archive : s0metim3s

I thought that I would background and sort through some previously oblique references and meandering thoughts on the figure of man (or the human) as a machine capable of suffering, as distinct from the figure of the citizen (the proprietor of rights, including the right over one’s self, to dispose of one’s self).

In “Democracy, Authority, Narcissism: From Agamben to Stiegler” (Contretemps, pdf), Dan Ross concludes with this sentence:

The political question today is thus that of the suffering of existence, and whether this will permit any future for politics, that is, for human being.

It’s an essay I have a lot of time for, and yet I think that it seems remarkably deaf to the specificity of the register of the human, of gender, geopolitics and racialisation and, in so doing, serves up this “suffering of existence” and the experience of human being as a kind of anthropology, if not quite as ontology.

Which is why, even while I would perhaps read them for quite different conclusions (and lean a little toward Brown and Berlant, though by no means unreservedly), I find Susan Maslan’s essays of much more interest in thinking through the history of this figure of the human, capable of suffering and of evincing sentiment, and well worth reading more than thrice.

Specifically, “The Anti-Human: Man and Citizen before the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen”, in SAQ (103:2-3, 2004) and, in particular, “The Dream of the Feeling Citizen: Law and Emotion in Corneille and Montesquieu” in SubStance (35:1, 2006).

For now, an extract from the latter:

The rococo narrative of Montesquieu’s Persians is distant—formally, thematically and stylistically—from Corneille’s Rome, yet both texts structure their plots and their problematics around a fundamental division between humanity and citizenship. Technically, there are no citizens in Les Lettres persanes, since both the Persia and the France represented are absolute monarchies, nor are there citizens in Horace since the story takes place before the founding of the Republic. But both texts clearly represent some figures as full members of the state—those who make decisions, who belong within the sphere of what Agamben calls “politically qualified life,” while representing others as lacking that political qualification, relegated to the status of “simple, natural life.”14 The Lettres persanes establishes a stark opposition between the “human,” defined, above all, as essential bodiliness or “simple, natural life,” and the citizen, or member of the political state, even as it chips away at that opposition.

Les Lettres persanes is divided into two types of letters. One type circulates within a community of men linked by ties of friendship rather than blood or marriage. In other words, the community and the relationships constituted by the exchange of letters are purely voluntary, the product of will (volonté), not biology (kinship) or desire. These letters treat religion, politics, philosophy, and commerce. They are often rigorously searching, sometimes ironic or satiric, always respectful and affectionate in their mode of address to their correspondents.15 In short, these letters construct and enact the enlightened Republic of Letters: a virtual republic whose members exist for each other as disembodied writers, readers, and critics.16

The world conjured by the other Persian letters is anything but abstract and virtual. The correspondence between Usbek (not in his identity as a philosophe, but as absolute master of a harem) and his wives and slaves incarcerated there, along with their letters to him, describe a network of human relations that turn on the exercise of power over bodies. For many years, critics dismissed the harem letters as salacious, erotic fantasy added to the text’s serious political and philosophical reflections in order to enliven the book and divert readers. In his canon-making Histoire de la littérature française (1895), Gustave Lanson praised the “philosophical” letters written by the Persian travelers in Paris, but dismissed the letters relating to the harem: “avec quelle curiosité libertine il mettra en scène la vie oisive et voluptueuse du sérail, des femmes très blanches surveillés par des eunuques très noirs, des passions ardentes, des jalousies féroces, des désirs enragés. Mais ce n’est là qu’un ornement.”17

Recently, critics have become more interested in the politics of the harem letters, and have brought into focus their importance for the novel’s structure and politics.18 But in a sense, both schools of criticism are correct. The world of the harem is, indeed, a political world: even the most cursory reading of the brilliant letter 9 in which the first eunuch writes to another eunuch-slave that “je me trouve dans le sérail comme dans un petit Empire” (157), laying out a rigorous analysis of the power relations of that empire, makes this point clear. The harem’s politics, however, are represented as separate, distinct, and utterly different from the novel’s high politics: the harem is the domain of what Foucault and Agamben call biopolitics.19 In the field of biopolitics, the central terms of political philosophy — consent, contract, justice, sovereignty — do not obtain. The practice of biopolitics concerns instead the management of life and death, the administration of bodies and of populations. Biopoliticians consider the object of power not as an individual but as a human being understood above all as biological life.

