Because this is the first public presentation of this work, I’m a bit anxious and, generally, I’m not fond of conferences. I find the format more than a little restrictive – fifteen to twenty minutes to talk about something you’ve been working on for months or even years, on a panel with people potentially talking about completely different topics, and the tendency for a single paper to end up monopolizing the discussion.

More to the point, I’m not sure if it is possible to do what I want to do in my allotted time: I had planned to discuss the “savage” in relation to Hobbes and the “barbarian” in relation to Montesquieu pointing to how this “political anthropology” paves the way to the creation of the state. However, I’m not sure I can expect my audience (how arrogant I am: this is a conference at 9:00 AM – presenters, their friends and a few stragglers at most, right?) to be familiar with Hobbes and Montesquieu – including the secondary literature! – to appreciate what it is I am trying to do. The other option, then, is to go to the complete opposite extreme and abstract from the historical context thus focusing on formal definitions, which is rather dry and ends up losing sight of the argument itself.

First, the state of nature/social contract relation is a ruse. His point here, I think, is that if you accept the abstract and artificial account of the origin of the state, you also have to accept concrete and ‘natural’ accounts of the origin of the state – that is, the state and political power is always about conquest and acquisition. The state is the organ of institutionalized domination.

Second, the essential conflict in his political anthropology is that between savage and barbarian, represented, on the one hand, by the fearful and rational and, on the other hand, by the vainglorious and arational. In order to secure peace, it is necessary that the barbarian be excluded.

So, let me resolve at this point to avoid fine-tuning and excessively editing future work.

Prior to getting to editing, of course, I need to actually write something. For the past couple of weeks, I’ve been reading surveys and interpretations of Renaissance, Reformation and Counter Reformation political theory – essentially Machiavelli to Bodin. Once I finish that, I will move into reading primary sources from seventeenth century political theory, especially Hobbes and Locke, but also Spinoza. This pattern of reading inclines me to begin with the second chapter, which is on the social contract and ends with Spinoza’s anti-Hobbesianism as a way into the actual subject matter of the dissertation: i.e., Boulainvilliers, Dubos, Montesquieu, Buat-Nancay, Mably, etc.

The problem, of course, that in order to write the second and subsequent chapters, I have to, technically, assume the existence of the first chapter, which is largely a “theory of reading” for lack of a better term. How am I going to read these texts in the first place? How do I recognize the presence or absence of the figure (relation? – which? what?) of the barbarian? How do I distinguish barbarians from savages? I think it is quite clear that my approach is somewhere between Derrida’s deconstruction and Foucault’s genealogy (or, is it his ‘problematization as a way mode of writing history’?) – something like what David Couzens Hoy calls “deconstructive genealogy” or “post-critique.” The easiest – and cheapest – way to approach this is to write the first chapter at the end, but that seems a bit dishonest, even if I’m the only one who is aware of the dishonesty.

Now I can return to writing my lectures (next one on Durkheim’s Elementary Forms) and, in expectation of having my abstract accepted, writing my paper for “The Human Condition: Empire” conference, and, in expectation of its approval, an abstract and paper for the Cylons in America volume (sounds suspiciously like the title of Jodi’s book).

Available via email to those interested.

Waiting for the Barbarians
Constantine Cavafy, 1904

What are we waiting for, assembled in the forum?

The barbarians are due here today.

Why isn’t anything going on in the senate?
Why are the senators sitting there without legislating?

Because the barbarians are coming today.
What’s the point of senators making laws now?
Once the barbarians are here, they’ll do the legislating.

Why did our emperor get up so early,
and why is he sitting enthroned at the city’s main gate,
in state, wearing the crown?

Because the barbarians are coming today
and the emperor’s waiting to receive their leader.
He’s even got a scroll to give him,
loaded with titles, with imposing names.

Why have our two consuls and praetors come out today
wearing their embroidered, their scarlet togas?
Why have they put on bracelets with so many amethysts,
rings sparkling with magnificent emeralds?
Why are they carrying elegant canes
beautifully worked in silver and gold?

Because the barbarians are coming today
and things like that dazzle the barbarians.

Why don’t our distinguished orators turn up as usual
to make their speeches, say what they have to say?

Because the barbarians are coming today
and they’re bored by rhetoric and public speaking.

Why this sudden bewilderment, this confusion?
(How serious people’s faces have become.)
Why are the streets and squares emptying so rapidly,
everyone going home lost in thought?

Because night has fallen and the barbarians haven’t come.
And some of our men who have just returned from the border say
there are no barbarians any longer.

