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Ultranationalism: a Proposal for a Quiet Withdrawal

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Ultranationalism: a Proposal for a Quiet Withdrawal I developed an early suspicion of any form of nationalism courtesy of a geography teacher and an imaginary cricket game. As the only student of Chinese origin in a high school in Bangalore, I was asked by my teacher in a benign voice who I would support if India and China played a match. Aside from the ridiculousness of the question 01/05 (China does not even play cricket), the dubious intent behind it was rather clear, even to a teenager. Still, I dutifully replied, “Sir, I will support India,” for which I received a gratified smile and a pat on the head. I was offended less by the crude attempt by someone in power to force a kid to prove his patriotism, than by the outright silliness of the game. If all it took to Lawrence Liang establish the euphoric security of nationalism was that simple answer, I figured there must be something drastically wrong with the question. I Ultranationalism: was left, however, with an uneasy feeling (one that has persisted through the years), not A Proposal for a because I had given a false answer but because I had been forced to answer a false question. The Quiet answer made pragmatic sense in a schoolboy way (you don’t want to piss off someone who is going to be marking your papers), and I hadn’t Withdrawal read King Lear yet to know that the only appropriate response to the question should have been silence. If Cordelia refuses to participate in Lear’s competition of affective intimacy, it is not just the truth, but also the distasteful aesthetics of her sister’s excessive declarations of love, that motivates her withdrawal into silence. ÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊIf we similarly measure ultranationalism not just on a political plane but on an aesthetic one, l we are immediately struck by just how a w deafeningly loud and shrill it is. While one could a g r n d a attempt to counter the ascending clamor with i h L t i speech of one’s own, there are times when our e W c t n silence may be our greatest weapon. I would e e i r u w suggest that if we think of ultranationalism as an Q a a L Ê r affective excess marked by a hyperperformative o 4 f 1 l jingoism, often orchestrated around sporting 0 a 2 s rituals, then one of the undervalued ways of o e p n o u countering excess has been asceticism. j r P — ÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊIf nationalism presumes our consent to a A : 6 5 m social contract and ultranationalism forcefully # s i l l demands such a consent, what would it mean to a a n n r o imagine silence as a political act – not one of i u t o j a tacit consent, but rather the withdrawal of it? n x a u l r f t Stanley Cavell argues that presumptions of the l - e U social contract are always subject to repudiation through the withdrawal of consent, or withdrawal from society.1 The withdrawal of my consent is not necessarily a nihilistic rejection of the world, but a dispute that I have about its content. It is both possible and reasonable to reject society as it stands (because it is unfaithful to what I have consented to) while still consenting to a conversation about the horizon 06.17.14 / 12:33:57 EDT of possibilities of this society. The radical with technical matters seemed to bely the claim potential of such disagreements about the that he had entirely withdrawn from the social, substantive content of politics is testified to by and yet at the same time, his melancholic the existence of laws of sedition, which seek to disposition seemed to indicate a form of criminalize forms of speech that create inhabiting the world through the act of mourning “disaffection” towards the state. For Agamben, it, which in his case required his turning away the state is not founded on a social bond of from it. which it is the expression, but rather on the 02/05 ÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊJagadeesan’s withdrawal from society and dissolution, the unbinding it prohibits. his loss of hope could be interpreted as a form of apolitical ascetic withdrawal into the domain of the spiritual. However, it may benefit us to recall another political ascetic, Henry David Thoreau, who allegedly turned away from politics and towards nature at the height of his political career. In contrast to accounts that see Thoreau’s withdrawal into the woods to write Walden as an apolitical act that diverged from his more explicitly political writings such as Civil Disobedience, Shannon Mariotti, in her book Thoreau’s Democratic Withdrawal, focuses on how withdrawal from public life may itself be the basis for rethinking the political.2 It is often assumed that democracy cannot thrive if citizens withdraw from public spaces, but how are we to Schoolchildren display posters of Indian cricket player