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the Reflect series: Creativity and the City
How the Creative Economy
reflect #01 Changes the City
New Commitment Various authors
In Architecture, Art and Design
Various authors reflect #06
Urban Politics Now
reflect #02 Re-Imagining Democracy in the
Stadswijk Neoliberal City
Stedenbouw en het dagelijks leven Various authors
Arnold Reijndorp
reflect #07
reflect #03 Questioning History
The Capsular Civilization Imagining the Past in
On the City in the Age of Fear Contemporary Art
Lieven De Cauter Various authors
reflect #04 Reflect #08

Documentary now! Art and Activism in the Age of
Contemporary Strategies Globalization
in Photography, Film and the Various authors
Visual Arts
Various authors
Entropic
Empire
On the City of
Man in the
Age of
Disaster
Lieven
De Cauter
Contents
The New World Disorder. Foreword 8
From Ground Zero to Tahrir Square: The Post-9/11

Era Explained to Children 14
1. The War on Terror as Planetary State of Emergency
The Rise of Rogue States: The Construction of an Enemy

After the Cold War (with Patrick Deboosere) 26
The Tyrant as Messiah: Messianism and Antinomianism

in the Neoconservative Ideology 34
2. The City of Man in the Age of Disaster
The Mad Max Phase of Globalization 56
The New Spatial World (Dis)Order: The Archipelago

and the Ubiquitous Periphery (with Michiel Dehaene) 72
3. The Return of the State of Nature
The BeWILDerment of Pentheus (with Rudi Laermans) 88
Towards a Phenomenology of Civil War: Hobbes in Beirut 118
The Blackout 134
The Negation of the State of Nature 142
The Return of the State of Nature (Synopsis) 168
4. Spaces of Resistance
The Space of Play: Towards a General Theory of Heterotopia

(with Michiel Dehaene) 174
‘Everywhere Tahrir Square!’ Reflections on the Revolution in Egypt 1

90
Conclusions
The Perverted Pyramid or the Logic of Entropic Empire 204

Afterthoughts on Posthistory 212
Acknowledgements 220
7
Origin of the Texts 221
Credits 224
The New
World
8
Disorder
Foreword
Entropic Empire
Reflect #09
Our world is a complex, sophisticated system but also an increas-
9
ingly chaotic and barbaric one. In that respect one could speak about
a ‘New World Disorder’ as the political constitution of our era. The
formula is, of course, echoing the ‘New World Order’ declared by Bush
senior after the collapse of communism. The end of the Cold War was
seen as the final victory of liberal democracy – it was nothing less
than the end of history according to Fukuyama (and therefore the
beginning of ‘posthistory’).
It also brought the end of the welfare state, at least the begin-
ning of the end. The voluntary dismantling of the welfare state, which
started in the early eighties, under Thatcher and Reagan, might now
be reaching its finale. As I write this introduction in spring 2012, the
Europe Union is undergoing its worst economic and political crisis
since its inception, with more neoliberal shock therapy as a diet. The
welfare state was the culmination of modernity, the synthesis between
capitalism (or liberalism) and communism (or state socialism); it was
– when all is said and done – probably the most bearable constitution
in the history of mankind. What comes after the welfare state? A big
question mark. This is a book on posthistorical politics, as what comes
after the welfare state.
‘Entropic Empire’ is the term I have come to use to describe
the New World Disorder that we see emerging all around us. Of
course, entropy refers to the tendency of the loss of order in a complex
system. If scientific minds question this seemingly frivolous, super-
ficial use of a technical term – admittedly, I also had mixed feelings
initially – I would defend myself that I didn’t find a better word to
accurately describe the contemporary world system. So, I decided to
keep using ‘Entropic Empire’ as a name, as an index to point to some-
thing, as a heuristic term. What was it I was looking for, what was the
configuration I was trying to indicate with this oxymoron, this para-
doxical formula, this contradition in terms between two words that
signify supreme order and increasing disorder respectively?
A sort of lapidary, laconic answer would be: the Entropic Empire
is the geopolitical counterpart of an equally oxymoronic keyword
of the political Zeitgeist after the end of the Cold War: rogue state.
Entropic Empire is then the world system encompassing rogues states
and failed states in its constitution, and moreover – this is crucial –
also using ‘state ending’1 the destruction of states, and the engineer-
ing of civil war and ethnic, religious strife, as part of its dominance.
This might be the true face of posthistory. I will, of course, return to
all of these terms repeatedly throughout the text. All I can hope is
that by the end of the journey, I will have convinced the reader that
the term Entropic Empire does make sense.
This book is not only vertically anchored, trying to fathom the
underlying matrix that keeps our world system going (or going apart)
but it has also a horizontal, chronological axis: it is an abbreviated
crossing from Nine-Eleven to the Arab Spring, collecting my more
10
theoretical and political texts of the last 7 years (2004-2011). It is

with what happened in Iraq in mind that I wrote this book; a crime
against peace and against humanity of unspeakable proportions: 1.2
million deaths, 5 million refugees. One of the biggest, if not the big-
gest manmade humanitarian disaster of our age, remains unacknowl-
edged, taken for granted or forgotten. And the destruction of Iraq
is ongoing. This willful total disintegration of state and society has
been paradigmatic for me (I wrote several opinion pieces about it, but
decided not to include them in this more theoretical book).2 But it was
with this idea of the state ending of Iraq and with the general atmos-
phere of the ‘post nine-eleven era’ (like the criminalization of activism
everywhere, also here in soporific Belgium) in mind that all the texts
collected in this book were written. I explain this political constel-
lation, this Zeitgeist, in the text that serves as introduction: ‘From
Entropic Empire
Ground Zero to Tahrir Square’.

As the texts are deeply entrenched in the times in which they
were written, I have not basically altered them (as it would make
them in a sense anachronistic: you cannot speak about Occupy Wall
Street in a text of 2004). Therefore I have indicated the year they
were written under each title. The book is not only a retrospec-
tive documenting a dark decade, but also looks ahead into the grim
twenty-first century.3
One of the underlying, almost presupposed ideas of this book is
that the War on Terror was and is a planetary state of exception (state
of emergency or martial law). This thesis is, of course, inspired by
the work of Giorgio Agamben, and was already one of the themes of
The Capsular Civilization. This thesis is developed here in Part 1, in
a discussion on neoconservatism as the dominant ideology for inter-
national politics par excellence of the past decades. ‘The rise of Rogue
states’, written together with political scientist Patrick Deboosere,
tries to map the making of a new enemy by the neoconservatives after
the cold war. ‘The Tyrant as Messiah’ is a more philosophical confron-
tation with the theory and practice of neoconservatism: Leo Strauss
and the Bush administration (with echoes from Derrida and ramifica-
tions towards Agamben).
The texts of Part 2 try to sketch some crucial elements of the
Age of Disaster: the risk of chaos due to the combination of global
warming, disaster capitalism, and demographic explosion, which I
coined ‘The Mad Max phase of globalization’. In ‘The New Spatial
Reflect #09
World (Dis)Order’, I tried to evoke, together with urban planner

Michiel Dehaene, the spatial robot photo of our dualized world, in
stark chiaroscuro. We called this disintegration of the City of Man the
‘implosion of the polis’.
Our world however cannot be understood solely as a state of
emergency, a top down excess of sovereignty, but there are also many
forms and instances of bottom up implosions of sovereignty, or forced
implosions, like state ending and civil war engineering. This ‘implo-
11
sion of the polis’, the disintegration or collapse of the city of man, of
society, of the state, can be understood in the frame of the old philo-
sophical idea of the state of nature, as a relapse into primordial anar-
chy, chaos: ‘the war of all against all’. The third part of this book tries
to show how and why; it constitutes the true core of the book.
Together with my friend and colleague Rudi Laermans I hoped
to write an entire book on this return of the state of nature, but we
never got there. The text on ‘The BeWILDerment of Pentheus’ is the
nucleus of that book project. In the text on Beirut, based on inter-
views with Lebanese architects, artists and intellectuals, this thesis
becomes concrete in a sort of anthropology of civil war. The interviews
revealed to me how civil war is the realized instance of the state of
nature and it made the trauma it leaves on a society palpable. ‘The
Blackout’ is a small case study of this ‘implosion of the polis’. The
sudden absence of electricity is also a political blackout: anything
can happen, from feast to lawlessness. In ‘the negation of the state of
nature’ the roots of American neoconservatism, notably the philoso-
phy of Leo Strauss (and one of his masters Carl Schmitt), becomes the
focus again. It is death politics or ‘thanatopolitics’. But this text tries
to go beyond it, by introducing the new concept of ‘zoöpolitics’ (as an
alternative to the all too loose and pejorative use of Foucault’s concept
of biopolitics) and ends with an evocation of an alternative politics:
‘cosmopolitics’. However imperfect, it might be the most important
text within this book.
The theme of resistance appears in the concept of heterotopia
as counterstrategy. Heterotopia, the other space, as opposed to the
camp as spatial embodiment of the state of emergency, is referred to
in several texts of this book (‘The New Spatial World (dis)order’, ‘The
BeWILDerment of Pentheus’ and ‘The Blackout’). But this concept is
center stage in the fourth and last part of the book with the text ‘The
Space of Play. Towards a general theory of heterotopia’, again written
together with Michiel Dehaene. For us heterotopia is both a counter-
strategy to economization under neoliberalism and a laboratory of
sharing the (un)common, an alternative public space in extreme situa-
tions like refugees camps. This theme of resistance comes to full light
however in the texts on the Arab Spring, as a world historical event
bringing the post 9/11 era to an end. The ‘Reflections on the revolution
in Egypt’ speculate about the power of the multitude, swarm intel-
ligence, and anger as political affect. Hence the last texts brings some
light in the darkness, it is a moment of hope near the end of the book.
The conclusion of the book, ‘The Perverted Pyramid’, tries to sketch in
a concise manner the logic of Entropic Empire, and the Afterthoughts
look back on the concept of posthistory. Indeed, the question of hope
could be formulated in an entirely different, more philosophical way
– also a radically negative one. But as it is underlying this book, I feel
obliged to share it with the reader from the outset. It sounds simple
but ominous: ‘Is it possible that we are falling out of history?’
12
Notes
1 The term ‘state ending’ was introduced by Raymond T. Baker, Sher-
een T Ismael & Tariq Y. Ismael, ‘Ending the Iraqi State’, in: Cultural
Cleansing in Iraq. Why museums were looted, libraries burned and
academics murdered, Pluto Press, London, New York, 2010, 3-41.
They contend that the destruction of Iraq as a state and as a society,
even as a culture, was the war aim from the very onset. As I have
been writing about the massacre of Iraq for almost 10 years now and
was active as chairman of the the Brussells Tribunal, a people’s court
and subsequently activist network on Iraq, I consider this thesis as
proven. But the concept and practice of state ending should be stud-
Entropic Empire
ied more. I will come back on it in the text on the blackout.

2 See my Dutch-English open source compendium De alledaagse apoca-
lyps. Van Nine Eleven tot de Arabische lente. This 600 page compila-
tion of nearly all my political texts, opinion pieces, pamphlets, polem-
ics and even petitions is of course much more complete. It is free
available online, and can be ordered as print on demand on: http://
www.dewereldmorgen.be/artikels/2011/09/02/de-alledaagse-apocal-
yps-van-nine-eleven-tot-de-arabische-lente-nieuw-boek-nu-onl
3 In that respect it a sequel to The Capsular Civilization (started in
1998 and published in 2004), my millennium book. Its conclusion
carried already ‘Entropic Empire’ as title, as if by premeditation of a
sequel.
Reflect #09
From Ground
Zero to Tahrir
14
Square:
The Post-9/11
Era Explained to
Entropic Empire
Children
[2001]
Reflect #09
15
Ten years after 9/11 it is time for a retrospective of this epoch. I
want to wade through the decade, from the War on Terror to the
Arab Awakening, I want to sketch the spirit of the age the way I
experienced it, in rough brushstrokes. The events on the eleventh of
September 2001 – with Ground Zero as its focal point – marked the
beginning of a grim century; or at least the dawn of a dark decade: a
decade of fear, pessimism, fundamentalism, terror, militarization, war
and other state violence, dualization, paranoia, repression and, above
all, a devouring obsession with security.
Apocalypse 2001: The Planetary State of Emergency

After the attacks on the Twin Towers, I began writing opinion pieces
to warn against the logic of a war against terror (included in my book
on The Capsular Civilization). From the beginning I held the thesis
(heavily inspired by the writings of my one time mentor Giorgio
Agamben) that the War on Terror would become a planetary state of
exception or state of emergency (also called martial law). The state of
emergency is a partial suspension of basic laws, such as constitutional
protections of the private sphere or freedom of speech, in order to
defend the political order against internal or external emergencies, in
our case terrorism. The so-called Patriot Act, which took effect shortly
after 9/11, contained (apart from an expansion of presidential powers)
a series of decrees establishing the state of emergency on American
soil: house searches without search warrants, unauthorized intercep-
tions of information, eavesdropping, wiretapping, access to email and
financial traffic, unlimited provisional detentions and deportations of
immigrants, and broad powers to monitor political activists. And then
there was: Guantánamo.
I have been criticized for describing Guantánamo as a concen-
tration camp; however such critiques ignore the difference between
the concentration camp and the extermination camp. Agamben
showed that a concentration camp is a space that embodies the state
of exception, that is: a space outside the law. Well, Guantánamo is
such a space outside the law. The Military Commissions Act of 2006
created a new category for these detainees. This new category was
called: unlawful enemy combatant. Subjects given this designation are
detained outside of every legal protection. The Geneva Conventions
and the regulations for ‘prisoners of war’ are not applicable to them.
Indeed, they are not prisoners but, quite literally, ‘outlaws’. Therefore
Guantánamo is not a prison but a concentration camp. The majority of
the people who have been confined there have not even been charged
with a crime, so how can they be processed by the legal system? One
does not even know if they are perpetrators or people who were on the
wrong spot on the wrong moment. President Obama promised to shut
down Guantánamo within the first year of his presidency, but it is not
an easy operation to abolish such a place outside the law in a legal
fashion. In short, the twenty-first century started with the reappear-
16
ance of the concentration camp. Allegorical as it might sound, Guan-

tánamo was only the tip of the iceberg. Let’s not forget the enhanced
interrogation techniques – another word for torture – with water
boarding as it’s most notable practice. It was openly advocated by
many Western liberal politicians and intellectuals. In addition, there
were the extraordinary renditions, which meant the illegal extradi-
The Post-9/11 Era Explained to Children
tion of prisoners to nations that are known to apply torture, and extra
judicial killings.
Europe cooperated in these extraordinary renditions and adopted
a whole package of exceptional measures under American pressure. In
Belgium, the spirit of the War on Terror was translated into the anti-
terrorism law and the so called BIM- and BOM-laws: respectively, spe-
cial intelligence methods and special investigation methods. There was
hardly a parliamentary, let alone public debate about it. Media and
public opinion looked the other way. A federal attorney was installed
with the posture of an anti-terrorism czar. One of the side effects of
this local war on terror – or, more accurately, direct consequences
and perhaps even objectives – was a large-scale criminalization of
activism. Let’s start with a case in which I was involved through the
Platform of Free Speech (Platform voor Vrije Meningsuiting), the case
of Bahar Kimyongür, a Belgian citizen from Turkish descent, activist
and sympathizer of the Turkish opposition movement DHKP-C. This
is an organization which was first a legal opposition party in Turkey,
but then was suddenly put on the list of terrorist organizations. Bahar
translated texts for the DHKP-C and denounced torture of political
prisoners in Turkey. When weapons were found in an apartment in
Bruges, Bahar was arrested by association and convicted to five years
imprisonment for leadership in a terrorist organization, despite the
fact that he wasn’t involved in any violent activities in either Belgium
or in Turkey. Despite him being a Belgian citizen, there was even a
secret attempt by the federal prosecution and the state security to get
him arrested in the Netherlands. The idea was he then could be extra-
dited by the Dutch to Turkey, which had launched an international
arrest warrant against him for waving a flag in the European Parlia-
ment during a visit of the Turkish minister of Foreign affairs. He was
arrested when he went to a concert in the Netherlands but the Dutch
judge dismissed Turkey’s request. This attempt by Belgian authori-
ties to extradition was unconstitutional. It is called in Belgian law ‘a
conspiracy of civil servants against a citizen of the state’. Yet, the case
Reflect #09
was covered up to this day. The acquittal of Kimyongür came only

after the fifth trial. Our vocal protests helped, according to his law-
yers, to alert the judicial powers to stick to the law and not surrender
to a general climate of exceptional justice.
As said, the general climate of the decade was one of intolerance
towards activism, even of criminalization of activism. It has almost
become standard procedure to challenge the right to strike by means
of legal prosecution. Peace activists from Liège were wiretapped for
17
years. Even Greenpeace Belgium was taken to court by Electrabel for
being a ‘criminal organization’. Many of its volunteers were repeat-
edly questioned, demonstrating how interrogation serves as a tech-
nique of intimidation. Luk Vervaet, a language teacher in the prison
of St-Gilles and a prisoner activist, was denied entrance to all Bel-
gium prisons for non-disclosed ‘security reasons’ – possibly because
he had visited Nizar Trabelsi, a football star convicted for planning
an attack on a military base in Belgium, where American missiles are
located. The dismissal of Vervaet for ‘security reasons’ was clearly a
case of Berufverbot, i.e. punishment by banning somebody from his
job. The decision was recently declared invalid by the Council of State.
But the man lost his job. These examples give an idea of what the
state of emergency means in practice.
The sacking of Barbara van Dyck, a bio engineer at the Uni-
versity of Leuven, in early June of 2011, is yet another example of
the ‘climate of antiterrorism’. She was fired for participating in and
defending an action against an experimental farmland for genetically
manipulated potatoes in Wetteren. We made a committee Barbara van
Dijck to defend her right to free speech. She was accused of violence,
but she committed none. The incident sparked off a wave of debates
on the privatization of research, the on the risks of Genetically Modi-
fied Organisms, on the privatization of the commons (seeds), on the
neoliberalization of university and the criminalization of activism.
Now she is on trial with 10 others for being member of a criminal
organization – which against not only the spirit but even the letter of
the law: the law excludes explicitly social activist organizations like
trade unions or NGO’s from the concept of criminal organization.
Conclusion? The curtailment of the right to activism, as part of
the right to free speech, or worse, the criminalization thereof, is one
of the fundamental signs of this time. In this climate of antiterrorism,
juridical terms are misused: some NGOs are qualified as criminal
organizations and actions or even opinions are stigmatized as intimi-
dation or violence. Since the War on Terror began all protests became
suspicious. Although few people are aware of this, the war on terror is
not only affecting global politics, far from our daily lives, but it is also
affecting local politics, as I briefly tried to evoke for Belgium. The War
on Terror is not over, despite the death of Osama Bin Laden (the fact
that it constituted another extra-judicial execution, is telling in itself).
We simply got used to this state of affairs.
The Decade of Neoconservatism and Neoliberalism

In the fall of 2002 I stumbled upon a website called The Project for the
New American Century (PNAC). By the end of the day, I had become
infuriated. In front of me I saw an organization that openly preached
American world domination by means of military aggression. The
PNAC turned out to be a neoconservative think tank founded in 1997.
It is part of the neoconservative movement William Kristol initiated
18
in 1997. Its body of thoughts was propagated by the Weekly Standard

and think tanks like the American Enterprise Institute.
According to the statement of principles, the end of the Cold War
marks a period in which the United States must seize the opportunity
to become ‘the preeminent power’, the sole world-dominating power.
A sharp raise of the defense budget and the willingness to conduct
pre-emptive strikes is a precondition for this strategic goal. American

interests and those of their allies (i.e. Israel) include spreading (i.e.
enforcing) ‘economic freedom’ (i.e. neoliberalism). But to install a new
American century of world domination military supremacy seems an
aim itself. Who signed this statement? We see a couple of interesting
characters: Jeb Bush, the president’s brother; Dick Cheney, without
a doubt one of the most sinister figures of our time; Steve Forbes
the media giant; Francis Fukuyama, the famous philosopher who
wrote The End of History and the Last Man; Lewis I. Libby, who was
later convicted for disclosing the name of a CIA-agent Valerie Plame;
Zalmay Kahlilzad, who became ambassador in . . . Iraq; not to forget
Donald Rumsfeld and finally: Paul Wolfowitz, student of the philo-
sophical father of the Neocons, Leo Strauss. These signatories were
to form the core of the first Bush administration: Cheney, Wolfowitz
and Rumsfeld, with Lewis I. Libby and Zalmay Kahlilzad as backing
vocals. In other words, with the Bush administration The Project for
the New American Century came to power.
The invasion of Iraq had long been on the program of PNAC.
As early as 1998 they wrote a letter to Clinton to urge him to invade
Iraq. So Iraq, but we know this by now, had strictly nothing to do
with 9/11. The result? 1.2 million deaths and 5.5 million refugees. The
invasion and the occupation of Iraq were not only illegal (and illegiti-
mate because it was based on a ‘web of lies’), but they also constitute
a crime against humanity. The invasion of Iraq is one of the key exam-
ples of the war on terror as planetary state of emergency: interna-
tional law was openly pushed aside.
Neoconservatism can be considered as the armed wing of neolib-
eralism. Just like neoconservatism was the dominant vision of inter-
national politics since the War on Terror, neoliberalism was the domi-
nant discourse on political economy. This neoliberalism which came to
power with Reagan and Thatcher is deeply utopian. Alan Greenspan,
president of the Federal Reserve, and one of the key players responsi-
ble for the ongoing credit crisis, was an Ayn Rand initiate. Rand wrote
Reflect #09
a neoliberal utopia Atlas Shrugged, which became one of the most

widely read books in the United States. Neoliberalism is a radical
utopia of privatization and deregulating, which is pushed through in
all areas. It has one sole recipe: socialize the costs, privatize the prof-
its. Neoliberalism is utopian because it resists facts: it was already
known that privatization of railway companies would not work based
on the British and Dutch example, but the project was continued
anyway. The banking crisis showed the same logic on an international
19
scale: first, taxpayers had to save the banks, but now national debts
are up, so we have to pay again, so now we have major cuts in social
spending. The credit crunch of 2008 keeps echoing.
By means of ‘management’, neoliberal thinking was not
restricted to marco-economics and politics. It has penetrated into
the deepest layers of society, from the macro-economic scale via the
intermediate scale of organizational structures to the micro scale of
our way of thinking. At the intermediate level, the university is a good
example: it has become a corporation, a corporation of knowledge for
the knowledge-based economy. But even our individual attitudes are
neoliberal: we all consider ourselves as small enterprises. The battle
against the supremacy of neoliberalism is one of the great challenges
of our time.
Free exchange of commodities and services went hand in hand
with a stop on migration. This is one of the deep contradictions of neo-
liberalism: the tension between open borders for globalization of the
economy but restrictions of the freedoms of movement for people. The
neoliberal world order has created an extreme dualization of society,
both on a world scale as well as in city districts. Disconnection, exclu-
sion, security have thus become the key words of our time. This is per-
meating our daily lives, from gated communities and security malls, to
SUV’s and surveillance cameras on every street corner. This is what I
called ‘the capsular civilization’ at an early stage. We saw the return of
hard borders: the new iron curtains in Ceuta and Melilla, designed to
protect Fortress Europe from African illegal immigrants. A long wall
between Mexico and the United States was erected after NAFTA had
facilitated the American agro-industry to destroy the small farming in
Mexico, causing massive immigration from Mexico. The combination
of globalization, the impoverishment of the Global South and the still
ongoing demographic explosion, has resulted in massive migrations.
This caused friction and symptoms of rejection. Still, globalization
cannot be stopped and the solid borders prove to be completely porous.
We will have to learn to live in ‘multicultural’ cities (and for-
eign ‘monocultural’ areas). My Moroccan-Turkish neighbourhood (in
Brussels) isn’t a bad place to live. It’s much livelier than the endless,
soporific suburban subdivisions in Flanders. To me this is one of the
important lessons of this decade too.
The Permanent Catastrophe

Around the turn of the millennium I felt the need to study the eco-
logical catastrophe that is awaiting us in the twenty-first century. In
2001/2002 I wrote an extensive text about progress as catastrophe, in
which I tried to determine a philosophical position on global warming
and the logic of growth, starting from a rereading of the first report to
the Club of Rome. It was discredited as a dooms prophesy. Neverthe-
less it was clear to me that humanity and its economy, and therefore
also its pollution, continues to explode in a finite ecosystem. In this
20
logic of growth, we are on a collision course with the boundaries of

the planet. We are thus threatening our ecosystem and our species.
Limits to growth, known as the first report to the Club of Rome dates
from 1972, was an attempt to wake up humanity: the melting of the
ice caps, tornados, hurricanes, extreme dry periods, the expansion of
deserts, the decline of rainforests, the diminishing of biodiversity – it
was all in there. But it took a long time for the message to be received.
2006, one could say, was the year of the awakening, the year
people started being conscious about these issues: Al Gore and the
IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) were awarded
the Nobel Peace Prize and the ecological question was all over the
media. Statistics showed a sharp rise in public awareness. It was one
of the few sparks of light in a dark decade. People became aware of
three things: the fact of global warming, the fact that climate change
was caused by human activity, and thus that something needed to
be done urgently. But in vain. Towards the climate conference in
Copenhagen – of December 2009 – three things happened. First arti-
cles appeared which noted errors and exaggerations in the reports; a
leaked email correspondence that was supposed to show that IPCC
was overstating its findings. It was, of course, a deliberate campaign
to discredit the IPCC. Then there was media attention to the fact that
the sense of urgency of 2006 had began to vanish in broader layers
of society. This is extremely bad news. If in three years, the alarm
bells of 2006 sound weaker instead of louder, then humanity is not
waking up. But, humanity must wake up, if it does not want to end
up in the middle of a nightmare. In fact, this nightmare has already
begun. This spring (2011) saw the largest drought ever in Belgium
and France, and the most deadly tornado season in the United States
(around 450 deaths were registered). Add to this the large scale wild-
fires around Moscow last year, devastating floods in Pakistan, and in
Thailand . . . the list of natural disasters seems endless these days.
The Red Cross judged 2010 to be the most catastrophic year in their
statistics ever. The permanent catastrophe has begun.
Thirdly, the climate conference failed, but it was the chronicle
of a failure foretold. Business as usual. And this is exactly what we
cannot permit. There is permanent control going on, an obsession
with security, but there is no institution that matters, anywhere in
the world, which can guide us or save us from the threat of global
warming which really endangers our security.
Reflect #09
I call this new world disorder ‘Entropic Empire’ (a sequel to The

Capsular Civilization), a complex interplay of imperial order that is
enforced manu militari from above and a rising disorder from below,
often provoked (like in Iraq). Entropic Empire – this is what awaits
us. 9/11 and the constellation of capsularization, dualization, state of
emergency, neoliberalism and neoconservatism, migration and perma-
nent catastrophe, has forced me to become an activist yet again.
Even in the arts a radicalization was noticeable. In our book
21
Art and Activism in the Age of Globalization there is a hilarious
e-mail correspondence between two gay artists about the difficulties
they face with security at airports as a consequence of 9/11. One can
also read about this fall out, and radicalization in the arts, in arti-
cles on the Errorist International in Argentina, or about the case of
Schlingenzief, or the anti-globalist artistic practice of the laboratory
of insurrectionary imagination . . . In a sense this entire book is an
expression of this radicalization: the problems have such extreme
proportions that we can no longer stand by and watch. ‘Pessimism
in theory, optimism in practice’, that was my slogan during these
depressing years.
The Arab Spring

And then came the Arab Spring. A bright lightning against a dark
sky. I was euphoric. I immediately saw it as the end of the post 9/11
era; and also as the end of neoconservatism in international politics.
America’s world domination with military means disguised as nation
building and bringing democracy suddenly seemed like a joke. Democ-
racy is realized more successfully by the people themselves. This Arab
Awakening hopefully will also end Muslim fundamentalism. Suddenly
the masses of the Islamic world proved to the world they are not
‘medieval’ and don’t dream about theocracy, but want democracy, free-
dom and social justice, and they are prepared to die for it.
After Ben Ali in Tunis, and Mubarak in Egypt, now president
Saleh has left Yemen, presumably for good. Even if the NATO inter-
vention in Lybia was most disputable, it is game over for Khadafi
too. Protests in Syria seem to be the prelude to the end of the Assad
regime. The shockwaves can be felt as far as America: the protests in
Wisconsin. The Iranian regime is scared. Even China has censored
the word ‘Jasmin’ from the internet – the political joke of the year.
Now the spirit of Tahrir Square should spread. In my migrant neigh-
borhood as well, but they apparently have not received the signal.
The manifestations in Athens, and the indignados of Barcelona and
Madrid were an admirable attempt to translate Tahrir Square to the
struggle against the grotesque measures in Europe and the IMF in
the trail of the credit crunch. It is a necessary protest against the next
phase of further neoliberalization, for this is shock therapy accord-
ing to the book (Naomi Klein’s Shockdoctrine). As I am writing this,
the Greek masses are on the streets. Even in richer countries gaps in
the budget are drastically cut by the governments. Even in the Neth-
erlands people are protesting against the severe cuts in the cultural
sector (that was June 2011). And yet, Tahrir Square – this proof of
incredible strength and intelligence of the multitude against devas-
tating powers all around, is certainly a source of hope in the light of
the daunting challenges that await us.
Hence my new slogan is: Everywhere Tahrir Square! Call it
multitude or civil society, we the people are rising up: from Tunis to
22
Athens, from Barcelona to Sanaa, from Damascus to Madrid, from

Wisconsin to Bejing. From Cairo to . . . Teheran, from Bahrain to . . .
the Amsterdam. And from Bagdad (the Friday to the Free, 15 April
2011 – not covered in the media) to . . . Brussels? Yes! For sure (Date
is uncertain, but there is no escape:) Tahrir Square Everywhere!*
* T
his text was written during the summer of 2011 for the occasion of the
10th anniversary of 9/11. You can imagine my joy when Occupy Wall
Street came into being on 17 September, and spread like a wildfire in
the US and then back to Europe, where the Spanish Indignados were
marching to . . . Brussels.
Reflect #09
Reflect #09 Entropic Empire 24
The War on
Terror as
26
Planetary
State of
Emergency
Entropic Empire
The Rise of Rogue

States:
The Construction
of a New Enemy
After the Cold War
[2006]
Reflect #09
With Patrick Deboosere
27
Rogue State – it makes for a smashing oxymoron, a contradiction in
terms: ‘Rogue/State’. It almost sounds like ‘ice-cold heat’ or ‘deafening
silence’. Rogues transgress law and order whereas the state installs
and maintains law and order, is law and order It is tilted jurisdiction,
or ‘bended right’; ideological new speak, straight from the animal farm
of the New World Order – through and through Orwellian. Rogue
state as a concept is the coincidentia oppositorum of the (juridical)
order of the state and disorder, the lawlessness of the state of nature,
and all that in one elegant spin doctor’s buzzword. It points to the
heart of the New Imperial World Order, or whatever you want to call
this present world system.
This freak concept needs further investigation. Wikipedia sup-
plies us with a very handy overview:
As early as July 1985, President Reagan had asserted

that ‘we are not going to tolerate . . . attacks from outlaw
states by the strangest collection of misfits, loony tunes,
and squalid criminals since the advent of the Third Reich,’
but it fell to the Clinton administration to elaborate this
term. In a 1994 issue of Foreign Affairs, National Secu-
rity Advisor Anthony Lake claimed that rogue states are
those ‘recalcitrant and outlaw states that not only choose
to remain outside the family [of democratic nations] but
also assault its basic values,’ Lake labeled five regimes as
‘rogue states’: North Korea, Cuba, Iraq, Iran and Libya’.
We learn, furthermore, that the concept of rogue state even
had criteria: ‘In theory, at least, to be classified as a rogue,
a state had to commit four transgressions: pursue weapons
of mass destruction, support terrorism, severely abuse its
own citizens, and stridently criticize the United States.
So the concept had to expand:
Three other nations, Syria, Sudan and Afghanistan, would

also be later treated in manners similar to the rogue states
as well. The U.S. invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 removed
Afghanistan from the list, and Iraq followed suit after the
U.S.-led 2003 invasion of Iraq. Libya was removed from
the list after achieving success through diplomacy . . . In
the last six months of the Clinton administration, former
United States Secretary of State Madeleine Albright
announced that the term ‘rogue state’ would be abolished
in June 2000, in favour of ‘states of concern’, as three of
the rogue states (Libya, Iran and North Korea) no longer
met the four transgressions which defined a rogue state.
However the Bush administration returned to using a simi-
lar term. The concept of ‘rogue states’ was replaced by the
28
Bush administration with the ‘Axis of Evil’ concept (gather-

ing Iraq, Iran, and North Korea). U.S. President George W.
Bush first spoke of this ‘Axis of Evil’ during his January
The Rise of Rogue States: The Construction of a
2002 State of the Union Address’.1
That’s all we needed to know. Derrida was so aghast when he read the
books of Noam Chomsky and William Blum about rogue states2 that
he promptly wrote a long meditation on the notion entitled: Voyous
[Rogues]. His conclusion is extremely clear:
New Enemy After the Cold War
The United States who claim to guarantee international

law, and initiate war and humanitarian interventions or
peace keeping missions because they have the power to do
so, this United States and its allied states are themselves,
insofar as they are sovereign, the first of rogue states.3
This may sound like an overstatement (in accordance with Chomsky

and Blum), but strangely enough it fits the self-image of the United
States. Nixon venerated the ‘madman theory’. According to Chomsky
this comes down to the following: ‘Our enemies must come to under-
stand that we are mad and unpredictable, with extraordinary destruc-
tive powers at our disposal, so they will bow in fear.’4 The concept
was allegedly invented by Israel in the fifties by the ruling Labour
Party, whose leaders ‘pleaded insane deeds’. Minister Moshe Sharett
wrote in his diary ‘that we will go berserk (‘nishtagea’) when we are
offended’. That was, still according to Chomsky, a ‘secret weapon’
against the United States which at that time was not considered
trustworthy enough as allies. Here it is openly stated that it is cru-
cial to project the madman as a persona. Both the United States and
Israel have recently succeeded in this feat gloriously. The madman
theory is operative again. ‘Shock and awe’ is its new name. That’s why
one can expect more madness, more frontlines in this permanent ‘war
against terror’.
Politics, according to Carl Schmitt consists not, as Aristotle
thought, in defining the good life in the polis, the city of man, but in
defining the enemy. The term Rogue State functions as a tautology in
that task: the Rogue State is whoever is called a Rogue State by the
USA (Blum and, in his trail, Derrida insist on this). Rogue States are
an a priori demonization of the enemy. Let us reconstruct this shap-
ing of a new enemy after the Cold War. In order to do this, we must
go back in time, before 9/11. Although the world looks different since
September Eleventh 2001, this historic event was not the cause of
change but rather the start of a very radical foreign policy, a policy
that reflects the political vision of the neoconservatives and is aimed
at renewed world domination: The Project for a New American Cen-
tury (PNAC).
From the onset the neocons have considered the end of the Cold
29
War as a problem: their crucial theorem was that if the Soviet Union
faded away as a world power, the population and the elites would no
longer endeavour to maintain America’s military power. In the event
of the Soviet Union’s fragmentation, then, the neocons sought to bring
the whole world under American dominance: ‘the goal of the American
foreign policy should have been to turn, what Charles Krauthammer
called a “unipolar moment” into a unipolar era.’5 In 2000, William
Kristol, the godfather of the neoconservatives and the founder of the
PNAC, and Robert Kagan published an revealing book: Present Dan-
gers. Kristol and Kagan call this unipolar era the ‘benevolent world
hegemony of America’. To motivate and convince the American popu-
lation of the necessity for a strong army a strong enemy was needed
that could embody a clear danger. The whole book aims at identifying
such an enemy: ‘. . . today there is a present danger. It has no name.
It cannot be found in a single strategic enemy. It doesn’t fit under the
name of international terrorism, Rogue State or ethnic hatred.’6 They
clearly could not conceptualize it very well. How does one create a
new enemy?
When Bush came to power, the notion of ‘rogue state’ was
already exposed as a clumsy attempt to define that enemy as a stra-
tegic unity. But after September eleventh the notion of international
terrorism became most suitable to embed America’s strategic activity.
The ‘Axis of Evil’ became the enemy to defeat. That Saddam Hussein
and Osama bin Laden were sworn enemies was of no importance.
Directly after 9/11 the PNAC wrote an open letter to President
Bush advocating an invasion in Iraq and the elimination of Saddam
Hussein.7 The blueprint of the foreign policy proposals for the Bush
administration, which was determined by the neocons (with Wolfowitz
as a front runner), can be traced back to 2000 to Present Dangers.
First there is the idea of ‘pre-emption’:
. . . American statesmen today ought to recognize that

their charge is not to await the arrival of the next great
threat, but rather to shape the international environment
to prevent such a threat from arising in the first place. To
put it in another way: the overarching aim of the American
foreign policy – to preserve and extend an international
order that is in accord with both our interests and our
principals – endures.8
This preventive approach was later radicalized by Wolfowitz into the

idea of ‘pre-emptive strike’.
The whole program is undeniably one of war and aggression,
of long-term war on all frontlines against any enemy challenging
American hegemony. It is a politics that inevitably leads to ultimate
confrontation with any new rising, regional or global power which by
simply existing, by its development or its endeavour to strive for its
30
interests, might block America’s endeavour for continued world domi-

nation. It is the sort of logic that makes a peaceful world impossible.
The invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq might only be a prelude of
what is coming.
The ultimate defence of American politics is the perfect circular
argument. ‘So long as we stay true to the principle of America‘s found-
ing, our self-interest as a great power will be inextricably linked to
mankind’s universal interest in life, liberty and the pursuit of happi-
ness.’9 This is what we could call a dirty trick (a rogue’s trick indeed):
my interest is the general interest and since all that is against my

interest is also against the general interest, we become the interna-
tional police. As Chomsky disdainfully wrote, it is an insult to the
police: the police defend the law, but America is overthrowing interna-
tional law with its role as an international police force.10 When around
September eleventh 2001 here and there it was suggested that the
Third World War had begun, it was not that far off the mark. The neo-
cons had already foretold this war in Present Dangers: ‘. . . the current
epoch of relative peace is but an interlude between the end of the
Cold War and the beginning of the next major conflict.’11 Today Bush
starts his speeches with: ‘America is at war’ . . . We know the result:
the revenge invasion in Afghanistan, the illegal invasion in Iraq,
the retaliations in the form of the bombings in Istanbul, Madrid and
London. The outrageous destruction of Lebanon in 2006 is also part
and parcel of this war on terror: Israel’s impunity is based on a quali-
fication of Hezbollah as a terrorist organization (the fencing off and
the following massacre of Gaza in 2008 is in line with it). All this nur-
tures a further radicalization of young Muslims. While we write this
a series of Muslim extremists are arrested, not only in London but
also in Denmark, which also partakes in the ‘coalition of the willing’
that invaded Iraq. So, there is method in the madness: the attacks hit
the states that are collectively responsible for the illegal invasion and
occupation of Iraq. A high-ranking Belgian police official warns that
the war in Lebanon has already radicalized some Muslim migrants
and the danger of an attack has increased in our country too. The
result is, in short, that the permanent war against terror intensifies
fundamentalism and terrorism.
The promising peace after the end of the cold war, ushered by
the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, is no more. The permanent war
has begun (and perhaps Iran is the next target, as insane as it may
sound).12 The term ‘rogue state’, even if is has withered away in
official rhetoric, is therefore symptomatic for our age. It has proven
useful in the construction of a new enemy. It is being used less now,
exactly because it has already done its service. Moreover the spin
in the term tends to make it boomerang: if the United States openly
pleads ‘exceptionalism’ in theory and practice, violates many inter-
national laws and treaties including the Geneva convention, then
who is the rogue state? Blum and Chomsky gave the answer: the
31
United States is the biggest of all rogue states. And Derrida went a
step further: ‘L’état est voyou’, the state is a rogue. The term has an
expiration date for political use, because as an oxymoron it is like a
Pandora’s box. It is problematic and points at a problem: the crisis
of the state, of the nation state. It is symptomatic, and symptomatic
terms work a bit like a slip of the tongue, a lapsus or a tic, a symptom
in psychoanalytic meaning: you cannot control them. As a sympto-
matic term it is connected to the state of emergency: the monarch,
the US as world sovereign, who has brushed aside international law
and subverted its own constitution, points, by means of a shadowy
notion to a target. The notion is a sort of abracadabra, an anathema.
Whoever is called a rogue state is immediately rendered an outlaw
and may be freely attacked. It is a tautological, empty, performative
term: whoever is called a rogue state is a target; whoever is a target is
called a rogue state. The rogue state is the ideal target, for terrorism
can’t be dealt with directly in grand scale military operations. And
terrorism in its turn is an ideal alibi to deal with states – preferable
weak in military terms, as was the case of Iraq (even if it had nothing
to with 9/11 or terrorism). Finally, the term is symptomatic because
it points to what one could call the Mad Max phase of international
politics that was ushered in by the war on terror: military disaster
management, domination through chaos. The ‘state ending’ in Iraq
is paradigmatic for this sort of rule by chaos.13 One could call it the
Entropic Empire.
Maybe ‘Empire’ is no longer. The moment the United States
attacked other states they had earmarked as rogue states (the inva-
sion of Afghanistan, which remarkably, was not listed as a rogue
state, Iraq and some day perhaps Iran), international law, the frame-
work for Empire in the conception of Negri & Hardt as a tripartite
pyramid, has been overruled. According to Negri & Hardt, the New
World Order is a synthesis between monarchy (the USA, and the UN
security council, G8, World Bank, IMF), aristocracy (the individual
states and the transnational corporations) and democracy (the UN,
the press, the NGO’s and religions . . . ).14 The war on terror as a per-
manent war is an attempt to overturn this tripartite pyramid for the
benefit of the monarchy: the US as hegemon, as good tyrant. That’s
what most of the dozens of recent books mean that recently have the
words ‘American Empire’ in their titles: not a balanced, triadic empire
in the sense of Negri & Hardt, but a unilateral world order with the
USA as autocrat by means of permanent war. One could save Negri’s
theory of Empire by stating that the pyramid has just become top-
heavy, with more power to the USA, but is in fact still standing. We
should think of it as a recast, a power grip, a reinforcement of power
rather then a coup d’état (Or, in retrospect, a failed coup d’état.)
Perhaps one can understand the future of the New Imperial
World Order best from the perspective of the The Empire Strikes
Back. It seems the Star Wars sequel is a scenario unfolding in our real
32
world: the intergalactic parliament is overthrown (‘Thank God the

UN is dead’, ‘Prince of Darkness’ Richard Perle said, shortly after the
invasion of Iraq) and in remote, arid corners of the world the rebels
are living in primitive, neo-medieval circumstances. They are being

fought with shock and awe, with massive force, intelligent weapons,
special forces and drones. The military strategy of the United States
is determined to make a fourth army power on top of the other three:
next and above the army on land, sea and the air force, a Space Force.
In any case, the construction of an enemy has succeeded, per-
haps all too well: now the enemy is everywhere. We now have, in
accordance to the book (of Carl Schmitt), an external enemy and an
omnipresent internal enemy (think of the British born suicide terror-
ists). In the name Al Qaeda they coincide. That’s why international
politics continues to take shape like policing and internal law enforce-
ment more and more resembles military characteristics – a revealing
blur. By boosting control of the domestic populations, antiterrorism
laws will surely defend democracy . . . by slowly dismantling it. This
is what Derrida called the ‘auto-immunity’ of democracy: democracy
which defends itself by attacking itself, by dismantling its very own
immune system.15 A dirty trick or even rogue behaviour? Whenever
civil freedoms and constitutional laws are dismantled or suspended,
all states become rogue states.
Notes
1 Online: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rogue_state.
2 Noam Chomsky, Rogue States. The Rule of Force in World Affairs,
South End Press, Cambridge 2000. William Blum, Rogue State: A
Guide to the World’s Only Superpower. Common Courage Press,
Monroe, 2000.
3 Jacques Derrida, Voyous. Deux essais sur la raison. Galilée, Paris
2003, 145 (our translation). In English published by Stanford Univer-
sity Press as Rogues.
4 Noam Chomsky, ‘Rogue States’, ZMagazine (http://www.zmag.org/
chomsky/articles/z9804-rogue.html)
5 Robert Kagan & Willian Kristol, Present Dangers. Crisis and oppor-
tunity in American Foreign and Defence Policy, Encounter Books, San
Fransisco, 2000, 6.
6 Ibid., 9.
7 Online: http://www.newamericancentury.org/Bushletter.htm.
8 Robert Kagan & Willian Kristol, op. cit. (note 5), 12.
9 Op. cit., 304.
10 Noam Chomsky, op. cit. (note 4).
11 Robert Kagan & Willian Kristol, op. cit. (note 4), 241.
12 This rumour, this threat has been on and off since we wrote the text
in spring 2006.
13 See on this concept of state ending: Raymond Baker, Shereen T
Ismael and Tariq Y. Ismael (eds.), The Cultural Cleansing of Iraq. Why
Museums Were Looted, Libraries Burned and Academics Killed, Pluto
Press, London & New York, 2010, 7-48.
14 Antonio Negri & Michael Hardt, Empire, Havard University Press,
Cambridge, Ma & London, 2000, 304-325.
15 Jacques Derrida, op. cit. (note 3), 59, passim.
34
The Tyrant as
Messiah:
Entropic Empire
Messianism and
Antinomianism in
the
Neoconservative
Ideology
[2006]
Reflect #09
35
The War on Terror as State of Exception
In ‘For a justice to come’, one of the last interviews with Jacques Der-
rida, the author stated clearly that he considered the war on terror as
a state of exception (or state of emergency, martial law). In a sort of
commentary on his train of thoughts in Voyous [Rogues] on the auto-
immunity of democracy, the tendency of democracy to defend itself by
destroying itself, he says:
The exception is the translation, the criterion of sover-

eignty, as was noted by Carl Schmitt . . .: Sovereign is he
who decides on the exception . . . In the same way that
democracy, at times, threatens or suspends itself, so sover-
eignty consists in giving oneself the right to suspend the
law . . . That is what the United States has done, on the
one hand when they trespassed against their own commit-
ments with regard to the UN and the Security Council, and
on the other hand, within the country itself, by threaten-
ing American democracy to a certain extent, that is to say
by introducing exceptional police and judicial procedures.
I am not only thinking of the Guantanamo prisoners but
also of the Patriot Act: from its introduction, the FBI has
carried out inquisitorial procedures of intimidation which
have been denounced by the Americans themselves, notably
by lawyers, as being in breach of the Constitution and of
democracy.1
It is obvious that this interpretation is not only inspired by Schmitt

but even more so by Agamben’s reading of Schmitt in Homo Sacer. This
interpretation of the war on terror as state of emergency, or ‘willed
state of exception’ in technical terms,2 is in any case close to Agamben.
When one reads this interview one indeed feels the shadow of Agam-
ben.
At some point it becomes very clear, but negatively, when Der-
rida says in the interview:
But at the same time you shouldn’t think that you must fight
for the dissolution pure and simple of all sovereignty: that is
neither realistic nor desirable. There are effects of sovereignty
which in my view are still politically useful in the fight against
certain forces or international concentrations of forces that
sneer at sovereignty.3
I think it is not Hineininterpretierung to say that this was a com-

ment on Agamben.4 This shadow of Agamben was already present in
Voyous.5 But Voyous is more openly commenting on Nancy and others.
On the topic of Rogues states it is following William Blum and Noam
Chomsky.6 For in Voyous Derrida states firmly that if rogue states
36
there are, then the United States and its allies, are the first among
them.7 In the same interview Derrida furthermore spells out, as in
Voyous, that this hegemonic war policy and state of emergency signals
Antinomianism in the Neoconservative Ideology
a crisis of hegemony:
To be fair, we must take into account this contradiction

The Tyrant as Messiah: Messianism and
within American democracy – on the one hand, auto-immu-

nity: democracy destroys itself in protecting itself; but on
the other hand, we must take into account the fact that
this hegemonic tendency is also a crisis of hegemony. The
United States, to my mind, convulses upon its hegemony at
a time when it is in crisis, precarious. There is no contra-
diction between the hegemonic drive and crisis. The United
States realizes all too well that within the next few years,
both China and Russia will have begun to weigh in. The oil
stories which have naturally determined the Iraq episode
are linked to long-term forecasts notably concerning China:
China’s oil supply, control over oil in the Middle East . . .
all of this indicates that hegemony is as much under threat
as it is manifest and arrogant.8
This renewed attempt to ‘American pre-eminence’ goes via ‘American

exceptionalism’ and ‘benevolent hegemony’ (all these are neoconserva-
tive key terms; we will come back on them). One could say that what
is now called in the press and numerous books ‘American empire’ is
in fact the ‘end of Empire’ as Negri and Hardt conceived of it, the end
of the triadic pyramid that kept the new (in the meantime old, pre
9/11) world order together: if that was a balance, or synthesis between
monarchy (the US), aristocracy (the G7, the world bank, the IMF, the
multinationals) and democracy (the UN, the press, NGO’s, etcetera),
then one could say that Empire is over, or at least shaken. This ‘end of
Empire’ might indeed be the best way to register the shift since 9/11.
It is known under the more innocent formula of the shift from mul-
tilateralism to unilateralism, but this does not signal the dramatic
character of the change.
For Derrida the invasion of Iraq, as the highly disputed central
component of the war on terror, has a multiple agenda:
There are many more stakes than petrol alone, especially

since oil is a matter of only a few more decades: there won’t
be any oil left in 50 years! We must take the petrol ques-
tion into account, but we shouldn’t devote all our attention
and analysis to it. There are military questions, passing
through territorial questions of occupation and control. But
military power is not only a territorial power, we know that
now, it also passes through non-territorialized controls,
techno-communicational channels, etcetera. All of this has
37
to be taken into account.9
Derrida even links the invasion of Iraq to Israel:
Many have said that the American-Israeli alliance or the sup-

port the United States gives to Israel is not unrelated to this
intervention in Iraq. I believe this is true to some extent. But
here too matters are very complicated . . . for if it is true that
the Americans support Israel – just like the majority of Euro-
pean countries, with different political modulations – , the best
American allies of Sharon’s policy, that is to say the most offen-
sive policy of all Israeli governments, are not only the American
Jewish community but also the Christian fundamentalists.
These are often the most pro-Israeli of all Americans, at times
even more so than certain American Jews.10
This alliance between ‘certain American Jews’ and the Christian

fundamentalists is one of the constellations we will try and clarify
somewhat. Finally Derrida points to the systematic lies in the media
and the preconceived nature of the invasion: ‘. . . there is evidently
. . . the enormous problem of the media, of control of the media, of
the media power which has accompanied this entire history in a deci-
sive manner, from September 11 to the invasion of Iraq, an invasion
which, by the way, in my opinion was already scheduled well before
September 11’.11 He was right, of course, as many documents of the
Project for the New American Century prove.12
Neocon Politics and Straussian Antinomianism

