Umar Nizar
In a televised debate in Australia, Žižek ’s vehement defense of Julian Assange was stymied by an opponent’s counter argument that some of Assange’s actions endangered the lives of US and allied personnel on the ground. Žižek ’s last stand, against this ultimate riposte, was that though it might have won the argument for you here (ha,ha!), in the end, `life’ itself is being foisted into a position where it performs its function as pure ideology. The ideology of life is the overweening, overwhelming, overarching feature of contemporary socio-economic and cultural politics. The `pro-life’ movement, animal rights movement, and the politics of human rights have drawn energy from the imperative that life is precious and that it must not be violated. The precariousness of contemporary globalized lifeworld produced by human as well as non-human elements segues into an inflationary value ascribed to human `life’ per se. An autobiography is no longer what it used to be but has turned into `life writing’. The human subjectivity has become enshrined all the more since the advancements in AI and Robotic Machine Learning technologies. Biomorphism in art, which seeks to imitate life forms, is just a symptom of this inflationary value that has been put on bare `life’ as an ideology.
The mechanical conception of law is that which hinders the infinite expansion of the ideology of life, till it encompasses every conceivable notion of human temporality and space. The spectre of capital punishment, anathema to most democratic societies, posits law against life and seems to uphold the supremacy of law over life. The free will of bare `life’ finds itself pitted against the artificial hurdles raised by the legal edifice. Thus, crime becomes `organic’, `spontaneous’ and `natural’ whereas law on the other hand is deemed `hypocritic’. Anti-immigration laws for instance curtail the free movement of human life across the planet. The Chinese `one child’ norm till recently had an impact on the biological reproductive proliferation of life in that country. The death penalty is where life finds itself directly pitted against the edifice of law. Not only does the death penalty contaminate the legal process with its punitive vindictiveness, but it also vindicates torture and other bodily humiliations and punishments inflicted on the condemned by foregrounding the essentially anti-life position, and vengeful nature of liberal justice.
The question here is whether organic life is a law unto itself, as exemplified by the 1968 student movement, or has inorganic, artificial law in its anti-protoplasmic, anti-life orientation been led astray into the path of injustice so that it has to be reformed by interpellating it into the ideology of life, thereby creating a radical justice. Modernity on the contrary stays bound to law and not to life; and thus, it was found to be a dark, pessimistic era by Baudelaire as well as Kafka whose `The Trial’ is a brilliant evisceration of the law as pitted against life. But can the primordial, mythical law of the Old Testament be recuperated? Divine law might supplement life. Modern reason on the other converse would insist that rational law and order must have precedence over the ideology of life. Žižek for instance personally supports the death penalty, but strangely the theoretical edifice of his thought condemns it, in what would be a rare contradiction in Žižekian thought.
The condemnation of death penalty is also at the same time a rejection of the transcendental position in thought. There is no big Other, that can validate, or give meaning to our actions. There is no divine figure who would signify human existence with divine meaning. Finally, we as humans are metaphysically condemned to be free though materially confined to numerous contingent limitations. Life is predicated upon absolute liberty. Thus, the philosophy of life espouses freedom whereas the legal edifice runs counter to it. (In a strange way, the support among the Indian rationalists such as C. Ravichandran for colonial law that introduced notions of universality, turns a blind eye to that fact of unfreedom that colonialism entailed. Mahatma Gandhi broke the law when he picked up a handful of salt from the Dandi Beach on April 6, 1930. But Gandhi’s mode of civil disobedience won India her freedom. India’s freedom was thus predicated upon the breaking of unjust colonial laws. Even today, in free India, Gandhi’s mode of non-violent resistance shows the way for activists fighting against unjust caste laws and homophobic laws. Thus, civil disobedience was not a repudiation of reason, but a demand for a `higher’ reason.
The Indian rationalist C. Ravichandran has delivered speeches in Brisbane, Perth and Melbourne which were hugely popular success with the expatriate Indian (Malayalam-speaking) community there. But otherwise, Ravichandran’s support of the colonial legal system has to be read in conjunction with some contemporary Afro-American activists who claim that slavery cannot be pitted against freedom. This is because a stance for freedom need not always be a stance against slavery. Slavery was once considered lawful. So if you oppose slavery, then you are opposing the laws of that era. Law, according to this opinion facilitates freedom. But even if you are shackled and being beaten, you still retain your basic humanity to forgive your assailant. Slavery in no way could take away the essential humanity of its victims. So can the shackles imposed by laws be seen as non-confining? Given the limited resources that are available for humanity today and the scramble to appropriate the same, it might seem only logical that there be some legal checks and balances for inordinate consumption by `life’.
It is in this context that the performative role of the American `Facebook’ judge Frank Caprio mercifully letting convicts off on humanitarian grounds becomes significant for illustrating the organic nature of the legal edifice. The anti-life posturing of contemporary law in its controlling aspect has to be remedied with a more rooted and organic `greater’ law as Judge Caprio exemplifies, although it often comes off merely as a publicity stunt. The organic law of Judge Caprio must be pitted against the inane, bureaucratic and Kafkaesque legal system. There is a conflict within the legal system between humane, ecumenical, liberal legalists and inorganic fundamentalist interpreters of clauses of law.
