In this paper I problematize that the suicides out of despair (hereafter sod) as statements of unfreedom. The paper is divided into six sections. The first section introduces the problem and locates it within the existing scholarship. The second section puts forward first of the two problems the paper engages: suicide as unfreedom. In this section, the situational and essent’ial ontology of suicide is briefly discussed and proceed to categorize two major forms of unfreedoms emergent from the historical ontology of human social life: slavery and bare life. The third section of the paper problematizes unfreedom as freedom corrupted both from the perspectives of Heideggerian essent’ial ontology and Badiouian situational ontology through set theoretical models of freedom/unfreedom. Subsequently three sets of unfreedom: heteronomy, atomy and bare life; and one set of freedom vis-àvis autonomy is logically derived and discussed. Freedom is presented as a directive idea helpful in doing away with unfreedoms. Then the second of the two problems – unfreedom as suicidal- is briefly discussed. The concluding section delineates that despite the emergent historical reality having constituted human social life as unfree, we could still be hopeful in recovering freedom as the essent’ial ontology of the human species and the evental potential of the situational ontology of life is not fundamentally unfree. In the following two paragraphs I discuss the classifications of sod and suicides out of choice (hereafter soc) and then I discuss how suicides are accounted in various disciplinary and theoretical positions. After the brief discussion on various approaches to suicide, I elaborate what I hold as unfreedom, contrasting it from freedom, from the positions of situational and substantial ontology. Through the discussion I arrive at a thesis that not just sods are impelled by conditions of unfreedom but problematize the unfreedoms as suicidal.
Suicide As Unfreedom And Vice Versa
P.Madhu[*]
1.1. Introduction
In this paper I problematize that the su i c i des out of despair (hereafter sod) as statements of unfreedom. The paper is divided into six sections. The first section introduces the problem and locates it within the existing scholarship. The second section puts forward first of the two problems the paper engages: suicide as unfreedom. In this section, the situational and essent’ial ontology of suicide is briefly discussed and proceed to categorize two major forms of unfreedoms emergent from the historical ontology of human social life: slavery and bare life. The third section of the paper problematizes unfreedom as freedom corrupted both from the perspectives of Heideggerian essent’ial ontology and Badiouian situational ontology through set theoretical models of freedom/unfreedom. Subsequently three sets of unfreedom: heteronomy, atomy and bare life; and one set of freedom vis-à- vis autonomy is logically derived and discussed. Freedom is presented as a directive idea helpful in doing away with unfreedoms. Then the second of the two problems – unfreedom as suicidal- is briefly discussed. The concluding section delineates that despite the emergent historical reality having constituted human social life as unfree, we could still be hopeful in recovering freedom as the essent’ial ontology of the human species and the evental potential of the situational ontology of life is not fundamentally unfree.
In the following two paragraphs I discuss the classifications of sod and suicides out of choice (hereafter soc) and then I discuss how suicides are accounted in various disciplinary and theoretical positions. After the brief discussion on various approaches to suicide, I elaborate what I hold as unfreedom, contrasting it from freedom, from the positions of situational and substantial ontology. Through the discussion I arrive at a thesis that not just sods are impelled by conditions of unfreedom but problematize the unfreedoms as suicidal.
Suicides can be broadly classified as the su i c i des out of choice (hereafter soc) and the su i c i des out of despair. Su i c i des of choice differ from that of despair as the sod is resentment over the victims’ status of unfreedom to live[1], whereas the soc are expressions of freedom to die. The sod victims would not have committed suicide had they either got habituated with the situations of despair or felt that the situations are being subdued or overcome. If suicides happen in clusters among marginalized communities it could probably be the sod. Sod could be final statements of suffering, despair, grief, frustration or anger by its enactor and often it is the voice of despair from the victim community.
Soc on the other hand need not have been prompted by any conditions of unfreedom, but by a decision to end one’s life due to unwillingness to continue living because of either personal reasons or social conditions. The personal or political reasons for soc can be ranging from loss of interest to live or just to express her freedom over terminating her life or it could even be a spiritual or political or ideological decision to end her life. Soc could also be expression of her resistance to certain conditions of social life against which she could express her protest with her self-inflicted death. Socs can be distinguished from sods as under the conditions of socs there would be no suicidal unfreedoms. The Soc were even prevalent among prehistoric communities and they have their prevalence among late modern individuals too[2]. For instance, the suicides of suicide bombers are mostly socs. There can also be fuzzy categories of suicides, which are both socs and sods in degrees as in the cases of euthanasia, which falls outside the gambit of this paper.
