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it) 20 I 0 by Jeremy Fernando Think Media EG
eries is supported by the European Graduate School
ATROPa PRE ew York · Dresden
I.'il FirslAvenuelf 14, New York. N.Y. loom cover design: Hannes Charen all rights reserved I BN 978-0-9825309-6-2
vii
'"A thinking," Flaubert said, "should have neither religion nor fatherland nor even any social conviction. Absolute scepticism." Radically rupturing, the statement is not merely subversive. It does not depend upon the program which it criticizes. How might one free oneself from the cowardliness pressing upon social convictions of the present, subjugated as they are to reactive, mimetic, and regressive posturings? Avital Ronell: Crack Wars: Literature, Mania, Addiction
viii
You are a clever man, friend John; you reason well, and your wit is bold; but you are too prejudiced. You do not let your eyes see nor your ears hear, and that which is outside your daily life is not of account to you. Do you not think that there are things which you cannot understand, and yet which are; that some people see things that others cannot? But there are things old and new which must not be contemplate by men’s eyes, because they know—or think they know—some things which other men have told them. Ah, it is the fault of our science that wants to explain all; and if it explain not, then every day the growth of new beliefs, which think themselves new; and which are yet but the old, which pretend to be young—like the fine ladies at the opera. Bram Stoker: Dracula
ix
To Avital Ronell, Wolfgang Schirmacher, and Werner Hamacher; the bravest thinkers I know. Thank you for being my mentors, my teachers, and most of all my friend.
x Whilst speaking with a survivor of the Second World War, what struck me most was her response to my question—‘what is the biggest difference between being a free citizen and one in captivity?’ To her it is simply the ability to say ‘no’. For when she was under the rule of the captors, this act of choice—expressing her unwillingness to perform a particular task, deed, action—was unthinkable.
Every question put to her was never a true
question—it was only a question in form; a question to which an answer was already known, already inscribed into the question itself—it was an order, a demand, an imperative.
One register that is opened is; a possible pre-condition for freedom is the ability to deny, the opportunity to reject. Here we can catch a hint of an echo of Herman Melville’s Bartleby in her response: when asked to do something, one is able to express one’s self through uttering “I would prefer not to.” 1 Whilst one might argue that the rejection of Bartleby is not as strong—there is no outright rejection of the request, merely a deflection (after all, just because one “prefer[s] not to” does not mean that one does not do it), one must also keep in mind that her utterance and Bartleby’s have one thing in common—both are responses that keep the question open, that allows the question to remain a full question. After all, ‘no’ does not mean an outright rejection of the premise, only a refusal to comply; and since there is no time element to the response, it does not rule out the potential for compliance at a later
1
Herman Melville. (2006). Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street.
xi date, just not now. It is in that precise sense of indeterminacy that the response of ‘no’ is far from an answer, far from any finality whatsoever: in fact it is the response that has the opposite effect; it is a response that opens other possibilities, by remaining unknown.
What remains unknown is not just the response to the question. Since there is always a possibility that one might answer in the positive to the question at some point in the future, this opens the question of, who is the ‘I’ that is uttering ‘no’. If one wants to posit that the self is consistent, then surely there would be a contradiction between a ‘no’ now and a future ‘yes’. (We see many such accusations in daily life—and particularly in the political arena—where people are charged with ‘going back on their words’). One could also posit that the self is situational: in particular situations one could respond in the negative to the question; at other moments, it might be a positive response. In either case, the self that utters the response at the later point is not exactly the same as the one of the earlier utterance (inconsistency suggests change; situational difference suggests that there is an external component to the self and since this is different, there is no reason to claim that it is the same self).
Hence, at each
utterance of ‘no’, the self that is uttering is also an indeterminate self: it calls to mind all the other self(s) that precede the ‘no’; and all that will come after.
xii At each utterance of ‘no’ there are always already ghosts of all the other self(s) that may or may not have uttered the same thing, the same response. However, this does not mean that if at any point there is a positive utterance to the question—a ‘yes’—that it would be any different. In fact, the only situation that would be different is if the ‘yes’ is a compulsory utterance; when it is a situation where there is no ability to say ‘no’, where there is no ability to respond to the question at all. This would be a situation where not only is the ability to respond effaced, but more crucially, where the self is effaced.
What is opened is a consideration of whether there is a link between the ability to respond and the self. Is there only a self when there is a ability to respond to situations, with situations? After all, responsibility is the very precondition of choice, and there is no self without choice; otherwise one would be a mere automaton, completely conditioned by one’s surroundings. This does not necessarily mean that one has complete control when one makes any choice: after all, since perhaps only one of the self(s) is making that choice, there is no reason to believe that the other self(s) might not have made a different decision; and with the same amount of legitimacy, or illegitimacy.
One may never even be able to comment on the legitimacy of the choice, as this presumes an external verification to the choosing. However, as each choice is situational—singular—the
xiii referent is always already different.
Hence, each choice is
irreducibly singular and thus incomparable, uncomparable.
In order to shed some light on the indeterminacy between choice and automated response, we turn to Maurice MerleauPonty and his meditation on the strange phenomenon known as the phantom-limb; the limb that is not quite there, but at the same time affects the person, has effects on the person, as if it was there. In fact on many occasions the person is affected by the absent limb in ways that seem completely unreasonable, inexplicable: for instance instead of pain where one’s hand used to be, the pain is now felt in another area of the body. Of course once we take into account the fact that the nerve receptors of the hand are now dead, it is completely reasonable that the pain is not felt where the hand was: however, this opens up the question of why pain is felt at all—clearly there must still be some stimulus that the ‘hand’ is feeling, is receiving, that is now transmitted to another part of the body.
It is in the light of the indeterminacy of whether the
sensation is caused by physiological or psychological stimuli that we must consider Merleau-Ponty’s claim that
what has to be understood, then, is how the psychic determining factors and the physiological conditions gear into each other: it is not clear how the imaginary limb, if dependant on physiological conditions and therefore the result of a third
xiv person causality, can in another context arise out of the personal history of the patient, his memories, emotions and volitions. 2
This suggests that sensations are neither purely from external stimuli nor internal cognition: it is rather an inter-play between the two, where the body discovers itself via the world and also discovers the world through itself. Hence, the phantom-limb, “is not the mere outcome of objective causality; no more is it a cogitatio.” 3 Lying in the indistinct space between cognition and external stimuli, the sensation felt by the patient is similar to a reflex—an action that is neither merely a reaction to stimuli nor fully cognitive. In fact, “reflex movements, whether adumbrated or executed, are still only objective processes whose course and results consciousness can observe, but in which it is not involved.” 4
The reflex does not arise from objective stimuli, but moves back towards them, and invests them with a meaning which they do not possess taken singly as psychological agents, but only when taken as a situation … The reflex, in so far as it opens itself to the meaning of a situation, and 2
Maurice Merleau-Ponty. (2006). Phenomenology of Perception. pp.89.
3
ibid. pp.89.
4
ibid. pp.91.
xv perception; in so far as it does not first of all posit an object of knowledge and is an intention of our whole being, are modalities of a pre-objective view …5
Hence, all cognition—every act of knowing—can only happen retrospectively: the meaning of the reflex can only be inferred after the fact. In other words, the phantom-limb sensation can only be known at the very moment at which it is felt, where the “experience does not survive as a representation in the mode of objective consciousness and as a ‘dated’ moment; it is of essence to survive only as a matter of being and with a certain degree of generality.” 6 It is a “personal existence … without, in other words, being able either to reduce the organism to its existential self, or itself to the organism.” 7
Hence, the phantom-limb “is not a
recollection, it is a quasi-present and the patient feels it now … with no hint of it belonging to the past.” 8
Every time there is a sensation in the phantom-limb, it is an event, unknowable until the moment in which it is felt; it is both pre-objective and pre-subjective, preceding both the cognitive
5
ibid. pp.91-92. italics from source.
6
ibid. pp.96.
7
ibid. pp.97.
8
ibid. pp.98.
xvi subject and also the very object of cognition itself. So, even as the phantom-limb pain is treatable in the realm of the imagination, 9 this is a treatment of its symptoms: the cause, and the very status of the sensation itself, remains unknown and ultimately unknowable. This suggests that once again we are left in the realm of darkness: the only thing that Merleau-Ponty’s ruminations reveal to us, is that there is a potential for response to an externality, to something that is outside of the self, to an other: what this potentiality is can never be known. Moreover, it is only a phenomenon after the fact—or at best at the moment in which it is experienced: there can be no knowledge of the phenomenon
9 The most common treatment for phantom-limb pain is the ‘mirror box’ treatment, that was created by Vilayanur S. Ramachandran and colleagues. A ‘mirror box’ is a box with two mirrors in the centre (one facing each way). A patient inserts their hand into one hole, and their ‘phantom hand’ into the other. When viewed from an angle, the brain is tricked into seeing two complete hands. The ‘mirror box’ treatment is based on an observation that phantom limb patients were more likely to report paralysed and painful phantoms if the limb was paralysed prior to amputation. The hypothesis was that every time the patient attempts to move her/ his limb, (s)he receives sensory feedback that the limb is paralysed. Over time, this feedback stamps itself into the brain such that even when the limb is absent, the brain has learnt that the limb (and its subsequent phantom) is paralysed. Hence, the patient feels discomfort or even pain because the phantom limb is either in an uncomfortable position, or is paralysed. However, if the brain is tricked into seeing two complete hands when the hand that is present moves, the brain thinks that the phantom limb is also moving. In this way, the person can ‘move’ her/ his phantom limb, and so the brain no longer recognises it as a paralysed limb. More recently, the University of Manchester has developed a virtual reality interface to treat sufferers of phantom limb pain: by attaching the present limb to an interface that shows two limbs moving, the somatosensory cortex is tricked again. Both the ‘mirror box’ and the virtual reality interface work on the same principle of visualkinesthetic synesthesia, except that the illusion is stronger in the latter.
For more on the ‘mirror box’ please read, V.S. Ramachandran & S. Blakeslee. (1988). Phantoms in the brain: Probing the mysteries of the human mind. A report on the University of Manchester virtual reality interface can be found, amongst other places, at http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/6146136.stm
xvii either before or even after the fact: it is only experienced at the point of its experience, after-which all that can be known is that there is a potentiality for yet another experience, perhaps similar or perhaps not at all.
After all, this is the legacy that is left to us, the legacy of the question that is bequeathed to us in and through the deceptively simple utterance, “did God really say not to eat from any of trees in the garden?” 10 In many ways—at least in the Judeo-Christian tradition—it is the first hermeneutical moment and it opens the possibility that a statement can have more than one interpretation, can have more than inference, more than one meaning. At this point it is irrelevant to posit whether God was telling the truth or whether the serpent’s question was a purely performative one: what is crucial to us here is the fact that if it is possible for there to be numerous inflections to a single statement—a command even— this suggests that not only are there potentially numerous self(s) at play, but also numerous ghosts that are within, and in, each statement at the same time. After all, one cannot forget that this question is never answered; it is a question that remains a question—it is a question that remains in full potential throughout the text.
If a question is a true question, in that it remains in its full potentiality as a question, this suggests that every inference, 10
Genesis 3: 1-2.
xviii interpretation, gesture by way of a response, or every response as a gesture, is a calling to one, from one, of its many possibilities. And since these are not possibilities that are plucked from nowhere (otherwise it would hardly be a response) this suggests that they are re-called, re-membered.
This then makes the gesture of
responding a response to another response—the interpretation is also a re-calling of something. Hence, the only thing that can be known about the response is that it is an ability to respond, that there is a possibility of responding: as to what this response is, or how one is to respond, nothing can be known except at the moment of response.
As one might recall from the many lessons in literature, there are various ways of responding to a call. When asked by the ghost, his father, his ghostly father, to “remember me,” Hamlet’s response was to pull out his pen and scribble on a sheet, almost as if to record him, archive him, keep him at bay, away: by committing the memory of his father’s ghostly request to paper, Hamlet can—at least temporarily—transpose that memory from his mind. 11 Each time we hear the request ‘remember me’, there is also the echo of the command to “do this in memory of me.” 12 11
This is taken from William Shakespeare. (1992). Hamlet. Act I sc v.
This particular reading of Hamlet was brought to my attention in a conversation with Avital Ronell in Saas Fee about memory and forgetting. This was also one of the various registers opened during her seminar, Finitude in Philosophy, Literature and Art, at the European Graduate School in August 2005. 12
Luke 22: 19.
xix Here, the register of form in memory is opened: after all, this is the moment of trans-substantiation which is a moment that is beyond all phenomenon(s)—absolutely beyond the comprehension of all phenomenology. This suggests that each time the Corpus Christi is recalled, what is crucial is to perform the ritual—the breaking of bread—after which nothing can be known. And we see an echo of this in each recollection, each response to the potentiality of a question: it is only through ritual, through habit, through culture, that we even begin to know the meaning of anything, to even have an inkling of how to respond in any given situation. In fact, each time the bread is broken, one is never even sure what “memory of me” is called up: the only thing that is known is the ritual itself, and it is that which is important. It is the musical Jesus Christ Superstar that reminds us of this: at the scene of the Last Supper, after commanding (or pleading with) his disciples to “remember me when you eat and drink,” Jesus turns aside and says,
I must be mad thinking I'll be remembered./ Yes, I must be out of my head./ Look at your blank faces. My name will mean nothing/ Ten minutes after I'm dead. 13
13 Tim Rice, Norman Jewison, Melvin Bragg & Andrew Lloyd Webber. (1973). “The Last Supper” in Jesus Christ Superstar.
Here, one might want to consider the notion that Jesus is only remembered because of the betrayal of Judas. Peter, the alleged ‘rock’, denies him, and the rest go into hiding after his crucifixion: in fact besides John, none of them are anywhere to be seen after the arrest at the Garden of Gethsemane. In this light, one can consider Judas his most faithful disciple—his betrayal of the man is in fidelity to the
xx
After all, it is only the idea of Jesus the messiah, or redeemer (or whatever adjective one chooses to put after his name) that is important: his actual name, and the person that he is, ceases to be important. In fact, one can posit that it is at this moment that he moves from a singular person, ‘Jesus the Christ’ to a universal ‘Jesus Christ’—the moment where his role and his person merge and they become indistinguishable, interchangeable; catholic. In this sense, perhaps what exactly is remembered becomes less important that the fact that it is remembered; what is known is less crucial than the fact that something is known: what that something is, however, remains to be known.
It is at this point that we must examine the relationality between memory and forgetting. Often-times they are taken as antonyms: forgetting as the negation of memory, as the absence of memory. However consider the fact that in order to remember something, it has to be out of our minds in the first place; otherwise it would just be knowledge.
This suggests that
forgetting is a part of memory: it would be impossible to remember if there was no forgetting. But would it suffice to leave it that forgetting and memory are different phases of each other? If we consider that each act of remembering is a recalling of one aspect—one register in a multiplicity of possibilities—would it not also suggest that each act of remembering necessitates the teachings, and ideals, of Jesus. Moreover, someone had to betray the Son of Man in order to fulfill scriptures, and complete the movement of God becoming man.
xxi forgetting, at least momentarily, of the other possibilities. Each time one possibility is recalled, all the other(s) are temporarily left out, excluded, forgotten.
Hence, within each act of memory
always already lies a forgetting.
In memory of the forgetting that lies within each act of remembering we should consider Hélène Cixous’ claim that
citation is the voice of the other and it highlights the double playing of the narrative authority. We constantly hear the footsteps of the other, the footsteps of others in language, others speaking in Stephen’s language or in Ulysses’, I mean the book’s language … It reminds us that we have been caught up in citation ever since we said the first words mama or papa. 14
The very nature of language involves citationality: since we are born into language, a language that precedes us—along with all of its significances and by extension its significations—all that we say always already is from the “voice of [an] other.” And since one is only able to understand via language (even an instinct or ‘gut feel’ enters the realm of language the moment we attempt to express it, articulate it, think it; at that moment it enters the realm of codification through language), this suggests our very conception
14
Hélène Cixous. (2005). Stigmata. pp.135.
xxii of ourselves is always already an interplay between memory and forgetting.
We recall ourselves—or a particular inference of
ourselves, our self—each time we utter ‘I’, but at the very same moment, all the other self(s) are by necessity forgotten, they remain “footsteps,” but perhaps in the distance, “hear[d]” but not necessarily seen, or even known.
This is not to say that the “footsteps of the other[s]” have no effect on us: just because we do not see, or even hear, them does not necessitate their lack of influence on us. It is at this point that all phenomenology fails again: the claim that only what is comprehended through the senses matters is ultimately an anthropocentric gesture, as if only what happens in and through the self is what is important, is what is real.
And it is this
anthropocentric gesture that can be found in all social constructivist theory, which is ultimately an attempt to subsume everything under the understanding—logic, reason—of the self, such that everything remains under the control of the self.
This matter is compounded if one considers the fact that one has no control over what one forgets—forgetting happens to one. At the very most, one can attempt to express this forgetting with the utterance, ‘I forgot’. The moment there is an object to this utterance, one is already back in the realm of memory—one has remembered what one has forgotten. However, since forgetting happens to one, this implies that there is no guarantee that the
xxiii memory of the forgetting has anything to do with the forgetting that took place.
More than that, the fact that it occurs from
without suggests that it can potentially happen at any point, at any time.
Hence, each act of memory potentially brings with it a
moment of forgetting.
By extension, each act of knowing—
knowledge itself—can never be sure of its status of knowing; there may always already be something forgotten within it.
1
Contents Reading the body
5
Origins - Firsts
20
The First Time or I Want to Make Sure it’s your Last
22
The Violence of the Question and the Terror of the Answer
29
Why … Why … Tell me Why …
32
Blindness and the Third
37
Witnessing: Fiction and Testimony
54
Symbolic Exchange or this is my gift of death Seductive secrets 3.5 Requiem for a name A measure of salvation On Death (Suicide) or what’s love got to do with it
71 88 101 117 121
On Suicide
125
The suicide bomber
137
4.5 The instant of death
140
2
4.7 Her gift of death
148
Shattering illusions or How Stalin was finally proven right
153
Approaching illusions: approaching Death
157
On Relationality
166
Suicide Bombers, Zombies, and Necromancy
171
Confessions; or a suicide note
185
Exteriority and Finitude
195
‘How stupid can you be?’
210
Poetry, irony, and the Suicide Bomber
213
Echoes
229
After-word
247
4
In the beginning there were three sexes—man, woman and the androgyn. The androgyn was composed of 4 arms and 4 legs—fused at the spine; they faced to the side. Since they were composed of both man and woman, the androgyn was twice as fast, twice as strong, and twice as clever. As such, the androgyn questioned the authority of the Gods, and due to their strength and intelligence, posed a threat to Olympus. In deciding how to deal with this threat, Zeus and his council deliberated obliterating the androgyn, but did not want to lose the offerings and homages from humankind. So they decided that they would split the androgyn without killing her/ him. So the androgyn was split down the middle— leaving her/ him with 2 arms and 2 legs. And to forever remind the androgyn of her/ his crime, Apollo was sent to turn their face sideways—facing the front. This was to forever remind the androgyn of the other half. This is why we are forever searching for our other half; our eternal soulmate. This is a story of sadness and longing. A story of love.
rebellion,
punishment,
5
Reading the body Perhaps we should begin by considering the beautiful epigraph in Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes which goes, “it must all be considered as if spoken by a character in a novel,” 1 and in particular, how it speaks to us, of the unknown, and the unknowable. For if it is only told “as if by a character in a novel,” we are forever left unsure of whether the “I” is that of the narrator or of a character: in fact, the narrator and the character are always already indistinguishable.
There really is no reason why one cannot consider the possibility that the narrator and the character are exactly the same entity. This would suggest that the narrative is unfolded at the very moment of its unfolding. What this opens is the status of knowledge itself: for the narrator is supposed to possess a certain over-arching knowledge of what happens not only before but to a certain degree after—there is a certain knowledge of the future that the narrator possesses, that everyone else in the tale is denied (even the reader, especially the reader). Once the possibility of the narrator being veiled from the future of the narrative is considered, an uncertainty is introduced to the entire narrative, not just from the angle of whether the narrator can be trusted or not (of course (s)he cannot) but more pertinently whether anything uttered by the narrator is constative, or can even be considered a 1
Roland Barthes. (1994). Roland Barthes. Epigraph.
6 constative statement. What this suggests is that everything uttered by the narrator is a future-anterior statement: perhaps with some knowledge of the future, and a particular version of the past, but never in the present except for the very fact that it is uttered in the present. Which then enters the entire narrative into the realm of undecideability: the only thing that one can be certain of is the fact that the narrator is uttering the narrative; nothing else can we be sure of.
This is the problem that we are faced with when we attempt to think the relationship between biology and gender: the ‘I’ that is the basis of gender—the self of identity, the self that is constructed—is never fully determinable; it is always already the ‘I’ of the narrator (the one who is constructing the tale) and also that of a character in the tale. In fact, one might also begin to posit that the ‘I’ is both narrating and being narrated at the same time, in the same moment, in the very gesture of articulating the ‘I’. This suggests that the ‘I’ is never either completely singular nor is it merely part of a network, part of the rest of the tale: borrowing Jean-Luc Nancy’s beautiful formulation, the ‘I’ is a singularplurality; always already singular and in relation with an other, another, all others.
The social-construction logic of gender has always been concerned with its status as plurality, where the ‘I’ is seen as the result of forces, influence, power, surrounding it, acting on it,
7 acting with it. In this way, the construction of the self is affected through the imaginary: to be more precise, the self is formed in the imaginary. If you prefer the language of psychoanalysis, what is at stake is the negotiation between the superego and the id. However, to reduce everything to a cultural construction would be an anthropocentric gesture: if everything is constructed, the underlying logic is that the ‘I’ is self-generated, or at the very least, the product of a solely human intervention. By extension, the human is the centre around which everything is generated. More than that, the implication is that the entire construction of the ‘self’ is under our control, that our very being is the result of a cognitive process; our very being can be subsumed under knowledge, and more pertinently our knowing.
We can see this again in
psychoanalysis in the attempt to subsume the unknowable under the category of the ‘unconscious’; everything that is unaccountable is then put under this, as if to say ‘leaving this aside everything else is knowable’: the ‘unconscious’ becomes the exception in order for normalcy—‘that we can comprehend the self’—to sustain itself. As Jean Baudrillard in Symbolic Exchange and Death elegantly posits,
the unconscious, and the psychical order in general, become the insurmountable agency, giving the right of trespass over every previous individual and social formation … the idea of the unconscious, like the idea of a consciousness,
8 remains an idea of discontinuity and rupture. Put simply, it substitutes the irreversibility of a lost object and a subject forever ‘missing’ itself, for the positivity of the object and the conscious subject. However decentred, the subject remains within the orbit of Western thought, with its ‘successive topologies’ … 2
In this manner, the imaginary that is the ‘self’ is the assumption in order to validate the axiom that the human is the centre of the world: instead of an unknown, an unknowable, psychoanalysis attempts to re-inscribe it into a positivistic mode by terming it an “unconscious,” merely the direct opposite of what is known, and hence, still governed by the same logics, the same calculations.
An examination of the very premise of ‘social construction’— that the ‘self’ is generated by experiences—problematizes this notion of the full plurality of gender (where man and woman are exactly the same, interchangeable, and only a product of influences, and more precisely a product of influences that can be known, cognitised and ultimately controlled). For if experiences are the basis of the self, then surely the differences in biology between women and men would result in different experiences: in fact the biological differences would be what Hélène Cixous calls the irreducible difference between the sexes. This is not to say that 2
Jean Baudrillard. (2007). Symbolic Exchange and Death. pp.143.
9 biology is deterministic, but to deny that it has an influence on experiences—and going by the very logic of social construction, gender, and hence, the self—would be false. The fact that only a woman can experience pregnancy, and menstruation, suggests that these are absolute differences that separate her from any man, all men.
This is not to say that all pregnancies and all
menstruations are exactly the same as well: each experience is perhaps unique, but to deny that they play a part in the formation of the self is false. Since these experiences are biological, predetermined by sex, this suggests that they are beyond social construction. Perhaps one can argue that the manner in which we speak of them, know them, attempt to understand them still falls within language and hence, within our constructions: however I would like to consider the fact that since they precede language (one does not have to conceive of menstruation in order to menstruate) there is a part of the experience that escapes cognition, that slips all attempts to understand, to know.
Perhaps this is the point where we can posit why biology has been subsumed under the auspices of gender.
By completely
separating biology from gender, it is made the absolute other: this exclusionary gesture allows the positivistic logic of gender to sustain itself. In this manner, gender, and by extension the self, is reduced to a calculable logic: the ‘I’ is now totally within cognition. Considering that there is no logic which can sustain itself—“no proof can possibly exist determining the truth or falsity of the
10 undecidable statement in the language of the system within which the statement was formulated” 3 —in order for there to be any totality (in the form of a consistent logic that can prove itself within its own logical system), some form of exclusion—by way of the suppression of the axiom that does not conform to the internal logic of the system—must take place.
However, it is not as if making gender clear, completely knowable, comes without a price: once the self is completely calculable, it is also completely exchangeable, completely transparent. In response to his playfully teasing question—“what happens after the orgy?”—Jean Baudrillard quips, “every individual category is subject to contamination, substitution is possible between any sphere and any other: there is total confusion of types.” 4 Hence,
each category is generalized to the greatest possible extent, so that it eventually loses all specificity and is reabsorbed by all the other categories. When everything is political, nothing is
political
anymore,
the
word
itself
is
meaningless. When everything is sexual, nothing is sexual anymore, and sex loses its determinants. 3
Avital Ronell. (2005). The Test Drive. pp.57.
4 Jean Baudrillard. (1999). The Transparency of Evil: Essays on Extreme Phenomena. pp.8.
11 When everything is aesthetic, nothing is beautiful or ugly anymore, and art itself disappears. This paradoxical
state
of
affairs,
which
is
simultaneously the complete actualization of an idea, the perfect realization of the whole tendency of modernity, and the negation of the idea and that tendency, their annihilation by virtue of their very success, by virtue of their extension beyond their own bounds … 5
If gender is now totally transparent, we have reached the stage of the trans-gendered, in the precise sense of everything is now engendered. However, once everything is gendered, gender itself “loses all specificity and is reabsorbed by all the other categories,” and gender itself loses all meaning. Ironically, by attempting to locate gender in everything, gender itself is rendered completely empty.
It is at this point that biology has to be re-inscribed into gender. For only if the unknowability that is biology is considered within gender—if unknowability is part of knowledge itself—is the gesture of totalising knowledge, the gesture of totalitarianism avoided. This is the notion of knowing, understanding, that we glimpse in Werner Hamacher’s deceptively simple formulation,
5
ibid. pp.9-10.
12 “understanding is in want of understanding.” 6
Only if every
attempt to know something brings with it an inability to comprehend within the same gesture, acknowledges a lack of understanding,
is
the
full
potentiality
of
the
object
of
understanding itself acknowledged. In terms of gender, it has to be thought of as a code—in that one learns one’s role to play; it is a form that is repeated, and normalised, only because there is mass repetition of that particular role. As Avital Ronell has opened our sensibilities to in Crack Wars, there is no culture without addiction: it is only when enough people are hooked to a particular way of life—a certain role—that it becomes cultural.
This opens the
question of why certain roles are legitimate whilst others are not. 7 However, what remains unknown is how these roles come into being in the first place; the question of origin remains blind to us. And it is this gap in the hermeneutical circle that allows the potentiality of the object in question—gender in this case—to remain un-effaced.
The category of gender—like any category—is faced with the problem of the relation between the part and the whole.
For
‘gender’ to mean anything, it has to have a certain universality, in its being applicable to everyone in general; but at the same time, it is also only able to derive any meaning from a particular instance, 6 Werner Hamacher. (1996). Premises: Essays in Philosophy and Literature from Kant to Celan. pp.1. 7
Avital Ronell. (1992). Crack Wars: Literature, Mania, Addiction.
13 in its application to each singular person. Therefore, for a whole to be a sum of its parts, there has to be an effacement of the particularity of each situation—the over-arching concept has to be perfectly repeatable—each situation has to be treated as exactly the same, corresponding to a pre-determined set of criteria. However since each instance is a singularity, this suggests that it brings with it a unique set of circumstances, and hence, there is no repeatability possible: even if the criteria were the same, there is no reason that the singular set of circumstances will ever match it in the same way. Hence, as Werner Hamacher posits,
the hermeneutical circle thus opens up and makes every closure into a hermeneutic fiction—a heuristically useful fiction, no doubt, a fiction capable
of
economizing
on
a
deficit
of
understanding, but a fiction that can neither accommodate itself to the ideal of perfect understanding nor redress the loss, constitutive of language and understanding, which the ellipses themselves introject. 8
And these ellipses, which are usually considered an aberration to writing—bringing the possibility of the incompleteness, or incompleteability of sentences to the foreground—or at best a mere 8 Werner Hamacher. (1999). “Hermeneutical Ellipses: Writing the Hermeneutical Circle in Schleimacher” in Premises: Essays in Philosophy and Literature from Kant to Celan. pp.76.
14 supplement—a graphical novelty—are in fact, “the rhetorical equivalent of writing: it depletes, or decompletes, the whole so as to make conceptual totalities possible. And yet every conceivable whole achieved on the basis of ellipsis is stamped with the mark of the original loss.” 9 Hence, gender as a category is always already incomplete: all social-construction theory, or in fact any theory that attempts to make an over-arching claim, always has to rely on the fiction of a complete hermeneutic circle, held together by the ellipsis, which is then denied in the very same gesture. Once the ellipsis is taken into consideration, not only is complete knowability a fiction, but more than that, whether it can be known even through fiction is itself ultimately unknowable.
In the
context of gender, it is biology that is its ellipsis; it is biology that is its unknowability.
It is this unknowability—this ellipsis that both allows one to know yet never allows this knowing to be complete—that Jacques Derrida notes in his magisterial text Right of Inspection when he argues that even though the reader has a “right to see,” and that it takes a certain “skill to see,” in that it is not a random, purely arbitrary act, (s)he is always already bound by a “law of seeing.” After all, “you have the authority to tell yourself these stories but you cannot gain access to the squares of that other one. You are free but there are rules.” 10 In this way, reading, and seeing, is a
9
ibid. pp.74.
10
Jacques Derrida. (1998). Right of Inspection. pp.1.
15 negotiation between the reader and the text. One is free within a certain set of rules—after all one is always already bound by grammar—and one’s reading is an interjection, an interplay between the reader and the text within the rules laid out, the rules before which both the reader and the text must stand; “there is a law that assigns the right of inspection, you must observe these rules that in turn keep you under surveillance.” 11 In order to play the game—the game of seeing, the game of reading—you have no choice but to “remain within these limits, this frame, the framework of these frames …” 12 And more than this, a text gives both you and itself (through its characters, through the outcome of its own narrative),
a right to look, the simple right to look or to appropriate with the gaze, but it denies you that right at the same time: by means of its very apparatus it retains that authority, keeping for itself the right of inspection over whatever discourses you might like to put forth or whatever yarns you might spin about it, and that in fact comes to mind before your eyes. 13
11
ibid. pp.1.
12
ibid. pp.1.
13
ibid. pp.2.
16 It is in this way that every seeing reveals and conceals at the same time; every seeing always already involves a certain inability to see, an inability to know. In effect every reading is a positing, taking a position, making a choice, which comes with a moment of madness, of blindness. Otherwise all one is doing is re-writing the text; otherwise one might as well not be reading at all. As Kafka has taught us time and time again, one can never know the law before which one stands.
Death is this unknowability that resides in every act of knowing, every attempt to know: not a death that is merely a phase of life, an end-point that is always already taken into consideration in advance, death as a negativity to life, but death as such, death that is a pure void, that can at best be constituted as a catachrestic metaphor; death as a pure name, naming nothing except for the fact that it is naming. This suggests that we cannot define death, that at best we might begin to approach it but that it will always already slip away from us. It is not as if we cannot know death because it is beyond us—in fact it is part of us, a part of us that is always already (n)either within us (n)or without us. In this sense we are always stricken with death, but a death from within that remains unknowable to us, one that we can at best glimpse as a metaphor, as a narrative, as fiction. It is with this in mind that we approach Marguerite Duras’ beautiful tale The Malady of Death. Perhaps in this non-direct way, we might begin to catch a glimpse of the unknowability that haunts the self, that is
17 always already of the self, that doesn’t allow the self to totalize. One must never forget that we can only see ghosts when we are not looking for them.
In The Malady of Death, there is a conversation between a ‘you’ and a ‘her’: at first glance, it would seem that it is between a man and a woman in a room by the sea. Occasionally an ‘I’—perhaps a narrator; perhaps the ‘he’—interjects. It is this impossibility of distinguishing, of separating the ‘he’ and the ‘I’ within the text, that brings the ‘she’ into question, that opens the question of referentiality; if one is never able to discern who is uttering the utterances, the poles of elocutioner and referent—the binary of subject and object—are imploded. At the end, all you can say about the status of referentiality in the text, to borrow a phrase from the very first time the ‘I’ appears, is “I don’t know”; 14 not just an ‘I don’t know’ in terms of a lack of knowledge, but more precisely an ‘I don’t know who the I that is uttering this statement is in the first place’. An echo of this is found later in the line “you think you know you know not what …”: 15 the first register it opens is ‘whether one can know they don’t know something’; another potentially more interesting register is, ‘if one only “thinks” one knows one does not know, then whether something is known or not known is now unclear’. In either instance, the difference between knowing and not knowing is blurred; they are
14
Marguerite Duras. (1986). The Malady of Death. pp.3
15
ibid. pp.40.
18 no longer antonyms but rather parts of each other: in other words, every time something is known, there is always already something unknown within it. The unknowability is not only in the content— the object to which the utterance refers to—but more radically in the relationality of the subject to itself: each time one utters “I don’t know,” one is attempting to name oneself as well, to utter one-self into being.
The only difference that is posited between the ‘I’, ‘you’, and ‘her’ is found in the line, “your difference, your death.” 16 What is unknowable—the difference between the utterers—what can only at best be posited—is death itself. This is why the tale is named The Malady of Death: death is always within one (one is a carrier of death from the very beginning) and always also from without (death ultimately claims you). But it is not as if one ever knows how death affects one: “one knows without knowing how” 17 and more than that, “whoever has it doesn’t know he’s a carrier, of death. And also because he’s like to die without any life to die to, and without even knowing that’s what he’s doing.” 18
16
ibid. pp.32.
17
ibid. pp.19.
18
ibid. pp.19.
One is tempted to turn to the after-word, to the commentary in The Malady of Death, by someone, someone we too easily presume to be Marguerite Duras herself, to gain a certain level of security; to stabilise as a fact the presence of two persons in the scene. However, as one can never be certain of the status of the commentator, this security—and assuredness—is called into doubt, into question. It would be too quick, too convenient, to ascribe this to a self-reflexive gesture, as a foregrounding
19
It is this gap between biology and gender—the gap that allows them to affect each other, yet at the same time never allows how they do so to be known—that prevents a totalitarian theory from coming into being, that prevents either biology or gender being absolute. This unknowability, this death, both allows biology and gender to communicate with each other, but also ensures that communication is impossible at the same time: in this sense, the exchange between them is always already a symbolic exchange—one where there is no equalisation, flattening out of differences, abstraction, but only reversibility, play—or even better still, an impossible exchange, an exchange between irreducible differences. How biology and gender affect each other can never be calculated, predictable, nor known in advance: all we can posit is that they do: and each exchange happens only in the moment of exchange.
Not only does the irreducibility of their difference(s) prevent either biology or gender from subsuming each other, it also allows both biology and gender to be as such: otherwise by consuming
of itself as a work of fiction. This is unless we explore the very limits of selfreflexivity and open the possibility of a questioning of who this self—through the ‘I’—is. Hence, it is not so much the status of the work as fiction that is foregrounded, but the fictionality of the self that is reflected upon. It is this unknowability—this indiscernability of the status of the self, of the possibility of the multiple selfs—that is the gap that allows us to read, to respond with the text, but always only provisionally, situationally; each reading is a singular reading, a positing of both the self that is reading, and the self that is read.
20 the other completely, they—biology and gender—would consume themselves, into meaninglessness, into nothingness.
Origins - Firsts This leads one to ask the question, ‘if one cannot know of origins, or at least if origins are indeterminate, why is it that claims to originality, sources, and ultimately the one truth, are constantly made’?
One can always make a too quick judgment, a snap
reaction, and say that there is a link between the source and power, that power lies in the source, the centre. From Johannes Fabian we learn that even time is no longer a neutral record of passing moments: instead time has been made a trace of power, in and through the idea of origins, the idea of the first moment. 19 One of the most obvious instances of the horror that is unleashed through time comes to us from Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge. In the insistence that everything is reset to an original time—Year Zero—what was unleashed was one of the most brutal instances of genocide in modern history. Of course it takes more than just a concept to kill people—an idea itself did not result in the death of millions.
