Archives of the Insensible: Of War, Photopolitics, and Dead Memory 9780226277479

Table of contents :
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Enigmatic Dispersals
Part I: Desisting Sovereignties
1. Before the Law at Guantánamo
2. The Apophatic Blur of War
3. First-Person Shooters: The Critique of Monopoly Violence
Part II: Amputating Archives
4. The Structuring Enemy and Archival War
5. Traumatizing the Truth Commission
Part III: Committing Anthropology
6. Turning Around Scars
7. Expiring Animality
Index

Citation preview

Archives of the Insensible

Archives of the Insensible Of War, Photopolitics, and Dead Memory

ALLEN FELDMAN

The University of Chicago Press Chicago and London

Allen Feldman is associate professor at the Department of Media Culture and Communication at New York University. He is the author of The Northern Fiddler and Formations of Violence, the latter also published by the University of Chicago Press. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637 The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London © 2015 by The University of Chicago All rights reserved. Published 2015. Printed in the United States of America 24 23 22 21 20 19 18 17 16 15

1 2 3 4 5

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-27716-5 (cloth) ISBN-13: 978-0-226-27733-2 (paper) ISBN-13: 978-0-226-27747-9 (e-book) DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226277479.001.0001 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Feldman, Allen, author. Archives of the insensible : of war, photopolitics, and dead memory / Allen Feldman. pages ; cm Includes index. ISBN 978-0-226-27716-5 (cloth : alk. paper)—ISBN 978-0-226-27733-2 (pbk. : alk. paper)—ISBN 978-0-226-27747-9 (ebook) 1. War (Philosophy) 2. Just war doctrine. 3. War—Moral and ethical aspects. I. Title. U22.F44 2015 172′.42—dc23 2015017185 This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48–1992 (Permanence of Paper).

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments / vii Introduction: Enigmatic Dispersals / 1 PART I: DESISTING SOVEREIGNTIES

ONE

/ Before the Law at Guantánamo / 33

T WO

THREE

/ The Apophatic Blur of War / 69

/ First-Person Shooters: The Critique of Monopoly Violence / 117 P A R T I I : A M P U TAT I N G A R C H I V E S

FOUR

/ The Structuring Enemy and Archival War / 185

FIVE

/ Traumatizing the Truth Commission / 229

PART III: COMMITTING ANTHROPOLOGY

SIX

/ Turning Around Scars / 295

SEVEN

/ Expiring Animality / 354 Index / 411

AC K N OW L E D G M E N T S

The seeds of these writings began in conversations with thinkers, both explicitly discussed in these pages or tacitly mediating; foremost are Reiner Schürmann, Ernesto Laclau, Talal Asad, Stanley Diamond, and Abram Engelman—their styles of thought and political integrity have been an irrevocable metahistorical influence that resonated with a voice and vision I encountered only in logos—Jacques Derrida. Avital Ronell, though she has not sought this role, continues to personify a rigorous ethics of politicized deconstruction, or “take down,” that beams like a searchlight on the lee shore of our grim contemporaneity. I also owe much to the generous and incisive interlocution of Jon Beller and Debbora Battaglia, and the unflagging support of my erudite editor, T. David Brent. In South Africa I would like to acknowledge the war veterans of Western Cape Action Tours for brokering my introduction to the herbal healers, and Mitzpah Botho, my Xhosa translator, and her nuanced reception of the multiplex speech of the “social mothers” and herbal healers. I am grateful to George Molebatsi, of the Human Rights Violations Committee of the TRC, for allowing me to sit in on their briefing sessions with witnesses during the course of hearings. I am in debt to Gerhard Richter and Juan Genoves, eminent visual ethnographers of violence, for making their art available for this book. Earlier attempts to engage the themes of this text appeared as sections of various publications, which are hereby superseded. A version of chapter 1 appeared as “The Disputation of Ashraf Salim,” in Cultural Studies 27, no. 6 (2013) and chapter 4 builds on and significantly expands the core argument of “The Structuring Enemy and Archival War,” which appeared in PMLA 124, no. 5, Special Topic: War (2009). I am in enriching debt to the political intensity and theoretical passion of Mangalika de Silva, who has never failed to incite and inflame in me the thinking through of justice.

INTRODUCTION

Enigmatic Dispersals In Memoriam Ernesto Laclau

War is philosophical and whatever its destructive power, it always maintains itself within the limits of the philosophical, and it even maintains those very limits. —Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy, The Title of the Letter

From Justice to Violence Everything functions: this is precisely what is uncanny.1

Archives of the Insensible explores war as a regime of truth, and truth claiming as forms of war. I contest the idea of jus ad bellum as actualizing a transcendental truth or grounding apperception, be that peace, democracy, homeland security, a national border, or entrenched racial, ethnic, or religious determinism. The matter-of-factness of truth as a justificatory and securing ground of violence is counterpoised as an in situ effect of the prosecutorial media of war that fuses right with fact. These chapters disinter regional ontologies of war and terror, mapped across embodiment, spatiality, and visuality, as mediologies that underwrite, convey, and implant truth effects that splinter off factuality from actuality in order to render war just. The anomalies that arise in war between justified factuality and dejustifying and disavowed actuality register the difference between constituted power (such as an order of veridiction) and constitutive power as a formative shapelessness behind and beyond political shape. Securitizing the violence of wars on terror in order to secure sovereignty entails the determination of sovereignty as indeterminate and as always in a self-altering motion. The prosecutorial autonomy of contemporary warfare, its capacity to exceed an extant ideological frame and normative and factual anchor-

2 / Introduction

age, presents as a matrix of dismedia, dissociation, disembodiment, and disidentity wherein each determinant act of force can reciprocally delink the state from its founding inception in law, proceduralism, discipline, instrumentality, means/ends ratios, and jus ad bellum. In such dislocation, peace, once a transcendentalized and orienting political ground, is no longer the absence of war, but one of its modalities or media; thus, peace cannot be readily polarized to violence, as evidenced by harm-making projects of pacification, rhetoricized postwar conflict resolution and facile reconciliation, blanket amnesty, and militarized policing. “Humanitarian” securitization is not the globalization of peace— the interdiction of antagonism and its Kantian conversion into international commerce— nor is it the just distribution of power, but rather the weaponization of globalization as a commerce in political symmetry and economic asymmetry. As Michel Foucault, in opposition to the Kantian concept of perpetual peace, succinctly puts it: “We are always writing the history of the same war, even when we are writing the history of peace and its institutions.”2 Rather than examining how jus ad bellum converts violence into justice through anthropological, theological, or productivist schema, I follow the conversion of justice to violence. Justified force, as hyperperformance and overkill, emits an overflow of effects and signifiers that cannot be readily folded back into the finite political purposiveness of jus ad bellum and its means/ends ratios. I term the chasm between these countervailing torsions of power the “degree zero of violence,” whereby political meaning and efficacy arise ex nihilo from a structuring absence—the ever-withdrawing and ever-contingent norm-giving, justificatory ground of war that can only be represented in absentia through the violence authorized as the name of its name. Without malice aforethought, these chapters have evolved into an itinerary of trials, formal and covert, orchestrated and improvised, criminalizing and criminal. In these receding chambers of law there are trials within trials in which the trial scene is re-cognized and rescripted as a crime scene. At these checkpoints, where law itself is strip-searched, the will to truth, justice, and justification disappears into the very violence it interrogates. There is the witnessing of Ashraf Salim at the Combatant Status Review Tribunal at Guantánamo (chapter 1); the kangaroo court of American soldiers who erased their murder of Gul Mudin, an Afghani noncombatant (chapter 2); Gerhard Richter’s forensic paintings of the disputed suicides of Baader-Meinhof members in Stammheim prison (chapter 2); Radovan Karadžic´’s forensic allegations against the corpses left by his shelling of Sarajevo (chapter 3); the trial of the police officers who gave Rodney G. King

Enigmatic Dispersals / 3

a beat down and their indemnification by racializing video montage (chapter 3); Jean-Luc Godard’s film class in Sarajevo, where images, like facts, are indicted for no longer speaking for themselves (chapter 3); the KantianSadean ethics of the drone (chapter 4); the aporias of avowal in the amnesty protocol of the South African truth commission (chapter 5); the discordant ethics of witnessing between that commission and fifth-century Athenian tragedy (chapter 6); the philosophical anthropology engendered by self-inflicted crimes against humanity (chapter 6); Edward Said’s crossexamination of the victimizing victims of a “survivor state” (chapter 6); the biopolitical excommunication of monstrosity, the zoopolitics of racist lynchings, Jacques Derrida standing naked before his cat, awaiting apocalyptic judgment (chapter 7); Emmanuel Levinas’s adjudication of snakes as nonethical subjects and the death penalty by migraine of a Roman emperor, administered by a restless gnat (chapter 7). This itinerary, at first glance, might appear unduly eclectic, but this diversity concretely refracts my ethnographical concern with a necessary and often disorienting passage through the particular, the singular, the micrological, and the contingent as undetected thresholds that rarely fail to unfold wider horizons of historicity. This prelude will unspool the connective threads that mediate these site-specific installations and the forces that convert their seemingly meandering pathways into structuring crossroads. As Foucault has noted in reference to his thematic engagements, “One can hardly discern the guiding thread until the end of the process—that is to say, at the moment one has or is going to stop writing.”3 To write these summations, overviews, or eulogies to the ashes of thinking is never a purely retrospective act; rather, it is to score an afterimage as a transit point between what has been written and a surplus terrain that makes of this introduction an aftermath. At each of these crime scenes, failed veridiction and violent adjudication unfold as intensive totalities of wider forces and histories. Foucault, in his archaeology of the will to truth, writes of the forensic crime scene in Greek tragedy: “The whole of the Oedipus tragedy is permeated by the effort of the whole city to transform the enigmatic dispersion of human events (murder, plagues) and divine threats into [certified] facts.”4 Peripeteia, or the reversal of communicative action, and its lexical breakdown invariably frustrate that forensic project in Athenian tragedy and in the crime scenes gathered here. My task has been to perform reverse engineering on the will to truth in diverse wars on and of terror, to unpack the logic of certifiable facticity in war by following the state’s empowering enigmatic dispersion of events, murders, and political plagues. The epistemic terrain

4 / Introduction

here combines the idiom of the modernist crime scene with the temporal aporias of archaic tragedy. As Ernst Bloch and Derrida respectively note: The problem of the omitted beginning affects the entire detective genre, gives it its form: the form of a picture puzzle, the hidden part of which predates the picture and only gradually enters into it.5 There is tragedy, there is essence of the tragic only on the condition of this originarity, more precisely of this preoriginary and properly spectral anteriority of the crime-the crime of the other, a misdeed whose event and reality, whose truth can never present themselves in flesh and blood, but can only allow themselves to be presumed, reconstructed, fantasized. One does not, for all that, bear any less of a responsibility, beginning at birth, even if it is only the responsibility to repair an evil at the very moment in which no one can admit it except in a self-confession that confesses the other, as if that amounted to the same.6

The reversibility between the force of justice and the force of violence is the nemesis of Oedipus and also his double bind—the incommensurability between his acts and the various alethurgical procedures, from divination to law to kingship to medicine, at his disposal as sovereign and criminal, husband and son, father and brother, agent and patient, victim and perpetuator. His attempted recuperation of lost or encrypted origins and acts of violation fails to install a new regime of facticity; rather, he escalates the crisis of existing juristic institutions. His self-blinding is not solely a recognition of his culpability and ignorance of originary causes, identities, and transgressions, but is provoked by the limits, failures, and occlusions of the array of instituted techniques of veridiction that were the cornerstones of his social order, his sovereignty, and his forensic reason. As sovereign adjudicator he enters into a condition of denegation for which his blind avatar, Tiresias, calls him out: “Thou art the murderer of him whose murderer thou pursuest.” In the tragic imagination, to act under the unilaterality of norm-giving facticity in politics and war is to open up enigmatic dispersal that stands against all traceable inceptions and origins through which consequence can be calculated. The “omitted beginning” is the historical inheritance of a withdrawn origin, an inceptual event and commencement that both opens and slips into the crevice between grounding factuality and ungrounded actuality, that cuts across the justification and prosecution of war. The facticity of war originates in a falsification that institutes the political difference be-

Enigmatic Dispersals / 5

tween fact and act, immunizing the former from the excessive dissonances of the latter. The more securing the regime of facticity in war becomes, the more it is permeated by the disturbing specter of an invasive otherness. In its denial and displacement of the dense dissonance of the actual, justifying facticity is imbued with the alterity of its defaced contingency. Invasion by alterity occurs at multiple registers of spatiality, embodiment, nomination, and normative cohesion. The trespass of a regime of facticity by invasive actualization disrupts the order of causality so treasured by the notion of justified war, precipitating the violence of the omitted beginning and spectral anteriority that suspend the promise of finality. The question of causality arises only where there is a dysfunction of facticity and its ordering of the world. Actuality in this context opens onto what Walter Benjamin termed politische Aktualität, which is irreducible to the linear time of a datable event history or a simple contemporaneity in being stamped by nonsynchronous time materialized as disturbing, heteronomous interpenetrations of body and image space—that, I might add, reach new levels of intensive acceleration in war.7 This can be  the difference between the underwriting presence or undermining absence of a norm-giving ground transecting the justification and praxes of war. One has only to cite here the evaporating rationales for the invasion of Iraq, the war crimes committed in “interrogations” exclusively attributed to scapegoated, low-ranking “bad apples,” those acts of extrajudicial murder technocratically camouflaged as collateral damage, and the compulsory “democratizing” and “humanitarian” regime change that culminated in a sectarianized, fratricidal Iraqi polity. However, the above diagnostic x-rays into the prosecution of the war on terror and similar campaigns persist in tandem with the global expansion of counterinsurgent governmentality. Humanitarian exposés of a showing and shaming counterfactuality have done little to blunt the selfindemnifying trajectory of the war on terror and the radiating immunization of its political dysfunction as a purported apparatus of public safety. To propose the disjuncture between factuality and actuality is not to arrive at a determining, uncontestable ground beyond masking ideologies, but rather to explore that fissure itself as a generative power that circulates through the mutual retraction of fact and act. Reiner Schürmann writes: “The ‘pathos of distance’ is not thinkable without one type of will fixing that distance and another type keeping it.”8 In a regime of facticity the measure-giving valuations of a mastering and normalizing agent install the fact as a norm for a patient to be normalized: “Referents whereby norms are considered valid within a configuration of forces take birth from an act of domination.”9 At the core of such

6 / Introduction

fact-setting operations is the act of co-agitatio, a forcing together, a compression of convergence (convergere means “bending together”) in an operation that fuses right and fact. A political regime of facticity, such as just war, transitional justice, and torture, is the advent of an artificed and dominant historical synchronicity. Legislating the facticity of war is a formative imposition on and compression of polymorphous forces bent to an economy of the objectified and the occluded.10 The principle of co-agitatio fuels the cultural logic of asymmetrical war. Globalized asymmetrical war is a compressive assault on political and corporeal asymmetry. As a politico-aesthetic project, this asymmetrical war for global symmetry spreads its cultural isomorphism over historicity while relegating the dissymmetrical to mere transitory and deficient appearance amenable to the erasures of violence. Asymmetric war is a commensurating commerce in targeted, exchangeable, partible, substitutable, and computational political flesh. Global counterinsurgency launches compressive typification through illocutionary assemblages of flesh and the inorganic (in the form of military ordnance death and debris). Typification, as a realist percept and regimen of facticity, is the media for political essentialization, for literalizing the metaphors and allegories of power through the material expropriation and ill-use of the bodies and places of asymmetrical others. Typification fabricates and totalizes precomprehended collectivities as maneuverable forms, as magnetizing triggers and phobogenic objects of assault. These chapters describe confrontations with hieratic dystopian typologies that claim immense and aggressive powers of global decipherment and conferred objecthood—who is or is not a terrorist, which violence is democratic regime change and which is terrorism, what is torture or enhanced interrogation, which ordinance is legitimate or illegitimate WMDs, who has a right to rights and who has a right to be rightless? The aesthetic regimes of typification or matter-of-factness known as synoptic and visual realism underwrite the expansionism of culturally isomorphic war; it is “the form par excellence of settlement and stability gathering individual lives into an integrated whole. . . . Realism depends on the assumption that the world is story-shaped—that there is a well formed narrative implicit in reality itself.”11 No enigmatic dispersal in realism and its typologies based on that diagnosis, until one asks from what site the realist percept emanates, from where does it speak, gaze, and describe, and why it suffers no description of its modes of production. Realism unfolds here as a denegation, for it repels “realist” or empiricist description of its operativity and represses its historical becoming. Rather than acceding to realism as the mandated aesthetic for the portrayal of violence, I am interested

Enigmatic Dispersals / 7

in posing state violence as the depictive blade that incises realist aesthetics—an anesthetizing matter-of-factness—onto a sociopolitical landscape. The fusion of synoptic and visual realism with inscriptive violence upholds truth claims about the justice, rationality, and efficacy of the latter’s damage and does so from a site that repels its own objectifying disinterment. Legal, visual, mediatic, and ballistical realisms are crime-scene debris in the trial of Ashraf Salim; in the historical logic of guilt/debt in the black site(chapter 1); in the biometric archivization of the murdered Gul Mudin and in Richter’s photo-paintings of the Baader-Meinhof “suicides” (chapter 2); in the perceptual politics of the first-person shooter and in the cinematic antihistory of modern war montaged by Godard (chapter 3); in the archival aesthetics of the war on terror and the South African truth commission (chapters 4 and 6); and in the blindness of political philosophy in regard to animal natality (chapter 7). Photopolitics The contemporary matter-of-factness of “low-intensity” war and what is deactualized by this global assault on asymmetry is at the root of my abiding engagement with the photopolitics at the core of a fact-setting regime. The photopolitical archives and releases the historical violence of light as a metaphorical power of truth claiming, facticity, objectification, exposure, erasure, and appropriation by the will to know. The photopolitical is a neologism of the Greek phos and politea that implies a political economy of phos and aphos, apparition and disapparition, for within this economy nonlight (aphos) is as much a constitutive practice of power and privation as is light. Nonlight is not darkness, which is still an experience of photosensitivity, but a formation of insensitivity mediated by the historical and political abysses cast by light. To approach the political as a photosphere and as a photography of history is to be confronted with the ballistics of nonlight within light—the supernumerary forces of apperception and anesthesia that journey alongside the officiating political passages of light that articulate right and fact. Derrida writes of “the ancient clandestine friendship between light [lumière] and power [puissance], the ancient complicity between theoretical objectivity and technico-political possession.”12 Reiner Schürman, in turn, describes the complicity between appropriative representation and the optics of accusatory targeting: “As an act of conceiving (begriefen) representation already amounts to an act of attacking (angriefen).”13 Levinas writes of typifying power: “If the other could be possessed, seized, and known,

8 / Introduction

it would not be the other. To possess, to know, to grasp are all synonyms of power.”14 These thinkers follow Heidegger, for whom the technical distillation of language to the torsions of optics, ballistics, and automation is inescapably entangled with the militarization of light and facticity in modernity: “Words have become instruments for hunting down and hitting, namely in the ‘procedure’ and the labor of representing everything [as surely as] precision-firing. The machine-gun, the camera, the ‘word,’ the poster— all have this same fundamental function of putting objects in retainment.”15 The axiomatic Enlightenment opposition of language to violence is here rendered a canard by their shared underlying photopolitical materiality and militancy. Political violence is photo-graphy when it draws upon everyday communicative life worlds to imprint scene-setting common nouns and grammatical forms onto diverse attack surfaces. These common nouns install scopic enclosures through co-agitatio—a “driving together”—as modes of retainment, retention, and detention that implant factual interiority and irreal exteriority. I seek to historicize the politics of light, a materiality without matter, as a transhistorical formulation that is difficult to bypass irrespective of the degree of context-bound or singularizing analysis being practiced. Derrida writes of the metaphoricity of light: “Who will ever dominate it, who will ever pronounce its meaning without first being pronounced by it? What language will ever escape it?”16 Or as Gilles Deleuze proposes: “the seeing subject is himself a space within visibility, a function derived from visibility.”17 Archives of the Insensible seeks to further a postmaterialist critique of the political metaphoricity of light and, along with it, of sovereign presence as a regime that commands truth and light in haptic media not limited to the visual. The reflexive treatment of photopolitics queries, as metaphysics, the heliocentric politics of state right and light enacted in war. Therefore, the critique of photopolitical violence cannot be a disalienating or unmasking return to an idealizing empiricity of the material, to an unproblematic self-evidence of state practice as purely concrete and as the ground of analysis. Critique here cannot be the return to light and disclosure from an estranging and veiling condition; rather, it must explore how the political economy of light is complicit with the “immateriality” or withdrawal that is nonlight, in order to access a formative aesthesis I diversely term political denegation, immateriality, stasiology, and anesthesiology. Political aesthesis (light) and anesthesia (nonlight) are not polarized or mutually exclusive practices, but unfold in tandem as differential declensions of political actuality and factuality and as modes of perception and apperception. The term aisthesis and its related form aisthetikos refer to what is felt

Enigmatic Dispersals / 9

and apprehended through the senses; the prefix aisthe refers to affect and is the etymon of anesthesia and aesthetics, a conjuncture that traverses every use of these terms in this book. Aesthesis as affect is haptic, and if violence is a particularly intensive modality of the haptic, then the anesthesia or political apperception produced through self-indemnified and self-effacing violence can be read as the tactility that shapes history, politics, and subjects through intangibility. In these chapters, what I term cultural anesthesia, political intangibility, and the inheritance of the uninheritable correspond to political aesthesis as marginalized, disqualified, deferred, or expelled sensory experience engendering a politics of disincarnation—the denudation of an embodied, situated, and common sensorium with the capacity to speak truth to war. Sensory stratification and deletion by state practice prepares the sociocultural conditions of political apperception—the violence of politically blanking out violence and the collective capacity for its public witness, seditious recirculation, and dejustification. The many discussions and descriptions in this book of the indemnification, immunization, intangibility, and impassability of state violence and sovereignty refer not only to juridical forms but to sensory deletion and mediated apperception. Regimes of matter-of-factness are not only tacitly reportorial and editorializing, but concretize both the visible and the invisible, which is why I locate this factsetting mediacy in the performativity of weaponized force—each act of violence reenacts, repurposes, and precipitates a fact-setting ground through formative subtraction or subsumption, generating the collateral damage of the uninheritable. Thus the infamous Israeli invocation of “facts on the ground” to legitimate its settler colonialism encrypts war as the expulsive occupation of both land and historical witnessing. In this context, as the occupied well know, the communicative and semantic legitimacy of heteronomous sensory capacities are politically stratified, if not voided, across lines of race, gender, class, rightlessness, religion, geography, and nationality. Cultural anesthesia excommunicates the capacity of a subjugated sensorium to achieve collective veridiction as the advent of a public culture of dejustification (see chapter 3). The Stasiology of the State The so-called exceptions and deviations of jus ad bellum cited above, as well as many other seemingly anomic scenes of disapparition discussed in this book, have to be rethought as structuring, integral, and nomothetic elements of justified war. For they refract not the hypocrisy of the state,

10 / Introduction

but rather a stasiology of the state wherein sovereignty, as detached from normative and unifying ground, multiplies power through discontinuous self-division of the presenting fact and the extrafactual surplus of its prosecutory force. Stasiology delineates the always unstable and permeable divisibility of state force into the material and immaterial, the visible and invisible, the perceptual and apperceptual, which withdraws all anchoring foundation from the inceptual architecture of war. Stasiology interdicts warfare’s conceptual reduction to pure materiality and technique as much as it bars the referral of war to any transcendental morality. The concept of stasis here partially references the classical Greco-Latin concept of an agonistic division and/or paralysis of a polity as well as the progression of a disease through a body, including a body politic. Stasis invokes the Latin cognate, se¯ditio¯ (sedition), a going aside, a going apart, and insurrectionary separation. In this book it specifically refers to the generative fissure within a sovereign formation as regards its own residual anchorages in positive law, the procedural, and goal-directed action. Stasiological sovereignty, as a self-retracting discourse, act, and movement in time and space, is a political foreclosure that consists of “presenting one’s being in the mode of not being it.”18 The stasiological, according to Carl Schmitt, is where the “One” (to hen) is infinitely in revolt (stasiazon) against itself. Derrida, commenting on this formula, relates the stasiology of the state to the immunological and to war: The One divides and opposes itself, opposes itself by posing itself, represses and violates the difference it carries within itself, wages war, wages war on itself, itself becoming war (se fait le guerre), frightens itself, itself becoming fear (se fait peur), and does violence to itself, itself becoming violence (se fait violence) , transforming itself into frightened violence in guarding itself from the other (il se garde de l’autre), for it guards itself from, and in, the other, always, Him, the One, the One “different from itself.”19

Schürmann writes of a denegating topology of power and emplacement as a “showing, arising, manifesting, presencing, self-giving; but it is all that in a ‘fissured’ mode, in ‘dissension,’ as ‘unconcealment-concealment,’ ‘appropriation-expropriation,’ in the ‘strife,’ the polemos and the agon by which the No asserts itself and death declares itself.”20 The torsions mapped by Derrida and Schürmann above are imbricated, entangled, ensnared, and entailed—they index an always creviced, polycentric, and excentric sovereignty structured by the free play of contingencies from which any anchoring ground has been cut away. There is no foundational norm

Enigmatic Dispersals / 11

or legality from which the sovereign apparatus could except itself. For warfare, as force protecting, retracting, and subtracting itself from itself, predicates violence through the latter’s indemnifying self-defacement, which becomes the condition of its presentation as lawfare. As forces in stasis, as conflictual and countervailing movements and culminating suspensions of each other, warfare and lawfare are neither exclusively interior nor external to each other, but are braided in a Möbius strip of productive and structuring dissonance and discontinuity. In this reciprocal hosting and hostaging of law and war there is a crosscutting di-visibility of power—war divides law against itself to produce the justifiability of violence, and law divides war against itself to produce its “justice.” Derrida and Schürmann excavate the anarchic political strata that Foucault anatomized when he described the civitas not as juridical form, but as silently encrypted by the polemological.21 If, as Foucault asserts, politics is war by other means, then actualized, promissory, and symbolic violence inform, imprint, and even overflow the arterial network of disciplines, practices, effects, and apparatuses that solidify the political sphere as contractual civitas, sufficient means/ends, and procedural formalism. Foucault’s schema of a disemic civitas, surreptitiously structured by the logic of war, of a civil peace that covertly and concurrently inscribes a history of war, is contingent on a stasiology that drives the sovereign exercise of war, overt and covert, within and without. Thus, the concussive sites delimited by Derrida and Schürmann above amend Foucault’s schema of state and civil formation as undercoded by interiorized war. Rather than thinking the stasiology of the state on the basis of external war that is interiorized, polemos should be thought on the basis of the stasiology inherent in the sovereign right to be without right. Stasis is itself a multiplex concept at war with it itself, unable to achieve semantic domestication and pacification; as such, its indecision and labiality are descriptive of the self-canceling yet empowering aporias of sovereignty at war. The description of sovereign right as an act of self-institution without law, and before the law, requires a stasiological narration. Stasiology both defines and describes a bifurcation in the structure of sovereign performativity that amplifies and striates power and privation in a fissured mode—the apparition and disapparition of the radiating material effects and authorial lineages of force in war. Stasiology is operant in the autoindemnification of an act of violence by the state as the latter unfolds a series of sense-violating retractions and effacements concerning the nameability of state violence and the accessibility and legibility of its damage. Stasis can be found in the mutation of war events into nonevents—a phase

12 / Introduction

shift that does not void the devastations of the former. I term this selfdefacement of violence, this appearing nonappearance of violence, exclosure (see chapter 5). Exclosure is the operative other side of a line of closure that circumscribes a topology of sense, facticity and right; exclosure repels the collateral illegibility of the violence it secures and conserves. Dis-exclosure, another seminal point of stasis, is the invasive counterpunch of a dismediating violence that resists being foreclosed as symmetrical or politically proportional. Dis-exclosure occurs when once secured state violence is thrown beyond the sense-making thresholds and phenomenality required by political interest, calculation, seriality, and program. Stasiology is at the root of a self-indemnifying counterinsurgency as a governmentality of auto-defacement. The reflexive fashioning of selfindemnifying warfare, which I term force protection, is the (re)securing of those ultimate referents that legitimate war as principial action—the unified rules and norms from which the compass of political action is meant to be derived and that political actualization is expected to re-echo.22 As force protection, war becomes a constitutive power that seizes, secures, and perverts the very epistemological and moral ground that measures its violence, including that very ground-seizing act. The stasiology of war is the motor for a recursive force that encircles and ensorcells warfare to secure a norm-giving ground prior to, in the aftermath of, or in tandem with a commissioned act of violence. Indemnification draws on the lifepreserving logic of immunization to alchemically alter the dead residues and surplus materiality of war into living circulatory value, prestige, and achievement— or, failing that, to spirit away politically compromising and remaindered residues of dead matter and memory to crypts of invisibility and opacity. A stasiological logic of self-fissuring promotes the disapparition of the dense and diffuse actualities of violence, thus generating just war through filtering scenic affirmations. Disapparition, as the self-division of prosecutorial action into perception/apperception, underwrites the dogmatics of war, which consign a polity to unreflective and securing automatisms. Stasiology fuses design and crime insofar as this self-effacement of violence emerges as a submedial incursion mobilizing sensibility and insensibility, attention and inattention. Self-indemnifying force protection incorporates two etymological senses of the term—to hurt or damage (from the Latin damnifica¯re, to injure; damnific-us, hurtful, injurious) and to protect from damage. In the sixteenth century one damnified an enemy in order to indemnify the sovereign. Indemnification is thus not the absence of violence, but the removal of violence through an act of violence. Here, violence as

Enigmatic Dispersals / 13

damnification and facticity as indemnification are constitutive antagonisms shaping the bifrontal stasiological motion of war. Shibboleth I find an alignment of war, conflict resolution, pacification, and metaphysics in their common question, “What is to be done?,” which has been historically assigned to a justificatory fundament as the source of measure and order in acting, be that the nomos of the Earth (such as “ground zero”), a deity (god or humanity), a returning traumatic date, a distributive good, or the supreme government of reason and its ends.23 If a transhistorical grounding of political action could be identified, according to Schürmann, it would be as a “system where representations of ground replace each other across the ages.”24 He interrogates the justificatory grounding of political action through a critique of the Aristotelian genealogy of acting. The latter is structured by a “double transference” from the doctrine of technical motion to that of physical motion, which is then transposed to political actualization. Being-moved defines the ontology of the political, which is grounded in an anthropology of fabrication where “man” is at the origin of technical causality. For Schürmann, Aristotle’s “physical kinetics obstructs the phenomenal understanding of what political life is” (87). He further proposes that to exclusively define the political as principial action— action anchored to a norm-provisioning ground and a calculable fabricated end—is to inherit a substantialist ontology of the political, which, by extension, in my view, authorizes the functionalist materialism of war. The substantialization of the political guarantees the autarchy of political teleology, since, for Aristotle, only substance is autarchial, for nothing is independent from substance, which predicates all subjects. The affairs of the city are treated [by Aristotle] genetically in a manner analogous to natural growth and in the last analysis to human fabrication. . . . Individual ends and actions are ordered to those of the city as accidents are to substances, and predicates to the subject, From this ontological priority of the body politic springs forth the common stereotypes of politics . . . public welfare first, private interests next—as well as all the corporatisms. (86–87)

Polity is cast here as a plêthos politôn, a political mass, motion, and efficacy, constituted by the quantifiable convergence, compression, or co-agitatio of its citizens as a theoria—a certifying collectivity. The act of political constitution here is the fabrication and design of the maximal substance of

14 / Introduction

the political. For Aristotle we aim at the good and target ends within a continuum of fabrication and technics. Praxis, techne, and methodos are intertwined in political domination as the appearance and alteration of substance by the motion and time of force as both causality and artifice. Schürmann writes: “Teleocratic representations refer to the substantial changes artisan man is capable of effecting” (83). This implies that the analysis of action is derived not from the phenomenal fields of the ethical and the political, but from the artifactory of technical fashioning from which political movement, causes, and ends unfold as subsistent on stabilizing and enduring substrates, as a sculptor or potter is subsistent on his or her material in order to produce the terminus of the good. Political action, such as warfare, is analogized to teleocratic technicity, which subordinates action to calculation as the positing of a good through substantive media. Substantialist action “demarcates the phenomenal region where the end reigns,” a rule that traverses the powers of scientific inquiry, war, economic good, and technical functioning (83). The legitimation of the city in relation to its constitutive elements is gained by substantialist criteria that belong properly to the analysis of fabrication. It is in making things that all acts of the artisan, all materials and “accidents” must be directed “towards the one,” that is towards the finished work. Only on this basis is there technical movement, and only then can the work be complete, independent, autarchic. Since the very beginning of politics as a branch of philosophy, its basic patterns have been aligned with that branch which studies technical production. (87)

Through this critique Schürmann opens the possibility of a nonteleocratic and nonsubstantialist model of political action. If continuous or linearized historical time registers and underwrites the dominance of teleocratic action, then the delinearization of historical time, the emergence of chronotopic breaks and ruptures, subtractive events, and new self-fashioning modes of constitutive power withdraw enduring ground and underlying substance from political action. When a transcendental apperception, such as an originating cause or substance, is delinked from political subjectification, the anchoring ground evaporates, calling into question the legitimacy of those public institutions that claimed this substance, territoriality, sequence, and referentiality as their site of repose. Action as linearized fabrication and design is double-edged in making the good it correspondingly designs the sustaining will that substantializes the political subject as the substrate and continuum of such production.

Enigmatic Dispersals / 15

Aristotle posits a hyperfoundation of the political, a hypokeimenon, the teleocratic fashioning that fuses politics with technocracy and the substances of life with the designs of power as a physics of the political.25 However, this raises the question of whether technicist or physicalist schemata can fully account for the political. The contemporary application of jus ad bellum in the war on terror appears to answer in the affirmative, mobilizing a will to fabrication in order to technologically submerge the political in substances of terror, fear, and destruction through artificing violence and computational technologies of enframing and retainment such as drone scanscapes and targeting by metadata. However, this does not exhaust the political ontology of a war for security. For the other side of this question is how a political substrate can appear without the attribute of definitive substance, such as the preemptive and spectralizing forensics of proleptic risk, threat, and terror and the disapparition of war crimes escalated by a state lacking in any substance beyond its technical capacity to void substance or to confine life to the immobilities of devalued, denigrating, and degraded substance. Either posture is testament to sovereignty’s immeasurable distance from the terrain of inscriptive design and material distillation it makes possible in the violent fashioning and fictioning through which it presents itself. The sovereign is at the height because the height separates the top from the bottom and frees the former from the humility of the latter: from the humus, from the back bent from working the earth, from laying down in sleep, from malady or death, and from extended things in general. Extension holds everything at the same level, but the thing that is not extended, what looms over extensions and inspects it, is the thinking thing and the subject of the general government of things.26

Political action as teleocratic substantialization requires an arkhé (ἀρχή), a ruling origin and instituting justification that commands and commences postures of moral, linguistic, economic, or technological measurement. It is at the imputed site of the arkhé where the substantialist and teleocratic model of power stands and, for Schürmann, falls. For Schürmann, like Foucault, the origin is neither ground nor fundament, but a contingently constituted topology, an historical a priori, that “has its era” and is thus tied to finite conditions of appearance and disapparition.27 The arkhé is an historical entity grounded on other historical entities, “which is to ground nothing at all.”28 The origin is a verb, not a noun, and a command “perverted” into a referent. The militaristic inference should not be passed over

16 / Introduction

lightly: in this schema warfare, as constitutive political power, commands justificatory grounds and derivatives though perverting violence and terror, denial and disavowal. The norm-giving ground is not perverted by de facto violence, but is itself a de facto violence, a right that is perverted through the erasure of its ballistical arrival. Schürmann writes of this terrain of political inception: Aristotle is the one who explicitly joins the more ancient sense of inception with domination. From the time of Homer, the common meaning of the verb ἀρχειν has been “to lead,” “to come first,” “to open,” for instance a battle or a discourse. In the epic tradition ἀρχή designates what is at the beginning, either in an order of succession in time, like childhood, or in an order of constitutive elements. . . . The other meaning, that of command, of power, of domination, although absent in Homer, is found in Herodotus and Pindar. Aristotle also uses the word in this sense. But the Aristotelian innovation consists in uniting the two senses, inception and domination, in the same concept.29

The arkhé refers not only to origin, ground, foundation, or inception, but to a continuance or sending of the rule of the ground across time and space as their measure. The arkhé is simultaneously superstructure and substrate, inceptual and teleological. Being singular in multiplicity, the arkhé, as a whole prior to its parts, is replicated and echoed through a substantializing touchstone such as violence. However, whether the arkhé is an unmodifiable substance itself is another matter, for the origin, which is pre-sent, always calls for its retrieval, re-collection, resending, and re-turning, which entails desubstantializing repetition. For Derrida, the origin, as that which is meant to escape play, is brought into presence through the immaterial play of the trace, the iterative possibility of self-substitution, and deforming repetition as nonoriginary origins of the origin. Through violence the arkhé can be measured, reenacted, altered, and degrounded in the radical mutation of extant material integrities (combining ruination and/as fabrication). What better demonstration of the covering rule of the origin than when and where its assigned executors violently fabricate the ex nihilo from which the justificatory origin appears to autonomously arise? What better demonstration of an absolute political ground than the subtraction of all other contingent grounds of sustenance, shelter, life, value, and polity? The reified justificatory origin as a norm-provisioning ground stands before and outside the field of meanings it commands and commences. It

Enigmatic Dispersals / 17

mediates the translation of indeterminate power into determinate forces. A dejustificatory engagement of jus ad bellum opens the dossier of this preemptive justification of ends, means, and the inceptual probative narratives that excuse destructive force. This is to scan the accusatory structures of war as they prove to be detachable from any norm-giving ground. It is to examine the act of command sending itself across time, space, and audition as pure medium, as an autonomous power of impartibility independent of any impartible content. In many ways the arkhé as ground is a shibboleth, a performative password empty of intrinsic content, a void point, the cut of a nonsignifying difference, and “the grillwork of policing, normalization and methodical subjugation.”30 The shibboleth was a code, a password that required enunciative, that is performative, fidelity. The arkhé as shibboleth is a sentinel, a gatekeeper, and a law positioned before the law, regime, polity, and policies it precipitates and enforces. The inceptual shibboleth is the incision that installs the difference, the circumcision, between communal selfhood and otherhood, friends and enemies, inside and outside, and historical periodization as moral order. Its demand, citation, and enunciation engrave lines and borders and permit their crossing or their barring. The shibboleth is a self-mandating autarchic singularity promoting “the indiscernible discernment between alliance and war.”31 It is not a cipher or secret of that polity, but in its self-encryptment and self-command, a precondition of polity, its initiation and rite of passage. The shibboleth encrypts polity as its immobile and immobilizing concentrate, since all are subject to it—the guard and the guest, the insider and the outsider, the living and the dead. The origin as shibboleth is not accessed through an extrinsic unlocking code, but unlocks itself and enchains others in being enunciated as an automated/phantomatic password and default public secret. The shibboleth, as a self-authorizing performative, presents a command that passes over a recessed ground whose logos, or law, or speech withdraws the Walten [autarchic force] from what hides it, from its retreat, its Verborgenheit . . . liberates this Walten—and this physis, this physis-asWalten, from its Verborgenheit, its hidden, dissimulated, silenced being. And what is thus said, liberated from its retreat in the shadow of what is hidden (Verborgenheit), would be Walten itself, i.e. the law, its order and its status, its law (seine Ordnung und Satzung, das Gesetz des Seienden selbst), the law that rules over beings themselves: “Im λóγοζ wird das Walten des Seienden entborgen, offenbar [in logos, the reign, the power, the law of the entity is unconcealed, manifest.]”32

18 / Introduction

That frozen point in time and space termed 9/11 is a shibboleth that withdraws the autarchic force of its logos from the ruins and graves that hide and conserve it. In being enunciated correctly, even orthopedically and therapeutically, the shibboleth of ground zero, as origin, rule, currency, debt, withdrawing abyss, void, hole, crevice, and demand, becomes the precondition for anything to happen politically, from war to the mass surveillance of civilian populations to winning presidential elections. Derrida writes of the shibboleth: “Like the date, like a name, it permits anniversary, alliance, return, commemoration—even if there was no more trace, what one commonly calls a trace, the subsistent presence of a remainder, even if there were scarcely an ash of what one still dates, celebrates, commemorates or blesses.”33 Traversing various political scenographies in this book is a discernible articulation, superimposition, and cohesion between the anachronic cavity of the war grave, the catastrophic topos, and the shibboleth as an archive and political morgue that holds and triggers dead memory as a password and pathway to the decisionism of the friend/enemy matrix. The shibboleth presents as an ethicohistorical invariance, a stigmata or punctum outside of time that gestates time through command and violence.34 Liquidating Economies At many sites in this book the break with justificatory ground in war takes shape as the “containerization” of violence, analogous to capitalist containerization, which fuses mobility, evasion of legal accountability, and state oversight with deferring invisibility, through what Alan Sekula terms the “serial discipline of the box.”35 Economic containerization is the stratagem of re-siting, dispersal, and disconnection that permits new mobilities of power—extraction, production, and consumption—which expand corporatist predation and legal impunity.36 Containerized war is the deconsolidation of the productive sites of power—the offshoring of governmentality through site-specific performances of sovereignty. Battlescapes reemerge as floating kill boxes or mobile enclosures of enframing and transnational target acquisition. This mobile teleprompting grid is rapidly transposable across diverse political borders that are rescripted as attack surfaces and kill boxes subjected to the typologies of spectrum dominance. This militarization of teleportation itself is a medium of geopolitical value productivity. Containerization is both an ethos and a habitus insofar as many drone ground control command centers operate from retrofitted shipping containers. However, in contrast to the economic mediation of containerization as a mode of global standardization, the containerization

Enigmatic Dispersals / 19

of war produces perceptual, moral, and legal destandardization and discontinuity. I read containerized war as a multiplier of power, as a drone or satellite regime of detachability that I term “the becoming nonstate of the state” (chapter 4). This is far from the containment of violence, in its limiting or pacific sense; it is instead the deintensification of war’s visibility through strategies of structural deniability, cutouts, and juridical shadowing and blurring. Containerization interdicts courts of conscience as organs of witnessing, jurisdiction, and veridiction as regards the harms of war and the reversal of its rationality. Containerization addresses how an organ of violence might sever itself from an originating or underlying body politic and procedural order and become self-organ-izing and self-mediating as the expansive power of ever-shifting centers of force. Containerized war is described as an organogenesis in which the increasingly detachable organ of war is no longer a subordinate organ of the state, but rather is the state’s dis-organ-ization. The emergence of a dis-organology of war runs in tandem with the escalating immateriality of counterinsurgent violence as an insular zone of political insensibility and anesthesia. Containerization advances the absence of moral or even phenomenal continuity in the prosecution of war that is invested in the logistics of disconnectivity. As a symptom of the withdrawal of a continuous justificatory ground of war, containerization speaks to the intertwining violence of political economy and a political economy of violence. Throughout this book convergences emerge between bellicosity and risk preemption on one side and forms of prognostic and aleatory capitalization on the other, though warfare’s traversal of economic and political forms precludes any reductive determination of state violence by capital or the reverse. As Étienne Balibar puts it: “Violence [Gewalt] circulates, in a way that is fundamentally uncontrollable, between politics and economics.”37 This an-archic circulation points to degrounding dynamics between economy and war as predatory, hyperconcentrated technologies of value extraction that meet at contingent points, though not always in encompassing synthesis. War and capital are situated, without fusion, in a matrix of accelerated liquidity, dissolution, and fragmentation that consequently accelerates the flux and mutability of their relation. They converge in a politics of abstractive destruction where the extermination of value becomes the inaugural point for the institution of value through the renewable exploitation of geostrategic and embodied substrates of threat, risk, and insecurity. Aleatory risk creates value as it drifts and swerves, thereby provisioning the securitizing project with expanding scenic prospects and newly encumbered bodies of value extraction and containment.

20 / Introduction

The politics of risk assessment and preemption in the war on terror intersects with the logic of accelerationist capitalism (see chapters 1 and 4).38 The latter is characterized by an unfixed site of value generativity that Deleuze variously names “the dummy-hand,” la place du mort (the dead man’s place), and “the empty square,” which can never be substantiated, occupied, or filled in order “to be displaced in relation to itself.”39 He elaborates: “Such an object is always present in the corresponding series, it traverses them and moves with them, it never ceases to circulate in them, and from one to the other, with an extraordinary agility. One might say that it is its own metaphor, and its own metonymy.”40 Deleuze particularly associates the empty square with the temporal qualities of an evercirculating debt, a theme taken up in chapter 1 of this book, which examines the fiscalized epistemology of the infinite historical culpability (debt/ guilt) extracted from the “terrorist” archetype at black sites. Culpabilizing debt structures the historicity of the omitted beginning and resembles the commanding shibboleth empty of intrinsic content; it embodies the power relation of value asymmetry that informs the logic of asymmetric war as a strategy of debt collection and debt peonage. Deleuze also associates the dead man’s place with Poe’s purloined letter, a ciphered threat image whose very circulation produces value and narrative trajectory irrespective of its actual content, which is serially deferred. A photopolitics of accelerated circulating risk converges with Moishe Postone’s and Derrida’s respective treatments of the inapparent in the appearance of the value forms of capital, which I contend also marks the political commodification of risk, threat, and insecurity as phantomatic and ungrounded circulating forms of antilife or thing life. Postone locates a phantomatic mode of production in the self-valorization of value, a temporal process entailing “a movement of expansion, value in motion . . .”; capital for Marx is a category of movement, for it has no fixed form in manifesting as ceaseless expansion.41 Postone quotes Marx: It [value] is constantly changing from one form into the other without becoming lost in this movement; it thus transforms itself into an automatic subject. . . . In truth, however, value is here the subject of a process in which, while constantly assuming the form in turn of money and of commodities, it changes its own magnitude, and thus valorizes itself. . . . For the movement in the course of which it adds surplus value is its own movement, its valorization is therefore self-valorization. . . . Value suddenly presents itself as a self-moving substance which passes through a process of its own, and for which the commodity and money are both mere forms.42

Enigmatic Dispersals / 21

Risk, like capital, is the subject of its own process, an automatic subject, and a self-relating negativity through the creation or destruction of value. Preemptive presentations of risk and threat carve out supersensory and anticipatory value topologies through what Derrida calls a coup de théâtre.43 Value as supersensible (in reference to money as a general equivalent) is a “sensuous nonsensousness” and a “spectralizing disincarnation.”44 The commodity form, like the terrorist archetype, presents as an a-physical body. This silhouette is inaccessible to pure sensuous fixation. Its appearance is a step beyond, “a thing in flight, that surpasses the senses,” like the computational phantasms of the security risk (189). In chapter 2 I rework the presentation of risk as sensuous nonsensousness through the circulation of “saturated images,” a materiality without matter, as the optical merchandising of fear and insecurity through phobic articles constitutive of a mass subject of attention. The saturated, unmappable, and threatening value form of preemptory risk display, overflowing with promissory violence and indeterminacy, only emerges at the very moment of its retreat into the invisible and the inaccessible. This dislocation is an incorporeal motion of the risk image that refuses stable definitional outline or value fixation. Derrida, using Marx’s own terminology, calls this “becoming bodiless” of appearing value forms, “Eskamotage,” a spectralizing disincarnation, which “speaks of subterfuge or theft in the exchange of merchandise, but first of all the sleight of hand by means of which an illusionist makes the most perceptible body disappear” (159). This is a mode and relation of production as a “causing to disappear while producing apparition,” a phantomatic mode of production both in its process and product (159). For Derrida the commodity form is a parthogenic subject, simultaneously dead and alive. Like Postone, he settles on the kinetics of this form of living nonlife, which is comparable to an automaton: “The autonomization and automatization of ideality as finite-infinite processes of difference (phantomatic, fantastic, fetishistic, or ideological)—and of the simulacrum which is not simply imaginary in it. It is an artifactual body, a technical body, and it takes labor to constitute or deconstitute it” (213). Postone positions this self-moving subject as a dematerialized substratum of social appearance. Capital as automatic subject is “grasped critically, as a form of heteronomy related to the domination of abstract time, to the accumulation of the past in a form that reinforces the present. . . . This dialectical dynamic can be grasped neither in terms of the state nor in terms of civil society. Rather, it exists ‘behind’ them, moulding each as well as their relation.”45 However, in contrast, the threat image as an attentional force, and parallel to finance capital, tends to accumulate futurities rather than pasts.

22 / Introduction

I discuss in chapters 2 and 4 the apotropaic presentation of risk futures as the severing of attentional from retentional forms of valuation and origination. In the passage above Postone deliberately uses and suspends the term “behind,” begrudgingly recognizing a coup de théâtre with no originating backstage, and intimates the lack of any stable transhistorical Archimedean point of inception and retention immutably ordering this mutability of value. Securocratic war runs on a parallel track to this line of flight of capital, where risk- or threat-bearing objects and persons appear as automata that embody the abstract time of forensic anticipation and preemption. This phantomatic mode of production captures the constitutive power of the war on terror, driven by the nonidentity between securitas as value and the risk artifact as a never fully probative or substantializing support or asset of risk value. The risk asset as intangible value form requires the unending recapture, prefiguration, and precognition of attentional peripheries of threat that are only incompletely actualized. In securocratic war, as in finance capital, the asset-backed securitization of presenting futurity is relieved of the burden of the actual value of what passes for an asset, beyond and below its circulatory function. Shooting Blanks Archives of the Insensible is not an ethnographic monograph, but a book of political theory drawing on ethnographic and social historical specificities; it is a genealogical critique of the returning sensibilities and insensibilities of warfare. I think through diverse forms of violent materialization at site-specific political installations. In many of these chapters ethnographic specificities are philosophized and political philosophy ethnographicized through micrological deconstructive description. I deploy this bifrontal approach across diverse historical contexts and in the vertigo of anticontexts (in war neither synchronizing contexts nor their lawful regularity can be assumed—in war context has no context). The crime scenes that are walked through here are comparable, though not identical, contingencies and are in part connectable through common or intersecting forms of bodily and psychic subjugation and by a fairly consistent sovereign right of the state to be without right, rule, or norm. These sites of analyses are not reducible to each other—though they can be made to communicate through strategic translations of choice conduits that permit envisioning each site through the aperture of another without achieving total convergence or identity across sites. In remaining cautious about state, ethnographic, and media realism

Enigmatic Dispersals / 23

as generic forms of the will to truth, I have come to rely more and more on the disorientation that arises from micrological description as theory, and from site-specific theoretical immersion as denotative. These modes of aspect seeing combine to downshift the hyperaccelerated, ballistical time of war and media to thicken and salvage the spaces the latter burn out and to prise open unmapped portals leading to the détournement of the universalizing war predicate. Transhistorical genealogies are not confined to universalisms or totalities but can present as heteronomic and regional ontologies that permit communication between evental sites as singularities. However, the terrain of analysis can never be assumed and is always in question; conceptual frameworks should serve here as the means of questioning both the cartography and our modes of its traversal. The pathways that I describe, trace, and retrace from diverse vantage points are the crossroads of an always protean lexicon and grammatology of war. Micrological description serves here to unname positive and canonical names and to excavate the underwriting rationalities that put a proper and proprietorial name in play and place as the fortified holder of that place. From such descriptions it becomes apparent that to think terror cannot be to stand outside of the photosphere of violence and its shadows, as an autonomous gaze with structuring overviews that permit the totalization and mastering of the material at hand. I recall a scene filmed at the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem at a point when he was permitted to leave his glass booth in order to exercise his will to know. Eichmann, having left the booth, this empty square of his juridical and historical circulation and accountability, is briefly seen standing side by side with the court prosecutor, Gideon Hausner. Both bald, middle-aged bureaucrats in dark suits are filmed from the rear, facelessly and silently probing a large wall map for the railway routes that transported Jews and others to extermination camps (see figs. fm001a and b). The camera twins these self-confessed men of law and procedure in a momentary stereoscopic convergence—the war criminal who engineered mass deportations to extermination camps, and the civil servant of a post-Holocaust state that was instituted in such a manner as to cause the mass displacement and deportation of Palestinians. It is a moment of historical bridging, though not gross conflation, as many intractable distinctions—forms of violence, ideologies, historical contingencies, logistical methodologies, and political outcomes—separate and connect the two regimes of racialized population displacement. Irrespective of such variance, both Hausner and Eichmann gravitate to the studium of the map and to the political punctum of the mass death that the map tracks silently in its flat and ethically neutral cartography of borders and stations.

24 / Introduction

Figure 0.1. Adolf Eichmann and Gideon Hausner perusing deportation routes. Still from Eyal Sevan, dir., The Specialist: Portrait of a Modern Criminal (DVD, Momento-France, 1999)

The map as a theater of operations—as interchangeably tracking trains and persons, life and death, as maneuverable entities—is deployed by both specialists as a forensic puzzle from which they each seek to decisively capture “facts on the ground.” Such maps encode panoramic political design transposed onto the bodies and souls of those condemned to transporta-

Enigmatic Dispersals / 25

tion, exile, and extermination. The routes and tracks indexed the forensic management of “criminalized populations” for Eichmann, who designed and administered the transports, and register genocidal process for Hausner. The Israeli prosecutor searches for evidence of Eichmann’s historical and systemic culpability in history synchronized as cartography, which is also the modus operandi of the state whose law he represents. They are both men of teleocratic design conflated with law. To excavate and study the crime scenes of war is to unavoidably stand beside these two men and participate in their interfolding gazes, which both would describe as following law. When we write and thereby adjudicate political violence, we do so as subjects of the law as gaze, as a space within visibility and as a function of visibility, who can never catch up with law and its photology, for it pre-emplots and overtakes our gaze, even when we strive to perform as unlicensed and licentious readers of its immobilizing cartographies and dystopian literacies. Against the thrust of teleocratic design, deconstructive description writes the sites, situations, and scenes of force, as incompletely constituted realities, for which entry and participation must occur by other than the cult of the immediately ascertainable fact. Some sites described here were birthed in secrecy as the very condition and mechanism of their factuality. These anticipatory topologies are in the process of becoming and unbecoming due to the violence, terror, technicity, and besieged humanity of which they are made.46 These topoi correspond to tragedy’s terrain of enigmatic dispersal that comes with and after, and not before, juridical and forensic certitude. The patterns of material and immaterial violence, sovereign truth claiming, and ethical occultation, of which these sites are formed, are drawn in terms not just of their appearance in the pseudo-immediacy of a imprinted cartography, but in reference to the forward movement and futurity of their mediology, which hovers at the edge of political perception. Indeed, my focus is on formations of formless sovereignty as a limit experience of political perception that refuses definitive outline. This is the writing of the present as perforated by political protention, “which can be said to escape the logic of presence because paradoxically it does not come after that which is identifiable—the ‘mark’ or element that is said to ‘split.’ It at the same time comes before it. For it is precisely this vestige or remnant—which is to say precisely a certain after-math—that makes possible identification and hence everything identifiable . . . a certain coming after emerges here as also the condition under which anything can come to be in the first place.”47 I rifle through this incompletely occupied and remaindered space through phenomenological infiltration, specularity, and

26 / Introduction

speculation. The dystopian literacies of the war on terror point to a u-topos in the present, the non-place of a future that has begun to arrive but resists prognosis in a present monopolized by finalistic prognostic fantasies and powers. I do reimagine contemporary war machines from out of the former terror zones of Northern Ireland and South Africa, where I conducted “realist” ethnographic inquiry, and which store and release embryonic missives and glimpses of the homeland security war as nascent in these prior counterinsurgencies. In this sense, like many scholars of violence and the political, as Avital Ronell observes, I am shooting blanks when writing of orchestrated absences as a material political force in the historical present.48 “Shooting blanks” also addresses the finality that in writing violence one almost never contributes to its end, to conflict resolution, or to the rescuing of victims of its damage. The writing of violence makes nothing happen: it survives in the valley of its own making. Though an iconoclastic discourse on the inutility of writing violence has often been used by others (though not Ronell), wittingly or unwittingly, to proscribe and silence those who think and write violence without presumptive and obvious pragmatic purpose such as pacification, quite often “we” violent writers of violence are accused of furthering force. This is true to the extent that our task is concerned with violent futures. However, a pragmatic iconoclasm identifies the writing of violence with its mandated termination and consequently conflates writing with the command of violence. Agamben was once publicly asked by Judith Butler if he agreed with Hannah Arendt’s support for Eichmann’s execution. He responded, “Who am I to sentence someone to death?” This too is shooting blanks—sentences of death are described and analyzed in this book, but none are delivered by it; that gesture presumes the command of violence. Agamben, in refusing to deliver a capital sentence, addressed the utilitarian diktat in Arendt, who does write a death sentence. Agamben, in asking “who am I,” raises the Foucauldian question: from where does someone speak or write to prescribe the utility or proscribe the inutility of writing violence? The utilitarian perspective often claims that violence is being offensively aestheticized by writing that is not self-evidently actionable. From where do they speak, those who deliver the ethical death sentence of aestheticization, or voyeurism, or sensationalism, in the thinking through of violence? Where is the nonaesthetic and supposedly functionalist ground from which such sentences are delivered? It certainly cannot be the aestheticizing techniques of media, legal, empiricist, biomedical, humanitarian, or statistical realism that also write violence without bringing peace. This common charge does not recognize that

Enigmatic Dispersals / 27

to write war in order to fulfill the requirement of political utility is also to aestheticize and perhaps to anestheticize violence. Nothing guarantees the divorce of utility from aesthetics, of use value from exchange value, and nowhere has it been proved that the making of an end to war can dispense with the working through of violence by a democracy of literatures. To return to Ronell’s powerful trope of “shooting blanks,” it speaks to the power within the powerlessness of writing and a powerlessness at the core of pragmatic power, which never ceases to shoot blanks and in making blanks to shoot. Within the writing of violence, shooting blanks can be a subverting mimesis of the mortal ballistics of war and its “live” ammunition (a terminological blank indicative of the machinic animism of war). Shooting blanks is also a practice of the state engaged in wars of secrecy and autoimmunization concerning its concussive damage. Shooting blanks can mean targeting the empty spaces around the manifest scripts and graphemes of war machines, puncturing or filling in their omissions, blind spots, aversions, disavowals, negative space, white noise, and counterfeit utilities. The first chapter in this book emulates Ronell’s target practice in excavating a scrap of transcript filled with blanks, with redactions seen and unseen, known and unknown. This transcript, punctured with white noise, harbors the fate of a free, contentious, and resistant voice, Ashraf Salim, whose public use of reason in the constricted terrain of a state tribunal devoid of all civitas is stunning in its lucidity. It is his testimony that in my view opens up a new thinking of the state I term apophatic sovereignty. Shooting blanks also applies to the extrajudicial killing of Gul Mudin, who was no Taliban; to the victims of drone signature strikes, who die as anonymous autographs; to the Bosnian victims of the Markale shelling, whose deaths were counterfeited by Serbian propaganda as prefabrications; to Rodney King, whose pain was whited out by televisual race aesthetics; to Samuel Kganakga, cooked and burned down to whitened terrorist ash in Gauteng; and to many others in this book who were designed and designated by the apparatuses of force to populate history as blank spaces, as vacuities, through the instituted anesthesia of those who govern and kill.

Notes 1.

2.

Martin Heidegger, Rudolf Augstein, and Georg Wolff, “Nur noch ein Gott kann uns retten” (Only God Can Save Us),” in Heidegger: The Man and the Thinker, ed. Thomas Sheehan, trans. William J. Richardson (Piscataway, NJ: Transaction Publishers), 45–67 (translation altered). Michel Foucault, “Society Must Be Defended”: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975–

28 / Introduction

3.

4.

5.

6. 7.

8. 9. 10.

11. 12. 13. 14. 15.

16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22.

1976, ed. Mauro Bertani, Allessandro Fontana, and Arnold I. Davidson, trans. David Macey (New York: Picador, 2003), 16. Michel Foucault, Wrong-Doing, Truth-Telling: The Function of Avowal in Justice, ed. Fabienne Brion and Bernard E. Harcourt (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), 235. Michel Foucault, Lectures on the Will to Know: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1970– 1971, and “Oedipal Knowledge,” ed. Arnold Davidson, trans. Graham Burchill (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 185. Ernst Bloch, “A Philosophical View of the Detective Novel,” in The Utopian Function of Art and Literature, trans. Jack Zipes and Frank Mecklenberg (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998), 264. Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York: Routledge, 2004), 24. Walter Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, V ed. Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhäuser, (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1980–9), 244, 309–310, 588. See also Sigrid Weigel, Body-and Image-Space: Re-Reading Walter Benjamin, trans. Georgina Paul with Rachel McNicholl and Jeremy Gaines, (London and New York, 1996). Reiner Schürmann, “Legislation-Transgression: Strategies and Counter-strategies in the Transcendental Justification of Norms,” Man and World 17, nos. 3–4 (1984): 378. Ibid., 375. “Economy is a metaphor of energy—where two opposed forces playing against each other constitute the so-called identity of a phenomenon. . . . Economy is not a reconciliation of opposites, but rather a maintaining of disjunction. Identity constituted by difference is economy.” Gayatri Charkravorty Spivak, “Translator’s Preface,” in Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Charkravorty Spivak (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), xlii. Terry Eagleton, Heathcliff and the Great Hunger: Studies in Irish Culture (London: Verso, 1995), 147 (emphasis mine). Jacques Derrida, “Violence and Metaphysics,” in Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (New York: Routledge, 1978), 113. Reiner Schürmann, Heidegger on Being and Acting: From Principles to Anarchy (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), 276. Quoted in Derrida, “Violence and Metaphysics,” 113. Martin Heidegger, Heraklit, vol. 55 of Gesamtausgabe (Frankfurt: Vittorio Klostermann, 1979), 70; translated and quoted in Schürmann, Heidegger on Being and Acting, 276 (emphasis mine). Derrida, Writing and Difference, 92. Gilles Deleuze, Foucault, trans. Seán Hand (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), 57. Jacques Lacan, Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English, trans. Bruce Young (New York: W. W. Norton, 2002), 748. Jacques Derrida, The Politics of Friendship, trans. George Collins (New York: Verso, 1997), 109 n. 13. Reiner Schürmann, Broken Hegemonies, trans. Reginald Lilly (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003), 557. Michel Foucault, “Society Must Be Defended.” “Principial” means “standing at the beginning” and derives from the Latin principium (beginning, origin, source, initial or rudimentary stage, guiding principle, first in time or order).

Enigmatic Dispersals / 29 23. Schürmann, Heidegger on Being and Acting, 288. 24. Ibid. 25. Thus it is from this substantialist and teleocratic ontology that the concept of biopolitics can be derived. Ironically, in Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, Heidegger appears to deepen this Aristotelian equation in presenting a prepolitical equation of a sovereign violence with physis through the German concept of Walten, which Derrida translates as autarchic “force, an imposed violence.” Derrida writes: “Physis is the Walten of everything, which depends, as Walten, only on itself, which forms itself sovereignly, as power, receiving its form and its image, its figure of domination, from itself. Walten as physis, physis as Walten is everything; physis and Walten are synonyms of everything, or everything that is, and that is, then, as originarily sovereign power.” See Jacques Derrida, The Beast and the Sovereign, vol. 2, Seminar of 2002–2003, trans. Geoffrey Bennington (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011 [Kindle ed.]), 39. See also Martin Heidegger, The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001), and “On the Essence of Ground,” in Martin Heidegger, Pathmarks, ed. William McNeill (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 97–135. The concept of Walten speaks to forms of power prior to any political determination; thus power and politics, sovereignty and the political are here separated. Walten is a pre-political predication of sovereign force and a conceptualization of physis prior to its reduction to nature. Yet, Walten might very well excuse a depoliticization and naturalization of violence. Though Derrida, commenting on Heidegger’s equation of physis and force, deploys the latter’s notion of the uncanny to decenter and deconstruct Walten as reducible to teleocratic design, in war Walten masters, determines, and grips humanity, particularly when it misrecognizes itself as the master of force. In this formulation Derrida’s reading of Heidegger on Walten communicates with Simone Weil’s treatment of force as that which cannot be thoroughly humanized because it turns its executors and recipients into something akin to inert matter, into physis. 26. Jean Luc Nancy, The Creation of the World or Globalization, trans. Raffoul François (Albany: SUNY Press, 2007), 96–97. 27. Schürmann, Heidegger on Being and Acting, 90. 28. Ibid. 29. Ibid., 97. 30. Jacques Derrida, Sovereignties in Question: The Poetics of Paul Celan, ed. Thomas DuToit and Outi Pasanen (New York: Fordham University Press: 2005), 30. 31. Ibid., 48. 32. Derrida, The Beast and the Sovereign II, 42 (brackets mine). 33. Derrida, Sovereignties in Question, 33. 34. The inceptual architecture of the war-mobilizing shibboleth traverses disparate trajectories and itineraries of historical sending that fall under the rubric of inheritance/uninheriting/the uninheritable as symptoms of the dissensus of factuality and actuality, archic grounding and anarchic contingency: “If the readability of a legacy were given, natural, transparent, univocal, if it did not call for and at the same time defy interpretation, we would never have anything to inherit from it.” I seek the cultural transmissibility of war through modes of dispersal as (1) inheritance, defined as the repetition of a norm-bestowing origin, foundation, or ground that circumscribes what is properly inheritable and perceptible in a political situation wherein “we inherit the very thing that allows us to bear witness to it”; (2) uninheriting, as a remembering to forget, to delete, to disavow or occlude—uninheriting regulates

30 / Introduction

35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48.

cultural and political devaluation of the history or memory to be transmitted as forgettable, thus enabling the petrifaction of legacy through silencing; (3) the uninheritable, that which eludes the proprietorial politics of inheriting/uninheriting— the experiential dislocation of the uninheritable transcribes the intangible, the loss of loss, the unwitnessable, the unthought and the anesthesticized into historical forces and affects of dispossession and as the inoperability and non-sense within communicative and norm-derived violence and justified warfare. See Derrida, Specters of Marx, 18, 68. Alan Sekula, “Freeway to China,” Public Culture 12, no. 2 (2000): 411. See Benjamin Noys, The Persistence of the Negative: A Critique of Contemporary Continental Theory (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press), 11. Étienne Balibar, “Reflections on Gewalt,” Historical Materialism 17 (2009): 113. Noys, The Persistence of the Negative, 4–8. Gilles Deleuze, Desert Islands and Other Texts, 1953–1974, ed. David Lapoujade, trans. Mike Taorma (New York: Semiotext(e)), 186. Deleuze, Desert Islands, 183. Moishe Postone, Time, Labor and Social Domination: A Reinterpretation of Marx’s Critical Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 269. Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 1, trans. Ben Fowkes (London: Penguin Classics, 1976), 255–56 (translation amended by Postone, ibid., 75). Derrida, Specters of Marx, 188. Ibid., 51, 189. Postone, “Critique and Historical Transformation,” Historical Materialism 12, no. 3 (2004): 64. Schürmann, Broken Hegemonies, 557. Samuel Weber, Mass Mediauras: Form, Technics, Media (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996), 139–40. Personal communication.

PA R T O N E

Desisting Sovereignties

ONE

Before the Law at Guantánamo

The courts, to be sure, have law books at their disposal, but people are not allowed to see them, “It is characteristic of this legal system,” conjectures K., “that one is sentenced not only in innocence but also in ignorance.” Laws and definite norms remain unwritten in the prehistoric world. A man can transgress them without suspecting it and thus become subject to atonement. But no matter how hard it may hit the unsuspecting, the transgression in the sense of the law is not accidental but fated, a destiny which appears here in all its ambiguity.  .  .  . In Kafka the written law is contained in books, but these are secret; by basing itself on them the prehistoric world exerts its rule all the more ruthlessly. —Walter Benjamin, “Franz Kafka: On the Tenth Anniversary of His Death” It may happen that a man wakes up one day and finds himself transformed into vermin. Exile—his exile—has gained control over him. —Benjamin, “Franz Kafka: On the Tenth Anniversary of His Death”

The CSRT On October 16, 2004, Ashraf Salim Abd Al Salam Sultan, a Libyan schoolteacher “captured” by the American military forces in Afghanistan, was subjected to a Combatant Status Review Tribunal (CSRT) held and staffed by U.S. military personnel at Guantánamo, where he had been imprisoned since 2002 after his rendition from Afghanistan.1 Salim was accused of being a member of a splinter faction of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (in opposition to the Gaddafi regime and reputedly allied to Al Qaida) and of being an enemy combatant against the American forces and its allies in Afghanistan at the time of his capture—abduction—in 2001.

34 / Chapter One

The CSRT proceedings conducted reviews of 558 Guantánamo prisoners between 2004 and 2007 in which 361 detainees personally participated to contest their status as combatants against American forces and their allies in the hope of being released.2 The tribunals were based on classified information inaccessible to the prisoner (or erratically available in heavily redacted summaries); unclassified information that was inconsistently made available to the prisoners; and spoken testimony of the detainee given at his tribunal and in statements made prior to the hearing to “personal representatives” who were neither legal advocates nor chosen by the prisoner (legal representation was denied to the prisoners). Each hearing was staffed by a court reporter, a translator, and the personal representative and was adjudicated by a tribunal president and two associate tribunal members. The prisoners were informed of the existence of inaccessible classified information and instructed on the role this archive would ultimately play in arriving at a final determination. Prisoners were explicitly or indirectly denied access to witnesses other than those already incarcerated at Guantánamo (see Salim’s transcript below). After face-to-face hearings with the prisoner, the tribunal members held in camera sessions without the prisoner, where the tribunal reviewed the classified information and arrived at a final adjudication. Transcripts of the sessions working with classified evidence are embargoed, unlike transcripts for the face-to-face hearing with the detainees, which were only involuntarily released well after the hearings through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit brought by the Associated Press. There was no burden of proof brought to bear on the classified information, evidence that was treated as presumptively valid and thus unchallengeable. Mark Denbeaux, the council to two detainees, a professor at Seton Hall University School of Law, and the principal investigator of a human-rights report on the CSRT, concluded that the government was attempting to replace habeas corpus with what he termed a “no hearing hearings” protocol that did not meet the requirements of due process.3 Almost from the start of his October 2004 hearing, Ashraf Salim questioned and contested the deployment of the classified information being used to adjudicate his case, information to which he had no access. This was not well received by the tribunal, who at the start of the hearing preemptively warned Salim against any emotional outbursts and disruptive behavior and threatened to remove him from the hearing. TRIBUNAL PRESIDENT:

You may be present at all open sessions of the Tribunal.

However, if you become disorderly, you will be removed from the hearing

Before the Law at Guantánamo / 35 and the Tribunal and the tribunal will con . . . [Detainee interrupts Tribunal president before she can continue her sentence] . . . D E TA I N E E :

How would I disturb order?

TRIBUNAL PRESIDENT:

Becoming too emotional. Not listening to the Tribu-

nal . . . if you become disorderly, you will be removed from the Tribunal and the Tribunal will continue to hear evidence in your absence.4

This warning from the tribunal was in part due to Salim’s “record” as an “uncooperative” prisoner in Guantánamo, which began before this hearing and continued long after, as the following report made subsequent to the hearing describes: His overall behavior has been sporadically compliant and hostile to the guard force and staff. Detainee currently has 45 Reports of Disciplinary Infraction listed in DIMS with the most recent occurring on 1 April 2008, when he failed to follow guard instructions. He has two Reports of Disciplinary Infraction for assault with the most recent occurring on 29 March 2008, when he attempted to break a guard’s arm. Other incidents for which he has been disciplined include inciting and participating in mass disturbances, failure to follow guard instructions and camp rules, inappropriate use of bodily fluids, unauthorized communications, damage to government property, attempted assaults, provoking words and gestures, and possession of food and nonweapon type contraband. In 2007, he had a total of six Reports of Disciplinary Infraction and four so far in 2008.5

Salim’s reaction to his detention and imprisonment can be inferred from this record. In the hearings no testimony was taken concerning the conditions of imprisonment or the conditions under which prior interrogations of the prisoners had been conducted. Though his behavioral record was not directly raised to Salim in the face-to face tribunal encounter, one crucial and rhetoricized criterion of judgment was the abducted prisoner’s compliance or noncompliance with the regime of abduction prior to any definitive assignment of the prisoners’ combatant status. This was ultimately expressed in the CSRT finding that Salim was a “high threat from a detention perspective.” The Guantánamo disciplinary apparatus was and is evidently engaged in manufacturing “security risks” through the technologies of incarceration. This unwritten protocol provides a crucial context for reading the CSRT process. The black site operates a culpabilizing system of managed “productive cooperation,” analogous to the techniques of immaterial labor,

36 / Chapter One

wherein detainees become active subjects in the coordination of the apparatus, which in this case is meant not to rehabilitate, but to manufacture terrorists through the protocols of detention.6 Standing outside positive law, the function of incarceration at the black site is to orchestrate ceremonies of criminalization, such as forced feeding and CSRT tribunals, sandwiched between the dead time of warehousing the human cogs of this certification machine. The production of a subject rendered adequate to the justifiability of capture through the conditions of incarceration explains why discussions of the release of Guantánamo inmates are short-circuited by the dogma of their “return to terror.” The inventive repertoire of misconduct ascribed to Salim by his captors, including his use of projectile body substances, expresses “autonomous productive synergies” as a display of virtuosity and affective labor functioning as “participative management as a technology of power, as technology for creating and controlling the subjective processes.”7 The post-Fordist prison produces the “entrepreneurial autonomy” of a prisoner as “terrorist” through confinement that promotes the detainees’ noncompliance with their detention as their compliance with the war on terror. In an ironic variation of the regimens of cognitive capitalism, the subject of penal production becomes the production of an incarceration-resistant subject.8 The manufacture of culpability and objective guilt at Guantánamo is immaterial insofar as it does not produce objects or tangible end products, but rather actions as ends in themselves.9 To manufacture self-willing, yet system-sustaining subjects is to fabricate structural guilt through the media of day-to-day disciplinary infractions, as well as more extreme protests such as hunger striking, resistance to forced feeding, and prisoner suicide. Forced feeding preempts the will to autonomy by prisoner hunger striking and suicide by severing the political will of the prisoner from the autonomic will of the body. The latter is circulated as an emblem of the regime’s penetrative power or subditio—the submergence of one will (the autonomic) into that of another (the penal regime). Forced feeding as subditio “ensure[s] that one always had the will of another in the place of one’s own.”10 However, in Guantánamo subditio is organized around the scenic agon of wills, of the state and the prisoner, as a theater of dislocation; subditio is concentrated in the performativity of forced feeding, which foregrounds, frames, and conserves the resisting will of the hunger strikers, not just its terminal submergence: “The existence of the colonizer as subject is shot through with the easy enjoyment that consists in filling the thing with a content that is immediately emptied. The subject that the colonizer is, is a subject stiffened by the successive images he or she makes of the native.”11 The substance (I will not deign to call it

Before the Law at Guantánamo / 37

Figure 1.1. Weight graph of Ashraf Salim while imprisoned in Guantánamo. Source: U.S. Department of Defense

sustenance or food) whose transfer mediates this agon of wills is literally a transmission of substantialized power.12 Thus it is no coincidence that the Guantánamo authorities have published weight-gain graphs of their prisoners as emblems of the clinical character of confinement and the value they accord to a sustainable warehoused terrorist body, however recalcitrant (fig. 1.1).13 Guantánamo prisoners who pretend that they are eating are termed “stealth hunger strikers” by the camp commander, connecting their resistance to their imputed and ongoing “terrorist” biopower.14 The photology of forced feeding deepens the occupation and spectrum dominance over the terrorist body by inserting “scopic” utensils (metal-tipped tubes) and compulsory state substances into the exposed and inverted interiority of the prisoner. This subject-making project extends to the adjudication process of the CSRT itself, which is why the futurity of its verdicts effectively appear to precede the actual tribunal and are integrated into the veridiction procedure, which functions as an act of avowal not by the accused, but by the state. The state avows the subject of the tribunal through what can and cannot be said in accordance with secret knowledge. Two archives or two anterior verdicts, that of the classified information and that of the disciplinary infractions of the detainee, elaborate the effective jurisdictional right of the CSRT. Both these archives establish the incompetency of the detainee as an avowing subject, which is why this act is transferred to the tribunal,

38 / Chapter One

masquerading as an intermediary between the prisoner and sovereignty as exemplified by the counterfeit figure of the “personal representative.” In the post-Fordist, post-rehabilitative apparatus, any prisoner’s contestation of the CSRT, of its evidentiary or procedural validity, merely extends the institution’s design of the former’s crime. Disframed and Disframing Sovereignty At his tribunal Salim was informed that he would be tried on documents, “partially masked for security reasons,” to which he would have no direct or indirect access. The tribunal transcript (as mediated by an Arabic-English translator and the court stenographer) recorded his response: D E TA I N E E :  We

are getting into things classified and unclassified. All this is just

about me proving what I did. If I did the things I did, I would admit that I did. Things I didn’t do, I will say clearly I didn’t do them. But if the Tribunal is saying there are classified things, classified information—they have to prove that. I am not asking to see the witnesses, if you have any. I need just their names to prove your documents are true. I think this is not justice if you accuse some one based on the classified information. This is not justice; it is not right. It hasn’t been witnessed in the whole human history. If you base your judgment or the accusations against me on classified information, then there is no need to continue. Let’s just stop it right here. T R I B U N A L P R E S I D E N T : Ashraf

Salim, I have classified information that is being

presented by the Government. If we release all of that information it could cause harm to the national security of the United States. D E TA I N E E :   What

harm or danger could you expect from someone in shackles

who cannot even move like me?15

Salim embodied himself in the transcript with this interjection by smuggling into the dialogue the constraints under which he politically appears and speaks at the hearing. This is the only reality he can avow, given the limited information and latitude of procedure put at his disposal. He is told that to fully defend himself, despite all the verdict-defining resources that have been announced by the CSRT, is to jeopardize the security of his captors—whether in imputed combat or in incarceration or procedural dispute, he is an agent of precarity. The tribunal president then reminds Salim that he could call witnesses, which turned out to be another evocation of limits rather than rights. Sa-

Before the Law at Guantánamo / 39

lim stated that he did not want to go through his personal representative to contact a witness but was seeking to contact them personally: TRIBUNAL PRESIDENT:

We must involve the US Government to communicate

with your Government [in this case the Gaddafi regime] to find the witness.16 D E TA I N E E :

I guess they will not contact these people, but will imprison them.

As far as I know, in all the history of the human race I do not think there have been any Tribunals of this forum or this kind. You swear to do your job rightfully and just. Unfortunately now you are just following orders or a predetermined way of conducting this Tribunal. TRIBUNAL PRESIDENT:

Ashraf Salim, you are correct. There is a higher authority

and we have to follow the rule of this Tribunal. I cannot change the rules of this Tribunal. . . . D E TA I N E E :

I know my fate is already predetermined and the judgment has

been pronounced already. So this Tribunal is just for show and it is not real. Everybody is reading from papers that are already printed and everything is already predetermined. I know for sure my destiny is already determined. The judgment against me is already made up. My presence, me defending myself or not defending myself, will have no importance whatsoever.  .  .  . One thing: is this unclassified document (referring to the Unclassified Summary of Evidence) what the Personal Representative showed me or is it something else? TRIBUNAL PRESIDENT: D E TA I N E E :

Yes, that is the unclassified summary of evidence.

There is no proof of all this. So give me the proof.17

The tribunal president then asks Salim if he consents to participate in this hearing or not: D E TA I N E E :

Before I answer this question, I would like to ask one more question.

The classified information is going to stay classified until when? TRIBUNAL PRESIDENT: D E TA I N E E :

It will stay classified forever.

I will not have a chance to take a look at the information?

T R I B U N A L P R E S I D E N T : No. D E TA I N E E :

You are telling me that you have classified information of classified

proof and I am not allowed to read it or see it? So where is the justice here? TRIBUNAL PRESIDENT:

Ashraf Salim, do you want to participate in this Tribunal?

Yes or no? D E TA I N E E :

No. Under this way, no. But I want to participate in a just way. Not

this way.

40 / Chapter One TRIBUNAL PRESIDENT:

This Tribunal is in recess until the Detainee can be re-

moved. (3063)

The tribunal then met in closed session and according to the transcript reviewed the classified information refused to Salim. Based on this assessment and subsequent findings on April 14, 2007, and May 19, 2008, the Department of Defense repeatedly prescribed continued detention of Ashraf Salim as •

A HIGH risk, as he is likely to pose a threat to the US, its interests, and allies

•

A HIGH threat from a detention perspective

•

Of MEDIUM intelligence value.18

Ashraf Salim was reported to have been transferred from Guantánamo, with other Libyan detainees, to “house arrest” in the Republic of Georgia in 2010.19 I have not been able to ascertain his current situation since the fall of the Gaddafi regime, against which he fought. Rather than exclusively concentrate on those standards of procedure and evidence that the CSRT hearings failed to meet, I ask what the trial of Ashraf Salim effectuated by not unfolding within positive law, while at the same time evoking and emulating due process. The CSRT crossstitched a mimesis of residual law and nonlaw—not to instate an exception, deviation, or variance, but in order to produce a bifrontal apparatus of grounded law and anomic ungrounded power. The Guantánamo tribunals performed sovereignty as a discontinuous assemblage of law, war, and securitization—a stasiological economy of countervailing gestures molded by intertwining strategies of apparition and disapparition. The performative structure of the tribunal expressed sovereignty in the war on terror as a figuration that both imparts and departs from its enclosure in law, just war, and due process. Denbeaux’s findings focus on the deficits of due process in the CSRT, as refracted in his aporetic title, “No-Hearing Hearings.” However, my concern is precisely with the denegation captured by Denbeaux’s title as being intrinsic to the political efficacy of a securocratic state practicing a politics of the inappropriable such as the public secret. Denegation, also termed apophasis in negative theology, is a negation that negates itself and permits no higher-order affirmative resolution. Denegation is a nomination that simultaneously unnames itself, an enunciation that renounces itself. Under a regime of denegation the enunciation of law opens nonlaw and the unstable vibration between law and nonlaw as di-visualizations of sov-

Before the Law at Guantánamo / 41

ereignty. Denegation acts through meanings and signs that are not fully constituted predicates. Denegation (dénégation) is used by Jacques Lacan to translate Freud’s term Verneinung, also glossed as the foreclosure of a signifier: “The earliest mode of signifying elision, which I am trying to conceptualize here as the matrix of Verneinung [negation], asserts the subject negatively, by preparing the void in which he finds his place.”20 I propose that the procedural denegations that can be deciphered in the CSRT event can be situated within a wider structural void of apophatic power in American securitization. The political witness is confronted here with the vertigo of a deliberate disframing: “the radical off-centredness of a point of view that mutilates the body and expels it beyond the frame to focus instead on dead, empty zones . . . the use of the frame as a cutting-edge, the living pushed out to the periphery beyond the frame . . . the focusing on the bleak or dead sections of the scene.”21 Under apophatic regimes law and nonlaw, apparition and disapparition express the sovereign instance. There is no strict opposition here between enframing and exteriority—between law and nonlaw. The instituting regime of denegation does not omit, preclude, silence, or repress that which lies outside a normative or procedural frame. Rather, the state presents itself as a fractured frame, as dismedia, and as the broken middle that frames only in the breaking of frames—legal, political, and communicative.22 Here apophatic sovereignty both displaces and simulates teleocratic norms to elicit consent to indeterminacy as a condition of arbitrary power. In this juridical terrain Salim collided with an apparatus of deliberate political vertigo specific to neocolonial subjection—“a vertigo brought on by a clash of grossly asymmetrical forces.”23 Frank B. Wilderson writes: “Subjective vertigo is vertigo of the event. But the sensation that one is not simply spinning in an otherwise stable environment, that one’s environment is perpetually unhinged[,] stems from a relationship to violence that cannot be analogized. This is called objective vertigo, a life constituted by disorientation rather than a life interrupted by disorientation. This is structural as opposed to performative violence. Black subjectivity is a crossroads where vertigoes meet, the intersection of performative and structural violence.”24 Wilderson’s astute reading of the constitutive vertigo of the colonized subject in the domestic trials of black insurgents renders problematic any assignment of the CSRT process, or Guantánamo itself, to a state of exception or some other transgression applicable only to Muslim ”terrorists.” Wilderson’s racing of vertigo speaks to a submerged American archaeology of abduction and captivity of bodies of color. In thinking Guantánamo and other black sites, we cannot ignore the underhistory that tacitly connects

42 / Chapter One

the latter to the Middle Passage and its legacy, that is, to a six-hundred-year sequence of extraordinary renditions of people of color to “black sites” administered under a politico-symbolic economy of captivity, human chattel, and movable property as a jurisdictional right.25 This economy of manhunting is derived from what Jon Beller terms computational colonialism, of which the containerization of transposable, convertible, manipulated, politically capitalized, and commensurated terrorist bodies is but one current example. The embodied subjects, commodified and subjugated by colonial capitalization, can be recast as interdigital and informatic units of surplus economic and/or political value accumulation. The advanced computerization of colonial containerization is evidenced by the infamous eighteenth-century diagram of a slave ship entitled “Stowage of the British Slave Ship ‘Brookes’ Under the Regulated Slave Trade Act of 1788.” This schematic is a blueprint for the escalating technology of human warehousing that, in this instance, was designed to maximize the carrying capacity and profitability of the slave ship (fig. 1.2). Prone bodies of Africans are displayed as laid-out bits of abstract digital code in accordance with the 0 and 1 of the body/ cubicle ratio with respect to the total square footage of the cargo hold. The cellular spatial order of the vessel is both an apparatus of transport and, as in Guantánamo, the making of conformable and genericized bodies therein—the manufacture of subjected embodiment as an instrument and end of production in itself. The computational diagram is simultaneously behaviorist architecture, slave artifactory, and law. This diagram eloquently captures Beller’s concern with the conversion of dense human worlds into the flattened ontology of the commodity form, homologous with the information bit as intersecting circulatory metrics of transportable and transposable human life from slave cargoes, to rendered terrorists, to subprime mortgage derivatives. The tribunal format is apposite here; as opposed to a court that inquires after a particular act or sequence of actions, a tribunal puts the historical character of the accused in its entirety on trial and reciprocally puts into play the historical character of the state that tries in this manner. A tribunal inventories all that which the accused possesses or does not possess in relation to all that which the state claims to possess, de jure, in its right to adjudicate and in its claim to procedural reason. At issue is legal title to the law itself, screened behind the question of de facto versus de jure possession.26 This is a question of dominion, of the relation of jurisdiction to authority and of the intelligible ground upon which legal title to law re-

Before the Law at Guantánamo / 43

Figure 1.2. “Stowage of the British Slave Ship ‘Brookes’ under the Regulated Slave Trade Act of 1788.”

sides, if it resides on anything other than the right of necessity, as a right of coercion without any right. Salim is the possession of the CSRT, and under natural law, the state of being in possession requires no authentication as a fact upon the ground, as a fact that is its own ground, just as chattel slavery was. To dispute the natural right to what is already in possession—as both Salim and the black insurgents discussed by Wilderson do debate—is to dispute jurisdiction, which, in this case, is to dispute both the freedom and necessity of the state in its disposition of its movable chattel.

44 / Chapter One

Before the Law Before the Law stands a doorkeeper. To this doorkeeper there comes a countryman and prays for admittance to the Law. But the doorkeeper says that he cannot grant admittance at the moment. The man thinks it over and then asks if he will he allowed in later. “It is possible,” says the doorkeeper, “but not at the moment.” Since the gate stands open as usual, and the doorkeeper steps to one side, the man stoops to peer through the gateway into the interior. Observing that, the doorkeeper laughs and says: “If you are so drawn to it, just try to go in despite my veto. But take note: I am powerful. And I am only the least of the doorkeepers. From hall to hall there is one doorkeeper after another, each more powerful than the last. The third doorkeeper is already so terrible that even I cannot bear to look at him.” These are difficulties the countryman has not expected; the Law, he thinks, should surely be accessible at all times and to everyone, but as he now takes a closer look at the doorkeeper in his fur coat, with his big sharp nose and long, thin, black Tartar beard, he decides that it is better to wait until he gets permission to enter. The doorkeeper gives him a stool and lets him sit down at one side of the door. There he sits for days and years. He makes many attempts to be admitted, and wearies the doorkeeper by his importunity. The doorkeeper frequently has little interviews with him, asking him questions about his home and many other things, but the questions are put indifferently, as great lords put them, and always finish with the statement that he cannot be let in yet. The man, who has furnished himself with many things for his journey, sacrifices all he has, however valuable, to bribe the doorkeeper. That official accepts everything, but always with the remark: “I am only taking it to keep you from thinking you have omitted anything.” During these many years the man fixes his attention almost continuously on the doorkeeper. He forgets the other doorkeepers, and this first one seems to him the sole obstacle preventing access to the Law. He curses his bad luck, in his early years boldly and loudly; later, as he grows old, he only grumbles to himself. He becomes childish, and since in his yearlong contemplation of the doorkeeper he has come to know even the fleas in his fur collar, he begs the fleas as well to help him and to change the doorkeeper’s mind. At length his eyesight begins to fail, and he does not know whether the world is really darker or whether his eyes are only deceiving him. Yet in his darkness he is now aware of a radiance that streams inextinguishably from the gateway of the Law. Now he has not very long to live. Before he dies, all his experiences in these long years gather themselves in his head to one point, a question he has not yet asked the doorkeeper. He waves him nearer, since he can no longer raise his

Before the Law at Guantánamo / 45 stiffening body. The doorkeeper has to bend low towards him, for the difference in height between them has altered much to the countryman’s disadvantage. “What do you want to know now?” asks the doorkeeper.” You are insatiable.” “Everyone strives to reach the Law,” says the man,” so how does it happen that for all these many years no one but myself has ever begged for admittance?” The doorkeeper recognizes that the man has reached his end, and to let his failing senses catch the words roars in his ear: “No one else could ever be admitted here, since this gate was made only for you. I am now going to shut it.”27

My reading of the CSRT transcript cannot report with much veracity on the event of the trial or state of mind of Ashraf Salim. The transcript itself denegates the event and unwrites the traces of Salim’s voice; as such, it is an extension of the aporias that Salim confronted at his trial. The transcript can only be read as he read his tribunal, by betraying its positive artifactual status. I can only respond to the transcript as a loosened fragment of institutional memory and amnesia, which can be possibly be played back against the CSRT—an intervention and excavation that the transcribed Salim appears to map out, at least as evidenced by this compromised text. I cannot forget that the Ashraf Salim who appears here is a juridical fiction authored by the transcript and by the wider CSRT process. Yet, there are moments of rupture and reversal in this far from seamless document where this juridical fiction can be seen to appropriate itself, to grasp its fictive existence in the CSRT procedure, in a chiasmus in which this fiction breaks with the machinery of the tribunal and becomes self-authoring. Chiasmic reversal erupts at precisely those junctures where the ghostwriter of this particular juridical fiction is unveiled as absent and petrified memory—the archival force of secrecy that sentences Salim to a culpable biography, a political rigor mortis. The transcribed Salim rejects any transcendental status of the secret and any external authorial locus of law. Authorial agency and signatures, both visible and invisible, are deposed by Salim as internal elements immanent to the tribunal process, despite its transcendental claims, evasions, and allusions. From this highly mediated transcript it can be inferred that the shackled prisoner, like Franz Kafka’s countryman in his fable of justice deferred, is immobilized “before the law.” In turn, the tribunal, repeating the posture of the gatekeeper at the house of law in Kafka’s story, sits not within law, but with its back to law, as an exterior checkpoint to this presumed threshold and interiority. These antagonistic positions evoke the performative terrain mapped by Derrida when he locates the capitalizing title of “Before

46 / Chapter One

the Law” within a fundamentally concussed topos that divorces the tale’s heading, the incipit, from the synoptic sequence wherein the law of this text can be read as the text of law: The two protagonists are both attendant before the law but in opposition to one another, being on either side of a line of inversion whose mark in the text is precisely the separation of the title from the narrative body. . . . Without rehearsing the narrative sequence, the event opens a scene, giving rise to a topographical system of law that prescribes the two inverse and adverse positions, the antagonisms of two characters equally concerned with it. The entitling sentence describes the one who turns his back to the law (to turn one’s back also means to ignore, neglect, or even transgress)—not in order that the law present itself or that one be present to it but, on the contrary, in order to prohibit all presentation. The other, who faces the law, sees no more than the one who turns his back to it. Neither is in the presence of the law.28

The Guantánamo tribunal performs as the gateway that bars Salim from law and sits as an antechamber, a chancery, where Salim is deposed outside of law, which has no topology or aperity for him. Salim recognizes his atopic relation to the law and law’s distance from him in the exhibition of an inhibition—the impervious violence of the letter. The classified text as a public secret is an unveiling of what cannot be unveiled; its power lies in its tangible excess to visibility, which bars Salim from the presence of law. The classified document presents to Salim a recto of blank facelessness whose verso also obstructs any opening onto law owing to the secret’s presumptive evidentiary validity—its immunity to the burden of proof. The public secret functions topographically, like Derrida’s line of inversion; it separates Salim from full access to due process and reciprocally guards the tribunal against the arrival of a law to which it might be held to account.29 Neither Salim nor common law can readily interrogate the selfabdicating locus of classified and unnameable texts and signatories upon which the tribunal reposes and is de-posed. The public secret is an enunciation that immediately renounces itself. The classified document, the public secret, is a palimpsest of the operational relation of law to the state through a withholding that voids definitive emplacement of the juridical but whose powers of simultaneous decision, recession, and remotion are imposed on and experienced by the detainee in no uncertain terms as force and destiny. In negative theology, the identification of divinity and/or sovereignty with the summit links height and power to remotion; its etymon, remo¯tio¯, means the act of moving (a thing back), withdrawal, removal or elimina-

Before the Law at Guantánamo / 47

tion of a condition or factor, recession, and distance. The deployment of texts rendered uncontestable by their sheer distantiation, yet held against the prisoner in their remove, means that the force of the evidentiary is felt through its claustrophobic absence and tangible silence. The tribunal and the norms of legality it claims to embody are perforated by denegations such as witnesses bereft of witness and the personal representative; in his counterfeit delegation the personal representative represents the accused as if the latter were the personification of the verdict that was always already Salim’s proper mode of visibility and rendition at the tribunal. There is no distinction here between process and judgment; the process, the trial, is the judgment, wherein Salim arrives already sentenced— not to punishment, but to guilt. As prejudged time, the linearizing force of procedure is lined up with the historical causality, unidirectionality, destining, and destination of the teleocracy in whose labyrinthine diagram Salim is caught. Frozen Doorways The tribunal sits, confers, and convenes on a stratigraphy of ab-sense, a series of performative retractions, such as the classified document and the witnesses who cannot be called without being arrested, silenced, and rendered unwitnessable. The most remote of these reclusions are the precessional “higher authorities,” who from an unapproachable and absentee locus actualize the tribunal through a series of anterior constraints, exclusions, and inadmissibilities. T R I B U N A L P R E S I D E N T :  Ashraf

Salim[,] you are correct. There is a higher author-

ity and we have to follow the rule of this Tribunal. I cannot change the rules of this Tribunal.

The tribunal resides on a pure performativity that is nothing more than the event of its sitting. In its invocation of higher, ex-centric, and indeterminate authorities who set terms of reference, the tribunal confesses a nonidentity with itself, as indexed by the receding ground against which it incompletely emerges: “Since the gate stands open, as usual, and the doorkeeper steps to one side, the man stoops to peer through the gateway into the interior. Observing that, the doorkeeper laughs and says:—‘If you are so drawn to it, just try to go in despite my veto. But take note: I am powerful. And I am only the least of the doorkeepers. From hall to hall there is one doorkeeper after another, each more powerful than the last. The third doorkeeper is already so terrible that even I cannot bear to look at him.’”30

48 / Chapter One

The tribunal, like Kafka’s doorkeeper, points to an infinite regress of other unseen gatekeepers guarding the inner recesses and courts of law from which the riddle of the CSRT emanates. In Kafka’s parable, each ascending gatekeeping plateau withholds law from a preceding stratum, so that no guardian holds or has law. This recessed and occluded parade of doorkeepers constitutes the space, time, and gestus of law, its topography and choreography. The sentinel and satellite of this ineffable law functions as an anti- and ante-history of law; the latter has no temporality except that of the recitation of law’s withholding—the time of withheld law is the temporality of reversible creation where law’s time is reversed by law-as-time itself. In its infinite regress Kafka’s law holds to its minimal “bare life” of withholding law and to the bared and exposed captive life from which law is withheld. The CSRT cannot be deposed but only pre-posed as an effectuation that is never in situ and never frameable. As in Kafka’s fable, the Guantánamo tribunal promises passageways, portals or doorways to law that frame and support nothing; their architectural-juridical violence is the unframeability of this abode of law, this (anti-)habitus of which they are a part, from which they are apart, and yet claim to part open. In Kafka and at Guantánamo the existential promise of juridical passage as the promise of movement and change, of humanly inhabitable transition and translation between times and spaces, of progress through the law, is interdicted by portals that repel and resist the human form, whose outline and posture are anticipated and archived by this aperture. Kafka’s doors offer inhospitality toward the human form, which the door commands, lures, and mocks. In Kafka’s tale the supplicant gradually loses his humanizing upright posture and sight, which renders law’s entryway all the more unapproachable and opaque and his subjecthood all the more fragmentary and partial; in such shrinking humanity and expanding disability he cannot even testify to his experience of being before a law with no discernible figure or ground. The less he sees of the law, the stronger is the blinding “radiance” of a nonlight (since it reveals nothing) that is described as emanating from law’s apertures, which magnifies the positivity of law’s disapparition—this is the photopolitical power of an apophatic dominion. The CSRT hearing similarly renders Salim’s ankle shackles negligible in comparison to the processual locking-in of his fate—he too cannot readily stand before the law, which permits him no erect posture, only the gravitational pull of procedural enchainment. Salim faces the tribunal as a habitus that evicts and disframes, and through which he cannot pass as an historicizing witness, since history presumes a movement through time

Before the Law at Guantánamo / 49

and space. These parodic doorways suspend human kinesis in inhuman legal architecture. In Kafka’s law humanity itself is but another doorway and frame that cannot be entered or formally assumed; anthropology, if it occurs at all, arrives in a verdict on humanity that destroys its very presumption. The lure of the door, of infinite regress, of a redeeming progression toward light and a higher and deeper authority, creates the illusion of an interiority, of a sense that someone or something can be found within the hallowed and hollowed abode of the law within which a kind of passage through the time of decision can occur. The illusory depth of field mocks interiority only in order to materialize, to give space to, what is outside the law. This exteriority or the “without” of law is the antechamber, chancery, satellite, or embassy of law that in itself has no law. Yet it is only by posing an outside of law as nonlaw that we can speak of, if not actually contact or engage, the law. The site and sight of law at Guantánamo and in Kafka have no positive content, no depth other than this act of making a border, a limit, and an anteriority that in turn promises what it never delivers except in the form of an anticipatory topos. As Derrida stresses, in Kafka’s fable topology autonomously conveys meaning and narrative. Topology is concerned with how bodies, discourses, and spaces are to be organized and related, and with the political connectivity arising from these arrangements. For Schürmann this enclosure is a circulatory and encircling regime that “measures all things against the economy that it synthesizes in itself and that it spreads over what is other than it” (such as Salim).31 He distinguishes between two forms of topological economy, the retrospective and the anticipatory—the former archic and analytical, the latter prospective, an-archic, and unframeable.32 Schürmann writes of the latter in terms of denegation: “Anticipatory topology. This deals with a possible historial locus, one already given, yet still to be occupied; thus it is a locus spaced out from within. Its description is first of all negative, since topos here no longer signifies any region of beings whose relations can be maximized to produce some archic referent. . . . The difficulty consists in understanding anticipation without any utopian or millennial postponements.”33 This description is perfectly serviceable as a phenomenology of Kafka’s house of law and of the CSRT protocol. The war on terror militarizes anticipatory topology, from preemptive war to spectral terrorists, through which the state carves out structuring terrains of political and legal evacuation. Anticipatory topology answers to a prudential logic of securitization through the hosting and hostaging of the visible by the invisible (234). Legal positivism appears in the CSRT but is securitized as materially inoperable—the

50 / Chapter One

regime of denegation denies the very probative conditions that make such positivism possible. The juridical mystification of state power as deriving from law is preserved only by a scenic affirmation, which is both a dogmatic right in itself and the foundation of all consequent rights to jurisdiction. According to Pierre Legendre, the “dogmatic applies to a truth that is sanctioned by its staging.”34 Staging here is the contingent instating of political presence, such as the CSRT, from an absence, of place from nonplace. Legendre discerns in scenic affirmation “an architecture made up of sequences that are structured as if time could become malleable, reversible and controllable material.”35 The law appears but commands nothing at Guantánamo, at which very few things occur except by command. Law, as a nonevent, is separated from its reproduction and continuity in deliverable sentences. Divorced from its technical mimesis in the procedural, law retains its auratic integrity by doing nothing and by being nowhere. At Kafka’s house of law, the only narrativity is that of law’s refusal of narrative, analogous to the CSRT’s banning of witnesses who can testify and act for Salim. In the recesses of the security state, in the security state as an assemblage of recesses, the court of law is declared in recess and subjected to an extraordinary rendition where it is consigned to an abyssal site from which all other black sites of the state emanate. Revealability without Revelation Decipherment of law’s nonevent by the accused is barred, because as predestination the classified document admits of no interpretation proffered by a singularizing reading as a rereading and hence a rewriting of law. This would be an illicit mimetic appropriation of an inaccessible, yet monumentalized codification that treats the secret as a summit coinciding with sovereignty. A certain astrological sovereignty of the secret, of the sentencing text, of the destinal, is asserted here over and against Salim’s potential reading, his will to decipherment and will to witnessing in a space where he commands nothing. In commanding no-thing in a space of totalizing command, witnessing becomes impotentialized willing that wills nothing but itself, and in so doing recursively attests to the inceptual void of the command, empty of object and subject, that underwrites and unwrites the juridical scene of the CSRT. Salim cannot be allowed the haptic felicity of a gaze over the text, because that elevation would provisionally situate him in at least a simulacral, if not an expropriating, relationship to the secret that has been secured for a mastering gaze and judgment. Salim’s reading would be a cutting

Before the Law at Guantánamo / 51

incision and decision—an intolerable democratization of the text whose power lies in the scenery of its rarefaction, privation, and privity. The secret will not admit of another inscription borne by Salim, who is only present at the tribunal to be read. That is why, when he begins to astutely fracture the tribunal’s monophony and monopoly, he is treated as an uncommandable gaze and voice—as bad conduct. Who can and who cannot read and decipher in Guantánamo is determined by the logic of incarceration as the architectural concentrate and textual surface of a scopic power. Here readability and unreadability, legibility and illegibility are no longer mutually exclusive: the classified artifact is rendered unreadable precisely because it can be read, and in turn presentifiable iconoclasm is both a bar and an invitation to decipherment; therein lies its denegating hegemonic radius. The prohibition on decipherment must be cast as the incitement to decipherment as an interdictable gesture that best dramatizes the barbed border of the secret. Salim struggles to put the tribunal and its presituated criteria of the inadmissible on view; he reaches for what has been subtracted as law’s condition of possibility, turning law into a negatively conditioned and irruptive contingency—an event that names itself law. Salim interrogates the tribunal’s claim to rationalize this bare habitus of being before the law, declaring it to be a form of misdirection, a “show,” a scenic dogmatism that displays nothing more than an unframeable power made up of silenced documents and witnesses. He invokes an impossible utopian adjudication whereby the malleable locus of juridical repose become the substance of his agon. This challenge is propelled by Salim’s apparent recognition that before this law a witness cannot testify without self-incrimination, without a denegation that activates witnessing only to produce a commanding silence through arrest, torture, imprisonment, and execution. T R I B U N A L P R E S I D E N T : . . . We

must involve the US Government to communi-

cate with your Government [to find the witness]. D E TA I N E E :  I

guess they will not contact these people, but will imprison them.

Politico-juridical denegation needs to be witnessed in itself as a command in its purest form as withholding any impartible content. The machinery of denegation turns witnessing here into something analogous to the secret. At this border Gaddafi becomes one more shadowy gatekeeper who will withhold the law by withholding those who might respond to Salim’s call to testimony and history. To be in a position to testify to history is to be judged capable and culpable of historical acting, which in itself objectifies

52 / Chapter One

the guilt of those seeking to historicize. The double bind of the witness, who cannot narrate the prisoner without being silenced, sentenced, and condemned, consigns Salim to prehistory. To be caught in the anteroom that is before the law is to also be before history—it is at best to experience history as reversible creation, as time withdrawn and revoked—as a shut aperture. “In Kafka the written law is contained in books, but these are secret; by basing itself on them the prehistoric world exerts its rule all the more ruthlessly.”36 The secret document fulfills a parallel function to the witness who cannot be called to the stand; it too is the denial of history— the inaccessibility of its historicization of Salim and of its own historical becoming as a public secret. Salim’s disputation attempts to break out from this anteroom of law by naming history itself, from which he has been exiled, as his witness: “As far as I know, in all the history of the human race, I do not think there have been any Tribunals of this forum or this kind.” Or: “This is not justice: it is not right. It hasn’t been witnessed in the whole of human history.” Here Salim reimagines history as a site and place from which the CSRT itself can be imagined, witnessed, and narrativized in all its anomaly, it is no longer a question of his biography, but of the tribunal’s historical right to name itself a tribunal, which is to contest its dominion over itself and its entitlement to judgment. A Media Theology of the Secret The degree to which that the public secret is presented as infinite, unframeable, remote, untouchable, and yet perpetually self-enclosed, it constitutes a media theology. The apocalyptic indifference of readability and unreadability installs revealability without revelation. In suspending the dialectics of veiling and unveiling media, theology performs the sheer revelation of revealability—of the power of showing abstracted and subtracted from what is shown. Revealability without revelation signifies an agnosia of power, a theology and pathology of transmission solely invested in the performativity and apodictic potency of the commanding power of impartibility autonomous from and irreducible to any imparted specificity. In the war on terror the precedent for this was the solarized threat display of the shock-and-awe onslaught sanctioned by, but in actuality empty of, confected WMDs and the perpetrators of 9/11. The Salim of record sees from the blindness that has been imposed on him when he claims a right, not merely to view or dispute the content of the classified document, but to litigate the very actuality of the withheld text itself: “But if the Tribunal is saying there are classified things, classified

Before the Law at Guantánamo / 53

information—they have to prove that.” Once the line between readability and unreadability is blurred, even the public secret can hide its nonexistence, making that the secret of the secret. Here Salim extends the burden of proof to the secret’s capacity to impart. He identifies and radicalizes the condition of textual disembodiment in law identified by Legendre when the latter speaks of the “decorporealisation” of the relation between commentator and text; “it is by means of this mechanism that there gradually took hold in the West the institutional doctrine that a text is nothing more than a documentary bearer of information.”37 Salim takes this thesis one step further and addresses the founding incorporeality of the CSRT itself through the classified text as a bodiless body. If the secret text is a power, it is the evidentiary power of archival disincarnation. The tribunal works with an archival apocalypse of the unhearable, the unreadable, the inaudible, and the unwitnessable, an archive of the eschatological terminus of the archive—the latter is but one more impassable doorway lacking any human coordinates in its iconoclastic blockages and repulsions. If he cannot see, read, or enter this archive, how can Salim accept it as material, not to speak of what it supposedly mediates and documents? How does imparting occur if there is neither a medium nor a locus of impartibility? If any secret is to impart anything, if it is readable or even just declarable and thereby decisive, it has already parted with itself, it is already di-visible into the impartible and un-impartible as its mode of self-presentation and repetition, which propels the secret out of its occlusion into the glare of public scrutiny. Salim, in questioning the secret in its sheer declarability, in its claim to impart, contests this mediatic regime as an amputated organ of veridiction. The secret archive vibrates between the nominative and the infinitive and as such homologizes the law in Kafka’s fable and ultimately the securocratic state, which imparts itself through a media theology of the incommunicable. Sovereignty here, like the secret, needs to remain both infinitely self-referential and yet unframeable and thus manifests as the impartibility of no part. The political trajectory of revealability runs unilaterally from the unconditionality of the sovereign-who-shows to the conditionalityunto-death of those condemned to the terrain of the revealable. Derrida theologically frames an unconditional sovereignty predicated by distance, remotion, indemnity, and veiling when he states: “Nothing can happen to absolute power, to the sovereign. If something happens to God, it implies vulnerability in God. Absolute power is also total insensitivity, total impassability with regards to an event.”38 However, this formulation implies a dialectic unnoted by Derrida wherein sovereignty shows, performs,

54 / Chapter One

and materializes its impassibility and insensitivity by giving events to vulnerable others, which is to give or monstrate pure revealability such as a monstrous exposure to violence and terror. Sovereignty over revealability is a one-sided rule by the purely apocalyptic—apocalypse (από, off, and καλύπτειν, cover) means to reveal, to uncover, to disclose. The sovereign can give the event or the time of revealability through fear, violence, terror, and capital penalty, which takes time as the vulnerability and destructibility of those to whom such events encompass. This selfsame gesture conversely permits no affective and conditioning event or time to touch, sensitize, or pass through sovereignty in its remotion from its violence and surfaces of attack. The drone plane or missile that flies over Afghani villages gives revealability to its acquired targets, while its faceless roboticism denies or, at the very least, radically withdraws any anthropological and affective origin to the attention of the prosthetic; this machinic privation of affective site foregrounds the impassability of sovereignty—its armored immunity to the juridical fate it renders to the nonsovereign as a somatic exposé. Immunity and indemnity appear as trans-ascendant only in that which is figured and reduced as destructible, as the media skins of a sovereign will. Denegation is a mode of presenting what the law or sovereignty is “in the mode of not being it,” such as the prone figures of destructibility.39 Or, as Jean Hyppolite further ventriloquizes denegation, “here is what I am not. What I am is deduced there from” (749, italics mine). This logic extends to the violence of sovereignty itself as “presenting one’s being in the mode of not being it” (748). Sovereignty inflicts destruction on diverse materialities as if to declare, “This is what I am not” (748). Through such distance-inrelation, sovereignty conditions itself as unconditional. The Deconstructionist State Salim expands his interrogation of the politics of impartibility in reference to the unclassified material when he inquires: One thing, is this unclassified document (referring to the Unclassified Summary of Evidence) what the Personal Representative showed me? Or is it something else? T R I B U N A L P R E S I D E N T : Yes, D E TA I N E E :  There

that is the unclassified summary of evidence.

is no proof of all this. So give me the proof.

