The Sustenance of Damage: The Deeds of Disaster and the Passage of Suffering
“Lucky the age to which an earthquake could do so much damage.”(i) Such an elegy could only befit modernity, an age that permitted us to be able to write elegies for an entire age at a time. How does one muster such an elegy? What does a damaged age look like? How does an age, for that matter, suffer, and what? Is damage a condition, or an act, or an event? When damage is made into an event or only understood as such, as is the norm, the emphasis is on damage done, and on its enumeration, categorisation and quantification. And this comes with an arrogant amnesia about the fact that damage done owes something to damage sustained and those who sustain it.
This essay wonders whether and how we have suffered the tsunami of 26 December 2004, what makes it a disaster, and what its damages are. How a disaster is ascertained, named, defined and assessed, involves historically sanctioned processes of representation and translation. The material for the damage, and for these processes, is provided by the actual suffering of “the damaged,” who get seen, heard, touched, smelt, tasted, in these processes.or not. The question of suffering-how to experience it, accost it, and respond to it-has repeatedly proven that the concepts and categories of dominant philosophical, religious, political, economic, hence ethical, discourses are not passive mediators between our intellect and the world, but actively construct the way we sense it in the first place. With their constitutive concepts and relations, various ideologies-liberal capitalism to name one-construct our experience of our own and others’ suffering, often mapping it in dimensions of time and space in ways reminiscent of a pre-set questionnaire that not only limits the content of what is asked, but also what the respondent can say.
While ways of reading disaster, damage, and how it is suffered, render visible much suffering, they also determine in what form suffering enters the calculi of law and politics. This process of naming and determining also paralyses and silences the suffering that survives in the interstices of that which is seen and heard and spoken for. Suffering often inspires a garrulity that shields the respondents from actually suffering it, matched only by an empty gaze that wants to conjure the suffering away, and still further by charitable superimposition of more “tolerable” sentiments that co-opt the suffering. This atrophies what can be damaged, as a result of which there are fewer “problems” to be solved. Moreover, it simplifies the meaning of damage to allow human emotions to be infinitely exchangeable and compensable, thus delimiting the damages that can be claimed-from god, or the state, or your local insurance agent. Ironically, the very position of the claimant is cheaply available-to the extent that the ability to claim damage becomes the condition of the possibility of damage itself. I believe that asking the question of how we sense and attend, and how our senses, access, and attention are themselves sculpted, may disarm us by forcing us to acknowledge our complicity in making, defining, and producing suffering, damage, and disasters in the way we do.
Mine is a plea not to simply see or hear more, but to allow what is seen to speak for more than is seen, to reveal our inadequacies of sensing and attending to the world-the only ethical moments allowed us-so that bearing witness to a sublime calamity such as the tsunami shows us that we don’t see, that we don’t hear. The 200,000 dead could serve as the occasion for considering the incommensurability of the suffering never named, counted or accounted for, not to mention those counts that don’t end up counting in any political boardroom-and to see in that both the injustice of, and potential liberation from, discourses that frame our relation to our own and others’ suffering. Sublime suffering was never meant to be a refuge, of any sort-and ought not to be suffered by bringing into question the meaning or validity of the universe (sorry, Lisbon!), but by carrying the weight of the material, tragic, ordinariness of suffering that is almost never glorious or eventful or name-worthy by contemporary standards. It is a plea to suffer differently.maybe even just to suffer.
The Becoming of Crisis
The elegy I opened with, though, was not written for this disaster, but for the Lisbon earthquake of 1755, the first “modern” “natural” “disaster.” I want to suggest that our linguistic, intellectual and emotional cartographies of the recent tsunami, and the ledgers of damage it does or doesn’t generate, may have more than a nominal relation to the damage Susan Neiman is invoking in her elegy. Hers is a wistfulness for an era’s ability to be damaged, measured in blows to an age’s intellectual confidence in itself. The Enlightenment’s approach to suffering may offer us important clues to our language of disaster and damage. I take up Neiman’s claim that the modern was book-ended by the crises of Lisbon and Auschwitz-with crisis being “the collapse of the most basic trust in the world, of the grounds that make civilisation possible”(ii)-and turn to registers of natural and man-made suffering, disaster and evil respectively that are framed in the aftermath of Lisbon. The secularism of suffering promulgated in the post-Lisbon approach to damage remained partial to suffering with origin, cause and meaning-the way this split apart questions that were intrinsically related marks our sensibilities to this day.
