Prisoners of the Infinite.

Jacques Rancire
Jacques Rancire. "Prisoners of the Infinite." in:
CounterPunch. April 30, 2002. (Enlish!.
"Infinite Justice". This was the initial name given to the Pentagon's offensive against
that fuzzy-contoured enemy, referred to by the term of 'terrorism'. s we !now, the
name was "uic!ly changed. It had been, as we were told, a case of language e#cess on
the $art of a $resident still ine#$erienced in the art of nuances. If he had wanted bin
%aden "dead or alive", it was obviously due to having seen too many &esterns at too
young an age.
'uch an e#$lanation left no one convinced. That's because the 'dead or alive' $rinci$le
isn't the one from &esterns. (n the contrary, it's "uite common to find sheriffs ris!ing
their s!in to save assassins from a lynch mob, and hand them over to Justice afterward.
Infinite Justice, as o$$osed to the )ar &est's whole morality, means *ustice without
limits. It's *ustice that ignores all of the categories by which its $ractice is traditionally
circumscribed+ distinguishing legal $unishment from the vengeance of individuals,
se$arating the law from $olitics, ethics or religion, se$arating $olice forms by which
criminals are hunted down from the military forms by which armies engage in battle.
)rom that $oint of view, there was no language e#cess. '-uances' would be
ina$$ro$riate indeed. These traces are $recisely what characterize the retaliatory
o$erations underta!en by the .'. They involve eliminating the differences that
se$arate war and the $olice from all the legal forms by means of which we've sought to
s$ecify and limit the action of war onto *ustice. &e're no longer tal!ing about 'dead or
alive', e#ce$t to say that nobody !nows whether the accused is dead or alive. /et no one
!nows e#actly what the charge is under which the merican military is detaining, with
the intension of trying, $risoners who benefit neither from P(& status nor from the
ordinary guarantees granted to defendants with $roceedings brought against them.
'Infinite *ustice' states e#actly what's at sta!e+ the assertion of a right identical to the
omni$otence hitherto reserved for the vindictive 0od. ll traditional distinctions end u$
by being abolished with the erasure of international forms of law.
To be sure, this erasure is already the $rinci$le of terrorist action, to which $olitical
forms and the norms of law are also indifferent. 1ut 'infinite *ustice' is not only the
answer to the adversary's $rovocation, thus being com$elled to share the same field as
him. It translates as well the strange status that the erasure of the $olitical nowadays
grants to law, within nations and amongst them.
2eflecting on the current state of law reveals an e#traordinary inversion of things. In the
3445's, the undoing of the 'oviet em$ire and the wea!ening of social movements in
ma*or &estern countries were usually celebrated as uto$ias being li"uidated from real
and social democracy to the benefit of the rules of the 'tate of 2ight. &hereu$on
unleashed ethnic conflicts and religious fundamentalism ended by contradicting this
sim$le $hiloso$hy of history. 1ut identifying &estern trium$h as the 'tate of 2ight's
has also $roved to be $roblematic. That's because at the very heart of &estern $owers
and in their modes of foreign intervention, the relation between right and fact has
evolved in such as way as to tend increasingly toward erasing the boundaries of law.
In these countries, we've seen two $henomena emerge. (n the one hand, there's an
inter$retation of law in terms of the rights granted to a whole series of grou$s. (n the
other, legislative $ractices have aimed at harmonizing the letter of the law entirely with
new lifestyles and wor!styles, new forms of technology, and the family or social
relationshi$s.
This is how the $olitical forum, sha$ed in the ga$ between the law's abstract literalness
and the $olemics over its inter$retations, has been found to have shrun!en as much.
Thus celebrated, the law increasingly tends to be the record of a community's lifestyles.
6thical symbolization has substituted the $olitical symbolization of $ower and its limits,
and the law's ambivalence. &hat's now familiar to us is a relation of consensual inter-
e#$ression between the fact of a society's state and the norm of the law.
&hat the merican res$onse asserts is the unmediated li!eness of law and fact in the
way a community lives. /et this is also what the merican 7onstitution's dominant
re$resentation symbolizes+ the ethical identity between a $articular lifestyle and a
universal system of values. s we !now, 'ethos' means so*ourn and lifestyle before
referring to a system of moral values. The recent manifesto issued by merican
intellectuals in su$$ort of 0eorge &. 1ush's $olicies highlighted this $oint well+ the
.nited 'tates are first and foremost a community united by common moral and
religious values, an ethical community more than one of law and $olitics. The 0ood, by
which the community is founded, is therefor the identity between law and fact. nd the
crime $er$etrated against thousands of merican lives can be immediately considered a
crime $er$etrated against the 6m$ire of 0ood itself.
