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In March 2005, the US were in the grip of the [[Terri Schiavo]] case: she suffered brain damage in 1990 when her heart stopped briefly from a chemical imbalance believed to have been brought on by an eating disorder; court-appointed doctors claimed she is in a persistent vegetative [[state]] with no hope of recovery. While her husband wanted her [[disconnected]] to die in peace, her [[parents]] argued that she could get better and that she would never have wanted to be cut off from food and water. The case reached the top level of the US government and judicial bodies, with the Supreme Court and President involved, the Congress passing fast-track resolutions, etc. The absurdity of the situation, when put in the wider context, is breath-taking: with tens of millions dying of AIDS and hunger all around the [[world]], the public opinion in the US focused on a single case of prolonging the run of NAKED LIFE, of a persistent vegetative state reduced of all specifically [[human]] characteristics. THIS is the [[truth]] of what the [[Catholic]] [[Church]] means what its representatives talk about the "[[culture]] of life" as opposed to the "culture of [[death]]" of contemporary nihilistic hedonism. What we [[encounter]] here is effectively a kind of [[Hegelian]] [[infinite judgment]] which asserts the speculative [[identity]] of the highest and the lowest: the Life of the Spirit, divine spiritual [[dimension]] and the life reduced to inert vegetation... These are the two extremes we find ourselves today with [[regard]] to [[human rights]]: one the one hand those "missed by the bombs" (mentally and physically [[full]] human beings, but deprived of rights), on the other hand a human being reduced to bare vegetative life, but this [[bare life]] protected by the entire state [[apparatus]].
What legitimizes such [[biopolitics]] is the mobilization of the [[fantasmatic]] dimension of the potential/invisible threat: it is the invisible (and for that very [[reason]] all-powerful and omni-[[present]]) threat of the [[Enemy]] that legitimizes the permanent [[state of emergency]] of the existing Power (Fascists invoked the threat of the [[Jewish]] conspiracy, Stalinists the threat of the [[class]] enemy - up to today's "war on terror," of course). This [[invisible threat]] of the Enemy legitimizes the logic of the [[preemptive strike]]: precisely because the threat is [[virtual]], it is too late to wait for its actualization, one has to strike in advance, before it will be too late... In other words, the omni-present invisible threat of Terror legitimizes the all too [[visible]] protective measures of [[defense]] (which pose the only TRUE threat to [[democracy]] and [[Human Rights|human rights]], of course). If the classic power functioned as the threat which was operative precisely by way of never actualizing itself, by way of remaining a threatening GESTURE (and this functioning reached its climax in the [[Cold War]], with the threat of the mutual nuclear [[destruction]] which HAD to remain a threat), with the war on terror, the invisible threat causes the incessant actualization - not of itself, but - of the measures against itself. The nuclear strike had to remain the threat of a strike, while the threat of the terrorist strike triggers the endless series of strikes against potential terrorists... The power which presents itself as being all the [[time]] under threat, living in mortal [[danger]], and thus merely defending itself, is the most dangerous kind of power, the very [[model]] of the Nietzschean [[ressentiment]] and [[moralistic]] hypocrisy - and, effectively, was it not [[Nietzsche]] himself who, more than a century ago, provided the best [[analysis]] of the [[false]] [[moral]] premises of today's "war on [[terror"]]?
"No government admits any more that it keeps an [[army]] to [[satisfy]] occasionally the [[desire]] for conquest. Rather the army is supposed to server for defense, and one invokes the [[morality]] that approves of [[self]]-defense. But this implies one's own morality and the [[neighbor]]'s [[immorality]]; for the neighbor must be [[thought]] of as eager to attack and conquer if our state must [[think]] of means of [[self-defense]]. Moreover, the reasons we give for requiring an army imply that our neighbor, who denies the desire for conquest just as much does our own state, and who, for his part, also keeps an army only for reasons of self-defense, is a hypocrite and a cunning criminal who would like [[nothing]] better than to overpower a harmless and awkward [[victim]] without any fight. Thus all states are now ranged against each other: they presuppose their neighbor's bad disposition and their own [[good]] disposition. This presupposition, however, is inhumane, as bad as war and worse. At bottom, indeed, it is itself the challenge and the [[cause]] of wars, because as I have said, it attributes immorality to the neighbor and thus provokes a hostile disposition and act. We must abjure the [[doctrine]] of the army as a means of self-defense just as completely as the desire for conquests."<ref>[[Friedrich Nietzsche]], <i>Sämtliche Werke: Kritische Studienausgabe</i>, Vol. 2, Berlin: Walter de Gruyter 1980, p. 678.</ref>