Even the declassified text rendered public in accordance with the dubious laws of secrecy/scarcity/security is all the more counterfeit in its publicness,

Before the Law at Guantánamo / 55

in its pretense to referentiality, accessibility, and readability—its diegetic functions are subverted by the originating secret, its publicity is secreted from the abode of withheld law, and its showing screens something from view. It is simply another gatekeeper presenting its back to the law. This realization is mobilized by the transcribed Salim as a crisis of translation and transcription, of the bleed-through between the communicable and the incommunicable, the readable and the unreadable, the visible and the invisible. The declassified document in Salim’s disputation is a detachable part of an unimpartible totality in which all the technologies of memory are hopelessly contaminated, a pathology that extends to the distinction between the communicable and the incommunicable itself. Political thought today is challenged on how to engage the war of terror as a counterfeit democratic sublime that does not readily permit the stability, positionality, and commensurations of ethical witnessing, nor of media or ethnographic realism. Critique here is in search of a situated descriptive adequacy for preprogrammed inadequations—the apophatics or denegations of the self-defacing and ethically disaggregated state at war. In the tradition of negative theology, apophatic discourse and practice paradoxically present unpresentifiable divinity as such, and in doing so forward the affect of the insensible.40 When theologically deployed in sequentially intensive statements and acts, denegations become enunciative theaters that generate an incorporeal ineffability effect, turning the finite auditor toward the unframeable. Negative theology effects the presentation of divinity or sovereignty as hyperousias, that is, as beyond being; it is an analytic of the ultimate that records the split between the infinitive and the nominative. Denegation in refusing any dialectical movement toward a higher order of affirmation resists perspectival witnessing and summation by sustaining dislocation between the negated and the negating. The counterterrorist state is actualized through procedural breaches in legal, military, technocratic, and aesthetic performances as sites of indeterminacy through which new forms of determination are effectuated. These procedural breaches reenact sovereignty as concussed foundation and as ungrounded action, but such citational performances require stabilizing evental sites: theaters of display, historiographic surfaces, and power/ knowledge apparatuses for making and showing denegation as a form of political creation. At these sites sovereign right is encountered and externalized through immanent materiality in a state of retraction—as the witnessing of the unwitnessable, as the tangibility of the intangible. In materially inscribing the ineffable into a political field, denegation connects negative theology to the political theology of “secular” sovereignty as a deific sub-

56 / Chapter One

stitute. Sovereignty resists the nominative in favor of the inalterable alternation between aesthesis and anaesthesis, the material and the immaterial. Beyond semantic play denegation becomes a political technology that withdraws finite positivity from power to amplify its political, moral, and ethical untouchability and insensitivity. Sovereignty is by happening to others in such a way that nothing happens to it. Schürmann summarizes the disframing effect of apophatics: “These negations have but one goal—to keep us from conceiving the one as position, as thesis.”41 Note that in this formulation, “the one” perdures, but any static, molar, and foundational position is unavailable to its witness. With political apophatics we are no longer within a heliocentric model of sovereignty and the state, nor within a “photopolitical” positivity of power—the light of the self-evident. The discontinuous fractured surfaces of the apophatic state are incapable of supporting sovereignty’s presumed continuous unity or ipseity; rather, the apophatic state circulates within an economy of light (phos) and nonlight (aphos). The atopology of “the one” to which Schürmann refers is a photopolitics that weaves and winds apparition and disapparition into a circulatory matrix of force that is at once invasive and yet remote from that over which it spreads. The material concretion of the state in transitive modes, forms, organs, and events of contingent appearing are profoundly discontinuous with whatever grounded indivisibility sovereign right may lay claim to, such as positive law or jus ad bellum. The presenting surfaces of the disapparitional state are fractured as well as disframed; the state, as an evental site, takes its parts from a mosaic of techniques and discourses but does not put them into new, closed, positive unities. Unlike the frontispiece illustration of Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan, these surfaces will never reflect back the constitutive political multitude to itself. To move along the fractured surfaces of the post-heliocentric state is to proceed, as Salim did, by in situ negations and negations of these negations, as if walking on the broken and mirroring shards of law, reason, and agency.42 In the war on terror the multiplication, occlusion, and occultation of sovereign positionality is structured by clandestine extraordinary renditions, black sites, paramilitary outsourcing, and disavowable collateral damage. These presenting forms preemptively indemnify the state at war through the concrete execution of its violence as simultaneously indeterminate and determinate, as law and nonlaw—this is the sign not of a monolithic barrier, but rather of the absence of a finite or teleological position or horizon within which sovereignty would acquire contour—a delimiting outline. Political denegation reveals that power is not possessed or

Before the Law at Guantánamo / 57

a property that would support a substantialist enframed model of power. Apophatic power is an actus exercitus that is supplemented by an actus signatus. An actus signatus recursively defines the material and immaterial conditions under which power takes its places or is generated as place in contingent instances, compositions, and encounters. Apophatic sovereignty takes place to postpone the political-perceptual encounter with its own limit; it is this performative retraction of political positivity that installs monopolistic right, law, nonlaw, and violence with preemptive immunity. The counterterrorist state insulates, dematerializes, and protects its violence through the demultiplication of terms, predicates, gazes, and voices that could describe, translate, limit, condition, adjudicate, and penetrate its unscathable sovereignty and its impassable and material insensitivities. We might then speak of a “deconstructionist state at war” to the degree that the autopositioning of the securocratic state in its law, violence, and terror appears within the oscillations, tempo, and velocity of the play of presence and ab-sense, what Legendre earlier described as “an architecture made up of sequences that are structured as if time could become malleable, reversible and controllable material.”43 The state, according to Massimo Cacciari, can then be figured as a “play of differences, a system of signs referring to each other in their continuous transformation, where nothing is simply present or absent. The center of the projecting thought is not replaced by another center, but instead, by the endless deconstructive work, claiming to produce the plenitude of absolute presence, the play of programmatic differences.”44 Apophatic power is a topology and tropology in which the coordinates of its appearing/nonappearing is the differential between the project of the state, such as its claim to do or be law, and the compositing of this claim in polycentric and pointillist multiplicity and self-amputating prosthetics, such as outsourced paramilitary formations, robotic drone weaponry, and the drone juridics of the “no-hearing hearing” process of the CSRT. The state, constituted through scenic affirmation, privileges topological performativity at the expense of textual authority or continuity. Specifically, the public-safety apparatus unfolds as an “anticipatory topology” as yet to be fully occupied, hence its anchorage in proleptic indeterminate, interminable, and invisible risk—the destined terrorist who will have been but who has yet to fully arrive. The anticipatory terrorist is a determination in negation of a sovereignty that, like the ex-centric violence and polycentric terror it guards against, is neither fully emplaced nor enframed: “Never quite taking place is thus part of its performance, of its success as an event, of its taking-place.”45 I have not been describing Schmitt’s casting of the sovereign decision

58 / Chapter One

as extraprocedural suspension—as a breakout from the finite frame of law and prescriptive process. Rather, the state, as disframing dismediacy, is postprocedural in displacing ostensive procedural rationality with other syntagma, sets, and series that lack clear indexical reference or means/ends relations. Boris Groys approximates the postprocedural in what he calls “sub-posing,” and the “sub-medial” in which structures of disframing become the support, conduit, and substrate for positive scenic affirmations.46 This is the production of the politically impartible via the unimpartible, which does not point to or disconceal an anchoring foundation, only the kinesis in which no presenting stratum is originary or protological and therefore vulnerable to a subtractive or suspending state of exception. As Cacciari stated, each stratum and strand of power and practice is a play of signs referring to one another in their continuous transformation, where nothing is simply present but is through suspension, deferment, retraction, and dismedia. Thus, the postprocedural is the forwarding of an elapsed scene of state rationality that perseveres only in negating citation, as both forwarded and dispatched— that is, as disframed. Disavowal and structural deniability are opened by a political apparatus every time the procedural is superseded through its dislocating citation or subversive mimesis and/or deployed as a screening and empty formalism at the level of discourse and act that deflects from in-place submedial and subposing scripts. The Securitization of Guilt If the CSRT did not take place within the strictures of positive law except by way of nostalgic citation, what of the guilt it adjudicated? This question opens the structure of guilt in Guantánamo to the moral logic of the wider war on terror waged beyond its walls. The political culture of counterterrorist risk, threat, and adjudication resynthesizes culpabilizing chronotopes drawn down and analogized from preexisting command structures of law, religion, and capitalism wherein history becomes guilt history as an archival idiom of deficit.47 Therefore the CSRT event reenacts a philosophy of history in which recitative history (witnessing, biography) and historical action as forward movements in time become intrinsically culpabilizing beyond the probative constraints of positive law: According to Anaximander, the sequence of time orders the rise and fall of all things and orders them in accordance with the law of guilt and punishment so that becoming (génesis) is a guilt (adikía) that must be expiated in

Before the Law at Guantánamo / 59 perishing. Time and more precisely its táxis, the positing of time, is thought in Anaximander’s sentence as an order of guilt and retribution, debt and payback. . . . The strict coherence of guilt and penance is ascertained by the principle of their equivalence. . . . This taxiological order of time places every realm of the natural and human world under a law of substitution without exception; this also allows ethical, juridical, and economic concepts to substitute for one another within this order.48

This economy of conceptual substitution and commensuration, traversing law, economy, and technicity and operating across a series of substitutable bodies and geopolities, drives the contemporary war on terror as a taxiological project. For Nietzsche, law originated in the violent infusion of guilt and fiscal debt into an exemplified body, thereby forging a promissory subject of the state politically conditioned and calculated by a moral economy of culpability and deficit. Old English scyld and German schuld etymologically link the sense of guilt and blame to that of fiscal debt and owing. Walter Benjamin foregrounded this fiscal-moral association between debt and guilt in describing the theological genesis of capitalism as a cult of preordained indebtedness and deficit, which he contrasts with a cult of atonement where restitution is still possible: “Guilt is the highest category of world history for guaranteeing the unidirectionality [Einsinnigkeit] of what occurs.”49 For Benjamin, capitalism restructures historical time as a unidirectional subtraction from a prior plenitude. Guilt and debt are categories of descent, inheritance, and causation that institute automatic deficiency through the forward movement of time. Occurrence incurs deficits measured by “the obsessive attribution of an economic index to every detail of conduct.”50 Benjamin writes of depletion and deficit as forms of historical causation: “Cause and effect can never be decisive categories for the structure of world history, because they cannot determine any totality. . . . It is a mistake of the rationalistic conception of history to view any historical totality (that is, a state of the world) as cause or effect. A state of the world is however always guilty with regard to some other later one.”51 Benjamin’s thesis is applicable to the history machine, the technical reproducibility, embedded in the auratic punctum of 9/11 as a concretion of historical guilt and unresolved indebtedness. As such, the security state is the cult of the “permanent duration” of capitalized damage and risk that permits of no atonement and restitution. Guilt and debt are chronometrical encryptions that function as the conserving crypt of history as terror. This cryptopolitics is also spatialized in an actual crypt—the empty tomb of ground zero, the

60 / Chapter One

maw that conserves and mechanically issues forth unending guilt/debt as war credits that are banked, in part, with Guantánamo and other black sites as a repository of historical culpability. Ground zero is the archival abscess upon which the war on terror first pledged its geopolitical crusade of infinite culpability, debt collection, and regime repossession, and to which the populace of Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, and Yemen and the prisoners of black sites are held hostage in seemingly unending debt peonage. The liquidated and liquefied Osama bin Laden and the Guantánamo inmate who is detained, adjudicated, and tortured under legal indeterminacy have been immersed in unfathomable historical delinquency and liability, drowning in and held captive to surplus indebtedness as historical regress without egress—this is why bin Laden could not have a locatable earthly grave, nor the Guantánamo inmate a public trial with due process. Such defaulters on historical time and the “disruptive” geopolities they evoke or implicate are sentenced not to definitive punishment, but to unending guilt as a theological-fiscal chronicity wherein they are denied finite judicial measure and atonement. Benjamin described the time signature of indebting guilt as an archival hell, a cosmos of punitive detention whose text humanity is condemned to copy out in countless repetitions and retentions.52 This hell is the governmentality of infinite culpability, the asymmetric power relation between creditor and debtor that today colonially spreads its cultural isomorphism across the globe through subprime, bundled, derivative, and “sovereign” debt as the reendowed crypt and encryption of history. Such practices historically underwrite and secure the political logic of debt/guilt but also reciprocally secure historical time through debt and guilt (such as in the double bind of culpable witnessing in the CSRT). Securitization captures time as an economy of debt in order to index a future that needs to be amortized through the surety and hostaging of exemplary insecure and culpable bodies and in militarily foreclosed and confiscated geopolitical landscapes. To amortize is to reduce a debt over time, but also to reduce time to indebtedness and to exercise an oppressive and retarding influence on time—to bring to death, to deaden, to treat as if dead, to destroy, to alienate property, and to extinguish or wipe out a debt. Amortization in the war on terror is related to the exercise of mortmain, the sovereign right of the dead hand. In medieval Europe mortmain, was the custom by which serfs and other subalterns were subject to homines manus mortuae, by which the latter had no right of testamentary disposition; their possessions upon their death automatically reverted to their sovereign. A license of mortmain was an instrument permitting the sovereign to alienate prop-

Before the Law at Guantánamo / 61

erty accrued in life at the time of death. The taxiological license of the dead hand is resurrected in the biopolitics of imputation, where the bearers of a stained life, as the perpetuators of risk and death, real and imagined, present and projected, are deprived of the right to the disposition of their life through extraordinary renditions as an accelerated social death. Here bare life is the condition of being indebted to sovereign right by the sheer fact of a particular geopolitical existence, race, and religion, which is to be always already a contaminating and phobogenic life. The modern law of the dead hand resecures life and secures security in constituting life itself as a deficit and debt to be infinitely claimed.53 In being enchained to a political economy of guilt, such reduced and extraordinary bodies of the tortured and the rendered, contrary to Agamben’s formulation of bare life, are not disqualified life, but rather present as value-imbued objects of extraction, as repositories of historical deficit from which the surplus value of capitalized risk can be repeatedly mined and renewed. Bareness, exposure, and denudation are auditing outcomes that transcribe biographical assets. Here the war on terror takes its marching orders from capitalism, by “systematizing a deficit without permitting any escape from it.”54 The bare life of being indefinitely withheld from law registers an interminable indebtedness to a law that never arrives to close the books, or to declare a court of conscience in session; any such event would introduce a finalizing and finite juridical event susceptible to debt resolution, atonement, revaluation, critical witnessing, review, and even readjudication by other accounting jurisdictions. The qualifying passages of assessed and anticipated political risk archive or crystallize mnemonic value in transitive yet supposedly exchangeable social substance such as the malleable figure of the terrorist. The drive to risk compression is the engine of valuation in which space/time concentrates unfold as value equivalencies between the penumbral glint of threat and its nominal murky substrates, such as the prejudged denizens of Guantánamo. In its current gestation of insecurity, risk appears as indebted to itself. Risk, like guilt/debt, is its own measure in producing itself from itself as self-valorizing political capital.55 Risk, hazard, and threat in the war on terror are governing denegations; the sublimating finality of risk and threat elimination is unavailable here except as a mediate and ideological figure of desire, as anticipatory topology. Within the kinesis of valorization and remediation, risk moves serially through multiple and disposable scenic affirmations wherein it presents as anamorphic and as lacking stable outline. Risk elimination as a primary

62 / Chapter One

negation of threat is displaced and sublimated by the secondary negation of renewable and phantasmatic risk as the forward movement and mass production and consumption of serialized threat surfaces. Once risk elimination comes before, as apotrope and medium, rather than after, as terminus, debt reconciliation, atonement, and higher resolution, the war on terror becomes the instrument for an infinite and floating culpability. In domestic surveillance the right of the dead hand has reached across unending asymmetric war to grasp the prism of (un)countable zettabytes and enframing metadata, recoding the latter as lubricants of an open-ended culpabilization of living speech and quotidian gazes. The promised futurity of risk termination has been refunctioned as a simulacral habitus and as an enclosing default locking history into anticipatory trajectories. However, as Schürmann stresses, any anticipatory topology has to be thought without any utopian or millennial postponements, whether these be the arrival of security, the law, or the last terrorist. Odious and Odorous Debt In questioning the sheer existence and capitalized contents of texts held and withheld Salim, must identify how he himself has been parted from himself by generative secrecy and procedural guilt: the known-unknown indebted Salims who endlessly proliferate in the alcoves and recesses of Guantánamo and the unknown-known simulacra of Salim that have become the deeply enshrined stuff of the security archive. The defendants at these tribunals enter the language of testimony and witnessing only to be met by a severance, an amputation from things, from compeers and from self by virtue of speaking and transcription as a rite of passage that institutes law, guilt, and their fabulation in the very action of these circumcisions. As a sentencing whose finality is delivered prior to Salim’s official sentencing, he is told that the unreadable text, the tomb of his guilt, will be his fate “forever”—the fate of inaccessibility—in much the same manner as life rendered to Guantánamo will remain classified, culpable, and inaccessible as one of its endless sentences. D E TA I N E E :  Before

I answer this question. I would like to ask one more question.

The classified information is going to stay classified until when? T R I B U N A L P R E S I D E N T : It

will stay classified forever.

The narrative of Salim’s life before the law is a sentencing to a life as infinite threat whether he is eventually released or not. In his institutional

Before the Law at Guantánamo / 63

warehousing Salim will remain unreadable to himself. The lives of the prisoners in the debtor’s prisons of Guantánamo, Bagram, and other black sites is not their life but a transmitted encryption or accounting that they are commanded to assume and inhabit like their handed-down prison jumpsuits, the uniform of indebtedness through which they are branded, “tranched,” and commensurated. In this they share a condition with other victims of “odious debt,” such as those in Greece who suddenly awoke to find themselves metamorphosized into fiscal “vermin,” at the cost of their economic and human rights.56 The many simulacra of indebtedness at play in the CSRT hearings and in Greece echo Kafka’s penal writing machine, whose tattooing could not be read by the prisoners who bore its script; they were unable to apprehend “their own” inscribed sentences and debts, for it was an “archaic apparatus which engraves letters with curlicues on the backs of guilty men, multiplying the stabs and piling up the ornaments to the point where the back of the guilty man becomes clairvoyant and is able to decipher the writing from which he must derive the nature of his unknown guilt.”57 As an oral historian and ethnographer of the Republican no-wash protests at Maze Prison (the “H-Blocks”) in Northern Ireland, it comes as little surprise to me that Salim, like the IRA dirt protestor, was compelled from time to time to “inappropriately” expel his “body fluids,” presumably on his captors, and at least on the doors, floors, and walls of his debtors’ prison. These substances, in their spraying, splaying, odor, and display, this political economy of the body, can at least be read, translated, and deciphered by Salim and his co-detainees as the legible calligraphy of a recognizable life before an unrecognizable law.

Notes 1.

2.

“Ashraf Salim Abd Al Salam Sultan—The Guantánamo Docket,” http://projects .nytimes.com/guantanamo/detainees/263ashraf-salim-abd-al-salam-sultan (accessed November 26, 2011); and “Office of the Secretary of Defense and Joint Staff FOIA Requester Service Center—Combatant Status Review Tribunal (CSRT) and Administrative Review Board (ARB) Documents,” http://www.dod.mil/pubs/foioperation _and_plans/Detainee/csrt_arb/index.htm (accessed November 26, 2011). Mark Denbeaux, “No-Hearing Hearings CSRT: The Modern Habeas Corpus? An Analysis of the Proceedings of the Government’s Combatant Status Review Tribunals at Guantánamo,” last modified November 11, 2006, http://law.shu.edu/ publications/guantanamoReports/final_no_hearing_hearings_report.pdf (accessed November 20, 2011). “Counter Terror with Justice Checklist: Assessing President Obama’s First 100 Days | Amnesty International,” April 29, 2009, www.amnesty.org/ en/campaigns/counter-terror-with-justice/checklist-assessing-president-obamas-first -hundred-days (accessed November 20, 2011). The CSRT process was suspended by

64 / Chapter One

3.

the Obama administration in 2009 but not irrevocably terminated, and the Obama administration has relied on charges pending under the Military Commissions Act to oppose applications for review of habeas corpus. Denbeaux’s assessment was based on the following findings: 1. The Government did not produce any witnesses in any hearing and did not present any documentary evidence to the detainee prior to the hearing in 96% of the cases. 2. The only document that the detainee is always presented with is the summary of classified evidence, but the Tribunal characterized this summary before it as “conclusory” and not persuasive. 3. The detainee’s only knowledge of the reasons the Government considered him to be an enemy combatant was the summary of the evidence. 4. The Government’s classified evidence was always presumed to be reliable and valid. 5. In 48% of the cases, the Government also relied on unclassified evidence, but, like the classified evidence, this unclassified evidence was almost always withheld from the detainee. 6. At least 55% of the detainees sought either to inspect the classified evidence or to present exculpatory evidence in the form of witnesses and/or documents. a. All requests by detainees to inspect the classified evidence were denied. b. All requests by detainees for witnesses not already detained in Guantánamo were denied. c. Requests by detainees for witnesses detained in Guantánamo were denied in 74% of the cases. In the remaining 26% of the cases, 22% of the detainees were permitted to call some witnesses and 4% were permitted to call all of the witnesses that they requested. d. Among detainees that participated, requests by detainees to produce documentary evidence were denied in 60% of the cases. In 25% of the hearings, the detainees were permitted to produce all of their requested documentary evidence; and in 15% of the hearings, the detainees were permitted to produce some of their documentary evidence. 7. The only documentary evidence that the detainees were allowed to produce was from family and friends. 8. Detainees did not always participate in their hearings. When considering all the hearings, 89% of the time no evidence was presented on behalf of the detainee. 9. The Tribunal’s decision was made on the same day as the hearing in 81% of the cases. 10. The CSRT procedures recommended that the Government have an attorney present at the hearing; the same procedures deny the detainees any right to a lawyer. 11. Instead of a lawyer, the detainee was assigned a “personal representative,” whose role, both in theory and in practice, was minimal. 12. With respect to preparation for the hearing, in most cases, the personal representative met with the detainee only once (78%) for no more than 90 minutes (80%) only a week before the hearing (79%). 13. At the end of the hearing, the personal representative failed to exercise his right to comment on the decision in 98% of the cases. a. During the hearing; the personal representative said nothing 12% of the time.

Before the Law at Guantánamo / 65 b. During the hearing; the personal representative did not make any substantive statements in 36% of the cases; and c. In the 52% of the cases where the personal representative did make substantive comments, those comments sometimes advocated for the Government. 14. In three of the 102 CSRT returns reviewed, the Tribunal found the detainee to be not or no longer an enemy combatant. In each case, the Defense Department ordered a new Tribunal convened, and the detainee was then found to be an enemy combatant. In one instance, a detainee was found to no longer be an enemy combatant by two Tribunals, before a third Tribunal was convened which then found the detainee to be an enemy combatant. 15. When a detainee was initially found not/no longer to be an enemy combatant: a. The detainee was not told of his favorable decision. b. There is no indication that the detainee was informed of or participated in the second (or third) hearings. c. The record of the decision finding the detainee not/no longer to be an enemy combatant is incomplete. 4. Department of Defense, Office for the Administrative Review of the Detention  of Enemy Combatants, “Combatant Status Review Tribunal (CSRT) Documents,” (2004), 3060, http://www.dod.mil/pubs/foi/detainees/csrt_arb/index.html (accessed April  6, 2010). “Ashraf Salim Abd Al Salam Sultan (ISN 263): Detainee Statements in the Tribunal Records,” http://humanrights.ucdavis.edu/projects/ the - guantanamo - testimonials - project/ testimonies/ testimonies - of - the - defense -department/csrts-1/csrt_statement_263.pdf (accessed November 12, 2011). 5. JTF-GTMO Detainee Assessment,” S E C R E T / / Noforn / / 20330519, Department of Defense Headquarters, Joint Task Force Guantánamo U.S. Naval Station, last modified May 19, 2008, http://www.emptywheel.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/ 080519-Ashraf-Sultan.pdf (accessed November 20, 2011). 6. Maurizio Lazzarato, “Immaterial Labor,” in Radical Thought in Italy: A Potential Politics, ed. Paulo Virno and Michael Hardt (Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press, 1997), 135. 7. Paulo Virno, A Grammar of the Multitude for an Analysis of Contemporary Forms of Life, trans. Isabella Bertolett, James Cascaito, and Andrea Casson (New York: Semiotext(e), 2004). See also Lazzarato, “Immaterial Labor,” 135, 138–40; and Gilles Deleuze, “Control and Becoming” and “Postscript on Control Societies,” in Negotiations, trans. Martin Joughin (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), 169–76 and 177–82 respectively. 8. Herbert Marcuse discerned surplus repression in the performance principle of subjectification understood as cognitive commensuration with a fetishized reality principle of production/consumption traversing and legitimating the capitalist organization of labor and knowledge. See Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud (New York: Routledge, 1987). 9. Related to yet distinguishable from a Marxian political economy of punishment focused on the historical coemergence of the institutional forms of the factory and the prison, and, more recently, prison privatization. 10. Michel Foucault, Wrong-Doing, Truth-Telling: The Function of Avowal in Justice, ed. Fabienne Brion and Bernard E. Harcourt (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014 [Kindle ed.]), 139. 11. Achille Mbembe, On the Postcolony (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2001), 188.

66 / Chapter One 12. See my discussion of politics as substance in the introduction. 13. Ashraf_Salim_Abd_Al_Salam_Sultan Guantanamo_weigh-ins.jpg, last modified March 16, 2007, http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:ISN_263 (accessed December 4, 2011). 14. “Food Fight: Guantánamo Captives, Guards at Stalemate,” last modified March 24, 2013, http://www.miamiherald.com/2013/03/24/3303644/at-guantanamo-camps -war-on-terror.html (accessed June 15, 2014). 15. Department of Defense, Office for the Administrative Review of the Detention of Enemy Combatants, “Combatant Status Review Tribunal (CSRT) Documents,” 3061. 16. All parenthetical insertions in testimony quotes are mine. 17. Department of Defense, Office for the Administrative Review of the Detention of Enemy Combatants, “Combatant Status Review Tribunal (CSRT) Documents,” 3061. 18. JTF-GTMO Detainee Assessment, S E C R E T / / Noforn / / 20330519, Department Of Defense Headquarters, Joint Task Force Guantánamo U.S. Naval Station, Guantánamo Bay, Cuba Apo Ae 09360, May 19, 2008, http://www.emptywheel.net/wp -content/uploads2011/11080519-Ashraf-Salim.pdf (accessed November 20, 2011). 19. “U.S. Sends Three Guantánamo Detainees to Georgia,” last modified March 23, 2010; http://www.reuters.com/article/2010/03/23/us-usa-guantanamo-georgia-idUSTRE 62M52C20100323 (accessed November 27, 2011). “Georgia: Guantánamo Prisoners Pose No Threat, Officials Say,” last modified March 28, 2010; http://www .eurasianet.org/departments/insightb/articles/eav032910a.shtml (accessed November 26, 2011). 20. Jacques Lacan, Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English, trans. Bruce Young (New York: W. W. Norton, 2006), 558. 21. Pascal Bonitzer, “Deframings,” in Cahiers du Cinéma vol. 4: 1973–1978: History, Ideology, Cultural Struggle, ed. David Wilson (New York: Routledge, 2000), 198–99, 200. 22. This discussion of framing builds on my prior treatments in “On Cultural Anesthesia: From Desert Storm to Rodney King,” American Ethnologist 21, no. 2 (1994): 404–18, which engaged aesthesis in terms of an enframing/disframing racializing anesthesia in law. There I work with Frantz Fanon’s formulation of black skins and white masks as the unpresentifiability of the black subject in white public space. In “Violence and Vision: The Aesthetics and Prosthetics of Terror,” Public Culture 10, no. 1 (Fall 1997): 24–60, I described the “politically visible, that horizon of actors, objects, and events that constitute the worldview and circumscribed reality of the political emergency zone—the gathered and linked components of crises” (26). Framing/disframing is linked to Barthes’s treatment of decoupage, cutting out, as a geometry of monstration and power. More recently Judith Butler, Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? (New York: Verso, 2009), explores this theme by treating the frame as a localized medium and opportunistic instrument enabling the transmission of a political and hegemonic message that is pointedly marked by its utilitarian exclusions, limits, and circulatory deformation. She associates the frame with ideological reproducibility; in contrast, my concern here is with the political ontology and force of unpresentifiable sovereignty through disframed and dismediated law and violence. 23. Frank B. Wilderson III, “The Vengeance of Vertigo: Aphasia and Abjection in the Political Trials of Black Insurgents,” InTensions 5 (Fall–Winter 2011): 2, http://www .yorku.ca/intent/issue5/articles/pdfs/frankbwildersoniiiarticle.pdf.

Before the Law at Guantánamo / 67 24. Ibid., 3. Wilderson writes of the courtroom posture of black insurgents: “They rejected the terms of jurisprudential engagement by refusing the hermeneutics of individual guilt or innocence. They believed the power to pose the question is the greatest power of all” (7). 25. See Saidiya V. Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997). 26. See Gillian Rose, Dialectic of Nihilism: Post-Structuralism and Law (London: WileyBlackwell, 1991). 27. Franz Kafka, “Before the Law,” trans. Willa Muir and Edwin Muir, in Wedding Preparations in the Country and Other Stories (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1978), 201–2. 28. Jacques Derrida, “Before the Law,” in Acts of Literature, ed. Derek Attridge (New York: Routledge, 1992), 200–201. 29. Jacques Derrida, “How to Avoid Speaking: Denials,” in Psyche: Inventions of the Other, vol. 2, ed. Peggy Kamuf and Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008), 162–63. 30. Kafka, “Before the Law,” 201. 31. Reiner Schürmann, Broken Hegemonies, trans. Reginald Lilly (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003), 234. 32. “It is the task of a retrospective topology to excavate, from under the great foundations of universal demonstrations, the phenomena that were used as their cornerstones. In distinguishing between maximization (the constitution of fantasms to subsume particulars) and singularization (the constitution of signs to exhibit singulars), topology will not destroy the foundations; it will recover those objects of exhibition and make of itself an analytic of ultimates. . . . Under a hegemonic regime, one acts and speaks in the name of a fantasm—an expression we hold to be tautological. Both common nouns and fantasms direct us to de-realize the singular and maximize a thetic reality. They direct us not to accept the given, but to subsume it under a thesis.” Ibid., 12. 33. Ibid., 557. 34. Pierre Legendre, “The Dogmatic Value of Aesthetics,” Parallax 14, no. 4 (2008): 10. 35. Ibid., 13. 36. Walter Benjamin, “Franz Kafka: On the Tenth Anniversary of His Death,” in Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans., Harry Zohn (New York: Shocken Books, 1968), 114–15. 37. Pierre Legendre, “The Lost Temporality of Law: An Interview with Pierre Legendre,” Law and Critique l, no. 1 (1990): 10. 38. Jacques Derrida, “Epoché and Faith: An Interview with Jacques Derrida,” in Derrida and Religion: Other Testaments, ed. Yvonne Sherwood and Kevin Hart (London: Routledge, 2005), 44. 39. Jean Hyppolite, “Appendix I: A Spoken Commentary on Freud’s ‘Verneinung’ by Jean Hyppolite,” in Lacan, Écrits, 747. 40. Negation (ἀπόϕασις), or “assertion” or “unnegation,” derives from ἀποϕημί, “to declare.” “It is well known that late Greek theology, both Neoplatonic and Christian, brings a new impetus to the use of the alpha privative: as a prefix it brings a negative sense to a word, and theological Greek in the late period abounds in alpha words: God is said to be unnameable, unspeakable, invisible, unengendered and so on. Side by side with this proliferation of the negating alpha comes the systematic development of the theology of negation, and the two phenomena should be considered together. Thus the second coincidence: alpha can signify both negation

68 / Chapter One

41. 42. 43. 44.

45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56.

57.

and its opposite. The alpha associated with negative theology is described as the alpha στερητικόν (privative), and it denotes the absence of a given quality. Yet the same prefix has another usage, and is labeled the alpha ἀθροιστικόν, the accumulative alpha. The prefix under discussion, therefore, can convey both the removal and the multiplying of characteristics, and this fact must make us alert to the possibility of ambiguities in the connotations of alpha words: we must also beware of wordplay.” Raoul Mortley, “The Fundamentals of the Via Negativa,” American Journal of Philology 103, no. 4 (Winter 1982): 429. Schürmann, Broken Hegemonies, 149. See Derrida, Writing and Difference, 111–12, 114. Legendre, “The Dogmatic Value of Aesthetics,” 13. Massimo Cacciari, The Unpolitical: On the Radical Critique of Political Reason, ed. Alessandro Carrera, trans. Massimo Verdicchio (New York: Fordham University Press, 2009), 128. Jacques Derrida, Limited Inc., ed. Gerald Graf (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1988), 90. Boris Groys, Under Suspicion: A Phenomenology of Media, trans. Carsten Strathausen (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012), 17–40. For history as culpablization, see also Samuel Weber, Benjamin’s-abilities (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), 250–80. Werner Hamacher, “Guilt History: Benjamin’s Sketch ‘Capitalism as Religion,’” in “Ethics,” special issue of Diacritics 32, nos. 3–4 (Autumn–Winter 2002): 81–82. Walter Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhäuser (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1972), 6:92. Hamacher, “Guilt History,” 87. Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, 6:92. Ibid., 6:101. On this etymology, see http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/122498?rskey=Q0F94p& result=1&isAdvanced=false#eid (accessed September 7, 2013). Hamacher, “Guilt History,” 86. See my discussion of the automatic subject in the introduction. This socioeconomic violence in Greece, which stems from the repayment of sovereign debt, meets the juridical criteria of “odious debt”—a debt that renders humane life inoperable. After 2003 the Bush administration, on behalf of the post-invasion Iraqi government, quietly invoked “odious debt” to annul the international debt incurred by the defunct Saddam Hussein regime. The United States had previously invoked this concept in the aftermath of its expropriation of Spanish colonies after the Spanish-American War, so odious debt has been invoked to serve imperial agendas but stigmatized in reference to anti-imperial politics in Argentina and Ecuador and now in reference to Greece. See, for instance, Anna Gelpern, “What Iraq and Argentina Might Learn from Each Other,” Chicago Journal of International Law 6 (2005): 391–414. See also the documentary film Debtocracy, dir. Katerina Kitidi and Aris Hatzistefanou (2011), http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xik4kh_debtocracy -international-version_shortfilms (accessed February 15, 2011). Benjamin, “Franz Kafka,” 133.

T WO

The Apophatic Blur of War

Under the influence of a fantasm, one associates representations according to the hysterics mobilizing the psychical or public apparatuses. —Reiner Schürmann, Broken Hegemonies

I. Signatures of the Counterfeit Biapolitics and the Modes of Motion of War Political violence is not simply a mechanical repetition of a static, stabilized, and historically completed formation of domination. The issuing forth of violence invariably indexes an existing constitutive lack, a negative space in the order of domination, an empty site through which historical completion can be imagined in the damage inflicted on the internal and external Other pushed beyond polity and civitas. Claude Lefort proposes that democracy is formed around an unstable and unfillable space of withdrawn sovereignty that is the effect of an act of violence (monarchial decapitation), and Cornelius Castoriadis defines the institution of democracy as a radical severance ex nihilo from any transcendental and extrapolitical foundation that creates a groundless political immanence.1 For Lefort and Castoriadis democracy claims a transparent self-presence as political immanence; yet, as Foucault observes, the politically “intelligible appear(s) against the background of emptiness and denies its necessity.”2 However, these ruptures leave a formative lack within the polity, expressed as the constitutive antagonism between unconditional anomic self-institution on the one hand, and self-limitation predicated by distributive rights, law, and procedure on the other. Both thinkers stress that such structuring incompletion goes on repeating its lack and the political demand to suture it in

70 / Chapter Two

the internal and external antagonisms of democracy. Democracy is driven by a constitutive self-emptiness, which Derrida figures as the inalterable alternation between licentiousness and law. Is such structural lack projected outward in American democracy’s unfulfilled search for external substrates and prosthetics of political completion in asymmetrical enemies and exogamous regime change? Can ground zero, as the abyssal site for the issuing forth of war, be related to this constitutive lack radiating from the nation’s symbolic decapitation in the World Trade Center’s ruins and in democracy’s ejection from a presumed post–Cold War political transcendence by globalized multipolar decentering? Is undeclared war without end the means by which democracy restores plenitude to itself as an evacuated site? And does this self-filling war apparatus retroactively superimpose a return structure of force on the experience and conceptual models of democracy? If so, the recursive effects of war would transgress democracy’s indivisible political immanence, in being the effective rebound of the negativity from which democracy originates. These questions require revisiting Foucault’s archaeology of war as an excavation of polemological practice constitutive of civil society. Foucault, like Lefort and Castoriadias, posits an intrinsic linkage between violence and democracy. In “Society Must Be Defended” he proposes that modern politics, as a calculation of relations of force, originates in the material logistics of warfare. Foucault advances a model of civic formation predicated on perpetual warfare as the production of disequilibrium in civil life.3 He cites military practices as relays of knowledge/power that incrementally colonize and constitute civil society through bellicose logics and stratagems from a position of metapolitical and anomic singularity. This polemical grid is diffused as a political technology beyond and below what is formally instituted as politics. Foucault sustains a generative distance between the political (the constitutive logic of war) and politics (the instituted rhetoric and procedural formalities of civil structures). “Material” violence appears to operate in this thesis as the aforementioned constitutive lack and/or form endowing formlessness from which an immanent and positive power/knowledge diagram is carved out and differentiated. Foucault distinguishes between material violence and its ordering by representational, surrogating discourses and administrative techniques. It is this organ-izing of a capacity for violence that implants an organology of civil power beyond the flux of “literal” warfare. Foucault excavates a guiding narrative from seventeenth- and eighteenthcentury invasion historiography, which he describes as antagonistic to the “Roman history” that attributes civil society and state formation to the

The Apophatic Blur of War / 71

pacifying evolution of juridical sovereignty. Invasion historiography, to the contrary, privileges war as a nonjuridical mode of sociopolitical institution.4 Political organization and institution building were prosthetically diffused from the structure of the military encampment as an exemplary space of typified bodies ordered by circulatory power. The politicity of war, for Foucault, follows the trajectory of a silent invasion, an undercoding and code switching of the civil organs of society. The political-cultural logic of warfare achieved a ciphered, silent, and larval in-formation and infestation of public and state institutions. This power was expanded to the militaristic disciplining of civil right and the shaping of a polemological civil subject marked by “racialized” and later biologized antagonisms of national, ethnic, linguistic, and class difference. In “Society Must Be Defended” kinetic anatomies of embodiment/ disembodiment encountered in Foucault’s analysis of penal discipline disappear behind generalized systems of calculable demographic-cartographic generality—the body becomes a mass and amassed article by which the logic of military assembly, assemblage, and regimentation is filtered into society as a circulatory machine. The logic of warfare-based political organization generates new objects and tactics of massifying governmentality centered on the instrumentation of demography, spatial organization, birth and mortality, public hygiene, urban planning, biomedicine, psychiatry, and planned political economy. Military organization unfolds as political organization through other media or organs; warfare is resituated as a technicity of somatic-spatial ordering and ordinance in the historical advance of neoliberal biopolitical government: It is no longer the simple binary mechanism that puts the seal of war on the entire social body; it is a war that begins before the battle and continues after it is over. It is war insofar as it is a way of waging war, a way of preparing for and organizing war. War in the sense of the distribution of weapons, the nature of the weapons, fighting techniques, the recruitment and payment of soldiers, the taxes earmarked for the army; war as an internal institution, and not the raw event of a battle. . . . War is a general economy of weapons, an economy of armed people and disarmed people within a given State, and with all the institutional and economic series that derive from that.5

Here the logic of war is both administrative and informed by the potential for terror in the division of the armed and the disarmed, of which we hear nothing more from Foucault. Polemological practice is a grid and optic through which Foucault reads dissembling institutional practices that

72 / Chapter Two

present as nonmilitary, pacific, civilian, contractual, juridical, homeostatic, and methodically governmental: “We are always writing the history of the same war, even when we are writing the history of peace and its institutions.”6 Foucault, by implication, treats discrete military practice and material violence in civil society as reducible to, and containable within, those quasi-militarized logistics of the “silent war” that underwrites social contract, institutional orders, and civil space. He rarely if ever speaks to actual practices, existentials, and enacting organs of violence as autonomously and retroactively restructuring an already polemicized social field. He does not address the return of the action and affect of war upon a civitas underwritten by bellicose logics. Foucault’s militarization of the civil sphere generates a technical and affective pacification of war—the latter is deleted as an apparatus capable of generating perceptual and bodily investments and signatures. The kinetic an-archism and autopoetics of violence, and the complementary forms of sovereignty, power, and embodiment reproducible through such violence, are expelled from civitas or sublimated within the civil sphere by the implantation of a general economy of tactical prognostics and calculation—a “meshed grid of material coercions” (36), understood as “the rationality of calculations, strategies and ruses; the rationality of technical procedures that are used to perpetuate the victory, to silence, or so it would seem, the war and to preserve or invert the relationship of force” (54–55). Despite his focus elsewhere on the performative structuring of power, Foucault, in “Society Must Be Defended,” is more concerned with the militarily encrypted institution and less so with violence as a self-directing mode of postjuridical political practice. Nor does he focus on warfare as a heterotopic space, a detotalizing countersite that shatters the seams and sutures of the symbolic order of a power/knowledge diagram. This may be because the monopolistic wielding of death and destruction finds its right in constructs of sovereignty, a form of juridical and monopoly power Foucault treats as displaced by the diffused disciplinary matrix of biopower. Biopolitics subordinates biapolitics (the Attic Greek βία, βιαιότης, translates as violence, force, power, strength both physical and mental). The sovereign right to take life is sublimated and surpassed by the production of life-forms and its symbiotic obverse, thanatopolitics—the formal administrative sanitization of what is nominated as life to be treated, pathologized, excluded, or abandoned. However, such formulations never completely eradicate the autopoetic gesture ex nihilo of armed biopolitical institution, which is both constitutive of and enacted against “life” itself as its inceptual political circumcision into valorized life and disarmed life.

The Apophatic Blur of War / 73

Thus, Foucault identifies an asymmetric, bifurcated, and stasiological shaping of social contract, law, and governmentality and even capillary biopower conjugated by the subtextual stratagems of warfare, but he tacitly denies such complexity or double binding to the “discrete” and dedicated praxis of executable violence. The materiality of violence is requisitioned as an extradiscursive negativity in order to institute a civitas built on a disavowal of the biapolitical force that infests its core. For Foucault civitas must be read against the grain as encrypted camouflaged warfare in contrast to overtly enacted violence, which remains desymbolized and reducible to negative materiality. The nexus between politics and “sheer” violence thus corresponds to another Foucauldian thesis—sexuality as institutional discourse, to be distinguished from what is actually enacted between bodies and their organs: “First, a series of brute facts, which might already be described as physico-biological facts: physical strength, force, energy. . . . A series of accidents, or at least contingencies. . . . Intertwining bodies, passions, and accidents: according to this discourse, that is what constitutes the permanent web of history and societies. And something fragile and superficial will be built on top of this web of bodies, accidents, and passions, this seething mass which is sometimes murky and sometimes bloody: a growing rationality” (54–55). For Foucault the primary expression of such war is a “racial” binary encrypted in civic structures as a constitutive antagonism of civil society (61). However, he does not speak to how embodiment is micropolitically raced or gendered by violence. Do not mastering subjects in the economy of propulsion that is war inflict the violence of typification—racial, gendered, ethnic—on other bodies to be biopoliticized and disarmed in life or death? Frank B. Wilderson implicitly extends Foucault’s theorem of civitas as war by other means without abandoning the disruptive material contingency of biapoliticized, raced bodies; he treats the raced body/subject as a foundational and constitutive lack, to be filled by “phobogenic projection and aggression”: “There is something organic to civil society that makes it essential to the destruction of the Black body. Blackness is a positionality of ‘absolute dereliction’ (Fanon), abandonment, in the face of civil society, and therefore cannot establish itself, or be established, through hegemonic interventions.”7 For Wilderson, the black body operates as a determination in negation from out of which the positivity of a raced civitas, a white public sphere, is carved. The militarization of civitas is historically entangled with the subjection of raced alterity at home and abroad. Nor does Foucault offer the reader the miseen-scène-ic act of political institution in colonial sites dissected by Achille Mbembe:

74 / Chapter Two Colonial sovereignty rested on three sorts of violence. The first was the founding violence. This is what underpinned not only the right of conquest but all the prerogatives flowing from that right. Thus it played an instituting role, in at least two ways. First, it helped to create the space over which it was exercised; one might say that it presupposed its own existence. . . . Its function was, as Derrida speaks of a somewhat different issue to provide selfinterpreting language and models for the colonial order, to give this order meaning, to justify its necessity and universalizing mission—in short, to help produce an imaginary capacity converting the founding violence into authorizing authority.8

Extending Wilderson and Mbembe and my own prior analyses of Northern Ireland and South Africa, I am not exclusively concerned with sovereignty as a truth content cited by doctrines of just war, nor with the truth that sovereignty presumably seeks to mobilize through just war. My focus lies more with the taking place or scenic affirmation of sovereignty via war as an assemblage of material and immaterial effects and affects. Here, contrary to Foucault, a polemological formation originates in the stasiology of the state, and not the reverse. Counterinsurgent violence overflows any residual technical or governmental program; the latter is bypassed in the passages of force and breaches of procedures that open the variance and gap between the “it is” and the “there is” of the state—the former refers to constituted power, the later to constitutive power as the groundless law or race-founding violence referenced by Mbembe. The “there is” of sovereignty is the state’s rapport with subjugated or phobic bodies, like the raced terrorist, the refugee, and the immune compromised, in which sovereignty becomes only by being implanted in another. The identification of sovereignty with preexistent supreme power invested in the indivisible will of a monarch or a nation, or with the state as the finite holder of authority and legitimacy by law, is here called into question.9 Under the war on terror these schema do not present as “indivisible, inalienable, and imprescriptible.” Nor do they wholly occupy a delimited and stable authorial site or Archimedian apex from which violence issues forth. In the war on terror sovereignty is constituted in situ as an evental site through pluralizing acts and through the site-specific bodies it invests with political legibility and illegibility.10 The subject of sovereignty implies a groundless subject-effect, an event, and not a grounded norm; it is a juridicopolitical fiction, a regulative phantasm, that is put into place by arrangements of force and discourse that do not originate in a monadic, continuous agency, but in a play of differences, a system of signs where

The Apophatic Blur of War / 75

nothing is simply present or absent but is presented through suspension, deferment, and disframing. The ipsocratia and autos that Derrida associates with the metaphysics of sovereignty as an indivisibility, as selfsame, is reproduced in the time and space of war through a mimetic-prosthetic logic of self-substitution or autokinesis that proceeds by way of the state’s transgressive passage through the body of the other from which dispersed multiplicity is reassembled into another One—the enemy—to which sovereignty can be opposed and from which it extracts and rhetoricizes its indivisibility: “the One divides and opposes itself, oppose itself by posing itself . . . for it guards itself from, and in, the other, always, Him, the One, the One ‘different from itself.’”11 The genesis of sovereignty in war lies in anamorphic and kinetic pathways of ballistical force and protean excess. Claudia Baracchi writes: “In the dialogue on the politeia . . . war emerges as a mode of motion. Discourse itself, opening up in its temporality, belongs to motion. This is eminently, though not exclusively, true of the discourse in and through which war is enacted. Such a discourse is, as was said above, of war—that is to say, it is a mode of war, a mode of that unique mode of motion which is war.”12 If war and its discourses are a mode of motion, then the state cannot be encapsulated as the fully constituted author or arkhé (origin) of this motion; rather, the becoming war of the state is this groundless self-altering kinesis that produces sovereignty. This is to “think ground as unstable and origin as multiple, as dynamically unfolding, as involved in sensibility and never constituting a pure beginning, a beginning from out of nothing.”13 The state can no longer be described as an archic form, as Machiavelli did, conserving its duration against the chance of the an-archic event. The state is not positioned behind its praxis or politicalmilitary organs as a stable enclosing horizon within which its violence attains coherent visibility, outline, and contour. Sovereignty is not, as Machiavelli proposed, an arkhé imposing its unity upon the accidents, but rather an assemblage and performance of contingencies, an organology of what I term the dis-organic and incorporeal mode of motion of war. An organ can be both a tool and a body. A critical organology of political violence treats such violence as both an instrument and as bodily, that is, as a means that can become its own form and ends. War is an organogenesis in which the increasingly detachable organ of war is no longer an organ of the state, but of the state’s dis-organ-ization. Extrajudicial killing, a core concern in this chapter, is one manifestation among others of disorganicity as productive power. To engage violence as a practice of the disorganic is to address how an organ of violence severs itself from an originating body politic, from retentional logic, from mediacy, and becomes

76 / Chapter Two

self-organ-izing dismedia. This disorganicity of the state in war unfolds as a self-relating negativity: “showing, arising, manifesting, presencing, selfgiving; but it is all that in a ‘fissured’ mode, in ‘dissension,’”14 indeterminate and as always in self-altering kinesis as its mode of motion. The stasiology described above by Schürmann cannot be consigned to the teleocratic notion of political substance he critiques in Aristotle (see the introduction). In contrast to such substantialist schema, the Stoics constructed an ontology of the event that was not reducible to things ideal or material. For the Stoics, a body or soma is everything that acts or undergoes action. What is done to or undergone by the body is a kategorema (passion) and is characterized as asomatic (asomaton) or incorporeal. The incorporeal is what takes place between bodies and different states of embodiment. It is understood as the friction of bodies, as affecting bodies and as enacted by bodies. A knife that cuts a body is the rapport of two bodies mediated by the cutting, which is incorporeal; once cut and scarred, uncut flesh ceases to be and is succeeded by an emergent corporeality—incised flesh mediated by an incorporeal frontier that delimits the difference, the cut, between bodies. The incorporeal is neither antithetical to nor incompatible with the corporeal, but rather the necessary condition of corporeality, which requires the incorporeality of time as meaning and form in transport.15 Deleuze, following the Stoics, proposes that incorporeal motion defines the limit of a body (whether individual or corporate); this kinesis expresses a limit that acts on the limits of another body—action as limit is incorporeal insofar it has no fixed outline. To assign a fixed outline to a body is to deactivate its mode of motion, to make it a mold and an end. The ends assigned to an action, as its chronometric, purposive, or ethical outline, ultimately delimit, petrify, and terminate an action. For Deleuze a limit was not a question of where a form stops, which he relates to the outline as a “tactilo-optical equilibrium,” but where a modal action ceases to be. Action is the opening of a threshold as a non-end, and this relates the act to formlessness as a mode of motion that slides over its residual referents and loses its proper name, intent, and teleology. The limit of the body is not the body, but an incorporeal threshold as the embodied gesture’s furthest reach into indeterminacy.16 The mode of motion of war can exceed the outline, the tactilo-optical-equilibrium, in being invested in either the fabrication of ideological outlines or their ballistical defacement and destruction. Sovereignty in war is the incorporeal motion that distributes corporeality, political outlines, and silhouettes in the trajectory of violence given and

The Apophatic Blur of War / 77

received. Corporealization here is the petrifaction, molding, or outlining of the attack surface by an incorporeal sovereign event horizon without stable outline. Warfare is a material kinesis for creating the unnameable and the invisible, those apophatic elements that both constitute and exceed a power/knowledge apparatus. To better explore how sovereignty is constituted as war, the intelligibility of violent performativity as a disposition and depositioning of bodies should be prioritized over molar institutional formalism, formulaic legitimation, and programmatic enclosure and calculation. The latter are not to be dismissed, but they should be disframed and reframed from the vantage point of the praxes of destructibility that they authorize but never totally circumscribe in their ideation and practice. Terrorist by Design The problem of historical representation is how to represent that ghost, something that is and yet is not.17

Unofficial photographs and videos, secretly obtained by Der Spiegel and Rolling Stone, show the falsified counterinsurgency shoot-to kill activities of a Fifth Stryker Brigade “kill team” between January and May 2010 in the Maywand district of Kandahar province, Afghanistan. In 2011 this entire unit, with one exception (that is, eleven out of twelve members), including their NCO staff sergeant, Calvin Gibbs, was found guilty by military courts of murdering three Afghan civilians originally targeted as Taliban, though it is likely that as a unit or individually they were responsible for many more extrajudicial killings and postmortem mutilations.18 Sergeant Gibbs was notorious for collecting the fingers and bones of his Afghani victims as a continuation of rumored mutilations he committed when stationed in Iraq. (A photograph of Gibbs shows him equipped with trauma shears.) One such series of photographs taken at the village of La Mohammad Kalay shows a soldier snapping a biometric photograph of the retina of an Afghani male corpse—the remains of Gul Mudin (fig. 2.1).19 Leading up to this scene, one of the American soldiers had thrown a grenade at the fifteen-year-old unarmed Mudin, who had been randomly encountered in a poppy field. The grenade was quickly followed by weapons discharge from two other team members that killed Mudin.20 The soldiers reported that the grenade had been thrown at them by Mudin, thus justifying the weapons discharge. Evidence of premeditated murder was erased in order to pass the incident off as a Taliban-initiated attack on the unit. The gre-

78 / Chapter Two

Figure 2.1. Biometric photographing of the corpse of Gul Mudin

nade thrower, Corporal Jeremy Morlock, “had been careful not to leave the grenade’s spoon and pin on the ground, where they might have been used as evidence that a U.S. weapon had instigated the attack.” For the same reason, “he’d also been careful to brush away traces of white explosive powder around Mudin’s body.”21 At the court-martial of Sergeant Gibbs, a similar scenario against an unidentified Afghani male was described by an anonymous military witness: UNIDENTIFIED MALE:

Then we had this guy by this compound, and so Gibbs, you

know, walked him out and set him in place and [was] like, “Hey, stand here.” UNIDENTIFIED MALE:

He was fully cooperating?

UNIDENTIFIED MALE:

Yes.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE:

Was he armed?

UNIDENTIFIED MALE:

No.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE:

Where did he sit [sic] him?

UNIDENTIFIED MALE:

Next to a wall. That’s where Gibbs could get like be-

hind cover after the grenade went off. And then he kind of placed me and (deleted) all over here out of line of sight for this guy. And you know, he

The Apophatic Blur of War / 79 pulled out one of his grenades, American grenade, you know, popped it and throws the grenade and then tells me and (expletive deleted) all right, dude, watch this guy.22

After Mudin’s murder Gibbs took fingerprints and biometric scans of the corpse. In a postmortem photo taken by the unit, one of Mudin’s fingers appears to be missing. The tactics of forensic blurring of their violence and a “drop weapon” was integral to the modus operandi of the 3rd platoon of the Fifth Stryker Brigade: The military keeps close track of the weapons and ammunition it issues to soldiers, carefully documenting every grenade exploded, every magazine expended. So Gibbs made it his business to gather “off the books” weapons through a variety of channels. He got friendly with guys in the Afghan National Police and tried to trade them porn magazines in exchange for rocket-propelled grenades; he cajoled other units to give him munitions; he scrounged for broken and discarded UXO—unexploded ordnance—until he had collected a motley arsenal of random weaponry, old frag grenades, bent RPG tails, duct-taped claymore mines, C-4, mortar rounds. His best find was a working AK-47 with a folding butt stock and two magazines, which he pulled from the wreckage of an Afghan National Police vehicle that had been blown up near the base’s gate. Gibbs placed the AK-47 and the magazines in a metal box in one of the Strykers’ [vehicles]. Later, a corporal named Emmitt Quintal discovered the gun and wondered what it was doing there. As he recalled, Staff Sgt. David Bram “sat me down and explained to me that it was basically to cover our ass if anything happened.”23

Gibbs assembled an arsenal of drop weapons in order to fabricate an archive of biometric Taliban body counts for this unit—a technique called “juking the stats.” Taliban kills were simulated with minimal physical risk to the unit in what amounted to the sacrifice of arbitrary victims, which took on a ceremonial aura in the collection of both requisite biometric images and fetishized body parts. Rolling Stone, in reporting on the range of images from this and other such shoot-to-kill incidents, stated that “in many of the photos it is unclear whether the bodies are civilians or Taliban, and it is possible that the unidentified deaths involved no illegal acts by U.S. soldiers.24 In legitimating the American occupation as a legality detoured by individualized criminality, the journalist misses the

80 / Chapter Two

critical point. It is the very admixture of the “legal” and the illegal, of the fact and the artifact, of Taliban and noncombatant—the blurring of such discriminations—that is salient to the entire enterprise of occupying Afghanistan. In prosecuting these soldiers as “bad apples,” an illegal occupation, a macro-illegality under international law, sought juridical coherence in procedural micro-legalities. Gul Mudin’s death and its falsification cannot be dismissed as an atypical, singular or exceptional occurrence, as an aberration, or as the work of bad apples. The Rolling Stone journalist Mark Boal implies a wider sphere of command responsibility and another layer of dissimulation to Mudin’s murder and its aftermath: “The Army wants Gibbs,” says one defense lawyer. “They want to throw him in jail and move on.” . . . So far, though, no officers or senior officials have been charged in either the murders or the cover-up. Last October, the Army quietly launched a separate investigation, guided by Brig. Gen. Stephen Twitty, into the critical question of officer accountability. But the findings of that inquiry, which was concluded last month, have been kept secret—and the Army refuses to say whether it has disciplined or demoted any of the commanders responsible for 3rd Platoon. Even if the commanding officers were not coconspirators or accomplices in the crimes, they repeatedly ignored clear warning signs and allowed a lethally racist attitude to pervade their unit.25

Gul Mudin’s death is not, as the initial reporting would have it, an instance of illegality, to be set off against the preponderant lawfulness, good faith, transparency, instrumentality, morality, and rationality of American jus ad bellum in Afghanistan; rather it foregrounds a counteractuality that is the founding principle and submedial structure of the war on terror. The press reports downplay this political logic and feed the pathologizing badapple rationalization of such atrocities by connecting the violence of the unit with their drug abuse and bereavement overload.26 Moving beyond the misdirection enabled by discourses of psychological abnormality and microjuridical due process means deposing extrajudicial violence as a legal form. How can the right to extrajudicial assassination, the state that arms itself with this right, and the victim of this right be theorized as legal, political, and visual forms rather than as exception, deviance, and singular aberration? This thought reverses the usual philosophical progression by moving from jurisprudence to metaphysics or the metajuridical—the latter implies the violence of the parapolitical that founds both law and

The Apophatic Blur of War / 81

the derivative violence intrinsic to law termed extrajuridical killing.27 The jurisdictional inquiry into the extrajudicial slips upstream from sovereign right to examine a parapolitical right to sovereign right to interrogate extrajudicial assassination as part of the history of rights. And the history of rights, of who has rights and who does not, is simultaneously the history of subjects who are made and unmade through rights as a mode of political design that includes the counterfeiting of Gul Mudin. The history of right is the history of a particular will that is elevated to a general will as an effective capacity to act. Will is given objective existence by rights. In extrajudicial killing this will as right is objectified in inflicted death and manufactured corpses as repurposed terrains of jurisdiction and entitlement. In extrajudicial killing the title to law, as in the Guantánamo CSRT hearing, encompasses the rights of necessity and the right of possession, as natural rights of dominion.28 Gul Mudin, as the target of extrajudicial assassination, is made the possession of the state through his very targeting, killing, and postmortem photoarchiving, mutilation, and evisceration—the preemptive targeting and the resultant deletions confirm ex post facto this property right by first making, ex nihilo, the jurisdictional terrain that is to be claimed as objectifying state right within the kingdom of ends. Gul Mudin, and many anonymous others like him, are the juridical and structuring nothingness, the nihil, from which the simulacrum, the property and propriety, and the iconic power of extrajuridical murder is extracted. This making of dominion ex nihilo is why the political identity of the victims before they were killed is rendered immaterial, and why ex post facto forensic falsification becomes a mechanical reflex that merely extends a preinstalled jurisdictional right to forge the substrates that will carry dominion in their counterfeited bodies. Ghosts From the Nuremburg trials to the more recent exhumation of remains in Eastern Europe and Central and Latin America by physical anthropologists, the witnessing and adjudication of war crimes has incrementally shifted from the spoken testimony of the eye- or earwitness to a forensic archaeology of horror: bones, DNA, shreds of clothing, scattered personal effects, and the spatial disposition of fragments. These artifacts bear mute witness transmitting unspoken subscripts of political events, historical violence, and ethical evacuation. The spoken and autobiographical witnessing of crimes against humanity has, in many ways, been superseded

82 / Chapter Two

by the harvesting of the forensic biography of things registered in medical, legal, genomic, and biochemical measurement and commensuration. The testimony of the victim is here virtualized in the involuntary and nonagential dimension of ventriloquized matter. Biomedicine and genetics have rediscovered political substance in their forensic methodologies, which appear to place war, once again, into the securing realm of the evidentiary, as required by law. The political crime scene has become a forum in which history itself is adjudicated, measured, and rendered materially calculable, thus reaffirming a positivist historical materialism denuded of experiential agency, a diminution that the Stryker kill team fully exploited in its counterfeiting of Taliban operatives. However, diagnostic forensics as an idiomatic practice has also been subject to cultural-political elaborations that need not adhere to strict custody over the chain of evidence. Owing to this biojuridical technicity, the war within counterinsurgent war—the assault on its legal and public witnessing—becomes the forensic falsification of war, traversing unlocatable WMDs, falsified terrorist body counts, the consignment of murder to random collateral damage, and the installment of juridical fictions through torture and battle-damage assessments. To create such forensic phantasmagoria (from the French fantasmagorie) is to design the terrorist as a serviceable datum from out of the raw material of dehistoricized and abjected bodies, topography, and demography—here the terrorist and his or her culpability become the spectral end product of war and not its imputed material cause. Counterinsurgency finds its origins, prime movers, objects, reasons, and ends in the aftermath of its violence, a metaphysics that is repressed in the technical terminology of battle-damage assessment and force protection. Battle-damage assessment, ideologically and forensically performed and falsified, ensures force protection as the underwriting of the political legitimacy of the violence deployed. In the case of Gul Mudin we witness the Stryker platoon engaged in the fabrication of an attack surface in view of subsequent assessment; in so doing they seek to indemnify their groundless violence. The counterterrorism pantomimed by the grenade thrown at Mudin and the resultant “defensive” discharge of weapons of photopolitical exposure functioned as political accelerants that were completed in biometrics and mendacity. This amounts to the niche creation of extrajudicial forensics for extrajudicial killing—a recursive gesture of design and crime. The political technologies that have congealed around the figure of the terrorist return to the original sense of “phantasmagoria” as the conjuring of ghosts, while agoria also means “to fool” and agoreuein translates as “allegory.” Benjamin related phantasmagoria to the saturation of modernity

The Apophatic Blur of War / 83

with technologically produced images and to the “deepening of apperception” generated by the media of mass distraction—patterns that are in play in Mudin’s mediatic counterfeiting.29 Mediated apperception is a cultural apparatus that structures the appearing of the terrorist by linking the latter to “naturalized” racial and gendered gazes applied to persons of color, armed or not: “This Manichean delirium manifests itself by way of the U.S. paradigm of policing that (re)produces, repetitively, the inside/outside, the civil society/Black world, by virtue of the difference between those bodies that do not magnetize bullets and those that do.”30 Mediatized apperception enables forms of presumed facticity and political speciation presented in dead matter, but also installs the dematerialization of the living, the contingent, and the situated. Here Foucault’s massifying administration of the body returns as the synthesis of somatic typification and counterfeiting to manufacture the phantomaticity of war.31 Derrida writes of phantasmagoria: “The conjuration is anxiety from the moment it calls upon death to invent the quick and to enliven the new, to summon the presence of what is not yet there.”32 In the scenic affirmation of forensic phantasmagoria, extrajudicial violence coincides with a theater, the becoming-ghostly of the terrorist. Here Mudin as biometrical ghost becomes an automaton of himself: “The automaton mimes the living. The Thing is neither dead nor alive, it is dead and alive at the same time. It survives. At once cunning, inventive, and machine-like, ingenious and unpredictable, this war machine is a theatrical machine, a mekhane.”33 The automaton that is bricologued from the living man, his corpse, and the ideological desire of the state is a photo exorcism—the extraction or expulsion of the terrorist as phantom from out of the occluding and intractable materialities through which the “terrorist” eluded a sovereign gaze. The faked sexual tableau at Abu Ghraib, which reanimated the dead flesh of pornographic film in postcinematic political flesh, was one such spectral reanimation. Another reanimating conjuration confirmed the fabricated terrorist as a dead/alive automaton, a mechanike, and a mannequin in the postmortem desecrations of the murdered Mudin: “It was like another day at the office for him”; Gibbs started “messing around with the kid, .  .  .  (the corpse of Mudin)  .  .  . moving his arms and mouth and acting like the kid was talking.  .  .  . Then, using a pair of razor-sharp medic’s shears, [Gibbs] reportedly sliced off the dead boy’s pinky finger and gave it to Morlock . . . as a trophy for killing his first Afghan.”34 The visual relation of the soldier and his corpse, one manipulating and ventriloquizing the other, is a striking tableau of the juridical fictions and somatic hierarchies of the war on terror. Related to this is the photo reproduced as figure 2.1: the soldier with the biometric camera looms over

84 / Chapter Two

the dead eye of the terrorist in a dronelike signature strike, in an act in which the lens sucks up and vacuums the body and the subject, removing autonomous agency and placing the animated corpse under the direction of a remote alien will and gaze. The Apophatic Body We perceive there the event, namely, of appropriation-expropriation; we perceive it in a flash, for technicity pushes both totalizing subsumption and singularizing dispersion to their extremes.35 But let me be clear—the experience of an absence of horizon is not one that has no horizon at all; it’s where the horizon is, in a sense, “punctured” by the other. With the coming of the other there is a non-horizon.36

The abbreviated biooptics of Gul Mudin pan from incidental Afghani bystander to victim of a premeditated and arbitrary attack, to biometric registration as evidentiary residue, to mute evidence in a media exposé where the face of Mudin is redactively blurred by the Der Spiegel film, presumably to protect the dignity of the deceased (fig. 2.2). The saturation of Mudin with blur exceeds the terminal redaction of pixilation and is the warp that threads the fatal trajectory of this body from the very moment of its acquisition as an attackable surface for the military and its media. The Afghani poppy cultivator is blurred in being set up as a Taliban attacker, in the digital abstraction and amputation of his body fragments, in the Pentagon’s suppression of his murder and its photographic-forensic record, and in the facial pixilation by Der Spiegel.37 This body’s politicization is inseparable from a metonymic chain and signifying network of strategic effects that make of Mudin a forensic revenant. In turn, the ratcheting up of blurring, blotting, and smudging that enchain Mudin’s incorporeality to the politically presentifiable effectively generates an apophatic body that renounces its presence in its very visual emanation. This body is denegated to the degree that it is stretched across the visible and the invisible and yet is unstably so at either locus. Gul Mudin’s body is distended along the curvature and commerce between disembodying visual acquisition by various powers, politicomilitary and mediatic, and a now defaced, inaccessible, destructible, creaturely, and subjective life. Historical witness is confronted here with a self-effacing double exposure of the body, an overexposure marked by terrorist stigma and death and an underexposure that makes of the once-lived body a secret without a body.

The Apophatic Blur of War / 85

Figure 2.2. Facial redaction of Gul Mudin

Political apophasis here is a double bind: the body that was at first screened for terrorist threat is subsequently screened off through a politically gestated and amputating frontality. This was an extracorporeal operation, an aphaeresis or taking away, where the substance of the donor body was graphically passed through a filtering metrics (before any biometrics) that sifted out politically legible from illegible elements, discarding and occluding the latter as forensic traces of this very siphoning operation. (Recall the killers’ drop-weapon tactics and sterilization of the crime scene.) The coiling or enfolding (complicatio) of sovereignty into his body through violence, death, and the photographic act was the uncoiling (explicatio) of an apophatic body through the porosity of photogenic blur and denegation.38 In the case of Gul Mudin, the body and its bios were occulted through the ballistical, photographic, and biometrical scenic affirmation of a political criminality that was not actually there. What is there is imposture, misdirection, and authorial remotion, which invisibly haunt these images from the unseen nether side of the rifle barrel and the camera lens. This is a spectrum dominance that does not resolve into clarity or precision, but arrests a submedial blur, which expels any acquisition and inquisition of representation. In Gul Mudin’s murder and postmortem manipulation, repurposing precision and detailing were tactics of denegation, iconic

86 / Chapter Two

quarantine, and juridical immunization. In such acts of apophatic death, writing with light is an act of photo-degraphing that promises, but never delivers, visual acquisition as an experience of identification and truth. The encryption that turns Mudin into the terrorist speaks to broader tendencies in the war on terror as a photopolitics of forensic phantasms. This mode of motion of the war is striated by what Jean-Luc Marion, in another context, terms saturated images as the presenting of nonlight within light itself.39 Marion writes of iconic saturation: What I see of them, if I see anything of them that is, does not result from the constitution I would assign to them in the visible, but from the effect they produce on me. And in fact that happens in reverse so that my look is submerged in a counter intentional manner. Then I am no longer the transcendental I but rather the witness constituted by what happens to him or her. Hence the paradox, inverted doxa. In this way the phenomenon that befalls and happens to us reverses the order of visibility in that it no longer results from my intention but from its own counterintentionality.40

Marion is concerned here with the visual theology of the icon and the miracle, but his formulation can be reencountered in photopolitical terror. The saturated, unmappable, and threatening image, lacking a stable referential horizon, impoverishes the quotidian gaze as an intentionality toward light. The image, filled with fear, violence, and indeterminacy, emerges only at the very moment of its loss in the invisible. This dislocation is an incorporeal motion within or of the image that refuses stable definitional outline. Thus the opticopolitical curvature of the risk object, such as the photos of Gul Mudin, overlaps with its disapparition—its taking place is contingent on its singularizing withdrawal. The saturated apparition “contradicts the subjective conditions of experience precisely in that it does not admit constitution as an object. In other words, though experientially visible, it never the less cannot be looked at, regarded. The saturated phenomenon gives itself insofar as it remains according to modality, irregardable.”41 As Ronell stresses, citing Maurice Blanchot, we need to rethink such moments as “operations of destruction” that resist temporal and spatial location, that lack Deleuze’s outline and Derrida’s horizon, in operating “inoperably” from a time and space that destroys time and space. The inoperable here points to the apophatic form of Marion’s saturation effect.42 The post-2001 outbreak of terrorizing saturated images was a transmission of suffering bodies and of bodies to be suffered—the terrorist, the asylum seeker, the undocumented immigrant, the virally compromised,

The Apophatic Blur of War / 87

and the Muslim. The communicable image both refracted and constituted a series of political experiments on the body of the risk-laden Other and on the affective culture of American witnessing in an attempt to impose the equilibrium of outlines and to police that which is without outline. Extraordinary renditions, “enhanced” interrogations, biometrical surveillance, civilian “collateral” deaths, drone target acquisition, security walls, kill boxes, and enclosures advance regime change as an experiment writ large on a body politic and writ small on bodies to be variously outlined by torture, indefinite detention, force-feeding, surveillance, and assault by drones. The abolishment of everyday life as a visual culture of certitude, the endangering poverty of mundane aesthesis, provokes prosthetic supplementation. The finite gaze of the citizen-spectator is here reassigned to a photopolitical apparatus that usurps the imputed ethical-perceptual autonomy of the subject in the name of a governmentality of the invisible, of nonlight, as addressed by the sentinel state: “to gaze regarder transcribes exactly in tueri and should be understood in terms of tueri, ‘to guard, to keep an eye on, to watch out of the corner of one’s eye, to keep in sight . . . gazing.’ . . . Regarder is about being able to keep the visible, thus seen under the control of the seer exerting his control by guarding the visible in visibility.”43 This means qua the saturated image the state must be seen to guard both the visible and the invisible in the visible. The counterintentionality of the saturated image refracts the latter’s inaccessibility or remoteness through an excess, reserve, or secrecy that makes of the visible a secretion from another site beyond the purview of the situated and finite spectator. The impoverished gaze must then contend with a postsecular disqualification of what the technosecularity of everyday visibility once claimed to emplace and order—the giveness and giving of the visible. The security of that subject of the gaze, the securing of its subjectivity, is now deemed to lie in an accession to a government of the ineffable and the unnameable that increasingly advances into the territory of the localized subject through expansive forensic phantasmagoria: “Now, no object can truly appear as such if just any aim whatever is exercised on it. In order to appear as such it requires a particular aim, privileged and adapted.”44 That the structure of the quotidian is not exhausted by the gaze of those confined to its habitus means that the immediate surround or screened image references a without that is invisible, inaccessible, and withdrawn, a political-sensorial abyss. It is this abyss that is occupied by the state as its proper locus in order to securitize both the visible and the invisible, the inside and the outside, and most particularly their (in)difference. We are told that from this abyss peers the

88 / Chapter Two

hooded face of the “terrorist,” but effectively it is the withdrawing visage of the state turned terror masked by the anomic figure of the enemy. The saturated image in the war on terror arrives without the endowed legibility of a framing horizon, stabilizing outline, or figure/ground relation—and thus its arrival does not deliver any revelation beyond puncturing destination. The turbulence of image succession intensifies to such a degree that it is not the succession of images that appears but the act of showing in itself as an unrelenting mediality and as the nullification of the immediate— its conversion to an empty or zero-sum event. The saturated image arrives as an event without response that is as “something other than the revealing of a truth, or a revelation of a truth, as something that has effects but makes no references to light, no reference to vision, no reference to unveiling.”45 Saturated images that denegate the visible “overflow with an infinity of meanings each equally legitimate and rigorous without managing to unify them or organize them”; they open the event of the invisible through the “saturation of the given without common measure.”46 Within the chronic image saturation of the war on terror politeia is no longer secured as the phenomenality of a transparent and public space of illumination. The Apotrope: Signatures of the Counterfeit There is a necessary imbrication between counterfeiting, the mass production of the forensic phantasm, and violence as interlacing signatures of the state in war. This assemblage serves to empty the exceptionalism connoted by the term “extrajudicial killing” and points to the latter as a necessary and essential predicate of the war on terror. The dead, disfigured, and transfigured Gul Mudin is not merely registered as a isolated biometric unit, but manufactured as an apotrope, as a mass article, now typified and exposed through the evacuated envelope of a defacing juridical personality. The work of denegation is this killing/defacing/blotting of the person to make a political criminal and to kill the killing of the person. Denegation here functions like a chemist’s re-agent, whose application makes what is effaced and the process of effacement itself appear in the form of a palimpsest, an interfolding of multiple, mutually canceling, layered, appearing, and disappearing surfaces that eventually release the frontality of a particular but always withdrawing political truth. Denegations are inherently apotropaic: the apotrope negatively repeats and conserves the privative, such as terrorist threat, in order to defer and to hold it in reserve. The apotrope is the prophylaxis, the mask, the simulacral

The Apophatic Blur of War / 89

face that metaphorically presents what is not there in the promissory; it is a shield against negation through the latter’s iconic re-creation. The apotrope is the privation of a privation that conserves the privative and preemptively allegorizes what has already been given to it through an absence. In defacing the metaphoricity of hazard while retaining its plasticity, the apotrope of threat substantiates what is proper to threat and appropriates and capitalizes these properties as advancing the state’s powers of affirmation. The apotrope preserves the radiating capital of a disavowed metaphor set up as precessional and foundational and thus becomes what it averts by inverting the precedence between the model and the copy. This is why the revealing of the terrorist by a security apparatus contains no grounding revelation, for it is already an apotrope of itself; it is an effigy of an effigy, a mask of a mask—an infinite regression of strategically released attack surfaces. If the gatekeepers in Kafka’s house of law have no law to show but only grasp its endless deferment, then neither do they have any criminality to depose—that too is deferred, as in the very figure of the terrorist, whose mode of presence is its eking out within, and sifting through, a messianic politics of withdrawal. The apotrope is both a figure of warning and of termination, it promises the circular finality of preemption, making what is supposedly before— the threat to be averted—an afterward—an epilogue and supplement to the rhetoric of the averting gesture. The apotrope cannot be brought into play without this compression and reversal of the time of threat and its redress. The promissory redress of the apotrope precedes and frames threat, pushing it back in chronology in forwarding it in consciousness. The homeopathic apotrope does not pledge to end the threat that is simulated and averted; rather, it pledges the end of the latter’s anomic repetition beyond apotropaic containment. The apotrope gives normative repeatability as an experience of visual and political control, calculability, and satisfaction that might explain Sergeant Gibbs’s need to visibly bear on his person, like body armor, the memoranda of amputated body parts as protective doubles of the defeated terrorist. The apotropaic sign as a mode of imposture speaks to the inscriptive act or signature as duplication in the absence of an authenticating author and origin. The signature is the simultaneous certification, forgery, and promissory structure of the absent signatory who disappears at the event of signing and behind the frontality and prosopon of the script as signage and currency. Mudin’s biopolitical metrics are signatures that authorize what remains of Mudin, who had signed nothing but his death warrant in simply being male, raced, Afghani, and conveniently at hand. His signatures

90 / Chapter Two

are generated by the erasure of their actual signatory, the Americans who falsified the death they branded with counterfeit endorsements. Signatures thus sign off on simultaneous acts of inscription and disinscription and sign from prior templates of inscription and disinscription. Political violence, projected as the signature of the state’s will, reenacts and counterfeits sovereignty as an absence that signs.47 In negative theology the act of remotion, like the drone strike, is the immeasurable distance from the corporeal that is the condition of unpresentifiable deity and of its ineffability effects: The sovereign is elevated because height separates. The separation ensures the distinction and the distinction ensures the differentiation of levels necessary to establish a hierarchy. . . . Its withdrawal gathers it in itself by removing it from the dependency of things pressed against each other, entangled in the action and reactions of the others. The sovereign is separated from this dependence and this endless exchange of means and ends. It is itself neither a means nor an end. It is of another order, of an order that indexes any horizontality, thickness and its connections, on a perpendicular verticality. The sovereign does not only tower over: it is transversal. . . . The Most High does not allow measurement. It escapes observation while at the same time it is inaccessible to scaling. It does not exactly pertain to the opposition between the top and the bottom but rather to the difference between the height and what has neither height nor depth. . . . The Most High is the Inequivalent itself. It is not equivalent to any kind of equivalence or inequivalence. It is, to the contrary, on its basis alone that something like the register of equivalence or inequivalence can be posited.48

The ritual posture of looming over cannot remain isolated from the humus; to be a summit it must, as in the drone strike, establish an insignia, a nomos of the earth, through incarnation and materialization in the extended in order to be apprehended as simultaneously remote and transformative in its grounding material consequences. Political remotion, in turn, can be defined as method, medium, or performance that manifests sovereign incorporeality by suspending or interrupting those materialities that cannot be allowed to condition, to limit, to outline sovereignty as it outlines death. The structure of the summit is a counterfeit; it has no existence and no precession without its earthly signatures in the extended and the prone as the originating and counterfeiting refraction of a fictive, elevated and heliocentric authority. Violence and the signature converge in an intrinsic self-erasure that gov-

The Apophatic Blur of War / 91

erns the act of signing, particularly as that act is only grounded on a prior series of signatures, each grounded upon the nonground of another, like Kafka’s receding doors echoing into the distance as they are slammed shut in the empty house of law. Foucault wrote of the authorial function as a juridical fiction and an effect of a signature that does not precede the latter.49 The drone strike signs itself into the house of law through the counterfeiting signatures it leaves in the violently outlined bodies and spaces of others, in the exploded cavities of the living and the visually occupied. Authorial remotion from the signatures of the state is materialized in counterfeiting apotropes—manufactured terrorists, or victims of collateral damage, as faked accidentals and incidentals, as those who literally die as autographs under the arc of drone “signature strikes” or “crowd killings ” based on “pattern of life signatures.”50 Signature strikes coincide with counterfeited terrorist killings: both modes composite the remote, the proxy, and the ballistical blur as a synesthesia of war. Force is here a differential between witnessable or adjudicatable violence and its occluded alter, which is also a doubled violence that signs and defaces its defacement of others. The force of forms differentiates violence— how violence is given diverse forms and how violence is made to inform, which can also be to render political forms formless (l’informe).51 In apophatic war the differential between force and violence is a tension within the force of forms. Apophatics re-forms violence, turning it against itself while preserving it in a performance that is also its formative and forcefully enacted retraction. Here the propensity of violence to supersede the focal forms from which it is generated and also to transgress and to move past those formations it contingently generates, its tendency to exceed its normation by law and procedure, is given political form by apophatics. This dynamic resolves into the animacy of violence as a living form, as a self-relating negativity in dead yet politically plastic matter—the practicoinert, which becomes the major, if not the only, accessible conduit to history under way as history retracted. In apophatic war violence is not necessarily incidentally unforeseeable in its pathways and end points, but it is performed as unforeseeable, as the sheer concretion of unforseeability as a haptic point of intensity and as an apparatus that gathers power unto itself through the formative drive of mandated and programmatic unknowing. Sovereign foundation in violence is a refounding, a repetition of origination, and of the latter’s purloining in each and every mediating instance and haptic pressure point. Violence is the originary (re)invention and promissory signature of sovereignty that institutes the latter as post-authorial effect, and this obviates any difference between authentication and falsifi-

92 / Chapter Two

cation. In the promissory architecture of violence lies the capacity for the denegation and inoperativity of state materiality—the positioning and privation of the state as sovereign in thesis and sovereign in antithesis, as sovereign in its realization and in its derealization. These denegations are coimplicated signatures and erasures of the state intrinsic to the deepening apperception of its damage. Here it is worth pondering the damage of apperception as a political force. Structural deniability and indemnity in war unfold as the concerted tactics of disframing, suspended impartibility, and dismedia that propel sovereignty outside of its acts and outcomes while leaving its residue in inert material substrates and mortified tactilo-optical outlines of pain and suffering. The signature of violence marks where the state breaches the difference between its being and nonbeing. The signature strike of war is a promissory mark of the state to come, and not a stabilizing frame; it is liquid and liquefiable, and not a mold: “Not placely as ther placed, spaced, and mesured, but ghostly, as ther unplaced[,] unspaced, and not measured.”52 The immateriality of unplaced and unspaced state violence is inseparable from its founding signature. If the state is nothing more than its founding signature and the latter’s iterability, as Kafka describes in “Before the Law,” then state archival right can never be “infelicitous” or exhibit “infidelity” to its foundational signatures in becoming “illegible,” as Veena Das nostalgically asserts.53 Illegibility has to be intrinsic to the founding violence that institutes the state and to the violence the state reinstitutes to reoriginate itself, to return to its virtual preformation in violence. Gul Mudin’s counterfeiting opens up the logic of the signature to the force of retraction. Nothing is archived by the state but the parapolitical proto-right to sign and to erase; this is the right to an authorizing signature without a predetermined author or holding archive, a drone signature. This is much more than to deform the statist signature as illegible, a political scrawl— which is Das’s lament; rather, it is to render it innately ineffable, detachable, and errant, and thus to indemnify the violence of its (dis)inscription by divesting the collective capacity to witness that script as legible or illegible, or as leading back to a precalligraphic and authenticating origin. One detached and anonymous signature, archival artifact, and posthumous autograph remains in its enucleated and atomized ruin: the amputated fingers of the Stryker platoon’s victims, including, possibly, those of Gul Mudin, which glow with an historical dark light. Friedrich Hegel writes “der Geist ist ein Knochen”— the spirit is the bone. In the apophatic aftermath only bones may remain as signatures of the spirit and as the remaindered emptiness of the war on terror. The bone as object stands for

The Apophatic Blur of War / 93

the evacuated signifier that was the “terrorist” or Taliban, as its material yet apophatic trace.54 The spirit bone in question here, the amputated finger fragment kept as an archival miniature by the executioner, subsists within the interspace of two deaths—Mudin’s death by firing squad and his death by image or archive. The bone remains and glows as interspatial spirit, as that which is not to be enclosed in the overproduction of image objects, the counterfeiting. overreaching net that bears Mudin’s name and that signed his life and death away. The amputated finger is the spirit as bone and as a returning unmanned ghostly drone of his disfigured death. This spirit bone captures an impossible recuperation: it points to the immeasurable distance of Gul Mudin from all the iconic phantasms and political surplus extracted from his sterilized death. As that which indicates his irreducible autonomy and singularity, as Mudin’s unrecognizable echo vibrating between death and life, it is the place where recollecting, re-calling, and mourning him might begin.

II. Distorted Depths of Field Stammheim Investing this opaque zone of the indiscernible, the artist appropriates the expropriated regime of politics in a Combat against War that destroys the system of sensory proofs that belongs to a false social peace. Perhaps the primary reason for the social danger posed by contemporary art lies here: it attacks directly the partition of identities that regulates the political effects of the relation between the utterable and the visible, or between appearing, being and doing. Yet this is what it cannot do for real—that is, outside of the mediation of the academy—without situating itself in the taking-place of what it wants to demonstrate in order to reverse; situating itself, and therefore placing us, both within and “after the passage of life through the ordeal of nihilism.”55

The countersignature of the “terrorist” blur can be encountered in Gerhard Richter’s 1988 series of fifteen paintings titled 18 October, 1977, also known as the Stammheim Cycle. The cycle is a sequence of monochrome paintings of photographs of the bodies and cells of the Red Army Faction members Andreas Baader, Gudrun Ensslin, Ulrike Meinhof, and Jan-Carl Raspe at Stammheim Prison, who were variously found dead or dying in the high-security wing. On October 18th Andreas Baader was discovered shot in the head, Gudrun Ensslin was hanged, and Jan-Carl Raspe suffered

94 / Chapter Two

Figure 2.3. Gerhard Richter, Arrest 1 [Holger Meins surrendering] (1988)

a head wound from a bullet and later died in the hospital. The only witness of what government authorities deemed a mass suicide was Irmgard Möller, who survived stab wounds that authorities claimed had been selfinflicted.56 The imputed precedent for political suicide by the RAF had been established by the discovery of Ulrike Meinhof, found hanged to death in her cell the year before and by the 1974 death of the RAF member Holger Meins from a hunger strike protesting prison conditions. To this day the classification of the deaths of October 18 as suicide has neither been fully accepted nor proven, not the least because the pistol that killed Baader had been smuggled into what was supposed to be a high-security prison. Richter’s paintings were based on a combination of crime-scene photographs released to the mass media at the time and informed by other media, government, and left movement photography extracted from an extensive portfolio he assembled throughout the 1970s and 1980s. The photo-paintings of the RAF are all notable for the juxtaposition of a certain photographic fidelity or mimicry with an interruptive blotting or blurring brushwork that renders the images hazy and out of focus (from the perspective of realism) in such a manner as to question the very historical possibility of proper focus and depth of field. The monochrome paintings

The Apophatic Blur of War / 95

diversely showed Holger Meins surrendering in front of an armored car by an anonymous administration building (Arrest 1 and 2; fig. 2.3), Gudrun Ensslin walking to and from her cell (Confrontation, 1, 2, and 3; fig. 2.4) and her hanged body (Hanged; fig. 2.5), Andreas Baader’s book-lined cell and his record player in which the gun that killed him was supposedly hidden (Cell, Record Player; fig. 2.7), Baader’s corpse on the cell floor (Man Shot Down 1 and 2; fig. 2.6), a photographic studio-style portrait of Ulrike Meinhof (Youth Portrait), Meinhof’s body cut down and laid out on the cell floor (3 paintings titled Dead; fig. 2.8), and the public funeral of Baader, Ensslin, and Raspe, attended by several thousand supporters and a thousand heavily armed policemen (Funeral; fig. 2.9). As Richter describes the sequence:

Figure 2.4. Gerhard Richter, Confrontation [Gudrun Ensslin] (1988)

Figure 2.5. Gerhard Richter, Hanged [Gudrin Ensslin] (1988)

Figure 2.6. Gerhard Richter, Man Shot Down [Andreas Baader] (1988)

Figure 2.7. Gerhard Richter, Record Player [in which the pistol was hidden] (1988)

98 / Chapter Two

Figure 2.8. Gerhard Richter, Dead [Ulrike Meinhof] (1988)

Three times Baader shot. Three times Ensslin hanged. Three times the dead Meinhof after they cut her down. Once the dead Meins. Three times Ensslin, neutral (almost like pop stars). Then a big, unspecific burial—a cell dominated by a bookcase—a silent, grey record player—a youthful portrait of Meinhof, sentimental in a bourgeois way—twice the arrest of Meins, forced to surrender to the clenched power of the state. All the pictures are dull, grey, mostly very blurred, and diffuse. Their presence is the horror and the hardto-bear refusal to answer, to explain, to give an opinion.57

The “German Autumn” suite has generated extensive art-criticism commentary, biographical/ideological speculation, and photoarchival archaeology in its own right, as if art theory had to restore the very event history, transparency, precision, and normativity that Richter eschewed both politically and aesthetically in his use of blurring wash effects. The paintings have been repeatedly and variously interpreted as memory work— expressions of elegiac autumnal mourning (Richter himself characterizes them as a leave-taking not only from the dead, but from the politics em-

The Apophatic Blur of War / 99

bodied by the RAF and German liberal democracy). Other commentaries describe the Stammheim sequence variously as frustrating the desire for photographic precision and realism, as self-reflective commentary on the practice of painting, as rejecting the power of aesthetic idioms and technologically mediated realism to capture history, as the vanishing of revolutionary idealism, as the raising of the ghostly, as a state of historical longing, as a reactionary response to the German left, as romanticizing the RAF as martyrs, and as breaking a taboo concerning the aesthetic representation of the RAF in particular and terrorism in general.58 Gertrud Koch is one of the few critics to resist reanchoring the work in a positivist art history or political historicism. She does so by centering on the physiognomy of the blur as a saturated image: This blurring is therefore both subjective act and objective state at one and the same time. In phenomenological terms, it can be conceived of as a mental state in which the relation to the world of objects blurs and the act of blurring causes that world to appear particularly threatening-to appear as an impenetrable presence. And against the background of a phenomenological description of vertigo as a way of relating to the object world, some of the motifs that recur in Richter’s pictures, photographs, and paintings take shape as embodiments of a conscious preference for the out-of-focus, for the blurred. It is not simply a case of imprecision; rather, it is the capture of a sliding glance.59

Figure 2.9. Gerhard Richter, Funeral (1988)

100 / Chapter Two

The question remains: Whose sliding glance? And further: Is there a politics to such a gaze? The images are literally paintings of photographs, yet effectively they are minimally positioned as distancing citations of photo-realist precision; the latter only appears in the form of a certain historicization in which painting functions as a code of interruption, aesthetic suspension, and archivization of the photographic and its truth effects. Richter used a brush technique of feathering, a spatula to smear the wet paint, and grisaille—the use of gray washes that soften photo precision. However, moving away from a painterly reading, Richter himself has declared, “I do not create blurs,” rejecting the blur as a personalized signature.60 Elsewhere, in reference to the pervasive gray tonality of these and other photo-paintings, Richter declared: “[The] color gray to me is just like shapelessness . . . it can only notionally be real . . . The painting is then a mixture of gray as fiction, and gray as visible.”61 The first declaration implies that he paints the blur that is there—the blur there is in photo-realism. The second statement correlates visibility and the fictive: the photo-realist image bleeds into the event it simulates. As the acceleration of historical time, political action anticipates the cinematization of history as constitutive montage. Cinematic flow provides the mediatic condensation that provisions a blurring and sliding kinetics and aesthetics of the act. Richter’s brush with the blur in part depicts the velocity at which images and the real imputedly exchange positions, temporalities, and valences, each penetrating the other through the porosity of bleed-through. The X of the blur imbricates the fictive in documentary and the documentary truth of the fictive. Blurred photography and cinema are associated with technical distortions in the depth of field, but if Richter is painting the blur that is there in photo-realism, we can then think alongside Richter’s brushwork of a distorted political depth of field that undermines visual frontality as an emblem of facticity, immediacy, and truth claiming. The bodies depicted in the Stammheim paintings are doubly mortified and petrified by both political death (murder or suicide) and realist precision; they are death masks in themselves, not only of the RAF members or of the politics that they represented or of that violence that was enacted upon their bodies, but of historical realism as evidentiary and juridical, and as a photopolitics.62 Richter instructs the viewer that only the medium whose truth effects photography historically supplanted can properly depict the decay of the evidentiary in photography itself in a gesture of dismediation. Only the historical estrangement of painting can figure the liquefaction at the core of the photo-realist archive and by extension drain the truth content out of the sites and surfaces that canonically achieve typifica-

The Apophatic Blur of War / 101

tion through the photographic idiom, including the forensic depiction of violence, crime, and death by law, journalism, and historiography. Here a deposed depictive idiom previously relegated to the status of ruined representation deploys its postscriptual positioning to depose the photograph’s power of revelation. Though the Stammheim sequence has been hailed as Richter’s political photo-paintings, they have their precedents in an oeuvre, a political stratigraphy of the amorphic blur dating back to paintings made from the mid-1960s onward, in part referencing historical events ranging from World War  II to the Cold War and beyond. These works are adumbrated by numerous photo-paintings of family portraits, scenes from daily life, and media illustrations. Some of the earliest political photo-paintings depict various military aircraft— Luftwaffe and American propeller fighters of World War  II vintage, and Cold War–era Phantom interceptor jets— all blurred and/or flying over and perhaps targeting blurred, blotted, and smeared landscapes. These early paintings have typically been read as representations of accelerated, machinic modernist time. But in the same year of these paintings, 1964, Richter made a photo-painting with blur titled Uncle Rudi. It is based on a World War II–era family photograph of the artist’s uncle, who is shown in a frontal pose in a Wehrmacht officer’s uniform; he was later killed on the Russian front. This soldier, smiling obliviously as he heads to the deadly Russian front, proudly wears the uniform that is already, in retrospect, his shroud (fig. 2.10). The blur is already fading away this life as archived in this photograph and as remaindered in his smile. His proud political assimilation as human capital to a war machine appears through the blur as a suicidal ascription. Then, in 1965, Richter made two photo-paintings that cohere into an elliptic narrative of state murder: Aunt Marianne, most likely based on a family photograph of 1932, which depicts the infant Richter cradled in the arms of a teenage girl, his aunt Marianne (fig. 2.11). Five years after the photograph was taken Marianne developed behavioral symptoms diagnosed as schizophrenia and was institutionalized, sterilized, and then starved to death under a Nazi euthanasia program. The second painting, Mr. Heyde (perhaps exploiting a fortuitous pun with Robert Louis Stevenson’s novella Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde), depicts the “perp walk” of a Nazi war criminal, the psychiatrist Werner Heyde (fig.  2.12). During the war Heyde designed and implemented psychiatric and eugenic screening programs contributing to the logistical organization of the T-4 Euthanasia Program, which killed between 70,000 and 100,000 patients and under which Richter’s Aunt Marianne was interned, starved,

Figure 2.10. Gerhard Richter, Uncle Rudi (1964)

The Apophatic Blur of War / 103

Figure 2.11. Gerhard Richter, Aunt Marianne (1965)

and murdered. Many of the euthanasia victims were Jews who were psychiatricized as mentally unstable or deficient to legitimate their execution. Heyde also worked as a psychiatric consultant for the Gestapo and was instrumental in the introduction of carbon monoxide gas as a means of mass execution. After he escaped from an Allied prisoner-of-war camp, Heyde publicly practiced as a sports physician and psychiatrist under a pseudonym, under which he also worked as a court consultant and an official medical investigator in northern Germany; his postwar career indeed epitomizes the public secret that blurred the moral and structural distinctions between Fascist and postwar denazified Germany. His career in West Germany could only have been possible through the complicity of sympathetic state officials who, after his arrest in 1959, were neither investigated nor prosecuted for their protection and promotion of Heyde. These persons of influence were indemnified from criminal prosecution through a timely death. In 1964,

104 / Chapter Two

Figure 2.12. Gerhard Richter, Mr. Heyde (1965)

within a week of Heyde’s trial, a codefendant and former colleague, the physician Friedrich Tillmann, leapt to his death from a ninth-story window in a maximum-security prison, and the next day Heyde hanged himself in his cell in the same prison. The circumstances of these deaths anticipated the questionable 1977 RAF prison suicides or murders that occurred at Stammheim, another maximum-security prison.63 The Autodestruct The paintings of Marianne, a victim of judicial murder, and Heyde, a specialist in such death, are both immersed in blurring gray wash and mutually enmeshed in a porous historiography where the technical precision of photography, medicine, psychiatry, euthanasia, the law, and the penal system produce procedural ghosts and related surplus affects. A spectral politics of blur and porosity also enmeshes these figures with the RAF suicides of Stammheim Prison and, ultimately, the photographic and scopic blotting of the life and death of Gul Mudin. The early work of Richter can certainly be contextualized in particular historical and biographical and

The Apophatic Blur of War / 105

even psychoanalytic frames, but read longitudinally and comparatively along with the fifteen photo-paintings of 18 October, 1977, they display apparatuses, figures, bodies, and human envelopes stamped and stained by particular forms of political sovereignty inserted into these finite memoranda and signatures of the political. Various histories of power, control, and terror enfolded in the material support of the interchangeable body and the image are uncoiled by Richter as blur. Many of those immersed, if not drowning, in blur are forensic phantasms of historical violence— bodies marked and altered by operations and effects of sovereign apparatuses, most notably Marianne and the Stammheim prisoners. However, some have marked and defaced the bodies of others with sovereign will, power, and alterity—fighter planes, Chairman Mao, Heyde, a Wehrmacht officer, and the Red Army Faction members. The Stammheim suicide victims are doubly blurred because they are caught within a chiasmus as both recipients of state violence and as self-elected agents and media of the violence of a sovereignty to come. The blurred reversibility or denegated character of sovereign violence is perfectly captured in the indeterminacy of the Stammheim Prison deaths as suicide or murder or both; no definitive juridical forensics can truly remove these bodies and the state that hosted and parasited them from an indifferent fulcrum of violence externalized, internalized, given, and received—here the immunization of society by the state through the hygiene of custodial incarceration is ideologically symbiotic with the self-immunizing hygiene of sacrificial suicide from the politically left or right (Heyde and Tillman). The thematic of suicide, real or counterfeit, chosen or compelled, cuts across the paintings of Uncle Rudi, Mr. Heyde, and the Red Brigade deaths at Stammheim, recapitulating the apophatic blur of the real and the fictive, of life and death in portraiture, and of the state’s dealing in death as the securing of life. The Hobbesian sovereign instituted the state of security by liberating its subjects from the state of war, a contractual exchange that installed both the transcendental right to make war against external enemies and the right to punish for internal sedition. In Foucault’s thought conscription by a biopolitical assemblage is an accession to Januslike sovereign rights: to make live and to let die. If biopower is an action upon the action of another, unifying subjugation and subjectification, it is political objectification sustained as self-subjection—a trajectory that I identified with resistance to torture and IRA hunger striking in my ethnography of prison protests in Northern Ireland.64 Biopolitical constitution of the subject through the latter’s agency is then a mode of potentialized political suicide, where to make live is reciprocally to let die, as mutually sustaining state

106 / Chapter Two

rights. Here the political construct that is the biopolitical subject is simultaneously the political autodestruct; and biopoliticized self-subjectification is equally self-retraction. This antinomic structure of biopolitical subjectivity distortedly mirrors the self-retracting sovereignty of a self-blurring apophatic power invested in and blurring the subject. Here the painterly blur and the political blur coincide, capturing the depicted political subject in the act of retraction and remotion inflicted by that subject or imposed by the sovereign authority. Under this regime suicide appears as virtually constructed by the state as a self-constructing or self-destructing mode of citizenship intrinsic to the biopolitical diagram as constituted power. However, as interior representation of an outside, political suicide may also advance a constitutive power, as I have discussed in reference to Irish Republican hunger strikes in the 1980s. Political suicide under a biopolitical regime for securing life indexes a ramifying zone of blurred indistinction, the structuring of citizenship by interpenetrating rights of life and death, and as the denegation of constituting and constituted power. Biopolitical suicide is an act of violence that opens an originating space of the political coinciding with the founding act ex nihilo of armed biopolitical institution, which is both constitutive of and enacted against autonomous “life” itself. The 18 October suicides that the Red Brigade prisoners may have committed were a statist event directed against the state. At the very minimum the inside/outside polarity that organizes much of the discussion of political suicide as “deterritorialization” can be alternatively viewed as dialectical modalities of a sovereign will invested in the biopolitical and its cognate norms of autoimmunization. The Stammheim prisoners under the biopolitical order of their immediate prison, and under the larger biopower they called Germany, may have committed a suicide against the suicide that was potentialized by state biopower. In doing so they foregrounded the founding conditions of autonomous political life in their deaths. Here there is no possibility of a non-sovereign politics, but only of apophatic sovereignty, a sovereignty that erased itself, which Richter caught as a fleeting smudge or blur. Saturation and Blur Richter’s brush with the death of photo-historical realism collides with the saturated image and event that cannot be reduced to or objectified as an exhaustible visibility, according to Marion. Saturated phenomena can be identified with an historical event “when the arising event is not limited to an instant, a place or an empirical individual, but overflows these singu-

The Apophatic Blur of War / 107

larities and becomes epoch-making in time . . . [and] . . . covers a physical space such that no gaze encompasses it with one sweep (not a mappable theater of operations).”65 The saturated image resists full visibility and precision and presents that resistance and withdrawal as the counterappearance of nonappearing, as blur, blot, and smudge. Marion, in his theological phenomenology, arrives at the same punctum as Richter’s brushed blur: Counter-experience is not equivalent to non-experience, but to the experience of a phenomenon that is neither regardable, nor guarded according to objectness, one that therefore resists the conditions of objectification . . . the intuition of the phenomenon is nevertheless seen, but as blurred by the two narrow aperture, the too short lens, the too cramped framed, that receives it— or rather that cannot see it as such. The eye . . . apperceives the perturbation that it in person produces within the ordinary conditions of experience—in the way an excess of light is not seen directly on the photographic paper but is inferred indirectly from the overexposure, or else—like the speed of something in motion, irrepresentable in a frozen image—nevertheless appears there in and through the smudge that its very unrepresentability makes on the paper. In these cases the eye does not see the exterior spectacle so much as it sees the reified traces of its own powerlessness to constitute whatever it might be into an object.66

Richter’s paintings are saturated images of political apophasis on multiple planes. As media, they are negations of photographic truth effects by painting, itself a technique and medium previously negated as an evidentiary and truth-claiming idiom by the advent of the mass-produced photograph. Richter’s photograms are crafted negations of a negation that do not affirm any truth content or clarity; their iconic interruption of photoprecision neither substitutes another facticity nor advances a sublimity, hence the staining smudge that captures the constitutive terrain of the photopolitical—the conditional appearing of light through the medium of nonlight. The blur, the smudge and stain, that Richter sees and reimagines points to the self-relating negativity and Archimedian vortex of the nonappearing appearance of political appearance. In Richter’s photopolitics the ruins of both realist painting and photography are exhibited along with the historically sedimented truth claims and certainties they once diversely promised. The blur is both an act and an image of defacement and of photo-de-graphing in which the amorphic and the anamorphic index the removal of the antecedent in the presentation of the consequent. Whether in reference to the Stammheim suicides/

108 / Chapter Two

murders or the murder of Gul Mudin, the infused staining blur captures the entry of force and power into a body that can neither fully present, contain, nor condition the surplus materiality and immateriality of such sovereign invasion; here an excess leaves a gap, interval, trace, and saturation in that which cannot hold this mark except as a wound in the field of vision and in the gaze of the painter. The saturating blur is an incision that marks a simultaneous excision, a locus of disfiguration beyond the frame that is the condition of the frame. The blur, in pointing beyond the frontality shown, gestures toward a remainder, a surplus, and an excised becoming as the incorporeality that supports, backs, and literally advances the corporeality and objectivity of the photographic real. This is why Richter, in painting the blur there is, figures a photoscenography that is not only interrupted or covered by the blur, but that hosts the blur as its necessary condition, as that vacuity to which it is held hostage. Richter anatomizes an apophatic sovereignty, both pictorial and political, that assigns topological positions from a site that is without position, which can only be shown as stain and smudge, as a capillary fog and slurring whose slippage penetrates and fades the body it poses and deposes. Apophatic politics uses denegation to wage war against the witness of war and attempts to level off the auditor of violence as a deviation from a politically required inability to attest. Richter both struggles with and paints this violence. Politically and technically engineered apophasis deposes the vacated witness standing in shock and awe in front of an immeasurable saturating evacuation. This political rarefaction and remotion of witnessing is repeated in Richter’s work in order to bring witnessable realism and violence as realism enacted, to their ungrounding. From this absence of ground the state can be shown as no longer reposing on unilateral norms, imperative principles, teleocratic agendas, and schematic finalities—rather, all these are signatures that mediate, and forge the state as the groundless and an-archic seriality of scenic affirmations, as signature strikes that outline a sovereignty that has no actuality beyond that impress. Apophatics leaves sovereign willing suspended in a void with no precessional anchorages, and as only visible and felt in the disposable succession of its transitive material repositories. Richter, in showing and blurring the bodies of the RAF members and of his aunt and uncle, painted these fading signatures of veridiction across diverse tableaux of photohistorical specificity. He brushed against the realist blur, thereby both accessing and exorcising its auratic power in destroying and remaking his gaze through an aesthetic suicide. Richter, in this postmortem repetition, ironically and

The Apophatic Blur of War / 109

Figure 2.13. Gerhard Richter, Mao (1968)

tragically painted, translated, and portrayed the apophatic blur with greater and greater critical historical precision and universality. The Sovereign and the Subjectile Apophatic photopolitics aims at the absolute rarefaction of a sovereign apparatus at the point of its vertical intensification and installation in the material support of a body and place invested with a force that saturates, overflows, and overdetermines these occupied containers. The blur in Richter’s work signposts the force of political remotion, which also operates in the iconic para-siting of Gul Mudin. Political remotion entails what in drone warfare is called “dwell-time,” a looming over and a descent into the

110 / Chapter Two

mundane body, rendering the latter a distended and unraveling habitus of incorporeal and supercorporeal power. Apophatic sovereignty reconstitutes itself in what is meant to be absent from it—risk-bearing and thus profaning, fallen, and presumably failed bodies. This is the self-emptying of sovereignty from a height into the subterranean extended otherness of the creaturely. The state’s expediting of its targets entails the pseudo-passivity of creaturely death in direct relation to sovereignty’s aggressive natality in the nullified. Through violence, sovereignty is pushed forward as power materialized in a concentrate of its inaccessibility, retraction, and elevation. Sovereignty presents as a severance, a saturation, and a surplus beyond any incarnation, image, or body—it is the escape of the One from any iconic limit through its dissemination across the lines of the visible and invisible, the law and the lawless, the corporeal and the incorporeal, the above and the below. Richter’s denegating blur renders the available and fallen bodies on display as hypodokhe, the temporary and contingent holding place, host and hostage, prosthetic and organ of a disembodied sovereignty. Apophatic sovereignty resists nomination and final embodiment even by the very supportive backing through which it shines through and forth in the blurring halo of hegemonic apperception and tacit political consent. Richter’s blur indexes a di-stance that sutures the visual sub-stance of these bodies as a dissymmetry between sovereign right and somaticized surfaces of revealability through which state violence reenacts right as the pathos of distance, the immeasurable interval and intimacy relating the sovereignly to the politically stained body. There is a doubled movement here of both subjugating and extracted dimensionality in which the photopolitical is as complicit as the weapon. Violence as the staining instance crushes, damages, collapses, flattens the bodily substrate or support, making it serve and servile as a subjectile: “Neither object nor subject, neither screen nor projectile, the subjectile can become all that, stabilizing itself in a certain form or moving about in another. . . . The subjectile is nothing, however, nothing but a solidified interval between above and below, visible and invisible, before and behind, this side and that.”67 The subjectile gives a place for appearance and in doing so becomes immaterial; it loses its status as subject and substance, as did Gul Mudin. The subjectile as media lies between incision and excision, frontality and backing. The subjectile as projectile has been cast down and impressed in order to engender another body behind which it disappears; its ghostly immateriality supports the positive figuration of an Other, as did Gul Mudin’s corpse. The subjectile precipitates scenic affirmations through

Figure 2.14. Gerhard Richter, Aeroplanes (1964)

112 / Chapter Two

its recession from the scene it makes possible, and in so doing eviscerates the subject, and sub-stance, that serve as the donating matériel of political objectivity. This doubled movement of both flattening and inscribing a depth of field, this compressing discharge that blurs the subjectile, in turn exfiltrates sovereignty from the humus of destruction, lifting it up while sculpting pictorial relief from out of the flattened and excised. All these elements were inlaid there in the blurring flash of the snapshot that destroyed Gul Mudin and his destruction over and over again.

Notes 1.

Claude Lefort, Democracy and Political Theory, trans. David Macey (London: Polity Press, 1988), 19–20; Cornelius Castoriadis, Figures of the Thinkable Including Passion and Knowledge, trans. anon., http://notbored.org/FTPK.pdf, 125, 202–9, 385–89. 2. Michel Foucault, “Friendship as a Way of Life,” in Foucault Live: Interviews, 1961– 1984, ed. Sylvio Lortinger (New York: Semiotext(e), 1996), 312. 3. Michel Foucault, “Society Must Be Defended”: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975– 1976, ed. Mauro Bertani, Allessandro Fontana, and Arnold I. Davidson, trans. David Macey (New York: Picador, 1997), 13–63. 4. Foucault’s thesis is in part empirically confirmed by Mukerji’s analysis of the gardens of Versailles as engineered landscaping and as a pedagogical text and immersion in three dimensions that depicted and inculcated the new geometrical and architectural structure of military perception based on fortification design, ballistic lines of sight, and perspectival aesthetics. See Chandra Mukerji, Territorial Ambitions and the Gardens of Versailles (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). 5. Foucault, “Society Must Be Defended,” 159–60 (emphasis mine). 6. Ibid., 16. 7. Frank B. Wilderson III, “The Prison Slave as Hegemony’s (Silent) Scandal,” Social Justice 30, no. 2 (2003): 18. 8. Achille Mbembe, On the Postcolony (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2001), 25. 9. For discussions of the many paradoxical and irreconcilable definitions of sovereignty, see Jean Bodin, The Six Bookes of a Commonweale, ed. Kenneth D. McRae (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1962); Emmanuel Sieyes, Qu’est-ce que le Tiers État? (Geneva: Librairie Droz, 1970); Perry Anderson, Lineages of the Absolute State (London: New Left Books, 1974); Carl Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty, trans. George Schwab (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985); Justin Rosenberg, The Empire of Civil Society (London: Verso, 1994); Jens Bartelson, A Genealogy of Sovereignty (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); A. H. Chayes, The New Sovereignty (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995); Thomas J. Biersteker and Cynthia Weber, eds., State Sovereignty as Social Construct (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); and Andreas Kalyvas, Democracy and the Politics of the Extraordinary: Max Weber, Carl Schmitt and Hannah Arendt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008). 10. The language is from the 1791 French Constitution, chapter III, article 1, https://

The Apophatic Blur of War / 113

11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16.

17. 18.

19. 20.

21. 22.

23. 24. 25.

26. 27.

28. 29.

30.

web.duke.edu/secmod/primarytexts/FrenchConstitution1791.pdf (accessed October 23, 2012). Jacques Derrida, The Politics of Friendship, trans. George Collins (new York: Verso, 2005), 109 n. 13 Claudia Baracchi, Of Myth, Life, and War in Plato’s “Republic” (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002), 153–154. Ibid., 8. Reiner Schürmann, Broken Hegemonies, trans. Reginald Lilly (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003), 557. Marcelo D. Boeri, “The Stoics on Bodies and Incorporeals,” Review of Metaphysics 54, no. 4 (June 2001): 723–52. Gilles Deleuze, “Deleuze/Spinoza, Spinoza Cours Vincennes—17/02/1981,” trans. Timothy S. Murphy, http://www.webdeleuze.com/php/texte.php?cle=38&groupe= Spinoza&langue=2 (accessed May 6, 2012). Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995), 147. “Court Sentences ‘Kill Team’ Soldier to 24 Years in Prison,’” Der Spiegel, March 24, 2011; http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/murder-in-afghanistan-court-sentences -kill-team-soldier-to-24-years-in-prison-a-752918.html (accessed May 12, 2012). “Spiegel TV Documentary: The US Army ‘Kill Team,’” April 1, 2011; http://www.spiegel .de/video/video-1119435.html (accessed May 12, 2012). Rolling Stone and Der Spiegel identify Corporal Jeremy Morlock as the thrower of the grenade, though in his subsequent confession he identifies Gibbs as the thrower of the grenade; see Mark Boal, “The Kill Team: How U.S. Soldiers in Afghanistan Murdered Innocent Civilians,” March 27, 2011; http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/ news/the-kill-team-20110327?page=1 (accessed May 12, 2012). Boal, “The Kill Team,” http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/the-kill-team -20110327?page=5 (accessed May 12, 2012). “Distorting the Truth; Civilians in Afghanistan Killed for Sport?,” Anderson Cooper 360 Degrees, aired September 27, 2010, 22:00 ET; http://transcripts.cnn.com/ TRANSCRIPTS/1009/27acd.01.html (accessed May 12, 2012). Boal, “The Kill Team.” http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/the-kill-team -20110327?page=5 (accessed May 12, 2012). Boal, “The Kill Team,” http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/the-kill-team -20110327?page=1 (accessed May 12, 2012). Julian Brookes, “Kill Team Soldier Gibbs Goes on Trial,” October 31, 2011; http:// www.rollingstone.com/politics/blogs/national-affairs/kill-team-soldier-gibbs-goes -on-trial-20111031 (accessed May 12, 2012). Boal, “The Kill Team,”http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/the-kill-team-20110327 ?page=4. For, as Benjamin proposes, all acts which instate sovereign right entail extrajudicial violence and leave their anomic traces in the ex post facto legalities of the state. Walter Benjamin, “Critique of Violence,” in Reflections, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings, ed. Peter Demetz (New York: Schocken Books, 1978), 286–87. Discussed in chapter 1. Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings, vol. 4, 1938–1940, ed. Howard Ellend and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2003), 265. Wilderson, “The Prison Slave as Hegemony’s (Silent) Scandal,” 20.

114 / Chapter Two 31.

32. 33.

34. 35. 36.

37.

38.

39. 40. 41. 42.

