Mapping Thought I: Evolution of Political Concepts, Research Time, 23/04/2018

Now that’s definitely the weirdest title I’ve written in a while. I want to get back to weirdness in the philosophical entries on this blog.

My new apartment has come together, finally. What needed to be built is built. What needed to be unpacked is unpacked. I’m not sure where my iPad charger went, but I’ll figure it out.

But the weirdness. So I made some really complicated notes as I was going through Paul Patton’s books on Gilles Deleuze’s works and ideas. Patton has a pretty good rep among the Deleuze scene in academia. He’s co-translated key works, and has been a main figure among the secondary material for a long time.

It isn't just "the" political theory. For every concept, there can be many
theories. And there are plenty of concepts too.

His book Deleuze and the Political begins in a place appropriately strange for a book about someone whose ideas were as strange as Gilles’. He starts by talking about the nature of the concept, in a philosophical sense.

Deleuze himself developed a complex concept of the concept, and wrote about it in detail in his last major book What Is Philosophy?. I wrote about that theory of how philosophy worked when I was going through that book myself, and over the next few posts, I want to talk about some of the ways Patton explores that theory.

It’s called meta-philosophy in the field, literally asking “What is philosophy?”. Of all the writing I’ve come across openly discussing meta-philosophy, only Deleuze really grappled with the ideas in a genuinely thorough and deep sense. I sometimes think that most philosophers are afraid to talk about the real conceptual foundations of philosophy.

Maybe they really are afraid. Do they worry that there’s nothing behind the curtain? Or are they afraid of just seeing a man behind the curtain?

The world doesn’t need gods. Reality does a good enough job.

Anyway, back to the nature of philosophical concepts. So every philosophical concept has its own logic. By this, I mean that when you’re guided by a particular concept in your thinking, some possibilities and potentials are more easily understood than others. That’s pretty simple to start with.

Now think about how concepts change over time. Concerns shift, historical contexts change. All the reasons why people think with that concept change. Patton mentions the concept of the social contract as an example, and I think it’s a great one.

For me, Hobbes as a person and a philosopher embodies
the uncomfortable tension that's always existed in
Western political thought between the belief in freedom
of democratic thinking, and the authoritarianism of the
institutions of the modern state, colonial imperialism,
and police institutions.

The concept of the social contract, in Western philosophy, began in its modern form with Thomas Hobbes. The social contract in this original form is resolutely authoritarian.

It’s the expression of someone whose life was upended by a civil war and military government that executed a king. That revolutionary government plunged his country England into political and economic instability for twenty years, until the restoration of the monarchy under Charles II.

So stability and the sanctity of authority was of central importance to Hobbes as he was developing this concept of the social contract. It was a concept that saw freedom as utterly secondary to stability and peace – a concept that saw freedom as practically indistinguishable from chaotic civil war.

Is Hobbes concept of the social contract the same as contemporary Western theories of it? Patton is, in particular, thinking of John Rawls. Rawls was the paradigm liberal democrat of 20th century American philosophy.

His concept of the social contract was a careful balance of freedom and individual desire. It’s a balance of freedom and commitment to the general welfare. Peace is a part of that welfare, but only a small part. Hobbes’ Leviathan put little thought into economic matters like social welfare, which was at the centre of Rawls’ A Theory of Justice, as well as many of his other major works.

So the concepts differ in many ways. Yet we understand more about both concepts by exploring the subtle and massive differences between them, as well as the points where these concepts converge despite their differences. Tracing continuity and change in the development of concepts is how the history of philosophy should be done.

Love Power II: A Tradition of Hope and Freedom, Research Time, 20/05/2016

Continued from last post . . . I originally wasn’t going to continue yesterday’s post about the power of love. But then I realized there was a little more to say. At least before I get into the most surreal and meta-textual episode of Trailer Park Boys Season 10 in Sunnyvale Psychochronography tomorrow.

One thing Antonio Negri* is doing in his exploration of the political power of love is looking through the history of Western philosophy to create a new tradition. He’s tracing a path through the history of European and American ideas to find better alternatives to the cynical political ideas that have followed on from Thomas Hobbes’ capitulation to humanity’s worst impulses.

I've been listening to a lot of Curtis Mayfield while I write
these last two posts. It's plain to see why.

* And the originator of this idea, Louis Althusser.

I mean, it’s almost to be expected that Hobbes, who lived through the English Civil War, would develop a political philosophy that understands humanity in terms of our most violent impulses. 

