In the chapters I read (1, 2, and part of 4) of Dreamworld and Catastrophe: The Passing of Mass Utopia in East and West, Susan Buck-Morss argues that the Soviet and American political imaginaries were too similar to each other. The socialist imaginary is based on the divisions between classes, not states; progress is conceived as temporal. The capitalist imaginary is based on divisions between nation-states; here, progress is conceived as purely spatial. But in each imaginary, progress is the motive force, and therein lies the problem. Both imaginaries are perfect successors to the French Revolution: socialism with its perpetual revolutionary terror, and capitalism with its perpetual mass-conscripted nationalistic war. “Progress” is the problem. And yet, we must cling to utopian aspirations, somehow. (Presumably the obvious theoretical difficulty of condemning “progress” while upholding “utopia” is addressed in one of the many pages I didn’t have time to read.)

Buck-Morss distinguishes between the “normal enemy” (e.g. for medieval Christendom, the sinner) and the “absolute enemy” (e.g. the heretic). Any individual instance of the absolute enemy must be violently eradicated, since this enemy’s existence is constructed as a dangerous threat to the existence of the sovereign power. But, as a group, the absolute enemy (whether heretics or, for a half-century of U.S. sovereignty, communists) must survive, since it is this group’s existence that legitimates (or as Buck-Morss would have it, “brings into being”) both the sovereign and the collective that the soverign protects. In a now-chilling passage written at least a year before 9/11, Buck-Morss predicts, on the basis of the 1998 bombings of Afghanistan and Sudan, that the U.S.’s next “absolute enemy” (after global communism) will be global terrorism. I’ll reproduce the entire paragraph:

“In August 1998, U.S. air attacks against a so-called ‘university of terrorism’ in Afghanistan and an alleged weapons-producing pharmaceutical company in Sudan initiated a new stage in the attempt to salvage the legitimacy of the U.S. as a global superpower, its monopoly of the right to possess arsenals of mass destruction and train paramilitary forces in terrorist techniques. These were offensive attacks secretly planned against an enemy secretly identified. With them the United States declared an ‘unending’ war against terrorism with explicit analogy to the Cold War against communism, justifying a secret (wild) zone of violent power of comparable scope. It needs to be understood that, regardless of the intentions of the policy-makers, such a definition of war feeds upon itself. By justifying the use of terror to stop terror, it generates what it seeks to destroy. In this war, the ‘enemy’ is defined not as anticapitalist but anti-American (equated with being less than civilized), so that whoever opposes the rationale of the U.S. use of terror becomes vulnerable to the charge of sympathizing with the enemy camp. Potentially such a war has no limits, short of undermining the legitimacy of U.S. superpower sovereignty itself, which is precisely what is at stake.”

The most frightening thing about this passage is neither its crystal-clear prescience, nor its smug-liberal refusal to consider that such a terroristic absolute enemy might pose a real and horrible threat, but rather the fact that neither of these two frightening aspects matters much in terms of the other. That is to say, something very like her analysis (pre-9/11, remember!) of our post-9/11 situation is now overwhelmingly accepted by attentive observers of the present geopolitical moment (lesson 1: we should fear above all else those who have declared us their responsibility to protect); and also there actually are legions of people outside our spatial borders who devotedly and innovatively seek to kill as many of us as they can, as spectacularly as the can (lesson 2: we should fear above all else those who have declared us their responsibility to destroy). Unlike the progress-utopia paradox I mentioned above, this paradox is theoretically, ethically, and politically insoluble . . .