[Reader-list] Of ingrates and hypocrites

[Kshmendra Kaul]

Dear Inder
   
  Inder, a dialogue of this sort should normally be one of  quotes of "I saids" and "You saids". Your "response" however is littered with many presuppositions about not only what my "thinking" is but even advance knowledge of what my "responses" to you are going to be. You have no words from me to use as quotes for substantiating your judgements. In places you, rather slyly, use my actual words and taking them out of the context in which they were spoken, you endow them with references and meanings that suit you.
   
  Inder if you already know the "sort of person" I am and what my "attitudes" are and what my "replies" will be, then why should you want to talk to me. If you want to vent "at" me using presupposition about me as the excuse then it would be better to refer to me in the "third person" so that I do not feel that a reply from me is expected. 
   
  1. Inder, you say that "unwittingly" I have given answers to my own questions. I am confused. Will you please list my answers against my own questions.
   
  2. You say that creative people are at my "mercy". Are they? I am in no position of authority or influence, how can they be at my "mercy"?
   
  3. You say "... artists need to escape, to imagine, to feel free, and be eccentric and be even psychic patients" Why are you telling me? Did I say anything that contests that right of an artist or anyone?
   
  Your and my disagreement could possibly be over whether a "right" is an unfettered right that can be taken to any extreme. I say no, it is not. Any "right" is, whether you like it or not, an "allowed right" under principles that govern "rights". A country's Constitution for example is both a "vision document" and furnisher of "prime directives" for the governance of rights. The governance is essential so that there is balancing of "all rights" in "all areas" for "all people". If there were no such "overseeing" then it would be a "jungle". 
   
  So Inder, in the case of an artist if the "eccentricity" or the "psychosis" (as you probably meant) were to upset the balancing act of "all rights" in "all areas" for "all people" then it would most probably attract regulation or censorship. It should too, in my opinion. There is no getting away from it. That holds true for not just India but any country you can name.
   
  4. Noted your comments about me that I have perhaps "never been stung by the creative bug"  or am possibly "too young"  or ".. have no idea of what it takes to make an artist, a performance artist, a poet, a musician". Either you know me extremely well Inder or you are presuming just too much.
   
  5. Inder I wrote in one section about how we as humans cannot escape being in a Nation. We might escape "This Nation" but will only land in "Another Nation" and that, whichever Nation it is, there will regulatory sets of Laws that will affect and sometimes impinge upon every aspect of our lives (even thinking) and associated rights/freedoms.  
   
  I had not spoken about "breathing" but now that you mention it, yes "breathing too". Simple examples are the Death Penalty takes away the right to breathe. Some Nations say no to appertaining that right to themselves. Similarly, all Nations (speaking under correction) disallow the individual the right of choice to "stop breathing" by treating suicide as being illegal. Some allow euthanasia, some do not. Medical termination of pregnancy is treated as being violative of the unborn child's right to live in some countries whereas others allow it.  
   
  All of that Inder was a representation of facts (to my thinking). If you have a different viewpoint on that please state so with examples. 
   
  What confuses me is how you could link all of this to my saying that the "state of the
Nation" tortures me. These are two different topics. Maybe my wording was wrong. I meant the condition (state) of India (Nation) tortures me. Meaning that it is quite bad in my opinion. It got qualified, I think, by expressing my desire to "rectify" the Nation as compared to your desire to "escape"
   
  6. Your references to Ravana, Sita Mata and Nation State must have had some profound interlinkages. They failed to stir my faculty to comprehend.
   
  7. Noted your evaluation that Indira Gandhi was more liberal than me.
   
  8. Hussain's is an interesting case. It is just one example that begs a serious and unbiased discussion on secularity of attitudes and freedoms. Unfortunately that particular topic also invariably brings in considerations of "sensitivities". As soon as 'selective secularism' rears it's head the discussions get muddled with cries of "pseudo-secularism" and in my opinion, such cries are not unjustified.
   
  For me personally (have written about it in another post which you might have missed) India needs to be "truly secular" and it is not. It is a different topic.
   
