Slavoj Zizek: On torture and terrorism
Slavoj Zizek: On torture and terrorism
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Are we in a war? Do we have an enemy?
SLAVOJ ZIZEK
, 23 May 2002
When Donald Rumsfeld designated the imprisoned Taliban fighters 'unlawful
combatants' (as opposed to 'regular' prisoners of war), he did not simply mean that
their criminal terrorist activity placed them outside the law: when an American citizen
commits a crime, even one as serious as murder, he remains a 'lawful criminal'. The
distinction between criminals and non-criminals has no relation to that between 'lawful'
citizens and the people referred to in France as the 'Sans Papiers'. Perhaps the
category of homo sacer, brought back into use by Giorgio Agamben in Homo Sacer:
Sovereign Power and Bare Life (1998), is more useful here. It designated, in ancient
Roman law, someone who could be killed with impunity and whose death had, for the
same reason, no sacrificial value. Today, as a term denoting exclusion, it can be seen
to apply not only to terrorists, but also to those who are on the receiving end of
humanitarian aid (Rwandans, Bosnians, Afghans), as well as to the Sans Papiers in
France and the inhabitants of the favelas in Brazil or the African American ghettoes in
the US.
Concentration camps and humanitarian refugee camps are, paradoxically, the two
faces, 'inhuman' and 'human', of one sociological matrix. Asked about the German
concentration camps in occupied Poland, 'Concentration Camp' Erhardt (in Lubitsch's
To Be or Not to Be) snaps back: 'We do the concentrating, and the Poles do the
camping.' A similar distinction applies to the Enron bankruptcy, which can be seen as
an ironic comment on the notion of a risk society. Thousands of employees who lost
their jobs and savings were certainly exposed to a risk, but without having any real
choice: what was risk to those in the know was blind fate to them. Those who did have
a sense of the risks, the top managers, also had a chance to intervene in the situation,
but chose instead to minimise the risk to themselves by cashing in their stocks and
options before the bankruptcy - actual risks and choices were thus nicely distributed.
In the risk society, in other words, some (the Enron managers) have the choices, while
others (the employees) take the risks.
The logic of homo sacer is clearly discernible in the way the Western media report from
the occupied West Bank: when the Israeli Army, in what Israel itself describes as a
'war' operation, attacks the Palestinian police and sets about systematically destroying
the Palestinian infrastructure, Palestinian resistance is cited as proof that we are
dealing with terrorists. This paradox is inscribed into the very notion of a 'war on
terror' - a strange war in which the enemy is criminalised if he defends himself and
returns fire with fire. Which brings me back to the 'unlawful combatant', who is neither
enemy soldier nor common criminal. The al-Qaida terrorists are not enemy soldiers,
nor are they simple criminals - the US rejected out of hand any notion that the WTC
attacks should be treated as apolitical criminal acts. In short, what is emerging in the
guise of the Terrorist on whom war is declared is the unlawful combatant, the political
Enemy excluded from the political arena.
This is another aspect of the new global order: we no longer have wars in the old
sense of a conflict between sovereign states in which certain rules apply (to do with
the treatment of prisoners, the prohibition of certain weapons etc). Two types of
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Slavoj Zizek: On torture and terrorism
conflict remain: struggles between groups of homo sacer - 'ethnic-religious conflicts'
which violate the rules of universal human rights, do not count as wars proper, and call
for a 'humanitarian pacifist' intervention on the part of the Western powers - and direct
attacks on the US or other representatives of the new global order, in which case,
again, we do not have wars proper, but merely 'unlawful combatants' resisting the
forces of universal order. In this second case, one cannot even imagine a neutral
humanitarian organisation like the Red Cross mediating between the warring parties,
organising an exchange of prisoners and so on, because one side in the conflict - the
US-dominated global force - has already assumed the role of the Red Cross, in that it
does not perceive itself as one of the warring sides, but as a mediating agent of peace
and global order, crushing rebellion and, simultaneously, providing humanitarian aid to
the 'local population'.
