vempire, glocalization

7/30/2019 vempire, glocalization

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dragan kujundzic

vEmpire, Glocalization, and the

Melancholia of the Sovereign

1

The multitude is the real productive force of our social world, whereas

Empire is a mere apparatus of capture that lives only off the vitality of the

multitudeas Marx would say, a vampire regime of accumulated

dead labor that survives only off the blood of the living.

Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire, 62.

What is thus put at risk by this terrifying autoimmunitary logic is

nothing else than the existence of the world, of the global itself.

Jacques Derrida, Le concept du 11 semptembre, 9899.2

Who or what will come out of going global? Who or what is going global, and who

or what is going to come out of it? From the word go, the questions multiply. There

are several regimes that one can hear in the phrases go global or going global.One is the admonition to go global, now that everybody or everything else has. An

encouragement, an invitation, a welcome: go global, release yourself from national

or other boundaries of identity, be free! A shipment, an envoi, is going global, a

letter without destination or a preprogrammed itinerary and without assured de-

livery. Going global might be precisely this possibility of never arriving or never

arriving properly; but also going global might be never having departed from a

certain, designated space in the first place.

The other sense, the other direction, of going global, is quite the opposite, awarding-off of the global: Go, go away global! The global should go away with all

its misery, the political and ecological devastation that follow globalization like a

shadow. No less a figure than Hannah Arendt warned, almost sixty years ago, in

The Origins of Totalitarianism, that The danger that [is] a global, universally inter-

related civilization may produce barbarians from its own midst by forcing millions

of people into conditions which, despite all appearances, are the conditions of sav-

ages (302). That danger of going global will be or will have been a reverse potential

of any going global. Is going global good to go? Who or what will come out of it?One should hear in going global an almost poetic beauty, an alliteration of

g/gl, gl/g, go, go, goo, goo, gl, gl, al/la, la/al, la/la, a poetic equivalence, to speak

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in Roman Jakobsons terms: a language in its infancy, with all the future and the

potentiality of senses, meanings, combinations, and directions open to it. Going

global would be the very glottic opening of language and into language, a pleasure

of a glossa, of words, an enjoyment in and of the words, a glottal-global, globetrot-

ting experience that is almost literarypoetic, unpredictable, free to go anywhere,

going global as the going of and dissemination of the global, the global is/as goingglobal, g-o-o-o-o global!, and, as Heidegger would have it, the world worlds. Going

global would be the becoming of the totality of senses, senses and meanings that

go in every direction, towards what Jean-Luc Nancy calls the creation of the world,

or globalization: La cration du monde ou la mondialisation (2002). Going global

as a pleasure, a jouissance of going global, as an exercise of an infinitely finite and

insatiable signification which is the act of being in a sense of being placed in the

world (lexercice insatiable et infiniment fini qui est ltre en acte du sens mis en

monde) (64).By the same token, one should not forget that this alliteration, going global, this

glottic repetition, and the meaning for which it stands and as it stands, is possible

only in English, and that going global is going on at the expense of other languages

and cultures. You cannot go globalin French, Russian, German, my native Serbo-

Croat, or any other language. Going globalsentences other cultures not to a poetic

but to a generalized equivalence, a forced translation of an English-dominated

globalization. Going global may be seen, thus, as the slogan of a generalized era-

sure of all alterity, singular difference, idioms, and idiomaticity. It would entail thetransformation of the so-called global sphere into a space of globalized exchange

under the banner of English, by means of a universal equivalence, which is, ac-

cording to Marx, ultimately money.3 This going global would be the name of an

erasure of alterity, going global as the smoothing of the global surface, a sovereign

globality of the one, English, globe, which is going global at the expense of all other

possible global folds.

The benefits of global communication are sometimes celebrated, by the best in-

terpreters of the global condition. In his essay, Notes on Globalization as a Philo-sophical Issue, from The Cultures of Globalization, Fredric Jameson writes that

we are now in a position to benefit from globalization in the activation of a host

of new intellectual networks and the exchanges and discussions across a variety of

national situations which have themselves become standardized by globalization

to the degree to which we can now speak to each other (65). The standardizing

power of globalization is a cause for celebration, in Jamesons view, since it allows

us to communicate with each other. But there is a great risk, of course, that such

standardized communication would take place in English. One should be mindfulthat universalism may be blind to the fact that if anything is worth communicat-

ing, it is an irreducible difference, even a secret one, of the Other, and if we talked

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only after every difference had been erased, standardized, then no communication

would take place.

One could certainly argue, taking a slightly different direction, that the global

dominance of English should or could be used as a vehicle enabling minority dis-

courses to preserve and disseminate whatever might yet be archived or saved of

their irreducible but ever-diminishing difference. Nevertheless, one has to bear inmind that the standardization of English on a global scale not only diminishes and

erases the specificityof other cultures and languages and reduces the range of politi-

cal and religious options, but also diminishes the very English culture from which

it detached itself in its going global. The globalization of English brings with it a

certain impoverishment of English or American cultures and idioms from within.

