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Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, Volume28, Number 1, 2008, pp. 124-141 (Article)

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Afterword: The Phenomenology of Violence and the Politics of Becoming

AshaVaradharajan

Sovereignty took life and let live. And now we have the emergence of a power that I would call the power of regularization, and it, in contrast, consists in making live and letting die. Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the Collge de France 1975 1976

By focusing on the violence of death, I want to look at the forms through which it is accomplished, the manner in which it embraces all substantiality indeed, to the point where it has penetrated almost everywhere and virtually nothing escapes it, since to a large extent, it has become the normal state of things. Achille Mbembe, On the Postcolony

It always remains an option to reopen talk, prophecy, philosophy and poetry. . . . Strike a blow, anyone can do that, but who is able to talk and who knows how to do so? Jean-Luc Nancy, Consecration and Massacre

he conceptual chiasmus of narrative violence and the violence of narrative produces in its wake an eloquent demonstration of how violence has become a structural fea-ture of our contemporaneity generated and sustained by powerful practices of sig-

nification (Gana and Hrting, in this issue). I share my collaborators complex sense of the dangerous reciprocity between violence and narrative and applaud their attention to the lat-ters simultaneously legitimating and insurrectionary functions. Much of the critical discourse on the subject of violence concentrates on its spectacular, traumatic, redemptive, or unprec-edented character, mapping the trajectory of the human subject in extremis and represent-ing violence itself as the marker of the limits of narrativity and historicity. This collection of essays is not immune to these tendencies, partly because these models of violence continue to have explanatory value, but also because the authors perceive and exploit the necessity of beginning with these assumptions before dismantling them. In other words, it is the function of narrative to organize, contain, and even probe acts of violence, but something ineluctable, even irreducible, eludes its best efforts. It is to the credit of the contributors that they abide by their faith in narrative, despite their own compelling accounts of its dubious, compromised, and inadequate character. The essays unflinching analysis of the concealed violence of narra-tive concludes with their collective determination to pose the following questions: If narrative

Thephrasesphenomenologyofviolenceandpoliticsofbe-comingaretaken,respectively,fromAchilleMbembe,On the Postcolony(Berkeley:UniversityofCaliforniaPress,2001),173,andWilliamE.Connolly,Suffering,Justice,andthePoliticsofBecoming,Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry20(1996):25177.

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cannot comprehend the enigma that the even-tuality of violence poses, how can it nevertheless serve as an ethical injunction and a political im-perative? Why is narrative both the poets and murderers (with apologies to Derek Walcott) weapon of choice?

The essays are persuasively organized under rubrics that are themselves suggestive of narrative progression. Mimetic urgencies demand mimetic responsibilities; atrocity, si-lence, trauma, exile, madness, and loss inhabit the language of affect in the exemplary narra-tives under scrutiny; and the essays struggle to resist the twin lures of spectacle and humani-tarianism in their own ardent elaboration of the ethics and politics of narrative violence. Editors Nouri Gana and Heike Hrtings admirable in-troduction delineates the contexts within which the essays find their (dis)place(ment) and ex-plains the crisis in witnessing contingent upon the event of violence. Their theorization of nar-rativity complements the detailed exploration of events and their narrative inscriptions in the essays. However, the distinction between narra-tivity as a condition of historicity and narratol-ogy as a hermeneutic becomes lost because nar-rative, as the essays understand it, is both cause and symptom of the contemporary crisis of rep-resentation. The individual essays are subtle and provocative, but their reason for insisting on the specificity of narrative in contradistinction to an all-encompassing category such as discourse or, indeed, representation, is unclear.

The emphasis on how and why narrative violence occurs and on its historical effects and psychological affect within each text enriches our comprehension of each authors significance but at the expense of formulating a political un-conscious and cultural imaginary of violence in the Middle East and Africa. I suspect that simply treating each analysis of different parts of the Middle East or Africa as a piece of the puzzle would be inadequate, as would extrapolation from the essays potent thematization of loss or exile or death or sexual violence. A narratalogi-cal approach would, for example, indicate which genres lend themselves to the disentanglement of foundational from historical violence; which ones are in greater danger of succumbing, pre-cisely, to the mimetic lure of violence; why the antidote to the spectacle of the African corpse

could not be the spectacular medium of cinema used to such antithetical effect in Paradise Now; or what the distinction between the violence of the force of law and the force of imagination might be.

The essays certainly interrogate the va-lence of recurring tropes, motifs, modes, and fantasies that weave the fabric of narrative vio-lence, but they cannot, within the constraints imposed by their respective objects of scrutiny, venture conclusions that, in their very transcen-dence of differences and their exaggeration of family resemblances, might come to approxi-mate a topography of cruelty in tienne Bali-bars sense. The narrative exemplum would then work against the grain of paradigmatic and/or synchronic interpretations that treat cultures as structurally or genetically violent; instead, historical repetition in the form of violence holds up a mirror to human folly and culpabil-ity, to the daily transgression of the limits of the human, rather than condemn sites of violence to exile from the territory of the human.

More to the point, the shifts in voice, enun-ciation, and focalization, the strategic deploy-ment of felt absences and enigmatic silences, the erosion of syntax and the depletion of spec-tacle, and the corpses that burden the narrative corpus at stake in this collection engender the subject of violence as that which exceeds objecti-fication and demands interpretation. The essays demonstrate how narrative violence defaces, ex-cludes, and violates, but they also insist that nar-rativization is the only hope for those free men and women born in the chains of violence. What does the subject of violence reveal about identity and subject formation? How do extremity and divestiture mark the self-possessed humanist subject with their taint? Could violence be the harbinger of a new politics of becoming?

I want to be clear that I have not offered a list of lacunae in my fellow scholars essays but, rather, have attempted to elicit their exciting potential. If these essays were in explicit conver-sation rather than only juxtaposed with one an-other, they would have no difficulty, I would like to think, in perceiving the steps I have taken as logical. In the extended meditation that follows, I have sought to create a theoretical framework in which the preceding essays might acquire new meaning and consequence. Such a move

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is, I think, necessary, because the scrupulous focus on narrative, whether fictional, graphic, cinematic, visual, or aural, forces this collection, as I have suggested, to foreground the singular-ity and multiplicity of historical predicaments and generic forms without gesturing, except perhaps implicitly or unevenly, in the direction of frames, structures, epistemologies, and life-worlds that constitute violence in Africa and the Middle East and that might require a certain universalization, indeed, a master narrative of the conditions, however overdetermined, that make violence inescapable.

This framework is a bricolage of the writ-ings of William E. Connolly, Michel Foucault, Jean-Luc Nancy, and Achille Mbembe. Apart from Connolly, all these writers are acknowl-edged presences in this collection; their thought is the taken-for-granted basis of the reflections on narrative violence here but not necessarily their epistemological and ethical inspiration or nemesis. It seems appropriate, therefore, to undertake a full-blown explication of their con-tentions in the hope that they might resonate powerfully and unexpectedly with these essays. I hope to supplement this collections contribu-tion to the narrative of violence with what Mbe-mbe calls the phenomenology of violence.1 This tactic refuses the separation of the symbolic from the physical as this collection does, but it also expands the domain of representation to include the material effects of discursive prac-tices and to imagine acts, flesh, and rituals as shot through with signification or symbolism, itself not limited to speech and writing. It is to this paradoxical task that I turn, to reflect on how a state of deprivation or apparent non-actuality called death can become the normal state of things.2

I want to undertake a provisional shift in emphasis from the constitutive function of nar-rative to the constitutive function of lifeworlds. As Mbembe explains, the life world is not only the field where individuals existence un-folds in practice; it is where they exercise exis-

tence that is, live their lives out and confront the very forms of their death (15). Mbembes subtle focus on the set of signs that confers on the current African age its character of ur-gency infuses the exercise of existence with integrity and actuality that signs shape but do not necessarily decipher (15; italics mine). The philosophy and (inadvertent) prophecy that limn the contours of my meditation here insist on the banality (in Hannah Arendts sense of the word) of violence, invert the conventional principles of its intelligibility, reinvent the na-ture of its historicity, and reflect on the ethical promise contained in times that are constitu-tively out of joint.3 These radical maneuvers in word and thought are united in their convic-tion that despite or perhaps because violence is palpable and ubiquitous in our world, suffering and sufferers are full of surprises. 4

