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April 30, 2002
Christopher
Reilly
Kissinger:
the Wanted Man
April 29, 2002
Larry Hales
At the Church of the Nativity
Michael
Colby
The
Times Does Brockovich
Ralph Nader with Cleavage?
CounterPunch Wire
Bank Robs Publisher,
Vows to Repeat
Gavin
Keeney
So
Long, Frank O. Gehry?
April 28, 2002
Michael Neumann
The Jewish Left and Palestine
April 27, 2002
Dr. Susan
Block
Adelphia
Going Down:
Cover Ups, Censorship
and Naughty Accounting
Jordy Cummings
Stuck Inside the Journalism School
Pyramid
Jeffrey
St. Clair
Set
This Flag on Fire!
April 26, 2002
Tom Turnipseed
Act
Now to Stop the Killing
of an Innocent Man
Mokhiber
/ Weissman
Anti-Bribery
Law Takes a Hit
Tariq Ali
Letter to a Young Muslim
April 25, 2002
Francis
A. Boyle
Home
Brew? Biowarfare,
Terror Weapons and the US
Adam Federman
"And the Earth Wept"
Bush at Saranac Lake
Stanton
and Madsen
US
Media Interests:
Champions of Profit, Propaganda and Puffery
Aaron Hawley
Cop a Buzz Day in Vermont:
Education v. Incarceration
David
Vest
Code
Red: Politics and Wordplay at the Vatican
Bernard Weiner
Time Out! A Pause for Longer-Range
Thinking
Rep. Dennis
Kucinich
Standing
with the Peace Movement
April 24, 2002
David Vest
State of Politics in France:
Code Bleu
Jean Fallow
A20
in Seattle:
Cops Get Rough, Again
Kevin Alexander Gray
Help Save the Life of an Innocent Man:
Ask for Clemency for Ricky Johnson
Tanya
Reinhart
Jenin,
the Propaganda Battle
Todd May
Drowning Children, Palestinians and American
Responsibility
Alexander
Cockburn
The
Loneliest Road
Nir Rosen
The Broken Home:
Revisiting Israel
Mokhiber
/ Weissman
A
Big Blow to Big Tobacco
April 23, 2002
Brian Wood
Where Is the Aid for the Victims in
Jenin?
John Chuckman
I,
George:
Gomer as Claudius
Norman Madarasz
French Presidential Elections
Absenteeism and Le Pen
Dr. Susan
Block
Bernard
Parks, Goodbye:
A Farewell to My Chief
Joan Smith
Who Will Rid Us of
These Pedophile Priests?
April 22, 2002
CounterPunch
Wire
EPA
Ombudsman Resigns
in Protest
Dave Marsh
DeskScan: What's Playing
at My House This Week
Ron Jacobs
A20
in DC: Taking the
Message to the Beast's Belly
Kathy Kelly
An Open Letter to
Israeli Soldiers
Irit Katriel
Word
Games and Body Bags
Rep. Cynthia McKinney
We Come for Peace
Daniel
Bar-Tal
Is
There a Way Out?
Occupation, Terror
and Understanding
David Wilson
A Week of Coups, But Now
The Freedom Train Hits Town
Shaik
Ubaid
Today
I Was a Palestinian
April 21, 2002
Michelle Campos
Suckered Again in Israel
Mike Leon
200,000
in DC Protest Say:
"We Are All Palestinians Today"
C.G. Estabrook
Sex and Power in Catholicism
Kathy
Kelly
Gimme
Some Truth Now
A Walk Through Jenin
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by Alexander
Cockburn
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The New Crusade:
America's War on Terrorism
By Rahul Mahajan
The Memphis Blues Again:
Six Decades of Memphis Music Photographs
Photos by Ernest Withers
Text by Daniel Wolff
The New Intifada:
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A Pocket Guide to
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April 30, 2002
Guantanamo,
Justice and Bushspeak
Prisoners of the Infinite
by Jacques Ranciere
"Infinite
Justice". This was the initial
name given to the Pentagon's offensive against that fuzzy-contoured
enemy, referred to by the term of 'terrorism'. As we know, the
name was quickly changed. It had been, as we were told, a case
of language excess on the part of a president still inexperienced
in the art of nuances. If he had wanted bin Laden "dead
or alive", it was obviously due to having seen too many
Westerns at too young an age.
