As you are likely aware, there has recently been a global acceleration in the campaigns against ‘disinformation’ and ‘hate speech’, as evidenced by three stories that it would no doubt be conspiracy-theoretical to link together too closely: the arrest of Telegram co-founder Pavel Durov and associated threats against Elon Musk, the banning of X in Brazil, and the proposed clampdown in the U.K. on ‘legal but harmful’ speech. It seems as though something is afoot: not so much a change in the weather as a sudden picking up of the wind, as though heralding an onrushing storm.
This makes it an apposite time for a brief post on the political theology of the anti-disinformation movement. This, I hope, will allow readers to see past what to my mind is the rather unhelpful way in which the subject is generally framed – i.e., as a ‘free speech’ issue. As I hope to make clear, casting the struggle in free speech terms as such is really to speak in relation to symptoms rather than causes. The problem at root is not that there are people who are seeking to suppress freedom of speech (though there are such people); the problem rather is the underlying desire to manage what I will call – following Foucault – the ‘circulation of merits and faults’ in society, and how this relates in particular to speech-acts. Put more straightforwardly, the issue is not exactly that freedom of speech is being restricted, but rather that a global effort is underway to decide what is true, and to produce a consciousness of that ‘truth’ within each and every individual, at any given moment, so that their speech indeed can do nothing but declare it.
This, as we shall see, will take us to a difficult but important subject: Jesus Christ, and his description by René Girard as the ‘first political atheist’. The secularisation of society has largely taken the figure of Jesus out of the public consciousness; my aim here is in part to show that this has been a great tragedy in terms of the loss to our understanding of politics in the round (leaving matters of spirituality and theology entirely to one side).
Let us begin all of this, then, with Foucault. As regular readers will recall,
in his 1977-78 lecture series, Foucault made plain that the state was
only an ‘episode’ in the trajectory of government. This, to recap, was
because government itself was a practice untrammelled by borders or
indeed physical barriers of any kind; the task of governing was a
project embarked upon precisely because, with the advent of modernity
and the Scientific Revolution, it became possible to imagine the world itself as
a domain which it was possible to act upon so as to improve it. This in
the first instance became the project of the state. But implicit in
that project was the notion the state was merely a kind of staging post
to world government (what is nowadays called ‘global governance’)
properly so-called....<<<Read More>>>...
