Violence as Historical Time
Timothy Brook, University of Toronto
Preface
Taking the events of 11 September 2001 as a starting point, Timothy Brook poses
several important questions in this short essay. What is the role of the historian
in illuminating events or moments in time like this one? What notions of time might
a historian use in pursuing this task? What is the place of violence in such notions
of time? Is it possible to write history without giving primacy to or celebrating
violence?
These questions are difficult ones and lead Professor Brook into some intricate
philosophical discussions. He begins by noting that historians are best equipped for
helping us understand the contexts in which the event-experienced took
place as well as the contexts in which our experience has become "indexed to
particular meanings." He moves on from this point to note that time and violence are
intricately linked in many historical accounts. As he writes, "Violence is
time-worthy; non-violence is not." The linkage is sufficiently strong that it is
difficult to imagine history in the absence of violence. He argues that this linkage
derives, in part, from seeing historical time as a linear sequence of causes and
effects, a kind of "chain reaction" in which violence successfully reproduces
itself.
At this point in the essay, he asks the question: what if we look at a different
view of time, one where such sequencing does not occur? Drawing from the philosophy
of Huayan Buddhism, he suggests the idea of "interdependent origination," summarized
in the simple proposition: "nothing exists independently of anything else…
everything that exists does so because of the existence of everything else." After
working through the implications of this position, he returns to 9/11 and suggests a
different way for beginning to understand the event. He also argues that this way of
thinking about historical time imposes moral responsibilities, particularly that of
showing compassion toward those others on whom we depend. He finishes the essay by
considering the question of whether it is possible to write history without
celebrating violence.
William D. Coleman, McMaster University
Any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in
Mankind.
— John Donne, Meditations XVII
There is continuity, there is no break.
—Crane to Birch Ojibway Tales (Johnson 1993,
117)
September 11th is a date that has become fixed in the calendar of public memory.
For one side in the conflict between the United States and the Islamic network
opposed to its power in the Middle East, the shocking display of destruction is
remembered as a day of infamy; for the other side, as a day of martyrdom. Which of
these claims is true — indeed, whether either is true — depends on
the
identity and political imagination of the person doing the remembering. But
regardless of which meaning the day is now made to bear, the leadership on both
sides of the conflict agrees on one thing: this was a moment in time that cannot and
should not be forgotten. For some, on both sides, 9/11 deserves to be seen as a
genuine turning point in history, changing the global political order in a way that
allows no going back. For others, again on both sides, it might more usefully be
seen as a moment of illumination, when the sudden flash of violence lit a political
landscape whose contours theretofore had been difficult to see
(Desai 2002).
Whether as a turning point or a moment of illumination, whether as infamy or
martyrdom, 9/11 has become a point in time signifying more than the events that took
place on that day.
Rather than pursue either interpretation down the path it points to, the historian
is better equipped, and of more use, to explore the contexts of 9/11: the contexts
in which the event we all experienced took place, and as well the contexts through
which our experience has become indexed to certain meanings. The work of
contextualization is essential if we are to set our understanding of 9/11 within the
broadest possible perspective, rather than steer it into the political categories
that the combatants themselves have offered.
This essay is not, however, an attempt to do the necessary work of
contextualization. That I leave to those more knowledgeable in the histories
implicated in this event. Instead, I will step well back from the event itself and
consider the epistemological operations that make it possible for us to understand
significant moments in time in the way we do. My approach will be philosophical
rather than historical. My goal, though, is not purely theoretical, nor is it to
satisfy myself or the reader with an elegant argument. It is to propose a practical
alternative to the current framework both sides in the conflict want us to use to
understand 9/11. There is nothing we can do, several years removed from the events
of that day, to change what happened. What can be changed are the conclusions that
the event is enlisted to support.
Every act is followed in time by consequences, yet every consequence is contingent
on more than one event, however terrible, and contingent most of all on how we think
time matters and what we believe consequence to be. To situate an event in time is
to declare its capacity to carry consequences; it is also to commit oneself to
certain consequences over others. This essay asks how, why, and whether this is
necessary. Such questions require, further, that we think about the relationship
between time and violence.
