From Advocates to Terrorists: Ideology, the State of Exception and the State of Emergency, and Political Ethics

摘要

Advocacy is a type of political expression. It takes certain political forms, depending on the state of the State, as a function of class relations. In "normal times," most States maintain a level of cultural hegemony that allows them control upon the tensions of class relations through what Althusser (2001) termed the "ideological state apparatus," with a lesser use of the "repressive state apparatus." In more acute times of States of exception and States of emergency, when the sovereign State increasingly reappears and claims itself as the nation, the range and scope of ideological expression tightens, and so too the repressive state apparatus becomes more active, foreclosing freedom of expression across various life-spheres by means of media control, violence, and other threats and actions of repressive force. "Advocacy" is increasingly pushed into a terrorist position as understood within a narrowing rational framework that then allows the increasingly sovereign State to punish it legally and morally. At the same time, "advocacy" assumes more ethical, rather than simply moral, dimensions, and its struggles for justice, and not just State sponsored rights, may become more universal.