Theoria

Due to a passing comment made two weeks ago, I’ve been invited to present at a graduate student conference at Carleton about Battlestar Galactica. Fortunately, the conference is thematized as “Works in Progress” and this work is certainly in progress – a few off-hand remarks and little else. So, in addition to a dissertation proposal defense on the twenty-first (in Toronto), I have a presentation on the seventeenth (in Ottawa) to prepare for. One is done and ready; the other not so much.

I haven’t spent much time thinking about what to say, but, I’ll note in passing that Battlestar is increasingly being “read” (“watched”?) as an allegory about Iraq. Perhaps; I haven’t gotten that far into the show. While that is certainly true, it is likely a rather superficial reading – a deeper or more theoretically inclined reading is likely possible. (See here, for instance.) I’ll note in passing two things:

• First, Carl Schmitt makes some bizarre comments in The Concept of the Political on alien invaders and the possibility of humanity as a political concept. These comments have rarely been discussed. (For an exception, see here.)
• Second, Ronald Reagan made some equally bizarre comments in 1985 on the exact same topic during his first meeting with Gorbachev. Perhaps not understanding or not being aware of any previous discussion of aliens in Marx, Lenin or Stalin, Gorbachev changed the subject.

Despite Gorbachev lack of interest in the question – and the embarassment it caused for the administration, especially Colin Powell who was embarassed by what he called Reagan’s “little green men” – Reagan raised the issue again in December of the same year in a speech to Fallston High School (in Maryland). He ended his speech recounting his meeting with Gorbachev:

I couldn’t help but – one point in our discussions privately with General Secretary Gorbachev – when you stop to think that we’re all God’s children, wherever we may live in the world, I couldn’t help but say to him, just think how easy his task and mine might be in these meetings that we held if suddenly there was a threat to this world from some other species, from another planet, outside in the universe. We’d forget all the little local differences that we have between our countries, and we would find out once and for all that we really are all human beings here on this Earth together. Well, I don’t suppose we can wait for some alien race to come down and threaten us, but I think that between us we can bring about that realization.

Schmitt’s argument is similar, but more elaborated:

Humanity as such cannot wage war because it has no enemy, at least not on this planet. The concept of humanity excludes the concept of the enemy, because the enemy does not cease to be a human being–and hence there is no specific differentiation in that concept. That wars are waged in the name of humanity is not a contradiction of this simple truth; quite the contrary, it has an especially intensive political meaning. When a state fights its political enemy in the name of humanity, it is not a war for the sake of humanity, but a war wherein a particular state seeks to usurp a universal concept against its military opponent. At the expense of its opponent, it tries to identify itself with humanity in the same way as one can misuse peace, justice, progress, and civilization in order to claim these as one’s own and to deny the same to the enemy.

I’ll thus note, in passing awaiting further development, that the problematic of the first season of Battlestar Galactica, is precisely this very trope of science fiction. Albeit a trope that is both post-Schmittian and post-Agambenian…