Acting Otherwise: Literary Justice and the Politics of Compassion

Walter A. Johnston (bio)

A review of Weber, Elisabeth. Kill Boxes: the Legacy of Torture, Drone Warfare, and Indefinite Detention. Punctum Books, 2017.

In The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt argues that the distinctively totalitarian strategy of absolute mobilization produces among the ruled not only the feeling of constant motion, but—by virtue of the inscrutable principle guiding the tumult to which they are subjected—of a chaos that legitimates authority by conferring the combined irrationality and inexorability of the natural event upon its decree. However farcical its repetitions appear, the current executive branch of the United States government has arguably achieved something of that effect, which makes it difficult to establish meaningful continuity between this government and even its most proximate antecedents: the mutations of United States national and international policy during the H.W. Bush and Obama administrations. Elisabeth Weber’s Kill Boxes: Facing the Legacy of US-Sponsored Torture, Indefinite Detention, and Drone Warfare analyzes a set of political phenomena that may appear to be yesterday’s news in the presentist atmosphere produced by today’s executive caprice. First and foremost, Weber focuses on the military use of “kill boxes” that allows for targeted drone strikes where no war has been declared, which exemplifies for Weber the blurred boundary between norm and exception within which US-sponsored torture, indefinite detention, and drone warfare all operate. Although Weber restricts her analysis to the pre-Trump era, her book helps to overcome the stunned fatalism that authoritarianism induces by sensitizing us to a logic that links the deliberate stupefaction of contemporary public discourse with the organized traumatization of the victims of US military practice in the pre-Trump era.

Weber issues a sustained plea for a notion of “compassion” she draws from Jacques Derrida’s “Avowing—the Impossible: ‘Returns,’ Repentance, and Reconciliation,” and which she posits as an antidote to the “contempt” that inspires torture, indefinite detention, and drone warfare at the turn of the millennium.¹ According to Weber, compassion is not merely one feeling among the many that already comprise our relations to others in the world. Rather, it is a “fundamental mode” of “living together” (these terms are borrowed directly from Derrida) that conditions relationality from the ground up, and obligates us, as witnesses to the suffering of others, to heed an unavoidable “call to action” (162). Though Weber does not specify the actions to which we are called, her book exemplifies the response and the responsibility she theorizes; and one of her central claims is that the humanities have a crucial role to play in addressing a set of phenomena that might more traditionally be confronted by political science or international law. According to Weber, compassion involves a “shock of recognition,” and “to initiate and explore such shocks of recognition is . . . one of the major responsibilities but also one of the major promises of the practice called ‘the humanities'” (13). Weber’s collaborator Richard Falk is more direct about the resulting calls to action in his afterward; he argues that “at the very least, the challenges posed throughout this book point to an urgent need to reconstruct international humanitarian law in light of the realities of [the] non-territorial patterns of transnational conflict” (241). Though trained in international law, Falk concurs with Weber “that the humanist sensibility poses a real challenge, if not a threat, to the militarized mentality that allows the modern forms of cruelty to pass undetected through the metal detectors of ‘civilized societies'” (241).

But how or why might that be? What is the link between the “humanist sensibility,” “compassion,” and resistance to such a “militarized mentality” (241)? Weber’s answer is performative rather than constative. Her book is valuable primarily for the way in which it brings the humanistic practice of close textual analysis to bear upon discourses that might not traditionally receive such attention. With some help from W.J.T. Mitchell, this approach allows Weber to read the “shock of recognition” produced by the Abu Ghraib photographs, which relies on their legibility as images of crucifixion, and to suggest some consequences for our understanding of the mode of universality that they convoke (21). Later on, it gives rise to an illuminating analysis of military naming practices—in particular the shocking designation of the victims of drone strikes as “bug splat”—in light of Kafka’s The Metamorphosis (203). That reading makes more vivid and consequential one of her book’s main political-theoretical suggestions: that the “kill boxes” that allow drone strikes where no war has been declared blur the distinctions between norm and exception established by Carl Schmitt as the foundation of political sovereignty. Throughout Kill Boxes, Weber’s attention to the poietic and para-literary dimension of military and governmental practices goes far toward accomplishing the book’s main objective: Whereas state-sanctioned contempt ensures the victim’s “absence from public space and discourse in the US,” she suggests, a “shift in awareness” associated with compassion “will reveal this absence as overwhelming presence” (39).

