brahm, g.hitchamisbhl

8/7/2019 Brahm, G.HitchAmisBHL

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Christopher Hitchens and his Critics:

Terror, Iraq, and the LefSimon Cottee and Tomas Cushman (eds.), aerword by Christopher Hitchens,

New York University Press, 2008, 365 pp.

Gabriel Noah Brahm

Also under review: Te Second Plane: September 11: error and Boredom, byMartin Amis, Knop, 2008, 204 pp., andLef in Dark imes: A Stand Against the New Barbarism, by Bernard-Henri Levy, translated by Benjamin Moser, Random

House, 2008, 233 pp.

Paradigms have moved on. Bernard-Henri Levy [1]

Still aghast in June 2002, Martin Amis witnesses that, September 11 was a day o de-Enlightenment. In his book, Te Second Plane collecting essays and short-storiespenned between September 18, 2001 and September 11, 2007 he orceully andyet elegantly registers the shock elt by a sensitive, courageous observer o events,thrust back by gusts o reactionary violence emanating rom an unsuspected world o medieval anaticism, in order to rediscover his own most basic moraland imaginative resources. Only the rst o the ourteen pieces indulges or evena moment in that cognitive-aective blunder which Paul Berman perspicaciouslyidenties as rationalist navet the morally lazy, ethically purblind temptationto deduce some readily graspable good reason that simply must lie behind everyapparently heinous act o brutality, so long as it is one directed against thoseperceived as powerul (the U.S., Europe, Israel) on behal o the worlds designatedvictims (the wretched o the earth). As Berman was rst to ully understand,

Te suicide bombings [o September 11] produced a philosophical crisis

among everyone around the world who wanted to believe that a rationallogic governs the world a crisis or everyone whose undamental belieswould not be able to acknowledge the existence o pathological mass politicalmovements. [2]

According to this logic, absent any pathology on the side o the killers, the moredesperate they are to kill us, the more guilty we are obviously or driving themto need to blow themselves up and take us out with them. I such reasoning were


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Deoctiy 15 | Winte 2008

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use and invocation o the very new and the very old; a mania or purication;and a erocious anti-Semitism.

Combating, as a member o civilised society, this thanatoid death-drive unleashedin the name o the latestFhrer Principe [5] whether one regards onesel as liberal,radical, or conservative is the moral and political challenge o our age (p. 200).Recognising this is the precondition o any viable le or progressive politics.

Te Hitchens Factor

So, odd it is indeed, as Christopher Hitchens most notably avers, that a considerablesegment o the contemporary so-called le denies precisely this. Widening his net

to encompass totalitarian threats rom around the world, he argues that the end othe Cold War inaugurated a new conjuncture, and with it came a resh challengeor political thought and action. Writing in the Aerword to Simon Cottee andTomas Cushmans major new edited volume Christopher Hitchens and HisCritics, a collection o Hitchens wartime writings, gathered helpully with repliesrom noteworthy interlocutors, and ramed beautiully by the editors thoughtulintroduction Hitchens wryly sums up:

the years aer the implosion o the Soviet Union in 1989 are marked by the

recrudescence o danger rom dierent orms o absolutism in Serbia, Iraq,Aghanistan, Iran, Darur, and North Korea, and once again, a huge numbero intellectuals will not agree that the totalitarian principle, whether secularor religious, is the main enemy. Tere is, apparently, always some reason whythis is either not true or is a distraction rom some more pressing business oris perhaps a mere excuse or empire. (p. 331)

Te anti-imperialist intellectual is slow to appreciate Hitchens point becauseit so prooundly strikes at the roots o their identity. Te challenge o neo-

totalitarianisms around the world, though serious and pressing, is one that upsetsthe presuppositions o the children and grandchildren o the 1960s because theUnited States is not primarily at ault in these situations, and might even do somegood.

And it is precisely this simple act that does not compute. For, as Jean BethkeElshtain incisively notes,


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Brahm | Te Concept o te Post-Lef: Deense

Somewhere along the line, the idea took hold that, to be an intellectual, you have to be against it, whatever it is. Te intellectual is the negator.