  In my India-view Hussain's right to paint any kind of pictures should extend to all forms of expressions concerning religions and equally for all religions. The State should have no cognition of any such an "animal" as religion (perhaps except the municipal provision of graveyards and cremation grounds)
   
  It is the "sensitivities" issue that squares the pitch because in Religion there are rarely sensitivities and oftener there are passions involved. The "pseudo-secularist" dart gets thrown when Hussain becomes a "cause" and the Danish cartoonist or Salman Rushdie get vilified. The dart hits dead-centre. 
   
  There are many more examples and possible scenarios to give on this issue and I erased them after writing them. Were harsh.
   
  But, what do you say Inder? Should there be respecting of all religious sensitivities or should it be an eternal open season for anyone to express any kind of a sentiment about anyone in whatever form of expression?  
   
  9. I smile. I express agreement with your statement that the Nation should understand it's subjects and that India has miserably failed in Kashmir AND YET you are insistent that I am actually not agreeing. Strange. Why? Because I did not write about the Kashmir conflict you say.  Thats is a bizzare deduction.
   
  10. You go on Inder to talk passionately about Kashmir "the bone" and India and Pakistan "the dogs" and go on about various other connected and unconnected issues. Your narrative is of a judge, jury and executioner with my (presumed by you) statements and reactions thrown in. You reach your conclusions. I do not see any scope for or intent in your having a dialogue with me about it. I can only listen.
   
  If you do want a dialogue on the "Kashmir issue" then it has to be over specifics otherwise we will both go the "emotional" route. But if you continue to make assumptions on my behalf without my words to substantiate them then it will be difficult to respond. If you will be kind enough to go over your own mail you might see the number of places you could with honesty reach the conclusion "Oh! but he didn not say that"
   
  Also Inder, just as you expect your points to be addressed and your questions to be answered, so do I. Will not dwell on it with examples. 
   
  Regards
   
  Kshmendra Kaul
   
  
inder salim <indersalim at gmail.com> wrote:
  Kshmendra writes :

1. You want to escape Inder. You cannot. Wherever you go, it will be
the Nation that will rule your life and through it's Laws determine
your extent of movement, your mode of movement, where you can live,
the kind of residence you can make, the quality of the air you
breathe, the quality of the food you eat, quality of the medicines you
get etc etc etc.

Inder you might escape 'This Nation' but you can only escape to
'Another Nation'. That one too will have it's regulatory Laws and that
one too will have it's problems. Show me the Utopia other than the one
where the mind can travel.

Inder, even the limits of your 'thinking' are regulated by the Laws of
the Nation. Controls over subliminal messaging and drugging under
legally enforced psychiatric interventions are just two examples.

In fact Inder, apart from a handful of Nations, in most other places
some of your own "Performance Art" will be totally unacceptable. Maybe
not sent to the gallows, but you would certainly be rotting behind
prison bars or sent for psychiatric treatment. Many countries
automatically choose themselves as examples where some of your kind of
"Performance Art" will bring you incarceration. At least on that score
Inder be a wee bit thankful.


Indersalim replies :

Dear Kshmendra,

I prefer not to answer the above in details. Unwittingly you have
given answer to all the questions raised by you. When a artist like
Chandermohan should be thankful in Gujarat that he is not sent to
gallows, but only imprisoned, then where is the need to answer. I
already, mentioned that our great Nation ' India' is brimming like
people like you, but you took it too personal. It is about the growing
intolerance. Creative people are at your mercy. Just read your
letter again, and see who is writing to whom. You are writing to an
artist ( you see me an artist ) and artists need to escape, to
imagine, to feel free, and be eccentric and be even psychic patients.
You have not been stung by creative bug, perhaps. But that is another
debate. Either you are too young, or have no idea of what it takes to
make an artist, a performance artist, a poet, a musician. You are not
even, that "sar faroshie ki tamana abb hamaray dil main hai " so,
forget about the debate on the true lovers of Nation Sate.

But what I am interested in is the debate. About Nation state,

Kshmendra Writes:

9. All your criticisms about India are genuine. The "state of the
Nation" tortures me as much as it tortures you. The difference again
is in our attitudes. You want to escape the Nation, I want to rectify
the Nation. Then there are some who want to destroy it or aid those
who seek to destroy it.

