figured in discourses of rights and economic democracy, contemporary deployments of this notion also draw so heavily on an undeconstructed subjectivity that they risk establishing a wide chasm between the (experience of) empowerment and an actual capacity to shape the terms of political, social, or economic life. (Brown 23)
While the concept of empowerment is normalized as an essential part of a liberal
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subject, it is linked to power relation and regulation. Contemporary welfare states prescribe the norm of empowerment through the “normative” correlate between identity, agency and citizenship (Mitchell Dean 83): A liberal subject, who is expected to “overcome a passive, indeed dependent, relation to government” (Dean 83), is empowered with rationality, knowledge and agency to make decisions and take actions. This prescription of the norm of empowerment should not blind us from the operation of biopolitical rule as a power relation. A victim who wishes to shake off his or her social powerlessness is drawn to the normative discourse of empowered identity, and without his or her awareness this act of self-empowerment involves a
“voluntary and coercive exercise of power upon the subjectivity of those to be empowered” (Cruikshank, “The Will to Empower” 35; qtd. in Dean 85). In this scenario, power is no longer a top-down relation, nor structured in a dichotomy of the powerful against the powerless. As Barbara Cruikshank writes, “Without the empowerment of the poor it would not be possible to act upon their actions or to extend relations of power and government to them” (The Will to Empower 82). The project of empowerment, which is based on the voluntary disempowerment of the self, works to disempower the powerless before empowering them.
In a profound way, empowerment is used as a “technology of citizenship”
(Cruikshank 68), as “the means by which government works through rather than against the subjectivities of citizens” in order to “maximize their[the victims’] actions, motivations, interests, and economic and political actions” (69). The political logic of empowerment works by eliciting the prior concession and consent of the powerless in the form of adopting full and responsible citizenship. Patricia de Santana Pinho, in interpreting Wendy Brown’s critique of empowerment, writes, “The formation of
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subjects and categories (blacks, women, and homosexuals, among others) in liberal societies demands an artificial development of self-esteem, because it is inserted within the orders of regulation, exploitation, and domination” (141). To attain
“self-esteem” signifies one’s prior consent to the biopolitical regulation. As Carolyn J.
Dean testifies, “The appropriation of traumatized identity (or ‘identity politics’) by victims themselves constitutes a misguided concession to dominant culture” (407).
This “misguided concession” constitutes the subservience to sovereignty, to biopolitical rule. Empowerment is fundamentally about the disempowerment of the victims, that is, how to entice the victims to adopt full citizenship so that they could be regulated within the biopolitical rule. Within this political logic, empowerment is synonymous with disempowerment, and it signals a new form of subjection:
Autonomy is subjected to discipline. In a political system that is founded on identity politics, the victim may appeal to the authorities for the restoration of their lost identities without the awareness that the state imposes a system that regulates, dominates and even exploits through the very concept of identity politics.
Mrs. Curren’s benign gesture to help Vercueil adopt a self-empowering identity and live a life of self-esteem leads to her unconscious complicity with the state ideology to tighten its control over the socially powerless people through the implementation of self-empowerment. Her job offering to Vercueil is indeed more like an imposition of her will on the elusive and passive Vercueil than an offering rooted in the willingness to help. She comes up with a list of the daily necessities for Vercueil that would be afforded by his work: “He needs a bath every day; he needs clean underwear; he need a bed, he needs a roof over his head, he needs three meals a day, he need money in the bank” (20). If Vercueil can live a life resembling
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Mrs. Curren’s, then she would not need to fend him off (her first thought when seeing Vercueil is how to fend him off). The imposition of her lifestyle on him would eventually lead to the implantation of liberalist ideology in him. In Mrs. Curren’s benign gesture toward Vercueil, we see a political act of inclusion and discipline with the practical expectation to maintain order and rule that cannot be disrupted by some unruly vagrants like Vercueil.
