The Ethical Ambivalence of Resistant Violence: Notes from Postcolonial South Asia

Abstract

In the face of mounting militarism in south Asia, this essay turns to anti-state, "liberatory" movements in the region that employ violence to achieve their political aims. It explores some of the ethical quandaries that arise from the embrace of such violence, particularly for feminists for who political violence and militarism is today a moot point. Feminist responses towards resistant political violence have, however, been less straightforward than the violence of the state suggesting a more ambivalent ethical position towards the former than the latter. The nature of this ambivalence can be located in a postcolonial feminist ethics that is conceptually committed to the use of political violence in certain, albeit exceptional circumstances on the basis of the ethical ends that this violence (as opposed to other oppressive violence) serves. In opening up this ethical ambivalence -or the ethics of ambiguity, as Simone de Beauvoir says -to interrogation and reflection, I underscore the difficulties involved in ethically discriminating between forms of violence especially when we consider the manner in which such distinctions rely on and reproduce gendered modes of power. This raises particular problems for current feminist appraisals of resistant political violence as an expression of women"s empowerment and "agency".

Melancholic politics and the politics of melancholia

“…They can become the scene of the kind of self-reproaches and self-blame that we currently witness in Indian feminist discourse, not to mention the preconditions for melancholic rage and aggression. In the context of Indian feminism, aggression of this kind is implicit in the feminist support for left-led anti-state 'liberatory' struggles that are avowedly violent and even militarized (see Roy, 2009). A failure to interrogate the politics of 'good' violence is part of the melancholic inability to imagine feminism's future in terms other than those associated with the utopian dreams and promises of the past.…”

Who or what do we care about in the 21st century?

“…She engages finely with political ethics throughout, but her exploration of the 'ethics of violence' specifically, but not only, in relation to a post-colonial feminism, does not go beyond opening up the ambivalent and ambiguous nature of it for feminist philosophies/ethics/politics. She notes that a singular feminist ethics towards revolutionary violence 'may not be possible or even desirable' (Roy, 2009). The core of this for me is the understanding that violence is not something that is external to self, but is rooted within political practices, political relationships, indeed within the fabric of subjectivities and subjecthood.…”

“…This feminist scholarship matured as the political landscape in India was taken up by authoritarian movements (filled with angry, hate-fuelled emotions) from the mid-1980s, and it became ever more attentive to the consequences of this xenophobic hatred for women, men and children of both the minority and majority communities. However, the violence of these authoritarian movements did not propel the feminist movement to re-examine its own relationship to movements of the left, including the revolutionary left, and the feminist impulse stopped short, in large measure, of a clear disavowal of the use of violence for the achievement of social justice (Roy, 2009). This even when -the second constellationthe role of revolutionary political violence had become increasingly marginalized and tempered into negotiated political settlements in the globe (Northern Ireland, South Africa) thereby leaving the terrain of the politics of violence to extremist movements as well as to state/co-state militaries and their corporate mercenary partners (Iraq, Afghanistan).…”