[Reader-list] Dr.Veena Das on WTC

[Bhrigu]

For those who were not able to open the essay as an attachment because of  
incompatability of format or any other problem, i am re-sending the essay as 
part of the mail. 




Violence and Translation
Veena Das
My writing on the events of September 11th is on two registers– the public 
event of spectacular destruction in New York and the private events made up 
of countless stories of grief, fear, and anticipationi.  I hope I can speak 
responsibly to both, neither trivializing the suffering of the victims of the 
September11th attack and those in mourning for them, as in the rhetoric of 
“deserved suffering” (as if nations and individuals were painlessly 
substitutable) – nor obscuring the unspeakable suffering of wars and 
genocides in other parts of the world that framed these events. A recasting 
of these events into conflicting genealogies by the politics of mourning in 
the public sphere raises the issue of translation between different 
formulations through which these events were interpreted and indeed, 
experienced. 
There are two opposed perspectives on cultural difference that we can discern 
today- one that emphasizes the antagonism of human cultures as in some 
version of the thesis on “clash of civilizations” and the second that 
underlines the production of identities through circulation and hence the 
blurring of boundaries. Both, however, are based on the assumption that human 
cultures are translatable. Indeed, without some power of self-translatability 
that makes it possible for one to imagine oneself using the categories of the 
other, human cultures would not be able to live on any register of the 
imaginary. The stark denial of this translatability on both sides of the 
present conflict concerns me most though I note that this is not to espouse a 
vision of justice that is somehow even- handed in distributing blame. My 
concern is of a different kind - I fear that classical concepts in 
anthropological and sociological theory provide scaffolding to this picture 
of untranslatability despite our commitment to the understanding of 
diversity. There are obviously specific issues at stake in this particular 
event of destruction, its time and its space, and the response casting it as 
a matter of war rather than, say, one concerning crime. But it seems to me 
that there is a deeper grammar that is at work here that invites us to 
investigate the conditions of possibility for this kind of declaration of war 
– as a genre of speech - to take place.  
One of the tenets of postmodern theorization is that the concrete and finite 
expressions of multiplicity cannot be referred back to a transcendental 
center –the grounds for judgment cannot be located in either the faculty of 
reason or in common corporeal experience.  Although postmodern theory does 
not suggest that diversity must be valued for itself – indeed, it is part of 
its struggle to provide for conversation and recognition of otherness without 
any predetermined criteria for the evaluation of divergent claims - it does 
raise important questions about the withdrawal of recognition to the other.  
I have suggested elsewhere that difference when it is cast as non-criterial, 
becomes untranslatable precisely because it ceases to allow for a mutual 
future in language.ii  The shadowing of this into skepticism in which trust 
in categories is completely destroyed and our access to context is removed 
transforms forms of life into forms of death. Some such issue is at stake 
here in the Taliban’s brutality against women on behalf of a pure Islam on 
the one hand, and a war waged on behalf of “Western civilization” on the 
other. After all it is the United States that spawned the very forces it is 
fighting as a defence against communism – the then enemy of freedom and 
values of Western democracyiii.  There are no innocents in the present war at 
the level of collectivities despite the powerful deployment of the figure of 
the “innocent” killed on both sides of the divide. 
 Elsewhere I have questioned the purity of the concepts that are put in play 
when claims are made on behalf of tradition, religious autonomy, modernity, 
or human rights. The translation of these concepts is not a matter of 
something external to culture but something internal to it. It is when a 
particular vision both refuses pluralism as internal to its culture and 
claims finality for itself in some avatar of an end of history that a 
struggle for cultural rights and the necessity to protect “our way of life” 
turns into violence and oppression. 
