We we exchanged a few words last week when we had our first session concerning the the Riemann’s of this particular seminar on religious enthusiasm and of course the question of enthusiasm as we in the way we spoke about last week has to do with extraordinary States which extraordinary
States of consciousness which lead to extraordinary kinds of actions both private and collective now remind us all I would remind us all that Ava Light who will be speaking in a few weeks when speaking about Breivik who perpetrated the massacre outside of Oslo might be diagnosed or might be studied according
To due to various types of to various concepts of psychology or psychopathology but after all we do treat we need to treat private not as a as a psychotic case or as a special case because private is in fact a doer and not entirely a patient so being a dual
And being a patient there are two ways of looking at persons who do who perform extraordinary acts and it is really at this confluence of psychology sociology explanation and viddied itself where the question being dealt with today actually comes in eternity and fear because fraternity and fear are in fact involved
In all in all of these matters that are concerned to us in this particular seminar I’m very pleased to welcome our speaker who is as you probably know some of you will certainly know is a philosopher and social and political theorists the author of an extraordinary book on fanaticism on the genealogy of
The word the concept its uses across the ages from from its inception at the time of the at the time of the Reformation and and thereafter and he we thought that he should be he would be the most fitting first speaker in this particular seminar because what what you have to say in
That book would actually then set the tone and set a number of parameters which should and can guide our our discussions in this particular seminar he is proposing to speak on fraternity and fear in the global civil war now we should soon find out what he means by
The global civil war in which global Civil War his is talking about just one last comment before the further introduction I was talking to a to a particularly interesting philosopher today over lunch Marcus Gabrielle from Germany who has a very interesting theory of fanaticism fanaticism is a meta according to him a
Meta philosophical notion which is based primarily upon the contention that difference does not exist or can be or can be or can be actually then written out of any form of workable workable existence so it is something which actually then transcends social interaction and political interaction that is another matter which we will
Come to later on but now I will ask our speaker to to tell us what he has in mind concerning fraternity and fear in the global civil war by way of brief introduction and he teaches at Goldsmiths College University of London and he has forthcoming three books –
Books with extraordinary titles which I find intriguing and I look forward to reading them one is last philosophy which may be resonant of the last man to some of us but then may not be necessarily and the bad new politics in a tragic key and prior to that another
Book were an extremely interesting and intriguing title the cartography of the absolute anyway if any of you have any questions on these particular matters you may address them to our speaker once he has concluded what he has to say please okay well thank you very much so asthma and thanks to the Central
University everybody involved for the invitation and it’s of course quite an honor to be selected hood starts off a seminar like this the reference of Marcus Gabriel incidentally is curious thinking back to writing the book fanaticism because I know he’s a specialist of the work of shelling and actually the first time I
Encountered and thought about the notion of fanaticism was quite a long time ago in fact in 1999 which is I think the first time I published an article which had fanaticism in his title that had nothing to do with the relationship between religion and politics but rather concerned precisely this philosophical
Notion of fanaticism as it traveled through conned through shelling to Hegel and in particular this notion of fanaticism in German philosophy as what Kant said the the notion or indeed the philosophical delusion that one can immediately see the infinite what can kind of identify oneself with the
Absolute so it’s curious to to be returned to that more philosophical territory so what I want to do today is in a sense to bridge the project of that book fanaticism that was a book written in a very or least that I started to write at a very particular moment mid-2000s and
Partly just out of a sense of irritation I guess would probably be the best word at the ways in which this term whose political and philosophical pedigree I had somehow been alerted to earlier on the way that this term was being manipulated or operationalized in a sense to present a very schematic one
Could say even very manichaean understanding of the relationship between politics and religion and specifically the way it was being turned into a pretty significant you know ideological an opinion forming operator in the context of the so-called global war on terror so it was really a critical project trying to dislocate the
Seemingly self-evident discourse about fanaticism by turning to various historical and political episodes in which it had played a signal role among them as Professor allows me I mentioned the radical Reformation but also the way in which fanaticism had been a key term in the Cold War discourse specifically
Us centered and kind of State Department centered I suppose discourse around communism in the 1950s and 1960s specifically around this discussion of communism as a secular or political religion and that itself went back to a very long tradition tradition that I guess one could call quite technically
In a sense almost quite neutrally a sort of counter-revolutionary tradition around the notion of fanaticism which had indeed developed in the wake of the French Revolution and specifically in what I think is the most formidable and fascinating text of what we could see as a kind of empty fanatical tradition that
Is to say Edmund Burke’s reflections on the revolution in France now we can discuss if you’re interested some of the aspects of what I was arguing in that book but what I want to do today is really bridge that project with some of the concerns that I suppose are guiding