The Project for the New American century (PNAC) is a think tank
established in 1997 to prolong and reinforce ‘American pre-eminence
into the twenty-first century, by ‘benevolent hegemony’ via permanent
war. The mission statement was co-signed by, amongst many others,13
Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz. From the very
beginning they were pleading for regime change in Baghdad. One
of their first actions was to compose a letter to Clinton to try and
persuade him to invade Iraq.14 In the (in)famous report, ‘Rebuild-
ing America’s defenses,’ one reads that one of the core tasks of the
new military, revolutionized by a exponential growth in the military
budget, is ‘to fight and decisively win multiple, simultaneous major
theater wars’.15 Further down in this report of September 2000, a year
before 9/11, we read the by now famous phrase that ‘this process of
transformation, even if it brings revolutionary change, is likely to be
a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event – like a
new Pearl Harbor.’16 In other words: 9/11 was a godsend for them. The
phrase is still on their website. Finally another crucial quote indicates
that Derrida was right in his assumption that the invasion of Iraq
was preplanned and had nothing to do with 9/11:
38
The United States has for decades sought to play a more perma-
nent role in Gulf regional security. While the unresolved conflict
with Iraq provides the immediate justification, the need for a

substantial American force presence in the Gulf transcends the
issue of the regime of Saddam Hussein.17
That one phrase provides a key, maybe the key, to the illegal invasion
of Iraq.18
Almost all the members of the Project for the New American
Century are neoconservatives, some are Straussians, and some of
them have taken important positions in the Bush government: Paul
Wolfowitz, Lewis I. Libby, Abram Schulsky, and Stephen Cambone.
Besides there are influential publicists like Irving Kristol, spiritual
father of the neocons and his son William Kristol, the propagandist of
the movement, both of whom are self-declared Straussians. William
Kristol is, besides founder and editor in chief of The Weekly Standard,
chairman of the PNAC. Gary Schmitt, its director, is also considered a
Straussian. The Straussians are not any longer only a very influential
strand in American academia, or a strong influence in powerful think
tanks, but they are also now in power in Washington and have a hand
in shaping US foreign and domestic policy.19
The political philosophy of Leo Strauss can be summarized like
this: the few, the ‘real men’, as Strauss calls them in quoting Xeno-
phon, the philosophers, know the truth: that there are no gods, that
there is only one natural right, namely the right of the strongest,
the right of the few (to enjoy the pleasure of life and contemplation).
These truths are dangerous for the philosophers, for they might be
prosecuted, and, more importantly, they are harmful to society. So
one has to make a double doctrine: an esoteric one for the few, and
an exoteric one for the many. This outward face of philosophy (which
Strauss calls ‘political philosophy’ –the face philosophy shows to the
polis), is, in Strauss’s terms made up of ‘pious lies’ and ‘noble myths’.
These ‘noble myths’ or ‘pious lies’ are essential to keep society going.
Modernity is the process of these esoteric, classical truths becom-
ing openly known – a process happening in the work of Machiavelli,
Hobbes, and Rousseau – and leading to nihilistic hedonism in the
masses. The ‘real men’ cannot rule directly, the philosophers need to
whisper in the ear of ‘gentlemen’ (again a term of Xenophon), who
do believe in the pious myths and noble lies. For Strauss the philo-
sophical elites who know the truth, should tell the gentlemen who
are in power to uphold in public the pious lies of God, law, freedom
and patriotism. Piety, fear and permanent war are a way to turn
the decadence of modernity into heroism and self sacrifice. To avoid
decadence, and solve the crisis of modernity, one needs patriotism
and religion to believe in the sacredness of morals, of the country and
its laws. But the laws are also ‘pious lies’. In fact, tyranny, the rule
39
in absence of law, can be far better than rule by law. To create this
strength and unity in the polis one needs an enemy; if there is none,
one has to create one. One needs subjects that are united by fear, fear
of God and fear of the enemy.20
In On Tyranny, a commentary on Xenophon’s dialogue Hiero or
on Tyranny, one gets a sort of summa of what Strauss calls the ‘tyran-
nical teachings’ in his own words (I quote the most striking passages
of the short chapter called ‘The teaching concerning tyranny’):
. . . the rule of law is not necessary for good government.21 . . .
To be just, simply means to be beneficent. If justice is then
translegal, rule without laws may very well be just: beneficent
absolute rule is just. Absolute rule of a man who knows how to
rule; who is a born ruler, is actually superior to the rule of laws
. . . Hence the rule of an excellent tyrant is superior to, or more
just than, rule of laws. Yet Simonides [the wise man, the poet
who dialogues with Hiero, the Tryant] goes much beyond prais-
ing beneficent tyranny: he praises in the strongest terms the
hoped-for beneficent rule of a tyrant who previously committed
a considerable number of crimes. By implication he admits that
the praiseworthy character of tyranny at its best is not impaired
by the unjust manner in which the tyrant originally acquired his
power, or in which he ruled prior to his conversion. [conversion
from malevolent to beneficent tyranny].22 . . . rule derived from
elections in particular, is not essentially more legitimate than
tyrannical rule, rule derived from force or fraud. Tyrannical rule
as well as ‘constitutional’ rule will be legitimate to the extent to
which the tyrant or the ‘constitutional’ rulers will listen to the
counsels of him who ‘speaks well’ because he ‘thinks well’.23
Here we see the philosopher whispering in the ear of those in power

and Strauss goes on, in a very ominous summary of his thoughts:
At any rate, the rule of a tyrant who, after having come

to power by means of force or fraud, or after having com-
mitted any number of crimes, listens to the suggestions of
reasonable men, is essentially more legitimate than the
rule of elected magistrates who refuse to listen to sugges-
tions . . . 24
And as a supplementary warning Strauss refers to the esoteric char-

acter of these truths at the end of this chapter: ‘It is one thing to
accept the theoretical thesis concerning tyranny, it is another thing
to expound it publicly’.25 The ‘problem of the law’ – ‘the difficult rela-
tionship between philosophy and the law that Leo Strauss sought to
delineate throughout his works’, as Agamben puts it at the beginning
of ‘The Messiah and the Sovereign’26 – is responded to: justice is trans-
40
legal, to be beneficent is to be just, so beneficent tyranny is more just

than the rule of law.
It is most probable that the neocon concept of ‘benevolent
hegemony’ (one of their key concepts, introduced by William Kristol

and Robert Kagan)27 is a rather direct translation of what Strauss
calls ‘beneficent tyranny’. And it is also clear that the fraudulent
elections, the secrecy, the lies, the politics of fear, the suspending and
breaking of law, and the politics of permanent war as politics to create
unity and patriotism by targeting and even creating an enemy – it all
seems to be text book Straussianism. Besides the use of religion and
its messianic version of fundamentalism, the main feature of Straus-
sian neocon thought is its deep antinomianism. Indeed, the contempt
for the rule of law is deeply embedded in neoconservative thinking
and realized in Bushite politics. Even Francis Fukuyama, a former
fellow traveler of the neocons, who co-signed the statement of princi-
ples of ‘the Project of the New American Century’ back in 1997, wrote
a book that is an appeal to abandon neoconservative ‘exceptionalism’
and a plea for a return to legality.28 In a recent article in the Wall
Street Journal he wrote:
To put it mildly, the Iraq war has not increased the pres-
tige of the U.S. and American ideas like liberal democracy
in the Middle East. The U.S. does not have abundant moral
authority for promoting the rule of law, since the first
thing people in the region associate with America today is
prisoner abuse at Guantánamo, Bagram and Abu Ghraib.
Many Americans have explained these events to them-
selves by saying that the abuse was an aberration that has
been hyped by enemies of the U.S., and that in any event
such things just happen during wartime. Perhaps; but the
fact remains that Guantánamo is still open, and nobody
except for a couple of lowly enlisted soldiers have been
prosecuted for prisoner abuse by the Bush administration.
Fair or not, American insistence on rule of law and human
rights looks simply hypocritical.29
The disrespect for international law, human rights, international

institutions and even the American constitution itself, is clearly
embodied, not only in concentration camps like Guantánamo, or in the
Patriot Act, but also in the executive orders and the 750 ‘presidential
signing statements’ that president Bush issued since taking power.
These ‘presidential signing statements’, invented by Samuel Alito Jr.
(now a justice on the Supreme Court) under Ronald Regan, can side-
line laws voted in Congress without the use of a presidential veto. A
famous example is the signing statement saying that the president
would not feel tied by the recent law passed in Congress against tor-
ture and inhuman treatment.30 Or more recently, the sidelining of the
41
Supreme Court’s ruling that Guantánamo is unconstitutional.31
This contempt for law could be called the ‘really existing antino-
mianism’ as opposed to the philosophical antinomianism that Agam-
ben exposes in his work. The ‘tyrannical teachings’ and practices of
this antinomianism has a strong link to religious fundamentalism, as
a ‘really existing messianism’. One could say that Christian funda-
mentalism is an important part of the ‘political philosophy’ of contem-
porary neoconservative politics, that is: the exoteric side of the doc-
trine, the pious lies and noble myths that help the elites, who know,
to rule. This strange and sinister alliance itself, is therefore textbook
Straussianism.32
The Role of Messianism in the Neocon Worldview

The Straussians are not messianic in their esoteric, true ideas, but
they use religious currents in their exoteric discourse, for religion is, as
we have noted, crucial for the cohesion of society and therefore it is a
strong base for politics. Religion, Strauss said, should be used to install
fear, morals and patriotism, and the idea of self sacrifice in the mind of
the masses.33 This is exactly the function of Christian fundamentalism
in contemporary American politics. To realize what contemporary mes-
sianism might mean, a summary of the basic creeds of Christian fun-
damentalism (as far as they concern the situation in the Middle East)
might prove useful. I quote this grim portrait:
Once Israel has occupied the rest of its ‘biblical lands’,

legions of the anti-Christ will attack it, triggering a final
showdown in the valley of Armageddon. As the Jews who
have not been converted are burned, the Messiah will
return for the rapture. True believers will be lifted out of
their clothes and transported to heaven, where, seated
next to the right hand of God, they will watch their politi-
cal and religious opponents suffer plagues of boils, sores,
locusts, and frogs during the several years of tribulation
that follow . . . It’s why the invasion of Iraq for them was a
warm-up act, predicted in the Book of Revelation . . . A war
with Islam in the Middle East is not something to be feared
but welcomed – an essential conflagration on the road to
redemption.34
Tradition comes back not as a tragedy but as a farce (pregnant of

tragedy alas). How utterly crazy it might seem, this apocalyptic belief
is shared by some 50 million Americans, and endorsed by a substan-
tial number of lawmakers in congress.35 It proves that strong support
for Israel – the one Derrida was pointing to – can be based on anti-
Semitism (which, by the way, proves ex absurdo that not all criticism
of Israel is anti-Semitic). And it is exactly with this combination of
high class cowboy, born-again Christian, redneck, and low class (under
42
class) bible belt American messianism, that the predominantly Jewish

neoconservatives (some of them of Straussian inspiration) have joined
forces.
The link, in a sense, is made in the person of the president him-

self. Numerous articles have documented Bush’s apocalyptic beliefs
and his so called ‘Messianic complex’.36 One quote must suffice here:
The Reverend Billy Graham taught Bush to live in anticipation

of the Second Coming, but it was his friendship with Dr. Tony
Evans that shaped Bush’s political understanding of how to
deport himself in an apocalyptic era . . . Most of the leaders of
the Promise Keepers embrace a doctrine of ‘end time’ (eschatol-
ogy), known as ‘dominionism’. Dominionism pictures the seizure
of earthly (temporal) power by the ‘people of God’ as the only
means through which the world can be rescued . . . It is the
eschatology that Bush has imbibed; an eschatology through
which he has gradually (and easily) come to see himself as an
agent of God who has been called by him to ‘restore the earth to
God’s control’ . . . This delusion is called ‘messianic leadership.37
The implicit link to this really existing messianism or millenarism of

the masses and the eschatology of the President himself as messianic
leader on the one hand, and neocon thought on the other can be found
in the apocalyptic tone of their writings. When one reads Present Dan-
gers, edited by Robert Kagan and William Kristoll, or The End of Evil:
How to Win the War on Terror, by Richard Perle and David Frum,
one cannot deny that there is a sense that the American Empire is
the only hope for humanity in the light of the ‘Present Dangers’ and
the forces of Evil. American Empire is built on a deeply apocalyptic
world view. And that is the messianism that drives Bush, fed by his
own apocalyptic belief as a born again Christian. For the neocons he
is indeed the ideal ‘gentlemen’ of Xenophon and Strauss, a messianic
godsend: an optimistic, charismatic leader, strangely close to the heart
of the people, like kings are. He is the gentlemen that lends his ear to
the philosophers, the neocons and Straussians in his administration.
The description, that Strauss gives of the ideal regime in On Tyranny,
captures in an ominous way, this strange but strong cocktail born
again Christian Bush and his neocon entourage make. The finale of
The End of Evil sounds like this:
A world at peace; a world governed by law; a world in which all

peoples are free to find their own destinies: that dream has not
yet come true, it will not come true soon, but if it ever does come
true, it will be brought by American armed might and defended
by American might, too . . . Our vocation is to support justice
with power. It is a vocation that has earned us terrible enemies.
It is a vocation that has made us, at our best moments, the hope
43
of the world.38
Pax Americana or chaos. Peace through permanent war. The Emperor

as savior. The tyrant as Messiah.
The Other Messianism: Messianicity

Is there some light in this darkness? According to Derrida there is.
For there is another messianic force at work in our world, a weak
messianic force. In the same interview we started with, ‘For a justice
to come’, he says at the end:
The weak force . . . is what I call ‘messianicity without

messianism’: I would say that today, one of the incarna-
tions, one of the implementations of this messianicity, of
this messianism without religion, may be found in the
alter-globalization movements. Movements that are still
heterogeneous, still somewhat unformed, full of contra-
dictions, but that gather together the weak of the earth,
all those who feel themselves crushed by the economic
hegemonies, by the liberal market, by sovereignism, and so
on. I believe it is these weak who will prove to be strong-
est in the end and who represent the future. Even though
I am not a militant involved in these movements, I place
my bet on the weak force of those alter-globalization move-
ments . . . What I call messianicity without messianism
is a call, a promise of an independent future for what is to
come, and which comes like every messiah in the shape of
peace and justice, a promise independent of religion, that is
to say universal. A promise independent of the three reli-
gions when they oppose each other, since in fact it is a war
between the three Abrahamic religions. A promise beyond
the Abrahamic religions, universal, without relation to
revelations or to the history of religions . . . And I believe
we must seek today, very cautiously, to give force and form
to this messianicity, without giving in to the old concepts of
politics (sovereignism, territorialized nation-state), without
giving in to the Churches or to the religious powers, theo-
logico-political or theocratic of all orders, whether they be
the theocracies of the Islamic Middle East, or whether they
be, disguised, the theocracies of the West . . . Messianicity
without messianism, that is: independence in respect of
religion in general. A faith without religion of some sort.39
Thus spoke Jacques Derrida. I believe these words can be considered
as an abbreviation, a summary of his thoughts on ‘messianicity with-
out messianism’ from Spectres de Marx [Spectres of Marx] (1993) till
Voyous [Rogues] (2003), but also as a step further, as a concretization,
44
for here he ventures to name an incarnation of this messianicity: the

alter-globalist movement.40
If we put the picture together we could say that, according to
Derrida, two opposing messianisms are dominating the political or

theological-political situation: the fundamentalist, theocratic messian-
ism and the other(-globalist) messianicity. Indeed already in Spectres
de Marx Derrida tried to clarify this opposition between the reviving

religious messiamisms and his idea of messianicity (which he then still
called le Messianique, ‘the messianic’). When at the end of the book he
asks the question of religion he speaks about ‘two messianic spaces’:
First it concerns what takes the original form of a return

of religion, whether it is fundamentalist or not’, and that
over-determines all the questions of the nation, the state,
international law, human rights or the Bill of rights, in
short, of all that what concentrates its habitat in the at
least symptomatic figure of Jerusalem, or, here and there,
of its re-appropriation and the system of alliances that are
aligned around it [qui s’y ordonnent]’.
He goes on:
‘How to relate the one to the other, but how to dissociate

also the two messianic spaces, about which we speak here
under the same name? If the messianic appeal belongs to
a universal structure, to this irreducible movement of the
historical openness to the future . . . then how to think it
together with the figures of abrahamic messianism?41
In fact Derrida’s answer, or alternative, comes in the form of the

adjective ‘Le messianique’ (the messianic), and then later, in Voyous,
in the form of the neologism: messianicity.
As he writes near the beginning of Spectres de Marx, one of
the problems, or aporias the book tries to tackle (in a very different
way than Leo Strauss) is the opposition between law and justice. ‘If
the law [le droit] has something of vengeance’,42 Derrida points to
the necessity to think ‘justice from the angle of the gift, that means
beyond the law’.43 And that points for him to messianism.44 At the end
of the book he calls the messianic (‘le messianique’) an ‘absolute hos-
pitability’:
Open, in the expectation [attente] of the event as justice,

this hospitability is absolute only when it watches over its
universality. The messianic, even under its revolutionary
forms (and the messianic is always revolutionary, it has to)
would be the urgency, the imminence, but, paradoxically,
an expectation without horizon.45
45
One cannot fail to see that the revolution seems to be put safely
between brackets here.
We know that Derrida rejected antionomiansm. As he defended
the concept of sovereignty, he defended ‘a democracy to come’ and ‘a
justice to come’. He defended (in the interview and in Voyous) warmly
the international legal order and the United Nations (even if they
needed reform). For him we cannot do without sovereignty, and not
without the law. The justice to come is based on an amelioration and
critique of the legal framework by the ‘inconditionality’ of the transle-
gal request of justice. In Voyous he states this firmly:
. . . justice exceeds the law [le droit] but also motivates its
movement, the history and becoming of juridical rational-
ity . . . The heterogeneity between justice and law does not
exclude, it appeals on the contrary to their indissociability:
no justice without appeal to judicial determinations and
to the force of law, no becoming, no transformation, history
or perfectibility of law without the appeal to a justice that
will always exceed it.46
This abyss or gap between law and justice that never can be filled
is exactly the space of messianicity: ‘This hiatus opens the rational
space for a hypercritical belief, without dogma or religion, irreducible
to any religious or implicitly theocratic institution’.47 Referring back
to Spectres de Marx he adds: ‘It is what I have called elsewhere the
expectation without horizon of a messianicity without messianism.48
As in Spectre de Marx Derrida reverts also in Voyous to the
oxymoron to evoke his messianic appeal, this messianicity. He calls
it, a freedom without autonomy (une liberté sans autonomie), a heter-
onomy with slavery (une hétéronomie sans servitude), a passive deci-
sion (une decision passive)49 and finally, in the insert to the book, with
the oxymoron of Paul and Benjamin, a weak force (une force faible),
‘an appeal to which all hopes are directed but that is in itself, without
hope’.50 When he tries to capture this messianicity in more philo-
sophical terms, that is to say in a concept, he calls it a ‘hyperethics or
hyperpolitics’.51 This might bring us to a fundamental question about
messianicity: does it leave space for the political, or does it reduce
politics to ethics?52 Does it leave space for the event, or does it delay
any truly political event (protest, revolt, revolution)? Is it not exactly
this event-like character Deleuze, Badiou, Zizek, and Agamben try
to think? Has Derrida indeed not put the revolution between brack-
ets? Does one not need some sort of antinomianism to think politics
(‘La politique’) as opposed to the political (le politique)? Does one not
have to see, like Benjamin tried in his critique of violence,53 that the
exceeding of the law in justice, as a political act, is often, mirroring
martial law, the state of emergency or state of exception (like general
46
strike, revolt or revolution)?

In this respect the work of Giorgio Agamben is extremely valu-
able, for it forces us to look the state of exception and sovereignty in
the eye. To look to our present situation from the perspective of mes-
sianism to the wisdom of Thucydides, Schmitt and Strauss that war
and the state of exception are the rule. Maybe his work is pointing to
a way out. It is not really a third way, it is a way to avoid the extremes
and their synthesis. Badiou once said, on the occasion of the pres-
entation of La communauté qui vient (The coming community) that
the work of Agamben, the method of Agamben is to ‘diagonaliser les
oppositions’, to diagonalize the oppositions. It is not easy to think it.
The true state of exception must be ultimately thought as (non-)syn-
thesis between love (as the surpassing and fulfillment of the law) and
revolt (as the suspension and destruction of the law). This messianic
coincidentia oppositorum might be the ultimate mystical ligne de fuite
of Agamben’s messianism. Even if Derrida reverts to this figure of the
messianic oxymoron, it seems that Agamben goes beyond Derrida’s
synthesis, the indissociability of law and justice. That is the revolu-
tionary side of his messianic philosophy.
Conclusion
As we have tried to show, Derrida was sharply aware that the ‘neo-
religious’ fundamentalist messianisms – if we allow it to be called
messianism – as a mask for power politics (the imperial vision for the
elites, fear for the masses and fundamentalism for the morons) – that
these really existing messianisms are a dangerous tendency in the
contemporary political landscape. It is to stay clear of this messianism
that he reduced the noun first to its adjective – the messianic – later
substantiating it in a neologism – messianicity. The antinomianism
of neoconservative thought on the other hand, is using this ‘end time’
craze in the service of its imperial war policies (not only the Christian
but also the Islamist one). The conservative revolutionary antinomi-
anism, its contempt for international law, human rights and even the
constitution itself, is a challenge for the leftwing antinomianism that is
so strong in contemporary thought. This antinomianism strongly per-
meates the work of Giorgio Agamben, so beautifully exposed in his book
on Saint Paul and many other writings, including the essay on the mes-
siah and the sovereign.54 It is very poetic, enchanting, in its anarchic
utopian beauty, the sublation of the law as the fulfillment of the law (by
the law of love), the sublation of sovereignty and bare life in ‘life forms
(formes-de-vie). It is antinomianism from underneath, from the coming
community formed by ‘singularités quelqonques’, which later became
the multitude of Negri and Hardt. Indeed, this antinomianism might
be the best philosophical armature the alterglobalist movement could
dream of. Its belief in the true state of exception, however, has a sinister
mirror in the antinomianism of the neocons. To put it bluntly: How can
we distinguish good antinomianism from bad antinomianism?
47
Which brings us back to Derrida’s oblique answer to Agamben
in the interview that to do away with sovereignty, if thinkable, is not
feasible and not desirable. Is this not implying that ‘the true state of
exception’ is neither feasible nor desirable either? But on the other
hand messianicity might prove very transient, furtive almost, like
the alterglobalist movement which seems to have lost its momentum,
is maybe over already. The moment that another world was possi-
ble seems to have passed, the time window seems to have closed on
the darkening skies of history. Maybe the split second, as the door
through which the Messiah could have entered (in Benjamin’s famous
metaphor) has proven once again too narrow. To think the interrup-
tion of history, of history as catastrophe, is not nostalgic or frivolous
at this moment, at the dawn of the twenty-first century, a century of
disaster. But it is, in the light of all the ‘really existing messianisms’
that surround us, a dangerous exercise. In the light of the really exist-
ing messianism ravaging the Abrahamic religions under the name
of fundamentalism, the philosophical messianism might have to be
rethought (that was Derrida‘s aim in deconstructing it). Just like the
fulfillment of the law as sublation of the law (in revolt, revolution or
in charity), redemption as the ‘true state of exception’ might, as a phil-
osophical thought figure, need revision in a new, more critical light.
When thinking of the ‘good’, ‘philosophical’ messianism from
Benjamin to Agamben and beyond: how will we make a distinction
between the state of exception (declared by the bad sovereign, the
tyrant) and redemption as ‘the true state of exception’? Can the not
really existing, philosophical messianism hold its faiths in the light
of the really existing, unphilosophical messianisms? Does antinomian
philosophy not lose its innocence in the light of the really existing
antinomianism? These questions are open to debate, they are ques-
tions for all of us. My answer would be – and here I tend to follow
Derrida: let’s go against all states of exception, even the ‘true state of
exception’. And let’s be very careful with the charms of paulinic, saba-
tian or neo-sabatian, neo-situationist or whatever antinomianism,
now we know ‘the really existing antinomianism’ of the Straussian
necons. And in the light of the really existing messianism of the fun-
damentalists, ‘Messianicity without messianism’, could indeed really
be read as a program: no more messianisms, only messianicities.
Notes
1 Lieven De Cauter, ‘For a justice to come. An Interview with Jacques
Derrida’, Lasse Thomassen (ed.), The Derrida-Habermas Reader,
Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh, 2006, 265 (online available:
48
www.brusselstribunal.org).
2 Agamben, Homo Sacer, Sovereign Power and Bare Life, Stanford Uni-
versity Press, Stanford, 1998, 168.
3 Lieven De Cauter, ‘For a justice to come’, op. cit. (note 1), 263.
4 For the interviewer had, dropped the name of Agamben now and then
in the interview (not transcribed), and that was indeed, no doubt,
Derrida’s response.
5 Explicitly – one of the few times his name appears in Derrida’s works
– when he states in passing that Agamben’s distinction between zoé
and bios on which he founds his theory of sovereignty and biopolitics
is not to be found as such in Plato or Aristotle. See Jacques Derrida,
Voyous. Deux essays sur la raison, Paris, Galilée, 2003, 46. Indeed the
distinction comes from Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, Uni-
versity of Chicago Press, Chicago & London, 1998 (1958), 97.
6 William Blum, Rogue State, Common Courage Press, 2001, Noam
Chomsky, Rogues States, the Rule of Force in World Affairs, Cam-
bridge, South End Press, 2000.
7 Jacques Derrida, Voyous, op. cit. 145. This idea is largely shared;
recently it becomes somewhat the common ground for criticisms of the
Bush administration’s belligerent foreign policy. Under the title ‘Spot
the Rogue’, Prem Shankar Jha summarizes (in April 2006) the situ-
ation regarding the impending attack on Iran: ‘The purpose of law is
to regulate relations between individuals. It is founded upon the sur-
render by all members of society of those natural ‘rights’ (such as the
right to rob or kill) that they would not like others to exercise against
them. International law applies this principle to relations between
States. The principles of international law were first codified in the
Treaty of Westphalia in 1648 and progressively refined into the body
of international law we have today. But the two pillars on which the
Westphalian State system rested were the sovereignty of States and
the non-interference in the internal affairs of other States. Peace was
maintained through deterrence and war was only justified when it was
waged in defence of one’s people, territory or vital interests. Grotius,
the father of international law, was absolutely convinced that the only
just war was a war fought in self defence. The danger, moreover, had to
be immediate and the force used to repel it had to be proportionate to
the threat. Both these pillars, which had been enshrined as recently as
in 1945 in Article 2 of the UN charter, were blown to smithereens by
Bush’s national security doctrine of preventive defence and its applica-
tion to Iraq. Unveiled in 2002, the doctrine substituted the intention
to do harm with the capacity to do harm. America would be justified
in declaring war not just on a country that unmistakably intended
to attack it, but one that had or was trying to develop the capacity to
harm it. For good measure, it also claimed the right to militarily inter-
vene in any country at any time to identify and destroy this capacity.
The US has thus plunged the world back into the ‘state of nature’ from
which it had emerged in 1648, and as Thomas Hobbes pointed out,
49
this was also a state of war, at least until another powerful hegemon
emerges which can restore order. All the international treaties signed
over the past hundred years and more have implicitly assumed the
existence of the Westphalian order and acceptance of its basic prin-
ciples. In destroying the former and repudiating the latter, Bush has
destroyed the premises, and thereby invalidated not the just the NPT
but all the major international treaties. The repudiation of the Kyoto
Protocol, the use of cluster bombs, depleted uranium shells, white
phosphorous bombs in Iraq and Afghanistan and the contemplated
use of nuclear bunker busters in Iran shows how rapidly other inter-
national agreements are unraveling before our eyes. The US is the
motive force and sometimes the sole perpetrator of all these renegade
acts. It is, therefore, truly ironical that this, of all countries, should
be seeking to indict Iran for breaking ‘The Law’. The sooner other
governments recognise that they are living under a tyranny and join
together to oppose it, the safer the world will be.’ (http://www.uruknet.
info/?s1=1&p=23132&s2=07
8 Lieven De Cauter, ‘For a justice to come’, op. cit. (note 1), 265
9 Ibid., 266-267.
10 Ibid., 267.
11 Ibid., 266.
12 See on this also the seminal, if controversial article by John
Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, ‘The Israel Lobby’, London Review of
Books, vol 28, 26 March 2006.
13 The full list of signatories is: Elliott Abrams, Gary Bauer, William J.
Bennett, Jeb Bush, Dick Cheney, Eliot A. Cohen, Midge Decter, Paula
Dobriansky, Steve Forbes, Aaron Friedberg, Francis Fukuyama, Frank
Gaffney, Fred C. Ikle, Donald Kagan, Zalmay Khalilzad, I. Lewis Libby,
Norman Podhoretz, Dan Quayle, Peter W. Rodman, Stephen P. Rosen,
Henry S. Rowen, Donald Rumsfeld, Vin Weber, George Weigel and Paul
Wolfowitz. (see statement of principles, www.newamericancentury.org).
14 See: http://www.newamericancentury.org/iraqclintonletter.htm
15 Thomas Donnelly, Donald Kagan & Gary Schmitt, ‘Rebuilding Ameri-
ca’s Defenses’ (pdf), IV (www.newamericancentury.org).
16 Ibid., 51.
17 Ibid., 14.
18 See on this my text ‘The New Imperial World Order, Chronicle of a
War Foretold, Snapshots of a Dawning Era’, in The Capsular Civiliza-
tion. On the City in the Age of Fear, NAi publishers, Rotterdam, 2004,
136-144. This permanent military presence is materializing: despite
all the rhetoric of withdrawal, the US is building 14 permanent mili-
tary bases in Iraq and in the green zone the biggest Embassy ever is
arising (some 100 times bigger than usual).
19 See Shadia B Drury: The Straussians in Power: Lies, Secrecy and
Permanent War’, new foreword to id., The Political Ideas of Leo
Strauss. Palgrave/Macmillan, New York 2005 (1988). See also, Shadia
B. Drury, Leo Strauss and the American Right, St. Martin’s Press,
50
New York, 1999 (1997). For a more impressionistic account see Ann
Norton, Leo Strauss and the Politics of American Empire, Yale Uni-
versity Press, New Haven & London, 2004.
20 This summary is based on Shabia B. Drury ‘s book, The Political Ideas

of Leo Strauss, op. cit. (note 19), written in tempo non suspecto 1988,
One must admit that this summary does wring a bell. It seems a
‘robot photo’ of the contemporary politics of the Bush administration.

21 Leo Strauss, On Tyranny. Revised and Expanded Edition. Including
the Strauss-Kojève Correspondence. Edited by Victor Gourevitch and
Michael S. Roth, The University of Chicago Press, Chicago & London
2000 (1961), 73.
22 Ibid., 74.
23 Ibid., 75.
24 Ibid., 73-75.
25 Ibid., 76.
26 Giorgio Agamben, ‘The Messiah and the Sovereign: the problem of the
law in Walter Benjamin’, in id. Potentialities. Collected Essays in Phi-
losophy, Stanford University Press, Stanford 1999, 161.
27 The term was introduced by William Kristol and Robert Kagan (both
leading neocons and members of the PNAC, in ‘Toward a Neo-Reagan-
ite Foreign Policy’, Foreign Affairs, July/August 1996. (see http://www.
ceip.org/people/kagfaff.htm).
28 Francis Fukuyama, America at the Crossroads: Democracy, Power and
the Neoconservative Legacy, Yale University Press, 2006.
29 Francis Fukuyama and Adam Garinkle, ‘A Better Idea’, The Wall
Street Journal, 27 March 2006.
30 In the International Herald Tribune of 6 May, an editorial points out
that Bush issued 750 ‘presidential signing statements‘ that circum-
vent or just dismiss laws voted in congress like the one against tor-
ture and inhuman treatment. Clinton issued 140 of these ‘presidential
signing statements’. (IHT, 6-7 May).
31 ‘The Bush agenda comes into focus’, International Herald Tribune, 17
July, 2006.
32 One could say of course that it is Machiavelli all over again and
therefore not very new; just a deep current in power politics as such,
but I think we can say that the Bush administration has been ‘straus-
sian’ (or tyrannical if you want) in a way that has shocked the world
and the big part of American intellectuals. Neoconservative ideology
in general and straussian antinomianism in particular are at least
partly an explanation for this sinister policy.
33 See on this Shadia Drury, The Political Ideas of Leo Strauss, op. cit.
(note 19), passim.
34 Bill Moyers, ‘On receiving the Harvard Medical school ‘s global citi-
zens award’. Bill Moyers is a journalist, who won the global environ-
mental citizen award of Harvard Medical School for his covering of
environmental problems and global warming (which the Christians
fundamentalists welcome as signs of the coming of end time) gives
this grim portrait. (www.commondreams.org/views04/1206-10.htm).
35 ‘Nearly half the U.S. Congress before the recent election – 231 legisla-
tors in total – more since the election – are backed by the religious
right. Forty-five senators and 186 members of the 108th congress
earned 80 to 100 percent approval ratings from the three most influ-
ential Christian right advocacy groups. They include Senate Major-
ity Leader Bill Frist, Assistant Majority Leader Mitch McConnell,
Conference Chair Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania, Policy Chair Jon
Kyl of Arizona, House Speaker Dennis Hastert, and Majority Whip
Roy Blunt. (Bill Moyers, op. cit., see also on this also Kevin Phillips,
American Theocracy. The Peril and Politics of Radical Religion, Oil,
and Borrowed Money in the Twenty-First Century, Viking, New York,
2006).
36 The words Bush and messianic give some several thousand hits in
Google and there are related articles from The New Yorker and The
Independent.
37 Michael Ortiz Hill, ‘George Bush’s Messianic Complex’, CounterPunch,
January 4, 2003 (http://www.counterpunch.org/hill01042003.html)
38 David Frum and Richard Perle, An End to Evil. How to Win the War
on Terror, Random House, New York, 2003, 279.
39 Lieven De Cauter, ‘For a justice to come. An Interview with Jacques
Derrida’, op. cit. (note 1), 268-269.
40 Since 9/11 and the war on terror the alterglobalist movement seems
evaporated, the multitude got tired of summit hopping and it seems
that the (anarchistic) so called ‘black block’ gave up its violent pro-
tests at G8 meetings in view of terrorism. This evaporation, if it is
one – it might be too early to say so – does not necessarily contradict
the disarming, touching, somewhat candid vision of the late Derrida.
Maybe against rightwing American messianism and Islamic funda-
mentalism there is a third way, an alternative to Abrahamic messian-
isms, the alterglobalist movement as messianic instance; a movement
towards ‘a justice to come’, under the aegis of an international body
(now the United nations). Is it wishful thinking of old philosophers
(from Kant to Derrida)? Is this a fundamental naivety that underlies
ethical imperatives like justice and equity? It seems likely. We are in
an age where the wisdom of Thucydides, that the nature of history is
war, is more valid than the wisdom of Aristotle, who thought that the
nature of politics was a discussion on the good life in the polis (since
the Arab Awakening and the occupy movement Derrida’s bet on the
messianic force of the weak is back, we will discuss the Arab Spring
later in this book).
41 Jacques Derrida, Spectres de Marx. L’état de la dette, le travail du
deuil et la nouvelle Internationale, Galilée, Paris 1993, p 266 (my
translation). English version was published as Derrida, Specters of
Marx. London: Routledge, 1994.
42 Ibid., 47 (my translation).
52

46 Voyous, op. cit. (note 5), 208 (my translation).
47 Ibid., 211.
48 ‘L’attente sans horizon d’une messianicité sans messianisme’ (Voyous,
op. cit. p 211 (my translation). In fact he did not use that expression
yet in Spectres de Marx, but called it ‘le messianique’.

49 Jacques Derrida, Voyous, op. cit. (note 5), 210.
50 ‘A c’est appel ce confient tous les espoirs, certes, mais l’appel reste, en
lui-même, sans espoir’ (Voyous, ‘Prière d’inserrer’[insert], s. p. – my
translation).
51 Ibid., 210.
52 I owe this question to prof. Rudi Laermans, a longtime intellectual
‘companion de route’.
53 Walter Benjamin, ‘Zur Kritik der Gewalt’ (GS, II, 179-203), see on this
most controversial of Benjamin’s essays, Derrida’s Force de loi and
Agamben, ‘the messiah and the sovreign’, in Potentialities.
54 Giorgio Agamben, Le temps qui reste, Un commentaire au premier
epitre aux Romains, Editions Payot et Rivages, Paris, 2000. Also
Giorgio Agamben, ‘The Messiah and the sovereign’, in id., Potentiali-
ties, op. cit. (note 26), 160-176.
The City of
Man in the
56
Age of
Disaster
Entropic Empire
The Mad Max

Phase of
Globalization
[2008]
Reflect #09
57
‘The behavior mode of the system is that of overshoot
and collapse.’
(Limits to Growth. Report to the Club of Rome project on

the Predicament of Mankind, 1972)
Back to Futurology
Is it possible the future of our world looks like some version of Mad
Max II, a trashy sci-fi movie in which oil scarcity has turned the
planet into a low-tech, chaotic, neo-medieval society run by gangs?
Is this implosion of the polis, this disintegration of society, not just
probable, but maybe even inevitable? That is the question. More
philosophically: is it possible that we are falling out of history and
have entered posthistory? Not the posthistory Fukuyama was dream-
ing of, not the capitalist liberal democracy as final state of the world,
but an entropic, chaotic world order, that rather looks like a return of
the Middle Ages in a high-tech society, the sort of world described in
cyberpunk novels.
To start to tackle this question, it is imperative to discuss the
results of the two major authoritative reports on climate change. The
first one is the Fourth Assessment Report of October 2007, issued by
the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, known as the IPCC,
the UN organization of some 1000 climatologists worldwide, which
has the task to make both analyses and proposals to guide humanity
to tackle the problem of global warming. The second is the equally
famous Stern Review also from 2007, produced under the direction of
Sir Nicholas Stern and ordered by the British government. Its focus
was the economy: the mission was to approach climate change from
an economic angle, evaluating both the threats and the opportuni-
ties. Even if recently, in the build-up to the Copenhagen summit of
November 2009, some minor mistakes in the IPCC report were blown
up to discredit it, the overall results still stand. Some papers by cli-
matologists have even claimed on the contrary that the report was too
optimistic.
Whatever the case, the projections of the Fourth Assessment
Report (AR4) of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change are
dire enough. On ecosystems the IPPC report states (with statistical
probability indications, such as medium confidence or very high confi-
dence, in italics between brackets in the text):1
The resilience of many ecosystems is likely to be exceeded this
century by an unprecedented combination of climate change,
associated disturbances (e.g. flooding, drought, wildfire, insects,
ocean acidification), and other global change drivers (e.g. land-
58
use change, pollution, fragmentation of natural systems, over-

exploitation of resources). Over the course of this century, net
carbon uptake by terrestrial ecosystems is likely to peak before
mid-century and then weaken or even reverse, thus amplify-
ing climate change. Approximately 20-30 per cent of plant and
animal species assessed so far are likely to be at increased risk
of extinction if increases in global average temperature exceed
The Mad Max Phase of Globalization
1.5-2.5°C (medium confidence). For increases in global average

temperature exceeding 1.5-2.5°C and in concomitant atmos-
pheric CO2 concentrations, there are projected to be major
changes in ecosystem structure and function, species’ ecological
interactions, and shifts in species’ geographical ranges, with
predominantly negative consequences for biodiversity and eco-
system goods and services, e.g. water and food supply.2
The report goes on:
Coasts are projected to be exposed to increasing risks,

including coastal erosion, due to climate change and sea
level rise. The effect will be exacerbated by increasing
human-induced pressures on coastal areas (very high con-
fidence). By the 2080s, many millions more people than
today are projected to experience floods every year due to
sea level rise. The numbers affected will be largest in the
densely-populated and low-lying megadeltas of Asia and
Africa while small islands are especially vulnerable (very
high confidence). The most vulnerable industries, settle-
ments and societies are generally those in coastal and river
flood plains, those whose economies are closely linked with
climate-sensitive resources, and those in areas prone to
extreme weather events, especially where rapid urbaniza-
tion is occurring. Poor communities can be especially vul-
nerable, in particular those concentrated in high-risk areas
. . . The health status of millions of people is projected to
be affected through, for example, increases in malnutri-
tion; increased deaths, diseases and injury due to extreme
weather events; increased burden of diarrheal diseases;
increased frequency of cardio-respiratory diseases due to
higher concentrations of ground-level ozone in urban areas
related to climate change; and the altered spatial distribu-
tion of some infectious diseases . . .
A very sensitive issue is of course water:

Climate change is expected to exacerbate current stresses
on water resources from population growth and economic
and land-use change, including urbanization . . . Wide-
spread mass losses from glaciers and reductions in snow
59
cover over recent decades are projected to accelerate
throughout the twenty-first century, reducing water avail-
ability, hydropower potential, and changing seasonality of
flows in regions supplied by melt water from major moun-
tain ranges (e.g. Hindu-Kush, Himalaya, Andes), where
more than one-sixth of the world population currently
lives.3
The conclusions – they call them ‘robust findings’ – forecast danger-

ous increases in temperatures:
With current climate change mitigation policies and

related sustainable development practices, global GHG
[Green House Gas] emissions will continue to grow over
the next few decades . . . Continued GHG emissions at
or above current rates would cause further warming and
induce many changes in the global climate system during
the twenty-first century that would very likely be larger
than those observed during the 20th century.
They stress the perverse effect of global warming, ‘Warming tends to

reduce terrestrial ecosystem and ocean uptake of atmospheric CO2,
increasing the fraction of anthropogenic emissions that remains in the
atmosphere.’ The IPCC Report furthermore warns for the delay in the
process: ‘Anthropogenic warming and sea level rise would continue
for centuries even if GHG emissions were to be reduced sufficiently
for GHG concentrations to stabilize, due to the timescales associated
with climate processes and feedbacks.’ The report is very much aware
of the tiny margin before the climate change triggers off: ‘Equilibrium
climate sensitivity is very unlikely to be less than 1.5°C.’ Part of their
robust findings, which in the meantime almost have become common
knowledge, is the uneven division of the burden: ‘Some systems, sec-
tors and regions are likely to be especially affected by climate change
. . . The regions are the Arctic, Africa, small islands and Asian and
African megadeltas.’ But, nobody will be spared:
Within other regions, even those with high incomes, some

people, areas and activities can be particularly at risk.
Impacts are very likely to increase due to increased fre-
quencies and intensities of some extreme weather events.
Recent events have demonstrated the vulnerability of some
sectors and regions, including in developed countries, to
heat waves and tropical cyclones, flood and drought . . .
That is the face of climate change. On the positive side the IPCC
report sees many ‘mitigation potentials’ and pleads for urgent action
– that is a traditional mantra by now. But they have very few positive
realizations to report so far.
60
The Stern Review, though trying to believe that economic growth

and fighting global warming can go together, is at times also pessimistic:
Climate change will affect the basic elements of life for

people around the world – access to water, food produc-
tion, health, and the environment. Hundreds of millions
of people could suffer hunger, water shortages and coastal
flooding as the world warms.
The report furthermore states:
If we don’t act, the overall costs and risks of climate change

will be equivalent to losing at least 5 per cent of global
GDP [Gross Domestic Product] each year, now and forever.
If a wider range of risks and impacts is taken into account,
the estimates of damage could rise to 20 per cent of GDP or
more.’
So the risk of implosion is real. Given the string of disasters, or ‘the

permanent catastrophe,’ that lies ahead, the implosion of our econo-
mies and our societies is a emerging as the most plausible scenario for
the future.
The Inertia of Acceleration

The uncanny thing is that we have known this for at least 40 years..
In the famous ‘Report to the Club of Rome’ in 1972, Limits to Growth,
this implosion was called ‘the collapse of the world system’. The most
basic predictions of this very first global report on climate change and
its risks still hold: the exponential growth of the population, of produc-
tion and pollution, the rise of temperature, melting of ice caps, the rise
of sea levels, etcetera. It was all there. The authors of the report con-
cluded (in a famous quote, or one that at least should be famous):
If the present growth trends in world population, industrializa-

tion, pollution, food production, and resource depletion continue
unchanged, the limits to growth on this planet will be reached
sometime within the next one hundred years. The most probable
result will be a rather sudden and uncontrollable decline in both
population and industrial capacity.5
This implosion scenario so dryly announced in the first report to the

Club of Rome, is and remains the most probable scenario, for the
simple reason that humankind is too slow in responding. Seen from
a political angle, it is not so much that humankind is inherently slow
to respond to challenges, but rather that the existing organization of
authority and global power relations are structured to prohibit collec-
tive action that would endanger capitalist accumulation.
61
All optimistic scenarios tend to forget that the peaks of popula-
tion and greenhouse gas emissions are not behind us but still ahead
of us, and that the growth of consumption continues to accelerate. The
only thing we can hope for is the slowing down of the speeding up.
However, in many parts of the world, especially India and China, the
growth and acceleration have just begun. We all know it because we
all live it. Our world is more than ever caught in the logic of growth
and mobility, in the – as Sloterdijk has put it – hyperkinetic frenzy
of total mobilization.6 This is to be taken literally. Of the 16 most air
polluted cities in the world, 12 lie in China, but only 2 per cent of the
Chinese population owns a car as yet. The Chinese are quickly giving
up their bicycles for cars, just as we are increasingly taking planes.
One could say that air travel as an everyday means of transport has
just taken off. Cheap flight companies are a relatively recent phenom-
enon. And they are booming. Whilst everybody knows air travel is
increasing the individual ecological footprint in an exponential way,
the economical rate of flying is less and less in proportion to its true
social and ecological cost. By now, after so many warnings, one could
expect that this should be considered as irresponsible, if not criminal
behaviour on the part of both the companies and the consumers. But
then, at cheap or expensive rates, all of us, be it businessman, well to
do tourists, students and migrants, have good reasons for, on average,
several flights a year. Several of my students from Africa admitted
to some 20 flights a year. Nobody seems to be able to escape the logic
of increasing mobility, of globalization, growth, and acceleration: in
short, this hyperkinetic frenzy of total mobilization.
With the advantage of some 40 years since the first report to the
Club of Rome, a term of two generations, emissions have only grown,
the demographic explosion is continuing, consumption in developing
countries is increasing exponentially, and the global ecosystem has
consequently come under intensified pressure. And we have done
nothing in the span of these two generations to alter the predicament
of humankind and of the planet. One of the ‘robust findings’ of the
2007 IPCC report is particularly painful in that respect: ‘Global total
annual anthropogenic GHG [Greenhouse Gas] emissions, weighted by
their 100-year GWPs [Global Warming Potential], have grown by 70
per cent between 1970 and 2004.’ This goes to show what happened in
these two generations since Limits to growth was published: instead
of altering our bad behaviour, we embraced it.
The time scale is mind blowing, for the report goes on:
As a result of anthropogenic emissions, atmospheric con-

centrations of N2O [Nitrous Oxide] now far exceed pre-
industrial values spanning many thousands of years, and
CH4 [Methane] and CO2 [Carbon Dioxide] now far exceed
the natural range over the last 650,000 years. [our italics]
62
This is what we should think about before we try to be optimistic: in

the four decades that have been lost, we have in fact broken a balance
that existed for hundreds of thousands of years. This is what falling
out of history means, this staggering break of all balance is indeed
maybe the ultimate face of posthistory. And: we are still speeding up,
we are still growing, production and consumption keep expanding,
and so of course does pollution. That is why the implosion scenario
is the most probable one, as was foretold in the report to the club of
Rome: ‘The behavior mode of the system is that of overshoot and col-
lapse.’7
We are caught by inertia; not the inertia of being too passive, but
the law of inertia in physics: being caught in an acceleration that will
not stop if there is no other body, friction or force to stop it: the inertia
of acceleration.8
In that respect, when both reports (the IPCC report and the
Stern review) try to be positive or optimistic, they are not very plau-
sible. The Stern review concludes for instance with the message that
‘there is still time to avoid the worst impacts of climate change if
strong collective action starts now’. But how can this sound convinc-
ing after four decades during which nothing or next to nothing hap-
pened, and instead things got worse, much, much worse?
The Rise of Disaster Capitalism

There are deeper reasons than the ‘inertia of acceleration’ for why
nothing will be done. Naomi Klein has given it a name: the rise of
Disaster Capitalism. Her book, The Shock Doctrine, based on well
documented fieldwork and a vast amount of literature, shows that
the shock doctrine has taken over. Largely designed by economist
Milton Friedman and the so-called Chicago school, this model was
first applied in Chile in 1973 and developed until it reached its
apogee in Iraq. Klein saw it at work in New Orleans after Hurricane
Katrina and in Sri Lanka after the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami. She
distinguishes three phases: first comes a disaster, be it a coup d’état,
a natural disaster, or a terrorist attack (like 9/11). This shock and the
paralyzing effects are used to impose economic shock therapy, includ-
ing privatization and deregulation (like the erasing of public housing
and public schools in the aftermath of Katrina, or the privatization
of security and war after 9/11). Finally, this results in a situation of
torture (often electroshocks) for those who oppose it, from Pinochet to
Abu Ghraib. Her text documents this shock doctrine in a painstaking
manner, shedding light on the last thirty years. She recognizes that
Halliburton, Bechtel, Parsons, Blackwater and the like are the succes-
sors of the military-industrial complex: they exist within the disaster
capitalism complex. If we thought peace and stability were good for
capitalism, we were wrong. Naomi Klein has unraveled the puzzle:
war and disaster are necessary within the new disaster capitalism
complex. She has put together what most of us always see as being
63
apart. On the one hand, the war on terror as state of emergency and,
on the other, the neoliberal logic of growth and short term profits.9
Klein’s analysis of the transformation of the Israeli economy,
from information technology to security business, is particularly
convincing. The rise of disaster capitalism and security business
explains why the Tel Aviv stock exchange was not plummeting but
peaking when Israel attacked Lebanon in 2006. Halliburton, Bechtel,
and Blackwater are iconic names for disaster capitalism in Iraq and
elsewhere, but the syndrome is much vaster and expanding. The same
companies that made a mess of the Iraqi reconstruction received
no-bid contracts for ‘rebuilding’ New Orleans: privatization with tax
payer’s money. The tsunami of 26 December 2004 has been an occa-
sion to get fishing communities off the beaches, allowing the high-end
tourism industry to take over in Sri Lanka and elsewhere. A recurrent
theme is the idea that the plans were ready, that elites were waiting
for disaster to act. Or as Milton Friedman has stated:
Only crisis – real or perceived – produces real change.

When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend
on the ideas that are lying around. That, I believe, is our
basic function: develop alternatives to existing policies, to
keep them alive and available until politically impossible
become politically inevitable.10
A case in point, strangely absent from Klein’s book, is ‘The Project for
the American Century’, a neoconservative think tank whose mem-
bers and signatories are almost all linked to the military industrial
complex, with names like Rand Corporation and Lockheed Martin
popping up in several CV’s. The list of co-signers of the mission state-
ment includes Lewis I. Libby, Podhoretz, Perle, etcetera, as well as
Rumsfeld, Cheney and Wolfowitz. In the report of September 2000,
Rebuilding America’s Defences, issued a year before 9/11, they write
this famous formula: the transformation of the American military
and the huge increase in defence budget required are unlikely ‘absent
some catalyzing, catastrophic event, like a new Pearl Harbor’.11 In
other words, they were waiting for a catastrophe to have a greenlight
for their war policy.
Since 9/11 war and disaster have become big businesses. The
disaster industry caters for everything: planning, destruction, secu-
rity, reconstruction, medical care, interrogators, prisons, recruiting
and training of recruits, food, entertainment, transport, building of
bases, energy supply, everything. The rise of this new form of capital-
ism is – and this is my point here – of course extremely bad news in
the light of climate change and the permanent catastrophe it will
entail. The argument that capitalism will be forced by ‘the invisible
hand’ of the market to find the tools to mitigate climate change and
develop ways of adaptation where mitigation is too late, is refuted by
64
Klein’s concept of disaster capitalism. Turning security and disaster

into a market is a way to ‘adapt’. Mitigation is not necessary and even
bad for business. For disaster is the business.
The New Spatial Disorder: A Cyberpunk Landscape

As we keep consuming dirty non-renewable resources, a series of
emergencies are ahead: natural disasters, wars for the control of
scarce resources and terrorist blowbacks – one could call it the feed-
back loop of disaster capitalism. This new capitalism has joined and
sometimes replaced the ‘informational capitalism’ of Manuel Castells’
network society. Klein sketches the mental and real landscape it pro-
duces:
If the dream of the open, borderless, ‘small planet’ was

the ticket to profits in the nineties, the nightmare of the
menacing, fortressed Western continents, under siege from
jihadists and illegal migrants, plays the same role in the
new millennium.12
A most important overall consequence of this rise of disaster capital-

ism is that the Mad Max phase of globalization will therefore not be
the collapse of capitalism but the implosion of society. One of the most
developed implosion scripts, entitled The Long Emergency, was writ-
ten by James Howard Kunstler in 2005. It is almost literally a Mad
Max scenario. His reasoning is clear and simple: The term ‘global
oil-production peak’ means that a turning point will come when
the world produces the most oil it will ever produce in a given year
and, after that, yearly production will inexorably decline . . . Now
we are faced with the global oil-production peak. The best estimates
of when this will actually happen have been somewhere between
now and 2010 . . . This is going to be a permanent energy crisis, and
these energy problems will synergize with the disruptions of climate
change, epidemic disease and population overshoot to produce higher
orders of trouble.13
After disqualifying all alternatives to the soon to be scarce oil,
like hydrogen, biomass, or renewable resources like solar energy,
etcetera, he writes:
The upshot of all this is that we are entering a histori-

cal period of potentially great instability, turbulence and
hardship. Obviously, geopolitical maneuvering around the
world’s richest energy regions has already led to war and
promises more international military conflict.’ Besides per-
manent war he sees strong social tensions and a neo-feudal
social order. This is Mad Max according to the book: ‘These
masses of disentitled people may enter into quasi-feudal
social relations with those who own land in exchange for
65
food and physical security.
Somewhat less convincing is Kunstler’s vision of future America as

a low-tech society disintegrated into small towns living of farming. I
think he really underestimates technology and the power of dualiza-
tion, the split within society between haves and have-nots. The future
will probably not only be a sort of regression to a former stage of his-
tory, it will also be science fiction. Not so much a sort of Amish society
but more a cyberpunk landscape – like in Neuromancer by William
Gibson or Diamand Age by Neil Stephenson, or of course, the set of
Blade Runner. The landscape of the future is probably more like this:
high-tech gated communities, condos and skyscrapers, surrounded by
a sea of slums. We have to agree, however, with Kunstler’s conclusion
that ‘the Long Emergency is going to be a tremendous trauma for the
human race.’
Yet the implosion of the polis, the disintegration of the City of
Man, is not ahead of us but is in fact already materializing in the new
spatial disorder. We have called this evolving process the rise of ‘a
capsular civilization’. In terms of Klein’s book one could say: disaster
industry is making movable green zones in the expanding red zones of
the world. Referring to Katrina, Klein writes:
At first I thought that the Green Zone phenomenon was

unique to the war in Iraq; now, after years spent in dis-
aster zones, I realize that the Green Zone emerges every-
where where the disaster capitalism complex descends,
with the same stark partitions between the included and
the excluded, the protected and the damned.14
Every city haunted by disaster can become Halliburton city (as

the Green Zone is sometimes termed). Another aspect of this Mad
Max landscape is the disintegration of public infrastructure: public
infrastructure around the world is facing unprecedented stress from
extreme weather events like hurricanes, floods, forest fires, heat
waves. According to the American Society of Civil Engineers, trillions
of dollars in investment is needed to get roads, bridges, dams, schools
back to standard.
It is easy to imagine a future in which growing numbers

of cities have their frail and long neglected infrastructure
knocked out by disasters and then are left to rot . . . The
well off, meanwhile, will withdraw into gated communities,
their needs met by privatized providers.15
The Mad Max phase has begun. One concrete recent example from
The International Herald Tribune illustrates the perverse logic. To
avoid overfishing in European fishing grounds, a grey, often illegal
fleet (Chinese, Russian and other) has completely overfished the West-
66
African fishing grounds. Consequently, the fishermen of Ivory Coast

and the surrounding countries, having no means of subsistence, take
their boats and try to make it to the Canary Islands; to the promised
land called Fortress Europe. An estimated 6000 people have died
trying to cross in 2007.16 But this is just the beginning: according to
the IPCC fourth assessment report, Africa will be amongst the hard-
est hit regions and the least equipped to adapt to climate change, and
(not mentioned in the report) moreover the region with the sharpest
demographic growth. This will have the disastrous results of mass
migration from Africa to the north, which will cause frictions, capsu-
larization, gating, dualization and finally, one can fear, the collapse of
the welfare state in Europe. Unless Europe really becomes more and
more a fortress (with leaking fences.) Fortress Europe will become
an Archipelago consisting of smaller islands inside bigger ones, from
the scale of the continent, to the scale of gated communities and high
security condominiums.
Within this new emerging spatial order, one can locate several
hotspots where the seams of the seemingly seamless network society
are painfully visible: these new iron curtains are the fences and secu-
rity walls all over the world in Ceuta, Melilla, Tijuana and elsewhere.
They divide the world between the north and the global south. The
architect and activist Teddy Cruz has called this global demarcation
line ‘the political equator’.17 But, it would be oversimplified to conceive
of a world geographically split between north and south. The new
spatial disorder is a collection of capsular entities, or green zones,
that are plugged in but surrounded by unplugged red zones, a lay-
ered archipelago, islands inside bigger islands, a sort of Russian doll
archipelago. To keep these worlds apart, detention centres for illegal
migrants, labour camps for grey labour forces, secret prisons for ter-
rorism suspects, or outright concentration camps like Guantánamo,
form a global archipelago of their own right. All these are spaces of
exception, some of them not only extraterritorial, but also extra legal,
outside the law, outlaw spaces that keep the split in place, break
resistance and spread fear. One could conceive of these camps as a
sort of spatial translation of the third element of Klein’s shock doc-
trine, besides the collective shock of a disaster, natural or unnatural,
and the economic shock therapy, torture.
We live in this dualized world already to some extend: on the one
hand, the hyper-reality of the world of consumption, tourism, media,
spectacle; in short the world as theme park. And, on the other, the infra-
reality that is the unknown, repressed, invisible, ugly reality outside
this matrix. Razor wire, being the marker of the dividing line between
the hyper- and infra-realities, will most probably be one of the most
important features of the architecture and urbanism of the twenty-first
century. This is the sort of cyberpunk landscape that will only get more
visible, more extreme. And of course ecology is crucial in the shaping of
this new dualized spatial order. Air-conditioned biosphere-like capsular
67
entities are no doubt ahead while the planet is heating up.
If we want to make a graphic map of the New Spatial Order we
could sketch it as two global archipelagos that are mirroring each
other: an archipelago of protected often corporate, networked islands
and the archipelago of camps, in between them the background, the
sea we call the ubiquitous periphery, either slum, megacity in the
global South or suburban sprawl in the North. That is a very concrete
face of the Mad Max phase of globalization with a neo-medieval,
cyberpunk, post-historical science fiction landscape that is taking
shape before our very own eyes.
Postscript on the Difference Between Waking Up and

