Journal articles on the topic 'Intimate enemy'

The figure of Satan has been a standing puzzle in the history of religion. Where did this figure originate, and what is its role? Satan is scarcely present in traditional Judaism to this day and is not present at all in classical Jewish sources—at least not in the form that later Western Christendom knew him, as the leader of an “evil empire,” of an army of hostile spirits who take pleasure in destroying human beings. Yet images of such spirits did develop and proliferate in certain late antique Jewish sources, from ca. 165 BCE to 100 CE. Specifically, they developed among groups I shall call “dissident Jews,” which included the early followers of Jesus; within decades, the figure of Satan and his demons became central to Christian (and later to Islamic) teaching. How did this occur?

En el siguiente trabajo se analiza el cuento “El pabellón del descanso” (2009) de Amparo Dávila, a partir de dos situaciones expresadas en el relato: la primera examina la relación del personaje con el símbolo de la casa; la segunda, el decaimiento anímico de la protagonista y la situación de desesperanza que la conduce a un desenlace funesto. Dentro del primer análisis se elabora un acercamiento intratextual con otros dos cuentos de la escritora zacatecana; “Oscar” (2009) y “El último verano”, para desarrollar el carácter interpretativo del hogar. En el segundo momento, se toma el concepto de “desesperanza” fundamentado a través de los autores Toro-Tobar, Grajales-Giraldo y Sarmineto-López (2016) para luego explicar desde la Psicología el funesto desenlace de Angelina, su protagonista. Las características simbólicas y la condición psicológica de los personajes davilianos, son figuras literarias recurrentes a lo largo de su narrativa.

This article examines studio photographs of Taliban fighters that deviate from popular media images which often confine them within the visual coordinates of terrorism, insurgency and violence. Gathered in a photographic book known simply as Taliban, these 49 photographs represent the militants in Afghanistan through a studio photography aesthetic, transplanting them from the battlefields of the global war on terror to intimate scenes of pretence and posing. Besides troubling the Taliban’s expected militant identity, these images invite an opaque and oppositional form of viewing and initiate enigmatic visual and imaginative encounters. This article argues that these alternative visualizations consist of a compassionate way of seeing informed by Judith Butler’s notions of precarity and grievability, as well as a viewing inspired by Jacques Rancière’s aesthetic dissensus that obfuscates legibility and disrupts meaning. Consequently, these photographs counter a delimited post-9/11 process of enemy identification and introduce forms of seeing that reflect terrorism’s complexity.

In this paper, first we present the experimental results about a small group of people exchanging private and public messages in a virtual community. Our goal is to study the cognitive network that emerges during a chat seance. We used the Derrida coefficient and the triangle structure under the working assumption that moods and perceived mutual affinity can produce results complementary to a full semantic analysis. The most outstanding outcome is the difference between the network obtained considering publicly exchanged messages and the one considering only privately exchanged messages: In the former case, the network is very homogeneous, in the sense that each individual interacts in the same way with all the participants, whilst in the latter the interactions among different agents are very heterogeneous, and are based on "the enemy of my enemy is my friend" strategy. Finally, a recent characterization of the triangular cliques has been considered in order to describe the intimate structure of the network. Experimental results confirm recent theoretical studies indicating that certain three-vertex structures can be used as indicators for the network aging and some relevant dynamical features.

- Carl Schmitt, a controversial twentieth century jurist and political philosopher never addressed the subject of urban planning. Nevertheless, many of his intuitions and theoretical suggestions, buried before their time together with the ashes of the Modern, are still able to stimulate thought which enquires into the intimate nature of space and those disciplines which deal with it. More specifically, this paper analyses three key concepts of Schmitt's theory (the nomos of the earth, the earth-sea dichotomy and the political friend-enemy categories) that are particularly interesting because they provide fertile suggestions on the ‘arcanic' nature of space, useful suggestions for a more open-minded rereading of many subjects with which planners deal everyday. At the end of the essay, this possibility is examined in relation to the subject of the ‘space of globalisation'.

[First paragraph]The Tropic of Baseball: Baseball in the Dominican Republic. Rob Ruck. Westport CT: Meckler, 1991. x + 205 pp. (Cloth n.p.)Trading with the Enemy: A Yankee Travels Through Castro's Cuba. TomMiller. New York: Atheneum, 1992. x + 338 pp. (Cloth US$ 24.00)Read Bart Giamatti's Take Time for Paradise (1989) or any of the other grand old game sentimentalists and you'11 discover that baseball somehow perfectly reflects the temperament of U.S. culture. This match, in turn, accounts for basebali's enduring and penetrating popularity in the United States. Read Ruck and Miller and you'11 learn that baseball is more popular and culturally dominant in the Dominican Republic and Cuba than it is to the north. The suppressed syllogism affirms that U.S. and Caribbean cultures hold intimate similarities. If that is true, this Caribbeanist has been out to lunch; then again, no one ever accused economists of having acute cultural sensibilities.

The radical distinction between civilization and barbarism used in the discourse of the national states of Chile and Argentina during the second half of the XIX century, not only was used to justify the genocidal military intervention of the territories inhabited by the mapuche indigenous from the south of both countries; but also inaugurated a conflictive relationship that remains to the present. The main objective of the paper is to identify the scope of the “civilization project” initiated during the second part of the 19th century and expressed during the 20th and 21st centuries through different and broad forms of marginalization, both ethnic and -by extension- immigrant, thecriminal and LGBT+ groups; in such a way that it is a historical, systematic and institutionalized process of producing marginalities, which considers various production strategies of the intimate enemy, especially from the cultural industry available in each time. The results show how “marginal/marginalized” is produced and reproduced, through policies of death, dispossession, inclusion/exclusion, in a constant relationship from moral, criminal and neoliberal rationalities.

Latin American maritime history is virtually an unexplored subject among English-speaking scholars. Opportunities for research abound since practically every Latin American nation has had an intimate affair with the water; for some it has been sweet and for others salt. One can find a maritime topic which complements his or her interest in almost any Latin American country or any era.Even land-locked Paraguay has been profoundly influenced by its maritime environment. It has fought two major wars since independence and the outcomes of both were influenced by the exploitation of the extensive river systems. During the War of the Triple Alliance, Paraguay lost control of the rivers, the only efficient means of transportation, early in the contest. As a result, Paraguay's enemies held the initiative and could find a haven under the guns of their fleet if the battle went poorly on land. Conversely, during the early stages of the Chaco War, Paraguay's control of the rivers gave it a significant logistical advantage over its enemy, Bolivia. Paraguay had to bring its supplies up the Paraguay River and its tributaries; on the other hand, Bolivia had to bring its supplies up the west slopes of the Andes and then down the other side.

The paper attempts to establish an intimate and epistemic connection between the philosophy of Gandhi and Psychoanalysis. The paper seeks to understand ethico-affective connection between the ‘truth methods’ employed by Gandhi (Satyagraha) and psychoanalysis as a technique, both passionately devoted to the quest of conscious/ unconscious truths. Both have been based on honest explorations of primal feeling, fears, and ever pervading intra psychic conflicts that humans constantly grapple with. The ethical and political plane of Satyagraha will be explored to situate its psychological significance of truth, using the psychoanalytic insights on Gandhi, by some eminent psychoanalytic thinkers such as Erik Erikson, AshisNandy, SudhirKakar and many others. The paper, as an ode to Gandhi and his explorations of truth, will help us understand its psychological characteristics underlying Gandhian values and its power of greatest transformative potential. One such psychological components of Satyagraha, identified by Erikson, was the critical significance of self-analysis paired with an attempt to understand another man’s inner conflicts. Secondly,how for Gandhi, the methods of confrontation with the enemy ( internal and external) was purely non-violent based on the acceptance of oneself as a person who also shares other’ s inner mechanisms. Thus, we find an idea of psychological interconnected and oneness permeating the human consciousness. Lastly, the paper will highlight the non separation of personal and political realm, which is the marker of Gandhian life philosophy, unique as it has been so far.

In his celebrated study of colonisation, The Intimate Enemy, Ashis Nandy observes of Indian responses to British colonisation: ‘The pressure to be the obverse of the West distorts the traditional priorities in the Indian’s total view of the…universe…It in fact binds him (sic) even more irrevocably to the West.’ This problem stems, he adds, from a tendency by both coloniser and anti-colonial thinker to ‘absolutise the relative difference between cultures’. This article will argue that Nandy’s observation is an essential element in a South African response to colonisation which does not repeat colonialism’s assumptions in the name of replacing them. In particular, it argues against an essentialism in which a reified ‘Western culture’ is replaced by an equally reified ‘African culture’ which is just as constraining and just as likely to be used as a rationale for domination as the colonial ideology it purports to reject. It will further argue that we avoid the trap of which Nandy warns if we define intellectual colonisation as an ideology which seeks to suppress or eliminate modes of thought which do not conform to a dominant set of values and its antidote, decolonisation, as the removal of this constraint, not as its replacement by new constraints. This decolonisation does not seek to abolish ‘Western culture’ but to integrate it into a world view in which it takes its place alongside African, Asian, and Latin American cultures. It therefore recognises the syncretic nature of all cultures and views of the world and seeks to enhance, rather than obstruct, conversations between them.

Transfers of property are an integral part of armed conflicts and instances of mass political violence. Not just the state and the military, but also civilians confiscate, dispossess, loot and redistribute wealth across ethnic, national, class or religious lines, in the process re-enacting and sustaining the boundaries of othering and belonging that stand behind the conflict. In this way, economic violence takes on an essentially political dimension. Although, to date, rarely conceptualized as such, even grave robbery perpetrated at the burial sites of a defeated enemy or a member of othered minority constitutes a practice of alterity and dehumanization. And while, in the aftermath of violence, this very fact has the ability to invest things taken from mass graves with a particularly disturbing potential, this article reflects on the practices and affective dynamics surrounding objects of a distinctively unsettling status: golden teeth and dental bridges in their ambivalent condition between material objects (valuables) and bodily remains of the dead. They are considered in this article through the conceptual lens of ‘atopic objects’, a notion designed to bring to the fore both the out-of-place quality and the at once as-well-as/neither-nor character of those things, suspended on the threshold between human remains and material objects, private possessions and body parts of othered and violently dispossessed people. In this article, the author asks how this uneasy ontological status is experienced, acted upon and negotiated by the new (and rarely rightful) ‘owners’ and offers an insight into the practical, affective, political and also legal framings through which ‘atopic objects’ are being constructed and reconstructed either as things or as body parts and, at the cost of their unsettling quality, become embedded in the postwar orders, both in the intimate order of the body and in the political–economic order of the state.

