[Reader-list] understanding politics:coming Indian Parliamentary Elections

[Inder Salim]

…today's society is tending toward a generalization of this procedure
to all citizens, placing the population under permanent suspicion and
surveillance. politics has “contaminated itself with law” in the state
of exception. Because “only human action is able to cut the
relationship between violence and law”, it becomes increasingly
difficult within the state of exception for humanity to act against
the State[: "The political body thus has became a criminal body"

The above is Giorgio Agamben, the well known Italian philosopher.

Given the Election Time in India, normally after quoting such a loaded
passage , talking on conflicts of immediate nature becomes imperative.
But I want to see it further down the line ,as the same person says
“our task would be to radically differentiate "pure violence" from…..,
instead of tying them together”

So what is the nature of this animal called violence? We all known how
psychologically we are hooked to horror stories, of all kinds, of
incest, of murder, war stories and what not. Novel and  cinema has
thrived on this human aspect. So there must be a reason or so; and the
most frightening one, perhaps, is that our own hearts must be hiding
some form of violence inside, and that is why when suddenly some thing
explodes in the middle of a society, we see it like we see theatre.
Beyond what we know as the Media turning such event into a spectacle,
I am thinking of Arts.  The Arts  ( speaking in general ) only lifts
the ideas and moulds them to the compulsions of different mediums
chosen for expressions, both individual and collective.

So we have a Triangle like thing, At the one end of it the Arts which
we celebrate, and the other is the politics out there, and the third
one indeed is our inner world. With Arts, we know there are signs and
rhythms and performances which interpolate and throws out some
unpredictable possibility to see the door for opening the other two
angles of the triangle.

So with the other two angles of the triangle,  we have two situations:
one where there is calm, but violence is within like ‘fish in the
river, and the other one is  isolated Fish as Piranha, much more
lethal than actual. In the later case we know that our only choice is
to run, and with the former we have alwyas hope.

That is too obvious, but see the paradox: We have a  school boy in
Germany who rampantly kills scores of his innocent friends in the
school, or the Austrian father who locked his daughter in the basement
for decades and even produced children from incest. We have all the
acidic expressions to explain the Mumbai’s  villain Ajmal Kasab, but
we don’t have system to deal the violence which is sitting like a
kundalani-snake in our so called developed societies. After all, India
is pursuing itself on the paths which leads a nation to such a
developed stage, but is that development ?

As Agamben often stresses, that ‘there is a very thin line between
Democracy and Fascism’ , there also is very thin line between this
isolated ‘piranha’ and ‘the fish’ who enjoy the depths of river. Both
the kinds  of fish plus water are structures  of our society, and
hence any attempt to treat it with a totalitarian and biased approach
will give rise to further violence.

I quote Hannah Ardent “Most of the evils of our time,  arise from
misguided attempts to moralize politics or politicize morality “  She
was on a mission to keep politics pure. It was almost like a very
passionate zeal to understand violence without any pre-condition. For
Ardent,  Politics was a precious cultural achievement rather than a
regrettable social necessity,

 I further quote text written on her
¬Politics required us to set aside all sentiments of pride,
indignation, shame or resentment, as well as any pretensions to
superior expertise, in order to become responsive, intelligent
citizens willing to negotiate all our differences on a basis of
complete equality. Politics, in short, was the opposite of
totalitarianism, and it depended on an open-hearted love for "human
plurality"”,

So far I quoted extensively two  political scientists of our times.
Although Arendt criticized  Racism and Veitman War, she nevertheless
celebrated Americanism, and on the other hand Agamben even refused to
visit America in 2004 simply because he saw giving Biometric
information to Visa authorities violates his fundamental existential
right of being: Zoe

In spite of two views of America, we have Arendt and Agamben talking
intensely about the need to , as I quoted earlier, “ differentiate
violence “

 Arendt argued that  the relationship between the world of public
politics and that of personal morality a lot in common, in that
neither political issues nor moral ones could ever be settled
definitively. So there is a constant demand of the subjectivities to
interact and alter the norm, and revaluate the sign.

Similarly, for Agamben” Modern politics has been governed by a 'secret
link' between bare life and politics.”. so the human being is in the
process of unraveling itself.

 During the hunger strikes at Guantánamo Bay prison, Agamben observes
that news of forced feedings began to surface in the autumn of
2005……which was a breach of the government’s power and was against the
rights of the prisoners.

Now this squarely means that the American policies mixed morality with
politics and finally created evils from such actions.

So under the situation , is it immoral to not-to-vote. if the
Political body  has become a criminal body, then why we cant see it as
an act against the state. A silent but potent act.

However, Arendt who was a radical feminist as well,  emphasized that
it is “the audience-centeredness that renders the  political…” and she
even thought Politics even much superior forms of expressions, even
bettter than poetry etc.

So not to vote, must be political…

To be contd….

with love
inder salim







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http://indersalim.livejournal.com