By ÉRICO ANDRADE*
A philosophy that does not recognize the terrain it treads on corroborates the colonial scope of its concepts.
A year ago, Habermas, Forst, Nicole Deitelhoff, and legal scholar Kalus Günther wrote a public letter on November 13, 2023, in which they defended unquestionable general principles, such as solidarity with the Jewish people in Israel and Germany. In the same letter, they defended Israel’s right to strike back at Hamas, taking into account what they called guiding principles according to which “the principles of proportionality, of avoiding civilian casualties, and of waging war with the prospect of a future peace” must be observed.
What I would like to emphasize a year after the publication of the text is something that runs through part of European philosophy. My point is that the commitment to a certain procedural dimension, present in the notion of “guiding principles,” shows not only a lack of perception of the materiality of geopolitical issues on the part of Jürgen Habermas and company. This could be taken simply as a kind of sociological deficit of some theories such as Habermas’s, if there were not something more serious in this, which consists in the fact that these theories are at best complicit with colonialism, when they do not indirectly support colonial actions.
It is clear that the restrictions that Habermas and Forst point out in relation to Israel's counterattack, which they consider legitimate, are precisely those that the State of Israel has been flouting for decades and are introduced into the text as a kind of rhetorical strategy to position itself in the middle of the two sides (the sobriety of those who supposedly want to occupy the center), but in practice it endorses one of the sides. The side of the colonizers, of course.
After all, if Israel has been disregarding UN resolutions and international agreements for decades, why would the State of Israel take fair action at this time? Now, without a historical analysis and the material issues present in that region, the defense of an abstract principle seems to serve as a kind of legislation for the necropolitics of the State of Israel, since there is no historical support to support that Israel would proceed differently from the violence it perpetrates against the Palestinians, always in a disproportionate manner. What epistemic or historical gain would there be in authorizing a counteroffensive by the State of Israel against Hamas? Would there be a political gain?
The distinction between war crimes and state terrorism can give rise to a good academic debate regarding conceptual precisions, but in practice the State of Israel is decimating the population of the Gaza Strip, the Palestinians, without any respect for international norms and conventions. The word seems to be clear today. The State of Israel is promoting a genocide, which those philosophers deny.
Thus, if the withdrawal of intellectuals in the face of Israel’s war crimes and its constant history of expansionism in Palestinian territory is a cause for perplexity, as Vladmir Safatle warned, the defense of intellectuals such as Habermas and Forst of Israel’s “counterattack” is the measure of colonization within philosophy. And colonization always responds to the defense of general or abstract principles, often invoked to sustain a state of violence of one group in relation to another.
The unquestionable general principles defended by Jürgen Habermas and company are those that apply to solidarity with Israel and with the Jews in Germany, to the detriment, obviously, of the Palestinian people. This is because by placing solidarity with Israel to some degree as something of the order of the unquestionable, I highlight the two philosophers of critical theory, Habermas and Forst, not only indicate the territory on which their reflection is based, but also operate with the due colonial position according to which Palestinian life loses dignity when the State of Israel is authorized to counterattack.
A text that touches on questions of geopolitics without any reference to the imperialism of the State of Israel is not a testament to the end of history, as if imperialism had ceased to exist by a conceptual decree, but to the failure of a certain critical theory that is reduced, at least in the figure of those who signed the pro-Israel letter/manifesto, to theoretical constructions that seek universal principles to endorse specific policies of domination.
The gravity of this situation is heightened because these universal principles conceal, as Charles Mills denounced, a racial contract, since every colonial action is a racial action in which one group prevails over another in the domination of its territory, in the control of its population and in the restriction of the movement of that population through the spaces that are rightfully its. This is exactly what the State of Israel promotes in Palestine.
Thus, the absence of a debate on the history and materiality of the Israel-Palestine conflict, far from being a slippage towards the “inclusion of the other” (the title of one of Habermas’s works), shows how Western colonialism operates. It moves to conceptually justify a type of non-racialized policy or one without any racial pretensions, but which ultimately exercises clear control and extermination of the colonized populations.
Genocide, if we follow Achille Mbembe's position, is a policy that puts into practice the “black becoming of the world” because it invariably carries a racial component by virtue of which peoples are segregated and killed, as well as their territories are usurped.
It is important to note that Habermas and Forst's position is not on the plane of contradiction, but of a strategy of a discourse that dignifies the universal in order to place itself in a position of neutrality that allows us to disregard the historical practice that in the present case resides in the fact that Israel's attacks are always disproportionate, so that authorizing a counteroffensive at any level is to be acquiescent to Israel's completely disproportionate military power in relation to Palestine.
Thus, the use of universal principles such as the “guiding principle” of simply “waging war with the prospect of future peace” is an abstraction compatible only with collusion with the victors (the colonizers), since the historical objective of every war waged by imperialist nations is not peace, but the domination of one people over another. In fact, the history of the State of Israel confirms this, especially under the government of Benjamin Netanyahu.
It seems that the experience of Nazi Germany has not taught us about the pretensions of imperialism, which, far from being a dated historical phenomenon or limited to fascist positions, is continually being adopted by European nations in relation to Africa and by Israel in relation to Palestine. Perhaps the pact that Habermas and Forst sign is in fact that of whiteness.
In the same way that it legitimizes Israel's counterattack, knowing the history of disproportionality of that state, Habermas and Forst indirectly argue that some situations are unbearable, such as the completely regrettable increase in anti-Semitism, more than others, such as the massacre of the Palestinian people, to which, according to the philosophers, the term genocide does not apply even though we are witnessing one of the largest massacres of babies in history.
European theories, especially those inherited from the Enlightenment, insist on human dignity as an abstract concept to justify colonial processes in territories marked by a situation of inequality at the starting point. Without an understanding of the correlations of power and historical materiality, abstract principles are devices of raciality, to use Sueli Carneiro's concept here, which serve to maintain the ideological and material dominance of imperialist nations in their respective territories of action.
A philosophy that does not recognize the terrain it treads on corroborates the colonial scope of its concepts; as if they could reflect the universal even though they are rooted in a specific territory and with its particular interests.
*Erico Andrade is a psychoanalyst and professor of philosophy at the Federal University of Pernambuco (UFPE). Book author Blackness without identity (n-1 editions) [https://amzn.to/3SZWiYS].
the earth is round there is thanks to our readers and supporters.
Help us keep this idea going.
CONTRIBUTE
