Musharraf Declares Emergency Rule

Musharraf Declares Emergency Rule

Gen. Pervez Musharraf:

WHEREAS a situation has thus arisen where the Government of the country cannot be carried on in accordance with the Constitution and as the Constitution provides no solution for this situation, there is no way out except through emergent and extraordinary measures;

Is it not the case, however, that this very action, with its emphasis on restoring law and order and “balance” qua balance of powers, in fact serves to radically undermine it by exposing within it the law’s own inherent deadlock? Law qua law, which is “ex-timate” to itself, acted out by the object-instrument of state authority and retroactively justified on the basis of “subjects supposed to believe” (in this case, in the constitution, modernity, etc.), rather illustrates the very lack of belief among those upon whom belief has been a priori conferred-displaced. In that sense, in a kind of Hegelian direct coincidence of the opposites, this action shows law as unlawful, as its pure opposite. By the same token, the so-called “war on terror” can be read in a similar way: the very act of fighting terror by means that can be most certainly evoked and defined as terror par excellence, results in the promotion and exponentiation of the very activity that it seeks to destroy.

The more interesting principle or perhaps idea to be drawn from this conclusion, however, is not the simple obvious one: that law must only serve itself as long as it doesn’t exceed itself, transgressing into a territory outside the bounds of its symbolic space (what one would call “unlawful”), but instead that law, as a concept and in application, is inherently unlawful, i.e., that it relies upon an initial wound, or cut, of the unlawful, in order to justify itself as legitimate. Perhaps that’s why “founding violences” of states are so prevalent and mysterious in all of their noumenal Real status.