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BARBARIANS

What does writing really have in common with living? If you do enough of both, you find out that in each instance you are operating through a set of relational categories that frame and indeed prophesize what you will say, and see, and do. This point of magical departure has been called the unconscious by those who, in modern times, like to organize things scientifically. But the name leads its concept away from itself, since self-awareness is nothing other than a becoming conscious of what you were previously unconscious about. The unconscious, in the discourse of psychology, is a fertile continent waiting to be colonized by the conscious – to be colonized means to be known, since as you know, “knowledge is power.” Yet there are ways and there are ways of knowing yourself, and introverted self-reflection is only one of them. There is also that miraculous idea that other people can tell you something about yourself that you didn’t already know. They can tell you how beautiful you really are in a way that mirrors can’t, because they see you in the act of living, whereas mirrors just see as still objects. Other people can also tell you how cruel you really are in a way that your own belief system can’t, since belief systems, in general, always flatter those who believe in them. The unconscious Self moves around the world like a ghost, and it moves specifically through the eyes of others that land upon us like a revelation, like a surprise that we don’t know what to do with. To see or to not see other people’s point of view – specifically, their point of view regarding you – means essentially to see or to not see yourself. But of course “other people” is a vast category and not all “other people” are the same – that is, our relations with “other people” are not all the same. In history, our favorite subject, which loves to occupy itself with power relations in society (in other worlds, politics) the “other people” that seem to matter most are either: a) the barbarian, b) the exploited, or c) the inferior. Yet you will notice that none of these “other people” are intrinsically any of these things that they are called until they are made so by the relational categories established by us. The Other (other people) has only an imaginary independent existence outside of the relations that bind him, or define him, in reference to the Self (us). Imagining that the Other imagines things differently from the Self is perhaps the key to establishing the social distance intrinsic to civic coexistence, or living closely together in a harmonious way. What can these others tell the self when they speak? What do the barbarians, the exploited, and the inferior say to those who have made them into these things? Here is a question that has occupied historians for quite a while, and that has even become a moral obsession, since it can never achieve its imaginary goal of the Other’s complete autonomy from the Self. When the Other speaks, he always speaks with the weight of us (those who made him Other) in his words. And so we hear the echoes and reverberations of ourselves in this magical figure (the Other) – we learn about ourselves through him. Today, the discourse of the Other (or what the Other has to say to those who have made him the other) consists in telling untold stories that remarkably are all structured in the same essential way. The accoutrements of the stories may vary, but the plots are very much identical. “You have silenced me, now I am speaking.” Yet low and behold, the I that speaks this phrase (the Other) ends up speaking exactly like the you that it is addressed to (you = the locus of power, the Self that establishes otherness). This is because today the dominant typology of otherness is the inferior, not the barbarian, nor the exploited. The inferior implies a single gradation of values wherein everyone aspires to the same status, those who have achieved it are superior, or – in

