Necroidealism accelerates sacrificial logics

A theoretical honesty, attended by a certain uneasiness, is evident in Dipesh Chakrabarty’s admission that the subaltern who resolutely resists incorporation by dominant state-forms or hegemonic cultures is ‘an ideal figure. No actual member of the subaltern class would resemble what I imagine here’ (Chakrabarty 2002: 36). The subaltern represents for Chakrabarty a utopian ideal that can be made to pose a challenge to ‘our thought systems, with all their aspirations to grasp things in their totality . . . [all those] languages of the state, of citizenship, of wholes and totalities, the legacy of Enlightenment rationalism.’ The subaltern stands for ‘a utopian line that may well designate the limit of how we [academics] are trained to think’ (36). Such a questioning of hegemonic thought, I wish to argue, may well find its most convincing and, at the same time, problematic representation in the figure of the dead subaltern. Readers familiar with the writings of subaltern studies historians or with literary portrayals of subalterns may recall how the death of a subaltern often provides the occasion for a meditation on subalternity as a critical alternative to dominant regimes of power. We see this close link between death and a critical opening of thought, for example, in such works as Ranajit Guha’s essay ‘Chandra’s Death’, an illuminating rereading of fragmentary legal depositions on a ‘criminal’ case of abortion, Gayatri Spivak’s classic analysis of reactions to Bhubaneswari Bhaduri’s suicide, Arundhati Roy’s moving account in The God of Small Things of the untouchable Velutha’s brutal murder at the hands of the police, and, to round off the list, Amitav Ghosh’s description in The Hungry Tide of the death of the fisherman Fokir during a storm.

In all these examples, the subaltern’s death appears to enable a questioning of the limits of hegemonic thought and to secure a utopian opening into another mode of life. Subaltern utopianism paradoxically seems to require the subaltern’s death; the subaltern has to die in order to serve as an irreducible idea. In death, the subaltern is perfected as a concept so pure no living referent can contradict or complicate it. As in utopian thinking, it is the subaltern’s non-existence that ensures the possibility of its conceptualization as a critical alternative to existing hegemonies. ‘A loss of existence’, according to Michel de Certeau, ‘is the condition for immortality in poetry’ (de Certeau 1988: 324). Similarly, the subaltern’s death can be seen as enabling a kind of ideological or political immortality, since the subaltern’s role both as a symbol of resistance to the dominant power and as the utopian promise of an alternative lifeworld finds its final affirmation and guarantee in death.

Mobilitas Mortis

In asking us to imagine a utopian subalternity, Chakrabarty urges us to embrace an openness so radical that [he] can express it only in Heideggerian terms: the capacity to hear that which one does not already understand. In other words, to allow the subaltern position to challenge our own conceptions of totalities, to be open to the possibility of our thought systems, with all their aspirations to grasp things in their totality, being rendered finite by the presence of the other: such are the utopian horizons to which this other moment of Subaltern Studies calls us. (Chakrabarty 2002: 36)

It is the subaltern’s radical alterity that makes possible the critical utopianism that exposes the limits of hegemonic thought and opens us to that which we do not already understand. As such, the ideal subaltern other must be seen as a figure who is inaccessible to and inappropriable by statist, hegemonic, and academic knowledge. Chakrabarty’s subaltern utopianism is thus related to what Gayatri Spivak has (in)famously described as the impossibility of subaltern speech. Spivak’s provocative statement that the subaltern cannot speak should not of course be taken literally, since it is not a question of whether the subaltern can speak but of whether what the subaltern says can ever be fully registered without the inevitable recoding and distortion by our non-subaltern knowledge regimes. As John Beverley has remarked, it is ‘Spivak’s point that the very recovery of the ‘‘voice’’ of the subaltern entails also its erasure, since in the mode of representation we give it (in testimonio, for example) it is no longer located in the space of subalternity, but rather has become something like a ventriloquist’s dummy’ (1999: 135). As in Spivak’s work, Chakrabarty’s subaltern remains a utopian ideal, its inaccessibility functioning to protect it from hegemonic appropriation. Both Chakrabarty and Spivak belong to that faction of subaltern studies that is concerned ‘to register where the power of the university and the disciplines to understand and represent the subaltern breaks down’ (Beverley 1999: 38). They seek to show ‘how the knowledge we construct and impart as academics is structured by the absence, difficulty, or impossibility of representation of the subaltern’ (40). It is precisely this ‘absence’ or ‘impossibility’ of representing the subaltern that results in the paradoxical condition in which utopia and death are linked, in which the subaltern’s death or disappearance enables the subaltern to fulfill the ideal role of the resistant and inappropriable other.

