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Public Intellectuals Resisting Global Violence

Grace Pollock & Brad Evans

Sunday, 27 January 2013

GRACE POLLOCK: The Histories of Violence Project began, I believe, as a cultural and intellectual intervention to address the escalation of global violence in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001. In your work, you’ve stated that our collective response to 9/11 represented nothing short of “a profound failure of the political and philosophical imagination.” I’m wondering if you could elaborate on what you meant by that, and what kind of trends emerged from 9/11 which led you to that conclusion?

BRAD EVANS: One of the impetuses for doing the film 10 Years of Terror was to make sense of what was taking place in the post-9/11 moment, particularly in the UK, around the July 7, 2005, bombings in London. At the time, I was living in the city of Leeds, and I was also living in the Hyde Park area, which was where a number of the suicide bombers had a particular association, so it was quite literally the War on Terror coming home. And what you found in the UK, which was similar to the whole discourse around 9/11, was very much a sort of “we have no complicity in this whatsoever, these people just simply hate us” and “this is an exceptional moment which demands an exceptional response.” There was no understanding that there was a history prior to 9/11. Of course, now we’re in a moment a decade on from 9/11 — which allows for much broader political and philosophical reflection.

A number of academics, sometimes with the best intentions, were caught by this politics of the exception — and this happened on the right and on the left. The discourse on the right was “this is profoundly exceptional, let’s have an exceptional response” such that “shock and awe” became the natural outcome. The left equally — particularly those familiar with the work of Giorgio Agamben — followed this idea of “we are living in a state of exception, there’s the abandonment of morals,” and so forth.

If we just simply take the date of 9/11, however, and look 10 years prior and 10 years afterwards, you can see that, actually, 9/11 is more of a continuum in a much wider historical process. And a lot of the dynamics that had taken place which led up to the violence of 9/11 had been slowly maturing for considerable time. It’s there in the ideas of Carl Schmitt, from whom Agamben borrows his terms. Carl Schmitt says what comes after a state of exception is a state of emergency. And the emergency is the return to the norm, and equally — of course Walter Benjamin writes about this, too — there’s this move from exception to emergency, exception to emergency — so, actually, states of exception are not that exceptional in the broad sweep of history.

That was one of the main issues I really wanted to start bringing out: this idea that actually clinging to this politics of exceptionalism represented a failure of the political imaginary, a failure in our ways of thinking about 9/11 historically. And also, tied to that is the question, how did this discourse of exceptionalism — “the world begins with 9/11,” “Ground Zero is Year Zero,” “all history projects forward from this moment” — how did that particular memorialization of the event lend itself to the discourse of war?

If we see the response to 9/11 as actually something that’s not exceptional but altogether normalized, we begin to enter into a new political discussion. And this discussion centers on the realization that none of us was actually surprised by the intervention in Iraq or Afghanistan — there was nothing exceptional to it. The way that Western Liberal societies — and that’s Liberal with a big L — the way we deal with violence is through violence and retribution. Such is the altogether normal way of dealing with problems which exceed our limits of expectation. So, in other words, our response to 9/11 wasn’t in any way exceptional. It was, actually, from the perspective of our political history, “business as usual.”