India: More Corruption Please!
The Citizen’s Amendment Act (CAB) has sparked country-wide protests and inspired international attention from concerned citizens, governmental and inter-governmental organizations, non-governmental organizations, etc. The amendment articulates a positive proposal, affirming citizenship rights on select religious identities. Thus, in this case the law is essentially about what is not written but it presents itself as if it were inverted. The Muslim religious identity is deliberately excluded. The new forms of power today function in precisely this way. It is by articulating a positive proposal — an affirmative proposal — which deliberately obscures or negates an altogether more essential but rejected proposal.
Take for example the traditional tablets of the law in the Judeo-Christian tradition, which were universal statements that function first as a universal negation. These were rules that instructed us about what was forbidden rather than what was permitted (e.g., “thou shalt covet thy neighbour’s wife,” etc), and, since it was universal, it was thought to be applicable to all people. Isn’t it the case that today the “universal negative” function of the law has morphed into a new and much more obscene form whose role is rather to provide “particular affirmative” chunks of enjoyment to allotted groups. We see the same sort of logic being worked out on the opposite political spectrum today by those who have deviated from the original radical and revolutionary position which inspired LGBTQ+: the continuous articulation of identities whose enjoyment or rights are secured precisely through the logic of ‘particular affirmatives.’
We should conclude from this that the function of the law today has morphed from its original ‘universal negative’ logic to a much more obscene logic of ‘particular affirmations.’ Thus, in the case of India, it is not that we have a law stating that “no citizen shall be rejected on the basis of religious identity” (which is a universally binding prohibition) but rather that selected identities are affirmed as being included. The only thing a progressive leftist might add to this is a “+.” It would be by adding a plus that a neo-fascist position quickly appears to morph into a radically progressive one. The problem therefore with the contemporary international obsession with particular affirmatives is that they always also come with what has not been said (the “+”). Thus, we can spot a difference over whether or not one symbolizes and includes what cannot be said or else one rejects what has not been said. In any case, for India, the Muslim has become, through its very exclusion from the range of particular identities, synonymous with the universal. Indeed, the Muslim is now showing itself to be a figure of a new universality in India with whom new forms of solidarity are currently being produced internationally. Today we are witnessing more than ever people from all backgrounds now standing in solidarity with this excluded universal.
A similar obscene shift in the function of the law has occurred in America and much of Europe. I have written at length on this in my book Jacques Lacan and American Sociology and in my forthcoming book On Love: Psychoanalysis, Religion, and Society. It is what the Slovenian psychoanalyst and philosopher Mladen Dolar has recently named “the second face of the Other,” or, to put it in more common language, it is the second face of the law, and, perhaps the other face of fascism. What is perhaps most “neo-” about “neo-fascism” today is that it does not operate at all according to the tradition “universal negation” or “universal prohibition” (e.g., it is not an explicit prohibition of the Jewish identity).
So, where do we go from here?
I am currently writing this from an apartment in Pune, India, where, truthfully, I feel a bit like a prisoner and I sometimes fear for my life. The situation here, at a small and new Indian university, is astounding. I am not allowed outside in the evenings, I am not allowed visitors, I must punch in and out to work each day as a professor, all business depends upon “trust” (one high ranking administrator openly stated that experience and education matter least of all since the most important quality in a professor is “loyalty”), and so on. Yet, incidentally, all of these laws are communicated according to a ‘particular affirmative’ logic of enjoyment: yes, we must comply and work on Sunday during the holiday break to celebrate the birthday of the president of the university, but, what is worse, we must demonstrate that we are enjoying ourselves!
The Modi government and the violent culture that is has inspired has demonstrate all of these neo-fascist characteristics and they have been responsible also for activating these attitudes at all levels of leadership. What the Modi government has is to discover a way to operate according to the law without falling into previous logics of universal prohibitions: they are slowly working toward an awareness that enjoyment and particular affirmatives are the best way to secure power and to tap into the passions of everyday people. George Bernard Shaw once said that ‘we get the government that we deserve’ but he clearly didn’t think about the contemporary model of international politics. Today the government should get the culture that it deserves: it is our choice whether that is a culture of courage or a culture of complicity.
Remember that Modi claimed in his platform that he would stamp out corruption. And yet the evidence suggests very clearly that he only displaced any responsibility for that corruption onto the poorest and most vulnerable segments of society. Meanwhile, corruption has increased among government, militant, policing, real-estate, health-care, education, and so on. So, in all of this, what constitutes courage? Courage is the ability to allow ourselves to show the government and the culture that it activates what real corruption looks like: the wickedness of the people will prevail over the false-goodness that prevents it! The acronym CAB should hereafter be understood as “Corruption Attacks Back!”
