Re: [-empyre-] Bare Life, Homo Sacer Internet beheadings

["Ana Valdes" <agora158@gmail.com>]

The issue I find most interesting in your reflexion is about the Islam
as fundamentalist. The Islam took the fundamentalism från the
catholics. In the last century it was the Catholic church which
started a "Reform" to find spiritual and politics tools to oppose the
gaining terrain of the Marxism and it's materialistic grounds.
The Christian fundamentalism, used in the colonization of the New
World, South America, Asia and Africa, erased old cultures and burned
on the stake priests and shamans. Old temples and shrines were put to
fire and destroyed, in the old mosques Christian churches were
builded.
When the Islam ruled Spain the Jews, the Christian and the Arabs
worked together to creat philosophy, architecture and art.
In the West the mosques are still an exception and many mosques and
synagogues are threated and arsoned.
I, as raised as Catholic, am ashamed about the heritage I share with
so many others, a heritage of intolerance, religious hatred and
hypocrisy, the hypocrisy we see in the trials against pedophile
priests in the US and Europe, the hypocrisy we see when the Church
reclaim the Crusades as a Catholic enterprise of love and
civilization.
The Crusades were the first succesfull expansion of the colonial
Europe and the rethoric and the myths of the Crusades are still being
alive in the Middle East, when many Arabs see Israel as a new
Crusading power.

Ana, http://www.crusading.se

On 7/16/06, G. H. Hovagimyan <ghh@thing.net> wrote:
> In continuing my meditation on Agamben, I realize that internet video
> is an assertion of citizenship in the media-polis of the global
> network. In particular is the Islamic fundamentalist use of websites to
> show the beheading of Westeners on video. Agamben discusses how the
> sovereign has the power of life and death over the political body.  The
> demonstration of the beheading of a Westerner is that assertion of
> sovereignity.  The Islamist and terrorist have 2 dynamics. Since
> Western culture excludes Islam, the Islamic terrorist asserts it's
> power over the Western exclusion by beheading Westerners while reading
> the legal, moral and religious justification for the act.
> "
> In contrast to arguments that understand political community as
> essentially a common 'belonging' in a shared national, ethnic,
> religious, or moral identity, Agamben argues that 'the original
> political relation is the ban in which a mode of life is actively and
> continuously excluded or shut out (ex-claudere) from the polis. The
> decision as to what constitutes the life that is thereby taken outside
> of the polis is a sovereign decision. Sovereignty is therefore not a
> historically specific form of political authority that arises with
> modern nation-states and their conceptualization by Hobbes and Bodin,
> but rather the essence of the political." -from philosophy.com , Posted
> by Gary Sauer-Thompson at May 4,
> <http://www.sauer-thompson.com/archives/philosophy/2005/05/
> im_reading_agam.html>
>
> The counterpoint to Western cultures' glabalization and corporate
> mono-culture is Islamic fundamentalism. It's a usurpation of authority.
> Or to use deconstruction parlance a re-appropiation of power.
>
> Two Summers ago I was at an opening and speaking with my old friend
> Carolee Schneeman. She is one of the first women performance/video
> artists in America to deal with the issues of the female body in
> performance. I mention this for those who don't know who she is.  In
> any case we were talking about the beheading videos. Carolee insisted
> that they were fakes. She told me that the CIA was manufacturing them
> to drum up war lust.  Around the same time a young man in California
> made a fake video of a beheading and put it on the internet just to
> show how easy it was. This reminds me of Jean Baudrillard's discussion
> in the Crime of Art, where he talks about how we are beyond simulation
> an into a realm of performance where everything is performed. Indeed
> because of digital technologies even the supposed authenticity of a
> photograph is suspect.  Even photography becomes a performative art.
> The beheading videos have become so popular that in order to see the
> video you have to pay a fee online.  The spectacle of a Westerner being
> made to kneel with his head bowed, in bare life, about to be murdered
> is exactly what Agamben talks about.  Even as I write this, Israel is
> attacking Lebanon in retaliation for Hezbollah's (the para-military
> terrorist group) kidnapping of two Israeli soldiers. It is quite clear
> that Hezbollah has asserted it's sovereignity in Lebanon and is
> demonstrating it with this action.  Israel is also attacking Hezbollah
> while ignoring the sovereignity of the state of Lebanon.
>
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