The Mourning Cloak

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The Rev. Joshua Gerhard Paetkau, M.Div, Rector of the Parishes of New Carlisle and Chaleur Bay in the Anglican Diocese of Quebec.

  • Review: Third Person


                  Roberto Esposito Third Person: Politics of life and philosophy of the impersonal (Translated by Zakiya Hanafi) Cambridge: Polity Press, 2012, 177 pages.
    At the outset of Third Person Roberto Esposito forcefully asserts that the category of person occupies an almost unassailable position in contemporary discourse. From analytic to continental philosophies and Catholic to secular schools of thought the idea of the person holds sway as the definitive category of meaning. Esposito holds that the category of personhood, allegedly the qualification capable of bridging the gap between human being and citizen, is in fact guilty of creating the separation between the voluntary rational part and the purely biological part of human life.  Against the performative power of the person Esposito pursues a philosophical inquiry into the impersonal, as a category which can release us from the “exclusionary mechanism” of personhood into the originary unity of living being.
    Esposito draws on the language of philosophy, bioethics, and law to make his case.  Bioethics seems to hinge on defining when a living being becomes a person or what kind of living can be considered a person. Yet whether the definition is slated to begin at conception or birth or somewhere in between, it is the entrance into personhood that secures its unquestionable value. The centrality of the person cuts across what Esposito calls the Catholic and secular schools of thought as well:
    If a tacit point of tangency exists between the seemingly opposing conceptions of the Christian sacredness of life and the secular notion of its quality, it resides precisely in this assumed superiority of the personal over the impersonal: only a life that can provide the credentials of personhood can be considered sacred or qualitatively significant. (2)
    Turning to the lexicon of law Esposito points to the belief that personhood has the conceptual, and subsequently practical, function of bridging the gap between the concept of human being and that of citizen. The contemporary discourse on human rights, he argues, is conceivable and viable only through the language of personhood. In legal discourse too “the category of person appears to be the only one that can unite human beings and citizens, body and soul, law and life.” (4)
    But all is not as it seems.  Growing numbers of deaths from hunger, war, and epidemics stand as a testament against the effectiveness of “human rights.” How to respond to this divergence between principle and practice? One answer is that the concept of the person has simply not been fully affirmed, and has not taken “root at the heart of interhuman relations.” Esposito offers us a rather different perspective, wherein the ancient Roman separation between persona and homo remains firmly engrained in modern philosophical, political and legal conceptions.  To be human is not necessarily to be a person, and vice versa. One need only think of the status of corporations for a contemporary example of this logic. A person is therefore an artificial entity, the result of abstract categories which resulted in procedures of exclusion. Esposito argues that the process whereby the experience of personhood is defined by reducing others to the level of a thing is still very much at work today, and can be seen at work in the rise of twentieth century biopolitics as well as the liberal tradition.
     Drawing our attention to the work of the 19th century physiologist Xavier Bichat, Esposito traces the lineage of biopolitics through linguistics and anthropology. Esposito argues that the mixing of new biological knowledge with politics and philosophy set in motion a biopolitical current which, under the guises of the hierarchical anthropology of the 1800s and later the racist anthropology of the early 1900s, appeared to crush the person-human dualism into a single biological referent with incredible and decisive violence.  This biological referent, articulated in terms of comparative zoology, sought to judge types of human species on the basis of “how closely or distantly they are related to animal species.” (7) The animal, held by Darwin to represent the origin of species, thus became a point of division and a mechanism of exclusion.
    That the biopolitical currents produced a politics of exclusion and destruction in the Nazi regime, dubbed “thanatopolitics” by Esposito, could be read as an argument in favour of the personal.  Surely the performative space opened up by the separation of the person from the body affords some protection against the crushing politics of death which, after all, appeared to undo the distinction. Esposito, however, makes the case that appearances once again deceive. While conflict between cultures built around personhood and the ideological attempts to crush the person back into pure biology certainly exists, there are continuities as well as ruptures between the two perspectives.
