Bare Life

When I overcome the forces that may have silenced the musicality of Indian history, I recount growing up in an India that had deep friendship with the historic Palestine through an intimate festooning of mutual imagination. Legends have it that Baba Farid, the beloved poet and mystic, traveled to East Jerusalem in the early-thirteenth-century Ottoman Empire. His presence touched those whom he encountered, and seven centuries later, the place where he lived is still known as Al-Hindi Serai, a shrine that has welcomed murids or the desirous ones who seek union with the mystic teacher. Not so long ago, the Nizam of Hyderabad, an independent monarchy in the Deccan before it joined the Indian Union post-independence, presented chandeliers to adorn Al-Aqsa Mosque. Beside the chandeliers lie the sepia-toned images of fallen Indian soldiers who fought alongside Allied forces against the Ottoman Empire. Around forty soldiers were buried in two cemeteries in Gaza far away from the motherland but closer to Baba Farid. While the market-driven, globalized world reduces cultures to forms of consumptions such as the promise of “authentic” hummus, zaatar, and künefe in supermarkets, in the deep recess of Indian imagination, Palestine flickers as a tall, burly man in keffiyeh we came to recognize as Yasser Arafat. 

 

Perhaps it was the memory of the long night of British colonization of India, with its wounds still quite fresh in the mind of its people, that the new republic of India found connection with the political struggle of South Africa and the Palestine Liberation Organization. Soon after its independence, India was the first country to sever diplomatic, cultural, or commercial relations with the apartheid government of South Africa. India was the first non-Arab country to recognize the PLO as the only legitimate representation of Palestinians. Through Arafat, India could acknowledge that Palestinians “carried an olive branch in one hand and the freedom fighter’s gun in the other.” These words, written and translated jointly by Edward Said and Mahmoud Darwish, come back as a plea for a binocular vision or scotopic vision without which we may experience a tragic divide within ourselves or the contemporary moment. How do we reconcile the two aspects of the image as coterminous, sharing a border? 

 

The challenge such a picture poses is not unknown. When Gandhi spoke of a nonviolent resistance, or nonviolence, in the same breath, it was an impossible proposition. The world wondered: Is it possible to be nonviolent in a political resistance? In the Indian experiment with the truth of the oppressed, we learned that nonviolence is not the same as cowardice and that violence may one day give way to nonviolence. The image of a freedom fighter could therefore carry the two sides, the olive branch and the gun, in a paradoxical relation. Along these nondichotomous lines, Indian support for Palestinian right to freedom and sovereignty exists alongside a Indian’s history of not engaging in antisemitism. 

 

India is neither without its own colonial ambitions nor innocent of its deep-rooted preference for, as Louis Dumont termed it, homo hierarchicus. One might ask what the past colonies know about rule by force that does not allow for political neutrality or liberal humanist approach. It is as though the past colonies fail to repress the specters of colonialism that mark their consciousness. This is sometimes visible in politics of friendship but also in the ethnic, ethno-nationalist, or caste enactments they perpetuate on their own soil. India has practiced “apartness” for centuries, segregating people based on their birth or belonging, on its land and around its peripheries. 

 

Like the Greek monster Hydra, “segregation” or the need for “apartness,” what in Afrikaans came to be known as apartheid in the South African political unconscious, has more than one head. Freud confronted the many-headed beast in his clinic as defensive operations, of repression, negation, disavowal, and foreclosure through which ego perpetuates an internal apartheid for intolerable aspects of reality. In “Fetishism” (1927), Freud observes that it is possible, and in painful situations necessary, for the ego to split itself to keep two contradictory experiences incommunicado, prevented from patriation. This way, for instance, one can host a memory of one’s victimization while also being identified with the aggressor, as two separate heads. Similarly, Freud (1919) noted that the fantasy of a child being beaten while appearing masochistic could also be sadistic. Most instances of ethno-nationalisms insist on attacking and delegitimizing the existence of contradictory states in favor of pure histories of innocence. The colonizers carried the burden to civilize the colonies while killing thousands by using the “logic” of racial Darwinism or religion, while postcolonies, chaotically pluralistic in most cases, may be organized by the fear of minorities to establish their regimes of power. 

