Info
« Théorie de l’otage, les trois concepts de l’otage », in Exposé # n°1: Le propre des noms, 1994.
auth. François Laruelle, trans. Sylvia
Sylvia's Note
Jeremy found this text online and, while it was uploaded on 7 March 2012 (with no other supplementary information provided), it seems to have been composed some time in the early to mid ’80s.
Many thanks to Artem Morozov for tracking down the collection it was published in.
Although evidently written at the level of Philosophy II, Theory of the Hostage touches upon themes (with similar treatments even) found in later texts like Éthique de l’Étranger, L’ultime honneur des intellectuels, Philosophie non-standard, and Théorie générale des victimes.
It is also very clearly a direct precursor to 2008’s Vers une science non-politique du pouvoir which Jeremy has translated.
Who is the Hostage? A Search in Identity
We distinguish three experiences of the state of hostage: hostage (of) itself, hostage of the Other or of others, and finally, at the confluence of the first two, hostage (of) the Other.
How do we know that the hostage is not just possible — that there is the hostage? A “transcendental” question of its reality, for which no information can furnish a response. It is not the taking of hostages that makes the hostage.
Taking hostages, systematically exploited for political and informational goals, has become a politico-media ideality. A “limit-experience” which, being added to others, enriches the capital of western affects but which also gives way to a labor of idealization or possibilization that obliviates the principal question to which the hostage is itself the response: what is the reality of the hostage, what makes its most determinate being once the all-too-general systems of interpretation (geopolitical, international technopolitics, systems of international information and political communication, etc.) are suspended?
The techno- or micro-political interpretation generalizes the hostage: we call hostage any force which is seized, by essence, by another force. The essence of force is to be kidnapped and kidnapping, captured and appropriative.
But the human hostage does not fall under this all-too-general — etho-techno-political — concept of capture and prey. If it is an object of forces, it is not itself of the nature of a thusly divided force. More than a new type of human, the hostage is a new affect. More than a supplementary critical point in the existing relations of power, it is the real critique of the techno-political economy to which one would want to reduce it. The hostage is the seat of a “non-political” science of power.
Philosophy only knows hierarchies: free man or indeed vulgar, quotidian, all-too-human, gregarious man; the rational subject and empirical man. But it has no place for the hostage which defies every hierarchy and for the human science in action which the hostage brings with it.
It can interpret it once more by producing an etho-polito-logical version of it, a new distribution of its relations of power, but it cannot account for the special humanity of the hostage and what it seizes from relations of power outside of every hierarchy — indeed of every relation of power.
If there is no place for the hostage in the political hierarchies in the more or less long term of philosophy, should one perhaps then introduce the Other that undoes the ontology of power and the power of ontology, and comprehend the hostage as the hostage of the Other? Hostage by an infinite debt rather than a finite debt? It is no longer the innocent who pays for the others, and finally for the power in person which triumphs above the combat of men, it is the innocent who pays for the Other or the Other one 〈l’Autrui〉. There they still protest: it is always withdrawing their identity and autonomy of the hostage, redoubling their servitude by ordaining or ordinating them to the Other, if not to others, it is to treat and think them in exteriority, by removing from them the possibility of leaving them, it is according to them an exterior essence that is already determined elsewhere than in them.
The forces in direct struggle next to the body of the hostage find in the body — which is not itself directly given to the forces — the absolute limit of their grip. Where is the most subjective body, the body suffering from hostage, situated? Not in the prolongment of physical and psychic ordeals that are imposed upon it, but in the very point of articulation of this semi-objective body and these disciplines that can thus attain or reach and transform it. Techno-politics, of which one can imagine a continuum of variants going from bio-ethics to torture, remains exterior to the real human body which is a suffered body without an exterior cause of suffering. The disciplines, with their terrorist and even torturing variant, do not have a real grip on the most immanent body, they do not produce it but find in it and it alone the absolute limit of their efficacy. A limit which is just as well the real condition of their determination and their materiality, but which they ignore as such: it is then that they become dangerous. State forces, and their terrorist sub-system, struggle on the terrain of the represented or transcendent body. But they postulate, across their denying pragmatics made of destitution, degradation, secrecy or media exhibition, a veritable transcendental reduction — which is like a torture —, something like a zero state, but one which is supposed positive, of man stripped of the ornament of its habitual predicates. They postulate the reduction of the hostage to the state of the ultimate individual, which they evidently cannot attain, and which can only be elucidated and described in its essence by the hostage itself.