Getting Up
I do not see any solution to turn these diverse challenges (overpopula-
tion, slums, global warming, permanent war and disaster capitalism,
dualization and capsularization, etcetera) into positive outcomes. But
then, I am a philosopher, and philosophers have no solutions; only
problems. I hope the specialists have solutions (and less problems
would be nice too). But I fear (as a philosopher) that most of those
who think they have solutions are part of the problem. To quote the
report to the Club of Rome once more:
The hopes of the technological optimists centre on the abil-

ity of technology to remove or extend the limits to growth
of population and capital. We have shown that in the world
model the application of technology to apparent problems
of resource depletion or pollution or food shortage has
no impact on the essential problem, which is exponential
growth in a finite and complex system . . . short-term con-
cerns will generate the exponential growth that drives the
world system toward the limits of the earth and ultimate
collapse.18
The report to the Club of Rome sold twelve million copies in 37 lan-
guages. It did not make one iota difference. No warning will stop us.
Only major disasters might. But both the recent IPCC assessment
and the report to the Club of Rome agree on this: once catastrophes
have begun it is too late to act.
We cannot say with certainty how much longer mankind

can postpone initiating deliberate control of its growth
before it will have lost the chance for control. We suspect
on the basis of present knowledge of the physical con-
straints of the planet that the growth phase cannot con-
tinue for another one hundred years. Again, because of the
delays in the system, if the global society waits until those
constraints are unmistakably apparent, it will have waited
68
too long.19
The physical constraints of the planet are becoming unmistakably

apparent, so, we know: we have waited too long. And, we are still
dodging.
But in a more optimistic vain, one has to admit: humanity has
gained consciousness of this impending global disaster, in a very short
span, especially between 2005 and 2007. Just a few years ago speak-
ing about global warming as an impending permanent catastrophe
was considered fear mongering and doom prophesy, if not just another
conspiracy theory. But that is over, that was before Al Gore. No need
to go into the debate pro and contra Gore, but friend and foe would
have to admit that he contributed in a major way to spreading the
awareness globally, of both the recognition that there is such a thing
as global warming, that it is manmade, and that it is really urgent to
do something. The release of his film An inconvenient truth, coincided
with many reports and newspaper articles on the melting of glaciers,
ice sheets, etcetera. So suddenly the constellation was right. The
Nobel Prize awarded in 2007 to both Al Gore and the International
Panel on Climate Change was the consecration of this awareness. So,
it is possible that humanity wakes up. That is terrific news. It really is
a sign of hope.20
But. There is a huge gap between waking up and actually get-
ting up. In a sense we could say that this lapse between waking up
and getting up will determine the future. In the run up to the Copen-
hagen Summit of autumn 2009, reports in newspapers told us that
public awareness of global warming has decreased considerably since
2007, both in Europe and America. So, instead of getting up, human-
ity seems to fall asleep again. The second report to the Club of Rome,
Mankind at a turning point, of 1974, called it: ‘deadly delay’.21
The inertia of our habits sabotaging the clarity of our awareness
and our moral consciousness will, most likely, be fatal. It will have
been fatal. In posthistory everything plays in the future perfect, a past
future tense, an anticipated déjà vu. The inertia of acceleration: we
are like speeding up in slow motion, fatally hitting the limits of the
planet, caught in the hyperkinetic frenzy of globalization and mobility,
framed by an ever accelerating technological development. It has been
called ‘exponential growth in a finite and complex system’: the coming
disasters are, in a sense, two generations after the first report to the
Club of Rome, déjà vu. As Nature hits back with a vengeance, History
seems to escape us.
Notes
1 The introduction of AR4 explains: ‘Where uncertainty is assessed
more quantitatively using expert judgement of the correctness of
underlying data, models or analyses, then the following scale of confi-
69
dence levels is used to express the assessed chance of a finding being
correct: very high confidence at least 9 out of 10; high confidence
about 8 out of 10; medium confidence about 5 out of 10; low confidence
about 2 out of 10; and very low confidence less than 1 out of 10.’ Inter-
governmental Panel on Climate Change, Fourth Assessment Report /
Climate Change 2007: a synthesis report. Available online: http://www.
ipcc.ch/ipccreports/ar4-syr.htm – accessed 12 April 2010.
2 Intergovernmental Panel on climate change, Fourth assessment
report / Climate change 2007: a synthesis report. Topic 3, p 7. Avail-
able online: http://www.ipcc.ch/ipccreports/ar4-syr.htm – accessed 1
January 2008. On Food the IPPC report says: ‘Crop productivity is
projected to increase slightly at mid- to high latitudes for local mean
temperature increases of up to 1-3 °C depending on the crop, and
then decrease beyond that in some regions (medium confidence). At
lower latitudes, especially in seasonally dry and tropical regions, crop
productivity is projected to decrease for even small local temperature
increases (1-2 °C), which would increase the risk of hunger (medium
confidence). Globally, the potential for food production is projected to
increase with increases in local average temperature over a range of
1-3 °C, but above this it is projected to decrease (medium confidence).’
(Ibid.)
3 Intergovernmental Panel on climate change, Fourth assessment
report / Climate change 2007: a synthesis report. Topic 3 p 7 available
online: http://www.ipcc.ch/ipccreports/ar4-syr.htm – accessed 1 Janu-
ary 2008.
4 Stern report, summary of conclusions; online available at: http://www.
hm- treasury.gov.uk/independent_reviews/stern_review_economics_
climate_change/stern_review_report.cfm – accessed 18 January 2008.
‘In contrast’, the report states, ‘the costs of action – reducing green-
house gas emissions to avoid the worst impacts of climate change
– can be limited to around one per cent of global GDP each year.’ But
we will not act. We will act too slow; too little too late. Why that is so,
is one of the things this paper tries to explain.
5 Dennis Meadows, Donnella Meadows, Jorgen Randers & William
Behrens, Limits to Growth. A Report to the Club of Rome Project on
the Predicament of Mankind, Universe Books, New York, 1972 (a sum-
mary is available online : www.clubofrome.org/docs/limits.rtf -).
6 Peter Sloterdijk, Eurotaoismus. Zur Kritik der Politischen Kinetik,
Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt am Main, 1989, passim.
7 Dennis Meadows, et. al, Limits to growth, op. cit. (note 5).
8 Capitalism, Wallerstein said, is characterized by the commodification
of everything. (Immanuel Wallerstein, Historical Capitalism, Verso,
London/New York, 1993 (1983), 7-13) That was and remains bad
news, but the acceleration of everything is, seen from the viewpoint of
ecology, much worse. The combination might prove deadly.
9 Framed differently, one could call it one of the riddles of neocon-
servatism. On the one hand, the neoconservative movement from Leo
70
Strauss unto his contemporary followers (like Wolfowitz), who intro-

duced contempt for legality in political theory and on the other Milton
Friedman and his followers who introduced ruthless privatization in
economic theory. These two should be thought together and the fact
that both originated in the Chicago University is maybe a clue to
start with.
10 Milton Friedman, quoted in Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine, The
Rise of Disaster Capitalism, Penguin, London, New York, 2007, 6

11 http://www.newamericancentury.org/RebuildingAmericasDefenses.
pdf – accessed 31 January, see also my ‘Welcome to the New Imperial
World Order’, in The Capsular Civilization, op. cit.
12 Klein, op. cit. 427.
13 James Howard Kunstler The Long Emergency, 2005, Grove/Atlantic,
Inc. (an adapted summary is online available at http://www.rolling-
stone.com/news/story/7203633/the_long_emergency -, accessed 21
January 2008).
14 Klein, op. cit. (note 10), 414.
15 Ibid., 415.
16 ‘The fish gone, Migrants take to sea’, International Herald Tribune,
12-13 January 2008, ‘World Pays a price for love of seafood’, Interna-
tional Herald Tribune, 15 January 2008.
17 See: http://www.politicalequator.org/index.html.
18 www.clubofrome.org/docs/limits.rtf – accessed 21 January 2008.
19 www.clubofrome.org/docs/limits.rtf – accessed 21 January 2008.
20 There is such a thing as a global public opinion, and maybe one day
we can speak about a global civil society. This is more and more the
case in the internet activism. The biggest manifestation on earth and
in world history brought up to 30 million people to the streets on 15
February 2003 to protest against the impending invasion of Iraq. So
all the lies and media spin, could not fool this planetarian public opin-
ion, from London to Tokyo, from Brussels to New York, from Sao Paolo
to Rome (three million people!) from Madrid to Istanbul, from Moscow
to Jerusalem. So humanity is more awake at times than we tend to
think.
21 Mihailo Mesarovic, Eduard Pestel, Mankind at the Turning Point,
1974 (Dutch version: De mensheid op een kruispunt. Tweede rapport
aan de Club van Rome, 72 and following).
72
The New Spatial

World (Dis)Order:
The Archipelago
Entropic Empire
and the Ubiquitous

Periphery
[2007]
Reflect #09
With Michiel Dehaene
73
‘Nowadays there can be no hesitation in admitting that the
urban phenomenon is the weakest point in the industrial
system. The metropolis, once the traditional “birth place of
progress” is today, in fact, the most backward and confused
sector of Capital’
(Archizoom, No-stop city, 1971)
Snapshots of Disaster City

The city seems doomed. Since the beginning: Nineveh, Babylon,
Sodom and Gomorra, Troy, Carthage. This archaic, mythical doom
over the city seems striking again these days. It hits you in the face:
Sarajevo, New York 9/11, Baghdad and Fallujah, New Orleans, Beirut.
In all these very different, but iconic cases, the city is the heart and
very target of destruction. The peaceful slumber of the welfare state
decades, with its well ordered cities and soporific suburbs, is over. The
awakening is hard and scary.
The continuing demographic explosion, the logic of growth and
technological acceleration requires the ruthless exploitation of non-
renewable resources. Pollution, mostly from fossil-based fuels and
carbon dioxide emissions, now results in global warming and all the
adverse effects that comes with it: the melting of icecaps and glaciers,
deforestation and desertification, the accelerated loss of biodiversity,
humanitarian disasters such as the shortages of drinking water,
droughts, storms, floods, landslides and hurricanes all over the globe.1
Then there is the dualization of society under the pressure
of neo-liberal globalization, the growth of extreme poverty, the so
called Fourth World,2 the emergence of the criminal economy, the
uncontrollable expansion of megacities in the poorest regions of the
world. Today, for the first time in history, more than half the world’s
population lives in an urban environment.3 All these phenomena, and
their interrelation, lead to one conclusion: planet Earth has entered a
phase of permanent catastrophe.4
One of the results is unstoppable mass migration from the
South, causing increasing frictions, with waves of xenophobia, crime,
feelings of insecurity, fear and alienation, riots and unrest. Then there
is the rise of fundamentalisms (Muslim, Christian and Jewish) rap-
idly turning into a clash of and within civilizations. Add to this the
War on Terror as a planetary state of exception – and you begin to get
the picture of Disaster City: not only the city of disaster, but also the
city as disaster.
But the real catastrophe that befalls the the city might be sub-
liminal and strangely undramatic. The city seems to lose what kept it
together; we call it ‘urbanity’ now, almost as if it were posthumous, with
‘urban theory’ as its theology: musings on the soul of the city while the
74
body is dying. City and citizenship, society and state, all seem to evapo-
rate. We live increasingly in a postcivil society.5 What we witness might
indeed be a far-reaching disintegration: an implosion of the polis.
The Archipelago and the Ubiquitous Periphery

Archipelago and the Ubiquitous Periphery
One of the city’s raisons d’être throughout history has been centrality
The New Spatial World (Dis)Order: The
and accumulation: the city was a powerbase, a node in the exchange

of goods, a concentration of the means of production, a creative milieu,
a centre of excellence and excess. It was linked to the hinterland in a
process of constant, be it unequal, exchange. At the dawn of the new
millennium, however, there are good reasons to question this common
wisdom. Global capital increasingly privileges spatial constellations
that do not resemble, per se, what we used to call the city. The link
to the hinterland, the interdependence between country and town,
is replaced by a logic of disconnection or bypassing. The city of the
twenty-first century is not the global city of high finance, the control
and command centre of a world economy that perpetuates the principle
of accumulation through centrality. The centrality of control is replaced
by the network and relocated in cyberspace, even if a few ‘global cities’
remain. The megalopolises of the global south (Lagos, São Paulo, Kara-
chi, Dhaka, Mumbai) are part of an emerging global ubiquitous periph-
ery caught in a logic of asymmetry that produces a geographical foot-
print of brutal clarity: ever fewer centres of accumulation, ever grow-
ing peripheries of extraction. Even in China’s booming economy, there
is massive poverty and systematic child labour exploitation from the
countryside to big distant cities. The work is hard, workdays long and
wages so low that the trip back home costs a year of work.6
The new megacities of the South are no longer the glorious social
elevators that bring the legendary newcomer from the bottom to the
top of the social ladder. Rather, the impoverished masses end up in the
city because they have nowhere else to go. The city provides the best
chance of survival, offering networks of reciprocity that support a sub-
sistence economy, with little hope for change or personal emancipation.
For millions of people of the Global South fleeing the countryside for
economical, ecological, or security reasons, the city has become a sur-
vival/subsistence machine instead of an accumulation machine. The
only thing it still accumulates is people – and problems. These megaci-
ties (more than eight million) or even hypercities (more than 20 mil-
lion),7 adding up to what Mike Davis calls the ‘planet of slums’, are set
as ecological and humanitarian time bombs.
The North, in contrast, is characterized by, on the one hand, the
proverbial ‘Global cities’, hubs in the global network, and, on the other
hand, the sprawling ex-urban zones of consumption, in the grip of the
network and its space of flows, the hyperkinetic frenzy of capital, com-
modity and people. In the era of city marketing, the post-industrial
city is trying hard to project an image of spectacle and entertainment.
This tourist festival-city keeps pace with the dualization of both global
75
and local society. As opposed to the planet of slums, there is a uni-
verse of entertainment, of media, (cyber)games, and theme parks: the
simulation that comes before the reality, ‘hyper-reality’.8 The reality
of poverty, war and chaos is not represented; it does not appear in the
images on our screens as it is ‘unimaginable’. It is an infra-reality. The
extremes are linked: the more infra-reality rises, the more we retreat
into hyper-reality.
The New Iron Curtain
‘Barbed wire is for cattle, razor wire for humans’
(South-African artist Kendell Geers, 2006)
Not everything in the ‘smooth space of flows’ has become virtual how-
ever: the New Iron Curtain dividing North and South is the obscene,
material marker of the split between the two realities. A new ‘Political
Equator’ is defined by the fence in Ceuta and Melilla, which embodies
the rampart of ‘Fortress Europe,’ and the fence on the Texas-Mexican
border, which is the new great divide between North and South Amer-
ica.9 The fences of Ceuta and Melilla – ‘monuments’ of, respectively,
7.8 and 10.5 km – are not really present in the European collective
consciousness even after more than ten years of existence and after
hundreds of people trying to climb the wall (with a climax in the mass
storming of October 2005 in Ceuta), and after several thousands of
people having drowned trying to cross the Mediterranean. This proves
that it is infra-real, an invisible side of the global landscape.
This brutal logic of razor wire is extended and replicated in
the detention centres for asylum seekers and illegal migrants but it
is also entering our everyday surroundings in many different ways.
People withdraw into capsular, self-sufficient entities: fortified houses,
condominiums, gated communities, enclosed malls, campuses, inward-
looking office blocks, atrium hotels, and all-in heterotopias, often with
hyper-real overtones. ‘Going out’ means entering all sorts of enclaves:
theme parks, themed city quarters, festival markets, holiday villages,
etcetera. Underneath the iconography of fun there is an ecology of
fear. The fearlessness of those who storm the razor wire fences mir-
rors the fear of those on the other side (those on the inside, us). The
more they become fearless, the more we are in the grip of fear. The
craze of the air-conditioned SUV, the luxurious ‘armed’ jeep that
invades our cities, is a clear allegory of this ‘capsularization’. The
‘militarization of city life’ (a term Mike Davis coined in the early nine-
ties)10 has never been so apparent. Razor wire, being the marker of
the dividing line between the hyper- and infra-realities, will be one of
the most important features of the architecture and urbanism of the
twenty first century.11
76
Our world has become an archipelago of connected islands in

a ubiquitous periphery.12 In the archipelago there are, for the time
being, rather peaceful and ordered islands such as ‘Fortress Europe’.
But this does not mean it is not part of an archipelago. Moreover, the
island itself is disintegrating into an archipelago. The spatial order
of the archipelago might become a Russian doll: archipelagos inside

bigger archipelagos.
‘Security capitalism’ and ‘disaster capitalism’ are two sides of
the same coin:13 the obsession with security, with defensible space
for capital flows is the flip side of the rogue methods of neo-liberal
capitalism (with the IMF and the World Bank as its tools). The forced
dismantling of the state, forced privatization of natural resources,
forced devaluations, open up the countries of the South for maximum
extraction and exploitation. Disaster relief is a profitable branch and
a growing ‘market’: the zones of ‘bare life’ surviving in a willed (in the
case of war) or unplanned (in the case of natural disaster) ‘state of
emergency’.
The Other Archipelago

The network is simultaneously a ‘deteritorializing’ and a ‘reterritori-
alizing’ force: deterritorializing because the network tends to remove
places from the place-logic of concrete localized conditions and rein-
sert them in the ‘space of flows’. Today, however, it is increasingly a
reterritorializing force to the extent that the network has become the
main device to maintain territorial integrity. The network constructs
a parallel reality which holds together the archipelago, literally aban-
doning what used to be the ‘integrated territory’ in which the topo-
graphic reality and the territorial logic of sovereignty still coincided.
Israel is the most extreme example of such spatial order.14 We seem
to live an inversion of the territory, a sort of turning inside out of the
globe as if it were a glove: the inside global, the outside local.15
The archipelago has its dark counterpart in the archipelago of
camps and enclaves of containment: the Gulag archipelago of deten-
tion centers, prisons, ghettos, labour camps and outright concentra-
tion camps such as Guantánamo as opposed to the archipelago of
order, wealth and security. The archipelago of camps is administered
by the archipelago of order. The camp is the biopolitical device which
makes it possible to operate within the treacherous terrain outside of
the network of well-connected premium worlds. In other words, it is
the missing-link between the hyper-real foreground of heterotopian
enclaves and the infra-real background of abandonment (abandon-
ment has to be taken literally here: à ban donner: ‘giving up to the
ban’).
The camp is, according to Giorgio Agamben (as is well known by
now), a space outside the law, outside the nomos, not a space that is
an extension of the law as is the case of the prison, but a space that is
extra-territorial to the nomos, a space where the law is suspended, the
77
embodiment of the state of exception. This is the space of the ban, the
place of the banned.16 The camp is the space where the city is anni-
hilated and the citizen has lost his citizenship, defined as life inside
the norms of culture (bios), and is reduced to mere body, mere nature,
‘bare life’ (zoè). We encounter the camp before and after the polis.
Before the polis: the encampment figures as the forerunner of the city
and indeed of all human settlement as such. After the polis: the camp
appears where the polis, the city as civic society, is suspended or dis-
solving, as we witness in the concentration camp, the refugee camp,
and the transit camp for asylum seekers or illegal immigrants. While
the encampment emerges out of the nature state and moves towards
the city, and therefore fulfils a proto-political role (the potentiality
of slums), the camp announces the relapse into the nature state and
marks the disintegration of society in the state of emergency (the
slum as dumping ground for ‘surplus humanity’).17
Both the archipelago of camps and the ‘state of abandonment’
in which these camps are inserted represent states of emergency. The
camps, detention centres, and labour camps are part of the ‘willed
state of exception’.18 The ‘state of abandonment’, the improvised hide-
outs for the illegal migrants and the homeless or worse the nomadic
survival of large swathes of the African people trying to escape civil
war and militias (in Sudan, Eastern Congo, Niger, etcetera), is the
non-willed state of exception and marks the return of the state of
nature. At first sight the state of nature does not seem to contain
anything comparable to this rogue capitalism in which resources and
cheap labour are the ‘fuel’ for mass production, but on closer look it
corresponds, in Hobbes’ words to ‘a time, wherein men live without
other security, then what their own strength, and their own invention
shall furnish them withall.’19 Indeed, living in the ‘state of abandon-
ment’ comes close to living in the state of nature. People living in ille-
gal settlements and slum conditions are tolerated, for the time being.
As soon as the power logic of the archipelago crosses their path (with
bulldozers for instance), they do not exist. Whoever lives in the nature
state ‘barely lives’ and is simply ignored. The rising statistics of forced
evictions in the cities of the Global South, registered by organizations
such as the Asian Coalition for Housing Rights,20 are the only traces
left of these ‘evictees’.
The megacities of the Global South reproduce within their own
geography the same opposition of archipelagos of capsular heteroto-
pian enclaves and camps that colonize the globe. Archipelagos of well-
connected, fortress-like precincts, held together in a matrix of ‘glocal’
bypasses, in stark contrast to the landscape of endless townships of
marginalized communities. The rest of the city and its citizens are
simultaneously exposed to the wild capitalism of global extraction and
to the mafioso logic of the informal economies that have sprung up in
the absence of any formal alternative.
The current fascination with the resilience of people living in
78
slums, the celebration of their capacity for self-organization and infor-

mal modes of organization – however true – plays into the hands of a
neo-liberal ideology and almost legitimizes the ongoing reduction in
welfare programmes.21 Intellectual exercises which describe the slum
out of respect for its inhabitants as the utmost expression of creativ-
ity when forced to do with minimal means,22 stop short of blaming the
less creative sections of the Global South for a lack of entrepreneur-

ship, for a failure to take advantage of the opportunities that a global
economy has offered them. Alterglobalist (of the Negri-school) and
neo-liberals seem united in their aversion towards the state, placing
their trusts in forms of self-organization. But the absence of the rule
of law and a level field (equitable relations that cater for fair play and
fair trade) simply privileges the bullies and the rogues.23
An almost allegorical black and white image of this double
archipelago is supplied by the grim labour camps for construction
workers in Dubai24 as opposed to the luxurious kitsch of the offshore
development for the superrich: ‘The World’, a heterotopian archi-
pelago representing the continents.25 In between these two extremes
lies only the desert, but elsewhere it is the ubiquitous periphery, the
grey zone of infra-architecture, the urban sprawl, the slums, the sea
of chaos, poverty and violence. Many places that function as centres
in the ubiquitous periphery (in Western Europe and North America,
Japan, China,) are still reasonably safe and dry, we call it ‘normality’,
the rule of law, the welfare state, the ordered city, etcetera. But many
places might become wetlands before they disappear under water,
others will rise and join the capsular logic of the archipelago. One
thing is certain: the sea level is rising (literally and metaphorically).
Somewhere in the not-too-distant future the prophesy of Rem Kool-
haas’s Harvard Project on the City might be fulfilled: ‘Lagos is not
catching up with us. Rather, we may be catching up with Lagos.’26
The Sanctuary and the Camp

The archipelago of plugged in and secured capsular spaces increas-
ingly produces a smooth sort of hyper-architecture: themed, spec-
tacular and illusionist. Hyper-architecture is the product of the
architect as the experience engineer within the experience economy.
Architecture as social engineering (modernism) has been replaced by
architecture as experience engineering or ‘imagineering’. Koolhaas
once said that the problem of our age is that there is no background
left; there is only foreground, self-consciousness. Hyper-architecture
has only foreground. In our world, architecture tends to be either pure
logistics or purely décor. Its counterpart, formed by the enclaves of
containment, comes in the form of infra-architecture: slums, ghetto’s
and camps. Infra-architecture, architecture reduced to its most mini-
mal function of logistics – architecture as survival kit – corresponds
to the ‘infra-reality’ of extreme poverty, chaos and war, as opposed to
the hyper-architecture of glossy magazines, which corresponds to and
79
expresses our hyper-reality. Most paradigmatic of all heterotopias
today is the theme park, the logic of theming is well known by now.
The theme park, however, is a dead heterotopia: all otherness has
been cleaned away. One can call it homotopia.
If most safe havens in the archipelago could be called ‘homoto-
pias’, which take on heterotopian traits, the black holes in the ubiqui-
tous periphery we can call ‘camp’. Heterotopia is, however, potentially
the opposite of the camp. A heterotopia is a sheltered space, closed
off from the political and the economical sphere and safe-guarded
against their respective intrusion or influence. The structure of the
space of heterotopia is that of a ‘sanctuary’. It is a refuge, a safe haven,
a protected space. This structure becomes clear when we realize that
heterotopias are spaces of the holy, of the holy days, the holidays.
From grave yards over temples, theatres, cinemas, libraries, museums,
saunas, holiday camps, brothels, and fancy fairs to our contemporary
. . . theme parks. The ‘holiday’ is a suspension – in time – of political
and economical activities. Heterotopia, in the proper sense, is a time/
spatial interruption, a refuge from the political and the economical. We
adopted this as a more restricted (re)definition of Foucault’s vast and
encompassing concept.27
The opposite of heterotopia as sanctuary is the camp. Our simple
definition of heterotopia as neither economical nor political, neither
private nor public, helps us to set the camp apart from the heterotopia,
as well as understand where the two meet. The word camp as such is of
course very open and vague: campus means just field in Latin. But there
are camps and then there are camps. There are two extreme manifesta-
tions: the concentration camp and the refugee camp. As said, the concen-
tration camp is, according to Giorgio Agamben, the territorialization or
embodiment of the state of exception, the place of the ban, where the law
is suspended. Its inmates, literally the ban-dits (those who have a ban
spoken on them), the outlaws, have neither civil rights nor human rights.
The camp is therefore the place where life (bios) becomes ‘bare life’ (zoë).
The concentration camp is the place ‘off limits’ in which anything can
happen.
The refugee camp is (or should be) the exact opposite of the
concentration camp. It is a refuge from the state of exception (mostly
war or civil war), a sheltered space in which normality is reinstated or
maintained. If we use the concept of the camp in the technical sense
as the space where the state of exception reigns, where the law is
suspended and inmates have neither civil rights nor human rights,
and therefore the place where life becomes bare life, then indeed the
sanctuary is its counterpart. Indeed, the concept of the camp (in the
Agambenian sense of concentration camp) has its exact opposite in
the concept of sanctuary or refuge. Both refer to ambiguous mythical
territory: the camp is the ‘ban’ of the homo sacer, while the sanctuary
is the temenos, the temple, or holy ground, where those who flee from
the law, power and violence can find asylum (for no human violence is
80
supposed to violate holy ground). A safe haven is, therefore, not a for-
tress, a dungeon or a gated community, for it is open exactly to those
for whom the fortress and the city walls are closed.
In the same way that we can oppose the camp (the ‘sacred
space’- the place of the homo sacer) to the sanctuary (the refuge of
the homo sacer), we can oppose the ghetto to the fortress or the gated
community: the ghetto is a closed off neighbourhood that is a form of

containment and can be turned readily into a camp-like situation. The
gated community is a closed off entity that is a form of exclusion and
exclusivity against the presumed state of nature or emergency outside
of it.
Camp and heterotopia are, strictly speaking, opposite figures
even if they show some similarities. The sanctuary is one of the emi-
nent forms of heterotopia, of the other space; it is the absolute discon-
tinuity of normality, of the nomos, for those who flee the nomos: the
homines sacri, the bandits. It is a safe haven against the violence of
society, legal or illegal. The sanctuary-like character of some hetero-
topian spaces is a direct consequence of our concept of heterotopia as
a space beside the public/political and private/economical spheres.
Heterotopian spaces provide an escape from the private sphere, the
oikos, and the public sphere, the agora, and, as such, interrupts the
conventional order.
The camp is also a space that is neither economical nor politi-
cal, however in a very different manner. As the space of the ban it
is a space in which the very distinction between the economical and
political, between the public and the private, has been suspended. The
camp and the sanctuary house the same people: those who have lost
their citizenship, their nation, their rights (the refugees, the migrants,
the outsiders, the nomads, the persecuted). Today, the illegal immi-
grant is a version of the one who is banned; the bandit is banned from
our national territory. It is telling that in Belgium and in France sev-
eral groups of asylum seekers and illegal immigrants recently went
on hunger strikes, taking refuge in churches and by doing so ‘instinc-
tively’ revived this ancient opposition between camp (closed detention
centre) and sanctuary. Our point is, in a sense, a plea for the recrea-
tion of sanctuaries, safe havens, shielded from the logic of ruthless
economization and the politics of the state of exception.
Heterotopian space as space of mediation entertains very precise
relations to the other spheres. In heterotopia the crucial distinctions
between private and public, between bios and zoë on which every soci-
ety since ancient Greece and all normality is based, is not suspended
but ‘diagonalized’, sublated, as in a catharsis: a healing suspension of
normality. The camp, in contrast, is the abject space of total rejection,
a space devoid of mediation, unrelated in the sense of residing outside
all relations. If the heterotopia is the place for otherness, for ‘alterity’,
then the camp is the space where the other, all otherness, is abolished,
annihilated, sometimes very literally.
81
The Implosion of the Polis
Our planet is beginning to look like a dual system, a sharp division
of what military analyst Thomas Barnett has called ‘the Pentagon’s
New Map’ with, on the one hand, ‘the Integrated Core’ and ‘the Non
Integrating Gap’. He uses this metaphor without irony. The ‘Non
Integrating Gap’ simply labels the black hole of poverty, failed states
and terrorism.28 It should be contained at all costs: with immigration
control, anti-terror intelligence, international policing, invasions and
permanent (low or high intensity) war. In this map, one could say
(in our terminology) that the periphery has become the centre. The
so-called integrated core, or just The Core, is the periphery of a huge
Central Gap on the world map (with Africa in the middle). That is a
concrete image of ‘the ubiquitous periphery’ (even if it obscures the
fact that the periphery is everywhere, in the back streets of our cities,
in the detention centres, in the trucks loaded with illegal migrants,
etcetera). Centre and periphery, or Core and Non Integrating Gap,
are related in a logic of disconnection: increasing mobility of capital,
increasing control of migration (or military control or intervention
vs terrorism). At specific points on the ground, in the ‘seams of the
world’, the divided globe is held apart by razor wire. The fences, bar-
riers and walls on these places are monuments to the strategy of con-
tainment.
In the graveyards of megacities we see a new symptom of emer-
gency. Just as the camp is, in its most abstract definition, an anni-
hilation of the difference between public and private, the graveyard
should mediate the difference between the living and the dead. The
graveyard, one of Foucault’s cherished examples of heterotopia, is
indeed an interesting configuration, for it is a holy ground beyond
any dispute (vandalizing graves is equally repugnant to believers
and non-believers). But in more and more places on earth graveyards
are inhabited: in Karachi, in Cairo, in Kinshasa, in Manila. It shows
that the megacities of the south are cities in an emergency phase. The
oldest testimony of the inhabitation of cemeteries comes from ancient
Athens. During the Peloponnesian wars, Pericles invited the people
from the Athenian hinterland and the city’s allies to come and protect
themselves inside the Athenian walls. As documented by Thucydides,
this gave rise to overpopulation and people had to live in the necropo-
lis and in the temples. This overcrowding caused epidemics and
proved to be a major disaster in a series that led to the fall of Athens.
The conclusion is clear: if the fact that people are forced to live in the
necropolis is a symptom of utter crisis of the City of Man, and if we
realize that in more and more cities this is the case, then it is clear
that we live through a major crisis, indeed a catastrophe. The fact
that thousands, indeed millions of people around the globe are dwell-
ing in graveyards is the allegory for the implosion of the polis. When
Heterotopia is no longer a sacred ground or safe haven, but becomes
82
a sort of oikos or dwelling, then this blurring indicates a permanent

state of emergency or the return to the nature state of mere survival.
The more the masses at the gates of ‘Fortress Europe’ are repat-
riated form the zones of quarantine in our ports and airports, the
more entire cities, even entire continents, are placed into a global
state of quarantine. But at some point the question becomes: who is

in quarantine? When the fortresses of the archipelago begin to look

like the penal colonies for a minority condemned to live in the con-
fines of privilege, privatization returns to its etymological roots: ‘the
voluntary prisoners of architecture’ are in the end deprived of the
good life within the public space and common ground of the polis or
even deprived of the polis as such. Yair, one of the characters in David
Grossman’s novel, Be my knife, asks quite openly whether Israel has
not become a penal colony.29
Both Johannesburg and Israel seem to be models and labora-
tories of the extreme dualization of the territory, they seem already
paradigmatic of the spatial order of the twenty-first century.30 In its
own way, Paris during the 2005 riots had become an example of what
this might look like when applied to the old metropolis of the North:
the centre encircled and, at the time, besieged by its periphery, the
‘banlieus’ that run amok and become again what the word originally
meant: the place of the ban (lieu du ban),31 the place of those who are
banned and who, in the process, become outlaws and ‘bandits’ (ban-
dits, literally meaning: those on whom the ban was pronounced).
To insist on the city today, presupposes that we don’t pretend
that we know what the city is. We can only try and invent search
terms for the city at the moment of its disappearance. ‘Urbanity’ (like
‘urban theory’) is a term which has, for the last ten years, accompa-
nied the difficult farewell to the metropolis. Raising the question of
the city today means thinking about the future of the endless periph-
eries, from the dying villages in la France profonde to the endless
slums of megacities in the Global South to the encampments of boat
people at the gates of Fortress Europe.
Notes
1 See the so called fourth IPPC report of October 2007: Intergovern-
mental Panel on Climate Change, Fourth Assessment Report / Cli-
mate Change 2007: a Synthesis Report.) available online: http://www.
ipcc.ch/ipccreports/ar4-syr.htm. (see of course the text on the Mad
Max phase of globalization in this book for a lengthy discussion of
this report).
2 Manuel Castells, End of Millennium, The information Age: Economy,
Society and Culture, Volume III, Blackwell publishers, Oxford, 1998,
p 70-161 (Chapter 2: The Rise of the Fourth World: Informational
Capitalism, Poverty and Social Exclusion).
3 Mike Davis, Planet of Slums, verso, London & New York, 2006, p 1.
83
4 I introduced this term in my book The Capsular Civilization. On the
City in the Age of Fear, NAi Publishers, Rotterdam, 2004.
5 Frederic Jameson, Michael Speaks, ‘Envelopes and Enclaves: The
Space of Post-Civil Society – An Architectural Conversation’ in:
Assemblage, 17 April 1992), 30-37.
6 See on this: David Barboza, ‘Dire Poverty Fuels Labor Scandal. Chi-
na’s Young Head to Distant Factories, International Herald Tribune,
10-11 May 2008.
7 Mike Davis uses this distinction between megacities and hypercities,
(Mike Davis, Planet of Slums, Verso, London & New York, 2006, 5.)
8 Baudrillard might be forgotten, but his concept is back. It is one of
the tools to understand our world, not only in high theory but also in
popular culture, from The Matrix to Žižek. See Slavoy Žižek, Welcome
to the Desert of the Real: Five Essays on September 11 and Related
Dates, Verso, London & New York, 2002.
9 See on this the work of Teddy Cruz and his studio, and the confer-
ences on this ‘Political Equator’.
10 Mike Davis, City of Quartz, Pimlico, 1998 (Verso 1990), 223.
11 In the Capsular Civilization I typically still called it barbed wire
instead of razor wire.
12 The Archipelago as metaphor for the new spatial order was used
in passing in The Capsular Civilization but much more system-
atically in Alessandro Petti, Archipelaghi e enclave, Architettura
dell’ordinamento spaziale contemporaneo, Bruno Mondadori, Milano,
2007. As we have an ongoing collaboration with this author, we
cannot say who borrowed from whom and do not care about it, as
unmasking this logic is our common task.
13 Naomi Klein, ‘The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism’
Pinguin Books, London, New York, 2007. Security capitalism is a term
used by Ignacio Ramonet in one of his editorial pieces for Le Monde
Diplomatique.
14 Hence Alessandro Petti, considers Israel as paradigmatic for a pos-
sible future spatial order of many places in the world, or maybe of
the spatial order as such. Alessandro Petti, Archipelagi e enclave,
Architettura dell’ordinamento spaziale contemporaneo, Bruno Monda-
dori, 2007. See on this complex geometry of separation also the semi-
nal book Hollow Land by Eyal Weisman.
15 This image is inspired by Paul Virilio, Ville Panique. Ailleurs com-
mence ici, Editions Galilée, Paris, 2004.
16 Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer, le pouvoir souverain et la vie nue,
Seuil, Paris, 1997. Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer. Sovereign Power
and Bare Life, Stanford University Press, Stanford, 1998.
17 Mike Davis, Planet of Slums, Verso, London, New York, 2006, 174.
18 Giorgio Agamben, op. cit. (note 16), 181. (Giorgio Agamben, Homo
Sacer, Sovereign Power and Bare Life, op. cit. 168.)
19 Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (1651), Penguin Books, Hamonsworth,
1968, 186.
84
20 See: http://www.achr.net/.
21 John Turner’s strategy of incremental change and self help, seeing the
slum as the solution rather than the problem, was from the start an
all-too-convenient logic for parties that were only looking for an opportu-
nity to cut back on aid. The collaboration of McNamara and John Turner
raised eyebrows from the beginning. Mike Davis, Planet of Slums, 71-75.
22 Alfredo Brillembourg, Kristin Feireiss, Humbert Klumpner, (eds.)

Informal City. Caracas Case, Prestel, Munich, 2005.
23 Ariel Armoni, The Dubious Link, Civic Engagement and Democracy,
Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004.
24 The workers, coming from Pakistan and increasingly form China,
have often taken their passports from them, so they are almost
imprisoned and can only leave when sick, as the building companies
discovered that transporting coffins is considered to expensive (as
stated in a BBC documentary on Dubai).
25 See on this: Alessandro Petti, ‘Dubai Offshore Urbanism’, in: Lieven
De Cauter & Michiel Dehaene (eds.), Heterotopia & The City. Public
Space in a Postcival Society, Routledge, London, forthcoming 2007.
26 Harvard Project on the City, ‘Lagos’ in: Rem Koolhaas, Stefano Boeri,
et.al., Mutations, Actar, Barcelona 2000, 653. When I asked him Rem
Koolhaas denied that this oneliner is his. But the style and power
comes close.
27 As exposed in ‘The space of play’ elsewhere in this book.
28 Thomas P M Barnet, The Pentagon’s New Map: War and Peace in the
Twenty-First Century, Putman’s sons, New York, 2004. See also J.P;
Riveong ‘In the midst of the Swarm: reconceptualising the (misla-
belled) war on Terror.online available at : http://www.djpr.us/Recon-
ceptualizing-the-Global-War-on-Terror-(GWOT).html. Both sources
are interesting as they look from within the Imperial logic of Ameri-
can Empire. For a image of the actual map see a document of the
Departement of Defense: http://www.oft.osd.mil/library/library_files/
trends_169_transformation_trends_16_december_issue.pdf.
29 David Grossman, Be My Knife, Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, New York,
1998.
30 See on this Alessandro Petti, Archipelaghi e enclave, op. cit. (note 12).
31 Ignatio Ramonet, ‘Une révolte française’, in: Manières de Voir, 89,
Monde diplomatique, octobre-novembre 2006, 4.
The Return of
the State of
88
Nature
The
BeWILDerment of
Entropic Empire
Pentheus
[2007]
Reflect #09
With Rudi Laermans
89
The Appeal of Horror
The fascination for the state of nature is deeply anchored in the lust
economy of our time. An omnipresent obsession with the more-than-
real prevails: with the extraordinary and the unsettled, with limits
and their transgression. You see it in films and television formats. The
popularity of reality television demonstrates it, just like the search
for hard kicks in night life and the leisure sector. Both passively (in
the ‘viewer’) and actively (in the ‘participant’) reigns a fascination for
collective situations experienced as thrilling because they appear to
make a direct contact with an absolute kind of ‘outside’ that domi-
nates – with wildness, naked life, a state of nature before or beyond
culture and society.
Of course, this is not new. Shall we begin with the Ancient
Greeks? There is a direct affinity between The Bacchae (or The Mae-
nads) and Big Brother or Expedition Robinson. Big Brother is a well
known reality TV game in which a group of people are locked up
in a house full of camera’s registering all their doings; they have to
execute all sorts of tasks but the main thing is to survive the pres-
sure until they are voted out. There is no privacy at all. An infamous
scene in our local Belgian version is when a woman called Betty
masturbates. She became famous overnight. Expedition Robinson
was another reality TV game wherein a group of people go to an
island and try to survive until, after all sorts of tests and voting, only
one remains and becomes ‘Robinson’. This Swedish format is called
Survivor in the Anglo-Saxon world. In The Bacchae by Euripides,
Dionysus has, in his own words, ‘hunted women, driven them out of
their houses with stimulants’ to force Thebes to recognize his cult;
and now they stay, deprived of their senses in the mountains. And the
choir of women is completely under the spell, they sing: ‘. . . the whole
earth will soon be dancing, when the roaring god leads his festive
flock, to the mountains, to the mountains, where a crowd of women
is waiting, driven away from their looms and shuttles by Dionysus’s
goads’. Pentheus, the king, wants to know what the women, led by
his mother, do during the Bacchus ritual. Pentheus embodies (male)
rationality, but is tempted by the (female) possibility of ecstasy and
loss of oneself, which he also wants to know, understand and control.
The stranger who introduces the rites – no less than Dionysus himself
who has taken on a human form – is captured and presented to the
king. He tries to dissuade Pentheus from the idea of taking up the
sword against the Maenads or Bacchae (because no sword or shield is
capable of dealing with maenads led by a god). Pentheus is immedi-
ately tempted when the stranger suggests spying on them, although
he emphasizes that it is forbidden for non-initiates to attend the rites.
When Pentheus insists, Dionysus disguises him as a woman, so that
he can look at the ecstatic women like a voyeur. However, the women
feel that they are being spied on and thinking that it is a mountain
lion (everyone hallucinates in this play), tear the intruder to pieces.
90
When they come back to their senses they are filled with horror.
Aristotle interprets precisely this moment of tragic horror as
the realization of tragedy: horror triggers catharsis. Horror acts as
purification, as chastening, because the horror is transferred to the
viewer and turns to compassion. Whatever one may think about the
Aristotelian hypothesis of catharsis, tragedy – at least this tragedy
– is a journey into the abyss, a rite of passage through excitement
and horror about the state of nature, wildness, the unregulated or
anomic. The abject ‘other’ of the state of nature lies behind, beneath
The BeWILDerment of Pentheus
and between each act of civility or all culture, which never can be
anything other than a shallow varnish or perhaps a harness, a suit
of armour, a cocoon around the biological body. The body itself is the
state of nature in our midst: zoë, bare life.
Is the Bacchic drama a remote precursor of Big Brother? Pen-
theus violated a prohibition and was punished; in contrast, the
television viewer accepts a widely extended invitation to yield to a
voyeuristic desire to watch, a fascination for the pornography of the
(consciously) disordered society. The Bacchae celebrated a ritual,
dedicated to a god and with fixed rules of play, while the participants
in Big Brother or Temptation Island, or the night-owls who dance on
endlessly on a cocktail of heavy beats and pep drugs, are more like
lonely atoms who hope to meet their genuine, natural self in moments
of complete loss of self. And yet a line does run solidly from The Bac-
chae to the reality TV formats. What keeps it all together is our fasci-
nation for the underside of our anthropological condition.
The human being of humanism is a polite and linguistic being,
with his body stamped by socio-cultural forms of life in such a way
that the reality of bare life appears to be erased. However, every
human being always also remains a pre-linguistic child, a mere
biological body or, in Freudian terms, an unconscious reservoir of
libidinal impulses (an ‘Id’) that is never fully obedient to the real-
ity principle (the ‘Ego’) and the interiorized demands of society (the
‘Super Ego’). The human being was therefore always an oxymoron:
both human and non-human, both natural and unnatural – both bios
(formed life, way of life) and zoé (mere life, bare life, naked life). Hence
the famous metaphysical definition by Aristotle of the human being
as ‘the living being that has language’. The human being shares the
simple fact of being alive with all other living creatures, whereas his
linguistic ability in contrast makes him a zoön politikon, a political
animal, a member of the polis, endowed, by the mere fact of language,
with the capacity to distinguish between good and evil, the just and
unjust. Humanism was therefore always rather more morality than
social science: a call to become a full human being. This call must be
constantly repeated as a struggle against ‘the facts’: we are mesmer-
ized by the biological. For his inhumanity or natural condition con-
tinues to fascinate the human being. It conjures up the possibility of
an authentic and sovereign life, a reconciliation with ‘the total Other’
91
(Adorno). This is the other humanism, that of The Bacchae or, more
contemporaneously, of Big Brother or Survivor (or Expedition Robin-
son): not a division but a transparent relationship between a culture
and its excrement, what it suppresses and therefore pushes for (re)
cognition. The greater part of the avant-garde wanted to explore and
expose this inhuman. According to Walter Benjamin, living in a glass
house was moral exhibitionism, a virtue for liberated people.
Both The Bacchae and Big Brother play, via the human, all too
human fascination for what lies past the limits of the (normal) human
existence, on the division that we are. Because we are unnatural ani-
mals (we are cultivated, social, linguistic), wildness is the contrary of
ourselves, of our culture and our society, and thus exciting – despite
any horror. The decisive difference between The Bacchae and Big
Brother is that the confrontation with naked life as a mass spectacle
is fake: it is staged as something worth being seen by everyone, and
not just by the initiates and the god for whom the cult is established
– it is significant that the slope where the wildness and later the
gruesome murder take place is never depicted in the tragedy about
the Maenads. In Big Brother or Survivor the reverse is true. Where
a public audience (‘they’) view what private persons (‘them’) do, an
anomic anonymity is created that inadvertently recalls the situation
of the camp guard who watches how a prisoner disrobes with dif-
ficulty – but here it is voluntary, swift, and with a tanned body. This
generalized fascination for the transgressive and ‘the outside’ that is
deeply anchored in the libidinal economy of our time may indicate a
premonition: the possibility of a coming state of nature. Just like Pen-
theus, we are all willy-nilly disaster tourists to a certain degree. We
therefore call this fascination the beWILDerment of Pentheus. He con-
fuses the obscene of seeing with the genuine ecstasy of the delirious
Maenads. His beWILDerment is also a state of wildness. He wants to
empathize with the cult of intoxication but he is already lost in the
moment that he disguises himself and thus sheds his rationality to
take part in an initiation, in rites that are not intended for him – in
transition rites from culture to wildness and back. Survivor – is a
trek of this type, but without a ritual structure. And the spirit of the
game is the war of everyone against everyone. Let that be precisely
the standard formula of the state of nature. Back to Nature, return to
Hobbes.
The Language-less, Naked Life as a First State of Nature

The human being is a disjunctive synthesis, a mysterium coniunc-
tionis, an uncomfortable combination of culture and nature which has
been understood from antiquity onwards as a strange mingling of soul
and body, of humanity and bestiality, of linguistic capacity and object
nature. But: ‘what is the human being, when he is always the location
– and simultaneously the result – of continuous divisions and caesu-
ras?’ (Agamben). The human being assigns himself certain ‘typically
92
human’ characteristics, and then he realises repeatedly that he is still

‘something different’, that he does not coincide completely with this
self-description in terms of linguistic ability, rationality, morality . . .
Perhaps, as Giorgio Agamben also suggests, in The Open: Man and
Animal, it therefore matters not to think the coupling or mysterious
synthesis of these characteristics and their opposites but, rather, what
must be thought is their radical decoupling, i.e. their disjunction.
Ecce Homo, see the human being: a figure of thought or topos, whose
essence is an empty conjunction – ‘culture and nature’, ‘human and
inhuman’.
We are under the spell of society and (its) language, which per-
mits the appearance of both the socially and culturally formed (the
bios), and also of reasonableness and the rationally understandable, as
formless life (zoé). Society does not allow the appearance of this naked
life and covers it with clothes, words, manners, rituals, that hide it in
taboos and banish it to ‘the private’ (‘the private – or ‘privy’ is an old
word for toilet in Flemish). The formlessness of mere life is a language
effect: what cannot be symbolized appears within the symbolic order
as an opaque gruel. We could call this ‘Real’ (Lacan) or ‘Outside’ (Blan-
chot, Foucault . . .) the first state of nature, in which ‘nature’ is synony-
mous with the prelinguistic reality. It is the state of the baby that bab-
bles and enjoys life in a ‘polymorphous perverse’ way. It is a state we
make contact with in the moment of orgasm or ‘the small dead’, which
according to Bataille momentarily repairs ‘the continuity of existence’
and briefly suspends the distinction between human life and mere life.
This first state of nature is, of course, a limit concept, a real
fiction, a fictitious reality. Fictitious, because no ‘outside language’
exists: the human being can, at most, stammer, but cannot remove the
glasses of language to actually inspect the Real. Kant already knew
this: ‘The thing itself is an unknown’. We cannot look beyond the
limits of language or society, which does not mean that the Real never
pierces through the symbolic order temporarily. However, every genu-
ine contact with the Real, such as in a situation of sudden danger, is
traumatic and results in a shock, in an aphasia or speechlessness,
in an inability to speak or symbolise. But the first state of nature is
also real, and exactly within language: every language includes its
‘outside’ by giving words a referential force. The inexpressible exists
in language via the word ‘inexpressible’. ‘The body’, ‘the universe’ and
thus also ‘nature’ are all indications for what eternally falls outside
language, because language includes it as ‘outside’. This is the case
at least until the time that the entire universe will be changed into
a computer network (then it would no longer be an outside but an
inside of language and information, but that is of course unthinkable).
The state of nature is even contained in the most trans-humanistic
techno-utopia. Cyberpunk novels have evoked the clash between the
state of nature and a high-tech society.
One might think that naked or bare life, zoé, is mere biological
93
life. But the expression only makes sense by relating it to the oxy-
moron the human being constitutes, as Agamben also does in many
passages. The notion then refers to a ‘zone of non-differentiation in
which – like a missing link, which is always lacking, because it is
already there virtually – the link between the humane and animality,
between the human being and non-human being, must occur’. This
zone is represented in the conjunction ‘and’, which simultaneously
couples and decouples the opposing terms that the human being
embodies. In this disjunctive conjunction there appears ‘neither an
animal, nor a human life, but only a life isolated and excluded from
itself – only a naked life’. Within bare life a distinction can no longer
be made between human and inhuman, culture and nature. It is the
life of the camp resident, of the illegal migrant, and also, albeit less
extreme, that of the inhabitant of the informal settlements, the slums
of the big cities. The horror of this life makes one speechless. Bare life
is not expressible, and therefore it cannot be testified, which connects
it with our first state of nature of ‘language-lessness’.
Bare life is also at stake in biopolitics, which in modernity takes
on multiple forms and, in particular, not a purely negative character.
Naked life is included in the legal order through human rights, and
it is monitored and normalized by an unceasing medicalization (also,
literally, medics define the lower and upper limits of human life).
And the post-fordist (postindustrial, non-hierarchical, information-
based, flexible) economy appropriates it via the demand for unbridled
creativity as a production force. The latter may surprise but as an
empty hybrid, bare life is also pure potentiality, pure capacity that
does not realize or determine itself within a singular expression, a
specific series of actions or, more generally, a particular form of life.
It is precisely for this reason that one cannot distinguish within bare
life between culture and nature, humanity and bestiality, private and
public existence . . . Biopolitics claims this naked generic life of pure
potentiality, both through the extremely violent state of exception
of the camp, as well as in the form of an economically usable factor
of production. According to Agamben, it is the vanishing point of all
politics so far; in the opinion of Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt,
biopolitics primarily acquires form within the new production rela-
tions of post-fordism, in which work and life, productivity and generic
capacities (of speaking, co-operation, imagining, etcetera) form an
inextricable knot.
The State of Nature as Dystopia: Hobbes

Where there is a language, there is society: addressing another person
means effectively creating a social relationship. Linguistic communi-
cation forms the fuel of every society and this remains so in the digi-
tal network society. All communication, and so every living together, is
always also permeated by inequality of power and thus the possibility
of conflicts. This is ‘the political’: the co-existence of sociability and
94
power, which also as a rule generates a political association, and so

‘politics’. Politics – stated traditionally: the Sovereign (the King, the
People, etcetera) – orders the political and ensures general pacifica-
tion. This happens via generally binding decisions which usually have
the form of laws or legal regulations. Thus we come to what we could
call the second state of nature.
This second state of nature is the one in which people deal with
each other without political meta-regulation: neither Law nor Sov-
ereign exists. Everyone is a sovereign. Anarchy literally reigns (lack
of principles, lack of norms, lack of laws). Once again this is a limit

concept: the second state of nature is the real fiction of a life before or
after politically organized society. Fictitious, because no one can look
‘before’ the conjunction of politics and society, nor imagine a life that
is not only exceptionally but permanently situated outside ordered
society. Aristotle also calls man a zoön politikon and speaking animal
in one breath. Man knows of good and evil because he is a speaking
animal, and he engages in politics because of his knowledge of good
and evil. The Penguin edition of Politeia therefore provides the chapter
from book 1 in which this famous passage stands with the title ‘The
State Exists by Nature’. According to Aristotle, the polis arises from
natural association, and not from war. There is man and woman, and
master and slave: these two asymmetric couples together comprise the
household in the economy of the oikos. The various oikia form a clan
via family connections and soon a village, and not much later different
villages form an association, a polis. This association is, admittedly,
asymmetrical. The slaves are not citizens and the Athenians were cer-
tainly not gentle with Melos in Thucydides: when the Melians refused
to join the Athenian alliance, all of the adult men in the city were
killed and the women sold as slaves. Nonetheless, in view of what is
understood as the purposeful evolution of this tangle or this ‘associa-
tion’, the polis or city state is something that grows (from the womb
of the oikos) and therefore is natural according to Aristotle. But the
second, political state of nature is also real, because it is always pre-
sent within society as a possibility. This virtual reality is the subject of
countless film scenarios, but it is sufficient to think of the disruptive
effects of a big electricity breakdown, such as the New York blackout
in 1977 (with massive looting and arson), to grasp the reality aspect
of the second state of nature: a sudden implosion of all social struc-
tures, the elimination of the monopoly of violence, the breakdown of all
control and repression, an explosion of violence, robbery and arson, a
destructive orgy, total anarchy in its most negative form.
In modern political thinking the figure of the state of nature is
inextricably linked to the names of Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) and
Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778). The former dedicates a short
chapter to it – the thirteenth – in his Leviathan (1651) under the title
‘On the Natural Condition of Mankind, as concerning their Felicity,
and Misery’. Rousseau is definitively more extensive: the first part
95
of his Discourse on the Origin and Foundations of Inequality Among
Men (1755) deals with ‘the natural state’, and the second section
covers the transformation of this simultaneously idyllic and harsh
reality in an initially social and then political association. Rousseau
knew Hobbes’ work and refers to it regularly. But he fires his sharp-
est arrows without naming the intended target. Not surprisingly: the
contrast between Rousseau’s and Hobbes’ states of nature is vast. For
Hobbes the state of nature is a hell, whereas for Rousseau it embodies
an almost paradisiacal form of life despite all possible shortcomings in
the light of later developments in the history of humanity. Hobbes and
Rousseau paint completely different portraits of the state of nature
because they use this figure of thought to legitimize contrasting politi-
cal constructs. Hobbes emphasizes the need for an absolute Sovereign,
while Rousseau argues in the exact opposite direction. Rousseau
therefore became a hero to the French revolutionaries and, later, hip-
pies and fans of well-being; anyone who now reads Hobbes hears in
contrast a choir of conservative voices, varying from Carl Schmitt to
Leo Strauss to the neo-conservative think tanks that enjoyed such
clout within the Bush administration.
‘Nature hath made men so equall, in the faculties of body, and
mind’, Hobbes begins. In the state of nature everyone can therefore
cherish the same hope of realizing personal goals. This sounds attrac-
tive, but it doesn’t take into account the three natural passions: they
ensure a continuing reciprocal discord, a continuous threat of a fight
for life and death. Firstly there is competition, the rat race in the
pursuit of scarce but desired goods, which triggers violence to make
a person master of another person’s land, women or animals. Hobbes’
man in his natural state is reflexive; he knows that others will do to
him as he does to them. This stimulates a second natural passion,
that of mutual suspicion. Expressed in contemporary speech, the con-
sequence is that the mechanism of the ‘pre-emptive strike’ enters into
action, i.e. to act oneself as the first aggressor in order to put as many
potential aggressors out of action by way of prevention. Finally men
in their natural state also know the passion of pride. Any expression
of contempt, regardless of how small, is therefore repaid with violence.
Hobbes concludes that people, during the time that they do not live
under a common power that enforces respect from all, live in a state
that we call war, and actually a state of war by everyone against
everyone. In the original, famous text, the standard formula reads as
follows: ‘Hereby it is manifest, that during the time men live without
a Power to keep them all in awe, they are in that condition which is
called Warre; and such a warre, as is of every man against every man’.
The word ‘Warre’ – Hobbes even writes it after the famous for-
mula in capitals: ‘WARRE’ – addresses the imagination here, because
it refers (in Dutch at least) to warrigheid, the general beWILDerment
that belongs to the state of nature. And indeed, the Online Etymol-
ogy Dictionary cites the following series: wyrre, werre, from Frankish
96
werra, also used as werso or werran; in German, it refers to verwirren,

