We asked a variety of scholars to share their reflections on Elad Lapidot’s new book The Politics of Not Speaking.
I want to begin by stressing what a bold and significant book this is at the present moment – a moment in history when the rift between the West and the non-Western world is perhaps greater than it has ever been since the concept of the modern West first gained currency.
Before detailing what I find so powerful about the message of this book, I would like to start out on a personal note. I have a habit of waking up very early in the morning, too early for getting up without suffering from lack of recovery for the rest of the day. So, what I would usually do is to stay on in bed and put on the radio, preferably BBC World, which has high-quality news reporting during the early morning hours. This is admittedly not always the most uplifting way to start the day given the current state of the world, but you nonetheless get a mixture of depressing and reassuring news most of the days.
But then there was this morning in early May. Instead of the rapid-fire news bulletin, what came out of my phone when I opened the BBC app that morning was an eerie rasping sound impossible to make sense of, apart from its eeriness. Then there was silence. And then, a few moments later, a quiet speaker voice said: ‘Sometimes in war it is the smallest sound that can make the loudest statement’.
The rasping sound, it turned out, was of five-month-old Siwar Ashour who struggled to cry, but due to severe malnutrition during her first months in life, all that came out was this hoarse whispering. Three months into the Israeli blockade, Gaza’s Nasser hospital had been unable to provide her the food needed to grow, and her voice was simply robbed of the energy to fully communicate her distress.
As I stood up that morning, I seriously thought that the tide would turn. After months of reporting on the unspeakable suffering inflicted on the Gazan population, I had a strong sense that this would be the tipping point, just like that moment in September 2015, when the image of two-year-old Alan Kurdi’s lifeless body washed up on a beach spread across the world and the political agenda with regard to immigration shifted for at least some time.
It is true that the report did affect many listeners. There were also follow-up reports during the next days, including images on the BBC webpage of Siwar’s distorted little body. But then things quickly went back to business as usual and Siwar became just another item in the never-ending flow of horrific data pouring out of Gaza. How to explain this moral numbness on the part of the majority of Europeans, including their elected leaders? It is certainly not about lack of facts, because major Western media outlets have not been covering up the truth about Gaza, as exemplified by the BBC’s report on Siwar.
And yet the tide did not turn, which may seem remarkable, given the unique way in which the violent reality of Israel and Palestine concerns the heart of Europe itself. Or is it, perhaps, precisely for this reason that Europeans on large scale have remained unresponsive to the brutalities meted out by the State of Israel against Gaza Strip civilians over the past two years?
This all brings me back to why I find The Politics of Not Speaking such a significant intervention at this moment: it captures, like few other interventions, the cultural and historical substrate that I believe is what allows people in Western democracies to brush aside the reported horrors as parts of the unavoidable casualties of war.
I would like, in this context, to pick up on a specific moment at the very end of the book, namely the point at which Lapidot takes issue with Carl Schmitt (who is otherwise read quite favourably throughout the book). Schmitt’s enduring attraction today is mainly due to his critique of liberalism; more precisely, to the tendency of liberalism to reduce politics to rational deliberation and to deny the irreducible presence of conflict in human relations. The problem of such denial is not only that it tends to end up in a neutralization of politics.
The most important part of Schmitt’s argument is that the denial of conflict and war tends to foster a kind of absolutist violence. When a political actor sees itself not as one side in a conflict but as the representative of a universal ethics, it begins to treat its opponent not as a rival but as evil itself – justifying their total elimination. Schmitt’s solution to the inherent flaws of liberalism was political realism: the recognition that conflict is inherent to human existence and that politics is therefore about existing with conflict rather than aiming to abolish it. More concretely, this entailed the ideals of power balance between territorial nation states, diplomacy, and a body of international laws designed to ensure that a state’s war against another state never acquires an absolute nature and becomes a war of good against evil.
