Late Foucault

In an excellent appraisal of Foucault's lecture series at the College de France , Michael Hardt writes about the later books in this series, some of which are yet to appear in English. The two books in question, The Government of Self and Others and The Courage of Truth are the subject of Hardts' review in the NLR. Since the middle of this year, I have been reading the lecture series and have so far read most of Psychiatric Power, Society must be defended, Security, Territory, Population and am currently reading The Government of Self and Others.

Contrary to his early style which many including myself find inaccessible, Foucault's style towards the later phase of his life is perhaps simpler and easier to understand. Foucault draws upon inexhaustible sources of erudition and much of what we read among contemporary philosophers is influenced by Foucault. Foucault elaborates upon his concept of Biopolitics, further written about and commented upon by Agamben later on. The style of these lectures is brilliant, direct and though not interspersed with questions, it takes account perhaps of those questions which the great philosopher might have anticipated. Foucault speaks like the master and his inexhaustible knowledge seemingly has all the answers.

In The Government of Self and Others, Foucault elaborates on the doctrine of Parresia or truth-telling and helps us differentiate it from mere performative utterances. Parresia must come at a price, he reminds us, sometimes one has to pay with one's life. From Plato confronting Dionysius with Parresia to modern technologies of the self, this brilliant book seems to be as prescient as any of his other works. The brilliance in reading Foucault consists of his drawing examples from ancient and medieval times and showing how relevant they are to current times. We may, with our own ways, reflect and draw upon the world around us in the light of what Foucault wrote and make it easier for ourselves to understand or make some sense of what we think is happening to us or the world as such.

An American Tea Party

Politics in the USA at present? Politics or in the place of politics a space filled by hatred, an ungainly form of market hatred, a capitalist fed ignorance of the "other", a creation of the other, a perpetuation of the notion of the other, of the enemy, an insistence, a loud insistence on difference, and the negation of that loudness, a suffocation of real debate, a thorough insistence on a univocal vision of the now, of the past and the future, the restoration of all previously mellowed prejudices, a resurfacing of a new climate of the fear of the other, for the fear of the fear of the other, a departure from debate, an American insistence on gesture dictated occupation of the political space, a soap-opera type attitude towards realities and of realities, a "Friends" type of structuring of reality, of the structuring of the other, through the now and present, towards the future.

The Tea Party at present, in modern America, the negation of the multicultural model, the affirmation of hidden prejudices, the "greatest" country in the world as is declared every day, the climate of fear, for Muslims in the USA, the new realities of America, the other, the Muslim. The Palinisation of politics, the reduction of Islam to news, as a sound bite, the negation of Islam as a religion, the negation of space for the other, the open declaration of a war against the new pariah, the new Jew as not the old Jew but the old Jew as the Muslim, the Muslim as the enemy, the open lance thrown at the new enemy, the Euro-Americanization of this hatred,this attitude. Europe follows this prescription, this Tea Party redemption, this Anglo-Saxon angst, angst because there was never a real angst, an angst of the angst, fear because the idols of fear are still prescribing the attitude towards the other, the new Jew.


When Europe will open it's gas chambers again, we know now who will be there.

Muslim, Muselmann, Concentration Camps

In Homo Sacer, Agamben elucidates on the issue of fact and law, wherein in under sovereign power, fact and law were considered different entities. However, bare life maintains Agamben, is subject to a state wherein this distinction is lost. The loss of this means that fact and law become interchangeable giving rise within normal public life to a state of concentration camps, which was the structure during the Nazi era in these camps but has since then lead to the evolution of camps in our public lives. We are effectively living under the aegis of life within a camp, bare life subject to a sovereign power, law suspended for ever. This has been an evolution in the scheme of things since the camps in Europe and lead to a similar situation in Bosnia and so on. Detention centres for illegal immigrants are the new concentration camps if not camps of extermination, since the immigrants are subject to adhoc laws and sovereign power and will.

Agamben borrows from Foucault's concept of Bio -politics and also makes it quite clear. Within the ambit of bio-politics, the state takes over the body and subjects it to its will, deriving from a loosening of association between fact and law. This is also a factor that eventually helps create a scene where productive and non-productive lives are differentiated and then lets in reign the medical scientists to allow the state to create a space where euthanasia can be debated, for bare life versus fact and law, camps and bio-politics merge together.

It is interesting to consider this conception of camps in our political and social midst as an aporia and also as a sign that needs recognition. In her Precarious Lives and now in her Frames of War, Judith Butler starts with her conception of precarity and precarious lives, focus sing on illegal detention in Guantanamo, and over indefinite detention and then over the distinction between useful and useless lives. Grieving over useless lives will never be an issue and hence the process of mourning and grieving must be considered in reference to grievable lives, lives that matter. Hence, Butler asserts, the American lives lost in New York are grievable under this concept and Iraqi and other Palestinian lives, lives belonging to faces that we don't know and see and hence cannot grieve over. However, Butler asserts that thses people, who are being killed by American- European sovereignty are already dead, faceless and nameless.

Butler scoffs at the idea of her brave writing and goes one step further in saying that the abuses at Abu- Ghraib in Iraq are the culmination of this process of ungrievability, useful and uselessness. She takes on Sontag's assertion that Photography is without narration and does not lead to any resolution and speaks of the frames within which such pictures of abuse and torture must be seen. That photos need an authorial signature and that this author must be considered present even outside the frame of this invisible author must never be forgotten, Butler adds the idea of the lack of mourning over these issues to her fundamental idea of precariousness of life. However, she laments that while all lives should be considered precarious, under the present frame, it is only some lives that are deemed so.

I think about the framework in which both Agamben and Butler work, basing theit thoughts on Foucault's concept of biopolitics and wonder whether the Guantanamo camps must also not be considered as concentration camps if not camps of extermination, for the individuals within this space are subject to a space that does not obey the customary distinction between fact and law. Sovereign power reigns supreme, the individuals are deemed indefinitely detainable and subject to a state of exception, which becomes the norm. Hence, the torture chambers of Abu Ghraib become a camp for this political experimentation, for not only are these people faceless, they are nameless and hence outside any legal status as either subjects or citizens or refugees. Arendt is quite clear about the rights of man in this reference though she does not ever write about bio-ploitics within the camp setting nor does Foucault make any reference to these camps.

