Deportee (Fr. le déporté)

Let us now leave this bucolic Greek desert and its rustic genealogy in order to return to a more modern “concrete situation,” recalling Schmitt’s term, that determines the fate of those who are not recognized to share the same political rights. In its extreme form, this evokes the concrete situation of war as well as the appearance of “a particular stranger” who exists outside the closed circle of the polis, a subject who can no longer claim to share the same political rights of the natural community: the deportee.

Throughout this study, I have been evoking the possibility of a “post-war” concept of friendship, which I have also argued is still awaiting a political philosophy yet capable of thinking it.1 To portray this concrete situation, I return to the figure of Robert Antelme, the member of the French Resistance and a survivor of Buchenwald and Dachau, who was the subject of the earlier correspondence between Deleuze and Mascolo. Antelme’s earlier letters to Mascolo, written in 1945 during his period of convalescence, are the subject of Mascolo’s later book written a few years after Antelme’s death in 1984 and represent a continuing effort on the part of his friends to monumentalize his portrait as an act of resistance against the incredible efforts to forget the war, the existence of the camps, and the enduring (but fading) presence of those who survived this experience. Also, in Maurice Blanchot’s The Infinite Conversation, which collects his writings between the period of 1953 to 1965, and which Deleuze himself calls a conversation between “exhausted friends,” there is a meditation on Antelme’s figure under the subtitle “Humankind,” where we first find the statement (later on also employed by Agamben) that “man is the indestructible that can be destroyed.” As Blanchot writes: “That man can be destroyed is certainly not reassuring: but because of and despite of this, and in this very movement, man should remain indestructible—this fact is truly overwhelming.”2 In the following, however, it is not the paradoxical significance of this statement that is the object of my reflections but rather the conscious certainty that Antelme expresses concerning the unity of the human species and not its destruction under the National Socialist program of extermination. In other words, it is this character of certainty alone that qualifies Antelme to become a central figure in the later writings of Blanchot and Mascolo, and perhaps this is what Deleuze had in mind when he calls Antelme a new conceptual persona of the friend, “where personal history and singular thinking combine.”3

In the very few statements written after the publication of The Human Species (1947), Antelme only repeats his conviction, on the basis of his “personal experience as a deportee and a survivor,” that in “a truly free society in which each man exists as a man, [he] exists as an end in himself.”4 In taking up this statement, we might classify the character of certainty of this knowledge as belonging to a class of concepts that Kant called a priori synthetic, except in this instance, such knowledge hails from an experience that cannot be generalized, since it could only be shared among those who survived the experience itself, the so-called survivors. In his own writings on Antelme, Blanchot constantly underlines this fact: first, the impossibility of sharing this experience through speech; second, the impossibility of thinking the unity of the concept of man with this experience; and third, the impossibility of the experience itself. And yet, Antelme had an unshakeable conviction that this unity has come about historically (“at the end of history”) and thus already belongs to the past of our species rather than to some unknown future as it is often represented by philosophy or politics. While most post-war philosophies have busied themselves with thinking the final negation of this unity in the concept of man—that is, that the Nazis, and the SS in particular, were different, no longer quite human, but subhuman, and thus it was on the basis of their definition of the human life as a species-being, fundamentally determined as a racial being, that they could separate themselves from other races in order to judge them as worthy of extinction—Antelme witnessed the unity of the human species, even at its most extreme limit, since, as he claims, the SS were members of the same species (i.e., they were human like us). Consequently, in their own program to “negate the unity of the species within their own race,” according to Antelme, they only managed to exhaust a division that has run its course throughout the history of scientific and racist ideologies, actually bringing about the reverse of this history as a living expression of “the unity of Man.”5

Nevertheless, this unity cannot be represented by modern scientific disciplines of biology or anthropology, which themselves are only ideologies founded on the primacy of division and on a fundamental myth: that division fundamentally constitutes the species, and that the common (or “universal”) essence can only be obtained by complete knowledge of this difference and diversity. According to this view that nature is the location of “lack” in the species, incapable of unifying the genus-being of the human species with the subjective spirit of humanity, the specific labor of the negative enters into history, defining history itself as a plane where the separation of the species and their potential unification has been played out successively over many centuries. Consequently, the idea of the common is not an idea of nature but rather the emergence of a strictly historical idea that functions to supplement nature, making up for, and thus complementing, an original deficiency. In Hegel, the unification of the species into an Absolute Subject is only achieved via the negative route introduced into the original deficiency of the natural determination of the species as a “common entity.” It is something that must be produced by activity, by an active transformation of humanity as a species-being, and this activity defines both a process that is historical and the object of both political and economic systems and their associated technological “enframing” of biopolitical life.

