From The Funambulist:
Whether we talk about the war in Iraq or the murder of Trayvon Martin,
there seems to emerge a legal means of justification for a country to
invade another or for a white man to kill a black boy. I call this means
“preemptive legitimate defense” insisting on its oxymoronic character
that demonstrates its ethical and legal absurdity. Such a claim is
revealing the contradictions of our era, what Slavoj Zizek denounces in
the marketing inventions of decaffeinated coffee and beer without
alcohol and their geopolitical equivalent: wars for peace. These
contradictions emerge from the necessity for a majority of people in the
Western World to maintain their way of life and to obtain an ethical justification for their political positioning. The notion of legitimate
is therefore important: it involves a narrative whose consistency
should be sufficient to be self-persuasive (the kind that makes us say
that we should not give money to a beggar because (s)he is probably part of a larger network that is abusing her or him). The notion of preemptive
also implies a narrative: an anticipated one — and therefore a
fictional or speculative one — that would retroactively justify the
defense. We find the paradox of Philip K. Dick’s Minority Report
here: if you know that someone is going to commit a crime you can
arrest him (her) before (s)he commits it; yet, if you do arrest him
(her) the crime has not been committed and therefore this person cannot
be legitimately punished. The justification of a “preemptive legitimate
defense” — of course, this is never presented that explicitely — is
therefore always either hypocritical or delusional.
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