Afrmation is not in his or her vocabulary. It was not always so. [but] Forthose o us who entered adulthood in the 1960s, to be an intellectual was tobe in opposition. [6]

Tat is so long as it reers to American power or anything else regarded as white,Western or male. When, on the other hand it reers to something non-white,non-Western, non-male, afrmation is nearly all the intellectual can nd in his (orher) vocabulary. In an age o so-called multiculturalism, the reverse o Elshtainspoint is equally apposite. It orms the other hal o the stupid discursive equation

that prevents some particularly on the le rom seeing the threats that peoplelike Amis, Hitchens and Bernard-Henri Levy see clearly. As Amis points out, inthe post-les eerily stereotyped discourse, everything other is good (p. 156). Teresults are tragic i also comical, since in all conicts between West and East, thosewho lack the ability to consider supporting the American government in anythingit does (or example in Aghanistan or Iraq) also suer rom the 100 percent and360-degree inability to pass judgment on any ethnicity other than our own (exceptin the case o Israel) (p. 197). Over time, such mechanical assessments harden intoidentity says Elshtain (p. 73).

Identity Anti-Politics

Hardened identities are not good or democratic politics, which depends uponthe uidity o citizens commitments relative to accurate inormation and soundargument, holding open the possibility o the transormation o both opinions andidentities in light o public discussion. Hardened identities, o the kind Elshtainreers to, make persuasion difcult to say the least. Tey are even in a sense anti-political, because they inhibit rather than encourage the collectivitys quest or arational consensus reely arrived at. Tey prevent rather than acilitate decisions

based on public scrutiny o reasons and evidence in view o debates about themeaning o shared values, such as liberty and equality.

My question thereore is whether such a rigid and automatic brand o thoughtcan be credited any longer as either le or right? Is it le to praise the dictatorSaddam Hussein or his courage, as British MP George Galloway did? Is it right towant to see the aliban deposed? Is it le to embrace Hassan Nasrallah, as NoamChomsky did, congratulating the leader o Hezbollah in person or standing up


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Nairman House, taking the lives o Rivka and Rabbi Gavriel Holtzberg, two youngparents in their 20s, and only spared their two-year old son, Moshe by a miracle.

Notice the way economic disparities burn down magnicent old hotels, whiletrickle-down eects employ well-trained anatics to shoot innocent bystanders atrandom. See the way Indias policies themselves train young radicals to embracetheir own deaths with gusto. For aer all,

Why should it be such a surprise i the perpetrators are themselves IndianMuslims? Its hardly a secret that there has been much anger within thepoorest sections o the Muslim community. [12]

Yes, this we know. And it is hardly a secret that, according to the post-le, mass-casualty suicide-terrorism is caused by poverty and powerlessness, even whenattacks are careully arranged by well-unded, powerul organizations that recruitMuslim youth through massive propaganda campaigns. It would take more than ag lea to conceal Alis excitement at this latest incident.

In Deence o the Post-Lef Concept: A Reply to Critics

o orestall conusion among readers o goodwill and good sense, while perhapsalso reassuring my more literal-minded and pedantic critics as well, the post-le,

as I see it, is obviously both post-lefandpost-le. Te term reers with productiveand intentional ambiguity (depending on context and emphasis) to those whoappear in danger o eithergoing over or having gone overrom the precincts o thele (broadly i vaguely dened, but dened) to something else. Tey exist. Teyinclude those well known to everyone likely to be reading this whom MartinAmis calls liberal relativists. In their cringing posture he detects, as do I, morethan a hint o hemispherical abjection, more than a touch o that moral scoliosisaccording to which,

given the choice between George Bush and Osama bin Laden, the liberalrelativist, it seems is obliged to plump or the Saudi, thus becoming theappeaser o an armed doctrine with the ollowing tenets: it is racist,misogynist, homophobic, totalitarian, inquisitorial, imperialist, genocidal.(p. 198)

Tats pretty ar right to be le, i you ask me. Whereas with the rotskyist, Leninistand even Stalinist, one might have disputed the advisability o breaking a ew eggs



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in order to make an omelette, the question nowadays is what omelette? It is onething to debate means and ends, when one has a desirable, in principle, end in view.

But when one can justiy as progressive neither the means nor the ends, then whatsle (to coin a phrase)?

