Post-Irony and the Rise of the Security
State
Once again it's that day when we are
all supposed to wipe that jaded grin off our faces and feel the grasp
of our innermost sincerity in the face of a memory of that day when
everything went wrong. A coveted treasure-trove for propagandists of all shades, the
terrorist attack of a few years ago has been framed as an assault on
such various lofty apparitions as the nation, the liberal-democratic
form of government, the workers' movement and suchlike. With no shortage of
pompous, self-important contestants to the post-22/7 cake, the
general agreement seems to be that of a general agreement as such,
its dire emphasis rivalled only by its vagueness, its content
secondary to its very existence.
I do not doubt the sincerity of the
public demonstrations of (os-)love that have followed. But herein lies
their true danger. When politicized, love becomes false and perverted. As we have known since Robespierre, nothing lends legitimacy to totalitarian means as easily as a rhetoric of love, dissolving
the distance between subjects, between private and public, zoe and
bios. Without a minimum of public alienation, no space for rational
political discourse is possible, and we are left with Lippestad's
doctrine of totalberedskap or Total Preparedness – a principle not
only impossible to achieve, but which also has no place in a
democratic society.
