Jeremy Fernando - The Suicide Bomber and Her Gift of Death

7/24/2019 Jeremy Fernando - The Suicide Bomber and Her Gift of Death

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2 I0 by

Jeremy Fernando

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'"A thinking," Flaubert said, "should have neither religion norfatherland nor even any social conviction. Absolutescepticism." Radically rupturing, the statement is not merelysubversive. It does not depend upon the program which itcriticizes. How might one free oneself from the cowardliness

pressing upon social convictions of the present, subjugated as theyare to reactive, mimetic, and regressive posturings?

Avital Ronell: Crack Wars: Literature, Mania, Addiction


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You are a clever man, friend John; you reason well, and your wit isbold; but you are too prejudiced. You do not let your eyes see noryour ears hear, and that which is outside your daily life is not ofaccount to you. Do you not think that there are things which youcannot understand, and yet which are; that some people see thingsthat others cannot? But there are things old and new which mustnot be contemplate by mens eyes, because they knowor think

they knowsome things which other men have told them. Ah, itis the fault of our science that wants to explain all; and if it explainnot, then every day the growth of new beliefs, which thinkthemselves new; and which are yet but the old, which pretend tobe younglike the fine ladies at the opera.

Bram Stoker: Dracula


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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.


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Whilst speaking with a survivor of the Second World War, what

struck me most was her response to my questionwhat 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 choiceexpressing

her unwillingness to perform a particular task, deed, actionwas

unthinkable. Every question put to her was never a true

questionit was only a question in form; a question to which an

answer was already known, already inscribed into the question

itselfit 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 Melvilles Bartleby in her

response: when asked to do something, one is able to express ones

self through uttering I would prefer not to. 1 Whilst one might

argue that the rejection of Bartleby is not as strongthere 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 Bartlebys

have one thing in commonboth 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

1Herman Melville. (2006). Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street.


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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 lifeand particularly in the

political arenawhere 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.


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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 questiona yesthat 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 ones 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 situationalsingularthe


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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 ones 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

allclearly 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-Pontys 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


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person causality, can in another context arise out

of the personal history of the patient, his

memories, emotions and volitions.2

This suggests that sensations are neither purely from external

stimuli nor internal cognition: it is rather an inter-play between the

two, where the body discovers itself via the world and also

discovers the world through itself. Hence, the phantom-limb, is

not the mere outcome of objective causality; no more is it a

cogitatio.3 Lying in the indistinct space between cognition and

external stimuli, the sensation felt by the patient is similar to a

reflexan action that is neither merely a reaction to stimuli nor

fully cognitive. In fact, reflex movements, whether adumbrated

or executed, are still only objective processes whose course and

results consciousness can observe, but in which it is not

involved.4

The reflex does not arise from objective stimuli,

but moves back towards them, and invests them

with a meaning which they do not possess taken

singly as psychological agents, but only when

taken as a situation The reflex, in so far as it

opens itself to the meaning of a situation, and

2Maurice Merleau-Ponty. (2006). Phenomenology of Perception. pp.89.

3ibid. pp.89.

4ibid. pp.91.


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perception; in so far as it does not first of all posit

an object of knowledge and is an intention of our

whole being, are modalities of a pre-objective view

5

Hence, all cognitionevery act of knowingcan only happen

retrospectively: the meaning of the reflex can only be inferred after

the fact. In other words, the phantom-limb sensation can only be

known at the very moment at which it is felt, where the

experience does not survive as a representation in the mode of

objective consciousness and as a dated moment; it is of essence to

survive only as a matter of being and with a certain degree of

generality.6 It is a personal existence without, in other words,

being able either to reduce the organism to its existential self, or

itself to the organism.7 Hence, the phantom-limb is not a

recollection, it is a quasi-present and the patient feels it now

with no hint of it belonging to the past.8

Every time there is a sensation in the phantom-limb, it is an

event, unknowable until the moment in which it is felt; it is both

pre-objective and pre-subjective, preceding both the cognitive

5ibid. pp.91-92. italicsfrom source.

6ibid. pp.96.

7ibid. pp.97.

8ibid. pp.98.


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subject and also the very object of cognition itself. So, even as the

phantom-limb pain is treatable in the realm of the imagination, 9

this is a treatment of its symptoms: the cause, and the very status

of the sensation itself, remains unknown and ultimately

unknowable. This suggests that once again we are left in the realm

of darkness: the only thing that Merleau-Pontys ruminations

reveal to us, is that there is a potential for response to an

externality, to something that is outside of the self, to an other:

what this potentiality is can never be known. Moreover, it is only

a phenomenon after the factor at best at the moment in which it

is experienced: there can be no knowledge of the phenomenon

9The most common treatment for phantom-limb pain is the mirror box treatment,

that was created by Vilayanur S. Ramachandran and colleagues. A mirror box is abox with two mirrors in the centre (one facing each way). A patient inserts theirhand into one hole, and their phantom hand into the other. When viewed from anangle, the brain is tricked into seeing two complete hands. The mirror boxtreatment is based on an observation that phantom limb patients were more likelyto report paralysed and painful phantoms if the limb was paralysed prior toamputation. The hypothesis was that every time the patient attempts to move her/his limb, (s)he receives sensory feedback that the limb is paralysed. Over time, thisfeedback stamps itself into the brain such that even when the limb is absent, thebrain has learnt that the limb (and its subsequent phantom) is paralysed. Hence,the patient feels discomfort or even pain because the phantom limb is either in anuncomfortable position, or is paralysed. However, if the brain is tricked into seeingtwo complete hands when the hand that is present moves, the brain thinks that thephantom limb is also moving. In this way, the person can move her/ his phantomlimb, and so the brain no longer recognises it as a paralysed limb. More recently,

the University of Manchester has developed a virtual reality interface to treatsufferers of phantom limb pain: by attaching the present limb to an interface thatshows two limbs moving, the somatosensory cortex is tricked again. Both themirror box and the virtual reality interface work on the same principle of visual-kinesthetic synesthesia, except that the illusion is stronger in the latter.

For more on the mirror box please read, V.S. Ramachandran & S. Blakeslee. (1988).Phantoms in the brain: Probing the mysteries of the human mind . A report on theUniversity of Manchester virtual reality interface can be found, amongst otherplaces, at http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/6146136.stm


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either before or even after the fact: it is only experienced at the

point of its experience, after-which all that can be known is that

there is a potentiality for yet another experience, perhaps similar

or perhaps not at all.

After all, this is the legacy that is left to us, the legacy of the

question that is bequeathed to us in and through the deceptively

simple utterance, did God really say not to eat from any of trees

in the garden?10 In many waysat least in the Judeo-Christian

traditionit is the first hermeneutical moment and it opens the

possibility that a statement can have more than one interpretation,

can have more than inference, more than one meaning. At this

point it is irrelevant to posit whether God was telling the truth or

whether the serpents question was a purely performative one:

what is crucial to us here is the fact that if it is possible for there to

be numerous inflections to a single statementa command even

this suggests that not only are there potentially numerous self(s) at

play, but also numerous ghosts that are within, and in, each

statement at the same time. After all, one cannot forget that this

question is never answered; it is a question that remains a

questionit is a question that remains in full potential throughout

the text.