Experts and religious leaders have tried everything in order to create an intimate and harmonious relationship between religious people in this famous, very pluralistic country of Indonesia. Through writings both books, magazines, journals and even through seminars and pulpits of sermons always suggest the importance of cooperation and dialogue between religious groups. Although it seems, their suggestions have not had such an exciting effect. To gain success for the realization of the noble goal of lasting peace and brotherhood among people who in reality have different religions and faiths, it is necessary to have the courage to invite them to make changes in the field of education, especially through a diversity-based curriculum. Because, through a curriculum like this, it is possible to be able to dismantle the theology of each religion which has tended to be displayed exclusively and dogmatically. A theology which usually only claims that only religion can build worldly welfare and usher in humans in God's heaven. The doors and rooms of heaven are only one that cannot be opened and entered except with the religion that he embraces. Even though such aology, we must admit, is something that is very worrying and can disturb the harmony of the people of religions in the present pluralistic era. An era in which all societies with all their elements are required to be interdependent and collect their fate together in order to create lasting peace. Here lies the challenge for religion (including Islam) to re-define itself in the midst of other religions. Or by borrowing the language John Lyden, an expert on religions, is "what should I think about other religions than one’s own? What should a Muslim think about non-Muslims. Is it still as an enemy or as a friend. Of course there is still the presumption of one religion with another as an enemy. It must be thrown away. Isn't in fact all of us as brothers and friends? Islam through the Qur'an and its Hadith teaches tolerant attitudes. In addition, the importance of reforming the PAI curriculum by presenting the face of tolerant Islam can be explained from the point of view of perennial philosophy, essentialism and progressiveness. In the view of perennialism the curriculum is "construct" which is built to transfer what has happened in the past to the next generation to be preserved, continued or developed. While in the philosophical perspective of progressivism, the position of the curriculum is to build a future life in which the past, present, and various plans for the development and development of the nation are used as the basis for developing future life. From this it is possible to teach the principles of humanist, democratic and equitable Islamic teachings to students. A principle of Islamic teachings that is very relevant to enter the future of the world which is characterized by the existence of cultural and religious diversity.

In literary narratives by Nava Semel (1954–2017) and Etgar Keret (b. 1967), both Israeli children of Holocaust survivors, readers encounter the kinds of searching questions about inheriting the burden of traumatic inheritance, witnessing, and postmemory frequently intrinsic to second-generation literature in other national contexts. However, their works are further distinguished by acute examinations that probe the moral fabric of Israeli society itself, including dehumanization of the enemy through slogans and other debased forms of language and misuses of historical memory. In addition, their fiction measures the distance between the suffering and pain of intimate family memory (what Semel once dubbed their “private Shoah”) and ceremonial, nationalistic forms of Holocaust memory, and the apartness felt by the children of survivors who sense themselves somehow at odds with their society’s heroic values. Semel’s numerous articles, and fiction as well as nonfiction books, frequently address second and third-generation trauma, arguably most impressively in her harrowing five-part novel And the Rat Laughed (2001) that spans 150 years but most crucially juxtaposes the experiences of a “hidden child” in a remote wartime Polish village repeatedly raped with that of her grandchild writing a dutiful report for her class in contemporary Israel. Elsewhere, in a distant future, a bewildered but determined anthropologist is set on assembling a scientific report with coherent meaning from the fragmented “myths” inherited from the barbaric past. Over the years, Keret (generally known more for whimsical and surreal tales) has often spoken in interviews as well as his memoir about being raised by survivors. “Siren”, set in a Tel Aviv high school, is one of the most acclaimed of Keret’s realist stories (and required reading in Israeli high schools), raises troubling questions about Israeli society’s official forms of Holocaust mourning and remembrance and individual conscience. It is through their portrayals of the cognitive and moral struggles of children and adolescents, the destruction of their innocence, and gradual awakening into compassionate awareness that Semel and Keret most shine, each unwavering in preserving the Shoah’s legacy as a form of vigilance against society’s abuses, whether toward “internal” or “external” others.

In 1969, Butler (1969) first coined the term “ageism” to confront “prejudice by one age group toward other age groups” (pp. 243). As with other “isms,” such as racism and sexism, ageism leads to bigotry and discrimination, though it is a very distinct beast in that, for the most part, other “isms” refer to those different from ourselves: distinct, mutually exclusive, and impervious groups. Conversely, age is a fluid social construct in which we are all intimately bound as we move through the lifespan, transitioning in and out of different age-groups. Unlike other “isms,” individuals negotiate shifts from the “in-group” of youth to the “out-group” of old age. Yet we are all immersed, largely unconsciously, in this ubiquitous but too often unrecognized “ism” that needs to be named and challenged.

Military operations are complex adaptive systems in which the means applied must be regarded as important as the ends sought. Complex adaptive systems work in an everything–affects–everything mode with various levels of interrelatedness. Conceptualizing military operations as a complex adaptive system allows biological evolution to be used as point of departure. Thus military operations are seen as a process that rests on adaptation and mutation in which the challenge is to offset changing conditions coming both from the environment and interaction with the enemy. The effects landscape as proposed metaphor makes clear that evolution by natural selection and the conduct of war are intimately related. Both reflect conflict, survival, and conquest in a very similar and fundamental way. The proposed metaphor helps think about military operations differently by also offering some advantages.

The immediate aftermath of the Second World War saw a transnational effort to identify and prosecute those individuals who committed war crimes and crimes against humanity in such fora as the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg. However, parallel national processes were carried out across Europe to punish those citizens who, by a range of definitions, allegedly collaborated with enemy occupiers and committed treason. In the Soviet Union, suspected collaborators were tried as counterrevolutionaries in both the areas where crimes were committed and also those distant from regions of German or Romanian occupation. By examining tribunals in Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan in this article, I argue for the importance of identifying and prosecuting alleged collaborators to the Soviet postwar project – a project which was far from limited to areas in the western parts of the country and which remained intimately linked to prewar, Stalinist understandings of justice and revolution.

In 1940, just before the Germans entered Paris, Haim Sloves, an Eastern European Jewish intellectual, finished writing a play in Yiddish, Homens mapole, or The Downfall of Haman. It was an act of resistance, as Haman, the great enemy of the Jews, was a transparent reference to Hitler, but within and beyond that, it continued a project that had absorbed many Eastern European Jews since the second half of the nineteenth century. Rabbinic tradition, they felt, was dying. It was urgent to discover a new source of inspiration for the Jewish people. In 1944–45, when Sloves and other Jewish survivors returned to Paris, where they had immigrated years before the war, the task of rebuilding seemed more urgent still. To continue to search for a new, secular mode of expression was intimately tied to the very revival of the Jewish people. Between 1945 and 1949, Homens mapole, considerably shortened and somewhat modified, played to resounding acclaim not only in Paris but also in several cities across three continents.

The article calls into question the prevailing discursive construction in contemporary debate on privacy and surveillance. At the core of this discourse is a moral coupling wherein surveillance is perceived as enemy and privacy as friend. Even if this binary approach renders arguments for democratising data more persuasive, a political cost accompanies it. As this discourse situates political struggle at the level of digital infrastructure and political structures, the moral coupling largely overlooks the ambiguities of how people in their various activities in a digital environment experience surveillance and privacy. Such a framing may discourage users at large from engagement with politics of privacy. Edward Snowden’s autobiography is taken as a prominent example of the prevailing discourse. While analysing Snowden’s descriptions of privacy and surveillance critically, the author points out the specific value of life stories in describing what privacy means and why it matters. While we cannot assume all people to be equally capable of considering how their own life intersects with the history of their society, we can presume that varying life stories should contribute to the public knowledge of privacy. To provide the framework necessary for appropriately contextualising empirical evidence, the author presents a model wherein privacy is composed of five dimensions: solitude, anonymity, secrecy, intimacy, and dignity.

“Why should not system be opposed to system, brevity to brevity, cheapness to cheapness, entertainment to entertainment, and perseverance to perseverance? Thus alone can the enemy be met in his marches and his countermarches, and thus a reasonable hope may be indulged of baffling his schemes.”–Annual Report of the Religious Tract Society, 1808 On the Thursday morning of August 23, 1821, the executive committee members of the Religious Tract Society (RTS) gathered for a special meeting. Spread before them were specimens of irreligious street literature sold by their competitors. Balefully, they eyed a “good number of the low, mischievous, and disgusting publications now on the table.” The committee was in fact already intimately familiar with these types of publications, but their review of them inspired the RTS to redouble their efforts “to publish tracts with the express purpose of meeting and suppressing the lowest class of books now circulating.” To this end, they deemed it “expedient to descend the scale which the society's publications have hitherto maintained, in order to meet the evil so much complained of.” Furthermore, the committee resolved to focus their attention on discovering “the best means” for putting their new, lowbrow tracts into “extensive circulation.”

In May 2020, one of the largest conflicts in recent decades occurred on the Sino-Indian border. Against the background of discussion of heated armed clashes, observers have also noted that in the past years China has been using hybrid tactics as means of ensuring its control over the Line of actual control on the border with India. This article examines the hybrid tactics of the Chinese side to ensure sovereignty on the border with India the PRC's policy of installing military and civilian infrastructure in disputed and border areas. In the areas claimed by India and Bhutan, Chinese objects for various purposes appear - from camouflaged barracks and installations of unclear purpose to residential villages. These installations testify to the application by China of the so-called "сabbagestrategy" - the gradual "surrounding" the enemy with its infrastructure in order to establish de facto Chinese military and economic control over the disputed territories. In addition, Beijing has launched a large-scale development program for the border Tibet Autonomous Region in order to strengthen its borders. Such actions are hybrid tactics used by China in other territorial disputes, for example, around the islands in the South China Sea. They allow the PRC to have a military superiority over the opponent, to intimidate him with its economic and military influence in the region. Such actions fit into the framework of one of the priorities declared by the current Chinese leadership: the protection of national borders and the restoration of sovereignty over the territories “lost” during the so-called century of humiliation.