However, it was this idea—that one can restart
everything and more than that, that one has the solution to everything—that forms the framework, the structure such that everything that lies outside the boundaries, the premise, is 19
Johannes Fabian. (1983). Time and the Other: How Anthropology makes its Object.
21 excluded, forbidden, banished. After all, in Khmer Rouge run Cambodia, one did not even have to be guilty of anything: as long as one was labelled an enemy, one was automatically excluded, imprisoned and very often tortured and executed. Clearly how one was labelled was crucial; all of this stems from the logic that there is one correct way, a single way—only one way—of being. Everything stemmed from the centre (Year Zero) and the only one(s) that had the solution—the answers—were Pol Pot and his central committee.
However, too quick a step in attempting to give a reason is no different from making a claim to an answer, a claim of access to a certain logos. Perhaps one way to attempt to address a question as large as this one, a question that remains crucial to our task here, is to embark on another detour, an aside into origins: in this manner we might be able to catch a glimpse of some possibilities, without making any over-arching claims to knowing, to knowledge itself. And perhaps we might begin at the beginning, begin by thinking what is a beginning, begin by positing why first-times remain such an obsession.
22 The First Time or I Want to Make Sure it’s your Last An obsession with beginnings.
And the fantasy of the original, along with the aura that comes with it; the aura that surrounds the first. And the power that comes with it, the power of credibility, of authority, of being the source. This is why correction fluid has become indispensable in our stationary drawers—a desperate attempt to over-write a word, a line, a smudge, as if by putting a layer over it, we can cover it up, erase it completely; as if banishing it from sight will equate to banishing its memory, banishing it from memory.
This is a denial that all experiences are literally written on our bodies. Which is also why tattoos have been traditionally frowned upon unless administered by the socius (in the form of tribal marks): in this case one has to have a particular set of tattoos which indicate that one is part of the tribe. So it is not as if the person is free to choose: the wrong set of marks would forever brand the person as an outsider, an outcast. This is the case when prisoners are marked by the state—they are literally branded for life. Tattoos are a literal, ‘this is what I have gone through’— symbolic of a particular passage, or trial, that the person has experienced. In the case of personal tattoos—that is when the person has made a free choice to mark themselves with a particular phrase, design or image—they are an indication that ‘this symbol means something to me’ and even more blatantly,
23 ‘this is what I have gone through whilst you were not in my life’. It is the absolute singularity of the tattoo that truly terrifies: it is a marking, a recording, a remembering of an experience, a thought, an event that is only known (and perhaps experienced) by the person wearing the tattoo; it is accessible to no one else. All any other can know is the representation of the event, the image on the person; and all this image reveals is that there is a secret that is known by the person, one that you will never be privy to.
The obsession with origins is a hangover of both Platonic thought and the Enlightenment, specifically the belief in transcendental Truth and origins. It is this association with—or even the correlation of—the power that comes with being the origin, the first, the author, that lends itself to the societal obsession with virginity, with virgins. And it is for this reason that everyone wants to be a virginal experience, the virginal experience—as if in order to be special one has to be the first. In effect, what is being said is the obscene ‘I want to be the first to write myself on your body’, which really translates to ‘if I’m not the first to do anything with you, it is not meaningful at all’.
But as always, the thing we fear most potentially gives us hope. Just like tattoos, experiences are always cumulative. More crucially, they are not added like Lego building blocks (one more piece to an already present structure) but are always already a reconstruction. In some way, this is how memory works: we are
24 not actually looking back to a past whenever we remember something—what occurs is a reconstruction of an event (that has happened previously) but in this re-writing, we bring it into the present precisely by re-membering it, by resurrecting it. Hence, an additional tattoo is not merely one more in a collection of other tattoos, but a reconstitution of the entire surface of your body; your body is literally (re)written.
And likewise, another
experience is the re-writing of your life-story. 20
The fact that every experience is a reconstitution of the entire realm of experiences, a restructuring of one’s entire memory, does not make first-experiences any less important. But neither does it elevate virginity into the realm of the sacred: there is of course an echo of religiosity at play here; the obsession with virginity and its link with the Virgin Mary cannot be denied. In fact, this obsession probably has an obscene link with the primordial ‘yes’ that was uttered to Gabriel: perhaps there is always a harbouring of a secret obsession that all virgins will utter ‘yes’. The operating logic in this instance is that without experience, one does not have a mind of one’s own: we see this operating in the Law as well (persons below
20 This is akin to Greg Lynn’s re-thinking of architecture where he contends that the entire building (and indeed by extension, the entire city) is organic. Hence, an alteration in one part of the building is not an isolated change, but one which not only affects the rest of the building, but reconstitutes the entire building. Lynn’s thoughts were shared at the European Graduate School, August 2004, when he was a guest lecturer in Hubertus von Amelunxen’s seminar Architecture and Information.
25 some arbitrary age are deemed minors who are not responsible— and hence, cannot be held accountable—for their own actions). 21
The obsession with beginnings: a manifestation of the wish for a ‘yes’ to every request, which translates brutally to a desire of dominance over another.
This is the spectre of the logos that
continues to haunt us.
In many ways, the poster-boy of the Enlightenment is the Marquis de Sade. This is because de Sade is the one who takes Immanuel Kant to the extremes: by applying the imperative to every situation, de Sade demonstrates the fact that a reliance on a single truth—one that is decided a priori—is the effacement of the singularity of every situation. In such a case, there is no other that is responded to, as no matter what the situation is, the method is always the same: whilst this doesn’t necessarily mean that the resulting response is exactly the same, it does subsume the situation under the same conception, the same category. In this manner, the will of the other is not taken into account; in effect the will of the other—and the other her/ him self—is effaced. This is why in a sadistic relationality, it is unimportant whether the sadist is beating the victim or vice-versa: what is crucial is that it is the sadist that is telling the victim precisely what to do. For instance, 21 This might well be reflective of the way in which the Law operates: one is only deemed responsible and/ or accountable because the Law deems one to be so. This is probably best captured in the phrase ‘subject before the Law’; not so much in the notion that one is a subject that is under the jurisdiction of the Law, but more precisely one is subjected to the will of the Law.
26 in de Sade’s Philosophy of the Boudoir, it is not the fact that Eugenie is liberated, but the fact that Dolmance, Madame De Saint-Ange and Le Chevalier de Mirvel, choose to train her into a libertine, and more precisely to mold her, transform her, into the libertine of their desires. It would have made absolutely no difference if they had decided to make her into a nun. 22
In fact, there is no
negotiation between the sadist and her/ his victim: it is merely the manifestation of the will of the sadist over the other. And since the other is effaced, there might as well not be any other: it is the sadist projecting her/ him self onto her/ his victim.
Sadism and the effacement of the will of the Other. Literally a logic of ‘I not only want to write myself into your existence, but I want to write my existence into you: I want to make you into my existence, I want to make you into me’.
The obsession with virginity or the wish to wipe out everyone else.
22
Marquis de Sade. (2000). Philosophy of the Boudoir.
There is an echo of the saying ‘made in God’s image’ here: one has no choice—nor even the remotest of influence—over how one is designed. To compound matters, after-which, one’s actions are supposed to conform with this very image, an image that was supposedly created by a God that is beyond both our comprehension or reach. Hence, this is an image that we are supposed to refer to, but at the same time, is an image that has absolutely no referentiality.
28
(Indeed, the only truly serious questions are ones that even a child can formulate. Only the most naïve of questions are truly serious. They are the questions with no answers. A question with no answer is a barrier that cannot be breached. In other words, it is questions with no answers that set the limits of human possibilities, describe the boundaries of human existence.) Milan Kundera: The Unbearable Lightness of Being
29
The Violence of the Question and the Terror of the Answer When Mas Selamat escaped from the Whitley Detention Centre in Singapore, on 28 February 2008, there should have been pandemonium: allegedly one of the most dangerous men in SouthEast Asia was now roaming with evil intent. However, what we encountered was ambivalence and even mirth; there were numerous jokes surrounding the escape ranging from his name (Mas Selamat Kan-diri) 1 to how Prison Break 2 should just be renamed Toilet Break. What these jokes reveal—regardless of their actual content—is a desperate attempt to find a reason for his escape.
These jokes function in the same way as conspiracy
theories, bringing us a perverse comfort in knowing that there is someone in charge of—some reason behind—all things that happen. 1 This translates to ‘Mas saves himself’ in the Malay language. There were numerous linguistic jokes that were popular in Singapore, Malaysia and Indonesia in the wake of Mas Selamat’s escape: amongst them was one that went, “How do you know that Mas Selamat is in Johor (the Malaysian state nearest to Singapore)?”—“Because at the causeway, there is a sign that says, ‘Selamat Datang ke Johor’.” (‘Welcome to Johor’ but could also be read as ‘Selamat came to Johor’). The irony of this joke was not lost on everyone on the morning of 8 May 2009, when it was announced that Mas Selamat had indeed been apprehended in Johor; at that point the nature of secrets was momentarily revealed: it is not what one knows that is important, but that one must know that one knows. 2 Prison Break is popular television series—created by Paul Scheuring—and the premise is how two brothers organise a team in order to escape from prison. The joke lies in the fact that Mas Selamat escaped through a toilet window after asking the guards if he could go to the restroom to relieve himself. The extension of the joke is that the series would have been very short, implying that this prison break was very simple compared to anything seen in the television series.
30
This is the same reaction that we’ve always had to terrorism: a refusal to acknowledge its status as an event; in exception to everything else, and ultimately unknowable.
Instead, we have
always attempted to tame it, discipline it, under a ‘cause and effect’ analysis. It is for this precise reason that you will always find an organisational chart whenever any ‘terrorist group’ is mentioned: it matters not whether the claim is that Mas Selamat is the 3rd, 4th, or 72nd most important person in Jemaah Islamiah; respective of the content, it is an attempt to assure oneself that there is a structure in place, simply because, if there is a structure, it can be toppled. This is the same reason why each time there is a suicide bombing, the question asked is ‘why did (s)he kill himself when (s)he had so much to live for?’ which is then usually explained via recourse to ‘(s)he was brainwashed’ or ‘the promise of 72 virgins’: in either case, the suicide bomber is brought back under reason.
This is why hoaxes are punished severely. It is not so much that they are a waste of state resources, but more pertinently, they reveal that we are unable to tell the difference between a hoax and the real thing. This inability is best captured in the fact one cannot make a joke about terrorism, or even mention the word ‘bomb’, at airports. Since the hoax, and the actual event, has the same form, the effects are the same: after the bomb hoax in Holland Village in November 2002, there was a dramatic decrease in the number of
31 patrons. 3 In fact we would rather there was an actual bomb: in that way it could be diffused or explode—in either case, the event would end. A bomb hoax is infinite: the effects go on endlessly; all we are waiting for is the bomb to go off. Or more radically still: the bomb has already gone off; all we are waiting for are the effects to catch up with us.
The punishment is not so much for the
utilisation of resources (they would have been used anyway in the instance of a real bomb) but the fact that the reality principle itself has been ruptured.
In this sense, the greatest fear that haunts us is if the escape was a pure accident, without any explanation.
When Deputy
Prime Minister, and Home Affairs Minister, Wong Kan Seng said, “this should never have happened,” 4 he touched on this precise fear: it is not as if we didn’t know that Mas Selamat would try to escape (or even that he could) but rather ‘we should never not know why or how it happened’. Much of the criticism of Wong was not the fact that the incident occurred, but rather that he was unable to provide a reason for its occurrence. Even though Mas 3 On 25 November 2002, many Singaporeans heard the warnings via SMS (short messaging service) to stay away from Holland Village which is a area known for a high concentration of expatriates. It was later discovered to be a hoax, but for months after businesses in that area were affected by a significant decrease in patrons. Even to this day, any mention of Holland Village brings with it an association of bomb threats: the fact that the customer base is increasingly local does not diminish this link, even though the logic originally posited for Holland Village being a prime target was the number of expatriates in the area. 4 This was part of a statement read out in Parliament by Wong Kan Seng on 28 February 2008 entitled Statement from Deputy Prime Minister and Home Affairs Minister Wong Kan Seng on escaped JI leader Mas Selamat Kastari which can be found at http://www.straitstimes.com/STI/STIMEDIA/sp/pdf/DPM_statement.pdf
32 Selamat has been recaptured by the Malaysian police, and he has laid out the route that he took to escape, the reason for it remains unknown; hence, it remains a mystery to all.
The escape—the event—remains unknowable and ultimately unsolvable.
Why … Why … Tell me Why … When one searches for a beginning, a source, a centre, one is almost always looking for a cause.
And more precisely for a
reason: even where one may not exist (it may have been purely chance) or when the reason is unknown (in the form of lack of knowledge) or more pertinently the fact that every reason is but a possibility, a reason among many other reasons. And it is this unwillingness to accept the non-reason within reason—that any reason is but a chosen reason—that is witnessed everywhere these days. For if one admits non-reason into reason itself, one is always already conceding that one can never know for sure, and it is this uncertainty that seems to scare us.
What we are searching for is a particular death, a death to possibilities, a death to multitudes, for that is what answers are: the moment one can fix a position—we find this in the daily saying ‘take a stand and stick to it’—take an unchanging answer, one
33 converts doxa into logos. Or more precisely, one speaks of doxa as if it was logos. This is the point at which an opinion becomes an over-arching logic, a theory.
It is Friedrich Nietzsche who resurrects to remind us that it is a yearning for “metaphysical comfort,” for certainty, which brings about this theorising—as opposed to true thinking which is always uncomfortable, discomforting, unsettling—in order to give the ‘theorist’ the false assurance that he knows, that he understands, that he grasps the world in his hands: the ego of the “theoretical man” is satisfied when he can fully explain the world he lives in. 5 In other words, his vanity is satiated when he can subsume the world under his own conception: not only to be someone in the world, living and learning in it, but rather to become the centre of the world, where the world is nothing other than his world. In this manner there is no longer a joy of living, of living as discovery, with openness to the potentiality of change, of flux, and of chance. In The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche posits Apollonian (and later Socratic) optimism as the totalitarian gestures that attempt to fully comprehend—through the centering of all existence in the individual—life itself, and by doing so, drains life of all its vitality. It is only the Dionysian gesture of pessimism that refuses complete knowledge—and in fact realises that the individual is a illusionary concept that merely brings “metaphysical comfort” to the masses—that truly understands life. 5
In effect, the search for
Friedrich Nietzsche. (1967). The Birth of Tragedy. esp, sections 15-18 pp.93-109.
34 certainty is also a gesture against life itself, against the energies of life, against the movement that is life.
This attempted freezing of movement, this suffocation of possibilities, is precisely what Jean-François Lyotard and JeanLoup Thébaud call terrorism—when relationality is one-sided, and the third is taken hostage— in their conversation in Just Gaming. In other words, we are in a situation of terror when it is a situation of non-negotiationality; when any possibility of negotiation is effaced from the very beginning.
In Lyotard and Thébaud’s
conception, a situation is terroristic when
the blow is not struck on the adversary but it is hoped that the blow will be borne by the third party, the witness, public opinion. In such a case, everyone
is
caught
“without
freedom,”
…
Whereas in a two-sided battle, my opponent thinks that what I think and do is unjust, and I think that what he does and thinks is unjust. Well his freedom is complete and so is mine. With a hostage, I am applying … not even “pressure.” It is much more than that. It is the social bond taken as a fact of nature. 6
6
Jean-François Lyotard & Jean-Loup Thébaud. (1999). Just Gaming. pp.70-71.
35 We see this very clearly in the case of 9/11: the fact that there is no need to even explain what the signifier signifies—what it refers to—suggests that we are only allowed to have one signified attached to it; it is “public opinion” and the space of negotiation that has been captured. And it is this that is terroristic about the event—on September 11, 2001, there were many violent deaths, and there are still many more deaths occurring as an effect of it; what was terroristic though was the fact that we are no longer allowed to say anything other than the official rhetoric about the event. The standard media theory argument is that only if you were actually in New York City (and more specifically near the World Trade Centre) on the morning of September 11, 2001, would you be able to tell what actually happened. This would imply that any other means of knowing would be based solely on the representation of the event: this is most clearly seen by the validation of news coverage with other news coverage (see it first on CNN, verify with FOX, and perhaps Al-Jazeera after that). Of course the problem with verifying news through news is obvious: all you are doing is allowing news to verify itself, strengthening the underlying premise that there is a link between news and the event.
However if we consider the notion that one has to be
present in order to know what actually happened, this suggests that the phenomenological experience is raised onto a pedestal: we find this in the everyday saying ‘seeing is believing’. The most obvious effect of this figure of speech is that sight is elevated above all other senses, as if the eyes have a monopoly over the truth, or at
36 least have a greater share of the truth, over hearing, touching, tasting, smelling. However, even if we accept the premise that the phenomenological experience encompasses all the senses, this does not shift the link between reality—the truth of the event—and its comprehension by the subject. In effect, taken to the extreme what it is saying is that ‘if a tree falls in the forest and I do not witness it, it might as well not have happened’.
Not only is the register of anthropocentrism which we had a glimpse of earlier re-opened, we have also encountered the issue of witnessing, of what it means to be a witness, of the possibility of witnessing, here. And more pertinently of whether one has to be able to comprehend the issue at hand in order to be a witness to it; does one have to ‘know’ in order to witness. This suggests that there are two factors at play here: one is the ability to comprehend, to see, to understand; the other is having an active role, one that involves making a decision. And these are the two factors that are fundamental to responsibility; an ability to respond to a particular situation, a singular event. In order to meditate on witnessing, responsibility, and what it means to respond, we will have to make a detour into blindness, and into the making of decisions.
37 Blindness and the Third In order to be responsible, one must be able to respond to the needs of the other without subsuming the other under one’s conception: in other words, the other must not merely become a reflection of one’s self. That would merely be the construction of the other in order to react to her/ him; a literal circle, a masturbatory circle where the other is reduced to merely its other, where the other is brought under the domain of the self, where the other is made the self. Hence, in order to even begin to approach the possibility of responsibility, one must maintain the other-ness of the other whilst responding. This suggests that the other always remains fully other to the self; one responds to the needs of the other whilst not fully understanding, and perhaps never fully understanding, what these very needs are.
At the moment of
response, and this brings us back once again to—revives the memory of—Werner Hamacher’s formulation, “understanding is in want of understanding”: 7 the self does not merely act towards the other; it is responding, communicating, negotiating with the other.
This is a conception of responsibility not as a prescribed act—a one-way projection of the self onto the other—but as a full
7 Werner Hamacher. (1999). “Premises” in Premises: Essays on Philosophy and Literature from Kant to Celan. pp.1.
38 response; two-way and in full communion between the self and the other.
The problem with a responsibility that is known a priori (in the form of an ethics that is pre-determined) is that there is no consideration of the singularity of the situation.
This is the
problem that Jacques Lacan points out in Kant avec Sade—with a categorical imperative in place there is no other that is responded to, as no matter what the situation is, the method is always the same.
Whilst this doesn’t necessarily mean that the resulting
response is exactly the same, it does subsume the situation under the same framework, the same borders, boundaries. Even if one considers Kant as teleological rather than ontological—as Lyotard and Thébaud do in Just Gaming—it still holds that the end point becomes the lens to which one then contextualises the entire situation. As Lyotard says to Thébaud, “when Kant introduces as a regulator for the determination of actions by means of reflection, the Idea of a supra-sensible nature, that is, of a society of free and responsible beings, he is indeed introducing the Idea of a totality.” 8
Whilst it remains true that the end result is
undetermined, the end is always already known: this does not allow the situation to be responded with as such.
And in
Lyotard’s words, “as soon as one makes a determinant use of the Idea, then it is necessarily the Terror”: 9 the will of the other is not
8
Jean-François Lyotard & Jean-Loup Thébaud. (1985). Just Gaming. pp.86.
9
ibid. pp.92.
39 taken into account; in effect the will of the other—and the other her/ him self—is effaced.
However it is not as if we can do
without an Idea—otherwise there is nothing to begin from, begin with, and that would be an absolute non-response. So in this sense, “one must effectively have an Idea; but, in contradistinction to what Kant thought, this Idea is not, for us today an Idea of totality.” 10 This suggests that an Idea which attempts to be a true response to the needs of the other has to take into account the unique situation that both the self and the other are in at any moment. 11
The Levinasian approach to ethics addresses the issue of the other, but ultimately is lacking in response as well—not in the sense of effacing the other, but ironically in its attempt to fully understand the other’s needs. By claiming to privilege the ‘visage of the Other’ and emptying the self up to the point of becoming “hostage for the Other,” what occurs is
an inverted arrogance: as if I am the centre whose existence threatens all others … confer[ing] on [it] a central position: this very prohibition to assert [the self] makes [it] into the neutral medium, the
10
ibid. pp.88.
For the more comprehensive discussion on Kant as teleological, please see Just Gaming. especially pp.84-93.
11
40 place from which the truth about the [other] is accessible. 12
In this situation, the self absorbs the other under its own categories: there is a total consumption of the other.
More
precisely, the self simulates the other—the response is not to the other but rather to the simulacra of the other. Hence, the self is actually responding to its own projected needs—the other exists but as an imaginary other. We see this most commonly in displays of organised charity: the organisations are rarely responding to the exact situation of the person(s) they are trying to help, but instead imposing upon them what they believe is good for them. This is the problem found in the interventions by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund: by ignoring the particularities of the economic problem at hand, and imposing their own solutions (that often have nothing to do with the actual situation), many an economic crisis has been acerbated. In both cases, there is no response to the situation as the intervening bodies have subsumed the actual situation under their own conception: in seeking to fully comprehend, understand, the situation, what has occurred is instead a trampling over the situation, an effacement of the very situation they attempted to help in the first place. Anytime the claim is made that the other is centred, to the extent that in
12 Slavoj Žižek. (2004). “Smashing the Neighbor’s Face” pp.8-9 found at www.lacan.com/zizsmash.htm [additions in parenthesis are mine].
41 Levinasian terms, “subjectivity is being hostage” 13 —taking the place of and being a sacrifice for the other—even if the intention is to fully understand the other in order to respond to her/ his needs, what occurs is the disappearance of the other via simulation: another other is created: there is no longer an other. In order for a true response, a full understanding of the other must never be assumed, or even attempted: in this sense, the ‘visage’ of the other must always already be (at least partially) hidden.
This hidden ‘visage’ of the other is not merely what Slavoj Žižek claims when he says, “the true ethical step is one beyond the face of the other, the one of suspending the hold of the face: the choice against the face, for the third.” 14 Žižek’s claim is that in privileging the third over the ‘visage’, one is able to have an ethics that is just (in the legal sense) for then one can “abstract [the face of the Other] and refocus onto the faceless Thirds in the background.” 15 Whilst the Žižekian gesture allows one to perform a justice (that in his conception has to be blind to specifics, as in every instance one can always justify whatever their actions are; for instance personal short-comings; the failing nature of man; etc), this is an ethics which privileges the material situation—“the faceless Thirds”—whilst effacing the other completely. In the self’s act of “indifference,” what one does is indeed “suspend one’s 13
Emmanuel Levinas. (1981). Otherwise Than Being. pp.127
14
Slavoj Žižek. (2004). “Smashing the Neighbor’s Face”. pp.10.
15
ibid. pp.10.
42 power of imagination” 16 with respect to the other, but what occurs instead is that this imagination is transposed onto the “faceless Thirds.” Hence, there is a simulation of the “faceless Thirds” and their needs. So whilst escaping the Levinasian trap of simulating the other, the Žižekian gesture merely simulates the ‘faceless others.’ Indeed as Žižek claims, this is not “simply the DerridianKierkegaardian point that I always betray the Other because tout autre est un autre, because I have to make a choice to select who my neighbour is from the mass of the Thirds[,]” 17 but rather a mere reversal of that statement—a ‘I betray the other because I refuse to select from the thirds’ or even more radically, ‘I betray both the other and all others because I am merely subsuming all of you under my conception—I have made ALL of you my absolute other(s).’ 18
The site of responsibility is indeed the third, but not in the manner that Žižek posits, for the third exists not as an externality to the other (in the figure of the faceless others), but rather in the other her/ him self. By responding to and with the needs of the other, the self has to communicate with the other in order to uncover these needs. It is communication itself that takes place in 16
ibid. pp.11.
17
ibid. pp.9. [parenthesis my addition]
18 In a conversation with Werner Hamacher, he pointed out that at no point does Levinas suggest that the ‘visage’ of the other can even be seen. In this case, one can then say that Žižek’s gesture—effacing Levinas in order to simulate a ‘Levinas’ in order to efface him yet again—is precisely a manifestation of his ethical conception.
43 the third—for true communication is not merely the exchange of information but rather is a process where the two parties connect and touch each other. 19 Communication, as Lucretius posits, takes place in the skin (the simulacrum) between the two parties and it is in that space that the two parties negotiate. 20 In this sense, there is no direct transfer of meaning, 21 but rather, meaning itself is an emergent property of the process of communication. By extension, there is no such thing as mis-communication: communication itself is an event and by definition its result cannot be pre-determined. Responding to the other takes place in the third—between the self and the other—and it is at this site that the needs of the other potentially emerge.
There is no doubt that an exchange takes place in communication—otherwise one will emerge from any process of 19 In order for communication to be an exchange of information there has to be a flattening out of differences. It is this flattening out that we see in Žižek’s gesture of transposing response onto the “faceless thirds”: in effect, the “faceless thirds” function as the abstraction of the situation, the abstract value onto which all exchange can take place, can circulate. Hence, there is full and utter exchangeability whilst the situation itself is effaced. 20 Lucretius’ conception of the simulacra was brought to my attention by Siegfried Zielinski in his seminar entitled Mediology: Audiovisual History and Techno Culture, and Pierre Alferi in his seminar From Script to Screen at the European Graduate School, in August 2005 & June 2006 respectively.
Lucretius. (2005). Sensation and Sex. pp.39-60. 21 Most communication models presuppose a direct transfer of meaning. One such instance is the Shannon-Weaver model, where every mis-communication is due to interference, mis-information, or in more general terms, noise. This critique of imperfect communication—through the concept of noise—merely strengthens the underlying assumption that meaning can be accurately transferred, as if it were an object.
44 communication completely unchanged (which is not true). Clearly after each event where there is communication between persons, each person changes in some way or another: however, how and in what way this change takes place remains unknown, and perhaps even unknowable, until at least after the event has occurred. But the exchange that takes place is not one of a direct information exchange: this would be the realm of a general exchange; an exchange of one unit of information for another. This is communication conceived as an economic exchange, where all differences have to be flattened; abstracted from a use-value to an exchange-value. Perhaps the sense of ‘meaning’ that is derived from the act is then its surplus value. This fits in perfectly with the logic of capital—communication as a process that is calculable, predictable and which produces surplus value that guarantees its continual cycle. An analogy of this would be one of furniture in the modern context: each piece of furniture no longer has a meaning in itself—the last of this is perhaps ‘dad’s chair’ which only he can sit in—except for the fact that it is part of the overall design of that particular room.
In this manner, each piece is
perfectly substitutable with any other piece: take any chair out and replace it with another chair, as long as it fits in with the overall design, it will work. Functionality is the key here. The ‘ambience’ of the room is the concept that determines the individual pieces of furniture, which only have meaning insofar as being part of the network that is the room itself: each piece is individual, but not
45 singular. 22
In a concept of communication in which there is a
direct exchange of information, each word functions like a piece of furniture: nothing has meaning in itself, and there is no singularity; individual words have meaning only as part of a network of other words, constructions, sentences, other sentences and so on.
Communication itself would be subsumed under
functionality, that is, the purpose of communication would be predetermined—exchange a particular piece of information. This is the only way in which one can deem mis-communication took place: only with an aim that is pre-set can any failure be determined, and calculated.
Within such a concept of
communication, the importance of each person is determined by her/ his position in the network, and by extension, each person is completely and utterly replaceable, exchangeable. Each person is individual, but not singular.
A process of communication in which there is no a priori aim—and by extension result—rests on an impossible exchange; an exchange that occurs in spite of the fact that there is no flattening of differences, an exchange that occurs in spite of the fact that no exchange can take place.
An impossible exchange is one that
realises that there can be no exchange because all logical systems rest on an exclusion—an exclusionary gesture—one that realises that there is no logical system that can sustain itself within itself, as 22 This analysis of furniture and ‘ambience’ is taken from Jean Baudrillard. (2005). The System of Objects. pp.30-74.
46 without a totalising logical system that is set in place—without an over-arching Idea in the Kantian sense—there can never be a natural equivalence.
Therefore there can never be any direct
exchange except if the exchange was simulated. This brings us back to Lucretius’ conception of communication: the exchange takes place in the simulacra; an exchange that is impossible but which happens non-the-less. This exchange, in the form of the act of communication, is precisely the emergent property of the process of communication; communication occurs for the sake of communication, and not some teleological goal.
There is no
overall ‘design’ or ‘ambience’ to govern the process of communication: after all, an emergent property is strictly speaking unknowable a priori; it can only be known either after or at best at the point of emergence itself. Hence, each act of communication is unique. Since there is no overall structure under which the act of communication is subsumed, there is a potentially unique response in each act of communication.
Of course, there is also a chance that this does not occur—in fact, the chances of a new and unique response is probably lower than one that has already occurred. In most occasions the lack of time dictates that conventions govern the ‘emergent property’ of communication, such that the ‘meaning’ produced is not a unique one. This potential ‘not to be’ is part of a full potentiality, without which there would be no difference between potentiality and actuality except for difference stages in a progression.
True
47 potentiality is thus the potential ‘to be’ and the potential ‘not to be.’ In fact in every potentiality, there is always already both these potentialities at play: each time something becomes, is, there is always already with it all the other potentialities that did not become; the phantoms of the other potentialities remain spectres in and within the potentiality ‘to be’. 23 unknowability,
an
uncalculability,
that
Hence, there is an lies
within
every
potentiality, and which extends to every actuality: this means that even when something actualises, perhaps in the form of a decision that is made, there is always already something unknowable within it, that remains a part of it.
It is this un-calculability—this unknowability—that resides in every pure decision, where as Jacques Derrida posits, there is “the sacrifice of economy, that without which there is no free responsibility or decision.” 24 It is this un-calculability that saves a decision from being a mere prelude to an act. The moment of decision is one where there is the potential for responding to the other, where the other remains unknowable (if not totally, at least partially), and in which one responds with a degree of blindness. The blindness occurs in two realms: one with regards to the other which the self is responding to (in the sense of not subsuming the other under the self); the second to the act that is to be done in This is meditated on in detail in Giorgio Agamben. (1999). Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy.
23
24
Jacques Derrida. (1996). The Gift of Death. pp.95.
48 response to the other (in the sense of not knowing a priori what is to be done). It is this double blindness that allows the self to respond, in the fullest sense, to the other: not only does “every other (one) [remain] every (bit) other” 25 in the acknowledgement that every decision privileges one over all the remaining others, to whom we always remain irresponsible towards, but also that the other that is privileged does not become merely an extension of the self.
However, if one chooses to respond, then one must respond whilst being blind (to all other possibilities).
It is this double
blindness that allows for the potentiality of a response that is
an absolute responsibility [that] could not be derived from a concept of responsibility and therefore, in order for it to be what it must be it must remain inconceivable, indeed unthinkable: it must therefore be irresponsible in order to be absolutely responsible. 26
This is why Søren Kierkegaard proclaims, “the instant of decision is madness”: 27 one chooses in spite of the fact that there is no rational basis to select one over the other(s): one chooses in the full 25
ibid. pp.82.
26
ibid. pp.61. italics from source
27
ibid. pp.65. which is probably a reference to Kierkegaard’s Philosophical Fragments.
49 knowledge that it is impossible to fully know what one is choosing. If one were to rely solely on logic or rationality, there will always be an aporetic situation—one has to know to chose, but since every decision brings with it an unknowability, one also cannot know when choosing. But one has to choose in spite of this. Otherwise there is always already a situation of non-action (which is a decision in itself): this would be the decision of nonresponsibility; the refusal to respond to the other and all the other others. This is the problem with Žižek’s position: by refusing to choose, he ultimately chooses a position that responds to none, that abandons all the others. However, this is also where Žižek’s claim that the authentic moment, the real moment of decision— one which is “harshness … sustained by love,” 28 which in his conception is a moment of justice that is guided by love, a blindness in fidelity to the other—is akin to Derrida’s claim that true responsibility is one
that doesn’t keep account or give an account, neither to man, to humans, to society, to one’s fellows, or to one’s own. Such a responsibility keeps its secret, it cannot and need not present itself …. It refuses to present itself before the violence that consists of asking for accounts and justifications …. 29
28
Slavoj Žižek. (2004). “Smashing the Neighbor’s Face”. pp.12.
29
Jacques Derrida. (1996). The Gift of Death. pp.62.
50
This is a responsibility that is blind in and to itself, in fidelity to responding to the needs of the other. This is a responsibility that is almost an inhuman responsibility, one that does not give account to anything other than responsibility itself. It is almost a divine responsibility, but one where God(s) has long already left the building.
Whilst responding to the needs of the other, the self and the other remain absolute singularities—this is why there is no economy of exchange that takes place.
The exchange is an
impossible exchange: it is an aeconomical exchange that takes place. This is secret of the exchange: there is nothing in the exchange except for the exchange itself. This is the secret of the gift: there is nothing in the giving but the giving itself. And hence, in a blind responsibility, one is responsible to no one except the ability to respond: this is
the paradoxical condition of every decision: it cannot be deduced from a form of knowledge of which it would simply be the effect, conclusion or explication.
It structurally breaches knowledge
and is thus destined to nonmanifestation; a decision is, in the end, always secret. 30
30
ibid. pp.77.
51 But in spite of this destiny, in order to respond to the other, one must respond—this is precisely where the element of blindness lies. To fully respond to the needs of the other, one must be blind to everything else, including the other: it is this that allows the other to remain fully other whilst one responds to her/ him; Hence, there is no object to responsibility.
Of course, once the instant of decision has occurred, there is a consequence which comes with the act, which is a consequence of the act, after-which there is an accountability to the other and to the other others as well—this is when everything is re-inscribed into an economy: one can calculate whether the response was ‘good’ or ‘bad’ and so on. However, this is an economy that is “in simulacrum, an economy that is ambiguous enough to seem to integrate noneconomy.” 31 For in every true response to the other, there is the element of the unknowable—the secret—that is brought into the act itself: there is no prior knowledge of the consequences; there is a potentiality for a previously unknown consequence. Ultimately, “the response and hence, responsibility always risk what they cannot avoid appealing to in reply, namely, recompense and retribution.
They risk the exchange that they
might expect but are at the same time unable to count on.” 32 And like every secret, and the unknowability that resides in every
31
ibid. pp.109.
32
ibid. pp.96.
52 secret, the unknowability that is part of every secret, it is this that truly scares us, that truly makes us tremble.
It is impossible to speak of a true responsibility in prescriptive terms for that would be the creation of another categorical imperative, the result being the subsumption every situation under its logic.
The double blindness that is in every decision—as
opposed to mere option or alternative—in fidelity to responsibility, is not an exception or an aberrant than can be done away with. Blindness is an essential part of responsibility itself, as it ensures that the self responds to the other, without doing away with the other-ness of the other, the radical otherness of the other. True responsibility is not an answer but a question; it opens up a space in which one can be responsible to the other by being a true question (for which there is no known answer, at least to the one asking the question) and “as often happens, the call of or for the question, and the request that echoes through it, takes us further than the response.” 33
It is this question, irresponsible to everything except responsibility itself, blind to everything—even the other—except the possibility of responding to the (unknown) other, that allows both the other and the self to preserve their singularity.
In
responding to each other, there is a coming together that is akin to a marriage, the precise ending of the vow being “what God has
33
ibid. pp.115.
53 joined, man must not divide.”
The joining is always already
imperfect and fragile—otherwise the vow would have read ‘what man cannot divide’. This suggests that man is fully capable of dividing the union, and it is this fragility that ensures marriage is not a mere constitutive merger—the two remain fully singular, and the union depends on the two recognising its fragility and becoming one in spite of the impossibility of doing so. Hence, it is only through this agreement, this contract, that the union is formed, that the union has a potentiality of occurring: in no way does the contract guarantee that the union will last, or even that the union will take place; the function of the contract is only to open up the space for the potentiality of this very union. In the same vein, the self and the other respond to each other in spite of the potential futility of any act to change or improve the situation; the self and the other respond with each other in spite of the impossibility of doing so.
This is a responsibility which is inherently blind, in which blindness is a part of its very structure: a responsibility that closes its eyes to everything—is blind to everything—except the ability to respond.
