Contract Man - Homo Sacer Investigations II

1.  ‘Infamy’ in the Americas 

2.  Black Rites

1.  ‘Infamy’ in the Americas

For some obscure reason Deleuze and Guattari were very jealous of Borges – or they appear to bear him some kind of grudge – claiming he ruined, “botched” at least two books – only the titles were good – A Universal History of Infamy and The Book of Imaginary Beings.  They reprimand him twice almost in the same words: “Everything is infamy, but Borges botched his history of universal infamy.  He should have distinguished between the great realm of deceptions and the great realm of betrayals.  And also between the various figures of betrayals.” (Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, London, 2004, p. 138) Or: “Jorge Luis Borges, an author renowned for his excess of culture, botched at least two books, only the titles of which are nice: first, A Universal History of Infamy, because he did not see the sorcerer’s fundamental distinction between deception and treason (…)” (ibid., p. 266)

Deleuze and Guattari imply that the phenomena of betrayal and deception – in themselves so ambiguous, so volatile, so chimeric – could be clearly differentiated.  Even Genet for whom treason belonged to the realm of religious transfiguration must concede through his character of Carmen in The Balcony – “One never knows whom one betrays – not even if one has betrayed.”

Leaving aside the phenomenon that some fidelities can have more terrible consequences than betrayals – why should Borges have written a book that Deleuze and Guattari think he should have written – or would have written in his stead had they had the good fortune to be Borges?  Borges was not writing a taxonomy or encyclopaedic treatment of betrayal or deception – he was if anything producing “pure appearance” – the opposite of all substantiality, essence, phyla and kingdoms – his betrayals were only literary – “falsifying and distorting stories” for his own amusement and possibly a reader’s – ‘mon hypocrite lecteur’.  He is a counterfeiter of stories, even of stories of betrayal.

The ruse (metis) is in the text itself – the conscious and unconscious ruse.  Of course as a falsifier Borges can also bear false witness to himself. (Metis is the characteristic associated with Ulysses – even polymetis.)  His stance is similar to the image of Hegel ‘the impostor’ conjured up by Blanchot in The Writing of the Disaster.

As Borges is a counterfeiter of stories, Hegel (according to Blanchot) is a counterfeiter of truth.  “(…) – the death of reading, the death of writing – which leaves Hegel living: the living travesty of completed Meaning.  (Hegel the impostor: this is what makes him invincible, mad with his seriousness, counterfeiter of Truth: ‘putting one over’ to the point of becoming, all unbeknownst to him, master of irony…) (Maurice Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster, p. 79 quoted in Gillian Rose, The Broken Middle, Cambridge/Oxford, 1992, p. 4)

Borges declares his intentions quite explicitly in a preface to A Universal Book of Infamy: “The theologians of the Great Vehicle point out that the essence of the universe is emptiness.  Insofar as they refer to the particle of the universe which is this book, they are entirely right.  Scaffolds and pirates populate it, and the word ‘infamy’ in the title is thunderous, but behind the sound and fury is nothing.” (A Universal Book of Infamy, London, 1975, p. 12) Deleuze and Guattari like the title the most – or only the title – they were fooled by the sound of thunderous nothing.  Borges’ writing inhabits another plane – a plateau without depth.  Perhaps for this reason so eminently suited to divining and perpetrating betrayals and deceptions.  The authors Deleuze and Guattari have been successfully duped into thinking that Borges’ stories have a profundity of soundings – but this is mere illusion – a betrayal of depth.  “The book is no more than appearance, than a surface of images; for that very reason, it may prove enjoyable.” (ibid.)  Borges is simply describing the sort of book that Deleuze and Guattari would like to think they have written – he exercises that liberty of the author they so aptly circumscribe in their opening pages: “A book has neither object nor subject: it is made of variously formed matters, and very different dates and speeds.  To attribute the book to a subject is to overlook this working of matters, and the exteriority of their relations.” (Deleuze and Guattari, ibid., p. 4)  And yet Deleuze and Guattari would force Borges – if the book were not to be a ‘botched’ one – to stick to his ‘subject’ – the nice title – and make sure that he produces an ‘exhaustive’ catalogue of all possible variations of the theme.  Adorno mocked such writers who imagine it is their duty to always start from “Adam and Eve”.  They had no understanding of the ‘essay’ – it starts anywhere and finishes nowhere.  In principle, Deleuze and Guattari even allow for such mapless writing – a book is “unattributable” whilst still “attributing to itself subjects that it leaves with nothing more than a name as the trace of an intensity.” (ibid.)  And even if Borges would have said nothing more about infamy than what resounds in his title – he did so with such sorcery, that Deleuze and Guattari are still scavenging for clues as to its whereabouts.

Besides the tales of infamy are not just ‘about’ treason – how to classify the story of the 47 loyal retainers – a fable of supreme vengeance – and fidelity beyond mere individual valour.  The retainers avenge their master who was condemned to commit hara-kiri because he aimed a grazing blow to the head of the imperial master of etiquette.  The enemy-villain – the infamous Kôtsuké no Suké himself is neither a deceiver nor a traitor – merely a courtier, a rude master of etiquette who insulted the unfortunate lord of the castle, whilst on an official visit to instruct the lord on how to receive the imperial envoy. His elevated position allowed him to indulge his greed and cruelty to an extreme degree.  The loyalty of the retainers verges on the supernatural – especially their pact of vengeance.  Finally after a year of preparation and the ‘simulation of infamy’ (shows of disloyalty to the memory of the dead master), the retainers march on the castle of the master of etiquette.  They slaughter most of his household – but he is nowhere to be found.  They notice that his bed is still warm and look down into a gloomy courtyard where a man in a nightshirt stands with his sword in a trembling hand.  He is too cowardly to commit hara-kiri when the retainers offer him this honour – so “as the day dawned, they are forced to cut his throat.” (Borges, ibid, p. 75)

Borges addresses the reader and himself as those who are not loyal, who will always drift off into some kind of betrayal – treason is the normal lot for most of us.  The story for us has no end because the retainers’ inimitable loyalty betrays us, the disloyal majority. 

Borges’ history of infamy is far more complicated than mere ‘realms of deception’ and ‘realms of treason’ – (insofar as one can speak of a type) his figures belong more to the type of the ‘desperado’, infamous in the pursuit of a dubious ‘respectability’ – a character more familiar to the Americas than in Europe. The desperado himself has infinite varieties – the impostor, the con-man, the hustler, the horse thief, the card shark, the pool shark, the Bible salesman, the preacher, the hustler’s manager, the pimp etc.  

For Deleuze and Guatarri treason and deception always end up either in a state apparatus or a ‘war machine’ – as they demonstrate on the next page – even Richard the Third their ultimate example of an “absolute traitor”, one of Shakespeare’s most anomalous characters – “the traitor springing from the great nomads and their secrecy” – whose secret project infinitely surpasses the conquest of power – all he finally is said to want is “to return the war machine both to the fragile State and pacified couples.” (ibid., p. 139)

How much more perverse and polytropic than Richard the Third is Borges’ character Lazarus Morell – despite even more humble origins – sprung from poor white stock out of the rotting bayous in the alluvial fish graveyards around the dead waters of the Mississippi – who devises an ingenious ‘philanthropic’ scheme to resell black slaves after enticing them to run away from their masters.  The blacks were promised freedom and cash after running away a second time.  Of course this does not happen - the runaway slave is eventually consigned to the Mississippi.  Morell’s nemesis – a nephew of a plantation owner, who had many slaves ‘emancipated’ in this fashion, poses as a ‘confederate’ of Morell (he becomes renowned for his vicious and cruel ways) and exposes his scam.  Morell manages to escape arrest even as the police surround his town house in New Orleans – and whilst riding the horse and wearing the good boots of a man he has just murdered on his way to Natchez  – he decides to (truly) lead a rebellion of the blacks against the whites and conquer the territory.  Morell mutates from brutal scoundrel to a dastardly poor white Don Quixote:  “His scheme was foolhardy.  He planned to enlist the services of the last men still to owe him honour – the South’s obliging blacks.  They had watched their companions run off and never seen them reappear.  Their freedom, therefore, was real.  Morell’s object was to raise the blacks against the whites, to capture and sack New Orleans, and to take possession of the territory.  Morell, brought down and nearly destroyed by Stewart’s betrayal, contemplated a nationwide response – a response in which criminal elements would be exalted to the point of redemption and a place in history.” (“The Dread Redeemer Lazarus Morell” in ibid., p. 28)  In Borges’ account the ‘real’ traitor is the fake confederate who sets up Morell – but his betrayal is the impetus for Morell’s grand scheme of redemption.  The criminal class has its own strict code of honour – and its behaviour cannot merely be assimilated to the rigid operations and calculations of a war machine or a state – nor is it simply ‘treason’ or ‘deception’.   Similarly Borges defends the more gentlemanly style of speech in the story “Streetcorner Man” against those who would claim a ‘hoodlum’ would not use such language:  “In that story, which is about life on the outer edge of old-time Buenos Aires, it will be noted that I have introduced a few cultivated words – ‘intestines’, ‘involutions’, and so forth.  I did so because the hoodlum aspires to refinement, or (this reason invalidates the other but is perhaps the true one) because hoodlums are individuals and do not always speak like The Hoodlum, who is a platonic type.” (ibid., p. 12)

Perhaps these other non-typical paradigms of infamy (the multiplicity of which are found in Borges’ universal history) appear flawed to Deleuze and Guattari because they originate in experience from the other side of the ‘abyssal line’ (de Sousa Santos) – the one between the new world and the old, colonies and ex-colonial masters – north and south – wherever one can look up at the night sky and see the southern cross.  On the North side of the line is where the western subject and his western modernity are valid (legal systems, criteria of truth and falsehood, loyalty and betrayal - science, theology, philosophy).  On the South Side of the line none of this applies.  The North is also the location of ‘civil society’, ‘humanity, ‘civilization’.  The other side of this geographical, navigational, ontological line is the ‘state of nature’ or rather a no man’s land, the outside of the law.  The ‘state of nature’ against which Hobbes devises his Leviathan – reflects at least in part reports of the time on the way of life of the “savage people” in America – who “(…) have no government at all and live in this day in that brutish manner.” (Thomas Hobbes, Chapter XIII, Leviathan 1909 edition [1651], The Online Library of Liberty)

The ‘North’ discovered its own ‘state of nature’ in the ‘South’ – later the South became a refuge from law and government for European adventurers and hasardeurs.

