[Felix Hoenikker]

Philosophical Considerations of Some Recent Facts
6:2 | © 2002 Alain Badiou Translation by Steven Corcoran

A/ Method

· Faced with the destruction of New York's Twin Towers by planes whose passengers, like the neo-pilots -- those assassinating impostors -- were transformed into incendiary projectiles, there was, everywhere, the evidence of a certain affect. For those who more or less secretly celebrated -- an extremely numerous crowd, hundreds of millions of living; all the enemies of the lugubrious and solitary American superpower -- it was a matter of an unbelievable mass crime. "Attack" is an inappropriate word; it evokes the nihilist bombings of the Tsar's coaches, or the attack of Sarajevo -- it has a fin de siècle resonance to it, but of another century. At the beginning of this millennium, the evidence of that affect registers the extraordinary combination of violence, calm, quiet relentlessness, organisation, indifference to fire, agony and destruction, necessary in conditions of such technological sophistication, to bring about the death of many thousands of common people and ordinary workers deep in the heart of a great metropolis. It was an enormous murder, lengthily premeditated, and yet silent. No one has claimed responsibility for it. That is why, one could say that, formally speaking, this mass crime -- which aimed, anonymously and with the most perfect cruelty, to destabilise a "normal" situation -- conjures up the fascist concept of action. And as a consequence, everywhere throughout the world, and quite apart from the immediate position of one's soul -- devastated or complicit -- there was a paralysing stupefaction, a kind of paroxysmally denied disbelief: the affect that signals a disaster.
· Philosophy must certainly register the evidence of this affect. Yet it is also its duty to never be satisfied with it. Religion may declare its confidence in evidences of the heart. Art, says Gilles Deleuze, gives form to percepts and affects. From the latter, philosophy must arrive at the concept -- this is its arid destination -- no matter how traumatic may be the affect on which the research is opened, or the construction undertaken.
· Proposing itself thus to philosophical labour is a second kind of evidence, not that of an affect, but of a name: the name "terrorism". This nominal evidence (that the mass crime of New York -- signalled by the affect of the disaster -- is a terrorist action) has since played a decisive role. It has, in fixing the designated enemy, cemented a world coalition, authorised the UN to declare that the US is in a state of "legitimate defence", and has participated in the programming of the targets of vengeance. But more significantly, the word "terrorism" has performed a triple function:
1.That of determining a subject -- this is the subject who is targeted by the terrorist act, who is struck, who is plunged into mourning and who must lead the vengeful riposte. It is named, as you will, "Our Societies", "The West", "The Democracies" or, even, "America" -- but the latter at the price, quickly paid by the editors, that "we" are "all American";
2.That of supporting predicates -- on this occasion the terrorism is "Islamic";
3.That of determining a sequence -- unfolding everywhere is now what is considered as the "war against terrorism". We are warned that it will be a long war. An entire epoch. In short, the "war against Islamic terrorism" takes over from the Cold (and Hot: Korea, Vietnam, Cuba...) war against communism.
There, once again, philosophy has the duty, if it is to register the widespread evidence of the word "terrorism" as an important symptom, to examine its origin and significance.
· In short, there are two rules to the method. First, philosophy must not be transitive to affect no matter how widely accepted it might be. It should be agreed that a crime is a crime. But the consequences of a crime should not mechanically lead to other crimes. And this designation should also be applied to State crimes, including those -- innumerable -- committed by "democratic" States. As one well knows, ever since Aeschylus' Oresteia, thus for a long time, the question is always to know how to reinstate justice in the place of vengeance. Secondly, as commonly held as they may be, philosophy should not accept the dominant nominations without critical examination. One knows that, in general, such nominations are under the control of the powers that be and propagandistic. We will thus proceed to a meticulous examination of names. Our point of departure is the central name, "terrorism". Then, following upon that, we will engage in a critique of the trio of the predicate ("Islamic"), the subject ("The West") and the sequence ("the war against terrorism").
B/ Terrorism?