Neiman provocatively retells the history of modern philosophy as a series of iterations of the question of evil. For her, Lisbon is the watershed for the modern formulation of this question, the crisis yielding distinctions between man-made evil and natural disaster. She bravely attempts to rejoin these questions at the moment of their divergence, almost as refreshingly as young enchanted scientists find the image behind the mirror even when there is a wall! She sees these bookends as exemplifying different versions of the same issue-that of evil in different forms, of successive tweakings. The fact that she can invoke Lisbon and Auschwitz in the same sentence is testament to her bravery-but she rests at finding the spirit of the Enlightenment as locked within these crises. I see myself as asking a question she claims to stop short of. I want to confront these iterations of evil as threaded in a narrative, by not only posing the question of whether and how one gets from Lisbon to Auschwitz, but also submitting to the overdetermined nature of the narrative wherein Lisbon (as a philosophical moment) could only commence a journey to Auschwitz (and its processings). First, she enacts Enlightenment’s internal limits by not being suspicious of “evil” as an abstraction and possible cooptative translation of the problem of suffering, as I do. Second, she flaunts a completely un-ironic relation to expression, of the philosophical stripe, insofar as her understanding of damage and hope remains romantically connected to the professions of faith of an era’s philosophers.
I don’t have the luxury of celebrating the Enlightenment as heroically or tenuously wedged between crises.(iii) I see it instead as the becoming of a crisis, and as a process of the encrusting of a relation to crisis, damage, and suffering. In this century, the events of September 11 and the tsunami disaster (that has by now missed the boat on being christened and lodged in human memory with the same grace as Lisbon, Auschwitz or 9/11) share an interesting parallel to the narrative that threads together Lisbon and Auschwitz.
Cartographies of Suffering, Sensibilities of Damage
Of Intimacies, Nautical and More
It wasn’t until a week after the tsunami came, and after numerous condolences from the West had made their way to my mailbox since I was “closer” to the tragedy, that the airwaves and streets of Karachi mustered a gesture of a response to this proximity. The new year celebrations of the city’s rich redeemed themselves by promising sizeable philanthropic donations in the tradition of their colonial masters, private TV networks instituted donation hotlines with my banker friends putting their mobile phones in service of the cause, and the less affluent commercial areas sprouted camps to collect relief goods, organised by the most murderous political party in the history of the city. It was business as usual, really. I was struck at once by the time it took the city to process and channel its silence, as well as with the relation between power, word and action. As usual, really. Only two people said anything to me. One made a rather self-congratulatory statement about how only a mosque survived the tsunami (I still don’t know how to read that since the point about Muslim specialness took many Muslim lives to be made, but isn’t that also usual); the other was irritated at the media’s exaggerated attention, asking why this was a big deal when this had happened to the people of Bangladesh every year in our memory. I then wondered if Karachi had lost its senses, thanks to its battering at the hands of those that now pitched relief camps. Or perhaps it had so thoroughly internalised and normalised tragedy and its extremely ordinary, regular, nature that only those who knew none of it would dress in their pathos to attend new year balls and talk philanthropy, while the rest went to no parties and spoke no tsunami. Or both. But, what about the closeness?
Oh, but Karachi is no Paris! And Aceh no Lisbon. Why ought I to measure damage, like Neiman wants to, with the humanitarian pathos of the elite, whether intellectual (in her case) and social or political (in ours)? There must be a difference between those for whom the sublime nature of suffering is a luxury, at least a protection, and those for whom it is a necessity and inescapable, and in being so perhaps even laughs at the sublime, forces it to get over itself. This is no apology on behalf of Karachi. But, could Karachi’s sense-lessness exemplify a reaction to, or consequence of, having our suffering diagnosed, interpreted, evaluated, sanctioned, and prescribed, for us?
Maybe our own senses of damage have been damaged beyond damage-so that suffering only becomes something when someone in power names it so. Is it the second coming of slave morality: where one can only choose between following the pied piper into fifteen minutes of glorious victimhood, or resist this “accommodation” by regularising the pain so that the former is no longer tempting? It could be that this is the only way the remainder, the excess of the discourse, protects itself. Or, to be hopeful for a moment, this could force another sensibility of suffering, obligation and sympathy altogether, beyond the depleted senses of the colonisers, with the joke being on the latter. Maybe it opens the possibility of seeing the affluent enact their farce of petting their consciences so that any mention of the suffering immediately triggers a pavlovian response to recite how much private humanitarian aid has flowed into South East Asia. Is there a different way those that are “closer” ought to suffer? What contempt must or does this familiarity breed-and towards whom?
The Affairs of Naming
Often, closeness tempts naming-think of all the times we name those we love, out of love, and perhaps also out of a need to pre-emptively determine them: our shot at their becoming. Unlike the 18th century earthquake (Lisbon), the Nazi extermination of Jews (Auschwitz), and the planes crashing into the World Trade Centre (9-11), the tsunami has no name-not because of its unintelligibility, but precisely to distance, deny, disavow, deplete all that it does name, make sensible, make intelligible.(iv) It is far away as it is, further away than Lisbon was from the civilisation that mattered, so perhaps no one even bothered over a name-there was no feigning an attempt to closeness either. Since materiality does exceed the name anyway despite being sculpted by it, the lack of a name is an opportunity for us to confront the materiality without limits imposed on us. Surely, September 11 provided a similar opportunity-but, alas!