Lets admit at once: the opposing possibilities (one of the preservation of local

identity in the face of a need to globalize, the other of a force of globalization that

obliterates national and particular difference) constitute the double structure ofany going global, one the reverse side of the other, one always a neighbor, a double,

or the twin of the other. We will be encountering such intertwining and twinning,

such a doubling of the world, the twin fangs of a glottic opening, going global and

biting both ways. It is a world of twins, and the twinning of the world, one the re-

verse or erasure of the other. At the opening of the world there will be an erasure

and a forgetting of the Other. This originary erasure would be the condition of

going global, in every sense: the twin shadow left at the origin of the word and of the

world. The extent to which such a potential erasure is remembered and warded offwill be the measure of the success of going global in a sense of creating the world.

ii

The central scene in Krzysztof Kieslowskis Double Life of Veronique (1991)

takes place on the square near Jagiellonian University in Krakow, with a 360-

degree revolution of the camera. The scene also inscribes Poland (in 1990)within the orbit of the Western world. That inclusion marks the death of a

certain political, communal immediacy and of a national identity and the

birth of prosthetic, mediated and mediatic, democratic modes of political

representation and integration. In a similar way, the Copernican revolution,

by the time its effects reached the eighteenth century (in itself a revolution-

ary century), finally became, as Thomas Kuhn has it, the common property

of Western man (227). The inclusion of Poland in the West takes place by

means of a death of one double, the Polish twin of Veronique, so that theFrench, Western other can live on and keep the deaths memory. And the 360-

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degree shot takes place at the Jagiellonian university where, almost exactly

500 years before, in 1491, Copernicus started attending. Here, the birth of a

certain global redrawing of European identity is achieved at the expense of

the commemoration of the death of the Other.

At the beginning of his The Creation of the World, or, Globalization, Nancy ex-

poses precisely such an ambivalence in the conjoining proposed by the title. The

Creation of the World, or, Globalization, creates three possible relations between the

two: first, a choice between the creation of the world, or its other, globalization;

second, the creation of the world, otherwise known as globalization; third, an in-

difference: either the creation of the world or globalization will come to the same

thing. Nancy goes on to say:

. . . since it is not a question of prophesying or of mastering the future, how

should we open up in order to look ahead of ourselves where nothing is

visible, with our eyes guided by two terms the sense of which escapes us

creation (until now reserved for theological mysteries), mondialisation

(until now reserved for technical and economic matters, otherwise called

globalization) (10).4

Global displacement is not something that occurs without historical or techno-ideological precedents. In a recent exhibit of the gifts to Stalin in the former Mu-

seum of the Revolution, now the Historical Museum, in Moscow, there was a dis-

play of a globe with a hammer as a telephone receiver and a sickle as a cradle, a gift

from the Polish workers in 1950. This gift in the shape of the globe should remind

us that Moscow and Russia were also the cradle of a global aspiration of a different

kind: the Third International, an attempt to unify the workers of the world. But

that unification, however admirable and desirable (in this day and age superseded

by the Internetional), was thwarted by the fact that this was an attempt at estab-lishing a false empire, an empire that was not truly global but subsumed under

the dominance of a sovereign state, the U.S.S.R. The globe-phone also provides an

occasion to remind ourselves of attempts since the fifteenth century to make Mos-

cow the third Rome and to remind us that a certain self-assumed messianism on

the part of Moscow, first in trying to make itself the religious leader of the world

and then the leader of all the proletariat, is not far from an aspiration that Derrida

calls mondialatinisation (globalatinization).5 A messianic and religious undertone

of the current aspirations of going global couples the sovereignty of ideological oreconomic capital with the sovereignty of one God (of which Rome is but an em-



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blem that stands for all Christian monotheism or, in the case of Moscow, proletar-

ian monotheism).

The global phone is mentioned here not for fun, or not for fun only. This piece

of technology keeps a person attached to the global telecommunications network,

from which, when using the phone, we hang like a puppet or a doll, hanging as if

from a string, not unlike the hanging Stavrogin, the citizen of the canton Uri, onthe last page ofThe Possessed. The global phone is an index of displacement that

transforms the ground on which we communicate, talk, work, or teach, keeping

us suspended and hanging in the air. Having gone global, where am I, as a sub-

ject (national, situational, political, etc.)? Who or what am Ia puppet, a machine

ventriloquized by a phone corporation, SwissComwhere are my words, mobile,

cellular, global? And what is the ground for comparison, for comparative literature,

in such a world?

ii i

Going globalwho or what will come out of it? Nancys analysis pursues two pos-

sibilities of going global. One, which could be called globalization proper, is an

enormous energyat work that turns the worldinto the site of a circulation of goods,

merchandise, the work oftechn and technicity, what Nancy calls cotechnie (eco-

technics), and into a universal equivalent (money). Negri and Hardt have given

this global phenomenon the name empire. The world in this sense of globaliza-tion is the world dominated by an instinct toward death: to follow Nancy, the work

taking place in the world that works toward the worlds destruction. And indeed,

sociologists warn that we live on a planet which is full and without space, the world

that is its own waste; we live on a globe in which modernization as mondialisation

in its devastating effects have come full circle. There is a price to pay. Quite liter-

ally, as Zygmunt Bauman argues, there is no more place for depositing garbage and

the refuse of the history of modernity. More and more, problems created globally

have to be treated locally, often desperately and with inadequate means. But therefuse is overwhelming, plenary and planetary.6

The radical mobility of capital undermines, obliterates, or ignores established

national borders, and economic accumulation and its benefits accrue outside, out

of the reach of those who work for capitals proliferation. There is a decoupling

between the power and structure of political representation, whereby the former

sovereign power of the nation-state becomes an emptied-out shell and a memory.

Accumulation of capital becomes the sovereign of the world, and the coupling be-

tween the sovereign state and capital gives way to a dehiscence (Nancy 164). Thestate does not know where or how to ground itself.



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Alexander Sokurovs Russian Ark (2002) takes place entirely at the foremost

site of Russian sovereignty, theWinter Palace (now the Hermitage Museum).