Norman Geras claims it is eeble o me to make this point, but I dont see why.Nothing in his criticism o me supports his dismissal o my claim that the post-leis dierent. [13] In spite o what Geras thinks, we have arrived, in other words, atwhat Bernard-Henri Levy calls mournully a progressivism without progress, and apointless radicalism. InLef in Dark imes, Levy contends nothing less than that (aportion o ) the le is not what it used to be. In the world aer September 11, as we

gradually are compelled to see, though the act that the Le kept talking nonsensewas itsel nothing new, its no longer the same nonsense. With the mechanicalembrace o what Hitchens calls ascism with an Islamic ace (Cottee/Cushman,p. 46) and Levy calls Fascislamism (p. 181) given some sort o credence merelybecause it attacked capitalism, the United States, Israel and the Jews came errorso another order (p. 75). I was coming to realize, Levy says, with sorrow anddismay, like a man who eels as his quietly punning title suggests abandonedand alone in a crisis,

that what wed been witnessing [recently] was a chemical process ocombustion, distillation, and recomposition more complex than metaphorso a cold ever or a mechanical lie useless, habitual reexes might suggest.

What had been catalysed into being was an oxymoronic Le, a Le that makes yourhead spin a le that, i words have any meaning at all, is sometimes more right-wing than the right wing itsel. He has no choice but to conclude, rom the weighto accumulated evidence, that the most singular characteristic o this right-wingLe is that it no longer takes its inspiration rom the Le but rom the Right (p.82). As Levy goes on to argue at length, in detail, and with marvelous eloquence,

the post-le that irts with groups like the Muslim Brotherhood is le-no-more; itis post-le; it is right; it is neo-ascist. He writes,

we were Marxists, Leninists, Marxist-Leninists we werentIslamoprogressives. We might not have been able to spot a Red ascist butwe were never wrong about Brown ascists. (p. 171)


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When Words Lose their Meaning: the Right-wing Lef?

And so we conront the situation that people who understand that words do indeed

have and keep their meaning must (Levy, p. 82). Tose I preer to callor this reasonalone (respect or language) the post-le (those whose radicalism only serves tomake them supine beore the brutal tactics o reactionaries at war with democracy),are prime examples o Bermans rationalist navet. Academics mostly, but withtheir semi-educated analogues and ellow travellers in the street, the post-le havenally thanks to the cumulative eect o decades o postmodern relativism, post-1989 posthistoire-induced malaise about the disappearance o all Utopian projects, postcolonial theorys overemphasis on imperialism as the root-o-all-evil, and apost-Marxist identity politics, calling itsel Cultural Studies, which invests all its

proessional energy in the monotonous ritual denunciation o the Western racistcapitalist patriarchy departed rom all commonsense notions o what it means tobe le. Quantity has become quality, in good dialectical ashion. It all adds up, toquote Saul Bellow, until one day it tips the scales.

I speak o Wittgensteinian amily resemblances, o course, and not essences: Oneneed not subscribe to all, or any particular one, o the myriad and contradictorytenets o all the post discourses to be post-le. Instead, by embracing somehodgepodge o reasons or anti-Americanism, anti-Zionism and, yes, sometimes

anti-Semitism too, one joins orces with those whom Hitchens so pungentlyidenties as,

a bunch o clapped-out pseudo-Marxists, who, deep in their hearts, have anostalgia or the days o the one-party State and who secretly regard Saddamas an anti-Imperialist[,] assisted by an impressive number o undamentalistMuslims, who mouth the gibberish slogans o holy war but who dont give adamn or the suering inicted by Saddam on their co-religionists. (Cottee/Cushman, p. 110)

I such an unsightly sight could lead Michael Walzer to ask, in the title o animportant essay, Can Tere Be a Decent Le? then surely one is permitted toponder whether or not there can be such an indecent one or whether we hadbetter start calling it something else. I believe City Journals reviewer, Fred Siegel,is mistaken on this count to ask o Bernard-Henri Levy, when is it time to leave adysunctional amily? since it is the post-le who have le BHL and the rest o us,without succor and in dark times. Levys title recalls Hannah ArendtsMen in Darkimes, and he echoes her clarion call to resist the eclipse o reedom, uncertainty


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and the individual, in avor o domination, sel-righteous certitude, and the generalwill.