    Hearkening back to Roman law, Esposito points to the position of the slave who is not considered a person, but instead occupies a place somewhere between person and thing. More than this, the act of defining who is counted as a person depends on the act of excluding what does not, as Esposito says,
    -not only in the general sense that the definition of the human-as-person emerges negatively out of that of the human-as-thing, but in a more meaningful sense that to experience personhood fully means to keep, or push, other living individuals to the edge of thingness. (10)
    On this reading it becomes clear that the “animal” of the emergent biopolitics and later thanatopolitics of the late 1800 and early 1900s functions precisely to define the lines between person and thing.  The relationship between the two, Esposito is careful to note, exists at different levels. Under liberalism it is the individual (person) who is considered to own the body wherein it is implanted. Under Nazism, by contrast, ownership of the body is assigned to state sovereignty. What remains constant is the role of bodily life as a subordinate thing to the higher aims of the person who owns it. Even when the goal of the person is the maximization of individual freedom, as under liberalism, this freedom “comes by way of potential reduction of the body to an appropriated thing.” (13) On careful reading the bioethics developed as part of the liberal tradition reveals the ancient Roman distinction between persona and homo; not all human beings are persons and not all persons are human beings.  “Hence” Esposito relates,
    the resulting gradation –or degradation –from full person to semi-person, non-person, and anti-person, represented respectively by the adult, the infant or disabled adult, the incurably ill, and the insane. Hence to each level of personalization – or depersonalization – there corresponds a different right to determination, and even preservation of one’s life. Here, too, in formulations that closely recall the sovereign power of the paterfamilias over his children and over anyone whose condition is a reified reproduction of that state, the personhood-deciding machine marks the final difference between what must live and what can legitimately be cast to death. (13)
    Personhood, and the politico-legal machinery behind, thus threatens to overwhelm contemporary discourse, but this is not the end of the story. Esposito counsels the impersonal as a way to trace lines of resistance. The impersonal, while lying outside the horizon of the person, remains related to the person; this peculiar relationship allows the impersonal to function as an alteration to the personal, calling it into question and overturning prevailing meanings.  Esposito draws on the work of Simone Weil, Emmanuel Levinas, Maurice Blanchot, and Gilles Deleuze among others to sketch out the figures of the impersonal in twentieth-century philosophy.
    Following Weil, Esposito establishes the third person as a figure of justice. Opposed to the privative, exclusive character of both Roman and modern law, the figure of the third person or the impersonal is a generalized term. As such it renders possible the thinking of a “common right” a term which appears nonsensical in the lexicon of privative law. The radical formulation here is that it is not the personal, but the impersonal that constitutes the sacred.
     Esposito traces this figure in from the non-person Emile Benveniste’s linguistic studies, the animal in the thought of Alexander Kojeve, the neuter in Blanchot’s writing, and the figure of the outside in the work of Michel Foucault. All of these come to a mighty crescendo in Deleuze’s “systematic destruction of the category of the person in all its possible expressions.” (142). In situating the philosophical horizon towards the impersonal event the category of the person becomes decentred, its boundaries opened to investigation and reinterpretation.  Couched in terms of our animality, what is at stake here is the possibility of being human in ways not coextensive with the person or thing, but rather as living persons, that is, coextensive with life itself.
    Third Person recasts the nebulous history of biopolitics with insight and ingenuity. Weaving together the biological, anthropological, linguistic and philosophic filaments of its genesis, Esposito finds that both liberal traditions of personalism and the catastrophic biopolitics of the twentieth-century share a common focus in the centrality of personhood. Esposito goes as far as to suggest that the horrors of biopolitics, which began as a naïve and unprejudiced science, are attributable to the cult of the personal. The figure of the impersonal, then becomes the place of refuge, or rather resistance. The book ends with a sort of invitation to meditate upon the impersonal as a way of being open to the radically new. Whether or not the impersonal is successful in unseating the hegemony of the personal, or indeed whether it provides sufficient resources for the conception and practice of politics, is still very much an open question.  Regardless Third Person stands as an important reflection whose demanding rigor and sparkling insight prove very much worthwhile. 