Thus, freedom is entangled with life. Bodily freedom to procreate is crucial, as it leads to the emergence of `life’. Freedom in its real sense facilitates life. It is unbridled, infinite and boundless. So is life. Law sets certain limits to life. But the big Other figure, that overdetermines our actions and endows meaning, is no longer law, but `life’ itself. This self-aggrandizing life is a symptom of the contemporary times and its precarity. The `risk society’ posited by Ulrich Beck has elevated `life’ as its own justification. No law can ever aspire to counter the rights or claims of `life’. The eager, pulsating protoplasmic magic called `life’ holds reality in thrall and overdetermines that reality itself. The ultimate bestower of meaning is thus `life’ itself. The maternal `Real’ is at stake here and not the symbolic father figure of the law. Bracha Ettinger would posit this Real as maternally accessible -a `Matrixial Borderspace’ of the Real. China attempting to lift its `one child’ stipulation is a case in point. This has long been identified in India as a demographic strength. The abundance of life is no longer met with dismay, but as a hopeful prognostication of the survival of humanity. Islam and its theological stance against contraception also gain valence in this respect.
Islam in its ideological manifestation also discourages contraception, just as Catholic Christianity does. (When Cherie Blaire, the wife of the then British PM Tony Blair gave birth to a baby, to much overall adulation on having a baby in 10 Downing Street, the feminist critic Germaine Greer derided the lecherous proclivities of PM Tony Blair, as having no sensitivity to his wife’s Catholic persuasion). This is where Iran and Vatican would find common religious ground. There is also a new material discourse surrounding Islam propounded by the Oxford-trained anthropologist Talal Asad. The material discourse surrounding Islam, such as the `discursive tradition ‘argument propounded by Talal Asad has created an episteme of non-vulnerability surrounding Islam that seeks to upset hitherto narratives of colonial victimhood, humiliation and subjugation. It posits Islam as a vital, living faith and not as being dominated by the death-drive or merely playing second fiddle to the West. Elsewhere, the Buddhist praxis consisting of anatta, anicca, and dukkha (non-soul, non-covetousness and non-desire) has attempted to emancipate the subaltern `lower’ castes in India with its materialist contravention of the idealistic Advaitic monism of Vedic religion. Monistic Advaita, a predominant idealist Brahmanical philosophy posits everything as the same `Brahman’ but still differentiates on the basis of caste, against which Buddha argued for the material non-existence of the soul (anatta). `Life’ since it is a so tangible and palpable a processual phenomenon, seems to have given hope to subjugated people the world over. For Marxism, a materialist ideology, the `proletariat’ is comprised of those who own just their bodies as means of `production’.
Embodiment and intentionality are brought into question by the new materialist current. Intention is retrospective for Žižek . Thus, he cites the instance of Bertrand Russel confessing his love to Ottoline Morrel and realizing his love for her in retrospect. The salient aspects of an event, including intention are revealed in retrospect. Thus, the performance of an event precedes its intention and ideological basis. Life gets entangled with itself as an ideology in a post-facto way. Life posits its own origin as future anterior (in order to have been).
Thus, Žižek often quotes Niels Bohr’s supposed remark about a horseshoe being a harbinger of luck despite his non-belief. Thus, the performative action is a marker of ideology and not belief itself. Belief need not always be vouched for with life (as certain radical Muslims would say, according to Žižek), but belief itself has a performative dimension today. (Islam is a `good religion’ for Žižek, in its performative dimension, not asking for its meaning to be signified with life, but for faith to be dissimulated to an extent till real faith `happens’).
Thus, Žižek cites the instances in Shakespeare where a woman acts as a man, only for the man in drag to again enact the role of a woman. Žižek rules out this possibility for the male. Thus female-male-female dissimulation is possible, but a male trajectory meets an impasse. Intention and free will are performatively entangled with the lifeworld in a non-spiritual way. Thus, Žižek posits idealism as the conception of a material reality existing in an inaccessible realm beyond our minds. The material world is precisely that which is created out of our entanglement with it. Law and life are the two claimants for supremacy in the materialist universe.
The material world is predicated upon its virtual spectrality. We have living bodies so that we can fantasize. The virtual fantasy thus has primacy over the corporeal materiality. The parallax of spectrality often cited by Žižek emerges here, since the spectrality as possibility argument (Spectres of Marx by Derrida for instance) finds itself separated by a gap from the spectral situation as an impossible haunting, trauma. This gap could be called the parallax. It operates independently of the ideology of life as well as the restrictions of law.
Žižek cites in his work `Absolute Recoil’ that at some point the human society created the spirit. Thus, a qualitative change happened. Humanity is on verge of such a change. It occurs once a demographic threshold is crossed. Sociologists such as Steven Vertovec calls this `super diversity’. Human population on planet earth has expanded so rapidly that we have gone beyond the normal notions of multiculturalism and diversity which cannot explain or control human behaviour any more. More than seven billion humans sharing the earth is hardly dystopic, but the hyper-expansion of humanity as the apex predator has led to a qualitative change in us. (Once billions of liquid water molecules have turned into vapour, water itself changes its state qualitatively). Perhaps we are turning into a more vicious species. Technologized mega human conglomerations are no longer what they once were-societies. But `Life’ in its contemporary popular sovereign manifestation is bound to break legal confinements. Whom would you support? Humans have become so successful that they have qualitatively emerged as different from before-aliens to themselves.
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Umar Nizarudeen is with the University of Calicut, India. He has a PhD in Bhakti Studies from the Centre for English Studies in JNU, New Delhi. His poems and articles have been published in Vayavya, Muse India, Culture Cafe Journal of the British Library, The Hindu, The New Indian Express, The Bombay Review, The Madras Courier, FemAsia, Sabrang India, India Gazette London, Ibex Press Year’s Best Selection, and also broadcast by the All India Radio.