The proper acting of the hostage obeys no techno-political law. Its complaint, its negotiation demand however seems like a passage to the limit — renouncement or abandonment. But it is also an ordeal outside of limits, another thing than a “limit-experience”, the suspension or undifferentiation of the political renouncement itself, the opposite of a defeat or victory, but as the forever Undefended where every possible defense takes root and is determined. The affect (of) the hostage is a lived experience or lived 〈vécu〉, but without object or finality, political or otherwise. A lived deprived of intentionality, and which has no need to be empty or filled. An absolute lived, the destitution of which is no longer manipulable by terrorism. The cogito of the hostage has no respondent or equivalent within the sphere of relations of power. This is what will open it up to the plenitude- or fullness-without-secret of these relations of power.
The hostage which knows itself as such or that lives within the immanence of the “in-hostage” does not receive its identity from games of force in which it takes part and is a stakeholder, nor even from the Other. It is not an identity by effect or loan: it rests in itself, without being able to say that the hostage is the cause of its own identity. Every identity received from the outside is simply supposed and then supposes another that is no longer supposed but internal or received non-decisionally and non-positionally (of) itself: by its internal and specific essence, man is the hostage (of) itself, the non-political hostage (of) itself.
The individual has no vocation to become the hostage here. But their specific reality as individual can be occasionally — on the occasion of their capture as techno-political hostage — described as that of a hostage (of) itself and thus comprehended as what gives not their possibility but only their reality to their becoming-hostage and its political conditions.
The description of the essence of man as hostage (of) itself is contingent or occasional, a function of the state of hostage of others or the political sense of hostage.
“A hostage” is said in two absolutely heterogenous senses, of which the first — hostage (of) itself — conditions the second — hostage of the Other —, without the latter conditioning or explaining the former. A rigorous theory of the hostage commences with this non-technopolitical distinction, incomprehensible to the state and its systems. A third sense — hostage (of) the Other — derives from these two.
Hostage (of) itself is not the subject “behind” the hostage of the other, but the cause which determines this phenomenon in the last instance. In the last instance, i.e., within its human reality alone and without explaining the side of its technopolitical conditions of existence.
Even if it seems to take refuge in its victim state, hostage (of) itself is not “behind” the hostage of the Other — it is before it, before the unlimited game of forces or the division of the political. It is the absolute right, real and non-ethical, of the victim when it is experienced within the intimacy of its “ordinary” or essential victim state anterior to every aggression.
Hostage is the trial or ordeal 〈épreuve〉 (of) its own identity, the identity of its trial (of) itself; it is not its interpreters and their transcendent identities that can make the hostage through their contradictory accumulation. The hostage of the Other is projected as the hostage of itself. But the hostage (of) itself is more essential and the only real one. Its essence is no longer strategy, that of the manifestation of strength or weakness for example. But the manifestation that is itself weak or the secret of weakness “in itself” — weakness “in flesh and blood” that the political, which suspects another ruse, cannot comprehend.
Man is by essence entirely the hostage (of) itself and, sometimes, but still entirely albeit this time in the mode where itself is Other, entirely the hostage (of) the Other. And finally, they can be the hostage of the Other or others — in the etho-polito-logical sense. Extreme experiences — the essence of the first, the occasion of the third — are needed to render the second possible.
The hostage of the Other is hostage-of-hostage, of an other which is and is not itself hostage of an other, etc. Hostage (of) itself, the affect (of) hostage absolutely precedes this universal chain of partial hostages within which minoritarian or terrorist premeditation hopes to make the adversary fall by vengeance (spread responsibility and contaminate those who believe themselves innocent).
Two great points of view on the hostage: the affect which constitutes the hostage (of) itself as the “objective” structure of human subjectivity, of man as absolute subject, i.e., deprived of every political correlate; and the techno-political, transcendent, image of the hostage of the Other or others. The hostage lived-without-representation and the representation of the hostage.
These two points of view do not unitarily share a supposed common reality but form a duality that is definitively open and without synthesis, an order that goes from the hostage (of) itself to hostage of the Other then still from the first to the hostage (of) the Other by passing through the hostage of the Other.
