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  • Disorderly DemocracyAn Axiomatic Politics
  • Grant Farred (bio)

The message from Hamas and the Palestinian Authority is this: talk to us no more about recognizing Israel’s “right to exist” or ending resistance until you obtain a commitment from the Israelis to withdraw from our land and recognize our rights.

—Ismail Haniyeh,“A Just Peace”

It is one of the tragedies . . . that the nation intended to protect the Jewish people has become the agent of state violence against another people, the Palestinians, who find themselves engaged today in a resistance of their own.

—Jacqueline Rose, The Last Resistance

Under conditions of extreme deprivation, with only limited amounts of food and medicines available, what could be more radical than refusing the existing politics of unending compromise? Affirming, in the face [End Page 43] of international sanctions and without so much as basic fuel supplies for its people, the right to proclaim a right? Insisting, while under attack from superior military forces, upon resistance as the only modality of politics? Since the first intifada, in 1987, the Palestinian movement Hamas—Harakat Al Mokawama Al Islamiya, or the Islamic Resistance Movement—can be said to have practiced exactly such a politics: the politics of the axiomatic. That is, the politics that is self-evident without proof or argument. Because the axiomatic requires no argument or definition, because it is something we should accede to on the grounds of self-evidence, Hamas demonstrates that the rejection of conciliation and/or the continuation of resistance in the face of Palestinian death, privation, and on-going loss is not a counterintuitive mode of politics. Rather, considered as such, the axiomatic constitutes the only common sense—the axiomatic as intuitive, politics as politics, resistance as the only appropriate response in the face of Israeli attacks—of the Palestinian political. The axiomatic stands, reflexively, as the rejection of politics as consensus. It is, first, foremost, and finally, the refusal of politics as the predetermined meeting in the middle—the ameliorating of extremes, the art of settling for, of the middle as the place where, in fact, no politics takes place.

The axiomatic claims and retains for itself the right to be divisive in that it necessarily, or constitutively, we might say, separates adherents from opponents—“friends” from “enemies,” in Carl Schmitt’s familiar terms. An axiomatic politics forecloses any possibility of concessions and accommodations (although there is, occasionally, the element of this tendency); it rejects gradualisms. There is no room, obviously, for the “third” or even the “fourth” way, for apologias, for infinite deferrals, in the axiomatic. What is contained in the very name “Hamas,” then, is salient. It is “an Arabic word for ‘zeal’” (Chehab 2007, 23). There is a priori contained in the propensity for intense partisanship; Hamas, in and by its very name, is predisposed toward the axiomatic.

Critic of the consensual that he is, Jacques Rancière understands the axiomatic. In his view, “The ‘rights of man and of the citizen’ are the rights of those who make them a reality” (2006, 74). No right or political subjectivity has any standing unless it is claimed. The only way to claim a right is, out [End Page 44] of historical necessity, to claim it, to speak it again and again as though it were already a right, a right established, a right practiced, as it were; thereby “making” it a right precisely because it is a right that has been denied, because its status, once in question, must now be affirmed in the battle that is being differently joined. In its divisive speaking, the right (of the subjugated) becomes a right when it demands its equivalence to the existing right (of the hegemonic power). When, as Rancière says, it is recognized that “[e]quality is not a fiction” but an inarguable right (Rancière 2006, 48).

The axiomatic begins with its foundational principle: equality, an equality endemic—as insisted on by the West—to the incongruous coupling: liberal democracy. The liberal abstractions equality and justice are, in advance, conceived and mobilized in response to inequality and injustice. As framed by Ismail Haniyeh, veteran Hamas campaigner, master of realpolitik, and since the movement’s electoral...

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