The Sods, especially those occur in clusters, it is argued, take place under the conditions of unfreedom. The suicides reported among aboriginals, small and marginal farmers, manual labourers, unemployed and other marginalized communities could be mostly sod. It is not accidental that in countries like Australia, Canada, New Zealand and USA suicide trend among the aboriginals are about three to five times higher than that of the mainstream[3]. Most of the aboriginal victims of suicide are reported to be either adolescents or persons from their early youth[4]. Unlike the predictions[5] made by Durkeim, the rise in rural suicide rate is higher than that of urban suicides, throughout the world, compared to the rates of earlier decades[6] however, not without meagre exceptions. Studies suggest that the rate of suicide from the rural areas of the third world countries steeply rose from initiation of structural adjustments of late 1980s and early 1990s[7]. It is observed that the rates of growth of rural suicides are nothing ‘normal’[8]. If we take India as a case point for third-world suicides, it can be observed that among the Indians, suicides are highly prevalent among lower middle classes of people, small farmers, and manual labourers and among other populations that is being marginalized. Though unreported, suicides progressively increase among adivasis[9], dalits[10] and poorer sections of India[11]. Indian rural suicides, for instance, are on the sharp increase since 1991 onwards, the year which coincides with the beginning of the structural adjustment regime[12]. Increase in suicides among already marginalized communities is an indication of the acceleration of their experience of despair. The studies of suicides in the third world countries reveal that humiliation, loss of honour, economic failure, indebtedness, crop-failures (especially while using genetically modified seeds), rising cost of agricultural inputs disproportionate to the return of income, inability to meet marital expenses of one’s daughter or sister, chronic medical illness etc., individually and combined with other factors such as disputes with spouses and in- laws, internal migration and its associated discomforts etc., are the immediate reasons for suicidal decisions. The recent suicide studies, in general, observe that the pattern of suicide among economically affluent societies is demographically different from those of the poorer ones. Among the middle class populations of the affluent society suicides among elderly is on the rise where as among the people living in ghettoes and also among the lower middle class of the affluent societies the youth have higher share of suicide victims. The studies of suicides in the west show that largely youth suicides have familial precedence[13]. In the ‘developed’ nations, unlike the ‘developing’ ones, schizophrenia, drug abuse, recent economic loss(es), limited social support for aged persons’ isolated living etc., are cited as the reasons for most of the suicides[14]. The point I drive home is not a case for increasing rural suicides but to figure out that more than rurality or urbanity it is the actual and perceived unfreedoms that lets one to sod. Though suicides are committed in the affluent north and the impoverished south for different immediate reason, the sods globe over have the same underlying reason[15]: the unfreedom. The recognition of the underlying cause is important because, that which triggers suicide among the dead and gone could probably have its resonance among the living too.