The three rigorous concepts of hostage allow us to eliminate the ethico-juridical interpretations which are only auxiliary from the techno-political point of view of the hostage of the Other (others). Interpretations which play with the bad faith of the citizen-man, of the doublet of the individual and their predicate of “national” 〈“ressortissant”〉 or which protest the innocence of the private individual. Between the extreme concepts of the hostage, there is no innocent third, only the hostage (of) itself is innocent, but in a sense that is essential and not ethico-political: it is impossible to invoke an innocence that only has a strictly immanent or transcendental rather than juridico-political sense. And moreover, this innocence of the absolute weakness that makes it such that the essence of man is a cause in its manner, by really, if not politically, rendering the condition of hostage of others contingent and ineffective. As for the techno-political context, a veritable innocent would be a third independent of the two adversaries in struggle: it does not exist, and terrorism exists to unmask this double game. Rigorously, one can imagine an infant as absolutely innocent with a goal of transforming, for example, God himself into a hostage and making him give in.
But the infant in this sense does not exist, or only symbolically designates the hostage (of) itself which is the human essence of man.
There is the innocent and the supposed innocent. The hostage is innocent, but not in the way in which they sometimes imagine following their executioners which have their own concept of innocence and responsibility and who know that innocence, outside of the state of the hostage, is always a supposed innocence with which the most culpable or guilty states play. One can imagine an international law of hostages, invent an international casuistry of the capture of individuals supposed innocent: legislation’s limits of impossibility can always be withdrawn. But the hostage does not make the law: they are the non-political hostage (of) their life, which does not have the time for a law, even when they are interested in the law.
The Science of the Hostage
The essence of the hostage, the only one to be thought and done, to be said and seen, is not reduced to relations of power in which it is also inserted and where it is found as disposable 〈en-trop〉 for its biggest scandal.
The science of the hostage: what only it can grasp from the relations of force where it is also found to be included, and above all what only it knows (of) itself qua its essence is to be the hostage (of) itself.
The science of the hostage describes the phenomenal state of things, of the political or other thing, such as it is seen in the immanence of the in-hostage, of vision-in-hostage. A really human science takes vision-in-hostage as its single point of view and describes by example what is there of the strategy of techno-political relationships within the limits of the simple humanity of the hostage (of) itself.
A science of the hostage stops explaining the forces and the stakes of their own point of view of inhuman forces, it suspends techno-political sufficiency and describes the condition of man as hostage of the Other or “amidst” forces, on the basis of the rigorously immanent identity of the hostage of itself.
What do we grasp of politics and strategy when, ceasing to still be politicians and strategists in thought, we grasp them “in-hostage”? What is their mode of givenness within the very person of the hostage rather then in themselves? Within the limits of its affect rather than those, indefinitely extensible, that they suppose in their pretention to be valid like norms of themselves?
The guiding thread of the identity of the hostage (of) itself limits the most profound madness of every power, which is not to extend or intensify itself, but to divide and redouble itself, to always appear in the philosophical figure of the doublet, by which every singularity to be described is annihilated or divided and then doubled, being doubled by a universal instance (techno-political, geo-political, semiological, communicational, etc.) to which it should identify itself willingly or by force. The hostage (of) itself is the absolutely real or simple essence of man as individual before every techno-philosophico-politico-etc. doublet.
There is nothing theoretically that forces us to distinguish the hostage (of) itself and the hostage of the Other. Since the theory which would refuse this distinction — philosophy and the human sciences conjoined — commences by adopting this presupposition which is the hostage of the Other to describe this state itself. Redoubling it thus, it makes of man in its turn a hostage and adds to their misfortune, whereas the theory of the hostage (of) itself alone can found a rigorous human discipline. Moreover, it puts an end to an infamy.
The hostage is not only the toy of forces too big for it or stakes which exceed it. This conception, which nourishes the interminable ethical, political, or juridical discourses, is globally philosophical or unitary and attempts to mask the radical duality, of a scientific essence, of the hostage as hostage (of) itself and the Other. Because man is not exhausted in the state of the hostage of the Other, it can, in its non-political manner, transform the relations of power in which it participates moreover as adversary and accomplice at the same time.
The destitution, the weakness, the impossibility of denying oneself has a specific effect on the techno-political sphere. There is a causality of destitution, on the condition of grasping it as essence, a real causality altogether distinct from effects of pity or the refusal to give in which are still techno-political traits.
The human sciences and philosophy, which reduce the essence of man as hostage (of) itself to the state of an effect of relations of knowledge, power, society, communication, etc. — of hostage of the Other —, redouble on the theoretical plane — but it is still techno-political here — the torture inflicted upon the hostage and man in general, whereas the duality of the hostage (of) itself and the Other respects the essence of man and absolutely limits the possibility of torturing them by limiting techno-political causality.