Toward the end of the movie, shot in one take, as a track shot follows the

crowd descending the Jordan Stairwell (named after the River Jordan, thus

making additional connections between the Russian Ark, the Bible, and theArk of the Covenant), we overhear an exchange between a governor and his

wife: When we get back to Kursk, we have to throw the same kind of ball in

the spring. The camera then pans onto the misty waters of the Neva and the

Baltic Sea, reinforcing the suggestion of the movies title that the Hermitage

is a ship. But it is a ship which is not hermetically sealed. The reference to

Kursk inserts a hole in the ark by invoking the worst Russian submarine dis-

aster ever: the sinking of the Kursk. Discreet but insistent sounds of grinding

metal remind one throughout the movie of the noises a ship or a subma-rine would make under distress, sinking. And in one scene, two modern-day

sailors in military uniforms confront the Marquis de Custine (Sergei Drei-

den) and get into an argument with him.The Russian Ark is a ship that leaks,

filling itself with the memory of its own lossnot least the loss of Russias

supreme, Messianic national sovereignty, hermetically sealed behind its Iron

Curtain. The Russian Ark leaks the lack that it tries to contain. And the film

turns that loss into a source of a post-historic, melancholic sovereignty, the

sovereignty of melancholia.

Another example can testify to a similar melancholic displacement or loss of na-

tional sovereignty. At the very center of Moscow there is the Hotel Moscow, built by

Alexei Shchusev, the same architect who built Lenins mausoleum and for a while

before they kicked him outStalins. (There is to this day in Moscow an architec-

tural museum that justly bears Shchusevs name, marking his importance for Rus-

sian and Soviet architecture). The building is famous for having an asymmetricalfacade. The myth has it that Stalin was given two blueprints of the hotel, a left and

right section of the elevation, which he signed in the middle to give his approval,

and no one dared to come back to ask him which faade he preferred. As a result,

it is said, the hotel was built with an asymmetrical facade. The hotel interior is a

masterpiece of high Stalinist architecture, known also as Stalinist baroque, and a

veritable gallery of invaluable works of art by some leading painters and sculptors

of the Soviet era: Gerasimov, Deneika, Mukhina. In a move that was not without

scandal, the hotel was recently sold by the Moscow city council and Mayor YuriLuzhkov for scrap. The very symbol of an epoch and of the city of Moscow is to be



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torn down. The Hotel Moscow, a building built to last ages, for some reason was

not on the list of the buildings protected by the state, and therefore a monument

by any measure has been slated for destruction. An effect of globalization?

Not long ago (in the summer of 2003) an automobile company, bmw, rented

the faade of the still-standing building as the place to display an ad for a newbmw.

The ad has the front grill of the car, with a menacing look, baring its fangs (onewould be tempted to say the twin fangs of capital, but more about that a bit later),

and it is stretched the entire length of the faade, two football fields, with an in-

scription: This is what the future looks like (tak vygliadit budushchee). The ten-

sion at the heart of Moscows and Russias identity, covered over and traversed by a

techno-economic monopoly, is accented by the fact that the menacing gaze of the

machine, this self-proclaimed gaze of the future, looks directly at the Russian state

parliament, the Duma. The advertising is reflected in the windows of the house of

the Russian parliament and even clearly visible as a reflection in the plaque fixed onthe building that bears the institutions name, The State Parliament. The sover-

eignty of the lawgiving state institution is emptied out by the gaze (of all things in

Russia) of a German car, that, in the Russian language, proclaims the future: this

is what the future looks like. And to the left there is an ad for another symbol of

global techno-mobility, a Nokia telephone, that also privileges a gaze, and next to

it, on another faade, another ad, a grand display of a globe. And in a nearby store

for children, the young consumerist paradise with the world in its name, Detski mir

(the world of children), one can buy an electric miniature version of a bmw.In lieu of sovereignty, the state now fills itself with something we could call

sovereignism, the condition of a sense of loss of sovereignty, a melancholic state

which often turns to violent compensations: war, internal and external repression,

the solidifying of a police state, nationalism at the place of the disappearance of

the nation-state. Going to war is a favorite compensatory mechanism to cover the

internal weakening of a nation-state: a lack of investment in the supporting struc-

tures of sovereignty, such as education, health care, pension funds, even the legality

of the democratic electoral procedures, all these are replaced by a compensatorybellicosity. As a graffito on the campus of the University of California at Irvine said

in the days preceding the war in Iraq, Give war a chance.

And Russia, as is well known, invented a war in Chechnya (and declared it fin-

ished three years ago, in the year 2000): a standing exercise of compensatory vio-

lence that, according to some political analysts, brought President Putin into power

and keeps him there. His first elections were preceded and assured by the explo-

sions, attributed to Chechen terrorists, of two buildings in the center of Moscow.

Political analysts have noticed a return of the figure of the leader, the Fhrerof thenation, who is beyond criticism, even a return of certain Stalinist aspirations, in

Putin.



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The Great Dictator, by Charlie Chaplin (1940), is a masterly example of the

ways in which a certain globalizing aspiration has at its origin a repression

of the twin other (in this case the obliteration of German Jewry, which was

in many instances the most exemplary and most integrated contributor

to German art, literature, economy, and culture). The Jewish barber andthe dictator, Hinkel, are both played by Chaplin. The establishment of sov-

ereign globalizing power here takes place by means of the obliteration of

the twin within the one: one nation, one sovereign, one leader. That is not

to say that the Jewish barber and the dictator are one and the same (twins

are never the same) but that the construction of sovereign national identity

always entails a destruction of otherness in the very social, political or literal

body that wants to climb above all others, as the German anthem to this day

proclaims: Deutschland ber alles in der Welt. In the film, such sovereignglobal aspirations are brought to their radical consequence when the globe

with which the German dictator plays bursts in his hands.