54
Witnessing: Fiction and Testimony It is at this point that we might want to detour back into witnessing, but perhaps through a question, the question not just of what it is to witness, what it means to be a witness to something, but the more pertinent question, the more basic question of ‘what does this mean’, which is also the question of uncertainty, an uncertainty towards the very thing which we are witnessing. This is a crucial question as it affects the very basis of one’s ability to witness in the first place: in order to respond to an event, a situation, one must first respond to what ‘this’ is, and means. And hence, even if witnessing is a willingness to respond to the situation, at some point there is a question of hermeneutics that is placed upon it; at some point all witnessing is subject to the question of ‘what does this thing I am witnessing mean’.
We return here to the echo of the eternal question of the serpent that remains unanswered, that remains unanswerable; the question of “did God really say you were not to eat from any of the trees in the garden?” 34 The serpent was not asking so much what Yahweh God said—that the woman already knew: “we may eat the fruit of the trees in the garden. But of the fruit of the tree in the middle of the garden God said, ‘You must not eat it, nor touch it,
34
Genesis 3: 1-2.
55 under pain of death’” 35 —but more pertinently the hermeneutical question of ‘what did God really mean by that’. In effect, the serpent was asking for an interpretive gesture by the woman. And after-which the serpent gives his interpretation of what Yahweh God says: “’No! You will not die! God knows in fact that on the day you eat it your eyes will be opened and you will be like gods, knowing good and evil’.” 36 Whether the serpent was telling the truth or not is irrelevant: for one, we never actually hear what Yahweh God says to woman and man; we have always heard of the prohibition through the woman; all that we ever hear from Yahweh God is that eating from the tree is forbidden, without any reason(s) given. Hence, all that we can verify is that there was a prohibition. So in fact what the serpent was calling into question was the very interpretation of woman herself, her own interpretative gesture, her version of the Law. Not only does this open the register that the Law only works due to the subject’s interpretation of it—the prohibition is only prohibitive when one reads it as such—but more pertinently that the serpent’s question is not a constative one, but one that opens up possibilities. For the woman could have chosen either her first interpretation, which was that eating of the fruit was absolutely forbidden, or could have questioned her version, which is what happens. It is not as if the prohibition has changed—whatever Yahweh God had told her remains the same—but that her interpretive gesture had altered:
35
Genesis 3: 2-3.
36
Genesis 3: 4-5.
56 and if we look closely, at no point did the woman state that perhaps she had misunderstood the command not to eat. However, the fact that she changes her mind about eating from the fruit of the tree suggests that her relationality towards the command altered.
Hence, what the serpent’s question does is
merely open the possibility of the command not being solely a constative one—where Yahweh God was either telling the truth or lying—by opening the register of it being a performative statement, where the command could mean a myriad of possibilities, each of them as true or as false as the other. And since there is no way to prove either the truth, or falsity, of neither the serpent nor Yahweh God’s statements, this suggests that the woman’s choice was a blind one: she was choosing in absolute blindness, between two possibilities. After all she could not even be said to be choosing between good and evil: before eating of the tree of knowledge, neither woman nor man had any knowledge of good or evil. Hence, this is a choice that was made in absolutely blindness to everything except the fact that there was a choice to be made.
When one is a witness to a situation, to an event, one is almost always alone with one’s interpretive gesture to the event, to what is seen. Even if there are many around with the witness, there is no solace that can be found with them, in them, for even if (s)he attempts to verify, all that is happening after the event is a verification of an interpretation with another interpretation. This
57 suggests that witnessing is not so much a gesture of truth or falsity, but rather one in which one responds to the situation with an absolute unknowability, an absolute blindness, to everything except to the fact that one is witnessing. And this is what makes testifying such a terrifying thing: one is ultimately making utterances without any possibility of referentiality, without any possibility of knowing whether one is right or not. Hence, when one witnesses and testifies, one is actually naming the event; one is giving a meaning to the event through one’s own interpretive gesture, one is giving one’s version of the event, one’s own story. This means that one is always already in the realm of fiction, where every testimony, every act of witnessing, is an act of inscribing, an act of writing, narrating. And more specifically an act of narrating in the first person; after all, one can only witness for oneself: one can always narrate a tale that has others in it, but one can only tell it from one’s perspective. Since the narrator has to be present to the event in order to narrate, there is always already the problem of indiscernability at play—the ‘I’ of the first person narrative refers to both the narrator of the tale and also the character that is in the tale, and it is impossible to differentiate whether it is the narrator or the character that is speaking, that is testifying, at any given moment. Hence, every act of witnessing, every act of testifying, is always already inscribed with the unknowability of whether the witness is recounting a tale, or telling it, whether the witness is narrating the tale or telling it as a character in the tale. This suggests that at every moment of the
58 testimony, one cannot tell if the witness knows how much (s)he knows: a narrator would ‘know’ the entire tale before recounting it; a character only knows what is happening at the point it is happening. And hence, at every point of the testimony, there is always an unknowability—an absolute blindness—that is part of it, that is in it.
At this point, the only thing that is clear is that the witness is caught in a double bind—a double blind—where one has to respond, but at the same time one is unsure—can never be sure— about what one is responding to. This as Jacques Derrida testifies, is the
distinction between fiction and autobiography that not only remains undecidable but, far more serious, in whose indecidability, as de Man makes clear, it is impossible to stand, to maintain oneself in a stable or stationary way.
One thus finds
oneself in a fatal and double impossibility: the impossibility of deciding, but the impossibility of remaining in the undecidable. 37
Once again we are back to this impossibility of distinction, the impossibility of separation between fiction and non-fiction, between the self telling her story and the self being part of the tale, 37
Jacques Derrida. (2000). Demeure: Fiction and Testimony. pp.16. italics from source.
59 the self becoming within the tale. Hence, all the witness can do is testify, all the witness can do—even though this is strictly speaking impossible for her to do so—is narrate her tale, in full response to both the event and the impossibility of knowing this event at the same time. This is witnessing, as the sub-title—the supplementary title, the secondary title—of Derrida’s text suggests, as an openness, a reception to all possibilities, never sure of itself, never grounded in anything, and always already keeping a questioning of itself in mind.
Since one is always already naming the event, we must consider that this brings with it all the seriousness of a name—a referent, with all the spectres of its history, its own stories, its own tales—and at the same time its illegitimacy—there is no reason that anything is named as such except for the fact that it is named such. At every naming, we are always already in a tautological structure, where the name refers to nothing except itself, except to the fact that it is so; and at the same time, refers to an entire history, to everything else except itself. Hence, each testimony is the naming, and more pertinently, a foregrounding that a name is a catachrestic metaphor; where the testifier is faced with “the impossibility of deciding [the name], but the impossibility of remaining in the undecidable,” where the testifier cannot name, but has to name. Hence, the witness has no choice but to name as if (s)he can name.
60 This is the problem that Vladimir and Estragon face in Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. Since neither of them has actually met Godot, there is no actual way to know who, or what, this name refers to: in fact it is a name without any referentiality. Hence, when they are waiting for Godot, they are on the one hand waiting for nothing, but on the other hand they are also waiting for everything. For if Godot has no referent, it is a signifier in full potentiality: anything and everything can be Godot.
However
even though anyone can be Godot, neither Vladimir nor Estragon will ever be able to verify that: in effect, even if they eventually do meet Godot, they will never know if that is the Godot they have been waiting for; there is no reason there cannot be more than one Godot. Hence, what Vladimir and Estragon are doing is waiting; and Godot is the name of that waiting. 38
Whenever a witness names—for the witness has to name— what (s)he is also doing is also waiting, and giving a name not for the event that has passed, but an event that is to come. For this is once again where the present, the past, and the future collide. Each time we call something, recall something, it has to be from a past; otherwise we can not do so: one cannot call to mind something that is absolutely unknown to one.
However each
recollection is always already a reconstitution, a re-writing, a revision as well: hence, it is also an event that has not yet happened, it is also an event that is yet to come. In effect, each time an event
38
Samuel Beckett. (1982). Waiting for Godot: a Tragicomedy in Two Acts.
61 is called to mind, each time the name of an event is uttered, it is the moment where all time comes together; the event is present but only present in as far as the present is a future-anterior moment.
It is Jean Baudrillard who never allows us to fully forget that each event is in exception to everything, is in exception to all attempts to subsume it under a particular category, is in exception to understanding itself.
In fact, each event is in exception to
everything including itself: exceptions are the norm, and it is the attempt to form a norm, create a norm where there is none that is truly brutal, and truly terroristic. After all,
there is no finer parallel universe than that of the detail or the fragment. Freed from the whole and its transcendent ventriloquism, the detail inevitably becomes mysterious. Every particle wrested from the natural world is in itself an immediate subversion of the real and its wholeness. Like the fragment, it only has to be elliptical. It only has to be an exception. Every singular image can be reckoned exceptional. And it puts an end to all the others. 39
39
Jean Baudrillard. (2005). The Intelligence of Evil or the Lucidity Pact. pp.103.
62 This re-calls us to the site that we were traversing on earlier, the site of the specific as opposed to the universal, the site of the singular which can never be brought under, disciplined, by the universal, never brought under the logic of the totalising one. The fact that it is even possible for the singular to exist “freed from the whole,” always already in relation with the whole but never under it, always already separate from it—a “subversion of the real and its wholeness”—suggests that at each encounter with the singular, there is both a memory of it—a remembering in relation with an Idea, with a concept, otherwise there can be no approach at all— and at the same time a forgetting that is part of this memory— otherwise it would not be in exception. And it is for this reason that the singular, the event, is always “elliptical”: as we recall Werner Hamacher and his elegant reminder, the ellipsis is the very figure of writing itself … and by extension, the very figure of thinking itself …
The ellipsis … both an ending, a middle, and also a beginning at the same time … for it is indiscernible whether the sentence has started at that point, or whether it is carrying on; and carrying on onto what is also unknown. Perhaps at each ellipsis, there is a sign of an end, but what the ending is, remains veiled to us; unveiled by the sign, but remaining hidden to us except as a sign. All that we can posit is that at each ellipsis, there is something there, but something missing, something hidden at the same time, hidden perhaps even from the one who inscribes the ellipsis … at each
63 ellipsis perhaps all we can say is that there might have been something there, something that we might have long forgotten, but that still remains with us, something that is yet to come.
It is this ‘yet to come’—the possibility of the not yet, the to be, the maybe—that terror attempts to halt, to cease, to seize. For the third is the site of all potentialities, the third is where all possibilities meet, connect, touch: and it is this third that terror attempts to take hostage, attempts to destroy; not by denying the formation of actualities (in the form of meaning) but by attempting to lock in the actuality, to form a ground, such that there is only one
possibility,
one
meaning,
whilst
everything
else
is
marginalised, pushed out, excluded. This is the point where—and here we invoke the voices of Lyotard and Thébaud once again— the “social bond is taken as nature,” 40 the point where a space that is negotiated, ever changing, constantly re-created as it is being created, is taken as something that is set—in time and in space— fixed, certain, always already formed, and that is unchanging, unchangeable.
Of course there are many risks when one attempts to remain open, to remain receptive to—in full response with—otherness. As Jacques Derrida points out, if we are attempting to remain faithful to a democracy that is to come, then we can no longer be prescriptive about what democracy is. Hence, democracy becomes 40
Jean-François Lyotard & Jean-Loup Thébaud. (1999). Just Gaming. pp. 71.
64 not an over-arching Idea, nor even a teleological goal, but a process, a becoming; something that can only be known as it is being known. And this incurs a large risk, as one can then no longer exclude anything a priori: thus when Adolf Hitler’s National Socialist Party came to power via democratic elections, one can not then claim that this is not part of democracy. The only thing that one can draw from this is that democracy allows for elements that are not democratic—that even go against democracy itself—to come to power through its process. Once we attempt to exclude all so called non-democratic elements from the process of democracy, then we are back to an exclusionary politics; a terroristic politics. This is of course the irony of the United States of America’s position on democracy: by enforcing their brand of democracy, the US is now no different from any other terroristic power; all they are doing is effacing one method of governance with their own.
The only time that one can judge whether a
system is democratic or not is after they come into power: of course in this light, the Nazi party is as un-democratic as they come.
However in order to be faithful to the possibility of a
democracy that is to come, that perhaps may come, one cannot exclude the possibility of fascism a priori. 41
A similar problem, when it comes to the realm of history, is the accusation of revisionism. Whilst one cannot deny the existence of certain events—for instance when Nazi revisionists attempt to
41
Jacques Derrida. (2005). Rogues: Two Essays on Reason.
65 claim that the Shoah never occurred—neither can one deny the possibility of a new register within the historicity itself. When someone is accused of being a Nazi sympathiser just because (s)he points out that there is a possibility Hitler was a good family man, we are seeing an exclusionary gesture (that one cannot say anything positive about Adolf Hitler). Of course after a statement has been made, one can judge it as correct or wrong, good or bad, and so forth but not before: it is the a priori exclusion—the denial of possibilities—that is problematic; that is terroristic.
This is the hidden problem—the perverse core—of political correctness: by attempting to delineate what can and what cannot be said, the issue itself is elevated to an absolute. For instance, if one can no longer call a man who is unable to walk ‘disabled’, but instead has to call him ‘differently-abled’, his disability has be raised to the level of the un-mentionable, to the level of an absolute otherness.
And by completely excluding his disability from
utterance, not only does this not change the reality of the man’s situation (that he cannot walk and might need material assistance), it makes his disability such an innate—and unmentionable—part of his being that it can no longer be uttered, as if it was the bogeyman that would then destroy everything good and peaceful in the world. And it is this exclusionary gesture—that you cannot utter the term ‘disabled’—that is truly terroristic, and which effaces the man her/ him self. Slavoj Žižek who has often been accused of racism whenever he tells jokes which involve ethnicity
66 has the perfect response: it is when one is no longer allowed to tell jokes linking characteristics and ethnicity that we are in trouble: it would be the point when these two are so completely indistinguishable that one cannot even utter one without the other; this would be the point when race is elevated to an absolute other and completely excluded: and it is this that is truly racist. 42
If we are to attempt to think of the possibility of a full response to a situation—a response that is neither pre-conditioned nor framed by a teleological goal—we have to consider each situation as an exception, as the exception. And not only is this situation singular in relation to all other situations, it is a situation in which there is no relationality with any other situation. Perhaps only after its occurrence, might one be able to cognitise it, ascribe some meaning to it, even begin to understand it, but never before. This then requires us to re-think how we usually constitute an event— and by extension how we constitute knowledge, and the ability to know, itself.
Usually, we conceive of knowledge in this sequence: something is unknown, then it is known, and then it occurs; something is impossible, we figure it out, it then becomes possible, that is, it happens. This is of course an anthropocentric conception; as if we have to know of something before it can happen—a 42 Žižek’s logic on racism being the point when race is elevated to an absolute level was part of his seminar, Media, Politics and Psychoanalysis, at the European Graduate School, August 2005.
67 privileging of the self as it situates not only occurrences, phenomenon, but also all sources of knowledge within the self, as if there is nothing that exists outside the self, independent of cognition.
However, let us consider this possibility: what if the sequence (if we can even consider it as sequential) is that something is impossible, it happens, after-which we realise, we figure out, how it happens. This would not only shift the conception of an event beyond the realm of subjective cognition, outside the self, it would also by extension remove any limits from the event itself; if the event is now freed from subjective cognition, not only is it no longer bound by reason and knowing, it is now completely free of, and from, human understanding. In this manner, we manage to
retain for the event its radical definition and its impact in the imagination.
It is characterized
entirely, in a paradoxical way, by its uncanniness, its troubling strangeness—it is the irruption of something improbable and impossible—and by its troubling familiarity: from the outset it seems totally self-explanatory, as though predestined, as though it could not but take place. 43
43
Jean Baudrillard. (2005). The Intelligence of Evil or the Lucidity Pact. pp.129-30.
68 This is the event as an enigma; future-anterior at best, never quite in the present except for the sudden and shocking fact that it did happen. And at best we only manage to catch a glimpse of the event at the very moment in which it happens, but it always already slips us—we can only know of it in the past; the moment we utter about it, in reference to it, it is already past; its referentiality always already absent.
It is only when one conceives of the event as an unknowable that one can escape—perhaps only momentarily—the confines of terror. For if the event is unknown, and remains unknowable, each attempt at understanding is a positing, a position, violent in the extent that it is competing with other understandings, negotiating, a position amongst other positions, but not with any certainty, knowability, legitimacy or even validity.
This is a conception of a relationality of the self towards the event—towards an other—towards all others—that retains a prerelationality of openness towards the other, towards all others, towards multiplicities and possibilities.
And all that we can have—all that we are able to know—is that perhaps we might be able to know __________ … 44
44 (and it is this un-nameability that is always enigmatic, and remains an enigma …).
69
If we are attempting to conceive a possibility of knowing that remains open to the other, that is attempting to fully respond to and with the other, this suggests that this is a conception of knowing that involves an exchange. However, this is clearly not a direct exchange as that would involve a flattening of differences which involves the effacing of details, particularities, singularities. In order to think the possibility of an exchange that remains singular, we have to consider the question of ‘what occurs in an exchange’. And we will attempt to do this by considering this question through ‘the gift’, and more precisely through the question of ‘what is the economy of the gift’.
70
In any case, to be liberated, you have first to have been a slave. And to have been a slave, you have to have not been sacrificed (only the prisoners who were not sacrificed became slaves). Something of this exemption from sacrifice and something of the consequent servility persists in 'liberated' man, particularly in today's servility—not the servility which precedes liberation, but the servility which succeeds it. Servility of the second kind: servility without a master. Jean Baudrillard: Impossible Exchange
71
Symbolic Exchange or this is my gift of death And everyone who has left houses, brothers, sisters, father, mother, children, or land for the sake of my name will be repaid a hundred times over, and also inherit eternal life. 1
These are the stakes that are set out, set up, in the contract that governs the exchange between Jesus of Nazareth and his disciples, in response to the question of Peter; the question of “what about us … we have left everything and followed you. What are we to have then?” 2 In this manner, an accounting system has been set up; whatever you have given up will be multiplied “a hundred times over” and returned to you. What is set in motion here is this: it is no longer enough to merely follow the commandments; one must now also give up one’s worldly possessions. In other words, it is no longer enough to believe, nor just to act in accordance with the laws; one must ‘put one’s money where one’s mouth is’.
One could possibly conclude that this exchange would fit in perfectly with the model of a potlatch: one has to give up everything in order to receive something in return; it is “an act of 1
Matthew 19: 29.
2
Matthew 19: 27.
72 giving that is necessarily reciprocated.” 3
The fact that this
exchange involves other people, other segments of society— houses, brothers, sisters, father, mother, children, land 4 —suggests that it is not an individual act of exchange. In fact the exchange is a social act, one that always as Marcel Mauss notes, involves “the intervention of a third person”; 5 not necessarily a person in a physical form but possibly a third in the form of social rules, norms, mores, laws.
What is clear though is that there is
something that lies beyond the two persons involved in an exchange—what remains unclear is what exactly this third is. It is this uncertainty, this lack of clearness, that is captured in the condition “for the sake of my name,” as this can only be a figure of speech, a metaphor at best.
In effect, in order to gain the
remuneration—along with interest, of course—one must leave everything one owns, has ties with, for a name, for something that cannot be defined, that is strictly speaking a catachrestic metaphor. This is why when asked, “who can be saved then,” the only reply that that is possible is, “for men … this is impossible.” 6
3
Marcel Mauss (2006). The Gift. pp.20.
“All these institutions express one fact alone, one social system, one precise state of mind: everything—food, women, children, property, talismans, land, labour services, priestly functions, and ranks—is there for passing on, and for balancing accounts.” (ibid. pp.18)
4
5
ibid. pp.14.
6
Matthew 19: 25-26.
73 It is this impossible premise that interests us: if one has to give up everything for “the sake of my name,” whilst not being able to define what this name is—or even know what it means—this suggests that one is not only giving up everything for an unknowable, but that one is also judged by an unknowable. Hence, there is a double unknowable at play here: both the basis of judgment (what law, or rules are being applied), and the judge, remain unknown. The only choice that the person has is to either give up everything, or not—the only choice available is either to play (and accept everything) or not to play at all.
It is this same unknowability of the law that we see in Franz Kafka’s The Trial, where K is brought before a power that he neither knows—and can never know—nor can see, but which clearly has effects on him. In fact, what is asked of K is similar to what Jesus of Nazareth asks of his disciples: give up everything unto a power that is me, even as much as the ‘me’ in question is unknowable to you. Hence, at best, all K—and the disciples—can do is to guess, to posit, what is required of them. It is this positing that is captured in the statement of the priest in the cathedral when he says to K, “no … you don’t have to consider everything true, you just have to consider it necessary.” 7 This is due to the fact that K is faced with a law that he must approach, and which has power of judgment over him, but at the same time is a law that is always
7
Franz Kafka. (1998). The Trial. pp.223.
74 already hidden from him. And it is this that the priest attempts to highlight to him in the famous parable of the Law:
Before the Law stands a doorkeeper. A man from the country comes to this doorkeeper and requests admittance to the Law. But the doorkeeper says that he can’t grant him admittance now. The man thinks it over and then asks if he’ll be allowed to enter later. “It’s possible,” says the doorkeeper, “but not now.” 8
It is not that the man—or K—is not allowed into the Law, not allowed to see what it is that is judging him, but that he is not allowed to at this very moment. As there is no time stipulation to “but not now,” it is not that the doorkeeper is lying to him, but that the moment of admittance is deferred, not necessarily eternally, but perhaps for just one moment longer than the life of the man. However it is not as if the Law has no effect on their lives: on the contrary the man from the country waits outside the doorway till the end of his life, and K’s trial fully occupies his daily existence. In other words both of them are completely consumed by the Law, by a force they do not, and cannot, see or comprehend, by a force they remain completely blind to.
8
ibid. pp.215.
75 Even though the Law is a force that affects them, has an effect on them, it is not as though they are compelled to be before it: after all, the man decides that “he would prefer to wait.” 9 At no point is he forced to remain; it is of his own free will that he does. This opens the possibility that it is the man who is free; unlike the doorkeeper who is captive to his duty, is captive to the Law, as not only has he to wait for the man to appear, but also must wait there till he decides to leave: in this sense, it is the executer of the Law who is most bound to it. As the priest explains to K,
the man is in fact free: he can go wherever he wishes, the entrance to the Law alone is denied to him, and this only by one person, the doorkeeper. If he sits on the stool at the side of the door and spends the rest of his life there, he does so of his own free will; the story mentions no element of force.
The doorkeeper, on the other hand, is
bound to his post by his office; he is not permitted to go elsewhere outside, but to all appearances he is not permitted to go inside either, even if he wishes to. 10
Even as the doorkeeper is bound to the Law, it is not as if he knows what the Law is: one can assume that he hasn’t been too far 9
ibid. pp.216.
10
ibid. pp.221.
76 into the Law—“I’m only the lowest doorkeeper … the mere sight of the third is more than even I can bear” 11 —and moreover, it is the man who “in the darkness … now sees a radiance that streams forth inextinguishably from the door of the Law”; 12 nothing is said of whether the doorkeeper sees this light. This suggests that both the man and the doorkeeper, regardless of whether they are there by choice or by duty, are affected by a power that is beyond their comprehension; even the “radiance that streams forth” is only seen at the end; only “now” does he see this light. And even though the man sees this light—this radiance emanating from within the door, within the Law—he never knows what it means, or even what the light is.
The unknowability of the Law becomes even more curious if we take into account the fact that, “no one else could gain admittance here, because this entrance was meant solely for you.” 13 This suggests that it is a personalised Law and this opens up the paradox that every law, that the Law itself, faces: in order for something to be Law, it has to have a certain universality, in that it can be applied to everyone without distinction or discrimination; however each application of the Law is singular, unique and situational.
It is this very paradox between
universality and singularity that Paul de Man reminds us of with 11
ibid. pp.215.
12
ibid. pp.216.
13
ibid. pp.217.
77 reference to the tension that lies between grammar and figurative language:
The system of relationships that generate the text and that functions independently of its referential meaning is its grammar. To the extent that a text is grammatical, it is a logical code or a machine. And there can be no agrammatical text, as the most nongrammatical of poets, Mallarmé, was the first to acknowledge. Any nongrammatical text will always be read as a deviation from an assumed grammatical norm. But just as no text is conceivable without grammar, no grammar is conceivable without the suspension of referential meaning. Just as no law can ever be written unless one suspends any consideration of applicability to a particular entity including, of course, oneself, grammatical logic can function only if its referential consequences are disregarded.
On the other hand, no law is a law unless it also applies to particular individuals. It cannot be left hanging in the air, in the abstraction of its generality.
Only by thus referring back to
particular praxis can the justice of the law be tested, exactly as the justesse of any statement can
78 only be tested by its referential verifiability, or by deviation from its verification. … There can be no text without grammar: the logic of grammar generates texts only in the absence of referential meaning, but every text generates a referent that subverts the grammatical principle to which it owed its constitution. 14
In other words, we can call text any entity that can be considered from such a double perspective: as a generative, open minded, non-referential grammatical system and as a figural system closed off by a transcendental signification that subverts the grammatical code to which the text owes its existence. The “definition” of the text also states the impossibility of its existence and prefigures the allegorical narratives of this impossibility.
A text is defined by the necessity of considering a statement, at the same time, as performative and 14
Paul de Man. (1979). Allegories of Reading. pp.268-69.
Since one can never escape from grammar, as any text, even a “nongrammatical text will always be read as a deviation from an assumed grammatical form,” this suggests that grammar itself is a base assumption of language. This is why de Man has to ultimately rely on Mallarmé’s acknowledgment: one cannot prove the existence of grammar; it is an assumption, doxa.
79 constative, and the logical tension between figure and grammar is repeated in the impossibility of distinguishing two linguistic functions which are not necessarily compatible. It seems that as soon as a text knows what it states, it can only act deceptively … and if a text does not act, it cannot state what it knows. 15
Hence, at best the Law can only be known—if that term can even be used in the first place—at the very moment in which it is applied; to the man, to K, to you: the Law can only be glimpsed by the effects it has on one, but can never be known as such. This is precisely why the priest tells K, “you don’t have to consider everything as true, you just have to consider it as necessary”: it is not so much that one cannot tell between what is true or not (which is the misunderstanding that K has in thinking that “lies are made into a universal system” 16 ) but more radically that each truth—and by extension each lie—is only provisional, situational, singular. It is the situationality of the Law, of each positing of the Law, that allows the “commentators [to] tell us: the correct understanding of a matter and misunderstanding the matter are not mutually exclusive.” 17
In fact, one can only guess at best
whether it is a correct understanding, which suggests that every 15
ibid. pp.270. italics from source.
16
Franz Kafka. (1998). The Trial. pp.223.
17
ibid. pp.219.
80 misunderstanding is not only potentially a correct understanding, but that it is impossible to distinguish between them in the first place: one might even posit that within every understanding lies a misunderstanding. It is for this reason that even the executer of the Law remains blind to it: all the doorkeeper is doing is carrying out the Law in that particular situation, the situation of the Law being “solely for you”; in other words, the only knowledge that the executer of the Law has is of its effects; the only time that the executer knows of the Law is at the very moment (s)he is executing it.
This undiscernability of the Law is precisely the problem the disciples are facing when Jesus of Nazareth commands them to give up everything “for the sake of my name.”
The
undiscernability of the Law is the very same problem that Jesus faces. This is why, when pressed by the mother of James and John to “promise that these two sons of mine may sit one at your right hand and the other at your left,” his response is “these are not mine to grant; they belong to those to whom they have been allotted by my Father.” 18 This suggests that not only is the power to grant the seats beyond him, which means that his powers are limited by his duty on earth (much like the doorkeeper), but that the will of the Father is also beyond his knowledge: both the source of Jesus’ power and the exact extent of it is unknown to him. Hence, strictly speaking, the status of his statement to the 18
Matthew 20: 20-23.
81 disciples is one of a promise: since he is unable to know either the extent of his powers, and his influence on the after-life, nor the very source of the powers itself, this means that his statement, which sounds like a contractual statement, is actually unverifiable. And it is for this reason that Jesus has to rely on the metaphor “my name”: it is only with this catachrestic metaphor in place that the statement can hold—by making it completely unverifiable, the statement can no longer be verified as true or false, “but only necessary.”
Since the statement made by Jesus to his disciples is ultimately unverifiable, this means that it is not a direct exchange that has to be made in order to be “repaid a hundred times over, and also inherit eternal life.” This suggests instead, that the exchange is symbolic; where the quantification of the exchange is not as important as the ritual of exchange itself. This however does not mean that there is no element of a potlatch in place, an element of excess at play; after all one must still give up everything. However, the only way that one can give everything (which is not a quantifiable amount much the same way as how ‘nothing’ cannot be accounted for) is through a ritualistic exchange.
This brings us back to the element of the third that Marcel Mauss speaks of: not only is it “not individuals but collectivities that impose obligations of exchange and contract upon each
82 other,” 19 but these obligations and contracts are ultimately unknowable outside the moment of exchange; the social rituals are situational, akin to the singular application of the Law as opposed to the Law in general (which can only be a figure). Hence, any prescribed contract can only be made by effacing the situation of the exchange: for if the Law is unknowable, one can only prescribe if one simulates the very Law itself, and then applies it in every situation.
By doing so, one is effacing the singularity of the
situation.
If there is no effacement—if the singularity of the
situation is preserved—then one must admit that there is neither precedence for the exchange, nor is there any repeatability to it.
And this is the point where one is faced with a paradoxical situation. If there is neither repeatability nor prescription to the exchange, this means that it cannot be learned or taught. However, for it to be a social exchange there must clearly be some level of universality (at least within a particular community or group) involved.
It is for this reason that the exchange is symbolic: since each situation is singular, there can be no flattening of differences that is required in a standard economic exchange (where the abstraction takes the form of an exchange-value that is simulated); instead, there is an exchange that is ritualistic, formal, nothing more—and nothing less—than a form. This is the only way in which the 19
Marcel Mauss. (2006). The Gift. pp.6.
83 system of exchange can be a “system of total services.” 20 If there was an inherent value—or meaning—within the exchange, the singularity of the parties would ensure that the exchange would be impossible. Obviously this is not the case: this suggests that it is an impossible exchange that takes place; an exchange that occurs in spite of its impossibility. The only way in which this can take place is if the exchange is purely formal—where the form of the exchange is everything—and in which each individual component is meaningless except for its role within the ritual itself.
This is what Georges Bataille speaks of when he describes a general economy: everything has its role in relation with every other thing, but it has no inherent meaning: in other words, it is the significance of the object and not its signification that is of interest. This is why in Bataille’s conception of the economy, sacrifice plays such a crucial role, where the “essence is to consume profitlessly”: 21 this is where each exchange is beyond rationality, beyond calculability, beyond reason itself, “unsubordinated to the ‘real’ order and occupied only with the present.” 22
Sacrifice destroys that which it consecrates.
It
does not have to destroy as fire does; only the tie that connected the offering to the world of 20
ibid. pp.7.
21
Georges Bataille. (1991). The Accursed Share Vol 1. pp.58. italics from source.
22
ibid. pp.58.
84 profitable activity is severed, but this separation has the sense of a definitive consumption; the consecrated offering cannot be restored to the real order. 23
Since there is no need for a physical change in the object of sacrifice—“it does not have to destroy as fire does”—this suggests that the tie that is severed is ruptured symbolically. Hence, there is an aspect of a trans-substantiation in this sacrifice: the form remains the same; in fact there is no perceivable change—this is the point at which all phenomenology fails—but there is always already a difference, an absolute separation from the “real order,” from logic, calculability, reason. The object of sacrifice,
the victim [,] is a surplus taken from the mass of useful wealth … Once chosen, he is the accursed share, destined for violent consumption. But the curse tears him away from the order of things … 24
And it is this tearing away from the order of things—the order of rationality—that “restores to the sacred world that which servile use has degraded, rendered profane.” 25 For only when it is no longer useful, when it is no longer abstracted—subjected, 23
ibid. pp.58. italics from source.
24
ibid. pp.59. italics from source. [parenthesis my addition].
25
ibid. pp.55.
85 subsumed under—merely a use-value, can the object be an object as such, can a subject be a subject as such; be a singularity. It is perhaps ironic that only within a general economy is singularity preserved: however one must remember that the object—or subject—of the sacrifice is never calculated; its worth is never in question, nor even taken into account. In fact it is never so much who or what is sacrificed, but the fact that there is a sacrifice. We find in The Accursed Share many tales of sacrifice and in each of them there is a sense of reversibility. For instance, in Aztec wars, all deaths were seen as a sacrifice to the gods: if victorious, the Aztecs would sacrifice the prisoners; however,
if the warrior had himself been overcome instead of returning a victor, his death on the field of battle would have had the same meaning as the ritual sacrifice of his prisoner: it would have satisfied the hungry gods. 26
It is this reversibility that can also be found in the tale of Abraham and Isaac. 27 When Abraham brings Isaac up to Mount Moriah as a sacrifice to the Lord, he is asked by Isaac, “… where is the lamb for the sacrifice?” His answer is, “God himself will provide one.” Unknown to Abraham at the time, his response (if one can call it a response at all for it was an empty statement; it was neither a truth 26
ibid. pp.54.
27
Genesis 22: 1-19
86 nor a lie to Isaac), 28 is precisely what occurs; it is God who provides the object for the holocaust—the ram that is burnt in Isaac’s place. Hence, at the moment in which he raises his knife to sacrifice Isaac, Abraham has already killed him—this is the sacrifice that God required from him: it is an objectless sacrifice; the act of killing Isaac is the sacrifice; this is the kind of sacrifice that “does not have to destroy as fire does.” It does not matter whether Isaac, or the ram, dies: in either case it “would have satisfied the hungry gods.” This suggests that the sacrifice itself is a ritual, is purely formal; the exact object—whether it is a warrior or the prisoner—is irrelevant.
As long as it is “for the sake of my name.”
However, one must never forget that it is God who provides the object for the holocaust. This brings us back to the reciprocity that is inherent in the exchange: if you give up everything, “for the sake of my name, [you] will be repaid a hundred times over, and also inherit eternal life.” Marcel Mauss speaks of the reciprocity as an obligation; this system in fact is a “total services of an agonistic type” which in fact is a “struggle … to establish a hierarchy
28 One can posit that at this point, Abraham demonstrates a true understanding of communication: it is not so much what is said—in fact the signification of what is said is sometimes completely irrelevant—but that it is said. For it would have been completely cruel of him to have told Isaac the truth (‘you are the ram’). Nor would it have sufficed for him to have stayed silent. By answering Isaac with a performative statement, Abraham told neither the truth nor lied: all he did was utter a statement that should be considered as necessary.
87 amongst themselves from which [they] will benefit at a later date.” 29 This is echoed by Georges Bataille when he points out that
potlatch is, like commerce, a means of circulating wealth, but it excludes bargaining.
More often
than not it is the solemn giving of considerable riches, offered … for the purpose of humiliating, challenging and obligating … The recipient has to erase the humiliation and take up the challenge; he must satisfy the obligation that was contracted by accepting. 30
Hence, “giving [or sacrifice, which encompasses destruction] must become acquiring a power.” 31 But since there is no necessity of an object in the sacrifice—there does not have to be a gift in the giving—this suggests that the act of giving itself is a stake, or more precisely, each time there is an act of giving, the stakes in the game are raised.
However, one must consider the fact that even though there is a reciprocation, even though there must be a response to the challenge, this does not mean that the rules for the exchange are 29
Marcel Mauss. (2006). The Gift. pp.8-9. italics from source.
30
Georges Bataille. (1991). The Accursed Share Vol 1. pp.67. italics from source.
31
ibid. pp.69. italics from source.
88 laid out, are known. The only rule that is known is that one must respond, with a stake that is at least as much, if not more. This suggests that one knows that one must play a stake, also that something is at stake, but that what the stake is remains unknown, unknowable; until the moment it is played, what the stake is remains a secret.
Seductive secrets It is at this point that we turn to Jean Baudrillard and his reading of the stakes in seduction, the very stakes involved in seduction, and the stake that is seduction, where “seduction takes the form of an enigma to be solved … it is an enigmatic duel, one that the seduction solves, but without disclosing the secret.” 32 This is why the game in The Seducer’s Diary is played out in writing, in a series of letters that go back and forth, as the
dead letter of writing often has much more influence that the living word.
A letter is a
secretive communication; one is master of the situation, feels no pressure from anyone’s actual presence … precisely at those moments … it has the strongest effect … 33
32
Jean Baudrillard. (1990). Seduction. pp.82. italics from source.
33
Søren Kierkegaard. (1997). The Seducer’s Diary. pp.158-159.
