What exactly do we encounter in the presence of the Other? In an era of globalization featuring multiculturalism, why do more frequent contacts with the Other provoke more intension, hostility or even misery, taken to its extreme by Agamben? Misery seems unavoidable due to exclusion. In the last chapter of Homo Sacer, Agamben places misery and exclusion together and defines them as not only economic or social outcomes but also the purposes of modern biopolitical project. As Agamben states, “our age is nothing but the implacable and methodical attempt…to eliminate radically the people that is excluded…[and] to produce an undivided people.” More precisely, misery results from elimination of the excluded bare life which “modernity necessarily creates within itself, but whose presence it can no longer tolerate in any way” (179, emphasis mine).
The motto of tolerating the Other, with sacred life in its least favorable and most miserable form, has disturbed multicultural societies the way the Christian imperative
“love your neighbor” has perplexed us. Being living avatars of bare life, Taiwan’s migrants bear the national, racial, religious and sexual stigmas, though they virtually come from the neighboring countries and live within our neighborhoods. As
interpreted in the second chapter, Escape and Separation do not reveal how different the migrants are in essence, but how estranged, isolated and excluded they feel from the non-migrants. Hau’s comments on the Taiwanese seated on the floor at Taipei Main Station also exposes the anxiety about resembling the migrants’ behavior. We could not help but wonder why Taiwanse’s hospitality meets its exception in the
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migrants.
In interpreting the tolerant attitude in our era, Slovenian philosopher and Lacanian psychoanalyst Slavoj Žižek probes into the Otherness to elucidate the ambivalent feelings the Other intrigues in us. Positioning the Other as the Neighbor, Žižek suggests the Other is not completely alien from us but remains familiar yet bizarre to us. It does not even require a neighbor’s dramatic, intentional act but “a tiny detail─a compulsive gesture, an excessive facial gesture” (The Abyss of Freedom 25) to invoke terror or disgust. One experiences the uncanniness of the Otherness as traumatic, monstrous and hideous. In Žižek’s words, the Other/Neighbor persists as
“an inert, impenetrable, enigmatic presence that hystericizes me” (“Neighbor” 140-41). In fact, Ž ižek finds the tendency to avoid the unbearable, intolerable Otherness of the Other actualized in today’s market. As he observes, products stripped of their threatening substances such as “coffee without caffeine, cream without fat, beer without alcohol” coincide with the “today’s tolerant liberal multiculturalism as an experience of Other deprived of its Otherness” (“A Cup of Decaf Reality”). In this sense, “to keep the neighbor at a proper distance” (“Neighbor” 163) with more chances to encounter with Other in our era functions as self-defense against the proximity to the Otherness.
How can one love an unknowable neighbor? It is by rethinking the unfathomable that Žižek formulates his ethics of the Other. In “Neighbors and Other Monsters: A Plea for Ethical Violence,” as Žižek draws from Judith Butler, the impossibility to fully understand the Other does not reach an ethical deadlock but a common ground for intersubjectivity. Since one is primordially exposed and impossibly opaque to each other, the vulnerability and limitation shared by people and rendering people human envisions an appropriate social interaction, namely, “a stance of fundamental
forgiveness and a tolerant ‘live and let live attitude’ ”(138). Žižek further
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problematizes the positive condition Butler suggests via unearthing beneath the ethical injunction “an even more fundamental violence…of encountering a neighbor”
(140). For Žižek, the fundamental violence results from the inhuman quality of the Otherness, characterized as an irreducible undead excess. While Emmanuel Levinas suggests a subject becomes ethical in responding the endless call from the vulnerable face of the Other, Žižek differentiates the experience of encountering a Levinasian face from that of confronting the Neighbor: The face belongs to the Symbolic Order, while the Neighbor dwells in the regime of the Real (161-63). Žižek identifies that it is the inhuman dimension of subjectivity that Butler and Levinas fail to assess. As Žižek suggests, the human face might cover up (“gentrify”) the monstrous Neighbor-Thing to prevent the traumatic encounter with the Other. The true ethical moment only occurs when the subject experiences the abyss without clinging to the symbolic big Other (146-47). To love the Neighbor is therefore violent, for we do not confront a
“face” but a “faceless monster.” The ethical violence is also “angelic” and
“revolutionary” because it intervenes a harmonious semblance, directly opposed to nonviolence (185-86).