The 19th century Europeans, especially the government of Emperor Napoleon III, must have still believed what Hobbes wrote about the Americas – sending a Habsburg for instance to become the emperor of Mexico – as if they had no government of their own.  It shows that one emperor tends to breed another. The pretext for the French invasion of Mexico was the decision of the government of President Benito Juárez to suspend interest payments on its debts to its creditors in particular France, Spain and England.  The creditor nations were united in an invasion coalition called “The Treaty of London”.  But the Spanish and English soon withdrew when they realized the French wanted to seize all of Mexico – especially its silver mines.

The Mexicans endured the reign of the Habsburg Emperor Maximilian the First of Mexico briefly before they followed the example of the French Revolution and in 1867 executed him.  Napoleon III had already prudently abandoned his protégé, withdrawing his invasion troops the year before. 

For Nietzsche writing mid 19th century – the abyssal line ran through the middle of Europe itself.  He uses the cartography of North and South (not east and west) – seeing himself as an escapee from the stifling sickly North (in particular Bismarck’s Germany) seeking health and gaiety (le gai savoir) in the South.  The Americas don’t seem to exist for Nietzsche. 

But nowadays during the reign of the ‘Troika’ – the abyssal line of demarcation in Europe is between the ‘PIIGS’ plus Cyprus and the imperators of the North. “Der Ab-grund ist Ab-grund”. (“the a-byss is a-byss”, Heidegger)  It is an abyssal line of ‘sovereign debt’.  In the case of Greece many analysts consider this sovereign debt to be of the category of ‘odious debt’ or illegitimate debt.  The debt regime Greece has been made to endure by the European Commission etc is thus regarded by a majority of the population as a renewed German ‘occupation’ of Greece. 

(see the Greek documentary films Debtocracy and Katastroika, Directors/Writers Katerina Kitidi and Aris Chatzistefanou, online) 

Carl Schmitt foresaw the time when a people could be proscribed (Ächtung) - not just for alleged “Menschenfleisch fressen” (cannibalism), as Bacon ordained for the Indians of the Americas (and which was seconded by Pufendorff), but for lesser more harmless aberrations such as when a “people can not pay their debts.” (see Carl Schmitt, Der Begriff des Politischen, Berlin, 2009, (1932), footnote pp. 52-53)]  Naturally, when Schmitt wrote his treatise in 1932 – he was not thinking of the American Indians, but of the “Schuldnernation” (debtor nation) Germany and its heavy burden of war reparations from World War I – dictated by the Versailles Treaty.      

Deleuze and Guattari’s idea of treason and deception presupposes (although they would deny this strongly) a unified Cartesian cogito/subject/certainty (a subject of certainty and its pendant doubt) – equivalent to the One of the State or its Grand Rival the War Machine - in turn sprouting/spawning/generating its own established/familiar forms of transgression, haunted by its too familiar ‘evil genius’ or ‘deceitful god’.           

Badiou clearly and emphatically refutes the notion of Deleuze as the philosopher of lavish/riotous confusion or the chaotic multiplicity of the organic and inorganic world – rather one must recognize in his work a “metaphysics of the One“ – a distinctly Heideggerian ‘clamor’ from the great univocity of Being. (see Alain Badiou, The Clamor of Being, University of Minnesota Press, 2000, Chapter 1. “Which Deleuze?”, Chapter 2. “Univocity of Being and Multiplicity of Names”)

Balibar has coined the term “ideality” for this sort of necessary transcendence – hegemonic violence cannot do without it, he contends, neither can revolutionary organizations insofar as they are implicitly contained in the idea of the State as the immanent ‘counter-violence’ to sovereign institutions. 

“Ideality” is another revamping of what Deleuze and Guattari would call the double subject of “modern or Christian philosophy” – Descartes’ Cogito, whose ‘heteronomous’ point of subjectification is transposed to and dependent on the Infinite or the Absolute.  The first subject is the Cogito itself (subject of enunciation) – the I of I think, assume, perceive etc – the second subject is the I of feeling or sensing (the subject of statement) who forms propositions concerning one’s self.  The second subject is often hidden by the first, but dependent upon it as the guarantor of interpretation – but has potentially a more immediate relation to the material world.  No matter how many times this subject is declared dead and defunct it resurrects itself zombie-like in a certain French theory or western philosophy – the word in Deleuze for this self-correcting resurrection is ‘recommencing’ -  “The cogito is a proceeding that must always be recommenced, (…)” (A Thousand Plateaus, ibid.,  p. 142)  The recommencing is a safety mechanism/device against its own ‘brokenness’ – the split between the norm, its inner legality and the darker face of its own transgressive potential.  One can thus never comprehend transgression (or more simply evil) according to this paradigm without relating it to the proper recommencing of cogito.  Evil or transgression though is the impetus for the recommencing – almost a purged reunifying of cogito with itself, or its reunion with the Absolute.

The double subjects in Balibar’s analysis of violence are compressed into one state subject of power  – potentially also encompassing what is not-state or counter-power  (rebellion, revolution, anti-systemic movements) – so that any ‘legitimate violence’ (is that also a vestige of the subject of statement?) must appeal to its own transcendence (the subject of enunciation) to truly appear/function as legitimate.  Such power or power apparatuses may appear multiple – but per force of quasi-gravity will inevitably act to reduce complexity (meaning to crush all internal and external resistance to it)  – and how?  “(…) not only by virtue of its material force, which would never suffice (subject of statement again sm), or could never be sufficiently focused, but by virtue of its own transcendence (the subject of enunciation sm).  I would say: by virtue of the ‘tautological power’ and violence of its ideality, as expressed in such formulas as God is God, the Law is the Law, which try to encapsulate the Absolute.” (Étienne Balibar, “Violence, Ideality and Cruelty” in Politics and the Other Scene, London/Brooklyn, 2002, p. 136) 
Voilà – “ideality” is also a ‘metaphysics of the One’.

 (In a slight variation of this metaphysical twist: Lacoue-Labarthe in his analysis of Heidegger’s Rectoral Address of 1933 “Transcendence Ends in Politics” concludes that Heideggerian politics is nothing but the continuation of metaphysics by other means – as opposed to Balibar’s more Clausewitzian approach to the relation of transcendence and politics – which might be abbreviated – metaphysics is nothing but the continuation of politics by other means.)      

Counter-violence ‘haunts’ the state body as its necessary chimera – for all state violence in Balibar’s assessment is “preventive counter-violence” against an anticipated quasi-transcendental primary counter-violence – which need not ever materialize.  This presumed counter-violence is the source of its legitimacy.  The counter-violent forces belong to the realm of the imaginary – mythically predating the state’s foundation and as such ever present as a potential recurrence.  This is the classic Hobbesian “state of nature”.  But foundational state violence alias “preventive counter-violence” cannot just remain possible or potential – it must become actual – for its own sake, for the self-preservation of its being.  “And basically, I think, that if the so-called ‘foundational violence of state power’ is to exist (or appear as foundational), it must not only be idealized or sacralized – that goes without saying – but also actually exercised and implemented at some points and times, in some visible ‘zones’ of the system…”(ibid. p. 138)  Foundational state violence - like any other machinery – if it is not tested at its limits once in awhile – it will rust and eventually fall apart.  Theoretically, Balibar would imply, preventive counter-violence must occur periodically with or without a counter-violent pretext.

The ‘South’ or “state of nature”, the declared outside of the law for the ‘North’, was historically a most efficacious zone (although not always so visible) for exercising European foundational state violence in the sense recommended by Balibar.  One could indulge there in material practices where violence crosses the border to transgressive cruelty – much more freely than if one were to be restricted to ‘normal’ European policing.  But still says Balibar – this is only possible because of the authority of an extreme ideality (not its abandonment/absence) – as one can see in the history of the Spanish conquest of South America – the practices of the conquistadores. 

“(…) the conquistadores were acting in the framework of an extremely powerful hegemony  – under the authority of an extremely powerful ideality, namely the Catholic religion, combining legal apparatus and messianic faith, which allowed them to subsume the practices of cruelty under the discourses of hegemony – that is, a spiritual and material violence which could be disciplined and ‘civilized’.” (ibid.)  But is that really the case?  Balibar overlooks that these discourses of hegemony were established elsewhere – not yet in the Americas – the conquistadores were in the process of transferring them there from the ‘motherland’, that was their practice of conquest – as an imported hegemony.  Their actions thus already assumed a discourse of hegemony, which was not yet established, they cannot be said to have been acting within an existing one.  The ‘zone’ in which they were operating could be better described as ‘anomic’, extrajuridical, (a sort of ‘primitive accumulation’ of legitimacy) rather than hegemonic (not even a ‘state of exception’) – or at least from the conquistadorial point of view there was not any law or right except their own. And within that law – the conquistadores were practicing cruelty in the encapsulated zone of the system which Agamben calls “pure violence without logos”. (Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception, Chicago, 2005, p. 40)

The actions of the conquistadores were pre-hegemonic, – the period of conquest was rather a de facto tyranny.  Tyranny is a phenomenon of the ‘state of nature’, it is not civilizable – it substitutes for a legal apparatus, it is its own legal apparatus.  In that sense tyranny is devoid of ideality – it is rather empirical, pure facticity or contingency – but not to be confused with chance, or the aleatory.  Tyranny is not adequately described as the rule of the One – the One suggests a coherent unity, an omniscient Singularity, the sovereign Individual (whatever form).  But tyranny is precisely the body cancelling this unity – diffuseness rules, not the One.  

For the Aztecs and Incas the presence of the conquistadores would have seemed rather like an invasion from another planet. Precisely because they were completely ignorant of any ‘framework of hegemony’ – they would have regarded the conquistadores as supernatural beings.  The brutal incursions of the conquistadors were inexplicable occurrences for the autochthonous populations, more like oracles than material events; – but whatever motivation the conquerors drew from “messianic faith” or “ideality” – this was their ‘past’.  Their onslaught, as Adorno notes in Negative Dialectic came from their future even if it took the antiquated form of a bloody Inquisition and Crusade.  The conquistadores unfolded an historical teleological principle immanent in nascent bourgeois society: the ‘irrational’ expansion of bourgeois rational society until it could achieve its ultimate conceptual limits of “one world” (see Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialektik, Frankfurt, 1982, p. 297).   