But Spinoza, the genesis of Negri’s history of a political philosophy of love, lived through the uprisings and repressions of the Dutch people through the turbulent rule of the House of Orange. Jan and Cornelius de Witt, leaders of the republican revolutionaries against the Dutch monarchy, were personal friends of Spinoza. Spinoza’s own life was in danger from the same royalists who murdered the de Witt brothers. 

You might think that suffering defeat as a democratic, republican revolutionary at the hands of brutal monarchists would have made Spinoza a pessimist about human nature too. But he was stronger than that. 

Belief in the power of love to be the fundamental principle of human society sounds corny as all hell. As Negri says, it sounds crazily naïve. It sounds especially naïve now, given our current political climate defined by hatred, resentment, and violence at so many different levels of human life. 

But believing in love as a fundamental political principle isn’t as simple as any belief that human nature itself is fundamentally good. That would fail to explain all the horrors and cruelty of human history. You’d be right to call that idea stupid.

But the idea that there’s a fundamental, unchanging human nature, and that it is evil, cruel, egotistical, and violent is just as naïve. Just as naïve and dumb as the belief that there’s a fundamental, unchanging human nature which is good, kind, open-hearted, and peaceful.

There being an essential human nature at all in this ethical sense is really the heart of the problem. Throw this belief away. 

Love will win.

But humanity isn’t a blank slate. We may not have a fundamental nature, but we still have our tendencies. And love is the active force in constructing human nature. The problems arise not through love or the privation of love. It’s the corruption of love.

There’s an old Christian idea that evil is the absence of good. Well, evil and cruelty is a lot more insidious than a sick call from our better conscience. Corruption isn’t the absence of love. It’s the power of love converted to make us cruel instead of making us kind.

Here's an example of what I mean. Understand nationalism this way. When it’s functioning properly, love leads us to care for our neighbours. We build relationships with them, look out for them, and help them out when we’re able. This is a good thing to do.

The problem comes when this drive for social solidarity becomes corrupt. One common way it becomes corrupt is when solidarity develops a boundary. When it isn’t an outreach, but a way to separate and divide people. That’s when love ends up creating nationalism and racism. 

When love and inclusion of one implies hatred and rejection of another, love itself is still driving you, but it’s become corrupt. Like any kind of malfunctioning organ or tool, love then has to be repaired so that the feelings and drives that used to create nationalism and racism lose their tendency to exclude. Until they become all-inclusive, as they’re supposed to be.

Philosophy is political medicine.

We’re All Equals Because We Can All Be Bought and Sold, Research Time, 11/02/2016

The past few posts may have given you the impression that I’m not a very pro-capitalist person. And I definitely think theres a lot of room for improvement in our economic system, as it is right now. But that doesn’t actually mean I’m anti-capitalist. At least not in the traditional or intuitive sense of the term.

I’ve never been an ordinary person. And I’ve never fit into the most typical styles of the group. An example. I remember in the early months of my friendship with G the libertarian, he accused me, with a slur of “you leftists,” of wanting Sun News off the air.*

The real greatest right-wing tv star in the world. You
don't deserve to eat Donald Trump's stinking gym
shorts, Ezra Levant, you small-timer.

* And the public spoke.

But I actually didn’t have a problem with a heavily conservative tv station being on Canadian cable. My only problems with Sun TV were that their production values made Wayne Campbell’s basement look like a Spielberg film, and they thought pointing a static camera at Ezra Levant screaming at the viewer for 20 minutes was good television.

It’s the same with my general thoughts on capitalism. It’s a perverse economic system, but it really is an engine of liberation, at least in some contexts. And some of those contexts are remarkably fundamental, even if they may sound paradoxical and weird.

Anti-capitalist that he is, Antonio Negri will praise the elements of capitalism that genuinely liberate people. 

Here's one weird, paradoxical kind of liberation you can find in capitalism. Everything has a price. Literally everything.

It goes like this. The logic of capitalism doesn’t permit exceptions. The logic of the sovereign state, in contrast, does. The sovereign state needs its institution of absolute authority (whether that’s a monarch, constitution, or parliament) to be held, at least in some fashion, above the state’s own law.

Once capital takes hold, though there’s no exceptions to its order. That order is price. Literally. Money is the universal medium of exchange – everything can be turned into anything else through the medium of money. The price system is the measurement of all these relations.

He's always known the secret of power
in capitalism. It's no secret.