  • Christian Call for Strangers in Our Midst.

    Our Christian Call to Care for the Strangers in our Midst

    Posted on December 8, 2012 by Catholic Commons

    A Biblical and Theological Reflection

    Maggie Helwig
    The Hebrew scriptures are deeply marked by the experience of displacement. The story of the exile of Jacob’s descendents in Egypt, their time of wandering in the desert after being delivered from slavery, and, later, the deportation of a large part of the population of Jerusalem to Babylon, all became part of the self-understanding of the ancient Israelites. These stories of being uprooted and endangered in unfamiliar lands influenced the ethical teaching of the scriptures; frequently, the Israelites are reminded of their obligation to care for the stranger and the exile, “for you were strangers in the land of Egypt” (Exodus 22:21, Leviticus 19:34, Deuteronomy 10:19). Care for the displaced person is a priority in many Old Testament texts, not simply as an act of charity, but out of a sense of identity with the outcast.
    The New Testament continues this emphasis on hospitality to the stranger and the alien. Throughout the gospels, Jesus is shown interacting with people who are foreign to his culture – a Samaritan woman (John 4), a Syrophoenician woman (Mark 7:25-30) – and the stories are told in a way which emphasizes the “border violations” involved. Outsiders and those whose status is “irregular” clearly have a particular importance in Jesus’ ministry.
    Moving even beyond the Old Testament sense of identity with the stranger, the New Testament texts present the foreigner and the outcast as those in whom we directly encounter God. In Matthew’s judgement parable (Matthew 25:31-46), the Son of Man presents himself as one who was “a stranger” and received welcome or rejection. Similarly, the author of the letter to the Hebrews draws upon Abraham’s hospitality at Mamre to stress that we encounter God in the person of the stranger (Hebrews 13:2).
    Perhaps most important of all, when we read the nativity stories in Matthew and Luke, we find Jesus himself entering our world as one of the excluded. In Luke’s gospel, Mary and Joseph are forced by imperial order to leave their home, and must search for shelter in a busy city where there is no room for an unimportant peasant couple. In Matthew’s gospel we see Jesus as a refugee baby, whose family must flee into a foreign country to avoid a politically-motivated massacre. In these stories, God comes among us as a wholly vulnerable displaced person.
    In a meditation on the nativity story, the Cistercian monk Thomas Merton wrote,
    Into this world, this demented inn, in which there is absolutely no room for him at all, Christ has come uninvited. But because he cannot be at home in it – because he is out of place in it, and yet must be in it – his place is with those others who do not belong, who are rejected because they are regarded as weak; and with those who are discredited, who are denied the status of persons, and are tortured, exterminated. With those for whom there is no room, Christ is present in this world. He is mysteriously present in those for whom there seems to be nothing but the world at its worst.
    The imperative of care for the displaced and endangered is profoundly rooted in our Christian narrative; if we neglect this imperative, we are, in effect, turning away Christ himself. And we believe that the uninvited, displaced Christ meets us, sometimes, in those who come from situations of violence and oppression, those who have been “denied the status of persons” in their countries of origin, and who seek safety in Canada.

    View Full Article at Catholic Commons

  • Advertise. Economy. Propaganda

    Le Roi reigne mail il ne gouverne pas. 