89
The game—and the challenge—between Johannes and Cordelia is played out through the letters, in the letters. However, all one sees—and in fact all either of them sees—is the letters themselves: the challenge remains implicit, hidden; both of them play this game whilst remaining blind to what the other means. At best, all either one can do is posit the potential meaning of the challenge in the letters—and it is this unknowability that captures their imagination.
What remains secret is thus the meaning of the
challenge itself: all that is known is that there is a challenge, a duel, a duality of the duel, but there is nothing beyond that—in that— that can be known. This is because,
a challenge terminates all contracts and exchanges regulated by the law (whether the law of nature or value), substituting a highly conventional and ritualized pact, with an unceasing obligation to respond and respond in spades—an obligation that is governed by a fundamental game rule, and proceeds in accord with its own rhythm.
In
contrast to the law, which is always inscribed in stone or the sky, or in one’s heart, this fundamental rule never needs to be stated; indeed it must never be stated. It is immediate, immanent
90 and inevitable (whereas the law is transcendent and explicit). 34
Hence, the only thing that can be known is the fact that there is a reciprocity, and that this is obligatory. Exactly what has to be reciprocated is unknown, and perhaps only known at the moment of reciprocation itself; and even at that point, all that is known is that the stakes have been raised, and another stake has been entered into the game: the duality is re-established and the duel is on again. In this manner, the stake remains a pure signifier— completely and utterly meaningless except for the fact that it signifies. But it is not as if a signifier can remain pure; the signifier is precisely the stake that calls forth the signified. Moreover, it is not as if the one that puts forth the signifier provides the signified: the meaning that is imbued into the signifier is precisely the response to the challenge; this is the point where the duel is answered, where the duality is fulfilled, where the duel is reissued. This is the reason why in the end, God provides the ram for the holocaust. When S(H)e calls forth “Abraham, Abraham … take your only child Isaac, whom you love, and go to the land of Moriah … offer him as a burnt offering,” this is a “test” in the form of a challenge: Abraham’s response is to imbue this call, this signifier, with meaning (murder Isaac), and hence, he raises the stakes by “[stretching] out his hand and [seizing] the knife to kill his son.” This challenge—I will obey your word literally, even if it
34
Jean Baudrillard. (1990). Seduction. pp.82. italics from source.
91 means murdering my son—then obliges yet another response, that of God providing the ram for the sacrifice: Abraham had already answered the test, responded to the challenge; it was then irrelevant who, or what, is sacrificed as “now I know you fear God.” 35
However, one must also consider this: Abraham answers the test, the challenge in a rather unconventional way.
Instead of
responding in strength (assuming he had a choice, he could have decided to respond to Isaac and ignore Yahweh), he chooses to do so by weakness (giving in to Yahweh’s Will respective of his own; after all, Isaac is his “only child … whom [he] love[s]”). Instead of challenging Yahweh, Abraham seduces Yahweh: instead of drawing God into his “area of strength, which, in view of the potential for unlimited escalation” 36 (which of course he would certainly lose), he seduces by drawing
the other into [his] area of weakness, which is also his or her area of weakness. weakness,
an
incalculable
A calculated weakness:
one
challenges the other to be taken in … To seduce is to appear weak. To seduce is to render weak. We seduce with our weakness, never with strong signs or powers.
In seduction we enact this
35
Genesis 22: 1-19.
36
Jean Baudrillard. (1990). Seduction. pp.83.
92 weakness, and this is what gives seduction its strength. 37
It is not as if Abraham knew for sure what God’s weakness is— that would be impossible. But instead of a direct challenge, he chooses to submit, to obey, and this is precisely the weakness of Yahweh: his test was a test of obedience—will you give up everything “for the sake of my name”—after-which Yahweh responds by not only merely providing a substitute for Isaac, but also rewarding Abraham’s lineage with mastery over all the nations. 38
If one posits that Abraham triumphs by seduction, this opens the consideration that it is the one who responds to the gift that decides what is exchanged: even as you give up everything “for the sake of my name,” it is ultimately I who decide whether you will be “repaid a hundred times over, and also inherit eternal life.” And since there is a gap between the gift of Abraham and the return of the gift, this suggests that there is an element of time— temporality—in the exchange. As Slavoj Žižek points out,
ibid. pp.83. “I swear by my own self—it is Yahweh who speaks—because you have done this, because you have not refused me your son, your only son, I will shower blessings on you, I will make your descendants as many as the stars of heaven and the grains of sand on the seashore. Your descendants shall gain possession of the gates of their enemies. All the nations of the earth shall bless themselves by your descendants, as a reward for your obedience.” (Genesis 22: 15-19. italics my addition). 37 38
93 the key feature that opposes potlatch to direct market exchange is thus the temporal dimension. In market exchange, the two complementary acts occur simultaneously (I pay and I get what I paid for), so that the act of exchange does not lead to a permanent social bond, but just to a momentary exchange between atomized individuals who, immediately afterwards, return to their solitude. In potlatch, on the contrary, the time elapsed between me giving a gift and the other side returning it to me creates a social link which lasts (for a time, at least): we are all linked together with bonds of debt. 39
Hence, when Abraham raises his knife above his head to murder Isaac, there is a moment when the singularity of his action (he has no idea what Yahweh’s response would be) and the plurality of the situation (there is already a relationality—a duality—between Abraham and God at play) coincide. And in this situation lies precisely the paradoxical nature of the gift: in order to be a true gift, one must give without any expectation of reciprocity, yet at the same time, every gift can only occur in a social situation (there needs to be someone to give it to) and hence, the moment one
39 Slavoj Žižek. The Secret Clauses of the Liberal Utopia. Law and Critique Keynote Lecture. 2007 Critical Legal Conference. Birkbeck: University of London (13 September 2007).
94 gives, one is already in a game of reciprocation; one gives in the full knowledge of the obligation of the other to respond.
Is this not exactly the same paradox that K is faced with: he is confronted by a Law that is unknowable to him, yet at the same time he is always already in relation to and with the Law. This suggests that K is in a relationality with the Law that precedes both his subjectivity and the Law: it is a relationality that is beyond his understanding, and in fact any possibility of understanding itself.
Hence, if one is looking for a face behind the law, an
overarching logic that one can comprehend, and therefore combat (as K is attempting to do throughout The Trial), one would be sorely disappointed. As Baudrillard beautifully encapsulates it,
there is no God behind the images, and the very nothingness they conceal must remain a secret. The
seduction,
fascination,
and
‘aesthetic’
attraction of all the great imaginary processes lies here: in the effacing of every instance, be it the face and every substance, be it desire—in the artificial perfection of the sign. 40
In fact, this is precisely the strategy of the Law itself: by remaining absolutely meaningless, by remaining a pure signifier, the Law draws K into its very void, and sutures K into itself. And like the 40
Jean Baudrillard. (1990). Seduction. pp.94.
95 man from the country who stands before the Law, K constantly remains there, until the very end, his very end. After all, one must never forget that “the great stars or seductresses never dazzle because of their talent or intelligence, but because of their absence.” 41
Here, we should take a short detour to consider the tale of Ra. When poisoned by Isis to extract the ultimate secret (his true name), he reveals to her—in order to obtain the antidote—his full name, his real name: Amen-Ra. The secret of his name: the secret that is his name. It is not so much what was concealed that is the secret, for everyone always already knew his name, but that his name itself is secret. After all, Amen-Ra is simply the affirmation of his name: in effect, the secret of Ra’s name is ‘I am Ra’. This shows that the power of a secret lies—are secrets ever about the truth— not so much in its content, but in the fact that it is a secret; the power of a secret lies in the fact that it is a secret in form. If one maintains that the secret lies in the content, one is confronted with a paradoxical situation: if it is an absolute secret, you would not— could not—have known of its existence in the first place; the fact that you know of it suggests that there is a relationality to secrets; however, if you knew of the contents of that secret, it would once again no longer be secret. Therefore, it is a situation where one knows of the existence of a secret, yet is not privy to what it is: hence, the secret lies in its form as a secret; it lies in the 41
ibid. pp.96.
96 relationality between two (or more) where all that is known is that something is not known.
And here, we have to revisit Matthew again for a crucial phrase with regards to rewards, with regards to the response to the gift: “and your Father who sees all that is done in secret will reward you.” 42 This opens the register of the privileging of ‘sight’ in secrets: instead of the other senses of touching, smelling, or hearing, the secret is entrusted to sight, to observation, to the gaze. Perhaps this is the reason why God is usually depicted as an eye, as an All-Seeing God. But this opens the question of, ‘if something is seen, does it still remain a secret’? After all, a secret presupposes that no other person has a knowledge of it: this suggests then, the secret that is seen by the Father is either known only to the Father and not to you (hence, retaining the structure of a secret; something that is only known to one and not any other), or that the secret is of a symbolic order (a secret in form but not necessarily in content). Perhaps the two are not all that different: after all, if one has to give up everything “for the sake of my name,” this suggests that there is an element of free will at play here. However, since this ‘everything’ is unknowable, this suggests that it remains secret from the person. Hence, what the person has to do is to give up everything ‘as if’ (s)he knows what this everything is: this is what the secret is; (s)he must act like (s)he knows what to do whilst never actually knowing. This is the same structure that we see in
42
This phrase in its various forms is repeated throughout Matthew 6.
97 the paradox of the King: he is only King because his subjects treat him as a King. However, in order for the subjects to do so, they must continue to act as if they believe there is an inherent kingliness in him. This might be why all Kings have to ascribe their King-ship to an external element (tradition, God, etc).
This
suggests that the power of a King is the result of a symbolic pact between the King and his subjects: he is King because they treat him as King; they are his subjects because he is King. However this pact must never be brought to light, must never be made known—this is the lesson of the tale The Emperor’s New Clothes— otherwise not only is the illusion shattered, but the entire structure of the King and his power crumbles. This is why “the nothingness that they conceal must remain a secret.” It is not so much to protect the image—without a referent, the image would collapse— but more crucially, to protect the very idea of God itself: for if the secret that “there is no God behind the images” is uttered, the form of the image is shattered, and God is revealed to be that very nothingness. What one must do is give up everything “for the sake of my name” as if one knows what this ‘everything’ is (otherwise the element of free will is gone; one can’t freely do what one doesn’t know), whilst allowing the Father to see in secret, and who will reward you “a hundred-fold.”
Since the structure of a gift is symbolic, this suggests that we are in the realm of a code. And not only is there the issue of temporality in this exchange, but more importantly, due to this
98 gap between the giving and the reciprocity, there is always already an element of unknowability—of not knowing what is exchanged in the exchange—that is part of the exchange itself.
It is this
unknowability that resides in the giving that suggests the structure of the gift is pre-relational: not only is it not a phenomenon, but it undoes the very possibility of phenomenology itself. Hence, it is this position of giving, this readiness to give that precedes everything—all gifts—and it is for this reason that one can give everything “for the sake of my name” without even knowing what one is giving up, without knowing whether what one is giving up will even be recognised, “seen in secret,” let alone rewarded.
The realm of the code: not merely the codified relationality of the gift, but the very relationality of the gift itself as a code. And since there is always an unknowability that is part of the gift itself, what we are left with is the giving—the giving of the gift—giving itself as the code; all we know is that there is a giving and that there is—there must be—a response to this gift. All that can be known is the obligation of reciprocity, and the necessity of the counter-gift.
One must never forget the challenge that resounds in every gift. Hence, giving everything “for the sake of my name” is also a challenge to God, a challenge that is reciprocated by a reward of “a hundred-fold” and more than that, by “eternal life” itself. And this is the way that God attempts to exert Her superiority over
99 mankind; by raising the stakes to one that cannot be matched, cannot be reciprocated. Except through death itself. With the counter-gift of “eternal life” all that is left for man, all that man can do, must do—reciprocity is not a choice—is to counter with her death, her life. But
death ought never to be understood as the real event that affects a subject or a body, but as a form in which the determinacy of the subject and of value is lost. The demand of reversibility puts an end to determinacy and indeterminacy at the same time. 43
This is why the only strategy is catastrophic, and not dialectical at all. Things must be pushed to the limit, where quite naturally they collapse and are inverted … Death must be played against death: a radical tautology that makes the system’s own logic the ultimate weapon. 44
Perhaps this is the very lesson of Franz Kafka’s The Trial: K’s mistake was to contest the Law directly, to attempt to engage it, reason with it, converse with it dialectically; the only thing that he could have done was to engage it on a symbolic level, and this is 43 Jean Baudrillard. (2007). Symbolic Exchange and Death. Endnote. pp.5. italics from source. 44
ibid. pp.4. italics from source.
100 why the only thing the man from the country can do is to die. Not because there is no answer, but that the Law is always already open, and only for him: he is always already before the Law and subject to all its powers: the only way in which he can counter the Law is not to assert his subjectivity but rather to offer the Law itself its fantasy—objectifying him(self). And the moment the man from the country makes himself an absolute object, the Law no longer has any power over him.
But one must never forget, this is not a death that is logical, in reason, with reason, but death as a pure unknown, an absolute unknowable.
This suggests that death is both un-nameable (after all we cannot ever know what it means) but also clearly can be named at the same time. But before we enter into thinking what death is, what death is as such, perhaps we need to take a little detour into names, into naming, into the death of names. After all, one cannot forget the irony that Peter, who is named the first Pope, is the same Peter that denies Jesus of Nazareth three times, that denies the name of Jesus.
101
3.5 Requiem for a name Goodbye Norma Jean Though I never knew you at all You had the grace to hold yourself While those around you crawled They crawled out of the woodwork And they whispered into your brain They set you on the treadmill And they made you change your name. - Elton John & Bernie Taupin 1 If it doesn’t happen on television, it doesn’t happen. - Pope John Paul II 2
Karol; a forgotten name: no longer a singularity that resides in a man.
A name that has been trans-substantiated into pure
nothingness: 3 perhaps then, no longer a name?
The name Karol
1 Elton John (music) & Bernie Taupin (lyrics). (1973). “Candle in the Wind” in Goodbye Yellow Brick Road. 2 When asked by an American Cardinal whether a television station from his city could record his presentation, John Paul II famously answered, “Of course! If it doesn’t happen on television, it doesn’t happen.” This is recounted in the article “John Paul II’s Relation with TV in Focus”—as part of coverage of the congress entitled John Paul II: Religious Event, Television Event—in Zenit: the world seen from Rome (6 April, 2006) which can be found at http://www.zenit.org/article15731?l=english 3 In some sense transubstantiation is always into nothingness—a body that is always already absent, but at the same time very much present—not so much in the
102 has not just faded into obscure memory; it might as well never have existed. In the minds of the faithful, there has always only been John Paul II—there was a being before October 16, 1978, but that was not Karol Jozef Wojtyla, but merely a pre-John Paul II; a certain someone preparing to become John Paul II and nothing more.
As we recall once again the tale of Ra, we remember the power that resides in a name. With the fully affirmed knowledge of his real name, all of Ra’s knowledge and power is transferred to Isis. It is this very power that the Papal-dom understands, and this is precisely why the name of Karol Wojtyla has to be buried: it is not as if no one knows John Paul II’s real name, but the fact is that it had to be never again be acknowledged. 4
One sees a manifestation of this phenomenon in the role nicknames play in society.
In some cultures, everyone knows the
person’s nick-name whilst only a select few know her/ his given name (Brazil, and many tribal cultures for instance), whilst in others the reverse is true (for instance most of Western Europe and material reality of the bread but rather in the memory (“Do this in memory of me”) which then becomes very much a part of the bread itself (or the bread becomes a part of the memory). In this sense, transubstantiation is a state of (n)either presence (n)or absence. The name of Karol Josef Wojtyla—always already a memory of (n)either the past (n)or the future—embodied in the material (non) body of John Paul II. 4 Similarly, another acknowledgement of the power of the name occurs during Yom Kippur, where only the High Priest can utter the secret name of God, and only on that afternoon. He would enter the Holy of Holies and there utter the name, having a rope tied to his ankle in case he died in there whilst uttering the secret name. The fact that everyone knows the secret name of God is un-important: its power lies in its utterance.
103 some tribes in Central Australia). In either case, the logic remains the same: one of the names remains secret (and only revealed to those whom are deemed close, or worthy). The knowledge of that particular (nick)name functions as a possession of a particular power over that person.
The Pope: Marilyn Monroe: and the hyper-reality of the sign. This is where the sign of Marilyn (in exactly the same manner as the sign of the Pope) has become more real than the person. Does anyone really care who Norma Jean is? In our search for Norma Jean, we might as well continue waiting for Godot. In fact, in the case of Godot, since there is no referentiality to the name, as long as someone claims to be Godot, you can choose to believe him, and he would be so. However in the case of Norma Jean, since there is an external referent, one could not name just anyone else as her. And since Norma Jean is now a spectre that is hidden away by the sign of Marilyn Monroe, it stands to reason that she will never arrive; Norma Jean is eternally deferred. Is this not the same in the case of the Pope? The sign of the Pope—and the performance of the sign— is more real than the man behind the sign. In fact, there might as well not be a man. Perhaps a literal reading of the Pope as an embodiment of St. Peter might be the most precise: the sign of the Pope itself is all that matters; the man is already dead. Each and every new Pope is a remix of St. Peter: DJ Vatican spins the same track with different layers and beats. At the advent of every new manifestation of St. Peter, the proclamation, “Annuntio vobis
104 gaudium magnum! Habemus Papam! ("I announce to you a great joy! We have a Pope!"), is in effect the official requiem to the man, along with his birth name.
It is completely appropriate that St Peter is regarded as the first Pope. After all, who is more apt to fill this role than the great denier himself.
How else can one make any claim to God (or
knowledge of God and Her Will—which is completely unknowable to begin with) unless one has already replaced God. It is not so much the usual claim that the Pope has murdered God in order to usurp Her place (for how is this even possible; only the vanity of humankind will allow us to entertain this thought) but rather that the Pope (and any other ‘religious’ leader that makes a claim to God’s Will) has hidden away God within images. Even Islam, which tries to hide this fact by banning any representation of Allah, has succumbed to this temptation: for without this murder, the place of the Ayatollah (or any Imam; for the position of Ayatollah is merely a public perception of the greatness of any particular Imam to begin with) cannot hold. By claiming to be the executor of the will of Allah (who is the legislator and judiciary of everything on earth) the Ayatollah is in effect deeming himself the person that knows Allah’s will.
In order to execute Allah’s ‘will’, what the
Ayatollah has to first do, is execute Allah. Through the constant invoking of ‘god’, God Herself has been hidden within the system of objects (and representations): in this manner, there is no way (as if there ever was to begin with) of telling God from god(s); and it is
105 through this simulated ability to distinguish them, that the Pope wields power.
The creation of idols is the creation of the system of objects into which God disappears. For there is never a singular idol: idols instead exist within their own network—for instance the multiple idols of Jesus (Sacred Heart, Santa Jesu … etc)—each of them connected yet separate from the others. The effect of this is that their meanings rely on each other: the perverse core 5 that holds up this structure is the meaning of God Herself (or in more precise terms, that God has a meaning; and more so, one that can be known). However, to maintain the system, the perverse core must always be kept external to, always be kept secret from, the system. Hence, God is the absolute absent other in this system that purports to be about Her. One can see this occur especially when Catholics (and Muslims) make their pilgrimages to the ‘holy land(s)’: it is akin to a collector who is anxious to gather all the different pieces in the series, often not for the piece itself; many a collector has
5 ‘Perverse core’ is used in the sense of the underlying premise that is used to hold up a system of logic. It is always already external to that particular system of logic—neither provable nor un-provable within it; it must be assumed. For instance, the perverse core of the logic ‘murder is illegal’ is that the state must be able to murder the one who breaks that law: the murder by the state is neither legal nor illegal; it is extra-legal. In Giorgio Agamben’s conception, this is termed the “state of exception” that is integral to any logic of sovereignty; in fact any decision is always already made in a state of exception.
Agamben’s thought on this can be found amongst other places in Giorgio Agamben. (1998). Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. One of many places that the term ‘perverse core’ can be found in this context is Slavoj Žižek. (2003). The Puppet and the Dwarf: the Perverse Core of Christianity.
106 purchased a piece in the series which (s)he has absolutely no interest in except for the fact that it is part of the series itself. What drives the collector is the fact that the series is incomplete: often the moment the series is complete, the collector immediately loses all interest in it. What prevents religious pilgrims from losing interest in their collection is the fact that the missing piece—God Herself— can never be found, is eternally absent. 6
In this manner, the
murder of God is enacted, not by killing God Herself, but by ensuring Her exclusion from the images; by making an image of Her. This is why God always has to have a name, is always given a name, even if it is a name that refers to nothing, especially if it is a name that refers to nothing. The name of God is precisely the name of nothingness: by maintaining this secret, what is maintained is not only the image of God, but God Herself.
But is it not that the official requirement to be the Pope, is death? For who would willingly give all that reverence to a man; but to the simulacrum of a man, certainly. This is why,
for a long time now a head of state—no matter which one—is nothing but the simulacrum of himself, and only that gives him power and the quality to govern. No one would grant the least consent, the least devotion to a real person. It is to 6 An excellent meditation on ‘collectors’ and ‘gathering’ can be found in Jean Baudrillard. (1968). The System of Objects. pp.91-114.
107 his double, he being always already dead, to which allegiance is given. 7
In the same way, the King’s power lies in his sceptre and crown; power lies not in the person, but in the sign(s) displayed. Since traditionally no one could look a King in the face—those that could were but few—no one really knew what the King looked like. In effect, the person that held the sceptre and wore the crown on his head was the King. Hence, it is not the person who is King, but the person that displays the correct sign(s) that is King: the ‘kingliness’ of the person resides not in him but in the sign(s): the person no longer matters; he might as well be dead.
8
In fact, it is probably
better that he is dead: no one would bow before another person; but a spectre, that is another matter completely. It is for this reason that the ghost in Hamlet has no name—this ensures that he is the eternal source of power. The spectre of the king continues to haunt the kingdom; it is still his kingdom even and perhaps especially because he is dead. This is also why Hamlet’s response to the ghost’s cry to “re-member me” is perfect: by writing him down, Hamlet ensures that the spectre enters the realm of re-presentation; is forever re-producible, endlessly re-producible, and hence, eternal. The answer to the question, ‘What makes a king, King?’ is 7 Jean Baudrillard. (1994). “The Precession of Simulacra” in Simulacra and Simulation. pp. 25-26. 8 This beautifully recounted in the tale “A King Listens” which can be found in Italo Calvino. (1988). Under a Jaguar’s Smile.
108 ‘you’. But not in the acknowledgment of the superiority of the person—for if that were so, all jokes about the British royal family would be impossible—but rather in the acknowledgment of the crown—literally the object on the head—itself.
Once again we turn to The Emperor’s New Clothes for a lesson: it is not that the Emperor had so much power that the people did not dare to point out that he wasn’t wearing any clothes (and that it took an ‘innocent’ child to point out the truth), but rather that his power was in the fact that everyone agreed on the fact that he was wearing his ‘new clothes’. It is the child that reveals the perverse core of the King’s power: it is completely external to the person of the King (or even the sign systems in the form of the crown); power rests in the subjects themselves. This is the paradox of power: the subjects must first conceive of themselves as subjects, in order to be subjected. However the point of transgression is not a resistance of this subjectification—that would only result in the crushing of the resistor via the network (the other subjects who remain as such), barring the unique situation of a critical mass. But even with a critical mass, the outcome is usually merely the replacement of that power with another which is exactly the same: this is what revolutions are about; moving about and around in circles. This is why one king (or leader, or even political party) can often be replaced by another without any problem; oftentimes life goes on as usual the very next day after a ‘major’ revolution. As long as the signs displayed are the same, it makes absolutely no difference who
109 is ‘wearing’ the signs. This was why Mikhail Gorbachev provided such a shock to the system: the person remained the same, but the signs were changed from the Secretary-General as the Absolute Head, to a Secretary-General who was open and receptive to external influences. And it is this changing of the sign system which the system cannot handle. This is exactly the same problem that is presented in The Emperor’s New Clothes: the king is the same person, all that he is missing are his signs of power; he literally stripped himself of them: this is why the moment the child points to the missing signs, everything collapses.
A truly radical solution would be to completely subjectify yourself. All power assumes the resistance of the subject; without that, there is no subjectification in the first place. By completely subjectifying oneself, one becomes an object: this is the nightmare of the dispositif. For how can one enact a disciplinary mechanism on the subject if (s)he does not mind being disciplined in the first place? This is why the suicide bomber still haunts all attempts at security: what defense is there if death is already accepted by the bomber?
On October 16, 1978, Karol Jozef Wojtyla was proclaimed dead.
On April 2, 2005, reality finally caught up with the Real.
110 Perhaps this is why the death of the Pope was such a traumatic event (the outpouring of emotion throughout the world seems to suggest this). This cannot be for the death of the Pope—for the title never dies; there is merely an Interregnum—but rather for the trauma brought on by the sudden appearance of the Real. This may be why the grief for this particular Pope seems to be greater than for any other; the gap between the Real and the symbolic is wider than ever before (in terms of actual time between the existence of the undead persona—John Paul II—and the real, dead, person). Hence, the greater the trauma of the event: the gap in time had almost allowed us to completely forget the existence of the person; all we had with us was the persona. There has been no other time in history where the sign of the Pope has been spun to this extent. After all, John Paul II is the first TV Pope: for many, all we ever knew of him was what we saw on TV.
Pope John Paul II—the media Pope—the mediated Pope. John Paul II is the perfect simulacrum. Not just more real than real, but in itself the only real (the Other, in this case Karol Wojtyla does not matter any longer; it is no longer even part of our consciousness). But that opens the question of whether it is John Paul II or the Pope that is the simulacrum. Perhaps this is a case of two co-existing at the same time; perhaps a rare moment when the persona (in the form of the name that murders the person) reaches the same level as the position (after all the Pope is the re-incarnation of the position of Peter). For isn’t the name Pope John Paul II really an
111 inter-play of two: the name John Paul II, and the title Pope; the title, the 264th (or 265th if you count Stephen II) version of Peter and the name John Paul II, the reincarnation (or resurrection if you prefer) of Karol Wojtyla. Of course, the fact that one can choose to count Stephen II or not already suggests that recognition is a rather arbitrary process.
At the very moment John Paul II replaced Karol Wojtyla, a singularity was murdered. And in its place was a pseudo-name: this is the exact moment when Karol Wojtyla becomes one in a series of objects known as the Pope. For after all, what is John Paul II but another variation of Peter; another signifier for a constant signified.
We see the Vatican acknowledging the murder of Karol Wojtyla at the funeral of John Paul II. At the very end of the ceremony, the wooden casket is displayed by the pallbearers to the crowd as a final farewell to the Pope (from the very steps which he made his entrance to celebrate his first Papal Mass)—this is the exact moment when the Real hits us; this is the site of the trauma: the moment when the two deaths come together (the virtual one present, the real one always already absent).
The funeral as a
symbolic closing of the life of John Paul II: there was never a need
112 to further acknowledge Karol Wojtyla; his funeral was already held 31 years ago. 9
This is why the funeral required the massive television coverage it received: it was the requiem of the image (the funeral of the pure sign). An ordinary burial would not have sufficed: that would only have been earth covering a corpse, an already dead one at that. This Papal funeral had far more at stake—the death of an image, or in the context of the Church, the death of the image; in some sense, the death of God Herself. What better way to solidify the death of an image than by having it on television? Nothing is solid till it’s on celluloid —Dell Marie Butler 10
How apt that the mediated Pope is buried via transmission—is there any other way? For is it not that this mediated burial ensures the immortality of John Paul II? After all, it is the re-producibility of the transmitted code that allows the image of John Paul II to be reproduced endlessly. But since the last image of John Paul II is the funeral, its endless playing (and re-playing) will also ensure that the death of John Paul II will continually occur—this would be an 9 For if Karol Wojtyla was still alive, would the Pope then not have two birthdays— like the Queen of England (one for the person, and another for the title)—one for Karol and the other for John Paul II? Or even a third birthday for the title if need be. 10 This phrase was uttered as part of a conversation between myself and Dell Butler at the Catholic Junior College in March 2005, Singapore.
113 occurrence of an immortal death. The only way to ensure that a spectre remains dead—and does not return to eternally haunt us by appearing and dis-appearing infinitely—is to continually play out its funeral, to continuously bury it (not in flesh, but certainly in images).
For the moment a spectre returns to haunt, this is a
confirmation of its death. However, when the funeral is replayed endlessly, he is in a state of being (n)either dead (n)or alive.
The trauma comes with the realisation that beneath the surface of Pope John Paul II, there is absolutely nothing. Under the mask of John Paul II, there lies not Karol the man, but instead John Paul II. 11
The true trauma is in the realisation that there is now no
longer a difference between Karol Wojtyla and John Paul II, not because they are one and the same, but because there is now no longer a Karol Wojtyla and that the sign of John Paul II has always already existed (even before 1978). Like the classic horror movie scene where the man finally removes his mask, the true horror is not when the face underneath is different from the mask, but when it is exactly the same as the mask.
Since the mask and the face underneath the mask are indistinguishable, this suggests that both John Paul II and Karol Wojtyla are as real as the other: the sign and the dead man have collapsed into one another.
John Paul II/ Karol Wojtyla have
11 The mask always lies, truth is never the concern of the mask; or if you prefer, the mask is always true; or better still, truth and un-truths are no longer the concern of the mask: it is now a game beyond truths and untruths.
114 become the same; which can only happen if both are nothing to begin with. Either that or the sign of John Paul II acts like a black hole, which then proceeds to suck Karol Wojtyla into it. In either case, the result remains the same: the sign of Karol Wojtyla has disappeared: it no longer matters, and might as well have never existed.
This also accounts for the massive popularity of Pope John Paul II. For if John Paul II/ Karol Wojtyla (we might as well use the names inter-changeably now) are empty signs, this also means that they operate as master-signifiers. In this manner, any signified can be attached to the sign of the Pope. Is it any wonder now that despite mixed feelings about his rather conservative stances (which range from full support to massive resistance), his popularity remains unchanged? It is no surprise that everyone is referring to him as her or his father (is it not the fantasy of every child that the father can be whoever the child wants the father to be). Of course the Pope’s unflinching stance on issues helps support this fantasy: his stances provide the gap, which ensures that the fantasy of a father who is everything you want, can never be fulfilled.
Karol. John Paul II. Pope. A trinity of empty signifiers. Each one reveling in complete absence, yet at the same time complete in themselves. Perhaps this is the true mystery of the Church: the inter-play of the 3 signifiers (which are complete signs in themselves) in which the embodiment of a complete presence lies
115 in absence. As if in Pope John Paul II nee Karol Wojtyla lay the very vision of the 2nd coming.
In this light, it is then truly
appropriate that the next manifestation of Peter, in the form of Benedict XVI, is the former Grand Inquisitor of the church: the 2nd coming—the appearance of the great judge.
Karol Wojtyla: the perfect simulacrum. Not in presence, but rather a hyper-absence; not more real than real, but rather more absent than absent.
A position of complete emptiness because
Karol Wojtyla was never there in the first place: the site for seduction has been set. Complete absence plays out in the presence of an empty sign (John Paul II) and in this emptiness, the public is seduced—John Paul II is to the viewer, anything that the viewer wants him to be; in the words of the supreme seductress, ‘I can be anything you want me to be’.
In fact, the ultra orthodox theological stance that he adopts adds even more to the seduction (whether you agree with him or not is irrelevant); for who actually dares to take a stance anymore. Taking a polemic position, regardless of whether it is absurd or not, seems to do little harm for one’s following: a case in point would be both Osama bin Laden (whether the spectre or the man matters little) 12 and George W. Bush. It is the daringness to be completely 12 In fact, the spectre may be more effective than the man itself. A master-signifier in the form of the name of a dead man is often more useful than the man itself: in this way, the institution can attach any signified to the signifier and use it in any manner it chooses—a perfect situation for branding. A prime example of this would be how the institution of the Church uses the name of Jesus Christ in a completely
116 polemic in this decaffeinated age 13 that allows them to move into the realm of myth: the romanticised hero that literally ‘sticks to his guns’ despite being in disagreement with the rest of the world, and even perhaps that of ‘common sense’. After all, the cowboy is not popular because of his intellectual approach to issues. There is an attraction, dare I say, to the savagery of the person who does, and not the one who ponders, especially in this age of inaction and political correctness.
The Pope is the perfect object: ‘project all your desires onto me and I will fulfill your fantasies (of what you want me to be)’: the law-maker, the man of god, the absolute father, the great absolver of all sins, god herself, etc.
This returns us once again to the
memory of Lucretius, recalls us to the simulacra; a third skin inbetween both parties onto which all communication takes place. In this realm, all is negotiated, all is negotiable, all is posit-able, all is possible.
meaningless way, such that the Jesus standing for peace and the Jesus of the Crusades are not incongruent but can stand side by side perfectly. Another instance would be how the fact that both the Eastern and the Western church operate as the “ONE Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church” despite the universality of the term Catholicism: the term Catholic then becomes an empty term, one that can (ironically—but irony no longer exists in this realm) include an exclusive element. 13 I borrow this term from Slavoj Žižek. His claim is that the West fears Islamic fundamentalism not because it goes contrary to the predominant Christianity but rather because they dare to still believe, or more precisely have the audacity to believe in this post-modern age of Western Buddhism, where the prevailing maxim is, ‘believing in anything is beneath me, I float above it all’.
For the full argument refer to Slavoj Žižek. (2001). On Belief.
117 A measure of salvation Is the complete disappearance of the name Karol Wojtyla, the perfect saving of the name itself? A name that speaks of nothing except itself: a perfect name: a name that no other can have, because it speaks of no other but itself, by speaking of absolutely nothing.
Identities are hinged on the existence of a name: the name acts like an axiom on which an identity is then built around. In the case of any other name, there is an immediate reference to an object (the person) and a process of signification takes place: in fact, this external referent, to which the name is attached, is the hinge upon which it revolves. When that occurs, the signifier (the name) then reaches a death of sorts through the process of signification; a signified is attached to the name (even if there are multiple signifieds, the concept still holds). This end point of signification is reached not because one of the signifieds is more suitable that the others but simply because it is chosen: in this sense, what we are speaking of is not its (semantic) signification, but rather its significance. 14
The ‘meaning’ that arises from this synthesis of
signifier and signified (not a coming together in any definite sense but at least in a momentary one) is akin to the emergent properties
14 An example to illustrate the difference would be when someone asks, ‘what is the meaning of my life?’ The person is not asking for a definition (in the semantic sense) of her/ his life—what the person really wants to know is ‘how important am I’; ‘what is the significance of my existence?’
118 of cellular merging. 15 This perhaps best captures why the name is secret (and even sacred) in many cultures: knowledge of the name is knowledge of the significance of the person. It is for this very reason that the secret addition to Ra’s name is Amen—the truth of his power lies in the significance that he ‘is’ Ra.
In the case of Karol, the death of the man allows the name to be freed from any signified. Or more precisely, his death frees his name, allowing it the full potential to be filled with any signified. Or even more interestingly, his name now has the potential to be filled, and the potential to not-be filled, with any signified; in other words, the name Karol is now in a state of pure potentiality.
In this state of an in-between—name and non-name—the name Karol has the unique ability to be anything for anyone, yet at the same time remains empty in order to be filled by any other. Karol is no longer arrested in the binary of either name or non-name: Karol is (n)either a name (n)or a non-name—a transitory state, a state of temporarily being in permanent flux: a perfect sign—a perfect name.
15 An example of this would be when hydrogen and oxygen merge to form water. In their singular states, oxygen and hydrogen are fuel. However when they synthesise into H 2 O, the emergent property that arises is water, which retards fire.
The link between semantics and emergent properties was discussed by both Manuel de Landa and Carl Mitcham in their respective seminars, Gilles Deleuze and Science and Ideas and Power at the European Graduate School, June 2006.
119 The position of the Pope: a sepulture which holds within it absolutely nothing but the ghost of a name. But precisely through that nothingness, lies hope for all names.
Now we are faced with another problem: in order to think Death as such, we need to speak of it, utter it, name it, but at the same time, the moment we name it, we are no longer speaking of Death as such, but a representation of death, a particular version of death, perhaps only a ghost of death.
Even as we attempt to
approach Death through fiction—through a narrative and accepting, and in fact foregrounding, all the indiscernability and unknowability that it brings—we still have no choice but to name Death, in order to even begin to think of it: after all, one cannot think of nothing, one has no choice but to think through language and with language.
In the light—or perhaps absolute darkness—of this situation, where all we can know is that we might not be able to know anything, we have no choice but to go on, to do the impossible, that is, name Death itself. But this not a naming that is legitimate, verifiable, or has even any possibility of referentiality: instead this is naming as naming, where we attempt to approach Death through a momentary positing, through the fiction of the name ‘Death’.
