IN our species definition, we are homo faber – human the creator, one who controls the environment with tools. This is an acknowledgement of violence as a primary, inclusive and inescapable human trait: man who shapes the surroundings, discards the existing, arranges the future according to one’s preference. This also explains why violence is in a way a paradox: underneath all the condemnation of violence, there is a tacit acknowledgement that it is also the prime mover of society, one that shatters stasis and makes history possible.

Think of the primal horde scenario in Freud’s Totem and Taboo. The father has monopolized all the women. The ‘desolate stasis’ of the primal horde ends with the sons collectively slaughtering the father, the original savage. The killing of the all-devouring father by the deprived sons should have also meant liberation from an all-encompassing determination. But Freud’s narrative comes with a twist. He sees the origin of modern society (and of law) in the internalization of the savage, who remains an ever-eruptive possibility that needs to be tamed and monitored.¹

Spelt out here is the condition of collectivity. This is after all also Hobbes’ conceptualization of the City as against the State of Nature, which is the antithesis of society. He sees the city (his shorthand for civilization) as tanquam dissoluta – ‘as if it were dissolved’ – always at peril in the face of the eruption of the state of nature, which is not a chronological marker but gestures to this ever-present immutable core. So violence, or rather its eruptive possibility, works as an anchoring, consolidating factor. We are because we may not be is this kind of thinking. In condemning violence, therefore, what we are mostly doing is seeking new strategies of pacification.

Much of what we call violence is really a matter of it being acknowledged as such. What gets to be known as violence today might not have been regarded so in yesteryears. Not unlike whipping the slave which was a common (and legal) practice during the days of slavery, many of us even now do not consider deducting the salary of our domestic help who goes on leave for a few days without prior notice, or sending her off to her village when she falls ill, as violence. So where does violence begin and end? Vegetarians consider meat-eating as violent. But if the fruit that falls from the tree contains life, would consuming it not incur violence?

The issue may in part be solved by drawing a line between ahimsa (nonviolence) and a-nrishansha (non-cruelty) – that is, between avoiding anything that involves violence and avoiding unnecessary violence. But who determines the borderline of ‘necessity’ here? As a matter of fact, imbued in the changing notion of violence is a larger and more profound question: the changing understanding of the human – the tension between anthropos and humanitus – that accompanied modernity. Remember how immediately after the French Revolution, there was a revolt of black slaves in San Domin, Haiti in the name of liberty, equality and fraternity. Ironically, the revolt was forcefully suppressed by the French Revolutionary government and slavery reimposed on the ground that the blacks were not quite human as yet to understand and appreciate the powers of those liberal virtues. In other words, universal citizenship rights would be extended to them but it would take a while.

 

Calling liberalism a project, philosopher Margaret Canovan imagined it in terms of a garden in a jungle that is continually encroaching upon it. In other words, liberalism is a garden that looks to the jungle as a threat; it lives imagining danger at the threshold. This threat of the ‘illiberal’ is constitutive of liberalism. It is not that liberalism does not practice freedom but it insists that citizens need to be cultivated into it. Like a pendulum, it swings back to the end of total control of life as soon it perceives threats, imagined or otherwise. Liberal verities, it may be said, are more a matter of strategies than principles.

Since liberalism is premised on possible threats to its existence against which it must be ever vigilant, the war on terror is congenital to liberal modernity itself. Phrasing it as ‘becoming-dangerous of being’, Michael Dillon argues that the threat of ever eruptive violence ‘underwrites the very political reasoning’ of war for extending zones of liberal peace.² Because everything has to be ultimately justified in its name, security works as a floating and radically intertextual signifier which transgresses – and in the process also brings together – disciplinary, political, corporeal and geographical boundaries and thus acquires the status of a defining, master discourse of modernity. This accentuated dispositif (apparatus or logistics, corresponding to new forms of power-knowledge) of security marks the social body as a juncture of all kinds of risk – from ‘illegal immigrants’ to drug peddlers to terrorists (alien, even if a citizen) and eventually biologized by equating with viruses known or unknown. Together this would provide legitimacy for constituting a disciplined biopopulace through a thick discursive facticity that cuts across disciplines and media. If we are looking for an archeology of violence today (actually peace as well as violence), I would say it lies here.