In Society Must Be Defended, Foucault of-fers a preliminary interpretive grid with which to analyze political power as war . . . to iden-tify the phenomenon of war and the relation-ship of force within political society.5 Violence, in Foucaults elliptical account, becomes the organizing principle of the multiple subjuga-tions that take place and function within the social body (27). Foucaults metaphorical de-ployment of war identifies its operation with the techniques and tactics of domination, with processes of normalization and regularization rather than with the eruption of an exceptional and unexpected state of affairs, with a tear in and a dislocation of the social fabric. His lec-tures, of course, pose this progressive analogy between relationships of domination, force, and war as a question and provocative hypothesis, but the effect of this ingenious reversal on the value and intelligibility of violence is profound. War, in Foucaults imagination, functions si-multaneously as a heuristic for analyzing power and politics and as the matrix for the apparatus of social and political domination. Foucault ac-knowledges his deliberate exaggeration of the conditions of domination, but he also hopes

1.Mbembe,On the Postcolony, 173 (italics intheoriginal).

2. Ibid.(italicsmine).

3. ErnestoLaclau,TheTimeIsoutofJoint,Diacrit-ics25(1995):88.

4.Connolly,Suffering,Justice,andthePoliticsofBe-coming,252.

5.MichelFoucault,Society Must Be Defended: Lec-tures at the Collge de France 1975 1976,trans.DavidMacey,ed.MauroBertaniandAlessandroFontana(NewYork:Picador,2003),19.

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his ploy will uncover the nucleus of political institutions (47). If it is indeed the case that violence has become the normal state of things, Foucaults prescient interrogation of politics [as] the continuation of war by other means (48) becomes, at worst, complementary and, at best, indispensable to this collections effort to render violence meaningful and describable if not surmountable.

Foucault situates his disturbing proposi-tion within the framework of his broader analy-sis of the idea and effect of sovereignty. I return to this overarching problematic in due course; for the moment, however, I want to explain how Foucault lays the groundwork for a precise ar-chive of the inescapable violence of the pres-ent.6 His lectures operate somewhat differently than the familiar analysis of the mechanisms of power in his oeuvre. Both the constitution of subjectivity and the agency of power are consis-tently described as material. In the space of a few pages, Foucault speaks of how subjects are actually and materially constituted, of the ma-terial operations of power, and, even more em-phatically, of a closely meshed grid of material coercions.7 Foucault has, of course, always in-sisted on the materiality of discursive effects and on the imbrication of apparatuses of knowledge in the instrumentality of power, but his mobili-zation of the metaphor of war produces intrigu-ing and concomitant consequences for his char-acterization of the truth effects of discourse as well: Either the truth makes you stronger, or the truth shifts the balance, accentuates the dis-symmetries, and finally gives the victory to one side rather than the other. Truth is an additional force, and it can be deployed only on the basis of a relationship of force (53). The anonymous, dispersed, and productive dimensions of power as well as the neutral and antiseptic technolo-gies of subjugation appear to have been ceded, in these lectures, to their combative and coer-cive dimensions, to the materiality of force.

This significant modulation in his think-ing allows Foucault to unearth a primitive and permanent war beneath peace, order, wealth, and authority, beneath the calm order

of subordinations, beneath the state and state apparatuses, beneath the laws (46 47). Why should this turn in Foucaults thought matter? Is there more to this than his penchant for flout-ing shibboleths, including his own? Could this rhetorical flourish or sleight of hand aspire to a dtournement, a transvaluation of the logic and history of violence? Foucaults ruse is designed to regard peace itself [as] a coded war and to expose the adversarial core of subjectivity and society (51). Foucault rejects the subject who speaks of right and seeks the truth in favor of a subject who is fighting a war (53 54). Fou-caults historico-political ambition here is genu-inely remarkable; his ire is directed against the traditional philosophical and legislative desire to extract the good, the just, and the rational from the violent contingencies and brutalities of history, to erect a fragile order upon seeth-ing chaos. The inverted explanatory axis upon which history turns reveals its drabness (55). This word immediately conjures up the specter of Arendts nod to banality, but with a view to diagnosing not violence but calm and order (54). This curious but crucial moment in Fou-caults compelling if aleatory speculations inau-gurates the birth of a new discourse of truth charged with disinterring the inscriptions of strife, exposing the false equilibrium of justice, rediscovering the blood that has dried in in-stituted codes, and surrendering history to the infinity of the eternal dissolution into . . . force, power, and war (56). Foucaults ultimate chal-lenge is to the dialectical logic of history, which, in his view, entertains contradiction only to sub-ject the latter to an irreversible rationality. For this reason, one can surmise, the perpetual war that rages beneath the smooth visage of society serves to reinforce rather than violate the logic of totalization and revelation at the heart of the dialectic (58). If Foucaults concern is mainly to reverse and replace the dialectical logic of ne-cessity with the brute force of contingency, he would not succeed in displacing it. He seeks, rather, to invert dialectical necessity in order to illuminate the subterranean and colonized force of brute contingency.

6. SeeArnoldI.Davidson,introductiontoSociety Must Be Defended,xvi.

7. Foucault,Society Must Be Defended,28,34,36.

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The dialectical impulse, for Foucault, is in pursuit of the historical constitution of a uni-versal subject based on the reconciliation be-tween the elements of what he has revealed to be a bitter and partisan struggle and on the subsumption of militant particularisms in the discourse of right (58 59). Against the grain of this impulse, Foucault tells the tale of interne-cine strife, retraces its evolution, adumbrates its physiological contours, and transcribes its philological and colonial inscriptions. Fou-caults animadversions on the art of social war-fare are plausible enough when they are read in conjunction with his genealogies of reason, madness, and sexuality and with his complex explorations of the power/knowledge nexus. More to the point, Foucault has always believed that discourse does violence to its object; in this regard, it seems logical that he would turn his attention in these lectures to a differently in-f lected anatomy of the social order, one that would rediscover the bloodied, defeated, and defaced remains of the past that the language of peace and prosperity disguises. In his other writings, Foucault describes power as having pulled off a bloodless coup, since resistance is one of powers many faces, and it is their sub-jugation that manufactures individuals as sub-jects. In these lectures, however, Foucault turns power inside out and upside down to expose its fragility and hypocrisy, to release the conflictual energies it has hitherto masked, contained, or sutured. Here, strategy and tactics are designed to win rather than deflect wars. What strikes me as intriguing about Foucaults method here is the abandonment of reconciliation, universal-ity, truth, or right in favor of a fight fire with fire approach. Both the discourse of regular-ization and normalization and the discourse of incident and accident adopt partiality and con-frontation, and their struggle, indeed, is to the death, or until victory can be wrested.

Foucault appears to be acknowledging the difference between the diagnosis of power and the anatomy of violence. The language of coercion (in Foucaults terms) and the narra-tive of violence (in the vocabulary of this col-lection) throb with mimetic urgency and only thus fulfill their ethical obligation to speak truth to power or, as Stuart Kendall describes it, to return words to the world (Kendall, in this

issue). Pierre Guyotats radical perspectivism is, to my mind, of a piece with Foucaults endorse-ment of partiality and confrontation, but with a fascinating twist. As Kendall describes it, Guy-otats reinvention of atrocity, destitution, and silence as forms of meaning making in a world deprived of sense dismembers rhetoric in the name of ethics. The threat Guyotats writing poses lies in what it demands of us (Kendall, in this issue). This persuasive claim, however, is somewhat marred by Kendalls reluctance to challenge Guyotats identification with Algeria. Even a writer as knowing as Guyotat can col-lapse the distinction between the dust of Alge-ria and his fatigue, can proclaim, seemingly without irony, Im a barbarian. In this regard, Kendall is right that the challenge is to Western structures of representation and ethics; the question remains, and Kendall is not unaware of this, whether the terminus of the Western humanist tradition necessarily redeems Algeria from dust and destitution.

