Digressions&Impressions

A note on Le Guin and Fanon, and Carl Schmitt

"You are the same species, race, people, exactly the same in every way, with a slight selection towards color. If you brought up an asset child as an owner it would be an owner in every respect, and vice versa. So you spend your lives keeping up this tremendous division that doesn't exist. What I don't understand is how you can fail to see how appallingly wasteful it is. I don't mean economically!"

"In the war," he said, and then there was a very long pause; though Solly had a lot more to say, she waited, curious. "I was on Yeowe," he said, "you know, in the civil war."

That's where you got all those scars and dents, she thought; for however scrupulously she averted her eyes, it was impossible not to be familiar with his spare, onyx body by now, and she knew that in aiji he had to favor his left arm, which had a considerable chunk out of it just above the bicep.

“The slaves of the Colonies revolted, you know, some of them at first, then all of them. Nearly all. So we Army men there were all owners. We couldn’t send asset soldiers, they might defect. We were all veots and volunteers. Owners fighting assets. I was fighting my equals. I learned that pretty soon. Later on I learned I was fighting my superiors. They defeated us.”

“But that—” Solly said, and stopped; she did not know what to say.

“They defeated us from beginning to end,” he said. “Partly because my government didn’t understand that they could. That they fought better and harder and more intelligently and more bravely than we did.”

“Because they were fighting for their freedom!”

“Maybe so,” he said in his polite way.

"So ..."

"I wanted to tell you that I respect the people I fought."--Ursula K Le Guin (1994) "Forgiveness Day" in The Found and the Lost: The Collected Novellas of Ursula K. Le Guin, p. 287.

Because I am about to teach The Dispossessed (recall) again, I am trying to read all the books in the so-called Hainish cycle. "Forgiveness Day" is part of a series of interlocking stories (also collected in Four Ways to Forgiveness) about two planets, Werel and Yeowe. As the quoted passage suggests, Werel is a slave-owning society that treated Yeowe as a colony. In fact, Werel is an extremely patriarchical society, too, which treats its women in the way Athens treats theirs. 

The nameless 'he' is Rega Teyeo, a scion of a rural soldiering elite; conservative and stoic in his ways. He discovers that after the lost war on Yeowe his own people, who are modernizing and shifting toward commerce, have little use for him. So, he ends up a bodyguard to Solly, the alien (female) ambassador to his planet. In many ways it's a humiliating end to his public service. 

The quoted exchange takes place in the turning point in the relationship between Rega and Solly, which itself occurs when they think they are in mortal danger. I am not a big fan of "Forgiveness Day" because the writing is relatively clunky and the characters are relatively stereotypical. Because it's Le Guin, there is still plenty of food for thought about the nature of patriarchy and the interlocking forms of oppression and resistance it generates.

The quoted passage illustrates my complaint about the writing in the novella; that Teyeo respects the people he fought is already abundantly clear before Le Guin makes it explicit ("I wanted to tell you that I respect the people I fought."). 

Having said that, the passage did remind me (no surprise we are in the ambit of Hegel's master-slave dialectic) of a kind of symmetrical point in the famous first chapter of Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth that in the Manichean world colonialism, "At the individual level, violence is a cleansing force. It rids the colonized of their inferiority complex, of their passive and despairing attitude. It emboldens them, and restores their self-confidence." (p. 51)

Le Guin invites us into thinking that when you have been defeated on the battle-field it is difficult to deny the fundamental equality of your victor. She published "Forgiveness Day" when the Vietnam war was living memory. As Le Guin's novella shows, that individual experience on the battle-field need not transform wider social attitudes toward those thought inferior if that society can insulate itself, to some respect, from the military defeat. As a cursory glance at history shows, for every Rega Teyeo whose attitudes are transformed, there may be a lance corporal who prefers a dagger-stab legend. And in her story Le Guin, who is not naïve about such matters, suggests that individual character matters a lot to when a potentially existential experience becomes transformative.

Earlier in the story, after Rega has requested a discharge from his duty to protect Solly, his request is declined by his (and her) employer as follows:

"Love of god and country is like fire, a wonderful friend, a terrible enemy; only children play with fire. I don't like the situation. There's nobody here I can replace either of you with. Will you hang on a while longer?"