1.2 Approaches to suicide in academic literature
Suicide studies, often referred as su i c i dology is a vast academic field with conflicting and complementary theoretical establishments. Most of the recent studies of suicide are from the field of epidemiology[16]. Epidemiologists view suicide as a contagious psychiatric disorder[17]. Psychiatrists focus on the aspects of adverse childhood[18], mood disorders[19] and other clinical psychiatric aspects. Psychiatric research into suicide is dominated by diagnostic systems[20]. The sociological studies concentrate on the collective aspects of suicide such as its statistical pattern of recurrence[21], social fact[22], shame[23], excessive individualism[24], and social exclusion[25]. Psychological theories of suicide on the other hand focus at the personal dimensions of anomy, guilt, despair or exclusion[26]. Psychological theorists also ponder upon developmental[27], familial[28], stress related[29], hopelessness[30]
interpersonal[31] and rational[32] dimensions of suicidality. Psychological studies often concentrate on the variables such as depression, self-esteem, locus of control, emotional disturbance and recent stressors[33]. The Contemporary sociologists belonging to the varieties of schools of generative structuralism, unlike their predecessors integrate the agency centred psychological and micro-sociological aspects with their structural counterpart and probe the ‘structurational’ aspects of suicide[34]. Trying to explain suicides sociologically, Giddens hybridizes Durkeimian sociology of anomie and Halbwashsian psychology of the individually experienced 'social isolation' of the suicidal persons and comes with his theory of structuration within which he identifies the psychological and sociological factors non-dually culminating in suicides[35]. There are also sociological studies concentrating dimensions of media contagion of suicides[36]. Studies from gender theorists reveal how the gender disparity and the social construction of masculinity having its suicide toll among the men[37]. Suicidology also has a wide reserve of contributions from psychiatrists, biologists, neurologists, and geneticists. Neurologists explore the brain processes such as serotonin dysfunction, which finally culminates into impulsive suicide[38]. There have been occasional attempts to demonstrate that suicides have genetic basis[39]. There are also attempts by economists to theorize suicide. Economic theories mostly draw their logic from the philosophy of utility and rational choice[40]. However, the studies despite their breadth, they have a either serious limitation as individually they limit discipline bound enquirers to get stuck within their discipline or baffle trans-disciplinary or inter-disciplinary enquirers with their sheer multifarious dimensionality.
2.1 Suicide as Unfreedom
In order to bring clarity I have categorized suicides as soc and sod. Irrespective of suicides happening out of choice or despair, to use the language of structuralism, the statement of suicide has morphology, syntax and structural aspects of grammar at its broadest level. Looked from its generative angle, it has its contextual meanings, praxis, generative grammar and micro aspects of practices. In other words, there are structural aspects, facticities[41] and the particularities of contexts specific to the suicide and the exchanges between the aspects mentioned above[42]. However, studies conducted from the perspectives of structuralism, post- structuralism or those weaved from the micro-sociological aspects leave us astray as they do not help us to understand the underlying factors that let such a structure or non-structure to emerge.
The cluster suicides[43] of despair happen among the sections of people thrown out of time and space. Throwing out the politically disadvantaged of place and time happens, as the space and the time in the social contexts are political constructions construed disadvantageous for the outliers within the history-power- state regime[44]. Time, as Negri puts it, is not merely a measure but ‘the global phenomenological fabric’, the base, the substance and the flow of production, the production of the social, in its entirety[45].
Mostly suicides happen because of intense subjective sufferings. The intense sufferings though could least be attributed to the conspiracies of their dominant alterity - the others - to hurt someone, ironically, the suicidal ‘intense suffering’ is not altogether unrelated the horizons, the existence, and the processes of the love of the dominant alterity[46]. In other words, the play of the politics of jouissance of the dominant alterity and its instruments of power[47] could not be written off as clean or unconnected .
Suicides in cluster happen among the victims during their acute transition into unfreedom. It is the figuration[48] effect of the adventitious unfreedom[49]. The global progression of unfreedom let the suicide too to be a global phenomenon. Fundamentally, Suicides are both the statements of protest and despair in reaction to the lives being turned into unfree bare life[50]. Reducing a human into bare life is to equate her with the simple reality of her living being, contemptible, quite opposite to what the principle of life implies[51].
‘Injustice is clear, justice is obscure,’ observes Badiou[52]. Also, he observes, “That it is easier to establish consensus regarding what is evil rather than - regarding what is good”. Similarly, while sod clearly instantiate unfreedom, freedom is obscure as it is about life and the rightful living. Life is obscure; death is clear. Unfreedom is concrete and observable as unfreedom has its effects: suffering, revolt, and habituation. Unfreedom, as Zizek puts it is being caught into a forced choice[53]. The idea of freedom is abstract but politically directive. Freedom is an axiom with which we recognize unfreedoms.