Silvia Federici writes, "Starting from an analysis of "body-politics," feminists have not only revolutionized the contemporary philosophical and political discourse, but they have also begun to revalorize the body. This has been a necessary step both to counter the negativity attached to the identification of femininity with corporeality, and to create a more holistic vision of what it means to be a human being." (15) I wonder, what does it mean for my body to live on different land than my parents'? How do I reckon with the gender binary, and with having a body and a gender that exist outside of normative narratives? What does it mean to dig into sexuality in a world of gender-based violence, of body negativity, of sex negativity, of moralism? What does it mean to fully grieve in a culture that obliges the body to be quiet and pretty? It is strenuous to seek embodiment in a world where the body is a site of so much violence and pain. Nonetheless, I am curious, and I am committed to the revalorization of the body as a site of liberation and wholeness. “Water Memory” is the story of the traumas that continue to live in my body—ancestral and current. It is written as an invocation of intimacy partnered with grief. It encourages relationships (with the self and with others) that not only allow, but revel in, the fullest embodiment of the body’s experience. I write from a place of queerness, of transness, as a first-generation Greek/Turk/Uke Canadian with chronic pain and a mood disorder. Yet, I insist, my body is not the enemy.

LANGUAGE NOTE | Document text in Chinese; abstract also in English.在本文筆者要逐一檢討在西方四個常見的贊成安樂死的論據（仁是在、生命贊素、尊嚴、自決），並且指出這四個論據分別與中國儒家的價值觀（仁、所欲有甚於生、士可殺不可辱、泰山與鴻毛）有不同程度的共鳴及相通之處。由於這些共鳴及相通之處只是在某程度上，而非徹底相通，所以透過中國古代的價值觀的相對照，也可以更清楚看出這四個西方論據之性質及其可能限制。筆者的結論是，從儒家的價值觀來看，除了在某極端的情況中，一般來說這四個支持安樂死的論據都是說服力不足。This paper attempts to analyze four major arguments in favor of the moral acceptability of voluntary euthanasia (including physician-assisted-suicide) as found in the West, and tries to assess these arguments through Chinese Confucian ethics and its perspectives on life and death. Through such a cross-cultural dialogue the author concludes that there is some similarity as well as difference in Chinese and western values. The western moral values appealed to in advocating voluntary euthanasia, to a certain extent, can strike an echoing chord in Confucian ethics. In other words, though the debate on euthanasia is a contemporary phenomenon, the arguments and their underlying values in favor of its moral acceptability are not entirely foreign to premodern Confucian ethics. This resonance notwithstanding, the Confucian echoes are also limited. Behind some general agreements are some significant disagreements as well. Hence this cross-cultural dialogue can reveal in a clearer manner the salient traits and possible flaws of the western moral arguments in favor of euthanasia, and can contribute to a multicultural reflection on some contemporary moral controversies.This paper begins by clarifying the etymological meaning of "anle si," the phrase for "euthanasia" in Chinese as well as in Japanese. The root of the phrase can be traced to either Mencius or Pure Land Buddhism. The latter possibility seems more probable, and "anle si" then means a death or dying free of suffering. In this paper, I shall restrict the term "anle si" or "euthanasia", to voluntary, active euthanasia and physician-assisted-suicide.The first common western argument in favor of euthanasia is the argument of mercy. For some patients the dying process is accompanied by such excruciating pain that euthanasia is a good way of release from suffering. Since the patient is on the way to die anyway, such suffering is pointless and is not worth-enduring. Euthanasia for such dying patients is to spare them from such pointless suffering and is therefore a manifestation of mercy. This argument can find an echo in Confucian ethics. The fundamental value in Confucianism is "ren," and one of its meanings is benevolence. According to Mencius, the root of "ren" or benevolence lies in compassion, i.e., feeling intense pain in seeing others suffer. Traditional Chinese medicine also adopts this cardinal Confucian virtue as its fundamental guiding norm, hence the dictum that medicine is "renxin renshu" (benevolence and benevolent art). Thus if the premise "Euthanasia is the only way or best way to eliminate pain in the dying process" is empirically true, one can infer that euthanasia can be justified by Confucian ethics of ren. However, in light of the recent progress in palliative medicine and hospice care, the aforementioned premise can be empirically true only in very limited circumstances, which are analogous to a torture scene in the recent Chinese novel, then turned into movie, The Red Sorghum. (The author also observes that the hospice philosophy is more in consonance with the Taoist philosophy of Zhuangzi.)The second common western argument in favor of euthanasia is the argument of the quality of life. It has been argued that some sufferers of disease and accidents do not want to live anymore not because of intractable pain, but because of the irreversible and unacceptable low level of the quality of life (e.g., in Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease, ALS, MS, quadriplegic, etc.). Since the condition is incurable, and the persons involved would rather die than to endure this "living hell," euthanasia is liberation from this bondage. Confucianism does not subscribe to the doctrine of the sanctity of biological life either, and places heavy emphasis on the quality of life, to be defined with reference to ren and yi (i.e., in the wide sense of supreme virtue), rather than on the quantity of life (i.e., longevity). To live out one's life to its natural limit is not in itself desirable. In order to secure a high quality of life, in some circumstances, one has to be prepared to die, even by taking matters into one’s hand, lest what is going to transpire in the natural life span will decrease the quality of life. However, the limit of the Confucian echo is that Confucianism cares largely the moral quality of life, and cares very little about the biological quality of life. As long as the low quality of biological life is not to affect adversely one’s moral quality of life, there is no good reason to terminate one’s biological life.The third common western argument in favor of euthanasia is the argument of death with dignity. According to this argument, our biological condition can be so bad (e.g., loss of control, being brought back to the infant condition, in a state of zombie) that it is a humiliation to our sense of dignity. Such an assault on our dignity can be more intolerable than physical pain. Euthanasia can therefore deliver us from such an undignified state of existence. In Confucianism, especially since the Han Dynasty, to commit suicide in order to avoid humiliation, disgrace, and dishonor is not only desirable, but also obligatory. Such an idea of "a man of integrity prefers death to humiliation" is even accepted by a number of Chinese intellectuals during the so-called "Cultural Revolution." However, historically the Confucian endorsement of death with dignity is largely limited to the cases in which the assault on human dignity came from an external source (from enemies, emperor, government), and such an assault is not a universal predicament. Furthermore, in those circumstances in which to commit suicide is the only way to avoid humiliation it happens because one’s destiny is controlled by hostile forces; there is no friendly force at hand to make one feel better. In the contemporary case of euthanasia, in contrast, the assault on human dignity comes from an internal source (disease, old age, bodily and mental decay all stem from our mortal and corruptible body) and is therefore a universal human phenomenon. Unless we conceive disease and sickness as an enemy, Confucian ethics would not view our deteriorating biological condition as an assault on human dignity. If we accept that our mortal embodied life is a part of our human condition, we can hardly say that bodily and mental decay is undignified. Besides, especially when palliative and hospice care are available, a patient is not captured and isolated in a maleficent environment, but is surrounded by health care professionals who are there to help us. After all, one purpose of hospice care is to help patients to maintain their dignity while they are travelling in this last stage of the journey of life. Hence the Confucian endorsement of euthanasia as death with dignity is quite limited.The fourth common western argument in favor of euthanasia is the argument of self-determination. According to the cherished western value of autonomy, an individual should be given the liberty to decide on things that matter much to him or her. Like the decisions relating to marriage, procreation, contraception, education, etc., the decision on how and when to die is one of the most intimate and personal choices a person may make in a lifetime. Hence we have the right to die; some even claim that this is a human right, both a negative right (whose correlative duty is nonintervention in suicide attempts) and a positive right (whose correlative duty is suicide assistance). After all, whose life is it anyway? In Confucian values, individual autonomy has never been a cherishedvalue; nor has there been any human rights thinking. That one can decide on the time and circumstances of one’s death is only implied. According to Confucian values one should choose a good death (good in the moral sense) even by actively bringing it about. Since "ought" implies "can," that in some circumstances a person ought to commit suicide implies that the person is morally permissible to commit suicide. However, the Confucian echo of pro-euthanasia argument is the weakest here. The western argument is concerned with the permissibility of suicide and euthanasia, whereas Confucian ethics is concerned with the impermissibility of not committing suicide. In other words, the western argument is concerned with the permissibility of all suicide, regardless of its worth. Confucian ethics, on the other hand, is concerned with only the permissibility of some suicide, those that are deemed morally worthy. The western argument is concerned with the right of euthanasia, but Confucian ethics is only concerned with the rightness, the right conduct, or the right exercise of the right, of euthanasia. Furthermore, the ideas of self-ownership and individual sovereignty are entirely foreign to Confucian values.To conclude, the Confucian echo of these four western arguments varies. The resonance is most prominent in the first argument and weakest in the last argument. This cross-cultural comparison should be instructive to Chinese as well as to the people in the West because it shows which values are universal and which are not. For example, the western society has the tendency to view the value of autonomy as self-evident ("We hold these truths to be self-evident......"), but this value is obviously not self-evident to the Confucian mind. Who is right, and who is wrong? That the Confucian endorsement of euthanasia is only limited should give something to every member of the global village to ponder about.DOWNLOAD HISTORY | This article has been downloaded 220 times in Digital Commons before migrating into this platform.

Abstract Background Impacts of biotic stressors, such as consumers, on coral microbiomes have gained attention as corals decline worldwide. Corallivore feeding can alter coral microbiomes in ways that contribute to dysbiosis, but feeding strategies are diverse – complicating generalizations about the nature of consumer impacts on coral microbiomes. Results In field experiments, feeding by Coralliophila violacea, a parasitic snail that suppresses coral growth, altered the microbiome of its host, Porites cylindrica, but these impacts were spatially constrained. Alterations in microbial community composition and variability were largely restricted to snail feeding scars; basal or distal areas ~ 1.5 cm or 6–8 cm away, respectively, were largely unaltered. Feeding scars were enriched in taxa common to stressed corals (e.g. Flavobacteriaceae, Rhodobacteraceae) and depauperate in putative beneficial symbionts (e.g. Endozoicomonadaceae) compared to locations that lacked feeding. Conclusions Previous studies that assessed consumer impacts on coral microbiomes suggested that feeding disrupts microbial communities, potentially leading to dysbiosis, but those studies involved mobile corallivores that move across and among numerous individual hosts. Sedentary parasites like C. violacea that spend long intervals with individual hosts and are dependent on hosts for food and shelter may minimize damage to host microbiomes to assure continued host health and thus exploitation. More mobile consumers that forage across numerous hosts should not experience these constraints. Thus, stability or disruption of microbiomes on attacked corals may vary based on the foraging strategy of coral consumers.