 

Theologic rule faced no problem in asking people to be law abiding, given that the law was God’s mandate, executed through the ruling monarch. But who mandates law in a secular, liberal state? The simple answer is, the ‘people’. And who is this ‘people’? This ‘people’ is what gets constituted as an entity through the very act of its declaration in the Constitution: ‘We the people of …’ In other words, it comes into being only through its enunciation. It is an ever-receding centre, much like the capital which also is an ever-enlarging grid. The people is the interface between the singular and the collective, the finitude and the infinitude. Everyone is the people just as no one is. At one level, it is the surpassing sovereign; at another it is the fodder for politicians to play their many games.

Since Carl Schmitt, the parallels between the theocratic state and the modern secular state have been much discussed. The burden of current political discourse is to ask, what is there in a formation like the nation-state – with its enormous theological load – that prevents it from being reduced to merely a deific state? In what ways is modernity critical and incompatible with deific substitutes? Answering this crucial question, Fitzpatrick points out that sovereignty’s self-generating supremacy crucially depends on a responsive incorporation and assimilation of the multitude of disparate forces that continually come to (re)constitute it.³

The modern state faces, quite often coevally, a multiplicity of diverse challenges like floods, outbreak of epidemics, shortage of food, political disturbance, religious violence, student unrest. It is in coping with these challenges that the state acquires its legitimacy. This Fitzpatrick calls, sovereignty’s ‘incipient vacuity’ which holds the key to the new chemistry of the modern state. The idea has interesting parallels with, classically, Rousseau’s idea of plenitude of collective presence needing an empty centre impossible to occupy and, more contemporarily, to Koselleck’s understanding of modernity as a constitutive crisis of an infinitely expanding subjectivity and the need to rein it back to the centre.

 

As against the liberal set-up, let us take up three instances of counter-violence: Walter Benjamin’s philosophic revolutionary violence, Hannah Arendt’s understanding of violence as mere instrumentality and Frantz Fanon’s anticolonial violence. Benjamin wrote his famous essay, ‘Critique of Violence’ in 1921 when Germany’s first experiment with parliamentary democracy, the Weimar Republic, had already started developing serious cracks. As Agamben in his collection of essays, State of Exception, reminds us, Article 48 that effectively meant temporary seizure of the legal procedure was used eighteen times during the republic’s fourteen years in office – i.e., 1919-1933. To put an end to the eternal cycle of violence and counter-violence, Benjamin urges us to stop seeing violence as instrumental in nature, as only a means to achieve certain ends, since this is what allows the state to carry on with its two primary functions – the source of its violence – law making and law preserving. Law making is the victor’s preserve while law preserving may be subjected to the restriction that it may not set for itself new ends, though in effect law preserving becomes law making in situations when for instance, the police intervenes ‘for security reasons’, where no clear legal situation exists.

 

Borrowing from Carl Schmitt’s understanding that sovereign power is the power to decide exception, Giorgio Agamben argues that the crux of law is law’s own wilful withdrawal from applying itself. As an example of law’s wilful suspension of itself, we can cite Indira Gandhi’s proclamation of Emergency in the mid-1970s. Agamben’s analysis of the state of exception resonates perfectly well with our experience. ‘If exceptional measures are the result of periods of political crisis and as such must be understood on political and not juridico-constitutional grounds… then they find themselves in the paradoxical position of being juridical measures that cannot be understood in legal terms, and the state of exception appears as the legal form of what cannot have legal forms.’⁴ Because the common people have to obey the law and can never challenge it, the figure of the ‘great criminal’, says Benjamin, acquires significance: while the state fears his lawmaking potential, the masses see in him the activity denied to them by law.

 

Under natural law – that is, the law that relates to human’s ‘so-called’ nature which they themselves discover and consider inalienable – violence is a product of nature almost like raw material, the use of which is in no way problematic unless deployed for unjust ends. Citizens are expected to surrender their natural propensity to kill to the state. For positive law (the law that the state posits on behalf of the human), this is both a source of assurance and worry because even after submission, humans remain de facto owners of natural violence. Benjamin observes: ‘Natural law attempts, by the justness of the ends, to "justify" the means, positive law to "guarantee" the justness of the ends through the justification of the means.’⁵ The focus, therefore, is not on the criteria of violence, but whether it is sanctioned or not.

To come out of this predicament, Benjamin proposes non-instrumental pure means which are neither law making nor law preserving. On the contrary it challenges both these functions to the core. Benjamin conceives this in the metaphor of proletarian general strike which he contrasts to political strike, that is the workers’ right not to violence but to non-action. Political strike may even lead to a change in the law making character of the state which simply means that the masses change their masters. What in effect it does is to strengthen the legal façade of the state. As against this, a proletarian general strike is not targeted at material gains and sets itself the sole task of destroying state power. Thus even if it were to produce bloody or catastrophic effects, the proletarian strike remains at core pure. It is not sacred by proxy like the liberal state but embodies messianic, divine power.