The object of Weber’s critique is not the paucity of publicly available information about torture, drone warfare, and indefinite detention, but the way in which state-sanctioned representation “ghosts” the tortured individuals to whom it appears to grant access. The difference between contempt and compassion—and, implicitly, between the ways of knowing proper to state power and humanistic research—is qualitative rather than quantitative. It is the difference between what one might call two regimes of the sensible, which is crystallized in Weber’s analysis of an anonymous art collective’s work, titled “#Notabugsplat.” This 90 X 60 foot piece of Martha-Rosler-esque didactic photomontage superimposes journalist Noor Behram’s disarmingly intimate portrait of an unnamed Pakistani girl projected atop drone footage of the village where she lived before the strike that killed her parents and seven-year-old brother. Weber devotes the following words to the image:

Facing directly up from the giant reproduction of the photo, cropped to feature only the girl, her eyes are “squarely trained on the lens of the camera.” She frontally addresses, literally con-fronts the drone operator, thousands of miles away, and with him or her all those in whose name the attacks are carried out, with nothing but the vulnerability of her face, thereby, to quote Mitchell’s formulation again, “hailing the viewer as the ‘you’ who is addressed by an ‘I’.” The result, I would argue, is not so much “empathy,” which, “in the context of empire,” as Keith Feldman cautions, “has the capacity to exacerbate a liberal divide between the civil enlightenment of Euro-American nations and the objects of former colonial rule.” Rather, belying the official discourse replete with words like “the enemy,” “collateral damage,” “targets of opportunity,” a “shadowy foe” to be eliminated in a “signature strike” (in which the killed person’s name is actually not known), the girl’s face is inescapable, and with it the realization that what occurs in a drone strike cannot be called by any other name than murder. For Emmanuel Levinas, the “alterity that is expressed in the face provides the unique ‘matter’ possible for total negation.” What “resists” in the face is precisely the face, “the primordial expression, […] the first word: ‘you shall not commit murder.'” Behram’s photograph reintroduces a face into a war zone where a death sentence can be executed on the basis of fitting the target demographic alone: all males aged 18 to 65, since the United States deems these men to be combatants “unless there is explicit intelligence posthumously proving them innocent”—again: “posthumously.” The photograph might puncture what Peggy Kamuf has called in the context of the acceptability of the death penalty in the US the “wholesale anesthetizing of public sensibility.” The image contrasts and confronts the fatal “kill boxes,” into which suspected combatants and everybody else in their vicinity are trapped for extrajudicial assassination, with the wide-open field of a face. (43-44)

I quote Weber at length because the work she describes is clearly a version of what she aims to accomplish in her own text and identifies as the promise of humanistic research more broadly. The “overwhelming presence” she aims to restore is that of the Levinasian face as she understands it. The face inspires a compassion that undoes the demographic categories and conceptual distinctions underwriting US government discourse and the murderous violence it unleashes. In the context of such violence, this undoing is tantamount to “a call to action” for Weber—in this case, the act of halting drone warfare.

The sheer scale of #Notabugsplat and its citation of military jargon leave little doubt that the collective was inspired by similarly ambitious (and laudable) goals. Yet taken as an oblique description of the aims and orientation of Weber’s project, her account of the image poses several difficulties, particularly concerning her concept of action and the forms of experience that, she suggests, enable or are even equated with such action. Weber wants an experience hardwired to produce certain effects: “the girl’s face is inescapable, and with it the realization that what occurs in a drone strike cannot be called by any other name than murder,” such that one is immediately compelled by the commandment “you shall not commit murder.” Compassion is the name of this compulsion, which is why Weber consistently positions it as both an experience and an action. According to Weber, while the spectral object of state representation “anaesthetizes” and leaves us unmoved, the present object of compassion moves us infallibly—so infallibly that to experience others in a compassionate mode is somehow already to act toward their just treatment.