Indersalim replies:

Now see, Mr. Kshmendra, where you go wrong. Just few lines above, you
point out that we can not even breathe without the Nation's will. But
few lines later you point out that the State of Nation torture you. So
how come that you worship Ravana who abducts Sita Mata of your Nation
Sate. The fact is that India neither tortures you, nor it is imposing
any unpleasant Laws on you, because you understand the language of
Power quite well and you want to be part of it. So, who is vulnerable.
You or Me ? But still I dare. Hope you know that a cartoonist in Iran
has been Imprisoned? No, not for imitating Danish Cartoons, but for
lampooning the men at the helm. You, want that same treatment for
artists here. Is not that a fact. During Emergency, even Indira
Gandhi, was a more liberal than you. I remember, late M.L. Saqi once
told me that once Buddhists in Kashmir were once too intoxicated with
power and they would go to the extent of killing the opponent if he
happens to be outwitted in a discourse. Imagine, how we treat an
artist like Hussain. Like Shuddha, I too don't see Hussain as a
genius with a brush, but he deserves a space in India, a respectable
space, after all he is not a criminal, nor is he supporting Kashmir
Freedom Movement. Or, you imagine.

Kshmenrdra Writes :

10. Coming to Kashmir. I completely agree with your statement "The
Nation State should understand its subjects, from all perspectives,
and India has miserably failed in Kashmir.......Kashmir issue is/was
about ethics".

Inder salim replies :

Actually you disagree with my statement, because you have not written
anything on Kashmir conflict. I guess, from class 8th or so in my
school I know that Kashmir is a 'bone of contention between India and
Pakistan'. We all know, this is official stand of both the countries
as well. Now, for Allah and Ishwar's sake, please describe the nature
of this bone. Certainly, two dogs are fighting for a piece of bone
i.e. Kashmir, and those who are living like worms/ants inside the bone
are destined to suffer. Is that what you want to say? Now, suddenly,
few ( first 5) ants in 1990 got wings and learned how to bite the dog
who almost kept the bone in his mouth for the last 50 years. The big
dog ( Indian ) is angry, because its nature is such, and it naturally
began crushing these rebellious ants in random. This resulted in a
big chaos. As it happens in the animal Kingdom also, there was a
specie of ants within the Khalq of ants who were friendly to this
particular dog. They had no choice but to escape the wrath of Majority
of ants. Now some of ants, outside the bone, lean to bark like dogs,
much to the amusement of the big dog. (Please don't take it
personal, it is just like a cartoon, and I hope it is still not Iran )
.

Now, if you suggest me that Kashmir issue will die its own death one
day, because it is too complex, I may believe even, but you have to
convince the majority of people living there. Kashmiri Pandits are
likely not to return, please agree with me. So what is wrong if
suddenly India Pakistan will sit with Yasin Malik and his Huriyat
colleagues and sort out the problem. Ah, now here you will say that
Kashmiri Pandits deserve a chair to be part of that final discussion.
No sir, you have theoretically given up that claim, because you have
already merged your idea of Nation State with that of Indian. Or, was
there any different Kashmiri Pandit idea of a Kashmiri Nation State
while being in Kashmir ? No, never, They were always part and parcel
of that Nation which declared, time and again, the Kashmir territory
as unresolved. Now, if you and your Nation State don't want to
resolve, then there are some Sar Farosh who will compel you to come to
the table. Now, of course, you are with the powerful, and you always
feel winning. That is where ' ethics' begins.
I forwarded a little of Giorgio Agamben to you on purpose, because it
want to convey the gravity of the situation. Now take this

" When the rights of man are no longer the rights
of the citizen, then he is truly sacred, in the sense that this term
had in archaic Roman law: destined to die"

Imagine, 1-2 million people died in 1947 partition. Who is
responsible. When Pakistani Army massacred thousands and thousands in
Bangladesh where was the state? When Tutusi and Hutu killed each
other where was the state? It happened in Gujarat, it happened in
Kashmir. Tell me what is state. It is nothing by army, guns, tanks and
bombs and nuclear bombs besides no accountablility.