One could give some more examples of the effects of globalization on a nation-

state by analyzing the dissolutionthe collapseof Yugoslavia. The government

of Slobodan Miloevi was efficient in dismantling the social and material infra-

structure of the old Yugoslavia; the new government was marked by corruptionand numerous falsifications in electoral procedures; the last elections of Miloevi

were forged, and the Supreme Court was called in to decide the election, which it

did in Miloevis favor; the government, coupled with corrupt capital (the liber-

alized market, if you prefer), monopolized the media, and used them to whip up a

bellicose frenzy; the rule of Miloevi was marked by malversations in the energy

industry, particularly in oil and electricity, pauperizing the population and leaving

the nation in the dark, in every sense of the word; while a few businessmen in oil

and energy got rich beyond belief at the expense of the rest in a devastated country.And how did such a regime, of which the recent killing of the prime minister Zoran

Djinjdji is but a last, belated spasm, stay in power? By inventing an enemy, the

Muslim other, as its scapegoat. The regime stayed in place until it ran out of scape-

goats, Muslim others, who were left to rot in the common graves in Srebrenica in

Bosnia, or Djakovica in Kosovo, or in the makeshift detention camps, or in cities

like Sarajevo, reduced to rubbleand then the regime turned openly against its

own populace. This autoimmune turning of the nation against itself7 finally, after

immense devastation, turned out also to be a stroke of luck: it provoked a revoltof the population, who overthrew Miloevi, and the people themselves for a brief

moment became sovereign. Miloevis trial in the Hague takes an immense and



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unprecedented step towards establishing forms of international legal protection

by providing a recourse to international justice.

iv

Going global: what will come out of it? Recent violent accelerations in world his-tory, violence gone postal and global, force a reflection on the possibilities of peace-

ful coexistence in the condition called global. The reflection is not new that mod-

ernization and mondialisation are each others obverse and are part and parcel of

what is called modernity with all its violent contradictions. In his Perpetual

Peace, Kant writes famously that the right to visit, to associate, belongs to all men

by virtue of their common ownership of the earths surface; for since the earth is a

globe, they cannot scatter themselves infinitely, but must, finally, tolerate living in

close proximity, because originally no one had a greater right on earth than any-one else (118). Kants reflections have been taken up recently and systematically

in several works by Jacques Derrida which reflect on the future of democracy,

democracy to come, in the age of globalization, in the essays On Cosmopolitanism

and Forgiveness (2001) for example, and most recently in Voyous. In On Cosmo-

politanism and Forgiveness, Derrida posits something called unconditional hospi-

tality, which would be another name for ethics. Hospitality is culture itself and

not simply one ethic among others. Insofar as it has to dowith ethos,thatis,theresi-

dence, ones home, the familiar place of dwelling, . . . the manner in which we relateto ourselves and to others, to others as our own or as foreigners, ethics is hospi-

tality (2001, 1617). This ethics of hospitality, which is a tautology, should be un-

conditional: it gives space and place to the Other, it gives a possibility to the future.

It should be what unconditionally precedes and informs its other potentiality, the

turning of hospitality into the law, legal systems, subsuming hospitality under the

governance of sovereignty. This corruption is always a possibility and even a ne-

cessity, without which the general ethical imperative of hospitality would be an

empty word. Both unconditional hospitality and the legal formalization of hospi-tality into the law, for example contracts among states, international laws, etc., as

envisioned by Kant, make space for the entire practice of the political. Between the

two appears an opening for something or someone to arrive. For example, a future.

In Theo Angelopouloss Ulysses Gaze (1996), a modern-day Ulysses, Harvey

Keitel, searches for the undeveloped reels of a movie made by the Manakis

brothers, the first movie ever made in the Balkans. Eventually, he finds it inmodern-day Sarajevo, during the last war, with the film being kept by a Jew-



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ish curator. After the curator and his family are killed, Ulysses watches the

empty reels of the first films projected before his eyes. Ulysses Gaze thereby

contests the privileging of sight and gazing, substituting a specific Greco-

Jewish ethics of space, according to which the face of the Other (pace Levi-

nas), the ethical, that which, in fact, is not given to visibility, precedes anygazing, spacing, or temporality.

In his essay Arriveraux fins de lEtat (et de la guerre et de la guerre mon-

diale) (To ArriveAt the End of the State [and the End of War and of World

War]), which is published as the concluding chapter of his Voyous, Derrida asks

questions about the future (-venir) of reason and about its becoming (de-venir)

(in short, if you wish, the future of studies, and therefore, of comparative studiesas well):

. . . today . . . the thinking of the world to come and, first, of the so-called

world of humankind is passing through terror, the fears and the trembling

of an earthquake whose every shake is in some way overdetermined and

marked over by the forces of evil and of sovereigntyof sovereignty in gen-

eral but more visibly, more readably, of the sovereignty of the indivisible

nation-state (aujourdhui . . . la pense du monde venir et dabord de ladite

terre humaine traverse la terreur, les craintes et le tremblement dun sisme

dont toutes les secousses sont en quelque sorte surdtermines et surnom-

mes par des forces en mal de souverainetde souverainet en gnral mais

plus visiblement, plus lisiblement, de souverainet tat-national indivisible)

(2003, 196).

The Kantian call for an enlightened cosmopolitanism between nation-states is

put to the test, as the very conditions of the nation-state, and the sovereignty of

reason, find themselves in crisis, facing the tremors of a singular and unconditionalevent that goes under the name of globalization. The states losing their sovereignty

close themselves off from the Other, the foreign, the alien, and those in need of

political protectionthe last group, particularly, increasing in numbers in the cur-

rent desedimentation of the nation state.

