vEmpire, Glocalization, and the Melancholia of the Sovereign

The multitude is the real productive force of our social world, whereas Empire is a mere apparatus of capture that lives only off the vitality of the multitude-as Marx would say, a vampire regime of accumulated dead labor that survives only off the blood of the living.

-Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire, 62.

What is thus put at risk by this terrifying autoimmunitary logic is nothing else than the existence of the world, of the global itself.

-Jacques Derrida, Le "concept" du 11 semptembre, 98-99.²

Who or what will come out of going global? Who or what is going global, and who or what is going to come out of it? From the word go, the questions multiply. There are several regimes that one can hear in the phrases "go global" or "going global." One is the admonition to go global, now that everybody or everything else has. An encouragement, an invitation, a welcome: go global, release yourself from national or other boundaries of identity, be free! A shipment, an envoi, is going global, a letter without destination or a preprogrammed itinerary and without assured delivery. Going global might be precisely this possibility of never arriving or never arriving properly; but also going global might be never having departed from a certain, designated space in the first place.

The other sense, the other direction, of going global, is quite the opposite, a warding-off of the global: Go, go away global! The global should go away with all its misery, the political and ecological devastation that follow globalization like a shadow. No less a figure than Hannah Arendt warned, almost sixty years ago, in The Origins of Totalitarianism, that "The danger that [is] a global, universally interrelated civilization may produce barbarians from its own midst by forcing millions of people into conditions which, despite all appearances, are the conditions of savages" (302). That danger of going global will be or will have been a reverse potential of any going global. Is "going global" good to go? Who or what will come out of it?

One should hear in "going global" an almost poetic beauty, an alliteration of g/gl, gl/g, go, go, goo, goo, gl, gl, al/la, la/al, la/la, a poetic equivalence, to speak in Roman Jakobson's terms: a language in its infancy, with all the future and the potentiality of senses, meanings, combinations, and directions open to it. Going global would be the very glottic opening of language and into language, a pleasure of a glossa, of words, an enjoyment in and of the words, a glottal-global, globetrotting experience that is almost literary-poetic, unpredictable, free to go anywhere, going global as the going of and dissemination of the global, the global is/as going global, g-o-o-o-o global!, and, as Heidegger would have it, the world worlds. Going global would be the becoming of the totality of senses, senses and meanings that go in every direction, towards what Jean-Luc Nancy calls the creation of the world, or globalization: La création du monde ou la mondialisation (2002). Going global as a pleasure, a jouissance of going global, "as an exercise of an infinitely finite and insatiable signification which is the act of being in a sense of being placed in the world" (l'exercice insatiable et infiniment fini qui est l'être en acte du sens mis en monde) (64).

By the same token, one should not forget that this alliteration, going global, this glottic repetition, and the meaning for which it stands and as it stands, is possible only in English, and that going global is going on at the expense of other languages and cultures. You cannot go global in French, Russian, German, my native Serbo-Croat, or any other language. Going global sentences other cultures not to a poetic but to a generalized equivalence, a forced translation of an English-dominated globalization. Going global may be seen, thus, as the slogan of a generalized erasure of all alterity, singular difference, idioms, and idiomaticity. It would entail the transformation of the so-called global sphere into a space of globalized exchange under the banner of English, by means of a universal equivalence, which is, according to Marx, ultimately money.³ This going global would be the name of an erasure of alterity, going global as the smoothing of the global surface, a sovereign globality of the one, English, globe, which is going global at the expense of all other possible global folds.

The benefits of global communication are sometimes celebrated, by the best interpreters of the global condition. In his essay, "Notes on Globalization as a Philosophical Issue," from The Cultures of Globalization, Fredric Jameson writes that "we are now in a position to benefit from globalization in the activation of a host of new intellectual networks and the exchanges and discussions across a variety of national situations which have themselves become standardized by globalization to the degree to which we can now speak to each other" (65). The standardizing power of globalization is a cause for celebration, in Jameson's view, since it allows us to communicate with each other. But there is a great risk, of course, that such standardized communication would take place in English. One should be mindful that universalism may be blind to the fact that if anything is worth "communicating," it is an irreducible difference, even a secret one, of the Other, and if we talked only after every difference had been erased, standardized, then no communication would take place.

