All paradises, all utopias are designed by who is not there, by the people who are not allowed in.

– Toni Morrison

 

‘A girl is far more responsible for a rape than a boy. Boy and girl are not equal. Housework and housekeeping is for girls, not roaming in discos and bars at night doing wrong things, wearing wrong clothes. About twenty per cent of the girls are good.’

– Mukesh Singh in India’s Daughter

 

WHEN dates become headlines and bodies turn into metaphors, the collective lament gives the impression of a historic rupture, a sure paradigm shift in political and personal discourse. However, theorizing from the ruins of Logos, as feminist thinker Judith Butler concedes, there is necessarily a marked distance between that which is and that which is written about. There is always something that cannot be articulated or represented in language, which the body in its material presence experiences immediately, and it is this gap, the aporia between what is, and the post-event memorialization in language that presents a problem. The very tangibility and corporeality of the body poses it as an argument which cannot always be fixed in language and discourse.

Political representation which depends on such discourse therefore always has a missing component – those material bodies that are not recognized in language, or have already been distanced in it, as bad bodies. So the question Butler takes up and which shall be repeated here is: which are the bodies that come to matter? Especially when one speaks of bodies such as Suzette Jordan’s (or ‘the Park Street rape case’ in newspeak), or the many Dalit women raped and men murdered by upper caste men such as Laxmanpur-Bathe in 1997 and Haryana’s Bhagana rapes in 2014? Rape has been persistently used as a punitive, reprimanding, socially gestural act of power. Rape goes on in towns, in villages, cities, in homes, on the streets, in parks, in buses, in cars, except that for the most part it is routine. Where it becomes visible is when rape is ‘unnatural’, and where the assumed law of patriarchy and capital is subverted. It is when the ‘wrong’ men commit rape on the wrong women that it becomes the topic of newsroom debates. It then shifts from being a routine activity, unseen and unheard of for the most part, to visceral outrage and hurt sentiment.

Mukesh Singh, now awaiting trial in Delhi’s Tihar jail, explains his notion of these relations (in an interview with Leslee Udwin, maker of the documentary India’s Daughter on the Nirbhaya rape on 16 December 2012), as a punitive impulse (however manufactured) to discipline such bad bodies, especially those of women. This I will argue is not merely a personal action against transgressive bodies, but part of social practices that signify him ‘male’ and locate his hierarchical position in a national, democratic and patriarchal space. Thus everyone who refuses to accept his/her location within the hierarchy is a bad body – the homosexual man who needs to be medicalized into ‘normal’ and good sexuality, the woman who refuses sex to her husband, the one who refuses to be a mother, or the one who wants to work outside the house. The accounts of women and men who have been castigated, punished and killed for such ‘transgressive’ desires is monumentally vast, and for such bad bodies no punishment is deemed enough.

 

This essay explores this notion of the ‘good’ versus ‘bad’ subject among other kinds of subjectivities in the context of such spaces, especially where rape becomes instrumental in the regulation and punishment of transgressive bodies. Here I want to discuss closely the linguistic term, patria, or the rule of the father, the foundation of early Athenian democracy, which is also the etymological root for other homologous terms – patriarchy, patriliny, and patrimony. One can detect in these terms their specific links to and moments in history, nation and the economy through which we reach different but intersecting consequences.

Patria as the rule of the father presents itself as a benevolent force in historical and social relations, but given that the appearance of the father in property relations and selfies with daughters has required the disappearance of the mother, it is necessarily implicit in various modes of violence. It has also influenced the idea of the ‘commons’ (which is the foundation of the demos, or the people), as a heritage that is handed down generationally – but only from fathers to sons – which then coalesces into the idea of a national heritage, into the patria as homeland which needs protection from outsiders, and the patria decides who is an outsider, and also the distinction between good outsiders and bad outsiders (foreign tourists vs. migrants from Bangladesh).

This very idea then sets up a binary relation between inside and outside, ours and yours, home and the world, and then goes on to argue for the necessary use of violence to defend its claims. It is no coincidence that patria returns to us as the male sovereign, enshrined in divine law as well as the secular as nation, as the defender of these claims. Therefore, what is a succession of ideas built on early false premises, now appears as the truth of self-evident natural laws. This will be the focus of this essay, the enactment of law necessarily in terms of conflict and power, rather than the manner in which the state desires to present itself, as a benign and democratic moralitat.