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today’s parlance, “privileged” – and those who have not achieved status’s status are the inferior, or the “underprivileged.” Yet this way of conceptualizing difference saliently obliterates otherness all together. For the Self and the Other of the privileged/underprivileged matrix (or superior/inferior matrix) aspire to the same thing (privilege itself), and so they already understand each other too well to be able to reveal to each other anything genuinely interesting. The concepts of difference and diversity imply already belonging to a single series. There is a differential hierarchy within the series (superior/inferior) but the series itself remains a closed world. Even if the ideal were achieved of establishing a differential order without hierarchy in the series, the series parameters would remain perfectly intact. I propose to you that the term difference (which has been popular for some time) and which belongs to the superior/inferior matrix is distinguishable from: a) the term alterity that belongs to the civilized/barbarian matrix, and b) the term contradiction that belongs to the exploiters/exploited matrix. The object of this lesson is to explore these two terms that stand apart from difference (alterity and contradiction) so that we may see the Other again in more vibrant and fascinating colors of otherness. The word barbarian is actually a hidden treasure. Its treasure is hidden from us by our own poor way of understanding the word, which is not based in the word’s etymology but instead in its usage in the “common law” of everyday language. In other words, we use the word without any reference to its history. Barbarian, in common English, implies something savage and illogical and hence “inferior” to the person who regards savagery and the absence of logic as inferior modalities of existence in themselves. Yet the same common English that uses the word barbarian in this way is also fascinated by Barbie. Playing with Barbie is in fact assumed to be a way of becoming less barbarian (more civilized). Yet something strange lingers between these two words, as there does between ourselves and our toys. Barbie is short for Barbara, and Barbara is a name that indicates a female barbarian. So who is this mysterious and fascinating Other that hides behind the barbed wire of our own perceptions? The word barbarian is Greek. Its sound is already an indication of its meaning, I mean specifically its repetitive sound: bar bar. In Greek, bar is an approximation of the English blah, as in blah blah blah. What do we mean when we say blah blah blah? We mean, perhaps, that meaning itself has been lost. Words are spoken that are not understood – either because they are in another language that we don’t comprehend or because they have evacuated our own language of any referent to comprehension. A barbarian would be akin to a blah-blah-ian, that is, someone who we do not understand. Someone, an Other, who speaks in a linguistic world beyond the parameters of our own. The barbarian speaks, and all we hear is noise (blah blah). But we know already that we don’t know something. We know that we don’t know another language: the language of the Other, who still has his own language. The Greeks, and then the Romans, used the term barbarian do denote people who operated in separate conceptual (linguistic) universes than themselves. So, people who were different in the “pure” sense of the term: not contained within a single series of meanings, but existing in a separate series of meanings. To be a barbarian meant to not be understood by the people who used the word barbarian to indicate the others who they did not understand. This “pure” difference of the barbarian Other can be called alterity. Alterity means outside of a system of symbolic references, not comprehensible, not reducible to a familiar meaning. In other words not knowable, which also implies not conquerable. All conquistadors in history have wanted to know and to study who they were conquering. They have wanted to penetrate the mystery of the blah blah. A certain kind of knowledge is born this way that is indelibly marked by the traces of how it has been known. Barbarians become conquered, and

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become civilized, in the same act of becoming known. Their alteriority is intolerable, and so must be reduced as the conqueror’s knowledge of them grows. Yet if the will to know is man’s first fall from grace (you remember Genesis) the resultant problem of knowing too much leads to man’s second fall: banality. The banal world is one in which there are no more events, surprises or mysteries, there is nothing left to wonder about, everything is predictable in advance. It is immensely boring, and regards this boredom as its greatest achievement. The barbarian – the real barbarian who cannot be understood – is reduced to just a toy, a controlled object: a doll. The hidden treasure of the word barbarian is the world of meaning outside of the world in which the word itself appears. It remains hidden by definition. A culture that is not understood by us and does not aspire to be understood by us remains a separate culture. It cannot be “graded” according to our standards – any grade it would receive this way would always be an inaccurate one. A person can coexist with barbarians (with cultures and things that he does not understand) only if the person in question is not a universalist, which means that he does not imagine that his own culture contains to the key to understanding all others. This implies making a distinction between science, which tends towards an infinite univeralization of itself, and the humanities, which locates knowledge always within an I that is not universalizable. In other words, the humanities plays with points of view that refract, and not with microscopes or telescopes that see only things that can never look back on how they are seen. The popular practice today of telling untold stories wherein the underprivileged speak to the privileged is based upon the idea that remaining a mystery has no value in itself. To be known – which means to be included in a system of meanings – is the obliteration of alterity, and also the shrinkage of the world into the portable, “pocket size” dimensions of banality. This is why Gabriel García Márquez wrote in One Hundred Years of Solitude that “science has made the world smaller.” Science, which assumes that everything can be known and should be known (since science is very duty bound), implies that there is nothing else to know besides science itself. A world made of one (one circuit of meaning) is certainly smaller than a world made of many. The point is that curiosity did not kill the cat, it merely killed itself when the cat began to imagine that the whole world is made up of just different breeds of cats. Being a barbarian, and living in alterity and secrecy, are illicit modalities of existing. The matrix of superior/inferior does not operate here, since a shared system of values is completely lacking. Neither does there operate here the sacrosanct notion of a universal, single humanity – a notion which unites Christianity and science, by the way (and Marxism too). Barbarian is a concept that indeed could only have been created by a polytheistic culture, wherein a single unifying axiom of meaning was nonexistent. Yet the “polytheistic point of view,” which sees in the word barbarian more of a compliment than an insult, has not been very popular for a couple millennia. “You must be understood, because I must understand everything!” – Who makes this statement? A conquistador, a missionary, a scientist, a control freak? At some level they are all the same. And by scientist I mean not someone occupied with the hard sciences (physics, biology, geology…) but someone occupied with the social sciences (anthropology, sociology, psychology – all of which took form in Europe in the nineteenth century in the context of far-reaching colonialism). How does the barbarian Other become just a different Other? How is his crime (his illicitness) of not being understood resolved, like a mystery novel? An image comes to mind by way of an explanation. A painting. A painting that displays the fascination of science’s fascinations. It is Rembrandt’s The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp.