If a question is a true question, in that it remains in its full

potentiality as a question, this suggests that every inference,

10Genesis 3: 1-2.


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interpretation, gesture by way of a response, or every response as a

gesture, is a calling to one, from one, of its many possibilities. And

since these are not possibilities that are plucked from nowhere

(otherwise it would hardly be a response) this suggests that they

are re-called, re-membered. This then makes the gesture of

responding a response to another responsethe interpretation is

also a re-calling of something. Hence, the only thing that can be

known about the response is that it is an ability to respond, that

there is a possibility of responding: as to what this response is, or

how one is to respond, nothing can be known except at the

moment of response.

As one might recall from the many lessons in literature, there

are various ways of responding to a call. When asked by the

ghost, his father, his ghostly father, to remember me, Hamlets

response was to pull out his pen and scribble on a sheet, almost as

if to record him, archive him, keep him at bay, away: by

committing the memory of his fathers ghostly request to paper,

Hamlet canat least temporarilytranspose that memory from

his mind.11 Each time we hear the request remember me, there is

also the echo of the command to do this in memory of me. 12

11This is taken from William Shakespeare. (1992). Hamlet. Act I sc v.

This particular reading of Hamlet was brought to my attention in a conversationwith Avital Ronell in Saas Fee about memory and forgetting. This was also one ofthe various registers opened during her seminar, Finitude in Philosophy, Literatureand Art, at the European Graduate School in August 2005.

12Luke 22: 19.


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Here, the register of form in memory is opened: after all, this is the

moment of trans-substantiation which is a moment that is beyond

all phenomenon(s)absolutely beyond the comprehension of all

phenomenology. This suggests that each time the Corpus Christiis

recalled, what is crucial is to perform the ritualthe breaking of

breadafter which nothing can be known. And we see an echo of

this in each recollection, each response to the potentiality of a

question: it is only through ritual, through habit, through culture,

that we even begin to know the meaning of anything, to even have

an inkling of how to respond in any given situation. In fact, each

time the bread is broken, one is never even sure what memory of

me is called up: the only thing that is known is the ritual itself,

and it is that which is important. It is the musical Jesus Christ

Superstar that reminds us of this: at the scene of the Last Supper,

after commanding (or pleading with) his disciples to remember

me when you eat and drink, Jesus turns aside and says,

I must be mad thinking I'll be remembered./ Yes,

I must be out of my head./ Look at your blank

faces. My name will mean nothing/ Ten minutes

after I'm dead.13

13Tim Rice, Norman Jewison, Melvin Bragg & Andrew Lloyd Webber. (1973). TheLast Supper inJesus Christ Superstar.

Here, one might want to consider the notion that Jesus is only remembered becauseof the betrayal of Judas. Peter, the alleged rock, denies him, and the rest go intohiding after his crucifixion: in fact besides John, none of them are anywhere to beseen after the arrest at the Garden of Gethsemane. In this light, one can consider

Judas his most faithful disciplehis betrayal of the man is in fidelity to the


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After all, it is only the idea of Jesus the messiah, or redeemer (or

whatever adjective one chooses to put after his name) that is

important: his actual name, and the person that he is, ceases to be

important. In fact, one can posit that it is at this moment that he

moves from a singular person, Jesus the Christ to a universal

Jesus Christthe moment where his role and his person merge

and they become indistinguishable, interchangeable; catholic. In

this sense, perhaps what exactly is remembered becomes less

important that the fact that it is remembered; what is known is less

crucial than the fact that something is known: what that something

is, however, remains to be known.

It is at this point that we must examine the relationality

between memory and forgetting. Often-times they are taken as

antonyms: forgetting as the negation of memory, as the absence of

memory. However consider the fact that in order to remember

something, it has to be out of our minds in the first place;

otherwise it would just be knowledge. This suggests that

forgetting is a part of memory: it would be impossible to

remember if there was no forgetting. But would it suffice to leave

it that forgetting and memory are different phases of each other?

If we consider that each act of remembering is a recalling of one

aspectone register in a multiplicity of possibilitieswould it not

also suggest that each act of remembering necessitates the

teachings, and ideals, of Jesus. Moreover, someone had to betray the Son of Man inorder to fulfill scriptures, and complete the movement of God becoming man.


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forgetting, at least momentarily, of the other possibilities. Each

time one possibility is recalled, all the other(s) are temporarily left

out, excluded, forgotten. Hence, within each act of memory

always already lies a forgetting.

In memory of the forgetting that lies within each act of

remembering we should consider Hlne Cixous claim that

citation is the voice of the other and it highlights

the double playing of the narrative authority. We

constantly hear the footsteps of the other, the

footsteps of others in language, others speaking in

Stephens language or in Ulysses, I mean the

books language It reminds us that we have

been caught up in citation ever since we said the

first words mama or papa.14

The very nature of language involves citationality: since we are

born into language, a language that precedes usalong with all of

its significances and by extension its significationsall that we say

always already is from the voice of [an] other. And since one is

only able to understand via language (even an instinct or gut feel

enters the realm of language the moment we attempt to express it,

articulate it, think it; at that moment it enters the realm of

codification through language), this suggests our very conception

14Hlne Cixous. (2005). Stigmata.pp.135.


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of ourselves is always already an interplay between memory and

forgetting. We recall ourselvesor a particular inference of

ourselves, our selfeach time we utter I, but at the very same

moment, all the other self(s) are by necessity forgotten, they

remain footsteps, but perhaps in the distance, hear[d] but not

necessarily seen, or even known.

This is not to say that the footsteps of the other[s] have no

effect on us: just because we do not see, or even hear, them does

not necessitate their lack of influence on us. It is at this point that

all phenomenology fails again: the claim that only what is

comprehended through the senses matters is ultimately an

anthropocentric gesture, as if only what happens in and through

the self is what is important, is what is real. And it is this

anthropocentric gesture that can be found in all social

constructivist theory, which is ultimately an attempt to subsume

everything under the understandinglogic, reasonof the self,

such that everything remains under the control of the self.

This matter is compounded if one considers the fact that one

has no control over what one forgetsforgetting happens to one.

At the very most, one can attempt to express this forgetting with

the utterance, I forgot. The moment there is an object to this

utterance, one is already back in the realm of memoryone has

remembered what one has forgotten. However, since forgetting

happens to one, this implies that there is no guarantee that the


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memory of the forgetting has anything to do with the forgetting

that took place. More than that, the fact that it occurs from

without suggests that it can potentially happen at any point, at any

time. Hence, each act of memory potentially brings with it a

moment of forgetting. By extension, each act of knowing

knowledge itselfcan never be sure of its status of knowing; there

may always already be something forgotten within it.


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Contents

Reading the body 5

Origins - Firsts 20

The First Time or I Want to Make Sure its your Last 22

The Violence of the Question and the Terror of the Answer 29

Why Why Tell me Why 32

Blindness and the Third 37

Witnessing: Fiction and Testimony 54

Symbolic Exchange or this is my gift of death 71

Seductive secrets 88

3.5 Requiem for a name 101

A measure of salvation 117

On Death (Suicide) or whats love got to do with it 121

On Suicide 125

The suicide bomber 137

4.5 The instant of death 140


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4.7 Her gift of death 148

Shattering illusions or How Stalin was finally proven

right 153

Approaching illusions: approaching Death 157

On Relationality 166

Suicide Bombers, Zombies, and Necromancy 171

Confessions; or a suicide note 185

Exteriority and Finitude 195

How stupid can you be? 210

Poetry, irony, and the Suicide Bomber 213

Echoes 229

After-word 247


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In the beginning there were three sexesman,woman and the androgyn. The androgyn was

composed of 4 arms and 4 legsfused at thespine; they faced to the side. Since theywere composed of both man and woman, theandrogyn was twice as fast, twice as strong,and twice as clever.