· Originally, a "terrorist" was one who legitimated and practised Terror (la Terreur). It was an objective designation that was defamatory only for certain political adversaries. In this way, the Grand Jacobins of the Committee for Public Safety during the French Revolution declared themselves to be "terrorists" without complex. They officially placed Terror 'à l'ordre du jour'. By that was designated a complete and provisional indivision of political and judicial power, justified by exceptional circumstances (civil war and war), the repressive deployment of expeditious measures without appeal, and widespread recourse to the death penalty. Terror was explicitly thought of as a contingent necessity (Robespierre was known for his categorical and principled opposition to the death penalty) when the political virtue -- that is, the republican conviction -- was still too precarious to assure victory over the enormous coalition of foreign and national counter-revolutionaries. As Saint Juste asked -- "What do they want, they who want neither terror nor virtue?" The Thermidoriens provided the response -- they want the end of the revolution, the reign of corruption, and suffrage only for the wealthy.
· It is remarkable that the word "terrorism", which clearly qualified a particular figure of the exercise of State power, has come, little by little, to signify exactly the contrary. Indeed, for a long time now the word "terrorist" has been used by the State to designate all violent and/or armed political adversaries, precisely in view of their non-State character. We may list as examples, the Russian terrorists of Narodnaia y volia at the end of the last century; all those of the anarchist tradition, including the Bande à Bonnot in France; and the character of Chen, in La Condition Humaine, who, already, incarnates the decision of the suicide mission to which -- without justifying it politically -- Malraux accords a terrible grandeur. But the word has finally come to designate -- and it is here that it takes on a negative connotation -- all those whose engagement in a combat, using whatever means at hand, against a given order is judged, from the position of the dominant, to be unacceptable. For Pétain and his militia the anti-Nazi resistors were "terrorists"; for every French government without exception between 1954 and 1962 the Algerian patriots of the NLF were "terrorists"; as also are the Palestinian fighters for the State of Israel, and the Chechens for Putin and his clique; lastly, for Bush and his servile patriotic opinion, the nebulous, or at least extremely opaque, group of those who take from the goods and lives of Americans are "terrorists".
· It must be said that today, at the end of its semantic evolution, the word "terrorist" is an intrinsically propagandistic term. It has no neutral readability. It dispenses with all reasoned examination of political situations, their causes and their consequences.
· In fact, it is a term that has become essentially formal. No longer does "terrorist" designate either a political orientation or the possibilities of such and such a situation, but rather, and exclusively, the form of the act. And it does so according to three criteria. It is first and foremost -- for public opinion and those concerned with shaping it -- a spectacular, non-State action, which emerges from clandestine networks, really or mythologically. Secondly, it is a violent action aiming to kill and/or destroy. Lastly, it is an action which makes no distinction between civilians and non-civilians.
· This formalism goes hand-in-hand with Kant's moral formalism. That is the reason why a "moral philosophy" specialist like Monique Canto believed she could declare that the absolute condemnation of "terrorist" actions and the symmetrical approval of reprisals, including those of Sharon in Palestine, could and should precede all critical examination of the situation and be abstracted from general political consideration. As it is a matter of "terrorism", explained this iron lady of a new breed, to explain is already to justify. It is convenient to punish without delay and without further examination. Henceforth, "terrorism" qualifies an action as being the formal figure of Evil. That is exactly, moreover, the way Bush conceived of the expenditure of vengeance right from the start: Good (factually speaking, State terrorism of villages and ancient cities of Central Asia) against Evil (non-State terrorism of "Western" buildings).
· At this crucial point, as all rationality risks folding beneath the immensity of such propagandistic evidence, one must be careful to be sure of the details and, in particular, to examine the effects of the nominal chain induced by the passage from the adjective "terrorist" -- as the formal qualification of an action -- to the substantive "terrorism". Indeed, such is the moment when, insidiously, form becomes substance. Three kinds of effect are thereby rendered possible: a subject-effect (facing "terrorism" is a "we" avenging itself); an alterity-effect (this "terrorism" is the other of Civilisation, the barbarous Islam); and finally, a periodisation-effect (now commences the long "war against terrorism").
C/ Who is this "we" facing Terrorism?

· It is clear that "terrorism" is a non-existent substance, an empty name. But this void is precious since it can be filled. And, in the first instance, as always, it is filled (as it was for "the Boche" or "the Jew") by that which is supposed to be facing it (the "Frenchman" or the "Aryan"). On such an occasion, facing "terrorism" there is a "we" defending itself. Now, outside America -- a name sufficient for American imperialist patriotism but hardly so for the anti-terrorist coalition, except if "we are all American", which even those committed anti-terrorists balk at declaring -- the three following names have been found for this "we" facing the beast: "The West", a perilous but weighty name; "Our Societies", a neutral name; and "The Democracies", a legitimating name.
