The following is an 'intervention in Global critical theory' by Facile Devji titled 'the return of non-violence'.
This begs the question, was Global critical theory a hopeless alcoholic or was it incessantly masturbating? Or was it both jizzing all over the place and continually drunk off its head? Is that why Duke University had to stage an intervention? Why did they ask Facile to participate? Was it because he had 'lived experience' of alcoholism and incessant masturbation? Or was he the victim of Global Critical Theory constantly jizzing upon him while off its head on drink?
It was to find the answers to these pressing questions, that I read Devji's article. Sadly, it was coy about the precise nature of Global critical theory's major malfunction. I invite you, dear reader, to go through Devji's essay with me on a line by line basis. Clearly something very shocking happened to Devji- which is why he was present at the intervention. But what was it? We need to read between the lines to get an idea of the awful truth.
There appears to be a revival of scholarly as well as activist interest in violence and nonviolence as concepts rather than descriptions of acts or situations.
So, Devji is saying that scholars and activists were interested in certain concepts but then they stopped being interested. Now that interest has revived. Why? Is it because the concepts in questions are causing Global critical theory to jizz on all and sundry while downing litres of Vodka?
This has led to the emergence of new writing on Gandhi as a thinker of violence and the historical figurehead of nonviolence,
But, in every decade of the twentieth and twenty-first century, there has been 'new writing' on Gandhi of precisely this sort! It can't be the case that Global critical theory, or an interest in violence and non-violence as concepts, has fluctuated in any way. The thing has been a constant. Indeed, even before there was Gandhi there was Tolstoy and an Edward Carpenter and so forth.
as well as to more expansive books on the subject, ranging from Slavoj Žižek's Violence to Judith Butler's The Force of Nonviolence.
Both of which are shit.
Étienne Balibar's text is the latest of several he has dedicated to the question of violence and the possibilities of nonviolence in political thought and practice.
But the guy is 80! French Communists ceased to matter a very long time ago. Whatever political thoughts the guy might have had, they were utterly shite.
If in past decades intellectual life was dominated by keywords like hegemony and transgression,
but only in shitty non-STEM University Departments where 'intellectual' means 'unemployable maniac'.
power and resistance, or sovereignty and subalternity, might violence and nonviolence become their successors?
Why not? The next step would be for 'niceness' and 'naughtiness' to become the successors of violence and non-violence. After that, one could simply say 'goo goo' and 'ga ga' and get a PhD
The moment this question is asked it appears preposterous.
OMG! Is Devji going to say something sensible? Don't be silly. Of course not.
Is this because, however ubiquitous terms like violence and nonviolence have become in public life, they have no real intellectual roots in Western political thought?
Has the guy never heard of Jesus Christ or a little thing called the Sermon on the Mount? The fact is, the early Church was pacifist and 'just war' doctrine emerged only after the Empire became Christian.
The Renaissance and Reformation both renewed an older Western European pacifist tradition submerged by Barbarian invasions- e.g. Erasmus or, a little later, sects like the Amish and the Quakers and Mennonites and so forth.
By contrast, a Hindu or a Muslim- if born in the warrior class- was expected to wage war. No doubt, one might chose to become an ascetic Sadhu or Sufi etc. but there was never any notion that Civilisation itself should eschew Violence. In some Buddhist realms, some animals may have been spared the butcher's knife but war remained a brutal business while cruel and unusual punishments were meted out to criminals and rebels and so forth as a matter of course.
These terms have received both their conceptual and political status in the Afro-Asian world, which includes for this purpose African American struggles.
Nonsense! These terms were adopted by the 'Afro-Asian' from White people some of whom worked closely with indigenous people. There is a hilarious story about the Moravians getting the Lenape to give up warfare after which they were massacred by American militia men.
Violence in particular has arguably achieved the status of a political idea after being magnetized by Gandhian nonviolence,
Nonsense! During the First World War all sorts of peaceniks went to prison rather than serve in the Army- even Bertrand Russel. Gandhi, however, was busy recruiting soldiers to go die for the King Emperor.
both terms being among the very few in the lexicon of Euro-American politics that have been redefined there by way of translation from languages and traditions outside Europe.
The problem with this view is that Gandhi only learned about Ahimsa and so forth from Europeans. Obviously, it made sense for Whitey to tell Brown people that their own religion said don't be violent if Whitey beats the fuck out of you and steals any nice things you might own. The reason the Europeans kept telling Hindus to read the Gita was because they wanted to show that Christ was a better incarnation than Krishna because Christ said 'don't fight' whereas Krishna was all like 'sack up already! Kick the other dude's head in!' Since some Hindus preferred to get rich while virtue signalling like crazy, Gandhi provided them a way to stay Hindu by pretending Hinduism was more Christian than Christianity.
For before its elevation by nonviolence into the primary target of moral and political action, violence had been a secondary category, the supplement of power, sovereignty, or forms of statehood.
Nonsense! Violence, though costly, was the ultimate way of enforcing claims of various sorts. Sometimes the violence was legal. Sometimes it wasn't legal but could not be punished. Sometimes it punished the legal authorities till they decided it was as sweet as pie.
While I cannot say why Balibar's work has gravitated toward this subject recently,
it's coz the old fool is pretending that Capitalism is very very cruel and has probably shoved something extremely nasty up your backside. Anyway COVID is the final final crisis. So we're all fucked.
