#thanatopolitics

Ideas of collective bargaining and self-determination eventually lead to a situation where instead of class warfare, there’s ethnocide, deportation and wilful state neglect to regulate the ratio of the majority and minorities. And so everywhere we see an unmixing of populations and rise of ghettos while purveyors of commonsense guilt-assuaging manoeuvres will have us believe that tourism, instant social news media and the obsessive documentation of every place on the planet for easy consumption by interested parties somehow fosters cultural understanding and a desire for peace through the recognition of the principle that, while we may have different practises, we are, in fact, all one species, we’re all human. Living in close proximity with different people, minoritised populations—populations officially labeled minor—or ‘foreigners,’ and those of different classes and gender identities: this is the luxury of a large urban sprawl, a chance to mix freely, to resist unmixing, because a city is full of refugees of one kind at another. The rich of the world aren’t referred to as a population, they have the luxury of individuation, of vast personal holdings that enable privacy and private space to keep the clamouring multitudes at bay, to prevent mixing. This is to be our class aspiration: escaping the constraints of living with others through private ownership.

Looking at my FB feed, it would appear that I am the only person unscarred and unmoved by the passing of Gabo. A great litterateur has died, depriving us of access to more of his work. How great a loss. This should probably move me to tears like everyone else on my newsfeed, but strangely I find that I have no emotion left over from feeling different degrees of empathy for suffering far and near, personally witnessed or through mediated images and stories meant for public consumption. I suppose the facility of empathy is meant to be infinite, but mine clearly isn't. It is a deficiency I contemplate with some shame today, but I cannot help but wonder about the stark difference in the public acknowledgment of the death of iconic figures and those many who had yet to reach such a status and die anonymous, as bug-splats even. What critical number should such anonymous deaths achieve, before they can compete with the death of an icon for public acknowledgment and mourning? What critical gravity must a political situation exceed before there is some form of revolution? 

I mean, sure, we’re bombarded with ever more prescriptive advice about how to make the most of our lives mostly by becoming better consumers and better citizens, but so much of current politics is about death. Death mechanized, distanced, termed targeted killing or collateral damage in the drone wars. Death weaponised by suicide bombers. Death spectacularised as political protest by self-immolators. More than control over our lives, increasingly, everyone wants control over death. We want to wrest this control from the state, denying it this privilege. We want a relevant death at time when life has become so cheap and expendable that objects and tokens far outstrip its value. States want death too, if not through war and ethnic cleansing, then through its deliberate devaluation of underclass lives. Nazism was not the culmination of thanatopolitics, and the clamor of Holocaust commemorators’ “Never Again!” has been futile against the ever increasing instrumentalisation of death.