120
The only way to win is cheat and lay it down before I’m beat, and to another give my seat for that’s the only painless feat. That suicide is painless it brings on many changes And I can take or leave it if I please. Michael Altman & Johnny Mandel: Suicide is Painless
121
On Death (Suicide) or what’s love got to do with it Acting is replaced here by reading. I always think nothing can replace the reading of a text, that no acting can ever equal the effect of a text not memorized. 1
At a glance, these seem like nothing more than the whimsical quips of Marguerite Duras as to how her tale, The Malady of Death, might be performed; an imaginary scenario which has not—and may not—even happen. She even seems to suggest it herself: the opening lines of what seems to be the epilogue to the tale are, “The Malady of Death could be staged in the theatre”; 2 there is no certainty there, either of the fact that it is staged, would be staged, or the venue of its staging. After all, at the end of this same passage of text—which we shall tentatively call the epilogue—she situates it as, “all this by way of a general suggestion.” 3
One of the aspects that her comments, her commentary on her own text, opens is the registers of reading, and the possibility of each reading being a first reading. Not a first reading in the sense 1
Marguerite Duras. (1986). The Malady of Death. pp.57.
2
ibid. pp.56.
3
ibid. pp.60.
122 of a virginal reading, but a first reading as a singular engagement, response, to and with the text, where each reading is potentially different, unique and particular. Perhaps the effect of the text is greater when read, as it foregrounds the forgetting that takes place in each reading: for it is not as if there is no memory in reading; one is able to read only because one has a memory of the words, the rules, the grammar and the language, but at the same time, the fact that there is a possibility of a singular reading suggests that this memory is not perfect, not complete, and not total. One can posit here that it is the effect of this forgetting itself, of the fact that the characters that the text refers to are always already absent, that enhances its effect; that in some way it is the very forgetting of the referent that affects us the most. problems
of
foregrounding
This brings with it all the
forgetting
though:
and
more
pertinently, the problem of whether one can even know that one has forgotten in the first place. Each time one utters the phrase, ‘I forgot’, it has to be in the past as one can only know of this forgetting because one has remembered it: Hence, strictly speaking this utterance is an effect of memory, which then suggests that the phrase is a performative one. More than that, it also suggests that there is no referent to forgetting, that forgetting has no possibility of referentiality: thus there is no verifiability to forgetting: it is a pure name, and each time we utter ‘forget’, we are only able to name it without any possibility of knowing what it is that we are forgetting, or what forgetting itself even means.
123 Perhaps this is why Marguerite Duras is only able to address— or if we want to be more careful, is perhaps why she chose to address—forgetting in a more direct manner—even though it is part of The Malady of Death itself—in the epilogue, in an aside that is not part of the text, but also not entirely separate from the text. In fact, one is never quite sure where and how to situate an epilogue: should it be considered part of the same trajectory of the text, and by extension its narrative; or is it a commentary on the narrative; or is it a separate narrative by itself. And there is no reason to believe that it might not be all three—or even more possibilities, some of which appear to us, and some which remain, at least for the moment, hidden from us—at the same time. This is the very same question that can be asked of titles: what is the status of the title The Malady of Death in relation to the text? The most apparent link is that the title refers to the text: however even if we establish that there is a relationality between the title and the text, by way of naming the text, one cannot say for sure what this relationality is. After all, since every text is open to numerous readings, multiple potentials, the title is always already referring to an infinite variety of possibilities, some present, some absent: one can perhaps say that the title is having an infinite conversation with its referent, that is, the text. Besides referring, the title also frames the text: after all, one is most likely to see—read—the title before attending to the text. This of course opens all the different registers of the relationality between the frame and its content. As Jacques Derrida has taught us, in the context of art, it is often the
124 frame that signifies that the art-word is a work of art: Sunflowers is a master-piece in a gallery, but might also be construed as graffiti if found on the side of a wall. We see the importance of the signature in art most apparently when it comes to graffiti art: if it is stencilled and sprayed on by Banksy, it is considered art; by any other and it is vandalism. 4 Remaining in the realm of art, it is Slavoj Žižek who posits that “art resides in the gap between the frame and the viewer.” 5 In both cases, the suggestion is that there is an indistinction, or more pertinently an inability, in terms of defining where art lies, or even what art is. Perhaps then it is Duras, Derrida, and Žižek, who give us a clue, a hint, even a “general suggestion,” as to how we might begin to approach death, and more precisely death as such, death as an absolute unknowability. And more than that, it is by way of a “general suggestion” that one might even begin to catch a glimpse of death, if only for a moment.
If we posit that one might only be able to catch a glimpse of death through fiction, through the forms of a narrative—as opposed to a direct attempt to see, to know—this suggests that one
4 Derrida posits the significance of both the frame and the signature in relation to the work of art amongst other places in Jacques Derrida. (1987). “Parergon” in The Truth in Painting. 5 This statement was uttered by Slavoj Žižek in response to a question of ‘where is art to be found in a gallery’ during his seminar, Media, Politics and Psychoanalysis, at the European Graduate School, August 2005.
125 can only hope to approach through a formalistic structure, that one might only catch this glimpse through a ritual.
On Suicide Perhaps in order to begin, we might consider a ritual that is not too far from death, that approaches death—and even occasionally succeeds in reaching death—but at the same time never pretends to understand death. In fact it is sometimes a phenomenological experience of death without all the trappings of an attempted comprehension of the phenomenon. Suicide.
We
might
provisionally
begin
our
glimpse
into
the
phenomenon by considering the notion that suicide is the expression of a subject’s will towards death. One can even posit that since one is thrown into life, and that one has no control over the point in which one dies, suicide is the subject’s way of gaining some form of control—at least of the telos of life itself. Of course the irony of the situation is, the very moment in which the subject gains a form of control over her/ his life is also the very same moment in which her/ his life is lost. This opens the question of whether one can think of suicide in terms of an economic exchange. Even though the opening gambit is that the subject exchanges life for control, the attempted control was over life itself: Hence, if life is lost within the very exchange that is taking place, is
126 there even a transference that occurs; is there actually an exchange? Since both the losses—the life of the subject—and the gains—control over a no longer existent life—amount to an exchange of nothing—in the economic sense of zero exchange— this is strictly speaking an empty exchange. Hence, one needs to consider suicide as a ritualistic exchange, where one stakes one’s life in order to gain a form of control: and here is where form is crucial, for surely there is no content in this emptiness, to this emptiness.
The life of the person committing suicide is a stake precisely because at the point in which (s)he gives up her/ his life, there is no way that (s)he can verify the result of her/ his death. If we consider the case of Thich Quang Duc, one can posit that perhaps he was hoping for a particular reaction to his self-immolation on June 11, 1963, in protest of the Ngo Dinh Diem regime. However at the point in which he set himself on fire, there was no way he could know whether anyone would even notice his death—only those who remain after the event can have any experience of the effects of his death. This suggests that the only thing that Thich Quang Duc can know is that he is approaching his own death; the only thing that he can know is that he is dead. In other words, Thich Quang Duc offers his own life as a stake—perhaps in the hope of a desired effect—but nothing more: this is a sacrifice in the very sense that we considered earlier through the inflexions of Georges Bataille and Jean Baudrillard; this is a sacrifice which is
127 “unsubordinated to the ‘real’ order and occupied only with the present,” 6 and in which
the tie that connected the offering to the world of profitable activity is severed, but this separation has the sense of a definitive consumption; the consecrated offering cannot be restored to the real order. 7
Hence, in this particular instance of death, Thich Quang Duc is “the accursed share, destined for violent consumption. [And it is] the curse [that] tears him away from the order of things …” 8 And at the same time, Thich Quang Duc’s death, like every stake, is also a challenge, and more precisely “a challenge [that] terminates all contracts and exchanges regulated by the law … [in which there is nothing except] an unceasing obligation to respond.” 9 But even though there is an “obligation to respond,” this does not mean that at any point Thich Quang Duc knows—or can even know—what the response is. Hence, the only thing that he can know for sure is that he is offering his life as a stake; the only thing that Thich Quang Duc is certain of is his own death.
6
Georges Bataille. (1991). The Accursed Share Vol 1. pp.58.
7
ibid. pp.58. italics from source.
8
ibid. pp.59. italics from source. [parenthesis my addition].
9
Jean Baudrillard. (1990). Seduction. pp.82. [parenthesis my addition].
128 Another instance that we might want to consider—in order to potentially unveil some of the registers of death in suicide—is arguably one of the most famous suicides which has left traces throughout the world; the one concerning Jesus Christ.
If we
consider the fact that Jesus of Nazareth was working towards his own death—in order to fulfill the scriptures, and his destiny as the Son of Man—one can quite easily constitute his death as a planned death; a suicide. After all, when Simon Peter attempts to draw his sword to protect Jesus in the garden of Gethsemane, he is told to “put your sword back in its scabbard; am I not to drink of the cup that the Father has given me?” 10 Even Pontius Pilate’s efforts to save him are turned down: when asked “are you the king of the Jews,” a simple ‘no’ would have been enough to save Jesus: instead he deliberately implicates himself by saying, “Mine is not a kingdom of this world; if my kingdom were of this world, my men would have fought to prevent my being surrendered to the Jews. But my kingdom is not of this kind.” This naturally leads to the next question by Pilate: “so you are a king then?” which is another opportunity for Jesus to deny and save himself. But instead he replies cryptically—and rather sarcastically—“it is you who say it,” before completely incriminating himself with the statement, “yes I am a king. I was born for this, I came into the world for this.” 11 Even as Pilate is “anxious to set him free,” 12 Jesus is clearly 10
John 18: 10-11.
11 The sequence between Pilate and Jesus in the Praetorium can be found in John 18: 28-40.
129 not playing a part in freeing himself: instead he is hurtling himself towards his own death.
The death of the Son of Man is usually ascribed as the cause, to which the effect is the salvation of humankind. However this would assume that Jesus of Nazareth was fully aware of what would happen at either the point of, or after, his crucifixion: this would assume that Jesus is fully aware of the actions of his Father, or at the very least, that he is fully aware of the effects that his death would bring about. Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani? 13 It is at this point that we must examine one of the last utterances of Jesus of Nazareth on the cross: “my God, my god, why have you forsaken me?” If we posit that this is a question, then by extension, he must have had some kind of idea of what would happen at his crucifixion: without a pre-conceived notion, he could not have been “forsaken.” This opens the possibility that the phenomenon of his being on the cross does not match up to the idea that he had: this suggests then that he is not privy to the entire picture—since the Father is by definition omniscient, all that is to happen is known by Him; however Jesus clearly does not share in this knowledge. Hence, at the very least, Jesus is in the dark about
12
John 19: 12.
13
Mark 15: 34 and Matthew 27: 46.
130 what it is to be on the cross until he is actually on it. Perhaps one can also posit that there is a hint of the hope of being saved: is the forsakenness that he feels due to the fact that the Father actually lets him die on the cross? After all, there have been previous instances of people being raised from the dead—it is Jesus himself that performed one of these with Lazarus. There is no reason to rule out the possibility that perhaps Jesus was hoping that he himself was to be saved: and not allowed to die and then performatively resurrected after that. In Patrick Süskind’s essay On Love and Death, he proposes that the raising of Lazarus was a contrived act of kindness; in fact he goes as far as to say that it was a perfect public relations stunt by the Nazarene.
As Süskind
writes:
Two ladies who are friends of Jesus send him a message saying that their brother Lazarus is sick and likely to die, and asking Jesus to come and heal him. What does Jesus do? He doesn’t come. He says: “This sickness is not unto death, but for the glory of God, that the Son of God might be glorified thereby.” He acts (according to St John the Evangelist, it is only fair to note), in exactly the same way as any political leader of earlier modern times and the present day when confronted by an unexpected and unwelcome event: his reflex reaction is to try turning the event to his own
131 advantage and exploiting it for self-advertisement. The fact that a man is lying sick and suffering is of minor significance. Far more important is how to stage the saving of the invalid’s life to the best effect for publicity, thus enhancing the savior’s own reputation and giving his own movement a boost. Jesus does this in an extreme and indeed brutal way. He waits until Lazarus is dead, and informs his followers that he is glad that he was not there, saying that it was to make them believe in him. Only now does he set off at his leisure, accompanied by his followers, to the village where Lazarus had lived, and arrived four days late. The two ladies, Mary and Martha, are understandably disappointed. “If you had been here,” they say, “our brother would not have died.” Jesus takes this remark as lèse majesté, becomes furious and shouts at the two sisters before the assembled mourners that they should not be weeping and wailing, but ought to believe in him as the Son of God, to whom nothing is impossible.
Then he
orders that he be taken to the grave, not without a touching performance on the way when he publicly sheds a tear, instantly achieving the desired success with his audience. “Behold how he loved him!” whispers the crowd. On reaching
132 the grave, a kind of cavern sealed with a stone slab, Jesus orders, “Take away the stone!”
He
dismisses the objection of one of the sisters who protests that it would be better not to, since the dead man has been there for fours days and “by this time he stinketh.” Raising his voice at her again, he tells her to shut up and believe in him— Sorry, that is not an entirely correct quote, for the Messiah expresses himself a little more elegantly. “Said I not unto thee, that, if thou wouldest believe, thou shouldest see the glory of God?” This is how he speaks. Then they removed the stone. The decisive moment has come. The crowd holds its breath. We can picture them first staring into the dark cavern, then looking expectantly at Jesus, we can imagine both supporters and opponents (for there are some of those present too) pricking up their ears, styluses at the ready, so that not a word of the Master will escape them and no detail will go unreported—for John’s story reads very much like a press report written after the event, and we get the impression of attending a media spectacle of our own day. Only the TV cameras are missing.
133 Next comes a close-up of Jesus. Before he goes into action he creates a dramatic climax and heightens the tension with yet another dramatic climax and heightens the tension with yet another delaying factor, at the same time proclaiming his own message and, with outrageous frankness, revealing the propagandist purpose of the event. He lifts up his eyes to heaven and to God, whom he addresses as his father. “Father, I thank thee that thou hast heard me. And I knew that thou hearest me always: but because of the people that stand by I said it, that they may believe that thou has sent me.” Only now does he turn his eyes to the cavern and calls, with a loud voice: “Lazarus, come forth.”
…
The success of the operation is, as intended, overwhelming. The majority of the Jews present spontaneously join the Jesus party; others deploy to spread the news of his famous deed throughout the country; some go straight off to tell on him to the high priests. The high priests decide that, for their own good political reasons, they will depose of the seditions itinerant preacher who has been a
134 thorn in their flesh for some time by killing him. So the raising of Lazarus leads immediately to the last act in the brilliant success story of Jesus of Nazareth: his death on the cross as foretold, desired, and instigated by himself.
After that,
nothing was going to stop its onward progress as propaganda. 14
Drawing from Patrick Süskind’s marvellous account of the raising of Lazarus, there is no reason to leave out the possibility that Jesus of Nazareth might have expected his own crucifixion to follow a similar pattern: a public relations performance in order to increase his fan club. Of course one can also posit that this is the point where Jesus has no prior knowledge of the will of his Father—the very same will that he agrees to submit to in the garden of Gethsemane when he says, “but let it be as you, not I, would have it.” We must not discount the fact that Jesus is not entirely willing though, as his earlier request is to “take this cup away from me,” 15 but this unwillingness is one that involves death, which does not mean that he knows what his Father intends for him. Otherwise there would not have been a moment where he thinks that he has been “forsaken,” that he has been abandoned. 14
Hence, at the
Patrick Süskind. (2006). On Love and Death. pp.58-63.
The scene from the garden of Gethsemane is taken from Mark 14: 32-42. Another version can also be found in Matthew 26: 36-46 in which the exact wording is slightly different but does not change the trajectory of the argument with any measure of significance.
15
135 moment in which Jesus utters “but let it be as you, not I, would have it,” the moment when Jesus tells the Father to ‘let thy will be done’, he knows nothing except the fact that he is to die; and perhaps more pertinently, that he is to die alone.
This might shed some light as to why suicide is denounced by Christianity. Not only is suicide a challenge to the governance of the body of the subject, it challenges the very basis of Christianity itself. For the operating logic of Christianity is that we are saved because Jesus of Nazareth died on the cross for the sins of humankind. However, if we take into account the fact that he had no notion of what he was dying for—that all he knew at the point of death was that he was going to die—then there is no reason to believe that the suicide of any single person is any different from his death. In fact if one takes the teaching of the Church—to follow the example of Christ—to its end, then what it calls for is a sacrifice, in the precise sense of a severing from all utility and in which the “consecrated offering cannot be restored to the real order.” 16 It is a sacrifice that knows not why it is sacrificed except for the fact that there is a sacrifice that is made: it is a sacrifice that knows nothing, that seeks for nothing, that is nothing, except unto itself. In this way, whenever there is a suicide, not only is the fact of Jesus’ unknowing sacrifice made too clear, it is also the moment in which the subject of the Church transcends the Church itself, not
16
Georges Bataille. (1991). The Accursed Share Vol 1. pp.58. italics from source.
136 because one has fallen from grace but precisely because one has become too much like Jesus.
And it is this gift—this gift of death—that cannot be repaid. For since no one can die for you—only you can die for yourself— this is a gift that must be made in solitude, in separation from the rest of the world, a death in which you will be forsaken by your father, by everyone else, “and your Father who sees all that is done in secret will reward you,” 17 not just “a hundred times over,” but more than that, you will “also inherit eternal life.” 18
And this
leaves the Church with no choice but to out-law suicide; for this reward—eternal life—is beyond Canon Law, beyond the control of the Church: for the gift of eternal life lies even beyond Jesus himself, who can never know the will of the Father. It is perhaps through the ritual of suicide that one touches too closely upon the divinity, not by knowing what the Son of Man went through, but by experiencing God becoming man through entering the absolute unknown.
And it is this unknowable death, this approach into the absolute unknowability that is death, through the sacrifice of one’s life, through the gift of one’s life—one’s death—that truly frightens us.
17
This phrase in its various forms is repeated throughout Matthew 6.
18
Matthew 19: 29.
137 The suicide bomber When someone is willing to give up their life, when someone is willing to give themselves as a gift of death, what defence is there any longer? And more than that, how can one even begin to deal with a phenomenon that not only escapes one’s comprehension, but that is beyond understanding itself.
It is of no coincidence that the most feared figure of the Second World War was the Kamikaze pilot. For not only was the pilot willing to die—in some way all soldiers who enter a war zone, either willingly or not, enter a complicity to death, accept in some way the possibility of their death—but more profoundly, the Kamikaze pilot was indeed of a divine wind, of a divine nature, because he was already dead. Before each squadron was sent off, the Kamikaze pilots would gather for a last meal, a last cigarette, a last cup of sake and a bow to the Emperor. By the time the pilot actually climbs into his cockpit, he is already a dead man: his life— and his death—has already been offered during the ritual. The typical Western analysis usually involves pointing out the fact that before flying, the pilots were pumped full of amphetamines in order to allow them to fly their planes directly into targets. However this misses the point as it assumes that it is only due to the drugged state that the pilots become suicide bombers, that it was the drugs that made them into suicide bombs. Even if they had gained a measure of ‘Dutch courage’ from the amphetamines, there is no denying that the pilots themselves were fully aware of
138 their status as the order of the Divine Wind the moment they began their training, the moment they become pilots. Hence, from that point onwards, their lives had already been offered as a sacrifice: if the amphetamines had anything to do with it, it was merely an instrument which aided their task; the sacrifice had long ago been made. And it is the ritual—of which there are echoes of a Last Supper; or a last meal of a condemned inmate—which allows the Kamikaze pilot to sever himself from the real order, to offer himself—his self—as a stake.
And like any true stake, the Kamikaze pilot has no idea what the reciprocation is, what the effects of his sacrifice are: all that he knows is that he has offered himself: everything else he remains blind to, remains in the dark from.
The attempt to explain away, ascribe, his actions to the effect of drugs—another favourite is social pressures, or brainwashing by the Japanese military machine—or any other cause is an attempt to re-inscribe the actions of the Kamikaze pilot back into a cause and effect analysis, to return it to the order of reason. We are never quite as afraid when something opposes the order of reason: in fact by opposing it, the underlying assumptions are strengthened. And this is what the offering of drugs as a reason attempts to do: by claiming that the pilots are flying in a drugged state, one is trying to establish that their actions are the result of an illusion, a change in mental state: in that way reality is preserved,
139 and one can then ascribe this action—an action that is beyond explanation itself—to another reason: more importantly, reason itself is preserved. What frightens us the most is when there is no reason for the action, when the action itself is beyond reason, beyond explanation, beyond knowing: for in that way it always remains an enigma to us, and we have no ability, no hope, of being able to discipline it, of putting it under us, of controlling it.
But before we go on thinking the figure of the suicide bomber, we have to make a momentary diversion, and open another register of thinking, that of what it is to be dead; and the question of, what is this very moment of death, the instant of death itself?
140
4.5 The instant of death Not mine, not yours, but death’s. Death as such. For, can one even begin to own death, make a claim on death? Nor does death claim you. Otherwise there is still a relationality between the subject and death. But since there is none that can be established—at least none that can be known—all that can be said is, you die. And yet whenever we speak of death, do we have a choice but to speak as if we can make a claim on it, as if we can even begin to speak of it.
Clearly we can never speak of it as a
phenomenological experience, for if we have experienced death, we would not be able to speak any longer. However, if there is no experience, we would not be able to speak of it as well. Hence, ultimately any discourse on death is—has no choice but to be— from the realm of the imagination, fictional. It is this aporetic situation—if it is narrated, it has to be from the past; however if it cannot have happened, if imagined, then surely it is only a future event at best—that makes the opening line of Maurice Blanchot’s The Instant of My Death—”I remember a young man—a man still young—prevented from dying by death itself—and perhaps the error of injustice.” 1 —such a curious one. If one remembers, the “young man” is surely from the past—he is a recollection, he is
1
Maurice Blanchot. (2000). The Instant of My Death. pp.3.
141 called back from a previous event, a memory. However if he is “still young,” this suggests that either he is trapped in time— sealed in permanent state in time—or that at each recollection, he is called back into the same state that he was at, that perhaps he will always remain in. This is a narration that is both of the past, and of the future, in the present—a future-anterior moment—a present that is always over and also already to come: we catch a glimpse of the indiscernability of time, and of the event itself, when the narrator recounts the moment of the shooting, when he utters, “there remained, however, at the moment when the shooting was no longer but to come,” and this is a moment of possibilities, all potentialities, where one is possibly “freed from life? the infinite opening up?” 2
Perhaps there is an “infinite opening up” only because one is “freed from life”; when one is freed from the order of the real, when one is freed from utility, from logic and from reason. This freeing takes the form of an unknowability, from an uncertainty: the narrator can only utter that “I know that the young man …” which is a different statement from ‘the young man’; by having to explicitly state that he knows, there is a foregrounding of the nature of the statement; he is not stating a fact, but merely an opinion, doxa.
This is further brought to light—through much
darkness—by the fact that the narrator shifts from an “I” to a “he,” and is also recounted as a “young man”: at all points there is 2
ibid. pp.7.
142 always already a trace of all three, and one is also unable to tell them apart. In this way, one is always unable to tell—especially when the pronoun “I” is used—whether it is the narrator, or a character in the narrative, which is speaking. It is the inability to distinguish between the first and the third person, whether what is uttered is in the past—which is the status of all first person narratives; always a teleological recounting—and the third person—which is a retelling of a past through the present; a recounting that does not necessarily know its own end point. And this indiscernability is most clearly seen—set in a scene—when he utters, “I know—do I know it—…” 3
It is this same unsure-ness—if one can be unsure and the same; perhaps a similar unsure-ness—that is found in the opening of the tale, where the narrator is not sure why he is not yet dead, why death is always to come: it is only “perhaps the error of injustice.” It is clearly not just a common mistake—there is an invocation here of the Law, of justice itself, and this is probably a reference to the fact that he was to have been executed, a killing carried out not by the whims of a person, but of a state mechanism. However one is never sure—he is never sure—of whether this is actually an error or not; it might only be one, and even if there was an error—it is after all a mistake that the “young man” is still alive—the cause of this error remains hidden from us, from the “young man” as well.
3
ibid. pp.5.
143 And perhaps it is this unknowability that is found in death, as opposed to dying, in a “dying prevented by death itself.” It is a double death, two kinds of death, perhaps even a dual death, that is found here: firstly “death itself” as an absolute unknown; secondly death as an order, as an imperative.
If death is an unknown, then it is an absolute onto itself, as opposed to dying which is the end of a phase, an antonym of living. At this point, we should consider that the “young man” was already in the line, already lined up to be shot, and
the one at whom the Germans were already aiming, awaiting but the final order, experienced then a feeling of extraordinary lightness, a sort of beatitude (nothing happy, however)—sovereign elation? The encounter of death with death? 4
It would seem that as he stood in the line, he was not dying in the sense of awaiting the end of his life, but that he was already dead—merely awaiting the final order to shift his bodily state to match that of his mind. And this is the point where death as an idea has an encounter with death as a corporeal existence. But this is not a death that can be known, or even spoken of, which is why the lines that immediately follow are, “in his place, I will not try to analyze. 4
ibid. pp.5.
He was perhaps suddenly invincible.
Dead—
144 immortal.” 5 There is a lack of certainty as to how the “young man” is feeling: even if we posit that the narrator is (or was) this “young man,” there is no more assurance than if they are completely separate beings with nothing to do with each other. And this inability to even describe—let alone define—the “encounter of death with death” is found in the duality of “dead— immortal”: the antonyms are linked, touching each other through the dash, but also forever separated: this is the encounter itself— the dash. For death is the opening of a new possibility, a new link, but beyond that, nothing more can be uttered.
One must also take into account the fact that the death of the “young man” is a result of an order, an imperative for him to die. So even though no one can die in his place, there is always an externality to death: it has to come from somewhere else, some other, some encounter with an other.
Perhaps this is another
reason why suicide causes so much discomfort: it is not so much that one breaks the rules of death (can one even do so), but that it makes it too clear that there is the possibility of otherness within our selves. And by extension, if there is always already otherness within the self, one can never fully comprehend the self—and it is this that might be difficult to accept. This “encounter of death with death,” at the point at which there is an imperative given for him to die, is then an encounter of death with its own otherness, the coming together of two unknowns. And since the moment in
5
ibid. pp.5.
145 which he is declared dead is also the moment of his death, there is an aporetic situation here: if the “young man” is both dead and “prevented from dying by death,” this suggests that the new state brought about is one that of (n)either life (n)or death: the “young man” is now of the living-dead.
And like every shift in space—the moment the “young man” who is dead, experiences the “encounter of death with death,” there is a reconstitution of who, or even what, he is—there is a shift in time as well: this we find in a very curious moment in the tale, the break between the German soldiers lining up to shoot him and the point in which the Russians arrive.
Even though the
Germans and the Russians are the same person—“Vlassov army” 6 —it is only revealed after a moment in time.
There is
absolutely no reason why the Russian soldier suddenly decides to reveal his nationality; even though he may be Russian by birth, he is still under the command of the Nazi officer.
Hence, his
nationality should not even matter; neither had he any reason to let the “young man” go. This would not be much of an issue in most narratives, but in The Instant of My Death, this is the crucial moment—the moment when he is saved from dying, from being shot, the moment of the “encounter of death with death”—and this moment remains hidden from us, hidden perhaps from the “young man” himself, and from all the other narrators, and their narratives, from the ‘I’ and the ‘he’ as well. 6
ibid. pp.5.
146
Not only do we have face an absolute blindness in terms of the moment when death encounters death, we are also faced with the problem of who is recounting this moment, recalling this unrecallable moment, and testifying to what is essentially untestifiable.
For even though every testimony requires an
uncertainty, a potentiality of fiction—otherwise it would just be fact, and knowledge—this moment of death remains blind from testimony due to the fact that in order to testify, one has to have experienced it, and if one is dead, there is no testimony that can be uttered. Hence, this testimony, this remembering of the event of his death, can only be uttered from this position of impossibility, this position of being living and dead at the same time, as a livingdead where one is not in either state but in a duality, of being both self and other at the same time, of being both the ‘I’ and the ‘he’, the duality embodied in the “young man.” There is an echo of this living-dead in what Jacques Derrida says of Maurice Blanchot and archi-passivity, which is the “neuter and a certain neutrality of the ‘narrative voice’, a voice without person, without the narrative voice from which the ‘I’ posits and identifies itself.” 7 For if the “young man” is always already potentially both the “I” and the “he” at the same time, then the “young man” is a signifier, signifying nothing more than the fact that it is signifying: and this is hinted at, near the end of the tale, when the narrative voice
7
Jacques Derrida. (2000). Demeure. pp.27.
147 utters, “I am alive. No, you are dead.” 8 It is not so much that there are two selves in this utterance—for the same self cannot be both alive and dead—but that there is always already an otherness within the self, an otherness of which nothing can be said. This is why all the narrative voice can say is, “I know, I imagine that this unanalyzable feeling changed what there remained for him of existence”: 9 all that can be said about this “unanalyzable feeling” is that which is imagined, recalled as fiction, testified to; a statement that will and can only remain unverifiable, and ultimately unknowable. Hence, the utterance, “I am alive. No, you are dead,” is an utterance without referent, without any possibility of reference: and by extension all that can be said about death is through an imaginative gesture: the instant of death is the instant in which death is uttered, but it is nothing more—or less— than an utterance.
It is this “unanalyzable” state of death that continues to haunt us, and unsettle us. For if it is undefinable—and remains always in the realm of the imagination—not only can one not be certain about death, it is always already in full potentiality. And like the problem that Vladimir and Estragon face in never being able to tell if and when Godot comes, we face the same dilemma: we would not know even if death is staring us in the face.
8
Maurice Blanchot. (2000). The Instant of My Death. pp.9.
9
ibid. pp.9.
148
4.7 Her gift of death For a gift must be active—she must offer it—but it is an offer that she cannot even begin to know, to understand; it remains open to death, to absolute otherness. She must remain open to death, to the possibility of death and all that it may entail: she can only remain open to death, and to all its possibilities. Her only choice— her active decision—is whether to be in a position where she might experience death; beyond that she no longer has any agency.
At the risk of banality, we must now attempt an imaginative gesture, for we have no means to speak of death, or the suicide bomber, without such a gesture. An attempt to analyse, to speak of it as though we can, as though we know anything, would be obscene: that would be the evil of transparency that Jean Baudrillard speaks of, where there is an imposition of the framework of analysis on the experience: not only would her experience be effaced, but more than that, the model of analysis would then precede the situation itself and all we would be doing is making the model real. And at the point where all differences are flattened, all we see is the model, for “they no longer have a referent in view, but a model”; 1 where the model refers to nothing but itself, where it is its own referent. This is not the same as having no referentiality—which is the status of a pure signifier, open to all possibilities—but the exact opposite, of being in a state 1
Jean Baudrillard. (2007). In the Shadow of the Silent Majority. pp.48.
149 where the signifier and signified are exactly the same. And this is the terroristic state par excellence: where the question and the answer are one, where to draw on Jean-François Lyotard and JeanLoup Thébaud again, the third—public opinion itself—is captured. Once that space of negotiation is captured, all we are left with is one, a single, and more pertinently a consistent, permanent answer.
This is the yearning of the theorist—the yearning for metaphysical comfort—that we spoke of earlier; it is the need to define, to state, to make clear—transparent—the need to know, the need for certainty. And if we allow the Nietzschean register to carry us for a moment, this is a yearning for a particular kind of death, where the “life and vitality” of the situation is drained and all we are left with is a stillness, a lack of movement, a lack of life itself. 2 This would be akin to how Nietzsche describes dogma, as opposed to the natural vitality—and constant potential for change—of myth when he says,
for this is the way in which religions are wont to die out: under the stern, intelligent eyes of an orthodox dogmatism, the mythical premises of a religion are systematized as a sum total of historical events; one begins apprehensively to defend the credibility of the myths, while at the 2
Friedrich Nietzsche. (1967). The Birth of Tragedy. esp, sections 15-18 pp.93-109.
150 same time one opposes any continuation of their natural vitality and growth; the feeling for myth perishes, and its place is taken by the claim of religion to historical foundations. 3
The moment a religion shifts from a movement—potentially changing, always already becoming—into stagnancy—being, a doctrine—all “vitality and growth” are drained from it: it is the systematization of the movement into a linear series, “a sum total of historical events,” into a logical sequence.
It is this
transfiguration from a monadic system where all parts are interlinked,
inter-dependant
and
hence,
ever-morphing,
where
knowledge is singular and situational, into a Socratic ‘knowledge by reason’, which drains the movement itself, and settles it into a structure, where it becomes lifeless, dead. By attempting to fully understand the religion, moving it from myths—constantly re-told, altered, alive—to a set story, a hi-story, linear, predictable, retraceable, uncontaminated by variation, what ironically occurs is the death of the religion itself, into mere dogma and orthodoxy.
This is the same issue that Jean Baudrillard posits as the problem of sociology: in its attempt to define itself, sociology does nothing but bring an end to the socius. By refusing to accept the fact that the ‘mass’ is an unknowable phenomenon, sociology
3
ibid. pp.75.
151 attempts to stake a claim as an all-knowing science, by sacrificing the ‘mass’ through effacing it with meaning. This is because,
the term “mass” is not a concept. It is a leitmotif of political demagogy, a soft, sticky, lumpenanalytical notion. attempt
to
A good sociology would
surpass
it
with
“more
subtle”
categories: socio-professional ones, categories of class, cultural status, etc. This is wrong: it is by prowling around these soft and acritical notions (like “mana” once was) that one can go further than intelligent critical sociology. Besides, it will be noticed retrospectively that the concepts “class,” “social relations,” “power,” “status,” “institution” and “social” itself—all these tooexplicit concepts which are the glory of the legitimate sciences—but also only ever been muddled notions themselves, but notions upon which agreement has nevertheless been reached for mysterious ends: those of preserving a certain code of analysis.
To want to specify the term “mass” is a mistake— it is to provide meaning for that which has none. 4
4
Jean Baudrillard. (2007). In the Shadow of the Silent Majorities. pp.37.
152 To “provide meaning,” to define, to set out, to form a frame around, and ultimately to leave out, to cut out, to exclude: even when there is none, even when there is no basis for doing so, especially when there is no legitimacy for doing so. But perhaps it is precisely when there is no legitimacy for doing so that we are most likely to find an exclusionary gesture: for if it were legitimate, a negotiated space would be more than sufficient for proving itself. It is when it is illegitimate that one has to resort to terror, to an absolute exclusion. 5 In the context of sociology, the exclusion by way of definition is not so to much protect the reality of understanding the socius (who even believes that this is possible), but more crucially to protect the illusion that this is even possible. For even when we know that it is an illusion, it is still important to maintain it: it is especially when we know that it is an illusion that we have to protect it.
In order to have a glimpse at illusions, we have to take a, perhaps illusory, detour to the Summer Olympics in Beijing 2008, where an important lesson on illusions, and the failure of keeping up appearances was painfully learnt by the organisers, by China.
5 One can find echoes of a similar illegitimacy that Avital Ronell traces in authority. For if something is legitimate, access to it would be open to everyone—governed by the Law. It is only when something is illegitimate that the authority of a person be required in order to enact it. In other words, authority is the very undoing of the Law itself, and by extension, the seizure of the space that is open to everyone, the space of discussion, of negotiation, through an effacement of the situation, by the self.
153
Shattering illusions or How Stalin was finally proven right On 8 August 2008, the People’s Republic of China taught the world about Stalinism; and about the importance of illusions.
During the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games, Yang Peiyi, the voice of “Ode to my Motherland” was literally relegated to the background (for having bad teeth), whilst the more telegenic Lin Miaoke took center-stage. A few days later, as the world was still swooning over that same ceremony, news of this switch-a-roo broke. The reaction was the usual liberal outpouring of how this is unfair, discriminatory, inhumane and such.
The fatal error of the officials was not so much in making the swap—after all, neither girl was known to anyone; and after a few weeks, no one would have remembered them any longer—but in getting caught. The scandal was caused not so much by the fact that the organising committee had been superficial in choosing Lin based on her appearance, but the even worse crime of shattering our illusion that we can see beyond superficialities.
Even as the liberals were thumping their chests over this incident, they might have considered the fact that no one likes ugly people on television. The only times they are allowed to appear on screen is when either a role directly calls for a feature-impediment
154 (since we are in the game of political correctness these days), or when the person is in a comedic role, ideally poking fun at themselves. In either case, we accept their presence on screen as they allow us to feel normal: in other words, we cast them as freaks in order to normalise ourselves. There is no accident that the massively successful Ugly Betty is a comedy: one can laugh at Betty, played by America Fererra, whilst maintaining a safe distance from her. In order to laugh, one has to maintain an ironic distance, and it is this distance that allows us to feel safe: after all, it is she who is ugly and not us. It is also no coincidence that Tod Browning’s 1932 film Freaks was wildly unpopular (there were street protests leading to the film being withdrawn from cinemas): no one likes to see actual freaks living normal lives, lives just like the rest of us; for if their lives are no different from us, how can we differentiate ourselves from them.
