Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

The Disputation of Ashraf Salim

2013; Routledge; Volume: 27; Issue: 6 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/09502386.2012.733172

1466-4348

Allen Feldman,

Middle East Politics and Society

AbstractIn Kafka's fable ‘Before the Law’ the appeal to infinite regress, to higher and deeper authority, creates the illusion of an interiority of law that someone or something is within the hallowed and hollowed abode of the law even if this indwelling is merely the performance of withholding law from others. The Combatant Status Review Tribunals at Guantanamo (2004–2005) similarly inscribed a territory, a space and a speculum where the sovereignty of the state was performed as the event of withholding of law. In the recesses of the security state, in the security state as an assemblage of recesses, the law itself is securitized and subjected to an extraordinary rendition and consigned to a black site from which all other black sites are authored and transmitted.Keywords: GuantanamosovereigntydenegationdebtguiltKafka Notes on contributorAllen Feldman, Political Anthropologist, is the author of three books, including Formations of Violence: The Narrative of the Body and Political Terror in Northern Ireland and the forthcoming Archives of the Insensible: On Aisthesis, War and Dead Memory. He has published numerous articles on political violence, the political philosophy of the body and the senses, and on transitional justice. He teaches the politics of the gaze and philosophy of media at New York University.Notes1 The CSRT were suspended by the Obama administration in 2009, but not irrevocably terminated, and the Obama administration has relied on charges pending under the Military Commissions Act to oppose habeas corpus review applications (Amnesty International Citation2009).2 Denbeaux's assessment was based on the following findings: The Government did not produce any witnesses in any hearing and did not present any documentary evidence to the detainee prior to the hearing in 96 percent of the cases.The only document that the detainee is always presented with is the summary of classified evidence, but the Tribunal characterized this summary before it as ‘conclusory’ and not persuasive.The detainee's only knowledge of the reasons why the government considered him to be an enemy combatant was the summary of the evidence.The government's classified evidence was always presumed to be reliable and valid.In 48 percent of the cases, the government also relied on unclassified evidence, but, like the classified evidence, this unclassified evidence was almost always withheld from the detainee.At least 55 percent of the detainees sought either to inspect the classified evidence or to present exculpatory evidence in the form of witnesses and/or documents. All requests by detainees to inspect the classified evidence were denied.All requests by detainees for witnesses not already detained in Guantánamo were denied.Requests by detainees for witnesses detained in Guantánamo were denied in 74 percent of the cases. In the remaining 26 percent of the cases, 22 percent of the detainees were permitted to call some witnesses and 4 percent were permitted to call all of the witnesses that they requested.Among detainees that participated, the requests by detainees to produce documentary evidence were denied in 60 percent of the cases. In 25 percent of the hearings, the detainees were permitted to produce all of their requested documentary evidence; and in 15 percent of the hearings, the detainees were permitted to produce some of their documentary evidence. The only documentary evidence that the detainees were allowed to produce was from family and friends.Detainees did not always participate in their hearings. When considering all the hearings, 89 percent of the time no evidence was presented on behalf of the detainee.The Tribunal's decision was made on the same day as the hearing in 81 percent of the cases.The CSRT procedures recommended that the Government have an attorney present at the hearing; the same procedures deny the detainees any right to a lawyer.Instead of a lawyer, the detainee was assigned a ‘personal representative’, whose role, both in theory and practice, was minimal.With respect to the preparation for the hearing, in most cases, the personal representative met with the detainee only once (78 percent) for no more than 90 minutes (80 percent) only a week before the hearing (79 percent).At the end of the hearing, the personal representative failed to exercise his/her right to comment on the decision in 98 percent of the cases. During the hearing, the personal representative said nothing 12 percent of the time.During the hearing, the personal representative did not make any substantive statements in 36 percent of the cases; andIn 52 percent of the cases where the personal representative did make substantive comments, those comments sometimes advocated for the government. In three of the 102 CSRT returns reviewed, the Tribunal found the detainee to be not/no-longer an enemy combatant. In each case, the Defense Department ordered a new Tribunal convened, and the detainee was then found to be an enemy combatant. In one instance, a detainee was found to no longer be an enemy combatant by two Tribunals, before a third Tribunal was convened which then found the detainee to be an enemy combatant.When a detainee was initially found not/no-longer to be an enemy combatant: The detainee was not told of his favourable decision;There is no indication that the detainee was informed of or participated in the second (or third) hearings;The record of the decision finding the detainee not/no-longer to be an enemy combatant is incomplete (Denbeaux 2006, pp. 2–3). 