THE ROVING
EYE Deconstructing the war on
terror By Pepe Escobar
"Bush speaks of 'war', but he is in fact
incapable of identifying the enemy against whom he
declares that he has declared war." - Jacques Derrida,
September 2001
Jacques Derrida, the master
of the concept of "deconstruction", died last Friday
from cancer at 74. He was the last survivor of the
fabulous generation of 1960s French thinkers - perhaps
not as popular as Michel Foucault, Jacques Lacan, Roland
Barthes or Gilles Deleuze, but certainly, in these last
few decades, the most influential, the most translated
and the most widely read of all French philosophers who
were discovered, absorbed and even transformed by the
great US universities. Derrida was an American academic
equivalent of U2's Bono. Even American talk-show hosts
and news anchors incorporated "deconstruction" into
their vocabulary.
Derrida had become the
enfant terrible of "continental philosophy" as
early as in 1966, at Johns Hopkins University in
Baltimore. But he really exploded in the United States
in 1976, when his De la Grammatologie was
translated into English. In the 1980s, Derrida ruled the
golden triangle of Johns Hopkins, Cornell and Yale. In
the 1990s, he conquered New York University and
University of California-Irvine - which now holds his
archives. An extraordinarily kind, accessible and
tolerant man, Derrida was sometimes incensed at how his
complex concepts were constantly deformed in very
naif ways. But usually he declared himself
"fascinated" by the whole process.
To
"deconstruct" is to criticize acutely what's occult
behind words, to take an idea (let's say "war on
terror"), an institution or a given value and understand
its mechanisms: it's something like a guerrilla attack
against a dominant system of thought. Derrida from the
beginning had a privileged point of view as far as
deconstruction was concerned: he was a French Jew born
in Algeria who grew up at the borders of multiple
territories - Christianity and Judaism, Islam and
Judaism, Europe and Africa, France and its colonial
empire, and the sea and the desert for that matter. So
no wonder that, all along his extremely challenging and
fascinating work, each word inevitably branches out into
a network of textual and historical connections. And
every time Derrida went political, he was shedding light
on these hidden connections. Derrida was arguably the
best and the brightest when it came to demystifying the
jungle of "collateral damage", "smart bombs" and
assorted euphemisms regurgitated non-stop by governments
and corporate media.
Two equally problematic
words For an international readership, at this
crucial historical juncture, few samples of Derrida in
action can be more essential than Philosophy in a
Time of Terror: Dialogues with Jurgen Habermas and
Jacques Derrida by Giovanna Borradori (University of
Chicago Press, 2003; see the ATol review The two gentlemen of Europe, May
15). Here we have an Italian professor of
philosophy at Vassar College talking to the two greatest
living (at the time) voices of European philosophical
tradition, the German Jurgen Habermas and the French
Jacques Derrida, in New York, only a few weeks after
September 11, 2001.
This is the kind of terror
talk you won't get on Fox News - or from the faux
cowboy mouths of Bush/Cheney. Their approaches may be
different, but both Habermas and Derrida go to the heart
of the matter, questioning on what basis terrorism can
claim a political content - and thus be separated from
ordinary crime; whether there can be state terrorism;
whether terrorism can be sharply distinguished from war;
and whether a state (or coalition, be it of the willing
or of the coerced) can declare a war on something other
than a political entity.
In a nutshell, the new
terror spin according to the administration of US
President George W Bush goes something like this. Bush
says he is the only tough guy available to prosecute the
"war on terror". On the other hand, he blames the Joint
Chiefs of Staff for any disastrous (re: Iraq) policy
decisions. Vice President Richard Cheney says that only
Bush/Cheney can lead the "war on terror" to its
conclusion. He also says that Democratic presidential
contender John Kerry simply doesn't understand what the
war is all about.
A cursory look both at the
Bush administration's record and the neo-con agenda for
the future reveals instead that Bush/Cheney are using
September 11 as an excuse to attack weak states that
interfere with an extreme right-wing world view and with
US corporate interests as well: Iraq was the first
target, Syria and Iran will be the next. The Bush/Cheney
scare of "terrorist groups" having access to nuclear
weapons is nonsense: "terrorist groups" don't have
access to technology capable of enriching uranium, and
no government would give nuclear technology to a
terrorist group. Moreover, no "war on terror" rhetoric
may disguise the fact that Osama bin Laden and Ayman
al-Zawahiri have not been captured.
The
complexity of Derrida's deconstruction of terrorism
cannot be reduced to a mere sound bite. Here are just a
few highlights - for the sake of Asia Times Online
readers fed up with a non-stop barrage of spinning.
Derrida lasers on the fact that "terrorism" can never be
a self-evident concept - as the Bush administration
spins it. Then he goes on to deconstruct "two equally
problematic words", "war" and "terrorism". Terror works
both ways: "Whether we are talking about Iraq,
Afghanistan, or even Palestine, the 'bombs' will never
be 'smart' enough to prevent the victims (military
and/or civilian, another distinction that has become
less and less reliable) from responding, either in
person or by proxy, with what will then be easy for them
to present as legitimate reprisals or counter-terrorism.
And so on ad infinitum ..."
For Derrida "the
terrorists" are, in a sense, us: "Those called
'terrorists' are not 'others', an absolute other whom
we, as 'Westerners', can no longer understand. We must
not forget that they were often recruited, trained, and
even armed, and for a long time, in various Western ways
by a Western world that itself, in the course of its
ancient as well as very recent history, invented the
word, the techniques, and the 'politics' of
'terrorism'."
