Of the destruction of worlds. On Mauricio Amar Díaz’s El Paradigma Palestina (2024). by Gerardo Muñoz

What does it take to destroy a world? It would seem that the question itself is too metaphoric and impertinent; perhaps also hyperbolic and presumptuous against the flight of the infinite embodied in worldling. But this is the question that we should direct ourselves to according to Mauricio Amar’s short and highly accessible book El Paradigma Palestina: Sionismo, Colonización, Resistencias (DobleaEditores, 2024), which is written in the wake of the ongoing war of annihilation in Gaza in order lay bare the paradigmatic abyss of social death in which humanity finds itself at the peak of its civilizational dominance. Amar does not use the term “paradigm” lightly, and nor is he interested, as recasted recently by none other than Steven Bannon citing Thomas Kuhn’s work about scientific revolutions, in posting a central conflict towards transformation; rather, one must situate this strategic conceptual deployment in light of the Chilean philosopher’s own work on imagination and use, which provides an irreducible and sensible texture to every emergence of a paradigm [1]. This means that if Palestine is, indeed, the paradigm of our epoch is precisely because it has no-space in the world – it is what can be infinitely be destroyed, as Maurce Blanchot famously said commenting Antelme’s work – and what illuminates the core and extension of the “integrated” planetary humanity oriented towards the administrative governmentality of contemporary Western democracies, and its corollary geopolitics of the total artificial spaces, as Bruno Maçaes has recently called it. Reading Amar one senses that under the name “Palestine” he is registering a limit to the Humanist force, where an existential claim reveals the maelstrom of an epoch that has resorted to a grotesque parody of the ancient homeric standards of domination and submission. It is the outlook that Simone Weil described as the paradigm of transforming the world into nonliving things.

If understood as a paradigm, Palestine reminds us that the homeric energy towards the aristocracy of equality through force and death among the human race never truly ceased, but only changed forms and cloaks throughout the ages. The post-mythic West seemed to have constructed itself through the repeated revolutions that accommodate justifications for usurpation and containment, self-deification and legibility of the territory at the service of a fictive ethnos. The belated nationalism of modern Zionism has had the paradoxical quality of being both a project of territorial usurpation after its illegalization in International Law (The Kellogg-Briand Pact of 1928); while, at the same time, a politico-theological configuration that, as Monica Ferrando has shown in L’elezione e la sua ombra: Il cantico tradito (2022), clings upon the manipulation of the theological election of “a People” in order to deploy the coterminous binding between community and territory justified through divine narration. The interdependence of the spiritual goal of Zion is only possible through the construction of a settler state, at the same time that the occupying state’s only legitimacy based on ‘one God, one People’ relies on the restitution of an instrumentalized form of the theological election. This is why for Amar the Zionist state building project is a the paradigm of a specific type of colonial governance whose end is not just to capture errant people into social subjects, but more fundamentally a translatio imperii that folds the Earth into a territorial nomoi of distinct multilevel functions: checkpoints, walls, vigilante control of movements, constructions and erasure of surfaces, administration of critical infrastructures, development of extractive resources, and finally the hunting down of humans that necessarily blurs the line between civil population and battlefield combatants. When Amar reminds us of Israel’s predominance in planetary security and warfare technology, one can immediately recall Emile Benveniste’s suggestion that “measurement” (med*-) and the proportional addition to produce objectivity, entails an efficacy of permanent dominance and governability whose main enterprise is the management of populations through the regime of accumulation. As Andreas Malm reminds us of the current cartography of Palestine: “The genocide is unfolding at a time when the state of Israel is more deeply integrated in the primitive accumulation of fossil capital than ever…This is the political economy of normalization: a sacralization of busines as usual that destroys first Palestine and then the earth” [2]. The ongoing devastation of Gaza is a window into the project as a whole: the necessary destruction of the worlds and the total artificiality of the life-worlds, always at the service of maintaining the needs of anthropological symbolizations.

For Amar this points to an epochal scenario of a people without world; and, following the lead of Sari Hanafi, he will claim that the paradigmatic mirroring of Palestine is also an spatial-cide, in which the living are deprived of a sense of inhabiting and roaming that brings to bear that the nakba is not something that has taken place in history once and for all, it is a catastrophic event that has not ceased from repeat itself, and whose ultimate intention is to suture the world and existence, the soul and the spirituality of the open atmosphere that is needed to sustain life. Reading Amar between the lines – who towards the end of the book finds distant interlocutors in Darwish’s poetry, the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze, as well as in the glosses of Walter Benjamin on history and the prose of Edward Said – one learns that the true arcana of Palestinian resistance is also a secret promise for our apocalyptic times: to hold on to the world, so that we can all passionately land on the Earth and freely breath in its surroundings. The nexus of the Palestinian question and the intrusion of Gaia, although underdeveloped in Amar’s analysis, obliquely runs through a text that is also very much about the central question of ethics that never abandons thought: how to name what escapes without taking the world as such into an object to be possessed, destroyed, and remade anew as a hostile secular imago dei. The vindictive hyper-consciousness of the contemporary unmediated arcana imperii now reveals, as Amar says towards the end of he book, a mirror through which we can observe our own increasing domestication, in which the metropolis is just the luminescent and self-protected hub, but whole ultimate darkening shadow is the Gaza’s pile of rubbles resembling an open air necropolis (Amar 108-109). Through different arrangements of organized destruction, both the metropolis and the necropolis converge in their preeminent ‘struggle against space’ and its form of life for the sake of familiar pieties of enslaved survival of unworldly anomie (Amar 116).