    Recently I wrote a letter to my local Member of Parliament  expressing concern over some of the provisions of Bill C-31 (the perversely titled “Protecting Canada’s Immigration System Act) which is already beginning a much harsher and less hospitable place for refugees. The Canadian Council of Refugees has pointed out that the provisions made in this bill will be unfair to refugees from designated countries, will grant sole power over refugee status to the Minister of Immigration – rather than a committee whose task would be to assess particular cases. The provisions will also allow for refugee claimants to be jailed, without review, for a minimum of one year. (http://www.change.org/en-CA/petitions/withdraw-anti-refugee-bill-c-31-protecting-canada-s-immigration-system-act). This is remarkably inhumane, it is also contrary to the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedom and International Law. 
     I also wrote expressing concern over the undemocratic procedures and general decline of political culture heralded by the Omnibus Budget Bill. I knew, even at the time of writing, that is was a crazy foolish gesture. I appealed to themes of justice and robust political culture to someone who grovels in adulation of some weird libertarian logic. Or, perhaps, at the end of the day, just another criminal in politician’s clothing. At any rate, I did get a letter in return, which informed me that I had not addressed my criticism particularly enough, and also pointing out to me how great the Conservative government was with its Economic Action Plan and all the jobs they had added to the “Economy.” I had composed my letter, initially, in response to a piece of propaganda I had received in the mail proudly touting the Tories commitment to the “Economy” and “Jobs”. I had explained in the letter how politically and ethically reprehensible it was to use “The Economy” as a justification for undermining human freedom and dignity and debasing Canadian political culture. I suspect it did not compute. 
    It seems the only language our current Canadian government speaks is that of “The Economy”, and that in a particularly truncated way. My MP did use the word shamelessly to refer to the NDP, for their efforts in attempting to block the legislation referred to above, and therefore “harming the economy.” Just what is the economy, though. Looking at the cuts that have been made recently the economy does not contain anything as substantial as, for instance, scientific research, education, environmental management, or other social services. What it does include is advertising – specifically advertising to praise the Conservatives “Economic Action Plan. In other words the Economic Action Plan ads are the Economic Action Plan end of story. As a recent CBC headline reveals: Conservatives commit $16M to ‘action plan’ ads while cutting programs. Approved funds just part of multi-million ad blitz by federal government. 
    I was reminded again of Giorgio Agamben’s work in The Kingdom and The Glory. Agamben argues that glory is a constitutive feature of modern political power. Power in the West, which has always assumed the form of an economy, that is, a government of people and things is actually constituted by the process of glorification, that is of liturgical ceremony and proclamation. In the phenomenon of advertising, then, we should be aware of what is going on. The “Economic Action Plan” is, in fact, a liturgical proclamation of the divine power of “the economy.” Only last Sunday I heard someone say that “money was as essential as God.” They said this not despondently or triumphantly but as though it were a lived reality. This is the message we are constantly fed, but  that does not make it true. Any true Christian (or Marxist for that matter) should quickly smell the stench of idolatry here. Yet the fact that it was said is far less disturbing than the reality that our behaviour is conditioned by this statement. 

  • Is This Child Dead Enough for You? » Counterpunch: Tells the Facts, Names the Names

    Is This Child Dead Enough for You? » Counterpunch: Tells the Facts, Names the Names

    I felt like this article bore sharing on this site. I have been deeply troubled over the last few days at the victory celebrations I have witnessed, in people I know and respect, celebrating the re-election of Barack Obama. People who should know better but are either deluded by the smoke and mirrors of the American political scene, or else persist in subscribing to this perverse “lesser evilism” that has us all descending into a moral hellhole. These are dark times. When will we say that enough is enough? When will we agree that killing children is actually wrong, and that no amount of military might or flash rhetoric can make it right?

    In conversation this evening someone mentioned to me the endearing photographs of Obama taken with children during his campaign. Now, on the Counterpunch site, I see the other side of the story. The child who has been killed at Mr. Obama’s command. There is no celebration, there is no victory. There is no endearment, only a sick reality where children are valued only as cute or endearing subjects of the propaganda machine or tossed aside as useless chattel.

    We don’t need this grotesquery. The slick and sleazy campaign. The president with his noble face and his noble rhetoric and his kill lists. The endless security and the manufacturing of fear in order to pursue the eternal and infinitely perverse securitization of the world. The time has come to announce a simple and powerful truth. We are not afraid. We are not afraid of the world. We are not afraid of terrorists, we are not afraid of jihad or of economic ruin, we are not afraid of the media, or the powerful speakers, or the security cameras or the drones. We are not afraid of the financial elite or the power they command. We are not afraid of children. We are not afraid of human relationships.

    We can learn this, the art of being unafraid. Collectively we can take up our common humanity and cast off the yoke of oppression, of surveillance and fear and mistrust. We don’t need to hand up power to weak-minded foolish puppets whose idea of managing the affairs of the world is to fill the banks with money, the skies with death planes, and the streets with the wretched poor. 

  • Holocaust 2.0

    The twilight of the American Empire, it thus appears, will be remembered for its endless kill lists and its codification of murder. -Ben Schreiner 

    It is high time we learned to read the signs of the times. The epitaph above is taken from the recent Counterpunch article “Obama’s Endless Kill List.” In that article Schreiner briefly illuminates some of the key facts about Obama’s drone program, including the administrative policy defining any military age male in so-called combative area as combatants, and the assumption of guilt unless proven innocent. Schreiner goes on to call our attention to the total credulity of those in government, and the absolute lack of challenge from the Republican quarter. Whatever the differences Obama and Romney both agree that killing poverty-stricken people in Pakistan is a good thing. And that is all that was said in the presidential debates, maybe not in those words.