My current research around this relationship between politics and the notion of tragedy and in particular to try to think different approaches to the problem of the relationship between the formation of collective subjectivity which is really what I’ll be talking about in terms of fraternity and questions of social political and indeed
Religious conflict so I’ll just move straight to the paper and hopefully these relationships conceptual and and and historical relationships I’ve just been mentioning will be apparent so a number of commentators reflecting on the most recent surge of religiously articulated violence and especially on the internationalization of the Islamic state or –
Phenomenon have foregrounded the primacy of collective and primarily masculine forms of solidarity over theological discourses as engines of so-called radicalization now use this clumsy formulation religiously articulated because partly what I think is at stake in this discussion of fraternity is whether one can indeed speak of religiously motivated action so in a
Sense I’m saying religiously articulated to sort of suspend the idea that you know suspend and then maybe revisit the idea that we can treat the religious as in a sense the primary motor or engine of subjective ation in these cases so in terms of this turn to the question of so
To speak fraternal or kind of like masculine solidarities here I guess there are resonances of the table light male fantasies so we could also I guess write a whole book about Isis called male fantasies but we can maybe revisit that but in terms of these debates I’m thinking in particular of the recent
Work of the anthropologist Scott OTT Ron who had already on what I personally think are rather problematic evolutionary sociobiological grounds argued in his 2010 book talking to the enemy that the model of an ideologically determined kind of terrorist central you know sort of the model which in a sense
Kind of repeats some of the more paranoid police models of how anarchism worked in the 19th century that you know you needed a kind of Center be at al Qaeda or or Isis or what-have-you and that this itself was a hierarchical and and centrifugal sort of system of organization should be radically
Revisited replaced by fine grained ethnographic biographic and psychological grasp of the significance of bonds of friendship and family and of mutable and improvised network in the most recent wave of Islamist mass terrorism so specifically at run looks within quite some detail pretty fascinating detail of that in talking to the enemy
At the genesis of the Bali and Madrid Madrid bombings of the earlier 2000s looking actually at how little any kind of centralized or hierarchical organization had to do with the actual dynamics of these of these movements so in a 2015 editorial specifically about Isis in The Guardian something happened
So just read out the cooked so in this 2015 editorial and Isis in The Guardian actually refers to a 2014 French poll a rather fascinating forum and who says the following the poll suggests that more than one in four one in four French youth between the ages of 18 and 24 have
A favorable or very favorable opinion of Isis although only seven or eight percent of France is Muslim its communal more than three of every four who joined Isis from abroad do so with friends and family most are young in transitional stages in life immigrant students between jobs and mates having just left
Their native family they join a and this is his expression a band of brothers and in parentheses and I guess the parentheses are significant and sisters ready to sacrifice for significance he’s a kind of interesting formulation to sacrifice for significance so actually trying to shake the reader out of her ideological slumber provocatively
Concludes the following he says jihad is an egalitarian equal opportunity employer fraternal fast-breaking glorious cool and persuasive and there’s a variant this argument and a quite interesting speech that he gives I think relatively recently you can find it on YouTube at the at the UN
So while able to follow a plan into the field so to speak I want to take this opportunity to pause on that adjective fraternal and to take it as a prism through which to revisit and revise some of the ideas I try to advance in my book fanaticism especially in that books
Preoccupation with the political and philosophical frameworks through which we understand the refusal of compromise and here I’m referring to in particular some of the work of a friend rather tragically passed away before finishing his book on fanaticism called American zealots Joel Olson who very nicely defined fanaticism as the extraordinary
Mobilisation of the refusal to compromise so probably my decision to think the discourse of fanaticism in a manner transversal to the distinction between secular for instance communists or anarchists and religious for instance Islamist forms of politics I wish to reflect here on the place of fraternity in the modern political vocabulary and
On its intersection with our understanding of excessive or violent political commitments in as much as the problem of fraternity was posed from ancient Greek political philosophy to French revolutionary discourse and further on as a problem concerning both the unity of the political body and the threat of civil war with the latter very
Often conceived that is to say civil war as the worst modality of violence which is something that really determines Greek political philosophy for certain once you look at it with some level of closeness I want to test out whether we can look in the archives of political
Philosophy for some of the tools through which to think the collective subjectivity of political and religious violence in a context that some commentators have identified as one of global civil war and I’ll turn to the term in a second now a proviso a kind of warning is called for this
Sexual sketch which seeks to supplement my discussion of fanaticism by inquiring into the political effects of group formation is confined to a very selective and very partial to ejector within Western philosophy and would itself required be supplemented or indeed supplanted or surpassed by a critical consideration of other understandings and political traditions