· In relation to the first of these names, one regrets to have to note that philosophy has for a long time compromised itself what with The Decline of the West -- Spengler's best-seller -- at the end of the nineteenth century, and continues to nowadays with "the end of Western metaphysics". The appropriation by thinking of the term "Western" -- which is but the intellectual trace of four centuries of imperialism -- resounds right up to and in the opposition of the West (Christian? Jewish?) to "Islamic terrorism". All things considered, recall that during its early evolution the political deployment of the term "the Occident" was for some decades confined to the extreme, racist right wing, to the point of being the name of one of its most violent groupuscules[1]. Moreover, it seems to me that the litany of colonial atrocities committed throughout the entire world, the savagery of the world-scale slaughters, the wars of national liberation in Asia, the Middle-East and Africa, the armed revolts in Latin America, the universal value of the Chinese revolution, and the febrile sterility of the world in which we live, is all that is necessary to show those who would oppose the "values of the West" to "Terrorism" that "Terrorism" is a hollow word.
· It will be agreed then, that if one still wants to use the term "the West" when speaking about "our Societies" and declaring that "Terrorism" wanted to "strike them right in the heart " and "destabilise" them, that either one does so in a demurefashion, or else with reference to a material paradigm, that is, to a certain state of objective wealth which has no kind of value for the philosopher and would not be able to found any kind of substantial solidarity. If that is not the case, why does the crime of New York touch our societies, while neither the millions of AIDS victims in Africa nor the genocidaldisasters in Rwanda touch them in any way. "Our Societies", designating in a thoughtlessly obscene way the wholly relative well-being of some of the wealthiest (minority) groups on the planet, hardly make for a presentable vis-à-vis to the supposed substance of Terrorism. That is, despite Monique Canto's -- her once again! -- estimation that it is philosophically superior and indispensable in the situation to remind us that being rich is not a moral fault. But that point we would grant her, going against the grain of her formalist zeal, only after a meticulous and concrete examination of the origins of the wealth in question. For it could well be that all really considerable wealth today is entirely, and by way of necessity, implicated in certain indubitable crimes.
· That leaves us with the fundamental propagandistic name: What "Terrorism" targets is the "Democracies" centring around that exemplary democracy, we all know it, the United States of America. As any old patriot from over there will tell you, "this is a free country", and that is what the Saudi fanatics wanted to mutilate. The consensus, in the last analysis, then is: "Terrorism against Democracy". Now, to the overwhelming majority of our contemporaries I want to say this: here, in this jaded democracy that is France, the political space given by that formula is the space of inscription of the mass crime of New York. It is the formula which has neutralised reactions and carried the general support, albeit a little plaintive, accorded to the American war. For inevitably it is in any case admitted that, if the democracies are attacked by Terrorism then, in view of their excellence, they have the right to avenge themselves. What remains to know is against whom these legitimate reprisals are to be carried out.
D/ Terrorism: Substance and Predicates

· At this point let's commit to a precise philosophical proposition: every substantialisation of a formal adjective requires a dominant predicate. If one goes from the adjective "terrorist", which qualifies an action by its form, to "Terrorism", which is an empty substantive, one cannot hope to fill the void by its vis-à-vis alone (The West, Democracy, etc.). It is necessary to endow it with a predicate (just as it was necessary around 1914 à la fin des fins that -- contrary to the reflective and Cartesian Frenchman -- the Boche was labelled as being bestial and delivered over to obscure and instinctive forces, and that around 1933 the Jew was labelled cosmopolitan and abstract -- contrary to the Aryan, tied to blood and soil. Today, the supposed substantial support called "Terrorism" has no being except to receive the predicate "Islamic". What, exactly, is the value of this predicate? One might be satisfied by saying that it has already been corrupted by its function, which is to furnish this "Terrorism" with a semblance of historical colour. Taken on its own it comes down to the observation that religion has been subjected to political instrumentalisation -- also a long "Western" story: the wily alliances between the State and the Church do not date from today. The conjunction of religion and all kinds of political processes, some extremely violent, in any case is not a particularity of Islam. One will recall that -- in Poland for example -- where religion (Catholicism this time) played an important role in the resistance against communism, the "democratic" States congratulated it.
