Humanitarian intervention in Abu Ghraib
Great piece on Hitchens, which might be profitably read alongside this vicious article on George Orwell. I’m not an unqualified admirer of Orwell by any means, but even I think Dolan is too harsh. Still, he’s absolutely right on Orwell’s imperialism; and this line (describing Orwell on the Burmese) seems particularly relevant:
> Occupation seems to be a lark for them, a chance to indulge their
> caddish habit of cheating at sport.
This is the core of the condemnation of the Iraqi resistance: they’re terrorists, they don’t obey the laws of war. Well, fuck the laws of war. Just war theory has always been an alibi for imperialism. It’s no accident that it began to be seriously elaborated in the 16th century, by Spanish scholastics seeking to justify the occupation of the Americas. It’s a species of casuistry, taking on the structure of counterfactual justification identified by Bat. The laws of war forbid the targetting of civilians; this is then held to justify actual wars, despite the fact that there has never been a war in which civilians have _not_ been targetted.
This is the logic which sustains instrumental justification for war. When the use of violence is treated as an unpleasant but necessary means to a good end, the unpleasantness tends to get elided in favor of the justness of the end; or, as with Tony Blair, the willingness to make “hard choices” is taken to be in itself an argument for the rightness of these choices. Which makes me think that there’s actually no surprise in the apparently paradoxical conjunction of the rise of the doctrine of humanitarian intervention, and the ongoing normalization of torture. Torture is perhaps the clearest example of the instrumental use of violence, and so, far from being opposed to humanitarian intervention, torture represents its truth.
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I am sitting, right now, writing about torture and being. In an attempt to embody phenomenology, I began to think of the different conception of being - Individual, immanent, Cartesian, infinte vs. Singularity, transcendent, Nancy-ean, finite.
It became clear that embodied Individual is impossible logically, whereas the Singularity is always, in some sense, as event or moment or series of those, embodied. And yet, as a culture we live by a code of the Individual (in more than just the phenomenological sense). The idea of mind/body separation and the according of ‘being’ to some over others fits in line with the Individual and the impossibility of embodying ‘being’ in the Individual is a way in which torture can be accepted, logically and justifiably. It is mere body we seek to ruin. The information we extract is pure and clean. The mind is intact, or so it seems.
So, I am trying, sort of confusedly I think, to argue that embodying being negates the possibility of torture absolutely (as though there were absolutes…….?) Who knows. We’ll see if it works out.
I read a Hitchen’s piece earlier though, as some torture research. A friend of mine took a class with him, which sounds as though it was rather close to torture.
Comment by elise @ 12/11/2005 10:19 am
and when i said “took a class” i meant ‘attended a lecture’ with Chris Hitch
Comment by elise @ 12/11/2005 1:18 pm
Yeah, that’s interesting, I hadn’t thought of it that way. There’s a definite paradox about torture: on the one hand, it is only possible at all because the mind and body are not separate (and so bodily pain can extract mental content), yet, as you say, this is immediately disavowed when the information extracted is held to be independent of the pain used to extract it. Has Foucault written about this? It seems like it would fit in with his concerns (it’s sort of mentioned in Discipline and Punish, but not in quite the way you’re developing the idea).
Comment by Tim @ 12/12/2005 12:52 am
Whoa, Tim; in denouncing just war theory I think you have to keep an eye the baby while briskly decanting the bathwater. After all, JWT is also behind the tradition of thinking that resulted in the Geneva Conventions etc. Law is always begun and/or fought according to some rules, even if they’re just prudential ones.
Michael Walzer’s point that Clausewitz’s concept of total war is a limit case that never exists is relevant here: to say that the rules of war are just hypocrisy is, as Walzer points out, effectively to throw your lot in with those who think war is simply a useful policy tool and can be escalated to any level as they see fit. Surely the point is, unless you radically oppose any kind of violence under any circumstances by anyone, that the rules (and in whose name they are formulated) have constantly to be exposed to scrutiny and worked over if necessary? This is, after all, exactly what bringing the story of the use of WP at Falluja etc. into the public eye was all about - uses of violence which violated agreed rules.
Comment by Rochenko @ 12/12/2005 3:48 am
I’m developing the idea more with an eye to Jean Amery’s “At the Mind’s Limit” - although he seems more invested in Sartrean, existential concepts of being, whereas I am using Jean-Luc Nancy almost exclusively, with a dash of Levinas.
Also, really, I’m just *using* them to make the point that *I* believe is valid and neither of those two above would probably dare make. Its probably flawed, but its a start.
I want to get it done quickly and then revisit it for publication, so at that time perhaps I will incorporate some Foucault.
Comment by elise @ 12/12/2005 8:29 am
You lot might be oh-so-fucking clever with your “Singularity” this and your “Foucault” that, but can you use apostrophes? Can you bollocks!
It’s *Hitchens’*, people! Honestly…
Comment by Marty @ 12/13/2005 7:09 am
It is, of course, Hitchens’s.
Comment by Alistair @ 12/13/2005 7:54 am
Both are acceptable.
Looking forward to a post on the crimes of Saddam, Tim.
Comment by Marty @ 12/15/2005 6:54 am