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240 14 Loving Your Enemy (Shortly after this lecture was delivered, the planet was beset with different levels of natural catastrophe, much of which was concentrated in the United States. Every day newspapers carried stories of horrific climatic aberration—a whirlwind of floods, earthquakes, uncontrollable fires, and hurricanes were visited upon the land. According to a psychoanalytical legend of the global unconscious, disasters of this order emerge when one fails to honor the dead enemy. —AR) I give up; I surrender. I yield without hesitation to the incomprehensibility of what is taking us down at this time. In the epoch and text of Hegel war meant something. It was productive of sense: the future was counted in, and depended on the way the Weltgeist waged its wounding temperament. The enemy figured as the negated other. War in Hegel served as a pregnancy test for historical becoming; on some pages, bearing the dignity of a solemn signifier , war spoke to us with worldly gravity. Delivering difference and future, it was sheltered by metaphysics and encouraged by the creation of value. In the past several years I have argued that we no longer know how to wage war or balance the books of some of its more remorselessly sacrificial economies. The notion of a just war is, as Hannah Arendt observes, a fairly recent invention. For all sorts of reasons tied to the breakdown of our metaphysical inheritance, war can no longer be justified, however. And despite God’s reappearance at the head of so many armies and insurgencies, the transcendental guarantor has by all counts gone AWOL. Transcendental wannabes show up where the names of God have deserted man. Hence the regressive hue of current aggressions, played out on repeat, running through immemorial desertscapes. War itself has become a rogue state in terms of the meaning and renewal it aims historically to yield, the sense it promises to make or break. For war also offers the express delivery of rupture and recognition, the emergence of a new order. It promises world, or a restoration at least of the confidence owed to the notion of world. These considerations are being stated too quickly, I know, mainly because I have worked similar assertions elsewhere, largely in 241 4 terms of the conjunction of God and technology and the new teletopies of aggression that presented themselves when I was tracking the cartography of the maternal empire. Elsewhere I have tried to raise deceptively simple questions about recent maternal incursions into the scenography and rhetoric of armed conflict: what it means that mothers go to war or that the United States puts together the mother of all bombs, the MOAB, or that those on bombing missions watch porno videos before they strike. I have been alert, moreover, to feminine registration codes and the maternal trace in the technological revealing from Heidegger to the Bushies. Today’s assignment is a bit different; it’s also a tough one due in part to the pervasive and elusive qualities of the topic, at once obsolesced according to essential protocols of reading, yet somehow inerasable. Now we are asked to speak about the return of an archaic, truly primitive construal of enmity, which strikes me as being phallogocentric to the bone. The enemy. Let me start up the engine, slowly, the enemy engine. To be frank with you, I didn’t know that facing the enemy was in my job description. Just as friendship has been shown to leave out women, based historically on entrenched notions of fraternity, brotherhood, and other essentially masculinist tropes, I must wonder what I, of all putatively sexuated beings, am doing here speaking with the enemy: my enmity. On the other hand, I am uniquely qualified for the job. I remember that Hegel considered women to be the enemy—not only the irony, but the enemy—of the community. Who could ever forget such a slight, such a truth, smack in the middle of being? This still burns me up. But I will hold fire. In terms of a more literary backdrop one thinks of the proud machismo of enmity exhibited by Wyndam Lewis and Ezra Pound as they flexed some poetic muscle; turning to cinema one thinks of the sustained fiendship of Kinski and Herzog or other foaming warrior poses that have been binding men since Cain and Abel. Proximity tightens the hug of enmity, rolling back to the pulses of brotherly love: absolute hostility is reserved only for a brother, which puts...

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