Agamben refers to the title given to Jewish inmates of concentration camps as Muselmann, for a Muslim was a term used for these Jews in camps who were in a state of total apathy, devoid of life, will, power, face, name, useless, expendable and using Butler's terms, outside precarity, ungrievable. And now, in and outside Euro- America and under their patronage elsewhere, the Muslim not as Muslim but as Muslim, as Muselmann.

Unforgivable

I was thinking about the lovesickness of which we spoke last time in the fervent echo or the melancholy wake of the Song of Songs, the Poem of Poems, as if the poetical of the poetical, of all declaration of love had to do with this sickness of the other, if not of the foreigner in me, of another in me, outside of me, of the other who angers me and puts me out of myself, the other who puts me out of myself in me, of the other always both more ancient and more to come than me, whom I thus mourn as a mourning of me, as if I carried with me the mourning of me carried by the other, there where would thus begin an ageless hospitality, or of a hospitality of all ages, a hospitality which could only survive itself before its time, and of which the poem would say, in sum, from one to the other: I love you, I am sick of love from you, sick of love for you, for while wholly wanting, with all my desire, to die before you so that I don't see you die, for you know that one of us will see the other die, well then, while wholly wanting, with all my hopeless desire, to die first, I would also want to survive you, to have at least the time to be there to console you at the time of my death, to assist you so that you would not be alone at the time of my death: I would want to survive you just enough to help you, the time it will take, to bear my death." I love you" would thus signify this impossible grammar, a grammar that one can find at once tragic and comic, as time itself: I would want to survive you at my death, to survive me in you, to guard in me your mourning of me, etc. And this "I love you, and therefore I guard you/keep you in surviving you" is unforgivable, therefore I ask you for forgiveness there where it is possible to ask for and to grant forgiveness, there where only, you recall, it is unforgivable.

from Hospitality: Acts of Religion, Derrida

Rosenzweig's War

An extract below from The Jew, the Arab: A History of the Enemy by Gil Anidjar, considered as one of the "101 most dangerous" professors in America by David Horowitz. A link to an interview with Anidjar.

"No one, perhaps, has gone as explicitly far as Rosenzweig in extirpating, ultimately eradicating, Islam from the figure of humanity, that is to say, from the theologico-political, from the religious and historical world configuration that is constituted by Judaism and Christianity. " Before God, then, Jew and christian both labor at the same task. He cannot dispense with either. He has set enmity between the two for all times, and withal has known intimately bound to each".

This exclusion constitutes Rosenzweig's political theology, the theologico-political configuration that links three rather than two entities commonly referred to as 'religions.' This term 'religion' of course means very little to Rosenzweig, who recasts each element( God, world, and man) as privileged in its relation to one of the three religions. Judaism is with God, Christianity is man on its way to God, Islam is the war of the world. Judaism is theological, and it therefore experiences war as political. Christianity is the embodiment of the theologico-political, unable to know the difference when it comes to war. Islam, finally is detheologized and can therefore spread nothing but holy war. Rosenzweig casts Islam at once as the most obvious and the most hidden figure of the world as political. He casts Islam as the most extreme opposite, the most distant figure in its relation to Judaism, in relation to the theological space that Judaism occupies. Rosenzweig casts Islam as the political enemy.

Islam, one could say, cannot relate to the world because it is the world.......what Rosenzweig makes explicit is the structure of the theologico-political as constitutively Abrahamic. By enacting the exclusion of Islam, by making visible the becoming of the theologico-political as the Jude-Christian, Rosenzweig makes Islam into the invisible enemy. He also made Islam the political enemy. With the Star, with what can be seen as a certain culmination of its history, the enemy draws away, and with him, the Jew, the Arab."

from The Jew, the Arab: A History of the Enemy, Gil Anidjar

Bathsheba or The Interior Bible

Helene Cixous writes with the force of torrents, unleashed unstoppable rapids, like we imagine angels should if they could, with music, loud and deeply touching, fast, furious, like a poet. There, in the painting above by Rembrandt, she approaches it with twenty-four steps. She who is percieved from afar, the non-nude nudity. Without a man.

It would be the last thing I do, write about the painting above, but I write about this halting stuttering poetry of Cixous', this chant, this prose, music that fills, that leaves leaving us longing, a cadence, some steps, a bit more, less, again, again, the same want, then the considerable erudition, insights, darkness, insights, her wandering, her Jewish-wandering, a flash, then loneliness. However, I am interested in certain aspects of how she reads this painting; what follows is just a paraphrase of her reading, which I intend to complete in three posts.

The background she warns is black; blackness isn't black, it is the last degree of reds. The secret blood of reds. Then the expression on Bathsheba's face: the passivity, the despondency, the imminence, drooping. We don't know where we are, what time, what age? Our own country, a foreign land, our hearts, that foreign country? No, this is interior land, the interior Bible.

We see some light on her, we see her servant now. Asks Cixious: Of what secret lights are we made? What lives do we live, this light takes us inside, down the stairs we never take, to the interior land. The entire room is flesh. Sex. Then again:

She does not look at us. She is of those who do not look at us. I mean to say: Bathsheba, Mary, don't look at us, don't stop living, in order to look at us. And when we look at them, thoughts take leave.

What is she thinking about?

Then we see the older woman, at the bottom. Says Cixous: the older woman is Bathsheba's foreignness, her exoticism, Asia. And the woman's coif is oriental. The body is Bathsheba's, the coif is the older woman's.
The servant gazes towards the East, Bathsheba towards the occidental future. The two gazes don't see each other. They are on two parallel planes. And then we see the letter.

I daresay that this is only half the movement, half of her approach. What interests me is the Occidental gaze. The coiffured servant, at her feet stands no chance. Though she too has partaken something from her. But the gazes are different, even if they are day dreaming. They are not of this world, they are parallel to each other. I don't know why I feel a pang for Bathsheba's servant.

from Stigmata, Cixous

Zionist White Phosphorus

The Israeli white phosphorus that burned Palestinian earth and sky recently should not be seen as a physical act of aggression alone, a chemical intending to burn skin and bone. It goes beyond arrogance, beyond any justifiable retribution that the Palestinians had invited on themselves. It reflects a crazy insistence on the part of the Israelis in annihilating the memories of Palestine, to put to fire the script of Palestine and to burn those who fire rockets as acts of resistance. The use of white phosphorous, the incendiary fire in the skies, with carte blanche approval from its western allies, signifies a new breach, a new step towards which Israel has taken this stateless people, this land that was stolen from them, the mention of which is considered anti-Semitic by a new brand of moralizers who know sycophantic erudition alone.