2.2 The situational and ‘essent’ial ontology of freedom/unfreedom
Freedom, is situationally emergent and sustainable through human action; nevertheless it is fundamental property and a ct i ve a spect of the human species and its praxis[54]. Freedom has its foundation in human care-structure and its engagement. In this regard quoting from Heidegger Dallmayr observes:
"Freedom," … “is not merely what common sense is content to let
pass under this name: the caprice, occasionally present in our choosing, of moving in this or that direction. Freedom is not mere arbitrariness in what we can and cannot do; nor, on the other hand, is it the mere submission to a requirement or necessity (and thus to an ontic standard or object). Rather, prior to all such 'negative' or 'positive' construals, freedom is engagement in the disclosure of beings as such”[55]
Heidegger further clarifies "freedom is not governed by human inclination”; and “man does not ‘possess’ freedom as property,” on the contrary “freedom, or freedom, or existent revelatory Da -sein possesses man”[56].
Also, freedom is emergent from situations and our activities. Badiou non- substantially conceptualizes freedom as a contingent reality emergent out of the situational elements constituting it in infinite ways[57]. However, it can also be observed that the situational ontology of Badiou and ‘ essent ’ial[58] ontology of Heidegger share their meaning as Heidegger too construes freedom as condition or grounding of the possibility of Dasein[59] . Also, for Arendt, freedom is the cond i t i on and o b ject i ve st a te of human existence that makes politics possible[60].
2.2 Forms of unfreedom: pre-capitalist slavery and late capitalist bare life Slavery in the historical past and bare-life in the late modern present are
major genres of unfreedom. Both unfreedoms, though emerged under different
historical ontologies, separated by epochs and episteme they share a commonality: the state of exception. Slavery is a status where the slave has no right or ownership while over whom any or all of the powers connected to the right of ownership are exercised. Bare life on the contrast a redundant life that has lost its utility for the dominant and hence excepted from the political life. Slaves were not considered ‘fully human’[61] on the other hand bare life remains included in politics in the form of the exception, that is, as something that is included solely through an exclusion[62]. While slavery and colonial dominance were impetus for the development and sustenance of capitalism in its formative phase[63], the modern form of bare life is its repercussion in its late phase. Both under slavery and bare life the sufferings the bearers of hardship undergo have its expression in suicide and also in various forms of ‘spiritualities’[64], especially before the victims got habituated within the conditions govern them. Both under bare life and slavery suicides are rare and often unrecognised as one, as the life of the victims is hardly counted as valuable. However, the social group that is ab out to enter or just entered the bare
life, and the slaves who find slavery unacceptable commit suicide[65]. Suicides under slavery and bare life happen and counted as one when the suicide victims are not fully habituated within such a life. For instance, suicides were relatively more prevalent among the first generation African- American slaves for whom “suicide was the result of a preference for death over slavery ... or undeserved punishment”[66].
2.3 unfreedom globalized, futurized, time-space distantiated
In the late capitalism bare life is globalised. Bare life is a consequence of the spatially globalized and temporally futurized neo-liberal world order. ‘Time-space distantiation’[67] and ‘colonizing the future’[68] are much avowed characteristics of the historical ontology of global capital. ‘Time-space distantiation’ is Giddens’ euphemism for the implosion and sustenance of global capital into the remotest corner of the globe wherein the localities face the global on a larger time scale and get spatio-temporally distantiated. It is a process that involves stretching the relations of power and dominance over time and space so that relations can be controlled and coordinated globe over for longer periods[69]. ‘Colonization of the future’ is a strategy Giddens prescribes for those involved in their survival games and ‘life politics’ towards ‘creation of territories of future possibilities.’ Bare life is the other side of the coin: that of the colonizing life-politics. Bare life is being produced as colonization of future progresses. In this regard, Barbara Adams observes:
industrial societies today the present is transcended and the future as last frontier colonized with enduring things, belief systems and institutions, with cultural and technological products, with insurance and economic practices. As such, the future is pursued, prospected, produced, polluted. It is thus traversed in the dual sense of being ‘travelled’ and negated… the industrial extension into the future is characterized by parasitical borrowing from the future, by prospecting and plundering it for use and benefit in the present without regard to time-space distantiated effects, that is, globalized impacts now and in the future.[70]
2.4. Unfreedom: subversion of citizenry
Bare life is a form of unfreedom; it is the state of exception[71], being exepted from the totalised empire[72]. By the phrase ‘state of exception’ I would like to indicate the subversion of citizenry and withdrawal of citizen rights especially that of the people
living in lower strata of the economy and society. In this paper I am not discussing
the state of exception in the West or about the ‘exception’ of those who are designated as terrorists or refugees rather I concentrate on the global state of exception of the lawful but marginalized citizens of the nation states. ‘The ‘State of exception’ of the marginalized in the nation states, I argue, is the direct fallout of exceptional privileges avowed by and rendered to the trans-national corporations and their logic[73]. In other words, the marginalized are thrown out from their existential spatio-temporality and made further a subject of tr a ns-n a t i on a l non- sovere i gn sovere i gnty as of as It is the consequence of the time-space distantiation of the global capital.
