Dispensable and Bare Lives: Coloniality and the Hidden Political/Economic Agenda of Modernity Walter Mignolo Duke University, Wmignolo@Duke.Edu

Human Architecture: Journal of the Sociology of Self- Knowledge Volume 7 Article 7 Issue 2 Historicizing Anti-Semitism

3-20-2009 Dispensable and Bare Lives: Coloniality and the Hidden Political/Economic Agenda of Modernity Walter Mignolo Duke University, [email protected]

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Recommended Citation Mignolo, Walter (2009) "Dispensable and Bare Lives: Coloniality and the Hidden Political/Economic Agenda of Modernity," Human Architecture: Journal of the Sociology of Self-Knowledge: Vol. 7: Iss. 2, Article 7. Available at: http://scholarworks.umb.edu/humanarchitecture/vol7/iss2/7

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HUMAN ARCHITECTURE: JOURNAL OF THE SOCIOLOGY OF SELF-KNOWLEDGE A Publication of OKCIR: The Omar Khayyam Center for Integrative Research in Utopia, Mysticism, and Science (Utopystics)

Dispensable and Bare Lives Coloniality and the Hidden Political/Economic Agenda of Modernity

Walter Mignolo Duke University –––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––– [email protected]

Abstract: Walter Mignolo discusses how racial formations in colonialism and imperialism have to be understood in the context of the simultaneous transformation of Christianity and the emergence of the capitalist world economy. In his contribution he focuses on how Christian theology prepared the terrain for two complementary articulations of racism. One was founded on Chris- tian epistemic privilege over the two major competing religions (Jews and Muslims), the other on a secularization of theological detachment culminating in the “purity of blood” that became the biological and natural marker (Indians, Blacks, Mestizos, Mulatos) of what used to be the marker of religious belief (Jews, Moors, Conversos, Moriscos). Mignolo also discusses the emergence of secular “Jewness” in eighteenth century Europe and how these developments were concurrent with Western Imperialism in the New World. He concludes that secular Jewness joined secular Euro-American economic practices (e.g., imperial capitalism) and the construction of the State of Israel by what Marc Ellis describes as “Constantine Jews.”

I. INTRODUCTION: BETWEEN who is neither Islamic in any of its varied DISCIPLINARY/EPISTEMIC AND ethnic configurations (Arab, Iranian, Turk- ish, Indonesian, Central Asian, or Islamic RELIGIOUS/ETHNIC population in Western Europe or the US), IDENTIFICATIONS nor a Jew, a Black or an Indigenous person. My experiences and subjectivities are only My participation in this conference-se- indirectly related to religious, national and ries (Islamophobia, Antisemitism, Anti- life experiences of people who have grown Black Racism and Anti-Indigenous Rac- up and been educated in any, or various, ism), as well as my own work on the sub- historical and subjective configurations just ject, is and has been carried out by someone mentioned. I learned to see the world first

Walter D. Mignolo is William H. Wannamaker Professor and Director for the Center of Global Studies and the Humanities at Duke University. He is an active member of the project modernity/coloniality/decoloniality and has been exploring the decolonial option as an epistemic and political avenue to overcome the limits of modern and Western epistemology founded in the Greco-Latin legacies and Western Christianity and its reincarnation in Secular philosophy and sciences. Among his recent publications: The Idea of Latin America (2005), received the Frantz Fanon Award from the Caribbean Philosophical Association in 2006. Co-editor with Madina Tlostanova of Double Critique: Knowledge and Scholars at Risk in the Post-Socialist World (2006). In collaboration with Arturo Escobar, Globalization and the Decolonial Option (2007). Co-edited with Margaret Greer and Maureen Quilligan, The Black Legend. Discourses of Race in the European Renaissance (2007).

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as a son of European immigrants in Argen- dians” descended from Jews. Although he tina, more specifically from Northern Italy. dismissed the possibility, he had neverthe- Later on, when I went to the university and less addressed an issue that was in every- through my Ph.D. I became aware that at body’s mind. Acosta first dismissed the the university you learn to see the world possibility of a connection between Jews through a discipline, whatever the disci- and Indians because Jews had a sophisti- pline is. That is, you identify yourself with cated writing system from a long time ago a discipline and people identify you with while Indians were considered “illiterate” the discipline. You see yourself and they see (in the Western sense of the word). Jews like you as a historian, biologist, lawyer, sociol- money, Acosta points out, while Indians are ogist, and semiotician. Through a lengthy indifferent to it; and while Jews take cir- process I learned to identify myself by the cumcision seriously, Indians have no idea seventies as a semiotician (for which Mi- of it. Last but not least, Acosta pointed that crosoft Office doesn’t have a word in its if Jews were indeed the Indies origin of In- Thesaurus) interested in discourse analysis dians, they would not have forgotten the and literary theory on the one hand, and Messiah and their religion. the historical foundations of epistemology But then there was also the question of and hermeneutics (which later I realized enslaved Africans. What to do with them? were Western ways of framing certain op- Early in the sixteenth century, Indians were erations and procedures of knowledge considered vassals of the King and serfs of common to human beings—and perhaps God. Consequently, they couldn’t be en- living organisms) on the other hand. slaved—which legitimized the massive en- It was at the junction of this personal slavement of Africans. Bartolomé de Las turmoil that The Darker Side of the Renais- Casas supported, first, the dictum about In- sance: Literacy, Territoriality and Colonization dians and Africans, but then he corrected (1995) started as a process of understand- himself and condemned slavery. Africa and ing the opening up of the Atlantic in the six- Africans were already classified in Chris- teenth century, “modern” imperial tian cosmology as descendent of Ham, colonialism (that is European: Spanish, Noah’s cursed son. And that was not good Portuguese, French, British), in contradis- for one of the meanings of “Ham” was tinction to contemporary and similar orga- “Black.” The conjunction of “cursed’ and nization (cfr. Ottoman Sultanate or “black,” plus the fact that Ham’s descen- Quechua Incanate). I became aware, in the dents spread through Africa and to the cur- process of writing and researching, that rent Middle East, prompted the scenario for people in the Valley of México living in the the British to describe Spaniards as “Black- Aztec Tlatoanate, whether in conformity or amoors.” When Elizabeth I of England dissenting (like the people in Tlaxcala, who launched the campaign against the brutal- supported Hernán Cortés), were com- ity of Spaniards against the Indians (known pared—by the Spaniards—with the Jews. today as “the Black legend”), the Spanish The comparison was twofold: on the one were likened with “Blackamoors” under- hand, Indians and Jews were dirty and dis- lining the close connections between Spain trustful people; on the other hand, “Indi- and Muslims from North Africa (Greer, Mi- ans” in the New World may have been a gnolo and Quilligan, 2007). “Moors” and consequence of the Jewish diaspora. Jesuit “Black” were thus conflated as undesirable Father José de Acosta collected, in his Histo- persons in Christian Europe and used to es- ria Natural y Moral de las Indias (1589) a leg- tablish the internal imperial difference be- acy that goes back to the middle of the tween England (a want-to-be empire) and sixteenth century pondering whether “In- Spain (a leading imperial force).1