· In the case at hand, that of Bin Laden -- if, however, it really concerns him, which nobody up to this date has been able to prove -- one knows for certain that the point of departure is a series of manoeuvres of extraordinary complexity in relation to the manna of oil fields in Saudi Arabia and that this figure is in sum a good American, someone for whom that which is important is wealth and power, little matter the means employed. Just as are his rivals and comperes for power in the region. For the sovereigns of Saudi Arabia have never held themselves from making terror reign in the name of hard-line Islamic fundamentalism, and to my knowledge not a single notable democrat has ever asked for an armada of B-52's to go and wipe them out.
· It must be strongly suspected, then, that for these democrats there is "Islamic Terrorism" and "Islamic Terrorism". The first, supported by the Americans and by way of consequence a friend to "our Societies", is to be, if not admired, then at least tolerated. Turn a blind eye and keep on going. The second, which succeeded in striking us by its devious calculations: stigmatise it and level it with bombs! In the final analysis, it is a matter of knowing how one is situated with regard to the access to oil.
· In passing, let us underline Wagner's prophetic virtue when, in his Tetralogy, he staged the curse put on the Rhine's gold. Indeed, it is one of the great modern curses to have the equivalent of that gold in one's subsoil. South Africa's diamonds, Bolivia's tin-metal, the precious stones of the Congo and Sierra Leone, the oil in the Middle East and the Congo -- as many regions or countries put to fire and to sword because, as the stakes of rapacious and cynical calculations, the planetary administration of their mineral resources must necessarily escape them. It does not seem as if "our Societies", "our paradigmatic Democracies", as to that which involves them, draw the least consequence from these atrocious disasters. In any case, Bin Laden, if like the Wotan God he speaks at length, and somewhat confusedly, of destiny and religion, it seems that his business is rather to know how to seize (more) black gold and accede in this way to the Nibelungen collection, the petroleum monarchies of the Gulf.
· It is worth remarking that the political instrumentalisation of religion has been persistently instrumentalised by the United States themselves. That has been one of the great constants of their politics for decades. Fearing Soviet influence, they fought everything that even mildly resembled secular politics in the Arab world. Whether Nasser in Egypt, or Baas in Iraq or in Syria, they did not involve themselves except to create more and more serious problems, whilst on the other hand they supported without failure the retrograde fanatics of Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Pakistan. In Indonesia they lent a helping hand to the eradication of a progressive pro-third world regime bringing about the death of five thousand by encouraging an alleged Saint Bartholomew of communists. In Palestine everyone knows that the development of Hamas was considered from the beginning to be an excellent thing by the Israeli services, who were themselves against the hegemony of the Fatah the catch-cry of which, you will recall, is a secular and democratic Palestine, and which included Christians in its ranks. Finally, the Taliban themselves are the conjoint creature of the Americans and the Pakistanis, both of whom were against the coming to power of any potential allies, whether of the Russians, the Chinese, or the Iranians. The ensemble of these manoeuvres disqualifies the relevance of the predicate "Islamic" when it is a matter of designating the "terrorist" enemies of the United States.
· Note the singular status of that which could be called the instrumentalisation of an instrumentalisation. In the Middle East or elsewhere, certain cliques of politicians instrumentalise religion with the aim of serving their projects (in fact: in order to take over power from other ageing or discredited cliques of politicians). American governments attempt regularly to instrumentalise that instrumentalisation, with a view to take control of this or that situation. But the instrumentalisation of an instrumentalisation is a delicate mechanism. It is exposed to brutal deviations. In this way, the United States (and the French who were very active at the time) instrumentalised Saddam Hussein who instrumentalised the opposition between the Sunnites and the Shiites against his Iranian neighbour. The goal of the "West" was to break the reign of the Iranian revolution, while the goal of Saddam Hussein was to set himself up as the greatest regional power. The result: a terrifying war on the scale of the war of 1914-18, hundreds of thousands of dead, the consolidation of the Iranian regime, and the making of Saddam Hussein into an uncontrollable creature, then into a "terrorist" enemy. The same story reoccurring with the Taliban, we propose to all States the following maxim: "do not instrumentalise an instrumentalisation except with prudence". Especially one including religion, a subjective sustenance that will not be easily manipulated by cruel and sly politicians.