What's striking about the response is that it is couched in terms familiar from Schmitt (with its friend-enemy distinction) [recall here and here mediated via Popper]. This is interesting because the employer I have just quoted represents in Le Guin's story, and in the wider Hainish cycle, the Kantian federative ideal of the aspiration toward perpetual peace founded in human equality. And what Le Guin recognizes is that one can accept that in some circumstances the friend-enemy distinction is empirically adequate of people's ('childish') behavior even though one is oneself committed to a different ideal that is supposed to abolish or overcome it.

Now, in light of "Forgiveness Day" it is tempting to suggest that the friend-enemy distinction itself rests, if not conceptually then at least on the battle-field, in a kind of symmetry between the two foes. And this symmetry is itself ground in a kind of equality or mutual recognition. And so, one may be tempted to see in this observation a refutation of Schmitt.

As an aside, this is why 'wars' on cancer, drugs, and on poverty are such strange ways of speaking. (This is extended to the "courageous battle" one wages against a fatal disease.) They do not have the latent possibility of such mutual recognition. Norman MacDonald (who died of cancer) makes the point in a sketch here. His punchline is that, if you die, the cancer dies at exactly the same time in your body. “That, to me, is not a loss. That’s a draw.”

Be that as it may, of course, Schmitt anticipates the point and suggests that the political distinction is orthogonal to any moral interpretation of such mutual symmetry.  It is entirely compatible with his view that one can find one's enemies moral, even beautiful. (I doubt he would grant that they are superior, but it seems logically consistent.)

Now, it is important to Schmitt's analysis that these judgments involve collectivities not individuals (as it is in Le Guin and Fanon). And so there is an important sense that Schmitt can accommodate the point about symmetry or the transformative experience of the battle-field, as long as (and I find this ironic) it is understood in, and limited to, individual terms. 

And, in fact, one of the psychological, perhaps, social conditions for Rega's judgment, or maybe it's an effect of it, is his disenchantment with his own society. And while this turns out to be a pre-condition for his political understanding (he starts to see through slogans) it also leads him to withdraw from it emotionally, politically, and eventually physically. Part of the closing line of the story with him going into a kind of exile is (also) explicit about this: "he had lost his world." And so, while one can read the Hainish cycle as resting on a kind of faith that Schmittianism can be overcome, Le Guin recognizes that there are circumstances in which its logic is impeccable. 

 

 

 

Covid Diaries Continued...

Last week I conveyed progress about my symptoms  (recall here; here; here; here; here; here; and last week). Inevitably (one of my two favorite jokes, Q: “Are you happy?” A: “Yes, I am happy, aber glücklich bin ich nicht…”),* that was followed by a horrid week-end of headaches. (To be sure the headaches are not as painful as six to eight weeks ago.) It was horrid because now accompanied by a weird nausea. 

So, while I was receiving all kinds of encouraging and optimistic well wishes, I was in no mood to project optimism. Luckily the headaches dissipated again and the start of this week (Monday-Wednesday) was pain free, mildly marred by the by now familiar fatigue (and accompanying hunger). Unfortunately, the last two days the headaches have returned. In both cases I awake in the middle of the night confused why I can't fall back to sleep, eventually I realize that I have a strange pain (which has moved, again, now to the back of my skull). But despite my insomnia, I did not want to skip this update.

As it happens, and perhaps not unrelated, I was shocked and deeply saddened by the news that Dr. Rachelle Dyanne “Dara” Bascara has passed away. (HT: her colleague Nick Cowen). I feel frustrated that my illness prevents me from writing a detailed appreciation now. Heidi Howkins Lockwood has a touching memorial on her facebook page, but I am not sure it is public.

Long before #MeToo was mainstream, Dara was one of the people who bravely broke the conspiracy of silence in the philosophy profession about the predatory culture of sexual harassments that was being tolerated. The shock at what she revealed, as well as the fact that some senior philosophers also criticized her for her actions, convinced me that the magnificent work of (recall) feministphilosophers crew had not yet ended this culture in our time. Her example and our correspondence going back to 2014 nudged me into a series of digressions that have remained among the most read (and friendship ending) pieces I published. Her example got me thinking anew about how to conceptualize the nature of philosophical integrity, the coherence between a philosophical life and thought (which I also digressed upon). 

 

When my family moved to London we got to know each other a bit in person. She was able to combine genuine activism, intellectual profundity, humor, perseverance in the face of much hardship and indifference, and more than a touch of glamour. She always made a point to attend my talks.