Such an explanation left no one convinced.
That's because the 'dead or alive' principle isn't the one from
Westerns. On the contrary, it's quite common to find sheriffs
risking their skin to save assassins from a lynch mob, and hand
them over to Justice afterward. Infinite Justice, as opposed
to the Far West's whole morality, means justice without limits.
It's justice that ignores all of the categories by which its
practice is traditionally circumscribed: distinguishing legal
punishment from the vengeance of individuals; separating the
law from politics, ethics or religion; separating police forms
by which criminals are hunted down from the military forms by
which armies engage in battle.
From that point of view, there was no
language excess. 'Nuances' would be inappropriate indeed. These
traces are precisely what characterize the retaliatory operations
undertaken by the USA. They involve eliminating the differences
that separate war and the police from all the legal forms by
means of which we've sought to specify and limit the action of
war onto justice. We're no longer talking about 'dead or alive',
except to say that nobody knows whether the accused is dead or
alive. Yet no one knows exactly what the charge is under which
the American military is detaining, with the intension of trying,
prisoners who benefit neither from POW status nor from the ordinary
guarantees granted to defendants with proceedings brought against
them. 'Infinite justice' states exactly what's at stake: the
assertion of a right identical to the omnipotence hitherto reserved
for the vindictive God. All traditional distinctions end up by
being abolished with the erasure of international forms of law.
To be sure, this erasure is already the
principle of terrorist action, to which political forms and the
norms of law are also indifferent. But 'infinite justice' is
not only the answer to the adversary's provocation, thus being
compelled to share the same field as him. It translates as well
the strange status that the erasure of the political nowadays
grants to law, within nations and amongst them.
Reflecting on the current state of law
reveals an extraordinary inversion of things. In the 1990's,
the undoing of the Soviet empire and the weakening of social
movements in major Western countries were usually celebrated
as utopias being liquidated from real and social democracy to
the benefit of the rules of the State of Right. Whereupon unleashed
ethnic conflicts and religious fundamentalism ended by contradicting
this simple philosophy of history. But identifying Western triumph
as the State of Right's has also proved to be problematic. That's
because at the very heart of Western powers and in their modes
of foreign intervention, the relation between right and fact
has evolved in such as way as to tend increasingly toward erasing
the boundaries of law.
In these countries, we've seen two phenomena
emerge. On the one hand, there's an interpretation of law in
terms of the rights granted to a whole series of groups. On the
other, legislative practices have aimed at harmonizing the letter
of the law entirely with new lifestyles and workstyles, new forms
of technology, and the family or social relationships.
This is how the political forum, shaped
in the gap between the law's abstract literalness and the polemics
over its interpretations, has been found to have shrunken as
much. Thus celebrated, the law increasingly tends to be the record
of a community's lifestyles. Ethical symbolization has substituted
the political symbolization of power and its limits, and the
law's ambivalence. What's now familiar to us is a relation of
consensual inter-expression between the fact of a society's state
and the norm of the law.
What the American response asserts is
the unmediated likeness of law and fact in the way a community
lives. Yet this is also what the American Constitution's dominant
representation symbolizes: the ethical identity between a particular
lifestyle and a universal system of values. As we know, 'ethos'
means sojourn and lifestyle before referring to a system of moral
values. The recent manifesto issued by American intellectuals
in support of George W. Bush's policies highlighted this point
well: the United States are first and foremost a community united
by common moral and religious values, an ethical community more
than one of law and politics. The Good, by which the community
is founded, is therefor the identity between law and fact. And
the crime perpetrated against thousands of American lives can
be immediately considered a crime perpetrated against the Empire
of Good itself.
Yet for some time already this rise of
ethics to the detriment of justice has characterized the forms
by which the Western powers have intervened abroad. Blurring
the limits between fact and law has taken on another face, one
opposite and complementary to consensual harmony, i.e. the face
of the humanitarian and 'humane interference'.