One could certainly argue, taking a slightly different direction, that the global dominance of English should or could be used as a vehicle enabling minority discourses to preserve and disseminate whatever might yet be archived or saved of their irreducible but ever-diminishing difference. Nevertheless, one has to bear in mind that the standardization of English on a global scale not only diminishes and erases the specificity of other cultures and languages and reduces the range of political and religious options, but also diminishes the very English culture from which it detached itself in its going global. The globalization of English brings with it a certain impoverishment of English or American cultures and idioms from within.

Let's admit at once: the opposing possibilities (one of the preservation of local identity in the face of a need to globalize, the other of a force of globalization that obliterates national and particular difference) constitute the double structure of any going global, one the reverse side of the other, one always a neighbor, a double, or the twin of the other. We will be encountering such intertwining and twinning, such a doubling of the world, the twin fangs of a glottic opening, going global and biting both ways. It is a world of twins, and the twinning of the world, one the reverse or erasure of the other. At the opening of the world there will be an erasure and a forgetting of the Other. This originary erasure would be the condition of going global, in every sense: the twin shadow left at the origin of the word and of the world. The extent to which such a potential erasure is remembered and warded off will be the measure of the success of going global in a sense of creating the world.

II

The central scene in Krzysztof Kieslowski's Double Life of Veronique (1991) takes place on the square near Jagiellonian University in Krakow, with a 360-degree revolution of the camera. The scene also inscribes Poland (in 1990) within the orbit of the Western world. That inclusion marks the death of a certain political, communal immediacy and of a national identity and the birth of prosthetic, mediated and mediatic, democratic modes of political representation and integration. In a similar way, the Copernican revolution, by the time its effects reached the eighteenth century (in itself a revolutionary century), finally became, as Thomas Kuhn has it, "the common property of Western man" (227). The inclusion of Poland in the West takes place by means of a death of one double, the Polish twin of Veronique, so that the French, Western other can live on and keep the death's memory. And the 360-degree shot takes place at the Jagiellonian university where, almost exactly 500 years before, in 1491, Copernicus started attending. Here, the birth of a certain global redrawing of European identity is achieved at the expense of the commemoration of the death of the Other.

At the beginning of his The Creation of the World, or, Globalization, Nancy exposes precisely such an ambivalence in the conjoining proposed by the title. The Creation of the World, or, Globalization, creates three possible relations between the two: first, a choice between the creation of the world, or its other, globalization; second, the creation of the world, otherwise known as globalization; third, an indifference: either the creation of the world or globalization will come to the same thing. Nancy goes on to say:

. . . since it is not a question of prophesying or of mastering the future, how should we open up in order to look ahead of ourselves where nothing is visible, with our eyes guided by two terms the sense of which escapes us-"creation" (until now reserved for theological mysteries), "mondialisation" (until now reserved for technical and economic matters, otherwise called "globalization")

(10).⁴

Global displacement is not something that occurs without historical or techno-ideological precedents. In a recent exhibit of the gifts to Stalin in the former Museum of the Revolution, now the Historical Museum, in Moscow, there was a display of a globe with a hammer as a telephone receiver and a sickle as a cradle, a gift from the Polish workers in 1950. This gift in the shape of the globe should remind us that Moscow and Russia were also the cradle of a global aspiration of a different kind: the Third International, an attempt to unify the workers of the world. But that unification, however admirable and desirable (in this day and age superseded by the Internetional), was thwarted by the fact that this was an attempt at establishing a false empire, an empire that was not truly global but subsumed under the dominance of a sovereign state, the U.S.S.R. The globe-phone also provides an occasion to remind ourselves of attempts since the fifteenth century to make Moscow "the third Rome" and to remind us that a certain self-assumed messianism on the part of Moscow, first in trying to make itself the religious leader of the world and then the leader of all the proletariat, is not far from an aspiration that Derrida calls mondialatinisation (globalatinization).⁵ A messianic and religious undertone of the current aspirations of going global couples the sovereignty of ideological or economic capital with the sovereignty of one God (of which Rome is but an emblem that stands for all Christian monotheism or, in the case of Moscow, proletarian monotheism).

