Descartes' Angelus Novus

1.1 The terms a priori and a posteriori indicate a difference in epistemic warrant that has purchase throughout our linguistic culture. G.E. Moore circled this difference with his open question: X may be pleasurable, but is it good?—and we can pump an analogous difference by asking of warrant per se, noting well that something might be justified but that this doesn’t mean the idea, or whatever, is true. In juridical terms it is possible to ask of any law, whether it is in fact right. All these points are grounded in the belief that Truth doesn't depend on whatever you may you think of it (or even anything you make of it--making it inaccessible); Reality isn’t whatever you want it to be, one might say; if something is true, it is true come what may, as Quine might say (differently). If something is right, it was always right. And so on.

From this question of truth, the anxiety of (sterilized) doubt quickly arrives. What if everything (or anything) we believe is wrong? Truth (the kingdom of God?) opens up in our discourse to shatter our epistemologies, forcing us to provide better reasons, that then could again be questioned, or perhaps, force us to figure the notion in a way that escapes open questioning altogether. In another register we might say, Derrida’s impossible (quasi-transcendental) could never break out of doubt because it was always messianic in the sense of an arrival of whatever. My immodest claim is that Descartes' messianic moment of truth may very well be intended to overcome a demonological moment of doubt.

1.11 Descartes’ skeptic was such an a priori move. Looking for a certainty for experience, he noted that what couldn't be doubted was that, in the event one is doubting, that one is actually doubting. I might doubt that I believe the assertion that “this is an indexed statement”; and I can doubt (t1) that I was then (t1-1) in a (de re) moment of doubt; but in the propositional attitude of doubt that x (tn), whatever X, doubt is legitimate and unassailable. All of this reasoning already begs the question of course in that Descartes presumed space to be made up of points that are unextended; that souls occupy space (have place (topos)) without being extended, and that therefore, consciousness itself, in a moment, doesn't permit simultaneous doubt. The argument, of course, can be justified by making the following seemingly true considerations: I can always doubt the past; I can even doubt that I was doubting in the past; but in a moment of doubting whatever, I cannot doubt the doubt in that moment. There is no supervenience here! I might very well turn to represent the previous moment and doubt that I was doubting (supervenience); but this then pushes Descartes' almost trivial point one step back. In the moment of doubt towards X, the doubt that I have is not something I can doubt; in the moment of having had doubt, I can doubt that I had it, but not that I am doubting the previous moment. 

1.111 The ontology of experience is tricky, especially if we consider that what we are talking about is meant to be conceived as prior to experience. What is the experience of doubt if not fully in experience? Perhaps the supervenient point is always made and the reality of the moment that Descartes relies upon to pull the trick is completely illusory. And yet it seems intuitive that in the moment of having had doubt, I can doubt that I had it, but not that I am doubting the previous moment. Nevertheless, it is hard to picture how this comes down to as being prior to experience. The sense of some event of thinking being prior to experience is difficult to understand (because thinking is an experience, of course!). In any event, perhaps what Descartes was trying to say was that it would be irrational to suppose that a demon would have an agenda of making us doubt that we are doubting. Or perhaps what Descartes was saying was that only God (Rationality) could pull us out of doubt. (And that this wasn't an idol). This is the tension I wish to explore: If God saves rationality, was the rational proof above obviously weak?

1.12 The argument that there is reason to doubt everything is a difficult one to make. In fact, it is clear enough that we have no way to understand the problem. But what was the problem? The demonological point that Descartes makes signified a common understanding, once, long ago; it was providence that was being questioned. The first cause of existence (God) yields a bridge to the a priori indubitable “moment” of Descartes. In this protected (protracted a priori experience) we are not second causes (even though we are created); it almost seems necessary to say that the bodily order is a different sort of secondariness (ontologically fallen) let us say, while the beautiful soul, the crown and jewel of creation, is a proper form of secondariness. What’s that? The reasonable man has entered once again into the garden, on his own strength of rationality?—As though reason were already redeemed? In Aquinas, the seat of reason is not perfect. In Eckhart we have moments of perfect union (with God)—provided we are self-less and without expectancy for God. Whatever that means. 

