Living With Ghosts
Notes from Lebanon
Nadia Bou Ali
When one is living in a time of mass death—an abundance of death to the extent of its banality—death is an everyday happening. People dying; bodies petrifying; bodies evaporating; bunker busters vaporize bodies and turn them into powder, like a mass crematorium. A ritual of grand proportion in which names remain unrecorded. The dead cannot be named. We don’t even know who really died, or whether they count as dead or if they just disappeared in a puff of smoke… there is no time for memorialization. One could say that the immediacy of extermination disavows the mediation involved in any duel between life and death. Those who remember the dead and memorize them with rituals and social practices do so to distance themselves from the dead—to declare the dead as really dead. It’s a form of exorcism to remember—a resuscitation of the dead to duly note that they are as dead as you imagine them to be. But here, rather than going down the winding lane of ruminations about absences—from Anaximander to Heidegger to Derrida, the postmodern condition of rendering absence a radical gesture in the face of the unbearable presence of being—let’s ask, can we actually imagine the death of the individual any longer in these sites of countless deaths?
In high modernism, that death was largely coveted: an individual death is an attempt at a recuperation of the tragic. I can die despite the attrition of form—the death of all symbols, the retreat of all guarantees. In that death, I can imagine the solace of my hovering for time immemorial over my death bed, secularly chained to the dissolution of the function of the body, finally having a respite from the neurosis of modern existence. Things are not the same. We are in a different place: tragedy is over; heroes can die all they want but that doesn’t make any experience of death different. In fact, there is a collectivization of the experience of death unfolding: like sheep in the slaughterhouse, death becomes a spectacle to be witnessed petrified in the form of an image—death as a selfie. We watch others dying and it increasingly becomes impossible to not imagine our death: dying in your own bed out of old age is boring, says the resistance fighter, I would much rather die battling colonialism and imperialism. Old age… Who wants to age anymore in a world in which everything dissolves into air more and more so by the second? There is nothing to age for, or to age with: the age is an age of final solutions, the final cut, the end of the end… an endless repetition of an end that won’t end. In a sense, the supplements of apocalypse and messianism are the antinomies of the decay of postmodernity: we live with ghosts. The ghost is itself a hovering spectacle of the immanence of an ending that cannot end… it sticks with us, like the martyr does, as a revenant.
“The post-modern crisis of bourgeois consciousness is precisely this: the future is no longer guaranteed.”
Marx may have been right after all: “let the dead bury their dead,” not for the sake of positing an ontology of presence, of a living against the non-living, but to end a history in which alterity and otherness have become what haunts the living. The time of mourning must be brought to an end: the bunker buster leveling residential buildings, entire neighborhoods, knows that better than us. Decolonization and post-modernity are coincidental: they come hand-in-hand; the looming figure of the other—the sub-human, the sous-humain, as Mehdi Amel and Fanon called it—is itself a figuration of the abstraction of history. There is no other history but this history: maraboutique histories are not excesses to “real” histories of progress, rather they are repressed narratives of a material unconscious. The return of the repressed, the return of the death in form, symbolic mortification. The symbolic mortification of the colonized—their transformation into mortified cultural forms—ought to compel the colonizer to transcend the domain of the animal kingdom: to transcend the Hobbesian domain of natural law—its war of all against all, all-out war. Master–slave dialectic reloaded: the master cannot live without the petrified dead image of the slave.
This is also not very new, but something is truly different today, so unlike the grey-on-grey days that Hegel so disliked: the forewarnings of modernity—its contradiction—have now really synthesized into our very experience of living. The image or spectacle is already recorded in the future-to-come of the body. The body politic is swollen with narcissism, bloated with avarice, oozing with the excess of the death drive unable to sublimate it—like a stick bug caught in its own spit. Spectating the end of others is a dress rehearsal for our own end: the more it appears that we can choose how to move forward, the more that others are compelled to choose what they have been chosen for. The post-modern crisis of bourgeois consciousness is precisely this: the future is no longer guaranteed. More so, it is one in which everything is at risk, the conditions of living no longer have any guarantees—disaster capitalism is the rule. This bourgeois hold on the infinite—its transformation into data banks of codes—is at odds with a proletarian destitution that holds onto its own finitude: a fight against the machine, against the techniques of subjugation. Discourse has become more impotent than it ever was from the beginning of modernity. However, this contradiction between the machine of death—the dead machine of the bloated edema of the body politic—and the destitute ought to entail something other than the transformation of original accumulation yet again into force and power. Otherwise, this asymmetric duel is the only path forward for the substance-less subject: a dystopic future forlorn, and Lebanon and Gaza are its testing grounds.