    The mainstream American media is onboard too, perpetuating an incredibly callous attitude human life, which, as an aside, I remember all too well from the attitudes of people around me at the onset of the Iraq war. Because the people being killed are so far away it is easy to lump them into some indiscriminate category of “the enemy” as though the people in question were simply elements in a video game. (This in fact was the exact attitude of some of the people who attended my high school.) Schreiner has this to say:

    The callous absence of doubt is just apparently just as prevalent among elite U.S. media. For instance, in an appearance on MSNBC’s Morning Joe Tuesday, Time columnist Joe Klein chillingly sought to justify the gravest horror’s of Obama’s drone program. 

    In a debate over drones with right-wing host Joe Scarborough Klein went on to aver: “The bottom line, in the end, is this: whose four-year old gets killed. What we’re doing is limiting the possibility that four year olds here are going to get killed by indiscriminate acts of terror.” 

    The very fact that rationalizing the killing of children can freely emanate from amongst “respectable” circles in Washington is indicative of the severe moral deterioration from which the  Obama administration’s drone program was born. (Obama’s Endless Kill List)  

    This is disgusting. The subtext of Klein’s statement is perfectly clear; it is okay to kill the poor Arab Muslim child. But of course it isn’t okay. When anyone, even a liberal American, starts to justify the murder of children then it is time to stop listening to that person. It is time to denounce them as cold-hearted killers and face the facts of what is going on. Murder is murder. Obama’s drone program is not a foreign policy it is a brutally vicious extermination program. There are lists, lists of people who are condemned to die at the say-so of the American president without evidence, without trial, without justice. Anyone who gets in the way is “collateral damage.”

    The technology may have changed, but the game is the same. Welcome to Holocaust 2.0.

  • Reactivating the Social Body: Interview with Bifo

    In my view, ima­gin­a­tion is the cent­ral field of social trans­form­a­tion in the age of semiocapital.[2] Capitalist dom­in­a­tion is sus­tained by the per­sist­ence of men­tal cages that are struc­tured by the dog­mas of growth, com­pet­i­tion and rent. The epi­stem­o­lo­gical dic­tat­or­ship of this model – its grip on the dif­fer­ent spheres of human know­ledge – is the very ground of power.  So the task of trans­form­a­tion requires us to ima­gine and make sens­ible a dif­fer­ent con­cat­en­a­tion of social forms, know­ledge, and tech­no­logy. Of course, ima­gin­a­tion will never be enough on its own.  We need to build forms of social solid­ar­ity that are cap­able of re-​​activating the social body after the long period of its isol­a­tion and sub­jug­a­tion to com­pet­it­ive aggress­ive­ness.  Solid­ar­ity – in con­trast to this aggress­ive­ness – is based on empathy, on the bod­ily per­cep­tion of the pres­ence of the other…

    We con­tinue to use old forms of action but we will have to begin to ima­gine new forms that are cap­able of actu­ally strug­gling against fin­an­cial dic­tat­or­ship. In my opin­ion, the first task – which we have begun to exper­i­ence over the last year – is the react­iv­a­tion of the social body that I have already described. But as I have said, this will not be enough.  We will also have to begin to learn to cre­ate new forms of autonomy from fin­an­cial con­trol and so on.  For instance, in Italy we have been talk­ing increas­ingly of “insolv­ency.” Of course, insolv­ency means the inab­il­ity to pay a debt but we don’t think of it strictly in mon­et­ary terms. There is also a sym­bolic debt that is always implied in power rela­tion­ships. Ima­gin­a­tion might mean the abil­ity to cre­ate the pos­sib­il­ity of insolv­ency – to cre­ate the right to be insolv­ent, the right not to pay a debt – at a semi­otic and a sym­bolic level.  We need to ima­gine forms of social rela­tion­ships that escape mon­et­ary exchange or invent new forms of exchange, like time banks, new forms of cur­rency, com­munity cur­rency and so on. Do you see what I am try­ing to say? The pro­cess of ima­gin­a­tion begins with the react­iv­a­tion of the social body but next this body has to cre­ate new levels of social inter­ac­tion.  Escap­ing fin­an­cial dic­tat­or­ship, in other words, means ima­gin­ing new forms of social exchange.  I don’t know what form eman­cip­a­tion will take in the com­ing years.  I can only pro­pose this little meth­od­o­lo­gical start­ing point from what we already know.


