Search results

The theological enemy -- Derrida, the Jew, the Arab -- De inimicitia -- Rosenzweig's war -- The enemy's two bodies (political theology, too) -- Muslims (Hegel, Freud, Auschwitz) -- Corpse of law : the Messiah and the Muslim

Abstract
Were one to trust the experts of "the risk society," and the countless volumes that take risk as their object, one might conclude that we have lost sight of danger. How secure is the distinction? This essay registers the discursive proliferation that has surrounded risk, as opposed to the poverty of theorizations of danger. Since Mary Douglas's famous 1966 contribution, it is as if the two terms were synonymous. Yet linguistic usage, along with other counterexamples, signal that we might learn from attending to danger in its specificity. The essay then turns to Sigmund Freud, that little-recognized thinker of danger. It was Freud who located loss—and the mother—at the center of what he strikingly called the "danger-situation."

This essay seeks to reframe the question of continuity (or discontinuity) between Orientalism and Islamophobia as, underlying the question, is an enduring conception of history as agentive, as a "making," a "construction," or a "production" ("Men make their own history …"). Turning our attention instead toward destructive power—distinct from repressive and coercive and from productive and enabling modes of power (Foucault, Said)—a distinct history, or anti-history, emerges, which necessitates a different lexicon. Political or subject formations might still be at stake, but another logic or illogic, a different politics may become visible where the main concern is not the making of world (Arendt), but its undoing; not the production of collectives or of individual subjects, but their destruction. Torture, as Jean Améry described it, is one such destruction of world. It may thus become possible to ask whether, between Orientalism and Islamophobia, the Muslims or Muselmänner of the Nazi camps were a "product," whether they were "made" into subjects. The essay builds on earlier reflections where elements of a lexicon and analytics of destruction were considered (Heidegger, Derrida), along with preliminary answers to the question: what is destruction? Or here: is there a history of destruction?

Tekst jest fragmentem książki The Jew, The Arab. A History of the Enemy poświęconej historii wrogości między Arabami i Żydami, a także historii związku tego konfliktu z kształtowaniem się zarówno tożsamości w Europie, jak i tożsamości samych Arabów i Żydów. Śledząc rozważania takich filozofów jak Carl Schmitt czy Jacques Derrida, autor stara się przedstawić mechanizmy odpowiedzialne za tworzenie różnic pierwotnych względem tożsamości i jednocześnie dla ich konstrukcji niezbędnych. Różnice te są niezbędne do tworzenia par pojęciowych takich jak "wnętrze–zewnętrze" czy "wróg–przyjaciel". Problem konstrukcji pojęcia wroga jako konstrukcji różnic i tożsamości zostaje tu zbadany na płaszczyźnie teologii, polityki i prawa, a także jako zagadnienie związane z różnicami etnicznymi oraz z pojęciem "Europy".

On n'a pas toujours reconnu l'Autre comme « religieux ». On ne s'est pas partout servi du latin pour le comprendre, le classifier, le gouverner. Comme la race, la notion de religion n'est qu'un chapitre dans l'histoire du savoir et du pouvoir, chapitre provisoire, éphémère, embarrassant. Race et religion ? Contre une histoire qui les maintient distinctes et séparées, contre une périodisation qui conçoit la religion comme un « fait » archaïque ou immémorial, cet article propose de recadrer religion et race (et donc, religion et politique) comme deux notions contemporaines et coconstituées, éléments désintégrés d'une laïcité qui ignore sa propre histoire.

In this article, I wish to ask about the dignity of weapons, the kind of elevated worth weapons appear to have acquired despite (or because) of their role in the production of indignity, a worth which, perhaps not as paradoxically as it may otherwise appear, constitutes (or rather de-constitutes) human dignity. I shall not take Kant as my guide, though, but the other K, namely, Franz Kafka.