Abstract

For Jacques Derrida, one of the most urgent tasks of philosophy today is to think “sovereignty” and the ways in which it is inseparable from the two “ages” of cruelty of today’s wars: one techno-scientific, from which the “cruor” of blood seems to have been wiped away, and another, bloodily “archaic,” reacting savagely to the first. Derrida and the French-Tunisian psychoanalyst Fethi Benslama assert that these two “ages” of cruelty are closely intertwined, and that for both of them, today’s media play a crucial role. For Derrida, the “revolution of psychoanalysis” would consist in addressing cruelty without alibi, without political, moral, theological, or other justifications, while refusing to neutralize ethics and politics, that is, the specific geo-political realm in which psychoanalytic theory and practice intervene. In this spirit, Benslama attempts an analysis of the particular new cruelty some Middle-Eastern countries are confronted with today.

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