Benjamin linked allegorical practice to the deadening of the organic (particularly through fetishized equivalence) and with the pictorial use of ruins and the death images of memento mori to visualize the destructive movement of historical time across space and the human form. See Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborne (London: NLB, 1977). For a discussion of the raced phantasmagoric aesthetic, see Zahid Chaudhary, “Phantasmagoric Aesthetics: Colonial Violence and the Management of Perception,” Cultural Critique 59 (Winter 2005): 63–119. Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (London: Routledge, 1994), 135. Ibid., 192. Mekhane is a device that generates special effects or illusion in the theater, in particular a crane that lowers the gods to the stage (deus ex machina), and also is an apparatus of war. The word is associated with ruse, machination, engine, fabric, frame, device, trick. It is related to mekhos, meaning means, expedient, contrivance; from Proto-Indo-European maghana-, “that which enables,” from base magh-, “to be able, have power. Boal, “The Kill Team,” 27. Schürmann, Broken Hegemonies, 555. Jacques Derrida and Richard Beardsworth, “Nietzsche and the Machine,” in “Futures of Nietzsche: Affirmation and Emporia,” special issue of Journal of Nietzsche Studies, No. 7, Futures of Nietzsche: Affirmation and Aporia (Spring 1994): 51. Rolling Stone writes: “Even before the war crimes became public, the Pentagon went to extraordinary measures to suppress the photos—an effort that reached the highest levels of both governments. General Stanley McChrystal and President Hamid Karzai were reportedly briefed on the photos as early as May, and the military launched a massive effort to find every file and pull the pictures out of circulation before they could touch off a scandal on the scale of Abu Ghraib. Investigators in Afghanistan searched the hard drives and confiscated the computers of more than a dozen soldiers, ordering them to delete any provocative images. The Army Criminal Investigation Command also sent agents fanning out across America to the homes of soldiers and their relatives, gathering up every copy of the files they could find. The message was clear: What happens in Afghanistan stays in Afghanistan.” http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/ the-kill-team-20110327?page=3 (accessed April 10, 2011). This photopolitical blurring of the terrorist face, visage, and body also communicates with other scenes of occultation, blotting, and disfiguring associated with the war on terror. The practices of blurring traverse the hooding and defacement of captives in the photographs of Guantánamo and of the captives of jihadi groups; the leveling, orificial blending, and deindividualizing generic massification of naked bodies at Abu Ghraib; the satellite photos of sheds and tubes posed as WMDs; the geographical renditions that occlude the fates of prisoners through clandestine air carriers and unlogged flight plans; the flexible blurring of the rules of engagement in combat; and the occultation of war-crimes accountability in the latter’s outsourcing to pathologized low-ranking “bad apples” or legally immune corporate security agents. Jean-Luc Marion, In Excess: Studies of Saturated Phenomena, trans. Robyn Horner and Vincent Berraud (New York: Fordham University Press, 2002), 112. Ibid., 113. Jean-Luc Marion, Being Given: Toward a Phenomenology of Givenness, trans. Jeffrey L. Kosky (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002), 214. Avital Ronell, Loser Sons: Politics and Authority (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2012), 87–88.

The Apophatic Blur of War / 115 43. Marion, Being Given, 214. 44. Marion, In Excess, 107. 45. Jacques Derrida, “Epoché and Faith,” in Derrida and Religion: Other Testaments, ed. Yvonne Sherwood and Keven Hart (New York: Routledge, 2004), 44. 46. Marion, In Excess, 112. 47. “Violence as iterability re-marks what is sovereign and in doing so the sovereign contains in itself the discrepancy of a difference that constitutes it as iteration. The iterability of an element divides its own identity a priori, even without taking into account the fact that this identity can only determine or delimit itself through differential relations to other elements and that it hence bears the mark of this difference.” Derrida, Limited Inc., 53. 48. Jean-Luc Nancy, The Creation of the World or Globalization, ed. Francois Raffoul and David Pettigrew (Albany: SUNY Press, 2007), 97. 49. Michel Foucault, “What Is an Author?,” in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice, trans. Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977), 124–27. 50. “Signature strikes” are differentiated from “personality strikes,” which are based on confirmed identity or act. See David S. Cloud, “CIA Drones Have Broader List of Targets,” Los Angeles Times, last modified May 5, 2010, http://articles.latimes.com/ 2010/may/05/world/la-fg-drone-targets-20100506 (accessed June 7, 2013). See Daniel Klaidman, “Drones: The Silent Killers,” Newsweek, last modified May 28, 2012, http://www.newsweek.com/drones-silent-killers-64909 (accessed June 7, 2013). 51. Georges Bataille, “Formless,”Documents 1 (Paris, 1929), 382; trans. Allan Stoekl with Carl R. Lovitt and Donald M. Leslie Jr., in Georges Bataille: Vision of Excess; Selected Writings, 1927–1939 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press), 31. 52. Made in reference to the doctrine of the transubstantiation of Christ; Edmund Geste, Treatise against the Privy Mass (1548), sig. Ciii. 53. Nonetheless, the state and its political culture willingly enact violence against the infidelity of others unfaithful to the archival repositories and scenic affirmations of law and democracy. For Kafka’s law as signature without authorial origin, see chapter one; for a further discussion of the occlusion of foundational violence, see the discussion of monopoly violence and the beating of Rodney King in chapter 3. For Das’s discussion of state signatures see Veena Das, Life and Words: Violence and the Descent into the Ordinary (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2006), 162–64. It could be argued here that even the illegibility of state inscriptions that Das discusses still sustains a positive materiality that resists decoding by a public sphere of witness. 54. G. W. F. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), 208. 55. Eric Alliez and Antonio Negri, “Peace and War,” Theory, Culture and Society 20, no. 2 (2003): 114. 56. Irmgard Möller subsequently denied the existence of a death pact and the notion that she attempted suicide. See Stefan Aust, Baader-Meinhof: The Inside Story of the R.A.F., trans. Anthea Bell (New York: Oxford University Press 2009), 412. 57. Gerhard Richter, “Notes, March 17, 1986,” in The Daily Practice of Painting: Writings, 1962–1993, ed. Hans-Ulrich Obrist, trans. David Britt (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995), 175. 58. See Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, “A Note on Gerhard Richter’s October 18, 1977,” October 48 (1989): 88–109; Buchloh, “Divided Memory and Post-Traditional Identity:

116 / Chapter Two

59. 60. 61. 62.

63.

64. 65. 66. 67.

Gerhard Richter’s Work of Mourning,” October 75 (1996): 60–82; Hubertus Butin, Zu Richters Oktober-Bildern (Cologne: Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König, 1991); Robert Storr, Gerhard Richter: Doubt and Belief in Painting (New York: Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2001); Julian Stallabrass, “Gerhard Richter: Painting and Mass Media,” published on the site of Julian Stallabrass, Courtaulds Art Institute, London, and published in Spanish as “Pintura y medios de comunicación,” in Kalías: Revista de arte 8 (1992): 102–8; Arthur C. Danto, “History in a Blur,” The Nation, last modified April 25, 2002, http://www.thenation.com/article/history -blur (accessed May 13, 2002); Don DeLillo, “Baader-Meinhof,” The New Yorker, last modified April 1, 2002, 78–82; Rainer Usselmann, “Gerhard Richter’s Work of Mourning and Its New Audience,” Art Journal 61, no. 1 (Spring 2002): 4–25; Rosemary Hawker, “The Idiom in Photography as the Truth in Painting,” South Atlantic Quarterly 101, no. 3 (Summer 2002): 541–54; Lisa Saltzman, “Gerhard Richter’s Stations of the Cross: On Martyrdom and Memory in Postwar German Art,” Oxford Art Journal 28, no. 1 (2005): 25–44; Detlef Hoffmann, “Die Schärfe der Unschärfe: Zum Beispiel: ‘Onkel Rudi’ von Gerhard Richter,” in “Geschichte und bildende Kunst,” ed. Moshe Zuckermann, special issue, Tel Aviver Jahrbuch für deutsche Geschichte 34 (2006): 254–68; Randall K. Van Schepe, “Benjamin’s Aura, Levine’s Homage and Richter’s Effect,” InterCulture 4, no. 2 (Summer 2007); Alex Danchev, “The Artist and the Terrorist, or the Paintable and the Unpaintable: Gerhard Richter and the Baader-Meinhof Group,” Alternatives 35 (2010): 93–112; Andrew Otwell, “Gerhard Richter and the Simulacrum,” 1997, http://www.heyotwell.com/work/arthistory/ Richter.html (accessed August 4, 2011); Hilde Van Gelder, “The Present-Day Scholar: An (Im)possible Representation?,” Image [&] Narrative 10 (March 2005), http://www .imageandnarrative.be/inarchive/worldmusica/hildevangelder.htm (accessed June 12, 2014); and Leith Passmore, “Another New Illustrated History: The Visual Turns in the Memory of West German Terrorism,” EDGE—A Graduate Journal for German and Scandinavian Studies 1, no. 1 (2009): 1–16. Gertrud Koch, “The Richter-Scale of Blur,” October 62 (Autumn 1992): 136. Richter, The Daily Practice of Painting, 35. Storr, Gerhard Richter, 62n100. For the 1971 exhibit “Two Sculptures for a Room by Palermo,” Richter cast plaster of paris “death masks” of himself and his collaborator, Blinky Palermo. Buchloh, “Divided Memory and Post-Traditional Identity,” 65. “West Germany: Cheating Justice,” Time, last modified February 21, 1964 http:// content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,870803,00.html (accessed February 17, 2012). Allen Feldman, Formations of Violence: Political Terror and the Narrative of the Body in Northern Ireland (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 218–69. Marion, Being Given, 228. Ibid., 215–16 (emphasis mine). Jacques Derrida, “Maddening the Subjectile,” trans. Mary Ann Caws, Yale French Studies 84 (1994): 169–70.

THREE

First-Person Shooters: The Critique of Monopoly Violence In Memoriam Žarana Papic´

With Ice in Their Ears In Sarajevo on February 5, 1994, Bosnian Serbs fired a 120mm shell that landed in an open-air market called Markale, killing sixty-eight Muslims and Serbs and injuring more than two hundred others (fig. 3.1). The market was littered with heads and limbs when the American reporter Mark Danner arrived at the scene of carnage. He had a subsequent appointment to interview Radovan Karadžic´, head of the Bosnian Serb Republic. who is currently being tried in The Hague as a war criminal. At their lunch Danner queried Karadžic´ about what he had seen at the market in the aftermath of the shelling. Karadžic´ responded: “Many had ice in their ears.” “What? Excuse me?” “Ice. They had ice in their ears,” said Dr. Radovan Karadžic´, psychiatrist, poet, leader of the Bosnian Serbs, as he prepared to take another bite of stew. “You know, the Muslims—they took bodies from the morgue and they put them there, in the market. Even when they shell themselves like this, no one shell kills that many. So they went to the morgue.” . . . I was—and not for the first time during our lunch—left speechless. Dr. Karadžic´, clearly a very intelligent man, had mastered the fine art of constructing and delivering with great sincerity utterances that seemed so distant from demonstrable reality that he left no common ground on which to contradict him. Ice in their ears? Muslim intelligence officers stealing into the morgue to snatch corpses, secreting them in cars, setting off a bomb in the marketplace, and in the smoke and confusion leaving the frozen corpses strewn about the asphalt: it seemed an absurd idea. And yet despite myself I found myself thinking of

118 / Chapter Three

Figure 3.1. Bikes against wall after Markala massacre, Sarajevo, 1994. Source: Ministry of Internal Affairs, Serbia

the man in the overcoat lying on his back, staring upward, open-eyed. His face was peculiarly gray. Strange he bore no evident wounds. . . . Ice in his ears? No. No, of course not.1

Danner realized that Karadžic´’s question insinuated that the dismembered bodies and the massacre itself were a theatrical fabrication in which frozen corpses and body parts had supposedly been removed from Sarajevo’s refrigerated city morgues and artfully displayed by Bosnian Muslims in the marketplace for the world press to photograph. Danner understood this story as extending other Serbian allegations of self-inflicted or fabricated violence committed by the besieged Bosnians, such as Karadžic´’s allegation that the Bosnian Muslims were themselves shelling Sarajevo.2 In this deflecting innuendo Karadžic´ revealed his disturbing sense of how visual truth has been made in the political culture of Serbian irredentism and beyond. Karadžic´ erased Bosnian Serb violence in a political imaginary of puppetry and montage. Karadžic´’s archive of morgues and graves, repurposed for propaganda, holds and releases dead memory and dead artifacts of memory as shibboleths, as passwords and pathways to war. This archive functions as the recessional cavity from which historical images, time, and truth are spewed and sprayed like machine-gun fire. The Serbian feminist and sociologist Žarana Papic´ describes how this amalgam of the theatricized recess, cavity, and grave also fostered a traumatic earliness in the wider Serbian psychogeography of war that later culminated in ethnic cleansing and the siege of Sarajevo by Serbian paramilitaries: Much was also done also to revive Orthodoxy among the population of Serbia, but the symbolic identification with World War II was probably most

First-Person Shooters: The Critique of Monopoly Violence / 119 important: for instance, we were given a continuous visual presentation— between 30 and 60 minutes of TV every day—of the exhumation of mass graves in Herzegovina (from World War II).  .  .  . The media were used so that people would once again internalize the traumas of Ustasha crimes. Exhumation of the bones was in reality a preparation of the ground for new graves. Propaganda was used to create the feeling that Serbs are the main victims, who therefore have the right of revenge and the right to wage new wars and commit crimes. Karadžic´, for example, stated that Serbs in BosniaHerzegovina have a right to preventive defence. In other words, he amnestied in advance the crimes that were to come, by exploiting the traumas associated with the unearthed bones from 1941. . . . So we had a verbal and a visual, a horizontal and a vertical, preparation for war. The war actually arrived late: indifference and genocide were psychologically ready for activation as early as 1989.3

Making visual history from the grave with political mannequins unites the political aesthesis of Miloševic´, Karadžic´, and more recently Bush and Obama (in reference to 9/11 and ground zero). Papic´’s analysis anticipates the artfully edited compulsive-repetition spectacle in 2001 of the two towers collapsing in the American media and state discourse, and the moral synchronization and space/time compression of this scene with the attacks on Afghanistan and Iraq. This 2001 media assemblage brokered the American version of Karadžic´’s doctrine of “preventative defense” called the war on terror. For the Miloševic´ and Karadžic´ regimes, history was a mounted tableau, a decoupage or cutout, a display screen upon which ideological verities are projected and staged as a theater of marionettes in the juxtaposing of broken bodies, collective pain, and social suffering. The media and transitional justice projects have also exposed some of us to a theater of war fragments, usually performed by scattered survivor witnesses on the ground of their violated embodiment and “traumatic” testimony. However, such fragmenting war imagery should first be located within the political-military technologies of mass literalization that fabricate theaterscapes of corpses and ruins as scenic affirmations of a particular theoretics and dogmatics of power and history. The war-crimes survivor bears witness to having been used as confirming matériel of political literalization by an Other. The survivor is the singularized residue of a mass-produced political aesthesis that has been parasitic on his or her transgressed body and the bodies of absent others. Regimes of fact setting render violence and the bodies it makes the media of implanted ideological literality; this is the political occultation of the self-evident, which can promote a

120 / Chapter Three

politics of apperception. Media representation of violence invariably reinforces the mediatic efficacy of violence in-itself as the putting of facticity to work. Violence, through the material expropriation of the bodies and places of others, functions as primary means for effectuating the metaphors and allegories of power. Karadžic´ posed the technologically created corpse as a special effect in the (re)surfacing of history. He epitomized the new Cartesian politics of “first-person-shooter” media mastery. (Karadžic´’s troops terrorized Sarajevans with long-distance assassination by telescopic sniping as well as shelling.) The first-person shooter, as political hegemon, stands outside the ludic arena of the history he stages and plays as panorama. The first-person shooter, who is neither a first, nor a person, nor an anthropological point of view, addictively manipulates life-forms, transmuting them into blackened silhouettes, and performs war by remote viewing and acting in which targets die as detachable drones of an apparatus of image generation and screening. Here the full optics of the first-person shooter as political form is only available in the topography of the dead, who are montaged elements that make this gaze tangible in their sheer spacing and objectification. The orchestrators of such image games are anchored in a static and recessed space of spectrum dominance from which scenarios of weighted historical time, diachronic trajectory, and transformational efficacy are projected. Technologies of ballistical terror render life worlds into fabricated cartographies of political allegory, into frozen screens and scenes of ideological confirmation and affect that I have elsewhere termed the “historiographic surface.”4 The political citability enabled by morgues analogizes the grave to the archive as the abyss from which the historical skiagram or shadow image is issued forth. Karadžic´, once a practicing psychiatrist, organizes historical truth into a post-Freudian topology; the archival tomb stands in relation to the scenographies of fact as the unconscious does in relation to consciousness. The historiographic surface is a screen onto which history’s once frozen and buried and now disinterred phantasmata are projected in editorialized shapes and tableaux. Karadžic´’s first-personshooter diversion and distraction fabricate a politically deniable and illegible terror that precludes accountability and ethical response. Karadžic´’s innuendo points to the prevailing detachability of factuality from the actuality of violence. He promoted war as the potential to be both corporeal and incorporeal and as a materiality irreducible to the sensible. Intangible force has become integral to a global political aesthesis in which the truth claims that both identify the event and take place through the “identifi-

First-Person Shooters: The Critique of Monopoly Violence / 121

able” political event become possible by way of an inappropriable, immaterialized, and self-defacing act of violence. I am less interested here in the visual culture of the current digital and ludic formatting of the first-person-shooter function in gaming than in a wider historical genealogy and political scanscape. My concern is with possible antecedents in the technical and political optics of violence, which include the problems of an authorial origin of state violence (raised by Karadžic´) as a discourse on sovereignty, the modeling of political sovereignty on a theory of the subject (what Derrida terms “ipsocracy”), and the relation of the authoring subject of ballistics and firstness to the state monopoly of violence. To pursue these questions further I have assembled a particular, but not exhaustive, first-person-shooter itinerary traversing the Markala massacre; the exhumations of the Ustasha executions; sectarian assassination in Belfast; Jean-Paul Sartre’s theory of the practico-inert, Godard’s filmic meditation on facticity, oneiric war, and Hobbesian montage; the smart bombs of the Gulf War (1990–91); the televisual aesthetics of the police who beat Rodney King; the death penalty of Troy Davis; and Israeli genocidal desistance in Gaza (2008–14). Each of these scenographies shares a certain scopic continuity but also plays different variations on the theme, as if moving from one player position to another, which reveals a different dimension of the play of the first-person shooter or another ludic and agonistic arena altogether. Lacan provisions a connecting thread to this metonymic itinerary; he contests the first-person-shooter politics of source-code inception as the presumed self-holding of a position that permits autonomous encryption in favor of a metonymic chain: “The Other, as preliminary site of the pure subject of the signifier, occupies the key [maitresse] position here, even before coming into existence here as absolute Master—to use Hegel’s term with and against him. For what is omitted in the platitude of modern information theory is the fact that one cannot even speak of a code without it already being the Other’s code; something quite different is at stake in the message, since the subject constitutes himself on the basis of the message, such that he receives from the Other even the message he himself sends.”5 Lacan pinpoints a crucial authorial recess that calls into question the assumption of firstness for the spectator/shooter/code transmitter, whom he theorizes as constituted upon an emission from the unavailable and mastering site of a sovereign Other as source code whose own firstness is the absence of any finite position. Lacan, drawing here upon Hegel’s master/slave dialectic, provides a communicative model of political sovereignty as the absence of position that enables subject positioning.

122 / Chapter Three

The Jackal I initially encountered the political sensibility of the first-person shooter in the late 1980s in Northern Ireland, though this particular personification used no guns or artillery shells. During a night of late drinking, a Loyalist paramilitary described to me a legendary and much-rumored figure of his organization, a faceless assassin known as “the Jackal.” Jackal stories circulated throughout the Belfast Loyalist paramilitary community. The Jackal killed Catholic men by moving in and out of Catholic areas, silently slipping into their bedrooms at night, and slitting their throats while they slept—leaving the body to be discovered the next morning by unsuspecting family members or by the wife who had been unknowingly asleep beside the victim. His silent invasion and subsequent surveying of Catholic domestic scenes magnified the Jackal’s aura for the narrator. As he described the silent invisibility of the Jackal’s movements in and out of people’s homes, he invoked an almost dreamlike creature, whom he apparently found to be exotic, frightening, and admirable for his technique: the Jackal was ethnic cleansing as pure medium, a politically neutering and neutral cipher, a degree zero of violence as the circulating code of the Other. The presence of a zoopolitics in the name “Jackal” can be considered integral to the phantasmagoria of Northern Irish first-person shooters. In Belfast, there was the figure of the Blackman, who was associated with the sacrificial death of animals; his rumored appearances and murders congealed accumulated perceptions about the uncanny urban space brought about by kaleidoscopic terror. Dead dogs and cats were delivered to the doorsteps of suspected IRA operatives by the British SAS as death-list warnings.6 There was also the association of the name “Jackal” with a popular film concerning a professional sniper of many mannequinlike guises and of no subjectivity, whose elaborately crafted rifle, disguised as a crutch for a disabled war veteran and fitted out with a custom-made precision scope, was more of a personality in the film than the assassin, who had none. Like the Loyalist killer, the film’s character was also a master of incognito and namelessness. In Belfast, the zoological jackal is popularly known not as a predator or hunter but as an eater of carrion, consuming bodies already dead, already inert, in much the same manner as the Bosnian victims of the marketplace bombing were already supposedly dead when they were assaulted by Serb shells. I would suggest that embedded in the zoopolitical image and the killing methods of the Jackal as a first-person shooter is the recognition that the actual physical death of his victim was a secondary to a mortify-

First-Person Shooters: The Critique of Monopoly Violence / 123

ing gaze that turned the observed into an ethnic tableau and carrion. The Jackal invaded and visually commanded the nocturnal domestic space, an eminently feminized terrain in Belfast and a fitting stage for a politics of the pose. His victims were first assaulted by ocularity when the killer infiltrated their privacy and surveyed their sleeping, unknowing bodies. The Jackal is a morbid echo of Terry Eagleton’s characterization of the realist observer as an “omniscient authorial eye” penetrating a “hinterland of inscrutable private experience” secreted behind each “social persona.” He performed the sovereignty of inspectacularity (fusing inspection and spectacle), which can be read as an autopsy and necropsy of the hidden private sphere behind the public persona of the generic ethnic Other. Through the Jackal’s home invasions the private lives of Catholic others were rendered optically confessional, which has a particular frisson because of the polarized ethnicities of victim and killer—their mutual spatialized estrangement in the highly segregated and ethnicized geography of Belfast, and their physical contiguity in this death by ocular intimacy. The Jackal indulged in the satisfaction of seeing before killing and in seeing as killing, hence his focus on the sleeping, unknowing victim disenfranchised by eyes wide shut. Sleep observed anticipates petrifaction and mortification; the gaze of the killer imprints these qualities on the body, and the material act of violence leaves a forensic trace of these scopic operations by the first-person spectator. Here optical expropriation robs the victim of material subjecthood in transforming the target into an ethnic specimen or type; this is his first theft, the visual erasure of singularity and specificity. The second theft of the Jackal takes life itself. Physical death is a redundant and archival action after piercing by the ethnicizing gaze of the killer, which has already frozen the victim into a rigid political outline, a statue. Karadžic´, too, robbed the Markala dead of their unique and singular deaths by treating them as prefrozen telegenic corpses, as finalized political outlines, prior to any act of Serbian violence. Any violence inflicted on these specimens is automatically a self-effacing violence, an immateriality of force. The Jackal left for others, in the form of “the stiff” (the Belfast term for a corpse), the concretion of his invasive vision in the petrified body. The Jackal’s vision is only accessible in this prone corpse, for as the animal declension implies, there is no human source for this gaze—its nonhumanity is tied to its invisibility and its inscription as an alien irradiating trace element in the body of a zoopolitical Other. The body left by the Jackal is both a materialization and a memory of the killer’s vision. An important element here is the recession of the observer. The externality of the spectator/killer to the scene of violence es-

124 / Chapter Three

tablishes the potency of the latter by removing this sovereignty from perceptual fixation and framing—the gaze in the first-person-shooter regime is off-frame: it cannot be posed, for it is that which poses; it has no site because it is the author of sites. And yet this intangibility requires materialization in the act of physical assault, which leaves marks not solely of tactile contact but of ocular contact on the body and the diffraction of their indifference. The siteless gaze is located and seen only in the bodies of the viewed, posed, and politically remaindered. The victim becomes the memorandum of a remote power intent on serial self-embodiment, selfsubstitution, and self-refraction in an inert Other. The first-person shooter as an allegory of sovereignty functions as a visualizing automaton whose only purpose is to repress life and difference through a detachable drone gaze that comes to rest in each of the dead and that is extended in a series of the deposed dead—optical genocide begins here in this micrological matrix. The violence of the Jackal, like Karadžic´’s corpse-display fantasies, is a conscription and scattering of prone bodies in a serial contiguity that encapsulates a photopolitical history. This distribution of the pre-dead and the post-dead form a Sartrean practico-inert of terror, a “plurality of isolations” by violence, in which the seriality (production en série) of multiple killing and dying entrenches war in the duplicability of the photo-graphic. The practico-inert is the congealment, sedimentation, imprint, and negative-like substrate of chronometric praxis made political substance through fallen bodies and ruined habitus. Its inertial thrust is neither static nor passive, but an incline and slippage that installs and propels involuntary subject positions, time signatures, and political topoi. It is the pressing density and intensity of accumulated historicity from below as pressurizing and gravitational material that institutes a commanding and commencing historical a priori without appeal or reversal. Sartre’s discussion of seriality and the practico-inert provides insight into a mediology of history. His theory of seriality is an attempt to think the relations of power and technicity as forces of massification and assemblage, as well as the autonomy of the material, the machinic, and the iterative as infrastructures of historicity. He writes of the seriality of the practico-inert as an eminently communicative and mediatic infrastructure of historical becoming and design: “the practico-inert object not only produces a unity of individuals outside of themselves in inorganic matter, but also determines them in separation and, insofar as they are separate, ensures their communication through alterity.”7 Sartre’s concept of the practicoinert refers to the interface between recursive practice and worked-over or temporalized matter as the exteriority and sediment of embodied practice

First-Person Shooters: The Critique of Monopoly Violence / 125

and a structuring space-time template registering all action, from language and labor to institutional inscriptive forms. Serialization as iterative praxis becomes a condition of historicity. The Jackal, in killing, makes photographs of these bodies as a form of historiographic speciation, as a zoophotopolitics registered in the practico-inert of his concretizing and incarnating gaze. Karadžic´ dismissed the counterfeited frozen Bosnian corpses as just so many snapshots, frames of the rigor-mortified, dropped and scattered on the presenting surface of a conclusive history. Each body in its photographed petrification, as surveilled Catholic or “frozen” Bosnian, is made to exist only in relation to other such necrographs, and to exhibit, despite the death on display, as a counterfinality, as a means; each photocrypt exists through another in obtaining its political identity and ideality through a metonymy of such artifacts, that is, through a leveling seriality.8 A single death would not have been a cleansing evisceration of the enemy or a totalization of the Jackal’s adversarial Other, nor would it confirm the concretion of history aimed at by his corpse emplacement. Rather, it is the ideal arc of photopolitical flesh extending toward a cinematic infinity that produces transhistorical efficacy. In this artifactory of history the conscripted dead are superimposed on or sedimented into the seriality and technical reproducibility of other such bodies as a stratigraphy and montage of an optico-species-being. The collective object for Sartre is a spacetime locus of recurrence and repetition and has no other intrinsic status. Political speciation results from being unified, fused, and massified from without, from being invested, leveled, and sequenced by a cinematizing force that coincides with making history happen in the arraying of emblematic substances. For Sartre, each concentrate of the practico-inert presents a synchronic slice or stratum of a historical assemblage as a compositing of negativities and not as the connectivity of positive events, acts, or things. Historical trajectory and direction are found not at the conclusion of such violence, in the last body dropped and displayed, but across serial units sutured and enchained by force. Each historicizing photograph robs the preceding one of its unique death; it is the simultaneity of this presentation/privation of the terminal that drives the tempo of historical motion through the genericized substance of a fabricated history machine: “an infinite number of social objects and of the most varied kinds contain as their inner structure the twofold negation of themselves and of each component by the other.”9 Serialization is the indifferent production of anonymous and defective entities that generate history as a depersonalized and anonymous drive de-

126 / Chapter Three

posited in an apparatus of sequencing. The seriality of distributed death is also a teleology effect that is constructible and misrecognizable as social transformation, which it simulates. Serializing force is both a self-sufficient assemblage and an indefinite continuance as a closed system that simulates directional historical time in the mutability and repeatability of voided matter. Serialized terror follows the sacrificial logic of world renewal delineated by the ethnologist Robert Hertz. To paraphrase Hertz’s formulation: to move a thing from this world to the next, it first must be destroyed.10 Hertz intended a topographic theology of sacrifice as a movement from the profane to the sacred, but his formula ironically anticipated a cinematic theology of history on the very brink of World War I, during which he was killed at Saint-Cloud by industrial mass death. Political violence as serialization emerges as the social organization of solitude and finitude as a mass article. Serialization is a massification composited from the repeatability of made fragments—of historical snapshots put to work as the sliding movement of appearing history. War is an autokinesis through which sovereignty as a totality recapitulates itself in each of its enactments and in what has yet to be enacted—that is, through the future anteriority of mimetic terror. To place Sartre’s mediology in communication with that of Benjamin, political serialization accelerates history as technical reproducibility in which the inceptual event, originating cause, or project (just, liberating, nationalizing, or democratizing war) is auratically evacuated through its mimesis and irrecuperable alienation in the practico-inert. However, seriality means that the micro-event of violence, the photopolitical practico-inert, is a concentrated punctum of the terminal and can never be simply functionalized as a subordinate means to an end (socioepochal transformation). Rather, it is the means as its own tautological end that contributes to the summation of the series or assemblage as a recapitulating nonend in toto. For all such finality is “alienated,” to use Sartre’s language, in the counterfinality of the means, the mediate, as a concentrate and continuum of damage. The photo-inert holographically presents the terminal in the counterfinality of and across each mediating micro-unit of the series. The entire historical project of terror is impressed into each singular photograph of force but appears nowhere else—certainly not in any conclusive resolution. Political violence becomes the search for the correct form-endowing repetition that can justify infinite force in its infinite media. Political sufficiency can only be sustained through repetition, citation, and recursion—each image or iconic unit opens up the repeatability of the punctum of death as a terminus that happens over and over so that history becomes a cul-de-sac made up of the unending relay of its iconological endings.

First-Person Shooters: The Critique of Monopoly Violence / 127

This photography of history is a political metric in which the corpse, the ruin, and the damaged are set up and orchestrated as the fleshly gears and cogs of historical time, like de Sade’s human furniture, made up of intertwined and twisted bodies. The serialization of death installs a politics of massification embedded in the shreds of the body or the ruined habitus as the practico-inert of power that is put to work in the political real as a numbing literality. The practico-inert in war is where the ballistics of militarized time are stored as an orienting retention of futurity. A serialized mode of motion of war unfolds as an inertial memory of the future that is always deposited “behind” the still living in the shadow image, the skiagram, the encrypting and cryptlike vortex that propels the historical witness toward the precession of the death and time we name history.11 Within serialization, the first-person shooter becomes a hollowed-out shell lacking any substantiation other than to be the interstitial site, switching station, and relay through which the capacity to repeat death and terror must pass as the received/emitted code of a fictive Other. The first-person shooter, like the Jackal, circulates as an imprint through its serialized corpse displays. As such, this sovereign site, position, or instance corresponds to what Deleuze called, in the spirit of gaming, the dummy hand, the empty square, or the dead man’s hand, which is always displaced in relation to itself but is always parasitically at the site of the death of the Other, and which never ceases to circulate across such mortifying photographies as its own metaphor and metonymy and nothing more. Shot/Reverse Shot We say that facts speak for themselves and Celine said “Sadly not for much longer.” And that was in 1936.12

The political logic of the first-person shooter also appears in Notre musique, Godard’s filmic meditation on war, filmed in Sarajevo.13 He reenacts the locus of the first-person shooter in using his recessed and shaded body, disembodied voice, and hand-held image-play to splice together, as he has frequently done in other films, the fused subject position of director and sovereign. He presents political-historical facticity as topology and fabricated landscape, in which visually ordered terrains anticipate and coincide with territorial domination and political violence. A pivotal scene is set in a film class in “postwar” Sarajevo, in which the pedagogy is concerned less with film studies than with the cinematics of veridiction we have inherited as an archive of ruins. (Earlier scenes are staged in the ruined edifice of

128 / Chapter Three

the Sarajevo library, where novelists and poets recite or read their texts in rooms bereft of bookshelves and tomes.) Godard begins his lesson by projecting a photograph of a ruined cityscape with hollowed, broken shells of buildings and asks the class to identify the locale, to name the historical fact that the image indexes. The students suggest Stalingrad, Sarajevo, Hiroshima, and other war-torn cities of the twentieth century; he replies, “Richmond, Virginia, in 1865” (fig.  3.2). The chain of warscapes indicates that the iconicity of war-torn “Richmond, Virginia, in 1865” is marked through the citational caption effects of other warscapes that determine Richmond’s conditions of historical, if not geographical, recognizability. The image as factual emerges from a relationality to other images, not shown, that institutes the visual fact by virtue of tacit titling and epigraphy borrowed from absent or recessed frames, artifacts, and recalled and (now frozen) gazes. The visual sign as mark becomes re-marked, retraced, and re-treated through serial citation and indexical adjacency. Within this series Richmond is barely a place or habitus; rather, it is a contingent historical density, where one technology of the first-person shooter (photography) converges with an-

Figure 3.2. Richmond, Virginia, 1865. Still from Jean-Luc Godard, dir., Notre musique (2004)

First-Person Shooters: The Critique of Monopoly Violence / 129

Figure 3.3. Shot/reverse shot. Still of Howard Hawks, His Girl Friday. Still from Jean-Luc Godard, dir., Notre musique (2004)

other (industrial bombardment). The open city of ruins is the product and vertigo of these crosscutting mechanized gazes—the camera lens and the gunnery scope. Godard draws attention to the contemporaneity and complicity of the camera, mechanized war, and mass destruction to install ruined Richmond as a nexus of visualities that produce the concretion of place that does not preexist the convergence of these scopic regimes. The visual homology of Richmond, Sarajevo, and Hiroshima disrupts any historicist sequence; visual fact setting is anachronic, recursive, and, through montage, a computational apparatus. The so-called site or event that is accessed through the image is neither its origin nor precipitant, but an effect of the image that is the event of that image. Godard then displays two stills from a Howard Hawks film, His Girl Friday, showing Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell alternately in nearly identical poses and remarks that they are in effect the same image presented twice in two different positions (fig. 3.3). This is not only because the director is incapable of seeing gender difference, quips Godard, but because the two stills represent shot/reverse shot, a montage that differentially cre-

130 / Chapter Three

ates identity from nonidentity by alternating presentation and recession; the image lies not in each still, but between them, in the movement of juxtaposition as a mode of filmic enunciation or performativity that exceeds any particular visual unit. Godard proposes shot/reverse shot as a profilmic theory of political aesthesis.14 Throughout Godard’s discourse the voice of the interpreter is audibly foregrounded, overlapping his French with her Bosnian, and thus posing shot/reverse shot sequencing as a sonic medium in addition to a visual tactic. Godard’s disembodied yet controlling hands are persistently highlighted shuffling and crosscutting Hawk’s stills, layering one over the other. He repeats this gesture with other photographs, film stills, and art reproductions throughout the lesson, as if playing with a deck of cards with limited visual information but capable of endless permutations and combinations. Godard’s shot/reverse shot theorem installs a theater of the event. He thereby combines two modes of command, the political auctoritas and the cinematic auteur, who unfold founding acts in the senses of pro-duction, as the movement of a gaze that brings forth the Other, and of ab-duction, which is the outward scanning movement of the eye over a mappable theater of operations. In the Roman republic the auctor was a master of communication and the auctoritas was an authority that preceded and instituted law. The image is not presented as a transparency that re-presents, but as an obstacle and opacity, a body, that signifies in reference to another opacity, another body through the incorporeal movement of montage. Historical truth is formed by constellations of densities and not by lines of autonomous extraiconic reference preceding and leading to and from the image. Godard shows both war and montage as acts of disfiguration that generate referentiality. Notre musique’s narration declaims that “before is after”— origin and referentiality come after the peripatetic anachronic trace as the inceptual ground from which cinematized time flows. Godard’s face and eyes are veiled behind his montaging hands, though his disembodied voice fills the screen as he observes, “ The field of the text has already covered the field of vision.” Shot/reverse shot is a writing with images that has no historical status but that mediatically underwrites historicism through anamorphosis, by which one image begets another by opening the differential possibility of iteration, spacing, divergence, and duplication with itself. Hobbesian Montage Godard assumes a sovereign posture in an Archimedean theater of visual truth. His seemingly disembodied and pantomiming image-bearing hands,

First-Person Shooters: The Critique of Monopoly Violence / 131

like the images they array, track back to the vanishing horizon of the recessed locus of the auteur, the first-person shooter, hovering at the edge of the scene. In a 2002 interview Godard confessed a fascination with what Deleuze would have termed the empty square, the dead man’s hand, or the dummy hand: “When I watch television I watch it on mute. Without the sound you see the gestures, you see the routines of the women journalists and hosts, you see a woman who doesn’t show her legs, moves her lips, does the same thing, and occasionally is interrupted by the so-called onthe-scene footage. She’ll be the same the next day; only the text will have changed.”15 The sovereign’s body and the cinematic body are fused in the assumption and production of postures and their cinematic procreation of time. Godard here plays with the interchangeability of sovereignty and causality. The sovereign pose of the first-person shooter is shown as the posturing of visual elements in order to arrest truth and facticity in spatialized historical time, in a kinesis that articulates diverse image frames as a narrative axis. Though in his pedagogy, which interrupts cinematic time, Godard seeks to place montage at a standstill; to halt the movement and intervals of posturing and posing that generate historical time, referentiality, and truth; to freeze or retard this kinesis in order to assess the production and abduction of sense and the insensible in politics and war. Godard’s posture in Notre musique resembles the frontispiece of Hobbes’s Leviathan (fig. 3.4), by the engraver Abraham Bosse, an ardent advocate of mathematical perspectivism. Both the image and the text explicitly link sovereignty to a composited apical identity, to montage, to the machinic, and to the relation between optics and political epistemology. This image may very well be one of the earliest depictions of the first-person shooter and its gaze. In this engraving a display screen is not interfaced with the sovereign gaze and body as a mirror, but rather the totalizing body of the sovereign itself exhibits as an assemblage of all the players of that game of exchange termed the “social contract” and the “transfer of right.” The sovereign body is portrayed as its own interface and exchangist habitus. This habitus is the visual homologue of Galileo’s method of the “resolutive compositive,” a mechanistic theory of the passions and sense perception, where any whole is analytically reducible to its constituent elements—which should be the proper starting point of analysis. Following Galileo, Hobbes sought to apply physics to the political, with the caveat that whereas physics concerns “natural” bodies, the matter of political physics is an artificial body that does not exist in nature. From the perspective of Godard, one might conjecture that the atomic units and frames that are montaged or composited to achieve the resolution of a unified image are equivalent to a physics of the political.

132 / Chapter Three

Figure 3.4. Abraham Bosse, frontispiece of Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (1651).

Whether the figure of the sovereign appears as a body, that is, as a living volume with depth and dimension, or only as a pure frontality, that is, as a flat screen surface and machinic display, is an open question. The body of the Leviathan below its crowned head is an Arcimboldian collage of hundreds of miniature human bodies congealed into the monumental edifice, like plates of armor. These montaged bodies are all but faceless; their backs are to the spectator, and their heads are turned upward to the sovereign structure that they reciprocally compose.16 Though these plural gazes are hidden from the auditor’s sight, they are returned, unified, compressed, and amplified in the gaze of the Leviathan as a suprasensible totalization of the multitude in monocular form. The relation between the unseen mass gaze of the compositing multitude and the privileged sovereign gaze enacts a shot/reverse shot sequence. Far from being static, the montage of bodies and the architecture of gazes screen a movement in time that can be considered to be proto-cinematic. The presentation of double images that contain a disemic mimesis within themselves was a technique for stressing the self-referentiality of the artwork in the seventeenth century. Bosse, in dialogue with Hobbes, who philosophically investigated optics and col-

First-Person Shooters: The Critique of Monopoly Violence / 133

lected optical instruments, transferred this visual recursivity to the political self-referentiality and autonomy of the sovereign. The montage here also simulates the seventeenth-century technique of the “multiplying” or “perspective glass,” a beveled lens that, when applied to an image made up of diverse perspectival fragments, could be manipulated to resolve the latter into a single form.17 Prince Charles Stuart, the future recipient of Leviathan, when in exile in Paris, had been advised to practice looking through such a glass to develop the multiperspectival gaze proper to a sovereign.18 The political utility of multiperspectival optics can also be encountered in Machiavelli’s theory of political deception and camouflage in war. Hobbes and Bosse transferred the optical analogy of a unifying sublimating form composed of a holographic multiplicity to the political theory of sovereignty as a body politic. Revealingly, unlike Arcimboldo’s collage portraits, the sovereign’s crowned head at the apex of the allegory is not a composited mosaic, but a unified and realistic face and gaze (a mannequin of Charles Stuart), as if to indicate the ultimate autonomy of constituted sovereignty as the congealed surplus and overdetermination of its constituent parts. If, in this image, multiplicity indicates the plural living substance of the multitude, the head, face, and gaze of the sovereign is devoid of this teeming plurality and embodies nonlife as a death mask of the body politic, and one in which a monstrous gaze is shown that lacks any human or living derivation but is just a political mask. Bosse’s engraving does not present a unified aesthetic or theoretical field, but is rather a political mise-en-scène turned against itself, a visual denegation that refuses any synthesis of its elements or parts. Sovereignty as constituted power is presented as disconnected from its constitutive forces and elements. In Hobbes this montage visualized the transfer of rights of autonomy from the natural bodies of the multitude to the artificed body of the sovereign in exchange for security. The transfer of right is a mechanistic process effectuated by the machinery and market logic of contract, whereby the autonomous subject is a whole with the ability to transfer a part—the natural right of force—through contractual agreement and to receive back a part in exchange from the totalized state—the right to security. However, the state accrues a surplus in this exchange: the monopolistic right to punish and kill the subordinate citizen in the name of the security of the entire body politic. From a Godardian perspective this ossified collage would stand for the transfer of visual plurality to a monocular indivisibility. The sovereign is a defacing and re-facing compression, simulation, and prosthesis of the multitude. Derrida calls this shift autosubstitution, the replacement and displacement of self (subject) by self (subject). The authorial and sover-

134 / Chapter Three

eign projector in Godard and Hobbes performs cinema but is also cinematic in itself—it is the composited and compositing materialized force that creates and becomes time as an order of verities. In Hobbes’s era the temporal principle of self-substitution operates as the right of sovereign succession as an artificed chronotope that was mediated by successive and simulacral monarchial image effigies, a cinema that conveyed and continued embodied political authority during periods of interregnum, thereby creating an artificed sovereign body as a living on beyond life and death.19 Derrida also links self-substitution as a prosthetic to prosthatics; this term is inspired by Hobbes’s conceptualization of the state as an artificed anthropomorphic automaton or political metamachine: “Art goes yet further, imitating that Rationall and most excellent work of Nature, Man. For by art is created that great LEVIATHAN, called a COMMON-WEALTH or STATE, (in latine CIVITAS) which is but an Artificiall Man; though of greater stature and strength than the Naturall, for whose protection and defence it was intended.”20 The present-day security state, in its death drive, is a form of artificial inorganic life wherein the One emerges to represent, concentrate, and repeat a constitutive multiplicity in a deadening substitution. In the glowing dark of nuclear decision, or in the immunization of democracy from terrorism, this prosthetic shell of securitizing sovereignty cannibalizes the composited and intestinal multitude that contracted its deterrence, its protection, through a transfer of a right to life to the nonlife and dead memory of the prosthatic drone state exercising its right to kill in the name of security. As Godard lectures, the camera pans across the faces of the students, who display entrancement, curiosity, distraction, boredom, hostility, and indifference—a typology of achieved and failed witness, a facial metonymy of reception in distraction informed by the instituted apperception of cinematic time (though one student is videotaping Godard as he lectures). Godard then shuffles a photo of Kosovo refugees wrapped in blankets, riding on donkeys, and holding umbrellas over their heads (fig. 3.5) with Giotto’s painting of Mary and Joseph on a donkey, fleeing to Egypt to escape Herod (fig. 3.6): modern Bosnian Muslims as biblical Jewish refugees, or one event relegated to forgotten media sound bytes and the other to exemplary universalized biblical allegory. Godard’s voice, as disembodied as his hands supporting these scenes, speaks of two different images of the same moment of history as part of the shot/reverse shot apparatus, yet the artifacts shown are not even from the same century. For Godard the historical event qua event draws its gravitas from imaginaries not-at-hand, neither evident nor evidentiary, in a gesture that defies periodization as a discrete unit. This differentiality historicizes

Figure 3.5. Kosovo. Still from Jean-Luc Godard, dir., Notre musique (2004)

Figure 3.6. Giotto, The Flight into Egypt. Still from Jean-Luc Godard, dir., Notre musique (2004)

136 / Chapter Three

the event only through a conditioning anachronicity of shot/reverse shot, citational crosscutting, re-marking, and archivization. Here Godardian montage coincides with the visual historicity identified by Benjamin, who asserts that the legibility of an image is not reducible to its datable historical provenance; rather, “the image attains legibility only at particular time” that he associates with a state of historical awakening.21 For Godard political legibility is to be provisioned in the spatiotemporal juxtaposition of two or more visual elements that create legibility and even political instruction from iconic heteroglossia and the colportage of prescriptive images from one presumable historical site to another. Godard then shows a photo of a turbaned woman in bare feet lifting the shrouded corpse of a dead child, perhaps a contemporary Muslim Pietà. Godard then produces an emaciated face with the caption “Juif” (fig. 3.7) and interjects a face grimacing in pain in front of a stretch of barbed wire with the caption “Musulman” (fig. 3.8); this particular nomenclature evokes an undecidable in situ montage, as the figure shown here might be a Muslim or possibly a Jew or Christian named as Muslim by the concentration-camp inmates of the final solution, who designated fellow prisoners lacking the will to survive by this orientalist appellation. There is

Figure 3.7. Jew. Still from Jean-Luc Godard, dir., Notre musique (2004)

First-Person Shooters: The Critique of Monopoly Violence / 137

Figure 3.8. Musulman. Still from Jean-Luc Godard, dir., Notre musique (2004)

a quick segue to the Bosnian students reexamining an image of a death’shead face shedding a death’s-head mask (fig. 3.9)—a doubled memento mori, the same iconic lesson that the “Muslim” fulfilled for the inmates in the camps. Godard continues to narrate: “In 1948, the Jews waded through water to reach the Holy Land. . . . [the juxtaposition of the Kosovo refugees and Giotto’s flight to Egypt is repeated here] . . . The Palestinians walked into the water to drown. Shot and reverse shot.” He shuffles images to and fro as the camera focuses on the back of his head, reinforcing his faceless recession. He concludes, “The Jews became the stuff of fiction; the Palestinians of documentary,” as he examines a postwar photo of stateless European Jews wading ashore, “returning home,” which alternates with a scene of Palestinians on Yawm an-Nakbah (Day of Catastrophe), crossing the Jordan into exile. Godard only recognizes the distinction between the fictive and the documentary as an ideological hierarchy dependent on the reciprocal montage of these idioms. History is the shuffling and assignment of Israelis and Palestinians into different media regimes, different media geographies of truth and fact-setting, sensibility and insensibility, in which

138 / Chapter Three

the documentary enclosure and exile assigned to Palestinians, as an element of their relative invisibility and devaluation, struggles against the designer victimage and prestige of Hollywood fiction. Earlier in the film the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish (fig. 3.10), in addressing an Israeli interviewer, proposes his own citational theory of historical montage based on a theory of the unconscious trace or montage that permits historical recognition and legibility. Darwish states: “I want to speak in the name of the absentee. . . . [Palestinians] . . . are only recognized because of the Jews. Do you know why we Palestinians are well-known? Because you are our enemies. Interest in us is as a result of interest in the Jewish issue. You have caused us defeat but given us fame.” In the Sarajevo class, waves of student conversation and laughter interrupt and overlay Godard’s exegesis as he moves on to talk of Borg and Heisenberg walking by Kronborg Castle in Denmark (renamed Elsinore Castle in Hamlet). The accumulated soundscape, Godard’s commentary, and the student’s chatter recede and flow like flotsam and jetsam washing up at the edge of the camera’s lens as historical witness and its recess. In the commentary Heisenberg exclaims there is nothing special about this castle. Borg replies: “Yes, but if you say Hamlet’s Castle it becomes special.”

Figure 3.9. Memento mori. Still from Jean-Luc Godard, dir., Notre musique (2004)

First-Person Shooters: The Critique of Monopoly Violence / 139

Figure 3.10. Mahmoud Darwish, “I am looking for the poet of Troy.” Still from Jean-Luc Godard, dir., Notre musique (2004)

Godard’s hands alternate a realist painting of Kronborg in the daytime with a gothic image of the castle obscured in fog. He quips, “Imaginary, certitude; the real, uncertainty, the principle of cinema.” He is asked by a student if he thinks that “lightweight digital cameras will save cinema.” He does not reply. His face remains hooded in the shadows, and the lens turns to a bare light bulb wildly swinging back and forth overhead—shot/ reverse-shot—like a puppet on a string in the surrounding darkness. Hell For Godard we can have no cultural memory of modern war independent of photography and cinema as the practico-inert of war. The opening section of Notre musique, titled “Hell,” indifferently cross-splices and crossreferences fragments of Hollywood-style war films, documentary or news footage, and found footage, erasing any threshold between fact and fiction, image and event, before and after, perception and action. He aims for a cinematic efficacy that allows no space or time for an affective response to these bulletlike discharges—though many of the images, separately and in

140 / Chapter Three

sequence, are choreographic. The serial acceleration of death and destruction, of the anamorphic production and erasure of forms, becomes sheer deafening white noise (there is no matching synchronized sound track for each brief image fraction). One reechoing motif is that of a body falling down to a center of gravity, in a movement not unlike Heinrich von Kleist’s marionettes; this is the humanizing, and sometimes grace-giving, incline from the upright to the prone, traversing a home movie of children playing at war amidst sand dunes, a collapsing and dying Vietcong teenage girl, and nuns abasing themselves in cruciform poses on the floor of a church. Godard excavates war through intentionally accented oneiric montage flows because he is obsessed with the explicit projection and reception of technologically executed and reported war as a mediumless dream—the occultation and demediatization that installs violence as uncontestable immediacy, literality, transparency, and certitude, which he associates with the imaginal. Consider the clamor over “real-time reportage” in the early days of the war on terror, which effaced technical reproducibility to incarnate the event in itself as the verifying portability of the immediate. Godard deploys montage to counter the self-effacement of the mediatic in both the prosecution and the reporting of jus ad bellum as the automation of truth as transparency. This mediatic self-effacement includes a self-targeting nullification of war by which sovereignty immunizes itself—effacing its damage, lawlessness, and inertia through the targeted reframing of its own violence in an exercise of force protection. Hell is mapped as a cinematized underworld, a dystopic political abyss. The “Hell” section presents wartime as dreamtime, the unstoppable flow of “our music,” as a political imaginary undermining the difference between the factual and the fictive, or deploying the latter as a shot/reverse shot dynamic, thereby presenting a third space. This section portrays an historical nightmare from which Godard is struggling to awake through deliberate reimmersion in the logic of historical montage as the mode of motion of statist dreamtime. This political stream of consciousness is the archive of surplus, deferred, inassimilable, and inadmissible material as always reactivatable historical debris. This is the cinematic registration of history itself as disavowed collateral damage, past, present, and future—as an optical-political unconscious. Like the Freudian unconscious, this oneiric abyss performs as an apparatus of self-immunization through denial, disavowal, defacement, repression, and encryption. Godardian cinematic hell enjoins the haptics of an underworld, the unconscious, the underscore (our music), the practico-inert of serialized image flows, and the recesses

First-Person Shooters: The Critique of Monopoly Violence / 141

of the crypt and encryption, which provoke endless decipherment of these uninheritable and buried traces he excavates. Photopolitics invests in war as oneiric space and time where war objectifies, spatializes, maps, and materializes an unconscious structured like a state.22 I borrow this concept from Avital Ronell, who extrapolates from Lacan’s formulation of an unconscious structured like a language. In this model a particular posture of the unconscious unfolds beyond repression, or the absence of consciousness, as Hyppolite describes it: “But we certainly find destruction there. We must thus clearly distinguish between the destructive instinct and the form of destruction, otherwise we will not understand what Freud meant. In negation, we must see a concrete attitude at the origin of the explicit symbol of negation [négation]; this explicit symbol alone makes possible something like the use of the unconscious, all the while maintaining the repression . . . one always finds . . . in a negative formulation, the hallmark of the possibility of having the unconscious at one’s disposal even as one refuses it.”23 Hyppolite’s final formulation above succinctly describes my understanding of the doctrine and act of collateral damage in war as a disavowal of violence. Deleuze converges with Ronell and Godard in describing the unconscious in the language and logistics of military ballistics and cartography, as a moving itinerary that “follows world-historical trajectories.” “The unconscious no longer deals with persons and objects, but with trajectories and becomings; it is no longer an unconscious of commemoration but one of mobilization, an unconscious whose objects take flight rather than remaining buried in the ground.”24 The unconscious as trajectory or line of flight is externalized as a persistent automaticity in misfire and overkill, in the overreaching of targets, and in the default mechanical hyperbole and autokinetic overdrive of collateral damage. The unconscious, structured like a state, subtends, exceeds, and undermines ostensively judicious, prudential, and finite means-ends ratios. This dronelike underwriting of a war of disavowed excess, indemnified and immunized from its own rippling damage, is an oneiric formation that is contingently extrojected in nightmare settings such as the Abu Ghraib tableau. Godard’s oneiric wartime and threnody signals the end of an imputedly technocratic war for the good, but not of its dream, the “tropium” of just war itself.25 This automated ballistical unconscious is a plasticity of violence, an infinition of force deposited in technological modes of motion but certainly not containable within the machinic, and therefore suggesting a different thinking of the machine. In Notre musique Godard links the montage machine to a liquid archive that negates the finite and the

142 / Chapter Three

finalized in fast-forward filmic afterlife. The latter extends the tropology of war in time and space, putting it in service for emerging forensic phantasms of the political that have yet to arrive, but that will draw down its particular cultural forms and justifications from this archive of cinematic teleprompts. The association of an unconscious with the densities and opacities of language and bureaucratic-technocratic forms intersects the political unconscious with the determining and encrypted sediments of the practicoinert of the state. In late-modern war, the cultures of governmental design that are associated by James Scott with “seeing like a state” can be rescripted, in their cognitive maps and sociometric ordinance, as dreaming like a state.26 As the practico-inert of war’s excess materiality and immateriality, this oneiric political milieu marks the indistinction between authoritarian and nonauthoritarian states subsumed under the schemata of the autonomic or drone state. The latter reaches its zenith as an intensive totality in war, as a hyperperformance of the statist unconscious. There is an intrinsic metonymy here striating the incessant droning of war machines— linguistic, imagistic, and technical—and something like an inertial will driven by encrypted codes. The figure of the drone returns modernity and its aftermaths to a heliocentric model of sovereignty, irrespective of how multiple, capillary, or miniaturized drones and war become. The rise of these machines, these portative sovereignties, and porta-sanitizing devices means that they no longer turn around the world—for the world that is being made by this apparatus will increasing come to rotate around it (see my discussion of drone typographies in chapter 4). Sovereignty is drone to the extent that it is always circling around itself without ever achieving closure. This figure of the drone is not simply the latest expression of a sovereign decision and will, now augmented and extended by “tech.” Rather, we must work retrospectively from the microcosmic drone to the artifactory of a macrosovereignty as confessing itself, particularly through war, as having been, and invariably projecting a condition of circular, self-enclosed autonomy and self-regulating automatisms—a political solitude, or what should be called circumdomination. The cinematized dream war presented by Godard is irreducible to a superimposed mediatic outside or supplementation, misrecognition, and distortion of a prior actuality of war by reportage, public relations, or disinformation campaigns. It is commemorative neither of a precinematized event nor of the originary conditions of antagonism that make a war just. Godard recognizes no prior actuality of war without cinematization in its widest sense, in which visual realism is one imaginary and virtuality

First-Person Shooters: The Critique of Monopoly Violence / 143

among others. The latter is welded to the material, perceptual stratigraphy of war that fuses technicity (montage), the real, and the dream. The mode of motion of montaged images captures the staggered, jump-started, juddering momentum of the war machine as an apparatus that produces pain, law, justice, and the good in a state of dream defined in part as a state of certitude in the virtual. Godard uses war as indexical of the degree to which technicity has colonized the unconscious and, in turn, has itself been refurbished as a dream form. He further presents a filmography of war, as a mythography of witnessing, understood as part and parcel of the unconsciousness of war in its apperceptual formation and affectivities, in being completely entangled in war’s kinesis—cuts, fast-forward, freezeframing, and self-erasure. In the “Hell” section, various war and witnessing machines reciprocally come into visibility as the making and unmaking of worlds and their percepts; the war/witnessing machine cuts up and restructures everyday experience and topography in a manner akin to oneiric cinematic montage. However, this abyss is a thoroughly commodified unconscious, colonized by the consciousness industries of Hollywood, television, and the news media. In one of Godard’s earliest war films, Les carabiniers, the two lead characters return home from war with a suitcase full of first-personshooter trophies and “spoils” (fig. 3.11a). These turn out to be hundreds of postcards of the buildings, cities, trains, luxury cars, cultural monuments, landscapes, animals, factories, and planetary constellations they have attacked, destroyed, and plundered, which are displayed like playing cards by the two veterans in montaged assemblages and as commodity phantasmagoria (figs. 3.11b and c).27 They slap down their postcards on a kitchen table in much the same gesture in which Godard, thirty years or more later, will shuffle his shots and reverse shots in Sarajevo. The demobilized soldiers treat this oneiric inventory of modernity as their accrued war profit; the icon is tangible surplus value, an interest-bearing excess over the thing itself. This surplus value of the image over the violently displaced thing will reappear in the discussion of the circulating American postcards of lynched African Americans in the last chapter of this book. However, Godard’s message in this scene is that the riflemen have fought for and vanquished, occupied and expropriated phantasmagoria and not objectivity. Objectivity, due to war, lies in ruins and disarray, like the traumatized fact that can no longer speak for itself—a silence that renders the image their ex post facto detritus. The real in political montage lies in the kinetics of war as a cinematized oneiric flow that transmutes concrete places and in situ bodies into disframed, recuttable,

Figure 3.11. Postcard loot. Still from Jean-Luc Godard, dir., Les carabiniers (1963)

First-Person Shooters: The Critique of Monopoly Violence / 145

composited, and circulating mass articles with a magnetic power of their own. One is tempted here, through fast-forwarded intercutting montage, to insert into this buffet of images the confected Iraqi weapons of mass destruction and the fleshed pornographic dreams in which naked Abu Ghraib prisoners are posed, amassed, and photographed as spoils of war. The Dream of the Hand Throughout Godard’s Sarajevo lesson, authorial embodiment itself is presented as an assemblage of shots/reverse shots as he manipulates truth claims through montage. Godard’s recessed face and torso are barely discernible in the dimly lit background behind the images and behind the concealing and disclosing hands of a white-gloved magician. In their showing of montage, the foregrounded hands of the auteur direct the eye of the witness. In Bosse’s portrait of the Leviathan, upraised hands hold the emblematic instruments of authority and war. The interpellated witness visually (mis)recognizes the immediacy and givenness of the evidentiary image, whereas Godard’s montaging hands embody mediacy, artifice, and indirection. It is as if the shape-shifting hands mark the place where the optical unconsciousness episodically and ephemerally resides. Godard thus tracks cinematic montage and the first-person shooter back to the hand as much as to the gaze as he unfolds, relativizes, and parodies “unmediated” truth claims.28 Visual immediacy is based on the erasure or stratification of other sensory mediations as practico-inert, such as the tactility that in montage intervenes through synoptic assemblages to simulate historical causation. Godard’s manual montaging and demontaging poses the image work of history itself as violent monstration. Derrida, Godard, and the first-person shooter in gaming and politics converge on this metonymy of monstration, signifying hands, monstrosity, sovereignty, and the simulacral, and in doing so return us to the priority Aristotle accorded touch (haphe), which pervades the entire body (pan to soma), as the prototype of all sensory experience: “The possibility of touch is thus strictly correlative with the possibility of sensuous life as such; the one necessarily exists and ceases to exist alongside the other. This is the sense of Aristotle’s statement, whose importance here cannot be overestimated, that all the senses ‘perceive by touch’ (haphei).”29 Semiotic tactility and cinematic tactility converge in the production of sensibility as monstration. Derrida writes of the hand and sovereignty: We are a monster, in the singular, a sign that shows and warns, but all the more singular since, showing, signifying, designating, this sign is void of

146 / Chapter Three sense (deutungslos). It calls itself void of sense, simply and doubly monster, this “we”: we are a sign—showing, informing, warning, pointing as sign toward, but in truth toward nothing, a remote sign [à l’écart], at a distance from the sign [en écart par rapport au signe], a display [montre] that deviates from the display or monstration, a monster that shows [montre] nothing. Isn’t such a gap in the sign’s relation to itself and to its so-called normal function already a monstrosity of monstrasity [monstrosité], a monstrosity of monstration? . . . The hand: the proper characteristic of man as sign, monstre (Zeichen). The hand reaches and extends, receives and welcomes—and not just things: the hand extends itself, and receives its own welcome in the hands of the other. The hand holds. The hand carries. The hand designs and signs, presumably because man is a sign.30

The monster is void of sense because it defies natural and sensible form; the hand, as the author of signs, has to signify from a cavity of insensibility as its degree zero and as external to the sense that this site puts into play—for Godard this void is the locus of the auteur and the sovereign who originates code. Monstration and the void of sense, concentrated in the sign, structures the designing hand as a praxis of screening, disclosing, and veiling: “The hand comes into its essence . . . only in the movement of truth, in the double movement of concealment and disclosure.”31 In Latin this doubled aspect of design is traced to two terms, de¯signa¯re and dissigna¯re. The latter form in classical Latin means “to order, plan” and “to scheme, perpetrate” and in post-classical Latin “to separate, distinguish,” “to destroy.” This doubled structure of design brings the aesthetic and the political in proximity—political design in the multiple sense of the latter term becomes patterning, projecting, and conspiracy as an aesthetic of display and hiding. The hand cannot be terminally objectified, insofar as it objectifies for and institutes a gaze. Derrida writes: “The hand must be thought. But it cannot be thought as a thing, a being, even less as an object. The hand thinks before being thought; it is thought, a thought, thinking.”32 The hand, in showing, pointing, and signaling, shapes and grasps by creating “presence-at-hand” (Vorhandenheit or Zuhandenheit). The hand simulates and virtualizes presence and truth in practices of “manuscripture,” writing with the hand, that traverse the history of script from calligraphy to typography to cinematic montage as manual manipulation of the image. Godard’s performance reenacts this sequence whereby the gaze is traceable back to a defamiliarizing, estranging, and disorienting performance of the hand as image-generating media. The hand is autonomous from the body

First-Person Shooters: The Critique of Monopoly Violence / 147

and the eye as a prehensile prosthetic; it assumes the glove of prosthesis as tool and machine but is already an archprosthesis, a tool of tools. These gestures reimagine and materialize the body as held in the closure of the hand. Disembodied hands, such as Godard’s, do not point to the lack of the body but give birth to a body. The hand is both corporeal and incorporeal (shot/reverse shot) in writing the authorial body that the hand grasps and dreams as its inceptual ground. Derrida speaks of the sovereignty of this mediatic hand: “The being of the hand (das Wesen der Hand) does not let itself be determined as a bodily organ of prehension (als ein leibliches Greiforgan). It is not an organic part of the body intended to grasp, take hold, or indeed grip [griffer], and let us add grasp [prendre], comprehend, conceive, if one moves from Greif to begreifen and to Begriff” (40). The body does not have the hand, and the latter is not a simple organ but denatures the materially given and is thereby disorganic because the hand holds and molds bodies, things, and organicity itself. The hand is a disorganicizing organ because composing, compositing, and virtualizing the body as semiotic material initiates a severance and a division in the organic; gesture and design proceed by cutting, editing, and reframing. The severed/severing hand designs by means of decomposition as a negation of organic giveness. The hand is the difference that institutes an identity and an organization of which it is a part but from which it remains undetermined as the concentrate of free activity. A self-severed, autonomous, and signifying hand separates from the organism in its prosthetics as a mode of dis-organicization. Situated between gaze and object/product the hand is transitivity, the medial in itself; its flesh, ligature, and skeleton sustain no outline, no tactile-optical equilibrium, only a liquefaction that, like the dream, engenders discernible outlines. It is the origin and unconsciousness of the first-person shooter in a tactility and a digitality that precedes optics. The hand is thus a site and an author of aesthesis; it grasps perception, which is to hold nothing, hence Derrida’s reference to the void of the sign, which renders the hand complicit with anaesthesis or the insensible as it erases itself in the production of the sign. The sovereignty of the montaging hand lies in its relation to projection; it is a cinematic screen or ground from and upon which meaning is differentially projected and circulated. For if the hand virtualizes and simulates, it also dissimulates, as it is hand in glove with deception, design, indirection, misdirection, and concealment, wherein sense is given with one hand while another takes it away, wherein one hand reveals while another conceals, wherein one hand records and archives and the other erases in the denegations of shot/reverse shot. The rule of the hand is two-sided and cinematic because it is doubled by an-

148 / Chapter Three

other hand; it is a mirror of itself and a theater of mirroring. As the locus of citation and virtualization, the hand grasps itself in its intrinsic conditions of production, its gestural economy of presence/absence, of the trace and the erased. The hand is the incorporealizing edge time of the corporeal that divides embodied kinesis against itself.33 This has become increasingly evident with the emergence of robotic remote killing technologies, in which the hand is prosthetically extended into the incorporeality of the interdigital, where it reappears in the inorganic but still overreaching ocular grasp of the drone. In Godard’s 2003 short film In the Darkness of Time, there is a segment titled “The Last Minute of Silence,” which is a torture scene extracted from his 1963 feature film Petit soldat.34 The interrogation setting is a white bathtub, evoking the use of the baignoire, the torture of the bathtub, or the violence of le bain de minuit (the midnight bath), a technique employed by French paratroopers in the Algerian war that expressed the association of torture with sociopolitical hygiene. In this sequence a prisoner is forced into the bathtub and handcuffed to the spigots (fig. 3.12) as he is interrogated at gunpoint and repeatedly asked: “Who did you phone . . . What is the number . . . What number did you dial?” He is subjected to an early form of waterboarding, but the focus of the scene is his bound hands. One of the interrogators lights a bundle of matches that are held under the prisoner’s hands, which contort and flap frantically and silently in a futile attempt to escape the fire, as if they were the wings of a bird struggling to fly. The camera gravitates to the silent language of the hands under the flame,

Figure 3.12. Still from Jean-Luc Godard, dir., In the Darkness of Time (2003)

First-Person Shooters: The Critique of Monopoly Violence / 149

forcing the spectator into an involuntary act of complicit and abhorrent decipherment. The bird language of the hands is acquired immediately through the translative clarity of torture. The prisoner’s face only appears intermittently during this assault, but it remains inscrutable, with eyes shut and a vacant expression of mute endurance. All the affect and haptics of being tortured are pressed into the macabre dance of the hands. As the title of the segment indicates, these hands under torture are at the last minute of silence and are thrown into voiceless eloquence through this contorted choreography. Detached from the body through torture, the hands are mechanically assaulted by another detached, impersonal hand that holds the flame, a light, against the first, as if this incandescence of pain could be fused with the light of exposure, of a secret brought back from concealment. Godard rejects any commensuration of torture with information. Rather, this is cinematic torture, the torture of the cinematic by cinema, which is redoubled by the camera relaying this scene. The hand as inquisitor assaults another hand with cinematizing light, expecting hidden things to appear in view from out of the assaulted hands. This scene summarizes the complicity of cinema and war that is echoed in Notre musique. Godard, in a microspace and through microseconds of unbearable and unsupportable intensity, shows us the de-signing hand, the pure war of the medium turned against itself, unweighted by any legible content, by any obligation to explain, expound, or justify. The hands in pain, in their cinematic isolation, are removed from any humanity in their absolute severance from the body and face and yet are the concentrate of all that which can signify humanity in a deep alterity. This silent humanity is glimpsed briefly when one exhausted hand rests on the other in a caress of consolation, empathy, and intimacy that in this last minute of silence lifts these beings beyond the space of torture and war, but not the time and memory of cinema. The Beast Before the Law It didn’t make any sense to me, I couldn’t see why they were doing what they were doing . . . He moved, they hit him . . . I was trying to look at and view what they were looking at . . . Evidently they saw something I didn’t see.35

Less than two months into Operation Desert Storm in 1991, the targeted and manhandled Other returned home with the televised beating of Rodney King, but with a good deal more density and intractability than the Iraqis, sterilized by first-person-shooter smart bombs and their video feeds. Originally visualized outside the prescribed circuits of fact production,

150 / Chapter Three

this black body broke through the nets of anesthesia instituted by Desert Storm. Its shock effect derived not only from long-standing racial scars, but also from the concurrent postracial myth being played out through Desert Storm. The media campaign in the desert succeeded in sterilizing the postVietnam violence of the state. The images of King’s beating showed the state making pain. Between Desert Storm and King’s beaten body, the disembodied public eye was pulled back to the disembodying tactility of the hand. The immediate shock of the televised beating originated in unprogrammed sensory substitution. Even the viewer insulated by race and class could envision and feel the involuntary projection of his or her body into the arc marked by the swinging police batons as they came down upon the collective retina that was suddenly rendered haptic by this descent. Desert Storm and the beating of Rodney King unfolded two irreconcilable national narratives. The spectacle of state-manufactured trauma interdicted the visual myth of first-person-shooter violence. King’s manhandling and mangling was the skeletal x-ray image flashed upon the presenting surface of the technical optics of Desert Storm. The war presented an optics of pure immediacy without any material drag and celebrated a triumphalist sense of a narrative completion, while King’s beating laid bare another layer of wounding encounters: unfinished history, retentional repositories of race and violence as a mise-en-scène—bound to return in the near future despite the capacity to change channels between “postracial” war without and raced violence within. Two antagonistic icons of national experience impinged on the public screen of electronic consciousness without resolution, without one set of images offering a coherent account of the other. The actual beating of Rodney King and its subsequent juristic reconstruction mobilized a series of first-person-shooter scenarios within which King’s body could be pre-positioned as a racial, disciplinary, and legal object. Through this metonymy of spaces, explicit and inferred, King’s body achieved a racialized kinesthetics for which the video of beating was only a pretext. Twenty minutes prior to King’s car being stopped by the police, Officer Powell tapped that infamous statement into his communication unit concerning a recent case: “Sounds almost as exciting as our last call, it was right out of ‘Gorillas-in-the-Mist.’”36 He was referring to a domestic dispute involving an African American family, though he later denied that the remark had any racial connotations. The media and the prosecution gravitated to this image but missed its deeper significance by psychologizing the racist imagery of Powell’s remark, which severed it from the everyday exercise of police power. The movie Gorillas in the Mist in this instance clearly evokes the jungle,

First-Person Shooters: The Critique of Monopoly Violence / 151

the wilderness, and the frontier: extimate spaces, as opposed to legal interiors. These are anomic terrains from which the police not only extract the disciplinary subject as so much raw material to be reworked by the state, but reenact their monopoly of violence, which is why these terrains have to be encoded as the freely circulating, disorderly violence of the commons. Bestiality continued to leak into subsequent characterizations of King made by the accused police and expert defense witnesses. In testimony, Officer Powell referred to King as “bear-like” and “getting on his haunches.”37 The jungle imagery of simians in the mist may have informed Officer Powell’s project of both taming and civilizing King within a prescribed spatial perimeter within which King could be outlined as a legal artifact. During his examination by his attorneys and the prosecution, he stated: “I yelled at him [King] to get down on the ground, to lay [sic] down on the ground. . . . He repeated the motion again, getting up again. . . . I stopped and evaluated whether he was going to lie there on the ground or whether he was going to get up again. . . . It was a continuing series of him getting back up on his arms, pushing up, sometimes raising [sic] to his knees, and sometimes getting on his haunches. I commanded him to get down on the ground and when he wouldn’t go for it, I hit him in the arms and tried to knock him back down.”38 At one point the prosecutor asked: “What was the reason for hitting him?” P OW E L L :

I didn’t want him to get back up.

PROSECUTOR: P OW E L L :

What were you striking at?

I was striking at his arms. . . . I was trying to knock him down from

the pushup position, back down onto the ground where he would be in a safer position. . . . I was scared because he was being told to lie down on the ground; he was getting hit with the baton several times and he continued to get back up. . . . I was looking up for something else to keep him down on the ground.39

It took forty-six baton blows to visually incarcerate King into the corridor of “the ground.” During the course of that evening Officer Powell’s geographical focality moved from “jungle” to “the ground,” a provisional territorialization, while King was shifted from a metonymic animality to an anthropomorphic subject in compliance. It could be observed that King’s insistence on standing up, “getting on his haunches,” was an attempt to reassert his bipedal humanity, whereas for the police “compliance” initially meant the enforcement of prone animality from which human subjection could be manually extracted. Sergeant Charles Duke, the defense’s police

152 / Chapter Three

procedures expert, described this mannequinlike and thanatological posture as viewed from the video: “When he was in a flat position, where his feet were not cocked, where they were straight up and down and where his hands were above his head or at his side, he was not hit.”40 Sergeant Stacey Koon, the commanding officer at the scene of King’s beating, also testified to the meaning of this posture and added that at this point King’s bodily response and directed speech to the officers beating him signaled the final level of compliance. The successful confinement of King and the acquisition of linguistic reciprocity marked the neutering of the animalized body and its internalization of the will of the state. A “gorilla-in-the-mist,” a black “bear” that insisted on rising on its “haunches,” was turned by force into a subject in communication. Official Los Angeles Police Department procedures underwrite this civilizing sequence. Police department directives on the use of violence while performing an arrest locate the subject capable of discourse at the lowest end of the scale of noncompliance and physical intervention. The subject in logos is the subject in law. The further removed the arrestee is from language, the closer the suspect is to the body and thus to escalating violence by the state. I suggest that for the police who beat him, this violent passage of King from animality and the body to language and compliance intimately involved judgments concerning his capacity to sense and to remember pain as a determination of his humanity or his animality. When asked by the prosecution whether he considered King to be an animal, Officer Powell replied that King “was acting like one . . . because of his uncontrollable behavior.” In other words, King was bestial to the extent that he could not feel and therefore could resist the baton blows. Animalistic anesthesia to pain functioned as a determination in negation that retroactively established the sanitized and almost humanitarian application of “reasonable violence” by the police. The jury distributed the police and King along a graded sensory scale. It is the fictionalized visual acuity of the police in assessing the impact of their violence after the fact that separated them materially from their own bodies and actions and that becomes a contributing factor in the jury’s exoneration of the officers. The jury assessed King’s beating as the transcription of law onto a rogue animality, elevating this incident to the level of racial allegory, which became a disavowed factor in the trial, hidden behind the artificed realism of the video and expert analysis. King could not be reasonable or lawful because for the police and the jury he was submerged in a resistant nonhuman body, without senses and corresponding judgment. Confronting his alleged insensate resistance, the police ultimately endowed King with affectivity by inducing

First-Person Shooters: The Critique of Monopoly Violence / 153

the levels of pain that could finally register the will of the state on his body and voice. King had to be taken to a hospital after his beating. Medical attendants assisting with his treatment testified to a statement made by Officer Powell (and later denied by him) to King, who worked at a sports stadium: “We played a little hardball tonight. Do you remember who was playing? . . . We won and you lost.”41 It is a moment of replay and summation after the act. King’s wounds are being tended at the instruction of the man who beat him. The author of violence, grown intimate after his labors, inquires whether his prisoner can recollect what has passed between them and whether he is now sensible of the social relation they have entered and how pain had been used to conduct his conduct. Powell positions himself as a first-person shooter and requires recognition of this status from King. This inquiry presumes King’s capacity to take part in a common cultural ground—a mutuality that exists for Officer Powell only after the beating as the price of admission into the American cultural commons. Baseball becomes a ludic vehicle that converts batons into bats. The baseball diamond itself, with its fixed player positions, becomes a normalizing reverse shot to the grid of violence from which this remade King has been extracted. It is through this dialogue of recognition that the agent of violence retrieves what he has authored through his acts. What is expected to answer him is his creation, his violence, and his body, doubled and returned in the logos and submission of the properly emplaced subaltern. Powell’s hospital discourse is too deeply enmeshed in the narratology of raced and state violence to have been fabricated. At a minimum, as rumor, it is a spontaneous populist confession of what had actually taken place on the freeway. In The Day of the Scorpion, the second volume of Paul Scott’s Raj Quartet, an analogous encounter takes place between a white English policeman and his Indian prisoner, whom he has just finished beating. The victim, Hari Kumar, describes “the situation”—the creation and acknowledgment of dominance and racial iconicity through torture—to an ex post facto government inquiry: —What in fact was this situation? . . .  —It was a situation of enactment. —These ideas of what you call the situation were the DSP’s [District Superintendent of Police] not your own? —Yes he wanted them to be clear to me.  .  .  . Otherwise the enactment would be incomplete. . . . The ideas without the enactment lose their significance. He said if people would enact a situation they would understand its

154 / Chapter Three significance. . . . He said that up until then our relationship had only been symbolic. It had to become real. . . . He said . . . [it] wasn’t enough to say he was English and I was Indian, that he was ruler and I was one of the ruled. We had to find out what it meant . . . the contempt on his side and the fear on mine. . . . He said . . . we had to enact the situation as it really was, and in a way that would mean neither of us ever forgetting.42

Scott, writing fiction based on his army service in India during World War  II, both depicts the act of racialized torture and ventriloquizes his own analysis of it in the mouth of Kumar’s white interrogator. Through violence, King, like Hari Kumar, is meant to acquire memory, a colonial history of who “won” and who “lost.” In his own “situation of enactment,” Powell confirms the first-person-shooter gaming logic of his graphic usage of King’s body. King is asked to recollect hierarchy, its origin, and his position in the game of force. This is why Officer Powell speaks to King about baseball, memory, and hierarchy at precisely the moment that his victim is receiving medical attention. Police violence assaulted King’s body; police-ordered humanitarian medical treatment remakes the sensory capacity of that body, thereby assigning King a sensibility under law that was denied to him during the beating and then later removed once more at the trial. It is at this juncture that Powell asks King to remember through the senses, through the removal and manipulative restoration of the senses as an act of state archivization.43 In Scott’s novel, Hari Kumar identifies the attempted restitution of sensory integrity by his aggressor as the final stage of his racial humiliation, “the offer of charity. He gave me water. He bathed the lacerations.”44 The culminating disapparition of King’s body and pain took place at court. Isolated frames of the video were time coded by the prosecution and freeze-framed and grid mapped by the defense as if the event were both a forensic and archaeological site, as if police violence had to be constructed as already forensic in its action and damage—indemnity could be achieved through demonstrating an in-place archaeology, a reinscribed juridical and judicious depth of field for juridical action. The courtroom rehearsal by the police of the events of that night recast their gestures as an anticipation of the inadvertent video that on that evening they had not known to exist. The reorganization of the video’s surface was in effect the preparation of a visual script and teleprompt for police veridiction that further restored the first-person-shooter mastery that had been sullied in the negative public reaction to the unvarnished video. The new video resembled the scopic grids superimposed upon their targets by the smart bombs of

First-Person Shooters: The Critique of Monopoly Violence / 155

Desert Storm, through which much of the American televisual public was able to enjoy the war in the immunity of their armchairs. Like those videos, the heightening of visual penetration for the gathered spectatorship would be enabled by the absence of any other sensory strata, including the voice, screams, and haptics of the victim of state projectiles. In the Simi Valley courtroom, fragments of action and isolated body parts achieved visibility and relationality as material evidence through shot/reverse shot montage. The grid mapping detached King’s limbs from each other in a serialization that sorted out pertinent parts and actions from inadmissible or complicating residues, artificing a juridical practico-inert and juridical personality within which King was petrified. Visual dissection and manufactured frontality of King’s body provided the defense argument with crucial perceptual and juridical targets. Cinematized time informed the following typical analysis of King’s videoed postures by the use of force expert, Sergeant Duke: “It would be a perception that position 3:36:06 [time code] to be an aggressive position.”45 This discourse was possible because of the occupation of King’s body by the virtual temporalities of slow motion, fast-forward, and freeze-frame, which sublimated the “raw” footage to the rescripting of the grid map and police design. King’s body was remediated into a purely electronic entity with no inwardness or tangibility. His body became a panoramic flat-screen surface susceptible to racial desire as a forensic reassemblage. The court admitted such cinematic fictions and grammars as an unsullied chain of evidence commensurate to crime-scene and laboratory-derived blood work and fingerprints. The material redactions of the reedited video collapsed and flattened the perceptual and temporal divergence between watching edited video fragments and the in situ intent and subjectivity of the police in the fulcrum of violence. The geometricized video screen became the operator of historical time and the anachronic structure of the event. The courtroom commentary of police witnesses embedded a panoramic point of view of the disembodied, offsite first-person shooter/spectator into the evental plane of violence. A refiguring pictorial and juridical gestalt was created by a figure/ground relation that foregrounded selected body parts, sensations, and actions and withdrew others. In their courtroom performance and voice-over narration, the once shadowy figures of the police stepped off the screen and appeared and spoke in the flesh, while the mute black figure remained incarcerated by the video, race, and violence. King only existed at the moment of violence, only in relation to material disorder, never in relation to language, memory, explanation, affect, and reason, as did the police when they testified;

156 / Chapter Three

these mediations distanced the police from King’s mute animality while sealing the latter as his defining condition. These fabrications provided the defense lawyers and the jury with an extraordinary prosthetic penetration to the same extent that the subjective and sensorial violence undergone by King was redacted. The agency of the participants in the trial was based on sensory and communicative privileges denied to King from beating to verdict and always accorded to the police (King never testified in court). As the accused policemen accounted for their actions that night, they re-viewed and re-cast their violence through the pseudo-exactitude of a network of prosthetics inorganic and organic, interfacing the video lens and the raced body, which further effaced the temporal interval between enactment and testimony. This compression remapped the crime scene into a game board of pre-fixed positions and prescribed moves, many of which had been historically preempted by the archaeology of the black male body and its cinematic idioms long before the beating and the trial. The reediting of the video juxtaposed temporally and spatially distanced acts that extended to the empowering courtroom vision and discourse of the defendants. By such means the defense was able to convert the video into a time-motion study in police kinesthetic efficiency and productivity, in which the goal was to visually manufacture the rationality and legality of police violence. In his use-of-force expert testimony, Sergeant Duke exploited the camera’s eye to counterfeit the visual capacities of the police in the midst of the supposedly fear-laden and defensive delivery of baton blows to King. Duke simply invented a semiotics of King’s imminent aggression, turning the video into an anatomical inspection and autopsy that implicitly technicized the gaze and violence of the police in situ during their assault. Duke’s autopsic purview invested image fragments with density, intentionality, and agency to indict King through the phobogenic autonomy of his disconnected limbs: “The suspect has the hand flat on the ground. The arm appears to be cocked. His left leg appears to be bent, coming up in a kneeling position; it appears to be in a rocking position with the other arm flat on the ground in a pushing position.”46 Wlad Godzich asks, how did the “certification of social and legal facts, the discursive standing of the real came to be occulted?”47 He writes: The Greeks designated certain individuals, chosen on the basis of their probity and their general standing in the polity, to act as legates on certain formal occasions in other city states or in matters of considerable importance. These individuals bore the title of and collectively constituted a theoria. (It may be useful to bear in mind that the word is always a plural collective.) . . .

First-Person Shooters: The Critique of Monopoly Violence / 157 The theoria provided a bedrock of certainty. What it certified to having seen could become the object of public discourse. The individual citizen, even, indeed, women, slaves and children, were capable of aesthesis, that is, perception, but these perceptions had no social standing. They were not sanctioned and thus could not form the basis of deliberation, judgment and action in the polity. Only the theoretically attested event could be treated as a fact.48

The theoria apparatus, modeled on practices of optical/auditory inspection and spectatorship—autopsia (seeing for oneself)—is the power of an avowal concerning what is material or immaterial to law, the state, and the polity. Civic theoria was associated with delegations of witnesses sent beyond the precincts of the polis to audit athletic and dramatic performances, religious oracles, and diplomatic events. The theoric gaze relates to a political gaze, as it constructs a civic personality through the performance of an avowal of what can be said to have occurred and implicitly what cannot be performed and archived as an event. This spectatorship is not casual but rather a “ritual centered visuality.”49 As an avowal, it constitutes a veridiction of one’s self within a citizenizing and civilizing structure. This position of avowal is assumed by the Los Angeles police through the technicized theoros of the video as an impersonal and hence implicitly collective gaze. King possessed no such possibility of avowal as the affirmation of citizenship; rather, the form and content of police self-certification is only possible through the exclusion of King from citizenship, polity, humanity, pain, and the senses. King is positioned by the counterfeited video as an anti-theoros in a constitutive vertigo beyond any site of veridiction. His visual and auditory expulsion does not even achieve the status of criminalization, for even the criminal can avow himself—confess and do penance as a civic gesture.50 The bestialized and electronically dissected King had no such possibilities. Even the jury acceded to the authoritative grasp of the event by the theoric gaze of the video. Godzich’s discussion speaks to the question of a right of avowal that replicates itself through the desertification of sensibility across stratified sociopolitical subject positions. Can a fact-setting political theoria allow for counterfactual aesthesis encompassing the nonevent mediated by sensorial difference, and could the latter attain the status of being “worthy of viewing,” what Xenophon called axiotheata, and thus be admissible as a civic avowal?51 Or is domination itself born as constitutive power from the structuring chasm between mandated aesthesis and its privation? Narcosis was the final ingredient in the racial zombification used to make King’s anesthesia and the juridical apperception of police violence

158 / Chapter Three

by the jury. The defendants’ testimony dosed King with virtual “PCP” at the time of his arrest. Yet no physical corroboration was ever provided for this allegation, despite King’s medical examination. The powerful combination of racial innuendo and cinematic dismemberment forged the complicity of the jury in the subtraction of King’s senses. As one jury member declaimed after the trial: “I am thoroughly convinced[,] as the others I believe, that Mr. King was in full control of the whole situation at all times. He was not writhing in pain [emphasis added]. He was moving to get away from the officers and he gave every indication that he was under PCP.”52 King was drugged yet in control, he felt no pain because he was drugged, but he was trying to escape from the massive cordon of police that surrounded him with baton blows that he could not feel. Such imputations by members of the jury attest to the felicities of immaterialized violence that informed the verdict. Another jury member was able to deliver a first-person-shooter theory of the Rodney King movie, which attested to the success of the state’s absorption of the beating into the logic of cinema: “King was directing all the action . . . [he] was choosing the moment when he wanted to be handcuffed.” King, drugged and knocked prostrate to the ground, from which he tries, crawling, to rise, presides over the violence to such an extent that it becomes self-inflicted and self-authored.53 The police testimony (with the exception of that of Officer Theodore Briseño) smuggled the authorial site of violence from the police and planted it on the victim. This was embodiment by directed mimesis and a Lacanian “mirror relation,” in which an imagined and specular Other is endowed with substantive attributes by the originating and dissimulating agent, which restages itself in the patient. Through transcription and transposition, the aggression originating in the model (the police) became the qualifying somatic attribute of the copy (the rogue target). In transferring the origins of their violence to King, the police inhabited and possessed King’s body in an imaginary relation where blackness became protective camouflage for state aggression. Police violence was a reenactment of the intrinsic violence “known” to already inhabit the rogue animal as its political substance. By this mimetic logic, King was the magnetizing pole, attracting, soliciting, and therefore animating the gestures of the police at a distance in a form of sympathetic magic. Blackness, bestiality, narcosis, and anesthesia created both the specularity and the aggressive density of King’s body. King, once targeted by these mythemes, functioned as a neocolonial mirror stage radiating an autonomous racial miasma that by default prejustified state force. Stretched out on the rack of distorted cinematic time and space, King’s body could be

First-Person Shooters: The Critique of Monopoly Violence / 159

described by Sergeant Duke as “a spectrum of aggressive movements.” In the logic of the colonial mirror, the body to be colonized is defaced by fabulation and force in order to turn it into the “dummy hand” as a circulatory metaphor to be filled by the phantasms of the colonizer.54 By fashioning the murky density of the Other, the police regime succeeded in dematerializing its own violence in a crucial displacement. The colonized mirror creature, though specular, becomes “real” and laden with a negative material gravity in an exchange where the violence of the colonizer becomes rational, lawful, and ultimately weightless, if not spiritualized. The immaterialization of state violence by perceptual technologies contributed to the legitimacy of Operation Desert Storm and was also an important dynamic in the Simi Valley courtroom, as indicated by one juror: “They [the jury] didn’t think much damage had been done to King as they looked at the photos [that displayed his bruises].”55 Now a theater of autopsy presupposes a cadaver and nonlife. King was rendered cadaverous in his insensate immunity to pain, in his narcosis, which were the motors of his imputed aggressivity. In his recirculation and reanimation as a legal form, King was treated as a senseless persistence and as a phantomatic movement (ghostly and machinic in the same dimension). Now, beating or even killing an automaton, marionette, mannequin, or ghost is a violence that erases itself as violence, for no life or sentience is here transgressed and damaged. The act of violence that unwills itself as violence at the very point of inflicting damage and pain is a self-indemnifying and self-immunizing violence. This is the very same lesson that Karadžic´ attempted to teach Danner with the “staged” and “frozen” corpses of the marketplace bombing in Sarajevo not long after King’s beating. In their courtroom reversioning of events, the police played a first-person-shooter game as callously as Karadžic´ had done. Zombification is not just about death in life, but about dead labor, the magical “mechanization” of racially and colonially reduced bodies for the production of extractable surplus out of the living death of the occupied, colonized, or ethnically cleansed. Subsequent to the Simi Valley trial and the Los Angeles crowd actions that ensued from the exoneration of the police, the latter were named in a litigation for violating King’s civil rights. The New York Times sent a reporter to interview Koon prior to the civil trial: Three little girls were playing tag in the living room, a small white dog was barking happily and Sgt. Stacey Koon was rolling around on the rug, demonstrating the actions of the man who was beaten, Rodney G. King. . . . The large screen television set dominates his living room, and Sergeant Koon

160 / Chapter Three cannot seem to stay away from it.  .  .  . “There’s 82 seconds of use-of-force on this tape, and there’s 30 frames per second,” he said. “There’s like 2,500 frames on this tape and I’ve looked at every single one of them not once but a buzillion times and the more I look at the tape the more I see in it. . . . When I started playing this tape and I started blowing it up to 10 inches like I’d blow it up on this wall . . . fill up the whole wall. . . . and all of a sudden, this thing came to life.  .  .  . You blow it up to full size for people, or even half size, if you make Rodney King four feet tall in that picture as opposed to three inches, boy you see a whole bunch of stuff.  .  .  . He’s like a bobo doll. . . . Ever hit one? Comes back and forth, back and forth.”56

In this interview Koon appears to be taken over by and obsessed with the images, now reestablished as a video game within which Koon sought to reassume his first-person-shooter mastery and to which he had become addicted. Both he and King function as bobo dolls in Koon’s marionette theater. Here we have an early indication of the first-person shooter merging into second life through the scenic structure into which he or she is plugged and from which the shooter can no longer be unplugged in becoming as much of a designed prosthetic of the apparatus as the targets on display. Through such mimetic play Koon confirms his bond with King while at the same time resurrecting that body as a zombie or automaton completely subservient to Koon’s will to repetition. Koon uses his own body to reenact King’s and receives his code from that specter which he has counterfeited as real. Koon becomes King playing Koon. It is my suggestion that his mimicry not only reflects and extends the video rerun of the courtroom, but also echoes the actual police violence that with each baton blow simulated and inflicted a rogue bestiality onto King. When, in an act of self-zombification, Koon rolls around on his living room floor imitating— without fear, sensory pain, or shock—the man he has beaten, he merely plays back the black body that was always his own. This play, reminiscent of the child’s improvisations before the Lacanian mirror, testifies to that transposition in the (neo)colonial mirror relation when the possessor becomes the possessed and the author his creation. Koon is the sovereign monteur parodied by Godard, replicating himself in the disassemblage and reassemblage of a black body by shot/reverse shot—King-Koon, KoonKing, over and over again. Mimetic possession extends also to the somatic/ technological interface. Koon’s quasi-visceral rerun of that night is a mimesis of the video’s capacity for flashback, fast-forward, and freeze-frame. Sergeant Koon’s body and memory becomes the mounted screen upon which

First-Person Shooters: The Critique of Monopoly Violence / 161

the video is projected, played, and replayed “back and forth” like a “bobo doll,” marionette, or mannequin. The Critique of Monopoly Violence Rodney King, fabricated as drugged, bestial, and aggressive, was a concentrate of force monopolization by the police. The legal defense of his attackers first established that King was the source, bearer, and vehicle of an improper, formless violence (through his drugged and animalized raciality). The state’s first-person-shooter monopolization of force called “policing” requires an economy of licit and illicit violence that circulates between the state and the nonstate. Thus the confiscation of illicit violence is simultaneously the seizure of the commons’ potentiality for violence; the virtual capacity for violence itself is expropriated by the state, which entails dissembling, counterfeiting, and simulation, as evidenced by the use made of the beating video. The black male body is here unfolded as a reserved locus wherein American policing reenacts its foundation in monopolized violence. Police testimony tapped into the anarchic unruliness, the “constitutive vertigo” harbored in the metaphysics of race and gender.57 This antinomic schema between rarified force and the shapeless violence of the commons is the figuration that Derrida and Agamben respectively term the beast and the sovereign, and the sovereign and the wargus or loup-garou— the predatory wolf-man outside of all social order. King’s body was put to productive use; he was beaten less for what he was actually doing— cringing, evading, and flinching in the face of baton blows and kicks— than for what he might do, or was meant to do as a rogue beast. And this action replayed within law’s purview the primal scene of a law-founding expropriation of the violence of the commons (the “gorillas in the mist”), which is why anomic nature and biologized disorder (raced animality and drug mania) populated the police discourse that advanced the beating of King as a civilizing fate. King’s bestiality was required to establish him as the bodily interruption of the functioning of law—as a site of nonlaw where this interruption and its redress could be made known, displayed, and adjudicated in a dramaturgy of law’s foundation. Establishing King’s bestiality through the video nominated him as a public enemy. The latter must be distinguished from a citizen who merely commits an infraction of the law. As a public enemy, King’s violence was cognate to that of a foreign hostile, thereby rendering police violence civil defense. This was the space and time in which

162 / Chapter Three

King’s miscegenated animality/humanity had to be posed as a necessary prelude to their surgical separation by the police in the beating and later in the anatomy theater of the spliced and splicing video. The exploitation of his embodied formlessness in court erased any distinction between process and judgment; video reversioning was made to coincide with the procedural reason and materiality of law—and no one, neither judge nor prosecutor nor jury member, challenged this artificed chain of evidence. The reversioned video, supplemented by the voice-overs of experts, not only told the story of King’s pacification and arrest, but spun a fable of the becoming-law of law. Law’s foundation is never with and never without theatricality; it institutes the stage, the frame, where foundation is repeated but where it never initially occurs—unless political foundation is nothing more than making a stage, a trace-space, on which the inceptual can appear as such in a state of deferment. The pristine act of foundation is a nonact, for it occurs prior to theater, prior to the stage, screen, and body on which it is played and replayed; and yet it is never wholly captured there, as Sgt. Koon discovered in the bounce-back of the bobo doll he had become. The inaccessibility of foundation without its virtualization and chronic reenactment raises the issue of monopolized violence as a parapolitical and virtual right to right rather than as positive law and a proprietorial right to force. After the first trial, Koon’s obsessive cinematic introjection of King’s body schemata mimetically reoccupied King’s rogue animality and by extension further extended Koon’s violence as King’s. Koon’s replay of King’s raced aggression was a cinematic rewind back to the foundational expropriation and enclosure of the violence of the commons that is preliminary to law. Koon’s “boboing” body choreographed mutually sustaining figures of the beast and the sovereign as respectively below and above the law, and therefore as symmetrically fused in being beyond and before the law. Koon enacts the indifferent violence of the beast and sovereign only to emerge from this immersion to announce the law by asserting their apartheid. His entry into this zone of miscegenation between the beast and the sovereign further slides toward the point where law is posited through the mediacy of a repetition that gives structure to violence. Koon’s own boboing, his passing back and forth between King’s projected aggression and his own, was an exercise not in the mastery of violence, but in the mastery of repetition, which gives violence and race form and thus law. Certainly this was demonstrated in the courtroom with the montaged video, wherein the superiority and reason of state violence were demonstrated in its masterful technical-digital repetition. The reedited video facilitated the assertion of

First-Person Shooters: The Critique of Monopoly Violence / 163

the self-control and juridical-referentiality of police assault as metonyms of monopolization and first-person-shooter mastery. The monopolization of law-founding violence implies that the making of legal actuality requires a reserve of violence held in virtualizing and potentializing suspension as a form of desistance, which is to stand away from violence through an act of violence, to leave off one form of violence by taking on another. Desistance, as nonact, is the retreat to the middle voice of force, where violence belongs neither to agent and patient, the beast and the sovereign, projectile and target, but to a third space that we glimpse in the noumenality of force monopolization. In its desistance from violence, sovereignty puts off from itself any configurable essence of violence; desisted violence persists as a formless force in its nonbeing and promissory phenomenality.58 The mimesis of violence, glimpsed in Koon’s antics, is law’s condition of possibility through desistance; a negation, spacing, or withdrawal from the “stance” of violence and the interruption of the self-identicality of violence through differentiation, repetition, and parodic mimesis. It is law that deploys violence as the material medium of its command to cease and desist as in King’s defensive beating. However, desistance as a mode of mimesis does not eradicate violence but places it at a standstill, which is to enframe, to incarcerate, and to withstand violence in other modalities, including the virtual and the future anterior. The seizure of common violence by monopoly force is the seizure of the very formlessness that steers the reversible passage between the sovereign and the beast. The rarefaction of police violence, in the trial, was not an event of nonviolence, but rather the deactivation of and remotion and desistance from the violence inflicted on King in its imputed lack of inflicted pain and materiality, and in its ex post facto scopic precision. The potential both to rarify and to actualize violence implies desistance as the capacity not to pass violence into factuality, and this withholding contours state monopoly power as a spectral form. Monopolized violence installs not only law but also the virtuality of all consequent state violence held in political amber, which occults state force as untouchable, rarefied, and a surplus to come. Law-positing violence becomes the hidden history of law’s genesis that is covertly repeated throughout law’s subsequent practice, particularly to ensure, secure, and conserve law’s pacified present. Monopolization is law’s occlusion of the unbounded violence that institutes law as the binding and unbinding of violence—as positing and de-positing violence. The relation between actuality and spectrality in monopolized violence is not an inversion of one by the other or the annulment of one by the other, but

164 / Chapter Three

a holding and containment of one in the other. The potential for monopoly violence is potent to the degree that it possessively withholds and delays the finite actualization of state force and does so as promissory credit for future magnitudes of violence. A violence held in visceral suspension is raised over its subjects and objects as both infinite and releasable. Domination is perceptually potent and efficacious when it is sustained in situ as rarified intangibility. Monopolized force expands domination as the correlative expansion of its powers of self-virtualization. If the rarefaction of violence by the state is the removal of violence by violence, what is this violence that before law takes violence from common usage and is the condition for the consequential legality, rationality, and ethicality of state force? If violence simultaneously marks the decision and act of sequestration as well as that which is sequestered, it is a formative formlessness; violence is shapeless, stasiological, and anamorphic in being held back by and within the state and in being both anterior and posterior to its legality, proceduralism, and formalism. Monopolized violence thereby expresses forms of power not limited to self-coincidental legal presence and moral identity, despite the claim that this is its mandated political utility. In this sense, what exactly is internalized in the sovereign sequestration of the presumed violence of the commons if not its projected formlessness, which is expropriated by sovereignty seeking its form in this anarchy of the commons? This is what we encounter in the interface between police violence and King’s gendered, drugged, and animalized blackness or Michael Brown’s “demonic” inflating body at Ferguson—the circulation of formless force between the police and their beast. It is this violence against violence, the form-endowing subtraction of violence by violence that conjugates ongoing state formation as the originary act of policing. It would be this confiscation of the right to and capacity for violence that precipitates the pacific plane of civil society, which presumably offers a stabilized and subject-sustaining purview for the measuring of licit and illicit force. To address this immaterial, formless, deniable, and disavowed violence is to engage Norbert Elias’s thesis of the formative monopolization of violence as a civilizing medium at the level of the collective and individual. He argues that modernization entails a “monopoly mechanism,” the progressive withdrawal of violence from everyday life in tandem with its increasing rarefaction by the state, leading to the creation of internally pacified social spaces.59 Elias connects the stratification of violence with the inauguration of discriminations between formalized/informalized

First-Person Shooters: The Critique of Monopoly Violence / 165

and licit/illicit violence. However, he tends to focus on this process as a product of increasing social differentiation—the monopoly of taxation and the barracking of military force—rather than as a juridical discourse on sovereignty, although internal pacification by sovereign power was a requirement for the increase in the state’s capacity for externalized war.60 Elias posits force monopolization as an extension of positive law, but a different perspective emerges if monopolization is viewed as the origin or as the condition of possibility of law. Unlike Benjamin, Elias only recognizes law-conserving monopolies of violence (the centralization of taxation precedes and engenders the monopoly of violence) and not law positing by monopolized force, or by contests over force monopolies. State formation, for Elias, requires greater controls over the use of force; however, the concept of statist control as formative is but a euphemism for a preexisting capacity for stratified enforcement that reveals a tautological structure embedded in Elias’s evolutionist and gradualist schema (this redundancy also applies to his thesis that the development and possession of greater destructive technologies was a deterrent to the wider use of violence).61 Even more problematic is Elias’s association of force monopolization with increased institutional and subjective inhibitions in the use of violence; this is not borne out by the history of colonialism, or by the global antagonisms and regional counterinsurgencies of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The doctrine of increased restraint does not fully account for gendered, racial, ethnic, colonial, and sexual subjects to whom the rules of civil restraint were inapplicable. Elias associates internal pacification with growing social interdependencies; his thesis does not acknowledge marginalized collectivities and categories barred from socioeconomic reciprocities and civilities, which can be the lubricant for internal strife.62 Elias views monopolized violence as a socially homogenizing political technology rather than as an apparatus perpetuated by the constitutive antagonisms of a society. With Elias, monopoly power is reduced to technophysical force, with little acknowledgment given to the role terror, intimidation, and preemption play in the internal pacification of society. The increase in the subjectifying powers of the state apparatus that enable increased restraint reciprocally enables greater powers for (de)subjectivizing intimidation and terrorizing by the state. Lastly, it has become increasingly evident that centralized states have few inhibitions against the decentralizing informalization, paramilitarization, and outsourcing of violence that is tactically, technologically, and fiscally sanctioned by the monopoly power.

166 / Chapter Three

This denegating schema of monopolized violence follows the Aristotelian concept of privation (steresis, translated into Latin as privatio). Augustine, Aquinas, and other Christian thinkers defined evil as the privation of good (privatio boni). In this sense the state’s privation of the common usage of violence is posed negatively as a privation of a privation with no concluding finality, since any positing of the good cannot transcend its contingency in the privative it negates. This doubling of negation does not resolve into some sublimating affirmation, insofar as the rarefaction of violence held in monopoly does not abolish violence but sustains a noumenal relation to violence as a desistance from force through which law-conserving violence can perdure. Reserved violence claims a phantomatic and tautological legitimacy by virtue of its deferment, recession, and rarefaction, which barricade and indemnify the ethicality of such stratified violence. The fusion of ethicality with rarefaction presupposes a certain capacity to constrain violence to certain repeatable forms or techniques. Violence is consigned by law and the state to exemplary materialities in order to make it matter. Under such containment, common, unconstrained violence is artificed as physis in relation to denaturing, rationalizing, spiritualizing, and ascetic ethical technique. The ideology of collateral damage captures this oscillation between form and formlessness while trumping the latter in terms of the technical reversioning of formlessness. Ethical excess generated by so-called collateral damage becomes technically reducible to amorphic superfluity, error, and miscalculation that the state will eventually contain, rebalance, repair, reshape, or delete in a further monstration of its technics as a surfeit of ethics beyond the ethical. The state’s confiscation of common violence and, along with it, the common witnessing of violence consequently unfold in differential relation to the formless commons as a public terrain meant to be devoid of the improper use of force—the territory of “gorillas in the mist” evoked by the Los Angeles police just before their encounter with King. The state represses the violent and unruly commons through the making of a public sphere, a locus that the state erects as an empty proscenium for the display and application of rarified violence from a position of recess from that sphere. For that which decides on the distribution of the legibility and illegibility of violence cannot legislate from a finite sensible position itself, from a fixed site or from within the very space whose law it constitutes. This anachronic site is formless to the degree that it supplies the political conditionality of forms of force by distributing sites of sensibility and insensibility as a regime of emplacement, as a line of sight, as a theoric gaze.