Lapidot’s critical observation in relation Schmitt is that these two ideals – that is, liberalism’s commitment to ‘the pure logos of humanism’ versus Schmitt’s embracement of ‘the pure violence of the state’s sovereign’ – are not necessarily two competing paradigms but rather two sides of the same coin; two sides of the same border. The key word here is border. While Schmitt thought and trusted that borders between sovereign territorial states would contain violence, Lapidot instead suggests that what the border de facto does is to split state power into two spheres: the inside and the outside. “The inner space,” he writes, “is a state of law, a polis of logos, of democracy and human rights. The outer space is a space of war, a world of sovereign, namely absolute, violence. Both spaces, both regimes, belong to the same sovereign power” (105).
It is the ability to curate this border that explains the intricate nature of the kind of violence carried out in colonial contexts, where democracy and rule of law inside the border serves to justify war and lawless violence outside it. As Lapidot suggests by the end of the book, this ‘operation of bordering’ is today what has been manifested in the extreme in the destruction of Gaza and what precedes it – but also, I would like to add, in the Western complicity in what is going on. Because the ability to create and maintain the border between inside and outside is also what ultimately explains the moral numbness referred to a moment ago – the mental compartmentalization that allows so many Europeans to deplore the victims of Gaza while still seeing the rationale of Israel’s right to ‘defend’ itself. It is, after all, the ‘only democracy in the Middle East’.
Now, words, of course, matter here, as pointed out earlier this year in a The Guardian editorial, titled ‘They Make a Desert and Call it Peace’. Our mental compartmentalization is in other words facilitated by a rhetoric that aims to obscure the horror, for example by labelling a proposed concentration camp a ‘humanitarian city’, or by choosing the designation ‘Gaza Humanitarian Foundation’ for an aid distribution initiative that was in practice a death trap for starving people.
George Orwell could not have said it better: WAR IS PEACE. FREEDOM IS SLAVERY. IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH. And Orwell, by the way, knew what he was talking about. Having served a violent imperial system from within as a young police officer in Burma, he spent most of the rest of his life exposing the nature of imperial violence, its vicious capacity of justifying itself by presenting oppression as civilization and subjugation as liberation.
This is also the powerful achievement of Lapidot’s book: the way in which it exposes the crude identification of peace with logos and war with logoclasm, thereby summoning us to recognize that the most infernal violence is sometimes that which is carried out in the name of humanity, just as the most cruel wars are often those carried out in the name of peace. As long as we fail to recognize this, we will also fail to break out of the moral numbness that will allow the violence to go on.
What I have written so far has been more of a comment on what I find so significant about the message of this book. I would like to end by a related reflection that may also invite to further conversation. The challenge the book leaves us with, having exposed the dangers of ‘the pure logos of humanism’, is how to remain faithful to the logoclastic gesture, which, importantly, is not about negation – about denying the desirability of peace, unity or rationality – but about interrupting and disturbing discourses that do not recognize their own inherent potential violence.
So, how to keep up such an attitude of constant self-examination, the kind of attitude that prevents us from believing that we indefinitely stand on the right side of history, which, again, is when we tend to become truly violent, truly ahistorical? Put in more concrete political terms, this is ultimately about the question of horizons, of the visions or expectations for the day after the liberation. How to prevent the closure of the horizon, the liberated victims from becoming new perpetrators, and so on?
Lapidot touches upon this question on several occasions, notably in his readings of Heidegger and Fanon. Whereas he rejects the subtle violence inherent in Heidegger’s belief in intercultural reunification beyond linguistic differences, he is more favourable to Fanon’s notion of redemption as act that requires a clean break between good and evil: ‘the breakdown of the existing world and the creation of a new world, a new humanity, a new language’ (44–45; see also 50).
To be sure, it is not difficult to side with Fanon against Heidegger when considering their broader commitments, the latter fighting for restoring German supremacy, the former for restoring the dignity of the wretched of the earth. Yet there is something about the lack of distance to Fanon’s rhetoric of newness and purity that I find troubling and which seems to stand in contrast to another voice in the book – the voice Lapidot speaks with in his conversation with Derrida, whose uneasiness with clean breaks or any claim to purity runs through all his works and not least the text Lapidot chooses to engage with (Monolinguism of the Other).
I therefore want to insist again on the question: How to prevent the closure of the horizon, the redeemed from becoming new oppressors, productive logoclasm from turning into a violent counter-logos? Or, in Lapidot’s own words: How to maintain logos ‘in the state of imperfection’ (112)?