The concept of God by the Hebrew mind is not projected in pompous psychological, philosophical, and theological complex terms. It was not a great deal of the learned mind but empirical knowledge of shepherds, warriors, battles, temple services, etc. characterized the world of imagery full of freshness and significance. The imagery in the book of Psalms is based upon conceptual relationships and divine principles which are integrated appropriately from the traditional and conceptual metaphorical analysis. Among the varied divine images, the image of God as a Refuge is a predominant one that makes room for many other protective images. It signifies the existing relationship between Yahweh and Israel, Christ and the Church. The imagery asserts a spiritual need of man to be in the right relationship and intimate prayer fellowship with God to defend oneself from the destructive powers of the enemy. Metaphorical images underline the allegorical interpretation as well as typological relations. The paper deals with some of the select divine images and their significance contextually.

By redefining villeinage as applicable only to those of English heritage, Somerset v. Stewart inadvertently expanded Englishness to encompass English Jews, who had been associated with villeinage both in the medieval and early modern periods. The sudden cessation of legal and political references to Jewish villeinage post- Somerset constitutes a reframing of Jewish history, with the goal of reestablishing the boundary between Englishness and Jewishness. To fully understand Somerset’s contribution to the making of Englishness, we must, therefore, look beyond the case’s impact on racial slavery and consider the role the case played in legally and politically redefining English Jews as fundamentally non-English.

Scholars of war and combat posit that soldiers are more willing to execute strikes on adversaries when they perceive lower risk to themselves or less connection with their targets. Accordingly, technologies like the drone, which drastically expands the distance between adversaries, should make it easier to strike decisively and without remorse. The empirical record tells a different story. Despite operating very far away from the battle theater, drone operators suffer PTSD at the same rate as pilots of manned aircraft. We argue that this unanticipated consequence of drone warfare stems from the unique way in which drone tactics marry spatial distance and temporal duration. Drone operators surveil their targets via detailed video footage for extended periods of time, both before and after firing, in order to identify or locate potential targets, to measure collateral risks, and afterward to assess a strike’s effectiveness. We argue that the clarity and duration of this surveillance tempers any advantage derived from ‘distance’. Spatial distance protects drone operators from enemy fire but temporal proximity exposes them to greater emotional costs of killing than previously thought. Indeed, prolonged observation temporally extends ‘contact’ and mitigates the dehumanizing effects imputed to distance. This unexpected effect highlights a shifting ethical dilemma. In the formulation of the ‘naked soldier’, combatants in a just war deserve respect due to shared vulnerability. Yet while spatial distance physically protects the drone operator, it also requires that they identify vulnerable and legitimate targets through contemporary timing practices that establish intimate knowledge of that target and may thus denude and even heighten the operator’s emotional vulnerability. While others have argued that contemporary wartime features technologies and tactics that undercut conventions about legitimate combat, we uncover an emerging ethical problem in moral and psychological harms associated with the way that drone warfare trades space for time.

This article is a brief attempt to outline some of the difficulties involved in reconciling a film like Enemy of the State to itself. Perhaps a short synopsis: Will Smith plays a lawyer who unexpectedly encounters an old acquaintance who passes him something before being murdered. The acquaintance had become privy to a conspiracy involving members of the NSA who are responsible for the death of a politician. The politician was obstructing the passage of a new surveillance Bill, and the conspiracy is one of expanding the possibilities of invasive surveillance by the state, or at least rogue elements of the state. The conspirators work at watching and hounding Will Smith until they can retrieve the information. Jon Voight plays the lead conspirator. What this synopsis didn't mention is that Gene Hackman plays a reclusive, grouchy ex-NSA agent and surveillance expert. What the film doesn't mention is that he has done this before, in Francis Ford Coppola's early 1970s film The Conversation. Hackman's character in the earlier film has been described as "a private and suspicious man who lives with as little traceable human reference as possible, as if fearful of the threat of surveillance" (Thomson, America 185). Such a description is entirely applicable to his character in Enemy of the State. It is worth comparing certain aspects of these films not as simply an exercise in critical or textual analysis, but because the differences are illustrative of some key points pertaining to contemporary Hollywood film culture. One such point is that Enemy of the State can throw into relief the fraught relationship between special effects and the technologies of surveillance, a relation even more fraught for its visibility in an action film with a very large budget. The film of Tom Clancy's novel, Patriot Games, starred Harrison Ford as Jack Ryan. There is a sequence in that film that illustrates some of the binds in which Hollywood films can find themselves when they attempt to moralise about the invasive potential of image technologies. A live satellite feed has been arranged for American intelligence viewing of a raid on a suspected terrorist training camp. Low resolution, high angle pictures are recorded and relayed to the American audience of commando units acting on the intelligence analysis (image analysis) of that same audience. The data dies live to air. Ford's Jack Ryan is drawn into watching the fruits of his previous scrutiny. He is eventually disgusted by the armchair quarterbacking of the other viewers and turns away from the images. Not before we, the viewers have had enough time to recognise what we have seen and perhaps reacted to the "gee whiz" potential of that coupling of new image and new image technology. Ryan's disgust is actually a little intrusive on our appreciation. But there is enough of Indiana Jones in Jack Ryan for us to be convinced he truly believes in the integrity of acting at first-hand rather than at an inter-continental remove. Harrison Ford's character in Coppola's The Conversation has no adventurer's taint. More like one of the replicants in Blade Runner, with a liberal dose of Richard Gere's pretty poise in American Gigolo. Ford is genuinely bland and genuinely menacing under Coppola's direction in The Conversation. That film, made almost as a penitential act after The Godfather1, confines its special effects budget almost entirely to the soundtrack. Sounds, and their editing, are much of the surveillance of the film. Gene Hackman plays Harry Caul, "the best bugger on the West Coast", a surveillance expert for hire, with a somewhat shadowy background of bugs half-legend. Part of that background concerns a triple murder where information he provided to a client caused the deaths of three people. Caul is haunted by the chance of that happening again. Hired to bug a couple conversing in a crowded square, Caul and his people take photos and record a conversation that he subsequently edits into audibility. Increasingly afraid that the infidelity his surveillance uncovered will cause the deaths of the couple involved, Harry attempts to prevent the transfer of the data. His attempts are for nothing, as it turns out the couple murder the corporate executive husband of the overheard woman, Caul himself is under their surveillance, or perhaps just the surveillance of corporate underling Harrison Ford. Caul demolishes his apartment at the end of the film, fruitlessly trying to find the bugs. Enemy of the State's most basic problem is the casting in the male lead role of Will Smith. This is a film about paranoia, and release publicity deployed paranoiac pop culture jokes of some staleness such as "You're not paranoid if they really are out to get you". The male lead is scripted as the site at which real anxieties about intrusive levels of government surveillance are to be deployed and made visible. Will Smith, with Independence Day and Men in Black recently behind him, does not function in such a register. It is the persona of the comedian that lingers (and is cultivated by directors and producers) over Smith as an actor, a persona in part defined by the desire for attention, the wish for surveillance. At some level, the film is Smith's wish-fulfilment of more attention than he can handle -- except that he does handle it. Think of how different the entire film would have been with Denzel Washington as the lead, or Spike Lee. The fact is that conspiracies have become one of the great comforts of Western popular culture. The security of knowing that in spite of visible chaos someone out there knows what is really going on. The vogue for conspiracy is a nostalgia for metanarratives. In Enemy the conspirators are rogue elements of the State. What has been displaced is the entirely more edgy prospect suggested by Coppola's film, in which corporations commission acts of surveillance, or elements within corporations spy on each other. Rogues within rogues. Enemy, on the other hand, gives us the individual, the family man, in a desperate battle against the massed resources of the State. But this is not all there is to see or say. For me, perhaps the most interesting aspect of Enemy of the State is the relation between the special effects of the film and the invasive technologies of surveillance whose misuse the film is critiquing. This is not the time to address the issue of the varying aesthetics of special effects, save to note that there certainly are a range of aesthetic criteria on which spectator judgments about effects "quality" are made. At least one of these criteria is that special effects should visualise the new. Related to this is that they should provide new visual experiences2. Enemy has as its new visual experience the expanded resources of contemporary satellite surveillance technologies, along with various miniaturised surveillance devices. The only "conventional" big special effect is a building exploding. The rest of the film is engaged with using surveillance footage as special effects, in on-screen chases and pursuits. The crucial problem on which the film founders is that in generating viewing pleasure from the invasive application of these technologies, a double marking of the technology as special effect and the technology as invasive is made available to the viewer. The pleasure and the object of criticism share the same sign. The result is a vacillation. The screen jockeys in the film, childishly willing accomplices of Jon Voight and the rogue State, taking the pleasure of "cool" from a new image, are the viewers of the film, taking pleasure in a cool special effect. The attempts to render those spectators morally culpable for the plots of the film are, not surprisingly, shallow. To me, this film functions as a sort of limit case for special effects. It is as if the distance between effect and subject has been allowed to shrink a little too far, leading to a sort of collapse. As a note in closing, I would like to suggest that in the genre of the Hollywood action film, perhaps the only close relative of Enemy of the State is the "failed Arnie", Last Action Hero. Whereas that film deployed reflexivity about special effects and entertainment and hence to some degree trivialised the pleasures of its audience, it similarly marks a problematic convergence of special effects technology and spectators' acceptance of the moral consequences of vision. Footnotes David Thomson has written that: The Conversation has the reputation of being the intense chamber work of a director otherwise employed on large movies where spectacle takes precedence over private themes. The modesty of scale, after The Godfather, is regarded as a token of gravity. It was made clear as the picture opened that Coppola had used some of his own profits from the big movies to make this study in intimate anxiety. In sanctioning that gloss, Coppola appeared to be grappling with the demands of the industry and the inner responsibilities of the artist. The film is therefore a parable about talent, private satisfaction, and public duty. But it is the most despairing and horrified film Coppola has made. (Thomson, Overexposures 298) The first does not necessitate the second. It is entirely possible to visualise the new in such conventional fashion that it is meaningless to consider such to be a "new visual experience". References Thomson, David. America in the Dark: Hollywood and the Gift of Unreality. New York: William Morrow, 1975. Thomson, David. Overexposures: The Crisis in American Filmmaking. New York: William Morrow, 1981. Citation reference for this article MLA style: Paul Starr. "Special Effects and the Invasive Camera: Enemy of the State and The Conversation." M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2.2 (1999). [your date of access] <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9903/enemy.php>. Chicago style: Paul Starr, "Special Effects and the Invasive Camera: Enemy of the State and The Conversation," M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2, no. 2 (1999), <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9903/enemy.php> ([your date of access]). APA style: Paul Starr. (1999) Special effects and the invasive camera: Enemy of the State and The Conversation. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2(2). <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9903/enemy.php> ([your date of access]).