What Benjamin is celebrating here is disruptive, revolutionary force or ‘now time’, the liberation of the restlessness that inheres time, the multiple, disjunctive histories squashed by the false continuum of progress. It also links to his other agenda of politicizing aesthetics in face of a fascist aestheticization of politics. However, messianic strike which is so pure, so unalloyed, that it actually represents frozen time, can only be couched in transcendental terms. The essay too clearly carries the stamp of its time, when the civil state’s difference from the state of nature has become nearly indistinguishable. Paradoxically, perhaps what it manages to achieve is to emphasize the need for a liberal state as it promises itself to be. To be fair, Benjamin was not advocating pure violence as the absolute end of politics. But can there be pure means disengaged from ends? Can eruptive politics conceived in general terms escape this dilemma without getting stuck in the obfuscation of messianism?

 

Hannah Arendt in her small book, On Violence, did not refer to Benjamin. But obviously she did have him in mind because her treatise was a sharp critique of the proposition of erasing the difference between violence and power, which is the sign, she argued, of the cynicism marking the post-Holocaust, post-nuclear world. For Aristotle, man’s distinctiveness as a species lay in his political nature: the ability to judge fairness, to use reason and language. As a student of Aristotle and Kant, Arendt not only thought that violence is instrumental, but to the extent violence was effective in reaching an end, it was fundamentally rational in nature. And this is what power is: to put violence in a means-end relationship. But what happens when the ends towards which violence is employed are not justified? The tacit assumption is that where the ends are not justified, violence will soon itself become an end, as it is in forced occupation. Where violence is supreme, that is both the means and the end as in concentration camps, language, a la ratiocination, falls silent. This is the point of humans’ entry into non-human zone.

Agamben has evocatively discussed this condition. Between those who survived the camps and those who perished in the gas chambers were the clusters of walking dead – skulls elongated, noses dripping constantly, eyeballs sunk, limbs moving slowly and hesitantly, almost mechanically. They muttered words but that’s not language. They bore the look of trauma. They were banteringly called Musselmann by the camp guards because from a distance they looked like a cluster of Arabs in prayer. Agamben quite offensively decided to retain the word.

Agamben’s take on this emaciation, of bodies falling into silence, is diametrically opposed to Arendt’s. Unlike Arendt, for Agamben the figure of the Musselmann does not represent the collapse of politics but its fullest realization, politics that evacuates all relationship, reduces life to its barest. Law is not what guides violence rationally but is force without signification, indicating to a complete arbitrariness.

 

The technical development of the implements of violence has now reached a point where no political goal can conceivably correspond to their destructive potential or justify their actual use in armed conflict. The inevitable excess of violence makes defunct the means-end logic. Especially after the arrival of the nuclear bomb, there is an inbuilt reversal in the nature of violence. Since it is implement dependent, there is always the possibility that with the acceleration of technology, violence will become so extreme that to even think that it can be rationally guided or make a scheme of political classification according to uses of violence, is redundant.

While nuclear warheads keep piling up in an era of deterritorialized terror, what causes real concern is the threat of possible violence. In the prevailing atmosphere of terror, an empty suitcase, for instance, at Madison Square or Sydney Opera House or Victoria Terminus can put civil life at total disarray. Agamben observes that in contemporary life, it is disorder which guides order, indicating to the accentuated dispositif that governs the everyday life of ordinary life.

 

Not that Arendt was unaware of the potential of violence of democracy. As she says: ‘A legally unrestricted majority rule, that is, a democracy without a constitution, can be very formidable in the suppression of the rights of minorities and very effective in the suffocation of dissent without any use of violence.’⁶ What she would not consider was that a properly instituted constitution too contains the legally established protocols of exceptions. The more she found democracies going aberrant, the more she emphasized the difference between power and violence.