First-Person Shooters: The Critique of Monopoly Violence / 167

The public sphere functions as a mediating locus between the excess of sovereignty and the excess of the commons. Consider the protest against capital executions (as monopolized violence) spurred by the death warrant of Troy Davis. Protesters mobilized against his execution, motivated by numerous anomalies in testimony and trial procedure and by the statistically demonstrated racial skewing of capital sentences in American courts. The protesters attempted with body and voice to democratize and cross the impassable walls and hierarchical violence of capital punishment as the state’s right to an executable monopoly. All such demonstrations carry the latent possibility of the radical democratization of the death penalty, which is not merely to ask the state to abolish it, insofar as that request still preserves the right of the state to take or not to take life, and the right to either execute or pardon those sentenced to death. Democratizing the abolishment of the death penalty ultimately means to abolish the law-founding and core monopolistic right of sovereignty to let live or to let die. History shows that as long as sovereignty as the underwriter of civil life persists, the death penalty can repeatedly be abolished and reinstated. It is to this existential threat to sovereign right that the civil servants of the death penalty violently react. The commons’ protest against Davis’s execution stood in both visual and ethical excess to the sanitizing incarceration of witnessing mandated and moralized by state executions through screened and classificatory guest lists and the medico-architectural ordering of the theatrical portal of execution.63 Such sanctioned or monopolized witnessing is the annulment of any notion of the public sphere as a perceptual common. It is a simulacrum of the public sphere by invitation only. Screened and incarcerated witnessing at death-penalty events is used to establish the probity, indemnity, and justness of state violence as underwritten by iconoclastic juridical protocols and the Plexiglas and tubular hygiene of chemical killing. Screened witnessing for the screening of state-inflicted death amplifies rarified violence rather than rendering it visually or procedurally common, profane, and adjudicatable. The protestors at Davis’s execution were treated by the state as the return of the violence of the commons, arrayed against the state’s right to decide on life and death. This sense of contaminating interruption was expressed in the protesters’ being kept at a distance from the prison walls by a threatening cordon of armed response teams brandishing body armor and weaponry similar to that arrayed against the demonstrators at Tahrir Square. This rippling radius of force protection marked the protestors as literally being before the law, in the sense of facing it, and

168 / Chapter Three

outside the topology of law, in being kept at bay from the walls without and the death chamber within. Monopoly was thus exemplified in a shot/ reverse shot sequence; proprietary force was rendered visibly potential and virtual before the prison walls by crowd control and invisibly actual in the execution chamber behind those staggered barriers of flesh, body armor, stone, and Plexiglas. The desistance from violence embedded in the structures of its monopoly is not an absence of force but a mode of conservation that provokes the question: how can the nonbeing of violence as yet to be actualized, the event of its relational absence, exert any force? Agamben writes of such nonbeing as impotentiality, as a withholding of actuality, as the event of nonevent: Aristotle makes two statements: “Impotentiality (adynamia) is a privation contrary to potentiality. Thus all potentiality is impotentiality of the same in respect to the same.” . . . [This] means that in its originary structure dynamis potentiality maintains itself in relation to its own privation, its own steresis (lack of form, morphe) its own non-Being. . . . To be potential means: to be one’s own lack, to be in relation to one’s own incapacity. Beings that exist in a mode of potentiality are capable of their own impotentiality; and only in this way do they become potential. They can be because they are in relation to their own non-Being. In potentiality, sensation is in relation to anesthesia, knowledge to ignorance, vision, to darkness.64

The law-founding monopolization and rarefaction of violence by the state can be read through this schema. Agamben presents a theory of the sensorium of power, a political organization of affective intensities that circulate between being and nonbeing, willing and unwilling, doing and nondoing, doing and undoing, as the architecture of a political effectivity.65 The concepts of form (morphe) and its privation (steresis) are axial here. Monopolized violence is the impotentialization of violence by the state that conserves an ever-present atemporal potentiality for violence—a formlessness of force—as the state’s masterful arrangement of violence. Monopoly power circulates violence between form (legality, technicity, procedure) and formlessness (virtuality, impotentialization, immateriality, superfluity, anesthesia, apperception). This means violence can be executed as form and/or formlessness, that is, as a structuring indeterminacy that escalates its political potency in compositions and decompositions of force. Agamben’s association of impotentiality with privation (poverty and deprivation) appears at first glance to link impotentiality to impotency, to

First-Person Shooters: The Critique of Monopoly Violence / 169

a lack of power. But another sense, one not explicitly elaborated by Agamben, would liken this withholding of actuality to the privatized and to privity, which include acts of enclosure, separation, secrecy, and occlusion. One of the senses of privation is to dispossess of something, to cut off from something. To monopolize and rarify violence is to link state power to modes of sequestration that withdraw capacities, events, and goods from common circulation and use. The state’s monopolization of violence is an act of political privatization and privation that cuts violence off from the commons both as act and as witnessed event, and is far from impotent in so doing. The relation of impotentiality to privity is equally telling, for it connects acts of sequestration to political secrecy and to occlusion as modalities of the virtual. The impotentialization of violence can encompass both the unexaminable political techniques of sequestration and the determination of which acts of violence will become unexaminable from the purview of a public witness. In this context we can more fully appreciate how and why the formalism of the state’s reservation of legitimate violence can be continuous with the informalization and outsourcing of state violence as extensions of monopoly right, as the removal of use of force from the terrains of witnessing to which the state is presumed to be accountable. The circulation of power between political form and formlessness is a meta-formation, that can be called sovereignty, a self-relating negativity that enacts mastery over the (with)holding of forms as mastery over power’s finite apparition and disapparition. Violence is raised to a higher degree of potency to the extent that it remains in a state of remotion, as formless, impotential, and apophatic (indeterminate). Sequestered and rarified formless violence is released not as means nor as ends, but as replayed origination, as the return to and mimesis of the founding event of law. Bosnian political constitution and instituted autonomy were perverted by Karadžic´ as grounded on self-inflicted and self-referential violence as a parodic variant of monopoly right. The reenactment of a law-founding violence is the retrieval of that which authorized juridical repetition— calculable law, procedural legitimacy—as rules for repeating violence. As such, the reenactment of law’s origin is a schematic and nostalgic return to what precedes and enables form-giving repeatability in order to reboot state legitimacy. Monopolization is the simulacrum that holds law positing violence in reserve and that invests in a hyperforce by which sovereignty returns to its origin in the release of its formlessness:66 “The self-obstruction and corruption of positing and law-imposing violence become apparent every time such violence seeks to preserve itself. By turning from positing to preserving law, it must also turn against hostile forces of positing and thus

170 / Chapter Three

indirectly against its own principle-the principle of positing itself. In order to remain what it is—violence of law imposition—law-imposing violence must become law-preserving, must turn against its original positing character, and, in this collision with itself, must disintegrate.”67 The monopolization of violence as withholding, deferment, rarefaction, subtraction leads to a particular disposition of impotentialized violence. This is the potential to disavow, disframe, hyperrarify, and deactualize material violence before, during, and after its infliction. I stress that impotentialization is not nonviolence, but rather the not-yet-ness of state violence, which is always inscribed in advance and in medias res in the practice of law, in the reasonable use of force, in deterrence and just war. Violence impotentialized and virtualized corresponds to the mode of desistance that Nietzsche described as the will not to will.68 The will not to will violence is neither to abandon sovereignty, nor any grounds for the privileged infliction of violence. Further, the will not to will violence is in relation not only to the prospective and imminent, but also to force in process and force completed. Impotentializing violence is the unwilling of violence in its unfolding kinesis. To unwill actualized violence, to impotentialize such violence, can be to desist from its effects, costs, and consequences in tandem with its infliction. Political impotentiality is a discriminating, formative, and plastic desistance from the actual embedded in the latter’s political genesis. The de-positing of violence in the very process of making violence mediates actuality as a site occupied by an unoccupiable force. In this case we have to take into account that the constructed immateriality of de-positing violence can entail the hiding of violence in full sight. The reversioned video of King’s beating, the smart bombs of the Gulf War, and the souvenir photography of Abu Ghraib are examples of the hiding of violence in full sight in idioms that succeeded in forging, for a specific duration, a matter-of-factness that, by interweaving the visceral, the vicarious, and the virtual, annulled the ethical vacuum, autonomic brutality, and full human damage of the force on display. Desisting Genocide at Gaza Monopolized violence is politically crafted as a radical singularity as an exemplary and inappropriable act that in turn institutes an entire series of such singularized, unrepeatable, and rarified acts. Monopolized violence is inherently an unrepeatable violence that goes on repeating its unrepeatability in and out of law. The sublime politics of the grave, be it ground zero in New York or the exhumation of Ustasha execution burials in Ser-

First-Person Shooters: The Critique of Monopoly Violence / 171

bia, leaps over undeniable horror to institute a rarified historical firstness, a first right to force that unfolds from anachronic cavities. This ethicohistorical invariance is a stigmata or punctum outside of time that gestates time through violence. The hypostatic grave licenses a serialized and morally singularized damage. The Israeli sieges of Gaza in 2008–9, 2012, and 2014 launched, in tandem with their missiles, an array of pacifying missives carrying humanitarian payloads armed with the moral authority of Holocaust victimage. As a self-characterized postgenocidal state, Israel is self-sacralized as a humanitarian specialist in victimage through its de jure moral monopolization of the Holocaust (formally institutionalized with the trial of Adolf Eichmann). Each Israeli attack on Gaza is simultaneously and implicitly recast by state subtext as a desistance from genocide. As discussed above, desistance from violence can be to withdraw from a stance of violence through an act of violence, to leave off one form of violence by taking on another. In criminology, an offender’s desistance from crime is analyzed as the absence of an event, which nevertheless conjugates this absence as a possible crime to come. Desistance from crime, civil or humanitarian, is the twofold self-positioning of the desisting agent as both inside and outside a continuum of criminality. Desisting from violence can be both the deferring representation and the virtualizing repetition of certain forms of violence held in political abeyance and managed in absentia. Desistance also refers to the deliberate detachment of a subject from its productions such as the collateral damage, secrecy, and outsourcing of the American war on terror. In an interview with Al Jazeera during the 2014 assault on Gaza, Paul Hirschon, of the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs, illustrated the structuring logic of Israeli desistance in war by noting “the hesitancy and care” with which attacks on Gaza were being carried out.69 In 2008 Israeli government representatives frequently excused the casualties and deaths they inflicted as minimal or proportionate given the ratio of population density to the quantity of ordnance launched to secure public safety for Israel. These imputed desisting discriminations are ideologically embedded into Israeli governmentality as the measurable moral structure of its genocidal impotentiality, as sealed by the imperatives of the Holocaust. In 2008 Israeli governmental spokespersons described their missile assaults as a war between Hamas and “the rest of humanity,” thereby casting these incursions as the culling of entities beyond or below the human. This formulation repeated the motif of the sovereign and the beast as respectively above and below the law.70 In its humanitarian war against the unhuman, the Israel Defense Forces doled out humane corridors of intermittent

172 / Chapter Three

cease-fire as episodic desistance, cast as “hesitancy and care” or as “altruistic gestures,” by which Gaza residents could “enjoy some quiet,” as one Israeli spokesperson put it. To be gifted with quietude in blockaded Gaza would be to experience a rationed, contingent, and gifted humanity. But this donation is a double bind, for the gift of quiet is part and parcel of the gift of sensibility, which in the continuum of war is always a punishment and a penalty, either in its removal or in its traumatic overload. The Israeli “humanitarian window” in Gaza is just that, an aperture through which Palestinians can glimpse a world and a realm of the senses they can never enter. In a recent interview with CNN, Benjamin Netanyahu described the 2014 Israeli assault on Gaza as seeking “sustainable quiet.”71 In its war against the unhuman, the state’s rationing of quietude decides when and where Palestinians can be treated as if human and when they cannot. Israeli ballistics are ratcheted up and down in order to give Palestinians brief respites under which they too could be given a virtual “humanity” that is the quiet of state-induced anesthesia as the sensibility of a death (im)potentialized. Derrida has stressed the desistance embedded in the relation of anesthesia to the death penalty; the “anesthesial compromise” has always been integral to the “humanization” of the death penalty, while at the same time underwriting the state’s right to kill.72 Contemporary asymmetrical war is pervaded by many such anesthesial logics including televisual smart bombs, shock and awe, clandestine extraordinary renditions, hidden black sites, the legal indeterminacy of torture, and the presumed uncountability of Iraqi dead since the 2003 American invasion. Inflicted anesthesia in Gaza opens “humanitarian windows” to ration the pain and suffering of wartime and the quietude of a faux peacetime as the scenic affirmation of the absolute occupation of Palestinian time and space by Israeli anesthesiology. Political anesthesia as wartime annulled communicates with genocide as an eschatology of history that freezes time and space into the stasis and silence of the destined death and the mass grave. The bestowal of quietude, in the midst of invasion and occupation, is a mode of genocidal desistance where the absence of a war event becomes a weapon of war. Israeli truces and temporary no-fire zones dole out quietude as death desisted and thus as death anticipated. A humanitarian window is opened, only to be loudly and abruptly shut and shattered. Thousands of ethnic Tamils in northeast Sri Lanka discovered this bitter lesson in 2009, when the rationed humanitarian corridor, a strip of beach designated by state forces as a no-fire zone, was converted into a free-fire zone death trap once Red Cross refugee camps had been set up. Simone Weil effectively describes the promissory structure of a desis-

First-Person Shooters: The Critique of Monopoly Violence / 173

tance from immediate violence as the virtualization of death: “It will surely kill, or it will possibly kill, or perhaps it merely hangs over the being it can kill at any and every moment; anyway, it turns man into stone. From the power of transforming a man into a thing precedes another power, otherwise prodigious, the power of turning a man into a thing while he is still alive. He is alive, he has a soul; and yet, he is a thing. . . . Still breathing, he is nothing but matter, still thinking he can think nothing.”73 The rationality of the ration lies at the core of genocidal desistance when applied to quietude, to restricted corridors of humanity, and to the proportions and measures ruling life, death, and population density and launched ordnance. Humanitarian ration-ality in Gaza has been institutionalized by the Israeli blockade, which regulates the trickle of food calories (calculated at 2,000 calories a day per person), diesel oil for electrical power and water pumps, medical supplies and technology, and other essential services and goods into the Strip. This exercise defines and redefines minimal thresholds of viable humanity, which, like the Israeli cease-fires, administer dosages of humanity to the Palestinians, thus marking the instituted distance between the two entities. The rationing of life support to Gaza is greeted by critics of the blockade with the term “sociocide,” which registers the limited possibilities of sustaining core forms of social life and societal structure under a regime of enforced human minimality. The appellation raises the comprehension of sociocide as desistance from genocide—as the will not to will genocide, which has little to do with the annulment of privation, terror, or violence. In the blockade of Gaza, sociocide is a logic of desistance that marks Weil’s “hanging over” as a latency and plasticity of the genocidal promise echoed in computational human minimality. In the blockade the consummate administrative rationing of life-sustaining things is explicitly the administration of Palestinians as Weil’s living things, as forms of death in life. Sociocide desists from genocide through surrogate and sublimating acts of damage. Sociocide is the rationing of privation as either proportionate or disproportionate and reciprocally calculates and seeks the slippage of the former into the latter through a contaminating political logic. Rationing proportionality and disproportionality and their indifference is an economic monopoly and targeting mechanism that extends the state’s monopoly of violence. The institution of acceptable levels of violence indexes the contingent potentiality of the unacceptable level, which invariably signals the capacity and competency to actualize the latter: both postures of force, the desistance and the stance, are meant to demonstrate consummate technical control. Blockades, sieges, and humanitarian rationing are technolo-

174 / Chapter Three

gies for making and unmaking humanity. This ration-ality is a persistent exercise in shifting the thresholds and measures between the acceptable and the unacceptable, the proportionate and the disproportionate, ballistics and hesitancy and care. Sociocide as desistance is the third space of genocidal suspension, preemption, and promise; it mediates genocidal potentiality at one pole and the ever-fluid rationality of denuding blockade at the other. Thus, when truces are called, missiles halted, and demands negotiated, the sociocide of Gaza still remains as the desert that is called peace. Telegenic Suicides Symbolic desistance from genocide through the latter’s surrogation, apotropaic mimesis, and virtualization extends to depictions of Palestinians magnetizing Israeli ordinance. In the same interview where Netanyahu spoke of seeking “sustainable quiet,” he declared to CNN: “All civilian casualties are unintended by us but actually intended by Hamas. They want to pile up as many civilian dead as they can, because somebody said they use, I mean it’s gruesome, they use telegenically dead Palestinians for their cause. They want the dead, the more the better.”74 In Netanyahu’s phantasmagoria, each launched Israeli missile teleports genocidal potentiality to a Hamas imputedly committed to the mass production of teleprompting death. The Israeli first-person shooter, historically inoculated from any genocidal trajectory, subsists in a state of technocratic unintentionality that is personified in the hesitancy of the launched missile—a ballistics of innocence. Israeli ordnance is simply the automata and prosthetic of the Palestinian will to telegenic death. The “true violence” of Gaza is cast in lead by Netanyahu as the self-enclosure of the agent and patient of force exclusively within the Palestinian body politic. As discussed in the last chapter, Wilderson’s model of racist police violence in America is directly applicable to racialist violence directed at Gaza: “This Manichean delirium manifests itself by way of the U.S. paradigm of policing that (re)produces, repetitively, the inside/outside, the civil society/ Black world, by virtue of the difference between those bodies that do not magnetize bullets and those that do.”75 Netanyahu’s teleportation of “telegenic death” can be seamlessly montaged with the mythomania of Karadžic´, who alleged that the Bosnian Muslims were themselves shelling Sarajevo and staging their telegenic dead. Like Netanyahu today, Karadžic´ was and still is a practitioner of the dissembling discourse of genocidal desistance. The silenced sovereignties of the Palestinians and the Bosnians are respectively reread, by both first-

First-Person Shooters: The Critique of Monopoly Violence / 175

person shooters, as the political perfidy of the autodestruct, by which their adversary and target undermines the intended “hestitancy and care” of the desisting aggressor through self-inflicted violence. However, charges of collective suicide, of self-inflicted mass murder, are also a displaced genocidal fantasy for Netanyahu, whereby the Palestinian victims of violence underwrite Israeli humane war by becoming their own executioners. This Israeli fantasy mirrors what Edward Said described as the mentality of the Israeli “survivor state,” defined as a political ark in which citizenship is identical with universal catastrophe past, present, and future; a state that conceives of its existence in the zero-sum game of minimal survival as a political ultimacy.76 A survivor state monopolizes the violence of victimage to create victims of the victim, and it is committed not to the biopolitics of qualified life, but to the reproduction of bare life that is centered on absolute victimage, either internalized or exported. One of the more insidious dimensions of the Nazi death camp was the manner in which it procedurally orchestrated the complicity of the inmates in their own extermination. The transplantation of this closed system into a besieged Gaza profoundly deepens the punishing impunity of Israeli warfare as genocide rationed and genocide deferred. Netanyahu’s recoil at the telegenic profanations of the Palestinians goes much deeper than self-inflicted violence and inadvertently exposes a theological archaeology of the current forms of Israeli warmaking as a perceived clash of cultures of sacrifice. In discussing the emerging electronic interfaces between religion and media, Derrida counterpoises two scenes of child sacrifice in the Abrahamic religions that communicate today with the sacrifice of the children of Gaza: Abraham’s attempted sacrifice of his son Isaac, and the sacrifice of Jesus, the son of God, through crucifixion. In the first scene Derrida implies that Abraham’s ensuing silence around the entire incident reveals that he has been commanded by his god to keep the incident secret, to foreclose its dissemination. Derrida connects this inhibition against repetition and representation to the ban on graven images: “The supreme betrayal would have been to transform a secret of this kind into a public affair, in other words, to introduce a third party, that transforms it into an item of news in public space, information that could be archived and seen from afar, televisualizable. “Above all no journalists. . . . no mediator between us.  .  .  . Not third. The ordeal that binds us must not be newsworthy.’”77 The second sacrifice, that of Jesus, becomes the occasion for the global spread of the news of his sacrificial death and resurrection—the latter is irrevocably tied to the newsworthy repetition and imaging, which creates a public sphere of reception. In contrast, Derrida marks the crux of the

176 / Chapter Three

“sceneless scene” of Abraham’s sacrifice as the test of silence, as the keeping secret that institutes the exemplarity of a commanding and purified iconoclasm pitted against profane public mediatization. This injunction against repetition and mimesis links the Abrahamic sacrifice to the Holocaust as a sacrifice that resists scannable teleportation owing to its magnitude and its institutionalization as the ultimate affront to the essence of humanity. The Shoah, in the eyes of Zionists and many others, cannot be dislodged from its sacralized anachronic site through historicism, comparativism, or mediatization. Today it has become a state monopoly of archived violence at the almost exclusive disposal of Israeli settler colonialism and the Israeli war machine: “This is where the experience of the secret is bound up with the experience of the infinite gloss. There where the Thing does not reveal itself, does not manifest itself directly, does not show its face, there where the Cause remains secret, one has to gloss. This is why I began with Abraham and Isaac. We will never know what happened on Mount Moriah; we never saw anything and will never see it.”78 Derrida connects the iconoclasm of sacrifice to the secrecy or withdrawal that tacitly links the sacrifices of the Holocaust to the silence of Abraham, but that can also be countersigned as the routinized silenced and silencing oppression inflicted on Palestinians by the Israelis in a binding ordeal that is rarely rendered newsworthy until its damage and harms reaches the intensity of the grotesque. “Telegenic” in American parlance means a person or thing shown to advantage on television, providing an interesting or attractive subject.79 Thus the allegation of Palestinians’ manufacture of their own telegenic dead implies their subjugated knowledge of a genocidal truth that both magnetizes and repels Netanyahu as the return of the familiar in the form of the uncanny—for Euro-American public culture Palestinians become more attractive and rhetorically persuasive when dead than when alive, when televisually spiritualized rather than protesting or resisting or simply enduring intractable prison-house materialities. Telegenic and monopolistic spiritualization has become part of the cultural inheritance of the victim’s of the World War II Holocaust through the latter’s cinematization across multiple media platforms, which began with the first newsreels of the Allied liberation of the camps and continued through the Eichmann trial to presentday Hollywood fictionalizations and archived life histories. Netanyahu attacks telegenic death because he fears the population bomb of Palestinian dead and wounded, wherein they mimetically become the graven images of Jews. Mahmoud Darwish recognized the possibility of this transference, this telegenic substitution fantasy, that haunts Netanyahu. In his interview with an Israeli journalist in Notre musique, which I have previously dis-

First-Person Shooters: The Critique of Monopoly Violence / 177

cussed but which is worth revisiting, Darwish spoke of the transferential dimension of the conflict: “I want to speak in the name of the absentee. . . . [Palestinians] . . . are only recognized because of the Jews. Do you know why we Palestinians are well-known? Because you are our enemies. Interest in us is as a result of interest in the Jewish issue. You have caused us defeat but given us fame.”80 For Netanyahu, owing to their telegenic dying the Palestinians fail the Abrahamic test; their mass iconography of ordeal is essentially “Christian” and profaning in requiring a mediating third. This condemns the Palestinians to inauthenticity. Therefore, they cannot lay a claim through their suffering to an irregardable genocide, nor can they lay claim to the land that has been preemptively sanctified by the Abrahamic pact with God and more recently renewed and resanctifed by the Holocaust. Lacking this sacral relation to blood and soil as the primordial scene of sacrifice, the Palestinians for Netanyahu can only exist televisually, because for him they can exist nowhere else. Postscript When the planes disappear, the white, white doves Fly off and wash the cheeks of heaven With unbound wings taking radiance back again, taking possession Of the ether and of play. Higher, higher still, the white, white doves Fly off. Ah, if only the sky Were real [a man passing between two bombs said to me]. —Mahmoud Darwish, Under Siege

Notes 1.

2.

3.

Mark Danner, “Bosnia: The Turning Point,” New York Review of Books, February 5, 1998, http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/1998/feb/05/bosnia-the-turning -point (accessed June 7, 2010). Karadžic´ repeated this charge at the Hague war crimes tribunal on March 2, 2010, http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/mar/02/radovan-karadzic-siege-sarajevo -myth (accessed June 7, 2010), and “Karadžic´ Markale Staging Claims Challenged,” Institute for War and Peace Reporting, last modified December 13, 2010 http://iwpr .net/report-news/karadzic-markale-staging-claims-challenged (accessed June 7, 2010). “The Forging of Schizophrenia: An Interview with Zarana Papic, Prominent Serbian Feminist and Member of the Belgrade Circle Women in Black,” http://www.bosnia .org.uk/news/news/080600_1.cfm (accessed June 8. 2010). See also Zarana Papic, “Kosovo War, Feminists and Fascism in Serbia,” http://k.mihalec.tripod.com/fem _in_serbia.htm (accessed June 8, 2010); and Papic, “Europe after 1989: Ethnic Wars,

178 / Chapter Three

4.

5. 6. 7.

8. 9. 10. 11.

12. 13. 14.

15. 16. 17.

18. 19.

the Fascistization of Everyday Life and Body Politics in Serbia,” in Thinking Differently: A Reader in European Women’s Studies, ed. Gabriele Griffin and Rosi Braidotti (London: Zed Books, 2002). Allen Feldman, Formations of Violence: The Narrative of the Body and Political Terror in Northern Ireland (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 181–82, 184–85, 216–17. Jacques Lacan, “The Subversion of Subject and the Dialectics of Desire,” in Écrits, trans. Bruce Fink (New York: W. W. Norton, 2006), 683. Feldman, Formations of Violence, 81–84. Jean Paul Sartre, Theory of Practical Ensembles, vol. 1 of Critique of Dialectical Reason, ed. Elkaim-Arlette Sartre, trans. Quentin Hoare (New York: Verso, 2010), 271 (emphasis and parentheses mine). Sartre, Theory of Practical Ensembles, 256–79. Jean Paul Sartre, The Intelligibility of History, vol. 2 of Critique of Dialectical Reason, ed. Elkaim-Arlette Sartre, trans. Quentin Hoare (New York: Verso, 2010), 13. Robert Hertz, Death and the Right Hand, trans. Rodney Livingstone (Aberdeen: Cohen & West, 1960), 46. Here the practico-inert emerges as something akin to other mediologies of history, such as Deleuze’s cinematic line of flight; Derrida’s thanatological archive, which preserves life and historicity in the finality of the inorganic; or Bernard Stiegler’s retentional apparatus, which prostheticizes and petrifies irrecuperable and alienable anthropological activity in the machinic. Notre musique, dir. Jean-Luc Godard (Paris: Avventura Films, 2004; DVD, 2005). Ibid. Godard here appears to be citing the reverse shot thesis of Jean-Pierre Oudart and Daniel Dayan, with some significant differences. He sees the relation of shot/reverse shot as fusing what is essentially incommensurable and estranged from each other, whereas Dayan sees the shift from shot to reverse shot as introducing estrangement for the spectator in the form of Oudart’s absent intermediary (l’absent), which is ultimately sutured into filmic space through the adhesion of the reverse shot to shot one. In Notre musique that sovereign position is not absent but structured in situ by shot and reverse shot. Godard moves away from the Archimedean reductionism of Dayan. Dayan’s identification of the sovereign position with the absent one leads to an inversion model of unmasking that brings sovereignty into full presence through decodification, whereas Godard’s Sarajevo lesson does not assign plenitude and encrypted or deferred presence to sovereignty but associates the latter with the curvature of cinematic kinesis. See Daniel Dayan, “The Tutor-Code of Classical Cinema,” Film Quarterly 28, no. 1 (Autumn 1974): 22–31; and Jean-Pierre Oudart, “Cinema and Suture,” Screen 18, no. 4 (1977–78): 35–47. Jean-Luc Godard, Jean-Luc Godard: The Future(s) of Film; Three Interviews, 2000–01 (Bern: Gachnang & Springer, 2002), 20. In the manuscript version presented to Charles II, the heads of the multitude face outward. Horst Bredekamp, “Thomas Hobbes’s Visual Strategies,” in The Cambridge Companion to Thomas Hobbe’s “Leviathan,” ed. Patricia Springborg (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 40–42. Ibid., 42. See Horst Bredekamp, “From Walter Benjamin to Carl Schmitt via Thomas Hobbes,” Critical Inquiry 25, no. 2 (1999): 55–58.

First-Person Shooters: The Critique of Monopoly Violence / 179 20. Thomas Hobbes, “Leviathan”: Authoritative Text, Backgrounds, Interpretations, ed. Richard E. Flathman and David Johnston (New York: Norton, 1997), 9. 21. Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, ed. Rolf Tiedemann (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999), 462–63. 22. Avital Ronell, Loser Sons: Politics and Authority (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2012), 93. For a different but intersecting discussion of a technological unconscious, see Patricia Ticineto Clough, Autoaffection: Unconscious Thought in the Age of Teletechnology (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000). 23. Jean Hyppolite, “Appendix I: A Spoken Commentary on Freud’s ‘Verneinung’ by Jean Hyppolite,” in Jacques Lacan, Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English, trans. Bruce Young (New York: W. W. Norton, 2002), 753 (emphasis mine). 24. Gilles Deleuze, “What Children Say,” in Gilles Deleuze: Essays Critical and Clinical, trans. Daniel W. Smith and Michael Greco (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 63. 25. Ronell’s grafting of trope and opium to describe an oneiric and addictive politics. 26. James C. Scott, Seeing like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998). 27. Les carabiniers, dir. Jean Luc Godard (New York: Fox Lorber, 1967; DVD, 2001). 28. For an analysis, based on Wittgenstein, of Godard’s treatment of hands in other films, see Richard Neer, “Godard Counts,” Critical Inquiry 34 (Autumn 2007): 135–71. 29. Daniel Heller-Roazen, “The Matter of Language: Guilhem de Peitieus and the Platonic Tradition,” in “French Issue,” special issue, MLN 113, no. 4 (September 1998): 864. 30. Jacques Derrida, “Heidegger’s Hand (Geschlecht II),” in Psyche: Inventions of the Other, vol. 2, ed. Peggy Kamuf and Elizabeth G. Rottenberg (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008), 34–35. 31. Ibid., 45. 32. Ibid., 39. 33. The hand, according to Heidegger, institutes a hierarchy of the anthropological hand over the nonhuman paw or claw that Heidegger endorses and that infers a violent relation between the two degrees of the organ. Violence undoes this hierarchy in the technical tool turned claw. Here haptic perception reaches an intensity in violence that, despite Heidegger’s anthropological hierarchy, claws at bodies and things to render them no longer touchable or touching, that denies monstration and manuscripture to the Other whom it manhandles and mangles. This is the showing of the “back of the hand,” the showing of a faceless, closed, and occluding hand to the witnessing gaze as a hard-handed projectile in the hand-to-hand agon of violence. The open hand, however, can be opposed to the paw and claw, as it is an almost universal gesture of the absence of a weapon and an offering of hospitality—before language and even violence it shows reconcilability not only between humans but between the human and the nonhuman. See Martin Heidegger, “The Question Concerning Technology,” in Basic Writings: Martin Heidegger, ed. David Farrell Krell (London: Routledge, 1993), 332. 34. “In The Darkness of Time,” dir. Jean-Luc Godard, in Ten Minutes Older, the Cello (London: Odyssey Films, 2003; DVD, 2008 ); and Petit soldat, dir. Jean-Luc Godard (New York: Fox Lorber, 1963; DVD, 2001). 35. Los Angeles Police Department Officer Theodore Briseno, from The Rodney King Case: What the Jury Saw in California versus Powell, dir. Dominic Palumbo (Oak Forest, IL: Courtroom Television Network, 1992; video recording).

180 / Chapter Three 36. Courtroom Television Network, “The Rodney King Case.” LAPD vehicles used a keyboard communications system at that time. 37. John Riley, “Inside the Courtroom: What the Jury Heard That the Public Didn’t Series; Inside the King Case; First of a Two Part Series,” New York Newsday, May 13 and 17, 1992, p. 5. 38. Courtroom Television Network, “The Rodney King Case.” 39. Ibid. 40. Ibid. 41. Riley, “Inside the Courtroom,” 30 (emphasis mine). 42. Paul Scott, The Day of the Scorpion, vol. 2 of The Raj Quartet (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 297–98 (emphasis mine). 43. See Feldman, Formations of Violence, 128–38. 44. Scott, The Day of the Scorpion, 300. 45. Courtroom Television Network, “The Rodney King Case.” 46. Ibid. 47. Wlad Godzich, “The Tiger on the Paper Mat,” in The Resistance to Theory and Other Essays (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), xiv. 48. Ibid. For a discussion of theoros, performance, and visuality, see Simon Goldhill and Robin Osborne, eds., Performance Culture and Athenian Democracy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 6–7. 49. Jas Elsner, “Between Mimesis and Divine Power: Visuality in the Greco-Roman World,” in Visuality Before and Beyond the Renaissance: Seeing as Others Saw, ed. Robert S. Nelson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 62. 50. For the relation of avowal to subjectification, see Michel Foucault, Wrong-Doing, Truth-Telling: The Function of Avowal in Justice, ed. Fabienne Brion and Bernard E. Harcourt (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013) 51. Goldhill and Osborne, Performance Culture and Athenian Democracy, 4. 52. Riley, “Inside the Courtroom,” 116. 53. Ibid. 54. Michael Taussig, Shamanism, Colonialism, and the Wild Man (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987). 55. Riley, “Inside the Courtroom,” 5. 56. Seth Mydans, “Their Lives Consumed, Officers Await 2nd Trial,” New York Times, February 2, 1993, A14. 57. See Saidiya V. Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997); Hartman, Lose Your Mother: A Journey along the Atlantic Slave Route (New York: Macmillan, 2007); Saidiya Hartman and Frank B. Wilderson III, “The Position of the Unthought,” Qui parle 13, no. 2) (Spring–Summer 2003): 183–201; Frank B. Wilderson  III, “The Vengeance of Vertigo: Aphasia and Abjection in the Political Trials of Black Insurgents,” InTensions 5 (Fall–Winter 2011): 2, http://www.yorku .ca/intent/issue5/articles/pdfs/frankbwildersoniiiarticle.pdf; Jared Sexton, “Social Life of Social Death: On Afro-Pessimism and Black Optimism,” InTensions 5 (Fall– Winter 2011), http://www.yorku.ca/intent/issue5/articles/jaredsexton.php; Sexton, “The Ruse of Engagement: Black Masculinity and the Cinema of Policing,” American Quarterly 61, no. 1 (March 2009): 39–63; Sexton, “People-of-Color-Blindness: Notes on the Afterlife of Slavery,” Social Text 28, no. 2 (2010): 31–56; Fred Moten, “Music against the Law of Reading the Future and Rodney King,” Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association 27, no. 1 (Spring 1994): 51–64; and Fred Moten

First-Person Shooters: The Critique of Monopoly Violence / 181

58.

59.

60.

61.

62. 63.

64.

65.

66.

and Stefano Harney, “Blackness and Governance,” in Beyond Biopolitics: Essays on the Governance of Life and Death, ed. Patricia Ticineto Clough and Craig Willse (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), 351–61. I deploy the term “desistance,” well aware that its use to translate Derrida’s term désistement is controversial. My usage is situated at a midpoint between the latter and the criminological use of desistance as the event of a nonevent—the withdrawal from criminal action by the criminal. In criminology the appearing of desistance is hypothetically considered to be coterminous with the end of the criminal act and is thus contiguous with that act, implying no clear ending of criminality and no pristine origin of desistance. Each criminal act opens up the possibility of desistance from criminality. I conjecture that these aporias, emerging from a positive science, would have entertained and intrigued Derrida. Jacques Derrida, “Desistance,” introduction to Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Typography: Mimesis, Philosophy, Politics, ed. Christopher Fynsk (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), 1–42; Shadd Maruna, Making Good: How Ex-Convicts Reform and Rebuild Their Lives (Washington, DC: American Psychological Society, 2001), 17. Norbert Elias, “Civilization and Violence: On the State Monopoly of Physical Violence and Its Infringements,” trans. David J. Parent, Telos: A Quarterly Journal of Critical Thought 16, no. 54 (1982): 133–54; see also Max Weber, “The Profession and Vocation of Politics,” in Weber: Political Writings, ed. Peter Lassman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process: Sociogenetic and Psychogenetic Investigations (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 2000), 136–42, 161–72, 178–79, 257–344, 355, 356–61, 388–89, 397. Norbert Elias, “Power and Civilization,” in Essays II: On Civilizing Processes, State Formation and National Identity, ed. Richard Kilminster and Stephen Mennell, vol. 15 of Collected Works (Dublin: University College Dublin Press, 2009), 93–104. For the last point see Arjun Appadurai, “Dead Certainty: Ethnic Violence in the Era of Globalization,” Public Culture 10, no. 2 (Winter 1998): 225–47. “Democracy Now! Special Report from Troy Davis Execution: Did Georgia Kill an  Innocent Man?,” Democracy Now!, last modified September 22, 2011, http:// www.democracynow.org/2011/9/22/democracy_now_special_report_from_troy (accessed September 22, 2011). Giorgio Agamben, Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy, ed., trans., and introd. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999), 181–82. In his analysis Agamben accesses a nonsusbtantialist model of force in Aristotle. One can ask: how does the schema of impotentiality alter the concept of teleocratic design? (See my discussion of this in the introduction.) The relation of virtuality to (im)potentiality refigures the usual understanding of virtuality as a deficient duplication, repetition, or mimesis of actuality. Impotentiality maintains its potentiality, its potency, in and through the actual. As virtual, it is not added onto the actual as if the latter is pre-given, nor is it a doubling of the actual, as in the relation of a copy (the virtual) to a protological model (the actual). Rather, (im)potentiality’s sustaining of nonbeing is effectuated in and through the mediation, support, and substrate of the actual. In speaking of positing and de-positing violence I am opening a point of convergence between Agamben’s discussion of impotentiality, Derrida’s desistance, and Hamacher’s concept of afformative violence. See Werner Hamacher, “Afformative, Strike,” trans. Dana Hollander, Cardozo Law Review 13, no. 4 (December 1991): 1133–57.

182 / Chapter Three 67. Hamacher “Afformative, Strike,” 1134. 68. The will not to will is a self-instituted autonomy that establishes the ratio between the creation of norms and that which is subject to normation. See Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1966), 208. 69. Q & A: Paul Hirschon, Israel Foreign Ministry Spokesman, July 21, 2014, https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=HCOVXRDCH94 (accessed July 21, 2014). 70. Jacques Derrida, The Beast and the Sovereign, vol. 1, Seminar of 2002–2003, trans. Geoffrey Bennington (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009). 71. “Netanyahu: Israel Seeks ‘Sustainable Quiet’ with Gaza,” CNN staff, updated 1:04 PM EDT, July 21, 2014, http://www.cnn.com/2014/07/20/world/meast/mideast -crisis-blitzer-netanyahu-interview (accessed July 21, 2014). 72. Jacques Derrida, The Death Penalty, vol. 1 of The Seminars of Jacques Derrida, trans. Geoffrey Bennington (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), 50, 282. 73. Simone Weil, “The Iliad, or the Poem of Force,” Chicago Review 18, no. 2 (1965): 5. 74. “Netanyahu: Israel Seeks ‘Sustainable Quiet’ with Gaza.” 75. Wilderson, “The Prison Slave as Hegemony’s (Silent) Scandal,” in “War, Dissent, and Justice: A Dialogue,” ed. Joy James, special issue of Social Justice 30, no. 2 (2003): 18–27, at 20 (emphasis mine). 76. Edward W. Said, The Politics of Dispossession: The Struggle for Palestinian SelfDetermination, 1969–1994 (New York: Vintage Books, 1995), 168; see also Said, “Zionism from the Standpoint of Its Victims,” Social Text 1 (Winter 1979): 7–58. 77. Jacques Derrida, “Above All No Journalists,” in Religion and Media, ed. Hent de Vries and Samuel Weber (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001), 57. 78. Ibid., 84. For an intersecting discussion about Holocaust mediatization and iconoclasm, see Georges Didi-Hubermann, Images in Spite of All: Four Photographs from Auschwitz, trans. Shane B. Lillis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008). 79. http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/198683?redirectedFrom=telegenic#eid (accessed September 3, 2014). 80. From a scene in Godard, Notre musique.

PA R T T WO

Amputating Archives

FOUR

The Structuring Enemy and Archival War

The Lost Enemy In the wake of the collapse of the Cold War’s bipolar world order, Jacques Derrida wrote: “Losing the enemy would simply be the loss of the political itself. . . . The invention of the enemy is where the urgency and the anguish are: this invention is what would have to be brought off, in sum to repoliticize, to put an end to depoliticization. Where the principal enemy, the ‘structuring’ enemy, seems nowhere to be found, where it ceases to be identifiable and thus reliable—that is, where the same phobia projects a mobile multiplicity of potential interchangeable metonymic enemies, in secret alliance with one another: conjuration.”1 Derrida refers to the friend/enemy matrix that Carl Schmitt theorized as the origin of the political.2 The loss of the structuring enemy would be not a political crime but a crime against the political, insofar as the absence of the reliable enemy defaces the threshold between the political and the nonpolitical, between war and murder. As that which threatens the emptying of value equivalence and relational identity, the recession of a structuring enemy would not be the absence of war or structuration: “Losing the enemy would not necessarily be progress, reconciliation or the opening of an era of peace and human fraternity. It would be worse: an unheard-of violence. The evil of a malice knowing neither measure nor ground, an unleashing incommensurable in its unprecedented—therefore monstrous forms. . . . The figure of the enemy would then be helpful—precisely as a figure—because of the features that will allow it to be identified as such, still identical to what has always been determined under this name.”3 The principal adversary is replaced by figurations, metaphors, doubles, typifications, traces, apparitions, placeholders, emissaries, and specters of this archived enemy who have been con-

186 / Chapter Four

scripted to underwrite, support, and mold a decentered political posture. What unleashed multiplicity is now being determined under the name enemy? Recall the restless post–Cold War push for authenticating political emblematica: the floating empires of evil; the war of civilizations (in which one is an anticivilization); the burned twin towers; the solarized cosmogenesis of shock and awe; the manifold apparitions and disapparitions of bin Laden in life and in death; the leashed dog people of Abu Ghraib; the orange-clad, hooded, and defaced ghosts of Bagram and Guantánamo; the abysmal scenography of homeless, paperless asylum seekers, boat people, and cargo-container corpses; the immune-compromised, the theologically toxic, and the incidental corpses left by drone signature strikes. This is an archive of disassociation and incongruity; a frontier of bad names, bad bodies, and unwanted forms of life; and an inventory of the dehistoricized and the desubjectified. Derrida’s disappearing enemy evokes the theorem that the name of the name is not a name, and we are today embroiled in archival wars of naming and unnaming, including what can be named as war, enemy, and violence. If we have lost a measurable enemy we have lost war itself. The departure of a reliable enemy seriously threatens war as a media of political-discursive commensuration that a prognosticated enemy secures and anchors. The loss of the reliable enemy reciprocally unleashes an aggressive and incommensurate unilateral war without measure or end. This war has also become one of political effects and consequences deemed either immeasurable, such as the perpetual detention of imputed terrorists, or unworthy of measurement, such as the dis-counted Iraqi wounded and dead under regime change, or those Afghanis, Pakistanis, Yemenis, and Americans killed by extrajudicial drones from which no accountability need be offered. What unfolds between a war without measure and a war that refuses measurement? The subjects of extraordinary rendition and torture cannot be indicted, accused, or tried— or, if tried, brought into open court. Such delimiting steps would not only measure and limit their imputed offenses but also render their very detention and torture, and the jurisdictional power that committed such acts, measurable and recallable by ethics and law. The American debate on the legality or illegality of torture is recorded in the afterimage of torture’s routinization on rogue bodies in rogue spaces. At issue here is not the measure of torture’s lawfulness or criminality, but rather the institutionalization of its legal indeterminacy. The rogue body of the political Other is offered up as the circulating currency of procedural discontinuity. Like the captives held in their bowels, these very cached tombs, the black sites of disappearance, function as self-canceling deposi-

The Structuring Enemy and Archival War / 187

tories enclosing memory and forgetting, and law and nonlaw. At these sites archivization, as a crypt and as encrypted power, stores nothing but the command to hold human exhibits as testaments to a programmed historical vacancy. The black sites are archives of ciphers made up of nothing but their human placeholders and those who guard these empty suits and redacted files while waiting for the arrival of the reality they supposedly index. Derrida’s topology of the unreliable enemy extends to the incarcerated and tortured and ultimately addresses these dislocations in human form as the loss of a political outline upon which the concepts of sovereignty and the political unproductively pivot. The lack of mnemic support, and the resulting incapacity to name law or identify the enemy, then points to reciprocal transformations in the forms of war and the archival, thereby drawing attention to their political entwinement. Hypomnematic War There is no archive without a place of consignation, without a technique of repetition, and without a certain exteriority. No archive without outside.4

The formative division of inside and outside is a founding condition of both war and the archive and suggests a structural convergence—the force of accrued memory in relation to the forms of force as practices and technics of accrual and retainment. The friend/enemy relation that Derrida complexifies orders the relation between inside and outside through archival power: it is the self-archiving and conservation of sovereignty in the exterior figure of the enemy as a retentional apparatus. Derrida would call this transposition “consignation”; to consign is to assign residence, to insert in a domicile. In the Schmittian friend/enemy constellation, the identity and normativity of the sovereign subject is consigned to the enemy under house arrest as a hostage, memorandum, support, and transport of sovereignty. The structuring and archived enemy is a political screen (as in showing and concealing); it is covered by and a cover for sovereignty. In this echographic archive of reversible transcription, the sovereign subject and the enemy inhabit and house each other; each becomes the host, hostage, and habitus of the other. This dynamic of haunting and hosting then reemerges in relation to those surrogating derivatives, the mobile multiplicity of interchangeable adversaries as a precarious and evaporating archive of the principial enemy. Can we conceive of the destructive but enabling technics of war as commemorating, archiving, and conserving the structuring and promised en-

188 / Chapter Four

emy as a repurposed memory form? When Avital Ronell declared, at the time of the Gulf War, that its core mission was to “support our tropes,” she referenced both the archival function of and the archival crisis posed by war.5 If war, particularly a war against terror, advances the global projection of military technics and their damage, to what degree does such securing technicity extend to tropological stockpiles that underwrite what can be targeted under the name “the enemy”? Anamnesis is written into the functionality and political utility of targeting and imaging systems that inflict damage, securitize, occupy, and exert cartographic containment. The divorce of destination from derivation, of the state’s trajectory from its originating enemy, the expanding chasm between ground zero commemoration and the recessional enemy who subverts secured memory enmeshes the war project in the aporias of the archive. Rather than focus on how critical memory can be recovered from the destruction, attrition, and erasures of war, to which numerous cultural memory and human-rights theorists aspire, I contend that war, in its destruction and technicity, can be remapped as hypomne¯mata, the supplemental, artificed devices that support, repeat, and preserve political memory in prosthetic media. In the classical Hellenic-Latin world hypomne¯mata were originally copybooks of memoranda, account books, public registers, individual notebooks, dream books, and guides of conduct. Foucault stresses that hypomne¯mata enabled the “defragmentation” of lived experience and discourse. He moves beyond the utility of hypomne¯mata as an external support of memory in relating it to self-government. Foucault associated hypomne¯mata with apparatuses that enable the permanent relation of self to self, described as the self-subjection of a subject through a supplement. Though Foucault eschewed apical models of political sovereignty, in his discussion of techniques of the self and prosthetic memory he provides a mnemic theory of political sovereignty as self-affirmation through prosthetic self-othering “the constitution of a permanent relationship to oneself—one must manage oneself as a governor manages the governed . . . this new idea that virtue consists essentially in perfectly governing oneself, that is, in exercising upon oneself as exact a mastery as that of a sovereign against whom there would no longer be revolts.”6 Foucault’s early engagements with panopticism and the body under compulsory visibility were concerned with the retentional apparatus as a form of power insofar as the circuitry formed by visuality, attention (disciplinary and orthopedic surveillance) and the archival volume of the body to be attended permitted an uninterrupted continuity of power, a continuum of “care,” discipline, and askesis through external prosthetics. Here the government of self takes form through the

The Structuring Enemy and Archival War / 189

passage into the supplemental Other as a mode of self-limitation instated by an illimitable sovereign subject. These Foucauldian technologies of the self fused care with attention, producing what Bernard Stiegler and Jonathon Crary identify as an attentional economy through mediating retentional apparatuses.7 For Stiegler the attentional apparatus is the synchronic spatialization of time signatures, retentional practices, norms, and forms that marks an archive. Within the thematic of this chapter, this ex-posure describes how sovereignty maintains itself in the exteriority and substrate of the structuring enemy. Derrida’s terms the recursive coil of subjectifying permanence formed by retentional and attentional interfaces “ipsocracy,” the being-same of oneself as a principle of autonomy and sovereignty; the Latin intensive pronoun ipse (self, or same) is a kratia, a power or capability, as a self-positing and self-determining will to continuity, knowledge, and autonomy.8 With both Foucault and Derrida this sovereign self-positing and self-posing must pass through an ex-posure, an alterity and a template of self-substitution that is inherently archival—the hypomnematic interface, be that a book, a lens, a weapon, or another body or figure such as the structuring enemy (as discussed by Hegel, Alexandre Kojeve, and Fanon). The work of both thinkers point to the archival support, substrate, and subjectum as the difference, the externality, the adjunct and citational device that constitutes the unity, the presence of a sovereign subject to itself in a political economy of attention/retention. The sovereign apparatus repeats itself not only in its subjugated subjects but also in the subjecting subjects of this signifier who are dispersed across a skein of mimetic sites and agents from the police to the structuring enemy. However, Foucault did not contemplate the revolt, infidelity, and resistance of the hypomne¯mata, the withdrawal of the prosthetic as a purely retentional apparatus and its mutation into an errant and radicalized attentional apparatus. This attentional autonomy coincides with Derrida’s peripatetic and unreliable enemy who no longer succors citational expectations crucial to the replication of sovereignty. This is the amputation of an organ of retentionality that leaves a nonconserving disidentity and severance. The reversioned and autonomous attentional apparatus produces the circulating estrangement of failed or dead memory. If the functional and domesticated hypomne¯mata sustained a materiality and spatiality of memory that carried and extended the political subject conserved by this support, then the radicalized attentional apparatus, which has jettisoned retentional norms and functions, supports only the immateriality of that subject. The political economy of retention/attention is atomized into ter-

190 / Chapter Four

rorizing and unmasterable yet potent fragments of autokinetic memory. The errant enemy as protentional threat can be neither rejoined nor dialectically conserved and mastered. If the recessional enemy is a specter of a lost sovereignty, going to war against the attentional/recessional phantasm attempts to reactively organ-icize deferred political subjecthood through materialities of death and damage. This is the political will to both install and, more important, to be seen to install, a new regime of conserving political-archival positivity. However, the militarization of ground zero teaches that the political action of (re)instituting a retentional norm can also install nothing more than another emergent attentional demand and imperative authorizing one war after another, and doing so each time with greater and greater retentional loss. In the wake of such archival leakage or ungrounding, renewed attentional investment in the war on disappearing enemies merely furthers the state’s overreaching of law, just war, accountability, and teleocratic agendas as retentional sites. Recursive archivable memory and enchained magnetizing fields of attention presuppose the photopolitical—apertures and circuits of refraction that sustain the political continuum of sovereignty. Self-posing and mimetic self-substitution through prosthetics shape government as a heliocentric power/knowledge apparatus. In contrast, Derrida’s treatment of the unreliable enemy poses the latter as a light-capturing attentional and light-consuming recessional apparatus. Kafka, in turn, captured the very image of a political form as an attentional/recessional apparatus divorced from any normative retention in his parable “Before the Law,” discussed in the first chapter. What is retained in Kafka’s law is the detained subject who comes before an archival authority empty of any retentional structures beyond that of the withholding or recession of law and memory. Kafka’s story notes the intense hypnotic light that emanates from the black hole of this recessional apparatus. This penetrative light perfectly illustrates the structure of pure command without content, issued from a purely attentional surface and power. The Agony and the Extimacy—the Para-site Discontinuity between the structure and objects of archiving, such as the inability to recover a protological enemy, also determines how sovereignty as the power that archives is remembered, experienced, and understood: “The archive has always been a pledge, and like every pledge [gage] is a token of the future. To put it more trivially: what is no longer archived in the same way is no longer lived in the same way. Archivable meaning is

The Structuring Enemy and Archival War / 191

also and in advance codetermined by the structure it archives.”9 Archivization is a sovereign action that duplicates and simulates, yet displaces sovereignty as a discrete inaugurating locus through repetition such as the prosthetics of the programmed drone. Archival stasis is situated at the disjuncture intrinsic to the productive power of duplication—sovereignty’s delegation and self-differentiation of itself in various memory forms, from black sites to automated targeting mechanisms, to military outsourcing, to friends and enemies. The potential for the drift, depletion, and dislocation of memory and identity is engendered by these mandated and necessary conveyances of duplication and delegation. Mnemotechnics are inherently politicized, for as derivatives they can provoke contestations of fidelity and infidelity over what is being stored or not, and how. Archival infidelity and unreliability are negatively sanctioned as improper duplication, subversive mimesis, mimetic parody, forgetfulness, and detouring misremembering. Mimetic proliferation renders both the sovereign and its structuring enemy reciprocally unstable. Mimesis accompanies the extraction of the archival supplement from the living derivation; it is coterminous with the original division between inside and outside as a relation of fidelity and infidelity. The faithful repetition of sovereign authorial beginnings is a prescription of what must be remembered, yet such repetition can usurp inaugurating archival enunciation, script, and event. The originating enemy becomes recessional and absent in being displaced and dispersed by the archival preemption, duplication, and parasiting of its memory: The space of writing, space as writing, is opened up in the violent movement of this surrogation, in the difference of mne¯me¯ and hypomne¯sis. The outside is already within the work of memory. The evil slips in within the relation of memory to itself, in the general organization of mnesic activity. . . . Memory always therefore already needs signs in order to recall the nonpresent with which it is necessarily in relation. . . . Memory thus is contaminated by the first substitute: hypomne¯sis. . . . Why is the surrogate or supplement dangerous? It is not, so to speak, dangerous in itself, in the aspect of it that can present itself as a thing, as a being-present. In that case it would be reassuring. But here, the supplement is not, is not a being (on). It is nevertheless not a simple nonbeing (me¯ on) either. Its slidings slip it out of the simple alternative presence/absence. That is the danger. And that is what always enables the type to pass for the original. As soon as supplementary outside is opened, its structure implies that the supplement itself can be “typed,” replaced by its double, and that a supplement to the supplement, a surrogate for the surrogate is possible and necessary.10

192 / Chapter Four

The unreliability and incalculability of the enemy as enemy refracts a structural insecurity of the war archive centered on the surrogate of the surrogate, in which what is already being supplemented, typed, and surrogated is sovereignty itself as it “slides in and out of the simple alternative of presence and absence.” How, then, is sovereignty, never fully constituted at any given point of time and space, to be repeated and recalled without the thesis, guarantee, and position of “the One”? This stasiology of the state speaks to the slippage of those exteriorizations, supplements, prosthetics, substrates, and supports meant to carry political memory and sovereignty in extending media. Archival apparatuses of absolute protective enclosure, such as “ground zero” and “the Holocaust,” arrest history and sovereignty against the slippage and forgetful loss of normative time. However, the recession of the unreliable enemy both threatens and intensifies the archival project of arrest, repetition, duplication, and return, precipitating new and remediating modes of consignation and new campaigns against peripatetic terror as an incompletely constituted reality. Archivization commences from memory’s structural breakdown and loss, from the originating precipice of referential disappearance—the violence the lost enemy promises to inflict on sovereignty and its memory and the threat that Derrida discerns as always depleting the friend/enemy matrix. It is at this conjuncture of fidelity/infidelity, mediation/dismediation, where the structuring yet absentee enemy can be encountered in all of its emptiness. In 2008, as the Iraq War, “the bad war,” descended into a politics of bribery (the Sunni Awakening Movement), then presidential candidate Barack Obama pledged to secure America’s future purchase on the disappearing enemy with war on the Afghan-Pakistan frontier. This resecuring of war may also have been analogized to the crisis of value retention of equally virtualized artifacts of subprime credit. Because of political devaluation in Iraq, recalculated West Asian wars were posed as derivatives recalled to an accrediting origination banked and entombed at the groundzero repository. However, presidential campaign innuendo rescripted the value structure of the war on terror, transferring the war’s axioms from the thresholds of Middle Eastern green zones to the inner courts of national electoral conversation and transforming Obama into a para-site of American homeland and hospitality. Despite his renewal of fidelity to the ground-zero archive, his critics, drawing on the tropology of the war, turned Obama into a placeholder for the promised enemy, making him the Obama of the bad names: the Islamic mole posing as a Christian; the sleeper harboring the excess of racial mixing and transcultural promiscuity; Obama, the exemplar of racial and natal alienation; Obama, the transient

The Structuring Enemy and Archival War / 193

indexical of covert migrancy (his contested birth certificate, his madrassa schooling, and his illegally resident aunt); Obama, guilty by association with a reformed minister of terrorism and an unreformable terrorizing minister; and Obama whose epidermal difference precipitated calls for his branding with American flag pins—updated extensions of the branding irons that once disciplined and archived the enslaved in America. This demand for confessional fidelity to the 9/11 archive expressed more than the panic of Obama’s Republican and Democratic adversaries and the avarice of predatory media; this was a broader sociological reflex capable of as much flexible repurposing as the war on terror itself. The global war on terror, first mobilized to defend the memory of democracy assaulted, was redeployed to immunize that democracy from assaulting itself, from falling into archival exteriority—the political infidelity termed “Obamanation.” Long-standing and addicting tropiates of the war on terror retroactively toxified the political landscape, seeking new forms of accreditation by mortgaging Obama’s race and (non)origins, transforming him into a pathogen within American electoral democracy, and thereby igniting campaigns of autoimmunization that continued throughout his presidency. Roberto Esposito writes of autoimmunity: “[We] have already seen how the most incisive meaning of immunitas is inscribed with its contrary that indicates that the concept of immunization presupposes that which it negates. Not only does it appear to be derived logically, but it also appears to be internally inhabited by its opposite. . . . What is immunized in brief is the same community . . . through a negation of its original horizon . . . the fold that separates community from itself, sheltering it from an unbearable excess.”11 Esposito’s juxtaposition of the fold and the unbearable excess captures an archival landscape in crisis. Obama became the memorandum of the structuring enemy who never quite arrives, who resists location, and whose promised threat fills a necessary political lack. The 9/11 grammatology of fear overprinted on Obama, turning him into the living organ of the encrypted dead memory of an archive bequeathed by the World Trade Center dead, for whom he became a placebo of profanation. Racialized natal alienation in this context can be defined as Obama’s consignment to historical capital that refuses any valence to its placeholder. Such devaluing consignation is nothing new in our public culture, where racial archives historically exhibit anamorphic mobility; the African American body from slavery onward has repeatedly served as the archive and domicile for the transmutable fantasy, fears, violence, and oppositional determination of the democratic white majority. That this archival violence did not immediately prevail in the election did nothing to mitigate its presence, currency,

194 / Chapter Four

circulation, and malleability in American political culture to this day. This assault discloses that the unwinnable exteriorized war on terror can be recalled, typed, ameliorated, supplemented, prolonged, and commemorated by an interiorized war of proliferating securitization. In this culture of bad names and returning revenants it comes as no surprise that Obama inoculated his presidency through fidelity to the Afghan-Pakistan war as the good, winnable, and calculable war, thereby bending the arc of American exceptionality to the West Asian frontier, a passage that betrayed his initial promise of military closure and homecoming. The ideology of archival profanation, such as “Obamanation,” can be situated within Derrida’s rethinking of the dialectics of hospitality crossed by Esposito’s agon of community and immunity, and their unsupportable excess. The proverbial hospitality of open democracy, the American invitation to be democratically normalized, has evolved into an aggressive, ballistical hospitalization of estranging life worlds as an investment in the abominable and the anomic as itineraries of risk and threat. Derrida sets up a series of substitutions, a theory of the homely site that emerges when an alien threat traverses the domiciles of archive, host, homeland, and body politic. Derrida speaks of complicity between hospitality and hostility, conjoining them in a figure of archival aggression, intrinsic desistance, and transitivity termed “hostipitality,” a neologism formed of “hospitality” and “hostility”: “[hospitality] . . . a word of Latin origin, of a troubled and troubling origin, a word which carries its own contradiction incorporated into it, a Latin word which allows itself to be parasitized by its opposite, ‘hostility,’ the undesirable guest [hôte] which it harbors as the self-contradiction in its own body.”12 In American public culture this hostipitality welds the mediatic hosting of attentional threat to the military exportation of democratic hospitality in an addictive, innervating, and explosive formula. This hosting of threat and risk by their imputed political hostage both provisions risk with a simulacral circulation and institutes a mediatic court of conscience. In the forward movement of panic, hosted threat and hazard become politically citable and, in turn, para-sitable. Derrida identifies a certain double bind to hospitality, where the conditions of entry can never be allowed to subvert the given laws of habitus, of archival emplacement; from this it can be assumed that even the hosting and domiciling of the most threatening prospect furthers the expansive remapping of sovereignty as an archival habitus that sustains itself through an hypomnematic Other. Derrida conjoins the spatial principles of hosting and archiving: “hospital, hospice, family, city, nation, language, etc., the law of identity which de-limits the very place of proffered hospitality and

The Structuring Enemy and Archival War / 195

maintains authority over it, maintains the truth of authority, remains the place of this maintaining, which is to say, of truth. . . . This is the principle (one could say, the aporia) of both the constitution and the implosion of the concept of hospitality.”13 Wherever the threshold of habitus is crossed, the proprietary alarm of the prescriptive origin is set off and recalled along with this contamination. The border between the proper and the improper is foundational and inaugurating. It is the incision and circumcision that archives the difference between the within and the without and thus creates interiority, the homeland as an archival habitus that only becomes a fully constituted reality through inadmissible entry—through the outside and the without. The foundation and habitus are invariably revoked and evoked by the crossing of the extimate Other (inside and penetrating but not intrinsic), thereby generating a para-site, a third intersecting locus to the inside/outside nexus: “It should also be remembered that the parasite is by definition never simply external, never simply something that can be excluded from or kept outside of the body ‘proper,’ shut out from the ‘familial’ table or house. . . . The parasite then ‘takes place.’ And at bottom, whatever violently ‘takes place’ or occupies a site is always something of a parasite.”14 If the border as archival aperture gives interiority and exteriority, then the political para-site is the border of the border, the archive of the archive, that abrogates any sense of the protological. The homeland is not first and then secondly para-sited as a fall from origin and rule; rather, the habitus and its para-site are each other’s condition, archived in the triangulating coordinates of (1) the crossed boundary, insofar as the latter’s traversal marks it as something to be crossed, (2) as having been crossed out as protective barrier, and (3) as primordially present only to the degree that it first appears in only being crossed by another bo(a)rder. The border marks and makes the para-site as much as the latter marks and makes the border. Securing habitus proceeds through a succession of reversible parasitic interfaces through which the homeland reencounters itself, reveals itself to itself, recalls itself, and displays its archival authority through a storehouse of disturbing figures that are declared as such only through their perceivable depth of disclosure—as that which is, and shows the border of the border as the limit and the end of the grounding border. Here that parasitical hosting of the political para-site discloses the principle of the latter as a nearness that conserves, carries, or introduces the principle of farness: “The purity of the within can henceforth only be restored by accusing exteriority of being a supplement, something inessential and yet detrimental to that essence, an excess that should not have been added to the unadulterated plenitude of the within. The restoration of inner purity must therefore re-

196 / Chapter Four

constitute, recite—and this is myth itself, the mythology, for example, of a logos recounting its origin and returning to the eve of a pharmacographical assault.”15 The structuring enemy as a citable para-site is rooted to the archival foundation, is foundational, and cannot be expelled without rooting out rootedness itself. The foundation of the habitus was instated in a contamination that inaugurates the archival logic of the para-citable, as an ordo inveniendi (an order of discovery). The parasitic supplement and ruin of the origin repeats what is para-sited and contaminated through the reciting and re-siting of the habitus in itineraries of invasion and assault. Hosted threat is the marked difference, the edge zone that is smuggled into the heartland precisely because danger supports and arches the power to domesticate, archive, and consign. “hospitality always in some way does the opposite of what it pretends to do and immobilizes itself on the threshold of itself, on the threshold which it re-marks and constitutes, on itself in short, on both its phenomenon and its essence.”16 Yet, this immobilization of identity and interiority on the border, edge, or limn is a prelude to kinesis, kenosis, and plasticity: the state goes to war on threat and the para-site by reconstituting itself on its thresholds as a political project. The mediation of terrorist negativity as domicilable and archivable seeks habitus and the habitual not in enclosure and rigidity, but in the decay of sovereign thresholds, in the spectropoiesis of a liquefied and spreading border spillage such as the overflight, invasion, and occupation of a nominated political para-site in Iraq, West Asia, or Yemen. The homeland archives and secures only in presenting itself as unhomely (unheimlich), as estranged from itself and thus in deficit to itself; it must pay, and play itself back to itself, retrieve itself with interest, with archivable supplementation that can only derive from what and where it is not. Political liquefaction draws down the reserve of the para-site wherein the homeland becomes augment and surplus to itself, becomes more than itself by being resecured, resolidified, and even rearchived in multiple exterior locales, in the hosting and hostaging of foreign terrains and alien bodies that border the border. Archival Dismediation In speaking of the incommensurability unleashed by the (de)structuring enemy, Derrida tacitly disputes any sequence of before and after between the calculable and incalculable enemy. He presents a dialectical law of the enemy (one without any sublimation): the present enemy and the promised enemy contaminate and interpenetrate each other; the structuring en-

The Structuring Enemy and Archival War / 197

emy is an amalgam of mimetic surrogates promised, manifest, and receding, within and without, forthcoming and withheld. Derrida’s reference to a mobile multiplicity of enemies also implies a parallel multiplicity of sovereignties that posit and pursue the multiplying errancy and unpunctuality of the enemy. This self-partitioning and self-substitution of sovereignty in the repetition of the enemy is only poorly grasped by appealing to the Schmittian state of exception, which presumes a stabilized and stabilizing enemy and a parallel molar Archimedean state apparatus. For the peripatetic and disappearing enemy requires the self-surpassing of the state as a fixed point, as Althusser observes: “And supposing that this place . . . [of the political] . . . is a point, it would not be fixed, but mobile—better still, unstable in its very being, since all its effort must tend towards giving itself existence: not a transient existence . . . but historical existence.”17 Mimetic adequation with the structuring, multipliable, and selfdispersing enemy requires a polycentric and poly-ex-centric state that vicariously executes war with prosthetic proxies and drones (machinic or human) in procedural mufti that are armed with built-in warrants of indemnification and deniability. The state practices self-substitution, selfpartitioning, and self-archiving through transplanted and ex-orbited organs of aggression that task everyday life with intimidation and terror—the systemic randomness of political terror, from preemptive attack to automated drone-plane targeting to clandestine kill-team assassinations. Rule by vicarious and detachable sovereignty takes the diverse and not always continuous forms of “low-intensity” warfare, extralegal paramilitary formations, outsourced corporate and criminal surrogates, militarized police actions, extrajudicial assassination, deniable black ops, and the practice and fakeries of collateral damage. These new “roboticized” satellites and drones of sovereignty move from place to place, target to target, as mobile liquid archives. A satellite is a guard; it keeps watch, gives warning, and acts in the name of an absent origin and at a distance from this deferred center. I term this development the “becoming-nonstate-of-the-state”—an apparatus of political virtualization or simulation invested in the production of vicarious power rather than the practice of law-conserving classification or discipline. Today the exemplary corporate organ without body is the state-become-nonstate, with its detachable prosthetic tendrils of force. The state-become-nonstate is a “deactualization” of the state that has nothing to do with a decrease in its pragmatic efficacy— quite the contrary. In war by self-substitution, by distaff and deniable prostheses of the state, the latter enacts its mastery over its own legal discontinuity, containerization, and disappearance without relinquishing its sovereign right to violence. This

198 / Chapter Four

counterfactual and deactualizing state is performed as programmatic indifference and institutionally orchestrated inattention and misdirection that traverse the aporetic archival forms of anonymous disappearances or renditions, forgotten massacres, clandestine burial grounds of the executed, and the covert back spaces and black sites of torture. It coincides in part with what Foucault anticipated as the capillary “deinstitutionalization” of panoptical power, which he identified as aspiring to continuous command and control over everyday life. However, the contemporary “securocratic” state no longer requires a truth-generating continuity of the body, the subject, and the population, subjected to compulsory visibility and a seamless disciplinary grid. In contrast to capillary power, this ex-centric, centrifugal state institutes a parasitic and disintegrative rather than an integrative relation with the everyday. Compulsory and contingently constructed zones of invisibility, alternating with optical saturations of shock and awe and quasi-visible collateralized damage, are the order of the day. And this tactical politics of exposure and disappearance applies equally to the phenomenality of the state and to the fate of its polemological objects. The state-at-war can no longer be described, as it was by Machiavelli, as an archival form in continuous movement conserving its duration and virtù against the chance or fortuna of the an-archic event. Sovereignty at war is transformed into “the becoming necessary of the encounter of contingencies.”18 The state-become-nonstate internalizes aleatory encounter, including the heterogeneity of the everyday and the ordinary, through its own productive randomness as a floating organ of sovereign right. The state’s transcription into inconsistent multiplicity and contingent composition materializes as a random-access sovereignty. This self-voiding in repetition is the state’s disassemblage into performative striations, containers, points, and parcels. Refocusing on differential contingent presentations of the state means grasping the phenomenality of the state not as a multiple of one, but as multiple of multiples. The fractal state is effectively captured in the infinition of the war on terror, in the outsourced declensions and conjugations of sovereignty, and by its homeomorphic identification with the multiples of the enemy. Through detachable organs of violence the state is recomposited into “states” of the state that defer, distance, delay, and spatialize the “of the state” as the no-longer stable “conditioning” ground of such kinesis. Sovereignty in this discontinuity appears only in situ, that is, in discontinuous, regionally tactical formations, enclosures, and preoccupations of detained bodies and landscapes. Ernst Junger, writing in 1957, pointed out that modern war is won not by heroic onslaughts and battles, but by rapidly making one’s own weap-

The Structuring Enemy and Archival War / 199

onry obsolete. Junger presents a visual culture of planned technical disappearance as intrinsic to the mode of motion of war: “Weapons vanished in the abyss like fleeting images, like pictures one throws into the fire. New ones were produced in protean succession.”19 The violence of autokinetic weaponry here is the dearchivization of weaponry as memory forms and a protean seriality structured by self-altering repetition, and disposability as depositions of expansive power. Can this designed disappearance be extended to the weaponized state itself? The amputated organ of war is part of this protean archival emptying; it is the disapparition of a continuous corporate structure and the state’s virtualized reappearance in new, postcorporate forms. In the state-become-nonstate, the organs of war and terror are severed from any residual and now surpassed and sublimated corporate body; the organs of force lose any organically related relationship to prior political determination. The self-amputating prosthetics of the state open up a politics of indeterminacy made up of contingent decompositions, recompositions, and a vertigo of the state without underlying ground. The detachable organ of war is an organ no longer of the state, but of the state’s dis-organicization. The organ of war negates its own concept in becoming a self-referential, self-legislating, and self-constituting body or autokinetic drone form. A core archival thematic is here confirmed—the reproduction and auto-repetition of the war archive lies in self-substitution; it always recedes from what it is meant to conserve. This is the state’s retentional power, performance, and plasticity of archiving itself in distension and rupture. This is also an apparatus that imparts only its powers of impartibility, particularly if the archived object is an enemy never adequately present to a sovereignty repeatedly positioned as conceptually adequate to the sheer nonactuality of the enemy withheld. As a self-amputating organ of force, this desistance of the archive from conservation creates a new materiality/ immateriality of sovereign right, pushing it upstream as an ungrounded right to sovereign right and a sovereign right to be without form, and ends in its warfare. Archival Asiety Hegel hailed the synchronized march of Napoleon Bonaparte’s armies across Europe as an archival and almost mechanized and mediatic release of the idea of progress that has recently returned in the technocratic release of compulsory democracy known as regime change.20 Martin Heidegger recognized an accusatory interface between the predatory archives of mass media and mass war as machines of release, targeting, and retainment:

200 / Chapter Four

“Words have become instruments for hunting down and hitting, namely in the ‘procedure’ and the labor of representing everything [as surely as] precision-firing. The machine-gun, the camera, the ‘word,’ the poster—all have this same fundamental function of putting objects in retainment.”21 Predatory mechanisms as diverse as posters, cameras, machine guns, regimented armies, and mobile “kill-teams,” when placing objects and subjects in “retainment,” execute an archival vocation associated with the persecutory drives of classification as a derivative of the Greek concept of catagorein—to accuse. The predatory and mobile archive is currently exemplified by drone weaponry and particularly by experiments seeking to implant ethical discriminations or “deliberative/reactive autonomous architecture,” into this apparatus that will extend existing discriminating routines of “signature strikes,” “personality strikes,” and facial recognition. These satellites are currently encrypted with computational memory, termed “automodes,” that guide these weapon systems as roaming, polycentric, and multipliable repositories and doppelgängers of a detachable and released sovereign will to watch, record, and kill. Supposedly the humanitarian programming of “ethical routines” or “automodes” termed “Intelligent Control” would install a jus in bello through a calculus of doubt, as exemplified by software that differentiates combatants and noncombatants, threat and nonthreat. However, the current temporally elongated antiterrorist doctrine of imminent threat, which requires no actual evidence of planned violence, renders the possibility of a nonactionable nonthreat all but nonexistent and technologies of accusation noncontingent. Ronald C. Arkin, a theorist and designer of robotic ethical routines, derives such ethical programming from the international Laws of War and rules of engagement (international and localized). As humanitarian injunctions these codes should override any human contamination such as “scenario fulfillment” in battle (a euphemism for ideologically inculcated threat perception), which “leads to distortion or neglect of contradictory information in stressful situations, where humans use new incoming information in ways that only fit their pre-existing belief patterns.”22 The autonomized ethical routine will be enhanced by equally autonomic visuality, no longer reliant on the site-specific human gaze, being developed by the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency’s Mind’s Eye project to program robotic visual intelligence.23 Arkin presupposes transparency in ethical programming due to its superior accelerated information processing in comparison to human drone operators and their “pre-crime” proleptic distortions. He grounds humanitarian drone decisionism and futurities in automated data delivery and computation that unifies humanitarian im-

The Structuring Enemy and Archival War / 201

peratives with fiscalized calculations of risk assessment. (It is curious that Arkin’s appeal to and reliance on international law and rules of engagement makes no mention of the existing and prospective robotics of nuclear deterrence systems, whose activation would render the humanitarian laws of war null and void.) Despite Arkin’s appeal to the injunctions of the international laws of war, he confesses that drone warfare is ultimately subordinate to the unwritten metaphysics of “military necessity” and to the “inevitability” of the evolutionary deployment of this technology. Robotic war, irrespective of ethical modifications, materializes an apolitical telematic determinism naturalized by the idea of progress. Here lies a concordance— technological, historical, political, and anthropological—between the preemptive targeting function, the preemptive humanitarian-ethical function, and the preemptive institutionalization of drone weaponry as converging and recursive futurities. A pivotal rationale of robotic weapon development is anesthesiological, permitting humans to kill without undergoing the risk of wounding, death, and mutilation. This political immunology coincides with Derrida’s figuration of sovereignty as a mode of impassability and affective insensitivity. Junger anticipated the logic of the drone in the 1930s when he proposed that modernity’s interfacing of the machine and pain generated an unprecedented horror that a protective mechanics of pain insulation would redress by relocating pain from the sphere of necessity to that of chance, where pain can be better managed or deferred.24 In delinking war and necessary pain by connecting machinic armoring, desensitization, and aleatory pain, Junger anticipated the doctrine of collateral damage as the excusable aleatory excess of antiseptic war technology. Lacan, in his discussion of the mirror stage, describes the need of human embodiment for mediating “orthopedic” prosthetics as conditioned by intrinsic disability. He posits a compensatory drive toward immunizing bodily integrity mediated by a prosthetic. It is by virtue of the archiving prosthetic that hominization is completed in “an imaginary direction” out of deficiency and disability.25 The historical structuring of modern war, by scopic and other modes of distancing disembodiment traversing agent, medium, and patient, appears to fulfill this “humanizing” trajectory from contingent disability to phantasmatic completion and plenitude as mediated by a “nonhuman” prosthetic. The contemporary simulacrum that conjoins technics and war imprints, enframes, and types bodily ideality, stability, and permanence while simultaneously sublimating bodily contingency and finitude. Ethical programming of the drone through idealized humanitarian codes, and the drone’s surrogation of the combat soldier, is

202 / Chapter Four

an archive of anthropological mirroring that simultaneously sublimates human existentials. One prominent media theorist of drone weapons, Peter Asaro, depoliticizes the relation between the drone, archival ethics, and autonomic war: “for the most part, the nature of robotic technology itself is not at issue, but rather the morality behind human actions and intentions exercised through the technology.”26 Asaro’s thesis does not speak to the technology “behind human morality,” such as the teleological determinism admitted to by Arkin. Asaro assumes a neutrality or anesthesiology of the technical in relation to substantive “human” morality and pathologies—as if the latter do not already refract autonomic procedural routines and ideological automatisms originating in securities and routines cognate with that of the drone. Existing and orienting institutional and ideological automatisms, like the friend/enemy imperative, are given “second life” in current drone programming such as facial recognition routines, rendering both ethical normativity and neutrality a commerce between symbiotic archives devoid of any pristine human or machinic predicate. The presumption of machinic impassivity and apathy that can facilitate the imprint of distortional anthropological affect in the apparatus evades the historical and submedial cross-contamination of two archives, the anthropological and the interdigital. These machinalities are in play when Pentagon theorists delimit the operative terrain of human intercession and accountability by grading operator/machine interface in terms of the archival embedding of “human in the loop,” “human out of the loop,” and full machinic autonomy or “on the loop.” Such distinctions are neither ontologically nor ethically neutral, since they can be reread as juridical discriminations that can limit ultimate responsibility for war crimes committed by robotic weaponry to low-ranking operators and programmers or render legal imputation relatively unavailable (one cannot punish a fully autonomous machine). In these cases the immunological trajectory of drone warfare paradoxically underwrites harm reduction for combat personnel, humanitarian injunctions, and unpunishability for operators and machines—an assemblage that I have previously described as “force protection.” Asaro ascribes the potential ethical distortion of the drone to particularizing human pathology, political or otherwise, and identifies an a priori, universal, categorical autonomizing indifference and insensitivity in the drone that has yet to be ethically programmed or perverted by human motivations or Arkin’s phantasmatic “scenario fulfillments.” In doing so he replicates the Kantian opposition between empirically contingent human “pathology” and the categorical formalism of the imperative program

The Structuring Enemy and Archival War / 203

that subtends ethical autonomy. What Kant termed human pathologies or situated object choices are particular modes of willing that are not universalizable. The drone’s apathetic susceptibility to human particularity and pathology is already an ethical deficit within a framework where the noncontingent autonomy or self-determination of the moral subject is considered to be the pure form of ethical action. Kantian ethical dronology, like the Lacanian mimetic prosthetic, paradoxically embodies dehumanizing detachment and anthropological mimesis in the same form. The Kantian subject, in the name of universality, is expected to abandon its particular objects, whose situated utility does not sustain a consistent relation to the good; the latter is the goal of a self-positing will that sacrifices its empirical objects for universality. Thus Arkin’s ethical design for drones would subsume the part objects and interfaces of rapport between drones and their operators under a universal determination originating in the laws of war and rules of engagement that both require and enable the escalation of drone autonomy and reason. Lacan writes of Kant’s devaluation of particularized objects of action: The pursuit of the good would thus be an impasse if it were not reborn as das Gute, the good which is the object of the moral law. It is indicated to us by our experience of listening within ourselves to commandments, whose imperative presents itself as categorical, that is, unconditional.  .  .  . Let us note that this good is only supposed as the Good by proposing itself, as has just been said, over and against any object which would set a condition to it, by opposing itself to whatever uncertain good these objects might provide, in an a priori equivalence, in order to impose itself as superior by virtue of its universal value. Thus its weight only appears by excluding anything—drive or sentiment—which the subject might suffer in his interest for an object, what Kant therefore qualifies as “pathological.”27

The ethical subject’s detachment from all contingency, part objects, and situated materiality empties the latter of any finite content causing its desubjectifcation. Today this reappears in the incremental dehumanization of the drone, which is progressively insulated from a contingent human interface. The unpunishability of the drone further confirms its Kantian assemblage in armoring autonomy as that which can never be predicated by its particular intermediate objects (collateral damage) in pursuit of its overarching mission and injunctions. Like the Kantian subject as read by Lacan, the ethical programming of the robot redesigns the drone as a split subject/ artifact capable of relinquishing its particular object at the behest of the

204 / Chapter Four

universal laws of war— that is, to desist from the drone’s acquisition of bodies as potential attack surfaces. Lacan writes: “One perceives . . . the obvious universality of the duty of the depositary would lead us to . . . the bipolarity by which the moral Law institutes itself is nothing other than this splitting of the subject which occurs in any intervention of the signifier: namely that of the subject of the enunciation from the subject of the statement.”28 For Arkin and Asaro, existing human/drone/target interfaces too closely resemble particularist and contingent intersubjective encounters made up of potentially contaminating human and machinic exchanges of specialized functions and part objects. Kant’s definition of marriage as reciprocal access to the sex organs of the partner can define human/machinic interface, where each entity makes contaminating use of the organs and orifices of the other. For Arkin and Asaro this rapport, moving from human to machine, opens the possibility of pathology in drone war—the reverse direction is not considered to be ethically problematic, because it is associated with prenormative informatic transparency. Humans, for these theorists, can infect drones with nonsynchronous data assessment and apperceptual ideological desire and reactivity, thus compromising the drone’s immunological and informatic project of which humanitarian war is an extension. The humanitarian trajectory of robotic violence unfolds as distantiation from its finite human derivation. Such drone networks will open up a political space motored by watchfulness and violence as the polycentric manifestation of a sovereign will to the good, purified by the humanitarian removal of human impurities. The multiplicity of ethically autonomous drones will function as a combinatory of sovereignty in which each drone is the equivalent of the other in an autocracy of the machine rendered actuarial in the name of the international laws of war. The programming of an overriding good in drone overrides requires the intervention of a hyperobjectified will exerting its universal right, such as Reason, the State, or an executive Program or Design. This is why Arkin locates the unavoidability of drone war in both military necessity and an eschatological technological determinism as the expressions of a natural right to drone. Lacan, in his essay “Kant with Sade,” identifies the former’s ethical imperative and the latter’s erotic violence as mutually locked in the autonomy of a universal nomothetic command or drive. The ethically programmed drone is a Sadean machine in its execution of Kantian-style imperatives as universal commands to inflict commensurating pain, dismemberment, and death on asymmetrical others. Sade interlaces nature, sovereignty, the libertine, and their overlapping autonomic drives. The libertine in Sade is subject to an overriding impersonal law—the mechanics of nature—that

The Structuring Enemy and Archival War / 205

drives the libertine as an apparatus that programs the mechanics of pain in the latter’s mechanically chosen or typified objects. Assault occurs with mathematical regularity—the selection and number of experimental subjects and the types and number of treatments that are to be inflicted. Experimentality is effectuated at the level of autonomic limned surfaces—a circuitry of sensory inputs and material discharges, a microphysics of ingestion and aggression which instantiate the Law. Yet behind and below all this sensory intensity and informatics of suffering is the libertine’s insensate, blind, unquestioning, and machinic following of the designs of law. Pain in Sade is valued for its automaticity, for the felicities of its fabricated perpetuation as compared to the fleeting duration of finite pleasure. The potential infinitude of pain correlates to the infinitude of a sovereign will exercised over an uninterrupted continuum of available bodies viewed as if from above. This drive can be coupled with the project of achieving humanitarian perfection in perpetuity in the autokinesis of war by drone, whose ethical routines would perform as a perpetual-motion machine granting both death and life. Pierre Klossowski observes an anesthetized (“apathetic”), autonomic, indifferent, repetitive, and droning narratological program in Sade that can be read as anticipating the automaticity and indifferent repetition with which the drone program executes its autonomy and objects: “The parallelism between the apathetic reiteration of acts and Sade’s descriptive reiteration again establishes that the image of the act to be done is re-presented each time not only as though it had never been performed but also as though it had never been described. This reversibility of the same process inscribes the presence of nonlanguage in language; it inscribes a foreclosure of language by language.”29 The Sadean foreclosure of language by language refracts an autoimmunization program whereby repetitive acts and encodings of penetration, dismemberment, pain, and death serve to typologize and homogenize the will to stamp and to imprint embodiment/disembodiment; the homogeneity of descriptions both actively produces and refracts the mechanized leveling of experimental bodies in the Sadean act while systematizing the will to experiment. Droning Sadean postnarratology and drone sadism perform signature strikes, an imposed typography of pain upon a once-singular body to be rendered a reliable substratum, a support, a scenography, and a theater of operations. Does not the exercise in ethical autokinesis by the drone mandate the experimentality of inflicted pain in an imperative mode, a Sadean and sovereign right to experiment, owing to the command to be equally ethical in inflicting pleasure and pain, in both killing and not killing? A similar imperative can be encountered in the amnesty hearings of the South African

206 / Chapter Four

truth commission, which were mandated to indemnify certain acts of torture as experiments in utilitarian and universal “proportionality” in relation to particular “political motivation” (see chapter 5). Under drone ethicality humans are killed through procedures, protocols, and authenticating adjudications that render the death of the Other not a means to an end but a desirable end in itself that authenticates the drone’s ethical targeting of the universal (if the privation of terrorism can be seen as such). Here the power both to let live and to make die sustains ethical necessity; those targets who die as well as those who are spared under such protocols become insignia of a universal and abstract law, the concretion of which is accessible only in those very instantiating acts and their data retrieval (as a certifying and uniform postnarrative repetition). “The drowned and the saved” are both required elements and instruments of a symbiotic kill chain and spared-life chain enabled by humanitarian robotics in pursuit of perpetual duty. This remote and unearthly morality coincides with the orbiting, groundless, and peripatetic drone floating in the interdigital nonspace of “split-location operations.” The universal abstraction that is the ethicalized drone act will be instantiated or “enunciated” from nowhere and anywhere and by nobody when the robot will have been all but sterilized of human predicates and interface by computational-ethical autonomy. One of the pivotal concerns driving the minimizing and eliminating of the human/drone interface through ethical autokinesis is the fear that control of the drone could be captured by an adversary. Thus the projected technical and ethical “dehumanization” of the drone is structured around the Schmittian friend/enemy matrix, which speaks to how drone trajectories can refract, capture, and, in turn, alter residual forms of sovereignty.30 The fear of a potential capture and remediation of a drone by an adversary is both an anxiety concerning inherent robotic apathy and a testament to the political anesthesiology of the drone—it knows no nationality, takes no oath of allegiance, and hence fidelity and betrayal become zones of indifference within the drone orbit. The drone can be detached from the social contract implied by the friend/enemy matrix, and its inversion of and/or indifference to the latter effectively furthers the drone project as a form of indivisible sovereignty unconditioned by any externality. Such omnidirectional logics can propel a certain political amorality backward from drone indifference to the armed force and assemblage that fights through drones. Here what goes out—radicalized operative autonomy—must also go inward. The structuring of counterinsurgent war through technical detachability is ultimately indicative of a sovereign autonomy that obeys no fidelity and that neither has nor protects any stable political constituency.

The Structuring Enemy and Archival War / 207

The globalized signifiers of the humanitarian, of security, and of democracy are here morphed into the prospect and law of the universal target detached from discrete empirical content and contingent origination such as the nation-state. The fully autonomous drone would improve on its cooptable antecedent by manifesting the closed circuitry of an indifferent, and thus a radicalized reversible, friend/enemy matrix. As such it would neither have friends nor enemies, only omnidirectional targeting functions. The drone that could be turned through an interface with the enemy and the drone that is totally autonomous from all predicating interfaces both embody that eponymous maxim attributed to Aristotle: “Oh friends, there is no friend.” Drone warfare at this juncture further effaces the logistical distinction between polemos and stasis, war and fratricide, war and domestic policing—indistinctions—that have long been embedded in the historical trajectory of counterinsurgent governmentality. The unreliable friend/ enemy matrix, which Derrida poses as threatening the coherence of the Schmittian concept of the political, would be reencountered in the drone, whose orbital arc traces a profound disjuncture between instituted politics and the constitutive power of war, whereby the latter overtakes the former through a prosecutorial autonomy that knows neither friend nor enemy— only metonymic multiplicities and substitutions. Asaro normalizes operativity in drone command centers as the “labor of surveillance.”31 This phrase inadvertently opens up terrains of ethicality, bypassed by Asaro, that tacitly engage attentionality and the historical relationship between the embodied subject and the latter’s machinic transposition-alienation. Asaro, in his discussion of the labor of surveillance by drone operators, does not acknowledge that computational discriminations refract acts of normative disembodiment at either end of the drone kill chain, which articulates the operator and the victim. His assumption of an inherent technological neutrality of the robotic is an anodyne for the disembodying logic of remote split-location operations wherein the assailant and the assailed do not occupy a connective, embodied spatial and perceptual field, which all but precludes the possibility of a coeval ethical encounter between the drone operator and the target. In drone warfare the assailant and the target diverge across an abstracted cartographic arc, an interdigital hyperspace (hyper- here indicates a space beyond space, or a space without space). The attribution of ethical neutrality to the machine, unless otherwise programmed, ignores the intrinsic antinomic structure of the automaton as a pharmakon (remedy and toxin), wherein mimetic form is effectively defined by its resistance to passive repetition, compliance, and fidelity, and

208 / Chapter Four

where repetition becomes the parricide of the model by the copy, which extends to computational “anthropological” ethicality. Karl Marx understood this dynamic and its profound implications for machinic mimetology as the archiving and dearchiving of labor, which would also encompass ethical labor as a power/knowledge apparatus: In machinery, the appropriation of living labour by capital achieves a direct reality in this respect as well: It is, firstly, the analysis and application of mechanical and chemical laws, arising directly out of science, which enables the machine to perform the same labour as that previously performed by the worker. However, the development of machinery along this path occurs only when large industry has already reached a higher stage, and all the sciences have been pressed into the service of capital; and when, secondly, the available machinery itself already provides great capabilities. Invention then becomes a business, and the application of science to direct production itself becomes a prospect which determines and solicits it. But this is not the road along which machinery, by and large, arose, and even less the road on which it progresses in detail. This road is, rather, dissection [Analyse]—through the division of labour, which gradually transforms the workers’ operations into more and more mechanical ones, so that at a certain point a mechanism can step into their places. Thus, the specific mode of working here appears directly as becoming transferred from the worker to capital in the form of the machine, and his own labour capacity devalued thereby. Hence the workers’ struggle against machinery. What was the living worker’s activity becomes the activity of the machine. Thus the appropriation of labour by capital confronts the worker in a coarsely sensuous form; capital absorbs labour into itself—“as though its body were by love possessed.”32

Marx’s “Fragment on the Machine” speaks to a form of archival power emanating from the interface of capital and technique, including cognitive and affective techniques of the body. This interface exponentially enlarges and accelerates mimetic power mediated by autonomic reproduction. The archival apparatus retroactively redesigns or resections the senses and the gestural economy of those who are encased and enframed by its microfunctions; retentional and attentional schema striate the body in order to conduct its conduct toward this apparatus, which could eventually include ethical discrimination as machinality. Marx characterizes the worker as a watchman of the machine, and contemporary post-Fordist modes and relations of production render such subjectivizing and subjugated attention as both integral to and an end product of capitalist production and value

The Structuring Enemy and Archival War / 209

generativity, which manufacture actions and their agents as mass generalizable articles. Archivization entails automatic and decontextualizing disembodiment, consistent with Kantian departicularization, which becomes the conditioning anesthesiological “ground,” or rather abyss, of all consequent machinic judgment. However, Marx also finds in this transcription an emerging and mediating general intellect, traversing labor, capital, machines, the anthropological, the organic, and the inorganic. As a possible gloss of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s general will, the general intellect, as mediatized by machinic reproducibility, references a transgenic and self-assembling sovereign will that is reencountered in concentrate in drone decisionism. Ethical detachability through the machinic interface is a transposable organ that refers back to the anthropological intentionality of attention and care that the drone is designed to extend, surrogate, and displace. To attend (Latin attendere, or tendĕre, to stretch or extend) is to shift one’s attention to, to take care to give consideration, to regard, to arrest and to fix, to watch over, to minister to, or to wait upon. Humanity, as an ethical construct of care, is thus in symbolic attendance whenever the extending drone watches over, arrests, and fixes surfaces of surveillance and attack. However, this human posture vis-à-vis the machine, is also a standing at attention, as a molding discipline or pedagogy of sensibilities inculcated by conducting and being conducted by the conduct of the drone. And certainly each act of killing by the drone is a taking of attendance—of terrorists and nonterrorists—as part of a routine of attention. Finally, this attentional routine of the drone fabricates a political conditionality, if not hegemony, wherein both the terrorist and the nonterrorist either learn to attend to the attentions of the drone or die. Nowhere in this circuitry of attentionality, of taking care, can the machinic and the human be severed or parsed, and nowhere does one attentional entity or posture simply originate the other. As Bernard Steigler stresses, citing Gilbert Simondon, this recursive terrain of care and attention effects the acritical “transindividuation” of both the “human” and the “machinic” at either end of the kill chain, resulting in a collective habitus of attentional habitude between the machinic subject and the subjectified machine.33 Attending “humanity,” as a kinesis of care, is here posited as a virtualizable mobile ethical type that becomes the occasion for a general mimetology spread across heterogeneous interfaces and interraces— the human operator, the machinic, and whatever third is conjugated from their inter(de)facement. Facial-recognition technologies extend this typology and schematism of the human and, by extension, the inhuman, of the ethi-

210 / Chapter Four

cal subject and the terrorist, to admissible and inadmissible visages as political pixels of a drone mediated world picture—not a picture of the world, but of the world reduced to the pictorial, to manipulated metadata and maneuverable signature patterns. The association of the anthropological with a transposable normative “type” entails a recursive self-molding, self-designing, and self-outlining of the human in the transfer of ethical types, portraiture, schema, transcripts, and aesthetics across inter(de)facements. This would be equivalent to Deleuze’s equilibrium of outlines, but now transposed into drone warfare and its reliance on the incriminating and delineating “signature” pattern: “But if you consider Aristotle, there the tactile reference of the Greek optical world appears quite evidently . . . the form is related to its outline. . . . Statuary has the greatest importance in this optical world; it’s an optical world, but a world of sculpture, that is to say one in which the form is determined according to a tactile outline. Everything happens as if the visible form were unthinkable outside of a tactile mold. That is the Greek equilibrium. It’s the Greek tactilo-optical equilibrium.”34 Imprinting ethical injunctions and attending to digitally generated outlines become an “onto-typo-logy.” Onto-typo-logy presupposes that the world guarantees its own continuous mimesis in an eidetic ontology wherein what is present is pre-sent.35 Ontotypo-logy takes place as normation when the protohistorical and the protoanthropological have been passed through the sensorium of the machinic and the mimetic to emerge on the other side of this mediation as stabilized optical-tactile outlines. The ethically autonomous and humanly minimalized drone is designed in accordance with this autarchic and commanding visual idiom as “the natural coming about of what is dominated.”36 In this schema, re-presentation becomes the autopresentation of pure unmediated visibility. Onto-typo-logy preforms conjugating fidelities in which the world becomes innately maneuverable through its movable types, outlines, or signatures. This general mimetology of types, or onto-typo-graphy, guarantees the auto-representability of targets through the grafting of ethos and tupos, upon which ethical judgment can repose; but it is also, as Schürmann stresses, an abyssal continuum where successive yet discontinuous norm-giving mimetologies and outlines of the enemy replace each other in constant succession. Phillipe Lacoue-Labarthe, in positing the relation of onto-typo-logy to technology and visuality, opens a fascinating and complex meditation on the convergence of the Heidegerrian notion of technology as Ge-stell, which can be somewhat reductively glossed as enframement and retainment, and Gestalt or Gestaltung, which Lacoue-Labarthe reads as figuration

The Structuring Enemy and Archival War / 211

and schematization. Lacoue-Labarthe presents a rhizomatic genealogy of the etymons of Ge-stell as the force of retainment and release: stellen means to summon, to stop someone in the street, to force a person to give an account; nachstellen means to track, to pursue, to be after, to avenge; verstellen is to dissimulate; and a Gestell can be a skeleton.37 The drone partakes of all these predicates, even the skeletal in being a postanthropological frame, preserving an extracted human shell or sensorial superstructure that this automaton schematically and subversively embodies. And then there is the primary connection between Gestell and herstellen, to set forth or produce, and Darstellung or (re)presentation, which Heidegger posits as a mode of unveiling and unconcealment.38 For Lacoue-Labarthe, general onto-typo-logy, as the pre-sending of the world, occurs by virtue of the type (tupos) and its imprinting, which links figuration to the bestowal of meaning and thus links onto-typo-logy to ontotypography. Figuration is bestowed in the tactile impress of ideal types or the equilibrium of outlines on substance. Lacoue-Labarthe’s discussion looks back to Nietzsche’s concept of typus or type (overman). Junger associates the overman with the activity and self-formation of an anthropological machinality he calls “the worker,” whose posture toward self and Other is mediated by the material and immaterial labor of stamping (Prägung) and imprinting (Stempeln). The worker (overman) form is defined as a recursive Gestalt in the instituting of schema and figuration through a typologized will to typification. Heidegger casts this stamping and imprinting as “the severity of simplification,” which can undoubtedly be encountered in the death-penalty decisions of the “workers” at drone command centers and in the drone’s autonomic discharging of the death penalty upon outlines.39 In Junger’s thought, Gestalt refers to affecting a standstill connected to stalling, arresting, hunting down, and retention. Gestalt is aligned to the term Bestand (asset stock, inventory, reserve), a sense that Heidegger takes up with Gestell. Enframement and figuration animate the drone’s tracking and targeting of “terrorists” enabled by the imprinting and stamping of scopic dominance and launched ordinance. Junger also identifies the modern factory worker as a type who stamps or outlines himself or herself with anesthesiological objecthood through the withstanding of (dis)embodying pain. In his famous discussion of photography, particularly the photography of war, Junger treats this apparatus and its artifacts as bestowing a second “colder consciousness,” which expands the cultural capacity to objectify the world by way of the imprinting/imprinted overman as a self-relating object.40 This bidirectional anesthesiology communicates

212 / Chapter Four

with the desingularizing disembodiment of drone operator and victim that traverses the entire space-time arc of the drone kill chain. The transgenic production of types leads onward to the ethics of the drone as a literal “overman” driven by “dwell time” above the target, and schematic modes of seeing as the imposition of forms, regularities, and analogous semblance that Lacoue-Labarthe calls the “fashioning” and “fictioning” of sameness, in order to render an account and to accuse.41 The departicularization and anesthesia of Junger’s worker type, such as the drone operator, through self-objectification relates ontotypography to the stamp and imprint of the universal and noncontingent Kantian good as an object that enables the self-neutralizing self-objectification of the ethical subject, be it human or drone, in its pursuit of the good. Gillian Rose proposes a reperceptual event that suspends ontotypography when she critiques the instantaneity of “seeing into.” Rose diagrams a field of automatic and decisive visuality that can be reencountered in drone guidance: “We know our actions but deny their actuality. This is a form of dissembling. We know each action as the exercise of duty, and we refuse to know its actuality in the phenomenal world.”42 We refuse to know our actions from a site other than the one where we are enabled and disciplined to pay attention, which is the site of a blinding enclosure that denies or excludes entire terrains of inadmissible phenomenality; this is because the world picture fashioned by ontotypographic machines does not coincide with the world as an evental site that breaks through instituted lines of sight and their structuring closed horizons. Rose states: “Re-cognizing emphasizes the lack of identity or difference which is seen. . . . Anerkennen (re-cognizing) thus implies an initial experience which is misunderstood, and which has to be reexperienced. . . . Hence ‘re-cognition’ implies initial mis(re)cognition, not an immediate seeing into.”43 Rose succinctly links two issues here: first, the mode of “dissembling” implies the production of an enclosing and virtualizing scopic theater wherein unilateral and autonomic actions are denied their surplus actuality in the name of a curtained and compressing economy of discrete routines; and secondly, in this curtained theater, immediate recognition guaranteed by onto-typo-logy, or the pre-sent, presumes an aesthetics of transparency, “an immediate seeing into,” characteristic of the overman type, that suppresses the phenomenal opacity and resistance of the context, the real and the consequential. If the entire apparatus of the drone is premised on scopic instantaneity, Anerkennen (re-cognizing), as an incalculable and contingent ethical decision, could entail a withdrawal from optical immediacy—a re-cognition of the unseeingness of “seeing into” and the refusal and rescendence of

The Structuring Enemy and Archival War / 213

a transcendental optics. Would a drone ever shut down its cameras and other remote-sensing equipment as part and parcel of an ethical routine? Would a drone-human assemblage depolarize binary codes that institute the facial recognition of security and threat? Would such an assemblage ever de-drone and dethrone its overlook? Can a drone retract scopic sovereignty and operant ontotypography? Arkin does not contemplate the ethical abandonment of remote sensing, since his concept of ethics requires transparency, and not opacity or unrecognizability; but he inadvertently attests to the Kantian structure of drone ethics when he postulates that a robot given a directive violating its ethical routines could respond by selfdestructing, a sovereign decision that fulfills the sadomasochistic trajectory of the Kantian imperative as read by Lacan. Can there be an ethics within the archival machine akin to Foucauldian parrhesia, which is inherently anarchival, if not antiarchival? The ethical decision for Derrida, and I assume for Rose, refuses absolute archival retention, conservation, and ontotypography, for it “carries within it, and must do so, an essential excessiveness. It regulates itself neither on the principle of reason, nor on any sort of accountancy.  .  .  . I believe there is no responsibility, no ethico-political decision that must not pass through the proofs of the incalculable or the undecidable. Otherwise everything would be reducible to calculation, program, causality, and at best hypothetical imperative.”44 Programming ethical discrimination can never but be anthropological mimetology, parody, and parricide through the repetition and conversion of the living labor of ethicality into dead memory and the transduction of the latter as ineluctably giving or taking life as modes of autonomic attention. However, the anesthesiological consignment of ethical discrimination to the remote archive of the drone opens questions concerning the moral economy of drone war that disembodies on either end of its trajectory with greater and greater ethical inconsequence.45 The notion of a pro forma indifference and neutrality of the autonomous drone in relation to human-derived morality is but a rehearsal of the technologically imbued aseity of the anestheticized drone. Aseity refers to the absolute independence and self-existence by which a being, such as a god, exists in and of itself, from itself, as causa sui, which is the ultimate goal of programming ethical discrimination into the drone. Aseity corresponds to an impassible sovereignty that is incapable of being affected by another, that is moved only by itself and is unpunishable; the U.S. Air Force describes drone aseity as “projecting power without vulnerability.”46 The drone operator and the target are organs of an archive that mediates their respective incorporeality on the basis of this sovereign projector. The dispassion of

214 / Chapter Four

the drone fuses anesthesiological logics and ethical autonomy, thus reenacting the contemporary anesthesiological-humanitarian compromise of the death penalty, which upholds the ethicality of the sovereign right to kill. Absent from Asaro’s treatment of drone ethicality is the Derridean requirement of singularizing decision, sensitized responsivity, and the public affect of reciprocating and mutually accessible embodiments that might trigger the preemptive grievability that refrains from killing. Apocalyptic Preemptions The structuring enemy is designed through interminable tactical anticipation and delay, engendering particular forms of temporalizing violence. The promised enemy has a particular mode of appearing in time, that of traumatic earliness or the future anterior, a mode of anticipatory archiving and performative tautology that deploys the vicarious violence of the statebecome-nonstate to manifest a memory that will “produce après coup what it was destined in advance to produce, namely, proper interpretive models to read in return, to give sense, necessity, and above all legitimacy to the violence that has produced, among others, the interpretative model in question, that is the discourse of its self-legitimation.”47 To see war as archiving that which is not there or manifest is to detach archivization from a purely retrospective foreclosure and to explore how the war archive militarizes futurity and temporality. Preemption means “prior seizure of,” the interrupting expropriation of the mode of arrival of that which is seized, of that which is yet to come. Preemptive violence intervenes as a power of priority over the arrival and even nonarrival of the object of interdiction. “Preemption” derives from the Latin praeemptio, meaning “previous purchase,” from praeemere, meaning to buy before or to claim an early share of something that was meant to be held in common, such as the law or life. Preemption interrupts circulation and exchange through an appropriation before its time and exerts a suspending a priori over law, event, and time. The violence of preemption seizes the law and the enemy as its destined interpretive orders and in so doing seizes the archive within which the violence of preemption ultimately attains legibility and legitimacy. Preemption prefigures law just as it interdicts by prefiguring, previsioning, and premediating the enemy and its violence. Preemptive violence also precipitously seizes exemption or immunity for itself as the exception to law that law will excuse and indemnify. Preemption materialized in force not only anticipates a virtualized law to come but also installs violence as a law of virtualization.

The Structuring Enemy and Archival War / 215

The Latin etymon providentia, or providence (and the related term “divine purveyance”) refers to the redemptive governance of the world through the archival management of invisibility by means of strategic revealability, foresight, or preemption. Marie-José Mondzain locates a theology of revealability in the archive she terms “providential economy.” According to Mondzain, the profession of providential economy in early Christian theology was to keep the passage open between the empirical spectacle of the world and the transcendent spectacle of divine mystery and enigma, a locus now occupied by the aggressive images of globalized risk, portentous hazard, and vengeful sovereignties as privative figures of worldlessness in addition to, or in place of, divine will. Providential economy is the distribution of an invisible governing agency within the visible surround that can currently apply as much to the counterinsurgent deep state as it does to the “terrorist” mole. The providential economy is historically and empirically manifested but exceeds history, for it is providential and prudent to the degree that it preempts, orchestrates, or disposes of history through strategic unveiling or veiling. “Its economy will make use of all . . . the subterfuges of the doctor to heal the patient despite himself, all the seductions dear to the teacher who must make the most difficult knowledge loved. Speech, remedy, guile, condescension, punishment or lie . . . all the means of the economy are good when one uses them with economy, that is to say while remaining loyal to the spirit of the divine providential economy.”48 The prudential and the providential are the power of seeing in advance, foresight and forethought, and the making of provisions through the seeing and guarding of the invisible in the visible. Our contemporary providential economy controls actualization and deactualization; it is a form of government as the government of forms both veiled and unveiled, screened and screened off. In the Christian providential economy the image was a vehicle of salvation to the degree that it is economically coordinated to a transcendent will or plan. The visual politics of providential rule is the distribution of saving images or images from which subjects must be saved: only the providential economy as a media theology can render the distribution of revealability coherent as a medium of moral salvage and capitalization. Thus the contemporary actuarial structure of political providentiality combines three sites of archival veridiction, theology, theatrology, and ontotypography—a general mimetology of the future as a power/ knowledge apparatus not wholly anticipated by Foucault, who viewed capillary power as acephalous and atheistic. Derrida describes this theological sovereignty, proscenium presentation and archival mechanike that subtends Mondzain’s providential economy:

216 / Chapter Four The stage is theological for as long as its structure, following the entirety of tradition, comports the following elements: an author-creator who, absent and from afar, is armed with a text and keeps watch over, assembles, regulates the time or the meaning of representation, letting this latter represent him as concerns what is called the content of his thoughts, his intentions, his ideas. He lets representation represent him through representatives, directors or actors, enslaved interpreters who represent characters who, primarily through what they say, more or less directly represent the thought of the “creator.” Interpretive slaves who faithfully execute the providential designs of the “master.” Who moreover . . . creates nothing, has only the illusion of having created, because he only transcribes and makes available for reading a text whose nature is itself necessarily representative; and this representative text maintains with what is called the “real.”49

Prudential rule in the war on terror resides in archival control over the apparitional. The powers of revealability are self-referential idioms of government; traversing the state, the media, and public culture; providential rule itself is reiterated in scenic affirmations through its visible presentation, timing, and spacing of peril. Providential scenography determines not only what and how danger may appear, but also what will never be allowed to come before the public gaze, including the political formation of that gaze. Providential rule can extend to justifications of suffering and privation as the economizing and managing of evil.50 Mondzain connects this economizing of privation to an economy of the flesh: the flesh is the mimetic and thus archival site of sovereignty that unfolds and mimes itself in its particular disposition of scenic bodies. Under emerging post–ground zero public safety regimes, embodiment as “visceral interiority” is increasingly prudentialized. The tissue of the world and the flesh of the body are no longer folded together by immanence; rather, they unfold as duplicitous surfaces of visual error and discontinuity where the politically imperceptible life, the enemy as mole or sleeper, is sheltered and often fails to be objectified. This actuarial gaze strives to reassemble dispersed bodies under the symbolic order of a newly impassable sovereign national body. In this process habeas corpus became the coercive and ongoing obligation to declaim bodily integrity, to present before the state and its citizenry a juridically archivable body as a prism that abjures risk, that is cleansed of hazard, and that is thereby combinable with the corporate interiority of the homeland. In the war on terror, the ultimate dissociation is the loss of national interiority through the loss of the identitarian interiority of the body. The making of the apocalyptic archive, of providential futurity, is the

The Structuring Enemy and Archival War / 217

making of the future as dead memory and dead matter. For Derrida, global nuclear war presents sovereignty as dead matter and the archival as a desiccating, self-incinerating organ of retention that archives beyond life and living memory, including the life of any extant archival format and capacity. Global nuclear war is fought on the name alone in the sense of a speculative combat depicted and executed solely in terms of a self-enclosed archival imaginary, with no foundation in an actualized, historicizable, and already experienced or datable event. For Derrida, a global nuclear holocaust is an all-consuming event of untouchable and unscathable violence, for it has yet to take place even though it occupies, parasites, and takes hostage of the present as a spectral archive and memory.51 The fiction that poses global atomization as calculable denegates a future apocalypse as that which has already taken place in prognostic imagination and as cultural vernacular. The nuclear archive ballistically issues its traumatic memory from the future as a bleed-through effect, sending its missile-like missives back to the present as the reverse engineering of the present through forensic phantasms. Here nuclear destruction is read backward, from total obliteration to a signifying impasse in its staging in the present. Nuclear war is transmitted from the future to the present in a reverse retention that makes the present infinite war on terror conceptually possible. The nuclear archive imparts a sovereign fiat from the precession of an incorporeal afterlife saturating the incarnate present with eschatological logics—the axis of evil, WMDs, bioterrorism, and nuclear terrorism conflated with Iran, North Korea, a failed Pakistani state, blackmarket dirty bombs, and related powers of political asymmetry. Nuclear sovereignty as an apophatic form is reencountered in our current wars of terror—in the latter’s metonymic lack of a discreet battle zone, in the lack of any ethical and datable criteria for victory or defeat, in the recession of a datable enemy, and as total war irrevocably incommensurate with the life-forms, norms, and discourses from which it erupts and claims to protect. Global nuclear war as a preemptive ghost archive anticipates the war on terror in being the decisive event that will have culminated in the annulling remediation of archives and naming, including the war of names and political fables—and, for Derrida, even the name of war itself. Derrida’s critique of nuclear fictions situates nuclear war as archiving a narratological apocalypse that ends all consequent archival possibility, being a war that would destroy all transmittable names, even of friends and enemies, and leave in its wake a thanato-archive of the unnameable, an absolute ruin of the name that preserves the death of the archive without remainder. This is

218 / Chapter Four

the advent of an apophatic archive that leaves in its wake a rubble of denegations, “the name of which war would take place would be the name of nothing, it would be pure name, the ‘naked name’ . . . that war would be the first and last war in the name of the name with only the non-name of name . . . it would no longer share even the name of war with other events of the same type . . . beyond all genealogy, a nameless war in the name of the name.”52 Derrida weaves together war, the archive, and fabulation and then slices this hermeneutic knot or protective caduceus with the nuclear blade, which stands for a radical aphophatic gesture of both war and sovereignty for which the proper name is unavailable. Nuclear war becomes a sovereign decision that denegates sovereignty and war, making the latter temporally unpresentifiable without doing away with war and the sovereignly as immanent and power-laden memory forms armed with a postarchival radioactive half-life. This is the de-nomination of sovereign war, which leaves no possible antisovereign affirmation in its wake, no alternative formulation or higher resolution such as a non-sovereign politics, not even the memory that would be the latter’s condition of possibility. The becoming-nonstate-of-the-state is captured implicitly in Derrida’s treatment of the post-Hegelian consequences of apophatic war, whether the war on terror or nuclear war. Archives of denegation are disjunctive with the Hegelian dialectic of subjugating recognition. In that schema, the sovereign or master is supreme only by representing the fear of death for another who becomes the living archive and subjugated organ of that terror.53 The Hegelian master requires a politics of transmissibility and translation; the master capitalizes risk and death in combat to win recognition from the subjected Other, the transmissibility of his name, as the enjoyment of “symbolic profit” in the form of the labor service, and fear of a death-by-the-master on the part of the subjected: “He . . . (the sovereign/ lord/master) . . . takes risks and he dies in the name of a surplus, a power of excess which is worth more than life, but something which will still be able to bear his name in life, in a residue of living support.”54 The Hegelian master, for all his violence and terror, still requires literature, names, memory, and readerships—in other words, a public sphere. Such Hegelian mediologies are radically evacuated and removed from all living supports of translation, witnessing, and transmission in the war to end all wars, whose focal attack surfaces are the organic and living substrates of transmissible names, including those that support the nomenclature of war itself. The opposition between nomos and physis, between thesis and physis, in war disappears in this “sur-vival” of sovereignty, situated beyond all acts of nomi-

The Structuring Enemy and Archival War / 219

nation, beyond the life-forms of memory itself. With nuclear obliteration, sovereignty-as-subject becomes, in a momentary flash, pure substance, and then even this incandescent punctum is rendered a persistent historical dust. Sovereignty disincarnates as an abyssal but persisting void or “desert” that lives on as an interspatial trace-structure overrunning both life and death, despite being beyond all secured evidence, phenomenological light, or visibility. Derrida compellingly describes this apophatic nomos of the earth, this site-specific and minimalist archival corpus, in a passage that was meant to refer explicitly not to war but to negative theology: “Some trace remains right in this corpus, becomes this corpus as sur-vivance of the apophatic more than life and more than death, sur-vivance of an internal ontologicosemantic auto-destruction: there will have been absolute rarefaction, the desert will have taken place, and nothing will have taken place but this place.”55 Derrida’s discussion of the atomizing war of the death of names implies a theory of sovereignty embedded in but not limited to the terminal aporia of nuclear catastrophe. Securocratic war migrates and vibrates as autosubstitution wherein the war without end and the war to end all wars converge and blur at their thresholds, where neither can be ethically and historically witnessed. The nuclear sequence of decision, the becoming substance of the sovereign subject and the flash become abyssal, is today repeated in spatiotemporal extension, compression, and condensation in the bodies of others, in the rabble, who are considered beyond the interiority of civilizational recognition. The pressed button of nuclear finality is miniaturized in the instantaneity of the acquisition of an attack surface by the drone as an autokinetic sovereignty beyond life, lighting up and irradiating the bone, the spirit, and the flesh. Archival Deficit Acceleration and Drift Mimetic deficit is the presenting form of the war on terror in search of the unreliable yet structuring enemy. This drift of the calculated risk/threat object institutes an escalating dialectic of value retention and loss across the securitized, the insecure, and the archival. A debt logic contours mimesis by the war archive, with its focus on ballistical preemption, the accelerated production of hazard and threat, and the promised adversary who never fully appears. Archival war commits to the acceleration of mnemic duplication (of proliferating risk, telematic imaging, and target acquisition), which paradoxically threatens the loss of archival retention. War’s anamnesis is unable to detain and recall the ballistical velocities of weaponized time

220 / Chapter Four

materialized in its launched ordinance and acquired targets. Ballistical performance drifts and deviates from the inaugural event, target, and rationale concentrated in the protological, yet unavailable enemy, thereby generating mistargeted victims and mistargeted geopolities. Yet, it is only through mimetic acceleration that the war archive can be commensurate with the peripatetic enemy as a defining and yet ineffable outside, to double it by passing it inward, to simulate synchronicity with the nonarchival to which it is bound and promised. However, the disjunctive exteriority of the enemy invariably restructures archival interiority. By virtue of its mimetic displacement and consignment in the archive, the outside resists stabilization by eliding the archive’s simulating grasp, which deactualizes rather than actualizes the targeted adversary. Guantánamo, with its untried and unsentenced detainees, is a warehouse of failed actualizations and failed mimesis of the terrorist authored by the war on terror. The archive is condemned to a war of untimeliness, misrecognition, and failed exchange with what is without—the (un)archivable. This is a war for immobilization and containment that is only won virtually on the inside. Consequently, the war archive overreaches for an immunizing enclosure beyond time and acceleration and yet creates dislocating mimetic velocity and drift in order to enclose and encompass the differential. Failed enclosure and speed form an economy of archival debt and mimetic deficit. Risk, once capitalized and archived, both presupposes and generates displacements and dislocations of material realities, substances, and embodied subject positions. Spectral security requires, but never fully achieves and archives, the tangible compression of risk—its political pathologization and literalization in the fundaments of embodiment, time, and cartography. The fundamentalized threat container is a mediatic interface where risk is organ-ized (rendered an instrument) and organicized, rendered material and second nature, where threat and hazard are traced, tracked, and mobilized in determinate forms of political-economic vagrancy. However, much unrecordable or otherwise inadmissible material significance and intensity is jettisoned from such value compression. In securocratic war this politically decommodified residue becomes collateral damage, the externalized cost and disavowed surplus of dis-organ-ized force. Collateral damage is a mimetic drift that performatively communicates with the situationist concepts of dérive (drift) and détournement (subverting or value-generating detouring, hijacking, and diversion of a power grid). The Situationist dérive was focused on the remapping of sovereign cartographies by tactics of randomness that forestalled spatial closure and

The Structuring Enemy and Archival War / 221

collapsed the line between the mapped, the demapped and the unmapped, thereby creating new itineraries of movement and cognition. Dérive, as a play of the para-site, is etymologically linked to the economic and archival concept of the derivative; the participial stem de¯rīva¯re means to draw off from a source. The ideology of collateral damage confesses state error and terror as dérive, as a programmatic detour from the itinerary of just war and securitization. The Situationists anticipated the emergence of the mode of motion of war as geopolitical détournement transcribed in the unmappable indifference between law and nonlaw, war and peace, friend and enemy, threat and daily existence. Far from being only disavowed refuse, the collaterally damaged express the invariable drift of accelerated terror/risk as the detoured subprime derivative of and deviation from a ballistical project of value retention. Anamorphic risk finds its concrete form in the recession, displacement, dislocation, disframing, and multiplication of the disappearing enemy, whose occluding arc intersects with that of the collaterally damaged. The collaterally damaged are disarmed surrogates of an adversary already given as not conclusively there.56 Political and economic risk derivatives outrun and overshoot an auditing gaze through misfire, misdirection, and hyperperformance, in which value (political and military) does not return in the form of commensurable and archivable stuff. For instance, democratizing regime change returns as the balkanization of Iraq and the creation of a third thoroughly antidemocratic entity traversing Syria and Iraq. Israeli bombing and shelling of Hamas missile command centers and tunnel networks return viscerally as the inexcusably wounded, mutilated, and dead children of Gaza, with not a glimpse of an incapacitated Hamas. Mimetic debt haunts the archival apparatus in the form of failed retention materialized in the loss of predicated risk objects as memory forms and the valuations they supported. Accelerated devaluation of risk objects results in the decrystallization and dispersal of the cathected object and the emergence of a provoking surplus materiality beyond discrete spatial and temporal envelopes. This is the attentional phantasm unmoored from retentionality—the singular terrorthing that circulates without commensuration and equivalence. Archivable risk capital also becomes value creating as it drifts and swerves, thereby provisioning the securitizing project with new expanding terrains and newly encountered bodies of political value. The war against terror fuses the autovalorization of capitalized risk with the dérive of acceleration, which drives and threatens the value generativity of violence. What

222 / Chapter Four

can only be retained under a regime of risk acceleration is the debt/risk/ threat vortex itself as materializing Kierkegaard’s maxim: “the only repetition was the impossibility of repetition.”57 The recessional enemy as a defaulting retentional apparatus is a destructured or severed organ of sovereignty. The impossibility of a reliable enemy is a lack incurred through archival mimesis and acceleration that fail to repeat the enemy; the latter are unavoidably entwined with both the required loss of achievable security and the forward panic of derivative risk—the terrorist as a self-altering autonomic subject. At this impossible juncture capitalization and securitization meet in an economy that has its basis in deficit, that is, in the lack of identity or ratio that arises between an ideological wish image and the deficient object or organ meant to materialize that wish. It is the intrinsic nonidentity between securitas as value and risk as intangible asset that calls for the recapturing, prefiguration, precognition, or preemption of attentional surfaces of attackable threat that are never fully constituted actualities. Preemptive threat valuation is the exchangeability of the “not yets”—a logic that can be grasped as the selfmoving substance of risk, as the repetition of the unrepeatable and the unarchivable that can neither redeem nor be redeemed by securitization. War profit is no longer to be measured in terms of the production of victory or defeat, which have become much the same thing, but in threat management, that is, the infinition of risk. If there is production in war it lies in the serial containerization of threat and risk to enable their global export, circulation, and renewable capitalization. It is not that war has become totally dematerialized; but in its apophatic declension, it advances as a retractable materiality. War, like finance capital, becomes an exercise in its own re-siting through the conservation of its discontinuities. Nonarrival and Misaddress of the Enemy The polemological archive becomes a death drive in the accelerated enucleation of difference (the without, the disappearing enemy, the frontier, the invisible, and the illegible). This mortifying memory is distributed across deathlike conservation and what it omits and loses. The binding of life and living memory to the inorganic is as crucial to political violence as it is to archivization. This velocity of the medium over and against the instrumental end leads to political unbinding through the quickening medium of dead memory—of memory conserved in a contingent corpus of petrifaction, which in war will invariably be manifested as a transitive and collateral corpse or ruin, the locus of decay and impermanence and the

The Structuring Enemy and Archival War / 223

penultimate disappearing attack surface. The capacity to impose political form via the imprinting, repetition, and enclosure of the living (speech, memory, and natality) in the inorganic unites the archive and war as death drives. The archival death drive can be understood as a biopolitical infiltration of speech, memory, and event by exterior and deadening mnemotechniques. Event, speech, and memory are bared in being rendered exposable to technical penetration and envelopment. The echographic violence of the archiving impress is a preserving internment of living substance in commemorative dead substance. This fall of life into the inorganic and preserving supplement caused Plato to compare mnemotechnology to a pharmakon (remedy/toxin) producing and not reducing forgetfulness and devaluation. The archive preserves only by effacing mne¯me¯ in hypomne¯sis as a political form of nonlife, as a thanatopolitics. Agamben treats the thanatopolitical as the lack of qualified life, but the thanatopolitics of the war archive is an encrypting technicity that qualifies life in rememoration and legislates the “productive organization of death” through the accumulation of insecurities.58 In war the act of striking as a flattening inscriptive impress and graphic force is a double marking of the receiving substrate, for it simultaneously creates both the archived and an archive in a single blow. This installation becomes apparent when we detach transcribed surfaces of writing, commemorating, and archiving from technocratic and communicative neutrality and recognize that the enveloped surface of violent inscription can encompass political geography, daily habitus, and the body in which the act of striking, stamping, or impress, can entail graphic projectiles and missives, from smart bombs and armed drones to the electric current coursing across the body of the tortured. The structuring enemy restructures by recessions, spacing, and absence. This expanding interval between archiving sovereignty and a posited terminal Other that refuses absolute interiorization implicates war as teleopoiesis, as a projectile of dispatch, delivery, sending, transmission, and envelopment— a grasping at the recessional enemy as an archival lack and debt to be bridged. The graphic creation of the archival subjectum, the support, from out of an exposed and impressed body creates a hybrid of life and death. These inscribed and receiving somatic surfaces, alcoves, and orifices are reconstructed as repositories and organs of sovereign memory. In war the territorializing dispatch, reach, missile, and missive of archiving violence itself becomes an orchestrated spectacle exposed, dramatized, and enframed in the receiving surface malformed into a political proscenium. This tableau conveys a double envelopment of life and death constituted

224 / Chapter Four

by the mnemic codes that are deposited in political flesh and the act of compression, which converts the receiving support into a memorandum of the state. In this context the archive of infamous Abu Ghraib photos is a compendium of misdirection that evades that even more formidable archive extracted at Abu Ghraib and other black sites from out of the bodies and senses of the tortured. As a writing in light, these photos are an archive of an archive, the latter written with damaged flesh and built with embodied pain, stress positions, and sensory deprivation. The heaped naked bodies with orifices opened to supplementary political imprinting and rememoration by the camera were already hieroglyphs and entombing repositories of regime change and compulsory democracy as dead memory. In a war without end that is in search of interchangeable enemies without measure, violence is mystified as collateral and mediate rather than principial and terminal. An antidemography of the dis-counted and misappropriated has emerged as collateral damage in Iraq, Guantánamo, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Yemen. The doctrine of collateral damage is a calculated remission of the wounded, the tortured, and the dead as such; it is a systematic (de)archivization, deactualization, and retraction of violence and its consequences. Such unwritten inventories function as mnemotechniques not of inadvertent mediate collateral victims, but of that which they were not—the terminal and capitalized enemy. What is deemed collateral damage is the trace of the enemy that is erased as that trace. The victims and ruins of collateral damage constitute the nonarrival of the enemy; they materialize a missive that has missed its mark, an illegibility gone astray, scratched out, and misaddressed. The victim of collateral damage is the envoy of the enemy in withdrawal, a postal artifact of war, and a dead letter that has been dispatched and canceled in place of the terminal enemy whom the collaterally damaged simulate and evoke. Collateral damage as the nonarrival of the enemy is atopic, without place, and anachronic, a nontime within wartime. The untimely dead of collateral damage are the dispatched who cannot be claimed and who have to be disappropriated and re-sent as accident and apology. In being discarded as discounted and unmeasured, collateral damage invariably persists as a remainder beyond and yet a consequence of the archive. Anachronic and atopic nonarrival cannot be readily historicized or domiciled in the war archive without devaluing the latter’s preemptive reach and mimetic fidelity. Thus the accretions, ruins, and remainders of admitted and deniable collateral damage become the unwritten archive of the unarchivable and the uninheritable. It is from this anti-archive that the only critical ethics of the war archive and the only just liquefaction of its petrifying memory and amnesia can be derived.