The desedimentation of the sovereign nation-state in the spasms of what I have

called sovereignism paradoxically undermines the possibility of waging wars in

the classical sense or mutates wars into another form. And indeed, if we turn to

the example of Yugoslavia, Miloevis regime was not, stricto sensu, at war withanyone; there was no declaration of war, Yugoslavia was never at war, and the war



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really never took place (not in Baudrillards sense, not even virtually). Yes, there

was devastation and the exercise of nothingnessimmense and senseless destruc-

tion, human, mostly civilian casualties and suffering, exported elsewhere and used

to legitimate a certain power and to put the former Yugoslavia in a perpetual state

of emergencybut there was no war. The same might now be the case, arguably,

in Iraq.This coming-to-the-end of war, as Derrida calls it, finds its doubling in the

spread of terror and terrorism, wars reverse, twin, global double. Globalization has

not only produced mutations in the configuration of the nation-state and there-

fore a mutation of the right towage war as a sovereign decision, but also a mutation

in terrorist reactions to state violence. It is not possible to define terrorism in its

most devastating and therefore exemplary instantiations by any classical definition

or denomination, as a fight for a territory or rights of a minority, as a partisan war,

or a struggle for any other cause. Nor is it possible to wage a war against ter-rorism. Spreading rhizomatically, as an undertow of global capital, as its resentful

shadow, and latched onto it like a virus, using it as a host for transporting money

or killing bodies, and therefore reaching everywhere in the world, going global in

the center of the world and in the World Trade Center, it is its ubiquitous, unrepre-

sentable, unconscious doubling, evading the exposure to light or enlightenment;

it is a vEmpire shadow of an empire.

No less an authority than Marx likened capital to a vampire, neither dead nor

alive, accumulated dead labor which, vampirelike, lives off the living. But how didthe vampire get to be the figure of universal abjection? What precisely are we try-

ing to purge?

In Francis Ford Coppolas Bram Stokers Dracula (1992), Prince Vlad avenges

the fall of Constantinople and the advent of the Muslim world in Europe. In Bram

Stokers novel, Dracula is someone who avenges, some fifty years after the event,

the Battle of Kassova, or Kosovo (in 1389), waged by Serbian troops who lost to the

Ottoman forces but at the same time stopped them and constituted by the loss the

southern border between the Christian and Muslim worlds. Dracula is thereforean avenger against or defender from the Muslim other, constituting and defending

Europe and Christianity. In the course of mounting the defense from the Other, he

becomes like the Other, starts impaling his enemies just as the Turks did (whence

his name, Vlad the Impaler), and eventually threatens the tranquility and insularity

of the heart (threatens also the veins) of the empire, London. It is necessary there-

fore to purge him from the very empire that produced the vampire as its guardian

at the border in the first place. Enter Dr. Van Helsing and the techno-brotherhood,

freely waging war on other sovereign soil, equipped with the technological meansof destruction: not only weapons, but a phonograph, a gramophone, typewriters,



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the telegraph, media, the cinema, trains, photography,the Kodak cameramaking

its first appearance in literaturedrugs, chemical weapons like morphine and

sulfa, and the capacity to transfuse blood, all put to techno-militaristic purposes.

Dracula is also a figure of crumbling sovereignty, living on the top of a moun-

tain in a ruined castle (the sovereign means the one who lives on the summit, the

one who is the summit itself) in eternal melancholia. In the movie he cries blacktears, metonymy for black bile ( ), and he is someone who keeps inter-

nalized the memory of the destruction and disintegration of his own sovereignty.

He keeps his soil, blood, and money close to him when he travels, the very figure of

the nation-state of the second industrial revolution and the accumulation of capi-

tal in a nation-state. Unlike the members of the techno-brotherhood, who freely

roam the globe with weapons and means of telecommunication, Dracula is tied to

blood and soil (the proverbial nationalist Blut und Boden). But, interestingly, the

weapons of the technocrats parallel and appear as twins of the capacities of Dracula.He has a capacity to mesmerize, they have telephones that work at a distance; he

is wounded by light, and so is their Kodak film, making the vampire, by the way,

the very emblem of cinematic production. Dracula carries his own crypt around

and so his own churchchurches are the sepulchers of god, as Nietzsche would

say. Dracula is therefore also an epitome of Irish Roman Catholicism (the Fenian

nationalist uprising cloaked in the guise of a Romanian prince, conveyed to the

very heart of the British-English empire by the closeted Irishman Bram Stoker).8

One should also consider Dracula in general to be the literal believer in transub-stantiation, someone who cannot get enough of that Sunday mass wine or blood.

In contrast, the techno-brotherhood is equipped with the interiorized Protes-

tant faith symbolized by the Dutch doctor Van Helsing, who carries with him a

cross and a stake, Draculas own trademark tool. Van Helsing is a combination of

scientist and Protestant fundamentalist, an obscurantist and exorcist who purges

by fire, a purging best representing at the same time the Enlightened West in the

figure of Lucy Westenra (sic). (We cannot go here into another terrible European

tradition which likened European Jews to vampires and purged them with fire; wecan only hint at that even more sinister interpretive possibility.) And at the center

of the battle is blood, the biopolitical figure and the pre-eminent figure of diseases

of autoimmunity. Dracula on the side of the sovereignty of the nation-state; the

techno-brotherhood on the side of globalization, a vampire and a vEmpire, one

the obverse and the twin of the other. You could call it love at first bite.