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This painting was made in the Netherlands during the Scientific Revolution of the seventeenth century. In order to know the body better, the body must be dead. It must longer be able to react to being known. And it must be deprived of the ability to hide from being known. While these morbid concepts may very well hold a value in the hard sciences (such as biology), their transcription into the social sciences (or human sciences) is not without a certain added tinge of vulgarity. Notice that the observers in the painting are noticing more the method of knowing (Dr. Tulp’s hand) rather than the thing itself that is being known (the body). And this is because things that are known tend to disappear into the categories they are known through. Alterity, in Rembrandt’s painting, can be imagined as what the corpse dreamt before he became a corpse – something which Mr. Tulp and his admirers can only dream of themselves. The discursive matrix of exploiter/exploited follows historically from the one of civilized/barbarian and indicated a coming closer of the two foundational categories of Self and Other (Self = exploiter, Other = exploited). This coming closer is evident in their relational term contradiction, which might be imaged as something of a knot that wants to be untied – and this is different than alterity which looks like something you haven’t seen before. Contradiction is a preferred term of dialectical thinking (Marxism) which most firmly posits the Other as the carrier of the Self’s Truth – the hidden truth that the Self creates for itself while imagining that it is simply going about its business. The object here is not whether to know or not know the Other, but to know that the Other knows the Self better than the Self does itself. This discursive matrix

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is indeed a venomous space of secrets revealed and disguises destroyed. “You are not really advancing universal ideas, like abstract knowledge and human rights,” says the Other (the exploited) to the Self (the exploited) in this telenovela. “Your real practices contradict everything you say. You simply suck the life out of the world in order to sell that life back to it in commodified form.” But the Other’s speech continues, “We, the exploited, are the true bearers of the universal ideas that you have talked about but left as clouds in the air. We are your worst nightmare and your dream come true at the same time.” The Other resolves contradictions by becoming the Self that it addresses itself to. Exploitation’s end occurs when the exploited don’t need the exploiters to exploit them anymore – they can exploit themselves. This is of course an illusion of an end. And it may look something like working from home. The Other of historical discourse, whether cast in the terms of alterity, contradiction or difference is a recurrent figure in all historiography devoted to tales of power. For the Other is created specifically by power to give it something to amuse itself with. In this lesson I want to present to you two examples from ancient historiography that demonstrate very different ways of conceiving of the Other. Those examples come from the Roman historian Tacitus’s Agricola and from The Book of Deuteronomy. As we regard these two pieces of writing, we might want to be like the students in Rembrandt’s Anatomy Lesson and focus our attention on the discursive terms of organizing the Other deployed by the hands of the two texts’ authors. Tacitus, writing in the first century AD, wrote in the manner of the other Roman historians who we regarded in the last lesson (Livy and Sallust) – that is, he wrote primarily about the state and its adventures. Power, in other words, was his favorite subject. Silly things like pleasure could be left to poets – poets like Ovid, for example, who the Roman state exiled for forgetting that pleasure must always answer to power. Tacitus’s book Agricola is where our attention is focused. Agricola was the name of Tacitus’s father-in-law, whom he held in very high esteem. Agricola was a general who led the Roman campaigns in Britain that resulted in the building of Hadrian’s Wall – a wall made to demarcate the Roman-controlled territories of Britain in the south (England) from the non-Roman controlled barbarian territories in the north (Scotland, known in ancient times as Caledonia). Tacitus’s book Agricola documents the adventures of his father-in-law in Britain, and tells us much about the life of the Britons in the first century AD. I have set the stage here in a particular way: Tacitus writes from the perspective of power (the Self, the Empire) and he writes about the Empire’s wars of conquest – conquest of barbarians who were intended to become slaves and subjects of the Romans in the very act of being civilized by them (deprived of their alterity). Yet what is remarkable about Tacitus is how he writes – how he is able to see beyond where he is. The passage of his that I give you to read regards a speech made by a Caledonian chief named Calgacus. In the passage, Calgacus is rousing his people to fight Tacitus’s father-in-law, Agricola. Observe what words Tacitus attributed to Calgacus: Calgacus, a man of outstanding valor and nobility, summoned the masses who were already thirsting for battle and addressed them, we are told, in words like these: “Whenever I consider the origin of this war and the necessities of our position, I have a sure confidence that this day, and this union of yours, will be the beginning of freedom to the whole

