A note on Le Guin and Fanon, and Carl Schmitt - Digressions&Impressions https://digressionsnimpressions.typepad.com/digressionsimpressions/202...

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11/28/2021
A note on Le Guin and Fanon, and Carl Schmitt
"You are the same species, race, people, exactly the same in every way, with a slight selection towards color. If you
brought up an asset child as an owner it would be an owner in every respect, and vice versa. So you spend your lives
keeping up this tremendous division that doesn't exist. What I don't understand is how you can fail to see how
appallingly wasteful it is. I don't mean economically!"

"In the war," he said, and then there was a very long pause; though Solly had a lot more to say, she waited, curious. "I
was on Yeowe," he said, "you know, in the civil war."

That's where you got all those scars and dents, she thought; for however scrupulously she averted her eyes, it was
impossible not to be familiar with his spare, onyx body by now, and she knew that in aiji he had to favor his left arm,
which had a considerable chunk out of it just above the bicep.

“The slaves of the Colonies revolted, you know, some of them at first, then all of them. Nearly all. So we Army men
there were all owners. We couldn’t send asset soldiers, they might defect. We were all veots and volunteers. Owners
fighting assets. I was fighting my equals. I learned that pretty soon. Later on I learned I was fighting my superiors.
They defeated us.”

“But that—” Solly said, and stopped; she did not know what to say.

“They defeated us from beginning to end,” he said. “Partly because my government didn’t understand that they could.
That they fought better and harder and more intelligently and more bravely than we did.”

“Because they were fighting for their freedom!”

“Maybe so,” he said in his polite way.

"So ..."

"I wanted to tell you that I respect the people I fought."--Ursula K Le Guin (1994) "Forgiveness Day" in The Found
and the Lost: The Collected Novellas of Ursula K. Le Guin, p. 287.

Because I am about to teach The Dispossessed again, I am trying to read all the books in the so-called Hainish cycle.
"Forgiveness Day" is part of a series of interlocking stories (also collected in Four Ways to Forgiveness) about two planets
two planets, Werel and Yeowe. As the quoted passage suggests, Werel is a slave-owning society that treated Yeowe as a
colony. In fact, Werel is an extremely patriarchical society, too, which treats its women in the way Athens treats theirs.

The nameless 'he' is Rega Teyeo, a scion of a rural soldiering elite; conservative and stoic in his ways. He discovers that
after the lost war on Yeowe his own people, who are modernizing and shifting toward commerce, have little use for him.
So, he ends up a bodyguard to Solly, the alien (female) ambassador to his planet. In many ways it's a humiliating end to
his public service.

The quoted exchange takes place in the turning point in the relationship between Rega and Solly, which itself occurs when
they think they are in mortal danger. I am not a big fan of "Forgiveness Day" because the writing is relatively clunky and
the characters are sketched are relatively stereotypical. Because it's Le Guin, there is still plenty of food for thought about
the nature of patriarchy and the interlocking forms of oppression and resistance it generates.

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A note on Le Guin and Fanon, and Carl Schmitt - Digressions&Impressions https://digressionsnimpressions.typepad.com/digressionsimpressions/202...

The quoted passage illustrates my complaint about the writing in the novella; that Teyeo respects the people he fought is
already abundantly clear before Le Guin makes it explicit ("I wanted to tell you that I respect the people I fought.").

Having said that ,the passage did remind me (no surprise we are in the ambit of Hegel's master-slave dialectic) of a kind of
symmetrical point in the famous first chapter of Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth that in the Manichean world
colonialism, "At the individual level, violence is a cleansing force. It rids the colonized of their inferiority complex, of their
passive and despairing attitude. It emboldens them, and restores their self-confidence." (p. 51)

Le Guin invites us into thinking that when you have been defeated on the battle-field it is difficult to deny the fundamental
equality of your victor. She published "Forgiveness Day" when the Vietnam war was living memory. As Le Guin's novella
shows, that individual experience on the battle-field need not transform wider social attitudes toward those thought
inferior if that society can insulate itself, to some respect, from the military defeat. As a cursory glance at history shows,
for every Rega Teyeo whose attitudes are transformed, there may be a lance corporal who prefers a dagger-stab legend.
And in her story Le Guin, who is not naïve about such matters, suggests that individual character matters a lot to when a
potentially existential experience becomes transformative.

Earlier in the story, after Rega has requested a discharge from his duty to protect Solly, his request is declined by his (and
her) employer as follows:

"Love of god and country is like fire, a wonderful friend, a terrible enemy; only children play with fire. I don't like the
situation. There's nobody here I can replace either of you with. Will you hang on a while longer?"

What's striking about the response is that it is couched in terms familiar from Schmitt (with its friend-enemy distinction)
[recall here and here mediated via Popper]. This is interesting because the employer I have just quoted represents in Le
Guin's story, and in the wider Hainish cycle, the Kantian federative ideal of the aspiration toward perpetual peace founded
in human equality. And what Le Guin recognizes is that one can accept that in some circumstances the friend-enemy
distinction is empirically adequate of people's ('childish') behavior even though one is oneself committed to a different
ideal that is supposed to abolish or overcome it.

Now, in light of "Forgiveness Day" is tempting to suggest that the friend-enemy distinction itself rests, if not conceptually
then at least on the battle-field, in a kind of symmetry between the two foes. And this symmetry is itself ground in a kind
of equality or mutual recognition. And so, one may be tempted to see in this observation a refutation of Schmitt.

As an aside, this is why 'wars' on cancer, drugs, and on poverty are such strange ways of speaking. (This is extended to the
"courageous battle" one wages against a fatal disease.) They do not have the latent possibility of such mutual recognition.
Norman MacDonald (who died of cancer) makes the point in a sketch here. His punchline is that, if you die, the cancer
dies at exactly the same time in your body. “That, to me, is not a loss. That’s a draw.”

Be that as it may, of course, Schmitt anticipates the point and suggests that the political distinction is orthogonal to any
moral interpretation of such mutual symmetry. It is entirely compatible with his view than one can find one's enemies
moral, even beautiful. (I doubt he would grant that they are superior, but it seems logically consistent.)

Now, it is important to Schmitt's analysis that these judgments involve collectivities not individuals (as it is in Le Guin and
Fanon). And so there is an important sense that Schmitt can accommodate the point about symmetry or the
transformative experience of the battle-field, as long as (and I find this ironic) it is understood in, and limited to,
individual terms.

And, in fact, one of the psychological, perhaps, social conditions for Rega's judgment, or maybe it's an effect of it, is his
disenchantment with his own society. And while this turns out to be a pre-condition for his political understanding (he
starts to see through slogans) it also leads him to withdraw from it emotionally, politically, and eventually physically. Part
of the closing line of the story with him going into a kind of exile is (also) explicit about this: "he had lost his world." And
so, while one can read the Hainish cycle as resting on a kind of faith that Schmittianism can be overcome, Le Guin
recognizes that there are circumstances in which its logic is impeccable.

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A note on Le Guin and Fanon, and Carl Schmitt - Digressions&Impressions https://digressionsnimpressions.typepad.com/digressionsimpressions/202...

Posted at 03:05 PM in Aesthetics, Cosmopolitanism, jokes, Kant, Leo Strauss, political philosophy, Popper, Racism,
Revolutions, standpoint theory, Transformative Experience, War | Permalink
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3 of 3 29/11/2021, 20:51