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Now what you have here is a messy could have been Muslim or not in Europe historical configuration, the emergence of and Africa; and finally with “African the racial matrix of the modern/colonial Blacks” when they were enslaved, trans- world; that is, of Western imperial capital- ported to the New World from different Af- ism and of racism as a necessary epistemic rican Kingdoms, diverse in their language, structure that legitimized at the moment religions and histories. The messy histori- the epistemic supremacy of Theology and, cal configuration entered, nonetheless, in a later on, the epistemic supremacy of Philos- process of order and management through ophy and Science as the ultimate proof of the creation of the Spanish Inquisition in the empirical existence of “races” dividing 1505. The Spanish Inquisition contributed the human species and ranking human be- to clear up the field. ings according to their degree of humanity In retrospect, the racial matrix (and the (ontology) and their degree of intellectual historical foundation of racism as we know capacities and knowledge (epistemology).2 it today) is a combination of two structures, However, the messy historical configura- one religious and one secular. Christian tion has an underlying logical and histori- Theology and European Egology (e.g., in cal structure: Christian Theology was the sense of René Descartes and Immanuel confronted with equivalent and competing Kant) both provided the frame for racial religions of the book (Jews and Moors); classification and management of the pop- with people like Indians who lack religion ulation. and were victims of the mischievous and Let’s imagine two triangles (see Figure perverse designs of the Devil; with a com- 1). One of them has Christian Theology/ plex population who descended from Ham Christians at the upper angle of the triangle and became a confusing mixture of “Black- and at the base you see Islamic Theology/ amoors”—that is, not exactly Moors as Muslims or Moors at one end and Jewish Muslims and simultaneously Black who Theology/Jews on the other. Then you have “Moriscos” and “Conversos” to des- 1 Emil C. Bartel points out (in her article ti- ignate the “religious mestizaje,” the mixing tled “To Many Blackamoors: Deportation, Dis- of Christian and Moorish blood on the one crimination and Elizabeth I”), that, hand and Christian and Jews blood on the In 1596, Queen Elizabeth issued an other. That was clear in the Iberian Penin- “open letter” to the Lord Mayor of sula, or, if you wish, in the heart of the London, announcing that “there are of late divers blackmoores brought into emerging empire. In the colonies, the situa- this realme, of which kinde of people tion was different since there was no reli- there are allready here to manie,” and gion of the book and therefore no ordering that they be deported from the country. One week later, she reiter- ated her “good pleasure to have those 2 Racism as an epistemological and ontolog- kinde of people sent out of the lande” ical construction of imperial knowledge (Chris- and commissioned the merchant tian Theology and Secular Egology (e.g., secular Casper van Senden to “take up” cer- philosophy and secular science), has been ar- tain “blackamoores here in this realme gued in several opportunities, following up on and to transport them into Spaine and Anibal Quijano’s seminal works on the “coloni- Portugall.” Finally, in 1601, she com- ality of power.” Racism has been construed as plained again about the “great num- epistemic colonial difference by devaluing knowl- bers of Negars and Blackamoors which edge beyond Greek, Latin, Christian Theology (as she is informed) are crept into this and Secular Egology (see Mignolo 2000, 2002) realm,” defamed them as “infidels, and as ontological colonial difference (Maldonado- having no understanding of Christ or Torres 2007) by devaluating non-Western people his Gospel,” and, one last time, autho- in relation to the ideal of Man both in the Euro- rized their deportation. (Studies in En- pean Renaissance and European Enlightenment glish Literature 1500-1900, 46.2, 2006, (e.g., consider for example the declaration of the 305-322). Right of Man and of the Citizen).

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Figure 1

theological-based knowledge, Christian of the expulsion of Moors and Jews from Theology became more and more displaced the Iberian Peninsula and the colonization by Spaniards or Castilian. And on the lower of the New World which brought Indians base on the triangle we have then Indians and Black Africans into the picture, I be- and Blacks/Africans. Religious blood mix- came aware also that my own subjectivity ture that engendered non-existing catego- was formed by the history of European im- ries until then as Moriscos and Conversos, migrants in South America and the Carib- in the Iberian Peninsula, were replaced by bean—by which I mean, not Creole from Mestizos/as and Mulatos/as in the New Hispanic descent since colonial times but World. But, while in the Iberian Peninsula European immigration that started toward the blood mixture between Moors and Jews the end of nineteenth century. And also, by was not accounted for (and probably phys- my own migration to the US to become a ically not very common), in the New World Hispanic/Latino,4 I realized that: the mixture of Mulatos and Mestizas or vice-versa engendered a new racial cate- a) Given the epistemic and ontological co- gory, Zambos and Zambas. From here on, lonial differences that structure the classification multiplied but all of them imaginary of the modern/colonial were displayed under the “purity” of Span- world, I enjoyed (as an Argentine from ish/Castilian blood (Cástro-Gómez 2006). European descent) “the privilege” When I convinced myself that logically (from the hegemonic model of Man and historically “race” was an epistemic and of Knowledge) of having an edge category to legitimize racism3 and that over the diversity of Indians and Afro- modern/colonial racism was a Western descendent in South America; theological construction at the confluence b) However, in relation to the European and US model of Man and of Knowl- edge I was “deficient”: not quite Euro- 3 This idea is further developed in the introduction and afterword, and illustrated by several of the articles contained in the collective 4 I dealt with the complicities between Isla- volume, Rereading the Black Legend: The Discours- mophobia and Hispanophobia in the paper pre- es of Religious and Racial Difference in the Renais- sented at the first of these series of workshops, sance Empires, edited by Margaret Greer, Walter published in Human Architecture: Journal of the Mignolo and Maureen Quilligan. Chicago: Chi- Sociology of Self-Knowledge, VI, Issue 3 (Summer cago University Press, 2007. 2008).

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pean (only European descent) and advantage of their privilege to join the indeed not really White in the US. The struggles carried on by progressive Indians Spanish accent colored me. Spanish and progressive Afro-South and Caribbean language has been demoted as a lan- Americans. I am not “representing or guage of ground-breaking and guiding speaking for them (Indians and Afro-de- knowledge since the eighteenth centu- scendent).” “They” have been speaking for ry, when French, German and English themselves for centuries. And of course, no took over the leadership of Western one will accuse me of representing or epistemology. Knowledge produced speaking for them when the “them” in and framed in Spanish language is to- question are Jews or Islamic. I use semiot- day, in the European Union, less influ- ics, discourse analysis and literary theory ential and less sustainable than as a tool to deal with the problem I just out- knowledge produced in English, lined. I am not using semiotics as a French or German—English, above all “method” to dissect “racism” as something due to the imperial leading role of the that is outside of myself and that I can US. “study” through my disciplinary identification. I am not hiding myself under the Thus, it is as a South American from clothing of disciplinary objectivity, as if dis- European descent cum Hispanic Latino in ciplinary formations where not infected by the US (ethnic identification) and someone the modern racial matrix or were epistemic trained in semiotic, discourse analysis and formations outside of it. literary theory, that I approach “racism” in I am here inverting the process and this the modern/colonial and imperial/colo- inversion is indeed my methodology: the nial world.5 The equation is relevant since I problem at hand is infected already by the am not starting from the discipline to un- racial matrix and there is no way to hide derstand an imperial management of hu- from this infection in any discipline (semi- man subjectivities (through racism) but, on otics, sociology, political science, biology, the contrary, I start from the subjective feel- bio-technology) and pretend that “racism” ings of my own history and of those who and “human being” or “humanity” can be are not immigrants in South America, but described and explained from the uncon- dissenting creoles from Spanish descent or taminated eyes of God (theology) or eyes of Mestizos and Mestizas. That is, I joined Reason (egology). Furthermore, disciplines forces with those who instead of using their are a surrogate for religious and ethnic privileges, in South America, of being from identities. Disciplinary identities are European descent (one way or another, that formed under the principle of objectivity, is, Creoles, Mestizas or Immigrants), take neutrality, reason without passion, mind without interference of affects, etc. Disci- plinary identities are formed on the basis of 5 By ‘modern/colonial’ I refer to the Euro- pean, philosophical and political concept of mo- a set of beliefs posited as detached from in- dernity, countered by dissenting histories dividual experiences and subjective config- placing coloniality as the missing half of the sto- urations. However, disciplinary identities ry. Moreover, when I say ‘imperial/colonial’ I refer to both sides of the equation, imperial/co- are no less identities than religious or eth- lonial. Although modern imperialism (that is, nic ones. Western capitalist empires) without colonies has From the sixteenth century on, been in place since the nineteenth century (e.g., England in South America and England and the epistemic and ontological constructions of US in China since the Opium War), there are no racism had two major devastating conse- capitalist Western empires without coloniality. quences: the economic and legal/political Thus, by imperial/colonial I mean imperiality/coloniality. dispensability of human lives. Dispensable