As such, the androgyn questioned theauthority of the Gods, and due to theirstrength and intelligence, posed a threat toOlympus. In deciding how to deal with thisthreat, Zeus and his council deliberatedobliterating the androgyn, but did not wantto lose the offerings and homages fromhumankind. So they decided that they wouldsplit the androgyn without killing her/ him.

So the androgyn was split down the middleleaving her/ him with 2 arms and 2 legs. Andto forever remind the androgyn of her/ hiscrime, Apollo was sent to turn their facesidewaysfacing the front. This was to

forever remind the androgyn ofthe otherhalf.

This is why we are forever searching for ourother half; our eternal soulmate.

This is a story of rebellion, punishment,sadness and longing.

A story of love.


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Reading the body

Perhaps we should begin by considering the beautiful epigraph in

Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes which goes, it must all be

considered as if spoken by a character in a novel, 1 and in

particular, how it speaks to us, of the unknown, and the

unknowable. For if it is only told as if by a character in a novel,

we are forever left unsure of whether the I is that of the narrator

or of a character: in fact, the narrator and the character are always

already indistinguishable.

There really is no reason why one cannot consider the

possibility that the narrator and the character are exactly the same

entity. This would suggest that the narrative is unfolded at the

very moment of its unfolding. What this opens is the status of

knowledge itself: for the narrator is supposed to possess a certain

over-arching knowledge of what happens not only before but to a

certain degree afterthere is a certain knowledge of the future

that the narrator possesses, that everyone else in the tale is denied

(even the reader, especially the reader). Once the possibility of the

narrator being veiled from the future of the narrative is

considered, an uncertainty is introduced to the entire narrative, not

just from the angle of whether the narrator can be trusted or not (of

course (s)he cannot) but more pertinently whether anything

uttered by the narrator is constative, or can even be considered a

1Roland Barthes. (1994). Roland Barthes. Epigraph.


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constative statement. What this suggests is that everything uttered

by the narrator is a future-anterior statement: perhaps with some

knowledge of the future, and a particular version of the past, but

never in the present except for the very fact that it is uttered in the

present. Which then enters the entire narrative into the realm of

undecideability: the only thing that one can be certain of is the fact

that the narrator is uttering the narrative; nothing else can we be

sure of.

This is the problem that we are faced with when we attempt to

think the relationship between biology and gender: the I that is

the basis of genderthe self of identity, the self that is

constructedis never fully determinable; it is always already the

I of the narrator (the one who is constructing the tale) and also

that of a character in the tale. In fact, one might also begin to posit

that the I is both narrating and being narrated at the same time, in

the same moment, in the very gesture of articulating the I. This

suggests that the I is never either completely singular nor is it

merely part of a network, part of the rest of the tale: borrowing

Jean-Luc Nancys beautiful formulation, the I is a singular-

plurality; always already singular and in relation with an other,

another, all others.

The social-construction logic of gender has always been

concerned with its status as plurality, where the I is seen as the

result of forces, influence, power, surrounding it, acting on it,


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acting with it. In this way, the construction of the self is affected

through the imaginary: to be more precise, the self is formed in the

imaginary. If you prefer the language of psychoanalysis, what is at

stake is the negotiation between the superego and the id.

However, to reduce everything to a cultural construction would be

an anthropocentric gesture: if everything is constructed, the

underlying logic is that the I is self-generated, or at the very least,

the product of a solely human intervention. By extension, the

human is the centre around which everything is generated. More

than that, the implication is that the entire construction of the self

is under our control, that our very being is the result of a cognitive

process; our very being can be subsumed under knowledge, and

more pertinently our knowing. We can see this again in

psychoanalysis in the attempt to subsume the unknowable under

the category of the unconscious; everything that is unaccountable

is then put under this, as if to say leaving this aside everything

else is knowable: the unconscious becomes the exception in order

for normalcythat we can comprehend the selfto sustain itself.

As Jean Baudrillard in Symbolic Exchange and Death elegantly

posits,

the unconscious, and the psychical order in

general, become the insurmountable agency,

giving the right of trespass over every previous

individual and social formation the idea of the

unconscious, like the idea of a consciousness,


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remains an idea of discontinuity and rupture. Put

simply, it substitutes the irreversibility of a lost

object and a subject forever missing itself, for the

positivity of the object and the conscious subject.

However decentred, the subject remains within

the orbit of Western thought, with its successive

topologies 2

In this manner, the imaginary that is the self is the assumption in

order to validate the axiom that the human is the centre of the

world: instead of an unknown, an unknowable, psychoanalysis

attempts to re-inscribe it into a positivistic mode by terming it an

unconscious, merely the direct opposite of what is known, and

hence, still governed by the same logics, the same calculations.

An examination of the very premise of social construction

that the self is generated by experiencesproblematizes this

notion of the full plurality of gender (where man and woman are

exactly the same, interchangeable, and only a product of

influences, and more precisely a product of influences that can be

known, cognitised and ultimately controlled). For if experiences

are the basis of the self, then surely the differences in biology

between women and men would result in different experiences: in

fact the biological differences would be what Hlne Cixous calls

the irreducible difference between the sexes. This is not to say that

2Jean Baudrillard. (2007). Symbolic Exchange and Death. pp.143.


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biology is deterministic, but to deny that it has an influence on

experiencesand going by the very logic of social construction,

gender, and hence, the selfwould be false. The fact that only a

woman can experience pregnancy, and menstruation, suggests

that these are absolute differences that separate her from any man,

all men. This is not to say that all pregnancies and all

menstruations are exactly the same as well: each experience is

perhaps unique, but to deny that they play a part in the formation

of the self is false. Since these experiences are biological, pre-

determined by sex, this suggests that they are beyond social

construction. Perhaps one can argue that the manner in which we

speak of them, know them, attempt to understand them still falls

within language and hence, within our constructions: however I

would like to consider the fact that since they precede language

(one does not have to conceive of menstruation in order to

menstruate) there is a part of the experience that escapes cognition,

that slips all attempts to understand, to know.

Perhaps this is the point where we can posit why biology has

been subsumed under the auspices of gender. By completely

separating biology from gender, it is made the absolute other: this

exclusionary gesture allows the positivistic logic of gender to

sustain itself. In this manner, gender, and by extension the self, is

reduced to a calculable logic: the I is now totally within cognition.

Considering that there is no logic which can sustain itselfno

proof can possibly exist determining the truth or falsity of the


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undecidable statement in the language of the system within which

the statement was formulated3in order for there to be any

totality (in the form of a consistent logic that can prove itself

within its own logical system), some form of exclusionby way of

the suppression of the axiom that does not conform to the internal

logic of the systemmust take place.