But what if that first cause that guarantees the second order entirely, isn't really there—asks Satan (or the demon, or whatever). Answer: of course it is; it constitutes the trust that we have. But how? And, as we know, the proof falls apart, and Descartes is caught in his circle. Of course it might be incorrect to see the lopped off soul as being the sort of thing that is secondary in a different sense. But my point is theological. If we are talking about doubt (sin) and we are looking for solutions, the theology of Descartes would have it that what is required is faith in God; or trust in God himself. And not faith in reason. When we doubt our capacities, or we doubt what we believe God has told us to do (consider Abraham, a knight of faith in Keirkegaard), what makes the despair of doubt vanish is putting our faith in God, God himself. So then what is curious about the demonology of Descartes’ skeptic is that God comes after the fact, later on in the proof as if they were detached, as if reason didn't require God--and this is how the argument has been taken up by rationalists. If this proof is virtual; if God was always necessary and the proof is only half good (if not utter bunk) without God, then we have an interesting problem because Descartes has rarely been considered as having made a demonological point. The point I’m making above about “moments” might then come down to the point that Reason was never good enough. If Descartes had just said only God can make the doubt disappear. But then what is this sense of doubt? Could it be something more than just seeing a proposition as possibly false?

1.3 

X doubts that Y (is true)

implies that Y might be false. And its opposite seems to be that 

X believes that Y (is true)

In our common everyday world of intuition, the certainty of Y is basically whether or not it is grounded in experience. If I hold up a hand, and you see it, you won’t likely doubt that it is a hand unless you’ve taken some entry level epistemology class. Of course the way out is to insist that the burden of proof is not on the one holding the hand; it is on the question in the first place. That is, it seems in keeping with ordinary common sense to doubt what is not evident. Any change in the conversation made by the epistemological skeptic, will seem out of place, like a conversation stopper. In sum we no longer find it believable that a posteriori experience requires a priori justification. And the epistemological skeptic is always asking an a priori question. 

The contemporary problem with understanding Descartes, therefore, is that God as guarantor for certainty in trivial matters seems unnecessary; and in matters that are less evident, aseity is completely out of place. God might sufficiently explain everything, of course—such is in keeping with the difference between truth and justification; but most people just don't live in Descartes’ world: God seems like a conversation stopper, offered in a no longer medieval world.

1.31 One point that I find exceedingly interesting stemming from the thoughts on Descartes’ demonology is that “X believes Y” is not the same as “X has faith that Y”. Faith is not the simple opposite of doubt. One might say that faith is independent of objective a posteriori evidence. Is faith then independent of reasons? Not necessarily. What of objective a priori reasons? Perhaps these will do, but we might also call upon experience as long as it is subjective. What is clear is that God doesn't arrive with the simple calling of his name, or at least God doesn't arrive in a way that is explicable, objectively, by others. Descartes wanted to make God superficially rational--evidently enough; but that doesn't mean that what he was saying wasn't deep too.  

Believes that Y and having faith that Y seem to be different sorts of things; but doubt is the opposite in both registers. If I have faith in God, I will certainly suffer from doubt when I have reason to do so. If I have faith that God is with me, (and he actually is), it is highly likely that I will experience doubt about that belief. And what is the nature of this doubt that has little to do with everyday problems like whether or not there is a hand, or a cat or a bed--that resonates not completely differently than it did to one thinking through the mechanics of sufficient reason? Sovereign Providence implies that so long as God permits doubt to be compounded there is nothing but his own saving power that can break through the cycle. Such a form of doubt is not a rational mode. In other words, when real demons arrive to make us doubt, there is no reason to suppose that they are rational and willing to be tricked; and there is every reason to suppose that seeing them as tricked is part of their trick; that such is part of their doubt. Doubt for a demon is only in a superficial way the kind of thing that ends quickly in reason.

**It is very important to note, however, that reason is not identical throughout philosophical history. For Aquinas it is clear; he means prudence; for Descartes it is less obviously like Aquinas, unless what I said above is on the way. Unless rationality was always too weak and too simple and too much like an idol.

1.4 Therefore, the simplicity of "doubt in Descartes", in analytic philosophy, catches only part of the meaning of doubt in terms of its vicious elements. And it seems that this is important. If the Kingdom of Heaven is Truth and everything else is a lie, then the mode of faith that we have lost in the simple analysis of belief and doubt can only be caught up with a new meaning of doubt, and perhaps, with a fresh reading of what Descartes was searching for. If he was looking for a way out of the vice of doubt, then it should be expected and unsurprising that he sought this ultimately in God; and yet, if we read this demonology ever more back into Descartes, it would seem evident that the grounding of doubt in itself was always too flimsy (and Descartes saw it). 

