There was only ever one debate to be had, that of being versus becoming. This card
is extremely complicated and if you even try to answer it you will lose.
Bataille 1985. Georges. "The labyrinth." trans. Allan Stoekl, Visions of Excess, ed. Allan Stoekl
(Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1985) 5 (1985). The Labyrinth (1930)
**This evidence is gender-modified – pronouns are replaced in brackets
Negativity, in other words, the integrity of determination - Hegel
I. THE INSUFFICIENCY OF BEINGS
[Humans] act in order to be. This must not be understood in the negative sense of conservation
(conserving in order not to be thrown out of existence by death), but in the positive sense of a
tragic and incessant combat for a satisfaction that is almost beyond reach. From incoherent
agitation to crushing sleep, from chatter to turning inward, from overwhelming love to
hardening hate, existence sometimes weakens and sometimes accomplishes "being". And not
only do states have a variable intensity, but different beings "are" unequally. A dog that runs and
barks seems "to be" more than a mute and clinging sponge, the sponge more than the water in
which it lives, an influential [human] more than a vacant passerby.
In the first movement, where the force that the master has at [their] disposal puts the slave at
[their] mercy, the master deprives the slave of a part of [their] being. Much later, in return, the
"existence" of the master is impoverished to such an extent that it distances itself from the
material elements of life. The slave enriches [their] being to the extent that [they] enslaves these
elements by the work to which [their] impotence condemns him.
The contradictory movements of degradation and growth attain, in the diffuse development of
human existence, a bewildering complexity. The fundamental separation of [humans] into
masters and slaves is only the crossed threshold, the entry into the world of
specialized functions where personal "existence" empties itself of its contents; a
[human] is no longer anything but a part of being, and [their] life , engaged in the
game of creation and destruction that goes beyond it, appears as a degraded particle
lacking reality . The very fact of assuming that knowledge is a function throws the
philosopher back into the world of petty inconsistencies and dissections of lifeless organs.
Isolated as much from action as from the dreams that turn action away and echo it in the
strange depths of animated life, [they] led astray the very being that [they] chose as the object of
[their] uneasy comprehension. "Being" increases in the tumultuous agitation of a life
that knows no limits; it wastes away and disappears if [they] who is at the same
"being" and knowledge mutilates himself by reducing himself to knowledge. This
deficiency can grow even greater if the object of knowledge is no longer being in
general but a narrow domain, such as an organ, a mathematical question, a juridical
form. Action and dreams do not escape this poverty (each time they are confused with the
totality of being), and, in the multicolored immensity of human lives, a limitless
insufficiency is revealed; life, finding its endpoint in the happiness of a bugle blower or the
snickering of a village chair-renter, is no longer the fulfillment of itself, but is its own ludicrous
degradation - its fall is comparable to that of a king onto the floor.
At the basis of human life there exists a principle of insufficiency. In isolation, each [human]
sees the majority of others as incapable or unworthy of "being". There is found, in all free and
slanderous conversation, as an animating theme, the awareness of the vanity and the emptiness
of our fellowmen; an apparent stagnant conversation betrays the blind and impotent flight of all
life toward an indefinable summit.
The sufficiency of each being is endlessly contested by every other. Even the look that expresses
love and admiration comes to me as a doubt concerning my reality. A burst of laughter or the
expression of repugnance greets each gesture, each sentence or each oversight through which
my profound insufficiency is betrayed - just as sobs would be the response to my sudden death,
to a total and irremediable omission.
This uneasiness on the part of everyone grows and reverberates, since at each detour, with a
kind of nausea , [humans] discover their solitude in empty night . The universal night in
which everything finds itself - and soon loses itself - would appear to be the existence for
nothing, without influence, equivalent to the absence of being, were it not for human nature that
emerges within it to give a dramatic importance to being and life. But this absurd night manages
to empty itself of "being" and meaning each time a [human] discovers within it human destiny,
itself locked in turn in a comic impasse, like a hideous and discordant trumpet blast. That
which , in me, demands that there be " being" in the world , "being" and not just the
manifest insufficiency of human or nonhuman nature, necessarily projects (at one time or
another and in reply to human chatter) divine sufficiency across space, like the reflection
of an impotence , of a servilely accepted malady of being .