The Structuring Enemy and Archival War / 225

A thin and permeable membrane fails to separate proper from improper enemies and victims, the archivable from the nonarchivable, and proper destination or consignment from nonarrival. The victim of collateral damage represents an aporia of the time and space of war, an impasse that must be quickly bypassed and forgotten, for the collaterally damaged at first appear to disturb the mnemic reproduction of the enemy and thus war’s claims to mimetic efficacy and proper dispatch. However, the scandalous incalculability of the promised structuring enemy is also stored in the ruins, substances, residue, and excess of collateral damage. This residue is depoliticized and dehistoricized as collateral, as untimely and dislocated, only in terms of what is politically determined under the name of an appropriate destination: a terminal enemy as a proprietary artifact of war over and against the collaterally damaged as discredited yet supplementary derivatives. Collateral damage is no inadvertency but is situated at the ideological core of the war on terror, for it preempts any singular target as a terminus and conserves both the enemy and the ends of war as a surplus return yet to come. The deaths and wounds of collateral damage condense the anomaly of an enemy promised and an enemy vanished in the same form and medium. The disfiguration of collateral damage is the material substrate that divides the war into event and nonevent, the archive and its Other. Collateral damage is the calculation that permits archival war to return time after time to the memory and the forgetting of what counts and does not count as the enemy beyond count.

Notes 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

6. 7.

Jacques Derrida, The Politics of Friendship, trans. George Collins. (New York: Verso, 1997), 84. Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, trans. George Schwab (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 19–73. Derrida, The Politics of Friendship, 83. Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, trans. Eric Prenowitz (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 11. Avital Ronell, “Support Our Tropes: Reading Desert Storm,” in Rhetorical Republic: Governing Representations in American Politics, ed. Frederick M. Dolan and Thomas L. Dumm (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1993), 13–37. Michel Foucault, “On the Genealogy of Ethics: An Overview of a Work in Progress,” A Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: Vintage Books, 1984), 363. See Bernard Stiegler, Technics and Time 3: Cinematic Time and the Question of Malaise (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010); Stiegler, “Nanomutations, Hypomnemata and Grammatisation,” http://www. humanities.uci.edu/humanitech/ eventarchives/Nanomutations.pdf (accessed September 12, 2014); and Stiegler, “Relational Ecology and the Digital Pharmakon,” Culture Machine 13 (2012), http:// www.culturemachine.net/index.php/cm/article/view/464/501 (accessed Septem-

226 / Chapter Four

8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18.

19. 20.

21.

22.

23.

24. 25. 26. 27.

28. 29.

ber 12, 2014); see also Jonathan Crary, Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle, and Modern Culture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001). Jacques Derrida, Rogues: Two Essays on Reason, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005), 11–17, 45. Derrida, Archive Fever, 18. Jacques Derrida, Dissemination, trans. Barbara Johnson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 109. Roberto Esposito, “The Immunization Paradigm,” trans. Timothy Campbell Diacritics 36, no. 2 (2006): 28 (emphasis mine). Jacques Derrida, “Hostipitality,” Angelaki Journal of the Theoretical Humanities 5, no. 3 (December 2000): 3. Derrida, Hostipitality, 4–5. Jacques Derrida, Limited Inc., ed. Gerald Graf ( Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1988), 90. Derrida, Dissemination, 128. Derrida, Hostipitality, 14. Louis Althusser, Machiavelli and US, François Matheron, trans. (London: Verso, 2001), 21. Althusser, Philosophy of the Encounter, Later Writings, 1978–1987, ed. François Matheron and Oliver Corpet, trans. and introd. G. M. Goshgarian (London: Verso, 2006), 193–94. Ernst Junger, The Glass Bees (New York: New York Review of Books, 2000), 74. Susan Buck-Morss, Dreamworld and Catastrophe: The Passing of Mass Utopia in East and West (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002); Tom Darby, The Feast: Meditations on Politics and Time (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1982), 221. Martin Heidegger, Heraklit, vol. 55 of Gesamtausgabe (Frankfurt: Vittorio Klostermann, 1979), 70, footnote; translated and quoted in Reiner Schürmann, Heidegger on Being and Acting: From Principles to Anarchy (Bloomington: Indiana University Press 1990), 278 (emphasis mine). Ronald C. Arkin, “Governing Lethal Behavior: Embedding Ethics in a Hybrid Deliberative/Reactive Robot Architecture,” Technical Report GIT-GVU-07–11 (2011), http:// www.cc.gatech.edu/ai/robot-lab/online-publications/formalizationv35.pdf (accessed September 10, 2012; emphasis mine). Steve Lohr, “Computers That See You and Keep Watch Over You,” New York Times, January 1, 2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/02/science/02see.html ?pagewanted=all (accessed April 6, 2011). Ernst Jünger, On Pain (New York: Telos Press, 2008), 2. Jacques Lacan, Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English, trans. Bruce Young (New York: W. W. Norton, 2002), 75–81. Peter Asaro, “What Should We Want from a Robot Ethic?” International Review of Information Ethics 6, no. 12 (2006): 11. Jacques Lacan, Kant with Sade, trans. James B. Swenson Jr., October 51 (Winter 1989): 56. See also Immanuel Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, trans. and ed. Mary Gregor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 17–19, 50–62. Ibid., 59. The subject of the statement goes to the laws of war, and the subject of enunciation indexes the emission of violence by the drone. Pierre Klossowski, Sade My Neighbor, trans. Alphonse Lingis (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1991), 41. See also Marquis de Sade, Philosophy in the Boudoir, or The Immoral Mentors (London: Penguin, 2006).

The Structuring Enemy and Archival War / 227 30. For a discussion of autonomous drones and their humanitarian implications, see Christian Enemark, Armed Drones and the Ethics of War: Military Virtue in a PostHeroic Age (London: Routledge, 2013), 98–101. For a political philosophy of drone warfare and its antecedents, see Gregoire Chamayou, Théorie du drone (Paris: La Fabrique Éditions, 2013); Derek Gregory, “Drone Geographies,” Radical Philosophy 183 (January–February 2014): 7–19; and Lila Lee-Morrison, Drone Warfare: Visual Primacy as a Weapon, vol. 2 of Transvisuality: The Cultural Dimension of Visuality, ed. Anders Michelsen, Frauke Wiegand, and Tore Kristensen (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, forthcoming). 31. Peter M. Asaro, “The Labor of Surveillance and Bureaucratized Killing: New Subjectivities of Military Drone Operators,” in “Charting, Tracking, Mapping: Technology, Labor, Surveillance,” ed. Gretchen Sonderlund, special issue, Social Semiotics 23, no. 2 (2013): 196–224. 32. Karl Marx, The Grundrisse Notebook VII, “The Fragment on Machines,” https://www .marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1857/grundrisse/ch14.htm (accessed October 12, 2013). 33. Stiegler, “Relational Ecology,” 2. 34. Gilles Deleuze, “Deleuze/Spinoza, Spinoza cours Vincennes—17/02/1981,” trans. Timothy S. Murphy, http://www.webdeleuze.com/php/texte.php?cle=38&groupe= Spinoza&langue=2 (accessed May 6, 2012). 35. Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Typography: Mimesis, Philosophy, Politics, ed. Christopher Fynsk (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), 52–55. 36. Jacques Derrida, The Beast and the Sovereign, vol. 2, trans. Geoffrey Bennington (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 40. 37. Lacoue-Labarthe, Typography, 64, 68. 38. Martin Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology, and Other Essays, trans. William Lovitt (New York and London: Garland, 1977); translation of “Die Frage nach der Technik,” in Heidegger, Vorträge und Aufsätze, part 1 (Pfullingen: Verlag Günther Neske, 1953), 5–36. 39. Ernst Jünger, “Total Mobilisation,” trans. Joel Golb and Richard Wolin, in The Heidegger Controversy: A Critical Reader, ed. Richard Wolin (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998); and Ernst Jünger, Die totale Mobilmachung, vol. 7 of Sämtliche Werke, Essays 1 (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1980), 119–41; Ernst Jünger, Der Arbeiter: Herrschaft und Gestalt, vol. 8 of Sämtliche Werke (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1981), 15–317; Martin Heidegger, Die Beiträge zur Philosophie (vom Ereignis), ed. Friedrich-Wilhelm v. Herrmann (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 2003), 55. 40. Junger, On Pain, 16–17, 38–39. 41. Lacour-Labarthe, Typography, 70. 42. Gillian Rose, Hegel contra Sociology (London: Athlone Press, 1981), 189. 43. Ibid., 76. 44. Jacques Derrida, “‘Eating Well,’ or the Calculation of the Subject,” in Points . . . : Interviews, 1974–1994, ed. Elisabeth Weber, trans. Peggy Kamuf et al. (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995), 272–73. 45. Asaro does speak of the “stress” of and “cognitive demands” on the drone operator, but these terms are cast as workplace pathologies that equate optics and an intimacy with violence. The discussion of workplace stress recapitulates Kantian polarities between the pathological and the overriding good (elimination of the terrorist) that further the normalization of killing. One looks forward to the overdetermined shock and psychic assault of the unrecognizable that might break through this

228 / Chapter Four

46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51.

52. 53. 54. 55. 56.

57.

58.

cocooning and ultimately familiarizing and reassuring maladjusted stress, which opens up a false coeval ethicality through the trope of the suffering drone operator in the torture chamber and psychic black box of his or her cubicle. The category of stress disorder already smuggles a depoliticizing workplace ethics into war. See Asaro, “The Labor of Surveillance.” Gregory, “Drone Geographies,” 2. Jacques Derrida, “Force of Law: The Mystical Foundation of Authority,” trans. Mary Quaintance, Cardozo Law Review 11 (1989–90): 993. Marie-José Mondzain, Image, Icon, Economy: The Byzantine Origins of the Contemporary Imaginary (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press 2004), 36–37. Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (New York: Routledge, 1978), 296. Mondzain, Image, Icon, Economy, 37. Jacques Derrida, Catherine Porter, and Philip Lewis, “No Apocalypse, Not Now (Full Speed Ahead, Seven Missiles, Seven Missives),” Diacritics 14, no. 2 (Summer 1984): 20–31. Ibid., 31. G. W. F. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 104. Derrida, “No Apocalypse, Not Now,” 30. Harold Coward and Tobay Foshay, eds., Derrida and Negative Theology (Albany: State University of New York, 1992), 300. Ballistical collectivization as a modality of archivization refers to those violent techniques by which the curvature of heteronomic social space is straightened and rendered reducible to full reflection, presence, and archival compression that forges the apperception of “pre-comprehended collectivity.” Ballistical collectivization or compression is the reproduction of the enemy through the targeting of heterogeneity and archives an identifiable and stabilized enemy. Søren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling/Repetition: A Venture in Experimenting Psychology by Constantin Constantius, trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983), 170. Jacques Derrida, Disseminations, trans. Barbara Johnson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 92. On the thanatopolitical see Michel Foucault, “The Right of Death and Power over Life,” in The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: Pantheon, 1984), 258–72.

FIVE

Traumatizing the Truth Commission In Memoriam Édouard Glissant, September 21, 1928–February 3, 2011

Say bones. No bones but say bones. Say ground. No ground but say ground. —Samuel Beckett, Worstword Ho

I. Transitional Justice and the Critique of Violence Traumatropes Owing to its commitment to legal realism and the ad hoc therapeutics of “the talking cure,” what was the capacity of South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) to approach both the infliction and the receipt of terror and violence as an organized continuum of meaning and identity and not as a set of politically expedient or irrational or amoral acts that, once publicized and condemned, could be dismissed? Debates on these different interpretations were waged in public fora and associated with particular political parties and their respective strategies of remembrance and chosen historiography. Thus, the National Party, which had presided over apartheid and its counterinsurgency, and its supporters in the army and police depicted operatives of the state apparatus who perpetrated humanrights violations as aberrant. Their exposure would restore the integrity of the security forces, who had crusaded against imported communism. Their aberrancy conveniently ensured continued moral and political deniability for politicians and the upper command structures of the police and army who had mandated the use of specific tactics from disappearance and assassination to torture. For much of the South African media and the majority of the white public, “gross violations of human rights” did not originate in the state apparatus nor in the political economy of racism, but rather in the behavioral and moral pathology of individual perpetrators—“bad

230 / Chapter Five

apples,” as former General Magnus Malan put it under questioning by the TRC in October 1997.1 Bad apples were either psychologically and ideologically deviant or otherwise incompetent. Even so, many “bad apples” were indemnified by the TRC because they claimed “political motivation” and jus ad bellum for their actions. Some, like the police officer and torturer Jeffrey Benzien, were posed as “traumatized” by their security work in interrogation, which in turn accounted for their human-rights violations. Moreover, the confessional tendencies of the TRC’s model of witnessing itself reinforced such medicalizing, psychologizing, and individualizing interpretations of state-enacted atrocities. I contend that the “bad apples” who appeared before the TRC amnesty judges as personifications of aberrant violence and defective humanity represented a second, relatively occluded, traumatic blockage: the unpresentifiable racist violence of the state apparatus itself over and against the TRC’S normalizing framework of indemnification based on credentialized political motivation. Paradoxically, in the antiracist political culture of the anti-apartheid movement, of which the TRC was a part, that insisted on the economic character of racism, the violence of the killers and torturers was psychologized and atomized rather than raced. Nation-building projects, reconciliation processes, and movements for social justice are energized by what can be called “traumatropism.” In this the TRC was no exception: it both responded to and crafted traumatropology. “Traumatropism” is a term I have analogized from botany, where it is defined as the reactive curvature of a plant or an organism resulting from a previously inflicted wound. Local communities and entire societies can reorganize their identities, histories, and projects around the curvature of a chosen wounding; this would be a politically constructed traumatropism. Traumatropes can also cohere into formations of domination: institutional agendas, rules, and prohibitions as technologies of memory. Traumatropes are eventually prescriptive and indicate a point of historical stasis, a punctuation beyond which a society refuses to narrate itself. Dominick Lacapra theorizes trauma as a privation and breakdown experience that is “radically decontextualizing and disempowering” and as an unreadable aporia that resists meaning but poses the question of how it is to be worked through.2 Though he rejects the equation of trauma with the sublime, Lacapra implicitly asserts that historical trauma, as negativity, privation, and absence, cannot be politically generative or constitutive. Rather, trauma is consigned to a limit that bars society from historical transformation, understood as transcending the chronic and the intractable. In contrast to Lacapra, I contend that traumatropism is not worked

Traumatizing the Truth Commission / 231

through by something outside of itself, such as narration, testimony, or therapeutics, but is already a working through of a political aesthesis and a convertible violence. It is a force of historiographic departure and propulsion that enables ethical and political periodization through its interposal. Lacapra’s analysis does not recognize that the botanical model of traumatropism he also cites can detach the traumatic from its humanitarian confinement to moralistic discourses on confession and witnessing, fraught intersubjective encounter, and historical paralysis. Lacapra’s formulation does not allow for the political production and/or exploitation of traumatropes by the state as fashioning a political culture of witnessing, veridiction, avowal, fact setting, and institutional certification. He thus conserves much of the canonical conceptual topology of the traumatic in the humanities—the naming, redressing, healing, and mourning of historical negativity and closure in surrogating forms. The metaphor and diagnostics of traumatization have become a creeping philosophy of history that colonizes the political with a tropological inventory of terminal temporality—a history of political trauma as the end of history, of historicizability itself. The discourse and study of trauma become a recursive act of traumatic repetition that denies the traumatic as politically generative. I propose traumatropism as a performative intervention traversing discourse and significative violence that installs a historically situated limit experience as hollowed-out space around which a polity is recentered, magnetized, and even reconstituted. I share Lacapra’s concern that a transcendental and transhistorical model of trauma brackets the possibility of the historicity of history, but in my view historicity can be engaged by witnessing traumatropism not as an existential cul-de-sac, but as a political technology that produces regional ontologies, norms of description, time signatures and coercive anthropologies. Both the politicizing of the traumatic and the political as traumatic can be engaged as a self-grounding constitutive power, and not only as a cognitive and cultural paralysis. Structures of Return This chapter responds to these themes and critiques by identifying the traumatropes inherent in South Africa’s amnesty procedure, and perhaps in many similar protocols, which impeded the engagement with raced violence by transitional justice. In contrast to solely focusing on those “traumatized” by gross violations of human rights, my concern is with the self-traumatization of the truth commission through what it consigned to juridical and ethical exteriority and invisibility. The core criteria South

232 / Chapter Five

African amnesty applicants had to meet were (1) full disclosure of the human-rights violation for which indemnity was requested; (2) demonstrated political motivation for the act that included following the orders of a command structure; and (3) proportionality, that is, the moral and pragmatic ratio between utilitarian and ideologically mandated political goals and the violent methods used to advance those goals.3 I look to how the TRC’s amnesty hearings primarily measured and indemnified humanrights violations through the standard of “political motivation,” which I gloss as intentionalist continuity grounded on the rationales of “just war” and ideological fidelity. This chapter is not one more grading of what transitional justice protocol failed to achieve in South Africa or elsewhere. Rather, I propose that the criteria for measuring and comparing acts of violence in amnesty adjudications, in tandem with the silent abandonment of other mandated rationales, opened up a larger problematic: the relation between political program as performative pro-duction (a bringing forth) to the event of demediatization, in which violence does not “bring forth” as claimed, and does not operate as a subjacent interwoven vehicle of political motivation, intentionality, and programmatic actualization. Demediatized and repurposed violence, previously cast as an intended means to a justified end, is not depoliticized violence. Rather, it requires a rethinking of the political and of the ethicality of force through the absence or fluidity of a norm-giving ground of political action. Thus, paradoxically, the TRC’s amnesty protocol can be read against the humanitarian grain to advance a critique of political violence within a philosophy of means and media. In this chapter both the apartheid state’s counterinsurgency project and the TRC’s amnesty protocol are read as a mediology that bracketed racialized percepts and fetishes in the execution of just war. The TRC’s indemnification of such violence short-circuited transitional justice as a critique of institutional racism. I am not claiming that excessive and racialized violence was not testified to or documented by TRC fora, for such testimony is extensively discussed in section II of this chapter in reference to braai torture. Rather, I delimit the grid of juridical intelligibility to which such accounts were submitted, particularly when given in amnesty hearings. Irrespective of the specificity of horrific testimony, the TRC constructed a closed moral and practical subject of violence and of just war through its amnesty protocol. To avow political motivation or intentionalist continuity and fidelity in one’s violence means to demonstrate self-possession in violence and demarcates the latter as a teleocratic derivative of the avowing subject and its ends. To give such an account or a reckoning of violence is to straighten

Traumatizing the Truth Commission / 233

violence, to orthopedically restructure destruction, and to align the calculability of violence with the temporal span of a subjectified and subjugating intentionality. Intentionalist continuity is a narrowing aspect on what might constitute the surplus and unbidden consequences of a political act beyond all pretexts of normative consistency. Intentionalist continuity draws a self-referential circle around the actor and acts of violence in which the horizon figures of the target and victim are repurposed to exemplify this fidelity. This circularity puts the victim of politically motivated force to work as anchoring the normativity of such violence. Reiner Schürmann refers to avowal and intentionalist fidelity when linking the return of action upon the actor to “economic” accountability, responsibility, and responsivity (originating in the Latin spondere, “to pledge”) as postures of self-possession: “ To promise, to pledge oneself to, and respondere therefore means to therefore to ‘commit oneself in return.’ . . . Legitimation is the successful answering for one’s acts to . . . a normative and justificatory agency. As legitimated our acts ‘come back’ (re-) to us. The legitimating ‘referent’ from re-ferre, to carry back—measures them and therefore necessarily transcends them. We are responsible actors if we take upon ourselves and claim like measurement. This return structure is the ground for imputation.”4 Indemnified political motivation in relation to gross violations of human rights is such a “return structure.” To be responsible within an intentionalist continuum is to avow that all one’s ends are within oneself, in all of one’s acts, measures, and means, which then become computational, returnable, and assessable; it is also to bind or contract those ends to a competent authority such as a political party, organ of the state, or other command structure. Under the TRC amnesty protocol, to be accountable required the binding of subjects and their ends to a meta-tribunal, a tribunal of tribunals (of various political apparatuses, bureaucracies, edicts, laws, and ideologies). The ethical self-possession of means and ends traversed the truth commission, from the latter’s auditing of the procedural rationality of violence in amnesty hearings to its postconflict agenda of reconciliation as the demonstration of national self-possession by the new “rainbow” polity. The former apartheid regime was associated by its opponents with the absence of any return structure of accountability and with the dispossession of means and ends in its institutional mendacity, its structural deniability and secrecy, and its informalization of violence. The ethic of transparency, advocated and advertised by the truth commission through its various hearings and tribunals, was meant to redress such occluding and colluding practices in a pragmatic and symbolic perfor-

234 / Chapter Five

mance of ethical returnability. Justice, reconciliation, and pro- and antiapartheid violence were all made to stand under the signifier of political self-possession as symbolic capital, political property, and moral propriety. This commensurating interface between the commission and the violence it measured unfolded as a grounding, adjusting, and commanding reconciliation prior to any postwar reconciliation across races, ideologies, parties, and classes. In swearing to self-contained violence (intentionalist fidelity) the amnesty applicant performed violence as calculable and reciprocally performed the universality of the computational reason that measures such force, whether exercised by the state or by transitional justice. The excusable metrics of the perpetrator coincided with the procedural rationality of the TRC. Under the rubrics of self-possession and self-transparency, the principles of performing and accounting for violence became mutually contingent, immanent, and commensurable, with no transcendental ground for the judgment, justification, or dejustification of violence.5 The agon between the TRC and perpetrators of human-rights violations pertained mainly to the commission’s leveling commensuration of the violence of diverse political antagonists, pro- and anti-apartheid, state and nonstate actors, and its condemnation of singular actors as lacking in political motivation and/or transparency and thus being incommensurate in their violence and their testimony. The testimonial and evaluative circle was sealed—in giving an account of one’s self-possession of violence to the judgment of the amnesty tribunal, one reflexively affirmed the latter’s self-contained sovereignty over historical violence. This circularity had two consequences; through the metric of political motivation the truth commission placed itself in an equivalential relation to the political antagonists it adjudicated, who claimed self-possession both in their execution of force and in their command of testimony. Through ceremonies of indemnification the truth commission became an allegorical apparatus through which the nation in its entirety demonstrated its postapartheid condition of self-possession through archival control of apartheid-era violence, now consigned by amnesty to a sublimating past. I ask with Schürmann: where is the autonomous and originary ethical and epistemic ground here to which “an account of accountability can and must be rendered”? (262). Political motivation and intentionalist continuity are inadequate descriptions of the surpassing phenomenality of political violence but do represent a persuasive philosophy of history to which we are all morally acclimated. I contend that ideologically mobilized force produces an overflow of effects and signifiers, this is a hyperperformance that cannot

Traumatizing the Truth Commission / 235

be folded back into political purposiveness; such demediatized violence presents as a purposiveness without purpose, in reference to an extant political-discursive field. By relating the critique of violence to the critique of political intentionality I engage the becoming-event of the mediate—the unbidden rupture of inadmissible signification in mediate violence that was intended to be folded into the teleocratic but that never arrives at that justified terminus. This disframing of mediacy detaches violence from the enframing ratio of origins, conformable means, and ends and can generate the infinition of force beyond all ratios. The critique of violence requires a media ethics. I do not mean by this a critique of how the consciousness industry depicts and circulates violence while simultaneously placing itself outside of its mode of circulation.6 Rather, I refer to the critique of the political presentation of violence as media: as a utensil meant to install a sequence of closure, the production of a terminal threshold, finality, or political outline as a typifying figuration of history. The contingent normativity of dismediated violence does not excuse the political actor from ethical accountability but rather proposes that such agents act historically in their violence through collective forms of appearing, address, and interpellation and thus engage the public judgment of history’s varied tribunals. This alignment of action with formative historicization crosscuts both the moral framing of force and the possible disframing and disavowal of its anomic consequences. “Fate is politics,”—destiny here not being a fatum already written down unbeknown to us, but the collision in the very heart of history between contingency and the event, between the multiplicity of the eventual and the uniqueness of the necessity in which we find ourselves when acting to treat one of the possibilities as a reality, to regard one of the futures as present. Man can neither suppress his nature as freedom and judgment—what he calls the course of events is never anything but its course as he sees it—nor question the competence of history’s tribunal, since in acting he has engaged others and more and more the fate of humanity.7

Acting historically encompasses, but also exceeds, detemporalizing, rigidifying political ideology and institutions, but it invariably coincides with the instituting passions of the political, the passions that institute a society as an immanent political form.8 In this case racial subjugation must be held to account as one such instituting passion that gives political form to a society, and it does so through modalities of violence as the return structure of that founding act of racialized polity. To this violence can only

236 / Chapter Five

be juxtaposed another instituting passion, that of revolutionary antiracism in all of its rupturing economic, political, and juridical gauges and import. The TRC’s norm of politically motivated and self-possessed violence presumed given models of existing humanity—an extant juridicopolitical anthropology; in stark contrast, the instituting passions of an antiracist polity presume a humanity to be made as a subtraction from and an interruption of entrenched racialist transcendentals. Its tribunals must then judge all accountable historical actors and their violence in terms of the humanity and inhumanity they have either made or unmade. Measuring Forgiveness Amnesty hearings were the most controversial of the activities of the South African TRC. They were structured as modified adversarial adjudications in which the burden of proof rested with the applicant. They were based on the principles of the Danish jurist Carl Norgaard, who had developed the criteria of motivation, full disclosure, and proportionality in reference to the change of regimes in Namibia. Measures applied to proportionality cannot be constrained to the critique of means. This metric has the discretionary latitude to potentially reframe the justness and proportionality of those ends by which means are authorized.9 However, in also recognizing political motivations for violence as excusable, the TRC could not bring proportionality to bear on the tactical decisions of such organizations without also exposing the latter as lacking in bona fides and/or ideological coherence in their violent pursuit of political agendas, thereby placing reconciliation at risk.10 The mandate of reconciliation skewed the assignment of disproportionate violence toward individual actors whose conduct was allegedly disconnected either morally or behaviorally from their political structures. What is not discussed in the legal literature on the proportionality standard was that its application could have potentially recuperated the racialized imaginaries and racially inflected socioeconomic historical conditions that informed and patterned many of the atrocities committed by the state’s security apparatus. Though apartheid had been condemned as a racially exploitative economic apparatus by the members of the TRC, its counterinsurgency was rarely discussed as a systematically racist practice in the commission’s public fora. In contrast, the TRC’s legal recognition of equivalent political motivation, though it legitimated armed insurgency against the apartheid state, effectively indemnified the state’s ideological

Traumatizing the Truth Commission / 237

fabulation of fighting global communism through the use of “proportional” terror against local communities of color. In the actual amnesty process the “securocrats” of the former government were indemnified by demonstrating only the criteria of full disclosure and political motivation. Where political motivation had been demonstrated, few applications were denied for failing to meet the proportionality criterion. The amnesty adjudication of four of the five killers of Steve Biko indicates a transitional moment and significant ambivalence concerning the proportionality criterion and race as a factor in state violence. The rare application of proportionality in the amnesty adjudication of Biko’s killers and the need to present a complete mandated amnesty procedure were due to Biko’s international standing, the notoriety of his death in custody on September 12, 1977, and his family’s lawsuit against the application of the amnesty protocol to those responsible for his murder.11 It certainly did not indicate a procedural diligence across all the amnesty hearings. The amnesty application for Biko’s death was essentially denied on the grounds of the killers’ failing to demonstrate political motivation and proportionality in their medical neglect of Biko after severely beating him during a twenty-hour interrogation, and for failing to disclose the full facts of his post-interrogation ill-treatment to the TRC. Biko, in spite of the severe injuries he suffered during his beating, was driven more than seven hundred miles from Port Elizabeth to Pretoria lying naked and shackled in the back of a police van; he died in transit from a head injury. Biko’s torture-interrogation was seen as beginning in licit political motivation by the amnesty tribunal but was then derailed into personalized punishment and post-torture maltreatment that could not be politically justified.12 Medical neglect was considered by the amnesty judges to be disproportionate violence in relation to declared political motivation. The commission also stated that if the manner of Biko’s death was accidental (as the applicants claimed), it could not be attributed to a political rationale and was “wholly disproportionate to any possible objective pursued by applicants, particularly the stated one of extracting information or admissions from Biko.”13 The judges concluded that the police were in fact motivated by “ill-will and spite” as they reacted to Biko’s “arrogant, recalcitrant and noncooperative attitude, particularly exemplified by his occupying a chair without their permission to do so.”14 In many ways this decision set important precedents and case law concerning the use of proportionality that were not followed in many other amnesty hearings by the very same judges. What is lacking in their description of disproportionality would be the

238 / Chapter Five

South African equivalent to the American racist term “uppity,” applied to a person of color as a ritualized and rhetoricized racist provocation for white aggression; rather, the amnesty judges deracialized the police reaction to Biko’s resistance posture, attributing the ensuing abuse of Biko to idiosyncratic bad temper and ill will. The judges divorced the individual from the subject in the space of torture by which both Biko and his killers were artificially subtracted from an institutionalized racism that authorizes extreme violence and that had little to do with the extraction of intelligence. It is counterintuitive to accept as transitional or restorative justice those rulings that recognized the disproportionate in Biko’s “medical neglect” but located principles of ideological adequacy, necessity, and proportionality in torture in this and many other cases, as well as attributing the absence of post-torture medical care to lack of due diligence. For instance, Jeffrey Benzien, a well-documented police department torturer, who hid his practices by denying his prisoners timely medical treatment, received amnesty under the criteria of full disclosure and political motivation. Can this division between the political and nonpolitical, violence and race, the institutional and the individual, be upheld? What is the import of subsuming disproportionate violence under the liminality of lack of political motivation or lack of political objective, or ill will? One of the senior evidence leaders of the TRC’s amnesty investigations told me that proportionality had been unofficially dropped as a criterion for amnesty by the time of the Biko hearings.15 In other words, both the application of proportionality and its abandonment were too scandalous for an organization that identified itself with transparency and truth telling. Many TRC evidence leaders (a position roughly analogous to that of a prosecutor) had attempted to demonstrate lack of proportionality in amnesty hearings to no avail; this was borne out by the granting of amnesty in cases in which political motivation was demonstrated but the proportionality of the violence deployed in relation to mandated political agendas was clearly not evident. In 2004 at a symposium on the TRC that I chaired at New York University, I queried Alex Boraine, former deputy chairperson of the commission, why proportionality had been silently omitted from the amnesty protocol. I received a dismissive response from Boraine and from another panelist, Judge Dennis Davis of the High Court, Cape Town, who gruffly asserted that proportionality “was unworkable”—though these responses did not account for the public silence around its abandonment. One such case in which TRC lawyers and judges evaded the issue of proportionality was the Heidelberg Tavern massacre on New Year’s Eve of 1993 by the Azanian People’s Liberation Army (APLA), the military wing of the Pan Africanist

Traumatizing the Truth Commission / 239

Congress (PAC). The PAC applicants were granted amnesty under the criteria of political motivation and full disclosure. The Heidelberg Tavern was popular with students from the nearby University of Cape Town and attracted a multiracial clientele. Based on intelligence provided by their commanders that the Heidelberg was also a drinking spot for security forces in mufti, a cadre of the APLA sprayed indiscriminate automatic-weapons fire into the crowded bar. Four people were killed and five others wounded; the casualties had no clear connection with the security forces. Upon withdrawing from the bar, the cadre sprayed bullets at the balcony of another bar and restaurant across the street packed with mixed-race drinkers. That bar had not been identified as being frequented by security forces. The indiscriminate killing and wounding of civilians in the Heidelberg and the attempted murder at another establishment not specified in the original mission plan qualified under Norgaard and TRC criteria as disproportionate violence. Even straight forward anti-apartheid political motivation was contestable here, since the Heidelberg attack occurred three months before scheduled elections, which were part of the negotiated settlement between the ANC and the state that formally ended apartheid, and was most likely meant to subvert elections by escalating racial tensions. By dropping proportionality, the ethically neutered rationale of political motivation was transformed into a parody of Malcolm X’s “by any means necessary.” There was little public discussion of the proportionality issue by the TRC other than a few workshops on the principle of justice in war in contrast to the principle of just war, none of which mentioned the dropping of the proportionality criteria. Further, under the criterion of political motivation the concept of responsibility was implicitly lifted off the political command structures and pushed onto the shoulders of individualized amnesty applicants, consequently producing the aberrant figure of “the bad apple,” whose violence was classified as politically unmotivated and/or psychologically abnormal. Many of the state’s amnesty applicants were careful not to implicate higher-echelon command structures in their actions, which could have placed the bona fides of commanders and political leadership under scrutiny by disclosing the lack of discrete political motivation and measure in the tactical planning of sheer indiscriminate terror, assassination, and torture. As the infamous amnesty hearings of the police officer Benzien demonstrated, the TRC proved particularly inept at detecting the institutionalized policies and practices that had mandated and routinized torture preferring to hold “bad apples” like Benzien accountable. Benzien claimed he had not received any instructions to torture and had invented

240 / Chapter Five

and unilaterally initiated his techniques of torture, which included what is now known as waterboarding (referred to at the time as the “wet bag treatment”). His “invented” techniques followed escalating sequences of intimidation common to transnationalized torture protocols; I had encountered much of what he described in the oral histories of torture I collected in Northern Ireland in the mid-1980s. His commanding officer, who claimed ignorance of Benzien’s actions, occupied an office adjacent to the interrogation room where Benzien operated. These omissions in testimony merely extended the structural deniability that had previously been embedded in the planning of state violence and that rendered many amnesty applications an extension of that dissimulation. In cases in which political motivation was not demonstrated, a normative void framed the act of violence at issue. In the political culture of the securocratic state, wherein contestation of the apartheid order was cast as a global communist conspiracy, the justification of political motivation for apartheid perpetrators acquired the dimension of fantasy.16 Parrhesia, the Touchstone, and the Betrayal of Bios In reducing amnesty to political motivation (intentionality) and full disclosure, was the TRC setting the criteria for its own ultimate politicoethical indemnification before the res publica of South Africa? The TRC acted as if all parties in the conflict originated in a preexisting liberal consensus (hegemonic outside of the country and belatedly represented internally by the TRC itself) who had then deviated from this norm, for which they owed an apology and an amnesty application in order to return to a South African liberal contract that had not existed until 1992–94. This was the logic in part imposed by the negotiated settlement that had enabled the truth commission. In morally and juridically detaching the counterinsurgency waged in defense of apartheid from the structural violence of the racialized economy itself, the TRC did little to explore how the material violence and violent ideologies of the racial economy had contributed to the etiology of state violence. Counterinsurgency was not exhaustively examined as a material practice required to underwrite the threatened laws and rule of racialized labor, production, and surplus extraction. Could an ethical, tactical, and historical boundary be maintained between apartheid’s spatioeconomic practices of psychic and bodily subjugation and its ways of policing and making war? Could war and policing be treated as having no transformative effect on how economic and spatial apartheid was administered? The expansive productivity of the apartheid economy was as historically

Traumatizing the Truth Commission / 241

committed to the (re)production of a racialized labor reserve as it was to fiscal accumulation.17 In the production of this labor reserve, structural and transacted violence was a motor of labor subjection, as I discuss below. Racialized counterinsurgency can be omitted from “gross violations of human rights” only by artificially divorcing the latter from the commodification and fetishization of the black body raced by capital. Various political technologies alienated racially stratified economic valuations in the body of color as the reified presentation of capitalist relations, that is, as an artificed second nature rescripted as the appearance of first nature through racial biologization. The violence of the state and its agents was never explicitly interrogated by the TRC for what light it could shed on the organizational mentalities and subject, making practices of economic apartheid as a war machine in itself. This opens not the ethical question of means and ends, but rather the question of what autonomous political technologies are required to impose and support the subjugating means of economic extraction and accumulation as an end in itself. Separating the violence of political economy from the political economy of violence artificially divorced the movement of capital under apartheid from the correlative excess of its violence against persons of color, who were the striated circulatory substrate of capital generation. Did the truth commissioners and amnesty adjudicators—made up of human-rights activists, judges, lawyers, clerics, social workers, psychologists, and historians—not know that race significantly structured the lack of “measured” violence inflicted by the state on its opponents? That is hardly credible, given their credentials, ethnicities, historical situatedness, and professional and political biographies. Rather, we are confronted by contradiction, indeterminacy, and discontinuity between competence (knowledge) and performance: the silence on the state’s racialized violence, in short, was predicated on knowledge of the truth. The TRC in effect “passes for the thing itself, ceases to represent it so as to replace it by destroying it, and becomes itself both the only archiving archive and the archived event.”18 This would mean that amnesty protocols performed the deracialization of state violence as a means to “reconciliation.” What was at stake here was not limited to the procedural integrity of the TRC but impinged on the entire ethico-politico-historiographic project of fashioning democracy and a “culture of human rights” out of the compromised institutions of apartheid and the ANC’s negotiated settlement with those edifices. Foucault writes of the singularized production of parrhesia (frank speech) in the classical era as a will to truth and as a performed relation between reasoned discourse and a mode of life or bios.19 This ratio is de-

242 / Chapter Five

scribed in Hellenic discourse as a touchstone (basanos) that measures the rapport between a person’s life and his or her speech as a principle of intelligibility. The basanos was a rubbing stone used to test the authenticity and purity of gold. Parrhesia is irreducible to constative and performative utterances, which in different ways can effectuate outcomes according to preexisting conventions and agreements. In contrast, parrhesia may or may not bring about political change by naming the ethical void denied by a situation, but it does generate a truth-telling subject from a bios under ordeal, producing an open situation of unknown effects and possibilities. Parrhesia can ignite the irruptive event to which the subject binds itself even at the risk of life. Foucault states that the touchstone enables the assessment of the reality of what is to be tested as a concordance or homologia, triangulating a form of life (bios), the discourse that stakes claims and the reality that is claimed. The TRC’s indemnification protocol, based on a confessional concordance between violence and political intentionality, was predicated on a similar touchstone, a principle of homologia seeking to fold one into the other. However, the TRC’s suppression of the criteria of disproportionate violence eliminated the bios, the sociohistorical biographies, of the commission’s officials, witnesses, and perpetrators, as one possible touchstone of its truth-telling practice. The silence around the disproportional separated both amnesty policy and adjudications from the bios of those TRC role players who had been mandated by constitutional legislation, funding, and oath taking to perform parrhesia, to speak frankly about apartheid and human rights to enable and witness such truth speaking by others. Page duBois traces the semantic mutation of the touchstone principle in Hellenic law, philosophy, literature, and theater to the point where the technique of the touchstone comes to coincide with the use of violence in political agon and judicial torture to differentiate the counterfeit from the true.20 Slaves were conscripted for torture in the Athenian democracy to bear witness against citizens, who could not be tortured under law; torture as touchstone required a subjugated difference, the slave, who possessed no veridiction except under the duress of pain. DuBois stresses that in a polity where the citizen could not be violently interrogated, juridical torture was a ritual enactment of the difference between citizenship and the noncitizen as mediated by the legally torturable slave. This legality skewed the cultural production of truth in that society as the production of knowledge and a juridical subject from the fear and pain of the slave as a violently discarded and disqualified extrasocietal figure of Hellenic “apartheid” who was both inside and outside the social order.

Traumatizing the Truth Commission / 243

As the basanos became more proximate to violence in law, political agon, and theater, Hellenic tragedy expressed this locus through the commingling of the true and the counterfeit in the reversible speech of tragedy’s protagonists in scenarios of violence. The self-subverting performance of truth telling that is foregrounded in tragic theater dramatized the paradox that any violence that claims to test and to make historical truth through an ordeal is itself subject to reversibility and a double bind. Tragic theater gravitated to the riddle that if violence becomes the touchstone, the medium of accrediting truth and testing the counterfeit, then what stands as the touchstone to this touchstone? What decides its efficacy and what it authenticates or counterfeits? Violence as absolute touchstone automatically counterfeits itself by unilaterally withdrawing from purview the validity and intelligibility of any other criterion—thus, no binding political or legal institution “tortured” the practice of torture to extract its truth in fifth-century Athens. The very equivalence between forensics (as experimentation on nature) and torture, noted by Pierre Hadot, precluded such an operation by rendering it tautological: torture was inherent in forensics, comprehended as the inquisition or “torturing” of materiality to relinquish its “secrets,” Forensic inquiry cannot separate the will to truth from an archaeological relation to coercive violence.21 Oedipus, as the methodical truth seeker and in the wake of the failure of all other forensic procedures, threatens to torture the slave who witnessed his abandonment and adoption as an infant. This scene evidences the shift of avowal from transcendental guarantees of religion, divination, and kingship to the immanence of first-person witnessing and the material mediacy and witness of the body.22 The touchstone, whether of torture or political motivation, prevails only by repressing a countertouchstone, by being blind to the contamination inherent in its claim to set purity, to get to the ground of things, to achieve the foundational, which, as in torture, invariably entails counterfeiting a grounding evidentiary body and the autonomic voice of legibility. The aporia of the touchstone is the aporia of the medium—the question of what mediates mediation and whether truth or the counterfeit or both reside in the medium as pharmakon, as both a toxin and cure, that Plato engaged in his critique of the media of writing. The Ethics of the Immeasurable Norgaard principles seek a realizable commensuration between justice and the means of war: that there is a metric for violence, be it political motivation or proportionality, that can adjudicate unjust terror. These com-

244 / Chapter Five

mensurations install an immanent and leveling nonantagonistic ground for measuring and equating political antagonism. Antagonism ceases to be constitutive of the social; rather, a liberal order is conceived upon the moral priority of continuity and/or proportion between word and deed, ideology and violence, intention and act, means and ends, to which political antagonists are to be submitted. The TRC’s moralization of politically motivated violence prescribed a continuist ratio that mandated the reciprocal self-grounding of discourse and violence as the circular touchstone assemblage upon which acts, subjects, and bodies were to be tested. Yet an analogous interfolding of violence, the body, and discourse could also be encountered in the torture chambers of the apartheid regime under scrutiny by the TRC. The moralization of balance or proportionality, of a politics of equilibrium, once resided in theocracies with transcendental foundations that were subsequently jettisoned by regimes of secular political immanence. Once secularized, the political principle of balance had to be mined from internal relations of force, opposition, and mediation. Here the relation between harmony and homology bears consideration. Government by checks and balances regulates the flow and circulation of decision and action. In transitional justice this would be to measure the circulation of force, damage, and destruction as they intersect with ratios of discourse and assessment. Balance in a liberal order is politically posited as internal self-regulation predicated on the warrant of a presituated commensuration of political difference; however, balance produces itself by constituting an excess exteriority to be balanced. In this relation to excess a constitutive antagonism is smuggled into the symmetry of checks and balances. This is a politics of the surplus that is presumably outside law, justice, and polity, which require this exteriority to name themselves. Imbalanced political violence is a praxis and politics that overperforms and overreaches the constituted limits of the political—it is a self-instituting violence beyond intent and program, and the extrapolitical beyond politics.23 Proportionality as a normative imperative seeks to suppress or condemn that which is in excess of the political by consigning it to nonpolitics; this is the falsifying touchstone that produces the political by demarcating true politics from its counterfeit and deficient other. In this the TRC amnesty adjudication becomes government by the geometry, symmetry, and proportionality of the middle place as an Archimedean point. There is a spatial and structural homology between government from a fictive harmonizing center and the proscenium dramaturgy of the truth commission that stages a literal theater of the middle place where political actors appear on a nation-

Traumatizing the Truth Commission / 245

constituting stage in order to generate their reconciliation, their harmonization at a central locus of originating balance. This immanence of balance is predicated on a morality that engages the question of how and when violence is sufficient in the absence of transcendental judgment. Is sufficient violence identical with the intentionality and completion of ends, with the appropriation of the essence of the end as the unity of the finite (the medium and its mediacy) with the infinite? The infinite here would be the ongoing permanence and closure of an unending end, without which temporality it could not be a sustainable point of sufficiency. Violence construed as medium contains the trajectory of its own abolition, for the appearance of the end is correspondingly the mandated disappearance of the mediate in the prestige of the sufficient. In this context the means and the media are by definition insufficient and attain a state of sufficiency only in their self-negation or self-consumption in the reconciling end. What then takes place, what positions are appropriated when violence exceeds the sufficiency of the means/ends matrix as a superfluity, as overactualization, overperformance, and overkill? Can we further inquire after the insufficiency of the paradigm of sufficiency as applied to the political? Is there a legible history of sufficiency as a form of justice and law, or only of its lack—what is called “politics” as the concentrate and sphere of the insufficient, the unjust, and nonlaw? Is historical sufficiency only a necessary fiction, particularly as a discourse of legitimated force? Time, contingency, and historicization undo all sufficiency—the sufficient is only a transitive punctum in time and thereby always surpassed in being produced as intrinsically impermanent and historically situated. What occurs when the means become their own sufficiency, shifting outside of their mediacy, and become a purposiveness without purpose, which mediates nothing but their temporalized self-perpetuation? The eternity of the means relieved of ends marks war as always in a surplus and extraterritorial relation to itself. The insufficiency of the disproportionate haunting proportional reason discloses that the ultimate ground of the proportional and the sufficient lies outside of a certain axiology in that which has no ground and is beyond the binary of sufficiency/insufficiency. Sufficiency is a fiction opposed to historicity as the domain of the insufficient, and that structuring lack subsequently situates the terrain of the political beyond all balancing acts. Under Norgaard protocols of proportionality violence either carries, transports, circulates, conducts, and materializes the sense of the prescriptive program or it does not. Now that which conveys sense—that which is constitutive of sense—is inherently sense-less in itself, for it does not be-

246 / Chapter Five

long to the semantic field that it makes possible. The medium presents but mediacy in itself is not represented until it desists from imparting. When viewed as detached from the imputed intentionality and sufficiency of political program, ex-mediate violence becomes non-sense, incommunicable, imbalanced, and thus nonindemnifiable. Norgaardian amnesty, as a means to justice, seeks to forestall a fall into such historical senselessness, for justice, as accountability, requires reason’s sufficient inherence in history. The Norgaardian measure of the proportional is haunted and dislocated by the real prospect that acts of violence can be in excess of the political field from which they were authored and were meant to structure and enclose. Excessive violence is a political force beyond what has been institutionalized and intended as the political. Violence here no longer outlines and stabilizes intention and end but opens thresholds of act and meaning that redefine the political and the antinomic choices made in its elapsed names. This last factor is crucial: even if political motivation may have determined the normativity of an act of violence, the TRC ignored that act as intending, harboring, and engendering both the form and the formlessness of the political as both constituted power and constitutive power—as failed lawconserving violence and as potential race-making violence. The TRC, despite dropping the criterion of disproportionality, attempted to salvage the Norgaardian relation between history and reason by anchoring amnesty to avowed political motivation and the transparency of full disclosure. To further guard against the fall into the inchoate, disproportionate violence was reassigned to the individualized, depoliticized, and psychopathologized perpetrator.24 Amnesty rendered a negative periodization of human-rights violations coherent and serviceable for a reconstructed South African polity and its postconflict balancing. State violence, archived and amnestied, became a sublimated landmark signposting historical progress and national reconciliation. Amnesty was a key inceptual point for the museumification of apartheid, but that conservation required a certain aesthetics and orthotics of exhibition as regards violence that, like many other aestheticizing, enframing, and rehabilitative gestures, banished the inaesthetics of the disproportionate, the excessive, and the imbalanced to unreason and the abnormal. Schürmann speaks to intentionalist continuity within the Heideggerian care for the finalities of force that follows the principle of civitas communis hominum et deorum, a protocol that is foundational to the transitional justice project: “The principle of continuity between well-ordered man and the human genus is the reckoning of right reason. The tendency toward ends is

Traumatizing the Truth Commission / 247

right, and it is right that I should watch over the finality in the economy of my own forces as well as of those in the city and the species. Such is the nature inscribed in us: a principle of exact reckoning, of dosage, of telic adjustment; a principle of maximized amplitude which is beyond all phenomenal regions. Hence, a norma (‘leveling’).”25 The care for an economy of telic forces assembles bodies into underlying regimes of political equivalence, be these political, economic, sexual, racial, or humanitarian. Here assemblage becomes literally assembly as a gathering in, as the conscription of subjects, and as a politics of demonstrable centration. In contrast, demediatized violence discloses modes of political presencing that are disjunctive with instituted regimes of proportioning, commensuration, and centration. Violence that moves through a closed circle of antagonistics, as the substance of exchange and equivalence (between act and discourse or act and act), readily ruptures that circle, engendering material leakage that is unexchangeable, unequivocal, and incommensurable as the aftermath and afterimage of such antagonistics. Materiality once experientially altered and opened as excess by the generative incision of violence experientially breaches ideological and utilitarian ends. Political motivation in violence comes to be dislocated as the insufficient and inadequate means to the historically determinate. Violence can be drawn as producing a situated and relational surplus immanence generated by what emerges as politically inadmissible in or from that force. Teleological violence is thereby excavated as the fractured vertiginous staging ground for those immediacies that refuse mediation and those counterfinalities that resist the prestige of the terminal. This subtractive materiality is the ungrounded, ideologically jettisoned, and disavowed surplus that, in exceeding the entrenched thresholds of the antagonistic, provisions an estranging standpoint on its closed logic of exchange. From this threshold we can infer that the TRC amnesty protocol fashioned a closed metric of antagonism and commensurable political bona fides, which were thrust by all parties against the breach posed by the oncoming historical void of racialized violence. One indicative instance of this racial surplus inadmissible to the TRC is ethnographically mapped in the second part of this chapter in the practice known as braai torture. In the ethical coupling of the proportionate and disproportionate, the priority of the proportional can only repeat the disproportionate as its lack, superfluity, as a relation of nonrelation. Proportionality, as a theorem of the measurable, requires and produces the negative, open, infinite nonground of incommensurable and immeasurable violence but refuses it

248 / Chapter Five

any historical valence—it is simply the absence of something, a desistance from the political, history, and humanity. In turn, under the rubric of balance and sufficiency the disproportional becomes the sense-less medium, the substrate that constitutes and carries the meaning and normativity of the proportionate without being intrinsically intelligible as its historical entailment. The inherence of reason in a history wedded to restorative justice falls into crises when faced with this intractable surplus that is denied political legibility, and that had to be individualized, psychiatricized, and traumatized in an arch gesture of dehistoricization. Buried within the Norgaard requisite of proportionality between violence as act and violence as reason is another call to ethicality. Moving beyond the arbitrary historical and normative priority of the proportional means admitting an ethical reversibility: that the just measure of proportionate violence can be a violence without measure. Neither the proportional nor the disproportional is historically or epistemologically prior to the other, for in each lies the historical possibility and contingency of the other. Disproportionate violence as the self-dispossession of the politically motivated subject constituted the threshold of the TRC’s representation of violence and the limit of its own self-representation, beyond which its practices of anamnesis and reconciliation ceased. The disproportional is not provided with a transcendental and atemporal ground as such, for this violence is eminently situated, material, finite, chronic, and embedded in effective history. It captures power “at that point where . . . intentions—if, that is, any intention is involved—are completely invested in real and effective practices . . . the places where it [power] implants itself and produces its real effects.”26 Foucault implies that neither originating subjects and their intentions, nor self-possessed violence may survive this implantation of self-altering power effects. Incommensurable violence becomes the limit-experience at which fabulated means/ends ratios attain a point of exposure as internally riven heteronomy. The unstable relationality of the proportional and the disproportional was disjunctive with the sublimating value equivalence of the amnesty protocol that commensurated ideological and repressive apparatuses. The estrangement of “proportioned” force by disproportional, formless violence explodes the artificed compression, the forcing together (co-agitatio) of moralized ideological codes and prosecutorial force. A core function of political programming is to deflect and suppress any modal atonality—that which cannot be harmonized or homologized—between theory and praxis. Disproportionality as an historical force derails the synchronicity that subtends such

Traumatizing the Truth Commission / 249

a grammatology of power. The discourses and practices of force are undeniably interlaced and contiguous, and yet invariably swerving, detachable, and mutually autonomous strands of political actualization and deactualization. An analytics and optics of incommensurate violence decrypts those moments and tendencies when relations of antagonism (the means and transaction of conflict) become the determining conditions of antagonism. A plethora of conditioning and orienting ideological phantasmata spring forth from within teleocratic practice, dislocating its forces as a technically subjacent and iterable media: interrogators torture not for information but to imperially extract power, self-identity, sovereignty, race, and even democracy from the pain of the other; the state dissociates from its own effects and actuality through self-idemnifying fact setting and the automatism of technocratic command and control; and ideologues bind themselves to their justified and moralized programs but do not conjoin with the durable, gestating damage of their violence beyond all program, mandated outcome, and projected finality. Disproportionality measures the violence of displacement intrinsic to once tidy systems of moral commensuration and unpacks the effective counterturning of means and ends. The disproportional only becomes politically and ethically representable as an inutility within the rationalized apparatuses of power. It is the system-derived undertow of a deterritorializing act of force within the computational territory of the political. Violent disproportionality is effectively a depleting truth event that leaks out from under the common nouns of formal political ideology and covering excuse and turns against a certain politics of emplacement. My stress on a surplus immanence of the disproportionate is not a claim that transitional justice should be grounded on a sublime stasis of immeasurable terror beyond all history, reason, and representation—attributes that are often assigned to the Holocaust. Our access to the semantic drift and effectual superfluity of any act of political violence is through its finite and instantiated material presentation and its binding to, and unbinding from, closed political materiality and operativity. I claim that the unstable relationality of the proportional to the disproportional constitutes a transcendental materiality disjunctive with the sublimating value equivalence and idealities of computational violence. Disproportionate violence was the immeasurable lack and occlusion in the TRC’s project. Disproportionality was not simply a failed logical category but rather was constituted as a doubled blind spot, as a stand-in for the TRC’s neglect of both a politics of terrorizing inutility and the racing of violence.

250 / Chapter Five

Disexclosure and Dismediation To rescript political indemnification as inadvertently provisioning a critique of violence requires a consideration of performance and event, bearing in mind that the issue of performativity here traverses (1) the testimonial structure of witnessing violence, (2) the gestural actualization of violence, (3) the occluding retraction through word and deed of violence exposable as disproportionate, and (4) the TRC’s epistemology of violence in amnesty protocols. The imbrication of measurable and immeasurable violence questions the concordant constitution of the political subject and ideological program. The TRC’s reduction of human-rights violations to political intent, and its reduction of violence to the performativity of that continuity, pose questions concerning the homology of political program and its “motivated” performances. Derrida writes: “Pure performativity implies the presence of a living being, and of a living being speaking one time only, in its own name, in the first person. And speaking in a manner that is at once spontaneous, intentional, free, and irreplaceable.”27 Derrida here implicitly associates intentionalist continuity in performance with power, autonomy, and sovereignty. Political performativity makes reflexive claims over acts through its “I can, I am authorized, I am competent to, and I have the right and the power to speak, act, and claim.” These predicates reach back to the Latin potior (to have power over something, to have at one’s disposal), pot-sedere (to possess), and pote est (“I am capable,” “I can”).28 In German Macht (power) is mögen and vermögen—being capable of something but without any definitive purpose, a virtuality without ends or finitude in actualization. The sovereign subject of intentionality, underwritten by recursive continuity, supports the triangulation of conduct, performativity, and power/ knowledge identified by Foucault with the mastering of the bodies of self and other. Government of self and others, compulsory visibility, and hierarchical observation are some of the modalities of intentionalist teleology as political program; they install the interdependent continuity and contiguity of a panoptical sovereign performativity and scopically subjugated embodiment in one and the same “person.” To discuss the mediate violence of political intentionality is to discuss the body as medium, the body-in-violence, the becoming bodily through violence, and the emergence of transcorporeal assemblages as a political field both within and well beyond battle zones. Within the continuum of the performative, if the weaponized body is prosthetic to political code, then the weapon or utensil is a supplementary and surrogating prosthetic

Traumatizing the Truth Commission / 251

of this politically encoded and codifying body that predicates the latter; in an act of violence this relation is extended to the target/victim as a ballistically encoded and terminal concentrate of the war assemblage. These metonyms, splices, intervals, and intensities of performativity constitute a sequence of closure. The intentionalist assemblage is the holographic reproduction and compression of the inceptive political code in the body as weaponry, in the body of the weapon, and in the target/victim mortally enclosed by weaponry, velocity, and ballistics. Within performativity the mediate, the method, is subordinate to external intent and yet must embody and repeat intentionality to produce it as a commencing origin, effect, and end. The medium, empty of subjectivity and will, and as submissible to willful repetition, or as mechanical itself, is antithetical to the unrepeatable and singular event; its action or operativity is not an open event but only the path to a calculated terminus and enclosure, which for Derrida can never qualify as a nascent event. “An event would not be worthy of its name, it would not make anything happen, if all it did was to deploy, explicate, or actualize what was already possible: which is to say, in short, if it came back down to unfolding a program or applying the general rule to the case.”29 The event for Derrida presents a lack of plenitude and immanence; it is a subtraction and an abstention from the subject conserving work of the performative. The event is also the absent cause of the performative, for the event can be a desistance from an existing order of performativities that instigates the necessity for recuperative reenclosing action. As Alain Badiou stresses, there is no truth of the event, nor is there any performativity of the event; there are only the performatives and truths that come after the interruptive arrival and passage of the event.30 Derrida associates the actualization of plenitude or self-presence in performance with the calculable finalities to which intentionalist continuity belongs, but which conversely open the possibility of a “non-end,” the evental site of anti-performance, which no longer sustains the continuum and ends of the political subject. “This non-end is not an extraneous vestige of the teleological essence of intention, it belongs to it as its most intimate and most irreducible other, as the other itself in it. It lasts as long as there is life, intention, language, or, as I prefer to say in general, the mark (or vice versa). . . . If nonplenitude (the non-telos) is therefore not an empirical accident of the telos, or even a simple negativity, one cannot not take it into account as one might a contingent accident held in the margin out of concern for method or for eidetic purity.”31 Simon Critchley defines “closure” as the act of bringing an end, of delivering and conveying ends, of

252 / Chapter Five

enclosing an end, all of which would identify closure and nonclosure with mediality: “Closure is the act of terminating a process, of definitely ending a state of affairs. [. . .] In this temporal sense closure is always associated with the process or activity of completion.”32 “Exclosure,” in contrast, is the other operative side of a line of closure as that which repels the foreign elements threatening a circumscribed terrain of enclosure like self-possessed violence and its intentionalist continuity. “Dis-exclosure” is the swerve of a violence that resists foreclosure as proportional. Dis-exclosure occurs when once secured state violence is thrown beyond the sense-making thresholds and phenomenality required by political interest, calculation, seriality, and program as the becoming event, and the becoming immediate of the mediate. Wlad Godzich diagrams demediatization: “when [a] supplement substitutes itself to the intermediary; in this metabola, it is mediation itself which is exceeded; a dimension which is no longer just an in-between is opened.”33 When the interval of mediation is dispersed beyond interposal, this is the becoming event of the mediate, which subverts the means as matériel of performativity. The irruptive event as non-end disexcloses the subjacent passivity and linearity of the medium, substratum, or subjectum that was assigned to carry, transmit, transport, to conduct the codes and to encode the conduct, of the intending programmatic subject. This is to detach the medium or the support from its conserving archival vocation and to witness a mediatic failure, deformation, profanation, and emergence by which another strata of political reason becomes representable beyond code and closure. Disproportional violence as disexclosure overthrows the moral and epistemological priority of the purposive subject commensurated to the finalities of a certain political reason in all its techniques and rationalities. At the level of spatiotemporal action, the moralized model of performativity is a compressed structure where all com-posited elements metaphorically express the intentionalist center or concentrate. In contrast, modal, desisting violence, with all of its rippling errancy, randomly unfolds as a dissociation—the swerving distension, dispersal, syntactical fragmentation, and decompression of the concentrates of intentionality. This dissociative metonymy is the pathway of the broken and plural subject, who is also a self-altering subject, a subject that differs with itself by intending itself through violence—that is to say, through the detouring coercive alteration of the bodies of others.34 The media of performativity are enclosed within finality, yet in order to produce closure, any sequence of termination presupposes a preexisting open terrain in which performatives do not prevail, from which they may

Traumatizing the Truth Commission / 253

be extracted, and to which performativity must address itself in order to adumbrate, enclose, and stabilize—in other words, to shape, subjectify, somaticize, or “performatize.” Preemptive or retrospective enclosure of an act of violence indexes this open terrain through a violence that is both exterior and interior to the performative apparatus. Violence as the legitimized and sanctioned medium of political closure substitutes for and displaces an open field of political, material, and historical possibility. In the truth commission this open terrain was indexed by an inadmissible and unframeable violence upon which proportioned violence was parasitic. When such disframed and formless violence was referenced by the TRC, it was only as an errancy, cited to support and transport the purposiveness, rationality, and necessity of licit and thus indemnifiable force. However, in Derrida’s open site of the evental, the non-end arrives as the ending of ends; it arrives as an antiteleological rupture and as the derailing of the mediate. The subtractive event is this spacing, this chasm, between a violence interiorized as ideological norma or leveling and the very unleveled violence of this leveling. Derrida engages the event of demediatization in his thought experiment of the event machine, a figure that by extension relates the performativity and technicity of violence. The machinic is at first presented as material reproduction responsive to imprinting by an exterior intentionality or will that the machinic or medium lacks: “The machine [. . .] is destined to repetition. It is destined, that is, to reproduce impassively, imperceptibly, without organ or organicity, received commands.”35 The medium as method is machinic; it appears as passively subordinated to the will to actualization associated with intention. Derrida initially identifies a sharp polarity between performative response and machinic reactivity: “Performativity [.  .  .] excludes in principle, in its own moment, any machine like [machinale] technicity. It is even the name given to this intentional exclusion.”36 However, as Derrida writes of the tension between intentionality and the machinic, another scene emerges: This [. . .] foreclosure of the machine answers to the intentionality of intention itself. It is intentionality. Intentionality forecloses the machine. If, then, some machinality (repetition, calculability, inorganic matter of the body) intervenes in a performative event, it is always as an accidental, extrinsic, and parasitical element, in truth a pathological, mutilating, or even mortal element. Here again, to think both the machine and the performative event together remains a monstrosity to come, an impossible event. Therefore the only possible event. But it would be an event that, this time, would no longer happen without the machine. Rather, it would happen by the machine. (74)

254 / Chapter Five

Derrida terms this mutilation and demediation of performative assemblage the “event-machine,” which arises from the swerving and contingent self-disassemblage of the mediate that controverts both the notion of the machinic as subjacent repetition and the event as self-constructing singularity while homing in on their possible complicity.37 In thinking through the instability of intention and the machinic, Derrida articulates the political with the technological, thus calling into question reassuring assumptions concerning freedom, self-determination, and the ethically autonomous subject supported by technical motilities. He presents an anatomy of criminal reason in the era of mechanized genocide and related global event machines like the war on terror. A certain anesthesia, based on the opposition of the intentional and the machinic, silently frames the testimony, excuses, and silences of inhuman power and privation: “on the one hand, the irrationality of the machine that is irresponsible or beyond my control, the mechanism that caused me to do evil, and, on the other hand, the absolute sincerity, the authentic innocence of my intentions” (88). Derrida sifts through the ethical debris of bad faith enabled by the event machine that counterfeits the political by removing ethical responsivity in its widest scope and gauge from the serial killing of political modernity while preserving jus ad bellum and the intentional purity of the killers. What happened by the machine of race in South Africa in the drive to capitalize, subjugate, and fetishize by color, in the automatism of racial sequestration, in the mass production of disappearance and torture, in inertial terror against the families and communities of activists and their supporters? Did the term “bad apples” secretly name the unnameable? Was their autonomic drive to terror without affect a misdirecting screen for the state’s own autonomic death drive, fused with the autonomy of racism as an event machine? Here the pathogenesis of state violence became the sanctioning ground of individual “aberrancy.” State agents performatively and responsively assimilated to the reactive race machinery that facilitated, legitimated, and indemnified killers and torturers opaquely commensurated to the state’s fabulated “world communist” enemy. However, the TRC, in complicity with the structural deniability of the repressive apparatus, decoupled one drive from the other. In the ideology of the bad apple, from TRC hearings to Abu Ghraib inquiries (where this principle was also extensively deployed), the machine as event is displaced onto the traumatic drives of depoliticized psychological aberrancy as personalized machinic breakdown. The “bad apples” in South Africa or Abu Ghraib are repurposed and falsified as bits of once linked-in human capital that had supposedly become discombobulated, delinked cogs of the rationalized war

Traumatizing the Truth Commission / 255

machine. The bad apple, which had fallen from the sheltering arbor of the state was thereby barred from bearing responsible witness to the dissimulating and equally discombobulated, delinked cogs of the wider artifactory of race war in which they were assembled and kick-started.

II. Cinders Amongst the numerous human-rights violations and amnesty hearings dealt with by the TRC was the case of the PEBCO Three. In this infamous incident of political “elimination,” three Port Elizabeth Black Civic Organization activists (Sipho Hashe, Qaqawuli Godolozi, and Champion Galela) were kidnapped by askari (double agents and informers), then beaten and executed by the police on May 5, 1985, near Cradock. One of the officers implicated in the crime, Colonel Roelf Venter, described the scene of interrogation at an amnesty hearing held in October 1996: We went to Cradock[,] where Major Winter, the commander of the Cradock security branch[,] took us to the place where the three captives were. It was an old police station in the Cradock area. We had a barbecue and had some drinks and the three captives were with us but their faces were covered so they were not able to see us. I could see them, and it had not appeared [that] they were in any way harmed.  .  .  . I am not entirely sure what happened to these three  .  .  . persons nor did I hear afterwards what had happened to them.

The amnesty judge was fascinated with the positioning of the barbecue—or the braai, to give its local Afrikaans name—in the interrogation scenario: JUDGE WILSON:

I’ve heard several cases where when people are being ques-

tioned the police who were doing the questioning are enjoying a braai, was that happening here? COLONEL VENTER:

No. I did not interrogate them and I don’t know whether

they were being interrogated. They were in the vicinity but there was no interrogation conducted as we normally conducted interrogations. JUDGE WILSON:

When you say in the vicinity were they outside where you were

having a braai? COLONEL VENTER: JUDGE WILSON:

Correct.

Can you give any reason why they should have been brought

out there, why they weren’t kept shut up? COLONEL VENTER:

No.38

256 / Chapter Five

The December 4, 1994, edition of the (Port Elizabeth) City Press does tell us what happened. It quotes a Sergeant X, who made three statements regarding the Cradock incident. According to him, the PEBCO Three were enticed by a telephone call to meet a British diplomat at the Port Elizabeth airport and were driven straight to Cradock that very night by askari.39 They were interrogated and assaulted with knobkerries (short, knobbed sticks) and pistol butts while the police held a barbecue, which was part of the scenario of the interrogation and not a postscript, as Venter claimed in order to remove himself from the scene of torture. Subsequently, the three activists were executed, their bodies burned, and the remains dumped in a river. Anti-apartheid activists who had heard stories of interrogations or had undergone interrogations themselves understood the police braai as a code for assault and murder, as in the following case from Port Elizabeth in 1985.40 MR. MPOMPI MELFORD DLOKOLO:

I could hear some cars driving in, these peo-

ple (the police) had come to see this person and when Gerber (a policeman) came, he said “So this is the Mpompi,” then another foreigner from Port Elizabeth came. He came and there were three whites with me and they were saying they were going to have a braai and I knew they were referring to me. . . . There is a farm not far from Humansdorp—as you go down there are also some bushes and then we go round those bushes and Faleni said I should go and collect wood. I said “No, I am not going to.” REV. XUNDU:

Is Faleni the only person who you knew?

MR. DLOKOLO:

Yes, Faleni was the only black amongst whites. One of these

white policemen was from Port Elizabeth. These were the two people who were torturing me. Faleni was asked to accompany me to go and collect wood so that they could make a braai, because we were heading for Uitenhage. Then I refused, I said there is grass, there is no wood. I didn’t even plead, I just refused, so they made their braai next to the Kombi, then I had my thing, I was holding it fast and I was sure they were not going to do anything to me. So, we went to the police station, that is I was going to take an oath, before Kayamier who could see—Kayamier was a Judge in Humansdorp and they could see that I was bleeding.

The consumption and culinary imagery of the barbecue appears in the following testimony of T. Mvudle, given about his police interrogation in 1985 at Khutsong, where he was a leading member of the local youth and student organization.

Traumatizing the Truth Commission / 257 At about one in the afternoon they called me. They said I seem to know a lot and I have been organizing a lot. They requested information about the children who would go to Botswana and Zambia. . . . They took a shambok from the van. . . . They took our shirts off and then started assaulting us with shamboks. We kept on denying, saying we do not know. At about three they put a fire on. They had a braai. They would take us one by one. There was a forest nearby where they would take us. After coming back from the forest you just would not be able to talk. I would ask the others what happened. They would say no, we have been really beaten up at the forest.41 At about four they took a group from amongst us. Four of us were left behind. The boys (his fellow captives) were braaiing meat. (The police) were saying they do not know what they are going to do about me because I had put them in trouble. Van Wyk was drinking brandy the whole time. He said that they are all the same. They took the fork that they used for the meat, and came to me. I was half-naked. He put it on my back. This mark is as a result of that assault. They burnt me. They said that I would tell the truth.42

On other occasions, the police use the braai to humanize their relationship with their captives, to insulate their own conscience from the violence, and as a cover-up strategy for recent acts of brutality, as evidenced in the amnesty hearings of the notorious torturer Jeffrey Benzien, here speaking to his victim: MR. BENZIEN:

Could you remember the time that you had seen snow for the

first time? Can you remember what happened in the snow? The husband and the wife and the two children who were taking photos of you playing in the snow along the N1? Your trip to Colesberg, where you braaied with me that night and with the rest of the Unit, therefore Mr. Forbes, in the spirit of honesty and reconciliation, I am sure you are making a mistake about the 16th of every month [being] the day that I would assault you . . . MR. FORBES:

I would just like to say that these are all occurrences that I can

clearly remember. But then to continue could I then ask Mr. Benzien, apart from I think the impression that you are giving this Commission is that we went on these joy trips in the snow and for braais and so forth, can I put it to you that it was always after an assault of this nature, that we would be taken on these trips and that the intention of these trips was to ensure that the injuries would heal and that I would actually not get into contact with the District Surgeon?43

258 / Chapter Five

Most acts of police cover-up took the form of burning the bodies of victims, in order to conceal both the acts themselves and the identities of the deceased. Charity Kondile, speaking about the kidnapping and execution of her son Sizwe, centers on the culinary aura of the disposal of her son’s body. Well, Dirk Coetzee goes on further to say that when he died, they put his body on a pile of wood with a tyre near the Komatiepoort River at night, where it took them nine hours to burn his body. Dirk Coetzee further states that twice they were burning his body, the flesh was smelling good and they were having beers at that time. So it was like a braai to them. As a mother I feel that, no matter whether it was politics, fighting for his land, I don’t think he deserved all that treatment. I feel it was grossly inhuman. I feel they could have killed him and gave us the body or left it in the veld there, I feel that this was tantamount to cannibalism, or even Satanism.44

In July 1996, at an amnesty hearing in Pretoria, two investigators of the Fidelity Guards security firm and former policemen, Hennie Gerber and Johan van Eyk, petitioned for amnesty. The applicants claimed that they (along with the co-investigator, Frans Oosthuizen) had been in part acting on behalf of the National Party when they murdered suspected PanAfricanist Congress member Samuel Kganakga on May 21, 1991. They had been investigating a robbery, supposedly committed on behalf of the Azanian People’s Liberation Army, in which four million rands were stolen.45 Advocates acting for the amnesty applicants told the TRC that Gerber’s and van Eyk’s actions had been politically motivated and thus met the commission’s requirements for amnesty. The amnesty applicants regarded themselves as agents of the police against what was at the time seen as a communist-inspired onslaught against the state. However, they were denied amnesty owing to lack of political motivation due to lack of explicit political affiliation. Gerber, one of the amnesty applicants, described the abduction of the victim and the locale of the murder: “He was . . . taken by vehicle to this open field, I decided to go to Cleveland forest area where we usually had braais. Their captive was bound and hoisted up by his legs so that he was hanging upside down.”46 This was at about 9.00 a.m. Jack Nkoana, an African employee of Fidelity Guards, witnessed the interrogation. Mr. Gerber . . . came with a bag with some extra ropes in (it) also, it seemed like old telephone (wire). And then he instructed the deceased to sit down,

Traumatizing the Truth Commission / 259 tied his legs with a rope and used a piece of stone as the tree was very high, you know, to tie that stone to the rope and then throw it over the blue gum tree. They did that. They started hoisting the deceased upside down on that tree, and then after that they tied the rope on the tree. And they further untied his belt and . . . they pulled his trousers up and took out this torturing machine (electric shock apparatus) . . . and started (connected) one wire on his finger and then the other piece of wire on his private parts.47

Kganakga was questioned while the electricity was applied to his genitals: He continued to deny all knowledge of the robbery in which he was suspected to have taken part. Nkoana continued: I could see that the deceased was crying and starting jerking while hanging upside down and he was crying very badly. And while he was doing that, it seems they were enjoying the thing because they were laughing.

After the application of the shocks, which lasted for about an hour, Kganakga was left hanging upside down on the tree for most of the day until about 5:00 p.m. He was lowered from time to time for more shock treatment but then hoisted back onto the tree. Nkoana was never told to ask Kganakga about his political affiliations. Later, Nkoana was sent by Gerber to buy “cool drinks”: They said to me I must go to the shop to buy some cool drinks, because it seems maybe they have had enough (of torturing). They have been trying to get the information from Samuel, but all the time he was denying.48

When he returned, Gerber and van Eyk had retired to their vehicles, about two hundred meters from the tree. They were drinking whisky and vodka. Gerber explained the drinking of alcohol: “During these types of investigations and interrogations alcohol is always used. No right-thinking person can act in this way without your conscience plaguing you.” However, Gerber never made any reference to the laughing, the joking, the interrogators’ connoisseurial perusal of their handiwork that accompanied the torture, and the alcohol consumption, which imbued the occasion with a recreational atmosphere. Every now and then they returned to where Kganakga was hanging to continue the torture and questioning. During the course of the day, while Kganakga was hanging suspended from a tree, van Eyk collected leaves that were lying in the vicinity and set a fire under the captive’s head. It was his evidence that the intention was not to cause any injury to

260 / Chapter Five

Kganakga but to further intimidate him by causing him to breathe in the smoke. At 5:00 p.m. Nkoana was told he could go. Kganakga was lowered and brought back to the vehicles by the torturers. His face was swollen and his eyes bloodshot; he could hardly walk, and he had marks and abrasions on his legs. Gerber then claimed that despite having hung upside down for most of the day, and in spite of his swollen legs and multiple abrasions, Kganakga was able to jump up, charge van Eyk, and grab him. “That was when I realized that we had big problems,” Gerber testified. Oosthuizen shot Kganakga in the shoulder. Kganakga then tried to run away in the direction of the mines, and Gerber fired two shots in Kganakga’s back. His testimony was that Kganakga was shot and killed while attempting to escape. It was decided to get rid of the body, and Gerber took the corpse to a deserted spot, poured gasoline over it, and set it on fire. Later van Eyk revisited the charred body and chopped off one arm, which had not been burned, to prevent identification of the body. After disposing of Kganakga’s remains, the security guard put it about that one “terrorist” had been killed during the course of the robbery. Nkoana reported for work the next day. He stated: “On arrival at the office, the first person I met  .  .  . was Frans Oosthuizen. He then said in Afrikaans, ‘Moenie worry nie, ons het hom gebraai’ [Don’t worry, we have braaied him].”49 Thus, the disfigurement of Kganakga accompanied his categorical transformation and abstraction from an individual and co-worker of his torturers into a charred specimen of a fictive terrorist. Braai is Afrikaans and South African English for an outdoor barbecue, and braaiing is a ubiquitous weekend recreational practice throughout South Africa. Associated with sports competitions, hunting, the frontier geography of the bush, relaxation, and alcohol consumption, it is also part of the political culture of white male dominance. Braaivleis is the name for the meat that is consumed at such events. It is my contention that at the braai and torture sites described above, consumption, commensality, and violence were fused, and that this conflation seems to have become convention—to the extent that one cannot immediately discern from Gerber’s testimony of past braais held at the Cleveland Forest spot whether he refers to actual barbecues, to interrogations and torture, or to both. This association of braaiing with torture and interrogation speaks to issues that have concerned theorists of torture and political terror ever since Arendt’s meditation on Nazi banality. I refer to the incorporation of everyday life practices, objects, and associations into extraordinary scenes of violence and terror, a dynamic that serves to normalize the violence for

Traumatizing the Truth Commission / 261

the perpetrators and that conversely refracts the increasing penetration of a political culture of terror into the quotidian, as well the imperializing conscription of signs of the ordinary in the mobilization and application of terror. At Kganakga’s braai torture and that of others, consumption and commensality serve to normalize excessive brutality and to inure the perpetrators to the human consequences of their acts. Distancing from and depersonalization of the victims begins with the hooding of the captive, the erasure of a face, of individual identity. Kganakga’s disfigurement is further enhanced by inversion, by hanging him upside down, and this is elaborated by successive acts of disfiguring violence. Torture has been described by many of its practitioners with the culinary imagery of “softening” the suspects so that they will want to relinquish their information. Kganakga’s body was subjected to an elaborate and baroque series of transformative culinary-type procedures that had little to do with the extraction of information: he was hung upside down like a piece of meat; he was “softened” by electric shocks; he was smoked and cooked by fire; he was dismembered and butchered, his body transformed into leftover refuse. In the meantime, the laughing perpetrators consumed “cool drinks” and alcohol. These atrocities transformed Samuel Kganakga into an object of food consumption, pleasure, and recreation. Nkoana, one of two black witnesses, was obviously not part of this commensality. He misinterpreted the call for alcohol as the termination of torture and as a sign of the ex-policemen’s frustration with their captive’s denials; however, drinking was necessary to intensify the commensality of the violence. Gerber may have told the TRC that he drank due to a bad conscience, but it would not have advanced his amnesty application to advertise that he drank as a form of recreation and pleasure during torture. However, the inducement of anesthesia by alcohol, as claimed by Gerber, supports my point that the consumption practices and commensal dynamics of the torture inured the perpetrators to the suffering they were causing, even though measuring that suffering—scrutinizing the pain of the other and the latter’s responsiveness or lack thereof— would supposedly have been axial to measuring the instrumental efficacy of the interrogation. I would suggest that this physiological anesthesia is a component of a wider sociocultural anesthesia that informed the racial treatment of Kganakga and was manifested by the transmutation of the prisoner into an artifact of consumption—as well as a racialized fetish, and a zoopolitical specimen. With regard to Kganakga’s culinary interrogation, it is clear that the defacement of his personhood proceeded through a process of political despeciation and respeciation. Political animality confirms the ra-

262 / Chapter Five

cial Other as hunted prey and in this instance communicates with the economic and food consumption metaphors of the braai that further deface—and, by inference, politically commodify—the victim’s body through the conjoining of commensality and his animality as a circulating fetish form mediating the singular subject and the terrorist construct. In Kganakga’s case, the electric shock treatment, being hooded and hung upside down like a haunch of meat, and the attempt to smoke and burn the victim’s head—and later the entire body—are techniques of racist cuisine, of changing the raw into the cooked, the individual into a type, Kganakga the security guard into a fictive terrorist and a political artifact that could be brandished as a trophy within the culture and propaganda of the securocrats. In the TRC archives there are dozens of transcripts from the state security forces in which the act of braaiing features as commensal and recreational activity, as the site for casual police social gatherings, as a predominately male space, as a way of passing the time during the evenings in cross-border operations in the bush, and as a celebration of the completion of successful counterinsurgency operations. In reported incidents of human-rights violations, the braai also appears in the midst of interrogation episodes entangled with the scene of torture, as an apparatus of torture and as a medium for covering up the traces of torture and murder through the burning of bodies. In TRC hearing testimony these disposal fires are almost always termed or compared to a braai. The victims are always black males; white anti-apartheid activists and women of color were the victims of other forms of abuse and torture. Anti-apartheid activists who had heard stories of interrogations or had undergone interrogations themselves understood the police braai as a code for assault and murder. Being taken to a braai by the police meant that a black detainee would be severely ill-treated and possibly executed. Zoopolitical Economies It is largely as a force of production that the body is invested with relations of power and domination, but on the other hand, its constitution as labor power is possible only if it is caught up in a system of subjection (in which need is also a political instrument).  .  .  . The body becomes a useful force only if it is both a subjected body and a productive body.50

In reference to consumption and commensality, anthropology has always attended to how societies fashion the substances that sustain them, and

Traumatizing the Truth Commission / 263

here I want to apply that perspective to bodies of color as a sustaining substance of the political terror and of the political economy of the apartheid regime. Consumption, food, and commodification metaphors, as repositories of deep cultural memory, served to materially fashion acts of state and para-state violence in South Africa. I would propose that there is a mnemic linkage of the braai tortures described above with prior forms of labor coercion and the economic commodification and consumption of bodies of color. This linkage can be discerned at three levels: (1) the relationship of the forms of torture applied to Kganakga and other victims of braai interrogations to the forms of labor discipline that ensured the continued commodification and compliance of black labor in southern Africa from the seventeenth century to the late 1980s; (2) the conversion of the victim’s persona into an artifact of consumption—braaivleiss—through bestialization and culinary deformation and comparable forms of bestialization in labor discipline practices in the agricultural and mining industries; and (3)  the evocation of labor subordination performances in the braai tortures. I would further suggest that the braai tortures were theaters that mobilized antecedent forms of racialized interpersonal dominance and structural subjugation that could no longer be unequivocally sustained in the 1970s and 1980s in an increasingly insurrectionary South Africa, and as such constitute acts of structural nostalgia. Thus, these interrogations, tortures, murders, and body disposals, irrespective of their practical political goals and content, sustained and fed the perpetrators of these atrocities at multiple levels of act, memory, and meaning. These atrocities were reenactments, material forms of anamnesis for the assailants that had only the most tenuous connection to anticommunist political or military strategies. Here we must reflect on the process by which the racial Other, coercively deployed as an instrument of economic production, is eventually transformed into a medium of pleasurable consumption, a process that links violence and the commodification of black labor with practices of commensality that elaborate white dominance within the economic culture of South Africa prior to and during apartheid and particularly within the counterinsurgency campaign of the 1970s to the early 1990s. I stress the pleasures, fantasy material, and satisfactions extracted from the chosen substance in these tortures, and in doing so I seek to remedy the TRC’s inability to address disproportionate and racist violence in amnesty hearings. This means deploying historical and ethnographic materials that speak to a diversity of cultural memories linked to such violence that had no evidentiary or discursive status within the moralized historicism and positive law of the TRC. Here one must point out that in South Africa, racism was not struc-

264 / Chapter Five

tured solely as a psychological pathology, but also as a medium of economic organization and subjugation, which was crucial to the creation and disciplining of a labor force. Both the violence applied to Kganakga’s body and the locale of the torture harbor dense historical associations and genealogies that are crucial to understanding the political economy of the body that is both refracted and reenacted by such torture practices in South Africa from the 1970s and to the early 1990s. The methodology of torture and the ill-treatment of the body of victims in braai tortures and post-execution disposals mobilize an economic memory, rituals of racial and class relatedness, acted out on the terrain of the eviscerated body of color that are entwined with the cultural memories of white economic hegemony; an economy that was facing a growing political crisis in the late 1970s and 1980s, when state-enacted braai tortures emerged and proliferated. The cultural fault line of this crisis, though aggravated by later international sanctions and boycotts, was situated in popular resistance, clandestine community organizing, and community-based insurrection, which, from the perspective of a racist political economy, could only be viewed as a massive race- and class-based breakdown of labor discipline. The braai tortures are archaeologically linked with the practices of labor discipline in colonial, postcolonial, and apartheid-era South Africa in their ceremonial structure. In turn, such evocations of labor discipline in practices of political torture can be viewed as mutually fashioning and reiterating the embodiment, social identity, and class position of both the aggressors and the victims. Societies do not leap from one economic mode and means of production to another through clean evolutionary breaks; the periodized modes and relations of production overlap and are structurally related, not least by common ideological apparatuses such as labor discipline. I look to the relations of production in three overlapping South African economic epochs to show the continuity and evolution of labor discipline practices, tracking these practices as they eventually migrate to counterinsurgency practice. As evocative as it may be, I do not claim that the replication of labor discipline practices is symbolically expressive of the entire history of racist oppression in South Africa; no such totalization is asserted here. I do make the link between the braai tortures and the discrete history of economic punition, which displays a certain teleological profile as domination methods shift to and from different modes and relations of production that are pertinent here: (1) a slaveholding economy, (2) agrarian tenancy and sharecropping and white agrarian paternalism, and (3) industrial rela-

Traumatizing the Truth Commission / 265

tions of production in the mineral industries. However, the migration of labor discipline practices to the political field of counterinsurgency is not a teleological culmination of economic hegemony, but rather a contingent recursivity by which white dominance thinks through its current historical site with available cultural, technical, and mnemic resources. The translation of labor discipline frameworks from economic domains to political and policing domains indicates that ideologies and structures of economic teleology and hegemony were fracturing in the period of braai tortures. In this sense these torture practices draw their apocalyptic resonance from being a post- or neo-apartheid phenomenon from within the apartheid apparatus itself. In the Cape Colony, at least one slave per month was publicly executed between 1680 and 1795. A full array of whippings, beatings, and punitive amputations was mandated by law, including the setting up of ten torture wheels known as Cape gallows. One method of capital punishment was to crucify the offending slave hanging upside down from a tree, much in the same way Kganakga was suspended upside down for smoking from the gum tree. The bodies of executed slaves were frequently left out in the bush to be devoured by carrion eaters. Slaves convicted of arson, a standard form of slave resistance and insurrection in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, were punished by being “half strangled and killed” on a “slow” fire.51 The symbiosis between labor commodification and violence that was institutionalized with slavery in the Cape Colony in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries expanded in terms of population and geographical scope following the emancipation of the slaves in the 1830s and the military annexation of trans-Ciskean territories in the 1840s and 1850s. It culminated with the 1913 Land Act—that rapid and violent mass production of a rural proletariat through the dislocation of African landowners and tenant farmers who had staged an economic recovery in the latter half of the nineteenth century.52 The Land Act created a landless rural proletariat crowded into “native reserves” who were subsequently recruited into the emerging mineral industry. Informal “cajoling” and violent coercion of African labor resources under independent chiefly control was, from the eighteenth to the midnineteenth century, transformed into a coercive ideology of rural paternalism and, eventually, a policing grid rooted in the compound system of the mineral industries. The right to corporally punish the underclass of color had been vigorously defended by slaveholders in the Western Cape since the eighteenth century. At that time colonial governments had attempted

266 / Chapter Five

to place halfhearted limits on these practices, which were reasserted as part of the coercion of labor in the supposedly free labor market of post-slavery South Africa. In the second third of the nineteenth century, white landowners, represented by such organizations as the Zuid-Afrikaansche Boeren Beschermings Vereeninging (BBV), promoted an ethic of farm-labor control based on patriarchal familial metaphors, a rural labor paternalism that was a key repressive apparatus for enforcing class and racial distinctions. By the late nineteenth century the white homestead, with its underclass of tenant and seasonal contract laborers, was seen as the ideological wellspring for the ethics of “working, obeying, and submitting” that organized racial interaction and class relatedness within disciplinary frameworks. This rural paternalism and its command of violence were advanced as a model in miniature for the racialized South African nation as a whole.53 As John Comaroff and Jean Comaroff have extensively discussed, these views were part of a wider ensemble of “moralized discourses” that posited the disciplining of African labor within policing, geographic, theological, and medical frameworks. Nevertheless, brute violence existed alongside these ideological apparatuses in the enforcement of labor discipline, particularly in agricultural areas marked by labor scarcity. Rural paternalism was literal; white farmers looked upon and disciplined workers of color as children, confining them to a world of domesticated subjugation. In the nineteenth century the Natal Masters and Servants Act (1850) authorized the confinement and dietary punishment of offending farm laborers and provided a legal framework for a customary law of beatings and floggings that were meted out to black contract labor.54 The 1932 Native Service Contract Act, Section 11, mandated the whipping of offending workers.55 Based on the results of a study conducted between 1979 and 1981, the South African Council of Churches concluded that torture and other forms of violent disciplining of farm laborers was widespread. The study found a high incidence of workers being beaten naked, having their clothes cut from them before an assault, and having their sexual organs wounded; the council urged the banning of the sjambok, a type of whip. In 1986 the Association of Rural Advancement reported that the flogging of workers was considered a “paternalistic rite” in rural Natal.56 The choice of an abandoned mine site as the locale for Kganakga’s interrogation can also be viewed as evoking an economic geography in a South Africa deeply entangled with the processes of violent proletarianization and racialized class formation. From the late nineteenth century onward, the mines, with their heavily policed compounds, were essentially run as closed institutions. Furthermore, the induction or disciplinary proletari-

Traumatizing the Truth Commission / 267

anization of rural black migrants into mine labor resembled many of the more recent intimidation and sensory deprivation techniques used by the apartheid security apparatus in their maltreatment of political detainees. Mine training focused on coercive conditioning and the initiation of the black worker’s body and mind to underground environments. The newly recruited workers were confined to heated, windowless “acclimatization chambers,” where they received little or no food or water and were compelled to do physical exercises under conditions of sensory deprivation.57 Anti-apartheid activists describe being subjected to analogous sensory deprivation regimes in the 1970s and 1980s, involving stress positions, compulsory exercise, and light and oxygen deprivation through waterboarding. The mine compounds in southern Africa were militarized sites patrolled by security officers who were recruited from ethnic groups different from those of the laborers. Boss boys, white miners, and compound police frequently assaulted black laborers, resulting in large-scale desertions from the mines. In certain mines recalcitrant workers were placed in cells equipped with stocks and flogged. According to Charles van Onselen, the whippings were so vicious that it took more than one man to administer them.58 As in the braai torture episodes, much of this violence was ideologically advanced through methods of depersonalization and bestialization. The Comaroffs state that the coercive commodification of the black population proceeded through animalistic imagery, such as the trope of “beasts of burden.” Ideologies of race-based bestialization were crucial to the commodification of black labor. On the farms, contract black laborers were given the names of cattle or of wild beasts, such as Bobbejaan (baboon); farm holdings were referred to as being “stocked” with natives who had to be “broken in.”59 Mine workers were perceived by white managers as “imported stock” that had to be acclimatized to the mines; instead of personal names, workers were known simply by assigned numbers. The selection of the bush as the locale for the interrogation of Kganakga can also be viewed as evoking a crucial stratigraphy in South African economic violence. Historically, the forced removal of individuals and communities of color to the bush signified their zoopolitical status; the bush was where the bodies of recalcitrant slaves were disposed. The imagery of the bush is made up of contradictory and antagonistic cognitive maps. For Bantu cultures, the bush is positioned by traditional inside/outside polarities such as village/bush, or the social/the wild. It is a liminal space for the ritual initiation of male youths and for traditional healers; the animals associated with the bush are symbolic mediators for the human world. However, the bush also resonates with the colonial history of the

268 / Chapter Five

Xhosa and other African populations, who were pushed off of fertile lands to infertile margins by the British and Afrikaaners. In Cape Town, colored working-class memory interprets the forced relocation of colored populations from city centers and nearby suburbs—such as District 6 and Mowbry in the 1960s to the outlying Cape Flats—as tantamount to forced exile to the bush and as sealing their nonhumanity in the state’s eyes. The bush was further elaborated as a geography of the inhuman in the 1970s and 1980s, when it became the scene of clandestine state violence involving interrogation, torture, and execution sites such as those described in the testimony reprinted above; this was a covert political geography that harbored remote execution farms, which became the locales of grisly forensic exhumations by the TRC. Police and army personnel operating in bush settings for long periods during operations such as cross-border raids referred to the state of being “bush-fucked,” a colloquial term for continued exposure to traumatic violence. The performative infrastructure and semiotics of braai torture and the genealogy of punitive violence outlined above suggest that these episodes were ritualized reenactments of racialized class relatedness mediated through the terrain of the black male body. The state’s braai violence transcribed labor discipline codes onto the political template of the insurrectionary and insubordinate male body of color. And this wholesale transfer of a symbolic economy of class and racial dominance occurred when a once triumphant political economy was being challenged by “labor” insubordination of previously unimaginable scope. In some braai tortures the collapse of the mandated socioeconomic and geographical discipline of apartheid was performatively encoded in customary forms of violent labor punition. In other interrogations this was combined with overt rituals of labor service in which the prisoners prepared the braai that would later be used for their own torture. The disposal fires rendered many an aftermath of torture and execution into a scenario of commensality and celebration in which the victims were consumed at multiple levels both material and symbolic. The imagined communist onslaught, with its explicit anticapitalist associations, was the dream form through which the rupture in apartheid’s symbolic economy was envisioned and projected onto black bodies by the securocrats. It is now all the more curious—if not downright offensive to any human-rights paradigm—that this fabulation served as the basis of indemnification in amnesty hearings. The crime that Kganakga was accused of fit well into this fantasy material. Kganakga had been the black subordinate to Gerber and van Eyk

Traumatizing the Truth Commission / 269

in their place of employment. The bank robbery attributed to him was an assault on South African capitalism in the form of violated labor discipline and expropriation of white wealth by clandestine agents of color. Kganakga was assumed to be a member of the Pan-Africanist Congress, though he was never asked about it at any time during his torture. After his death he was fictionalized as an unknown terrorist through the defacement of his body. The construction of racial and class relatedness through discipline is apparent in the conjuncture of subjugated labor, the command of violence, and consumption/commensality practice in the following account from Jabu James Malinga, speaking of his torture near Alexandra in 1978, which resembles the labor scenario of Dlokolo’s torture described above. In Malinga’s testimony, the use of the term “kaffir” and the rehearsal of labor subservience serve to set both the scene of intimidation and the racial and class relatedness between the white policemen and their victim, all of which seem important to the policemen’s interrogation protocol. The fact that, as in the Kganakga torture, policemen of color either assist at or watch these atrocities further accentuates the dramaturgy of domination. We have here the doubled colonial optic of the bestialized black body, fit for punition, labor, and burning, and the quasi-humanized black body wearing the endowed uniform, that is, the discipline of its masters. Thus, the divide between bestiality and provisional and/or provisioned humanity is a labile one for people of color in the braai theater: And Mtibi and Skieter and  .  .  . Van der Linde (policemen), they were in a green Chevrolet. They called me, they said I must get into the car. I wanted to know why. They said, you kaffir, you mustn’t ask a lot. Get in. Then I went inside the car and left off with them. They took me into some bush in Alexandra where it is a highway at the moment. They took some meat from the car, they said I must just go and get some wood for them. I did as I was told. And then they said I must make fire for them. Thereafter they said I must braai the meat for them as well. And thereafter they were eating and drinking alcohol. . . . Then they started beating me. They said I knew too much, they will show me something that I don’t know. They handcuffed me and the fire was still burning at that time. They took me towards the fire, they threatened to burn me should I not be prepared to talk the truth. I didn’t think that they would burn me or not. Whilst they were assaulting me and the other one lifted my leg they dragged me towards this fire. They started burning me, they said I must talk the truth. I refused because I knew that should I tell the truth they will kill all my companions. Then they burnt me. I was dressed in

270 / Chapter Five an overall. When they realized that I was burning they took something to extinguish the fire. They extinguished the fire. They said they wanted to know what we were doing on the 17th June. They wanted the truth. I still refused to tell them. I was just being kicked, I was not aware of what was happening, I was unconscious at that moment. I found myself at the clinic. That is when I became conscious. I can’t remember what happened.60

The rhetorical, yet unrelenting, search for the truth by the torturers indicates that another type of truth than that of political secrets was being extracted from the abuse of Malinga’s body. It is a truth that is not so much encased in what is said or silenced in an interrogation, but a truth and a discourse inscribed in the methodologies and sequencing of acts of degradation and intimidation that moved Malinga and his interrogators through a series of stylized role sets and bodily postures organized by the iconography of forced labor, consumption, and personal nullification. In the aggression inflicted upon Samuel Kganakga, Jabu James Malinga, Melford Mpompi Dlokolo, and other victims of braai tortures, the symbolic economy of performative violence and the violence of historically embedded economic domination can be seen as integral to each other’s ideological replication. Braai tortures were a theater of economic memory, replay, and nostalgia for old structural hierarchies that could be replicated in the present state of emergency only through the sensory associations of the masculinist and white barbecue. The braai torture was a pleasureinducing experience in which the subordination of racial Others was explicitly linked to heightened moments of commensality, object choice, and virtual or symbolic cannibalism. The convergence of forced labor, violence, and consumption practices also coincides with almost pan-African anticolonial perceptions about European capitalist penetration and labor practices. This is particularly true for black mine workers, who view economic violence as a vast machinery for the consumption, cannibalization, digestion, and wastage of bodies of color. This folk perception coincides with western and southern African witchcraft-related beliefs concerning “belly-eaters” and “soul-eaters.” The braai torture episodes give us a glimpse of this process from the other side of economic violence, that of the white baas (boss) and consumer of black subordination and expropriation. This is entangled here with trauma tropes, racial fantasies, and wounds that provoke commensal pleasures on the one hand, and acts of domination and violence that are encrypted by consumption symbols on the other hand, thereby indicating the presence

Traumatizing the Truth Commission / 271

of commodification logics, of self-valorizing capital, at the core of both repressive and ideological apparatuses. It is precisely the capacity of braai tortures to evoke and replicate old hierarchies that enabled the perpetrators to extract power, pleasure, and identity from these atrocities, essences that had little to do with the gathering of political intelligence but much to do with the performativities of political, racial, and class formations. In this conjuncture torture objectifies race and class in disposing of the bodyfetish form as use value and as exchange value. Here the circulation of motifs of nature in the form of food and/or prey consumption in the bush points to braai torture as the making of second nature, concentrated in the refiguring zoopolitical fabrication of the terrorist from tropes of commensality and animality. The ceaseless expansion of pain under torture in the braai scene mimics the self-expansion or self-valorization of capital as abstraction, where production/consumption and creation/destruction are conjoined. This valorization process, including the admixture of use and exchange value, institutes torture as pure process or as a means without end or instrumental pretexts; this is tangible in the mutations of Kganakga from trusted subordinate, animalized prey, and foodlike object of consumption to APLA terrorist. This last state coincided with the highest level of abstraction of Kganakga, the burning and dismemberment of his corpse in which body erasure permitted his spectral recirculation as the communist enemy. Under torture the concrete is produced via disfiguring violence, consumable pain, and obliterated death as the necessary carriers of the abstract. This logic informed by and/or parasiting capitalist value making informs current counterterrorism strategies to such a degree that the mode of death and disappearance of Kganakga anticipates many of the motifs that culminated in the liquefaction of bin Laden and clandestine extraordinary renditions to black sites. However, despite my focus on economic culture, these events are not exhausted by Marxist analysis, for there are other readings that intersect with the diachronic one I have just provided, and these readings directly address the excessiveness and disproportionality of the violence, its very lack of political utility, expediency, and rationality. These facets must be attended to, for even contextual socioeconomic explanations can overrationalize modalities of being and perception that begin on the historical stage of state political and economic instrumentality and terminate in an altogether different place. That evental site has been marked by the religious and medicinal beliefs of the communities from which the victims of braai torture came.

272 / Chapter Five

The Door of the Demonic As a mother I feel that, no matter whether it was politics, fighting for his land, I don’t think he deserved all that treatment. I feel it was grossly inhuman. I feel they could have killed him and gave us the body or left it in the veld there, I feel that this was tantamount to cannibalism, or even Satanism.61

Charity Kondile, a Xhosa from Port Elizabeth and a member of the Zionist church who was cited earlier, declared that the torture, execution, and braaiing of her son Sizwe was a form of cannibalism and satanism. It would be easy to dismiss her accusation of satanism and the demonic as the expression of an understandably grieving mother. However, the notion of the demonic reflects another, quite crucial cultural memory at play in the comprehension of state terror, this time from the perspective of South Africans of color. I held a series of discussions in the Cape Town office of a policeman seconded to the Amnesty Committee of the TRC. He had been involved in numerous torture investigations, including braai tortures. A meticulous and methodical investigator and evidence analyst and the right-hand man of the TRC’s legal experts, he is also a member of the Seventh-Day Adventist church. He related the following: Sometimes when I read the amnesty applications, it really gets to me [that] it cuts me right to the bone, sometimes when I’ve read an application over a hundred times I still can’t believe that men or humans can have been so evil going in and killing families, mothers, children, to me it was because they were just demonic, it is only a person who is controlled by demonic powers or forces who would do these evil deeds. It’s evil! And I just hope and pray that they would find peace within themselves when they come and speak about this [at amnesty hearings].

I asked him what the origin of the demonic was. He replied: I come from a police background. It has been institutionalized that the police would braai every Friday. Because of my religious background and my beliefs, I would not attend, for at a braai they would discuss the women they slept with, the guys they assaulted. If you look at guys like de Kock, Coetzee, and other guys who braaied people, in normal human understanding you can never understand what would bring someone to do something like that, it’s not the culture or the upbringing—it has to be some force or some

Traumatizing the Truth Commission / 273 demonic power because you are burning this person, while less than twenty meters from him, while this flesh is burning, you are actually having your meat. It’s a satanic ritual, you are offering this person to Satan, here is the trophy. If you look at it from [a] religious aspect it is actually some form of satanism: “you have given us this power [being above the law, being judge, jury, and executioner], so we are giving you back the sacrifice.” It makes them feel powerful. By doing this they get that sense of power. If you look at it from a religious point it comes from Satan itself. They would never use those terms, but without realizing it they are coming under the lordship of Satan himself because they are being controlled because of the evil deeds that they are doing.

Are they extracting a sense of power from the act of sacrifice? I asked. Naturally, yes, because if you do it once you will do it again. Blowing up one person into a thousand pieces, as one amnesty applicant put it, and the day after holding a braai and laughing about it. Once doing that, they get that sense of power no matter who you are. It will take you up. And that power is demonic. It’s not from God, for these men went to church, and they . . . never confessed the wrong they’ve done. Later on it becomes a normality, something they were just doing. They could argue the facts, but I could sit down with them and prove it to them, that they are totally under the control of the demonic forces. I would prove to them in a biblical sense and in a nonbiblical sense. In the nonbiblical sense, if you go to [a] certain place, certain places are under the stronghold of Satan because of the things that are happening there. If you go to Indonesia, where they have a lot of witchcraft and a lot of rituals, they have voodoo, they have Ouija boards, and these are all demonic powers. You that are living there are being controlled by demonic forces; that is from a nonbiblical sense [non-Christian]. If you read the amnesty applications when they go to do torture, they always go back to these certain spots, for instance a mine, a shooting range, because they feel safe there because no one could see them. They realize this is really where we can exercise our powers. They open a door at that point because that place accumulates power, because sometimes when I step into a torture spot, I could feel its presence. I wasn’t afraid—it even challenges me in my dreams, but I overcome it with the blood of Jesus.