Supplementary Halos

There are a variety of meanings appended to the sense of freedom. 

We might mean moral freedom, implying that we are responsible and not absolutely determined; that causality is efficient in some sense; that material causes do not strictly determine the ends that one is inclined towards. It's complicated, of course; but moral freedom starts with the assumption that one is always free, “radically free” as Sartre put it; for even in the moment of strict coercion, one can still choose. In The Nick of Time, Johnny Depp is coerced to kill some politician, or his daughter will die. Sartre's point is merely that no situation necessarily produces a predetermined result. So even though the choices are limited (Kill this politician or do not (and your daughter will die)), the fact is that Johnny is not determined to do X to the exclusion of Y. It is likely that most people will kill someone they don't know rather than permit someone they love to die, but perhaps not; perhaps one will choose to end their own life instead, avoiding the given disjunctive choice altogether. In this sense, the claim is that

F1: One is always radically free from a metaphysical perspective because nothing coerces us (or determines us) to choose any end.

Of course, the argument may be that there is some prior causal sequence that explains whatever end there may be, and that therefore, the will is nothing more than an alley way of drives that precede it to their ends. And yet, in the moment of coercion above, it seems evident that no drive explains what Johnny Depp is going to do; after the fact, we might explain it--give it a narrative; but in the moment it seems unclear, and the latter ad hoc explanation seems to give us no real understanding into the meaning of coercion, the moment of choice, which one is “under”. Neither the drive to kill the politician nor the drive to let his daughter die, nor the self-destructive drive to kill himself, can offer itself in any objective prediction. The drives give us plausibilities, not necessities. 

Perhaps then, this sense of radical freedom, is not freedom as we usually mean it; and of course that makes sense. For we are rarely coerced. Or is it more the case that we rarely feel like we are coerced? 

It is for this reason that I wish to entertain another sense: political freedom under the presumption that No one feels coerced to live life.

Financial freedom and political freedom go hand in hand, we are told. If you have enough money to survive, evidently you are free from the burden of work. If you have enough money to have whatever you could ever want, you would always be free from simplicity, and free from having to do anything necessary. (You could always pay someone to do anything, and everything). If you are poor, you will of course never be free from doing anything necessary, and you are likely, intuitively, not to be free from desiring more. 

Epicurus distinguished necessary needs and non-necessary needs; to track only the former is to be run by the principle of simplicity; to have a problem with simplicity and to only focus on non-necessity is to be run by the desire for more. The question of being run by X (being had by X) and having X, then, strikes me as relative; one has what one is not had by. Therefore, the rich are had by avarice but they have necessity; the poor are had by necessity but they have avarice (perhaps). Therefore,

F2: One is free from X to the extent that one has whatever X one isn’t had by. 

I said above that no one feels coerced to live life. And yet what I mean is simply that being had by debts, life, and work, if such is your conception of life—which is the conception of life we desire if we are fully sublimated by civilization—makes it so that we have nothing but homelessness. (We are not had by the need to find shelter.) That is, if we live life as it is designed for us by the forces of biopolitics, the only thing that we are truly beyond (the only thing we have) is dependence in the sense of fully depending on the charity of weather, good people, and luck outside the city gates, of course to the degree that we are financially independent. Thus, if we are fabulously rich, we are not had by these biopolitical forces, we have them; and yet, as we said above, we are then probably had by avarice, an insatiable greed for more security for the self in things. 

So from this, the notion of coercion follows to the degree that we are had; and the phenomenological sense that we are had depends on how much financial freedom we have. One is always had by something; the rich by avarice, the poor by necessity. Accordingly, there is no such thing as autonomy. The homeless man, however, while he is had by the need for shelter and security, mirrors the wealthy person who is had by avarice; if only either would turn back into the security of necessity. Then one can be free of even being had.

Is the homeless person had by necessity? There are needs in day to day life, of course, as Epicurus said: necessary needs are food and shelter and yet, in our culture, these things are readily available given the general rule of charity. The homeless person is not had; the homeless person is had (perhaps) by the need for more for themselves, a better situation. Or they are had by the shame that ultimately propels us towards Avarice. The homeless person, too, might have necessity all figured out. They might even have diminished every sense of fear.

Perhaps what Giorgio Agamben meant in “Halos” (The Coming Community) is simply this turning from vice into virtue: “The Hassidim tell a story about the world to come that says everything there will be just as it is here. Just as our room is now, so it will be in the world to come; where our baby sleeps now, there too it will sleep in the other world. And the clothes we wear in this world, those too we will wear there. Everything will be as it is now, just a little different”.