‘Ideality’ is one of many terms forged by ‘western metaphysics’ to embody the logic of the Absolute; in this example of the transplanting of dominion from the ‘old world’ to the ‘new’ –it magically converts any ‘hegemonic’ act of cruelty or ‘infamy’ against populations whether in one’s own territory or anywhere else on the globe into a civilizing process.  In the mother country such ‘ideality’ is also a prerequisite for biopolitics.  

Obviously then, Deleuze and Guattari who come from the same school of thought as Balibar – will not have found this ‘ideality’ of transgression in Borges’ A Universal History of Infamy - thus they cannot identify the infamy and betrayal in his stories according to their customary models of cogito and its infinitude of transgressive renewal.

Borges does not situate infamy in a firmly hegemonic ideality or ‘ontotheology’ – as is customary in Europe.  His history of infamy is much closer to a ‘state of nature’ than to civilization – norms and systems are as mutable as clouds or rivers.  Perhaps as the ‘treacherous’ literary anthropologist or purveyor of counterfeit anthropologies and “baroque” histories of the ‘South’ – Borges, the untitled ‘infamous’ compiler of his history of infamy (itself a forgery, a false history) –unconsciously confirms the traveller’s tales about the new world Montaigne reports in his essay Of Cannibals “This is a nation, I should say to Plato, in which there is no sort of traffic, no knowledge of letters, no science of numbers, no name for a magistrate or for political superiority, no custom of servitude, no riches or poverty, no contracts, no successions, no partitions, no occupations but leisure ones, no care for any but common kinship, no clothes, no agriculture, no metal, no use of wine or wheat.  The very words that signify lying, treachery, dissimulation, avarice, envy, belittling, pardon—unheard of.” (The Complete Essays of Montaigne, Stanford, 1998, p. 153)

How then could one satisfy the criteria of a European canon of treason or deception when grounded in such a void?

2.  Black Rites

Is the exalted position of the traitor in Deleuze, Genet etc analogous to the ‘outside of thought’?  The traitor is the inside outside or (like homo sacer) – the included excluded, not to be mistaken with resistance?  If there is a deep state, there is certainly a deep society, which has already consumed the state.   Would what deep society then regurgitates – be the factum brutum of a new biopolitical state of nature?

Bob Trivors, Huey Newton’s instructor at UC Santa Cruz and occasional ‘confessor’ never heard him unequivocally confess to any act of murder – although Newton would frequently tell him ‘I feel so guilty’.  Ever cognizant of the law, he would explain almost coquettishly – the statute of limitations never runs out on murder – meaning the state never relinquishes its right to punish the crime of murder – but this sentence was true not of the state but of that other ‘revolutionary court’ who in the end had the longest memory.

When the Black Panther Party was still just staking its claim to overlordship over all of black power - with the consciousness of a demiurge of history – Newton himself called the revolutionary court into being.  He publicly drafted Stokely Carmichael of the SNCC into the Black Panther Party – assigning him the rank of field marshal in charge of “revolutionary law, order and justice” for the territory east of the continental divide – just as the Black Panther Party was the supreme adjudicator for the western parts.  The title of field marshal was perhaps also an inside joke – Carmichael had recently been demoted to ‘field secretary’ of SNCC.   

Bobby Seale, cofounder of the Party, read out this official act of vestment at a press conference in San Francisco in 1967.  The Black Panthers had a precocious sense of legal diction and representation, ranks, titles and party bureaucracy – even in their early phase when members numbered only a dozen or so.  They were desirous of a merger with SNCC (Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee) a veteran organization of the civil rights movement.  In the world of rival black militants of those days – this public act of reading out Newton’s “executive mandate” was the Black Panther Party’s symbolic claiming of authority over the entire black movement.  The proclamation implies - The Black Panther Party is vested with the complete authority and can bestow at its discretion portions of this authority upon chosen others.  They styled themselves already as a quasi-state authority/body, an incipient state apparatus of a separate black nation.

The “10 point program” ended with a long unidentified direct quotation from the introduction and the preamble of the American colonies’ “Declaration of Independence” from the British Crown – “When, in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, (…)”  This passage also includes the “(…) the right of the people to institute a new government (…)” -  and the first act of the ‘new government’ instituted as the Black Panther Party was to grant themselves titles – Bobby Seale became Chairman – Newton chose Minister of Defense.

Perhaps the idea to become Minister of Defense was inspired by Malcolm X’s public statement on the occasion of his break with the Nation of Islam in 1964.   In it, he asserts the right of the American Negro to “fight back in self-defense” (Malcolm X Speaks, Selected Speeches and Statements, New York, 1990, pp. 18-22).  Point 7 of the Panther’s 10-point program similarly declares: “We (…) believe that all Black people should arm themselves for self-defense.” (Huey P. Newton, Revolutionary Suicide, New York, 2009, p. 124)

In Newton’s autobiography Revolutionary Suicide he marvels at the speed – 20 minutes – with which he and Bobby Seale composed this document in October 1966 – not mentioning that the second half of this short document is a patriotic ‘plagiarism’.  The quotation must have seemed very natural – as they deemed themselves “black colonial subjects”, not in the sense of the anti-colonial movements of the Third World, but in the way the American colonists had been ‘white colonial subjects’ of the British monarchy – and their party platform and program was an imitation of that historical declaration of separation.

Contrary to Badiou’s theory that the Organization arises after an Event as the vehicle of a militant subject’s ‘fidelity to the event’ of the rebellion, riot etc – the founding of the Black Panther Party was itself the Event – or a prelude to a phantom (black American) 18th century revolution.  In other words – if one can speak of an Event, which transfixed their fidelity, it would be the American Revolution of 1776 – making them seem closer in their constitutive origins to The Daughters of the American Revolution or the later Tea Party Movement – than to Mao or Fanon.  
(Genet has little sympathy for the interviewers from Ramparts who punctured his romantic view of the Black Panther’s menacing shadow play – they ask him “‘Was the Panthers’ failure due to the fact that they adopted a ‘brand image’ before they’d earned it in action?’ (Jean Genet, Prisoner of Love, London, 1990, p. 84) – but the question reflects the impression of the time – the Panthers were an organization – or a new brand of black - in the search of an Event – not yet the militant ‘subjects of an exception’.) 

It was also during this time that Eldridge Cleaver staged a publicity photograph of Huey Newton wearing his Black Panther uniform (black leather jacket and beret) but transfigured as an ‘African king’ - sitting in a wicker seat, two shields leaning against either side of the ‘throne’, an animal pelt on the floor, holding a spear in one hand and a shotgun in the other. 

The Black Panther Party inhabited a vanishing point between theatrical rites, military bravado and a nascent mandarin style civil service.

Hugh Pearson, in his critical study of Huey Newton’s life and career, The Shadow of the Panther, calls this proclamation of “revolutionary law, order and justice” simply “more cosmetic than anything else” – for the internal reason that: “The Panthers and SNCC didn’t hold serious discussions about a coalition until after Newton was arrested and charged with the shooting death of Officer Frey.” (Hugh Pearson, The Shadow of the Panther Huey Newton and the Price of Black Power in America, Cambridge, 1996, p. 142)

When Stokely Carmichael though resigned from the party in 1969 in the wake of allegations that the Black Panther leadership had tortured fellow SNCC member James Forman with a gun - he alluded precisely to an authoritarian manner already evident in that earlier proclamation, dubbing him ‘field marshal’: “I cannot support the present tactics and methods which the party is using to coerce and force everyone to submit to its authority.” (ibid., p. 164)   

The Black Panther Party might have been a “phantom bureaucracy and a shadow administration” (Edmund White, Introduction to Jean Genet, Prisoner of Love, ibid., p. xiii) but they could generate real fear.

Genet, whom they courted in the sixties, was so impressed by their ‘spectacle’: how striking the colour black looked clothed in shades of mauve, pink, gold and azure, their massive hairdos, as if pubic hair were growing everywhere (“furry sex on their heads”), their ithyphallic moldings in “Florentine trousers” (like the ‘stage pants’ of ancient Greek comedy) – their theatre of extreme visibility – he could not see that the same excessive carnivalesque appearance was perhaps merely the inversion (like carnival itself) of a puritanical drive to rule the black community.  He identified them rather with the Palestinians – two ‘homeless’ people in a permanent diaspora.

“But even if they themselves had been the masters, or had had sovereignty over some territory, they probably wouldn’t have formed a government complete with president, minister for war, minister of education, field marshals and Newton as ‘supreme commander’ as soon as he got out of jail.” (Prisoner of Love, ibid., p. 85)

But that’s precisely what happened.  The Oakland neighbourhood – the ‘flatlands’ was their territory.  Newton gave himself various titles – after Minister of Defense he changed himself into the Supreme Commander, then Servant of the People, after that Supreme Servant of the People.  Or just The Servant.  In the first phase – when he was Minister of Defense – their rule tended to martial law, but this intimidated the black community as Newton himself notes.  They then switched (after his release from prison) to ‘civilian rule’ implementing ‘survival programs’ (free breakfasts for schoolchildren, an education centre) in the community – but that was when mafiaesque ‘enforcement’ also flourished well hidden behind the scenes of the ‘legit’ community services – against members of the party and the general black community.  Behind the visible public benefits of these programs, the Black Panther Party had evolved its own ‘deep state’.  Those closely associated with the movement regarded the Black Panther Party as having changed from a people’s organization to Newton’s “private army”. (see Lee Lew-Lee ‘s documentary All Power to the People! The Black Panther Party and Beyond…, online)     

Was the Black Panther Party’s typical American gangster pragmatism one metamorphosis Genet did not care to look at?

If Newton’s first law book was the California state legal/penal code – his second was Kafka’s The Trial.  He mentions it in his autobiography as one of those books, which he read in his early college years. Another was Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment.