Let us imagine a philosophical theory of taking hostages, in the micro-geo-political style. Some minoritarian sub-sets of the state would suffer from the repression of war, which would indeed be the most serious problem that civilization has to confront and resolve, and find a way out in terrorist dissemination. Terrorism would be a malady that would result from a forced vacancy. The immobility or blockage of dominant relations of force would oblige the weakest to seek their overturn by recourse to a micro-politics of exceptional violence. Hostage-taking, for the most part, would belong to this figure of international relationships of power, this would be the strategy of the weak, even when it would entail states which are recognized but that would act against dominant forces. An inevitable malady, a necessary “reaction” in the context of the equilibrium and cooperation of the large international ensembles, there would be no de jure bilateral state without a de jure terrorism being interior and exterior to it at the same time. This is a state interpretation and even an auto-interpretation. It is indubitably likely and even objective in the sense that it is necessary to states or, precisely, to some of their minoritarian sub-sets. But it testifies to a state sufficiency that a rigorous theory of the hostage should exclude or lift for the benefit of the latter, of what it alone knows of itself and the state.
For example, “taking hostage” is already, as such, a specific operation, a politico-police ritual which possesses invariants and an essence which can be described. It arises from a political ethology, a virtual discipline which we can invent and which is particularly interested in phenomena of capture and prey, of the state grip over the individual supposed private: such a political ethology of states and sub-sets of the state allow us to understand terrorism more concretely. But globally it can only serve as material for the “non-political” science of which the hostage as hostage (of) itself is the only one to possess the principle and which should serve as an immanent guide to every theory of the state.
Either terrorism is contrary to the famous dialectic or it is the victim of an illusion. The risk taken for death might make one believe for a moment in the acquisition of mastery, but what results of it never has the meaning nor the perfection of a dialectic result. Either the terrorist dies effectively, acquires the symbolic glory of the martyr but emerges defeated from an affair that increasingly overwhelms them and their memory, or they win but always locally and miserably (exchange, recuperation, ransom) without definitively dominating the adversary: the stakes are too high for them. So, either the dialectic takes place elsewhere than in their enterprises and has already abandoned them to their contingency, or else these presuppose another thought, which conjugates a political catastrophism and a micro-politics.
But the hostage is still more unintelligible, not just for the dialectic but for micropolitics as well. This is apparently a much more efficacious hypothesis, but it also transforms the individual into its hostage under the pretext of thinking it and believes to have explained its most determined reality by this redoublement. To what extent does the hostage liberate itself? What do we read in the soul of the hostage? That it suspends war, that it forbids it absolutely without this prohibition leading to terrorism as is the case when it is imposed by the more powerful. It suspends the terrorism born from the repression of war as well as this repression itself. It demonstrates how war, i.e. the prohibition of war, is anchored without the slightest restraint to the souls of the most innocent. The very destitution of the hostage — less than a refusal — inhibits the international economy of human beings, whether they be diplomatic or political. It does destroy it but utilizes it to describe an an-economic dispersion of the humanity which is discovered as the correlate of its state of hostage and where every man is unexchangeable with their equal. It is the citizen, not the hostage, that is the object of bargaining.
The new interest borne by the most gregarious states in the individual in its precarity and its loneliness, which it uses by henceforth showing them as such, is only explained for one reason: no state will ever trigger a war for an individual really “without qualities” and deprived of the predicate of citizenship which may be worth blackmail, but not a war. The hostage knows as well that it is not worth a war, but it knows much more deeply than every state that states and war stop where the individual that knows itself as such starts.
Taking hostage is a crime against the citizen-man, not against man itself as hostage (of) itself a crime against which it is not a certain that a crime is possible. Terrorism has the same presupposition as the state, it naively believes that man is defined by the predicate of citizenship, that it belongs to its essence to be a political animal. It is the victim of State or State-political Appearance still much stronger than it, a transcendental appearance that only the hostage (of) itself unmasks and displaces, thus rendering possible a science of the state from the point of view of the hostage. Terrorism can only be an absolute evil… relatively to the political definition of man which is an appearance, objective without doubt, but misleading.
The hostage is entirely an ante-state Robinson and entirely a Robinson-of-state in a supposed-Robinson.
The hostage is not only reduced to the Other, affected by foreign forces which marginalize and oppress it. Before being altered thus, it feels and knows itself as an Absolute Other, this is what distinguishes it from the terrorist who feels altered straightaway, reduced in themself to the state of the Other of an Other, and who wants to constitute a universal chain of minorities or the excluded, vengeance by becoming-other, to which the hostage puts an absolute end.
