Table Of Contentit) 20 I 0 by Jeremy Fernando
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'"A thinking," Flaubert said, "should have neither religion nor
fatherland nor even any social conviction. Absolute
scepticism." Radically rupturing, the statement is not merely
subversive. It does not depend upon the program which it
criticizes. How might one free oneself from the cowardliness
pressing upon social convictions of the present, subjugated as they
are to reactive, mimetic, and regressive posturings?
Avital Ronell: Crack Wars: Literature, Mania, Addiction
viii
You are a clever man, friend John; you reason well, and your wit is
bold; but you are too prejudiced. You do not let your eyes see nor
your ears hear, and that which is outside your daily life is not of
account to you. Do you not think that there are things which you
cannot understand, and yet which are; that some people see things
that others cannot? But there are things old and new which must
not be contemplate by men’s eyes, because they know—or think
they know—some things which other men have told them. Ah, it
is the fault of our science that wants to explain all; and if it explain
not, then every day the growth of new beliefs, which think
themselves new; and which are yet but the old, which pretend to
be young—like the fine ladies at the opera.
Bram Stoker: Dracula
ix
To Avital Ronell, Wolfgang Schirmacher, and Werner Hamacher;
the bravest thinkers I know.
Thank you for being my mentors, my teachers,
and most of all
my friend.
x
Whilst speaking with a survivor of the Second World War, what
struck me most was her response to my question—‘what is the
biggest difference between being a free citizen and one in
captivity?’ To her it is simply the ability to say ‘no’. For when she
was under the rule of the captors, this act of choice—expressing
her unwillingness to perform a particular task, deed, action—was
unthinkable. Every question put to her was never a true
question—it was only a question in form; a question to which an
answer was already known, already inscribed into the question
itself—it was an order, a demand, an imperative.
One register that is opened is; a possible pre-condition for
freedom is the ability to deny, the opportunity to reject. Here we
can catch a hint of an echo of Herman Melville’s Bartleby in her
response: when asked to do something, one is able to express one’s
self through uttering “I would prefer not to.”1 Whilst one might
argue that the rejection of Bartleby is not as strong—there is no
outright rejection of the request, merely a deflection (after all, just
because one “prefer[s] not to” does not mean that one does not do
it), one must also keep in mind that her utterance and Bartleby’s
have one thing in common—both are responses that keep the
question open, that allows the question to remain a full question.
After all, ‘no’ does not mean an outright rejection of the premise,
only a refusal to comply; and since there is no time element to the
response, it does not rule out the potential for compliance at a later
1 Herman Melville. (2006). Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street.
xi
date, just not now. It is in that precise sense of indeterminacy that
the response of ‘no’ is far from an answer, far from any finality
whatsoever: in fact it is the response that has the opposite effect; it
is a response that opens other possibilities, by remaining
unknown.
What remains unknown is not just the response to the
question. Since there is always a possibility that one might answer
in the positive to the question at some point in the future, this
opens the question of, who is the ‘I’ that is uttering ‘no’. If one
wants to posit that the self is consistent, then surely there would be
a contradiction between a ‘no’ now and a future ‘yes’. (We see
many such accusations in daily life—and particularly in the
political arena—where people are charged with ‘going back on
their words’). One could also posit that the self is situational: in
particular situations one could respond in the negative to the
question; at other moments, it might be a positive response. In
either case, the self that utters the response at the later point is not
exactly the same as the one of the earlier utterance (inconsistency
suggests change; situational difference suggests that there is an
external component to the self and since this is different, there is
no reason to claim that it is the same self). Hence, at each
utterance of ‘no’, the self that is uttering is also an indeterminate
self: it calls to mind all the other self(s) that precede the ‘no’; and
all that will come after.
xii
At each utterance of ‘no’ there are always already ghosts of all
the other self(s) that may or may not have uttered the same thing,
the same response. However, this does not mean that if at any
point there is a positive utterance to the question—a ‘yes’—that it
would be any different. In fact, the only situation that would be
different is if the ‘yes’ is a compulsory utterance; when it is a
situation where there is no ability to say ‘no’, where there is no
ability to respond to the question at all. This would be a situation
where not only is the ability to respond effaced, but more crucially,
where the self is effaced.
What is opened is a consideration of whether there is a link
between the ability to respond and the self. Is there only a self
when there is a ability to respond to situations, with situations?
After all, responsibility is the very precondition of choice, and
there is no self without choice; otherwise one would be a mere
automaton, completely conditioned by one’s surroundings. This
does not necessarily mean that one has complete control when one
makes any choice: after all, since perhaps only one of the self(s) is
making that choice, there is no reason to believe that the other
self(s) might not have made a different decision; and with the same
amount of legitimacy, or illegitimacy.
One may never even be able to comment on the legitimacy of
the choice, as this presumes an external verification to the
choosing. However, as each choice is situational—singular—the
xiii
referent is always already different. Hence, each choice is
irreducibly singular and thus incomparable, uncomparable.
In order to shed some light on the indeterminacy between
choice and automated response, we turn to Maurice Merleau-
Ponty and his meditation on the strange phenomenon known as
the phantom-limb; the limb that is not quite there, but at the same
time affects the person, has effects on the person, as if it was there.
In fact on many occasions the person is affected by the absent limb
in ways that seem completely unreasonable, inexplicable: for
instance instead of pain where one’s hand used to be, the pain is
now felt in another area of the body. Of course once we take into
account the fact that the nerve receptors of the hand are now dead,
it is completely reasonable that the pain is not felt where the hand
was: however, this opens up the question of why pain is felt at
all—clearly there must still be some stimulus that the ‘hand’ is
feeling, is receiving, that is now transmitted to another part of the
body. It is in the light of the indeterminacy of whether the
sensation is caused by physiological or psychological stimuli that
we must consider Merleau-Ponty’s claim that
what has to be understood, then, is how the
psychic determining factors and the physiological
conditions gear into each other: it is not clear how
the imaginary limb, if dependant on physiological
conditions and therefore the result of a third
