NOTES TO PAGES 391–98being defended is not ‘‘democracy’’ as such but its ‘‘homeland.’’ The traditional term, still in use,
isnational security. But the security of the ‘‘nation’’ is abstract compared to the security of the
‘‘homeland.’’ ‘‘Homeland security’’ thus is part of a trend that can be described as the ‘‘privatization
of the political.’’ One belongs to the nation as a citizen, which is to say, as a member of a public.
One belongs to the homeland, by contrast, as to an extended family. It would surely be revealing to
pursue the history of this term.The Merriam-Webster Online Dictionarydefineshomelandas follows:
‘‘A state or area set aside to be a state for a people of a particular national, cultural, or racial origin;
especially: BANTUSTAN.’’The American Heritage Dictionary, in its fourth edition, dated 2000, de-
fines the term as designating ‘‘A state, region, or territory that is closely identified with a particular
people or ethnic group’’ and also gives as sole example of usage ‘‘Any of the ten regions designated
by South Africa in the 1970s as semiautonomous territorial states for the Black population. The
Black homelands were dissolved.’’
- Michael Naas, in the text cited, indicates the decisive significance of ‘‘auto-immunity’’ in
rethinking this ‘‘force’’: ‘‘As a ‘weak force,’ a force that turns on and disables force or power,
autoimmunity at once destroys or compromises the integrity and identity of sovereign forms and
opens them up to their future—that is, to the unconditionality of the event.’’ - The analysis and deconstruction of the political ramifications of ‘‘fraternity’’ constitutes
one of the major motifs of Derrida,Politics of Friendship. - It is difficult here not to be reminded of Judge Daniel Paul Schreber’s description of God
in hisMemoirs of My Nervous Illness(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988)—with, of course,
the hardly untrivial difference that Aristotle’s Prime Mover, although erogenous, is not corporeal,
in sharp contrast to Schreber’s deity. - But, interestingly enough, never (to my knowledge) as ‘‘autocracy.’’
- Prouty’s first and major book, L. Fletcher Prouty,The Secret Team: The CIA and Its Allies
in Control of the United States and the World(Prentice-Hall: New York, 1973, rpt. 1992), disappeared
from most libraries and bookstores shortly after its appearance. Meanwhile, Prouty’s numerous
books, essays, and interviews are available in CD format as well as in print. - Max Weber,The Spirit of Capitalism and the Protestant Ethic(London: Routledge, 1992).
- In his essay ‘‘The Work of Art in the Age of Its Mechanical Reproducibility,’’ Benjamin
uses the termscultandcult-value, which he associates both with art in its early stages and with the
fascist use of technology to produce ‘‘cult-value.’’ Although this seems to bear littledirectresem-
blance to the ‘‘cult-religion’’ of capitalism as described in the earlier text, it does share with it the
tendency to conceal its object: ‘‘Cult-value as such tends to keep the work of art concealed [im
Verborgenen].’’ The ‘‘immature’’ deity of the capitalist cult, by contrast, is ‘‘kept secret [verheim-
licht],’’ which is more and other than just hidden or concealed. See Walter Benjamin,Gesammelte
Schriften(Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1980), I.2:443. (HereafterGS.) - Walter Benjamin, ‘‘Kapitalismus als Religion,’’GSVI:100.
- It is significant, perhaps, that as a noun the word signifies guilt in the singular, and debt(s)
in the plural.
24.GSVI:102. - The banknotes of the new European currency, the euro, have replaced representations of
personal ‘‘figures’’ with monuments and maps. This separation of ornamentality from figuration
may contribute to the sense of distance and detachment that increasingly is manifest in the attitudes
of Europeans to the European Union. - This was the brief slogan of an advertising campaign launched in the 1970s by the prede-
cessor of Nissan Motors, which had then to be withdrawn because of protest by religious groups.
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