Now what’s going to happen to us without barbarians?
Those people were a kind of solution.

Every enhancement of the type ‘man’ has so far been the work of an aristocratic society – and it will be so again and again – a society that believes in the long ladder of an order of rank and differences in value between man and man, and that needs slavery in some sense or other. Without that pathos of distance which grows out of the ingrained difference between strata – when the ruling caste constantly looks afar and looks down upon subjects and instruments and just as constantly practices obedience and command, keeping down and keeping at a distance – that other, more mysterious pathos could not have grown up either – the craving for an ever new widening of distances within the soul itself, the development of ever higher, rarer, more remote, further-stretching, more comprehensive states – in brief, simply the enhancement of the type ‘man,’ the continual ‘self-overcoming of man,’ to use a moral formula in a supra-moral sense.

To be sure, one should not yield to humanitarian illusions about the origins of an aristocratic society (and thus of the presupposition of this enhancement of the type ‘man’): truth is hard. Let us admit to ourselves, without trying to be considerate, how every higher culture on earth so far has begun. Human beings whose nature was still natural, barbarians in every terrible sense of the word, men of prey who were still in possession of unbroken strength of will and lust for power, hurled themselves upon weaker, more civilized, more peaceful races, perhaps traders or cattle raisers, or upon mellow old cultures whose last vitality was even then flaring up in splendid fireworks of spirit and corruption. In the beginning, the noble caste was always the barbarian caste: their predominance did not lie mainly in physical strength but in strength of soul – they were more whole human beings (which also means, at every level, ‘more whole beasts’).

The Destructive Character
Walter Benjamin (November 1931)

It could happen to someone looking back over his life that he realized that almost all the deeper obligations he had endured in its course originated in people who everyone agreed had the traits of a “destructive character.” He would stumble on this fact one day, perhaps by chance, and the heavier the shock dealt to him, the better his chances of representing the destructive character.

The destructive character knows only one watchword: make room. And only one activity: clearing away. His need for fresh air and open space is stronger than any hatred.

The destructive character is young and cheerful. For destroying rejuvenate, because it clears away the traces of our own age; it cheers, because everything cleared away means to the destroyer a complete reduction, indeed a rooting out, out of his own condition. Really, only the insight into how radically the world is simplified when tested for its worthiness for destruction leads to such an Apollonian image of the destroyer. This is the great bond embracing and unifying all that exists. It is a sight that affords the destructive character a spectacle of deepest harmony.

The destructive character is always blithely at work. It is Nature that dictates his tempo, indirectly at least, for he must forestall her. Otherwise she will take over the destruction herself.

The destructive character sees no image hovering before him. He has few needs, and the least of them is to know what will replace what has been destroyed. First of all, for a moment at least, empty space – the place where thing stood or the victim lived. Someone is sure to be found who needs this space without occupying it.

The destructive character does his work; the only work he avoids is creative. Just as the creator seeks solitude, the destroyer must be constantly surrounded by people, witnesses to his efficacy.

The destructive character is a signal. Just a trigonometric sign is exposed on all sides to the wind, so he is exposed to idle talk. To protect him from it is pointless.

The destructive character has no interest in being understood. Attempts in this direction he regards as superficial. Being misunderstood cannot harm him. On the contrary, he provokes it, just as oracles, those destructive institutions of the state, provoked it. The most petty bourgeois of all phenomena, gossip, comes about only because people do not wish to be misunderstood. The destructive character tolerates misunderstanding; he does not promote gossip.

The destructive character is the enemy of the étui-man. The étui-man looks for comfort, and the case is its quintessence. The inside of the case is the velvet-lined trace that he has imprinted on the world. The destructive character obliterates even the traces of destruction.

The destructive character stands in the front line of traditionalists. Some people pass things down to posterity, by making them untouchable and thus conserving them; others pass on situations, by making them practicable and thus liquidating them. The latter are called the destructive.

The destructive character has the consciousness of historical man, whose deepest emotion is an insuperable mistrust of the course of things and a readiness at all times to recognize that everything can go wrong. Therefore, the destructive character is reliability itself.

The destructive character sees nothing permanent. But for this very reason he sees ways everywhere. Where others encounter walls or mountains, there, too, he sees a way. But because he sees a way everywhere, he has to clear things from it everywhere. Not always by brute force; sometimes by the most refined. Because he sees ways everywhere, he always stands at a crossroads. No moment can know what the next will bring. What exists he reduces to rubble – not for the sake of rubble, but for that of the way leading through it.

The destructive character lives from the feeling not that life is worthing living, but that suicide is not worth the trouble.