More than most of her contemporaries, Arendt understood the paradox of modern politics as the paradox of the simultaneous elevation of life to the status of a supreme good and the multiplication of instances in which human life was degraded to the utmost. But it never occurred to her as the biopolitical paradox of intensification and purification of a population’s life standards that brings as its necessary counterpart to care and welfare the implementation of massacres and genocides as vital political exigencies. Instead, the way she wanted to counter what she calls ‘the oblivion of politics’ was through the light and illumination of the debating public, which seemed to her as far more preferable than the warmth and intimacy of brotherhood. She uses this neo-Kantian position as a critique of mass society which she combined with a Heideggarian stress on ‘worldliness’: a relatively enduring world of human artifacts, a world that carries traces of the past with it as against the ‘weird irreality’ of ‘transient consumer goods’.

 

Arendt is right in thinking that violence cannot have an intrinsic meaning on its own. Violence does not participate in any order of reasons; it does not serve a truth, it wants instead to be itself the truth. An assaulted face is denied of any truth beyond the rage of the blow that hits it. Since in the Kantian tradition she subscribes to a ratiocinative understanding of politics, and since violence is devoid of any intrinsic meaning of its own, she holds that it can only be the means of politics. Her gesture is primarily against violence being considered a radically constitutive event. Both Benjamin and Arendt, however, display a blindness to structural violence from two reverse sides. Arendt is blind to it because it resides too far away for her gaze; for Benjamin, it resides too close to our eyes and therefore one can see only an inflated, distorted version of it, stripped from all collateral relations. The question is, if liberal democracies makes violence the limit of the political, do theories of revolution as a reverse gesture constitute its political claims primarily by a justification of violence?

 

This question is addressed in Fanon’s discussion of anticolonial violence. He admittedly is not talking in the global, transcendental terms of Benjamin or Agamben, but has a specific, historical referent: the Antillean, Creolized subjects of French colonialism. In Black Skin, White Masks, the black subject internalizes the white other as ‘Ideal I’ but is also rejected. The colonizer subjects the colonial other to a double command: be like me, don’t be like me; be mimetically identical and also totally different. The colonial subject is located somewhere between difference and similitude at the vanishing point of subjectivity. Thus, there is a relay of substitution, creating a weak, beleaguered ego. The violence of colonialism results in obsessional neurosis; fragmentation is the sign of colonialism. In The Wretched of the Earth, this neurosis can only end in matching colonial violence in counter-violence, causing reciprocal homogeneity of violence. Violence creates history by cleaning history. This is a drastic version of Hegel’s struggle for recognition.

Fanon worked towards developing an intellectual framework to diagnose and treat not only the psychological disorders produced in individuals by the violence of colonial domination, but also the neurotic structure of colonialism itself. Deploying the conventional psychoanalytic grammar of ‘the other’ and ‘the Other’ to distinguish between imaginary and symbolic difference, or between primary and secondary identification, Fanon suggests that colonialism inflicts its greatest psychical violence precisely by attempting to exclude blacks from the very self-other dynamic that makes subjectivity possible.

Diana Fuss observes: ‘Stricken and immobilized by a white child’s phobically charged cry, "Mama, see the Negro! I’m frightened!" Fanon’s very body strains, fragments, and finally bursts apart. "I took myself off from my own presence, an excision, a haemorrhage that spattered my whole body with black blood?"’⁷ Black may be a protean imaginary for the white, but for itself, it is a stationary object; objecthood, substituting for true alterity, blocks the migration through the Other necessary for subjectivity to take place. Through the violence of racial interpellation – ‘dirty nigger!’ or ‘look, a Negro!’ – Fanon finds himself becoming neither an ‘I’ nor a ‘not-I’ but simply ‘an object in the midst of other objects’. The black man is forever in combat with his own image.⁸

Denied entry into the alterity that underwrites subjectivity, the black man, Fanon implies, is sealed into a ‘crushing objecthood’. There are two ways open to the black man. Either he identifies with the white and others of his own community which leads to obsessional neurosis or he develops a revolutionary alliance with other blacks and launches a full-fledged offensive against the colonizers. Fanon advocates the second path in The Wretched of the Earth. This is an obligatory subscription, not an intellectual resolution. He does little to theorize this revolutionary identity but leaves it to the force of will.

 

If universalism is an attempt to judge history in the light of universals – say, fairness, justice, democracy – and historicism is an analysis of how real practice inflects the universals, Foucault’s radical historicism advocates putting universals in a grid of practice and write the history of those universals in terms of their practice. He points out that in medieval philosophy, general or abstract words did not stand for objectively existing entities and that universals – like madness, disease, delinquency and sexuality – are no more than names assigned to them. What happens if we, as a thought experiment, decide to revert back to the medieval position? Would these universals become unreal? They would not, simply because their reality is the weave of concrete practices that have evolved taking them as universals.

