[IndyMedia Bombay] Slavoj Zizek on the Enemy

[PUKAR @ IndyMedia]

Are we in a war? Do we have an enemy?

by Slavoj Zizek

When Donald Rumsfeld designated the imprisoned Taliban fighters 
'unlawful combatants' (as opposed to 'regular' prisoners of war), he 
did not simply mean that their criminal terrorist activity placed 
them outside the law: when an American citizen commits a crime, even 
one as serious as murder, he remains a 'lawful criminal'. The 
distinction between criminals and non-criminals has no relation to 
that between 'lawful' citizens and the people referred to in France 
as the 'Sans Papiers'. Perhaps the category of homo sacer, brought 
back into use by Giorgio Agamben in Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and 
Bare Life (1998), is more useful here. It designated, in ancient 
Roman law, someone who could be killed with impunity and whose death 
had, for the same reason, no sacrificial value. Today, as a term 
denoting exclusion, it can be seen to apply not only to terrorists, 
but also to those who are on the receiving end of humanitarian aid 
(Rwandans, Bosnians, Afghans), as well as to the Sans Papiers in 
France and the inhabitants of the favelas in Brazil or the African 
American ghettoes in the US.

Concentration camps and humanitarian refugee camps are, 
paradoxically, the two faces, 'inhuman' and 'human', of one 
sociological matrix. Asked about the German concentration camps in 
occupied Poland, 'Concentration Camp' Erhardt (in Lubitsch's To Be or 
Not to Be) snaps back: 'We do the concentrating, and the Poles do the 
camping.' A similar distinction applies to the Enron bankruptcy, 
which can be seen as an ironic comment on the notion of a risk 
society. Thousands of employees who lost their jobs and savings were 
certainly exposed to a risk, but without having any real choice: what 
was risk to those in the know was blind fate to them. Those who did 
have a sense of the risks, the top managers, also had a chance to 
intervene in the situation, but chose instead to minimise the risk to 
themselves by cashing in their stocks and options before the 
bankruptcy - actual risks and choices were thus nicely distributed. 
In the risk society, in other words, some (the Enron managers) have 
the choices, while others (the employees) take the risks.

The logic of homo sacer is clearly discernible in the way the Western 
media report from the occupied West Bank: when the Israeli Army, in 
what Israel itself describes as a 'war' operation, attacks the 
Palestinian police and sets about systematically destroying the 
Palestinian infrastructure, Palestinian resistance is cited as proof 
that we are dealing with terrorists. This paradox is inscribed into 
the very notion of a 'war on terror' - a strange war in which the 
enemy is criminalised if he defends himself and returns fire with 
fire. Which brings me back to the 'unlawful combatant', who is 
neither enemy soldier nor common criminal. The al-Qaida terrorists 
are not enemy soldiers, nor are they simple criminals - the US 
rejected out of hand any notion that the WTC attacks should be 
treated as apolitical criminal acts. In short, what is emerging in 
the guise of the Terrorist on whom war is declared is the unlawful 
combatant, the political Enemy excluded from the political arena.

This is another aspect of the new global order: we no longer have 
wars in the old sense of a conflict between sovereign states in which 
certain rules apply (to do with the treatment of prisoners, the 
prohibition of certain weapons etc). Two types of conflict remain: 
struggles between groups of homo sacer - 'ethnic-religious conflicts' 
which violate the rules of universal human rights, do not count as 
wars proper, and call for a 'humanitarian pacifist' intervention on 
the part of the Western powers - and direct attacks on the US or 
other representatives of the new global order, in which case, again, 
we do not have wars proper, but merely 'unlawful combatants' 
resisting the forces of universal order. In this second case, one 
cannot even imagine a neutral humanitarian organisation like the Red 
Cross mediating between the warring parties, organising an exchange 
of prisoners and so on, because one side in the conflict - the 
US-dominated global force - has already assumed the role of the Red 
Cross, in that it does not perceive itself as one of the warring 
sides, but as a mediating agent of peace and global order, crushing 
rebellion and, simultaneously, providing humanitarian aid to the 
'local population'.