 

She was proud of her PhD thesis "Towards a Unified Theory of Oppression," at Birkbeck, and in our last quick chat she told me she was pleased to have a position at Lincoln. But since the Covid lockdowns our interactions had been much reduced. I always silently assumed Dara would have the last laugh. Dara and her family had already overcome shocking circumstances, including (if I recall correctly) a lengthy cover-up of a brutal police murder of her father.+ My sincere condolences to her loved ones, friends, and colleagues.

 

This week we had a Dutch election, and surprisingly my post from four years ago on the topic has held up exceedingly well (recall here). This time around the election campaign was even more focused on values. And foreign affairs barely figured into the campaign. The historic collapse of Social democracy and Christian democracy continued, but now all left-wing parties collapsed along with them. (In fairness, none run an impressive campaign.) Simultaneously, as a group the rise of neo-fascist parties continued, despite splintering and scandal, apace.

 

Democratic left and neo-fascist right (some of which clearly not paying even lip-service to minimal norms of democracy anymore) both have a fifth of the seats in parliament now. (That's not unprecedented: for most of the 1930s Holland was ruled by Colijn, who was not just a war criminal, imperialist and racist, but practically invented 'austerity'; see also this shocking episode on the fate of Chinese living in Holland). But oddly -- it was a year of pandemic mismanagement, unprecedented riots, long simmering exposés on institutional racism and perversion of the rule of law in so-called toeslagenaffaire (childcare benefits scandal) that reached all the way to the most important state actors and prompted a merely symbolic government collapse-- the ruling bourgeois quasi-liberal center (divided in a cosmopolitan and a more conservative branch) came out strengthened and will surely rule again.

 

Since I am a bourgeois liberal the result is probably the best I could hope for given the circumstances. One problem with Dutch multi-party representative democracy is that, despite its many virtues, it lacks good rituals for cleansing of the stalls. Even when a resignation is not just symbolic, the consequence is that many failed politicians get kicked upstairs (into quasi-judicial roles in the council of state) or are parked (as part of a spoils system) as mayors (in Holland these are appointed) and so can still influence people's lives in non-trivial ways. The effect is to give the appearance that nothing changes. My spleen about the election was lessened because my excellent direct departmental colleagues in "Challenges" were all over the media (including TV) as expert commentators.

 

I am always amused that Marx and Engels thought that Holland was a likely place to initiate socialist revolution. I now think that if the Nazis had allowed the Dutch government to continue as before after defeat in May 1940, De Geer would have been reelected. 

 

Hopefully, with Spring sunshine, next week my digression will be more upbeat.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

On the Equality of Death

Therefore, how foolish it is to fear it, since men simply await that which is sure, but fear only that which is uncertain! Death is necessarily equitable and unavoidable/undefeatable. Who can complain when one is in the same boat that included everyone? The chief part of equity, however, is equality....[Mors necessitatem habet aequam et invictam: quis queri potest in ea condicione se esse in qua nemo non est? prima autem pars est aequitatis aequalita.]*

We do not fear death; we fear the thought of death. For death itself is always the same distance from us; wherefore, if it is to be feared at all, it is to be feared always. For what season of our life is exempt from death?
But what I really ought to fear is that you will hate this long letter worse than death itself; so I shall stop.--Seneca, Letter 30.

It's hard not to read Seneca's thirtieth letter, which tells us of his frequent visits to his dying friend Bassus Aufidius (the historian, who in the letter is revealed to have a fondness for Epicurus, and who also wrote an account of Cicero's death), who is "cheerful" [alacer animo] in the face of death, and not think of Adam Smith's obituary of the cheerfully dying Hume (who was also a celebrated historian) [see here for my scholarship; and Corsa's correction]. Smith also emphasized (and thereby amplified Hume's own claims) the utmost cheerfulness of his friend in the face of death. The comparison is non-trivial: Bassus Aufidius is said to be "living almost as if he had survived his own death" which is the peculiar rhetorical perspective of Hume's autobiography ("I am, or rather was (for that is the style I must now use in speaking of myself, which emboldens me the more to speak my sentiments)") and both Bassus Aufidius and Hume are praised for the "frankness" in discussing death.