The Israeli white phosphorus that crazed Gazan sky and earth recently was not an act of war, for war is fought between enemies who can hurt each other, not between a modern army and helpless women, children and men. The occupied must resist an occupation, must resist, must sings its songs, must write its history down, even when its skies are rendered afire by white phosphorous, given carte blanche to by the people who will write a new road map. Anyone who has been silent in the face of this aggression is intellectually dishonest, brutally partisan and the time has come to write about the bombed homes, hospitals and schools. Any other opinion about the atrocities inflicted on the Palestinians since being robbed of their entire historical land will be obscene, not unjust.

While the Israelis are burning Gaza, a young Palestinian boy in the West Bank has picked up a stone, his aim is the huge wall that separates his third world concentration refugee camp from the Zionist settler in his first world kibbutz camp. The settler has just finished fondling his Uzi and is taking aim at the boys head. The bullet that whizzes through the Palestinian air misses the head and pierces the heart of the boy. He is thrown and lies mangled on Palestinian earth, the stone dropping from his fist and falling near his feet. The Zionist settler, satisfied, glib with his aim, raises his head towards the sky, thanking the God of his chosen tribe. The dead Palestinian boy is now a stone himself. His wailing mother, who will be informed soon of her loss will beat her chest and the young boy will be buried under an indifferent earth.

Certain Oriental sages have written that in times past, this young boy's blood would have dug rivulets under the earth and formed rivers of blood and many such rivers would have flooded many islands of the oppressors. But in our times, oriental prophecies don't come true. However, it is hoped that the young boy will rise again from the dust and pick up another stone. And, in spite of the superiority of the settler god, it is hoped that the stone will gain speed and pierce that settler wall.

What the Zionists want

The outcome of the present Zionist atrocities unleashed on the Gaza strip will ultimately end in legitimizing the mass killings of Palestinian civilians that also include children and women. The fault as noted earlier lies with the Palestinians for they are nameless, stateless and thus without any rights. The stateless person does not actually exist. For the Zionists and their benefactors to actually not allow the Palestinians to resist, to fight and claim the land that was stolen from them, to besmirch their resistance and to attach to their resistance the label of terrorism is the ultimate victory of the Israeli state. From all this, the ultimate victory will only belong to Israel, for in essence, what Israel is fighting for is an extreme ideology, in which God has been given a role too. From a secular democracy to a theological ideology, everything is immersed in an identity that claims a threat to its existence from a people sandwiched between an artificially progressive Arab states, progress based on desert mirages and that of Israel, a mini America, God's promised land, sponsored by right wing ideologues and their war machines.

After the present genocide is halted, to be resumed at a further date, there will be peace initiatives followed by new maps of peace to nowhere followed by a flurry of non-activity and more frustration. The Arab states will donate their hopeless money to re-build what Israel destroys on a regular basis, the allies of the Zionist entity will call for peace initiatives while Israel will continue to rebuild settlements of extremist Jews in the West Bank, home of Abbas and his gang, the place from which not a single rocket has been fired at Israel and yet the settlements are being build. Who is sincere about peace?

The other players in the area like Iran and the rhetorically naive Hezbollah will continue to exploit the Palestinians for their own purposes and innocent Palestinians will continue to perish. The endgame will culminate in the creation of an Eretz Israel by which time the Palestinian entity will be the substance of myth, nurtured only in poetry and song, some tears and some faded old maps. There are not even many Mahmoud Darwish' around to write about this pain. The fountains of sadness are sprouting blood, the insane cries for help are falling on deaf ears, at this time poetry and Literature seem superfluous, including my naive post. The futility of resistance, the futility of memory, the futility of death and cries and blood, that is what the Zionists want, that is what they will achieve. In the annihilation of the Palestinians lies not their victory but in the annihilation of the memory of Palestine, the will to fight and dream. That is what the Zionists want, what they will achieve.

The crime of Gaza

The current atrocities unleashed on the Gaza strip must not be viewed as a crisis but as a systematic destruction of the feeble body politic of the Gaza strip. Any one viewing it as a crisis is a partisan observer. The war, unleashed by the homicidal murderers of Israel, backed by the US and UK, and supported by word and deed by all the others, including the "moderate" Arabs, is nothing but a continuation of the occupation that is eating away at any civilized remnant that Israel's Western backers might still have. There is shame in this war unleashed on Gaza, a war that pits unarmed civilians against the inheritors of the holocaust, now aided blatantly by the perpetrators of the holocaust. The French and the Germans, the new fascists in place in their capitals and the countries that civilize the uncivilized, the US and the UK, are putting the onus on the Palestinians. What a shame!

The fault lies with the Palestinians because they happen to be there, the murderer murders because he has the murder weapon, the victim should have stayed home, why rush out in the open, why not stay indoors, why ask for rights, what freedom? Isn't occupation better, isn't humiliation better, why not stay tied with civilized Israeli's than roam free as nomads, as birds? Every child, every woman, every man killed in Gaza is a terrorist because they are Palestinian. The war has not lead to any humanitarian crisis we are told because the Palestinians are not human. Listen, listen the world! The Palestinians asking for freedom! A blind man asking to see, to see colours!

The other Arabs, soaked in technicolour oil, floundering in protecting their regimes are as brutal in their silent complicity as the Western powers are blatantly one-sided. The Palestinians can only hope for anarchy, for anarchy to spread in this area so that all become one: The unjustly killed family with the brutal dictator with the modern war machine with the crusaders from the West with the dead intellectuals from everywhere. Since there is no justice in the world, the Palestinians of Gaza should not hope of it. The fascist Israeli's and their shameless backers will never cease to stop till Gaza is itself a large grave. There is no hope for them and no chance of a separate state.

