Deform’d, unfinish’d, sent before my time
Into this breathing world scarce half made up,
And that so lamely and unfashionable
That dogs bark at me as I halt by them—
Why I . . . have no delight to pass away the time,
Unless to spy my shadow in the sun
And descant my own deformity.
And therefore, since I cannot prove a lover
To entertain these fair well-spoken days,
I am determined to be a villain. (act 1, scene 1)
It seems we cannot manage without an enemy. The figure of the enemy cannot be abolished from the processes of civilization. The need is second nature even to a mild man of peace. In his case the image of the enemy is simply shifted from a human object to a natural or social force that in some way threatens us and has to be defeated, whether it be capitalistic exploitation, environmental pollution, or third-world hunger. But though these are “virtuous” cases, even hatred of injustice, as Brecht reminds us, “makes the brow grow stern.”
Is our moral sense therefore impotent when faced with the age-old need for enemies? I would argue that morality intervenes not when we pretend we have no enemies but when we try to understand them, to put ourselves in their situation. Aeschylus has no resentment toward the Persians, whose tragedy he experiences with them and from their point of view. Caesar treats the Gauls with great respect: at worst, he makes them appear rather wimpish each time they surrender. And Tacitus admires the Germans, crediting them with fine complexions and complaining only about their dirtiness and their reluctance to undertake heavy work as they cannot cope with heat and thirst.
Trying to understand other people means destroying the stereotype without denying or ignoring the otherness.
But let us be realistic. These ways of understanding the enemy are the prerogative of poets, saints, or traitors. Our innermost impulses are of quite another kind. In 1967 Report from Iron Mountain on the Possibility and Desirability of Peace was published in America by a certain “John Doe” (someone even suggested it was Galbraith).1 It was clearly a pamphlet against war, or at least a pessimistic lament on its inevitability. But since, in order to wage war, we need an enemy to fight, the inevitability of war is linked to the inevitability of identifying and creating an enemy. In the pamphlet it is thus suggested with extreme seriousness that the reconversion of the whole of American society to a state of peace would be disastrous, since only war provides the basis for the harmonious development of human societies. Its organized wastage provides a valve that regulates the effective running of society. It resolves the problem of supplies. It is a driving force.
War enables a community to recognize itself as a “nation”; a government cannot even establish its own sphere of legitimacy without the contrasting presence of war; only war ensures the equilibrium between classes and makes it possible to locate and exploit antisocial elements. Peace produces instability and delinquency among young people; war channels all disruptive forces in the best possible way, giving them a “status.” The army is the last hope for outcasts and misfits; the system of war alone, with its power over life and death, induces people to pay a blood price for institutions far less central to social organization than war, such as the motor car. From the ecological point of view, war provides a release valve for surplus lives; and though, until the nineteenth century, only the most courageous members of society (soldiers) were killed in war while worthless members survived, current technology has made it possible to overcome this problem with the bombardment of urban centers. Bombardment limits the population boom better than ritual infanticide, monasticism, sexual mutilation, extensive use of capital punishment . . . War makes it possible, at last, to develop a truly “humanistic” art in which conflicted situations predominate.
If this is so, the cultivation of the enemy must be intensive and continuous. George Orwell provides an excellent example of this in Nineteen Eighty-four (1949):
The next moment a hideous, grinding speech, as of some monstrous machine running without oil, burst from the big telescreen at the end of the room. It was a noise that set one’s teeth on edge and bristled the hair at the back of one’s neck. The Hate had started.
As usual, the face of Emmanuel Goldstein, the Enemy of the People, had flashed onto the screen. There were hisses here and there among the audience. The little sandy-haired woman gave a squeak of mingled fear and disgust. Goldstein was the renegade and backslider who once, long ago . . . had been one of the leading figures of the Party . . . He was the primal traitor, the earliest defiler of the Party’s purity. All subsequent crimes against the Party, all treacheries, acts of sabotage, heresies, deviations, sprang directly out of his teaching. Somewhere or other he was still alive and hatching his conspiracies . . .
Winston’s diaphragm was constricted. He could never see the face of Goldstein without a painful mixture of emotions. It was a lean Jewish face, with a great fuzzy aureole of white hair and a small goatee beard—a clever face, and yet somehow inherently despicable, with a kind of senile silliness in the long thin nose near the end of which a pair of spectacles was perched. It resembled the face of a sheep, and the voice, too, had a sheep-like quality. Goldstein was delivering his usual venomous attack upon the doctrines of the Party—. . . he was demanding the immediate conclusion of peace with Eurasia, he was advocating freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of assembly, freedom of thought, he was crying hysterically that the revolution had been betrayed . . .
Before the Hate had proceeded for thirty seconds, uncontrollable exclamations of rage were breaking out from half the people in the room . . .
In its second minute the Hate rose to a frenzy. People were leaping up and down in their places and shouting at the tops of their voices in an effort to drown the maddening bleating voice that came from the screen. The little sandy-haired woman had turned bright pink, and her mouth was opening and shutting like that of a landed fish . . . The dark-haired girl behind Winston had begun crying out “Swine! Swine! Swine!” and suddenly she picked up a heavy Newspeak dictionary and flung it at the screen. It struck Goldstein’s nose and bounced off: the voice continued inexorably. In a lucid moment Winston found that he was shouting with the others and kicking his heel violently against the rung of his chair. The horrible thing about the Two Minutes Hate was not that one was obliged to act a part, but that it was impossible to avoid joining in . . . A hideous ecstasy of fear and vindictiveness, a desire to kill, to torture, to smash faces in with a sledgehammer, seemed to flow through the whole group of people like an electric current, turning one even against one’s will into a grimacing, screaming lunatic.
(part 1, chapter 1)
We do not have to reach the excesses of Nineteen Eighty-four to recognize ourselves as beings who need an enemy. We are witnessing the fear that can be caused by new influxes of migrants. In Italy today, Romanians are being portrayed as the enemy by extending to a whole ethnic culture the characteristics of a few of its marginalized members, thus providing an ideal scapegoat for a society that, caught up in change—including ethnic change—is no longer able to recognize itself.
Sartre provides the most pessimistic vision in this respect in No Exit. We can recognize ourselves only in the presence of an Other, and on this the rules of coexistence and submission are based. But it is more likely that we find this Other intolerable because to some degree he is not us. In this way, by reducing him to an enemy, we create our hell on earth. When Sartre locks up three people who have died, who didn’t know each other in life, in a hotel bedroom, one of them realizes the terrible truth: “Wait! You’ll see how simple it is. Childishly simple. Obviously there aren’t any physical torments. You agree, don’t you? And yet, we’re in hell. And no one else will come here. We’ll stay in this room, the three of us, for ever and ever . . . In short, there’s someone absent here, the official torturer . . . It’s obvious what they’re after—an economy of manpower . . . each of us will act as torturer of the two others” (translated by Stuart Gilbert).
[Lecture given at Bologna University on May 15, 2008, as part of a series of evenings on the classics, published in Elogio della politica, edited by Ivano Dionigi (Milan: BUR, 2009).]
Absolute and Relative
IF YOU ARE HERE this evening in spite of the terroristic title of my talk, that means you are prepared for anything—though a serious lecture about Absolute and Relative ought to last at least two and a half thousand years, as long as the debate itself. The title of this year’s Milanesiana festival is “Conflict and the Absolute,” and naturally I have been wondering what these words mean. It’s the most basic question any philosopher must ask.
Since I haven’t been to the festival’s other events, I did a search on the Internet for pictures by artists who refer to the Absolute, and there I found Magritte’s La connaissance absolue, as well as various works by others I needn’t name—Painting the
