On: End in sight? Hormuz, nukes at the heart of US-Iran sticking points
Diary Entry
They speak of “sticking points.” Hormuz. Nukes. The price of a barrel of oil. The language of the negotiators is the language of the zone of being, where states are recognised as sovereign actors, where interests are balanced, where a “deal” is possible. It is a language that erases the lived reality of the zone of non-being. For whom is the war “three months” old? For the architects of the negotiation, perhaps. For the bodies upon which this Manichean world is inscribed, the war is decades old. It is the permanent condition of being under the gaze that names you a threat, that defines your sovereignty as a “problem” to be managed, your resources as a “lever” to be pulled.
The crude price dips on a word from Trump. This is the ultimate epidermalization. The life of a region, the destiny of millions, is reduced to a fluctuation in a market that does not see them. Their being is processed as data, as risk, as a “sticking point.” The violence is not merely in the bombs; it is in the categories. To be told you may only re-enter the zone of being by surrendering your right to what the other possesses by nature - this is the psychological violence of the colonial structure. It says: your existence is conditional upon wearing the mask I approve. Your “nukes” are a threat; ours are a guarantee of order.
They ask if an end is in sight. An end for whom? The negotiation seeks not to dismantle the structure, but to calibrate it. It seeks to make the division of the world into zones of being and non-being more efficient, more stable for the markets. It is a reform that leaves the diagnostic categories intact: the West as the arbiter of legitimate power, the rest as supplicants who must prove their harmlessness. The first act of liberation is always a refusal of the terms of the debate. Until that happens, there is no end. There is only the management of an endless war, waged in boardrooms and on trading floors, and felt in the skin of those who are never asked when their four weeks began.