This weird 'coincidence of opposites' reached its peak when, a few 
months ago, Harald Nesvik, a right-wing member of the Norwegian 
Parliament, proposed George W. Bush and Tony Blair as candidates for 
the Nobel Peace Prize, citing their decisive role in the 'war on 
terror'. Thus the Orwellian motto 'War is Peace' finally becomes 
reality, and military action against the Taliban can be presented as 
a way to guarantee the safe delivery of humanitarian aid. We no 
longer have an opposition between war and humanitarian aid: the same 
intervention can function at both levels simultaneously. The toppling 
of the Taliban regime is presented as part of the strategy to help 
the Afghan people oppressed by the Taliban; as Tony Blair said, we 
may have to bomb the Taliban in order to secure food transportation 
and distribution. Perhaps the ultimate image of the 'local 
population' as homo sacer is that of the American war plane flying 
above Afghanistan: one can never be sure whether it will be dropping 
bombs or food parcels.

This concept of homo sacer allows us to understand the numerous calls 
to rethink the basic elements of contemporary notions of human 
dignity and freedom that have been put out since 11 September. 
Exemplary here is Jonathan Alter's Newsweek article 'Time to Think 
about Torture' (5 November 2001), with the ominous subheading: 'It's 
a new world, and survival may well require old techniques that seemed 
out of the question.' After flirting with the Israeli idea of 
legitimising physical and psychological torture in cases of extreme 
urgency (when we know a terrorist prisoner possesses information 
which may save hundreds of lives), and 'neutral' statements like 
'Some torture clearly works,' it concludes:

We can't legalise torture; it's contrary to American values. But even 
as we continue to speak out against human-rights abuses around the 
world, we need to keep an open mind about certain measures to fight 
terrorism, like court-sanctioned psychological interrogation. And 
we'll have to think about transferring some suspects to our less 
squeamish allies, even if that's hypocritical. Nobody said this was 
going to be pretty.

The obscenity of such statements is blatant. First, why single out 
the WTC attack as justification? Have there not been more horrible 
crimes in other parts of the world in recent years? Secondly, what is 
new about this idea? The CIA has been instructing its Latin American 
and Third World military allies in the practice of torture for 
decades. Even the 'liberal' argument cited by Alan Dershowitz is 
suspect: 'I'm not in favour of torture, but if you're going to have 
it, it should damn well have court approval.' When, taking this line 
a step further, Dershowitz suggests that torture in the 'ticking 
clock' situation is not directed at the prisoner's rights as an 
accused person (the information obtained will not be used in the 
trial against him, and the torture itself would not formally count as 
punishment), the underlying premise is even more disturbing, implying 
as it does that one should be allowed to torture people not as part 
of a deserved punishment, but simply because they know something. Why 
not go further still and legalise the torture of prisoners of war who 
may have information which could save the lives of hundreds of our 
soldiers? If the choice is between Dershowitz's liberal 'honesty' and 
old-fashioned 'hypocrisy', we'd be better off sticking with 
'hypocrisy'. I can well imagine that, in a particular situation, 
confronted with the proverbial 'prisoner who knows', whose words can 
save thousands, I might decide in favour of torture; however, even 
(or, rather, precisely) in a case such as this, it is absolutely 
crucial that one does not elevate this desperate choice into a 
universal principle: given the unavoidable and brutal urgency of the 
moment, one should simply do it. Only in this way, in the very 
prohibition against elevating what we have done into a universal 
principle, do we retain a sense of guilt, an awareness of the 
inadmissibility of what we have done.

In short, every authentic liberal should see these debates, these 
calls to 'keep an open mind', as a sign that the terrorists are 
winning. And, in a way, essays like Alter's, which do not openly 
advocate torture, but just introduce it as a legitimate topic of 
debate, are even more dangerous than explicit endorsements. At this 
moment at least, explicitly endorsing it would be rejected as too 
shocking, but the mere introduction of torture as a legitimate topic 
allows us to court the idea while retaining a clear conscience. ('Of 
course I am against torture, but who is hurt if we just discuss it?') 
Admitting torture as a topic of debate changes the entire field, 
while outright advocacy remains merely idiosyncratic. The idea that, 
once we let the genie out of the bottle, torture can be kept within 
'reasonable' bounds, is the worst liberal illusion, if only because 
the 'ticking clock' example is deceptive: in the vast majority of 
cases torture is not done in order to resolve a 'ticking clock' 
situation, but for quite different reasons (to punish an enemy or to 
break him down psychologically, to terrorise a population etc). Any 
consistent ethical stance has to reject such pragmatic-utilitarian 
reasoning. Here's a simple thought experiment: imagine an Arab 
newspaper arguing the case for torturing American prisoners; think of 
the explosion of comments about fundamentalist barbarism and 
disrespect for human rights that would cause.