In its namelessness, the tsunami signifies an unwillingness as well as an inability to own and capture on part of global powers. Even now, the occurrence of this event only ushers in conversation about the pragmatics of preventing and controlling it, since its definition as a “natural” disaster keeps it safe from lending it to the sort of structural, geopolitical, analysis that, say, a war, may invite. But I am not convinced that we need to follow the precepts of discussion that the philosophes set for us, affirmed only by philosophers, such as Kant, who told us which suffering was political and which was not. It is a mistake to see those separations-between natural and man-made suffering, between disaster and evil-as prior to and outside of modernity’s framing of problems. Instead, these separations are integral to the approach to suffering that spawns many of the insolubilities of how injury, damage, injustice and victimhood are constructed today, what struggles they inspire, what responses they merit, and in which registers they are accounted for (or not). Insofar as we are also equally capable of naming people out of love (sic), by having the name co-opt rather than share in their becoming, the namelessness of the tsunami is an opportunity for those close to it, and able to be close to it, to occasion a more truthful, humble, and embracing relation to its damages and to all that it opens to the senses beyond its photographs and body-count. Maybe it is time for a new kind of love, and a new kind of suffering. Maybe I will call it the blue crush. Maybe I won’t.
The story of the Enlightenment that begins with a garrulous crisis called Lisbon (garrulous for all the ways it spoke and burst into psyches and print) and ends with the silent crisis called Auschwitz (silent for the conspicuously proclaimed death of poetry or very limited ranges of contestation over its meaning or the sheer inability to process it without talking about something else), may push one to ask whether finding evidence for speech and silence in elite discourse is even methodologically, let alone ethically, sound. Even if we bracket that cynicism, one can still ask the question of what kind of voicing and hearing would befit such moments. Is silence the consequence of questions that no longer seem to fit? When we say that the befitting response to suffering is silence, is that an essential claim about suffering, or a historical one? Perhaps we are so overpowered by the words and queries preceding the moment of speech that we just don’t know where to begin. I find the loquacity of contemporary liberal humanitarianism silencing in precisely the way therapeutic discourse economises and hypostatises pain; or the manner in which walls of words are erected repeatedly as protections from actually confronting the messiness of suffering by alienating, defining, and controlling it in how (much) it reaches us; or still in fear of the silence that only threatens the self-confidence of subjects who have the privilege of only fearing known unknowns.
Liberal capitalism’s philanthropic garrulity is nervous and afraid, and betrays a dwindled capacity for a compassion that isn’t predicated on its knowledge, and hence on its power. But it isn’t completely its fault. How can it be otherwise if it has never known abject powerlessness, abject uncertainty, and abject fear? It is exemplary of our inadequacies that we don’t see the complicity of elite philosophical, political and legal discourse in rendering suffering-whether “natural” or “moral”-mute by insisting on a certain kind of speech and translation. Neiman’s wistfulness for the proliferation of expression in philosophy, narrative and bad poetry is response to Lisbon is certainly well-meaning-but commits the grave mistake of taking it at its word, much like the widely occurring sensibility that is easily consoled by fundraisers, candlelight vigils and moments of silence that take themselves way too seriously, and by other symbolisms that need to once in a while be pecked with a tuning fork. Who remembers Nietzsche’s philosophising with a hammer? The way in which the question has forever been posed deserves only a very deeply felt refusal to speak. I read Lisbon and Auschwitz not as passive bookends to modernity; the blank that Auschwitz drew was the perfect culmination of the noise of Lisbon. What was left to say?
And Rousseau cried lovingly, “Oh shut up, Voltaire!”
One way god was expunged from politics was by separating suffering caused by nature and its elements from that caused by the actions of human beings. This radical move certainly laid the ground for revolutionary activity, but in limiting the scope of the natural, it also delimited the political, allowing a very mechanistic liberal politics to arise precisely where certain human actions impeded on certain other human actions. The language of the origin and purpose of things that took off (without god this time), ended up centring on responsibility and choice, to the gradual occlusion of the activity of suffering and the sufferer’s experience of its materiality. This was a move made by Rousseau when the likes of Voltaire digested Lisbon by launching wholesale attacks on the goodness and rationality of Providence and the universe in general. Designed to bring the discussion back to earth and to those who were suffering, Rousseau’s move met its fate in Kant, who took it upon himself to write the script for the injured and their suffering.(v) Rousseau’s radical Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, where he separates natural from moral inequality, certainly foreshadows the separation of the domains of god and man in relation to suffering. It was only by securing a place for humans and their suffering that this served as a counterpoint to Voltaire, who felt comfortable speaking for the sufferers, and telling them in rather comedic eighteenth century nihilism that he knew that the world was worthless.
