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> > >This idea of politicising things is interesting, and puzzling. A lot of the >agora has been developed by private finance since Aristotle's time; but >what is happening in US and in UK looks to me like an attempt at total >depoliticisation > > > What little I know of Carl Schmitt, sometimes described and probably not without justice as the Nazi theologian, suggests that the renewed emphasis in recent times on the power of the sovereign to identify an enemy and demand his death is precisely what Schmitt would have called politicisation, where previously there was what he might have seen as depoliticisation run rampant. The sovereign here is not the people; this is not a democratic politics, but it makes a deeper claim on the people than the ballot or than any civil process: it calls on them to kill, or to support killing, and possibly (although this is not so much spoken of) to be killed in turn - war against Iraq will undoubtedly cost American lives, and this may include the lives of civilians. Trying to carry on a democratic politics, a civilian politics, in the midst of all of this requires a greater than usual obduracy. The democrat must endure being portrayed, and not only portrayed but also bullied, as irrelevent, impertinent, "bloodless" in affairs which are destined to bloodyness. I wonder whether this is inevitable, however; can't we have a democratic politics that is also prepared to hang dictators (what ever will be done with Milosevic, in the end? I fear they will not hang him from a lamp-post like Mussolini)? Can there be a civilian imperative to take up arms and kill? "If I can shoot rabbits", etc. Dominic