When, at the beginning of April, the Americans got hold of Abu 
Zubaydah, presumed to be the second-in-command of al-Qaida, the 
question 'Should he be tortured?' was openly discussed in the media. 
In a statement broadcast by NBC on 5 April, Rumsfeld himself claimed 
that American lives were his first priority, not the human rights of 
a high-ranking terrorist, and attacked journalists for displaying 
such concern for Zubaydah's well-being, thus openly clearing the way 
for torture. Alan Dershowitz presented an even sorrier spectacle. His 
reservations concerned two particular points: 1. Zubaydah's is not a 
clear case of the 'ticking bomb' situation, i.e. it is not proven 
that he has the details of an imminent terrorist attack which could 
be prevented by gaining access to his knowledge through torture; 2. 
torturing him would not yet be legally covered - for that to happen, 
one would first have to engage in a public debate and then amend the 
US Constitution, while publicly proclaiming the respects in which the 
US would no longer follow the Geneva Convention regulating the 
treatment of enemy prisoners.

A notable precursor in this field of para-legal 'biopolitics', in 
which administrative measures are gradually replacing the rule of 
law, was Alfredo Stroessner's regime in Paraguay in the 1960s and 
1970s, which took the logic of the state of exception to an absurd, 
still unsurpassed extreme. Under Stroessner, Paraguay was - with 
regard to its Constitutional order - a 'normal' parliamentary 
democracy with all freedoms guaranteed; however, since, as Stroessner 
claimed, we were all living in a state of emergency because of the 
worldwide struggle between freedom and Communism, the full 
implementation of the Constitution was forever postponed and a 
permanent state of emergency obtained. This state of emergency was 
suspended every four years for one day only, election day, to 
legitimise the rule of Stroessner's Colorado Party with a 90 per cent 
majority worthy of his Communist opponents. The paradox is that the 
state of emergency was the normal state, while 'normal' democratic 
freedom was the briefly enacted exception. This weird regime 
anticipated some clearly perceptible trends in our liberal-democratic 
societies in the aftermath of 11 September. Is today's rhetoric not 
that of a global emergency in the fight against terrorism, 
legitimising more and more suspensions of legal and other rights? The 
ominous aspect of John Ashcroft's recent claim that 'terrorists use 
America's freedom as a weapon against us' carries the obvious 
implication that we should limit our freedom in order to defend 
ourselves. Such statements from top American officials, especially 
Rumsfeld and Ashcroft, together with the explosive display of 
'American patriotism' after 11 September, create the climate for what 
amounts to a state of emergency, with the occasion it supplies for a 
potential suspension of rule of law, and the state's assertion of its 
sovereignty without 'excessive' legal constraints. America is, after 
all, as President Bush said immediately after 11 September, in a 
state of war. The problem is that America is, precisely, not in a 
state of war, at least not in the conventional sense of the term (for 
the large majority, daily life goes on, and war remains the exclusive 
business of state agencies). With the distinction between a state of 
war and a state of peace thus effectively blurred, we are entering a 
time in which a state of peace can at the same time be a state of 
emergency.

Such paradoxes also provide the key to the way in which the 
liberal-totalitarian emergency represented by the 'war on terror' 
relates to the authentic revolutionary state of emergency, first 
articulated by St Paul in his reference to the 'end of time'. When a 
state institution proclaims a state of emergency, it does so by 
definition as part of a desperate strategy to avoid the true 
emergency and return to the 'normal course of things'. It is, you 
will recall, a feature of all reactionary proclamations of a 'state 
of emergency' that they were directed against popular unrest 
('confusion') and presented as a resolve to restore normalcy. In 
Argentina, in Brazil, in Greece, in Chile, in Turkey, the military 
who proclaimed a state of emergency did so in order to curb the 
'chaos' of overall politicisation. In short, reactionary 
proclamations of a state of emergency are in actuality a desperate 
defence against the real state of emergency.