However, it is not as if making gender clear, completely

knowable, comes without a price: once the self is completely

calculable, it is also completely exchangeable, completely

transparent. In response to his playfully teasing questionwhat

happens after the orgy?Jean Baudrillard quips, every

individual category is subject to contamination, substitution is

possible between any sphere and any other: there is total confusion

of types.4 Hence,

each category is generalized to the greatest

possible extent, so that it eventually loses all

specificity and is reabsorbed by all the other

categories. When everything is political, nothing

is political anymore, the word itself is

meaningless. When everything is sexual, nothing

is sexual anymore, and sex loses its determinants.

3Avital Ronell. (2005). The Test Drive. pp.57.

4 Jean Baudrillard. (1999). The Transparency of Evil: Essays on Extreme Phenomena.pp.8.


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When everything is aesthetic, nothing is beautiful

or ugly anymore, and art itself disappears. This

paradoxical state of affairs, which is

simultaneously the complete actualization of an

idea, the perfect realization of the whole tendency

of modernity, and the negation of the idea and

that tendency, their annihilation by virtue of their

very success, by virtue of their extension beyond

their own bounds 5

If gender is now totally transparent, we have reached the stage of

the trans-gendered, in the precise sense of everything is now

engendered. However, once everything is gendered, gender itself

loses all specificity and is reabsorbed by all the other categories,

and gender itself loses all meaning. Ironically, by attempting to

locate gender in everything, gender itself is rendered completely

empty.

It is at this point that biology has to be re-inscribed into

gender. For only if the unknowability that is biology is considered

within genderif unknowability is part of knowledge itselfis

the gesture of totalising knowledge, the gesture of totalitarianism

avoided. This is the notion of knowing, understanding, that we

glimpse in Werner Hamachers deceptively simple formulation,

5ibid. pp.9-10.


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understanding is in want of understanding. 6 Only if every

attempt to know something brings with it an inability to

comprehend within the same gesture, acknowledges a lack of

understanding, is the full potentiality of the object of

understanding itself acknowledged. In terms of gender, it has to

be thought of as a codein that one learns ones role to play; it is a

form that is repeated, and normalised, only because there is mass

repetition of that particular role. As Avital Ronell has opened our

sensibilities to in Crack Wars, there is no culture without addiction:

it is only when enough people are hooked to a particular way of

lifea certain rolethat it becomes cultural. This opens the

question of why certain roles are legitimate whilst others are not.7

However, what remains unknown is how these roles come into

being in the first place; the question of origin remains blind to us.

And it is this gap in the hermeneutical circle that allows the

potentiality of the object in questiongender in this caseto

remain un-effaced.

The category of genderlike any categoryis faced with the

problem of the relation between the part and the whole. For

gender to mean anything, it has to have a certain universality, in

its being applicable to everyone in general; but at the same time, it

is also only able to derive any meaning from a particular instance,

6Werner Hamacher. (1996). Premises: Essays in Philosophy and Literature from Kant toCelan. pp.1.

7Avital Ronell. (1992). Crack Wars: Literature, Mania, Addiction.


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in its application to each singular person. Therefore, for a whole to

be a sum of its parts, there has to be an effacement of the

particularity of each situationthe over-arching concept has to be

perfectly repeatableeach situation has to be treated as exactly the

same, corresponding to a pre-determined set of criteria. However

since each instance is a singularity, this suggests that it brings with

it a unique set of circumstances, and hence, there is no

repeatability possible: even if the criteria were the same, there is no

reason that the singular set of circumstances will ever match it in

the same way. Hence, as Werner Hamacher posits,

the hermeneutical circle thus opens up and makes

every closure into a hermeneutic fictiona

heuristically useful fiction, no doubt, a fiction

capable of economizing on a deficit of

understanding, but a fiction that can neither

accommodate itself to the ideal of perfect

understanding nor redress the loss, constitutive of

language and understanding, which the ellipses

themselves introject.8

And these ellipses, which are usually considered an aberration to

writingbringing the possibility of the incompleteness, or

incompleteability of sentences to the foregroundor at best a mere

8 Werner Hamacher. (1999). Hermeneutical Ellipses: Writing the HermeneuticalCircle in Schleimacher in Premises: Essays in Philosophy and Literature from Kant toCelan. pp.76.


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supplementa graphical noveltyare in fact, the rhetorical

equivalent of writing: it depletes, or decompletes, the whole so as

to make conceptual totalities possible. And yet every conceivable

whole achieved on the basis of ellipsis is stamped with the mark of

the original loss.9 Hence, gender as a category is always already

incomplete: all social-construction theory, or in fact any theory that

attempts to make an over-arching claim, always has to rely on the

fiction of a complete hermeneutic circle, held together by the

ellipsis, which is then denied in the very same gesture. Once the

ellipsis is taken into consideration, not only is complete

knowability a fiction, but more than that, whether it can be known

even through fiction is itself ultimately unknowable. In the

context of gender, it is biology that is its ellipsis; it is biology that is

its unknowability.

It is this unknowabilitythis ellipsis that both allows one to

know yet never allows this knowing to be completethat Jacques

Derrida notes in his magisterial text Right of Inspection when he

argues that even though the reader has a right to see, and that it

takes a certain skill to see, in that it is not a random, purely

arbitrary act, (s)he is always already bound by a law of seeing.

After all, you have the authority to tell yourself these stories but

you cannot gain access to the squares of that other one. You are

free but there are rules.10 In this way, reading, and seeing, is a

9ibid. pp.74.

10Jacques Derrida. (1998). Right of Inspection.pp.1.


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negotiation between the reader and the text. One is free within a

certain set of rulesafter all one is always already bound by

grammarand ones reading is an interjection, an interplay

between the reader and the text within the rules laid out, the rules

before which both the reader and the text must stand; there is a

law that assigns the right of inspection, you must observe these

rules that in turn keep you under surveillance. 11 In order to play

the gamethe game of seeing, the game of readingyou have no

choice but to remain within these limits, this frame, the frame-

work of these frames 12 And more than this, a text gives both

you and itself (through its characters, through the outcome of its

own narrative),

a right to look, the simple right to look or to

appropriate with the gaze, but it denies you that

right at the same time: by means of its very

apparatus it retains that authority, keeping for

itself the right of inspection over whatever

discourses you might like to put forth or whatever

yarns you might spin about it, and that in fact

comes to mind before your eyes.13

11ibid. pp.1.

12ibid. pp.1.

13ibid. pp.2.


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It is in this way that every seeing reveals and conceals at the same

time; every seeing always already involves a certain inability to

see, an inability to know. In effect every reading is a positing,

taking a position, making a choice, which comes with a moment of

madness, of blindness. Otherwise all one is doing is re-writing the

text; otherwise one might as well not be reading at all. As Kafka

has taught us time and time again, one can never know the law

before which one stands.