Everything having its price (at least potentially) is the great equalizer. There are no exceptions from the order of everything’s relation to everything else. So there can be no sovereign power once capitalism truly takes hold. 

The ability to be bought erodes absolute power, because an absolute power needs a wall between itself and the people it orders around. A sovereign institution needs to hold itself above the fray of the people – it justifies its authority over the people largely because of its separateness. 

Remember the story Thomas Hobbes told in Leviathan about what the sovereign power was: it’s the institution that the people give power to, for the sake of protecting them. It’s constituted as an exemption, because the people cut the sovereign off from them by granting it the power of authority.

If you know an institution or a public figure can be bought, it loses its authority. Nothing more democratic than a bribe – if everyone has a price, you just need to name it. It may not be total equality, but it means we’re all the same.

Save Us V: The World Is Lost But I’m Found, Research Time, 16/12/2015

Well, that turned into a couple of nice false starts. But here we are at the actual start of what I wanted to say about Hobbes when I was writing my follow-up to the Only a God post.

What Leo Strauss has to say about Hobbes is rooted in Strauss' own attitude about truth. The problem of truth – particularly the natural universal rights of man als Männer – is the conceptual core of Natural Right and History.

Here's the pragmatist answer to the problem of
relativism. Many truths doesn't mean there are no truths.
Each truth is partial, limited to a particular unique
domain or set of concerns, and only God knows the
totality of all that truth. But God isn't exactly
forthcoming with the answers, so we have to figure
all this out on our own.

Okay, so what makes truth a problem? 

See, Strauss is a textbook example of someone who thinks that saying “There’s no one absolute eternal truth about X" is the same as saying “There’s no truth at all about X, and you can believe whatever you want about X.” When X is the list of human rights, shit gets serious.

It’s the fear of moral relativism, but in a context where anything that falls short of moral absolutism is total relativism. And Strauss’ analysis of Hobbes is how he roots moral relativism in thinking that goes back well further than the usual suspects like Friedrich Nietzsche and Martin Heidegger.

The real relativist, as far as he's concerned, is Hobbes. The reason is intriguing, though. It has to do with the implications of a thorough mechanism for knowledge in Hobbes’ thinking.

Before I lay this out, I want to say that these aren't my views at all. I’m walking you through how I understand Strauss’ argument. I think that argument is fascinating as a set of ideas and inferences, but I don’t think it’s true at all.

If everything that exists is a mechanism, then humanity has no powers to progress beyond what we can already do. That includes our thinking. We can only think, plan, and act in a way that’s peculiar to human existence alone. So we can only understand the world in human terms.

If we want to understand everything in the world (the ostensible goal of scientific inquiry), we’d have to understand everything in the world on its own terms. But we only have human knowledge frameworks to work with, so can’t know the world in itself. 

So humans gaining knowledge of truths beyond human experience or thinking is impossible. Reason is impotent. But action isn’t. Mathematics is a human way of knowing, but it does allow us to study how mechanisms work and manipulate them.

The heavily oversignified central illustration of
Hobbes' Leviathan.

Non-human mechanisms are permanently alienated from humanity. But we can use our knowledge of mechanism in the abstract (mathematics and the derived applied sciences) to wrench those alien bodies to behave according to human possibilities.

This is the mind-set of Modernity.* The book of nature is in a language we can never know. But we can burn its pages and remake the world in the human image. Strauss thinks this is a disastrous path, and so have many environmentalists over the years.**

* The epoch, that is. 

** Further notions that environmentalism should properly be a conservative dogma, as it was back when it was called conservationism, and resulted in the creation of America's national park system. But in the 1960s, the movement became critical of big business because of pesticides and pollution, so became the province of hippies. Environmental consciousness still hasn’t recovered the same political power it had in John Muir and Teddy Roosevelt's day, and I don't know that it ever will.

If humanity is so lost in the world that we can only find ourselves, then we'll make sure we can be found everywhere by steamrolling our nature, our character, our way over everything. That’s modernity, says Strauss. 

So we have to figure out a return to the pre-modern mind-set when we rooted philosophical thinking and argument in real endpoints: the actual, absolute, universal answers to our questions.

Hoo boy. To Be Continued . . .

