The Boundaries of the “We:” Cruelty, Responsibility and Forms of Life

Abstract

This paper establishes a dialogue between the later works of Wittgenstein, those of Cavell and the novels of J. M. Coetzee concerning the problem of violence, authority and the authoritative voice. By drawing on J. M. Coetzee's Waiting for the Barbarians and Diary of a Bad Year, the paper discusses lessons and insights on the nature of violence and the ways in which it can be accepted as “normal.” The term “normalization” is used in order to show how violence and cruelty can become a “form of life” (Ludwig Wittgenstein) that develops according to its own actors, cultural practices and legitimacies (Stanley Cavell and, by implication, Richard Rorty).

Keywords:

• Wittgenstein
• Cavell
• Coetzee
• Lear
• violence
• authority
• cruelty
• responsibility
• forms of life

Acknowledgements

I am very grateful to Estelle Ferrarese, Penelope Deutscher and Sandra Laugier for their critical and very helpful comments. I had the good fortune of presenting an earlier version of this paper at Pittsburg University, Northwestern University, University of Manchester and National University of Singapore (NUS) and want to thank the members of the audience and participants for the astute comments they offered, particularly Sidharthan Maunaguru at NUS for very helpful discussions.

Notes

1 John Maxwell Coetzee, Waiting for the Barbarians (London: King Penguin, 1982); John Maxwell Coetzee, Diary of a Bad Year (London: Penguin, 2007).

2 Jonathan Lear, “The Ethical Thought of M. Coetzee,” Raritan 28.1 (2008); Jonathan Lear, “Waiting with Coetzee,” Raritan 34.4 (2015).

3 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (New York: Macmillan, 1953).

4 Veena Das, “Wittgenstein and Anthropology,” Annual Review of Anthropology 27 (1998); Veena Das, Life and Words: Violence and the Descent into the Ordinary (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007).

5 Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations.

6 Ludwig Wittgenstein, On Certainty, ed. G. E. M. Anscombe and G. H. Von Wright, trans. D. Paul and G. E. M. Anscombe (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1974). For a more detailed discussion, see Clara Han and Veena Das (2015).

7 See Stanley Cavell, The Claim of Reason: Wittgenstein, Skepticism, Morality, and Tragedy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979).

8 Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations.

9 Cavell (1979).

10 Bhrigupati Singh, Poverty and the Quest for Life: Spiritual and Material Striving in Rural India (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015).

11 Wittgenstein, PI, 226.

12 Wittgenstein, PI, 217.

13 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Grammar (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 184.

14 Stanley Cavell, “Declining Decline: Wittgenstein as a Philosopher of Culture,” Critical Inquiry 31.3 (1988): 253–64.

15 See Das, Life and Words; Veena Das, “What Does Ordinary Ethics Look Like?,” in Four Lectures on Ethics: Anthropological Perspectives, ed. M. Lambek et al. (Chicago: HAU Books, 2015).

16 Das, “Wittgenstein and Anthropology;” Das, Life and Words.

17 Sandra Laugier, Why We Need Ordinary Language Philosophy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013).

18 Stanley Cavell, Must We Mean What We Say?: A Book of Essays (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969), 52.

19 See Laugier, Why We Need Ordinary Language Philosophy, for one of the clearest expositions on this point.

20 I leave for the moment the question of how different ontologies might create different experiential modes – as for instance in being able to “see” the human in an animal body just as the animal or machine in the human body comes to inform the common sense of moral discussions in the West.

21 Lear, “Waiting with Coetzee.”

22 The proposition that we suffer deprivation of imagination under conditions of injustice might need more discussion for one can easily cite counter examples in which the concrete experience of injustice is what leads to political protest. However, I think Lear is referring to a complete destruction of a form of life rather than simply injustice that can cover a very wide variety of experiences.

23 Stanley Cavell, “Foreword,” in Life and Words: Violence and the Descent into the Ordinary, by Veena Das (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007).