‘to confuse, perplex. The dictionary suggests the original sense was “to
bring into confusion” ’. Ergo: war is confusion, beWILDerment; a state
that perplexes, that ‘makes people wild’ and dumbfounds. This mad-
ness of running wild is visible in The Bacchae. This wild violence has
mythical roots, as in the murderous amazons and in the legendary
wild warriors, the Beserkers who run amok (leading to the expression
‘going beserk’) and who embody the violent intoxication of war. It has
echo’s in war movies like Rambo and its many imitations, and alas
alos in reality of soldiers loosing it and going beserk in random kill-

ings of civilians and cruelties.
Hobbes continues that the notorious war of everyone against
everyone is not a continual actual state of war, but primarily exists
in the form of a continuing and generalized threat of war, ‘a tract of
time, wherein the Will to contend by Battell is sufficiently known’.
Of course, this condition is not very beneficial for effective work and
mutual exchange or trade, and even worse for the development of the
sciences or arts. There is more: the state of nature knows ‘no Society’
(although Hobbes suggests that families do exist). But the worst of all,
according to Hobbes: there is a ‘continuall feare, and danger of violent
death; And the life of man, solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short’.
It is pointless to complain morally about ‘the ill condition, which
men by meer Nature is actually placed in’. After all there is no Sov-
ereign, and so also no law – and ‘where no Law, no Injustice’. Good
and evil, or Mine and Thine, therefore do not apply either: ‘Force, and
Fraud, are in warre the two Cardinall virtues’. Men in their natural
state only become moral beings after the simultaneous and common
transfer of their capacity to exercise power to one man or assembly,
who consequently changes into the Sovereign. This transfer of power
is thus not based also on moral considerations but, again, on certain
passions and reasonable insight (Hobbes’ Leviathan is largely based
on a mechanistic psychology). ‘The Passions that encline men to
Peace’, thus Hobbes writes, ‘are Feare of Death; Desire of such things
as are necessary to commodious living; and Hope by their Industry
to obtain them. And Reason suggesteth convenient Articles of Peace
[or natural laws], upon which men may be drawn to agreement’. The
state of nature may therefore be a hell, but the human being somehow
has by nature the necessary capacity to escape it. But why would he
then not immediately end ‘the Naturall Condition’? Why go through
hell if one has both the required passions and the reasonableness to
end this from the outset? Hobbes leaves this question unanswered,
and this silence brings down the entire construction immediately as a
fiction, as a political-philosophical fable. Or perhaps not?
Anyone who has doubts about the unsocial nature of people
must consider that anybody shows little trust in others: ‘when taking
a journey, he armes himselfe, and seeks to go well accompanied; when
going to sleep, he locks his dores; when even in his house he locks his
97
chests; and this when he knows there bee Lawes, and publike Officers,
armed, to revenge all injuries shall bee done him’ (it is clear that for
Hobbes individuals are male, only men are sovereign subjects, women
are in the nature state like cattle the property of men). Of course,
Hobbes also clearly realizes that mutual distrust in a politically paci-
fied society differs from ‘a warre of every man against every man’. He
therefore adds a few other arguments in favour of the existence of a
state of nature, which nonetheless do not make his plea immediately
more convincing. Firstly, generalized war is not necessarily a uni-
versal condition and origin of organized political society. ‘I believe it
was never generally so, over all the world; but there are many places
where they live so now’, writes Hobbes, who supports this last asser-
tion further with a reference to the life of ‘the savage people in many
places of America’. Apart from this call on both literal and figurative
‘Indian stories’, it is particularly strange to mention a state of nature
and simultaneously to admit that it may not be a universal condition
that necessarily precedes the establishment of a sovereign author-
ity or a state. Hobbes assumes this universality and necessity in the
rest of his argument in Leviathan. Finally Hobbes also expresses an
ex negativo argument: ‘Howsoever, it may be perceived what manner
of life there would be, where there no common Power to feare; by the
manner of life, which men that have formerly lived under a peacefull
government, use to degenerate into, in a civill Warre’. So civil war is
the ultimate, concrete instance of the philosophical, anthropological
fiction of the natural condition of man. But what does the disintegra-
tion of a politically organized society say about life in the state of
nature that precedes every other form of political order?
‘Uz-liuga’: War as the State of Exception

Is war, or civil war, as the (second) state of nature, the origin (and
end) of all history? Perhaps yes – the Bible just suggests the first:
the expulsion from Paradise is the beginning of history. Prior to this
Adam and Eve lived outside history, in an eternal ‘now’ as they did
not have any work and therefore no culture or economy, no technol-
ogy or politics. That was paradisiacal, but also unhistorical. History
begins with Adam’s sons, who only know of Paradise through hearsay.
One could say that Cain and Abel are the first real human beings. As
known, they clashed with each other: history begins with a fratricide.
Hobbes’ myth of origin is in line with the Cain and Abel story. He
summarizes his pessimistic picture of man in De Cive in the formula
that he took from Plautus: homo homini Lupus: the human being is
a wolf for other human being. And this is exactly why we need a sov-
ereign to tame us. Kant paraphrased this thought: ‘Man is an animal
that needs a master in his relationship with his fellow man’. Herder,
in line with Rousseau, answered aptly: ‘The one who needs a master
in his relationship with his fellow man is an animal’.
For Hobbes, the state of nature is a predatory state in general-
98
ized civil war. To break this spiral of violence, people conclude a pact
in which they jointly transfer their power to a single Sovereign who
will guarantee their security. Thus begins society in the strict sense:
the politically ordered community. Against Hobbes, Rousseau put
forward that this Hobbesian state of nature, as well as the need for
political order, will only arise with the generalization of private prop-
erty and the ensuing difference between rich and poor. We will return
to Rousseau soon; let us first follow in the tracks of Carl Schmitt to
understand the state of nature in Hobbes’ view more effectively.
According to the well-known opening sentence from Schmitt’s

Political Theology, the Sovereign is ‘he who decides about the state
of exception’. The latter is a paradox: the Sovereign stipulates by
law that the laws no longer apply, mostly because of a state of emer-
gency or of war. He suspends the law, which technically and legally
amounts to a division between the ‘force of law’ and the law. According
to Agamben (in State of Exception), the state of exception (or state of
emergency, martial law) ‘defines a “state of the law” in which, on the
one hand, the norm is in force but is no longer (it has no “force”) and,
on the other, acts that do not have the value of law acquire its “force”’.
In a word, the regular laws no longer apply in the state of excep-
tion, but the army and police can lawfully do deeds that are illegal in
normal times.
War and the state of exception imply each other. The expres-
sion, ‘martial law’, captures it well: the law of war, wartime law. Both
characterize the decision-making competency of a Sovereign, and both
usually go together: a war – or threatening danger of war, whether
this comes from outside or inside (insurrection, civil war) – legitimizes
the state of exception fully or partially. In the latter case there are
exceptional laws which, for example, give full powers to the executive
or fully or partially neutralize constitutionally anchored rights and
freedoms. The state of exception comes down to the temporary sus-
pension of constitutional rights, such as the right to freedom of speech
and freedom of association. It is frequently linked to a ban on gather-
ings, the establishment of a curfew, and usually also with a limitation
of privacy, such as the possibility of house searches without a search
warrant, the breach of the privacy of correspondence, and eavesdrop-
ping. Derrida summarized the state of exception as the suspension of
legal order to defend the legal order, or the suspension of democracy
in order to defend democracy. He called it in his book Rogues ‘the self-
immunity of democracy’, the immunity system that attacks itself.
Exception laws have been introduced in several Western democ-
racies from the 1970s, initially in the wake of so-called far left-wing
terrorism and, since 9/11, in response to so-called Islamist terror-
ism. In addition, governing by exceptional powers has been used
frequently by invoking a deteriorated economic situation. The recent
acceleration after 9/11 of – to phrase it gently – debatable measures,
in particular in the US and UK, fits in with a more general reconfigu-
99
ration of the neo-liberal state. The state no longer pursues a more just
redistribution of social wealth, but operates first and foremost as a
security state. We are thus back to Leviathan by Hobbes, who in chap-
ter 17 defines the Sovereign as
One Person, of whose Acts a great Multitude, by mutuall

Covenants one with another, have made themselves every
one the Author, to the end he may use the strength and
means of them all, as he shall think expedient, for their
Peace and Common Defence.
The contemporary security state operates like Hobbes’ Leviathan.

This state does not use the fiction of a state of nature or a ‘warre of
every man against every man’. It works with the Schmittian para-
digm of ‘friend’ and ‘enemy’, ‘we’ and ‘they’, usually in a moralized
form (like ‘the Axis of Evil, the Rogue state, or terrorism). In short: the
‘War on Terror’ is a planetary state of exception.
‘In the beginning was the Word’, says the Bible, which thus also
adopts a position immediately – more particularly at a cosmological
level – against what we previously called the first state of nature. In
the beginning there was the polis, because human beings spoke with
each other, says Aristotle; this assertion does not refute the Biblical
emphasis on the performativity of divine language, but completes it
for human society. How can we then think of war if it is not at the
origin of politics? Perhaps we can think of it as a sovereign and, there-
fore, political decision that disbands: social disintegration is not a
natural fact, nor even a social one, but is instead a political fact.
According to Van Dale’s Etymological Dictionary, the word
‘oorlog’ [‘war’] occurs in Dutch from around 1200. Middle Dutch has
the word ‘orloch’, and old High German the expression ‘uzliuga’. The
latter word is a composition of the prefix ‘uz’ from Germanic and the
Gothic ‘liuga’; ‘uz’ means as much as the current Dutch prefix ‘ont-’
[‘de-’], while ‘liuga’ means a marriage or, more general, link, pact,
bond, like in ‘liga’, which seems analogous to it. Put together this
therefore produces the basic meaning of ‘dissolution of an agreement’.
In addition, there is also the Old Saxon ‘orlag’, the Old High German
‘urlag’, and the Old English ‘orloeg’; these words are related to the
old High German word ‘irlegen’, which means deposit. Van Dale con-
cludes from this that it involves a ‘fate as set down for the human
being’ (sic). Of course, this introduces an ambiguity: the word ‘oorlog’
[‘war’] apparently has a twofold origin. On the one hand, war is a fate
set down – set aside – for human beings, while on the other hand it is
also ‘uz-liuga’ or dis-bandment. Etymologies may be always be some-
what unreliable, but they also indicate the way towards a deep under-
standing of the world that is stored in language as a huge archive.
The original meaning of the word ‘oorlog’ [‘war’] perhaps offers
the best definition of the phenomenon: it is a human fate, a fatal,
100
imposed dissolution of the normal order – of society and its political

order to the benefit of the state of exception. War, especially civil war,
is indeed the disbandment of normal social order and its political-
judicial anchoring, in a word: the dissolution of the nomos (the Norm,
the Law). In the normal condition, one cannot kill, only the Sovereign
has this right: the monopoly of violence, together with the taxation
monopoly, forms the basis of every political order of society. In contrast,
one must kill in war in the Sovereign’s name (anyone who refuses this
is a deserter and is usually killed). The Sovereign is also the dissolver:
he is the only one who can kill without murdering and generalizes this
right selectively through the declaration of war. In short, the Sover-
eign – the President, the National Assembly . . . – is the origin of war,
of the ‘fate as set down for human beings’. In the beginning there was
the bond, but it is threatened from inside by the authority that both
binds and disbands: in the figure of the Sovereign, order and disorder,
nomos and anomy come together. There is an oxymoron, a disjunctive
conjunction, again in this issue. The imposed, binding disbandment of
bonds is the core of beWILDerment, of the confusion specific to war:
‘the WARRE’.

The State of Nature as Utopia: Rousseau
Back to Nature, return to . . . Rousseau – and then the image of the
state of nature switches completely. Compared with Hobbes’ outline,
Rousseau’s account differs to such an extent that we can speak of a
paradigm shift:
Let us conclude that, wandering in the forests, without

industry, without speech, without shelter, without war, and
without ties, with no need of his fellow men, nor any desire
to harm them, perhaps without ever recognizing anyone
individually, savage man, self-sufficient and subject to few
passions, had only the sentiments and knowledge appropri-
ate to that state; that he felt only his true needs and looked
only at what he believed he had an interest in seeing;
and that his intelligence made no more progress than his
vanity.
It is immediately clear that in Rousseau’s view, savage man was a

primitive being. He had few desires and therefore also a barely devel-
oped thinking capacity. According to Rousseau, we only cultivate our
intellect when we have to think up means to provide for our needs or
to satisfy our passions. A vain creature – in Rousseau’s opinion, self-
love is the social evil par excellence – continually thinks up strategies
to impress others, whereas man in his nature in contrast was solitary
and found the little that he needed within hand’s reach. As a result,
he also did not look far ahead: the observed present was adequate.
He did not know property nor a house and was not burdened with a
101
rioting imagination. Of course, savage man was not unfamiliar with
physical desire, as distinct from love. It was simply satisfied at times,
after which everyone went on her or his lonely path again. Words
were superfluous, and the begot child was suckled by the mother after
birth and left behind once it was able to look for food itself.
In Rousseau’s hypothetical natural condition, the first and
second state of nature coincide completely. Man in his natural state
was completely asocial, he lived a solitary life and made no relation-
ships with the human beings that he encountered incidentally in
his nomadic wanderings. In brief, Rousseau takes the second state
of nature literally: it is not only pre- but ‘un-social’. The first human
beings were therefore also in what we previously called the first
state of nature. They lacked language; at most they uttered instinc-
tive cries. Their intellectual capacity also remained undeveloped as a
result, because forming any type of abstract ideas is impossible with-
out the corresponding words.
The savage deprived of language and social intercourse knew
neither god nor commandment and, as such, the state of nature was
free of morals. But what did natural man do when he accidentally
came across a fellow being who, for example, had just caught a large
fish? Attack and rob him or go around him in a large circle? ‘Above
all, let us not conclude with Hobbes that for want of any idea of good-
ness, man is naturally evil’, says Rousseau. The fact Hobbes’ state of
nature does not experience any peace is because the author of Levia-
than projects passions such as competition, mistrust and pride onto
it, whereas they only can develop through a social bond. Rousseau
agrees with Hobbes that the savage pursued self-preservation, but
notes that there is ‘another principle that Hobbes did not perceive’.
This is compassion and the associated aversion to seeing living beings
suffering or dying. This natural feeling replaced the action of laws,
customs or virtues in the state of nature. It ensured that everyone
acted according to the principle ‘do what is good for you with the least
possible harm to others’. The state of nature was thus not at all a
war of everyone against everyone. There were conflicts, for example
concerning food, but they remained limited and did not escalate into
a general bloodbath because the interplay between self preservation
and compassion restrained the first human beings from vengeance
and other useless violence. It sounds idyllic, almost paradisiacal, but
of course Rousseau makes exactly the same movement of thought for
which he blames Hobbes. Indeed, how could something like compas-
sion, even if it is an innate feeling, develop outside any social bond?
As primatologist Vanderwaal showed (in Philosophers and Primates),
empathy is natural in gorilla’s or chimpanzees (this is more against
Hobbes’ vision of the innate evilness of man, than against the good
savage of Rousseau). Rousseau’s portrait of natural compassion indi-
cates a sensibility and tact that only a gregarious animal can have.
Rousseau projects his social disposition into the state of nature, thus
102
repeating the error of all previous writers about the state of nature.
However, it is not an error but an impossibility. We have already
said it: we simply cannot image the original first and second state of
nature, except precisely in the form of a reading backwards from the
existing social relationships. In short, Rousseau’s tale about the origi-
nal condition of man is just as fictitious as Hobbes’, in a sense even
more so: a non-speaking, non-gregarious creature, cannot be man for
man is a speaking mammal by definition and our ancestors, the pri-
mates, teach us that we are also by nature gregarious. So, there are
some crucial flaws in his paleo-anthropology.

Rousseau puts up a wall between the state of nature and society.
The first is the anti-image of the second, which again illustrates its
projective nature. The state of nature is synonymous with a human
being minus all of the characteristics that make him a social being: no
social relationships, no language, no morals, and of course no organ-
ised economy or polity. The outcome is an antinomy: either the state of
nature or society, with the result that Rousseau must call on a deus ex
machina. This happens in the brilliant opening sentence of the second
part of his Discourse on Inequality: ‘The first man who, having fenced
off a plot of land, thought of saying ”This is mine”, and found people
simple enough to believe him was the real founder of civil society’. The
human being therefore did not jump from the state of nature to the
organised political space of the sovereign state bond (like in Hobbes).
According to Rousseau, the latter was preceded by ‘civil society’ or
the establishment of property relationships, which Hobbes already
presumes in his brief outline of the state of nature. Rousseau repeats
that Hobbes’ natural state is therefore not one: Hobbes’ savage is
a proud and rivaling owner, a constantly suspicious bourgeois that
seeks his own honour and advantage without fuss – in a word: a wild
capitalist. That could fit with paleo-anthropology: making war is
linked to the arrival of sedentary farmers; nomadic hunters could flee
during skirmishes, but the farmers had a fixed territory that had to
be defended (e.g. against nomads that did not accept the occupation
of hunting grounds – but we will leave the Deleuzian smooth space
of the nomads’ war-machine and the striated space of the sedentary
State for some other time).
For Rousseau property is the source of all evil. Private owner-
ship destroyed natural equality, created rich and poor, and thus gen-
erated a lasting conflict in the first human society. Of course, this did
not happen in one step. Firstly, there developed separate families; in
a second phase there was a continuing neighbourhood, so that the
families merged to become villages. People met, enjoyed singing and
dancing, and began to compare themselves with others. This led to
both the first moral consciousness and the vice par excellence: people
became vain and sought standing. Just as in Leviathan, the dialectic
of respect and contempt leads to revenge and cruelties. ‘This is pre-
cisely the stage most of the savage peoples known to us have reached’,
103
says Rousseau. Some other writers – Hobbes is not mentioned by
name – confuse it with the state of nature and conclude ‘that man
is naturally cruel and that authority has to be exercised over him to
make him gentler, although nothing is so gentle as man in his primi-
tive state’. Le Bon Sauvage in the picture. Actually, natural compas-
sion continued to play through in the second development phase of
humanity, which restrained self-love. This only changed with the
discovery of the characteristics of iron and the generalization of farm-
ing. There came an initial form of division of labour and barter, and
in particular property became normal. People worked their own land
and enjoyed the proceeds, and could call themselves the owner of per-
sonally made objects.
The natural differences in talents took on a new meaning with
the adoption of property:
the strongest did more work, the most skillful turned his to
better advantage, the most ingenious found ways to curtail
his work; the farmer needed more iron, or the blacksmith
more wheat; and, by working equally, one earned a great
deal, while the other had barely enough to live on. Thus,
natural inequality spreads imperceptibly along with con-
trived inequality.
Rousseau notes that all the rest can be guessed, and his succinct his-
tory of humanity does indeed take a predictable turn. The rich wanted
to be richer, not due to need but simply for self-satisfaction. They
started to fight against their neighbours, enslaved the poor and the
weak, and established slavery. Some of the dispossessed resisted and
became bandits who made life difficult for the rich. ‘Between the right
of the strongest and the right of the first occupant arose a perpetual
conflict which came to an end only in fights and murders. Nascent
society made way for the most horrible state of war’. The reference
is clear, even without mentioning a name. According to Rousseau,
Hobbes’ supposed state of nature is simply the outcome of the unre-
strained hunger for profit – which itself ensued from the interplay
between private property and self-elevation – and the destitution of
the poor. This characterization can also be found partially in Hobbes,
but he is silent (and this may be said to be revealing) about its prem-
ise: people are private owners. Anyone who reads Leviathan via the
Discourse on Inequality immediately discovers this blind spot in the
English philosopher’s primary psychological argument. Precisely
because Rousseau does have an eye for the disruptive role of property
and, in particular, its unequal distribution, he does not talk of a ‘war
of every man against every man’ either. In the civil society that had
entered war, the rich were against the poor and the few against the
many.
The apotheosis comes a few paragraphs after Rousseau has
104
described ‘the most horrible state of war’. According to him, this

disastrous situation mainly led the rich to think about it. They
were to realize that their usurpations were barely justified and
the state of permanent war was very bad for them – ‘although all
risked their lives, they alone risked their property’. To turn the tide,
the rich ‘finally conceived the most carefully thought out plan that
ever entered the human mind’. This plan was no more or less than
Hobbes’ idea of a social contract, in which everyone to save his live
would transfer his power to a Sovereign who would safeguard safety
. . . apart from property rights. Without naming him again by name,
Rousseau converts the author of Leviathan into a ventriloquist for the
rich owner:
to this end [the transfer of power], after having shown the

horror of a situation which armed them against each other,
which made their possessions as burdensome as their
needs, and in which no one found safety either in poverty
or in wealth, he easily invented plausible reasons for lead-
ing them to his goal. “Let us unite”, he said to them, “to
protect the weak from suppression, to restrain the ambi-
tious, and to ensure each person of the possession of what
belongs to him . . . In a word, instead of turning our forces
against ourselves, let us assemble them into a supreme
power which governs us according to wise laws, protects
and defends all members of the association, repulses
common enemies, and maintains us in an eternal accord.”
It reads like a perfect exercise in critique of ideology: Hobbes’ con-

struction presents the private interest of the landowning class as the
general interest.
Psychotic Games: Homo Homini Lupus Meets Homo Ludens

Why reread Hobbes or Rousseau? To understand the most banal con-
temporary life. A whole new world of games has arisen which present
the second state of nature as a liberating war, a synthesis of Rousseau
and Hobbes. There is the aforementioned craze for a certain type of
reality television that has a specific game structure: De Mol [‘The
Mole’], Big Brother, Survivor, Temptation Island, Peking Express, Par-
adise Hotel . . . This game structure also pops up in all types of films,
such as eXistenZ, The Game, or Das Experiment, Battle Royale and
recently El Metodo. The new game appears as a ‘genuine’ game on the
Internet – there are numerous examples. All of these games have the
same basic structure, despite the differences in format or medium.
Let’s take the film The Game, in which the protagonist, a rich
businessman, gets an experience game as a gift from his brother. He is
robbed of his work, his wealth and finally also his identity: he experi-
ences one long nightmare that finally pushes him to suicide. It later
105
appears that everything was staged by an agency that organizes expe-
rience games for rich people. Or we can take the countless computer
and videogames, the many virtual games in which people not only
adopt other identities but believe them completely for the duration of
the game. Are we not dealing here with a new paradigm that appears
in all types of contexts and configurations? To grasp its contours, we
have to compare the new games with the basic structure of the tradi-
tional game. This is made of a play area (the football pitch or tennis
court, the chess or goose board) and a set of rules that all players must
respect. Thus, the traditional game includes three elements. One: the
rules make the game, there is no game without rules. Two: the game
is a fair play, because there is no game without an opponent. Three:
there are clear limits thanks to the rules of play, lines that make a
distinction between inside and outside. There is no game without play-
ing field or court, no game without borders. Anyone who is outside
the lines is out of the game. The pitch or board, the ring or tatami, is
therefore the universe in which the game takes place. Outside prevails
‘reality’, which is so sharply demarcated compared to the fiction of the
game that we can speak of two worlds: the world of the game and the
world outside it.
The traditional game creates a regulated world in the world, a
fictional exceptional reality. Derived games, such as quizzes or televi-
sion shows with games components, also fit within this traditional
model. Even the theatre is a traditional game in principle: the acting
area is sharply demarcated from the rest of the world and the audito-
rium (the ‘fourth wall’). The actor’s private life is therefore clearly dis-
tinct from his role. You play theatre. The play is a mimesis, an artistic
emulation of real life, an imitation (or representation), a performance
of situations. The actor’s psychological background and life experience
evidently count for this commentary on life situations, but his profes-
sion – his acting – differs from his private life. Even more, the game
structure makes something like ‘being yourself’ or authenticity impos-
sible in the theatre. Everything that happens on a stage is acted and
therefore fictitious. This also remains the case when the play pretends
to be real. Realistic theatre is an acted representation of reality, a ‘re-
entry’ by the real world into the fictitious one. Someone only dies on
stage due to ‘the suspension of disbelief’.
The new games are the exact reverse of the old games. One: the
limits of the game are vague and elastic, the distinction between fic-
tion and reality is erased as far as possible. Take Big Brother: people
live and sleep in the play area, fall in love, cry, laugh, make love,
masturbate . . . There is no ‘outside’, only a closed universe guarded
by cameras. Anyone who still wants to leave the playground loses
in a way that cannot be compared with a traditional leaving of the
play ground in football or tennis. Two: the rules are deregulating.
There are few rules, what matters is endurance because the game is
an elimination race. Just like in the past in the Coliseum the public
106
frequently decides on the fate of the players in the ring. New rules
are introduced more than once to maintain the deregulating aspect of
the game in a new series. Thus the drop-outs got another chance on a
different island in a later series of Survivor: they could return to the
game by willy-nilly besieging the uninformed players and for exam-
ple stealing their food ration, merely with a view to their survival
chances. This brings us to three: there is no fair play. Everyone is the
other person’s opponent, even if these others are team-mates. The
rules of the game imply that every player must constantly distrust
and betray every other player, which frequently leads to dramatic

scenes. It results in a paradoxical communality: every friend is a
potential enemy, and every form of intimacy is a potential weapon, in
your own hands or those of others. One only co-operates from the con-
viction that one will benefit oneself.
The blurring of ‘inside’ and ‘outside’, private and public, oppo-
nent and team-mate, game and seriousness, assignment and betrayal,
false play and fair play, fiction and reality, make these games psy-
chotic in the literal sense. Both psychopathology and everyday lan-
guage talk about hallucination when the distinction between dream
and reality disappears. Hallucination is the symptom par excellence
of psychosis: all hallucinations, including those under the influence
of heroin and other drugs, are structured psychotically. According to
Freud, psychosis is based on the elimination of the regulating func-
tion of the I or Ego. The task of the Ego involves suppressing the lust
principle, which structures the Unconscious or Id, to the benefit of
the reality principle. This is called repression: the Ego suppresses
the unconscious libidinal drifts to conform to the requirements of
reality. In neurosis, which as it were is the contrary of psychosis, the
repressed returns as a tic, as nervousness, as lapsus, as a mistake or
‘poor performance’ (‘Fehlleistung’), as compulsive action. The neurotic
symptoms are a compromise between repression and the return of the
repressed, whereas the repression is eliminated in psychosis because
the umpire, the referee (the I) is weak or absent. The consequence is
a combination of dreaming and reality that usually degenerates into
a nightmare: the person finds itself (or rather loses itself) in a kind of
inescapable film without an exit, a hallucination.
We find this Freudian structure, translated into a game situ-
ation and therefore in a directed form, in the new games. It is not
coincidental that they do not have an umpire in the traditional sense.
The intervention of programmers or the public, for example, precisely
push for more deregulation, more hallucinating situations. Thus, due
to the structure of the game itself, the players get ensnared in a shim-
mering zone between reality and fiction, between private and public,
between inside and outside, between games and seriousness. We
therefore speak of psychotic games. They make people ‘wild’; through
their structure, they force regression to states in which the reality
principle (‘Ego’) and the normal rules of living together (interiorised
107
by the ‘Super-Ego’ or conscience) no longer apply. This structure is
similar to the state of nature according to Hobbes: ‘save who can’,
even at the expense of others. At the same time, the created state of
exception is, in line with Rousseau’s moral of authenticity, presented
as a liberation: ‘this is real’, ‘a slice of life’ – naked life. For both the
spectator and the participant, the experience of the game as a form
of authenticity is psychotic. The psychosis is hyper-real for the par-
ticipant and for the spectator a fantasy that he enjoys via empathy
or identification with the temporary winner in the fight of everyone
against everyone.
Variations on a Theme: Ritual, Liminality, Heterotopia

Starting from the idea that every culture needs ‘safety valve customs’,
we can perhaps situate psychotic games within a mediation space (the
stadium, the theatre, the nudist beach, the uninhabited island), and
therefore on the threshold between nature and culture. As a survival
game, the temporary ‘stepping out of culture’ is just as old as culture
itself. Every access to the communality of the polis is, in anthropologi-
cal perspective, mediated by a transitional phase in which the step
from childhood to adulthood is taken. For example, male children,
as boys or ephebes, were sent out on survival excursions in ancient
Greece. They had to become wild, hunt wild animals, look for food, and
learn to handle weapons, before they became adults (i.e. citizens in
peacetime and soldiers in wartime). We still have youth movements:
‘going out camping’ is a reenactment of this excursion from civiliza-
tion where children and young people let themselves ‘go’ in survival
games (in the origin of the youth movements this was also explicitly
based on military training). Perhaps the psychotic games are there-
fore a new form, overblown by mass media, of the eternal search for
an equilibrium between nature and culture, between wildness and
civilization, between the state of nature and law, between the real and
the symbolic.
The structure of the psychotic game differs however from that of
the traditional transition rites. According to Arnold van Gennep, every
rite of passage contains an organized moment of wildness, of depar-
ture from society, of a temporary return to the state of nature. The
traditional transition rite therefore has three distinct phases: a stable,
fixed state 1, an unstable (one could say fluid or gaseous) interim
state, and finally a new aggregation state 2 that is fixed and stable.
In our example: a stable state of being a child, an intermediate and
unstable state of anarchy or ‘betwixt and between’ (with tests of force
in which one must prove himself, an initiation, a baptism of water
or fire, a learning process), and the ratification of the new status of
adulthood. Victor Turner, who thought further about van Gennep’s
triad, calls the middle phase liminal. Anyone who is in this phase is
on a threshold or limit (literally: ‘limen’) between two social positions,
such as that of child and adult. The liminal phase is characterized
108
by putting popular conventions and rules between parentheses. It

is therefore according to Turner an anti-structure, a ritually coded
series of actions and situations that indicate in the direction of the
state of nature as the opposite of regulated, structured life. Several
unstable states in society are based on the blurring between structure
and anti-structure, norm and anomie: youthful transitional rituals,
sexual twilight zones, the honeymoon, dance parties, rock festivals . . .
and psychotic games. However, the new games are exactly psychotic
because they let the difference between structure and anti-structure
implode completely. There are no rules, unless the rule that the rules
can continually be adapted; there are no expectations, apart from the
expectation that the other players or the public may vote away at
any time one’s own abilities. In psychotic games the anti-structure no
longer has a ritual framework: there is only a lack of rules.
In modernity the liminal phase is, according to Turner, weak-
ened to ‘liminoid’ moments in the sphere of leisure during which the
social structure is only partially, not radically interrupted. A pop con-
cert is admittedly wild, but it is not a genuine transition rite marking
an anthropological shift, for example from childhood to adulthood;
it rather is the eternal delaying of it that people play on a Saturday
evening. It might involve a Dionysian celebration but most of the
times also ultimately it is and remains a banal drink and dancing
party. The pop concert is a game with anti-structure, it plays with the
possibility of a total reversal without realizing it (and if it does take
place, there is horror at the suddenly erupting real violence). How-
ever, both liminal and liminoid moments are temporary by definition:
they are bulges in normal time. In addition, every society also has
locations in which the anti-structural is autonomized into a perma-
nent, organized space, a socially recognized area where the liminal/
liminoid can take place. Such a world in the world is the scene of the
theatre, the sauna, the brothel, the holiday village . . . Foucault calls
this type of space, these ‘other spaces’, heterotopias.
Some heterotopias are liminal spaces between wildness and cul-
ture. Take the garden. The heterotopia of the eastern garden is a min-
iature of the world, with the four sections and a pool in the middle,
a basin as the navel of the world, thus Foucault says (in the text ‘Of
Other Spaces’). Within the order of the garden, the state of nature can
only be represented as an allusion to the disorder of wild nature that
precedes gardening, and which is elsewhere or ‘outside’. If Foucault is
correct that a carpet is a miniature of a garden, it could be said that
the state of nature is always swept under the carpet (and must be
swept under the carpet). Like language, the garden – and therefore
it is a heterotopia – not only excludes but particularly also includes
its ‘outside’. The garden is a catharsis, a beneficial, be it always also
artificial synthesis between nature and culture: an included exclu-
sion. The same can be said about the nudist camp or the Djerba huts
that Foucault speaks about ironically. For a few paltry weeks per
109
year, one can return there to primitive nakedness, to the supposed
origin of human history. This heterotopia therefore provides, Foucault
states ironically, some sort of ‘grand, immediate knowledge’: by a mere
knowledge of the body that is experienced as real and authentic, one
can trace back to the origins of mankind.
The nudist camp holds a special place in Foucault’s ‘heteroto-
pology’. It is namely a synthesis between two types of heterotopias
which are both marked by time (what he calls heterochronia): ‘the
heterotopias of eternity’, like the museum and the library, and the
temporary, chronic heterotopia of the fair, the festival, the annual
market, ‘the heterotopias of the feast’. In the nudist camp (and by
extension the holiday village), these heterotopias of the eternal feast,
these solidified fairs, it could be suspected that Foucault is drawing
the outline, or sensing the advent, of what has since become the most
paradigmatic heterotopia of our culture: the theme park. Let us listen
to Foucault himself:
And, just recently, a new chronic heterotopia has been

invented, the vacation village, those Polynesian villages
which offer three short weeks of a primitive and eternal
nudity to city dwellers. And you can see, moreover, that the
two forms of heterotopia, the heterotopia of the festival and
that of an eternity of accumulating time are combined: the
straw huts of Djerba are in one sense akin to the librar-
ies and the museums, for, by rediscovering Polynesian life
one abolishes time, but time is also regained, the whole of
humanity goes back to its source as if in a kind of grand
immediate knowledge.
The desire of our time is a desire for this form of ‘immediate knowl-
edge’. This is why our consumption economy changed into an experi-
ence economy. ‘Sign-values’ no longer suffice, the consumer wants soft
experiences and hard kicks. This ‘immediate knowledge’ is what the
experience economy conjures up and reality games mediatize. Like
the nudist camp, Big Brother or Survivor is an acted state of nature
– but with a public. However, they are also real games, formats which
transform the anti-structure into a structure. They not only simulate
the war of everyone against everyone but also satisfy the obscene
hunger for authenticity in the vanishing point of all reality television:
the obligatory tears of the participants. Not sex ‘in real time’ but tears
are the genuine supplement of the various forms of reality television,
both of reality games and docu-soaps (like ‘The Children’s Cancer
Clinic’ and other programs on ‘Life as it is’).
The ‘real’ appears in the tears of the people in reality TV, they
are the reality indicator of the authenticity of pain, joy or distress and
therefore are comparable with ejaculation in hard core pornography
(because ejaculation, unlike a female orgasm, cannot be acted and is
110
therefore ‘authentic’). Bodily fluids always count as absolutely true,

as ‘immediate knowledge’, regardless of the degree of mediation or
mediatization. The public display of the weeping face is already a
loss of face in itself, a transgression of a moral and cultural diffidence
regarding human vulnerability, which comprises the core of his inti-
macy. All reality television is the turning inside out of intimacy, its
perverse inversion into anonymity. In terms of Debord’s Society of the
Spectacle, reality TV is the mediatized, ‘spectacular’ form of ‘concrete
life’. It is false immediacy par excellence: after the disappearing of
immediately experienced life in and behind the spectacle, it returns as
a direct confrontation with the real (e.g. bodily fluids). The television
viewer is Pentheus, who spies on wildness and fragility from a safe
seat; who wishes to get a glimpse of exciting, irrational abnormality
from the banal, rational normality; who from a safe distance enjoys
the breached taboo, the secret, the intimate: the obscenity of the real,
the biological that mesmerizes us.
The contrary of heterotopia, the playground of mediation, is the
camp. The film Das Experiment, a dramatization of an actual experi-
ment in which a group of test persons is divided into guards and
prisoners, shows how fast things can degenerate in camp-like situa-
tions, with the obligatory cruelties and even fatal victims. Big Brother
or Survivor do not create any camps in the Agambian sense, but do
effectively stage an anomic situation of exception. These are survival
games at the limit between the state of nature and the state of excep-
tion. Analogous with the exposure of naked life in the camp, psychotic
games target the indivisibility of culture and nature, humanity and
inhumanity, private and public. They produce naked life as a mass
spectacle and attraction: the tears in a reality television program are
both moral and emotional, both psychological and biological. With
reality television, the mass media definitively became a component
of the modern biopolitical machine. Comparable to pornography, but
simultaneously quite different, reality television tries to show naked
life as such, to separate it from both the mere biological substratum
of the human body and the social and cultural forms with which it is
fused (and which cover and protect it). Psychotic games, with reality
television games as public paradigm, transform contemporary mass
media into a bio-political dispositive that constantly tries to stage the
state of exception of naked life, thus reproducing the fascination for it.
El metodo is interesting in this respect. It is a film in which
applicants for executive functions are tested by being put in a typi-
cal psychotic game situation: a war of everyone against everyone is
simulated in which only the strongest survive. It shows how much the
neo-liberal economy is fascinated by the state of nature. The entre-
preneurial individual is a monadic sovereign in the war of everyone
against everyone which is called competition.
Transgression as Cellular State of Nature
111
Tears speak, but without language. It is the hallmark of every ‘imme-
diate knowledge’. This ‘knowledge’ is literally dumb, mere bodily
knowledge without mediation – in brief: the first state of nature.
Speechless (language-less) dumbness strikes in transgression even
more than in heterotopia or the psychotic game. According to Bataille,
indisputably the thinker par excellence on transgression, the state
of nature is ‘the continuity of being’. Eroticism is the desire for this
‘continuity of being’. According to Bataille life wants to spill itself, to
go beyond itself, already at the simple level of the cell, it is tending
towards a fusion with what it is not. Precisely therefore, ‘the continu-
ity of being’ is in the last instance only realized with death, as Freud
already stated in Beyond the Pleasure Principle. Freud says that the
organic is more tuned to resisting stimuli than to intake of stimuli
or excitement and finally tends towards the absolute rest of the inor-
ganic, of dead matter. In human culture, Bataille’s ‘continuity of being’
is produced in the sacrifice, in cutting open the sacrificial animal, in
nakedness, in the violence of penetration, in sexuality as transgres-
sion. However, transgression is not only a longing for the dumb natu-
ral (state). In its most extreme and for Bataille also its purest form,
Eros is Thanatos.
In Bataille’s view, the basic taboo of the human condition is and
remains nakedness. Transgression is an exposure of naked life, a fas-
cination for bodily orifices, the private parts: the orgasm is an apothe-
osis within love, without it, outside of it, it is ‘objectified’ or subjected
to – with a neo-marxist keyword – ‘reification’: a naked body in a state
of excitement is obscene or pornographic. The transgression is ‘imme-
diate knowledge’ of the taboo on naked life. In The Bacchae, the deliri-
ous behaviour of the women is ritually coded and protected by the
godhead: it takes place in a holy space (the slope as heterotopia). The
real violator of limits is Pentheus, who as a genuine voyeur enters
this forbidden area and as a result breaks the game, just like the
football supporter who enters the field. But the spoilsport also experi-
ences a very particular type of enjoyment – a mixture of a feeling of
power (breaking the rule by overstepping the limit) and of the specific
excitement of fear (the adrenaline rush). In the end, his biggest joy
may be proving that the crossing over of the chalk lines is nothing
and the sacrosanct space of the game a fiction.
The love game too does not tolerate supporters that enter the
field. Feeling awkward is therefore the hallmark of sexual transgres-
sion. In the case of someone who experiences such a transgression or
is the witness to it, thus when one is the object of the transgression,
this can range from slight discomfort to open shame or barely con-
cealed disgust. The limit breaking subject, the violator of the taboo or
prohibition, demonstrates an unmistakable nervousness, a fear that
the other will become angry, break off, go away, refuse or even raise
alarm, will use responding violence or tie the violator to the pillory. It
is therefore no coincidence that the exhibitionistic-voyeuristic disposi-
112
tive is usually mediated by the camera. Even pornography thus still

shows a sensitivity for the difference between ‘inside’ and ‘outside’. It
produces a paradox: mediated ‘immediate knowledge’. The acting out
of the phantasm without mediation in reality could be called the por-
nographic situation. It is the genuine sexual transgression, that of the
exhibitionist who opens his proverbial raincoat in the park. His pleas-
ure is the tension of crossing the barrier; his sin is the asymmetry
that he creates relative to his object: he virtually changes the inno-
cent human eye into a complicit camera. The other must undergo his
scenario and becomes a victim, at least of reification. In exhibitionism,

the other is reduced to a mirror.
Living out transgressive scenarios in fantasy or reality can
work as a catharsis, as a healing type of safety valve custom: it can
give one’s ordinary erotic life new impulses, a new breath. That was
also the hope of the sexual revolution of the 1960s. Its participants
knew that transgression can only be called genuinely libertine and
heterotopian when it is symmetrical and shared (the commune, the
orgiastic feast). Therefore, something else is always also at stake in
every transgression: the improbable possibility of crossing the limit
as a real liberation, sin as redemption, transgression of the law as the
completion of the law (these motives are already present in Bataille,
in radical messianism, like the seventeenth-century sabatianism, in
freudo-marxism, and, mediated through the oeuvre of Benjamin, in
Agamben’s writings). Perhaps the pornographic situation therefore
points to a more general utopia in which transgression no longer
has real or symbolic violence but literally is a lucky game, a happy
constellation. What the Situationists called a ‘constructed situation’
was the dream image of such lucky, symmetrical libidinal situations.
They hark back to the polymorphous-perverse game of the child. The
‘constructed situation’ is ‘liminoid space/time’, but also ‘time out’, the
interruption of everyday existence.
It is the indelible phantasm of an anonymous intimacy – of
course, this cannot be other than in the figure of the oxymoron, the
quasi mystic coincidentia oppositorum. But this delusion of desire is
a vicious circle. This circle has been expressed in an inimitable way in
the famous, studious palindrome of the prophet of situationism, Guy
Debord: ‘In girum imus nocte et consumimur igni’. We go around in
a circle at night and are consumed by fire. And the fact that you can
also read it backwards in Latin makes that the circle closes itself each
time in a dizzying way. The ‘situation construite’ as a happy transgres-
sion is an aporia.
Situationism was not alone. The core question of Freudo-Marx-
ism, from Reich to the early Lyotard, from surrealism to a certain
‘Deleuzianism’, reads as follows: is a liberating objectification of sexu-
ality imaginable? Seen in this light, the transgressive desire for ‘the
continuity of being’ is included in a Messianic movement. Becoming
an object, making an object is then a cabbalistic alchemy. Israel asked:
113
‘when shall Thou release us?’ And the Almighty answered: ‘I will only
release you when you have sunk to the lowest stile’.
But becoming an object, making an object: this is simply the
joyous mimesis of the playing child who identifies itself with things.
Transgression is therefore only tolerable if it takes place in a con-
trolled, symmetrical play situation, thus in a heterotopia, such as a
homosexual sauna or SM club.
Transgression is synonymous with a rediscovered state of
nature both in the sexual revolution and in the tradition of Freudo-
Marxism. According to Foucault, who is completely in line with
Bataille who localizes the essence of sexuality in violent capture, this
dream of a ‘Rousseau-istic’ happy sexuality, this return to nature, to
good savagery is mere appearance. Foucault is very clear in the text
‘A Preface to Transgression’, his homage to Bataille. Although modern
sexuality claims a new naturalness and appears to have (re)found a
‘truth of nature’, it is far from natural. The apparent naturalness of
modern sexuality does not involve any return to the state of nature,
in any case no peaceful return: ‘Thus, it is not through sexuality that
we communicate with the orderly and pleasingly profane world of
animals’.
What can be concluded from this? In pornography appears the
dumbfoundedness of nature, the first state of nature. In the exposure
of the body and the depiction of the excited private parts or orgasm,
the unnatural naturalness, the taboo of the human being breaks
through: the public secret that we do not have any secret. This rei-
fication (or objectification) tallies with perplexity. In his ‘preface to
transgression’, Foucault sees the ‘languagelessness’ of the objectifica-
tion in transgression at work in modern writing: as a reification of
language. The words lose their interior nature and become an outside,
a strangeness. Language crumbles. The words become things (epito-
mized in the work of Beckett). See the polished writing of Blanchot or
Bataille, hear the stammering in Big Brother. The dissolution of lan-
guage, the beWILDerment of words.
The Third State of Nature

The return to Hobbes and Rousseau, the sources par excellence of
modern political-philosophical thinking, has thought us that the state
of nature as real fiction is not an unequivocal but an ambivalent
theme. There is the bad savage, and there is the good savage: there
is the state of nature as a hell of cruelty (as horror: as a means to
frighten, as dissuasive concept) and as a paradise of peacefulness (as
heaven: as an attractor). Both the stories of explorers and the reports
by the first generations of anthropological field workers swing between
both possibilities. Lévi-Strauss promoted Rousseau to the founding
father of academic anthropology, but his canonizing gesture – which
Margaret Mead had previously popularized with her selective sto-
ries about the experience of sexuality on the Samoa islands – did not
114
remain unchallenged. The balance is now leaning in the opposite direc-

tion: ‘Hobbes was right, not Rousseau’. The current popularity of Dar-
winist evolutionary psychology among social scientists is a symptom of
this, but the rapid success of the now hegemonic neo-liberal worldview
is socially more important. The three passions that Hobbes assigned
to man in his natural state – competition, mutual mistrust and
pride– are actually the alpha and omega of planetary capitalism and
its ideology (and also of the psychotic games). But at the same time
Rousseau remains alive and well as the herald of the widespread belief
that man is essentially good by nature. This belief is not avowed in the
field of work and the economy but in the one of relaxation and leisure.
It is paralleled by a marked split in the field of governmental action
between the premises of a hard economic discourse and a soft welfare
discourse. Generalized war and generalized compassion, Hobbes and
Rousseau: postmodernity is an oxymoron, a disjunctive conjunction
without the possibility of reconciliation. We talk not one but two politi-
cal languages. The result is known under the label of political correct-
ness and the excluded third, of course, is called Karl Marx (‘commu-
nism’). An intellectual juncture that does not consider the possibility of
a society which orders itself without a Sovereign will continually swing
between Hobbes and Rousseau: it is under the spell of a double state of
nature. From this spell springs the fascination with naked life as pure
potentiality, its omnipresence without the positive political translation
in terms of a by definition socially shared happy life.
The fascination with the state of nature is a symptom of our
society. It reflects neo-liberalism as the supposed state of nature of
competition, and perhaps also the ‘War on Terror’ as a geopolitical
state of exception, as martial law imposed by the US on the planet.
But it also testifies to a premonition of a coming state of emergency
– the permanent disaster of global warming. The ‘War on Terror’, as a
voluntary state of exception, is just one part of the geopolitical situa-
Rudi Laermans & Lieven De Cauter
tion, contrasting with the disintegration of the state (e.g. in Africa) and
the disintegration of the city (in the mega-cities of the South). ‘State
of nature’ is also the entire informal economy in the illegal cities, the
slums. Finally the state of nature is also the inhospitableness of the
outside, of the excluded in the dual society and capsular civilization.
Our world is under the spell of states of emergency. The soporific nor-
mality of the welfare state appears to belong to the past. The end of
the Cold War proves to be the end of our peaceful view of history. But
we have not yet awoken from the dream sleep of capitalism, on the
contrary.
Modernity or, in the famous words of Adorno & Horkheimer, ‘the
dialectic of Enlightenment’, is synonymous with a constantly increas-
ing control over nature, with the trend towards the incorporation
and socializing of everything that initially escaped direct political,
economic or social control. The modern inclusion project was multi-
faceted, it comprised both the colonization of distant regions and the
115
disciplining of living labor, both the civilizing of the exotic Other (‘the
savage’) and the incorporation of the native, innate Other (‘the uncon-
scious’, instinctive lust) into culture. The dialectic of Enlightenment
was unthinkable without modern science and the technology based
on it. Max Weber already knew this: the technical-scientific system is
the basis for modern goal rationality, i.e. for forecasting and calcula-
tion, for a systematic administration and planned production. Adorno
& Horkheimer start from this insight but remain sufficiently Marxist
to decry the merger of calculating control and capitalism in moder-
nity. On the bewitched junction of both is to be found Commodity: it
is ‘goal rational’ because it is efficiently produced and ‘goal rationally’
distributed in view of the widest possible sales. More goal rationality
(Weber) therefore also means more commodification (Marx): capital-
ism colonizes both the former zones of the independent production
of use-values (eating, making clothes, leisure . . .) and the previously
free practices of thinking, imagining, fantasizing, enjoyment, etcetera.
In this process of capitalistic ‘progress’, everything that traditionally
counted as nature is either mercilessly crushed or transformed into
a rationally produced artefact with a price tag. The commons (both
the natural common of nature and the artificial common of language,
communication and knowledge) are ruthlessly privatized. Our era is
synonymous with this destruction and the experience economy, the
wrecking of nature and ‘the commodification of everything’ (Waller-
stein): the nature reserve, for which an entrance ticket has to be
bought, replaces nature.
With the current planetary, transcendental techno-capitalism
the project of omnipresent natural management reaches its climax.
‘Postmodernism is what you get when the process of modernization is
complete and nature is gone for good’, says Jameson. Indeed, nature
appears to be further away than ever in postmodernity. Artificiality
reigns, from consumption kitsch to ‘Lifestyle’ has ousted the ‘form of
life’, the dumb visual language of merchandise, the sign-language sub-
merged in tradition. This may partly explain the return of the second
state of nature as a game scenario, as the calculated and therefore
expectable outcome of a series of artificial rules and situations. The
impression almost everything can happen in ‘Temptation Island’ hides
a sophisticated directing: naked life is planned and administered, the
real fiction of a state of nature becomes hyper-real.
But is nature gone once and for all? In the very same moment
that there is no further natural ‘outside’ because everything and
everyone appears to be included in social bonds (the global market,
Empire . . . ), the natural returns in the form of a threatening ecologi-
cal disaster. The world is colonized, privatized, possessed, processed
and marketed, but the unforeseen effects of the modern project are
changing the atmospheric environment of the globe into a greenhouse.
The emerging reality of a coming state of nature therefore coincides
today with a fighting multitude gasping for air or competing for
116
drinking water sources: the Mad Max phase of globalization. In the

coming state of nature, it is not the safety of assets but mere survival,
not just a relationship with others mediated via property but mainly
also access to scarce natural sources, which prompt a generalized civil
war. This is the third state of nature, and it is literally coming – it is in
the process of becoming reality. The coming bare life is not biopolitical
but simply biological, generic. Just as in the camp, living and surviv-
ing cannot be distinguished, yet it is no longer about a biopolitical
product but involves an ecologically compelled survival.
The ‘premonition’ of all of this and the beWILDerment that it
brings with it, is played out in the mediatized fascination with the
state of nature of psychotic games and reality television. It is the
beWILDerment of Pentheus: an exhibitionistic-voyeuristic arrange-
ment in which bare life is put on show and the state of nature
becomes an attraction. It is our beWILDerment, the beWILDerment
of today. The ‘warre of every man against every man’ is the mark of
Cain on the forehead of the twenty-first century: ‘post-history’ as
a return to prehistory. It is Benjamin’s thought of doom: when the
state of exception becomes the rule, it may be already too late to see
that bringing closer the ‘real state of exception’ is the political task of
today. It is Adorno’s nightmare and Beckett’s prophecy: posthistory
as a relapse into natural history. This is why the fascination with
the state of nature is deeply anchored in the libidinal economy of our
time. We are mesmerised by the double face of postmodernism as
post-history, history past the dialectic of Enlightenment, past the end
of history, the condition of the last human being (from Nietzsche via
Kojève to Fukuyama): on the one hand the transcendental, all absorb-
ing capitalism, on the other the permanent catastrophe (ecological
disaster as a return to the state of nature, and the ‘War on Terror’ as
a state of exception). Fathoming the connection between posthistory
as the completed society of spectacle on the one hand and on the other
posthistory as a combination of state of emergency and relapse into
the state of nature, is the task of theory and art today.
118
Towards a
Phenomenology
of Civil War:
Entropic Empire
Hobbes in Beirut
[2009]
Reflect #09
119
‘Beirut is a city that destroys itself.
Never has it found its stability, its balance.
It is a city without compass . . .
This city will explode. It is at war, it is at war!’
(Marie-Claude Souaid)
Abstract
Based on interviews with Beirut intellectuals and architects, this
essay endeavours to trace the contours for a phenomenology or
anthropology of civil war.1 Thomas Hobbes serves as a guide, with his
idea of civil war representing a relapse into the ‘state of nature’; as
absence of sovereignty resulting in a ‘war of everybody against eve-
rybody’. The effects of ever-latent civil war in Beirut are far-reaching:
the fragmentation of urban space and the disappearance of public
space, the loss of memory and the fragmentation of time, even the
reification of language. In the collective imagination and in the arts,
Beirut appears as a ghost town, a spectral city with a spectral civil-
ity. What we discover is a city, its inhabitants, its social behaviour,
but also its art and literature, in the grip of post-traumatic stress
syndrome. From all this, we take home two things: first, the trau-
matic modernity of Beirut mirrors the traumatic artistic expressions
of modernism – the shock of modernity is also always a modernity of
shock; and second: any city can (at least in principle) relapse into a
similar state of nature – Beirut can become a paradigm of latent uni-
versal civil war.
Introduction: On Freedom in Beirut