3.1 Unfreedom as freedom corrupted: elements and their corrupt forms that constitute freedoms and unfreedoms
In the following paragraphs I delineate the elements that constitute the situations of unfreedoms drawing the concepts of freedom from Agamben, Arendt, Badiou, Bookchin, Foucault, Heidegger, and others and reconstitute them into the perspectives of set theory[74] in order to explicate how unfreedoms are combinations of corrupt forms of the elements that constitute freedom. Set theory unlike the theories that claim ‘what there is’ is capable of presenting the ‘structure of what any situation s a ys ex i sts[75]. Corruption, explained in the words of Hardt and Negri, “contrary to desire, is not an ontological motor but simply the lack of ontological foundation of the biopolitical practices of being”[76]. In Heideggerian terminology, corruption is concealment and distortion that hides the ‘essence of truth,’ the freedom[77]. For Badiou, evil is nothing but the corruption of truth[78]. Further he confirms, “[i]f Evil exists, we must conceive it from the starting point of the Good”[79]. Unfreedom is freedom corrupted.
3. The elements that constitute freedoms and their corrupt unfreedoms Situations of freedom (d) I hold is a fuzzy set having the elements of Ecology
of freedom (EoF), Project i v a l openness (PO), C a re of the self (CoS) and Authent i c i ty
(A) ( d = p{ EoF, PO, CoS, A}[80]). Of these four fuzzy elements C a re of the self is the individual dimension of freedom and Ecology of freedom is the trans-individual freedom of collective amplitude; and Authent i c i ty and Project i v a l openness are mixed situations where former has individual accomplishment with collective import and the later is collective accomplishment with individual import.
[...]
[*] I can be contacted at: madhu.mes@gmail.com
[1] Nevertheless, the sod need not always be the suicides of unfreedom. However, massive and serial suicides that happen in the same geographical location or among the persons belonging to similar socio-economic stature, or ethnic communities with a pattern of relative uniformity if attributed to wholly to impulsive decisions reacting to the singularities of immediate unpleasant instances or neurological conditions we will be committing errors of methodological solipsism, or empirical fallacy whether or not committing other methodological fallacies.
[2] Kiemo, 2004:10
[3] Krebs, 2005; Middleton, 2003; Pesonen, 2001; Shiva, 2003:88; Simpson & Conklin, 1989
[4] (Tarz, 1999; Kiramayer, 2004; Hunter, 2002)
[5] For Durkheim, suicides are social facts that happen while individuals out of excessive individualism scuttled off from forms of social attachments and social regulation or, when they are excessively regulated. Durkheim pointed out protestants, who are relatively more individualized are more susceptible to suicides than Catholics and Jews of his time as the later were more bound together by tradition. Unlike Durkheim’s prediction, that the individualized and urbanized committing suicide, sucides happen among the aboriginal and rural folks for whom communitival bondedness still matter. It is not because of anomie (normlessness), altruism, egoism (insufficient integration with the society) rather because of various sorts of unfreedom such as inability to meet personal and collective expectations, shame, incapacity to cope with the emergent social and economic order, being reduced to worthless, and having no means to compete for survival etc (Durkheim, 1951)
[6] Davis, 2007:12-13; Middleton, 2006: 1991-92
[7] White, 2007; Hong, 2000:59; Ritzer, 2007:181
[8] Herring, 2005:9
[9] Indigenous people of India
[10] The ‘untouchables’
[11] Madhu, 2005:160; Tarz, 1999: 89; Shiva, 2003:104
[12] Patnaik, 2003:22,25; Stone, 2002
[13] Kiemo, 2004; Gallagher, 2002; Cutler, 2001
[14] Bhatia, et. al., 2000; Bhatia., et al., 1957; Prasad., et al., 2006; Pionetti, 2005; Sathish, 2006; Mishra, 2006; Herring, 2006; Newman, 2007; Corsby, Rhee & Holland, 1977; Suri,K C, 2006; Patnaik, 2007; Patnaik, 2003; Mohanty, 2004; Singh, 2006; Vaidyanadhan, 2006; Reddy, 2006; Sridhar, 2006; Rao & Suri, 2006; Jeromi, 2007; Mohanakumar & Sharma, 2006.