The Responsible Leviathan, Research Time, 15/05/2014

There’s a curious point in Michael Bérubé’s The Left at War, where he reflects on the philosophy of the Responsibility to Protect. This concept is a fascinating idea in itself, not only for its conceptual complexity, but because it’s probably the first serious philosophical concept to emerge from multilateral and multinational political conversations. I don’t think I could ever write on this concept myself, because of the sheer amount of work that I’d need to do to be taken seriously. Unless I had a head start of something like forty years, I’d never be able to read absolutely everything that has been produced on R2P. I’m rarely intimidated by anything in philosophical scholarship, but R2P has done it.

However, Bérubé makes a fascinating assessment of the centrepiece of R2P, the notion that, when a sovereign government commits terrible violence against its people, it loses its claim to sovereignty. Because so much of his book is based around an extended critique of the political writings of Noam Chomsky, Bérubé mostly focusses on attacking how Chomsky has misunderstood so much of this idea. Essentially, Chomsky is one of the most articulate opponents of R2P on the grounds that it is a humanitarian mask on the bog-standard military imperialism of the near-omnipotently powerful United States as it forces its corporate capitalism down the throats of the world. 

Who knew the United Nations would end up following
principles of Thomas Hobbes so well?

So Bérubé unfortunately ignores the most intriguing element of his reading of R2P to engage with Chomsky, when a discussion of how R2P, this defining concept of liberalism in international politics, is a pure Hobbesian doctrine. This makes for a wonderful collision, given that Hobbes is so frequently portrayed as an arch conservative. The reason for his conservatism is, for one, his actual conservatism as a staunch monarchist, having lived through the English Civil War. But the more widespread philosophical reason for Hobbes’ conservative reputation is his conception of the legitimacy of government as grounded in the people’s literal surrender of their will to a sovereign who rules over them absolutely.

Carl Schmitt and Giorgio Agamben take up this idea of sovereignty in their own ways, which Bérubé briefly mentions before moving on again, because he apparently considers yelling at Noam Chomsky more important than formulating a genuinely interesting philosophical idea in much detail. Schmitt is a theorist of the fascist right, and Agamben of the radical European left, but they agree* on a conception of sovereignty which defines that figure as the controller of the power to make someone an exception to civil society, the rule of law, the basic regime of human rights, and even the community of humanity itself. An illustration relevant to Bérubé’s inquiry is how George W Bush became such a sovereign when he exercised the powers of indefinite detention and extraordinary rendition of enemy combatants. 

* Well, they don’t agree, so much as Agamben is following in the tradition of Schmitt, picking up his conception of sovereignty and developing it in wildly different directions. 

In both Schmitt’s and Agamben’s thinking, the sovereign is a genuinely absolute power. The sovereign possesses the power to cast someone out of their personhood for entirely idiosyncratic reasons, and this power is built into the essential structure of state governance. Their own difference is that Schmitt is quite happy about this, while Agamben is horrified. 

But this isn’t Hobbes’ conception of the sovereign. For Hobbes, unlike Schmitt and Agamben, the sovereign can be made illegitimate, and therefore it is justified to revolt against him and remove him from power. The sovereign, in Hobbes’ thinking, is a product of a solemn contract among all citizens, that they enter this arrangement where one person or institution has an overall monopoly on force for the sake of mutual protection. 

In other words, the Hobbesian sovereign has a responsibility to protect his citizens. The legitimacy of a government is founded not literally on the superior force of arms, but on a promise. Where the sovereign power fails or mocks that responsibility, he has lost his right to govern. Whether an internal revolution or an international invasion removes him from physical power after that failure, such an act is legitimate, because the promise has been broken. 

Who Is a True Sovereign? Research Time, 21/11/2013

I mentioned yesterday how totalitarian Leadership is the closest any actual political system has ever come to instituting a true Sovereign in the textbook Hobbesian sense. As I approach the end of The Origins of Totalitarianism, Arendt describes what precisely would be the government institutions that would permit the rule of a Sovereign with the powers Hobbes describes: held apart from all of society, yet imbuing that society with his will alone. 

One apparently inescapable feature of a modern state government is that a government had many levels and agencies with many different domains of authority. There are, of course, the devolved powers of the federal system between the broad abilities of the national governments in planning, foreign relations, and economic oversight; the more administrative powers of states or provinces, and the local management powers of municipal governments. Aside from this, there are a variety of government agencies, each connected to a different level and responsible for a different domain. Food and health inspection agencies, municipal police, vehicle registration, public welfare, urban planning, and so on. Each of these levels and agencies of government should, at best, have a clearly defined set of powers and range to apply those powers.