Indeed non-western traditions of fraternity so not for part one there’s three parts to the paper the reference to global civil war in my title is drawn from georgia Gambon’s recent work his short volume entitled stathis which is one of the last two volumes of this kind of gargantuan and strangely organized
Homo soccer series the book is a reflection on the figures of civil war in the Western political tradition principally in ancient Greece and in the work of Hobbes which tries to recover the resources of that unstable and polysemic Greek concept stasis which is need one of the greek names for a civil
War there is the name of a whole number of things including what we call stasis as opposed to Kinesis or movement and a government tries to recover this concept of stasis to intervene intellectually in a situation where the very distinctions between internecine war so what the greeks indeed call stasis and war
Between states which in some ways resembles the Greek concept of Palomas or war against non Greeks or war against barbarians the dis distinction between internal and external war in a sense to put it quite plainly seems to have effectively imploded and we are not withstanding the coining of that formula
Global Civil War so that at least according to a gunman I haven’t looked into it independently but the concept of global civil wars first used simultaneously in 1963 by Hannah Arendt in her book on revolution and by Carl Schmitt in his book the theory of the partisan so notwithstanding the coining
Of the four no global Civil War sorry passage is a little so to turn to this question of the Civil War notwithstanding the fact that from Plato through Hobbes and into modern political philosophy the preemption of civil war is constitutive arguably of European conceptions of politics as such we can
Also think here for instance of Jacques Derrida’s comment in the politics of friendship a textual term in a moment about the state stasis as a category of what he calls political knows ography or that is to say the diagnosis of the maladies of public and collective life
As a gunman observes whatever date one wishes to trace this end back to it is certain that today the state of war in the traditional sense has virtually disappeared we might want to argue with this but take this sentence for the time being the scholarly response by and large has been oriented towards
Varieties of crisis management and not to confronting the crisis of political practice and rationality itself that such a collapse of the normative framework of war entails now in order to elaborate his hypothesis a civil war can be understood as a threshold of politicization and deep politicization in what he calls the political paradigm
Of the West a galvan turns to the partying and incisive work of the historian of ancient Greek thought and politics Nicole or lore is also crucial reference for Derrida’s politics of friendship to which all turn later commenting on Plato’s dialogue main axis law had already sought to elucidate the
Fundamental ambivalence in ancient Greek political thought and indeed political practice haunting the relationship between the OI costs of the domain of the family or the home and the polis and a gunman makes the following comment he writes civil war is the status and Phyllis it is the conflict particular to
The feel on to blood kinship it is the such an extent in hearing to the family that phrase taw in philia literally the things internal to the bloodline simply means in ancient Greece civil wars now that incidentally is a 19th century painting of Antigone looking over the body of polyneices
From the Sophocles play and one can of course see especially through the prism of Laura’s work who writes about this in a number of her books and essays the whole question of tragedy and of tragedies capacity to think and to stage politics as indeed a thinking of civil
War which revolves either around the relationship between the family and the polis and yet it is a family in ancient Greek thought that also serves as the antidote to the malady it itself incubates so there’s a kind of ambivalence which is of course in many ways what tragedy is about of the family
As cause and the family as solution of this problem of internecine war one of the ways the family does this to which will return is by the creation of a kind of civic or symbolic or invented kinship and indeed fraternity politically understood is nothing but a form of
Symbolic or invented kinship and more specifically by fashioning a kind of political Brotherhood which combines reflexivity with reciprocity Laurel in fact narrates in one of her essays it was indeed the one that I put on the reading list and the politics of brothers a case in ancient Greek
Inhabited or dominated Sicily in the town of Nocona of a reconciliation following a Status of following a kind of localized civil war which depends on the act or the oath of what in Greek is called a Adel fourth Atia that is to say to adopt one another as brothers and
It’s a very interesting essay about how the solution to the civil war is basically to invent to scramble the otherwise feuding or antagonistic kinship and bloodlines into a sort of entirely artificial form of fraternity where you would in a sense adopt as a brother a member of the
Opposing faction the relies on a Greek thinking of conflict which also organizes a constant disavowal so this repression of status Laveau also notes in some quite striking instances for instance the fact that the Athenians remove from the calendar the date of their of a crucial moment of of status
So you have this very strange situation in which the possibility of civil war is both forgotten but obviously entirely remember because if you move from the 2nd to the 4th of January or a sort of you know illicit to the notion that on the 3rd of January something incredibly
Bad happened even though that date doesn’t exist anymore this is a very interesting way of thinking this kind of dialectic of amnesia and remembering that is you know in many ways central to political memory in the political memory of conflict this way of thinking conflict ultimately crystallizes into
The notion of what she calls a generalized civic kinship so that’s what we get from law is this notion and at the at the root of ancient Greek political thought and therefore at least of the root of one of the streams which then composes for want of a better term