Death is this unknowability that resides in every act of

knowing, every attempt to know: not a death that is merely a

phase of life, an end-point that is always already taken into

consideration in advance, death as a negativity to life, but death as

such, death that is a pure void, that can at best be constituted as a

catachrestic metaphor; death as a pure name, naming nothing

except for the fact that it is naming. This suggests that we cannot

define death, that at best we might begin to approach it but that it

will always already slip away from us. It is not as if we cannot

know death because it is beyond usin fact it is part of us, a part

of us that is always already (n)either within us (n)or without us. In

this sense we are always stricken with death, but a death from

within that remains unknowable to us, one that we can at best

glimpse as a metaphor, as a narrative, as fiction. It is with this in

mind that we approach Marguerite Duras beautiful tale The

Malady of Death. Perhaps in this non-direct way, we might begin to

catch a glimpse of the unknowability that haunts the self, that is


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always already of the self, that doesnt allow the self to totalize.

One must never forget that we can only see ghosts when we are

not looking for them.

In The Malady of Death, there is a conversation between a you

and a her: at first glance, it would seem that it is between a man

and a woman in a room by the sea. Occasionally an Iperhaps a

narrator; perhaps the heinterjects. It is this impossibility of

distinguishing, of separating the he and the I within the text,

that brings the she into question, that opens the question of

referentiality; if one is never able to discern who is uttering the

utterances, the poles of elocutioner and referentthe binary of

subject and objectare imploded. At the end, all you can say

about the status of referentiality in the text, to borrow a phrase

from the very first time the I appears, is I dont know;14not just

an I dont know in terms of a lack of knowledge, but more

precisely an I dont know who the I that is uttering this statement

is in the first place. An echo of this is found later in the line you

think you know you know not what :15 the first register it

opens is whether one can know they dont know something;

another potentially more interesting register is, if one only

thinks one knows one does not know, then whether something

is known or not known is now unclear. In either instance, the

difference between knowing and not knowing is blurred; they are

14Marguerite Duras. (1986). The Malady of Death. pp.3

15ibid. pp.40.


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no longer antonyms but rather parts of each other: in other words,

every time something is known, there is always already something

unknown within it. The unknowability is not only in the content

the object to which the utterance refers tobut more radically in

the relationality of the subject to itself: each time one utters I dont

know, one is attempting to name oneself as well, to utter one-self

into being.

The only difference that is posited between the I, you, and

her is found in the line, your difference, your death. 16 What is

unknowablethe difference between the uttererswhat can only

at best be positedis death itself. This is why the tale is named

The Malady of Death: death is always within one (one is a carrier of

death from the very beginning) and always also from without

(death ultimately claims you). But it is not as if one ever knows

how death affects one: one knows without knowing how 17and

more than that, whoever has it doesnt know hes a carrier, of

death. And also because hes like to die without any life to die to,

and without even knowing thats what hes doing.18

16ibid. pp.32.

17ibid. pp.19.

18ibid. pp.19.

One is tempted to turn to the after-word, to the commentary in The Malady of Death,by someone, someone we too easily presume to be Marguerite Duras herself, togain a certain level of security; to stabilise as a fact the presence of two persons inthe scene. However, as one can never be certain of the status of the commentator,this securityand assurednessis called into doubt, into question. It would be tooquick, too convenient, to ascribe this to a self-reflexive gesture, as a foregrounding


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It is this gap between biology and genderthe gap that allows

them to affect each other, yet at the same time never allows how

they do so to be knownthat prevents a totalitarian theory from

coming into being, that prevents either biology or gender being

absolute. This unknowability, this death, both allows biology and

gender to communicate with each other, but also ensures that

communication is impossible at the same time: in this sense, the

exchange between them is always already a symbolic exchangeone

where there is no equalisation, flattening out of differences,

abstraction, but only reversibility, playor even better still, an

impossible exchange, an exchange between irreducible differences.

How biology and gender affect each other can never be calculated,

predictable, nor known in advance: all we can posit is that they do:

and each exchange happens only in the moment of exchange.

Not only does the irreducibility of their difference(s) prevent

either biology or gender from subsuming each other, it also allows

both biology and gender to be as such: otherwise by consuming

of itself as a work of fiction. This is unless we explore the very limits of self-reflexivity and open the possibility of a questioning of who this selfthrough theIis. Hence, it is not so much the status of the work as fiction that isforegrounded, but the fictionality of the self that is reflected upon.

It is this unknowabilitythis indiscernability of the status of the self, of thepossibility of the multiple selfsthat is the gap that allows us to read, to respondwith the text, but always only provisionally, situationally; each reading is a singularreading, a positing of both the self that is reading, and the self that is read.


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the other completely, theybiology and genderwould consume

themselves, into meaninglessness, into nothingness.

Origins - Firsts

This leads one to ask the question, if one cannot know of origins,

or at least if origins are indeterminate, why is it that claims to

originality, sources, and ultimately the one truth, are constantly

made? One can always make a too quick judgment, a snap

reaction, and say that there is a link between the source and

power, that power lies in the source, the centre. From Johannes

Fabian we learn that even time is no longer a neutral record of

passing moments: instead time has been made a trace of power, in

and through the idea of origins, the idea of the first moment. 19

One of the most obvious instances of the horror that is unleashed

through time comes to us from Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge. In

the insistence that everything is reset to an original timeYear

Zerowhat was unleashed was one of the most brutal instances of

genocide in modern history. Of course it takes more than just a

concept to kill peoplean idea itself did not result in the death ofmillions. However, it was this ideathat one can restart

everything and more than that, that one has the solution to

everythingthat forms the framework, the structure such that

everything that lies outside the boundaries, the premise, is

19Johannes Fabian. (1983). Time and the Other: How Anthropology makes its Object.


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excluded, forbidden, banished. After all, in Khmer Rouge run

Cambodia, one did not even have to be guilty of anything: as long

as one was labelled an enemy, one was automatically excluded,

imprisoned and very often tortured and executed. Clearly how

one was labelled was crucial; all of this stems from the logic that

there is one correct way, a single wayonly one wayof being.

Everything stemmed from the centre (Year Zero) and the only

one(s) that had the solutionthe answerswere Pol Pot and his

central committee.

However, too quick a step in attempting to give a reason is no

different from making a claim to an answer, a claim of access to a

certain logos. Perhaps one way to attempt to address a question as

large as this one, a question that remains crucial to our task here, is

to embark on another detour, an aside into origins: in this manner

we might be able to catch a glimpse of some possibilities, without

making any over-arching claims to knowing, to knowledge itself.

And perhaps we might begin at the beginning, begin by thinking

what is a beginning, begin by positing why first-times remain such

an obsession.


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The First Time or I Want to Make Sure its your Last

An obsession with beginnings.

And the fantasy of the original, along with the aura that comes

with it; the aura that surrounds the first. And the power that

comes with it, the power of credibility, of authority, of being the

source. This is why correction fluid has become indispensable in

our stationary drawersa desperate attempt to over-write a word,

a line, a smudge, as if by putting a layer over it, we can cover it up,

erase it completely; as if banishing it from sight will equate to

banishing its memory, banishing it from memory.

This is a denial that all experiences are literally written on our

bodies. Which is also why tattoos have been traditionally frowned

upon unless administered by the socius (in the form of tribal

marks): in this case one has to have a particular set of tattoos

which indicate that one is part of the tribe. So it is not as if the

person is free to choose: the wrong set of marks would forever

brand the person as an outsider, an outcast. This is the case when

prisoners are marked by the statethey are literally branded for

life. Tattoos are a literal, this is what I have gone through

symbolic of a particular passage, or trial, that the person has

experienced. In the case of personal tattoosthat is when the

person has made a free choice to mark themselves with a

particular phrase, design or imagethey are an indication that

this symbol means something to me and even more blatantly,


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this is what I have gone through whilst you were not in my life.