Rousseau’s response to Voltaire’s poem on Lisbon often gets painted as an apology for Providence, since it places responsibility for suffering on people themselves.(vi) I choose to read it as a dismissal of a dumb question-at a time when it was necessary to see what human beings are able to do to themselves through structures they create and affirm. By pretty much saying that god really doesn’t have the time to be counting individual sins and striking lightning when needed, it was a call for civilisation as a whole to disregard the farce of individual sin, and to confront the world they were creating for themselves-and, yes, they were creating it, actively or passively. The fact that Kant remained unable to do justice to this harbinger of a notion of species being, which was to later infect Feuerbach and Marx, is really unfortunate. The kind of responsibility Rousseau is trying to enlist is not blame. Rather, he is challenging the entire modern enterprise that took the occasion of ordinary human suffering to make grand conclusions about the world as such. (This is a version of the problematic approach to defining and “abolishing” human suffering that I find in contemporary global politics and its favourite disasters.) In Voltaire’s charitable disabuse of hope lies a weird remnant of Providence itself. The umbilical cord had not been cut, and Providence was still the validator of suffering and hope. Thus it was that, absent that validation, hope could take a hike. Rousseau found it to be an affront to Providence and humanity alike to reduce the question of suffering to the Providence that allows it to happen, thus ensuring that hope, like suffering, also has nothing to do with humanity itself. (vii)
In questioning Voltaire’s preoccupation with happiness, evil, and limit cases like cruelty and death, Rousseau broadens the meaning of suffering and death, and also enriches that of joy and life. If there is anything the destruction of Lisbon can do, it can show us that we do worse things all the time. It is hypocritical, then, to allow only such moments inspire horror, and to remain silent about the inequality and the multiple ways of dying inflicted upon us by society and civilisation. Rousseau is not making peace with the event by normalising it, but is making its sublimity material; the aim is to forestall consolation, in a way entirely contra Voltaire. That particular eventful suffering ought to make us look at the suffering we never do see.(viii)
The Enlightenment’s responses to Lisbon have left a legacy of coopting human suffering by imposing limits on which suffering and which parts of life matter, and on their admission into political discourse. These arbitrary thresholds-on what counts as an injury, what is a crisis, how damage is measured and compensated-employed today in politics, law, media, separate good from bad suffering, decide what will be seen, heard, felt, and tell us what is worth suffering for and where we can trade our injuries and damages. Instead of, and along with, religion, the state and capital continue to keep the engines of the search for the meaning of suffering going-so that either they can provide the answer and give the kiss of death to suffering, or continue the Sadeian spectacle of those their non-knowledge and non-sense keep in bondage.
Endnotes
(i) Neiman, Susan. Evil in Modern Thought: An Alternative History of Philosophy. Princeton U.P.: New Jersey, 2002. p. 1
(ii) Ibid., p. 1 & 2
(iii) This is Neiman’s argument in the “Introduction” to her book. I identify where my thoughts in this paper explicitly respond to Neiman, but her book helpfully augmented many of my questions and was a companion in reflection, for which I am grateful.
(iv) Neiman muses a bit, in the paperback edition published after 11 September 2001, about how Lisbon and Auschwitz were named by places, while the WTC attacks were named with a date.
(v) Cf. Kant’s Doctrine of Right (first part of the Metaphysics of Morals) for his discussion of injury in relation to right and property that is the fountainhead for the approach to suffering in liberal law and politics.
(vi) I am referring to Rousseau’s Letter to Voltaire, dated 18 August 1756. My discussion of Rousseau from this point forward derives from my reading of this letter, couched within a background of his other works (especially the first and second discourses). Cf. sections 6, 7, 10, 11, 12, 17, 21 of the Letter. (in Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. The Discourses and Other Early Political Writings, ed. Gourevitch. Cambridge UP: New York, 1997). Rousseau is responding to Voltaire’s poem, An Inquiry into the Maxim of What is, is Right written after the Lisbon earthquake of 1 November 1755. In Candide, Voltaire further fleshes out his position.
(vii) See, in particular, Sections 10
(viii) cf., sections 6, 710, 11, 12, 17, 21,
Damages Inc.: Making the Sublime Matter–Asma Abba
Damages Inc.: Making the Sublime Matter
by Asma Abbas
The Sustenance of Damage: The Deeds of Disaster and the Passage of Suffering
“Lucky the age to which an earthquake could do so much damage.”(i) Such an elegy could only befit modernity, an age that permitted us to be able to write elegies for an entire age at a time. How does one muster such an elegy? What does a damaged age look like? How does an age, for that matter, suffer, and what? Is damage a condition, or an act, or an event? When damage is made into an event or only understood as such, as is the norm, the emphasis is on damage done, and on its enumeration, categorisation and quantification. And this comes with an arrogant amnesia about the fact that damage done owes something to damage sustained and those who sustain it.