So what kind of war is this? It
is, says Derrida, "a strange 'war' without war. It often
takes the form, at least on the surface, of a
confrontation between two groups with a strong religious
identification. On the one side, the only great
European-style 'democratic' power in the world that
still has at once the death penalty in its judicial
system and, despite the separation in principle between
church and state, a fundamental biblical (and primarily
Christian) reference in its official political discourse
and the discourse of its political leaders: 'God Bless
America', the reference to 'evildoers' or to the 'axis
of evil', and the first rallying cry (which was later
retracted) of 'infinite justice', would be but a few
signs among so many others. And facing them, on the
other side, an 'enemy' that identifies itself as
Islamic, Islamic extremist or fundamentalist, even if
this does not necessarily represent authentic Islam and
all Muslims are far from identifying with it. No more,
in fact, than all Christians in the world identify with
the United States' fundamentally Christian profession of
faith."
This leaves us, says Derrida, with "a
confrontation between two political theologies, both,
strangely enough, issuing out of the same stock or
common soil of what I would call an 'Abrahamic'
revelation".
Derrida emphatically deplores the
absence of dialogue between the West and Islam: "In the
course of the last few centuries, whose history would
have to be carefully re-examined (the absence of an
Enlightenment age, colonization, imperialism, and so
on), several factors have contributed to the
geopolitical situation whose effects we are feeling
today, beginning with the paradox of a marginalization
and an impoverishment whose rhythm is proportional to
demographic growth. These populations are not only
deprived of access to what we call democracy ... but are
even dispossessed of the so-called natural riches of the
land, oil in Saudi Arabia, for example, or in Iraq, or
even in Algeria, gold in South Africa, and so many other
natural resources elsewhere ... These 'natural' riches
are in fact the only non-virtualizable and
non-deterritorializable goods left today: they are the
cause of many of the phenomena we have been discussing.
With all these victims of supposed globalization,
dialogue (at once verbal and peaceful) is not taking
place. Recourse to the worst violence is thus often
presented as the only 'response' to a 'deaf ear'. There
are countless examples of this in recent history, well
before 'September 11'. This is the logic put forward by
all terrorisms involved in a struggle for freedom.
[Nelson] Mandela explains quite well how his party,
after years of non-violent struggle and faced with a
complete refusal of dialogue, resigned itself to having
to take up arms. The distinction between civilian,
military, and police is thus no longer pertinent."
This analysis leads Derrida to conclude that the
"terrorism of the 'September 11' sort (wealthy,
hypersophisticated, telecommunicative, anonymous, and
without an assignable state)" happened as a direct
consequence of a global dialogue not taking place.
There's simply no meaningful dialogue between the rich
and poor world: "It is a simulacrum, a rhetorical
artifice or weapon that dissimulates a growing
imbalance, a new opacity, a garrulous and
hypermediatized non-communication, a tremendous
accumulation of wealth, means of production,
teletechnologies, and sophisticated military weapons,
and the appropriation of all these powers by a small
number of states or international corporations."
And it gets worse Talking about the
relation among terror, terrorism and territory, Derrida
worries that this abyss of non-communication may lead to
even greater, and invisible, dangers: "The relationship
between earth, terra, territory, and terror has
changed, and it is necessary to know that this is
because of knowledge, that is, because of technoscience
... In this regard, when compared to the possibilities
for destruction and chaotic disorder that are in
reserve, for the future, in the computerized networks of
the world, 'September 11' is still part of the archaic
theater of violence aimed at striking the imagination.
One will be able to do even worse tomorrow, invisibly,
in silence, more quickly and without any bloodshed, by
attacking the computer and informational networks on
which the entire life ... of the greatest power on earth
depends."
Meanwhile, we are squeezed between
"the two supposed war leaders, the two metonymies, 'bin
Laden' and 'Bush', and the war of images and of
discourses ... at an ever quickening pace over the
airwaves, dissimulating and deflecting more and more
quickly the truth that it reveals, accelerating the
movement that substitutes dissimulation for revelation -
and vice-versa" (one thinks about the vast Bush/Cheney
disinformation campaign before, during and after the
invasion of Iraq).
When "Bush and his associates
blame 'the axis of evil', we ought both to smile at and
denounce the religious connotations, the childish
stratagems, the obscurantist mystifications of this
inflated rhetoric".
Derrida always comes back to
something absolutely crucial: the world order is based
on the reliability and credibility of US power. So by
exposing the fragility of the superpower, September 11
exposed the fragility of the world order itself. Before
he died, he interpreted September 11 as in fact the
implosive finale of the Cold War, killed by its own
contradictions. But he went one step further when he
talked about the "vicious circle of repression": by
declaring a war against terrorism, the US has engendered
a war against itself.
Derrida's greatest fears
were crystallized in his suspicion that terrorism in the
near future will have nothing to do with actual attacks
against actual places, like September 11, the Madrid
bombings or the daily bombings in Iraq: it will be
virtual, and it will erase all remnants of the
distinction between terrorism and war and even between
war and peace: "Nanotechnologies of all sorts are so
much more powerful and invisible, uncontrollable,
capable of creeping in everywhere. They are the
micrological rivals of microbes and bacteria. Yet our
unconscious is already aware of this; it already knows
it, and that's what's scary." Derrida was in fact
rephrasing Oscar Wilde ("each man kills the thing he
loves"): we are already dreaming and engendering the
forms of our own destruction.
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