Weber elaborates this concept in a reading of the tension between the Quranic notion of compassion and the prohibition of mutual aid among inmates at Guantanamo Bay:

Rahma is a compassion that cannot but act, because one’s “womb” commands it and because God commands it. As Mouhanad Khorchide explains, the “straight road” or the “right path” consists in “accepting God’s love and compassion and to give it reality in one’s actions.” Sells writes that “holding or keeping the faith […] includes not only intellectual assent to certain propositions but also engagement in just actions,” such as “protecting those who are disinherited or in need.” By contrast, “those who reject the reckoning [the final judgment]—which, in early Meccan revelations, is the foundation of religion—are those who abuse the orphan, who are indifferent to those suffering in their midst, and who are neglectful in performing the prayer.” Not helping the orphan and the widow, or worse, preventing others from helping the orphan and the widow is a fundamental rejection of the oldest and most ingrained obligation towards the other. (160)

Weber reads this tension in poems written by detainees at Guantanamo Bay. For Weber, the state censorship of these poems and its prevention of practices of compassionate mutual aid among inmates are deeply intertwined because compassion is linked to what she, following Shoshana Felman, calls “literary justice” (130). Literary justice is associated with access to the face in its singularity and is opposed to “legal justice,” which relies on preexisting abstract concepts or categories under which the other is subsumed (130). The censorship of the Guantanamo Bay poems is thus emblematic of a larger strategy that invokes legal categories to justify indefinite detention of prisoners and, conversely, to explain the impossibility of determining their legal guilt or innocence (a strategy akin to what Giorgio Agamben has called the inclusive exclusion of life in the juridical).

The association of compassion and literary justice brings to light a further link between compassion and aesthetic experience in the Kantian sense. I would suggest that this notion tacitly subtends Weber’s understanding of the distinctiveness of humanistic modes of inquiry. For Kant, scientific knowledge is the subsumption of a singular intuition under a general concept, while aesthetic experience is the singular judgment of an intuition for which one lacks an adequate concept. Kant famously links aesthetic experience to seeing “as the poets do,” and associates it with the reflective capacity to disrupt and transform the conceptual matrix that governs knowledge. Similarly, for Weber, a compassionate reading of the Guantanamo poems challenges contempt by interrupting the application of prefabricated concepts used by the state to represent the detained, thus enabling an encounter with their testimony in its singularity. Yet for Kant, in contrast to aesthetic judgments, practical judgments capable of providing the basis for action must determine the object or end in relation to which one acts. Here a difficulty emerges for Weber’s understanding of compassion as the singular judgment of the face of the other, and as action. The claim that compassion entails action is based on Levinas’s association of the face and the commandment interdicting murder. Like aesthetic experience in Kant, the relationship to the face and the prohibition it entails are not for Levinas instances of moral cognition in the traditional sense. Instead, they involve insight into the phenomenological irreducibility of a relationship to the other that precedes and destabilizes all possible object relation. Murder is prohibited by the face because murder presupposes a cognitive relation to a known other, whereas exposure to the face is pre-conceptual for Levinas. The face intervenes before I perceive the other as a known object (an “orphan” or a “widow”) that I can murder or not, and expresses the way in which the knowing subject is always already related to others in advance of him or herself by virtue of the immediate mediation of experience via forms that are socially and temporally disseminated (194). This is why, for Levinas, the relationship to the face must be conceived not as an immediate visual or sensory relation, which would position it as a form of knowledge, but rather as a relation to the “speech” through which the other “dawns forth in his expression” in a manner that remains productively “incomprehensible.”

The face . . . cannot be comprehended, that is, encompassed. It is neither seen nor touched—for in visual or tactile sensation the identity of the I envelops the alterity of the object, which becomes precisely a content. (194)

Speech cuts across vision. In knowledge or vision the object seen can indeed determine an act, but it is an act that in some way appropriates the “seen” to itself, integrates it into a world by endowing it with a signification, and, in the last analysis, constitutes it. In discourse the divergence that inevitably opens between the Other as my theme and the Other as my interlocutor, emancipated from the theme that seemed for a moment to hold him, forthwith contests the meaning I ascribe to my interlocutor. The formal structure of language thereby announces the ethical inviolability of the Other. (195)

If compassion is the relationship to a face in this sense, how can it constitute either action or a call thereto? Levinas seems to withdraw precisely that possibility on the eminently Kantian grounds that although “in knowledge or vision the object seen can indeed determine an act,” this action presupposes the reduction of the singularity of the other through conceptual subsumption, which “integrates it into a world by endowing it with signification” only by foreclosing the appearance of the face together with the possibility of compassion.