One can imagine that for someone as experienced with courts, court officials and prisons as he was – Kafka would have become an intimate companion, his fables of the law writing themselves on Newton’s body just as indelibly as the execution apparatus scored the bodies of the condemned in Kafka’s In the Penal Colony.  Part Five of Revolutionary Suicide contains two chapters titles clearly echoing Kafka: “The Trial” – his trial for first degree murder of the police officer Frey and “The Penal Colony” – one of the California prisons in which Newton served time for the lesser crime of voluntary manslaughter after his first trial.     

But Kafka returns in two other crucial passages directly reflecting Newton’s experience of the unreality of his imprisonment and numerous court appearances.

As one of that rare breed amongst blacks (of that time), being both a ‘brother off the block’ and an intellectual – a ‘streetcorner man’ and someone who cultivated his ‘bourgeois skills’ like reading novels - Newton could easily see himself as a character in a work of art.  So when he re-entered the same courtroom where two years earlier he had been tried for the capital offence – he is reminded of some lines from The Trial – quoting K. as if he were another one of his brothers.  

“Going into the packed courtroom (…) was like a flashback to the same scene two years before.  The whole thing seemed to be starting over again.  It reminded me of a line from Kafka’s The Trial that I think of when events seem to be repeating themselves.  When K., the hero of the novel, is about to be executed, he says “…at the beginning of my case I wanted it to finish and at the end of it [I] wanted it to begin again.”  At first K. is bothered by the confusion of going through the court system—the slow wheels of justice or injustice, the questioning, the stifling routine.  It is a slow, draining process, which K. equates with the absurd toil and the endless striving of life.  I felt the same emotions—wanting the absurdities and the eternal toil to end.  Then, at the end, I was not quite ready for it to be over, and I felt a vague desire for it to start all over again.” (Revolutionary Suicide, ibid., p. 310)

When he was released from the Penal Colony to await his retrial Newton sees the scene during which the prison authorities hand him over to his escort of sheriffs as reminiscent of Genet’s The Balcony and Kafka.  The warden and his assistant see him off, wishing him luck upon his release:  “It was like a scene from Kafka or Genet’s The Balcony—normal and logical on the surface but nightmarish and phantasmagorical in essence.  It had the quality of a symbolic ritual; no one was truly involved or affected.” (ibid., pp. 291-292)   

(Most of Genet’s theatricality draws on the naturally occurring  ‘command performance’ of the prisoner for his guards and punishers – also for fellow prisoners - and vice versa.  The most thrilling spectacle is the state execution – although in Genet’s work it takes place mostly off-stage – unlike in Kafka.)

In the prison system one is always under immediate physical surveillance (the paradigm is the Panopticon) – as a captive actor the prisoner is totally exposed (360°) to his captive audience of punitive officials.  Rituals and repetitiveness mark both prison and the court system – each causes one to lose track of time – the life-time one is meant to lose when punished by confinement or when standing trial.  The loss of time and repetitive sequences create detachment from one’s surroundings – and one’s self.  Repetition is both what is happening now – and an augury of the predictable future, how it will be.  One is in the scene and not – one is less real than the institutional correctional mask one has become.

But still why The Balcony? – where the uprising, the revolting masses are invisibly raging outside – they besiege the brothel, the symbolic state (‘the house of illusions’), with its cast of auxiliary masquerade notables (the Queen, the Bishop, the Judge, the General) – and the real hero is the police president, the only one who is still himself, but who will also be duly sacrificed, entombed alive in his mausoleum. 

Had Newton psychically traded places (swapped souls) with the warden at the moment of his departure, his rite de passage – his spirit remaining with the warden in the prison/brothel – while the warden’s spirit went out inside his body into the revolt?  And when sudden enlightenment comes – it also has the form of repetition…

(Contract Man – Homo Sacer Investigations III will follow.)



© Shannee Marks, July 2013 

Self-Assertion of an English Garden (After-Life Topoi of Nazi Desire) Chapter 2

1.     Il faut cultiver notre jardin   

2.     Pêcheurs de lune

3.     Iterability of the Nazi State (Economy of Genocide)

4.     Growth (and Form/Morphe)

5.     Decay

6.     Pompes Funèbres

6.1.  Type (Model, Example, Tupos)

6.2.  Usus Tyrannus (Interlude)

6.3.  The Ageing of a Note

7.      Critique of Beginnings

8.      Demonology of Defeat

2.  Pêcheurs de lune


The Australian Kimberly Cornish accused Wittgenstein of inspiring the “final solution” – equivalent to the final solution of philosophy’s problems.  Besides having had the misfortune to have been in the same school class in Linz as Hitler, Wittgenstein’s essential influence is supposedly his tenet of the non-private property of spirit or mind – any individual is only part of a cosmic collective will (sounds like Jung), leading to the idea of the will of the individual particle being swallowed by the collective will, an immanent ‘breaking of the will’.  But as this is supposedly always the case – this general annihilation of the will would be a poor explanation of the unique phenomenon of the German ecstatic/ek-static subservience to the will of their Führer.  Such mass self-erasure would be the equivalent of a freak accident of the collective will, (like the bearded lady or elephant man on the level of the will), but not its eternal nature.  (Wasn’t such an aberration of the will the basis of the plot of Das Kabinett des Doktor Caligari 1919 – murder via hypnosis of the somnambulist-murderer was camouflaged as part of a fairground sideshow? The fairground hypnotist Caligari flees to a mental asylum of which he seems to be the director.  The murders are never really solved.)

If one considers the ‘collective will’ as a form of collective representation – then any theory of such a collective presupposes what it needs to explain – “the similarity of millions of people.” (Gabriel Tarde cited in Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, London/New York, 2011, p. 240)

The non-private property of language and a non-private property of will need not be identical.  All of these ideas of a collective mind and will are in extreme opposition of course to the monadology of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus theories.
The transcendental Will is a Schopenhauer idea – the real mentor of Hitler according to Cornish – in keeping with his claim that this non-private property of spirit-will is a precursor of Nazi ideology.  Naturally any transcendental or metaphysical properties of will or mind would have had to be stripped of their universal appeal and transferred exclusively to the German race – this was the task of Heidegger not Wittgenstein (or Schopenhauer). Heidegger: “Aber heute gilt das Wir.  Jetzt ist die “Wirzeit” statt der Ichzeit.  Wir sind.” [“But today the we counts.  Now is the “we-time” instead of the I-time.  We are.” Einführung in die Metaphysik (1935), Tübingen, 1998, p. 53]   

In his serpentine rhizomist apologia for Heidegger, Roberto Esposito imputes to him exactly this move – from the idea of community as a general condition of ‘being-with-lack-in-common’ to community as the historical destiny of a particular people.  Esposito sees this as Heidegger’s original sin against self, in other words, “Heidegger’s Nazism” is a self-estrangement – an unknowing of his own philosophical self in the momentous remarkable ‘change’ Heidegger’s philosophy sustained between Sein und Zeit (1927) and the “Rektoratsrede” (1933) and beyond. “Here is the terrible syllogism that captures Heidegger within his own discourse and that imperceptibly changes the most drastic thought of community considered in its most traditional philosophical-political mythologeme.  It is one that transforms the “in common” of all in a particular community that masters its own future by rediscovering its own purest origin.  This and nothing else was Heidegger’s Nazism.” (Roberto Esposito, Communitas The Origin and Destiny of Community, Stanford, 2010, p. 100)  The “purest origin” though is not in the slightest German or Aryan – as Esposito notes (ibid.) – Heidegger migrates his ideal origin of Germany to there where German poets and thinkers had already set up their poetic-philosophical-political dream colonies – to ancient Greece.
Though, Goethe could not deceive himself so easily about any similarities between his time and that of ancient classical Greece.  In a conversation with Eckermann about the dreariness of contemporary German drama he remarks: “Die Zeit, in welcher Äschylus, Sophokles und Euripides schrieben, war freilich eine ganz andere: sie hatten den Geist hinter sich und wollten nur immer das wirkliche Größte und Beste.  Aber in unserer schlechten Zeit, wo ist denn das Bedürfnis für das Beste?  Wo sind die Organe, es aufzunehmen?” [“The time during which Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides wrote, was really quite a different one: they had the spirit behind them and always wanted only the truly greatest and the best.  But in our bad time, where is the desire for the best?  Where are the organs to perceive it?”, Johann Peter Eckermann, Gespräche mit Goethe, Insel, 1987, 20. Dez. 1826, p. 176)

But unlike Hegel, Hölderlin or Nietzsche to name a few – Heidegger does not just idolize and wish to imitate ancient Greece, he constructs an absolute identity or fusion between this purported ideal German origin in ancient Greece in particular the “birth of philosophy” and the outbreak of the Nazi State-People-Movement-Führer.  Heidegger invests the Nazi entity with metaphysical properties and the proper. 

Heidegger’s phantasm of a Nazi entity with an ancient Greek pedigree is one variation of those ‘traditional’ poetic mythologemes so credulously rendered in Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe’s and Jean-Luc Nancy’s “The Nazi Myth”. Attempting to establish a “fascist logic” or a “logic of fascism” Lacoue-Labarthe & Nancy are not at all disturbed by any “terrible syllogisms” as is Esposito – on the contrary – the Nazi state and people etc is the excrescence of a German propensity for rational (technical) myth-making (see Blumenberg’s Work on Myth) – which by its forced association with the Greek becomes ‘immediately’ a “work of art”.
“Henceforth, perhaps, one will better understand why National Socialism did not simply represent, as Benjamin said, an "aestheticization of politics" (to which it would have been sufficient to respond, in a Brechtian manner, with a "politicization of art," as if totalitarianism were not perfectly capable of assimilating that as well), but rather a fusion of politics and art, the production of the political as work of art.” (Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy, “The Nazi Myth” Critical Inquiry 16, University of Chicago Press, Winter 1990, p. 303)
‘The political’ is nothing other than the German people and its bodies, supplements, extensions – just as community has become from ‘now’ on (now-time means Nazi-time) only the German one – the political as a work of art can only be the singular monocultural construction of that one sole remaining people or community. “The Nazi myth, as H. J. Syberberg (without whose Hitler, a Film from Germany the analysis that we attempt here would not have been possible) has so admirably shown, is also the construction, the formation, and the production of the German people in, through, and as a work of art.” (ibid.)  As Albert Speer reports, Hitler conceded the ‘world’ in this case the Japanese - one more hosting of the Olympic Games in 1940 – from then on the Olympics would have taken place forever in Germany. 

