Contenu du sommaire : Guerres et paix dans l'empire

We have entered a new long-term war regime. This regime is multiform, and deployed on two mutually interpenetrating fronts : one internal, the other external. The military and the forces of « law and order » cooperate with each other to face a supposed common enemy : international terrorism, both actual and potential. If, in this war regime, the American government occupies a leadership position, several other governments are engaged at the same level, France and Russia amongst them. This state of affairs cannot be reduced to a simple model of Americal imperialism. This article argues that the principal cause (behind the formation of the new regime) is at once the deepest and largest : it reflects the fear of globality, of the subversive emergence of a humanity at once globalised and mixed, which in multiple ways, shifts future prospects : shaking up dominations, confronting the big, global problems, without playing the game of conflicts of force and territory. It is this fear which, whilst it motivates those promoting this new regime, also poses to us, a real challenge : that of expressing, more than they can suppress, the virtualities of this globality.

Alliez and Negri start out from the contention that world war does not establish itself as the power of the imperial order without obscuring (opacifier) all regulatory ideas of peace, reduced to a deceptive illusion. Absolutely contemporary with war, « postmodern » peace presents itself as the « postdemocratic » institution of a permanent state of exception, the continuation of war by other means (both internal and external), the reduction of sovereignty to the disequilibrium of terror according to the principle of distinguishing between friend and enemy. Since war, peace and barbarism interact without any regulation other than that of the common sense of the Unworldly squalor (l'Immonde), there remains only the Combat against War to destroy the evidence system of the false social peace and to work for the construction of a World once again possible for the whatever singularities (singularités quelconques) that we are in-common. This is where the socially dangerous character of contemporary art comes from, when it attacks the media image-world by setting a new transversalist aesthetic paradigm » to work which exposes itself to the tearing of the sensible in the overexposure of peace to war. This could be art's new adress, the marking out of its difference in a creative conspiracy (machination) of affects, which can no longer sustain itself with even the slightest memory of peace.

This essay is addressed to the US antiwar movement which dismisses the Bush Administration as a crew of short-sighted right-wing cranks toadying to the big oil companies who don't deserve serious intellectual consideration. But the Bush Administration deserves « respect » (i.e., a « look-again ») because it is responding quite resolutely to the five-year old global crisis of neoliberalism. Its solution is to make the US military the enforcer of the rules of neoliberal economics while billions of people and their governments have been made so destitute by them that they simply cannot abide by these rules any longer. This is « the Fourth World War » the Zapatistas named at the beginning of the crisis. A war with Iraq is the first application of the US's unilateral role in this larger struggle. To stop the war with Iraq, the antiwar movement must show to US workers — white, black and immigrant — that the Bush Administration's effort to overcome the crisis of neoliberalism is bound to harm their bodies and welfare much more than Saddam Hussain ever could.

For more than two centuries the constitutional State and the principle of legality have constructed a rampart against the selfsufficiency of police power, but the events of Summer 2001 have brutally unveiled the porosity of this limit. Suddenly, an entire history reappeared, preciously instructive, supposedly past and dedicated to erudition since the fateful date, 1789. Like the revolutionaries in the constituent and legislative Assembly (1789-91), we are once again confronted by a dilemma barely modified by two centuries of juridical positivism. Is it possible to subject the activities of the police to a system of legal control, or must we rather admit that that institution possesses its own standards and that any blunders are less the sign of a specific violation of the law than the confirmation of a structural specificity proper to the police?

Around the beginning of the 21st century, certain mutations of capitalism and modes of neomanagement combined to replace the old "disciplinary society", with what we can call the law and order society. Initially combining mechanisms of disciplinary power and a sophisticated biopolitics, the law and order society, has begun to adapt mechanisms of control (Deleuze), as well as elements of the old sovereign power and the state of permanent exception (Agamben) to face threats to its security. The methods of law and order operate in an ambiguous manner, oscillating between protection and repression. A perfect example of this oscillation can be seen in the measures used to control migratory fluxes, notably the detention centres, which are — I will argue — to contemporary society, what the prison was to Foucault's disciplinary society.

