Living Among Ruins
The Abyssal Human Condition
This text is not specifically about the brutal atrocity of the Gaza genocide. But it is dedicated to it, and the reasons will become clear. At the time of writing, Gaza is the tragic metaphor for the times we live in. We live among ruins. There is a recent memory of houses, schools, hospitals and living people, but all we see is rubble and death. There is a recent memory of ethical principles and national and international legality, but all we see is impunity, indifference, complicity or impotent revolt. There is a memory of ideas and projects of resistance against modern Eurocentric domination (capitalist, colonialist and patriarchal), but they have apparently been defeated by the frontal opposition to them from the dominant classes, especially since the beginning of the 19th century, the national bourgeoisies and the global bourgeoisie, always the same and always different. This is the class that has always benefited from the system of domination and which today proclaims with noisy triumphalism that it will never allow itself to be dislodged from that position peacefully.
One of the fundamental characteristics of modern domination is the abyssal line that radically separates beings considered fully human from those considered sub-human or infra-human, and treated as such. This abyssal line is radically absent from modern philosophical consciousness. It is this absence that legitimizes the persistence of the abyssal line, both in social relations and in the “normal” performance of political, legal and educational institutions.
The idea that in the modern Eurocentric era humanity does not exist without inhumanity is difficult to accept or even understand, given the extraordinary system of illusions and half-truths that, over time, has become a reality for those who benefit from this system and, often, even for those who are its victims. Of course, the humanity/inhumanity pair has always been present throughout history, whether it is a divine punishment, a religious imperative, either biblical or Koranic, or simply a human fatality, is irrelevant. What is specific to the modern era is the denial that such a duality exists. In its terms, humanity is one and without exception; what is outside of humanity is, by definition, non-human nature, non-human life, however similar it may be to human life. The persistence of this conception is remarkable. American Indians were inferior beings and, as such, exterminable; African slaves were things that could be traded; Palestinians are, in the eyes of Israel’s Zionists, human animals; immigrants on their way to the global North are disposable beings, whenever they are unnecessary for the economic interests of the countries they are trying to reach. To paraphrase James Baldwin, anyone who does not have the right to say yes to life, as fully human beings do, is, by definition, subhuman. [i] Or, as Frantz Fanon would say, they inhabit the zone of non-being. [ii] The subhuman condition is thus constructed as natural and as such no one is guilty of it, no one is responsible for it. Eliminating it would be unnatural, a violence against the nature of things.
The tragedy of the present time is that, although the duality of humanity/inhumanity is more necessary than ever for the survival of the modern system of domination, there is a general malaise, an indefinite malaise, arising from the fact that, after centuries of coexistence between beings considered fully human and beings considered subhuman, it is impossible not to see that subhuman beings are people like everyone else. The unease this causes represents the moment when the abyssal line becomes present in the collective consciousness.
On the other side of the abyssal line, people who are considered subhuman stubbornly assert their presence. They have everything they need to be able to say yes to life, just like beings who are considered fully human. But what do they lack in order to be treated as fully human beings? The contemporary malaise lies in an unacknowledged perplexity that stems from the suspicion that the answer to this question is intolerable for those who ask it. There are therefore two types of questions: questions that are asked in order to know the answer, and questions that are asked in order to avoid the answer. The former are motivated by curiosity, the latter by panic. The anticipation of panic is as paralyzing as panic itself.
The disturbing nature of the question—what are they missing?—lies in the fact that in the modern Eurocentric era, beings considered fully human are only so because other beings as human as them have been expropriated of the ability to say yes to life.
This answer puts the totality of human beings at the center of the contemporary tragedy. Beings considered fully human can no longer claim innocence. The credible response does not lie in assuming individual guilt, but rather in assuming the individual share of a collective responsibility that has created this contradictory state of affairs in which the principles and values of universal humanism are, in practice, the exclusive privilege of some at the cost of the sacrifice of others.
