3-04-08, 10:00 am

As one of the famed theoretical architects of the so-called 'War on Terror,' and of the subsequent US invasion of Iraq, Francis Fukuyama’s much celebrated postmodern, even in some respects deconstructionist, notion of the 'End of History' repeated in a kitsch fashion that which others have already repeated of the philosopher Hegel, who said it far more eloquently a long time ago. Recently however (during 2007), because history has continued (yet again), in order to disown this 'scriptwriting' position he has been forced into the ridiculous mental contortion of likening the current actual results of the US neo-con imperialist agenda to Leninism, something that he was always against and obviously feels on safe ground opposing.

Fukuyama, along with Paul Wolfowitz and others, represents the US tradition of conservative interest in the legacy of the Nazi philosopher Carl Schmitt through Leo Strauss. Strauss, a German Jewish political philosopher and émigré, was able to leave Germany enabled by a Rockefeller Fellowship helped set up by Schmitt. Schmitt was a philosopher and jurist whose ideas, especially his critique of democracy and liberalism, have their heritage in Nazism – including anti-Semitism – he was a committed Nazi Party member.

Schmitt’s ideas are taken up and critiqued by such figures as the Italian theorist Georgio Agamben. Agamben became famous in the academy for his work on the idea of the ‘state of exception’ and homo sacer. He followed Derrida who had referred to Schmitt during the aftermath of the scandal over Paul de Man’s wartime Nazi collaborationism. It has also been remarked that Agamben’s words are 'sometimes cryptic' (like Derrida).

I write currently (March 2008) as Armenia is functioning under a state of emergency. For Agamben the state of emergency or Schmitt’s 'state of exception' (emergency powers, marshal law, and so on) is not a dictatorship but 'a space devoid of law.' 'For one reason or another' (as he puts it) this space seems so essential to the legal order that it makes every possible attempt to relate to the former, as if the law, in order to guarantee its functioning, needs to entertain a relation to what he calls an 'anomy' (an anomalous condition). The state of emergency is an 'anomic space' in which what is at stake is a 'force of law without law.' Such a force is apparently a 'mystical element,' a fiction by means of which the law attempts to make 'anomy' a part of itself. In this perspective, the distinction proposed by the great critic Walter Benjamin between an effective and a fictitious state of emergency becomes important. Agamben here reads the debate on the state of emergency which saw Walter Benjamin and Carl Schmitt pitted against each other during 1928-1940.

Walter Benjamin is an uncanny contrast to Paul de Man here, both critically and in his life, they both reaching the Spanish border in the same wartime summer, but which for Benjamin had tragic consequences (he committed suicide when he was not allowed through the border post). The problem Benjamin poses in his “Critique of Violence” is how to establish the possibility of a future violence beyond the law, a violence which could rupture the apparent 'dialectic' between the violence that opposes and the one that conserves the (bourgeois) law. Schmitt, according to Agamben, must maintain the connection to law at all costs (presumably because he had a vested interest in making the Nazi’s case seem legal), whereas for Benjamin it has to be liberated from this relation (presumably because he was Marxist orientated).

Analyzing this argument, to Agamben the Western political system seems to be a 'double apparatus,' founded in a dialectic between two opposing elements: 'nomos' and 'anomy.' That is, between legal right and pure violence, or between the law and life. But, it is really inaccurate to call this 'a dialectic' unless it is meant in the old Hegelian sense. Power here seeks and finds justifications no longer in law or science but in the lowest common everyday ideology, based in alienated feelings, and in this it digs up sympathy, if not legitimacy, as in 'mob law' which tells us nothing except who is to be considered beast and who angel. Here legality and violence is contrasted in a false dialectic as the 'Great Conflict,' and the 'Great Leader' solves this conflict by fusing the sides (strength and order) in his very persona, whose voice consequently 'has the force of law,' the apparently 'popular voice.'

