Conversations After Reading Friel (Part Three)
- By Amanda Minervini and Adam Sitze, with Jim Hicks
Editor's Note: After attending a launch event for Howard Friel's Chomsky and Dershowitz: On Endless War and the End of CIvil Liberties, we asked a couple of friends of MR to sit down for conversation about the book and the crucial issues it raises. What follows is the third of a five-part discussion.
Link to Part One
Link to Part Two
III. The View from Outside
Jim Hicks: In the questions I sent you both, I’m afraid I wasn’t very effective at framing the next topic, but what I’d like to ask you both is rather simple: how do you think Friel’s arguments might resonate outside the US? My sense is that there’s a certain level of insularity in his presentation of these two figures—perhaps necessarily so, to do it otherwise might be asking Friel to write a different book. But I have spent enough time outside the US—talking with people and getting a sense of how they see the US—to wonder whether the critique that Friel offers might just be heard as just one more example of American exceptionalism, as if he’s saying that, somehow, this great and beautiful country, the shining light for the world, has gone astray, and yet, if we expose its errors with the correct sort of jeremiad, we can still get back on path and do good. Though I don’t know for sure, I do suspect that by now the rest of the planet might be rightfully suspicious of this line of argument. Did the two of you, both scholars who have at least a foot and part of your histories thinking outside of our borders, have that sense of the book as well?
Amanda Minervini: I actually didn’t think about it in those terms. But now that you say it, I see that you have a point, and I realize how I simply took it for granted that an American book like this had to be insular. I wasn’t really expecting him to go outside of US data and US politics. So, right, maybe it could have been more open and also talk more about the role of the US in within an international network, about NATO and so on. That’s not there.
Jim Hicks: What really worries me is the implicit suggestion that any sort of solution can be arrived at merely through domestic politics, when clearly the subject of the book is foreign policy.
Adam Sitze: Jim, let me actually return to your first provocation and say that I couldn’t agree more. There’s a whole school of thought on the American left that seems to me to define itself in terms of constitutional patriotism, that seems to hold that the American constitution is, if not the epitome of the true, and the good, and the beautiful in jurisprudence, then essentially the modern origin of what’s true, good, and beautiful in jurisprudence. And, honestly, I think it’s a premise of this sort that allows Dershowitz to move from his role as a critic of Vietnam in the 1960s to that of the security advocate of 2014. The same exceptionalism that says that “America” is a synonym for the true, the good, and the beautiful in law also allows us to say that any law that constrains America is, in a way, contrary to the innermost potential of law itself. In this respect, the constitutional patriotic left risks being the undeveloped photographic negative of the nationalist security advocate. Whereas the nationalist patriot has great pride in US exceptionalism, the leftist constitutional patriot has great shame in US exceptionalism, as if shame were sufficient for a politics or the hallmark of critique. It’s a superegoic gesture that quietly ascribes to the US the same sense of omnipotence—the same understanding of unlimited US power—that the far right openly affirms. Let’s take Friel’s implied causality: if America ceased waging aggressive wars, then terrorism would cease. I think that’s a fantasy. I think it’s a fantasy of American omnipotence, but from a left-wing angle, that essentially sees America as an omnipotent power; that if it just exercised its will differently, it would produce different results. It’s a nationalist fantasy of infinite power, only played in a minor rather than major key: shame instead of pride. This I think is a mode of legal critique that leaves itself open to a reversal of the Dershowitzian type.
Jim Hicks: Let me push you a little bit on that. . . because while I appreciate the critique of the leftist constitutional patriot, I also was reminded of something a friend and scholar, Marilyn Young, said on the subject of US exceptionalism. She said, roughly, that one thing we do have to remember is that, at least since WWII, there is something exceptional about the US and that is its power to affect the rest of the planet—and I think, by the word “affect,” “harm” is what she meant. My feet are in several countries, but I certainly spend a lot of time in Italy, and there I’m often pushed to reflect on the difference between a horrific administration with very little military power and a horrific administration with tremendous military strength. I have a feeling that Amanda has been in those conversations as well. The Berlusconi/Bush simultaneity definitely lent itself to some interesting conversations.
Adam, you were talking about a fantasy of omnipotence in this kind of leftist constitutional patriotism, but there’s also a history of tremendous power. Maybe that history is ending; certainly we’re reminded over and over again recently of the limits of these “interventions,” the drug war perhaps being the most obvious.
Adam Sitze: Yes, I’d like to respond to that, because it’s something that’s worth dwelling on. With Arendt, I think we should distinguish between violence and power: power is a capacity that is held in common and that doesn’t need to rely upon instruments or technologies in order to sustain or maintain itself. I usually think of violence as an instrumental relation that forces somebody to do something, through some kind of leverage, or through some direct application of plastic, steel, concrete, or silicon, some direct application of force. On these terms, I do think that the United States is extraordinarily violent, but I also think that its military might is in some cases, though not in all cases, surprisingly impotent. The US lost the war in Vietnam, it does not seem to me to have won its war in Iraq or Afghanistan, not to mention its war on drugs or its war on poverty. What then are the recent wars that the US has won, that have led to lasting victories?
Jim Hicks: Yes, it’s almost as if every war that the US has engaged in, since WWII, without declaring, it has also lost.
Adam Sitze: Yes, exactly. I guess I need to be very very clear about this. It would be a mistake to think, or to pretend, that the US is not violent, but I think the US is increasingly an impotent state. It’s a violent and impotent State, and I think we need to treat those qualities as dialectically related. The US’s dedication to exceptionalism (to which proponents of “soft power” remain committed), its fascination with military might, its faith in advanced technologies, leave it incapable of achieving the power it desires. The predator drone strikes are an example of this dialectic; they’re an attempt to use advanced military technologies to keep designated terrorists constrained to certain places, and to keep their activities to a minimum in certain places. But in Pakistan among other places these strikes are producing a huge response, they are deepening enmity toward the United States. The predator drones are certainly violent, but I think we need to ask ourselves whether they are powerful as well. In important respects, the answer is no. In general, instead of assuming that the US is omnipotent, I think it’s useful to consider the possibility that the US as an empire in decline, and to remember that empires in decline are often very violent externally and very unstable internally. If you think of France and Algeria during the 1960s, and think of the boomerang effect that followed the Algerian War, you have a sense of what I mean.
Link to Part Four
Amanda Minervini is Visiting Assistant Professor of Italian and German at Salem State University. She has published translations of Giorgio Agamben, Wendy Brown, and Carlo Galli, as well as essays on Saint Francis, Italian cinema, and the work of the philosopher Roberto Esposito. Her essay on the war years of Saint Francis and Pope Francis will appear in MR this fall.
Adam Sitze is Assistant Professor of Law, Jurisprudence, and Social Thought at Amherst College and author of The Impossible Machine: A Genealogy of South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission (Univ. of Michigan Press, 2013). He has also edited, with Timothy Campbell, Biopolitics: A Reader (Duke UP, 2013) as well as Carlo Galli's Political Spaces and Global War (Univ. of Minnesota Press, 2010).