Especially alert to the dangers of the recuperation and incorporation of subaltern alterity by hegemonic narratives, Gayatri Spivak has defined subalternity as ‘the space out of any serious touch with the logic of capitalism or socialism’ (1995: 115). The word ‘subaltern’, she writes, is ‘reserved for the sheer heterogeneity of decolonized space’ (1999: 310). She argues that subalterns are effaced even as they are disclosed. Subaltern women, for example, can never be sufficiently explained or adequately represented by any totalizing narrative mode:

If, as [Fredric] Jameson suggests, the mode of production narrative is the final reference, these [subaltern] women are insufficiently represented or representable in that narration . . . We can docket them, but we cannot grasp them all . . . [T]he ground-level value-codings that write these women’s lives elude us . . . We pay the price of epistemically fractured transcoding when we explain them as general exemplars of anthropological descriptions. (2445)

Not only do we epistemically fracture or distort subaltern beliefs and values when we transcode and explain them, but our attempt to turn them into ‘general exemplars of anthropological descriptions’ encounters a stubborn and recalcitrant singularity that refuses to yield any secrets. Referring to subaltern women, Spivak tells us that they will only ‘be instructive if they remain singular and secretive’ (245, n.73). Radically heterogeneous and ‘non-narrativizable’ (Spivak 1990: 144) the subaltern, like the Friday of J. M. Coetzee’s novel Foe, remains the unemphatic agent of withholding in the text. For every territorial space that is value coded by colonialism and every command of metropolitan anticolonialism for the native to yield his ‘voice’, there is a space of withholding, marked by a secret that may not be a secret but cannot be unlocked . . . The curious guardian at the margin who will not inform. ( Spivak 1999: 190)

Spivak’s argument for subaltern secrecy and withholding is similar to Derrida’s discussion of the relation between the secret and the ethical: I have a taste [Derrida confesses] for the secret, it clearly has to do with notbelonging; I have an impulse of fear or terror in the face of a political space, for example, a public space that makes no room for the secret. For me, the demand that everything be paraded in the public square and that there be no internal forum is a glaring sign of the totalitarianization of democracy. I can rephrase this in terms of political ethics: if a right to the secret is not maintained, we are in a totalitarian space. (Derrida and Ferraris 2001: 59)

The secret, the space of withholding that Spivak and Derrida wish to maintain as a right, lends itself to a subaltern utopianism a no-place, that is to say, an unrecognized space yet to be nationally coded or made to parade in the public square.

To Spivak, even the most well-meaning attempt to understand the subaltern must acknowledge its limits before the subaltern’s ultimately non-narrativizable singularity. As she puts it:

The moot decipherment [of the subaltern] by another in an academic institution (willy-nilly a knowledge-production factory) many years later must not be too quickly identified with the ‘speaking’ of the subaltern. It is not a mere tautology to say that the colonial or postcolonial subaltern is defined as the being on the other side of difference, or an epistemic fracture, even from other groupings among the colonized. (1999: 309)

Subalterns thus remain elusive to our knowledge apparatuses. ‘Indeed’, Spivak remarks, ‘it is only in their death that they enter a narrative for us, they become figurable. In the rhythm of their daily living, the elusion is familiarly performed’ (245). Thus, for Spivak, it is only with the epistemic colonization of the subaltern’s utopian space of withholding and resistance, that is, with the death of the curious guardian of the margin, that the subaltern becomes representable or retrievable for hegemonic knowledge. I wish to argue, however, that the death of the subaltern can be read differently. The death of the subaltern does not result in the appropriation of the subaltern’s secret, the erasure of subaltern singularity, or the colonization of subaltern space. On the contrary, it safeguards subaltern secrecy, singularity, and space. As Derrida has noted, ‘death is always the name of a secret, since it signs the irreplaceable singularity’ (1993: 74). It is the subaltern’s death that ensures its secrecy and irreplaceable singularity and enables Spivak, Chakrabarty, and others to figure or narrate the subaltern as the ideal guardian of a utopian horizon that promises, in Spivak’s resonant phrase, ‘the sheer heterogeneity of decolonized space’. It is the dead and silent subaltern who makes possible subaltern inaccessibility, unfigurability, and singularity. At the same time, however, this unfigurable singularity of the subaltern, safeguarded by death, becomes an exemplary figure; subaltern inaccessibility gains cogency as a theory of unrepresentability, becomes narrativizable once again as resistance to hegemonic incorporation, and can be imagined as a utopian alternative to the postcolonial present. In an astute reading of Spivak’s A Critique of Postcolonial Reason, Ian Baucom has argued that ‘the source of the Critique’s greatest anxiety’ is that subaltern singularity may become exemplary, thereby losing its singularity and turning, in the hands of the theorist, into an accessible discursive concept:

