Philosophers at War

In times of con­front­a­tions between expli­citly mater­ial interests, and in the absence of any real pub­lic debate involving the Italian Gov­ern­ment (busy pro­tect­ing the orgy of power), what could be bet­ter than a proper exchange between internationally-​renowned philo­soph­ers, on the alleged neces­sity of a mil­it­ary inter­ven­tion in Libya? In an art­icle pub­lished on the 28^th of March on Libéra­tion, Jean-​Luc Nancy defends the West­ern oper­a­tion. Bengazi insur­gents, he explains, are ask­ing us to defeat the ‘vile mur­derer’ Gad­dafi, and the West is called upon to assume the polit­ical respons­ib­il­ity for that desired change. Nancy believes that the non-​interventionists’ argu­ments – the poten­tial col­lat­eral risks of the oper­a­tion, the sus­pi­cions about the real interests at stake, the prin­ciple of non-​interference in the reserved domain of States, the weight of the (recent) colo­nial past – are de facto no longer valid in this glob­al­ised world, which emp­ties the prin­ciple of sov­er­eignty of any mean­ing. In such a world it is rather neces­sary “to rein­vent the act of liv­ing together and, before all else, the act of liv­ing itself”. This, ulti­mately, would be what the Arab people are for­cing us to acknow­ledge. Hence the neces­sity of the inter­ven­tion, in order to pro­tect the rebels from Gaddafi’s bloody clutches. In the second instance, only in the second one, the West­ern people (we all) should act so as to neut­ral­ise oil, fin­an­cial and war mer­chants’ interests, already respons­ible for bring­ing and keep­ing such ‘pup­pets’ as Gad­dafi in power.

The answer to Nancy, com­ing from a stu­pefied Alain Badiou, deserves the greatest atten­tion. First, he reminds, in Libya we didn’t face a pop­u­lar upris­ing such as the Egyp­tian and Tunisian ones. In Libya there is no trace of doc­u­ments and flags of protest of the same char­ac­ter as those employed in Egypt and Tunisia, and no women are to be found among Libyan rebels. Second, since the last autumn Brit­ish and French secret ser­vices have been organ­ising Gaddafi’s fall; this would explain, third, both the weapons of unknown ori­gin, avail­able to the rebels, as well as the sud­den form­a­tion of a revolu­tion­ary coun­cil to replace the Raìs’ gov­ern­ment. Fourth: in con­trast to the other Arab coun­tries, expli­cit help requests have been com­ing from Libya. Accord­ing to Badiou, the West­ern object­ive is evid­ent: “to trans­form a revolu­tion into a war”, to replace the rebels with weapons (heavy weapons, armoured vehicles, war instruct­ors, blue hel­mets), so as to allow “the des­pot­ism of cap­ital” to “recon­quest” the effer­ves­cence of the Arab world. If this wasn’t the case, Badiou asks – and we ask our régime too – how could those same West­ern lead­ers, friends to Gad­dafi, per­form such a turnaround?

What, then, is to be done? Even in the case we would be will­ing to con­cede – and we are far from being per­suaded by it – that the human­it­arian motiv­a­tion would suf­fice to jus­tify the inter­ven­tion. As Peter Singer con­tends recall­ing the cata­strophe of Rwanda, it is still impossible to ignore that the UN res­ol­u­tion does not author­ise a mil­it­ary inter­ven­tion (Singer him­self reminds that). From a util­it­arian per­spect­ive – in his con­sequen­tial­ist ver­sion, that is – col­lat­eral risks do mat­ter indeed. Wouldn’t it have been bet­ter to seek to obtain the desired out­come by resort­ing to deterrent meas­ures and high-​efficacy sanc­tions, emphas­ising pre­cisely (and uniquely) the human­it­arian reas­ons for oppos­ing to Gad­dafi? In any case, Nancy’s solu­tion is wholly unsat­is­fy­ing: why wait (for the mil­it­ary inter­ven­tion to suc­ceed) to pre­vent (only in the second instance) the sor­did mater­ial interests from com­ing back onto the polit­ical scene? Doing this, Badiou explains, would equate to bow­ing to the West­ern will, repress­ing the “unex­pec­ted and intol­er­able” (for the West­ern war­lords, that is) char­ac­ter of the Egyp­tian and Tunisian revolu­tions, and thus the “polit­ical autonomy” and “inde­pend­ence” of the Arab revolutionaries.

Badiou is right: as I wrote in this blog some posts ago, the mul­ti­polar world has its own needs. It is simply not enough to remind all that the West­ern Imper­i­al­ism of the cold-​war and post cold-​war era can no longer aspire to dom­in­ate the world. The true revolu­tion will come when the West will learn to step back, to accept the dif­fer­ence, to real­ise that in a glob­al­ised world the concept of sov­er­eignty has even more sig­ni­fic­ance. Nancy’s is a logic mis­take: it is exactly the world we wish for, the (inter­na­tional) soci­ety in which we would wish to live – to use the words writ­ten by Singer some­where else – which calls upon us to revisit the tra­di­tional cri­teria of the inter­ven­tion­ist logic. The world in which we would wish to live, today and tomor­row, is not that of Sarkozy and Cameron, but rather one in which the Arab coun­tries, like­wise those of Latin Amer­ica and Asia, will be legit­im­ate to build from a pos­i­tion of inde­pend­ence and equal rights with respect to the West­ern nations.

Pub­lished first here in Italian, and trans­lated by Andrea Pavoni.

Tags: Alain Badiou, Jean-Luc Nancy, Libya

This entry was posted on 11 April 2011 at 8:33 am and is filed under Political Philosophy, Series: Philosophers at War. Published under Creative Commons (CC) Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License: You are welcome to share and remix this content for non-commercial purposes. Kindly acknowledge and hyperlink the source.