 Agamben goes on to write:

“The theory developed by Saint Thomas in his short treatise on halos is instructive in this regard. The beatitude of the chosen, he argues, includes all the goods that are necessary for the perfect workings of human nature, and therefore nothing essential can be added. There is, however, something that can be added in surplus (superaddi), an “accidental reward that is added to the essential,” that is not necessary for beatitude and does not alter it substantially, but that simply makes it more brilliant (clarior).

The halo is this supplement added to perfection - something like the vibration of that which is perfect, the glow at its edges.”

~

The question of having nothing doesn't put one in a position to be unhad by anything. Something supplementary is required to make one indifferent in the proper sense. Joyful indifference places us beyond being had by necessity, but this turning, perhaps, requires a different sort of infusing. One is not naturally joyful, in Thomas’ sense; one does not naturally have beatitudes (stemming from their own capacities). Zoe requires a super infused addition. 

Form-of-LIfe: Beyond Law?

In Giorgio Agamben's The Open, the crucial point is to understand that every generation of the concept of man as not-animal because functional of developing a concept of animal, produces a possibility: Neither man nor animal; a figure that resonates as delineating a more complete picture of the metaphsyics of homo sacer. And if you'll recall the vision at the end, the idea of Feasting on Leviathan (ahem...) is caught up in the figure of the acephalus, the one that has become ignorant of division within (existence): the one that no longer sees herself as human, essentially, and, as such, willing to become a mini-Eichmann; for it is the definition of 'human' that produces bios (citizen) and thereby produces the outside (zoe), and therefore, also, the virtual possibility of 'bare-life', if it is not already present in the mere reality of non-citizen being a function of citizen. 

The extent to which we are willing to merely follow orders is proven by our willingness to entertain bios. We go to work, we make a wage; we consume products that have nasty origins in Third world countries; and the bios that is given to us in entering into citizen-life marks us. Our essence is built on the bare-life of the outsider that cannot become one of us, because they must produce the possibility of us.

---

The politics of civil disobedience are often associated with pacifism; but existential sedition, or drop out culture has more to it than is recognized. This is why monasticism is analyzed in his Highest Poverty.  If you know anything about the cell and the monk, it is the case that the Franciscans held no personal property and as such, were in tension with their  catholic "owners". Francis traveled to see Pope Innocent III after having his church burned to the ground; and yet, the meeting between Innocent and Francis became a different kind of thing. Here was a Christian focused on Jesus, and that very same Jesus led him to poverty, to a life of charity, and to holiness and anti-materialism. The Pope was humiliated for what had been done, but he responded in humility by kneeling to Francis' feet. From thence, the relationship was tense between the Franciscans and their "sponsors" (Dominicans) because the politics of Jesus tends to call the church into question (even now!). And metaphysically too! The politics of the Franciscans was based on the simplicity of metaphysical individuation--the privileging of nothing above anything else: the animal and the stone, the human and the weed; all are creatures, on equal footing, under God as created-being. Here, in this beautiful metaphysical vision, there can be no sense of "bare life".

If Francis called for a rejection of the hierarchy of (created) beings under Uncreated Being, then it is not impossible to see this (heavenly?) economy as having far reaching consequences. The revealed Christian economy of God (to become a fool for Christ, as Francis did) calls us out of  the wisdom of the world into the foolishness of faith. It calls us to serve God, never ourselves; it never calls us to serve Mammon (You cannot serve both God and Money). And so, it is no surprise that more can be said about the early Christians than their mere resistance to Emperor Worship (as the common Conservative Evangelical tradition would have it). As Hornus articulates in It Is Not Lawful for Me to Fight: Early Christian Attitudes toward War, Violence, and the State, the early church was also guided by indifference to the state and its desires, to the point that governing the vast sections of Christian reality became impossible because they were unwilling to participate in Mammon politics. We know that the early church, after Pentecost, were led to sell all their possessions and live to feed the poor.  That we don't do this is testament to our lack of faith. Indeed, one might spend a life figuring out how to link not-World economy with God's Economy.

It is not impossible that this vision of non-participation is what Agamben has in mind. There can be no doubt that it rejects the principle that None are Free unless all are Free. And yet, it seems clear enough that this position of non-participation cannot fail to do violence to Mammon. The real question is why the early Christians were so effective, and why contemporary anarchist approximations don't catch fire. Could it be that the monastic life involves more than mere existence?