The inhabitants of the harem are the subjects and objects of biopolitics. Unlike the masters, the women and the eunuchs are irrevocably immured in their bodies.20 Their politics always springs from the body. Thus, even when he displays his political virtuosity, the first eunuch reveals that its source is to be found in the fact of his body, in the fact that he is castrated:

il me semble que je redeviens homme dans les occasions où je leur [the women] commande encore…. le plaisir de me faire obéir, me donne une joie secrète: quand je les prive de tout, il me semble que c’est pour moi, et il m’en revient toujours une satisfaction indirecte: je me trouve dans la sérail comme dans un petit empire; et mon ambition, la seule passion qui me reste, se satisfait un peu. (156-157)

Pleasure, satisfaction, secret joy, the restitution of manhood: these are the libidinal sources and products of the first eunuch’s politics. But this politics also dooms him forever to dwell in the harem: he can achieve “satisfaction” only within its system. Since he cannot free himself from his status as mutilated body in search of wholeness through the exercise of power over the bodies of women, he cannot address the real cause of his slavery—not his castration, but his master. The first eunuch faintly perceives the bounded and essentially counterfeit nature of the power he exercises—”il me semble…il me semble“—but he can neither demystify, nor break free from biopolitical operations. The master, in Montesquieu’s novel, is always outside the harem.21

The women’s status as bodies in Les Lettres persanes is even more marked than that of the eunuchs. Their only reason for existence is to present their bodies to the master. The safeguarding of those bodies is the raison d’être of the harem system—a system of grotesque economic waste and lack of production. Moreover, the representation of the women as both identical to and imprisoned by their bodies is amplified by the incessant invocation of the means by which their bodies are imprisoned, from Usbek’s references to “ces portes fatales qui ne s’ouvrent que pour moi“(142) and “ces verroux et ces portes ” (184), to the lengthy description of the boxes in which they are transported (144, 251-252), to the veils which are the subject of so much anxiety. These enclosures are so many material extensions and manifestations of the women’s absolute materiality. Even the women’s attempts to rebel against the carceral world of the harem system further demonstrate their inability to escape its operations. The attempt to evade the veil, for example, serves only to heighten the impression of the woman’s existence as body by translating insurgency into a display of her face and by describing that display as making her a fascinating object of the spectators’ vision. When, in the novel’s final letter, the favored wife Roxane reveals that she has revolted against the master, she demonstrates that she can do so only by way of her body, and only in a way that reinforces the division of the world that makes women subject only to the laws of the body: she takes a lover and commits suicide.

But in the structure of Les Lettres persanes power belongs to the disembodied—to the absent Usbek, who, in the eleven long years of the narrative, never sets foot in his own harem, never touches his wives or concubines, never has a dalliance, and never takes a lover (his wives and slaves take plenty). Indeed, Usbek never experiences a physical desire or appetite. Power is in the hands of the “philosophe” Usbek, who is so nearly biologically non-existent that, despite his many wives and eunuchs, he has only one child, a daughter referred to only once in passing. Montesquieu opposes the virtual world of citizenship, inhabited by men who dispute, who debate, and who exchange ideas in writing, to the female and servile world of biology inhabited by what Usbek calls, in a letter to a slave, “vils instruments…qui n’êtes dans le monde que pour vivre sous mes lois, ou pour mourir dès que je l’ordonne” (186)—that is, by those who merely live and die. From the virtual sphere of writing, the citizens of the Republic of Letters rule over a world of instrumentalized humanity. The harem system as Montesquieu represents it betrays a Machiavellian brilliance: the harem’s inhabitants exercise a particular politics with vigor and skill, but the harem is, in a sense, a mere simulacrum of politics. The eunuchs and the women misrecognize their expert manipulation of biopolitical practices as political power.22 Imprisoned in the realm of biopolitics, the rebellious wives and slaves cannot see that their acts — whether of revolt or complicity — never encroach into the polis where the power over their lives resides.