A kind of European or indeed perhaps Western political tradition there is a really constitutive role given to a kind of political Brotherhood or indeed a notion of civic kinship which is in a sense the other side of the utterly central role that civil war and its prevention have in the entire thinking
Of politics the stems according to Laveau to what she calls intriguingly quote the Greek tendency to transform blood kinship categories into merely classificatory categories the ultimate ideal then is not even so much that of the Adelphi which is a kind of sin Giller and indeed more familial notion
Of brotherhood but that of The Fratellis whose collectivity as she puts it is a solidarity of definition and ideally free from all tensions now for Georgia gamble arose thesis especially as formulated in her landmark 1987 essay on war in the family can be summarized in three steps first her work shows an
Attention to house tosses for civil war deconstructs the idea that Greek politics is marked by an overcoming of the OI caused by the polis so this is a very familiar narrative and indeed a kind of self narrative already present in Greek thought itself that somehow the city transcends the family or the Oikos
Or the home and it circumscribes its role but in a sense maintains it in its proper place and therefore terminates the possibility of civil war of course this narrative or indeed this ideal or even this myth is present in what is perhaps the most emblematic tragedy in
This regard which is Aeschylus’s or stea in which the feminine power of revenge and indeed as embodied in the ironies or the Furies is domesticated in a sense literally by the figure of Athena and the polity is precisely founded on this institution of a form of kinship which
Is civic but also form of kinship which is male and is a whole very complex politics around gender and civil war which law is very attempted to for one just incidentally one of the crucial political responses and practical responses to the problem of civil war which is to say to internecine conflict
Revenge and so on is the prohibition on female mourning in Athens so the the state regulation of mourning as that which constantly throws up the possibility of future revenge so the first point then is that status viewed from this angle does not you know the status is not to be really thought
As a surpassing of the part the polis the OI cost by the polis second status is essentially originating in the Oikos at least according to a government’s reading of Lauro and reveals the ineluctable presence the fact that the family but the family as conflict continues to haunt the polity no matter
How much it tries to surpass it and third again this is a gun ban kind of summarizing OHA’s work the oil cost is an ambivalent formation a source of discord and consensus alike against the grain of these theses and arguing on the basis of his interpretation of the bio
Political foundation of Western thought so that for Gambon the crucial separation is the one between what he calls be us or political life and Zoe or bear animal biological life an argument that he makes in koma soccer a gamba suggests the staz’s should instead be considered as what he calls a threshold
Commenting on a passage in plato’s laws Agamben notes what follows from the text of the law that the athenian of the platonic dialogue proposes is less the connection between status and oil costs in the fact that the civil war assimilates and makes undecidable brother an enemy inside an outside
Household and city in the stars as the killing of what his most into intimate is indistinguishable from the killing of what is most foreign this means however that the status does not have its place within the household but constitutes a threshold of indifference between the Oikos and the polis between blood
Kinship and citizenship this is a threshold of for a government of both D and re-familiarize ation in a sense he sees Greek political thought as constantly trapped in this kind of ambivalence and oscillation politicisation and depoliticization familiarize ation Andrey familiarization notwithstanding a government’s critical observations I think some of low
Other writings namely her Magisterial work the divided city from which the essay the politics of brothers is taken suggest she is a very attentive Explorer of this dimension of the threshold not least around the question of Brotherhood there in that book while noting a kind of ideology of fraternal kinship in
Greece and she of course notes that this is one of the things that really separates the Greek thinking of civil war from the Roman thinking of civil war Roman thinking of civil war has as its obsession not fratricide but parasite so it’s a very different understanding and
The worst you know in a sense the worst in the Roman context is that the son killing the father indeed the father killing the son rather than this fraternal war but the ultimate ideology fraternal kinship in Greece is that a sheep would sit no real no real or blood
Or family kinship bond must interfere with the bond instituted by the city it’s almost as if the principle of this conception of politics were that political Brotherhood should always trump kin or blood Brotherhood so that we find in Greek thought according to her is ultimately in Greek political
Thought is a logic in a sense Beyond and against the family which reveals in her words the contradiction endlessly opposing the family to itself eternally suspected of bringing both too much cohesion and too much division she also places Brotherhood itself so to speak on the threshold of politics I quote caught
Between the vertical axis affiliation and the horizontal axis of companionship the brother is a kind of figure of the political oscillates from one to the other without ever filling in the gap between blood kinship and the reciprocity of fellow men so in a sense the the brother ends up being this
Unstable ambivalent figure which though ideally is supposed to allow for the turn sentence of blood kinship by political kinship actually serves much more in the sense as that kind of threshold of which a government spoke in that sense we can also think through this kind of fraternal volatility or fraternal
Trouble what Laurel pointedly identified as the denial of conflict as the law of politics and life in the city in fact the whole of the divided city is precisely a book about how the Greeks are so to speak invention of politics a much celebrated idea that you know the Greeks invented politics invented