24 Matt DelConte, “A Further Study of Present Tense Narration: The Absentee Narratee and Four-Wall Present Tense in Coetzee's Waiting for the Barbarians and Disgrace,” Journal of Narrative Theory 37.3 (2007): 436.

25 DelConte, “A Further Study of Present Tense Narration,” 428.

26 I thank Akio Tanabe at the Institute of Humanities, Kyoto University, for this astute point. I think this characterization of life also marks the way in which my own ethnography on violence is conducted which is why I do not think that the difference between ethnography and literature can be characterized as the difference between “real lives” and “true lives” as in D. Fassin. “True Life, Real Lives: Revisiting the Boundaries between Ethnography and Fiction,” American Ethnologist 41.1 (2014): 40–55. While Fassin has a point that the ethnographer cannot invent events – they must retain fidelity to what actually happened or what they were told. My difficulty in this formulation is that what is told often has an element of fantasy which is part of the real if not the actual, while the meaning or significance of what you are observing is not self-evident. Indeed, if everyday life is laced with fantasy and scepticism, the question of arriving at the real in ethnographic accounts is more problematic than suggested by Fassin even as I agree that ethnography's anchoring in the real is different from a novel's anchoring in the real.

27 Coetzee, Waiting for the Barbarians, 133.

28 Ghassan Hage, “Waiting out the Crisis: On Stuckedness and Governmentality,” in Waiting, ed. G. Hage (Carlton, VIC: Melbourne University Press, 2009); Vincent Crapanzano, Waiting: The Whites of South Africa (New York: Random House, 1985).

29 V. Procupez, “The Need for Patience: The Politics of Housing Emergency in Buenos Aires,” Current Anthropology 56.S11 (2015): S55-S65.

30 Coetzee, Waiting for the Barbarians, 135–6.

31 Coetzee, Waiting for the Barbarians, 145.

32 Coetzee, Waiting for the Barbarians, 8.

33 Stanley Cavell, The Claim of Reason, 419–20.

34 Coetzee, Waiting for the Barbarians, 126.

35 Lear, “Waiting with Coetzee,” 16.

36 Coetzee, Waiting for the Barbarians, 39.

37 Lear, “The Ethical Thought of M. Coetzee,” 71.

38 Coetzee, Diary of a Bad Year, 3.

39 Coetzee, Diary of a Bad Year, 39.

40 Coetzee, Diary of a Bad Year, 31.

41 Coetzee, Diary of a Bad Year, 52.

42 Coetzee, Diary of a Bad Year, 3.

43 Coetzee, Diary of a Bad Year, 7.

44 Coetzee, Diary of a Bad Year, 23.

45 Coetzee, Diary of a Bad Year, 157.

46 Coetzee, Diary of a Bad Year, 61.

47 Coetzee, Diary of a Bad Year, 60.

48 Coetzee, Diary of a Bad Year, 226.

49 Coetzee, Diary of a Bad Year, 227.

50 Das, “What Does Ordinary Ethics Look Like?”

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Veena Das

Veena Das is Krieger-Eisenhower Professor of Anthropology at the Johns Hopkins University in the United States. Before joining Johns Hopkins University in 2000, she taught at the Delhi School of Economics for more than thirty years and also held a joint appointment at the New School for Social Research from 1997–2000. She is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Academy of Scientists from Developing Countries. She was awarded the John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship in 2009, the Anders Retzius Award of the Swedish Society of Anthropology and Geography in 1995 and the Ghurye Award in 1977. She received an honorary doctorate from the University of Chicago in 2000 and the University of Edinburgh in 2014. Most recently, she was awarded the Nessim Habif Prize by the University of Geneva. Her most recent books are Life and Words: Violence and the Descent into the Ordinary (University of Carolina Press, 2007) and Affliction: Health, Disease, Poverty (2015); and three co-edited volumes: The Ground Between: Anthropologists Engage Philosophy (2014), Living and Dying in the Contemporary World: A Compendium (2015) and Politics of the Urban Poor (forthcoming).