The global phone is mentioned here not for fun, or not for fun only. This piece of technology keeps a person attached to the global telecommunications network, from which, when using the phone, we hang like a puppet or a doll, hanging as if from a string, not unlike the hanging Stavrogin, the citizen of the canton Uri, on the last page of The Possessed. The global phone is an index of displacement that transforms the ground on which we communicate, talk, work, or teach, keeping us suspended and hanging in the air. Having gone global, where am I, as a subject (national, situational, political, etc.)? Who or what am I-a puppet, a machine ventriloquized by a phone corporation, SwissCom-where are my words, mobile, cellular, global? And what is the ground for comparison, for comparative literature, in such a world?

III

Going global-who or what will come out of it? Nancy's analysis pursues two possibilities of going global. One, which could be called globalization proper, is an enormous energy at work that turns the world into the site of a circulation of goods, merchandise, the work of technē and technicity, what Nancy calls écotechnie (eco-technics), and into a universal equivalent (money). Negri and Hardt have given this global phenomenon the name "empire." The world in this sense of globalization is the world dominated by an instinct toward death: to follow Nancy, the work taking place in the world that works toward the world's destruction. And indeed, sociologists warn that we live on a planet which is full and without space, the world that is its own waste; we live on a globe in which modernization as mondialisation in its devastating effects have come full circle. There is a price to pay. Quite literally, as Zygmunt Bauman argues, there is no more place for depositing garbage and the refuse of the history of modernity. More and more, problems created globally have to be treated locally, often desperately and with inadequate means. But the refuse is overwhelming, plenary and planetary.⁶

The radical mobility of capital undermines, obliterates, or ignores established national borders, and economic accumulation and its benefits accrue outside, out of the reach of those who work for capital's proliferation. There is a decoupling between the power and structure of political representation, whereby the former sovereign power of the nation-state becomes an emptied-out shell and a memory. Accumulation of capital becomes the sovereign of the world, and the coupling between the sovereign state and capital gives way to a dehiscence (Nancy 164). The state does not know where or how to ground itself.

Alexander Sokurov's Russian Ark (2002) takes place entirely at the foremost site of Russian sovereignty, the Winter Palace (now the Hermitage Museum). Toward the end of the movie, shot in one take, as a track shot follows the crowd descending the Jordan Stairwell (named after the River Jordan, thus making additional connections between the Russian Ark, the Bible, and the Ark of the Covenant), we overhear an exchange between a governor and his wife: "When we get back to Kursk, we have to throw the same kind of ball in the spring." The camera then pans onto the misty waters of the Neva and the Baltic Sea, reinforcing the suggestion of the movie's title that the Hermitage is a ship. But it is a ship which is not hermetically sealed. The reference to Kursk inserts a hole in the ark by invoking the worst Russian submarine disaster ever: the sinking of the Kursk. Discreet but insistent sounds of grinding metal remind one throughout the movie of the noises a ship or a submarine would make under distress, sinking. And in one scene, two modern-day sailors in military uniforms confront the Marquis de Custine (Sergei Dreiden) and get into an argument with him. The Russian Ark is a ship that leaks, filling itself with the memory of its own loss-not least the loss of Russia's supreme, Messianic national sovereignty, hermetically sealed behind its Iron Curtain. The Russian Ark leaks the lack that it tries to contain. And the film turns that loss into a source of a post-historic, melancholic sovereignty, the sovereignty of melancholia.

Another example can testify to a similar melancholic displacement or loss of national sovereignty. At the very center of Moscow there is the Hotel Moscow, built by Alexei Shchusev, the same architect who built Lenin's mausoleum and for a while-before they kicked him out-Stalin's. (There is to this day in Moscow an architectural museum that justly bears Shchusev's name, marking his importance for Russian and Soviet architecture). The building is famous for having an asymmetrical facade. The myth has it that Stalin was given two blueprints of the hotel, a left and right section of the elevation, which he signed in the middle to give his approval, and no one dared to come back to ask him which façade he preferred. As a result, it is said, the hotel was built with an asymmetrical facade. The hotel interior is a masterpiece of high Stalinist architecture, known also as Stalinist baroque, and a veritable gallery of invaluable works of art by some leading painters and sculptors of the Soviet era: Gerasimov, Deneika, Mukhina. In a move that was not without scandal, the hotel was recently sold by the Moscow city council and Mayor Yuri Luzhkov for scrap. The very symbol of an epoch and of the city of Moscow is to be torn down. The Hotel Moscow, a building built to last ages, for some reason was not on the list of the buildings protected by the state, and therefore a monument by any measure has been slated for destruction. An effect of globalization?

