Shame and the Homo Sacer: Agamben and Rushdie in Dialogue

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August 2014

Shame and the Homo Sacer: Agamben and Rushdie in Dialogue

Salman Rushdie in his novel Shame and Giorgio Agamben's discussion of shame in his

critical Homo Sacer project draw attention to a universal human reaction, namely our potential to

be absolutely and distressingly present to ourselves under the gaze of another. This presence to

ourselves revealed precisely by the gaze of another which compels us to flee ourselves betrays

our unique, socially embedded reality. The existence of shame productively illustrated by the

comparison of Rushdie and Agamben betrays the precise ways in which we bear macro-social

processes of oppression in our very bodies. Locating when and where shame is provoked opens

up a productive space for change precisely inasmuch as we can pinpoint this universal tendency

in ourselves and in the “others” whose gaze incites our shame.

In making this comparison, supplemented in part with the work of Judith Butler, I hope to

provoke our “literary imaginations” to look further afield and suggest potential engagement

across deep cultural, linguistic, and political boundaries. I am taking my cue from O’Hagan,

cited in Kenway and Fahey’s Globalizing The Research Imagination, that:

the everyday work of the imagination can make us see both the rarity and the

responsibility of being truly alive. And literature is the accompaniment to that

sense: not something you do in your spare time, but the beat of time itself, and we

will feel that pulse in every major area we turn to . . . Our power truly to imagine

the world and the worlds inside us is what constitutes our moral sense. (Kenway

and Fahey 3)

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Kenway and Fahey go on to note that “For [O’Hagan] many ‘failures of the imagination are

behind the conduct of our woes’ . . . and literature has the power to confront such failures by

imaginatively chronicling our ‘stock of human dread’” (3).

Setting themes from Agamben and Rushdie in dialogue may help express the precise

nature of our collective “failures of . . . imagination” and indeed uniquely chronicle our “stock of

human dread.” Bignall and Svirsky suggest that setting Agamben in dialogue with the

postcolonial context can be complicated business. The act of comparing a postcolonial novelist

and a continental philosopher is certainly no less fraught. To do so, I will start with Rushdie’s

Shame and then Agamben’s project, noting the particular ways in which the themes overlap as

well as the similarity in critiques of both. I will conclude by suggesting ways the comparison

opens up the field of application for Agamben’s work in Asia and perhaps the larger postcolonial

theoretical project in general.

Shame

Rushdie describes shame in the abstract early in his novel. Having inserted himself as

narrator of the novel he pauses to discuss shame. He highlights in relation to one of his

characters (Omar Khayyam) shame’s content and character as a word with a place and

significance that supersedes and spills over its English equivalent:

This word: shame. No, I must write it in its original form, not in this peculiar

language tainted by wrong concepts and the accumulated detritus of its owners’

unrepented past, this Angrezi in which I am forced to write, and so forever alter

what is written . . .

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Sharam, that’s the word. For which this paltry ‘shame’ is a wholly inadequate

translation. . . . A short word, but one containing encyclopedias of nuance. . . . No

matter how determinedly one flees a country, one is obliged to take along some

hand-luggage; and can it be doubted that Omar Khayyam (to concentrate on him),

having been barred from feeling shame (vb. int.: sharmàna) at an early age,

continued to be affected by that remarkable ban throughout his later years. . . (32).

For Rushdie, "the English term “shame” is “tainted,” carrying with it “wrong concepts

and the accumulated detritus of its owners’ unrepented past.” “Sharam” is not fully

“translatable” and, therefore, Rushdie “recovers” the word's “encyclopedias of nuance” by

insisting on its use in transliteration. The “hand-luggage” of shame carried from Rushdie’s south

Asian home into the West, therefore, is at once the same and different for colonizer and

colonized. The English colonizers, owners of the “unrepented past,” also own the English

“shame,” peculiar to the British colonialists’ totalitarianism, but the encyclopedias of nuance in

sharam do not match the source of the unrepentant owners’ shame.

Also significant is that for Rushdie there is a social-structural component to shame. It is

Khayyam’s mother(s) who forbid(s) him to feel shame (or any of its corollary emotions). The

“hand luggage” of shame is something one takes from one’s “country,” an enormous web of

complex social relations variously defined. This abstract definition of shame stands over the

entirety of the novel. Both shame and its opposite are learned and enacted within a society. In

Rushdie’s personification of “shame” we also see this relational quality at work.