As an aside, Seneca admits to feeling a certain amount of pleasure of witnessing this. In the letter, he even reveals a creepy tendency (anticipating Boswell's visit to Hume) of spying on Bassis Aufidius to see if his friend's cheerful self-presentation was really so constant: "I admit...that I have visited this dear friend of mine more frequently on many pretexts, but with the purpose of learning whether I should find him always the same."**

The main message of Seneca's letter is to offer en exemplar of philosophy's efficacy to promote strength of mind and lack of fear of death in the one dying. Amy Olberding (here; ignore the silly title not chosen by her) and Alexander Douglas (here) have recently reminded us to there is more to death than one's own end. There is also the losses one suffers in other people's deaths (especially loved ones). This loss prompts grief over a lost affective-conceptual world. And if I understand Olberding's philosophical (Confucian) advice such grief has to be acknowledged even if it, simultaneously, inaugurates a new uncertain world with un-charted territories (that will be the conceptual-emotional landscapes of other human connections) that arrives at a certain destination (death). Seneca does not emphasize the significance of grief (perhaps because in this letter he has not felt it yet), but he too (in this letter and recall elsewhere) explicitly understands living a philosophical life in terms of nautical metaphors that are all about navigating uncertainty.

The second key point (and I have quoted the passage at the top of this post) is that death is the ultimate ground for human equality. In fact, Seneca goes on to make the significant moral-political point that when equality is present nobody has grounds for complaint [queri].+ This is even clear in his joke about how fear of (boring) others may be more important than fear of (the thought of) death. One senses here why the recovery of Seneca's thought was so vital for early modern thinkers (perhaps even Hobbes [recall this post on Chris Brooke's book]).

In fact, the conceptual connection with Hobbes is non-trivial because Seneca goes on to claim "But who is not near death? It is ready for us in all places and at all times. Wherefore, if it is to be feared at all, it is to be feared always." This is not entirely true, of course, in a world of unequal resources and unequal protection against natural and political harm. While none of us can prevent our death (yet), we run unequal risks of it at any given time. But Seneca's claim is true in the state of nature. So not unlike, say, Spinoza later, Seneca seems to intimate that in reality the state of nature is never fully absent and will catch up with each of us eventually and, sometimes, quicker than we realize.

 

On that lovely note: this is my last post of the year. I am planning to take a slightly longer winter break from blogging than I usually do. I do so for two reasons: I need some time to catch up on a long list of outstanding academic obligations; and I feel that my blogging during the past few months showed signs of strain (oddly enough, the evidence for this is the fact that my posts were increasing in word-length and in time to compose.)

In conclusion, I thank this year's guest authors -- including Elizabeth Anderson (here), Daniel Hogendoorn (in a two-part series), Joel Katzav (who had quite a few guest posts this year), Joshua Miller (here), Lisa Shapiro (here), and Krist Vaesen (here) -- for trusting their ideas to this ephemeral site and you, my dear, critical reader, for your ongoing engagement with these digressions.

On Holiday Travel

Are you surprised, as if it were a novelty, that after such long travel and so many changes of scene you have not been able to shake off the gloom and heaviness of your mind? You need a change of soul rather than a change of scenery [Animum debes mutare, non caelum].--Seneca, Letters, 28.

Seneca is surely right that travel generally reinforces and even reveals existing tensions. I am confident there is a statistic somewhere that, on average, parents get into more squabbles shortly before they leave on family holiday, or during that holiday, than at other times (and not just correlated to casino-resort-induced-bankruptcy). More subtly, one need not be an elitist, to see that much tourism is a kind of temporary escapism that fails to address structural features that condition one's well-being. If the previous sentence strikes you as ridiculously highfalutin, I remind you of the return trip from Corfu on Ryan Air, when you are hung-over and a three year old is whining in a high pitch five rows ahead of you (and you suddenly recognize that's your child). To paraphrase Seneca, you fly along with yourself, and your relations.

For most of my post-PhD professional life, the Summer between academic years was when I got research & writing done. This led to inevitable work-balance dilemmas (yes, those are weasel words) during family trips. Rather than enjoying each other's company, my desire to get back to work, meet a  deadline, finish a revision (etc.) only led to irritation and/or (barely suppressed) conflict. The low point was probably my honeymoon -- I am not making this up -- where we not only brought our lovely son, but also the submission deadline of a pan-European grant proposal (of which I was PI), which required coordination between seven, slow-moving and fickle university bureaucracies (including at least one that had major corruption problems). Of course, we didn't get the grant (despite happy referees) due to structurally low acceptance rates.