II. THE COMPOSITE CHARACTER OF BEINGS AND THE IMPOSSIBILITY OF FIXING
EXISTENCE IN ANY GIVEN Ipse
Being in the world is so uncertain that I can project it where I want - outside of me. It is a
clumsy man, still incapable of eluding the intrigues of nature, who locks being in the me.
Being in fact is found NOWHERE and it was an easy game for a sickly malice to discover it
to be divine, at the summit of a pyramid formed by the multitude of beings, which has at its base
the immensity of the simplest matter.
Being could be confined to the electron if ipseity were precisely not lacking in this simple
element. The atom itself has a complexity that is too elementary to be determined ipsely. The
number of particles that make up a being intervene in a sufficiently heavy and clear way in the
constitution of its ipseity; if a knife has its handle and blade indefinitely replaced, it loses even
the shadow of its ipseity; it is not the same for a machine which, after six or five years, loses each
of the numerous elements that constituted it when new. But the ipseity that is finally
apprehended with difficulty in the machine is still only shadowlike.
Starting from an extreme complexity, being imposes on reflection more than the precariousness
of a fugitive appearance, but this complexity - displaced little by little becomes in turn the
labyrinth where what had suddenly come forward strangely loses its way.
A sponge is reduced by pounding to a dust of cells; this living dust is formed by a multitude of
isolated beings, and is lost in the new sponge that it reconstitutes. A siphonophore fragment is
by itself an autonomous being, yet the whole siphonophore, to which this fragment belongs, is
itself hardly different from a being possessing unity. Only with linear animals (worms, insects,
fish, reptiles, birds and mammals) do the living individual forms definitively lose the faculty of
constituting aggregates bound together in a single body. But while societies of nonlinear animals
do not exist, superior animals form aggregates without ever giving rise to corporeal
links; [humans] as well as beavers or ants form societies of individuals whose bodies are
autonomous. But in regard to being, is this autonomy the final appearance, or is it simply error?
In men, all existence is tied in particular to language, whose terms determine its modes of
appearance within each person. Each person can only represent [their] total existence, if only in
[their] own eyes, through the medium of words. Words spring forth in [their] head, laden with a
host of human or superhuman lives in relation to which [they] privately exists. Being
depends on the mediation of words, which cannot merely present it arbitrarily as
"autonomous being," but which must present it profoundly as "being in relation".
One need only follow, for a short time, the traces of the repeated circuits of words to discover, in
a disconcerting vision, the labyrinthine structure of the human being . What is
commonly called knowing - when a [human] knows [their] neighbour - is never
anything but existence composed for an instant (in the sense that all existence
composes itself - thus the atom composes its unity from variable electrons ), which
once made of these two beings a whole every bit as real as its parts. A limited number of
exchanged phrases, no matter how conventional, sufficed to create the banal interpenetration of
two existing juxtaposed regions. The fact that after this short exchange the [human] is aware of
knowing [their] neighbour is opposed to a meeting without recognition in the street, as well as
to the ignorance of the multitude of beings that one never meets, in the same way that life is
opposed to death. The knowledge of human beings thus appears as a mode of
biological connection, unstable but just as real as the connections between cells in tissue.
The exchange between two human particles in fact possesses the faculty of surviving momentary
separation.
A [human] is only a particle inserted in unstable and entangled wholes. These
wholes are composed in personal life in the form of multiple possibilities, starting
with a knowledge that is crossed like a threshold - and the existence of the particle
can in no way be isolated from this composition, which agitates it in the midst of a
whirlwind of ephemerids. This extreme instability of connections alone permits
one to introduce, as a puerile but convenient illusion, a representation of isolated
existence turning in on itself.