This weird 'coincidence of opposites' reached its peak when, a few months ago, Harald
Nesvik, a right-wing member of the Norwegian Parliament, proposed George W. Bush
and Tony Blair as candidates for the Nobel Peace Prize, citing their decisive role in the
'war on terror'. Thus the Orwellian motto 'War is Peace' finally becomes reality, and
military action against the Taliban can be presented as a way to guarantee the safe
delivery of humanitarian aid. We no longer have an opposition between war and
humanitarian aid: the same intervention can function at both levels simultaneously.
The toppling of the Taliban regime is presented as part of the strategy to help the
Afghan people oppressed by the Taliban; as Tony Blair said, we may have to bomb the
Taliban in order to secure food transportation and distribution. Perhaps the ultimate
image of the 'local population' as homo sacer is that of the American war plane flying
above Afghanistan: one can never be sure whether it will be dropping bombs or food
parcels.
This concept of homo sacer allows us to understand the numerous calls to rethink the
basic elements of contemporary notions of human dignity and freedom that have been
put out since 11 September. Exemplary here is Jonathan Alter's Newsweek article
'Time to Think about Torture' (5 November 2001), with the ominous subheading: 'It's a
new world, and survival may well require old techniques that seemed out of the
question.' After flirting with the Israeli idea of legitimising physical and psychological
torture in cases of extreme urgency (when we know a terrorist prisoner possesses
information which may save hundreds of lives), and 'neutral' statements like 'Some
torture clearly works,' it concludes:
"We can't legalise torture; it's contrary to American values. But even as we continue to
speak out against human-rights abuses around the world, we need to keep an open
mind about certain measures to fight terrorism, like court-sanctioned psychological
interrogation. And we'll have to think about transferring some suspects to our less
squeamish allies, even if that's hypocritical. Nobody said this was going to be pretty."
The obscenity of such statements is blatant. First, why single out the WTC attack as
justification? Have there not been more horrible crimes in other parts of the world in
recent years? Secondly, what is new about this idea? The CIA has been instructing its
Latin American and Third World military allies in the practice of torture for decades.
Even the 'liberal' argument cited by Alan Dershowitz is suspect: 'I'm not in favour of
torture, but if you're going to have it, it should damn well have court approval.' When,
taking this line a step further, Dershowitz suggests that torture in the 'ticking clock'
situation is not directed at the prisoner's rights as an accused person (the information
obtained will not be used in the trial against him, and the torture itself would not
formally count as punishment), the underlying premise is even more disturbing,
implying as it does that one should be allowed to torture people not as part of a
deserved punishment, but simply because they know something. Why not go further
still and legalise the torture of prisoners of war who may have information which could
save the lives of hundreds of our soldiers? If the choice is between Dershowitz's liberal
'honesty' and old-fashioned 'hypocrisy', we'd be better off sticking with 'hypocrisy'. I
can well imagine that, in a particular situation, confronted with the proverbial 'prisoner
who knows', whose words can save thousands, I might decide in favour of torture;
however, even (or, rather, precisely) in a case such as this, it is absolutely crucial that
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Slavoj Zizek: On torture and terrorism
one does not elevate this desperate choice into a universal principle: given the
unavoidable and brutal urgency of the moment, one should simply do it. Only in this
way, in the very prohibition against elevating what we have done into a universal
principle, do we retain a sense of guilt, an awareness of the inadmissibility of what we
have done.
In short, every authentic liberal should see these debates, these calls to 'keep an open
mind', as a sign that the terrorists are winning. And, in a way, essays like Alter's,
which do not openly advocate torture, but just introduce it as a legitimate topic of
debate, are even more dangerous than explicit endorsements. At this moment at least,
explicitly endorsing it would be rejected as too shocking, but the mere introduction of
torture as a legitimate topic allows us to court the idea while retaining a clear
conscience. ('Of course I am against torture, but who is hurt if we just discuss it?')
Admitting torture as a topic of debate changes the entire field, while outright advocacy
remains merely idiosyncratic. The idea that, once we let the genie out of the bottle,
torture can be kept within 'reasonable' bounds, is the worst liberal illusion, if only
because the 'ticking clock' example is deceptive: in the vast majority of cases torture is
not done in order to resolve a 'ticking clock' situation, but for quite different reasons
(to punish an enemy or to break him down psychologically, to terrorise a population
etc). Any consistent ethical stance has to reject such pragmatic-utilitarian reasoning.
