Eso’s Chronicles 319 / 6
It’s Not Over Until It’s Over
© Eso A.B.
All comments appearing within brackets [ ] are editorial in origin.

SO-CALLED ‘SUICIDE’ AS MECHANISM TO ESCAPE THE DICTATORSHIP OF THE CONSENSUS STATE (2)

I was being selective when in the previous blog, I chose to honor Hardt and Negri with the quote: “The first task of Empire, then, is to enlarge the realm of the concensus that support its own power.”

However, as the book states a few sentences before the above quote: “Empire is formed not on the basis of force itself but on the basis of the capacity to present force as being in the service of right and peace. All interventions of the imperial armies are solicited by one or more of the parties involved in an already existing conflict. Empire is not born of its own will but rather is called into being and constituted on the basis of its capacity to resolve conflicts. Empire is formed and its intervention becomes juridicially legitimate only when it is already inserted into the chain of international consensuses aimed at resolving existing conflicts….” (p15)

Hardt and Negri, however, also point out that to be “juridicially legitimate’ and to enforce this legitimacy is based on “…poststructuralist [Deleuze and Guattari] understanding of [hominid] biopower that renews materialist thought and grounds itself solidly in the question of the production of social being.” (p28. My highlight.)

The authors anticipate my possible disagreement with their argument—which seeing that it precludes the multitudes or masses of hominids of making their own evaluation of the situation, which may lead them to insubordination of the ‘law’ (Aaron Schwartz being one such insubordinate)—by stating that “…a new theory of subjectivity must be formulated that operates primarily through knowledge, communication, and language.”

Alas (and unfortunately), the Empire acts as a dictatorship rather sooner than later.

We can note this act of the Empire in the fact that the U.S. government presumes itself to represent The Empire and bars all others from participating in its self-presumed juridicial legitimacy also known as ‘exceptionalism’. This disbarment includes all other UN Security Council Members and the so-called BRICS nations http://thediplomat.com/2014/03/why-did-brics-back-russia-on-crimea/ (: via ZH). Indeed, as the BRICS of he link have it: the exceptionalist approach of the U.S. has become a matter of dictatorship on more than one level, because its ‘legitimacy’ is based on no more than militant militarism and its ability to project it to the field. Aaron Schwartz (see blog 318) experienced the Empire’s militancy on the domestic juridical front, while Russia experiences it in the geopolitical arena by having its traditional area of influence undermined by overpaid NGOs stirring up insubordination among the multitudes by utilizing extremist nationalist elements as, for example, in the Ukraine.

The presumption of the U.S. government is not only self-puffery, but a puffery that aside from its potential tragic consequences is comical as the laughter of Russia’s President Putin at a correspondent’s formally serious question indicates https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ux3oiWELIQ . The only thing missing from the scene is the President of the U.S. asking the question and getting the same answer.

The encirclement or Russia with missile bases, its missiles ostensibly programmed not against Russia, but Iran is in fact a perfect illustration of what Hardt and Negri say is the Empire’s “…contemporary transformation of supranational law, the imperial process of constitution [that] tends either directly or indirectly to penetrate and reconfigure the domestic law of the nation-states, and thus supranational law powerfully overdetermines domestic law.” (p17)

As we may judge for ourselves, in this case, the ‘imperial process’ is not aimed at either Aaron Schwartz or Latvia (where the NGO ‘politica.lv’ is more than happy to collaborate with the undermining of Latvia’s sovereignty), but against a UN Security Council State—a not to be belittled Empire itself. The U.S.’s ‘imperial process’ can be (indeed must be) perceived as arrogant dependence on military power that treats potential human beings as a multitude or swarm of hominids.

As we saw in the previous blog, Aaron Schwartz perceived himself as being reduced—in spite of his attendance at MIT and Harvard (allegedly the elite among institutions of higher education in the U.S. and the world) to a hominid, who is left no other recourse but to fight the Empire with self-sacrifice of his life. Is the next step the self-sacrifice of 47? I am thinking of the 47 samurai sacrificing themselves in front ot the gates of the Japanese emperor.  Are these the warriors of the future against the Empire? To paraphrase Deleuze and Guattari: “Is this the resistance to the present?”