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The bulk of his representation of this shame, or sharam, comes in the character of Sufiya

Zinobia; shamelessness through Omar Khayyam. Both representations connect to the larger

questions of nationality, identity, and the representation of the “other.”

Sufiya is born to Raza and Bilquìs Hyder and described as “the wrong miracle” having

been born a female after the stillbirth of a boy. When Sufiya is born, her father’s shock and

disbelief come as explosive denial: “Genitalia! Can! Be! Obscured!” (88) The narrator quotes the

“family legend”: “when her parents had to admit the immutability of her gender, to submit, as

faith demands, to God; at this very instant the extremely new and soporific being in Raza’s arms

began—it’s true!—to blush.” He continues: “They say the baby blushed at birth. Then, even

then, she was too easily shamed” (88).

The narrator tells us that just before she turned two, Sufiya contracted a “brain fever that

turned her into an idiot” (100). Bilquìs immediately interprets this as judgment: “I must accept it:

she is my shame” (101). Sufiya’s blushing damages her brain and renders her permanently a

child. We learn later that Bilquìs’s statement meant much more than we initially believed. The

narrator betrays a “lie” that the “fever” was in fact “a figment of Bilquìs Hyder’s imagination,

intended to cover up the damage done by repeated blows to the head: hate can turn a miracle-

gone-wrong into a basket case” (119).

Sufiya grows and a decade later the narrator tells us “her parents were still perplexed by

these reddenings.” The meaning of her blushing confounds the Hyders. The narrator insists

“Sufiya Zinobia Hyder blushed uncontrollably whenever her presence in the world was noticed

by others. But she also, I believe, blushed for the world” (125). “Let me voice my suspicion,” he

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adds, “the brain-fever that made Sufiya Zinobia preternaturally receptive to all sorts of things

that float around in the ether enabled her to absorb, like a sponge, a host of unfelt feelings”

(124).

At the age of twelve, her absorption of the feelings around her spills out into violence.

She destroys a flock of her neighbor’s turkeys. “What seems certain,” the narrator asserts, “is

that Sufiya Zinobia . . . had discovered in the labyrinths of her unconscious self the hidden path

that links sharam to violence; and that, awakening, she was as surprised as anyone by the force

of what had been unleashed” (144).

At this point Omar Khayyam, a doctor, comes to care for Sufiya and falls in love with

her. He and her father become aware of her outbursts of violence. When she is nineteen the

Hyders marry Omar to Sufiya. Having reached the mental age of seven at the biological age of

twenty—a “beast” stirring within—her violence escalates and becomes sexualized. She allows

herself to be raped by four men then proceeds to decapitate them. This escalation prompts Raza

and Omar, having already contemplated killing her, to sedate and restrain Sufiya in the attic of

the Hyder home.

Sufiya escapes and becomes a beast. She roams the countryside, killing animals and men.

Stories circulate of her terror. Yet Omar waits for her. In the climax of the novel, Sufiya returns

for him. The two meet in a disintegrating violence, Omar decapitated and Sufiya exploding in a

final radiance of heat, a mushroom cloud of fire and ash itself “in the shape of a giant, grey and

headless man, a figure of dreams, a phantom with one arm lifted in a gesture of farewell” (305).

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Throughout the novel Sufiya is further embedded in a network of relations. She is

daughter to a general who has his predecessor executed. Iskander is found guilty, but the

expectation to be pardoned, instead is killed then hung, an allusion to Pakistan Prime Minister

Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s purported murder by Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq (Hyder, in the novel). Sufiya

is living in a home that is a seat of national power. Her father is at once himself shamed in battle

and yet restored to “honor” by intentionally losing in wrestling matches to his men, thereby

restoring to them their honor in his shame.

A variety of women orbit Sufiya, most related to one another by blood or marriage, each

with their own “shame.” Her mother Bilquìs fled the allegorical “Partition” naked, save for her

dubatta. Her sister Naveed Hyder scandalizes the family by having an affair with a polo player

and makes up for it by begetting exponentially more children (twenty-seven total) before killing

herself to prevent any more gestation. Rani and Arjumand Harappa are the wife and daughter

respectively of Iskander Harappa, the national leader whose corpse is hung instead of pardoned.