To say, however, that the Lettres persanes represents a stark opposition between the biological and the political, the human and the citizen, is not to say that Montesquieu endorses such an opposition.23 The bleak and violent conclusion and the collapse of Usbek’s philosophical project argue against such a reading. Moreover, Montesquieu chooses to represent one place where humanity and citizenship are fully and happily continuous: the world of the good Troglodytes (letters 12-14). In this famous utopia, described by Usbek, friends, wives, husbands, and children all work and live together. Devotion to the community, to friends, to family, and to the state are impossible to disentangle. All these bonds emerge from and share the same affective energy. Here is how Usbek describes the response of the Troglodytes when they are invaded by a jealous people:

Ils furent étonnés de l’injustice de leurs ennemis, et non pas de leur nombre: une ardeur nouvelle s’était emparée de leur coeur; l’un voulait mourir pour son père; un autre pour sa femme, et ses enfants; celui-ci pour ses frères, celui-là pour ses amis; tous pour le Peuple Troglodyte: la place de celui qui expirait, était d’abord prise par un autre; qui, outre la cause commune, avait encore une mort particulière à venger. Tel fut le combat de l’Injustice et de la Vertu. (170)

Humanity itself is freed, in a sense, from its biological nature by its sentimentalization. Sentiment transmutes biology. Husbands, wives, children, and friends are sentimental love objects rather than “instruments” or bodies. The state is itself, moreover, a love object on the same order. Absolute power relations are replaced by republican participation: all the troglodytes are citizens (even the women, it seems) and their citizenship is indistinguishable from their membership in a sentimentalized humanity. In an exchange about human nature, one of Usbek’s correspondents, Mirza, explains that he poses his question “comme homme, comme citoyen, comme père de famille” (159). This character presents citizenship and humanity as harmoniously continuous. But the only “pères de famille” in the Lettres persanes are to be found among the Troglodytes. Mirza’s self-description serves only to underscore the radical discontinuity of humanity and citizenship for the Persian masters.

The sentimental Troglodytes—not the noble Romans of Corneille, not the philosophical Persians—are the models for the modern subject of human rights. It is they, and the sentimental characters who populate the literature of eighteenth-century France who followed in their wake, who inspire article 5 (Section “Devoirs“) of the Déclaration des droits et des devoirs de l’homme et du citoyen (Constitution of 5 Fructidor an III [ August 22, 1795]): “Nul n’est bon citoyen, s’il n’est bon fils, bon père, bon frère, bon ami, bon époux.”24 Sentiment, rather than history, tragedy, or irony materialized the subject of human rights, a subject defined as at once human being and citizen. This sentimental resolution to the problem of division, exclusion, and instrumentalization is to be found in the most marginal of locations: a fiction within a fiction. Yet this unlikely figure of man-citizen was to become a central figure of modernity. Sentimentalizing the “human” of human rights implied a shift from bodies and their sufferings, to persons and their unhappinesses, from biology to the mental and emotional cognates of physical suffering. Sentimentality thus offered a means to bridge the violent division between “politically qualified life” and “simple, natural life.”25 This may help explain the central place of happiness and unhappiness in the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, the first formal declaration of human rights.26 It also helps clarify the degree to which the subject of human rights was a literary invention.

An English-language, electronic version of Montesquieu’s Persian Letters can be found here.

My emphasis on the figure of the human as a machine capable of suffering is, of course, a nod to Hamacher’s discussion of work, but also Silvia Federici’s Caliban and the Witch:

the human body and not the steam engine, and not even the clock, was the first machine developed by capitalism.

And Battlestar Galactica, in which sentiment explicitly provides a kind of bridge between cylon (human) and human (citizen) - but, I think, shows that the distinction remains in play, not least perhaps for the reasons Berlant might suggest (eg, the compassionate gaze) …