In a colloquium held in Beirut entitled ‘Beirut, Pioneer of Freedoms
in the Orient’ (5-7 November 2009), sociologist Ahmed Beydoun, one
of Lebanon’s most respected intellectuals, gave a lecture defending
the position that there was no plurality of freedoms in Beirut, but
only one: that the freedom to create and the freedom to kill are one
and the same thing. Hence there is no call for boasting about free-
dom to create and express oneself, a freedom the city is said to be the
pioneer of in the Orient (albeit less so today), since it is the same as
the freedom to kill. In an interview he gave us, Beydoun said that in
Lebanon the rule of law did not exist, not because there are no laws,
but because there is an absence of sovereignty. What prevails there
is anomie in the literal sense: a-nomos, absence of legality. Socio-
logical freedom exists in an unstable equilibrium among religious
denominations and political groups. But since there is no hegemon,
no sovereign entity, permission to apply the law may be withdrawn
at any moment. When crisis starts, when factionalism rears its head,
freedoms are annihilated and intellectuals and politicians are killed.
120
These murders are an extreme form of censorship: censorship mani-

fests itself as murder rather than through more conventional forms.
Beydoun talked about a city, a nation, torn apart not just by the past
civil war but also by the ongoing latent civil war. On this point he was
emphatic: ‘This war can break out at any moment’. Moreover, recent
history proves this: after the ‘great civil war’ (1975-90), came the ‘little
Towards a Phenomenology of Civil War:
civil war’, an outburst of violence in May 2008. In ‘Of the naturall con-
dition of mankind, as concerning their felicity, and misery’, the best-
known chapter of Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan, this famous definition
appears: ‘Hereby it is manifest, that during the time men live without
a common Power to keep them all in awe, they are in that condition
which is called Warre; and such a warre, as is of every man, against
every man’. It is the absence of sovereignty that produces the state
of nature as a condition of war, the war of all against all. However,
Hobbes in Beirut
there is no chapter on civil war as such in Leviathan. For Hobbes, civil

war was the natural condition of man, an exemplification of this pri-
mordial condition. For him this is not exactly a philosophical fiction:
although he admits that the state of nature as the war of all against
all has never been generalized everywhere in the world, he does give
the example of civil war and adds that ‘there are many places, where
they live so now’. Beirut is one such place. It is perhaps the best-
known among those cities where this relapse into the state of nature
has occurred. The intellectuals, artists and architects of Beirut we met
on our field trip for a cultural project on the city (held in Brussels)
provided eloquent testimony to this. Listening to what they had to say
allowed us to better understand Beirut through civil war, understand
the concept of civil war better through Beirut, and, in a manner of
speaking, explain Hobbes to himself.
I. The fragmentation of Urban Space
The Disappearance of Public Space

Ahmed Beydoun remarked that public space is an extremely
restricted and rare thing in Beirut. For any public institution, loca-
tion is very important: newspaper offices, radio and television stations
have to be in specific places, otherwise they will be exposed to undue
intimidation or even attack. ‘The whole territory is divided up by fac-
tions: the Chouf Valley is the territory of Walid Jumblatt; Hezbollah
cannot give a speech in a Sunni quarter, etcetera’.2
Mona Fawaz, an architect teaching at the American University,
also emphasized that public space in Beirut is a rarity. The sole true
public space in Beirut is the seafront promenade; the only place where
all Beiruters, regardless of their religious or political affiliations,
can enjoy a stroll. At the time of our interview, Fawaz was undertak-
ing a study with her students on security systems in the city.3 She
explained that since 2005 there had evolved a veritable obsession
with security. Cameras and security gates had been installed and
121
whole streets closed, thus forming gated communities in the centre
of the city. Consciously or unconsciously, people submitted to specific
security routines. In the downtown Solidere neighbourhood – so called
because it was built by the developers firm Solidere of whom the
then prime minister Rafik Hariri was the president – every passer-
by has to go through army checkpoints; at Ashrafieh, it is the ABC
securitized mall that represents the spirit of muscular neoliberalism;
while the new developments on the seafront are designed, with Arab
tourism in mind, in the forbidding Dubai style. According to Fawaz,
the political class is waging a sort of ‘war against the city’. Curator
Rasha Salti brought up the concept of ‘Disneyfication’ as war:
Disney is very strong here. Even Raphaël Moneo created

the new souk in the town centre in that spirit. It is a real
high-security mall. And it was actually Hariri who had
the old souk blown up, even though it was still there after
the war. This dead security city that is the new centre has
swept away and replaced the old city.
The problem of public space is also a problem of density, especially in

the very cramped southern suburbs. During reconstruction of Haret
Hreik after the summer 2006 bombardment by the Israeli army, Mona
Fawaz and her colleagues tried to persuade Hezbollah to provide a few
public spaces, but it proved impossible. Hassan Nasrallah, the first
secretary and representative of the ‘party of God’, had resolved in his
famous Wa’ad (‘promise’) to rebuild the neighbourhood ‘as it was, but
better’. He had to re-house all the inhabitants, some 20,000 people, in
an area of about a hectare. Today there are new 20-storey towers, most
of them only two meters from the next, creating real problems of light
and dampness (an indication of the unhealthiness of this environment
is that residents complain of food going off too quickly).
According to architect Assem Salem, the southeast suburbs are a
‘reinforced-concrete Kasbah’. In the 2006 bombardments, 1,200 Shiites
died. Some 20,000 people had to bere-housed fast.4 ‘So Hezbollah
stepped in, and that gave it a lot of power’. Georges Arbid, also an archi-
tect, is very clear: ‘You can say that the southern suburbs are a lost
opportunity: there is no longer any public space, whereas the recon-
struction was an opportunity to make more public space. They acted
as fast as possible to re-house the people’.
As for town planner Mona Fawaz, she regards the southern sub-
urbs above all as a neighbourhood subject to the diktats of security.
Since Hezbollah has become an important force in Lebanese society,
especially after Israel’s attack in 2006, this obsession is now even
more marked – Hezbollah’s armed forces are stronger than the Leba-
nese army, thus constituting an enormous threat to security in the
territory. In the southern suburbs there is a whole security system
run by Hezbollah. According to Fawaz, this can be seen as a veritable
122
militarization of society.
The Real, Virtual and Mental Demarcation Lines

Monika Borgman, a German journalist who directs the Umam Centre,
gave her view on Beirut, stressing the lines of demarcation.5 The city,
she said, is marked, crisscrossed and fragmented by demarcation lines
which are simultaneously real and virtual. Each virtual demarcation

line can become real at any moment. In Beirut since the civil war,
people no longer (or only rarely) leave their neighbourhoods. It can
happen that a Christian from the east, who ventures into the western
part of the city, say the Hamra district, has to ask where the institu-
tions (or the hotels, restaurants, etcetera) are, so unknown has wider
Beirut become to its population. According to Borgman, each territory
has its own centre, but also seeks to have some control over other
Hobbes in Beirut
territories. For instance in Hamra, the city’s most cosmopolitan area

which most resembles the image of pre-war Beirut, there are four
alcohol-free cafés, as a symbolic presence of Islam, or even Islamism.
According to her they are outposts in a sort of mini-war. The demar-
cation lines are many, but today she finds the major division line is
between Sunnis and Shiites. Previously by contrast, during the civil
war, it was particularly the Right-wing Christians who were opposing
the Left. The Green Line divided real space.
Today the emphasis is more on mental demarcation lines, as is
evident in the southern suburbs, controlled by Hezbollah and not by
the state. It is more or less accepted that neither Christians, Sunnis,
Druzes nor atheist intellectuals enter this part of the city; any non-
Shiite has no business there. The southern suburbs have become a
no-go area. This idea of mental demarcation lines is evidently a real
metaphor for Beiruters; we heard it from others too. After telling us
about her struggle to preserve the city’s heritage, for instance, Mona
Hallak said something very similar: ‘There are demarcation lines eve-
rywhere, not only in the town, but even within each house. Now there
is a demarcation line inside each household’. Hallak explained that
even with her mother she could not talk about politics without things
degenerating into a squabble. Monika Borgman concluded:
Beirut is a city of camps, full of blocked thoroughfares. The

visible city is not the city. The city is invisible. Everything is a
screen . . . There is no curiosity in the people, because of the
roadblocks. Those who use the city are the last of the Beirutis.
II. Time, Memory and Language
Fragmentation of Time and Loss of Memory

(Time in Civil War)
123
The poet Abbas Beydoun talked to us about time and memory:
In Beirut there are no street names or almost none, and

even if they have names they are not used. Things are
located by recent “stuff ”: a signboard on a building, a
roundabout, a known place in the neighbourhood . . . His-
tory is simultaneously weighing heavily and forgotten.
For him this is not just a historical given but a key to the mysteries
of Beirut as a city without memory, without landmarks. According
to Beydoun, the civil wars broke the continuity of history. ‘After the
civil war Fairuz, the Fairuz, who was the voice of Lebanon, suddenly
sounded to us like a lie’. Her songs sounded bitter after the war. He
explains: ‘During and after the civil war, there was downright ethnic
cleansing . . . The hills are no longer pastoral’. Fairuz seems to be both
the voice of Lebanon and the symbol of everything that has become
false. The poet insisted on the nature of time and memory in war.
The civil war was a beginning, an interrupted beginning, a

beginning with no memory. An abominable present, immo-
bile and burdensome. It really is rather tiring: even the
future does not exist. The right to forget becomes obligatory
forgetting. The things of the past become unimportant, for
instance independence . . . The recent past becomes remote.
His conclusion is very clear: ‘The war atomized society, dispersed it.
People seek refuge in the family, in the community. There is no longer
a state as an intermediary between the communities. There is no civil
society’.
The most crushing testimony on memory and time was given by
the Palestinian- Syrian essayist and curator Rasha Salti. She said:
Old people have a relationship with time and space that

has something very beautiful about it. When they lose con-
tact with the present and their memory fades, they believe
they are among the olives in Galilee. I am waiting for senil-
ity: it will be a moment of freedom.
The thought is so sadly ironic and ironically sad that it reveals the
loss of memory as a desire, as liberating for those who have so many
troubling, shocking, painful memories. It is no doubt a self-defense
mechanism, this loss of memory of a traumatized collective psyche.
In Beirut, loss of memory is like mourning for the impossibility of
mourning. For it is still going on, since the state of civil war remains
latent.
The destruction of Beirut is a cipher for this loss of memory, as
a cause and effect of forgetting. The architect Mona Hallak, telling
124
us about her fight for the architectural heritage of Beirut, detailed

the phases in its destruction: in 1992 the historic town centre was
destroyed (by the Solidere project); in 1995 the minister for culture
and the heritage foundation drew up a list of 1,020 buildings. Not
wanting to risk losing the profit on a tower block or some other devel-
opment opportunity, owners engaged in ‘preventive’ destruction.
Fearing they might be listed, many owners decided to act fast, and
by 1997 only 520 of the buildings on that list remained. In a second
listing process, the idea of classification by clusters of buildings was
dropped, since there were only scattered buildings left. In a third and
more recent study, only 220 buildings considered to be of historical
value were still standing. This process of destruction in a few years, a
decade or little more, of 800 historical buildings is perhaps again very
symptomatic of the loss of memory. In any case, for the city it is a loss
Hobbes in Beirut
of memory of the most material, fatal and definitive nature. Beirut is

in fact on the road to becoming a town without history.6
The Loss of Language: Civil War and Reification

For novelist Elias Khoury, Beirut’s crisis is one of modernity. Accord-
ing to him, this requires an art able to respond to the crisis; in a crisis
the need for works of art is accentuated. The present has to be written
about, not contextualized in historical terms. The present is mute, it
cannot be evoked in yesterday’s language. Indeed, repeatedly in our
interviews we heard about changes in art and language during and
after the civil war. It was poet Abbas Beydoun who first talked to us
about literature and poetry. ‘The war engendered the new literature.
Before, there was a mythic, dream-like, idyllic side to art. During the
war and after it, it withdrew to the concrete – the all too concrete;
a tap that does not work, for instance’. He insisted that literature
seemed obsessed by things, by the ‘thing-ness’ of things. He talked to
us about concretism as a sort of mutism of art, a language without
empathy, autistic and atomized.
While he was talking like this I realized, or imagined, that the
literature was attesting to a sort of reification of things in the alert,
traumatized consciousness of the human mind in moments of danger.
What it very well evoked was this falling back of things into their
condition of being things, or this fixation of the alert and traumatized
consciousness of a subject which focuses upon things like a tap that
is not working in order not to lose its head. According to him, this
reification also took a hold on time: ‘The time of danger is a time of
minutes and seconds’. Fear makes time coagulate. It might be called
‘traumatized concretism’ swallowed up all poetic language, all poetic
landscape and even sensuality.
The architectural theoretician Tony Chakar gave more or less
the same diagnosis, but saw it in everyday things as well: ‘Language
was destroyed during the civil war. Now we are left with nothing but
the debris of language; all communication among people is codified
125
and every dialogue is an interrogation’. For him the loss of dialogue
and the mutism of literature apparently form a continuum. ‘When
you meet someone you try to find out his father’s name, to be able to
identify him; the region he comes from, where he lives. There is no
dialogue; people never say what they think’. How is this to be taken?
One might say that all communication is profoundly politicized, that
people are only putting labels on others, and that none can escape
this labeling logic. Although ‘classifying’ others is a habit in all human
societies, it only becomes obsessive once everyday life is profoundly
politicized. Perhaps a politicized everyday life loses its everydayness.
Then he uttered this unforgettable phrase: ‘Words fall before
they reach you’. With this metaphor, he was (like Abbas Beydoun)
trying to catch the ‘traumatized concretism’, that total reification of
language. He gave the example of a film where in one scene two girls
were walking among ruins. One of them liked a man, but she real-
ized that there was no language of love left over, so she used quotes
from an Egyptian film. For Chakar this is a non-perceptual anal-
ogy7 permitting talk about war without talking about the war. How
can one express the dreadful? One cannot. There is a breakdown of
language, one does not recount the history except in the debris. Nor
can one express the beautiful, or love . . . Each catastrophe destroys
language a little more. It has to be talked about without talking about
it. According to Chakar there are three sorts of space-time: the idyllic
space, that of one’s father’s village, for instance; the present, which
is the space-time of catastrophe; and the projected future, which is a
space without fear. ‘In the alert awareness of traumatism, one makes
plans but is not convinced of them, they become provisional, fictions.
It would be necessary to recall everything and forget everything at
the same time’. In Elias Khoury’s novel A Perfume of Paradise, one
of the main characters, a respectable old gentleman who has lost his
son in the civil war, becomes rather peculiar and, having collected
the posters of his martyred son, begins wiping out all the posters
and painting the walls along the streets white – a clear allegory of
this loss of memory. He himself is found killed one day, and the novel
buzzes with ‘concretist’ conversations on banal things.
It is important to stress the fact that there is a certain dialectic
here: it is in fact this reification, this ‘concretized traumatism’, that
gave rise to Beirut’s postwar modernism: a delayed modernism (since
we are talking about the 1975-90 war) yet a very authentic one, since
this style of the nouveau roman, of this absurd nihilism of a crum-
bling, fragmented, meaningless language, lends itself very well to ren-
dering this ineffable, dulling experience of civil war. Concretism and
the stripped down style has always been the sign of modernity, if not
indeed its very DNA. Thus, there is no modernity without reification.
And in order to turn the dialectical wheel, the extreme reification of
language lends itself very well to conveying the ‘traumatized concre-
tism’ of the critical situation of danger that civil war is. One might say
126
that Beirut, art in Beirut, has experienced the shock of modernism as

a modernism of shock.
III. Bodies and Phantoms
The Fight With the City

One young architect told us that Beirut torments him, that after his
return from America he had to take tranquillizers; according to him
he felt the intensity, the tension of this city in his body. Tony Chakar
also talked of this problematic corporeality, of this hand-to-hand fight
with the city.
All behaviour changes: you start to ration water, even if it

is not necessary. And the war behaviour comes back when-
Hobbes in Beirut
ever there is a crisis, in 2006 for instance. Even in normal

times, white Mercedes frighten you because they were the
ones most often used to commit the murders. Even parking
lots are felt to be dangerous spaces.
According to him the very experience of space has become deranged:

at the red light one wants to go, and at the green one no longer does.
As if the body itself is paralyzed by the fragmentation of time and
space. We asked him why people were so kind, as at Zokak El Blat, a
neighboorhood where everybody talked to us, introduced us to their
colleagues, etcetera. Chakar answered that such experiences were
evidence of a sort of Janus head: violence on one side, gentleness
on the other. In Beirut politeness is often a disguise for threat; for
instance, Hezbollah is very polite. But otherwise politeness has disap-
peared, especially in the movements of bodies in space: ‘In the public
space people take up the maximum space; they bump into each other
without seeing, without apologies. People see only themselves. Open-
ing the door for someone is something that one no longer does’. This
alienation of physical bodily space reflects a gap between people, an
existential mistrust.
In a style somewhere between irony and caustic sarcasm, Rasha
Salti said ‘We act as if we were telling ourselves: “the civil war is over,
we are not going to kill each other. There were victims . . . but the
killers were extra-terrestrials.” ’ And yet, as Tony Chakar put it, when
you shake someone’s hand, you never know if it might have been the
one that killed your father, your brother, your friend. The struggle
with the city, the experience of modernity since Baudelaire, as an
experience of shock (to use Benjamin’s term: Schockerlebnis), mani-
fests itself in Beirut as a moral or even ethical and political shock: the
hurly-burly, the city as a mix-up of victims and killers (not just vic-
tims of the past and ex-killers, but undoubtedly also potential victims
and potential killers).
How to make the link between the physical body and ‘the body
127
politic’?8 This metaphor from Hobbes, which has since become a com-
monplace concept in the English-speaking world, might be applied
to Beirut or Lebanon, but in the Lebanese case it is a dismembered
body politic. What our interlocutors revealed to us amounts to a sort
of anatomy of this dismemberment. This dismemberment of the city
as body politic has repercussions on the physical bodies of the inhab-
itants. In the absence of society, state and legality, a lawlessness, a
generalized anomie, prevails; everyone is exposed in their corporeality
in a literal sense. If the citizen is not clad in his/her citizenship and in
rights, in personal freedoms, he/she becomes deprived of protection by
legality and the state, and in that respect outlawed, banished: ‘bare
life’.9 This is the state of nature: the implosion of the polis exposes
bare life and atomizes individuals. In anomie and profound alienation
from others, the social itself risks becoming artificial. Rasha Salti said
towards the end of our last meeting, as a sort of conclusion: ‘We came
into a world undone’. Then she added: ‘I was born into a sad world,
I had no time to lose my illusions’. A childhood without illusions
– another feature of the traumatism, the collective and individual
pathology of civil war. Beirut, a city without illusions? Or a city of illu-
sions for a dis-illusioned population?
A Phantom City
Beirut is, according to novelist Elias Khoury, a broken mirror;10 its
image as a city of intellectual refuge and cultural mixing, pioneer
of freedoms in the Orient, and artistic and commercial centre, was
destroyed by the civil war and its sequels. All the same, Beirut was
cited among the ‘44 places to visit in 2009’ by The New York Times.
It was even named among the ten liveliest cities in the world by
Lonely Planet in 2009.11 How is this paradox to be understood? The
city ‘swings’ like few others, but it is a dance on the edge of a crater:
the volcano of civil war may erupt at any moment. One might call it
a danse macabre. Tony Chakar cited a scene from a film (the title of
which he could not remember): after a disaster, people find a deserted
village; the inhabitants are in the forest, dancing like lunatics with
the dead. He reminded us there were 200,000 deaths during the civil
war. For him, the nights of letting one’s hair down at Gemmayzeh or
elsewhere are moments of mad exhilaration, an escape from sadness.
In her film, I Had a Dream, Mum, Linah Saneh recounts a
dream to her mother, who is filmed on a bed, her face in close-up. The
voiceover of the artist behind the camera tells how she dreamt one
day that someone had taken her off to a deserted city. All the inhabit-
ants were dead and only tourists were walking about. The city was
intact, as if the people have just disappeared. At nightfall she goes
into an art gallery and discovers a painting that starts to move; she
turns round and a lady speaks kindly to her. She then discovers that
at twilight the ghosts come back to haunt the town, and that the tour-
ists were expected to have already left. She tells her sick mother all
128
this. Her mother is fascinated and asks repetitive questions on all the
details of her dream, asking: ‘Were you afraid?’ over and over again.
She cannot manage to grasp that it was a dream; she suggests her
daughter make a film of it, without realizing that she is in the film,
and is playing the main part. The mother asks: ‘But what’s the town
called?’ The question returns several times. For anyone who has vis-
ited Beirut, even just for a few days, the answer is obvious.12
Other works of art also tackle this theme of phantoms: explicitly
so in Ghassan Salhab’s film Beyrouth Fantôme (Phantom Beirut).
One also thinks of the work of Walid Raad and the Atlas Group (itself
something of a phantom), which produces phantom documents, or
Walid Sadek, Rabih Mouré, etcetera. One might also recall the BO 18
dance club, for there you really dance in a hole, in a common grave,
and given the number of dancers and the lack of light, everybody at
Hobbes in Beirut
BO 18 becomes a ghost; the place was originally furnished with cof-

fins.13 An observer specializing in the Beirut artistic scene could draft
a list full of these references and draw out a veritable phantomology
of Beirut in art and the collective imagination.
One might further wonder whether the civil war perhaps cre-
ated phantom citizens. When citizenship becomes something ghostly,
it is quite possible for people themselves to become phantoms. They
are inverse phantoms: just as real phantoms have only their appear-
ance and no matter, false phantoms have only their body, their naked
life (zoé), because they have lost their citizenship, their belonging,
their civic human appurtenance, their form of life (bios).14 Is this not
also a layer in Beirut’s ‘phantomology’: a phantom citizenship, a phan-
tom civility?
Conclusions?
he Post-traumatic Stress Syndrome as the Modern

T
Condition
One week in Beirut. What has it taught us? It has explained Hobbes
to us. It has never been clearer that the true exemplar of the state of
nature is civil war, the war of all against all. The state of nature turns
out to be a projection right back into human prehistory of contem-
porary civil war (contemporary for Hobbes, contemporary for Beirut,
quite simply contemporary). The all-too-true horror of civil war
explains to us the philosophical fiction of the state of nature. You can
better understand the difference between status naturalis and status
civilis (state of nature and civil/civic state): civil war is the un-civic
condition or the un-civic state. But our interlocutors also explained
Hobbes to himself: the talks in Beirut gave us a sort of phenomenol-
ogy or anthropology of civil war, or at least a ‘pathography’; the frag-
mentation of space, the loss of public space (as the place or symbol of
political space and space of politeness, of urbanity), of demarcation
lines that turn into mental lines, of almost psychic cleavages; the
129
loss of memory, of history; concretism, the reification of language;
the struggle with the city, compensation through entertainment; and
finally the phantoms that haunt the consciousnesses of people and the
unconscious of the city. In our conversations, we discerned the bases
of a ‘phenomenology of the civil war’ that might also be an ‘anatomy of
the dismemberment of the body politic’.
The experience of civil war is the experience of loss of experience.
The disintegration of experience Walter Benjamin talks about is not
only inspired by a certain romanticism, a nostalgia for experience as
tradition and transmission, but also and above all it is a consequence
of modernity as catastrophe (Benjamin was thinking of the first world
war and nascent fascism). In Beirut there is nothing hyperbolical or
apocalyptic about these words: they describe the state of affairs, the
state of experience of the disintegration of the society, of the dismem-
berment of the body politic, as a quasi-physical experience, graven
into the bodies and minds of the citizens. Beirut shows us an epitome
of modernity as a shock experience, an experience of traumatism
and a traumatism of experience. The week in Beirut thus taught us
something about modernity, about our modernity: modern art, modern-
ism, has always been a traumatized art, an art that expresses ‘post-
traumatic stress syndrome’. But this mirror can also be turned back
on the city: modernism in Beirut risks being a postmodern modernism,
a modernism played out in post-history, which repeats, reinvents, and
can only reinvent, the gestures of the postwar avant-garde (the nou-
velle vague, Beckett, he nouveau roman, etcetera who were themselves
reinventing the gestures of the historical pre-war avant-garde).
The interviews give a new meaning to the concept of ‘post-
traumatic stress syndrome’, and especially to the prefix ‘post’. What
is ‘traumatic’ is not just the experience, but also the impossibility of
digesting those experiences. Traumatism continues in the potential
for a new outbreak of civil war. The pain does not heal, because the
civil war is not over, is never over. The civil war turns into an endless
latent war. Is this true only in Beirut?
Everywhere Beirut
The ‘culture shock’ in Beirut is more of a ‘nature shock’: a confronta-
tion with the civil war that is within us as a possibility: homo homini
lupus. The war of all against all is always there as a possibility, as a
potentiality; it might be called the ‘universal latent civil war’.
One recent article on the state of nature draws the distinction
between three states of nature: the speechless animal life of human
beings, the war of all against all, and humanity in the face of ecologi-
cal disaster;15 or the anthropological state of nature, the political state
of nature and the cosmological state of nature. What one may find in
Beirut is that the second state of nature, reduces people to the first
state of nature: beside reducing people to bare life, civil war makes
human beings mute, and murderous. In the times of the third state of
130
nature, this is exactly what must be avoided. It is the challenge of the

planet.
In his essay Aussichten auf den Bürgerkrieg (published in Eng-
lish as Civil War) Hans Magnus Enzensberger alluded to a diffuse,
generalized civil war. He called it ‘the molecular civil war’. Today it
might be also called the ‘glocal civil war’: the local violence as a result
of migration, globalization and the extreme dualization of our society.

One does not only have to think of far away African failed states here.
The burning of the banlieux in Paris of 2005, the London riots and
lootings of 2011, the regular unrest in Molenbeek, Brussels – all give
an idea how close it can be.
With identity politics on the rise everywhere, and now that
theocracy (the kingdom of darknesse, i.e. a satanic force, according to
Hobbes) has become virulent in the form of fundamentalisms, just
Hobbes in Beirut
as the demographic explosion, migrations, global warming and the

war on terror are coming together into a dangerous highly explosive
cocktail, it may be that Hobbes’ hypothesis of the possibility of a gen-
eralized state of nature in humanity’s primitive, prehistoric past may
become a reality in postmodernity, through humanity in its post-his-
torical condition. Thus, the philosophical fiction of a primordial pre-
historic state of nature might become the postmodern Real, it might
be the true face of post-history. Beirut might well be the paradigm for
a possible future: the permanent planetarian civil war. Then Beirut
will be everywhere. And everywhere will be Beirut.
Notes
1 In a working week in Beirut in November 2009 to prepare a cul-
tural project on the city for the Halles de Schaerbeek, a major
arts centre in Brussels, we met various witnesses: a novelist, a
sociologist, a poet, a curator and several architects. Our team
consisted of Fabienne Verstraeten, director of the Halles de
Schaerbeek, who headed our mission; Nedjma Hadj, an architect
by training (currently working at the Halles) who handled the
camera; Iwan Strauven, an architect and head of Bozar Architec-
ture (Palais des Beaux Arts); Jean Didier Bergilez, an architect
who teaches at La Cambre Institute for Architecture in Brussels;
plus of course myself. Since this is an account of views on Beirut
communicated orally, the text uses an informal ‘spoken’ style. But
by bringing together the testimony, the ‘oral histories’ of our field
trip, we hope also to have supplied a few rudimentary elements of
a phenomenology of civil war: what sort of city it creates and what
sort of society, what sort of space and time, what sort of culture
and what sort of art, what sort of body, of mentality, of subjectiv-
ity, of collective consciousness and unconsciousness, what sort of
experience? What we are offering, then, is a phenomenology in the
131
literal sense: a description of experience.
2 These words were still hanging in the air when through the open
window we heard a car touring the neighbourhood with an audio
message: the voice of Nasrallah, the charismatic leader of Hesbol-
lah. An allegorical moment. The sociologist smiled, albeit a tired,
pained smile: ‘That is political intimidation’.
3 In the study, Mona Fawaz asked each of her students to draw up
precise records indicating all the checks and security routines
they had to go through on their daily journeys. When she brought
them together, it emerged that everybody was subject to rigorous
security procedures. They investigated the apparatus, technology
and architectural equipment required for the implementation of
such security.
4 After the Israeli offensive in 2006, there were around 500,000
refugees in Lebanon.
5 Why was the demarcation line called the ‘Green Line’? It was only
when Mona Hallak told us that since no one could go there, trees
and wild plants flourished everywhere along the demarcation
line, that I understood why it had been so called (though it should
be noted that the Israeli–Palestinian Green Line which predates
the one in Beirut does not share this origin of meaning).
6 Beyrouth ville sans histoire? was the title of a colloquium held at
the Halles de Schaerbeek, Brussels, on 6 December 2009
7 As in everything he said, he was subtly referring to Walter
Benjamin, this time to the concept of unsinnliche Ähnlichkeit,
non-sensible, non-perceptible similarity. Language, according to
Benjamin (1933 [1999]) in his little text Lehre vom Ähnlichen
(doctrine of similarities) says that of all animals humans are the
most mimetic, and that language is a reservoir of non-perceptual
similarity.
8 The term appears in the foreword to Hobbes’ Leviathan. He likens
society to the physical body (Body Naturall) and talks of society
as a body politic (Body Politique), an ‘artificial animal’: he gives
himself the task of describing this ‘artificial man’. The expression
body politic, which has no real equivalent in other languages, is
really to be taken in its literal sense (so to speak): as a baroque
metaphor. Just as Descartes, in order to explain the functions
of the physical body, compares it to physical machinery like the
water systems of baroque gardens, Hobbes compares society to
a body. The sovereign, Leviathan, as the head of the body politic,
‘incorporates’ the unity of this artificial animal that forms society
as a political entity. That is how this artificial animal (this Levia-
than) is depicted on the famous frontispiece of the book.
9 I am here referring to the difference drawn by Giorgio Agamben
between bios and zoé, between protected, civil, cultural life and
naked life, in his seminal book Homo Sacer. Sovereign Power and
Bare Life.
132
10 Elias Khoury, ‘Le miroir brisé’, in: Jade. Tabet (ed.), Beyrouth: la
brûlure des rèves, Editions Autrement, Collection Monde, Paris.
This volume, a classic on Beyrouth, has inspired this text.
11 See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beirut.
12 Is it really a dream? And how we are to understand it? One might
ask whether the mother is not right to take it as a true story.
Perhaps Freud might help us. In his famous essay ‘Beyond the
Pleasure Principle’, he compares the brain to a single-cell organ-
ism: just as the membrane has to defend the single-cell organ-
ism against the environment, the neo-cortex has to fend off the
stimuli from its environment. Freud draws the general conclu-
sion that for any living organism self-defence against stimuli is
more important than absorbing sensory information or stimuli.
If a stimulus becomes too strong, and fear does not havee time to
Hobbes in Beirut
prepare for the shock, a psychic trauma arises. This crack in fear,
this breach in the psyche’s defences, has to be restored. This is the
function of the nightmare: the fearful situation is repeated in the
hallucination of the dream, to the point where the breach is filled,
when the subject is healed of the trauma. In the nightmare, then,
fear continually returns as a phantom, a sort of phantom pain. It
is as if the mother’s repetitive questions were acting as an exam-
ple of what Freud calls the Wiederholungszwang, the compulsion
to repetition. Whether fantasy tale or not, nightmare or beautiful
uncanny dream, this film is an allegory of Beirut.
13 We had been told not to miss Saturday evening at Gemmayzeh,
so the three men in our group did their duty and went into a
café on the main street. The ambience was not terrific, but there
was a small group celebrating a birthday; one of us joined it and
got to know the people. We were then invited to go with them to
some other place. To our great surprise, we found ourselves in
front of the famous BO 18. The young man who had invited us
told us that he liked to invite foreigners here, not just because he
felt honoured that they were visiting his city, but also in order to
show them the animated and convivial side of it. Bernard Khoury,
the architect of this cult night spot, is partly right in saying that
people cannot keep on living in a city of ghosts, but have the right
to let their hair down, the right to normality, the right to convivi-
ality (the interview with him can be found in the full version of
this text).
14 I am here again referring to the distinction drawn by Giorgio
Agamben, referring to Arendt, between zoé and bios, between
civil, cultural, civic life and the life of nature, natural life, naked
life, in his book Homo Sacer. He puts the stress on the production
of naked life by the sovereign in a state of emergency, particularly
in the concentration camp, but one might say that the lack of sov-
ereignty in the state of nature produces the same effect: in civil
war, naked life is no longer protected by legality, by citizenship.
15 Rudi Laermans and Lieven De Cauter (2007) The beWILDerment
of Pentheus. On the attraction of the nature state and the nature
state as spectacle. In Kendell Geers Irrespectiv Catalogue, SMAK
City Museum of Contemporary Art, Gent, ACTAR, Barcelona, s.d;
s.p. (see elsewhere in this book).
[2010]
The Blackout
135
The large scale electricity failure, the blackout, has allegorical power,
it might become symptomatic of our age. With ‘peak oil’ in sight
(maximum production and consumption, after which the reserves
deplete) and the alarm over depletion of non-renewable resources,
the blackout becomes more than a pure fantasy or far-fetched science
fiction plot. The idea of energy scarcity is strengthened by the shadow
of global warming and the current demographic explosion. In 1960
there were 3 billion people. In 2000 there were 6 billion people on the
planet. Somewhere in 2011 there will be 7 billion wandering around
the planet. So between 2000 and 2011 one billion people were born.
How to bend the growth curve to peak human (in analogy to peak oil)
at only 9.4 billion by 2050 remains a mystery. The only thing we know
for certain is that recent estimates are constantly adjusted upwards.
The almost metaphysical need for the capitalist economy to
grow reveals progress as a vector that collides with the limits of the
ecosystem. What we are experiencing is the inertia of acceleration.
Globalization means the explosion of mobility and migration. Just like
every climate report warns us that the warming of the planet becomes
visible in extreme weather conditions, so drought, extreme colds, hur-
ricanes, floods, etcetera, so too one can predict that with migrations,
the pressure on demography and the extreme dualization of our soci-
eties the human climate will be put under pressure: extreme social
conditions will become more likely, from extreme poverty through
famine to ethnic clashes, riots, and ‘low intensity civil war’. Civil war
is a form of relapse into the state of nature. Perhaps the phenomenon
of the blackout can help to better understand the state of nature, and
vice versa: the idea of the state of nature can help us understand the
blackout.
The Ambiguity of the Blackout

In an interview after the publication of his book, When the lights go
out. Blackout in America, David E. Nye points out the ambiguity of
a large scale power blackout: it is both the source of a spontaneous
conviviality and the catalyst for the outbreak of anarchy. On the one
hand he states: ‘a blackout is not merely an interruption, it pushes
people into a new situation, and whether caused by an ice storm in
Maine or an overloaded urban system during a heat wave, it can end
up making the community stronger.’ On the other hand he says:
If people fear impoverishment and sense that the com-

munity is breaking down, as was the case in some parts of
New York City in 1977, they may see the blackout as an
opportunity for looting. In such cases, the blackout reveals
that the bonds of community have frayed to the breaking
point.1
Let’s take the New York blackout of 13 June 1977 as a case. In News-
136
week from 23 June 1977, exactly 10 days after the blackout, we find
an elaborate account of the ‘night of horror’. It starts out with an
impression of the stagnation of the entire city:
For a night and a day, nothing worked . . . Subways ran

dead. Elevators hung high in their shafts. Water pumps
failed, and with them the sinks, tubs and toilets. Street-
lights and stoplights went out . . . Refrigerators and air
coolers quit. Commuter Lines stalled. Stores, banks, busi-
nesses and stock exchanges closed. Theaters went dark.
Office towers stood nearly empty. Airports shut down. Hos-
pitals switched to backup generators . . . [P]roduce wilted
and frozen food melted in stores. The stranded flaked out
on hotel-lobby floors.2
The Blackout
Also in 1977, it started out in a positive atmosphere: people expected

it to be festive like the memorable ‘North-East blackout’ in 1965 when
vast parts of Canada and the East Coast ran out of electricity. The
situation was cozy and exceptionally quiescent. Fewer crimes were
reported than usually.
Well-seasoned after the 1965 blackout, many New Yorkers

took to the streets in search of friends, neighbors, candles,
and most importantly, an explanation. In some communi-
ties, people found solace in the streets, where they swapped
stories, chatted with strangers, and enjoyed an unelec-
trified nightlife. In Greenwich Village, for example, the
streets became an improvised festival as people strolled
out to witness the city without power. Some listened to
news reports on battery-powered transistor radios, and all
wondered when the lights would return.3
But the party did not last. Poor areas of New York erupted in violence.
In other parts of the city the experience was starkly differ-

ent. News broadcasts reported outbreaks of violence, loot-
ing, and fires. Areas of Harlem, Brooklyn, and the South
Bronx experienced the most damage, where thousands
of people took to the streets and smashed store windows
looking for TVs, furniture, or clothing . . . The police made
3,776 arrests, although from all accounts, many thousands
escaped before being caught. 1,037 fires burned throughout
the City, six times the average rate, while the fire depart-
ment also responded to 1,700 false alarms. Regardless of
where you where when the lights went out, New York’s
streets teemed -and sometimes burned – with life.4
137
And elsewhere it sounds like this: ‘And in the ghettos and barrios of
four of the city’s five boroughs, the looters and burners owned the
night, on a scale and with a fury unmatched . . .’ 5
These eruptions of lawlessness are accredited to a heat wave
that was holding New York in its grip, in contrast to the cold weather
in 1965, but particularly the crisis in New York with its high unem-
ployment rate and deep discomfort seem to have fueled the outburst:
‘The blackout of ’65 fell fortuitously in the cool of mid-autumn; crimi-
nals stayed home – there were only 96 arrests all night – and crime
rates actually fell. But the switchoff of ’77 caught black New York
in the midst of the summer’s worst heat wave and in the thrall of
depression-level unemployment- and when the lights went out this
time, the mean streets simply erupted . . .’6
Perhaps anthropology can help us understand the festive
moment of the blackout. Victor Turner resorts to Van Gennep’s notion
of ‘rite de passage’ in his The Ritual Process. Structure and Antistruc-
ture (1969). The notion denotes a passing ritual in which people are
transformed from one stable condition to another. For example, being
a virgin is a stable condition, as is being married (anthropologically
speaking that is). The transition however is unstable. This passing
from one steady state to another is what Turner calls ‘the liminal
phase’. In our example the honeymoon, which takes place outside of
the normality, preferably far away from civilization, at the coast, in
the mountains or at the Niagra Falls. There it happens. Influenced by
structuralism, Turner reduces these three moments to an opposition:
structure versus anti-structure. The liminal phase is the anti-struc-
ture, which has a very specific function in relation to the structured
social system. Around the same time, Michel Foucault introduces the
term heterotopia and it was no coincidence he gave the honeymoon as
an example. He points out that defloration happens elsewhere, and in
a certain sense: nowhere.
As is well known, Turner connects structure with what he calls
societas and anti-structure to communitas, in which he resorts to the
difference between Geselschaft and Gemeinschaft by the sociologist
Ferdinand Tönnies. The spontaneous, unstructured, at times exorbi-
tant, if not uncontrollable, abnormal or at least extraordinary atmos-
phere of the party intensifies the sense of community. From this per-
spective it seems almost self-evident that the blackout can be under-
stood as anti-structure, as a liminal phase, a heterotopian moment.
The extraordinary condition brings people together. People help each
other, one speaks to strangers, one brings candles and drinks and a
spontaneous celebration of community commences. But simultane-
ously the extraordinary, the abnormality of the situation, the elimi-
nation of order, can also be a catalyst for the fading of cultural and
moral norms, for anomie (to use Durkheim’s word), and thus the point
where the celebration can deteriorate in an eruption of lawlessness,
looting and arson.
138
The Blackout as the Relapse into the State of Nature

In the same fashion as the honeymoon which takes place at the out-
skirts of culture and often literally is a sort of exodus to nature, the
blackout can be conceived as a relapse into the state of nature, an
abolition of the law. Think about the Ancient Greek opposition
between nomos and fusis: nature is defined as that which lies outside
of the borders of the territory governed by law, outside the borders of
the city. Oedipus kills a stranger at a crossroads somewhere far away
from Thebes where everyone is sovereign, because in the lawless ter-
ritory of nature the survival of the fittest and the right of the strong-
est reign. Our hypothesis is nothing less than that: the blackout is an
ephemeral, potential form of relapse into the state of nature. It is also
a way to think this regression.
When we reread Hobbes, we can interpret power (the sovereign)
The Blackout
also as electricity (power), ‘Hereby it is manifest, that during the time

men live without a common Power to keep them all in awe, they are in
that condition which is called Warre; and such a warre, as is of every
man against every man.’ Political power today is inconceivable with-
out electrical power. To be unplugged is a figure of the state of nature,
reduction to prehistoric energy, primordial self-reliance. One could
also give a McLuhanian (or Postmanian) twist to it: without television
and computer screens that keep the masses glued (the power to keep
them all in awe, in the words of Hobbes), they will go on the streets
and wreck havoc. In any case, during a blackout not only electric
power is down, but also political power.
This yields a potentially interesting new concept: the political
blackout. Ever since our society became dependant upon electric-
ity this applies: without electricity, no power. All sovereignty might
melt into air, and with it, the monopoly on violence of the police, as
the police is disarmed by a blackout. Why, in one big blackout, this
leads to plundering, arson, murder and rape and during another one
it doesn’t, is a question for historians and sociologists. Perhaps it is
the result of a coincidence of events. In New York 1977 it was the heat
wave, the economic recession with a wave of crime and a tense politi-
cal situation. This contingency only proves the definition by Hobbes:
the state of nature is not a war, in the sense of actual battle, but a
disposition to war.
For WARRE consisteth not in battle only, or the act of fight-

ing, but in a tract of time, wherein the will to contend by battle
is sufficiently known: and therefore the notion of time is to be
considered in the nature of war, as it is in the nature of weather.
For as the nature of foul weather lieth not in a shower or two of
rain, but in an inclination thereto of many days together: so the
nature of war consisteth not in actual fighting, but in the known
disposition thereto during all the time there is no assurance to
139
the contrary.7
So whether or not the war of all against all breaks out is dependant
on a matter of coincidences and disastrous chain reactions.
Another thing the blackout in New York 1977 teaches us is that
the blissful anarchy of the anarchists does not exist. It has never
existed in the past, nor will it ever exist in the future. Regrettably so
maybe, but it is true. I do not know of a single historic counter exam-
ple unless one takes the brief flares from Munster to the Commune in
Paris, the utopian experiments of the phalanstère by Fourier actually
serious. That is, as a model of a permanent political condition. Every
day a party? A nightmare (as the new Zion of Munster illustrated; it
ended in an orgy and violence). The Temporary Autonomous Zone (TAZ)
of Hakim Bey? Cute. But a temporary celebration isn’t politics, just an
interruption of politics. At best it is heterotopian politics.
José Saramago’s Blindness (Ensaio sobre a Cegueira) is an alle-
gorical blackout, the perfect embodiment of the sudden relapse in
the state of nature: the whole city suddenly becomes blind and goes
to pieces. The cruelest things happen, truly a ‘war of all against all’.
Perhaps there is no such thing as the real state of nature (as Hobbes
himself admitted), but Saramago’s depiction is exemplary. What hap-
pens is a sudden reduction of bios to zoé: life coated in citizenship and
middle-class culture is suddenly reduced to roughness, to humilia-
tion, barbarism, bare life. All humanism is gone and what remains is:
zoölogical functions (which all become problematic). The book is quite
graphic about it. An epidemic of blindness annuls the entire social
fabric, but also all human dignity, or almost. Saramago’s book is an
ominous allegory of an old writer looking at the dark side. It teaches
us something very clear: the blackout is a temporary suspension of
the social contract and in this suspension humans are reduced to
mammals. It shows the ‘implosion of the polis’ in the most literal way.
Whilst the well-organized liberal social democratic welfare state is
dominated by biopolitics, the blackout can mean a sudden return of
thanatopolitics: murder, rape, plundering and arson.
In a certain sense the blackout might be the purest existing
form of Hobbes philosophical fiction of the state of nature, the bottom
up absence of sovereignty, a moment in which anything becomes pos-
sible. That would perhaps be the most pure form, since a civil war
is not really a war of all against all, but a war of clans, tribes, par-
ties, factions and coalitions. Still, the civil war remains the one and
only lasting form of a state of nature, next to the blackout which is
in essence transitory and partial. Do civil wars ever end? Or do they
remain latent until one day they erupt again? Why do they have the
tendency to linger for so long? It is because in any society there is
a latent civil war, which is why Hobbes called it the state of nature.
The state of nature – as we discovered in Beirut – is not so much a
philosophical fiction about an anthropological state of a pre-historic,
140
pre-social and pre-political man, but a bottom layer in or under any

society.
To sum this whole exercise up in one formula again: the black-
out often causes conviviality with neighbors and even strangers, and
can be a moment of celebration, but it contains spurs of a potential fit
of lawlessness. Indeed, the blackout is one of the purest instances of a
relapse into the state of nature.
State Ending: The Blackout as Military Strategy in Entropic

Empire
But we need to take this one step further: the blackout can deliber-
ately become a part of the military strategy of Empire. That was the
subject of a recent study: Cultural Cleansing in Iraq; Why Museums
Were Looted, Libraries Burned and Academics Murdered. From Viet-
nam to Iraq and Gaza there was a recurrent slogan: ‘We will bomb
The Blackout
them back into the Stone Age’. The authors show that we have to take
this seriously and even almost literally. They call it ‘State Ending’ as
a war aim, the annihilation of the state through ‘shock and awe’ aerial
attacks, the dismantling of all state institutions, the willful splinter-
ing of society by reintroducing ethnic and religious identity papers,
etcetera. This strategy of annihilation is almost literally a reduction
to the state of nature. In Iraq the state was completely dismantled
immediately after the bombardments, the army was dismantled; all
government officials were sent home under the pretence of ‘debaathi-
fication’. Under the watchful eye of the occupier museums were plun-
dered, libraries burnt down and death squats started systematically
killing academics, journalists and doctors.8 Of course the economy
was privatized and entirely ‘outsourced’ (to private firms running
the country, with unimaginable levels of corruption). The blackout is
part of this annihilation: in Iraq there are blackouts on a daily basis.
There is only electricity for a few hours a day and this from 2003 till
the present. (Israel also uses blackouts of electricity, internet and
even telephone communication at critical moments.) There is barely
drinking water, and concrete barriers between each neighbourhood in
Baghdad and elsewhere are blocking all mobility and bring city life to
a halt (a strategy of ‘pacification’ mimicked from the Israeli wall and
the checkpoints, of course).
This military strategy of state-annihilation might give us a
glimpse of the political order of the future: the ‘Entropic Empire’ (as I
have come to call it) as the syntheses between the state of exception
and the state of nature. The empire is in permanent war, based on
the state of exception, the war on terror, with everything that comes
along with it: Patriot Act, and exceptional anti-terror-laws in western
countries, with Guantánamo as a place outside the law and a pars pro
toto for the many detention units at an unknown number of locations,
most likely on the approximately 700 American military bases around
the world or practices like extraordinary rendition, the extradition of
141
prisoners to countries that use torture; and of course the interrogation
techniques like water boarding and excesses like Abu Ghraib.
The counterpart to this excess of sovereignty as the state of
exception is the implosion of sovereignty by shock and awe, military
primacy; or: laissez-faire politics – like in Africa. Just let it all happen:
disintegration of the State, civil war, genocide. To understand this
Entropic Empire one has to see the touching of extremes: next to the
permanent war, there are no go areas; next to drones that can domi-
nate the most desolate area’s, there is the return of piracy, like in
Somalia. The New World Order must perhaps be understood as the
synthesis and patchwork of creative chaos and creative destruction on
the one hand, and strict, ruthless military domination. Hence the oxy-
moron ‘Entropic Empire’. The blackout is a punctual, allegoric constel-
lation that can help us understand this oxymoron, or at least, help us
begin to understand it.
Notes
1 http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2010/03/ask-an-
academicblackouts. html#entry-more, last accessed on 12 April 2010.
2 http://blackout.gmu.edu/archive/pdf/newsweek_77.pdf.
3 http://blackout.gmu.edu/events/tl1977.html.
4 http://blackout.gmu.edu/events/tl1977.html.
7 Hobbes, Leviathan, Pinguin Books, London 1981. p 186 (online: http://
www.gutenberg.org/files/3207/3207-h/3207-h.htm#2HCH0013)
8 Raymond W. BAKER, Shereen T. ISMAEL and Tareq Y. ISMAEL
(eds.), Cultural Cleansing in Iraq. Why Museums Were Looted, Librar-
ies Burned and Academics Murdered., Pluto Press, London, New York,
2010.
142
The Negation of
the State of Nature
Entropic Empire
[2009-2010]
Reflect #09
143
‘The affirmation of the political is the
affirmation of the state of Nature’
Leo Strauss
Introduction: The State of Emergency vs. the State of Nature
The concept of the state of nature, belonging to the classical concepts

of political philosophy and, forever linked to the names of Hobbes and
Rousseau, does not figure prominently in today’s discourses on poli-
tics. Almost all recent articles or books which are available on the sub-
ject deal with academic commentary on aforementioned authors. That
is noteworthy. We on the contrary are convinced that the hypothesis
of the relapse into the state of nature may well turn out as one of the
most significant concepts for understanding the geopolitical and the
politico-anthropological situation in the twenty-first century. Somalia
and many other imploding or failed states in Africa are proof of this.
But is it not possible that the state of nature, as a concept, can be of
help in acquiring a better understanding of other phenomena: the
chaotic political stratification and also the yearning for the outdoors,
extreme sensations, for ‘reality’, as is seen in reality TV? It is prob-
ably not a coincidence that one of the more successful formats of this
genre, Expedition Robinson (also known as Survivor), is a deliberate
re-enactment of the state of nature. The possibility of ‘a latent glocal
civil’ war on the other hand is demonstrated by a city like Beirut. In
this text we focus on the political theory, on the idea of the state of
nature, and how it bears upon the concept of the political.
This unearthing of the old idea of the state of nature also has a
strategic purpose in providing an alternative for the idea of the state
of exception or, in Anglo-Saxon terminology, state of emergency or
martial law: the partial suspension of the constitution, like the sus-
pension of civil rights, the right to liberty of speech, gathering, strike,
the protection of privacy, etcetera, in view of the defence of the system
against an external or internal danger, such as an uprising, disaster,
or attack. The state of emergency (with the camp as its embodiment),
as it appears in the work of Giorgio Agamben, has justifiably become
one of the most influential political and philosophical concepts of our
time. But the paradigm has its limitations. For one, not all camps
can be comprehended in terms of the state of exception; moreover,
our political space cannot simply be reduced to a concentration camp.
The state of nature and the state of emergency relate to each other as
opposites, which may be outlined as follows: the state of emergency is
a top down excess of sovereignty (tyranny, dictatorship), the state of
nature is a bottom up implosion or absence of sovereignty (anarchy,
lawlessness, chaos, civil war). Is it possible to reinstate the concept
144
of the state of nature and to absorb it in current political theory,

as a supplement to Agamben’s on the concept of the state of emer-
gency? We will try to shed some light on this question by examining
Schmitt’s The Concept of the Political (first edition 1927, reprinted
in 1932) and the commentary of a then young Leo Strauss, which he
articulated in 1928. Schmitt was so impressed that he made partial
revisions in the original.
The Negation of the State of Nature
Politics as Thanatopolitics
In Der Begriff des Politischen, translated as The Concept of the Politi-
cal, Carl Schmitt defines the concept of the political, as is well-known,
on the basis of the distinction between friend and foe. His point of
departure is an analogy: just like morality is based on the distinction
between good and evil, aesthetics on the distinction between beauti-
ful and ugly, economy on the distinction between profit and loss – in
the same way politics is based on its own binary distinction: ‘The
specific political distinction to which political actions and motives
can be reduced, is that between friend and enemy’.1 The enemy is
‘the other, the stranger; and it is sufficient that he is, in an especially
intense way, existentially something different and alien, so that in the
extreme case conflicts with him are possible’. The enemy could also
be labeled as ugly, bad, economically detrimental, but at the core of
this reasoning is the ‘autonomy of the political’, which follows from
the fact that the distinction between friend and enemy can be made
independent of the other opposites. Only the insiders are able to make
this judgment, in other words, the political – defined as the distinction
between friend and foe – has no criterion outside itself.
An enemy only exists when a collective of people fight another,
similar collective. The concept of an enemy in politics is that of a
public enemy. Schmitt stresses that we cannot talk about metaphori-
cal enemies; opponents in party politics or a debate, or competitors,
like in economy, are not relevant here. Contrary to these innocent
forms of conflict, politics is always rooted in a battle of life and death.
Schmitt insists on making the point that the possibility of death
invests politics with a specific significance: ‘The friend, enemy, and
combat concepts receive their real meaning precisely because they
refer to the real possibility of killing’.2 The battle, war or civil war,
with the stakes of killing or being killed, is the existential foundation
of politics. A world without war, without ‘hostilities’, would be a world
without politics. ‘Hostility’ is the essence of politics. For Schmitt, the
true political dimension appears only in the extreme possibility of the
battle of life and death: ‘From this most extreme possibility human
life derives its specific political tension’. In more uncertain terms
he states that the ‘definition of politics’ is rooted in ‘the meaningful
antithesis whereby men can be required to sacrifice life, authorized to
shed blood, and kill other human beings’. This conception of politics
one could call thanatopolitics.
145
In 1976, Foucault, concluding the first volume of The History of
Sexuality, introduced the concept of biopolitics. He further developed
his thoughts on it, in the last lecture of his series at the Collège de
France, that same year, posthumously published as Il faut défendre
la société (Society Must Be Defended). The old form of sovereignty
(the monarchy, till the American and French Revolutions) allowed the
sheer existence of its subjects, but included the power to take life; in
other words, sovereignty was the right to decide on death. The new
sovereign power, which emerges with the modern state and with the
idea of ‘government’ and ‘gouvernementalité’ (which came to be known
in English as ‘governementality’), and which Foucault, sees as an
addition to ‘disciplining’, basically gives life. Through demographic
politics, rules for hygiene, public health care, campaigns on family
planning, urban planning, and the like, the state will interfere with
the biological life of its subjects (seen as ‘population’), rather than the
bringing to death of its subjects. He calls this technique of exercis-
ing power, characteristic for the emerging modern state and more so
for the welfare state, ‘biopower’ or ‘biopolitics’. He opposes biopolitics
(politics of life) to the old sovereingnity with its politics of death, and
calls it at some point thanatopolitics.3 However, since thanatopolitics
belongs to the old sovereignty, the focus has recently been on the
concept of biopolitics (Agamben, Virno, Negri & Hardt, and a stack of
secondary literature).
Politics as thanatopolitics means that the political is not
grounded in the good life, as Aristotle claimed, but in death; not in
legitimacy but in the existential confrontation, not in social organi-
zation but in war. For Schmitt this holds true in a literal sense: the
ultimate test of the political lies in the demand to risk one’s life and
to obliterate the lives of others. Schmitt is well aware of the fact that
his conception of politics is essentially thanatopolitics. It is death
which forges the unity and sovereignty of a political entity (state or
group): ‘By this power over the physical life of the people, the politi-
cal community rises above every other form of community or society’.
Or even: ‘The political unity must, if needs be, demand the sacrifice of
life’. Or more elaborately:
In any event, that grouping is always political which orients

itself toward this most extreme possibility. This grouping is
therefore always the decisive human grouping, the political
entity . . . and it is sovereign in the sense that the decision
about the critical situation, even if it is an exception, must
always necessarily reside there.
The ultimate political act is violence: war, revolution, or civil war. All
true politics is, for Schmitt, thanotopolitics.
The political grouping is ultimately and in all respects the deci-
sive authority: the one which, given the possibility of war and civil
146
war, decides on all other groups and institutions in society. Here the
link with the Politische Theologie is unmistakable: sovereign is he who
decides on the exception (sovereignty is not so much about making
the law, but about deciding to suspend the law, when it really mat-
ters, in extreme situations). There is a difference, however, because,
in Der Begriff des Politischen, sovereignty resides in a group whereas,
in Politische Theologie, a sovereign is conceived of as a single person
invested with power. But fundamentally, it is the will to violence, to

death and war which defines sovereignty. Sovereignty is the willing-
ness to wage war. The entity which loses the will to engage in warfare,
loses its sovereignty. There is some truth to be found here. One cannot
help but ponder on the ‘postwar’ relationship between war-weary
Europe and the perpetually belligerent United States.
Although Schmitt, in positing a definition of the political, theo-
rizes about the grouping in abstract and neutral terms, he does limit
his scope. The first and foremost political entity is the state: ‘That
the state is an entity and in fact the decisive entity rests upon its
political character’. And the state is decisive because it embodies the
political. Without the state, there is no politics: ‘Were this entity to
disappear, then the political itself would disappear’. When the state
disintegrates, this primeval principle of the distinction between friend
and enemy resonates within the boundaries of the state, resulting in
civil war. But civil war is proto-politics because it is a fight over sov-
ereignty. The civil war is a first form of politics as the state of nature;
the permanent possibility of war between states is a second form of
the state of nature, which is mostly what Schmitt has in mind. It is
exactly this which will enable Strauss, somewhat inordinately yet fol-
lowing the lead of Schmitt, to position the state of nature at the core
of the fight against the liberal negation of politics.
Thanatopolitics as Paleopolitics
Political theory, for Schmitt, amounts to state doctrine, in a strict
sense, thereby emphatically ignoring the plural character of the mod-
ern-democratic political system. To a certain degree this perspective
stems from Schmitt’s juridical approach of politics. Nonetheless, this
one-sidedness is not further elaborated, on the contrary: everywhere
in Schmitt’s oeuvre the ‘political’, in a quasi-ontological way, is identi-
cal to the problems of state, as they appear to state leaders: who are
friends, who are enemies?
This boils down to a pre-modern notion of politics: the state is
sovereign. In the era of supranational entities (like the EU, the UN,
the US, international law, etcetera), the state is superseded. In the
preface of the 1963 edition, Schmitt admits this: ‘The era based on the
state is coming to an end . . . The state as the model of the political
unity, the state as bearer of the most astonishing monopoly, namely
the monopoly of the political decision . . . is dethroned’.4 Internally
the state only knows police (policing), not politics: ‘within such a state
147
there really was only police and no politics, or one should consider
court intrigues, rivalries, frondes and attempts to uprisings by dis-
sidents, in short obstruction as political . . . Back then, politics in a
broader sense, high politics, was solely foreign politics, thus the poli-
tics between states. States that recognize each other as such, and who
based on this recognition decided on mutual friendship, animosity or
neutrality’. So: ‘There really has been a time, in which it was useful
to equate the concepts state and politics’5 – and that time clearly
belonged to the ancien régime, not to the democratic state of law, and
not to the era of interstate systems and international law.
From Foucault’s viewpoint one can contend that Schmitt falls
back on an archaic concept of politics, or, so to say, returns to the
ancien régime. It is not the politics which manage the biological life
of the subjects, but the politics of the old sovereign which takes life.
In other words: politics as thanatopolitics is primitive, primordial,
archaic politics, one could call it paleopolitics. Schmitt’s definition of
politics (just like that of sovereignty from Political Theology: ‘Sover-
eign is he who decides on the exception’) fully ignores the matter of
the legitimacy or lawfulness of political power. Schmitt presupposes a
complete autonomy of the political exercise of power, regardless of the
democratic or even legal legitimacy. His implicit perspective is that
of political leaders who, from within or on behalf of states, jostle for
or have attained power, sovereign by principle, in an arena which is
exclusively populated by friendly or hostile political actors.
The sovereign is, for Schmitt, albeit in an inherent way, always
an absolute ruler, tyrant or dictator: he who decides on the exception,
and thus he is the one whose word replaces the law, whose word is
law. The sovereign who issues the law, and who, therefore, is above the
law, embodies the state of exception as the abolition of the law, Agam-
ben rightfully concluded. Accordingly, he cannot be held accountable
for his use of power; neither does he have to take care of the trans-
formation of his power into authority by invoking external references
such as the ‘people’ (or its representatives) or legal procedures and
constitutional principles.
Another way of expressing the same: Schmitt disregards the the
division of powers, safeguarding the independence of the executive,
the legislative and the judicial power. Such a conclusion follows from
his polemic stance against liberalism, as is accentuated by Strauss,
without actually mentioning that the abolition of the division of
powers is boiling down to totalitarianism. Schmitt’s concept of politics
condenses all politics to the executive power and reduces sovereignty
to the decision about the exception and the state of emergency or
martial law. Schmitt’s idea can be labeled as paleopolitics because he
thinks sovereignty as full, as unified and indivisible. But that’s con-
tradicted by the political constitution of most modern states and their
histories. Politics is struggle, not war (as Mouffe and Laclau empha-
size). And the place of sovereignty is not occupied, but empty (Lefort).
148
The modern sovereign, the king in a representative democracy, has

ceremonial power only. He symbolizes the unity and the sovereignty
of a state, but he holds very limited power. ‘Full sovereignty’ on the
contrary is totalitarian: dictatorship is based on the permanent state
of emergency. In short: for Schmitt all true sovereignty is dictatorial.
Schmitt uses an archaic, pre-modern concept of politics, because
he openly turns away from the Weimar republic and liberalism. One
could say that Schmitt, who was a member of the National-Socialist

