news flash

I interrupt this Carl Schmitt symposium to bring you astonishing breaking news.

It appears women's underwear was found at the site where Al-Zarqawi was killed. Go here.

You know, this really explains a lot. I mean, for instance, the beheadings take on a new meaning. They say Al-Zarqawi lived for 45 minutes after the blast and kept mumbling something. He was probably saying, "Listen, you can't just throw around silk underwear like that. You have to fold it -- oh, never mind."

Comments

[John]

Re: "...a leopard-print nightgown...A few feet away was a magazine picture of former President Franklin D. Roosevelt."

The horror. The horror.

[Jodi]

and this is noteworthy why?

[Matt]

It's going to be hard to compete with Colbert without podcasts.

[s0metim3s]

wtf? When did insinuations of crossdressing (or is it just feminisation) become amusing if served up as an 'explanation' of beheadings?

[Matt]

Maybe rather other aspects are worthy of discussion..?

[John S. Ransom]

I'm amazed at the reaction. This was front page news on msnbc, just to name the one source I provided. What do those who seem offended think it's doing there?

[Alain]

Aren't they simply defining/immasculating the enemy?

[Blip]

It's fairly simple, ain't it? This desperate perpetuation of war in what might otherwise be peaceful, cosmopolitan times signals, among other things, "a new kind of war" (Bush is correct, though in his, or Karl Rove's eyes it's a "post-political" condition they are content to merely exploit, by reasserting the political (in Schmitt's conception) at all costs, nostalgically, cynically, paranoiacally, in the service of a "final" knock-down drag-out geopolitical scrapping over resources). But while the nation-state itself and traditional conceptions of sovereignty are on the deline (as Schmitt began to see, in fear), Bush gang (and the masses they imagine and cultivate) are still Schmittians, or ethnic nationalists, at heart - the collective imagination they speak to, however secular, is fanatically theological through and through and desperately needs an identifiable enemy to get going (in the vein of Schmitt's later paranoia and obsession - perhaps the more identifiable the better). And so the enemy needs to be constantly created, marketed and sold. But crucially in "a new sort of way" signifying vaguely this "new kind of war." It's important, at a time when such things are becoming obsolete, that this "newness" remain essentially vague and confused. Frankly, it's a script-writer's dream. Practically anything, no matter how obscene or banal, is justified, is dignified in the same pious overtones. (Doesn't Zizek describe this, the charactaristic of rampant, postmodern "belief"?)

But as with Schmitt, in his later quest to locate and delineate an enemy at all costs (as first his attention was directed toward Russian, then later the US), there is a potentially even deeper cynicism at work. There is a real, persisting and dangerous vague and obviously rhetorical quality to antagonisms of such forced intensity. For in a sense, the more obscenely over-the-top this portrayal of the enemy, the better (it reduces the chance of accountability for the framing of the political itself). By all means, highlight to hell the overall wierdness factor - it creates a stir, monopolizes discourse, and yet to anyone in power and paying attention the transparency is obvious. The ridiculousness of the spectacle, and one's lack of trust in it's representation of reality, is thereby naturalized. Make the photo of Zarqawi into a hundred thousand dollar piece of art, why not? How perfectly perverse and fitting, really. Dignify the techno-military apparatus, re-affirm US might and right in this struggle against ethnic suicide savage monsters - they whose ethnic nationalism US fundamentalist Republicans mirror and indeed create, are fascinated by and even identify with to some degree...but this remains just the storyline. It's always working - politically still - on two levels at once. You might say they compliment each other:

1) Sensationalize and sell the enemy (exploit, shotgun-fashion, the easy resurgent funamentalisms, ethnic nationalisms, paranoia, etc.) Feed the narratives and fantasies. Distance the administration from the fringe, just barely, when necessary, but otherwise pretty much anything goes.

2) Continuously oversell, and overfeed the narratives, and so in the process undermine (and conveniently immunize from critique) the tangibility and legitimacy of the whole framing. It's not serious, but ups the stakes such that pointing this out is practically tantamount to treason. As well, the potential for genuine accountability is thereby eluded.)