It is also on the basis of the same primordial division, moreover, that we find that there remains implicit a nineteenth-century biologism (i.e., “Social Darwinism”) even in Marx’s notion of humanity as a genus that is divided against itself in the beginning, at war with its own identity as a common species-being. This is an original defect that emerges in “need” organized instinctually into forms of interest that clash with one another and become the basis of all social conflict. Consequently, the concept of the common is lacking at the level of the biological determination of the species, and it is from this lack that the multiple determinations of class division emerge historically that define the divisions of “the common property of man” until this is finally organized by neoliberal ideology into the various and diverse forms of contemporary biopolitical life. Therefore, even before Sigmund Freud, it was Marx who first declared that “biology is not destiny,” to which he added that Communism was the active sprit of destiny that was the only subject capable of repairing the original lack in nature—that is, the dispersion of the “common property” of the species into multiple and unequal divisions that, in turn, distort the true forms of social need and community. Finally, if we assume, according to the thesis of Agamben, that the original social division finds its ultimate expression in the camp—that is, in the absolute division between bios and zoē in the production of “bare life”—then all remaining divisions in current society (between classes or even between races) must be understood, according to the precise term of Louis Althusser, as “survivals” (survivants) of this final and absolute division of the common property of man. Just as the term functioned to designate, in classical Marxist thought, the continued existence of previous social divisions that belonged to earlier stages of production, it now functions analogously to designate that all current divisions (antagonisms and exclusions) exist as so many earlier stages to the determination of this division in its final instance by technological and scientific racism that was realized by the National Socialist State. Of course, racism must be extended here from its earlier historical representations of the history of anti-Semitism that finds its culminating point in Nazi ideology, to include the new definitions addressed by Foucault’s concept of biopower as a division between the forces of life, labor, and consumption that do not necessarily correspond to “subjects” (individuals, members of classes, and races) but address entire populations, or “the vast flows of humanity” (migrant labor, refugees, deportees, the poor, etc.).

In a remarkable essay published just one year after The Human Species, “Poor Man—Proletarian—Deportee,” Antelme returns to account for the history of this species division (into classes, races, and peoples) in order to clarify its incarnation from the Christian era and leading to its culmination under National Socialism. Today, he argues in 1949, the fundamental division that runs underneath all subsequent historical incarnations is simply the universal division between rich and poor. As he writes, “This couple has become progressively anonymous in history, but the two partners remained closely linked for a long time.” Accordingly, the rich man is the master who lives off the exploitation of the poor, which is the form of his worldly salvation, and in compensation works off his “evil” through the creation of charity—gifts offered to the poor in exchange for his “acts of evil,” which redeems the rich man by clothing the poor in order to hide his own nakedness and social misery. As a corollary, “The poor man is destined for blessedness. . . . In the end, he becomes convinced that he will find his chance for this blessedness only in his condition as victim, as a person who is exploited, in his predetermined, sacred place within the linked couple of rich/poor.”6 In the previous Christian world, he writes:

The poor man was a truth himself. He was the possibility of redemption made real. His relationship to the rich man placed him in the surest relationship to God. But this relationship was fixed, was in some sense an obligation. Salvation and real damnation were linked. He surpassed the rich man before God, but he relied on him, they were linked. No truth existed that separated the poor man from the rich man in this world; he did not envelop the rich man in this world but existed instead within his universe.7

In this last statement we might see a pronouncement of the failure of modern political dialectics to resolve the contradiction between rich and poor and to make of this opposition between rich and poor a common identity. This sets the stage for the emergence of the modern democratic subject who, according to Antelme, is both rooted in the poor by being destitute and exploited but also endowed with an active consciousness and the ability to work off his own exploitation, even by becoming the rich man to himself, which nevertheless remains a form of depropriation and negation, since the classes of poor and destitute only multiply under new forms of exploitation invented by capitalism. Thus, the concept of the poor now becomes empty and thoroughly secularized. Moreover:

The rich/poor couple breaks apart. A truth now separates them, and it is the proletarian—who certainly didn’t invent it—who wants to realize it. From a poor man who is a totally destitute being [i.e., one whose value only exists in God], he wants to erect a totally free man who is recognized as such by everyone. And he wants to universalize this value.8