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lives were and are either assumed (natural- mentary meanings. The life of an enslaved ized “feelings”) or established by decree person is dispensable because once a given (laws, public policies). Two human com- enslaved-body is no longer labor-produc- munities that paid the price of economic ing it can be replaced by another enslaved- and political devaluation of human lives body. Behind the naturalization of eco- were enslaved Africans from the sixteenth nomic dispensability were all European At- to the eighteenth century and German Jews lantic imperial/colonial, merchants as well in the twentieth century. Both histories are as the monarchic states (Portugal, Spain, my own history as a human being; disre- France, England and Holland). Ottobah garding whether I am Black, Jewish or Ar- Cugoano gained his freedom in England, in gentine “from European descent.” the second half of the eighteenth century However, as an Argentine from European (after being enslaved in the Caribbean) and descent I cannot be oblivious to the fact that devoted several pages to the economic as- the two communities in question where en- pect of slavery and the dispensability of hu- slaved Africans and German Jews. Why so? man lives in his Thoughts and Sentiments on When, by who, and how was such cosmol- the Evil of Slavery (1976). One among many ogy put in place and why did the cosmol- observations, strictly relevant to the eco- ogy in question “constructed” enslaved nomic aspect of dispensable lives, is the fol- Africans and German Jews as undesirable, lowing: dispensable or unvalued human lives? The vast carnage and murders II. DISPENSABLE LIVES, ETHNIC committed by the British instiga- tors of slavery, is attended with a AND EPISTEMIC PRIVILEGES very shocking, peculiar, and al- most unheard of conception, ac- My understanding of anti-Semitism cording to the notion of the and the Holocaust comes from my under- perpetrators of it: they either con- standing of the racial matrix of the mod- sider them as their own property ern/colonial world. More speciﬁcally, it that they may do with as they comes from my understanding of dispens- please, in life or death; or that the able lives in a capitalist market-driven taking away the life of a black man economy (particularly in the transforma- is of no more account than taking tion of monopolistic mercantilism to free- away the life of a beast. trade mercantilism before the Industrial Revolution), coupled with the legal/politi- A very melancholy instance of this cal dispensability brought about by the for- happened about the year 1780 as mation of the modern-nation state in recorded in the courts of law; a Europe. The ﬁrst is the case of enslaved Af- master of a vessel bound to the ricans and the second of the murdered Jews Western Colonies, selected 132 of in the Holocaust. the most sickly of the black slaves, and Economic dispensability of human ordered them to be thrown overboard lives is a practice, and subsequently a cate- into the sea, in order to recover their gory, that did not exist before the sixteenth value from the insurers, as he had per- century. It was put in practice during the ceived that he was too late to get a good massive slave trade and exploitation of la- market for them in the West Indies. bor engendered by the European discovery (pp, 85; italics mine, WM) and exploitation of the New World. Dis- pensable economic lives have two comple- Cugoano’s observation was echoed

HUMAN ARCHITECTURE: JOURNAL OF THE SOCIOLOGY OF SELF-KNOWLEDGE, VII, 2, SPRING 2009 DISPENSABLE AND BARE LIVES 75 some 150 years later, by a Trinidadian Merchant Adventurers of London scholar and politician, Eric Williams. Will- were deprived of their monopoly iams recasts the making of enslaved Afri- of the Muscovy Company that was cans’ dispensable lives and re-framed the abrogated and trade to Russia legacy of the racial/colonial wound in a made free. Only in one particular context that was not visible at the time of respect did the freedom accorded Cugoano. For Cugoano, Christian ethics in the slave trade differ from the was the weapon available to him. And freedom accorded in other Christian ethics serve him to build two trades—the commodity involved complementary arguments. One about the was man (Williams, [194] 1994, 32). barbarian attitudes he found in colonizers from Spain and Portugal to Holland, Slavery, as a particular form of exploi- France and Britain. The other was the tation of labor, is consubstantial to capital- Christian struggle against the growth of ism. While slavery in the form it acquired in economic horizons that transformed hu- the economy of the Atlantic since the six- man subjectivities into predators that will teenth centuries officially came to an end go to any length in order to obtain eco- during the first half of the nineteenth cen- nomic benefits. Williams instead had the tury, it never ended in reality. On the one Marxist analysis of capitalism to replace the hand, not only did people from African de- ethical dimension that Christianity offered scent continue to be enslaved; when they to Cugoano. However, both Cugoano and were not, they continued to be racialized Williams introduced a dimension that was and marginalized from society. On the alien to both, Christianity and Marxism: other hand, a new form of slavery devel- they introduced the radical critic of racism, oped until today. More so, what never which means the radical critique of the im- ended was the commerce of human bodies perial/colonial foundation of capitalism. and, today, the commerce of human organs A telling paragraph by Eric Williams (Waldby 2006). Dispensable lives are those (in his Capitalism and Slavery, 1944) brings that become indispensable when they be- together the bottom line of racism in the come commodities.6 modern/colonial world and by the same It so happened that human agents who token constitutes an opening to the de-colo- controlled knowledge and money had the nial option that both critical Christianity authority (not necessarily the power) to and Marxism are missing. The de-colonial classify and manage sectors of the human option has been opened by subjects who ei- population. Their authority was an invisi- ther suffered directly the consequences of ble structure that was nevertheless im- racism (Cugoano) or its enduring legacy printed on their bodies and minds. That (Williams): invisible structure has been described as “the colonial matrix of power” in its syn- One of the most important conse- chronic as well as diachronic dimensions. quences of the Glorious Revolution of 1688 and the expulsion of the 6 The obvious connections between en- Stuarts was the impetus it gave to slaved Africans in the early imperial/colonial the principle of free trade. In 1698 Atlantic period and enslaved and exploited the Royal African Company lost its women, today, have made even the editorial page of the New York Times. See Bob Hebert, monopoly and the rights of a free “Today's Hidden Slave Trade” at http:// trade in slaves was recognized as a www.nytimes.com/2007/10/27/opinion/ fundamental and natural right of 27herbert.html?_r=1&n=Top/Reference/ Times%20Topics/Subjects/P/Prostitu- Englishmen. In the same year the tion&oref=slogin.