If Guyotats narrative turns the act of wit-nessing into an assault on the citadel of Western barbarism masquerading as civilization, Tunji Osinubis discussion of Antjie Krogs and Rian Malans deliberat(iv)e abuse of victim testimo-nies teases out a different, but equally thought-provoking, dimension of Foucaults rumination on war by other means. Osinubis fine-tuned analysis reveals how Foucaults refusal to distin-guish between truth and power (both deploy the language of violence) acquires particular con-sequence in the context of the function of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) in South Africa. The goals of amnesty, redress, and, indeed, reconciliation have already fore-closed on the accusatory force of the utterance of truth. Instead, Osinubis defense of Krogs and Malans narrative missiles (Osinubi, in this issue) and his subtle undermining of the vaunted prerogatives of the TRC produce an alternative ethical imperative. The abstract violence in Foucaults imagination of power becomes charged with affect, and testimony is not only a mode of utterance that bespeaks the rhetoric of violence but a form of embodiment that exposes its politics. As Osinubi explains, both accuser and accused share the imagined geography of apartheid laden with hidden his-torical legacies of violence.

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These affect-inflected imagined geogra-phies (Osinubi, in this issue), one would infer, are also differently inflected; that is, anxiety, desire and fantasy would hardly bear the same connotations for either side of the divide.8 Be-cause the focus on redress and amnesty might serve, paradoxically, to obscure the violence that has hitherto structured the social and spa-tial imaginary of South Africa, and, ironically, to refrain from transgressing its logic, testimony must operate, in Osinubis terms, as a violently reconstructive force. Herein lies a remark-able illustration of the uses to which Foucaults thinking about politics as war might be put. By demonstrating how fidelity to truth can, instead, be nothing more than another form of usurpa-tion, and by refusing to conflat[e] economies of emotional life with those of formal political redress, Osinubi shoots a narrative missile of his own at the twin enchantments of truth and reconciliation. This time, the violence of recon-struction produces not the traumatic repetition of event but the interminable demand of wit-ness. Guyotat and Krog and Malan represent, for me, complementary aspects of the problems of witnessing and ethico-political transforma-tion. Algeria is the occasion for the putative de-mise of European Man and South Africa, where what was once the deadlock of violence cannot but strain to become the dance of mutuality, recognition, and collective self-determination.

If the contributors to this collection have shown why the orders of narrative and ethical becoming must be thought together, the gene-alogy Foucault is in the throes of composing is itself doubled, committed to searching for the shadowy and conspicuous traces of both po-litical and philosophical becoming.9 Why does Foucault need these orders to function alongside rather than as the flip side of each? It is in this context that Foucaults transfiguration of sover-eignty becomes paramount. The mechanisms of social warfare acquire a face and a meaning that Foucault has hitherto concealed: biologico- social racism (61). The remainder of his lec-tures is devoted to tracing the historical emer-

gence of race war, not, however, as the clash between races, but, more enigmatically, as the idea of a race that is permanently, ceaselessly, infiltrating the social body, or which is, rather, constantly being re-created in and by the social fabric (61).

The concatenation of determinants in this race war colonization, philology, and evolutionism are deployed to different ends and in different circumstances. Foucault makes the startling claim that the discourse of race struggle . . . will become the discourse of power itself (61). Foucault envisions an unsavory con-spiracy between biological-racist discourses of degeneracy [and] all those institutions within the social body which make the discourse of race struggle function as a principle of exclu-sion and segregation and, ultimately, as a way of normalizing society, which will result in a rac-ism that society will direct against itself, against all those perceived to deviate from the norm (61 62). The rudiments of Foucaults concept of biopower are implicit in this new theory of modern racism, one that rejects both racial animosity and scapegoating as the bases for its persistence. Foucault makes the new version of racism the technology of the power of the State, what he calls the death-function in the econ-omy of biopower (258).

This technique of power articulates the murderous rage directed against the political enemy with the risk posed to members of the States own population; after all, it is the States duty to protect, manage, and multiply precisely those that it risks in order to wage war against threats to its integrity and purity (258). Early in his lectures, Foucault explains his method to date, his challenge to juridical forms of sover-eignty and power, his focus on the external face of power, on extremities and peripheral bod-ies, on effective practices and material institu-tions, on relays and networks and circulations of power, and, finally, on an analysis of power that proceeds from the infinitesimal to the general, that ascends rather than descends from on high (28 30). These methodological caveats indicate

8.DerekGregory,ImaginativeGeographies,Prog-ress in Human Geography19(1995):455,quotedinOsinubi(inthisissue).

9. Foucault,Society Must Be Defended,59.

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that Foucault customarily rejects precisely the centralization that biopower requires in order to exercise its control over life and in order to manage death. The chilling effect of his enor-mous claims can then be attributed to the subtle but inexorable shift in his thinking from the circulation and productivity of power to the rationalization and normalization of violence (261). Precisely the Foucault who is too wary of turning individuals into inert or consent-ing targets of power, who refuses to deduce power by beginning at the center (29 30), is, in these lectures, constrained to imagine a sov-ereign power faced with the unanswerable ques-tion and insoluble problem: How can one both make a biopower function and exercise the rights of war, the rights of murder and the func-tion of death, without becoming racist? That was the problem, and that I think, is still the problem (263).

I have undertaken this detour, not with a view to adding to the growing scholarship on Foucaults concept of biopower, but in the inter-ests of suggesting that philosophical reflection on the subject of violence cannot do without Foucaults relentless pursuit of the question as to what we ourselves are and, by the same token, without his singular interpretation of philosophy as the politics immanent in history and the history indispensable for politics.10 The lectures foreground the subjects of racism and of colonization, on which Foucault has often been deemed to be unconscionably silent; I be-lieve that despite Foucaults unpredictable take on modern racism (a subject to which I return), his philosophy demonstrates not only what ails modern civilization but what ails mod-ern civilization inasmuch as it is European.11 The poignancy of these lectures, for me, resides in Foucault stepping out from behind the ano-nymity of discursive formations and the ubiq-uity of power to acknowledge the simultaneous genesis of historicity and ethical responsibility. This is no empty gesture precisely because his own trademark genealogical excavation has

elicited the ethical demand that he turns, char-acteristically enough, into the imponderable with which he concludes his lectures. How, in-deed, does Foucaults diagnosis of sedimented social relations that disguise the fact of race war translate into a prognostication of the violence of contemporaneity? And if, in this new world order, truth too functions as a weapon, how is the whole story to be told?

Foucault attributes the banality of vio-lence to the process by which racism sustains the explosive contradiction of a technology of power whose objective is essentially to make live but which seeks, simultaneously, to exer-cise the power of death, the function of death, to let die.12 Foucault hastens to explain that he is tracing not the invention of racism but its inscription in the mechanisms of the State (254). Racism fractures the field of the bio-logical, the domain of biopower, introducing a novel inflection in the justification for war, in the relationship that war routinely establishes between my life and the death of the other (255). Racism, in this sense, allows biopower to eliminate perceived threats to the species, not only, and not necessarily, political adversaries, except insofar as politics has already become in-distinguishable from biopower. Foucaults aim is to suggest that race or racism is the precondi-tion that makes killing acceptable (256). The modern form of power produces a concert be-tween two forms of sovereignty, each becoming the others supplement. As Foucault observes, If the power of normalization wished to exercise the old sovereign right to kill, it must become racist. And if, conversely, a power of sovereignty, or in other words, a power that has the right of life and death, wishes to work with the instru-ments, mechanisms, and technology of normal-ization, it too must become racist (256). The genealogy of violence that Foucault produces is punctuated by privileged moments . . . when the right to take life was imperative (257). But accounting for the genocidal impulses of colo-nization and its corollary, evolutionist racism,

10. Foucault,asquotedbyAlessandroFontanaandMauroBertani,SituatingtheLectures,inibid.,288.

11. IhaveborrowedJacquesDerridasphrasingfromThe Gift of Death,trans.,DavidWills(Chicago:Uni-versityofChicagoPress,1995),34(italicsmine).