Political torture continues as a practice used to undermine the “enemy.” As spectators, most people can look away or turn it off. Others live with marked bodies and memories triggered by everyday smells, sights, and sounds. The central question behind this work was how to make a film about someone’s experience of torture. What kind of strategy and what kind of filmscape could embed the sensorial experience? What are the images and sounds? Furthermore how does one make the boundaries of documentary permeable? To be able to look again and ask new questions. A Silence Full of Things gave me the possibility to touch on the issue of political torture from a new perspective: the memory of the senses. From there a filmscape was created that proposes new relations between testimony, sensorial memory, image, sound and the sensorial entanglements of the audience. The film juxtaposes the poetic beauty of intimate imagery with a story about the physical, emotional and psychic wounds of political torture. Miriam narrates and performs her story. It is in this deliberate theatrical performance where shifting relations occur and the story becomes individual and universal at the same time. A Silence Full of Things is self-conscious about strategy, form, style, and effects. The internal composition of the film is made up of a relationship to close up images in order to arrive at the core of the pain through the beauty of the voice and the images: the fragility and delicacy of the lace, the yellowness of the day of the capture, and Miriam’s look to the audience at the film’s closure. Her face leaves us imagining being hit in the stomach. We cannot escape being affected by her expression. What, when and how we imagine documentary films to be saying are other matters. A Silence Full of Things leaves a sensorial mark, and it open questions on how we read the gestures, the signs and the words.

The Forbidden Forest by Mircea Eliade is a “total novel,” whose complexity is evident on every page through the variety of suggestions, metaphors and symbols, of intertextual and mythological references. In this study, I will mostly discuss the penultimate chapter of this novel where the death of Biriș, the rational and sceptical philosopher, at the beginning a follower of the philosophy of Kierkegaard, is presented. In this troubling episode, I identified the presence of two myths whose unconscious actor this rational spirit currently anchored in history became. The myth—an exemplary story about foundation—seeks his Chosen One and finds him in the opposite of an intellectual, an “unbeliever,” just as Jesus chose his most bitter enemy, Paul of Tarsus, to become his faithful apostle. But the gnostic and religious philosopher also needs to believe in self-salvation from the clutches of the demon of fear and cowardice, and impending death, surrounded by friend-interrogators (Mihai Duma), by a compassionate executioner (Bîrsan), and demonic monks (Bursuc). The healing function of the story is lost in this world of suspicion, where Biriș is surrounded by masks, which disguise their true role. The myth of the sacrifice of Christ acquires a double saving power, because Biriș saves himself and redeems his torturers, too. By converting nocturnal stories into a sacred ritual of story, the destiny of Scheherazade, the heroine of One Thousand and One Nights, is saved from the banality of a simple literary character, because “the story in the story” provokes the human being to descend into the abyss and to live by the symbol. In the company of his interrogators—human aspects of demons—the frightened philosopher becomes the image of a Thracian Orpheus, trying in vain to “tame” the human beasts by his wise Logos. By the Logos, Biriș fails to rescue his torturers and himself from their own bestiality, but at the level of his “trance-conscious”—where Eliade speaks in his scientific work—he mystically lives a symbolic and mysterious superposition between the stages of the sacrifice of the shepherd in “Miorița” and those of the sacrifice of Christ. This intelligent, subtle and erudite intellectual lives deeply rooted in history with the consciousness of the presence of death in all intimate structures of life, a mentality specific to Western conception. In the last moments of his life, Biriș is converted to the sacred mystery of the Great Passing. Homo sapiens becomes Homo religiosus, the mysterious veil of Maya rises and the exit of the labyrinth is a certainty. The two myths which I take into account are the Orphic myth about the healing word and the mixture of the mioritic and the Christ myth of salvation through sacrifice.

Following critiques of anthropologists’ involvement in colonialism and insufficient attention to power, friendship, solidarity, and closeness have become implicit ideals for fieldwork relationships. But distance is also inherent to respectful fieldwork relationships. I therefore argue for greater attention to boundaries—the ways we are able to mutually understand in the midst of, rather than by dissolving, difference and distance—and the labor and finesse that go into negotiating them. Foregrounding boundary work allows for a greater honesty about fieldwork relationships and facilitates the broadness of spirit that is the discipline’s hallmark. It also helps people who are most engaged in boundary work to grapple with it and not see that work as failure, weakness, or their taking “risks.” And it further helps one avoid imposing one’s own social ideals for egalitarianism or intimacy on one’s interlocutors. Boundaries are not the enemy of mutual understanding and integrity; in fact, boundaries facilitate them.

In joining together to become citizens of particularist communities, we have made ourselves the enemy of humankind. This thought, which Rousseau intimated two centuries ago, forms the backdrop to Andrew Linklater's new book. It opens with a description of the Westphalian international system as one in which force and domination have been the regular condition of international relations. In contrast to exponents of the realist tradition, Linklater argues that there are good reasons for thinking these patterns will not be reproduced in the future. To support this contention, he points to the zones of cooperation which exist in world politics today, where new and more inclusive forms of community and citizenship are emerging.The main body of The Transformation of Political Community draws on the work of critical theorists—from Kant and Marx to Habermas—to consider the possibilities of a ‘triple transformation’ in international relations. By this, Linklater means pursuing greater moral and economic equality whilst remaining sensitive to cultural difference. Crucial to this transformation is the idea of an inclusive inter-cultural dialogue which, it is hoped, will provide a foundation for a new cosmopolitan community of humankind.