· In truth, what is dissimulated behind the predicate "Islamic" -- and other such "cultural" categories, the subjective resources of which can be activated at leisure -- are generally unappetising (state) political operations, that it is important to keep from public attention. For a thousand reasons, in France it is very easy to awaken an anti-Arab zeal, whether through the vulgar and post-colonialist form that the extreme right gives it, or the historian and "ethical" form given to it by the Zionist or feminist petit bourgeois intellectual. Thus, some will rejoice that Kabul is being bombarded in order to "liberate the women", others will be saying to themselves that Israel can always procure some benefits from the situation, and the extreme right will think that a massacre of "Bougnouls"[2] is always good to take. None of any of that has strictly anything to do with the crime of New York, either in its causes, its form, or its real effects. But all of them rally together behind the flag of the vengeful crusade of various colours and especially of innumerable apathies validating the syntagm "Islamic terrorism".
· The philosophical lesson is thus the following: when a predicate is attributed to a formal substance (as is the case with every derivation of a substantial from a formal adjective) it has no other consistency than to give an ostensible content to that form. In "Islamic terrorism", the predicate "Islamic" has no other function except to supply an apparent content to the word "terrorism" itself devoid of all content (in this instance, political). It is a matter of an artificial historicisation which leaves what has really happened (the crime of New York) unthought. This does not prohibit, but rather commands that what originates in that unthought -- that is, in the name of the inconsistent term designating it (Islamic terrorism) -- is a sort of history in trompe l'oeil of the period which opens.
E/What "war" against Terrorism?

· What has arrived, our leaders tell us, is the "war against Islamic Terrorism". A long and difficult epoch. But why a "war"? Just as with "Terrorism" and "Islamic" this word, with regard to the situation, is extremely problematic. What we uphold/maintain here is that "war", also entirely formal, is the symmetrical term to the very vague "Terrorism". It is important to be aware that the usage of the term "war" (which was immediate in the declaration of American officials then in those of their servants -- public opinion and foreign governments) is something new. Previously, when governments declared that their duty was "to eradicate Terrorism", they were careful to keep themselves from speaking of war. Indeed, how does one declare war on a few delinquent civilians or fanatical bombers or on a group of anarchists? The word war is far too dignified and has been reserved for resolutions between States. Even during the interminable and very violent colonial war against the Algerian patriots, which mobilised hundreds of thousands of soldiers, French governments from Mitterrand to De Gaulle always spoke of "maintaining order" and of "pacification". Even today, using the same methods as the French in Algeria forty years ago in order to settle accounts with Chechen nationalists (systematic torture, internment camps, the destruction of villages, the raping of women) Putin is careful not to say that there is, strictly speaking, a war. It is an immense police operation, wherein, to employ his own expression "we will go looking for the terrorists right into the sewers" and so on. In sum, governments have opposed repression to terrorism, generally using the most violent and abject of means, but always in the symbolic register of the police.
· Hence, in the case which concerns us here, why is it a matter of war, including and especially in the symbolic register? The crime of New York, like all crime, calls for a mobilisation of police to track and to judge its authors or its financial backers. That doing, without doubt the feared and extremely unethical methods of the modern "services" will be used. But war?
· My thesis is that, in the formal representation it makes of itself, the American imperial power privileges the form of war as an attestation -- the only one -- of its existence. Moreover, one observes today that the powerful subjective unity that carries (away) the Americans in their desire for vengeance and war is constructed immediately around the flag and the army.
· The United States has become a hegemonic power in and through war: from the civil war, called the war of Secession (the first modern war by its industrial means and the number of deaths); then the two World Wars; and finally the uninterrupted continuation of local wars and military interventions of all kinds since the Korean War up until the present ransacking of Afghanistan, passing via Lebanon, the Bay of Pigs, Vietnam, Libya, Panama, Barbados, the Gulf War, and Serbia, not to mention their persistent support for Israel in its war without end against the Palestinians. Of course, one will hasten to add that the USA won the day in the Cold War against the USSR on the terrain of military rivalry (Reagan's Star Wars project pushed the Russians to throw in the towel) and are understood to be doing the same thing against China, by the imposition of an exhausting armament race (that is the only sense of the pharaoh-like anti-missile shield project) by means of which one hopes to discourage any project of great magnitude.