Rani, against Arjumand’s hagiographical memory of her father, knits eighteen “allegorical”

shawls testifying to the shamelessness of her husband’s rule.

It is important, despite our focus on Rushdie’s personification of shame in Sufiya, not to

lose site of the “embeddedness” of her character. She is a socially situated character. Her

absorption of the emotions around her, make her the cipher for the emotional core of the

community, men and women. She is a character in her own right, but in Rushdie’s narrative she

is operating as more than that. Her “preternatural receptivity” opens her to the “unfelt feelings”

of her family, community, and nation.

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The Subject and Shame

Having highlighted how for Rushdie shame is conceptualized/characterized in his novel,

it should be clear to those familiar with Agamben’s project that the two authors belong in

dialogue. Agamben’s “double movement” of shame is expressed in Sufiya. In Remnants of

Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive, Agamben proposes that

[i]n shame, the subject has no other content than its own desubjectification; it

becomes witness to its own disorder, its own oblivion as a subject. This double

movement, which is both subjectification and desubjectification, is shame. (106)

Antelme’s account of a young Italian student who, being marched from Buchenwald to

Dachau, arbitrarily singled out to be shot is paradigmatic for Agamben. He quotes Antelme:

His face has turned pink . . . I still have that pink before my eyes. . . . He turned

pink after the SS man said to him, ‘Du komme hier!’ He must have glanced about

him before he flushed; but yes, it was he who had been picked, and when he

doubted it no longer, he turned pink. . . . the Italian, having understood it was

really him, accepted this chance selection. He didn’t wonder: Why me, instead of

someone else? (103)

Like Sufiya who blushes “whenever her presence in the world was noticed by others,” the young

Italian, who turns “pink” when singled out by the SS. Beneath the gaze of the other, Sufiya’s

physiological response is the same as the one singled out for death.

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This expression of shame by the Italian, when it seems most inappropriate to feel it

(precisely by one who will not survive), reveals for Agamben that shame is grounded in

something other than survivor’s guilt. He argues that “in shame we are consigned to something

from which we cannot in any way distance ourselves” (Remnants of Auschwitz 105). Agamben

quotes Lévinas argument that shame is the “fact of being chained to oneself, the radical

impossibility of fleeing oneself to hide oneself from oneself, the intolerable presence of the self

to itself” (105).

Agamben concludes:

To be ashamed means to be consigned to something that cannot be assumed. But

what cannot be assumed is not something external. Rather, it originates our own

intimacy; it is what is most intimate in us (for example, our own physiological

life). Here the “I” is thus overcome by its own passivity, its ownmost sensibility;

yet this expropriation and desubjectification is also an extreme and irreducible

presence of the “I” to itself.(105-106).

Agamben shows a number of other ways one is both subject and desubjectified in the same

instance. He cites the sadist/masochist relationship in which the subject is complicit in his

desubjectification in such a way as to derive pleasure (107-109). He appeals to Kant’s notion of

auto-affection (interpreted by Heidegger) in which one appears to one’s self as an object of love

(109-112). Interestingly enough for our purposes, he argues that poetic language, perhaps all

language, and specifically the “poetic ‘I’” is also an instance of the “double movement” of

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subjectification and desubjectification (112-123). Agamben in this section concludes that shame

is the

hidden structure of all subjectivity and consciousness. Insofar as it consists solely

in the event of enunciation, consciousness constitutively has the form of being

consigned to something that cannot be assumed (128).

Agamben believes that it is precisely in this paradox that we “testify.” This too collapses the

binary distinction of the “human” and the “inhuman.” Indeed:

The human being is thus always beyond or before the human, the central

threshold through which pass currents of the human and the inhuman,

subjectification and desubjectification, the living being’s become speaking and

the logos’ becoming living. These currents are coextensive, but not coincident;

their non-coincidence, the subtle ridge that divides them, is the place of testimony

(135).

Agamben concludes Remnants by using the impossibility of bearing witness to the

experience of the Muselmann as a means to identify “modal categories” (im/possibility,

contingency/necessity) as more than “logical or epistemological categories” but “ontological

operators.” They are the “devastating weapons used in the biopolitical struggle for Being, in

which a decision is made each time on the human and the inhuman, on ‘making live’ or ‘letting

die’” (146-147). Having laid out the aporia at the center of human existence, Agamben, having

spoken so much about the Muselmann, closes Remnants by giving Bronislaw Goscinki, who was

a Muselmann but was rescued before succumbing to his condition, the final word (166-171).