"Beyond" Contraries

1. The law of the excluded middle implies that every conceivable proposition must be either True or False; that there is no third way for a proposition to be. According to Aristotle, two terms are contrary if they share the same genus and are “separated by the greatest possible difference” . If two terms are contraries like good and evil or humility and selfishness, a curious logic is invoked in saying that there is something beyond both. 'Neither A nor not-A', and 'Both A and not-A', indicate a third term, an “intermediary” (Aristotle 12a15ff). If A and not-A are mutually exclusive, in fact, then the claim that there is an intersecting, or intermediary, possibility, is impossible; if they are mutually exclusive and constitute the entirety of possibilities, then Neither A nor not-A indicates an impossible zone. Thus everything hinges on whether the two terms are mutually exclusive. In other words, If every act is either good or evil, then to affirm that some act is neither evil nor good means denying that everything is either good or evil, and the person making the argument will most likely be denying the definition.

2. Eckhart calls us to detachment, as a primary virtue that metaphysically unites us with God. His meaning of course is that we are to aim for this perfect union, and that one does so by going beyond humility in not attending to anything but God, since creatures distract, which is enough to find “fault” in them (“Detachment” 91). Humility before other creatures means going out into them, to be attached to them, to care for them, to be worried about them, whereas detachment is a never-having-gone out. The two virtues are closely bound up; “Detachment” “completes” humility—as though detachment contains humility (ibid., 89). And even humility is course corrected if it moves us to nothingness with respect to ourselves. The fact that under God we are all metaphysically equal (mere humanity) seems to be the mode that puts us in unity with God; while humility rests (or never rests, rather) at keeping us under others. Neither above nor below creatures—neither humble nor selfish; and never above God (never selfish), and always below God (humble). Obviously humility with respect to creatures and humility with respect to God must have different meanings; only the latter is detachment.

3. Another way of seeing Nietzsche’s position of being beyond good and evil—returning to master morality, good and bad—is to see it as articulating that Good and Evil are neither mutually exclusive nor fully constitutive. Good, as Nietzsche laments, once meant something different from what it was constructed genealogically to mean; of the couple Good-Evil, what is Good is roughly identical to what is Bad in the “distinct” couple Good-Bad. Aristocratic values are praised and Christian “priestly” values are blamed in his rhetorical maneuver. So the gesture “beyond good and evil” cannot fail to include some sense that there is an alternate definition on the “tables”. In saying that there are different meanings to Good, we are saying that the terms Good and Evil as defined by the priests do not exhaust the moral universe. Thus ,for Nietzsche in The Genealogy of Morals (GOM) the phrase,

1.1] Action X is evil

Can be met with:

2.1] Not in the least, action X is Good, for it is life affirming!

And the phrase

1.2] Action Y is virtuous, proper Good; for it is proper to be self-sacrificial

Can be met with 

2.2] On the contrary, such is bad, lowly, life-denying!

Here, the meaning of Good under the heading 1.2 is redescribed as bad at 2.2, while evil at 1.1 is redescribed as Good at 2.1. We ask, in order to determine what we mean by “beyond” the following question: In saying that Aristocratic values are praiseworthy, is this move a strict inversion of master morality, or does his epideictic rhetoric produce a third term? Relative to the bounds of Christian morality, Good and Evil are fixed as contraries; Nietzsche’s position is, in the least, a naming of slave morality as a privation of his natural, positive, “life affirming” praise. Once stipulated, once returned to traditional values in some broad sense, that is to say, good and bad become rough contraries, approximating the possibilities of Zarathustra. 

The inversion that these responses produce, undermines the way we think about values; values are not a matter of correspondence, but are, rather, perspectives on the way that we would prefer to say the world is. What happens in the genealogical trace of the term Good, is that we can no longer make sense of it in terms of having the appropriate sense; its has been associated with its opposite in a way that makes correspondence no longer a straight shot affirmation—as if it ever were. 