The concept of war is inextricably linked to violence, and military action almost always resounds with the emotion and language of rage. Since the War on Terror began in September 2001, post-9/11 expressions of terror and rage have influenced academics to evaluate rage and its meanings (Gildersleeve and Gehrmann). Of course, it has directly influenced the lives of those affected by global conflicts in war-torn regions of the Middle East and North Africa. The populace there has reacted violently to military invasions with a deep sense of rage, while in the affluent West, rage has also infiltrated everyday life through clothes, haircuts, and popular culture as military chic became ‘all the rage’ (Rall 177). Likewise, post-9/11 popular films directly tap into rage and violence to explain (or justify?) conflict and war. The film version of the life of United States Iraq veteran Chris Kyle in American Sniper (2014) reveals fascinating depictions of rage through the perspective of a highly trained shooter who waits patiently above the battlefield, watching for hours before taking human life with a carefully planned long-distance shot. The significance of the complexities of rage as presented in this film are discussed later. Foundations of Rage: Colonial Legacy, Arab Spring, and ISISThe War on Terror may have purportedly began with the rage of Osama bin Laden’s Al Qaeda missions and the responding rage of George Bush’s America determined to seek vengeance for 9/11, but the rage simmering in the Middle East has deeper origins. This includes: the rejection of the Shah of Iran's secular dictatorship in 1979, the ongoing trauma of an Arab Palestinian state that was promised in 1947, and the blighted hopes of Gamal Abdel Nasser's Arab nationalism that offered so much in the 1950s but failed to deliver. But these events should not be considered in isolation from events of the whole 20th century, in particular the betrayal of Arab nationalism by the Allied forces, especially Britain and France after the First World War. The history of injustice that Robert Fisk has chronicled in a monumental volume reveals the complexity and nuances of an East-West conflict that continued to fracture the Middle East. In a Hollywood-based film such as American Sniper it is easy to depict the region from a Western perspective without considering the cycle of injustice and oppression that gave birth to the rage that eventually lashed out at the West. Rage can also be rage against war, or rage about the mistreatment of war victims. The large-scale protests against the war before the 2003 Iraq invasion have faded into apparent nothingness, despite nearly two decades of war. Protest rage appears to have been replaced by outrage on behalf of the victims of war; the refugees, asylum seekers, economic migrants and those displaced by the ever- spreading conflict that received a new impetus in 2011 with the Arab Spring democracy movements. One spark point for rage ignited when Tunisian street vendor Mohamed Bouazizi embarked on his act of self-immolation in protest against harassment by public officials. This moment escalated into a kaleidoscope of collective rage as regimes were challenged from Syria to Libya, but met with a tragic aftermath. Sadly, democratic governments did not emerge, but turned into regimes of extremist violence exemplified in the mediaeval misogynistic horror now known as ISIS, or IS, or the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (Hassan). This horror intensified as millions of civilised Syrians and Iraqis sought to flee their homelands. The result was the movement of peoples, which included manipulation by ruthless people smugglers and detention by governments determined to secure borders — even even as this eroded decades of consensus on the rights of refugees. One central image, that of three-year-old Aylan Kurdi’s corpse washed up on a beach (Smith) should invoke open rage. Here, the incongruity was that a one-time Turkish party beach for affluent 18 to 35-year-olds from Western Europe would signify the death place of a Syrian refugee child, now displaced by war. The historical significance of East/West conflicts in the Middle East, recent events post- Arab Spring, the resulting refugee crisis in the region, and global anti-war protests should be foremost when examining Clint Eastwood's film about an American military sniper in Iraq.Hot Rage and Cold Rage Recent mass shootings in the United States have delineated factions within the power of rage: it seems to blow either hot or cold. US Army psychiatrist Major Nidal Malik Hasan was initially calm when he embarked on a public expression of rage, wounding 30 people and murdering 13 others in a mass shooting event in 2009 (MacAskill). Was this to be categorised as the rage of a nihilist, an Islamist - or as just another American mass shooting like events in Orlando or Sandy Hook? The war journalist and film maker Sebastian Junger authored a study on belonging, where he linked mass shootings (or rampage killings) to social stress and disunity, as a “tendency rising steadily in the US since the 1980s” (115-116). In contrast, the actions of a calm and isolated shooter on a rooftop can be justified as acceptable behaviour if this occurs during war. Now in the case of Chris Kyle, he normalised his tale of calm killing, as an example identified by action “built on a radically asymmetric violence” (Pomarede 53).Enemy at the Gates The point is that sniper killings can be presented in film as morally good. For example, the 2001 film Enemy at the Gates portrays a duel of two snipers in Stalingrad, Russia. This is a fictionalised contest of a fictionalised event, because there was only tangential evidence that Russian sniper hero Vasily Zaytsev actually engaged in a three-day sniper duel with his German enemy during the Second World War. Enemy at the Gates presents the sniper as an acceptable figure in mass popular culture (or even a hero?), which provides the justification for American Sniper. However, in this instance, viewers could recognise a clear struggle between good and evil.Politically, Enemy at the Gates, whether viewed from a conservative or a progressive perspective, presents a struggle between a soldier of the allies (the Soviet Union) and the forces of Nazism, undeniably the most evil variant of fascism. We can interpret this as a defence of the communist heartland, or the defence of a Russian motherland, or the halting of Nazi aggression at its furthest expansion point. Whichever way it is viewed, the Russian sniper is a good man, and although in the movie’s plot the actor Ralph Fiennes as political commissar injects a dimension of manipulation and Stalinist authoritarian control, this does not detract from the idea of the hero defeating evil with single aimed shots. There is rage, but it is overshadowed by the moral ‘good.’American Sniper The true story of Chris Kyle is quite simple. A young man grows up in Texas with ‘traditional’ American values, tries sport and University, tries ranch life, and joins the US Navy Special Forces. He becomes a SEAL (Sea, Air and Land) team member, and is trained as a specialist sniper. Kyle excels as a sniper in Iraq, where he self-identifies as America's most successful sniper. He kills a lot of enemies in Iraq, experiences multiple deployments followed by the associated trauma of reintegration to family life and redeployment, suffers from PTSD, returns to civilian life in America and is himself shot dead by a distressed veteran, in an ironic act of rage. Admired by many, the veracity of Kyle’s story is challenged by others, a point I will return to. As noted above, Kyle kills a lot of people, many of whom are often unaware of his existence. In his book On Killing, Lieutenant-Colonel David Grossman notes this a factor that actually causes the military to have a “degree of revulsion towards snipers” (109), which is perhaps why the movie version of Kyle’s life promotes a rehabilitation of the military in its “unambiguous advocacy of the humility, dedication, mastery, and altruism of the sniper” as hero (Beck 218). Most enlisted soldiers never actually kill their enemies, but Kyle kills well over 100 while on duty.The 2012 book memoir of United States Navy sniper Chris Kyle at war in Iraq became a national cultural artefact. The film followed in 2014, allowing the public dramatisation of this to offer a more palatable form for a wider audience. It is noted that military culture at the national level is malleable and nebulous (Black 42), and these constructs are reflected in the different variants of American Sniper. These cultural products are absorbed differently when consumed by the culture that has produced them (the military), as compared to the way that they are consumed by the general public, and the book American Sniper reflects this. Depending upon readers’ perspectives, it is a book of raw honesty or nationalistic jingoism, or perhaps both. The ordinary soldier’s point of view is reiterated and directed towards a specifically American audience. Despite controversy and criticism the book was immensely successful, with weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. While it naturally appealed to many in its primary American audience, from an Australian perspective, the jingoism of this book jars. In fact, it really jars a lot, to the point of being quite challenging to read. That Australian readers would have difficulty with this text is probably appropriate, because after all, the book was not created for Australians but for Americans.On the other hand, Americans have produced balanced accounts of the soldier experience in Iraq. A very different exemplar is Garry Trudeau’s Doonesbury blog that became the book The Sandbox (2007). Here American men and women soldiers wrote their own very revealing stories about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, in autobiographical accounts that ranged from nuanced explanations of the empathy for the soldier’s predicament, to simple outright patriotism. TIn their first-hand accounts of war showed a balance of ordinary pathos, humour – and the raw brutality of a soldier finding the neck stem of a human spine on the ground after a suicide bomb attack (Trudeau 161) – and even this seems more palatable to read than American Sniper. A similar book on the US military sniper experience (Cavallaro and Larsen) also shows it is possible to incorporate a variety of perspectives without patriotic jingoism, or even military propaganda being predominant.In contrast to the book, the film American Sniper narrates a more muted story. The movie is far more “saccharine”, in the words of critical Rolling Stone reviewer Matt Taibbi, but still reflects a nationalistic attitude to war and violence — appropriate to the mood of the book. American producer/director Clint Eastwood has developed his own style for skipping around the liminal space that exists between thought-provoking analysis and populism, and American Sniper is no exception. The love story of Chris Kyle and his wife Taya looks believable, and the intensity of military training and war fighting, including the dispassionate thoughts of Kyle as sniper, are far more palatable in the film version than as the raw words on the page.The Iraq War impacted on millions of Americans, and it is the compelling images shown re-living Chris Kyle’s funeral at the film’s conclusion that leaves a lasting message. The one-time footballer’s memorial service is conducted in a Texas football stadium and this in itself is poignant: but it is the thousands of people who lined the highway overpasses for over 200 miles to farewell him and show respect as his body travels towards the funeral in the stadium, that gives us an insight into the level of disenchantment and rage at America’s loss. This is a rage fuelled by losing their military ‘empire’ coupled with a traumatised search for meaning that Jerry Lembcke sees as inextricably linked to US national failure in war and the tragedy of an individual soldier’s PTSD. Such sentiments seem intimately connected to Donald Trump’s version of America, and its need to exercise global power. Kyle died before Trump’s election, but it seems evident that such rage, anger and alienation experienced by a vast segment of the American population contributed to the election result (Kluger). Calm Cold Calculation Ironically, the traditional sniper embodies the antithesis of hot-blooded rage. Firing any long- distance range weapon with accuracy requires discipline, steady breathing and intense muscle control. Olympic shooting or pentathlons demonstrate this, and Gina Cavallaro and Matt Larsen chronicle both sniper training and the sniper experience in war. So, the notion of sniper shooting and rage can only coexist if we accept that rage becomes the cold, calculating rage of a person doing a highly precise job when killing enemies. In the book, Kyle clearly has no soldierly respect for his Iraqi insurgent enemies and is content to shoot them down one by one. In the film, there is greater emphasis on Kyle having more complex emotions based around the desire to protect his fellow soldiers by shooting in a calm and detached fashion at his designated targets.Chris Kyle’s determination to kill his enemies regardless of age or gender seems at odds with the calm detached passivity of the sniper. The long-distance shooter should be dispassionate but Kyle experiences rage as he kills to protect his fellow soldiers. Can we argue he exhibits ‘cold rage’ not ‘hot rage’, but rage none the less? It would certainly seem so. War Hero and Fantasist?In life, as in death, Chris Kyle presents a figure of controversy, being praised by the political far right, yet condemned by a diverse coalition that included radicals, liberals, and even conservatives such as former soldier Michael Fumento. Fumento commented that Kyle’s literary embellishments and emphasis on his own prowess denigrated the achievements of fellow American snipers. Reviewer Lindy West described him as “a hate filled killer”, only to become a recipient of rage and hatred from Kyle supporters. Paul Rieckhoff described the film as not the most complex nor deepest nor provocative, but the best film made about the Iraq war for its accuracy in storytelling and attention to detail.Elsewhere, reviewer Mark Kermode argues that the way the film is made introduces a significant ambiguity: that we as an audience can view Kyle as either a villain, a hero, or a combination of both. Critics have also examined Kyle’s reportage on his military exploits, where it seems he received less fewer medals than he claimed, as well as his ephemeral assertion that he shot looters in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina (Lamothe). In other claims, the US courts have upheld the assertion of former wrestler turned politician Jesse Ventura that Kyle fabricated a bar-room brawl between the two. But humans are complex beings, and Drew Blackburn sees it as “entirely plausible to become both a war hero and a liar” in his candid (Texas-based) assessment of one person who was, like many of us, a multifaceted figure.Conclusion This article has addressed the complicated issues of rage originating in the historical background of military actions that have taken place in the East/West conflicts in the Middle East that began in the region after the Second World War, and continue to the present day. Rage has become a popular trope within popular culture as military chic becomes ‘all the rage’. Rage is inextricably linked to the film American Sniper. Patriotism and love of his fellow soldiers motivated Chris Kyle, and his determination to kill his country’s enemies in Iraq and protect the lives of his fellow American soldiers is clear, as is his disdain for both his Iraqi allies and enemies. With an ever- increasing number of mass shootings in the United States, the military sniper will be a hero revered by some and a villain reviled by others. Rage infuses the film American Sniper, whether the rage of battle, rage at the moral dilemmas his role demands, domestic rage between husband and wife, PTSD rage, or rage inspired following his pointless murder. But rage, even when it expresses a complex vortex of emotions, remains dangerous for those who are obsessed with guns, and look to killing others either as a ‘duty’ or to soothe an individual crisis of confidence. ReferencesAmerican Sniper. Dir. Clint Eastwood. Warner Brothers, 2014.Beck, Bernard. “If I Forget Thee: History Lessons in Selma, American Sniper, and A Most Violent Year.” Multicultural Perspectives 17.4 (2015): 215-19.Black, Jeremy. War and the Cultural Turn. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2012.Blackburn, Drew. “How We Talk about Chris Kyle.” Texas Monthly 2 June 2016. 18 Feb. 2019 <https://www.texasmonthly.com/the-daily-post/chris-kyle-rorschach/>.Cavallaro, Gina, and Matt Larsen. Sniper: American Single-Shot Warriors in Iraq and Afghanistan. Guildford, Connecticut: Lyons, 2010. Enemy at the Gates. Dir. Jean-Jaques Annaud. Paramount/Pathe, 2001.Fisk, Robert. The Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2006.Fumento, Michael. “American Sniper’s Myths and Misrepresentations.” The American Conservative 13 Mar. 2015. 18 Feb. 2019 <https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/clint-eastwoods-fabricated-sniper/>.Gildersleeve, Jessica, and Richard Gehrmann. “Memory and the Wars on Terror”. Memory and the Wars on Terror: Australian and British Perspectives. Eds. Jessica Gildersleeve and Richard Gehrmann. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. 1-19.Grossman, Dave. On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society. Boston: Little, Brown, 1995.Hassan, Hassan. “The True Origins of ISIS.” The Atlantic 30 Nov. 2018. 17 Feb. 2019 <https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/11/isis-origins-anbari-zarqawi/577030/>.Kermode, Mark. “American Sniper Review – Bradley Cooper Stars in Real-Life Tale of Legendary Marksman.” The Guardian 18 Jan. 2015. 18 Feb. 2019 <https://www.theguardian.com/film/2015/jan/18/american-sniper-review-bradley-cooper-real-life-tale-legendary-marksman>.Kluger, Jeffrey. “America's Anger Is Out of Control.” TIME 1 June 2016. 17 Feb. 2019 <http://time.com/4353606/anger-america-enough-already>.Kyle, Chris. American Sniper. New York: Harper, 2012. Junger, Sebastian. Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging. London: Fourth Estate, 2016.Lamothe, Dan. “How ‘American Sniper’ Chris Kyle’s Truthfulness Is in Question Once Again.” 25 May 2016. 19 Feb. 2019 <https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/checkpoint/wp/2016/05/25/how-american-sniper-chris-kyles-truthfulness-is-in-question-once-again/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.d8806f2b8d3a>.Lembcke, Jerry. PTSD: Diagnosis and Identity in Post-Empire America. Lanham: Lexington Books, 2013.Pomarède, Julien. “Normalizing Violence through Front-Line Stories: The Case of American Sniper.” Critical Military Studies 4.1 (2018): 52-71. Rall, Denise N. “Afterword: The Military in Contemporary Fashion.” Fashion and War in Popular Culture. Ed. Denise N. Rall. Bristol: Intellect, 2014. 177-179. Rieckhoff, Paul. “A Veteran's View of American Sniper.” Variety 16 Jan. 2015. 19 Feb. 2019 <https://variety.com/2015/film/opinion/a-veterans-view-of-american-sniper-guest-column-1201406349/>.Smith, Heather, and Richard Gehrmann. “Branding the Muscled Male Body as Military Costume.” Fashion and War in Popular Culture. Ed. Denise N. Rall. Bristol: Intellect, 2014. 57-71.Smith, Helena. “Shocking Images of Drowned Syrian Boy Show Tragic Plight of Refugees.” The Guardian 2 Sep. 2015. 17 Feb. 2019 <https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/sep/02/shocking-image-of-drowned-syrian-boy-shows-tragic-plight-of-refugees>.Stanford, David (ed.). The Sandbox: Dispatches from Troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. Kansas City: Andrews McMeel Publishing, 2007.Taibbi, Matt. “American Sniper Is Almost Too Dumb to Criticise.” Rolling Stone 21 Jan. 2015. <https://www.rollingstone.com/movies/movie-news/american-sniper-is-almost-too-dumb-to-criticize-240955/>.Trudeau, Garry B. The Sandbox: Dispatches from Troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. Kansas City: Andrew McMeel Publishing, 2007.West, Lindy. “The Real American Sniper Was a Hate-Filled Killer: Why Are Simplistic Patriots Treating Him as a Hero?” The Guardian 6 Jan. 2015. 19 Feb. 2019 <https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/jan/06/real-american-sniper-hate-filled-killer-why-patriots-calling-hero-chris-kyle>.