/et for some time already this rise of ethics to the detriment of *ustice has characterized
the forms by which the &estern $owers have intervened abroad. 1lurring the limits
between fact and law has ta!en on another face, one o$$osite and com$lementary to
consensual harmony, i.e. the face of the humanitarian and 'humane interference'.
The 'right of humane interference' has enabled the $rotection of some $o$ulations of the
former-/ugoslavia from ethnic li"uidation. 8owever, this was carried out at the cost of
blurring symbolic boundaries as well as 'tate borders. It has not only consecrated
giving u$ a structural $rinci$le of international law, i.e. the $rinci$le of non-inference--
whose virtues were admittedly ambiguous. It es$ecially introduced a destructive
$rinci$le of limitlessness regarding the very idea of the ga$ se$arating law and fact,
which otherwise endows the law with its status.
1ac! in the days of the 9ietnam &ar or of the cou$s merican $ower engineered more
or less directly in various regions throughout the world, there e#isted an e#$licit or
latent o$$osition between the great $rinci$les as asserted by the &estern $owers and the
$ractices subordinating those $rinci$les to their vital interests. The anti-im$erialist
mobilizations of the 34:5's and 34;5's had denounced this s$lit between the founding
$rinci$les and real $ractices. -owadays the $olemics over means and ends seems to
have vanished.
The $rinci$le behind this disa$$earance is re$resented by the absolute victim, a victim
of infinite evil, forcing a res$onse of infinite re$aration. This 'absolute' right of the
victim has come to full fruition in the framewor! of 'humane' war. It was bac!ed u$
during the last "uarter century by the ma*or intellectual movement that wor!ed on
theorizing infinite crime.
&e've undoubtedly not heeded the s$ecific features enough of what could be called the
second denunciation of 'oviet crimes and the -azi genocide. The first denunciation had
aimed at establishing the reality behind the facts while also reinforcing the
determination of &estern democracies to struggle against an ever-$resent and ever-
threatening totalitarianism. The second !ind, develo$ed during the 34;5's as a record of
communism, or in the 34<5's when returning to the way in which the 6uro$ean Jewry
was e#terminated, has ac"uired a whole new meaning. -ot only have the crimes been
transformed into the monstrous effects of regimes that have to be fought against, but
into the forms whereby an infinite, unthin!able and irre$arable crime was made
manifest=the wor! of an 6vil $ower e#ceeding all legal and $olitical measure. 6thics
has become the way to thin! this infinite evil, which has created an irremediable brea!
in history.
The ultimate conse"uences of the e#cess of ethics over law and $olitics is the
$arado#ical constitution of an individual's absolute right whose rights have, in fact, been
absolutely negated. This individual actually a$$ears as the victim of an infinite 6vil
against which the fight is itself infinite. This is the $oint at which the one defending the
victim's rights inherits absolute right.
The unlimited feature of the wrong $er$etrated against the victim *ustifies his counsel's
unlimited right. merican re$aration for the absolute crime $er$etrated against
merican lives has brought the $rocess to its culmination. The obligation of attending
to the victims of absolute 6vil has become identical to the fight without limits against
this evil. nd this is identified with de$loying unlimited military $ower, acting li!e a
$olice force in charge of restoring order to every $art of the world where 6vil can find
shelter. This military $ower is also a legal one, e#ercising the mythical $ower of
9engence in hot $ursuit of 7rime against all alleged accom$lices of infinite 6vil.
s the saying goes, unlimited right is identical to non-right. 9ictims and cul$rits ali!e
fall into the cercle of 'infinite *ustice'. These days this translates into the total
indeterminacy of the law as it deals with the status of the merican army's $risoners and
the way of "ualifying the facts held against them.
8egel had already sun! into the night of the bsolute in which "all cows are gray". The
lac! of ethical distinction, in which $olitics and the law drown nowadays, has
transformed the $risoners of 0uantanamo 1ay into ca$tives of the same ty$e of infinite,
with gray being switched to orange.
%egal and $olitical symbolization has been slowly substituted by another ethical and
$olice symbolization of the lives of so-called democratic communities and of their
relations with another world, identified by the sole reign of ethnic and fundamentalist
$owers. In the one corner, the world of good+ that of consensus eliminating $olitical
litigation in the *oyous harmonizing of right and fact, ways of being and values. In the
other+ the world of evil, in which wrong is made infinite, and where it can only be a
matter of war unto death.