Absolute Hostility and Ubiquitous Enmity

Abstract

Much has been made of President Felipe Calderôn’s use of thousands of military personnel to police the country’s northern territories in order to eradicate the highly sophisticated and heavily armed drug cartels. In a guerrilla war there is no controlled or bracketed conflict between clearly defined enemies. Similarly, in the “War on Drugs” there is no fully schematized or negotiable distinction in place between friend and enemy, war and peace, aggressor and victim, law and civil war. There is a distinction between military and civilian because the army is still uniformed and is said to be working on the side of the law. However, the cartels and the police are often partners in crime, the military is supplemented by paramilitary defense groups, and the civilian force is often better armed than the military one, so at the technological and administrative levels the distinction between the uniformed and the ununiformed, or the sovereign and the countersovereign, is of little to no importance. The functional and recognizable boundaries between such concepts have been blurred, as market-based civil conflict essentially performs the collapse of any clearly demarcated friend-enemy relation.

In the unjust act to have too little is to be unjustly treated; to have too much is to act unjustly.

—Aristotle

The struggle between rich and poor is not social reality, which politics then has to deal with. It is the actual institution of politics itself. There is politics when there is a part of those who have no part, a part or party of the poor.

—Jacques Rancière