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5 / The Passion: The Betrayals of Elián González and Wen Ho Lee The experience, the passion of language and writing (I’m speaking here just as much of body, desire, ordeal), can cut across discourses which are thematically “reactionary” or “conservative” and confer upon them a power of provocation, transgression or destabilization greater than that of so-called “revolutionary” texts (whether of the right or of the left) which advance peacefully in neo-academic or neoclassical forms. —jacques derrida, acts of literature To be a concrete agent in history is, after all, to be contaminated in turn by historically existing ideals and norms, no matter how contaminated these ideals and norms are. —pheng cheah, “posit(ion)ing human rights in the current global conjuncture” In April 2000, during the height of the media and political maelstrom surrounding the young Cuban boy rescued a little over four months earlier off the shores of Florida, the Washington Post ran a picture of Elián González hanging, arms akimbo, on a playground jungle gym, with a headline reading “The Passion of Elián.” The story highlighted the local religious significance that had been attributed to the plight of this “miracle boy.” The image, headline, and story elicited a symbolic order different from the otherwise tiresome framing of the case in mainstream media as a matter of national political interests versus private familial rights. In highlighting a terrain of religious meaning, this text implicitly asked: Could this child indeed (potentially) provide some kind of collective redemption in a world fissured by postmodern diversities? If so, whose redemption was it? Who were the Judas or Judases who betrayed this child-martyr? What sacrifice was needed from the child to make redemption possible?1 With these questions in mind, this chapter compares the case of Elián González with a contemporaneous case that also became figured on a national screen in terms of martyrdom, scapegoating , and betrayal, that of the Chinese American Los Alamos physicist accused of spying on the United States, Wen Ho Lee. 130 / the passion The questions I initially ask about these two cases, as part of an ethical analysis of betrayal, are meant to evoke some political discomfort: What if Wen Ho Lee did in fact engage in espionage? What if we take seriously the traumas of Cuban exiles and their grievances against Castro ’s Revolutionary government? To pose these questions in the context of academic minority politics and discourse is to follow the injunction of critics like Gayatri Spivak and Rey Chow who urge us to accord to colonial and minority agents subjectivities as complex and contradictory as we are willing to grant to white, Western subjects. By forsaking the victim /oppressor binary, we might chart the multiplicities of domination, desire, and agency in minoritarian subjectivity. An ethical critique here rethinks the framework of rightist and leftist politics because, in Jacques Derrida’s words, the “power of provocation” conferred by passionate language troubles these categories in minority discourse. And as I have already specifically argued in Chapter 2, such a critique must be willing to recognize that diaspora constitutes an other to the nation-state, an other whose desires the nation cannot resolve into its own narrative demands.2 The radical alterity of this otherness can produce loyalties and desires that may, or even must, appear treasonous from inside the nation. This then leaves us in a space that is fraught, where neither Right nor Left can claim a priori the higher moral ground, and betrayals loom in all directions. This is precisely the unstable terrain for emergent identifications and ethico-political agency that I have been describing throughout An Ethics of Betrayal. In this final chapter, I would like to draw out more sharply the ideological and material effects of hewing to the ethical dimensions of betrayal. This chapter continues the analysis of political rhetoric, and of the ethical grounds upon which such rhetoric depends, that I began in Chapter 3. However, following upon the radical pedagogy of intellectual self-critique that we saw allegorized in Chapter 4, this chapter focuses upon the responsibilities to the other that also antagonize the leftist and liberal subjects of minority discourse. Anidealizedpoliticsofresistanceforeclosesanethico-politicalproject; Rey Chow explains that idealism is a kind of “collective sentiment” that demands that critics disregard what they recognize to be “exploitative, coercive or manipulative” in “so-called ‘oppositional’ discourse.”3 Ethico -political action therefore involves “risk-taking” that “supplement[s] idealism doggedly with non-benevolent...

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