Not long ago (in the summer of 2003) an automobile company, BMW, rented the façade of the still-standing building as the place to display an ad for a new BMW. The ad has the front grill of the car, with a menacing look, baring its fangs (one would be tempted to say the twin fangs of capital, but more about that a bit later), and it is stretched the entire length of the façade, two football fields, with an inscription: "This is what the future looks like" (tak vygliadit budushchee). The tension at the heart of Moscow's and Russia's identity, covered over and traversed by a techno-economic monopoly, is accented by the fact that the menacing gaze of the machine, this self-proclaimed gaze of the future, looks directly at the Russian state parliament, the Duma. The advertising is reflected in the windows of the house of the Russian parliament and even clearly visible as a reflection in the plaque fixed on the building that bears the institution's name, "The State Parliament." The sovereignty of the lawgiving state institution is emptied out by the gaze (of all things in Russia) of a German car, that, in the Russian language, proclaims the future: "this is what the future looks like." And to the left there is an ad for another symbol of global techno-mobility, a Nokia telephone, that also privileges a gaze, and next to it, on another façade, another ad, a grand display of a globe. And in a nearby store for children, the young consumerist paradise with the world in its name, Detski mir (the world of children), one can buy an electric miniature version of a BMW.

In lieu of sovereignty, the state now fills itself with something we could call "sovereignism," the condition of a sense of loss of sovereignty, a melancholic state which often turns to violent compensations: war, internal and external repression, the solidifying of a police state, nationalism at the place of the disappearance of the nation-state. Going to war is a favorite compensatory mechanism to cover the internal weakening of a nation-state: a lack of investment in the supporting structures of sovereignty, such as education, health care, pension funds, even the legality of the democratic electoral procedures, all these are replaced by a compensatory bellicosity. As a graffito on the campus of the University of California at Irvine said in the days preceding the war in Iraq, "Give war a chance."

And Russia, as is well known, invented a war in Chechnya (and declared it finished three years ago, in the year 2000): a standing exercise of compensatory violence that, according to some political analysts, brought President Putin into power and keeps him there. His first elections were preceded and assured by the explosions, attributed to Chechen terrorists, of two buildings in the center of Moscow. Political analysts have noticed a return of the figure of the leader, the Führer of the nation, who is beyond criticism, even a return of certain Stalinist aspirations, in Putin.

The Great Dictator, by Charlie Chaplin (1940), is a masterly example of the ways in which a certain globalizing aspiration has at its origin a repression of the twin other (in this case the obliteration of German Jewry, which was in many instances the most exemplary and most "integrated" contributor to "German" art, literature, economy, and culture). The Jewish barber and the dictator, Hinkel, are both played by Chaplin. The establishment of sovereign globalizing power here takes place by means of the obliteration of the twin within the one: one nation, one sovereign, one leader. That is not to say that the Jewish barber and the dictator are one and the same (twins are never the same) but that the construction of sovereign national identity always entails a destruction of otherness in the very social, political or literal body that wants to climb above all others, as the German anthem to this day proclaims: "Deutschland über alles in der Welt." In the film, such sovereign global aspirations are brought to their radical consequence when the globe with which the German dictator plays bursts in his hands.

One could give some more examples of the effects of globalization on a nation-state by analyzing the dissolution-the collapse-of Yugoslavia. The government of Slobodan Milošević was efficient in dismantling the social and material infrastructure of the old Yugoslavia; the new government was marked by corruption and numerous falsifications in electoral procedures; the last elections of Milošević were forged, and the Supreme Court was called in to decide the election, which it did in Milošević's favor; the government, coupled with corrupt capital (the liberalized market, if you prefer), monopolized the media, and used them to whip up a bellicose frenzy; the rule of Milošević was marked by malversations in the energy industry, particularly in oil and electricity, pauperizing the population and leaving the nation in the dark, in every sense of the word; while a few businessmen in oil and energy got rich beyond belief at the expense of the rest in a devastated country. And how did such a regime, of which the recent killing of the prime minister Zoran Djinjdjić is but a last, belated spasm, stay in power? By inventing an enemy, the Muslim other, as its scapegoat. The regime stayed in place until it ran out of scapegoats, Muslim others, who were left to rot in the common graves in Srebrenica in Bosnia, or Djakovica in Kosovo, or in the makeshift detention camps, or in cities like Sarajevo, reduced to rubble-and then the regime turned openly against its own populace. This autoimmune turning of the nation against itself⁷ finally, after immense devastation, turned out also to be a stroke of luck: it provoked a revolt of the population, who overthrew Milošević, and the people themselves for a brief moment became sovereign. Milošević's trial in the Hague takes an immense and unprecedented step towards establishing forms of international legal protection by providing a recourse to international justice.