Does this mean that we are all “Palestinians”? Mauricio Amar’s El Paradigma Palestina (2024) rejects the all too well expected craft of solidarity and subjective identifications that can only work on the payroll of the gravediggers of the current civilizational project. On the contrary, if Palestine is our paradigm, and it remains so, it is because it can only refuse measurement and recognition in order to dwell in the only possible exteriority as embodied to Darwish’s poetry that Amar quotes towards to the end book: “Do not trust the poem / absent child / it is the throbbing of the abyss” (Amar 140). From the abyss we nourish the soul as the return to land on Earth prepares itself in order to no longer conquer a territory, an ancient tradition, or a “People” (ethnos), but to dwell on the nearness of a place that is an excess to every location or community of belonging (this is the false exit of the kibbutzim). We do not have political grammar to articulate what this integral freedom could mean, except that it is an exotic relation in Victor Segalen’s sense: a creation of a world alien from the compatible and petty one that currently drains us into its ongoing desperate destruction and passive enslavement [3]. Finally, like all authentic paradigms, it is worth noting that Paradigma Palestina (2024) teaches and preaches nothing; it only invites us into the swirling sensation that crosses over the imagination and the singing voice, from the world of the last remaining lives to the isles of the dead martyrs, and back.

Notes

1. Mauricio Amar. Ética de la imaginación: averroísmo, uso y orden de las cosas (Malamadre, 2018).

2. Andreas Malm. The Destruction of Palestine is the destruction of the Earth (Verso, 2025), 53.

3. Victor Segalen. Essay on Exoticism (Duke University Press, 2002), 24.

arcana imperii Carl Schmitt Civil War civilization concrete order delegation Edward Gibbon Hobbes institutions J.G.A. Pocock Roman empire rule of law state Tacitus territorial power Tyranny

Tacitus’ arcana and political wisdom. by Gerardo Muñoz

During the flourishing of Renaissance civic humanism, the tradition of Tacitism, as well as the work of Tacitus, was broadly understood as advisory to the problem of tyranny within the cycles of political power’s rise and decline, unmasking imperial rule’s debasement and cruel domination [1]. It is in Edward Gibbon’s erudite project where Tacitus’ political wisdom receives an integral treatment about the institutional dimension of power and its cohesive structure based on both facts and theoretical presuppositions. For Gibbon, the wisdom of Tacitus is not merely anchored in theoretical speculation; rather, the rhetorical construction takes its energy from the convergence between historical facts and the physics of a concrete political order. Tacitus’ wisdom is practical but also flexible, and this entails that political realism is not about the opportunist dimension of power (although this most certainly occurs in every political community), but about the deployment of analytical understanding regarding faults, fissures, and disequilibrium of institutions. Tacitus’ thought is about vision, and this means looking at the cracks, identifying the asymmetrical correspondences, and teasing out the nuances of a particular reality.

This presupposes that Tacitus’ enduring notion of the arcanum imperii, far from posing a ‘mystery of the state’ (its legitimacy, rule, and mystical reserve), allows for a strong narrative about the latent crisis internal to every political community. Tacitism is, insofar as it confronts the crisis and ruin of a political order, draws a negative reflection on the ongoing force of civil war as a historical and existential condition of domination. In other words, no politics can exist without the concrete legibility of the faults of conflict, which ultimately entails that civil war and political power are constantly in proximity. The arcana delimits the problem of civil war as the internal contradiction of every imperfect institutional design that cannot transcendent its own crisis through conceptual reordering.

At the center of Tacitus’ arcana in Rome is the death of Nero as well as the fault lines of civil war: “The was revealed that arcanum of state, the discovery that emperors might be made elsewhere than Rome” [2]. Of course, Rome as the glorious center of power was fundamental and indivisible; but for Tacitus the argument condensed in the arcana is precisely that the corruption of politics takes place when political representatives (power delegated at the provinces) and that of the center ceased being in coordination, losing the grip of institutional mediations. Thus, the ruin of politics is best expressed by the disjointment of formal procedures between authority and delegation, the vesting of the emperor and territorial monopoly, legitimate rule and predatory corruption. When this happens the arcana is transformed into a permanent revolution that dissolves checked political rule into the willful triumph of the uncontained and proliferated fragmentation (this is why Tacitus looked back with nostalgia to the unlived era of Roman republicanism).