In the most general way, every isolable element of the universe always appears as a
particle that can enter into composition with a whole that transcends it. Being is
only found as a whole composed of particles whose relative autonomy is maintained. These two
principles dominate the uncertain presence of an ipse being across a distance that never
ceases to put everything in question . Emerging in universal play as unforeseeable chance,
with extreme dread imperatively becoming the demand for universality, carried away to vertigo
by the movement that composes it, the ipse being that presents itself as a universal is
only a challenge to the diffuse immensity that escapes its precarious violence, the
tragic negation of all that is not its own bewildered phantom 's chance. But, as a man,
this being falls into the meanders of the knowledge of [their] fellowmen, which absorbs [their]
substance in order to reduce it to a component of what goes beyond the virulent madness of
[their] autonomy in the total night of the world.
Abdication and inevitable fatigue - due to the fact that " being" is, par excellence, that which,
desired to the point of dread, cannot be endured - plunge human beings into a foggy
labyrinth formed by the multitude of "acquaintances" with which signs of life and
phrases can be exchanged. But when [they] escapes the dread of "being" through this flight
- a "being" that is autonomous and isolated in night - a [human] is thrown back into
insufficiency, at least if [they] cannot find outside of himself the blinding flash that [they] had
been unable to endure within himself, without whose intensity [their] life is but an
impoverishment, of which [they] feels obscurely ashamed.
III. THE STRUCTURE OF THE LABYRINTH
Emerging out of an inconeivable void into the play of beings, as a lost satellite of two phantoms
(one with a bristly beard, the other softer, her head decorated with a bun), it is in the father and
mother who transcend [them] that the miniscule human being first encountered the illusion of
sufficiency. In the complexity and entanglement of wholes, to which the human particle belongs,
this satellite-like mode of existence never entirely disappears. A particular being not only acts as
an element of a shapeless and structureless whole (a part of the world of unimportant
"acquaintances" and chatter), but also as a peripheral element orbiting around a nucleus where
being hardens. What the lost child had found in the self-assured existence of the all-powerful
beings who took care of [them] is now sought by the abadoned [human] wherever knots and
concentrations are formed throughout a vast incoherence. Each particular being delegates to the
group of those situated at the centre of the multitudes the task of realizing the inherent totality
of "being". [they] is content to be a part of a total existence, which even in the simplest cases
retains a diffuse character. Thus relatively stable wholes are produced, whose centre is a city, in
its early form a corolla that encloses a double pistil of sovereign and god. In the case where
many cities abdicate their central function in favour of a single city, an empire forms around a
capital where sovereignity and the gods are concentrated; the gravitation around a centre then
degrades the existence of peripheral cities, where the organs that constituted the totality of
being wilt. By degrees, a more and more complex movement of group composition raises to
the point of universality the human race , but it seems that universality, at the
summit, causes all existence to explode and decomposes it with violence. The
universal god destroys rather than supports the human aggregates that raise [their]
ghost. [they] himself is only dead, whether a mythical delirium set [them] up to be adored as a
cadaver covered with wounds, or whether through [their] very universality [they] becomes,
more than any other, incapable of stopping the loss of being with the cracked partitions of
ipseity.
IV. THE MODALITIES OF COMPOSITION AND DECOMPOSITION OF BEING
The city that little by little empties itself of life, in favour of a more brilliant and
attractive city, is the expressive image of the play of existence engaged in
composition. Because of the composing attraction, composition empties elements of the
greatest part of their being, and this benefits the centre - in other words, it benefits composite
being. There is the added fact that, in a given domain, if the attraction of a certain centre is
stronger than that of a neighbouring centre, the second centre then goes into decline. The action
of powerful poles of attraction across the human world thus reduces, depending on their force of
resistance, a multitude of personal beings to the state of empty shadows, especially when the
pole of attraction on which they depend itself declines, due to the action of another more
powerful pole. Thus if one imagines the effects of an influential current of attraction on a more
or less arbitrarily isolated form of activity, a style of clothing created in a certain city devalues
the clothes worn up to that time and, consequently, it devalues those who wear them within the
limits of the influence of this city. This devaluation is stronger if, in a neighbouring country, the
fashions of a more brilliant city have already outclassed those of the first city. The objective
character of these relations is registered in reality when the contempt and laughter manifested
in a given centre are not compensated for by anything elsewhere, and when they exert an
effective fascination. The effort made on the periphery to "keep up with fashion" demonstrates
the inability of the peripheral particles to exist by themselves.