12. Foucault,Society Must Be Defended,254.

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is insufficient in Foucaults scheme of things, because it fails to include the conceptualization of abnormality (criminality and madness, for example) in racist terms as well as the biologi-cal extrapolation from the theme of the politi-cal enemy that justifies the elimination of the enemy race in order to regenerate the species (257). Biopower, for Foucault, is in excess of sov-ereign right. When technologies of discipline and technologies of regularization coalesce, they control both the individual body and the biological multiplicity of populations (253). This moment is responsible for the terrifying paradox that constitutes biopower: the power that guarantees life is precisely that which ex-tinguishes it.

The escalation of power to violence, as well as the appearance of a technology of power that operates in excess of sovereignty, divests Arendtian banality of some of its purely administrative ra-tionality as well as its deadpan servility. Foucault now conceives of the dispersal of power across the domain of the biopolitical as precisely the precondition that makes sovereignty pass rather than the consequence of the latters ob-solescence. This reversal enables a conception of violence that circulates between the disciplin-ary and regulatory dimensions of biopower, that turns war into the controlling metaphor for its biological extrapolation from the political, and that, rather than oscillate between the twin poles of the everyday and the exception, inhab-its the continuum in which they assume their shape and significance. This twist to Foucaults more familiar pronouncements on the micro-history of power, I hope to demonstrate, puts his lectures in productive and contrapuntal relation with Jean-Luc Nancys suggestive chronicle of the everyday that run[s] like a nervous system through our culture, stimulating it.13

Both Nancy and Foucault articulate a tem-porality rather than an eschatology of violence; their projects are distinct, however, in that Fou-cault interrogates the emergence of violence, the preconditions for its configuration and ef-fectivity, whereas Nancy considers violence in its moment of repetition and disappearance, in the inconsistent and insignificant instant

where each present takes its leave (47). Unlike Foucault, whose challenge to exceptionality is based on war as the constitutive trope of politi-cal power itself and, therefore, in its status as the rule rather than the exception, Nancy estab-lishes the everyday as the law of insignificance and equivalence that becomes the everyday of this exception: war (47 48). In other words, the banality of war, for Foucault, is responsible for its consolidation and legitimation, whereas, for Nancy, it is the consequence of the desacral-ization of the right of war (and of peace) which was in bygone days the privilege of sov-ereigns (48). Nancy, of course, is writing in the aftermath of the events of September 11 and thus understands current justifications for war as operation[s] of a police nature (48) rather than as the self-legitimating acts of sovereigns. In uncompromising fashion, Nancy declares, But there is no State for this police, no more than there is any divine for that which is no lon-ger sacred (48). For Nancy, banalization is rig-orously and appropriately desacralization; that is, an operation of a police nature is a debased or hyperbolic version of the arcane form of sov-ereignty. Nancy seems reluctant to concede the simultaneously vital and destructive power of racism that finds its confirmation in and ar-ticulation through the State and ultimately es-capes the control of sovereignty. In short, what for Foucault is the new face of sovereignty is, for Nancy, its mockery and desecration.

Moreover, Nancy challenges the prevail-ing model of the clash of civilizations with two models of monotheism or symmetrical counterparts: the fetish-god of money and misery and a hypersacralised warrior rearma-ment (48). These models stretch the limits of the civilisation once called Western rather than split it into opposing religions or cultures because, in Nancys minds eye, the divine One or the capital One, its all the same (48). The provincializing of Europe in Foucaults writing becomes, in Nancys, a strategic universaliza-tion of Western civilization (formative Judeo- Christianity, Islam, and parts of Hellenistic phi-losophy) (49). The historic event, then, is the perceived equivalence between communion

13. Jean-LucNancy,ConsecrationandMassacre,trans.AmandaMacdonald,Postcolonial Studies6(2003):47.

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and commerce because, according to Nancy, the motif of true riches appears simultane-ously in all three precisely when the distinction between wealth and poverty was beginning to be sharply felt and, subsequently, in the wake of political economy, the liberty and equality of individuals [were accepted as] condition[s] of the market (49). The genealogy of violence that Nancy proposes differs qualitatively from Foucaults in that the terrain of the biopoliti-cal is replaced by the ambiguous face of the divine in which the formidable contradiction between universal love and universal exploita-tion stands revealed, and by the law of insig-nificance and equivalence that interrupts and deconstitutes the monotheism of historic events and challenges us to comprehend the difference between nonaccidental and necessary punctua-tions of the everyday (49).

While Foucaults elaboration of sover-eignty acquires, despite itself, a metaphysical character because biopower is the vital prin-ciple of society and its death function, Nancy elicits a more supple and equivocal form of his-torical becoming inhabited by the multiplicity of the singulars and by the dissolution of the exemplary in the everyday. The affective differ-ence between both reflections is worth noting: in one a growing conviction of the true enor-mity of the advent of biopower that underlies the manifest, infinitesimal, and everyday forms of discipline and regulation and, in the other, a growing anticipation of the not yet, and the not now, in which everything remains to be invented in the face of the event that cannot be appropriated and [remains] unforgettable (47). Foucaults phenomenology of violence sug-gests that biopower is the answer to the question of war; Nancys, on the contrary, suggests that war does not cease to . . . come alive to us, anew, with its questions (47).

Foucaults definition of racism subsumes the legacy of colonization in the mechanisms of social warfare conducted by biopower and imagines racism as a binary rift within soci-ety rather than a clash between two distinct races. The new idea that Foucault describes is

that the other race is basically not the race that came from elsewhere or that was, for a time, tri-umphant and dominant, but that it is a race that is permanently, ceaselessly infiltrating the social body, or which is, rather, constantly being re-created in and by the social fabric.14 This rather enigmatic and abstract definition of race, a race without identifying marks, so to speak, culmi-nates in a startling observation: To put it a dif-ferent way, it is the reappearance, within a single race, of the past of that race. In a word, the ob-verse and the underside of the race reappears within it.15 While it is easy enough to see how the coincidence between biological discourses of degeneracy and social practices of normal-ization conspires to generate a binary rift within society rather than between races and how the paradoxical function of biopower both manages and protects life and produces risk, disposabil-ity, and death, the language of Foucaults articu-lation of biologico-social racism resurrects the ghost of colonialism apparently exorcised from his exclusive concern with evolutionism and the struggle for existence.

This unease in Foucaults passionate de-nunciation of race war reappears in Nancys chronicle, in the distinction he draws between consecration and massacre in the representa-tion of violence and calamity in different parts of the world. Nancy writes of [all] these little others killed, battered, burnt to death, ampu-tated, stupefied. All those who live the every-day of terror, of hunger, of the lack of care and of services, the lack of education, the lack of information.16 Because Nancy finds noth-ing to choose between the two monotheisms, his distinction between consecration and mas-sacre could be applied anywhere in the world where deprivation rules existence. However, his point of reference is the monumentalization of the September 11 tragedy at the expense of the everyday of its exception. The everyday of the little others has lost the dignity and consola-tion of the rhythm of a cultures nervous system; instead, it reveals itself in jerks, jolts, convul-sions (49). The universality of tropes of con-secration and massacre begin, in this reading,

14. Foucault,Society Must Be Defended,61.

15. Ibid.

16.Nancy,ConsecrationandMassacre,49.

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to acquire geopolitical contours which expose the enterprise to dominate and exploit the earth (50) as well as the representational hubris that consigns the dominated and exploited to the humiliating and repetitive banality of mas-sacre while consecrating the suffering of the acolytes of the fetish-god of money and misery and of war resuscitated (48) in the singularity and monstrous presence of the event (47).