Democracy is also the invention of all of these ways of denying disavowing and repressing the conflicts that are the heart of political life and specifically Stas or civil war and its possibility of course you can think of classic ancient philosophy as one of the privileged sites of this attempt to quell or quash
Conflict in some way it’s most philosophical famous philosophical figure perhaps is to be found in the utopian or in a sense communist fraternity and indeed sorority of Plato’s Republic in which Plato imagines the generation of a stock of citizens who are only children of the city but not of their parents brothers and
Sisters in and for the city a process which of course requires and Plato’s very open about this a formidable mythological which is to say ideological manipulation much of which being involved in this incredibly peculiar technical discussion of how you can prevent incest amongst his brothers and
Sisters if indeed they do not know who their parents are in the first place leaving blood kinship behind as we know can and has been a very bloody process implicating our very notions of citizenship wellö asks why there is such consensus to make consensus the bond of politics the question of political Brotherhood
Surely in the foreground so now to my second part now this question of political Brotherhood is indeed in the foreground of the work of Jacques Derrida especially in his book which is drawn from a seminar of the 1980s the politics of friendship attacks which wagers on the possibility of thinking
Politics in Derrida’s words beyond the principle of fraternity to beyond the principle of fraternity so just what in a sense the Greeks at least according to laho could not do the context for this questioning is what he calls I quote a harrowing tremor in the structure of the experience of belonging therefore a
Property of communal belonging and sharing religion family ethnic groups nations homeland country state even humanity end of quote Derrida poses a complex and haunting question can politics in the West but perhaps also in the globalized and dominated rest be thought of outside of what he calls a schematic affiliation a
Schematic schematic which would link the production and reproduction of human life to a fundamentally paternal patriarchal recognition and kin politics exist outside of what he terms it the possibility of a fraternity a possibility which he thinks is inextricable from what in another formulation he calls Christianization
There the rights for attorneys a ssin is the essential structure of Christianisation as though you know christian proselytism worthy in position of the political figure of the Brotherhood on non fraternal cultures and try to extricate the political valence as a friendship as instantiated in Plato Aristotle Montaigne shalay and
Many more from a talk to me eugenics and filial and fraternal bonds is Derrida trying to repeat and intensify or even exaggerate that gesture of trying to overcome the Oikos in and by the polis that both local and Agamben discuss so one can reading Derrida thing that
Perhaps he’s also caught in this kind of utopia you know we could leave the family behind and finally have and proper politics but as we’ve stressed in its Greek form the separation from the Oikos always appears to take the form of it’s symbolic sublimation so at least for the Greeks
Every time you try to get away from kinship you do so by inventing political kinship not by doing something that’s not kinship so the articulation of the political and the biological or of the city and the family is never really left behind it’s kind of euphemized metaphor eyes sublimated or what-have-you
There’s a kind of natural law based on the bond between in Derrida’s formulations the bond between the political and autochthonous constant when eighteen of the sharing of blood and the belonging to a territory or land and he continues we should be alert to the place of return ization as the
Symbolic bond alleging the repetition of a genetic tie nature persists in commanding law in treating equality as an attribute of birth as in the Greek derivation of ISA Galia the right to equal speech from is ellonija the fact of equal birth this nature is doubled by memory by a testamentary tie which is
Also an original patrimony as their it’s the obligatory necessity of this bond of memories as a kind of fraternity that also has to do with a conception of history and a conception of origin forms the condition of a certain notion of political freedom so what would the democracy be a democracy too common
Derrida’s famous formulation that would not base or ground political appearance or political belonging on the vertical axis of affiliation and indeed of fundamentally patrilineal filiation and/or the horizontal line of fraternal solidarity what would a democracy be which would not be in there disturbs an Aristo democracy of brothers according to
Virtue the right of the best starting from equality at birth from national homo filial or talked honest equality a democracy of in a paradox or oxymoron what he said calls countable singularity which would forbid the imposition of a numerous Clowes us or close number on what he calls the
Arrived and it is always pausing to reflect on the way that the question of paternity intersects would there that calls the question of number namely the tragic tension between what he argues are the two laws of other nests I quote there is no democracy with our respect for irreducible singularity or alterity
But there is no democracy without the community of friends without the calculation of majorities without identifiable stabilizable representable subjects all equal these two laws are irreducible to one another what is at stake for Derrida against Schmitt who is one of his main interlocutors in the politics of friendship is the very
Possibility of thinking what he calls a politics a friendship a justice which begin by breaking with their naturalness or their homogeneity with our alleged place of Orden so what would be a politics that wouldn’t in somewhere another sublimate this origin and origin which is always at the very least a
Metaphor of a kind of biological or natural fraternity such a break would perhaps above all mean breaking with what he sees as the Andrew centric or famous infamous formulation fallig eccentric character of our conception of the political in which as he puts it the sister and this is interesting visibly
