The Society of Enmity
The contemporary era is, undeniably, one of separation, hate move- ments, hostility, and, above all, struggle against an enemy. Consequently, liberal democracies—already considerably leached by the forces of capital, technology, and militarism—are now being sucked into a colossal process of inversion.
Yesterday, “Negro” and “Jew” were the favored names for such objects. Today, Negroes and Jews are known by other names: Islam, the Muslim, the Arab, the foreigner, the immigrant, the refugee, the intruder, to mention only a few.
The desire for an enemy, the desire for apartheid (for separation and enclaving), the fantasy of extermination—all today occupy the space of this enchanted circle... This also means accepting that there is nothing common to be shared between us and them. The anxiety of annihilation thus goes to the core of contemporary projects of separation.
As it happens, the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories serves as a laboratory for a number of techniques of control, surveillance, and separation that are today proliferating in other places on the planet. [Besides the detention centres in Europe and Australia, see for example the plight of the Muslims in India, Myanmar and China]
In South Africa wholesale separation would have undermined the very survival of the oppressor.
But it was Europe that, perhaps for the first time in modern history, inaugurated a new epoch of global resettlement. This repeopling of the world, which occurred between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries, presents a twofold characteristic: it was at once a process of social excretion (for the migrants who left Europe to found overseas colonies) and a historic tipping point. For the colonized, it came at the cost of new forms of enslavement.
On one side, therefore, is me—fabric par excellence and zero point of worldly orientation—and, on the other, others with whom I can never completely blend; the Others that I can bring to myself but with whom I can ever genuinely entertain rela- tions of reciprocity or mutual implication.
The enemy the Other that I am
Irrepressible, the desire for an enemy, for apartheid, the fantasy of extermi- nation, all constitute the line of fire, indeed the decisive trial, at the begin- ning of this century. As the fundamental vectors of contemporary brain- washing, they push democratic regimes everywhere into a kind of vicious stupor and, inebriated and reeking, to engage in drunken behavior. As both diffuse psychic structures and generic passionate forces, they stamp the dominant affective tonality of our times and stir many contemporary struggles and mobilizations. These struggles and mobilizations thrive on a vision of the world that is threatening and anxiogenic, one that grants primacy to logics of suspicion, and indeed to all that which is secret, or pertains to conspiracy and the occult.
To be deprived of an enemy—or to not have lived through a terrorist attack or any other bloody acts fomented by those who hate us and our way of life—means being de- prived of the kind of relation of hatred that authorizes the giving of a free rein to all sorts of otherwise forbidden desires.
The enemy [Carl] Schmitt describes is neither a simple competitor nor an adver- sary nor a private rival whom one might feel hate or antipathy toward. The enemy refers to a supreme antagonism. In both body and flesh, the enemy is that individual whose physical death is warranted by his existential de- nial of our own being.
And if the enemy has a name, this might be only a borrowed name, a false name whose primary function is dissimulation. Such an enemy advances, at times masked, at other times openly, among us, around us, and even within us, ready to emerge in the middle of the day or in the heart of night, each time his apparition threatening the annihila- tion of our way of life, our very existence.
Aided by the heightened reproduction of the affect of fear, liberal democracies have not stopped manufacturing bogeymen apt to scare themselves—today the young veiled woman, tomorrow the terrorist nov- ice returning from the battlefields of the Near and Middle East, and, more generally, lone wolves and sleeper cells that, dormant in the crevices of society, lie in wait looking for the right moment to strike.
What are we to say about the “Muslim,” the foreigner, or the immigrant, those about whom one has continued, beyond all reasonable bounds, to weave images that, little by little, speak to each other by association? That such images do not tally with reality matters little. Primary fantasies know neither doubt nor uncertainty. As Freud argued, the mass is only “excited by immoderate stimuli. Anyone seeking to move it needs no logical calibration in his arguments, but must paint with the most powerful images, exaggerate, and say the same thing over and over again.”
In the mythoreligious logic specific to our times, the divine (just like the market, capital, or the political) is almost always perceived as an immanent and immediate force: vital, visceral, and energetic.
The damned of the faith
In their effort to suppress terrorism and complete their transforma- tion into security states, liberal democracies no longer hesitate to turn to grand mythological schemas. The nation is summoned to shed its tears of rancor in public and rise up against the enemy. And on each occasion the path from tears to weapons is paved anew. Clothed in the rags of international law, human rights, democracy, or, simply, “civilization,” militarism no longer needs a mask to advance. Breathing life back into hatred, yesterday’s and today’s accomplices are suddenly transformed into the “enemies of humanity in general,” whereby might becomes right.
By demanding the death of all those who are not unconditionally on our side, is the risk not that we forever reproduce all the tragedy of a humanity gripped by hatred and unable to get free?
With their imaginations whipped up by hatred, liberal democracies do not stop to feed on all sorts of obsessions about the real identity of the enemy. But who is this enemy really? Is it a nation, a religion, a civilization, a culture, or an idea?
State of insecurity
Taken together, hate movements, groups invested in an economy of hostility, of enmity, and multiform struggles against the enemy, have all contributed, upon this exit from the twentieth century, to a significant raising in the acceptable levels and forms of violence that one can (or should) inflict on the weak, on enemies and intruders (anyone considered not to be one of us). They have also contributed to a widespread instrumentalization of social relations, as well as to profound mutations within contemporary regimes of collective desire and affects. Further still, they have fostered the emergence and consolidation of a state form often referred to as the surveillance or security state.