This means that the abyssal line is as dehumanizing for beings considered fully human as it is for beings considered subhuman. Those considered fully human are faced with the terrifying idea that their well-being is based on a long-legalized theft of the well-being of those considered subhuman. Fully human beings are individually honest people, but they are collectively thieves. They are individually incapable of violence, but collectively they are professional killers. They are law-abiding citizens, but collectively they benefit from limitless impunity. On the one hand, an unjust privilege, on the other, an unjust sacrifice, both concealed by a diaphanous cloak of universal principles and values (liberty, equality, fraternity). There is no psychiatrist who can resolve this antinomy when it settles in the body and soul of both beings considered fully human and beings considered sub-human. This same conclusion was reached by the great psychiatrist Frantz Fanon. [iii]
It is necessary to analyze phenomenologically and existentially both the abyssal condition of the populations, relatively more and more numerous, who have been expropriated of the right to say yes to life, and the condition of those who have benefited and are benefiting from this expropriation. It is essential to bear three facts in mind. Firstly, the existence of the abyssal line is a constant of the modern Eurocentric era. However, the line is not fixed and historically it has moved, either in the direction of including more of the population in full humanity, or in the opposite direction. Secondly, it is possible for individuals to pass from one side of the abyssal line to the other and remain there with some stability; what is not possible is for the collective to which the individual originally belonged to pass collectively to the other side of the line. Thirdly, in the prevailing conditions, especially in the global North, it is possible for individuals to transition from full humanity to sub-humanity on a daily basis, and vice versa.
Living on the other side of the abyssal line
The existential condition of subhumanity consists of an immense set of characteristics. It doesn’t mean that all of them are present, but some of them will be. I use the universal masculine plural to designate subhumanized individuals and collectivities.
They don’t belong to the world that is officially recognized as the world, but they live in it. Just as not everyone who lives in the city belongs to the city.
They know the universal principles and values (freedom, equality, fraternity), but they know from experience that they don’t protect them; at most, they contribute to promoting their passivity.
They are constantly evaluated and judged by what they are, not by what they do.
They only share friendship, joy and suffering with those who are on the same side of the abyss. Those considered fully human appear and disappear at their convenience.
The most official recognition they can get is they are considered useful, or at least not considered dangerous.
There are many opinions about their condition, with the images of someone observing a landscape on an urban safari for tourists or analyzing the residue of an unhappy story that has fortunately been overcome or is best forgotten.
They have their own opinions, but nobody takes them into account in the official world except insofar as they are considered dangerous or capable of being appropriated.
When they look in the mirror, they have the feeling that the mirror sees them, depending on the circumstances, sometimes with suspicion, resignation, complacency, sometimes with pride and unbridled revolt.
When they leave home (if they have one) they enter a hostile world that, at most, accepts them conditionally and for pragmatic reasons that are foreign to them. When repression is bloodthirsty, the home is as dangerous as the street.
Their work, when paid, is always over-undervalued and precarious. When they are given autonomy, it is always without the conditions to be autonomous. Autonomy is one of a thousand forms of self-enslavement.
If they live in a country where slaves lived in the same territory as fully human beings, they will never cease to be descendants of slaves, even if they are descendants of kings or queens.
They can’t plan their lives or that of their families. Every moment there are emergencies and risks that endanger everything, including life itself. However much they educate their children, they know that they will probably never be able to escape this contingency.
They are occasionally treated kindly by beings considered fully human, but they know that none of them would like to be like them or live with them.
They have bodily, ideological or religious markers that make them suspect in the eyes of beings considered fully human until proven otherwise, a proof that never applies to the collective to which they belong.
They are encouraged to imitate the world of those considered fully human, but on the condition that they never belong to it or use it for their own benefit.
They are constantly watched and policed. The close coexistence with beings considered fully human, apparently benevolent and educational, is often the most insidious.
They go to school to unlearn everything their family or ancestors have taught them and, above all, not to know the real reasons for their subhuman condition. What they learn teaches them to live in imitation of those considered fully human, but it never teaches them to be different from them and equal to them. The most the school can teach them is not to despise or hate, even though they are despised and hated.
They have moments of intense joy, but that’s very different from being happy.
They know that no one controls destiny, but that, in their case, someone other than themselves controls their destiny.
Someone told them that in the past there was a class of people who had nothing to lose but their shackles. They ask themselves: can everything they have be considered shackles?
When they receive help, they hold their throats so they don’t have to shout: Damn the help because it’s needed!
Being aware that they have been expropriated and disarmed is the primary weapon for resisting.
Living on this side of the abyssal line
In modern Eurocentric society (capitalist, colonialist and heteropatriarchal), living on this side of the abyssal line is synonymous with being considered fully human. To be fully human under the conditions of Western modernity is to be able to realistically live an existence with characteristics diametrically opposed to those I have just listed to characterize subhumanity. Living human fullness as if it were a universal condition is the primordial existential innocence of Western modernity. Over the course of several centuries, the immense library of Western innocence has been built up, listing, analyzing, detailing, criticizing, incessantly proposing new interpretations for all the supposedly universal principles, values and ideals that make up this innocence, and organizing all the political-legal, ideological and educational institutional paraphernalia that hides the abyssal divide on which this innocence is based.