Contemporary humanitarianism is held in a permanent and tense relationship with the warlike, destructive, and exclusionary strategies of the states which dominate the planet. On the one hand, a politics of the "clenched fist" champion of both holy and just wars, exemplary sanctions, lightning raids and surgical strikes ; in other words, the technical arsenal of a police force acting globally on an ad hoc basis and according to the friend / enemy relation, following the principles of partisan fidelity and the vendetta. On the other hand, occupying the place of social politics at the same global scale is a spectacular humanism, manifesting itself through an ensemble of private organisations whose role is to keep the survivors alive, treating them as nameless victims, held at a distance for the sole purpose of salving the conscience of the powerful. However, the displaced and refugee populations are responding to this situation by developing diverse forms of, generally illegal, action and by so doing, are exacerbating the tensions inherent in the humanitarian field.

By looking carefully at the city of El Paso-Ciudad Juárez we can correct popular misunderstandings of the border between the United States and Mexico. Perhaps the Fronterizos provide positive new models for transnational life.

Recent antiterrorism legislation allows for the preventive breaking up of any social gathering whilst guaranteeing a tight surveillance of private life. It is less about punishing specific acts than ensuring a generalised control. It is in this context that we can best understand the laws put in place to control the Net. Recent measures aimed at terrorism and the measures guaranteeing surveillance of the Net have an immediate international impact. They are aimed at a virtual criminality. Action is no longer reactive but proactive. These measures inscribe themselves in a mutation of criminal law dedicated to the primacy of procedure over the law and give all power to the police. The task of the police becomes directly, and no longer in a mediated fashion, one of maintaining order, and the latter is essentially social control

The essay looks into the world of the Internet after the dotcom crash. It investigates the ways in which libertarian gurus and leading business journals responded to the April 2000 downfall of the NASDAQ. Also it reviews the latest work of Manuel Castells, The Internet Galaxy, and looks into the ambivalent position of Castells towards « real » Sillicon Valley and the « bubble » dotcoms.

In this paper we review certain cinematographic practices which, by inscribing a becoming minor into the production and reception of films, attest to a resistance to normalisation. We pay special attention to the ways in which problems of representing the minor and transmitting their experiences have been addressed in the works of Dardenne and in Pasolini's poetic cinema. Each of these filmmakers have developed a true « minor cinema » where the body, by taking over language, becomes problematic.

Luc Dardenne focuses on his work with his brother Jean-Pierre, and in particular on their last film Le fils, and on the path which has led them to the mastery of new cinematographic practices. Dardenne touches on, in turn, the importance of the history and memory of struggles, changes in forms of engagement and of resistance, in the ethics of filming a body, the imbrication of technology in the search for the limits of their art.

This paper charts changing representations of male homosexuality in mainstream French cinema in the period from 1983 to 2000, a period that opens with the beginning of the AIDS epidemic, and closes with the legal recognition of same sex relationships [le Pacs]. By looking at such established films as Bertrand Blier's Tenue de Soirée, Cyril Collard's Les Nuits Fauves, and François Ozon's Sitcom, we get an overview of the transformations that have taken place in the social imaginary with particular emphasis placed on the problematics of space, the gaze and language.

This article explores the ethics of physical and verbal interpersonal relations which express themselves as displacements and intersections of genres in Pedro Almodovar's film Speak to her (Hable con ella, 2002). Ethics must be understood here in the strict sense of care for the self, which always presupposes care for the other. I will argue that the film suggests the demetaphorisation of corporeal experience as a path towards ethical relations between people. I argue too that the film proposes a feminisation of the masculine as a step towards a higher level of humanism and mutual comprehension.

This article uses the example of the feminist movement in Latin America and the Caribean to analyse the way in which the UN and its allied organisations neutralise anti-establishment social movements by urging them to « participate » in its project of global « good governance ». By studying the « population politics » of international institutions and the question of micro-credit schemes for women, we see how the UN presented itself as an « ally » to women and managed to recruit a part of the feminist movement to its own project, even though it was carrying out policies that were absolutely disastrous for women, and in particular for the poor women of the Southern hemisphere.