From Real Presences

An extract from George Steiner's Real Presences:

"The usages and values predominant in the consumer societies of the West today are the opposite to those in the imaginary community of the immediate. It is the secondary and the parasitic which overwhelm. Literate humanity is solicited daily by millions of words, printed, broadcast, screened, about books which it will never open, music it will not hear, works of art it will never set eyes on. A perpetual hum of aesthetic commentary, of on-the-minute judgements, of pre-packaged pontifications, crowds the air. Presumably, the greater part of art-talk or literary reportage, of music reviews or ballet criticisms, is skimmed rather than read, heard but not listened to. None the less, the effect is antithetical to that visceral, personal encounter and appropriation designated by Ben Johnson. There is little ingestion; it is the digest that prevails.

At the level of critical-academic interpretation and evaluation, the volume of secondary discourse defies inventory. Not even the computer and electronic data bank are able to cope. No bibliographies are up to date. The mass of books and critical essays, of scholarly articles, of acta and dissertations produced each day in Europe and the United States, has the blind weight of a tidal wave. In the humanities- a general rubric which I will take to encompass literature, music, the arts together with the totality of hermeneutic and normative argument which they occasion.....enumeration verges on the grotesque".

The Intellectuals

"All men are intellectuals, one could therefore say: but not all men have in society the function of intellectuals.

When one distinguishes between intellectuals and non-intellectuals, one is referring in reality only to the immediate social function of the professional category of intellectuals, that is one has in mind the direction in which other specific professional activity is weighed, whether towards intellectual elaboration or towards muscular-nervous effort. This means that, although one can speak of intellectuals, one cannot speak of non-intellectuals, because non-intellectuals do not exist. But even the relationship between efforts of intellectual-cerebral elaboration and muscular nervous effort is not always the same, so that there are varying degrees of specific intellectual activity. There is no human activity from which every form of intellectual participation can be excluded: homo faber cannot be separated from homo sapiens. Each man, finally, outside his professional activity, carries on some form of intellectual activity, that is, he is a philosopher, an artist, a man of taste, he participates in a particular conception of the world, has a conscious line of moral conduct, and therefore contributes to sustain a conception of the world or to modify it, that is, to bring into being new modes of thought".

Antonio Gramsci, Selections from Prison Notebooks

Dabashi : American Empire

We live in the age of the most modern of empires, one that does not however call itself so. We also need to be reminded of it and sometimes the haze and mist that liberal democracies carry mists popular perception. The realm of opposition to this vulgarity resides mostly inside academia and that too of a particular kind for in its very nature and becoming, the modern American led liberal empire is insidious and subverts logical approaches towards understanding it. The American led invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan, its pursuit of Iran and Syria and to some extent Pakistan and its strangle on Middle Eastern dictatorships and its single minded protection of Israel makes one ask as to the nature and design of this imperial project. The cost of human life that Afghanistan in particular is suffering, especially its children and women are things that mainstream media here in Europe and elsewhere do not even allow to be a topic of discussion.

Hamid Dabashi's recent write up on this issue, called Triumph of triumphalism is worth considering in this regard. ( I have sketched a few lines about Dabashi in my previous post) Dabashi begins by drawing our attention to the "xenophobic provincialism" of current US politics, especially with the film star Hollywood style nature of its presidential election pomp and fanfare but against the background of a rising tide of greed amongst its politicians and the sea of "christian zionism", as Dabashi has it, in alliance with Jewish Israel, a distant ally with Hindu fundamentalist India against a belligerent Islamic republic. ( I presume that by belligerent, Dabashi only means Iran.)

The wave after wave of belligerence in the Middle East led by America resulting in untold miseries is the result of what Dabashi terms as "chronic attention deficit disorder". The current imperial project is not new and any attempt to link all and sundry to the events of 2001 must be resisted, he warns. The militant adventurers responsible for those events and the lack of a structural link between Afghanistan and Iraq baulks the mind. Dabashi then points out the theory of a just war, promoted for Afghanistan, where war then takes on a moral and religious dimension. Calling this whole set of thinking as "historical amnesia", Dabashi then tells us the all too familiar story of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and its ensuing results and the American attempts to stop the revolution from Iran spilling elsewhere. The consequences later on resulted in Iran becoming a strict theocracy and Afghanistan spiralling into further violence.

It is clear, while reading this essay the influence that Negri and Hardt have on Dabashi for he quotes and accepts that freely. In Empire, Negri and Hardt argued that the present American empire is without a definite ideology, it is an empire without being an empire and that its main ideology is globalization. They dismiss the theories of Fukuyama and Huntington which Dabashi labels as parochial and banal and "smacking of intellectual poverty and too much protest". However, Hardt & Negri wrote Empire before the Iraq war and thus the dimension of ideology cannot be ignored. He then goes on to reflect on the notion of empire according to the conservative writer Niall Ferguson who laments at America's not declaring itself as an empire for empires, according to Ferguson are beneficial.

The reasons behind America's reticent celebration of its one sided domination of the world and its relentless wars lie, Dabashi thinks, in its protestant asceticism and in its "Calvinist predilection to avoid admission of wealth", the lack of Soviet style military parades being evidence. America is an empire without imperialism, thinks Dabashi though it no longer seems so. The tactics of the US army in Iraq are likened by Dabashi to how America plays soccer in comparison to football, where small bits of territory are fought over for domination in contrast to the US way where vast swathes in between conquered area lie without control. Dabashi then seeks to draw insights from John Ford's movies where the nature of empire is considered civilizing, for the betterment of natives and for progress in comparison to David Lean's British way of looking at empire, which is lost and pathological as in The passage to India.

I was surprised at Dabashi's comparison of the last 8 years of the Bush era to Nazi Germany and what he calls a fascist America, though he is not surprised at the readers surprise. He exhorts the reader to read the theories of Leo Strauss and his cabalistic neo-con sway over academia or to understand fascist America better, to read Naomi Wolf and her essay on this spiral towards fascism or Earl Shorris's Ignoble liars. Dabashi has elsewhere spoken of Comprador intellectuals who were employed by the US administration to prepare public opinion for the Iraq war and the names he quotes are those that are familiar.....Vali Nasr, Fouad Ajami, Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Azar Nafisi amongst others, examples of psy-op scholarship and embedded writers fomenting theory after theory.

