Sorglose Nacht

After letting it sit in my inbox for almost a week, my sense of love for comics finally overtook me. Camouflage comics is a monument of comics to Argentina’s “Dirty War” of 1976-1983. Briefly, in 1976, Argentine army commander-in-chief Jorge Rafael Videla and others (Emilio Massera, Orlando Agosti) overthrew then-President (and Videla appointer) Isabel Martinez de Perón and installed a military junta at the helm of Argentina.

From Wikipedia (here):

By mid-1975, the country was in chaos. Extreme right death squads used their hunt for far-left guerrillas (like the Montoneros) as a pretext to exterminate their ideological opponents on the left and as a cover for common crimes. In July, there was a general strike. Wealthy, conservative landowners encouraged the army, which prepared to take control by making lists of people who should be ‘dealt with’ after the planned coup. “As many people as necessary must die in Argentina so that the country will again be secure,” Videla declared in 1975 in support of the death squads.

The junta was responsible for the slaughtering of an estimated 10,000 to 30,000 Argentineans, mostly trade-union members, students and people thought to espouse left wing views. Camouflage Comics notes in its own mission statement that it rides dangerously close to founding the (Argentinian) Holocaust Entertainment Industry, which it does, but some of the comics are quite beautiful, and the collection introduced me to a lot of exciting Argentine comic-creators. Case in point, from Dante Ginevra and Diego Agrimbau…

Last year, as Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, Pope Benedict XVI wrote this document to commemorate the occasion of the 60th anniversary of the Allied forces landing in Normandy in 1944. It is, as one might expect, an almost stoically well-written text. Toward the front:

They [the first-generation post-war politicians] did not want to found a state upon religious faith, but rather a state informed by moral reason, yet it was their faith that helped them to raise up again a reason once distorted by, and held in thrall to ideological tyranny.

Across Europe ran a frontier, and not just across our continent, but dividing the entire world. A great part of Central Europe and Eastern Europe came under the domination of an ideology that subjected state to party, in the end, effacing the difference. Here, again, the result was the rule of lies.

He writes then that if post-war Europe experienced a period of relative peace, South-East Asia, the Middle East, most of Africa, and parts of the Europe on the eastern side of “the frontier” experienced nothing less than a sustained and bloody arc of armed conflict. He suggests that two (somewhat) new symptoms seemingly common among these disperate conflicts were:

1. The collapse of the “cohesiveness of law” - that is, the usurping of conscience-based order by “the cynicism of ideology”, which he corrleates at least in part with the interests of big business. The “good,” he suggests, “is shoved aside by the expedient, and might setup in the place of right.”
2. The phenomenon of terror, which, as he notes, “so often has its source in standing injustice, not addressed by effective measures.” The forces which have access to “right and law” of course must also have access to “carefully calibrated force,” to combat the phenomenon, but, he firmly intones, “is it important to vouchsafe forgiveness in advance, in order that the circle of violence may be broken.”

He continues, “In all these cases it is important that no one particular power act as the champion of justice. All too easily can interest interfere with action, and contaminate one’s view of what is just. Most urgent is a genuine jus genitum, free from hegemonic predominance and action which follows from it: only thus can it remain clear that what is at stake is the defense of collective law and right, and those also of them who stand, so to speak, on the other side.”

A secular viewpoint of enlightened reason, he says, is opposed to a fanatical fundamentalist religious viewpoint. There are pathologies of reason (say, Pol Pot) and of religion. Both pathologies “are life threatening for peace - indeed, in an age of global power structures, for humanity as a whole,” a formation that I think Derrida himself would have liked. In the following jarring short paragraph, he continues:

To a reason fallen ill, all recognition of definitively valid values, all that stands on the truth capacity of reason, appears finally as fundamentalism. All that remains is reason’s dissolution, its deconstruction, as, for example, Jacques Derrida has set it out for us. He has “deconstructed” hospitality, democracy, the state and finally, the concept of terrorism, only to stand in horror in the face of the events of September 11th. A form of reason that can acknowledge only itself and the empirical conscience paralyzes and dismembers itself.