Bringing together Žižek and Agamben, I suggest the crucial connection between the Neighbor and bare life resides in the inhuman property, as exemplified in the Otherness of the Other and a life neither human nor animal. The Other without its Otherness, a human life stripped of the political existence and affective labor deprived of affect, all point to the paradox of reducing the irreducible, of excluding the
inclusive, and ultimately of separating the Other from the Self. As we shall see, both social network and juridico-political order rely on immanent divides to sustain their operation. Žižek’s formulation of monstrosity of the Neighbor contributes to a profound understanding of why identification with the Other is potentially difficult and subversive. It captures the incongruous feelings between migrants and
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migrants, which are impalpable yet substantially inscribed in migrants’ everyday social interactions in Escape and Separation. It is noteworthy that we cannot simplify social discrimination or defective laws into something purely irrational, but rather recognize the union of mental and power mechanism.
In light of Žižek’s emphasis on the “the unfathomable abyss of radical Otherness” (143), I interpret Escape and Separation not as a mirror but in itself an ethical act to engage the non-migrants into the chaos they build a life upon, to expose them to the unspeakable moment, and to bring them closer to a not “normal” state of life. Therefore, under the prosaic, declamatory, and sometimes discursive language style, the gripping narratives in Escape and Separation are not a string of individual complaints or accusations. Rather, migrants’ writing demonstrates subjectivity of the migrant Other for voicing out what could have never been heard, for signifying the invisible, voiceless and nameless multitude, and most of all, for tackling and
transforming vulnerability into words. Through writing their own life stories, migrant writers not only fulfill self-realization but also inaugurate the potential connections with the Other. In this regard, life stories embody both individual and collective forms of resistance. In “The Women-Led Travel Agency,” the power of life stories impresses the editors Du-Shou Zuo and Yun-Chang Liao:
One reader of the 4-Way Voice is a migrant spouse. She cries whenever she reads the articles in the column of “Cross-Border Marriage.” Thus her family says to her, “Why do you cry? Do not read it in case you cry!”
However, she replies, “How could those immigrant women share such similar experiences with me? I have to read and I must cry. I will be all right after crying.
…when she discovers someone in the same plight with her…she feels relieved. Hence, writing those new immigrant women’s stories is
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meaningful because it makes their suffering visible to others and simultaneously acts as a form of release or healing to themselves….
(Separation 183)
As the passage demonstrates, on the one hand, reading an irreducible being’s life stories resonating with the self may lead to the unspeakable moment, but it is through crying, a means of emotional catharsis, that one can regain his or her strength and faith. On the other hand, while writing one’s life stories can be painful when pouring out one’s suffering, it can no longer be repressed and silenced. With life stories, the distinction between migrants and non-migrants, readers and writers, the Self and the Other becomes blurred.
II. Justice Unbound
Žižek’s musing on the impossibility of love inspires me to further explore the possibility of embracing multiculturalism with cultures in a capitalist democracy.
While Hardt and Negri propose multitude against Empire by applauding “a common potential” shared by immaterial labor, do “the differences of kind that used to divide labor no longer apply” (Multitude 107)? If inclusive exclusion inevitably functions as the kernel of the social and political order, what kind of politics may posit a radical break between misery and exclusion? Centering on the concept of difference, American political theorist and feminist Iris Marion Young’s notions of justice, oppression and power pertain to my discussion on ethics toward the Other in a biopolitical discourse. In Justice and the Politics of Difference, her classic work of feminist political thoughts on justice, Young does not propose a theory of justice as a guidance to improve the politics, but to explicate relevant concepts alluding to justice through reflection on the norms of a certain historical and social context. Young
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suggests that justice can be realized in the politics of difference: The politics of
affirming instead of suppressing differences within and among social groups would be conducive to a projection of what justice could be instead of what justice is (6).