Now, whether an act is justified by the universe in a correspondence sense, is strictly indeterminate one way or the other. If an act is wrong, the nihilist, who doesn't even admit the sense of saying there is a morality divided between good and evil, merely says that nothing external to our language games support us. Beyond our language games there are just consequences at best, that are only ever enacted by some language game. Nothing but actors can produce the possibility of consequences; the universe is amoral and will not do this for us. If someone has wronged us, by our lights, we can hit back, or remain passive. It was never the universe that carried out the need for revenge—we give out own language games this extra gravitas, and thereby delude ourselves that there is anything that cares beyond us. For Nietzsche an act is genuinely bad if it is life denying. Accordingly, all Christian slave morality is bad, even though Christ says that his completion of human virtue in the coming of the Holy Spirit (the counsellor to come) is The Way, the Truth, and the Life. 

4. In denying that there are good and evil people, both Christians and nihilists agree. The marxist wants to praise the worker and blame the boss; the nihilist points to the fact that we are all bosses and workers, complicit in the gears of oppression. There are no good and bad guys means that it is not so easy for anarchist moralists to define the target of their rage. In the nihilist world of brute materialism, there are just consequences, none of which are Just, but rather, only ever what we can get away with given our capacity to will.

Nietzsche, in advocating what is life affirming as good gestures with Primitivism against Thanatos or decadence. Evidently Nietzsche and Primitivism go separate ways as Nietzsche affirms good and bad in a way that celebrates the individual as possibly-Zarathustra, while primitivism is collectivist. For primitivists, we would be free as individuals only if we made the world free of white-settler colonialism, free of us, that is to say. Nihilists would argue that this position is too ends oriented, to good oriented, too Manichean, that such is, perhaps a piece of deliberative rhetoric that is forever deluding itself. The nihilist might then say of Nietzsche, that he, too, is a little too moralistic in his lament. Perhaps the nihilist has no use for the term “good” or “bad” or “evil” and would prefer to generate a series of contradictions out of the mere relativism by which these terms are supported. Not to pick them up, like Nietzsche in his Aufheben, but to cross them out.

Is it good enough for a nihilist to say of moralism that such is what I do, if I do it, ceteris paribus; or is that even too far? Is this perhaps what Nietzsche also said?

'White Male'

MRA activists have historically been subjected to violence from feminists and their allies. And the reasoning behind this is evident; for the celebration of men as such, men as functioning in lockstep with abusive men, violating womyn, etc., ought to be shameful. Similarly, the celebration of being white is ridiculous if it is not distanced from lynching and violence carried out against APOC folks. Unqualified celebration of whiteness, then, leaves open the criticism of association with white supremacists; qualified whiteness or maleness that unequivocally makes the association with violence impossible should be sufficient for getting on with the celebration--if celebration were even to be a thing that anyone should care about. The problem is that no one would have ever thought of celebrating whiteness if it were't for the fact that folks have been attacking whites for simply being white. That is, everyday white people don't like being told there is something wrong with them; for there isn't; there would only be something wrong with them if they were actual white supremacists, and being white (in skin colour) is obviously not sufficient.

I've written before that being white and male in the intended sense is a matter of performance; being white male means living at the peak of privilege, which is ugly/repulsive in itself. Being white in this sense is a matter of not necessarily being white; thus one that is black can become white, while remaining black; for Obama was performatively white even though he was black. Accordingly, white people, if they are white in the performance sense, pass easily; Black people might perform very well but may have difficulty passing in every context. The question for bio-political beings is a question of passing; if anyone can perform whiteness, anyone can fail to pass. The advantage of being white in the sense of having a white body is therefore that one might be 1] perceived to pass, when in fact they are complete privilege-failures, and 2], that if they want to perform, such can come "naturally". Being an anarchist makes 1] the only possibility for white people, to say nothing of the easy simplicity assumed by the conditional at 2]: There is nothing natural about being a capitalist, whether white or APOC; thus, it is not easier for white people to get the hang of capitalism because privilege, now, in late capitalism, is more than likely simply a matter of earning it. That is, anarchists shouldn't want privilege. Hence, 2 seems to be a non-starter. We no longer live in a world that assumes only APOC folks are revolutionary subjects. Performing white is all it takes to avoid the marker; for anyone can be captured and rendered "bare life".

People know there is nothing wrong with being white. Anarchists should affirm that there is something wrong with being performatively white. Without making a qualification about what we mean by saying there is something wrong with being white, we allow for trolls like Milo whatever the fuck his name is to affirm there is nothing wrong with being white. When will anarchists agree? When their APOC friends authoritatively permit them to do so? Fuck that.

The Significance of Trump in the Age of Exception.

The limits and reality of counter-state violence is gestured at by Walter Benjamin in his Kantian Critique of Violence. We take it as obviously true, without conspiracy, that States only let us get away with what they can handle. This is because resistance is legal. 