When Orbinski proclaims that “the first act of justice is recognizing the victim,”
he is adamant in linking the question of suffering to justice. Suffering is fundamentally a question of justice. However, the state seeks only legal and institutional justice, that is, justice administered mainly through legal terms. In legal practice, suffering is measured on the scale with a proportionate amount of punishment or compensation. The state brings the perpetrator to justice through legal means in the name of justice and mete out adequate compensation to the victim. However, justice in the form of legal justice does not do justice to the victims themselves. In Derrida’s famous distinction between the imperative of unconditional justice and the materialization of conditional justice in the form of law in “Force of Law: The ‘Mystical Foundation of Authority,” justice that is reduced to the status of legal prescriptive proportions is simply distributive and calculated justice, i.e.
conditional justice at the service of the political authority. The institutional thinking that takes the law and justice to be synonymous reveals that the law is a stable system in the onto-epistemological order that prescribes generally accepted rules, norms, and rights. In dealing with suffering as a political question, the state overlooks the singular experience of suffering itself, since what concerns the state is less the injuries and pains felt by the victims than the damage that could harm the
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political system. To the state, suffering represents “a challenge to society, threaten[s]
the social bond, and disturb[s] the social order” (Wieviorka 49). Essentially, the state uses the issue of suffering and the concept of justice to maintain its rule by remedying social wrongs, to ward off any potential threats to its rule by arming itself with the legal system to increase its authority to rule. The state speaks for the victims in the communal interests of the collectives; in other words, the state needs the victims in order to enforce its sovereignty.
To think suffering from the liberalist perspective is already to set a limit to our responsibility to the suffering others, and to house justice under legal jurisdiction. To think suffering ethically, we cannot simply entrust the question of suffering to the state, to the lawmakers who are expected to implement the most benign policies without touching on the fundamental issue of suffering itself. Justice suffers when suffering takes place. If the state conceives of justice as part of its rule, then we have to think justice that is singular and unaccountable to law, a justice that is beyond the legal order. The experience of justice is fundamentally unsettling: Justice is radically interruptive, and it can reinterpret and reinvent the law by opening the law to the other. We can have a chance of justice only in radical excess of existing apparatuses of law and legal institutions. The justice demanded by the other is irreducible to the legally distributive justice in the onto-epistemological register of identity and presence.
Perhaps the first act of doing justice to the suffering others is to “unrecognize”
the victims. The theory of recognition is a vital liberalist concept associated with the formation of self-identity.10 To recognize the victims, however, is a much more
10 Hegel is usually perceived as the historical figure whose thinking started the discussion of recognition for contemporary social and political philosophy. Important contemporary contributors to this theory include Charles Taylor, Alex Honneth, and Nancy Fraser.
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complicated matter than simply identifying the victims and providing the urgent assistance they need. In Witnessing: Beyond Recognition, Kelly Oliver points out that the mechanism of recognition is problematic, despite its importance for the debate on multiculturalism and for marginalized or oppressed people’s struggle for social struggle: “[W]hat is recognized [and recognizable] is always only something familiar to the subject” (Oliver 9). She maintains, “Only when we begin to think of the recognition of what is beyond recognition can we begin to think of the recognition of difference” (ibid). Recognition recognizes only what is recognizable—it sets limits to the range of recognizability. An ethical gesture would be to move beyond the economy of recognition toward those rendered unrecognizable within the dominant framework of intelligibility.
For Coetzee, real victims are absolute victims, who are irreducible to representation and who are even unable to claim the status of the victim: “One of the meanings of what is call a victim . . . is precisely to be erased in its meaning as victim” (Derrida, “Passages—from Traumatism to Promise” 389). An absolute victim is perceived in his or her fundamental powerlessness to claim his or her suffering, let along the identity recognized by the state. “The absolute victim is a victim who cannot even protest. . . . He or she is totally excluded or covered over by language, annihilated by history, a victim one cannot identify” (ibid 389). As the novel proceeds, Mrs. Curren is exposed to more absolute victims, to mutilated bodies and the dead bodies that cannot die, and this exposure collapses her faith in liberalist politics that relies on the “science of victims” and the discourse of empowerment to deal with the question of suffering. The mechanism of recognition fails, and the discourse of empowerment founders. To attend to the experience of absolute suffering demands
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“the tongue of a god,” the “maimed language” that articulates the unspeakable pain.