I do want to comment on its more general implications in my response to his essay. What does it mean to deploy a word like violence, or indeed nonviolence, as an abstract and universal concept?
it means shit if the deploying is being done by a shithead.
By abjuring its particularization in forms like domestic, police, or gun violence, to say nothing of criminal acts such as assault, rape, or murder, Balibar's use of violence as an abstract political concept, like that of all its modern thinkers, escapes the vocabulary of law and therefore perhaps of the state as well.
Because the thing now means shit. Anything at all is violence- provided it isn't- like Gandhi telling his wife that her refusing to cook mutton chops (she was vegetarian) for his pal was a terrible act of violence.
On the other hand, nothing genuinely meaningful escapes 'the vocabulary of law' or 'the state' or any entity that uses language. Thus 'domestic violence' could be expanded to include non-violent but 'controlling' actions. Consensual sex may be rape if a certain type of deception was involved. Murder may be lawful slaying etc, etc.
Yet its modern form is also neutral enough to evade the moral rather than simply juridical opprobrium of terms like oppression, torture, or tyranny.
There is no 'juridical' opprobrium' that is not ab ovo moral. It is not the case that a person convicted of torture is considered a fine upstanding citizen. Speaking generally, the Judge dwells on the immorality of what has occurred when passing sentence.
Its abstract universality, then, makes violence available to thought primarily in conceptual or philosophical terms yet beyond the inherited categories of political thought.
But 'political thought' has the same 'inherited categories' as philosophy. That is why there is a subject called Political Philosophy.
As an abstract noun, violence refers to a condition rather than an act or event.
No. It refers to a particular type of act. It does not refer to a condition or state of being. Happiness is an abstract noun associated in an intangible manner with being in a state of happiness. There is no equivalent word- like 'Violentness'- to describe being in a state whose condition is violence.
Its deployment in this way is modern, not dating back earlier than the nineteenth century.
Violence is an English word meaning the use of force, or an act of violation, which has been used figuratively to mean 'improper treatment' from at least 1600. But we can find it in Wycliff Bible and in Chaucer and so forth.
Marxists may have been late to this party but only because Marx was a mid-Victorian atheist.
This is true of the most influential European texts that include the word in their titles, from Georges Sorel's Reflections on Violence and Walter Benjamin's “Critique of Violence” to Hannah Arendt's On Violence and René Girard's Violence and the Sacred.
These are not 'influential' texts. They are silly and middle brow.
As was already clear in Sorel's book, violence conceived in this way is linked to capitalism as the instantiation of a naturalized and universal condition.
But Sorel didn't know shit about Capitalism- which is a theory of resource allocation which had a sophisticated mathematical representation by the beginning of the Twentieth Century. Lenin was important. Sorel did not become so even after the old fool jumped on Lenin's bandwagon. Anyway, Europe soon saw that Violence was not cool. It led to genocide and famine and American troops on your soil if you were lucky and Soviet troops on your soil if you weren't.
For capitalism, too, is defined not by law, the state, or morality,
Actually, Capitalism has a mathematical representation of a very useful type which is well defined by Law & Econ under which rubric morality, good faith, culpa levis, 'unconscionability' etc. is subsumed. People who know this make big bucks as lawyers or hedge fund managers. People who don't know this have to stage interventions for a Global critical theory which keeps tugging itself off and jizzing while stumbling around drunkenly.
but as a kind of second nature whose spell can be broken either with more violence (according to Sorel and Fanon) or with nonviolence (according to Tolstoy and Gandhi).
No! Professor Ashgar Ali Ansari has conclusively proved that the spell in question can only be broken by True Love's first kiss.
We can replace capitalism with colonialism, as Fanon does, or with modern civilization, as Gandhi did,
or modern civilisation with Prof Asghar Ali Ansari's butt hole as that esteemed scholar would love to do for the benefit of the rosy red lips of Devji
where both of these names nevertheless imply it.
But only in the sense that everything and anything implies Devji is French kissing Ansari Sahib's butt hole in a manner Balibar finds very arousing.
But the focus on violence as a naturalized condition, rather than as a regime or political type like dictatorship, authoritarianism, or totalitarianism, remains constant in all of these usages.
Because Devji is violently giving rim job to Ansari Sahib! Taliban should take action!
In order to point out the irreducibility of violence or make it visible as a condition, Balibar prefers the oppositional term anti-violence to the more familiar nonviolence.
While Devji may prefer the term 'anti-anti-rim job' for what he is doing to Ansari Sahib.
He also wants to signal with the former term's use a political and polemical dimension that he thinks is missing in nonviolence as what he calls a metaphysical category.
Devji's incessant anti-anti-rim jobbing of Ansari Sahib is the condition for the possibility of the metaphysical category of Being as stupid as shit.
What is lost in this shift, however, is the explicitly negative character of nonviolence as a phenomenon lacking ontology and so being.
Very true. Rather than saying Devji is anti-anti rim jobbing Ansari Sahib we should stipulate that Ansari is imaginary. Thus we can laugh more heartily at Devji rim jobbing a purely Meinongian object while participating in an intervention to get Global critical theory to stop jizzing on all and sundry while off its head on drink.
