Interesting choice for a title, but not the best interview. -rg

"Continental Drift:
Questions for Jean Baudrillard"
Deborah Salomon, New York Times Magazine

Q: As one of France's most celebrated philosophers, can you give us any insight into the civil discontent that is pitting a generation of young people against the rest of the country?

It will get worse and worse and worse. For a long time, it was a relatively friendly coexistence or cohabitation, but the French haven't done much to integrate the Muslims, and there is a split now. Our organic sense of identity as a country has been split.

Q. Perhaps that was inevitable. Many of us here were surprised last year when the French government banned hijabs, head scarves, and other religious emblems from public schools.

Yes, in America there is more of a history of immigration. America is constituted by ethnic communities, and though they may compete with one another, America is still America. Even if there were no Americans living in the United States, there would still be America. France is just a country; America is a concept.

Répliques. Filming the Enemy
The Cinema of Avi Mograbi
Translated by Sally Shafto

http://www.cahiersducinema.com/article536.html

From film to film, Israeli filmmaker Avi Mograbi has constructed an incomparable oeuvre in world cinema. To name but four of his films, which with their echoes and leitmotifs, operate like a musical fugue: How I Learned to Overcome My Fear and Love Arik Sharon (1996), Happy Birthday, Mr Mograbi (1998), August (2001) and Avenge But One of My Two Eyes (2005). Each film is in the present of the political and military situation in Israel, but also in the affective present, both engaged and old-fashioned, of the Mograbi home, place of political debate, and of the Mograbi house, small family enterprise of cinematographic production.
Each time, it’s about a film to be made, what we conventionally call a documentary, here and now, in the present situation, Israel and Palestine, military occupation and Intifada, religion and politics, colonization and the attacks. But above all, it’s about Avi Mograbi, those like him and the others - different and alternately alike, playing the role of enticing demons. And the filmmaker does battle, via telephone, with these voices, which sometimes ask him to film, and sometimes dissuade him from doing so; he hesitates, to film despite everything/ not to film despite everything? The film that we see is the story of the difficulties encountered in its making, rendering it both indispensable and impossible. Or almost.
All Mograbi is in this almost. Because there will be - despite everything - film. On the edge of renunciation. Or rather on the edges, since there are two borders (at least): from the interior of Israel and from the interior of occupied Palestine. Mograbi is animated by a fundamental instability that pushes him to cross borders, interiors, exteriors, symbolic, mental, but also stylistic, in a series of departures and arrivals captured in the standing around at checkpoints. The explosive mix of agitation and the feeling of marking time that characterizes his films resonates (or reasons) with the well-developed mania, which is born exactly there where Mograbi wants to film.
Let us consider the first of these films, begun several months after the assassination of Itzhak Rabin (November 1995), How I Learned to Overcome My Fear and Love Arik Sharon. Mograbi tells the camera, in a frontal shot, brow pitted against the camera lens, how he gave in, over the course of shooting, to what he calls Sharon’s “charisma” (at the time in full electoral campaign to gain control over the Likud party - the right- and its president Bibi Netanhayu). During a first period, Tammi, Mograbi’s wife, pushes him to make this film on what they both believe will be “Sharon’s swan song,” except that the same Sharon doesn’t let him come near; in a second phase, there is a turnaround: Sharon is often encountered and filmed by Mograbi; even better, he opens up with bonhomie to the exercise at hand, while Tammi rebels more and more openly against continuing the film, until finally she leaves her husband; and he, for his part, allows himself to practice stammering hysterical slogans of the radical right, screamed until nausea by rock fans with side-curls.

Preacher of the profane

http://www.signandsight.com/features/399.html

Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben is a beacon for an entire generation of young intellectuals across Europe - and a flighty eclectic. By Daniel Binswanger
With his collarless shirts and dark suits, he comes across like something of a cleric. In fact the newest rage among philosophers at German universities is not lacking in prophetic aura, even if his thinking is not exactly Catholic. On the contrary, his ideas are more like present day pessimism, reminiscent of the Gnostics, with their mystic counter-utopias and disdain for the world, according to whom Creation was the reprehensible work of an evil God. But regardless where the theological, mystical, philosophical and other roots of Giorgio Agamben's thinking are to be found, the Italian philosophy professor has become a remarkable fashion phenomenon.