We experience horror not when there is a difference but when we are no longer able to differentiate ourselves from an other. This is why the classic horror movie scene is when the monster takes off his mask, only to reveal that under the mask is exactly the same face. In this way, not only are we unable to tell which is the real monster; by extension, we are no longer able to trust our phenomenological senses, and hence, all our abilities to discern are lost: and our very selves, our notion of self, is called into question. The fatal error that is made is of course the attempt to unmask the monster: in order to defeat it, all one has to do is to maintain a
155 proper distance from it. This is the lesson of Wes Craven’s The Nightmare on Elm Street: the way to defeat Freddy Krueger is not to attempt to understand who he is (or was) or where he comes from, but instead, to take him on his own terms; enter the dreamscape and kill him within the dream. This logic is even clearer in the Friday the 13th series. Unmasking Jason as a disturbed individual who is merely guarding the memory of his mother who was murdered, is not only irrelevant but also potentially dangerous: one is more likely to hesitate when taking into consideration the personal problems of one’s assailant; something he is not going to do. In order to survive Jason, one has to focus on his persona, on the hockey mask he wears. By attempting to see the face of the monster, by attempting to see too much, everything is lost, including one’s (sense of) self.
In fact, the typical liberal politically-correct stance about not discriminating by looks shows precisely this: appearances have been raised onto the level of the absolute; it is no longer open for negotiation: in fact it is best if no one talks about it at all. This unwillingness to engage appearances suggests that appearances are so important that they are beyond discussion: more that that, they are so important that they must remain secret.
And this is precisely the lesson of Stalinism: even if everyone knows that it is a performance, it is crucial to maintain appearances. This is why even at show trials, it was mandatory for
156 the condemned to confess to their crimes. The fact that everyone knows that the verdict is pre-determined is unimportant: Stalinism recognised the importance of allowing everyone to maintain the illusion that there was a trial taking place. There is nowhere that the importance of the illusion was more clearly shown than at the 20th Party Congress in 1956, when Nikita Khrushchev denounced Stalin in what has become known as the ‘Secret Speech’. There was widespread pandemonium after the speech with many officials suffering from severe shock. However, it was not as if no one knew of the horrors of the Stalinist regime—all of them lived through it, and experienced it, first-hand. The shock was precisely in the revelation itself: the veil of illusion was shattered and it was this that caused the chaos. 6
It is not so much that we can live with lies; it is more so that it is lies that we need in order to live. It is not that we cannot tell that it is an illusion; it is that the illusion is crucial, not just to sustain a fantasy, but the very reality in which we live.
And it is the shattering of our illusions that the People’s Republic of China is paying for. If the organisers of the opening ceremony had left Yang Peiyi on stage, we would have all commented on how she had an angelic voice, but pity about her 6 This is quite possibly why the ‘Secret Speech’ is such an apt name. For it is not that the Nikita Khrushchev’s speech was to be secret—the fact that everyone knew about its occurrence puts paid to that—but that the speech itself was a demonstration of the importance of secrets.
157 teeth. By getting caught swapping, the organisers made it too clear to us that we would not have been able to see past her teeth. How they have shattered our own illusions about ourselves; how we are going to make them pay for it …
Approaching illusions: approaching Death As we all know, Jean Baudrillard ended up paying for shattering the illusion of sociology: in effect, he paid the price for not listening to his own lesson. But then, if we are to attempt to think, we must not worry about such consequences, and we must be willing to consider even such affirmations as the one that Georges Bataille challenges us with, “that the sexual act is in time what the tiger is in space.” 7
Whether one can even begin to know what
Bataille means by that is irrelevant; whether one can eventually know is equally irrelevant: what is crucial is that one has the “patience, and the courage, to read [the] book.” 8 Perhaps then the courage and the patience required here is not so much to shatter the illusion, but rather to confront the illusion: for since the illusion is the medium between reality and ourselves, then it is also the space, the gap, of negotiation; the very site that terror attempts to efface. Georges Bataille. (2007). The Accursed Share Vol.1. Preface. pp.12. italics from source.
7
8
ibid. pp.11. [additions in parenthesis are mine].
158
And the illusion we shall attempt to approach is that of the suicide bomber herself: and the moment in which she approaches death. When she straps the bombs to herself, to her body, she is already dead: at the moment in which she decides to strap on the bombs, she is already encountering death. It would be obscene if we pretended to psycho-analyse her at this point: after all, one can only die for themselves, and die as themselves, and there is no way in which we can replicate, or empathise, with her situation. If we were to attempt to give a reason for her death, it would be the terroristic gesture of “giving meaning where there is none,” 9 or at least none that we are privy to. This is precisely the manner in which nation states attempt to deal with the phenomenon of terrorism: ascribe a meaning to it—even when there is none, especially when there is none—in order to prescribe a solution. This is the circle where one provides both the question and the solution: this is the question as a performative act, where the solution is already in the question; a substitute-formation that is created in order that the subject can hold on to a meta-physical comfort of knowing, of hanging on to an order in her/ his world.
By doing so, there is a death that is introduced into thinking; not the death that is an absolute unknown, an opening up to possibilities, but a death to any possibilities, death as an end point, where thinking stops. This is death that comes in the form of an 9
Jean Baudrillard. (2007). In the Shadow of the Silent Majorities. pp.37.
159 answer, a statement; it is of no coincidence that all statements begin with a capital sentence, a death sentence, and end with a period, a full-stop, a demarcator of an end of the idea, where there is no longer a space for negotiation, where all variables and contours of a thought—along with all its possibilities—come to a stand-still. But even as one attempts to arrest the movement of thought through a death sentence, we are faced with the unknowability of death itself: even if we attempt to enforce certainty through a capital sentence, the Law in which we call forth—as Franz Kafka will never let us forget—always continues to escape us, to slip past us. So even as the effects of the Law are felt—even as the idea might come to a momentary end—the very reason for its ending remains unknown to us; and this is doubly ironic as it is precisely reason, through a cause-effect analysis, that one attempts to induce death with. At the last gesture, this very reason itself remains its own blind spot: we can only go as far as to posit reason on the suicide bomber, as if one can even begin to understand her: and it is this ‘as if’ that will always remain; a remainder that continues to haunt us.
But what we can attempt to do, in fact the only thing we can attempt, is to posit. And this is a positing that contends—even gambles—that at the point she straps on the bombs, or even decides to strap on the bombs, she has already encountered death. For if the suicide bombing is successful, she is dead; if it fails, she will be killed (at the very least she will be tortured and then
160 imprisoned for life): her life as she has known it till this point, is over. Hence, even before a physical death—one that is described as a lack of brain-activity and heart-beat 10 —she is already dead: her encounter with death is not a phenomenal one (at least not yet), but more pertinently, she has a pre-relational relationality with death. Her encounter with death is always already there, even before death claims her: at the point, in which she decides to strap on the bombs,
there remained, however, at the moment when [death] was no longer but to come, the feeling of lightness that I would not know how to translate: freed from life? the infinite opening up? Neither happiness, nor unhappiness. Nor the absence of fear and perhaps already the step beyond. I know, I imagine that this unanalyzable feeling changed what there remained for [her] of existence. As if the death outside of [her] could only Henceforth
The fact that biology, the science (logic) of life, cannot go beyond describing death suggests that it is at best a metaphor. Perhaps we can even go on to posit that the border between life and death is the limit of biology—and the metaphor death is the assumption needed for the logic of bios to sustain itself. In effect, death is a name for the unknown that is part of life itself.
10
In fact, the term biology itself suggests that it is a logic of a certain aspect of life— social, political life; life in relation with others. In other words, represented life; life in representation. Perhaps then, of life as such—zoë—nothing can be said.
161 collide with the death inside of [her]. “I am alive. No, you are dead.” 11
This brings us all the way back to the beginning, to our first encounter with Maurice Merleau-Ponty and the pre-relational moment; where there is something external to the self in the relationality between the self and itself, something that the self is completely blind to, that escapes all knowing, and all knowability.
However, this is not a position of complete passivity. For even though one cannot choose death, one can put oneself in a position where one is open to the encounter of death, to potentially encountering death. Even as the phenomenological experience of death is not a guarantee—for instance in the case of the suicide bomber—the possibility of the pre-relational experience has to be chosen by her. This is also what happens in the suicide of Christ: even as Jesus of Nazareth has no control over the fact of his crucifixion, he has to take an active role in putting himself into position; opening the possibilities of his own death.
This puts us in a position of an active-passivity, where one is actively passive, where one is attending to the possibility of death, of awaiting the unknown.
This of course is the position that
Vladimir and Estragon adopt: even though they are completely Maurice Blanchot. (2000). The Instant of My Death. pp.7-9. [additions in parenthesis are mine].
11
162 unaware of who, or what, Godot is, and hence, are unable to tell even if Godot arrives, they have placed themselves in a situation where there is a possibility of waiting for Godot. Hence, Waiting for Godot is not so much a play about Godot, but rather a meditation on waiting itself, on the possibility of waiting, and on the active position of awaiting: on the fact that there is no object to waiting; there is nothing to waiting except waiting itself. 12
There is nothing to waiting except attending to the possibility of waiting.
There is nothing to (her) death except attending to the possibility of death.
In this manner, when death comes, when death claims her, it is death as an event, “indecipherable in [its] singularity … the equivalent of excess in a system that is itself indecipherable in its extension and its headlong charge.” 13 And this is perhaps also
12 One might also consider the term ‘awaiting’ itself. The prefix draws attention away from the self, from the subject: as opposed to the term ‘to wait’, where there has to be a subject waiting for either another subject, or perhaps even an object. Whilst there is a subject in an awaiting, the status of the object that (s)he is waiting for is now called into question: one can now be in the state of waiting, where there is nothing to the awaiting except for the fact that one is waiting.
It is waiting as a state that is also meditated upon in Maurice Blanchot’s tale, Awaiting Oblivion. This was a major focus of Werner Hamacher’s seminar— Exteriority: Blanchot—at the European Graduate School, August 2007. Jean Baudrillard. (2005). The Intelligence of Evil or the Lucidity Pact. pp.127. [parenthesis my addition].
13
163 why we are constantly surprised at the event of each death, each suicide bombing: it is not as if we do not know that it can happen, or in certain situations even likely that it will happen, but each death still shocks us. The utter inability to explain away death is what continues to haunt us. In spite of any attempt to create substitute-formations to explain the phenomenon of suicide bombers, death continues to slip past, to be the spectre that refuses to be exorcised. The death of each and every suicide bomber is not just an aberration, an accident that can be written off, discounted, but more profoundly an event,
counter-offensive
and
much
stranger
in
inspiration: into any system at its peak, at its point of perfection, it reintroduces internal negativity and death. It is a form of the turning of power against itself, as if, alongside the ingredients of its power, every system secretly nourished an evil spirit that would ensure that system were overturned. 14
Hence, unlike opposition to a system, which merely strengthens its underlying premise—or even accidents which can then be reinscribed by a statistical calculation—events “cannot be predicted and they form no part of any set of probabilities.” 15
14
ibid. pp.127.
15
ibid. pp.127.
164
The death of the suicide bomber: the return to the system of the gift of the unknown: the gift of death itself.
And it is not as if this is a gift from without, from somewhere else: for uncertainty, and unknowability is always already within every system, only that it has been hidden away, explained away. By refusing to allow death to remain a pure figure—an image that shows nothing except for the fact that it shows—all attempts to know, to be certain, “destroy images by overloading them with signification … kill images with meaning.” 16 By offering herself as a sacrifice—an enigmatic sacrifice—the suicide bomber offers herself as a pure image, one that is nothing more than an image of attending to death, and this “image in the pure state … brings out the essential point: namely, that the image is more important than what it speaks of, just as language is more important than what it signifies.” 17
Hence, we must attempt to think of the suicide bomber as such: not as a part of a network of meanings; neither her signification nor even her significance to anything else. But as a pure figure, meaning nothing except in and of herself—at the risk of meaning nothing, perhaps only because she means nothing. In
16
ibid. pp.92.
17
ibid. pp.98.
165 this sense, we must think of her poetically. And poetically, in the precise sense of an enigmatic figure, keeping in mind that
the poem lacks nothing: any commentary makes it worse. Not only does it lack nothing, but it makes any other discourse look superfluous.
Poetry and thought are to be taken in their literalness, not in their truth: truth merely makes things worse. 18
This is not to say that the poem—poetry—reveals nothing, or says nothing. In some way poetry says more by not directly saying anything, by allowing language to be “more important than what it signifies.” After all, in the words of Michel Deguy, “poetry does not unveil the very visible, nor the invisible.
Poetry instead
unveils the slightly visible.” 19
In order to perhaps catch a glimpse of the suicide bomber, to “unveil” her relationality to and with death—mayhaps only momentarily—we have to approach her indirectly: in other words, we have to approach her as a figure, full and complete in herself, without attempting to make her part of a network of meaning, 18
ibid. pp.211.
19 This was Michel Deguy’s response to my question, “what is poetry to you?” at the end of Judith Balso’s seminar—Poetry and Philosophy—at the European Graduate School, August 2004, where he was the guest poet.
166 without attempting to locate her in, as part of, some larger discourse, but as a suicide bomber as such; without ever pretending to know, nor even attempting to understand her.
This suggests that we have to attempt to approach the suicide bomber—whilst allowing her to remain an enigmatic figure— through yet another figure.
There is no reason why a certain
figure is selected over any other figure; after all in every choice there is always already illegitimacy and blindness. Hence, every figure that we select, any figure that we select, is always already plagued by doubt, and is open to the same question: why is this particular relationality set in place? Perhaps then, before we select a figure, in which, through which, to think about the suicide bomber, we might have to take a slight detour and consider the very status of relationality itself; of what it means to make a statement, “_________ is like _________.”
On Relationality When we make a statement “_________ is like _________” what do we mean; what does a statement of relation between one thing and another imply about the relationality between the two objects in question?
167 Perhaps there is always already a trace of preference—a liking—that is inscribed into this statement: when one says “_________ is like _________,” there is the possibility that attention is drawn to this likeness because you like it to be so. There is potentially a subjective biasness—or at least a subjective involvement—in the statement of relationality between the two. This suggests that without this subjectivity, without the will of the subject, there can be no similarity between things; that perhaps subjectivity is the pre-condition of relationality. Moreover, the object that is referred to in the utterance is no longer a pure object; it is not an objective statement. It is a subjectivised-object; it is an object only because it has been called into a relation with another object by a subjective moment, a subjective will.
Only when
named as an object does it attain its objective status: otherwise it remains unnamed, unknown, uncalled, sans papiers.
Hence, its
status as an object is only as such due to its relationality with the other object. Since this relationality itself cannot exist without a subjective moment, the very status of the object in the relation is no longer stable: it is a relationality between two objects that are only objects because of this relationality.
However, if we take into consideration the fact that the statement “_________ is like _________” is a statement of relationality, this would suggest that that the possibility of the relationality between the two things would have to first be in place in order for that very statement to be made.
Since this is
168 unverifiable before the statement is actually made, the possibility of the relationality between the two things in question has to be assumed.
So even if there is a subjective moment to this
relationality, the possibility of this relationality precedes the subjective moment, precedes the subject.
If the possibility of relationality precedes the subject, it follows that this is a relationality that precedes cognition.
Since this
relationality is one that is pre-cognitive, there is always already a notion of unknowability in it. Hence, in the statement “_________ is like _________,” there is always already a relationality that is unknowable, a relationality that precedes both the similarity between the objects and the subject that is uttering the very similarity itself; there is an unknowable relationality within the relationality.
This unknowability opens this register in the statement “_________ is like _________”: if this relationality is one that is preceded by an unknowable relationality, then is it a call to the subject from the unknown, in the sense of the subject responding to something that it does not, and cannot, fully comprehend? This would suggest that the subject is responding to a transcendental relationality between the objects, one that somehow the subject has been made privy to. However, considering that the relationality is a result of language—it only exists at the moment in which the statement “_________ is like _________” is uttered—this suggests
169 that this pre-relationality that calls the subject to making the utterance cannot precede, be outside, language. In this sense, the pre-relationality is part of language, part of the language that calls forth the relationality; language itself must encompass a prerelationality within the relationality that it establishes. And since this relationality is only established, can only be established, within language, not only is pre-relationality part of the language that establishes relationality, it is always already within relationality itself. Hence, pre-relationality is not something that precedes
relationality—coming
before
to
be
replaced
by
relationality—but rather a condition of relationality itself: all relationality brings with it a pre-relationality.
It is etymologically possible to trace the term ‘like’ to the corpse—this would be through lich (or liche) which literally mean ‘a dead body’.
This opens the consideration that this pre-
relationality is written on the body, is part of the body, and not just that of the subjective body, the cognitive body, but a body that precedes the very subject in question. This reopens the register that the body of the subject must already be open to the possibility of a relationality before the relationality itself is even possible: the body is the site in which this pre-relationality is written, is situated; the body is where the potentiality for relationality occurs in the first place.
170 If there is a pre-relationality that is a part of every relationality, this means that there is a part of every relationality that does not lie within the boundaries of relationality: it is not a nonrelationality in the sense of an antonym of relationality (for that would be just a phase before relationality) but a relationality that is unknown to the relation itself; a relationality that is unknowable within the boundaries of the relationality between the two objects in relation. Not only is this unknowable relationality part of the relationality between the two objects, it is a condition of this very relationality which is established in the statement “_________ is like _________.”
Hence, whenever there is a statement of relationality, one can never fully legitimise this relationality, not because there is a subjective bias in making the statement—‘I want there to be a relationality so there will be one’—but as there is always already an unknowability within this very relationality. This is a structural assumption, a structural condition. And it is this very assumption that both allows the statement of relationality to be made, and which also never allows the statement to be fully legitimate. It is for this reason that “_________ is like _________” is a descriptive statement, one that never reaches the status of a definition, and is never a definitive statement. Hence, “_________ is like _________” is a claim.
171 In fact, one can no longer even discern whether the claim made is true or false as such—one can no longer differentiate whether it is a performative or a constative statement as there is no external referent.
Referentiality is precisely the assumed relationality of language itself.
In this we find an echo of Paul Celan, who on March 26, 1969, wrote this about poetry: “La poésis ne s’impose plus, elle s’expose” (Poetry does not impose, it exposes itself). 20
Perhaps then,
relationality can at best only be a poetic relationality; one that does not impose a frame, impose a particular meaning, does not efface the singularity of the relationality, but instead only seeks to be open, exposes itself, to the potentiality of relationality.
Suicide Bombers, Zombies, and Necromancy Here, let us turn to the figure of the zombie in order to shed some light on the figure of the suicide bomber, bearing in mind the responsibility that this light brings with it darkness, in fact blindness,
for
this
comparison
brings
with
it
the
very
unknowability of whether this relationality can be made at all. In fact, all one can say is that the relationality between the suicide 20
Paul Celan. (1983). Gesammelte Werke. pp.181.
172 bomber and the zombie is a test, a trial of the claim that suicide bombers are will-less beings that are controlled by some force from above—brain-washed—and mere tools for some agency.
This is of course very close to a conception of the zombie that one sees in any Hollywood movie; the zombie has no will of its own, and is unable to make any decision, doing only what it has been commanded to, usually by a ‘zombie master’, who is using the zombie as an instrument to bring harm to the master’s enemies.
If we consider George Romero’s Dead Series of five
zombie movies, the moment humans are turned into zombies, they lose all of their abilities to choose, and all they have are trace memories of their past lives. Therefore, they are apt to repeat actions that they most often performed in their respective pasts. Naturally this lends itself to a comparison between suicide bombers and zombies: the claim of course is that the suicide bomber must have been brainwashed (by a cause, by religion, by a charismatic leader) and from that point on has no will of her own and
only
does
what
she
is
trained—or
more
precisely
programmed—to perform. As Zora Neale Hurston, one of the first anthropologists who researched voodoo and zombification in Haiti, writes in her 1938 publication, Tell My Horse,
it was concluded that [zombification] was not a case of awakening the dead, but a matter of a semblance of death induced by some drug known
173 to a few … It is evident that it destroys that part of the brain which governs speech and will power. The victim can move and act but cannot formulate thought. 21
Whether Hurston’s conviction that a drug could put its victim into a mindless stupor is accurate or not is irrelevant; what is crucial is the fact that she traces a communal belief in the notion that mindless creatures can be created. In fact, “the belief in the poison was so common that virtually every subsequent student of Haitian culture would make some reference to it.” 22 This belief in creation of mindless creatures is not isolated in Haiti; after the attacks on the World Trade Centre in New York on September 11, 2001, there were many comparisons of the suicide bombers as victims that were brainwashed by Islamic clerics, and hence, were completely under Osama bin Laden’s command.
The branding of the enemy as mindless creatures following orders bears an echo of a very similar strategy used during the American occupation of Haiti (1915-1934) where there were many publications by Marines stationed in Haiti that spoke of the occult and zombies, and “each one conveyed an important message to the American public—any country where such abominations took 21 As read in Wade Davis. (1985). The Serpent and the Rainbow. pp.214. [additions in parenthesis are mine]. 22
ibid. pp.214.
174 place could find its salvation only through military occupation.” 23 It is of no coincidence that soon after the September 11 attacks, the United States launched a military offensive on both Afghanistan and Iraq, and in both instances, the reason given was the liberation of the people from barbarism of the Taliban and Saddam Hussein respectively. The overall strategy is similar: all the problems are caused by a zombie master; hunt him out and destroy him and all the problems will be solved. The attribution of all will to a zombie master fits in completely with a totalitarian logic where there is a single cause from which everything else is a manifestation: this is the basis of all cause-effect analysis.
In order for the logic to
sustain itself, the single cause to which everything is attributed to is ultimately a catachrestic metaphor: in the current war on terror, Osama bin Laden serves as the name for terror itself. Once this is set in place, bin Laden can be blamed for anything and everything: of course, on the flip side any act can also be credited to him. We see this play out whenever there is a bombing anywhere in the world: all acts of violence are claimed by his followers; all act of violence are blamed on him by nation states. In this manner, the master-signifier that is Osama bin Laden allows for all meaning, any meaning, and at the same time remains meaningless: both ‘terror’ groups and states can use him for any means, for all means.
23
ibid. pp.209.
175 In fact, the signifier Osama bin Laden becomes the exception in order for all world order to continue. 24
However, thinking the figure of the suicide bomber through the zombie is problematic as it constitutes the suicide bomber as one without will—and this is just not true. For in order for it to be a suicide, it has to first and foremost be an act, a decision. So even if we take into consideration the notion that the suicide bomber might be using her body, her very life, as a testament to a cause, totally consumed in service to the cause, there is no denying that there has to be an initial gesture of giving her body to that cause.
One might even consider that the suicide bomber testifies through her act. First and foremost, she must be present: the act cannot exist, does not exist, without her. This is not to say that her presence automatically results in anyone else understanding, or even receiving, her account, her testimony. But at the same time, at some level, she must assume that the other understands, or at least has the possibility of understanding, her testimony (otherwise there is absolutely no motivation to carry out the act). But even if the other has no comprehension of her act—and perhaps even no ability to ever comprehend the act—she of course will never know. All relationality between the suicide bomber and the other is at the level of assumption, at the level of faith: this This particular logic was explored in Jeremy Fernando. (2008). Reflections on (T)error.
24
176 moment of blindness is a necessary part of the act. And where is this testimony given—spoken—but on her body: her act of testifying (to whatever cause, whatever message), even as much as it will always be hidden from us, even as we will always remain blind to it, will open us to the possibilities through its effects.
Once again, we turn to The Seducer’s Diary, and Johannes’ observation that “the dead letter of writing often has much more influence than the living word,” that “a letter is secretive communication,” and as such “[the reader] is master of the situation, [feeling] no pressure from anyone’s actual presence,” 25 and hence, feels free to interpret as (s)he chooses. This is perhaps because the reader
would prefer to be alone with her ideal, that is, at certain moments, and precisely at [these] moments when [the letter] has the strongest effect on her mind.
Even if her ideal has found an ever so
perfect expression in a particular beloved object, there nevertheless are moments when she feels that in the ideal there is a vastness that the actuality does not have. 26
25 Søren Kierkegaard. (1997). The Seducer’s Diary. pp.158-159. [additions in parenthesis are mine]. 26
ibid. pp.159. [additions in parenthesis are mine].
177 It is the alleged absence of the writer in the letters, the absence of a certainty, a single meaning that allows the reader to feel the space, the freedom, of interpretation, as if (s)he were actually free to interpret in any manner (s)he desires. However, the interpretive gesture is always already bound by the rules of seeing, the law of looking; after all her right of inspection is already bounded by a law of reading, the rules of grammar, one that the writer is aware of (and that the reader has to know in order to read), and is also operating within. So even if the author is dead, the spectre of the author remains—perhaps not so much in terms of her/ his intent but by the hand that (s)he plays, by the combination within the rules of the game that are laid out by her/ him; the very same hand that the reader now has to play with. This is perhaps the very death that the author enacts, not the absence of her/ him self—for once the text is written (s)he is always already absent and yet present—but that the letters themselves are dead.
Awaiting resurrection by the reader.
This is reading as necromancy. And this is the hold of the “dead letter” over the reader—for even as much as one cannot legitimately interpret, one cannot legitimately read, one has no choice but to do so; once one is faced with the text, the moment one even begins to read, one is in the game of raising the dead.
178 And perhaps it is this very game that we are drawn into when faced with the suicide bomber; a figure that remains a pure figure, referring to nothing but itself, referring to nothing but the fact that there is a reference. When faced with this lack of an object, what choice do we have—what choice does the reader have—but to imbue this figure with any reading, any meaning, that we have. At her point of death—at the instant of her death—she literally becomes the “dead letter,” not in any semantic manner, nor in any signification of death, but the very opposite, the refusal of any signification, the refusal of any meaning.
And just like in the case of Mas Selamat, is it not this absence of meaning that truly terrifies us? After all, we have witnessed the same desperation time and time again: in the case of September 11, the Arabs were blamed even before there was any evidence of their involvement; the absurdity of this finger-pointing was painfully highlighted in the Oklahoma City bombings of 1995 where till this day conspiracy theories abound about how Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols were merely agents in a wider network.
In fact conspiracy theories work on the level of
providing us with an explanation—a logic—such that we can remain assured that there is ‘meaning’ in our lives, in our worlds: in other words, any event, any coincidence is brought back, disciplined, under the auspices of rationality, brought back under reason. It is as though explaining away an event would allow it to remain an aberration, an exception; which is the same gesture as
179 rejecting it completely, separating it from us. However, if it was to remain unknowable, then we cannot exclude it from us—more horrifyingly we cannot exclude ourselves from it.
In the case of the suicide bomber, there is an even more terrifying premise: since there is no object for analysis, not only is she dead, she is also indistinguishable from any other suicide bomber, every other suicide bomber.
Hence, not only are we
unable to say anything about her, about the phenomenon, we are also unable to draw a boundary around it, around her. Since we cannot say what the suicide bomber is, we also cannot say what she is not: not only is the suicide bomber nowhere and everywhere, she is now no-one and everyone at the same time. And more that just the paranoia of not being able to identify the suicide bomber, there is still an even more terrifying possibility: if (s)he is nowhere and everywhere, perhaps (s)he is always already us, perhaps we are always already her.
The suicide bomber terrifies us not because she is a marginal figure that cannot be co-opted into the socius, brought back under our systems of thought, of logic, but because of the exact opposite: (s)he terrifies us because she is us, because she is potentially in each and every one of us. The suicide bomber terrifies us because she is the shadow that is in us; she is the shadow of the silent majorities. Her strength consists in the fact that she is a pure event—the event of her death—and hence, she has
180
no history to write, neither past nor future … no virtual energies to release, nor any desire to fulfill. [Her] strength is immediate, in the present tense, and sufficient to itself. It consists in [her] silence, in [her] capacity to absorb and neutralize, already superior to any power acting upon [her]. It is a specific inertial strength, whose effectivity differs from that of all those schemas of production, radiation and expansion according to which our imaginary functions, even in its wish to destroy those same schemas.
An unacceptable and
unintelligible figure of implosion (is this still a “process?”)—stumbling block to all our systems of meaning, against which [(s)he] summon[s] all [her] resistance, and screening, with a renewed outbreak of signification, with a blaze of signifiers, the central collapse of meaning. 27
And this gives us nothing to cling on to, nothing to understand, nothing to know. And it is this void—her emptiness—that sucks us in: by being nothing, (s)he both allows us to make her whatever we want her to be, yet at the same time constantly reminds us that regardless of what we want, (s)he will always be nothing to us; and more importantly, we will always be nothing to her. 27 Jean Baudrillard. (2007). In the Shadow of the Silent Majorities. pp.36. italics from source. [additions in parenthesis are mine].
181
And it is in this way that she occupies the position of the neuter; she is (n)either devoid of any meaning (n)or filled with any meaning.
In this way, any meaning that is ascribed to her is
always already (n)either possible (n)or impossible: in other words, the only thing that we can say about the suicide bomber is that we don’t know, we cannot know.
But it is not as if we will allow her to remain in this state of being unknown: after all the moment we even attempt to speak of her, we are attempting to ascribe some sort of significance—if not signification—to her. This is the gift that we are attempting to return to her: at the instant of her death, (s)he becomes the absolute unknown, devoid of any certainty, open to every possibility; our return is to invest ourselves wholly in writing onto her, desperately attempting to imbue her with some meaning, any meaning.
It is in this way that (s)he becomes our mirror, our reflection, and our own image. And this is precisely the gift of love that (s)he offers us—her betrayal of us. For it is never possible to betray unless one also loves the other; perhaps even loves the other too much: there is no gesture more appropriate than Judas’ kiss at the moment of betrayal. Someone had to betray the Son of Man in order that he could fulfill scriptures, fulfill his own destiny. Hence, Judas’ betrayal of Jesus of Nazareth is in fidelity to Jesus
182 himself, to Jesus’ own ideas. There is an echo of this fidelity—this harshness guided by love—in Brutus’ betrayal of Caesar: only by killing Caesar could Brutus stop him from becoming a despot, and over-turning everything that he stood for.
Every time a suicide bomber offers her-self, she is offering us the possibility of singularity, the possibility of remaining unknowable, enigmatic, and in full potential.
At the instant she becomes a suicide bomber, (s)he offers us the gift of her death: we reciprocate, we return the gift, with our lives.
183
184
This im-possible is thus not a (regulative) idea or ideal. It is what is most undeniably real. And sensible. Like the other. Like the irreducible and nonappropriable differance of the other. In the second place, then the responsibility of what remains to be decided or done (in actuality) cannot consist in following, applying, or carrying out a norm or rule. Wherever I have at my disposal a determinable rule, I know what must be done, and as soon as such knowledge dictates the law, action follows knowledge as a calculable consequence: one knows what path to take, one no longer hesitates. The decision then no longer decides anything, but is made in advance and is thus in advance annulled. It is simply deployed, without delay, presently, with the automatism attributed to machines. There is no longer any place for justice or responsibility (whether juridical, political, or ethical). Jacques Derrida: Rogues: Two Essays on Reason
185
Confessions; or a suicide note Surely you don’t think I have forgotten the ones who died. And that they are more than figures of thought, to thought, in this quest at thinking the very possibility of thinking itself. But even as we—or above all I, if one insists that I take full responsibility, and even accountability for this attempt—attempt to approach the suicide bomber, taking into account the probability of the murderous intent harboured, we have to bear in mind that at best, this intent is guessed at, extrapolated, assumed. It is difficult to deny the allure, and the elegance, in the claim that since suicide can be constituted as an internalising, even a punishment, of the self, for the desire to kill others, the suicide bomber is the moment par excellence where the killing of the other and the murder of the self come together: almost a perfect collision of the two drives in one instance.
Even though we should not
neglect, and certainly should not reject this claim, I ask for a temporary deferral of its
186 certainty, if only to consider that the coming together of two drives is in itself a positing of their relationality; that is in itself a naming, and always already in catachresis.
So even as we can claim—with a
certain amount of psychoanalytic credence, and historicity—that suicide is an attempt to destroy one’s self in order to destroy the other—perhaps even all others—we have to bear in mind—insofar that memory is even a possibility here—that we are claiming, we are positing. Otherwise we are in the banal game of reduction, abstraction, valuation—where what we do is attempt to calculate the exchange rate of the stakes at hand.
And we would be
doing nothing more than asking the obscene question of ‘how much is one life worth?’
And
by extension, ‘what is the going death rate of bombs?’
At this point we might as well go all
the way and ask if the value of a bomb increases if another human is attached to it. And that would be the very moment in which all human life is banalised. So even as I set out to defend what might be an indefensible figure—as I attempt to redeem the unredeemable—one might try to keep this
187 in mind: it is only when the suicide bomber is maintained in her full enigmatic status, that the very potentiality of singularity, and by extension all human life as singularities—irreducibly different—remains a possibility. It might seem a tad strange to attempt to explain—even rationalise—this decision, especially in the light of the fact that for much of this work, rationality, reason, calculation, has been regarded with much distrust. In fact, it would be almost a surprise if you didn’t suddenly regard this moment with suspicion.
So even as you regard
confessions—testimony even—as no different from a narrative, from a tale, relying on the same structures, tropes, strategies, of story−telling, perhaps allow me to plead for a moment of generosity from you, one that will accommodate the fictionality that cannot but veil as I attempt to unveil. For a long time, I was blind to the need— either that or I am not recognising a desire that is pushing me here—to explain myself. Perhaps there is a trace here of the beautiful line of Paul Celan that echoes all over this work, that of poetry exposing itself—and in some way I have exposed myself, almost thoroughly, to the possible criticism
188 that I am placing the suicide bomber on a pedestal, whilst ignoring the fact that people are murdered.
It was only when
speaking, and thinking, with friends—Avital Ronell, Larry Rickels, and Josh Eidem—for it is only a true friend that can destroy without devastation, that the need to explain myself, if only momentarily, became apparent. In what is, and probably would be, constituted as a work that attempts to think, convention disallows—almost dictatorially—a writing that is deemed personal; one is expected to divorce one’s life, one’s voice, from what is thought about in the text.
And
in my state of utter anxiety about this—after all, there is no way that I can explain myself without being personal, unless I rely on logocentric tropes and strategies, something which I did not want to—I turned to the telephone, and made my own long distance connection to a dear friend, Julia Hölzl, who responded in what can only be called an elegant manner, channelling her dear teacher, Jean−Luc Nancy’s words, “if you don’t take it personally, you don’t take it at all.” So even as it is at a personal risk, I will assume the responsibility—and the possibility of being held accountable—for this choice to defend the suicide bomber; whilst at the same
189 time attempting to think the unthinkable, to think the impossible.
Perhaps the greater
transgression is, and has always been, the attempt to place the two—thinking and the suicide bomber—next to each other, in a relationality with each other. Here one almost naturally wonders why I never listen to my own advice: after all, one of my claims is that it is the unknown that truly terrifies us.
And since I posit that every
suicide bombing—even though it is one of the most calculated, planned, thought−about, thought−out, acts—still brings with it a moment of absolute unknowability, and to compound matters, place it alongside thinking, and knowledge, which is also at the final gesture fraught with the unknown, it should come as no surprise that my position— my positing of their position—results in much discomfort. The irony of course lies in that fact that a work that has overtly very little to do with psycho−analysis, is hinged on the unknowable; which is precisely the site of trauma.
The
fact that there is no effort spared to subscribe, inscribe, a meaning to all suicide bombings—and all acts of thinking (after all, the fact that it is usually called an act suggests that one has to see a result to
190 thinking)—suggests that we are scrambling to deal with some unknowable that continues to haunt us, that has great effects on us, that affects us.
The reason for this need to find
a reason is perhaps non−reason itself; the fact that a suicide bombing—and thinking—is an event, in the fullest sense of a phenomenon that escapes all phenomenological correspondence, that perhaps is the undoing of all phenomenality, is precisely what is traumatic about it. The moment we attempt to solve this trauma though, to put it back under the Law—perhaps even our own Law—do we not step into the realm of effacement, into terror?
After all,
if we are attempting to maintain the possibility of thinking as a question, if we are trying to think the potentiality of a question as question, then we might also have to forgo the possibility of boundaries, borders, and perhaps even answers—at least answers that we know, that we are certain of, that we can rely on.
So even as we search
for answers, in the most provisional sense of the term, perhaps we have to do so as detectives rather than as persons under the Law.