When we learn to talk a little about Socrates, who knew nothing other
than the ethics, its endless limits, to fashion the idea of a state,
we are transported to a new-new world. He was every thing, sacred,
profane, eros, empirical, spiritual, friend, lover and philosopher. He
had the chance to escape the prison, but he stayed, because his idea
of ' know they self' was impossible to imagine without the idea of
state. This is in comparison to Aristotle, who fled Athens when things
were tough. There is an element of ' hysterical' to his willingness of
drinking the Hemlok, but you also comes under ' performance art ' and
as I see from you letter to me, you are quite averse genera like that.
The point in the case here is that the State has a tendency to lapse
into a 'state of frigidity'. And sooner it becomes arrogant and
executes a hero like Donton Marat in France, Sufi Sarmad in India or
Mansoor Hallaj in Iran. There are many heroes who contributed to the
idea of state. The irony is that who sit on the throne of power always
quote the sacrificed while order executions. Even Ashoka the great is
believed to have ordered some death sentences during the height of his
Buddhist fame. Do you want to be part of that power, if so, then you
are on the right path, sir.

You know, this seat of power issued fatwa against the poet Abdul Ahad
Zargar for writing a poem. I hope you know that, you will certainly
criticize that Fatwa, but suddenly you will justify the action against
an artists for example, Hussain.
I don't know you, you make sharp turns, which is confusing. May be you
also criticize the violence of Bajrang Dal, but how I will understand
the opening lines of your letter, which leave no space for artists
like me, even to breathe.

Yesterday, I saw one more documentary film by Sara Singh at IIC. I am
sure if you had been there, you would have protested like you did
during Sanjay Kak's JesjhneAzadi. There was candid interview with
Hashim Qurashee, besides many other interviews by people from
Partition time. He was saying that people of Kashmir are caught
between three guns. He expressed anguish that Kashmiris are living
dogs life and what they have done to deserve all this. The film was
multi layered covering India Pakistan conflict and the pain of
Partition. What interested me most is that it was punctuated with
folk music of Kutch, Punjab, and Kashmir, as Sanjay Kak's was with
poetry or Bandh theatre. In short the historical narrative was given a
break to speak itself while singing the earth, its songs, its past.
How come, we have never given any space to discourses that include the
music. Simple music. Is our vocabulary more superior than the notes of
our shared folk song. I guess no.