There is a lesson to be learned here from Carl Schmitt. The division 
friend/enemy is never just a recognition of factual difference. The 
enemy is by definition always (up to a point) invisible: it cannot be 
directly recognised because it looks like one of us, which is why the 
big problem and task of the political struggle is to 
provide/construct a recognisable image of the enemy. (Jews are the 
enemy par excellence not because they conceal their true image or 
contours but because there is ultimately nothing behind their 
deceiving appearances. Jews lack the 'inner form' that pertains to 
any proper national identity: they are a non-nation among nations, 
their national substance resides precisely in a lack of substance, in 
a formless, infinite plasticity.) In short, 'enemy recognition' is 
always a performative procedure which brings to light/constructs the 
enemy's 'true face'. Schmitt refers to the Kantian category 
Einbildungskraft, the transcendental power of imagination: in order 
to recognise the enemy, one has to 'schematise' the logical figure of 
the Enemy, providing it with the concrete features which will make it 
into an appropriate target of hatred and struggle.

After the collapse of the Communist states which provided the figure 
of the Cold War Enemy, the Western imagination entered a decade of 
confusion and inefficiency, looking for suitable schematisations of 
the Enemy, sliding from narco-cartel bosses to the succession of 
warlords of so-called 'rogue states' (Saddam, Noriega, Aidid, 
Milosevic) without stabilising itself in one central image; only with 
11 September did this imagination regain its power by constructing 
the image of bin Laden, the Islamic fundamentalist, and al-Qaida, his 
'invisible' network. What this means, furthermore, is that our 
pluralistic and tolerant liberal democracies remain deeply 
Schmittean: they continue to rely on political Einbildungskraft to 
provide them with the appropriate figure to render visible the 
invisible Enemy. Far from suspending the binary logic Friend/Enemy, 
the fact that the Enemy is defined as the fundamentalist opponent of 
pluralistic tolerance merely adds a reflexive twist to it. This 
'renormalisation' has involved the figure of the Enemy undergoing a 
fundamental change: it is no longer the Evil Empire, i.e. another 
territorial entity, but an illegal, secret, almost virtual worldwide 
network in which lawlessness (criminality) coincides with 
'fundamentalist' ethico-religious fanaticism - and since this entity 
has no positive legal status, the new configuration entails the end 
of international law which, at least from the onset of modernity, 
regulated relations between states.

When the Enemy serves as the 'quilting point' (the Lacanian point de 
capiton) of our ideological space, it is in order to unify the 
multitude of our actual political opponents. Thus Stalinism in the 
1930s constructed the agency of Imperialist Monopoly Capital to prove 
that Fascists and Social Democrats ('Social Fascists') are 'twin 
brothers', the 'left and right hand of monopoly capital'. Thus Nazism 
constructed the 'plutocratic-Bolshevik plot' as the common agent 
threatening the welfare of the German nation. Capitonnage is the 
operation by means of which we identify/construct a sole agency that 
'pulls the strings' behind a multitude of opponents. Exactly the same 
holds for today's 'war on terror', in which the figure of the 
terrorist Enemy is also a condensation of two opposed figures, the 
reactionary 'fundamentalist' and the Leftist resistant. The title of 
Bruce Barcott's article in the New York Times Magazine on 7 April, 
'From Tree-Hugger to Terrorist', says it all: the real danger isn't 
from the Rightist fundamentalists who were responsible for the 
Oklahoma bombing and, in all probability, for the anthrax scare, but 
the Greens, who have never killed anyone. The ominous feature 
underlying all these phenomena is the metaphoric universalisation of 
the signifier 'terror'. The message of the latest American TV 
campaign against drugs is: 'When you buy drugs, you provide money for 
the terrorists!' 'Terror' is thus elevated to become the hidden point 
of equivalence between all social evils. How, then, are we to break 
out of this predicament?