IV

Going global: what will come out of it? Recent violent accelerations in world history, violence gone postal and global, force a reflection on the possibilities of peaceful coexistence in the condition called "global." The reflection is not new that modernization and mondialisation are each other's obverse and are part and parcel of what is called "modernity" with all its violent contradictions. In his "Perpetual Peace," Kant writes famously that "the right to visit, to associate, belongs to all men by virtue of their common ownership of the earth's surface; for since the earth is a globe, they cannot scatter themselves infinitely, but must, finally, tolerate living in close proximity, because originally no one had a greater right on earth than anyone else" (118). Kant's reflections have been taken up recently and systematically in several works by Jacques Derrida which reflect on the "future of democracy, democracy to come, in the age of globalization," in the essays On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness (2001) for example, and most recently in Voyous. In On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness, Derrida posits something called "unconditional hospitality," which would be another name for ethics. "Hospitality is culture itself and not simply one ethic among others. Insofar as it has to do with ethos, that is, the residence, one's home, the familiar place of dwelling, . . . the manner in which we relate to ourselves and to others, to others as our own or as foreigners, ethics is hospitality" (2001, 16-17). This ethics of hospitality, which is a tautology, should be unconditional: it gives space and place to the Other, it gives a possibility to the future. It should be what unconditionally precedes and informs its other potentiality, the turning of hospitality into the law, legal systems, subsuming hospitality under the governance of sovereignty. This corruption is always a possibility and even a necessity, without which the general ethical imperative of hospitality would be an empty word. Both unconditional hospitality and the legal formalization of hospitality into the law, for example contracts among states, international laws, etc., as envisioned by Kant, make space for the entire practice of the political. Between the two appears an opening for something or someone to arrive. For example, a future.

In Theo Angelopoulos's Ulysses' Gaze (1996), a modern-day Ulysses, Harvey Keitel, searches for the undeveloped reels of a movie made by the Manakis brothers, the first movie ever made in the Balkans. Eventually, he finds it in modern-day Sarajevo, during the last war, with the film being kept by a Jewish curator. After the curator and his family are killed, Ulysses watches the empty reels of the first films projected before his eyes. Ulysses' Gaze thereby contests the privileging of sight and gazing, substituting a specific Greco-Jewish ethics of space, according to which the "face of the Other" (pace Levinas), the ethical, that which, in fact, is not given to visibility, precedes any gazing, spacing, or temporality.

In his essay "Arriver-aux fins de l'Etat (et de la guerre et de la guerre mondiale)" (To Arrive-At the End of the State [and the End of War and of World War]), which is published as the concluding chapter of his Voyous, Derrida asks questions about the future (à-venir) of reason and about its becoming (de-venir) (in short, if you wish, the future of studies, and therefore, of comparative studies as well):

. . . today . . . the thinking of the world to come and, first, of the so-called world of humankind is passing through terror, the fears and the trembling of an earthquake whose every shake is in some way overdetermined and marked over by the forces of evil and of sovereignty-of sovereignty in general but more visibly, more readably, of the sovereignty of the indivisible nation-state (aujourd'hui . . . la pensée dumonde à venir et d'abord de ladite terre humaine traverse la terreur, les craintes et le tremblement d'un séisme dont toutes les secousses sont en quelque sorte surdéterminées et surnommées par des forces en mal de souveraineté-de souveraineté en général mais plus visiblement, plus lisiblement, de souveraineté état-national indivisible)

(2003, 196).

The Kantian call for an enlightened cosmopolitanism between nation-states is put to the test, as the very conditions of the nation-state, and the sovereignty of reason, find themselves in crisis, facing the tremors of a singular and unconditional event that goes under the name of globalization. The states losing their sovereignty close themselves off from the Other, the foreign, the alien, and those in need of political protection-the last group, particularly, increasing in numbers in the current desedimentation of the nation state.