Terrorist hostage-taking indubitably does not belong to wartime reprisals (the category of the “prisoner”, etc.), to the law that the epochè of war liberates. The reason being that war changes at the same time as the law from which it is inseparable. But the hostage themself, not the terrorist, displaces war, law, and their disjunction: the law of war, the war within law. They alone can describe the new state of things, who pretends, each in their own manner, to benefit from the situation, because they understand the truth of hostage in terms of hostage-taking.
Hostage-taking perhaps arises from an extension of micro-politics to international relations of power. The hostage is thus seized in exteriority and represents as an empty box and a pawn in a network of relations of power which are immediately communicational and informational, where information is in its turn not the least power, etc. But the hostage themself does not think in terms of international micro-politics, they undifferentiate the already political disjunction of the macro- and the micro-. They do not make an economy and redistribute the carceral secret and media visibility with which the executioners play.
It can only grasp them as identical to hate them when they are imposed upon it and to love them in the prolongment of its own body.
Taking hostage, within a micro-political strategy, is the way of “going to extremes”. Blackmail over the life supposed innocent allows the terrorist to unmask adverse bad faith without a hitch. But the hostage has another way of accomplishing the “going to extremes”. Insofar as its situation is an occasion to experience itself as hostage (of) itself rather in terms of its masters, it has already gone to extremes in the only real way: by suppressing them, by experiencing itself in its ordinary state of hostage which suddenly changes its real situation amidst its executioners.
On the techno-political chessboard, the hostage is part empty box and part disposable 〈en-trop〉 man. Reduced to impotency, it is the symbol of the abhorred adversary that one dreams of subduing through a magical action upon its representative and of the kidnapper whose miserable fate only he shares at the same time. The hostage is the interface of adversaries that confront each other across it and forbid it from being an innocent or a neutral individual. It is even the interface of multiple systems: systems of international political relations, systems of struggles of minority or excluded peoples, international systems of information, etc. What matters here is understanding that it is not a simple middle-term, or a third and neutral instance, that, as excluded Other, abandoned by its people and prey of its kidnappers, it bears a double and immediate symbolic charge and that its hostage-identity is not reduced to any of those of the systems in struggle. It is no longer a question of saying that this immediately contradictory and overdetermined complex identity is simply outside it: it is contingent — this is quite different — in relation to its essence of hostage (of) itself. Moreover, it is indeed under this erasing and heartbreaking form that it finds itself and lives in this sphere of techno-political relationships. Nevertheless, the hostage is by its being or its essence still altogether other than this chiasmus within it of the private and the public, the national and the foreign, the aggressor and the excluded, the pledge and the witness, etc. Not that it simply exceeds this chiasmus and the infinite combinations to which it gives way, but, insofar as it thus has the occasion to discover itself in its humanity which is of being hostage (of) itself rather than of the Other, it only lives these contradictions by affecting them, without explicitly knowing them itself, with a coefficient of contingency and absurdity which precisely renders them to the order of the occasion. Because it is not itself contingent, but hostage (of) itself or necessary, it brings to the relations of power, knowledge, and communication a contingency that they no longer master.
Pragmatics of the Hostage
Political minorities institute a pragmatics of the individual as individual, under the form of its human or prehuman destitution: they dissociate the individual and man, and want to make a demonstration of that to which they themselves have been reduced. A semi-pragmatics from which they except if not their own adversaries drawn into universal inhumanity, at least their practice itself which remains enslaving 〈asservissante〉. But the hostage is kept from falling into this misery. Because it is deprived of every power, it is the only man of all humanity which does not take its kidnappers hostage, its existence contains a certain universal use of its executioners, a pragmatics of every executioner without exception: the dominated become dominant, kidnapped become kidnappers, minorities become terrorists, etc.
The distributions of the secret and publicity between the prisoner of war and the hostage of terrorism are innumerable. But it is always the invariant synthesis of the dungeon and the pillory, jail and television, isolation and public demonstration; always the same logic of abandon and attention, the same inexplicable and instantaneous passage from insignificance to glory, restraint to return. This logic belongs to the eidetics of the hostage. The only absolute novelty is the hostage itself that detains it with the liveds in which it receives this imposed logic, this hostage-status which one naively pretends to affect. What does living “in-hostage”, in the immanence of hostage-life, its contradictions mean? They are precisely no longer lived as contradictions. Only the hostage, more than its kidnappers, has the involuntary power to determine its situation as conformal to what it is and to makes it identity, de jure inaccessible to executioners, pass through to the existence that is made for it. Its “relations” to the state have changed and should be interpreted in terms of its radical identity of hostage (of) itself rather in terms of that of the state or minorities-of-the-state.