For, if the reading of the cryptic, withheld singular contains (as one of its secrets) Spivak’s answer to the many critics who have denounced her dictum ‘The subaltern cannot speak,’ if what it suggests is that she really meant ‘the subaltern will not speak (in code)’, then the moment in which that withheld speech licenses its abstract conceptualization is the moment in which it indeed becomes codable: for theory. (Baucom 2005: 165)

Ania Loomba makes a similar point when she argues that

the silence of Spivak’s subaltern is a precondition for her own project of representation . . . It is no accident that such a project focuses on the immolated widow . . . She provides the most suitable language for talking about silence: she is, after all, a conceptual and social category that comes into being only when the subject dies. (Loomba 1993: 21718)

In short, Baucom’s and Loomba’s discussion of Spivak’s troubling focus on the dead or silent subaltern can be more bluntly summarized thus: the subaltern dies or remains silent (a form of verbal death) in order that the concept or theory of subaltern singularity and alterity may live on.

Dead subalterns, in their very unrepresentability, make ideal representatives of a utopian decolonized space. Their death guarantees their inaccessibility to hegemonic coding; in other words, their death becomes the precondition for a theory of subalternity. A sacrificial logic is clearly at work here, a logic Georges Bataille has formulated thus: ‘Sacred things are established through a labor of loss’ (cited in de Certeau 1988: 324). A certain forfeit or loss secures a lasting martyrdom for struggling, uncertain subaltern actors who are transformed, in death, into symbols of counter-hegemonic resistance and alterity. But such an immortalization of the subaltern involves a disturbing necroidealism that abandons the messiness and ambiguity of actual struggles for the reassurance of a political ideal. A dead subaltern lends itself to sacrificial idealization; a living subaltern, however, may well wish to insert himself or herself into a hegemonic way of life, negotiate some kind of compromise with the status quo, or engage in a complex dialogue with the nation-state. Bart Moore-Gilbert has cogently argued that it is a little too simple to say that if subalterns were able to speak they would ‘automatically become part of the hegemonic order’ or join ‘the constituency of stooge-like ‘‘privileged native informants’’’. Moore-Gilbert points out further that ‘Spivak’s contention that ‘‘If the subaltern can speak then, thank God, the subaltern is not a subaltern any more’’ does not sufficiently recognize that there may be a number of intermediate positions between ‘‘full’’ subalternity and hegemony’ (Moore-Gilbert 1997: 1078). Too sharp a dichotomy is drawn between subalternity and hegemony without the necessary attention to the complex relation or the possible transition between the two. The live subaltern has to face the uncertainty and ambiguity of the intermediate position while the dead can remain an unwavering, heroic symbol of subaltern resistance and utopian difference.

There is another problem with a subalternism inspired by the dead. Subaltern theory’s safeguarding of the subaltern from the power of hegemonic representation is, at the same time, its power to police all representations of the subaltern by determining how far they fall short of the ideal (dead and silent) subaltern. A similar problem is explored in Elizabeth Povinelli’s insightful book The Cunning of Recognition, in which she shows how the purported unrepresentability of the Australian Aboriginal subject becomes a regulative ideal of what Aboriginal alterity should be. Povinelli describes how, for non-Aboriginal Australians, the ideal Aboriginal subject is a forever receding or disappearing ideal that actual Aborigines, more often than not, fail to live up to. The Aboriginal subject becomes an empirically emptied alterity, a phantasm that enables a national fantasy in which every determinate aspect of Aboriginal life is measured against an imaginary, unchanging idea of Aboriginality. Actual Aboriginal subjects thus not only fail to live up to this unrepresentable ideal, but they ‘stand in the way of this unrepresentable good object in the dual sense of being merely metonymic of it and a material barrier to it’ (Povinelli 2002: 59). Moreover, the contemporary Aboriginal subject is not only measured and judged according to this imagined, unrepresentable ideal, but is also made ‘to identify with [this] lost indeterminable object’ and to become ‘the melancholic subject’ of longing (39). Like his Aboriginal counterpart, the subaltern too can only fail to live up to the impossible, indeterminable utopian alterity of the dead subaltern.

