Turns every impact

Once we attempt to enact an ethics of responsibility that challenges existing political ontologies, especially nationalist ones, a new danger appears: it seems unmooring. By playing out what Connolly calls 'a politics of disturbance through which sedimented identities and moralities are rendered more alert to the deleterious effects of their naturalisation upon difference' and 'a politics of enactment through which new possibilities of being are propelled into established constellations', the new ethics produces uncertainty - political and ontological. 'The politics of disturbance can backfire', he writes, 'inducing that identity panic upon which the politics of fundamentalism feeds'. By antagonising conservatives and provoking them to cling to fundamentalist certitudes, the deployment of such an ethics may unwittingly reinforce the very politics it is seeking to transform. The Israeli settler lobby, and the US government's fundamentalist faith in the utility of military violence as a panacea for insecurity and uncertainty, are powerful contemporary examples of this problem. As Michael Barnett suggests, the post-Oslo process exacerbated such problems: the growing divisions within Israeli society exemplified by Yitzhak Rabin's assassination in fact 'grew more severe, in no small measure due to his secular and liberal response'.84

Buber senses this problem in advance, arguing that a movement from a form of existence based on I—It to one that privileges the You forsakes a world that is 'ordered', 'detached' and 'somewhat reliable' for one that 'cannot be surveyed', that must live with contingency and surprise. This, he argues importantly, is still better, because it holds the promise of a more durable and stable world order:

the encounters do not order themselves to become a world, but each is for you a sign of the world order. They have no association with each other, but every one guarantees your association with the world. The world that appears to you in this way is unreliable, for it appears always new to you, and you cannot take it by its word.85

Connolly writes of 'the persistent need for a precarious balance between 'a politics of governance and a politics of disturbance, not only in the present, but in the regulative ideal of pluralistic politics itself'.86 This is not appreciated by conservatives or fundamentalists (among these we could perhaps include uncritical nationalists) who privilege the politics of statism, governance and 'security', and who see in the current structure of social truth and political order a promise of continuity, certainty and reassurance. It is not easy to avoid this problem, and I believe that the more common response - seeking to avoid it tactically either by softening one's message or by confrontation - will not work. Even if we're lucky enough to defeat such forces at the ballot box or, God forbid, by some more violent means, the discursive power of their thinking remains untouched and may become more organised and determined. This is as true for fundamentalisms like Islamist terrorism as for the coercive policies and convictions of their Western state antagonists in the United States, UK, Australia and Israel. Fundamentalisms are powerful, not only because they represent well-organised and ambitious attempts at power or hegemony, but because they are also driven by fear, trauma or psychological insecurity. Violence and antagonism, however perverse and chaotic its effects, provides ontological reassurance, especially for those who (like Sharon and Weisglass) hope that an untenable and fundamentally unjust status quo can be imposed indefinitely.