This universal and universalizing value, as Antelme defines it later on, is humanity as such. Here we see the emergence of the political project of emancipation of universal democracy—in which all men would be recognized as free by everyone else—correspond to the emergent consciousness of the bourgeoisie in Marx’s own analysis, as the proto-proletarian consciousness of a man liberated from the material conditions of his servitude and exploitation by an earlier class of masters, a man who works off his servitude and his destitution, who, more importantly, “clothes himself” (also symbolically meaning one who humanizes himself through his own activity and work) and who thus no longer depends on the rich man nor upon God for his own image and value as a human being. However, because the emergence of bourgeois consciousness is still rooted in the kingdom of the poor, from which he takes his morality and his “justice” in opposition to a class of former masters, he runs the risk of always falling again to the level of the poor “should his consciousness weaken or grow dim.”9 In other words, the democratic project of an emancipated humanity can exist only in the present moment within the active project of universalizing the value of man through his own activity, and this active soteriological history is now referred to the field of politics and no longer to religion and, ultimately, to the creation of the state as the concrete expression of this principle of ultimate recognition, as we also discovered in Schmitt. The modern liberal democratic state is no longer a “kingdom of ends” but rather a “kingdom of rights” and a purveyor of recognition. Thus, the form of universal recognition that is performed by the state is thoroughly temporalized and thus refers only to the present time, having neither history nor eternity. That is, the democratic state exists in such a manner that it demands recognition from everyone in every present moment; moreover, the nature of this social demand is enforced: should this consciousness of recognition weaken or falter, it would then be seen as a threat to the security of the identity on which the community is founded. As for the liberal democratic project, as well as for the socialist, should this historical dialectic ever stop, even for one moment, and admit its failure to realize this value “for all human beings and all divisions” (including animals who belong to its kingdom), then the subject could quickly find himself again in the situation of the poor, stripped of an active consciousness, passively accepting his natural condition of a being who is located at a certain level of poverty by a force that resembles fate or predetermination in their original Greek senses.

It is at this point, however, in what appears as a third dialectical reversal surrounding the conceptual personage of the deportee, that Antelme addresses the historical incarnation of this division in its final instance between the SS-master and the deportee-enemy. In contradiction to the previous incarnation of the rich–poor couple, the SS embodies the position of the rich man who no longer needs the poor man as a path for his own salvation in this world; as Antelme observes, “The SS wanted to kill all their poor men.”10 Consequently, there was no longer any identification with the poor man, since in the earlier Christian phase the rich were obliged to recognize the value of the poor man in God and thus were equally obliged to clothe their naked bodies and feed them in order to compensate for their own evil; this was the exact price of their salvation in this world. Before the SS, however, the poor man was no longer a man—and was certainly not a sacred man—but was simply determined as an enemy of the rich, “and the more oppressed he was the less chance he had of being a man.”11 Here, according to Antelme’s dialectical thesis, for the first time the link that bound the anonymous couple, rich man/poor man, was broken and could no longer be repaired by any shared morality; rich and poor appeared as two entirely different species-beings who, from that point onward, had no common relationship except that of being mortal enemies. “In light of this extreme situation in the link between rich and poor,” Antelme writes, “we understand how impossible it is to fill in the concept of the ‘poor man’ from any point of view that is not strictly phenomenological.”

From the moment, in fact, when the couple rich/poor, exploiter/exploited, protector/protected—whatever you like—is broken apart by the awakening of consciousness in the exploited, the poor man has ceased to exist as such, except as the enemy of all poor men. When the poor man has become a proletarian, the rich man has become the SS. And when the rich man has become the SS, the poor man, who remained a poor man, cannot remain in the same situation of poor man; he has become an enemy of the proletariat, or else he has immediately agreed to his own death.12

It is at this point in history we witness the awakening of the consciousness of the deportee, who still remains an enemy of the rich but from a point of view that no longer corresponds to the former position of the poor man or the destitute and exploited position of the proletarian consciousness. The concrete situation of the deportee is presented in the form of a double bind (either you remain a poor man and become an enemy to yourself or you must agree to your own death), and it is from this double bind that a new consciousness is produced. This emergent, new consciousness is a product of the refusal of the order of the SS; consequently, the deportee was no longer a poor man, who found his value in God, nor even the bourgeoisie or the avatar of the working-class proletariat who sought to work off this division through the humanization of the universe (and thus project the complete redemption of man in the future of a political order) but instead found the certainty of his consciousness as a man in the active refusal of a complete negation of his own value as a member of the same species.