Here's a simple thought experiment: imagine an Arab newspaper arguing the case for
torturing American prisoners; think of the explosion of comments about fundamentalist
barbarism and disrespect for human rights that would cause.
When, at the beginning of April, the Americans got hold of Abu Zubaydah, presumed to
be the second-in-command of al-Qaida, the question 'Should he be tortured?' was
openly discussed in the media. In a statement broadcast by NBC on 5 April, Rumsfeld
himself claimed that American lives were his first priority, not the human rights of a
high-ranking terrorist, and attacked journalists for displaying such concern for
Zubaydah's well-being, thus openly clearing the way for torture. Alan Dershowitz
presented an even sorrier spectacle. His reservations concerned two particular points:
1. Zubaydah's is not a clear case of the 'ticking bomb' situation, i.e. it is not proven
that he has the details of an imminent terrorist attack which could be prevented by
gaining access to his knowledge through torture;
2. torturing him would not yet be legally covered - for that to happen, one would first
have to engage in a public debate and then amend the US Constitution, while publicly
proclaiming the respects in which the US would no longer follow the Geneva
Convention regulating the treatment of enemy prisoners.
A notable precursor in this field of para-legal 'biopolitics', in which administrative
measures are gradually replacing the rule of law, was Alfredo Stroessner's regime in
Paraguay in the 1960s and 1970s, which took the logic of the state of exception to an
absurd, still unsurpassed extreme. Under Stroessner, Paraguay was - with regard to its
Constitutional order - a 'normal' parliamentary democracy with all freedoms
guaranteed; however, since, as Stroessner claimed, we were all living in a state of
emergency because of the worldwide struggle between freedom and Communism, the
full implementation of the Constitution was forever postponed and a permanent state
of emergency obtained. This state of emergency was suspended every four years for
one day only, election day, to legitimise the rule of Stroessner's Colorado Party with a
90 per cent majority worthy of his Communist opponents. The paradox is that the
state of emergency was the normal state, while 'normal' democratic freedom was the
briefly enacted exception. This weird regime anticipated some clearly perceptible
trends in our liberal-democratic societies in the aftermath of 11 September.
Is today's rhetoric not that of a global emergency in the fight against terrorism,
legitimising more and more suspensions of legal and other rights? The ominous aspect
of John Ashcroft's recent claim that 'terrorists use America's freedom as a weapon
against us' carries the obvious implication that we should limit our freedom in order to
defend ourselves. Such statements from top American officials, especially Rumsfeld
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Slavoj Zizek: On torture and terrorism
and Ashcroft, together with the explosive display of 'American patriotism' after 11
September, create the climate for what amounts to a state of emergency, with the
occasion it supplies for a potential suspension of rule of law, and the state's assertion
of its sovereignty without 'excessive' legal constraints. America is, after all, as
President Bush said immediately after 11 September, in a state of war. The problem is
that America is, precisely, not in a state of war, at least not in the conventional sense
of the term (for the large majority, daily life goes on, and war remains the exclusive
business of state agencies). With the distinction between a state of war and a state of
peace thus effectively blurred, we are entering a time in which a state of peace can at
the same time be a state of emergency.
Such paradoxes also provide the key to the way in which the liberal-totalitarian
emergency represented by the 'war on terror' relates to the authentic revolutionary
state of emergency, first articulated by St Paul in his reference to the 'end of time'.
When a state institution proclaims a state of emergency, it does so by definition as
part of a desperate strategy to avoid the true emergency and return to the 'normal
course of things'. It is, you will recall, a feature of all reactionary proclamations of a
'state of emergency' that they were directed against popular unrest ('confusion') and
presented as a resolve to restore normalcy. In Argentina, in Brazil, in Greece, in Chile,
in Turkey, the military who proclaimed a state of emergency did so in order to curb the
'chaos' of overall politicisation. In short, reactionary proclamations of a state of
emergency are in actuality a desperate defence against the real state of emergency.
