Critical Inquiry — Volume 34, Number S2

Michael Taussig

Zoology, Magic, and Surrealism in the War on Terror

1. Exposure Does Not Weaken Deceit

I take Sun Tzu’s wise words regarding war on pretty much the same level as a fortune cookie, but when it comes to the war on terror, then Sun Tzu here catches my breath. For it seems that the art of deception in this particular war is organic and built in to what is by necessity a war of error, a deliberate and compulsive lying, tied up with the fact that in the name of defending the people, which is to say democracy, the war is now against the people. We the public have become the enemy, and that is how I read Sun Tzu on the art of war today.
Yet would it were that simple because the power of the art of deceit does not—I repeat not—necessarily weaken with exposure. Sometimes the very opposite occurs; sometimes deceit seems to thrive on exposure, as in the conjuring tricks of shamanism and in the conjuring now exercised on a global scale by the world’s only superpower. This global conjuring rests on a sea change in the way truth and language work in what Carl Schmitt called “the exception,” meaning the state of emergency. The curious thing is that despite the tremendous concentration of power such a state of emergency implies, which should allow the leaders to tell the truth without fear of the consequences, the opposite is more likely to occur.

Michael Taussig first met Tom Mitchell a decade ago when Tom wore a leather jacket and smoked cigarettes in New York City. They talked a good deal about fetishism, of course, and Taussig, who had pretty much given up on professors, said to himself, “Why aren’t there more academics like this? He makes it fun all over again.” Taussig has contributed a number of essays to Critical Inquiry, such as “The Language of Flowers” (Autumn 2003), and has published a few books, including The Devil and Commodity Fetishism (1980); Shamanism, Colonialism, and the Wild Man (1987); The Nervous System (1992); Mimesis and Alterity (1993); Law in a Lawless Land (2003); and My Cocaine Museum (2004).