This essay wonders whether and how we have suffered the tsunami of 26 December 2004, what makes it a disaster, and what its damages are. How a disaster is ascertained, named, defined and assessed, involves historically sanctioned processes of representation and translation. The material for the damage, and for these processes, is provided by the actual suffering of “the damaged,” who get seen, heard, touched, smelt, tasted, in these processes.or not. The question of suffering-how to experience it, accost it, and respond to it-has repeatedly proven that the concepts and categories of dominant philosophical, religious, political, economic, hence ethical, discourses are not passive mediators between our intellect and the world, but actively construct the way we sense it in the first place. With their constitutive concepts and relations, various ideologies-liberal capitalism to name one-construct our experience of our own and others’ suffering, often mapping it in dimensions of time and space in ways reminiscent of a pre-set questionnaire that not only limits the content of what is asked, but also what the respondent can say.
While ways of reading disaster, damage, and how it is suffered, render visible much suffering, they also determine in what form suffering enters the calculi of law and politics. This process of naming and determining also paralyses and silences the suffering that survives in the interstices of that which is seen and heard and spoken for. Suffering often inspires a garrulity that shields the respondents from actually suffering it, matched only by an empty gaze that wants to conjure the suffering away, and still further by charitable superimposition of more “tolerable” sentiments that co-opt the suffering. This atrophies what can be damaged, as a result of which there are fewer “problems” to be solved. Moreover, it simplifies the meaning of damage to allow human emotions to be infinitely exchangeable and compensable, thus delimiting the damages that can be claimed-from god, or the state, or your local insurance agent. Ironically, the very position of the claimant is cheaply available-to the extent that the ability to claim damage becomes the condition of the possibility of damage itself. I believe that asking the question of how we sense and attend, and how our senses, access, and attention are themselves sculpted, may disarm us by forcing us to acknowledge our complicity in making, defining, and producing suffering, damage, and disasters in the way we do.
Mine is a plea not to simply see or hear more, but to allow what is seen to speak for more than is seen, to reveal our inadequacies of sensing and attending to the world-the only ethical moments allowed us-so that bearing witness to a sublime calamity such as the tsunami shows us that we don’t see, that we don’t hear. The 200,000 dead could serve as the occasion for considering the incommensurability of the suffering never named, counted or accounted for, not to mention those counts that don’t end up counting in any political boardroom-and to see in that both the injustice of, and potential liberation from, discourses that frame our relation to our own and others’ suffering. Sublime suffering was never meant to be a refuge, of any sort-and ought not to be suffered by bringing into question the meaning or validity of the universe (sorry, Lisbon!), but by carrying the weight of the material, tragic, ordinariness of suffering that is almost never glorious or eventful or name-worthy by contemporary standards. It is a plea to suffer differently.maybe even just to suffer.
The Becoming of Crisis
The elegy I opened with, though, was not written for this disaster, but for the Lisbon earthquake of 1755, the first “modern” “natural” “disaster.” I want to suggest that our linguistic, intellectual and emotional cartographies of the recent tsunami, and the ledgers of damage it does or doesn’t generate, may have more than a nominal relation to the damage Susan Neiman is invoking in her elegy. Hers is a wistfulness for an era’s ability to be damaged, measured in blows to an age’s intellectual confidence in itself. The Enlightenment’s approach to suffering may offer us important clues to our language of disaster and damage. I take up Neiman’s claim that the modern was book-ended by the crises of Lisbon and Auschwitz-with crisis being “the collapse of the most basic trust in the world, of the grounds that make civilisation possible”(ii)-and turn to registers of natural and man-made suffering, disaster and evil respectively that are framed in the aftermath of Lisbon. The secularism of suffering promulgated in the post-Lisbon approach to damage remained partial to suffering with origin, cause and meaning-the way this split apart questions that were intrinsically related marks our sensibilities to this day.
Neiman provocatively retells the history of modern philosophy as a series of iterations of the question of evil. For her, Lisbon is the watershed for the modern formulation of this question, the crisis yielding distinctions between man-made evil and natural disaster. She bravely attempts to rejoin these questions at the moment of their divergence, almost as refreshingly as young enchanted scientists find the image behind the mirror even when there is a wall! She sees these bookends as exemplifying different versions of the same issue-that of evil in different forms, of successive tweakings. The fact that she can invoke Lisbon and Auschwitz in the same sentence is testament to her bravery-but she rests at finding the spirit of the Enlightenment as locked within these crises. I see myself as asking a question she claims to stop short of. I want to confront these iterations of evil as threaded in a narrative, by not only posing the question of whether and how one gets from Lisbon to Auschwitz, but also submitting to the overdetermined nature of the narrative wherein Lisbon (as a philosophical moment) could only commence a journey to Auschwitz (and its processings). First, she enacts Enlightenment’s internal limits by not being suspicious of “evil” as an abstraction and possible cooptative translation of the problem of suffering, as I do. Second, she flaunts a completely un-ironic relation to expression, of the philosophical stripe, insofar as her understanding of damage and hope remains romantically connected to the professions of faith of an era’s philosophers.