The desedimentation of the sovereign nation-state in the spasms of what I have called "sovereignism" paradoxically undermines the possibility of waging wars in the classical sense or mutates wars into another form. And indeed, if we turn to the example of Yugoslavia, Milošević's regime was not, stricto sensu, at war with anyone; there was no declaration of war, Yugoslavia was never at war, and the war really never took place (not in Baudrillard's sense, not even virtually). Yes, there was devastation and the exercise of nothingness-immense and senseless destruction, human, mostly civilian casualties and suffering, exported elsewhere and used to legitimate a certain power and to put the former Yugoslavia in a perpetual state of emergency-but there was no war. The same might now be the case, arguably, in Iraq.

This coming-to-the-end of war, as Derrida calls it, finds its doubling in the spread of terror and terrorism, war's reverse, twin, global double. Globalization has not only produced mutations in the configuration of the nation-state and therefore a mutation of the right to wage war as a sovereign decision, but also a mutation in terrorist reactions to state violence. It is not possible to define terrorism in its most devastating and therefore exemplary instantiations by any classical definition or denomination, as a fight for a territory or rights of a minority, as a partisan war, or a struggle for any other "cause." Nor is it possible to wage a "war" against terrorism. Spreading rhizomatically, as an undertow of global capital, as its resentful shadow, and latched onto it like a virus, using it as a host for transporting money or killing bodies, and therefore reaching everywhere in the world, going global in the center of the world and in the World Trade Center, it is its ubiquitous, unrepresentable, unconscious doubling, evading the exposure to light or enlightenment; it is a vEmpire shadow of an empire.

No less an authority than Marx likened capital to a vampire, neither dead nor alive, accumulated dead labor which, vampirelike, lives off the living. But how did the vampire get to be the figure of universal abjection? What precisely are we trying to purge?

In Francis Ford Coppola's Bram Stoker's Dracula (1992), Prince Vlad avenges the fall of Constantinople and the advent of the Muslim world in Europe. In Bram Stoker's novel, Dracula is someone who avenges, some fifty years after the event, the Battle of Kassova, or Kosovo (in 1389), waged by Serbian troops who lost to the Ottoman forces but at the same time stopped them and constituted by the loss the southern border between the Christian and Muslim worlds. Dracula is therefore an avenger against or defender from the Muslim other, constituting and defending Europe and Christianity. In the course of mounting the defense from the Other, he becomes like the Other, starts impaling his enemies just as the Turks did (whence his name, Vlad the Impaler), and eventually threatens the tranquility and insularity of the heart (threatens also the veins) of the empire, London. It is necessary therefore to purge him from the very empire that produced the vampire as its guardian at the border in the first place. Enter Dr. Van Helsing and the techno-brotherhood, freely waging war on other sovereign soil, equipped with the technological means of destruction: not only weapons, but a phonograph, a gramophone, typewriters, the telegraph, media, the cinema, trains, photography, the Kodak camera-making its first appearance in literature-drugs, chemical weapons like morphine and sulfa, and the capacity to transfuse blood, all put to techno-militaristic purposes.

Dracula is also a figure of crumbling sovereignty, living on the top of a mountain in a ruined castle ("the sovereign" means the one who lives on the summit, the one who is the summit itself) in eternal melancholia. In the movie he cries black tears, metonymy for black bile (μελαν ξολια), and he is someone who keeps internalized the memory of the destruction and disintegration of his own sovereignty. He keeps his soil, blood, and money close to him when he travels, the very figure of the nation-state of the second industrial revolution and the accumulation of capital in a nation-state. Unlike the members of the techno-brotherhood, who freely roam the globe with weapons and means of telecommunication, Dracula is tied to blood and soil (the proverbial nationalist Blut und Boden). But, interestingly, the weapons of the technocrats parallel and appear as twins of the capacities of Dracula. He has a capacity to mesmerize, they have telephones that work at a distance; he is wounded by light, and so is their Kodak film, making the vampire, by the way, the very emblem of cinematic production. Dracula carries his own crypt around and so his own church-churches are the sepulchers of god, as Nietzsche would say. Dracula is therefore also an epitome of Irish Roman Catholicism (the Fenian nationalist uprising cloaked in the guise of a Romanian prince, conveyed to the very heart of the British-English empire by the closeted Irishman Bram Stoker).⁸ One should also consider Dracula in general to be the literal believer in transubstantiation, someone who cannot get enough of that Sunday mass wine or blood.