The ethnic, religious, and geographical differences between Mrs. Kondile, a Xhosa from the Eastern Cape, and this Seventh-Day Adventist policeman, of colored or mixed race from the Western Cape, suggest an un-

274 / Chapter Five

dercurrent of vernacular theorizing on what the TRC would juridically call gross human-rights violations. Like Charity Kondile, this TRC functionary, a former member of the same police force he was investigating for the commission, sees the demonic in these acts of torture, a demonic fashioning of power through ritualized violence that is not simply the repressive application of state power to the victim. The demonic is centered on the requirement and substance of the victim; it is not a constraining violence that deletes or eliminates, it is a productive, speciating force akin to the apartheid economy. Like that economy, it is tied to a circuit of miasmic, enclosed spaces that attract, magnetize, and accumulate further acts of violence. The notion of the demonic speaks to embedded concepts of morbidity, of chronic evil, sickness, and perhaps bodily possession. We are in religious and medically discursive territory here, but it is far removed from the individualized confessional canons and talking cure of the TRC. The enchained signifiers of the demonic that traverse Christian and animist beliefs constitute a political theology of transcendental materiality that grapples with the suprasensible in the experience of state violence. Jacques Rancière has taught us that the political is instituted by and situated within the violent rift of the sensible and the insensible. The demonic emerges here as a culturally specific representation of this divide, as a response to state hegemonization of the sphere of sensible immanence through chronic terror-producing force; the demonic congeals fear and horror as the inadmissible immanence and suprasensible excess of the state’s material violence. In order to explore the political theology of the demonic as moral sickness and as possible healing, I sought the perspectives of the Umntu Omhlophe, the “white people” popularly known by the Zulu term isangomas, carrying TRC dossiers of atrocities to male and female traditional healers from the KTC and Crossroads shantytowns, where I was conducting community-based fieldwork with TRC witnesses and their families. I was interested in the notion of miasmic space that attracts further acts of violence, as discussed by the policeman and as implied by Mrs. Kondile. The Xhosa isangomas are no strangers to these forms of topological violence. Such miasmic spots are usually associated with roads, especially crossroads where fatal highway accidents have occurred, and particularly with mine shafts, where industrial accidents and deaths have taken place. These are sites where “a lot of people have lost their souls,” I was told. The recurrent phrase was that there are magnetic spots that “pulled,” “dragged” or “invited” souls—ukutsala imiphefumlo, in Xhosa. Umphefumlo is a soul (the prefix imi- indicates the plural form), and phefumla, the verb form, means “to

Traumatizing the Truth Commission / 275

breathe.” Phefumla has a moral connotation, for to breathe is also to speak of painful events that weigh on someone; it can also mean the strong, empowered speech of the traditional healer. A person in mourning or a person harboring great suffering and emotional trauma experiences a heavy weight on the chest and shoulders and cannot breathe easily. The miasmic site is a place where the spirit leaves the person, as indicated by the many souls lost at these locales. In such a miasmic spot, one is no longer umphefumlo, that is, with a soul; once the soul is gone, one can no longer breathe, for what made one breathe is absent. At this juncture, the souls that are “dragged” from the person are transformed into imimoya imibi, troubled, restless spirits that gravitate to the miasmic site. Kwelemimoya (spirit place) is a term used to describe the locations of dragged spirits. Since “bad” untimely death is frequent in the mines, it is customary amongst the miners to commission isangomas to go down into the mines every six months to talk to the spirits at a spot where someone has died. Cows and goats are slaughtered and white beads and tobacco are left; this propitiation ensures a renewed level of safety for the miners. Roads where car accidents have been frequent receive the same ceremonial attention. I met with the Umntu Omhlophe, traditional herbal healers, about what was occurring psychologically, physiologically, and metaphysically in the braai tortures if such distinctions apply. We talked in their largish shanties as local folks bent over large pots on kerosene stoves, received herbal steam treatments. In our discussions, the term used for the victim was ixhoba, which can mean “prey” or “target.” To braai is ukosa or ukoja in Xhosa. In their diagnoses, the isangomas focused on the exposure of the torturers to the aroma of burning human fat, a substance that is used by a few healers in their treatments, though most utilize animal fat. According to the healers, the aroma and smoke of burning human fat will encourage the torturer to kill and burn more victims to reexperience this aroma. The more the perpetrators inhaled burning human fat, the more they were compelled to commit the same act. One healer declared that the police were “poisoned” and concluded they were “like animals” or animalistic. The term for animals in Xhosa is isilwanyana. The phrase used by the healers is babu-lwanyana(rha); babu is plural for “people,” and the entire term means literally “animalish people.” Here the trope of bestialization is associated with the torturers and not with the tortured. By treating people as prey and food, the police had bestialized themselves. This was both a moral and a physiological condition, if such a distinction were to be made by the healers, considering the perpetrators’ addiction. Referring to the Christian characterization of indigenous African belief systems, one isangoma

276 / Chapter Five

described the police as “animists,” thus inverting a white moralizing discourse on primitivity and reassigning it to the white police. The concepts of an addicting aroma and self-medicating torture are crucial for many reasons. To be addicted is to crave (ukurhaleia/ukubawa). It can also be described as an intolerable itching (ukurhawuzelela). This term connotes being discomforted by an alien presence and was often used by African National Congress activists when they were suspicious that an informer was in their midst. As one described to me: “It is such a level of discomfort that you have to remove that person by killing him. They feel it in the blood that an informer is around.” This deadly aroma of burned human fat, which is either inhaled through the nostrils or absorbed through the pores of the skin, intersects with the notion of umphefumlo or soul as akin to breath. It can imply toxification of the assailants’ souls as well as their bodies. As one healer described it to me: “The human fat is in their blood. It has penetrated their bodies and requires cleansing. They are polluted.” Being addicted to killing would be seen as the multiplication of the pollution. Isinyama (pollution or curse) is a moral concept applied to Xhosa who are sent to jail and who consequently require ritual cleansing after their release. Before they decommissioned their weapons, former resistance fighters I met with in Katlehong in Gauteng hired an isangoma to clean the isinyama associated with their weaponry. Another form of isinyama is associated with calendrical killing sprees: the Xhosa believe that if a person kills at a certain time of year and is not cleansed (ukususa isinyama), he will kill again in the next year during the same season, in a kind of temporal duplication or compulsion that complements the notion of addictive miasmic space. According to a Xhosa healer in reference to braai torturers: “This craving makes them want to smell that aroma again, they gain a pleasure from smelling human flesh.” This is a miasmic and an empowering process all at once. According to the isangomas, it can be viewed as a particularly morbid form of intelezi, or medicine. Intelezi is the name for certain types of medicines used by herbalists and isangomas; it can also mean a specific herb. Intelezi is frequently administered by exposing the body to herbal steam: the medicine is simmered in water, and the person taking the intelezi sits over the pot on a chair covered with blankets. It is important that there be no leakage so that vapor penetrates as much of the body as possible. The patient sits there until he or she feels dizzy, which is the sign that the medicine has entered the body through both the pores and the nostrils.

Traumatizing the Truth Commission / 277

The word for “steaming” is ukufutha, and the process described above is referred to as “cooking yourself” or ukupheka. Ferdi Barnard, an infamous policeman who terrorized the KTC squatter camp near Cape Town and who was supposed to have been allied with certain anti-ANC herbalists, was rumored to have practiced witchcraft, was believed to have “cooked himself” (wazipheka) with multiple empowering intelezi. This process of “cooking” closely resembles what the healers described as occurring in the braai tortures, when the odor of burning human fat penetrated the bodies of the torturers. Indeed, one isangoma declared that the police in the Kganakga torture had “cooked themselves” (bazipheka) in the odor of human fat. Cooking is also associated with a pharmacological armoring of the body. It can be said that the police cooked themselves with empowering substances that intensified their propensity not only for violence but also for human atrocity. Heat symbolism also features in the isangomas’ sensing of a place inhabited by imimoya emibi, or troubled or bad spirits, the topographic phrase being imimoyaabantu abahambayo ye. In the aftermath of Nelson Mandela’s declaring Robben Island a national memorial, a place of nation-building remembrance, a federation of isangomas went to Robben Island to ritually cleanse it of accumulated pollution and related miasmas after a well-known female ANC activist testified to the media that she had been raped in her cottage by an unidentified white male when she stayed overnight on the island as part of an inspection tour commissioned by Mandela. The only white men on the island that night were policemen. I asked one isangoma who performed the cleansing how she felt when she first set foot on the island where anticolonial and anti-apartheid resisters had historically been incarcerated and abused and had died, including eighteenth-century insurrectionary Indonesian Muslim clerics, nineteenth-century Xhosa chieftains, and many of the current ANC leadership, and where this rape had just occurred. She replied: [She] wrote us a letter telling us about the incident. We went together to clean the place to pray to ensure that this time even sangomas would gain access to the museum, as in the past [we] were not allowed, not unless one will first consult with the ancestors, for we believe that museums are not clean. When we first set our foot there to inspect the place we came back with broken hearts, as we saw the place as not suitable for human beings. We felt the troubled spirits [imimoya emibi] in our blood. Your body tells you by “choking”; you feel that way when you suspect someone of being a witch,

278 / Chapter Five or—even if a person is sick your body will tell you the type of sickness they have. It’s the same when a place is sick. A heavy heartbeat and a choking weight on your chest is the first thing you feel. You can barely breathe, and the air you breathe is hot, and you feel like uttering something but something is preventing you.

The notions of the sick place and of the hot choking air reappear in the healers’ diagnosis of what is morally, spiritually, and physiologically taking place in the braai tortures. A sick place of this type is embedded with its own memories, affective residues of excessive violence and negativity that have occurred there and continue to circulate. Consequently, until they are healed, such sites exist outside of historical time. The past is endlessly replayed at these locales, and even those who come from the present, such as Mandela’s representative, can be sucked into this fulcrum of temporally static pain and violence. These images speak to the patterned perception of state violence as mediated by autokinetic racism, a perspective that had little interest for the TRC’s gravitation to political motivation and intent, for it does not view agents of the state as rational political subjects but as a disease progression. There can be no new beginnings at such locations, no reorigination of identity and purpose, since only the violent past of the state and its prey circulates there. Bulimic Politics: Economimesis and Addiction Through a telescoped history of South African labor discipline violence I have shown that state violence was provisioned by a retrospective mythography—the reality and spectacle of economically disciplined and ultimately consumable black bodies. This framework shows the state using violence to materially reshape the political field into provisional idealities of nostalgic subjugation. This framework can also explain the persistent repetition of certain types of violence despite their proven inutility as regards information extraction and collective political intimidation. This chapter has examined how certain memory formations mediated the reproduction of whiteness through racialized violence, which was given short shrift by the TRC. By treating memory as a utilitarian and recuperable transparency residing largely in harmed individuals or fragmented communities, and as a culturally neutral juridical technology, the TRC ignored memory as norma, a leveling political history of force. In doing so, it ended up stressing memory’s therapeutic and fact-setting possibilities at the expense of establishing its pathogenic connection to political

Traumatizing the Truth Commission / 279

speciation and the latter’s inherence in economic racism, a connection that would have more explicitly related the TRC’s project to the historical and ethical evisceration of apartheid’s economic and spatial violence. The TRC has left an ambivalent and contradictory moral legacy to the degree that it has ceded to future generations an important archive of political terror and violence, witnessed largely from the previously unwritten and often silenced or sequestered perspective of black counterhistory, voice, and embodiment, and yet has failed to adequately confront the institutional procedures and racialized memory prosthetics that bureaucratically routinized such violence—an important prophylaxis for future democratic institution-building in South Africa. My analysis brings the two poles of structural and transacted violence into greater proximity through the very tissue of sedimented and somatically cathected historical memory—the inertial structures of racial repetition and reenactment that animated the braai violence. Analyzed from the perspective of the commodification of the body, labor discipline, and sorcery, such acts as Kganakga’s torture and murder open a depth archaeology. At different stages in the history of the colonial and postcolonial political economy, transacted violence and structural violence served as mnemic lubricants for each other. Severe labor discipline, as act, threat, and spectacle, facilitated the ideological and somatic reproduction of the colonial economy and its project of making profit from making race. I historically elaborated how regimes of labor discipline in colonial and postcolonial South Africa deployed the body of color as an interchangeable economic and fetishized substance; the worked-upon body of color was the substrate that provisioned a racialized economimesis—a signifying chain of color, capital, and value.62 With the emerging threat posed to capitalist labor discipline by the anti-apartheid “struggle institutions,” economimesis evolved into a counterinsurgency theater of structural nostalgia that restaged subjugated bodies of color through pain and culinary disfigurement. In this theater the now threatened political economy was violently rehearsed through the reinscription of labor discipline onto a recalcitrant black body as politically withdrawn labor. By accessing alternative historiographies to the memory work of the TRC located in labor history, local moral geographies, indigenous practices of healing, and vernacular theories of sorcery and the demonic, I posed the difficult question of how a political culture fashions power and symbolic capital from violent modes of somatic production and human substances of consumption. Animalizing the torturable as both productive and consumable was a mode of political speciation, a zoopolitical

280 / Chapter Five

typification that extends the discourse on race in the ideological manifestos of apartheid. Structural nostalgia for a mode of class relatedness haunted braai violence as fantasy material that found expression in simulations which remade the black body into a revalorized substance for the white symbolic order, even though by the 1980s this image work had only a tenuous linkage to fiscal accumulation or even the restoration of labor discipline as political subordination. Rather, inflicted torture addressed the surplus value of accumulation and capitalization based on the raced commodity fetish, as a mode of enjoyment in-itself for a white gaze restaging itself in the field of the Other. Economimesis in torture retroactively secured the white subject as consumer of spectacle, the spectacle of encindering consumption, and whiteness itself as a medium for the enjoyment of racially generated goods. In Hegel’s dialectic of master and slave or lord and bondsman, the master consumes both the embodied labor product and the spectacle of deferential labor originating in the generative body of the slave or serf, whose service expresses the duplicative and virtual absorption of the violence and death potentialized by the master. To the same degree that the slave makes a world of labor artifacts, including her or his own servile body, the master unmakes worlds through orificial (including optical) consumption of labor as spectacle and as a rite endowing de jure recognition to the master. In braai torture the proximity of alcohol drinking, barbecuing, eating, and carousing to the scene of pain and race making replicates this Hegelian dialectic of mastering consumption and production. In braai violence the spectacle of pain, mutilation, and death was the labor product and consumable substance provisioned by the tortured upon which mastery is ontologically, chemically, and symbolically dependent. This is a political economy of violence as sovereign voracity that is simultaneously optical, ingestive, commensal, cannibalizing, bulimic, and ultimately addictive. Derrida maps the Janus-faced kinesis of sovereignty as centered on the image of the orifice, on consumption, enjoyment, transmission, emission, and ideological regurgitation: “And as for orality, between mouth and maw, we have already seen its double carry [portée], the double tongue, the carry of the tongue that speaks, carry as the carry of the voice that vociferates (to voci-ferate is to carry the voice) and the other carry, the other devouring one, the voracious carry of the maw and the teeth that lacerate and cut into pieces. Vociferation and devourment, we were saying, but let us not hasten to attribute speech to the mouth of man supposed to speak and voracity or even the vociferation of the cry to the animal’s maw.”63 The motility of sovereignty is here mapped as political physiognomy and economy, where the

Traumatizing the Truth Commission / 281

taking place and face of the sovereign is a recursive circuit of denegating self-regurgitation/self-consumption, appearing and disappearing, as the rhythm and velocity of political being and nonbeing. Derrida follows the protean apocalyptic motion and self-moving substance of sovereignty that conjugates and conflates the sovereign and the beast as that which is both above and below polity. In the slippages between the bestial and the master Derrida finds the now-time (Jetztzeit), the dialectical image of a political prosopon that is the face of war as disemic motion— a visage spanning logocentric audiovisual sense production and the self-devouring remotion of a retractile abyssal organ. Derrida describes this fabulation/figuration of the beast-sovereign as “an onto-zoo-anthropo-theologico-political copulation.”64 The prolonged conjugation deployed here linguistically incarnates the anamorphic and self-substituting motion of sovereignty across the terrains of the corporeal and the incorporeal. Yet for all of its disjointed metonymic slippages, there is no coming to a halt of the beast-sovereign under a hypotactical formation; the miscegenation of the zoological, the anthropological, the theological, and the political does not repose upon a single stabilizing signifier. Rather, at any moment this horizontal syntagmatic motion can tilt into a vertical paradigmatic ladder where each term in the metonymic chain becomes substitutable for the others without any of these terms tethering the others. In this perpetual translation, simultaneity and simultude, the beast morphs into the sovereign, the sovereign into the beast; the theological becomes anthropomorphic and the anthropological theologized and bestialized. What was excluded from the proceedings of the TRC, and addressed in the imagining of the demonic by Xhosa healers and Christianized Africans, is the immeasurable in voracious and vociferative violence through the chronicity of miasma—the isinyama and toxic smoke of burned humanity. A surplus immanence is tangibly presented in those narratives of spatialized isinyama and bodily addiction. There is an excess chronicity, a surplus time as endless and errant duplication, a recursive circumdomination that refuses to shut down, and an infinite dissatisfaction generated by and within a spherical violence that desists from all ends. These miasmic emblems of that which exceeds historical time resemble a machinic death drive in which consumable and yet indigestible victimage and pain implant a bulimic politics of infinite regurgitative repetition. Addiction here represents the self-sufficient circularity of sovereignty as inherently insufficient and structured around a void. Derrida writes: “Vomit is related to enjoyment [jouissance], if not to pleasure. It even represents the very thing

282 / Chapter Five

that forces us to enjoy—in spite of ourselves [notre corps defendant]. But this representation annuls itself, and that is why vomit remains unrepresentable. [A representation of the irrepresentable, a presentation of the unpresentable].”65 In the medicinal/toxifying substance dependency of braai torturers there is a reversible orificial commerce, traffic, and exchange; the addicting smoke of burnt humanity as intelezi infiltrates the mouth, nose, and pores of the perpetrator/pyromaniac as remedy/poison, which, in serial torture, precipitates a vomitorium of the state, an irreversible stuttering and regurgitating autokinesis that mimics, parodies, and undermines political intentionality as self-possession. Here, procedural police reason becomes compulsive repetition underwritten by addiction, by gestures and substances that mimic, profane, fracture, and contaminate performative sovereignty in its very enactment. Derrida implicitly speaks to such political bulimia when he writes: “A single ‘thing’ is unassimilable. It will therefore form the transcendental of the transcendental, the non-transcendentalisable, the non-idealisable, and that is the disgusting. It presents itself, in the Kantian discourse, as a ‘species . . . of the hideous or of the hateful, but one quickly observes that it is not a species that would peacefully belong to its genus.’”66 However, the regurgitation of the torturer’s will is crossed by a counterlimit in the narratives of the isangomas. These readings settle upon the inability on the part of the assailant to master the subjugated Other at the very moment of the latter’s annihilation, for such is the moral lesson of the substance dependency and toxification induced by inhaled burning human fat. Through the frame of medicinal cooking, of intelezi, the culinary ambiance of the braai torture is clarified: at the moment of the captive’s animalizing cooking and consumption, the torturer cooks and consumes himself. This moment of self-consumption and self-traumatization postulates an Afro-Hegelian ethicality. The burned prisoner, at the moment of his death and disappearance, becomes a toxic concentrate of historical dark matter. This historical opacity is the return of action upon the sovereign actor in the form of addicting political bulimia and dependency. That moment stands apart, beyond all political program, all humanitarian reconciliation and amnesty, as both subjugated knowledge and an inhuman historical reckoning achieved at immeasurable human cost as an unrecognized foundation of a postapartheid political order. Consumption and commensality point to practices of enjoyment that move beyond the intentionalist teleology of political program—enjoyment is the non-end, a purposiveness without purpose materialized in the subjecting subject’s immersion in the racialized commodity fetish; the latter is

Traumatizing the Truth Commission / 283

the locus of value-endowing surplus, the addicting black discharge beyond the racial-industrial-policing economy that manufactured its existence. The political habitus of insatiable political insufficiency discloses the compulsive desire of the addicted master to separate himself, through violence, from historical time through somaticized and consumable racial invariance as an autarchic substance. Political invariance migrates from the victim to master in the process of the latter’s relapse into the black body, which is at the same time despised, magnetizing, and convulsing. If the torturer consumes anything from the by-product of the tortured it is his own excess of bulimia—his own political vomit. Braai torture makes, inscribes, and misencounters the constitutive outside, the traumatic real of the apartheid system that cannot be represented and digested by that system. What was regurgitated in the addictive violence of the braai torture is the apartheid apparatus itself as recidivist human wastage. The pathogenesis of addiction diagnosed by the herbal healers provides a vantage point on politically autonomic and intentionalist continuity by opening the thematic of the pharmakon, of pharmacographical aggression, the drug that is both poison and remedy and that Plato, and following him Derrida, ingested to envision the linked political crisis of repetition as failed conservation and fidelity, and failed sovereignty.67 According to The Oxford English Dictionary, to be addicted is to “bind, attach, or devote oneself as a servant, disciple, or adherent (to any person or cause).”68 Can politically motivated violence as a mode of fidelity be construed as addictive in its very underwriting of a political subject, who is sustained, replenished, and repeated through that violence for its subject-conserving powers, in turn contingent on the radical depletion of the subjugated? To be addicted is also to receive a sentence by a court, to be dictated to, or by, a law. Addiction as fidelity mobilizes involuntary political, experiential, and bodily memory, an anamnesis that faces the future with promissory gestures and thus relates to law, to the dictates of keeping faith, to being sentenced, to fate, finality, and fatality. To be addicted is also to be formally made over or bound (to another); attached by restraint or obligation; obliged, devoted, and consecrated. Ethical accountability, the returning consistency of conduct, entails being bound, obliged, and addicted to a competent measuring authority. This topology casts another light on the ontology of responsibility and responsivity as a structure of return requiring a transcendent “referent” (from re-ferre, to carry back) that measures ethicopolitical action. The return structure, the re-ferre, of addiction discloses an irresponsibility, involuntary reactivity, and detour at the core of being possessed by ideological accountability. Here the ground that sup-

284 / Chapter Five

posedly guarantees a transcendental metric for action is returned in the estranged mode of pathogenic repetition, a stuttering self-interruption of the responsible and intending subject caught up in the vortex of a significative surplus of political terror. Self-inflicted addiction is the sardonic and subverting mimesis of fidelity to political intentions and norms. Addictive repetition immerses the politically faithful actor and the will to intentionality in the victim as media and prosthetic, as the non-end and inutility of such computational violence. The victim, in being cooked into an addictive substance, resists terminal closure and continues circulating as a self-substituting signifier even after death and incineration, becoming a form of time generated by violence itself. Being addicted is the temporal state of being in the medium without exit, message, or communicability. Addiction as chronotope is disjunctive with and parasitic to the teleocratic history aimed at by politically motivated violence. Braai torture is an operation in which the torturer is captured and captivated by his own biopolitical triggers. The captive’s unmaking in torture ejects the latter from the closed system of political and racial antagonistics to which the bodily remains are consigned, which is why the unmastered victim returns as hauntology, as the indigestible materiality of addiction. The returning victim inaugurates a new historicity, a new index of political appearing through sheer inutility. The state’s torture and erasure of the victim in the braai disposal fires presuppose the readability of the victim; readability in torture is a criterion that insists on the convergence of victimage with productivity, information, mastery, control of space and time, and calculability. Transitional justice itself does not abstain from this presumption of the readability of the victim within its pharmacopeia of law and confessional therapeutics. However, the victim can return from beyond these grids of intelligibility as illegible, as disavowed kernel, as the disproportional in relation to the adequation machine, which embodies itself in each singular victim to produce the commensurable laws of victimage. The braai victim in this instance circulates with the reversibility and undecidability of the pharmakon, as toxin and remedy, by traumatizing the apparatuses of traumatization that required this substance. The anabasis of the victim entails the divorce of victimage from the adequation machine that promotes the exchangeability of political codes, body parts, deaths, and wounds, whether for domination or for justice. The anabasis of the victim stands for the transcendental to any transcendental project of reproportioning violence or law that aspires to master the victim. Automatism resides in the repetition or naming of the victim, which

Traumatizing the Truth Commission / 285

can efface the singularizing event of the historical wound, turning it into a law. Derrida calls this mode of political appellation and archivization a writing on cinders in cinders, in which ashes constitute the textile of historical (de-)mediacy.69 Cinders index the embodied subject burned by violence and history, the disappearance or mutilation of the body that originated as a target present to or fabulated by an assailant and the remainder left by violent subtraction. The victim of violence can return with or without a body, voice, and face, as a demediatized and incommunicable contaminating inexistent; but in all these (mis)arrivals the recipient of force is constituted in the ashes of what has been consumed by history and memory. Naming as iteration of the victim tracks over the trace work of cinders and risks dispersing the ashes in an effort to fix and to outline, which is to freeze the cinders of historical suffering in the ice and mirror of archival refraction. This is why Derrida repeatedly stresses that the cinder here no longer is—rather, the cinder there is. The nomination/denomination of the victim is situated at the precarious fault lines of those burned by the sun of the sovereign. The intrinsic opacity of those encindered by history is a smoking and choking ember that refuses to be extinguished or to anchor the nominating machines of the state, whether transitional justice fora or today’s humanitarian wars on terror.70 Fidelity to the posthistorical cinder requires instead our own scathing in its cold and lucid glow. Postscript The absent man who walks exhausts no territory; he sets roots only in the sacred of the air and evanescence, in a pure refusal that changes nothing in the world. We are not following him in reality, because we always want to change something. But we know in the end that his traveling, which is not nomadism, is also not rambling. It traces repeated figures here on the earth, whose pattern we would catch if we had the means to discover it. —Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation

Notes 1.

Witnessed by the author. Ethnographic fieldwork in South Africa took place in 1997, 1998, 1999, and 2000 where I attended human rights violation, amnesty, and reparations hearings; interviewed TRC witnesses at hearings and TRC witness handlers, translators, evidence handlers, police investigators, and legal staff in Cape Town and Durban; and conducted fieldwork and oral history research with TRC witnesses and their families in Cape Flats and Katlehong. In addition to individual applications for amnesty by ANC members, the party leadership submitted applica-

286 / Chapter Five tions under the rubric of collective responsibility that were rejected by the amnesty committee, as the TRC was mandated only to grant amnesty based on individual responsibility. 2. Dominick LaCapra, History and Its Limits: Human, Animal, Violence (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University, 2009), 22–23, 39–42, 59–89. 3. See section 20(3) of Promotion of National Unity & Reconciliation Act 34 of 1995. Norgaard’s full criteria were (a) the motive of the person who committed the act; (b) the context in which the act took place, and in particular whether the act was committed in the course of or as part of a political uprising, disturbance, or event, or in reaction thereto; (c) the legal and factual nature of the act, including the gravity of the act; (d) the object or objective of the act, and in particular whether the act was primarily directed at a political opponent or State property or personnel or against private property or individuals; (e) whether the act was committed in the execution of an order of, or on behalf of, or with the approval of, the organization, institution, liberation movement, or body of which the person who committed the act was a member, an agent, or a supporter; and (f) the relationship between the act and the political objective pursued, and in particular the directness and proximity of the relationship and the proportionality of the act to the objective pursued. http://www.justice.gov.za/legislation/acts/1995–034.pdf (accessed July 10, 2012). 4. Reiner Schürmann, Heidegger on Being and Acting: From Principles to Anarchy (Bloomington: Indiana University Press 1990), 261. 5. Ibid., 260–64. 6. The public media sphere per se cannot engender an ethics of violence for itself or for another, as that ethics would entail a demediatization of media by media prior to any ethical reversioning. 7. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Humanism and Terror: An Essay on the Communist Problem, trans. John O’Neill (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969), 64. 8. This formulation derives from Castoriadis’s reading of Sophocles and is identified with his concept of the autonomous self-constitution of a polity. See Cornelius Castoriadis, Figures of the Thinkable, Including Passion and Knowledge, trans. anon., http:// www.notbored.org/FTPK.pdf, 33. 9. In the initial application of the Norgaard principles in Namibia, the proportionality did not encompass the granting of amnesty for killing a civilian; political motivation could not justify the killing of a noncombatant. See Raylene Keightley, “Political Offences and Indemnity in South Africa,” African Journal of Human Rights 9 (Summer 1993): 334, 339. 10. In Kantian and Hegelian legal philosophy, the principle of proportionality is applied to the punishment of a crime by the state as the annulment of a transgression by a commensurate interdiction. Proportionality was associated with retributive justice not restorative justice: “proportionality must be understood, not strictly with reference to the gravity of the crime instigating the encounter with the state, but rather, to the confidence that the state has in knowing the perpetrator’s recognition of his defeat, which implies the knowledge of the wrongfulness of his unrestrained will.” Dan Markel, “The Justice of Amnesty? Towards a Theory of Retributivism in Recovering,” University of Toronto Law Journal 49, no. 3 (Summer 1999): 434. In this framework the TRC’s assimilation of proportionality to documented political motivation implied that acts of violence could be indemnified if they were deployed against, and were politically proportionate to, a perceived transgression against a declared political program, and were intended to induce recognition of the gravity

Traumatizing the Truth Commission / 287

11.

12.

13. 14. 15.

16.

of the transgression through its repetition in a counterforce. This model of communicative reason and retribution could very well include torture as an instrument proportionate to treason against the apartheid state, as torture can require a degree of recognition in the form of confession; thus, partisan retributive justice was implicitly indemnified as proportionate by a restorative justice project. Lawyers for the families of Steve Biko in their litigation objected to the provisions of the Promotion of National Unity and Reconciliation Act, which awarded civil and criminal immunity for perpetrators granted amnesty. The Biko family argued that they were being deprived of their constitutional rights to have “justiciable disputes settled by a court of law or, where appropriate, another independent and impartial forum.” Constitutional Court of South Africa, case CCT 17/96, The Azanian Peoples Organization (Azapo), First Applicant; Nontsikelelo Margaret Biko, Second Applicant; Churchill Mhleli Mxenge, Third Applicant; Chris Ribeiro, Fourth Applicant, versus the President of the Republic of South Africa, First Respondent; the Government of the Republic of South Africa, Second Respondent; the Minister of Justice, Third Respondent; the Minister of Safety and Security, Fourth Respondent; the Chairperson of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, Fifth Respondent, heard on 30 May 1996. Decided on 25 July 1996. Decision, Truth And Reconciliation Commission Amnesty Committee: Application in Terms of Section 18 of the Promotion of National Unity and Reconciliation Act No. 34 of 1995 Harold Snyman, 1st Applicant (Am 3918/96); Daniel Petrus Siebert, 2nd Applicant (Am 3915/96); Jacobus Johannes Oosthuysen Beneke, 3rd Applicant (Am 6367/97); and Rubin Marx, 4th Applicant (Am3521/96), February 1999, http://www.justice.gov.za/trc/decisions/1999/99_snyman.html (accessed January 30, 2012). Ibid. Ibid. The political scientist Padraig O’Malley claims that the 1992 Further Indemnity Act, which provided for the release of “all prisoners whose imprisonment was related to political conflict of the past and whose release could make a contribution to reconciliation,” jettisoned the Norgaard principles of proportionality. Many incarcerated amnesty applicants were not released from prison when denied amnesty. However, in my conversations with TRC legal staff and evidence analysts between 1997 and 1999, they viewed the abandonment of proportionality in the vast majority of amnesty adjudications as an informalized policy decision, made around 1997, in which they had not been consulted. See Padraig O’Malley, The Heart of Hope: South Africa’s Transition from Apartheid to Democracy, August 11, 2014, http://www .nelsonmandela .org/ omalley/ cis/ omalley/ OMalleyWeb/ 03lv02167/ 04lv02264/ 05lv02335/06lv02336/07lv02344/08lv02350.htm (accessed July 15, 2014). The following statement from General Magnus Malan, former minister of defense, is illustrative of the theodicy of communism that justified the scope and degree of the violence of the security forces. He claimed that South Africa was fighting global communism on several continents: “Although it is difficult to appreciate the threat which communism posed to the free world, and South Africa in particular, especially after the demise of communism in Eastern Europe during 1989, for purposes of a proper analysis of the policies and actions of the South African government during the 1980s. . . . The threat was the expansion of Marxism by fomenting revolution in southern Africa. Its aim was perceived to be, first, the overthrow of the white regimes in southern Africa so that the militant Africa bloc could realize its

288 / Chapter Five

17.

18. 19.

20. 21.

22.

23.

24.

25. 26.

27. 28. 29.

aspirations with regard to the destruction of so-called colonialism and racialism and the establishment of pan-Africanism. In its desire to destroy alleged racism, the Arab bloc can, with certain exceptions, be regarded as the partner of the Africa bloc in its hostile actions.” Recorded by the author at a TRC hearing on the army. The marginalization of the racial predication of state violence is illustrated in the following analysis of Anthea Jeffery, The Truth about The Truth Commission (Johannesburg: South African Institute of Race Relations, 1999), which conflates the increasing unworkability of apartheid institutions and the impending loss of economic viability with transformations of the culture of the white minority and their representative fractions in the state security apparatus—despite the latter’s ongoing violence. The same report stresses the rise of interethnic communal violence in the 1990s and its higher casualty rates while ignoring the historical role of the state in the creation of antagonistic communalized identities and in its clandestine arming of ethnic-sectarian paramilitaries. Jacques Derrida, Without Alibi, ed. Peggy Kamuf (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), 65. See Michel Foucault, The Government of Self and Others: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1982–1983 (New York: Picador, 2011), and Foucault, “Discourse and Truth: The Problematization of Parrhesia; 6 lectures given by Michel Foucault at the University of California at Berkeley, Oct.–Nov. 1983,” http://Foucault.infor/documents/ parrhesia (accessed May, 5, 2014). Page duBois, Torture and Truth (New York: Routledge, 1991). Pierre Hadot, The Veil of Isis: An Essay on the History of the Idea of Nature, trans. Michael Chase (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), 93. Hadot unfortunately seems unaware of duBois’s triangulation of torture, basanos, and truth with the figures of the tortured slave and the sexually and/or textually inscribed woman. Michel Foucault discusses this scene but does not relate it to the concept of the touchstone, which he does not associate with torture in Wrong-Doing, Truth-Telling: The Function of Avowal in Justice, ed. Fabienne Brion and Bernard E. Harcourt (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), 77–79. Stathis Gougaris, in Does Literature Think? Literature as Theory for an Antimythical Era (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003), 150, translates the term “overperformance” from the ancient Greek hyperdramein and associates it with singularized and “paranomic” action. Supporting this was the public fascination with and media stardom of specific perpetrators of state violence, such as Dirk Coetzee, Eugene de Kock (dubbed “Prime Evil”), Ferdi Bernard, Lothar Neethling (“South Africa’s ‘own Dr. Mengele’”), Wouter Basson, and Craig Michael Williamson as almost celebrity-like personifications of anomic evil. Reiner Schürmann, Broken Hegemonies, trans. Reginald Lilly (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003), 205–6. Michel Foucault, “Society Must Be Defended”: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975– 1976, ed. Mauro Bertani, Allessandro Fontana, and Arnold I. Davidson, trans. David Macey (New York: Picador, 1997), 28. Derrida, Without Alibi, 74. See Jacques Derrida, The Beast and the Sovereign I, trans. Geoffrey Bennington (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 65–66. Jacques Derrida, Paper Machine, trans. Rachel Bowlby (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005), 91.

Traumatizing the Truth Commission / 289 30. Alain Badiou, Being and Event, trans. Oliver Feltham (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2007). 31. Derrida, Limited Inc., 129. 32. Simon Critchley, The Ethics of Deconstruction: Derrida and Levinas (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), 61. 33. Wlad Godzich, “The Domestication of Derrida,” in Yale Critics: Deconstruction in America, ed. Jonathan Arac and Wallace Martin (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), 35. 34. Hegel, in the master/slave dialectic, taught us that intentionalist continuity, as the sovereignty of the mastering subject cannot be sustained outside of a dialectics of recognition that confirms willing in the gestures of the subordinated as an archive of the mastering subject’s virtual and concrete violence. However, Hegel uncovered the general opening of surplus political space in the derailment of intentionalist continuity beyond a dialectics of recognition. This occurs when the mastering subject can only find itself, which is to lose itself, through unmasterable dependency on the degraded and the subjugated, whose ultimate historical project is irreducible to the requirement to provision the master subject with recognition. Amnesty procedures, such as that of the TRC, as a licensed simulacrum of the victim, inadvertently recapitulate this Hegelian theater, where indemnification bestows intentionalist continuity— that is, recognition— on the perpetuator as a bona fide political subject (though whether this bestowal truly denies the latter the subjecthood that had been previous sought through violence is an open question). This is also to inquire after the effect of amnesty on the status of the opened political site instituted by those who had mandatory demands for recognition (which they refused) incised on their bodies and souls. G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 104; Alexandre Kojève, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel: Lectures on “The Phenomenology of Spirit,” ed. Alan Bloom, trans. James H. Nichols (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977). 35. Derrida, Without Alibi, 72. 36. Ibid., 74. 37. Derrida writes: “Will this be possible for us? Will we one day be able, and in a single gesture, to join the thinking of the event to the thinking of the machine? Will we be able to think, what is called thinking, at one and the same time, both what is happening (we call that an event) and the calculable programming of an automatic repetition (we call that a machine)?” Derrida, Without Alibi, 72. 38. Killing of the PEBCO 3—part 2 Lotz, G (3921/96); Snyman, H (3918/96); Mogoai, KP (3749/96); Van Zyl, JM (5637/96); Beeslaar, G (5640/97); Du Plessis, H  (4384/96); Niewoudt, G (3920/96); Koole, J (3748/96. http://www.justice.gov .za/trc/amntrans/am1998.htm. All transcripts cited in author’s archive, obtained directly from TRC computer files in the TRC’s Cape Town office; where possible I have provided online websites of the transcripts.) 39. Askari were captured members of liberation organizations who were “turned” by the security forces and worked as double agents for the police and army. 40. Truth and Reconciliation Commission Human Rights Violations Submissions—Questions and Answers. Date: August 26–28, 1996. Name: Mpompi Melfred Dlokolo. Case: Ec/96 Uitenhage—Day 1, http://www.justice.gov.za/trc/hrvtrans%5Cuiten/dlokolo .htm (accessed September 15, 2014). 41. Truth and Reconciliation Commission Human Rights Violations Submissions—Questions and Answers. Date: November 11, 1996. Name: T. Mvudle. Case: Krugersdorp; http://

290 / Chapter Five

42.

43. 44.

45. 46.

47. 48. 49. 50. 51.

52.

53.

54. 55.

www.justice.gov.za/trc/hrvtrans%5Ckrugers/mvudle.htm (accessed September, 14, 2014). Truth and Reconciliation Commission Amnesty Hearing. Date: July 14, 1997. Name: Jeffery Benzien. Day 1, http://www.justice.gov.za/trc/amntrans%5Ccapetown/ capetown_benzien.htm (accessed September, 14, 2013). Ibid. Truth and Reconciliation Human Rights Violations Submissions—Questions and Answers. Date: April 17, 1996. Name: Charity Kondile. Case: Ec0021/96—East London, Day 3, http://www.justice.gov.za/trc/hrvtrans%5Chrvel1/kondile.htm (accessed September 14, 2014). All statements are taken from TRC transcripts of amnesty hearings held in Pretoria in July 1996. Pretoria Amnesty Hearings, July 15–19, 1996, J. A. van Eyk (0070/96); H. Gerber (0071/96), murder of Samuel Kganakga on May 21, 1991, http://www.justice.gov .za/trc/amntrans/pta/gerber.htm (accessed September, 14, 2014; my ellipses and parentheses). Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York: Vintage, 1979), 26. This was reserved for the company’s slaves; private slave owners were not allowed to flog slaves. For discussion of these statistics and of slave punishments in the Cape Colony, see Robert C. H. Shell, Children of Bondage: A Social History of the Slave Society at the Cape of Good Hope, 1652–1838 (Johannesburg: Wits University Press, 1994) 193, 206–11, 215–16, 265–56, on punishment of slave arsonists. For a comparative discussion of punishment of Khoisan farm laborers and Cape Colony slaves, see Susan Newton-King, “The Enemy Within,” in Breaking the Chains: Slavery and Its Legacy in the Nineteenth-Century Cape Colony, ed. Nigel Worden and Clifton C. Crais (Johannesburg: Wits University Press, 1994), 257–58. On ideologies of labor discipline and the application of violence, see John Edwin Mason, “Paternalism under Siege,” in Breaking the Chains: Slavery and Its Legacy in the Nineteenth-Century Cape Colony, ed. Nigel Worden and Clifton C. Crais (Johannesburg: Wits University Press, 1994), 48–52, and Mason, Social Death and Resurrection: Slavery and Emancipation in South Africa (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2003). See John L. Comaroff and Jean Comaroff, Of Revelation and Revolution: The Dialectics of Modernity on a South African Frontier (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997); Timothy Keegan, Colonial South Africa and the Origins of Racial Order (Cape Town: David Philip, 1996); Charles Van Onselen, Studies in the Social and Economic History of the Witwatersrand, 1886–1914 (Johannesburg: Ravan Press, 1982); and Solomon T. Plaatje, Native Life in South Africa: Before and Since the European War and the Boer Rebellion (London: P. S. King & Son, 1916). See Herman Gilommee, “Aspect of the Rise of Afrikaaner Capital and Afrikaaner Nationalism,” in The Angry Divide: Social and Economic History of the Western Cape, ed. James Wilmott and Mary Simons (Cape Town: University of Cape Town, 1989). See Marian Lacey, Working for Boroko: The Origins of a Coercive Labour System in South Africa (Johannesburg: Ravan Press, 1981), 169–71. See Helen A. Bradford, A Taste of Freedom: The ICU in Rural South Africa, 1924–1930 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1987, 51–53.

Traumatizing the Truth Commission / 291 56. For a fuller discussion, see Gerald Kraak, Breaking the Chains: Labour in South Africa in the 1970s and 1980s (London: Pluto Press), 37–40. 57. Ibid., 95–97. 58. For a detailed discussion of mine labor discipline and the social structure of the compound system in Southern Africa from the late nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century, see Van Onselen, Studies in the Social and Economic History of the Witswatersrand, 137–57. 59. Bradford, A Taste of Freedom, 42–43. 60. Truth and Reconciliation Commission Human Rights Violations Submissions—Questions and Answers. Date: August 28, 1996. Place: Alexandra. Name: Jabu James Malinga, September 14, 2014, http://www.justice.gov.za/trc/hrvtrans%5Calex/malinga.htm (accessed September 14, 2014). 61. Charity Kondile testifying at the TRC, Truth and Reconciliation Human Rights Violations Submissions—Questions and Answers. Date: April 17, 1996. Name: Charity Kondile. Case: Ec0021/96—East London, Day 3, September 14, 2014, http://www.justice .gov.za/trc/hrvtrans%5Chrvel1/kondile.htm (accessed September 14, 2014). 62. Jacques Derrida, “Economimesis,” in “The Ghost of Theology: Readings of Kant and Hegel,” special issue, Diacritics 11, no. 2 (Summer 1981): 2–25. 63. Derrida, The Beast and the Sovereign, 65. 64. Ibid., 18. 65. Derrida, Economimesis, 22. 66. Ibid. 67. Jacques Derrida, Disseminations, trans. Barbara Johnson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 92. 68. Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “Addict,” http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/2176 #eid16471438 (accessed May 7, 2013). 69. Jacques Derrida, “‘Eating Well,’ or the Calculation of the Subject,” in Points . . . : Interviews, 1974–1994, ed. Elisabeth Weber, trans. Peggy Kamuf et al. (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995), 390. 70. Édouard Glissant, “For Opacity,” in Over Here: International Perspectives on Art and Culture, ed. Gerardo Mosquera and Jean Fisher (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004), 253.

PA R T T H R E E

Committing Anthropology

SIX

Turning Around Scars

The Occident—and such is the energy of its essence—has worked only for the erasure of the stage. —Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference

The Loss of Loss Despite, or more likely because of, the theatrological and archival apparatuses set up by the South African truth commission, the gendered violence of dissonant veridiction seized the transitional justice stage, tilting its axis of “transparent” truth, testimony, and justice. Black mothers, sisters, wives, and daughters testifying at the Truth and Reconciliation Commission stood before archive and law, apartheid and postapartheid, in search of the disappeared, assassinated, and detained; in doing so they used voice and body to prise apart preinstituted encryptions of witnessing and silence. Many Xhosa and Zulu women sculpted antiphonal sound- and memoryscapes in hearing halls to represent not only themselves or fragmented nuclear families, but extensive networks of filiation, of real and symbolic kinship. Many of these women had struggled as “social mothers” in their communities and brought that agonistic sensibility to the hearings. Ruth Wilson Gilmore defines social motherhood as a repertoire of roles and “techniques developed over generations on behalf of black children and families within terror-demarcated racially defined enclaves.”1 The social mothers took the stand not as atomized, traumatized victims, but as representatives, envoys, missives, and embodied simulacra of death and disappearance. They superimposed an antiphonic performance space of calland-response between stage and audience while also antiphonally calling

296 / Chapter Six

to the absent voices and unseen faces of the missing and the dead, who could witness these women only as a tangible silence. The social mother complexified and deepened the commission’s Arendtian space of political appearing through the sound-intensive bodyscapes of the rightless unimagined by Arendt in her political nostalgia for the androcentric isonomia of classical Athens. The women performed an echography of acoustic pain with enunciating and gesturing counterparts in the audience and detoured the exemplarity of individualized confession favored by the commission and the lines of control of its proscenium setup. Their antiphonic rescripting stood in metahistorical proximity to fifth-century Athenian tragedy’s antiphony, organized around a soloist and the chorus, who in part personified the audience but also entered into dialogue with the protagonists.2 Gendered antiphonal performance—lament singing, related or not to Athenian tragedy—was performed by grieving yet vociferous women in contemporary rural Greece until quite recently: Antiphony has been described as a prevalent pattern of . . . lamentation from antiquity to the present. It has been understood by commentators as an aesthetic device and a literary genre. . . . [In performance it is] . . . 1. the social structure of mortuary rituals[;] 2. the internal acoustic organization of lament singing[;] 3. a prescribed technique of witnessing, the production and reception of jural discourse and for the cultural construction of truth[;] and 4. a political strategy that organizes the relation of women to male dominated institutions.  .  .  . The truth claims that arise  .  .  . then depend on the emotional force of pain and the jural force of antiphonic confirmation. . . . Antiphony is a jural and historicizing structure. Its dyadic structure (soloist/ chorus) guarantees a built-in record keeping function.3

The social mother in effect performed what in Athenian tragedy was termed ekplexis (astonishing shock, fear, and terror), through the interplay of sight, emotion, and sonic pain, generating and dramatizing exemplary pathemata mathemata, “learning from suffering,” the core ethos of Athenian tragedy.4 However, integral to this pedagogy of pain in tragedy was the force of encounter with a transgression that had erased itself in its committal and aftermath, and whose truth traversed both its violence and its occultation. The social mothers were also confronting abyssal historical erasure, for they stood on the public stage demanding from the “deep state” an accounting of disappeared kin or the handover of their secretly buried and burned remains.5 Biographical erasure, whether in Athenian tragedy or at the South African TRC, functioned as an echographic structure of history.6

Turning Around Scars / 297

The aftermaths of state, extrajudicial, outsourced, and parastate political terror have become the terrain of a humanitarian historiography wedded to calls for redressive action. These forms of redress diversely exhibit, publicize, archive, reenact, investigate, prosecute, and indemnify political violence that violates human rights. However, the violence that inaugurates the demand for restorative justice is frequently inaccessible and rarely transparent. Opacity here is due to the magnitude of incalculable social suffering and the subterfuge, secrecy, structural deniability, and silencing intimidation with which terror has been executed.7 If death, wounding, and terror elude authorship, responsibility, answerability, responsiveness, and clarified witness, these experiences constitute the perceptible horizon of a certain historical oblivion—the loss of loss.8 By the dislocation of loss I refer to programmed deniability, instituted political indifference, acts of defacement, sheer experiential incommensurability, and the loss of war as such, rather than mere archival lapse. Contemporary political terror in our informationrich era is as committed to the destruction of the cultural capacity to witness violence as it is to the destruction of the built environment, political actors, and collateral bystanders. These wars against witnessing can traverse the amputation of victims’ eyes, ears, lips, and tongues as organs of witnessing by Renamo (Resistência Nacional Moçambicana); secret state burials in the Soviet Union, the former Yugoslavia, and Guatemala; political corpse disposal fires in South Africa; American covert extraordinary renditions and the technological sublime of the shock-and-awe assault that interdicted agential witnessing through photopolitical bedazzlement.9 Political terror here is deliberately given as the not-given. Part and parcel of this opacity is the collective condition of being after violence, in the double sense of being in forensic pursuit of violence and being situated in the aftermath of violence, which is not without its violence. Defacement of the public memory of privation extends the potency of violence as a form of withholding, as the theft of time and mortality, in which loss itself is subsumed under that which is not politically available. The aporia of transitional justice is the violence of an arrival after violence, the impossibility of a clarified return to an origin, a regress that would ideally recuperate the linearity, etiology, and limits of violence and ensure the progressive rationality of its forensic historiography. However, in its structural deniability, opacity, and effacement, dislocated loss inaugurates the inconclusive and untimely search for a sublimating repose in law, justice, memory, archive, and exhibition, which perennially express but never reconcile with this founding historical privation. The transitional justice project, as the public and juridical staging of democratizing accountability and/or reconcilia-

298 / Chapter Six

tion, is entangled with the anagnorisis of coming after violence, which rarely yields catharsis in the forms prescribed by human-rights practice, such as the transparency of truth and history, restorative law, redress, prevention, and conciliation.10 Thus the historical “we” who will remembrance, and who are propelled into the various collectivities of witness, survivor, adjudicator, and even consumer of terror, are always after violence. This collective is the inoperable community, many of whom come late to violence in order to make a postviolent futurity. Athenian democracy arrived after civil strife, class violence, and economic dislocation, which were accompanied soon after by the earliest performances of tragic theater. In the aftermath of civic fratricide, in both classical Athens and contemporary South Africa, theater, exhibition, and aesthetics were in symbiosis with the inaugural self-institution of democracy.11 Being after violence becomes the means by which self-constituting democracy witnesses itself through a theatricization of its inaugural antifoundations. That democracy is after violence defines its aporia of selffoundation without ground and its postviolence project of both autonomy and political self-limitation. Democracy, like the tragic hero, is condemned to autonomy as the ever-present failure to find limits.12 Here democracy as the regime of equalization and commensuration is never equal to itself. Democracy, coming after violence and terror, as all that which lacks limits, assumes the task of instituting a regulating political limit—a polity, citizenship, a commensurating regime of rights and restorative justice—from out of asymmetric and disjointed adikia (injustice) and anomia (lawlessness). The transitional or restorative justice project hovers between political self-limitation and the will to constitutive power in cutting a path to democratic self-inauguration across the broken limits and nonlaw of antidemocratic governance. Interpretive transmission of violence becomes a defining democratic task and yet becomes a labyrinth within which democratization never encircles the violence and scarification it is after. Interpretive and historical distantiation from experienced political trauma is a founding condition both of democratic polity and of an opacity that aligns democracy with a theatrokratia that comes after tragedy. This chapter is a telescoped passage through multiple, intersecting, yet invariably discordant theaters of witnessing violence and victimage both “ancient” and “modern,” if such strict divisions can at all be affirmed without numerous qualifications and inversions between the before and after. It is a transhistorical examination of political scarification as a motor of history and as a medium of its witnessing. I examine and critically com-

Turning Around Scars / 299

pare norms and practices of witnessing violence in classical Athenian tragic theater and concurrent amnesty protocols as multiple vantage points from which to audit “modern” theaters of humanitarian crime and justice. Athenian tragedy foregrounded the contentious relationship of ethics and aesthetics to democratic publics through reenactments of myth, revenge, and blood sacrifice. Many restorative-justice projects are meant to enable postauthoritarian and postviolence passages to democracy through the symbolic exhibition and juridical interrogation of illicit force. Tragedy crafted sublimating grammars of violence in its aesthetics of action and enunciation of self-subverting speech. Transitional justice events grammatize prior violence by seeking to render murky terror lucid, if not transparent, through archival legibility based on confessional, evidentiary, historicist, and bereaved exhibition.13 Athenian tragedy advanced political allegory by reenacting archaicized transgression for a postmythic and self-inventing democratic polity. Transitional justice events are frequently scripted as allegories of nation building predicated on the mourning, healing, and archivization of gothic state violence as the required moral foundation of restorative democracy. In these theaters ineffable moral substance could be grasped through encrypted optical-acoustic exteriorities that dramatize the agon between law and governance. In their respective cultural contexts Athenian tragedy and transitional justice performances unfold as intensive totalities, where the formative antagonisms of an historical epoch are displayed in exemplary synopsis; they function as moral government by an imaginal spatial center, recession or reserve. Both theaters bestow a paradoxical legacy: that the geometricized frontality of restaged violence and its witnessing is meant to coincide with an operant knowledge constitutive of a democratic habitus.14 Lost Stages The transitional justice stage on which the social mothers appeared was concerned with the proper placement of the untimely and the disjointed. Historical, juridical, and proscenium emplacement is meant to coincide with the correct prospect and orthological setup of witnessing and auditing that expose, certify, and benefit from the impropriety or anachronisms of violence. Restorative justice first gives violence a place in order to begin itself and to see itself in the rejointing straightedge of procedural reason. Yet, this is but one possible ethical beginning promoting a specific gaze and perspectival ethical prospect. The generative oblivion of the loss of loss

300 / Chapter Six

means that each embarkation toward adjustment and straightening tacitly indexes a radiating abscess of recessed or disavowed inceptual points not taken that abide and bind in their persistent disjointedness as forms of lost loss. Being bound to one instituted mode of ethicality and justice can occlude other potential yet silently binding embarkation points, generating a bifrontal field wherein any dominant ethical gaze or decision is transected by unrecognized lines of sight and sound, grids of veiling, exhibition and concealment, memory/forgetfulness, attention/inattention, political institution/destitution, and the defaced and withdrawn nonevent turned surprisingly evental and decisive. For Derrida, law and the tragic are intertwined in the failed ethicalpolitical project to generate a jointedness of time as an effect of justice. Forensic mimesis is driven by disjointed time, such as the loss of loss, and commemorates temporal misarrival through redressive testimony, confession, archivization, and juridical formalism: “Even the just if not the right is always supposed by adjoining, by the articulated gathering up of oneself, coherence. Responsibility. But if adjoining in general, if the joining of the ‘joint’ supposes first of all the adjoining, the correctness [justesse] or the justice of time, the being-with-oneself or the concord of time, what happens when time itself gets ‘out of joint,’ dis-jointed, disadjusted, disharmonic, discorded or unjust? Ana-chronique?”15 Theatrical synchronization at the TRC addressed disjointed, inequitable apartheid time and space, which had only recently been formally revoked but whose economic inequities and related harms were then and are still in place. By presenting public memory and ground-up testimonial vocality as equalizing democratic forms, the commission instituted an Arendtian plane of political appearing. This democratic spacing has a dramaturgical archaeology that can be pulled back beyond the TRC’s enlightenment inheritance to the interface between theater and the political in fifth-century Athens and earlier. Marcel Detienne reconstructs a Homeric anticipation of Athenian isonomia as theatrical and democratic spatiality prior to formal democracy: A single spatial model dominates the interplay of these institutionsdeliberative assemblies . . . a circular and centered space within which, ideally, each individual stands in reciprocal and reversible relationship to everyone else. From the time of epic on, this representation of space went hand in hand with two complementary ideas: publicity and community. The meson (reserved spatial center) was the common point for all those gatherings in a circle around it . . . the meson was the public space par excellence; its geographical position was synonymous with all that was public.16

Turning Around Scars / 301

Jean-Pierre Vernant theorizes theatrical isonomia as the political transcription onto democracy of abstract principles of geometrical adjoining, isomorphism, and commensuration: The world of social relations thus formed a coherent system governed by numerical relations and correspondences that permitted the citizens to declare themselves “the same,” to enter into relations of mutual equality, symmetry and reciprocity and together to form a unified cosmos. The polis was seen as a homogenous whole without hierarchy, without rank, without differentiation. Arche was no longer concentrated in a single figure at the apex of social structure but was distributed equally throughout the entire realm of public life in that common space where the city had its center, its meson.17

Contemporary political philosophers such as Arendt, Jean-François Lyotard, and Jacques Rancière have been magnetized by theatrokratia as foundational to shared political space—city, market, theater—within which the exposé of political agency is instituted through modes of visual frontality, circulating affect, and acoustic publicity. Their spatial archaeology of Hellenic democracy is self-evidently mediated by a contemporary democratic habitus in crisis and by a public sphere complexified by the occlusions of large-scale bureaucracies and hypermedia. Arendt addresses appearing agency as both a politics of theater and a theatricized political space of isonomia and isegoria where the ethical unfolding of character as bios (mode of life) is presented as a dramaturgical landscape. She cites Aristotle, who identified tragic theater with mimeseos praxis, defined as “complete action.”18 “The chief characteristic of this specifically human life, whose appearance and disappearance constitute worldly events, is that it is itself always full of events which ultimately can be told as a story, establish a biography; it is of this life, bios as distinguished from mere zoé, that Aristotle said that it ‘somehow is a kind of praxis.’”19 Arendt proposes a politics of emergent natality, a self-initiating, self-constituting practice in the act of visual and vocal appearing that is constitutive of political space. Natality is defined as the primary visual and linguistic exposure and inception of the subject in front of peers or co-natals as a community of reciprocating witness. This Arendtian visual and acoustic co-natality of peers generates a theatrical nexus termed “the in-between,” the inter-est.20 The interlocutory is entangled with a collectivizing mimesis that opens sociopolitical space to aesthetic modalities. Geometry theatricized communicated with Vernant’s arithmetical vocality of the democratic collective. All these reticular arrangements consigned an exteriority to the nonpolitical in relation

302 / Chapter Six

to this scenography, wherein action and speech become politically legible and democratic.21 As Lyotard stresses: The classical theater requires not one limit, but two, the theater enclosure first and then the stage setting, the one in which representation takes place, which envelops the stage auditorium as a whole. . . . Ancient Greece provides a good model of it; the limit of citizenship and on the interior, the limit of the political sphere, the centre (meson) where the orator comes to speak of what has been done and what is going to take place and through whom therefore the city comes to be represented. . . . Every citizen can in principle stand there and speak and so becomes the mirror of the city, its reflection.22

Lyotard and Rancière treat theatrokratia as a topographic-architecturalpolitical modality both in reference to its protocols of representation, its apatê or illusionistic effect, and in terms of who can and cannot occupy this space and how such distributions and positions are governed as a politics of witness. Lyotard calls this the “setup of the politeia,” understood as a filtering mechanism of signs and persons that Rancière identifies as a political aesthetics that distributes the sensible and the insensible across and beyond polity. Rancière describes this as the utopian bringing of “a space in thought in conjunction with a perceived or perceptible intuitive space” that he terms “government by the center.”23 This mise-en-scène-ic setup and its conferral of sensibility or insensibility are orthotic points of insertion enabling the spectator/witness to function as a political actor and subject of aesthesis.24 Intensive totality fills the theatricopolitical interior, while incommensurable singularities haunt and define democracy’s ethical and depictive thresholds of nonlaw, the unpolitical, and violence. The crossing of this threshold in either direction structures the aporias and core motifs of tragic theater. The protocols of veridiction at the TRC were carefully set up to advance a frontality of truth consonant with the ethics of “transparency,” which guided the forensic mission and proscenium visuality of the commission, “as in the emphasis by the Enlighteners on the older moralistic application demanding of historical representation that it give to men an ‘impartial mirror’ of their duties and obligations.”25 The scenic setup of the TRC’s human-rights-violation hearings was often a proscenium layout in a local high school, church, community center, gymnasium, or institutional auditorium, crowned with an overhanging banner declaiming: “Truth. The Road to Reconciliation.” The motto was complemented at the foot of the stage by a Christianizing row of lit candles (though their flickering light

Turning Around Scars / 303

was overwhelmed by the arrayed glare of floodlights of the commission’s own video cameras and that of the South African Broadcasting Company and foreign media). At stage right four to six booths were set up offstage for the simultaneous translators, who, depending on the location of the hearing, represented the eleven official languages of South Africa. Simultaneous translation symbolized and functionalized the new democratic synchronicity and transparency of the speech economy that structured the entire mediatic-archival apparatus of the TRC. Closest to the translation booths, but raised on the stage, were the chairs and tables reserved for witnesses and, when deemed necessary, witness handlers or briefers, who provided psychological support and offstage pre- and post-testimony therapeutic debriefing. Directly opposite the witness table at extreme stage left was the long table reserved for the truth commissioners assigned to the hearing. Below the commissioners, at stage left, in the “orchestra pit,” were clusters of legal, investigative, and research staff, who passed up to the commissioners evidence bundles that had been specially prepared for each hearing, based on the regional locale and/or a specific sequence of events and witnesses to be heard. From this proscenium setup the sonic and gestural kinesthetics of truth was meant to circulate between the witness and the commissioners. This circulation and frontality was designed to be audited at an insulating distance by the audience, seated before the stage, and the cameras, which were mainly aimed over the heads and faces of the audience in their fixation on the proscenium action where democracy was to transparently make itself. Between the Saying and the Said Adorno argues that the ability to be horrified—the “shudder”—is an affirmation, ultimately, of the humanity of the witness at a scenography of horror. The subject is lifeless except when it is able to shudder in response to “a total spell.” Without the shudder, consciousness is trapped in reification, as a mimetics of death; the shudder is a kind of premonition of subjectivity, a sense “of being touched by the other.”26 Aristotle in reference to tragedy’s mimesis describes an analogous concept, psuchagogeo, and its adjective, psuchagogikon, which means to impose a movement of a soul, as in the conjuring of ghosts by the unconstrained lamenting of women that so troubled the prescriptive gendered silence of the public sphere of fifth-century Athens.27 In the hearings of the South African truth commission Adorno’s dereifying shudder appeared in an antiphonal call by onstage women to, and response from, the audience as “archival” authenti-

304 / Chapter Six

cation through acoustic and gestural collectivity. The call was embedded in the prose of testimony and punctuated by members of the audience in responses that transgressed the stage/audience threshold. These choreographers of antiphony contoured a new cartography of truth in polyphonic screams, bodies collapsing in grief and pain, church shout-outs, the episodic dancing of the toyi-toyi (a ubiquitous, mobilizing protest dance), and intermittent concurrent and overlapping singing and chanting.28 This disjointedness of the gestural body somaticized and subjectified disjointed historical time; embodied shuddering and stuttering became the hinge between the living and the political absentee, mediating what Derrida describes as “two disadjustments, between the disjuncture of the unjust and the one that opens up the infinite asymmetry of the relation to the other, that is to say, the place for justice.”29 Authentication was sealed by the reciprocating social incorporation of the breath of a testifying caller flooding those called with the exteriority of personal and collective pain and kin lack. This vocality emerged from the body but also from its limit and extended beyond it into a contingent truth space, where it was retraced by answering auditors as their historical and biopolitical signature. The antiphonal choreography moved across, between, and through subjects and interlocutors on- and offstage, encompassing both the living present and the presenting recession of the absent political deportee. Here embodied and expressed pain was not the debilitating blockage or disability of trauma, but a medium for collective veridiction and avowal magnetized by the sustaining and energizing subtraction and insufficiency of the missing and the dead. This transitive vocality, stained by a history not well lived, in turn stained the acousticoptical hygiene of the hearings. This assault on the proscenium suspended the flattened space of theatrical textualization and produced a dense spatial volume as an echo of the serial disintegration of the volume of the signbearing bereaved body in testimony. The evocation of a ghostly interspace of antiphonal apparition and disapparition foreclosed any imposed solidification of the onstage witness as a passive victim or as paralytically traumatized. Rather, antiphonal reciprocity, blurring the line between stage and audience, opened a chasm between name and voice, unfolding the nonsynchronous in the presumed juridical personality and punctual selfhood of the commissioned witness. Many of these women mounted the dais of the proscenium at first seeking to accuse, appeal, and receive fiscal reparation, but at the apex of their pain they presented as unpresentifiable representatives of the unpresentifiable. Their withholding of closed identity pointed to the disparity between

Turning Around Scars / 305

the commission’s investment in the biographical mimesis of recorded testimony and these voices that refused archival closure and governance. In their reassemblage of the missing and the dead, these social mothers were both kin and akin to the absent in their presenting of the affective absentia of the dead in their own bodies. They used graphic disidentity to evoke an extramateriality that had to be historically accounted for as a truth event, an intervention that opened a testimonial void dissonant with the commission’s holistic mediatic archivization. The antiphony of transverse, transcorporeal witnessing could not be slotted into either public commemoration or privatized mourning, but rather undid this polarity in crafting an acoustic event and site where, according to Levinas, “the spirit hears the echo of the otherwise.”30 Sonic exchange transferred an undercode of the absentee as a substance secreted from mouth to mouth, as if from wound to wound, that rendered any single atonal testimony a polyphonic collaborative speech of exchangeable breath, echoing haunting overtones and historical undertones. Antiphonic response surrogated and transmitted the silenced call-and-response of the dead, and both soloist and responding chorus ultimately held themselves accountable to the absentee as an interlocutor and audience beyond audition. Spontaneous antiphonal performance in the hearings were patterned rescriptings that took the form of Dopplerlike mourning as a hyperperformance and hyperrepetition that referenced gestural laws discordant with the liberal subject-centered humanitarianism embedded in the proscenium setup. Antiphonal sound, gesture, and pain constituted the commission’s echographic yet dissonant afterimage. This personification of extralinguistic pain, installed as the signature of the absentee, was a historical substance of evidentiary gravitas equal to that of any archivable script, though in the commission’s institutional memory it was given an ambiguous and reluctant psychologized and therapeutic status. Regardless, this sonic discordancy both contested and pointed to the continuing neocolonial marginalization of the subjugated knowledge of black embodiment in the postcolony. The shadows these women pointedly smuggled into the glare and artificed clarity of juridical, humanitarian, and televisual space were conjurations of the historical cavity from where they witnessed that could not be translated into transparent confessional speech. The social mothers did not calm or reconcile through cathartic therapeusis but, like tragedy’s chorus, heightened disquiet in preserving the irreconcilable by facing a history deprived of a face. The antiphonal acoustic space of witnessing also raised the optics of the antiprosopon. Prosopon means face, or to be toward a face; antiprosopon

306 / Chapter Six

is the faceless Other of the face. The related form antiprosopos encompasses the juxtaposition of differing faces and the anamorphosis of the face from or to the nonface. The antiprosopon as the unpresentifiable face can be a counter-sovereignty that both precipitates representation and defines the limits of the visible (and here the audible) through its recession and summons. Antiphonal witness, as the relay between caller and called, sound and silence, face and nonface, emerges from historical structures where vertical veridiction of subjugated knowledge has been refused. Apartheid’s stratification of African speech economies went hand in hand with the social stratification of truth claiming, which prevented black voices from testifying to the conditions of black experiential embodiment. The black body was reserved by the apartheid state as the place where only its truth was meant to be made and exhibited. Antiphonal choral choreography countered and redressed the apartheid state’s vacant repetition of historical time through the mendacity, secrecy, disinformation, and intimidation that had “contaminated the act and practice—even the technologies of memory  .  .  . in an already prejudiced polity.”31 Such communicative asymmetries were both cited and countered by gendered and raced witness in the truth commission hearings through polyphonic and polycentric performances that led culturally competent auditors to shared but tacit moral inferences previously silenced in the public sphere by communicative apartheid. Antiphonic juxtaposition replicated a preexisting violent intrusion through the disruptive transportation and translation of the deleted—the figure of the antiprosopon, as political deportee, reentered social space as literal dissonance, as disembodied political static, and as an omnidirectional sonic interruption that stitched together visible and invisible political cartographies of the living and the dead. This acoustics of the silent dead and the missing registered their dislocation in time and space by disturbing the geometrical symmetry of the proscenium cutout. The spacing of phonic meaning by their silence made tangible disrupted the linearity of logical time to which the commission was dedicated in its historiography. Thus these outbursts of phonic and antiphonic irregularity were registered as traumatic interruption by the TRC and not as the movement of history itself, tied to breath and flesh and arrayed against the dead letter of the archive. The social mothers’ concerted fracturing of formalized testimonial space and time was not oblivious to the technicity of witnessing mobilized by the truth commission. Antiphonal answerability entered the space of truth as acoustical derailing of the synchronicity formed by proscenium presentation, simultaneous translation, audiovisual recording, real-time broadcast,

Turning Around Scars / 307

archival cataloging, and evidentiary bundling. Antiphonal authentication flowed through the synchronic grid upheld by truth commissioners, witness handlers, legal advisors, and researchers, and by the halo of televisual lens, flash, cameras, and floodlights. For many Xhosa and Zulu witnesses, any deritualized repository of the dead, of their bodies, appendages, and effects, from hospitals and morgues to museums are considered to be miasmic spaces of contamination, and this phobia inserted a certain ambivalence toward the archival storage of death by the TRC, with its cameras, tape recorders, wireless headphones for simultaneous translation, evidence bundles, and computerized transcripts. The social mothers performed and demanded witnessing, but not with voices that were appendages or executors of the dead letter of the archive.32 Nor was their giving of voice the presentation of an archivable immediacy, that treasured effect curated by the commission’s theatricality and televisuality. Rather, because of antiphonic relay and repetition, social mothers did not speak singularly in their own name, in one time, and at one locus; the peripatetic voice of antiphony resisted capture as archival dictation and could not be reduced to one more exhibit in the synchronic museum of dead sound. Their sonority was in antiphonal disjuncture to both apartheid’s repressive mendacity and silence and to the TRC’s archival therapeutics of individualized status confessionis.33 In the irruptive space of antiphonal answerability, the saying exceeded the said (the archived). Privileging the said over the saying subordinates witnessing to an ontologizing apparatus in which, according to Levinas, “the field of synchronizable diachrony, of temporalization—that is, field of memory and historiography . . . becomes a quasi structure and is thematized and shows itself like an entity.”34 Under apartheid the disjuncture between the saying and the censoring archive of the said and unsaid had widened beyond reconciliation and would continue to taint any postapartheid terrain of discursive exchange. Antiphony reverberates with incompatible chronic polyphony as the acoustic decay, afterimage, or Dopplerlike fracture of former narrative unities and securities. Ernst Bloch resorted to musical analogies in describing nonsynchronous historical time as the acoustics or “multi-voiced dialectics” of a nonlinear history, linearity here being a metaphor for directional, continuous, and thus manageable and calculable historical time. Bloch identified incertitude and semiotic errancy with organized sound and rejected the notion of the representational and referential auditory sign. Sonority has no ground except the not-yet, the Vorschein or pre-view. Discordant sonority points to a possibility, a futurity that has no actuality in the present and in presence and thereby functions like the

308 / Chapter Six

echo of the insensible. Bloch thus uses sonority against visual certitude— sonority and visuality produce two different forms of the event and stand for wider multisensory historical postures of illegibility and veridiction; the aural stands for whatever dethrones the hegemony of the visual that has subsumed all the other senses and inflicted upon them a regime of exactitude, surveillance, transcription, and synchronized flat space. The trace work of the ear and the sonorous voice reecho that which has been deleted from optically centered hierarchies and official channels of transmission producing new forms and qualities of the event. Another archive and temporality were at issue here. Among the Xhosa and Zulu, as well as many other South African ethnicities, locating the remains of deceased kin and ascertaining the circumstances of death is part of once pre-Christian but now syncretistic purification rituals that embark dead kin on the passage to becoming ancestors for an entire collective. The dead may have died as isolates within the structures of the state, but their witnessing and mourning by social mothers was a ritual of social reincorporation. The dead were resocialized owing to their potential but politically blocked status as ancestors, through a rite of reorigination for the surviving kin groups and communities who looked to the dead as agents of corporate identity, moral compass, and transhistorical purpose. When it came to the actual exhumation of the missing from hidden graves, which began the passage to becoming an ancestor, antiphonal performatives violently overflowed the proscenium paradigm, imploding the juristic forensics of truth. The apartheid state had used clandestine execution and burial to expel anti-apartheid activists from polity, history, family, and social memory in a modern revisiting of Kreon’s profaning abandonment of the corpse of a state “traitor” that ignites the core conflict of Sophocles’ Antigone. However, the ethics of social motherhood in South Africa reconfigured Antigone’s demand for proper burial rites with a demand for the public exhumation and display of profaned remains, followed by their purifying reburial and symbolic return to comrades, kin, home, and homeland. These rituals of the returned remainder and its reincorporation filled the residual and decaying empty time of the apartheid state’s denials with damaged but exhumed and possibly decipherable body parts, a narrative sequence that bridged the loss of loss inflicted by the former regime. Though the recovered and returned remains of the dead never fully reassembled the subtracted life, or the circumstances of dying, or even a complete corpse, their disappearance, sequestration, and political decomposition by the state had to be preserved as political cachet integral to their positioning as reoriginating ancestors:

Turning Around Scars / 309

reorigination presupposes interruption and dislocation, which also needs to be remembered and consecrated. In both polities, the South African and the Theban, the relation of the state, codified law, and customary law to the disposition of political corpses emerged as an axial agon that defines civic space in terms of the political visuality and juxtaposition of the concealed and disconcealed dead. Traversing the moral postures of Kreon and Antigone is the ironic reversal and double binding of their antagonistic visual projects—the nomos of the earth upon which corpses are to be politically and theatrically displayed and a nomos of the unearthly underground. Antigone’s unrelenting resolve to bury the corpse of her brother (a state criminal) is her insistence on proper concealment as the material emblem of Polyneikes’ (polyneikes = manifold strife) confinement to Hades (a-ides, the unseen), the abode of the dead wherein the friend/enemy distinction—the earthbound purview of the sovereign—loses its privilege. Antigone seeks her brother’s consignment to the abjected archive of the undifferentiated, memoryless domain of the dead across the river Lethe (the dead are the nonumnoi, a miasmic, faceless magma that Odysseus encounters in his visit to Hades). In contrast, Kreon, in commanding the exposure of Polyneikes’ corpse, exercises the state’s panopticism, its unlimited claim to powers of political appearance. Kreon uses the exposed corpse as a desiccating archive of infidelity and of that which is beyond polity, thereby defining the latter. The political conflict between Kreon and Antigone is in part an agon of archives, pitting the state’s posing of a rotting criminalized corpse as archival volume against the repositories of the commemorative burial chamber.35 In ancient Thebes and in apartheid and postapartheid South Africa, the state insisted on its authority to decide what was archivable and what was unarchivable, and on the political status of incommensurable archives— archives that cannot archive each other without violating their respective schema of memory, media, and time. In South Africa the scenes of truth commission–ordered exhumations were bluntly wounding, cathartic, and markedly lacking in the platitudes of human-rights discourses of healing and reconciliation. The kin of the dead could be witnessed mourning over real, possible, and partially imagined anonymous burial terrains and debris, literally consecrating this historical dust with a lost humanity. They would grieve over tortuously retrieved encrypted scatterlings of a part-real, part-desired remainder, as if to decipher in these ashes, cinders, and shards a justice that had yet to arrive. In contrast to the truth commission, the antiphonal mothers crafted in their testimony and at exhumation sites not an archive of the abjected, but

310 / Chapter Six

an abjected archive in which the absentee was politically reinstated from fragments and dispersal. Antiphonal witnessing refused archivization by widening and stressing the interruptive interval or differences in historicity between three archives: those of the unsaid under apartheid, of the confessional opening of the truth commission, and of symbolic ancestorship or customary law of the social mothers. In so doing the social mothers delimited the heteronomy from which these discordant interiorities of memory were unfolded. Through their summons of reaudited and revisualized political dust and ashes, state executioners were themselves exhumed from their legal vaults of self-indemnity and conscripted by, and riveted to, their own secret burial grounds as culpable undertakers of atrocity. Public mourning by women at exhumations constructed one last antiphonal dissonance simultaneously setting the absentee on the path toward ancestorship while excavating and sifting through the ever-expanding concussion of the state’s damage. Forgetting the Unforgettable Nicole Loreaux’s study of amnesty (amnesesanta) in the Athenian city-state stricken by fratricide describes a civic justice that stands in marked contrast to contemporary transitional justice. Athenian amnesty addresses fratricidal violence through the forgetting of the unforgettable (alaston).36 Amnesty was remembering to visibly enact an amnesia of violence. What must be both recalled and forgotten by amnesty is the loss of the civic self that is repeated in the recalling of misfortune (mnesikakaseo). Amnesty interdicts the event not to be repeated and the subject of misfortune as the agent of this repetition and thereby strives to symbolically and juridically lose loss. Yet, despite the differing between memory as silence in fifth-century Athenian amnesty and memory as vocalized healing and historicization in contemporary transitional justice, both protocols arrived at a similar posture as regards the political control of memory: On one side forgetting on the other a living memory that bears no other name than excess of grief. . . . It is left to the citizens—spectators gathered in the theater to guess what in this anger that does not forget is the ultimate danger for the city because it is the worst enemy of politics. . . . If it were not for Achilles whose menis (anger) is all Greek memories, I would say that we have here a female figure of memory, which the cities try to confine to anti(ante-) politics. And in fact wrath in mourning, whose principle is eternal repetition, expresses itself by an aei . . . [unceasing repetition] . . . and the

Turning Around Scars / 311 fascination of this tireless “always” threatens to make it a powerful rival to the political aei that founds the memory of institutions.37

This protocol of institutional silence addresses the temporalities and repetitions that are proper and improper to the conservation of political community, in which the latter is threatened by the transmission of the inopportune. Vernant’s geometric model of democracy also has its acoustic equivalent in amnesty’s synchronized public silence. The relation between the unforgettable and its prescriptive forgetting through contractual oaths interwove locution and silence that were reciprocally shown in theater and theatricized by the civility of amnesty: While speech is a prerequisite for a healthy political life, silence too has its assigned place. In the first two plays [of the Oresteia], silence is almost always a stratagem or a consequence of intimidation. But once speech is righted, silence too can resume its proper place . . . public speech rests on what is sacred and unspeakable  .  .  . politics relies on passions inarticulate within its realm of discourse. Thus, though there are things inappropriate for or dangerous to such discourse, they are nevertheless fundamental to it. In his position as poet and political educator, the dramatist reminds his city of the silent foundations of their speech.38

The qualified repetition of the unrepeatable is performed as silence— the interval and spacing that precedes, allows, and begins a renewed order of political speech, a new sharing of Arendtian lexis. J. Peter Euben’s analysis above implies that the unforgettable, as that which could not be commingled or circulated without provoking further fratricidal possibilities, was set apart by amnesty in the sacralization of silence. The unforgettable was a temporality apart: to repeat it profaned the city. It must be confined to its threshold, or buried alive like Antigone. Sworn nonrepetition had to be exhibited. Loreaux writes: “Politics means acting as if everything were fine. As if nothing had happened. Neither conflict nor murder nor ill feeling nor resentment . . . an Isocratic-Aristotelian definition of politics that starts when vengeance stops.”39 At this juncture the performance of silence becomes homonoia (identity of thought or concord), which is usually associated with homologia (identity of speech), which summarizes the enactment of ethical political consensus. With amnesty, silence becomes a paradoxical form of homologia; amnesty is a logos or law that precludes speech beyond the oath to keep collectively silent—a democracy of denial, a juristic logos alienated from voice (phoné). This silence, in recent postconflict situations

312 / Chapter Six

such as Argentina and Sri Lanka, has become the virtualized extension of terror and violence through a political aisthesis and aesthetics of disappearance and historical disapparition. For Arendt, Athenian democracy and its model of politics is predicated on speech and persuasion, but here Loreaux and Euben refer to the foundation of a persuasive silence, which indicates that amnesty is neither the neutralization of politics nor an anesthesiology of stasis (internecine violence), but is radically politicized and thus an exercise of power against, among other things, stasis itself. Barbara Cassin observes that, owing to such procedures, the Athenian public sphere was far from being an isonomic transparency: “The principle of publicness is necessarily a principle of hypocrisy, as with Antiphon who defines the right use of justice by the observance of the prescriptions of the laws when in the presence of witnesses and by the observance of the prescriptions of nature when in the solitude of the private realm.”40 Speech was associated with the activation of time in its capacity to bring forth change; thus, amnesty’s silence is the suspension of time premised on a totalizing fixation and politicization of memory, the past, and the present: “The Encomium of Helen . . . thematizes the almightiness of speech by explicitly connecting it to time (‘If everyone on every subject possessed memory of the past and present, and knew the future in advance, speech would not be such as it is,’ 82B11,11, DK II 291), it is the very model of a logos that brings about a change of homonoia.”41 Homonoia, concord, is coupled with stasis, the suspension of polity through internecine and fratricidal violence. Thus homonoia, in the declension of silence, is the petrifaction of the memory of prior stasis apprehended as the virtualizing medium of a stasis-to-come. Amnesty repeats the unrepeatable in silence, and thus opens onto a stasiology of repetition itself by bifurcating silence, speech, forgetfulness, memory, and indemnity. Stasis is hyperbolic, since it contains its own stasiology or divisibility within itself as diversely meaning kinesis, stillness, stand, the state, and gridlocked countervailing forces that put civic life at a standstill. The couple homonoia/stasis represents two forms of repetition, memory, and mimesis (which can encompass concord and discord, speech and silence) constitutive of the political, as well as being each other’s condition of possibility. The inalterable alternation between homonoia and stasis implies that the Greeks did not have a model of an originary conciliation that is supplemented and reenacted by reconciliation. Rather, protological conciliation is a fiction and otherwise unavailable in the inalterable alternation between concord and stasis, without which there would not be a need for the negative concordance of the loud

Turning Around Scars / 313

silence of amnesty as the condensation of all that which is rendered unavailable though nonrepetition. In tragedy, acts and methods of witnessing and its aversion were diagnostic of the cultural, ethical, and political status of societal well-being itself; vociferation and silence were metrics of polity. The focus on tragic witness in Athenian theater concerned the schema of citizenship, the appearance the citizen presented to a polity, which included gestural movement or posture (badisma) and face (prosopon) as moral physiognomies axial to the performance of civic personality in a visual field both within and beyond theater.42 Schema as dramaturgical-rhetorical display was applied to forms of government and forms of life beyond the theater; schema was linked to epideixis, display or rhetorical display, and apatê (illusion, deception), both verbal and physical, which conditioned the gestural presentation of power and authority and implied a capacity for force.43 The constitution of a visual field as a political space followed from this grammar of display in which to be seen to witness was to perform the political and to exercise citizenship. This political visuality was linked to theoria, the public act of commissioned spectating and witnessing of formal public events. Violence is archived, memorialized, and theatricized by the memory of memory as addressing or forgetting, successfully or not, the loss of loss crucial to amnesty and tragedy. In Athenian tragedy and transitional justice, memory as witnessing, image, gaze, and speech is put on display alongside the direct or indirect exhibition of the harm to be recalled or reenacted. In Athenian theater and in contemporary theaters of restorative justice, a mediating witness (in the diverse forms of the corypheus, the chorus, the wounded survivor, confessing perpetuator, adjudicating truth commissioner, forensic specialist, and therapeutic witness handler) is presented onstage so that the mass subject of witnessing can experience memory or its absence in personification, in the visual and linguistic pathos of exposed embodied attestation. Athenian theater and Thucydidian historiography were concerned with how the people who witness appear (how they gaze and react bodily) in their shock, empathy, and aversion as the material exposition of learning from suffering, whether that culminated in speech or began silence.44 Mimesis as untimely memory and mimesis as the time inaugurating acting-as-if renders Athenian amnesty a theater that conserves or archives what it silences. Forgetfulness is simulated and amnesty didactically played; the polity mimics its political ideality in amnesty and tragedy: “The awareness of that fiction is both the condition and the effect of tragedy. In

314 / Chapter Six

a way, it is the city playing itself . . . However that mythical past presented problems familiar to fifth century Greece: What is the human being? What is the meaning of action? What is responsibility? What is crime? However, as no answers were provided, man himself became interrogation.”45 Amnesty, in its widest sense as the trace and tracing over of an indelible violence, secures fragile polity through an aesthetics of time wherein the silence of amnesty emerges as a particular type of history. Vernant writes: “For Greeks of the classical period to act meant not so much to organize and dominate time as to exclude oneself from it, to bypass it.”46 This bracketing of indelible temporality, of the unforgettable, is tied to the lexical ambiguity of the command of amnesty, which according to Loreaux is to forget the unforgettable. The installed interval between the violent past and “pacified” present performs the encapsulation of violence, but not its historical disappearance, to the degree that the violence marked for political abandonment is conserved in order to be seen to be abandoned in a repertoire of acts and gestures (badisma and prosopon). As Loreaux concludes, only memory can decree forgetting.47 Loreaux, echoing tragedy’s concern with lexical ambiguity, selfsubverting speech, and self-incriminating juridical forensics, treats the banning of the unforgettable as the communication of two discordant messages concerning public memory: “the prohibition of memory may affect the very definition of memory.”48 Here the present is secured and anchored in a rigidified repertoire of arrested memories, arrested because they have been archived, set apart, rendered uncitable and even sacralized in ritual by the prohibition against their unfettered circulation: “Me mnesikakein (forgetting the unforgettable) . . . the negative formula in itself suggests that the prohibition actually sealed the past. . . . Paradoxically it became necessary to focus more on the recall than on the forgetting, on the mnesikakein than on the negative prescription me.  .  .  . I wonder: what if banning memory had no other consequences than to accentuate a hyperbolized though fixed memory?” (261). Amnesty in its ceremonial silencing of the unforgettable social scar was apotropaic, a protective, screening concordance on violence. It was not a question of the memory of misfortune returning as the valence conferred on it by the ban; rather, by being profanely rehearsed in the present, it could destabilize those institutions that remember to forget as something other than that which was censored. Violence itself, no matter how effectively silenced, is structured as a stasiology of memory—the inheritable (even as silence) and the uninheritable (as errant repetition). Athenian amnesty shares with the modern transitional justice project an

Turning Around Scars / 315

aversion to anomic repetition when the latter subjects violence to prescribable forms of representation and rememoration. Illicit circulation of the unforgettable in the Athenian polity could have mutated into emergent political appearing as the release of collective scarification that could be both anomic and apolis—beyond political community, beyond a political limit where lies the unpolitical. Licentious repetition, such as black and gendered antiphonal call-and-response at the South African truth commission, can exceed the memory of misfortune that is institutionalized and the masters of memory who work memory’s preformation. Witnessing in classical tragedy stands in opposition to the truth procedures of Athenian amnesty and contemporary transitional justice. JeanPierre Vernant’s treatment of Attic tragedy examines the violent entrance of nihilistic extimacy into this clarified theatrico-optical frame. Reemergent memory exceeds the sum of its datable parts as an occulted, occluded, denied, disavowed alien, yet binding contingency and force intrinsic to character, speech, act, and history. This structural discordancy seriously complicates the idealized transparency and isonomia of the Arendtian theater of appearing natality and interlocutory transaction. Returning unbidden, memory in Attic tragedy followed the philosophical, narratological, religious, and recreational form of the riddle (ainigma, to speak darkly) through which the core categories of origin, descent, action, agency, time, and identity were encrypted and played back against the present. Tragedy was played as the agon of the “capital riddle” (a contest with a death penalty) by which lives were risked and upon which the bios, the form of life of the political community, was staked. Vernant aligns tragedy with emplotment by encryption in the disfiguring of speech and action as a degrounding semantic subversion of intent and decision. Manifest lexis is aborted and crossed by homonumia, or lexical ambiguity and riddling that suspends the shared referentiality crucial to a polity and its communication economy: This type of ambiguity is made possible by the vacillations or contradictions of language. The playwright plays with them to translate the tragic vision of a world divided against its self torn by contradictions. In the mouths of several characters the same words take on different or opposed meanings because their semantic value is not the same in the religious, legal, political and common languages. . . . Each here, enclosed in the universe which is his own gives a meaning, a single meaning. Against this unilaterality, another unilaterality clashes violently. Tragic irony may consist in showing how, in the course of the action, the hero finds himself taken at his word.49

316 / Chapter Six

Tragic communication is fated to unwillingly repeat the unrepeatable, which returns as desire and history denied, forgotten, and silenced in a double-keyed language as manifesting the unassimilable violent or contaminating excess of the politics of the good. The miasmic singularity of the dead and defaced infiltrates visible immediacy and is embodied in disemia, which brings about the reversal of action termed peripeteia. Tragic speech is self-destructive, stasiological repetition infiltrated by a semantic violence standing in for material acts that invade not only the body but a community’s speech economy; the incapacity to signify refracts a violence made manifest in being concealed and withheld. Signification here is inadequate to history and thus repeats something other than what it claims to name. Discourse as referential destitution depletes any action of significative conservation by bringing forth non-knowledge as the nonidentity of the polity with itself. I raise these themes because their official recognition in transitional justice fora is minimal, or, at best, associated with the communicative distortions of the perpetrators and regimes of human-rights violations, which are to be literally clarified by the procedural rationality and transparency of juridical interrogation—a project that falls into crisis in the Greek tragic imagination. Connected to the temporal liminality of homonumia is the transgenerational transmittal of violations of philia (fraternity). Curse and fate drive tragic denial across diverse plays and generations and through recursive time, such as that which links Oedipus to Kreon, Polyneikes, and Antigone, or that connects Agamemnon, Iphigenia, and Klytemnestra to Orestes and Elektra. This lexical violence and agon is the communicative regime of rule by the dead; it is the transgressive consequences and mortal violence inflicted and suffered by prior generations that complexify truth claims and action in the present. The anterior generation condenses the inaccessibility of historical and violent origins. The defaced dead invade the time of the present and fissure the unclouded visibility of scenic presence usurping causation and intent. The unrequited dead exist outside of time and sequence. They mix the disjointedness of the nomic and anomic and are inadmissible repetition incarnate; they are heralds of customary law transgressed and invoked as an uncompromising fate and yet abandoned and historically surpassed. Rule of the living by the dead is rule by the repetition of the unrepeatable, and just as in the South African Truth Commission, the returning dead contaminate referentiality, mimesis, and representation as that which conserves and props up institutional truth regimes. Lexical ambiguity delinearizes the time of act, speech, and choice. An antiphonic futurity and fury is smuggled into a self-subverting speech that

Turning Around Scars / 317

“acquires all the executive force of a curse . . . inscribed into being in advance.”50 The particular peripeteia, reversal of action and communication, stalking apotropaic amnesty is the inheritance of the uninheritable, the repetition of the unrepeatable, which is to be distinguished from the historicization of the unforgettable secured by amnesty’s ban and silences as prescriptive memory. Thus the Other of unforgettable violence is not amnesty as legislated forgetfulness, but the uninheritable as that which eluded the cultural axis of both memory and forgetting as the polity separated itself from the memory of itself to effect postviolence through nonrepetition. The respective forensics of Athenian amnesty and transitional justice can be formulated as a homeopathics and allopathics of repetition: how to repeat violence in its silencing and forgetting (for only memory can decree forgetting), or in its public witnessing, archiving, and commemoration, in order to halt the ungovernable and visceral repetition of violence. If the remedial repetition of violence is intended to interdict violence, then amnesty and transitional justice are structurally entangled in the violence of repetition. As Loreaux teaches us, neither stratagem or ethic avoids the formalization of memory that leads to the double bind of the violent return of the forgotten, repressed, and deferred. The polity remains caught between two repetitions that can be equally criminal and violent owing to the fragility of their difference—the forensic repetition of violence meant to produce its nonrepetition, and the errant violence of a repetition that releases an unrepeatable, unsupportable violence. Helmut Lehen describes the horror of repetition that is integral to the modern metaphysics of rational and directional history, which is invariably sustained by the anamnesis of transitional justice: “The circling eternity” seems to carry no more meaning. The sphere of repetition is situated on the “dark side of history.” On this side everything is amassed that is not illuminated by the floodlight of dialectic which is, in other words, without meaning. Since modernity got on its way (1750– 1850), phenomena of repetition are painted in the black colors of despair or the blazing colors of cynicism. Whoever excluded themselves from the accelerating process of history, was thought to be falling back into the darkness of a realm without history—to the level of the animal world or into the provincialism of the back woods. It was a common opinion in the nineteenth century that in a circulatory view of things man had no history at all, just like the animals, which are “trapped in an eternal circle of actions.” [.  .  . This] discourse of “history” remains locked into the idea of progress,

318 / Chapter Six whereas the methods of repetition are split off into separate chambers of the private sphere.51

The chronicity of repetition is antithetical to Enlightenment projections of historical progress and transparency that transitional justice extends and amplifies in practices of theater, curation, and cure. For reason’s historical self-development repetition was all that which was without meaning, normativity, decision, temporality, intention, and purpose and associated with the antihistoricity of an everyday life, with submerging and intractable materialities antithetical to time-accelerating, transformative, natal, and novel events. With the transitional justice forum, the fear of chronic violence and of violent chronicity has tellingly displaced and expropriated the fear of the automatism of the everyday as the dark side of history. Everyday life is not absent in this aversion but is refigured by new modes of political terror in which the state and other belligerents normalize and habituate violence within the mundane. Violence and victimage in the transitional justice project become diagnostic of anomic chronoscapes. Dehistoricizing repetition is a force without law to be brought into law by the rectifying enforcement of nonoccurrence known as conflict resolution, reconciliation, forgiveness, and amnesty—an instituted “culture” of human rights. Whatever can be classified under the anomia of repetition, that which can be moralized, medicalized, psychiatricized, and criminalized undergoes detemporalization in much the same manner as the everyday was deliberately defaced and confined to the anachronic by event history. The phobia around uncontrollable repetition—as the time of violence—establishes a cultural isomorphism, a prescriptive anamnesis and calculable governmentality, over what is consigned to the chronic and the normatively unrepeatable. This idea of progress in transitional justice, however, becomes a prescriptive repetition over and against unrepeatable repetition. In Athenian tragedy, however, unrepeatable repetition is interwoven into the structures of memory and political action, as phobic aversion for the polis seeking amnesty that identified this iteration with revenge-code violence. The pharmakon of repetition, which is both a toxin and a remedy in Athenian amnesty and transitional justice, calls forth an antiphonal disjuncture between retrospective anamnesis and repetition forward that issues forth the uninheritable, the errant, and the emergent. Anamnesis is a recuperative movement backward in time centered on datable events and oriented to redressive futurity such as Athenian amnesty, whereas peripatetic repetition in tragedy or in the antiphony of the social mothers at the TRC

Turning Around Scars / 319

suspends temporal linearity and in that motion forwards the unbidden, the unrepeatable, and the uninheritable. Antiphonal repetition became an omnidirectional movement of stasiological time that the social mothers mapped out in omnidirectional sonics. Repetition as a polyphonic and polyexcentric movement of time fractures the present and disrupts standing criteria of the certifiable event in the remedial and commemorative archive. Anamnesis, in contrast, shapes and arrests the past, holding it to a particular posture in an action dramatized as an exemplary humanitarian, legalistic, civic, and therapeutic grasp. Anamnesis performed is a doubled action, a repetition that also seeks to exemplify and theatricize proper repetition or forms of witnessing and thereby functions as a disciplining memory of memory. Anomic repetition can emerge as sheer errancy in relation to this arresting (re)constitution of the past. Repetition of the uninheritable is the “desubmergence” of a plurality of worlds, nonevents, and illegibilities—as that which appears but is not properly citable to the degree that the laws of citation are tied to the action of holding to a particular reading of the scarifying past as a moral-legal posture in the present upon which the future is expected to repose.52 Turning Around Scars Dike harmoniously conjoins, in some way, the joining and the accord. Adikia to the contrary: it is at once what is disjointed, undone, twisted and out of line, in the wrong of the injust.53 There are lines which are monsters. . . . A line by itself has no meaning: a second one is necessary to give expression to meaning. Important Law.54

Loreaux’s study of amnesty profoundly frames Derrida’s various discussions of amnesty, pardon, and reconciliation in modern transitional justice. Loreaux calls out the impossible command to “forget the unforgettable,” and Derrida responds with the (im)possibility of “forgiving the unforgiveable.”55 Derrida prefaces his discussion of forgiveness and amnesty within fratricide not of the polis, but of a universal humanity. He marks a criminalized and unreconciled anthropology as the encounter with an unrecuperable anterior crime defining the present: “Here is a humanity shaken by a movement, which would like itself to be unanimous; here is a human race which would claim to accuse itself all at once, publicly and spectacularly, of all the crimes committed in effect by itself against itself, ‘against humanity.’”56 Humanity’s self-incrimination is autodidactic, as humanity

320 / Chapter Six

teaches itself to know itself through the lessons of criminal suffering (pathemata mathemata). The autodidactic circle of humanity’s self-imputation provisions a philosophical anthropology as an epochal rupture instituted by the globalization of humanity’s “crimes against humanity.” This transmundane criminality covertly confesses humanity as complicit with an inhumanity that, in profaning the human, reciprocally defines its scarifying genesis and consequential sacredness, which lie dormant and archived in the crime scene. Scarification traverses both the inaugural criminal act and the anthropologizing act of self-accusation. Yet despite a certain despair, this event of global self-incrimination is construed as part of the incremental humanization of humanity—of the becoming more fully human of (in)humanity through the recursivity of its scars. When humanity witnesses itself as a crime scene, the questioner becomes the questioned, the accuser the accused, the investigator the investigated, and the entire status of the accusation and of humanity’s jurisdictional authority falls, wittingly or not, unto crisis. No silence, amnesia, or amnesty can sustain the border between the crime and its juridical redress—the imputed scar and its imputing rescarring by memory and the law. The self-institution of humanity through self-imputation institutes a strict, unforgiving, and protean circularity. Humanity creates itself as criminal and the criminal as its creator. Criminal reason in tragedy is schematized by Foucault as a circular denegation of the will to truth: “In Oedipus the King, recognition, anagnorisis by which the one who does not know becomes one who knows and which the one who thought he did not know realizes that he already knew— has two particular characteristics.  .  .  . The one who seeks is the object of the search; the one who is ignorant is the one it is a question of knowing about; he who unleashed the dogs is himself the prey; the trail on which he set them takes them back to the point where he is waiting for them.”57 Like tragedy’s dissection of forensic action, humanity’s self-incrimination begins in certifiable facts and culminates in the enigmatic dispersal of persons and events: “Interest is thus posited radically prior to the knowledge it subordinates as a simple instrument . . . its original link to truth is undone since truth is only an effect within it . . . [an] effect of a falsification that calls itself opposition of the true and the false.”58 The humanitarian will to truth entails the falsifying and severing opposability of the human and the inhuman, an act that emplaces a binding cut and disavowal at the inception of truth and humanity. As the disavowed disclosure of an extimate Other both inside and outside humanity, law, and truth, the self-

Turning Around Scars / 321

imputation of crimes against humanity turns around an uncompassable wound that bars humanity from rejoining itself. Derrida writes: There is thus a contradiction in turning around . . . [a wound] . . . in the two senses of this expression; and above all in turning around something that remains a wound: that has taken place, that has already taken place inside the body . . . you can’t turn around your wound. A wound has taken place in the body. And how can you turn around a wound which in one way is your own? From a topological point of view this already resembles the game of an impossible geometry: you can’t turn around your wound . . . it forbids you this distance.59

The scar as dead time and binding wound, as abyss, mark, and border, opens onto history from a point of unmaneuverability, recession, or withholding. It is a cavity that pushes forward and frontward a history for which the scar is the precipitant and the motor of duration, durability, and repetition. If one cannot turn around a scar and is not permitted that distance, it is because the self-subjecting subject of the scar must rescar and immobilize itself in the failed circumnavigation of the impassibility its scar has become. If one cannot turn around a scar, it is because we do not know how to turn a scar without making a scar, which is to scar a scar. Further, one cannot depart from a scar without leaving a scar. Derrida’s discourse on the scar communicates with his concept of the archiviolithic, defined as “the dead time within the presence of the living present, within the general form of all presence.”60 Dead time implies a relation of scarification to embodied history and to the archival deadening and reimpression of history. Derrida here provokes questions on how archival release, extraction, and circulation can turn the act of witnessing required by historicization, forgiveness, amnesty, and pardon into a rescarification that is well beyond the medical precautions of self-traumatization through recall. Enunciated reconciliation and forgiveness are for Derrida the mutilated speech of the scarred: Pardon, should a pardon be heard or said, audible, visible, in a word phenomenal? Or on the contrary, secret, silent mute stifled, unsayable, inconspicuous, solitary? In other words, should there be a theatricality, a scene, even a possible obscenity to the scene of pardon? Should it present itself or should it withdraw? Let’s go and see at the theater. Here we are. Let us see and hear . . . the word of reconciliation (Hegel). Not the word “reconciliation” but the word of reconciliation. The word of the reconciliation, in

322 / Chapter Six other words the word by which we begin reconciliation, by which we offer reconciliation by holding out our hand first. So the word of reconciliation is the act, the speech act, by which with one word, one spoken word, we begin reconciliation. We offer reconciliation by talking to the other.61

Reconciliation is promised, heard, or gestured in a time and space disjunctive with a scarred historical actuality; it is a word on offer that can be ingested or regurgitated and as such is a promise, a desire, and a one-sided transmission without guaranteed transmissibility or necessary response or conservation. Here forgiving (speaking) the unforgivable (what was done to the body as spirit) is fraught with the irreconcilable spacing, interplay, and interpenetration between word and body, between sema and soma as a signifying chain of irreconcilability. The “word of reconciliation” is also the fiction and theatricality of reconcilability. It is manifested in spaces where words and gestures can be projected outward past the space of simulation and ideality to be audited as a scene, as a tableau to be witnessed by those who stand as scarred spectators, unreconciled, unforgiving, and unforgivable beyond the reconciling gesture. Derrida’s scene here tacitly refers to the unconditional yet radically contingent act of forgiving the unforgivable. Like tragic lexis, this Derridean “word” of forgiveness is potentially subject to Vernant’s schema in tragedy of dissonance and peripatetic reversal that “acquires all the executive force of a curse . . . inscribed into being, in advance.”62 Reconciliation is etymologically related to destitution and restitution, to such terms as “reunion, “reconsecration,” and “readmission” (of the excommunicated). Re-conciliation is already by virtue of its prefix, re-, in a state of repetition, dislocation, surrogation, mimesis, and simulation—it is a surrogating displacing double and trace that presumes an originary yet imaginary or unavailable conciliation and incises the latter’s authority, anteriority, and inexistence, which scars reconciliation in advance. The pretext of re-conciliation thus embodies the structural tragedy of the loss of loss. A foundational state or condition of conciliation has been dislocated in an action with no clear lineage or track. Due to this dislocation, reconciliation, as that which can only come after, embodies the loss of loss, for it is the erasure of what it simultaneously claims to repeat, and thus has no prior ethical ground. That is why for Derrida reconciliation, in its repetition of the spectral, is a nihilistic theatrical idiom. The conciliatory word is traversed by the incommensurate illocution of the wounded body. And through the inscriptions of violence, the body is as much a grapheme as is the word:

Turning Around Scars / 323 Which means before this word there was war and suffering wounds and traumas. So we would say according to the most indisputable common sense, that only a living being can be wounded, can receive and feel a wound, even if it be a mortal wound. A wound that, in the future, will inevitably lead to death. So lesion, blow, wound, trauma, gash, cut, graze, scratch, mutilation, incision, excision, circumcision; every imaginable wound only affects living tissue by leaving, at least within its own time frame, a scar. Even if “wound” is a biological term that refers to psychological or moral pain, spiritual suffering, phantasmic as we say, there is only a meaning to pardon, to reconciliation, there where the wound has left a memory, a trace, a scar to be healed or soothed or dressed.63

As archival substance these wounds, though inflicted on a living body, as Derrida stresses, are effectively dead memory, “phantasmatic,” the inert grapheme, substrate, and/or substance harbored and borne by the body as a structuring death in life that Derrida associates in part with the dead memory of the archival.64 The wound, the scar, temporalizes living tissue in its historicization of the body. The transgressed body or body politic archives itself in the scar; the whole is consigned to the part, a referral that marks both the assault and its aftermath. The wound, the scar, writing, and history become increasingly interchangeable and unfold as such in the comportment of the body divided within and against itself by the scar. Derrida’s understanding of the scar as historicity communicates with Foucault’s genealogy of the body as “a volume in perpetual disintegration.”65 The scar initially presents as a synchronic slice of disjunctive history and a dead time, a “sur-vival,” within the living present. The scarred can be read as reducible to their incision as a frozen mark, but the scar can reciprocally be a point of embarkation—the wounded and traumatic surface and interruptive ground from which the recipient of violence critically engages history. Scarification structures aesthesis from the time frame of a wounding/writing from under a flashing point of incision or stigmata as a moving inscriptive stylus of time such as the pierced sockets of Oedipus or the eye bisected by a razor blade in the opening scene of Un chien andalou: “Their empty and black globes [can] see the double bind admitting of no reconciliations, super-revelation or synthesis. They see the human condition, the clear knowledge of which is tragic knowledge.”66 The scar is a genesis that results from treating the body as a maneuverable object but in itself is not maneuverable. As such, historical scars cannot be erased from the body; they become a body, the sema as soma, and an archival volume, formed and hollowed out by violence, and revolving

324 / Chapter Six

around a wound as a cavity that cannot be encircled. The word of pardon is the circulation of the scar between flesh and breath across enunciating and auditing subjects, but this does not substantialize the bearer of such marks and sonics, turning the latter into a stable legal personality. The scar resists substance as it refuses closure and encirclement, refuses a closed embodiment, for it always entails a dislocation and internal dissociation of the body; the scar is a mode of motion of the body as historial. The disembodying/embodying scar is a concept thoroughly linked to the metaphysics of sensible substance, and its theory would include the mappable site of historicity itself. Historical-political scarification cannot be a maneuverable object of forgiveness, amnesty, indemnification, immunization, and reconciliation. Such historical suturing entails a rewriting of scars—in other words, a rescarification, both ceremonial and binding, as Loreaux stresses in her discussion of Athenian amnesty. Neither forgiveness nor reconciliation escapes the command and commencement of the scar, which is their condition of possibility, and which irrevocably embeds these gestures and acts in violence and not in the referentiality of the postviolent. When Loreaux declares that only memory can decree forgetting, she evokes the scarring that is historical memory, which commands forgetting as the scarification of memory. The scar is an originary act that founds the intelligibility of history, and in its incision simultaneously marks all such origination as displacement, separation, difference, and spacing, which cannot uphold any originary transparency for such history. The scar denies the recuperative circle to history; it is the mark of a decentered self-organizing contingency in which inception and repetition are fused in their mutual dislocation. The scar commands and commences the present and the future, bringing what and who it crosses, incises, and outlines into specific conditions of visibility and contiguity. Scarification partakes of many of the attributes of religious circumcision in Derrida’s thought, to the degree that these marks are doubled-edged and double binds. Circumcision and scarification are violent passages into the space of law and language as institutions that cut and demarcate the singularizing name and the exclusive community.67 The scar is a shibboleth that installs a possibility of community among those so marked and divided, an ethnicity, a race, a nationality, a belonging and nonbelonging. At the same time, the scar as media takes affective hostages and can mark and hook others when being re-marked, cited, spun out, spread, unspooled, and cast outward. One can be held hostage to, and conscripted by, the scar as culpability, guilt, and lack. Scarification is the grounding trace structure that marks a determinate ground.

Turning Around Scars / 325

The scar by where and how it is inscribed determines what is to be the ground; it can mark the body as ground with a grinding of that body to the ground. The scar is “the grounding of historical entities on other historical entities, which is to ground nothing at all.”68 The binding scar not only demarcates bodies, homely and foreign, but also engenders bodies to be allocated to either side of the scar as border— the body is not so much scarred as gestated from out of the excision of the inceptual cut. The scar as graphology is the naming and law of self and Other that constrains their identities to either side of a border behind which oppositional subjects become reciprocally visible, enframed, or invisible. The scar, then, is never strictly internal. As a grapheme it writes across bodies and subjects. Scarification, as much as it can signify a belonging, an interiority, also registers the entry and locus of the stranger. The embodied subject is opened and othered by the entry of a force that cuts, wounds, and scars simply by entering, and that is retroactively embodied by this very scarifying passage. The other’s passage across a body politic invokes the scarring of another pretextual and habituated scar—the crossable border as an incision firming up the divisibility of inside and outside, the principle of alien proximity itself. In scarification the crossed border is forcibly shifted and shattered from the known to the unknowable; the threshold becomes an X—an unnameable double scar. Perhaps this is why since 2001, if not before, the American southern border with Mexico has been escalated into a site of stark social suffering, vicious prohibition, and unwarranted death as a criminalized no-go war zone, inhabited by police, vigilantes, human traffickers, genocidal drug trafficking, corrosive walls, destitute and dying migrants, and lost children. It is a locale of minimal responsibility and responsivity, where it is a criminal offense to give someone who lacks proper papers a glass of water, food, or medical care. This border is the most severe of disaster zones, a scarified slow-war zone, and yet remains systematically unacknowledged as a crime against humanity that is guarded and maintained as such in the racialization of public safety. Self-Scarifying Anthropologies Self-scarifying crimes against humanity are the ultimate unlimited and intolerable repetition. This deficit evokes Mauss’s maxim that all systems of value equivalence begin in debt, in a privation, a subtraction and scar that can never be requited by any final reconciliation. The fiscal structure of crime and reconciliation speaks to the fiduciary inflection of humanization. The exemplifying victim becomes a circulating currency, the general

326 / Chapter Six

value equivalent that is expected to commensurate crime, debt, guilt, the inhuman and the human, the past and the present. The unlimited debt installed by crimes against humanity installs a sacrality of the victim as an ethical substance, as abstract value and as a cultural isomorphism and formal subsumption to which everything is owed as the stand-in of a universally slighted humanity. This reserved victimage refracts Kant’s synthesis of Christian metaphysics with money and law. These commensurating rationalities are forms of autonomous reason that abandon their material conditions of possibility.69 Exemplary victimage suspends multiplex history in frozen substances of categorization that open a theater of moral tableau. The accusation of crimes against humanity conscripts the exemplary victim who is a testimonial to the humanity of human beings, which is to testify “to universality, to responsibility for universality.”70 In transitional justice, this homo sacer, as victim/accuser and scar, steps forward as a differing in opposition to what has trespassed it, yet universally exhibiting that trespass and its inhuman criminality. Human sacrality is instated in the unforgivable in order to erect the victim as the memory of a dislodged integrity and wholeness. Humanitarian sacrality is barely legible outside the structures of antihuman criminality and its decisive and divisive scarification. This endowment of legibility is crucial and yet a diffraction. In being a prescriptive condition of human sacrality, the unforgivable, profaning, and antihuman crime defines a threshold, a limit experience and the curvature of anamnesis. Does this boundary, like Loreaux’s formalization of the unforgettable to be forgotten, expel a wider historical and semantic terrain of events, artifacts, and practices? Is the exemplary victim distilled from a wider empiricity and constituted as a scarifying rent in that jettisoned history? The nomination “crimes against humanity” refracts the loss of a loss—the crime and the profanation can be screened memories of, and missed encounters with, wider heteronomies of violence defaced by the forensic exposé of crime scenes and its will to claim only interrogatable, law-endowing objects. Humanizing forgiveness comes late and actually requires this nonarrival at the scene of disaster in order to identify, formalize, and address the properly unforgivable in all the senses of address: to identify, engage, to locate, to situate, and to mark as incision and excision. Derridean forgiveness, following Loreaux, thus forensically historicizes what counts and does not count as the unforgivable. Therefore, experiential violence and the unforgivable are neither symmetrical with nor reducible to each other—the decision on what is unforgivable leaves a divergence, a severance, an ethical excess, and a bifrontal history. Derrida demands the unconditionality of

Turning Around Scars / 327

forgiveness that implicitly buries the difference of the forgivable and the unforgivable in asserting the transcending aporia of his formula as the only truly ethical mode and threshold of forgiveness. However, forgiveness, in Foucauldian terms, is also the will to know the unforgivable, and as such it must produce the latter from a falsifying division of the true and the false, and right and nonright—what is rightly forgivable, what is rightly unforgivable, and what is neither. Forgiveness and criminalization are complicit in stabilizing the contours and meaning of the unforgivable and of history itself. Forgiving the unforgivable cauterizes the unforgivable, preventing a bleed-through of the latter and its thresholds into politically inconvenient and unforgiving terrains of the dehistoricized. Forgiveness may also indemnify the unforgivable, as in the granting of blanket amnesty to recently deposed or abdicating authoritarian regimes; this decision can be the unforgivable forgiving of the unforgivable. Derrida does not explicitly speak of the act of forgiving unforgivable forgiveness, but it is implied in his formulation of pardon and restorative justice, in which the latter itself may be in need of amnesty and reconciliation. The unforgivable is an injury to Arendtian human natality as appearance, possibility, and inception; humanity’s imputed reserved position is predicated on an ideal and unscarred natal antecedence as a given, which crimes against humanity deplete and suspend. However, unending “criminality” against human natality is both antihuman and silently antehuman, for it is unnameable before the advent of its criminalization by customary, natural, or positive law. The event that de jure is rendered an unforgivable act may be in actuality anterior to the humanizing project of its criminalization, though it is theologized and moralized as a derivative of the latter. In being prior to a law that criminalizes or the norm that links forgiveness to deity or humanity, the antihuman act would be neither lawfully forgivable nor unforgivable, nor even criminal. Is there a criminality anterior to the law, or does criminality coincide with a violence that founds law as its postlegal echo and archive? The performativity of self-incrimination seeks human genesis from out of the inhuman, which gives the latter a certain priority, if not an a priori status. Criminalization is deployed retroactively, like the pardon, as a technique of humanization by way of a detour through the inhuman—consider the time lag between an endless recession of assaults against humanity and the modernity of humanity’s confession of crimes against itself as noted by Derrida. The crime against humanity fabulates human precedence as utopian (eu-topos), as a non-place that interminable criminality both defaces and

328 / Chapter Six

preserves in its transgressive repetition. Inhuman criminality unfolds as a negative trace of, and perhaps our only link to, the humanitarian sacred. However, human natality has to be absolutized in order to arrest intolerable criminal repetition—to give its errancy a locus and a law. Human natality as the default commandment has to be placed before in order to come after crime in terms of an organizing chronology of anthropological injury and insult and its prosecution. Denial and lexical ambiguity unfold here; scarifying crimes against humanity cannot preexist human natal sacrality, yet they define and historicize the latter, sustaining it in a repetition, which then becomes a kind of regulative archive of anthropological conservation. Crime and the law of sacral/scarred humanity appear as coengendering yet self-canceling inceptions, implicitly pointing beyond their explicit moral grid, with its severe circularity. The crime against humanity and humanity’s sacral natality are diffractions of “disparate laws calling for an impossible common authority” and thereby reference no legal ultimacy or ground.71 Humanitarian oversight inhibits such archaeological exposure of heteronomy and mutual contingency by installing the precedence of human natality over its violation at the expense of petrifying both. Humanitarian ethics move invariably toward what Schürmann calls the “sun of the good” as a traumatropism, as a formative wound and lack, deposited in the monument, the commemorative, and the archival as traces of a decentered but recuperable human transcendence. Humanizing natality has to be arrested both within and against thanatological antihuman criminality; this petrified natality takes the form of the victim as the theatron or “seeing place,” as an ethical substance and stage that archives, receives the impress, and serves as the supporting substrate of both depleting criminality and remedial humanization. Here the victim as archive enables a ground view where humanity and scarification become essentially interchangeable. The canonical victim who can be nominated as a serviceable substrate, as an archive of various political wounds, desires, and satisfactions, is historically and symbolically petrified as “dead” in being made self-identical, complete, positivistic, and absolute. This thanatological humanity as ontological scar is the truly autonomous subject of ethics, which is why diverse political subjects can find unification and assembly within its rictus as a habitus for new aggressive agency. Unlike Athenian tragedy, the humanitarian rule of the living through the dead expresses not a disavowed yet enchaining fate or the chasm of an uninheritable past, but rather a prescriptive futurity. The strategic governmentality of the symbolic dead, discussed in chapter 3, is made up of the dead, cognate survivors, and the

Turning Around Scars / 329

deadening memory of the dead. The living rule the living through rule by the dead, which is rule by frozen thanatological logics, in which the dead become conscripts of sovereignty—the very political aporia confronted in The Antigone. Saidiya Hartman anticipates Antigone’s aporia in reference to the memorialization of Atlantic slavery: “Yet, the work of mourning is not without its perils, chief among these are the slippage between responsibility and assimilation and witnessing and incorporation. Can we mourn for those lost without assuming and usurping the place of the dead, and yet recognize that the injuries of racism tether us to this past? Does mourning necessarily entail the obliteration of the other through identification?”72 Rule by the dead is a problematic tableau that encompasses the memorializing ballistics of 9/11 war machines, the self-incineration of human suicide bombs, the archival ceremonies of both torture regimens and truth commissions, and the immunization of present war crimes in the name of genocides and catastrophes past. Government by the dead is both retrospective and an originating shibboleth that silences what precedes the partition of its emergence out of victims and scars deemed worthy of aggressive refunctioning. This governmentality of the dead installs an expansive apatê, an absolute virtualization that becomes a cultural isomorphism with universal spread and cover. Victim exemplification enables dominant moralities and sovereignties to be mapped onto the frozen ethical substance of the thanatological. Here the maximal victim is cut off from any singularity, including inadmissible, forgettable, and unforgivable victims, as all that which cannot be encompassed in its masterful arrangement. Extending the work of Michael Warner on the mediatic embodiment of the mass subject and Hal Foster on the genesis of the latter in the mass consumption of catastrophe, I suggest that humanitarian sacrality is made through theaters of transverse idealization, what Michael Taussig describes as the hallucinogenic recreation of the self in the antiself of the therapeutic and homeopathic victim.73 Humanitarian transference is mapped onto and witnessed through the prostheticizing body of the exemplary victim as the container, screen, and finite visibility of unlimited crimes against humanity. A technicity of repetition is necessary to the exemplification of victimage. As Foster puts it, the mass consumer of catastrophe, of “traumatic realism,” constructs itself through the technically reproducible and telegenic suffering Other—technical mimesis becomes the hidden crime scene, the missed encounter, that comes after an unavailable traumatizing event. Foster stresses that this is not a representation directly indexing an autonomous reality, but rather a compulsive repetition at the level of technique—a series of punctuations that reveal nothing but the impossibil-

330 / Chapter Six

ity of referential return or recuperation. Foster stresses that this catastrophilia does not deliver the real, only a repetition drive from which historical transformation is precluded: The mass subject cannot have a body except the body it witnesses . . . disaster and death were necessary to evoke this subject, for in a spectacular society the mass subject often appears as an effect of the mass media, or of a catastrophic failure of technology (the plane crash), or more precisely, of both (the news of such catastrophic failure) . . . in its guise as witness the mass subject reveals its sadomasochistic aspect, for this subject is often split in relation to a disaster; even as he or she may mourn the victims, even identify with them masochistically, he or she may also be thrilled sadistically by the victims of whom he or she is not one.74

For Foster, transverse idealization is not fully identical with reciprocating empathy with the victim, which is only a provisional reassuring entry point. Empathy here is normation and elevating homogenization of the victim through the pathos of sensorial distance, which furthers the inspectacularity of the victim as occupying a site where the idealizing agent is not but over which the mass witness of victimage exercises a will to truth. The hypostatic and telegenic victim divorces tragedy’s pathemata mathemata, learning from suffering, from apatê, persuasive artificed representation. Rather, transverse idealization provisions the body politic of the mass witness with autoimmunity through controlled apotropaic dosages of the catastrophic. The exemplary victim is amplifiable and circulated by various mediatic techniques that securitize mass witness, and all that it makes possible, through the prospect of virtualized, containable, and consumable inhuman damage. As surely as it may justly condemn a perpetrator, the proscenium of the victim reciprocally inoculates the consumers of social suffering—history and morality become triangulated by the victim, the convicted, and the ethically excused. For Foster, the “catastrophilic” object makes the disjuncture between referential representation or reproduction and self-referential repetition—the automaton as an effigy in relation to an absence. Repetition is understood as a substantializing motion at the level of technique under which empathic affect is subsumed. The traumatizing/ traumatized technical repeating of the maximalized victim returns us to an Aristotelian teleocratic model of the political in which the exemplary victim functions as a donating and autarchic substance that is artificed as such by violence and by subsequent mimetic appropriation.