I don’t have the luxury of celebrating the Enlightenment as heroically or tenuously wedged between crises.(iii) I see it instead as the becoming of a crisis, and as a process of the encrusting of a relation to crisis, damage, and suffering. In this century, the events of September 11 and the tsunami disaster (that has by now missed the boat on being christened and lodged in human memory with the same grace as Lisbon, Auschwitz or 9/11) share an interesting parallel to the narrative that threads together Lisbon and Auschwitz.
Cartographies of Suffering, Sensibilities of Damage
Of Intimacies, Nautical and More
It wasn’t until a week after the tsunami came, and after numerous condolences from the West had made their way to my mailbox since I was “closer” to the tragedy, that the airwaves and streets of Karachi mustered a gesture of a response to this proximity. The new year celebrations of the city’s rich redeemed themselves by promising sizeable philanthropic donations in the tradition of their colonial masters, private TV networks instituted donation hotlines with my banker friends putting their mobile phones in service of the cause, and the less affluent commercial areas sprouted camps to collect relief goods, organised by the most murderous political party in the history of the city. It was business as usual, really. I was struck at once by the time it took the city to process and channel its silence, as well as with the relation between power, word and action. As usual, really. Only two people said anything to me. One made a rather self-congratulatory statement about how only a mosque survived the tsunami (I still don’t know how to read that since the point about Muslim specialness took many Muslim lives to be made, but isn’t that also usual); the other was irritated at the media’s exaggerated attention, asking why this was a big deal when this had happened to the people of Bangladesh every year in our memory. I then wondered if Karachi had lost its senses, thanks to its battering at the hands of those that now pitched relief camps. Or perhaps it had so thoroughly internalised and normalised tragedy and its extremely ordinary, regular, nature that only those who knew none of it would dress in their pathos to attend new year balls and talk philanthropy, while the rest went to no parties and spoke no tsunami. Or both. But, what about the closeness?
Oh, but Karachi is no Paris! And Aceh no Lisbon. Why ought I to measure damage, like Neiman wants to, with the humanitarian pathos of the elite, whether intellectual (in her case) and social or political (in ours)? There must be a difference between those for whom the sublime nature of suffering is a luxury, at least a protection, and those for whom it is a necessity and inescapable, and in being so perhaps even laughs at the sublime, forces it to get over itself. This is no apology on behalf of Karachi. But, could Karachi’s sense-lessness exemplify a reaction to, or consequence of, having our suffering diagnosed, interpreted, evaluated, sanctioned, and prescribed, for us?
Maybe our own senses of damage have been damaged beyond damage-so that suffering only becomes something when someone in power names it so. Is it the second coming of slave morality: where one can only choose between following the pied piper into fifteen minutes of glorious victimhood, or resist this “accommodation” by regularising the pain so that the former is no longer tempting? It could be that this is the only way the remainder, the excess of the discourse, protects itself. Or, to be hopeful for a moment, this could force another sensibility of suffering, obligation and sympathy altogether, beyond the depleted senses of the colonisers, with the joke being on the latter. Maybe it opens the possibility of seeing the affluent enact their farce of petting their consciences so that any mention of the suffering immediately triggers a pavlovian response to recite how much private humanitarian aid has flowed into South East Asia. Is there a different way those that are “closer” ought to suffer? What contempt must or does this familiarity breed-and towards whom?
The Affairs of Naming
Often, closeness tempts naming-think of all the times we name those we love, out of love, and perhaps also out of a need to pre-emptively determine them: our shot at their becoming. Unlike the 18th century earthquake (Lisbon), the Nazi extermination of Jews (Auschwitz), and the planes crashing into the World Trade Centre (9-11), the tsunami has no name-not because of its unintelligibility, but precisely to distance, deny, disavow, deplete all that it does name, make sensible, make intelligible.(iv) It is far away as it is, further away than Lisbon was from the civilisation that mattered, so perhaps no one even bothered over a name-there was no feigning an attempt to closeness either. Since materiality does exceed the name anyway despite being sculpted by it, the lack of a name is an opportunity for us to confront the materiality without limits imposed on us. Surely, September 11 provided a similar opportunity-but, alas!