Following this line of analysis, can we posit that there cannot be a theory or for that matter a critique – that is, the search for transcendental conditions of possibility – of violence? Does it mean that we cannot write a history of violence? Yes, of course, we can. But it would be a history of its many, even intractable, manifestations, albeit locally in the force-field in which it operates. We can trace the regularities or otherwise of these manifestations and include in that history the ways they respond to a crisis in the present. Such responses to a present event could well lead to a reordering of their past life, the regime of truth in which they are coordinated. In other words, a change in the archive, that is, a set of practices coordinated with a regime of truth.

 

The political order is a crystallization of power relations and an outcome of concrete combat. Beneath the Hobbesian arrangement of contract, laws and the establishment of sovereignty is the scene of a shifting and historical struggle, a cauldron of fierce struggle to achieve dominance. Relationships operate in a parallelogram of power. Backing positions of power is, of course, the promise of force which is where naked violence enters the scene. Relations of subjugation manufacture subjects through the constant presence of this threat of violence. Violence, we may say, is the temporarily postponed destiny of power and also its ultimate denial.

The modern administrative state is a historically specific form of power with a distinct rationality. Foucault identified the historical conditions as Christian pastoral power and the birth of political economy. Adam Smith had argued that the price which emerged from voluntary transactions between buyers and sellers – that is, in a free market – could coordinate the activity of people at large, each seeking their own interests, in such a way as to make everyone better off. Behind viewing society only as an economy lies Smith’s guiding wisdom.

 

The function of the modern state, Foucault says, is ‘to make live and let die’, both of which are inscribed in the three forms of pastoral power – obligatory, sacrificial and curative – and accentuated by the Greek city-citizen model on which it is superimposed. This overlaying leads him to comment: ‘Our societies proved to be really demonic since they happened to combine those two games – the city-citizen game and the shepherd-flock game – in what we call the modern state.’⁹

It is legitimate to conjecture that the modern state is at the crossroad of two different trajectories. On the one hand, informed by the wisdom of the Physiocrats that the economy performs best when left to itself, the state pursues the notion of optimal, limited government. Limited government, we will do well to remember, also means pervasive governance which it inherits from the pastoral surveillance. The modern state operates through the different sites of civil society aimed at governing citizens through attention and care. But the other reality of the state is rule through the rhetoric of security, risk and exclusion.

These two functions of the state – care and termination – mostly emanate from the self-same governmental apparatus. For instance, the same police force that killed Lalmohan Tudu, a Maoist activist of Midnapore, shooting him in the eyes, also made sure that his daughter was escorted to the local Ramakrishna Mission school for her madhyamik examination the very next day. Derek Gregory in his book, Colonial Present, puts these two opposed function graphically by citing an Afghan chieftain’s confusion about the yellow packets falling from the planes. They could be food packets or lethal bombs. Both looked the same.

 

A notion is increasingly gaining strength that with the current levels of technology and stress on value added commodities, one third of the world’s population is simply rendered redundant, either as labour or market. (The lineage of this thought goes back to the Club of Rome of the 1970s and its much discussed book, Limits to Growth). This would mean a combination of care of ordinary citizens as also termination of lives it considers useless or dangerous. (Let us not forget here the accentuated production of ‘detritus’ in postcolonial versions of neoliberalism.) Partha Chatterjee’s Politics of the Governed shows how the inhabitants of a squatter colony next to the train lines in Calcutta, people whose very habitation and livelihood lay on the other side of legality, managed to make paralegal arrangements with the state. The squatters lodged a discursive and practical negotiation based on the right to life and the state’s professed commitment to the welfare of the poor.

While Chatterjee’s case of the rail bustee is well known, what is seldom cited is his example of the coal miners of Raniganj who showed little or no interest in a rehabilitation project, even though they lived dangerously with fire breaking out all around in their surroundings.¹⁰ Such was their level of despondency that they preferred to continue as living dead. Modern societies are marked by a ceaseless production of bare bodies. In the neoliberal era, this process has markedly increased. Bare life is not life under any specific constraint. Rather it is the context of today’s politics.