Laughter intervenes in these value determinations of being as the expression of the circuit of
movements of attraction across a human field. It manifests itself each time a change in level
suddenly occurs: it characterizes all vacant lives as ridiculous. A kind of incandescent joy - the
explosive and sudden revelation of the presence of being - is liberated each time a striking
appearance is contrasted with its absence, with the human void. Laughter casts a glance,
charged with the mortal violence of being, into the void of being, into the void of life.
But laughter is not only the composition of those it assembles into a unique convulsion; it most
often decomposes without consequence, and sometimes with a virulence that is so pernicious
that it even puts in question composition itself, and the wholes across which it functions.
Laughter attains not only the peripheral regions of existence, and its object is not only the
existence of fools and children (of those who remain vacant); through a necessary reversal, it is
sent back from the child to its father and from the periphery to the centre, each time the father
or the centre in turn reveals an insufficiency comparable to that of the particles that orbit
around it. Such a central insufficiency can be ritually revealed (in saturnalia or in a festival of the
ass as well as in the puerile grimaces of the father amusing [their] child). It can be revealed by
the very action of children or the "poor" each time exhaustion withers and weakens authority,
allowing its precarious character to be seen. In both cases, a dominant necessity manifests itself,
and the profound nature of being is disclosed. Being can complete itself and attain the
menacing grandeur of imperative totality; this accomplishment only serves to project it
with a greater violence into the vacant night. The relative insufficiency of peripheral
existences is absolute insufficiency in total existence. Above knowable existences, laughter
traverses the human pyramid like a network of endless waves that renew themselves in all
directions. This reverberation convulsion chokes, from one end to the other, the
innumerable being of [human] - opened at the summit by the agony of God in a black
night.
V. THE MONSTER IN THE NIGHT OF THE LABYRINTH
Being attains the blinding flash in tragic annihilation. Laughter only assumes its
fullest impact on being at the moment when, in the fall that it unleashes, a representation of
death is cynically recognised. It is not only the composition of elements that
constitutes the incandescence of being, but its decomposition in its mortal form .
The difference in levels that provokes common laughter - which oppose s the lack of an
absurd life to the plenitude of successful being - can be replaced by that which opposes
the summit of imperative elevation to the dark abyss that obliterates all existence.
Laughter is thus assumed by the totality of being. Renouncing the avaricious malice of the
scapegoat, being itself, to the extent that it is the sum of existences at the limits of the night, is
spasmodically shaken by the idea of the ground giving way beneath its feet. It is in universality
(where, due to solitude, the possibility of facing death through war appears) that the necessity of
engaging in a struggle, no longer with an equal group but with nothingness, becomes clear. THE
UNIVERSAL resembles a bull, sometimes absorbed in the nonchalance of animality and
abandoned to the secret paleness of death, and sometimes hurled by the rage of ruin into the
void ceaselessly opened before it by a skeletal torero. But the void it meets is also the nudity it
espouses TO THE EXTENT THAT IT IS A MONSTER lightly assuming many crimes, and it is no
longer, like the bull, the plaything of nothingness, because nothingness itself is its plaything; it
only throws itself into nothingness in order to tear it apart and to illuminate the night for an
instant, with an immense laugh - a laugh it never would have attained if this nothingness had
not totally opened beneath its feet.<b>Georges Bataille</b>
Everything is infinitely divisible. This is the paradox of infinite identity. You are an
atom, a quantum, in Borges’ library, which contains the true story of your own
death.