According to Young, justice is not a fixated, systematic or universal value for
philosophers to prove the existence of it, but a request or a plea that awaits to be heard and responded within a society. Young’s efforts to contextualize of the abstractness of justice reflects her revision of the blind spot of contemporary theories of justice: a distributive paradigm, purported by John Rawls and slightly modified by Charles Taylor and Michael Sandel. As Young observes, the distributive paradigm commits the fallacy of viewing “nonmaterial goods” as distributable as material goods. In a distributive paradigm, the underlying presumption of a “just” society focuses on the individual’s “possession.” Young agrees that possession of material good can make a discernable and valid standard to make judgments of justice; however, if nonmaterial goods are narrowly perceived as measurable “goods,” one risks neglecting the
“institutional context within which those distributions take place, and which is often at least partly the cause of patterns of distribution of jobs or wealth” (21-2). The
keyword here is “cause.” We come to perceive that the importance of social context to Young’s musing of justice consists in its potential role of contributing the patterns of distribution. As Young adds, “what is important is not the particular pattern of distribution at a particular moment, but rather the reproduction of a regular
distributive pattern over time” (29). Young’s emphasis on the existing social milieu reminds us that since social context is not objective or neutral, the reproduction should be discreetly distinguished and prevented from re-creating oppression. It challenges Hardt and Negri’s concept of biopolitical production defined as “immanent to society and creat[ing] social relations and forms through collaborative forms of labor” (Multitude 94-5) in the sense that Hardt and Negri seem to overlook the
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disadvantageous conditions inherent in a highly capitalized society that may impede some particular forms of labor from creating social relations that allow them to truly become “creative potential of Empire” (Lemeke, Biopolitics 68).
Young discerns that it is not only the disregard for reducing unmeasurable nonmaterial goods to be calculable but also the misunderstanding or negligence of the differences within and among social groups that fosters institutional oppression and dominance, two crucial types of mechanism for Young to comprehend injustice in relation to justice. As Young explicates, oppression constrains the value of
“developing and expressing one’s experiences,” and dominance limits that of
“participating in determining one’s actions and the conditions of one’s actions,” while justice refers to “the degree to which a society contains and support the institution for the realization” (37) of those two values generally implied in the good life. Though herein Young uses “one,” it should be noted that she does not promote the idea of individualism according to which human beings are defined as” primarily consumers, desirers and possessors of goods” (36), which is endorsed by the distributive
paradigm. For Young, human beings are also “doers and actors,” who are always and already thrown in social groups (46) and simultaneously engage in “social life in contexts where others can listen” (37). For Young, affirming the differences of social groups is crucial for one to embrace personal differences and realize the values of the good life, and most of all, for a society to realize justice. Young’s formulation of difference resonates with Žižek’s notion of the Otherness and makes a way out of inclusive exclusion. As Young defines, difference refers to “absolute otherness” and a group would fall into “exclusion and opposition” only when we essentialize it by assuming the group members to have “specific dispositions” and “no common nature with the normal or neutral ones [groups]” (170). To reverse this fear for specificity, or the monstrous alterity, Young proposes a rupture between difference and exclusion/
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oppression by understanding difference as “indeed ambiguous, relational, shifting without clear borders that keep people straight” (171). In other words, we can reassess sameness and difference in terms of similarity and dissimilarity.
Placing social context at the core of her critique, Young does not follow the convention of treating the governmental power as the only source of social injustice.
For Young, difference does not mean oppression and that institution does not necessarily entail power in a negative sense. As Young clarifies, “Hierarchical
decision-making structures subject most people in our society….Many of those people nevertheless enjoy significant institutionalized support for their ability to express themselves and be heard”(38). Young suggests a structural understanding of power rather than power mechanism. Both tracing back to Foucault’s discourse on power, Agamben and Young contribute disparate interpretations to the nature of it. While Agamben identifies the ever-lasing paradox of power that “the modern State therefore does nothing other than bring to light the secret tie uniting power and bare life”
(Homo Sacer 6), Young uncovers the “ironic situation” in contemporary welfare corporate societies that “power is widely dispersed and diffused, yet social relations are tightly defined by domination and oppression” (Justice 32-3). Young proposes that power should be understood as “processes rather than patterns of distribution” (33). In other words, a few possess power but they must rely on agents who work for power to execute it in a social context. In effect, Agamben’s and Young’s perspectives do not contradict each other but altogether depict how biopolitical power is intertwined with social network. To a great extent, affective labor of which production “has been enriched to the level of complexity of human interaction” (Empire 293) signals the possible break within a power structure.
