Introduction to Focus: Perpetual War

Introduction to Focus: PpfnetUSl War Robin Truth Goodman and Barry J. Faulk, Focus Co-editors ? To collect a set of writings that bring into the present the problem of "perpetual war" seems both of obvious necessity and of doubtful historicity. Yet, as Kant admits, the problem of perpetual war is a problem of representation. Kant defines "perpetual peace" in two prescriptive ways: (1) "perpetual peace," he says, is not the same as "perpetual war," which is man against man in a state of nature; the only way to end the possibility of future outbreak is through a constitution, an authority, an agreement, or a representation oflaw that acts by instituting the suspension of hostilities; and (2) "perpetual peace" is based on a "representative system" that would separate out the executive and legislative powers: the initial proposition of the general will can never contain a second proposition of a particular instance without resulting in despotism and violence. On the other hand, as French political philosopher Jacques Rancière contests in his book Hatred ofDemocracy (reviewed below), contemporary forms ofpower are inadequate to the tasks oflegitimating, representing, and authorizing the limitlessness and anti-foundationalism of practices of democratic politics. The discrepancy here registers a transformation in historical expectations. Representation that should be "of something has become intransitive. What I am saying is not about the need to regain "control" over representation, as though we could somehow change the global future by imagining ourselves differently in relationship to it. Nor is it about representations of the general will being insufficiently general, and so needing to be tweaked for broader inclusion, where the particular can find its point of connection within the general. This is not about some sort of truth, signification, or consciousness that has been concealed, made arbitrary, or forgotten but can come to light through discovery, enlightened reason, dialectics, confession, or analysis. Rather, the institutions through which citizens in a democracy have traditionally staked their claims cannot represent public needs or democratic political force in the present: representations ofgovernance have become disassociated from public agency. Representation has failed at least in part due to contradictions in the logic of liberalism, where the autonomy of the rational actor in economic transactions often blurs into and sometimes replaces the autonomy of the political subject motivated by particular interests, whether personal or civic. Besides the war itself, an example of this might be the recent mainstream media coverage of the 2008 presidential elections, where candidates were evaluated according to the amount of(corporate) funding their campaigns were able to raise. For those three weeks that this story was topping the headlines, the electorate was written out of the elections, as were issues, positions, or interests. The general view of the government's representative function and the particular will of those represented was circulating through disjointed and unjoinable systems: cash value was supposed to read as voter decision, even though the reporters themselves seemed not to believe this. I am not addressing here the question of whether or not the members of the administration lied to us, though it is clear that they did, but rather the question of why they did not think it was necessary to make lies that their citizens could or would believe: why, that is, their lying and our knowledge of their lying—right from the beginning, or even before the beginning—did not matter, as though an appeal to voters was no longer a necessary step in democratic decision making. Another instance is the congressional effort to pass a bill that would put benchmarks on achievements of the Iraqi government and for the withdrawal of the US military, and tie these benchmarks to funding. In this scenario, democracy has been reduced to the semblance of conflict: one position becomes representative because of what it is not, or rather, its significance is based on its difference from another significance, where the attention to the boundaries between opposing actors becomes the political act ratherthan either the content of the positions or the almost total overlap between the positions that makes the taking of positions but the struts and frets ofa poor player upon a stage. The story of the benchmarks controversy...