But by the same token Siegel is surely on-target in asking, is it not time to reeourselves, as much as possible, rom a hopelessly outdated and unavoidablymisleading set o political categories? [14] Amis, Hitchens, Levy, and Paul Berman to whose path-breaking investigation, error and Liberalism, all three worksunder review here owe a substantial debt (and in Hitchens and Levys case, anunacknowledged one) have been showing us how to do just this. Which meansthat: Jonathan Freedland, writing in Te New York Review o Books, is wrong todismiss Hitchens battle with the hard le and clashes with ultra-leists material

comprising the bulk o the historic Cottee and Cushman volume, as well as the bulko its interest as a predictable waste o ink. [15] Nor, interestingly, did Hitchens position on the war in Iraq lead him to endorse John McCain, as Freedlandthought it would have to. [16] Finally, theNYRB reviewer unaccountably joins theLilliputian chorus in panning Martin Amis one more time or, o all things, writingwell and memorably about the most important issues o our day taxing him witha display o pyrotechnical talents purportedly out o place. In act, precisely theopposite is true! For it is signicant that what Freedland casually dismisses as themerely virtuosic quality o [their] writing is actually an important part o what

binds these authors together. Te post-le cant write or shit. Te ghting liberalscan. And the quality o their prose is an indication o the quality o their thought,in each case.

Gabriel Noah Brahm is Assistant Proessor o English at Northern MichiganUniversity, and Research Fellow in Israel Studies at Brandeis University,Schusterman Center or Israel Studies.

ReerencesAli, ariq (2008) Te Assault on Mumbai, Counterpunch, November 27, 2008, http://www.

counterpunch.org/tariq11272008.html.

Amis, Martin (2008) Te Second Plane: September 11: error and Boredom, Knop.

Arendt, Hannah (1970)Men in Dark imes, Washington: Harvest Books.

Baudrillard, Jean (2001)Le Monde, November 2. A translation is available at, http://cryptome.org/baud-terr.htm

Berman, Paul (2003) error and Liberalism, New York: Norton.

Brahm, Gabe (2008) Te Odyssey o the Post-Le,Democratiya 13.


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Elshtain, Jean Bethke (2003) Just War Against error: Te Burden o American Power in a ViolentWorld, New York: Basic Books.

Freedland, Jonathan (2008) Falling Hawks, Te New York Review o Books, 55:12, July 17.Geras, Norman (2008a) A post about the term post-le, normblog, April 21. http://normblog.

typepad.com/normblog/2008/04/a-post-about-th.html

Geras, Norman (2008b) Post-le again, normblog, May 25. http://normblog.typepad.com/normblog/2008/05/post-le-again.html

Heller, Agnes (2002) 911, or and Modernity and error, Constellations 9:2, 53-65.

Hitchens, Christopher (2008) Vote For Obama, Slate, October 13. http://www.slate.com/id/2202163/.

Johnson, Alan, ed. (2007) Global Politics Aer 9/11: Te Democratiya Interviews, London: TeForeign Policy Centre / Democratiya.

Johnson, Alan (2008) Wright and the Post-Le, Comment is Free, March 27. http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisree/2008/mar/27/wrightandthepostle

Kramer, Martin (2006) Islamism and Fascism: Dare to Compare, http://www.terrorismawareness.org/islamo-ascism/45/islamism-and-ascism-dare-to-compare/

Kntzel, Matthais (2007) Jihad and Jew-Hatred: Islamism, Nazism and the Roots o 9/11, NewYork: elos Press.

Levy, Bernard-Henri (2008) Le in Dark imes: A Stand Against the New Barbarism, translated byBenjamin Moser, Random House.

Mahmood, Saba (2008) Feminism, Democracy, and Empire: Islam and the War on error, inWomens Studies on the Edge, Joan Scott ed. Durham: Duke University Press.

Markovits, Andrei and Gabe Brahm (2008) Cosmopolitanism vs. the Post-Le, Democratiya 12.

Siegel, Fred (2008) Family ies, City Journal, October 22, 2008, http://www.city-journal.org/2008/bc1022s.html. (An extended version o this essay is published in this issue oDemocratiya.)

Walzer, Michael (2002) Can Tere Be a Decent Le? Dissent (Spring 2002): 19-23.