There is a lesson to be learned here from Carl Schmitt. The division friend/enemy is
never just a recognition of factual difference. The enemy is by definition always (up to
a point) invisible: it cannot be directly recognised because it looks like one of us, which
is why the big problem and task of the political struggle is to provide/construct a
recognisable image of the enemy. (Jews are the enemy par excellence not because
they conceal their true image or contours but because there is ultimately nothing
behind their deceiving appearances. Jews lack the 'inner form' that pertains to any
proper national identity: they are a non-nation among nations, their national substance
resides precisely in a lack of substance, in a formless, infinite plasticity.) In short,
'enemy recognition' is always a performative procedure which brings to light/constructs
the enemy's 'true face'. Schmitt refers to the Kantian category Einbildungskraft, the
transcendental power of imagination: in order to recognise the enemy, one has to
'schematise' the logical figure of the Enemy, providing it with the concrete features
which will make it into an appropriate target of hatred and struggle.
After the collapse of the Communist states which provided the figure of the Cold War
Enemy, the Western imagination entered a decade of confusion and inefficiency,
looking for suitable schematisations of the Enemy, sliding from narco-cartel bosses to
the succession of warlords of so-called 'rogue states' (Saddam, Noriega, Aidid,
Milosevic) without stabilising itself in one central image; only with 11 September did
this imagination regain its power by constructing the image of bin Laden, the Islamic
fundamentalist, and al-Qaida, his 'invisible' network. What this means, furthermore, is
that our pluralistic and tolerant liberal democracies remain deeply Schmittean: they
continue to rely on political Einbildungskraft to provide them with the appropriate
figure to render visible the invisible Enemy. Far from suspending the binary logic
Friend/Enemy, the fact that the Enemy is defined as the fundamentalist opponent of
pluralistic tolerance merely adds a reflexive twist to it. This 'renormalisation' has
involved the figure of the Enemy undergoing a fundamental change: it is no longer the
Evil Empire, i.e. another territorial entity, but an illegal, secret, almost virtual
worldwide network in which lawlessness (criminality) coincides with 'fundamentalist'
ethico-religious fanaticism - and since this entity has no positive legal status, the new
configuration entails the end of international law which, at least from the onset of
modernity, regulated relations between states.
When the Enemy serves as the 'quilting point' (the Lacanian point de capiton) of our
ideological space, it is in order to unify the multitude of our actual political opponents.
Thus Stalinism in the 1930s constructed the agency of Imperialist Monopoly Capital to
prove that Fascists and Social Democrats ('Social Fascists') are 'twin brothers', the 'left
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Slavoj Zizek: On torture and terrorism
and right hand of monopoly capital'. Thus Nazism constructed the 'plutocratic-
Bolshevik plot' as the common agent threatening the welfare of the German nation.
Capitonnage is the operation by means of which we identify/construct a sole agency
that 'pulls the strings' behind a multitude of opponents. Exactly the same holds for
today's 'war on terror', in which the figure of the terrorist Enemy is also a condensation
of two opposed figures, the reactionary 'fundamentalist' and the Leftist resistant. The
title of Bruce Barcott's article in the New York Times Magazine on 7 April, 'From Tree-
Hugger to Terrorist', says it all: the real danger isn't from the Rightist fundamentalists
who were responsible for the Oklahoma bombing and, in all probability, for the anthrax
scare, but the Greens, who have never killed anyone. The ominous feature underlying
all these phenomena is the metaphoric universalisation of the signifier 'terror'. The
message of the latest American TV campaign against drugs is: 'When you buy drugs,
you provide money for the terrorists!' 'Terror' is thus elevated to become the hidden
point of equivalence between all social evils. How, then, are we to break out of this
predicament?