A related paradox: this is a library that is necessarily infinite, simultaneously
taking up all space, yet leaving all space vacant. This library casts a shadow in
which you stand. You are the limit and the surplus of the archive, an irreducible
atomic shadow of its potential having already been formed.
Lippit 05. Akira Mizuta Lippit, professor of comparative literature at the University of
Southern California, Atomic Light (Shadow Optics), Minnesota Press: 2005, pg. 6
Every word written and unwritten , yet and never to be written , endlessly divided : a
record of every event that has occurred, will occur , and will never occur . Future
histories and histories of the future, minutely detailed and timeless, an archive of timeless time
and history, of the untimely nature of both . Each moment divided into endless variations,
infinitely. You are also here , in it, as a figure of the future ; as is your future , your
future death , which has been archived a priori . (You are in the universe, but you are also
a figure of the universe itself.) Borges's archive includes, among everything, "the true story
of your death." It includes the authentic narrative of your death (as well as,
presumably, an infinite number of false accounts), a death that has already happened ,
will have (already) happened when it finally arrives. Perhaps it has already happened ,
and you are only an afterthought , its shadow , a trace of your (own) death , which is
there already , as if another's .
In the vast archive of an infinitely divisible space and time , you are an atom : singular
and indivisible: a " hypothetical body , so infinitely small as to be incapable of further
division"(Oxford EnglishDictionary)."Atomism, the preeminent discourse of Western
materialism (at least in antiquity and, more convincingly, since the seventeenth century)," says
Daniel Tiffany, "contends that the authentic material existence of any body (as opposed to
its merely phenomenal appearance) consists of infinitesimal and irreducible particles called
atoms."5 Because of the invisibility of atoms , atomism relies, says Tiffany, on images .
Your death imagines you as a hypothesis . Atomic space emerges from a universe
divided infinitely to the point of a hypothetical irreducibility . The logic of the atom , the
atomology, sustains a paradox : infinite divisibility that ends, despite the endless nature of
atomic division, in a hypothetical figure , small and indivisible , and also perhaps
invisible . Gilles
Deleuze calls this effect of "pure becoming"
"the paradox of infinite identity ."6 You are an atom in
Borges's Library , an infinite identity , infinitely
divisible .
The Library of Babel exemplifies the promise of all archives, the fantasy and "fundamental law
of the Library": totality . And so it "exists ab aeterno," in and toward the future, always
promised , imminent , here already but only ever as yet to come .7 The totality of the
archive effects an architectural temporality that is virtually universal. As a structure, an arkhe, it
consumes almost all space , all future space , except for an irreducible sliver , which
always remains as a surplus of the archive . In this small, indivisible, and atomic crevice in
space and time, you reside, under the archive's shadow. This is the paradox of the Library
of Babel , of its law, time, and fantasy: the universal Library takes all space , continues to
expand , but always leaves space ; its taking is a form of leaving , which casts, in the
difference between totality and virtuality, a shadow . A shadow made possible only by the
imaginary and hypothetical space always left vacant by the archive . A surplus space of
images that can never be filled . You are there . You are the limit and surplus of the
archive—an irreducible , atomic shadow of the archive.
But archives burn; and the archive continues to burn. You entered the room
expecting this debate to be a proper archive, but that did not happen, has not
happened, yet is always already happening. This is the anarchive – we are the
unarchivable
Lippit 05. Akira Mizuta Lippit, professor of comparative literature at the University of
Southern California, Atomic Light (Shadow Optics), Minnesota Press: 2005, pg. 10
A science of memory and commemoration, psychoanalysis forges an archaeology of repression
and of history, bringing them together in an uneasy stasis. A heterogeneous archive of the
memorial and historial. In The Gift of Death, Derrida says that "history never effaces what it
buries ; it always keeps within itself the secret of whatever it encrypts , the secret of
its secret . This is a secret history of kept secrets ."23 Psychoanalysis brings together the
flows of memory and history, the personal and impersonal, interior and exterior lines of
demarcation: the elements that at once make a heterogeneous thinking possible, and an
archive—by definition—impos- sible. Psychoanalysis, in Derrida's formulation, makes another
archive possible, an alternate archive split against itself, against the very law of the archive, a
shadow archive in the distance and alterity of the other. An outlaw or other archive , an
archive of the other, an unconscious archive. An archive made possible by the
heterogeneity instituted by repression and the secret. "As if one could not," Derrida writes,
"recall and archive the very thing one represses, archive it while repressing it (because
repression is an archivization), that is to say, to archive otherwise, to repress the archive while
archiving the repression."24
To archive otherwise—anarchivize .