Both Foucaults and Nancys examinations of the dubious face of sovereignty strain at the limits of the European malaise of modernity or of Western civilization, acknowledging the ma-teriality of discursive practices and imaginary significations, adumbrating the iniquities of cap-italism and colonization, discerning the geneal-ogy of violence in the archaeology of successive monotheisms, and actualizing, in the interstices of this economy of death, a future as yet dimly perceived but that demands recognition. These indispensable qualities, for all their sensitivity to the renewed biological inscriptions of racism and the reinvention of the dialectic between self and other in the language of consecration and massacre, nevertheless remain inadequate to the task of representing those parts of the world subject to the founding violence of colonial sov-ereignty, representation, and economy. How, in other words, would these admirable analyses of violence contend with, for example, the long dogmatic sleep that has designated Africa the exemplary and irreducible site and sign, crucible and calculus of violence?17 Foucaults words, the past, obverse, and underside of the race (the species) that reappears within it, resonate rather painfully and uncomfortably with a long history of the negative interpretation of Africa, the elementariness and primitiveness that makes Africa the world par excellence of all that is incomplete, mutilated, and unfinished, its history reduced to a series of setbacks of na-ture in its quest for humankind.18

My point is not to make Foucault culpable in this regard, but to argue that claiming nov-elty for his theory of racism does not dispel the specter of Africa that has long borne the bur-den of precisely the discourses of evolution, de-

generacy, and survival of the fittest that animate Foucaults vision of modern racism in apparent contradistinction to colonial or Manichean rac-ism. How, then, does one contribute to an analy-sis of the historicity of violence that simultane-ously acknowledges that African societies are embedded in times and rhythms heavily condi-tioned by European domination and questions the intelligibility that European conceptual structures and fictional representations used precisely to deny African societies any histori-cal depth and to define them as radically other provide?19 More to the point, such care and precision will cease to make the Wests apolo-getic concerns contingent on its exclusionary and brutal practices towards others.20 This last point is particularly harsh, perhaps, but both Foucaults unwitting example and Nancys rue-ful self-deprecation succeed in demonstrating how precarious is the boundary between these two options. It is possible, however, to envision Foucaults theory of biopower as a corollary to Mbembes imagination of the postcolony in order to expand Foucaults and Nancys discus-sions of sovereignty to include state sovereignty in a colony as well as to consider more closely Mbembes hypotheses about current contexts of instability and crisis in which Africa is seen as engaged in rampant self-destruction.21

I do not have the space here to offer a more complex and substantial interpretation of the unusually compelling and daring aspects of Mbembes extraordinary work, but I do want to reiterate its methodological and epistemologi-cal iconoclasm. To my mind, Mbembes power-ful insights are indispensable to the study of the subject of violence (in both senses of the word), not least because, as I have already indicated, Africa functions as the paradigmatic instance of violence in conventional sociopolitical theory and, moreover, because Mbembes energies are devoted to demonstrating not only how Africa escapes its paradigmatic character but how so-cial theory has no choice but to divest itself of its preconceptions and find itself the richer for it. As Mbembe outlines the enterprise, social theory has first to abandon the sign[s] of the

17.Mbembe,On the Postcolony,3.

18. Ibid.,1(italicsintheoriginal).

19. Ibid.,9,11(italicsintheoriginal).

20. Ibid.,2.

21. Ibid.,8.

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strange and the monstrous and of the experi-ence, world, and spectacle of the beast under which Africa appears in critical consciousness.22 Even if social theory were prepared to grant both humanity and rationality to African af-fairs, this largesse would not necessarily result in a serious and ethical probing of the man-ner in which Africa still constitutes one of the metaphors through which the West represents the origin of its own norms, [and] develops a self-image, while Africa itself continues to con-stitute the limits of absolute otherness.23

The customary integration of fact and value, method and example, in the social sci-ences acquires a disconcerting character; one cannot help wondering whether Africa has quite lost its attribute of an object of experi-mentation, in and through which Western con-sciousness can discern the limits of both con-science and brutality.24 My own contrapuntal argument not only explores the curious concat-enation of multiple and differently located re-flections on the question of violence but insists, with Mbembe, that the political imagination of these times requires a simultaneous universal-ist aspiration, historicist inflection, and militant particularism. This is, of course, a formidable and daunting enterprise, but I believe Mbembe, with his characteristic flair and wisdom, reveals how speaking rationally about Africa need no longer occur against the background of an impossibility.25 To borrow Nancys language in this regard, the everyday rhythm of consecra-tion must be thought in illuminating conjunc-tion with the jolts, shocks, and convulsions of massacre. Mbembe, predictably enough, com-plicates this even further: how is the monstrosity and animality of Africa once again reinforced even in sympathetic allusions to the rhetorical division of the death zones of the world into scenes of consecration and abysses of massacre? If Africas jolts and convulsions cannot be de-scribed in the language of rhythm or duration, does this mean that Africa is still incapable of uttering the universal?26 Indeed, Mbembes quiet, dignified assertion it is not true, as ei-ther starting point or conclusion, that Africa is

an incomparable monster, a silent shadow and mute place of darkness, amounting to no more than a lacuna (9) comes as something of a shock, astonishing as that may seem in these days of ref lexivity, apologetics, and strained compassion, because he dares, quite simply, to speak the language of truth and error rather than that of a conflict of interpretations or of the force field of representations.

Mbembes dazzling moves systematically disentangle Africa from European lies, inviting it to emerge from the shadows of the slave trade and colonization, but they also commence the painstaking and meticulous labor of peeling away the mask of stupidity and madness that serves to obscure further its prolonged servi-tude and brutalization and that preempts the emergence of the autonomous African subject from the residue of tyranny. Mbembe describes his project as an attempt to force Africa to face up to itself in the world (14), thus differentiat-ing his scholarly intentions from more common-place efforts to make Africa live up to European expectations, to reveal an alternative modernity or comparable history, or to remain trapped between the impossible choice of emancipa-tion and assimilation. Intriguingly, Mbembe too shares Foucaults and Nancys intuition that to think violence is to rethink temporality and contingency beyond the hypothesis of stability and rupture underpinning social theory and beyond the lazy categories of permanence and change beloved of so many historians (16, 8; italics in the original). Because Mbembe wishes to account for time as lived, his desire might be said to be of a piece with Nancys inquiry into the everyday and Foucaults investigation of the drabness of history (8). An important qualifica-tion must be made, however: On the Postcolony is a study not of violence but of why and how Africa has come to be synonymous with chaos, destruction, monstrosity, arbitrariness, and tyr-anny, all of which are usually attributed to zones in which violence occurs. Nancy and Foucault, on the contrary, are concerned, respectively, with comprehending violence in societies where it is deemed to be both exceptional and acci-

22. Ibid.,1.

23. Ibid.,2.

24. Ibid.

25. Ibid.,1.

26. Ibid.,4.

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dental and with turning the banality of politics on its head to reveal the violence at its core. All three, nevertheless, link the comprehension of the nonaccidental (historical) if not necessary state of violence to the foundational violence embodied in state, divine, and colonial sover-eignty. Mbembes shift in emphasis produces stunning results; he collapses the clichs that have come to define violence in even the most scrupulous of accounts by charging them with a grotesque dramatization that succeeds in rendering what political imagination is in Af-rica . . . incomprehensible, pathological, and abnormal (8).

Nancy calls for an art of multiple senses, multiple ways, of the equivocal and even of veiled senses, veiled ways, of suspended sense or of ab-sense to derail the call to consensus that fools nobody.27 Mbembe, too, believes that the impasses of scholarship call for a different kind of writing that might displace the consensus that combines conviction about what Africa is not, with an equally insurmountable ignorance about what Africa actually is. Mbembe needs to tread much more carefully, however; his aim is to find a way to see human action in Africa pro-ceeding from rational calculation and to elicit human suffering from the putative sway of ar-bitrary cruelty. In this regard, Nancys call for a certain deracination of business as usual de-velops discomfiting implications in the palimp-sest of negative interpretations to which Africa has been subject, the epitome, in other words, of suspended and ab-sense, the equivocal and the veiled (the dark) continent. Mbembe ac-complishes something altogether more mod-est, but equally fundamental: he grants himself permission to narrate the particular figures of reason in African history.28 In Africa, too, the relationship between the objectivity of struc-tures and the subjectivity of representations, the experiential and the symbolic, needs to be established, or, in other words, the African self as a reflexive subject is capable of meaningful human expressions (6; italics in the original). Mbembe does not deny the presence of ter-rible forces that every day tear human beings,

animals, plants, and things from their sphere of life and condemn them to death; instead, he demands that [the] torment of nonfulfillment and incompleteness, which is in no way a spe-cifically African [feature], be understood as participat[ing] in a complex order, rich in unex-pected turns, meanders, and changes of course (8; italics in the original) rather than simply in a lack of order (8; italics mine). By making reason itself both contingent and figurative, Mbembe undermines the prevailing understanding of modernity under the aegis of Western rational-ism. He thus opts out, on behalf of Africa, from accomplishing in reality the promises of univer-sality contained in the ideals of the Aufklrung (11). With these caveats in mind, Mbembe sets about, with wrenching clarity and impressive ar-duousness, to imbue the continent that has be-come the very figure of what is null, abolished, and, in its essence, in opposition to what is with meaning, intelligibility, and affect (4).