Taken together, hate movements, groups invested in an economy of hostility, of enmity, and multiform struggles against the enemy, have all contributed, upon this exit from the twentieth century, to a significant raising in the acceptable levels and forms of violence that one can (or should) in- flict on the weak, on enemies and intruders (anyone considered not to be one of us). They have also contributed to a widespread instrumentalization of social relations, as well as to profound mutations within contemporary regimes of collective desire and affects. Further still, they have fostered the emergence and consolidation of a state form often referred to as the sur- veillance or security state.
The security state thrives on a state of insecurity, which it participates in fomenting and to which it claims to be the solution. If the security state is a structure, the state of insecurity is a kind of passion, or rather an affect, a condition, or even a force of desire.
The security state—being explicitly animated by a mythology of freedom that at bottom stems from a metaphysics of force—is, in short, less concerned with the distributions of places and remuneration than by the project to control human life in general, whether it is a case of its subjects or of those designated as enemies.
Domestic pacification, what might be termed a molecular or “silent” civil war, mass in- carcerations, the decoupling of nationality from citizenship, extrajudicial executions sanctioned by new legal and criminal powers—all these factors contribute to blurring the old distinction between internal and external security, against an intensification of racist affects.
Nanoracism
what is nanoracism, if not that narcotic brand of preju- dice based on skin color that gets expressed in seemingly anodyne everyday gestures, often apropos of nothing, apparently unconscious remarks, a little banter, some allusion or insinuation, a slip of the tongue, a joke, an innuendo, but also, it must be added, consciously spiteful remarks, like a malicious intention, a deliberate stamping underfoot or tackle, a dark desire to stigmatize and, in particular, to inflict violence, to injure and humiliate, to sully those not considered to be one of us?
Nanoracism has become the obligatory complement to hydraulic racism—that of juridicobureaucratic and institutional micro- and macro- measures, of the state machine, one that recklessly shuffles clandestine workers and illegals around, that continues to camp the rabble at the urban outskirts like a jumble of odd objects, that multiplies the number of undocumented workers by the shovelful, that presides over their removal from the territory and electrocution at the borders, when it does not simply turn to account shipwrecks on the high seas; a state that carries out racial profiling in buses, airport terminals, underground trains, streets, that unveils Muslim women and strives to keep its own women on file, that multi- plies its immigration and other detention centers, that invests extravagantly in deportation techniques; a state that discriminates and performs segregation in broad daylight while swearing to the neutrality and impartiality of the secular republican state—“indifferent to difference”—and still talks nonsense about that open-air putrefaction that no longer stiffens its phallus but that, against all good sense, one persists in calling “the rights of man and the citizen.”
Nanoracism, in its banality and capacity to infiltrate into the pores and veins of society, is racism turned culture and into the air one breathes, at a time of the generalized idiotizing, machinic decerebration and bewitchment of the masses.
The camp, it ought to be said, has not only become a structural feature of our globalized condition. It has ceased to scandalize. Better still, the camp is not just our present. It is our future: our solution for “keeping away what disturbs, for containing or rejecting all excess, whether it is human, organic matter or industrial waste.” In short, it is a form of government of the world.
All over, we hear the appeal to good sense, to the good old republic with its rounded and decrepit back, the appeal to good old smart-ass humanism, to a certain rotten feminism—calls for which equality henceforth rhymes with the duty-to-make-the-veiled- Muslim-girl-wear-a-thong-and-shave-the-bearded-man.
Despite all the horrors of the Negro slave trade, colonialism, fascism, Nazism, the Holocaust, and other massacres and genocides, Western nations especially—their bowels bloated with all sorts of gases—continue to mobilize racism in aid of all manner of more or less harebrained and murderous histories.
they employ racism like a hooked blade, the poisonous addition to a beggar’s nationalism, that is, one reduced to its last rags in an hour when the real centers of decision-making are denationalized, wealth is offshored, powers and mass debt are enclaved, and whole territories are zoned, while entire populations suddenly become superfluous.
One allows oneself some racism not because it is something unusual but by way of reply to neoliberalism’s general call to lubricity. Out with the general strike. In with brutality and sex. In this era, which is so dominated by a passion for profit, this mix of lubricity, brutality, and sexuality fosters the “society of the spectacle’s” assimilating of racism and its molecularizing through structures of contemporary consumption.
A kind of merry and frenzied nanoracism that is utterly moronic, that takes pleasure in wallowing in ignorance and that claims a right to stupidity and to the violence that it institutes—herein lies the spirit of our times.
Concerning the history of being and the politics of being, it can thus be argued that the West has never properly thought through its own finitude. It has always posited its own horizon of action as something inevitable and absolute, and this horizon has always wished to be, by definition, planetary and universal. The universal here is the name given to the violence of the victors of wars that are, of course, conflicts of predation.
Humanity’s division into native and foreign peoples is far advanced. If, with Schmitt or Heidegger, yesterday’s fundamental demand was to find the enemy and bring him out in the open, today it suffices to create him so as to rise up against him, to confront him with the prospect of total annihi- lation and destruction.
Is it enough to shoot down enemies and expel foreigners to be truly rid of them, to doom them to the eternity of that which is to be forgotten?
Achille Mbembe, Necropolitics, 2019, pp. 42-65
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