 

Such conflicted and divisive logic to be found in texts-become-tradition, such as in the Manusmriti or Plato’s Meno, which declare that the virtues of men and women are different, in such that they belong to different domains of work and behaviour – the man as belonging to the public and the affairs of the city, and the woman as performing the duty of ‘ordering the house well, looking after the property indoors, and obeying her husband.’ This subject is expected to conform to a particular physiological-psychological- social continuum, and is constantly subject to surveillance and regulation by the law. As this essay shall further argue, this law not only surveils but leads to the very production of particular beings within such structures. In the current context, the structure calls itself democratic (as demos – the rule of the people both in form and spirit), but tracing itself back to a law that is patriarchal and patrilineal. Thus what we deal with is not a homogenously coherent and neutral homo democraticus, but a patria democraticus, where the particular forms of the supposed democratic state are already written into inequality as law.

If the people are already inaugurated into their political existence as an unequal people, and if the promise of democracy is merely a formal ceremony that hollows out its substance, where do the directions for a political future lie? The inauguration, therefore, of a body into politics is locating it into a pre-existing historical space and language, either as inside to the structure or as the excluded, the abject – that body which is required by the state to be a vulnerable body, the body that is not allowed in, the body that is eternally excluded and yet exists, subject always to the threat of incipient violence and to erasure, since it is the continued docility and submission of that repudiated body that maintains the privileged order. To paraphrase Margaret Atwood, these are the bodies whose ‘...deaths are not elegant/ they have the faces of no one.’

 

The text of the 2011 judgment passed by the J&K State Human Rights Commission (JKSHRC) describes the monstrous night of 23-24 February 1991, when soldiers from the highly decorated 68th Brigade of the 4th Rajasthan Rifles conducted a cordon-and-search operation in the adjacent Kunan-Poshpora villages in Jammu and Kashmir,

Analyzing the statements of all the witnesses/victims it transpires that at about 10 to 11 pm in the night, security personnel cordoned the village...and committed forced gang rape against their will and consent. The personnel from the security forces had actually turned into beasts and had lost their sense of reasoning as even minor girls of eight years of age of some of the victims were also ravished.

The structure that presents itself as reasonable and lawful, displays the schizophrenic conditions of its construction at such moments, and reveals the endemic relationship of violence to the structure – it homogenizes the structure, immanates and penetrates every possible space, and pathologizes loving relationships into power relations. Events such as the protest held by the Manipur Mothers in 2004, naked and holding up the banner ‘Indian Army Rape Us’, or the outcry over that ‘prisoner of conscience’ Soni Sori, the Adivasi schoolteacher from Chhattisgarh, who was arrested in 2011 on suspicion of being a Maoist and was raped and tortured in police custody, and the famous Nirbhaya case which ‘shook the collective conscience of the people’, present just a few instances of the different modes and irruptions of this invisibilized oppression that disguises itself in civitas. This violence permeates our everyday practice of being within the structure, and manufactures our continuous consent to its conscience, and the conscience is savage.

 

In Bodies that Matter, Butler argues that instead of being a fixed objective category imposed upon bodies, sex is not a simple, individual practice, but rather a normative category – it is part of a social regulatory mechanism, which lays down the rules for sexual identities, and for who can have sex with whom (where sex within marriages is ‘good’, and outside is ‘bad’, heterosexual sex is good, homosexual is bad and so on and so forth). This regulation over time produces the kind of good bodies the social norm desires, and also produces certain bodies as the bad bodies. It names bodies as good and bad, and then goes on to produce such bodies through such naming (and shaming).

Extending this horizon of performativity, I would argue that rape too is performative, productive and regulatory. Rape is the law made visible as enactment of power, and the performative logic of oppressive discipline (by singular agents of the structure or by the structure as state) – whether on an individual such as Nirbhaya or Soni Sori, or an entire village such as Kunan Poshpora. It becomes, as Cornel West argues, an ontological wounding, which subjects both prisoners and the keepers of collective conscience to its penal codes. It is not, therefore, only a question of who rapes whom, or whether raping is essential to a particular gender, but that the exploitative structure itself desires such violence in order to establish itself as sovereign – whether as the law, or as transcendent to it.

 

One has only to read Mukesh Singh’s and other men’s claims in this respect – that the body of the woman, which has already been recognized as an abject by patriarchal law, and whose responsibility it is to reproduce that law, should be punished if it fails to do so. If such a body contravenes any part of the law, then it is to be subject to its proportionate punishment, and the only penal logic available within patriarchy is necessarily violative, and necessarily requires the forcible imposition of a sexualized and violent hurt upon the ‘transgressor’. Hence any questioning of the sovereign installed at the heart of such patristic democracy invites threats to attack the very body of the agitator/questioner through an act of rape, and where rape itself becomes a threatening metaphor for conquest and punishment.