How can one write Africa, not as a fic-tion, but in the harshness of its destiny, its power, and its eccentricities (17)? How can one differentiate between contingent, dispersed, and powerless existence and existence that is contingent, dispersed, and powerless but reveals itself in the guise of arbitrariness and the abso-lute power to give death any time, anywhere, by any means, for any reason (13)? How can one assert that it was through the slave trade and colonialism that Africans came face to face with the opaque and murky domain of power without abnegating responsibility for current and past forms of violence (14; italics in the original)? Why does the arbitrariness of violence have the peculiar characteristic of concealing human suffering?29 In a lovely turn of phrase, Mbembe calls the time of existence and experience, the time of entanglement in order to envisage subjectiv-ity itself as temporality, to imagine the time of African existence as nonlinear, nonsequential, and interlocking, full of disturbances, unpre-dictable outcomes, instabilities, and ebbs and flows, but neither chaotic nor irreversible, and to validate in flesh, perception, and language what makes the current African age a source

27.Nancy,ConsecrationandMassacre,49.

28.Mbembe,On the Postcolony,14(italicsmine).

29. Ibid.,13.

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of terror, astonishment, hilarity all at once.30 The mistake, from Mbembes point of view, is to believe that a world devoid of beauty cannot command clarity.31

These questions, impossibly searching as they are, are not, for Mbembe, insusceptible to the beginnings of an answer and, together, con-stitute the rudiments of the phenomenology he ponders with wit and sensitivity in the course of On the Postcolony. I am not able to describe the features of this phenomenology in much more than a schematic fashion, and with far less nu-ance than Mbembe, but I offer my polemical take on it here as incitement to further discus-sion and as a tentative attempt to include the Middle East, inadequate as that moniker is, in my deliberations thus far. First, Mbembes phe-nomenological approach partakes of the com-monplace characteristics of this philosophy in its numerous incarnations, in his dismantling of the oppositions between mind and body, cognition and perception, existence and es-sence, corporeality and intentionality, time and duration, signs and meaning, or subjective rep-resentations and practices (acts) and objective structures (material effects, bodily and affective validation, imbued meanings, and the violence of contingent institutions such as capitalism and colonialism). This (composite) epistemology and the collapse of conventional philosophical (rationalist) oppositions are encapsulated in his insistence on two phrases, life worlds and languages of life, throughout his work.

The phenomenological emphasis on the essence of existence manifests itself in Mbem-bes historical rather than ontological intuition that for each time and each age, there exists something distinctive and particular or, to use the term, a spirit (Zeitgeist).32 This spirit is constituted by a set of signs and practices and experienced by individuals equipped with imag-ination and intelligence. In this sense, life is lived in and through languages and every age acquires its singularity and its urgency in the vitality of its vocabularies (15). Mbembe does not stop here, however; subjective experience

both lives and espouses [its] contemporane-ousness and, in a bold move, accomplishes the age and validates it (17; italics in the original). It is this move that enables Mbembe to advocate a perceptive consciousness of things, one that ac-cords the flesh/body and the senses the power to function in the register not only of experi-ence but of evaluation and re-actualization, functions usually attributed to consciousness and acquiring their authority from the power of retrospective reflection rather than from the indivisibility of consciousness and perception, body and affect, immediacy and re-actualiza-tion (17; italics mine). The phenomenological approach is crucial to Mbembes desire to ac-count for time as lived because it embraces both memory and anticipation and conceives of tem-porality as overlapping and dynamic rather than linear or sequential and as unafraid, precisely, of the unpredictability and oscillations of move-ment and stasis, crisis and calm. Mbembe thus deems it necessary to rehabilitate the two no-tions of age and dure in order to focus on the configuration of events and on the visible and imperceptible dimensions of such relationships that the simple category of time could not begin to articulate and to which only those who live and espouse their contemporaneity can attest (14; italics in the original). At least two interrup-tions of this seamless narrative of phenomeno-logical conformity must be recorded, but even they serve to expand the domain of phenom-enology rather than determine its limits.

Mbembe is struck, first, by the paradox that the (African) age of violence poses to the ardent phenomenologist. What might be rea-sonably construed as phenomenologys raison dtre, the life world, is immediately subject to what Mbembe calls elsewhere a knock-out ef-fect the exercise of existence, for the subjects of violence, includes not only the act of living lives out but also, grimly, a diurnal confronta-tion with the very forms of their death. In a brilliant move, what has come to be the vital and destructive, disciplinary and regulative, domain of the biopolitical in critical discourse

30.Mbembe,On the Postcolony,16(italicsintheorig-inal),15,17,15.

31. Ibid.,13.

32. Ibid.,15(italicsintheoriginal).

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is transformed into the informing principle or fundamental assumption of a new phenomenol-ogy, attuned to the visceral and symbolic con-stitution of the world in which constraint and terror [operate] as limits of what is human.33 Second, Mbembe recognizes that his phenom-enology of the death function is ontologically significant or, more simply, theoretically plau-sible only to the degree that it is historically or temporally inflected with a consideration of the imaginary of state sovereignty . . . in a colony (25; italics in the original). Violence as a condi-tion of conscious perception and meaningful expression must be examined in tandem with violence that was of a very particular sort, im-mediately tangible, and [that] gave the natives a clear notion of themselves in proportion to the power that they had lost (26).

Mbembe traces the development of colo-nial sovereignty from the founding violence that legitimates the right to conquest, its conversion into authorizing authority, to its repeated authentication (25). Colonial sovereignty thus reconstitutes its denial of right into the asser-tion of right, acts as both authority and moral-ity, and outlaws opposition to the sly and callous conversion of violence into sovereignty. It is this combination of sleights of hand that makes co-lonial sovereignty indistinguishable from the right to dispose, an indispensable feature of the monotheisms Nancy identifies and of the State Foucault reinvents. To my mind, Mbembe indi-cates the peculiar intimacy with which violence inhabits the social fabric of the postcolony; rather than treat violence as an abstract or in-eluctable condition of existence or as merely a colonial and, therefore, obsolete imposition, he characterizes violence as the persistence of a central excess, of a form of opaque violence and degree of terror that flow from a particular fail-ure: that of the postcolonial subject to . . . give him/herself and the environment in which he/she lives a form of reason that would make ev-eryday existence readable, if not give it actual meaning (143). This comment is one part of a

controversial and elaborate meditation on the situations of powerlessness that are the situa-tions of violence par excellence (133), one that includes those who command and those who are assumed to obey in a process of mutual brutalization (133, 167).

I foreground Mbembes ruminations on powerlessness and its corollary arbitrariness as peculiarly colonial predicaments, or products of the exercise and legitimation of colonial sov-ereignty, because they enable a compassionate reading of violence as emanating from power-lessness rather than from whimsy or monstros-ity and counter the common sense that makes arbitrariness a defining feature or inevitable effect of a diffuse violence rather than the in-augural act at the root of colonization (188). The potency of this moment in Mbembes argu-ment cannot be exaggerated. Colonization, in its guise as arbitrariness, is a phenomenological miracle: limitless and realizable representation, a lifeworld of enjoyment, appetite, and desire, and the fantasy of the indivisible (sovereign) subject. By the same token, however, and herein lies Mbembes impressive counterintuitive ploy, colonization is also that which the phenom-enological worldview cannot explain, the ex-cess that phenomenologys ethos of limits and determinants, of the humbling prison of law, reason, doubt, time, measure, cannot contain (189). Colonization sustains itself through it-eration: the Janus-faced movement of biopower that Foucault delineates consists of both desire and vengeance, creating, destroying, and desir-ing the thing and the animal that it has previ-ously summoned into existence (189). Because the violence of colonization and its masquerade as sovereignty and limitless subjectivity are con-tingent on the animalization and/or thingifica-tion of the native, on the power to summon and cancel or annul life, Mbembe shows the mutu-ality of violence and contingency, arbitrariness and persistence, intimacy and domination, and, above all, the fact that to have been colonized is, somehow, to have dwelt close to death (189).