Here, it is always helpful to keep in
mind the scene in most detective novels—or even Hollywood movies—where the detective is hauled into his superior’s office, and his
191 badge and gun are taken away (for some transgression of the Law).
It is only after
this point, when (s)he is no longer under the auspices of the Law that the actual searching, the actual detecting, takes place. Of course one can also open the register that the detective often ends up being completely consumed by the case, by the search, that most of her/ his life falls apart; there is almost always a trope of addiction that cannot be ignored within detective work: here one might recall that Sherlock Holmes’ addiction manifests itself both in his work and through his coke nose. Hence, I must risk the potentiality of becoming seduced by the search for the possibility of a question that remains a question, by the attempt to think a non− terroristic thinking.
And perhaps even
resist all common sense which tells one to imbue some form of meaning into the site of trauma, to allow a recounting, recollection of the event, to allow memory to function, instead of keeping in mind—even foregrounding—the impossibility of discounting forgetting.
Here one cannot
ignore the irony of the gesture towards not− forgetting forgetting, especially taking into account the constant acknowledgement that one has no control over forgetting; in other
192 words, this is work that foregrounds something (there is no possible name for an absolute unknowable) that is completely external, absolutely other, to one’s self. And that is the trauma that I must continue to face in pursuing what might not be there in the first place; the relationality between the suicide bomber and thinking—this is the risk of maintaining the possibility of a relationality between two potential impossibilities. At this juncture, perhaps you’ll allow me to posit that part of the bravery Georges Bataille reminds us is a necessity for thinking, lies in accepting the risk of addiction, being ‘out of my mind’; even being unable to renounce the possibility that there is no relationality between thinking and the suicide bomber.
It is no coincidence that we
find echoes of heroin in heroine, that we detect traces of heroin in heroism.
“In fact,
heroin was first produced in 1974 at St Mary’s Hospital in London.
It was reinvented or
‘discovered’ in Germany in the 1890s and marketed by Bayer under the trade name ‘heroin’, which derives from heroisch.” (Avital Ronell: Crack Wars pp.51n)
193 And here I shall channel the spirit, and energy, of the World War II survivor I spoke of much earlier, through the words of Amy Winehouse, and renounce all attempts to ‘go on the straight’, resist all interventions to get me to ‘clean up my act’—“they tried to make me go to rehab and I said no, no. no …” Perhaps here my only comfort is in the words of my dear teacher, and friend—Avital Ronell— in a lesson that was uttered on a Monday morning – 10 August, 2009 – on a hilltop in Saas Fee, a message that I don’t yet pretend to understand, but will let write onto myself; that of, “trauma structures you, so hang on to it.”
−−− jf −−−
194
You know, I believe if there's any kind of God, it wouldn't be in any of us. Not you, or me ... but just this little space in between. If there's any kind of magic in this world, it must be in the attempt of understanding someone, sharing something (sigh). I know, it's almost impossible to succeed, but ... who cares, really? The answer must be in the attempt. Celine: Before Sunrise
195
Exteriority and Finitude Boundaries are not borders … On the contrary, it is
a
place
of
ceaseless
negotiations
and
ruses. Which means there is no reference … We are always within opinion, and there is no possible discourse of truth on the situation. And there is no such discourse because one is caught up in a story, and one cannot get out of this story to take up a metalinguistic position from which the whole could be dominated. We are always immanent to stories in the making, even when we are the ones telling the story to the other. 1
Perhaps at this point, we should allow the register of Roland Barthes to re-emerge from the shadows, and remind ourselves that all we might be doing is telling a tale, and more than that, in terms of this tale, all “must be considered as if spoken by a character in a novel.” 2 We not only consider this from the register of the inability to distinguish the narrator from the character, but more pertinently, we are thinking the very status of the tale itself: can this tale be considered a testimony (along with all the registers of fiction that it brings with it), and is there even a verifiability to it 1
Jean-François Lyotard & Jean-Loup Thébaud. (1999). Just Gaming. pp.42-43.
2
Roland Barthes. (1994). Roland Barthes. Epigraph.
196 (after all, there are references to events that occur, or at the very least representations of those events)?
For if we momentarily
follow the trajectory of the conversation between Jean François Lyotard and Jean-Loup Thébaud, and consider that “we are always immanent to stories in the making,” then there is nothing that lies outside the story; by extension, there is no referentiality to the tale. As such, even if there are references to events, these references refer to nothing other than the fact that they are referring: the events themselves are nothing but “opinions” within the tale. In terms of reading the tale—which one has to do even if one is writing it; there is no other way of knowing what is written—one then has no choice but to “judge therefore by opinion alone, that is, without criteria.” 3 There is of course an echo of Aristotle’s judge in this, where a just judge is one who is becoming a judge only whilst judging: “that a judge worthy of the name has no true model to guide his judgments, and that the true nature of the judge is to pronounce judgments, and therefore prescriptions, just so, without criteria.” 4 If the prescription of the judge comes from the judging and not from an a priori model, this then suggests that “prescriptions are not of the order of knowledge,” 5 that at best, a judgment is of the order of doxa, of a claim.
3
Jean-François Lyotard & Jean-Loup Thébaud. (1999). Just Gaming. pp.43.
4
ibid. pp.26.
5
ibid. pp.26.
197 This is not to say that the judgment is false—nor is it true—as judgments are not in the realm of truth or falsity. At best, after the judgment is made, one can judge it to be a good or bad one in terms of its effects; maybe even a fair or unfair one. What cannot be said however, is if it is a just judgment in an ontological sense: after all,
we are in dialectics, and we are never in the episteme. prescriptive
I think that dialectics is all the authorizes
…
dialectics
cannot
present itself as producing a model that would be a model that is valid once and for all … On the contrary, dialectics allows the judge to judge case by case. But if he can, and indeed must (he has no choice), judge case by case, it is precisely because each situation is singular … This singularity comes from the fact that we are in matters of opinion and not in matters of truth. So much so that the ethos of the judge indicates that an ethics of reasonable distribution has been constituted. And the reason implied in this reasonableness has nothing to do with Plato’s reason; it is not a reason that states being … It is a calculating reason, as in strategy; it is a mode of strategy, but one in which the issue is not how to conquer but how to achieve parity between people … In every instance, one must
198 evaluate relations: of force, of values, of quantities, and of qualities; but to evaluate them there are no criteria, nothing but opinions.
But it does seem to me that with the notion of mean we do have a theoretical statement that is used as a criterion for justice: In every instance one chooses the mean. calculation
is
The aleatory estimating
concerned
only
with
the
determination of the mean.
When one says: in every instance, choose the mean, it means, for Aristotle, that this mean cannot be determined in itself, that is, outside of the situation in which we find it. 6
In other words, “the rule of the undetermined is itself undetermined.” 7
This opens up questions of not only what we can know—after all, if the boundaries are not defined, and cannot be defined, then one not only cannot know the limits of one’s knowledge, but more pertinently, one cannot even know what one knows. This is when 6
ibid.pp.27. italics from source.
7 This is taken from Aristotle’s Nichomachean Ethics 1137b29-30 and is also the epigraph to Just Gaming.
199 it might be helpful to turn to an unlikely source for thought, the now infamous US Department of Defense news briefing on 12 February, 2002, by then Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, where he quipped,
but the truth is, there are things we know, and we know we know them—the known knowns. There are things we know that we don't know—the known unknowns. And there are unknown unknowns; the things we do not yet know that we do not know.” 8
Perhaps unbeknownst to him, Rumsfeld had stumbled upon a key problem of knowing and knowledge; that of the relationality between the object of inquiry and awareness of the existence of that object.
In the first scenario—the “known knowns”—the
subject is both aware of the object and has a cognitive understanding of it. In the case of the “known unknowns,” the subject is aware of her/ his lack of cognitive understanding of the object.
It is more interesting in the case of the “unknown
unknowns”: here the subject is unaware of the fact that (s)he lacks a cognitive understanding; this would be the case of an absolute lack of knowledge. The problem with Rumsfeld is that he did not go far enough: he missed the fourth variation, that of the ‘unknown knowns’. In this case, the subject is unaware of the fact
8
http://www.defenselink.mil/transcripts/transcript.aspx?transcriptid=3793
200 that (s)he has a cognitive understanding of something. Hence, one is never able to determine whether (s)he knows or does not know of something: this would be the case of the indeterminability of knowledge. However, just because (s)he is unaware of something does not mean it has no effects on her: even though (s)he might be completely blind to it, it can possibly have an affect on her.
In this manner, the ‘unknown known’ would be akin to a traumatic event: something that occurs to one, but which one is unable to cognitise, understand, or even realise.
However the
effects take the form of symptoms that occur; after-which one can only treat these symptoms. Even if a “substitute formation” is created, and the analysand goes on to believe that the ‘cause’ of their symptoms is found, this is of the order of faith rather than knowledge. This is true even in the occasion that the actual cause is found: it would be exactly the same scenario as someone walking up to Vladimir and Estragon and declaring himself to be Godot. This is in no way a claim that treatment of symptoms is unimportant—after all, the analysand is suffering from real symptoms; if the treatment manages to relieve the patient from suffering, it is never a bad thing. However, even if the patient is completely ‘cured’ of the symptoms, one can never have claimed to have found the cause of it; one can never get to the ‘root of the problem’. The traumatic event is always already an ‘unknown known’ to both the analysand and the analyst; both will always remain blind to it.
201
This blindness is not exclusive to a traumatic event. In fact, it is the very nature (if one can use that term) of all events. Since they are only cognitised—or brought to bear under reason—after their occurrence, this would be the creation of that very same “substitute formation.” Hence, not only is every event blind to us, one could even posit that every event is by definition traumatic: we know not of the event as such; all we can feel are its effects on us, and how it affects us. This would, of course, never allow one to feel the assuredness—to borrow from Nietzsche once again, the “metaphysical comfort”—of knowing that one is cured, that the source of one’s ailments has been discovered and conquered.
A common criticism of psycho-analysis is that it is not a science; that is it is not consistent, and more importantly nonrepeatable. By extension, the claim would be that something is a ‘science’ when there is a centre: from there, one can draw an overarching structure from the logic, and it would be universal. In other words, there would be a method that is replicable: the singularity
of
the
situation
would
be
governed
by
the
universalising model; the methodology. However, an examination of what is usually regarded as the most consistent of systems— mathematics—would suggest that this is problematic as well. One of the simplest and most basic of mathematical logics— arithmetic—requires two factors to be at play: real numbers, and operators. In order for real numbers to maintain themselves as a
202 sequence, the notion of ‘zero’ is required: whilst not actually a number, or even an entity, this position of absolute nothingness is required in order that the rest of the real numbers maintain a sequential order. As Hélène Cixous teaches us,
this is because the zero is not the nonvalue we think it is. The originary zero (zero come from the Arabic sifron, the cipher, the number) is the key cipher, the one which permits writing of numbers with the notation of position. To write 10, 100, 1000 we use the same numbers, but the ciphers have different values according to their positions in the writing … The 0 was introduced at first as an empty and necessary position. It is a space. Originally zero is not a number, but a marker of space.
Everything began with zero. Zero is how much there is when there isn’t any. When there isn’t any, there is, nonetheless. 9
In this manner, the ‘zero’ occupies the position of the absolute other in order that the logic of real numbers can sustain itself. The problem arises when one considers the relation of ‘zero’ to the operators: each operator is a promise of a function between two
9
Hélène Cixous. (2005). Stigmata. pp.165.
203 real numbers; however when the ‘zero’ is introduced as one of the objects in the relation, the operators fail to fulfill their function. This suggest that the ‘zero’ is both what allows arithmetic to function, and yet at the same time is its failing point. Even a system as consistent as mathematics cannot be, can never be, completely consistent: at every point, its consistency is allowed and yet haunted by the spectre of the ‘zero’.
In other words, ‘zero’ is both inside and outside of arithmetic at the same time; ‘zero’ is both the finitude and exteriority of arithmetic.
At this point, one might consider the fact that in every cipher rests a secret. Perhaps here we might posit that ‘zero’ is the key to arithmetic—or if we want to be adventurous and extrapolate, mathematics as such—but at the same time, it is the key that only allows us to see that there is a secret. After all, even with the ‘zero’ at hand, we are not anywhere closer to discovering the mystery behind why this position of nothingness is not quite nothing. Then again, as the tale of Ra continually reminds us, it is not the content to the secret that establishes it as a secret. In the case of the ‘zero’, perhaps the fact that we realise that ‘zero’ is the secret nonetheless maintains it as a secret: perhaps even more than that, the fact that we recognise it as a secret further reinforces its position as a secret.
204 Here, one might draw a parallel with another inside-outside position throughout history; that of the shaman. The shaman both holds the key to power—in terms of influence—in the society, yet at the same time is always an outcast from that very same society. This is most obviously reflected in the geographical position of the shaman’s abode: it is almost always on the fringe of the village, or town, or even city. However, whenever there is an important decision to be made, the shaman has to be consulted; in fact nothing crucial was ever done without the approval of the Gods, and this is only known through the mediatory, the shaman. Even the most headstrong of leaders, Genghis Khan, never went to war without first consulting his shaman; King Leonidas was unable to raise the army to defend Sparta against Xerxes’ Persians at the Battle of Thermopylae and had to be content with his personal bodyguards as he was unable to receive the approval of the priestess of the Oracle.
This suggests that the shaman is in a
position of exception with regards to the society: (s)he is the key to the decisions, influence, and even the distribution of power in the society (one cannot imagine the leader not having the support of the shaman), but yet is never a part of that very same society. The shaman is the cipher to the society, allowing everything to function through her/ him self, yet at the same time remaining a mystery, remaining a secret, of which “when there isn’t any, there is nonetheless”; remaining as the remainder.
205 The cynics—or the Marxists among us—might jump on the fact that there is a paradox in the position of the shaman: that the claims of ‘God is infinite whilst man is finite’, and the fact that the shaman is somehow able to ‘know’ what God wills, are incompatible. However, this criticism seems to be more valid of organised—and institutionalised—religions where there is a fixed doctrine, a dogma, in which the ‘Word of God’ is interpreted with a finality, and all questioning is considered heresy. In the case of the shaman, there is no finality to the word of the Gods: in fact, all the shaman does is to listen to—respond to—the Gods. In no way does (s)he make the claim to knowing what God will say or do: all (s)he is—and can be—is the conduit between the Gods and man; the medium between the two. Hence, all the shaman can do is to be open to responding to the Gods, to be open to the possibility of hearing what the Gods have to say. Of course, the ones who are listening to the shaman will never be able to tell whether the words uttered are those of the shaman, or of the Gods; or even if the two are distinguishable in the first place. And more than that, since there is no referentiality to whatever (s)he says—after all, the others are not privy to the voice of the Gods—“one does not know if s/he is a god or a human. It is a [shaman], but it may be a god, since the other is metamorphic, and one will have to judge therefore by opinion alone, that is, without criteria.” 10 In some way, this brings us back to a faith-based situation: there is no valid or legitimate way to distinguish the shaman from the Gods; there 10
Jean-François Lyotard & Jean-Loup Thébaud. (1999). Just Gaming. pp.43.
206 is only belief. But is there any other way? For even the most ‘stable’ and ‘consistent’ of methodologies require a moment of faith—in the case of arithmetic, it is the ‘zero’; since it is a mystery, a secret, one has no option but to have faith in its position—after all, there is no way of verifying it. After-which everything else can function—the symbolic order that is mathematics can function, once we proceed as if we can know what zero even means.
What we have to keep in mind though, is the absolute singularity of each response: the singular response of the shaman to the Gods, and the singular response of those who hear what the shaman has to say; none of which are verifiable, repeatable nor comparable. Hence, each of these responses is a response that is irreducibly different, that is in exception to everything else. This also means that one cannot hold the shaman accountable to two different responses that seem incompatible or even contradictory; for if every response is in exception, there is no reason why any of them should ever be consistent with another.
In fact, every
response is an absolute other to every other. In other words, there can be no prescriptive response, for
prescriptions taken seriously, are never grounded: one can never reach the just by a conclusion. And particularly, that which ought to be cannot be concluded from that which is, the “ought” from the “is.”
Then we are faced with one of two
207 things: either the just comes to us from elsewhere, which means that we are never more than the addresses of prescriptions … Or we have our situation … 11
This is not to say that the two are necessarily mutually exclusive; for there is no reason to exclude the possibility that the situation “comes to us from elsewhere,” that there is a transcendentality to the call that somehow we are momentarily made privy to. For after all, this is the very situation that the shaman is in: (s)he responds to a call from elsewhere, one that addresses her, but at the same time it is only a response because the shaman responds, in that very moment, and situation. This returns us to the question of relationality. The shaman’s response to the call from elsewhere is only a response as (s)he responds to it; there is no response without her/ his active response, but at the same time, (s)he can only respond with the assumption that this relationality is possible in the first place. Therefore, in the end, all that can be said is, the only thing the shaman can do is to be open to the possibility of this response.
And like the shaman, we can only remain open to the possibility of responding … 12
11
ibid. pp.17.
12 Much, if not all, of my thoughts on the shaman have been guided and inspired by my conversations with Mina Cheon, in particular in late July 2008, Singapore. A
208
Perhaps this is the point at which we must return to death. And in particular, communication with the dead; in itself a call from elsewhere, one that somehow we can hear, even if not directly.
Speaking with the dead is always already beyond a
phenomenological experience, but yet, it is a call that has effects on us. Hence, this is a call that we can strictly speaking know nothing about, that we are completely blind—and quite possibly deaf—to. And what better way to open this call than to recall one of the most famous calls from beyond in literature, the call of
All hail, Macbeth! Hail to thee, Thane of Glamis! All hail, Macbeth! Hail to thee, Thane of Cawdor! All hail, Macbeth, that shalt be king hereafter. 13
This is a call to Macbeth from the three witches, but not a call from them per se, for their “prophetic greeting” as we later discover is “from our masters.” Hence, the witches are but the media through which these prophesies reach Macbeth: in fact, when asked by Macbeth, “what is’t you do?” their collective response is—and can only have been—“a deed without a name.” 14
wonderful meditation on the shaman can be found at Mina Cheon. (2009). Shamanism + Cyberspace. 13
William Shakespeare. (1980). Macbeth. Act I sc iii.
14
ibid. Act IV sc i.
209 Considering the fact that these prophesies are the driving force behind all the events in Macbeth, it is significant that they come from a place that is indistinctly within and without; they come through the conduit of the witches. Even if you take into account that Macbeth in Act 4 sc i hears the predictions from “[the witches’] masters”—and one can easily regard this as an attempt to verify the claims of the witches—this does not discount the fact that the events had already been put into place; the very same events that were prophesised by the witches in Act I sc iii. What one is never clear—and can never be clear—about is this: are the events predicted by the witches (in the sense of them being able to see into the future), or do the events occur because of this very prediction? In other words, are the witches the narrators (which would suggest a knowledge beyond that point in the play), or are they characters in the play?
So even whilst “we are always
immanent to stories in the making,” our exteriority to this very tale is always already called into question.
It is this unknowability—this absolute blindness both by the one telling the tale, and the one hearing, or seeing, the tale—that makes a tale, every tale, told by one who can never be sure of what (s)he is telling, and by extension, a tale in which the meaning of the tale itself can never be certain, in fact can never be known, only guessed at best;
210 a tale Told by an idiot full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing. 15
‘How stupid can you be?’ Stupidity knows no limit, offering one of the rare “experiences” of infinity. Brecht once noted that intelligence is finite but stupidity, infinite. That it knows no limit means it knows no law, no alterity; it is indifferent to difference and blind to hierarchy … While one of its forms only asks “stupid” questions, the dominant form of stupidity bucks the question entirely; it doesn’t allow for questions … Ever resisting the question, dominant stupidity on the contrary, effaces it with the quickness of the answer. 16
This first statement that springs to mind, almost too quickly, almost like a reflex here, is ‘I don’t know’. When someone utters that, what are they actually referring to; is there even a referent to that statement? For if one has an object of reference, is there truly an absolute not knowing that is occurring: that would be a form of 15
ibid. Act V sc v.
16
Avital Ronell. (2003). Stupidity. pp.43.
211 ignorance that can be rather easily rectified; if someone did not know what a fact is, telling them would suffice. However, if there is no referent, then we encounter a problem; that of the indistinguishability of the statement. On the one hand, it could be a performative statement; a refusal to engage the other: this would be the case of one actually ‘knowing’ but refusing to acknowledge the fact that one knows. One sees this approach very often when it comes to relationships of extreme power imbalance; one can only speculate that this is the most common response to a question by the police, or one’s parents.
This is a strategy of survival
commonly known as ‘playing the idiot’; a role perfected by the court jester, provoking the one with power to her/his very limits and then drawing back, collapsing into the role of the fool, and hence, sparing the face of the one who has power. This is in fact a role of extreme intelligence; timing the ‘I don’t know’, the nonresponse, to perfection. For this is a recognition that in a situation of extreme power imbalance, a response to the power would result in a loss; a strategy of non-response would then allow the power to save face and at the same time bestow a reward for the retreat. Timing, however, is of utmost importance; an error could be a fatal error. On the other hand, an ‘I don’t know’ can also be a position of absolute non-knowledge.
Whilst this is also a position of
absolute non-response, total exclusion, it is not an irresponsible position as there is no subjective will to this non-response. One can paraphrase this position in Rumsfeldese—in some way there is nothing more apt than speaking of stupidity in his terms—as an
212 “unknown unknown.” The difficulty of course—perhaps even an impossibility—is discerning whether an ‘I don’t know’ is an “unknown unknown” or whether it is, as in the first instance, a performed, and hence, deliberate, non-response, a ‘known unknown unknown’.
The difficulty—impossibility—is in deciding whether ‘I don’t know’ is a genuine position, or a performance to “[resist] the question … [effacing] it with the quickness of an answer,” a deliberate act of exclusion, of effacement, where there is “no alterity.”
Perhaps because it is completely impossible to
distinguish the ‘genuine’ from the ‘performative’, the effects are the
same:
the
communication.
short-circuiting
of
any
negotiation,
any
At the moment ‘I don’t know’ is uttered, the
space of negotiation is effaced. In this sense, a position of utter weakness, of giving up one’s position, of ‘being whatever you want me to be’, is also the terroristic position par excellence. By effacing one’s self, by giving you the gift of my death, you are then obliged to respond with your own life, with your own death.
Even though the effect may be the same, one should not fall into the trap of being “indifferent to difference”; the fact that the end might be the same should not deter one from thinking the route.
In the instance of deliberate effacement, of a subjective
refusal to respond, the ‘I don’t know’ rests in the ‘I’: in the absolute security of the self. This is a statement where the self is denying
213 the other, any others—‘I know for sure that I refuse to know’—and staking its self in the very centre of its existence. On the contrary, when the ‘I don’t know’ is a genuine ‘unknown unknown’, the ‘I’ is in a completely unstable position. This is not an ‘I’ that is merely lacking information, but more profoundly, an ‘I’ that is completely unsure of its own position, one that might as well be saying ‘I don’t know what I even begins to mean’. And this is an ‘I’ that is in alterity with itself; a self that is other to itself.
And it is in this position of being other to one’s self that we might find some hope.
Poetry, irony, and the Suicide Bomber The poet, irremediably split between exaltation and
vulgarity,
between
the
autonomy
that
produces the concept within intuition and the foolish earthly being, functions as a contaminant for philosophy—a being who at least since Plato, has been trying to read and master an eviction notice served by philosophy. The poet as genius continues to threaten and fascinate, menacing the
214 philosopher with the beyond of knowledge. Philosophy cringes. 17
If we recall the words of Paul Celan, the words that we turned to earlier, that of “poetry does not impose itself, it exposes itself,” one’s instinctive reaction—the thought that comes to mind without thinking, without knowing—is the question ‘expose itself to what?’ Whilst it is easy, too easy, to dismiss a naïve question like that, it would be to our detriment if we choose not to attend to it, not to attend to a possibility that sometimes lies in the simplest of questions, the ‘silly question’ as it were. After all, if one “exposes” oneself, it can only be so if there was something, or someone, to expose oneself to.
There has to be a witness to the exposure,
otherwise there would not be one at all. Hence, “exposure” is always a state of establishing a relationality with another. 18 17
ibid. pp.287.
18 With “exposure” also comes the potential risk whenever one is open to the possibility of the other, to the possible response(s) of the other, all of which is out of one’s hand, one’s control. One of the most glaring instances of this risk occurred in the summer of 1990, when British metal band Judas Priest was brought to trial in Reno, Nevada: they were alleged to have contributed to the attempted suicide of two young men in December 1985, Ray Belknap (who died instantly from a shotgun wound), and James Vance (who survived with horrific injuries, but died of drug complications three years later). It was alleged that a subliminal phrase, “Do it,” in one of their songs—“Better by You Better Than Me” from the album Stained Class— triggered the suicide attempt.
The fact that the band can be held accountable for words that were unwritten—that were only heard by these two boys—only foregrounds the risk in exposing oneself to the other; there is no way in which one can know how it affects the other, and what forms these effects might take. And more than that, one is always already risking accountability for what one is not even responsible for; one can be called before the Law to answer for a question that one didn’t even open, but was opened for one by another, by the other.
215
It is not a relationality that seeks to impose a particular, single, meaning, reading upon another. And this is why poetry continues to “[menace] the philosopher with the beyond of knowledge”; without an imposition, the borders are not drawn, the limits are not set. And whilst not forgetting the registers that Paul de Man and Jacques Derrida opened earlier—yes there are always rules to seeing, and we are always already in grammar, always bound by grammar—the lack of a boundary also always opens more possibilities than we can account for. One may not even be overstating if one claims that at this point, all accounting systems— which are set up to predict, to control, via graphs, curves, probabilities—fail.
Whilst exposing itself, and hence, opening
itself to response, any response, poetry “always risk[s] what [it] cannot avoid appealing to in reply, namely, recompense and retribution. [It] risk[s] the exchange that [it] might expect but [is] at the same unable to count on.” 19 Once the poem is sent off, set off, one can only hope for a response. In fact, one always gets a response; even a non-response, a complete ignoring of the poem, is a form of a response. It is just that one can never know what kind of response one is going to get.
Once the poem is set off, the poet remains completely blind to its effects.
19
Jacques Derrida. (1994). The Gift of Death. pp.97.
216 Once the bomb is set off, the suicide bomber is completely blind to its effects.
It is probably of no coincidence that the suicide bomber is usually constituted as one who is completely irrational, cast as a complete idiot; the most common question heard whenever there is an instance of a suicide bombing is, ‘why would one give up her life when (s)he has so much to live for?’ All attempts to provide an answer to this question are banal, as the very person that the answers attempt to address is dead; hence, all ‘answers’ are unverifiable.
One has no choice but to admit that all reason
eludes, escapes, is beyond one, is beyond the limits of one’s cognition, is at the “beyond of knowledge.” Perhaps the only thing we can say is that (s)he gives up her life in spite of the fact that (s)he has so much to live for; after all, it is (s)he who chooses to do so. Whilst this does not provide any answer to the question, provide any comfort that we finally understand her, this is all we can say.
Perhaps it is the fact that (s)he remains an enigma that is her gift to us. It is this refusal to be understood, to be subsumed under any existing conception, to be flattened, exchanged, reproduced, that is her gift. And in that same spirit, it is not a gift that can be understood—this is not a gift that one can bring to the returncounter at the shop, to be exchanged for something else, something more palate-able, something easier, something more comfortable,
217 more comforting.
This is a gift that is unknowable, in full
potential, always possible; perhaps always a gift that is to come.
What continues to trouble us is that this gift—as with all gifts—comes with an obligation to reciprocate, an obligation to respond.
So even though this is an objectless gift—and to
compound it, a gift that we might not even begin to comprehend, or even know is present—we are always already within the realm of reciprocation. This is the point where the eternal question of the serpent, that of ‘what did (s)he mean’, returns to haunt us, along with the other question, the question of responding, and attempting an appropriate response at that; the question of Lenin, that of “what is to be done?” If we attempt to answer the question, to provide a prescription, then we are back to the situation of effacement. Perhaps then the task that we are faced with is that of reconstituting Lenin in and within a situation. If the question of “what is to be done” is a situational question, there can be no answer outside of the situation—at the point of uttering both the question and the ‘answer’, “we are always immanent to [the story] in the making, even when we are the ones telling the story to the other”—and more than that, each ‘answer’ is at best a provisional answer. However, the fact that one can even attempt an answer suggests that at least momentarily, one must be able to ‘step back’ as it were, be exterior to the question, to the situation. Hence, each answer, each ‘definition’ to the question
218 can only be accomplished as a more or less provisory, more or less violent arresting of a dynamic that is interminable, but never simply indeterminate or infinite. For a dynamic such as this can only be conceived as a series of highly conflictual determinations, as a movement of ambivalence, in which the other is always being seized as a function of the same, all the while eluding this capture.
The other becomes the
intimate condition of the possibility of the game, remaining all the while out of bounds … 20
It is the “ambivalence” that is the key in this provisionary relationship between the question and the situation; a relationality that Sam Weber points out is constantly unsure of itself, as “we can never be in a position that is totally ‘immanent’ to the stories we tell because—here as elsewhere—the stories are not ‘immanent’ to themselves.” This is why
we cannot be entirely “in” a game or story, any more than we can be squarely “outside” the stories we tell. But if in dreams, as in popular narratives, “there is no place one can go to photograph the whole scene,” it is not because, as 20 Samuel Weber. (1999). “Afterword: Literature—Just Making it” in Just Gaming. pp.109. italics from source.
219 we read in Just Gaming, “there is no exteriority,” but because in a certain sense, there is only that; as soon as the unconscious is in play, we are dealing with an exteriority that tries to exclude itself, in other
words
to
internalize,
incorporate,
appropriate itself, without managing to do it. But if we can never succeed in this impossible effort, neither can we renounce it, and it is precisely this double impossibility that makes the game of the unconscious both imprecise (because it is never completely
determinable)
and
ambivalent
(because it is always in the process of arresting itself, of revolving around a “fixation”). 21
In all of this, there is always already an echo of the strange pairing of despair and hope in the Beckettian formulation of not being able to go on, but yet having to at the same time. We also hear this strange paradox resound in Wolfgang Schirmacher’s wonderful response to aporia, one that he formulates in his deceptively simple maxim of ‘Just Living’.
This is not a over-arching
philosophy to life—one that frames, guides, or attempts to be a framework—but the exact opposite; it is a response to life itself. All you can ever do is choose, respond, live—live your life; life as a concept, life in general, will take care of itself. In other words, in order to live life, you have to actually distance yourself, at least 21
ibid. pp.111.
220 momentarily, from life as an idea, and actually be ambivalent to life. When one is asked, ‘how to live’, the only answer—which is at best a provisional response—is ‘you just do’. And perhaps it is in this ambivalence towards the answer—of having to come up with a provisional answer whilst knowing that it is only provisional at the same time—that allows one to maintain a ‘proper distance’ as it were, towards the answer, towards a final solution.
This ‘proper distance’ is also the space of irony, where one recognises the multitude of possibilities that rest within every singularity, where each possibility—or meaning—is but one of the multiplicities, where every “interpretation, like narration, is not simply external … it is also an active participant … (while still distorting it).” 22 Hence, the story, the tale, is “inseparable from a process of interpretation that in turn implies a play (and a relation) of force.” 23 In maintaining this ‘proper distance’, there is also the maintaining of “a certain tension between unity and disunity—that characterizes all games as such.” 24
And it is this tension that
maintains the space between, the site of negotiation, and continual negotiation; this tension is precisely the tension of relationality itself. When poetry “exposes itself,” it is exposing itself to this very tension, to the possibility of relationality, all the while 22
ibid. pp.112.
23
ibid. pp.113.
24
ibid. pp.113. italics from source.
221 maintaining this ambivalence, and ambiguity, as to the exact nature of that relationality.
The significance of this exposure, this ambiguity, comes to light if we recall Jean Baudrillard and his lamentation that “the possibility of metaphor is disappearing in every sphere.” 25 This disappearance as he posits, is due to the “viral loss of determinacy”; 26 that of transparency, of utter and absolute exchangeability; in other words, when everything is like everything else and one can no longer distinguish between objects any longer. It is this lack of distance between objects that results in them disappearing into each other, into meaninglessness.
For, the very name for this ambivalence, this ‘proper distance’ itself, is metaphor.
It is metaphor that allows us to name, to call, and to witness. And it is also metaphor that doesn’t allow the names to sink into one another, doesn’t allow names to equate with each other, prevents them from disappearing into utter nothingness.
Perhaps it might be momentarily disturbing to consider the suicide bomber in this light, as the one that remains to remind us Jean Baudrillard. (1993). The Transparency of Evil: Essays in Extreme Phenomena. pp.7.
25
26
ibid. pp.7.
222 of the impossibility of determining, the impossibility of knowing who or even what (s)he is. But in the spirit of thinking, recalling the bravery needed to think that Georges Bataille invokes, one must be willing to consider this possibility, whilst never resting in any surety, or finality, that this is a solution of any sort. In this sense, all one can do at this point is posit the possibility that the suicide bomber is our reminder in these times of instant answers, a reminder of the impossibility of answering. After all, one must never forget that we can only invoke the suicide bomber after the event—(s)he is only named as such after her death. Hence, she is always already named in absence, named when there is no possibility
of
verification,
named
in
the
absence
of
all
referentiality, where all possibility of legitimising the name— which requires the knowledge of her subjective will—is lost; (s)he is named as a suicide bomber even though there is nothing we can say of her except the fact that she is dead.
This brings us to the other register the question opens, that still remains with us. If we are inquiring ‘what is to be done’, this suggests that we are also struggling to cope with how to accept, and reciprocate, this gift, her gift to us. Any attempt at a direct exchange, a direct repayment, would be dire—this would be an attempt to repay her death with our lives. As Margaret Atwood beautifully captures in Cat’s Eye, “an eye for an eye only leads to more blindness”; 27 all we would have are more deaths, and
27
Margaret Atwood. (1989). Cat’s Eye. pp.427.
223 nothing more. But more than that, an attempt at a direct exchange would also be banal—there is no exchangeability on a life. But in spite of this impossibility of a direct exchange, this gift must still be reciprocated; one has no choice in this respect. One has to go on even though one cannot go on. Hence, the exchange is symbolic; exchanging in spite of there being nothing to exchange, exchanging whilst keeping a distance from the fact that there is nothing in this exchange. This is an exchange that keeps secret the fact that there is nothing in this exchange.
At this point, can we do anything but chuckle?
For, in the chuckle lies not an ironic distance that is indifferent to anything and everything. That would be a position of utter and absolute non-response; what Slavoj Žižek has so aptly termed ‘Western Buddhism’.
This is an attitude of ‘I am above and
beyond all of this, and nothing will affect me’, a dangerous game that has been played so many times in history by despots, governed by a single Idea, dismissing any singularity as a mere blip in their path, to be over-looked, and discounted. One is hard pressed to find a more fitting—and frightening—figure for ‘Western Buddhism’ than Heinrich Himmler. 28 Moreover, it is of no coincidence that many fascist regimes were ‘inspired’ by perverted versions of Buddhism.
‘Western Buddhism’:
an
Himmler (in)famously carried a copy of the Bhagavad-Gita with him at all times, claiming that like the warrior Arjuna, he was simply doing his duty without attachment to his actions.
28
224 anthropocentric gesture as there is no other that is in relation to the self; not only is the self the centre of the world, there is no other in this world. By definition, every other has already been excluded. Apparently most of them seemed to have completely overlooked—effaced—the fact that in Buddhism, the self is completely absent as well; the self is absolutely other to itself.
If anything, this is an ironic distance that is disinterested. In this situation, one responds to the other, whilst keeping a distance from the other in the sense of not subsuming the other.
This
echoes the response that takes its cue from Aristotle’s judge; one judges, and even passes a judgment, on the act, on the situation, without judging as a totality, without totalising the judgment of the particular as a judgment of the whole person, without a universalizing gesture. In this manner, all judgment can only be passed ‘with reasonable doubt’; or in other words, all judgment is always already only ‘within reasonable doubt’. This is not a doubt that is exterior to the judge in the form of one being unsure of the Law and therefore being unable to pass a definitive judgment, but rather a doubt about the very ability to judge; this is a doubt that stems from the judge judging her/ his own judging. In other words, this is a doubt that comes from one taking a ‘proper distance’ to oneself; a doubt that can only come from one’s exteriority to one’s self. This is a doubt that comes from one’s recognition that one is always already one’s own other; that the only way to speak of one’s self requires one to be exterior, alterior,
225 to one’s self. And since one can only speak of one’s self in alterity whilst being that same self, this suggests that the self is its own exteriority, its own finitude.
Faced with the possibility of not
being able to know one’s self, of knowing that potentially all that one knows of one’s self is but a notion—faced with the finitude of one’s ability to know one’s self—one can either be filled with horror, or chuckle.