  • Alexander Cockburn

    A few months ago, on July 21 to be exact, the world of journalism lost one of its bright lights. At the time I was completely unaware, was unaware in fact until a few days ago, that Alexander Cockburn even existed. It is probably a testament to my own erratic reading habits that I discovered Cockburn through Robin Blackburn’s obituary of him in the New Left Review. Blackburn attributes to Cockburn the founding of a new kind of radical journalism and says

    Alexander saw journalism as a craft or trade and brooked no excuses for those who out of laziness- or cowardice- endorsed the idees recues of the age. (Blackburn NLR 76, p.68) 

    The article goes on to tell the story of a challenging and insightful journalist who read the signs of the times with wit and accuracy. Cockburn was the founding editor of a political newsletter CounterPunch, a publication which I had heard of, but never paid any attention to; the loss it turns out was mine. I have since been going back and reading old articles, including some rather vitriolic exchanges with Christopher Hitchens. Vis-a-vis the whole Mother Teresa fiasco Cockburn comments:

    Anyway, between the two of them, my sympathies were always with Mother Teresa. If you were sitting in rags in a gutter in Bombay, who would be more likely to give you a bowl of soup? You’d get one from Mother Teresa.  Hitchens was always tight with beggars, just like the snotty Fabians who used to deprecate charity. (CounterPunch) 

    Now, maybe everyone else knows who Alexander Cockburn is, but we all almost certainly know about Hitchens. I can’t help but feel a little bit sad about that. 

  • Eulogy for America

    I used to sleep at the foot of Old Glory, and awaken 
    at dawn’s early light. But, much to my surprise, when I 
    opened my eyes, I was a victim of the Great Compromise. 
    -John Prine 
    They said I would always remember where I was on September 11,2001. It was our Pearl Harbour, a day that would change everything. And they were right. New York was wounded and we, awash in freshly minted ideological fervour, were filled with righteous rage. 
    Even at the time, however, I was dimly aware that something about the whole scenario was off. The response of the people around me was less one of shocked horror than a kind of perverse delight that manifested itself in the immediacy of the battlecry. The figure of the Muslim radical crystallised before our eyes. I was among Americans and they suddenly knew who to hate, and who to fear. The attacks on the Twin Towers somehow gave them all a sense of justification and legitimacy, at the expense of a few thousand  dead America suddenly experienced a vindication of it rightness. 
    I was inoculated, in part, against the more egregious effects of this manufactured absolution by the dual vaccine of petty Canadian nationalism, and a deeply instilled pacifism from an Anabaptist upbringing that made me balk against the adding of horror upon horror. It did not make sense to me because of a great tragedy we should praise the efforts of soldiers going out to make war and kill more people. The whole thing reeked of ideology and conspiracy. Suddenly the United States was given a martyr. It could muscle out and play world-cop, and to any dissent they could invoke the Law of 9/11. The ideological transformation was instant, it was as if planned. In effect the conspiracies theories etched out later, whatever their empirical truth, grasped the essence of what happened. Even if 9/11 was not a conspiracy it functioned like one. 
    What I failed to understand, however, was that a deathblow had been dealt to America. Not in the attacks themselves, America could have withstood those. But in the aftermath, when the politicians at the White House raised the rallying cry urging the minions to shop and to hate the (Muslim) other that – that was the severe blow that struck at the heart of American freedom. It was absurd, and continues to be absurd, that Americans accepted the threat of a few Arabs with AK-47s as legitimate threat. The acceptance of this threat, and the subsequent heated rhetoric and escalated hatred, signaled nothing but the death of the freedom. In thrall to a figure of pathetic violence – one which ate at their hearts, even our hearts and brains- we became the abject servants of surveillance and warfare. Mindless we regurgitated the slogans “war on terror” “axis of evil” “Muslim extremists.”  And in this regurgitation America was given over into slavery. 
    It should never have been accepted. The nation that struggled through the civil rights movement should have ousted those clowns who bled her at the onset. The world should have shook with anger at this appalling destruction. By what right did the Bush government return the home of the free to a new slavery? By what right does the Obama administration continue to turn the wealth of America into technologies of spying and death? A nation afraid of itself, afraid of its own people, afraid of all people. A nation that hunts down women and children in the wretched places of the earth because its leaders, fat from the blood of their own people and of all people, are scared. They hide behind wall street, they hide behind desks. And America lies bleeding, mortally wounded by its own leaders. Dying and numb, is there any hope for America, or has she been wounded unto death? 
    Sometimes I suspect that America has already died. That whatever configuration lies south of me, isn’t America, but just some unspeakable machine that plugs along stupidly razing down whatever lies in its path. But  I don’t want to believe that. Somewhere deep down I harbour a hope. A hope that what was good in America, that a passion for liberty and justice, however misguided it was at times, will return against all odds. That America might cast off the spell of those wizened enchanters who taught her to believe in fear, hatred and moral cowardice,  and become a beacon of light in world of shadows. It will be a miracle, I know, for America to live, but it is my prayer and my hope.
    Return, America, from the world of demons and shadows. Do not fear the iron spirits of death that hover over your people, and all people, wreaking the violent magic of corpulent sorcerers. Throw of the chains of hatred. Be entangled in fear no more. The Law of Death is unbecoming to America the beautiful. Cast of your shroud and live. 

