Philosophical Musings on Salman Taseer’s death in Pakistan

By Shaireen Rasheed

Will the real Moderate Muslim Please Stand Up: Making Sense of Salmaan Taseers’s Assassination?

I think we all are trying to grapple and come to terms with the latest tragedy surrounding the assassination of Salmaan Taseer. The response in the media and civil society has been overwhelming. Liberalism is a word that is being used as our last resort to combat ‘extremism’. In trying to understand the big picture I wonder if to quote Kelly Oliver regarding the war on terror, “we are taking the theater of war globally,” (Oliver, 2007). War is everywhere and at once. The space and time of this war has become infinite because the enemy is infinite. Furthermore perpetuating a systemic ideology that further divides the Us vs. Them mentality. By pitting the extremists against the liberals, secular against the religious discourses force us to polarize what is really at stake in this issue: a neopolitics of communication, whose understanding of the public is not derived from the notion of civil society but from the biopolitical element of the population (Said, Covering Islam:How the Media and the Experts Determine How We See the Rest of the World., 1997).

Under the guise of protecting the well being of a population, a majority-governmental reason also recuperates within a bio-political regime, the sovereign power to kill, but this time not in the name of power of the sovereign as such, but in the name of the life of the population-its health, longevity but also its way of life and thought, or as in the name of what Felix Guattri called ‘its existential territories and its incorporeal universe of values’ ( (Guattri, 1995:16). It is in the name of life that one kills and let’s die-sometimes actively and directly, at other times simply by neglect. Thus the binary opposition between liberal and the extremist Muslim consolidates a larger proliferation of differential racisms defined by cost-benefit analysis, suffused by unmistakable relations of fear and degree of menace, by the perils that different internal and external groups represent in relation to a life of a given population as stabilized around cultural, economic and biological norms. (Terranova, 2007) It is important to note that its main basis is a regression in the representation of racial politics. This recognition is part and becomes part of a politics of exceptionalism (Paur, 2007) Carl Schmitt’s rather controversial characterization of the political might merit a discussion as a further elaboration to a politics of exceptionalism during times of war. According to Schmitt, liberalism seeks to bring an end of politics (Shmitt, 1995). Advancing the fallacy that the state is neutral, its primary function being that of protecting the rights of its citizens.

In our current political vocabulary, the category of the Other, most frequently associated with women, people of color and marginalized groups is synonymous with objectification, exclusion, domination. It is either a negative foil for the identity of those who count as political subjects. Within this context the task becomes one of transforming the institutional conditions of inequality and to demand the status of those who have been oppressed. Maybe what is needed is a non appropriate relation to the other that is based on an ethics of responsibility rather than power. Marginality within this context, both as theoretical and embodied existence, becomes a source of controversy. It exists and is expressed within the very language that makes it essential and that it must oppose. Ironically, it must resist the notion of resistance. Definitions of marginality within this context are placed in resistance to issues of authority or power, where it is further reduced to “social categories as race, class, religious, gender or sexual orientation with little or no regard for the intersection of these categories with smaller group and individual contexts” (Edgerton, 1993). Consequently, one of our main purposes as ‘postcolonial critics,’ (borrowing Said’s term) becomes then one of considering the inversion effected when “others” and otherness occupy a subject position in political, legal and civil  accounts and accounting practices.

Bibliography

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Guattri, F. (1995:16). Chaosmosis:An Ethico-aesthetic Paradigm. Sydney: Power Publications.

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Paur, J. (2007). Terrorist Assemblages:Homonationalism in Queer Times. Durham: Duke University Press.

Said, E. (1997). Covering Islam:How the Media and the Experts Determine How We See the Rest of the World. London: Vintage.

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