For Gibbon to hold on to the Tacitan tradition of the arcana imperii meant, above all, to underscore the esoteric relationship between history and revolution as part of the desire to understand political energy, which he posed as a methodological concern: “In our larger experience of history the imagination is assisted by a perpetual series of causes and effects , to unite the most distant revolutions” [3]. The arcana is political wisdom of a secondary source; that is, it’s not a normatively established political premise or category, but an excess to description of political order. Hence, it is not that the arcana imperii is a monocausal and ultimate foundation of instability – and in this sense he was still faithful to his conception of plurality of causation in defense of the study of literature and the imagination – the emphasis is placed, on the contrary, in the way in which grasping the archeological and heterogeneous field of tension that will reveal, in turn, the historical specificity of the arcana [4].

In other words, the arcana grants access to the fundamental features of the epiphenomenon of civil strife without a recourse to abstraction and the closure of the concept. In this way, it could be said that the arcana (in part in the reading that Gibbon undertakes of Tacitus) is continuously operating in three distinct registers: a) it is a comprehensive analytic of the plurality of causation that impact political conflict and civil war, b) it reports to the center of authority, probing its direct and indirect meditations on the ground; its forms of delegation and adjudication, and its production of legality and dominium and implementation; c) it demands to design a description and a narrative of the political situation in order to properly respond to the paradox of tyranny and corruption within a specific polity.

Having sketched out the operational effect of the arcana, we can say that the notion is far from being reducible to a Renaissance “ragion di stato” scenario assisting in the consolidation of power in the hands of the price; the arcana seeks to elucidate the contours and limits of the intensification of war and its risks; a problem that becomes central to Hobbes notion of the state [5]. To claim that this political wisdom is something that merely emerges technically-placed in the Renaissance “great men”, and systematically blurred in modern liberalism is a thesis that will need further elaboration about the resources of the state and the underpinning of modern legitimacy through civil society and its late-modern mutation into planetary imperial spaces. In a certain sense “Tacitism” opens the possibility of sketching the political crisis of in each distinct epoch. It is perhaps in this sense that Carl Schmitt invites us to think the issue in an entry of his Glossarium:

“The beginning of Tacitus’ Histories has moved me. Is it just rhetoric, like Ortega told me?’ Isn’t it about the identity of the situation, that is, existential participation, participation in one and the same nuclear and ancestral situation of our eon? Every word of that chapter of Tacitus is absolutely current: «Magna ingenia cessere; opus adgredior optimum casibus, atrox proeliis, discors seditionibus, ipsa etiam pace saevum. Of course, “ipsa etiam pace sacvum, bella civilia et exterior plerumque permixta.” The relationship between international war and civil war, that is not rhetoric but the horrible reality recognized and expressed, the non-distinction between war and peace.” [6]

The arcana never truly coincides with a philosophy of history or a rhetorical veneer of civil existence (social contract). The subversiveness of Tacitus plays out in thinking through the elaboration of a specific governmental organization [7]. And what is the “ancestral situation of the eon” if not the polar relationship between political order and stasis, the duality between civil war and the principle of authority, the nihilism of the will and the limits of a public rule of law, however ordered? Tacitus’ classical wisdom, invested in plotting legible facts with a singular narrative, far from raising itself to a “science of politics” or a set of “fundamental principles of order”, responds to potential fluctuations devoid of a universal grammar. In this way, politics remains closer to a physical experiment: an active self-evolving canvas in which the arcana is irremediably drawing upon the instituting and destituting of interconnected forces at play.

Notes

1. Arnaldo Momigliano. “Tacitus and the Tacitist Tradition”, in The Classical Foundations of Modern Historiography (University of California Press, 1990), 120.

2. J. G. A. Pocock. Barbarism and Religion: The First Decline and Fall, Vol.III (Cambridge University Press, 2003), 25.

3. Ibid., 58.

4. G.W. Bowersock. “Gibbon on Civil War and Rebellion in the Decline of the Roman Empire”, Daedalus, Summer, 1976.

5. Richard Tuck. “Hobbes and Tacitus”, in Hobbes and History (2000), eds. G. A. J. Rogers and Tom Sorell, 99–111.

6. Carl Schmitt. Glossarium: Anotaciones desde 1947 hasta 1958 (El Paseo, 2019), 7.

7. Ronald Syme. “Who was Tacitus?”, Harvard Library Bulletin XI, Spring 195, 185.