It is the absolute singularity of the tattoo that truly terrifies: it is a

marking, a recording, a remembering of an experience, a thought,

an event that is only known (and perhaps experienced) by the

person wearing the tattoo; it is accessible to no one else. All any

other can know is the representation of the event, the image on the

person; and all this image reveals is that there is a secret that is

known by the person, one that you will never be privy to.

The obsession with origins is a hangover of both Platonic

thought and the Enlightenment, specifically the belief in

transcendental Truth and origins. It is this association withor

even the correlation ofthe power that comes with being the

origin, the first, the author, that lends itself to the societal

obsession with virginity, with virgins. And it is for this reason that

everyone wants to be a virginal experience, the virginal

experienceas if in order to be special one has to be the first. In

effect, what is being said is the obscene I want to be the first to

write myself on your body, which really translates to if Im not

the first to do anything with you, it is not meaningful at all.

But as always, the thing we fear most potentially gives us

hope. Just like tattoos, experiences are always cumulative. More

crucially, they are not added like Lego building blocks (one more

piece to an already present structure) but are always already a

reconstruction. In some way, this is how memory works: we are


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not actually looking back to a past whenever we remember

somethingwhat occurs is a reconstruction of an event (that has

happened previously) but in this re-writing, we bring it into the

present precisely by re-membering it, by resurrecting it. Hence, an

additional tattoo is not merely one more in a collection of other

tattoos, but a reconstitution of the entire surface of your body;

your body is literally (re)written. And likewise, another

experience is the re-writing of your life-story.20

The fact that every experience is a reconstitution of the entire

realm of experiences, a restructuring of ones entire memory, does

not make first-experiences any less important. But neither does it

elevate virginity into the realm of the sacred: there is of course an

echo of religiosity at play here; the obsession with virginity and its

link with the Virgin Mary cannot be denied. In fact, this obsession

probably has an obscene link with the primordial yes that was

uttered to Gabriel: perhaps there is always a harbouring of a secret

obsession that all virgins will utter yes. The operating logic in this

instance is that without experience, one does not have a mind of

ones own: we see this operating in the Law as well (persons below

20This is akin to Greg Lynns re-thinking of architecture where he contends that theentire building (and indeed by extension, the entire city) is organic. Hence, analteration in one part of the building is not an isolated change, but one which notonly affects the rest of the building, but reconstitutes the entire building. Lynnsthoughts were shared at the European Graduate School, August 2004, when he wasa guest lecturer in Hubertus von Amelunxens seminarArchitecture and Information.


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some arbitrary age are deemed minors who are not responsible

and hence, cannot be held accountablefor their own actions).21

The obsession with beginnings: a manifestation of the wish for

a yes to every request, which translates brutally to a desire of

dominance over another. This is the spectre of the logos that

continues to haunt us.

In many ways, the poster-boy of the Enlightenment is the

Marquis de Sade. This is because de Sade is the one who takes

Immanuel Kant to the extremes: by applying the imperative to

every situation, de Sade demonstrates the fact that a reliance on a

single truthone that is decided a prioriis the effacement of the

singularity of every situation. In such a case, there is no other that

is responded to, as no matter what the situation is, the method is

always the same: whilst this doesnt necessarily mean that the

resulting response is exactly the same, it does subsume the

situation under the same conception, the same category. In this

manner, the will of the other is not taken into account; in effect the

will of the otherand the other her/ him selfis effaced. This is

why in a sadistic relationality, it is unimportant whether the sadist

is beating the victim or vice-versa: what is crucial is that it is the

sadist that is telling the victim precisely what to do. For instance,

21This might well be reflective of the way in which the Law operates: one is onlydeemed responsible and/ or accountable because the Law deems one to be so. Thisis probably best captured in the phrase subject before the Law; not so much in thenotion that one is a subject that is under the jurisdiction of the Law, but moreprecisely one is subjected to the will of the Law.


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in de Sades Philosophy of the Boudoir, it is not the fact that Eugenie

is liberated, but the fact that Dolmance, Madame De Saint-Ange

and Le Chevalier de Mirvel, choose to train her into a libertine, and

more precisely to mold her, transform her, into the libertine of

their desires. It would have made absolutely no difference if they

had decided to make her into a nun.22 In fact, there is no

negotiation between the sadist and her/ his victim: it is merely the

manifestation of the will of the sadist over the other. And since the

other is effaced, there might as well not be any other: it is the sadist

projecting her/ him self onto her/ his victim.

Sadism and the effacement of the will of the Other. Literally a

logic of I not only want to write myself into your existence, but I

want to write my existence into you: I want to make you into my

existence, I want to make you into me.

The obsession with virginity or the wish to wipe out everyone

else.

22Marquis de Sade. (2000). Philosophy of the Boudoir.

There is an echo of the saying made in Gods image here: one has no choicenoreven the remotest of influenceover how one is designed. To compound matters,after-which, ones actions are supposed to conform with this very image, an imagethat was supposedly created by a God that is beyond both our comprehension orreach. Hence, this is an image that we are supposed to refer to, but at the sametime, is an image that has absolutely no referentiality.


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(Indeed, the only truly serious questions are ones that even a childcan formulate. Only the most nave of questions are truly serious.They are the questions with no answers. A question with noanswer is a barrier that cannot be breached. In other words, it isquestions with no answers that set the limits of human

possibilities, describe the boundaries of human existence.)

Milan Kundera: The Unbearable Lightness of Being


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The Violence of the Question

and the Terror of the Answer

When Mas Selamat escaped from the Whitley Detention Centre in

Singapore, on 28 February 2008, there should have been

pandemonium: allegedly one of the most dangerous men in South-

East Asia was now roaming with evil intent. However, what we

encountered was ambivalence and even mirth; there were

numerous jokes surrounding the escape ranging from his name

(Mas Selamat Kan-diri)1 to how Prison Break2 should just be

renamed Toilet Break. What these jokes revealregardless of their

actual contentis a desperate attempt to find a reason for his

escape. These jokes function in the same way as conspiracy

theories, bringing us a perverse comfort in knowing that there is

someone in charge ofsome reason behindall things that

happen.

1 This translates to Mas saves himself in the Malay language. There werenumerous linguistic jokes that were popular in Singapore, Malaysia and Indonesiain the wake of Mas Selamats escape: amongst them was one that went, How doyou know that Mas Selamat is in Johor (the Malaysian state nearest toSingapore)?Because at the causeway, there is a sign that says, Selamat Datangke Johor. (Welcome to Johor but could also be read as Selamat came to Johor).

The irony of this joke was not lost on everyone on the morning of 8 May 2009, whenit was announced that Mas Selamat had indeed been apprehended in Johor; at thatpoint the nature of secrets was momentarily revealed: it is not what one knows thatis important, but that one must know that one knows.

2 Prison Break is popular television seriescreated by Paul Scheuringand thepremise is how two brothers organise a team in order to escape from prison. The

joke lies in the fact that Mas Selamat escaped through a toilet window after askingthe guards if he could go to the restroom to relieve himself. The extension of the

joke is that the series would have been very short, implying that this prison breakwas very simple compared to anything seen in the television series.


