LIFE, EMERGENT LIFE, EMERGENT book interior.indb 1 8/25/16 7:28 AM This page intentionally left blank Life, Emergent THE SOCIAL IN THE AFTERLIVES OF VIOLENCE Yasmeen Arif A Quadrant Book UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA PRESS Minneapolis · London LIFE, EMERGENT book interior.indb 3 8/25/16 7:28 AM 1/4” spine treatment Quadrant, a joint initiative of the University of Minnesota Press and the Institute for 1/2” black & white Advanced Study at the University of Minnesota, provides support for interdisciplinary scholarship within a new, more collaborative model of research and publication. Sponsored by the Quadrant Global Cultures group (advisory board: Evelyn Davidheiser, Michael Goldman, Helga Leitner, Margaret Werry) and by the Institute for Global Studies at the University of Minnesota. Quadrant is generously funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. http://quadrant.umn.edu. reverse Copyright 2016 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. Published by the University of Minnesota Press 111 Third Avenue South, Suite 290 Minneapolis, MN 55401- 2520 http://www.upress.umn.edu Printed in the United States of America on acid- free paper The University of Minnesota is an equal- opportunity educator and employer. 22 21 20 19 18 17 16 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Arif, Yasmeen, author. Title: Life, emergent : the social in the afterlives of violence / Yasmeen Arif. Description: Minneapolis : University of Minnesota Press, [2016] | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2016008374 (print) | ISBN 978-1-5179-0054-0 (hc) | ISBN 978-1-5179-0055-7 (pb) Subjects: LCSH: Political violence—Developing countries. | Social conflict—Developing countries. | Civil society—Developing countries. | Citizenship—Developing countries. | Humanity—Developing countries. | Developing countries—Social conditions. Classification: LCC HN981.V5 A75 2016 (print) | DDC 303.609712/4—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016008374 amasis MT Bold Frutiger 55 Roman QUADRANT HEALTH & SOCIETY LIFE, EMERGENT book interior.indb 4 8/25/16 7:28 AM Contents Introduction. Afterlife: Violence, the Social, and Life 1 1. The International Social: Humanity, Crime, and Law in Sierra Leone 35 2. Compassionate Citizenship: Nyayagrah, Gandhi, and Justice in Gujarat 67 3. Wounding Attachment: Su£ering, Surviving, and Community in Delhi 103 4. Emotional Geographies: War, Nostalgia, and Identity in Beirut 135 5. Bios, Pathos, and Life Emergent 169 Acknowledgments 199 Notes 203 Bibliography 233 Index 247 LIFE, EMERGENT book interior.indb 5 8/25/16 7:28 AM This page intentionally left blank INTRODUCTION Aerlife VIOLENCE, THE SOCIAL, AND LIFE For anyone undertaking a genealogical study of the concept of §life¨ in our culture, one of the first and most instructive observations to be made is that the concept never gets defined as such. And yet, this thing that re- mains indeterminate gets articulated and divided time and again through a series of caesurae and oppositions that invest it with a strategic function in domains as apparently distant as philosophy, theology, politics and— only later— medicine and biology. That is to say, everything happens as if, in our culture, life were what cannot be defined, yet precisely for this reason must be ceaselessly articulated and divided. —Giorgio Agamben, The Open FRAMES OF LIFE The query, what is life? is an arrogant one. With due restraint, this book does pose such a query, but with the following intent: how can the ques- tion of damaged life, in all its incessant living and dying, be posed as a query of the social? The possibility of answers is sought in archaeolo- gies of the contemporary, in an assembly of locations of mass violence where such articulations could be found and which calls them afterlife— §afterlife¨ as a metaphor or a metonym that suggests life after damage. Life, as it lives or dies, in a momentum consonant with damage, in- scribes an emerging, dynamic, fluid, ever- changing explosion of relation- alities on the cognizable realm called society. These relationalities, like the momentary patterns in a kaleidoscope, despite their ephemeral destiny, still manage to capture the shape of a pattern and inscribe a permanence on the universe of patterns— life in the multiple contexts of vulnerability or potential, defeat or triumph, compromise or fulfillment, articulates a pattern of the social, temporary in its duration, perhaps, but durable in its expression of the social. While the making and unmaking of life 1 LIFE, EMERGENT book interior.indb 1 8/25/16 7:28 AM 2 INTRODUCTION unfolds through these relationalities, so does the making of the social. This exploration seeks life in its social embedding and its individuated experience, life that is reclaimed, mediated, or disavowed after