This is how the part of humanity that has been granted the privilege of representing the totality of humanity that holds universal principles and values has been controlled and legitimized. It was a huge ideological and political investment. It was about reproducing the abyssal line and ensuring its invisibility in order to be fully effective in reproducing the modern, Eurocentric system of domination. If the library of Western innocence is to be defined by essential concepts, two seem obvious: liberalism and the forgetting of history. Liberalism consisted of the prerogative to universalize what suited the emerging bourgeoisie and to particularize (and therefore discard) everything that opposed it. Forgetting history consists of seeing it as the past and never as the present. The USA was built at the cost of the extermination of the Indians, but that’s the past or Hollywood movies and John Wayne. The well-being of Europeans was built both by stealing the natural resources of colonized peoples and by stealing their human resources through slavery, but that ended with the end of slavery and the independence of the colonies.
The existence of universal principles and values and the institutions that gave them shape never prevented social exclusions within the world of beings considered fully human. But such exclusions were controlled and reduced by the effective enforcement of those principles and institutions: the rule of law, democracy, human rights. In other words, rights and guarantees to be used to eliminate or reduce such exclusions. Liberalism’s constitutive blindness was not to realize that on the other side of the abyssal line, in the world of relations between beings considered fully human and those considered sub-human, those principles and institutions were not in force, precisely because, if they worked in the same way, they would call into question the abyssal divide that had given them life. For this reason, social practices never questioned the universality of the principles they violated.
The price you pay for being considered fully human and protected as such under these conditions is an existential risk. The risk of, at some point, being confronted with the idea that this condition of fullness, far from being a natural and universal right, is a cruel privilege that, since the 16th century, has been based on the inescapable need to subject entire populations to the condition of subhumanity. The ideology of universal validity that underpins the principle of the rule of law or the principle of human rights is so hegemonic that populations considered subhuman have no alternative but to appeal to these principles in order to alleviate the unjust suffering to which they are subjected, even knowing that they will only come to their aid to marginally and temporarily alleviate their condition and to guarantee their passivity in the face of the system of domination.
Being fully human under Western modernity implies a degree of dehumanization. It implies having to live with the idea that human fullness, of which modern Eurocentrics are so proud, is based on the rubble, the ruins, the mass graves of the humanity of so many human beings throughout modern history, and today more than ever. I would venture to say, thinking of Gaza, that this degree of dehumanization is experienced more intensely today than ever before, even if it is an experience of passivity. It is the result of complex and even contradictory social processes, as contradictory as the solutions that are being given to this existential experience.
Contemporary societies are dramatically divided between social groups that don’t want to remember history and social groups that can’t forget it. That’s why I conclude this text with the voice of the great Palestinian poet, Mahamoud Darwish.
The war will end The leaders will shake hands The old woman will keep waiting for her martyred son The girl will wait for her beloved husband And those children will wait for their hero father I don’t know who sold our homeland But I saw who paid the price
[i] James Baldwin The Cross of Redemption. Uncollected Writings (New York: Vintage, 2011) 90.
[ii] Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (New York: Grove Press, 1967); The Wretched of the Earth (New York: Grove Press, 1968).
[iii] Frantz Fanon, Alienation and Freedom. Ed. Jean Khalfa e Robert J.C. Young. Trans. Steven Corcoran (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2021).
The mainstream media has to work very hard to maintain the control of the narrative for the imperialist powers by promoting 'liberal' values whilst denying liberation and encouraging us to forget the history of our own working class. Despite this resistance breaks through even in our debased parliamentary democracy we now have 5 MPs elected on a pro-Gaza platform and 4 Greens also elected on platform supportive of Gaza. So whilst I recognise that in the imperialist heartlands we are encouraged to see others as subhuman - the Palestinians, the 'boat' people, etc - I do find the concept of Eurocentrism odd. Particularly when we are asked to abandon the enlightenment on which modern socialism is built, and when we are asked to believe that the idea that there are two sexes (in the 'heteronormative patriarchy the writer refers to) is a western idea then I am even more confused. Gender ideology is the very essence of modern muddled elitist liberal thinking and an ideology we are trying to impose it on the rest of the world. It is causing disarray - having the effect of pushing people to the right to find some intellectual sanity - and then because they have moved to the right they embrace the dehumanisation of Palestinians.