In its namelessness, the tsunami signifies an unwillingness as well as an inability to own and capture on part of global powers. Even now, the occurrence of this event only ushers in conversation about the pragmatics of preventing and controlling it, since its definition as a “natural” disaster keeps it safe from lending it to the sort of structural, geopolitical, analysis that, say, a war, may invite. But I am not convinced that we need to follow the precepts of discussion that the philosophes set for us, affirmed only by philosophers, such as Kant, who told us which suffering was political and which was not. It is a mistake to see those separations-between natural and man-made suffering, between disaster and evil-as prior to and outside of modernity’s framing of problems. Instead, these separations are integral to the approach to suffering that spawns many of the insolubilities of how injury, damage, injustice and victimhood are constructed today, what struggles they inspire, what responses they merit, and in which registers they are accounted for (or not). Insofar as we are also equally capable of naming people out of love (sic), by having the name co-opt rather than share in their becoming, the namelessness of the tsunami is an opportunity for those close to it, and able to be close to it, to occasion a more truthful, humble, and embracing relation to its damages and to all that it opens to the senses beyond its photographs and body-count. Maybe it is time for a new kind of love, and a new kind of suffering. Maybe I will call it the blue crush. Maybe I won’t.
Sustaining Damage
While, in the debates on Lisbon, people vented their own fears about the closeness of disaster, today the abundance and speed of representations make one superficially closer, without any guarantee of enabling imagination and empathy. The terms of this closeness are already set, unless we subvert them by looking, hearing, feeling differently. Who wants the tsunami to be Lisbon? Who wants damage Neiman-style anyway? The debate about providence, the goodness of god, was a subterfuge even then, and more passé now. The Enlightenment remained shackled to religion’s obsession with limit cases-suffering had to be glorious and eventful to strike the same nerves and to consume the space vacated by god. If the condition of our closeness to fellow beings, of the ability to suffer them and suffer for them, and of the possibility for claiming redress, lies in representations of the sublime, then this is an instance of crisis itself, an old-fashioned tragedy: human hubris resulting in bad stuff we never planned for! Ironically, representing the sublime was an oxymoron for Kant and hardly the condition of the possibility of hope or redress that he wanted.
The story of the Enlightenment that begins with a garrulous crisis called Lisbon (garrulous for all the ways it spoke and burst into psyches and print) and ends with the silent crisis called Auschwitz (silent for the conspicuously proclaimed death of poetry or very limited ranges of contestation over its meaning or the sheer inability to process it without talking about something else), may push one to ask whether finding evidence for speech and silence in elite discourse is even methodologically, let alone ethically, sound. Even if we bracket that cynicism, one can still ask the question of what kind of voicing and hearing would befit such moments. Is silence the consequence of questions that no longer seem to fit? When we say that the befitting response to suffering is silence, is that an essential claim about suffering, or a historical one? Perhaps we are so overpowered by the words and queries preceding the moment of speech that we just don’t know where to begin. I find the loquacity of contemporary liberal humanitarianism silencing in precisely the way therapeutic discourse economises and hypostatises pain; or the manner in which walls of words are erected repeatedly as protections from actually confronting the messiness of suffering by alienating, defining, and controlling it in how (much) it reaches us; or still in fear of the silence that only threatens the self-confidence of subjects who have the privilege of only fearing known unknowns.
Liberal capitalism’s philanthropic garrulity is nervous and afraid, and betrays a dwindled capacity for a compassion that isn’t predicated on its knowledge, and hence on its power. But it isn’t completely its fault. How can it be otherwise if it has never known abject powerlessness, abject uncertainty, and abject fear? It is exemplary of our inadequacies that we don’t see the complicity of elite philosophical, political and legal discourse in rendering suffering-whether “natural” or “moral”-mute by insisting on a certain kind of speech and translation. Neiman’s wistfulness for the proliferation of expression in philosophy, narrative and bad poetry is response to Lisbon is certainly well-meaning-but commits the grave mistake of taking it at its word, much like the widely occurring sensibility that is easily consoled by fundraisers, candlelight vigils and moments of silence that take themselves way too seriously, and by other symbolisms that need to once in a while be pecked with a tuning fork. Who remembers Nietzsche’s philosophising with a hammer? The way in which the question has forever been posed deserves only a very deeply felt refusal to speak. I read Lisbon and Auschwitz not as passive bookends to modernity; the blank that Auschwitz drew was the perfect culmination of the noise of Lisbon. What was left to say?
And Rousseau cried lovingly, “Oh shut up, Voltaire!”
