"hell is other people's music."

5/06/11

NATURAL'S NOT IN IT

on the topic of the last entry, the new york times' take. personally, i think it's more complicated than bloodlust, at least for those whose moral universes are usually not bloodlusty. but, to try to speak in a social psychological language that is not mine, could we think about this as a kind of moral break in the sense that one speaks of a psychotic break?

5/02/11

WHAT'S SO EXCEPTIONAL ABOUT EXCEPTIONALITY?

i guess it has taken a world historical event to bring me out of my blog sabbatical. or, better said, it has taken a world historical event that is not one.

last night, certain proponents of social justice, human rights, liberal democracy, and the like arose from their contented, righteous slumbering to cast a smile, some very small and guarded, some beaming from the moon, at the u.s. killing of osama bin laden. the prevailing sentiment among these voices who would at other breaths denounce the death penalty seems to be that, just this one time, we will make an exception.

president obama concluded his statement last night with the last lines of the pledge of allegiance: "with liberty and justice for all." minutes earlier, he said: "last week, I determined that we had enough intelligence to take action, and authorized an operation to get osama bin laden and bring him to justice." i am no expert on international law, but i don't think "justice" in obama's usage is the same as the formal, legal definition of justice: "a scheme or system of law in which every person receives his/her/its due from the system, including all rights, both natural and legal" (that is, if this source can be trusted).

there was an article in the new yorker today questioning the legality of bin laden's killing. its last paragraph reads:

No one today is shedding any tears about bin Laden’s death. (He apparently resisted capture, which offered an additional justification for killing him.) But it’s worth remembering what gave rise to the ban on assassinations. It is, to put it mildly, an easy power to abuse. Bin Laden didn’t get a trial and didn’t deserve one. But the number of people for whom that is true is small. At least it should be.

the body of the article asked much more relevant questions about whether this was or was not a political assassination, and whether the killing violated international law or executive orders signed by ford, carter, and reagan barring political assassinations. citing this washington post article, the author jeffrey toobin points out that george w. bush "more or less acknowledged that the ban on assassination did not apply to bin Laden or other perpetrators of terrorism."

in october of 2001, in the midst of the air strikes on afghanistan, haji abdul kabir, then the taliban's deputy prime minister, offered to surrender bin laden to justice "if America would halt its bombing and provide evidence against the Saudi-born dissident." bush's response: "When I said no negotiations I meant no negotiations. We know he's guilty. Turn him over. There's no need to discuss innocence or guilt." so, then, what is the nature of these exceptions, that made by bush at the beginning of the war on terror and the one subsequently made by jeffrey toobin alleging that bin laden did not deserve the fair trial that he was not granted?

in an article by the cbc posted last last night, neil macdonald wrote:

when bin Laden directed those airplanes at civilians ten years ago, he stole a lot more from this nation than the lives of 3,000 of her citizens.

He taught this country the consequences of operating an open, free society. Literally, he showed Americans the price of their liberty, how many of their principles they'd be willing to cast aside, and how quickly they would do it.

In other words, bin Laden showed American exceptionalists how unexceptionally they behave when faced with horrors most older nations have endured.

anyone who has been inside an airport with a u.s. terminal in the last nine and a half years knows that what is meant by "unexceptional" here is actually exceptionality in its most extreme legal form (the terror alert is orange). but my point here is not a call to moral or ethical duty, nor is it to tell anybody how they should feel or why they should feel bad about how they feel. i'm more interested in all of these exceptions, and whether we can make some sense of what they have in common.

quite predictably, i have most firmly in mind the italian philosopher giorgio agamben's account of the extraordinary legal elisions made in the name of warfare on terror in his book the state of exception:

The USA Patriot Act issued by the U.S. Senate on October 26, 2001 already allowed the attorney general to "take into custody" any alien suspected of activities that endangered "the national security of the United States," but within seven days the alien had to be either released or charged with the violation of immigration laws or some other criminal offense. What is new about President Bush's order is that it radically erases any legal status of the individual, thus producing a legally unnamable and unclassifiable being. Not only do the Taliban captured in Afghanistan not enjoy the status of POWs as defined by the Geneva Convention, they do not even have the status of persons charged with a crime according to American laws. Neither prisoners nor persons accused, but simply "detainees," they are the object of a pure de facto rule, of a detention that is indefinite not only in the temporal sense but in its very nature as well, since it is entirely removed from the law and from judicial oversight. The only thing to which it could possibly be compared is the legal situation of the Jews in the Nazi Lager [camps], who, along with their citizenship, had lost every legal identity.

now what does this abjuring of both civic and human rights have to do with the current exceptional state of moral sentiment (or the lack thereof)? it seems to me that, whatever the actual legality of yesterday's killing, the legal exception pronounced by bush has been transformed into a moral exception in mainstream political discourse. which is to say that the sanctity of life and the universality that subtends it has been temporarily lifted in this instance to accommodate an imaginary resolution to a now nearly ten year old emotional debt. this emotional debt seeks, perhaps demands, the payment of one death for the thousands taken on september 11, 2001. in order to secure the repayment of this debt, the citizens of the united states had to make a further payment of their moral belief in universal human rights—not the individual rights of one osama bin laden, but universality itself: the same (coerced) exchange of their civil liberties for "justice" returns in the exchange of their emotional care for human beings as human beings for a "just" symbolic equanimity.

as jacques derrida had repeatedly taught us, in every exchange, there remains an excess. the remainder, in this case, is the exceptionality that was necessary for this exchange to be requested in the first place. because emotionality and law must, by convention, be separated, the exception is, by nature, a-logical and bears no instrumentality. it thus had to perform its own justification: the exceptionality of the exception is its exceptionality.

but this does not mean that there is nothing to be learned from the exception. the german political theorist carl schmitt, who formulated the state of exception (Ausnahmezustand), wrote, before his Nazist affiliation: "The exception is more interesting than the normal case. The normal proves nothing, the exception proves everything: The exception does not only confirm the rule; the rule as such lives off the exception alone," and, elsewhere: "The state suspends the law in the exception on the basis of its right of self-preservation." with schmitt in mind, walter benjamin wrote:

To want to depict the universal as an average is perverse. The universal is the idea. The more precisely the empirical is investigated as an extreme, the more profoundly it will be penetrated. The concept takes its point of departure in the extreme.

three years before he wrote the state of exception, and preceding the war on terror by one year, agamben pointed out that exceptionality in schmitt's formulation reveals the impulse behind law, drawing a parallel between "Justice without law . . . not the negation of law, but [its] realization and fulfillment" and the exceptional act of religious faith that creates the moral universe of which it cannot be a part (this is from agamben's the time that remains; see also sam weber's reference to "Augustinian doctrine [which] both exceeds and explains the created world" in his essay "taking exception to decision: walter benjamin and carl schmitt"). to translate agamben for our purposes here, only at the points where we have decided that our legal or moral systems fail us can we see why we believe in or have erected these systems in the first place.

what remains will be left an open question, which is to say that the preceding should be taken as a set of clues. i will not venture to diagnose what it is that the exception that grants "our" celebration of bin laden's killing in fact signals—for it is truly and profoundly alien to me—but i have provided the provisional groundwork to begin such a diagnosis. i will, instead, conclude with the logical, cause-and-effect exchange that the current exception stands beyond, because it is all i can comprehend at the moment (moral superiority, or just a severe inability to relate to others?): is osama bin laden the only person in the world who can lead al qaeda? will his death bring an end to u.s. intervention into the middle east? does his death bring back the victims of september 11?

then enough.

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