This difficulty is intertwined with another. Weber frames the “shift in awareness” from contempt to compassion as a transition from “absence” to “overwhelming presence,” and this transition brings about the compulsion to act that Weber associates with Derrida’s notion of compassion. Yet as Weber herself notes, Derrida’s work has always critiqued the traditional metaphysical valorization of presence over absence, and the preference for a fully present other over the traces or ghosts of the departed (166). For Derrida, then, to welcome the written ghost of the Guantanamo Bay detainee could never amount to making him fully or indeed overwhelmingly present. Weber’s desire to do so is linked to her desire to defend the “shadowy” others produced by US military practice from the horrifying spectralization to which they are subjected. In contrast to US military practice, which anaesthetizes and thus disables the intended addressee of the testimony of the tortured, compassion would restore the “ghosted” other to an overwhelming presence that compels their just treatment. Restored presence is thus linked to infallible communication—a form of address that cannot fail to hit its mark and compel its addressee to act. Yet this too stands in tension with the deconstructive reading of address, which associates the possibility of political resistance to the cognitive status quo that reinforces state power with the fallibility or waywardness of address. In a passage on the divine call received by Abraham that Weber quotes in her introduction to Living Together, Derrida writes that the call

conjures up more future to come than many others . . . by calling us to this truth . . . that anyone responding to the call must continue to doubt, to ask himself whether he has heard right, whether there is no original misunderstanding: whether it was in fact his name that was heard, whether he is the only or the first addressee of the call . . . . It is possible that I have not been called, me, and it is not even excluded that no one, no One, nobody, ever called any One, any unique one, anybody. The possibility of an originary misunderstanding in destination is not an evil, it is the structure, perhaps the very vocation of any call worthy of that name, of all nomination, of all response and responsibility.(34)

Applying the consequences of Derrida’s insight to instances of humanitarian crisis, Thomas Keenan interrogates the equation of address, knowledge, and action that informs Weber’s notion of compassion. For Keenan, this notion also informs the understanding of the public sphere operative within humanitarian discourse. Responding to the coincidence of overexposure and inadequate response during the Bosnian genocide, Keenan writes that “Humanitarian action seems . . . to depend on . . . a fairly limited set of presuppositions about the link between knowledge and action, between public information or opinion and response” (22).

What failed in Bosnia? We often say that we failed and imply that “we” means this well-known public of the so-called Enlightenment project. But the more we rely on and retreat to the idea that the public sphere has collapsed, the more we shore up a notion whose apparent solidity may be implicated in the disaster. What if belief in this public was part of the failure? What if the faith in the obviousness—the evidence or self-evidence of the pictures and the automatic chain of reasoning they inspire—was not what failed, but was the failure itself? The conceit or fantasy of this kind of public sphere must, after Bosnia if nowhere else, contend with what we could call the rule of silence—no image speaks for itself, let alone speaking directly to our capacity for reason. Images always demand interpretation, even or especially emotional images – there is nothing immediate about them. This implies a second rule, that of unintended consequences or misfiring – the story of Bosnia is that images which might have signified genocide or aggression or calculated political slaughter seemed for so long to signify only tragedy or disaster or human suffering and hence were available for inscription or montage in a humanitarian rather than a political response. So what failed in Bosnia is an idea or an interpretation—and a practice—of publicity, of the public sphere as the arena of self-evidence and reason, an idea which now must be challenged, not to put an end to the public sphere but to begin reconstituting it. (34-35)

Though Keenan’s critique of the operative notion of the public sphere hinges on its faith in reason rather than compassion, reason, for him, like compassion for Weber, is nothing more than the name of what articulates experience and appropriate response. To the extent that we take this articulation for granted, we often help to ensure that it will fail. This is what demands the rethinking of address along Derridian lines: “The public, we could say in shorthand, is what is hailed or addressed by messages that might not reach their destination. Thinking about the images at hand, we could even say that what makes something public is precisely the possibility of being a target and of being missed” (25).