Party (NSDAP), anticipated, with the first (1928) and second (1932)
publication of his text on what he called the ‘total state’, a state in
which anything could become political at any moment. This is why
he denies (albeit not always in a coherent fashion) that politics is
one sphere next to others. It is the basis of all other spheres of life,
because of the possibility of death. Totalitarianism is a first figure of
the return of politics, from the liberal neutralization of politics and
the crisis of parliamentary representation.6
The Affirmation of Politics as State of Nature

In his commentary of Schmitt’s ‘The concept of the Political’, Leo
Strauss makes this remarkable statement (the epigraph which liter-
ally constitutes the motto, the motive, the motor of this text): ‘The
affirmation of the political is the affirmation of the state of nature’.7
As mentioned, one has to keep in mind that Schmitt and Strauss
mostly point to international politics, to the relationship between sov-
ereign states. Internal pacification on the part of the state has ren-
dered this tension between friend and enemy virtually obsolete. Rela-
tive to this, one may offer the suggestion that this proposition should
be taken as an analogy, in a metaphorical sense. The true relationship
between sovereign states is like that of the sovereign subjects in
Hobbes’ philosophical fiction of the state of nature. What does it mean
to hold that the affirmation of the political implicates the affirma-
tion of the state of nature? In the first place that politics is rooted in
and always based on the possibility of war, because there is no higher
authority than the sovereign state itself. And that’s the Hobbesian
premise: without sovereignty there is a state of war. When everybody
is sovereign it leads to conflict.
In his commentary of Schmitt’s The concept of the political, Leo
Strauss furthermore generalizes Schmitt’s definition of politics and
emphasizes its polemic against liberalism. Starting from Schmitt’s
thesis that the liberal state, with it’s emphasis on the autonomy of the
different spheres (economy as the private sphere, politics as the public
sphere, and culture as third sphere) amounts to a ‘depoliticization’
and neutralization of the political, Strauss sees Schmitt’s text and
his interpretation of the concept politics as one long polemic against
liberalism. What Schmitt called a depoliticization and neutralization,
becomes a negation of the political for Straus’s. In his commentary
(from 1928) he writes that liberalism has come to an end, is depleted,
149
and must be countered with (in the words of Schmitt) ‘another system’;8
a system that brings the political – hidden in liberalism – to light.
Depoliticization not only is the accidental or even neces-

sary result of the modern development but it is its original
and authentic goal; the movement in which the modern
spirit has gained its greatest efficacy, liberalism, is char-
acterized precisely by the negation of the political. If lib-
eralism has already become implausible, if it accordingly
must be countered by ‘another system’, then the first word
against liberalism must in any case be: the position of the
political.
If liberalism has already become implausible, if it accordingly must be

countered by ‘another system’, then the first word against liberalism
must in any case be: the position of the political.’9
This is the task Leo Strauss will take upon himself as his life’s
work. In that sense one could take his text on Schmitt as a program-
matic text. Later, he will perfect it in his own esoteric way. Because
philosophy proclaims truths that are incompatible with the city –
think of Socrates: the godlessness of philosophy will always come into
conflict with the ‘pious myths’ and ‘noble fictions’ of the polis – the
philosopher must always write esoterically. Strauss has elucidated
this in Persecution and the Art of Writing.10
The attack on liberalism is executed by Strauss through an
attack on the relative autonomy of the spheres. Schmitt is not always
clear on this matter, hence Strauss ‘clarifies’ and radicalizes Schmitt.
It would – says Strauss – be a misconception to think that Schmitt,
next to the autonomy of culture, aesthetics, morality, science and
economy, would like to found the autonomy of the political. The liberal
answer to the question of the essence or genus of politics is, according
to him, culture. Politics is part of the totality of human thinking and
action. But to Strauss this ‘culturalism’ of liberalism is a first target:
‘. . . the understanding of the political implies a fundamental critique
of at least the prevailing concept of culture.’11 Politics isn’t, as Natorp
said, ‘a province of culture’.
And then Strauss uses a philosophical magic trick: he comes up
with a ‘naturalistic’ conception of culture. Culture is not an autono-
mous conceptual production but the cultivation of nature, whether
that refers to the cultivation of land, or human nature. This cultiva-
tion is not only the care for nature, but also the struggle against it.
Because we conceive of culture as the cultivation of human nature,
culture is the cultivation of the social animal; those are the human
relations before any culture. That is Strauss’ state of nature: ‘Because
we now understand by culture primarily the culture of human nature,
the presupposition of culture is primarily human nature; and because
man is by his nature an animal sociale, the human nature on which
150
culture is based is the natural social relations of men, that is, the
way in which man, prior to all culture, behaves towards other men.
The term for the natural social relations understood in this manner
is status naturalis. One can therefore say: the foundation of culture is
the status naturalis.’12 Culture is the cultivation of nature, so culture
is based on the state of nature. That is simplistic, particularly since it
immediately makes the solitary man of Hobbes into a social animal,
but still presupposes a war of all against all. But temporarily this
magic trick enables Strauss to introduce Hobbes into his discussion
with Schmitt: Hobbes understood the state of nature as a state of
war (not actual war but disposition of war), and in Schmitt’s concep-
tion this possibility of war is the essence of politics. ‘It follows that for
Schmitt the political is the ‘state of nature’ that underlies every cul-
ture.’13 Nature is swiftly equated with war, but that’s glossed over by a
rhetorical trick. Schmitt restores, according to Strauss, the Hobbesian
state of nature in its glory. The fact that Hobbes takes this to be a war
between individuals and Schmitt as one between groups is considered
completely irrelevant to Strauss. This is debatable. But a more impor-
tant difference is this: Hobbes wants to move away from the state of
nature and thus war – by means of a social contract, by the transfer
of power to the sovereign. To Strauss this means abdication from war,
and the abdication of war means a depoliticization. So, Strauss says,
Hobbes ignores the political. In a footnote he even calls Hobbes ‘the
antipolitical thinker’.14
According to Strauss, there is not a full negation of the political
in Hobbes, since the state of nature still exists between states. But the
fundamental difference with Hobbes is, according to Strauss, that for
Schmitt the state can ask its members to die, whereas this is impos-
sible in Hobbes because for him the foundation of sovereignty is the
safeguarding of life. That is the basis of the social contract between
sovereign and his subjects. This is also why Strauss considers Hobbes
the patriarch of liberalism. The right to live is an inalienable human
right (and thus right of nature) to Hobbes. It is the individual’s prior-
ity over the state; it determines its goals and limits: if the sovereign
cannot safeguard the life of his subjects, then the social contract is
annulled. To Strauss, Hobbes lays the foundation of human rights in
its liberal meaning.15 Hobbes differs for Strauss from the later liberal-
ism because the axiom in his analysis is man’s evil character, whereas
later liberals believe in an inherent goodness of man.
According to Strauss the self-image of liberalism is a ‘philosophy
of culture’ and is therefore forgetful of the establishment of culture
in the state of nature ‘that is human nature in its dangerousness and
endangeredness’. Against this negation of the political by Hobbes and
even more so by liberalism, Schmitt holds, in Strauss’s conception, an
affirmation of the political. And with this we can finally fully under-
stand the core formula of Strauss text: ‘the affirmation of the politi-
cal is the affirmation of the state of nature.’ To affirm the political
151
amounts to saying yes to the state of nature, to power politics, to the
right of the strongest, to oppression and above all to war. Yes, also to
the death penalty, yes to total sovereignty which is essentially defined
by the right to take the life of the subjects. If this is the essence of
politics, then indeed, all politics is thanatopolitics. Or conversely
formulated: all thanatopolitics has the state of nature as its hidden
paradigm. At least according to Strauss: ‘the political is the state of
nature that underlies every culture.’ We can formulate this conclusion
even more clearly: all politics has its paradigm in the state of nature
because all politics is thanatopolitics, and necessarily must be. Politi-
cal is not the art of the possible, but the art of death.
The Total State and the Attack on the Autonomy of Spheres

The political has no proper domain, no sphere, but potentially covers
all domains. ‘Every religious, moral, economic, ethnic or other antith-
esis transforms into a political one if it is sufficiently strong to group
human beings effectively according to friend and enemy.’16 The reli-
gious community that fights others is a political unity. Schmitt gives
the example of crusades and holy wars. We involuntarily think of
political Islam, Israeli religious colonists or the Tea Party. It surely
is very topical to understand the rise of fundamentalism in this fash-
ion: fundamentalism is nothing but the becoming political of religion.
The same goes for the working classes which takes the class struggle
seriously: the other class becomes class enemy. Schmitt emphatically
states that in the nineteenth century the domain of economy endur-
ingly becomes political in a double sense: class struggle, but also eco-
nomic property becomes a political power. This constitutes a toning
down of the equation of state and politics. At the end of his essay, after
the rant against liberalism, Schmitt states: ‘Economic antagonisms
can become political, and the fact that economic power position could
arise proves that the point of the political may be reached from the
economic as well as from any other domain’. Or: ‘. . . economics has
become political . . .’17
To Schmitt the political is everywhere: ‘The political can derive
its energy from the most varied human endeavours, from the reli-
gious, economic, moral or other antitheses. It does not describe its own
substance, but only the intensity of an association or dissociation of
human beings . . .’18 That’s crucial: anything can become political and
even worse: politics can absorb anything. To Schmitt there are no sepa-
rate domains of the moral, the aesthetic, the economical, or at least
these neutralizations and depoliticizations are liberal appearance. In
the ‘total state’, that clearly has his approval (in 1932 this is particu-
larly meaningful) anything can become political at any moment.
As a polemical concept against such neutralizations and depo-
liticizations of important domains appears the Total State, which
potentially embraces every domain. This results in the identity of
152
state and society. In such a state, therefore, everything is at least

potentially political . . . 19
This might be one of the most evident instances in which Schmitt

committed himself to totalitarianism. In the total state, the private,
as well as the cultural sphere can become political. That is exactly
what totalitarianism accomplished: the absorption and abolition of the
private sphere (by means of tapping conversations, raids by the SS or

KGB, etcetera) the abolition of the cultural sphere (by purifications in
art and universities – all degenerate elements or class enemies were
sent to camps or liquidated) and the abolition of the economy as pri-
vate sector by a planned economy (five year plans, war economy, or in
any case a politically driven and determined economy). This leads to a
fundamental question: can one plead for an abolition of the autonomy
of the spheres without defending a totalitarian politics? Yes, by betting
on anarchism. But anarchism so far has been a confused and confusing
utopian movement, the history of which is littered with failure.
For Schmitt the choice for the total state is about historic neces-
sity. In an annotation to the second edition from 1932 he adds: ‘The
development can be traced from the absolute state of the eighteenth
century via the neutral (noninterventionist) state of the nineteenth to
the total state of the twentieth century.’20 After a concise summary of
the theories on the relation between state and society from Jacob Bur-
khardt, he characterizes the political situation in Germany (in 1932)
as ‘a situation in which society is no longer integrated into an existing
state (as the German people in the monarchical state of the nine-
teenth century) but should itself integrate into the state.’ And accord-
ing to him, this can only happen in a total (read ‘totalitarian’) state.
‘This situation necessitates the total state . . .’. With great consent he
cites a number of unknown authors like Smend, and this quote by a
certain H. Trescher (admittedly about Hegel’s tenet of the separation
of powers): ‘The most vigorous penetration of all societal spheres by
the state for the general purpose of winning for the entirety of the
state all vital energies of the people.’ Given the date of publication,
one cannot but see an appeal for totale mobilmachung of the national-
socialism, totalitarianism of the worst kind. Schmitt concludes:
In actuality it is the total state which no longer knows

anything absolutely nonpolitical, the state which must do
away with the depoliticizations of the nineteenth century
and which in particular puts an end to the principal that
the apolitical economy is independent of the state and that
the state is apart from the economy. 21
This can count as a call for totalitarian politics.
Behind the merging of economy and politics (that also was the
major point in Leninism which Schmitt admired) one can see clearly
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the penetration of the private sphere by the political, which, next to
the omnipresence of the secret services, leads to the disciplining of the
arts and culture to accord with the official party ideology. Comes with
it the duty for anyone to betray ‘class hostile’, ‘counterrevolutionary’
or ‘race hostile’ postures or statements. The vigorous penetration of all
societal spheres turns this dream of politicization into a nightmare.
In other words, this attack on the autonomy of spheres has ‘serious’
consequences (much more serious then the fact that all art is essen-
tially play and always has been): the rejection of the autonomy of cul-
ture and art as optional entertainment sooner or later turns into the
ruthless purification against artists and intellectuals. That is a given
from the outset. The conception of the private-sphere and personal
freedoms as narrow-minded, petit bourgeois liberal, and obsolete is
a license for state terror. The Total State, in which nothing is apoliti-
cal, knows no private life. A schoolbook example of this is the Hitler-
jugend that made children betray their parents. This omnipresent
betrayal is the hallmark of all totalitarian regimes. And all art and
culture are completely at the service of the state, all other art is deca-
dent, degenerate or class hostile, reactionary and must therefore be
exterminated. In all totalitarian states the autonomy of the arts must
be liquidated: the purification of the universities, the incarceration
of artists and intellectuals (as race- or class enemies) is then logical
and inevitable. One has therefore to be alarmed whenever politicians
advocate interference with culture.
Strauss too emphasizes in his commentary that politics is not an
autonomous area next to others, and he does so exactly from the con-
ception of politics as thanatopolitics:
. . . war is the dire emergency not merely within an ‘auton-

omous’ region – the region of the political – but for man
simply, because war has and retains a ‘relationship to the
real possibility of physical killing’; this orientation, which
is constitutively for the political, shows that the political
is fundamental and not a ‘relatively independent domain’
alongside others. The political is ‘the authoritative’.22
This connection between the deadliness of politics and the rejection

of the autonomy of the spheres is essential. Clearly put: whoever is
against the autonomy of the spheres, chooses totalitarian politics as
thanatopolitics. Or he must believe in a stateless (benign) anarchy.
According to Strauss Schmitt is out to defend a certain ‘seri-
ousness’. If the political, i.e. war, disappears and culture becomes
autonomous, then culture will become entertainment. After a typically
Strausian reading of a Schmitt citation in which he digs up the word
‘entertainment’ as if it was a piece of crystal, he writes: ‘. . . politics
and the state are the only guarantee against the world becoming
a World of entertainment, a world of amusement, a world without
154
seriousness.’23 To Strauss life loses its seriousness when culture pro-

gresses towards autonomy. He and Schmitt want to defend this seri-
ousness on moral grounds. The sophisms of Strauss reach uncanny
heights here: warmongering as such must be defended in the name of
the most fundamental and therefore highest moral. Short-circuiting
two key formulas, he states: ‘the affirmation of the political is ulti-
mately nothing other than the affirmation of the moral.’24 In other
words: the state of nature, the war of all against all, is the core of all
morality. But Hobbes was more lucid: in the state of nature there is
no morality, and there can be no morality or law (except for the right
to self-defense and the right of the strongest), which is precisely why
such terrible things happen during moments of lawlessness in both
civil and regular war. To make that into the basis of morality is pure
sophism. This is (extreme) right Nietzscheanism.
This heroic morality, which finds its ultimate foundation in
the sacrifice of life and the possibility of death, is the morality of an
authoritarian totalitarianism and aggressive militarism. Good politics
is martial politics. All warlike sentiments should therefore be encour-
aged – regardless of what is being fought for, Strauss says explicitly.
‘Therefore the affirmation of the political as such is the affirmation of
fighting as such, wholly irrespective of what is being fought for.’25 This
affirmation of fighting as such, regardless of the cause, one could call
political hooliganism. But to Strauss it is a moral calling. A battle-
front must be made against the enemies of politics: the liberal concep-
tion that defines politics as an open debate (Schmitt made this clear
in his Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy), and so as a pacification.
Strauss goes quite far:
He who affirms the political as such respects all who want

to fight; he is just as tolerant as liberals – but with the
opposite intention: whereas the liberal respects and toler-
ates all ‘honest’ convictions so long as they merely acknowl-
edge the legal order, peace, as sacrosanct, he who affirms
the political as such respects and tolerates all ‘serious’ con-
victions, that is, all decisions oriented to the real possibility
of war.
That is clear. Be warned for the defenders of this sort of seriousness.

To be concrete: Bush and Cheney, but also Osama Bin Laden and Al
Qaida deserve more respect than Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Des-
mond Tutu or Mandela.
But the attack on liberalism is only a prelude. Liberalism is
pushed aside with contempt as a neutral obstruction to seeing the
real enemy. The world historic battle that Schmitt sees, according to
Strauss, is this:
The polemic against liberalism can therefore only signify a con-
155
comitant or preparatory action; it is meant to clear the field for
the decisive battle between the ‘spirit of technicity’, the ‘mass
faith that inspires an anti-religious this-worldly activism’ and
the opposite spirit and faith, which, as it seems, still has no
name.
This quote deserves further elaboration. First of all, it is not difficult to

recognize communism in the ‘anti-religious this-worldly activism’. And
that which does not have a name in 1928 to Strauss (or Schmitt? – the
confusion is complete, and certainly intended by Strauss), has taken
many shapes by now: catholic conservatism, fascism, national-social-
ism, Frankism, neo-conservatism, fundamentalism. Strauss’ contribu-
tion to it lies in the fact that he became the philosophical patriarch of
American neoconservatism. Now we finally understand their conviction
that only militarism can save the world (or at least the United States).
Whether that conviction is sincere or not is beside the issue, because
politics, according to Strauss (not necessarily to Schmitt) is acted out
with the use of ‘pious lies’ and ‘noble fictions’.
Secondly we can remark that Schmitt’s opposition between ‘the
spirit of technicity’ and ‘what does not yet have a name’ is a rare occur-
rence of (Heideggerian?) blindness: Fascism was imbued with this
spirit of technicity (the romantic notions of the ‘Volkische’, ‘Heimat’ and
‘nature’ were only ideological decoration). The spirit of technicity can
of course be clearly detected in communism, fascism as well as neocon-
servatism. All three are technophile ideologies. In relation to neocon-
servatism, I think of course of the Rebuilding America’s defenses report
by The Project for a New American Century, in which pleas for a ‘space
force’ and paeans to a technological ‘revolution in military affairs’ are all
over the place. They dominate the entire document. And now we know
why: if war (of all states against all states) is the core of the political,
and the and the essence of all technology (or the motor behind it) is war
technology, then technology in itself is essential to (this form of total)
politics. One could call this the syllogism of thanatopolitics. A third and
final remark (to the Strauss citation above): we should realize once and
for all that we must be weary of political thinkers who summon a politi-
cal battle for a spirit and a belief which does not yet have a name.
From the Total State to the Abolition of the State

The political theory of Schmitt (and Strauss to a lesser extend) has
deeply influenced some Italian thinkers. The Schmittian conception
of politics has penetrated the left. One could speak of left-Schmitti-
anism: Mario Tronti, Negri and Hardt, Paulo Virno to a lesser extend
and certainly Giorgio Agamben. Maybe Strauss had a point when
he stated: ‘. . . the ultimate quarrel occurs not between bellicosity
and pacificm (or between nationalism and internatinonalism) but
between the “authoritarian and anarchistic theories”.’26 Whereas
Schmitt dreams of a Total State, where anything can become political
156
at any moment, they dream of the total absence of the state. Schmitt’s
authoritarian statism has become an anarchistic anti-statism. These
thinkers try to think a post state condition. The multitude is crucial:
in taking back its sovereignty for the abolition of Empire it can make
way for a new sort of anarcho-communism. The demand of sovereignty
by the multitude is, in Negri and Hardt or Virno, the crux of political
theory. They only fail to fill it in and only praise the possibilities of the
multitude, of creative producers in a postfordist era. The multitude,

however, was already a concept used in Hobbes’ texts. The multitude
is present, but has been forced to abandon its sovereignty to get away
from the anarchy and chaos of the state of nature. Full sovereignty
is possessed by everyone in the state of nature and this sovereignty
must be abandoned. In Hobbes, the multitude is the reason there
cannot be a people’s sovereignty: the multitude can never reach a
decision. The fundamental dream of the operaists, is the activation
of the multitude. It presupposes full sovereignty: it presupposes that
the Leviathan comes to life conversely: sovereignty is reclaimed. The
(economical) communism of capital becomes political: communism
of the multitude. That’s the almost mystical leap of faith that Negri
and Hardt and other ‘operaists’ make. But they fail to explain how
this has to come about. That the postfordist labor is a communicative,
creative and collective labor, which can emancipate the creative pro-
ducers is plausible, but how one translates this into a political libera-
tion and the undoing of the Empire, is yet to be made clear. (Occupy
Wall Street and the Indignado movement was a signal of hope, but
also proved that forcing the system to change is not so easy, these self
organized insurrections, or jacqueries as Negri and Hardt call them,
tend to extinguish as quickly as firecrackers).
There is an important parallel with rightwing political think-
ers, the neoconservatives (with Strauss as their patriarch): these
‘(extreme) leftist’ thinkers too are against the liberal or social demo-
cratic division of autonomous spheres. For Agamben there is no
autonomous aesthetic, moral, or economic sphere. That is: this auton-
omy is regarded by him as deadly to culture. Whomever defends such
a ‘total’ conception of politics runs the risk that his theory ultimately
becomes an vindication for politics as a matter of life and death –
thanatopolitics. Perhaps the critique of biopolitics is less urgent, less
fundamental than the critique of the politics of death. Since the Homo
Sacer cycle of Agamben there is a tendency to regard biopolitics as the
worst of the worst: the camp as biopolitical paradigm of the planet,
with Guantánamo as its new embodiment, extending to biometrical
control, body scans, etcetera. Perhaps that conception looks different
when measured up against thanotopolitics. Or perhaps the attacks
on biopolitics, the critique of it especially in Agamben, looks different
when one realizes that these critics defend a politics of love (beyond
the law), heavely inspired by the Christian (Franciscan) tradition
(in Negri and Hardt Commomwealth there is an entire chapter on
157
love), but eventually hold on to a schmittian definition of politics, and
therefore a conception of politics as thanatopolitics. Politics as ‘war
with different means’ can indeed also express revolutionary politics or
anarchist terrorism (or the Messianic figure of it). The moment every-
one talks of biopolitics, thanatopolitics returns.
Introduction of Zoöpolitics
Biopolitics is a fashionable but vague term. It has become a container
concept. And it is almost exclusively used in a pejorative sense, which
is odd because it does not align with the meaning Foucault gave to it.
In Foucault it is used to correct his own theories focused on discipline.
Apart from the discipline that is inscribed on the individual body, the
new regulating biopolitics is focused not on the subjects or citizens
but on the population – in the sense of demographic, biologic and sta-
tistical population. Next to the old sovereignty, which lets people live
yet has the right to take life (the right of the sword), biopolitics is a
new strategy of power. It gives life, and the examples of Foucault are
certainly not negative: the rise of hygiene, the sanitation of swamps,
urbanism, health care, prevention and information etcetera. In his
sketch on the rise of social medicine this is quite apparent.27
Disciplining happened mostly through institutions (on which
Foucault had written his most well-known genealogies: the clinic, the
asylum, the prison). Biopolitics on the contrary was mostly a matter
of the state. Biopolitics is the spearhead of the modern state, espe-
cially the welfare state. Demographics and urbanism are the sciences
that regulate and improve the living conditions of the populations.
Foucault catches this equation of discipline and biopolitics in a typical
enumeration: ‘So we have two series: the body-organism-discipline-
institutions series, and the population-biological processes-regulatory
mechanisms- State’. The footnote to this sentence is telling: ‘The
manuscript has “assuring” in place of “regulatory.”’28 ‘Assuring’ has
a clearly positive meaning of guarantying, securing, catering for. We
presume Foucault adapted his choice of words in his lecture for the
symmetry of his argumentation. Yet it is significant. It is this ‘assur-
ing’ meaning of biopolitics that becomes dominant in the welfare
state and that, oddly enough, is least emphasized in what one could
call ‘the critique of biopolitics’. For sure Foucault sees the danger in a
thorough biopolitics. But only when it coincides with thanatopolitics
and discipline, as in Nazism, does biopolitics become hideous. It is in
a sense strange that literature these days – strongly influenced by
Agamben – dismisses biopolitics completely.29
In a book review on a biology text in which it is shown that
races are on their way toward ‘deracialization’, Foucault writes lyri-
cally: ‘We can see formulated here in all clarity a “biohistory” that is
not the unitary and mythological history of the human species and
a “biopolitics” which would not be that of divisions, conservations
and hierarchies, but one of communication and polymorphism.’30 So,
158
according to Foucault, there is clearly a possibility of ‘good’ biopolitics.

In any case: a mere negative image of biopolitics is not consistent
with Foucault’s conception of it. One could conclude that Agamben’s
critique of biopolitics is based on confusion of concepts. In his work
biopolitics – in spite of Foucault – becomes a dark force. It is the
reduction of life (bios) to bare life (zoë). This is done by the ban of the
sovereign: the outlaw (the ‘illegal migrants’ or ‘nonlegal enemy com-
battants’ of Guantánamo) is homo sacer. The concentration camp is

then ‘the biopolitical paradigm of the planet’. This, however, projects
the thanotopolitics under fascism onto the biopolitics of the welfare
state. That is confusing the terms. The camps are not biopolitics, but
thanatopolitics in its most literal and horrific expression.
The fact that the welfare state has decreased infant mortality
is certainly a form of biopolitics, but to label it as a dark force right
away seems incorrect and not useful. Biopolitics is one of the achieve-
ments of the modern state, of modern politics. The so-called ‘popula-
tion transit’, the democratization of life expectancy, is without a doubt
of world historic importance. A realization which must be considered,
from the viewpoint of a history of the longue durée, as one of the
goals of all politics: the idea of the good life in the polis has always
been coupled with the good life of the individual, and the good life is
a long life since time immemorial. Hence we see a history of attempts
to prolong life: first through mysticism (Taoism and Buddhism) then
through ancient care for the self (Epicurism and Stoa), later through
modern medicine and the biopolitics of the welfare state.
The new biopolitics, which Agamben is after – think of biomet-
rics, body scans, etcetera and the obsession with security and secu-
rity technology that has spread since 9/11, or the reduction of illegal
immigrants to bare life,– do not work on the level of the population,
but on the level of the individual and are a form of discipline. So they
should be categorized, in Foucault’s terms, as technologies of disci-
pline, rather than of regulation, let alone ‘assurance’. This is why we
plea to catch these forms of politics with the term zoöpolitics. Just
as biopolitics is the protection of bare life (zoë) – by means of care in
body culture, hygiene, information, child care, social medicine, urban-
ism, etcetera by giving it rights, by means of citizenship, culture, and
by doing so turning zoè into bios, not bare life but ‘clothed’ life, clad-
ded with rights and embedded in culture – zoöpolitics is the reduction
of humans to bare life, whether it involves body scans or the rightless-
ness of illegal immigrants.
The distinction between bios and zoë, that underpins the entire
Homo Sacer cycle, in fact calls for a division between biopolitics and
zoöpolitics. We are convinced that this term could clarify the too nega-
tive conception of biopolitics significantly. Biometrics, body screening
and all these techniques, if we follow Foucault’s reasoning, cannot be
understood as biopolitics. This is why we introduce zoöpolitics. This is
not just a matter of scholastics with concepts. Zoöpolitics is the point
159
where biopolitics transforms into thanatopolitics. We need just to
think of Guantánamo or Abu Ghraib, and the abstraction in the ter-
minology becomes nauseatingly concrete. Biopolitics in contrast could,
as it appears in Foucault’s texts and especially in the book review in
a lyrical, almost utopian, at least hopeful light, be transformed into
cosmopolitics: caring and catering for all life in the ecosystem, human
and non-human.
The Return of Thanatopolitics

The return of thanatopolitics is not just expressed theoretically. Ever
since 9/11 death politics is back with a vengeance. The war on terror
is not just a global state of emergency, but a permanent, infinite war.
In Afghanistan, Iraq, and Israel, politics is consciously exercised as
thanatopolitics: politics as permanent war. In his book, Israel’s occu-
pation, Neve Gordon asks himself why Israel’s occupation has caused
relatively few victims between the Nakbah (1948) and the first Inti-
fada (1987) and why the number of victims is rising ever since. His
hypothesis is that the Israeli politics of domination by hegemony/paci-
fication has failed and so Israel now turns to oppression.31 In other
words: a transition from (bio)politics to thanatopolitics. This hypoth-
esis has – so to speak – become prophetic: the massive attack on the
Gaza strip in December 2008 began on a Saturday at noon when chil-
dren were leaving school and was meant to cause as many casualties
as possible, in line with the archetypical Israeli shock-and-awe theory;
the so called madman theory.32
Admittedly, Negri is aware of this return of thanatopolitics in
the contemporary Empire in the form of a permanent war and the
planetary state of emergency. ‘In today’s “metapolitics” . . . peace
appears to be merely the continuation of war by other means. An
entirely relative alterity of a policing action continuously exercised
over the globalized polis, under the state-of-exception jurisdiction of
never-ending war.’ And Negri links it explicitly to the Schmittian con-
ception of politics: ‘Peace is no longer the “solution” of war [but] the
procedural condition inherent to the conduct of war founded on the
distinction between friend and enemy. In this context . . . Schmittian
decisionism . . . now serves Empire.’33
This affirmation of politics as an affirmation of the state of
nature is the underlying thought of American neoconservatives. It’s
not accidently that a number of them are self-proclaimed Strauss-
ians. All of them hold the thesis that, since Thucydides, politics has
been war, and that for this reason the United Nations (UN) has no
role in international politics. Richard Perle’s comment shortly after
the illegal attack on Iraq, ‘Thank God the UN is dead’, is and remains
symptomatic. This affirmation of the state of nature as a perma-
nent readiness for war and as essence of politics naturally amounts
to a leading role for imperial America. Pax Americana, or the state
of nature, comes down to this: the hegemon, the international ‘pre-
160
eminent power’ as they call it themselves, can only exist based on the
political affirmation that between states there is state of nature. The
hegemony of the strongest state presupposes there cannot be interna-
tional law, let alone an institution above states. The American neocon-
servatives basically plead for the right of the strongest.
A hypothesis in this context could be that neoconservative poli-
tics, which blossomed under George W. Bush’s administration, will
continue in more subtle ways, such as in the politics of Blair, which

was neoliberalism with a human face (Obama’s policy is not much
more than neoconservative international politics with a human face).
One could conceptualize neoconservatism as the open or latent para-
digm of international politics in the West today. In fact – and this is
our hypothesis – all international politics today is dominated by some
form of neoconservatism, or at least neoconservatism is the dominant
paradigm in international politics.
The war on terror could be taken as a planetary state of emer-
gency, but under current political conditions one could speak of
‘entropic empire’. A mix of emergency conditions, exceptionalism and
the state of nature, an international legal order as an eternal war
without a true sovereign. This new chaotic world condition can only be
restrained by a Pax Americana (or another dominating world power).
Indeed the return of the state of nature, functions or could function as
neoconservative doom prophesy. The reason is simple: Pax Americana
or chaos. Because for neocons politics is always and essentially a war
of all against all, and finds its logic in the right of the strongest, there
is a need for a sovereign who creates order. The preeminence of Amer-
ica means that America is the world’s police force. The work of Robert
Kaplan is such a neoconservative dooms prophesy. In Warrior ethos,
he bluntly pleads for a culture of warmongering.34
A Plea for Cosmopolitics

The conception of politics as essentially thanatopolitics reduces all
politics to executive power. But real politics begins with the division
of power. The rest is tyranny, dictatorship, or anarchy; either state of
emergency or state of nature. Tyranny and anarchy, the state of emer-
gency ad the state of nature, are extremes of politics, not its poles.
They fall outside of politics so to speak. In the state of nature of anar-
chy and the dictatorship of the state of emergency there is in a certain
sense no space for politics. The political becomes completely absorbed
by censorship, fear, and repression, or by chaos, anarchy, mafia prac-
tices, warlords, gangs, etcetera. Both extremes are the end of the
political (if need be one could also situate them before the beginning
of politics). Schmitt correctly calls civil war proto-politics. If that’s
correct, we ought to call war metapolitics or at most hyperpolitics.35
Politics must always try to avoid and exclude these extremes. It is the
task – if not the definition – of politics itself: to exercise the art of the
polis (we follow Mouffe, Laclau and Rancière in this).
161
In contrast to the Straussian glorification of the state of nature
as the definition of politics, we start from the opposite: politics is
the incessant ‘annihilation’ of the state of nature. Its essence is
not war but words, the transformation of war in a discursive order,
debate and deliberation; in laws and policy plans, in checks and bal-
ances. Because the political is not about friend or enemy, but about
the transformation of it in opponents. It starts with the division of
powers. The Schmittian/Straussian conception of politics is paleopoli-
tics, for it regresses to an archaic concept of politics before the division
of powers and modern forms of policy. If from a Straussian perspective
that is seen as ‘antipolitics’,36 then so be it.
True politics today, can only be cosmopolitics,37 in the sense of
cosmopolitan and cosmic and cosmological: both ecological and global.
A politics on a planetary scale, via open discussion and compromise,
via checks and balances, that aims at a just order between people,
and a lasting peace with nature. How can we think this cosmopoli-
tics? Perhaps we ought to consult old Kant. More precisely we must
consult a footnote in a late text. ‘Idea of a Universal History from a
Cosmopolitan Perspective’ (Idee zu einer Algemeinen Geschichte in
Weltbürgerlicher Absicht). Let’s summarize this text shortly to contex-
tualize the footnote. The biggest problem nature set up for man is the
accomplishment of a civil state of law (The Rechtsstat), in which the
greatest possible freedom is accompanied with its own limitation in
order to secure the freedom of others. But because everyone misuses
his freedom, this civil state is difficult and happened late. ‘Only the
progression towards this idea is given to us by nature’. It is an eternal
task. Without international law that regulates the relations between
states, the complete social organization cannot be realized. The antag-
onism between states, says Kant, can only be solved by a League of
Nations. One can conceive of the history of humanity as the process
of realization of a hidden plan of nature: the complete national and
international social and legal order as the only situation in which all
potentialities of the human species can blossom.
The fact that this was realized some 150 years later gives Kant’s
vision quite an impressive aura. The philosophical attempt, Kant holds,
to think history as a hidden plan of nature that is after unity in man-
kind, must be held as possible and advantageous. Kant suggests, in other
words, that when we realize we are on our way, we will be less likely to
get lost. If we do as if there is a plan, we might actually realize it.
We know Kant wanted to answer three questions in his three
critiques: What can I know? What must I do? And: What may I hope
for? After answering the first and the second question in Kritik der
reinen Vernunft and Kritik der praktischen Vernunft that third ques-
tion remained largely unanswered in Kritik der Urteilskraft. The fact
that there is purposefulness in nature, which we conceive as beauty,
as purposefulness without purpose (like flowers, or derived from that
natural beauty, art), is not yet hope.
162
In this remarkable footnote in this late text on history, Kant

finally answers his third question:
We do not know what is the fortune of inhabitants and

nature of other planets. When we however complete our
task given by nature, then we can pride ourselves for
having quite a rank amongst our neighbours in the cosmic
building [unter unseren Nachbaren im Weltgebäude]. Per-

haps with them every individual can find his destination in
life. With us, things are different: we can only cherish hope
to realize this in the entire species.38
What may I hope for? Well, that humanity one day will become one as
a species and will establish an international legal order. The fact that
Kant felt he needed to start talking about extraterrestrial creatures,
might sound unexpected, but there is still enough common sense in
the text. Only our species can hope for its fulfillment. However the
fortunes of our neighbours in the universe (whether they exist or not),
who might be able to achieve perfection as individuals – for our spe-
cies it can only be done collectively, not by biological perfecting (Kant
clearly did not think of plastic surgery making people look like extra-
terrestrials, or about genetic engineering), but socio-political perfect-
ing.
The destiny of progress is, according to Kant, the self determina-
tion of mankind. The enlightenment or illumination of Kant is to dare
to know that this is it: our collective journey through history is the
highest achievement of the idea ‘humanity’. Only in a national and
international legal order can humankind find – as a species, not as
individuals – its perfection. And that is an everlasting task. Derrida
pleads, fully in concord to Kant, in his later writings and interviews,
for a democracy that is always to come, and that must take shape in
many forms, as the messianicity without messianism of the alterglo-
balist movements but also as a continuous reform and reinforcement
of the United Nations.
Kant’s footnote, in fact, contains the entire problem of human-
kind and its history. Not only in cosmopolitical but even in cosmic per-
spective. Can it be avoided that it has something comical? In any case,
with his text, Kant lays the foundation of what is recently dubbed
(by Stengers and Latour) cosmopolitics. For an ecological-socially just
world order is not possible without an international legal order. In
times of globalization humankind de facto has become one. It is about
time for us to realize and to find structures to cope with that. The
current crisis in politics is nothing other than the helplessness in the
face of this challenge. It is from the perspective of the universe, and
so from the perspective of Kant’s hypothetical extraterrestrials (or at
least astronauts who saw the earth for the first time as a blue planet),
that we can see earth and the world as an inevitable unity.
163
What Kant might have really wanted to say, with his allegory
of extraterrestrials is this: man will always be human, all too human.
There is no hope for man to become perfect (neither as an individual,
nor as a species) – so Kant is not a utopian who believes in self crea-
tion of mankind, in the feasibility of the New Man. But there is hope
that the norms and institutions will progress and that ‘the tradition
of enlightenments’ (as he calls it), the handing down of illuminations,
will continue, like that of our inventions and tools and our emancipa-
tions, as ‘a tradition of reliefs’. Emancipation and liberation do not
bring about fulfillment but relief, Habermas rightly pointed out. On
top of that, the tradition of enlightenment is invariably threatened.
Today again, and that’s why conceiving history as a plan, according
to Kant’s keen insight, is helpful to realize that plan. The plan thus
has an as if structure: we act as if there is a plan. We can fulfill this
plan, but if we leave it be, tyranny and chaos will rule. That’s what
we are experiencing today: we have lost the power to read our history
as a plan. The map of history has been yanked from our hands by the
storm that progress has become (according to the well known image of
Benjamin in ‘The Theses on the Concept of History’).
We see only one alternative: an ecological and socially just world
politics. If we consider the ecological catastrophe as the third state of
nature,39 another world is and remains not only possible but neces-
sary. This paradox remains true: ‘One cannot make a better world
without abolishing it. Making a better world means to go against its
abolition’.40 The question is how? Well, by realizing what we are up
against, and by accepting this challenge. Radical but not extremist.
An eco-social, democratic world system is the only good option given
globalization and global warming. Cosmopolitics must strive for a
global governance that forms an alternative to permanent war and
the intolerable exploitation of nature. If thanatopolitics derived from
an archaic sovereign and biopolitics from the modern state, then the
urgent question today will be: will humankind invent an agency that
can realize this cosmopolitics.
The forecasts are ominous and time is against us. Thanatopoli-
tics is expanding. We see a return to the old ‘unilateral’, warlike
‘deadly’ sovereignty: Iraq, Afghanistan, Gaza. Elsewhere we see a
relapse into the state of nature: Sudan, East Congo, Somalia, Ivory
Coast, even Mexico and Columbia, etcetera. On the other hand biopol-
itics in the welfare state can no longer face the combination of neolib-
eral hegemony, overpopulation, migration and climate change. Since
9/11, zoöpolitics, the reduction to bare life, is superseding biopolitics,
the care for bare life. If we don’t succeed in realizing cosmopolitics,
Entropic Empire will reign. Entropic Empire, as a monstrous com-
bination between the planetary state of emergency (the diffuse and
permanent war against terror) and the relapse into the state of
nature (the failed states, the state ending – like in Iraq – dominance
by chaos, civil war engineering); as a name for the New World Disor-
164
der, is what we have to learn to see and at the same time it is a name
for what we have to avoid at all costs.
Notes
1 Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, expanded edition, Trans-
lation, notes and introduction by Georges Shwab, With ‘the age of
neutralizations and depoliticizations’ (1929) translated by Matthias
Conzen en John P. McCormick, wih Leo Strauss’s essay Notes on

Schmitt’s essay, translated by J. Harvey Lomax, Foreword by Tracy
B. Strong, Chicago University Press, Chicago, 2007 (1996), 26.
2 Ibid., 33.
3 Michel Foucault, ‘La technologie politique des individus’, in: idem,
Dits et Ecrits II, 1976-1988, Gallimard, Paris 2001, 1645.
4 This foreword is not included in the English edition. Therefore
we refer to the Dutch edition. Carl Schmitt, Het begrip politiek,
Boom, Amsterdam 2001, 46 (translation ours).
5 Ibid., 47.
6 We are referring to Die Geistesgeschichtlichen Lage der heutigen
Parlementarismus, an essay Schmitt published in 1923, and to
which Der Begriff des Politischen was the sequel. Published in
English as: The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy, translated by
Ellen Kennedy, MIT press, Cambridge, MA, London, 1988 (1985).
7 Leo Strauss, ‘Notes on Carl Schmitt, concept of the political’
[1928], in; Carl Schmitt, University of Chicago Press, Chicago,
1996, 118.
8 Schmitt writes that in current politics there is no other coher-
ent system or political theory but liberalism. Strauss ‘interprets’:
there is need for ‘another system’ opposed to liberalism. Strauss
radicalizes Schmitt all the time and makes him say things that –
strictly speaking – are not in the original text. In a sense, Strauss
forces Schmitt to become more explicit, but in doing so he manip-
ulates the text. In his later writings this becomes his method.
With Strauss it never becomes completely clear who is speaking:
Strauss or the author he cites. Undoubtedly this follows from his
esoteric style of thought.
9 Strauss, op. cit. (note 1), 84.
10 See on this esoteric method of Strauss: Sadia Drury, The political
Ideas of Leo Strauss, Palgrave, 2005 (1988). See also ‘The Tyrant
as Messiah’ elsewhere in this book.
12 Ibid., 105.
13 Ibid. (our emphasis)
14 Ibid. 108.
15 This thesis is from a more liberal angel also defended by Quentin
Skinner, in Hobbes and Republican Liberty, Cambridge Univer-
sity Press, Cambridge 2008.
16 Schmitt, op. cit. (note 1), 37.
165
17 Ibid., 78.
18 Schmitt, op. cit. (note 1), 38.
19 Ibid., 22.
20 Ibid., 22-23.
21 Ibid., 25.
22 Strauss, ‘Notes on Carl Schmitt, concept of the political’, in ibid.,
104.
23 Strauss, ibid., 116.
24 Ibid., 117.
25 Ibid., 120.
27 Michel Foucault ‘La naissance de la médecine sociale’ in: idem, Dits
et Ecrits II, op. cit. (note 3), 207-228. A very important text from
1974, since it corrects his earlier works on madness, prisons and the
birth of the clinic, where he still argues from his fixation on disci-
pline (as the will to power that inscribes itself on unwilling bodies).
28 Michel Foucault, ‘Society Must be Defended’, Lectures at the
Collège de France 1975-1976, Picador, New York, 2003, 250.
29 Negri and Hardt do correct this in Commonwealth. They call the
informational, networked labour based on creativity and com-
munication ‘biopolitical production’, because it involves human
nature in a vital way: language, intelligence, communication.
But that, opposite to Agamben’s narrowing of the term to a sort
of repressive control, is a very loose, broad, vague, almost nonde-
script notion of biopolitical: all labour of all ages, has in a sense
been biopolitical. ‘Generic production’, or ‘immaterial production’
which involves the generic capacities of man as man (language,
intelligence, communication, collaboration) – as Virno uses the
concept in his Grammar of the Multitude – is more helpful. (See
on this concept of generic production: Rudi Laermans, ‘the prom-
ises of commonalism’, in Lieven De Cauter, Ruben De Roo and
Karel Vanhaesebrouck (eds.), Art and Activism in the Age of Glo-
balization, NAi Publishers, 2011).
30 Michel Foucault, ‘Bio-histoire et biopolitique’, in: idem, Dits et
écrits, II, op. cit. (note 3), 97. My translation.
31 Neve Gordon, Israel’s Occupation, University of California Press,
Berkeley, 2008.
32 See ‘the rise of rogue states’ elsewhere in this book.
33 Eric Allié & Antonio Negri, ‘Peace and War’, available online:
http://www.16beavergroup.org/mtarchive/archives/001688.php
[accessed November 2011].
34 See on this cult of war, Peter Sloterdijk’s Zorn und Zeit [Rage and
Time].
35 The term post-politics has understandably been reserved for gov-
ernance and consensus politics, good governance as management
instead of politics based on real political choices, that is: house
holding rather than state affairs, economy rather than politics.
166
36 I use the word antipolitical in line with Strauss’s reasoning that

Hobbes is a antipolitical philosopher because he holds that the
state/the sovereign should protect life (if not: the social contract is
null and void). It is extremely important that the social contract
in Hobbes ends whenever the sovereign no longer protects, but
threatens his civilians.
37 Cosmopolitics is a term used by Isabelle Stengers and Bruno Latour.
38 Immanuel Kant, ‘Idee zu einer allgemeinen Geschichte in
Weltbürgerlichen Absicht’, in: id., Schriften zur Anthropologie,
Geschichtsphilosophie, Politik und Pädogogik I, Immanuel Kant
Werkausgabe, XI, Wilhelm Weischedel (ed.), Suhrkamp, Frankfurt
am Main, 1977, 41 (our translation).
39 See ‘The BeWILDerment of Pentheus’ elsewhere in this book.
40 From my Book of Openings (manuscript).
168
The Return of the