Violence alone is time-worthy; non-violence is not. Violence marks what we accept as
a fully historical moment, a meeting point of conflicting forces that have been
waiting in suspension and then are forced by violence to precipitate and resolve
themselves into something new. Indeed, historical time and historical violence seem
so powerfully linked that it is difficult to imagine history in the absence of
violence. My challenge is to consider what might happen when that link is denied. Is
it then possible to think about 9/11 in relation to a philosophy that removes it
from its dominant readings as, from one side, a legitimate strike against the United
States for its Middle East policies and, from the other, a criminal act of violence
justifying American military intervention in that region? Is it possible to take
this violent lieu de mémoire, to adapt Pierre Nola's spatial
concept to a temporal usage, and set this event into an alternative philosophy of
time that foregoes the temptation to violence on both sides?
The most powerful time location in any philosophy of time is the dimension of time
for which there is no evidence: the future. In a recent documentary, Jacques Derrida
offers a distinction between le future and l'avenir that
resonates with my concern that explanation not interfere too early or too abruptly
with our ability to reflect critically on time-experience:
The future is that which — tomorrow, later, next century — will be. There's a future
[le futur] which is predictable, programmed, scheduled, foreseeable.
But there is a future — l'avenir, to come — which
refers to someone who comes whose arrival is totally unexpected. For me, that is the
real future: that which is totally unpredictable, the Other who comes without my
being able to anticipate their arrival. So if there is a real future beyond this
other known future, it's l'avenir; in that it's the coming of the Other
when I am completely unable to foresee their arrival.1
To apply Derrida's binary literally, the bombing of the World Trade Center was an
event of l'avenir, the coming of the Other at a moment in time and in a
fashion when the Other's arrival could not be foreseen. However much Derrida's
language cleaves to metaphor, his observation is not purely metaphorical. The Other
is always imagined in abstract opposition to the Self; at the same time it is
experienced bodily every time someone comes into our presence. Pure time-experience
has this unpredictability, the unpredictability that is innate to being-in-time, the
source of all that unsettles us by virtue of taking away our guarantees that the
future will simply replicate the present, but the source as well of the
consciousness that makes consciousness of time, which is the consciousness of self
and other, possible.
The bombing of the World Trade Center was a unique time-experience: the first event
in world history to be witnessed by almost everyone in the world in real
time. Television's capacity to produce simultaneous shared witness, hitherto
never as fully exploited, made 9/11 the most globally experienced and globally
remembered event in history. The sharing of witness is one of the bases on which
cultures replicate themselves. This sharing did not produce a shared community of
interpretation, however. Many interpretations quickly formed, freeze-framing the
ambiguous vitality of the pure moment by inserting it into different narratives,
each supported by a different subcommunity.
Embedding 9/11 in a larger story in this way serves to sublimate the violence by
positioning it in a particular sequence of causes and consequences, which are in
turn consistent with other understandings about how the world works, thereby
neutralizing the capacity of this shock to induce breakthroughs in standing
assumptions. For despite the scale of devastation, almost everyone was confirmed in
what he or she already thought before the violence was done. Culturally comfortable
modes of understanding were ready at hand to downscale what might have looked like a
turning point or produced a new illumination into something safely repetitive and
required no effort of imagination to assimilate. Through this pre-emptive conceptual
strike, the completely unanticipated arrival of 9/11 became part of a familiar
history, positioned within a flow of time that moves toward it, and then away,
without a change in the flow. The effect of this narrative normalization has not
been to condemn the use of violence, but to authorize its return.
As long as we think of time as a linear channel of causes and effects, linked one to
the next as atoms in a chain reaction, violence successfully reproduces itself. What
I would like to do instead is to turn this picture ninety degrees and try thinking
of time in another way: not as a line of flow but as something more like a
simultaneous array of reference and connection. To do this, I will draw on a
philosophical tradition that stands outside either of the traditions of eastern
Mediterranean monotheism that have dominated popular perceptions of 9/11. The
alternative tradition I propose to use is Buddhism, in particular the Huayan school.