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The colonial matrix of power provided and added that federal programs would lead to provides legitimacy to constant processes “a European style government-run health of racialization decreeing human lives dis- care” (Financial Times, World News, on Fri- pensable under the progressive and never day September 21, 2007). If you put to- ending face of economic growth and capital gether the government-run “war” in Iraq accumulation. For that reason, capitalism and the government washing-hands on with a human face is either an honest uto- healthcare, you have two outstanding ex- pia or a perverse lie. Good intentions to end amples of dispensability of human lives in poverty are misleading in the sense that the benefit of corporate-run economy and poli- very concept of poverty was invented and tics supporting it. It is also another good ex- introduced in the rhetoric of modernity to ample of “efficiency in management” to hide the fact that the poor are indeed lives reduce cost and to increase benefits on the that are dispensable and as such they are ei- dispensability of human lives. Thus, the ther discarded or when necessary made in- brutal transformation of slavery in the six- dispensable as labor force and consumers teenth century and the Jews’ Holocaust in (The Economist, August 2007, the New Mid- the twentieth century are two outstanding dle Class in Latin America).7 cases of the “naturalization” of dispensable Another example, among many, are the lives in a society in which reducing costs Health Care Centers in the U.S. The New and increasing production and accumula- York Times (Sunday, September 23, 2007) tion of wealth go hand in hand with politi- reported the story of Habana Health Care cally saving communities from the in Tampa Florida. In 2002 the Habana “danger” menacing it (e.g., communists, Health Care was purchased by a private in- Jews, terrorists, immigrants, you name it). vestment firm which bought, around the These are the final horizons of salvation same period, another 48 Health Care Cen- and the reason for living. ters in the country. “Efficiency” and “Man- agement” were put at work. There was an III. DISPENSABLE AND BARE LIVES: immediate personnel reduction; costs in COLONIALITY OF KNOWELDGE AND daily life of patient’s needs were also effi- ciently reduced. The cost the families of the OF BEINGS patient paid was maintained. Conse- quently, patients receive less and less atten- Behind the history of slavery in the for- tion, several died as a consequence of mation of the Atlantic economy, the foun- careless attention, while the private inves- dation of capitalist economy and, later on, tors increased their economic benefits. of the nation-state, there was something President George W. Bush was reported as major, as I have tried to suggest. Slavery defending the privatization of Health Care: practiced on African bodies was the tip of “Democratic leaders want to put more the iceberg of a most fundamental perver- power in the hand of government by ex- sity: human beings making human lives panding federal healthcare programs. It’s dispensable and transforming them into so incremental a step towards government- commodities. Five centuries later, Norbert run healthcare for every American.” He Wiener saw the dangers in the domain of technology when he adverted to “the human use of human beings” (Wiener 1949). 7 A good account of the “invention of eco- He was writing on the edge of the Jewish nomic poverty” (different from the religious sense of “poverty of spirit”) was provided by Holocaust. While Africans were the first Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation. The Polit- victims of the economic side of imperial ical and Economic Origins of Our Time, Boston: subjectivity, the Jews were the first victims Beacon Press, 1944, pp. 35-58.

HUMAN ARCHITECTURE: JOURNAL OF THE SOCIOLOGY OF SELF-KNOWLEDGE, VII, 2, SPRING 2009 DISPENSABLE AND BARE LIVES 77 of the modern state. Human lives became differently located in the ethno-racial clas- dispensable in the domain of the economy sification in the modern/colonial world and of the state—that is to say, as technolo- based on Christian Theology and Secular gies for controlling economy and authority Egology. In both cases, nevertheless, the two spheres of the colonial matrix of power conceptual analysis is embedded in the linked to racism and patriarchy. memory of a community of people de- Hannah Arendt provided a detailed graded or suspected from the official rheto- analysis revealing the dispensability of hu- ric and sensibility controlling authority, man lives in the sphere of the political economy and, above all, the principles of (Law, the State). Arendt’s analysis is at once knowledge (e.g., epistemology). This is historical and conceptual. Historically, it what Césaire had to say, being in France af- traces the avatars of the Jews, in Europe, after WWII and close to the impact of the Ho- ter they were expelled from Spain at the locaust. He suggested a detailed analysis of end of the fifteenth century. Although I’m the steps taken by Hitler and Hitlerism not claiming that all Jews in Germany and since he (Césaire) suspected that such Poland that were victims of the Holocaust study will reveal that, were descendent from those expelled from Spain, I do claim a direct link between the …the very distinguished, very hu- Spanish Inquisition, the expulsion of the manistic, very Christian bourgeois Jews, and the Holocaust. They are all logi- of the twentieth century that, with- cally linked to the colonial matrix of power; out being aware of it, he has a Hit- they are all different manifestations of the ler inside him, that Hitler inhabits logic of coloniality. That the Holocaust can- him, that Hitler is his demon, that if not be explained through the history of Eu- he rails against him, he is being in- rope only, as has been perceived by consistent and that, at bottom, Martinican poet, essayist and activist Aimé what he cannot forgive Hitler for is Césaire. Not only that it cannot be ex- not the crime in itself, the crime plained through the history of Europe but against man, it is not the humiliation that, on the contrary, the Holocaust “re- of man as such, it is the crime against flected” on Europe itself what European the white man, the humiliation of merchants, monarchs, philosophers and of- the white man, and the fact that he ficers of the State did in the colonies. Han- applied to Europe colonialist proce- nah Arendt also perceived the connections dures which until then had been re- between the Holocaust and European colo- served exclusively for the Arabs of nization of South Africa, but her view was Algeria, the “coolies” of India, and still “centrifugal” (looking from Europe the “niggers” of Africa (pp. 36; ital- outward) while Césaire shifted the geogra- ics mine, WM). phy of understanding and made his observation centripetal (looking from outward We should add the Indigenous, Native, toward Europe). Fourth Nations, Aboriginals of Americas Césaire (like Cugoano and Williams), from Chile to Canada, Australia and New narrates, analyses and conceptualizes colo- Zealand. As for the analysis that Césaire niality at the intersection of the historical imagined and suspected will reveal what legacies of African slavery and Western cat- he described in the paragraph above, was egories of thought while Arendt does it at perhaps provided—indirectly—by Claudia the intersection of the historical legacies of Koonz’s magisterial The Nazi Conscience Jewish people and Western categories of (2003). Koonz observes that thought. However, Jews and Africans are

