Saturday, February 10, 2007
(9:14 AM) | Amish Lovelock:
Bare Life or Death
So, does the horror of a sedated auschwitz lay in the maintenance of bare life or in the deaths? Do we stick with Agamben or join the Arendtians with their fervancy for keeping life alive and bread eaten in dignity rather than cake eaten in slavery? Or, do we really make the move back to Fanon or jubilee and know that under the colonial predecents of the auschwitz event the slave often prefers the possibility of death to the continuing condition of inhumanity? It is interesting that in Paul Gilroy's account of this, he quotes Lacan: "death, precisely because it has been drawn into the functions of stake in the game... shows at the same time how much of the prior rule, as well as of the concluding settlement, has been elided. For in the last analysis it is necessary for the loser not to perish, in order to become a slave. In other words, the pact everywhere precedes violence before perpetuating it." (quoted in
The Black Atlantic, 1993 p.63.) - (did Zizek get the Garner story from Gilroy?!). Death in life - is it just a metaphor? Is it so obvious to "the most superficial observer of of the processes that go on in the human body" that it is an untruth? Are the walking dead the site of political action
par excellance? Should we then ask the question of: if this is not metaphor, then what could it possibly "feel like," all the time risking the assumption that it is a archetypal "experience"; something to be measured and recorded... What would Santner think?
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(Amish Lovelock has asserted the moral right to be identified as the author of this post.)