For Gandhi, nonviolence was one of a number of negative ideas, which included noncooperation and nonpossession, all of which were marked by their derivation from the positive categories after which they were named.
Actually, the 'yama'- restraints- are prior to the niyamas- observances, because Yama, the first King and the Judge of the Dead, restrained himself from what was 'natural'.
Gandhi claimed to have first fulfilled the 'natural' duties arising from oikeiosis before beginning to restrain himself such that he would gain spiritual merit which would help his people. Sadly, even sleeping naked with young girls and not jizzing all over them wasn't enough to give him magical powers.
Nonviolence, in other words, claims an intimate relationship with violence
like that between Devji and Ansari Sahib- if only in Imaginationland.
while refusing the ontological status of its opposite in a form like anti-violence, which the Mahatma feared would only mirror it.
Though a bit of 'anti-violence' would have saved millions of lives during the Partition riots. Every District Commissioner knows there are times when you have to lock up, or extern, the known trouble-makers in the area.
Voters like 'anti-violence'. They will pay taxes to get it.
Nonviolence, moreover, was not only groundless because, as he often said, it literally did not exist in its own right but only with regard to violence; it deprived violence, too, of being by casting it into an abyss.
Okay, okay- the guy was as stupid as shit. Don't rub it in. Anyway, Jinnah was yet stupider. Come to think of it, the Aga Khan backed the wrong horse in this matter.
This it did by showing in its practices of withdrawal, renunciation, and sacrifice that the apparent positivity of violence was itself founded upon the negative reality of nonviolence, whose invisible work of sustaining social life was turned into the basis and target of violence.
This is nonsense on stilts. Violence is costly which is why violent anti-violence (locking up nutters) gets funded out of tax revenue. Non-Violence disappears when nobody will pay for its silly theatrics. Once India became independent, Gandhian stupidity ran out of money because businessmen preferred to pay Ministers and bureaucrats. Later Indira Gandhi prevented Gandhian Peace Organizations getting foreign funds. Buta Singh accused all those senile shitheads of being CIA agents!
Neither law nor custom and self-interest allow people to live together without slitting one another's throats,
Really? Is that what things have come to in Oxford where Devji teaches?
and for Gandhi nonviolence made such a life possible without being reduced to a positive cause.
Coz life is still possible after your throat is slit so long as 'being is not reduced to a positive cause'.
He even thought that nonviolence had no history because it was not “for” anything and could not be understood in conventionally political terms as being dedicated to making or protecting a future.
Mental illnesses have a history. Interventions can be staged even for hopelessly alcoholic, incessantly masturbating. Global critical thought
Without attributing its ubiquity to human nature, the Mahatma insisted that it was what in a quite different context Emmanuel Lévinas might call an “an-archic” figure of thought, something so intimate as to refuse perspective and so categorization.
Like Devji's incessant anti-anti-rim jobbing of Ansari Sahih.
And by thematizing it in negative terms, Gandhi did nothing more than reveal nonviolence to be a practice that remained groundless or without reason.
i.e. stupid shit. Why has Devji devoted his life to it? Is it due to his incessant anti-anti-rim jobbing Ansari Sahib?
But its status as a set of habits or practices that made social life possible
It had and has no such status. What makes social life possible is 'tit for tat' at the collective level.
meant that nonviolence was also capable of enabling the emergence of violence,
if the thing could pay for itself or seemed like a fun idea at the time- sure.
which continued to depend upon its virtues of solidarity and sacrifice even as they were turned to evil ends—for he thought that evil depended upon goodness in this way.
whereas he depended on rich guys giving him money. Money is non-violent politics in action.
This was why Gandhi understood the duty of nonviolence as its refusal to cooperate with evil.
Sadly, if the nonviolent are stupid and useless, nothing wants to cooperate with them. Just locking them up when they are being a nuisance works fine.
Unlike in the dualistic relationship posited by anti-violence, then, nonviolence not only made violence possible but could also repudiate it.
Anti-anti-rim jobbing Ansari Sahib can repudiate shit it ends up swallowing. But it too can be repudiated.
Such a vision accomplishes two things. One is to recognize the groundless power that nonviolence always exercises in social life.
Which is zero unless backed by money.
The other is to acknowledge it has no boundaries and can occur anywhere.
Like out acknowledging that Devji is rim jobbing Ansari Sahib everywhere and nowhere and at all times and never.
Unlike peace, which ends where war begins,
but like wars which end when peace begins
nonviolence does not exist in a mutually exclusive relationship with violence
coz it is giving rim job to Ansari Sahib
but can emerge from it.
like the shit which emerges from Ansari Sahib's anus.
Nonviolence possesses a universality that peace or anti-violence does not,
but which Devji's rim jobbing of Ansari Sahib has in greater measure
because it is true everywhere and can be withdrawn from violence at any time to cause its collapse.
Actually, that's exactly what just happened in Afghanistan! America non-violently withdrew from violence in that country. This has caused violence to collapse though no doubt some people still get shot or blown to pieces.
Nonviolence, furthermore,
like Devji's incessant rim-jobbing of Ansari
is defined neither by a phenomenology nor by any measuring-out of hurt and pain.
Or the swallowing of feces.