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What surprised Jewish Germans exterminate them. during this period was not the cru- Hannah Arendt offered the first con- elty of kleptocrats, fanatics, and ceptualization, to my knowledge, of a situ- malcontents, but the behavior of ation in which human lives become friends, neighbors, and colleagues dispensable when they are stripped of the who were not gripped by devotion legal web that links people to the State, that to Nazism… Germans who, in is, that makes people citizens. Like Césaire, 1933, were ordinary Western Euro- who saw the problems in Europe from his peans had become in 1939, any- experience of colonial histories, Arendt saw thing but. (2003, pp 11-12) the problems in Africa and Asia from her experience as a Jew in Germany. That is The telling lesson of Césaire’s suspi- why Arendt’s view is centrifugal while Cé- cion and Koonz’s scholarly conclusion is saire is centripetal: geo-politics of knowl- how subjectivities have been formed under edge is crucial to delink (or to decouple) the naturalization of dispensability of hu- from imperial assumptions that categories man lives in the frame of the colonial ma- of knowledge are one and uni-versal; that trix of power. During the period of heavy is, knowledge is and should be centrifugal. slave trade lives made dispensable for eco- First of all, Arendt elaborates on the nomic reasons implied that the people in- philosophical implications and shortcom- volved in slave trade or benefiting directly ings of the Rights of Man. Writing while the or indirectly from it, did not subjectively Universal Declaration of Human Rights care. And if they did not care it was because was not yet stamped, Arendt’s reflection is either they accepted that Africans were not on the “Declarations of the Rights of Man quite human or did not care because they and of the Citizens” that followed the were getting used to accepting the fact that French Revolution but was preceded by the there are human lives who are just as dis- “Bill of Rights” in late seventeenth century pensable as human beings even though England and by “the Rights of the People” necessary as workers, be they enslaved, in sixteenth century Spain. These, however, servants or employed at minimum wage naturally, are out of Arendt’s horizon. In and without health insurance, etc. any case, her analysis of the Rights of Man In the Holocaust (in which the main is strictly offered at a time when the Uni- victims where Jews although other “irregu- versal Declaration was being written while lar” people and citizens were also consid- she was completing her book. Arendt per- ered dispensable—gypsies as well as ceives insightfully that “man, and the peo- “Aryan citizens” alleged to have damaged ple” have been taken out of God’s tutelage genes or homosexual inclinations, shared a and placed under the frame of Man: “The heritage, language and culture with their people’s sovereignty (different from that of tormentors), were declared a “problem” to the prince)—was not proclaimed by the be solved (see chapter on Du Bois, titled grace of God but in the name of Man, so “What Does It Mean to be a Problem?”, by that it seemed only natural that the “in- Lewis Gordon in his Existentia Africana, alienable” rights of man would find their Routlege, 2000,). To solve the problem it guarantee and become an inalienable part was necessary to invent strategies (technol- of the right of the people to sovereign self- ogies as we say today) to eradicate them government” (Arendt 1948, 291). from the community, to make them non-cit- Arendt makes clear the link between izens, to deprive them of all citizenship the Rights of Man and the emergence of na- rights and once they were converted to tion-states in Europe, after the French Rev- “things” (but not into “commodities”), to olution which has been relegated as a

HUMAN ARCHITECTURE: JOURNAL OF THE SOCIOLOGY OF SELF-KNOWLEDGE, VII, 2, SPRING 2009 DISPENSABLE AND BARE LIVES 79 forerunner in most recent Universal Decla- still believed that “Never before had the ration of Human Rights. What are the con- Rights of Man, solemnly proclaimed by the nections between both? Arendt points out French and the American revolutions as the that: new fundament for civilized societies, been a practical political issue” (pp. 293). The The full implication of this identifi- problem here is a generalized one mainly cation of the rights of man with the among scholars and intellectuals whose rights of peoples in the European sensibilities and subjectivities have been nation-state system, came to light shaped by their dwelling in countries only when a growing number of where the Glorious, the American and the people and peoples suddenly ap- French revolutions took place. Notice peared whose elementary rights Arendt’s unconscious move: she mentions were as little safeguarded by the first the French and then the American rev- ordinary functioning of nation- olutions. Why? The chronological order has states in the middle of Europe as been displaced by the unconscious hierar- they would have been in the heart chical structure of coloniality of knowledge of Africa. The Right of Man, after and of being: within imperial internal dif- all, had been defined as “inalien- ferences, France (and German and En- able” because they were supposed gland) comes first and the US in second to be independent of all govern- place. Racism is pervasive, it operates at all ment; but it happened that the mo- levels. Furthermore, Arendt seems to be ment human beings lacked their oblivious or unaware that Rights of the own government and had to fall People (Ius Gentium) became a practical po- back upon their minimum rights, litical issue in the sixteenth century with no authority was left to protect the European “discovery” and invention of them and no institution was will- “Indians” in the New World—another si- ing to guarantee them. (1948, 292) lence produced by the coloniality of knowledge and, in a way, a manifestation of Thus, the Rights of Man and of citizen- internal epistemic racism, to which Imman- ship came together. One of the dramatic uel Kant has significantly contributed: consequences (particularly today for immi- Spain, for Kant, as later for Hegel, belonged grants in Europe and the US) is that lack of to Europe’s South. citizenship implies lack of protection. There The history of “Rights” (of People, of are no instances in the Universal Declara- Man and of Citizen, Human Rights) is con- tion to protect people who are not citizens substantial to and constitutive of the colo- or who have been deprived of their citizen- nial matrix of power. Such a statement ship. Stripped out of their citizen’s rights, would be endorsed, today, by liberal think- citizens become “legally naked,” bare lives ers and journalists writing in The Financial as Arendt (and more recently Giorgio Ag- Times (http://www.newamerica.net/pub- amben) conceptualizes it. Thus, dispens- lications/articles/2007/ able lives are such either for economic humanitarian_action_can_mask_imperial_ reasons (commodity) or legal-state reasons agenda_5832). Arendt is correct in asserting (bare life). Multiplication of these two basic that the Rights of Man and of Citizens, in “technologies of death” can be traced geo- the history of Europe since the Glorious politically in Africa, Asia, South America Revolution (for her, the American and the and, lately, by US outside of the country: in French revolutions), is part and parcel of Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib. the nation-state building. What is missing At the time of writing her book Arendt in the picture is that British, American and

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French versions of nation-state building when it was forgotten that it was have been made possible by the Colonial man who had deprived his fellow revolution initiated by Spanish and Portu- men of freedom, and when the guese monarchies in the sixteenth century. sanction for the crime was attribut- The Colonial revolution installed, in the ed to nature. New World, monarchic managements of the colonies by displacing and marginaliz- Yet in the light of recent events it is ing the existing orders in the New World possible to say that even slaves still (Maya, Inca, Aztec) while disrupting (by belonged to some sort of human extricating people from their communities) community; their labor was need- the existing order in Africa. Arendt per- ed, used and exploited, and this ceived, however, that from the Rights of kept them within the pale of hu- Man to the “the recent attempts to frame a manity. To be a slave was after all to new bill of human rights” (pp. 293; she is have a distinctive character, a place referring to the Universal Declaration of in society—more than the abstract Human Rights being drafted while she was nakedness of being human and noth- finishing the manuscript) there was still ing but human (pp. 297; italics mine) something slippery and hazardous in that: “Nakedness of being” (also “bare life” […] no one seems able to define is another expression used by Arendt and with any assurance what these picked up by Italian philosopher Giorgio general human rights, as distin- Agamben), then, is not just the condition of guished from the rights of citizens, losing specific rights, “but the loss of a com- really are. Although everyone munity willing and able to guarantee any seems to agree that the plight of rights whatsoever…the calamity which has these people consists precisely in befallen every-increasing numbers of peo- their loss of the Rights of Man, no ple” (pp. 297). Arendt concludes then that, one seems to know which rights they lost when they lost these hu- Man, it turns out, can lose all so- man rights. (pp. 293) called Rights of Man without losing his essential quality as man, his For Arendt the historical situation she human dignity. Only the loss of poli- witnessed in Europe, between 1930 and the ty itself expels him from humanity. late 1940, was unprecedented. Unprece- (pp. 297; italics mine) dented was not the fact that many people lost their homes, “but the impossibility of We arrive here at the crux of the matter: finding a new one” (pp. 293)—a historical dispensable lives and bare lives. Bare lives situation that prompted Arendt to compare are the consequences of legal-political rac- it with slavery. And this is what she has to ism at work in and for the control of author- say about slavery: ity. Thus, the concept of citizenship fulfilled that role and insured the authority of the Slavery’s crime against humanity State to keep people in and out of it. Citi- did not begin when one people de- zenship is a legal-administrative entity that feated and enslaved its enemies was con-fused with the nationality of the (though of course this was bad person with his or her citizen number. For enough), but when slavery became that reason, undesirable nationals (in this an institution in which some men case German Jews), could be deprived of were “born” free and others slave, their citizen number because of their na-