There did not exist a single believing deportee who, on again hearing Christ’s message—“Blessed are the poor”—did not think, did not immediately cry out, the complete, the true meaning of that message: that the SS order, the order of the rich, represented the negation of man, and had to be combated.13

Therefore, “merely to wish to live—but standing side by side with the deportees—was enough to make a proletarian, a man who actively refused the SS project to make him die, a proletarian on the same level as the universal, because the freedom of all men was tied to his victory, tohis survival.”14 It is this character of certainty in the recognition of consciousness that emerged in the camp, in the subject of the deportee and the survivor. It is only in this last statement that we can begin to understand Antelme’s radical thesis that the SS incarnated the final instance (and the exhaustion) of all the previous species divisions and, as a result, unconsciously restored to the idea of the human the concrete certainty of its unity as a species-being. This might even take the form of a Christological determination of a new human being; although, it is a figure that replaces the previous Christian form.

Again, following this quasi-Hegelian logic, we must understand this character of certainty and this consciousness historically as the embodiment of the spirit (or mind) that cannot be reversed and represents a culmination of the recognition of freedom out of a concrete expression of consciousness itself, no longer in the form of a dependence on the master or by his own activity of labor or work. It is only at this extreme point that a subject emerges as a universal value that must now be recognized by everyone. The true historical consciousness of the survivor, from this point onward, would only be identified with this great refusal of a project that would make someone die but also would be the sharpened consciousness of an enemy: an enemy of the rich. It is for this reason that there can no longer be any common or shared morality between the rich and the poor, no universal religion, no system of charity that could cover over or save the rich man from his own evil in this world. Once again, we find a claim that was later taken up as a major thesis by Agamben, who did not always credit Antelme as the original source: “We believe that we have revealed, or recognized, that there is no inherent difference between the ‘normal’ system of man’s exploitation and that of the camps. The camps are simply a sharpened image of the more-or-less hidden hell in which most people still live”; therefore, “we cannot accept any morality or any value if it cannot be made concretely universal.”15

Concerning Antelme’s final thesis, however, we cannot help but note that the final stage of this dialectic does not resolve itself into a synthesis. In fact, it does quite the opposite: it completes the original division between rich and poor and carries out their opposition, which becomes an absolute opposition. It splits the two terms into an irreparable antagonism. In other words, this division is no longer cast in the form of a contradiction that could be concealed or otherwise “redeemed” by any moral or political system. There is no salvation in this world, or the next, for the rich man who becomes completely identified with the SS. From here onward, outside the earlier division, the “rich man” no longer establishes a genus either determined by the classic division of labor or by the species-being of racism that resolves this earlier contradiction. Instead, the rich man determines a new form of biopolitical life that is now absolutely opposed to the existence of the poor. As for the sacred poor, according to Antelme’s own thesis, either he has completely disappeared, or is faced with an impossible decision, for the poor man who chooses to remain a poor man thereby becomes an enemy to himself. Concretely, as the result of either decision, the sacred position of the poor man in the universe disappears entirely, since if he chooses to remain a member of the sacred poor, he must willingly agree to his own extermination as part of this divine order. And yet, Antelme already refutes this last possibility, since no deportee would have ever accepted their fate under order of the SS as God’s commandment. In the above passage, I am simply underscoring the historical meaning of Antelme’s earlier claim that the poor man disappears entirely. It is not just that, by definition, the poor disappeared because they were exterminated in the camps but also that the position of the poor vis-à-vis “the rich SS” was no longer possible or even thinkable. Underlining this disappearance is also the fact that the idea of the poor as the “sacred being” who is sanctified and blessed by God for his sacrifice and his poverty disappears as well. Thus the poor man is placed in a deadly paradox: either to become an enemy to himself by consciously agreeing to his own death, which is impossible even to think; or, instead, to choose “bare life,” in which case the poor man has no real choice except to condemn himself to death (i.e., to become the SS to himself).