For such a subject, taking hostage — but also every other ideality (detention, return, etc.) — ceases to be a simple doublet, a politico-police one for example. Opposites stop being exchanged, passing one into the other in the manner of dialectic procedures, and even co-belonging in difference in the manner of disciplines. The hostage (of) itself, which is the essence of every man, does not assist in taking-hostage, but assists it or maintains it in its phenomenal existence. Its own identity by immanence is the only — absolutely immanent — rule of the “hostage” state of things. Now, this identity prohibits or excludes from it the various politico-philosophical, or philosophico-police, or politico-police machines, precisely the ones which are called dialectic, simulacrum, disciplines, post-modern, or even language games, which always, and very ritually, function “in doublets”. Thus it does not matter which idealizing ritual of hostage-taking, when it is grasped “in-hostage” it is identically or immediately a materiality, an absolutely determined singularity, not despite its ideality, but because of it, if one can say. It no longer represents such a materiality for another ideality, the very structure of representation no longer belongs to the lived-immanent phenomenon of an event just as “transcendent” nonetheless as hostage-taking when the media makes a scene and offers their publicity on the condition nevertheless of taking the only point of view that is a little bit rigorous, not circular, which is that of the hostage (of) itself.
From the micro-political point of view, hostage is a certain practice of the individual: by the state — or by its sub-sets, that does not matter here. The direct encounter of the violence of the state and the private individual, outside of the habitual mediations, makes of the hostage a political being of the third type, where the state freely plays with what it ordinarily respects (even under the name of an “exceptional situation”). It needs to show that its force extends to the arbitrary and that it only tolerates in the individual the rights that it has de facto accorded it. Nevertheless, this improbable and forced synthesis is nothing if we compare it to what the hostage itself lives of the unheard-of identity of its body and state violence. For it and only for it, as hostage (of) itself, this violence is manifested integrally as the very body of the individual and not as technologies exercised upon it. It loses the residual objectivity of “disciplines”, the transcendence of their state origin, their withdrawal, and their secret. The subjective or immanent assumption of relations of power and finally of the state withdraws from them their relational nature and renders them integrally visible under the form of a unlimited materiality of the body, but lived without distance; of an infinitely open continuum of suffering which is foreign to the enterprise of disciplining the body. The state pretends to discipline or simply train the body in general: in reality it entails only the type of body that it imagines or hallucinates in its own way. But real human bodies are of a subjectivity too full and too indivisible to allow themselves to be affected through-and-through and in relative exteriority by their representation, i.e., their state division. The hostage (of) itself still lives, in the last instance, as another body, the only transcendent body that it possesses, body (of) the Other which it still is itself and which is this time identically or without remainder the body (of) the state or one of its sub-sets. If the disciplines and tortures do not penetrate the remote or secret recesses of the immanent body, they are on the other hand lived, through some side which is no longer that of the prime state transcendence of their origin, as identical to this body (of) the Other under which the hostage lives on the occasion of its situation. Here again, the body of the hostage is said in at least two heterogenous senses and refuses the unitary ideology of “disciplines” and “techno-politics”.
It is impossible to distinguish and oppose prison and the media, the secret and the visible, silence and information. The characteristic 〈propre〉 of the hostage as such is that in each point of the body (of) the Other such as it phenomenally lives it, everything is visible, everything is concealed, everything is information, everything is opacity. Its effective situation is now inscribed as this body (of) the Other, within this non-horizon: it becomes abstract or unreal and cruelly singular or ruthless at the same time. The identity of its exhibitionist staging and its silence, its mise au secret and its presentation. It is not even a process or a simulacrum, a turnaround of opposites. The hostage is inseparable from the affect of this identity without exception or delay. The return to private life is, without going, the return to public life — without going and perhaps without return. It is as private and only thus that the private is inscribed into the public without mediation. The hostage is a man who has been so deprived of everything, even of its private life, that everything can only be given back to it together. This identity is nevertheless not by accident or coincidence. It itself is frozen by the affect of its necessity and can no longer make the traditional distinction go between the two “spheres”: they have stopped being “spheres”, “levels”, or “layers” of its experience. The hostage is the man who goes “without going” from one state to another. It has the affect of this going without being affected by it a second time, without it itself having to “go”.