Povinelli’s description of the idealized Aboriginal and Spivak’s account of the singularly silent subaltern recall an idealist strain of primitivism in which the so-called primitive functions more as a concept than as a living presence.1 In this idealist primitivism, the dead or vanished primitive returns as a more powerful spectral figure to haunt the modern imagination. In his 1924 book Studies in Classic American Literature, D. H. Lawrence argued for just such a form of primitivist haunting:

The moment the last nuclei of Red life break up in America, then the white men will have to reckon with the full force of the demon of the continent . . . Within the present generation the surviving Red Indians are due to merge in the great white swamp. Then the Daimon of America will work overtly, and we shall see real changes. (1971: 41)

Though the Red Indian will never again possess America, Lawrence writes, ‘his ghost will’ (40). Inspired by Lawrence’s work, Leslie Fiedler in 1968 published a book with a title that succinctly summed up the paradox Lawrence had noted: The Return of the Vanishing American. Fiedler observes in his study that ‘an astonishing number of novelists have begun to write fiction in which the Indian character, whom only yesterday we were comfortably bidding farewell (with a kind of security and condescension we can no longer even imagine), has disconcertingly reappeared’ (1968: 11). The paradox of the primitive becoming more powerful in his or her disappearance finds its most explicit and disturbing expression in the postmodernist musings of Jean Baudrillard. Baudrillard argues that rather than surrendering the secret of their otherness to their Spanish conquerors, South American Indians chose to die:

When they [the Indians] found themselves obliged to become part of an otherness no longer radical, but negotiable under the aegis of the universal concept, they preferred mass self-immolation . . . The Indians’ strange collusion in their own extermination represented their only way of keeping the secret of otherness. (1993: 133)

Though Baudrillard’s assertion is morally and factually dubious (one wonders what contemporary South American Indians would make of his claim of their ancestors’ ‘mass self-immolation’), it serves to highlight the paradox of qui perd gagne. His statement clearly emphasizes the sacrificial logic in which death confers on the primitive subaltern a power he or she never had in life a bizarre logic that Baudrillard explains elsewhere through the ‘pataphysical’ example of Alfred Jarry’s dead cyclist who carries on cycling: ‘Rigor mortis is replaced by mobilitas mortis, and the dead rider pedals on indefinitely, even accelerating, as a function of inertia. The energy released is boosted by the inertia of the dead’ (102). Similarly, in death, the primitive wields even greater power as a ‘phantom presence’, its ‘viral, spectral presence . . . [infecting] the synapses of our brain’ (137).

Baudrillard’s South American Indian who would rather die than yield his or her secret resembles in some ways Spivak’s subaltern who chooses to be singular by not yielding her secret or Coetzee’s Friday, the curious guardian of the margin, who refuses to communicate. The paradoxical primitivism described by Lawrence, Fiedler and Baudrillard in which the primitive haunts us more powerfully in death than in life finds an echo in Spivak’s championing of marginalized and unassimilated tribal subalterns who, unlike disenchanted moderns, can still ‘traffic with the incalculable’, that is, with the sacred. The ‘sacred’, Spivak explains, need not have a religious sanction but simply a sanction that cannot be contained within the principle of reason alone. In this sense, nature is no longer sacred for civilizations based on the control of nature. The result is global devastation due to a failure of ecology. It is noticeable that less advanced groups in the fourth world still retain this sense as a matter of their cultural conformity. I am not exoticizing or romanticizing the aboriginal, they are not all ‘radicals’ . . . What we are dreaming of here is not how to keep the aboriginal in a state of excluded cultural conformity, but how to learn and construct a sense of sacred nature by attending to them . . . We want to open our minds to being haunted by the aboriginal. We want the spectral to haunt the calculus. (1995: 11516)

Spivak’s recourse to what she regards as Aboriginal ecological sanity may be admirable. But in urging us to be ‘haunted by the aboriginal’ or in wanting ‘the spectral to haunt the calculus’, she appears to be using the same language as that employed by Lawrence, Fiedler and Baudrillard in which a necroidealism sacrifices the complex desires of the living for the edifying spectrality of the dead or vanishing.

I have been arguing so far that a logic of sacrifice underwrites those works in which the loss or death of subalterns leads in turn to the immortalization of the dead subaltern as representing the idea of resistance and utopian difference. Subalternity becomes a theory of martyrdom in which subalterns die so that the subaltern can emerge as an exemplary, heroic symbol of resistance. I will now turn to a closer examination of how this troubling conjunction of idealization and necropolitics underpins the following texts: Ranajit Guha’s essay ‘Chandra’s Death’ (1987), Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things (1997), and Amitav Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide (2004).