But not bringing my laptop and not answering work-related emails (on my smart-phone) has improved my holiday experience and made me, I hope, more pleasant to be with during the holiday (compared to being with me on holiday previously). Of course, this does not address Seneca's point because for all I know I may be the same miserable human when I return from holiday. Not to mention the fact that upon return, I have a load of automatically generated emails reminding me of missed referee-request deadlines--I can't tell you how much I curse the influence of Nudge.

But lurking in Seneca's letter is a more important point. The very idea of holiday travel, presupposes that home is one place (or, if you are insanely wealthy senator, many places) and that one is a tourist/guest/visitor/refugee/stranger in the other places. This is clear from his admonition to live  one's life with the conviction that one's home-territory (or patrimony) is not a mere corner, one's birthplace, but the whole world [Cum hac persuasione vivendum est: 'non sum uni angulo natus, patria mea totus hic mundus est'].

Now, it is of course a familiar fact that Seneca is a cosmopolitan and that being a citizen of an expansive empire makes it easier to think of oneself as a citizen of the world. But, without denying the moral and political ways in which Seneca may also be such a cosmopolitan, the primary point here is the task to be at ease, as it were, with one's authentic self anywhere and nowhere. And this self is inauthentic both when it seeks novelty as a species of distraction elsewhere [this is the main example used by Seneca in this letter] as well as when it brings the comforts and trappings of one's home -- say, Dutch peanut-butter to French campgrounds -- to foreign places [these signify the fleeting attachments that make us servile and miserable (recall, for example, Letter 19). And the very act of tourism is a recognition of a transient way of being.

Luckily I am not, myself, much attached to holidays that promise spiritual renewal.

But my smugness disappears when I read Seneca's closing quote from Epicurus: one's health begins with the marking of one's waywardness or deviations from the true path. [Initium est salutis notitia peccati.]* To secure the first steps on our path of self-improvement, we must engage in honest self-scrutiny; we must, anticipating Adam Smith, split ourselves into different persons and become, as it were, prosecutors/judges (etc.) of ourselves. And such self-scrutiny is impossible if one is, as it were, in motion such that a selfie becomes a blur. 

To be sure, there is a improper way in all of this not just because of the strength of self-deception; Seneca warns against what he calls the glorification of vice [vitiis gloriantur]. I am, here, reminded of one of my favorite, Jewish jokes (thank you mom!):

During Yom Kippur services the Rabbi kneels and puts his forehead to the floor and says,
"Before you oh Lord, I am nothing."

The Cantor looks at him, kneels, puts his forehead to the floor, and says, "Before you oh Lord, I am nothing." Further back, a schlemiel is watching, goes in the middle of the isle, kneels and puts his forehead to the floor and wails,
"Before you oh Lord, I am nothing."

The Rabbi nudges the Cantor. "Look who thinks he's nothing!"

Maybe, next holiday, I'll try to stay away from Facebook.

What words, images, and principles are you willing to die for?

What words, images, and principles are you willing to die for?

That's the question (hereafter 'The Question') after last week's assassination of Charlie Hebdo's editorial staff and cartoonists posed to those of us -- e.g., journalists, academics, cartoonists, publicists, politicians, artists, etc. -- that live by peddling words and images to various audiences. It's not a new question; earlier in the week I called attention to the fate of Socrates, and it has been revived even in the relatively law-abiding, gun-poor environments of Northwestern Europe with the assasinations of politicians (e.g., Olof Palme; Pim Fortuyn), aspiring politicians (Utøya island massacre), and political commentators (Theo Van Gogh).* Such targets -- the victims of let's call them, 'politicized crimes' -- have in common with more ordinary terror attacks that they are 'soft,' that is, that they are relatively unprotected and that the moment of attack is relatively unexpected. But unlike ordinary victims of terror, the victims of politicized crimes draw attention to themselves by their active construction of the public sphere.+ The Question has become ever more acute with the rise of suicide bombers and other politicized killers that are very evidently willing to die for their principles.

The whole idea of legally protected freedom of expression is designed to diffuse The Question. If only the very brave or foolish participate in the public sphere then it is likely that all kinds of insights and positions never get articulated with the care and expertise required to guide the life of and constitute the polity. But this open public sphere requires not just a government to live by its own rules, but also capability and willingness to protect its own public sphere by having a monopoly on violence (and arms). While undoubtedly more can be done to secure safe participation in a public sphere, there is in governments a tendency for policing and security-measures overreach, which, paradoxically undermines an open public sphere and, indirectly, Liberal society.

