Abstract
It’s the long road to Guinea Where your fathers await you without impatience. Along the way, they talk. This is the hour when the streams rattle like beads of bone.
The dead do not die. There is no beyond in the Christian sense, but rather a broken and obstinate communion between the living and the dead. What might have been a lament or praise song, memorial or work of mourning has turned into a conversation. Or more exactly, fragments of words spoken over drinks, outside on a terrace, or written in random e-mail messages over a decade. My sense of the piecemeal matters as does my insistence on what remains in mind, whether words held back, merely suggested or barely spoken. They return to me now.
This reckoning with Nasser’s death is an encounter with him through and through, just as he would have wanted it. Laughing softly, he reminds me with his sweet reticence how he’d like me to get past any praise of his work and get on with our conversation: talk about sacrifice, the visceral, and animals – especially dogs. But in spite of these reservations, I turn to the remarkable quality and breadth of his writing, its abiding engagement with the rules of law, the ruses of colonial beneficence, and the meaning of terror in post 9/11 locales.
I. A Sort of Prelude, Then
I first met Nasser in Los Angeles in 2005. We were both participants in a symposium on “Guantánamo, Torture, and the Rule of Law.” 1 Everything seemed possible. It was a world still in the throes of change, or so we thought.
Nasser spoke urgently about those he called “new legal subjects” in locales of “hyper-legality.” Practices of detention and torture thought to be beyond the law he demonstrated not only to be legal, but also ready to be expanded into ever-new domains of illogicality, an argument he made most fully in “Beyond Norm and Exception: Guantánamo” (2007). 2
In “Thresholds: Sovereignty and the Sacred,” a review essay written with Melissa Ptacek (2000), which I return to again and again, he confronted and went beyond what Hannah Arendt recognized as the paradoxical and vexing history of human rights. 3 In doing so, he laid the ground for his incisive analyses of Carl Schmitt’s legal theory while questioning Giorgio Agamben’s designation of Guantánamo as a space of “lawlessness.” Nasser cautioned against grave dangers in Agamben’s portrayal of the detainees as legally “unclassifiable.” For not only are these detainees the brunt of a nearly unprecedented administrative taxonomy, but the protocols for determining their “status” continue to underpin the brutal efficiency of our new global criminal law system.
Calling for the use of more precise terms than is common practice, Nasser also gave a new and uniquely colonial history to our present concerns in The Jurisprudence of Emergency: Colonialism and the Rule of Law (2003). Most importantly, he demonstrated how one might build a philosophical infrastructure for the study of law. So indispensable a reference point is this book that lawyers representing Guantánamo prisoners in Rasul v. Bush and Al Odah v. United States asked Professor Hussain in 2004 to help prepare the Amicus Curiae Brief to the US Supreme Court. 4
There are political implications whenever a writer chooses as subject conditions of disfigured personhood, civil incapacitation, and degrading treatment or punishment. With practices of torture in Guantánamo or other sites of incarceration both secret and known or foreign and domestic, The Jurisprudence of Emergency became the necessary text for anyone working on legal standards of conduct in the war on terror, the claims of rights and justice, as well as the philosophical, moral, and ethical (normative) backgrounds to the debates on legality and legitimacy.
And then, and then, Nasser left us his manuscript, tentatively titled Warfare and Legality: From Colonialism to the War on Terror. How, he asked, is “security” configured in nineteenth and early twentieth-century British colonialism and in the current war on terror? Turning to the question of “race,” he supplied a much-needed historical corrective to tired and unexamined claims of “racism.” What he called “race thinking” promised to revolutionize the way we understand such terminological frames of conflict as “war,” “crime,” and “civilization.” It also raised the question how an inventively conceived legality can institute judicial novelties that the law itself was designed to prohibit.
In “The Sound of Terror: Phenomenology of a Drone Strike” (2013), two years before his death, Nasser intimated what would become ever more crucial to him, the effects of the global hand of enlightenment when harnessed to oppressive habits of “lawful lawlessness.” I could say more about his ongoing work on the legal history of slavery; the jurisprudence of emergency; his far-ranging work on pardon, mercy, and torture; the constraints of any philosophy of human rights; his intimation about law and love in Auden; his gorgeous and brave letter to President Biddy Martin at Amherst regarding her attack on Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions. Instead I will stop here and turn instead to what might have been, what nags at me still whenever I think about what was to come: Nasser’s conjecture about animals under duress in the lure of sacrifice. I hear now his near whisper as he remembered his childhood in Pakistan, his grandmother’s belief in the ritual cadence of gifts to the gods. What haunts me still is how deeply he spoke about the sacred, which was nothing apart from sensation, an experience that abides in the flesh and there openly welcomes the double experience of defilement and exaltation.
II. Perturbation, Now
In our morally disenchanted world, where daily cruelty and casual violence accompany the call for law and order, Nasser – in what remains unwritten but not unspoken, or unspeakable – turned ultimately to what might challenge the call for human supremacy or the claims and ruses of white enlightenment. In his return, though only momentary, alas, to what he thought he had left behind in Pakistan, he spoke about a radical change in perspective that might point us toward the cumbersome but saving embodiment of the natural.
That night on the terrace under the Los Angeles skies, we talked about the tenuous but exacting perturbation of civility and privilege. How could we as scholars and teachers render creaturely experience – “one of surfaces and sense,” in his words – that upsets the reliable, moral order of things? Out there in a darkness riddled with light, he confided a perspectival technique that would also become somewhat amazingly a radical inhabitation of the world of war, the plight of news, casual slaughter and wanton disregard. Out there, we stood as if two conspirators, relishing the chance to write what would discomfit and transgress the false sanctities of reasonableness and consensus.