Although his works are not systematic and do not betray any given "direction", Agamben enjoys star status today the likes of which neither Derrida nor Habermas nor Rorty, nor any other illustrious names from the front ranks of contemporary thinkers could boast. Giorgio Agamben has set a new benchmark in prophesying from the university lectern. His message is radical and fearsome – and it has caught on among today's young intellectuals like wildfire.

At the beginning of May the professor filled the entire Volksbühne theatre in Berlin for the presentation of the German translation of his new book "Profanazioni" (profanations). At the last Frankfurt Book Fair, his lecture at the traditional cocktail given by Suhrkamp publishers was touted as the number one place to be. No catalogue preface or feuilleton debate today does not at least signal its connection to the Zeitgeist with a reference to Agamben's notion of "biopolitics". Writing in Die Zeit, Thomas Asshauer called Agamben the day's most "quotable author" in university lectures and graduate courses. That may be an exaggeration. But he has filled the vacant seat of today's number one master thinker.

POSTMODERN COMMUNITIES:

THE POLITICS OF OSCILLATION

by

HEESOK CHANG
hechang@vaxsar.vassar.edu
Department of English
Vassar College

_Postmodern Culture_ v.4 n.1 (September, 1993)
pmc@unity.ncsu.edu

Copyright (c) 1993 by Heesok Chang, all rights
reserved. This text may be used and shared in
accordance with the fair-use provisions of U.S.
copyright law, and it may be archived and redistributed
in electronic form, provided that the editors are
notified and no fee is charged for access. Archiving,
redistribution, or republication of this text on other
terms, in any medium, requires the consent of the
author and the notification of the publisher, Oxford
University Press.

Review of:

Vattimo, Gianni. _The Transparent Society_. Trans. David
Webb. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992.

Agamben, Giorgio. _The Coming Community_. Trans. Michael
Hardt. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993.

I. Philosophical Homelessness

[1] Readers of the young Georg Lukacs may recall this
memorable citation from _The Theory of the Novel_:
"'Philosophy is really homesickness,' says Novalis: 'it is
the urge to be at home everywhere.'"
[2] According to Lukacs that is why "integrated
civilizations"--where the soul feels at home everywhere,
both in the self and in the world--have no philosophy. Or
"why (it comes to the same thing) all men in such ages are
philosophers, sharing the utopian aim of every philosophy.
For what is the task of true philosophy if not to draw that
archetypal map?"^1^
[3] Needless to say (especially in the [virtual] pages of
the present journal) this endorsement of philosophy's
"utopian aim" would not find many adherents today. If
anything, the "task" of contemporary philosophy would be to
debunk the notion of its universalizing, "archetypal"
vocation. The subsumptive mapping of the world by reason is
no longer an unquestioned telos of occidental thought.
[4] Today, especially in France, philosophy has addressed
itself to a nonappropriative understanding of exteriority, a
"thought from the outside."^2^ Modern thought has
deterritorialized its claims to dialectical resolution; it
has become homeless, so to speak, once and for all. Against
the grain of philosophy's utopian memory--its nostalgic
stance in being, its nostalgia for Being--the philosophers
of our moment urge a "nomadic" thinking.

It's a strange experience, but I'm sure quite familiar to many: a hidden
war, one you constantly hear about without seeing.

Today I felt compelled to go where I never do, across the canal, then across
the ring road, then across the suburban towns by foot and by tramway. First
the city, the warm afternoon, people smiling - glad to be inside. Then
beyond the ring road, through the low, gray, poverty-struck constructions of
the 1940s and 50s, surging with people of all origins; across the no-man's
lands between huge tower blocks; to the incredible modernist housing
projects around Bobigny, so tall and forbidding and clean. But the shoddy
decaying estates where the cars burn and the stones fly and the kids stand
off against the police are further out, you have to go specially by bus,
people look at you and wonder what you're there for, that was not my
intention. Instead, just the need to remember what's beyond the ring road,
at walking distance, the other world of the class-divide inscribed in the
urban geography.

Now that the children and grandchildren of the immigrants who built the
postwar prosperity of France have spoken the only language that the elites
can hear - the language of fire and bricks - what's gonna happen next?

Tonight is the 12th night of this collective speech. For years I thought
something like Watts was coming to this country. This is it, but without all
the guns. Maybe they'll appear next time, when it's organized. For now, the
wild improvisation of stones and molotov cocktails and roving confrontations
with the cops is the only thing these young people could do. The cars and
buses and schools are still burning as I write. Bagdad is the word on
everyone's lips.