The discussion Laveau in which as he says the sister will never provide a docile example for the concept of fraternity going against the grain of Schmidt’s theory the part isn’t there that will in fact ask what if the woman were the absolute partisan and what if she were the absolute enemy of this
Theory of the absolute enemy the specter of hostility to be conjured up for the sake of the sworn brothers end of quote is it possible for a politics to move beyond the brother and can we heed this call to denaturalize fraternity now we can parenthetically note the interest of
Derrida’s pausing in his interpretation of the notorious friend enemy distinction in Carl Schmidt’s concept of the political on the exemplary play is that the political conflict against Islam has in the history of the Christian West this is a bit of off piece from my talk but since it’s in the
Politics of friendship I thought it would interesting leaf it perhaps is some of our discussion there as reflection of schmidt is particularly and i think intentionally unsettling because of its reflexive form as though he were including himself within that Christian or European political Brotherhood as he
Writes you are obliged this is very odd use of the this kind of vocal form it’s not clear of Derrida stalking to Schmidt if he’s talking to himself if he’s talking to us or who this US might be you’re obliged you always have been obliged to defend Europe against its
Other without confusing the genres without confusing faith and politics and minion hostility friendship and alliance or confusion there’s an interesting question here of course of the extent to which Derrida himself is committed to a certain perhaps particularly French version of political secularism albeit in a quite oblique way in question would
Be a defensive operation destined to defend the political beyond particular states or nations beyond any geographical ethnic or political continent on the political side of this unusual front the stakes would be saving the political as such insuring its survival in the face of another who would no longer even be a political
Enemy but an enemy of the political more precisely of being radically alien to the political as such supposing at least that in its purported purity it is not Europeanized and shares nothing of the tradition of the juridical and the political called European these lines uncannily foreshadow the more enlightened in many scare quotes
Versions of contemporary Islamophobic discourses or their obsessive demand that the other adopt a certain framework of the political from which we are at the same time trying one could argue in a kind of imposed consensus to expunge all substantive forms of conflict namely any conflict over the very forms of
Politics in the state of the kind and mobilize much of Europe throughout the 20th century ironically aware thus witness to a strange spectacle of a kind of cold list defense of democratic politics is assertive Western or European property which is actually the other side of a fiercely anti-democratic and anti
Political practice and now to my third and last part in the politics of friendship Derrida insists as I suggested on a necessity to deconstruct what are only apparently be naturalized fraternity says very insistent point is actually fraternity can never seems never to be able to undo its link to a land to an
Ethnos to some kind of substantive perhaps biological perhaps racial identity in that sense he wants to deconstruct a whole tradition of thinking from aerosol to all modes of spiritual fraternity of sovereign paternity of fraternities of what he calls Alliance or election and he asks himself and he asks us why does the
Natural schema remain so why is it that politics one must always be thought of in some relationship to a kind of basic understanding of natural origins you know something that is obviously present for instance most strikingly and the whole etymology of the word nation its relationship to birth and so on and so
Forth I want to turn now by way of conclusion to what is arguably the most concerted and many ways intense effort to think the centrality of fraternity to political group formation and to the generation of political intensity but also political violence jean-paul Sartre theory of what he called fraternity
Terror expounded in his 1960 critique of dialectical Reason vol 1 as an aside this was a text that though sadly the transcripts of these lectures don’t exist anymore was the object of one of Frantz Fanon’s last seminars which was actually given to the Algerian army of the exterior in
Tunisia a very strange notion that you needed and if you’ve tried to read Sartre strategic of dialectical reason but the idea of teaching it at a military camp is you know far-fetched to say the least but speaks to the kind of intensity of phonons relationship not just to that book and
Not just the Sartre book to that particular argument so could start to perhaps provide some clues to the predicament with which I began mainly the preeminence of fraternization say following those arguments by Scott Alfred and others as a source of so-called radicalization I say so-called a bit like people keep saying so-called
Islamic state because actually find radicalization to be an incredibly problematic term but maybe we can discuss that later Sarkis critique is a vast and at times forbiddingly actually not at times it’s like constantly for fittingly complex book so we’ll need to bracket the bulk of his argument and its underlying development
And above all his advancing of what he calls scar city as a contingent but inescapable origin of conflict and in the sense of dialectical thinking itself what I will do is simply sketch the guiding lines of his notion of fraternity terror which emerge about halfway through the more than eight
Hundred pages of the book a Sartre tries to grapple with a passage which is critical in in his narrative from the atomized multiplicity of human groups what’s articles sea realities existing in a kind of series series of atoms to the unity of groups which totalize themselves and seek to act in unison and
In a sense Sartre is trying to think the collective nature of revolutionary subjectivity with in many ways the French and Russian revolutions as his principal objects of speculation reflecting a revolutionary conjunctures especially Sartre calls our attention to the moment to that experience which barring from under mo hos account to the