This was evident in the recent furore over the selfies with daughters campaign initiated by the Prime Minister Narendra Modi, where proponents of the campaign (mostly men) violently countered the questions posed by Kavita Krishnan, Secretary of the women’s organization AIPWA, and Shruti Seth, an actor, through the language of rape and sexual punishment, thus displaying the very misogyny towards daughters that the campaign claimed to be countering. The claim of transgression, therefore, can only proceed upon the historicity of the law itself, which recognizes the transgression as valid, and the act of rape a necessary intervention upon a ‘bad’ body.

 

Every rape thus becomes an act of disclosure – of an otherwise normalized and invisibilized machinery of punitive judgement and the mundane disciplining of ‘bad’ subjects and bodies. Rape is punitively and reparatively invoked as the subterranean curative within modern democratic structures, whether restoratively in the case of avenging patristic honour or to discipline bad women, but which also brings the oppressive structure into view and problematizes it. It is that which reveals the pathological immanence of the order and makes the order reappear in its other, hateful, disfigured, monstrous face. Every rape also produces and reproduces the law materially on other bodies, making those bodies appear in public discourse, where they otherwise would be banal everyday subjects. It is what presents this law as a problem, as the conflictual fundament of democratic structures.

How then do we begin to unravel the multiplicities of bodies, both bad and good, within democratic spaces, and think the democratic potential of bodies in common, where the question is not of reclaiming particular spaces legitimated by the state, or of taking back the night, but of claiming all space as belonging to the people, thus taking back both days and nights? If democracy is the utopian ideal of the moment, what then could its form be that facilitates the articulation of difference and dissent? Ambedkar, following Renan’s notion of democracy, states, ‘Democracy is incompatible and inconsistent with isolation and exclusiveness, resulting in the distinction between the privileged and the unprivileged’, but later also counters it with the question: ‘What will be our fate in free India?’ On the one hand is the hope of a national solidarity; on the other is the actualization of what he sees as a half-formed derivative nation which presents only the illusion of freedom. It is this aporia that stretches between these positions that poses the problem.

 

Here one must turn away from the gestural democracy emblematic of the state, and turn to the idea of the agon, or struggle as the site of democracies to come. However, one has to be careful to reconceptualize this idea of the agon, not as a partisan politics, but as the struggle for a continual self-fashioning, and the struggle to imagine and create the politics of the future. One must draw the distinction, as Chantal Mouffe advises, between antagonism, a binary relation of friend/foe, and an agonism which is an open, fluid relation between contingent adversaries. This agonism therefore, challenges the limits to democracy where the demos is not a one but a multiple, and in its articulation of resistance is the very raison d’etre of democratic politics.

At a lecture titled ‘Democracy Now’ delivered in Argentina in 2012, Jacques Ranciere elaborated his idea of such a politics: ‘Democracy is not a system of government, but the always conflictual and disruptive manifestation of the principle of equality’, and that ‘it denotes a dynamic which is autonomous of place, time and state agenda.’ The ‘outside’ and zones of exclusion and dispossession have to be reconstituted through an agonistic engagement with the illusory and vacuous democratic space, but which declares itself immanent and the privileged insider. A rape is not simply a manifestation of a perverse desire that could be collectively assuaged by the violence of a simple death sentence, as was handed out in the Nirbhaya case, but the necropolitical symptom of a demos pathologically haunted by its exclusions, that pornographic spectacle of its surplus labouring humanity, dehumanized, dispossessed, whitewashed, flyover-ed, and shut out of the handouts of a neo-liberal democracy.

 

An agonistic politics thus becomes necessary where the epiphenomenal pathology of rape can coexist with self-stated goals of a tragic and savage democracy, which in a climate of manufactured threats, un-freedoms and prohibitions becomes a fascism of the people haunted by capital – the oligarchical preserve of a right wing atheism with secular, masculine idols. This idiom of violence, rape and a spectacular, consumptive pornography has to be countered then also with the language of a tactile eros, the dynamic of love that resists, is agonistic, and is a defiantly participative standing with, not a deadening standing against – an eros which imagines democracy as a shared commons, not only as a risible annual parading. Reiterating the questions posed by Wendy Brown then, how do we now imagine our demos, what is the kind of freedom promised by democracy and is this freedom likely to yield the good for the world, not just a few?

Or as the poet asks –

Where should we go after the last frontiers?

Where should the birds fly after the last sky?

Where should the plants sleep after the last breath of air?

– Mahmoud Darwish, ‘The Earth is Closing on Us’