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of Britain. To all of us slavery is a thing unknown; there are no lands beyond us, and even the sea is not safe, menaced as we are by a Roman fleet. And thus in war and battle, in which the brave find glory, even the coward will find safety. Former contests, in which, with varying fortune, the Romans were resisted, still left in us a last hope of succor, inasmuch as being the most renowned nation of Britain, dwelling in the very heart of the country, and out of sight of the shores of the conquered, we could keep even our eyes unpolluted by the contagion of slavery. To us who dwell on the uttermost confines of the earth and of freedom, this remote sanctuary of Britain’s glory has up to this time been a defence. Now, however, the furthest limits of Britain are thrown open, and the unknown always passes for the marvelous. But there are no tribes beyond us, nothing indeed but waves and rocks, and the yet more terrible Romans, from whose oppression escape is vainly sought by obedience and submission. Robbers of the world, having by their universal plunder exhausted the land, they rifle the deep. If the enemy be rich, they are rapacious; if he be poor, they lust for dominion; neither the east nor the west has been able to satisfy them. Alone among men they covet with equal eagerness poverty and riches. To robbery, slaughter, plunder, they give the lying name of empire; they make a desert and call it peace.1 “Nature has willed that every man’s children and kindred should be his dearest objects. Yet these are torn from us by conscriptions to be slaves elsewhere. Our wives and our sisters, even though they may escape violation from the enemy, are dishonored under the names of friendship and hospitality. Our goods and fortunes they collect for their tribute, our harvests for their granaries. Our very hands and bodies, under the lash and in the midst of insult, are worn down by the toil of clearing forests and morasses. Creatures born to slavery are sold once and for all, and are, moreover, fed by their masters; but Britain is daily purchasing, is daily feeding, her own enslaved people. And as in a household the last comer among the slaves is always the butt of his companions, so we in a world long used to slavery, as the newest and most contemptible, are marked out for destruction. We have neither fruitful plains, nor mines, nor harbors, for the working of which we may be spared. Valor, too, and high spirit in subjects, are offensive to rulers; besides, remoteness and seclusion, while they give safety, provoke suspicion. Since then you cannot hope for quarter, take courage, I beseech you, whether it be safety or renown that you hold most precious. Under a woman’s leadership the Brigantes were able to burn a colony, to storm a camp, and had not success ended in supineness, might have thrown off the yoke.2 Let us, then, a fresh and unconquered people, never likely to abuse our freedom, show forthwith at the very first onset what heroes Caledonia has in reserve.” Translation by Alfred John Church and William Jackson Brodribb Tacitus’s Other, Calgacus, is able to speak the truth regarding the nature of the Romans’ attempt to conquer Britain. “They make a desert and call it peace.” Right, in this scenario, is on the side of who attempts to defend their freedom – and not simply on the side of he who writes. What is admirable in Tacitus’ writing is the degree of somber objectivity he expresses. The Other is not demonized or exotified, nor reduced to an object of anthropological “study.” Instead, the Other is coherent and rational, which in turn implies that “the Self” – or the position that Tacitus is 1 In Latin: ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant. 2 The woman referred to is Boudica, a British warrior queen of the first century AD. The Brigantes were the people of northern England.

