A word on the recent Israeli military campaign in Gaza in relation to Obama's boycott:
The recent "invasion" of Gaza, a word which is disarmingly curious, demands an occasion for reflection, and indeed there are numerous things of which I have considered worthy of reflection. The use of the word "invasion" is curious in itself along all lines of its deployment, from American protest movements, social action networks, IDF media scripts, Israeli government appearances, to Hamas statements and speeches. It is curious for the reason, (especially in the context of Israel and its allies), in that it affirms, in the violence of the present, a strange rhetorical reality or figure of rights, duties, and sovereignties that Israeli occuption, ghettoization, dispossession, and annilihation of Palestinian political, material, and social life has attempted to bury beneath its bombs and the violence of its narratives. The particular historical-legal-military framework signified by the use of such a word, carries with it a particular structure of recognition (an ironically Hegelian kind of murderous recognition) and legitimacy. However it is a grotesque irony that recognizes Palestine not as a nation and the Palestinians as a people, but as victims, as blood-stained corpses or tearful women and children- faces Western media outlets have greedily lusted for as images of a Palestinian national culture of death, tragedy, helplessness and sorrow. The white polity of the west has always demonstrated a collective desire and will continue to desire these endless images of suffering, contorted, and charred brown bodies, whether in the discourses of human rights and military intervention (Darfur) or as signifiers of Western superiority, decency, civility, and above all-empathy- the great insult of those whose tax dollars fund the IDF's military technology. The grand irony of course being that this cycle repeated itself as the "humanitarian crisis" of the Gaza campaign worsened. But let me be absolutely clear on this point, what took place in the streets of Gaza, in its hospitals and in its morgues, was not a "humanitarian crisis" at all, rather it was a totalizing violence (epistemic, ideological, material, political, even aesthetic) against the rights of the Palestinian people to exist. Its targets have ranged from cultural and educational institutions (always the target of a colonizing force that seeks to humiliate, degrade, and destroy the highest hopes of a people forced to live in the exhaustive and rotten squalor that only Israel- with its stolen wealth robbed from the graves of all Palestinians, and its immense depositories of Western aid- could dream up), to ambulances, demonstrators, journalists, doctors, aid workers, and anyone who dares to dream that their streets are indeed their own and not pathways for IDF tanks.
In my previous post, I examined the Obama administration's decision to boycott an upcoming U.N. conference on racism. In this post, I intend to revise and expand several previous points in the hopes of widening the frames of understanding through which President Obama's regimes of governance can be theorized. The concept of "discursive sovereignty" is a phrase I have coined in order to establish a general way of looking at political language, discourses, speech-acts, and networks or "circuits" (Foucault) of textuality under the Obama regime. "Sovereignty" in the sense I am using it, refers to executive judicial power, power that intervenes, narrates, and conceptualizes its own particular logics, epistemologies, concepts, and methodologies in terms of a "decision" or a response. However, the space of this "decision" is one that is in itself, constituted through sovereign claims and representations. What initially sounds like a vague tautological construction, a circle and circling of statements, is in essence, the dizzying core of a right of power that has no demarcations of limits or conditions of application.
The space of the "decision" is a network of densely active channels, zones, and sites; a network firmly located outside of communicative politics and foundational liberal notions of governance i.e. : consent, debate, the division of powers etc. Carl Schmitt calls this space the "situation":
"... For a legal order to make sense, a normal situation must exist, and he is sovereign who definitely decides whether this normal decision situation actually (concretely) exists. ... The sovereign produces and guarantees the situation in its totality."
To return to Obama's own sovereign decision to boycott the upcoming U.N. conference on racism, we can ask what is the "normal situation" of the state "global racism"? In what ways is the state of Israel an "exceptional" state, and how have these "exceptions" been actively produced, constructed, and guaranteed? The possible answers are of course, to complicated to attempt here. However the purpose of such questions is to open considerations of the particular logics, truths, and rationalities embedded in such a sovereign decision, a decision rooted not in legal "situations" and norms, but in a discursive regime that decides upon something far more important than a particular legal event or act, the definitions, truths, and specific content of global classes of racisms. The sovereign power to not only decide what constitutes racism, but also narrates the content and histories of racism, is a power that intervenes at the precise moment that it begins to loose its grip.
As an event, the decision to boycott the conference marks a deeper relation between what Michael Omi and Howard Winant call the project of "racial neoliberalism" and new regimes of tolerance; tolerance as an impossible response to a "problem" that both the United Nations and the U.S. have failed to understand. At a time when "rabid neoliberalism" (Giroux) has reached an untenable crisis, the post-racial impulses of the Obama administration points to a politics of cynicism so embedded in the "hope" of American exceptionalism, that it cannot even see the realities that are everywhere apparent. Obama's televised spectacles of emotion, from his recent "anger" over the AIG bonuses, to his insulting style of presidential humor on the tonight with Jay Leno (insulting in the sense that he would address the nation on the state of the economy from a location as deadly mediocre as Jay Leno's studio) , are so removed from genuine political despair and the
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