The Huayan school takes its name from the Huayan jing, the Chinese
translation of the Avatamsaka Sutra, its founding text. Huayan
teachings are in fact a Sogdian elaboration of the Mâdhyamika or Middle Way
school of Indian Buddhism, the basic tenets of which Nâgârjuna
developed in the second century in India and Kumârajîva introduced to
China in the fourth. (Sogdiana lay within the area now divided between Tadzhikistan
and Afghanistan.) Although the sutra was translated into Chinese in 420, it
attracted little doctrinal attention until the seventh century, when the brilliant
Sogdian Buddhist master Fazang (643-712) took it up and enlarged its insights.
Huayan is not distinguished as a separate school of practice today, yet its
elaborations of Mâdhyamika philosophy are widely embraced by Buddhists today,
perhaps most energetically by Tibetan Buddhists.
The core contribution of Huayan teachings to Buddhism is its explication of the
notion of "dependent origination" (dharma-dhâtu
pratìtya-samutpâda in Sanskrit, fajie yuanqi in
Chinese), also translated as "interdependent origination" or "conditional
existence." The proposition is a simple one: nothing exists independently of
anything else. By extension, everything that exists does so because of the existence
of everything else. Everything else causes it, and it by the same token causes
everything else. Every thing is still different from every other thing, but that
difference is only possible because everything shares a common identity with
everything else.2
Fazang was particularly skilled at communicating this challenging idea through
vivid, concrete images. In his commentary on the Daúabhûmika
Sutra, he analogizes the relationship between the universal and the
particular, and between identity and difference, as the relationship of a rafter to
the building whose roof it supports. Fazang argues that the rafter is more than a
part of the building. Rather, the rafter is coexistent with the building, since "if
you get rid of the rafter, the building is not formed." At the same time, the whole
is not simply made up of its parts; it creates the parts of which it is made. A
piece of wood that had the size and thickness of a rafter could not become a rafter
were the other elements of the building non-existent. As Fazang puts it, "when there
are no tiles and such things, the rafter is not a rafter, so it does not create the
building." It becomes what Fazang calls a non-rafter, which he defines as "a rafter
which does not create a building."3 In the absence of everything that creates the
building, no part of the building can exist. All the parts of a building are
therefore dependent on all the other parts; they share what Fazang terms "identity."
The inconceivability of any one of the parts makes the existence of the building
inconceivable, as it does all the other parts of the non-existent building. Nothing
can be taken away, nor can the sense of any one thing be sustained without bringing
into sense all other things.
From this logic follows a conception of causality: that everything that comes into
being does so because of the existence of everything else, and conversely that
nothing comes into being without everything coming into being. Whole and part create
each other and are inconceivable and unproducible without each other. To say that
everything causes everything is not, however, to say that every thing is the same.
Simultaneity is not sameness. The rafter causes the building without being the same
as the building. Their difference is essential, for without it there could be no
identity between them; a stack of rafters does not make a building.
My motive for introducing Huayan philosophy in the context of 9/11 is to broach an
alternative philosophy of time.4 Just as every datum of existence exists in a
continuous field of interdependence with every other datum of existence, so too
every moment in time depends on and produces every other moment of time. Nothing
originates apart from or before anything else. This proposition is not the same as
predestiny or necessity. Huayan Buddhism does not argue that all that happened had
to happen; it asserts only that what happened did happen along with everything else
that has happened. Accordingly, the only way to achieve a full understanding of why
an event happened at the moment it did is to recognize its coincidence or
simultaneous existence with every other moment in time. This is actually quite
commonsensical when applied to the past: once something has happened in the past,
nothing about it can be changed, nothing else can happen. All past events, to the
extent that they can be said to exist, exist conditionally on, and simultaneously
with, everything else that has ever happened. We can always discover new information
about what did happen which we did not know before, and so our knowledge of the past
continually grows, but we cannot add anything to the ontological sum of time past.