Likewise, it identifies in its Other-body, without going from one to the other or without alternation, two states which in it do more than cohabitate in a forced manner, which are lived as de jure identical. It experiences its belonging to collective (national, professional) entities as the very object of the other and its subjection to the Other as a belonging to the collectivity of the Other. Except to assume the objectives of its executioner, it itself cannot sort things out like its country or its kidnappers do and pretend to require from it, as if it was a median instance or precisely an interface. This is something else than a shuffling of the cards: the hostage does not strategize, it lives, imprinted within its single Other-flesh which renders everything single, its double belonging: that, finally, of a collectivity (of) the Other, a society (of) minorities, a people (of) excluded peoples. And yet it is no longer one of these or those. It is its impotency — its paradoxical force — to redo the economy, the shares, the strategic distributions, to enter struggles, or even to decide in the undecidable. A strange forced complicity, sometimes, between hostages and their executioners, by the importance proven among some and others of the founding books of religion: the Bible and the Quran…. The hostage is constrained to live suspended in extreme transcendence, that which most surely denies the individual by pretending to found or decide its being as “creature”. The hostage, nevertheless, does not perhaps let itself be entirely abused by the confusion of two precarities which affect the individual and its identity: as creature of a transcendence without pity, as immanence to itself; as hostage of a God or as hostage (of) itself. It lives and resolves in its manner the eternal misunderstanding of the One.
Taking hostages has become, thanks to its live media narrative, a politico-police ideality. It is a system of idealized invariants or events: emergence of terrorists and occupation of premises, masked faces and armed arms at the windows, blindfolded hostages, a waiting public, corpses and trails of blood, negotiations with “ultimata”, “twists and turns”, and “hierarchy” (administration), procedures of hostage exchanges or the departure of terrorists, strategy of the police assault, with or without death of the hostages, etc. A meticulous and manic topography and chronology, a dramaturgy, a pose even, surrounding these events, forming their obligatory texture. More generally, the eidetics of the hostage includes four specific moments, four politico-media idealities, which have their own essence: the real-time narrative that constitutes the hostage-taking, the catastrophist and dramatic narrative that constitutes the interminable negotiation (blackmail, negotiations, false hopes, twists and turns), the narrative of celebration that constitutes the hostage’s return “in glory”, its reinsertion into its private life and the reinsertion of the latter into the flux of public life, the historical or repetitive narrative which constitutes the narrative-of-detention.
Nevertheless, this is not just the result of a media idealization, since television makes itself part of the materiality of the situation. The undecidable failure and success of negotiations or assault, the ultra-catastrophic style of events always suspended between the imminence of death and the precarity of survival, accentuates the ideal aspects in this situation, but just as much its materiality and its chaotic diversity; its obsessional rituals, but equally the singularity of “uncontrollable” events. Everything is exhibited, visualized. Even the secret — even the anti-secret, television — is commented upon and offered as secret, as is, so to speak. Ideality is here identically a materiality. This is better understood if we know to whom this “spectacle” is addressed. Television is also a part of the ritual and cannot be addressed to itself or to the “viewers” 〈“téléspectateurs”〉 which are only the other part of the public that “observes” the situation and prepares for its imminence. It does not matter if it is shown live or visualized “hot”: hostage-taking is indubitably lived in its victims and its agents at the same time as a “live” operation, and as a strange catastrophe in the quotidian continuum of information. But if this police and visual ritual ends up constituting a media ideality, a system of visual and communicational invariants, it is in reality destined neither to viewers, nor to the gods — no spectacle is ever really destined, if not by a fateful illusion, to the gods —, nor their unity in the “philosopher”. But to the hostage-man who is the essence of every man and who experiences from their own funds or grounds 〈fonds〉 an affinity with victims. It is addressed, in the strict identity of its ideality and materiality, to an “objective” subject, a subject which is not that of terrorism, the police, or television, a subject without object and capable of assembling all the sides of this spectacle in their identity: the hostage (of) itself.