33. Ibid.,14.ItshouldbeclearthatMbembe(andI)donotintendterrorinitscurrentwidespreadandcav-alieruse.Ihavealsointerpretedthesephrasesstrate-gically,butnot,Ibelieve,egregiously.MyinfidelitytoMbembesargumenthere,inotherwords,discernsapotentialhedoesnotmakeexplicit.

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Mbembes magical deployment of phe-nomenology in the analysis of the violence of colonial sovereignty, then, interweaves the imaginary realized and the real imagined in both writing and life (242). This is, in my view, a more radical move than that which makes truth stranger than fiction, that makes repre-sentation constitutive of reality, that asserts the materiality of discursive effects, or that speaks of their indivisibility. Even though his argu-ment might be said to acknowledge the validity of all the possibilities I have outlined, and his language of co-extensiveness and embedded-ness seems to conjure up the uncertain status of representation throughout his work, I think Mbembe deliberately eschews liminality in favor of metamorphosis, and representation in favor of expression. The beauty and ugliness of the postcolony (242), I would suggest, demands such exclusivity on his part because he is deter-mined to consider it a space of proliferation rather than death (242). In this regard, contexts of instability and violence command attention and respect both in the multiplicity of forms, practices, and significations that translate, nar-rate, and authenticate their experience and on their own terms, in the expressive power of the inchoate and phantasmatic, trembling on the edge of meaning and perception. I am particu-larly compelled by Mbembes allusion to percep-tions and phantasms in pursuit of each other; his charming turn of phrase grants each its difference and integrity while envisioning both on the brink of metamorphosis. This tactic ap-preciates the courage and resilience of worlds in crisis, reveals their violent and hallucinatory ar-bitrariness as powerlessness, skewers the moral authority of colonialism while acknowledging the persistence and pathos of its contemporary inscriptions and lieutenants, and dares to look deeper than the necropolitics of chaos, brutal-ity, and zombification to offer glimpses of hilar-ity and wonder in the midst of horror, of societ-ies in the throes of becoming.

I turn now to an early example of Con-nollys authoritative insights into the political

dimensions of ethical responsiveness and ob-ligation. I have attempted to supplement this essay collections attention to the narrative of violence with a delineation of its phenomenol-ogy, in order that each might render the other both expressive and meaningful. Both my fellow contributors and I have adhered scrupulously to our announced focus, the subject and dis-course of violence, but I wonder whether some-thing else might be disinterred if our collective grappl[ing] with mimetic urgencies (Gana and Hrting, in this issue) and responsibilities was reinscribed, in Connollys terms, as the ethics of responsiveness to suffering.34 This move has the advantage, in my view, of acknowledging the blurred distinction between victim and killer that characterizes some aspects of violence in Africa and the Middle East, of insisting that at-tributions of arbitrariness do not occur in the absence of a serious consideration of powerless-ness, of (in Connollys words and the spirit of this collection) asserting that severe suffering exceeds every interpretation of it while persis-tently demanding interpretation, and, finally, of imagining the power of powerlessness.35

A brief recapitulation of Connollys com-plicated argument might be in order. His essay considers John Caputos Against Ethics, a work that cuts through ethical abstractions to concen-trate on flesh, the soft, perishable medium in which suffering occurs, and that renders obliga-tion palpable, because the movement from us to them is based, uncomplicatedly, on the vulner-able flesh that all humans share.36 Connolly ap-plauds Caputos simultaneous affirmation of the fragility of flesh and of an ethics of responsive-ness to suffering but wonders whether Caputo simply bypasses the conundrum that plagues ethics when it confronts the question of suffer-ing: Is suffering a porous universal, whose per-sistence as a cultural term reveals how conceptu-ally discrete injuries, wounds, and agonies are experientially fungible, crossing and confound-ing the fragile boundaries we construct between them? Or is it a barren generality, seducing theo-rists into metaphysical explorations far removed

34.Connolly,Suffering,Justice,andthePoliticsofBecoming,254.

35. Ibid.,252;andJohnCaputo,Against Ethics(Bloom-ington:IndianaUniversityPress,1993),asquotedbyConnolly,255.

36.Connolly,Suffering,Justice,andthePoliticsofBecoming,253.

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from specific injuries (252)? Connolly admires Caputos return to the impatience of flesh but is skeptical of Caputos claim that bloodied, smelly, starving flesh automatically inspires ethical obli-gation and propels justice.

Connolly suspects that Caputos charity model of ethical obligation and social justice has the troublesome effect of turning the help-less and the devastated into paradigm objects of obligation to whose helplessness virtuous help-ers respond (255; italics in the original). For Connolly, this situation, noble as it is, does not present the most difficulty in an age of politi-cal pessimism; rather, situations where those who suffer are not entirely helpless but are de-fined as threatening, contagious or dangerous to the self-assurance of these identities, and . . . the sufferers honor sources of ethics inconsonant or disturbing to . . . constituencies implicated in asymmetrical structures of power, do. This suffering, too, invades the flesh. It engenders fa-tigue; it makes people perish; it drives them over the edge (255; italics in the original). Connolly makes an adroit move here to restore a politi-cal dimension to Caputos ethics of obligation to the deserving: when does Caputos model provide moral cover for the refusal to cultivate an ethics of engagement with constituencies in more ambiguous, disturbing, competitive posi-tions? And how does one include those am-biguous contexts where suffering is intense and the injuries suffered by some contribute to the sense of self-confidence, wholeness, transcen-dence or cultural desert of others (255; italics in the original)?

Reading this essay helped me see what I daresay is the utopian import of this collection, hidden in the interstices of its persistent chal-lenge to spectacularization, its ethical injunc-tion against re-membering and re-presentation, and its baleful experience of the violence of enunciation. Connollys declared subject is suf-fering rather than violence, but the ease with which I could substitute violence for suffering in his essay made me suspect that I could just as readily substitute suffering for violence in our collection. The result, I argue, is not a cavalier fungibility of categories of interpretation and analysis, or indeed a callous confusion of the victims of violence with its perpetrators, but a profound recognition of the painfully obvi-

ous violence and suffering are two sides of the same coin.

For this reason, the problems that attend the organization of suffering into categories that seek to account for its perdurability are precisely those that haunt explanations charged with the task of predicting, containing, and de-stroying violence. Thinking violence and suffer-ing with and against each other would, I believe, prevent the commonplace philosophical con-signment of suffering to the domain of ethics and violence to the domain of politics, thus ef-fectively emptying ethics of politics and politics of ethics. Connolly reintroduces politics in his discussion of the ethics of responsiveness to suf-fering but does so, at least in this essay, without attention to the violence that might be said to make suffering ubiquitous. The contributors to this issue might be said to perform the opposite task. Their commentary on the retrospective in-scriptions of violence in narrative and on the unsavory ideological implications of practices of accountability and forgiveness and discourses of rights and obligations requires them to invoke sufferers as those whom narrative cannot but fail. Nancys and Foucaults respective decon-struction of the opposition between consecra-tion and massacre and between war and politics is equally guilty of monumentalizing violence at the expense of suffering that is neither redemp-tive nor exceptional, and Mbembes phenom-enology of violence rests on the paradox that death embraces all substantiality, leaving no room for inert or quickening flesh. All musings on violence assume that suffering is what grants their speculations ethical authority and affec-tive appeal, but what would change if suffering were addressed rather than assumed?

