(DOWNLOAD) "Critiquing the Violence of Guantanamo: Resisting the Monopolization of the Future (Part II: the Politics of Utopia) (Critical Essay)" by Arena Journal # eBook PDF Kindle ePub Free
eBook details
- Title: Critiquing the Violence of Guantanamo: Resisting the Monopolization of the Future (Part II: the Politics of Utopia) (Critical Essay)
- Author : Arena Journal
- Release Date : January 01, 2006
- Genre: Religion & Spirituality,Books,
- Pages : * pages
- Size : 212 KB
Description
In his Critique of Violence Walter Benjamin attests to the impossibility of subordinating power to law by demonstrating that law is both founded and preserved by violence. Law therefore relies on the state's monopolization of the use of violence, a monopolization which stems from the acknowledgement that violence contains the possibility of modifying or founding legal orders. When individuals use violence outside the law, then, the state is not purely concerned with their individual ends, but with the very means they have used and the possibilities inherent in these means to destabilize the entire existing legal order. This possibility ensures the necessity for law to strip individuals of all violence, even that which is used purely for their own individual gain. What the state fears in each individual use of violence is the law-making power inherent in it and the possibility that the state will be forced to relinquish its monopoly on this power. In this article I want to reflect on Benjamin's Critique of Violence and on this necessity for law to strip individuals of their ability to use violence to see if it might help us understand something of the existence of Guantanamo Bay. To do this, I will trace some aspects of the relation between law, violence and the American project. More specifically, I will reflect on the US doctrine of pre-emption--which I believe is fundamental to an understanding not only of the war on terror but also of Guantanamo Bay--and argue that what is at stake in pre-emption is a particular form of law-founding violence that aims to monopolize the use of violence in the future. In trying to understand Guantanamo Bay as what Giorgio Agamben has referred to as a localization of a state of exception, (1) I believe it is necessary to examine the temporality, and the vision of history and of the future, that this space seeks to enable. In the Critique of Violence, Benjamin distinguishes between two types of violence as means, which he calls law-founding and law-preserving violence. Law-founding violence refers to the originary violence that establishes a new law, and is thus bound by the requirement that it 'prove itself in battle', overcoming all hostile counter-violence in order to achieve a stable situation that can then be codified in law. Law-preserving violence in contrast relies on precisely the stability and monopolization of the use of violence that law-founding violence brings about. Through founding violence we see the establishment of a legal order which then relies for its preservation on the representation of this originary violence. To represent founding violence in preserving violence, however, is to degrade that founding violence, Benjamin tells us, as 'all law-preserving violence in its duration indirectly weakens the lawmaking violence represented by it through the suppression of hostile counter-violence'. (2)
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