Turning Around Scars / 331

A performance culture of traumatic realism is discernible in some of the earliest episodes of witnessing crimes against humanity. According to Houston A. Baker, writing of abolitionist gatherings of the nineteenth century, escaped slave narratives were, in great measure, extensions of the active oratorical and dramatic roles played by ex-bondsmen in the abolitionist movement. The most important presence at any public abolitionist gathering was that of the former slave. The proof of American slavery’s horrendous effects could be dramatically exhibited by requesting the fugitive to turn his naked back to the audience, displaying for all to see the permanent disfiguration caused by the overseer’s and the slave driver’s whips. The less visible psychic scars caused by slavery could be made manifest, however, only through the vivid, thrilling, first person oratory of the bondsman. Most authors of slave narratives had told their stories innumerable times at abolitionist meetings before committing their accounts to writing. They had to be skillful users of language indeed to convey their messages effectively at these assemblies.75

The fusion of linguistic performance and bodily exposure unfolds a theater of hierarchical observation and authentication. The nineteenth-century abolitionist audience, clothed in middle-class, religious, and liberal rectitude and relatively insulated from day-to-day violence, witnesses the slave’s authentication of his or her spoken biography through the naked and scarred black body. The ex-slave is endowed with the status of speaking subject, but his or her testimony both originates in and requires the supplemental archive of the subjugated, disfigured body for an adjudicating spectatorship invested in the refracted disturbance offered by that body. The full circuit of authentication requires the targeting gaze of the audience of racially removed witness, which instates the peculiar legibility of the black body and its subordinate and somatically contingent voice. The testimonial mise-enscène described by Houston Baker follows the will to truth of abolitionist witness as a vertical descent into a doubly estranged embodiment (black and scarred) that qualifies as Taussig’s hallucinogenic recreation of the self in the antiself. Page duBois stages a profound anterior encounter with this epistemology of witnessing the slave in classical Athenian democracy, which juridically tortured slaves for their involuntary and supposedly unmediated and thus truthful testimony. For duBois, slave torture subordinated the extraction of information to the dramatization of who counted as a citizen and

332 / Chapter Six

who did not—only the citizen was immunized from torture, this indemnification was reenacted in the suffering inflicted on the slave. DuBois says of this will to truth: “the dominant spatial model for the approach to truth appears to be the . . . descent into darkness and re-emergence into light.”76 Taussig follows an analogous migration of colonizers who, rather than juridical redress, seek shamanic healing from Native Americans or ex-slaves in colonial Colombia: “How often we have been told that rites enforce solidarity, bringing people together affirming their unity, their interdependence, the commonwealth of their sentiments and dispositions. But what are we to make of rites such as this wherein the Indian heals the souls of the colonist? Surely the healing here depends far more on the existence, the reproduction, and the artistry of difference as otherness and as oppression than it does on solidarity ? .  .  .  [Such a dynamic displays] the colonized turning back to the colonizer the underside of this hate and fear congealed in the imagery of savagery.”77 We cannot suspend the historical contexts of the archaeologists of this epistemic model of subjugated truth, which render these scenes as both historically situated and disemic strata as allegories of a present moment. DuBois’s analysis, in particular, interfaces and montages antiquity and the modern without the distortion or moralism of presentism. At the antebellum gatherings of the abolitionists, the ex-slave has been brought to view from out of natal alienation and from out of “southern” slavocracy, but even in the North, in the predominantly white abolitionist forum, the black condition remains one of inherited and chronic alienability. In recounting the biography of oppression, the ex-slave may translate body into speech, but this is received by the spectators, despite any eloquence, as a hypersomaticized speech, what is today ethnocentrically labeled and ghettoized as “traumatized.” In order to address white public space, the African voice must anchor itself in the exposition of the body, thereby enabling a colonizing gaze to descend into this striated materiality. The testifying, and now free, ex-slave still needs to underwrite his or her speech with the scarified body—which the ex-slave both reclaims and loses in a single gesture. This somaticized speech and truth are precipitated from out of a black body for a white audience-seeking vicarious witness through scopic reembodiment in the other. The slave’s exposed/composed body mediates here between the abolitionist and the slave master, between the remedial witness and the perpetuator, fusing the gaze and bodies of both through the grillwork, interface, and interraciality of the scar. DuBois, thinking through an analogous subsumption of the Athenian slave’s body as a text written by torture, is compelled to ask

Turning Around Scars / 333 What kind of truth is the slave’s truth? Aristotle says of the relationship between slave and master: “The slave is a part of the master—he is, as it were, a part of the body, alive [empsukhon tí] but yet separated [kekhôrismenon] from it (Politics 1255b).” Thus, according to Aristotle’s logic . . . the slave’s truth is the master’s truth; it is in the body of the slave that the master’s truth lies, and it is in torture that his truth is revealed. The torturer reaches through the master to the slave’s body, and extracts the truth from it. . . . The body of the tortured . . . on the rack, on the wheel, under the whip assumes a relationship to truth. Truth is constituted as residing in the body of the slave; because he can apprehend reason, without possessing reason. . . . Truth, alêtheia, comes from elsewhere, from another place, from the place of the other.78

In the nineteenth-century abolitionist oration, the theatricized exposition of the scarred body of the ex-slave stands in a relation to the exhibition of the slave’s body as a commodity on the auction block. There is a reversal of the relation between body and speech in abolitionist testimony. From the Middle Passage through the journey of the slave coffle to the auction block, the enslaved was moved from language to the body, from a speaking subject to a reduced mute bodily object as chattel property. The abolitionist auditing of testimony reversed that passage, moving the ex-slave from the body to language—but that passage had to be rendered tangibly visible, even spectacular, in such a manner as to always anchor slave vocality and slave reason in the convergence of race and embodied frontality—race as the frontal circumcision of a body as a recuperable archive in white public space. There occurs a median locus where these exposures of the slave’s body as coerced and surveilled productive labor, or as credible witness to that subjugation, combine into a stereoscopic image that anchors remedial witnessing and inflicted violence to a common teleocratic and raced substance. The gaze of the white abolitionist witness, like duBois’s juridical torturer, reaches through the ex-slave’s body and scars to the truth of the violence of the former master in a scarifying scopic collaboration. In the nineteenth-century abolitionist, meeting a sovereign gaze required the mediated violence formative of the enslaved and tortured black body for instating its own relation to truth. In antebellum abolitionist theaters, the slave’s body still confessed a truth about the slave master and displayed the master’s will, conjoining it with the will to truth of the imputed benevolent masters of his freedom. As Hartman states in reference to other, related raced spectacles: “These performances of blackness are in no way the ‘possession’ of the enslaved. They are enactments of social struggle and contending articulations of racial meaning.”79

334 / Chapter Six

With the epistemology of the slave we are confronted with a returning and transhistorical archaeology of what Foster terms “traumatic realism,” which calls up an enchaining hauntology of the catastrophilia of the contemporary televisual spectator: the ailing colonizer and therapeutic colonized of Colombia, the liberal piety of the abolitionist theater in antebellum America, and the juridical torture of slaves under Athenian democracy. This transhistorical trajectory, which cannot be collapsed into evolutionary continuism, unfolds a discontinuous stratigraphy of the humanitarian gaze and its antecedents and antithetical forms as a traumatic and traumatizing lookout devolved, in part, from structures of psychoeconomic subjugation. DuBois’s dissection of the architecture of this will to truth is particularly poignant, for it privileges the interspatial passage, above the visual and linguistic elements, that are undoubtedly present in such a manner as to abrogate any clear demarcation between interior cognition and the topographic invasion of foreign bodies and terrains. In reference to the Athenian juridical torture of slaves she concludes: “At another extreme of this spatial model is the idea of truth hidden and buried. . . . Seeking the truth may involve a journey, a passage through a spatial narrative . . . a sinking down into the past, into the interiority of memory. This model of truth seeking is consistent with other such paradigms already suggested . . . where . . . the violence of the torturer is thought to be necessary to enforce the production of truth from the slave. . . . The slave’s body is thus construed as one of these sites of truth, like . . . the underworld, the interiority of the woman’s body, the elsewhere toward which truth is always slipping.”80 The Victim of the Victim I am provisionally concerned here less with the undeniably horrific, oppressive, and unjust manufacture of victims en masse than with victimage as the abstract, alienated, and congealed involuntary labor product of mass suffering as amplified and circulated by attentional machines—statist, mediatic, and humanitarian. To the degree that violence is a pivotal point of the victim’s inception, superlative victimage underwrites the social mastery of violence through empathic and depictive mastery over the violated exemplar. We have witnessed the post–9/11 ideological fusion of humanitarian restoration, superlative victimage, and militarized regime change as a new technical mode of weaponized restorative justice. The war on terror demonstrates that democracy’s ethic of self-limitation does not necessarily perform nonviolence but rather commits violence as a supposedly exemplary medium of technopolitical control expressive of a sovereignty over

Turning Around Scars / 335

limits. Democracy can universally inflict a “humanitarian” limit, such as regime change, as the measure of its lack of limits in allocating the good extracted from it exemplary victims. American democratic technicity can then present as the fusion of ballistics and ethics in which exported wars for democratization become the proportionate aggregation and distribution of the political good mediated by triggered ordinance, pattern bombing, robotic target acquisition, and utilitarian “collateral damage” legitimated by the superlative victim. The moral anthropology that sustains the ideality of the canonical victim mediates and masters violence itself through the victim’s technical repetition as both the container and containment of force, damage, power, and destitution. Transverse idealization of the victim, from orchestrated commemoration (collective mourning) to traumatic anticipation (terror alerts), leaps over itself into the hyperperformance and overdrive of idealized violence. Technical mastery over the repeatability of victimage in all its idioms, trajectories, scripts, and guises is externalized in the manufacture of exemplified perpetrators as targets in which the eventual historical recuperation of the exemplary victim is lodged. There is a dialectical rapport between the superlative victim and an equally productive seriality of structuring enemies that enables the translation of mastering memory and mourning into masterful warfare. I do not seek here to historically invalidate social suffering, subjugation, or terror, but to excavate those utilities and filtering pedagogies that have been conscripted to serve and support exemplary victimage. I do, however, seek to question any assumption of the unmediated universality of exemplified victimage(s) in reference to the anonymity of the manifold and disparate singularities that are jettisoned from this black box of anthropological self-recuperation. The ethical command to identify with the exemplary and absolute victim coincides with an ethical bifurcation; this division, according to Schürmann, is “the decisive cut to promote a common noun capable of laying down the law.”81 Transverse idealization of political selfhood through the historically damaged antiself partitions and empirically allocates ethical practice, objects, and sites through the filtering excision of moral landscapes into sensible victims and the insensible Other of the victim. The Other of the qualified victim is not the assailant (who is coupled with and dialectically defines the exemplar), but rather Edward Said’s “victim of the victim.”82 A univocal superlative victim can be sustained by the denial of a diffracted Other, the victim of the victim, thereby instituting tragic differing and reversal. Consider the exiled Palestinians of the Nakba, politically and ethically asphyxiated by Israeli settler colonialism normatively indemnified by the Holocaust; the ANC’s pro-

336 / Chapter Six

longed disavowal of those affected and infected by HIV/AIDS in postapartheid, post–truth commission South Africa; and the collaterally damaged of Iraq and Afghanistan, whose moral defacement is erected from the nationalized ground zero and 9/11 dead: “A prosthetic strategy of repetition inhabits the very movement of life: life is a process of self-replacement; the handing-down of life is a mechanike, a form of technics. Not only, then, is technics not in opposition to life, it also haunts it from the very beginning.”83 The replaceable and defaceable victim of the victim becomes the externalized cost of the production of the latter’s exemplarity. Said’s victim of the victim is literally the loss of loss—the dehistoricized, appositional, and unrepeatable alter who is barred from exemplification as an inadmissible historical contaminant. Foster speaks of the political reversioning of traumatic affliction by mass-mediatic technical iteracy, which instates and perpetuates a missed or screened encounter with the Real. It is at this site of misencounter that Said’s victim of the victim can be encountered as an infrapolitical and interspatial exile and deportee, an entity who is intrinsic to the historical real but who cannot be historically represented without putting institutionalized and utilitarian exemplarities into crisis. Said describes Palestinians as the victims of an Israeli “survivor state,” wherein Israeli citizenship is identical with universal catastrophe, past, present, and future. Derrida’s technicity of handing down bare life through replacement is discernible in Foster’s technical reproduction of catastrophic life, which in turn encompasses the modus operandi of nationalist catastrophilia attributed by Said to the hypostatic survivor state. Humanization through canonical victimage performs anthropology by theatrical scenes and screens in order to secure self-containment for a victimage-centered survivor state.84 In militarizing humanitarian crimes as utilitarian ethics, the survivor state desubjectifies as much as it ethically subjectifies. Transverse idealization installs an enclosed theater of the unforgettable and the unforgivable and in so doing indemnifies its own terror in silence. Like Lyotard’s filtering “set up of the politeia” and Rancière’s “aesthetics of the sensible,” the superlative victim as a reified proscenium, as a seeing place, requires offsite dehistoricization and insensibility. Forgettable or unrepeatable victims of the victim are subjected to a triple defacement: their initial assault, accompanied by their juridical-moral erasure, and the likelihood of ongoing exposure to a chronic future of effaced backspace decimation. Hypostatic victimage is a shield, a barrier, an indivisible line not against the inhumane, but against a nonidentity that is both the by-product of and provocation for a humanitarian economy of the exemplary. Derrida writes:

Turning Around Scars / 337

“In each case the structure of exemplarity (single or multiple) is unique thereby prescribing a different affect. And in each example it remains to be decided what example is to be made of the example: is it to be dropped as extrinsic excrement or retained as intrinsic ideality?”85 The exemplary victim who recapitulates a philosophical anthropology in its scars encapsulates disidentity as both contingent particularity and as universal. This disidentity must be submitted to various theatrical-iconic procedures of unification and solidification. The enshrinement of the exemplary victim erects an uncuttable boundary. Consider the position advanced by the Clinton administration concerning the 1994 massacres of Tutsi in Rwanda on what did and did not constitute actionable genocide. The Clinton presidency drew a juridical border between systemic genocide and episodic “acts of genocide” as a relation between a whole and desemanticized parts; the administration deemed only mass-produced and state-designed genocide actionable.86 American inaction implicitly cited the industrialized murder of the Holocaust as constituting the metric for all mass crimes against humanity. In the Clinton administration’s distinction between genocide as processual system and disorganized, episodic “acts of genocide,” the Holocaust functioned as an enabling architecture of exemplarity that disqualified and jettisoned the assaults on Rwandan Tutsi. The Holocaust was here instituted as a trans-ascendant norm, repeating its exceptionality as a validating or invalidating predicate of humanitarian crime. Precedential victimage circumcises in its cutting out of indicative from nonindicative victims. This would be the Kantian relation of the parergon and the ergon, the frame and the work that is framed, of exemplifier and exemplified. The Latin roots of “example” and “exemplar” are exemplum and eximĕre, meaning to take out, to exempt, something taken out as a sample or specimen, a type, and a model figure. For the Clinton administration, the Rwandans, in their nonexemplary killing and dying, did not conserve the rules of genocide as established by the rationalizing technocrats of the Holocaust. Here the exemplary victim functions as the frame, proscenium, aperture, and shrine that demarcates between the interiority and exteriority of the humanitarian: “A parergon is against, beside and above and beyond the ergon, the work accomplished, the accomplishment of the work. But it is not incidental; it is connected to and cooperates in its operation from the outside. [.  .  .] If the parergon, this supplementary hors d’oeuvre, has something like the status of a philosophical concept, then it must designate a general formal predicative structure which may be carried over, either intact or consistently deformed, reformed, to other fields, where new contents may be submitted to it.”87 Victimage is enframed and staged by a

338 / Chapter Six

supervening exteriority that defines intrinsic, anchoring elements and conservational rules, written or unwritten, while consigning a remainder to the nonexemplary and to excrement. The exemplar moves through the maximalized victim, as the victim in a state of exception in regard to the dissuasive disarray of victims, who are passed by and submitted to the doubleentry bookkeeping of excrement. Exemplarity installs what example is to be made of the example, which rules are to be followed in determining which instances of victimage are to be rendered unforgivable and unforgettable or not. As for the nonexemplary and deframed victim of the victim, Loreaux’s dictum bears repeating: only memory can decree and frame forgetting. Derrida writes, “Actually, the frame warps as it works. As a locus of work, an origin is structurally bordered with surplus value, that is, exceeded on both sides by that which it exceeds, in effect it warps. Like wood. It splits, breaks down, breaks up, at the same time that it cooperates in the production of the product, it exceeds it and deducts itself. It never simply exposes itself.”88 In the field of violence, the parergon of exemplarity either touches and warps a body as its frame outline and mold, or it finds nothing enclosable therein. Intrinsicality communicates with duplicability, repetition, with the supplementary conservation of a property and thus with the proper and appropriable victim—and, conversely, with the disframing of a dissuasive or nonproprietary victim. Thus the Clinton administration was able to parse genocide from acts of genocide in a discourse on intrinsicality versus extrinsicality in order to legitimate inaction and ethical abandonment in the name of a humanitarian standard. The figures that exemplify and those that do not both support exemplarity; in the latter case the frame jettisons, regurgitates, drops “as extrinsic excrement” something that is unpalatable in order to sustain the enframed and the deducting authority of enframing. I am concerned here with the aesthetics and inaesthetics of mass victimage, of crimes against those not allowed to claim slighted humanity and memory in the aesthesis of history. Alternately, the parergonal frame, in infringing on the ergon, the victim’s body enframed and interiorized, is invasive and scathing; it sinks into the exemplifiable body as informed matter, inscribing universality into the singular body, making it container and containable—thus putting the victim to work through a politically ergonomic scarification. Derrida’s concept of “the unopposable other of the other” communicates with Said’s “victim of the victim” and is applicable to those disqualified from exemplarity: “Each time the decision concerns the choice between the relation to an other who is its other (that is to say an other that can be opposed in a couple) and the relations to a wholly non-opposable

Turning Around Scars / 339

other, that is, an other that is no longer its other. What is at stake in the first place is therefore not the crossing of a given border. Rather, at stake is the double concept of the border, from which this aporia comes to be determined.”89 The imagery here, like the parergonal frame, is deliberately spatial and topographical, the nonopposable Other of the Other subsists beyond interiority/exteriority and exemplification. The victim of the victim as the nonopposable Other of an exemplified subject is demapped and disframed by the totality of the politically opposable. Political dualism, such as the friend/enemy coordinate, erases that which is neither interior nor exterior but which is withdrawn from the very possibility of political opposability. This is the “double concept” of the border as the line/law that conditions and foregrounds the exemplary and is tacitly or negatively outlined in itself by an ab-sense that borders that border. Derrida punningly riddles: “What is at stake, in the first place?” The stake implants, cuts, circumcises, territorializes, and claims its place as first, as arkhé (origin, rule, commencement, and command), and in doing so is staked as a boundary over the Other of the Other, consigning the latter to the unlocatable, beyond this cartography of inside/outside, of a governing firstness and its derivatives. All of this apportionment is possible only because the model of the line, law, or scar that is staked, drawn, and traced assumes original and sovereign indivisibility; how else can it commence, command, shield, protect, and perform what Derrida calls the “being-oneself of anything”? This is the operative ground of the edge line; from a site of imputed indifference the parergon confers, keeps apart, and relates the differential interiority and exteriority of atrocity and terror. The critique of the uncuttable and indivisible border leads to the antipolitical (neither nonpolitical nor apolitical), raising the image of the border of the border, which implicitly asks whether there can be a politics without the line and without the propriety and property of the border. What would such a politics be that abjures the defining felicities of anchoring partitions such as Schmitt’s friend/ enemy dichotomy, humanity/inhumanity, and anthropology/animality, particularly once it is clarified that they do not rest on any transhistorical ground? By bordering the entire concept of the humanitarian border, the unmappable and unframeable victim of the victim is the nonplace where it is no longer possible to constitute the opposability of the humanitarian and the inhuman, or criminality and juridical sacrality as the architecture of the unforgettable and the unforgivable. The nonopposable Other of the Other exceeds the practices of substitution, projection, and prosthesis that constitute the border raids of the humane and the inhumane, the friend and the enemy. The victim of the victim redefines a totalizing humanitar-

340 / Chapter Six

ian politics as a regional map of opposability in being unthinkable and unpresentifiable within it. Tragic Anthropologies I have adjoined and disjoined Attic tragic theater and concurrent practices of Athenian political amnesty as multiple vantage points from which to witness “modern” humanitarian justice events. I have been in search of the normative anthropologies, visualities, and time signatures that are generated, inherited, and disinherited by the witness of damaging force; my stress here is not so much on literary or legal scripting, but on the mekhane of showing and making known and on the mesh of conflictual gazes— mythic, humanitarian, civic, democratic, juridical, theological, gendered, and racial—which shaped the staging of the witness of violence in these disparate yet imbricating theaters of law and ethicality. Truth commissions and war crimes tribunals, in adhering to positive law, event histories, and confessional truth procedures, generate aporias inadmissible to the procedural and juridical norms and practices of such inquiries. Many of these impassable issues were confronted by the moral imagination of Attic tragedy, which was not structured as a truth procedure but rather staged various truth procedures—religion, law, medicine, sovereignty, riddling, oaths, divination, and kinship—embroiled in fatal agon and lexical and indexical incommensurability. My own staging of these theaters of witnessed violence gravitates to the question of how violence is constituted at the unstable fault line between anomic repetition (as violating chronic force) and nomothetic repetition (recuperating anamnesis and prescriptive mimesis), between repetition as dike and as adikia. Opposability and nonopposability, law and nonlaw (which is not reducible to criminality) imply that the tragic scene cannot be restricted to the certifying agon of binary conflict, but rather traverses the difference between the pseudo-totality of opposability and the singularized fragments of the nonopposable. The unfolding of witnessing in Attic tragedy and transitional justice has been diversely mediated by radical contingencies in which witnessing as a sovereign act is conditioned, traced, and traversed by testimonial and archival failure—by sovereignties of silence. The decision to stage the witnessing of violence generates supplementary and often violent decisions concerning the act of witness. The ordeal of witnessing in its very undergoing is the excision of witnessing, in its concept and practice, its scarification, particularly when what is at stake is the giving of witness to the scar itself:

Turning Around Scars / 341 Tragedy traces out something like a path of sight. The hero sees the laws in conflict. Then—this is the moment of tragic denial—he blinds himself towards one of them, keeping his gaze fixed on the other. Armies and cities have lived, and continue to live, within the shadow of this blindness. Then follows a catastrophe that opens his eyes: this is the moment of tragic truth. The vision of irreconcilable differing takes his sight away (even gouges his eyes out, as was the case for Oedipus and in another way for Tiresias) and it singularizes the hero to the point that the city has no room for him any longer. From denial to recognition, blindness is transmuted. His orbits empty, Oedipus sees a normative double bind, i.e., tragic differing.90

In the above passage Reiner Schürmann maps out the consequences of blind fidelity to the nomic single bind, which can be reelaborated with more stress on preserving certain sustaining dualities, such as perpetuator/ victim, triumph/defeat, and state/family. Such dualities comprise a totalized arc of opposability as a closed agonistic circle. Tragic peripeteia (reversal) and homonumia or lexical ambiguity are contingent on the protagonists’ erection of incommensurable theaters as walled-in spaces of interiority and meta-interiority—horizon lines of the politically visible beyond which lie the plural illegibilities beyond the political. Schürmann identifies this singularization with the implosion of binaries. However, this chiasmus also demarcates what is ethically exemplary from what is not and delimits what is worthy of agonal interface from what is not. Asymmetrical war, as in the clash of Kreon and Antigone, is not simply the agon between two or more politically, morally, technically, or numerically unequal parties; rather, it is war against asymmetry itself, as that which threatens the very being of the political. Can the blind adherence to the single bind be recast not as fidelity to one law at the sacrifice of another, but as adherence to the lawful at the cost of that which lies beyond the opposition of legality and illegality? This would be the surplus and border logic of a nonlaw from which the very laws of exemplarity and the exemplarity of law derive. Reading the normative single bind in terms of what it screens off is to focus not just on political blindness, but on the blindness of the political. The transitional justice project as ideology and event is potentially transected by another recessed, silenced, and withdrawn beginning that is deeply enmeshed in violence and memory. Athenian tragic theater was a democratic institution that hesitated before teleocratic truth procedures such as the canonical victim—neither proactive Antigone nor Oedipus falls under the shelter of pure victimage. The contemporary forensic project of rejoining broken time that drives restorative justice and that is pledged to

342 / Chapter Six

the exemplary victim is the very mismeasure that suffered normative fracture in the tragedies of Oedipus and Antigone: Man is the calculative animal insofar as in all metaphysical economies— whether Greek or technological—the relations that link entities have been fixed in reference to him and therefore remain more than ever equalizing. So understood as adjustment to man, justice . . . the truth of truth . . . has remained the chief tool of equalization throughout the epochs. The elevation of the theoretical gaze towards the sun of the Good, the soul’s road to the Good . . . are so many incidences of the one categorical trait which becomes full fledged in contemporary standardization and normalization . . . justice is the conversion of everything without remainder into values of the will, it is the willful transformation into stock (Bestandigung). Willful homogenization is part of the very project of preservation and enhancement that defines the will to power.91

Schürmann pushes the problem of justice in tragedy and modernity beyond measure, ratio, historicism, assimilation, deification, unification, and simplification; tragedy offers an interdicting ironic reversal to the action of thinking our present moment as modalities of adjustment and normalization. “What is, then, while the struggle for the standards set by archai—by ultimate referents, normative loci, and hegemonic phantasms—withers away? What comes to be is the possibility that an older, more hidden struggle can openly flare up: that of the event of appropriation-expropriation, whose essence is the tragic.”92 Lacan stresses the clash of heteronomic truth procedures when relating the tragic imagination to modernity and implicitly anticipates both the continuities and disjuncture that bind and unbind tragedy to contemporary humanitarian justice projects. For Lacan, Athenian tragedy itself is a haunting nonsynchronicity speaking with atonal dissonance to our present. The contemporary estrangement from tragedy is linked to the inception of Western metaphysics, which began with jettisoning the equivocality of tragedy in favor of the distributive “ethics of the universal good” that currently drives the transitional justice project and related humanitarian interventions: “Thus before the ethical progression from Aristotle to Kant leads us to make clear the identity of law and reason, doesn’t the spectacle of tragedy reveal to us in anticipation the first objection? The good cannot reign over all without an excess emerging whose fatal consequences are revealed to us in tragedy.”93 The contemporary promotion of the good of all is a law without limits, a unilateral law that precludes the violent return of the

Turning Around Scars / 343

limit, actualized in Athenian theater by the reversibility of speech, and memory as the collision of the incommensurate and a politics of unilaterality and dualities. Lacoue-Labarthe opens the problematic of delinearizing the historicization of Athenian tragedy that entrenched the ethics of the good, by asserting metaphysics was “set up” against the moral imagination of tragedy: “Depending on the emphasis brought to bear on this ‘against’ and the interpretation it is given, either tragedy potentially bears hidden in it the entire unfolding of philosophy (this being the dialectical version); or tragedy is a document more ancient or archaic than philosophy, before which the latter serves as a screen.”94 This analysis implies the failure to completely jettison the aporias raised by the tragic imagination regarding the cultural isomorphism of the good. The persistence of a tragic double bind permits the disinternment of Athenian tragedy from its regional site and from a certain historicization of that site, propelling it into the present as a discordant afterimage—a returning ghost. In this approach tragedy is dislodged from any classicism, for as a diremptive optic, Schürmann writes, tragedy “strips this world, forever and from all time, of its reconciling, consoling and consolidating foci.”95 Lacoue-Labarthe elaborates on this future anteriority, “the will have come of tragedy,” which he connects to the chronicity of the political terror that contemporary transitional justice strives to encapsulate: According to a historical and rigorously Heideggerian logic, the “prior to” of tragedy signifies its “ahead-of-ness” [son “en avant”]; tragedy harbors a “non-thought-of” [un impensé] (that is, a thought-of, une pensée), which, having never been correctly thought, still awaits that “thought” and, as such, configures a “thought-to-come.” I employ the Heideggerian vocabulary but such is the very structure of the relation that exists between knowledge and non-knowledge. Tragedy is beyond the line or barrier at the edge of which a possible crossing point is glimpsed but above all hoped for . . . the line to be crossed is “the barrier erected by the structure of the world of the good.” And if the line is to be crossed, it is because “the sphere of the good erects a strong wall across the path of our desire” [quoting Lacan]. Desire is the enemy of the good, that is to say, of pleasure. But this line is a historical frontier, which, as we know, concerns “what happens in the world” today. Underlying the malaise detected by Freud, this means that the world of the good is historically revealed to be the world of radical evil as epitomized not only by the famous reversibility of “Kant with Sade” but also by the unending murders under the reign of the politics of happiness (because the morality of the good, in order to preserve itself, only engenders a politics).96

344 / Chapter Six

For Lacoue-Labarthe, the condition of being after tragedy ignites “the question of a return to that which was ‘prior to’ the ethics of the good, that is, of a return all the way to its very possibility.”97 As Schürmann notes, “In the most brutally subsumptive single bind lies the opportunity of remembering a more ancient double bind.”98 Under the contemporary ethics of the good, the tragic loses all specificity and is currently marketed as a media sensation, traumatic realism, or as the insensate, emptied of meaning and historicity by being reduced to one-sided anguishing and abyssal privation divorced from ethical tutelage. In contrast, Lacoue-Labarthe’s “line to be crossed” carries with it all the resonances of cultural repression and the political unconscious and thereby pinpoints the voice of dread underneath the incessant murmuring of our securitizing machines. The tragic is with us yet, bracketed by a morality that divorces it from the political— a double disavowal, since the kernel of tragic sensibility is the unbidden consequences of holding to a unilateral moral limit. Lacoue-Labarthe considers the Kantian imperative of the good to be opposed to the repetition of durable desire and yet complicit with the duplication of “unending murders” associated with genocide, totalizing regimes, political purges, and impending nuclear annihilation. The ethics of the good, like Plato’s pharmakon, deals in double prescriptions, curative and toxic scripts that retract their manifest conferral of benefit. The imperial distribution of goods holds us to a single bind in which one region of liberal experience has been economically, juridically, and militarily maximalized and enforced as a globalizing illiberality culminating in the perverse violence of the humanitarian. Cultural isomorphism in the war on terror, or in the proxy militarization of fratricidal conflicts, produces a bifrontality through which integrative violence disintegrates into the “collateral damage” of its ethical sectarianism. Beyond humanitarian anthropology as a politics of totalizing opposability to the inhuman lies the encounter with irreconcilable differing, not only as stasis or stalemate but as a forward movement in time, that is, as a “practicopoietical action” that opens the heteronomic history of “(in)humanity.”99 Castoriadis writes of this counteranthropological praxis: Tragedy, and more particularly, Antigone, presupposes precisely the man of deinotës, who culminates in and destroys himself with hubris. . . . The central idea of this choral song is heralded in the first two lines, polla ta deina kouden anthrôpou deinoteron pelei. These two lines immediately open up for us several questions. The key word in these lines is obviously the untranslatable deinos. (Heidegger renders it by the very inadequate das Unheimliche [the uncanny],

Turning Around Scars / 345 which neglects the central significations of the word; and his French translator widens the gap by rendering Unheimliche as inquiétant [disturbing]). . . . Sophocles . . . not only is not always obliged to choose among the various meanings of a word but obviously, most of the time, does not choose. He is able and he is willing to give them all together. Deinos is he who quite rightly provokes terror, fear, fright—he is terrible, terrifying, dangerous. From there one is led, by one of the most beautiful productions of meaning in Greek, to extraordinarily strong, powerful, astonishing, admirable and probably also strange.100

Castoriadis reads Sophocles’ Ode to Man through the play of polysemic terms derived from deos, signifying fear: to deinon, deinos, (superlative deinotaton), the (most) awesome, the surpassing and the terrible, the dreadable, the uncanny, and the strangest of the strange. Deinos as both achievement and destitution invokes anthropological indeterminacy and the effraction of humanity’s imputed teleological pathways. This self-surpassing awesome, disturbing, and shocking creature is not the subject of a celebratory idealizing humanism. Rather, the uncanny and the estranged are but the desublimated return and repetition of the familiar in its repressed or denied and unbidden form, such as that which blurs the border between accusatory humanity and criminalized inhumanity. In tragic action there is no progression or pathway, no real crossing or stepping across a border; one is in law or the human and simultaneously outside law and humanity. There is no border of the deinon, no being-athome and then being-not-at-home as the encounter with the uncanny and in the fearsomeness of political self-construction. Pathetic recognition merely traverses the political cartography of the uncanny that was always there, buried like a derelict stratigraphy under normalizing fidelity to the single bind. The fearsomeness of political self-constitution ex nihilo, which Castoriadis associates with democracy, perdures beneath and beyond the symbolic order of norm giving. Deinon captures the paradox of selfinstitution, of political limits and the bearing of the universal by an agent that appears to have no limitation, and who consequently collides with catastrophic singularity. Tragic action as the blind and disavowed crossing of limits converges with what Castoriadis describes as a moment of selftutelage: “Man himself creates himself as creator, in a circle whose apparently vicious logic reveals its ontological primacy. . . . That this is Sophocles’ conception may be ascertained without any doubt on the basis of one word. This word . . . is: edidaxato, he taught himself. . . . As we know, the middle voice expresses the return of the action onto the acting subject.”101

346 / Chapter Six

Castoriadis aligns this anthropological indeterminacy with democracy as a tragic regime to the degree that the demos, in their instituting actions and passions mobilize a social power—kratos—to give themselves something that had not previously existed in which “the ‘content’ as well as the ‘subject’ . . . are defined by each other and exist through each other” (32). Paranomic democracy can thus give itself the idealized victim or interminable crimes against humanity as its own ethical self-determination and tutelage; but this self-endowment can also become the self-cancellation of democracy when and where it blindly brings forth supplemental victims of its lack of limits in instituting itself in the shining dead. The deinon of the practicopoietical is the theatrical spectacle of reversal in act and in speech (lexical ambiguity) as the return of action upon the acting subject. In Oedipus Tyrannos, the deinon is a formative repertoire of anthropological destitution identified with horror and extreme suffering, with self-mutilation, self-punishment, and expiation resulting from the arrogation of power.102 Vernant writes of Oedipus in terms of the deinos of anthropological self-constitution, which he locates in the capital riddle upon which life is staked: The Sphinx’s question was: What is the creature with one voice that has two, three and four legs? Confusing and mixing them up, it referred to the three successive ages of man that he can only know one after another: . . . Here is the last tragic reversal: It is his victory over the Sphinx that turns Oedipus into, not the solution that he, guessed, but the very question posed, not a man like other men but a creature of confusion and chaos, the only creature (we are told) of all those that live upon the earth, in the air or in the water who has “changed his nature” instead of keeping it clear and distinct. As formulated by the Sphinx then, the riddle of man does have a solution but it is one that recoils against the monster’s victor, the solver of riddles and reveals him to himself to be a kind of monster, man in the shape of a riddle—and this time a riddle to which there is no solution.103

Juridically entwined veridiction, profanation, and sacrality at play in Oedipus are still today the sliding tectonic foundations of humanitarian anthropology. This ethical construct evidences a tragic retraction that cuts away any stabilizing ground to humanity as a shapelessness behind shape—“a fault incising a vanishing line in every foundational representation.”104 Institution and destitution are not reducible to anthropology, nor are they secondary to any covering laws of this genus; rather, they are

Turning Around Scars / 347

its condition of possibility by being asymmetrically spread across disparate laws. Self-incrimination embedded in the naming of crimes against humanity should be read through Castoriadis’s Sophoclean theorem: “Deinos defines man, and it is defined by man.”105 That “deinos . . . is defined by man” means that anthropological self-institution installs ethical meaning within a closure and thereby imposes a defining nonhuman limit and delimiting exteriority on the ethical that functions, says Schürmann, as the “co-normativity of the law’s disparate other under the very reign of the law.”106 In the differing double bind of the deinon, anthropological constitution through the superlative victim can require the unhuman and nonopposable Other of the Other, the victim of the victim as a defaced donating support or substrate. Humanitarian criminality and sacrality are named by a part of humanity as defining humanity as a whole, but this self-institution does not exhaust the structuring asymmetries that trespass against humanitarian anthropology as its collateral inexistent: inexistent to the degree that the nonopposable Other of the Other exists but is politically unavailable within a certain logic of political appearance and emplacement. Humanitarian law passes through and over an occulted or occluded Other, beyond the opposability of the human and the inhuman upon which it is erected. Excess precedes and follows upon anthropological self-institution as the return of the unhuman upon humanity. In response to one-sided anthropological measures and symmetrical equalization, Castoriadis archaeologically excavates a counterlaw in the lexical ambiguity, dissonance, and ethical reversibility of deinos in its awesome, terrifying, and estranging making and unmaking of the human. He recovers a Sophoclean linguistic ethics in the refusal to choose one name or institution/destitution of the human over another, in the refusal to maximize. This refusal is a disemic acceptation of agonal disparity, of the necessary asymmetry between anthropology and nonanthropology as the arché anarcheos (the law outside of law) from which the human/inhuman emerges and through which it vanishes. Castoriadis offers an-archic ethicality with no principial ground. His fidelity to lexical ambiguity proposes a tragic sensibility that Schürmann calls amphinoein, thinking from two sides at once without arriving at the finality or the reconciliation of the One—be that theological, ontological, anthropological, victimological, or nomological.107 The question remains: can there be a justice that grasps and shakes our securing theaters of ethical denial, that will turn the Janusfaced mask of the humanitarian toward the antiphonal call of its estranged damage?

348 / Chapter Six

Notes 1.

Ruth Wilson Gilmore, “You Have Dislodged a Boulder: Mothers and Prisoners in the Post Keynesian California Landscape,” Transforming Anthropology: Journal of the Association of Black Anthropologists 8, nos. 1–2 (January 1999): 12–38. 2. C. Nadia Seremetakis, The Last Word: Women, Death, and Divination in Inner Mani (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 100, 124. 3. Ibid., 100. 4. Andrew D. Walker, “Enargeia and the Spectator in Greek Historiography,” Transactions of the American Philological Association 123 (1993): 353–77; Darien Shanske, Thucydides and the Philosophical Origins of History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). Shanske writes: “The symbolic complexity and ultimately ruthless consistency of the Athenian Democratic Empire cannot be understated. The Athenian demos went to the theater to see deliberative, forensic and epideictic speeches much like those they could hear at an assembly or law court” (31). 5. It must be stressed that discourse and sight are not discontinuous in pathemata mathemata. The witnessing gaze in tragedy is shaped by enargeia, the technical term for how discourse creates a visual presence by bringing the narrated or dramatized event into the pathos of its perception; in this sense enargeia gives shape to the “raw material” (hyle) of events and acts. However, the witnessing gaze is theatrically structured by the disparity between the incidents (ergon) and their perception (opsis) as the differential between the event and its mediation by language and memory. Walker, “Enargeia and the Spectator in Greek Historiography.” 6. See the discussion of spectral anteriority in Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York: Routledge, 2004), 24. 7. While I was attending hearings on human rights violations as part of my fieldwork at the human rights and amnesty hearings of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (1997–2000), numerous opacities repeatedly impeded forensic discovery. To name a few: many victims could not identify the perpetrators of violence inflicted on them (with the exception of face-to-face encounters in torture, and even then not in all instances); many presumed victims’ bodies were missing; the state planned the counterinsurgency with structural deniability; state archives were hidden and/or destroyed; and the state frequently acted through nonstate surrogates who enhanced deniability and occlusion. The cauterizing language used by amnesty applicants from the police and army also contributed to the selfdissociation of perpetrators from the etiology, acts, facts, and consequences of their violence. 8. In contrast to Bosteels, I am not concerned with dislocated loss as a structural effect of the unconscious or semiotic structuration, but with an orchestrated political apparatus—the state’s production of a civic unconscious, though one can also speak here of a politico-technological unconscious (see chapter 6); in both cases a politically instituted anesthesia functions as a field of apperception. See Bruno Bosteels, “Force of Nonlaw: Alain Badiou’s Theory of Justice,” Cardozo Law Review 29, no. 5 (2008): 1905–26. 9. See Allen Feldman, “The Actuarial Gaze: From 9/11 to Abu Ghraib,” Cultural Studies 19, no. 2 (March 2005): 203–26. 10. Anagnorisis is “a shift from ignorance to awareness, pointing either to a state of close natural ties (blood relationship) or to one of enmity, on the part of those

Turning Around Scars / 349

11.

12. 13.

14. 15. 16. 17.

18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25.

26. 27.

persons who have been in a clearly marked status with respect to prosperity or misfortune.” See Gerald Else, Aristotle’s Poetics: The Argument (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1957), 343. In Aristotle, recognition of reversal is a subcategory for recognition of changes in fortune. But the “finest recognition occurs when the two forms coincide—recognition and reversal are different kinds of metabolé.” See John MacFarlane, “Aristotle’s Definition of Anagnorisis,” American Journal of Philology 121, no. 3 (Fall 2000): 367–83. Solon’s democratizing reforms date to 594 BC; Cleisthenes’ reforms occurred in the last decade of the sixth century, ca. 510; extant record fragments based on lists of victorious tragedians date roughly from 535 to 499 BCE. The boule, the council chosen by lottery, was instituted in 462 BCE; Aeschylus’s The Suppliants can be dated to 464. See M. L. West, “The Early Chronology of Athenian Tragedy,” Classical Quarterly, n.s. 39, no. 1 (1989): 251–54; and Jean Pierre Vernant and Pierre Vidal-Naquet, Myth and Tragedy in Ancient Greece (New York: Zone Books, 1988), 256. See Cornelius Castoriadis, Figures of the Thinkable, Including Passion and Knowledge, trans. anon., http://www.notbored.org/FTPK.pdf, 122–23. Rainer Nägele distinguishes allegorical and grammatical interpretation in “Text, History and the Critical Subject: Notes on Peter Szondi’s Theory and Praxis of Hermeneutics,” Boundary 2 11, no. 3 (Spring 1983): 29–42. Roland Barthes links the origins of theater to geometry in “Diderot, Brecht, and Eisenstein,” in Image—Music—Text (New York: Hill & Wang, 1977), 69–70. Derrida, Specters of Marx, 25. Marcel Detienne, The Masters of Truth in Archaic Greece, trans. Janet Lloyd (Cambridge, MA: Zone Books, 1996), 97. Jean-Pierre Vernant, The Origins of Greek Thought (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1984),101. For the relation of geometric theory to Athenian democracy, see Pierre Lévéque and Pierre Vidal-Naquet, Cleisthenes the Athenian: An Essay of the Representation of Space and Time in Greek Political Thought, trans. David Ames Curtis (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1996). Aristotle, Poetics, trans. Stephen Halliwell (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), 25. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 97. Ibid., 182. Jacques Taminiaux, The Thracian Maid and the Professional Thinker, trans. Michael Gendre (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997), 89–121. Jean-Francois Lyotard, Libidinal Economy (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), 197. Jacques Rancière, On the Shores of Politics, trans. Lisa Heron (New York: Verso, 2007), 15; and Jean-François Lyotard, Des dispositifs pulsionnel (Paris: Galilée, 1994), 95. See Roland Barthes, “Roland, Diderot, Brecht, Eisenstein,” in Image–Music–Text (New York: Hill & Wang, 1977). Reinhardt Koselleck, Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time, trans. Keith Tribe (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985), 13. The civic imperative of transparency was the notion of “naked truth”—unadorned testimony and discourse in which events and actors are allowed to speak for themselves without ornamentation or mediation. Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 1998), 418. Sheila Murnighan, “Sucking the Juice without Biting the Rind: Aristotle and Tragic

350 / Chapter Six

28.

29. 30. 31. 32. 33.

34. 35.

36.

37.

38.

Mimesis,” New Literary History 26, no. 4 (1995): 762. On women’s political vocality through lament, see Nicole Loreaux, The Invention of Athens: The Funeral Oration in the Classical City (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986). The toyi toyi, variously described as originating with the Mau Mau in Kenya or with ZIPRA in Zimbabwe, has an antiphonic structure; a leader shouts “Amandla!” (power) and the chorus responds “Awethu” (to us). The chanting is accompanied by syncopated footwork, beating on the ground, and hand clapping. Derrida, Specters of Marx, 26. Emmanuel Levinas, Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence, trans. Alphonso Lingis (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1981), 44. Francis Barker, The Culture of Violence: Tragedy and History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 34. For the practice of the letter see Mladan Dolar, The Voice and Nothing More (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), 105–13. The TRC’s model of confessional truth telling was historically rooted in a more complex model of institutional disclosure, which was retained by the South African Truth Commission but in an extremely attenuated form. The discursive role of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission can be seen as both heir to, and an elaboration of, the Reverend Beyers Naudé’s adaptation of the anti-Nazi German churches’ status confessionis to South Africa in 1960. After Hitler’s seizure of power in 1933, Protestant Christians faced pressure to “Aryanize” the church, to expel Jewish-descent Christians from the ordained ministry, and to adopt the Nazi “Führer principle” as the organizing principle of church government. The status confessionis originated in the 1934 Barmen Declaration when German churches opposed to fascism formed themselves into a confessing synod as a call to resistance against the theological claims of the Nazi state. After the Sharpeville massacre in 1960, the forum of the confessing synod was revived by the South African Cottesloe Consultation (1960) at a meeting of nonracialist churches that challenged apartheid and its theological justification by confederations of Afrikaaner churches. At the end of the week-long consultation the delegates drafted the “Cottesloe Statement,” which condemned racial discrimination, affirmed the legitimacy of multiracial worship, called for an equitable justice system, and affirmed the validity of interracial marriage. See L. A. Hewson, ed., Cottesloe Consultation: The Report of the Consultation Among South African Member Churches of the World Council of Churches (Johannesburg, 1961); John W. De Gruchy, “From Cottesloe to Rustenburg and Beyond: the Rustenburg Conference in Historical Perspective,” Journal of Theology of Southern Africa 74 (1991): 21–34. Levinas, Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence, 41. Véronique Fóti, “Heidegger, Hölderlin, and Sophoclean Tragedy,” in Heidegger toward the Turn: Essays on the Work of the 1930s, ed. James Risser (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999), 169–70, 174. Nicole Loreaux, The Divided City: On Memory and Forgetting in Ancient Athens, trans. Corrine Pache and Jeff Fort (Cambridge, MA: Zone Books, 2002). See also Josiah Ober, “Social Science History, Cultural History and the Amnesty of 403,” Transactions of the American Philological Association 132, nos. 1–2 (Autumn 2002): 127–37. Loreaux, The Divided City, 160; See also Nicole Loreaux, The Invention of Athens: The Funeral Oration in the Classical City, trans Alan Sheridan (Cambridge, MA: Zone Books, 2006). J. Peter Euben, “Justice and the Oresteia,” American Political Science Review 76, no. 1 (March 1982): 31.

Turning Around Scars / 351 39. Loreaux, The Divided City, 153. 40. Barbara Cassin and Jake Wadham, “From Organism to Picnic,” Angelaki 11, no. 3 (2006), 25–26. 41. Ibid., 22–23. 42. “The gaze of the citizen in which honour and status are contested constructs the citizen’s bodily appearance as a schema open to evaluation, regulation and scrutiny. It is the gap between schema as form and schema as appearance that allows for the performance of self—that is the self-presentation, self-regulation, self-concealment which construct or stage the citizen in the public eye.” See Simon Goldhill and Robin Osborne, eds., Performance Culture and Athenian Democracy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 4. 43. Ibid., 3, 5. 44. Walker, “Enargeia and the Spectator,” 356–357. 45. Sergio Benvenuto and Jean-Pierre Vernant, “Oedipus without Freud: A Conversation,” http://www.psychomedia.it/jep/number3–4/vernant.htm (accessed December 16, 2012). 46. Vernant and Vidal-Naquet, Myth and Tragedy in Ancient Greece, 83. 47. Loreaux, The Divided City, 263. 48. Ibid., 263. 49. Jean-Pierre Vernant, “Ambiguity and Reversal: On the Enigmatic Structure of Oedipus Rex,” New Literary History 9, no. 3 (Spring 1978): 475–76. 50. Ibid., 477. 51. Helmut Lethen, “Kracauer’s Pendulum: Thoughts on German Cultural History,” New German Critique 65 (Spring–Summer 1995): 42. 52. On citation, repetition, and recollection, see Samuel Weber, Theatricality as Medium (New York: Fordham University Press, 2004), 45–47. 53. Derrida, Specters of Marx, 27 (emphasis mine). 54. Eugene Delacroix, Journal of Delacroix, vol. 1 (1843); quoted in Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (New York, London: Routledge, 1978), 16. 55. Jacques Derrida, On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness (New York: Routledge 2001). 56. Ibid., 29. 57. Michel Foucault, Lectures on the Will to Know: Lectures at the College de France, 1970– 1971, and “Oedipal Knowledge,” ed. Arnold Davidson, trans. Graham Burchill (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 229–30. 58. Ibid., 227. 59. Jacques Derrida, Questioning Judaism: Interviews by Jacques Derrida, ed. Elizabeth Weber (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press), 40. 60. Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1967), 68. 61. Safaa Fathy, dir., D’ailleurs, Derrida (Derrida’s Elsewhere), DVD (New York: Sept Arte/ Gloria Films, 1999). In Pauline Christianity reconciliation as hilasmos has to do with the expiation of wrongs and stumbling blocks to atonement (at-one-ment). Reconciliation has another sense as katalassoo, which refers to harmony in the relationship with the other. Miroslav Volf, Exclusion and Embrace: A Theological Exploration of Identity, Otherness, and Reconciliation (Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 1996), 171. 62. Vernant, “Ambiguity and Reversal,” 477. 63. Fathy, D’ailleurs, Derrida. 64. Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, trans. Eric Prenowitz (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998).

352 / Chapter Six 65. Michel Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice, ed. Donald F. Bouchard, trans. Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977), 83. 66. Reiner Schürmann, “A Brutal Awakening to the Tragic Condition of Being: On Heidegger’s Beiträge zur Philosophie,” in Martin Heidegger: Politics, Art and Technology, ed. Karsten Harries and Christoph Jamme (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1994), 90. 67. Derrida, Questioning Judaism, 43. 68. Reiner Schürmann, Heidegger on Being and Acting: From Principles to Anarchy (Bloomington: Indiana University Press 1990), 90. 69. Immanuel Kant, The Philosophy of Law: An Exposition of the Fundamental Principles of Jurisprudence as the Science of Right (Clark, NJ: Lawbook Exchange, 2010). 70. Derrida, Questioning Judaism, 41. 71. Reiner Schürmann, Broken Hegemonies, trans., Reginald Lilly (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003), 551. 72. Saidiya V. Hartman, “The Time of Slavery,” South Atlantic Quarterly 101, no. 4 (Fall 2002): 771. 73. Michael Warner, Publics and Counterpublics (Cambridge, MA: Zone Books, 2002); Hal Foster, “Death in America: Shocked Subjectivity and Compulsive Visual Repetition,” in October: The Second Decade, 1986–1996 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997), 348–74; and Michael Taussig, Shamanism, Colonialism, and the Wildman (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988). 74. Foster, “Death in America,” 366–67. 75. Houston Baker, “Introduction,” in A Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Written by Himself, ed. Houston Baker (New York: Penguin, 1982), 10. 76. Page duBois, Torture and Truth (New York: Routledge, 1991), 77. 77. Taussig, Shamanism, Colonialism, and the Wildman, 327. 78. DuBois, Torture and Truth, 66, 68. 79. Saidiya V. Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in NineteenthCentury America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 56. 80. DuBois, Torture and Truth, 105. 81. Schürmann, Broken Hegemonies, 622. 82. Edward W. Said, The Politics of Dispossession: The Struggle for Palestinian SelfDetermination, 1969–1994 ( New York: Vintage Books, 1995), 168; see also Said, “Zionism from the Standpoint of Its Victims,” Social Text 1 (Winter 1979): 7–58. 83. Jacques Derrida and Richard Beardsworth, “Nietzsche and the Machine,” in “Futures of Nietzsche: Affirmation and Aporia,” Journal of Nietzsche Studies 7 (Spring 1994): 52. 84. The intensity of societal and mediatic mourning propelled by the killing and wounding of six people, including Representative Gabrielle Gifford, in Tucson, Arizona, and the subsequent debates over the general incivility of American political discourse and gun control needs to be read in this light of the victim of the victim. With respect to the massive damage of the American war machine in Iraq and West Asia, the national debates on civility and weaponry turned Gifford into a politically superlative “collateral victim.” Iraqis remained structurally invisible in American public culture. Not coincidentally, the political Right, seeking to dissociate the Tucson shootings from their performative investment in personal firearm display, deployed a “bad apple” argument analogous to that used by the Bush and Obama administrations in reference to the torturers at Abu Ghraib.

Turning Around Scars / 353 85. Jacques Derrida, “The Parergon,” trans. Craig Owens, October 9 (Summer 1979): 15. 86. Douglas Jehl, “Officials Told to Avoid Calling Rwanda Killings ‘Genocide,’” New York Times, June 10, 1994, p. A8. “A State Department spokesperson went one disavowal further and explained that ‘Although there have been acts of genocide in Rwanda, all the murders cannot be put into that category.’” See Gérard Prunier, The Rwanda Crisis: History of a Genocide (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995): 274. 87. Derrida, “The Parergon,” 20. 88. Ibid., 34–35. 89. Jacques Derrida, Aporias, trans. Thomas Dutoit (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1993), 18. 90. Reiner Schürmann, “Ultimate Double Binds,” Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal 14, no. 2/1 (1991): 217. 91. Schürmann, Heidegger on Being and Acting, 193. 92. Schürmann, “A Brutal Awakening,” 97. 93. Jacques Lacan, “The Essence of Tragedy: A Commentary on Sophocles’ Antigone,” in  The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, trans. Dennis Porter (New York: W. W. Norton, 1997), 259. 94. Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, “On Ethics: A Propos of Antigone,” Journal of European Psychoanalysis 24 (2007), http://www.psychomedia.it/jep/number24/lacoue.htm. (accessed January 12, 2010). 95. Schürmann, “Ultimate Double Binds,” 232. 96. Lacoue-Labarthe, “On Ethics: A Propos of Antigone.” 97. Ibid. 98. Schürmann, “Ultimate Double Binds,” 214. 99. See Castoriadis, Figures of the Thinkable, 46. 100. Ibid., 28–29. Castoriadis severely questions Heidegger’s exclusive translation of deinos as unheimliche, the uncanny and unhomely, preferring to retain its foundational polysemy and consequent indeterminacy. This critique is taken up by Stathis Gourgouris from a Freudian perspective in Does Literature Think? Literature as Theory for an Antimythical Era (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003), 136. Heidegger writes: “Man is deinon, first because he remains exposed within this overpowering power, because by his essence he belongs to being. But at the same time man is deinon because he is the violent one . . . (He gathers the power and brings it to manifestness). Man is the violent one, not aside from and along with the other attributes but solely in the sense that in his fundamental violence, he uses power against the overpowering. Because he is twice deinon in a sense that is originally one, he is to deinotaton, the most powerful: violent in the midst of the overpowering.” Martin Heidegger, An Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. Ralph Manheim. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1959), 149. 101. Ibid. 102. Jan Parker, “Key Words, Paradigmatic Figures, Tragic Bonds,” Cambridge Quarterly 24, no. 1 (March 1995): 17–40. 103. Vernant and Vidal-Naquet, Myth and Tragedy in Ancient Greece, 138. 104. Schürmann, “A Brutal Awakening,” 99. 105. Cornelius Castoriadis, “Figures of the Thinkable,” 29. 106. Schürmann, “Ultimate Double Binds,” 224 (emphasis mine). 107. Ibid., 67.

SEVEN

Expiring Animality

He thinks by means of animals as others do by means of concepts. —Elias Canetti Whenever you observe an animal closely, you feel as if a human being sitting inside were making fun of you. —Elias Canetti

Syntagmatic Bodies All must be supprest which is not found in their Syntagma.1

Syntagma (Constitution) Square has been the center of the antiausterity protests in central Athens since 2010. Its name originates in an 1843 republican uprising for constitutional rule against a colonially imposed monarch from Germany. From 2008 to 2015 the multitude have gathered there to rebel against German economic sovereignty over Greece. Located in front of the Greek Parliament, the square has become a barricaded and besieged high-security emergency zone where, despite economic retraction in all state sectors, the police stand faceless guard behind shut visors and raised shields, equipped with the latest body armor and riot-control weaponry: Since yesterday, June 28, 2011, we live like cockroaches in Syntagma Square. We are sprayed continuously with chemicals by the Greek police regardless of what we do or what we say, but we persist. We leave Syntagma [S]quare for a while to catch our breath and keep on coming back. We rest a bit and return to the square. . . . As we are becoming cockroaches we begin, without really realizing it, to adopt tactics of stasis, of perseverance and endurance, that were

Expiring Animality / 355 previously unknown to us. Chemicals keep on flying, sound bombs keep on exploding all around us making terrible noise and the crowds respond by not leaving, by remaining at Syntagma Square. Becoming cockroaches and growing more and more resistant to the chemicals, our bodies begin to mutate. In gas masks, painting maalox, on our faces, wearing sun glasses and ski masks, we persist. The figures in gas masks and maalox recognize each other even when they meet further away from Syntagma square.2

Becoming cockroach in Syntagma Square is not a retreat into, or a phenomenological reduction to, an underlying sensible and preindemnified life world over which the death world of the state and capital is spread but can never fully penetrate. In the emergency zone, the ordinary and the everyday do not function as the surplus and stabilized ground for making state violence legible but register the extraordinary through their own historical dislocation, amputation, inaccessibility, and loss of essence and reference. Turning cockroach is not an imaginary of how restorative everyday life worlds resecure the ethical and the human through an affective grounding in the quotidian. One day, not so long ago, the Greeks, as if in a fable by Kafka, awoke to find themselves transformed, due to odious debt, into fiscal vermin. Mladen Dolar speaks of how in Kafka one awakes to a home or a body that has been unhomed, mislaid, and rendered uncanny and mutable; the everyday is suspended or, worse, dislocated at the edge of awakening and is no longer a fully constituted reality.3 There is a metamorphosis in every awakening that changes the relation of subject and world. The Athenian cockroach emerges between the world that has been and a world to come and perseveres at this edge, this fissure in accepted reality, in capital and in the state. However, the Athenian cockroach awakes to reject the dream of its fiscal culpability but also to accept metamorphosis as an unplaceable body. The political economy of the cockroach is not a finality or a teleology, but a simultaneous point of insertion and desertion, a movement ex nihilo into a space of heteronomous self-constitution conditioned by, and yet severed from, the state and its residual implantation in bodies and spaces. Becoming cockroach is not organically related to a prior political determination; it is a self-amputating prosthetic, an organ without body, an organ without organic organization. Becoming cockroach opens up a politics of unbinding—the cockroach is a disorganic multiplicity made up of contingent compositions without underlying ground. This detachable organ of insurrection is no longer a citizen, worker, or consumer, an organ of the state and of capital, but the latter’s dis-organicization. The citizen-becomevermin or cockroach negates its own concept (organ of an organization)

356 / Chapter Seven

in becoming disorganic incorporeality. Deleuze describes this becoming as the incorporeal “language of events.” Irreality, incorporeality, uncertainty, paradox, and the disorganic are the objective structure of the event of coming political speciation.4 In the preceding chapters I recounted that in their battering of Rodney King, the implicated policemen characterized King as “bear-like” and as rising on his “haunches,” presumably to attack the police. Prior to this the same police referred to the film Gorillas in the Mist when intervening in a black neighborhood. King, like the animal who lacks language, was rendered voiceless at the Simi Valley trial and subjected to dissection at the level of the pixilated, virtual carving up of his body into parts consumable by vision and law. I have described the posthuman gaze of the Jackal, who used murder to photograph history. I navigated through testimony at the South African truth commission on the braai interrogations where hooded black political prisoners were hung upside down like “bush meat,” as their torturers described it, using a term reserved for wild game. I historicized braai torture in South African labor-discipline violence, from seventeenthcentury slave punition to the nineteenth-century denotation of black farm and mine labor as animal herds or livestock, “baboons,” and “beasts of burden.” The policemen who burned their prisoners were termed “animalish people” by the isangoma, local traditional herbal healers who saw this police torture as indicative of a pathological addiction to burning human fat. Elsewhere I have written of conducting HIV/AIDs harm reduction in the settlements and jerry-rigged shacks of homeless people under the Bruckner Expressway in New York City; I puzzled over the ubiquity of oversized stuffed bears, dogs, cats, kangaroos, elephants, horses, and giraffes mounted on the cardboard roofs and crate walls of their shanties—were these nostalgic images of home, care, and childhood, or totems of losing all shelter, including that of humanity? I witnessed an eight-story tenement squat of the homeless in East Harlem where dozens of such carefully posed, oversized stuffed animals peered down at me from every shattered window frame. One intravenous drug user at the Bruckner Expressway likened the circulating HIV-infected syringes that were shared or scrounged from the gutter to the physiology of stinging malarial mosquitoes.5 And I have written on the leashed and collared “reservoir dogs” of Abu Ghraib being walked on all fours by their American guards.6 At these diverse geopolitical sites animality was a shared nexus for both the agents and recipients of violence; practices, images, and memories of violence were rendered tangible, material, and intractable through the figure of the animal.7 Political animality functions in many of the episodes

Expiring Animality / 357

rehearsed above as a habitus of inhumanization, by which I mean not the conventional notion of the maltreatment of humanity (not that abuse, degradation, or ill use is absent from what I have described above), but rather the entrenchment of specific immunizing norms. Inhumanization is instated through ideological projections of humanity’s negations, alters, and antagonists—all that which lacks humanity and yet densely signifies the human by this lack. For the state, this can become the targeting of the human through the animal signifier in a doubling of violence that fuses nomination with the act. Animality is not passivity here; rather, this targeting entails the weaponization of animality. This is a tripled violence, since “in this logic, one is never cruel toward what is called an animal, or a non-human living creature. One is already exculpated of any crime toward any non-human living being.”8 Here aggression is a priori immunized from being named as such through the interface of animality. If, as Derrida asserts, the unrecognizable begins ethics, then the assault on suspended, minimalized, or liminal humanity that passes through the media, interface, and ensign of animality is the foreclosure of ethical possibility. For Derrida, an ethics based on conditions of unrecognizability precludes the political normation of speciation. Violence speciates “animality” in the “fellow,” rendering “the neighbor” unrecognizable and therefore disposable. Animals become familiar by not entailing ethical obligation; they become familiarized and normalized as preencoded forms of ill usage, casual disposability, and informal death. Violence here both presumes and makes the unrecognizable in a vicious circularity that is always the telltale signature of sovereignty as a form of self-speciation that coercively speciates and despeciates the other. Recognizability/unrecognizability becomes a repeated motif in the theorem of the human/animal interface and drags along with it theories of visuality and semiosis. Heidegger proposes, as I discuss below, that the animal Umwelt is composed of biosemiotic triggers or disinhibitors that render its surround a total theater of recognizability, which is the generative root of animal action. Lacan speaks of a capacity for homeomorphic identification, an “intraorganic mirror” relation in animality that can precipitate reproduction and gender mutability through the media of mimetic mirrors, puppets, drawings, and other “lures,” a process that he likens to the specularity of the child’s mirror stage.9 These techniques and ensembles of triggered recognizability carry with them political codes that fuse captivation and captivity, which the above philosophers invariably require that humanity transcend but which the animal predictably cannot. Negativity structures the human through the encounter with unrecognizability as de-

358 / Chapter Seven

ferment and postponement, whereas recognizability is associated with animal immediacy. Lacan specifically identifies homeomorphic identification with the imaginary and humanization with the ascension from that mirror stage (the imaginary and its immediacy) to the symbolic order of the social contract enabled by deferring language, which the animal lacks. However the form that such humanizing entry into the symbolic takes in the world of political power is all too frequently the fabrication of autonomic apparatuses of constraining and lawful recognizability such as scopic regimes, from racism to facial recognition technologies and the arbitrary politics of the shibboleth—empty “passwords,” passports, birth certificates, and related ceremonies and gestures that draw down the portals of political identification and authentication. Such political media constitute the ultimate zone of a hybrid human animality in which political force becomes invested in the making and enforcing of the recognizable and the unrecognizable. For Derrida, in this context, politics, including that of the human/ animal, begins in the law of the near and the far. In this context animality is an ethical aporia—the nearest form of the unrecognizable within and without the human subject—and this (un)familiarity is exploited to generate even more distant forms of the unrecognizable as null and void: “That one has obligations only to the fellow, be it the foreigner as fellow and ‘my neighbor,’ which, step by step, as we know, in fact intensifies our obligations toward the most similar and the nearest [du plus semblable et du plus proche]. More obligation towards men than towards animals, more obligation towards men who are close and similar than towards the less near and less similar (in the order of probabilities and supposed or phantasized resemblances or similarities: family, nation, race, culture, religion).”10 This means that the deepest ontologies of first philosophies are never insulated from particular forms of political predication, and that the state in pursuing pragmatic political violence simultaneously executes a foundational metaphysics of the nearest far through the animal. Does political animality point to an anthropological sovereignty that only acquires positivity, tangibility, and fungibility through its displacement onto, and passage into, the extimacy and distance that is animality? And why does subjugated or expelled animality perennially threaten anthropological plenitude as an uncontainable negativity? These questions imply that the many thresholds of language, labor and finitude that have repeatedly delimited, governed and consigned the animal and human in metaphysical thought and practice can be remapped as a properly political dominion; a wildlife reserve in which philosophical, ethological, and anthropological declaratives and descriptions encrypt zoopolitical relations of power and force, and where

Expiring Animality / 359

the animal predicate circumscribes a concentrated time and space of subjugation, exposure, disappearance and abandonment. In philosophy the animal is varyingly characterized as lacking language; self-consciousness; a face or a least an ethical visage; hands; the ability to disclose being; the ability to deceive, pretend, respond, and witness; sensitivity to pain; a natality; and a death. The last attribute carries a special dispensation, as animals imputedly live from moment to moment, with forgetfulness equivalent to multiple deaths.11 Or, as Heidegger describes this condition: “The mortals are human beings. They are called mortals because they can die. To die means to be capable of death as death. Only man dies. The animal perishes. It has neither death ahead of itself or behind it.”12 In 1949 Heidegger equated the manufacture of cadavers in the gas chambers with technologized agribusiness and asked if those who “perished” in the concentration camps could be said to have experienced death. Heidegger repeatedly asks, “Sterben sie?” (Are they dying?). The concentration camp fatalities are grausig ungestorben er Tode (“horribly undeceased”).13 The camp inmates were deprived of humanizing “mortality” in much same the manner that anonymous animal perishing is deprived of an ontological relation to death; however, for Heidegger, that humanizing relation is sustained by the sacrificial wartime death of German soldiers for the Reich.14 Thus Heidegger conceptualizes “ontological” death within a racialist hierarchy, extrapolated from a near/far hierarchy. Heidegger’s differentiation of Dasein’s being-toward-death from the nondeath of animal expiration is currently reencountered in the political aesthetics of counting sacrificial nationalized American military deaths while dis-counting the Iraqi and Afghani dead, who, in American political culture, merely perish, like Heideggerian animals. It is with the metaphysical foundations and consequences of this hierarchical politics of expiration that this chapter grapples. The Missed Encounter with the Real Derrida has asserted that the history of the Western metaphysics of the animal is a history of misrecognitions.15 Is this to presuppose that beyond these missed encounters with the animal Real there is the potential for a recognition that did not miss the animal, an ethical recognition that would “take place” in the “presence” of the animal? If animality is always already politics, can a nonsovereign encounter with the animal occur—what Derrida would name as relations of hospitality, the protocol of the neighbor?16 If so, then one would have to theorize a politics that rejects the legitimacy of speciation as an act and unit of sovereignty. Derrida himself has admit-

360 / Chapter Seven

ted (particularly in reference to hospitality) that such a politics is difficult to think or enact, though this does not mean we are precluded from situationally exploring the relation of speciation to sovereignty and animality at their extreme limits, particularly since at the root of animal-rights discourse lies a principle of sovereignty and immunity as an ethics of speciation. As Derrida stresses, the sheer act of animal nomination is a selfdefining sovereign gesture and act: “God gives Ish alone the freedom to name the animals, granted, and that represents at the same time his sovereignty and his loneliness.”17 In the missed encounter with the animal, Western metaphysics “has been guilty of an irrational, non-empirical, and politically problematic reduction of ‘the’ animal; on the other hand, this reduction is central to the whole discourse of human rights and humanism tout court.”18 However, to move beyond this impasse is to pose the question that, if the political emplacement of the animal has yet to historically take place outside of institutionalized misrecognition, then might the missed encounter with the animal be the commencement of the political? This aporia is not resolved by proposing a pathogen of misrecognition to be treated by a medicinal politics of commensurating and conciliating recognition; rather, it suggests that being political requires acts and invariably entails effects of misrecognition. The political both institutes and is historically formed by constitutive and mutually inadmissible antagonisms as formative zones of unrecognizability that are frequently instated and materialized by orbiting figurations and emblematica of humanity and animality. To acknowledge such constitutive antagonisms is to encounter the political as a modality, an apparatus, and a technique of speciation and despeciation, and to consider the relation between sovereignty and speciation, as well as sovereignty, whether human or animal or a third, as a species—a project that Foucault sketched in his brief discussion of monsters of form (see below). Derrida has more assiduously tracked this theme in his writing on the beast and the sovereign, where speciation is considered to be both a genre (aesthetic, literary, fictive, and political) and a formative frame, a technicity, a power/knowledge apparatus: The beast being the sovereign, the sovereign being the beast, the one and the other being each engaged, in truth changed or even exchanged, in a becoming-beast of the sovereign or in a becoming-sovereign of the beast, the passage from the one to the other, the analogy, the resemblance, the alliance, the hymen depending on the fact that they both share that very singular position of being outlaws, above or at a distance from the law, the beast

Expiring Animality / 361 ignorant of right and the sovereign having the right to suspend right, to place himself above the law that he is, that he makes, that he institutes, as to which he decides, sovereignly. The sovereign is not an angel but, one might say, he who plays the sovereign plays the beast.19

My concern here is with the sheer repetition of such missed encounters with the animal as a generative traumatropology and political topology, which cannot be readily uninherited by an animal-rights discourse or other ethical frames rooted in recognizability. To engage such repeated misrecognitions as a traumatology of power— or, better yet, to engage traumatropology as power— is to explore what the location and naming of the animal, which never takes place in the presence of the “animal,” permits of politics.20 This posture does not presume to theorize the political or what passes for animality from a utopian site through which the recursive and deficient binaries of the human and animal attain a state of institutional inoperability and from which terminal dysfunction we can anticipate the eschatological solace of a postbinary “companionship” across species. Rather, these deficient and structuring binaries need to be recalled, retraced, and bracketed as key political technologies whose archive is not so readily escaped by denouncing the “evil” of the systematizing and serializing binary as such. As Schürmann points out with respect to the construct of the moral subject, an encounter with the animal or the human, or with a liminal third, invariably emerges from contingent intersections of force, of successive acts of (re)interpretation and (re)appropriation of discourses and acts of speciation: “Power forms itself into a configuration and domination means that the constituents of such configurations are forces. . . . In that ordering . . . the moral subject is only an instance.”21 In the metaphysics of Western political thought and practice there is no recuperation of the animal in itself or for itself as an irreducible moral subject, for the latter already arrives “contaminated” by the generalities and genres of anthropology, as that which is speciated in order to speciate. Thresholds of Anthropology and Nonanthropology The subtitle hovering above seeks not to perpetuate the dualism of the human and the nonhuman, but to explore its thresholds and limits, though it can also be pointed out that what nonanthropology lacks (unlike animal lack in Western metaphysics) is any delimitable outline, in contrast to the human who cannot exist without the outline provisioned by its alters. Or, to refer back to the previous chapter on tragic anthropologies, the deinon of

362 / Chapter Seven

humanity is its unavoidable crossing over into the nonhuman. In each of these passages the crucial thematic is embodied in the political ontology of the threshold, the border, the limn, the edge, the outline, which enables speciation but is neither human nor animal, since they are its product. What is the species of that which speciates? The autospeciation that gives rise to the name of humanity, to the generality and genre of humanity, is both a symptom of sovereignty and an index of the nonhuman origination or trace structure in the act of autospeciation. Whence does it arise? Who or what enunciates the autos of speciation that defines the objectivity of beings? With this enunciation there is no proper protological position of the human, since it is nominated by that which is more than human, even unhuman, which exceeds and simultaneously encloses and encircles itself in the human. Just as the sovereign precedes and exceeds the law instituted in its name, the site that legislates autospeciation is a nonhuman logos that does not coincide, point for point, with and even slides past the anthropological in its automation and autokinesis. In The Beast and the Sovereign Derrida explores sovereignty as a species, as a becoming beast, but rarely as purely anthropological, and in such a manner as to overturn the authority and sovereignty of the concept and act of speciation. Derrida’s shift to the sovereign and the beast from the anthropological and the animal is strategic; the two couples are not reducible to each other, though they do cross over to each other’s side through porous thresholds. The move to the coupling of the beast/sovereign, with their multiple and gendered interfaces and recursions, opens up a zone of deferment, of a distance, and an interval in relation to the more restricted binary enclosure of the anthropological and the animal. In doing so, Derrida shifts the problematic of the anthropology machine to the problem of the threshold, the interface—to the no-man’s land between anthropology and animality. Over many writings Derrida, in a related gesture, has questioned the “uncuttable and atomic unity” of the threshold and what can threaten its indivisibility and its foundational solidity: “[The threshold] supposes the solidity of a ground or a foundation, they too being deconstructable. The word ‘threshold’ [seuil, sill, sole] itself signifies this solidity of the ground.”22 Any threshold to be crossed or not crossed as an imputedly indivisible line between humanity and animality is the foundation and the beginning of an inside and outside, a before and after, and thus exercises a sovereignty that rules the beginnings and ends of the human and animal and their political relations. For Derrida, the deconstruction of sovereignty, of the hyperousias (beyond being) of the sovereign and of the infra-

Expiring Animality / 363

humanizing deficiency of the animal, requires the deconstruction of the line of demarcation between humanity and animality. This circumcising border and scar is treated by Derrida as an apparatus of sacrifice insofar as it institutes and reserves the singularity of the human as mediated by the infinite substitutability of the “animal” multitude. By infinite substitutability I mean the co-agitatio, or compression or anonymizing massification, of the “animal” as type and as an instance of interpellation. The sacrificing unicity of the animal type secures by the sovereign singularity of the human grounded upon the border between human and animal. This political vocation and focality of infinite substitutability as infinite sacrifice is what enables the conveyance of the fellow, the neighbor, and the stranger into the substrate of animality through which violence against the former will be enacted and defaced as violence. Sacrifice as culturally formative begins as an act of substitution, surrogation, and supplementation, of the individual for the community, of the animal for the human, of exteriority for interiority, though with the animality/humanity divide it is the many who are sacrificed for the consumption of the one. The infinite substitutability of animals under the animal/human couple reciprocally fuels sacrifice as iterative power. If the animal has no being toward death, as Heidegger proposes, it is because that death is preempted, preimagined, and already in a state of anonymous repetition by a sacrificial humanism. The deconstruction of this sacrificial and sacrificing line transecting the human and the animal, the sacrifice of this line, opens onto the fractured horizon of the Other of that Other encountered in the unity of inherited opposites as an enclosure that imposes limitations or sameness on the otherness of the animalized Other. Derridean ethics begins with the depolarized Other, altered in its mode of alterity and as an infinite differentiation with otherness itself beyond recognizability. Derrida seeks the otherwise than the polarized Other, which resides elsewhere than the place where the Other is expected to repose and oppose. For Foucault, the creaturely haunts the threshold of a permeable biopolitical order and invariably exceeds what has been circumcised and incised by that order to produce life itself as an exploitable substance for the production and projection of power. Animality nomadically resurfaces in Agamben’s Homo Sacer as pretext, waste product, and effluvia, and in the form of a conditioning and conditioned divergence that is both an invasive threat and a locus of punishment and the death penalty. Though animality can materialize the interval between biopolitical enfranchisement and thanatopolitical disqualification, peripatetic animality is not containable

364 / Chapter Seven

within that interval. Prescriptions of an animalized bare life consequently emerge as correctives to and barriers against a resistant heterogeneity that is political animality as a zooanarchism, which anomically trespasses on the interior, thresholds, and edges of the political enclosures of bioqualified life. In this framework animality, the negated and yet necessary staging ground of the political emerges as the inadequate name for those unmasterable extimacies beyond the anthropological and biopolitical count. My other engagement with biopower theory concerns the consequences when life as zoé, as bared (Agamben), as natality (Arendt), and as a transcendent face (Levinas) can be thought of as preceding the threshold of the political and thus becomes insulated as a founding transhistorical apolitical arkhé, permitting an ultimate return to the ethical after the depredations, exigencies, and losses of the political. In contrast, in many cases, to be discussed below, the condition of possibility of political immanence is an expelled yet value-generating substrate denied any political status by a self-constituting body politic, economic determination, biologistic destiny, or racialized/gendered reduction. The circularity of this schema, where a repressed or deferred “part,” such as bare life, encodes and enables a totality, is problematic, since what is excluded never escapes formal typification and is denied any autonomous trajectory beyond a functionalized relation to totalization. The search for the animal is a tragic passage that overturns the positions of the hunter and the hunted. This hunt recalls the Renaissance image of the trapping of a lion or tiger, in which a mirror is set up in a large chest whose lid is propped open by a stick. The animal is meant to stare into that mirror, ensnared and hypnotized by its reflection, which then enables the hunters to propel it from behind into the trunk and trap it within. The motif says more about the predatory anthropological search for itself through otherness than anything concerning the visual psychology of the animal. For Lacan the mirror is a humanizing artifact that preexists the human. This mirror relation encompasses the visual construction of anthropology through the imagined animal gaze that is trapped inside a conceptual black box; we require the gaze of the animal to see ourselves, and this creates interminable diffractions. The thematic of captivation and capture will reemerge several times in the search for animality in the rest of this chapter. I consider this inquiry a preliminary descriptive ethnography of the animal theorem in which metaphysical descriptions and decisions concerning animality function as encrypted ontologies of political subjugation and as a visual culture of exposable life, encountered not only in philosophical and anthropological discourse but also in concrete political

Expiring Animality / 365

practices. In excavating the depoliticizing scopics of the animal in Western metaphysics and elsewhere, I do not leave such technologies of enclosure and captivity behind; rather, Rodney King and the victims of apartheidera torture are co-interlocutors in this political ethnography of the praxis of philosophical animality, anthropology, and nonanthropology. Thus this chapter entertains the possibility of an ethnography of political animality that does not commit anthropology. Detotalizing Biopower The thanatopolitical, as the obverse of biopolitical totalization, constitutes a formalist transgression, an exile into the anomic, into juridical indistinction, that Agamben describes as an interior construction of a political/legal outside in which those subject to the dense inscriptive praxis of biopower undergo processual erasure and unlife.23 Heideggerian entelechies of a humanized ontological death and a deontologized animal perishing are repeated in this oscillation between biopolitics and thanatopolitics. Like the theorem of the animal in Western metaphysics, the thanatopolitical is treated as a figure of lack—the absence of formalized law and/or qualified life—and thus becomes the abode of the animalized characterized as bare life, lacking any qualities and agency. Agamben raises the human/animal fault line in situating the relation of logos (as reason language, law) to phoné (voice) within biopower: The question “In what way does the living being have language?” corresponds exactly to the question “In what way does bare life dwell in the polis?” The living being has logos by taking away and conserving its own voice in it, even as it dwells in the polis by letting its own bare life be excluded, as an exception, within it. Politics therefore appears as the truly fundamental structure of Western metaphysics insofar as it occupies the threshold on which the relation between the living being and the logos is realized. In the “politicization” of bare life—the metaphysical task par excellence—the humanity of living man is decided.24

Agamben’s discussion originates in the notion of logos as the imposed sovereignty of reason, law, or written or spoken command that dominates and shapes physis as nature, life, birth, and naked voice. He draws a parallel between the naked voice and the body in their mutual subsumption by the political. This passage evokes Aristotle, who assigns phoné as vocalized noise to those living beings who are limited to the sensations of pain and

366 / Chapter Seven

pleasure, in contradistinction to those beings who have logos as phone semantike, that is, vocality as productive of meaning that can decide between the just and the unjust.25 Slaves, women, barbarians, and some animals apprehend meaning (aisthanesdthai) but do not possess (ekhein) it, for they are subject to affect and not to reason. Animality has aesthesis as affect; humans possess aesthesis as the political capacity to judge the good. In Agamben’s treatment of politicized logos and prepolitical phone, the acts of conservation and exclusion (“taking away”) are the archival powers and substantializing foundations of biopower rather than the imputed bioavailability, ubiquity, and destination of life itself as supposedly coextensive with, and in symmetrical relation to, a biopolitical apparatus. The act of vocal storage, mimesis, and filtering reveals the biopolitical project as mnemic, archival, and disjunctive with what is termed “raw life,” to the degree that something is expropriated as life and naked voice, and something else—something that is beyond biopolitical predication and its thanatopolitical ejections—remains as unfiltered and nonsignifying. Here an indeterminacy is cut off from the conserving and mortifying mnemotechniques upon which archival biopower is grounded. “Life” itself emerges as always already adumbrated from something indefinable in relation to biopower. For Agamben, the biopolitical subject is formed from a deferred and deadened voice that has been both stilled and stabilized as logos. This neo-Freudian repression and impression of the voice in the name of logos or law discloses that life and anthropology/ animality emerge from the dual gesture of conservation and exclusion and do not preexist the bioarchival incision. In Agamben’s The End of the Poem this dichotomy reappears as the archival organization of the voice of the animal in terms of the sensible and the insensible: Grammar above all begins by distinguishing the “confused voice” of animals (phone agrammatos) . . . which cannot be written . . . from the human voice, which can be written (engrammatos) and articulated. . . . A more subtle classification, which is of Stoic origin, nevertheless characterizes the (animal) voice with greater sophistication. . . . In entering into grammata in being written, the animal voice is separated from nature, which is inarticulate and cannot be written; it shows itself in letters as a pure intention to signify whose signification is unknown. . . . Imitations of animal voices capture the voice of nature at the point at which it emerges from the infinite sea of mere sound without yet having become signifying discourse.26

Homo Sacer implicitly links this Stoic dismissal of the animal voice to the animality of a prepolitical bare life as a nonsignifying “infinite sea of

Expiring Animality / 367

mere sound.” It is my suggestion that the political lies not within a biopolitical enclosure, but between the latter and the nonsignifying “infinite sea of mere sound” and other cognate indeterminacies. The political enclosure of voice and body in Homo Sacer is the setting to work of mnemic duplication, conservation, and grammatization as the archiving of animality in supplementary hypomne¯mata or prosthetic instruments of memory, of which the concept of the animal is a function. If phone, the bare voice, is considered to be a signature of both bare life and animal vocality, it is clear that it has no living presence in the biogrammatological order; it subsists there in a state of mimetic detachability, simulation, and archival mortification resulting from the partitioning consignment of voice and life to the media of dead memory. Archival biopower preserves only by effacing mne¯me¯ (vocality as living memory) in hypomne¯meta as forms of conserving nonlife that comprise thanatopower.27 Agamben treats the thanatopolitical as the lack of qualified life and law, but here the thanatopolitics of bioarchivization qualify voice and life and legislate the productive organization of death through a rigidifying conservation of life. The thanatopolitics of the bioarchive is the historicizing power to extract, partition, and expropriate what is archivable as life in order to preserve, petrify, and displace animality through mnemotechnology, which remembers to forget nonhuman dispersion. The historicizing death of animal vocality, its grammatization as logos, is the founding stillbirth of Agamben’s biopower, which archives, filters, and then subsequently nominates a petrified, pacified, parasitable brute, mere or bare life, as a universal foundational figure that, in the end, is a political fiction. (One expression of this is the slippage between the terms “biological” and “life” in biopower theory: biology is already a disciplinary and objectifying biopolitics.) Archival thanatopolitics operates as the unacknowledged technical origin of the biopolitical and is not its manufactured excess. There is thus no autonomous ”bare life” taken in by biopower, and no exteriorized coextensivity, or even necessary relation, between qualified life and its dependent and jettisoned obverse: a life without qualities exiled beyond the bioarchive. These couples and symmetries are all typified, recursive, and functionalized figures intrinsic to the bioarchive, which is erected from an exteriority and surplus that Agamben does not name and that he keeps at a distance from the political in order preserve the radical lack of bare life as the degree zero of his theoretical edifice. In contrast, Derrida asserts a temporalizing spacing and iterability of life that exceeds the detemporalization of bare life as posited by Agamben: “Life does have a beyond, but it does not allow itself to be made into something secondary. As itself and in itself it

368 / Chapter Seven

unfolds the movement of truth and knowledge. It is in itself as its own beyond.”28 In Agamben, life as hypokeimenon, as substrate and support, is already in a relation of political subjugation, and thus already qualified/disqualified, as that which stands under biopower by virtue of being devoid of any intrinsic political formation. Rather than being conscripted as antecedent commons, life is already partitioned, commensurated, and politicized in being made to appear as a substrate, and as a replicatable code and subjugated mimetic topography. Agamben’s legal formalism, which relegates the thanatopolitical to ontological nullification or indeterminate anomic lack, advances biopower as a leveling apparatus of totalization, as a judgmental universality and the structure of structures in which the fiction of bare life is the absent cause and decentered effect. In Agamben, however, life cannot be delimited as an assignable origin of biopower. As Althusser writes of Hegel: “There is no assignable origin  .  .  . because the whole process, which is fulfilled in the final totality, is indefinitely, in all the moments which anticipate its end, its own Origin.”29 In Homo Sacer this totalizing encirclement of and by life as both arkhé and eschaton is in effect a Hegelian recursivity that can be described as follows: biopoliticization (zoé to bios) is the becoming subject of substance, and the making of bare life (bios to zoé) is the becoming substance of the subject. Corpus emblematica Can the detotalizing conditions of biopower’s possibility be reclaimed? Foucault addressed this question, if nowhere else, in his theorizing of early modern monstrosity as a zooanarchism. In doing so he implies, against his own model of a totalizing biopower, that there would be no biopolitical legislation if biopower did not also both presume and constitute an indeterminate moment in every state formation and historical situation. Foucault’s “monsters of form,” wandering at modernity’s thresholds, can be recursive, structuring forces of the biopolitical and are not simply to be dismissed as an outmoded stage in their psychiatric evolution and domestication to “monsters of behavior”: The frame of reference of the human monster is, of course, the law. The notion of the monster is essentially a legal notion in a broad sense, of course what defines the monster is the fact that its existence and form is not only a violation of the laws of society but also a violation of the laws of nature. . . . The field in which the monster appears can thus be called a juridico-

Expiring Animality / 369 biological domain.  .  .  . The monster is the limit, both the point at which law is overturned and the exception that is found only in extreme cases. The monster combines the impossible and the forbidden. . . . The monster does not bring about a legal response from the law. . . . When the monster violates the law by its very existence it triggers the response of something quite different from the law itself. It provokes either violence, the will of our simple repression, or medical care or pity. The monster is then so to speak the spontaneous brutality but also consequently the natural form of the unnatural.30

Foucault’s monsters materialize resistance to biojuridical enclosure as a state of denatured and thus political animality; a political bestiary as the “natural form of the unnatural,” a singularity that transgresses subsumptive law. However, one could also say that biopolitical enclosure is condemned to visualizing its exception or what exceeds it as monstrous creaturely life. Foucault’s monstrosity materially erupts as the edges of two sovereignties, law and nature. The enlightenment monster is a mixture of two kingdoms, human and animal, belonging wholly to neither; it is an “anti-cosmological figure.” As discontinuity and exception, monstrosity precipitates a colonizing regime of “violence, the will of our simple repression or medical care or pity,” by virtue of its resistance to biopolitical and legal circumscription. Foucault’s monsters engage the concept of the exception as materiality, as a form of life, as animal and creaturely, and as irreducible to lack or nullity; if anything monstrosity is excessive, more not less, a lack of law perhaps, but an unassimilable surplus of bodily form and aporetic thresholds. The Foucauldian monster is both a force and a barrier of resistant creaturely life; as the “animality” of exceptionality, monstrosity is a constitutive antagonism and limit experience of biopolitical governmentality. An early reference to caricatura, an Italian word meaning “to load,” occurs in Sir Thomas Browne’s Christian Morals: “Expose not thy self by four-footed manners unto monstrous draughts, and Caricatura representations.”31 Browne adds the note, “When Men’s faces are drawn with resemblance to some other Animals, the Italians call it, to be drawn in Caricatura.” The emblem of the unhuman is the affirmation of a norm of humanity through the nexus of disidentity. Emblematic inhumanization throws up figures of antihumanity in defense of a hegemonic, but also besieged, anthropological phantasm in need of politicotheological enforcement. This is because emblematic signification of the nonhuman is a reauthentication of the “human” through incarnate abjectivity. Emblematic imaging, in the form of the Foucauldian monstrous, the grotesque and

370 / Chapter Seven

disfigured, is not passively expressive of a complex social reality lying behind it but is a formative, structuring force by which an order of bodies— human, animal, and monstrous—is materially crafted as political species. If such images provoke “either violence, the will of our simple repression or medical care or pity,” they can also personify the limit at which anthropological law is overturned by the silenced sovereignties of nonanthropology. Emblematica of the nonhuman such as monstrosity are not governed by relations of resemblance but by disidentification; they are signification by fetishistic devices such as the grotesque, the rogue, the bestial, and the racially abject. Emblematic truth is displayed through incongruity and caricature, which affirms humanity through a posturing disavowal that regulates the relations of the human to its neighboring and impinging alters. The citational structure of antihumanity enables the production of the human not from sameness, but from difference—from what was never, or is no longer, fully human, or from the extreme limits invoked by human minimality. The caricatural or grotesque emblem is a site of exchange and interface, a switching station between the rule and its exception, between normative subsumption and anomic singularity. Hegemonic anthropology generates Nachleben—the afterlife and afterimage of the latter’s entangled and collateral nonhumanity. However, by standing in for what it disfigures, the caricatural emblem of the nonhuman installs humanity itself as equally fictive. Animality, monstrosity, and bestiality, as media of incongruity, impropriety, and disavowal, do not displace the properly human but give rise to it as yet another emblem, as one more fetishized trace and race.32 The Theater of Skins In colonial and neocolonial modes of domination the monstrous excess of race, ethnicity, religion, or gender does not invariably appear as an interior sector to be expelled in an act of decontamination or protective severance, as if it were a once integral part detached from a whole that preexists that jettisoned part. This part/whole antagonism informs Agamben’s biopower in the predicating movement from biopoliticized to bare, anomic, and disqualified life. In this schema, biopolitical enfranchisement or citizenship as a Foucauldian project of self-subjecting normation entails its obverse, a thanatopolitics (see my discussion of biopolitics and suicide in chapter 2) as an entry into the nullity of rightlessness from out of biopolitical right. For this reason the entire discussion of the homo sacer as the emblem of a life exiled into a condition of bareness and disqualification never addresses the slave economy of ancient Rome and Greece, despite Agamben’s schol-

Expiring Animality / 371

arly immersion in Roman law and Hellenistic philosophy. The condition of slaves in Greece and Rome, in relation to citizenship, was from the onset one of ontological rightlessness, which paradoxically made of slaves malleable vehicles of value generation denied Agamben’s homo sacer as a citizen who has lost assigned rights and therefore lacks any social value. This also explains why, for Agamben, the ban and violence enacted against the homo sacer has to be strictly demarcated from sacrificial ritual, since such ceremonial death culminates in the production of a social and symbolic surplus, valuations that the death of the homo sacer lacks as a parajuridical discharge. The presumption of a prior societal integration, such as citizenship, does not apply to those categories of the nonsubject, the sub- or unhuman who functions as a pregiven disqualified element, contiguous with a social order but never of it, and possibly its occluded condition of possibility. Here is required a deeper thinking of the manner in which life or bios and citizenship adumbrate each other. Citizenship—juridical, racial, ethnic, religious, and gendered—is an archival and prosthetic apparatus that performs a bifurcating circumcision on life as a conscripted substrate of power. Derrida has discussed this symbiosis in his analysis of the eugenic structure of fraternity in democracy as a qualifying and disqualifying materialism and biologism of isonomia or substantive equivalence.33 The slave and the occupied colonial subject were consigned to another kind of formal equivalence as forced labor, labor reserve, regressive primitivity, and human instruments entrapped in a cage of eugenic reduction and isomorphism; they were at best nominal or actualized commodity forms and/ or tool forms, denied any access to democratic fraternity and equalities, atomized and vulnerable to extreme violence under the corporeality of labor discipline. Agamben never brings the violence enacted against bare life into proximity with the violence afflicting slaves, the descendants of slaves, and colonial subalterns, all whom subsisted, under a relentless historical a priori, at an immeasurable distance from the biopolitical as a qualifying structure of rights autonomy and normalized agency. However, the juridical torture of slaves in the Greco-Roman societies of antiquity could suspend the economic value of the latter as property and render the slave disposable by law, avowal, and veridiction. This juridical violence is proximate and analogous, if not identical, to that enacted against the disposable homo sacer as a death that coincides with a movement of devaluation. The juridically tortured slave undergoes the suspension of value or the substitution of one subjecting regime of value by another and reaches an extremity where the only value left to this figure is the coerced extraction by pain

372 / Chapter Seven

and fear, of a naked, bare voice that can be converted to and circulated as testimony in court, where the slave could never bodily appear. In this evidentiary production phone was archived as logos under the letter of the law. This torture, as an act of translation, is akin to the Stoic grammatization of animal vocality from the sea of infinite sound. However, torturing slaves communicates with the homo sacer to the degree that the denudation of embodied value for both figures could still engender certain critical value functions and forms. DuBois supports this perspective when she suggests in Torture and Truth that, beyond testimony and veridiction, the juridical torture of the slave visibly enacted the distinction between the citizen and the noncitizen in an Athenian democracy. Why would this rite of consignment and conscription not be relevant to the expulsion of the homo sacer, who becomes rightless, a condition that resolidifies the citizenship of the latter’s executioners as that which the sacer embodies as his or her lack? The convergence of thanatopolitical disposability in diverse entities such as the homo sacer, the slave, the ex-slave, the slave’s descendants, and the colonial subaltern is particularly sharp in reference to the scopic regimes that govern their conditions of life and death, or rather death in life. For Agamben, simply seeing the condemned homo sacer in the civitas authorized the latter’s immediate and unceremonious execution. To explore this executive gaze is to open a visual economy of the dispensable body— the forms of seeing implanted in the norms and practices of civic disposability. Of immediate pertinence here are the mass-produced photographic postcards of lynchings featured in the Without Sanctuary dossier dating to the first decades of the twentieth century.34 The African Americans in these photos were not “dehumanized” in order to be lynched as a bare life without qualities. These victims never enjoyed any operative human status. At best, they were confined to a minimalized, parodic, submimetic, and always deficient, broken, and failed outline, schemata, or automation of the human through which they could be accessed by violence and from which they could be expelled in violence. Such demarcations of the human from the unhuman were qualified by a prepredicative linguistic and scopic enforceability of race. The disposition of their bodies in the lynching scene was, at multiple levels, an extreme value-generating event that fused disposability and productivity into a visual economy of race making. Black lynching victims were born into the exposability and disposability of their bodies as a generative political form of abjectile unlife and uncitizenship and bore the historical burden and pressing gravity of such bodies, which carried no prior biopolitical enfranchisement. These bodies were required

Expiring Animality / 373

to support only an inheritable commodification and, below and beyond that, an overdetermined and ever-expansive thinghood. The photographic souvenirs of this extrajudicial violence, discarded in the attics and cellars of the American political unconscious and subjected to a pseudo–slave trade as curios and antiquities, provision American technological modernity with a dark underside. Late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century racial lynchings traversed the South, the Midwest, the Mid-Atlantic, Texas, and California and were a repeated subject of photographic spectacle. These murders and their visual commemoration constituted a white counterpublic sphere and photosphere, owing, in part, to the ambivalence and duplicity of state institutions toward these executions and news media strictures against printing lynching photography. The lynching photograph was prosthetic to a historically implanted gaze applied to the black body rendered generic by its defacement, and zoological disproportionality in relation to the singularized white faces posed over the raced corpus. Lynching photography reunited two photographic genres that had been sundered by the mid-nineteenth century: popular and cheaply produced democratizing portraiture, and a disciplinary juridical photography centered on typifying criminals, the mentally deficient, the indigent, immigrants, and other deviants.35 Intrinsic to this project of racial typification was the mass production and circulation of these images as a cottage industry of lynching tourism. Many lynching photographs were taken in order to be reproduced as postcards, to be kept as memorabilia or mailed to those who could not attend, thereby creating a mobile visual culture of prosthetic whiteness through the postcard. Photographic evidence of culpable murder, banned from the news media of the day, was officially transmitted through the U.S. Postal Service. The photographic postcard as a mass article embodied and transcribed the technical reproducibility of the unwritten, but no less authoritative, customary law of lynching. This lynching tourism furthered the conjugation of the black body as a circulating and pleasure-generating consumable mass article that could also be encountered in the advertising culture of the period. The photographic postcards were instruments for the realignment of a renewable racial hierarchy originating in chattel slavery, which extended the visual commodification of the latter long after slavery’s constitutional abolishment. In most photos the scenography is circumstantial and haphazard, with an aura of topographical abandonment, even when street corners are the crime scene. In other photographs, a studied formalism is evident, originating with either the photographer or the crowd or both. Laura Nelson and her son L. D. were hanged from the Old Schoolton bridge over the

374 / Chapter Seven

North Canadian River on May 25, 1911, in Okemah, Oklahoma. The copyrighted photo, taken from a boat, displays a panoramic view of the fiftyeight executioner-witnesses (thirty-five men, six women, and seventeen children) standing in a line spanning the bridge above the two bodies, which are suspended over refracting water. Woody Guthrie, whose father, Charlie, took part in the lynching four months before Guthrie was born, wrote several songs about this lynching including “High Balladree,” which featured a verse that highlights the entertainment and commercial dimensions of the event and its technical reproduction: “A nickel postcard I buy off your rack / To show you what happens if / You’re black and fight back / A lady and two boys hanging / down by their necks / From the rusty iron rigs / of my Canadian Bridge.”36 In the Nelson lynching the camera lens instigates an innervating circuitry originating in a floating point of view at an elegiac distance from the lynching party. The photographer renders the murderous crowd visible as a collective unanimity while transecting their visual fabrication and exposure of the “strange fruit” hanging under the bridge. This racial circuit, passing between the lens and the faces of the vigilante mob, is completed in the reflections of the Canadian River, which tacitly mirrors back the floating photographer in the boat and the photographed, both living and dead. The photo makes, shows, and is integrated into a hermetically sealed scopic world where every element, the observer and the observed, the living and the dead, whiteness and blackness, reinforces and reaffirms one another’s posture and position in repeating and mirroring racial emblematica. The camera incorporates the bridge as technicity as intrinsic to this proscenium of race. In such acts of atrocity, if blacks were treated instrumentally as extensions of a degraded materiality, if such violence anonymized the victims by stripping off their clothes and disfiguring them by fire, then these techniques visually encased the victim within a mortifying state of decaying nature. Reciprocally, this racialized landscape also suggests the act of lynching as a technology for the heightened or sublime naturalization of whiteness. Here the double nuance of the sublime as in “sublimation,” and as also “above,” as in “exalted,” organizes the state of nature for blacks and whites respectively. The arc circumscribing the dead of color and murderous living whiteness locates these figures more precisely at the threshold of nature in transition. The photograph freezes a moment in time that captures the movement of the killers to a stratum above immanent nature and the descent of the victim of color to somewhere below nature. Photography in its initial vocations was thought to capture, with greater precision than painting, the lineaments of nature. Lynching photography takes up and repeats

Expiring Animality / 375

that project through the naturalization of politics and the racialization of nature. The lynching images within themselves are the ceremonial taking of colonial skins in which the white mass subject desires to be seen posed and clustered around burnt, defaced, hanging body fragments. The huntinganimality iconography is particularly explicit when multiple bodies of victims are clumped together, like a brace of wild game, as in the lynching of Nease Gillespie, John Gillespie, and Jack Dilllingham on April 6, 1906, in Salisbury, North Carolina.37 A postcard from the burning and hanging of William Stanley in August 1915 in Temple, Texas, which stresses the visibility of the white accessory at the crime scene, declares: “this is the Barbecue we had last night my picture is to the left with a cross over it your son Joe.”38 At some lynchings body parts were sold as trophies, and some were even cooked to further their animalization, destruction, and nonhumanity. This predation tropology extends to symbolic acts of skinning and scalping. A framed photograph of the bodies of Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith, lynched on August 7, 1930, in Marion, Indiana, is accompanied by the actual hair of one of the victims, as if to sustain the auratic authority of the technological artifact by enchaining it to its somatic archaeology (fig. 32). Though the ill use of and value extraction from slaves stopped at cannibalism, in the lynching photographs there can be discerned an orificial, optical cannibalism, where the lens as maw completes the photological charring of the lynched victim by fire and enables the victim’s repetition and circulation as a moment of ultimate consumption, loosened from the place and time of lynching. On another level this photography is also biopolitical portraiture in the sense of the branding of the sovereign spectatorship of white vigilantes, who were frequently foregrounded against the generic defaced victims of color arrayed in these scenes of devastation. In these acts of populist reason and customary law, the constructed sameness of white raciality coincided with the typifying sameness or isonomia of democratic fraternity, from which blacks were barred and yet mediated through the scarification and civic dereliction of their bodies. Both race and democracy found their condition of possibility in the inadmissible black body—provisionally subordinated, “assimilated,” or ingested, only to be periodically regurgitated in an exercise of bulimic politics. It was for, and from, this anticipated and effectuated racial debris that a populist consensus of the lynching crowd, their homologia (concord of speech), their homonoia (concord of thought) and their theatrokratia (vociferous and theatrical public appearing), was technologically renewed and authenticated as constitutive democracy by

376 / Chapter Seven

commercial photography. This was not the denial of democracy, but an instituting passion and kratia of the demos as a majoritarian power that conscripted the black body as a proscenium and aperture for its scenic affirmation. However, this elevation of the raced populist democratic crowd over the degraded black body was ultimately a trans-ascendance of populist democracy beyond codified law, situating it in the “without” of law. The instituted quorum of the lynching mob, created out of the abyss of the black body, placed the democracy of the vigilante crowd above law to the same degree that the lynching victim was incarcerated below and reciprocally beyond law. This isonomic and democratic formation of racial domination is a zootheological apparatus in which white fraternal sovereignty is constituted in relation to black animality. Here there is no mediation or echo of anything anthropological. The formative constitution of both raced formations, whiteness and blackness, required the withdrawal and foreclosure of any possible anthropological commons (irreducible to any calculable a priori humanism or humanitarianism) between these species, between the hunter and the prey. The action of lynching was the immunization of both whiteness and blackness from any transecting anthropological contamination, porosity, or permeability. The zootheological lynching crowd is a formation where there are only white sovereigns and black beasts, and where the anthropological “is caught, evanescent, disappearing, at the very most a simple mediation, a hyphen between the sovereign and the beast, between God and cattle.”39 Political man is above the animal, since the political entity kills and otherwise subjugates beasts; but above political man, above the anthropological as a political category or entity, resides sovereignty, which inversely mirrors the beast in standing as a law above the law, while it condemns the beast to lie below law. Racialization as sublime naturalization removes whiteness from the sphere of the anthropological and the political. This translation is effectuated in the intensity of lynching as an intimate act of distancing that forecloses any possibility of a minimal commonality between white and black. At this historical site, the foreclosure of the anthropological does not restore the civil integrity and ontological dignity of what has been consigned to political animality or bestiality, irrespective of what the discourses of a posthuman animal ethics presuppose. Rather, the political zootheology of race, in which the anthropological commons is no more than an ephemeral hyphen or a blank space between transcendental whiteness and abjected blackness, preempts any possibility of a dialogical encounter, transposability, or connective embodiment between these speaking animals.