This is another debate.
With regards and love to all
Inder salim


On 9/11/07, inder salim wrote:
> dear Mr. Kshmendra
>
> i cut paste the following by Giorgio Agamben. i will come back to u
> after some time.
> all this effort in the end is to bring some shower of love upon all the us....
>
> 1. In 1943, in a small jewish periodical, The Menorah Journal, Hannah
> Arendt published an article titled "We Refugees." In this brief but
> important essay, after sketching a polemical portrait of Mr. Cohn, the
> assimilated Jew who had been 150 percent German, 150 percent Viennese,
> and 150 percent French but finally realizes bitterly that "on ne
> parvient pas deux fois," Arendt overturns the condition of refugee and
> person without a country - in which she herself was living - in order
> to propose this condition as the paradigm of a new historical
> consciousness. The refugee who has lost all rights, yet stops wanting
> to be assimilated at any cost to a new national identity so as to
> contemplate his condition lucidly, receives, in exchange for certain
> unpopularity, an inestimable advantage: "For him history is no longer
> a closed book, and politics ceases to be the privilege of the
> Gentiles. He knows that the banishment of the Jewish people in Europe
> was followed immediately by that of the majority of the European
> peoples. Refugees expelled from one country to the next represent the
> avant-garde of their people."
>
> It is worth reflecting on the sense of this analysis, which today,
> precisely fifty years later, has not lost any of its currency. Not
> only does the problem arise with the same urgency, both in Europe and
> elsewhere, but also, in the context of the inexorable decline of the
> nation-state and the general corrosion of traditional legal-political
> categories, the refugee is perhaps the only imaginable figure of the
> people in our day. At least until the process of the dissolution of
> the nation-state and its sovereignty has come to an end, the refugee
> is the sole category in which it is possible today to perceive the
> forms and limits of a political community to come. Indeed, it may be
> that if we want to be equal to the absolutely novel tasks that face
> us, we will have to abandon without misgivings the basic concepts in
> which we have represented political subjects up to now (man and
> citizen with their rights, but also the sovereign people, the worker,
> etc.) and to reconstruct our political philosophy beginning with this
> unique figure.
>
> 2. The first appearance of refugees as a mass phenomenon occurred at
> the end of World War I, when the collapse of the Russian,
> Austro-Hungarian, and Ottoman empires, and the new order created by
> the peace treaties, profoundly upset the demographic and territorial
> structure of Central and Eastern Europe. In just a short time, a
> million and a half White Russians, seven hundred thousand Armenians,
> five hundred thousand Bulgarians, a million Greeks, and hundreds of
> thousands of Germans, Hungarians, and Romanians left their countries
> and moved elsewhere. To these masses in motion should be added the
> explosive situation determined by the fact that in the new states
> created by the peace treaties on the model of the nation-state (for
> example, in Yugoslavia and in Czechoslovakia), some 30 percent of the
> populations comprised minorities that had to be protected through a
> series of international treaties (the so-called Minority Treaties),
> which very often remained a dead letter. A few years later, the racial
> laws in Germany and the Civil War in Spain disseminated a new and
> substantial contingent of refugees throughout Europe.
>
> We are accustomed to distinguishing between stateless persons and
> refugees, but this distinction, now as then, is not as simple as it
> might at first glance appear. From the beginning, many refugees who
> technically were not stateless preferred to become so rather than to
> return to their homeland (this is the case of Polish and Romanian Jews
> who were in France or Germany at the end of the war, or today of
> victims of political persecution as well as of those for whom
> returning to their homeland would mean the impossibility of survival).
> On the other hand, the Russian, Armenian and Hungarian refugees were
> promptly denationalized by the new Soviet or Turkish governments, etc.
> It is important to note that starting with the period of World War I,
> many European states began to introduce laws which permitted their own
> citizens to be denaturalized and denationalized. The first was France,
> in 1915, with regard to naturalized citizens of "enemy" origins; in
> 1922 the example was followed by Belgium, which revoked the
> naturalization of citizens who had committed "anti-national" acts
> during the war; in 1926 the Fascist regime in Italy passed a similar
> law concerning citizens who had shown themselves to be "unworthy of
> Italian citizenship"; in 1933 it was Austria's turn, and so forth,
> until in 1935 the Nuremberg Laws divided German citizens into full
> citizens and citizens without political rights. These laws - and the
> mass statelessness that resulted - mark a decisive turning point in
> the life of the modern nation-state and its definitive emancipation
> from the naive notions of "people" and "citizen."
>
> This is not the place to review the history of the various
> international commissions through which the states, the League of
> Nations, and later, the United Nations stempted to deal with the
> problem of refugees - from the Nansen Bureau for Russian and Armenian
> refugees (1921), to the High Commission for Refugees from Germany