One way god was expunged from politics was by separating suffering caused by nature and its elements from that caused by the actions of human beings. This radical move certainly laid the ground for revolutionary activity, but in limiting the scope of the natural, it also delimited the political, allowing a very mechanistic liberal politics to arise precisely where certain human actions impeded on certain other human actions. The language of the origin and purpose of things that took off (without god this time), ended up centring on responsibility and choice, to the gradual occlusion of the activity of suffering and the sufferer’s experience of its materiality. This was a move made by Rousseau when the likes of Voltaire digested Lisbon by launching wholesale attacks on the goodness and rationality of Providence and the universe in general. Designed to bring the discussion back to earth and to those who were suffering, Rousseau’s move met its fate in Kant, who took it upon himself to write the script for the injured and their suffering.(v) Rousseau’s radical Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, where he separates natural from moral inequality, certainly foreshadows the separation of the domains of god and man in relation to suffering. It was only by securing a place for humans and their suffering that this served as a counterpoint to Voltaire, who felt comfortable speaking for the sufferers, and telling them in rather comedic eighteenth century nihilism that he knew that the world was worthless.
Rousseau’s response to Voltaire’s poem on Lisbon often gets painted as an apology for Providence, since it places responsibility for suffering on people themselves.(vi) I choose to read it as a dismissal of a dumb question-at a time when it was necessary to see what human beings are able to do to themselves through structures they create and affirm. By pretty much saying that god really doesn’t have the time to be counting individual sins and striking lightning when needed, it was a call for civilisation as a whole to disregard the farce of individual sin, and to confront the world they were creating for themselves-and, yes, they were creating it, actively or passively. The fact that Kant remained unable to do justice to this harbinger of a notion of species being, which was to later infect Feuerbach and Marx, is really unfortunate. The kind of responsibility Rousseau is trying to enlist is not blame. Rather, he is challenging the entire modern enterprise that took the occasion of ordinary human suffering to make grand conclusions about the world as such. (This is a version of the problematic approach to defining and “abolishing” human suffering that I find in contemporary global politics and its favourite disasters.) In Voltaire’s charitable disabuse of hope lies a weird remnant of Providence itself. The umbilical cord had not been cut, and Providence was still the validator of suffering and hope. Thus it was that, absent that validation, hope could take a hike. Rousseau found it to be an affront to Providence and humanity alike to reduce the question of suffering to the Providence that allows it to happen, thus ensuring that hope, like suffering, also has nothing to do with humanity itself. (vii)
In questioning Voltaire’s preoccupation with happiness, evil, and limit cases like cruelty and death, Rousseau broadens the meaning of suffering and death, and also enriches that of joy and life. If there is anything the destruction of Lisbon can do, it can show us that we do worse things all the time. It is hypocritical, then, to allow only such moments inspire horror, and to remain silent about the inequality and the multiple ways of dying inflicted upon us by society and civilisation. Rousseau is not making peace with the event by normalising it, but is making its sublimity material; the aim is to forestall consolation, in a way entirely contra Voltaire. That particular eventful suffering ought to make us look at the suffering we never do see.(viii)
The Enlightenment’s responses to Lisbon have left a legacy of coopting human suffering by imposing limits on which suffering and which parts of life matter, and on their admission into political discourse. These arbitrary thresholds-on what counts as an injury, what is a crisis, how damage is measured and compensated-employed today in politics, law, media, separate good from bad suffering, decide what will be seen, heard, felt, and tell us what is worth suffering for and where we can trade our injuries and damages. Instead of, and along with, religion, the state and capital continue to keep the engines of the search for the meaning of suffering going-so that either they can provide the answer and give the kiss of death to suffering, or continue the Sadeian spectacle of those their non-knowledge and non-sense keep in bondage.
Endnotes
(i) Neiman, Susan. Evil in Modern Thought: An Alternative History of Philosophy. Princeton U.P.: New Jersey, 2002. p. 1
(ii) Ibid., p. 1 & 2
(iii) This is Neiman’s argument in the “Introduction” to her book. I identify where my thoughts in this paper explicitly respond to Neiman, but her book helpfully augmented many of my questions and was a companion in reflection, for which I am grateful.
(iv) Neiman muses a bit, in the paperback edition published after 11 September 2001, about how Lisbon and Auschwitz were named by places, while the WTC attacks were named with a date.
(v) Cf. Kant’s Doctrine of Right (first part of the Metaphysics of Morals) for his discussion of injury in relation to right and property that is the fountainhead for the approach to suffering in liberal law and politics.
(vi) I am referring to Rousseau’s Letter to Voltaire, dated 18 August 1756. My discussion of Rousseau from this point forward derives from my reading of this letter, couched within a background of his other works (especially the first and second discourses). Cf. sections 6, 7, 10, 11, 12, 17, 21 of the Letter. (in Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. The Discourses and Other Early Political Writings, ed. Gourevitch. Cambridge UP: New York, 1997). Rousseau is responding to Voltaire’s poem, An Inquiry into the Maxim of What is, is Right written after the Lisbon earthquake of 1 November 1755. In Candide, Voltaire further fleshes out his position.
(vii) See, in particular, Sections 10
(viii) cf., sections 6, 710, 11, 12, 17, 21,