An epochal event took place in Israel in January and February: 
hundreds of reservists refused to serve in the Occupied Territories. 
These refuseniks are not simply 'pacifists': in their public 
proclamations, they are at pains to emphasise that they have done 
their duty in fighting for Israel in the wars against the Arab 
states, in which some of them were highly decorated. What they claim 
is that they cannot accept to fight 'in order to dominate, expel, 
starve and humiliate an entire people'. Their claims are documented 
by detailed descriptions of atrocities committed by the Israel 
Defence Forces, from the killing of children to the destruction of 
Palestinian property. Here is how an IDF sergeant, Gil Nemesh, 
reports on the 'nightmare reality in the territories' at the 
protesters' website (www.seruv.org.il):

My friends - forcing an elderly man to disgrace himself, hurting 
children, abusing people for fun, and later bragging about it, 
laughing about this terrible brutality. I am not sure I still want to 
call them my friends . . . They let themselves lose their humanity, 
not out of pure viciousness, but because dealing with it in any other 
way is too difficult.

Palestinians, and even Israeli Arabs (officially full citizens of 
Israel), are discriminated against in the allocation of water, in the 
ownership of land and countless other aspects of daily life. More 
important is the systematic micro-politics of psychological 
humiliation: Palestinians are treated, essentially, as evil children 
who have to be brought back to an honest life by stern discipline and 
punishment. Arafat, holed up and isolated in three rooms in his 
Ramallah compound, was requested to stop the terror as if he had full 
power over all Palestinians. There is a pragmatic paradox in the 
Israeli treatment of the Palestinian Authority (attacking it 
militarily, while at the same time requiring it to crack down on the 
terrorists in its own midst) by which the explicit message (the 
injunction to stop the terror) is subverted by the very mode of 
delivery of that message. Would it not be more honest to say that 
what is untenable about the Palestinian situation is that the PA is 
being asked by the Israelis to 'resist us, so that we can crush you'? 
In other words, what if the true aim of the present Israeli intrusion 
into Palestinian territory is not to prevent future terrorist 
attacks, but effectively to rule out any peaceful solution for the 
foreseeable " future?

For its part, the absurdity of the American view was perfectly 
rendered in a TV comment by Newt Gingrich on 1 April: 'Since Arafat 
effectively is the head of a terrorist organisation, we will have to 
depose him and replace him with a new democratic leader who will be 
ready to make a deal with the state of Israel.' This isn't an empty 
paradox. Hamid Karzai is already a 'democratic' leader externally 
imposed on a people. Whenever Afghanistan's 'interim leader' appears 
in our media, he wears clothes that cannot but appear as an 
attractive modernised version of traditional Afghan attire (a woollen 
cap and pullover beneath a more modern coat etc), his figure thus 
seeming to exemplify his mission, to combine modernisation with the 
best of Afghan traditions - no wonder, since this attire was dreamed 
up by a top Western designer. As such, Karzai is the best metaphor 
for the status of Afghanistan today.

What if there simply is no 'truly democratic' (in the American sense 
of the term) Palestinian silent majority? What if a 'democratically 
elected new leader' is even more anti-Israeli, which wouldn't be 
surprising since Israel has systematically applied the logic of 
collective responsibility and punishment, destroying the houses of 
the entire extended family of suspected terrorists? The point is not 
the cruel and arbitrary treatment of the Palestinians in the Occupied 
Territories but that they are reduced to the status of homo sacer, 
objects of disciplinary measures and/or even humanitarian help, but 
not full citizens. And what the refuseniks have achieved is a 
reconceptualisation of the Palestinian from homo sacer to 
'neighbour': they treat Palestinians not as 'equal full citizens', 
but as neighbours in the strict Judeo-Christian sense. And there 
resides the difficult ethical test for contemporary Israelis: 'Love 
thy neighbour' means 'Love the Palestinian,' or it means nothing at 
all.

This refusal, significantly downplayed by the major media, is an 
authentic ethical act. It is here, in such acts, that, as Paul would 
have put it, there effectively are no longer Jews or Palestinians, 
full members of the polity and homines sacri. One should be 
unabashedly Platonic here: this 'No!' designates the miraculous 
moment in which eternal Justice momentarily appears in the sphere of 
empirical reality. An awareness of moments like this is the best 
antidote to the anti-semitic temptation often clearly detectable 
among critics of Israeli politics.
_____

Shekhar Krishnan
9, Supriya, 2nd Floor
Plot 709, Parsee Colony Road No.4
Dadar, Bombay 400014
India