Riots are a class act - and often they’re the only alternative
The Guardian Monday November 14, 2005
par Gary Younge
Mise en ligne le mardi 15 novembre 2005
France now accepts the need for social justice. No petition, peaceful march or letter to an MP could have achieved this
’If there is no struggle, there is no progress," said the African American abolitionist Frederick Douglass. "Those who profess to favour freedom and yet depreciate agitation are men who want crops without ploughing up the ground ; they want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters ... Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will."

By the end of last week it looked as though the fortnight of struggle between minority French youth and the police might actually have yielded some progress. Condemning the rioters is easy. They shot at the police, killed an innocent man, trashed businesses, rammed a car into a retirement home, and torched countless cars (given that 400 cars are burned on an average New Year’s Eve in France, this was not quite as remarkable as some made out).

But shield your ears from the awful roaring waters for a moment and take a look at the ocean. Those who wondered what French youth had to gain by taking to the streets should ask what they had to lose. Unemployed, socially excluded, harassed by the police and condemned to poor housing, they live on estates that are essentially open prisons. Statistically invisible (it is against the law and republican principle to collect data based on race or ethnicity) and politically unrepresented (mainland France does not have a single non-white MP), their aim has been simply to get their plight acknowledged. And they succeeded.

Some politically incorrect reflexions on violence in France
par Slavoj Zizek

http://multitudes.samizdat.net/article.php3?id_article=2142

Mise en ligne le lundi 21 novembre 2005
Two parallels are often evoked apropos the recent violent outbursts in France : the New Orleans looting after Katrina hurricane and May 68. In spite of significant differences, lessons can be drawn from both parallels. With regard to New Orleans, the Paris fires had a sobering effect on those European intellectuals who used New Orleans to emphasize the advantage of the European welfare state model over the US wild capitalism - now we know it can happen here also. Those who attributed the New Orleans violence to the lack of European-style solidarity are no less wrong than the US free-market liberals who now gleefully returned the blow and pointed out how the very rigidity of state interventions which limit market competition and its dynamics prevented the economic rise of the marginalized immigrants in France (in contrast to the US where many immigrant groups are among the most successful). On the other hand, what strikes the eye with regard to May 68 is the total absence of any positive utopian prospect among the protesters : if May 68 was a revolt with a utopian vision, the recent revolt was just an outburst with no pretense to any kind of positive vision - if the commonplace that "we live in a post-ideological era" has any sense, it is here. Is this sad fact that the opposition to the system cannot articulate itself in the guise of a realistic alternative, or at least a meaningful utopian project, but only as a meaningless outburst, not the strongest indictment of our predicament ? Where is here the celebrated freedom of choice, when the only choice is the one between playing by the rules and (self-)destructive violence, a violence which is almost exclusively directed against one’s own - the cars burned and the schools torched were not from rich neighborhoods, but were part of the hard-won acquisitions of the very strata from which protesters originate. The first conclusion to be drawn is thus that both conservative and liberal reactions to the unrests clearly fail.

A crane lowers one of the gates that will mark the border between Jewish and Arab Hebron. The IDF claims this is part of a plan to improve the lives of the Palestinians.