I suggest, contrary to Agamben, this is best understood as law 'in the last instance' seeking legitimacy on the aesthetic level, which ensures that such emergency decrees 'feel right' and law-like even when they lack law as such, or are in direct contradiction to it. This level is, so to speak, accessed in a special way by ruling classes during moments when their position is, or appears to be, threatened. The only dialectic that comes into play here is the false one that seeks to justify such bourgeois violence. This is not something confined to European history, of course. In the history of the US this same structure can be seen at work, perhaps more obviously, for the 'Slave Power,' and it had contradictory effects. Whenever there was a question of protecting slavery, the slaveholders became friends of centralized power. Slavery required centralization in order to maintain and protect itself, but it needed to control the centralized state machine and so needed despotic principles of government. But in this centralizing process (the US) state’s individual rights were also diminished. Yet the same rights were, during the Civil War made a Southern reason for war. This political contradiction between the Slave Power and democracy is, I submit, today recuperated to a role within the standard democratic system, as it is in the US. That is, between the supporters of total liberal democracy and those of partial social intervention (right versus left). The position of the unemployed worker in bourgeois society is not so far from the 'detainee' of 'Gitmo,' who 'does not work,' is 'kept,' is not a prisoner of war, but operates in the capacity of a figure of Terror. It is necessary thus to conceal their slave status and their usefulness to the Slave Power. (Certainly there are 'actual terrorists' who fulfill these roles, but they are also roles that await the actor). When actual democracy reverts to totalitarianism it is always a metamorphic reversion to the Slave Power within the already exploitative Wage Slave system (recall the Nazi’s made widespread use of slave labour).

The idea that Agamben perhaps succumbs to, along with many of his fellow travelers, in his borrowing of Schmitt’s concept of the 'state of exception' is something like this: there is a genuine and a false democracy, the latter is not really a democracy at all because of its usage of 'exception,' and because this functions as a transition leading to 'totalitarianism.' To make such pronouncements you will note that we must speak from the position of an imagined 'perfect democracy,' but to do so we must forget, or rather we might say we must denegate our own knowledge of the fact that democracy itself is achieved through class conflict, so, in effect, coming into existence through a 'state of emergency': = social revolution. And because of this fact there is no other form of democracy than 'protected democracy' as Agamben calls it, meaning democracy protected for the ruling class by force. Nevertheless, from this position Agamben worries about the loss of the 'separation of powers' (executive, legislative) that he feels has happened in Italy and many other western democracies recently. It is understandable, but in doing so I think he tends to take the original separation of powers to be real rather than ideological and therefore their dissolution to be a real loss rather than the politically expedient exchange of one illusion (- democracy is the only just political system) for another (- democracy must cede to violence – that is, must evaporate – to protect its uniquely just nature).

The fact is that the 'state of exception' in capitalist democracy can only be an exception within the illusion of denegated power; otherwise it is always plainly the rule of the dominant class. Certainly the actual conditions may be different. But it is in any case an 'exceptional state,' as Benjamin knew, that is only extraordinary to the ruling classes, because the exploited live in a continual condition as if they were the subject of peculiarly oppressive 'emergency powers' not applicable to the more privileged. Exception is for the working class the rule, for as the exploited, as wage slaves, by default.

For Schmitt, a strong dictator could embody the 'will of the people' more effectively than any parliamentary body. But his definition of sovereignty as the ability to create the 'state of exception,' while it may seem to have an affinity with Lenin’s concept of the 'dictatorship of the proletariat' (as Fukuyama hopes we conflate), is wrong because Schmitt is deluded into forgetting that even the most powerful individual tyrant is subject to the movements of the ruling class in the class struggle. In other words, no matter what great leader a nation is 'ruled by,' he or she can never really separate themselves from their objective social and political background. Thus Schmitt’s principle of power denegates, that is, it accidentally-on-purpose forgets the concept of class, while for Lenin the existence of classes always theoretically subordinated executive power to class determination.

The belief that the dictator/leader could be beyond the class that he represents is an illusion that unfortunately leads to actions in support of that illusion. And the forgetting of class in the analysis of real world situations becomes a source of fascist terror and repression, where everyone and anyone may be a potential enemy. And like in any fever of extreme hubris, enemies are produced everywhere. The postmodernist, deconstructionist critical climate that has in recent years attacked Marxism for making the working class the grand Subject of history (seeing it as a variant of bourgeois humanist ideology in which the 'working class' takes over from 'Man' or 'Human Nature' as the big historical mover), is itself the very apotheosis of denegation. But finding historical responsibility to exist nowhere it suddenly saw itself as licensed to blame anyone or anything and in any way for 'power' and the crises. Hence it became philosophical terrorism, or the terrorist philosophy. But class is a peculiar Subject if it is to be taken as one, for it has no center (or soul) and is populated by an ever-changing series of individuals. The concept of class is actually opposed to the idea of a historical Subject and represents Marxism’s great advance in theory on the standard bourgeois model of history.