Granted, this may be unfair to poor Nazi Schmitt, to link his name to such necessarily vague paranoia, and otherwise mostly obvious.

[Gabriel Sanchez]

Blip,

I don't know what to make of your first paragraph. A lot of it hinges on your psychology of the Bush Administration which, truth be told, I can't say I agree with. Either way, if there is anything "Schmittian" about them, it certainly isn't self-conscious or correct. I don't believe there is a "need" for the enemy to keep the State going if only because there will never be a time where there is not an enemy. As much importance as Schmitt laid on the integrity of the State, I am not certain if that has to be the "final" political form for Schmitt. Yes, Sovereignty is clearly critical and yes, so is representation, but that can be acheived by other means than the post-Westphalian State. What seems to be true (at least in Schmitt's eyes) is that the modern liberal model is not the way to go.

Hasn't the world always been in a "desperate perpetuation of war in what might otherwise be peaceful, cosmopolitan times"? (And I mean "war" in the broad sense.) Wouldn't the world always be "otherwise peaceful" and "cosmopolitan" if only the human race changed its stripes? What I am getting at here is that there is something undeniably troubling about holding up a pleasant fiction as the standard by which to "test" the actions of individuals or States that are forced to exist in the world-as-it-is rather than a world-as-we-might-like-it-to-be.

Did Schmitt have to force the antagonisms? As I understand it, it wasn't so much the Soviet Union or the United States that was problematic for Schmitt as much as it was the sentiments which gave rise to them. I don't recall Schmitt going one-on-one with Lenin, Stalin, and George Washington, but I do recall him kicking dirt at Bakunin, Marx, and, eventually, Hobbes (though in a less-obvious way).

Personally, I wouldn't link Schmitt to any of what is going on in the world today, even if I believe he offers some conceptual tools to sort through it. The problem that I see so many on the Left running into with Schmitt is that he provides no answers they can digest. (Of course, one might not be venturing too far off the road to assert that the Left never has answers, only gripes.) It's probably even more far-feteched than the painfully comedic attempts to link Leo Strauss with them.

Of course, if one's head hits the pillow a little softer each night under the belief that the 21st Century is the work product of two otherwise-obscure Germans--one a Nazi, one a Jew--far be it for me to disrupt their snoozing practices.

[Blip]

I don't believe there is a "need" for the enemy to keep the State going if only because there will never be a time where there is not an enemy.

One shudders imagining what you think of Kant.

And I mean "war" in the broad sense.

You don't say.

Snoozing our way into ontological MAD, indeed.

[Blip]

It's probably even more far-feteched than the painfully comedic attempts to link Leo Strauss with them.

Presumably Gabriel means this?

I'll grant the epistemology connection is a little stretched. But still.

And maybe there's some truth yet to the claim, most famously made by H&N in Multitude, that "contemporary forms of right-wing populism and fascism are deformed offsprings of socialism" and "attempt to resolve the contradictions of the socialist idea of representation in populist fashion by imposing on it the most traditional theories of sovereignty..."

[Gabriel Sanchez]

Blip,

For what it's worth, I have (had?) a great fondness of Kant. It was studying him at the graduate-level when I was at Michigan State that made me "fall in love" with philosophy. I don't think I would have recovered from my agnostic-atheist hangover without him. All that said, I certainly don't identify myself as a "Kantian" and I don't think he was on the "right track" so-to-speak. That doesn't mean I despise him or even what he was trying to do.

Are we on our way to MAD? The great boredom will be over sooner than I thought...

[Chris]

Read the actual Reuters article, and proceed to feel silly for some of your conclusions based on an article heavily edited for content due to the short attention spans of most readers of MSNBC.

http://today.reuters.com/News/CrisesArticle.aspx?storyId=IBO024142

[Chris]

Comparing the two, I would in fact take most offense to the highlighting of the "Thank you America" quote as a section headline... and I seem to have misspoken in saying that the MSNBC article is shorter, so I remain clueless as to why the article was hatcheted in such a fashion, making it potentially unclear. The lazy headline, not accurately describing the article, is the biggest offender. My point being: perhaps this is to be filed under sloppy journalism, not some calculated attempt at Other-portraiture.