Atrocity Exhibition. Brad Evans
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image of thought, which, as you have indicated, not only demands that one needs metaphysics in order to think, but also, given that the world is reduced to ideal forms of representation, it exorcises any possibility of immanent political and ethical relations.
Despite these problems, Kant’s notion of “perpetual peace” has become a sort of manifesto for liberal internationalists and cosmopolitan theorists who advocate a shift towards a bounded/inclusive humanity. Whilst this notion of a bounded humanity is itself enough cause for political concern — not least since certain politicians have now made it their task to begin speaking on behalf of an endangered humanity, a formidable power which serves to provide humanity with an authentic voice — what worries me here is the strategy of deception that is taking place. For even though Kantian-inspired liberals continue to use transcendental humanitarian notions of universality in order to justify their global ambitions, a more critical eye would note how humanity has always been misplaced in this script. Humanity has never been the unifying transcendental principle for liberal theorists and practitioners since humanity is always assumed to be flawed. Why else would you require the continuous juridical watch if not to keep an omnipresent eye on the pious subject? Indeed, as Kant himself taught, given that the negative lacuna of juridical power alone is insufficient to ensure that life does not side with the unreasonable, then something beyond juridical power is also required.
Kant takes up this challenge in his essay on perpetual peace. In a part of the essay that contemporary liberals tend to ignore, Kant notes how ending conflict depends upon setting in place the right economic system. Thus, invoking what he termed “the spirit of commerce” (a phrase which Agamben recently notes has obvious theological connotations), for Kant, the task of settling conflict by reaching the highest stage of political development also rests upon the productive power of economy — something which clearly represents more than mere economic transaction and exchange. What Kant implied with his positive cosmopolitan ethic can be said to appear today in its full theological and economizing glory. Existing above and beyond the law, the unifying driver for liberal practitioners is not the humanitarian principle but the pure regulatory principle governing this flawed humanity. What then constitutes the divine principle for liberal practitioners is not the divine endowment of a universal freedom of rights or individual reason but the regulative and productive economy of life itself. When Tony Blair therefore remarked, in a very Kantian way, that the wars of the 21st century are global wars for the very politics of life itself, he was revealing more about the contemporary nature of liberal power than is readily accepted. For today, not only is the nature of threat being extended to give priority to the wider political problem of globally insurgent populations, but since this is also matched by a broadening of the security agenda (which is increasingly drawing into the same strategic framework non-political accidents), the productive economy of liberalism now begins to appear in all its divine earthly light.
MICHAEL HARDT: It might be interesting to set the liberal paradigm you are challenging back in relation to Carl Schmitt since, in a way, the movement we are tracing in the nature of warfare in the last few years might be understood in terms of a shift from Schmitt to Kant or, really, from transcendent forms of power and domination to transcendental ones. For Schmitt, the political has the same form as warfare since both are defined by the friend-enemy distinction. That is why, he insists, there is no relation between the economic and the political: in the economic realm (or at least in the capitalist market), one has no enemies, only competitors. Similarly, for Schmitt, the sovereign decision stands outside the constitution and the legal realm. In the liberal paradigm you articulate and identify with Kant, however, these terms are all scrambled. Liberal war is no longer separated from but rather identified with both economic life and the legal sphere. This is where I find useful the Kantian distinction between the transcendent and the transcendental — used a bit against the grain. The ground for politics and war is not located in the transcendent position of the sovereign but rather in the transcendental position of capital and the law. These are the dominant forces today that primarily determine the conditions of possibility of social life. And, as you point out, this liberal configuration of politics and war is perhaps just as theological as the sovereign, transcendent one, focusing now on the constant action required to limit the negative effects of and govern a humanity characterized by its imperfections. This theological-political difference might even be understood as separating Schmitt’s Catholicism from Kant Protestantism.
Aside from the pleasures of mapping out such correspondences, what are the political and theoretical consequences of this analysis of the liberal war paradigm along with the claim that it has become dominant today? One important consequence, from my perspective, is that it poses a limit to the utility of understanding politics today in terms of sovereignty. For the last decade, the concept of sovereignty has played an important and expanding role in political theory and focused attention on transcendent forms of power that stand outside the social and legal constitution, ruling over states of exception. The sovereignty paradigm has even led many theorists to decry new forms of fascism. The George W. Bush administration and its “War on Terror” certainly did provide numerous “exceptional” instances — such as the functioning of Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib prisons, the officially sanctioned use of torture, the establishment of extraordinary rendition programs, the widespread violation of international law, the passage of the Patriot Act, and so forth — that were read, under the rubric of sovereignty, as essential to the current political scene. The liberal war paradigm suggests instead that, although such exceptional acts of a sovereign power should be challenged and defeated, they are not the essence of the current political situation. (And, in my view, this has not altered fundamentally with the change of US administrations but has only become more obvious in the wake of the failures of the Bush regime.) One problem for political theory is that focus on such dramatic instances has generally diverted attention from the primary, transcendental pillars of domination and war today: law and capital, which function through “normal” rather than exceptional means. The continuous juridical watch to police humanity and guard against the effects of its imperfections that you mention is matched by the naturalized social divisions and hierarchies constantly reproduced by capital. And the argument goes one step further to claim that, at times, war is necessary to maintain this liberal order, but the form, rationale, and ideology of such war rests on the values of the transcendental realms of economy and law.
Another consequence of this shift from a sovereignty paradigm to a liberal war paradigm has to do with the nature of resistance and alternative that each implies. Whereas critiques of and resistance to transcendent, sovereign forms of power do not generally nurture alternative powers, critiques of and resistance to the liberal paradigm do uncover powerful alternative subjectivities. The critique of capitalist political economy can reveal not only the exploitation but also the power of social labor. Capital, as Marx and Engels say, creates its own gravediggers as well as the subjectivities capable of creating an alternative social order. The critique of the liberal legal order, too, can bring forth powerful subjects of rights. The resistance to and critique of sovereignty, in contrast, offers nothing to affirm. In Giorgio Agamben’s biopolitical framework, for example, what stands opposed to sovereign power is bare life. And the numerous recent analyses of various states of exception and new fascisms have generally merely combined moral outrage with political resignation. Perhaps equally important, then, to the ability of the liberal war paradigm to identify how power and domination primarily function today is the kind of subjectivity generated by the critique of and resistance to it. Recognizing liberal war as our primary antagonist can be an extraordinarily generative position.
Originally published in somewhat different form in Theory & Event.
The Liberal War Thesis
Brad Evans
Thursday, 1 September 2011
WHEN THE HISTORIAN Sir Michael Howard delivered the prestigious Trevelyan lectures at Cambridge University in 1987, he posed one of the most pertinent questions of our times: What is the relationship between liberalism and war? For many, the fact that this question was posed at all represented a remarkable political departure. In international politics, liberalism has conventionally been associated with the Kant-inspired virtues of perpetual peace, along with the commitment to uphold human rights and justice. Preaching peaceful cohabitation among the world of peoples, liberal advocates