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While the question may still remain open whether we can witness for ourselves or others, it is

instructive that Agamben at least tries to let the Muselmann testify for himself.

The overlap between Agamben and Rushdie, or perhaps better, what Agamben helps

clarify in Rushdie, is the moment of desubjectification in shame. Shame is in part born of being

an object of the other’s gaze. There is, as with the Italian, an involuntary quality to it. Regardless

of the absurdity of having no business being embarrassed by her physiology—any more than the

Italian should be ashamed that he should die and no other—Sufiya blushes.

We see also that the tragic absurdity of the camp, that those who should not have felt

shame were the ones who avert their gaze, who burn at what has been done and the fact that the

world contains such things as the camp. While in contrast, those most responsible—the SS,

administrators of the camps (exemplified by Stangl in Remnants), Raza and Iskander, Omar, and

the youths who rape Sufiya—feel nothing. The desubjectification of the one who is shamed is

darkly illustrated by Rushdie.

But is Sufiya a subject? Indeed critiques of Rushdie have been that his women are

misogynistic tropes and not fully formed subjects. Is the “movement” in Sufiya “double” or

simply “singular” (i.e., that of one desubjectified)? Here it is important to remember that Sufiya

is a kind of cipher. She has a subjectivity of her own, even prior to her transformation to beast.

But we must also remember that in Sufiya’s absorption of the shame of others she is the center

around which others orbit. For the “subjectivity” of shame personified in Sufiya we look first to

the other women in the story.

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Sufiya blushes first for her mother, having been the “wrong miracle.” She incarnates

(rather than ameliorates) Bilquìs’s barrenness after the stillbirth of her first child (a son). We

recall her resignation: “[Sufiya] is my shame” (101). In this respect, Sufiya’s “subjectification”

the first of the double movement comes from Bilquìs, she is the “subject” in the moment of

Sufiya’s “desubjectification” witnessing her own disorder in the form of a firstborn daughter.

With this as the model, in as much as we believe our narrator that Sufiya blushes “for the

world,” we are free now to move outwards in the “orbit” to other women in the narrative. We

may think of the shame of Naveed (“Good News”) Hyder for example. She is shamed by falling

in love with the “wrong” man and perhaps by her fear of birthing an exponentially infinite

number of children. She too is the subject of Sufiya’s double movement. And we must not forget

that Sufiya as an individual has a subjectivity. Much is made of her infantile “idiocy,” but late in

the novel we discover that Sufiya has an awareness of the world. Though it is the awareness of

the child, it is awareness nonetheless (224-227). In Sufiya, Rushdie has captured Agamben’s

“double movement”.

Sufiya as a cipher for shame extends beyond the narrative. Rushdie’s narrator shares that

the inspiration for the character Sufiya was a series of news stories (117-120). The first is of a

young Pakistani girl in the UK (Anahita/“Anna”) who is killed by her father (with the

community as an accomplice) for being suspected of sleeping with a white boy. The second is of

a young girl, raped by four men, who for shame refused to go to the police. The third is of a riot

of young people “hitting back” at an oppressive system. The fourth is that of a young man who

spontaneously combusts. Sufiya enacts all four, with key modifications: Her father does not kill

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her; Sufiya decapitates her rapists; her violent terrorism reenacts the riot; and she combusts at the

end of the novel when shame and shamelessness meet.

Important too is the narrator’s closing comment connecting the real world to the novel:

the first time I sat down to think about Anahita Muhammad, I recalled the last

sentence of The Trial by Franz Kafka, . . . My Anna, like Kafka’s Joseph, died

under a knife. Not so Sufiya Zinobia Hyder; but that sentence, the ghost of an

epigraph, hangs over story still: “‘Like a dog!’ he said: it was as if he meant the

shame of it to outlive him” (120 emphasis original).

Agamben also invokes Kafka’s Josef K. while discussing the death of the Italian student:

“[S]omething like shame arises in him; ‘it was as if the shame were to survive him.’ . . . that

flush is like a mute apostrophe flying through time to reach us, to bear witness to him”

(Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz 104). Agamben’s “double movement” of subjectification and

desubjectification gives us a lens with which to read Shame, drawing together a number of

threads. Both the blush of the Italian student and the burning of Sufiya (as Anna) serve as the

“mute apostrophe flying through time.”