Bram Stokers Dracula allows further interpretive turns, pertaining to the con-

version of blood to oil, and testifying to the great analytic and anticipatory capaci-

ties of the novel. Prince Dracula lives the life of the living dead in Romania (moreprecisely, in Walachia). Walachias capital (and therefore the capital of Draculas



13/19

princely, sovereign domain), Ploesti, was the site of the largest European oil re-

finery during the Second World War and the target of one of the wars largest air

raids, on 1 August 1943. That date saw the largest number of American planes and

men lost in any single raid: 540 American airmen died and 54 planes were lost,

one-third of the raiding fleet, while bombing in Ploesti the blood of the economic

life of another, the German empire. (American history books call the raid BlackSunday).9 That war was of course not about oil either. It was about blood. And

Ploesti is just a skip awaythe area shares the same Black Seafrom some middle

Eastern countries in which capitalism sank its twin fangs in search of economic

life-blood a long time ago. If some may see in the figure of Tony Blair a slightly

nutty and hysterical modern-day Dr. Van Helsing, let us not forget that the latter

also has at his side a faithful gun-toting Texan: Quincey P. Morris.10

During the nato bombing of Belgrade and Serbia a few years ago, the then

Yugoslav president, Slobodan Miloevi, who started his political career with aspeech to some half-million Serbs on the field of Kosovo and was supported by the

West as a source of stability in the region for quite a while, was likened to a vam-

pire.11 There you have it, capital and the vEmpire hard at work (Cf. Longinovi;

Goldsworthy, 1998; 2002).

v

Going global: who or what will come out of it?Current world political configurations combine a certain obscurantism and ir-

rationalism with a hypertechnical conclusion that universalism and the Enlight-

enment will triumph, amid a euphoria of nationalist or colonialist, but in any case

imperialist, hyperidentifications with national identities. As Sam Weber points out

in his essay The Future of the University, in his Institution and Interpretation,

globalization carries with it a fundamentally political redefinition of the social

value of public services, and of universities and education in particular (225). It is

therefore necessary, in order to think the world, to couple the thought of Enlight-enment, which it is necessary to maintain but which is not fully capable of analyz-

ing the events that constitute globalization, which precisely refuse to be exposed to

light (and are preciselycreated as an effect of the Enlightenment), with a politicized

psychoanalysis that would be able to give account of spectral, hauntological, eco-

technic figures, from media to capitalism. The latter practice has been pursued for

quite a while, for example, in the works of Jacques Derrida. The advantage of such

discursive or analytic practice over that inherited from the Enlightenment is the

capacity to give an account of the unconscious movements of the death wish thatare the shadow of the living, representative, and visible forms, one set the double

or twin of the Other. Any future comparative studies will have to investigate this



14/19

difference at work in what is considered to be selfsame in identity and in compara-

tive analytic practice itself. And unless a space for justice is opened before the new

comparative studies are undertaken, such studies will be only be more of the same,

a vicious regress, and no world will come out of them. The university should be the

place where the ethics of work turn work into an oeuvre, pace Derrida (The Uni-

versity Without Condition, in Derrida, Without Alibi, 219), or turns the work intoa network, as Sam Weber proposes in the new edition of Institution and Interpre-

tation. (Weber, The Future of the University, 2001, 220235). Both Derrida and

Weber point to the ethical demand to change the university itself, where such a re-

working of work in the direction of ethics, hospitality, and heterogeneity, oriented

toward the Other, is, as Derrida says, unconditional: unconditional but without

sovereignty. Derrida writes: It would be necessary to dissociate a certain uncondi-

tionalindependence of thought, of deconstruction, of justice, of the Humanities,

of the university, and so forth from any phantasm ofindivisible sovereignty and ofsovereign mastery (Derrida, 2002, 235).

The work should be turned into an opening to the world.

In order to counter some of the terrifying variants of globalization, one has first

and foremost to reassert already-existing and hard-won democratic institutions,

liberties, and practices. Butreassert them radically, uncompromisingly,and in their

totality, since the division of the world between so-called democracy at home and

war abroad is not sustainable in the conditions called global. And new forms of

economic distribution have to be invented. Such processes are in some instanceswell-advanced and give hope for the future. In the summer of 2003, for example, we

saw France forget some fifteen thousand elderly left to die in the heat, and we saw

France ravaged by the social and economic turbulence that devastated the working

conditions of so-called intermittentspart-time workerswhose just protests re-

sulted in thefirst-ever cancellation of the festival in Avignon. Butthe protests them-

selves initiated and invigorated new debate on the conditions of labor and have

revitalized the movement for the so-called alter-mondialisation . As Jacques Niko-

noff, one of the leaders of the movement, wrote in Libration on 18 August 2003,the alter-mondialiste movement attempts to surpass the old movement of anti-

mondialisation. This change corresponds to a profound evolution, which adds

to the always-necessary contestation of globalized capital some concrete, opera-

tional, and effective proposals. In his analysis, which is steeped in the language of

mondialisation, Nikonoff writes that no other world (aucun autre monde) will

be possible if millions of people remain without jobs. And he makes an interest-

ing plea for reinvestment in the state. He notices a strange alliance in that regard:

for the economic liberals, the state is an impediment to the free market; for liber-tarians and some leftists, the state represents the power of the ruling class. And he

goes on to conclude: These two currents join each other in the same spasm, to



15/19

deny a positive role that could be played by the State. In reality, the State is what

the citizens make of it, and it should become an instrument of common interest

and the object of social struggles for its democratization.