Instead it is represented by actions that seek to convert violence by inviting its force in a kind of wager.
Sadly, 'rough trade' demands to be paid the going rate. The fact is, the one way to get thugs not to beat you up is to shriek 'I bet you 50 pence you can't kick me in the testicles till I jizz my pants!'
Such acts are marked by the purity of their means, which, as Balibar notes, must be scrupulously maintained so as to prevent their ends from being compromised by the violence that would otherwise be perpetuated.
So, don't jizz your pants while being beaten. That's what the elderly French dude is saying- right? Foucault would so not have approved.
If nonviolence possesses no phenomenological character,
though it must do if it is itself a 'phenomena'- i.e. corresponds to an intention, representation or other mental state.
this is surely because violence as the condition from which it proceeds is also abstract and difficult to define.
No. If Ahimsa is a 'yama'- a restraint- then it has a ready to hand representation or intention which however is unconnected to any 'niyama'. Thus, a little kid going off to school to learn to read and rite and do rithmetic doesn't actually start doing any of those things on his first day or week- or, in my case, first few years- there. Instead he learns things like sitting still rather than screaming hysterically and running around shitting all over the place. These 'restraints' are the first thing the kid has to master. Once he has done so he may actually learn to read and write and so forth. Or so I have been told.
Of course, the same thing can be said about learning to be a soldier or learning Karate. You first have to restrain and discipline yourself before being taught how to kill a guy with your bare hands.
However, no great difficulty arises in defining what 'niyamas' you should acquire after you have restrained yourself by the appropriate 'yamas'.
Balibar addresses the problem of differentiating structural from other forms of violence by turning to cruelty or excessive violence as the issue to be addressed by anti-violence.
The Law does this perfectly well. There is a 'reasonable person test'. Senile Marxists can't shed any light on this subject.
Among the criteria defining excessive violence, he mentions its victims' preference for death over life
how about Paradise with lots of virgins over being stuck in a dead-end job?
as well as its own anti-utilitarian form.
What could be more utilitarian on getting your hands on 72 Virgins- more particularly if you are the seventy second.
For the first criterion, Balibar has the suicide bomber in mind, whose act he describes as occurring in a context of asymmetric power and therefore as being nihilistic.
From Balibar's p.o.v- sure. But this is 'altruistic suicide' which may bring the bomber's family money and status.
The second criterion may also refer to the Islamic militant alongside other actors whose actions go beyond instrumental rationality.
Till Biden runs away from Kabul weeping hysterically.
I want to suggest that these examples of excessive violence can be domesticated in the idea of nonviolence insofar as it is able to claim the virtue which nevertheless serves them as a foundation.
But this is only insofar as Devji can feel he is leading the Dandi Salt March while giving Ansari Sahib a rim-job.
Commenting on the suicidal assassins of the anticolonial struggle in his own day, Gandhi was clear that what Balibar considers nihilistic about their violence was in fact what recommended itself to him.
There were no 'suicidal assassins' then. Some assassins did get caught- like Godse- but some got away. An American captured Godse. It may be the fellow wanted the publicity of a trial. The day may come when that nutter is considered a greater hero than the nutter he killed.
He saw in the willingness to die the supreme form of nonviolent action,
just as he saw it in the act of killing a daughter who might become the victim of rape provided of course the father immediately surrendered his own backside to the would be rapist as compensation.
and he thought that it required the greatest struggle for violence to master it.
Also he thought not jizzing when sleeping naked with your grand-niece meant you were one super-duper Mahatma.
It was in fact this imperfect struggle to master sacrifice that made their violence so excessive, because it had to forcibly join killing and dying into the same act.
Though every act of violence carries some risk of retaliation. It makes sense for an untrained person to use excessive violence whereas a professional would do the job cleanly and economically.
The task of nonviolence, then, was not to prefer “utilitarian” over “nonutilitarian” violence, but instead to reclaim the latter's sacrificial character from the uncertain grasp of violence.
Though the sacrifice was originally the thing you killed upon the altar. Were I a samurai, the sword would only becomes unsteady in my grasp when I have to perform seppuku. At that point, I decide I'd rather be a geisha.
Balibar recognizes that violence and nonviolence are linked,
in the same way that I am Balibar because I'm not and Balibar is me because he isn't and we thus remain as indissolubly linked as are Devji's lips and Ansari's rectum.
and that, as Gandhi held, it is this connection that allows one to transit into the other.
Sadly, this is nonsense. Violence is a learned skill- like being good at Chemistry. A History Professor is a non-Chemist but practicing non-Chemistry won't allow him to transition into being a Chemist.
He focuses on the “force” or “violence” shared by these categories.
But they aren't shared at all.
But the Mahatma thought that they were in fact linked by sacrifice and so nonviolence, whose withdrawal from violence would therefore cause the latter's collapse.
There was a theory that the Shrauta warrior was bound not to kill cows but could kill people while on a cattle raiding expedition. However this vow was reversed when he returned triumphantly to organize a big sacrifice to the Gods. This was a silly theory but then Indology was particularly silly when it went through a structuralist phase.
For Balibar, force or violence might be a problematic category, but it is one that is nevertheless necessary for a politics dedicated to social justice.
Which has achieved zilch because it is shit.