> (1936), the Intergovernmental Committee for Refugees (1938), and the
> International Refugee Organization of the United Nations (1946), up to
> the present High Commission for Refugees (1951) - whose activity,
> according to its statute, has only a "humanitarian and social," not
> political, character. The basic point is that every time refugees no
> longer represent individual cases but rather a mass phenomenon (as
> happened between the two wars, and has happened again now), both these
> organizations and the single states have proven, despite the solemn
> evocations of the inalienable rights of man, to be absolutely
> incapable not only of resolving the problem but also simply of dealing
> with it adequately. In this way the entire ques- tion was transferred
> into the hands of the police and of humanitarian organizations.
>
> 3. The reasons for this impotence lie not only in the selfishness and
> blindness of bureaucratic machines, but in the basic notions
> themselves that regulate the inscription of the native (that is, of
> life) in the legal order of the nation-state. Hannah Arendt titled
> chapter 5 of her book Imperialism, dedicated to the problem of
> refugees, "The Decline of the Nation-State and the End of the Rights
> of Man." This formulation - which inextricably links the fates of the
> rights of man and the modern national state, such that the end of the
> latter necessarily implies the obsolescence of the former - should be
> taken seriously. The paradox here is that precisely the figure that
> should have incarnated the rights of man par excellence, the refugee,
> constitutes instead the radical crisis of this concept. "The concept
> of the Rights of man," Arendt writes, "based on the supposed existence
> of a human being as such, collapsed in ruins as soon as those who
> professed it found themselves for the first time before men who had
> truly lost every other specific quality and connection except for the
> mere fact of being humans." In the nation-state system, the so-called
> sacred and inalienable rights of man prove to be completely
> unprotected at the very moment it is no longer possible to
> characterize them as rights of the citizens of a state. This is
> implicit, if one thinks about it, in the ambiguity of the very title
> of the Declaration of 1789, Declaration des droits de I'homme et du
> citoyen, in which it is unclear whether the two terms name two
> realities, or whether instead they form a hendiadys, in which the
> second term is, in reality, already contained in the first.
>
> That there is no autonomous space within the political order of the
> nation-state for something like the pure man in himself is evident at
> least in the fact that, even in the best of cases, the status of the
> refugee is always considered a temporary condition that should lead
> either to naturalization or to repatriation. A permanent status of man
> in himself is inconceivable for the law of the nation-state.
>
> 4. It is time to stop looking at the Declarations of Rights from 1789
> to the present as if they were proclamations of eternal, metajuridical
> values that bind legislators to respect them, and to consider them
> instead according to their real function in the modern state. In fact,
> the Rights of Man represent above all the original figure of the
> inscription of bare natural life in the legal-political order of the
> nation-state. That bare life (the human creature) which in the ancien
> regime belonged to God, and in the classical world was clearly
> distinct (as zoe) from political life (bios), now takes center stage
> in the state's concerns and becomes, so to speak, its terrestrial
> foundation. Nation-state means a state that makes nativity or birth
> (that is, of the bare human life) the foundation of its own
> sovereignty. This is the (not even very obscure) sense of the first
> three articles of the Declaration of 1789: only because it wrote the
> native element into the core of any political association (arts. 1 and
> 2) could it firmly tie (in art. 3) the principle of sovereignty to the
> nation (in accordance with its etymon, natio originally meant simply
> "birth"). The fiction implicit here is that birth immediately becomes
> nation, such that there can be no distinction between the two moments.
> Rights, that is, are attributable to man only in the degree to which
> he is the immediately vanishing presupposition (indeed, he must never
> appear simply as man) of the citizen.
>
> 5. If in the system of the nation-state the refugee represents such a
> disquieting element, it is above all because by breaking up the
> identity between man and citizen, between nativity and nationality,
> the refugee throws into crisis the original fiction of sovereignty.
> Single exceptions to this principle have always existed, of course;
> the novelty of our era, which threatens the very foundations of the
> nation-state, is that growing portions of humanity can no longer be
> represented within it. For this reason - that is, inasmuch as the
> refugee unhinges the old trinity of state/nation/territory - this
> apparently marginal figure deserves rather to be considered the
> central figure of our political history. It would be well not to
> forget that the first camps in Europe were built as places to control
> refugees, and that the progression - internment camps, concentration
> camps, extermination camps - represents a perfectly real filiation.
> One of the few rules the Nazis faithfully observed in the course of
> the "final solution" was that only after the Jews and gypsies were
> completely denationalized (even of that second-class citizenship that
> belonged to them after the Nuremberg laws) could they be sent to the