Ghost town
By Meron Rapoport
A first visit to Hebron after almost 20 years. A strange feeling prevails when one exits the gate of Kiryat Arba, descends in the direction of the Cave of the Patriarchs. It wasn't Shabbat, it wasn't a Muslim holiday, it was noontime, the weather was glorious, and the streets were empty. Along the road from Kiryat Arba to the Avraham Avinu neighborhood, a kilometer and a half of road that winds among old houses and market streets, we saw perhaps two Palestinians walking.
"What's your impression?" asked the host, Aryeh Klein of Hebron, after a while, after he had shown me the Sephardi synagogue that was rebuilt from its ruins, and the museum of the 1929 massacre in the basement of Beit Hadassah, which is amazingly similar to the Yad Vashem museum in Jerusalem. "What do you think of Hebron?"
"It's like Pompeii," I replied.
"Why Pompeii?" he asked in surprise. "The Last Days of Pompeii?"
"No, like Pompeii - an ancient city, where you can see exactly how they lived, just that no people have remained in it."
It's hard to find a place in the territories where the signs of the intifada are more in evidence. During the five years of the intifada, the city changed its appearance. The central part of H2, the area of Hebron that was left under Israeli control according to the 1997 agreement, emptied almost completely of its residents. Before the agreement, 30,000 Palestinians lived in the "Israeli" part of Hebron, alongside about 500 Israeli citizens. The number of Israelis hasn't changed, but the number of Palestinians has declined to a few thousand.
A tour of the areas closer to the homes of the Jews in the city is like visiting a ghost town. (The term "Jewish neighborhoods" can be misleading; the Jews live in six or seven houses in the Avraham Avinu compound, in two houses in the Beit Hadassah compound, in Beit Romano, and in one house and about three trailers in Tel Rumeida.) Some of the streets, like Shuhada Street, formerly the main commercial street of Hebron, are completely off-limits to Palestinians, even on foot. In the rest of the area, in other words, in all of H2, which covers about 20 percent of the area of Hebron, Palestinians are forbidden to travel in vehicles. The only Palestinians seen in the streets walk close to the walls, like shadows. "Only several dozen Palestinians have remained here, no more," says an officer who is serving in the sector at present. "The rest were chased away by the settlers."
"What does it have to do with us?" wondered a soldier in the Israel Defense Forces Spokesman's Unit, when asked about the IDF's responsibility for the fact that Hebron has been emptied of Palestinians. Soldiers who have served in Hebron understood perfectly. The Palestinians call what happened in Hebron "transfer." The outgoing commander of the TIFH (the Temporary International Presence in Hebron), the international patrol that entered Hebron after Dr. Baruch Goldstein's massacre of worshipers in the Ibrahimi mosque (the Cave of the Patriarchs) in 1994, defined it as "cleansing" (in an interview with Arnon Regular in Haaretz). The settlers in Hebron, like Aryeh Klein, call it a gift from heaven. "The fact that there are fewer Arabs gives us more security," says the head of the Kiryat Arba local council, Zvi Katzover.
Whatever the definition, what happened in Hebron during the second intifada has not happened in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict since 1948: Entire neighborhoods in a populated city have been abandoned.

The Nerds Are Pissed
New York University opts for war with its best and brightest
by Tom Robbins
November 15th, 2005 11:28 AM

"Nerds" is their term, not mine. It comes from a flyer, one of dozens tacked around Washington Square Park these days. "The nerds are pissed," it reads. "Nerds on strike," reads another. Not exactly your standard union slogans, but a self- deprecating sense of humor is just one of the tactics that some 1,000 graduate teaching assistants adopted when they declared themselves on strike last week against the administration of New York University, the nation's largest private college and the sprawling behemoth that has come to dominate the Village, both east and west.
Not that the nerd tag is completely undeserved. By the university's own admission, its graduate assistants comprise the best and brightest on campus. Selected for their academic excellence, grad assistants are provided with tuition waivers and stipends (now up to $19,000, thanks to their union) in exchange for agreeing to teach and grade, and otherwise supplement the educational needs of undergraduate students. Like their counterparts at Yale, Columbia, Brown, and other campuses, however, the graduate students have complained that they're often used as little more than an ever expandable pool of cheap labor, and therefore in need of union protection. Those demands have set off a series of clashes that have created the greatest campus disruptions since the anti-war and civil rights battles of the 1960s. NYU's current fracas threatens to be the worst so far.

ARTIST RELEASED FROM PRETRIAL SUPERVISION OVER DOJ OBJECTIONS
Supervisor requests release, prosecution attempts to block

Contacts:
Edmund Cardoni 1-716-812-9237
Gregg Bordowitz 1-312-420-6092
Lucia Sommer 1-716-359-3061
mailto:media@caedefensefund.org

Buffalo, NY - Artist and University at Buffalo professor Steven Kurtz
has been released from pretrial supervision despite strong objections
from US Department of Justice prosecutor William Hochul.

Kurtz's case has not yet gone to trial and motions for its dismissal
are pending, but until last week the artist was subject to random
house searches and drug tests, was limited in his ability to travel,
and had to report regularly to a probation officer. (See "Summary of
Case" below for background.)

Last week, arguing that there was no hint of criminality or risk of
flight, Zenaida Piotrowicz, Kurtz's pretrial supervisor, motioned a
federal court to release Kurtz from supervision. Despite vigorous and
exceptional objections by Department of Justice prosecutor Hochul,
Magistrate Judge Kenneth Schroeder agreed there was no reason not to
release Kurtz on his own recognizance to await trial.