Spanish Civil War he calls the apocalypse the dissolution of a cereal collective into a group infusion this is a kind of political subjective ation as a kind of apocalypse in the sense of both an extremely vital event but also a revelation revolution what kind of new identity crucially for Sartre this group
And this is very important about Sarkis thinking of groups is not a kind of hyper organism it’s not a it’s not a kind of macro individual it’s still very much a group made up of a multiplicity of individuals but individuals which are transformed by their belonging to the
Group the group is above all four Sartre as he puts it himself a passion it constantly renewed and at times tortured struggle against practical inertia against all the social and psychic forces which if unresisted would spell the group’s demise or its dissolution so to be in a group for Sartre is to fight
The natural tendency to no longer be in a group in a sense and this in many ways explains the whole problematic of terror and violence I do not know whether Derrida had the critique somewhere at the back of his mind and writing politics of friendship but his repeated
References to the oath or the pledge the signal as a crucial operator input in political fraternities echoes the pride of place of this concept and Sartre steel of group formation where it is only the free decision to fuse into a group which also means to treat oneself
From the standpoint of a third internal to their group which according to Sartre invents the very possibility of treason or betrayal it’s a very curious move for starter or by the oath is in a sense the oath not to betray the oath in a way to be the Punishers of one’s own possible
Betrayal but in that sense it invents the very experience of treason in see reality or an atomized collective life nobody can really betray anything or anyone and it Institute’s the violence of the group against itself a violence which is inextricable from its unity the fear in fraternity is ultimately twofold on the
One hand it is the fear of scarcity a fear or better and anxiety directed at the other as a danger a danger to my to our survival and first Sartre this is kind of anthropologically fundamental in some sort of speculatively sort of Malthusian sense you know the other is
Fundamentally a danger before he is you know an object of ethics or of solidarity or whatever our experience of other nurses is fundamentally determined by this experience of the other as a possible danger to my own survival or to our or the survive it’s pretty bleak view of
Human nature that at times of persuasive works but on the other hand it is a fear of time as that which will disperse our unity it is a fear and this is a very curious but I think persuasive formulation the fear in fraternity is a
Fear of the absence of fear it’s a fear that fear will no longer be present and therefore there will be no motor for solidarity and it is this absence of fear that the oath or pledge negates so Sarge as a curious model by in a sense the group internalizes the external
Danger and turns itself turns that possible danger of violence against itself in order to maintain its unity and you know in some way Sartre is really trying to think and creat lay through you know a very familiar phenomenon especially from the history of left-wing movements that being you
Know the constant seeming necessity of the internal purge is the only way that you maintain group unity fraternities fraternity terror in as much as cementing cohesion and homogeneity the group must in his words reinvent fear fear is thus what starter calls a free product of the group aimed at
Pre-empting its zero dispersion grounded in the absolute self world violence over the group of its own members in history nology the oath or the pledge reactor Eliza’s violence as the negation of individual freedom by common praxis making it so that hope is inextricable from terror and freedom from violence
This oath or pledge in which I swear that I will not be the conduit for serial alterative multiplicity into the group I will not portray I will not dissolve is like LaRose family in a sense an intrinsically ambivalent or better dialectical fashion it serves to unify the group in reciprocity but it’s
Also the source of separation and differentiation as one can see in the whole history precisely of the violence that groups do to themselves to remain united the meaning of fraternity in Sakura is nicely foregrounded in the empty psychiatrist RD Laing synopsis of the theory of groups from his book reason
And violence co-authored with David Cooper and if you don’t have the time or inclination or fortitude to slog to the 800 pages of Sartre Lang’s summary is which has Sarkar’s kind of blessing so to speak is a quite an effective one and so in Lang’s version he says this is
Just it’s not even him interpreting is just him kind of summarizing Sartre his argument in the pledge group that is liable to exist also a mortal concern for my co member my brother he who is linked to me in an indissoluble bond an eternity of presence without future this
Kind of interesting thing about the time of fraternity being like this kind of eternal present we have come out of the mud together and now the brother whose existence is not other than mine depends on me as I depend on him let there be no mystification about having a
Common nature we are brothers because we are our own sons our fraternity is our common invention this fraternity is an ensemble of reciprocal and singular rights and obligations the badge for group membership might be the color of skin and of could Lang who follows chakras rather closely including and
Especially in the mention of race and skin color articulates willy-nilly one of the immense challenges of such a praxis centered conception of fraternity especially alight to that critique of political fraternity encountered in Derrida how can fraternity extricate itself from these empirical badges to use the Lang term of its pledge the
Material anchors of its common invention which it is so often wholly mired and under what condition can we for instance politically invent our skin color or our race I don’t mean to suggest incidentally that this cannot be done as the whole history of the concept of political blackness for instance from