Cornish was not the first to couple or correlate ‘Jewish genius’ with the Nazi “Final Solution”.  Derrida in his commentary “Force of Law” had already sought to somehow obligingly redirect the blame/guilt for the infinitude of atrocities towards Walter Benjamin – in particular to his essay “Critique of Violence” (1921).  The real scandal for Derrida of Benjamin’s text “Critique of Violence” is that it reflects a dialectical revolutionary logic extracted from a materialist or Marxist philosophy of history – “Die Kritik der Gewalt ist die Philosophie ihrer Geschichte.” [“The critique of violence is the philosophy of its history.” “Zur Kritik der Gewalt” in Angelus Novus, Frankfurt, 1966, p. 65]  Benjamin would dismiss Derrida’s premise of “the mystical foundation of authority” (subtitle of “Force of Law”) in other words – the inevitability of the state – as a ‘bastardised’ form or hybridic amalgam of myth and law. “Von neuem stehen der reinen göttlichen Gewalt alle ewigen Formen frei, die der Mythos mit dem Recht bastardierte.” [“Now again the pure divine violence/force/rule has at its disposal, all the eternal forms which myth had bastardized with law.”, ibid., p. 66]
Benjamin’s revolutionary logic recognizes another sovereign (“die waltende”) force – not identical with human action, nor acting in its place, but constituting the possibility, “the insignia and seal” of “revolutionäre Gewalt” (revolutionary violence/force).  This “reigning force” is what he calls “divine violence/force” (göttliche Gewalt) beyond and above the state and law (the dialectical-historical immanent corruption of forms), a negative indiscernible force from a not so unimaginable (unimaginably distant - “Fernflucht”) future, which potentially would negate them. (see ibid.)
Such a force though is anathema for the likes of Derrida.
A provenance he tries to undermine and malign by associating it with its opposites or its ‘enemies’, so that the slur becomes nonsensical – “This text, like many others by Benjamin, is still too Heideggerian, too messianico-Marxist or archeo-eschatological for me.” (Jacques Derrida, “Force of Law: The “Mystical Foundation of Authority” in Acts of Religion, New York, 2010, p. 298)  Derrida does not seem to bother much about chronology – Benjamin’s text dates from 1920-1921 – Heidegger’s first major work Sein und Zeit was published in 1927.  The ‘Heideggerian’ did not yet exist in 1921.  Ernst Bloch’s Geist der Utopie (1918) rather than Heidegger is a more likely influence on Benjamin.

In Benjamin’s “Theologisch-politisches Fragment” appearing directly after “Zur Kritik der Gewalt” in Volume II of Benjamin’s Collected Writings (suggesting the editors considered them to be from the same period), Benjamin writes: “(…) The order of the profane can not be mounted upon the thought of the kingdom of God, that is why theocracy has no political but only a religious sense/meaning.  To have denied theocracy a political meaning with all intensity is the greatest virtue/contribution of Bloch’s “Spirit of Utopia”.” [“Darum kann die Ordnung des Profanen nicht am Gedanken des Gottesreiches aufgebaut werden, darum hat die Theokratie keinen politischen sondern allein einen religiösen Sinn.  Die politische Bedeutung der Theokratie mit aller Intensität geleugnet zu haben ist das größte Verdienst von Bloch’s “Geist der Utopie”.”Walter Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, Band II.1, Frankfurt, 1977, p. 203] 
The profane order, continues Benjamin, which is also ‘the political’ has to erect itself upon “the idea of happiness”. (ibid.) Nothing could be further than happiness from Derrida’s ‘Schmittian’ thought of the political.

By locating göttliche Gewalt (divine power) above the state and law (mythical power/violence)  - in fact as their potential destroyer – Benjamin also undermines any political theological paradigm – one which Derrida following Carl Schmitt is eager to assert.  In “Faith and Knowledge” Derrida stipulates that religion or the theological-political repertoire or medium is necessary to even isolate something one might even call ‘the political’: “The fundamental concepts that often permit us to isolate or to pretend to isolate the political (…) remain religious or in any case theologico-political (…) Carl Schmitt was obliged to acknowledge that the ostensibly purely political categories to which he resorted were the product of a secularization or of a theologico-political heritage.” (“Faith and Knowledge: The Two Sources of “Religion” at the Limits of Reason Alone” in Acts of Religion, New York, 2010, p. 63)
In other words, to purify ‘the political’ of any contaminating discourse of the economic or social etc one must recognize the secularized theological origins of this thought.

Benjamin’s notion of ‘divine violence’ as the opposition of positive law, the bastard form of myth, is also an anti-political theology par excellence.  Is that what annoys Derrida so much?
 

[Commentary:  In the text “World and Time” written shortly before “Critique of Violence” Benjamin explores similar terrain – a “critique of theocracy” is implicit in his concept of “divine power”, which can only enter the secular world destructively.  Perhaps for this reason Benjamin associates it with revolutionary force (in “World and Time” as later in “Critique of Violence”) – but not directly.  The “social” in the present (the time of writing) says Benjamin, “is a manifestation of spectral and demonic powers” – the tension within the social is the “effort (of these powers) to transcend themselves” – this transcendent drive is how the divine manifests itself in them but “only in revolutionary force”. (See “World and Time” in Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings, 1913-1926, Harvard, 2002, pp. 226-227)  Here Benjamin’s idea of divine power seems flavoured by some of Baudelaire’s thoughts on the infinite – any excessive or obsessive drive, such as the indulgence of opium or hashish, has a potential trajectory of the infinite, le gout d’infini.]

Derrida, on the other hand, with his formulaic theses – the mystical foundation of authority, the concomitant inevitability of the state/any state and its law/any law founded/unfounded on apriori force/violence – shows his own kinship with the Nazi ‘jurist’ Carl Schmitt’s thought of ‘the political’.  Although he does his best to infect Benjamin with this association – he and not Benjamin is magnetically drawn to a thought of the ‘theological-political’; Derrida posits a groundless ultimately violent grounding of any institution.  The overarching ‘chiastic’ framework, which makes any/whatever such ‘mystical’ foundational act possible, is the state (including theoretically the Nazi state), whilst at the same time the state supposedly arises out of similar mystical Ur-fog.  In the same sense of the beginning (origin, foundation) that Heidegger, in his Freiburg inaugural address, the “Rektoratsrede” of 1933 euphorically predicts will go on forever - Derrida’s state/authority/law is ultimately irrevocable.  The groundless grounding of authority is a beginning that never ends and extends far beyond now commanding ‘us’, says Heidegger, from an elusive future (Derrida’s “à-venir”).  Such a thought could be described as a paradigm of a speculative counter-revolution.  “Yet, the operation that amounts to founding, inaugurating, justifying law, to making law, would consist of a coup de force, of a performative and therefore interpretative violence that in itself is neither just nor unjust and that no justice and no earlier and previous founding law, no preexisting foundation, could by definition, guarantee or contradict or invalidate. (…) Its very moment of foundation or institution, besides, is never a moment inscribed in the homogeneous fabric of a story or history, since it rips it apart with one decision.” (“Force of Law”, ibid., pp.241-242).  Although Derrida is commenting upon texts of Pascal and Montaigne – one hears that Carl Schmitt is never far from his thoughts – as the first line of Schmitt’s Political Theology - “Sovereign is he who decides on the exception” with which Schmitt announces his notion of the absolutism of sovereign decision - reverberates in this paragraph.  Like Schmitt, Derrida also immediately retreats from this pronouncement – qualifying this testimony of faith in absolute sovereignty with an appeal to the ‘limit’.  Schmitt calls this ‘decision on the exception’ a “borderline case” – he is opening his treatise on “sovereignty” (Derrida’s “authority”) with something from the “outermost sphere” (Carl Schmitt, Political Theology, Cambridge/London, 1985, p. 5)  Similarly, Derrida reassures the reader/listener that “Discourse here, meets its limit – (…) It is what I propose to call here the mystical.  There is here a silence walled up in the violent structure of the founding act; walled up, walled in because this silence is not exterior to language. (…) I would therefore take the use of the word mystical in a sense that I would venture to call rather Wittgensteinian.” (ibid.)     

One cannot help but see Cornish’s spurious collection of anecdotes maligning Wittgenstein or Derrida’s denunciation of Walter Benjamin other than as intellectual/academic versions of the medieval ‘blood libel’.  In Derrida’s case, has he also ‘inadvertently’ slipped into the role of the ‘head Jew’ or the historical ‘Hofjude’?  A species of informer, collaborator or traitor - the Nazis could exploit this traditional mechanism or function well in their appointed “Judenräte”, the auxiliary functionaries of the extermination process – which produced such figures as the much loathed Benjamin Murmelstein, of whom both Gerschom Scholem and Hannah Arendt said he should have been hanged.  Murmelstein was a rabbi in Vienna, after the Anschluß appointed by the Nazis (Eichmann) to the Vienna Judenrat, later last surviving ‘Jewish Elder’ in Theresienstadt.  Murmelstein, was both inebriated and deadened by his close relationship with Eichmann and his entourage and the power they conferred upon him over the life and death of the Jewish population of Vienna.  He cooperated meticulously with all phases of the deportation (for instance – compiling lists of those selected either for ‘transport’ to the East alias death camps or forced emigration and the physical act of rounding up the victims and their detainment) besides the expropriation of Jewish property in Vienna.  In Theresienstadt, as ‘Jewish Elder’ he was largely responsible for the daily administration of genocide.  During his 11 hour filmed interview with Claude Lanzmann Murmelstein boasted frequently of his significance for Eichmann and his apparatus, the Gestapo:  “Everything that Eichmann knew about emigration he had from me.  It was like a correspondence course.” (See the transcript of the filmed conversation between Claude Lanzmann and Benjamin Murmelstein, online; see also Anna Hájkova, “Benjamin Murmelstein, The last Elder of the Jews from Theresienstadt, and his ambivalent relationship with Eichmann’s men”, German Studies Association, October 7-10, 2010.)  Murmelstein always insisted though that his actions had only been meant to save lives and ‘prevent the worst’.