By contrast, for Gandhi, who was fully aware of the ineluctable character of violence as a structural as much as a historical fact, it was sacrificial nonviolence that could alone interrupt it through processes of renunciation and withdrawal leading to conversion.
but only so long as rich peeps kept giving him money for his crackpot schemes.
Sacrifice in Gandhi's view represented the surest means of nonviolence.
He was always urging people to sacrifice their money or jewelry so that he could have more cash to piss against some stupid wall or other.
He saw collective life as being made possible by sacrifices of all kinds, whether among relatives, friends, coreligionists, fellow-citizens, or even strangers. He saw sacrifice, not contract, as the fundamental social relationship, and he was critical of the latter because it could only be achieved by interests founded in the idea of property.
Sell all you have and give me the proceeds.
Gandhi claimed that property could only serve as the basis for violence and
founding could only serve as the basis of losting and losting could only serve as the serving of service till property's loss of self-possession
doubted that all social relations could be mediated by its possessive ideal. Interest had its place in law and politics but was unable to define social relations altogether, which still depended on the kind of sacrifice whose structure has received anthropological attention and has been discussed largely in terms of gift and potlatch.
Coz Gandhi read Marcel Mauss- right? But that shite was only translated into English a few years after Gandhi ate a bullet. Potlatch has never existed in India. It may have been a feature of some North American tribe whose social order had collapsed because the European had brought Old World diseases but it didn't exist in India.
These and other forms of sacrifice could be co-opted by the violence exercised in families, states, or religions but never fully owned by it, representing instead the privileged sites from which it could be converted into nonviolence.
So- non-existent forms of sacrifice could be converted into a nonviolence that didn't exist. Cool.
This was because such renunciations could not be defined by the utilitarian categories of self-interest
Sadly, any behavior at all can be shown to be defined by a utility function.
or, indeed, of interest itself, whose logic of instrumentality Gandhi thought violent by definition.
So everything is violence including non-violence especially if some logic or thought is involved.
For to be workable, interests required a society whose relations were fully mediated by property.
But anything mediated by property is violence and all interests are violence so everything workable is violence and thus Society is just violence and all relations are relations of violence.
But this meant that self-interest could also manifest itself in the “voluntary servitude” that Gandhi thought made colonialism acceptable to its subjects through their desire for security or commodities. It is not death and life but interest and sacrifice that we can map onto the distinction between violence and nonviolence.
Cool. Murder is not violence and spending your time killing people aint violent behavior. Any rational or interested behavior is violence but sacrificing your neighbors to Hecate is non-violence.
As for the nonutilitarian character that gives excessive violence its name,
e.g taking your time copulating with the empty eye socket of your victim while he screams
it bears comparison to the noninstrumental action that is meant to define nonviolence as a practice that refuses to sacrifice means for ends.
Cool. Sodomizing the eye socket of your victim is equivalent to Gandhian satyagraha.
The contrary sacrifice of ends for means, therefore, permits cruelty to be converted into nonviolence because the two share a nonutilitarian logic.
Once you have decapitated your victim, sodomizing his eye-socket adds little utility. It represents excessive cruelty. Facile says it is pure Gandhian non-violence. Why? If you do something utterly useless you are doing something very Gandhian. Facile doesn't get that though Gandhi was a useless tosser he was wasn't sodomizing the eye sockets of his victims. He wasn't excessively cruel- merely excessively shit.
Both Balibar and Arjun Appadurai see in such “useless” violence not the prior causality of social, political, or other kinds of difference, but rather the opposite.
May their eye-sockets be sodomized in a non-utilitarian way.
In an essay on religious violence in India focusing on the apparently pointless, lengthy, and exhausting practice of disembowelment, Appadurai argues that at stake in this practice is an “epistemological” anxiety about finding the enemy's alien essence in a familiar body.
He would argue no such thing if he was subject to it. On the other hand, it is a good idea to disembowel your victims if you are planning to hang them up as a warning to others. This is because you want to get all the shit out of the cadaver so it does not stink up the place more than necessary.
The violence that Appadurai describes is driven by identification. Its Muslim victims are mimicked by their Hindu attackers, who rehearse the history of Islamic conquest
Devji seems to take a very dark view of 'Islamic conquest'. On the other hand, so do ISIS.
through “medieval” practices like ripping out fetuses from the bodies of pregnant women and spearing them on swords. Children are made to swallow petrol, after which lit matches are placed in their mouths, so that they explode like miniature suicide bombers. Muslim violence against Hindus, when not characterized by stone-pelting and hand-to-hand fighting for control over neighborhoods, is modeled on the high-tech practices of global jihad movements in its reliance on bombs. This is also due to the demographic and political differences that prevent Muslims from enacting the Dionysian spectacles favored by their enemies.
But this is perfectly Gandhian because it is excessive violence. What is insupportable is the surgical drone strike. Obama is the only bad guy here. The violence he used against Osama wasn't excessive at all. According to Devji, that's a bad thing.
It is important to note the novelty of these practices. Such violence once occurred and was understood as part of a logic of retaliatory equivalence. Today this informal contract survives only in the efforts of each group to match or exceed its rival's death toll.