TAKE ACTION THIS WEEK TO SAVE ACCESS TV!
NEW ANTI- ACCESS LEGISLATION GETS FAST TRACKED BY NOV. 15TH!

There is New Anti-Access Legislation in Washington to be discussed this week Wednesday, Nov. 9th, WITHOUT input from the Access Community!

On Wednesday 11/9/05 the House Commerce Subcommittee will meet to discuss legislation that could seriously impact Public, Educational, and Governmental (PEG) Access TV - including Manhattan Neighborhood Network and the nation’s other access stations.

This new legislation is known as the "BITS Bill" or the "Commerce Committee Staff Draft". The Subcommittee will finalize their draft of the “BITS Bill” and move it out by the week of November 15th.  This draft will not represent the interest of the PEG Access TV Community. We must Act Now! We must ensure that the BITS Bill protects the future of PEG Access TV!

The Alliance for Community Media (ACM) - which Represents PEG Access TV in Washington - says that although they met with the Commerce Committee during the drafting of this Bill - NONE OF THEIR RECOMMENDATIONS HAVE BEEN INCLUDED IN THE DRAFT and THE ACM HAS NOT BEEN INVITED TO PARTICIPATE IN FURTHER DISCUSSIONS!

Katrina: Rumors, Lies, and Racist Fantasies
By Slavoj Zizek, In These Times
http://www.alternet.org/story/27442/

According to a well-known anecdote, anthropologists studying "primitives" who supposedly held certain superstitious beliefs (that they descend from a fish or from a bird, for example) asked them directly whether they "really" believed such things. They answered: "Of course not -- we 're not stupid! But I was told that some of our ancestors actually did believe that." In short, they transferred their belief onto another.

We do the same thing with our children by going through the ritual of Santa Claus. Since our children (are supposed to) believe in him and we do not want to disappoint them, they pretend to believe so as not to disappoint us by puncturing our belief in their naivety (and to get the presents, of course). Isn't this also the usual excuse of the mythical crooked politician who turns honest? "I cannot disappoint the ordinary people who believe in me." Furthermore, this need to find another who "really believes" is also what propels us to stigmatize the Other as a (religious or ethnic) "fundamentalist." In an uncanny way, some beliefs always seem to function "at a distance." In order for the belief to function, there has to be some ultimate guarantor of it, and yet this guarantor is always deferred, displaced, never present in persona. The point, of course, is that this other subject who directly believes does not need to actually exist for the belief to be operative: It is enough precisely to presuppose his existence, i.e. to believe in it, either in the guise of the primitive Other or in the guise of the impersonal "one" ("one believes…").

The events in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina struck the city provide a new addition to this series of "subjects supposed to..."-- the subject supposed to loot and rape. We all remember the reports on the disintegration of public order, the explosion of black violence, rape and looting. However, later inquiries demonstrated that, in the large majority of cases, these alleged orgies of violence did not occur: Non-verified rumors were simply reported as facts by the media. For example, on September 3, the Superintendent of the New Orleans Police Department told The New York Times about conditions at the Convention Center: "The tourists are walking around there, and as soon as these individuals see them, they're being preyed upon. They are beating, they are raping them in the streets." In an interview just weeks later, he conceded that some of his most shocking statements turned out to be untrue: "We have no official reports to document any murder. Not one official report of rape or sexual assault."

CIA Holds Terror Suspects in Secret Prisons
Debate Is Growing Within Agency About Legality and Morality of Overseas System Set Up After 9/11
By Dana Priest

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/11/01/AR2005110101644_pf.html

The CIA has been hiding and interrogating some of its most important al Qaeda captives at a Soviet-era compound in Eastern Europe, according to U.S. and foreign officials familiar with the arrangement.

The secret facility is part of a covert prison system set up by the CIA nearly four years ago that at various times has included sites in eight countries, including Thailand, Afghanistan and several democracies in Eastern Europe, as well as a small center at the Guantanamo Bay prison in Cuba, according to current and former intelligence officials and diplomats from three continents.

The hidden global internment network is a central element in the CIA's unconventional war on terrorism. It depends on the cooperation of foreign intelligence services, and on keeping even basic information about the system secret from the public, foreign officials and nearly all members of Congress charged with overseeing the CIA's covert actions.