Allow me to take the pronouncements on events of September 11th, that the 
attack on the World Trade Center in New York was an attack on civilization or 
on values of freedom. I take these as statements in ordinary language 
propelled into a global public sphere from which there is no flight - for 
they function, it seems to me, as anthropological language. What these 
statements conjure is the idea of the United States (herewith America, not 
illegitimately I think) as embodying these values - not contingently, not as 
a horizon in relation to struggles within its borders against, say, slavery, 
racism, or the destruction of native American populations, but as if a 
teleology has particularly privileged it to embody these values. This is why 
the issues cannot be framed by the bearer of these utterances in terms of 
American interests but as of values that America embodies (not merely 
expresses) in its nation state. So the point of view of totality exists in 
these utterances not in the divine whose reason is not accessible to us, but 
in the body of the American nation in which the gap between the particular 
and the universal, the contingent and the necessary is indeed sought to be 
cancellediv. Now it may surprise one that in the country that has given so 
much political and public space to multiculturalism, and when much effort has 
gone into signaling that this conflict is not a modern replay of the crusades 
(despite slips of tongue)– political language slides into the idea of America 
as the privileged site of universal values. It is from this perspective that 
one can speculate why the talk is not of the many terrorisms with which 
several countries have lived now for more than thirty years, but with one 
grand terrorism – Islamic terrorism. In the same vein the world is said to 
have changed after September 11th. What could this mean except that while 
terrorist forms of warfare in other spaces in Africa, Asia, or Middle East 
were against forms of particularism, the attack on America is seen as an 
attack on humanity itself. 
The point about many terrorisms versus a single grand terrorism that 
threatens American values that are seen to embody the force of history – 
teleology and eschatology – is indeed significant. As is well known, the last 
three decades have seen a transformation in the idea of war. While there is a 
monopoly over high technology of destruction, the low technologies have 
proliferated freely, encouraged and abetted by geopolitical interests. The 
social actors engaged in this warfare in Africa, or in parts of the Middle 
East or Asia are neither modern states, nor traditional polities but new 
kinds of actors (sometimes called warlords) created by the configuration of 
global and local forces.vFurther it is the very length of these wars – some 
lasting for more than thirty years that allows for the constantly changing 
formations – slippage between the categories of warlords, terrorists, 
insurgents, and freedom fighters reflects the uncertainty around these social 
actors.  It is thus the reconfiguration of terrorism as a grand single global 
force – Islamic terrorism – that simultaneously cancels out other forms of 
terrorism and creates the enemy as a totality that has to be vanquished in 
the interests of a universalism that is embodied in the American nation. 
There is a mirroring of this discourse in the Taliban who also reconfigure 
themselves as historically destined to embody (not only represent) Islamic 
destiny. Ironically the clash of civilization thesis is repeated in the 
pronouncements of the Taliban leadership. 
The tremendous loss of life and the style of killing in the present wars – 
call them terrorism (including state terrorism), call them insurgency, call 
them wars of liberation, all raise the issue of theodicy. Yet, while in many 
other countries the wounds inflicted through such violence are acknowledged 
as attesting to the vulnerability of human life – in the case of American 
society there is an inability to acknowledge this vulnerability. Or rather 
the vulnerability to which we, as embodied beings are subject, the 
powerlessness, is recast in terms of strength. And thereby the 
representations of the American nation manage to obscure from view, the 
experiences of those within its body politics who were never safe even before 
September 11th.  While many have heard arrogance in these statements  - to my 
ears they are signs of the inability to address pain. Consider the following 
passage in Nietzsche on the moment of the production of ressentiment 

to deaden, by means of a more violent emotion of any kind, a tormenting 
secret pain that is becoming unendurable, and to drive it out of 
consciousness at least for the moment: for that one requires an affect, as 
savage an affect as possible, and, in order to excite that any pretext at 
allvi.  
I am obviously not suggesting any conspiracy theory, or that a pretext was 
needed for subsequent bombing of Afghanistan but pointing to the deep need to 
show the tattered body of the “enemy” as a rational response to the September 
11th attacks. In the first instance, it seemed to me that this was the site 
of punishment as spectacle. Michel Foucault claimed that “
justice no longer 
takes public responsibility for that violence that is bound up with its 
practice”vii, but here we find an emphasis on visible intensity through which 
justice is to be theatrically displayed pointing to the ways in which 
Foucault might have overstated the case for disciplinary power as the 
dominant mode for production of normality under the regime of modernity. On 
further reflection though, it appears to me that theatrical display of 
sovereign power is only part of the story.  It is the further need to replace 
the pain of the nagging questions posed to American citizens about what 
relation their pain bears to the pain of the others - what kind of 
responsibility is theirs when successive regimes elected by them have 
supported military regimes, brutal dictatorships and warlords mired in 
corruption with no space for the exercise of critical monitoring of politics 
in the Middle East?  If violence has replaced politics in the present 
globalized spaces in this regions, then surely it is only by acknowledging 
that pain as “ours” that a global civil society could respond. Instead of 
replacing the pain with another more violent and savage affect, it would have 
to engage in a different way with the pain inflicted on it. 