Derrida, ‘katechon’ of the ‘academy’, summons Walter Benjamin posthumously, spectrally to appear before his court of academic ‘elders’.  The various lectures gathered together in “Force of Law” were his first foray into politics, justice and law in a ‘statist’ sense.  The “presiding judge” Derrida, like Genet’s judge invoked in Glas – “who under his red robes is stiff like justice” (Jacques Derrida, Glas, University of Nebraska Press, 1986 p. 76) has convened the court (he is addressing an assembly of legal specialists in New York) so that they and he “must think, know, represent for ourselves, formalize, judge the possible complicity among all those discourses and the worst (here the “final solution”).” (“Force of Law”, ibid., p. 298).  The court situation Derrida simulates resembles the trial of the sanctified murderer in Our Lady of the Flowers.  “The twelve jurors are twelve decent men suddenly become sovereign judges.  So, the courtroom has been filling up since noon.  A banquet hall.  The table was set.” (Genet cited in Glas, ibid.) 

Agamben feels compelled to ‘protect’ Benjamin from Derrida’s ‘wrath’ – although Agamben has distorted and mangled Benjamin’s thought in his own way; he feeds off it vampiristically, erecting his whole Potemkinian edifice (village) of “the Camp” as the paradigm of sovereign power and its favourite inmate “homo sacer” on the corpus of Benjamin’s critical term “mere life” and its correspondence with “mythical violence”. (see “Notes on Powerlessness” 26th December 2009, at Faust Series Opus 9, online)
But Derrida’s ‘excesses’ are in a way Benjamin’s ‘fault’, says Agamben, covering for Derrida’s ‘fallen mask’.  Agamben claims, the so-called third figure “divine violence” (göttliche Gewalt - whereby Gewalt in German means authority, power, force as well – as in the forces of nature or Naturgewalten) of Benjamin’s “Zur Kritik der Gewalt” is never really defined or identified,  (which is hardly the case, the typology of divine versus mythical authority/violence is the subject of the last third of the essay) and thus can lead to “the most dangerous equivocations”: “The definition of this third figure, which Benjamin calls “divine violence,” constitutes the central problem of every interpretation of the essay.  Benjamin in fact offers no positive criterion for its identification and even denies the possibility of recognizing it in the concrete case.  What is certain is only that it neither posits nor preserves law, but rather “de-poses” (entsetzt) it.  Hence its capacity to lend itself to the most dangerous equivocations (which is proven by the scrutiny with which Derrida, in his interpretation of the essay, guards against it, approximating it—with a peculiar misunderstanding—to the Nazi “Final Solution” [“Force of Law,” pp. 1044-45]).” (Homo Sacer Sovereign Power and Bare Life, Stanford, 1998, pp. 64-65)

It is a hardly a misunderstanding – especially since Derrida objects not only to “divine power” – but to the whole of Benjamin’s text – in particular his negation of any “mystical foundation of authority”.  Derrida’s interpretation of Benjamin’s “Zur Kritik der Gewalt” is a feverish act of overwriting.  Derrida, the non-mystical commentator (with mystical affectation) wishes to reduce or miniaturize the mysterious author Walter Benjamin to a mere name or signature – even to just a forename – le prenom Walter.  In Derrida’s obsessional fictionalizing of its history, “Zur Kritik der Gewalt ” is signed simply Walter, 1921.  As if Benjamin were a village idiot known only by his first name – at the same time this “Walter” is not human, rather divinely sovereign (die Waltende), in fact, God himself.  Derrida in his awe of Benjamin and the text deifies it so as better to perform his Tartuffian genuflections. 

A symptom of Derrida’s non-mystical vapeurs (‘crise du nerfs’) is the proliferation of ‘mysticisms’ (some of which cancel one another) in the text “Force of Law” – already garnished with the subtitle “the Mystical Foundation of Authority”.  The two main mysticisms are that of authority (state, law, police) and the mysticism of justice, which is an infinite deferral.  The first mysticism is more or less equivalent to what Benjamin calls law positing/founding violence – although Derrida does not distinguish, as does Benjamin between law positing and law preserving violence. The “‘mystical’ limit” of authority, its origin is “a violence without ground”. (Derrida, ibid., p. 254)  Law is not justice, says Derrida – though justice is somehow dependent on law; certainly Derrida’s justice has nothing to do with “divine power (Gewalt)” as in Benjamin’s typology of mythic violence (Derrida’s authority) and its arch and only enemy “divine power”.  Justice for Benjamin is not a question of law or its positing/founding – but only possible as a form of divine power: “Justice is the principle of all divine determination of purpose (Zwecksetzung), power is the principle of all mythical positing/founding of law.” [“Gerechtigkeit ist das Prinzip aller göttlichen Zwecksetzung, Macht das Prinzip aller mythischen Rechtsetzung.”, “Zur Kritik der Gewalt”, ibid., p. 198] 
The justice Derrida has in mind is powerless, impossible, a pre-contractual infinite debt of everything to the ominous other, an indestructible, incalculable obligation without reward not even “recognition or gratitude”, a “gift without exchange” – reminiscent of the logic Rousseau discovered in government: “You are dependent on me, because I am rich, you are poor.  Let’s come to an agreement (make a contract) between us.  I will allow you the honour to accommodate me, under the condition, that you give me that little you have left, for the effort, I take upon myself to command you.” (Rousseau, Political Economy, 1755)  Derrida’s justice sounds very much like such a regime of “la servitude volontaire”.  Its apriori and unconditional servitude to the other resembles rather what Esposito calls the ‘the law of the gift’ – the unavoidable original founding debt of community, or lack thereof – the ‘nothing in common’ which is community, except this generic hereditary burden of debt or a ‘gift’ which can never be given.  Such a concept of justice (about which as Derrida writes deconstruction is ‘mad’) is rather modelled on the perpetuity of the national debt – into which one is born rather than accruing oneself.  In fact, the relation between debtor and creditor belongs to the misty beginnings of any law with validity beyond the clan, guild or religious orders, the oikos – the groups in which human society regulated its affairs on a daily basis prior to any political life in the polis.  The absolute rule of the head of the household was a model for the most perfect dictatorship throughout antiquity – bios politikos could only take place in the polis, a realm of relative freedom from labour and any kind of servitude.  It is rather the oikos or household, perhaps the true origin of community and Derrida’s justice, in which the idea of absolute unpayable debt to the other was formed.  Max Weber cites examples of early Roman civil law regulating creditor-debtor relations in his Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft.  The earliest ‘debt’ though was a compensation (Sühne) determined by a judge in a trial against a defendant accused of a delict.  The two basic Roman exchange contracts nexum and stipulatio were both money contracts – though in the event of arrears the property of a debtor could not be touched but his physical body was the Pfand (security) and could be used in lieu of payment.  Liability in the case of money-debt was only attached to the physical person.  The debtor could be taken as a “debt slave” (Schuldknecht), to be sold into slavery or used directly by the creditor – and if there were more than one creditor, the Roman codex of the 12 Tables permitted the creditors to cut up his body into pieces and distribute it accordingly.  Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice with its intrigue revolving about a “pound of flesh” still reflects such early Roman debt and compensation legislation. [Hegel speaks of this “abscheuliches Gesetz” (hideous law) and Shakespeare’s dramatization of it in The Philosophy of Right (G.W.F. Hegel, Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts, Werke in zwanzig Bänden, 7 Frankfurt, 1975 p. 39).]  The historical antecedents of Derrida’s idea of justice come from the origin of law in debtor-creditor relations and the legal instrument of the security, pledge or pawn.  The total indebtedness to the Other, the ghostly creditor – ‘who will always come’ (Derrida) - reflects the ‘extreme’ of debt law – when in the event of the inability to pay, the physical body of the debtor becomes the physical property of the creditor.  And with an infinite debt such as Derrida’s justice foresees – one will always be in arrears – and the more one pays the bigger it gets.

But beyond these, this deconstructionist justice positing an infinite servitude, a Being-indentured to the Other – apriori – without any reciprocity – this Derridean ‘justice’ resembles Heidegger’s initial original state of Dasein – “schuldig-sein” (being-guilty – whereby the German Schuld means both guilt and debt).  But as Dasein is immediately Mitsein – there never being a singular Dasein without its Mitsein or Being-with – Schuldig-sein is a quasi collective mode of being – or a Being-Guilty-With the other, where guilt/debt is ubiquitous and has no specific address, it is rather the climate, weather, air of Mitsein. “Prior to any knowledge of it - is being guilty.  And only because Dasein is guilty in the ground of its being and as thrown and falling closes itself off from itself, is conscience possible, when the call of this being guilty at the core makes itself otherwise understood.” (“Ursprünglicher als jedes Wissen darum ist das Schuldigsein.  Und nur weil das Dasein im Grund seines Seins schuldig ist und als geworfen verfallendes sich ihm selbst verschließt, ist das Gewissen möglich, wenn anders der Ruf dieses Schuldigsein im Grund zu verstehen gibt.”, Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, Tübingen, 1986, p. 286)

Derrida would rather call this meteorology of being – “a ghost story, a history of ghosts” (“Force of Law”, ibid., p. 278).  Ghosts, spirits and demons follow and surround the founding ‘mysticisms’ of the text as its retinue and guard of horror.  
In a rather peculiar tribute to the ‘spiritual’ police in “Force of Law” – Derrida seems to have gathered into one confluence the quintessence of his Heideggerian, historical debt legislation and actual
law-enforcement tributaries:  “Let us take the example of the police, this index of a ghostly violence because it mixes foundation with preservation and becomes all the more violent for this. (…) By definition, the police are present or represented everywhere there is force of law [loi].  They are present, sometimes invisible but always effective, wherever there is preservation of the social order.  The police are not only the police (today more or less than ever), they are there [elle est là], the figure without face or figure of a Dasein coextensive with the Dasein of the polis.” (ibid.)