3 The discussion of framing expands my discussion in ‘On Cultural Anesthesia: From Desert Storm to Rodney King’ (Feldman Citation1994), which engaged aesthesis in terms of racializing anaesthesia, and in Violence and Vision: the Aesthetics and Prosthetics of Terror where I wrote of the ‘politically visible, that horizon of actors, objects, and events that constitute the worldview and circumscribed reality of the political emergency zone – the gathered and linked components of crises’ (Feldman Citation1997, p. 26). Framing/disframing is linked to Barthes' treatment of decoupage, cutting out, as a geometry of monstration and power. More recently Judith Butler in Frames of War (Citation2009) has explored this theme by treating the frame as a localized medium and opportunistic instrument enabling the transmission of a political and hegemonic message that is pointedly marked by its utilitarian exclusions, limits and by circulatory deformation. She associates the frame as media with reproducibility; in contrast my concern here is with the political ontology and the force of the irreproducible through disframed law, violence and sovereignty.4 It is well known that late Greek theology, both Neoplatonic and Christian, brings a new impetus to the use of the alpha privative: as a prefix it brings a negative sense to a word, and theological Greek in the late period abounds in alpha words: God is said to be unnameable, unspeakable, invisible, unengendered and so on. Side by side with this proliferation of the negating alpha comes the systematic development of the theology of negation, and the two phenomena should be considered together. Thus the second coincidence: alpha can signify both negation and its opposite. The alpha associated with negative theology is described as the alpha oτερητικóν (privative), and it denotes the absence of a given quality. Yet the same prefix has another usage, and is labeled the alpha α'θρoιστικóν: the accumulative alpha. The prefix under discussion, therefore, can convey both the removal and the multiplying of characteristics, and this fact must make us alert to the possibility of ambiguities in the connotations of alpha words: we must also beware of word-play. (Mortley 1982, p. 429)5 It is the task of a retrospective topology to excavate, from under the great foundations of universal demonstrations, the phenomena that were used as their cornerstones. In distinguishing between maximization (the constitution of fantasms to subsume particulars) and singularization (the constitution of signs to exhibit singulars), topology will not destroy the foundations; it will recover those objects of exhibition and make of it self an analytic of ultimates … Under a hegemonic regime, one acts and speaks in the name of a fantasm – an expression we hold to be tautological. Both common nouns and fantasms direct us to de-realize the singular and maximize a thetic reality. They direct us not to accept the given, but to subsume it under a thesis. (Reiner Schürmann Citation2003, pp. 12–13)6 This and all subsequent parenthetical insertions in testimony quotes are mine.7 Before the Law stands a doorkeeper. To this doorkeeper there comes a countryman and prays for admittance to the Law. But the doorkeeper says that he cannot grant admittance at the moment. The man thinks it over and then asks if he will he allowed in later. ‘It is possible’, says the doorkeeper, ‘but not at the moment’. Since the gate stands open, as usual, and the doorkeeper steps to one side, the man stoops to peer through the gateway into the interior. Observing that the doorkeeper laughs and says: If you are so drawn to it, just try to go in despite my veto. But take note: I am powerful. And I am only the least of the doorkeepers. From hall to hall there is one doorkeeper after another, each more powerful than the last. The third doorkeeper is already so terrible that even I cannot bear to look at him. These are difficulties the countryman has not expected; the Law, he thinks, should surely be accessible at all times and to everyone, but as he now takes a closer look at the doorkeeper in his fur coat, with his big sharp nose and long, thin, black Tartar beard, he decides that it is better to wait until he gets permission to enter. The doorkeeper gives him a stool and lets him sit down at one side of the door. There he sits for days and years. He makes many attempts to be admitted and wearies the doorkeeper by his importunity. The doorkeeper frequently has little interviews with him, asking him questions about his home and many other things, but the questions are put indifferently, as great lords put them, and always finish with the statement that he cannot be let in yet. The man, who has furnished himself with many things for his journey, sacrifices all he has, however valuable, to bribe the doorkeeper. That official accepts everything, but always with the remark: ‘I am only taking it to keep you from thinking you have omitted anything’. During these many years the man fixes his attention almost continuously on the doorkeeper. He forgets the other doorkeepers, and this first one seems to him the sole obstacle preventing access to the Law. He curses his hard luck, in his early years boldly and loudly, later, as he grows old, he only grumbles to himself. He becomes childish, and since in his years long contemplation of the doorkeeper he has come to know even the fleas in his fur collar, he begs the fleas as well to help him and to change the doorkeeper's mind. At length his eyesight begins to fail, and he does not know whether the world is really darker or whether his eyes are only deceiving him. Yet in his darkness he is now aware of a radiance that streams inextinguishably from the gateway of the Law. Now he has not very long to live. Before he dies, all his experiences in these long years gather themselves in his head to one point, a question he has not yet asked the doorkeeper. He waves him nearer, since he can no longer raise his stiffening body. The doorkeeper has to bend low towards him, for the difference in height between them has altered much to the countryman's disadvantage. ‘What do you want to know now?’ asks the doorkeeper. ‘You are insatiable’. ‘Everyone strives to reach the Law’, says the man, ‘so how does it happen that for all these many years no one but myself has ever begged for admittance?’ The doorkeeper recognizes that the man has reached his end, and to let his failing senses catch the words roars in his ear: ‘No one else could ever be admitted here, since this gate was made only for you. I am now going to shut it’ (Kafka Citation1978, pp. 201–202).8 For a pioneering analysis of the Marxian concept of the automatic subject, self-moving substance and self-valorization of capital see Moishe Postone (Citation1993).9 This socio-economic violence in Greece stemming from repayment of sovereign debt meets the juridical criteria of ‘odious debt’ – a debt that renders humane life inoperable. After 2003, the Bush administration, on behalf of the postinvasion Iraqi government, quietly invoked ‘odious debt’ to annul international debt incurred by the defunct Saddam Hussein regime. The United States previously invoked this concept in the aftermath of its expropriation of Spanish colonies after the Spanish-American War, so odious debt has been invoked to serve imperial agendas but stigmatized in reference to anti imperial politics in Argentina and Ecuador and now in reference to Greece. See Anna Gelpern (Citation2005, pp. 391–414).