The Haitian Constitution of 1805 which judge all Haitian citizens to be black even if they were white because it was a political identity or not skin identity to the descanse eped of blackness in 1980 su KMT racism and so on means that indeed one can invent these terms and
Yet these badges are also accompanied by Sartre zone reckoning by myths the Sartre says there is also a myth a necessary myth of fraternity fraternity terror in particular is based on the myth of a new birth or rebirth and here I was thinking of a you know particularly emblematic form of this
Pledge and an oath which I’m sure many of you will have seen which was this ritual of speaking of liberty equality and fraternity of French members of Isis collectively burning their passports and just thinking of this in there as a kind of very emblematic moment of this kind
Of mythical rebirth a rebirth into a group of brothers who are only their own sons fraternity 10 particulars based on the myth of a new birth or rebirth the myth that we are our own sons amethyst is inextricable from a frequently very loudly proclaimed parasite and often a
Silent if sometimes far deeper matricide cuz of course to be one’s own son one clearly has to do without a mother in the sense to the brother is a brother of violence and fraternity for Sartre fraternity is a kind of and this is his own formulation a violence friendship we
Live in a world in which there are a lot of violence friendships the unity must be mythical sense through the group though the group is a constant process and project of totalization the group itself is in existence so one of the things that Sartre alerts us to is a
Part of the violence in the violence of this project of unification and terror is based on the implicit recognition that the group has no kind of ontological consistency like the French people doesn’t exist you know the fraternity of brothers doesn’t really exist in the same way that an individual would exist and
Therefore this non existence the totality involves this constant process of violent unification and also of myth to replace the language of Being and Nothingness the group too is a for itself which must fantasize or Rey if by itself as an in itself to fantasize itself as a kind of cause of its own
Existence be it as a past essence as omits of foundation or future plenitude in kind of myths of messianic apotheosis it is very striking in terms of the orientation of our discussion towards the question of religious enthusiasm that for Sartre we can derive the crowning effect and substance of
Religion the sacred as well as the law from a reflection of the travails of fraternity terror so one of the things that Sartre dozen critique of dialectical reason is actually think well sacredness and law can be thought of as products of this process of fraternity terror as a way of inventing
A permanence for a group that’s real problem for Sartre that’s the whole problem of the group is to invent its permanence inline summary the sacred constitutes the fundamental structure of terror as legalized power without the law as the new synthetic product issuing from the pledged group freedom in human
Relations does not intimidate a kind of intimidating freedom is what the group is searching sacred power is thus a kind of inert ray fide freedom or as Sartre himself puts it the sacred constitutes the fundamental structure of terror as juridical power it is freedom returning to man as a superhuman and petrified
Power from the intense violent reciprocity of the group infusion or love and terror are inextricable there thus emerges seemingly necessary alien nations ruses or tricks of permanence the sacred law and myth but what emerges for Sartre is above all the concept of humanity things a whole interesting discussion one could have actually about
The relationship between fanaticism and humanism that we can maybe do that later the pledge group writes Arcturus produces its objectification so it treats itself as a thing as an object as a particular material product in it the pledge that’s a way of exterior izing yourself we have pledged ourselves we have
Pledged our allegiance to our own group and therefore to ourselves but thus interior objectivity starter continues which produces itself for everyone as impossibility of going back beyond a certain path State as an irreversibility of temporal ization is not the objectification of the group as being so we can’t objectify the group as
Being caused of course the group doesn’t exist as a thing it is the eternal frozen preservation of its rising or of its emergence it is the origin of humanity rights it is also the origin of inhumanity could be argued by Sarkar’s own lights as Sartre writes further in
The critique of dialectical reason man is violent throughout history right up to the present man is violent to the empty human that is to say to any other man and to his brother insofar as he has the permanent possibility of becoming empty human himself and of quote
But how carrot this dialectic of the group from what Derrida tries to deconstruct namely a fraternizing humanization that would ultimately find its Fantas mattock and mythical sources in Atok denis eugenics birth race or how in Sartre Stern can we live experience collectively and otherwise the fact that
Our common being is not a nature but a freedom or indeed an invention it is of interest by way of conclusion that Sartre explains the genesis of the notion of fanaticism with which I began precisely through the inability of living the group as a group treating it instead serially in terms of individual
Psychology so this is what he writes so from critique of dialectical reason what people call fanaticism blindness is really fraternity terror as experienced in another group and insofar as we as individuals treat it as an emotional occurrence in individuals so it’s as though to see a particular action as
Fanatical would be to individualize and psychologize what is fundamentally a kind of collective passion in which of course the individual participates but does not participate as a atomized psychological individual what would it mean instead to treat it in terms of a dialectic of liberation and alienation of freedom and violence which
Has not individuals but what’s articles common individuals which is different notion in reciprocal praxis as its subjects would this allow us perhaps to suspend the liberal ontology of the individual ontology to put it all – briefly of the discourse of fanaticism thank you
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