But what do they bear witness to? Here Agamben and Rushdie mutually inform.

Agamben’s reflection on shame occurs in the context of the concentration camp, the natural

outworking of biopolitical sovereignty. The double movement in shame rests on the paradoxical

existence of the homo sacer (exemplified in the camp victim, ultimately in the Muselmann) who

can be killed but not sacrificed. Here Agamben’s reflection opens up a new layer of

interpretation to Rushdie’s novel, namely the sovereignty exercised in biopolitics. Rushdie’s

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characters are caught in a web of shame, a socio-cultural web, certainly, but also a nationalist

and legal web (both families are the families of totalitarian “sovereigns”). What is at stake in the

society and the nation is the bare life (zoē) of the characters. Indeed, it is a matter of Sufiya

having the “wrong sort” of biological existence that brings shame to Raza and Bilquìs. Her birth

occurs amidst the Indo-Pak war and the creation of Bangladesh, a moment of national shame for

Pakistan. The biological (sex) and the national stand in direct narrative and symbolic relation for

Rushdie.

Zinobia’s “bestiality” serves as the paradoxical limit of the power of the home and nation

(given that her father is leader of both). In a section of Agamben’s Homo Sacer entitled “The

Ban and the Wolf” he argues that the homo sacer is “approximated” in the ancient Germanic

figure of the “werewolf.” This is a being whose status as both man and beast dances across the

limit between the forest/nature and the city (state):

It is, rather, a threshold of indistinction and of passage between animal and man,

physis and nomos, exclusion and inclusion: the life of the bandit is the life of the

loup garou, the werewolf, who is precisely neither man nor beast, and who dwells

paradoxically within both while belonging to neither” (Agamben 105 Emphases

original).

Agamben notes the relationship of the “werewolf’s close tie to sovereign power” in the

narrative poem of Marie de France, Bisclavret. The baron who vanishes and becomes a werewolf

in this poem is a friend of the king. The baron’s unfaithful wife conspires to reveal the baron’s

secret; the werewolf approaches the king who is out hunting. Agamben notes the werewolf’s

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“final transformation” to the baron “takes place on the very bed of the sovereign” (108). Here

Sufiya both residing in her father’s home (within the city) and out killing plays the role of the

liminal beast both inside and outside the spheres of the polis and the forest. Here, in Agamben

and Rushdie, the relationship of the order of the law and the chaos of nature stand not so much

opposed as integrally linked, the one embedded in the other.

Furthermore it is precisely sex as a biological indicator, its role in the nation or society,

and its socially situated relation to power where Rushdie informs Agamben’s project.

Agamben’s homo sacer is decidedly male. This is no surprise birthed as the paradox was in

Roman law. In his chapter ‘Vitae Necisque Potestas’ (Agamben, Homo Sacer 87–90) he

discusses the power of life and death the father has over a son in Roman law. But he asserts that

the father’s power in this “should not be confused with the power to kill, which lies within the

competence of the father of the husband who catches his wife or daughter in the act of adultery”

(88). This power lies strictly within the sphere of the domus (home). Agamben is only concerned

with the sovereignty over zoē within the polis, a space that Roman women and girls do not enter.

But closing his section on the homo sacer Agamben notes:

Sacredness is a line of flight still present in contemporary politics, a line that is as

such moving into zones increasingly vast and dark, to the point of ultimately

coinciding with the biological life itself of citizens. If today there is no longer any

clear figure of the sacred man, it is perhaps because we are all virtually homines

sacri (Agamben, Homo Sacer 115).

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If we are all “sacred” now and as women are increasingly included in the polis, then the

special way in which their bodies/biological life are the object of biopolitical sovereignty should

be of importance. Indeed women bear the status of homo sacer uniquely in modern society. One

only needs to think go the spate of “honor killings” world-wide (and, incidentally the

“humanitarian” push to “save” women in the religions/societies that produce this). Rushdie’s

novel illustrates a way in which gender, power, and nationalism conflate to produce violence

borne of shame. In the same way that Yehousa Shenhav identifies “racially based exceptions as

acts of sovereignty” (26), I would add “gender based exceptions.” Shame is not gender neutral.