An exclusive focus on security does not address the reasons why people may wish to kill (and die) for their beliefs. Political terrorists are not random natural facts; they are (if we leave aside the children among them) agents that are animated by a whole host of commitments, feelings, aspirations, and ideologies. That is to say, while undoubtedly there are many security-driven ways of preventing political attacks, these do nothing to undermine and may, perhaps, reinforce the experienced intentional world(s)** of would-be-politicized-killers.

This last point is especially important because many of the politicized killers are not strange, undercover invaders from foreign places. Rather they are home-grown; they have turned militant despite (perhaps because of) being quite familiar with the norms, aspirations, and even rewards of an arms-free public sphere. I leave it to the social scientists to help explain various social sources of militancy among a subset of those born in the European West. But part of the issue is also ideology. The nub of the matter is that evidently our Western normative and social commitments are  displaced at the level of individual psychology among part(s) of the population.

It's at this point of the analysis that nearly all commentators focus on the varieties of militant Islam, which quite evidently generates motivational power to some people to kill and die for its principles. As I noted a few days ago, Justin Smith, an eminent philosophical scholar who lives and works in Paris, has been among the most intelligent and interesting philosophical commentators on the assassination of the editorial staff of Charlie Hebdo. He puts his point as follows:

it's a great shame that political Islamism today perceives an equivalence between the symbolic and the real that make an act of vengeance of this scale seem like a fair trade. I recall that one horrible, amateur film ridiculing Mohammed a few years ago; they interviewed some kid in Egypt whose reaction was: 'Well, how would you feel if we made a movie making fun of, say, Abraham Lincoln?' He sincerely didn't understand that no one would care.

Today when the assassins were fleeing toward their getaway car, they shouted: On a vengé le prophète Mohammed. On a tué Charlie Hebdo.++ One cannot help but think: there is a double confusion here. Not just one but two fictional characters have been mistaken for real people. And twelve real people have been killed as a result.--Justin Smith.

Now unlike most commentators, in his blog posts Smith is clear that Charlie Hebdo offered not just a willingness to die (Stéphane Charbonnier has been quite explicit about this), but as Smith explains (here, here, here), an alternative, life-affirming even joyous and raunchy set of commitments that challenged many forms of powers and ideology (including Islamic ones) at the level of affect as much as reason.

Even so, the passage quoted from Smith contains some missteps. Smith's "political Islam" fails to do justice to the Islamic political movements (inside and outside of Europe) that do not promote or condone (even tacitly) the killing of  folk in the European public sphere. Given that there are political movements in Europe that are extremely intolerant/hostile toward all of Islam (and Smith is clearly no fan of these movements), Smith's wording is unfortunate.

More important, there is, in fact, no opposition between the "symbolic and the real." (There is an opposition between the real and the illusory.) In particular, when we are dealing with social reality, the symbolic and the real can coincide, but need not. This connects to another, more serious misstep in Smith's analysis. Muḥammad is not a fictional character. He was a historical figure who (among other social scripts (recall)) played political and religious role(s) in his own life and thereafter. The symbolic is constituted (albeit non-exhaustively) by such roles. (It is not impossible that a fictional Muhammad could also play such symbolic roles, but that's not my concern.) The symbolic matters here because it's what animates or gives meaning to the experienced intentional world of individuals, including the would-be-killers and those that sympathize with them.

So Smith is absolutely right that the "Egyptian kid" in his example fails to understand the symbolic organization and commitments of contemporary Americans. Having said that, plenty of Americans get very upset about flag-burning; so Smith's Egyptian kid could have found a better example for his case.  The point here is not that every society has symbols it is touchy about (although it is not irrelevant); rather it misses the point to say about such a symbol, 'oh well, it's just fictional.'

Furthermore, Smith is right to note (and we can nod to Nietzsche's analysis of Lex Talionis) that in revenge-killing there is an element of trade that restores a balance within a community. Despite the fact that the killers of Charlie Hebdo's editorial staff and cartoonists do not conform to and violently transgress the laws of the land, their words, if accurately quoted, suggests that they, too, recognize, perhaps implicitly, that they belong to a community in which their victims play a symbolic (even sacrificial) role.

