The Enemy of All: Piracy and the Law of Nations(The Enemy of All)

The philosophical genealogy of a remarkable antagonist: the pirate, the key to the contemporary paradigm of the universal foe.The pirate is the original enemy of humankind. As Cicero famously remarked, there are certain enemies with whom one may negotiate and with whom, circumstances permitting, one may establish a truce. But there is also an enemy with whom treaties are in vain and war remains incessant. This is the pirate, considered by ancient jurists considered to be "the enemy of all." In this book, Daniel Heller-Roazen reconstructs the shifting place of the pirate in legal and political thought from the ancient to the medieval, modern, and contemporary periods presenting the philosophical genealogy of a remarkable antagonist. Today, Heller-Roazen argues, the pirate furnishes the key to the contemporary paradigm of the universal foe. This is a legal and political person of exception, neither criminal nor enemy, who inhabits an extra-territorial region. Against such a foe, states may wage extraordinary battles, policing politics and justifying military measures in the name of welfare and security. Heller-Roazen defines the piracy in the conjunction of four conditions: a region beyond territorial jurisdiction; agents who may not be identified with an established state; the collapse of the distinction between criminal and political categories; and the transformation of the concept of war. The paradigm of piracy remains in force today. Whenever we hear of regions outside the rule of law in which acts of "indiscriminate aggression" have been committed "against humanity," we must begin to recognize that these are acts of piracy. Often considered part of the distant past, the enemy of all is closer to us today than we may think. Indeed, he may never have been closer.

About the Author :
Daniel Heller-Roazen is the Arthur W. Marks '19 Professor of Comparative Literature and the Council of the Humanities at Princeton University. He is the author of Echolalias: On the Forgetting of Language, The Inner Touch: Archaeology of a Sensation, The Enemy of All: Piracy and the Law of Nations, and The Fifth Hammer: Pythagoras and the Disharmony of the World, all published by Zone Books.

Review :
Brilliant, well-researched, and politically acute Brimming with learning and yet delightful to read, this brief book offers an enlightening and truly original reflection, at the crossroads of history, law and philosophy, on the confusions that threaten us since September 11th. Daniel Heller-Roazen has laid an intellectual explosive charge [...] The pirate is of fundamental relevance for international legal theory and political action, since he cannot be recognized as an enemy nor can he be treated as criminal. In a binary system, the pirate functions as the problematic third. Daniel Heller-Roazen has tracked down this figure over a period of more than two thousand years, and from the problem of the third he has deduced startling conclusions [....] This book is as learned as it is intelligent and, here, on land, where we have rarely concerned ourselves with the pirate, our gaze being turned towards the shore, this book holds the power to clarify a great deal.