HUMAN ARCHITECTURE: JOURNAL OF THE SOCIOLOGY OF SELF-KNOWLEDGE, VII, 2, SPRING 2009 DISPENSABLE AND BARE LIVES 81 tionality; being Jewish was not exactly be- are dispensable when expelled from human- longing to a given religion but to a given ity not because the loss of polity but because ethnicity. Those who were born free but they are pulled out of their community (en- had the bad luck of being born in lan- slaved Africans yesterday, young women guages, religions, histories, memories, and and children today) to become commodi- styles of life that were not the norm of a ties. Lives become bare in racist rhetoric given nation-state (say, Spain, France or that justifies national homogeneity and Germany), may run into trouble. And the ideal citizens. In the first case, commodity is Holocaust was an extreme and dramatic preferable to humanity; in the second citi- exercise of the state controlling the na- zenship is preferable to humanity. Thus, we tion(s). have here epistemic racism at its best, Dispensable lives are instead the conse- working toward controlling economy and quences of the racist foundation of eco- authority—two pillars of the modern/colo- nomic capitalist practices: cost reductions, nial world which is also the world of impe- financial gains, accumulation to re-invest to rial capitalism (i.e., the Ottomans could be further accumulation, are economic goals described as imperial but certainly not as that put human lives in second place. Rac- imperial capitalism) and Western Christian ism is a necessary rhetoric in order to deval- monarchies and Western secular nation- uate, and justify, dispensable lives that are states. portrayed (by hegemonic discourses) as This is the moment to remember Aimée less valuable. Once again, the bottom line Césaire’s view of the Holocaust. What of racism is devaluation and not the color of counted for Césaire was “the application of your skin. The color of your skin is just a colonialist procedures” to the “white man.” marker used to devaluate. Thus, human “Colonialist procedures” had been in- lives as commodities and the fact that slavery vented and implemented on people classi- transforms human being into commodities, fied as inferior or out-cast—closer to means that they did not just lose their rights animals than to Man or unbelievers, pa- but they lost their humanity. At the other gans, derailed by the Devil on uncivilized. end, the concept of citizenship served a sim- Five centuries after the colonial matrix of ilar regulatory function for controlling pop- power has been put in place and imple- ulation. Thus, it is not only the loss of polity mented in relation to non-Europeans, it itself that expels him (Man) from humanity, as went back to Europe like a boomerang. But Arendt has it. Enslaved Africans have been this time not so much in terms of economy not expelled but pulled out from their com- and the transformation of human lives into munity. It is shortsighted, and self-serving, commodities, but in terms of the state and for Arendt to say that “yet in the light of re- the law. cent events it is possible to say that even Dispensable lives and bare lives are slaves still belonged to some sort of human subsumed—in the language of de-colonial community” (pp. 297), and to place bare life projects that I engage in here—as two di- and the Holocaust above dispensable lives, mensions of the coloniality of being. You human lives transformed into commodi- have to have the power of decision and ac- ties. tion to be able to extract people from their Thus, both crimes against humanity— community and sell them as a piece of fur- dispensable and bare lives—are ingrained niture and/or to expel them from your in the very logic of coloniality. Certain lives community even if they were, like you, become dispensable in racist rhetoric to jus- German citizens but Jewish nationals in- tify economic control, chiefly exploitation stead of ethnic Germans (Volksdeutsche). of labor and appropriation of natural. Lives Both have in common to be a consequence

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of epistemic imperial racism.8 In order to uted to nature” (pp. 297). The ethical and carry on such projects, you have to be able political principle that freedom and sover- to make human beings to feel that they are eignty consists in the “no right” for any hu- not quite human like you, either because man being to enslave or disposes any other they are a commodity (or exploited like an- human being of their rights, was one of the imals) or because they are made into illegal crucial arguments of Ottobah Cugoano, in or criminals that do not deserve to be in the his Thoughts and Sentiments about the Evil of polity of citizens. Briefly, common to both Slavery (1786). However, Cugoano’s argu- the economic legacy of slavery and the po- ment was out of the framework of Euro- litical/legal legacy of the Holocaust, is the pean political philosophy, the genealogy of epistemic racism of the modern world: the thought in which Arendt was dwelling. Cu- coloniality of knowledge. The coloniality of goano articulated de-colonial political phi- being is a consequence of the coloniality of losophy but, as a Black, African ex- knowledge (see above). Consequently, de- enslaved man, he did not have the ontolog- colonial projects have to start from the de- ical and epistemic privilege that would coloniality of knowledge and of being, in have made his cause heard. The crux of the order to de-colonize the economy and au- matter here is also that it is difficult to claim thority (e.g., political economy and political the privilege of suffering, which is implied theory). in Arendt’s argument. Both Cugoano and Let’s now—after the clarifications Arendt were arguing for the same human made above regarding dispensable and injustices and abuses against humans. They bare lives—come back to Arendt’s always were doing it from the vantage points of insightful observations. For Arendt slavery both their language of political philosophy became a crime against humanity when it (Christian for Cugoano, secular for Arendt) became “an institution in which some men and their own experiences as African sla- were ‘born’ free and others slave, when it very and Jewish internal-colonial racialized was forgotten that it was man who had de- subjects. My subjectivity is not embedded prived his fellow-men of freedom, and in African slavery or Jewish modern-colo- when the sanction of the crime was attrib- nial memories (since their expulsion from the Iberian Peninsula). But I want to join 8 This specification is important. There is a forces with both arguments and, at the common argument that goes something like same time, eliminate the claim of privileg- this: Oh, well, after all Blacks (or Latinos/as, Na- tive Americans, Moslems, etc.) are also very rac- ing suffering, which Indigenous people in ist. Yes, it is often the case, and it has to be the Americas, New Zealand and Australia analyzed. The starting point would be to distin- also have. And of course we can extend the guish between imperial and subaltern forms of racism, and go from there: if there are forms of list. Black and Latinas racism, be assured that they There are historical reasons in the for- are not imperial!!! Imperial racism goes beyond mation and transformation of the modern/ (although it embraces) the particular nation- state (of Christian Monarchy of the sixteenth to colonial world that made possible for Jews eighteenth centuries). There is a double dimen- in Europe to have access to education and sion in imperial racism, which starts in the colo- to participation in the public sphere before nies and reverts toward the national imperial territory. We are witnessing this phenomenon racialized minorities in the colonies. Great today with the immigration in the European thinkers like Spinoza, Marx, Freud, the Union and the U.S. And certainly, the Holocaust early Frankfurt School, etc., were able to was part of it. Thus, the pertinence of Césaire’s observation inverting the directionality of protest in the political and epistemic do- Arendt’s analysis. “Inverting” here means shift- mains. Africans and Afro-Caribbeans were ing the geography of reason, and thinking ana- delayed in the process. W.E.B. Dubois, in lectically instead of dialectically or in uni- dimensional historical terms. the US in the first half of the twentieth cen-