Dabashi then goes on to talk about John Hagee, a person I had never heard of before. It transpires that Hagee, who is has in his recent book Jerusalem Countdown: a warning to the world warned of an impending apocalyptic invasion of America by Arabs and Russians, culminating in the decisive battle between the East and the West. The same Hagee had earlier attributed hurricane Katrina to the sins committed by the people of New Orleans with reference to a "homosexual parade". It seems Hagee is one of the many such Protestant warners, speaking of the second coming of Christ, which this group feels is impending. The apocalyptic nightmares that this breeds only hurtles the US towards fascism, Dabashi warns. He says again that the Republican part has become the first religious party in the US.
Dabashi quotes the Italian philosopher Agamben who called the Nazi state as an exception, an exception where reason fades away and humankind dwindles into bestiality. The same rules apply when one thinks of states of exception, of Camp X-ray, of Abu Ghraib, the massacres of Haditha and the tortures of Bagram.

It is quite evident that Dabashi's manner of exposition, his way of writing are influenced by Said, that may be, but the immediacy of his arguments must not be ignored. There are waves after waves of conspiracy theories but the threat to loss of innocent life through terrorism is a real one. That should never be ignored but simultaneously, the theoreticians of empire, their influences on the minds of politicians, the nexus of empire and oil and fanaticism ( consider There will be blood ), the overpowering disparity between countries, the lack of sympathy for the innocents bombed daily in Afghanistan, the inhuman cult of Zionism, this strange nexus between the Christian right and Jewish Zionism and its reactionary mirror in Islamic fundamentalism are echoes of each other. This is the conclusion one draws after reading this highly well written and erudite essay. However, Dabashi has not spoken about the same messianic image of the Mahdi for the Shias of Iran, with its own eschatology and doomsday victory for Shias alone. The cult of the Mahdi, an army named after him in Iraq at present should have deserved equal notice.

It is interesting to know the space in which the writings of people like Hagee lie though evangelical puritanism is not knew to any one culture. Even in India, for example, one hears of the invasion of Christian missionaries converting gullible Hindus, but the causes are usually laid aside. Millenial eschatological fury, second comings, Mahdist states are not new. People in Sudan have gone through the convulsions of a Mahdist state and during Ottoman times, people have waited for doomsday. The dangers lie if the establishment, those that call themselves liberal and reasonable endorse these threatening and alarmist views of history and religion. If wars are now fought only on the basis of religious ideology, either state induced or terrorist groups led ones, the world will be a poorer place. However, the resistance for land, for dignity and honour and for genuine needs must not be identified with a particular religion only.

He ends by saying,
"the Christian fundamentalism at the heart of American imperialism echoes and corroborates the identically ferocious tribalism at the heart of a Jewish state, an Islamic republic and a Hindu fundamentalism, which have all gathered their storms to divide humanity at large along their basest tribal fears.
Opening the windows of fresh air and for bright light, letting the cultivated cosmopolitanism of all cultures and climes, of all peoples and nations, override religious fanaticism of one denomination over another is the sustained course of action that can put up a global resistance to this globalized terrorism.....imperial or nativist. People's faith in an overriding metaphysics of purpose might be integral to their humanity but can never be definitive to it nor are institutional religions to cultures they inform but can never categorically claim".

Negation of negation

"One of the minimal definitions of a modernist painting concerns the function of its frame. The frame of the painting in front of us is not its true frame; there is another, invisible, frame, the frame implied by the structure of the painting, the frame that enframes our perception of the painting, and these two frames by definition never overlap.....an invisible gap separates them. The pivotal content of the painting is not communicated in its visible part, but located in this dis-location of the two frames, in the gap that separates them. This dimension in-between-the-frames is obvious in Kazimir Malevich ( Black square on white background), in Edward Hopper, and again in Edvard Munch's Madonna..........The frame is always redoubled: the frame within reality is always linked to another frame enframing reality itself. Once introduced, the gap between reality and appearance is thus immediately complicated, reflected-into-itself: once we get a glimpse, through the Frame, of the other dimension, reality itself turns into appearance. In other words, things do not simply appear, they appear to appear. That is why the negation of negation does not bring us to a simple flat affirmation: once things start to appear as what they are not, creating an illusion; they can also appear to just appear, concealing the fact that they are what they appear to be".

Slavoj Zizek, The Parallax View

On thinking Contrapuntally

No one today is purely one thing. Labels like Indian, or woman, or Muslim, or American are no more than starting points, which if followed into actual experience for only a moment are quickly left behind. Imperialism consolidated the mixture of cultures and identities on a global scale. But its worst and most paradoxical gift was to allow people to believe that they were only, mainly, exclusively, white or black, or Western, or Oriental. Yet just as human beings make their own history, they also make their own cultures and ethnic identities. No one can deny the persisting continuities of long traditions, sustained habitations, national languages, and cultural geographies, but there seems no reason except fear and prejudice to keep insisting on their separation and distinctiveness, as if that was all human life was about. Survival in fact is about the connection between things; in Eliot's phrase, reality cannot be deprived of the "other echoes that inhabit the garden". It is more rewarding....and more difficult.....to think concretely and sympathetically, contrapuntally, about others than only about "us". But this also means not trying to rule others, not trying to classify them or put them in hierarchies, above all, not constantly reiterating how "our" culture or country is number one( or not number one, for that matter). For the intellectual there is quite enough of value to do without that.

Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism

The Blessings Of Insomnia

The extract below is from E. M. Cioran's On the heights of despair. Recently, Antonia wrote about insomnia, calling it morning, so I thought this might soothe.

"Just as ecstacy purifies you of the particular and the contingent, leaving nothing except light and darkness, so insomnia kills off the multiplicity and diversity of the world, leaving you prey to your private obsessions. What strangely enchanted tunes gush forth during those sleepless nights! Their flowing tones are bewitching, but there is a note of regret in this melodic surge which keeps it short of ecstacy. What kind of regret? It is hard to say, because insomnia is so complex that one cannot tell what the loss is. Or maybe the loss is infinite. During wakeful nights, the presence of a single thought, or feeling, reigns supreme. It becomes the source of the night's mysterious music. Thus transformed, the thoughts of wakeful nights are mild enough to stir depths of universal anxiety in man's soul. Death itself, although still hideous, acquires in the night a sort of implacable transparency, an illusory and musical character. Nevertheless, the sadness of this universal night is like the sadness of oriental music, in which the mystery of death is more dominant than that of love".