mass violence, damage, and su£ering. Life, Emergent traces the continuation of life and its sustenance after disruptive transformation just as much as it reveals its disintegration and failure. This book thus compiles an ag- gregate of contexts transformed by violence, frames them in the notion of an afterlife, and suggests that, while these afterlives emerge in the contingency of the moment, they trace the destiny of life and the social. So intended, the damage and afterlife that I explore here are in the con- text of a set of events and institutions. In conventional terms, the events are episodes of political violence in Lebanon, India, and Sierra Leone. I do not parenthesize the events together as similar in kind, nor do I attempt to understand a causes- and- consequences paradigm. Rather, I focus, on one hand, on the combinations of formal institutions, mechanisms, and other practices that come to bear on the event of violence in its aftermath. On the other, I explore the lived experiences that underline the a£ective worlds of social relationalities as well as dimensions of subjects, subjectivi- ties, and subjectifications that emerge in that aftermath. I borrow the idea of subjectification, with some interpretation, from Agamben«s association of it with the notion of an apparatus. He understands subjectification as a process that results from a relation, §a fight¨ even, between living beings and apparatuses; for instance, in his words, §the same individual, the same substance, can be the place of multiple processes of subjectification: the user of cellular phones, the web surfer, the writer of stories, the tango aficionado, the anti- globalization activist, and so on and so forth.¨1 In the notion of apparatus that I will employ here, I will imply the assembly of practices and discourses that develop the afterlife paradigm, where subjectification is that position in which a subject can simultaneously be the place of a victim, a survivor, a bureaucratic category, a kin relation, an identity, a legal entity, and so forth. Over all, neither a£ect nor the formal mechanisms stay separate in the way they inhabit the realms of the social, and I do not understand either as clear and separate categories of analysis. Bringing them together is an ensemble of relations, where, again, a£ect certainly does not exhaust their interpretive potential, and neither do the LIFE, EMERGENT book interior.indb 2 8/25/16 7:28 AM INTRODUCTION 3 formal mechanisms, but together, they guide an understanding of the con- nections among and between knowledges, discourses, institutions, laws, administrative measures, philosophies, moralities, or experiences. The social remains on the proscenium and, from there, asks and answers the question, how and what is the articulation of life? In another way, what is the nature of (re)constituted life, as it emerges in the (extra)ordinary realms of the social after violent damage? Shaping this intent of privileging the social is the prior work on social su£ering and violence— this book uses that work as a foundation and places itself in that path of concern. My reference is to the body of work that has proposed that su£ering is social in its meaning, experience, and representation.2 The notion that violence and the social compose an in- clusive and expanding assemblage of discourses, experiences, representa- tions, or pragmatics, which often get artificially separated in perspectival categories of disciplinary work or in practical bureaucratic and policy con- cerns, is the ground I build on. From that perspective, when the social is captured through su£ering, or equally, when su£ering is captured through the social, the possibilities of what constitutes either and how they fuse together in lived worlds lead to a breaking down of dichotomies, not least of which are the relationships between global and local or individual and collective. When these separations are traversed, it is clear that the pursuit of the social is an expansive field that can be circumscribed around the damages caused by violence— in diverse locations or in temporal spans. Though I ground my work here in the conjunction of social su£ering and violence, I do not seek an analytical intervention in either; rather, I take their intersection as an a priori given and proceed to a temporality that suggests an §after¨ to mass violence. I suggest an evented-ness to episodes of violence, not to mark out temporal limits in time that will parenthesize a beginning and an end of an episode, but rather to point toward those experiences, representations, discourses, and practices that emanate from the transformative e£ects of that §event¨ of violence. This consciousness may well surpass the temporal boundaries of the episode, whether into the past or into the future— thus disrupting the idea of a chronology.