December 2021

Camus, Sartre, and Saint-Just

Saint-Just

If we are to take bad faith as living life in accordance with a solution to which there is no problem, or living a role as if that is who we are, like an inkwell is an inkwell, and where this bad faith is to be contrasted with good faith, then we find in Camus’ The Rebel a precise date for the emergence of this bad faith—1789. More precisely, Camus argues that ‘Seventeen eighty-nine is the starting-point of modern time,’ for with the French Revolution, Camus claims, humanity ‘overthrew the principle of divine right and…introduce[d] to the historical scene the forces of negation and rebellion…’ (Camus 2000 [1951], 64). Before the French Revolution, whether it be the ‘Inca and the pariah,’ or those who endorsed the principle of divine right monarchy, Camus believes that ‘the problem of revolt never arises, because for them it has been solved by tradition before they had time to raise it—the answer being that tradition is sacrosanct. If, in the sacrosanct world, the problem of revolt does not arise, it is because no real problems are to be found in it—all the answers having been given simultaneously’ (ibid., 8). It may seem that it is the sacrosanct tradition that characterizes a world of bad faith, of living life in accordance with solutions to which there is no problem, for indeed Camus does point out that ‘no real problems are to be found’ in the sacrosanct world. If this is indeed true, and it is debatable, then Camus’ point is that prior to 1789 living in good faith, or as a rebel, was not truly possible for only then could one live with the awareness of the problems inseparable from solutions (to put it in the terms being used here).

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By Jeffrey Bell, ago

King Omicron

…the idiom of war between king and people draws on and is expressive of an even deeper structural reality—the ability to step outside the moral order so as to partake of the kind of power capable of creating such an order is always y definition an act of violence, and can only be maintained as such…This is not just war; it is total war. Insofar as the sovereign intends to apply such compulsion to an entire population within a given territory, it ultimately must always be. (The only limitation on such total war is that the sovereign cannot wipe out the entire population, or his sovereignty would itself cease to exist.) Hence…the tendency for modern states to frame their greatest projects in terms of some sort of unwinnable war: the war on poverty, crime, drugs, terror, and so forth

David Graeber, “Notes on the politics of divine kingship”
COVID-19 virus SARS-COV-2 OMICRON strain, covid-19 South African variant B.1.1.529 omicron 3d rendering

With the omicron variant spreading rapidly throughout the world, quickly overtaking the delta variant as the dominant strain infecting people now, the media coverage of omicron has highlighted a key motivation behind biopower, to use Foucault’s term. Namely, the health of a population becomes the justification for policies and powers that rely on the perpetuation of the very fears that lend legitimacy to the powers in the first place. These fears, however, are at the heart of sovereignty itself in that its power involves the power to kill, or it is a power at war with the very people over whom the power is wielded. Drawing from Carl Schmitt, Graeber points out that Schmitt reminds us, appearing “like some embarrassing uncle,” that “sovereignty…consists above all in the ability to set the law aside” (458). Moreover, Graeber adds, and with recurrent events no doubt in mind, when the “police regularly get away with murder [they] are simply exercising that small–but lethal–bit of royal power that has been delegated to hem by its current holder, an entity we refer to as ‘the people'” (ibid.). But such powers only emerge intermittently, and the war between sovereign power and those over whom it is exercised settles, Graeber argues, into an uneasy truce that takes on various forms including, for instance, the modern state’s unwinnable wars on ‘poverty, crime, drugs, terror,’ and omicron.

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By Jeffrey Bell, ago

The Necessity of Lies

The Nazis would have been unthinkable without the First World War, and here, right at the beginning of the story, we see something else: the trauma of defeat left millions of Germans believing a particular narrative about the war not because it was demonstrably true, but because it was emotionally necessary. The nation had been gloriously unified in the sunshine of August 1914, or so most Germans thought. Yet, in the cold rain of November 1918, betrayal and cowardice at home–the “stab in the back”–had brought defeat on the battlefield. Neither part of this narrative was accurate, but the contrast between August and November allowed the Nazis to promise that they would bring back the unity of August once they had defeated the treason of November. What a nation believes about its past is at least as important as what that past actually was.

The Death of Democracy, Benjamin Carter Hett
Reichstag fire, February 27, 1933

In Benjamin Hett’s book on the fall of the Weimar Republic, The Death of Democracy: Hitler’s Rise to Power and the Fall of the Weimar Republic, there are eerily familiar echoes between 1930s Germany and the contemporary rise of autocratic power throughout the world, the United States in particular. Hett explicitly acknowledges these similarities, pointing out that in contrast to the “glow” that came with “the end of the Cold War,” he claims that “our time [meaning the time when this book was published, or 2017] more closely resembles the 1930s than it does the 1990s.” Although it is almost a cliche to draw parallels between 1930s Germany and the aspirations of Trump and many of extremists on the far right that Trump encourages, there was a a comment that stood out for me in Hett’s analysis. This is the necessity of lies, or as the pull quote above argued for, the role that lies played in the processes that made it possible for the Nazis to come to power and undermine democracy in the process. At the very basis of Nazi power was a big lie, or at the very least a narrative that strays far from the truth but was nonetheless “emotionally necessary.”

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By Jeffrey Bell, ago