Connolly begins his essay with the decla-ration: Suffering subsists on the underside of agency, mastery, wholeness, joy, and comfort. It is, therefore, ubiquitous (252). This collection has equally carefully demonstrated that vio-lence is as much the underside and crippling of agency as it is the true face of agency, mastery, wholeness, joy, and comfort. Heike Hrtings poignant question, But is agency thinkable for the dead and dying? becomes particularly sig-nificant in light of my proposed attempt to think violence and suffering with and against each other. She succeeds not only in thematiz[ing]

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death as a matter of the unequal historical and global distribution of pain and vulnerability (Hrting, in this issue) but also in exposing why the making of the suffering African body condemns Africans to political death. Hrtings thorough and intelligent analysis of the cul-tural politics of affect provocatively casts what Caputo would identify as the ethical possibilities of empathy and humanitarian intervention as the politically ambiguous means through which, as Hrting argues, the West mounts a revision-ary practice of cultural introspection and self-reinvention and rejects both the immediacy of flesh that Caputo endorses and the cathartic humanitarianist sensibility (Hrting) that un-derlies his principles of ethical obligation. Her unsentimental approach to the question of suf-fering also reveals how particular narratives of violence condition the modes of perception that govern the legitimizing practices of humanitar-ian interventions, thus reinforcing Connollys intuition that an ethics of obligation emptied of the asymmetries of power can only result in the spectacularization of suffering and the dis-avowal, as Hrting maintains, of the racialized constitution of mute, needy, and devastated flesh and of humanitarian sensibility.

Connollys animadversions emerge from a national context of vaunted and desired plural-ism, whereas the essays in this collection make it possible to interrogate the validity of his con-cerns in a global context where hierarchies in the categorization of violence and suffering are even more stark and insurmountable. Hrting introduces the disturbingly pornographic qual-ity of depictions of sexual violence, making it impossible to forget that what Connolly de-scribes as the polycultural character of suffer-ing obscures the sexualization of violence that has become synonymous with thingification and the simultaneously invisible and visceral suffering of female bodies and psyches.37 This is a theme that both Caroline Brown and Ngwar-sungu Chiwengo elaborate, but to different ef-fect. Caputos model of ethical obligation relies on an ethos of the olfactory and the visible, on the sublimity of spectacle as Hrting would have

it, in which wounded, bleeding, smelly, emaci-ated, and burnt flesh does not require the elo-quence of words to dignify it or to speak in its name. Flesh calls to flesh and empathy is born.

Browns and Chiwengos essays threaten Caputos investment in the power of powerless-ness even though both might be said to hold out the possibility that madness and rape, while invisible and unspeakable, could nevertheless [imperil] the stability of being through which dominant constituencies are coddled and comforted.38 These essays make us uncomfort-ably aware that sexual violence and psychosis bear a determinate relationship to ethnicity and gender, particularly in cultures accustomed to suffering, and that the figuration of madness, silence, and abjection as irreducibly feminine reinforces the alterity of suffering it seeks to absorb into human rationality. They also, nev-ertheless, enable what Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak would call the tracing of the itinerary of the silencing, the documentation of trauma and internecine rape that exceed the bounds of comprehension, articulation, and empathy. Connolly points out that Caputos model does not begin to explain what inspires the spirit of obligation or what accounts for the notorious unreliability of reception, compassion fatigue, as it were, or plain indifference with which tales of brutality and horror are routinely met. As Chiwengo asserts, dragging suffering into the public eye neither contributes to its demise nor, indeed, merits critical scrutiny or outrage. Against the grain of Chiwengos and Browns re-luctant faith in the quality of listening, of deci-phering, of re-membering (Brown, in this issue) that might make us alive to silent corpses and traumatized psyches, I find the negative charge of their analysis more productive. Rather than a Beckettian model of ethical obligation (I cant go on . . . I must go on), the fate of Congolese women and the symbolic power of madness hold both sympathy and indifference accountable for the failure their silent dissolution de-scribes.

Kimberly W. Segalls and Ken Seigneuries contributions to this collection depart from the prevalent motifs of atrocity, brutalization, spec-

37.AimCsaire,Discourse on Colonialism,trans.JoanPinkham(NewYork:MonthlyReviewPress,2000),42,quotedinGanaandHrting(inthisissue).

38.Connolly,Suffering,Justice,andthePoliticsofBecoming,262.

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tacle, and trauma to map a terrain of decline rather than devastation, of degradation rather than assault, of yearning and nostalgia rather than strangled desire, of loss and exile rather than overwhelming anarchy and numbing rep-etition, of ruin and resignation rather than si-lence and emptiness. My distinctions are not intended to be evaluative or indeed normative and hierarchical, but are slippery attempts to capture what Segall describes as the mood and ethos of social trauma and collective loss and to grasp the difference between spectator-ship and witnessing as performances of ethical responsiveness and obligation. If Africans ex-ercise existence in confrontation with the very forms of their death, inhabitants of the Middle East confront the precariousness of their exis-tence in melancholic narratives that combine the intimacy of witnessing with the enormity of loss, with the impossibility of making sense.

If the necropolitics of African life is itself how Africans not only suffer their contempora-neity but espouse it, the examples of Lebanon and Iran indicate, to the contrary, that resilience and endurance stem from a collective identifica-tion with loss and from a metaleptic yearning for the vision of an impossible that fuels hope (Seigneurie, in this issue). Throughout his ar-ticle, Connolly considers the word endure syn-onymous with bear as in submit and with undergo, thus constituting suffering as the underside of agency. The contributors to this collection dare to distinguish between endurance and submis-sion; one is irradiated by resilience and hope, while the other is consumed by despair. It would not be difficult to surmise that Mbembe would share my fellow contributors subtle comprehen-sion of the word undergo; I believe his insistence on proliferation at the expense of negation in-vests undergo with the dignity of his own word espouse. For Segall and Seigneurie, negativ-ity is productive. The flimsiness of the signifier, the precariousness of existence, the fascination of the abject, and the lure of melancholia fuel their chosen narrators counterintuitive vision of dignity amid degradation, anointing ruin and forging ties born of witnessing forgetting.

As a concluding gesture, I would like to suggest how Nouri Ganas interpretation of Paradise Now opens up a line of flight from cul-turally induced suffering.39 Suffering and vio-lence coalesce in the corpsofactual entities of Palestinian suicide bombers, both willful and reluctant, for whom self-assertion is bought at the price of bodily dissolution and who become otherwise than spectacle on the route to be-coming spectacle (Gana, in this issue). Give me liberty or give me death resonates pecu-liarly in this desperate context, without bravado and with infinite sadness. Paradise Now reiterates the distance between suicide resistance and the promise of Palestinian liberation (Gana) thus honor[ing] the politics of becoming rather than the politics of realization, deigning nei-ther to fulfill the logic of the universal nor to ex-pose its fault lines.40 Instead, Hany Abu- Assads insistent demand for and recessive withholding of narrative form or closure (Gana) gestures toward cultural and political possibility in the throes of its moving depiction of unrelenting suffering, of lives trapped between a denied past and an inchoate future. Paradise Nows artistic dismantling of the spectacle of terror-ism (Gana) places it in opposition to a histori-cal and narrative continuum that pathologizes both suffering and terror; its innovative form complements and undermines the sublimity of spectacular corpses with the vanishing traces of derealized rather than materialized terror. Gana locates the value of its intervention in its imaginative reconstitution, on the pyre of spectacle, of violence as life under siege; I pre-fer to emphasize Paradise Nows redefinition of suffering as a defeated consciousnesss infinite vulnerability to hope (Gana) rather than hu-miliation as the source of its true value. Paradise Now, like Mbembes reminders of hilarity and wonder in the midst of horror, exemplifies the significance of narrative reinscriptions of vio-lence: they resurrect the constitutive tension between suffering and the play of cultural pos-sibility and cultivate a bi-valent ethical sensibility responsive both to the indispensability of justice and the radical insufficiency of justice to itself . 41

39. Ibid.,256.

40. Ibid.

41. Ibid.,272(italicsintheoriginal).