This aligns perfectly with Agamben’s reading of the paradox of sovereignty in Homo Sacer. The sovereign’s threat against your life is at once completely internal to the political agreement (i.e., the sovereign was named precisely for the purpose of wielding alone the power of life and death), and completely external to it, since for you the political agreement has entirely dissolved at the moment of the sovereign’s threat.

This is a concrete example of how, for Hobbes, the state of nature is not something simply external to the state nor certainly “before” it; the state of nature emerges at the very heart of the state whenever the sovereign threatens, just as he has been charged to do, any individual life.

bq. The question that arises is whether, in fact, we’re not already experiencing what is in essence a creeping coup d’état. But it’s not people in uniform who are seizing power. It’s militarized civilians, who conceive of the world as such a dangerous place that military power has to predominate, that constitutional constraints on the military need to be loosened.

But Zizek makes the brilliant point in Violence that this is precisely the perspective that enables Sam Harris to justify torture. Our visceral opposition to torture, according to Harris, is simply a leftover instinctual repulsion to the sight of concrete suffering, an ethical illusion that tricks us into thinking that torture constitutes something different than other more distant forms of targeted, goal-oriented force. What we need, he says, is “a drug that would deliver both the instrument of torture and the instrument of their utter concealment” (The End of Faith, p. 197)–which we might, in the end, simply call a “truth pill.”

Zizek sees in this line of thought an attempt to abolish proximity: our proximity to visible suffering, first, but also our proximity to another human being as one who can stake a claim on us. “What Harris is aiming at with his imaged ‘truth pill’ is nothing less than the abolition of the dimension of the Neighbour. … What disappears here is the abyss of the infinity that pertains to a subject” (p. 45). What is lost is the dimension of depth and mystery in other human beings that would forestall the possibility of reducing someone to a passing figure in some grand utilitarian calculus. “The end of faith,” says Zizek, must refer not only to the end of faith in God, but also to the end of faith in the neighbor. “Another subject (and ultimately the subject as such) is for Lacan not something directly given, but a ‘presupposition,’ something presumed, an object of belief–how can I ever be sure that what I see in front of me is another subject, not a flat biological machine lacking depth?”

bq. Many people think that grief is privatizing, that it returns us to a solitary situation and is, in that sense, depoliticizing. But I think it furnishes a sense of political community of a complex order, and it does this first of all by bringing to the fore the relational ties that have implications for theorizing fundamental dependency and ethical responsibility. … Let’s face it. We’re undone by each other. And if we’re not, we’re missing something. This seems so clearly the case with grief, but it can be so only because it was already the case with desire. (pp. 22–23)

Today, our group from Notre Dame traveled into Jerusalem to visit “King David’s Tower,” the base of which was built by Herod the Great himself; and to see the Burnt House Museum, which showcases the archaeological remains of a priest’s house burned in the destruction of Jerusalem in AD 70. The walk through the Burnt House begins with a video dramatization centered around the family that would have occupied this house leading up to the burning of the Temple, demonstrating along the way the tensions that existed within Judaism at the time. But it was not only a re-telling of this history–how could it be? The entire presentation was framed by current events, and the story was told in a way so as to directly legitimate the Jewish control of Jerusalem.

The presentation began with an explanation of how the burnt house came to be discovered: through a dig that began after the “liberation” of the west wall in 1967. Liberation from whom or why was not mentioned; the screen only showed video footage of Jewish soldiers falling in front of the west wall and kissing it. The presentation cut to the past, and a young man began telling the story of the ruins–a young man, as it turns out, who was the zealot son of the priest who lived in this house. I gradually became aware of a cloth that was sitting on top of the chair where he sat: a white cloth, with several blue stripes–the colors of the Israeli flag. As I watched, I realized these colors were ubiquitous, on shawls and bags and those long scarves that orthodox Jews wear around their necks (the name of which escapes me). The moral thrust of the story was that only in unity can the Jews hope to resist invading forces, condemning the division between priest and zealot that existed in the characters of the father and his son. After finishing the story of his home’s destruction, the son is reflecting on what’s happened. “I don’t know why,” he says, “but I feel we will come back here one day.” He could sense that one day there would again be children playing in the streets. The presentation concluded, then, with a quote from the Hebrew Scriptures about the restoration of Jerusalem and the Jews’ return from exile. Jerusalem would again belong to the Jews.

In another room of ruins, a sign did give more information about the war of ’67. The Jews had been banished from Jerusalem in AD 70 (did it mention the more complete expulsion of AD 135?), only to return in the 14th century. Suddenly, then, in 1948, the Arab League attacked Jerusalem and razed the Jewish Quarter. It was only in 1967 that Israel was able to reclaim the west wall and restore peace for the Jews to Jerusalem. Obviously, a few important things are missing from this account.

It was especially difficult for me after seeing these things to pay any attention to the history of Jerusalem. This ancient site of a terrible tragedy had been transformed into Israeli propaganda. Every tourist that walks through this place–the innocent tourist who does not know the history of the conflict–receives an unexpected lesson in Israeli ideology. It is subtle, brilliant propaganda to be sure. No one would think they were being trained to read history in a very tendentious way if they did not know what was missing from the stories or what aim was originally sought by the prophetic texts of restoration. What is a long history of oppression and disaster–for Palestinians as much as Jews–was reduced to a simple story of violent exile and liberatory return; what is God’s promise of hope for restoration based on obedience and worship was reduced to an emotional tool for political re-establishment.

This is why I’m having so much trouble learning the history. It is being used for so much violence.

— Percy Bysshe Shelley, “Ozymandias“

(h/t D. W. Congdon)

The way I continually laugh out loud while reading Rorty makes me suspect I’m not taking him seriously enough. It’s this kind of polemic that I find amusing most of the time, and often because there’s quite a bit of truth to it–but, I admit, I also find myself laughing when Rorty is at his most philosophical, proclaiming the uselessness of Truth and the eschatological triumph of progress based on whatever contingencies. Still, I find his political vision oddly compelling, despite our enormous ground-level differences. Perhaps I’m just thankful for a leftist political philosophy that doesn’t begin with Marx or assume the immediate necessity of revolution, and moreover one that makes rooms for the messy sort of political cooperation that really constitutes all political history (as he himself argues).