p. 30.
[25] Ibid. p. 37.
[26] Ibid. p. 36.
[27] Ibid. p.2.
[28] Ibid. p. 13.
[29] Ibid. p. 89.
[30] Ibid. p. 111.
[31] Ibid. p. 44.
[32] Ibid. p. 92.
[33] Ibid. pp. 4/ 77/ 4.
[34] Ibid. p. 47.
[35] Jacques Derrida. "For a Justice to Come: An Interview with
Jacques Derrida." Trans. Ortwin de Graef. 19 February 2004.
www.brusselstribunal.org/pdf/Derrida_EN.rtf
[36] Nomadology. pp. 46/ 57.
[37] Ibid. p. 68.
[38] Ibid. p. 67.
[39] Ibid. p. 19.
[40] Ibid. pp. 19/ 34.
[41] Ibid. p. 111. My italics.
[42] Ibid. p. 44.
[43] Cf. Ibid. p. 95.
[44] Ibid. pp. 44-45.
[45] Ibid. p. 51.
[46] "Delocalization," of course, is Virilio's term for the damaging
effect of the technics of tele-technology. See especially Open Sky
(Trans. Julie Rose. London: Verso, 1997).
[47] "The Violence of the Global."
[48] Cf. Derrida: "[Globalization] is not taking place. It is a
simulacrum, a rhetorical artifice or weapon that dissimulates a
growing imbalance, a new opacity, a garrulous and hypermediatized
noncommunication, a tremendous accumulation of wealth, means of
production, teletechnologies, and sophisticated military weapons, and
the appropriation of all these powers by a small number of states or
international corporations" (In Giovanna Borradori. Philosophy in a
Time of Terror: Dialogues with JYrgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida.
p. 123).
[49] Nomadology. p. 120. My italics.
[50] Ibid. p. 66.
[51] Ibid. p. 62.
[52] Ibid. p. 54.
[53] Ibid. pp. 54-55.
[54] Ibid. p. 119.
[55] "Perpetual Peace." p. 93.
[56] Ibid. p. 115.
--------------------
Irving Goh is a doctoral candidate with the European Graduate School
(EGS). His current research interests include the intersection of
philosophy and architecture, theories of communities, the question of
friendship, and postcolonial theory. His paper on Deleuze and
Guattari and postcolonial theory was published by the journal ~genre~
(California State University). Irving Goh lives in Singapore.
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