The existence and locations of the facilities -- referred to as "black sites" in classified White House, CIA, Justice Department and congressional documents -- are known to only a handful of officials in the United States and, usually, only to the president and a few top intelligence officers in each host country.

PALESTINIANS HIT BY SONIC BOOM AIR RAIDS
Chris McGreal in Gaza

· UN condemns night noise attacks as indiscriminate
· Agencies say they cause trauma and miscarriages

The Guardian
Thursday November 3, 2005

Israel is deploying a terrifying new tactic against Palestinian
civilians in the Gaza Strip by letting loose deafening "sound bombs"
that cause widespread fear, induce miscarriages and traumatise
children.

The removal of Jewish settlers from the Gaza Strip opened the way for
the military to use air force jets to create dozens of sonic booms
by breaking the sound barrier at low altitude, sending shockwaves
across the territory, often at night. Palestinians liken the sound
to an earthquake or huge bomb. They describe the effect as being
hit by a wall of air that is painful on the ears, sometimes causing
nosebleeds and "leaving you shaking inside".

The Palestinian health ministry says the sonic booms have led to
miscarriages and heart problems. The United Nations has demanded an
end to the tactic, saying it causes panic attacks in children. The
shockwaves have also damaged buildings by cracking walls and smashing
thousands of windows.

"I have never heard such a loud explosion. I thought it was right
over the top of my building," said the owner, Tareq Dayyeh. "Sometimes
you hear the rockets the Israelis fire but this was different. I felt
like I was in the middle of a bomb. When I ran out the door I thought
I might find the rest of the street was gone."

EAST EUROPE 'HAS SECRET CIA JAILS FOR AL-QAIDA'
Jamie Wilson in Washington and Ian Traynor in Zagreb

The Guardian
Thursday November 3, 2005

The CIA has been interrogating al-Qaida prisoners at a Soviet era
compound in eastern Europe as part of a covert jail system set up
after the September 11 attacks, according to the Washington Post. The
secret facility is part of a network of "black sites" spanning eight
countries, the existence and locations of which are known only to a
handful of US officials and usually only the president and a few top
intelligence officers in the host countries.

The internment network has also been kept almost entirely secret from
the US Congress, which is charged with overseeing the CIA's covert
actions, the newspaper said.

The CIA refused to comment on the allegations yesterday, but human
rights groups demanded an urgent inquiry. "We've long been concerned
that the USA could be running a totally secret network of 'war on
terror' prisons and these claims need to be urgently investigated,"
an Amnesty International spokesman said.

Citing several former and current US intelligence and other officials,
the Post said the CIA was holding the top 30 al-Qaida suspects at the
secret facilities, where they were kept in dark, sometimes underground,
cells in isolation from the outside world. They have no recognised
legal rights, and no one outside the CIA is allowed to talk with them
or see them.

http://www.btselem.org/English/Special/20051030_Detention_Law.asp

30 Oct. 05: Proposed bill will enable Palestinian detainees to be held incommunicado

The Cabinet's Ministerial Committee for Legislation recently approved a bill initiated by the Ministry of Justice that will allow non-residents of Israel who are suspected of having committed security offenses to he held almost completely incommunicado for fifty days. The bill, which is proposed as a temporary order that will remain in effect for one year, is expected to be brought before the Knesset plenum for a first reading in the coming days. If enacted, the law will severely breach the fundamental rights of suspects in criminal proceedings, and increase the risk of maltreatment during interrogations.

Time to act!

Write to MK Michael Eitan, Chair of the Knesset Law Committee and request that he remove the proposed law from the Knesset's agenda. MK Eitan may be reached by fax at +972-2-6496404, or by e-mail at meitan@knesset.gov.il.

Giorgio Agamben: We Refugees

1. IN 1943, IN A SMALL JEWISH PERIODICAL, The Menorah Journal, Hannah Arendt published an article titled "We Refugees." In this brief but important essay, after sketching a polemical portrait of Mr. Cohn, the assimilated Jew who had been 150 percent German, 150 percent Viennese, and 150 percent French but finally realizes bitterly that "on ne parvient pus deux fois," Arendt overturns the condition of refugee and person without a country--in which she herself was living--in order to propose this condition as the paradigm of a new historical consciousness. The refugee who has lost all fights, yet stops wanting to be assimilated at any cost to a new national identity so as to contemplate his condition lucidly, receives, in exchange for certain unpopularity, an inestimable advantage: "For him history is no longer a closed book, and politics ceases to be the privilege of the Gentiles. He knows that the banishment of the Jewish people in Europe was followed immediately by that of the majority of the European peoples. Refugees expelled from one country to the next represent the avant-garde of their people."