HUMAN ARCHITECTURE: JOURNAL OF THE SOCIOLOGY OF SELF-KNOWLEDGE, VII, 2, SPRING 2009 DISPENSABLE AND BARE LIVES 83 tury and the great congregation of Africans enslaved women, traffic of children, traffic and Afro-Caribbean thinkers around of human organs, etc., or those sacrificed to Présence Africaine, in the fifties, launched a the economic and political order—e.g., in- powerful collective discourse of which vasion of Iraq) and the political order (e.g., CLR James, Aimé Césaire and Frantz the Holocaust). In the economic order, hu- Fanon, among others, bear witness. The man beings are pulled out from their com- historical reason is indeed the colonial/ra- munity and transported as any other cial matrix of power as it worked in differ- merchandise. In the political order, human ent global (e.g., national/imperial) beings are expelled from their community designs—from the Spanish Christian Em- and left bare, to their own destiny (e.g., ref- pires to the British and French secular uges) or eliminated (e.g., Jews, Gypsies). transformations, to the post-colonial impe- Césaire’s observation that the white man’s rialism of the US. In the historical logic of burden, in the Holocaust, was to endure the the colonial matrix of power, indigenous crime against white people without neces- people in the Americas, and Afro-descents sarily noticing that Hitler was applying in in the Spanish and Portuguese ex-colonies, Europe the same principles that Europe where left behind people from Afro-de- originally applied to their colonies (in scent in the French and British Caribbean America, in Asia, in Africa), brings together and in the U.S. The differential of course dispensable and bare live. The-interconnec- cannot be explained by the degree of intel- tion between both comes together in West- ligence of the ethnicity involved, but by the ern cosmology in the history of racial-ontological and racial-epistemic dif- International Law. ferences implicit in imperial/global de- International law is an invention of the signs—who among the racialized sixteenth century to cope with the realities population, and why, had access to educa- of an unexpected enlargement of the world tion? But it is explained also by the internal and the sudden awareness, for European imperial difference: of the racialized popula- state officers, merchants and intellectuals, tion who had no choice but to learn the im- of—for them—unknown people. While perial language, those who fell under records of the Europeans’ bewilderment French and English imperial rules (and and effort to accommodate into Christian learned French or English) made a quicker cosmology those who were not accounted and stronger intervention in the intellectual for in the Bible exist, records of Incas’s and arena and in the politics of scholarship. Aztecs’s equal bewilderment do not Let’s move on and see how dispensable abound. In spite of the unbalanced archival lives in the economic colonial order join material from both sides of the spectrum bare lives in the political order of the na- (the diversity of European’s reactions and tion-state. responses versus the diversity of Aztec’s and Inca’s reactions and responses), we IV. INTERNATIONAL LAW, LAND, could confidently assert that both parties (in their diversity) tried to understand and DISPENSABLE AND BARE LIVES accommodate the stranger into their own cosmology. However, European’s imperial Césaire’s perception of the Holocaust, designs prevailed over the Incanate and the quoted above, bringing together dispens- Tlatoanate, and knowledge in European able and bare lives, provided the connec- languages (based on Greek and Latin) pre- tion between the economic order vailed over knowledge in Indigenous lan- (dispensable lives, lives as commodity— guages (Aymara, Quechua, Aztec, e.g., enslaved Africans yesterday; today, Tojolabal, Maya-Quiché, etc.). And with it,

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European subject and subjectivity took con- rope and to justify their conquest of the trol of the colonies pushing aside subjectiv- New World. ities formed through centuries in Anáhuac, Francisco de Vitoria’s sustained reflec- Tawantinsuyu and the Yucatan Penin- tions on ius naturale (natural right) and ius sula—coloniality of knowledge goes hand gentium (people’s right/nation’s right) and in hand with coloniality of being and the his concern with order as a way to achieve formation of the colonial matrix of power. justice, were followed (without direct refer- Modern/colonial (e.g., from the Re- ence) by Immanuel Kant, in the eighteenth naissance to WWII) International law was century, in his reflections of perpetual formulated first in the School of Salamanca. peace and cosmopolitanism. “Without di- The debate on the distinction between Ius rect reference” doesn’t imply that Kant was Naturalis and Ius Gentium was a concern al- cheating or that he was a dishonest scholar ready within Western Christians: the emer- that plagiarized Vitoria. I am saying some- gence of Christian Kingdoms (Spain, thing else: Vitoria and Kant are in the same Portugal, France and England) contested frame of mind, the same logic and subjec- the authority of the Pope and the legacies of tivity of modernity/coloniality and that is Roman Emperors. Ius Gentium, in Francisco simply why Kant was concerned about de Vitoria, for example, was necessary to similar issues two centuries after Vitoria unite Western Christians’ dispensing at the and that is why (although he could have same time of an Emperor and the Pope as adopted a position closer to Sepúlveda or “rulers of the globe” (orbis). In the same Eu- Las Casas) his view of things was closer to ropean context, Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda Vitoria. Instead, Marx (also indirectly) fol- published in 1529, exortación al Emperador lowed in a Kantian-Hegelian world the po- Carlos V para que, hecha la paz, con los prínci- sition adopted by Las Casas. And Donoso pes cristianos, haga la Guerra contra los turcos. Cortés, when he wrote Liberalismo, Social- One of the central issues of the debate was ismo and Catolicismo (1852), followed the about just and unjust wars. The key issue legacies of Ginés de Sepúlveda and placed here is that the debate was one sided: Otto- himself vis-à-vis the legacies of Vitoria/ mans and Muslims had no say in the debate Kant and Las Casas/Marx. that was from, by and about Christian “re- International Law is an integral part of ligious security.” Muslims may have had coloniality: it legalizes the rhetoric of mo- something to say regarding the war and vi- dernity while simultaneously enforcing the olence Christianity directed against them. logic of coloniality. It was prompted by the When Juan Ginés de Seplveda extended his “discovery” of unknown lands and un- exhortation to declare war against Indians, known people; and by traffic of enslaved this was not because Indians were menac- Africans to the New World. In 1979, U.O. ing Western Christians and invading Span- Umozurike, from the University of Nigeria, ish territories but, on the contrary, because published a report on International Law and Indians presented a difficulty for the peace- Colonialism in Africa. The book was pub- ful expansion of Christianity. Sub-Saharan lished by Nwamife Publisher Limited, in Africans were also not invited to the de- Enugu, Nigeria. Given the book-market bate, even if the Portuguese had been in- and the trade-names of European and US vading their territory pulling out and scholars and intellectual, the book did not enslaving a significant part of the popula- get much attention, beyond a numerical tion. minority interested in the topic. In the Modern/colonial international law 1990s Siba N’Zatioula Grovogui, an African came to light in the Christianity’s double political theorist based at John Hopkins bind: to defend themselves in Western Eu- University, followed up on the issue re-