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This is the same reaction that weve always had to terrorism: a

refusal to acknowledge its status as an event; in exception to

everything else, and ultimately unknowable. Instead, we have

always attempted to tame it, discipline it, under a cause and

effect analysis. It is for this precise reason that you will always

find an organisational chart whenever any terrorist group is

mentioned: it matters not whether the claim is that Mas Selamat is

the 3rd, 4th, or 72nd most important person in Jemaah Islamiah;

respective of the content, it is an attempt to assure oneself that

there is a structure in place, simply because, if there is a structure,

it can be toppled. This is the same reason why each time there is a

suicide bombing, the question asked is why did (s)he kill himself

when (s)he had so much to live for? which is then usually

explained via recourse to (s)he was brainwashed or the promise

of 72 virgins: in either case, the suicide bomber is brought back

under reason.

This is why hoaxes are punished severely. It is not so much

that they are a waste of state resources, but more pertinently, they

reveal that we are unable to tell the difference between a hoax and

the real thing. This inability is best captured in the fact one cannot

make a joke about terrorism, or even mention the word bomb, at

airports. Since the hoax, and the actual event, has the same form,

the effects are the same: after the bomb hoax in Holland Village in

November 2002, there was a dramatic decrease in the number of


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patrons.3 In fact we would rather there was an actual bomb: in

that way it could be diffused or explodein either case, the event

would end. A bomb hoax is infinite: the effects go on endlessly; all

we are waiting for is the bomb to go off. Or more radically still:

the bomb has already gone off; all we are waiting for are the effects

to catch up with us. The punishment is not so much for the

utilisation of resources (they would have been used anyway in the

instance of a real bomb) but the fact that the reality principle itself

has been ruptured.

In this sense, the greatest fear that haunts us is if the escape

was a pure accident, without any explanation. When Deputy

Prime Minister, and Home Affairs Minister, Wong Kan Seng said,

this should never have happened,4 he touched on this precise

fear: it is not as if we didnt know that Mas Selamat would try to

escape (or even that he could) but rather we should never not

know why or how it happened. Much of the criticism of Wong

was not the fact that the incident occurred, but rather that he was

unable to provide a reason for its occurrence. Even though Mas

3 On 25 November 2002, many Singaporeans heard the warnings via SMS (shortmessaging service) to stay away from Holland Village which is a area known for a

high concentration of expatriates. It was later discovered to be a hoax, but formonths after businesses in that area were affected by a significant decrease inpatrons. Even to this day, any mention of Holland Village brings with it anassociation of bomb threats: the fact that the customer base is increasingly localdoes not diminish this link, even though the logic originally posited for HollandVillage being a prime target was the number of expatriates in the area.

4 This was part of a statement read out in Parliament by Wong Kan Seng on 28February 2008 entitled Statement from Deputy Prime Minister and Home Affairs

Minister Wong Kan Seng on escaped JI leader Mas Selamat Kastariwhich can be foundat http://www.straitstimes.com/STI/STIMEDIA/sp/pdf/DPM_statement.pdf


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Selamat has been recaptured by the Malaysian police, and he has

laid out the route that he took to escape, the reason for it remains

unknown; hence, it remains a mystery to all.

The escapethe eventremains unknowable and ultimately

unsolvable.

Why Why Tell me Why

When one searches for a beginning, a source, a centre, one is

almost always looking for a cause. And more precisely for a

reason: even where one may not exist (it may have been purely

chance) or when the reason is unknown (in the form of lack of

knowledge) or more pertinently the fact that every reason is but a

possibility, a reason among many other reasons. And it is this

unwillingness to accept the non-reason within reasonthat any

reason is but a chosen reasonthat is witnessed everywhere these

days. For if one admits non-reason into reason itself, one is always

already conceding that one can never know for sure, and it is this

uncertainty that seems to scare us.

What we are searching for is a particular death, a death to

possibilities, a death to multitudes, for that is what answers are:

the moment one can fix a positionwe find this in the daily saying

take a stand and stick to ittake an unchanging answer, one


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converts doxainto logos. Or more precisely, one speaks of doxaas if

it was logos. This is the point at which an opinion becomes an

over-arching logic, a theory.

It is Friedrich Nietzsche who resurrects to remind us that it is a

yearning for metaphysical comfort, for certainty, which brings

about this theorisingas opposed to true thinking which is always

uncomfortable, discomforting, unsettlingin order to give the

theorist the false assurance that he knows, that he understands,

that he grasps the world in his hands: the ego of the theoretical

man is satisfied when he can fully explain the world he lives in. 5

In other words, his vanity is satiated when he can subsume the

world under his own conception: not only to be someone in the

world, living and learning in it, but rather to become the centre of

the world, where the world is nothing other than his world. In this

manner there is no longer a joy of living, of living as discovery,

with openness to the potentiality of change, of flux, and of chance.

In The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche posits Apollonian (and later

Socratic) optimism as the totalitarian gestures that attempt to fully

comprehendthrough the centering of all existence in the

individuallife itself, and by doing so, drains life of all its vitality.

It is only the Dionysian gesture of pessimism that refuses complete

knowledgeand in fact realises that the individual is a illusionary

concept that merely brings metaphysical comfort to the

massesthat truly understands life. In effect, the search for

5Friedrich Nietzsche. (1967). The Birth of Tragedy. esp, sections 15-18 pp.93-109.


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certainty is also a gesture against life itself, against the energies of

life, against the movement that is life.

This attempted freezing of movement, this suffocation of

possibilities, is precisely what Jean-Franois Lyotard and Jean-

Loup Thbaud call terrorismwhen relationality is one-sided, and

the third is taken hostage in their conversation in Just Gaming.

In other words, we are in a situation of terror when it is a situation

of non-negotiationality; when any possibility of negotiation is

effaced from the very beginning. In Lyotard and Thbauds

conception, a situation is terroristic when

the blow is not struck on the adversary but it is

hoped that the blow will be borne by the third

party, the witness, public opinion. In such a case,

everyone is caught without freedom,

Whereas in a two-sided battle, my opponent

thinks that what I think and do is unjust, and I

think that what he does and thinks is unjust. Well

his freedom is complete and so is mine. With a

hostage, I am applying not even pressure. It

is much more than that. It is the social bond taken

as a fact of nature.6

6Jean-Franois Lyotard & Jean-Loup Thbaud. (1999).Just Gaming. pp.70-71.


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We see this very clearly in the case of 9/11: the fact that there is no

need to even explain what the signifier signifieswhat it refers

tosuggests that we are only allowed to have one signified

attached to it; it is public opinion and the space of negotiation

that has been captured. And it is this that is terroristic about the

eventon September 11, 2001, there were many violent deaths,

and there are still many more deaths occurring as an effect of it;

what was terroristic though was the fact that we are no longer

allowed to say anything other than the official rhetoric about the

event. The standard media theory argument is that only if you

were actually in New York City (and more specifically near the

World Trade Centre) on the morning of September 11, 2001, would

you be able to tell what actually happened. This would imply that

any other means of knowing would be based solely on the

representation of the event: this is most clearly seen by the

validation of news coverage with other news coverage (see it first

on CNN, verify with FOX, and perhaps Al-Jazeera after that). Of

course the problem with verifying news through news is obvious:

all you are doing is allowing news to verify itself, strengthening

the underlying premise that there is a link between news and the

event. However if we consider the notion that one has to be

present in order to know what actually happened, this suggests

that the phenomenological experience is raised onto a pedestal: we

find this in the everyday saying seeing is believing. The most

obvious effect of this figure of speech is that sight is elevated above

all other senses, as if the eyes have a monopoly over the truth, or at


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least have a greater share of the truth, over hearing, touching,

tasting, smelling. However, even if we accept the premise that the

phenomenological experience encompasses all the senses, this does

not shift the link between realitythe truth of the eventand its

comprehension by the subject. In effect, taken to the extreme what

it is saying is that if a tree falls in the forest and I do not witness it,

it might as well not have happened.

