The Metacolonial State
Description
'An urgent and extraordinary book. Weaving a philosophical analysis of Heidegger, Agamben and Foucault, Jan draws out the implications of their thought for a radical analysis of the ontological politics of Islam and Pakistan. Whether writing about the 'Ulama and Deoband schools, blasphemy laws, the military, beards, or the Bamiyan Buddhas, Jan provokes and challenges our thinking while unearthing the ground on which Pakistan-and our world-are built.' -Joel Wainwright, Department of Geography, Ohio State University, USA
'In this exceptionally inventive and important book, Jan shows us that the problems besetting political life in Pakistan are part of a more troubling crisis in modern forms of power. Challenging accounts that cordon off "political Islam" from "the West," Jan discloses their fundamental indistinction and thus, through his practice of critical ontology, reorients our understanding of how power and violence are at work in the world.' -Joshua Barkan, Department of Geography, University of Georgia, USA
The Metacolonial State presents a novel rethinking of the relationship between Islam and the Political. Key to the text is an original argument regarding the "biopoliticization of Islam" and the imperative need for understanding sovereign power and the state of exception in resolutely ontological terms. Through the formulation of a critical ontology of political violence, The Metacolonial State endeavors to shed new light on the signatures of power undergirding postcolonial life, while situating Pakistan as a paradigmatic site for reflection on the nature of modernity's precarious present.
The cross-disciplinary approach of Dr. Jan's work is certain to have broad appeal among geographers, historians, anthropologists, postcolonial theorists, and political scientists, among others. At the same time, his explication of critical ontology - with its radical reading of the interlacement of history, power and the event - promises to add a bold new dimension to social science research on Islamism and biopolitics.
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Najeeb A. Jan is Assistant Professor of Human Geography in the Department of Geography of the University of Colorado, Boulder, Colorado.
Content
Series Editor's Preface
Acknowledgement
Introduction Islamapolis: The Crisis of Islam and the Political in Pakistan
1. Critical Ontology: The Biopolitical Apparatus
2. The Space of Emergency: The Military, Discipline and Political Theology
3. The Space of Law: 'Ulama, Shari'a, and the Technology of Blasphemy
4. The Space of War: Homo Islamicus, Body Politics and Jihad
5. The Space of Exception: Nationalism and Biopolitical Sovereignty
Conclusion: The Metacolonial and The Space of Thinking
Appendix A
Appendix B
Glossary
References
1
Critical Ontology: The Biopolitical Apparatus
Do we in our time have an answer to the question of what we really mean by the word "being"? Not at all. So it is fitting that we should raise anew the question of the meaning of being. But are we nowadays even perplexed at our inability to understand the expression "being"? Not at all. So first of all we must reawaken an understanding for the meaning of this question.
- Martin Heidegger, Being and Time
Whoever seizes the greatest unreality will shape the greatest reality.
- Robert Musil1
This metacolonial exposition of history and politics is principally informed by a path of thinking cleared open by Heidegger, Foucault, and Agamben - the original figures that together constitute the axis of critical ontology. Their works can be seen as converging across at least three thematics: "technology/Machenschaft," "biopolitical sovereignty," and "the space of exception." Heidegger's critique of technology and his diagnosis of modernity as nihilism (Gestell), Foucault's genealogical grammars of power (biopolitics and governmentality/security), and Agamben's "sovereigntology" (the state/space of exception), all share a broad characteristic, which can be subsumed under the general trajectory of what might be called "power over the singularity of life." If in Foucault's work the ontological resonances of his grammars of power (biopolitics, discipline, governmentality, security) appear subdued, in Agamben they are explicit. Agamben radicalizes Foucault's conception of biopolitical sovereignty by articulating the question of power - the subject's (Dasein's) relation to truth (being) - in the very mediality of the history of being. The broader aim of the metacolonial then is to disclose the linkage between biopolitical sovereignty and Gestell - Heidegger's shorthand term for the technological understanding of being or technological dispositioning (techne). In its simplest formulation then, the metacolonial, as a phenomenon, refers to the relentless proliferation of a constellation of apparatuses that seek to capture and extinguish the singular potential of human existence. The metacolonial speaks to the colonization of life by metaphysics (onto-theology): the colonization of life by power.
In more brief and substantive terms, critical ontology should be understood not only as a cartography or topology of being-power - a question of the relay and relation of being-power - but also as a syntagm that marks the crisis, or emergency, of being. At first blush it may seem evident that the critical axis relates to power and the ontological axis to being - critical (power/knowledge), ontology (being). Such a neat separation, however, is not intended by this formulation, because, as will be clarified below, being is itself power (potentiality). If Foucault stands to the left of this formulation and Heidegger to the right, then Agamben exemplifies the confrontation and suturing between the two. Critical ontology is thus a disclosure of the crossing/tension between being and power; the polemos of being/power. This relay of being/power is not a philosophical abstraction but is rather constitutive of human subjectivity and praxis in its historical and political unfolding. As a guise of critical ontology, the metacolonial discloses the catastrophe of "human being" (Da-sein), unravelling in the wake of a life colonized by metaphysics.