	What are the obstacles in acknowledging this pain? Collective identities are 
not only a product of desires for recognition – they are equally forged by 
our relation to death. Yet it is in the classical theories of society that we 
learn that the “other” is not part of human society because she has a totally 
different relation to death. Consider the contrast between altruistic suicide 
and egoistic suicide in Emile Durkheim’s classic analysis – I suggest that 
this is the site at which a radical untraslatability of other cultures seeps 
into sociological analysis. It is no accident that it is in defining the 
subject’s relation to death that Durkheim finds himself positing the kind of 
subjectivity to the other that domesticates the threat of their forms of 
dying to the self-understanding of the modern subject. Consider the following 
passage in which he spells out the distinction between altruistic suicide and 
egoistic suicide.
The weight of society is thus brought to bear upon him to lead him to destroy 
himself. To be sure society intervenes in egotistic suicide as well, but its 
intervention differs in the two cases. In one case it speaks the sentence of 
death; in the other it forbids the choice of death. In the case of egotistic 
suicide it suggests or counsels at most; in the other case it compels and it 
is the author of conditions and circumstances making this obligation coercive 
(emphasis supplied).viii
India was the classic soil for this kind of suicide for Durkheim. But he 
makes a broader contrast between the “crude morality” and the “refined 
ethics” of societies with altruistic and egoistic suicide - the former sets 
no value on human life while the latter sets human personality on so high a 
pedestal that it can no longer be subordinated to anything. As he says, 
“Where altruistic suicide is prevalent, man is always ready to give his life; 
however, at the same time, he sets no more value on that of another.” In 
contrast,  “A broader sympathy for human suffering succeeds the fanatical 
devotions of primitive times.”ix  
	Now I am not going to argue that the making of the subject whose mode of 
dying is to kill him or herself in the service of killing others for a 
greater cause is transparent. I will suggest though that the way language is 
deployed to render some forms of dying as fanatical (e.g. by terrorists) and 
others as representing the supreme value of sacrificing oneself (e.g. as in 
values of patriotism) blocks any road to understanding when and under what 
circumstances individual life ceases to hold value. It is not that in one 
case society compels where as in the other case it counsels, but that by 
recasting desperate acts as those which close all conversations, there is an 
invitation to violence that raises the stakes - it leaves no other way of 
giving recognition except in the negativities through which more violence is 
created. It is not accidental that even a language of war is not sustained in 
the political pronouncements of American leaders for war has become 
transformed into a hunt thereby using the rhetoric strategy of animalizing 
the other. Hence there is the preponderance of such verbs as “smoking them 
out” or “getting them out of their holes”. 
Instead of Manichean battles between good and evil, there would be greater 
room for a tolerable peace if it was possible to attend to the violences of 
everyday life, to acknowledge the fallibility and the vulnerability to which 
we are all subject, and to acknowledge that the conflict is over interests, 
and further that these need to be renegotiated. It is not over uncompromising 
values.  Most people in the world learn to live as vulnerable beings to the 
dangers that human cultures pose to each other. Between that vulnerabilityx 
and the desperation that seeks to annihilate the other, there is a terrible 
gap.  In other words it is to the picture of transfiguration of violence 
rather than to its elimination or eradication in a war- like mode, that I 
draw attention. Different, even new ways of being Muslim are tied up to the 
creation of democratic spaces just as modern democracies would be deepened by 
the full participation of those who have been excluded from the public 
spheres in the West. Might we be able to mourn with the survivors of 
September 11th without the necessity of appropriating their grief for other 
grander projects? Whether conditions for this possibility exist when the 
languages of division are so virulent in the public sphere– I am pessimist, 
but I pray that I am wrong.