In contrast, the techno-brotherhood is equipped with the interiorized Protestant faith symbolized by the Dutch doctor Van Helsing, who carries with him a cross and a stake, Dracula's own trademark tool. Van Helsing is a combination of scientist and Protestant fundamentalist, an obscurantist and exorcist who purges by fire, a purging best representing at the same time the Enlightened West in the figure of Lucy Westenra (sic). (We cannot go here into another terrible European tradition which likened European Jews to vampires and purged them with fire; we can only hint at that even more sinister interpretive possibility.) And at the center of the battle is blood, the biopolitical figure and the pre-eminent figure of diseases of autoimmunity. Dracula on the side of the sovereignty of the nation-state; the techno-brotherhood on the side of globalization, a vampire and a vEmpire, one the obverse and the twin of the other. You could call it love at first bite.

Bram Stoker's Dracula allows further interpretive turns, pertaining to the conversion of blood to oil, and testifying to the great analytic and anticipatory capacities of the novel. Prince Dracula lives the life of the living dead in Romania (more precisely, in Walachia). Walachia's capital (and therefore the capital of Dracula's princely, sovereign domain), Ploesti, was the site of the largest European oil refinery during the Second World War and the target of one of the war's largest air raids, on 1 August 1943. That date saw the largest number of American planes and men lost in any single raid: 540 American airmen died and 54 planes were lost, one-third of the raiding fleet, while bombing in Ploesti the blood of the economic life of another, the German empire. (American history books call the raid "Black Sunday").⁹ That war was of course not about oil either. It was about blood. And Ploesti is just a skip away-the area shares the same Black Sea-from some middle Eastern countries in which capitalism sank its twin fangs in search of economic life-blood a long time ago. If some may see in the figure of Tony Blair a slightly nutty and hysterical modern-day Dr. Van Helsing, let us not forget that the latter also has at his side a faithful gun-toting Texan: Quincey P. Morris.¹⁰

During the NATO bombing of Belgrade and Serbia a few years ago, the then Yugoslav president, Slobodan Milošević, who started his political career with a speech to some half-million Serbs on the field of Kosovo and was supported by the West as a source of stability in the region for quite a while, was likened to a vampire.¹¹ There you have it, capital and the vEmpire hard at work (Cf. Longinović; Goldsworthy, 1998; 2002).

V

Going global: who or what will come out of it?

Current world political configurations combine a certain obscurantism and irrationalism with a hypertechnical conclusion that universalism and the Enlightenment will triumph, amid a euphoria of nationalist or colonialist, but in any case imperialist, hyperidentifications with national identities. As Sam Weber points out in his essay "The Future of the University," in his Institution and Interpretation, globalization carries with it "a fundamentally political redefinition of the social value of public services, and of universities and education in particular" (225). It is therefore necessary, in order to think the world, to couple the thought of Enlightenment, which it is necessary to maintain but which is not fully capable of analyzing the events that constitute globalization, which precisely refuse to be exposed to light (and are precisely created as an effect of the Enlightenment), with a politicized psychoanalysis that would be able to give account of spectral, hauntological, ecotechnic figures, from media to capitalism. The latter practice has been pursued for quite a while, for example, in the works of Jacques Derrida. The advantage of such discursive or analytic practice over that inherited from the Enlightenment is the capacity to give an account of the unconscious movements of the death wish that are the shadow of the living, representative, and visible forms, one set the double or twin of the Other. Any future comparative studies will have to investigate this difference at work in what is considered to be selfsame in identity and in comparative analytic practice itself. And unless a space for justice is opened before the new comparative studies are undertaken, such studies will be only be more of the same, a vicious regress, and no world will come out of them. The university should be the place where the ethics of work turn work into an oeuvre, pace Derrida ("The University Without Condition," in Derrida, Without Alibi, 219), or turns the work into a network, as Sam Weber proposes in the new edition of Institution and Interpretation. (Weber, "The Future of the University," 2001, 220-235). Both Derrida and Weber point to the ethical demand to change the university itself, where such a reworking of work in the direction of ethics, hospitality, and heterogeneity, oriented toward the Other, is, as Derrida says, unconditional: unconditional but without sovereignty. Derrida writes: "It would be necessary to dissociate a certain unconditional independence of thought, of deconstruction, of justice, of the Humanities, of the university, and so forth from any phantasm of indivisible sovereignty and of sovereign mastery" (Derrida, 2002, 235).