One’s subjectivity and desubjectivity is enacted in different ways. It is this gendered difference

that Rushdie foregrounds in Shame.

Placing Agamben and Rushdie together on this point also draws attention to another

connection that remains unmade between Agamben’s notion of the homo sacer and Judith

Butler’s conception of the “abject subject.” For Butler the abject subject is crucial for the

maintenance of boundaries of performativity between sex and gender, male and female. The

notion of “abjection” is crucial to the definition of human being particularly as it pertains to these

issues of gender and sexuality.

But what is also significant for Butler is the role of discourse in this process of social

exclusion: “The power of discourse to materialize its effects is thus consonant with the power of

discourse to circumscribe the domain of intelligibility” (Butler 139). This discursive process

works via “reiteration” and exclusion:

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The normative force of performativity--its power to establish what qualifies as

'being'--works not only through reiteration, but through exclusion as well. And in

the case of bodies, those exclusions haunt signification as its abject borders or as

that which is strictly foreclosed: the unlivable, the nonnarrativizable, the

traumatic. (Butler 140)

Furthermore for Butler:

The production of the unsymbolizable, the unspeakable, the illegible is also

always a strategy of social abjection. Is it even possible to distinguish between the

socially contingent rules of subject-formation, understood as regulatory

productions of the subject through exclusion and foreclosure, and a set of 'laws' or

'structures' that constitute the invariant mechanisms of foreclosure through which

any subject comes into being? To the extent that the law or regulatory mechanism

of foreclosure in this latter instance is conceived as ahistorical and universalistic,

this law exempted from the discursive and social rearticulations that it initiates.

(Butler 142)

Butler in this context is engaging Zizek's critique of discourse analysis purported inability to

“mark that which resists symbolization, what he variously calls a ‘trauma’ and ‘the real’” (Butler

21). But invoking Butler in a mediatorial way between Agamben and Rushdie accomplishes

several things. First it draws attention to the parallel between the “abject subject” and the homo

sacer and the potentially gendered element of the latter. The concept demands reflection on how

the concept is applied and enacted on men and women. Second, the Agamben-Rushdie-Butler

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framework highlights the role that shame can play in the process of sovereign social exclusion.

Rushdie's illustration of sharam particularly as it is a critical component of the maintenance (and

deconstruction) of socio-political life. Shame serves as a crucial dynamic at work in the socially

exclusionary “law” and “regulatory” mechanism Butler sees at work in the development of

“acceptable” gender performativity and the identification and maintenance of the homo sacer as

the site of political sovereign's place inside and outside the law.

Finally, we must address the extent to which Rushdie in dialogue with Agamben aids any

attempt to have Agamben speak to or be spoken to by Asia. Bignall and Svirsky note the

problem with applying Agamben to colonial or postcolonial contexts is the focus in his work on

the “exclusions internal to European society” (2). Yet they (and the others in that collection)

contend

that a renewed attention to Agamben’s core concepts such as “the camp” and

“homo sacer”, considered in terms of the colonial context and with respect to rich

histories of colonial rebellion and resistance, can enable a more nuanced

understanding of the forms of agency available to individuals and peoples that

have been rendered homo sacer by a politics of “inclusive exclusion.” (3)

To this end I would suggest that Agamben’s ontological conception of shame may aid to

universalize his concepts and facilitate the re-contextualization of his work in new and surprising

contexts. This is the starting point to launch globalized renewal of our literary (and thereby

political) imaginations.

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But we must also note the criticism of both men that their respective works engender

passivity, eviscerating agency generally (Agamben) and women in particular (Rushdie). In the

face of arguments that Agamben forecloses on exercising agency (Guenther) or that Rushdie’s

“postmodern Cosmopolitanism” is an empty politic (Ahmad, see also Grewal) it is important to

recognize both men’s project as largely descriptive. Agamben proposes the “zone of

indistinction” and critiques the interpretations of camp survivors’ (esp. Levi and Antelme) own

experience noting that this continues as a central dynamic in our modern political life, the

product of a structure (and subjectivity) born of a particular paradox. Shame certainly does not

assert itself the end all be all of feminist critique nor does it claim to be a handbook for feminist

praxis (Teverson). Both men’s work prevents us from moving too quickly to praxis without

being clear as to what is happening. Agamben and Rushdie can inform ongoing reflections on

power and gender, shame and honor, and the relationship of all these things to our politics.