From the point of view of techno-political sufficiency, the situation is this: the terrorist only makes use of the individual on the condition of being able to make a demonstration of the destitution that it inflicts upon them. A destitution which should also signify that to which, in its turn, the kidnapper is reduced which thus founds, within the hostage itself and not before it, its legitimate defense and the argument of the similarity of conditions. See how I myself am a hostage… The hostage, in the hands of its kidnappers, thus responds to the need of a double demonstration of which the supposed juridical, logical, or ontological aspects cannot be over-noted. This is an attempt to publicly demonstrate its own force, not only to manifest it, but to make its manifestation a supplementary force. And an attempt to reject the responsibility of the situation and the proof of the demonstration of the good or bad faith onto the adversary thus weakened. A form of the controversy that is armed and takes the risk of death to give it seriousness? This strategy is doubtlessly banal because it is directly ontological or metaphysical. But the hostage itself does not fall under such an onto-politics. For this argument, no human type is worth the national of a country which professes to recognize the rights of man and of the citizen within its borders, which is shown to be ignoring them outside it.
In the function of representation, it is now common man, the innocent citizen subject of the media, in the company of the reporter agent of the media, which replaces the old virtual hostage, the diplomat, as the media form of the most universal representation, replaces or absorbs its diplomatic form. The new hostage lives as agent and subject of a single function of representation, universal ambassador of the international community of innocents and reporter through its own body, its media body here, of their sufferings. Among the sufferings by which the hostage pays for its glory, there is a surplus-value of manifestation that the media takes from it, a benefit of prestige, meaning, and value, of truth even, that comes back to them, especially when they draw attention to it, which they sometimes ask of it according to the oldest onto-political maxim: that the remedy and the illness always go together and never leave each other.
From the point of view of the reality of the hostage, the situation is different. The hostage demonstrates nothing because it shows everything, as well as this mechanism itself of which it exhibits the least secret and uproots the little ruses. It manifests the force of its kidnappers without making of this manifestation a force that it would use against them, since it is capable of this manifestation qua hostage (of) itself. And if it asks its country to give in, it is from the ground or fund of its life that is inalienable and inaccessible to no other than itself. This demand is absolute, without political or strategic reason; an exigency without calculation that the state cannot understand under penalty of denying itself.
The old “political ruse” changes nature and form: it goes through terrorism, taking hostages, blackmail, and especially their amplification by the media. Information has become the real content and the surest means of the political ruse.
It entails demonstrating its force and existence a little more, drawing attention to itself and making, as we say, its demands known. This supplement of existence under the manifest or media form does not destroy the ruse as it might seem. On the contrary, laying down the cards is to prolong the deception by putting the manifestation in the service of the will to destroy the adversary or to overturn the relation of forces. Only the hostage, who is the absolutely improbable “fruit” of the terrorist ruse, uses what could pass for a supplement of the ruse — of manifestation — in an absolute manner, without reserve, secret, or stratagem. It manifests the ruse to manifest it, not to be a little more cunning. The fold or the ruse are the single variously varied essence of the philosopher, of the man of the state and the terrorist: only the hostage is condemned by themself, as hostage (of) itself, to a simplicity which manifests the ruse itself without remainder.
The Secret and Parousia of the Chosen
The hostage has an absolute experience of being-chosen, and a relative experience of election. The nature of its glory is changed according to one or the other of these points of view.
The hostage is entirely election and entirely chosen 〈élu〉, without being one and the other at the same time. It receives its glory as martyr of the struggles that make minorities. Twice a minority, as common citizen and as foreigner or stranger to the minorities who seize it to demonstrate the universality of their subjugation and their sufferings, it is only chosen under benefit of election, the chosen one of others that are already elected by a cause that chose the one and the other and that takes from them a surplus-value of authority. But it also knows itself as chosen-without-election, more isolated from every cause than its executioners, an absolute minority who has nothing left to defend, a martyr penetrated by a glory that it gets neither from them nor itself.
The hostage is the only man that has no political program; even its calls for help are no longer quite of the order of a program.
The mise au secret of the hostage is part of its parousia. But the parousia of the hostage is said in two incommensurable senses. In the techno-political and micro-political sense, the secret of the dungeon and media publicity making a system, dividing and reinforcing one another. In the sense, especially, where it is hostage (of) itself and knows itself as such: the manifestation of a secret that remains an unshared secret in its full manifestation and cannot further initiate its communication. The withdrawal of the hostage, cut off even from its private life by a decision that is of the state type but indeterminate. Its mise au secret draws from the criminal’s hideout, the entombment of Christ, the withdrawal of the ascetic, the incognito of the famous man. It is itself public and secret, its detention is in its turn protected and chased: this redoubling belongs to the logic of the politico-philosophical secret and cannot be surprising. But the hostage itself draws its essence from a secret which has no politico-philosophical equivalent, from an invisibility so simple that it manifests the procedures of the mise-au-secret without remainder in their rawness and singularity.