The limits of legacies
Posted on | June 22, 2005 |
When I made it back to the conference from dropping my stuff at Catri’s I had consumed nearly enough tea to reach my third wind for the day, having had very little sleep and a 6am flight from Vegas. Why do I get so anxious before going away? Anyway so I didn’t much rate my chances for Robert Bernasconi’s keynote, ‘Perpetual Peace and Total War’, but I figured I had already earned a free drink at the reception so it seemed worth trying. And to my joy I actually think I understood a lot of what he was saying. He claimed that the idea of permanently unequal races and a race hierarchy originates in Kant’s naturalist imagery. But Kant also established cosmopolitanism as a desirable ideal, a way of managing these conflicts. This is how war operates, to fix the bind. He then went on to explain that naturalist imagery also justifies the particular peace process leaders decide upon - even if it is waged through war - so that if countries leave the ‘natural’ process that leads to peace they abandon or join forces against the side of humanity. Not siding with the human is siding with the inhuman (leading to that familiar formulation “You are either with us or against us”) so in Darwinian fashion the inhuman enemy must be annihilated for the sake of progress, for the sake of humanity. War has in this way ‘been penetrated by the spirit of progress’.
Bernasconi seemed aware that all this might sound controversial and made it clear his attack was aimed at the blind loyalty of neo-Kantians in particular, but the task he’d set himself was to understand some of the ways motivations for war have been justified. Essentially he was arguing that the terms with which philosophers think about war and peace are so saturated with the thinking of a different time that it’s difficult to get outside of them to take a critical view. So we get a situation like Iraq, which is a war of philosophical ideas but philosophers themselves haven’t known how to respond to it, they have been forced to respond as citizens instead. I thought this resonated with Ros Diprose’s assessment, but Bernasconi wasn’t treated as sympathetically by the audience in the sense that some people wanted to claim philosophers have been active in making sense of Iraq. And on that note, I’ll talk about Judith Butler’s lectures later - I plan to write a report on them for the next MACS meeting.
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June 23rd, 2005 @ 8:25 pm
Are the papers available, Mel? The last one I went to they circulated a cd-rom for people who’d given papers, and we were permitted to pass them on to other researchers who might be interested.
Anyway, I’d be really interested in reading the paper. Perhaps it’s being published somewhere?
A fair chunk of what I’m doing now engages with the same issues Bernasconi talks about - particularly the neo-Kantian arguments for international law made by people who often end up justifying particular wars (ie Kosovo, Gulf War I) in the name of perpetual peace - ie Habermas, Bobbio, Rawls.
I’m not sure that it’s correct to see Kant’s cosmopolitanism in our late modern sense. While he certainly argued in his “Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose” about the concept of citizens with rights - he still had a vision of citizenship based on the appropriation of property and land which is not dissimilar to those of Locke and Hobbes, which were used to justify Western conquest and dispossession of Indigenous peoples. Similarly, latter day Kantians often emphasise his theses on the rule of law and trade to justify the inequalities which masquerade behind the image of globalisation.
Gayatri Spivak has made the same point about Kant’s imagery and progress and racism in her excellent “A Critique of Postcolonial Reason”.
The point about philosophers is interesting. But Derrida and Habermas in Philosophy In a Time of Peril are certainly exceptions, as is Butler, whose latest work I’m liking a lot more than I like some of her previous excursions into legal and political theory.