The work should be turned into an opening to the world.

In order to counter some of the terrifying variants of globalization, one has first and foremost to reassert already-existing and hard-won democratic institutions, liberties, and practices. But reassert them radically, uncompromisingly, and in their totality, since the division of the world between so-called democracy at home and war abroad is not sustainable in the conditions called global. And new forms of economic distribution have to be invented. Such processes are in some instances well-advanced and give hope for the future. In the summer of 2003, for example, we saw France forget some fifteen thousand elderly left to die in the heat, and we saw France ravaged by the social and economic turbulence that devastated the working conditions of so-called intermittents-part-time workers-whose just protests resulted in the first-ever cancellation of the festival in Avignon. But the protests themselves initiated and invigorated new debate on the conditions of labor and have revitalized the movement for the so-called alter-mondialisation. As Jacques Nikonoff, one of the leaders of the movement, wrote in Libération on 18 August 2003, the alter-mondialiste movement attempts to surpass the old movement of antimondialisation. "This change corresponds to a profound evolution, which adds to the always-necessary contestation of globalized capital some concrete, operational, and effective proposals." In his analysis, which is steeped in the language of mondialisation, Nikonoff writes that " 'no other world' (aucun autre monde) will be possible if millions of people remain without jobs." And he makes an interesting plea for reinvestment in the state. He notices a strange alliance in that regard: for the economic liberals, the state is an impediment to the free market; for libertarians and some leftists, the state represents the power of the ruling class. And he goes on to conclude: "These two currents join each other in the same spasm, to deny a positive role that could be played by the State. In reality, the State is what the citizens make of it, and it should become an instrument of common interest and the object of social struggles for its democratization."

Yes, there is a future and a promise of the world of the future: the world to come will have to be one that exercises democracy, or there will be none. Under this banner the alter-mondialiste movement today gathers hundreds of thousands of followers at its meetings; recently in Larzac, France, for example, there were some 300,000. The movement attempts to invent new types of global solidarity, points of contact made possible by the heightened global mobility through which such solidarity will spread, more permanent forms of the global organization of labor, and a thinking that is not that of opposites but democratic alternatives:

What characterizes our situation is both beyond and on this side of the state: the development of the world market, the power of multinational corporations, the outline of the "planetary" organization, and the extension of capitalism through the entire social body are forming a huge abstract machine that overcodes the monetary, industrial and technological flux. At the same time, the means of exploitation, control and surveillance are becoming more and more subtle and diffused, in some way more molecular. The workers of the wealthy countries participate necessarily in the looting of the third world. . . . The State no longer possesses the political, institutional or even financial means that would enable it to parry the social counter-attacks on the machine. It is doubtful it can rely forever upon older forms such as the police, the army, the bureaucracy (even unionized), collective equipment, schools or families

(Deleuze and Parnet 111-112).

Going global: the world of the future and the future of the world will not come, and nothing will happen, without this call for justice. "Democracy to come," says Jacques Derrida in Voyous, "although without presence, is nonetheless the hic et nunc of urgency, of an injunction as an absolute urgency" (L'à-venir de la démocratie, c'est aussi, quoique sans présence, le hic et nunc de l'urgence, de l'injonction comme urgence absolue) (2003, 63). The advent and therefore the future of what is to come, avenir, "will be marked by a certain passivity, an opening and exposure to the Other, to what will come and to who will come-and therefore has to remain incalculable" (exposition à l'autre, à ce qui vient et à qui vient-et doit donc rester incalculable) (2003, 210).

Nancy echoes that reflection when he writes, "Justice is always also, and probably foremost, the demand for justice: a protest and a demand against injustice, a call that cries for justice, a breath that is spent for it." Such justice does not come from outside the world, says Nancy, but "it is given with the world, in it, and as the law itself of its being given." (La justice est toujours aussi-et peut-être d'abord-l'exigence de justice: la réclamation et la protestation contre l'injustice, l'appel qui crie pour la justice, le souffle qui s'épuise pour elle. . . . Elle est donnée avec le monde, en lui et comme la loi de sa donation.) (178).

In a word, it is only just: go global, and create the world!