In pressing that we go beyond the bounds of common sense, he moved at last to that terrain where legal rituals and poetry were mutually adaptable. We found ourselves at the very least in a habitat of thought where we might experience an obstinate because provisional communion. In that encounter I now see we were preparing ourselves for recognizing how the all-too-natural is nothing other than the supernatural. And conversely and inevitably, we understood then the materiality of what we assumed to be the stuff of spiritual life.
I return to the never-to-be-experienced future by making palpable what is always-ready-to-be-present again: a past colloquy. What happens to memory when the particular sensations – the perceptual details and the feel of rapport – are no longer there?
The last time I saw Nasser was at Irvine in 2013, when we both spoke at the annual symposium of a group called “The Anti-Colonial Machine.” 5 Actually, Nasser did not speak. With his usual grace and generosity, he relinquished the opportunity to present his new work on “Auden’s Law Like Love” so that a new addition to our group could share his work. We had run short on time. None of those present realized that this would be our last chance to hear him talk to us.
So in the late afternoon at the bar of the hotel, Nasser and I talked about what Auden called “the glory of the vision.” 6 We then turned again to law and its possibilities of redemption, but talked finally and most fully about dogs, his Buddy and my Stella. In our experience with dogs, we knew a marvelous more inclusive than the divine. It also promised a politics that just might confound the self-congratulatory bias of liberal enlightenment. More than that, we found that the extraordinary consisted in what was at most only ordinary. A run with our dogs, the expectation in their eyes, attentiveness more miraculous than faith, all communicated a wonder that was not supernatural, if by that we mean transcendent. Instead, our dogs taught us how whatever we thought phantasmal could be re-defined, brought into sight and onto the earth in the here and now. Sensation, the inexorable demand to be present, set the terms for how we began to talk about creaturely experience that upsets the sensible or the reasonable – and the mean and monopolizing spirit such legitimacy masks.
Later that night, and into the wee hours, we continued our talk about the necessary return to the “primitive”: the violence or savagery that alone could resist global attempts to subjugate societies deemed unready or unwilling to capitalize on money making and consumption. We talked about what liberal humanism could probably never apprehend: ways of knowing that shove one into the gap of not knowing.
For Nasser, to be cracked by the pain of life was also a wonder. In such a condition alone could humans gain the attentiveness that he thought was the essence of a probing quality of perception. Now I hear him laughing about tearing off the mask of civility by taking our attention away from the habits of the human eye. I return to the words of Eduardo Viveiros de Castro in his introduction to the anthropologist Pierre Clastres’ Archeology of Violence (2010), in his lament about attempts “to nullify [Clastres’] work”: “‘academic caution’ seems to work as an instrument for the conceptual defanging of Amerindian thought, reducing it to the blandest banality.”
What would it mean to re-fang thought? That is the question that Nasser faced as he turned his back on prudence and returned to memories of his life in Pakistan. He heard again the voices of his ancestors. Now I remember, suddenly it comes to me, the most intense of our rendezvous, to paraphrase Wallace Stevens.
It was past midnight, and we were standing outside under what might have been stars in the skies of Los Angeles, when we turned to the question of sacrifice. Something about skin and heart and heat and closeness more intense than what can be easily borne. The shared intimacies of animals, human or no, things out of the earth and down from the sky, even or only when the knife slit the throat. We talked about the sacrifice of chickens in Haiti and the yearly goat sacrifice in Pakistan. Did the chickens smile? I remember telling him how I used to hear that only animals that showed their willingness to be slaughtered would be killed. Otherwise, they were spared, since the gods would not accept an offering of the unwilling.
What did you say, Nasser? We were not so much unsettled as exhilarated as we searched for what it might be to have feelings that were not sympathetic or self-indulgent. You insisted, again, that we rethink our understanding of the supernatural, just as you led me to question the context of the sacred and the meaning of accursed objects. Most of all, you spoke about the dangers of human-centered determinations of just and unjust. No, you tell me now that I should be more precise in a tone not quite as gentle as I recalled.
No, you say. There is nothing more terrifying than such binaries, though you would not use such a word. Instead, you sought to avoid the oppositional limits between humans and animals, or other subjectivities that inhabit the world. For these limits demand a rigor and purity that judges, dislocates and disposes of all that remains outside the human. We were getting close to speaking about that other more bounteous terrain, the habitat of spirits and animals that disavow sentimental entrapment. We were about to turn together toward a knowledge that has everything to do with perception, with an attentiveness that unleashes another intelligibility, beyond individual preferment. There we would learn about another kind of love, something close to attachment and awe, compassion and fury, an exceptional tenderness for what is fast disappearing.
Do I hear you still, Nasser? The unsaid carries the most weight. The undone is our boon.
Footnotes
1.
Organized by David Lloyd and held at the University of Southern California on February 10, 2005.
2.
Nasser Hussain, “Beyond Norm and Exception: Guantánamo,” Critical Inquiry, 33(4) (Summer 2007), 734–53.
3.
Nasser Hussain and Melissa Ptacek, “Thresholds: Sovereignty and the Sacred,” Law & Society Review 34(2) (2000), 495–515.
4.
Nasser Hussain, The Jurisprudence of Emergency: Colonialism and the Rule of Law (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2003).
5.
“The Anti-Colonial Machine,” a yearly conference that began at Duke University in 2010, was held at Irvine with Sora Han at the helm on October 17–18, 2013.
6.
See Nasser Hussain’s unpublished “Auden’s Law Like Love.”