[15] The ‘real’ for Bhaskar is the underlying structure that are not spontaneously apparent in the observable pattern of events. However, they can be deciphered through practical, theoretical, scientific or philosophical investigations (Bhasker, 1989). For Badiou it is “being, in a situation, in any given symbolic field, the point of impasse, or the point of impossibility, which precisely allows us to think the situation as a whole (Badiou, 2001:121).” In Bhasker, the ‘real’ has the generative mechanisms whose manifestations are seen in the ‘actual’ domain. Bhasker holds that events (not in the badiouvian sense of ‘event’) and behaviours are at the domain of the actual. In the domain of actual events and patterns of events are observable. The domain of ‘empirical’ the third domain consists of what we experience (Bhasker, 1978). Badiou revolutionizes the ‘actual’ set of situations from which his ‘real’ emerges. Actual for badiou is not something in which reality is subdued and perverted, rather, it is the field for the evental reality.
[16] Kosky, 2002:80
[17]Leenaars, 2004; Yufit, 2005
[18] Brodsky and Stanley, 2008
[19] MacLeord, 2004, Catanzaro, 2002
[20] Lester, 2002:12
[21] Durkheim 1951, Maskill, 2005
[22] Durkheim, 1951
[23] Tangney, 1995: 1132-1145; Hastings et. al., 2002: 67-80; Sheff, 2000: 13-27
[24] Lester, 1997; Lester, 1982
[25] Tubergen and Utlee, 2006
[26] Halbwachs, 1978
[27] Oquendo & Mann, 2008
[28] Brendt & Melhem, 2008
[29] Currier & Mann, 2008
[30] Abramson, et al., 2002
[31] Davila, 2005
[32] Silverman, 2000
[33] Lester, 2002: 12
[34] Giddens, 1965
[35] He justifies that such an integration would be methodologically superior as the new hybridised approach would not only explore the question of why in certain social situations individuals kill themselves, but also would find its converse: why do others, in a great range of social situations, not display suicidal behaviour? - ibid; Giddens, 1984:8
[36] Marsden, 2000; Jamieson, 2003
[37] Connell, 2005; Scourfield, 2005
[38] Sanchez, 2007; Mann, 2003
[39] Westefeld, 2000
[40] Hamermesh & Soss, 1974
[41] For Heidegger facticity is the state in which dasein exists. Facticity, Agamben explains, “is not the factuality of the factum brutum of something present-at-hand, but a characteristic of Dasein's Being-- one which has been taken up into existence, even if proximally it has been thrust aside.” -Agamben, 1991: 177-242
[42] Ricoeur, 2005:90
[43] Suicides occurring in demographic clusters.
[44] Cosmological time emerges from cosmological events. Similarly, social time emerges from the events constituting the social. The events in the human arena are essentially political either concreatizing the politics of the history-power-state regime or dysfunctioning that (Badiou, 2005: 13-18; Badiou, 2005: 252).
[45] Negri, 2005: 29
[46] Badiou, 2001:66
[47] State, its bureaucratic instruments and the party mechanisms are such instruments of power of the dominant alterity, mostly the corporate. There is politics of jouissance as Zizek observes in the procorporate but anti-poor legislations and its implementation where the mechanisms of parties and their bureaucratic appendages do not just do their ‘duty’ for duty’s sake out of the claimed objectives of development or economic growth but for the hidden gratification it brings (Zizek, 2005:120-121)
[48] Figuration is the process through which figures emerge into view (Deleuze, 2003:98). Elias presents figuration as the structuration process of mutuality and inter-affectiveness (Elias, 1978: 261). Here the figuration of the dominant alterity stifling its marginalized other is indicated.
