I. París

El avance de la extrema derecha, desde entonces, hizo que las cosas se pusieran poco más interesantes al introducir en los debates el olvidado escalofrío del fascismo; no fue, empero, hasta 2017 cuando las cosas empezaron a moverse de verdad, con la segunda vuelta de las presidenciables. […]

Pero, por lo que pude seguir, las cosas se desarrollaron con una corrección casi excesiva, los dos candidatos a la magistratura suprema multiplicaron los gestos de deferencia mutuos, expresaron por turnos un inmenso amor por Francia y dieron la impresión de estar de acuerdo con casi todo. Sin embargo, al mismo tiempo, estallaron enfrentamientos en Montfermeil entre militares de extrema derecha y un grupo de jóvenes africanos sin una filiación política declarada: desde hace semanas se había producido incidentes esporádicos en el municipio después de la profanación de la mezquita. Una página de internet identitaria afirmaba al día siguiente que los enfrentamientos habían sido muy violentos y que había varios muertos, pero el Ministerio del Interior desmintió inmediatamente la información. […] Durante varios años, en incluso durante varias décadas, Le Monde, así como en general todos los diarios, denunciaron regularmente a las “Casandras” que preveían una guerra civil entre los inmigrantes musulmanes y las poblaciones autóctonas de Europa occidental.

Un fragmento de Sumisión de Michel Houellebecq

II. NY

How does a terror that is organized, provoked, and instrumentalized differ from that fear that an entire tradition, from Hobbes to Schmitt and even Benjamin, holds to be the very condition of the authority of law and of the sovereign exercise of power, the very condition of the political and of the state? In Leviathan Hobbes speaks not only of “fear” but of “terror”. Benjamin speaks of how the state tends to appropriate for itself, and precisely through threat, a monopoly on violence (“Critique of Violence”). It will no doubt be said that not every experience of terror is necessarily the effect of some terrorism. To be sure, but the political history of the word “terrorism” is derived in large part from a reference to Reign of Terror during the French Revolution, a terror that was carried out in the name of the state and in fact presupposed a legal monopoly on violence. And what do we find in current definition or explicitly legal definitions of terrorism? […]

After September 11, an overwhelming majority of states represented in the UN (it may hace actually been unanimous, I would hace to check) condemned, as has happened more than once in the past few decades, what it calls “international terrorism.” during a televised session of the UN, Secretary-General Kofi Annan had to recall in passing some of their previos debates. For just as they were preparing to condemn “international terrorism”, certain states expressed reservations about the charity of the concept and the criteria used to identify it.

Un fragmento de Philosophy in a time of Terror, Jacques Derrida.

III. The autoimmunitary process of the nation-state borders

Explain an “event” as an autoimmunitary process in Occidental democracies, such as 9/11, is what Derrida did when he deconstruct “an act of international terrorism”. Understanding this act as “a military and diplomatic situation that destabilizes certain Arab countries torn between a powerful public opinion”. What is autoimmunity? when a body “works to destroyed its own protection”, said Derrida (Philosophy in a Time of Terror: Dialogues with Jürgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida, 2003). Or the paradoxical alliances between countries that don’t have any political policies in common (human rights defense, for example) but have mutual economic interests (oil production, for example). We know the result: the Western military intervention in some countries of the “Muslim world” and thousands of civilians dead in name of war.

More than a decade has pass since that “event” and in 2015 we experiment a different autoimmunitary process in Occidental democracies: thousands of Syrian refugees trying to get into Europe. That isn’t a casualty, previous 9/11 we can locate the Intifada in Palestina, the Gulf War in Iraq,  the conformation of the Islamic State, and right know the Paris attacks. So, in this sense, the autoimmunitary process of the nation-state borders perform a new geopolitical hegemony network and proceed to destabilize the ideals of the “Western modernity” and the utopian non-borders idea of the European Union. The challenge is very complicate for the Occidental democracies and the risk consists in asume an aporetic understating of the process that allow the governments to assume an ethical response for the civilians (the refugees or migrants and the citizens).

Roxana Rodríguez

14 de noviembre 2015.