Ozan Kamiloglu
After the horrific attacks in Paris, the painting of the great Bruegel, The Blind Leading the Blind is
in my mind. Bruegel finished this work in the year 1568. It was the year when
the notorious Duke Alba arrived with his troops on behalf of the Spanish King
in order to cleanse the land of all heretics: Calvinists, Lutherans,
Anabaptists as well as all those who dared to oppose the hegemony of the
governors of the Spanish Netherlands.
The Duke of Alba appointed the Council of
Troubles, also known as “the blood council” to pass relevant orders to protect
Spanish interests and to judge the sinners. Year by year the number of those
deemed ‘outlaws’ increased, and the authority of the council and its ‘justice’
grew with the execution of more than 1000 people, until the popular revolution
of 1576 in Brussels. It is the political and historical context of this city
where the the painting was created which links it to the recent Paris attacks:
it is the city where the law-making councils of the European Union sit, and
also where some of the perpetrators of the massacre in Paris came from.
Newspapers have written again and again speculating as to how the suburb of
Molenbeek has become the “Europe’s jihadi central.”
One of the details of the painting, the church that
lies behind the line of blind people, has sparked a great deal of
commentary from art historians. I will follow just one of these readings,
which considers the painting in relation to Matthew 15:14 : “They are blind
guides leading the blind, and if one blind person guides another, they will
both fall into a ditch.” It is argued that through the metaphor of the
blind leading the blind, Bruegel criticises the church, and of course the
“blood council” by setting the church just above the those depicted.
The
desolation surrounding the church and the small dry tree positioned exactly in
front of it present an image of death. The blind men themselves are alarmed — they
are not really able to progress, they begin to fall although they try hard not
to. They hesitate to move, and they have no one but their brothers in faith in
front of them. What we see in these men is also their lack of hierarchy; more
than following a leader they seem to follow each other because of
a need for solidarity. This makes it possible to consider them in more
general terms as ‘humanity’ rather than a particular religious community
as such.
What does this insightful painting tell us today?
I will not focus on the symbolism of the blind men holding and needing each
other, falling or progressing together. Judith Butler wrote on them in her recent article. For now, I prefer to focus on the
church in the background.
During the age of ‘discoveries’, as European children
used to be taught to call the events leading to the genocide of the indigenous
peoples of South America, when white Europeans would travel to a newly
known land, they would ask the Catholic Church to provide information about
that land and its people. Military expeditions were always pursued with the
participation of a priest and the benediction of the Catholic Church.
Today, it would not be the Church but Amnesty International along with the CIA fact
book that would be consulted before traveling, in order to have an idea of the
human rights abuses in a wild land. If previously a military
expedition would not be possible without the Church, today a military
expedition without human rights organisations is not imaginable. In all this
time and despite nominal changes, we have not left Brussels.
Humanitarian interventions that bring bombs to the
‘savages’ legitimize this violence in our hearts and minds, while also bringing
about the erasure of the political. French philosopher Jacques Rancière gives
a fine tuned conceptualization of this colonisation of politics by the
ethical in his article “The Ethical Turn of Aesthetics and Politics.”1 For Rancière the ethical turn “signifies the constitution of an
indistinct sphere.” It is not the reign of moral judgments over politics and
art, but the elimination of the distinction that would separate these two
spheres — in other words, the distinction between “what is and what ought to
be,” between fact and law. This creates the inclusion of “all forms of
discourse and practice beneath the same indistinct point of view.” Rancière
adds that, as far as this indistinction between fact and law grows, “an
unprecedented dramaturgy of infinite evil, justice and reparation” comes onto
the scene. This is where we are, when Holland declares war on terror 14 years
after George W. Bush: it is the search for infinite evil, in order to bring
absolute justice and reparation by demolition.
In order to explain the concept of infinite evil,
Rancière analyses the filmDogville (Lars
von Trier, 2003). The film is a transposition of Bertolt Brecht’s story,
Die Heilige Johanna der Schlachthöfer (1929 – 1930). In the original story
everything is divided into two: between the capitalist jungle and Christian
morality. Brecht’s story considers how Christian morality is ineffective
against capitalism’s violence until it is finally transformed into
a militant morality against oppression. Rancière affirms that “the
opposition between two types of violence was therefore also that between sorts
of morals and of rights.” And this division constitutes politics: politics is
not the opposition of these two forms of morality but their division (which is
a criticism addressed to Habermas). It is this division that creates basis
for disagreement. However, in Dogville, what one cannot see is the reason of the
division and their distinct morals. In the movie, Grace (Nicole Kidman) reaches
the town of Dogville whilst running from some gangster.
The community agrees to
hide her with encouragement from the intellectual of the town, Tom (Paul Bettany).
The community wants to “try” the migrant Grace for two weeks. In these two
weeks Grace tries hard to win the trust of the small town, but the demands of
the residents escalate day by day. She learns in a very hard way how the
hosts became evil, and at the end of the movie gives them a lesson with
the help of her mafioso friends. In Ranciere’s reading, the evil that Grace is
exposed to “refers to no other cause but itself.” Grace is the excluded “who
wants to be admitted into the community, which brings her to subjugation before
expelling her.“The local community is the evil without any cause. If there is
no specific reason for the violence, a morality that legitimizes the
violence, a division of the world, then the only way to abolish it is the
“radical annihilation” of the community itself. This brings us to infinite
justice, which can be reached only by infinite violence against the infinite
evil: a complete annihilation of the community where the evil comes out.
