Giorgio Agamben revises (in State of Exception) the Schmitt thesis about exception as the defining character of sovereignty, in formulating a thesis about a permanent, generalised state of exception that the world has been in, beginning from the end of WWII. Exception (in all its juridical and political veins), then, becomes a mundane format of power. We see a similar argument being made by Achille Mbembe in his recent book Brutalism (2023). I write in Philosophy in Review on Mbembe’s Brutalism:
Mbembe calls this neovitalism (8)— a state of being that does not know how to live with loss. This, I believe, is his most forthright interrogation of the obsessively solutionist statecapital combine in which we find ourselves trapped.
So, following Mbembe, let me offer the question: how do we express the feeling of being in permanent shock and trauma? The generalised exception calls for a recalibration of the alarm setting we have so far stored for a complete exception event - a climate catastrophe, a world war, aliens taking over, etc. But this exception event is now recurring, mundane, expected. Like the share of our incomes we regularly feed into mutual funds hoping that things will get better and markets will forever remain healthy. So the emotion(s) accompanying it are also permanent, mundane. Our vocabulary for such emotion(s) needs recalibration of some sort.
Such a recalibration is not easy. We fill the big holes in our consciousness with buying things on shopping websites or admiring (or pleasure-hating) the Indian ladies’ Cannes outfits. The Cannes outfit admiration and the high pitch of daily internet outrage are not very different from each other. What should we call this emotion? A grief of unknown origin, a colleague reminds me, per Freud, is called melancholia. We know not what we are grieving - it’s a generalised condition. In youthful slang, it might be described as a permanent condition of “ranting” or “giving vent”. That too is an emotion. Just like, a friend reminded me once that embracing a mental health diagnosis based identity is an emotion. We just don’t have a name for it yet. There is now this great range of emotions, in such amorphous categories, asking for nomenclature. It’s key element, I think, is that pleasure has become the template for expressing everything. Pain, too, is a form of enjoyment.
I was trying to play this piece these days. In an attempt to be masterful, I was playing it rapidly. My teacher said, “… but it is a sad song.” Perhaps, I (and we) don’t really have a way of getting at sad songs.
[Dawn at Palampur, Himachal Pradesh, 2024. Copyright: Atreyee Majumder]