State of Nature
Entropic Empire
(Synopsis)
[2009]
Reflect #09
169
The state of nature is back. Hobbes’ ‘war of all against all’ was a
philosophical fiction about prehistoric Man, but might come true in
posthistory: a latent universal civil war seems to be a potential para-
digm in the Age of Disaster. In many ways the state of nature can be
considered as a re-emerging reality: chaos and anarchy in Somalia,
Eastern Congo, Sudan . . . But ecological disasters also confront us
with chaos and anarchy. Think of Hurricane Katrina. Furthermore,
in neoconservative politics, ‘state ending’ has become a new form of
imperial rule in Iraq and Afghanistan. The slogan, ‘we will bomb them
back to the stone age’, should be taken seriously. ‘Civil war engineer-
ing’ is now part of Empire.
Beside these dire realities, there is also a certain mesmerizing
effect: the fascination for the state of nature runs deep in the libidinal
economy of our time. Reality TV games (like Survivor) are playing the
return to nature as/in liminal, heterotopian space, but also as a war
of all against all. These ‘psychotic games’ are symptoms of our age: no
limit between in and out (play and reality), deregulating rules, no fair
play. The fascination with these games is symptomatic of neoliberal
capitalism as the rule of universal competition and maybe even a
premonition of coming constellations. So we believe the old ‘fictitious’
idea of the state of nature should be brought to the fore as an alterna-
tive approach to the ongoing debates, especially to Agamben’s very
influential paradigm of the state of exception (or, in more Anglo-Saxon
phrasing, state of emergency or martial law).
Indeed, we tried to show it could be a true contemporary para-
digm: the Agambenian state of emergency or state of exception (with
the concentration camp as its embodiment) is a top-down excess of
sovereignty (the suspension of the law in favour of martial law), whilst
the state of nature is a bottom-up absence of sovereignty (the absence
of law as implosion of the society into anarchy or chaos). So we hope to
be able to complement Agamben’s paradigm with another one. The war
on terror was certainly a planetary state of exception: the Patriot Act,
the Military Commissions Act, presidential signing orders, torture,
and extraordinary rendition. It even had concentration camps: Guan-
tánamo and an unknown number of ‘secret prisons’. But this state of
exception cannot be the all encompassing paradigm to understand the
political landscape of the twenty-first century (as the age of perma-
nent war, dualization and polarisation, and, most probably, permanent
catastrophe). State of exception and state of nature are opposites, but
extremes touch. The notion of ‘bare life’ links the two. In both para-
digms of dissolution or emergency people lose the protection of citizen-
ship (bios) and their bare life (zoé) is exposed. Both the suspension
and the implosion of the ‘body politic’, expose the ‘body natural’ (to use
Hobbes’s analogy).
One of the political targets of this research on the state of nature
was neoconservatism in general, and its mastermind, Leo Strauss,
170
in particular. Strauss is a political thinker worth focusing on, as –

overtly and latently, consciously or unconsciously – neoconservatism
is today one of the most compelling and ambitious visions of politics.
In the West, in a sense, it is the hegemonic paradigm in international
politics. The motto of our research could be this phrase from Leo
Strauss as a comment on Schmitt’s definition of politics as residing
in the distinction between friend and enemy and nothing else: ‘The
affirmation of the political is the affirmation of the state of nature.’ If
The Return of the State of Nature
politics knows no other criterion than the distinction between friend

and foe, then politics is the art of war with other means. Right must
then be the right of the strongest, and politics a permanent war. This
is not the state of exception as a top down suspension of the law as
the essence and excess of sovereignty, but a bottom up suspension
of legality as absence of (international) sovereignty. In international
relations, every state is a rogue state. In this conception all politics is
essentially – Schmitt and Strauss are almost graphically clear on this
– thanato-politics: politics of death.
Local re-emerging states of nature are part and parcel of the
emerging New Spatial Disorder. We can see an emerging political
landscape polarized between state terrorism and non-state terror-
ism, between hyper-states (US/EU/China/Russia), infra-states (failed
states), and satellite states. In the Pentagon’s New Map, which makes
a distinction between the ‘integrating core’ and ‘the non-integrated
gap’, the state of exception could be the ultimate paradigm of ‘the
core’ and the state of nature that of ‘the non integrated gap’ (with
Africa as gravitation centre, as black hole).
It is important to note that the theme of the state of nature is
vital for architects and urban planners to be able to understand the
new spatial order on ‘the planet of slums’. Slums are much easier to
theorize as a state of nature (bottom up absence of sovereignty) than
as state of exception (top down excess of sovereignty). The ‘naked city’
is not a (concentration) camp.
What we called the implosion of the polis, is part of all the emer-
gencies the planet is facing and which are closer to a return to the
nature state than to the state of emergency (or state of exception).
‘The return of the state of nature’ as a project was really about con-
ceptualizing the emerging emergencies due to overpopulation, global
warming, and neoliberal/neo-imperial globalization. The local relapses
into the state of nature constitute the outer rim of what we have
called ‘the capsular civilization’. One could call it the ‘Mad Max-phase
of globalization’.
To structure the field we made a distinction between three
states of nature: the first state of nature is the speechless body that is
always underneath the speaking, socialized human; it is the ineffabil-
ity of the body as bare life. The second state of nature is the myth of
a society before a society, before and after polity, corresponding to the
possibility of a real (temporary) implosion of the polis, the political
171
anarchy before and after the state. Its embodiment is civil war. Global
warming, the human species hitting the limits of the ecosystem,
generic mankind having for the first time itself, its own ecological
footprint, as enemy, constitutes the third state of nature. This third
state of nature is the horizon of all politics today.
Neoliberal casino capitalism is gearing up to finish the last
vestiges of the welfare state. Integration, socialization and multicul-
turalism give way to disintegration, de-socialization and segregation.
Maybe ‘the Mad Max-phase of globalization’ has already begun, in
which case the return of the state of nature is not ahead of us but it is
happening before our eyes.
Spaces of
174
Resistance
The Space of Play:
Towards a General
Theory of
Entropic Empire
Heterotopia
[2008]
Reflect #09
With Michiel Dehaene
175
‘Perhaps our life is still ruled by a certain number of
oppositions that cannot be touched, that institution and practice have
not yet dared to undermine; oppositions that we regard as simple
givens: for example between private space and public space, between
family space and social space, between cultural space and useful
space, between the space of leisure and that of work. All these are
animated by an unspoken sacralization’.1
In The Human Condition Hannah Arendt portrays an ancient society

divided between oikos, the private, hidden world of the household, and
agora, the political ‘space of appearance’. The distinction between pri-
vate and public life qualifies the three forms of the vita activa: labour,
work and action. Labour, wound up in the necessities of life (zoë) and
its reproduction, was for the ancient Greeks a strictly private matter
that, like birth and death, was to be protected and hidden. Action, in
contrast, resides at the public end of the spectrum and constitutes the
defining ‘form of life’ of the polis and thus the highest manifestation
of the vita activa. Action is based on the essential plurality of people
in a political space and oriented towards the cultivation of the good
life and the construction of freedom. Finally, work is an inherently
ambiguous category as far as its public–private quality is concerned.
It designates the fabrication of the human world in its lasting forms,
yet is confined by the necessities of technique and material circum-
stances. Work is an extension of the strictly private realm of labour;
however, it has a public that originates in the transactional space of
market exchange. In Arendt’s analysis it does not, given its essentially
economic nature (oikonomia), constitute the public sphere in the full
political sense of the word.2
Arendt’s project seeks to re-emancipate action as the highest
form of the vita activa from its dominant treatment in Western philos-
ophy as only second to contemplation, and merely the instrument of
the latter’s ideological projections. Her efforts, however, immediately
reduce – albeit consistent with the Aristotelian vein of the book – the
vita contemplativa or bios theoretikos to a narrow understanding of
the art of thinking, leaving out everything that could be described as
the ‘thinking of art’. Perhaps not surprisingly the very notion of art
and artistic practices is shelved under the essentially economical cat-
egory of work, thereby largely disregarding art’s ritualistic origins, its
reflective bearing, and its proto-political dimension. It is generally not
clear how to theorize within Arendt’s binary opposition between the
economical and political spheres those dimensions of ‘the human con-
dition’ that in contemporary terms are commonly categorized as part
of the cultural sphere.
Hippodamus’ Third Sphere
In his Politeia Aristotle, right after discussing Plato’s Republic, briefly

comments on the theories of Hippodamus, the godfather of urbanism
176
who is introduced as the one ‘who invented the division of cities into
squares’:3
His system was for a city with a population of ten thou-

The Space of Play: Towards a General Theory
sand, divided into three classes; for he made one class of

artisans, one of farmers, and the third class fought for the
state in war and was the armed class. He divided the land
into three parts, one sacred, one public and one private:
sacred land [hiéran] to supply the customary offerings
to the gods, common land [koinèn] to provide the warrior
class with food, and private land [idian] to be owned by the
farmers.4
Aristotle criticizes Hippodamus’ utopia or ‘proposed constitution’

of Heterotopiar
quite sharply, indicating, for instance, that the defenders who have
no land and the farmers who have no arms will have a difficult rela-
tionship, while the artisans having neither will end up as slaves. The
division into three, however, is presented without further qualification
or criticism and is not theorized throughout the Politeia. However,
beyond Aristotle’s discussion, we can easily retrace this threefold divi-
sion of the polis in Hippodamus’ ground plan for Milete, in which the
collective spaces betray a similar triadic specialization: apart from the
gridded residential compounds, there are markets for commerce, an
agora for politics and precincts for sanctuaries.5
In Hippodamus’ division of space into sacred, public and private
space, we recognize Robert Jan Van Pelt’s description of the polis as
‘the fivesquare city’. According to Van Pelt, the constitution of the
Greek polis can be represented by five fields or squares.6 First is the
emporium – the wall or interface between inside and outside – rep-
resented as a big square that circumscribes the other four squares
contained within it. Within the emporium one finds the oikos, or pri-
vate house, the agora with the stoa, the acropolis with the temple or
shrine, and the necropolis (cemetery) with the stèla. On closer inspec-
tion, however, this division into five squares boils down to a tripartite
division similar to that of Hippodamus. When we link the acropolis
and the necropolis, we see an oblique zone in between the oikos and
the agora – a diagonal bar in the scheme of ‘the fivesquare city’
between the economical and the political. This diagonal, intermedi-
ate space stretching from temple to cemetery represents the inclusive
realm of all ‘other spaces’: theatre, stadium, palaestra, hippodrome,
gymnasium, etcetera. This intermediate terrain corresponds to Hippo-
damus’ ‘third sphere’ or ‘third space’.
Hippodamus’ simple and recognizable triad of space is indeed
illuminating. We are convinced it contains the key to a general theory
of heterotopia: heterotopia is, namely, the third space of Hippodamus’
triad. That ‘third space’ is neither political (or public) nor economical
(or private) space, but rather sacred space, or hieratic space – to use
177
Hippodamus’ term hiéran. This qualification renders the otherness
of other spaces – les espaces autres of Foucault – explicit. The other
space is different from the oikonomia of the oikos and different from
the politeia of the polis debated on the agora: heterotopia is the other
of the political and the other of the economical. In our terminology
today this third category of (mostly secularized) sacred space probably
comes closest to what we commonly describe as the ‘cultural sphere’:
the space of religion, arts, sports and leisure. It covers that realm
which is conspicuously under-theorized in Arendt’s analysis: it intro-
duces a third realm between the private space of the hidden and the
public space of appearance, a third sphere that we could venture to
call the space of hidden appearance. It gives space to everything that
has no place either in the public or the private sphere. It is the sacred
space where the remainder rests. By remembering this third sphere,
whose autonomy is largely forgotten in the relentless economization
of everything, we can understand and articulate the relevance of het-
erotopia today.
The spaces of the polis that belong to this third category do not
abide by the binary oppositions that stabilize the distinction between
oikos and agora: exclusive versus inclusive, kinship versus citizenship,
hidden versus open, private property versus public domain. Within
the world of heterotopia these divisions are reshuffled and readjusted.
During the City Dyonisia, for example, the rules of in- and exclusion
adopted within the political realm were explicitely suspended. The
whole community was free to participate in these theatre festivals,
not only the citizens of the polis but also ambassadors of other (colo-
nized) cities, women, the foreigners living in Athens and even slaves.
The issue of ownership – private or public – is often simply irrelevant
for the heterotopian character of these places. Many, perhaps most,
heterotopias are based on ‘societies’ in the original meaning of alli-
ance or club, an association of common interest7 and establish alter-
native and collective forms of sharing property or its enjoyment. The
private or public status of these places is often weakly or only par-
tially determined. Hence, special rules apply. For instance, the palaes-
tra – the training schools for young gymnasts – were privately owned
by the pedotribes. As training occurred in the nude, whoever wasn’t
involved was not supposed to go there. However, Plato reports that
this prohibition was hardly enforced, and mentions in the dialogue
Lysis that Socrates and his friends entered the palaestra to admire
some beautiful young athletes.8
Defined as ‘neither public nor private’ and ‘neither political nor
economical’, the realm of heterotopia is very broad. It is a sphere of
its own made up of a multitude of at times radically different het-
erotopias. In this heterotopian universe, there is more between the
extremes of honeymoon and graveyard, between Jesuit colony and
brothel than Foucault’s imaginative sketch could capture. Academia,
for example, absent from Foucault’s list, definitely qualifies as a heter-
178
otopia. It is the safe haven of the bios theoreticos (the vita contempla-
tiva), as both Arendt and Aristotle emphasize,9 which qualifies neither
as economic nor as political. The time of the school – skholè, originally
meaning free time – is a time without labour, work or action.
Architecture of the Holiday
‘The heterotopia begins to function fully when people

find themselves in a sort of absolute break with their
traditional time’.10
Heterotopia is perhaps more easily identified by its time than by its

space. It is not simply a space but rather a time-space. The triadic
of Heterotopiar
division of Hippodamus is not only a distinction between different

territories; rather, it is a relative separation of specialized ‘spheres’, of
time-spatial entities. The festive periods – of which Athens had many
(one day in three, more or less) – were called Hieromènia, clearly
referring to the holy (hièros) character of these festive days, even if a
large part was spent on profane activities: notably horse races (agon
hippikos), gymnastics (agon gymnikos) and music-theatre contests
(agon mousikos).11 The English word holiday has kept this reference
to the ‘holy’ origin of free time, rest and repose. Similarly to the way
in which heterotopia interrupts the continuity of space, the holiday
interrupts the continuity of time. Holidays, being extraordinary as
opposed to the mundane, ordinary character of the everyday, are the
permanent markers of the discontinuous moments on the calendar,
pacing the continuous flow of everyday experience.
Heterotopia is the counterpart of what an event is in time, an
eruption, an apparition, an absolute discontinuity, taking on its heter-
otopian character at those times when the event in question is made
permanent and translated into a specific architecture. The hieratic
nature of the ritual time is permanently represented in the specific
‘consecration’ of a particular building type: a church, a theatre build-
ing, a stadium. We could venture the hypothesis that many hetero-
topias were translated from event into building, from time to space,
from a transient moment to the permanence of a place, and that this
translation occurred in some cases as a structural reaction to a crisis.
For example, the first theatre performances during the City Diony-
sia in Athens were held on the Agora, with wooden grandstands for
the public. When these collapsed, it was decided to build the Theatre
of Dionysus on the south-eastern slope of the Acropolis.12 Similarly,
Plato decided, after the trial and death of Socrates, that a gymnasium
outside the city walls would provide safer ground for the philosopher
than the agora and so his Akadèmia came into existence.
In opposition to the ‘architecture of the everyday’,13 heterotopian
architecture can be defined as the ‘architecture of the holiday’. Het-
179
erotopia, we can therefore say, is ‘holyday space’. Most of Foucault’s
examples have this quality: the honeymoon, old people’s homes, the
graveyard, the theatre and the cinema, libraries and museums, fairs
and carnivals, holiday camps, hamams, saunas, motels, brothels, and
maybe even some ships. And, although the graveyard is no holiday
destination, it is a most sacred space, visited on holy days. The space
of rest is also a space for the rest, for what remains.
Heterotopia as Space of Mediation
‘ . . . counter-emplacements, a sort of effectively real-

ized utopias, in which the real emplacements, all the
other real emplacements that can be found within a
culture are simultaneously represented, contested, and
inverted’.14
Hippodamus’ triadic conception – public, private and other spaces –

points to a way out of the dualism between private and public that
has dominated Western thought from Aristotle via Arendt to the
recent debates on the city and ‘the privatization of public space’.
That reductive dichotomy has obscured the dialectical understand-
ing of space to which Foucault’s concept of heterotopia proves such
a wonderful point of entry (even if Foucault himself was allergic to
dialectics). Other-spaces are alternative spaces, altered spaces, and
often also alternating spaces, in the sense that two different time-
spaces come together and switch from one into the other. As Foucault
explains, the theatre consists of the combination of two different
spaces: the real space of the audience and the virtual space of the
scene. When the play begins, the virtual becomes real (and the real
disappears); when the play is over, the reverse happens and we return
to so-called reality.
Greek theatre, tragedy in particular, supplies extraordinary
moments of mediation between public and private. Why is it that
Greek drama (both in tragedy and comedy) so often features women
as protagonists, if women are, in the words of Pericles, best respond-
ing to their nature and duty when not seen or spoken about at all?
Probably because in the female protagonist the antagonism between
oikos and agora is mediated. Many of the tragic female characters
embody a sharp conflict between oikos and agora. Antigone is a clas-
sic example: according to the law of the oikos she should bury her
brother; according to the political decree of Creon she should leave
him for the scavengers, as he attacked Thebes and has therefore
become an outlaw. This conflict is her tragic dilemma. That tragic
conflict could be shown all the more sharply by staging a female
character rather than a man. There is a comic counterpart to this: in
Aristophanes’ Women’s Parliament, under the leadership of Praxagora
180
(literally: she who acts on the agora) the whole society is transformed
into a strange utopia when women, disguised as men, seize power in
the ecclesia and install radical communism by suspending private
property and declaring free love. Putting women on stage (even if the
female parts were played by men) was a way of compensating within

the third sphere for their actual absence from public life, giving them
speech and even a tragicomic form of emancipation in the space of
heterotopia. Their presence on stage was, in that respect, ‘cathartic’.
There are, however, more mediations at work in this third
sphere. The cemetery has a dialectical function of mediation between
the world of the living and the world of the dead, between the past
and the future. The cemetery presents the care for the polis’s past, for
the sacrifices of the great citizens to whom the city owes its prosperity
and freedom. The temple mediates between the world of the gods and
of Heterotopiar
the world of the mortals. Together with the cemetery, the temple is
situated on the historical axis that connects past, present and future.
If the necropolis is the spatialization of the past, of what remains, the
cult of the temple has to secure the good omens for the future. Both
open up the space for the care for the good life in the present, the
political space of the agora – which was situated between necropo-
lis and acropolis – and brings it under the guardianship of both the
memorable ancestors and the immortal gods.15
The stadium, the hippodrome, and the palaestra for athletic
training, in short all spaces for sports and games, are also spaces of
mediation. Sports and bodily exercises mark the threshold between
nature and culture, between the body as a manifestation of animal-
like nature (zoë) and the trained body as the expression of cultured
life (bios).16 In this respect, many sports and games also function as
rites de passage between infantile, uncontrolled existence and mature
composure, between unruly behaviour and civic life under the aegis of
the nomos. Sports and games provide for a parallel world, a protected
world in which military exercise becomes a goal in itself, disconnected
from its purpose in ‘real life’ and hence pertaining to the realm of the
aesthetic.
We can understand heterotopia’s mediating character as a
direct function of its position as a dialectical third in the constitution
of the polis, between the public and the private realm, animated by
an albeit restless dialectics, which always leaves a remainder, a rest.
Heterotopia entails an always faltering, incomplete process, without
synthesis, a dialectics at a standstill, an unstable interruption or sus-
pension. And precisely because it is unstable, the heterotopian process
of mediation requires special, different, other places, where entrance
is restricted, initiation or membership required; where appearance
is hidden but where the hidden appears. The theatrical event, in our
argument the heterotopia par excellence, releases all the force of the
oxymoron ‘hidden appearance’. Between the public realm as ‘the space
of appearance’ and the private realm as ‘space of the hidden’, hetero-
181
topia indeed embodies a world of hidden appearance: from the mask
of the Greek theatre to the modern bal masqué, from the hammam to
the naturist camp (Foucault’s Huts of Djerba). The ‘holy day space’,
the space of rest, is always also the space for the rest, for what has to
remain hidden, from private parts to Oedipus’s secret.
Homo Ludens Versus Homo Faber
‘These counter-spaces, these localized utopias, children

know them perfectly well. Of course, it is the end of the
garden, of course it is the attic, or even better the Indian
tent set up in the middle of the attic, or else, it is – on a
Thursday afternoon – the large bed of the parents.’17
If the space of appearance is shaped by the medium of action, and the

private space of hiding takes form in work and labour, what would be
the activity proper to the third sphere of heterotopia? Our guess is
play. If we include in it all ritualized and theatrical behaviour, play is
equally important and encompassing as work and action: an irreduc-
ible, creative element of the human condition. Arendt’s homo faber
and homo politicus meet Huizinga’s homo ludens.
Huizinga places great emphasis on the foundational character
of play in the organization of society in general and the production of
culture in particular. His definition in Homo Ludens contains seven
elements: game or play is a free act (1) outside the everyday; (2) with-
out direct purpose or material end; (3) that unfolds within a dedicated
space and time; (4) that is rule-bound; (5) often associated with a club
or specialized society and (6) often partly hidden or disguised.18 The
analogy to the concept of heterotopia is striking.
Play is not simply an instance of culture but in fact precedes cul-
ture. Huizinga focuses in his analysis on various spheres of life that
have partially shed their play-like, ritualistic character in the process
of their development, but in which one can nevertheless still recog-
nize the game-like, playful, ‘ludic’ component in their structural con-
stitution: theatre, law, warfare, philosophy, the arts, etcetera. In the
process of their development and institutionalization, the distinction
between the free and self-referential character of play is traded for
gravity and consequence outside the temporal and spatial constraints
of the play-space. Nevertheless, in many of these instances it is still
possible to discern the way in which the original distinction – the spe-
cialization of that sphere – was first established as a space of play.
Throughout his discussion of the foundational dimension of
play, Huizinga emphatically and repeatedly insists on the spatial
definition of play. The act of playing not only creates space, but also
requires a space and a time entirely of its own. The magic circle is the
basic spatial gesture that defines the space of play.19 That magic circle
182
– the spatial enclosure – is a temenos,20 which means temple and is

derived from the verb temeo, to cut. The temenos is literally a cut-out,
a space set aside from the ‘common’ fabric of the world. It establishes
an elementary distinction between inside and outside, between the
spell-bound character of the game or ritual and the conventions that

govern everyday life.21 The Pythian racecourse is called a temenos and
so is the Acropolis: it is the hiéron temenos, literally: the holy cut-out.
This temenos or magic circle creates a fundamental distinc-
tion between those in the enclosure and those outside it. Entering
the game, entering the circle, requires some sort of initiation into
the rules of the game. Play, therefore, has the capacity to establish
a sense of community. Play, Huizinga explains, creates special socie-
ties or clubs associated with the inclusive/exclusive character of the
game. The particular condition created within the space of play is
of Heterotopiar
fragile and unstable and can at any time be dispelled, when someone
decides to break the rules of the game and thereby betrays the bond
that holds the club together. The space of play, the space inside the
magic circle, can be described, using Victor Turner’s term, as a liminal
space: a space that, in its formal separation from the rest of the world,
presents a realm of instability and possibility. That space which is
the seedbed of culture, its condition and possibility – from ritual to
theatre – provides a clearing within the conventional order of society,
sheltered from the normalizing forces of the everyday.22
A stay in liminal space or a liminoid state is, by consequence,
mostly temporary. Some people, however, dwell in heterotopia: priests,
gurus and wandering philosophers, actors, artists, bohemians, musi-
cians, athletes, entertainers and even architects or urban designers
taking after Hippodamus, if we believe Aristotle’s description of the
man as ‘somewhat eccentric in his general mode of life’, with long
hair, expensive ornaments and strange clothes, at home in all sci-
ences, not a citizen yet inventing an ideal utopian constitution.23 We
could call these (often nomadic) outsiders heterotopians. They are
hated and adored, expelled and embraced by the polis; always ambig-
uously hosted as representatives of otherness, of ‘the rest’. That is:
the sacred, the taboo, the eccentric, the abnormal, the monstrous, the
secret, the extraordinary, the grandiose, the genius, the irrational, the
transgressive, the frivolous or simply the aimless.
As the space-time in which normality is suspended in order
to give a place to ‘the rest’, heterotopia starts from nature’s darker
grounds, the anomy of phusis, of what is before or outside the nomos
of the polis. The survival of the fittest is no game; nor are the law of
the jungle, competition or the primordial jealousy towards the other.
The game civilizes these real and imaginary battles, moves away
from, but often also ‘cultivates’ the nature state (in the form of nudity,
for instance, or survival trips). The nature state, phusis comes before
the cultivation of play, and nomos, the legal space, comes after the
game. The game, as the medium of heterotopia, constitutes a third
183
instance between phusis and nomos, nature-state and norm, opening
a profoundly ambiguous terrain marking both the moment of man’s
imprisonment within the norms of culture and the threshold of libera-
tion or, more likely, temporary transgression.
The Sanctuary and the Camp
The structure of the hieratic space of heterotopia is that of the

‘sanctuary’. It is a refuge, a safe haven, a protected space. This
structure becomes clear when we realize that ‘during the festive
periods, that the texts of antiquity call hiéromènia, people and
property were sheltered from seizure and the tribunals suspended
their activities’.24 Just like the holiday is a suspension – in time – of
political and economical activities, heterotopia is a refuge – in space –
from the political and the economical.
The opposite of heterotopia as sanctuary is the camp. The con-
centration camp is the territorialization or embodiment of the state
of exception, the place of the ban, where the law is suspended. Its
inmates, literally the bandits (those who have a ban spoken on them),
the outlaws, have neither civil rights nor human rights. The camp
is therefore the place where life (bios) becomes ‘bare life’ (zoë). The
concentration camp is the place ‘off limits’ in which anything can
happen.25 The refugee camp, on the other hand, is (or should be) the
exact opposite of the concentration camp. It is a refuge from the state
of exception (mostly war or civil war), a sheltered space in which nor-
mality is reinstated or maintained. The concept of the camp (in the
Agambenian sense of concentration camp) has its exact opposite in
the concept of sanctuary (refuge). Both refer to ambiguous mythical
territory: the camp is the ‘ban’ of the homo sacer, while the sanctuary
is the temenos, the holy ground and where those who flee from the
law, power and violence can find asylum (for no human violence is
supposed to violate holy ground).
A safe haven is, therefore, not a fortress, a dungeon or a gated
community, for it is open exactly to those for which the fortress and
the city walls are closed. The camp and the sanctuary house the same
people: those who lost their citizenship, their nation, their rights (the
refugees, the migrants, the outsiders, the nomads, the persecuted).
Today, the illegal immigrant is a version of the one who is banned, the
bandit; he or she is banned from our national territory. It is telling
that in Belgium and in France several groups of asylum seekers and
illegal immigrants recently went on hunger strikes, taking refuge in
churches, and by doing so ‘instinctively’ revived this ancient opposi-
tion between camp (closed detention centre) and sanctuary.
The sanctuary, then, is the ultimate heterotopia, the absolute
discontinuity of normality, of the nomos, for those who flee the nomos:
the hominess sacri, the bandits. It is a safe haven against the violence
184
of society, legal or illegal. The sanctuary-like character of heterotopian

space is, in other words, a direct consequence of the very definition of
heterotopia as ‘neither political nor economical’. Heterotopian spaces
provide a shelter from the strongholds of oikos and agora, and inter-
rupt the conventional order of public and private space.

Like heterotopia, the camp is a space that is ‘neither economi-
cal nor political’, however in a very different manner. It is the space
in which the very distinction between the economical and political,
between the public and the private, has been suspended. Heterotopian
space as space of mediation entertains very precise relations to the
other spheres. The camp, in contrast, is the abject space of total rejec-
tion, a space devoid of mediation, unrelated in the sense of residing
outside all relations. If the heterotopia is the place for otherness, for
‘alterity’, then the camp is the space where the other, all otherness, is
of Heterotopiar
abolished, annihilated (sometimes very literally).
From Potlatch Space to Club Space (and Back)
‘. . . economic development

(I have not been speaking of that today) . . .’26
Heterotopia belongs to the time of the holy day within which people
neither work nor act (in Arendt’s language). Heterotopia suspends the
everyday and makes room for bathing, rituals, games and cultural
contests. Heterotopia caters to an anti-economical time: the time of
sacrifice, gift, play and squandering. That makes heterotopia ‘potlatch
space’:27 the space that ‘consumes’, squanders or even destroys the
economic logic. This observation should not lead to the naive conclu-
sion that heterotopia has no economic basis. Rather, we believe that
its economy lies outside the economical ‘interest’ or profit typically
associated with the economical sphere.
In antiquity, the economy of the gift had its own place and
unity.28 Indeed, the festive events that lie at the basis of many of the
ancient Greek heterotopias were entirely financed by the conspicuous
gifts of notorious citizens. The buildings that house these heteroto-
pian events were often literally gifts to the city. These gifts break the
public–private opposition as they are publically performed private
gifts.29 The antique economy of the gift is, no doubt, too specific and
too exotic to present a clear picture of heterotopia’s economical status
within a more contemporary context. Nevertheless, parallels are
obvious: many heterotopias and most cultural institutions, precisely
because they are not there for profit but for the public good, receive
public subsidies, private donations or corporate sponsoring. Of course,
given the all-encompassing economization of everything, they are
increasingly swallowed up by the service economy, the cultural indus-
try, the leisure economy or even the themed ‘experience economy’,
185
amounting to an economization of heterotopia or a heterotopianiza-
tion of the economy.30
A sound contemporary point of entry to understanding the
status of heterotopia between public and private might be Chris
Webster’s notion of club space.31 Webster’s analysis seeks to take the
debate on public space beyond a fetishist understanding of ownership.
By shifting the focus to ‘user rights’, he opens up a variegated world
in between the polar tensions of the public and the private sphere.
Public spaces are typically ‘goods’ with regard to which user rights
are not allocated. The degree of enjoyment one can have is decided
time and again as people enter these spaces and make use of them. If
public spaces are too popular, if different claims on these spaces are
conflicting, their public character is constructed through the way in
which this conflict is settled. Public spaces are, in other words, con-
tested spaces. For private spaces, in contrast, user rights are uniquely
allocated. Their use belongs to a single owner who has the full enjoy-
ment of his or her property. Between the two extremes of contested
public spaces and strictly private ones we see a broad spectrum of
conditions that can be grouped into two main categories. First, there
are ‘local public spaces’, which are not fully public because of the
uneven spatial distribution of user rights. It is rather common that
certain groups enjoy easier access than others to a particular space:
a local playground or a parking lot. Those living nearby, for example,
have a stronger claim on such spaces.
Second, there are ‘club spaces’, the enjoyment of which is shared
within a group or club. These can be the exclusive worlds of golf clubs,
gated communities, fraternities and so forth, but they can also be the
spaces that accommodate all voluntary organizations and common
interest groups: from the boy scouts, the local NGO, the chess club, to
the carnival association. The spaces on which these groups rely can
be publicly owned and assigned to them as a form of public service,
they can be formally owned by the club, but they can also be the living
room of one of the members, which takes on heterotopian ‘club quali-
ties’ when the group meets.
Club spaces and local public spaces, the one having private over-
tones, the other posing as public spaces, might resemble each other.
If we think of all the administrative measures that regulate access
to public goods (parking permits, for example) we realize that there
are more clubs being constructed within the public realm than is first
apparent. These club-like spaces stand at the threshold of the bind-
ing/unbinding dialectics of inclusion/exclusion at work in the perma-
nent (re)construction of the public sphere. They house the worlds of
the overly praised public–private development constructions. We are,
however, not concerned here with the blurring of the public and the
private sphere, of economical and political leverage, but rather with
those club spaces that are ‘neither private nor public, neither econom-
ical nor political’.
186
Perhaps not all heterotopias can be adequately described as

clubs: calling the church, the art world, or academia a club smacks of
disrespect. What is at stake is not so much describing heterotopias
in Webster’s economical terms or pointing to the cultural, social and
symbolic capital accumulated within them, but rather clearly oppos-

ing their progressive economization. Heterotopias not only organize
this alternative ‘economy of the gift’ (often in the form of public sub-
sidies or private sponsorship), but above all represent a dimension of
the human condition that cannot be adequately described in economi-
cal terms.
Heterotopia United
of Heterotopiar
‘. . . there is probably not a single culture in the world

that does not constitute heterotopias. That is a constant
in every human group’.32
If the true heterotopia is anti-economical space, how does it relate

to politics? It follows from our definition that heterotopia is outside
the political process and proceedings properly speaking. As spaces
of mediation of ‘the rest’, heterotopias are central to the polis, but in
an eccentric way. Precisely because of that they can easily take on a
para-political, proto-political or infra-political role. Heterotopias, these
worlds of ‘hidden appearance’, are the experimental terrains where
‘special societies’ gather their forces to maybe one day break ground
in the full daylight of the ‘space of appearance’. Jafar Panahi’s film
Offside (2006) gives an idea: it portrays a group of Iranian women,
who, dressed as men like Praxagora and her club, desperately try to
attend the crucial qualifying match of the football World Cup, despite
a ban on women in stadiums. This bittersweet tale encapsulates the
infra-political role of heterotopia. The para- or proto-political power
of heterotopia appears clearly in the slippery terrain of ‘academic
activism’. The scholar who, one day, decides to leave the safe confines
of academia and join the public debate, thereby taking on the role of
intellectual, addresses the world from his ivory tower, using and abus-
ing its heterotopian high ground.
Today, the anti-economical, infra-political logic of heterotopias
makes them potentially the contemporary sanctuaries of ‘the multi-
tude’ in a postcivil society. The engaged spaces of conviviality and self-
organization, the ritual spaces of mourning and feast that preserve
the decorum of life, the bohemian liminal spaces of imagination, the
reflective spaces of commentary, study and critique, the holiday spaces
of skholè and play – all these places that make up the ‘third sphere’
besides, outside and in between the public (political) and the private
(economical) sphere, realize heterotopia’s binding role within the polis.
Foucault’s first principle, which states that all cultures have
187
their heterotopias, reads more than ever as a programme – no culture
without heterotopia – and his conclusion as a dire warning: ‘In civili-
zations without ships, dreams dry up, and espionage takes the place
of adventure, and the police that of the pirates’.33 If this were a pam-
phlet the slogan could be: Heterotopians of all countries, unite!
Notes
1 Michel Foucault, ‘Of Other Spaces’, in Michiel Dehaene & Lieven
De Cauter, Heterotopia and the City. On public Space in a Post-
civil Society, Routledge, London, 2008, 16 (Original text: Michel
Foucault, ‘Des espaces autres. Une conférence inédite de Michel
Foucault’, Architecture, Mouvement, Continuité 5 (October 1984),
46-49. Collected in: Michel Foucault, Dits et écrits IV, Quarto Gal-
limard, Paris, 2002, 1571-81. In the following we will keep refer-
ring to our translation).
2 Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, The University of Chi-
cago Press, Chicago, IL, London, 1989, 159-67.
3 Aristotle, Politics (The Loeb Classical Library), Harvard Univer-
sity Press, Cambridge, MA, and London, 2005, p 1267, b 1- 2.
4 Ibid., 1267, b 30-b 40.
5 Pierre Lévêque & Pierre Vidal-Naquet, (1964) Clisthène
l’Athénien. Essai sur la réprésentation de l’espace et du temps
grecque de la fin du VIe siècle à la mort de Platon, Macula, Paris
1983, p 126.
6 Robert Jan Van Pelt and Caroll William Westfall () Architectural
Principles in the Age of Historicism,Yale University Press, New
Haven, CT, and London 1991, 169 ff.
7 Arendt, op. cit. (note 2), 23.
8 ViolaineVanoyeke, La Naissance des Jeux Olympiques et le sport
dans l’antiquité, Les Belles Lettres, Paris, 2004, 29.
9 Arendt, op. cit. (note 2), 7-21; Aristotle, The Nichomachean Ethics,
trans. R. Rackham, (The Loeb Classical Library), Harvard Univer-
sity Press, Cambridge, MA, and London 2003, 1095 b.
10 Foucault, op. cit. (note 1), 20
11 J. C. Moretti, Theatre et société dans la Grèce antique. Une
archéologie des pratiques théatrales, Le livre de poche. Paris,
2001, 29, 69-71.
12 Van Pelt and Westfall, op. cit. (note 6), 231.
13 Mary McLeod, ‘Everyday and “Other” spaces’, in D. Coleman, E.
Danze and E. Henderson (eds), Architecture and Feminism, New
York: Princeton Architectural. Press. 1996. See also: J. Chase, M.
Crawford, and J. Kaliski, (eds) Everyday Urbanism, The Monacelli
Press, New York, 1999.
14 Foucault, op. cit. (note 2), 17.
15 Van Pelt and Westfall, op. cit. (note 4), 180-205.
188
16 On this distinction see Arendt, op. cit. 97; Giorgio Agamben, Homo
Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, Stanford University Press,
Stanford, CA, 1998, passim.
17 Michel Foucault, Die Heterotopien/Les Hétérotopies, Der utopische
Korper/Le Corps utopique. Zwei Radiovorträge, trans. Michael

Bischoff and with an afterword by Daniel Defert, Surhrkamp,
Frankfurt 2004 (with audio CD), 40. A fragment of the radio talk
on heterotopia is available online: www.foucault.info/documents/
heteroTopia/.
18 Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens, proeve eener bepaling van het
spel-element der cultuur, Tjeenk Willink en Zoon, Haarlem 1952
(1938), 14.
19 Op. cit., 10, 20-1.
20 Op. cit., 79.
of Heterotopiar
21 Op. cit., 8.
22 Victor Turner, From Ritual to Theatre: The Human Seriousness of
Play, PAJ Publications. New York 1982, 20-60.
23 Aristotle, op. cit. (note 3), 1267, b 22-b 30.
24 Moretti, op. cit. (note 11), 71.
25 Agamben, op. cit. (note 16), 166.
26 Foucault, ‘Of Other Spaces’, op. cit. (note 1), 22.
27 On this economy of the gift and the potlatch, as ritual of spill-
ing, of the excessive gift, there is a long tradition in anthropol-
ogy, we refer to some seminal texts: Marcel Mauss, ‘Essai sur le
don. Forme et raison de l’échange dans les sociétés archaïques’
(1923), in: id., Sociologie et anthropologie, Presses Universitaires
de France, Paris 2004; Huizinga, op. cit.; Georges Bataille, ‘La
part maudite. Essai d’économie générale’ (1949), in: id., OEuvres
complètes, Gallimard, Paris 1976; Guy Debord (ed.) Potlatch 1954-
1957 [bulletin d’information du groupe français de l’internationale
lettriste], Gallimard, Paris, 1996 (1985).
28 Paul Veyne, Le pain et le cirque. Sociologie historique d’un plural-
isme politique. Editions du Seuil, Paris, 1976.
29 Ibid., 23.
30 This ‘blurring of the spheres’ we highlighted in another version
of this text, see Lieven De Cauter and Michiel Dehaene, ‘Hippo-
damus’ “Third Space”: Towards a General Theory of Heterotopia’,
in P. Pelligrini and P. Viganò (eds), Comment Vivre Ensemble:
Prototypes of Idiorrythmical Conglomerates and Shared Spaces,
Officina Edizioni, Rome, 2006.
31 Chris Webster, ‘Property Rights and the Public Realm: Gates,
Green belts, and Gemeinschaft’, Environment and Planning B:
Planning and Design 29 (3), 2002, 397-412. 111
32 Foucault, op. cit. (note 1), 18.
33 Ibid., 22.
189
190
‘Everywhere Tahrir
Square!’
Reflections on the
Entropic Empire
Revolution in Egypt
[2011]
Reflect #09
191
On Anarchy as Last Resort of Tyranny
(Prologue 2 February 2011)
According to Aristotle there are, as is well known, six forms of govern-

ment. Three of them are good, three of them are bad. Monarchy is
good, or can be good, tyranny is bad. The bad news about monarchy is
that it has a tendency to become tyranny. And so on: aristocracy can
be a good form of government, but it tends to become an oligarchy.
And finally of course democracy. The bad news about democracy is
that it tends to become anarchy. Bad.
The worst case scenario. Nobody wants anarchy, chaos is danger-
ous for everybody. So, what does that teach us about Egypt? Egypt
of course is – you have to be idiotic or hypocritical not to know after
thirty years - a tyranny. When the tyrant is in trouble, what can he
do? Two options: make tyranny worse by declaring a state of emer-
gency: curfew, suspension of all civil liberties, etcetera. But when tyr-
anny is really in deep shit because of internal turmoil and uproar, it
can enhance anarchy. That is exactly the function of the police forces
that were signalled by several sources partaking in the looting in
Cairo. Or even being its main perpetrators. So first lesson: tyranny
can resort to anarchy to save its skin. The strategy of chaos.
But Hobbes teaches us that anarchy is a dangerous game. It
can become a relapse into the state of nature, the war of everybody
against everybody. Hobbes himself says that the most concrete exam-
ple of this relapse in the state of nature is civil war. Second lesson:
Civil War should be avoided at all cost because it traumatises society
for decades, if not forever.
The political theorist Carl Schmitt (who for a while was a member
of the National-Socialist Party in Germany) teaches us that the exact
opposite of anarchy/state of nature/civil war is the state of exception/
state of emergency/martial law. The state of nature is the bottom up
implosion of sovereignty, whereas the state of exception is a top-down
excess of sovereignty. In the extreme case, not only the state of excep-
tion is installed, but the sovereign can resort to what Foucault calls
thanatopolitics (death politics): the sovereign exerting his fundamental,
defining, ultimate right, namely to take the life of his subjects. So this
is what could happen, that the police or the army or the republican
guards unchain a bloodbath. Third lesson: the strategy of death.
Here one of the most brilliant pupils of Schmitt enters the pic-
ture, Leo Strauss, the philosophical father of neoconservatives, direct
teacher to Wolfowitz and others of the neocon cabal. In On tyranny, a
commentary on a dialogue by Xenophon, Strauss points out that tyr-
anny can be good, if and only if the tyrant listens to the advice of ‘wise
men’, the philosophers. Strauss, in his ‘classical political philosophy’,
says that it is the true esoteric doctrine that politics is based on ‘pious
lies’ and ‘useful myths’. His philosophy is classical in the sense that
it is what empires have done since they came into being. The neo-
192
conservatives were claiming that they were promoting democracy in

Iraq, but in fact they were bringing anarchy. Or, a truly classic one in
American foreign policy – from Pinochet to Mubarak – is preaching
about democracy but in reality supporting tyranny. Because, of course,
Strauss was right, as long as Mubarak listens to the wise men in
Washington who tell him to be a lackey to the US and Israel, he is a
‘good tryant’, meaning reliable.
Reflections on the Revolution in Egypt
So Obama is in a tough position, but he could once more since his

election stand on the good side of history: by being serious about democ-
racy, and not just using it as a useful myth. If he has the courage to
‘Everywhere Tahrir Square!’
whisper in the ear of the tyrant to step down. But alas, this opportunity
is also a dilemma. If he supports democracy, foreign policy hawks across
the board will nail him, and Israel and the pro-Israel lobby in America
will never forgive him. If, on the contrary, he supports the tyrant, he
will forever lose his credibility. That is the last and fundamental lesson
we can draw from Strauss and against neocon cynicism: if he finds the
courage, the turmoil in Egypt is Obama’s chance to once again write
history, simply by letting the people of Egypt write history.
The Power of the Multitude. Egypt Protests Signal an End to

the Post-9/11 Era
(8 February 2011)
A spectre is roaming the Middle East: the spectre of the multitude.

The beauty and in a sense the world historical importance of this Jas-
mine Revolution (or whatever it will be called in the annals of human-
ity) is that it has no leadership. It might also prove its fatal weakness,
but that does not contradict its beauty and importance. It was the
people rising up. Of course youngsters and schooled people – doctors,
engineers, etcetera took the lead, but it was from the beginning in
Tunisia the multitude at work.
A buzzing discussion is on about how important the new media
were for this instant, unpredictable, spontaneous revolt. It is self evi-
dent that e-mail, Facebook, Twitter and mobile phones have played an
enormous self organizing role. But you could say that this self organi-
zation could do without some media: when Aljazeera was banned, and
internet and mobile communication was downed, the revolt unfolded
untouched. So this has to be studied in a dialectical way: the media
and the multitude. The re-appropriation of communication that we
see happening (also in Iran) after it has been monopolized or con-
trolled by power (the state and multinational tycoons) for ages is in
itself of world historical importance. This will truly alter the Middle
East and, indeed, the entire world. It is not neocon militarism that
brought democracy to the Middle East – that only enhanced radical-
ism, fundamentalism, and terrorism, and was in a sense a present to
the extremists – but the new media.
193
In fact, one can say that Negri and Hardt had it wrong – in the
best Marxist tradition – in their localisation of the ‘historical subject’,
the driving force of history. Marx located it in the industrialized prole-
tariat and the revolutions took place in fundamentally rural and feudal
countries, Russia and China. Negri and Hardt in their Empire-sequel
located the subject of history in the creative class of the Western post-
fordist, information economy, but in fact it is the Arab people in the
street under conditions of old fashioned tyranny and poverty who are
giving history a push. The creative classes in the West are safely caught
in their rat race, but it is in the disenfranchised Middle East that the
‘the multitude’ is at work. This is of world historical importance.
Hactivism and online activism have taught us that a good action
is based on a strong story, an open-ended script or scenario without
author so people can appropriate it and improvise.1 Both in Tunisia
and in Egypt, the story was loud and clear: the people rise against the
tyrant. Strong story. One of the strongest ever told. That is why it is
so contagious. Domino theory in action. After Tunisia and Egypt more
can and should follow. Yemen, Morocco, Algeria, Syria . . . shockwaves
in the entire Middle East are now to be hoped for. Even if Egypt
looked dodgy for a moment. This revolt is beautiful and world histori-
cal: no hidden agenda, no leaders, no party, no religion.
Indeed, it is one of the most striking things: it is a secular revolt.
It might, let’s hope, even mean the end of fundamentalism. The people
in Tahrir Square street interviews were very explicit: we want an end
to tyranny, repression and corruption; we want freedom and democ-
racy, not theocracy (which is just another form of tyranny and repres-
sion, minus corruption at best). As they have proven the neocons
wrong and the alterglobalist guru Negri wrong, they are now also
proving the Islamists wrong.
This Jasmin/Arab revolution could and should change the course
of history: the end of tyrannies in the Middle East, the end of neocon
militarist policy in the Middle East, the end of Israel’s monopoly on
democracy (that could change a few equations), the end of fundamen-
talism as the main driving force of international politics. The weaken-
ing of Islamist fundamentalism as political Islam could also weaken
the fundamentalism of political evangelicals on American foreign
policy and the weight of Jewish fundamentalism on Israel politics. In
short, we are a facing a new phase in world history. The period ‘after
9/11’ is over.
Of course, the world should help. The former prime minister of
Belgium, now a European MP, Guy Verhofstadt was right (for once)
when he addressed the European Parliament: Europe should support
the demands of this revolution explicitly and ask Mubarak to step
down. Where is Obama? Where is this world-historical figure when
you need him? Maybe he is doing what he can. Because it is his slogan
that the people of the Middle East now practice: ‘Yes, we can’. He
should not let them down.
194
This combination of a story without author, a revolution with-

out leaders, via self organisation enhanced by networked new media
– rhizomatic, non-linear (to say it in a fancy way) and completely
secular, open – Muslim, Christian (crescent and cross united on ban-
ners!), young and old, men and women, working class and intellectual,
children and grandparents – this was, and is, and will remain forever,
awesome to see. Whatever comes after. Come what may. When the
activist writer Nawal Al Sadaawi, a girl in her 80s, said in a television

interview: ‘I have been waiting for this all my life, this is the most
beautiful moment of my life . . . I have to be here on Tahrir square’ –
she was damn right. We should all be with them. Tahrir Square is not
a symbol of the longing for democracy and freedom, it is democracy
and freedom! Self expression, fearless discussing, mutual help, self
organisation, all very remarkable. Even journalists who have seen a
few things and therefore are a bit cynical, rub their eyes!
The demonstrations are spreading outside Liberation Square
– as I write: Tuesday 8 February, 1 pm GMT – and sprawling across
the Egyptian Capital; in Alexandria also huge crowds are flocking
together. The so-called return to normalcy has meant that not only are
banks open but communication is up again, so the people can now see
and hear what is happening. Many Egyptians join in now. They start
to believe that something is actually happening! Spread the word!
World-historical, I says: the power of the multitude! Shifting the
course of history. Let us, on the outside, elsewhere, at least be awake
and express our solidarity and enthusiasm where we can. Old Kant
had a point when he said that the spontaneous enthusiasm of the
multitude for a world-historical revolution (he was of course think-
ing of the French Revolution, we are thinking of the fall of the Berlin
wall) is the proof, however indirect, that in spite of all the horrors,
history does make sense; that there is . . . progress. For that is what
this is: a truly progressive uprising of the multitude, not regressive
reaction of a minority of extremists. The emancipating effect is visible,
like children and women leading the crowds in chanting (I hear their
voices as I write – courtesy Aljazeera). Really wish I could be there
with you! All I can do is to write this text for you. With my utmost
respect, for you, the people of the Tunisia and Egypt and you, the mul-
titude of the Middle East.
Swarm Intelligence: A Key to Understanding Tahrir Square
(22 February 2011)
The Arab Revolutions change everything. Or, at least, a lot. We have
195
to reconsider the entire picture. It is a geopolitical paradigm shift. But
I cannot even start to tackle all this. Let’s start with trying to begin
to understand this new form of self-organizing protest. A while ago
I made some notes on ‘swarm intelligence’. I dropped them as misty,
premature musings. Now they make sense to me, in a very concrete
way. Here my notes (written somewhere near the end of 2009):
Recently intelligent behaviour of swarms (ants, bees,

birds, bats and fish, but also mammals) has been stud-
ied and this sort of survival by big quantities has been
called ‘swarm intelligence’. It truly is one of the wonders
of nature. Herd mentality is a well known word to point
to the same phenomenon but it is old fashioned: the indi-
vidual is intelligent (at best) but the mass is stupid (by
essence). It is a basic ideological presumption of much
ethico-political philosophy, from Seneca to the present.
Swarm intelligence is a contemporary concept and reverses
the logic: the swarm is more intelligent than small groups
of intelligent animals. Gnus crossing the river en masse are
more successful against crocodiles than the more individu-
ally intelligent but collectively small groups of zebras. A
swarm of small birds is swirling so close at such speed that
a prey bird can seriously hurt itself if it dives into it. In a
similar vein small fish move so fast and close that much
bigger predators can’t get a prey as it behaves as mist, as
an ever changing cloud. Maybe it is this swarm intelligence
that could save us. Maybe this swarm intelligence will
somehow help to cross this maelstrom of rapids and heavy
waters humanity has ahead; by being such a mass of inter-
connected creatures. But how can we think that massive
anonymity of the human herd – a herd of say 10 billion
people – as a saving grace?
Well, Tahrir Square gives an idea. Small in comparison with the scale
we will need, but huge, gigantic, unheard of. Ten of thousands, hun-
dreds of thousands, a few million indeed. Nineteen days, nineteen
nights. The biggest and longest mass event ever, maybe. And, from the
side of the masses: peaceful, non-violent. A logistical nightmare turned
into a fairy tale. Well, no fairy tale: a miracle (almost biblical, like the
miraculous proliferation of bread). Thousands of people to be fed, to be
cared for, waste, human waste, wounded people – field hospitals were
installed in a KFC fast-food joint and in a side street – and urgent and
crucial decisions to be made at every moment, all this . . . Besides the
Coptic Christian who laid down his coat so his Muslim co-protestor
could kneel and pray, or the guy who united the sign of the cross and
the crescent in front of a camera on Aljazeera, or the women chanting
and leading the crowds, the children leading the crowds, all this . . .
196
This is it! This is the swarm intelligence we will need! Oh God,

was I pessimistic when I made my first notes:
So far, we see no sign for hope: we use more 24/24 elec-

tronic gadgets, more cars, etcetera The exponential growth
of air travel is expanding our personal ecological footprint
at a pace that ridicules all our attempts to sort out garbage
or take public transport, etcetera No, it will have to come

from elsewhere. Slum intelligence as swarm intelligence?
Swarm intelligence will be massively important to survive
the twenty-first century.
I could not see a light, however hard I tried:
But will the quarrel of the villagers, the identity politics of

the quarters and neighbourhoods, the factions and inter-
ests, not foreclose this? Individualism has become one of
our biggest enemies, at least in ecological terms. 10 billion
people deserve a car. And they all have the right to travel
by plane, no? Logic, Watson. But this madness needs 10
planets or something like that. Human (post?) history . . . a
tale told by an idiot. Or the birth pangs of transhuman-
ism? Or else, a vibrant planet of slums? The beat, the heat,
the creativity of a new, young, urbanized world population.
Maybe. Swarm intelligence it should be. But so far we have
not come further than ostrich policy, at best.
Well, again, Tahrir Square has changed the entire equation. Swarm
intelligence was just a metaphor for the power of the interconnected
multitude of the Middle East. It is a model for a planetarian multi-
tude to come; a planetarian multitude in the making. It is from the
squared circle of Tahrir Square – how beautiful it was, this circle of
tents in the middle of the square – that we have to build the theorems
and stratagems of a future politics; the politics of globalized, and
therefore united humanity. After Tahrir Square there is hope again.
This can and should be the beginning of a truly new era. It depends
on every single one of us if it will come true.
No, it will not be paradise. Just less hellish. If we are able to
bring down all tyrants and all tyrannies and the extremisms they
breed. This should make fundamentalisms implode. Which will del-
egitimize neocon Empire even further. As rampant identity politics
will wane, so will the legitimacy of the war on terror. Let’s cross our
fingers. Because, that is just a start, before we can even begin to
tackle the Herculean, cosmic tasks ahead: the ecological and demo-
graphic challenges. But how to wake up the European youth? How to
wake up the American youth? How strange it is that wake-up calls in
history tend to come at unexpected times and in unforeseen places. I
197
pray that this is not the end. It is just a beginning. This could be truly
awesome. But it depends on all of us. On all of us at once. We have to
learn to think and move in sync, without leader, without party, with-
out manual. Swarm Intelligence Now!
The Days of Anger: Humiliation, Fear and Dignity in the

Middle East
(8 April 2011)
Some will claim that the true, structural causes for these Arab revolts
reside in the rising food prices or other objective economic factors.
Others will claim the riddle of this revolution is the new social media.
Some even say it was all orchestrated by the CIA and Soros’ Open
Society foundations. Then others will say it was the Egyptian army
that ditched Mubarak to stay in power. Others again will hail the
rising multitude foretold in the West, happening in the Middle East.
Who can prove them wrong? But that is not what the street inter-
viewees and commentators tell us: they speak of anger, of pride, of
humiliation and dignity.
In his famous, infamous book on The End of History and the
Last Man, Fukuyama was harking back to Plato and Hegel to stress
how important these affects are in politics. They are sui generis: polit-
ical moral affects of their own. Egotism and Desire are not the sole
factors that determine human behaviour (as both liberal and Marx-
ist ‘paneconomic’ theories have it). His major example is that it is
not the economy that played a major role in the movement of Havel
and his lot that brought down the totalitarian regimes in Eastern
Europe. Thymos (a word Fukuyama digs up out of Plato, meaning:
feeling for justice, honour, anger, pride, dignity, etcetera) has been a
determining factor from the outset.
The self-immolation of the Tunisian youngster was a ‘thymotic’
gesture par excellence. One of the highest thinkable forms of it: total
defiance, not only for death but even for the most painful and cruel of
death. A quote from the web:
Twenty-six-year-old Mohamed Bouazizi, living in the pro-

vincial town of Sidi Bouzid, had a university degree but no
work. To earn some money he took to selling fruit and veg-
etables in the street without a license. When the authori-
ties stopped him and confiscated his produce, he was so
angry that he set himself on fire. (our emphasis).
This total defiance out of humiliation turning into anger, and anger
turning into dignity and defiance has proven contagious:
Rioting followed and security forces sealed off the town. On