Sachin find expressions for our deepest disagreements Tendulkar, known to be one of the greatest batsmen of all time, India, 2013. Photo: AP. with the very content of democratic politics and its validation by a vast majority of people? Mariotti claims that Thoreau’s deepest insights ÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊBut while the state may enforce laws into democracy and politics may be found not in against speech, how does it proscribe seditious his explicitly political writings, but in his thoughts and feelings that do not seek out a reflections on nature. In fact, Walden is a text public, but are uttered in silence? In 2013, on a that forces us to move beyond the binaries of trip to postwar Jaffna, Sri Lanka to meet politics and nature, democracy and withdrawal. activists and scholars, I was introduced to Thoreau’s retreat into nature, Mariotti suggests, Jagadeesan (known to a few as “the was not a retreat from the political as much as philosopher”), who lived alone in a remote l an immersion into a form of life that allowed for a village. The philosopher was once a part of the w the cultivation of one’s true nature as the means a g r n d Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, but after he a to understand and activate the basis of a true i h L t became a critic of their politics, he was arrested, i democracy. In his essay on civil disobedience, e W c t detained, and tortured by them for several years. n Thoreau stated that he wanted to be a “bad e e i r u After his release, he withdrew from active w subject” but a “good neighbor,” and towards such Q a a L Ê political life, choosing to live in isolation. When r end he resembled Socrates, the quintessential o 4 f 1 we asked him what he felt about the postwar l bad citizen who disturbed, prodded, and 0 a 2 s situation and the mounting Sinhalese destroyed the euphoric security of the state with o e p n o chauvinism spurred on by the victory of the u his questions. j r P ultranationalists, he looked at us and replied — ÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊIf ultranationalism is charged with an A : 6 5 that he had no idea since he rarely talked to m affective immediacy bordering on frenzied # s i l people any longer. Gesturing to the trees in front l exuberance, what Thoreau and Jagadeesan share a a n n r of the house, he said that he now only spoke to o is a melancholic relation to the present, but a i u t o j a trees and shared his jokes with them, since melancholia based not on a mythical idea of an n x a u l r f people did not even understand jokes anymore. If t idealized past that has been lost, but instead on l - people no longer understood jokes, he said, it e U a mourning for an alternative future that the was clear that the world was going mad and present does not allow. Their respective there was no hope left. He indicated that he was withdrawals into nature and silence are, to my less and less interested in the political affairs of mind, a kind of experimentation with forms of the world around him, and more and more selves that reject any pragmatic or realist attracted to forms of spiritual practice (even as usurpations of the political horizons of the self. he gave detailed instructions to someone on how In that sense, it would be a mistake to read either to repair their pump: he had been an engineer). Thoreau or Jagadeesan in purely personal terms, His helpfulness to his neighbors and his comfort since their withdrawals are both a response to 06.17.14 / 12:33:57 EDT the state of politics as we currently know it, as betraying my friend, I hope I should have well as an attempt to redefine a political the guts to betray my country. Such a community that includes trees and neighbors. choice may scandalize the modern reader, The temporal distance of one and the spatial and he may stretch out his patriotic hand to proximity of the other are anathema to the the telephone at once and ring the police É national imagination of time and boundaries. When they do, down with the state say I, ÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊIf the radical call of politics is cast in terms which means the state would down me.4 of a call to action and a demand for a response, 03/05 how do we situate the refusal to stand up and the Ultranationalism presumes that the nation refusal to be counted in a collective as the should be both the natural and preferred home performance of a nonrepresentative individual? for everyone, but as Forster’s words show us, Rancière has suggested that perhaps the truly there may be those who do not feel at home in dangerous classes are not so much those that the nation and are threatened with either exile in make up a “collective,” with their clear sense of the case of political action, or with self-exile in common purpose (class, race, and so forth), but the case of Thoreau and Jagadeesan.
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