“One has to get rid of the bad taste of wanting to be in agreement with many.” (Nietzsche 53)Community is a policing word: the local community, the Christian community, the school community, the international community. The word evokes informal, benign, yet insistent patterns of authority, built around imagined consensuses. It is a judgement word. It includes and excludes, and always on terms that are imagined pre-set, pre-determined by an identity also already determined or incipient, yet always legitimate, receiving the credit, the credibility it deserves. The community is always licensing actions on its own behalf because it is the very authentic logic of legitimation, of folk sovereignty, of a natural peace that should not be disturbed. It is defensive in its very nature, always at risk of being disturbed from its regular state, its constitutive, deserved and deserving calm. It is the community against which you are most likely to offend. It is easily offended.Communities still claim to be natural. They stabilise, definitively, around an identity they assume to have inherited from fact, a locality, a choice, a lifestyle, a sexual preference. This is what allows them to normalise and judge so determinedly. Normalising judgement is the genre of signifying practice which most clearly defines community. Community is not unrelated to family, one of its isotopes. It even evokes family as its formalising logic and rhetorical resource, yet especially now, it cannot, even in its national forms, especially its post-colonial national forms, lay more than a token claim to the consanguinity that still haunts even the most reformed construction of family. The impetus of community therefore is to naturalise. It cites an identity, imagined to be pre-given, and then renders it incontestable by making it the lodestone of a local policy, one that can be used to make you an offender.Coalition is to community what friendship is to family. If family implies a pre-given situation into which one emerges without option, friendship allows for agency, your circulation in the world as a self-fashioning person, an adventurer, a discoverer, a forger of ties. You are a member of a family at home. Family like community even at its most attenuated is where you are at home, even in its most abstract and discontinuous. Yet, you are a friend in the same way you are a citizen, because you are in the world, where you are what you are by the right of election. You choose your friends. You decide who they are to be. Family naturalises even when it forms from those who share no genetic inheritance. Community too naturalises, imagining its chosen identity to be inherited from the established states of the world and therefore enduring, before and beyond us all, and therefore possessed of an authority and legitimacy no-one has chosen and that therefore no-one can question. Friendship, on the other hand, is an artifice. It is taken up and abandoned at will. Coalition too is chosen. Its only past is that of decision, not of inheritance. You enter into friendship with someone because you share no blood or family inheritance with them. The claim of friendship between family members does not convince because it is not necessary, and because it would create a contradictory history: you cannot chose what you have inherited from nature. The past doesn’t need to be that crowded. It can’t be. It is the same with coalition. If you were a member of a community with someone, you wouldn’t need to form a coalition with them. What would be the point? You are together with them, whether you like it or not.Coalition, therefore, requires an irreducible difference. This is both its practical logic, and its governing ethic. It assumes and respects otherness. This is what it has in common with friendship. You are friends with someone because you are different to one another, not because of what you have in common. That is the charm and attraction of friendship, the discovery of connection in difference. Coalition is friendship magnified to a politics. It repeats friendship’s respect for otherness without needing to risk its experiment with intimacy. Unlike community, coalition is a venture. It is proudly extensive, not defensive. It holds out its hand to you even if it doesn’t like you. It is not only the invention of a practice, but of a value, the value of human exteriority. Even when we are at our most solipsistic and closed, our most misanthropic and scornful, it is never impossible for human beings to connect with one another. That possibility can never be reduced to zero. Coalition assumes this irreducible openness to the other, and that is what links it irrevocably to the progressive as an incontestable virtue. What Derrida says of (what Aristotle says of) friendship here is also true of coalition. It is by nature a virtue:Since friendship does not – and above all must not – have the reliability of a natural thing or a machine; since its stability is not given by nature but is won, like constancy . . . through the endurance of a virtue, primary friendship, ‘that which allows all others to be named’ . . . we must say that it is founded on virtue. (Derrida, Politics 23)If we pursue the analogy with friendship, coalition is in itself a value, regardless of the reason that the coalition has formed. Unlike communities which keep obscuring their origins and claiming the authority of the natural or at least the inherited, contrived or naturalised, coalitions never deny they are artifice. They are formed historically for historical purposes. Often they even seem to concede that this makes them second-best. They are the substitute for perhaps the greater legitimacy that a community might purportedly have if we don’t think about it too deeply, or if we rest our politics on sentimentality, the endlessly resurging underside of the politics of the ideological era. Coalitions substitute for the natural bond of community the political purpose of history, even of the moment, as they form and un-form to repeal rogue legislation, combat sectional interests, clarify obscured rights, challenge illegal occupations and so on. Yet, over and above, beyond and before this, they are the institution of a primary, perhaps the primary social value. They are the positive enactment of the idea that relationships form in difference. Coalitions are not inherited or determined, but chosen as the result of a decision, and this decision is the taking on of the responsibility not only towards a specific political issue but to those who might only share with me a momentary commitment. Again unlike community, in which universality, specifically the conformity of all members to a fundamental identity or nature, is not only taken for granted but required, definitive and ineluctable, in coalition, the universality of a shared idea or judgement is merely an agreement destined to be outlived. Coalition is universality without conformity, agreement without oneness.In political terms, it is a double benefit, therefore. It both responds to some kind of political emergency, and models democratic openness to the other as purposeful social action. It is an action and a virtue. The risk, of course, is that these two enter into conflict with one another, especially that the virtue of social relationship trumps the exigencies of the critical political moment. In other words, the logic of relationship becomes the fundamental achievement at the expense of political engagement. It is here that the virtues and dangers of coalition become apparent. What is virtuous about coalition might in fact be the very thing that threatens its political effectiveness. Coalition works by persuasion and enlistment. It is a logic of the endlessly open “plus one.” Because no singular identity restricts membership of the coalition, it is endlessly open to an ever extending inclusivity. If you can be persuaded to agree about perhaps only one thing, then you can become part of a coalition. You can even pronounce on your own membership, given that the formal protocols of coalition membership are loose and the threshold to be crossed for membership is so specific. You can perhaps even be a member of a coalition without anyone else ever knowing. It can rely on the most limited and specific of agreements. The risk is that the logic of persuasion, enlistment and agreement over-shadows the particular politics which is the ostensible pretext for the formation of the coalition in the first place. In short, the logic of persuasion and enlistment takes over from the logic of opposition and resistance, which is what defines the political. Coalition risks becoming a church logic, therefore, and it is arguable that its cultural inheritance is fundamentally consistent with the social mission of Christianity and Islam, which aim to gradually enlist all, despite difference and non-identity. By committing to enlistment, coalition risks substituting an indefinitely extendable agreement for the political efficacy of enmity, the virtues of peace for the achievements of struggle. At its worst, coalition risks substituting the satisfactions of feeling positive about the other for the recognition of enmity as fundamentally definitive of the political and thus of the social. It risks becoming what Nietzsche disliked in democracy, its “talkative good conscience” (cited in Derrida, Politics 38), which is in the end nothing but a repression.The problem lies with coalition’s fundamentally positive construction of the other, and of sociality in general. This emerges through the definitive role of decision in coalition. You don’t decide to join a community. You find yourself in it. You may elect to leave but only in order to become a renegade. Your identity remains haunted by the community you have spurned as a lapsed member. To become a member of a coalition, on the other hand, is the result of some kind of election on your part, and this special event can take on a major significance in the evolution of your self-relation, as an instantiation of your will and thus autonomy. In Derrida, however, the decision is aporetic. Its relationship to the subject is indeterminate. What makes a decision is its openness on an in-determinacy, its possibility of always being radically otherwise, what Derrida calls, citing Nietzsche, its perhaps (Politics 68). The decision is, therefore, an event. It is a pivoting. It turns on what might and might not happen. It always, at some irreducible level, surprises. In any event, what happens might not happen: every event carries within it the traces of what does not happen. Even in its most emphatic confirmation of an option, the event remains haunted by all those things that did not happen, that did not become it, that it did not specify, that still define it as the chosen thing. Something cannot be chosen unless there is that which remains un-chosen.The decision, then, inevitably involves an openness of the subject towards that which it does not and cannot do. It arises in a field unchosen by the subject in which choosing takes place. To this extent, it happens to a subject more than it is a doing by a subject. To Derrida, this makes the decision irreducibly passive, even “unconscious,” (Politics 68), an idea he embraces in its heretical relationship to traditional understandings of agency: “In sum,” he writes, “a decision is unconscious – insane as that may seem, it involves the unconscious and nevertheless remains responsible” (Politics 69). Because it involves the other possibility, it is not certain in the way the automatic enactment of a pre-fixed program you know is right is certain. The latter Derrida calls mere calculation, the implementation of that to which you have or even know no alternative. Calculation does what is known unambiguously to be right, to be without alternative. Decision, requires doubt, uncertainty. It opens the subject to the ineluctable certainty of its own failure, if not now then inevitably. This is what makes it a taking on of the unknown, of the enactment within the subject of that which is unknown to it, its unconscious.Decision then is the overcoming of the