In sum, as if the follow-ups to Agamben’s quest for a satisfactory “psychological explanations” when he mulls over “the point at which the voluntary servitude of
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individuals comes into contact with objective power” (Homo Sacer 6), Žižek’s and Young’s theoretical formulations of otherness/difference reveal fear behind power mechanism. The radicalness of the ethical injunction “Love Thy Neighbor” consists in human’s capacity and willingness to demonstrate it. Love becomes possible if one can identify and overcome the uncanniness that the Neighbor is always and already inside of the Self, if one can withdraw from the sense of security of repressing the
ambivalent feelings toward the Other, and if one rejects conforming to the
unreasonable and even exploitative systems. Escape and Separation thus not only invoke our ethical concerns toward the Other but also present us with the significance of life stories toward migrants themselves. Reading and writing life stories are ethical acts for migrants for they demonstrate the subjectivity against oppression of the Other.
Aside from making “us more like our neighbors,” the irreducible individual life stories of different social groups of runaway workers and new immigrant women in Escape and Separation are also exemplary of Young’s conception that a just society would allow the minorities’ voices to be heard in public life. In light of Žižek’s and Young’s conceptions, we can comprehend Taiwan’s migrants not as the excluded, abandoned or disposable bare life but crucial members as distinctive as Taiwanese in society. It is from the latter perspective that we can bring those intimate strangers closer.
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Conclusion
For a thesis of graduate institute of English in Taiwan, it may appear
incongruous to illustrate local migration issues through analyzing migrants’ writing translated from Vietnamese to Chinese. However, it is the hybridity of social and political governance, globalized capitalism, cultural differences, and the migrants’
individual and collective life that marks the distinctiveness of Escape and Separation and engages Taiwan’s migration issues in the field of cultural studies. On a theoretical level, I involve European and American philosophies on biopolitics in East-Asian context to open up a conversation among different cultural spheres and beyond the pattern and limitation of regional thinking. On a textual level, I suggest that the voices from the multitude delineate the diverse and multiple aspects of migrants’ life and capture the subtleness of migrants’ affective experiences.
In what follows, I would like to first summarize this thesis and then briefly explicate the central topic of it for final remarks. Drawing on Agamben’s and Hardt and Negri’s biopolitical perspectives, this thesis conceptualizes Taiwan’s migrant Other as the contemporary avatar of bare life and affective labor to elucidate the underlying logic of inclusive exclusion applied to boundary making in migrants’ life through Escape and Separation. To further envision the ethical attitude toward Taiwan’s migrant Other, I extend the original theoretical framework by engaging Žižek’s and Young’s discussions that pinpoint the limits and solutions concerning the legitimacy of boundary. While boundary is shifting, flowing and blurring yet rigid, controlled and oppressive as well, its contradictory quality does not necessarily lead to a dichotomy between locals and migrants in Taiwan. Therefore, although recognizing that most of Taiwan’s migrants do not receive what they deserve, this thesis rejects the idea the migrant Other emerges as a group of passive victims under the institutional violence of power mechanism, and the notion that since boundary cannot be lived
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without, it is impossible to make any radical change. As Escape and Separation demonstrate, both readers and writers of the life stories participate in a form of resistance because they confront directly the adversity of the Self and the Other.
Ultimately I call for the understanding that boundary opens up a dynamic dimension where politics, economics and affect can encourage stronger sense of connection between the Self and the Other in our time. By showcasing the vulnerable, marginalized, and excluded state of life in Escape and Separation, this research identifies the functioning of power mechanism on Taiwan’s migrants and delivers a prospect of their escape from the grip.
Most importantly, I read Escape and Separation not merely as literary artifacts but discourses with significant social, political implications and ethical concerns. As a
Most importantly, I read Escape and Separation not merely as literary artifacts but discourses with significant social, political implications and ethical concerns. As a