[49] Elias,1978:134
[50] “Bare life” is life excluded from politics. Agamben holds that in being excluded from properly-qualified political life, “bare life” is thrown into a more basic and fundamental political relationship with the sovereign power that excluded it (Neal, 2007:4). In Agamben’s words, “bare life in the political realm constitutes the original -- if concealed -- nucleus of sovereign power. It can even be said that the production of a biopolitical body is the original activity of sovereign power. In this sense, biopolitics is at least as old as the sovereign exception” (Agamben, 1998:7). Page 32 of 35 Bare life (zoe) is an exception within the political life (Polis): an inclusive exclusion (Agamben, 1998:8)
[51] Badiou, 2001:12
[52] Badiou, 2005d:52
[53] Zizek, 1995:75
[54] Madhu, 2005:13, 17
[55] Dallmayr, 1984:216
[56] Heidegger, 1949:301
[57] Hallward, 2003:166
[58] According to Ralph Manheim, translator of Heidegger’s “An Introduction to Metaphysics” Essents = “existents,” “things that are” (Heidegger, 1999: 1f)
[59] Dallamyr, 1984:219
[60] Arendt, 1998:7, 71
[61] Tallant, 2005:1377
[62] Agamben, 1998:10.
[63] Perelman, 2000:14; Arendt, 1998:85
[64] Keenland, 2006:3
[65] ibid:4
[66] Piersen, 1977:152
[67] Giddens, 1990:64
[68] Giddens, 1991:242
[69] Jessop, 2002: 98
[70] Adam, 2006 :125
[71] State of exception is hidden ground of modern democracies. Within the state of exception all juridical order is suspended ,leaving no normative or juridical criteria on the basis of which to decide what the structure of any emergent political order should look like (Agamben, 2005; Kisner, 2007:222-253). For Agamben, ‘sate of exception’ is a ‘sovereign exceptionalism’ which is not simply an oppressive abuse of what should otherwise be a properly-balanced relationship between liberty and security, subject and sovereign. Rather, exceptionalism is the very structure of the sovereignty itself (Neal, 2007:4)
[72] Hardt & Negri, 2000:380
[73] Under new legislations of ‘special economic zones (SEZ)’ third world countries sanction ‘reverse of land reforms’ by which, governments acquire lands and distribute them at a nominal cost to the global ‘investors’ along with exclusive privilege over the host countries’ labour and resources. Not just these privileges were endowed on investors but also the special economic zones are declared free from interference by regular legislations regarding trade unions, labour welfare and other norms regarding customs check. For instance, the legislation regarding SEZ in India states: “ A Special Economic Zone shall, on and from the appointed day, be deemed to be a territory outside the customs territory of India for the purposes of undertaking the authorized operations ” (Govt. of India, 2005:Part II. Sec.1. Item.56). Indian act makes the SEZ free from otherwise obligatory legislations regarding trade unions, industrial and labour disputes, welfare of labour including conditions of work, provident funds, employers’ liability, workmen’s compensation, invalidity and old age pensions and maternity benefits (Govt. of India, 2005:Sec.49). Further, the act prescribes exemption from state taxes levies and duties to the developer or entrepreneur (Govt. of India, 2005:sec.50; sec. 54.h). Further, the Government of India commit for the ‘IT industries’ in the zones: twenty-four hours uninterrupted power supply at stable frequency in the Zone, reliable connectivity for uninterrupted and secure data transmission; provision for central air-conditioning system etc. (Govt. of India, 2006: part II, Page 33 of 35 Sec.3, sub sec. I, item.3). There are many such provisions exist under the new legislations which, for want of time I have not sufficiently researched.
[74] Set is an ‘extension of a concept’ (Badiou, 2005d:16)
[75] Emphasis original; Badiou, 2005d: 17
[76] Hardt & Negri, 2000:389
[77] Heidegger, 1993:73,125
[78] Hallward, 2003: xxxv; Hallward, 2001:xii-xiii
[79] Badiou, 2001:60
[80] The degree of truth of the statement "x possesses p" is denoted by P(x). By (xe) exception of the fuzzy element x is referred to.
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