The West is evil because it killed more bad guys than the bad guys managed to kill innocent Westerners. Why couldn't Obama just concentrate on disemboweling and sodomizing the eye sockets of Osama and his family? The truth is Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. did not understand Gandhi properly. Thus people like Obama were violent while Osama & Co were non-violent- according to the logic of these worthless cretins.
Their violent practices have otherwise diverged substantially from one another and taken on an increasingly global rather than national character. Yet instead of implying the increasing distinctiveness of both parties, this process does the opposite, turning cruelty into an act of mourning for a vanished foe.
If the foe has truly vanished, then she is beyond the reach of cruelty.
Appadurai's depiction of such violence as an epistemological inquiry leads us to recognize
that he has shit for brains probably because he disemboweled himself, chortling gleefully, before cracking open his own skull and pouring shit into it.
how the enemy lost to the past in Pakistan or to the future in global Islam comes to be embodied in the mimetics of Hindu nationalism.
These guys think Modi spends all his time disemboweling Muslims. That's why he is Prime Minister. No wonder his foreign policy is so successful! Kamala Harris wants to learn from Modi how to do the thing with yet more excessive violence so as to become greater than Mahatma Gandhi.
Animated by the search for and impersonation of difference, excessive violence emerges from a perverse recognition of what Balibar calls the common.
Perversity is involved- sho' nuff. But the thing aint common at all.
Gandhi had feared that making what is held in common into a collective identity would end up provoking violence through its demand for similarity.
But if that violence was excessive and involved disemboweling and copulating with eye sockets then it would turn into non-violence more particularly if it involved human sacrifices to Hecate.
He thought such identifications not only produced differences in order to eliminate them, but also made for the lawless cruelty of a violence produced by their very loss.
Devji is saying Gandhi was an evil lunatic.
The Mahatma even rejected a politics based on the idea of biological or human commonality as being nothing more than the expansion of a racist logic of similarity and similitude, something I am reminded of in one of Balibar's earlier essays. But my reason for dwelling on the anxiety produced by the loss or absence of difference and otherness lies not in Gandhi's time but our own.
My argument so far has been that any effort to replace nonviolence as a negative form with some more positive antagonist of violence falls into a dualistic logic.
It is a shit argument. Having a well disciplined Police and Army means that violence is put down by a legal or protocol bound juristic process which is 'buck stopped'. There is no 'mimesis', 'mirroring', or 'dualistic logic' here. Why? Because the protocols involved arise out of Law & Economics, not Crime or Domination. True, these nutters can say 'Law is Crime', 'Free Market exchanges are actually Rape and Robbery of a heinous kind'. But we can reply 'You have shit for brains. You aren't teaching Political Philosophy or History or whatever. You are a fucking cretin who is acting as a child-minder to a credential seeking cunt who, if her ambitions are fulfilled, will waste her life in some sycophantic career which adds negative value to the polity.
For violence depends on the creation of some object or other, even if not an enemy, against which force can be mobilized.
Thus the Creator is the cause of violence. Fuck you Mummy & Daddy! Fuck you very much!
This happens even and especially when such objects or others are not immediately available,
e.g when Muslims are not available for Modi to disembowel in front of Kamala Harris
as Appadurai's essay shows so nicely and as I will claim is generally the case today. By refusing this dualistic structure, nonviolence lodges itself at the heart of violence, in the form of a potential that also robs it of positivity.
And rapes it of its anality.
What nonviolence sacrifices is therefore the very possibility of otherness, which under capitalist conditions is apprehended as an interest to be included in contracts if not eliminated.
Great stupidity would have the same quality as would the condition of being brain-dead.
The loss of difference in the global arena is also compensated by the impersonation of difference to avoid the terror of a common violence.
Very true! BoJo is pretending to be a fat white man. Actually he is a slim Rohingya woman.
Carl Schmitt, for instance, thought that
Hitler was super-cool, till it was no longer safe to say so
any politics conducted in the name of humanity would define and eliminate its enemies as inhuman.
Actually, the Morgenthau plan could have reduced Germany to an agricultural region.
He was nostalgic for the regulated wars between European states that had in the past minimized violence by expelling it to the colonies and guaranteed freedom through the pluralism of war-making within the international order. Civil war represented a breakdown of this pluralistic order in the unregulated violence of the common. And Schmitt was particularly concerned with what he called the global civil war made possible by the Soviet Union's attempts to universalize class conflict.
He should have been grateful to Stalin but for whom the Morgenthau plan would have been implemented. Germans would have been a cheap source of labor for Latin America or South Africa.
At issue is not how realistic this idea was, but how a global civil war in which legal and political boundaries count for nothing has become thinkable.
Fuck off! Once the Hydrogen bombs start going off there won't be no fucking civil war. Everybody will just fucking die.
And I would like to suggest that it is this possibility that has brought nonviolence to the fore in contemporary debates, since the term refuses to lend itself to a politics of oppositional equivalence.
No. The utter uselessness of 'Critical theory'- i.e. pretending to be a Leftie in a shitty University Department- has caused senile shitheads to babble all sorts of stupid shite.
This is surely why Balibar needs to reinforce and redefine it by turning to anti-violence, while at the same time being unable to reject nonviolence altogether. The idea of civil war, in other words, provides another crucial point at which violence and nonviolence overlap, or at least a moment in which the latter can be revealed as a nonoppositional and even nonontological figure.
