The Rhine River

State of Pacification

The last form of the ‘Nation,' extermination will thus have exterminated the camp, that is, the fundamentally political principle of its limitation. Extending to the full range of the living, the transpolitical State would, as the strategies of political war feared, bring about a complete discharge where the invisible police of a generalized inquisition supercede the visible polls of a population with rights.

As the West German Chancellor recently declared, "The supreme value is no longer the Nation, it is peace." This phrase translates perfectly what lies beyond the political, the civic discharge. Peace tends to replace the Nation, the state of total peace supercedes the national State, and from this the concept of ‘security' surpasses the principle of ‘defence,' specifically linked with the geographically limited State.

Since the public will to power consists less in assuring the continued existence of a Nation by the defence or extension of its boundaries than in sustaining peace, the politically declared reality of the ‘enemy' now disappears, making way for the indeterminacy of constantly redefined threats.

We now see that, in this way of life, pacification replaces nationalism, the final citizen becoming less active than passive; the enemy of the constitution is henceforth less an 'internal enemy' of the national State than a 'threat' to the civil peace, a danger for the constitution of internal pacification.

In this sort of class struggle, in which the opposition is almost exclusively that between the 'military' and the 'civil', and where the warrior is transformed into the police, we may surmise that extermination as a superior form of the State of pacification will exterminate death, that is, the delimitation of this transpolitical life by the menacing threat of imminent disappearance, the innovation of a subject who is ‘living-dead' , no longer akin to the Spartan Helot or the Roman slave, but a kind of ‘zombie' inhabiting the limbs of a devalue public life.

posted by Nathanael @ 11:25 PM