The question of the witness or the one who represents one to another is crucial.

Agamben’s entire project is shot through with the question of what it means to say “I speak” and

how we can speak on behalf of or in testimony for another. This has been a concern of

postcolonial studies most clearly since Spivak’s question “Can the subaltern speak?” She has

precisely taken continental philosophers (notably Foucault and Delueze) to task for their

complicity in robbing the subaltern of their voice. Here, Agamben, because he is attempting to

think the problem of the “archive” through the camps as the center of biopolitical sovereignty,

may be able to contribute to the broader questions that perpetually trouble postcolonial studies

regarding representation and the difficulty of placing the subaltern “on the road to subjectivity.”

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Agamben’s contribution to the conversation in this volume of Concentric (“Except

Asia”) is to illustrate that there is nothing uniquely moral about the west over and against the

east. In setting Agamben in dialogue with Rushdie, we are spared the fiction that western law or

perspectives on gender stands morally over and against the “backwards,” “senselessly violent,”

archaically patriarchal east. Rushdie, recalling the complicated history of the west’s support of

Pakistan’s dictators, asserts that “Shame . . . is not the exclusive property of the East” (22).

Rather the ontological problems revealed by the persistence of shame in particular ways betrays

a more fundamental human problem that must be confronted both directly and imaginatively.

Rushdie does a service to represent the claustrophobia of power in Pakistan in the era of

Bhutto and ul-Haq (and beyond). Both Deszez and Strandberg have argued convincingly that

Sufiya’s “agency” is precisely as beast and is a perfectly acceptable (though by no means a

comprehensive) expression of female subjectivity in a fairy tale setting. What more ought the

novel do but portray and bear witness? Agamben gives us a framework to articulate precise

origin and nature of the claustrophobia brought on by shame. Interpreting Rushdie and others in

light of his project (and vice versa) may prove fruitful for both postcolonial studies and the

west’s continued attempt to speak and act ethically after Auschwitz.

With the question of witness and mutual dialogue before us we return to the hope in

literature’s “power to confront such failures by imaginatively chronicling our ‘stock of human

dread’” (Kenway and Fahey 3). Using literature as the sounding board and context for

transcultural dialogue potentially opens up new pathways for theoretical reflection in our

increasingly complex world. Indeed, Bignall says of Agamben’s particular approach to “the

subject” in his philosophical archeology:

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It is this notion of the subject as a relentless movement of subjectivation and

desubjectivation, taking place in the interstitial space between the bare life of

bodies and the apparatuses that constrain and order them, that Agamben hopes

will provide new possibilities for transforming ‘the historical element’ that is the

present arrangement of social life. (274)

It is possible that setting Agamben in dialogue with Rushdie and other Pakistani and Asian

fiction writers (the work of Mohammed Hanif, Nimra Bucha, and Mohsin Hamid come

immediately to mind from Pakistan) might be a way to “provide new possibilities” and further

suggests a method for Asia’s engagement with Agamben (and vice versa). Rushdie at least

gestures toward a way forward with his “palimpsestic” retelling of Pakistan’s history (85–87) or

when he re-imagines the four real-world stories mentioned above (most compellingly the fact

that Sufiya’s father does not kill her). Here we might recover “continuity between ‘poetry and

politics’” that de la Durantaye asserts concerns Agamben’s early work. The poetic, here

exemplified by Rushdie, may be another way in which we are able to inhabit the problematic

space of testimony which so vexed Agamben in Remnants, to bear witness precisely where it

cannot be borne.

This last point is especially significant for the larger project of postcolonial theory. Vivek

Chibber in his recent work Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital forcefully challenges

the subaltern studies project and its notion that (particularly south) Asia is largely exempt from

the universalizing tendency of European continental economic and cultural theory instead subject

to its own unique, perhaps inscrutable (to the west at least), reasons. Chibber, in critiquing this

project, appeals once again to universal material need as grounds for political engagement in “the

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east” or elsewhere. The juxtaposition of Agamben with Rushdie, particularly when supplemented

with Butler's thought reminds us there are other socio-cultural dynamics (i.e., shame) at work in

human activity than bare material need perhaps no less universal and no matter how significant

bare material need may be. These socio-cultural dynamics while not necessarily inscrutable to

the west (or the east) are still important sites of alterity (recall Rushdie’s frustration at

explicating sharam in the “Angrezi” in which he is “forced to write”). This comparative

framework I am proposing here, however provisional, illustrates ways the postcolonial project

precisely in continued and critical dialogue with the west may still have something to say to our

current socio-political life.