Is this true of any polity where a civil war currently rages? No. Ashraf Ghani was a professor who specialized in failed states. His own State just failed. Would he have learned anything from Balibar? Don't be silly. Ghani may have been stupid but he wasn't as stupid as any of the senile hacks Devji invokes.
A 'non-topological' figure is one which does not belong to any relevant set or space. To say x is non-topological is to say that it doesn't exist in a particular context. It is no great revelation to say non-violence is severely missing where there is violence. Yet this is the opposite of what Devji has been arguing all along.
For conceptualized as an internal struggle in which all sides share a common identity,
Oikeiosis- not identity. They belong together but have distinct identities- e.g. abolitionist Yankee v Slave Owning Dixiecrat both of whom are American by birth.
civil war undoes ontologically thick distinctions between friend and enemy,
No. It reinforces them.
insider and outsider, similarity and difference, to say nothing about the rivalry of liberal interests. And in doing so it recognizes violence and nonviolence as intimates.
No. It recognizes that only violence qualifies the combatant. A Civil War may rage with a large section of the population- recognized as non-combatants- left unscathed though no doubt they may have to contribute goods and services to whoever is living off their land.
Schmitt thought the emergence of a global arena for political action was most clearly conceptualized in communism, which put the freedom and plurality of Euro-American politics as it had hitherto been understood into question. Such a politics had been guaranteed by the possibility of war waged within territorial bounds and juridical limits, at least in the West if not elsewhere. Without these limits, one would end up either with a world-state lacking politics or in a global civil war amounting to much the same thing. This would be a world defined by what is held in common, a set of conflicts that can no longer differentiate themselves either juridically or territorially by drawing boundaries so as to create a “Nomos of the Earth.”
Schmitt was silly. He didn't get that Law and Economics are about what is 'multiply realizable'. There can be no 'Nomos of the Earth' precisely because resource allocation under a rule of law can yield many different configurations and growth paths.
Still, Schmitt was seen as a lapsed Catholic who was on our side in the Cold War.
The global civil war threatened by communism never materialized, because
of a balance of terror between NATO and the Warsaw pact
it was thwarted by a capitalist ordering of the world.
Communist China rose by using free market methods. It remains to be seen how this story ends.
And the emergence of civil war as a global form in the post-colonial world was also forestalled.
By what? Armies and Police forces which killed or locked up insurgents- unless the insurgents won and did the same thing to those who opposed them.
Gandhi was not alone in claiming that the struggle between Hindus and Muslims in the run-up to India's and Pakistan's independence had taken on the character of a civil war.
Yet, such was not the case. There was a lawful interim Government and then a lawful agreement to Partition the country. Nevertheless, there was ethnic cleansing on both sides because of 'land hunger' as well as a desire to create majoritarian districts.
He typically also preferred it to the negotiated contract of partition, which has resulted in the repeated staging of this frustrated civil war in genocidal forms of religious violence.
There was no Civil War because once the two new Armies were put in the field against insurgents, the insurgents shat themselves and ran away.
Other parts of the world also saw the occurrence of civil wars that were folded into the narrative of anticolonial struggles, producing new states in places like Vietnam, Korea, and Algeria.
There was a Cold War aspect to Vietnam and Korea. The French abandoned Algeria.
The postcolonial moment, which began in 1947 with the independence of India and Pakistan, ended
in 1950 or a little later as these countries became Republics
in 1971 when their conflict led to the independence of Bangladesh, created out of another partition.
This had nothing to do with colonialism.
Emerging from a civil war still not called by that name,
because it was no such thing
Bangladesh signaled the end of the postcolonial moment because its nationality was defined not against European imperialism but instead against the postcolonial state itself.
Rubbish! Its nationality was defined by Religion and Language just as it had been in 1905. This Bengali Muslim state broke away from a Punjabi/Pakhtoon dominated Military Regime because, at that time, the Bengalis were more numerous and would have taken power after the first proper general election in that country.
Since its independence, most geopolitical conflicts and the new states they occasionally give rise to have resulted from civil wars of this kind,
which kind? 'Post Colonial'? But that is clearly false in each of the cases listed.
helped of course by external forces. And these have only proliferated after the Cold War, beginning in Yugoslavia
where there were previous ethnic and religious divisions which were well known.
and including Afghanistan,
ethnic divisions
Rwanda,
ethnic divisions
Congo,
ethnic divisions
Sudan,
ethnic divisions
Egypt,
there has been no Civil War in Egypt.
Iraq,
ethnic divisions
Syria,
ethnic divisions
Yemen,
religious divisions
and Libya.
outside interference and a tussle over who gets the oil wells.
The post–Cold War period has seen the generalization of civil war with the collapse of a “nomos of the earth,”
There was never any such thing.
making for a political reality that influences even countries not riven by such wars, of which the violence Appadurai describes in India
where Modi keeps disemboweling Muslims and Kamala Harris turns up to watch and learn
provides the miniaturized illustration. If such violence is no longer confined to the nation-state either in its practice or in its imagination, this is because there is no escape from the novel conflicts that mark the post–Cold War world, which Balibar defines as being fully subsumed by capital. From the globalization of Islamic protest and militancy to the global war on terror and the anti-war protests it gave rise to, these new movements take the globe as their arena and find it difficult to draw lines between us and them.