Derrida takes umbrage in particular at a major distinction running through Benjamin’s “Zur Kritik der Gewalt” – that of the two ‘faces’ of law and its violent underpinnings – law founding violence and law preserving violence.  This seems to be for him the original sin of the essay.  Why is it so disturbing?  It is a transgression against “the paradox of iterability” a sovereign principle guiding the ‘bastardizing, contaminating’ methods of deconstruction – itself defined by Derrida as justice – “Deconstruction is Justice”.  For deconstruction there is no difference between founding and preserving violence – the second is inscribed in the former – and this means there is no interstice, lacuna or opening between the founding of law or state and the preserving of it.  Although this would seem rather technical – the concept of iterability has great consequences.  Whereas ‘justice’ as indebtedness belongs rather to the order of law (that of creditors and debtors, expiation); the “mystical foundation of authority” depends on the “paradox of iterability” – a mechanism guaranteeing the repetition of an instituted rule, a calculable preservation of law, state and its enforcing (preserving) organs – the police.  Iterability prescribes the “possibility of repetition at the heart of the originary” (“Force of Law, ibid., p. 272) – the police then could never overstep their powers in a Derridean authority – their powers are as absolute or total as any other organ of the state – preserving is founding just as founding is preserving of authority.  And yet – as Derrida is also affronted by the
revolutionary seizure of history immanent to Benjamin’s elliptical text –he claims for deconstruction’s legalistic “readings” the status of being themselves a “general strike” or a “revolution”, at least in “the academy”. (see ibid., pp. 271 -273)

In his concept of iterability, Derrida emulates Wittgenstein’s rule-thinking, not his ‘mysticism’ – but his mathematically determined theories of the formation and function of rules.  Wittgenstein would call iterability – the concept of “und so weiter” – “and so forth” – an expression Derrida uses frequently.       
A rule is the ordinary process/procedure or ‘myth’ – that which makes “und so weiter” possible.  “Und so weiter” (and so forth) is Wittgenstein’s crucial concept. 
“We need now the clarification of the concept of the atomistic function and the concept of “and so forth”.
The concept “and so forth”, in symbol “…”, is one of the most important and, like all others, endlessly fundamental.
Through it alone actually do we have the right to construct logic, respectively mathematics from the basic laws and Ur-symbols.
The “and so forth” comes into effect immediately in the very beginning of the old logic, when it is said, that we now according to the given of the Ur-symbol, can develop “so further” one symbol after the other.
Without this concept we would simply remain stuck at the Ur-symbol and could not go “further”.
The concept “and so forth” is equivalent to the concept of the operation. (… ) 
After the operation symbol follows the symbol “…”, which means, that the result of the operation can be taken again as the basis of the same operation, “and so forth”.”
[“ Wir brauchen jetzt die Klärung des Begriffes der atomistischen Funktion und des Begriffes “und so weiter”. 
  Der Begriff “und so weiter”, in Zeichen “ ...”, ist einer der allerwichtigsten und, wie alle anderen, unendlich fundamental.
  Durch ihn allein nämlich sind wir berechtigt, die Logik, resp. Mathematik, “und so weiter” aus den Grundgesetzen und Urzeichen aufzubauen.
  Das “und so weiter” tritt sofort im Uranfang der alten Logik ein, wenn gesagt wird, dass wir nun nach der Angabe der Urzeichen ein Zeichen nach dem anderen “so weiter” entwickeln können.
  Ohne diesen Begriff würden wir bei den Urzeichen einfach stehen bleiben und könnten nicht “weiter”
  Der Begriff “und so weiter” ist äquivalent mit dem Begriffe der Operation. (...)
Nach dem Operationszeichen folgt das Zeichen “...”, welches bedeutet, dass das Resultat der Operation wieder zur Basis derselben Operation genommen werden kann, “und so weiter”.” (Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tagebuch, 21.11.16, in Sonderausgabe Europäischer Buchklub, Stuttgart, Zürich, Salzburg, p. 182-3)]  

[Commentary:  Fidelity is “and so forth”, the perpetuity of action, movement, world (in its ‘appearing’).  Fidelity approximates a perpetuum mobile – an impossibility in physical nature.  Infidelity is a cosmic principle of equal force – the ceasing or breaking of the perpetuity of movement, action, world – the cosmic principle that things come to an end.  Badiou as usual bets on both directions – his concept of fidelity to the event derived from an arch sentimental view of love or the amorous twosome – is neutralized by his demand that philosophy ‘interrupt’ the incessant flux of circulation of goods, images, thoughts etc. (see Infinite Thought).  Interruption is a mild or timid form of infidelity.  Infidelity is both action and rest – quiet and unquiet (those fundamental categories of the ancients – in all three approved ways of life), because infidelity ‘interrupts’ whatever precedes it – if action has preceded it, inaction is infidelity.  If inaction had preceded it – action is infidelity.  Fidelity has only one direction – it can not be other than continuous.  So fidelity precludes change – one of Badiou’s major questions is: ‘what does it mean to change the world?’ Fidelity is no change; infidelity is change (clinamen).  His concept of fidelity presupposes an established rule, even if self-imposed or invented – the only way out of such a rule is necessarily a betrayal or violation. 
Infidelity has at least a double valence in the same manner as stasis – for the Greeks both immobility and dissolution or discord, civil war. ]

One can substitute for the mathematical term operation in Wittgenstein’s formulation of the concept “and so forth” – the concept of authority – or more specifically, the result of the operation of law founding violence is the basis of the operation of law preserving violence, which becomes the basis of law founding violence and so forth.  Whereby, for Derrida there is absolutely no difference between the two.  Such that the iterability-state is logically and empirically a police state – or one in which law making and law enforcing can take place at any level of authority.  “Positing is already iterability, a call for self-preserving repetition.  Preservation in its turn refounds, so that it can preserve what it claims to found.  Thus there can be no rigorous opposition between positing and preserving, (…)” (“Force of Law”, ibid., p. 272)  

Iterability as Derrida proposes it eliminates or levels all distinctions in law and its violences – turning law into an automatic and calculable agent of its own self-perpetuation (the automatic subject).  His vision of iterability is one of a homeostatic or entropic hell.
He concedes that Benjamin had some awareness of this “law of iterability”, but of course Benjamin saw this as a cycle of self-destruction of law leading eventually to a “new law and a new decay”.  Although Derrida, also contemplates “revolutionary situations” in which law is suspended to found new law violently – the “law of iterability” would seem to preclude this ever happening.  In essence, there is a never a “new law” – all law has always been both new and old.  This levelling mechanism inherent within the law of iterablity allows Derrida to include Nazism without any friction or exceptions – within its domain.  Nazism is in a sense the radical achievement of iterablity – and thus the apotheosis of the “coextensiveness” of police and state apparatus.  Derrida’s “spirit of the police” is perfectly exemplified in the Gestapo – just as the most ‘vital’ part of the Nazi state was the double headed state and military police ‘institutions’ – roughly the Gestapo and SS – both in the hands of the most powerful official (after Hitler) in that ‘state’ – SS Reichsführer Himmler.

It is thus in Derrida’s iterability principle (a ‘political’ “and so forth”) that one recognizes the ‘aberration’ of the Nazi state and not in Benjamin’s categories or distinctions from “Zur Kritik der Gewalt”.  Fascism or Nazism is the pure iterability of the law – where every act of preserving violence has its sole rationale in the repetition and representation of the originary founding violence – Heidegger will call this the endless commencement (Anfang) of the Nazi movement/state in his inaugural address of 1933.  Iterability would also name a kind of messianic project for the Nazi state – as it is the principle of longevity of any state/law/authority.  And as Heidegger told his pupils in the 1935 lecture course Einführung in die Metaphysik – after Hitler is gone (eventually in 60 years or so – he would have been a centenarian by then) – the continuity of the state (its preservation) is up to us.

Benjamin’s text though is the one, which is “anti-statist”, a “condemnation of the state” in its present form, an attempt to project a ‘pure immediate revolutionary violence/authority beyond law’ – divine power itself is the destroying of law and its violences/authorities.
Yet within Benjamin’s text Derrida would have the reader discover the fatal pattern of a justification of the “final solution”.  How is that possible?  Speaking as if at a séance and in Benjamin’s name – Derrida utters what Benjamin would have said or could have said about Nazism and the final solution.  Using Benjamin’s determinations/typology of mythical or Greek violence – Derrida concludes supposedly in Benjamin’s ‘voice’ that “Nazism (is) the final achievement of the logic of mythological violence (…)”(“Force of Law”, ibid., p. 295) and that “Nazism leads logically to the “final solution” as to its own limit (…)”(ibid.).  He also has Benjamin say that with Nazism “a certain mythology of law was unleashed against a justice, which Benjamin believed ought to be kept radically distinct from law, (…)”(ibid.) – the two orders of mythological violence and divine violence being absolutely separate in Benjamin’s understanding.  How then could Benjamin’s thought think the thought of divine power manifesting itself in the ‘final solution’ as Derrida proposes on the last page of his essay?  Why would divine power act through mythical power or violence – be in need of mythical violence to act out justice when they are so radically distinct and in everything opposed to one another?  Nazism is the most radical form of preserving law (in the sense of an SS-Gestapo state) whereas divine power is destructive of law (rechtsvernichtend) says Benjamin.  Benjamin of course at the time of writing “Zur Kritik der Gewalt” could have heard neither of Nazism nor the final solution – but it is Derrida who has reconstructed this logic from his text leading him to the incommensurability of divine and mythic violence, the one necessarily excluding the other.  But his own ‘coup de théâtre’ – is to ‘bastardize’ these categories and ‘contaminate’ them in such a way as if Benjamin would have seen the gas chambers (had he known of them) as a mimicry of the bloodless expiation divine power acted upon Korah (an example Benjamin uses in “Zur Kritik der Gewalt”).  Derrida plants a so-called “temptation” in Benjamin’s text – this temptation is not in the text, Derrida brings this temptation into the world in general and in particular of “survivors or the victims of the “final solution,” to its past, present or potential victims.” (ibid., p. 298) who might read this text and “think” this “temptation” which the text according to Derrida “leaves open” – but only because Derrida put this opening there.  It is first of all Derrida’s temptation.  “Which temptation?  The temptation to think the holocaust as an uninterpretable manifestation of divine violence insofar as this divine violence would be at the same time annihilating, expiatory and bloodless, says Benjamin, a divine violence that would destroy current law, here I re-cite Benjamin, “through a bloodless process that strikes and causes to expiate. (…) When one thinks of the gas chambers and the cremation ovens, this allusion to an extermination that would be expiatory because bloodless must cause one to shudder.” (ibid.)