A totalitarian system, however, does not. There is similarly the proliferation of government agencies, particularly as regards policing, the primary totalitarian activity. Arendt describes how the Nazi party created an entire mirror of the state within its own agency, such that when it came to power, all the mechanisms to govern were already within the party. Not only that, the regional divisions of the party were divided in ways that didn’t match at all with any of the administrative regions of the German government. They overlapped and cut across provinces and municipalities. 

One thing that has annoyed me about American politics in
the last five years is the far right's painting of Barack Obama
as Hitlerian. It is utter ignorance of how genuinely radical
Hitler's politics really were. This man made himself literally
omnipresent in a police state mobilized for the actual
destruction of hundreds of millions of people. Obama has a
shitty healthcare insurance signup website.

In effect, this created multiple police forces all acting simultaneously, and often stepping all over each other. Enforcers from multiple agencies would often be assigned to investigate the same matter. As a result, the average German citizen knew that one would be arrested for bad behaviour, but would never be sure which agency would make the arrest. The names of the agencies themselves would become interchangeable, practically speaking. The only thing in common would be, “Leader’s orders.”

The proliferation of police authority in such a chaotic way doesn’t actually devolve authority to any of these institutions. They have power, certainly. Power to arrest, to disappear, to kill, and to condemn to the death camps. But to have authority, the domain of an institution’s action must be restricted to their exclusive responsibility. The chaotic proliferation of police power means that the only one who still has authority is the Leader himself, the only one who is exclusively responsible in any domain at all. Because there’s a proliferation of powers with no strict limits on their domains, they all have competition for authority among each other. And where there is competition for authority, authority does not exist. The only authority is that which is held in common among all these powers: the Leader, the Sovereign.

•

I think at this point, I at least have the starting material to assemble a course on totalitarian political institutions and philosophy. Starting from a reading of the Leviathan, we analyze the role of the Sovereign, his relation to the rest of his society, and what his powers over them could be. Hobbes’ own account is vague in places, where the powers of the Sovereign would be more specific, he prefers to discuss them in the general sense. This section of the course would probably be supplemented with some readings taken from various chapters and passages of Agamben’s long-running Homo Sacer project, the theme of almost all his major books.

The Origins of Totalitarianism would essentially be the next step in developing the theory of government by pure Sovereign. Perhaps for such a course, it would also be worth looking into other political philosophers between Hobbes and Arendt for other material that develops these ideas. I remember Carl Schmitt has been recommended to me for this tradition before, but he was a Nazi contemporary. I’d be really interested to see if any political theorists in the West (or indeed, in China, perhaps?) had developed concepts for government by pure will in the intervening period from the 1600s to the 1900s.

In a World Ruled By Fear: Arendt-Hobbes Triangulation, Research Time, 04/11/2013

There’s a short section of Hannah Arendt’s discussion of imperialism in The Origins of Totalitarianism where she discusses Thomas Hobbes as a philosophical precursor to totalitarian government. He had long been considered a precursor to authoritarian government, focussing on his foundational argument in the most popular sections of his masterpiece Leviathan. But Arendt examines this argument in terms of a totalitarian principle of governance: rule through fear.

While Arendt would later complicate her conceptions of how totalitarian and fascist governance worked (wait for my posts on Eichmann in Jerusalem for my thoughts on that), Origins focusses on the dynamics of political fear. Here’s how she takes up Hobbes’ argument. 

Not much historical research exists on how many people
lived in fear of Thomas Hobbes specifically. Likely not
too many by the time of his death at 91, an impossibly
old age for the 17th century.

The core principle is that the natural state of men is to live in fear of each other. Every person is a competitor or potential competitor of everyone else, every person out to expand his property at the expense of everyone else. Given that everyone has become a threat to everyone else, the only rational way to regard others is fear. And because this is a situation where all possible force can be brought to bear against someone from any possible source, the only way to bring this chaos under control is with a power powerful enough to overcome (Hobbes uses the term “over-awe” and Arendt falls back on this repeatedly) all the individuals acting in force. This power is the state, and it rules by means of having the most powerful weapons: the police. 

For Arendt, this conception of people in constant competition, conflict, and fear of each other describes the morality of the petty bourgeoisie. I use the word ‘petty’ here in the sense of petty-minded, those unscrupulous businessmen who never seem to have any friends, and can speak and think only of the next ventures, the next profit, the next investment, the next swindle. They believe all people see each other in terms of their potential financial or material gain because that’s how they see all people. A society of these people is a society without empathy. Charles Dickens was wonderful at sketching such people, I thought of another way to sketch such a character, and it saddens me that they exist. 