HUMAN ARCHITECTURE: JOURNAL OF THE SOCIOLOGY OF SELF-KNOWLEDGE, VII, 2, SPRING 2009 DISPENSABLE AND BARE LIVES 85 viewing international law in the modern/ capitalism. Francisco de Vitoria in Sala- colonial world from the histories of colonial manca, Spain, in the mid sixteenth century; Africa and the colonial experience of Afri- Hugo Grotius in the Netherland at the be- cans. For the purpose at hand, here is a ginning of the seventeenth century; and lengthy paragraph that would help us in Seraphin de Freitas, in Portugal, critically unveiling the interconnections between in- responding to Hugo Grotious, constitute ternational law, dispensable and bare lives: three pillars of International Law in the historical foundation of the modern/colonial As a constituent element of West- world. Subjects whose subjectivities and ern culture, the law of nations has sensibilities have not been formed by the been integral to a discourse of in- European memories of Greece and Rome, clusion and exclusion. In this re- of Greek and Latin, and by its modern im- gard, international law has formed perial languages (Italian, Portuguese, its subject and objects through an Spanish, French, German and English), be- arbitrary system of signs. As rheto- gan to be constructed, in the European dis- ric of identity, it has depended course of international law, as legal objects. upon metaphysical associations “Legal objects” have been stripped of their grounded on religious, cultural, or language, religions, families, communities, racial similarities and differences. sensibilities, memories—in sum, legal ob- The legal subject, for the most part, jects became, for European international has been composed of a Christian/ law, not only bare but above all dispensable European self. In contrast, the Eu- lives. If non-European people were and are ropean founders of the law of na- targets of commodification of human lives, tions created an opposite image of they are also targets to be outlawed. As le- the self (the other) as a legal object. gal objects, non-European subjects had no They materialized this legal objec- say in International Law, unless they tification of non-Europeans agreed with the terms stipulated by Euro- through a process of alterity. The pean law-makers. other has comprised, at once, non- Let’s return now to Aimé Césaire. European communities that Eu- When he stated that Hitler had applied to rope has accepted as its mirror im- the White Man what Europeans had previ- age and those it has considered to ously created to deal with non-European be either languishing in a develop- people (excepting the “mediators” who mental stage long since surpassed played into the game of imperial rules, by Europe or moving in historical from the Africans who captured and sold progression toward the model pro- other Africans to be enslaved, to more con- vided by the European self (Gro- temporary industrial and politicians in ex- vogui, 1996, 65). Third World countries who sell their soul to IMF or private corporations in the US., The simultaneous epistemic process of France, Germany, Spain, etc., and open inclusion/exclusion, led first by Christian their pockets), international law was cer- theology, later on by philosophy and sci- tainly implied in his dictum: International ence, and lately by political economy sup- Law that served to convert non-European ported by political theory, of which subjects into legal objects was now put at international law was and continues to be a the service of the nation-state in order to le- key instrument, is at the historical founda- gally expel non-ethnic Germans from the tion of the modern/colonial world, of mo- nation-state. Césaire made this statement in dernity/coloniality and of imperial 1955. The statement (and his Discourse on

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Colonialism) clearly shifted the geography gions” of Aztecs and Incas in the New of reason: international law was seen from World; and certainly not among Bud- the consequences of its implementation. dhist and Hindus; Three years before, Carl Schmitt published The Nomos of the Earth (1952), in which he b) “Secularization” was able to detach clearly stated the Eurocentered nature of God from Nature (which was unthink- International Law. Both statements, Cé- able among Indigenous and Sub-Sa- saire’s and Schmitt’s, occupied distinctive haran Africans, for example; and seats in the geo-politics of knowledge. unknown among Jews and Musilms). Schmitt was not concerned about the colo- The next step was to detach, conse- nies and the colonial world in the process— quently, Nature from Man (e.g., during those years—of struggling for liber- Frances Bacon’ Novum Organum, 1620). ation, but with the crisis in Europe and, “Nature” became the sphere of living more particularly, of Germany. However, organisms to be conquered and van- Schmitt had to take European colonies into quished by Man; account. Césaire was not concerned with c) As Christian Theology became the Europe and Germany, but with the colo- privileged and imperial locus enuncia- nized world and people converted into le- tionis, it prepared the terrain for two gal objects. However, he had to take Europe complementary articulation of racism, and Germany into account. De-coloniality illustrated in the two triangles above. of knowledge and of being starts from the One was founded on Christian shift that is illustrated in Césaire’s state- epistemic privilege over the two major ment. And it follows by recognizing the competing religions (Jews and Mus- contribution, although partial, that Schmitt lims), a privilege founded on the de- has made from the perspective and interest tachment (I mean detachment and not of Europe to critique Eurocentrism in inter- merely a “distinction between the two national law. realms” which was common among other religions, even among the non-re- V. CONCLUDING REMARKS ligions spirituality of Aztecs and Incas) between God’s heaven and people’s earth. The other was founded on the The larger frame in which the racial “secularization of the theological de- formation of the modern/colonial world tachment”: when the detachment be- has to be understood should take account tween God and Man became of the context of concurrent transforma- secularized in the detachment between tions of Christianity and the emergence of Nature and Man, then racialization the Atlantic economy—an economy of in- was located in the “natural” markers of vestment and accumulation of wealth human bodies and “purity of blood” (wealth of nations for Adam Smith) that we became the biological and natural call “capitalism” (after Karl Marx). These marker (Indians, Blacks, Mestizas, Mu- two concurrent moments could be summa- latas) of what was before the marker of rized as follows: religious belief (Jews, Moors, Conver- sos, Moriscos); a) The Christian detachment between d) The emergence of secular “Jeweness” God’s heaven and people’s earth; a de- in Eighteenth Century Europe trans- tachment unfamiliar to co-existing “re- formed religious “Judaism”: the believ- ligions” such as Judaism, Islam, and er became, simultaneously, a citizen; a the so-called (by Spaniards) “non-reli- condition that was not open to other

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“religions.” One, because Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus or Incas, were not European residents at the time and, second, it was the complicity between Christianity and secular Christian Eu- ropeans who managed to negotiate, maintaining imperial control, Christian believers with European secular citizens; e) Last but not least, all of these went hand in hand with the consolidation, during sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, of homo economicus imperiali. If homo economicous, in the West, could be traced back to the thirteenth century, homo economicous imperiali, in the West, is without a doubt the transformation prompted by the economic change of scale opened by the conquest of the New World and the subsequent massive exploitation of labor. Secular Jew- ness joined secular Euro-American economic practices (e.g., imperial capitalism). The major consequence of the complicity between secular Jews and Euro-American economic and political practice ended up in the construction of the State of Israel—what Marc Ellis describes as “Constantine Jews.”

Anti-Semitism today is clearly a consequence of the historical collusion between Western (neo) liberalism and secular capitalism, backed up by Christianity, on the one hand, and Constantine Jews,” on the other.

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