Here again, what Antelme is calling our attention to is the complete exhaustion of a certain “morality” that has been built up around the figure of the poor for centuries, first by Judaism and then by Christianity, which divinizes the sacred being of the poor as a form of blessedness, “Blessed are the poor” (Matthew 5:3). In part, this morality has been responsible for sanctifying the victims of poverty and exploitation with a false consciousness of innocence for the evil that is inflicted on them by the rich. In other words, we must understand that the SS, who embody the extreme or “sharpened” position of all the masters who have preceded them, have also pushed the dialectic to a breaking point, since by refusing any recognition of commonality with the poor, which they must exterminate to the last man, they have also become the SS to the man in themselves. In other words, no morality can emerge to do justice to their evil unless it is the rationalization of total war against all the poor and the proletariat. This is their consciousness and their certainty. Ironically, however, they embody the extreme weakness and inherent flaw that was already present in the consciousness of the bourgeoisie, since the certainty of this consciousness can only exist as long as their power of extermination and division of the species is actualized in the camps, and thus this consciousness would disappear from the earth entirely the moment when the extermination is halted, as was certainly realized at the end of the war when Hitler ordered the extermination of the German people themselves for failing to achieve the order of the Reich. And the consciousness of the bourgeois is perverted from its objective of the universalization of the value of man to the purification of the race defined by the SS. Once this horrible labor of the negative was halted, this consciousness historically disappeared as well, along with the grotesque idea that the poor who accepted their fate of extermination remained in a state of blessedness, who were not simply killed and disposed of as bare life. In other words, the idea of the sacred poor was extinguished along with the idea of the sacred race.

Perhaps we are now in a position to understand what Antelme now claims as the victory of the survivor. If we remember, the poor disappeared by virtue of the fact that if they chose to remain poor, to claim the position of the sacred man in the camps, they must agree with their own extermination—but this is impossible and is presented in the form of contradiction or logical impossibility. As we say in the earlier passage, there was no deportee who willingly agreed to his own death. At the same time, the masters embodied a form of consciousness whose certainty remained only as long as the active technopolitical–scientific project of extermination was carried out and thus also disappeared from the earth the moment they failed to carry out this program completely—that is, to realize the unity of their race through the complete extermination of all their poor. It is only the survivor who remains by refusing equally the role of sacred victim (homo sacer) as well as the willing accomplice to the negation of man within himself (the SS), thus surviving the double negation of both rich and poor. If this sounds like a synthesis, it is only through the negation of the previous oppositions that it is achieved. As one consequence, however, for the survivor, “bare life” or “merely living” can no longer be called sacred. If only from the perspective and the concrete experience of the survivor, life (or concretely, what life that remains to be lived) can no longer be sanctified by God, and there is no suffering that can any longer be tolerated or justified as sacred. There is no morality that can justify the extreme situation of the camp, which now stands as the concrete symbol (or paradigm) for all exclusion; therefore, from this point onward, all suffering, all oppression, as well as all poverty, can only be identified with the conscious certainty of an active refusal to any longer negate the man within himself—that is to say, from a living spirit of “combat.”

In this final incarnation of the dialectic, we might recognize the situation that continues today around the growing demographic of another spirit of refusal globally and by a new class of poor who have emerged to assume the position once occupied by the sacred poor. This spirit of refusal first emerged in the accusation, addressed to the rich, that these acts of charity were only made in compensation for their misery. In place of the former poor, according to Antelme’s final observation, the rich are now faced by those who are united by their refusal of such charity and whose “recognition” only defiles the peaceful image of humanity created by the rich to hide their own normal system of exploitation, which has only served to consign the largest portion of this humanity to the real hell in which most people still live today.

Antelme writes: “We believe we have revealed, or recognized, that there is no inherent difference between the ‘normal’ system of exploitation and that of the camps. That the camps are simply a sharpened image of the more or less hidden hell in which most people still live.”16 As a result, and already foreshadowing our current situation, he concludes:

Faced with this poor man who arrived at consciousness, the rich man goes crazy. The object of charity gives way; humanity, for him, is transformed. The proletarian haunts the world, and the world is defiled: yellow, black, Jews, communists, Christians, those never before seen, pour forth—men who say no, subhumans.17

Therefore, if the rich today have been driven insane and are haunted by the proletarian consciousness and its refusal to accept the situation that has been determined for them under the system of wealth, it is possibly because the classes of subhumans are seemingly infinite and emerge from too many places in the world today. It is no longer the case where the poor man cannot encompass the rich man’s world but resides in his universe but rather it is the insane rich man who has come to realize that he resides in the universe that is being created by these very same subhuman classes and that his own position of security in this new order is far from certain. Perhaps, like the historical failure of the bourgeoisie, he will come to occupy a position of weakened consciousness and find himself once again in the position of the poor, deprived of the very world he has made by his own hands—that is, unless the rich hang onto their narrowing position by waging a perpetual war against all the poorest populations in the world.