Williams, Raymond (1978) Marxism and Literature, New York: Oxord University Press.

Notes[1] Levy 2008, p. 75.

[2] Berman 2003, p. 143. Subsequent reerences to this edition are cited in the text.

[3] Berman discuses the phenomenon o rationalist naivete in his Democratiya interview. SeeJohnson 2007.

[4] Kntzel 2007.

[5] Heller 2002.

[6] Elshtain 2003. Subsequent reerences to this edition appear cited in the text.

[7] Kramer 2006 takes note o Judith Butlers notorious comments to this eect on a panel beorean audience at UCB, in his Islamism and Fascism: Dare to Compare.

[8] See Saba Mahmood 2008, p. 149. A proessor o Anthropology at Berkeley, Mahmoodwrites approvingly, Even Osama Bin Laden was clear in his message at the time o the World


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rade Center Attacks: he wanted American troops out o Saudi Arabia, a just solution to thePalestinian-Israeli conict, and an end to Euro-American domination o Muslim resources and

lands. One is le to iner that Mahmood hersel sees justice in this message. For although sheails to speciy what Bin Ladens idea o a just solution to the Palestinian-Israeli conict mightbe, she continues: His ends, i not his means, speak to a wide range o Arabs and Muslims whoare currently witnessing one o the most unabashedly imperial projects undertaken in modernhistory, a project that, as a number o observers have pointed out, has done more to uel themilitant cause rather [sic] than eliminate it Both the sympathy or Osama and the assumptionthat the West causes terrorists to attack it are staples o post-le reasoning.

[9] Baudrillard 2001.

[10] See or example London Review o Books, October 4, 2001, http://www.lrb.co.uk/v23/n19/mult01_.html, where an number o intellectuals had their say about the root causes oSeptember 11. Mary Beard conessed to having the eeling that however tactully you dress itup, the United States had it coming. Tat is, o course, what many people openly or privately

think. World bullies, even i their heart is in the right place, will in the end pay the price.Eric Foner wondered who was worse, Bin Laden or Bushs speechwriters. Im not sure whichis more rightening: the horror that enguled New York City or the apocalyptic rhetoricemanating daily rom the White House. Charles Glass explained the attacks by the act, as hesaw it, that America has come to stand in the same relation to the Tird World, especially itsMuslim corners, as Israel stands to its Palestinian subjects. Fredric Jameson ound the seeds othe eventin the wholesale massacres o the Le systematically encouraged and directed by theAmericans, the elimination o the Iraqi and Indonesian [sic] Communist Parties precipitatingSeptembers dialectical reversal.

[11] Te term post-le was rst introduced by Markovits and Brahm 2008. Alan Johnson, who hadpreviously used the term reactionary le, picked it up and ran with it successully in Johnson2008. I presented my rst extended treatment o the subject in Brahm 2008. On the concept

o structure o eeling, see Williams 1978.[12] Ali 2008.

[13] Norman Geras reads Alan Johnson hastily and me narrowly and selectively, in his criticismso us or utilizing the neologism post-le. Tough the scrutiny o our work on an importanttopic is welcome, the accusations are misplaced and exaggerated. Geras says, or example, thatI oer an argument that is not simply a bit wrong or inadequate in some way, but absurd:It is hard to overstate the eebleness o [my] explanation, according to him. But he does,indeed, overstate. For I am not, as he claims, trying to cleansehistory by use o a denitionalstratagem, or any other stratagem or that matter, as air-minded readers will readily observe.I am simply attempting to grasp the present with an eye to the uture. Nor, it seems to me,is Johnson merely crying apostasy, much less seeking to excommunicate anybody rom theHoly Church o the Le (into which I or one was never baptized, and to which surely not

even the editor o Democratiya can be thought to hold the keys). Neither o us is interestedin any vain exercise in ritual purication, as Geras hyperbolically asserts. Instead, as should beplain to the careul reader, our eort at terminological innovation is a response to the changingworld around us one mapped nicely by the authors under review here as well. Te post-le isreal, not imaginary; we couldnt get rid o it i we tried; I simply put a name to it. Geras takesJohnson to task in 2008a and mysel in 2008b.

[14] Siegel 2008.

[15] Freedland 2008.

[16] Hitchens 2008.

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