The
open archive exposes, it reveals outward. It orients itself toward the outside , forming a kind
of public interiority , opening itself to and onto a public space. The other archive, the
shadow or anarchive , represents an impossible task of the archive : to protect the
secret , its heterogeneity , and divide the archive from itself. It is an archive that, in the
very archival task of preserving, seeks to repress, efface, and destine its own interiority to
oblivion. But to what end? And how does such an anarchive address the public from which it
conceals? Giorgio Agamben, following Michel Fou- cault, formulates a definition of the archive
that reflects the possibilities of enunciation within the vicissitudes of memory. Memory and
oblivion, and the said, sayable, and never said determine for Agamben a private and universal
archive of sorts: "Between the obsessive memory of tradition, which knows only what has been
said, and the exaggerated thoughtlessness of oblivion, which cares only for what was never said,
the archive is the unsaid or sayable inscribed in everything by virtue of being enunciated; it is
the fragment of memory that is always forgotten in the act of saying 'I. '"25 A
universal archive formed around and upon an oblivion of the subject. (To this
Derrida adds: "Once I speak I am never and no longer myself, alone and unique. It is a very
strange contract—both paradoxical and terrifying—that binds infinite responsibility to silence
and secrecy.")26 Agamben's fragment of memory , lost at the moment of uttering "I,"
destines the word, torn from the subject in the moment of enunciation and
immediately forgotten , to the archive of secrets , an unconscious of the spoken, the
anarchive . "The archive is thus the mass of the non-semantic inscribed in every
meaningful discourse as a function of enunciation ; it is the dark margin encircling
and limiting every concrete speech act ."27
Agamben's "dark margin" of nonsemantic inscriptions encircles the other archive, an alternative
archive outside the archive, anarchive and pararchive. A secret archive and an archive of
secrets , this asemantic archive survives the archive's destruction . It is founded on
its ruin , against the law of the archive as a paradox. It protects what will have been a
secret, the topology of the "secret history of kept secrets." The other archive , shadow and
anarchive , preserves the history that has never been a history , a history before
history , destroyed , as it were, before becoming history as such . An archive of that
which has not been —a universe of the unarchivable .
We would tag this card but that would conceal the mystery
Baudrillard, ’10 (Jean, Carnival and Cannibal; Ventriloquous Evil, p. 70-73) [m leap]
IN THE PROMETHEAN PERSPECTIVE of unlimited growth, there is not merely
the desire to make everything function , to liberate everything, but also the desire to make
everything signify. Everything is to be brought under the aegis of meaning (and
reality ). In some cases we know that knowledge will forever escape us. But in the immense majority of cases we do not even
know what has disappeared and has always already eluded us. Now,
science makes a systematic effort to
eradicate this secret area, this 'constellation of the mystery "' and to eliminate this
demarcation line between the violable and the inviolable. All that is concealed must be
revealed; everything must be reducible to analysis . Hence the whole effort (particularly since
the death of God, who restrained this attempt to break open the natural world) leads to an extension of the field of
meaning (of knowledge, analysis, objectivity and reality). Now, everything inclines us to think that this
accumulation, this over-production, this proliferation of meaning constitutes
little like the accumulation of greenhouse gases)
a virtual threat for
the species (and for
(a
the planet), since it
is gradually destroying , through experimentation, that domain of the inviolable that
serves us, as it were, as an ozone layer and protects us from
the
worst—from the lethal
irradiation and obliteration of our symbolic space . Shouldn't we then, work precisely in the
opposite direction, to extend the domain of the inviolable? To restrain the production of meaning the way they are
trying to restrain the production of greenhouse gases, to
reinforce that constellation of the mystery
and
that intangible barrier that serves as a screen against the welter of information,
interaction and universal exchange. This countervailing work
exists—it
is the work
of thought. Not the analytic work of an understanding of causes, of the dissection
of an object-world, not the work of a critical, en-lightened thought, but another
form of understanding
or intelligence,
which is the intelligence of the mystery.