This, as Arendt describes it, is not a condemnation of capitalism, but pinpointing a peculiar vulnerability to capitalist societies. The person who sees all human relations as reducing to ruthless competition for scarce resources among individuals is vulnerable to investing in a total government: a monopoly on force that prevents people from living in fear of each other because we’re all shuddering in fear of the Leviathan: the state and its police. 

The funny thing is that Hobbes is something of an ironist, and Arendt is aware of this. Despite philosophical arguments in favour of the state monopoly of violence, there is a current in Hobbes’ thinking that undercuts this. Within his conception of the social contract, a curious inversion takes place that would mutate this society of fear into a kind of public utopia of continual negotiation and compromise. Arendt works through the implications of the standard presentation of Hobbes’ philosophy in the above argument, but there’s a footnote where she describes how Hobbes’ secret democracy comes through. I paraphrase.

Footnote 36. The social contract that Hobbes describes is an agreement among all in a society to operate their politics to work toward satisfying all individual and familial private interests as best as the society can manage. Literally, the public interest is the satisfaction of private interests harmoniously and transparently within a community. The textbook version of Hobbes sees him advocating an over-awing state power that crushes private interests for the sake of overall public safety. Power descends from the state upon the people. The structure of his hypothetical social contract itself makes the adequate satisfaction of the various complicated private interests to be the primary interest of the public. Here, the desire for peace flows from the people to the institutions of power. 

That this paradox can exist within Hobbes fascinates me, and he may become a historical touchstone in my further university career as a researcher. 

Philosophical-Historical Triangulation: Sartre-Agamben-Hobbes, Research Time, 14/09/2013

This weekend, I thought I’d try out an experiment. Some of you might remember a post earlier this week where I described, in a little footnote, how ridiculous it is to waste time composing a journal article showing the links between different philosophers across eras and cultures. The best philosophical works and corpuses are remarkably singular creations, taking the unique starting point of a cultural perspective and creating a complex system or assembly of conceptual tools and machines that really can’t be compared to the works or any other such figure, except in details so superficial that you can’t really do anything with them anyway.

However, it can also be fun. So today and Sunday, I’ll post brief meditations on some common themes that different figures from the history of philosophy have with the ideas Jean-Paul Sartre explores in the Critique of Dialectical Reason. These will mostly be fun comparisons, just around to provoke some curious thoughts. All these posts come with the caveat that the concepts of the actual philosophers I’m discussing are vastly more complex and intriguing than the brief, almost stereotypical accounts I give them here. Just the thing for a weekend.

One of the central stereotypes of Thomas Hobbes’ political philosophy was that, without some overarching governmental authority, human life is “nasty, brutish, and short.” I’ve even heard people use this phrase in casual conversation when I was doing my undergraduate degree. This is because, without a single party having a monopoly on violence, all members of a society can commit violence on each other, resulting in a paranoid social state where everyone is under continual threat, or at least the possibility, of being killed.

Friday’s post discussed the paradoxical fraternal love of revolutionary communities. One aspect of this ability to do violence to each other is that violence actually brings the group together, in contrast to the vision of Hobbes. Solidarity through mutual violence would work something like this. Each member of a revolutionary community has a right to commit lethal violence toward each other member (including oneself, perhaps) in the case of their betrayal of the community or the cause, or some other serious internal threat. Because every member has the right to kill every other member in this case, the threat brings the community together. The ubiquity of possible killers means that death is inescapable in the case of betrayal, so the revolutionary brothers are brought closer together by the legitimacy of killing each other.

The violence of killing traitors includes its victim in the community even as the community rejects him in murder. The murder of traitors is the limit case of the community, but the members never sever their relationship with the betrayer. Truly severing their relationship would mean that their killing of him was illegitimate; he would no longer have been a betrayer, simply an enemy. Killing a traitor would actually affirm the traitor’s inclusion in the revolutionary community. Precisely because he remains a brother, the community has the right to kill him. This notion is reminiscent of Giorgio Agamben’s concept of the sacred man. Such a person has had their humanity rejected by the community: his punishment is that anyone in the community is allowed to kill him at any time. But the rejected person is still included in the community, because if he were rejected in every sense, he would simply be an exile. Because the community can legally kill this person, this person remains part of the community. He’s a limit case, but still a member.

As far as the utopias project is concerned for the moment, a principle like this shows just how ridiculous and terrifying political violence, no matter the justness of the cause, really is.