Julia Kristeva's Possessions

Julia Kristeva is a professional psychoanalyst, critic and philosopher, and the combination can be irksome if the product is a novel. I was in the mood to read a tale of murder, detection, clues and suspects, so I picked Possessions. As a tale of detection, it falls flat on itself, but as a text of psychoanalysis and related themes, Kristeva's prose blends myth with poetry. In that sense, it is a find for me, but overall, my feelings are slightly mixed. Kristeva has coined the term semanalyse, a combination of semiotics and psychoanalysis, the former unknown as yet to me, the latter that mythic, faulty edifice, remnant of Greek myth and western logic, that haunts common imagination.

The setting is Santa Varvara, a place where east meets west, more east than west. I thought the flavour was her native Bulgaria, for there were open hints towards that. A murder has been committed and we have a headless body, a decapitation. The victim is a professional translator called Gloria, recently commissioned to translate Shakespeare's sonnets. Our detective cum journalist, Stephanie Delacour is visiting Santa Varvara and happens to have dined with the victim hours before alongwith a few close friends of Gloria's. Thus we have a few suspects, Christie style and Rilsky, the official detective is surely going to go on the wrong trail.Among her close friends is her disabled sons speech therapist, a journalist. her assistant and a few close friends and her maid has disappeared too! So while the official effort is towards finding the maid, Delacour is theorizing in a different way.

Thus begins a narrative in her Delacour's own head, as she talks about the melancholic severed head of John the Baptist to Caravaggio, "of Isaac, innocent as blue beard, shrieking in the grip of an Abraham deaf and blind to the finger of the Angel "to other paintings, as myth and psychoanalytic theories are woven together. Delacour then weaves a portrait of Gloria through herself, talking about Gloria's difficulties as a wife, then as a single mother, her dyslexic son, her attractive figure, her passions, and into this Delacour then speaks of her own place, as a woman, as a lover, of Santa Varvara, with intrigue, greed, murder as less risque possibilities. For the next hundred pages, detection is subservient to psycho -therapeutic theories, of her own dreams and nightmares" from where the mother doll disports herself, from a hiding place of negative orgies, clammy furies".

The first half of the novel is very readable, with Gloria unravelled through a text that flourishes with defense complexes and Freudian and Lacanian analyses. The murdered woman's head is thus a fetish and the immediacy is ignored and what we have is a hunt for some mentally ill patients, who have escaped from an institution. Thus Gloria's death is blamed on mismanagement of a psychiatric institute, and their management and on politicians and even the republic's president. There is also a feeling that maybe Gloria invited this decapitation. A failure of analysis or any therapy, in my opinion is the controlling nature of the therapist, for the assumption that there is a fault pattern in the patients thinking is the basis of any therapy. What is ignored is the mix of Greek myth and modern cognitive techniques and in their midst, a scientific discipline like psychiatry, a branch of medicine, is trammelled, dusted into oblivion.

"All passion is homosexual", Kristeva writes. There are other confident platitudes, which make no sense. "Devotion is a kind of devouring, if you can't rely on the person you love, don't rely on anyone and Self-denial is a delusion of grandeur disguising trauma". Thus we have trauma's, Delacour's, Gloria's, her son's, his speech therapist and so on. The decapitated head, an atrocious crime, is thus a clue to their childhood traumas, which are as unknown to us as to the main players. There is a bit of forensic pathology too, but Delacour's narration is woven with analysing not only speech but movement. Thus, as we hear alibis and testimonies and this........"His complexion has gone blotchy and red. Could he be sexually aroused?"

Regarding the style, Kristeva's text sometimes borders on the poetic and some passages blend raw concepts with lilting prose. This novel is, as I fathom, a psychoanalytic-philosophical text rather than a conventional tale, though it is written in the guise of a novel. There are many themes, mostly feminist, some politics, even the scare of missing nuclear materials ( to Iraq or Iran!), sexual jealousy, childhood fears, unadvised liaisons, inconsequential lusts, hidden motives, slips of tongue, euphemisms, clues mostly inside, all hidden. The relationship between Gloria and her son, between her son and her therapist, between Gloria and Delacour, Delacour and her paintings, to the official Rilsky and his love for Menuhin are the bases for further detective insights. when the murderer confesses to the killing but not to the decapitation, Delacour is not surprised but neither is the reader.

We do not find the head, though we chase serial killers, who are actually not killers for the act has been performed by one of the inner circle, which true to Poirot fashion, we knew. This is not a satisfying tale but a good text on the workings inside. To be fair, as a philosophical work, it actually is quite lucid, in a language that sometimes glistens with the pain of reaching out, the sweat of loss and the realization of an anxiety that is occasionally obedient to language. I intend to read more Kristeva and then form any opinion. Till then, I am willing to try find out about my own trauma's. To end, a passage that perhaps expresses what i felt is a contradiction within this work but an honest declaration too.

"Our access to what other people experience, whether they are men or women, living or dead, is bound to be fragmentary, limited to the vestiges they leave behind in colour, sounds or words. We cannot apprehend them unless we are lucky enough to be able to forget our own preoccupations, large or small, and to touch not another body, nor even another name hiding in - or outside ourselves, but a vibration that is usually unattainable and that no personal pronoun can convey".

Interesting Links

The brilliant blog The Sharp Side on The Guardian's "long history of supporting western state violence and on suppressing the truth of its consequences" here and again, an interesting post on Malcolm Lowry at the Sharp Side.

A Noam Chomsky interview with the BBC's smug Andrew Marr here, reflecting on the almost unbreachable opinions of certain mainstream journalists, who unwittingly play for the establishment, reporting news and reflecting on affairs with the conviction that "what they are saying is the uncompromised freely expressed truth. The real genius of the modern system of thought control is that its greatest victims are not often the deceived but the deceivers themselves".

