The Suicide Bomber; And Her Gift of Death PDF
Preview The Suicide Bomber; And Her Gift of Death
it) 20 I 0 by Jeremy Fernando Think Media EG eries is supported by the European Graduate School ATROPa PRE ew York· Dresden I.'il FirslAvenuelf 14, New York. N.Y. loom cover design: Hannes Charen all rights reserved I BN 978-0-9825309-6-2 vii '"A thinking," Flaubert said, "should have neither religion nor fatherland nor even any social conviction. Absolute scepticism." Radically rupturing, the statement is not merely subversive. It does not depend upon the program which it criticizes. How might one free oneself from the cowardliness pressing upon social convictions of the present, subjugated as they are to reactive, mimetic, and regressive posturings? Avital Ronell: Crack Wars: Literature, Mania, Addiction viii You are a clever man, friend John; you reason well, and your wit is bold; but you are too prejudiced. You do not let your eyes see nor your ears hear, and that which is outside your daily life is not of account to you. Do you not think that there are things which you cannot understand, and yet which are; that some people see things that others cannot? But there are things old and new which must not be contemplate by men’s eyes, because they know—or think they know—some things which other men have told them. Ah, it is the fault of our science that wants to explain all; and if it explain not, then every day the growth of new beliefs, which think themselves new; and which are yet but the old, which pretend to be young—like the fine ladies at the opera. Bram Stoker: Dracula ix To Avital Ronell, Wolfgang Schirmacher, and Werner Hamacher; the bravest thinkers I know. Thank you for being my mentors, my teachers, and most of all my friend. x Whilst speaking with a survivor of the Second World War, what struck me most was her response to my question—‘what is the biggest difference between being a free citizen and one in captivity?’ To her it is simply the ability to say ‘no’. For when she was under the rule of the captors, this act of choice—expressing her unwillingness to perform a particular task, deed, action—was unthinkable. Every question put to her was never a true question—it was only a question in form; a question to which an answer was already known, already inscribed into the question itself—it was an order, a demand, an imperative. One register that is opened is; a possible pre-condition for freedom is the ability to deny, the opportunity to reject. Here we can catch a hint of an echo of Herman Melville’s Bartleby in her response: when asked to do something, one is able to express one’s self through uttering “I would prefer not to.”1 Whilst one might argue that the rejection of Bartleby is not as strong—there is no outright rejection of the request, merely a deflection (after all, just because one “prefer[s] not to” does not mean that one does not do it), one must also keep in mind that her utterance and Bartleby’s have one thing in common—both are responses that keep the question open, that allows the question to remain a full question. After all, ‘no’ does not mean an outright rejection of the premise, only a refusal to comply; and since there is no time element to the response, it does not rule out the potential for compliance at a later 1 Herman Melville. (2006). Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street. xi date, just not now. It is in that precise sense of indeterminacy that the response of ‘no’ is far from an answer, far from any finality whatsoever: in fact it is the response that has the opposite effect; it is a response that opens other possibilities, by remaining unknown. What remains unknown is not just the response to the question. Since there is always a possibility that one might answer in the positive to the question at some point in the future, this opens the question of, who is the ‘I’ that is uttering ‘no’. If one wants to posit that the self is consistent, then surely there would be a contradiction between a ‘no’ now and a future ‘yes’. (We see many such accusations in daily life—and particularly in the political arena—where people are charged with ‘going back on their words’). One could also posit that the self is situational: in particular situations one could respond in the negative to the question; at other moments, it might be a positive response. In either case, the self that utters the response at the later point is not exactly the same as the one of the earlier utterance (inconsistency suggests change; situational difference suggests that there is an external component to the self and since this is different, there is no reason to claim that it is the same self). Hence, at each utterance of ‘no’, the self that is uttering is also an indeterminate self: it calls to mind all the other self(s) that precede the ‘no’; and all that will come after. xii At each utterance of ‘no’ there are always already ghosts of all the other self(s) that may or may not have uttered the same thing, the same response. However, this does not mean that if at any point there is a positive utterance to the question—a ‘yes’—that it would be any different. In fact, the only situation that would be different is if the ‘yes’ is a compulsory utterance; when it is a situation where there is no ability to say ‘no’, where there is no ability to respond to the question at all. This would be a situation where not only is the ability to respond effaced, but more crucially, where the self is effaced. What is opened is a consideration of whether there is a link between the ability to respond and the self. Is there only a self when there is a ability to respond to situations, with situations? After all, responsibility is the very precondition of choice, and there is no self without choice; otherwise one would be a mere automaton, completely conditioned by one’s surroundings. This does not necessarily mean that one has complete control when one makes any choice: after all, since perhaps only one of the self(s) is making that choice, there is no reason to believe that the other self(s) might not have made a different decision; and with the same amount of legitimacy, or illegitimacy. One may never even be able to comment on the legitimacy of the choice, as this presumes an external verification to the choosing. However, as each choice is situational—singular—the xiii referent is always already different. Hence, each choice is irreducibly singular and thus incomparable, uncomparable. In order to shed some light on the indeterminacy between choice and automated response, we turn to Maurice Merleau- Ponty and his meditation on the strange phenomenon known as the phantom-limb; the limb that is not quite there, but at the same time affects the person, has effects on the person, as if it was there. In fact on many occasions the person is affected by the absent limb in ways that seem completely unreasonable, inexplicable: for instance instead of pain where one’s hand used to be, the pain is now felt in another area of the body. Of course once we take into account the fact that the nerve receptors of the hand are now dead, it is completely reasonable that the pain is not felt where the hand was: however, this opens up the question of why pain is felt at all—clearly there must still be some stimulus that the ‘hand’ is feeling, is receiving, that is now transmitted to another part of the body. It is in the light of the indeterminacy of whether the sensation is caused by physiological or psychological stimuli that we must consider Merleau-Ponty’s claim that what has to be understood, then, is how the psychic determining factors and the physiological conditions gear into each other: it is not clear how the imaginary limb, if dependant on physiological conditions and therefore the result of a third
The list of books you might like
