Pure Profanity

Last updated on: March 30, 2013 at 3:42 pm By Peter Leithart

Modernity, says Zygmunt Bauman ( Life in Fragments: Essays in Postmodern Morality , 139-40), is a “civilization of transgression .” Citing Krzysztof Pomian, he says that in modernity “borders are there sole to be transgressed” and “does not just tolerate transgressions as far as they remain marginal; it provokes them.” This transgression of boundaries arises from a desire to force things into new shapes, an impulse that always tries to stay a “step ahead of reality: having always more means... Read more

Civilizing Process

Last updated on: March 30, 2013 at 11:09 am By Peter Leithart

In a 1983 article in Past & Present , Lawrence Stone presented evidence that showed a precipitous drop in the homicide rate in England from the 14th to the 20th century. Why? Stone thinks that Elias’s Civilizing Process had something to do with it: “Yves Castan has shown with great brilliance the operation of the concept of honnetete’ in the eighteenth century, how the stress on civility, politeness and propriety spread down from intellectual aristocratic salons to wider sectors of... Read more

Critique of Violence

Last updated on: March 30, 2013 at 9:39 am By Peter Leithart

Critchley ( Philosophy and the Return of Violence: Studies from this Widening Gyre , 64- 8) gives a lucid analysis of Walter Benjamin’s “Critique of Violence” (in Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings ), organized around Benjamin’s distinctions between law-making and law-preserving violence, between political and the general strike, and between mythic and divine violence. Regarding the first: For Benjamin, all law is ” law-making or law-preserving ,” both of which are violent. All contract takes a pound of flesh, and... Read more

Zizek’s dreams

Last updated on: March 30, 2013 at 9:00 am By Peter Leithart

In his essay in Philosophy and the Return of Violence: Studies from this Widening Gyre , Simon Critchley describes Zizek’s Barlebyan politics in Shakespearean terms: “Zizek is, I think, a Slovenian Hamlet.” He “dreams of a divine violence, a cataclysmic, purifying violence of the sovereign ethical deed,” but is left “utterly paralyzed” while “dreaming of an avenging violent act for which, finally, he lacks the courage. In short, behind its shimmering dialectical inversions, Zizek’s work leaves us in a fearful... Read more

Shades of Grey

Last updated on: March 29, 2013 at 4:23 pm By Peter Leithart

At the end of his massively documented The Shadow World: Inside the Global Arms Trade , Andrew Feinstein notes the blurring of lines between formal and informal arms markets, the black and the white markets that merge into gray: “While the large defence contractors like BAE and Lockheed Martin – the formal industry working hand-in-glove with government – would have us believe they are distinct from and should not be tarred with the same brush as the apparently shadier world... Read more

Permanent War Economy

Last updated on: March 29, 2013 at 4:08 pm By Peter Leithart

Back in 1944, Walter Oakes predicted Marxianly that late capitalism would naturally develop a “permanent war economy.” Defining a war economy as one where “the government’s expenditures for war . . . become a legitimate and significant end-purpose of economic activity.” Capitalism, Oakes claimed, seeks equilibrium that reduces unemployment and thus keeps political upheaval in check. Maintaining high levels of defense spending in peacetime was one of capitalism’s tools to maintain the privileges of the privileged and to keep the... Read more

Not Bees

Last updated on: March 29, 2013 at 1:09 pm By Peter Leithart

Some political theorists have thought that we can live like bees – sociable without command, law, speech, punishments. Hobbes demurs ( Hobbes: Leviathan , II.17). And not because we are superior to bees. We can’t live like bees because we are “continually in competition for honour and Dignity” and thus prone to “Envy and Hatred, and finally Warre.” Bees have no private/public distinction since “being by nature enclined to their private, they procure thereby the common benefit.” Man has joy... Read more

Martyrdom and law

Last updated on: March 29, 2013 at 1:01 pm By Peter Leithart

Robert Cover (in an essay contained in On Violence: A Reader )) suggests that the very extremity of martyrdom makes it a “proper starting place for understanding the nature of legal interpretation.” For the martyr, “if there is to be a continuing life, it will not be on the term’s of the tyrant’s law. Law is the projection of an imagined future upon reality. Martyrs require that any future they possess will be on the terms of the law to... Read more

Division is Murder

Last updated on: March 29, 2013 at 12:54 pm By Peter Leithart

Ephraim Radner’s dense studies are always sobering, and his recent A Brutal Unity: The Spiritual Politics of the Christian Church is no exception. In a chapter chillingly titled “Division is Murder,” he exposes the complicity of Christians in political violence. Our ecclesial divisions may not cause violence, but Christian division provides a “magnifying coherence” to political, social, and other conflicts. Commenting specifically on the church in Nazi German, he writes, “Division had . . . become simply a part of... Read more

They Call This Friday Good

Last updated on: March 29, 2013 at 4:09 am By Peter Leithart

My meditation for Good Friday at the First Things site this morning. Read more