Before attempting to articulate a few of the parameters that form the outlines of a critical ontology, it is important to point out that I am not aiming for the development of a definitive theory or method. Critical ontology is deployed merely as an incitement towards thinking, an intuitive and creative endeavor that does not rest on discovery - of permanent structures, origins, or facts - but disclosure. Its measure is poiesis rather than techne, and like Heidegger's thought of being, it is always "underway."2 As a form of disclosure or revealing, it is more akin to art than social or political theory and in this way has affinities with the ficto-historical aspects of Foucault's genealogies.3 Rooted in what we might call Heidegger's "phenom-ontology," critical ontology seeks to witness and disclose the problems of the human condition (subject formation, war, the violence of law, etc.) and not the human cogito. Heidegger's rejection of philosophy itself and his embrace of poetic thinking are thus mirrored in the play of critical ontology. The metacolonial, the discursive destination of this work, is, in a sense, merely a terminological space intended to facilitate the amplification and resonance of critical ontology. Ensuing from our way of (not) thinking-being, the metacolonial names our current condition as one of concealment and abandonment. It seeks to expose the practices of law and violence that unfold in the wake of the topologies of exception that permeate our life-world. In short, it is an interpretation and exposure of the metaphysics - the contemporary attunement and understanding of being - under girding political modernity.4 For Heidegger understanding is not merely a cognitive disposition, it does not stand primarily in relation to idea (eidos) or a way of seeing (theoria), but rather it is an ethos, a way of being-dwelling. In this sense the metacolonial seeks to disclose our way of being in the polis.
It is of course in one of Foucault's final and widely read essays "What is Enlightenment?"5 - an essay devoted to Kant, in which he attempts to distance and distinguish the practice of critique from humanism - that we first hear the conjunction "critical ontology" and "historical ontology."6 In order to salvage the ethos of modernity as a "permanent critique of ourselves" Foucault risks thinking being and power as essentially together. If, Foucault writes, the Kantian question "was that of knowing [savoir] what limits knowledge [connaissance] must renounce exceeding, it seems to me that the critical question today must be turned back into a positive one: In what is given to us as universal, necessary, obligatory, what place is occupied by whatever is singular, contingent, and the product of arbitrary constraints?"7 The essay as a whole suggests that critical ontology is an attitude of experimentation8 at the limits of established knowledges and social practices.
The six references to "ontology" in the "Enlightenment" essay can perhaps be read as a late terminological gesture offered in acknowledgement of the decisive influence that Heidegger had on his entire corpus: "For me Heidegger has always been the essential philosopher. [.] My entire philosophical development was determined by my reading of Heidegger."9 If nothing else this phrase offers us a potentially invaluable bridge between the thought of ontology and the work of political and cultural critique. Despite the early appearance of these remarks in the introduction of Hubert Dreyfus's commentary on Being and Time (Foucault's statement appeared in French in 1984 and has been available in English at least since 1991), in the otherwise voluminous corpus of "Foucaultia" there has been remarkably sparse uptake exploring the productive links and confrontations between these two seminal figures.10 In the Homo Sacer project, however, Agamben offers a consistent refrain: that Foucault worked with a "lucid awareness" of the ontological implications of his arche-genealogy of power.11 Central of course to Agamben's own "political spirituality"12 is the exposition of the onto-political legacy inherent in the arcane imperii - the originary structure of biopolitical-sovereignty. As he writes in the Use of Bodies, the non-dénouement to the four volume Homo Sacer series:
Ontology or first philosophy has constituted for centuries the fundamental historical a priori of Western thought. . It is from this perspective that we are seeking to trace out - even if purely in the form of a summary sketch - an archeology of ontology, or more precisely, a genealogy of the ontological apparatus that has functioned for two millennia as a historical a priori of the West.13
Though Foucault does not himself develop or outline critical ontology as a specific, systematic method, it is clear that, in certain respects, this was simply a more formal term for the kind of critical practice he had been engaged in all along. For Foucault critique is a departure from the traditional philosophical search for origins and formal structures with universal value. It is instead to be thought of as problematization: a "philosophical ethos consisting in a critique of what we are saying, thinking, and doing, through a historical ontology of ourselves." This critical-historical ontology of ourselves is concerned with three elements: those historical discourses, or truths,...