The fact that he seems to accuse Derrida of relativism must be put aside. It is an old and long-standing tradition to imagine that Derrida or deconstruction in itself clearly indicates a sort of ethical relativism. Doubtless, there is more to be said, but not here. Back to the Cardinal’s ontology: “God himself is Logos,” he says, “the rational first cause of all reality, the creative reason out of which the world came to be, and which is reflected in the world. God is Logos - Meaning, Reason, Word, and so it is through the way of reason that man encounters God, through the espousal of a reason that is not blind to the moral dimension of Being.” This theology will be the condition of possibility absolute and sovereign reason and absolute justice, which is commented on shortly in the amazing formulation, “There is a justice love will not annul.”

Again, ontological arguments between the Pope and Derrida are unproductive, and at any rate I am unqualified to arbitrate them. But, is there a justice love will not annul? What a question. I really don’t know how to even begin to think it. But it is now being thought. I am intrigued.

Meanwhile, I think that short of what might be called their respective theologies, Benedict might find himself much closer to what might be called the ethical Derrida than he seems to think. This fact is littered through the above quotes. It is clear. From one small example:

I believe it is necessary, by way of a philosophical, historical analysis, to deconstruct the political theology of sovereignty…But at the same time you shouldn’t think that you must fight for the dissolution pure and simple of all sovereignty: that is neither realistic nor desirable. There are effects of sovereignty which in my view are still politically useful in the fight against certain forces or international concentrations of forces that sneer at sovereignty.

And finally,

My intent here is not anti-religious, it is not a matter of waging war on the religious messianisms properly speaking, that is to say Judaic, Christian, Islamic. But it is a matter of marking a place where these messianisms are exceeded by messianicity, that is to say by that waiting without waiting, without horizon for the event to come, the democracy to come with all its contradictions. And I believe we must seek today, very cautiously, to give force and form to this messianicity, without giving in to the old concepts of politics (sovereignism, territorialised nation-state), without giving in to the Churches or to the religious powers, theologico-political or theocratic of all orders, whether they be the theocracies of the Islamic Middle East, or whether they be, disguised, the theocracies of the West…

This is a very old link. I realize it is not particularly common to put up a link that is almost four years old. I don’t care. I really like it, and I think you will too. Please read: Basball is just baseball: An excerpt from a new book by David Shields. It is about the Seattle Mariners’ right-fielder Ichiro Suzuki, and if it doesn’t make you think that there’s hope for baseball, then you are not like I am in that respect.

A quote:

In a game against the Baltimore Orioles, Ichiro made two spectacular diving catches. Orioles manager Mike Hargrove said, “The catch he made on Anderson’s ball down the line and the catch he made on Hairston’s ball - no other right fielder in the American League makes those plays. Maybe he makes one of them but doesn’t make both of them.” Asked, afterward, which of the catches was the most difficult, Ichiro said, “It’s tough to say which one was the toughest, because each fly ball had a different characteristic.”

And another:

Asked his reaction to Alex Rodriguez getting booed so vociferously upon his return to Seattle, Ichiro said, “It’s very tough for a ballplayer to get proud and keep his dignity. There’s not much difference between love and hate.”

In old news, French voters rejected the EU Constitution [See also: this at CNN] a week ago Monday. In the last eight days, this somewhat surprising turn of events has elicited the commentary of a fairly wide variety of intellectual-types, notably (at least for me) the infamously outspoken Slavoj Zizek, as well as a somewhat clairvoyant pre-party commentary from Alain Badiou (nod in this direction for the link).