Small Town Weariness: Pankaj Mishra

My reading of Indian writers has sadly remained very limited, and I don't remember reading anything apart from Rushdie in the recent past. Over the last year or so, I have come across various articles and literary reviews by the Indian novelist, literary critic and essayist Pankaj Mishra and have just finished reading his brilliant collection of essays called Temptations in the west: How to be modern in India, Pakistan and beyond. These essays have been published over the last several years in various international magazines and papers and have been compiled here as a book. The essays are not chronologically arranged, as Mishra criscrosses over the years, apart from the first chapter where he speaks about himself.

This book is essentially a record of his journeys through a few countries but these impressions are mixed with part history and part memoir, a continuous reflective process, flashing on the things seen and heard previously, re-appraising, reevaluating. Mishra makes it clear that the essays are "not abstractions on democracy or religion and do not offer any solutions but are an attempt to confront bewildering perplexity", in countries as diverse as India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Nepal and Tibet. However, there is politics here and history too, but it is from the view of an insider and a foreigner, with a subtle deeply wise understanding of the cultural context of various issues.

Towards his native India, Mishra brings an approach of self examination, allowing an insight into his world, what he calls small town India, a land of poverty, corrupt officials, criminal politics, unemployment and open nexus between the rich and powerful at the cost of the disadvantaged. As he moves on, from a provincial town in North India to Delhi and then London, he casts an eye on the troubled divides and history of his country, pointing out that the general malaise of northern India was not unlike any other post colonial society, wherein a new class had emerged to fill in the spaces left by the British. This is evident in his extremely poignant descriptions of the divide between the clutter and mess of old cities against the civil lines, an inheritance from the British, with each person dreaming to cross the line somehow. As a student, he reflects on the student gangs employed by Hindu extremist parties, and his personal knowledge of a few, keeping to himself, reading Edmund Wilson and Sentimental Education among other books.

As we read further, Mishra dwells on the policies and predicaments of India's modern leaders, with not much written on Gandhi but some attention given to Nehru and his dynasty, clearly culminating in his daughters brutal repression of civil rights and her subsequent demise. He allows an insight into the Hindu extremist parties, comparing one of them to the Nazi brown shirts, with their similar styles, codes and agendas against what Mishra calls the helpless minorities of India, especially the Muslims, whose presence is described as tokenist, with falling employment levels and in modern times, a community that is targeted as the foreigner within. Mishra quotes a senior minister as saying that "let Muslims understand that their real safety lies in the goodwill of the majority". He blames the extremists for engineering souls and hurtling India towards fascism.

One gets an impression of two things simultaneously..........of a country emerging from poor economic policies and yet, hurtling towards fascism, religious extremism and a deepening chasm between the so called upper castes ( Mishra is one he reminds us a few times) and the lower caste Hindus, with the latter organizing their own parties, politics and creating further divides. the impression of a country in a relaxed siege is given, the minorities like Muslims described as thin, gaunt, angular faced men in prayer caps who stood idle before lightless shops and gazed warily at the passing cars. His reflections on Kashmir, a flash point between India and Pakistan are perhaps the best part of this book, as Mishra remembers his stay there, graphically describing the persistent heartbreaks of the kashmiris as a young boy sits near a newly dug grave, sprinkled with irises, "surrounded by mist-hazy mountains, memories of massacres contaminating the landscape that had once been a revelation of beauty".

He ends his section on Kashmir by startlingly saying that "you can't hope for much justice in the subcontinent, where fulfilment comes to a very few among the needy and restless millions, and where aspiration can itself be a luxury. in Kashmir, isolated and oppressed, more people have been confronted with this awareness in the last ten years than in all of its tormented history. the Kashmiris want a relative stability even if it involves living with the humiliation of continued Indian rule over the valley: the same private uneasy accommodations that keep the deprived millions elsewhere in the subcontinent from exploding into rage and destruction".

Mishra travels on, into Pakistan and Afghanistan, then Nepal and Tibet. I felt that his essays on India and his reflections on Kashmir are more well written than the other ones. His style is neat, measured with no hint of shrillness. There is an atmosphere of gloom in his writings, in his descriptions of his university hostels, villages, the country side in small town India and the impression is of melancholy, of a useless, being used to impotence at the unchanging nature of things, with this being no better than in his lyrical descriptions of Kashmir. The refrain seems to be the same, his emphasis on unequal development, criminalization of institutions, a powerless unemployed youth finding refuge in extremist religious discourse. He draws parallels between extremists in India and Pakistan but finds Hindu disaffection more accommodating towards the west and the current closeness between India and America as a result of their "sly materialism and this pragmatic relationship" leading to economic booms and the "Indians writing in English", which he finds as "related aspects".

Affluence is still a rare achievement, reminds Mishra for the vast majority of the subcontinent; but the gloss has got shinier and deeper, with small cities restored to wretchedness and cruelties that were probably there under the gloss of temporary affluence". His descriptions of Peshawar are similar to his on Indian cities, with "weary looking policemen, carts, trucks, cars.....the romance of Peshawar probably an invention of jaded westerners........relief only in the British created bungalows, whitewashed trees and flower beds and the lone guard standing stiff before long smoothly gravelled driveways". Compare this with "calf-deep floods, tin shacked roofs, rain battered villages, low caste women paving tiny courtyards with cow-dung, the men spinning rope for the string cots, the sky low and grey over the flat fields and the tiny huts and the buffaloes placid in muddy pools-the long drive through a world that belonged to itself as it would have done two centuries ago and was a reminder of how far even the superficially good things of a global economy were from this heavily populated and impoverished part of India".

Mishra writes on Bollywood or Bombay, speaking of films that are "long and unreal", containing "songs and dances in swiss meadows, plump action heroes saving their motherland and watching these movies was to shed briefly our deprivations, aimed originally at a small town audience, which is bemused by its pseudo-Indian setting and detachment from corruption and poverty".

All in all, this book is extremely readable, with the author speaking in a voice that is calm, sensible and measured and nowhere is there a betraying of any judgement; far from it, Mishra's voice is sane, filled with pathos and grimness, with some sections very lyrical, especially the descriptions of the countryside in North India and one gets the impression of his battling with his own self as he tries to make sense of a world changing against all odds. This is as good a description anywhere of any post colonial country, with high rises against shanty towns, an elite living in a world that is alien to the silent other majority, and escaping, as Mishra says he did but in a different way. He moves from "unquestioning submission ( for Hindus and Muslims alike) to one creed and philosophy to redefining himself and entering complicated affiliations with the larger world".