This is what conventional history does, after all. For example, to know the old fact
that Christopher Columbus set sail on 3 August 1492, has become conditional on
knowing that 2 August 1492 was the final deadline for the expulsion of all Jews from
Aragon, that the official who signed the expulsion decree and the official who
authorized Columbus' order was one and the same man, and that the windfalls of the
expulsion helped to finance the voyage (Sale 1991). The one now contributes to our
understanding of the other, and is inseparable from it. Given that the royal
expropriation of Jewish property in Spain appears to have helped cover the costs of
Columbus' expedition, each can be thought of as conditioning the other, at least in
a dependent if not a chronological sense. Reversing the gaze, we accumulate
understanding of that expropriation not just by relating it to Columbus' departure
but by situating it as well in relation to subsequent expropriations of Jewish
property, notably Hitler's. None of these events caused the other independently, but
our understanding of each is enriched and deepened by accepting its epistemological
dependence on knowledge of the others, and each is now conceivable only in
relationship to the others. Everything we know exists, not just in the context of
everything else we know, but because of what we know.
The Huayan emphasis on the simultaneous existence of all things does not make cause
and effect disappear. In fact, the core issue that Buddhist philosophy has been
developed to deal with is precisely the production of consequences from actions
taken, or what Buddhists call karma. What Huayan philosophy does not do is imagine
causality as a single chain of temporally sequenced events. This leads to looking
too narrowly for the effects of a cause and to isolating something as a cause
without fully taking into account that it in turn is powerfully active as an effect
of other causes, and indeed is only causing to the extent that it itself is caused,
just as the rafter and the building cause each other.
Mâdhyamika Buddhism concocted this metaphysics of causality not as an
exercise in logic but as a means to achieve particular ontological effects. What
follows ontologically from the proposition of dependent origination is the
conditionality of existence, including human existence. If what exists depends
entirely on what else exists, then nothing exists of itself. An individual, for
instance, has no self-existence but exists only insofar as he or she is "involved
with mankind," as John Donne put it. To return to Fazang, an assertion that the
building or the rafter exists independently of everything else is what he calls
"attachment." The same condition applies to the assertion that the self exists
independently of others. This too is an attachment that denies the interdependence
of all things — the condition that Buddhism terms "emptiness." The typical
example used to illustrate this thinking is the multiplicity of reference within
which every person continually comes into existence: in my case, I am a son, a
brother, a cousin, a spouse, a father, a friend, a teacher, to mention just a few of
the relationships that determine who I am. Dependent origination tells me first of
all that I am all these things; more than that, it shows me that I am inconceivable
in their absence. At the same time, I am not exclusively any one of these things: I
mark the place at which their significations converge. To declare that I am one or
some of these to the exclusion of the others is to become attached to a partial,
unrealistic, and unsustainable image of myself. Each time I produce that attachment,
each time I refuse to be implied by all that implies me, I suffer and cause
suffering, according to a Buddhist understanding.
What might a Huayan interpretation of 9/11 look like? I am not a philosopher, nor am
I a scholar of Buddhist philosophy. What follows is an attempt by someone willing to
use whatever means that lie to hand to come to terms with the distressing situation
we face in the world today. It may not seem particularly helpful to suggest that we
should regard 9/11 as conditioned by the existence of all that exists or has ever
existed. It is not my intention to make 9/11 disappear into some Oriental haze.
Fazang himself was careful to argue against the notion that dependent origination
mystically dissolves all differences and reduces all the things making up the world
to a single identity. Fazang was an imaginative thinker, but not a mystical one, I
think. He was simply analyzing the puzzle of reality as logically as he could, which
led him to argue that every event is "simultaneously completed by and mutually
correspondent with" every other event (Chan 1963, 411).