Yes, there is a future and a promise of the world of the future: the world to come

will have to be one that exercises democracy, or there will be none. Under this

banner the alter-mondialiste movement today gathers hundreds of thousands offollowers at its meetings; recently in Larzac, France, for example, there were some

300,000. The movement attempts to invent new types of global solidarity, points

of contact made possible by the heightened global mobility through which such

solidarity will spread, more permanent forms of the global organization of labor,

and a thinking that is not that of opposites but democratic alternatives:

What characterizes our situation is both beyond and on this side of the state:

the development of the world market, the power of multinational corpora-tions, the outline of the planetary organization, and the extension of capi-

talism through the entire social body are forming a huge abstract machine

that overcodes the monetary, industrial and technological flux. At the same

time, the means of exploitation, control and surveillance are becoming more

and more subtle and diffused, in some way more molecular. The workers of

thewealthy countries participate necessarily in the looting of the third world.

. . . The State no longer possesses the political, institutional or even financial

means that would enable it to parry the social counter-attacks on the ma-

chine. It is doubtful it can rely forever upon older forms such as the police,

the army, the bureaucracy (even unionized), collective equipment, schools

or families (Deleuze and Parnet 111112).

Going global: the world of the future and the future of the world will not come,

and nothing will happen, without this call for justice. Democracy to come, says

Jacques Derrida in Voyous, although without presence, is nonetheless the hic et

nuncof urgency, of an injunction as an absolute urgency (L-venir de la dmo-

cratie, cest aussi, quoique sans prsence, le hic et nuncde lurgence, de linjonctioncomme urgence absolue) (2003, 63). The advent and therefore the future of what is

to come, avenir, will be marked by a certain passivity, an opening and exposure

to the Other, to what will come and to who will comeand therefore has to re-

main incalculable (exposition lautre, ce qui vient et qui vientet doit donc

rester incalculable) (2003, 210).

Nancy echoes that reflection when he writes, Justice is always also, and prob-

ably foremost, the demand for justice: a protest and a demand against injustice, a

call that cries for justice, a breath that is spent for it. Such justice does not comefrom outside the world, says Nancy, but it is given with the world, in it, and as the



16/19

law itself of its being given. (La justice est toujours aussiet peut-tre dabord

lexigence de justice: la rclamation et la protestation contre linjustice, lappel qui

crie pour la justice, le souffle qui spuise pour elle. . . . Elle est donne avec le

monde, en lui et comme la loi de sa donation.) (178).

In a word, it is only just: go global, and create the world!

u University of California, Irvine

notes

1 Plenary presentation delivered on 20 September 2003, at the Southern Association of

Comparative Literature Annual Conference, Going Globalthe Future of Comparative

Literature, University of Texas at Austin, 1820 September 2003. Minor changes in-

clude an updated list of works cited and stylistic revisions to accommodate the written

format.2 Translation mine. A published English translation exists, by Giovanna Borradori (see

list of works cited).

3 A movement that suspends the assurance of a historical progress, which is a desedi-

mentation of an ethics of living together, a movement which affirms an empire that

joins technological domination with pure economic reason (Au contraire, cest dun

mme mouvement que lassurance dun progrs historique sest suspendue, que la con-

vergence du savoir, de lthique et du bien-vivre-ensemble sest dsagrge, et que sest

affirme la domination dun empire conjoint de la puissance technique et de la raison

conomique pure) (Nancy, 2002, 15).4 This technical and economic evidence, as Nancy has it, is exemplified by something

that is called a global telephone, which works everywhere in the world. One can ob-

tain it through Swiss Telecom, with a number in Switzerland. So everyone, just like

Dostoevskys Idiot, Prince Myshkin, or another character, Nikolai Stavrogin from the

Possessed, can say that he or she is a citizen of the canton of Uri. Most of us, though,

unfortunately, without the attendant Swiss bank account. This very essay should be

understood as a phone call for thinking that came from the global phone.

5 For example, in Foi et Savoir(Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1996), 48; Samuel Weber trans-

lates mondialatinisation (italicized by Derrida in the original) as globalatinization(Derrida, Acts of Religion, 67).

6 Globalization and waste are extensively analyzed in the chapter To Each Waste Its

Dumping Site, or, The Waste of Globalization, in Zygmunt Baumans Wasted Lives

(2004).

7 In a recent interview, Autoimunity: Real and Symbolic Suicides, in Philosophy in the

Time of Terror: Dialogues With Jrgen Habermas and JacquesDerrida, edited and trans-

lated by Giovanna Borradori, Derrida elaborates on the concept of autoimmunity

and its relationship to what is discussed here, the concept of globalization: And since

this absolute threat will have been secreted by the end of the Cold War and the victoryof the U.S. camp, and since it threatens what is supposed to sustain the world order,



17/19

the very possibility of a world and of any world-wide effort [mondialisation] (interna-

tional law, a world market, a universal language, and so on), what is thus put at risk by

this terrifyingautoimmunitary logic is nothing else than the existence of the world, of

the worldwide [i.e., globalD.K.] itself (Derrida, 2003, 9899). In French the title of

the book is Le concept du 11 septembre: dialogues New York (octobredcembre 2001).

8 For the relationship between Bram Stokers Dracula and BritishIrish colonial ten-

sions, see the excellent analysis by Joseph Valente, in Draculas Crypt(2002).

9 The official military history website run by the Pentagons Air Force History Support

Office gives the following justification for bombing Ploesti, in an article titled Tidal-

wave, the August 1943 Raid on Ploesti: The most inviting oil target was at Ploesti

which was thought to produce a third of Germanys liquid fuel requirements (http://

www.airforcehistory.hq.af.mil/PopTopics/ploesti.htm, accessed 1 February 2005). The

name of the unfortunate raid, Black Sunday, is to be found, among other places,

as the title of a chapter (Dugan and Stewart, 224247) and of a book (Hill). For the

blood-for-oil economy of the battle, see Stout.