 

In the last section, let us think about how philosophy has dealt with the problem of violence. Philosophy has had its share of responsibility in forging a world social order based on international capital, systematic inequality and mass violence. Has this led to a redefinition of its universalist claims? Have its categories of understanding been seriously challenged and even rendered irrelevant by global developments? How has its project of reason and the idea of autonomous rational human subjectivity withstood the test of European imperial extension? Or, was it always complicit with such ambitions? Has philosophy’s dream of global civility always been a niche enterprise, readily discarded once it crossed geographical and cultural borders?

Cartesian self-certainty, it has been pointed out, is largely a response to a large-scale culture of doubt that had direct resonance in the expanding European missions far away from Europe. As large amounts of sociological and ethnological data starting reaching the shores of Europe from the middle of the 19th century, it became clear that there were many ways of being ‘natural’ outside the Augustianian ‘natural reason common to humanity’. This once and for all, muddied the waters of philosophy and created a major schism in its grand aim of understanding the world with a uniform, universal tool kit. Philosphical thought has never stopped being haunted by the ghostly presence of the strange and the unusual, be it in other cultures or deep within its own psychic recesses.

 

The obsession of enlightenment philosophy with geometry began with Hobbes and Descartes. While reading Euclid, Hobbes reportedly fell in love with geometry. His interest in physics helped him understand matter in movement while geometry made him see neat patterns that govern nature. Together they helped him to fathom regularities and order in something which is constantly in flux. No wonder geometry and physics provided the foundations of his political treatise. Coevally, Descartes held on to the idea of a world reducible to substance as bare extension appropriable by coordinate geometry.

Both philosophers were attempting to safeguard the space of civility – the space of reason, of philosophy – from the eruption of the unusual and the strange. Vigilance against tanquam dissoluta became the pre-eminent modern gesture, as mentioned earlier. Howard Caygill points out that instead of clearing the intellectual space of theological remnants and establishing objectivity and universal reason, the presence of doubt actually took on the function of gate-keeping, a management strategy for containing violence to protect the new sovereign space.¹¹ Philosophy became concerned with preserving the integrity of rational civility and casting the aberrant to the pre-modern – both temporal and geographical. Kant’s essay, ‘Perpetual Peace’, outlines a political geography mapping the universal and general (the common name for the republican, contractual Europe) and the unknown vastness of the outside world which was viewed as held tenuously between the temporal (the yet to be modern) and the anthropological (the unpredictable, the rapacious) and where nothing can be certain. This has correspondingly remained a central concern of the republican project into which the larger part of humanity needs to be trained and cultivated, a project which, in keeping with the uncertainties of the temporal/anthropological phenomenon, would always remain an unfinished one.

 

But what lay outside that rapacious vastness as it was projected, was also systematically plundered and annexed. It thus became internal to the global order, an order for which philosophy had strived to provide a universal platform. Doubt, says Caygill, became the mechanism to banish violence either to the past or to the outreach of a sovereign space of reason, which needed to be safeguarded. This was not to be since territorial expansion and the establishment of a global order meant civility and violence folded onto one another, causing serious confusion in the discourse of philosophy. James Tully, for instance, points out that for Kant the key to progress was ultimately race.¹² Kant loved the idea of one global human race (earthlings, as he called it) but was also convinced of the natural differences between races. As a matter of fact, over time he tilted towards the latter, making the question of racial difference an ever widening spiral.

One way to resolve this dilemma, Foucault argues in ‘Society Must Be Defended’, was to accept that the human race is one long spectrum but also introduce a break in the form of racism: the break between what must live and what must die. The relationship between my life and the death of the other, previously viewed as a warlike relationship of confrontation, is now posed in biological terms: ‘The more inferior species die out, the more abnormal individuals are eliminated, the fewer degenerates there will be in the species as a whole, and the more I – as species rather than individual – can live, the stronger I will be, the more vigorous I will be. I will be able to proliferate.’¹³ Hence, the constant attempt in modernity to medicalize social crisis. Post-War War II and with decolonization, as vast numbers of people settled in the West, imperial violence returned to the metropolitan homeland. The multicultural West is now the scene of rhizomatic criss-crossing of different genealogies of religions, cultures and encounters with modernity. In recent decades, the West opened a Pandora’s box in its unwarranted attempts to establish ‘democracy’ offshore, the tides of which now have engulfed the homeland.

 

This brings us back to the question: Has the present slipped out of the grasp of philosophy? Does it have the tools to understand the conditions undergirding the possibility of political violence, so important if one has to conceptualize a functional, non-oppressive world order? The West formed its topology of thought as a matter of inheritance from the Greeks. But the intellectual tool kits – such constants as reason, logic, system, structure, etc. – also came accompanied with a certain understanding of their locations and modes of deployment. In his book, Being Political, Engin Isin shows how Greek thought was fundamentally conditioned by the invention of the ‘barbarians’, who had to be kept outside the walls of the polis and in contrast with whom the notion of democratic citizenship was formulated.