· This should remind us, in these times of economic obsession, that in the last instance power continues to be military. Even the USSR, albeit it ruined, insofar as it was considered as an important military power (and above all bythe Americans), continued to co-direct the world. Today the USA has the monopoly on the aggressive financial backing of enormous forces of destruction, and does not hesitate to serve itself with them. And the consequences of that can be seen, including (notably) in the idea that the American people has of itself and of what must be done. Let's hope that the Europeans -- and the Chinese -- draw the imperative lesson from the situation: servitude is promised to those who do not watch carefully over their armed forces.
· Being forged in this way out of the continual barbarity of war -- leaving aside the genocide of the Indians and the importation of tens of millions of black slaves -- the USA quite naturally considers that the only riposte worthy of them is a spectacular staging of power. Truly speaking, the adversary matters little and may be entirely removed from the initial crime. The pure capacity to destroy this or that will do the job, even if at the end what is left is a few thousand miserable devils or a phantomatic "government". Provided, in sum, that the appearance of victory is overwhelming, any war is convenient.
· What we have here (and will also have if the USA continues in Somalia and in Iraq etc.,) is war as pure form, as the theatrical capture of an adversary ("Terrorism") in its essence vague and elusive. The war against nothing: itself removed from the very idea of war.
F/Parenthesis on "Anti-Americanism"

· Certain "intellectuals" have judged the moment ripe to stigmatise the compulsive anti-Americanism to which French intellectuals are would be victims. One well knows that in this type of polemic, those whom the journalist-intellectuals call "French intellectuals" are other journalist-intellectuals who are not of the same mind. As a result, the word "intellectual" is all the more emphasised as intellectuality is absent. It is a requirement of this debate that each camp declares itself to be persecuted and in the minority, at least insofar as it is composed solely of veterans who can be seen everyday on television, and whose countenance and eloquence one cannot help but admire every time one picks up a magazine.
· We have thus been treated to the spectacle of Jacques Juillard and Bernard-Henri Lévy, two particularly copious editors, presenting themselves as the solitary dispensers of justice and fatigue-plagued by dint of their good fight for liberty and modernity against the enslaving, archaic, and repulsive horde of French intellectuals.
· The central argument of these brothers in heroic alliance with the American bombers amounts to the following: that to be against the USA in this affair, as in many others, is to be against freedom. It is as simple as that. Bernard Henri-Lévy, who never minces his words, states that to be anti-American is fascistic. As for Julliard -- veritably crepuscular by dint of having been right all along -- his axiom is that "French intellectuals" do not like freedom.
· We might rather say that an orientation of thought, for the sole reason that Bernard-Henri Lévy declares it fascist, deserves to be considered with attention. And we hasten to add that if "freedom" is such as to resemble Jacques Juillard politically and intellectually, it is assuredly better not to be free.
· But what must be said is this: if there exists only one great imperial power always convinced that its most brutal interests coincide with the Good; if it is true that every year the USA spends more on their military budget than Russia, China, France, England and Germany put together; and if that Nation-State, handed over to military excess, has no public idol other than money, no allies other than servants, and no view of other peoples other than an indifferent, commercial, and cynical one; then for the basic freedom of States, peoples, and individuals, everything must be done and be thought, in order to escape, as much as possible, from the commandments, interventions and interference of that imperial power.
· "Anti-Americanism" is meaningless. The American people have brought humanity admirable inventions in all orders of experience. But today there cannot be the least political liberty or independence of mind, without a constant and unrelenting struggle against the imperium of the USA.
· One can, of course, have as one's sole ambition to be considered by the masters in Washington as their most zealous servant. It seems sometimes as if Tony Blair dreams of the posthumous rest for his Old England that it would be to become the 51st state of the Union. He is reminiscent of those vassal "Kings" of Rome, whose pusillanimity is depicted in certain of Corneille's tragedies: "Ah! Don't put me on bad terms with the [Roman] Republic!" says Prusias, Bithynie's Pétain, to Nicomede the potential resistance fighter. Let's take the liberty to side with Nicomede and to consider that the inevitable condition of our freedom is to be at odds, seriously at odds, with American "democracy", like the Corneillian hero is with the Roman "Republic". At odds, one might say, "till death". For the American superpower is but the deadly guarantee of the obscene accumulation of wealth. The American Army is the instrument in the Race of "Western" Masters against the all the unfortunates of the earth.
