The Light of Transcendence and the Vicissitudes of Time*Peter Gratton, Ph.D.

Memorial University of Newfoundland

*This is a rather misleading title for what is to follow.

Dick Cheney, Meet the Press (NBC)16 Sept. 2001

VICE PRES. CHENEY: I'm going to be careful here, Tim, because I - clearly it would be inappropriate for me to talk about operational matters, specific options or the kinds of activities we might undertake going forward. We do, indeed, though, have, obviously, the world's finest military. They've got a broad range of capabilities. And they may well be given missions in connection with this overall task and strategy.

…

DICK CHENEY: We also have to work, though, sort of the dark side, if you will. We've got to spend time in the shadows in the intelligence world [my emphasis]. A lot of what needs to be done here will have to be done quietly, without any discussion, using sources and methods that are available to our intelligence agencies, if we're going to be successful. That's the world these folks operate in, and so it's going to be vital for us to use any means at our disposal, basically, to achieve our objective.

MR. RUSSERT: There have been restrictions placed on the United States intelligence gathering, reluctance to use unsavory characters, those who violated human rights, to assist in intelligence gathering. Will we lift some of those restrictions?

VICE PRES. CHENEY: Oh, I think so. I think the - one of the by-products, if you will, of this tragic set of circumstances is that we'll see a very thorough sort of reassessment of how we operate and the kinds of people we deal with. There's - if you're going to deal only with sort of officially approved, certified good guys, you're not going to find out what the bad guys are doing. You need to be able to penetrate these organizations. You need to have on the payroll some very unsavory characters if, in fact, you're going to be able to learn all that needs to be learned in order to forestall these kinds of activities. It is a mean, nasty, dangerous dirty business out there, and we have to operate in that arena. I'm convinced we can do it; we can do it successfully. But we need to make certain that we have not tied the hands, if you will, of our intelligence communities in terms of accomplishing their mission.

I don’t need to revisit all the metaphors and conceptions of light in our multiple traditions—such that the separation between the metaphor and the concept, I would argue is undecidable, since to remove the metaphor from the concept would be to render it so completely visible to the mind’s eye that it would, in turn, be absolute lit up, that is, self-transparent, i.e. have the visibility of the pure Idea, which as we know, derives precisely from early Greek terms concerning light and visibility.

I also don’t need to revisit all the metaphors and conceptions of light that concatenate around notions of the public from the Greek period, when to follow Hannah Arendt, the virtuous split their time between the almost blinding light of the public sphere or polis and the darkened shadows of the oikos or home, up to our own time: to be democratic is to follow the rule of law, to produce transparency and be transparent in the public space, to be visible and render citizens visible in turn. The politics of light is politics tout court.

A depiction of Marquis de Sade, who anti-Enlightenment works are replete with the rhetoric of darkness.

The subtitle of Mayer’s book suggests a complete turn from past American practices.

An American base in Afghanistan where detainees are held (above) and detainees (right).

17 Afghan villagers in Kandahar Province killed by the US military in this night raid, March 11 2011. (Source: http://www.opensocietyfoundations.org/publications/cost-killcapture-impact-night-raid-surge-afghan-civilians

Kafka’s parable, “Before the Law,” from The Trial

(Note the play of shadows)

The publicity cover for ZERO DARK THIRTY

A programmer in a typically dark 24 set.

An advertisement for Zero Dark Thirty.

Zero Dark Thirty and it’s quite ineffective office lighting.

Like the inverse of medieval paintings of the Madonna, Chastain’s face is always shaded.

Drone strikes have only increased since Bush left office.

But though I would never want to deny the deep changes that are historically always underway, that have indeed been happening in the concept of what we call “democracy,” I would also, as Veronica put it two weeks ago, want to show the “co-constituted nature of lightness and dark,”—that is, that one can only think one by defining it in opposition to its other—or what gets now politically codes as the Enlightened debates of our polity and the dark, secret military and intelligence agency actions; neither one without the other.

My read on this is that one should look to the history of the West to show the coimplication of lightness and dark, of what we democratically call the force of law and its opposite, the law of force. My larger project is to begin re-reading the supposed Western tradition from beginning to demonstrate this logic, all the more to put it in question, since I would argue merely opposing darkness in the name of light blinds one to the forces that enforce any such differences and gives one the alibi to avoid thinking a sovereign politics at the heart of the West. Political sovereignty defends the safety and security of personal autonomy as the idioms of safety and security have indemnified all sorts of sovereignty cruelty in the modern state; this is the dark underside of modernity, even if it’s been depicted as the Enlightenment’s brightest legacy.

Here I would just say simply: the separation of light and dark and the politics and sovereignty over life and death go hand in hand, and I would want to show that Cheney’s discussion of working in the shadows is literally a Platonism repeated in our history, and quickly I’d like to show how a reading of the politics of darkness shows ambiguities in our greatest thinker of light and the tradition that follows.

He then describes the “nocturnal council” [nukterinos syllogos], which despite the name either meets nightly [908a] or from dawn until dusk [951d], a fundamental ambiguity in a text that is remarkably consistent. The place of the council for readers of the Laws is controversial: this part of the text, in the last book of the last of Plato’s works, should have been finished continuing the argument of the whole book: that there is no one above the law, that it is the laws that are kurios or sovereign; yet this nocturnal council, which is said to meet nightly or during the day, is said to be the “real guardian of the laws” [tous ontos phylakas…ton nomon (966b)], to be truly kurios (951e)—sovereign and authoritative—and thus it leaves in place the ambiguity of law and its enforcement, the forces of light and darkness, even the time of the meeting of these authorities.

And what does this nocturnal council do, the one to which Plato seems to grant the greatest political power—“if this divine council should come into being for us, dear friends, the city ought to be handed over to it” [paradoteon toutoi ten polin]”? It enforces the most important laws of state and it alone, he makes clear, can meet with those suspected of various forms of treachery, from impiety to wanting to destroy the state. Thus thrown to oblivion—outside the light of the public and its laws—the real guardians, the nocturnal council steps in, to educate, that is, to make the prisoner confess to his treachery for the “salvation of his soul [tēs psyches sotēria homilountes].”

I won’t read these long and obviously resonant passages to you. Operating outside the law as its guardian—outside the laws as the interpreter of the laws that it enforces—this nocturnal council has the right over life and death, the classical sovereign right—and I should remark that they are to be led by intelligence and all the Platonic traits that he links to light. But they have a further sovereign right, a right that Plato considered worse than death, since at least those given the death penalty: this nocturnal council could remove the citizenship for those deemed the worst of the worst—to use a more contemporary word—to make the prisoner stateless, and thus he would receive no burial, no permanent place in this world, a fate worse than death.

The Light of Transcendence and the Vicissitudes of Time*Peter Gratton, Ph.D.

Memorial University of Newfoundland

*This is a rather misleading title for what is to follow.