Not only is the register of anthropocentrism which we had a

glimpse of earlier re-opened, we have also encountered the issue of

witnessing, of what it means to be a witness, of the possibility of

witnessing, here. And more pertinently of whether one has to be

able to comprehend the issue at hand in order to be a witness to it;

does one have to know in order to witness. This suggests that

there are two factors at play here: one is the ability to comprehend,

to see, to understand; the other is having an active role, one that

involves making a decision. And these are the two factors that are

fundamental to responsibility; an ability to respond to a particular

situation, a singular event. In order to meditate on witnessing,

responsibility, and what it means to respond, we will have to make

a detour into blindness, and into the making of decisions.


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Blindness and the Third

In order to be responsible, one must be able to respond to the

needs of the other without subsuming the other under ones

conception: in other words, the other must not merely become a

reflection of ones self. That would merely be the construction of

the other in order to react to her/ him; a literal circle, a

masturbatory circle where the other is reduced to merely its other,

where the other is brought under the domain of the self, where the

other is made the self. Hence, in order to even begin to approach

the possibility of responsibility, one must maintain the other-ness

of the other whilst responding. This suggests that the other always

remains fully other to the self; one responds to the needs of the

other whilst not fully understanding, and perhaps never fully

understanding, what these very needs are. At the moment of

response, and this brings us back once again torevives the

memory ofWerner Hamachers formulation, understanding is

in want of understanding:7 the self does not merely act towards

the other; it is responding, communicating, negotiating with the

other.

This is a conception of responsibility not as a prescribed acta

one-way projection of the self onto the otherbut as a full

7 Werner Hamacher. (1999). Premises in Premises: Essays on Philosophy andLiterature from Kant to Celan.pp.1.


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response; two-way and in full communion between the self and

the other.

The problem with a responsibility that is known a priori (in

the form of an ethics that is pre-determined) is that there is no

consideration of the singularity of the situation. This is the

problem that Jacques Lacan points out in Kant avec Sadewith a

categorical imperative in place there is no other that is responded

to, as no matter what the situation is, the method is always the

same. Whilst this doesnt necessarily mean that the resulting

response is exactly the same, it does subsume the situation under

the same framework, the same borders, boundaries. Even if one

considers Kant as teleological rather than ontologicalas Lyotard

and Thbaud do in Just Gamingit still holds that the end point

becomes the lens to which one then contextualises the entire

situation. As Lyotard says to Thbaud, when Kant introduces as

a regulator for the determination of actions by means of reflection,

the Idea of a supra-sensible nature, that is, of a society of free and

responsible beings, he is indeed introducing the Idea of a

totality.8 Whilst it remains true that the end result is

undetermined, the end is always already known: this does not

allow the situation to be responded with as such. And in

Lyotards words, as soon as one makes a determinant use of the

Idea, then it is necessarily the Terror:9the will of the other is not

8Jean-Franois Lyotard & Jean-Loup Thbaud. (1985).Just Gaming. pp.86.

9ibid. pp.92.


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e self and the other are in at any

momen

to the point of becoming

hostage for the Other, what occurs is

[the self] makes [it] into the neutral medium, the

taken into account; in effect the will of the otherand the other

her/ him selfis effaced. However it is not as if we can do

without an Ideaotherwise there is nothing to begin from, begin

with, and that would be an absolute non-response. So in this

sense, one must effectively have an Idea; but, in contradistinction

to what Kant thought, this Idea is not, for us today an Idea of

totality.10This suggests that an Idea which attempts to be a true

response to the needs of the other has to take into account the

unique situation that both th

t.11

The Levinasian approach to ethics addresses the issue of the

other, but ultimately is lacking in response as wellnot in the

sense of effacing the other, but ironically in its attempt to fully

understand the others needs. By claiming to privilege the visage

of the Other and emptying the self up

an inverted arrogance: as if I am the centre whose

existence threatens all others confer[ing] on [it]

a central position: this very prohibition to assert

10ibid. pp.88.

11 For the more comprehensive discussion on Kant as teleological, please see JustGaming. especially pp.84-93.


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place from which the truth about the [other] is

accessible.12

In this situation, the self absorbs the other under its own

categories: there is a total consumption of the other. More

precisely, the self simulates the otherthe response is not to the

other but rather to the simulacra of the other. Hence, the self is

actually responding to its own projected needsthe other exists

but as an imaginary other. We see this most commonly in displays

of organised charity: the organisations are rarely responding to the

exact situation of the person(s) they are trying to help, but instead

imposing upon them what they believe is good for them. This is

the problem found in the interventions by the World Bank and the

International Monetary Fund: by ignoring the particularities of the

economic problem at hand, and imposing their own solutions (that

often have nothing to do with the actual situation), many an

economic crisis has been acerbated. In both cases, there is no

response to the situation as the intervening bodies have subsumed

the actual situation under their own conception: in seeking to fully

comprehend, understand, the situation, what has occurred is

instead a trampling over the situation, an effacement of the very

situation they attempted to help in the first place. Anytime the

claim is made that the other is centred, to the extent that in

12 Slavoj iek. (2004). Smashing the Neighbors Face pp.8-9 found atwww.lacan.com/zizsmash.htm [additions in parenthesis are mine].


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Levinasian terms, subjectivity is being hostage13taking the

place of and being a sacrifice for the othereven if the intention is

to fully understand the other in order to respond to her/ his needs,

what occurs is the disappearance of the other via simulation:

another other is created: there is no longer an other. In order for a

true response, a full understanding of the other must never be

assumed, or even attempted: in this sense, the visage of the other

must always already be (at least partially) hidden.

This hidden visage of the other is not merely what Slavoj

iek claims when he says, the true ethical step is one beyond the

face of the other, the one of suspending the hold of the face: the

choice against the face, for the third.14 ieks claim is that in

privileging the third over the visage, one is able to have an ethics

that is just (in the legal sense) for then one can abstract [the face of

the Other] and refocus onto the faceless Thirds in the

background.15 Whilst the iekian gesture allows one to perform

a justice (that in his conception has to be blind to specifics, as in

every instance one can always justify whatever their actions are;

for instance personal short-comings; the failing nature of man; etc),

this is an ethics which privileges the material situationthe

faceless Thirdswhilst effacing the other completely. In the selfs

act of indifference, what one does is indeed suspend ones

13Emmanuel Levinas. (1981). Otherwise Than Being.pp.127

Jeremy Fernando - The Suicide Bomber and Her Gift of Death

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