Back in the fall of 2020, we discussed a book entitled Intifada: una topología de la imaginación popular (2020), written by Rodrigo Karmy, which considered the implications between the forms of contemporary revolts for the common imagination. It has been said with good reasons that the health-administrative controls deployed during the COVID-19 brought to a halt the high tides of revolts against the experiential discontent in the social fabric. The wearing out and domestication of experience has proved, at least for now, its stealth efficacy and unilateral success. However, what some of us did not see at the time was that this energy over protracted containment was also being waged at the very substance of language. This has now come forth in the wake of recent events at university campuses where administrative authorities, opinion writers, and legal analysts have suggested that a particular word, “intifada”, should be proscribed and effaced from campus life. One should not waste time considering the etymology, semantic reach, and political deployment of this term – for this there is already Karmy’s elegant and dense articulation of the term.

What has completely gone unnoticed in the current chatter about “intifada” is the fact that the full realization of a “rhetorical society” entails, necessarily, an ongoing preventive civil war over what is perceived as “sayable”. This means that containment does not only reach to the moment the realization of action (and its reason or justification of an act); but rather that it fully extends about what might be said potentially. The various calls – on the left and right, from the legal analysts to the pundits and some of the academic administrations – against “intifada” is not merely substantive (or at least it does not stop at this specific threshold); it is a preventive reaction against the very possibility of the name and naming. The act of naming is intimately related to the exterior events in the world; therefore, the proscription of naming is one more step in the domestication process in which the human specie is tore not only from establishing a contact with the world, but also incapable of accessing it through the specific density of naming.  

The paradoxical situation of this interregnum is that, on one hand, the collapse of modern political authority that founds the Liberal State (non veritas facit legem) as an overcoming of language and truths, has led straight into the rhetoric inflation where naming is sacrificed and language codified into a second order normativity that imposes arbitrary obligations on what is licit and illicit. This is why the First Amendment of the United States Constitution – and total constitutionalism writ large – becomes the construction zone that allows the contingent justification of “time, place, and manner” under the civil right of “freedom of speech”, which turns naming into an ominous and terrible shadow; an unwarranted apostrophe. The almost anecdotal proscription over “intifada” reveals the heteronomic dominion over interiority; that is, over the possibility of saying.

I can recall how Quentin Skinner told some of us at Princeton years ago that a fundamental characteristic of unfreedom, broadly considered, begins when you think twice about whether it is convenient or prudent to say what you think. Of course, I do not think he favored a position of imprudence and generalized cacophony. I take it that he meant that the end of liberty begins when the possibility of naming disappears: “Between the motion and the act falls the shadow”. Fixation and transparency is the evolving grammar of the day. Can language subsist in such an impoverished minimum overseen by the general governmental logistics? As a preamble, one can say that in the current moment any conception of liberty begins with the opaque exercise of naming.