G/ The disjunctive synthesis of two nihilisms

· Let's return to our point of departure: philosophy facing the event. As is always so with the destitution of terms, we have arrived at the important critical stage. Little intelligibility remains of our consensual statement "the war of the Democracies against Islamic Terrorism".
· What, then, is our own formula? Joyfully borrowing a concept from Gilles Deleuze we say: What the crime of New York and the battles following it attest to is the disjunctive synthesis of two nihilisms.
· Let's clarify that aphorism.
· There is a synthesis since, to our mind, the principal actors are of the same kind. Yes, Bin Laden, or whoever financed the crime, on the one hand, and the foundations of the American superpower, on the other, belong to the same world -- nihilistic -- of money, of blind power, of cynical rivalry, of the "hidden gold" of primary resources, of total scorn for the everyday lives of people, and of the arrogance of self-certitude, based on the void. And of moral and religious platitudes plated onto all that: on both sides Good, Evil, and God serve as rhetorical ornaments in jousts of financial ferocity and schemes for hegemonic power.
· There is a disjunction in that it is inevitably under the form of crime that these actors seek and find each other. Whether the crime is the deprecating, secretly machinated and suicidal crime of New York, or crimes of State -- Kabul, Kandahar, and elsewhere -- reinforced with anaesthetised machines bringing death to others and zero death to oneself.
· The mass crime is the exact inverse of the imperial brutality. It -- real or borrowed -- personnel (Bin Laden, the Taliban etc), come directly from the cookhouses of that American hegemony, which educated and financed it, just as it desires a place of choice in the system -- it is the reverse side of the coin. At that point religion is nothing but a demagogic vocabulary worth neither more nor less that the populist "anti-capitalism" slogans of fascists in the thirties. One speaks for the "disinherited" Muslims, but wants to become a billionaire Saudi Arabian, that is to say American, just as one had the "German Worker" on one's lips solely in order to become the State commensal of canon merchants. On Bush's side, one is with God, The Good, Democracy, and also America (it's the same thing) tracking down Evil -- but in reality it is a matter of reminding all those disobedient imperial creatures that they will be reduced to ashes if they think about undermining the Master. If not them, then their parents. And if not their parents, then those accursed with whom they live. And if not them then their hosts, no matter, any unfortunates vaguely resembling them will do. As the Defence Secretary, Rumsfeld, declared with the frank speech of an imperialist in chase, it is a matter of killing as many people as possible. It must be said that some of those suave American professors lent him a helping hand in asking whether or not, considering the circumstances, it wouldn't be useful to use torture -- to which some even more refined American professors objected that it would be in any case preferable to expedite the suspects to allied countries where torture is an official method. Upon the latest news, we hear that they are being rounded up, drugged and chained for transportation to the thousands of cells hastily constructed in a base at Guantanamo, Cuba -- appreciate the irony.
· In the same way as the crime of New York, America's war is unconnected to any law and indifferent to any project. On both sides, it is a matter of striking blindly to demonstrate the strike capacity. It is a matter of bloody and nihilistic games of power without purpose and without truth.
· All the formal traits of the crime of New York indicate its nihilistic character: the sacralisation of death; the absolute indifference to the victims; the transformation of oneself and others into instruments ... but nothing speaks louder than the silence, the terrible silence of the authors behind the crime. For affirmative, liberating, non-nihilistic political violence is not only always claimed, but finds its essence in claiming. In 1941, when the first resistance fighters killed a German officer or blew up a pylon, it was only ever to say "it's us, the Resistance! Resistance exists and will continue to strike back!" The tract, saying who did what, must accompany the act (acte). Violence is, to forge a neologism, a Tract(e).[3] There is none of any of that today. The act remains unnamed and anonymous just like the culprits. We see in that the infallible sign of a sort of fascist nihilism.
· And opposite it we have the nihilism proper to the old name of "capital". Das Kapital. The latter is nihilist in its extensive form -- the market having become world-wide -- in its fetishisation of the formalism of communication, and in its extreme political poverty, that is to say, in the absence of any project other than its perpetuation -- the perpetuation of American hegemony and vassality, as comfortable as possible, for the others.