Expiring Animality / 377

These lynching postcards stage Heidegger’s animal perishing as a patently race-building rite in which whiteness as biopolitical qualification is visually manufactured from a material nullification of the black body— which, given the longue durée and aftermath of slavocracy, is certainly not reducible to an expulsion from civic life, as indexed by Agamben’s unsacrificeable bare life without qualities. The camera’s gaze traverses the burned effigy only to come to rest on the upturned white faces of the gathered celebrants, mapping a necrography in which the sovereignty and autonomy of whiteness are relationally forged through both the making and exhibiting of the animalized corpus of color. The disfigured “skin” that has been entrapped and mounted is a historicizable vortex bearing witness to what Heidegger grudgingly refers to as that “scarcely fathomable, abyssal bodily kinship with the animal.”40 The postcards refract both residual and emerging techniques of political speciation, wherein one species parasitically exists upon another particularly through the real and symbolic extraction of its pain, suffering, mortification, death, and image. The intractable material densities of the lynching, the disfiguration, suffering, and death, never suffice; the act, the event, and the ecstasy must become knowable and sustain their knowability across time and space as an anchorage for the continuous trans-ascendance of whiteness that must float and never be brought to its ground—the black body. The anxiety over the impermanence of the racial self-awareness and immunization obtained through lynching can be tracked back to the eviscerated and anonymized dead matter upon which this knowledge is archived. The photographic transcript becomes an automaton of the now-absent black body around which fraternal unanimity and populist democracy had been concretized. The lynching is a materially dense, multimediatic chromography, which the souvenir photograph archives in its abbreviated medium. Value extraction is rampant in these images: lynched unlife is productive and generative. The racial emblem is neither bare nor lacking in qualified substances but accumulates a historiography, repeatability, calculability, a structuration, a destiny, and a surplus enjoyment—it shows the becoming law of whiteness itself. Part and parcel of making the act of speciation calculable and destinal is its visual reproducibility. The violence and postcards mechanized the whiteness of the portrayed spectator through the displayed antilife of thanatochromatic “black” matériel. The white figure on show here bears the trace of a traumatizing b(l)ackground from which this chromaticism unfolds. In this figure/ground interface the black abjectile is experienced as a disturbance in the field of eugenic fraternal sameness (whiteness) and is exhibited as animal exteriority. Animality and blackness are both the motors of and yet

378 / Chapter Seven

manifest the limit of white self-representability—the former is the politically crafted lack around which whiteness is formed. The issue remains as to what degree the technologies of photography mediated race, or whether the technology of race making, as a scopic regime, historically anterior to photographic technology, overdetermined the latter. There is a discernible dialectic between these visual postures and periodizations. The first formulation posits race as an immediately objectifiable substance and substrate, submissible to new and diverse forms of technological framing; but it downplays its prephotographic visuality. This schema presumes an evolutionary trajectory of raced visuality in American culture based on a problematic distinction between pretechnological and technological racisms without recognizing racism as an economic, political, and sexual technicity. The second proposition posits race making, speciation, and objectivation as an in situ photopolitics entwined with visual valuations prior to and crosscutting nineteenth-century photography. For African Americans, under the technicity of a slavocratic gaze, photographic mortification before the invention of the camera was literal, continuous, and enclosing and confirmed their status as reproducible forms of endlessly maneuverable life. The visual reification of stolen Africans, which predicated their descendants, placed slaves in an interspatial domain between death and life wherein social death, as discussed by Orlando Patterson, becomes the dominant mode of presentation of slavocratic “life.”41 There is a genealogical relation of writing with light to the thanatochromatic black body that had been historically inscribed by branding irons and whips, and reciprocally enframed and mortified by various forms of punitive shackling, long before the advent of the camera. Is not economic racism, predicated on the convergence of melanin, political economy, and colonial cartography, already a photography, an economimesis, that crosscuts depictive apparatuses of finance, global shipping, accounting, cargo insurance, and agribusiness, as well as technologies of capture, confinement, disciplinary surveillance (of the overseer, the paddyroller, the runaway poster), and the body/currency conversions of the auction block? One could further propose that the spectacularization of torture and death evidenced in lynching photography was previously intrinsic to the public pedagogy of punition and labor discipline in the plantation economy, which used the threat and actuality of whipped backs and amputated appendages as mnemonic instruments of white supremacy and economic necessity. Certainly the dissemination of inexpensive mass-produced photographic technologies transformed the visual experience of race from the mid-nineteenth century onward. However, prior to and conditioning

Expiring Animality / 379

this mediatic regime was the scopic specification and surveillance of black bodies from slavery onward.42 This was remediation in reverse. Lynching photography did not separate itself, in its technical precision and positivism, from the phantasmatic; rather, the automaticity of the camera was absorbed back into the automaticity of a residual slavocracy and its ontology of race. Two forms and periodizations of spectatorship and visuality converged in the mass-produced stereographs, picture cards, snapshots, and postcards of lynching. The typifying power of photography and a residual ontology of cultural, gendered, and economic typification, historically congealed around the body of color, and brokered the entry of black abjectness into technopolitical modernity. Lynching photography reproduced and extended the anatomy theaters and exhibits of slavocracy, preparing their urban circulation, which today assumes the cultural logic of the shoot-tokill arrests of unarmed black women and men and the quantifiable racial predilections of the American death penalty. The anonymous scenography of lynching—desiccated secondarygrowth terrain, rusting iron rail bridges, telephone poles and lampposts, abandoned backyards, and derelict street corners— bear witness to the situation that, for the white spectator, black life/death carries its own portable proscenium wherever it can be captured and only requires the artifice of white spectatorship to liberate that intrinsic theatricality and consumability always lurking in the thanatochromatic body. These encindered and hanging bodies are caricatures in which the capital penalty is transmuted into minstrelsy, composed of a final, fatal “corking up” (burning) and the danse macabre of the hanging, swaying, and charred body. This minstrel aesthetic is a political taxidermy by which black bodies are recaptured in being theatricized, occupied, and imaged as consumable substances of pleasure and commensality that further enchains the latter to nullity and automatism. An explicit example connecting lynching to the mummery of the minstrel theater is the photograph of a lynching victim bludgeoned to death and propped up with a long stick by one of his killers, to look as though he were sitting upright in a rocking chair (see my discussion in chapter 2 of a similar postmortem posing by American kill teams in Afghanistan). The victim’s face was covered with multicolored paint, circular disks were glued to his cheeks, and white cotton was applied to his face and head to simulate the hair associated with the elderly, domesticated, avuncular “Uncle Tom” stereotype (165). American cinema originates in the minstrel montage of white actors playing black speaking instruments in a circuit where whites are both puppeteer and puppet. The minstrelized black body is fabricated by a racial transvestism in a montage that can only be described

380 / Chapter Seven

as cinematic capture in the passing back and forth between two imagined bodies that generates a third body of optical miscegenation—the conjugation that is the sovereign and the beast. Natality and Animality In the same fashion Agamben treats life itself as a subjectum, a support and backing, for a universalizing biopolitical constitution, Arendt posed natality, appearing life or vita activa, as the universal prepolitical condition of the political. The political potentiality ascribed to natality is denied to the animal and to the human body because of its metonymic contamination by regressive animality; thus, a definitional politics of life is introduced at the onset by Arendtian natality. Natality is defined as: “beginning, before it becomes a historical event, is the supreme capacity of man; politically, it is identical with man’s freedom!”43 Natality has precedence as the initiation of initiative: “Because they are initium, newcomers and beginners by virtue of birth, men take initiative, are prompted into action.”44 Natality is the givenness of birth as a singularity that phenomenalizes a world to be acted upon: “to put it differently, the decisive fact determining man as a conscious, remembering being is birth or ‘natality,’ that is, the fact that we have entered the world through birth.”45 Following St. Augustine, Arendt situates natal singularity at the human/animal fault line. Augustine proposed that God “started . . . with one man, whom he created as the first man . . . instead of starting with many.” However, with animals, “he commanded many to come into existence at once.”46 For Arendt, animality is a multitude devoid of singularity and even a singularizing birth, as befits the animal’s immersion in biological repetition. In Augustinian anthropology, man is in a sovereign position because human natality recapitulates the similitude of God’s singular creative action. Arendt retains this isomorphic relation between sovereignty and natal singularity, in which both are counterpoised to a nonsovereign anonymous animal multiplicity. The decisiveness of natality renders it analogous to the miracle: “Every act . . . is a ‘miracle’ . . . that is, something which could not be expected. If it is true that action and beginning are essentially the same, it follows that a capacity for performing miracles must likewise be within the range of human faculties.”47 Natality as a constitutive exceptionality or “miracle” is the very power of decision, willing, and transgression that Schmitt previously allocated to the sovereign.48 A political theology of natality, willing, sovereignty, and inauguration underlies Arendt’s theory of freedom and the political: “with the creation of man, the principle of be-

Expiring Animality / 381

ginning came into the world itself . . . the principle of freedom was created when man was created but not before.”49 Arendtian political action is the assertion of will over material necessity, while the animalized body, lacking singularizing will, is enchained to necessity. If the natal act is a miracle, the human body, in contrast, is consigned to animalized automatism, repetitive subsistence, and biological survival: “The biological process in man . . . [is] endlessly repetitive” (98). As compared to the creativity of natality, physical labor and consumption are described, in a classic Hegelian formulation, as “devouring” activities (100). Though any initiating action can be embodied action, its autonomy is dependent on the will that masters the body, the animal, and the material: “Marx never doubted about the animality [das Animalische] in the definition ‘animal rationale.’ Through the concept of labor he attempts to connect immediately what is specifically human to the animal. That means, mutatis mutandis, to derive freedom from necessity. . . . The Greeks do the opposite: they ‘derive’ freedom out of the ‘rational’ or violent domination of the necessary. This is one of the reasons why the logos becomes tyrannical. . . . Eu zen = to live in freedom = to dominate tyrannically over necessity.”50 The domination of necessity by the natal type indicates that natality is not absolute creation ex nihilo: the natal event is in relation to antecedence, but natality interdicts the antecedent by refusing inheritance as a condition of freedom. Thus the refusal of animal bodily inheritance structures natality as human domination over the animal in itself and outside itself. The tyranny of natality over necessity is autotelic self-constitution, an executive action that Arendt locates at the core of the political. From this animal nonnatality is extrapolated to politicoeconomic states of subjugation. Writing of the will in relation to slave labor in the ancient world, Arendt associates the latter with the nonnatal and as entrapped in apolitical necessity:51 “the human speaking instruments (the instrumentum vocale, as the slaves in ancient households were called) whom the man of action had to rule and oppress when he wanted to liberate the animal laborans from its bondage. . . . Man cannot be free if he does not know that he is subject to necessity; because his freedom is always won in his never wholly successful attempt to liberate himself from necessity.”52 As Andreas Kalyvas, who frames natality in Arendt’s theory of the will, writes: “A will that is incapacitated because of certain social, cultural, and economic obstacles becomes an inherent impediment to political action and public participation. In other words, only a will that is relatively liberated from the necessities and deprivations of life can decide to act. As Arendt argued, ‘only those could begin something new who were already rulers . . . and had thus lib-

382 / Chapter Seven

erated themselves from the necessities of life.’”53 The necessity that Arendt ascribes to first nature is reconstituted by modern biopolitical regimes as a second nature that interdicts political possibility. Arendt recognizes that natality as postpartum agency can be constrained and forestalled by a politically constructed practico-inert, which she sees as the petrifaction of the natal in biopolitics: “With men the beginning came into the world. On this rests the sanctity of human spontaneity. Totalitarian extermination of men as men is the extermination of their spontaneity. This means at the same time the reversal of creation as creation, as to-have-made-a-beginning. [Maybe here is the connection between the attempt to destroy men and the attempt to destroy nature.]”54 The lack of natalized spontaneity associated with the animal and the body is recapitulated in totalitarian biopolitics as a reconstituted repressive necessity. Biopower for Arendt is an assault not only on natality, but on the political, which is opposed to retrograde biopolitical regimes of command, calculability, normalization, and repetition that animalize the human. Though natality is predicated on the differential singularity of each natal subject, the existential birthright of natality for Arendt is isonomia—the political self-organization/self-inauguration of natal peers as exemplified by Athenian democracy. Arendt sharply opposes isonomia to instrumental power as mimetic subordinating repetition equated with depoliticization. Natality is also a precipitant of political visuality as a prosopon, the appearing of singular natals in public space, which is the biographical event of exposability. Kalyvas comments that “to be a citizen entails a willingness to suffer the consequences of such a decision to leave one’s private hiding place and disclose or expose one’s self in front of one’s peers.”55 Though Arendt’s natal exposure may specify visibility as the precondition of political action and biographical events, she does not account for politicized visual dominance, visually driven embodiment/disembodiment and systems of regulatory surveillance that drive systems of command and control and invariably link natal exposure to foundational modes of politicized violence, such as the violent racing and gendering of natality. Arendt proposes a primary and secondary natality, analogous to Agamben’s refiguration of zoé, given life, by bios, or politically qualified life. Natality as bios is connected to biography, which is contingent on the event as the temporal expression and narrative artifact of natal aperity:56 “The chief characteristic of this specifically human life, whose appearance and disappearance constitute worldly events, is that it is always full of events which ultimately can be told as a story, establish a biography; it is of this life, bios,

Expiring Animality / 383

as distinguished from mere we, that Aristotle said that it somehow is a kind of praxis.”57 Animal life, structured by the circularity of subsistence and devoid of natality and will, lacks the event and thus lacks the bios of the biographical and is thereby barred from the political. (See Derrida’s contestation of this below.) The human body, immersed in analogous biologized circularity, similarly lacks events and biography unless it is reconfigured and redressed by natal willing, which would be the event of the body’s entry into political biographics.58 Secondary natality as bios establishes a reflexive purchase upon the sheer nakedness of appearing-in-the-world: “With word and deed we insert ourselves into the human world, and this insertion is like a second birth, in which we confirm and take upon ourselves the naked fact of our original physical appearance. This insertion is not forced upon us by necessity. . . . Its impulse springs from the beginning, which came into the world when we were born and to which we respond by beginning something new on our own initiative.”59 Natality as an a priori performs a political function: it establishes selfconstituting anthropology as a foundational birthright and insulates that foundation from a relapse into the bodily antecedence and inheritance of naked and denuded apolitical animality. Arendt denies natality to the metonymic assemblage that links human embodiment to animal multitudes and further sees the body as betraying singular natal autonomies through a collectivized automatism that renders it susceptible to biopolitical colonization, control, and detemporalization. Thus Arendt poses two contradictory forms of bios: the natal refiguration of the body as mere life (tou zen) into bios, based on isonomic action, will, initiation, and miracle, and the biopolitical interdiction of spontaneity through biologizing technics, mimetic command structures, and intimidating violence. Is the polarity between the two sovereignties and modes of domination sustainable? Arendt’s prepolitical universalization of natality constitutes an idealist moralization of the phenomenological life world that erases a foundational political abortion as a condition of possibility for political natality. To what degree is natal autonomy both predicated on and conditioned by depoliticized animality, which Arendt bars from natal initiation? I suggest that political animality is the mediating terrain where the complicity of isonomia as eugenic fraternity with rule by biologized subjugation can be discerned. This schema rebounds upon the lynching of blacks as an exercise in populist reason enacted against a subject lacking any natality and thus reciprocally incapable of dying, only of expiration or perishing, as Heidegger described animal death.

384 / Chapter Seven

Descriptions of natality as phenomenological appearing-in-the-world have to be tempered by comprehending prepolitical natality as the concealment of the political in the (un)birth of the animal and the animalized as those other forms of life that are politically disqualified by Arendt and Heidegger either as natals or as mortals. I have in mind here a political ontology that radically interdicts natal inauguration at its roots by virtue of a birth that is always already an “animalizing” enclosure. I refer to Patterson’s concept of natal alienation as the ontological temporal and topological structure of the slave and also as a wider schema for cognate and descendant modes of domination.60 Patterson describes the slave as being “recruited” as a socially dead person, and this conscription structures the slave’s lack of natality—enslaved birth itself traverses both biological and social natal nullification. According to Patterson, the slave’s natal alienation involves the “loss of ties of birth in ascending and descending generations,” which means that the slave loses the ability to make natal claims to his or her parents and community and has none to pass onto his or her children.61 In reference to hereditary slavery Aristotle relates that “there was the case at Chalcedon of a man [who we can infer was a slave] who was branded on his arm and the same letter though somewhat confused and indistinct appeared marked on his child.”62 What the slave bequeaths to descendants is a “perpetual and inheritable” nonnatality, an ontological stillbirth in which the slave’s natal alienation constitutes a “genealogical isolation,” turning the slave into an “ideal human tool, an instrumentum vocale—perfectly flexible, unattached and deracinated.”63 Slavery here is animality reconstituted as technology and tool-being. A political critique of natality, in contrast to Arendt’s phenomenology of natality as prepredicative, would recognize that the politicizing difference between the political and nonpolitical is also the bifurcation of birth itself into natal potentiality and natal nullity—the latter as a founding recruitment into the explicitly politicized privation of animalized ontologies. Patterson’s natal alienation renders the Arendtian universal model of the natal crucially dehistoricizing. Heidegger demarcates a singularized human being-toward-death from a repetitive anonymous animal expiration. Similarly, Arendt delimits a terrain of initiating natality and nonnatal repetition, which is effectively an internal bifurcation of natality into the politically manifest and a depoliticizing containment that Patterson terms natal alienation. Natality qualified as bios and biography is born from and borne by the natal nullification of the animalized, the enslaved, and the subjugated, viewed by a complicit anthropocentric metaphysics as trapped in a circle of repetitive action de-

Expiring Animality / 385

void of diachronic progression. Yet isonomic political organization, which Arendt posits as antagonistic to rule by command and control, may be as much in symbiosis with natal nullification as it is informed by natal aperity. Arendt tacitly concedes this in On Violence, where the dignifying protection that civitas terrena affords the citizen is evoked. She cites Xenophon as crediting the isonomic organization of the polis with enabling citizens to organize themselves against attacks from and murder by slaves and criminals.64 Here the threat against sovereign isonomia comes from the strata of the nonnatal. Arendt does not consider the slave attack as expressing natal assertions and human demands, which are political rather than criminal and/or driven by imposed material necessity. The Athenian imaginary of slave attack and revolt was a de facto recognition that their democratic constitution was dialectically implicated in the deconstituted. Arendt does not acknowledge that the prepolitical sovereignty of natality both presumes and produces the political “necessity” of the natalized and the denatalized, initiative and repetition, isonomia and biopolitical subjugation, and the politically human and apolitical animality. Arendt’s natality is a condition of the political, but like all arkhé it remains external and prior to what it installs, inaugurates, and opens. Yet, is not her reading of natality enabled through a backward look from the vantage point of her model of the political as multiple isonomic natals acting in concert? In this sense natality is theorized within the framework of the future anterior, in which natality is eulogized action that will have been legitimized as political in reference to a point in the future. The natal subject is determinable only in prolepsis, not as the one who is, but as the one who will have been a political subject and agency. Natality is absorbed forward into the political order it virtually enables and effectively receives its positioning as prepolitical arkhé from the political-to-come and not from an innate phenomenological givenness. Whether from the perspective of isonomic self-constitution or slave attacks on those enfranchised by isonomia, natality appears as born politically and dialectically from life that is twice aborted. The Biographics of the Animal For Derrida the critique of the human/animal checkpoint is a journey across a confining threshold (le passage des frontières) into the previously deferred, suppressed, and unwritten autobiography of the animal as the Nebenmensch, the unassimilable neighbor of the human.65 The sheer recognition of animal autobiography means that there can be an animal natality that has been concealed or displaced by the birth of the human and

386 / Chapter Seven

that bears the disfiguring trace of that anthropocentric appearing. Derrida will, in contradistinction to Arendt, recover a natal event in this passage across the ontoanthropological checkpoint as the birth or upsurge of the animal from within a leaky and tenuous anthropocentric threshold, which for Derrida is both a divestiture of the sovereign subject and the subject of sovereignty and an opening onto a human/animal indeterminacy. Derrida is concerned with the reciprocal and co-contaminating appearing and disappearing of the human and the animal in a terrain whose political character awaits description and decision. Derrida writes of the human/animal checkpoint in specifically visual terms: The animal is there before me, there next to me, there in front of me—I who am (following) after it. And also, therefore, since it is before me, it is behind me. It surrounds me. And from the vantage of this being-there-before-me it can allow itself to be looked at, no doubt, but also—something that philosophy perhaps forgets, perhaps being this calculated forgetting itself—it can look at me. It has its point of view regarding me. The point of view of the absolute other, and nothing will have ever given me more food for thinking through this absolute alterity of the neighbor or of the next(-door) than these moments when I see myself seen naked under the gaze of a cat.66 Descartes, Kant, Heidegger, Lacan and Levinas.  .  .  . Their discourses are sound and profound, but everything goes on as if they themselves had never been looked at, and especially not naked, by an animal that addressed them. At least everything goes on as though this troubling experience had not been theoretically registered, supposing that they had experienced it at all, at the precise moment when they made of the animal a theorem, something seen and not seeing.  .  .  . It is as if the men representing this configuration had seen without being seen, seen the animal without being seen by it, without being seen seen by it; without being seen seen naked by someone who, from deep within a life called animal, and not only by means of the gaze, would have obliged them to recognize, at the moment of address, that this was their affair, their lookout [que cela les regardait]. But since I don’t believe, deep down, that it has never happened to them, or that it has not in some way been signified, figured, or metonymized, more or less secretly, in the gestures of their discourse, the symptom of this disavowal remains to be deciphered. It could not be the figure of just one disavowal among others. It institutes what is proper to man, the relation to itself of a humanity that is above all anxious about, and jealous of, what is proper to it.67

Expiring Animality / 387

To write an autobiography of the animal, according to Derrida, is to gaze at and be exposed to an animalizing gaze. The engagement with the anamorphic presences that are embodied, disembodied, materialized, and dematerialized in and as animality occurs in Derrida’s uncanny encounter with his cat as he stands without clothes in his bathroom, though what is meant by the “gaze of the cat” or even by the emitting site or origin of this regard is not self-evident. Donna Haraway reads this meeting as Derrida’s self-evident defaulting on “a simple obligation of a companion species,” as a failed moment of potential cross-species communication that she names as a “scientific” and “biological,” and therefore (I stress) an ethical and anthropological, return of the animal gaze.68 Haraway does not acknowledge that the stabilized subject position from which a cross-species capacity for exchange could be launched is exactly what falls into crisis with Derrida. Derrida’s experience of the animal gaze transposes him from humanity to animality, in which Derrida no longer possesses a sovereign ipseity but “lives on” as his own Nebenmensch or neighbor. Of the ipse implied by the notion of foundational speciation or iterable communication across diverse species, Derrida writes: “I would like to have the plural animals heard in the singular. There is no animal in the general singular, separated from man by a single indivisible limit. We have to envisage the existence of ‘living creatures’ whose plurality cannot be assembled within the single figure of an animality that is simply opposed to humanity.”69 Derrida’s objection to a fictive or unexamined gross collectivization embodied in the term “animal” and related forms reveals that the encounter with the “cat” occurs in a uncertain field, and not a determinate ethological interspecies space. Derrida has elsewhere questioned what Gayatri Spivak also critiques the assumption of “precomprehended collectivity” as “chunks of the real.” A priori speciation, as the support for Haraway’s cross-species communication, is one such precomprehended collectivization.70 Calculable collectivity both presumes and contravenes “the heteronomic and dissymmetrical curvature of social space”—the curvature that complexifies full representational appropriation as the impress of collective magnitude onto singularity. For Derrida this curvature of social space is the contingent relation with the Other before all organized socius, polity, and law, before the “we” and “they” of speciation and before the name one assigns to oneself and to the Other, along with the responsibilities, agency, and freedoms that are supported by that name. At the moment that collectivities are announced as such, there is no longer an asymmetrical singular Other, only a commensuration that would support translation

388 / Chapter Seven

and exchange. Derrida adheres to this heteronomic curvature throughout his untranslatable encounter with his cat, “for the heteronomic and dissymmetrical curving of a law of originary sociability is also a law, perhaps the very essence of law.”71 Derrida’s mise-en-scène may begin with the coappearance of a man and a cat, but neither subject position survives their mutual exposure—the cat is both a cat and not a cat, and Derrida is himself and another: “In the course of this experience the other appears as such—that is to say, the other appears as a being whose appearance appears without appearing, without being submitted to the phenomenological law of the original and intuitive given that governs all other appearances, all other phenomenality as such. The altogether other and every other (one) is every (bit) other, comes here to upset the order of phenomenology. And good sense. That which comes before autonomy must also exceed it—that is, succeed it, survive and indefinitely overwhelm it.”72 Stripping Biographical Checkpoints For Derrida the visual field of animality is fractured—one animal, the human, experiences exposure, embarrassment, shame, numbness, and violence when “naked” in front of the animal neighbor in itself and before itself. Nakedness both decenters humanity and is a heightening of animality, the raising into visibility of the deferred animal biographics of the culturally and politically constructed human. He describes the denuding visual exposure of this stratigraphy of the animal in the human as a “mishap,” a “fall,” an “unpaid debt,” a “symptom that cannot be admitted,” and a pathology, so to speak. This Edenic fall is not nakedness, but knowledge of nakedness. For Derrida, animals cannot be naked because they do not know nakedness (nonhuman animality). To be naked as an animal is not to be an animal but to be reduced to the specularity and the disenfranchising gaze of an animalizing Other. To be naked is to be naked before someone or something that occupies an enfranchising or disenfranchising position as regards the human, whether this is the radical alterity of a watchful Other; the scrutiny of the law, medicine, or the rifle scope of a sniper; or the telemetry of the drone. Derrida’s project is autobiographical, and thus no biographics of the animal can be construed as devoid of human informatization, particularly when an encounter with animality precipitates biographical divestiture. Foucault linked animality to madness, which “was thus an animal with strange mechanisms, a bestiality from which man had long been suppressed.”73 Derrida chided Foucault for writing as if he could tell us what madness is and what the mad really think.74 In turn, Derrida

Expiring Animality / 389

equally cannot report on what animals really see; he can tell us only of the haptics of that gaze of “someone who, from the basis of a life called animal,” he experiences as “animalizing.” In the interstices of a banal everyday encounter with his cat, Derrida undergoes a passage into a bared life where animality arises as a nakedness and exposure that is not proper to animals per se, but that defines human impropriety, propelling humanity outside of its “proper” and sovereign self. This stripping, numbing, nonhuman gaze is at issue here, and not the field of vision of the cat. We are far from the animal as a species-being, contrary to what Haraway presumes. For if there are gazes that provoke the upsurge of animality and the disenfranchisement of a secured humanity, these scopic regimes come into existence through operations that both anthropologize and animalize. Neither Derrida’s cat nor any other “animal” can be shown to have such a sovereign project. The impropriety [malséance] of a certain animal nude before the other animal, from that point on one might call it a kind of animalséance: the single, incomparable and original experience of the impropriety that would come from appearing in truth naked, in front of the insistent gaze of the animal. . . . Clothing would be proper to man, one of the “properties” of man. “Dressing oneself” would be inseparable from all the other figures of what is “proper to man,” even if one talks about it less than speech or reason, the logos, history, laughing, mourning, burial, the gift, etc. (The list of “what is proper to man” always forms a configuration, from the first moment. For that reason, it can never be limited to a single trait.)75

Proper dressing or presentation of the body, habeas corpus as a performative of anthropological citizenship, conversely implies stripping the body, in which the human would come into a knowledge of a politically constructed animality in the divestiture of human cover, in the loss of political dressage—from clothing, to identity cards, to entitlements, to rights to life itself. Here the animal and its gaze bear the sacrificial trace of human divestiture and nakedness without being the origin of these political conditions. In tracing the animal, the latter is covered in nakedness, and the human is figured and dressed. This is a biographics that decides on states of dress as conditions of address or subject positioning, where the dressed and the naked are interpellated as a human or animal, as political subject and nonsubject in which ethological categories and boundaries are subsumed under political speciation. Derrida engages political speciation when he frames anthropology and animality, dressage and nudity within a theory

390 / Chapter Seven

of prosthetics and disability as intrinsic to a theory of subjectification. “We would therefore have to think shame and technicity together, as the same ‘subject.’”76 Derrida writes of an optics of shaming that produces an ensnared and exhibited subject in a state of “debt” to an encircling, magnetizing, and animalizing Other. He does not explicitly name any of this as political. Derrida’s animal exposé also echoes the biosemiotics of Heidegger and Jakob Johann von Uexküll; the latter’s notion of Umwelt, the semiotic surround within which the animal senses and acts, is transposed by Derrida into a predicating and denuding visual field.77 In von Uexküll the Umwelt as sensorial specularity, as spatial aesthesis, is the locus from which the animal always receives its code. In Heidegger’s reading of von Uexküll the animal is in a state of captivation (Benommenheit) by its surroundings and in a state of “benumbedness” (benommen) as it is lured by a hypnotic ring (Umring) of disinhibiting semiotic triggers borne by the Umwelt.78 The animal, for Heidegger, is “taken” (hingenommen) by its perceptible Umwelt rather than taking a position over and against it, which is implicitly a bipedal ontology that Heidegger later renders explicit by asserting that the animal, owing to its capture by the Umwelt, does not stand alongside man (hence Derrida’s experience of a philosophical fall into animality, and captivation/captivity by an animalizing regard). Mastery is never prone; being erect over, against, and before is the signature of the mastering and representing subject. This disability of not-standing-beside-the-human anticipates the disabilities of Derrida’s captivity, shame, captivation, and “involuntary exhibition” under the animalizing gaze.79 There are more explicitly institutionalized and political analogues to this ecology of captivation and captivity. The Umwelt as artificed second nature reappears in Henri Ellenberger’s inquiry into the parallel development of mental institutions and zoological gardens in late eighteenth-century France, in which the incarceration of animals and that of mental patients were pathogenically compared for their disabling and numbing effects on their inmates.80 In Foucault’s anatomy of the scopic regime in the asylum, the clinic, and the prison, the visual colonization of aperity drives the formation of politically biologized embodiment. The totalizing politicization of life identified by Foucault is predicated on the aperture of the body, which is permeable and trainable and therefore subjected to a biosemiotic ring or habitus of agency-forming technics or disinhibitors (to use Heidegger’s term): the administrative motors of embodied captivity known as panoptical penetration. Biopower forms a captivating/ capturing Umwelt to the degree that it is anchored on the aperity, visibility, and spatiality of the body as the enabling terrain for a continuous power

Expiring Animality / 391

without interruption, where the body’s exposure and aperity enables the subjugating colonization of the political subject by technologies of political aesthesis. Owing to its openness in a state of privation, the Heideggerian animal is infamously declared “poor in world” or “merely life,” tropes that anticipate Agamben’s bare life and Derrida’s experience of debt.81 The concept of the disinhibiter that disables is revealing here. Animal action for Heidegger shifts from one negative state to another—it is action as disablement. This scenario compels Agamben to ponder an experiment of Uexküll’s in which a tick was placed in a sensory vacuum for eighteen years without the slightest exposure to disinhibiting aesthesis; this scene of suspension encapsulates his notion of anomic bare life as totalizing nullity and abandonment.82 For Agamben, the Heideggerian animal has an Umwelt, thus a field of perception, an opening, but no self-reflexive understanding of “the Open” as such. The animal senses without understanding, a privative formula that Derrida, in an earlier text on Heidegger, states is in opposition to the Enlightenment concept of seeing with and/or as understanding: “The animal has no world . . . because it is deprived of it, but its privation means that its not having is a mode of having. . . . The animal has and does not have a world.”83 And Agamben elaborates on Heidegger’s notion of animal poverty: “The ontological status of the animal environment. . . . is offen (open) but not offenbar (disconcealed). For the animal beings are open but not accessible; that is to say they are open in an inaccessibility and an opacity—that is . . . in a non-relation. The openness without disconcealment distinguishes the animal’s poverty. . . . The animal is not simply without world, for insofar as it is open in captivation, it must—unlike the stone which is worldless—do without world, lack it.”84 Derrida writes of this impoverishment: “If privative poverty indeed marks the caesura or the heterogeneity between the non-living and living on the one hand, between the animal and human Dasein on the other, the fact remains that the very negativity of the residue which can be read as a discourse on privation cannot avoid a certain anthropocentric and humanist teleology.”85 These Heideggerian privatives map a terrain of animal lack that I suggest is political not only because these theorems deny their political import by entrenching animality in a destined site of ontological privation, but also because they emerge from and are symptomatic of a modernity where humanization and inhumanization, sensory captivation, capture, and world negation have become political and economic projects of unprecedented magnitude. If poverty of world or life or language anchors the entelechy of the human over the animal, the thanatopolitical

392 / Chapter Seven

category of ultimate devaluation and poverty—that is, of life not worthy of life—transposes this anthropocentric teleology into a juridical and existential fault line for political subjects in which anthropocentrism becomes the numbing, capturing, and killing machine of biopower. Derrida writes of the relation between numbness, anesthesia, deprivation, and captivation that “benumbedness seems to close off access to the entity as such. In truth it does not even close it off, since closure implies opening or aperity, an Offenbankeit to which the animal does not have access.86 Being open in a state of captivation, or “being taken in the drivenness of instinctual captivation,” as Heidegger puts it, is to define captivity and subjugation in terms of sensory colonization and as an anesthesia that is borne by sensory enclosure.87 Captivation as captivity occurs when a being’s mode of aperity and natality becomes a mode of automated entrapment and a lure in which the aperture of embodied aesthesis becomes a shutter. The Heideggerian animal Umwelt is a politically coded space of imprisoning autokinetic captivation, benumbment, disability, impoverishment, and debt in communication with the camp, the asylum, the prison, the detention center, even the cult of capitalist deficit and other structures of spatialized subjugation and violence where the animalized possesses a “world” in an impoverished state of dispossession. This impoverishment of world is a structure of subjugation in which aperity or natality has been foreclosed. Having a world in a mode of dispossession speaks to the desertification of life, to life that is politically exposable and disposable, that has been bared, exhibited, abandoned, and denuded to the edge of disappearance. Derrida summarizes the scopic regime within which he is caught: As with every bottomless gaze, as with the eyes of the other; the gaze called “animal” offers to my sight the abysmal limit of the human: the inhuman or the ahuman, the ends of man that is to say, the border crossing from which vantage man dares to announce himself to himself, thereby calling himself by the name that he believes he gives himself. And in these moments of nakedness under the gaze of the animal everything can happen to me, I am like a child ready for the apocalypse, I am (following) the apocalypse itself, that is to say the ultimate and first event of the end, the unveiling and the verdict.88

Derrida barely stands here in shame, passivity, and nudity in a zone of surveillance, confronted by “a bottomless gaze,” a visually constructed zone of bared life; a zone that delivers apocalyptic yet natal expectations, that functions as a border with checkpoints where identities must be announced and are strip-searched and suspended, where terminal infancy has been ex-

Expiring Animality / 393

perienced, and where verdicts may be forthcoming. The formlessness and facelessness of this animalizing, bottomless, and denuding gaze installs “the pathos of distance . . . [with] . . . one type of will fixing that distance and another type keeping it.”89 The sovereign will whose gaze distributes the distances between humanity and animality is neither human nor animal, but rather functions as a third site of surplus nonhuman immanence from which such allocations and consignments of animality and humanity as archival gestures are performed. Derrida performs a self-reflexive and self-abjecting autopsy on both humanity and animality, and on dress and nudity, in the sense of autopsia, the bearing of sovereign witness; but with whose eyes, whose sovereign gaze? Autopsia as self-witnessing, curiosity, and curation has to be pushed to crisis and collapse, for political autopsy is an inspectacular power that dissects, orchestrates, and exchanges human for animal flesh; it is also an archival thanatological incision that can rigidify or deface any difference between the two. Political speciation is exactly this commerce, this trade in observable, exchangeable, partible, substitutable, and calculable political flesh. Speciation is the media of political essentialization; the support for literalizing the metaphors and allegories of power through the material expropriation and ill use of the bodies and places of others in order to fabricate precomprehended collectivities as political targets. Derrida’s denudation here exposes the permeable thresholds or limns where the common nouns that lay down the law of political speciation are imploded as failed formations of literalizing power and violence and where new entities begin to appear from the political death of petrified metaphors. Thresholds of the Face It is the figure of prosopopeia, the fiction of an apostrophe to an absent, deceased or voiceless entity, which posits the possibility of the latter’s reply, and confers upon it the power of speech. Voice assumes mouth, eye, and finally face, a chain that is manifest in the etymology of the trope’s name, prosopon poiein, to confer a mask or a face (prosopon). . . . Our topic deals with the giving and taking away of faces, with face and deface, figure, figuration and disfiguration.90

Derrida’s encounter with the animal gaze and Arendt’s natality meet in their common concern for the politics of the prosopon as a politics of aperity, natality, and witnessing. Prosopon can diversely refer to the face as persona, to be toward a face, the self-appearing of being and what one sees

394 / Chapter Seven

and speaks with. The prosopon fuses the senses of face, facing, and person: pros is to be toward, in front of; opon derives from opsis as vision; so prosops can be glossed as “that which faces the eyes of another.”91 Arendtian animality does not have a prosopon, while for Derrida any singularity is a prosopon, an event with a power of interruption, response, and witnessing that can include a facelessness, as implied by his concept of the bottomless or groundless gaze; the latter indexes the heteronomic dissymmetrical curvature of social space. As Derrida puts it, “Here is the figure, the visage, the face and defacement.”92 For Arendt, the faceless animal has no appearing in a space qualified by natality, which she defines as a singular appearing in and facing of the world. Similarly, in the theory of biopolitics the animal lacks political advent and manifestation; it emerges as a depoliticized anomic multitude, and its mode of apparition is a mode of impoverished defacement without singularity. The animal is aprosopoi ontes, which refers to the absence of autotelic personhood and is linked to lack, connoting bare life. Agamben’s biopower in turn confers a collectivizing prosopon on life itself. The constructed biopoliticized prosopon variously termed zoé, bareness, and animality is a nudity to be appropriated, colonized, occupied, traced over, and ultimately jettisoned. In both Arendt and Agamben, animality marks a disavowed inaugural threshold of the political and the anthropological to the degree that its political concealment and confinement are also a supporting habitus, a subjectile life, the verso to the recto of the enfranchised human face as the dominant and determining political script. As such, the appearing nonface of political animality is akin to the gorgonean, the face or mask of the gorgon, which can be accessed only through refraction, figuration, and mediation that returns and circulates the animal prosopon in the malformed state of the disfigured and disfiguring Other.93 Derrida previously wrote of the apophatic politics of nudity in reference to the facial ethics of Levinas, which decidedly framed his reported encounter with the animal gaze two decades later: All nudity, “even the nudity of the body experienced in shame,” is a “figure of speech” in relation to the nonmetaphorical nudity of the face. . . . “The nudity of the face is not a stylistic figure.” And it is shown, still in the form of negative theology, that this nudity is not even an opening, for a opening is relative to a “surrounding plenitude.” The word nudity thus destroys itself after serving to indicate something beyond itself. . . . This nudity of the face, speech, and glance being neither theory nor theorem, is offered and exposed as denuding. . . . The structures of living and naked experience described by

Expiring Animality / 395 Levinas are the very structures of a world in which war would rage—strange conditional—if the infinitely other were not infinity, if there were by chance, one naked man, finite and alone. But in this case Levinas would no doubt say there no longer would be any war . . . Therefore war—for war there is—is the difference between the face and the finite world without a face.94

The Derridean animal gaze and face is also an infinite recession, a nudity as denegation that destroys itself, for it moves beyond and evades the anthropocentric trace in which the anthropological face functions as political figuration and dressage, The sovereign human face is the condition of political nudity as a determinate negation parasitical upon the human figure, its clothing, and its ornaments, though the face is only one more gaze without ground. The Derridean animal, however, evades capture by the anthropocentric face and exceeds the anthropological lure, law, and closure of that face. Levinas opposed a nonfigurative human face to the enclosing violence of societal-cultural-political figuration. For Levinas, the human face as radical alterity is nude to the degree that it is not shielded by or dressed in figuration; it, like Derrida’s animal gaze, is irreducible to a visual circumcision and should not serve as a support for a finite political-cultural speciation. Levinas seeks a foundational ethics in wresting the face from predicative figuration as iconic reduction. However, in this iconoclasm the animal “face” is either too much or too little: “One cannot entirely refuse the face of an animal. It is via the face that one understands, for example, a dog. Yet the priority here is not found in the animal, but in the human face. We understand the animal, the face of the animal, in accordance with Dasein. . . . I cannot say at what moment you have the right to be called ‘face.’ The human face is completely different, and only afterwards do we discover the face of the animal. I don’t know if a snake has a face. I can’t answer that question. A more specific analysis is needed.”95 In Levinas the domesticated dog’s face derives its legibility from the collectivity and clothing of human faces without partaking of their full ethical excess or prefigurative otherness; while the snake has no face at all to which an ethical response could be made. Animality is here divided between inside and outside, the near and the far, in a manner roughly analogous to Agamben’s bios and zoé. Despite Levinas’s iconoclasm, both the derivative dog’s face and the facelessness of the snake are political figures of subjugation and abjection, respectively. Levinas following Heidegger here denies to the animal/human interface the potential for bidirectional self-transposition; that is reserved for the intrahuman. Seeing the undomesticated animal, seeing

396 / Chapter Seven

its gaze (which presumes a prosopon), is the seeing of sheer formlessness with no anthropological recourse; the animal is an apparition beyond the anthropological face, the upsurge of the amorphon, the visage of that which is without figure except when it is reducible, like the dog, to a domesticated by-product of the humanized face. Levinas presumes an ethics based on minimal recognizabilty and bars an ethics and politics of maximal unrecognizability such as the faceless snake. The face here is an address and a condition of political address, and it is invariably circumscribed by anthropological measures that render animality faceless, homeless, and nonlocatable except in relation to a doctrine of facial signatures. Can the nonface, that which negatively signifies the face in lack, in being unrecognizable have a prosopon? What is the doctrine of signatures that authorizes and authenticates a face that endows political legibility to the face, qua face? Is the signature of the face only another anthropology, another uncuttable, inaugurating threshold between inside and outside, or can the facial politics of the signature be deanthropologized, creating new modes of address for the faceless and defaced and their unreturnable gazes of opacity? The signature as border is a line drawn through faciality/defacement/ nonface as an archive, a cadaverous rictus that conserves precomphrended collectivity, anthropological or animal in the stratigraphy of the legible/ illegible face. For Derrida, the signature is a standing structure, an erection and monument that communicates with the bipedal standing over of Heideggerian Dasein as mastering subject in relation to the prone, captivated and captive, defaced animal.96 The signature there is because the author of the signature is absent and only retraced in the archived face as the particular imprint or doubling of the gaze of an authenticating Other and as its conserving crypt and encryption. However, Derrida supports an animalizing gaze, a being-there that is bottomless and positionless and only legible within the signature of human nudity, which is alien to it. The signature signs the virtuality of an absent collectivity that never appears except in the executed and incised signatures of their withholding—signatures sign conditions of visibility and erasure. Levinas’s snake teaches us that the facial signature as archive and border is the divide between anthropocentric power and privation. The signature thus precipitates a faciality divided against itself. The signature circumscribes identity and thereby incises an interruptive topological wound within faciality; like a military checkpoint or border crossing, it is the division between the face and the nonface in the same entity. The appearance of that “animality” which is a nonsignatory to anthropological accords functions as a lesion in the anthropological law and visual surfacing of signatures.

Expiring Animality / 397

The Derridean politics of the animal prosopon is generated by the crossing of gazes that juxtaposes modes of appearing and concealing as a political landscape. The animal is the other face that is always already there and thus perennially traced over. If prosopon means to be in front of a face, to be toward a face, to be in someone’s face, the related form antiprosopos is to represent a face that is not present, perhaps a face-to-come or a lost or unrecognizable face, and also to place a face against a face, to superimpose one face upon another, such as the human upon the animal and the obverse. The face is a historical palimpsest; but this palimpsest can be either an iconic disavowal of or a hospitable cohabitation with the unrecognizable beyond animality and humanity. All of this presumes a Levinasian antecedence of the Other as an ethical preoccupation. Animal preoccupation is also a natality, an appearing-in-the-world that is inherited as a political relation. Derridean natality is the act of facial appearing before another face in which the latter is the preoccupant of that space which is politicized by the curvature of a heteronomic cooccupation, generating a politics of hospitality, abyssal kinship, hosting, tracing, neighboring, tracking, addressing in which there is no originating archic or ruling face or host. There is no historical linearity of faces; one is always before a face that is always before it. The suppression of an open horizon of faciality, of topologies of recognizability and unrecognizability (where the unrecognizable is still a face), is the condition of the disciplining anthropocentric economy of the face, which distributes its mimetic hegemony everywhere, and which lies at the core of humanizing visuality and blindness. A politics of natal appearing requires the preoccupation of and with the prosopon of the neighboring and the antecedent. Politics is the space where all those who can claim a positive or negative, secured or imperiled, relation to natality, to a face, to aperity, whether human, animal, beast, or monster, coappear in a nexus of dissymmetrical preoccupations; an interdependent relational and always contestable trace work of faces found and lost, near and far, before and after, defaced and unrecognized. Political subjugation aims to occupy and inhabit the face of the Other, which is to mask (prosopeion) the Other in determinate figurations and thresholds that deface through figuration, by which the face itself becomes the threshold between inside and outside, humanity and animality, friend and enemy, the political and the nonpolitical. Wherever defacement prevails without contestation, without the potentiality and/or topological capacity to counterface as the possibility of natal apparition, is where forms of naming, gazing, recognizability, and masking petrify the counterposed prosopon into a rictus.

398 / Chapter Seven

Yet an ethics of the prosopon that is opposed to the politics of facial rictus is what Levinas denies unrecognizable animality, a disavowal that should provoke a countericonicity of the faceless. This counterfacing entails the recognition of the unrecognizable as that which cannot be absorbed by political similitude, what Rancière calls the insensible. Can there be an ethics of the gaze not based on similitude, identification, fellowship, fraternity, or the assumption of a symmetrical and totalizing facial commons? This ethics would also be an excavation of anthropocentric, “animalizing” violence and damage that was never recognized as such because it was inflicted on the dissimilar and the disidentified as that which is beyond empathy, pain, the pathos of distance, and even, as Arendt and Heidegger claim, birth and death.97 A critical ethics of the prosopon of animality would not arise from any determinate and final tracing over of denudation or from a figuration that reassimilates the exposed, bared, and faceless to the very identifiable humanistic and anthropocentric sovereignty that rendered such life unrecognizable and bared. Any tracing over of the faceless that institutes a face can neither rule nor measure facelessness as political inauguration. The political natality of the monstrous or animalized neighbor can only emerge from a bared life that destroys itself as bare by exceeding, contesting, and destabilizing any figurative closure that violently defaces. The destruction of bare life and what it secures, including biopolitical enfranchisement, would speak to the absence of finite visage as the necessary condition for the opening of the closed histories of the anthropocentric face and the suborning of those biographics by the unrecognizable natalities and animalities of a signatureless, faceless becoming. Faceless Thresholds: The Gnat Vespasian sent Titus who said, Where is their God, the rock in whom they trusted? This was the wicked Titus who blasphemed and insulted Heaven.98 What did he do? He took a harlot by the hand and entered the Holy of Holies and spread out a scroll of the Law and committed a sin on it. He then took a sword and slashed the curtain. Miraculously blood spurted out, and he thought that he had slain himself, as it says, “Your adversaries have roared in the midst of your assembly, they have set up their ensigns or signs.” . . . Titus further took the curtain and shaped it like a basket and brought all the vessels of the Sanctuary and put them in it, and then put them on board ship to go and triumph with them in his city. . . . A gale sprang up at sea which threatened to wreck him. He said: Apparently the power of the God of these people is only over water. When Pharaoh came He drowned him in water,

Expiring Animality / 399 when Sisera came He drowned him in water. He is also trying to drown me in water. If he is really mighty, let him come up on the dry land and fight with me! A voice went forth from heaven saying; Sinner, son of sinner, descendant of Esau the sinner, I have a tiny creature in my world called a gnat. (Why is it called a tiny creature? Because it has an orifice for taking in but not for excreting.) Go up on the dry land and make war with it. When he landed the gnat came and entered his nose, and it knocked against his brain for seven years. One day as he was passing a blacksmith’s it heard the noise of the hammer and stopped. He said; I see there is a remedy. So every day they brought a blacksmith who hammered before him. If he was a non-Jew they gave him four zuz, if he was a Jew they said, It is enough that you see the suffering of your enemy. This went on for thirty days, but then the creature got used to it. It has been taught: Rabbi Phineas son of Aruba said; I was in company with the notables of Rome, and when he died they split open his skull and found there something like a sparrow two sela in weight.99

Titus in the Temple behaves allegorically, yet he is lost in the literality of the photopolitical—he uses visuality, sexual potency, and sexually mimetic swordplay to lay claims of sovereignty.100 Titus’s sexualization of the Jewish deity through phallic blade work is ludicrous for the Talmudic narrator— all this visual and theatrical somaticization of sovereignty is Titus’s pagan illusion, a profound moment of misrecognition. In defiling the temple through politicized sexual aggression Titus slays himself by enacting a Lacanian mirror relation—he attacks his own model of sovereignty in slashing the curtain, confusing what it hides with a stage, a Romanized theatrical politics of display and ornamentation. The spurting blood, misrecognized as his own, indicates that the Roman sovereign wounds only himself in transgressing the presumed body of the Jewish deity, whose sovereignty and law are neither embodied nor dramaturgical. Titus’s violence is selfdefeating because it reenacts the limits of the imperial worldview on deity and sovereignty. This violence returns with his torture by the gnat, a decided case of anti-imperial, asymmetric warfare. The retaliation of the gnat reveals the body of the Roman sovereign as permeable and violable—the imperium leaks. Magnitude is brought down by the minimal, by the animal. Does the Jewish God have such an orificial body? Rather, this deity’s embodiment is anamorphic and metamorphic; it is coextensive with yet commands nature; it is as large as the ocean and as small as a gnat.101 The gnat, like the power that sends the creature, is as faceless as Levinas’s snake; it appears primarily in the exhibited suffering of the emperor. However, the transformation of the gnat into a sparrow from the death’s-head skull of

400 / Chapter Seven

Titus speaks to the asymmetric anti-imperial violence as expressed by the miraculous, redemptive animal natality of the sparrow from the gnat (this is later described in the Talmud as a thoroughly militarized armored sparrow whose beak and claws are clad in iron and brass). Titus’s torture is the coercive slippage of his body from sovereignty to creaturely life, as personified and propelled by the gnat. His expansive sexuality is reduced by and to the orificial minimality of the gnat. Titus’s Talmudic offense is that he has a bad theory of sovereignty tied to the body and predatory sexuality, to finite binaries of earth and ocean, and to sacral space and its violation. He seeks a nomos of the earth; he wants his adversary the Jewish god to abandon the diasporic and boundless ocean for the finitude and positivity of land and for the war of the territorial; in reply he is sent the faceless and peripatetic gnat, whose undifferentiated microscopic orifice correlates to and parodies Titus’s attempted phallopolitical penetration/pollution of the Other. The pagan Roman emperor does not govern the creaturely but is commanded by it, in theatrical sexuality and later by the predation of the gnat. Titus must fornicate, stab, and rape in order to perform his mastery over bare life through his body. The Roman sovereign instrumentally deploys bare life in the mode of sexual potency and as mimetic display, but to do so he must descend into it and penetrate it in order to materially fashion it as a tangible sign. Thus he does not command the bodily but rules through and is ruled by the bodily as the medium through which creation is to be marred. Unlike the Roman emperor, the Jewish god has no such body to bring to bear on bare life; the infinitesimal gnat is an ineffable, undercoded materiality deployed against a territorializing, maximalizing, and supposedly infinite sovereignty. The gnat has no clear origin or will, no visible chain of command other than a disembodied voice, and exhibits no tactical instrumentality, despite its invasion of imperial territory. The gnat arrives as pure effective event, without clarified genealogy, causation, or law. The gnat is sent ineffably: it is its own message and thus carries a certain creaturely autonomy; it represents a domain that no emperor could conceive of imperializing. This is expressed by the sonic/optic polarity that organizes the reciprocal predations of the gnat and the sovereign. The gnat arrives as white noise, as a cipher and a living, intractable shibboleth, and as that which is beyond recognizable political opposability. If it is first sent as a delegate or representative of a counter-sovereignty, it also denegates the latter in its iconoclasm and diminution—by its idiosyncratic and comic singularization of “supremacy” in invading through the nose and by the auditory assault on

Expiring Animality / 401

the sovereign, who is constituted through imperial optics. Sonic opacity counters and comments on the visual fetishism of the imperium exemplified by the emperor’s behavior in the Temple. The minuscule reduces the ruler of the world to the creaturely and the chronic. Titus’s judgment is held captive to monomaniacal stimuli—both the nomadic buzzing dissonance of the gnat and the repetitive noise of hammers. His sensory ecology is turned inward, diminishing his imperial interface with the outside world, except when he is subjected to the hammering of blacksmiths. The invisible gnat is pure media, an unlocatable sonic emulsion that destroys the emperor from the head, the locus of vision, on down. The installed gnat makes an acephalous sovereign—a sovereignty torn from its height and remotion and flattened by monotonous droning. As pure sonics, with no stable locality in its derivation or even its terminus, the buzzing gnat is pure directionless time, without any reference or relation to space and territory, the medium upon which the imperium resides and which is both the substrate and object of the imperial gaze. The afflicted Roman emperor is like Heidegger’s animal, poor in world, held captive to and captivated and benumbed by his disinhibitors, be they visuality, eros, violence, noise, or pain. The emperor’s court seeks to assuage Titus’s affliction and captivity by turning to technique, which only provides a temporary expediency and does not avert this suffering and enclosure by noise and gnat. That Jewish blacksmiths are sought to relieve his torture indicates that mitigation of sovereign animality can paradoxically come from those whose voices have been reduced to subjugated noise by the sovereign. The hammering does not provide the relief of silence to the buzzing within the imperial skull but only alternates the latter with another form of dissonance. When it is a matter of Jewish blacksmiths performing therapeusis, this common thread of dissonance indicates a relation between the gnat and the subjugated in the redress that is Titus’s suffering. The gnat is here the rule of the disrupted, the displaced, and the scattered, thus the association with the oceanic. If Titus’s rule expresses a law, his undoing occasions a counterlaw, one that derives from no territoriality, presence, or site, but is epitomized by the specter of the peripatetic, that is, by all that which is not encompassed, stabilized, and anchored by positive imperial law and its violence. The gnat, like Titus, is poor in world, but that poverty is furnished not by nature but by the imperium as a site of captivity and enclosure represented by the thought cage of the emperor’s skull from which it escapes. The gnat is a diasporic entity that wanders nomadically within its imperial prison. In Heidegger animals exist on the cusp between a privative world and a complete lack of world, represented by the rock as

402 / Chapter Seven

the absolute negation of the creaturely. The rock has no world, but its privation is represented through the intraworldly ontology of the animal and the human and is thus a relational territory and not absolute; it represents a limit to different forms of having a world. Those poor in world can be pushed to the state of the stone, pushed to the point where it is possible to no longer register a world beyond the persistent vibration of power and privation, as paradoxically depicted in a Roman’s emperor’s loss of world through the drone weaponry that assaults and occupies him. The circulatory of the gnat echoes the turning of the world in an act where these stations of world, being without world, being poor in world, and world making are no longer static stigmata on the itinerary of political being. The torturing and eventual hollowness of the emperor’s skull, as decapitation, indicates the eventual evacuation of this imperial cartography. Becoming worldless can be a condition of political possibility. Arendt astutely argued that the democratic struggle of late modernity could not be the Enlightenment project for a specific set of descriptive and prescriptive natural rights that previsioned and enframed a pre-sent “humanity.” Such datable rights promote a regulative image and positive law of the human from which certain populations and life-forms could be, and have been repeatedly expelled in being rendered non- or subhuman, inherently rightless and thus poor in world, or worldless. Endowed or removed rights give and take worlds and worldlessness. Positive human rights preclude an inaccessible excess—the contingent and incalculable becoming of a subject of rights unconstrained by any foundational anthropological or world structure or trajectory. This thesis moves past Arendt’s treatment of natality as founding anthropology that conscripts the non-natal as depoliticized being. A rights-making subject can appear through the open-ended projecting, imaging, and imagining of a “right to rights,” which is not one of a series or a set but a parapolitical proto-right that precludes any predetermined subject of right or the worlding of natural rights.102 The right to rights, taken to its limits, is not a positivized power but a constitutive power understood as a nameless historical and political arc for any subject, protosubject, postsubject, and abject, irrespective of what the claimant of this proto-right has been, is, unbecomes, or becomes. The right to rights can be claimed beyond any existing natural or political legitimation by an existence without predicates, without precomprehended collectivity, speciation, a culture, or a state as world-endowing legacies. To be poor in such worlds may very well prepare political aperity. The right to rights is also a right not to claim or to use rights as the refusal of a positive identity self-limited by the appropriation of an essentializing right; this would

Expiring Animality / 403

disavow an identity that would pit its right as property against the proprietary worlds of others. (Of note, Édouard Glissant teaches that under the Enlightenment panopticism of colonial and neocolonial subjugation, the right to self-design can encompass “the right to opacity” as a core condition of the decolonial.)103 In this sense the right to rights is neither proper nor property, but a natality not specific to any species, an inception that explodes political speciation as much as it might initiate despeciation. Claiming the right to rights is effectively the self-design of subjects as they entitle themselves with visible and expansive being through their public struggles in and out of law. The right to rights as the right to self-design links rights and law to aesthetics, perception, and public sensibilities, insensibilities, or affect. The invasion and occupation of the gnat indicates that the turning of the static world of the imperium will be experienced as a revolution in aesthesis, in perception and affect. We should ponder on what the sensorial antiworld of the gnat was like as it excavated and mined the skull and cavern of sovereignty. The convergence of visual, haptic, political, and legal self-design constitutes a sensorium of rights, which shifts aesthetics from vita contemplativa to vita activa. The vita activa of a right to rights is concerned with how the subject of rights is to appear, what forms of visibility or opacity it will give itself, and how it seeks to unfold or not under a historical gaze. Now is the time, as my teacher Reiner Schürmann proposed, to begin “gathering singularities,” including singularizing rights and rightlessness, to begin recalling and calling to the “collateral damage” of the universalizing and maximizing imperial project, but also to the limit experiences of such political magnitude as marked by the messianic animals of the Talmud. The Athenian cockroach offers a glimpse of what a self-designing aleatory form of life could be—a form that can depose sovereignty as an incompletely constituted reality, a form of life that reaudits as redemptive history the lost voice and white noise of creaturely buzzing in the empty skull of sovereignty.

Notes 1. 2.

3. 4.

John Milton, Areopagitica (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1918), 49. Nelli Kambouri and Pavlos Hatzopoulos, “The Tactics of Occupation: Becoming Cockroach,” Greek Left Review, last modified November 27, 2011, http:// greekleftreview.wordpress.com/ 2011/ 11/ 27/ the -tactics -of -occupation -becoming -cockroach/#more-1895 (accessed December 13, 2012). Mladen Dolar, “The Burrow of Sound,” differences 22, nos. 2–3 (2011): 112–39. Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, ed. Constantin V. Boundas, trans. Charles Stivale and Mark Lester (London: Athlone Press, 1991), 3.

404 / Chapter Seven 5. 6. 7.

8. 9. 10. 11.

12. 13. 14. 15. 16.

Allen Feldman, “Philoctetes Revisited: White Public Space and the Political Geography of Public Safety,” Social Text 68, 19, no. 3 (Fall 2001): 57–89. Allen Feldman, “The Actuarial Gaze: From 9/11 to Abu Ghraib,” Cultural Studies 19, no. 2 (March 2005): 203–26. Derrida admonishes that the term animal is an unwarranted homogenization of singularities that are irreducible any one term and consequently there are multiple interfaces between humanity and the heterogeneity abbreviated as animality. He counterpoises the term animot. See Jacques Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I Am, ed. Marie-Louise Mallet, trans. David Wills (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008 [Kindle ed.]), 39–41, 47–48. Jacques Derrida, The Beast and the Sovereign, vol. 1, Seminar of 2002–2003, trans. Geoffrey Bennington (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 107. Jacques Lacan, Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English, trans. Bruce Young (New York: W.W. Norton, 2002), 377. Derrida, The Beast and the Sovereign, 1:109. For the deficits and lacks of the animal in Western metaphysics see: Aristotle, Politica, ed. W. D. Ross (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1957), 1253a–1253b; Heidegger, Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, 236–267; Emmanuel Levinas, “The Name of the Dog, or Natural Rights,” in Difficult Freedom: Essays on Judaism, trans. Seán Hand (London: Athlone Press, 1990), 151–53; Tamra Wright, Peter Hughes, and Alison Ainley, “The Paradox of Morality: An Interview with Emmanuel Levinas,” in The Provocation of Levinas: Rethinking the Other¸ ed. Robert Bernasconi and David Wood (London: Routledge, 1989), 168–80; Jacques Derrida, Legislation-Transgression and the Question, trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 51–57; Arthur Schopenhauer, “On the Indestructibility of Our Essential Being by Death,” in Essays and Aphorisms, ed. and trans. R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Penguin, 1970), 70, 76; Friedrich Nietzsche, “On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life,” in Untimely Meditations, ed. Daniel Breazeale, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 60–61; Akira Mizuta-Lippett, Electric Animal: Toward a Rhetoric of Wildlife (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 42–43; Lacan, “The Subversion of Subject,” in Écrits, 677–702; and Cary Wolfe, Before the Law: Humans and Other Animals in a Biopolitical Frame (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013). Martin Heidegger. Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper & Row, 1975), 179. Martin Heidegger, Bremer und Freiburger Vorträge, vol. 79 of Gesamtausgabe (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1994), 56. Martin Heidegger, Reden und andere Zeugnisse eines Lebensweges, vol. 16 of Gesamtausgabe (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 2000), 759–60. Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I Am, 27. On the ethics of singularity that excludes animality, see Jacques Derrida, Negotiations: Interventions and Interviews, 1971–2001, ed. Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. 2002), 309; and on the hospitality to be afforded the event of the singular, see Derrida, The Politics of Friendship, trans. George Collins (London and New York: Verso, 2005), 68. For a wide-ranging discussion of the political usages of animal imagery, from genetic engineering and iconoclasm to torture, see W. J. T. Mitchell, What Do Pictures Want: The Lives and Loves of Images (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004).

Expiring Animality / 405 17. 18. 19. 20.

21. 22. 23.

24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29.

30. 31. 32.

33. 34.

Derrida, The Animal Therefore I Am, 17. W. J. T. Mitchell, personal communication, n.d. Jacques Derrida, The Beast and the Sovereign, 1:32–33. I have here paraphrased Derrida’s own insight on ungrounded law and its tautological performatives, from which it can be inferred that nomothetic human/animal ethics would also be treated as a pure performative act suspended over an abyss; see Jacques Derrida, “Force of Law: The ‘Mystical Foundation of Authority,’” trans. Mary Quaintance, Cardozo Law Review 11: (1989–90): 991–93. Reiner Schürmann, “Legislation-Transgression: Strategies and Counter-strategies in the Transcendental Justification of Norms,” Man and World 17, nos. 3–4 (1984): 379. Derrida. The Beast and the Sovereign, 1:309–10. Michel Foucault, “The Right of Death and Power over Life,” in The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984); Georgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998). Agamben, Homo Sacer, 8. Jacques Rancière, “Introducing Disagreement,” trans. Steve Corcoran, Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities 9, no. 3 (December 2004): 5. Giorgio Agamben, The End of the Poem: Studies in Poetics (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999), 68–69. Jacques Derrida, Dissemination, trans. Barbara Johnson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 92. Jacques Derrida, “Interpreting Signatures (Nietzsche/Heidegger): Two Questions,” Philosophy and Literature 10, no. 2 (1986): 255. Louis Althusser, Essays in Self-Criticism, trans. Graham Lock (London: New Left Books, 1976), 180–81. I am citing Althusser’s critique of Hegelian totality. “There is no assignable Origin in Hegel, but that is because the whole process, which is fulfilled in the final totality, is indefinitely, in all the moments which anticipate its end, its own Origin. There is no Subject in Hegel, but that is because the becomingSubject of substance, as an accomplished process of the negation of the negation, is the Subject of the process itself.” Michel Foucault, “The Human Monster,” in Abnormal (New York: Picador, 2003), 55–56 (emphasis mine). Thomas Browne, Christian Morals (1716; Whitefish, MT: Mt. Kessinger Publishing, 2007), 254. Giorgio Agamben, Stanzas: Word and Phantasm in Western Culture, trans. Ronald L. Martinez (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992), 148. Here I have reworked Agamben’s earlier theorization of caricature to problematize his model of biopolitical totalization and anomic bare life. Mitchell discusses animalizing caricature as a mode of iconoclastic fetishism and disfigurement that bridges differential domains in What Do Pictures Want. See also Mitchell’s discussion of the animal image as a site of exchange in Picture Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press), 334–35. Jacques Derrida. The Politics of Friendship, trans. George Collins (New York: Verso, 1997), 99–100. James Allen, with John Lewis, Leon F. Litwack, and Hilton Als, Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America (Santa Fe, NM: Twin Palms, 2000). See also Jacqueline Goldsby, A Spectacular Secret: Lynching in American Life and Literature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006).

406 / Chapter Seven 35. For populist and institutional photographic typification and the advent of penalogical photography, see John Tagg, The Burden of Representation: Photographies and Histories (London: Macmillan, 1988). 36. Mark Allen Jackson, Prophet Singer: The Voice and Vision of Woody Guthrie (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 2008), 158. Mrs. Nelson had a baby who was kidnapped but not lynched and who disappeared during her abduction, which may be the basis of Guthrie’s reference to two sons. 37. Allen et al., Without Sanctuary, figure 12. 38. Ibid., figs. 25 and 26. 39. Derrida, The Beast and the Sovereign, 1:13. 40. Martin Heidegger. Pathmarks, ed. and trans. William McNeill (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 248. 41. See Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982), and Patterson, Rituals of Blood: The Consequences of Slavery in Two American Centuries (New York : Basic Civitas Books, 1999). 42. On the surveillance of slaves, see Simone Browne, “Digital Epidermalization: Race, Identity and Biometrics,” Critical Sociology 36, no. 1 (January 2010): 131–50. 43. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1973), 473. 44. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), 177. 45. Hannah Arendt, Love and Saint Augustine (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 51. 46. Augustine, The City of God (New York: Penguin, 1984), XII: 22. 47. Hannah Arendt, Between Past and Future (New York: Viking Press, 1961), 168. 48. Carl Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty, trans. George Schwab (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006). 49. Arendt, The Human Condition, 177. 50. Hannah Arendt, Denktagebuch: 1950 bis 1973 (Munich: Piper, 2002), 280–81. Translated in Miguel Vatter, “Natality and Biopoitics in Arednt,” Revista de Ciencia Política 26, no. 2 (2006): 15. 51. Consider Arendt’s notion of natal beginnings in the light of Foucault’s assertion that the body is a volume in perpetual disintegration, rather than in continuous repetitive motion. Foucault proposes both relative ends and relative inaugurations of discontinuous but successive modes of an embodied subject irreducible to biologization, thus allowing for a politicized natality of the body that Arendt all but precludes. In Foucault, natal origination follows from becoming/unbecoming. Michel Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History” in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, ed. D. F. Bouchard (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977), 83. 52. Arendt, The Human Condition, 121. 53. Andreas Kalyvas, “From the Act to the Decision: Hannah Arendt and the Question of Decisionism,” Political Theory 32, no. 3 (June 2004): 339. 54. Arendt, Denktagebuch, 66. See Vatter, “Natality and Biopolitics,” 141. 55. Kalyvas, “From the Act to the Decision,” 332. 56. Ibid., 321. 57. Arendt, The Human Condition, 97. 58. There is a direct connection between this privation of biography and Arendt’s notion of the rightlessness of the sans papiers, who have been deprived of biography, bios, and political possibility. Here citizenship is ignored as having the potential to denatalize the noncitizen and the stranger.

Expiring Animality / 407 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73. 74. 75. 76. 77.

78.

79. 80. 81.

82.

Arendt, The Human Condition, 176–77. Patterson, Slavery and Social Death. Ibid., 7. Aristotle, Generation of Animals, trans. A. L. Peck (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1953), 53. Patterson, Slavery and Social Death, 337. Hannah Arendt, On Violence (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1970), 50. Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I Am, 2. Ibid., 11. Ibid., 14. Donna Jean Haraway, When Species Meet (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007), 19–21. Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I Am, 47. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Schmitt and Poststructuralism: A Response,” Cardozo Law Review 21, nos. 5–6 (May 2000): 1726. Derrida, The Politics of Friendship, 233. Ibid., 232 (emphasis in original). Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization (New York: Routledge, 2006), 66. Jacques Derrida, “Cogito and the History of Madness,” in Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (London: Routledge, 1978), 39–41. Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I Am, 4–5. Ibid., 5. See Heidegger, The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysic, 236–67; Jakob von Uexküll, “An Introduction to Umwelt,” in “Jakob von Uexküll: A Paradigm for Biology and Semiotics,” ed. Kalevi Kull, special issue, Semiotica 134, no. 1 (2001): 107–10; Jakob von Uexküll, “A Stroll through the Worlds of Animals and Men: A Picture Book of Invisible Worlds,” in Instinctive Behavior: The Development of a Modern Concept, trans. and ed. Claire H. Schiller (New York: International University Presses, 1957), 5–80; and Paul Bains, “Umwelten,” Semiotica 134, no. 1 (2001): 137–67. Heidegger, The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, 236–67; See also Agamben’s discussion of Heidegger in relation to von Uexküll’s biosemiotics in The Open: Man and Animal, trans. Kevin Attell (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004). This imagery also evokes the fetalized state of the similarly disabled/fetalized child in the “orthopedic” refractions of the Lacanian mirror theater. See Lacan, Écrits, 78. Henri F. Ellenberger, “Zoological Garden and Mental Hospital,” Canadian Psychiatric Association Journal 5 (July 1960): 136–49. To comprehend the Heideggerian notion of impoverished animality and the function of this fiscal imagery, we need to turn to his essay on technology. Though Heidegger distinguished between an organ’s usability and an instrument’s utility, the impoverishment of the animal is not unrelated to the technological condition of the utensil or tool. (See also my discussion of Arendt and slavery above.) For Heidegger, the utensil is determined by “telic finality”—a tool is that which is “caused” by something from the outside, and thereby undergoes “a fall,” into a condition of indebtedness to that exteriority. See Martin Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, trans. William Lovitt (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1977), 7–9. The animal’s “poverty” is related to this state of technological “indebtedness ” to that which is outside of it as a capturing, disinhibiting, and benumbing encirclement. See Agamben, The Open, 47.

408 / Chapter Seven 83. Jacques Derrida, Of Spirit: Heidegger and the Question, trans. Geoffrey Bennington (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 50. 84. Agamben, The Open, 55. 85. Derrida, Of Spirit, 55. 86. Ibid., 54. 87. Heidegger, The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, 249. 88. Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I Am, 12. 89. Schürmann, “Legislation-Transgression,” 378. 90. Jacques Derrida, Memoires for Paul de Man (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 27. 91. For discussions of prosopos see Claude Calame, “Facing Otherness: The Tragic Mask in Ancient Greece,” History of Religions 26, no. 2 (1986): 125–42; and John P. Manoussakis,“From Exodus to Eschaton: On the God Who May Be,” Modern Theology 18, no. 1 (January 2002): 95–107. 92. Derrida, Memoires for Paul de Man, 26. 93. Calame, “Facing Otherness,” 138. 94. Derrida, “Violence and Metaphysics,” in Writing and Difference, 132–33. 95. Wright, Hughes, and Ainley, “The Paradox of Morality.” See also J. Hillis Miller’s discussion in “Derrida Enisled,” Critical Inquiry 33, no. 2 (Winter 2007): 252–53 96. Jacques Derrida, Signsponge, trans. Richard Range (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), 6. 97. See also W. J. T. Mitchell’s discussion of anencephalic animalized bodies in genetic engineering and torture regimes, which addresses the visual politics of facelessness in a similar vein. W. J. T. Mitchell, “The Unspeakable and the Unimaginable: Word and Image in a Time of Terror,” ELH 72, no. 2 (2005): 291–308. 98. Titus (Titus Flavius Sabinus Vespasianus, AD 39–81, Roman emperor 79–81, was the son of the emperor Vespasian. Vespasian was campaigning in Judea when he was proclaimed emperor; Titus stayed on in the province to repress the Jewish revolt and on his return to Rome was awarded a triumph for his victories in Palestine. 99. Babylonian Talmud, Tractate Gittin, 56b, www.come-and-hear.com/gittin/ gittin_56 .html (accessed April 15, 2013). “In the Talmud the ‘yattush,’ which is the most common term for the gnat, is called a ‘tiny creature’ (‘biryah k allah’) having a mouth wherewith to take in food, but no opening for evacuation (Git . 56b). It is enumerated among the weak that cast terror on the strong, its victim being the elephant, whose trunk it enters (Shab. 77b). From Sanh. 77a it appears that gnats in mass could torture a fettered and therefore defenseless man to death; and at times they would become such a plague, entering the eyes and nose of man, that public prayers were instituted for their extermination (Ta’an. 14a). Insignificant as the gnat is, it admonishes man to humility, having preceded him in being created (Sanh. 38a).” The Unedited Full-Text of the 1906 Jewish Encyclopedia, http://www .jewishencyclopedia.com/articles/8125-insects (accessed April 15, 2013). 100. Though I recognize that there can be a period-specific and culturally specific reading of this text, it is also in the spirit of Talmudic exegesis to generate a messianic reading that speaks to the present moment. For a period-specific medical reading, see Julius Preuss, Biblical and Talmudic Medicine, trans. and ed. Fred Rosner (New York: Sanhedrin Press, 1978), 204–6. 101. What is the relation between the violence of the gnat and the visual pleasure of the colonized at the theater of sovereign suffering? The denial of payment to Jewish blacksmiths whose hammering distracts the wounded sovereign and alleviates his

Expiring Animality / 409 suffering is posed by the Talmud as Roman recognition of imperialist guilt. In the Talmud, if not in history, the Romans recognize the Jewish/Nietzschean economy of guilt as debt and exchange. The Romans witness the subjugated’s gaze on the suffering sovereign and are so thoroughly offended by it as not to render customary monetary payment. Oppression brings its own exotic rates of exchange such as the gnat’s haunting of Titus’s skull. 102. Werner Hamacher and Kirk Wetters, “The Right to Have Rights (Four-and-a-Half Remarks),” South Atlantic Quarterly 103, no. 23 (Spring/Summer 2004): 343–56. 103. Édouard Glissant, “For Opacity,” in Over Here: International Perspectives on Art and Culture, ed. Gerardo Mosquera and Jean Fisher (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004), 253.

INDEX

Abrahamic sacrifice, 175–77 Abu Ghraib, 83, 114n38, 141, 145, 170, 186, 224, 254 addiction, as political, 274–88, 356 Agamben, Giorgio, 26, 61, 161, 168–69, 181n64, 181n66, 223, 348, 363–72, 377, 380, 382, 391, 394–95, 405n32 Alliez, Eric, 93, 115n55 Althusser, Louis, 192, 226nn17–18, 368, 405n29 amnesty: Athenian, 310–19; and Derridean pardon, 319–23, 326–28; and the TRC, 236–50, 240–48 Anderson, Perry, 12n9 anesthesia/apperception, 7–10, 12, 14, 66n22, 83, 92, 110, 120, 134, 150, 152–53, 157–58, 167–69, 172, 261, 348n8, 392 antagonism, conditions and relations of, 142, 249 apophasis, 10, 14, 27, 40–41, 55–57, 67n40, 73–77, 105–10, 169, 217–19, 222, 394; blur as, body as, 84–93. See also denegation; negative theology archive: 48, 58, 60–62, 79, 81, 92–93, 100–101, 115n53, 123, 154, 157, 279, 285, 289n34, 295, 297, 299–300, 303, 340, 393; amnesty as, 236–48, 310–19; animality as, 354–61, 363, 365–69; antiphony as, 305–10; apocalyptic, 53, 217–19; apophatic, 10, 41, 48, 55–57, 77, 84–93, 105–12; apotropaic, 86–92; and arkhé, 15–17, 75, 339, 364; bio-

metrical, 81; criminalized humanity as, 328–29; and dearchivization, 189–90, 196–99, 221–22, 247–55, 284–85, 297–98, 303–10, 334–40; and death drive, 221–25, 140–45; and debt/ guilt, 58–63; and devaluation, 188–90, 219–20; as disincarnate, 53; drone as, 199–213; enemy as, 185–94, 197–96; forensic, 82–84; forgiveness as, 319–21, 326–28; and gender, 303–10; groundzero as, 60, 120; hand as, 145–49; Holocaust as, 175–77; and logos/phone, 365–67; memory of, memory as, 313– 31; morgue/grave as, 118–20; as oneiric, 140–42; and ontotypology, 208–13; parasite as, 194–96; performativity as, 250–55; and photopolitics, 7, 78, 91– 93, 98–112, 115n50, 117–45, 154–63, 185; as political morgue, 118–21, 123, 127, 140–43, 174–76, 178n11; and political risk, 61; political unconscious as, 140–45; and the practico-inert, 124–27, 140–42, 155, 178n11, 382; and preemption, 214–19; raced body as, 192–93, 241, 263–80, 282–83, 331–34, 372–80; racialized, 42–43, 154–63; scarification as, 321–34; and secrecy, 33, 37, 40, 45–46, 50–53; serialization as, 127–28, and the shibboleth, 18, 34, 38; signatures as, 92–93; slave as, 331–33, 371–72, 384; and sovereignty, 42–56, 91–93, 187–92, 194–97; and subverting repetition, 317–24; transitional justice

412 / Index archive (continued) as, 229–35, 278–79, 289n34, 295–96, 298–303; victim as, 326–40; war as, 185–225, 227n30, 227n32, 227n56; weaponry as, 199–200 Arendt, Hannah, 26, 260, 296, 300–301, 311–12, 315, 327, 349n19, 364, 380– 86, 393–94, 398, 402, 406nn43–45, 406n47, 406nn49–52, 406n54, 406nn57–59, 407n64 Aristotle: and anagnorisis, 348n10; and the arkhé, 15; on friendship, 207; and the good, 342; and mimeseos praxis, 301; phoné and logos, and hereditary slavery, 384, 404n11, 407n62; political kinetics of, 13–15; and potentiality/impotentiality, 168, 181n64; and psuchagogikon, 303; and the senses, 145; and slave’s truth, 333 arkhé, 5, 15–17, 75, 339, 364 Arkin, Ronald C., 200–204, 207, 213, 226n22, 226n26 Asaro, Peter, 202, 204, 207, 214, 227n31, 227n45 Athenian tragedy: and anthropology, 344–47; and criminality, 4–5, 320; and decertification, 4–5; and the good, 344, and homeopathic/apotropaic repetition, 317–19; and the loss of loss, 3–4, 322; and rule by the dead, 326, 328; and transitional justice, 242–43, 288n2, 296, 298–99, 303, 305, 318, 340, 342, 344–47; and will to truth, 242–43, 288n2, 340–42, 344; and witnessing 313–22, 330, 340 autodestruct, the, 104–6 Baader-Meinhof, 2, 7, 93–99, 104–6, 115n56 Babylonian Talmud, 408n99 “bad apples,” 5, 80, 114n38, 230, 239, 254 Baracchi, Claudia, 75, 113n12 bare voice: amnesty and, 311; and animality, 365–67; biopolitics and 365–67; and phoné, 366–67, and torture, 372; women’s, 295–96, 303–10, 349–50n27, 365–66 beast, 171, 263, 267–69, 275, 356–57; and benumbment, 392; and labor

discipline, 267; and lynching 375–80; Michael Brown as, 164; and monsters, 360, 363, 368–70; and natality, 397; and the political speciation, 160–65, 360–36; and the prosopon, 396–98; Rodney King as, 149–52,157–58, 160– 65; and the sovereign, 29n25, 161–62, 165, 360, 362–63; and torture, 278–84; as traumatrope, 360–62 Belfast, 121–23 Beller, Jon, 42 Benjamin, Walter, 5, 33, 59–60, 67n36, 68n49, 68n51, 68n57, 82, 113n27, 113n29, 114n31, 126, 136, 165, 179n29 Benzien, Jeffrey, 230, 238–40, 257, 380 biapolitical, 72, 73 Biko, Steve, 230, 237–38, 287n11 biopolitical, 5, 29n25, 61, 71–73, 89, 105, 106, 223, 284, 304, 363–71, 375 Bloch, Ernst, 4, 28n5, 307–8 Boal, Mark, 80, 113nn20–21, 113nn23–24, 114n34 Bosse, Abraham, 131, 132–33, 145 Brookes (British slave ship), 42–43 Brown, Michael, 164 Buck-Morss, Susan, 226n20 Butler, Judith, 66n22 Cacciari, Massimo, 57–58, 68n44 Calame, Claude, 408n91 Castoriadis, Cornelius, 69, 112n1, 286n8, 344–47, 349n12, 353n100, 353n105 co-agitatio, 6, 8, 13, 248, 363 collateral damage, 56, 82, 91, 140–42, 166, 171, 191, 201, 203–4, 220–21, 223–25 Comaroff, Jean, 266–67, 290n52 Comaroff, John L, 266–67, 290n52 Combatant Status Review Tribunal (CSRT), 2, 33–53, 57–58, 63, 63–65n1, 65n4, 66nn15–17, 81 counterinsurgent governmentality, 5, 19, 196–99, 207, 214, 218 Crary, Jonathan, 189, 225–26n7 Critchley, Simon, 251–52, 289n32 Danner, Mark, 63n81, 117–18, 159, 177n1 Darwish, Mahmoud, 138–39, 176–77 Davis, Troy, 121, 167 Dayan, Daniel, 178n14

Index / 413 death penalty, 3, 26, 121, 167, 172, 182n72, 211 defacement, 77, 84, 91; of animality, 363, 393–98; of anthropology, 344–45, 347– 48, 379; and lynching, 373–75, 379; and photopolitics, 105–10, 114n38; in torture, 261–62, 269; and victim of the victim, 336; of violence, 11–12, 140, 159, 178n11, 185–86, 214, 297, 300, 336 Deleuze, Gilles: and the deadman’s place, 20, 127; and language of events, 356; and seeing subject, 8; and tactilo-optical equilibrium, 76, 131, 210; and the unconscious, 141 Denbeaux, Mark. 34, 40, 63n2, 64n3 denegation, 4, 6, 8, 10, 14, 27, 51, 147, 222, 320; and the animal face, 394–95; of embodiment, 84–93; and Gerhard Richter, 105–10; and Guantánamo, 40–41, 49–51; and the Leviathan, 133–34; and polemological foundation, 73–77; and sovereignty, 54–57, 147, 169; and traumatic earliness, 91–92, 106–8, 185–88, 217–18. See also apophasis; negative theology Derrida, Jacques, 3–4; and Abrahamic sacrifice, 175–76; and anesthesial compromise, 172; and animal biographics, 385–86; and animal face, 393–96; and animal privation, 390–93; and archival politics, 187–92; and the automaton, 83; and beast and the sovereign, 29n25, 161–62, 165, 280–81, 360–63; and the commodity, 20–22; and desistance, 18n62, 18n66, 163, 165, 172, 194; and the disappearing enemy, 185–92; and economimesis, 279–80, 291n61; and the ethical event, 212–13; and event machine, 214, 253–54, 289n37; and exemplification, 336–38; and forgiveness, 326–27; and the hand, 145–48; and hostipitality, 194–97; and impassable/ insensitive sovereignty, 53, 68n42, 70, 120; and ipsocratia, 75, 121, 133–34, 188–90; and iterability, 16, 181n62; and justice and jointedness, 300, 304; and Kafka, 45–46; and light/non-light, 7–9, 189–90; and nakedness, 388–90; and non-immanence of life, 367–68; and nonopposable other, 338–40,

405n20; and nuclear fictions, 217–19; and orificial sovereignty, 280–81; and the parasite, 195–96; and performativity, 250–51; and phantasmagoria, 83; and political theology of theater, 216; and politics of light; 7–8; and self-incriminating humanity, 319–24, 326–27; and shibboleth, 17–18; and speciation, 357–60, 362–63, 387–88, 404n7, 404n16; stasiology, 10–11, 16; and the subjectile, 110, 115n4, 181n66, 196–97; and subversive mimesis, 191– 92; and vomit, 281–82; and Walten, 17, 29n25; and wound, 323–24; and writing on cinders, 285 de Sade, Donatien Alphonse François, Marquis, 3, 127, 204–5, 343 Desert Storm, 66n22, 149–50, 155, 159 desistance, 121, 163, 166, 168, 170, 171–74, 181n62, 181n66, 194, 199, 248, 251 Detienne, Marcel, 300, 349n16 Dillingham, Jack, and lynching, 375 disframing and dismediation, 1, 12, 41; of the archive, 217–19; the enemy, 192, 196–99, 207, 213, 215; at Guantánamo, 38–44, 48, 66n22; of risk, 86–89, 217– 22, 235, 247–55, 300; of sovereignty, 56–58, 74–77; of victim of the victim, 338–40; of war, 92, 143, 170 Dlokolo, Mpompi Melford, 256, 269–70, 289n40 Dolar, Mladen, 350n32 drone weaponry: as archive, 223; and autonomic war, 142; and containerization of war, 18–19; and dwell time, 90, 109, 115n50; ethical programming of, 3, 199–214, 226n28, 227n30, 227– 28n45; facelessness of, 54; as mimetic prosthesis, 191, 197; as nomos of the earth, 90; and nuclear war, 219; and onto-typology, 210–12; and organology, 199; and the overman, 211–13; and signature strikes, 27, 54, 84, 91–93, 115n50; sovereignty as, 142 duBois, Page: and slaveocracy, 331–34, 372; and torture, 242, 288n21, 231–33, 372; and the touchstone (basanos), 242–43, 288n21 Duke, Sergeant Charles, 151, 155–56, 159

414 / Index Eagleton, Terry, 6 economimesis, 278–85, 378 Eichmann, Adolf, 23–26, 171, 176 Elias, Norbert, 164–65 Ensslin, Gudrun, 93, 95, 98 Esposito, Roberto, 193–94 exclosure/dis-exclosure, 12, 250–55 Fanon, Frantz, 66n22, 73, 189 Feldman, Allen, 63, 66n22, 288n1, 348n7 Fifth Stryker Brigade, 77–81 Forbes, Ashley, 257 Foucault, Michel, 2, 3, 69, 91, 180n50; and animality and madness, 388; and criminal reason, 3, 320; and deinstitutionalization of power, 198; and effective power, 248; and falsification of truth, 320–21; and forgiveness, 327; and hypomnemata; 188–90; and monsters, 360, 363, 368– 69; and natality, 406n51; panopticon as umwelt, 39–91; and parrhesia, 241–42, 288n22; and performativity, 250; and polemological civitas, 11, 70–74, 83, 112n4; and thanatopolitics, 105–6 Gaza, 121, 170–77, 221 Gerber, Hennie, 256, 258–61, 268, 290n45 Gibbs, Sgt. Calvin, 77–80, 83, 89, 113n20 Gillespie, John, and lynching, 375 Gillespie, Nease, and lynching, 375 Glissant, Edouard, 229, 285, 403 Godard, Jean-Luc, 3, 7, 121, 160, 178n14, 178n28; and the hand, 134, 145–49, 178n28; and Hobbes, 130–32; and shot/reverse shot 127–49 Godzich, Wlad, 156–57, 252 grounding/degrounding: and anticipatory topology, 57–62; and apophatic power, 58–60; apperception as, 1–2; and archival apocalypse, 217–19; and archival loss, 192; and autarchial action, 13–18; and becoming cockroach, 355; and constitutive power, 69–70; and constitutive vertigo, 41–42; of deconstructionist state, 55–56; and defacement, 394–97; and deinos, 346–47; dominion as, 42; factuality as, 1–7; and force protection, 12; and Foucauldian polemology, 70–75; Guantánamo tribunals as, 40,

47–48; and hospitality/hostipitality, 194–99; and indemnification, 231–34; and jus ad bellum, 2, 9, 15, 17, 56, 80, 140, 230, 254; and law’s performativity, 405n20; and legibility/illegibility, 50–51; and light/non-light, 7–9; and loss of loss, 297–300; and mass graves, 108; and matter of factness, 9; and monopoly violence, 161–72; and montage, 130; necessity of the state as, 43; and nonopposable other, 339–40; as norm giving, 5; and oneiric war, 140–41; and phoné, 365–67; and political speciation, 358–61; and populist reason, 376– 77; and potentiality/impotentiality, 168; and principal action, 13–18; and retentional/attentional apparatus, 190; and retrospective topology, 67n32; and the right to rights, 402; and risk, 20; and saturated image, 87–92; as scenic affirmation, 50; in self-inflicted crimes against humanity, 320–25; seriality of, 13; and sovereignty’s maw, 280–84; and spectral anteriority, 3–5; and stasiology, 9–13; of structuring enemy, 185; and synchronized history, 25; and the touchstone (basanos), 243–49, 254; and the uninheritable, 29n34 ground zero, 13, 18, 59–60, 70, 119, 170, 188, 190, 192, 216, 336 Groys, Boris, 58 Guantánamo, 2, 33–51, 58–63, 63nn1–5, 66nn13–14, 66nn18–19, 81, 114n38, 186, 220, 224 Guthrie, Woody, and lynching, 374, Hamacher, Werner, 58–59, 68n48, 68n50, 68n54, 169–70, 182n66, 402, 409n102 Haraway, Donna Jean, 329, 333, 387, 389 Hartman, Saidiya V., 180n57 Hatzopoulos, Pavlos, 354–55 Hausner, Gideon, 23–25 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 92, 121, 189, 199, 218, 280, 282, 286n10, 289n34, 321, 368, 405n21 Heidegger, Martin, 1, 8, 29n25; and the animal, 357–59, 363, 365, 377, 383–84, 386, 390–96, 398, 401, 404nn11–13, 405n28, 406n40, 407n47, 407nn77–78,

Index / 415 407n81; figure, 3, 12, 48, 179n33, 211, 226n21, 227nn38–39, 246, 286n4, 350n35, 352n66; and predatory archives, 199–200; and tragedy, 343, 344, 353n100 Heidelberg Tavern massacre, 238–39 Hertz, Robert, 126 Heyde, Werner, 101–5 Hobbes, Thomas, 56, 105, 121, 130–34 hostipitality, 194–96 hypokeimenon, 15, 368 hypomnemata, 187–90 Hyppolite, Jean, 54, 141 immateriality, 8, 10, 16, 19, 25, 110, 121, 140, 211; as defacement, 11, 91; force as, 91; labor as, 35–36, 65nn6–7; sovereignty as, 12, 56–57, 74, 77, 91, 108, 189, 199; victim as, 81; violence as, 11–12, 121, 123, 142, 158–59, 164, 168, 170, 214 immunization/autoimmunization, 5, 9, 10, 12, 27, 46, 53–54, 56–57, 76, 82, 86, 92, 105–6, 114, 134, 140–41, 154–55, 159, 166–67, 186, 193–94, 197, 201–2, 204–5, 214, 220, 287n11, 289n34, 310, 312, 324, 327, 329–32, 336, 357, 360, 376–77; inhumanization as, 157. See also indemnification; securitization; sovereignty incorporeality 21, 53, 55, 84, 86, 90, 108, 110, 113n15, 120, 130, 134, 213, 217, 281, 356; as apophatic, 84–88, 92–93, 108–12, and Gerhard Richter, 108–12; of Gul Mudin, 84–85, 86, 88, 92–93; of the hand, 147–48; monopoly violence as, 163–66, 168–70; and the photopolitical, 84–88; of Rodney King, 155, 157–62; of the Stoics, 73–77. See also immateriality indemnification: and force protection, 12, 82, 92, 103, 140, 141, 154, 159, 167, 197, 202, 206, 214, 268, 286n10, 287n15, 289n34, 297, 310, 312, 327, 332, 336, 355; of monopoly violence, 166–67; and parrhesia, 240–42; and performativity, 250–54; and the scar, 324–25; and sovereignty, 53–56; and Truth and Reconciliation Commission,

229–48; of warfare, 3–5, 9–13. See also amnesty; immunization; securitization; sovereignty intentionalist continuity/political motivation, 232–34, 246, 250–55, 282–83, 289n34 In the Darkness of Time, 148 Isangomas, 274–78 Jackal, the, 122–25, 127, 211–12 Junger, Ernst, 198–99, 201–2 jus ad bellum, 2, 9, 15, 17, 56, 80, 140, 230, 254, 282 jus in bello, 200 justification/dejustification, 28n3, 28n8, 36, 52–53, 56, 65n10, 74, 78, 80, 126, 149, 154, 167, 170, 180n50, 190, 200, 203, 214, 216, 221, 224, 240, 246, 284, 286n10, 287n16, 288n22, 304, 312, 318, 330, 343, 344, 353n100, 363, 366, 405n21; and amnesty, 231–35, 243–54; and arkhé, 13–18; of forgiveness, 326– 28; at Guantanamo, 38–40; and the loss of loss, 297–300; and the political unconscious, 140–43; and stasiology, 8–13; and tragedy, 342–44; and the uninheritiable, 29–30n34; and the victim of the victim, 334–40; of war, 1–8 Kafka, Franz, 33, 45–53, 63, 89, 91–92, 115n53, 190, 355 Kalyvas, Andreas, 381–82 Kambouri, Nelli, 354–55 Kant, Immanuel, 2, 3, 202–4, 209, 212–13, 226n27, 227n45, 282, 286n10, 326, 337, 342–44, 352n69, 386 Karadžic, Radovan, 2, 117–25, 159, 169, 174, 177n2 Kganakga, Samuel, 27, 258–63, 264–79, 290n46 Kierkegaard, Soren, 222 King, Rodney G., 2, 27, 66n22, 115n53, 121, 149–64, 356, 365 Klossowski, Pierre, 205 Koch, Gertrud, 99 Kojeve Alexandre, 189, 289n34 Kondile, Charity, 258, 272–74, 290n44 Kondile, Sizwe, 272 Koon, Sergeant Stacey, 152, 159–60, 162–63

416 / Index labor discipline (South African), 272–85, 290n51, 291n58 Lacan, Jacques, 41, 121, 143, 158, 160; on the animal gaze, 357–58, 364, 386, 399, 407n79; on Kant and Sade, 201, 203–4, 213; on tragedy, 342–43 Lacapra, Dominick, 230–31 Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe, 1, 181n62; and onto-typology, 210–12; on tragedy, 343–44 law, 2, 10–11, 17, 23–25, 34, 36, 67n22, 73, 130, 152; as addiction, 282–83; and amnesty, 232–34, 244–45, 310–19; and corpse profanation, 308–10; of the dead hand, 60–61; as denegated, 40–42, 54–58, 66n22, 74, 91, 110, 186–87; and the drone, 200–201, 203–6; and extrajudicial killing, 80–81, 104; of hospitality, 194–96; and Kafka, 33, 44–52, 89, 91–92, 115n53, 190; and monopoly violence, 161–70; and preemption, 15, 17, 19–22, 49, 56–57, 81, 89, 174, 191, 197–98, 201, 214–25, 253, 303; and the providential, 214–17; and the public secret, 50–56; and rogue, animality, 149–53, 158–59, 161–64, 171–72; as scenic affirmation, 50–51, 58; and selfcriminalization of humanity, 319–21, 325–28; taxiological, 58–61; and televisuality, 155–61; and tragedy, 340–47, 348n4; as transitional justice, 297–99, 300–301, 318–19, 322–33, 340 Lazzarato, Maurizio, 36 Lefort, Claude, 69 Legendre, Pierre, 50, 53, 57 Les carabiniers, 143–44 Levinas, Emmanuel, 305, 307, 394–95 lynching: and beast and the sovereign, 375–76; as eugenic fraternity, 375–76; Machiavelli, Niccolò, 75, 133, 198; and the photopolitical 372–80; Malan, Magnus General, 230, 287n16 Malinga, Jabu James, 269–70, 291n60 Marcuse, Herbert, 65n8 Marion, Jean-Luc, 86, 106–7 Markale massacre, 117–18

Marx, Karl: and the automatic subject, 20–21; and the machine, 208–9; and prisons, 65n9 Maywand district, Kandahar province, Afghanistan, 77 Mbembe, Achille, 36, 73–74 media theology, 52–54, 215 Meinhof, Ulrike, 94, 98 Meins, Holger, 94–95 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 235 Miller, J. Hillis, 408n95 Miloševic´, Slobodon, 119 Milton, John, 354 Mitchell, W. J. T., 300, 404n16 Moller, Irmgard, 94 Mondzain, Marie-José, 215–16 Morlock, Corporal Jeremy, 78, 83, 113n20 Mortley, Raoul, 67–68n40 Mudin, Gul, 2, 7, 27, 92–93, 104, 108–12 Mukerji, Chandra, 112n4 Mvudle, T., 256–57, 289n41 Nancy, Jean-Luc, 1, 15, 90 negative theology, 40, 46, 55, 67–68n40, 90, 219, 394; nuclear sovereignty as, 217–19. See also apophasis; denegation Negri, Antonio, 93, 115n55 Nelson, Laura, and lynching, 374 Nelson, L. D., and lynching, 374 Netanyahu, Benjamin, 172, 174–77 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 59, 68, 170, 211 Norgaard protocols, 236, 239, 243, 245– 46, 248, 286n3, 286n9, 287n15 Notre musique, 121, 127–49 Obama, Barack, 192–93 organology/dis-organicization, 19, 70, 75– 76, 147, 199, 220, 355 Papic, Žarana, 117–19 para-site, 194–96 Patterson, Orlando, 378, 383–85 PEBCO Three, 255–56 pharmakon, 196, 207, 223, 243, 277, 283– 84, 318, 344 photopolitical, the: 20, 23, 25, 37, 48, 114n38, 182n78; and assassination,

Index / 417 77–79; as blur, 94–101, 105–12; and collateral damage, 223–24; and disappearing enemy, 185–92; and the drone 199–214; and the first person shooter, 124–39; and forensic phantasmagoria, 81–87; and Gaza, 174–77; and Gerhard Richter, 93–112; and incorporeality, 84– 88; and light/non-light, 7–9; and lynching, 372–80; and monopoly violence, 166–69; and nuclear war, 219–22; and the oneiric, 141–45; and ontotypology, 208–14; and risk, 15, 19–22, 57, 61–62, 110, 194, 216, 219–23, 285; and Rodney King, 152–61; and saturation, 84–93; and sovereignty, 8–11, 56–58, 85–86, 90–92, 106–12, 120–27, 131–34, 140– 45, 217–18, 386–93; and warfare, 3–15, 20, 48, 56, 82, 86–87, 100, 107–10, 114n38, 124–26, 141, 190, 297, 399 political animality, 122–23, 151–52, 156, 158, 161–64, 261–62, 271–82, 354–402 political theology, 55, 276, 380 Postone, Moishe, 20–22 Powell, Officer Laurence, 150–54 practico-inert, 124–27, 140–42, 155, 178n11, 382 preemption, 15, 17, 19–22, 49, 56–57, 81, 89, 174, 191, 197–98, 201, 214–25, 253, 303; as providential, 214–17 Raspe, Jan-Carl, 93, 95 realism, visual, 12–13, 22, 26, 55, 94, 99–100, 106, 108, 142, 152, 329, 331, 334, 344 remotion, 46, 53–54, 85, 90–92, 106, 108–9, 281 Richter, Gerhard, 2, 7, 93–111, 115nn57–58, 116n62 risk, 15, 110, 194, 216, 285; acceleration of, 219–23; and guilt/debt, 61–62; and photopolitics, 15, 19–22, 57, 61–62, 110, 194, 216, 219–23, 285; and the saturated image, 86–87; as self-valorizing, 19–22, 57 Ronell, Avital, 26–27, 86, 141, 163, 169, 179n25, 188, 401 Rose, Gillian, 212

Said, Edward, 3, 175, 335 Salim Abd Al Salam Sultan, Ashraf (Ashraf Salim), 7, 27, 33–35, 37–43, 45–56, 62–63, 63n1, 65n4, 66n13, 66n18 Sarajevo, 2–3, 117–18, 127–29, 138, 143, 145, 159, 174 Sartre, Jean- Paul, 121, 124–26 saturated image, 21, 82, 84–90, 99, 106–12, 114n39, 198, 217–28 Schmitt, Carl, 10, 57, 185, 187, 197, 206– 7, 339, 380 Schürmann, Reiner, 5, 69, 328, 335, 403; and the abyssal, 210; on anticipatory and retrospective topology, 49, 56–57, 61–62, 67n32; on apophatic power, 56–57; on Aristolean political kinetics, 13–16; on avowal, 233–34; and the finalities of force, 246; on formations of domination, 361; and Kafka, 49; on stasiology, 10–11, 76; on tragedy, 341– 44, 347 Scott, Paul, 153–54 securitization: 1, 2, 19, 22, 40–41, 49, 58– 62, 87, 134, 188, 194, 202, 219, 221– 23, 330, 344; force protection as, 1, 12, 82, 140, 167, 202. See also apophasis; immunization; indemnification Sekula, Alan, 18 serialization, 124–27, 140–42, 155, 178n11, 382 Shipp, Thomas, and lynching, 375 Situationists, 221 slavocracy, 42–43, 121, 157, 193, 199, 216, 242–43, 264–67, 280, 288n21, 289n34, 290n51, 329, 331–34, 366; Arendt and, 381, 384–85; homo sacer and, 370–72; and lynching photography, 372–79; and torture, 231–33, 242, 288n21, 372 Smith, Abram, and lynching, 375 social mothers (South African): and Antigone, 308–10; and antiphonal witnessing, 295–96, 303–10, 350–51n27; and transitional justice 295–96, 303–10 sociocide, 173–74 somaton/asomaton, 76 sovereignty: 112n9; as apophatic, 1–2, 9–10, 27, 41–42, 48, 50–58, 74–77, 84–86, 90–92, 106–12, 140–45,

418 / Index sovereignty (continued) 168–70, 197–99, 217–25, 393–96; and the apotrope, 89–92; as archival, 187–92, 199–214, 219–22, 305–10; and autoimmunity, 5–6, 9, 12, 27, 46, 53–58, 84–86, 105–6, 134, 140–41, 155, 159–61, 193–96, 201–7, 214–15, 224–25, 329–40, 356–57, 360, 376–78, 380; and autokinesis, 141, 198–99, 219, 233–35, 244, 284–85; and the beast, 151–52, 157–58, 160–65, 171, 263, 267, 269, 275, 278–84, 356– 57, 360–62, 368–70, 375–79, 388, 392, 397; and collateral damage, 56, 82, 91, 140–42, 166, 171, 191, 201, 203–4, 220–21, 223–25; colonial, 9, 41–43, 60–62, 73–74, 114n31, 154, 158–60, 165, 171–77, 262–70, 277, 335, 344, 354, 370–72, 375, 378, 403, 408–9n101; and debt, 59–63, 219–22, 279–80, 287n16, 305, 332; and defacement, 392–97, 408n97; as disframed/ dismediated, 38–41, 66n22, 143, 235, 253, 339; and drones, 199–214; as ex nihilo, 2, 16, 67n32, 69–77, 81, 126, 166, 214, 244, 345, 355, 405n20; and extra-judicial violence, 81; and hostipitality, 194–96; and immateriality, 8, 10, 15–16, 19, 25, 35–36, 56–57, 74, 81, 92, 108–10, 121, 123, 142, 157, 158–59, 164, 168, 170, 189–90, 199, 211; as impassable, 48–49, 53–54, 57, 398–403; and ipseity, 16, 56, 75, 121, 123–24, 131, 134, 189–90, 197, 199, 250–55, 289n34, 387, 405n20, 406n29; and monopoly violence, 161–72; and nuclear war, 217–19; as orifice, 280–83; and performativity, 2, 9, 11–12, 17–18, 27, 36, 45–46, 52, 54–58, 65n8, 72, 75, 77, 91–92, 105–12, 120–21, 123–27, 130–34, 140–42, 146–49, 155–57, 161–64, 168–70, 180n48, 197–99, 205, 214, 219–22, 231–32, 234–36, 241–46, 250–55, 263, 268, 270–71, 282–85, 288n23, 295–99, 304–8, 310–11, 313– 14, 319, 327, 329–35, 351n42, 371, 383, 389–90, 393, 399–400, 405n20; and photopolitics, 8–11, 85–86, 90–92, 106–12, 120–27, 131–34, 140–45, 217–

18, 386–93; and preemption, 214–16; and the public secret, 17, 25, 27, 33, 37, 40–41, 45–47, 50–55, 62, 84, 87, 103, 149, 168–69, 171, 176, 187–71, 233, 254, 270, 296–98, 306, 310, 386; as remotion, 90–92; and rule by the dead, 329; and sacrificial animality, 356–65, 404n7; and self-substitution, 16, 75, 124, 134, 189–90, 197, 199; as shibboleth, 18; and shot/reverse shot, 178n14; as signature, 89–93; as stasiological, 9–13, 75–76, 80–81, 132–33, 192; and suicide, 105–6; and the victim of the victim, 334–35; and Walten, 17, 292–95 Spivak, Gayatri Charkravorty, 387 state: and the aleatory, 75; and animal signifiers, 356–58; and anticipatory topology, 49–50; apartheid, 229–30, 232, 234–40, 246, 254–64, 266–67, 269–80, 287n12, 287–88n16, 288n17, 288n24; Archimedian, 74–75; and autoimmunity, 5–6, 9, 12, 27, 46, 53–58, 84–86, 105–6, 134, 140–41, 155, 159–61, 193–96, 201–7, 214–15, 224–25, 329– 40, 356–57, 360, 376–78, 380; and autonomized warfare, 1–2; becoming nonstate of, 19, 196–99, 214, 218; and collateral damage, 56, 82, 91, 140–42, 166, 171, 191, 201, 203–4, 220–21, 223–25; and Combatant Status Review Tribunal (CSRT), 2, 33–53, 57–58, 63, 63–65nn1–3, 65n4, 66nn15–17, 81; and constituted and constitutive power, 1–7, 12–14, 16, 22, 69–70, 74, 106, 133, 157, 207, 228n56, 244, 246; and containerization, 18; and cult of guilt/debt, 58–61; and deactualization, 197–98; deconstructionist, 54–58; and democratic hospitality, 194–96; and desistance, 121, 163, 166, 168, 170–74, 181n62, 181n66, 194, 199, 248, 251; disframing of, 38–44, 48, 56–58; and dogmatic right, 49–50; as ex-centric, 196–99; and ex-closure, 12; and extrajudicial killing, 81; and facticity, 3–4; and force protection, 1, 12, 82, 140, 167, 202; as heliocentric, 8; Hobbsean, 131–34; and interiorized war, 13; “it is” and “there is” of, 74; and juridical

Index / 419 history, 70–71; and media theology, 53– 54; and monopoly violence, 161–72; and odious debt, 68n56; organology/ dis-organicization of, 19, 75–76, 199; and the parasite, 194–96; polemological foundation of, 70–74; and political suicide, 106; post-Holocaust, 19, 171–72, 176; and preemption, 15, 17, 19, 20–22, 49, 56–57, 81, 89, 174, 191, 197–98, 201, 214–25, 253, 303; and racialized manhunting, 41–42; and realist aesthetics, 7, 22–23; and right of no-right, 22; and risk/threat perception, 86–88; and secrecy, 17, 25, 27, 33, 37, 40–41, 45–47, 50–55, 62, 84, 87, 103, 149, 168–69, 171–87, 233, 254, 270, 296–98, 306, 310; secret burials by, 297, 308–10; and securitization, 19, 22, 40– 41, 49, 58–62, 87, 134, 188, 194, 202, 219, 221–23, 330, 344; and sensory stratification, 9, 11; as shooting blanks, 27; signatures of, 89–93, 108, 115n53; sociocide by Israeli, 171–74; stasiology of the, 9–13, 73–76, 80–81, 132–33, 192; and subditio, 36–37; substances of, 36–37; survivor, 3, 175, 336; and tribunals, 37–38, 42–43; unconscious structured like, 141–43 Steigler, Bernard, 188, 209 Stoics, 76–77 Taussig, Michael, 329, 331–32 Titus, Flavius Sabinus Vespasianus, 398– 401 torture, 230, 238–40, 257, 280n377, 380; and legal indeterminacy of, 60, 172, 186–87; and slavocracy, 231–33, 242, 288n21, 331–34, 372; in South Africa, 254–62, 269–85 Trouillot, Michel-Rolph, 77 Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC, South African), 229–30, 285n1, 288n17; amnesty procedure of, 231–48, 250, 254–55, 262, 278, 286n3, 286n9, 288n38, 289nn40–41, 290nn42–49, 291nn60–61; and Athenian tragedy, 3, 243, 296, 298–99, 303, 305, 313–19; and homeopathic/apotropaic repetition, 317–19; and memory, 278–79, 303–10,

318–19, 350n33; and proportionality criteria, 236–40, 242–49, 263, 281, 286n10, 287nn11–12; staging of, 299– 303; witnessing at, 295–96, 303–10, 318–19, 348n7; women’s antiphony at, 295–96, 303–7 van Eyk, Johan, 258–60, 268, 290n46 Virno, Paulo, 36 von Uexküll, Jakob, 390–91 Walten: 17, 29n25, 353n100 war: and accelerationism, 19–22; as actuarial, 19–21, 204, 215–16, 348n9; and aisthesis/anesthesia/apperception, 7–10, 12, 14, 66n22, 83, 92, 110, 120, 134, 150, 152–53, 157–58, 167–69, 172, 261, 348n8, 392; as apophatic, 10, 14, 27, 40–41, 55–57, 73–77, 84–93, 105–10, 169, 217–19, 222, 394; as archival, 7, 18, 34, 38, 45, 48, 53, 58, 60–62, 79, 81, 92–93, 100–101, 115n53, 118–20, 123, 127–28, 135–36, 140–42, 154, 157, 175–77, 178n11, 185–225, 227n30, 227n32, 227n56, 234, 241, 246, 252, 279, 285, 289n34, 295, 297, 299–300, 303, 305–10, 313–14, 317–24, 328–29, 331–33, 340, 365–67, 371–72, 393; and arkhé, 15–17, 75, 339, 364; and autoimmunization, 5, 9–13, 27, 46, 53–54, 56–57, 82, 86, 92, 105–6, 134, 140–41, 154–55, 159, 166–67, 193–94, 197, 201–2, 204–6, 214–15, 220, 230–34, 236–37, 240–42, 246, 250–54, 268, 286nn9–10, 287n11, 289n34, 310, 312, 324, 327, 329–32, 336, 357, 360, 376–77; as constituted and constitutive power, 1–7, 12–14, 16, 22, 69–70, 74, 106, 133, 157, 207, 228n56, 244, 246; containerization of, 18–20; and denegation, 4, 6, 40–41, 47, 49–51, 54–56, 61, 85–88, 91–92, 106–8, 133, 147, 217–18, 320, 395; as disframing and dismediation, 1, 12, 38–44, 48, 56–58, 66n22, 74–77, 92, 143, 170, 192, 196–99, 221, 235, 247– 55, 338–40; factuality and actuality of, 1–8, 29n34, 120, 163; and grounding/ degrounding of, 1–20, 24–26, 29n25,

420 / Index war (continued) 29n34, 40, 42–43, 47–48, 50, 55–56, 58–60, 67n32, 69–70, 73–75, 87–92, 99, 108, 115n53, 119, 128, 130, 140–41, 145, 151, 155, 161–62, 169–70, 185, 190, 192, 194–99, 206, 209–10, 217– 19, 228n47, 229, 231–34, 243–49, 254, 280–84, 296, 298–99, 301, 311–12, 315, 321–25, 328, 339–40, 346–47, 355, 358–59, 362–64, 366–67, 376–77, 382–83, 394–95, 397, 402, 405n20; and immateriality, 8, 10, 16, 19, 25, 55–57, 74, 81, 92–93, 108, 109–10, 121, 123, 142, 158–59, 162–64, 168–70, 186, 189, 199; as incorporeal, 21, 53, 59–60, 73–77, 90, 108, 110, 113n82, 84–86, 88–89, 130, 147–48, 213, 217, 356; and indemnification, 5, 9, 10, 12, 27, 46, 54, 57, 76, 86, 105–6, 114, 155, 159, 186, 193–94, 201–2, 204–5, 214, 220, 287n11, 324, 329, 330, 332, 357, 360, 376, 377; and justification/ dejustification, 1–18, 28n3, 28n8, 29– 30n34, 36, 38–40, 52–53, 56, 65n10, 74, 78, 80, 126, 140–43, 149, 154, 167, 170, 180n50, 190, 200, 203, 214, 216, 221, 224, 231–35, 240, 243–54, 284, 286n10, 287n16, 288n22, 297–300, 304, 312, 318, 320–28, 330, 334–40,

342–44, 366, 405n21; peace as mode of, 2, 11, 70–73; as philosophical, 1; as photopolitical, 13–15, 20, 48, 56, 82, 86–87, 100, 107–10, 114n38, 124–26, 141, 190, 297, 399; and the practicoinert, 124–27, 140–42, 155, 178n11, 382; as preemptive, 15, 17, 19, 20–22, 49, 56–57, 81, 89, 174, 191, 197–98, 201, 214–25, 253, 303; as providential, 214–17; as a regime of truth, 1–9, 21, 50, 74, 86–88, 106–7, 118–20, 130– 31, 137, 140, 145, 176, 198, 237–55, 269–70, 288n22, 295–99, 302–16, 320, 330, 335–42, 350n32, 360, 370, 389; and saturated images, 21, 82, 84–90, 99, 106–12, 114n39, 198, 217; as shibboleth, 19, 29n34, 118, 324, 329, 358, 400; and sovereignty, 1, 4, 9–11, 15, 18, 27, 29n25, 38–41, 46, 50–57, 66n22, 69–77, 85, 89–92, 105–12, 112n9, 121, 124, 126, 131–34, 140, 142, 145–47, 166–70, 178n14, 187–92, 194, 197–99, 201, 204, 206, 213–14, 215–19, 223, 234, 250, 280–83, 289n34, 306, 329, 334–35, 357–62, 385, 398–403 Weber, Samuel, 25, 351n52 Weil, Simone, 29n25, 172–73 Wilderson, Frank B., 41, 43, 67n24, 73–74