A moment in radical left reality, say a march, or a parade, is oK if it is permitted. Therefore a moment outside its purview is the unpermitted march. Cops hate this; but chances are good that they will lead the entire way anyway, containing it from becoming an insurrection. The march or parade or legal protest becomes extra-legal when it turns into a riot, or an unlawful assembly, first; declared whimsically by the cops, first as unlawful (perhaps, which is to say not-necessarily), then as riot, then finally as abandoned insurrection. Yet, even Ferguson wasn't genuinely abandoned; it was left to be as such, as though this event! would eventually fizzle, thereby justifying further biopolitics. For the State there must not be an outside!

The paradox of Sovereignty, as outlined by Giorgio Agamben, is that there are few checks on the limits of power that the constituitive function of power maintain (and so), can legally undermine. The possibility of martial law, slowly eroded from legality, attests to the brute fact that the Sovereign can will whatever, come what may, against whomever may come to challenge. The outlaw who can, somehow, outrun the legality of the state and its imposition, is the one that can retain a moment of the state of nature, against that which, it seems, contains every possibility of violence in its orbit.  The contract that our European ancestors gave up, from administering justice themselves over to the one that would do it on our behalf--do we still believe this incredible proposition?--permits the state to will into reality whatever it likes, from "pacified/pacifying" means of violence in everyday police reality and maintenance, to the brute force of fiat law ex nihilo caught up in the concept of martial law. If, however, martial law in the microscopic merely entails the creative act of law, then every moment of police impunity carries this reality, making martial law the rule, and rarely the exception. 

Chance are good that Trump won't do much that his predecessors already were wont to do. His cronies, however, the alt-right that are dying for a chance to be accepted by Trump--at present his sin is a mere act of omission--have somehow been enabled to carry out the divisive work his own genesis as possibly-president required. The white-privilege protector who carried out a shooting for which he was absolved with his word: "self-defence," did so as though the state of nature wasn't really challenged, even though, importantly, the violent legality of the act as such, undermines the monopoly on violence of the Sovereign. Perhaps then what we witnessed here is a moment of doing the right thing by the lights of the Sovereign, on behalf of the Sovereign, which was forgiven without reprimand. Free Policing! Witness Leviathan!

I predict that Trump will do nothing extraneous with respect to growth in power, that unity will be the goal by way of biopolitical mastery (the ultimate goal being political docility). I propose that the divisive elements caught up in the origin of Trump, must be occluded, somehow, and yet that the state of exception as martial law (lawlessness) will be permissible everywhere so long as one acts only on the way to the divisions that already exist and already make life disturbing. Trump, then, is merely an intensified Obama. Under Obama we already saw the possibility that anyone deemed a terrorist could be thrown in jail without trial; we saw nothing done by a "Black" president for police powers that carry out racist shootings; under Trump we will see the term terrorist figure itself as indicating anyone that doesn't put America first, which is understandable, indeed reasonable for its citizens, and a total joke for members of other Sovereign nations. And we will probably see more police. But this was a long time coming. 

I also want to say that it is very possible that Trump functions to recuperate the radical right, a real threat to state sovereignty. These must then get a pass, just as the Black bloc is given a pass, for the most part. They must be punished, or seem to be on the whole and for the most part, but carrying out such acts must never be made impossible, for the obvious reason that people got to sublimate somehow, given repressed desires. If Trump never condones racist acts of the police (turning them instead to iterations of proper job-functioning) and sometimes ignores racist shootings so long as they can have some legal justification (in the above case, self-defence), then it will forever be the case that the white rebel is contained, and the ultimate legality of the USA is never overturned. A little goes a long way. That is, I bet Trump will never clean his robes of his origins because governmentality must contain and make docile every american citizen, even reactionaries. Let's hope the real racists never realize they've been duped...

Negation II

To say that one is Anti-X implies that one is against something, opposed, in opposition. Strictly, being an enemy of X is to be opposed to X. 