 

In every subsequent phase of European political thought, Isin shows, democratic discourse revolved around identifying exclusions which in its turn gave rise to ceaseless contestations. He calls the city a difference machine, ‘insofar as it is understood as that space which is constituted by the dialogical encounter of groups formed and generated immanently in the process of taking up positions, orienting themselves for and against each other, inventing and assembling strategies and technologies, mobilizing various forms of capital, and making claims so that space that is objectified as the city.¹⁴ Liberal governmentality with its tools for analysing its rationality, techniques and procedures tries to incorporate this encounter in its favour through many different modes of conducting the heterogeneous. Colossal violence, pathological mobilization of religious convictions worldwide and sharp turn to the extreme right in democratic states, however, warrant a serious rethink of the current techniques to pacify and displace violence. As fault lines become more glaring, conventional, tried and tested solutions look seriously out of place.

The structures of judgment that philosophy has laid out through such categorical oppositions like consent/disagreement, inside/outside, form/matter, and through which we as finite beings are expected to calibrate our sense of the world, does not seem to be working in a world that has incorporated the antithetical outside within its folds, thereby heralding a new topological order for experience.¹⁵ Are our theoretical predicaments constituted on practices of exclusion? How important are these exclusions for modes of formation of subjectivity? Kant was well aware of the limits of categorical thought, given the parochial nature of our experiential being which can extend only to a certain point and not beyond. But he did not question the extra-categorical structure through which we came in possession of these categories in the first place, the violence that marks our relation with space and time.

For Marx, the ever expanding grid of capital sunders human perception of space and time. Capital expands and destroys not only existing cultures but also our cherished postulates and tools of perceiving the world – his famous pronouncement in Communist Manifesto: ‘All that is solid melts into the air.’ Written in Marx’s project is a critical genealogy of our being – how we came to be what we are – only that it needs to be read outside the terms of economic determination and the teleology of history that he and subsequent generations of Marxists have quite often encouraged us to believe.

 

At the very end, let us revisit the argument we began this essay with – namely, the undeniable necessity of violence. It is often argued that even new forms of knowledge are necessarily forms of intervention and, therefore, involve cognitive violence to what existed before. But can we not make a distinction, however provisional and contingent, between the violence of dissemination of knowledge and the sheer aggressive transactions of humans? Is the violence done by Galileo’s truth in the process of displacing the then existing truth and the violence that man was threatened with of the same order? Possibly, the idea of ‘discriminating violence’ as such would not invite many detractors. What will, however, be seriously challenged is the border line between necessary violence and avoidable violence. This contestation cannot be easily resolved since it is actually imbricated in the larger configuration of innumerable strives that a society at a particular juncture is caught in.

 

Our ethical comportment or, better, the cultivation of it, promises to be more helpful than mere rational, objective analysis in deciding the issue of necessary violence beyond what is socially prescribed. To develop one’s own sense of ethical legitimacy, we need to refuse the demand for external justification and opt for the cultivation of an appropriate ethical sensitivity through an exercise of critique as a performative practice of the self – that is, the effort to think one’s own history, how one has become what one is, that can free thought from conventional grooves and thus enable it to think differently.

Unlike the Cartesian paradigm, this is not merely a matter of the subject’s innate rational faculty guided by an appropriate method, but a form of objectification which integrates intellectual introspection to the knower’s ethos and bios in such a way that this person’s very comportment became the attestation of the process of knowing. Performative critique aims to reshape our ethical sensitivity by looking into the self not merely objectively but historically, i.e. how we have come to where we are and transform our practices in its light.

Any knowledge involves a relation between modes of objectification and modes of subjectification. This can be taken as a universal condition of knowledge. Foucault coined the expression ‘historical a priori’ to indicate the additional, and historical, epistemically enabling conditions that each age inscribes into the process. The task of critique is to unveil those historical a priori at work. Practice of critique as an ethos is perhaps the best way to attain a nonviolent life beyond the customary violence required to continue living.