Much to my surprise Smith insists that contemporary Jihadists "are entirely unable to interpret the Charlie Hebdo cartoons." (His ire is also directed at professors at American universities, but I will ignore them here.) This strikes me as confused  about the nature of the symbolic. Images play multiple roles and functions in different symbolic systems/organisations sometimes simultaneously--some philosophers, of course, cannot abide multiplicity of meaning, but if they allow such a possibility cartoons would be on the very short-list. There is no true interpretation of the symbolic. (To avoid confusion: there are symbolic systems, of course, that are governed by truth.) While we can allow that the Jihadists failed to understand all the intended complexities of the Charlie Hebdo cartoons, they discerned in some of these images satire (and worse) of their commitments.+++

Finally, it's possible, of course, that one can die because of a mistaken interpretation of one's words, images, and principles. That's the stuff (with a nod to Oedipus) of tragedy. If one participates in the public sphere with highly affective images and words that mistake is probably not unexpected. It is also possible -- I think this happened to Stéphane Charbonnier -- that one dies both for a principle one embraces and for a hostile interpretation of one's work that is offered from a vantage point one does not share.

(here, here, here), including satire.) a genuine alternative, life-affirming joyous even raunchy set of of commitments one that was as challenging to Islam as it was to many other ideologies and political powers.

Can one be funny in analytical philosophy?

IT is sometimes said that the world might itself be vague. Rather than vagueness being a deficiency in our mode of describing the world, it would then be a necessary feature of any true description of it. It is also said that amongst the statements which may not have a determinate truth value as a result of their vagueness are identity statements. Combining these two views we would arrive at the idea that the world might contain certain objects about which it is a fact that they have fuzzy boundaries. --Gareth Evans

"Is Gareth Evans (the philosopher) funny?" I ask myself in reflecting on his famous "Can There Be Vague Objects?"*

By this I do not mean the kind of funny in which one uses a principle denied by the opponent as an undisputed premise in one's argument against them.** This kind of funny is generally an expression of situational power--one can assert and get away with it. It is a byproduct that accompanies the clever in a certain milieu.

I also do not mean the kind of funny that presents itself as rigor, yet does not axiomatize or stipulate the rules of the sentential operator.*** In fairness to Evans, there is funniness here because Evans might respond that this problem, while real, is really his unnamed opponent's problem. It's not clear that the principled metaphysical indeterminatist has a right to a definite logic of vagueness.

Benjamin's Angel in the Eye of the Needle

“The state of emergency” [Ausnahmezustand] in which we live is the rule.--Walter Benjamin (VIII)

Two hunters are out in the woods when one of them collapses. He doesn't seem to be breathing and his eyes are glazed. The other guy whips out his phone and calls the emergency services. He gasps, "My friend is dead! What can I do?" The operator says "Calm down. I can help. First, let's make sure he's dead." There is a silence, then a gun shot is heard. Back on the phone, the guy says "OK, now what?"--World's Funniest Joke

Upon dwelling lately on "On the Concept of History," I was impressed by the fact that not unlike Hayek, Benjamin's treats Fascism as a natural development out of (vulgar) Marxism and Social Democracy (see paragraph XI). That is to say, they both diagnose a kind of social-conceptual-necessity that can hold between a particular set of beliefs (and social institutions) at one point and later social outcomes.** They both take care to distinguish this particular necessitating relationship from a cruder and more general determinism and progressivism. Moreover, they are both (as good readers of Nietzsche and Weber) aware of the suppressed theological commitments that animate the very idea of living with faith in science, and tempt the reader into a theological critique of these commitments. 

A crucial part of Benjamin's strategy is to offer an alternative to what he calls "homogeneous and empty time" (13ff). For, echoing Bergson, he rightly notes, despite the best efforts of the collaborating bureaucrats and some misguided philosophers of science, who impose homogeneous time on us, this need not be experienced time. That is to move momentarily to a metaphysical-Spinozistic register that articulates one version of Benjamin's general position: something need not be past as long as its effects can be made to endure (Ethics 1p36; recall here, here). In practice, this entails -- as Benjamin stresses -- that at any given moment our world is largely the product of victor's justice.

Benjamin's position is a healthy alternative to the ruling dogma's of today's cult of contingency embraced by the quietist followers of Foucault and Wittgenstein that dominates our era's historical reflection. On this today's historians are, despite mutual contempt, at one with the randomness-embracing mathematical, social scientists. By this I do not just mean that they (falsely) disown complicity in ruling ideology (although certainly there is that); they forsake part of their task, that is to generate the seeds of alternative futures.