So, we're all fucked coz Balibar sez so.
In a global arena no longer ordered by rival superpowers and their respective allies, conflict takes on the character of a civil war.
No it doesn't. Either the State is cohesive enough to lock up bad guys or else there is armed conflict on the basis of ethnic divisions.
This has led to the apparent resurgence of racist, religious, and nationalist violence.
Where? In Oxford? Of course. This guy keeps getting his throat slit there. Still, at least his lips are firmly attached to Ansari Sahib's asshole.
These identities have not sprung to life from some hibernation but represent a phantasmatic recycling of past differences in a situation where they can no longer be naturalized.
This stupid shit is just the recycling of the Left's warmed up sick from fifty years ago.
The mimetic relationships these movements create with their enemies are instructive in this regard, as when anti-Islam activists take on the fears of conquest and conversion that have since colonial times bedeviled Muslim revolutionaries.
But anti-Islam activists existed immediately there were any pro-Islam activists. Hindus dominated what is now India before the Brits did so. Sadly, the Hindus weren't much better at running things than the Muslims so John Company became the 'Stationary Bandit'. Marx initially approved but was then persuaded by the Chartist poet Ernst Jones that 'Sepoys' might bring down the Bourgeoisie. The opposite was the case. India preferred British rule to Sepoy Mutinies. It was in this context that the Congress Moderates pushed Gandhi forward as the apostle of non-violence. That's it. That's the whole story. The odd thing is that Stalin could grasp the situation easily enough. Stupid Professors still don't get it.
Similarly, the right takes on leftist arguments about inclusion, discrimination, and rights, now claimed for white majorities facing demographic dilution.
But England first put in racist immigration laws in 1905. This was supported by the one Indian MP in Parliament at the time. Does Devji really not know that there was a popular movement to repatriate people who looked like him or me back in the Fifties and Sixties?
Following the Me Too movement for gender justice, anti-racist protest is the latest example of Schmitt's civil war as a struggle of, by, and for what is common, though it can also be described by Derrida's characterization of violence in the global arena as an autoimmune response.
Or it could simply be described as 'wokeness' gone mad.
Today's conflicts invoke issues that range from the environment to gender, race, religion, nationality, and occasionally class.
Meanwhile the Chinese push us down in the playground and eat our lunch. The Extinction Rebellion will collapse when Putin turns off the gas and leaves Europe to freeze this winter.
This violence of the common is defined not by difference so much as by its absence,
i.e. it is crazy shit.
and with it that of the interests and contractual relations that once held liberal politics in place with their logic of ownership. The suicide bomber provides a crucial example of this by sharing the death of his victim, having first shared his ideas and identity as well. It is in this world without duality that the negative vision of nonviolence may be making a comeback.
Devji thinks 'duality' ends if you get blown up along with a suicide bomber. Suppose she was slim and young, then- in death- you too would be slim and young and have a vagina rather than a dick.
The violence
which doesn't exist
that characterizes a global civil war
which doesn't exist
as the inability
which doesn't exist
to confine politics to capitalism's world of interest and contract is defined by
some stupid nonsense which does not exist viz.
the manufacture and sacrifice of others to make old selves possible, well expressed by the slogan “Make America Great Again.”
Or by Biden's promise to contain China.
The generalization of civil war, then, provides the matrix within which violence can pass over into nonviolence, because it has undermined capitalism's logic of difference to bring together two kinds of sacrifice.
No. The generalization of civil society- not civil war- has this role. War, like Violence, is costly. It does not undermine 'capitalism' logic' (which has to do with raising allocative and dynamic efficiency'). It raises it to new heights. But War is also about kill-rates. Asymmetric 'sacrifice' is what ends war. Equal sacrifice characterizes peaceful progress under a civil society which can become a part of the comity of nations.
What I am saying here is common sense. Marx may have thought revolting proles or sepoys or whatever might make things better but the proles or sepoys saw for themselves that this was not the case. Critical theory collapsed because where there is no illness, there can be no crisis. As for talk about 'world systems'- any cretin can do it though only David Icke has made mega-bucks by writing about it.
The violent attempt to sacrifice rather than include or contractually engage the other
like what happens when you try to sacrifice your neighbor's child to Hecate
has, in the process, come into close proximity with the nonviolent sacrifice of otherness itself along with its capitalist mediation in interest and contract.
in other words, by killing kids as a blood sacrifice to demented Gods, you have come in close proximity to the saintliness of a Mahatma Gandhi or Mother Theresa. This pisses off the Capitalist bastards. Pay them no mind. You are now just a step away from Canonization!
And it is in this proximity that a conversion can occur.
No. To get converted from the path of sin, first we must exercise restraint (yama). Thus if you get help for your drug addiction you can slowly give up your thoughts about sacrificing kids to Hecate. Then you can get a job and start learning to be more productive and helpful to others. Finally, you may start practicing positive religious or moral injunctions (niyama) such that you devote more time to meditation and charitable work. Finally you can give up a materialist conception of life and devote yourself to spiritual service. At this point, your conversion- by the Grace of God- can occur.
Alternatively, just listen to your ancestral spiritual preceptor and work hard and give to charity. Don't bother with 'political philosophy'. It is stupid shit.
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