Five days after the fact, and in what can only be called classic Zizek form, Lacan’s most popularly supposed heir had some interesting things to say:

The voters … were not given a clear symmetrical choice. The very terms of the choice privileged the yes lobby. … People were called to ratify the inevitable. Both the media and the political elite presented the choice as one between knowledge and ignorance, between expertise and ideology, between post-political administration and the old political passions of the left and the right.

So although the choice was not a choice between two political options, nor was it a choice between the enlightened vision of a modern Europe, ready to embrace the new global order, and old, confused political passions. (sic)

There was a positive choice in the no: the choice of choice itself; the rejection of the blackmail by the new elite that offers us only the choice to confirm their expert knowledge or to display one’s “irrational” immaturity. Our no is a positive decision to start a properly political debate about what kind of Europe we really want.

Now compare what Baidou said on May 18:

In the division between the ‘yes’ vote and the ‘no’ vote there has appeared - and it is a relative novelty - the argument from authority. In other words, the correlation, which Foucault would have appreciated, between knowledge and power: the ‘yes’ is the choice of enlightened people (experts of all sorts, without forgetting journalists), the ‘no’ belongs to the ignorant. The criticisms levied against Chirac on the choice for the referendum overlap with this argument: it is not a good idea to entrust matters as important as Europe to the decision of an ignorant mass; one could, or rather should, put the ignorant fraction of the population outside the capitalo-parliamentarian system (a theme which is already explicitly in circulation in the U.S.A. where grosso modo only half the population takes part in voting).

Baidou claims he will not have voted…

My personal view is that Europe, Europe as Idea, is already dead; voting for Europe is voting for a corpse. As far as I’m concerned, I won’t vote. There are only two ways of envisaging Europe as a singularity: a) conceiving it in the framework of inter-imperialist rivalry (Europe versus U.S.A.) - but this is a schema that belongs to the past; b) thinking it as a heterogeneous power, i.e. both heterogeneous vis-à-vis the U.S.A. and as a new type of power.

Zizek:

To put it bluntly, do we want to live in a world in which the only choice is between the American civilisation and the emerging Chinese authoritarian-capitalist one? If the answer is no then the only alternative is Europe. The third world cannot generate a strong enough resistance to the ideology of the American dream. In the present world constellation, it is only Europe that can do it. The true opposition today is not between the first world and the third world. Instead it is between the first and third world (ie the American global empire and its colonies), and the second world (ie Europe).

Baidou:

If the ‘no’ wins, we are threatened with a possible regression with regard to Europe. But I think that this backward step is necessary. What is on the agenda is effectively a ‘beyond’ of the national sphere … with the difference that this beyond must be subjectivated on the basis of what exists in the national sphere itself. We reencounter our question: the necessity of the identification of a figure of the adversary. The question of a power of a new type, of a power opposed to U.S. hegemony and which would not be symmetrical vis-à-vis U.S. power … a decisive question, which today largely remains open.

As it happens, back in 1960, Elias Canetti noted, "A man can evade commands by not hearing them and he can evade them by not carrying them out. The sting - and this can never be too emphatically stated - only results from the carrying out of a command. … [One’s] defence against new commands then becomes a matter of life and death." (Crowds and Power, Penguin: 1973. 373.) In fact, the last words of his one-score-year-consuming work are as follows:

The system of commands is acknowledged everywhere. It is perhaps most articulate in armies, but there is scarcely any sphere of civilized life where commands do not reach and none of us they do not mark. Their threat of death is the coin of power, and here it is all too easy to add coin to coin and amass wealth. If we would master power we must face command openly and boldly, and search for means to deprive it of its sting.

…and finally…

WE’RE VOTING no. It is a constitution for the bourgeoisie, for multinationals, for bosses. It is only about the economy, competition, profits, the market and capitalism. We are against all that; we are communists. There isn’t any progress for workers. Most workers want to say “merde”, to stick two fingers up at them. We are fed up with saying yes to politicians.

- Thomas Meurnier, a 32 year old history teacher (quoted in the Guardian 28 May)