Thursday, February 03, 2005
(10:04 AM) | Adam Kotsko:
The Right to Death
From Garrett Keizer, "Life Everlasting," Harper's (Feb. 2005): 57-58.Assuming that one's life might be taken as the most private of all forms of poverty, one might also assume that the option for assisted suicide would resonate most powerfully with conservatives. But to make that assumption would give too much weight to ideology and too little to the psychology that informs it. The right talks about protecting life and tradition, but at some level... it is mostly interested in protecting pain. For two reasons.I've written somewhat along these lines on abortion before, and I was of course told that I was being terribly unfair, that the respondant was pro-life and didn't think that pregnancy was a punishment for sexual sin, etc. That's the problem with "false-consciousness" type arguments, with which Harper's is replete (best example: they published exerpts from Thomas Frank's What's the Matter with Kansas? months before it was published in book form) -- no one who holds the views being "deconstructed" would own up to the unconscious motivations that the analyst has uncovered. Its effect would be profoundly anti-persuasive.
The first is theological: the belief that pain holds the meaning of life. Supposedly, and demonstrably, this is a Christian idea, though if Jesus himself had believed it, he would have told the lepers to find meaning in their sores. The fact is, with even a little encouragement, most lepers do. This explains the conundrum so perplexing to the liberal mind: why hard-pressed people can vote against their interests in support of someone like George W. Bush. How can they not see? In fact, they do see; they see from the same point of view that has led them to believe that the misery of their lives is the foundation of their integrity.
The second reason, which can always be counted on to exploit the first, is political: the belief that pain is fundamental to justice, which makes perfect sense if justice is conceived as nothing more than a system of punishments and rewards. The essence of punishment is pain. Whoever owns pain owns power.
The suicide, the mystic, the woman who seeks an abortion, the cancer patient who smokes a joint (the cancer patient's long-suffering lover who smokes a joint) --- all are roundly condemned for their escape from "responsibility" but truly feared for their escape from jurisdiction. It is a fear with a long and traceable history. The Roman emperor Tarquin crucified the bodies of citizens who committed suicide in order to escape his tyrrany. When Margaret Sanger began her campaign for birth control, she was accused of permitting women to escape their God-ordained sorrow of bearing children.
Of course, most people who hold such views either never read Harper's in the first place or gave up on it long ago, so the real point is to understand one's enemy -- to understand them, however, by pathologizing them, by refusing to take them at their word or to allow their conscious intentions to have any weight. It's a profoundly anti-liberal and, yes, "unfair" way to proceed. Harper's authors seem to be classic liberals who view our country as having been taken over by people who are, basically, insane and who thus need to jettison the trappings of reasoned liberal discourse when dealing with such people (or analyzing such people's actions in the hope of indirectly coming up against the problem of how to deal with them). From there, it's only a short step to the psychoanalytic ideology critique championed by Žižek, or in another way, to the whole trajectory of "psychologizing" readings developed by Nietzsche, sometimes deployed by Derrida, and annoyingly overused by "postmodern" theorists in general.
In some ways, I find such psychologizing to be one of the greatest obstacles to genuine thought -- in another way, it seems to be absolutely necessary. I suppose my judgment would depend heavily on the question of whether the psychologization takes place before a reading (such that, for example, every text in the Western Canon was written in order to reinforce straight white male hegemony and therefore we don't have to read any of them) or after.