It is worth reflecting on the sense of this analysis, which today, precisely fifty years later, has not lost any of its currency. Not only does the problem arise with the same urgency, both in Europe and elsewhere, but also, in the context of the inexorable decline of the nation-state and the general corrosion of traditional legal-political categories, the refugee is perhaps the only imaginable figure of the people in our day. At least until the process of the dissolution of the nation-state and its sovereignty has come to an end, the refugee is the sole category in which it is possible today to perceive the forms and limits of a political community to come. Indeed, it may be that if we want to be equal to the absolutely novel tasks that face us, we will have to abandon without misgivings the basic concepts in which we have represented political subjects up to now (man and citizen with their rights, but also the sovereign people, the worker, etc.) and to reconstruct our political philosophy beginning with this unique figure.

Tomgram: Mark Engler on the War Woes of Business

The Bush administration, with its crony corporations in tow, e
1000
ssentially sallied forth into the world with the collective mentality of a plunderer, ready to strip mine the planet. While its plans for global -- and energy -- domination (as well as the military conquest of space) have been aimed at forever, its business plans seemed more focused on tomorrow and the day after. For a while, it looked as if the President and his friends might even make back to Crawford for a life of Mai Tais and brush-cutting without the economic chickens coming home to roost. This now looks less likely.

Mark Engler takes up a distinctly under-attended subject -- just how bad for business (at least as measured by the post-Cold War presidencies of Bush the Elder and Bill Clinton) this administration might prove to be. He also explores the question of whether significant sectors of the business community will turn on the administration's war in Iraq and allied policies. Though largely forgotten, it happened once before -- in the Vietnam era. Tom

Bush's Bad Business Empire

Making the World Unsafe for Microsoft and Mickey Mouse
By Mark Engler
The Bush administration has a reputation for creating an unusually business-friendly White House. Put Dick Cheney's secretive Energy Task Force and massive tax cuts together with corporate lobbyists writing regulations for their own industries, and you've made an argument that seems pretty persuasive.

There are reasons, however, to consider a contrary notion: Maybe George Bush and Dick Cheney aren't very good capitalists at all.

George W. Bush's history as a failed businessman is well known. Dick Cheney, portrayed by conservatives as a brilliant ex-CEO and by progressives as a Halliburton shill, also has a suspect past. While he certainly increased Halliburton's profile in four-and-a-half years as its chief, his foremost accomplishment was the $7.7 billion acquisition in 1998 of Dresser Industries, a rival that turned out to be plagued with staggering asbestos-related liabilities. In the wake of Cheney's reign, multiple Halliburton divisions sought bankruptcy protection and the company's stock price plunged. Rolling Stone magazine reported in August 2004, "Even with the bounce Halliburton stock has received from the war, an investor who put $100,000 into the company just before Cheney became vice president would have less than $60,000 today."

Many analysts hold the Vice President accountable for the downturn, arguing that Dresser's asbestos problems, which cost Halliburton billions, were predictable. Less harsh critics nonetheless question his success as a business leader. For instance, Jason E. Putman, an energy analyst at Victory Capital Management, argues that, as Halliburton chief, "[o]verall, Cheney did maybe at best an average job." Newsweek's Wall Street editor, Allan Sloan, is less complimentary, suggesting Cheney was a "CEO who messed up big-time."

When it comes to Iraq, we hear a lot about the government largesse flowing toward Halliburton, Bechtel, and a handful of other favored firms. Less often do we consider the possibility that the administration's "war on terrorism" has been a major business blunder. If you start, though, with the lackluster corporate records of Bush and Cheney, the administration's foreign policy comes into quite a different focus. Even if you believe that the White House is designing its overseas crusade to benefit U.S. corporations, there's no reason to assume that it has been doing so successfully.

Increasingly, the business press is suggesting that corporate leaders, who once hoped the current administration would push the corporate globalization of the Clinton years to new heights, now fear another fate from the international order Bush has created. Tax cuts and deregulation on the domestic front have been obvious bonuses, but otherwise many U.S. multinationals face a troubling scene. The White House's failed CEOs have pursued a global agenda that, at best, benefits a narrow slice of the American business community and leaves the rest exposed to a world of popular resentment and econ
1000
omic uncertainty.