 

The Israeli retaliation following the October 7, 2023, attacks by Hamas has killed and wounded thousands and displaced more than two million. The world is looking on to those who narrowly escaped death but may not escape hunger, starvation, dehydration, and disease. I wish to stay with the image of the starving person to imagine what will be an ethical obligation, not only for those we grieve but those who are disappearing before our eyes. For the poorer nations, hunger has always been a war. But now we are called to witness an appetite for destruction. Through the consternation of the starved, wounded, and displaced Palestinians, Giorgio Agamben’s formulation of “bare life” as an analysis of sovereign violence and biopolitics returns to our minds. Palestinians’ fate connects them to the millions starving in the Sahel region, South Sudan, Syria, Yemen, and Afghanistan whose dispossession like that of their Palestinian counterparts is a consequence of expanding armed conflict, coup d’état, and poverty. Freud knew that hunger is a catastrophe, where care and violence take macabre shape inside the body and the mind. Even in the concentration camps, Levi testified, it was the starved “Muselmann” that were the most abject form of life for whom fear, humiliation, and horror had taken away all consciousness and all personality as to make him absolutely apathetic who the inmates wished to avoid at all costs (Agamben, Homo Sacer, 1995). Agamben viewed bare life called “Muselmann” to designate “not so much a limit between life and death . . . [but] the threshold between the human and the inhuman (Agamben, 1999, p. 55). 

 

It is interesting to imagine that an Arabic word, Muslim, appears as the master figure of “bare life” in the concentration camps, literally meaning “the one who unconditionally submits to the will of God” (Agamben, 1999, p. 45). Upon reading Levi’s account of the abject life in the camps, Agamben writes, “In any case, it is certain that, with a kind of ferocious irony, the Jews knew that they would not die at Auschwitz as Jews” but, rather, as Muslims. In Thomas Keneally’s Booker Prize−winning novel, Schindler’s Ark, Keneally writes that the camp jargon was “based on people’s memory of newsreels of famine in Muslim countries, for a prisoner who had crossed the borderline that separated the ravenous living from the good-as-dead” (1982). Some suggest that it is possible that some prisoners of Nazi camps had seen photographs or perhaps read Albert Camus’s chronicles of the famine in the Kabylia region of Algeria in 1939. What is important to note is that the image of the Muselmann throws light on modern European colonial violence and its procedures that carry holographic affinity with Arabs of Algeria, “coolies” of India and “niggers” of Africa (Jarvis, J, 2014). These epithets are markers of necropolitics and hunger—a line that separates the favored and the damned. 

 

The news of the alarming rate of hunger experienced by the dispossessed Palestinians in Gaza coincided with a change in my dream life that’s now pervaded with nightmares. The image of children, women, and men queuing for food in empty plastic containers; trucks of food vanishing before a starving mass of people; or the manic relief on the rain-drenched faces of children hopeful that Allah was trying to quench their thirst has evoked a traumatic reaction in my unconscious, linking me to the experience of hunger that’s stored in my tissues generationally.

 

 In my dream, a vampirish presence is approaching fast to feed on me. It dawns on me that this is an unconscious representation of those for whom my heart bleeds. On waking up, shame replaces terror. Besides one’s identification and caritas, is it possible I have perpetuated a private caste division in which I must protect myself against the ones condemned to starve? The necrophilic, cannibalistic invasion in my dream brought associations of the Bengal famines or the Great Hunger, where thousands collapsed in the private pits of fire without a grain of compassion by their absentee landlords or colonial rulers. Vampires, as we know, are dead and condemned to live forever, a state similar to hunger in which one is being destroyed silently by a sensation that doesn’t yield itself to a quick death. Like the folklores, the undecaying body of the vampire unapologetically walked out of its burial ground to affect this dreamer. Perhaps vampires do not return to the living with the torment of hunger. They covet life itself and envy its effects that run in the veins of the living as their eternal right.

 

 

References

Agamben, G. (1995). Homo sacer: Sovereign power and bare life. Stanford University Press.

———. (1999). Remnants of Auschwitz: The witness and the archive. MIT Press.

Freud, S. (1915). “Observations of transference love”. In J. Strachey (Trans.), The complete psychological work of Sigmund Freud, Vol. XII, pp. 159−71. Hogarth.

———. (1927). “Fetishism” In J. Strachey (Trans.), The Complete Psychological Work of Sigmund Freud, Vol. XXI, pp. 147−57. Hogarth.

Jarvis, J. (2014). Remnants of Muslims—Reading Agamben’s Silence. New Literary History, 45(4), 707−28.

Keneally, T. (1982). Schindler’s Ark [also published as Schindler’s List]. Hodder and Stoughton. 

Lacan, J. (1973). The four fundamental concepts of psychoanalysis—Book XI. In Jacques Elian Miller (Ed.), The seminar of Jacques Lacan. W.W. Norton & Company.

 

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This essay was first written in December 2023 for Calibán, Latin American Journal of Psychoanalysis anticipating and responding to the humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza. Translation of the article, in Spanish and Portuguese, was published as “El hambre y un lugar para el ñam-ñam” in Calibán, Revista Latinoamericana de Psicoanalisis, Vol 22, no.1. Testimonios, pp. 149−53, 2024. The abridged version of the original writing is presented here with permission from the journal.