The persistent problematic however is still the difficulty of having others speak to us, to

“allow”—or better—to be confronted with or without permission by the voice of the other. It is

instructive that at the end of Remnants Agamben turns his work over to the testimony of one who

had been a Muselmann in the camps but recovered. Westerners in particular must turn over the

testimony to those who experience what we seek to excavate in our philosophical (and literary)

archaeologies. We in turn must cultivate our capacity to listen. Agamben gives us tools with

which to listen. Rushdie and other novelists give us new contexts in which to listen and be

confronted. Speaking in the context of the recent Sinhala-Tamil ethnic conflict in Sri Lanka,

Maryse Jayasuriya says of literature that “imagining other times and spaces . . . is both a

reminder that problematizes narratives of long-standing and implacable enmity . . . and a

motivating force to seek ways and means of recuperating and re-creating such spaces and times”

(9). Agamben in dialogue with Rushdie may yet aid us in “imagining other times and spaces”

and “recreating” our “fractious global age.”

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Works Cited

Agamben, Giorgio. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen.

1st ed. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998. Print.

---. Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive. Trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen.

Brooklyn, NY: Zone Books, 2002. Print.

Ahmad, Aijaz. “Salman Rushdie’s Shame: Postmodern Migrancy and the Representation of

Women.” In Theory: Nations, Classes, Literatures. London: Verso, 2008. 123–158. Print.

Bignall, Simone. “Potential Postcoloniality: Sacred Life, Profanation and the Coming

Community.” Agamben and Colonialism. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012.

261–284. Print.

Bignall, Simone, and Marcelo Svirsky. “Introduction: Agamben and Colonialism.” Agamben and

Colonialism. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012. 1–14. Print.

Butler, Judith. Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex. New York: Routledge,

1993. Print.

Chibber, Vivek. Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital. 1st ed. Verso, 2013. Print.

De la Durantaye, Leland. “The Paradigm of Colonialism.” Agamben and Colonialism.

Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012. 229–238. Print.

Deszcz, Justyna. “Salman Rushdie’s Attempt at a Feminist Fairytale Reconfiguration in Shame.”

Folklore 115.1 (2004): 27–44. Print.

Grewal, Inderpal. “Salman Rushdie: Marginality, Women, and Shame.” Reading Rushdie:

Perspectives on the Fiction of Salman Rushdie. Ed. M. D. Fletcher. Amsterdam: Rodopi,

1995. Print.

Guenther, Lisa. “Resisting Agamben: The Biopolitics of Shame and Humiliation.” Philosophy &

Social Criticism 38.1 (2012): 59–79. 0-psc.sagepub.com.lib.utep.edu. Web. 29 May

2013.

Hamid, Mohsin. Moth Smoke. Reprint. New York: Riverhead Trade, 2012. Print.

Hanif, Mohammed. A Case of Exploding Mangoes. 1st ed. London: Vintage, 2009. Print.

Jayasuriya, Maryse. Terror and Reconciliation: Sri Lankan Anglophone Literature, 1983-2009.

Plymouth: Lexington Books, 2012. Print.

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Kenway, Jane, and Johannah Fahey, eds. Globalizing the Research Imagination. Milton Park,

Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY: Routledge, 2009. Print.

Rushdie, Salman. Shame: A Novel. Reprint. New York: Random House Trade Paperbacks, 2008.

Print.

Shenhav, Yehouda. “Imperialism, Exceptionalism and the Contemporary World.” Agamben and

Colonialism. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012. 17–31. Print.

Strandberg, Lotta. “Images of Gender and the Negotiation of Agency in Salman Rushdie’s

Shame.” NORA 12.3 (2004): 143–152. Print.

Teverson, Andrew. “Salman Rushdie and Aijaz Ahmad: Satire, Ideology and Shame.” The

Journal of Commonwealth Literature 39 (2004): 45–60. Print.