Later Keenan continues:

Hypothesis: to the extent that we imagine or take for granted the articulation between knowledge and action, which seems to define the public sphere, it is bound to fail. But what can only be thought of as a failure in those terms is, in another sense, the success of a political strategy, and if we continue to think that images by virtue of their cognitive contents, or proximity to reality, have the power to compel action, we miss the opening of ‘new fields of action’ (Benjamin) that they allow.(34)

For Keenan, then, deconstructing the Enlightenment identification of knowledge and action does not imply an abandonment of action or of the public sphere, but rather their joint reconceptualization. To do so, we must relinquish the fantasy of moral obviousness, whether at the level of the meaning of the address or of the identity of the public hailed by it. Relinquishing that fantasy shifts us from a humanitarian to a political optic: from an optic that sees in the image only the self-evidence of a suffering we wish to alleviate to one that apprehends political struggle as the ongoing modification of processes of mediation that continually constitute, deconstitute, and reconstitute ontologically intertwined objects and agents, redefining the public as merely the “possibility of response to an open address” (25).

Keenan’s shift from certainty to possibility also shifts from a cognitive to a reflective approach to politics. While it would be easy to understand this shift as a subjectivist abandonment of objectivity and of the concrete political action that depends upon it (Hegel was the first to do so), it may also redefine concrete political action as the reflective modification of modes of mediation rather than a struggle over pre-constituted objects. To the extent that Weber associates compassionate action with the disruption of conceptual subsumption by the singularity of the face and with the reflective reading practices fostered by humanistic research, she also points politics in this direction. Still, if one takes compassion and contempt not merely as two different ways of orienting oneself toward a pre-constituted object world but as events that give rise to fundamentally different worlds, more remains to be done to specify how these modes of emergence differ.

By designating compassion as a “fundamental mode” of “living together,” Derrida points us toward such analysis. His formulation invokes the Heideggerian relationship between “fundamental attunement” and “being-with,” and thereby the differential analysis of modes of collective worlding or different ways of apprehending one’s unavoidable entanglement with the world in its facticity. These modes refer not to the world’s objective presence to a knowing subject, but rather to the process of its ongoing “disconcealment,” which is always-already technologically or linguistically mediated and socially distributed. When action is conceived only as actualization and thus as immediately bound to a subject’s univocal relation to the presence of a compelling object, this other strangely diffuse and yet world-forming activity disappears from view, and with it, the possibility for the reflective opening of a future that could be other than a repetition of the same. If that opening is what apprehending the face of the other is about, then this apprehension cannot take the form of restoring the ghosted other to full or overwhelming presence; to do so would be to obviate the possibility for a reflective transformation of the way in which the present presences. Yet while Weber sometimes seems to call for such a restoration, the overall effect of her work is quite different. State-sponsored spectralization produces a desire for restored presence that in fact enhances the power of those who exploit the fear of living death. This effect parallels Arendt’s observation that state-induced chaos and the promulgation of incompatible falsehoods generate a desire for normalcy that reduces the possibility of resistance to a presentist grounding of politics in matters of fact, which may inadvertently enhance the power of those who exploit the desire for normalcy through its strategic withdrawal. To the extent that Weber helps to release us from the stultifying effects of today’s chaos-induced presentism, her book moves its reader not to action per se, but to the possibility of acting otherwise.

Footnotes

1. Derrida delivered this essay as the keynote of a conference Weber co-organized at UC Riverside in 2003, the proceedings of which appeared in her edited volume Living Together: Jacques Derrida’s Communities of Violence and Peace.

Works Cited

• Derrida, Jacques. “Abraham, the Other.” Judeities: Questions for Jacques Derrida, edited by Bettina Bergo, Joseph Cohen, and Raphael Zagury-Orly, translated by B Bergo and Michael Smith, Fordham UP, 2007, pp. 1-35.
• Keenan, Thomas. “Publicity and indifference: Media, Surveillance, and ‘Humanitarian Intervention.'” Killer Images: Documentary Film, Memory, and the Performance of Violence, edited by Joram ten Brink and Joshua Oppenheimer, Wallflower P, 2012, pp. 15-40.
• Levinas, Emmanuel. Totality and Infinity. Translated by Alphonso Lingis, Kluwer, 1991.
• Weber, Elizabeth. Living Together: Jacques Derrida’s Communities of Violence and Peace. Fordham UP, 2012.