  • Experimental Religion: In Reason and Out

    title

    Misty G. Anderson Imagining Methodism in 18th-Century Britain: Enthusiasm,    Belief & the Borders of the Self Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press, 2012, 279            

       
    I grew up in a place where immediate heartfelt religion -the experience of conversion and being born again – was extremely important. The passing of years, and an education in reading both literature and scripture, have led me to an uncomfortable distancing from that past. Many of my own experiences have become, for me, tainted with the suspicion of charlatanism and theatricality and I struggle to make sense of them. 
    In many respects this experience, the struggle to balance emotional immediacy with an appropriately rational approach to life, is mirrored in the experience of eighteenth-century Methodism, and especially its reception in the popular media of the day. Misty G. Anderson’s work Imagining Methodism in 18th-Century Britain  paints Methodism as a movement that at once attracted and repelled. John Wesley’s literary contemporaries, such as Henry Fielding and Samuel Foote, all had much to say about Methodism, much of it not very nice. Methodism, Anderson argues, inspired the eighteenth-century imagination with admiration and disgust. It was  viewed as on the margins of what was acceptable in modern rational culture, and served as “a sign of sexual, cognitive, and social danger.” The language of the Methodists was, often, perceived as too visceral and bodily, lacking the appropriate detachment of civility. Methodist preaching led workers away from their labour, upset gender roles, and was tainted with theatricality and sexuality. 
    At the same time Methodism inspired even its harshest critics with a certain admiration for its zeal and commitment. Anderson proceeds through an examination of the perception of Methodism as it passes from virulent satire to lighthearted ridicule. Throughout this passage Methodism, as it is imagined, functions in a conceptual way, interrogating the self and its various fluid relationship. What is the relation between enthusiasm and reason, or religion and literature? The verbal battles fought between actors of the stage and theatrical preachers like George Whitefield make the distinctions between religious and secular less clear. Common desires and struggles inform both the enthusiastic believer and the aesthete. 
    The lesson Anderson draws from this history is the necessity to “move beyond the recalcitrant religious and ideological fundamentalisms of a worldview that pits secularism against religion in a deadly contest.” (Imagining, 238). For someone who has been at the brink of both fundamentalisms it is an important lesson, and one which Anderson analyzes with humour and a keen eye for detail. 

  • Review: Drone Warfare: Killing By Remote Control

     Medea Benjamin Drone Warfare: Killing by Remote Control 

    New York: OR Books, 2012. 