subject in its own action. It defies self-identity, exposing the subject to that which is other to it, that otherness which now defines it in its relationship to itself. As the social enactment of decision, then, coalition instantiates the subject’s excess over itself, its constitutional and necessary orientation to that which exceeds it, which it now understands not simply as otherness but as other people. Again, this makes coalition analogous to friendship, the other social relation formed by election. In both cases, the actual decision seems to happen to the subject as much as it seems to be the simple result of will. Why do I find myself a friend with you, but not the person standing next to you? What draws me to this coalition and not that is not simply the patient, systematic, rational evaluation of moral and political alternatives, but my enthusiasm for one thing, my disgust with another. It is through this unstable, semi-obscure and dynamic producing of separating options that my decision suddenly emerges to always in some way surprise me. I don’t know why I like you. I don’t know why I believe this and not that, why I connect in the way I do, even though I know I am answerable, responsible for these choices, at some point, if even just before the casual court of my own curiosity.Friendship then and coalition are made but they are also received. They deconstruct the opposition between these alternatives. This is what distinguishes them from community, which routinely denies that it is made in which the making is denied, even though a rigorous deconstruction would contest the notion that pure inheritance is possible especially as the constitution of a self. Community would then merely be coalition in denial of itself. But the quality of otherness should not be simply taken for granted. Alain Badiou complains about the value given to respect for otherness as the only contemporary ethic. The responsibility of our behaviour is not towards the enactment of priorities and values of our own individual or collective subjectivity, but to a mere logic of do no harm. To engage properly with Badiou’s point would require a whole other argument, but he does alert us to the temptations of sentimentalising respect for otherness as the definition of social relations which thus risk settling into an ethic of a benign and self-justifying harmlessness as the final social good.Is the other always good? Again, I want to approach this question by returning to Derrida’s account of friendship, and its relationship to enmity. Derrida recalls that at least in the hands of Carl Schmitt, decisionism is always a logic of enmity (Politics 67). How does this relate to what we have said about decision, otherness and friendship? As we have seen, coalition like friendship is the enactment of a decision, albeit possibly an unconscious one, in Derrida’s terms. You elect who is to be your friend, and you elect the coalitions you will join. Coalition is artificial, therefore. It does not make the claim implied by the notion of community; that the primary social bonds are natural, and therefore, inherited, unelected, perhaps even instinctive. The institution of the coalition by way of the decision is, therefore, an historical event. Where in community, the natural bond to which I am subject already exists, perhaps even was the very thing that called me into being, the formation of the bond between me and others is something I choose, one way or another in coalition. Where in community, only certain people marked out by some essential attribute over which they have little control (their only choice is to express or repress it) are the ones with whom I can join, in coalition, nothing necessarily or essentially distinguishes the people with whom I enter into alliance, other than the fact that they too have made the decision. The decision, therefore, groups together in coalition those who are in themselves indistinguishable from anyone else. They become my partner in coalition. They become my political friend. Yet, there is nothing about them that has pre-marked them for this friendship. They could just as easily not have entered into relationship with me, or indeed they could have become my enemy. This is the fulfilment of the logic of decision: the option chosen in decision is always in relation to that which has not been chosen. It is marked by the trace of the un-elected. The friend too is marked by the trace of those who are not chosen.In Politics of Friendship, Derrida pursues these issues by way of a reading of Carl Schmitt. Schmitt famously argued that the political grouping is defined by the collective identification of a shared enemy. You become a friend only by agreeing on a specific other who is to be your foe. There is, according to Schmitt’s argument, nothing about the enemy that marks them out to be your enemy: no traditional rivalry, no ethnic contempt, no economic competition or cultural antipathy, nothing about the enemy requires them to be your enemy. If such markers are seen to exist, they are superadded to the antagonism in order to invest it with a motivating intensity. Yet, such emotion is unnecessary. Someone is the constituting enemy of your group because your group could not be a group without an enemy, some enemy or other, someone you need to be prepared to kill, as the enactment of your political being. So, you become a member of a political grouping – you attain political friendship – by your preparedness to kill some other, even though there is nothing about them in themselves that requires you to do this, or even want it. They could just as easily be your friend if circumstances were different. The fact they are your enemy is purely historically contingent.Derrida puts it like this in his reading of Schmitt:There is no friend without this possibility of killing which establishes this non-natural community. Not only could I only enter into friendship only with a mortal, but I could love in friendship only a mortal at least exposed to so-called violent death – that is, exposed to being killed, possibly by myself. (Politics 122)So, in coalition, I decide to enter into relationship with those who could just as well be my enemies. Derrida’s aim in his reading of Schmitt is to show that the fundamental opposition on which the latter’s theory of the political depends – the historically enduring distinction between friend and enemy – is untenable. Since the friend can only be my friend because they are just as equally qualified to be my enemy, the distinction cannot be sustained. The rapid renomination of friends as enemies and enemies as friends in historical experience would seem to bear out the radical fragility of these categories.For our purposes in a discussion of coalition, I want to derive a slightly different point. The formation of political friendship will always bear with it a trace of enmity. You cannot be friends with someone who cannot just as easily be your enemy – in fact perhaps tomorrow, if not in some way always already. The formation of political friendship must also involve the inevitable enactment or at least acknowledgement of enmity. This is clear in the logic of community which imagines essential, natural differences which pre-identify groups implicitly alien and therefore constitutively already on the threshold of enmity. We have seen how these assumptions enact the willing blindness, the determined naivety, of community. Yet, there is blindness in coalition as well, a denial of its constitutive relationship with enmity. Because it forms by way of decision, coalition operates by a practice of persuasion and enlistment, the endlessly open to the other logic of the “plus-one” we have mentioned, the addition of the extra other comrade and so on theoretically forever. In other words, coalition believes in the hypothesis that everyone can enlist, that the addition of yet one more ally, one more member, one more willing other, can go on forever, as long as you use the right language to persuade them, theoretically to the point of absolute universality.The risk here is the repression of the constituting logic of enmity, the forgetting of the role of antagonism in politics. The selection of the political friend involves distinguishing them from those who are your enemies. Your friends are those who are not (now) your enemies. In other words, the selection of your friend involves the ready identification of the non-friend, and this withholding of friendship must stretch, open-endedly, all the way to antagonism and opposition. The formation of coalition should not be seduced by its own image of itself as the incipience of a potential universal agreement. Coalition involves the establishment of political friendship in the context of the separation from political opponents, who will, at some level, never be less than to-be-opposed. Post-1960s politics in the west has been beset by different styles of coalition that have in their own ways striven to deny or frustrate political conflict: on the soft left, an automatic rejection of violence and war, regardless of what might need to be achieved; on the soft right, a complete acceptance of the market as the measure of social progress, a neo-liberal consensus that has tolerated no alternative social logic in planning and policy in government, mainstream media, corporation and institution. Coalition, by valuing agreement as a virtue in and of itself, risks disregarding the historical role and necessity of conflict in politics, a conflict that must potentially run to physical violence.In the historical context of an issue like the politics of climate change, there is the risk of being taken by the idea that what is required is more effective communication, better explanation, more persuasion. Then everyone will understand, agree and join the coalition of the willing to act. What this overlooks is the fact that already, no matter what the stakes, the political context is one in which antagonists have already emerged: whether by way of dogma, self-interest or sub-cultural intolerance. The politics of climate change is a politics nonetheless, built on antagonism as much as consensus, hostility as much as care, enmity as much as friendship. The politics of climate change must be recognised as being, as much about fighting as it is about persuasion.Is otherness always good? The ethic of openness to the other about which Badiou complains is routinely seen as the enactment of the ultimate and endlessly extending commitment to a social generosity. Derrida’s elaborations of a justice in excess of law, of an absolute hospitality in excess over local customs and practices of asylum, of a democracy-to-come in excess of any enacted historical democratic practice, all of which acknowledge the indeterminateness and immeasurability of the other, have all been read as socially optimistic and positive ethical instances of an opening towards a new Enlightenment. But as Derrida never avoided saying, these opennesses on the indeterminate nature of otherness always involves the risk of the worst, perhaps even of “radical evil” (Faith 83). The formation of political friendships, like coalition, also always involves the recognition of enmities. Without enmity, coalitions could not form. The very openness on the other that makes friendship available is the perhaps slightly withheld but always possible identification of the other as enemy, as danger, as something to be fought, as bad. It is this that in the end, every decision decides, in its openness to the other, whether it likes it or not. Without the willingness to accept enmity as necessary, even desirable, politics is not possible.ReferencesBadiou, Alain. Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil. Trans. Peter Hallward. London: Verso, 2001.Derrida, Jacques. “Faith and Knowledge.” Acts of Religion. Ed. Gil Anidjar. Trans. Samuel Weber. London and New York: Routledge, 2002. 40-101. ———. Politics of Friendship. Trans. George Collins. London: Verso, 1997.Nietzsche, Friedrich. Beyond Good and Evil. Trans. R.J. Hollingdale. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973.