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writing from – is not without an awareness of its own contradictions. The empire makes a desert and calls it peace. In other words, the empire destroys everything, and calls that emptiness left in destruction’s wake peace. It is not really a peace, it is a nothingness. It is curious to note that in the language Tacitus wrote in, Latin, the phrase is said like this: “Ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.” The word solitudinem you see is translated as desert. But solitudinem in fact means solitude. “They created a solitude and called it peace,” would be the more accurate translation of the phrase. Why, you may ask, was solitudinem translated instead as desert? – for this is how the word appears in all English translations of Tacitus’ book. It is attributable to the poetic licence of translators, since desert after all, is a poetic password – a word that opens into another world of meaning. A solitude called peace means the obliteration of other people who are free and alive – and of course this isn’t a peace, it is a destitution, an isolation, an incompleteness – since people, to be complete, need each other – and hence, as an incompleteness it is agitated and restless, and so not peaceful at all. In The Book of Deuteronomy, written in the seventh century BC, a radically different narrative of conquest is presented – a simpler narrative, without contradiction, wherein the we (the Self) is right by definition (by the chain of monotheistic reasoning), and the they (the Other) is utterly dehumanized. I present to you this passage from Chapter 7 of Deuteronomy: “When the Lord your God brings you into the land which you go to possess, and has cast out many nations before you, the Hittites and the Girgashites and the Amorites and the Canaanites and the Perizzites and the Hivites and the Jebusites, seven nations greater and mightier than you, and when the Lord your God delivers them over to you, you shall conquer them and utterly destroy them. You shall make no covenant with them nor show mercy to them. Nor shall you make marriages with them. You shall not give your daughter to their son, nor take their daughter for your son. For they will turn your sons away from following Me, to serve other gods; so the anger of the Lord will be aroused against you and destroy you suddenly. But thus you shall deal with them: you shall destroy their altars, and break down their sacred pillars, and cut down their wooden images, and burn their carved images with fire. “For you are a holy people to the Lord your God; the Lord your God has chosen you to be a people for Himself, a special treasure above all the peoples on the face of the earth. The Lord did not set His love on you nor choose you because you were more in number than any other people, for you were the least of all peoples; but because the Lord loves you, and because He would keep the oath which He swore to your fathers, the Lord has brought you out with a mighty hand, and redeemed you from the house of bondage, from the hand of Pharaoh king of Egypt. Therefore know that the Lord your God, He is God, the faithful God who keeps covenant and mercy for a thousand generations with those who love Him and keep His commandments; and He repays those who hate Him to their face, to destroy them. He will not be slack with him who hates Him; He will repay him to his face. Therefore you shall keep the commandment, the statutes, and the judgments which I command you today, to observe them.

“Then it shall come to pass, because you listen to these judgments, and keep and do them, that the Lord your God will keep with you the covenant and the mercy which He swore to your fathers. And He will love you and bless you and multiply you; He will also bless the fruit of

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your womb and the fruit of your land, your grain and your new wine and your oil, the increase of your cattle and the offspring of your flock, in the land of which He swore to your fathers to give you. You shall be blessed above all peoples; there shall not be a male or female barren among you or among your livestock. And the Lord will take away from you all sickness, and will afflict you with none of the terrible diseases of Egypt which you have known, but will lay them on all those who hate you. And you shall destroy all the peoples whom the Lord your God delivers over to you; your eye shall have no pity on them; nor shall you serve their gods, for that will be a snare to you.

“If you should say in your heart, ‘These nations are greater than I; how can I dispossess them?’ – you shall not be afraid of them, but you shall remember well what the Lord your God did to Pharaoh and to all Egypt: the great trials which your eyes saw, the signs and the wonders, the mighty hand and the outstretched arm, by which the Lord your God brought you out. So shall the Lord your God do to all the peoples of whom you are afraid. Moreover the Lord your God will send the hornet among them until those who are left, who hide themselves from you, are destroyed. You shall not be terrified of them; for the Lord your God, the great and awesome God, is among you. And the Lord your God will drive out those nations before you little by little; you will be unable to destroy them at once, lest the beasts of the field become too numerous for you. But the Lord your God will deliver them over to you, and will inflict defeat upon them until they are destroyed. And He will deliver their kings into your hand, and you will destroy their name from under heaven; no one shall be able to stand against you until you have destroyed them. You shall burn the carved images of their gods with fire; you shall not covet the silver or gold that is on them, nor take it for yourselves, lest you be snared by it; for it is an abomination to the Lord your God. Nor shall you bring an abomination into your house, lest you be doomed to destruction like it. You shall utterly detest it and utterly abhor it, for it is an accursed thing. New King James Translation I leave it to you to fill in the space of meaning that can make sense of the difference between these two passages of writing. Dimitri Papandreu November 9, 2020