The camp has not only become a structural feature of our globalized condition. It has also ceased to scandalize. Or, rather, the camp is not just our present. It is our future, namely our solution for ‘keeping away what disturbs, for containing or rejecting all excess, whether it is human, organic matter or industrial waste’. [32] In short, it is a form of government of the world.
Unable to face up to the basic fact that what once belonged to the exception is now the norm (the fact that liberal democracies, like any other regime, are capable of incorporating criminality into their system), we find ourselves plunged head-deep into an endless racket of words and gestures, symbols and language, delivered with increasing brutality like a long series of blows to the head. There are mimetological blows too: secularism and its mirror image, fundamentalism. All this, every blow, delivered with perfect cynicism. For, let’s face it, all the surnames have lost their first names, as it were, and there are no more names to name the outrage, no more languages to speak the unspeakable. Almost nothing stands up any longer, except in the form of a kind of viscous and rancid snot, draining from the nostrils without even a single sneeze.
Can one truly come to presence in the world, dwell in the world, or traverse it, on the basis of this impossibility of sharing it with others, this impassable distance? Is it enough to shoot down enemies and expel foreigners to be truly rid of them, to doom them to eternity, to forget them for all time? This attitude demands that such acts of death and banishment succeed in erasing the face (its living substance) that gives the enemy his humanity. The task of disfigurement and erasure is almost a precondition for any execution under the contemporary logic of hatred. Within societies that continue to multiply structures of separation and discrimination, the relation of care towards the other has been replaced with a relation without desire. Explaining and understanding, knowledge and recognition, are no longer necessary requirements. Hospitality and hostility have never been so opposed, a factor that serves to explain the interest in returning to those intellectual figures for whom the misery of men and the suffering of enemies were never mere ‘silent remainders of politics’. [34] Instead, they were always combined with a demand for recognition, notably in contexts where the experience of being unrecognized, humiliated, alienated and mistreated was the norm.
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