“The Maimed Language”
Suffering is the moment of shock, the site of the irreducible gap between the unspeakability of pain and knowledge’s attempt to represent it. When we approach suffering, we encounter a limit site where self and the world meet on new terms.
Suffering has its own authority: It demands its own voice that resists political, philosophical and medical perspectives of comprehension, a voice that articulates the singular instance of pain. The crying out of unrecognized victims demands that we think beyond the biopolitical conception of suffering, for the act of claiming victimhood for recognition and adopting self-empowering identity amounts to the subjection to state paternalism. As I wrote in the previous section, to approach victimization in biopolitical terms, that is, to empower the victims, is fundamentally to disempower those who suffer. While we suffer from the impossibility of accessing the inarticulate pain through our entrenched linguistic and cultural expressions, it is in this irreducible gap that we might be able to explore new possibilities of responding to the suffering others, and to explore how responsibility and justice do not rely on recognition and empowerment but on vulnerability (Rubenstein 62).
The state relies on the disciplines of law, sociology, political science, and psychology and medicine to produce the “science of victims” that provides the necessary knowledge to deal with social security and intervention (Wieviorka 57).
Modern culture, founded on the philosophy of Enlightenment and science, attempts to leave nothing out of its universal grasp of the world, and its attitude toward suffering is to see it as a subject of study, a problem to which a solution is to be
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proffered. As Daniel Callahan writes, “Enlightenment and the science that goes with it (especially in modern medicine) treat it[suffering] as a problem, an effort full of hopes, possibilities, and upward progress” (X). This epistemological orientation is translated into “the science of victims” that “can make an important contribution if we wish to define what a victim is, and to distinguish between different types of victim” (Wieviorka 59). This science leaves nothing undisclosed from its predatory eye, not even trauma, the abyss where the experience of the unimaginable and the unspeakable reside. According to Michel Wieviorka, a French sociologist known for his study on violence, terrorism and racism, this science of victims “allows us to approach the central problem of trauma, to further specify the notion of harm, and to outline and discuss concrete ways of caring for victims, making reparation to them, or indemnifying them” (59). “Science of victims” mobilizes the methods of taxonomic division, rational analysis, statistics and graphs, and functional language that allow for no ambivalence in the investigation of suffering and in communicating the abstract feelings of suffering. Suffering, if it is to be comprehended by the public and elicit sympathy, has to make sense, to have meaning in our daily discourse.
A typical example of this confidence to represent pain and suffering is seen in Rob Roddice’s “Introduction” to Pain and Emotion in Modern History in spite of his awareness of “polyvalence” in the articulation of pain. He writes that pain “has been, is and can be expressed—bodily, orally, emotionally and linguistically” through
“metaphors,” “figures,” “contexts” and the sharing of a common culture (1-2).11
11 Some critics suggest that figurative speech is one possible method to get close to the experience of suffering. Nevertheless, Jean Améry, a concentration camp survivor, rejects this suggestion. He writes of his “incomparable” experience of torture by the Nazis in At the Mind’s Limits: “It would be totally senseless to try and describe here the pain that was inflicted on me. Was it ‘like a red-hot iron in my shoulders,’ and was another ‘like a dull wooden stake that had been driven into the back of my head?’
One comparison would only stand for another, and in the end we would be hoaxed by turn on the hopeless merry-go-round of figurative speech. The pain was what it was. Beyond that there is nothing
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Roddice’s faith in the expressibility of pain and suffering is self-defeating in that the translation of biological and psychological feelings into artistic and linguistic representation is undermined by the discrepancy between the signifier and the signified, and the asymmetry between the linguistic conceptual tools and the affective and somatic feelings. The employment of “metaphors,” “figures” and
“contexts” renders the project of translating inner feelings impossible, for metaphors involve “a tremor, a shock, a displacement of force” in the movement of communication (Derrida, “Signature Event Context” 1). Metaphors and figures introduce heterogeneity and ambivalence into communication, often leading to not only polyvocality but also displacement of meaning (ibid 2).