In response to this worsening situation, it is not surprising to see today the incredible conversion to Christianity especially among the very rich populations in the First World but precisely as a kind of nostalgic return to reestablishing a relationship of a pastoral form of sovereignty and charity toward the disaffected and proletarianized poor and subhuman classes that they have created in the first place. And yet, this will not work, for the reasons already recounted above following Antelme’s thesis. Any attempt to address the growing demographic of the global poor—at least, to administer their populations through a concerted “letting die”—will only provide the conditions for the awakening of consciousness similar to the deportee, for the creation of a new enemy. Moreover, as shown by recent global events, this is because the spirit of refusal on the part of a new poor man no longer assumes the form of politics but rather the return of an absolute and Manichean order of “good and evil.” In fact, according to Antelme’s early thesis, this is the ultimate destination of the original division of rich and poor; however, it exceeds any political and economic rationalism and marks the absolute limit where both political and economic powers today have reached a threshold of postmodernity that cannot be addressed by a secularized ideal of the universal but rather only ameliorated in the interest of globalized security and the protection of free markets, which are strictly defined in juridical and economic terms and no longer in terms of a single or unified image of humanity or according to the democratic ideal of a universal friendship.

At this point I return to the idea of friendship that, at least for Mascolo and Blanchot, is instituted around the figure of Antelme. In the correspondence that occurs later between Antelme and Mascolo, the idea of friendship is no longer defined in positive terms. In a letter written in 1950, Antelme writes:

I don’t think of friendship as something positive, as a value I mean; but instead I think of it far more as a state, an identification, a multiplication of death, a multiplication of questioning, as miraculously the most neutral of places from which to grasp and to feel the constant of the unknown . . . the proximity to death. It is the questioning that I think first of all, or the cry of the impossible.18

Here, in other words, we might see the return of a more archaic notion of friendship that we addressed in the previous section, which is particularly reserved for those who are deprived of all political rights, for those subhuman classes who emerge around the impossible cry of aidṓs (dignity, respect) but for whom there is no longer any corresponding host—that is, no modern institution of hospitality. Thus, Blanchot and Mascolo both speak of an exigency that only the deportee and survivor can testify to from the extremity of an experience that is impossible to communicate, and thus it is only the survivor who is given any authority over this speech, “the unique authority of this speech coming directly from this exigency.”19 For Mascolo, Antelme’s exigency had but one revelation: “The organization of society into classes, such as we experience it in our daily lives, was already an image of the division of this same society into species, such as it existed in the society created in the camps.”20 Therefore, “scientific racism,” which marks the culmination of both the technological rationalism and philosophical nationalism of the post-Enlightenment societies of which German society was the most extreme expression, is only the embodiment of class division in its last or “final instance.” As Antelme writes: “It’s an SS fantasy to believe that we have an historical mission to change species, and as this mutation is slowly occurring, they kill. No, this extraordinary sickness is nothing other than a culminating moment in man’s history.”21 Elsewhere, Mascolo says that this is the very basis of our communism from that point onward, in the sense that “the intuition of the unity of the species naturally leads to the historical necessity of the communist idea, which is no longer for that reason solely political.”22 Again, I underline that this intuition is neither a political nor religious idea, nor is it a theory of political economy of the division of the species that is scientific in nature, since all the disciplines themselves belong to the history of this division and were partly responsible for its final transformation into racism. In other words, as Mascolo argues, the modern disciplines have only rendered archaic myths of “the inequality of the races” more presentable in the form of new scientific and anthropological epistemes and thus in a much more dangerous fashion (more possible and thinkable) that we scarcely any longer need to recover these earlier myths in order to find nationalism far more preferable as, for example, the response to terror has recently shown. However, in the face of terror we cannot find peace in the reduction of social order to a single and totalizing model, whether this assumes a hegemonic super-state (Pax Americana) or the economic hegemony of the current neoliberal order, which I have argued earlier can only be regarded as a “generalized Machiavellianism.” In fact, such are the alternatives still offered today regardless of whether the preference is neoliberal or democratic: either newly emergent expressions of nationalism and ethnocentrism or the justification of a permanent hegemonic struggle between populations without even the idea of perpetual peace as a horizon—and thus the endless production of new classes and new divisions to the coming war. (Again, I simply underscore the fact that today what we are witnessing is a spirit of refusal and a new form of combat whose horizon cannot be defined in political terms, which poses the greatest threat to any political constitution of humanity or any pretension of the idea of universal democracy.) Concerning the future of this new hegemonic struggle, it appears that the state of permanent warfare has been accepted by neoliberal society and leftist critics alike, since the former cannot affirm the idea of communism as an absolute future, and the latter cannot admit to a democratic alternative due to the failures of late-capitalist democracies, and thus both have fatally resigned themselves to accepting the position that all politics are partial and thus condemned to repeat an endless cycle of appropriation/depropriation. This either/or is, ultimately, the impasse and the final exhaustion of the concept of the political itself: neither nationalism, which is unthinkable by virtue of its absolute culminating point in Nazism, nor any solution to the possible end of a more generalized hegemonic struggle for power, which culminates in a political form that is governed according to the accepted premise that the cycle of violence and depropriation, is inevitable (if not necessary). At best, all we can hope is to find a better way to manage and administer the original species division as the only measure of peace that can be imagined for the future of humanity, which Deleuze and Guattari have argued might actually bring about a state of peace “more terrifying than fascist death.”23