We propose being as the queer suicide terrorist before the law –an explosion of
self-sacrifice with a bomb, in favor of unsettling the violent definitions of
subjectivity. This is a complete refusal of western notions of subjectivity and a
universal humanity. We are machinic organisms, metal and environment together
in a messy fusion. Where does life begin and end? This question is only answerable
from a position of reason and power that we want to blow up.
Puar 07. Jasbir Puar, professor of women’s and gender studies at Rutgers University, Duke
University Press: Durham, NC and London, UK, pg. 216
The fact that we approach suicide bombing with such trepidation , in contrast to how we
approach the violence of colonial domination , indicates the symbolic violence that
shapes our understanding of what constitutes ethically and politically illegitimate
violence .- Ghassan Hage, "'Comes a Time We Are All Enthusiasm'"
Ghassan Hage wonders "why it is that suicide bombing cannot be talked about without being
condemned first," noting that without an unequivocal condemnation, one is a "morally
suspicious person" because "only un- qualified condemnation will do." He asserts. "There is a
clear political risk in trying to explain suicide bombings ."33 With such risks in mind,
my desire here is to momentarily suspend this dilemma by combining an analysis of these
representational stakes with a reading of the forces of affect, of the body, of matter. In pondering
the modalities of this kind of terrorist, one notes a pastiche of oddities: a body machined
together through metal and flesh , an assemblage of the organic and the inorganic ;
a death not of the Self nor of the Other , but both simultaneously , and, perhaps more
accurately, a death scene that obliterates the Hegelian self/other dialectic altogether.
Self-annihilation is the ultimate form of resistance , and ironically, it acts as selfpreservation , the preservation of symbolic self enabled through the "highest cultural
capital" of martyrdom, a giving of life to the future of political struggles -not at all a sign of
"disinterest in living a meaningful life." As Hage notes, in this limited but nonetheless trenchant
economy of meaning, suicide bombers are "a sign of life" emanating from the violent
conditions of life's impossibility , the "impossibility of making a life. "" This body forces a
reconciliation of opposites through their inevitable collapse- a perverse habitation of
contradiction.