Baudrillard On Apocalypse Now

The French philosopher, Jean Baudrillard is mostly famous for his philosophical concept of hyper reality. Apart from writing important philosophical works and a cool collection of essays on America called Cool Memories, Baudrillard's most famous work is Simulacra and Simulation. I would however like to draw attention to an essay from the same volume called Apocalypse Now, which is a different understanding of this Francis Ford Coppola movie by this great philosopher.

Baudrillard starts by saying that this movie is an excess, a surfeit, showing immoderation, just like the Americans make war. This movie, he claims is an extension of war, the pinnacle of America's failed war, its apotheosis. By decking his helicopter captain in a ridiculous hat, and crushing the Vietnamese villagers to the sound of Wagner's music, Baudrillard says that they are not critical or distant signs but part of the director's megalomania, a clownish effect in overdrive.

"Coppola tests cinema's power of intervention, tests the impact of a cinema that has become an immeasurable machinery of special effects. In this sense, his film is really the extension of war through other means. The war became film, the film becomes war, the two are joined by their common hemorrhage into technology".

"One revisits everything through cinema and one begins again: the Molochian joy of filming, the sacrificial joys of so many millions spent, of such a holocaust of means, of so many misadventures, and the remarkable paranoia that from the beginning conceived of this film as a historical, global event, in which, in the mind of the creator, the war in Vietnam would have been nothing other than what it is, would not fundamentally have existed- and it is necessary for us to believe in this war: the war in Vietnam in itself never happened, as it is a dream, a baroque dream of napalm and of the tropics, a psychotropic dream that had the goal of neither victory nor of policy at stake, but, rather, the sacrificial excessive deployment of a power already filming itself as it unfolded, perhaps waiting for nothing but consecration by a super film, which completes the mass- spectacle effect of this war".

"The war in Vietnam and this movie are cut from the same cloth, nothing separates them, if the Americans lost the other one, they certainly lost this one". For Baudrillard, this film retrospectively "illuminates what was crazy about that war, irrational in political terms". Because the two nations are again reunited, "one has understood nothing, neither about the war nor about cinema if one has not grasped this lack of distinction that is no longer either an ideological or moral one, one of good and evil, but of the reversibility of destruction and production, of the immanence of a thing in its very revolution, of the organic metabolism of all the technologies, of the carpet of bombs in the strip of film"..........

Baudrillard also wrote a book called The gulf war never happened, and as he explains, "simulation is no longer that of a territory, a referential being, or a substance. It is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal".

His reflections above remind us of the horrors of the two recent Gulf Wars, wars played out in the innocent space of the TV viewer, a spectacle, of thunder and awe, as it was called. But, sadly, these wars did happen. Baudrillard the philosopher writes like a poet, his writing is a dream. I have found his Cool Memories brilliant with each page quotable. It remains my intention to quote from those volumes in the future.

The Politics Of Silence

There is almost an imperialistic silence when we want answers about writers who are generally considered untouchable because they are great writers. For, the most important aspect of a writer is surely who the writer is, after or even before we read any writer. Now there are certain writers that are generally read by most people indiscriminately, like myself, without an inkling as to who they are. This goes for most established or canonical or classical literature in major languages. I am thinking of English or Russian or other literary greats from everywhere else.

And yet, while the novels we read are really well written, the creed that they espouse is opposite to what the writers themselves thought of or lived. In other words, there is a discrepancy, a chasm between the aesthetics of their writing and the ideologies these writers actually had. And because most of these writers or such literature has been considered great, to be thought of as great, there are sadly no questions asked about them. I am thinking of writers like Proust, Flaubert, Dickens, Dostoevsky etc, to name a few. For while it is certain that they wrote so well and are really great writers, their silence on questions of empire, imperialism and the constant genocidal wars their countries have waged historically is acutely noticeable.

How can writers or great literature only exist in a pure aesthetic space, for just the aesthetic quality of the writing alone, that writing only ? Why should not their politics be considered as equally important, as important as their poetic side for the man who thinks and then writes things down is actually the same person. To add to this odd and unjust silence, the actions of literary critics have been no less unjust for they have perpetrated this silence, never allowing anyone to even question this imperial attitude. Thus I find most classical literature immensely readable but I want to know more about the why and why not of these writers and the basis of their political credo. The same could be said of embedded journalists in new imperial wars, the latest in Iraq, where journalists helped liberating these backward territories, one British broadcaster declaring, "I have liberated Afghanistan"!

The sharp side writes about the attitude of Charles Dickens to the Indian mutiny, and Dickens is reported to have said that "I wish I were commander-in-chief in India ... I should proclaim to them that I considered my holding that appointment by the leave of God, to mean that I should do my utmost to exterminate the race." ( Various sources on the Internet) It is thus important to remember that the man who wrote his great novels also said the above and his literature must be considered in light of his remarks, his attitude, for they exist simultaneously and cannot exist in a limbo, without each other. While it does not diminish their status as writers, it reflects what one keep in mind to measure contemporary writers too.

I found a related issue while reading Walter Benjamin too, for in his essays and the notes on his essays, it seems possible that Benjamin was planning to emigrate to Israel, an Israel carved on Palestinian soil, and surely there is no mention of Palestine by Benjamin, its people and their eventual death. He was an admirer of Scholem, an ardent Zionist. Thus, not only does this philosophical attitude sound confusing, it becomes unconvincing for surely generally regarded philosophical greats cannot only mention one injustice amongst a multitude of pains. One can have sympathy for something but one cannot assume a blanket silence for the role of an artist is not to fill an aesthetic corner or fulfill the fetishistic craving of a dumb, ill informed and brutally dishonest reader but to carve out of his or her own vision, a truth that is truly possible.

I do not find these issues irrelevant but part of an incoherent whole, a whole that has mystified and added the thickness of illusions to the rarefied greatness of these writers. If one considers the novel of ideas, what better than to read some of these great writers. It is when one considers that in all of this and subsequently more, even in the debates and literary critiques that have followed, this silence has added to a similar attitude, one feels a sense of dismay. And if one considers these issues again, then, sadly, there are few great writers.