198
Wednesday [12 January], another jobless young man in Sidi

Bouzid climbed an electricity pole, shouted “no for misery, no
for unemployment”, then touched the wires and electrocuted
himself. Tunisia’s president Ben Ali has fled his country after
weeks of mass protests culminated in a victory for people
power over one of the Arab world’s most repressive regimes.
The Jasmine Revolution in a nutshell. Mohamed Bouazizi was not a

calculating, egotistic, economical being, measuring his profit. He just
went for it. It is not by accident that this most powerful of gestures,
the gesture of defiance and indignation, has set off a wave of anger
that floods the Arab world.
Anger has had some bad press lately in our culture. So much so
that we tend to dismiss it. And yet it is this affect that has given its
name to these appeals to revolt: ‘Days of Anger’. The Days of Anger
have been succeeding one another since January: from Tunisia to Iraq,
from Egypt to Yemen, from Oman and Bahrain to Libya and Syria. Was
it just a cheap appealing slogan to mobilize? No. It contains a profound
truth (philosophical, psychological, political or even psycho-political as
Sloterdijk would call it): he (or she) who is angry loses all fear.
Anger can be a door to freedom. Freedom is just another word
for nothing left to lose. Janis Joplin’s catch phrase explains it all.
Human dignity resides in freedom. Therefore he who is free has noth-
ing to lose, he who has nothing to lose is free. Even if anger is not a
popular affect in our culture, the philosophical truth is that freedom
lies in human nature, that it is in the human nature to desire not
only for food and riches, but also for recognition, for honour, and pride.
When this longing for dignity and recognition is not met, entire peo-
ples can get angry. And lose fear.
He who loses fear regains his pride and honour. He who
regains his pride and honour has nothing to lose but his freedom. He
will defend it with everything he has, with his life if need be. This
sequence explains why the words of anger, pride, honour were omni-
present in street interviews and commentaries, and even in slogans:
‘Here we are, Egyptians, proud again!’ read a slogan in Tahrir Square
quoted on Al Jazeera, on 10 February, at 7 pm local Belgian time. Why
is it so touching, this slogan? Because it strongly reverberates in all
of us. Freedom is the base of dignity. A slave can be rich and healthy
and well (mostly not, mind you), but has no dignity, cannot be proud.
For he is not free. Now the people feel sovereign, free to speak and
act. This is the biggest empowerment one can get. No bullets will stop
this, even airstrikes can’t stop this.
Peter Sloterdijk’s accusations in his book Zorn und Zeit (Rage
and Time) against what he calls ‘Anger Big Banks’ is convincing in his
case studies, quite devastating in fact: his cases being the church and
communism – but wrong in its premises and conclusions. By taking
up Fukuyama’s theme and linking it to Nietzschean resentment, he
199
casts an almost solely negative light on anger. The Days of Anger,
from Tunisia to Syria, from Egypt to Libya to Yemen, etcetera prove
him wrong. Anger can be a very positive force in history as the days of
anger in the Arab world prove.
A witness from Cairo on 18 February on Skype: ‘The repres-
sion is massive, and will only rise by the days . . . scary. This era is
mad. Full of mixed hope and anxiety, I have this unbreakable smile
with eyes filled with tears at times.’2 Libya is a matter of concern.
But whatever Gaddafi does, or any other leader in the Middle East
for that matter, as somebody said from Tripoli on Al Jazeera (on 23
February): ‘The wall of fear has fallen, the spring of Arab youth has
begun.’
And we haven’t seen the end of this. Even China is wary and
cracking down on activists ; they censored the word jasmine on the
internet – can you imagine? Can you imagine a more innocent word?
I can understand (not agree) that authorities censure words like porn,
bomb, terrorism; but jasmine? I mean I think it is the practical joke
of the year. World historically ridiculous. But indeed, the Chinese
call their days of anger and protest ‘jasmine walks’. And, indeed, the
authorities are wetting their pants. They are scared like hell for this
fertile spring breeze blowing from the Mediterranean. Let a thousand
flowers bloom. He who is angry loses all fear. And when humanity
lays off its fear, liberation is within reach. Tahrir Square in Cairo has
proven it. Everywhere Tahrir Square!
The Arab Awakening and the Final Destination of History

(February-August 2011)
Fukuyama must congratulate himself these days: the striving for

liberal democracy by a people’s revolution is now sweeping the Middle
East, just like it did during the collapse of the former Soviet bloc. That
Velvet Revolution was the departure for his book, The End of History
and the Last Man. So he was right all along: liberal democracy is the
goal, target, destination and end of history. But: history has no end.
The idea that history has an end is simply wrong. It is an eternal task
to move towards its goal: a free, democratic, legal and just world order.
Kant was right, not Hegel. Hegel spoke against philosophers speak-
ing about the future, but he himself considered his own time as the
end of history (the German State as final stage of history and his own
philosophy as absolute spirit, as the world-spirit finally comprehend-
ing itself). Fukuyama makes the same mistake as Hegel: he thinks
the United States of America has reached the final stage of history.
But we have to think the future more than ever. Tahrir Square is tes-
tifying to this future. But also Pearl Square in Bahrain and even the
bloody streets of Hama and Homs. The shock waves are now felt not
only from Morocco to Iran but from America to China. This wave of
200
people’s revolts is hitting the planet. It might even stir up American

youth and disenfranchised workers and leftist intellectuals to unite
and fight back at the Tea Party and Wall Street oligarchs in the US.
Wisconsin and Ohio saw some rare confrontations last weekend! The
Dutch have now to cast Wilders and his islamophobic discourse aside,
the Islamic youth here in Europe have to take the message of the
youth revolution at heart. I think they will. I for my part would be
proud to be Tunisian, Egyptian, Syrian or Libyan right now. I do feel

part of this. Or, more correctly: I feel frustrated not to be.
The wall of fear should also fall in the West, I dream aloud of
European, American, and Chinese Springs! The interconnected mul-

titude overthrowing the undemocratic, unjust world order and saving
the planet by . . . swarm intelligence. Globalization is in action now
more than ever. Maybe the alterglobalist movement is not over, it has
just begun. Another world seems again, for the first time in many
years, for the first time since 9/11, possible. When the walls of fear
fall, the days of anger will be countless and the spring of the planetar-
ian multitude will have begun.
. . .The Libyan pilots, crashing their own planes after jumping
out, showed us the way. A Great scene. God, do I admire those guys.
For me it is the gesture of the day. You have to give messianism a hand
now and then (in the pious spirit of Thomas Aquinas, who claimed
that there was a natural right to kill the Tyrant). The weakest cannot
win when they are crushed. But then, this multitude, I feel, will not
be crushed. So they will have to do it, and they will do it, on their own.
Of course, the human toll for crossing the river of fear might be huge.
Libya could really become a site of immense carnage . . .
Now, on 31 March, more than a month later, the no-fly zone has
been in effect for two weeks and I am in utter doubt and despair. The
hundreds of Tomahawks rockets fired contained depleted uranium, so
now Libya is contaminated. This constitutes a crime against human-
ity in its own right . . . And, we are not there yet. Gaddafi is still in
power, and the intervention is in a deadlock. Syria, just as bad . . .
As I try to finish this text, the last day of August 2011, Gaddafi
is as good as gone (even if not found as yet). But Syria is in a terrible
state. The city of Hama was, for weeks, totally occupied by tanks; a
warzone, if not worse. I wish I could pray. I hoped the month of Rama-
dan would give the Arab multitude the strength and courage to force
all these dictators out, but for Syria it has not worked. Yet.
When, in one of his last interviews before his death, Derrida
identified the alterglobalist movement as a messianism without reli-
gion. Indeed his words now are no longer suave words of a dying man,
but have taken on a prophetic ring: ‘I believe it is the weak who will
prove to be strongest in the end and who represent the future.’3 The
final destination of history is not (neo)liberal democracy, because it
crushed the weak.
Why do I bet on this insurrection of the multitude? Not out
201
of naiveté, not out of a destructive urge, certainly not – rather out
of despair. Because there is simply no other instance that will save
us. Not the UN, not the EU, not the US, not the NGOs, there is no
instance structure at a global level that can guide humanity through
the storm – the chain of demographic-ecological disasters – that we
are approaching. It will be for us to change the course of the vessel.
For all of us, the Arab awakening should be a reminder that
things can change, even if the forces unleashed against the multitude
of the precarious and the weak are incredibly powerful, massive, and
without mercy (like Mubarak’s secret service and state apparatus).
We just have to lose our fear. Adorno wrote that revolution is the
emancipation from fear. It has a new ring, a new significance now.
Let’s hope the Arab awakening brings us a few inches closer to the
emancipation of humankind. We need it badly. We need it now!
We just do not have the right to stand by and watch while neo-
liberal hypercapitalism is not only putting millions, if not billions of
people in misery, but is also threatening the planet. We cannot. There-
fore, yes, I do think that the Arab Awakening is a wake up call in his-
tory. We cannot afford to sleep through it. We simply cannot. As I said
before – forgive me, but I really think this is the way ahead, for the
challenges we are facing are urgent and frightening like hell, so we
have to go for it: Tahrir Square Everywhere!
Postscript
(August 2012)
On 17 September 2011 Occupy Wall Street broke out. And the Span-
ish Indignado’s came to Brussels for a worldwide day of protest on 15
October. I was elated: my slogan had proved prophetic and my dream
came true. For a moment.
But all in all, with Libya and Syria in the shambles (and the
ensuing confusing in the left), it was a depressing winter. Most
depressing for me personally was the fact that a co-founder of the
World Tribunal on Iraq, Ayse Berktay, was arrested in Turkey late
October. I have hardly ever felt so powerless. She still is in prison.4
The future will tell what the balance sheet of the Arab Spring,
the Occupy and Indignado movement really looks like,5 but the occu-
pations of Tahrir Square, Liberty Plaza New York and so many other
squares in the world, like Puerta del Sol in Madrid, have to be seen in
themselves, as events.
In retrospect this quote from Deleuze and Guattari gives me
(and I hope all of us) some consolation (and courage to go on):
Would everything be in vain because the suffering is eternal and
because revolutions do not survive their own victories? But the
success of a revolution consists only in itself, precisely in the
vibrations, the embraces, the openings it has given to humans on
202
the moment it was made . . . The victory of a revolution is imma-

nent and consists in the new links it installs between humans,
even if they do not outlast its matter in fusion and make swiftly
place for division, for betrayal.6
Notes
1 See on this several texts in our book Art and Activism in the Age
of Globalization, NAi Publishers, Rotterdam, 2008.

2 I later did an interview in class with this person, journalist and
activist Hana Al Bayaty: ‘Behind the Scene of Tahrir Square.
A Skype conversation with Cairo’. See my Dutch-English com-

pendium of the decade De alledaagse apocalyps. Free down-
loadable from the internet: http://www.dewereldmorgen.be/
artikels/2011/09/02/de-alledaagse-apocalyps-van-nine-eleven-tot-
de-arabische-lente-nieuw-boek-nu-onl (or just google ‘Alledaagse
Apocalyps’).
3 ‘For a Justice to Come. Interview with Jacques Derrida’, op. cit.
(online: www.brusselstribunal.org).
4 Read Ayse’s letter from prison on Al Jadaliyya: http://www.jadali-
yya.com/pages/index/3787/letter-from-istanbul-bakirkoy-womens-
prison ; on the trial which took place in the beginning of July
2012, read my diary of an obsever on DeWereldMorgen: ‘Guanta-
namo Bay Istanbul’ (http://www.dewereldmorgen.be/blogs/lieven-
de-cauter/2012/07/03/ guantanamo-bay-istanbul-kafkaesque-trial-
in-middle-nowhere. click right for part 2 and 3) More context on
the petition: http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/detentionsintur-
key/ (click on Blog for more articles) and on the Brussels tribunal
website: www.brusselstribunal.org.
5 In spring 2012 we did Radio Tahrir in Kaaitheater, a marathon
looking back on the Arab Spring. It was broadcasted on Klara,
Flemish classical radio. We discussed for three hours with a large
panel and did interviews with Michael Hardt on the indignado
movement and with Tariq Ali on the Arab Awakening: see Foreign
policy in focus: http://www.fpif.org/blog/radio_tahrir_part_i_tariq_
ali_on_the_arab_awakening (transcribed by Odette Dijt, really a
must read).
6 Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari, Qu’est-ce que c’est la philoso-
phie ? Les Editions de Minuit, Paris, 1991, 167 (my translation).
Conclusions
204
The Perverted
Pyramid, Or the
Logic of Entropic
Empire
Entropic Empire
[11 September 2011]

Reflect #09
205
Ever since writing my book The Capsular Society, I have used the
term ‘Entropic Empire’, which I perceive as an empire inclined
towards and sustained by anarchy, civil war, and chaos. One could
criticize the author as an imposter for his frivolous use of scientific
jargon; one could say that this entropy is just another word for chaos,
for decay. But Entropic Empire is not necessarily a decaying empire
(although American predominance is waning, and even America itself
decaying), it is rather an emerging order. This is important. For me it
was the name for a new world system: it is the political constitution
that accompanies disaster capitalism. It was my feeling that together
they form the global political economy of our time. Or at least, that
the words ‘entropy’ and ‘Empire’ name the poles of the global system.
The somewhat outrageous or farfetched, pretentious, pedantic or a
least high-brow expression ‘Entropic Empire’, seemed inevitable: it is
not only not a decaying empire, but neither simply a chaotic empire.
What I tried to name was an emergent system where ‘creative chaos,
‘creative destruction’, state ending, rogue states, failed states, low
intensity civil war, etcetera, had become part of the functioning of the
system.
Now it is undeniable that violence, war, subjugation, urbicide,
genocide, and even state annihilation have been part and parcel of all
imperialism, from ancient Greece to the present day. But I would still
argue that in the new constellation, this ‘rule by chaos’ has become
systematic in an entirely new way. It has become part of a methodol-
ogy – Foucault would say a technology – of ruling. One could call it
‘disgovernance’. And in that respect it is remarkable. It is indeed the
demise of biopolitics (the governance of life in the welfare state) and
a return to thanatopolitics (politics of death) with the help of what I
called zoöpolitics (security politics).
Another way to put it would be to say that Entropic Empire is
‘imperial overstretch’ that has crystallized into a more or less stable
configuration. I conceived of Entropic Empire in a somewhat instinc-
tive, or evocative way, as a grotesque marriage between the War on
Terror, as a planetary state of exception (i.e. a no-win war against
terror and, by necessity, diffuse and permanent), and the relapse into
the state of nature (exemplified by failed states and the strategy of
state ending, like in Iraq, the rule of and by chaos), and following this,
as a planetary state of disarray which should and must be averted.
To me ‘Entropic Empire’ presented itself as a rather murky and
certainly vertiginous coalescence, which I tried to pinpoint and expose
for what it is, in opinion pages, but also in philosophical essays, diary
entries, case studies (like on Beirut or the blackout) and interviews.
The point of departure was, both explicitly and implicitly, that true
(good) politics is an attempt to maintain a balance in-between the
political extremes of the state of emergency and the state of nature;
or one could say also, in more traditional terms, between tyranny and
anarchy. These are extremes and not poles because their existence
206
goes, so to speak, beyond the realm of politics. In the nature state of

anarchy and the dictatorship of the State of Emergency, there is no
politics as such; the political is fully absorbed by either military law
(Patriot Act, Guantánamo, Abu Ghraib) and censure, be it by order
of the Party or the Great Helmsman, or in the other extreme case
by chaos, anarchy, thuggery, warlords, gangs, and organized crime.
Both extremes signify the end of the polis as the (more or less polite)
dispute on and organization of the good life in the city of man. Both
extremes mean the end of the political. Civil war is correctly described
by Carl Schmitt as proto-politics (by this admitting that the political
is something else than just the absolute confrontation between friend
and enemy); one could call war meta-politics, or at most, hyperpolitics.
Politics is an inherent attempt to avert and exclude these extremes; it
is the duty, if not the definition itself of politics, as the art of the polis.
Entropic Empire then is the order that thrives on the combination of
both extremes; it takes up, on the one hand, chaos and, on the other
hand, the imperial state of emergency; or in a different dimension, on
the one hand the latent civil war and on the other hand, permanent
war. Entropic Empire is in that sense a perverted synthesis of the
Aristotelian extremes.
Now we can connect the dots. We can draw the outline of
Entropic Empire, starting from the famous pyramid of Negri and
Hardt: Empire, the new structure of power, which, according to them
is, as is well known by now, threefold. The US, and along with them
the G7, the IMF and the World Bank, constitutes what Negri and
Hardt call the monarchy. The second layer of the imperial pyramid is
the aristocracy: transnational enterprises (companies) and the indi-
vidual states. Below that is the democracy: the UN general assembly,
the media, the religions, and the NGO’s. That three-tiered structure,
is Empire. This ‘mixed constitution’ they copy from Polybius, who
claimed that the Roman Empire was a mix of monarchy, aristocracy
and democracy, which explains why the call it ‘Empire’.1 And thus fol-
lows that the power no longer lies exclusively in the hands of America,
and that the power is not centralized, but ‘de-territorialized’. Hence it
is possible to describe, after Negri, the states as filters, and the media
as channels of the Empire.
And now on to the new pyramid, the tilted form of Empire. It
has the makings of a cartoon comic: The Perverted Pyramid. Parallel
to where Negri placed the monarchy, the neoconservatives have given
us a tyranny: the not quite so ‘benevolent hegemony’ of the US with
its ‘pre-emptive strike’ and ‘shock and awe’ strategy. So far the Obama
administration has not really changed course on this: the blatant
‘unilateralism’ was toned down, but the practices of American ‘excep-
tionalism’ (like targeted killings) remained, and homeland security
measures are even enhanced. NATO has transformed itself from a
European defense treaty to a worldwide intervention army under US
order, and has assumed its full imperial role: first in Afghanistan,
207
more recently in Libya.
Where Negri positioned the aristocracy, we can now see an oli-
garchy in place, poignantly demonstrated by the comportment of the
bonus-grabbing banker CEO’s, in short, the oligarchy of the neoliberal
culture of greed. The privatization of everything, even nature and lan-
guage; the ruthlessness of ‘disaster capitalism’ is covered by the total
hegemony of neoliberalism from the macro-scale of world economy
to the micro-scale of our own brains; our self conception as both con-
sumer and enterprise, which gave rise to the ‘enterpreneurial self’.2
Where Negri placed the democracy (the UN, the religions, the
press), we now can locate anarchy: rogue states, terrorism, piracy,
riots, but also state ending, rule by chaos, etcetera. Both the oligarchy
and the anarchy are used to diminish the power of the UN, to break
the power of the Arab nations, for instance by stirring religious strife
between Shia and Sunni. Here the use of entropy (or disorder) is very
clear. Empire was a (neo-roman) synthesis of the three forms of gov-
ernment which Aristotle considered examples of good governance; the
entropic empire is a synthesis of the three harmful ones.
Another way to put it would be to speak of ‘political entropy’ in
analogy to ‘social entropy’. Wikipedia gives us a most useful definition:
Social entropy is a macro-sociological systems theory. It is

a measure of the natural decay within a social system. It
can refer to the decomposition of social structure or of the
disappearance of social distinctions. Much of the energy
consumed by a social organization is spent to maintain its
structure, counteracting social entropy, e.g., through legal
institutions, education and even the promotion of television
viewing. Anarchy is the maximum state of social entropy.
Social Entropy implies the tendency of social networks and
society in general to break down over time, moving from
cooperation and advancement towards conflict and chaos.3
To go against entropy we have to invest more and more energy.
Modern Western complex societies remain organized by

large inputs of energy to mitigate the natural progression
of increasing entropy (disorder), according to the Second
Law of Thermodynamics, a fundamental law of physics.
This effectively states that Entropy (disorder) increases
with time. As the system becomes more complex, through
access to energy, it becomes more susceptible to changes
that may occur if one were to remove this source of energy.
Take away the energy inputs (largely from fossil fuels) and
organization corrodes, thus society becomes less cohesive
and trends toward anarchy.4
208
One could say that social entropy equals (or is a more scientific
description of) what we called the ‘implosion of the polis’ or the
‘relapse into the state of nature’.
Important is that this concept of social entropy supplies us with
the missing link between the permanent war on terror and global
warming. Beyond the fact that the Pentagon has the largest ecological
footprint on the planet, which is in itself reason for grave concern, it
gives us a glimpse of the disastrous deadlock we are in: we need more
and more energy to keep the system (from food production to mobility
and state apparatuses) going. Against the certainty of demographic
explosion and global warming this is a horrendous scenario. It is clear
that social entropy leads to political entropy, the disintegration of
political organization (failing states, civil war, etcetera) and that it is
used today within the (neoconservative) theory and practice of impe-
rial rule.
Most of all entropy is about irreversibility, as beautifully
expressed in this mental experiment (ascribed to artist Robert Smith-
son): when a child runs clockwise in circles with a pot a white and
black sand they will mix and the sand in the box will become grey. If
the child then runs in the opposite direction, it will not undo this pro-
cess but the sand will mix more. You cannot undo entropy, just as you
cannot undo the cloud of milk spreading in your coffee. Our ‘empire’
on earth has become entropic in that sense. The speeding up of our
life processes by our electronic media and by neoliberal technocapital-
ism and the increasing mobility of the world population – indeed, the
increasing mobility of each one of us – and the migrations that come
with it, seem to be irreversible. The most threatening is of course
global warming: it has become irreversible. These processes are with-
out ‘undo’ options. The more we try to run against the clock, the more
the sand seems to mix. That might be the broadest sense of what I
called ‘Entropic Empire’.

Am I being apocalyptic? To quote Hölderlin: ‘where danger is, the
redeeming power grows also.’ (Wo aber Gefahr ist, wächst das Ret-
tende auch’ – or as the saying goes: when the need is highest, help is
nighest). ‘Negentropy’ is what we need, forces that restructure, reor-
der our world. Against the backdrop of an ecological catastrophe con-
stituting a relapse into the state of nature, we have no option but to
change the current course of events. The only answer to the Entropic
Empire as perverted pyramid, based on the use of social and political
entropy, consists of environmentally aware and socially just politics,
in one word: ecological and social(ist) world politics.
The situation is dire, we need radical change, and the first step
is protest that in itself is not only a call for democracy, from Cairo to
Madrid (the slogan of the indignados: Democracia Real Ya!),5 from
Athens to New York, but also an exercise in re-inventing democracy.
Hence the importance to contrast 9/11 (and the 9/11 era) with the
209
Arab Spring, Ground Zero, with Tahrir Square.
And it is from Tahrir Square to Occupy Wall Street that a
new historical subject might be arising. It was at least a promising
signal of its potential: call it civil society,6 or a multitude of networked
creative producers, or the coming community of indetermined sin-
gularities, or just, ‘we, the people’. This new (and of course age old)
collective subject, this driving force of history, is our only hope. After
posthistory, neohistory? A new phase in history after the end of his-
tory as progress? It sounds like comic strip science fiction philosophy,
but in one form it is thinkable. In fact, the Marxists have been dream-
ing of it for 200 years now: the end of capitalism. That would mean
that ‘historical capitalism’, an era of more than 500 years according
to Braudel and Wallerstein, would have come to an end. That seems
for the time being unlikely but it remains conceivable. Not only as a
utopia but also as a dystopia. And even in a neutral way: it is think-
able that after the Age of Disaster (ca. 2050 to 2100), a new historical
system comes into being. It might take centuries before it really takes
shape. After the end of the Roman Empire there was a long twilight
zone between Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages. This comparison
can, of course, only be methodological: to show that world systems
come to an end and mutate. No one can predict what this mutation
will look like. In any case, Entropic Empire is a name for what we
have to avoid.
We know now what we fight against: the Entropic Empire. What
do we fight for? There is, I think, an anti-imperial consensus growing.
(If it ever will become a consistent new leftist program or paradigm
remains to be seen). The fight of the twenty-first century, is maybe
more than ever before in history – there Žižek, Negri and Hardt,
Agamben, Badiou, ecologists, Marxists, counterglobalists, indigna-
dos, slow science movement, the occupiers, etcetera, all agree – the
struggle of the twenty-first century is a struggle for the common. This
fight for the common starts when we start ‘commoning’: open source
science, open source internet, open source books, in short, re-appro-
priation of the artificial commons of language, culture, creativity, com-
munication, and knowledge, and, possibly more important even, the
defense, the protection, of the natural common, the planet. This fight
is made more urgent by the desire of Monsanto and other transna-
tional corporations to privatize the entire global food production.
The stakes are so high that one gets dizzy! ‘Defeatism’ looms.
‘Innere immigration’, the retrieval into the inner circle as large
swaths of the German intelligentsia did under Nazism and so many
people had to do in the age of totalitarian regimes, the ‘Nicht mit-
machen’ of Adorno, is, this time, not an option. On the other hand
it remains a plausible scenario: the capsular civilization, the elites
retreating from the chaotic, violent, polluted world. Entropic Empire
is the political constitution in the age of realized science fiction..
210
(Postscript on hysterical concepts. We should, maybe more than ever,

think ‘der Totale Blendungszusammenhang’, the blinding total coa-
lescence, the opaque ideological smoke curtain Adorno had in mind.
If we think of the film the Matrix, it is easier to understand Adorno‘s
oracle: ‘Das Ganze ist das Unwahre’. The Totality is the Untrue. I
would never have thought to think one day that Adorno did not exag-
gerate. Today, half a century after he wrote this phrase in his Nega-
tive Dialectics, people really have no more language to criticize the
system, no more eyes to see through it. Let alone they would have the
agency to do something about it, or, God forbid, overthrow the system.
With Europe in its deepest economic and political crisis since the
inception of the EU, severe budget cuts are the remedy, even if many
distinguished economists like Nobleprize winners Paul Krugman
and Joseph Stiglitz warn that this will make the economy shrink fur-
ther. Even a child can understand that. But Thatcher’s TINA is and
remains the mantra: ‘There Is No Alternative’.
What we need is, in Adorno’s terms, an ‘ontology of the false
state of things’. Therefore, ‘hysterical concepts’ are urgently needed:
insurrectional intuitions, revolting formulas, or terminator terms.
Like ‘transcendental capitalism’, ‘capsular civilization’, ‘glocal panic’,
or ‘glocal civil war’, ‘implosion of the polis’, ‘permanent catastrophe’,
‘New World Disorder’ and of course, ‘Entropic Empire’. Hysterical con-
cepts – the formula is in itself an example of what it tries to describe
– can help to name the Hydra, the seven headed dragon. I believe and
hope they can be useful, even if some of them might be short-lived,
like fire crackers. Against the post-political neutrality of consensual
terms like ‘sustainability’ or ‘good governance’ – who could be against
it?7 – we need strong language, graphic words, explicit lyrics, theoreti-
cal graffiti. Today one can only make concepts like Molotov cocktails.
Hysterical concepts? Badly needed!)
Notes
1 Antonio Negri & Michael Hardt, Empire, Havard University
Press, Cambridge, Ma & London, 2000, 304-325.
2 So much has been written on neoliberalism and its discontents
lately that the reader will forgive this omission in this book. To
give an concrete example of the power and ruthlessness of this
oligarchy, we can think of Monsanto having a hand in the ousting
of President Lugo of Paraguay. See: http://readersupportednews.
org/news-section2/318-66/12596-monsanto-linked-to-coup-that-
ousted-paraguayan-president.
3 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_entropy.
4 Ibid.
5 See on this our interview with Michael Hardt on Radio Tahrir:
http://www.fpif.org/blog/radio_tahrir_part_ii_the_indignado_and_
211
occupy_movement.
6 On civil society as motor of history see Foucault in a most inspir-
ing meditation on Fergusson’s concept of civil society in Naissance
de la Biopolitique, Gallimard, Paris, 2004, 310-311.
7 See on this Eric Swyngedouw, ‘The Post-Political City’ in: BAVO
(eds), Urban Politics Now. Re-imagining Democracy in the Neolib-
eral City, NAi Publishers, Rotterdam, 2007.
212
Afterthoughts on
Posthistory
Entropic Empire
[2012]
Reflect #09
213
Is it possible that we are falling out of history? Is it possible that we
are entering or have already entered something called posthistory, a
strange limbo after the end of history? This question has been haunt-
ing me for many years, indeed ever since my first book.1
Of course, there is common sense to save us: one cannot fall out
of history, just as little as one can fall off the earth. But are we sure
we cannot fall of the earth? Lately we are maybe a bit more doubtful.
Humanity is on a collision course with ‘spaceship earth’. If we are hit-
ting the limits of the earth, the limits of the ecosystem, of our natural
habitat, to the extent that might cause it irreparable damage and
unchain a series of catastrophes – one starts to wonder. We can fall
off the earth. At the very moment humankind starts hitting the limits
of the planet as ecosystem the question of falling out of history seems
less foolish.
The idea of posthistory as both the terminus and aim, the final
state of history, has a long and rather impressive genealogy: Hegel,
Marx, Cournot, Gehlen, Kojève, and recently Fukuyama; but also Vat-
timo, Baudrillard, and occasionally Agamben. For Hegel post-history
began once the (German) State was really formed and philosophy had
understood that the subjective spirit and objective spirit were one and
made the synthesis in absolute spirit, this process of awareness being
the philosophy of Hegel himself. In more political terms, the German
State was the final phase of history. Like the end of art, Hegel pre-
dicted the end of history. He was prophetic about art – uncannily so
– so he might have had a point about the end of history too. But that
remained much less convincing.
For Marx the end of history was not the bourgeois state was
but the classless society. The withering away of the state, the end of
capitalist exploitation, was a sort of materialist version of messianic
redemption: the classless society as paradise on earth. The welfare
state came close and that is why Kojève saw the Japanese consumer
society of the seventies as a neo-Hegelian form of posthistory. The
people had nothing left to do other than stimulate themselves with
all sorts of gadgets. Art, Kojève predicted, would become a sort of
ikebana, a formal play without anything really at stake. Close to that
was the neoconservative vision of Fukuyama, stating that capital-
ism had finally defeated competitors, communism and fascism, and
that capitalism under the guise of liberal democracy (close to the
state of Hegel) would live happily ever after. Indeed, the individualist
consumer of democratic society was the fulfillment of Zarathustra’s
prophecy of the ‘last man’: a long-living, death and disease fearing,
self-indulgent, passive and pacified creature.
A different take on posthistory represents to the theories of
the early nineteenth century positivist and mathematician Antoine
Cournot. He believed that history and society were calculable enti-
ties, and had laws like physics. One of them was that any system had
three phases, a phase of building up, a phase of finding equilibrium,
214
and a third phase that was a post-equilibrium in which a system

persisted without major changes (in thermodynamics, it would be a
system in equilibrium where entropy is not increasing but constant).
This third phase he called the posthistorical phase. Our posthistory
seems to be the exact opposite: the system, the ecosystem to begin
with but also the political system and the ideologies, seems to have
lost all sense of equilibrium, all parameters seem rampant, and all
attempts to change the parameters cause new problems. Biofuel is a
schoolbook example because by now it causes more problems than it
solves (as it has made food prices go up and requires large swathes of
land badly needed for an ever growing world population). So our pos-
thistory seems more close to chaos theory, a sort of entropic universe,
where complexities are staggering and all equilibrium is gone, and in
which the system might change abruptly once tipping points are met.
Posthistory has many faces. Its most innocent but most omni-
present one is the city as theme park, posthistory as generic history,
history as fake (a real fake or a faked reality): history as déjà vue. The
writings of Koolhaas on the generic city and on ‘junkspace’ are full of
sardonic depictions of this concrete posthistory. More serious are the
others faces. Posthistory is the end of the welfare state: neo-liberal-
ism. It is the end of the state: globalization. It is the end of Enlighten-
ment: fundamentalism. It is the end of the international legal order:
the war or terror. It means the end of Empire: the stable pyramid of
power drawn up by Antonio Negri is shaking on its feet. The contem-
porary world order seems to be taking on the plot of Stars Wars: the
Empire strikes back, meaning shock and awe and pre-emptive strike
as a neocon ‘Project for a New American Century’. It is the end of pro-
gress as unlimited growth via the consumption of limited resources:
global warming. It is the end of territorial integrity: mass migration.
It is the end of the seemingly seamless network society because the
seams of the world become more and more visible: the walls in Ceuta,
Tijuana, Israel. We have called them the new iron curtains, and they
may be the most allegorical (and obscene) monuments of our New
World Disorder. High security routines on all levels. Indeed, this is
the rise of a capsular civilization. Posthistory is the new Middle Ages,
where neo-theocracy, the politics of fear, and fortressing all seem to go
together.
Dropping out of history still seems as unthinkable and ludicrous
as falling off the earth, yet maybe it is precisely this impossibility
that we are living through. It is from this perspective that we have to
rethink the City of Man. What we need is a new philosophy of history.
What comes after progress? It seems like another incongruous, absurd
question, and yet that is the question that we have to address: we
need to try and think the future. Kant proved that it is possible when
he predicted, 150 years before the advent of the UN, the need for an
international legal order and an ‘eternal peace’ between states. Today
the question is also: is there an international legal order to be thought
215
that lies beyond a treaty between states and dominated by states?
That is another way to put our question: what comes after the state?
Kant made not so much a prediction as a plea: if we do as if
there is ‘a plan of nature or providence with mankind’, it will enhance
the realization of that plan. In that respect Kant’s famous alsob, his
as if, is the core of his philosophy of history: if you do as if there is
progress (at least in law and legality), then you heighten the chance
to realize it. And then history might indeed show effective progress. It
helps to be progressive. In that respect his text on ‘the idea of general
history from a cosmopolitan viewpoint’ had something prophetic that
is still inspiring: progress for him was a self-fulfilling prophecy. And
he could name it: the advent of an international legal order was the
target of history. What we need now is a similar vision, a similarly
self-fulfilling prophesy. And it is that which we seem to fatally lack at
the moment. When all is said and done, that is the deficit of the left,
and not only of the left, but of politics in general or even modernity at
large. That is and remains the world historical meaning of the rather
academic, confusing, and confused debate on postmodernism that was
launched in 1979 by Lyotard, in La condition postmoderne, in which
he famously declared the end of grand narratives – indeed precisely
those narratives about progress and emancipation.
Later, in L’inhumain, Lyotard also started to formulate his
black hypothesis on posthistory. It was his way to think into the far
future: the hypothesis that technology is becoming an instance that
will try and survive the death of the sun and the death of humanity if
necessary. ‘Technoscience’ as the new subject or motor of history – it
was his form of philosophy of history in the age of realized science
fiction. This ‘black hypothesis’ is perhaps also a hidden horizon of my
writings.2 Because of the ongoing digital revolution and all that it
entails technology seem to leave more than ever the status of means
or medium, but to become a milieu, and even an aim it itself, if not
to become its own aim: the intelligent machines as species. Indeed, it
is pretty impressive as the new telos of history: the absolute spirit of
Hegel as Ghost not in but of the machine. But the black hypothesis is
a long shot, too far (and too dystopic) as it plays out in the cosmologi-
cal time of the dead of the sun, which is 4.5 billion years ahead. We
need a self fulfilling prophecy, a projection, a politico-philosophical
project for now. And we need it urgently. The multitude, civil society,
can be a tool, or even the driving force of history, but it is not the goal,
the end of history.
I have another black hypothesis. It has also been underlying this
book. Let’s look one more time to the curve of the Club of Rome (men-
tioned in the text on the Mad Max Phase of Globalization) and make a
stark and simple version of it: a perfect ‘bell curve’ or Gaussian func-
tion. If in 2000 we were six billion and in 2050 we will be 9/10 billion,
we could end up in 2100 with six billion again. Pure statistical logic.
Pure symmetry. It means three billion people less in 50 years. That is
216
a concrete, dry, statistical face of the abstract and ‘hysterical concept’

of ‘permanent disaster’. It will not be the end of the world, not the end
of mankind. But it will be hellish all the same. It seems an almost
scientific forecast to predict a very dark spell somewhere between
2050 and 2100; something comparable to the ‘mad fourteenth century’
with its black death, which was likewise not the end of the world nor
of mankind but hell nonetheless. And after that? What comes next?
Difficult to say. But it might be called: ‘beyond posthistory’.
The texts in this book cover, in a more or less philosophical mode,
the decade from Ground Zero to Tahrir Square. From despair to hope?
Yes. The protests are indeed a sign of hope. This awakening, this force
of the weak, as Derrida would say, is an attempt to rethink the phi-
losophy of history (a negative theology of history): the ‘messianicity
without messianism’ that Derrida saw at work in the alterglobalist
movement.3
Negri and Hardt, Žižek, and Badiou all seem to believe in a new
communism. In fact, I wish I could believe them. Is the commons an
aim in itself? Does this work? How to think the ‘commoning’ of the
common as the telos of history? Return to language (as the artificial
commons), return to nature? Maybe. But not as we can think it now.
One thing is certain: the defence of the common is some sort of com-
pass to steer through the heavy waters to come.
Agamben even more radically, and in a more radically theologi-
cal mode, bets on the (anarchistic) messianic interruption. The gen-
eral refusal of national or any other identity (symbolized by identity
papers) is for him the ultimate political gesture that would reveal
humankind, all of us, to be beyond legality and human rights (which
are only functioning as citizens rights not for illegal migrants, refu-
gees, and other stateless people), and to be a multiplicity of unspeci-
fied singularities. I wish I could believe him too. Thinking the inter-
ruption or the revolution is something topical today. But capitalism
and international politics, the New World Order, Entropic Empire,
will only be really transformed by structural mutations, and these are
not only in the hand of a ‘historical subject’ (i.e the driving force of
history: the proletariat for Marx, civil society for liberals). For it is the
objective processes of the economic and technological infrastructure
that determine history (in this I do follow Marxism).
Maybe the historical subject is already, as Lyotard predicted in
his black hypothesis, technology. Even more than capitalism, technol-
ogy will take its course, unless we see a quasi total collapse – compa-
rable to the way knowledge and technology regressed after the fall
of the Roman Empire. It took more than a thousand years, until the
renaissance, for a real paradigm shift to occur: the renaissance, as
the beginning of capitalism as system and ‘modernity’ as ‘episteme’
of a world historical era. Technology is older than capitalism, it is in
a sense as old as humankind, and therefore it will be the iron hand
behind progress. Alas, war and technology are twins – all technol-
217
ogy starts as military technology. From the silex to the internet and
GPS, war technology will remain a driving force – unless and until we
outlaw war.
Outlawing war sounds as outlandish, as utopian as the class-
less society, if not more so. And yet, this is the way ahead. That the
outlawing of war is feasible is proven to us by history: war is outlawed
within ever greater swathes of the planet. Within North America
war is unthinkable. In Europe, despite of the Yugoslavian nightmare
(which was a civil war, and as we have seen, that is quite something
different), this is also the case. So a world system (whatever its name
would be: the United States of World or whatever) is perfectly think-
able. Kant’s vision 2.0.
The world system will never be perfect, as humans are not per-
fect, yet those who dream of perfection, beyond state and property,
beyond public and private, beyond the division of powers, etcetera,
dream of a utopian or messianic posthistory. To them I shout with
Zarathustra ‘Gegen den Hinterwelten’: ‘No to the afterworlds, there
is no beyond’. Transcending man is no option. Politics should stick to
what we have, to (Deleuzian) immanence. It is with this world, with
this human species and within this history that we will have to live.
There is no other one. As there never was a paradise, there never will
be redemption. Plain and simple. Those who dream of the commons
without (state-owned) public sphere and (property-based) private
sphere, are dreaming of something beyond history, beyond historical
Man. They are mostly harking back to pre-sedentary, nomadic tribal
man for vague examples catapulted into the information age. Or else
they take heterotopian examples, like the Franciscan order, and try
to project that onto an entire society (strongly present in both Negri
and Agamben). But however inspiring, society cannot be modeled, as
Morus did, on the cloister as paradigm; heterotopia cannot and should
not be turned into a utopia covering all of society for it will be totali-
tarian (like theocracy). We cannot think politics by postulating the
possibility of a truly posthistorical, paradaisical Man. What we need
is a real historical political program.
But a global civil war, on the contrary, remains plausible. The
breakthrough of fundamentalism in the wake of the Arab Spring and
the power grip of Tea Party and Christian fundamentalism in the US,
the ultra-zionism in Israel and the neo-fascism in Europe (think of
the Golden Dawn in Greece), are more than ominous.
According to Schmitt, pacifism leads to the final war: the war
against war. For him that was a reason to define politics as essentially
the fight on life and death with the enemy and the affirmation of the
state of nature in international politics. This has been the true target
of this book: today the affirmation of politics should be, more than
ever before in history, the negation of the state of nature (as the state
of latent civil war). Posthistory should not and cannot be the eternal
return of prehistory. We have to think dialectically: in that respect
218
Nietzscheanism as a philosophy of history is unacceptable. A philoso-

phy of history cannot accept the unacceptable. Nietzscheans would
claims that a tragic philosophy of history is the only option after the
death of God: it is post-theological. But the eternal return is refus-
ing history; history is not circular, but linear, or at least irreversible.
There is, even in entropy, the arrow of time.
Without an ethical stance, no philosophy of history is possible.
That is the as if of Kant. In Hegel, Benjamin, Agamben, and Derrida,
there is, however differently, a theological, messianic defence-line
against this Nietzschean hammer. We need a ‘messianicity without
messianism’. Hegel was right in his own terms: all philosophy of his-
tory is a theodicy. Or as Benjamin said, more accurately in a paradox
that encompasses all his endeavours: history gives us an experience
that forbids us to read history in a non-theological way, but we cannot
represent it in a theological way.4 Even Adorno held on to a teleology
of history. In an article called ‘Progress’, he was dreaming, with the
sensitivity for suffering of the fin de siècle decadence as example (he
refers to Nietzsches embrace of a horse), ‘about the progress that was
not yet begun’. The political term ‘progressive’ has or had, in addition
to its banal meaning (like left and right), also true philosophical roots
and a profound meaning. But what does ‘progressive’ mean when we
are falling out of history? That is yet another way to put the question.
The essays in this book, I hope, have brought some bits and
pieces of answers. But the true answer lies outside the scope of this
book – of any book. It lies in practice; in the activism of each one of us.
Whether the multitude exists or not, is viable or not, is an academic
debate, but if we do as if the multitude could exist and act accordingly,
then we might prevail. And finally start the progress that has not yet
begun.
Notes
1 Het hiernamaals van de kunst [The Hereafter of Art], Vlees &
Beton, Mechelen, 1991. It was a collection of essays on postmod-
ern art and therefore with necessity pondering on modernity, his-
tory and progress.
2 Lyotard called it that way in an interview/seminar we did with
him in the frame of Antwerp 93, cultural capital of Europe. The
recordings of this interview were done by professionals of the
classical radio (BRT3 it was called at that time), but got lost. I
have not found a written reference of him using this phrase of the
black hypothesis. The phrase ‘Hypothèse noire’ even gives zero
results on Google – strange: nobody, in whatever context has used
this phrase, ever, at least not as archived by internet. And when,
in disbelief, I type ‘Lyotard black hypothesis’ google finds . . . one
of my own texts (‘The Capsule and the Network later published
219
The Capsular Civilizaition). Uncanny. Maybe it is not by incident
the tapes got lost.
3 I discussed this idea extensively at the end of ‘The Tyrant as Mes-
siah’ in part one of this book.
4 This paradox was the leitmotiv of my book on Benjamin, The
Dwarf in the Chess Machine, published in Dutch as: Lieven De
Cauter, De dwerg in de Schaakautomaat. Benjamins verborgen
leer, SUN, Nijmegen, 1999, 463; in English there are for the time
being a few chapters available on www.oxumoron.org. I hope it
will some day be published in full.
Mit Schrecken sieht der Swhermütige die Erde
zurückgefallen in einen Bloben Naturzustand.
‘Horrified the melancholic sees the earth relapsed into a bare state of Nature.’
220
(Walter Benjamin)
Acknowledgements
First of all I have to thank Patrick Deboosere, Michiel Dehaene and

Rudi Laermans as co-authors of some of the best texts of this book for
their courtesy in letting me publish these in a book of mine. The work-
ing sessions with you, gentlemen, I cherish as some of the most excit-
ing intellectual pleasures of the past decade.
I wish to thank the Department of Architecture, Urbanism and
Planning of the University of Leuven, the media school RITS in Brus-
sels, the Berlage Institute in Rotterdam, the institutions where I have
been teaching, for giving me research time and letting me write my
own stubborn texts far away from formatted ‘output’.
Of course it is a pleasure to name the people who actually helped
make this book: Odette Dijt, who translated several texts out of sheer
enthusiasm and has been a sharp but witty critic; Leonhard De Paepe,
who also translated several texts, out of sheer enthusiasm; Dakin
McDonald, who assisted with the language editing of the final manu-
script, again out of sheer enthusiasm; Peter Bultinck and Jobert van In,
who gave enthusiast but critical feedback on the final manuscript. It is
awesome this sort of fervor. It is a great honour. An equally great honour
is having my fetish photographer (Carl De Keyzer from Magnum!) on the
cover of a book of mine. Thank you, Carl, for not only letting me cut it but
also for clearing it with a generous: ‘on the house’. It is only after staring
several times at the first attempt to frame it, that I recognized myself in
the child: tiny author lost in an endless catastrophic landscape.
Furthermore I wish to thank nai010 director Eelco van Welie
and his team for the trust in the relevance of my writings and the
professional handling of the process from manuscript to book. Making
books with them is great.
Then there is my wife, of course. She not only gives me space
for all my activism and busy life but also endures my volatile moods
(either too high or too low) during my solitary writing days and
nights. Thanks a million for being there, Leen.
Big thanks also to all my friends and activist comrades for shar-
ing ideas and experiences. You are part and parcel of these texts, if
mostly, this time, in indirect ways.
Special thanks finally for my students who helped me finalize
these texts while discussing them for hours on end. You have inspired
me more than you might think. It is for you that I have been writing
this book. I know, it is a mixed blessing; a poisonous gift.
Forgive me the darkness of my thoughts, but I hope they will
enlighten your path.
Origin of the Texts
‘From Ground Zero to Tahrir Square’ is based on a talk at De Unie,

Rotterdam, 16 June 2011. The essay was written in the summer and
221
published in the September issue of the magazine Rekto:Verso. Trans-
lated by Leonhard De Paepe.
‘The Rise of Rogue States’ was written in collaboration with Patrick

Deboosere. He is a professor of demography at the VUB (Vrije Uni-
versiteit Brussel). He was formed as a political scientist. Together we
were the cofounders of the Brussells Tribunal against the war in Iraq
(see: www.brusselstribunal.org). Published as: Lieven De Cauter &
Patrtick De Boosere, ‘ “Schurkenstaat” of “Schurkenstreek” ’. Over de
constructie van een vijandsbeeld na de koude oorlog’, in: Parmentier,
15, nr 4. Translated by Leonhard De Paepe.
‘The Tyrant as Messiah’ is a lecture held during a colloquium on Mes-

sianism and the law, at the Institute for Jewish studies, Antwerp,
11-12 May 2006, published as: Lieven De Cauter, ‘The Tyrant as Mes-
siah. The role of Messianism and Antinomianism in Neoconservative
Ideology’, in Vittoria Borsò, e.a. (eds), Benjamin – Agamben. Politik,
Messianismus, Kabbala / Politics, Messianism, Kabbalah, König-
shausen & Neumann, Würzburg 2010, p 255-270.
‘The Mad Max Phase of Globalization’ was first published as ‘The Mad
Max Phase’, in: Richard Plunz & Maria Paola Sutto (eds), Urban Cli-
mate Change Crossroads, Earth Institute, Columbia University, 2009,
p 111-117 (ISBN 978-0-9822174-0-5) and in an extended version in
Frederick Le Roy e.a (eds), Tickle Your Catastrophe. Imagining catas-
trophe in Art, Architecture and Philosophy, Ghent, Academia Press,
2011, p 155-186. This version synthesizes the previous two.
‘The New Spatial World (Dis)order’: A first version of this text

was published in French as Lieven De Cauter & Michiel Dehaene,
‘L’Archipel et le lieux du ban. Tableau de la ville désastre’, in Airs de
Paris (catalogue), Centre Pompidou, éditions du Centre Pompidou,
Paris, 2007, p144-148. A second version was made for the Biennale of
Rotterdam and published as, ‘Meditations on Razor Wire. A Plea for
Para-architecture’, in Visionary Power (cat.), NAi Publishers, 2007, to
go with our contribution to the exhibition of the same name. A third
version was published as Lieven De Cauter & Michiel Dehaene, ‘The
Archipelago and the Ubiquitous Periphery’, in Border Conditions,
Marc Schoonderbeek (ed.), Amsterdam: Architecture, & Natura Press,
2010, p 77-83. This is the original version.
‘The beWILDerment of Pentheus’, written with my friend and col-

league Rudi Laermans, who is a professor of sociology at Leuven
University, and who has published several books (on popular culture,
cultural policy, and system theory). It was published (and hidden) in
a artist’s catalogue: Rudi Laermans & Lieven De Cauter, ‘The BeWIL-
Derment of Pentheus. On the Attraction of the Nature State and the
222
Nature State as Spectacle’, Kendell Geers Irrespectiv (catalogue),

SMAK Gent, ACTAR, Barcelona, 2007 (also in French), s.p., (ISBN
978-84-934879-5-9).
‘Towards a Phenomenology of Civil War’ was written for a cultural

project in Les Halles, a cultural centre in Brussels; in particular, it is
the basis for a colloquium held in March 2011 on ‘Beirut as Paradigm’.
This version of the text is a highly abridged translation from the
French original, and published as ‘Towards a Phenomenology of Civil
War. Hobbes meets Benjamin in Beirut’, in the Journal of Urban and
Regional Research; Volume 35, nr 2, March 2011. Translated from the
French by Iain L. Fraser.
‘The Blackout’, unpublished lecture, University of Ghent, 2010. Trans-

lated by Leonhard De Paepe.
‘The Negation of the State of Nature’, unpublished so far, was written

as a contribution in an ongoing dialogue with Rudi Laermans. Even if
I used some of his reading notes on Schmitt, the main argument, all
interpretations, and hence also all possible mistakes, are mine.
‘The Return of the State of Nature’, is an unpublished seminar hand-

out used at Goldsmiths College, University of London, 2009, hence I
call it ‘The London Program’. The seminar introduced the research on
the state of nature I was conducting with Rudi Laermans. As said in
the introduction, the idea was to make a book together. This part III is
a stand in for it.
‘The Space of Play: Towards a General Theory of Heterotopia’ is a text

written together with Michiel Dehaene who is now a senior lecturer
in urbanism at the University of Ghent. It was published as: Lieven
De Cauter & Michiel Dehaene, ‘The Space of Play. Towards a General
Theory of Heterotopia’, in Michiel Dehaene & Lieven De Cauter (eds.),
Heterotopia and the City. Public Space in a Postcivil Society. Rout-
ledge, London, 2008, p 87-102. (It is the nucleus of a planned book:
The Third Sphere. Towards a General Theory of Heterotopia.)
‘ ‘‘Everywhere Tahrir Square!”: Reflections on the Revolution in Egypt’

is a series of articles written in the heat of the Arab Spring, published
on FPIF, Foreign Policy in Focus (often under titles of the editors):
‘Egypt: Back Against the Wall, a Tyrant Embraces Anarchy’ http://
www.fpif.org/blog/egypt_back_against_the_wall_a_tyrant_embraces_
anarchy
‘Egypt Protests Signal an End to the Post-9/11 Era’
http://www.fpif.org/blog/egypt_protests_signal_an_end_to_the_post-
911_era
‘The Key to Understanding Tahrir Square: Swarm intelligence’
223
http://www.fpif.org/blog/the_key_to_understanding_tahrir_square_
swarm_intelligence
‘The Days of Anger: Humiliation, Dignity and Fear in the Middle East’
http://www.fpif.org/blog/the_days_of_anger_humiliation_fear_and_dig-
nity_in_the_middle_east; except the last text which was never pub-
lished..
‘The Perverted Pyramid’ was written on the occasion of the publica-

tion of De Alledaagse Apocalyps (11 September 2011) but remained
unpublished. This is an extended version. Translated by Odette Dijt.
‘Afterthoughts on Posthistory’ was, like the prologue, written for this

book.
Credits
This book has been made possible in part by the support of the Department of
Architecture, Urbanism and Planning of the University of Leuven and the
224
media school RITS in Brussels.
Translations of texts written in Dutch: Leonhard De Paepe, Odette Dijt

Copy editing: Dakin McDonald
Design: Joseph Plateau, Peter Kingma
Type setting: ViaMare, Marijke Maarleveld
Cover photo: © Carl De Keyzer, Magmun, Remains of a Russian plane, Kabul,
2004 (detail), from the ‘tableaux de guerre’ series, published in his book Trinity.
Publisher: Eelco van Welie, nai010 publishers, Rotterdam
© 2012 Lieven De Cauter, nai010 publishers and Rudi Laermans, Patrick

Deboosere and Michiel Dehaene for their respective contributions
© 2012 nai010 publishers (Reflect series)
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,

stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, elec-
tronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior writ-
ten permission of the publisher.
info@nai010.com
nai010 publishers is an internationally orientated publisher specialized in

developing, producing and distributing books on architecture, visual arts and
related disciplines.
www. nai010.com
Available in North, South and Central America through D.A.P./Distributed

Art Publishers Inc, 155 Sixth Avenue 2nd Floor, New York, NY 10013-1507,
tel +1 212 627 1999, fax +1 212 627 9484, dap@dapinc.com
Available in the United Kingdom and Ireland through Art Data, 12 Bell
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nai010 publishers

intend the Reflect

Previously published in reflect #05

reflect #04 Reflect #08

The New World Disorder. Foreword 8

From Ground Zero to Tahrir Square: The Post-9/11

1. The War on Terror as Planetary State of Emergency

The Rise of Rogue States: The Construction of an Enemy

The Tyrant as Messiah: Messianism and Antinomianism

2. The City of Man in the Age of Disaster

The Mad Max Phase of Globalization 56

The New Spatial World (Dis)Order: The Archipelago

3. The Return of the State of Nature

The BeWILDerment of Pentheus (with Rudi Laermans) 88

Towards a Phenomenology of Civil War: Hobbes in Beirut 118

The Blackout 134

The Negation of the State of Nature 142

The Return of the State of Nature (Synopsis) 168

The Space of Play: Towards a General Theory of Heterotopia

‘Everywhere Tahrir Square!’ Reflections on the Revolution in Egypt 1

The Perverted Pyramid or the Logic of Entropic Empire 204

theoretical and political texts of the last 7 years (2004-2011). It is

Ground Zero to Tahrir Square’.

World (Dis)Order’, I tried to evoke, together with urban planner

ied more. I will come back on it in the text on the blackout.

Apocalypse 2001: The Planetary State of Emergency

ance of the concentration camp. Allegorical as it might sound, Guan-

was covered up to this day. The acquittal of Kimyongür came only

The Decade of Neoconservatism and Neoliberalism

in 1997. Its body of thoughts was propagated by the Weekly Standard

pre-emptive strikes is a precondition for this strategic goal. American

a neoliberal utopia Atlas Shrugged, which became one of the most

The Permanent Catastrophe

logic of growth, we are on a collision course with the boundaries of

I call this new world disorder ‘Entropic Empire’ (a sequel to The

The Arab Spring

Athens, from Barcelona to Sanaa, from Damascus to Madrid, from

The Rise of Rogue

As early as July 1985, President Reagan had asserted

So the concept had to expand:

Three other nations, Syria, Sudan and Afghanistan, would

Bush administration with the ‘Axis of Evil’ concept (gather-

2002 State of the Union Address’.1

The United States who claim to guarantee international

This may sound like an overstatement (in accordance with Chomsky

. . . American statesmen today ought to recognize that

This preventive approach was later radicalized by Wolfowitz into the

interests, might block America’s endeavour for continued world domi-

my interest is the general interest and since all that is against my

world: the intergalactic parliament is overthrown (‘Thank God the

are living in primitive, neo-medieval circumstances. They are being

The exception is the translation, the criterion of sover-

It is obvious that this interpretation is not only inspired by Schmitt

I think it is not Hineininterpretierung to say that this was a com-

To be fair, we must take into account this contradiction

within American democracy – on the one hand, auto-immu-

This renewed attempt to ‘American pre-eminence’ goes via ‘American

There are many more stakes than petrol alone, especially

Derrida even links the invasion of Iraq to Israel:

Many have said that the American-Israeli alliance or the sup-

This alliance between ‘certain American Jews’ and the Christian

Neocon Politics and Straussian Antinomianism

with Iraq provides the immediate justification, the need for a

Here we see the philosopher whispering in the ear of those in power