10 The vampiric and economic hegemony of the United States is explored in Anne Rices

Interview with the Vampire. The origin of the economic vampire is directly related to

the issues of the unavowable and therefore forever melancholic racial and colonial

domination at the origin of the United States, embodied in the vampire Lestat (a thinly

veiled reference to Les Etats Unis, the United States in French). The novel situates this

vampiric / vEmpiric etatist-economic expansionism in the American South, in Louisi-

ana more precisely, at or around the time of the Louisiana Land Purchase from France

in 1803. Thus, Lestat and his apprentice Louis (as in Louisiana) are directly related to

the colonial expansion of the U.S. (les Etats Unis): the economic exploitation of the

sugar-cane plantations sucking the sweet excess from colonial expansion; racial, bio-

political and economic domination. We could call this episode a Domino-sugar effect.

11 See, for example, the caricature by David Levine in the New York Review of Books,

vol. 39, no. 3, 30 January 1992, 15, which depicts Slobodan Miloevi, the butcher of

the Balkans, with blood dripping from his mouth.

works cited

Angelopoulos, Theo, dir. Ulysses Gaze. Fox Lorber Studio, 1997.

Arendt, Hannah. The Origins of Totalitarianism. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1976

[1948].

Baudrillard, Jean, The Gulf War Will Not Take Place. In The Gulf War Did Not Take

Place. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995, 2328.

Bauman, Zygmunt. Une plante pleine et sans espace, Liberation, 21 July 2003, 5.

. Wasted Lives: Modernity and Its Outcasts. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 2004.

Borradori, Giovanna, ed. and trans. Philosophy in the Time of Terror: Dialogues With

Jrgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003.

Pub. in French as Le concept du 11 septembre: dialogues New York (octobre

dcembre 2001). Paris: Galile, 2004.



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Chaplin, Charles, dir. The Great Dictator. Twentieth Century Fox, 1940.

Coppola, Francis Ford, dir. Bram Stokers Dracula. Columbia/Tristar Studios, 1992.

Deleuze, Gilles, and Claire Parnet. Politics. In On the Line. Trans. John Johnston. New

York: Semiotext(e), 1983.

Derrida, Jacques. 1996. Foi et savoir. Paris: Seuil, 1996.

. On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness. Trans. Mark Dooley and Michael

Hughes. London and New York: Routledge, 2001.

. Acts of Religion. Trans. Samuel Weber. New York: Routledge, 2002.

. Without Alibi. Trans. Peggy Kamuf. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002.

. Voyous (Rogues). Paris: Galile, 2003.

Dostoevsky, Fyodor. The Idiot. Trans. Alan Myers. Oxford: Oxford University Press,

1998 (1868).

. The Possessed. Trans. David Magarshack. New York: Penguin, 1971 (1872).

Dugan, James, and Carroll Stewart. Ploesti: The Great GroundAir Battle of 1 August

1943. Washington, D.C.: Brasseys, 1998.

Goldsworthy, Vesna. Inventing Ruritania. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998.

. Invention and Intervention: The Rhetoric of Balkanization. In Balkan As

Metaphor: Between Globalization and Fragmentation. Ed. Duan Bjeli and Obrad

Savi. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002.

Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri. Empire. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,

2001.

Hill, Michael. Black Sunday: Ploesti (Atglen, PA: Schiffer, 1994).

Jameson, Fredric. Notes on Globalization as a Philosophical Issue. In The Cultures of

Globalization. Fredric Jameson and Masao Miyoshi, eds. Durham and London:

Duke University Press, 1999, 5481.

Kant, Immanuel. Perpetual Peace and Other Essays. Trans. Ted Humphrey. Indianapolis:

Hackett Publishing Company, 1992.

Kieslowski, Krzysztof, dir. The Double Life of Veronique. Color. Paramount, 1991.

Kuhn, Thomas. The Copernican Revolution: Planetary Astronomy In the Development of

Western Thought. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1957.

Levine, David. Slobodan Milosevic. Carricature. New York Review of Books 39.3

(30 Jan. 1992), 15.

Longinovi, Tomislav. Vampires Like Us: Gothic Imaginary and the Serbs. In Balkan

As Metaphor: Between Globalization and Fragmentation. Ed. Duan I. Bjeli and

Obrad Savi. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002.

Mastnak, Tomaz. Crusading Peace. Christendom, the Muslim World, and Western

Political Order. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002.

Nancy, Jean-Luc. La cration du monde ou la mondialisation. Paris: Galile, 2002.

Nikonoff, Jacques. Aprs le Larzac, de nouveaux dfis, Libration, 18 Aug. 2003, 6.

Rice, Anne. Interview With the Vampire. New York: Ballantine Books, 1976.

Sokurov, Alexander, dir. The Russian Ark [Russkii kovcheg]. Egoli Tossell Film AG and

Hermitage Bridge Studio, 2002.

Stoker, Bram. Dracula. Ed. Nina Auerbach and David J. Skal. New York: Norton

Critical Edition, 1999.



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Stout, Jay A. Fortress Ploesti: The Campaign to Destroy Hitlers Oil. Havertown, PA:

Casemate, 2003.

Valente, Joseph. Draculas Crypt: Bram Stoker, Irishness, and the Question of Blood.

Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2002.

Weber, Samuel. Institution and Interpretation. Expanded Edition. Stanford, CA:

Stanford University Press, 2001.


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