An epochal event took place in Israel in January and February: hundreds of reservists
refused to serve in the Occupied Territories. These refuseniks are not simply 'pacifists':
in their public proclamations, they are at pains to emphasise that they have done their
duty in fighting for Israel in the wars against the Arab states, in which some of them
were highly decorated. What they claim is that they cannot accept to fight 'in order to
dominate, expel, starve and humiliate an entire people'. Their claims are documented
by detailed descriptions of atrocities committed by the Israel Defence Forces, from the
killing of children to the destruction of Palestinian property. Here is how an IDF
sergeant, Gil Nemesh, reports on the 'nightmare reality in the territories' at the
protesters' website (
):
My friends - forcing an elderly man to disgrace himself, hurting children, abusing
people for fun, and later bragging about it, laughing about this terrible brutality. I am
not sure I still want to call them my friends ... They let themselves lose their
humanity, not out of pure viciousness, but because dealing with it in any other way is
too difficult.
Palestinians, and even Israeli Arabs (officially full citizens of Israel), are discriminated
against in the allocation of water, in the ownership of land and countless other aspects
of daily life. More important is the systematic micro-politics of psychological
humiliation: Palestinians are treated, essentially, as evil children who have to be
brought back to an honest life by stern discipline and punishment. Arafat, holed up and
isolated in three rooms in his Ramallah compound, was requested to stop the terror as
if he had full power over all Palestinians. There is a pragmatic paradox in the Israeli
treatment of the Palestinian Authority (attacking it militarily, while at the same time
requiring it to crack down on the terrorists in its own midst) by which the explicit
message (the injunction to stop the terror) is subverted by the very mode of delivery
of that message. Would it not be more honest to say that what is untenable about the
Palestinian situation is that the PA is being asked by the Israelis to 'resist us, so that
we can crush you'? In other words, what if the true aim of the present Israeli intrusion
into Palestinian territory is not to prevent future terrorist attacks, but effectively to rule
out any peaceful solution for the foreseeable " future?
For its part, the absurdity of the American view was perfectly rendered in a TV
comment by Newt Gingrich on 1 April: 'Since Arafat effectively is the head of a
terrorist organisation, we will have to depose him and replace him with a new
democratic leader who will be ready to make a deal with the state of Israel.' This isn't
an empty paradox. Hamid Karzai is already a 'democratic' leader externally imposed on
a people. Whenever Afghanistan's 'interim leader' appears in our media, he wears
clothes that cannot but appear as an attractive modernised version of traditional
Afghan attire (a woollen cap and pullover beneath a more modern coat etc), his figure
thus seeming to exemplify his mission, to combine modernisation with the best of
Afghan traditions - no wonder, since this attire was dreamed up by a top Western
designer. As such, Karzai is the best metaphor for the status of Afghanistan today.
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Slavoj Zizek: On torture and terrorism
What if there simply is no 'truly democratic' (in the American sense of the term)
Palestinian silent majority? What if a 'democratically elected new leader' is even more
anti-Israeli, which wouldn't be surprising since Israel has systematically applied the
logic of collective responsibility and punishment, destroying the houses of the entire
extended family of suspected terrorists? The point is not the cruel and arbitrary
treatment of the Palestinians in the Occupied Territories but that they are reduced to
the status of homo sacer, objects of disciplinary measures and/or even humanitarian
help, but not full citizens. And what the refuseniks have achieved is a
reconceptualisation of the Palestinian from homo sacer to 'neighbour': they treat
Palestinians not as 'equal full citizens', but as neighbours in the strict Judeo-Christian
sense. And there resides the difficult ethical test for contemporary Israelis: 'Love thy
neighbour' means 'Love the Palestinian,' or it means nothing at all.
This refusal, significantly downplayed by the major media, is an authentic ethical act.
It is here, in such acts, that, as Paul would have put it, there effectively are no longer
Jews or Palestinians, full members of the polity and homines sacri. One should be
unabashedly Platonic here: this 'No!' designates the miraculous moment in which
eternal Justice momentarily appears in the sphere of empirical reality. An awareness of
moments like this is the best antidote to the anti-semitic temptation often clearly
detectable among critics of Israeli politics.
Slavoj Zizek is a philosopher, a pyschoanalyst and a researcher at the University of
Llubljana. His books include The Ticklish Subject, Welcome to the Desert of the Real
and The Puppet and the Dwarf: The Perverse Core of Christianity.
Other articles by Slavoj Zizek on FromOccupiedPalestine:
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