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Peace and War
Éric Alliez and Antonio Negri

http://pages.akbild.ac.at/aesthetik/eric/peace.html

Ernest Hemingway once wrote:
"The world is a fine place, and worth fighting for."
I agree with the second part.
– Seven


1.
War and peace: in its classical-modern form, the conjunction of war and peace preserves the disjunctive value implied in the chiasm of these two common notions, whilst showing the impossibility of producing – both historically and conceptually – a positive definition of peace. Peace, as disarmament, negatively designates the social state of affairs characterised by the absence of war. This is Raymond Aron’s peace by disarmament: "It is said that peace reigns when commerce among nations does not entail the military forms of struggle” (R. Aron, Peace and War between Nations, 1962). Being neither essential nor existential, peace does not exclude struggles and conflicts (it demilitarises them) from the moment its principle has become "no different than that of wars: instances of peace are based on power” (ibid.) in a world that the imperative of public security already requires us to consider in its entirety (totus orbis). With security at its core, this first secular form of political globalisation is indissociable from the antinomy War/Peace, which submits the ‘law of peoples’ (jus gentium) to the universal perspective of power (potestas). Antinomy: this is the term used by Proudhon to explain that "peace demonstrates and confirms war”, whilst "war in turn is a demand of peace” (P.-J. Proudhon, War and Peace, Inquiries into the Principle and the Consitution of the Law of Peoples, 1861). Despite the striking actuality of this formula, Proudhon is describing here what he himself calls "the alternative conditions of the life of peoples”, who are subjected to the historical, ‘phenomenological’, alternation between states of peace and states of war in a world in which the national logic of State centralisation both implies and explains the propensity toward military confrontations.

The BwO Condition or, The Politics of Sensation* Éric Alliez The Body
without Organs has to hurt. And it hurts the philosopher. And it's a hard
blow. Body without Organs. Artaud's Body without Organs - an affective, an
intensive, an anarchic relation of the body to forces (it hurts), relations
to forces qua becomings (when it works) - To Have Done With the Judgement of
God and Its Power of Organisation Ad Infinitum. BwO - A fashionable logo, an
up-to-date trademark, a badge of membership? A new scholasticism? A
schizo-scholasticism? As such it hurts, it hurts the 'Deleuzian' philosopher
caught in a trap. As neurotic anti-production, as imitation without
invention, as repetition without forces and differences, as logo(s), this
refrain of the BwO hurts. But it does not hurt as the Body without Organs
has to hurt me as a philosopher, because it does not dis-organ-ise my
(supposed) philosophical identity. Quoting Deleuze and Guattari, the BwO
vulgate hurts because »Becoming is not imitating;« because »No problem of
meaning, but only of usage;« because »To chant viva the Multiple is not to
do it. We have to make it. We have to make thought become nomadic;« because
»The cheat has a real future but no becoming at all …« An anti-productive
schizo-scholasticism 1 has alimented the reaction against Anti-Oedipus and A
Thousand Plateaus which considers them as dated by-products of ’68 thought.

Generations of neglect
Riots across France reveal a nation's failure to admit the mistreatment of its migrants, writes Emma-Kate Symons in Paris
November 07, 2005
"NO to violence and yes to dialogue." The thousands of silent marchers in Aulnay-sous-Bois, one of the worst-hit suburbs in the Paris riots, yesterday left French citizens in no doubt as to their yearning for respite.

Despite the attempts by police and politicians to talk down the rapidly escalating evidence of sustained urban warfare, the nightly parade of torched cars and buses, firebombed brasseries, warehouses, nurseries and schools has continued unabated for 10 evenings.

On Friday night alone, almost 900 cars were torched, mostly in poor immigrant suburbs. Hundreds more struggling residents of la banlieue -- or the suburbs -- lost their means of transportation at the weekend. At least 3000 cars have been incinerated since October 27, and late last week copycat attacks spread across France to Normandy, Lille, Marseilles and Dijon.

The clashes sparked 10 days ago by the accidental death of two teenage boys -- who were electrocuted after taking refuge in a substation, believing police were chasing them -- in the Paris suburb of Clichy-sous-Bois have paralysed the country.