Since one is still bound by the self when thinking—it is not possible to think from an exterior position—this suggests that all thinking, and by extension all knowledge, is in a certain tension with itself, ambivalent to itself. Hence, it is at best a thinking that is done as if it is possible; it is a thinking that is unsure of itself as thinking.
And as such, all thinking brings with it a ‘perhaps’; in
fact, the finitude of knowledge is found in a ‘perhaps’, which is also its very limit(s), and exteriority. For a ‘perhaps’ which is an indiscernability cannot lie within a statement of knowledge (otherwise it would not be a statement), but at the same time is its own limit (and therefore is always already part of that statement). Hence, every attempt to think has to ultimately face its own indiscernability; the indeterminacy that is (n)either within (n)or without thinking.
Poetry has long confronted philosophy—and all systems of knowledge, all attempts at systemising knowledge—with this limit. And here perhaps it is apt to invoke Jean Baudrillard once
226 again, and his poetic claim that “the poem lacks nothing: any commentary makes it worse. Not only does it lack nothing, but it makes any other discourse look superfluous.” 29 And when faced with its own finitude, “philosophy cringes.”
In this day of
globalisation, where everything is transparent and knowable, immediately knowable, the suicide bomber is the poem that never lets us forget that there are still enigmas, enigmatic moments, and unknowables. And when confronted with this poem—her gift of death—we cringe. The only way that we can face her, to face this unknowable, is to adopt a momentary distance from it, and acknowledge—with and through this distance itself—that we can never know her face, can never touch her, and that all we can do is guess, posit, take a position.
And that all we can do is say
‘perhaps’. 30 29
Jean Baudrillard. (2005). The Intelligence of Evil or the Lucidity Pact. pp.211.
30 One question that remains, that has haunted us from the beginning but has never been addressed is, ‘is there always already a tension between writers and readers because of the unknowability of intent’? This is of course compounded by the fact that a writer can only have a glimpse of what (s)he wrote by reading it: so even as you re-read your own work, there is a chance that the intent remains hidden from you. And as Larry Rickels reminded me during our conversation in Saas Fee, this is the same problem at every site of criminality. Which then opens the register of, are we always already criminals as we write, and detectives as we read? Perhaps it is only in the gap between criminality and detecting (if we can even separate them; and if we can, mayhaps only momentarily), in the space of negotiation, that we can temporarily slip between the law, and even all the rules, and keep open the space of reading, thinking, and the question.
In this sense, we might even posit that poets are the worst of these criminals: for the form that is poetry often makes the intent of the poet the hardest to guess, let alone know. On the other side, we might claim that the intent of the suicide bomber is so apparently clear: mayhem, destruction, and death. But even as there is a high possibility, and probability, we must never forget that even within the discourse of statistics, a ‘hundred per cent probability’ is an impossibility. If we make that leap from positing to certainty, from doxa to logos, we are back into the realm of terror; it
227
Perhaps all we can say is;
Perhaps the most important word in thinking is perhaps … 31
is through allowing the space of the question to remain that we can momentarily be in singularity and potentiality. And if it remains a scandal to place the suicide bomber alongside poets, one might recall that these seemingly meek and gentle poets are also the same people— through their work, thoughts, and questions—that constantly ‘blow our minds’. 31 This phrase is a trace of a memory that comes to me from a source that remains a mystery to me. In many ways, I have attributed it to a conversation with Avital Ronell about Nietzsche and the significance of the ‘perhaps’ to his thinking. Regardless of its origin, it clearly has written itself into my consciousness; after all, “words are missiles that explode in your somatic being.” (Avital Ronell, re-opening a register on Jacques Lacan)
228
If he had smiled why would he have smiled? To reflect that each one who enters imagines himself to be the first to enter whereas he is always the last term of a preceding series even if the first term of a succeeding one, each imagining himself to be first, last, only and alone whereas he is neither first nor last nor only nor alone in a series originating in and repeated to infinity. James Joyce: Ulysses
229
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231 Baudrillard, Jean. (1988). The Ecstasy of Communication. (Caroline Schutze, Trans.). New York: Semiotext(e). ______________. (1990). Seduction. (Brian Singer, Trans.). New York: St Martin’s Press. ______________. (1994). Simulacra and Simulation. (Sheila F. Glazer, Trans.). Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press. ______________. (1995). The Gulf War did not take place. (Paul Patton, Trans.). Bloomington: Indiana University Press. ______________. (1999). The Transparency of Evil: Essays in Extreme Phenomena. (James Benedict, Trans.). London: Verso. ______________. (2001). Impossible Exchange. (Chris Turner, Trans.). London: Verso. ______________. (2002). The Spirit of Terrorism. (Chris Turner, Trans.). London: Verso. ______________. (2002). The Perfect Crime. (Chris Turner, Trans.). London: Verso. ______________. (2005). The System of Objects. (James Benedict, Trans.). London: Verso. ______________. (2005). The Intelligence of Evil or the Lucidity Pact. (Chris Turner, Trans.). Oxford: Berg Publishers. ______________. (2007). Forget Foucault. (Nicole Dufresne, Trans.). Los Angeles: Semiotext(e). ______________. (2007). In the Shadow of the Silent Majorities. (Paul Foss, John Johnston, Paul Patton, & Andrew Berardini, Trans.). Los Angeles: Semiotext(e).
232 ______________. (2007). Symbolic Exchange and Death. (Iain Hamilton Grant, Trans.). London: Sage Publications. ______________ & Noailles, Enrique Valiente. (2007). Exiles from Dialogues. (Chris Turner, Trans.). London: Polity Press. Beckett, Samuel. (2006). Waiting for Godot. London: Faber and Faber. ______________. (2006). Endgame. London: Faber and Faber. Benedikt, Michael. (1987). For an Architecture of Reality. New York: Lumen Books. Bergson, Henri. (2005). Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic. (Cloudesley Brereton & Fred Rothwell, Trans.). New York: Dover. Bhabha, Homi. (1990). The Nation and Narration. London: Routledge. Blanchot, Maurice. (1992). The Step Not Beyond. (Lycette Nelson, Trans.). New York: State University of New York Press. ________________. (1997). Michel Foucault as I Imagine Him. (Jeffrey Melham, Trans.). New York: Zone Books. ________________. (1999). Awaiting Oblivion. (John Gregg, Trans.). Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. ________________. (2000). The Instant of My Death. (Fata Morgana, Trans.). Stanford: Stanford University Press. Borges, Jorge Luis. (2000). A Universal History of Iniquity. (Andrew Hurley, Trans.). London: Penguin Books. Borradori, Giovanna. (2003). Philosophy in a Time of Terror: Dialogues with Jürgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida. (Luis Guzman,
233 Pascale-Anne Brault & Michael Naas, Trans.). Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Brooks, Max. (2003). The Zombie Survival Guide: Complete Protection from the Living Dead. New York: Three Rivers Press. ___________. (2006). World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War. New York: Three Rivers Press. Burke, Jason. (2003). Al-Qaeda: Casting a Shadow of Terror. London: I.B. Tauris. Burroughs, William S. (2001). Naked Lunch. New York: Grove Press. ___________________. (2002). Ghost of Chance. London: Serpent’s Tail. Calvino, Italo. (1959). The Baron in the Trees. (Archibald Colquhoun, Trans.). Orlando: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. ____________. (1997). Invisible Cities. (William Weaver, Trans.). London: Vintage Classics. Camus, Albert. (1989). The Stranger. (Matthew Ward, Trans.). New York: Vintage. Canetti, Elias. (1982). The Voices of Marrakesh. (J.A. Underwood, Trans.). London: Marion Boyars. Chang, Eileen. (2007). Lust, Caution. (Julia Lovell, Trans.). New York: Anchor Books. Cheon, Mina. (2009). Shamanism +Cyberspace. New York: Atropos Press. Chondron, Thubten. (1999). I Wonder Why. Singapore: Awaken Publishing.
234 Cioran, Emil M. (1992). On the Heights of My Despair. (Ilinca Zarifopol-Johnston, Trans.). Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Cixous, Hélène. (1976). “The Laugh of the Medusa” in Signs, Vol. 1, No. 4. (Keith Cohen & Paula Cohen, Trans.). Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ____________. (2004). Portrait of Jacques Derrida as a Young Jewish Saint. (Beverly Bie Brahic, Trans.). New York: Columbia University Press. ____________. (2005). Stigmata. London: Routledge. ____________. (2008). Love Itself: in the Letterbox. London: Polity Press. Davis, Wade. (1985). The Serpent and The Rainbow. New York: Simon & Schuster. Debray, Regis. (2006). A Modest Proposal: A Plan for the Golden Years. New Jersey: Melville House Publishing. Deleuze, Gilles. (1993). The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque. (Tom Conley, Trans.). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. ____________. (1999). Coldness and Cruelty. (Jean McNeil, Trans.). New York: Zone Books. ____________. (2002). Pure Immanence: Essays on A Life. (Anne Boyman, Trans.). New York: Zone Books. Deleuze, Gilles. & Guattari, Felix. (1977). Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. (Helen Lane, Mark Seem, & Robert Hurley, Trans.). New York: Penguin.
235 __________________________. (1987). A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. (Brian Massumi, Trans.). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. de Man, Paul. (1979). Allegories of Reading: Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke, and Proust. New Haven: Yale University Press. Delillo, Don. (1999). White Noise. Hammondsworth: Penguin Books. Derrida, Jacques. (1989). Of Spirit: Heidegger and the Question. (Geoffrey Bennington & Rachel Bowlby, Trans.). Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. ______________. (1993). Memoirs of the Blind: The Self-Portrait and Other Ruins . (Pascale-Anne Brault & Michael Naas, Trans.). Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. ______________. (1996). The Gift of Death. (David Wills, Trans.). Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. ______________. (1997). Of Grammatology. (Gayatri C. Spivak, Trans.). Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. ______________. (1998). Right of Inspection. (David Wills, Trans.). New York: The Monacelli Press. ______________. (2000). Demeure: Fiction and Testimony. (Elizabeth Rottenberg, Trans.). Stanford: Stanford University Press. ______________. (2001). On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness. (Mark Dooley & Michael Hughes, Trans.). London: Routledge.
236 ______________. (2005). Rogues: Two Essays on Reason. (PascaleAnne Brault & Michael Naas, Trans.). Stanford: Stanford University Press. de Saussure, Ferdinand. (1959). Course in General Linguistics. (Wade Baskin, Trans.). New York: Philosophical Library. Duras, Marguerite. (1986). The Malady of Death. (Barbara Bray, Trans.). New York: Grove Weidenfeld. ________________. (1998). The Lover. (Barbara Bray, Trans.). New York: Knopf Publishing Group. ________________. (2008). Moderato Cantabile. (Richard Seaver, Trans.). London: Oneworld Classics. Eco, Umberto. (2002). Five Moral Pieces. (Alistair McEwen, Trans.). London: Vintage. Fabian, Johannes. (1983). Time and the Other: How Anthropology makes its Object. New York: Columbia University Press. Fernando, Jeremy. (2008). Reflections on (T)error. Saarbrücken: Verlag Dr Müller. _______________. (2009). Reading Blindly: Literature, Otherness, and the Possibility of an Ethical Reading. New York: Cambria Press. Flaubert, Gustave. (1995). Madame Bovary. London: Penguin Classics. Foucault, Michel. (1997). Maurice Blanchot: The Thought from Outside. (Brian Massumi, Trans.). New York: Zone Books. Fynsk, Christopher. (2000). Infant Figures: The Death of the Infans and Other Scenes of Origin. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
237 Gide, André. (2000). The Immoralist. (David Watson, Trans.). London: Penguin Classics. ___________. (2002). Theseus. (Andrew Brown, Trans.). London: Hesperus Press. Gödel, Kurt. (1992). On Formally Undecideable Propositions of Principia Mathematica and Related Systems. (B. Meltzer, Trans.). New York: Dover Publications. Gramsci, Antonio. (1971). Selections from Prison Notebooks. (Q. Hoare, & G.N. Smith, Trans.). London: Laurence & Wishart. Groves, A. Staley. (2009). Imaginality: Conversant and Eschaton. New York: Atropos Press. Hamacher, Werner. (1999). Premises: Essays on Philosophy and Literature from Kant to Celan. (Peter Fenves, Trans.). Stanford: Stanford University Press. ________________. (2007). Uncalled: A Note on Kafka’s ‘Test’. Saas Fee: Open Lecture at the European Graduate School. Hänggi, Christian. (2009). Hospitality in the age of media representation. New York: Atropos Press. Heidegger, Martin. (1993). Basic Writings. (David Farrell Krell, Trans.). San Francisco: Harper San Francisco. ________________. (2004). What is Called Thinking? (J. Glenn Gray, Trans.). New York: Harper Perennial. Heisenberg, Werner. (1989). Physics and Philosophy: The Revolution in Modern Science. London: Penguin Books.
238 Melville, Hermann. (2006). Bartleby the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street. Easyread Edition: Objective Systems Hölzl, Julia. (2007). Beyond Eden [distorting symmetree]. Munich: Grin. __________. (2010). Transience: a poiesis, of dis/appearance. New York: Atropos Press. Houellebecq, Michel. (2001). The Elementary Particles. (Frank Wynne, Trans.). London: Vintage. __________________. (2004). Platform. (Frank Wynne, Trans.). London: Vintage. Jarry, Alfred. (1997). The Ubu Plays: Ubu roi, Ubu cocu, Ubu enchaine & Ubu sur la butte. (Kenneth McLeish, Trans.). London: Nick Hern Books. Kafka, Franz. (1998). The Trial. (Breon Mitchell, Trans.). New York: Schocken Books. ___________. (2000). The Metamorphosis, In the Penal Colony, and Other Stories. (Joachim Neugroschel, Trans.). New York: Touchstone. Kazantzakis, Nikos. (1998). The Last Temptation. (P.A. Bien, Trans.). London: Faber and Faber. Kierkegaard, Søren. (1997). The Seducer’s Diary. (Howard V. Hong, Trans.). Princeton: Princeton University Press. Kim, Jong Il. (1982). On the Juche Idea. Pyongyang: Foreign Languages Publishing House. King, Rodney. (1990). Armed Revolution. Singapore: EPB Publishers.
239 Kundera, Milan. (2008). The Unbearable Lightness of Being. (Michael Henry Heim, Trans.). London: Harper Perennial. Latour, Bruno. (1999). Pandora’s Hope: Essays on the Reality of Science Studies. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Lenin. (1997). Will the Bolsheviks Maintain Power? Gloucestershire: Sutton Publishing Limited. Lévi-Strauss, Claude. (1995). Myth and Meaning: Cracking the Code of Culture. New York: Schocken Books. Levinas, Emmanuel. (2003). Humanism of the Other. (Nidra Poller, Trans.). Chicago: University of Illinois Press. Lim, Lee Ching. “Sounds in the Key of Light: Reticence as Soundscape in the Poetry of Arthur Yap.” in Southeast Asian Review of English, Special Issue: Singapore Writing, 2010. Lippmann, Walter. (1922). Public Opinion. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co. Lucretius. (2005). Sensation and Sex. (R.E. Latham, Trans.). London: Penguin. Lyotard, Jean-François. (1984). The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. (Geoff Bennington & Brian Massumi, Trans.). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. ___________________. & Thébaud, Jean-Loup. (1985). Just Gaming. (Wlad Godzich, Trans.). Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press.
240 Marquez, Gabriel-Garcia. (2006). Memories of My Melancholy Whores. (Edith Grossman, Trans.). New York: Vintage International. ______________________. (2007). Love in the Time of Cholera. (Edith Grossman, Trans.). New York: Random House. Marquis de Sade. (2000). Philosophy in the Boudoir. (Meredith X, Trans.). New York: Creation Books. Mauss, Marcel. (2002). The Gift. (W.D. Halls, Trans.). London: Routledge Classics. McEwan, Ian. (1998). Black Dogs. New York: Random House. McLuhan, Marshall. & Fiore, Quentin. (1967). The Medium is the Massage: an Inventory of Effects. New York: Bantam. Melville, Herman. (2006). Bartleby, the Scrivener. Gloucester: Dodo Press. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. (2006). Phenomenology of Perception. (Colin Smith, Trans.). London: Routledge. Miller, J. Hillis. (1987). The Ethics of Reading: Kant, de Man, Eliot, Trollope, James, and Benjamin. New York: Columbia University Press. Murphy, Neil. (2004). Irish Fiction and Postmodern Doubt: An Analysis of the Epistemological Crisis in Modern Irish Fiction. New York: Edwin Mellen. Nancy, Jean-Luc. (2002). Hegel: The Restlessness of the Negative. (Jason Smith & Steven Miller, Trans.). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
241 Nietzsche, Friedrich. (1967). The Birth of Tragedy. (Walter Kaufmann, Trans.). New York: Vintage Books. _________________. (1967). The Case of Wagner. (Walter Kaufmann, Trans.). New York: Vintage Books. _________________. (1989). On The Genealogy of Morals. (Walter Kaufmann & R.J. Hollingdale, Trans.). New York: Vintage Books. _________________. (1999). The Anti-Christ. (H.L. Mencken, Trans.). Tuscon: See Sharp Press. Noon, Jeff. (2000). Automated Alice. London: Black Swan. O’Brien, Flann. (2006). The Third Policeman. Illinois: Dalkey Archive Press. Quigley, Brendan. "The Distant Hero of Samson Agonistes." in ELH Volume 72, Number 3 (Fall 2005): 529-551. Ramachandran, V.S. & S. Blakeslee. (1998). Phantoms in the brain: Probing the mysteries of the human mind. New York: William Morrow & Company. Ronell, Avital. (1989). The Telephone Book: Technology, Schizophrenia, Electric Speech. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. ___________. (1993). Dictations: On Haunted Writing. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. ___________. (1998). Finitude’s Score: Essays for the End of the Millennium. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. ___________. (2003). Stupidity. Chicago: University of Illinois Press. ___________. (2004). Crack Wars: Literature Addiction Mania. Chicago: University of Illinois Press.
242 ___________. (2005). The Test Drive. Chicago: University of Illinois Press. Rushdie, Salman. (1981). Midnight’s Children. London: Picador. _______________. (1991). Haroun and the Sea of Stories. London: Penguin. _______________. (1998). The Satanic Verses. Dover: The Consortium. Sacks, Oliver. (1985). The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat. London: Picador. Saramango, Jose. (1994). The Gospel According to Jesus Christ. (Giovanni Pontiero, Trans.). London: Harcourt. Schirmacher, Wolfgang. (1983). “From the Phenomenon to the Event of Technology” in F. Rapp. (Ed.). Philosophy and Technology. Dordrecht: Reidel. ____________________. (1987). “The Faces of Compassion: Towards a Post-Metaphysical Ethics” in Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka. (Ed.) Analecta Husserliana XXII. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers. ____________________. (1989). “Media as Life World” in Timothy Casey & Lester Embree. (Eds.). Lifeworld and Technology. Washington DC: Centre for Advance Research in Phenomenology and University Press of America. ____________________. (1989). “Eco-Sophia: The Artist of Life” in Carl Mitcham. (Ed.). Research in Philosophy and Technology 9: Ethics and Technology. Greenwich: JAI Press.
243 ____________________. (1994). “Homo Generator: Media and Postmodern Technology” in G. Bender., & T. Duckrey. (Eds.). Culture on the Brink: Ideologies of Technology. New York: The New Press. ____________________. (2000). “Cloning Humans with Media: Impermanence and Imperceptible Perfection” in Stephen K. Levine. (Ed.). Poiesis 2. Toronto: EGS Press. ____________________. (2001). “Netculture” in Stephen K. Levine. (Ed.). Poiesis 3. Toronto: EGS Press. Schnitzler, Arthur. (2003). Dream Story. (Otto P. Schinnerer, Trans.). Los Angeles: Green Integer. Schopenhauer, Arthur. (1994). Philosophical Writings. Wolfgang Schirmacher. (Ed.). (E.F.J. Payne & Virginia Cutrufelli, Trans.). London: Continuum Shah, Idries. (1974). Reflections: Fables in the Sufi Tradition. New York: Penguin Books. Shakespeare, William. (1984). Julius Caesar. London: Hutchinson. ___________________. (1987). Hamlet. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ___________________. (1987). Macbeth. Singapore: Pan Pacific. Shelley, Mary. (1998). Frankenstein. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Spinoza, Benedict. (2000). Ethics. (G.H.R. Parkinson, Ed. & Trans.). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Stein, Gertrude. (1997). Tender Buttons. New York: Dover Publications.
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246
247 The call of ‘death’ and ‘the gift’ is a strong one; the call to the suicide bomber.
And it is a call that she must choose to
accept or to deny, a call that is for her and her alone, that is often heard by no one else (even though many might claim to have taught her, influenced her, or even trained her). No one can take credit for answering the call of death, the call of her own life. After all, no one can die in her place, no one can die for her; no one else can pick up that call for her.
At a more banal level, this is a call of the second half of the sentence to the first, the call of the sub-title; always already from elsewhere and from within at the same time. In much the same way, death comes to claim one, from elsewhere (death has to come to you) and yet at the same time it is one’s own death (a death from within you, one that you always had from the very beginning).
Perhaps one can
provisionally posit that it is at the moment of recognising death, if that is even possible, that one potentially touches the other; that each touching of the other is also the moment in which the potentially of death is always already foregrounded.
And since there is no phenomenal aspect to
death—it is not as if it can ever be sensed; those who claim to be able to predict death have to rightly call it an extrasensory perception—this suggests that it is an object-less call. It might seem a little strange to call in a metaphysical
248 moment here—a transcendental call—but since the call of death is an event, then it can only be an idea, an abstract thought till it occurs; at best it is one that can only be known at the moment it is experienced.
In some way, the only role that one can play when it comes to death is to die.
This sounds like a completely absurd statement until we take into consideration the fact that there is no object to recognition;
there
is
no
object
of
referentiality
in
recognition—there is no object involved in picking up a call. In this, we find an echo of man’s role in Greek mythology. When challenged by the Gods, it is man’s role to recognise that this challenge comes from the Gods; so even though man is fully capable of besting the Gods (with dire consequences), he has to lose in the challenge. Hence, the challenge is a ruse; the actual challenge is the recognition. Or more precisely the challenge is a ritual in the specific sense that man has to continue to act as if it was a real challenge, one that (s)he is trying to win, whilst ensuring that (s)he loses. In both ways, the end result is the same; man loses and the Gods win. The difference lies not in the result, but in the response.
249 The only difference when it comes to death is in the acknowledgement that it is always already a part of one’s life, that death is always already awaiting, that all you are doing is awaiting its call.
This opens the register of death as a call
that is perhaps always already there, one that cannot be heard, until the very moment it is heard.
Here one cannot forget that one of the founders of the modern usable telephone—Alexander Graham Bell—was a teacher of the deaf. It is not too much of a stretch to say, especially taking into consideration that his own mother was gradually becoming deaf, that Messr Bell was very much in tune with absent voices, with connecting with voices that were not there, that were not in front of him.
After all,
speaking with someone on the telephone is akin to receiving a call from beyond—a distant sound—from lips that one cannot see, from a person that may or may not actually be there.
Whenever one receives a phone call, one’s only role is to choose whether or not to accept the call, that is, whether to pick up or not.
This is not a response to the other in any
cognitive manner—for one can never know who is on the other side, the other line.
Even in this day of automated
caller identification, there are so many instances of mistaken
250 IDs or crossed-lines; all your caller ID really does, is tell you that someone is calling—someone that might or might not be the person whose name is flashing on your screen.
This
opens registers of the self’s relation with the other: if one does not, and cannot, know who the one on the other side is, not only is the choice to pick up the call a response to an unknown other, it is also one that privileges the other. For at the point of picking up the call, one is putting down everything else, for reasons unknown, in order to attend to another who might potentially have nothing to do with one, or even worse, might be detrimental to one’s self. As Avital Ronell says, when answering Rodolphe Gashé’s call from The Tain in the Mirror: Derrida and the Philosophy on Reflection, “the call transfers you to the Other.
In this regard, calling
might be viewed as perturbing the self’s traditional subjection of the Other to itself.” 1
This privileging of the other is most apparent when it comes to prank calls. As one can never know who is on the other line, each time one picks up the phone, one is opening oneself to the possibility of being pranked, to being made fun of, of being faced with an other that is out to humiliate.
One
cannot help but recall the call made to Jacques Derrida which
1 Avital Ronell. (1989). The Telephone Book: Technology, Schizophrenia, Electric Speech. pp.82.
251 he recounts in a footnote in The Post Card: “I must note it right here, on the morning of 22 August 1979, 10 A.M., while typing this page for publication, the telephone rings. The U.S. The American operator asks me if I accept a ‘collect call’ from Martin (she says Martine or martini) Heidegger.
I
heard, as one often does in these situations which are very familiar to me, often having to call “collect” myself, voices that I thought I recognised on the other end of the intercontinental line, listening to me and watching my reaction. What will he do with the ghost or Geist of Martin? I cannot summarise here all the chemistry of the calculation that very quickly made me refuse (“It’s a joke, I do not
accept”) after having the name Martini Heidegger repeated several times, hoping that the author of the farce would finally name himself. Who pays, in sum, the addressee or the sender? who is to pay? This is a very difficult question, but this morning I thought, I should not pay, at least not otherwise than by adding this note of thanks.” 2
Reject. Refuse. “It is a joke, I do not accept.” Put down phone.
Jacques Derrida. (1987). The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond. Footnote. pp.21.
2
252 At first glance, Derrida’s response might seem to be a contradiction to his claim a few pages later—a claim ascribed to a much earlier date, 8 June 1977—when he says, “I accept [j’accepte], this will be my signature Henceforth, but don’t let it worry you, don’t worry about anything. I will never seek you any harm, take this word at its most literal, it is my name, that j’accepte, and you will be able to count, to count on it as on the capital clarities, and from you I accept everything.” 3
However, to even know that it is a joke, a
prank call, one has to first accept the call, pick it up.
In
Derrida’s case, he has to first accept that call—only after the acceptance, could the calculation that it was not Martin Heidegger on the other end take place. And even though he does not speak to the person at the other end, he has already been affected by the call, the call already has its effect on him: no one ever said that we will always like the calls we receive.
One
can
only
imagine
Abraham’s
discomfort—even
displeasure—at receiving the call from God to sacrifice his beloved Isaac. It is no wonder that Abraham didn’t pick up immediately; sometimes even God has to call back.
3
ibid. pp.26.
253 God’s call to Abraham opens another register of the call; calling as testing, calling to test, calling to see if anyone will pick up the line.
‘Hello?
Hello? … is there anybody out
there?’ A test to see if anyone will answer the call to duty. Perhaps
this
oft-used
phrase,
particularly
in
political
rhetoric—‘call of duty’—reminds us of a crucial aspect of calls; a call always comes from beyond us, and sometimes calls for one to go beyond oneself. And that a response to this call—which is almost always a call to something—is an “I accept,” and an acceptance of the fact that one is “perturbing the self’s traditional subjection of the Other to itself,” that one is putting the other ahead of one self. This is an “I accept” that occurs before any phenomenal experience of the call itself; this is an unconditional “I accept,” an acceptance that leaves the self open to any call, to any calling. Of course, after the experience of the call, one can then discern whether or not to act on it, but never before. This is an acceptance that does not permit the self to reject a call a priori.
Hence, once one adopts the position of
acceptance, one is always already open to the possibility of a prank, a call to a duty that one does not like, or even agree with, a call that attempts to obligate, a friendly call, appointment, date, lunch, and so on … This is an acceptance that is pre-relational; an “I accept” to any call that might, or might not, ever arrive.
254
I accept … Pick up phone …
I have to accept … even before picking up the phone.
Just because one is able to reject a call after experiencing it does not mean that one is not already affected. If this were so, then presence would be a prerequisite for effects: if this were true, phone sex would not be possible.
And the fact
that phone sex is possible opens the register of the imaginary that lies in responding.
For, if one has to respond to the
other without effacing the other, without making claims to knowing the other, one is responding purely by opening up one’s own imaginary to the very possibility of responding. After all, phone sex is more than possible with a complete stranger, is often with a complete stranger.
And this is
precisely the risk that one takes; by opening one’s imaginary, one is also always already opening one’s self to the possibility of wounding, of trauma.
And it is the trauma of the unknown caller that continues to haunt Derrida, through the question of “who pays?”; a question that cannot be answered, can never be addressed. It is Derrida that will always continue to pay, has no choice but to continue to pay; or at least bear the burden of the
255 continual question.
By responding to the call, Derrida has
already opened himself up to the wounding of the call(er): every call is a ‘collect call’ in this very sense. Every call that one responds to always already makes a demand of you, from you, and with you.
Perhaps it is a similar ‘collect call’ that I have to make, am making, and have made, whilst writing this particular piece. In attempting to make a case for The Suicide Bomber; and her gift of death, I have had to enlist, in an almost military styled recall-to-duty, all my influences, my guardians, other thinkers, writers, inscribers. It is a call that I make to them, one in which they have little choice—after all it is I who dialed their numbers, and they have responded independently of a conscious decision to respond.
By citing them, by
appropriating their words, their thoughts, their ideas, I have enacted an act of terror against them, on them; for it is not as if they were given a space of negotiation, a space to respond to me, to my thoughts.
Here, by way of an apology—the only one that I can offer—is an insistence on complete culpability, of accepting total responsibility.
“I accept” the ‘collect call’ and all the
payments that ensue from it … So even as I am laying out, have laid out, my little black book (for what is a citation list
256 if not a black book; friends that you can call up, count on, in case of a fight), I will open a running tab with them, one that will always remain unpayable; not because I want to default on my bill, but because it is impossible to settle this cheque. In this sense, the publicising—or even worse, publication—of a list of friends (which strictly speaking should have always remained private), is both the naming of my posse, and at the same time, the acknowledgment of an eternal debt to this same group.
This is not to say that they run absolutely no
risk as well: after this public naming, this exposing of their association with me (whether they want to be or not), they are now also potentially exposed to attacks, and perhaps even completely unwarranted assaults.
The register of the problematics of friendship brings to mind a conversation with Slavoj Zizek at the Hotel Allalin bar in Saas Fee, sometime in early August 2007. He was in a hurry to write a response to an attack on his work in some German newspaper (unfortunately I never got the name of that said publication from him).
Whilst he was quibbling about how
draining it is to constantly have to write such defenses, especially against baseless accusations, I asked him, “then why defend yourself?” To which he instantly responded, “just in case someone else attempts to do it for me—that would be infinitely worse.”
In some way, Zizek was highlighting the
257 dangers of someone else responding to your call, perhaps even a call that you did not intentionally send out, a call that you yourself were oblivious to. Here we once again find an echo of the lessons of both Jesus of Nazareth and Julius Caesar. Both their betrayals, and murders, were born out of love, were a result of their closest ones responding to their respective calls; calls that came both from within, and beyond them.
Tim Rice captures this beautifully in his lyrics in
“Heaven on their Minds,” from Jesus Christ Superstar, when he has Judas tell Jesus, “you’ve begun to matter more than the things you say.”
In this light, one can read Judas’
betrayal as an act of fidelity to Jesus’ teachings: he had seen Jesus beginning to turn against himself, against the spirit of the very word he was preaching. Moreover, without this act of betrayal, the Son of Man could not fulfill his own destiny—dying for the rest of humanity.
It is in this same
spirit that Brutus was responding to the call of Julius Caesar; killing him to prevent him from becoming the very despot he once detested.
On the one hand, ‘with friends like these, who needs enemies’. On the other hand, it is only friends like these who stop you from becoming your own worst enemy.
258 This opens the question of, ‘does one have to sometimes be an enemy in order to be a friend?’ And this of course is the question of fidelity; here the register of who and what are we responding to is then opened. In order to be faithful, do we respond to the person as such, or to the qualities of that person. And even as we aspire to respond to each person as a singularity, we are confronted with the problem of knowing; if each person is absolutely singular, irreducibly different, then we have no frame of reference, and strictly speaking, nothing can be said about the person, nothing can be known about her—we are then responding to an unknown.
To
compound matters, we cannot forget the more difficult question of—perhaps difficult mostly in terms of admitting to ourselves—what and who we must reject, refuse to answer, in order to answer some calls.
This is a hanging up that is
completely illegitimate, that cannot be justified: after all if one is always already responding to an unknown, there is no reason to choose that particular person; by extension, the rejection of the other person is completely unjustifiable as well. In some way we are always receiving a double-line (if not more), and are only able to speak to one other person at a time; the other(s) have to be put on hold, even if only temporarily.
So even if the others are in mind, never
forgotten, they are momentarily out of touch, only able at best to leave a message on your voicemail if they choose to
259 hang up; otherwise they will have to choose to wait—in either case, you have made your decision; their choice is now independent of you.
This is the difficult question that Jean-François Lyotard and Jean-Loup Thébaud attempt to respond to in Just Gaming, when Lyotard asks Thébaud, “can there be justice without the domination of one game upon the others?” 4 In other words, can one have justice without the over-arching idea of justice? In the case of multiplicity, ‘can one attempt to defend multiplicity, without effacing those who claim there is one, single, truth?’
Lyotard continues, “and the difficulty comes
from this: when one thinks of justice according to a nonunitary teleology, one tends to merely reverse what was implied in Kant’s doctrine, whereas one should be on one’s guard, I think, against the totalitarian character of an idea of justice, even a pluralistic one.” 5 Here, the stakes of the game lie in the relation between justice, being just, being ethical to one’s choices, decisions, judgments even, and the rules of the game, the language of the game itself.
For even as we
continue to claim that multiplicity, plurality, even to the extent of putting the other before the self, is crucial, we must
4
Jean-François Lyotard & Jean-Loup Thébaud. (1999). Just Gaming. pp.95.
5
ibid. pp.96.
260 admit that this stance can only occur if we agree to disallow the one, the single truth.
It is only via a pre-relational
exclusion that we can guard against exclusion.
In order to guard against terroristic gestures, we have to first be terroristic ourselves; we have to first efface the possibility of effacement.
Perhaps it is Thébaud that offers a glimpse into a way through this aporia, with his observation that “language cannot be mastered.” 6
Here we find an echo of Martin
Heidegger: we are thrown into the world, we are flung into language; our task is to find how we interact, communicate, negotiate, within language.
Lyotard follows along this
trajectory when he says, “language is indeed not, and cannot be, mastered.
Its very plurality makes it impossible for
anyone to establish her- or himself in a field and proceed to produce its laws in a sort of universal language or generalized metalanguage, and then go on to extend these laws to all the fields of language.” 7
In other words, language is specific,
singular, and only true at that moment, space, in time. In the
6
ibid. pp.98.
7
ibid. pp.98-99.
261 case of justice, when asked what is just, one can only answer, “it remains to be seen in each case.” 8
This suggests that it is a justice that is to come: we have to wait, to attend, to that very possibility of a justice, and possibly even a justice that we know not about, that we might never be able to recognise.
So even as we learn from
Wolfgang Schirmacher to ‘just live’, and to act as if we are able to, we also acknowledge that this pre-relational openness to relationality, to the possibility of touching the other, to otherness itself, can never be in the affirmative nor in the negative.
And since we cannot say what it is or is not, at
best we can proscribe in the very precise sense of a proscription against prescription.
Hence, at best, it is a
tentative proscription. As Lyotard reminds us again, “justice here does not consist merely in the observance of the rules … it consists in working at the limits of what the rules permit, in order to invent new moves, perhaps new rules and therefore new games.” 9
This requires knowing, and not
knowing, the rules at the same moment—perhaps an ironic acknowledgement of the rules.
8
ibid. pp.99.
9
ibid. pp.100.
262 It is completely appropriate that Just Gaming ends in laughter.
For when faced with such a situation, where one
must do even when one cannot do (or at least cannot be sure of what one is doing), what else can one do but laugh. This is not a laughter of despair, but a laughter of pure irony, a laughter that recognises that we are always already in singularity, where each situation is a situation in exception to everything
but
itself;
and
in
fact,
since
there
is
no
referentiality to a situation, any situation, this is a situation that is in exception to everything, even itself.
This is the laughter of Ubu Roi. A great belly laughter that
accepts
everything,
precisely because everything is completely
non-sense,
a
laughter that does not even pretend to understand that nonsense. … We are in the realm of pata-physics … where to know, to remember, we have to forget, but we have to somehow remember to forget; or perhaps we will forget even when we have forgotten to forget …
263
Thought must play a catastrophic role, must be itself an element of catastrophe, of provocation in a world that wants absolutely to cleanse everything, to exterminate death and negativity. But it must at the same time remain humanist, concerned for the human, and, to that end, recapture the reversibility of good and evil, of the human and the inhuman. Jean Baudrillard: Passwords