· In its structural aspect, this nihilism can be called the nihilism of virtual equality. On the one hand, the governments serving it organise monstrous inequalities, even in simple life. If you are born in Africa your life expectancy is perhaps 30 years of age, but it is 80 if you are born in France. Such is the contemporary "democratic" world. But at the same time (and that is what sustains the "democratic" fiction in the soul) there is an egalitarian dogmatism, that of equality vis-à-vis the commodity. The same product is proposed everywhere. Armed with that universal proposition, contemporary "democracy" forges the subject from this abstract equality -- every consumer, in his or her virtuality opposite the commodity, is ostensibly identical to all others from the point of view of abstract buying power. Market Man. As Man (or Woman) one is the Same as everyone else insofar as one looks at the same displays of commodities. That some have less money than others, and thus have unequal buying power, is a secondary contingence, and anyhow is no one's fault (except perhaps your own, so watch yourself carefully!). In its principle, anyone and everyone, able to buy whatever is being sold as a matter of right, is posited as being equal to everyone else.
· Nevertheless, as one knows, this equality is nothing but frustration and ressentiment. It is the only equality that can be conjointly claimed both by "Western" governments and billionaire "terrorists".
· In its circumstantial aspect, capitalist nihilism has come to the stage of the non-existence of any world. Yes, today there is no world, there are but some singular and disjointed situations. There is no world simply because the majority of the planets inhabitants today do not even receive the present of a name, of a simple name. When there was class society, proletarian parties (or presumed to be so), the USSR, the national wars of liberation etc., no matter which farmer of no matter what region -- just as no matter which worker in no matter what town -- was able to receive a political denomination. That is not to say that their material situation was better, certainly not, nor that that world was excellent. But symbolic positions existed, and that world was a world. Today, outside of the grand and petty bourgeois of imperial cities, who proclaim themselves as "civilisation", there is nothing but the anonymous excluded. "Excluded" is the name of those who have no name, just as "market" is the name of a world which is not a world. In actual fact, apart from certain singular situations, outside of the unremitting undertaking of those who make thought -- including political thinking -- live there is nothing but the American army.
H/ To conclude: Philosophy?

· If the situation is as we say it is -- the disjunctive synthesis of two nihilisms -- it is, as we see it, a formidable one. It announces the repetition of disasters.
· Philosophy has from that moment to welcome everything into thought that holds itself outside that synthesis. Everything which takes a foothold in the real and raises it to the symbol philosophy must make the condition of its own becoming.
· But to do that it must break with whatever leads it through nihilistic circuitry, with everything that restrains and obliterates the power of the affirmative. It must push beyond the nihilistic motif of the "end of Western metaphysics". And more generally, it must push beyond the Kantian heritage, the perpetual examination of limits, the critical obsession, the narrow form of judgement. For a single thought is far more immense than any judgement.
· In a word: it is essential to break with the motif, omnipresent today, of finitude. Stemming from a critical as well as a hermeneutical origin, and as well regarded by the phenomenologists as by the positivists, the motif of finitude is the discrete form by which thought folds in advance, and is enjoined to a modesty to conserve, in all circumstances, the fierce contemporary nihilism.
· The duty of philosophy is thus clear: to reconstitute rationally the infinite reserve of the affirmative that every liberating project requires. Philosophy does not, has never, disposed by itself of the effective figures of emancipation. That is the primordial task of that which concentrates on making-thinking political. Instead it is like the attic where in difficult times, one accumulates resources, lines up tools, and sharpens knives. Philosophy is exactly that which proposes an ample reserve of means to other forms of thought. This time, it is on the side of the affirmative and the infinite that philosophy must select and accumulate its resources, tools and knives.


Alain Badiou was born in 1937 in Rabat (Morocco). He studied at the Ecole Normale Supérieure and participated in 1969 in founding the University of Paris VIII (Vincennes) where, as a colleague of Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, Jean-François Lyotard, Jacques Rancière, Jacques Poulain and others, he taught for thirty years. Today, Alain Badiou is director of the department of philosophy at the Ecole Normale Supérieure, thus finishing where he began. Alain Badiou is a philosopher, but also a novelist and a playwright. He has, moreover, never ceased being a political militant. Of his considerable philosophic oeuvre, Being and Event (Le Seuil 1988) -- his most ambitious attempt to date -- the monographs such as those on Saint-Paul (P.U.F 1998) and Deleuze (Minnesota University Press 1999) and the recent trilogy Court Traité d'ontologie transitoire, Petit Manuel d'inesthétique, Abrégé de métapolitique (all published by Seuil 1998) distinguish themselves.