Achille Mbembe's and brilliant meditation on necropolitics notes that the historical basis of
sovereignty that is reliant upon a notion of (western) political rationality begs for a more
accurate framing: that of life and death, the subjugation of life to the power of death. Mbembe
attends not only to the representational but also to the informational productivity of the
(Palestinian) suicide bomber. Pointing to the becomings of a suicide bomber, a corporeal
experiential of "ballistics," he asks, "What place is given to life, death, and the human body
(especially the wounded or slain body)?" Assemblage here points to the inability to clearly
delineate a temporal, spatial, energetic, or molecular distinction between a discrete
biological body and technology ; the entities , particles , and elements come
together , flow , break apart , interface , skim off each other , are never stable , but
are defined through their continual interface, not as objects meeting but as multiplicities
emerging from interactions. The dynamite strapped onto the body of a suicide bomber is not
merely an appendage or prosthetic; the intimacy of weapon with body reorients the
assumed spatial integrity (coherence and concreteness) and individuality of the body that
is the mandate of intersectional identities : instead we have the body-weapon . The
ontology of the body renders it a newly becoming body :
The candidate for martyrdom transforms his or her body into a mask that hides the
soon-to-be-detonated weapon . Unlike the tank or the missile that is clearly visible, the
weapon carried in the shape of the body is invisible . Thus concealed, it forms part of
the body . It is so intimately part of the body that at the time of its detonation it annihilates the
body of its bearer, who carries with it the bodies of others when it does not reduce them to
pieces. The body does not simply conceal a weapon. The body is transformed into a
weapon , not in a metaphorical sense but in a truly ballistic sense .,1
Temporal narratives of progression are upturned as death and becoming fuse into
one: as one's body dies, one's body becomes the mask , the weapon , the suicide
bomber . Not only does the ballistic body come into being without the aid of visual cues
marking its transformation, it also "carries with it the bodies of others." Its own
penetrative energy sends shards of metal and torn flesh spinning off into the ether. The bodyweapon does not play as metaphor, nor in the realm of meaning and epistemology, but forces us
ontologically anew to ask: What kinds of information does the ballistic body impart? These
bodies, being in the midst of becoming , blur the insides and the outsides , infecting
transformation through sensation , echoing knowledge via reverberation and
vibration . The echo is a queer temporality-in the relay of affective information between and
amid beings, the sequence of reflection, repetition, resound, and return (but with a difference, as
in mimicry)-and brings forth waves of the future breaking into the present. Gayatri Spivak,
prescient in drawing our attention to the multivalent tex- tuality of suicide in "Can the Subaltern
Speak," reminds us in her latest ruminations that suicide terrorism is a modality of
expression and communication for the subaltern (there is the radiation of heat, the stench
of burning flesh, the impact of metal upon structures and the ground, the splattering of blood,
body parts, skin):
Suicidal resistance is a message inscribed on the body when no other means will get through. It
is both execution and mourning , for both self and other . For you die with me for the
same cause, no matter which side you are on . Because no matter who you are, there are no
designated killees in suicide bombing. No matter what side you are on, because I cannot talk to
you, you won't respond to me, with the implication that there is no dishonor in such shared and
innocent death. 36
We have the proposal that there are no sides , and that the sides are forever shifting ,
crumpling , and multiplying , disappearing and reappearing , unable to
satisfactorily delineate between here and there . The spatial collapse of sides is due to the
queer temporal interruption of the suicide bomber, projectiles spewing every which
As a queer assemblage - distinct from the queering
of an entity or identity- race and sexuality are
denaturalized through the impermanence , the
transience of the suicide bomber , the fleeting
identity replayed backward through its dissolution .
way .
This dissolution of self into others and other into self not only effaces the absolute
mark of self and others in the war on terror, but produces a systemic challenge to the
entire order of Manichaean rationality that organizes the rubric of good versus
evil . Delivering "a message inscribed on the body when no other means will get through,"
suicide bombers do not transcend or claim the rational nor accept the demarcation of the
irrational. Rather, they foreground the flawed temporal, spatial, and ontological pre- sumptions
upon which such distinctions flourish. Organic and inorganic , flesh and machine , these
wind up as important as (and perhaps as threatening) if not more so than the symbolism
of the bomber and his or her defense or condemnation.
Figure 24 is the November/December 2004 cover of a magazine called Jest: Humor for the
Irreverent, distributed for free in Brooklyn (see also jest .com) and published by a group of
counterculture artists and writers. Here we have the full force of the mistaken identity
conundrum: the distinctive silhouette, indeed the profile, harking to the visible by literally
blacking it out, of the turbaned Amritdhari Sikh male (Le., turban and unshorn beard that
signals baptized Sikhs), rendered (mistakenly?) as a (Muslim) suicide bomber, replete with
dynamite through the vibrant pulsations of an iPod ad. Fully modern, animated through
technologies of sound and explosives, this body does not operate solely or even primarily on the
level of metaphor. Once again, to borrow from Mbembe, it is truly a ballistic body. Contagion ,
infection , and transmission reign, not meaning .