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HENT DE VRIES

F I G U R E 1 Parisian graffito: ‘‘I love the assassin.

He who kills us and he who makes us dream.’’ ‘‘So you love Bush?’’

and Iraq? Or to Ehud Olmert, coming after George W. Bush and Tony Blair? Or, suppos-
ing that the anonymous author sympathizes with the West or with Israel, is the indirect
name-calling that of Sheik Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of Hezbollah, coming after Osama
bin Laden, and Abou Moussab Al-Zarkawi, one of his self-appointed deputies, assassi-
nated by American troops in Iraq?^79 Or is the reference to an adult movie or an interactive
video game, given that both exist under the title ‘‘Assassin III’’? There is no way to tell.
The anonymous gloss ‘‘So you love Bush?’’ may have gotten things wrong, just as we may
have overinterpreted (or not interpreted well enough).
Indeed, we may be eagerly anticipating meaning and message where there is none:
here, a call to arms or—by acting out such a call in front of our eyes—its indirect, as it
were negative-dialectical denunciation.Omnis determinatio negatio est: every determina-
tion, to vary Spinoza freely, allows, implies, and requires (its) negation. To state things as
clearly as this writing on the wall does—that is to say, perversely, given that most people

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