The rise of Zionism is signalling a shift from the bio-political regulation of life to the necropolitics of death; the death of not only corporeal bodies but also of illusions and aspirations. This death is marked by civic invisibility and loss of moral self-worth.
What makes the developments in Palestine disturbing is the reminder that the worst victims of 20th century have become the worst aggressors of the 21st century. It is, equally, a grim reminder that suffering does not necessarily bring moral compassion. Humans resist, not to rally around the ideal of justice but, as Foucault argued, to restore power to themselves. The repulsion against immigrants comes from, as the cultural sociologist, Zygmunt Bauman, observed, the grim possibility of the rest of us one day leading their lives. We weep for ourselves in the deep recesses of our inner environments, as Nietzsche claimed, even when we grieve for the weak. The global phenomenon of democratic backsliding and the rise of unapologetically authoritarian regimes are drafting new social norms around such fear and anxiety. Palestine is thus worrying not only because of what Arab Muslims are enduring; but the justification of Israel’s expansionism by global powers also marks the institutionalising of necropolitics and endurance.
This shift — to see things through how much we can endure — can drastically alter the way we collectively frame the conventional ideals of democracy, sovereignty, legitimacy and violence. Zionism could well be the subconscious expression of what Jews endured in the concentration camps just as the political dynamics in Palestine are representative of the acceptable ways of enduring suffering and searching for meaning while staring at death.
One could read Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning, much less as a tribute to hope and more as to how global authoritarian regimes are pushing the limits in the hope that humans can endure a greater degree of suffering than what liberalism and Marxism believe is politically feasible and morally acceptable. Authoritarianism is now rooted in altering the terms of reference beyond freedom and resistance. There is a different kind of meaning being attached to the life that is possible beyond the ideals of justice and revolution.
The Holocaust could be an event, even an aberration, but the lessons from the response to it go much beyond the paradigm of governance. Social life is constituted as much by erasure as by memory: Frankl recollects his first psychological reaction on entering Auschwitz — “I struck out my whole former life.” Forgetting was important in more ways than one, even for the Jew Kapos who assisted the SS soldiers knowing well that “they would have to leave their enforced role of executioner and become victims themselves.” Forgetting in Auschwitz also meant “detaching the mind from its surroundings” and slipping into living with the mundane details of routine. Frankl says, “[t]he prisoner of Auschwitz, in the first phase of shock, did not fear death. Even the gas chambers lost their horrors for him after the first few days – after all, they spared him the act of committing suicide.” The normalisation of death can be near-complete. Frankl observed: “[t]he sufferers, the dying and the dead, became such commonplace sights to him after a few weeks of camp life that they could not move him anymore.” The emergent necropolitics are reminiscent of how, in Auschwitz, the ragged and emaciated bodies projected “a creature with which you have so little in common that you do not even punish it.” It is a strange place where fraternity becomes conspiratorial and indifference evokes stigma.
Frankl points to how “the meager pleasures of camp life provided a kind of negative happiness – ‘freedom from suffering’...” Today, escape from suffering could be the new way of measuring life instead of freedom, dignity and fraternity. Freedom from suffering could thus be more alluring than the expansive gestation of the greater ideals of modernity.
Ajay Gudavarthy is Associate Professor, Centre for Political Studies, JNU
