"Not the exception, but the rule": Islamism, liberalism, fanaticism and a few other things for pro-war liberals to chew on. posted by Richard Seymour

Walter Benjamin wrote at an imcomparably darker and graver moment in history:

The current amazement that the things we are experiencing are ‘still’ possible in the twentieth century is not philosophical. This amazement is not the beginning of knowledge—unless it is the knowledge that the view of history which gives rise to it is untenable.

A while ago, while deriding some media 'criticism' of Bush for its timidity and ersatz 'satire', I suggested that a more important point was that Bush was there negotiating with a horrendous dictator, hoping to augment the profits of US capital etc. Now, mark suggested in the comments boxes that this was "a liberal beat-up", which is to say that it refused the real point that the Chinese premiere ought to have been ashamed of meeting Bush. I liked it then, and I like it now. Quite apart from how I intended my own suggestion, it is worth reflecting on the general tendency among liberals to criticise leading Western politicians for working with murderers, not for being murderers; for excusing torturers, rather than being torturers; for remaining silent on genocidaires rather than being genocidaires.

But the Bush regime does export torture, and murder, and it does happen to murder even those who are within the sacrosanct space of liberal democracy. Yes, even citizens of The Best Democracy in the World can buy it provided there is a justificatory strategy available - in the case of New Orleans, or John Africa, or Mumia, it's because they're black; in the case of Waco, Randy Weaver etc, it's because they're the wrong kind of white. The discursive strategies for demonising poor whites is very similar to those used against blacks - consider the common term 'rednecks', which generally evokes gun-toting, reactionary, anti-intellectual ignorance. The term emerged to describe white farm-workers who didn't tan very well while out chopping, planting and harvesting in the sun all day. It was a disdainful, dehumanising, class-supremacist term - and so it remains, yet somehow it has been appropriated by the liberal-left.

By such means, the murderous behaviour of the West is somehow rendered different, better, perhaps less egregious than that which persists in its Oriental counterpart. It is a simple matter of fact that the US killed more people in Vietnam than Saddam Hussein did in Iran - does ITN ever mention this? Does even the liberal press? The US killed more people in Nicaragua through its counterinsurgency in El Salvador than Milosevic did in Kosovo. Aristide, for his part, wasn't inclined to murder anyone, while both France and the United States currently kill Haitians under a UN mandate. Yet Aristide is the one whose reputation is subtly defamed so that the US liberal press can discuss the ousting of a democratically elected leader by US marines with equanimity. As soon as the West is perpetrating horrendous violence, euphemisms abound freely, are celebrated, indulged, ruthlessly enforced.

Now we have a racist mytheme, which is about the Fanaticism of Others. They are unEnlightened nutters, pre-modern medievalists, pre-rational, reverential and status-oriented. Aside from which, we might add all sorts of other Orientalist fantasies: they are opulent, lazy, cunning, capable only of a sinister kind of humour. Yet, this isn't altogether new. As rising philosophical star Alberto Toscano explains in his paper On Fanaticism:

The equation of egalitarian and primary communist politics under the rubric of fanaticism is hardly a recent fact. Edmund Burke famously spoke of an ‘epidemical fanaticism’, which, in continuity with the peasant depredations, or levellings, of the Anabaptists of Munster, afflicted an anti-clerical revolutionary France – asking ‘to what country in Europe did not the progress of their fury furnish cause for alarm? ... [T]he reproach of fanaticism, and its oppositional pairing with civil society, runs throughout modernity – featuring in such works as Leibniz’s Theodicy, Voltaire’s Muhammad, or Fanaticism and more recently, John Paul II’s Centesimus annus.

If the fanaticism of the Jacobins made the French revolution a success, so the chiliastic, often religious fervour of the Motley Crews and their milieu pushed the American Revolution and the anti-slavery campaigns to their peak. Yet fanaticism is a synonym for what is illiberal, dogmatic, counter-democratic, unrepresentative etc etc. And it is here that it becomes apparent that the mytheme is a case of pure projection. The liberal West is racialising a crisis that is rooted in Enlightenment and modernity (like capitalism, the Enlightenment produces its own grave-diggers). Just as the Islamists are a product of modernity, and reject the traditionalist ulama, so the Iranian Republic derives much of its mode of organisation and discourse from the French Revolution. Reducing all this to 'fanaticism' is at best an abdication of the responsibility to analyse, and at worst racialising essentialism. Worth noting in connection with this Toscano's superb reply to the authors of a recent attack on Foucault over the Iranian revolution:

Foucault tries to resist and provoke what he sees as a typically Occidental supercilious dismissal of religious politics. He highlights the importance, within the mounting social turmoil in Iran, of a religious resistance to what he calls the ‘modernisation-corruption-despotism’ series, explicitly trying to resist the capture of the situation in Iran by the ‘millenarian concept’ of fanaticism.

...

His intuition was that the supposed absence of a classical political programme driving the revolutionary uprising was matched by the strength of will, ‘the collective will of a people’ (746) – ‘an abstraction in political philosophy encountered for the first time in the flesh’. Tellingly, Foucault seems to elide the idea that Iran manifested a finally embodied Rousseauianism with the provocative notion that this appearance of the popular will in a religiously articulated uprising was a general strike against politics. Or, more precisely, that it demonstrated a political will not to allow any grip within the uprising for politics as it is classically understood.

...

It is here, in the fantasy of a mass anti-systemic singularity, of a primal capacity for resistance against which revolution is a mere rationalist domestication, that lies Foucault’s subjection to the trope of fanaticism – not in a supposed collusion with ‘Islamism’ or in some dubious sort of homosexist Orientalism, as the authors of Foucault and the Iranian Revolution contend.

The book itself is considerably less fair to Foucault than even this passage suggests, but that is for another post. The point here is that the carping by liberals (and some Marxists too) about 'fundamentalism' and so on is really a conservative political gesture, par excellence. It refuses analysis, resorting instead to brute moralism, and in doing so acts as a prophylactic, protects the body politic against free radicals. It conserves the domain of moral purity for Western liberals who - regardless of how much blood they soak in - are at least not supererogatory, fanatical, irrational. At least they are calculating, egoistic, rational and so on. At least they could never be truly evil.

On an entirely unrelated note, an audio recording of this weekend's Politics of Truth conference is now available.