by Jean-Luc Nancy
We would rather remain silent. In the face of the horror and emotion. In
the face of the effects of proximity – since what happened in Paris has been
happening constantly and for a long time in Bombay, Beyrouth, Kaboul, New
York, Madrid, Casablanca, Algiers, Amman, Karachi, Tunis, Mossoul, etc. etc. In
the face of the misery of our indignation (justified but hollow) or of our
protestations ( “One should…” ” One only has to…”) — and the gravity of
perspectives (control, retaliation…).
We would rather remain silent also because of the
acute consciousness that takes hold of us as soon as we imagine the
inextricable complexity of the origins, causes, and progression of ostensibly
entangled processes, themselves caught in the global conjuncture of massive
economical and geopolitical confrontations. From the point of view of
reflection, the situation doesn’t call for a simple ”One only
has to…”.
Yet, for those very reasons, we ought to try to speak.
Not only because emotion demands it, but also and especially because the
strength [puissance]
of this emotion stands for something else than the scale of the attacks. This
scale is nonetheless noteworthy — all this coordination, the choice of time and
location, tell something of the long work that went into preliminary planning.
But there is more to it: it’s the scale of a long sequence that started 25
years ago (to keep within the limits of the immediately perceptible) in the
Algeria of the 1990s with the foundation of the G.I.A. [Armed Islamic Group].
Twenty-five years, a generation, this is not merely a symbolic
calculation. It means that a process is deploying itself, that
a maturation is taking place, that an experience becomes characteristic.
Outlines, tonalities, dispositions are being set. Nothing permanent nor
definitive, of course, but nonetheless a certain configuration or at least
a kind of turn, the energy of an inflexion, even of an impulsion.
The evening of November 13, 2015 in Paris is loaded
with a force that makes this energy manifest. It is also why this energy
appears to involve the perspective either of a decisive turn or of the
beginning of a new generation: 25 years in front of us to reach another
stage or to cross another threshold. Many of those who were gunned down in this
massacre were barely over 25 years of age. Deceased or wounded, they enter in
this threatening obscurity.
The force at stake here does not stem, in what
constitutes it essentially, from the resources of what is called
“fundamentalism” or “fanaticism”. Certainly, active, vindictive and aggressive
fundamentalism — be it Islamic (Sunni or Shiite), Catholic, Protestant,
Orthodox, Jewish, Hindu (even exceptionally Buddhist) — characterizes for a significant
part the last 25 years. But how can one ignore the fact that this
fundamentalism is a response to what can be called the economical
fundamentalism inaugurated at the end of the bipolar separation and the
extension of a “globalization” that had already been identified and named
almost two generations ago (McLuhan’s “global village” dates back to 1967)? How
not to notice also the haste in which the experience of totalitarianisms was
erased? As if representative democracy, along with technical and social
progress, could adequately respond to the concerns raised a long time ago
by modern nihilism, as well as by the civilizational “discontent” mentioned by
Freud in 1930?
Liberal fundamentalism affirms the fundamental
characteristic of a law presumed to be natural regarding unlimited
competitive production, equally unlimited technical expansion and above all the
reduction of any other kind of rights (a reduction that also tends to be
unlimited), especially political rights and above all rights that claim to
regulate the natural law according to the specific requirements of
a country, of a people, and of a form of shared existence [existence commune]. The State
said to be “of law” [État de droit]
represents in a paradoxical way a political form deprived of horizon
and consistency, at once necessary and running out of life. Our productive and
naturalistic humanism is dissolving, opening the door to demons: inhuman,
super-human, all too human…
Religious fundamentalism cannot be limited to the
observance of a given doctrine and immutable rites, without interferences
from the socio-political context. When it wants to be active in this context,
it presents a double postulate. On the one hand, it is about finding the
power of a mystical foundation. On the other hand, it is a question
of allowing this force to coexist alongside technical and economic interests in
order to participate in their network of power. The most eloquent symptom of
this undertaking is the adaptation of the banking system to Islamic law – and
reciprocally. Another symptom is the war of religions. The Iranian Revolution
of 1979, which marked the awakening of a political Islam, also brought
onto this terrain the major division internal to Islam. As with those of
ancient Europe, the wars of religions respond to social and political
confrontations. If one were to simplify, one could say that the actual conflicts
in Middle East – aside from the one tied to Israel — all stem from the failure
or the corruption of the allegedly progressive attempts of the postcolonial
revolutions (Egypt, Syria, Iraq, Algeria).
This post-colonization was at times hampered, and at
times highjacked by the interests of the ex-colonizers as well as by the power
relationship between the ex-colonialized. To this context was added an
economic situation troubled by an increase in energy demands and by the
transformation of the monetary and financial system. In other words, since two
or three generations the world configuration is involved in a major
transformation of which the troubles agitating the Middle Eastern and European
spaces are but one aspect. The others are located in the transformation of Asia
and Latin America. For those reasons, fanaticism is able to recruit beyond the
space that one too often restricts to the “Arab-Muslim” world.
As for the Mediterranean Muslim world, and here again
at the cost of an oversimplification, it must be recognized that the Shia-Sunni
opposition (which encompass the difference between Persian and Arabic culture
as well) translates into an important difference in the configuration of the
relationship between religion and society. The model of a complete
religious impregnation of existence, culture and rights claimed by Sunni
fundamentalism remains partially foreign to the spirit of Shia messianism (that
being said, without forgetting the actual behaviour of the Iranian State). This
is not without consequences for the relationship with European and American
countries.
This all too broad outline merely suggest the
considerable weight of the facts that a lucid reflection must face.
Indeed, this weight is precisely what triggers fanaticisms that are as violent
and short-sighted as those we are currently witnessing. It is when a world
comes undone that follies are exacerbated. It is within mutations that lethal
possibilities stem forth. The Spanish Inquisition or the fanaticisms of the
Protestant Reformation, as many others (starting with those of the first
Christianism or Christianisms) are probably always correlated to such critical
situations, be they social or existential.
This renewed gravity and exasperation certainly do not
work in favour of any resolution. At the very least we can and we must
acknowledge the fact that we are not simply facing the sudden outburst of some
barbaric event that would have randomly befallen us, as if from some unknown
sky. We are facing a historical condition, a condition of our history — that
of an “Occident” transformed into a world machine frightened by its own speed.
It would be too easy to condemn this history, just as
it would be to try to justify it. But we cannot not ask ourselves whether it is
possible to save this history from the deadlock it has now reached — be it a nihilistic,
capitalistic, or Islamist one, or all of these at the same time.
Speaking about the sack of Rome by Alaric, while he
was in Hippo where Roman refugees where flowing, Augustine said: “from the
flesh that is being oppressed, the spirit must rise”.1 Where to find the spirit today?
1. “premitur caro, liquescat spiritus” Sermon 296, 6 (PL 38: 1355).
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