We have now come to the end of this dialectic. The terms have split apart and become irreparable. The two halves of the broken ring of friendship have been destroyed by perpetual war. Concerning the destination of phílos, just as the original signification of the Homeric Greek terms became, already by the time of Euripides’s Medea in the fifth century BCE, the ceremonial and hollow terms to be employed strategically for temporary alliance and economic advantage, today the politics of friendship have become totally corrupted by capital and there appears to be no future political form that seems capable of establishing a truce between two immortal enemies: the global rich and the global poor. Again, the rich man can no longer pretend “to clothe and feed” the poor in a total act of friendship and modesty, particularly after dismantling the welfare state, abandoning his “own poor”; nor can he conceal from himself the evil of the world of poverty his wealth has created, which returns to visit terror on him from the outside and threaten his security. It may very well be the case that for some the image of a “weakened sense” of religion (in opposition to an archaic or sovereign form of Islamic fundamentalism) is a new source of hope for renewing a more pastoral form of liberal democratic ideals of universal fraternity and/or friendship, but it is also evident that the new universe created by the poor and subaltern classes globally may have no place reserved for the rich. Instead, we might recall as a warning the statement of Achilles to Hector:

Do not propose an agreement. There are no pledges (hórkia pistá) between lions and men. The hearts of wolves and sheep do not beat in unison, but constantly do they devise evil for each other; even so is it not possible for you and me to be in philótēs, and there will be no hórkia between us: emè kaì sè philḗmenai oudé ti nō̄̂in hórkia éssontai (until the moment when one or the other is killed).24

In response to this pledge, as Antelme promises, the rich man (representing the advanced nations of the world) can only go insane and cling to his increasingly narrowing demographic, which is diminishing more and more each day, and thus it seems that he has also become a survivor in the universe he has created. Thus, at the point of closure of this complex genealogy, we come to three figures that stem from the modern experiences of amnesia and aphasia that have placed friendship in “distress”: first, we have the various contemporary strangers and new classes of subhumans who appear today in the very center of the polis as those who have been deprived of all their political rights; second, we have all those survivors who have passed through an experience of war and perhaps represent the “concrete situation” of the refugee populations today who live “in a more-or-less hidden hell” (i.e., a precarious existence deprived of both political rights and nationhood, at the mercy of their national hosts); and finally, we have the dominating figure of the global poor who can no longer be called “blessed,” or clothed by the charity of the richest nations. It is this last figure, moreover, and the increasing demographic it represents, who is becoming the wellspring of terrorism and thus regarded with renewed fear and suspicion. And for that reason the global poor will continue to be condemned to live outside the broken circle of friendship, in the wastelands that lie beyond the hedges: in the encampments and “security zones” of the richest populations in history (who are nevertheless decreasing in their own demographic proportion, necessarily as a result).25 In other words, today there is no possibility for any political philosophy, much less any new “concept of the political,” that does not address at its beginning these three figures as the new conceptual personae who will determine the future compass and the extreme limit of our common species.