 

Understanding the pathways of our contingent arrival to where we are now, both socially and individually, is part of the process developing a non-violence being. While a necessary condition, can this be enough? What sort of different ontology must we cultivate in us? Gandhi has emphasized that merely not kill my killer is not enough for nonviolence; it demands that we die praying for the killer. What kind of comportment, what practices of the self does this involve? For Levinas, opening up to other’s suffering is neither an authorial domination of the other, nor weakness. Rather, this demands on the part of the witness ‘absurd’ suffering and authorless compassion.

That suffering of the witness is absurd which doesn’t approach other’s suffering through the matrix of blame, cause, and responsibility. Extending oneself is a response to a call, a vocation beyond possessive or mimetic desire. Levinas calls it non-indifferent disinterestedness that demands and provides intensive care without getting stuck in the psychological grid of the intention of the agent and the meaning it conveys to the receiver.¹⁶ Even if difficult to practice, it is not impossible to imagine a personal ethical comportment which takes nonviolence as a vocation, a calling. But how do we convincingly imagine, let alone practice, collective nonviolence?

After Chauri Chura, Gandhi painfully realized that satyagraha is not a mass practice; it needs to be restricted to a core group of cadres.¹⁷ Shorn of collective expression, such personal comportments remain at best a niche ethics. We have no answer for such dilemmas. Advocating a clear solution is the luxury of the political/cultural right. ‘Stop the Muslims from entering our country, build a strong wall with Mexico’, the most powerful man of the world today is heard saying as a way of keeping America safe. Such convictions, as we know, are backed by violence – anything that does not conform can be made to conform. In contrast, let opacity remain our virtue.

 

As I come to the end of this discussion, an event I witnessed immediately after the 1984 Delhi pogrom against Sikhs comes to mind. Then a student of JNU, I went along with some friends to first-hand see the situation at Trilokpuri. The place still had a parched smell, quite a few families living inside hydrants, traumatized faces everywhere. At some point, I felt thirsty. I found a tube well. I stood there waiting as a girl was filling her bucket. She was too small to pump properly and had to raise her hands to get hold of the handle. A man came. Hefty, tall, tough, middle-aged. He waited for a few seconds for the girl to finish, but soon became impatient and kicked the bucket away, all the while glaring at the girl as she kept pumping. He drank and went away. This was immediately after those three days of carnage while smoke was still bellowing at places. Standing in the midst of the rubble, the scene of violence and mourning did not for a moment seem extraordinary.

 

Footnotes:

1. See Peter Fitzpatrick, Modernism and the Grounds of Law (‘Origin’). Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2001

2. Michael Dillon, ‘Governing Terror: The State of Emergency of Biopolitical Emergence’, International Political Sociology 1, 2007, p. 21.

3. Peter Fitzpatrick, Introduction, Law as Resistance. Ashgate Publishing, London, 2008.

4. Georgio Agamben, State of Exception. University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 2005, p. 1.

5. Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings: 1913-1926. Belknap Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 2004, p. 237.

6. Hannah Arendt, On Violence. Harvest, New York, 1970, p. 42.

7. Diana Fuss, ‘Interior Colonies: Frantz Fanon and the Politics of Identification’, Diacritics 24(2/3), 1994, p. 21.

8. Ibid., p. 22.

9. Michel Foucault, ‘ "Omnes et Singulatim": Towards a Criticism of Political Reason’, in Michel Foucault: Power. The New Press, New York, p. 311.

10. Partha Chatterjee, Politics of the Governed: Reflections on Popular Politics in Most of the World. Columbia University Press, New York, 2004.

11. Howard Caygill, ‘Violence, Civility and the Predicaments of Philosophy’, in David Campbell and Michael Dillon (eds.), The Political Subject of Violence. Manchester University Press, Manchester and New York, 1993, pp. 48-72.

12. James Tully, ‘The Kantian Idea of Europe: Critical and Cosmopolitan Perspectives’, in Anthony Padgen (ed.), The Idea of Europe: From Antiquity to the European Union. Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 2002, pp. 331-358.

13. Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended. Picador, New York, 2003, p. 255.

14. Edgin Isin, Being Political: Genealogies of Citizenship. University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, p. 49.

15. Howard Caygill, op. cit.

16. For an incisive discussion of Levinas (Alterity and Transcendence) on this issue, also see Marinos Diamantides, ‘The Subject May Have Disappeared but Its Sufferings Remain’, Law and Critique 11(2), May 2000, pp. 137-166.

17. See, Dipesh Chakrabarty and Rochona Majumdar, ‘Gandhi’s Gita and Politics As Such’, Modern Intellectual History, 2007.