As if the final solution consisted solely in the final gassing of its victims – and were not an iterable evolving operation of the Nazi Staatsgewalt drawing on all parts of the society and state – bureaucratic, juridical, medical (the “political doctors”), technological (transport etc) police and military including blooded shooting massacres in ravines when more practical or expedient (such as at Babi Yar in the Soviet Union).  Derrida would have Benjamin dress up mythical violence (in Benjamin’s sense of state violence-Staatsgewalt) in the trappings of divine power – carrying out its (Nazism’s) own blood penalty – as if it were bloodless i.e. divine.  But Derrida also neglects an essential consideration of Benjamin’s argument – the concept of “mere life”.    It is not simply an accident of the killing method (blooded or bloodless), which determines if a power is mythical (“Grecoid”, Derrida) or divine (according to Benjamin) – the determinate element for Benjamin is what he calls “bloßes Leben” (mere life): “Blood is the symbol of mere life”. (“Zur Kritik der Gewalt”, ibid., p. 63)  The “mythical manifestation of immediate violence” (ibid., p. 62) is deeply implicated, says Benjamin, in all “legal authority” (Rechtsgewalt) – the corruption of its historical function is what preoccupies Benjamin – the destruction of this nexus (law-mythical violence) is what he sees as the “task” (Aufgabe).  A pure immediate power is needed to resist the ‘impure’ immediate blood power of mythic violence.  This pure immediate power is the antithesis of mythic violence – hence it is divine violence – characterized by an “absence of any founding of law (Rechtssetzung)”.  But mythic violence itself, although a constituent element of law and identical with it, constantly dissolves its own legality – and it does so pre-eminently when it strikes directly (immediately) at “mere life”.  One might call that the aporetic structure of mythic violence/authority.
“Mere life” in mythic thought is the “marked bearer of guilt/guiltiness” per se – so when mythic violence as in the case of Niobe (her 14 children are killed with arrows sent by the gods, she is eventually turned to stone) – is dispatched it exercises “blood violence” against “mere life”.  Mythic violence arrives out of the sphere of fate (Schicksalsschlag) – mostly as retaliation for hubris not for statutory crimes.  The guilty one atones for his transgression against the gods (and his innate guiltiness, his bloodguilt), but the compensation exacted frees him (entsühnt) not from his guilt but from law.  The very act of mythical retribution against “mere life” is also immediately the dissolution of legal authority (Auflösung der Rechtsgewalt).  “Mythical power/violence” concludes Benjamin, is “blood power/violence or authority (Blutgewalt) “over mere life” – and with “mere life, the hegemony of law over the living ceases.”(ibid.)

If divine power is the destruction of mythical blood power/“current law”, according to Benjamin, how could divine power at the same time oppose so-called mythical Nazi power - while ‘using’ that posited mythical power qua Nazism, at its logical “limit” of the “final solution”, to enact a ‘divine and bloodless expiation’?  The ‘final solution’ would have been for Benjamin the Nazi state’s extreme act of law preserving (law dissolving) violence – but as such inscribed in the demonic repetitiveness envisioned by Derrida’s ‘paradox of iterability’. 

Is the “final solution” then a ‘joint venture’ between mythical and divine power – at the “limit” between representable and unrepresentable power?  Benjamin with his rejection of the founding of the profane order upon the thought of the divine (“kingdom of God”) would not contemplate any such interpenetration – this is the idea of any theocracy.  The riddle though of Derrida’s text – or where it dissolves itself (like mythic violence) – is why he should cut off from the Nazi ‘authority’ that part of it in which its ultimate unity (contamination) of founding and preserving violence, its iterability, was encapsulated – in the “final solution”?  And export (excommunicate) it to divine power via the hijacking of Benjamin’s text? 
Derrida, (not Benjamin) with his impulse to offer a crypto-theological justification of all possible violence of the iterable state must see the ‘final solution’ as such a ‘divine’ manifestation. This is simply the continuity of the logic of the “mystical foundation of authority” or law.
“The law [loi] is transcendent and theological, and so always to come, always promised, because it is immanent, finite, and thus already past.” (Derrida, “Force of Law”, ibid., p. 270)
In the spirit of Heidegger 1933 and beyond – who spiritualizes the organs of state repression and extermination – Derrida commends the “spirit of the police” which is coextensive with the ‘polis’, Heidegger more directly as the spiritualizing of Nazism and its effects sans phrase. (see Derrida, Of Spirit Heidegger and the Question)    

[Commentary:  A fictional prison confession of a member of the SS written in documentary style by the German writer Rudolf Hagelstange describes his training in the various execution methods (Tötungsart) including the gassing method.  Gas was classified not as a “bloodless” extermination, as Derrida would imagine it, but as a “soundless” (lautlos) “extermination type” (Vernichtungsart).  Unterscharführer Hammer finds out that this like so much else in the Lagerwelt (the camp-world) is a cheat.  “Das Giftgas, das sich aus den eingeworfenen Kristallmengen entwickelte, arbeitete zwar lautlos, aber die Vergifteten selbst schrieen wie Tiere, manche fast zehn Minuten lang. (…) Ich fand diese Tötungsart irgendwie unmännlich und feige und war ziemlich fertig, als ich nach Mitternacht in mein Bett kroch.” (“The poison gas which developed from the inserted crystal quantity, functioned soundlessly, but the poisoned persons themselves screamed like animals, for almost ten minutes. (…) I felt that this killing method was somehow unmanly and cowardly and was pretty knocked out when I crawled into my bed at midnight.” (“Lebenslauf” in Alleingang Sechs Schicksale, München, 1974, p. 39)  Contrary to Derrida’s speculations, for the SS apparatus their “Vernichtungsarten” (modes of extermination) were neither singular nor supernatural – but technical, pragmatic, multiple, contingent, dependent on personnel, their sort of normal, a career – in the end any method was acceptable.]

With more than a hint of Schadenfreude or vigilantism, Derrida implies that Benjamin’s text has ‘ruined itself’ because it has dared to denounce (“target”) the police (of the Weimar republic), their usurping and suspending of the powers of the executive and legislative.  The police, says Derrida repeatedly, are themselves “the force of law”.
[He begins his “address” to the colloquium at the Cardozo Law School, October 1989 by ‘confessing’ to being “in love” with “your idiom (…) the word enforceability (…)” (“Force of Law”, ibid., p. 243)  Sometimes though it is in not enforcing the law that enforceability truly makes itself felt – of the law behind the law.  Or – if the police are “the force of law” – they do not need to enforce it.]

Benjamin’s text, says Derrida, is “an exemplary ruin that singularly warns us of the fate of all texts and all signatures in their relation to law – that is, necessarily (alas), in their relation to a certain police force.” (“Force of Law”, ibid., p. 277)  “The text does not escape the law …” (ibid.)  Someone like Benjamin (his text) says Derrida – is always going to get in trouble with the police – presumably Derrida will always be someone on the side of the law and the police – the same law and police someone like Benjamin and his text will never escape.  (One must recall Derrida is addressing an audience of ‘legal beagles’ in New York.)  All of these innuendos lead to the impression that Derrida here uses Benjamin’s text as a surrogate for his person – the physical Benjamin who did not escape fascist Europe and its (‘spectral’) supranational (Spanish fascist, Nazi Gestapo) police – just as his text will ‘alas’ not escape either?  The “exemplary ruin” of the text is really Benjamin himself - whose suicide was motivated by the expectation that this ubiquitous fascist police who refused his transit visa on the Spanish border would hand him over in France to the Gestapo – heir of that Weimar police whose honour Derrida so defends.

Or does Derrida also mean to “warn us” perhaps that Benjamin’s suicide in Portbou, Catalonia, where his escape route, blocked by this police, came to an end, was the late just revenge of “a certain police force” for Benjamin’s hubris in “Zur Kritik der Gewalt” – the text in which – according to Derrida – Benjamin would have foreseen (perhaps even desired) his own death as part of a coming Holocaust, as an “expiation and an indecipherable signature of the just and violent anger of God.”? (“Force of Law”, ibid., p. 298)  Benjamin, would have been thinking since 1921, says Derrida the posthumous mind reader, of “nothing other than the possibility of this final solution that all the better challenges the order of representation since it would have belonged in his eyes to radical evil…” (“Force of Law”, ibid., p. 260)  What Benjamin was thinking of is far better documented in his own last known writing than in Derrida’s ‘hypotheses’ – it was also the thought: “auch die Toten werden vor dem Feind, wenn er siegt, nicht sicher sein.  Und dieser Feind hat zu siegen nicht aufgehört.”[“(…) also the dead will not be safe from the enemy, when he wins.  And this enemy has not stopped winning.” Geschichtsphilosophische Thesen (Paris 1940) in: Walter Benjamin, Illuminationen, Frankfurt, 1961, pp.270-271] 

The Benjamin of 1921 – in “Critique of Violence” – was motivated by the same historical materialist impulse as the Benjamin of 1940 in “Historical-Philosophical Theses” – to take possession of a memory, to hold an image of the past – as it “flashes in the moment of danger”:
“Vergangenes historisch artikulieren heißt nicht, es erkennen “wie es denn eigentlich gewesen ist”.  Es heißt, sich einer Erinnerung bemächtigen, wie sie im Augenblick einer Gefahr aufblitzt.  Dem historischen Materialismus geht es darum, ein Bild der Vergangenheit festzuhalten, wie es sich im Augenblick der Gefahr dem historischen Subjekt unversehens einstellt.” 
[“To articulate the past historically, does not mean, knowing it “as it really was”.  It means, to take possession of a memory, as it flashes in the moment of a danger.  Historical materialism is concerned to keep an image of the past, as it breaks in suddenly, for the historical subject, in the moment of the danger, .” ibid.]  

Here – in Derrida’s world, police and God are one hand – “the mystical foundation of authority” re-founded and preserved – on the French-Spanish border 1940.  The three words most revealing of Derrida’s ‘signature’ and ‘secret’ (or “material facts” in the language of insurance contracts) – and they are definitely his and not Benjamin’s – are when referring to the “final solution” he imagines not only past and present victims but also the future – “(…) its (…) potential victims”. (ibid., p. 298)  “Potential victims” imply (like Agamben’s “(…) we must expect (…) new camps”, Homo Sacer, ibid., p. 176) – the “final solution” is not yet finished, enacted – but still to come – ‘à-venir’ – like deconstructionist law and its justice.