The “science of victims” grounded in the optimism of the objective analysis of the indescribable experience of extreme pain is much disputed, especially after the Holocaust. For instance, Rebecca Chopp criticizes the “quantitative analysis” of the suffering of Holocaust survivors in The Praxis of Suffering:
Events of massive, public suffering defy quantitative analysis. How can one really understand statistics citing the death of six million Jews or graphs of third-world starvation? Do numbers really reveal the agony, the interruption, the questions that these victims put to the meaning and nature of our individual lives and life as a whole? Knowledge of suffering cannot be conveyed in pure facts and figures, reportings that objectify the suffering of countless persons. The horror of suffering is not only its immensity but the faces of the anonymous victims who have little voice, let alone rights, in
to say. Qualities of feeling are as incomparable as they are indescribable. They mark the limit of the capacity to communicate” (9).
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history. (2)
Facts, statistics and quantitative analysis say nothing about the nature of suffering itself, about “the agony, the interruption” and the victims’ silent accusation of the society that allowed the tragedy to happen. The experience of suffering is never at home in language and knowledge and can hardly be brought to broad daylight for examination. It resists logos and the power of speech, as Adorno writes, “Suffering remains foreign to knowledge; though knowledge can subordinate it conceptually and provide means for its amelioration, knowledge can scarcely express it through its own means of experience without itself becoming irrational. Suffering conceptualized remains mute and inconsequential” (Aesthetic Theory 18).
In Age of Iron, the experience of suffering does not “remain mute and inconsequential.” Bheki’s friend (Bheki is the son of Florence, the servant at Mrs.
Curren’s house) is riding a bicycle on the street, and he is pushed by the police and crashs into a car door. In her act of “covering the open wound” of the black body Mrs.
Curren feels the presence of a body for the first time, a body that suffers, a body that
“cannot protest” and yet accuses her and the white class silently:
As long as I pinched tight I could hold in most of the flow. But when I relaxed blood poured again steadily. It was blood, nothing more, blood like yours and mine. Yet never before had I seen anything so scarlet and so black. Perhaps it was an effect of the skin, youthful, supple, velvet dark, over which it ran; but even on my hands it seemed both darker and more glaring than blood ought to be. I stared at it, fascinated, afraid, drawn into
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a veritable stupor of staring . . . Because blood is precious, more precious than gold and diamonds. Because blood is one: a pool of life dispersed among us in separate existence, but belonging by nature together . . . (63)
In this passage, we do not find a Mrs. Curren maintaining her aloof liberalist stance surveying the scene in which the black boy is mutilated by police violence. Nor do we listen to her reporting his suffering with detailed description of the wound. We see her feeling, touching, holding, and covering the open wound on his head. It is the wound itself that articulates his experience of suffering: the body is lacerated, the skin peeled off, and the blood keeps flowing, coloring Mrs. Curren’s clothes. A mutilated, but also still and silent body, yet it powerfully accuses the society of its complicity with the police and its indifference toward the violence imposed on the blacks, and it vehemently demands a response from them. Mrs. Curren feels afraid, but also fascinated by the blood flowing from his body. The open wound fascinates Mrs. Curren, who covers the wound “on an impulse” (79). The wound and the blood unsettle her sense of self and result in a new relation with a black.
This black body lies still, but its suffering does not remain mute. While suffering might defy any linguistic or cultural attempt to bring it into consciousness, it confirms the undeniable presence of the body that feels the pain. In her seminal work The Body in Pain, Elaine Scarry writes, “Intense pain is world-destroying,” (29) as the totality of pain destroys consciousness, the notions of identity and subjectivity, and all means of articulation. Scarry further argues that pain “not simply resist[s]
language but actively destroy[s] it, bringing about an immediate reversion to a state anterior to language, to the sounds and cries a human being makes before language
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is learned” (4). In this reversion of linguistic articulation of pain, the experience of suffering is marked by “absence” of language (37), the world and the self while “the body and its pain are overwhelmingly present” (46). Very ironically, suffering confirms the presence of the suffering body while it also denying our access to that
is learned” (4). In this reversion of linguistic articulation of pain, the experience of suffering is marked by “absence” of language (37), the world and the self while “the body and its pain are overwhelmingly present” (46). Very ironically, suffering confirms the presence of the suffering body while it also denying our access to that