> extermination camps. When the rights of man are no longer the rights
> of the citizen, then he is truly sacred, in the sense that this term
> had in archaic Roman law: destined to die.
>
> 6. It is necessary resolutely to separate the concept of the refugee
> from that of the "Rights of man," and to cease considering the right
> of asylum (which in any case is being drastically restricted in the
> legislation of the European states) as the conceptual category in
> which the phenomenon should be impressed (a glance at the recent Test
> sul diritto d'asilo by A. Heller shows that today this can lead only
> to nauseating confusion). The refugee should be considered for what he
> is, that is, nothing less than a border concept that radically calls
> into question the principles of the nation-state and, at the same
> time, helps clear the field for a no-longer-delayable renewal of
> categories. In the meantime, the phenomenon of so-called illegal
> immigration into the countries of the European Community has assumed
> (and will increasingly assume in coming years, with a foreseen 20
> million immigrants from the countries of central Europe) features and
> proportions such as to fully justify this revolution in perspective.
> What the industrialized states are faced with today is a permanently
> resident mass of noncitizens, who neither can be nor want to be
> naturalized or repatriated. Often these noncitizens have a nationality
> of origin, but inasmuch as they prefer not to make use of their
> state's protection they are, like refugees, "stateless de facto" For
> these noncitizen residents, T. Hammar created the neologism denizens,
> which has the merit of showing that the concept citizen is no longer
> adequate to describe the sociopolitical reality of modern states. On
> the other hand, citizens of the advanced industrialized states (both
> in the United States and in Europe) manifest, by their growing
> desertion of the codified instances of political participation, an
> evident tendency to transform themselves into denizens, into
> conformity with the well-known principle that substantial assimilation
> in the presence of formal differences exasperates hatred and
> intolerance, xenophobic reactions and defensive mobilizations will
> increase.
>
> 7. Before the extermination camps are reopened in Europe (which is
> already starting to happen), nation-states must find the courage to
> call into question the very principle of the inscription of nativity
> and the trinity of state/nation/territory which is based on it. It is
> sufficient here to suggest one possible direction. As is well known,
> one of the options considered for the problem of Jerusalem is that it
> become the capital, contemporaneously and without territorial
> divisions, of two different states. The paradoxical condition of
> reciprocal extraterritoriality (or, better, aterritoriality) that this
> would imply could be generalized as a model of new international
> relations. Instead of two national states separated by uncertain and
> threatening boundaries, one could imagine two political communities
> dwelling in the same region and in exodus one into the other, divided
> from each other by a series of reciprocal extraterritorialities, in
> which the guiding concept would no longer be the ius of the citizen,
> but rather the refugium of the individual. In a similar sense, we
> could look to Europe not as an impossible "Europe of nations," whose
> catastrophic results can already be perceived in the short term, but
> as an aterritorial or extraterritorial space in which all the
> residents of the European states (citizens and noncitizens) would be
> in a position of exodus or refuge, and the status of European would
> mean the citizen's being-in-exodus (obviously also immobile). The
> European space would thus represent an unbridgeable gap between birth
> and nation, in which the old concept of people (which, as is well
> known, is always a minority) could again find a political sense by
> decisively opposing the concept of nation (which until now has unduly
> usurped it).
>
> This space would not coincide with any homogeneous national territory,
> nor with their topographical sum, but would act on these territories,
> making holes in them and dividing them topologically like in a Leiden
> jar or in a Moebius strip, where exterior and interior are
> indeterminate. In this new space, the European cities, entering into a
> relationship of reciprocal extraterritoriality, would rediscover their
> ancient vocation as cities of the world. Today, in a sort of
> no-man's-land between Lebanon and Israel, there are four hundred and
> twenty-five Palestinians who were expelled by the state of Israel.
> According to Hannah Arendt's suggestion, these men constitute "the
> avant-garde of their people." But this does not necessarily or only
> mean that they might form the original nucleus of a future national
> state, which would probably resolve the Palestinian problem just as
> inadequately as Israel has resolved the Jewish question. Rather, the
> no-man's-land where they have found refuge has retroacted on the
> territory of the state of Israel, making holes in it and altering it
> in such a way that the image of that snow-covered hill has become more
> an internal part of that territory than any other region of Heretz
> Israel. It is only in a land where the spaces of states will have been
> perforated and topologically deformed, and the citizen will have
> learned to acknowledge the refugee that he himself is, that man's
> political survival today is imaginable.
>


-- 

http://indersalim.livejournal.com
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