The 'right of humane interference' has
enabled the protection of some populations of the former-Yugoslavia
from ethnic liquidation. However, this was carried out at the
cost of blurring symbolic boundaries as well as State borders.
It has not only consecrated giving up a structural principle
of international law, i.e. the principle of non-inference--whose
virtues were admittedly ambiguous. It especially introduced a
destructive principle of limitlessness regarding the very idea
of the gap separating law and fact, which otherwise endows the
law with its status.
Back in the days of the Vietnam War or
of the coups American power engineered more or less directly
in various regions throughout the world, there existed an explicit
or latent opposition between the great principles as asserted
by the Western powers and the practices subordinating those principles
to their vital interests. The anti-imperialist mobilizations
of the 1960's and 1970's had denounced this split between the
founding principles and real practices. Nowadays the polemics
over means and ends seems to have vanished.
The principle behind this disappearance
is represented by the absolute victim, a victim of infinite evil,
forcing a response of infinite reparation. This 'absolute' right
of the victim has come to full fruition in the framework of 'humane'
war. It was backed up during the last quarter century by the
major intellectual movement that worked on theorizing infinite
crime.
We've undoubtedly not heeded the specific
features enough of what could be called the second denunciation
of Soviet crimes and the Nazi genocide. The first denunciation
had aimed at establishing the reality behind the facts while
also reinforcing the determination of Western democracies to
struggle against an ever-present and ever-threatening totalitarianism.
The second kind, developed during the 1970's as a record of communism,
or in the 1980's when returning to the way in which the European
Jewry was exterminated, has acquired a whole new meaning. Not
only have the crimes been transformed into the monstrous effects
of regimes that have to be fought against, but into the forms
whereby an infinite, unthinkable and irreparable crime was made
manifest_the work of an Evil power exceeding all legal and political
measure. Ethics has become the way to think this infinite evil,
which has created an irremediable break in history.
The ultimate consequences of the excess
of ethics over law and politics is the paradoxical constitution
of an individual's absolute right whose rights have, in fact,
been absolutely negated. This individual actually appears as
the victim of an infinite Evil against which the fight is itself
infinite. This is the point at which the one defending the victim's
rights inherits absolute right.
The unlimited feature of the wrong perpetrated
against the victim justifies his counsel's unlimited right. American
reparation for the absolute crime perpetrated against American
lives has brought the process to its culmination. The obligation
of attending to the victims of absolute Evil has become identical
to the fight without limits against this evil. And this is identified
with deploying unlimited military power, acting like a police
force in charge of restoring order to every part of the world
where Evil can find shelter. This military power is also a legal
one, exercising the mythical power of Vengence in hot pursuit
of Crime against all alleged accomplices of infinite Evil.
As the saying goes, unlimited right is
identical to non-right. Victims and culprits alike fall into
the cercle of 'infinite justice'. These days this translates
into the total indeterminacy of the law as it deals with the
status of the American army's prisoners and the way of qualifying
the facts held against them.
Hegel had already sunk into the night
of the Absolute in which "all cows are gray". The lack
of ethical distinction, in which politics and the law drown nowadays,
has transformed the prisoners of Guantanamo Bay into captives
of the same type of infinite, with gray being switched to orange.
Legal and political symbolization has
been slowly substituted by another ethical and police symbolization
of the lives of so-called democratic communities and of their
relations with another world, identified by the sole reign of
ethnic and fundamentalist powers. In the one corner, the world
of good: that of consensus eliminating political litigation in
the joyous harmonizing of right and fact, ways of being and values.
In the other: the world of evil, in which wrong is made infinite,
and where it can only be a matter of war unto death.
Jacques Ranciere's most recent work in translation is Disagreement:
Philosophy and Politics, (Julie Rose, translator) University
of Minnesota Press, 1998; and in French: L'inconscient esthetique,
Galilee, 2001.
Translated for CounterPunch by Norman
Madarasz.
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