    A recent article in the New York Times, entitled “A Day Job Waiting for a Kill Shot a Word Away” chronicles some of the psychological disturbances facing drone pilots, as they routinely confront an “enemy” across the world from the safety of a computer screen. While critics may argue that drones turn war into a video game reality, the piece seems to contend, the high-resolution cameras bring intimate footage of the people these pilots are attacking. An  excerpt from the piece suggests that:

    Among the toughest psychological tasks is the close surveillance for  aerial sniper missions, reminiscent of the East German Stasi officer absorbed by the people he spies on in the movie “The Lives of Others.” A drone pilot and his partner, a sensor operator who manipulates the aircraft’s camera, observe the habits of a militant as he plays with his children, talks to his wife and visits his neighbours. They then try to time their strike when, for example, his family is out at the market. (Elizabeth Bumiller, “A Day Job Waiting for a Kill Shot a World Away. New York Times, July 29, 2012)  

    There is, certainly, a great deal of truth to Bumiller’s presentation of the changing psychology  warfare. What she presents, ever, gives a far too sanitized picture of what is really going on. The extensive use of military and surveillance drones is not simply a minor adjustment in how soldiers carry out their “day jobs.” It entails a fundamental shift in how war is carried out and how it is perceived by both soldiers and civilians. And the idea that the only psychological trauma experienced by the drone pilots is the reality of having killed “bad guys, is absolutely false.

    In Drone Warfare, a haunting piece of investigative journalism, Medea Benjamin puts to rest any illusions of drones being a more humane and precise way of engaging in war and points to the reality of human suffering, of villages being destroyed because of alleged connections to “militant” groups. People are reduced to demographics and mercilessly slaughtered by someone behind  a computer a world away. And this happens, in the main, without even the formalities of war. It is instead an assassination program, of highly dubious legality, whose collateral damage or unintended consequences are the many destroyed villages, the wounded and the dying.

    Benjamin goes into some detail describing the clandestine assassination program and its participants, the ever-notorious CIA, the mercenary group Blackwater (now Academi) and a secretive wing of the military known as the Joint Special Operations Command. These agencies execute their directives without Congressional oversight, a fact which Medea outlines as part of a broader erosion of democracy in America. Even American citizenship is no deterrent for the President ordering up an execution, as in the case of Anwar al-Awlaki and Samir Khan, who were assassinated by one of the CIA’s Predator Drones in Yemen in 2011. Benjamin writes:

    Ironically, the CIA is forbidden under US law from spying on Americans – that’s left to the FBI. It seems that the agency can, however, murder Americans overseas at the behest of the president without so much as a whimper of “impeachment.” (Benjamin, 66)

    President Obama emerges from Benjamin’s book as perhaps the most ironic winner of the Nobel Peace Prize the world has yet seen. If Obama learned anything from the Bush administration, Benjamin suggests, it was that you don’t take prisoners. Benjamin goes on to highlight the numerous ways that drone attacks are in clear violation of international law as well as the American Constitution. This was particularly evident in the assassination of al-Awlaki, where the “Law of 9/11” trumped all Constitutional rights and vestiges of legal process.

    Behind it all is the insidious face of corporate greed. The drone market is a growth market, and is set to become even bigger. In the meantime in the theoretical world of robotics a brave new future is being envisioned when drones may be equipped with technology that can “hunt, identify, and kill the enemy based on calculations made by software, not decisions made by humans. (Benjamin, 159)

    Confronting the horrifying reality, and disturbing visions of the future, Benjamin raises a call to action. Governments must not be allowed to murder with impunity, noxious technologies should not be unquestionably accepted under the all-encompassing rubric of “security.” The barbarism of sitting in an air-conditioned room destroying the livelihoods of others thousands of miles away is perverse and will come back to haunt America. We must not allow killing to be made easy. Benjamin warns:

    Drones aren’t a unique evil – but that’s just the point. Drones don’t revolutionize surveillance; they are a progressive evolution in making spying, at home and abroad, more pervasive. Drones don’t revolutionize warfare; they are, rather, a progressive evolution in making murder clean and easy. That’s why the increased reliance on drones for killing and spying is not to be praised, but refuted. And challenged. (Benjamin, 215.) 

    Drone Warfare is a clearly written analysis of the dismal reality underlying the banal rhetoric of the “war on terror.” It is a wake-up call to the ongoing, excessive, and racist violence perpetrated by the military-industrial complex under the (increasingly thinning) auspices of democratic government.  It is a call to create a more human world.