But the matter is hardly easy to address, which is why the word of the margarine word contains so much insight: It is too easy to say that if you are not with us, you're against us, that, if you are in opposition to leftism (because it is pro-state/civilization), you agree with right wing politics.--As if these positions were easy to figure. In Negation I, I implied that there is a world of difference between double negation contained and spelled out in Logical operations, whereby not-not A is logically equivalent to A (boolean equivalency), and, on the other hand, the operation that occurs in a delicate qualification when we bracket the position and negate, as in not(not-A); for in the latter moment, the term has a different meaning, because the negation being negated does not permit alteration. Of course, it is not that this operation of bracketing functions coercively to deny the reduction to boolean equivalence, obviously; it is that this possibility might shed some light on some contradictions and difficulties in anarchist practise. Consider being against the left. By now most of us can see that being post-left doesn't mean one is right wing, alt-right or whatever; the explanation is that the margarine world (Cf. Margarine Words) is a rendering only by coercion and ignorance, of logical reductions switched and imposed upon pragmatic uses. However, the important thing is that the margarine word as a logical maneuver doesn't have any loyalty. Given that most of us can see that post-left signifies a position beyond the right and beyond the left, perhaps this can-opener can help us to see other issues. To gather the question before us, I want to note that Nationalism is not a special property of Fascism, unless Left Fascism means something. Now, Antifa doesn't seem to see the point spelled out by Fredy Perlman  here; only groups roughly associated with Neo-Nazis fit the bill; rarely, if ever, Stalinists; rarely, if ever, Maoists. The critique that both these authoritarian positions are fascisms because capital creates classes, because the state never withered away in Leftist Countries is important; but even more important is the historical fact that Nationalism has supported popular leftist uprisings. It would seem then that, prima facie, Nationalism is not sufficient for defining right wing politics. Perhaps we can untangle the problem by making a concerted effort to understand the social imaginary around "race". 

Terms like "racism" are nearly meaningless because they tend to be vaguely univocal, to the point that it is difficult to convince someone that falls under racism, from one side, to think of themselves as such. If racism was originally defined as being anti-Black, that a racist¹ is one that is trying to protect the white race, then, analogously, the idea is that, in its second stage, it is racist² to be against immigration because such is an effort to protect White (read: national) privilege. The racist¹ position is that, the one that has been rendered included (bare-life, on the way to full inclusion, however subordinate) ought to remain subordinate with respect to rights; in the second sense, the idea is that those that have been included, without rights ought not to have rights, and ought to be returned wherever, and that those not yet included ought to remain excluded. The aporia surrounding this double sense is that everyday people think we are talking about racism¹ when we are talking about racism², and that, importantly, protecting national privilege has, at once, something properly historical to do with being white--which everyone accepts--but which now (under racism²) means the problem of having become (or becoming) white. Thus, one can easily point to the problem of the black President leading the Empire of white privilege; his blackness was never poor; it was never the APOC revolutionary figure set to challenge white privilege, because, National privilege is no longer white privilege in the sense that reifies external bodily markings. Anyone can become an enemy of the state, anyone can become bare-life under the continuous threat of martial law defined as such in an exemplary and ontologically explicit way for the prisoner or the homeless person. These have been rendered right-less; and it is because the state gives us rights that these can be taken away. The State is Sovereign and independent of us in its capacity to narrow and make explicit the ontology of Martial Law, which need not be totally explicit. Thus, if anyone can be rendered bare life, anyone can participate in the production of wealth that is signified by the meaning of Becoming White.  The obvious conclusion which returns to mark race¹ and race² as a mere and difficult analogy to argue is that not All National Privilege is the sole property of white people, because, being a white person isn't necessary for Becoming White.  

And so, the average poor person in the west may very well be anti-immigrant--given the problem of vying for scraps, for jobs--but it is difficult to label them racist because, as they would insist, they are evidently not anti-black. They do not hate all blacks--they have black friends, they might say--they are just pro-nationalist, and as such, it is a consequence for them to despise Others in the way things are going badly, Others in an uncertain future that might still be controlled to their redneck favour through a few petty reforms of law. The redneck that hates the immigrant, perhaps not explicitly but rather simply because they themselves are patriotic, is no more common on the left than on the right, since patriotism is neither explicitly left or right. The racist that thinks all blacks should be lynched deserves nothing good, obviously. What I want to say is that the redneck living in the woods that doesn't really care about much except life with their family and survival, may very well be a racist, but it is not simply because they love their country that they are racist. It is mere rhetoric to label them nazis; the negation of what anti-fascists say poorly is not noncoercively reducible to neo-nazi fascism. Nationalism is not essentially neo-nazi fascism. This is another consequence of the logic of the margarine word; we have to watch the slippage it creates. And not because racists deserve a free pass, but rather because everyday people aren't political.