Rancière reminds us that the film was rejected from Cannes for ‘lacking
humanism’. He suggests that we should understand humanist fiction as
elimination of justice (justice of Grace), through hiding the opposition
between the just and the unjust.
On the one hand it is a very similar humanist
fiction that we are exposed to with the recent attacks: just like Bush, Holland
declared a merciless fight against “the barbarians of Islamic State,” as
the president of the country of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen.
However, the idea of human rights changed dramatically from that of an
emancipatory revolution to a war against evil in last two centuries.
Fourteen years after the seminal article of Makau Mutua, “Savages, Victims and
Saviours: The Metaphor of Human Rights,” the saviours continue to fight against
savages through a legitimization which stems from the victims. Mutua
writes that the grand narrative of human rights “depicts an epochal contest
pitting savages, on the one hand, against victims and saviours, on the other”.2 In this contest, justice becomes the annihilation of the savage and
construction of Evil is in the face of he other. Ironically enough, just as inDogville, the victim
becomes the source of legitimization for this absolute justice of the saviour.
This is same for the victims of Paris attack and bombings by Western powers in
Middle East. The Western subject and its Middle Eastern counter part legitimize
the violence of their saviours (be it drones or the suicide bombers) with this
controversial construction of war against the barbarian other.
This is also not very different for the systemically
disempowered second or third generation migrants who live in the ghettos of
European capitals. They have been asked to believe in the probability of
upwards mobility, the middle class religion of human rights and non-violence,
and the fiction of how enlightened Western powers protect the world from Evil.
As a twenty-four year old who joined Jabhat al-Nusra in Syria told :
They [Western society] teach us
to work hard to buy a nice car and nice clothes but that isn’t happiness.
I was a third-class human because I wasn’t integrated into a corrupted
system. But
I didn’t want to be a street gangster.
Terrorist violence has been condemned, while scores of
people experience other forms of violence in their segregated communities, each
time they turn on their television, each time they walk on the high street.
Human rights offers no protection from this degradation. They are as, if not
more, aware that something is rotten in urban planning, housing, labor law and
the capitalist production of desire. Yet “violence” is forbidden and the
disempowered must show respect to those who have a face, visibility, and
a voice because it is called “freedom of speech.” Walter Benjamin in his
“Critique of Violence” quotes from Anatole France: “poor and rich are equally
forbidden to spend the night under the bridges,” like middle class Parisiens
and the youth of suburbs. Numbers show that only “7 to 8 percent of France’s population is Muslim, however as
much as 70 percent of the prison population is Muslim.”
Even if they do not
have decent housing, or a face and a voice, or the color and dress
code, they have to respect to all those who have them, because it is their
right to have it. And if they don’t follow the established order, the absolute
justice of modern society will be waiting for them, with its penal system,
batons and bombs. Total annihilation as a form of justice haunts not only
the imaginary of middle class Parisian with a French flag covering their
facebook profile, but also the youth of Parisian suburbs, with their hoodies,
kefies and veils covering their faces.
Then, the church of Bruegel becomes a mosque with
a radical cleric obeying to Sharia Councils of ISIS this
time, instead of the European councils. The Catholic church in the painting,
the source of the violence of the Duke of Alba against protestants, this time
becomes legitimate source of absolute violence in the form of some particular
readings of Quran. ISIS calls
their 2004 manifesto Idharat at Tawahoush (The
Management of Savagery), as if they know their role in the tripod of Mutua.
They want to be savages, they declare to be so, and they insistently transgress
all the ethical norms which flow from the fiction of human rights, at the
expense of the lives of thousands. In the way that the Western narrative
creates its evil and its justice, the jihadist narrative finds its own as an
exact reflection of the first. You can defeat the evil only with unprecedented
violence, which in turn is considered justice.
The ‘mirror stage’ is, according
to Lacan, is when a child recognizes himself or herself in the mirror and
becomes conscious of selfhood. When a baby recognises itself in the
mirror, it also kills rest of the world from being a part of his/her
body. By the condemning the other to death, one becomes audible and visible,
but at the same time becomes indebted to the existence of the other (Evil
other) to determine itself. The one that calls for the bombing of Syria, and
the one that sympathises with the Jihadists, recognizes themselves as
a separate being from the other only because they are able to judge the
others with a death sentence.
King Phillip was talking about the heretics in
Netherlands when he said that: “in truth I cannot understand how such
a great evil could have arisen and spread in such a short time.”
Newspapers of Western media ask how the great evil of ISIS could
have arisen in such a short time again and again. This is the blind
leading the blind. Fight for the social justice is inaudible among the battle
cries of the politicians and the cries of victims. In the background, churches
of humanitarian intervention and Sharia hold confidently. Struggle for an
emancipatory politics, a libertarian, communitarian opening is being
oppressed both in Paris and Raqqa. A different ethics of looking at life
becomes impossible while war lords push us to stand with them against their
infinite evil, and condemn us if we don’t. Case in point, more than 24 environmentalist activists were put into house arrest before the Paris climate summit
using emergency measures after the Paris attacks, while ISIS has
killed in Turkey.
1 Jacques Rancière, Aesthetics and Its Discontents (London:
Polity, 2009).
2 Makau Mutua, “Savages, Victims and Saviours: the Metaphor of Human
Rights,” Harvard International Law Journal 42(1): 2001, 204.
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