What do we discover when we locate 9/11 in this way? To begin with, 9/11 cannot be
regarded as an "isolated incident," as the phrase goes. Nothing occurs in isolation;
nothing comes out of the blue. Even an event as terrible and as focused as 9/11
comes into being through a complex process of mutual production. It involves
everything from US foreign policy in the Middle East, to the Israeli bulldozing of
Palestinian homes, to the CIA's guerrilla training operations in Afghanistan, to
Ronald Reagan's representation of the USSR as an "evil empire," down to the design
and construction of flight simulators, the operation and regulation of flying
schools and, beyond that, to the invention of airplanes, electricity, glass, and
steel. The web is almost infinite, and each point at which our explanations cut that
web limits our capacity to see the dense interconnections among a myriad of mutually
causative factors. The men who flew the airplanes and the men who ordered them to do
so were points on a much larger field, as were the people caught inside the World
Trade Center. Those who died that day — and who died randomly, simply for
being in the wrong buildings or the wrong airplanes at the wrong time, utterly
ignorant of the crimes for which they were being executed — did so because
of all these things.5 So too did those who killed. But we must widen the field
even further and recognize that the extraordinary imbalance in global wealth and
power sustaining the privileged world we inhabit implicates us as well. There can be
no "them" and "us" in this understanding.
Huayan philosophy helps further by showing that the causation converging on the
event has little to do with, or at least is not efficiently explained by referring
the issue to, cultures or civilizations or religions. It asks that we look at what
real people do in real time in relation to all that they have experienced. The
strands of connection certainly go back to those who have mobilized race, religion,
or any other mode of community identity to create and fuel animosity, but animosity
cannot be "explained" by features internal to the philosophical predispositions of
Islam or Christendom. It arises from attachments generated by oneself and others in
real time. Only when such attachments are formed do the justifying ideologies that
philosophers, priests, and historians write into a culture's canon get traction.
This is the point at which they — we — become dangerous, for
narratives that insist on difference carve up the globe between national or
confessional selves and others. As the curators of the evidence of difference,
historians are part of this process of world-making, colluding in the fabrication of
stories that claim goodness for those who suffer and evil for those who cause
suffering. The threads in the skein of 9/11 go back a long way, but they need to be
untangled, not rewoven into another tapestry of good and evil. Neither is absolute.
Seeing ourselves as existing conditionally, in interdependence with all others,
imposes the responsibility of acting in accord with that understanding: to show
compassion toward all those others on whom we depend: compassion toward those who
suffered, certainly, but compassion as well toward those who caused that suffering,
and toward those who caused the suffering that led to their violence. This is a
difficult task, given that the natural reaction to being struck is to strike back.
But striking back, though psychologically satisfying, continues the cycle of revenge
and perpetuates the violence that set the cycle going. Confirming our mutual
interdependence does not mean that justice should not be done. Rather, it reminds us
that justice must be even rather than retributive.6 Revenge begets revenge;
justice invites the cycle of violence to halt.
This exploration of time consciousness in Huayan thought has led me to offer a
series of propositions in favour of non-violence, allochronicity, and compassion
toward which European traditions of thought are ill-disposed. Let me review the
objections to all three before concluding.
Is it possible for historians to write a history of 9/11 that declines to celebrate
violence? Is it possible to write it as a compassionate history, as an episode in
the history of non-violence? Deeper thinkers than I have been stumped by this
challenge. In a meditation on the problem of violence first published in 1949, Paul
Ricoeur reflected on the difficulty of presenting non-violence as something having
historical status. Non-violence, he observed, is a negative, the decision not to do
something. It is "of the order of discontinuity: circumstantial acts of refusal,
campaigns of non-compliance; it is of the order of the gesture"
(Ricoeur 1949, 232). It is not what anything is about. Violence on the
other hand is more than a gesture; it is an act. It takes its place naturally within
historical narratives by virtue of its capacity to perform narrative functions and
bear the burden of meaning. Violence gets treated "as the very mainspring of
history, the 'crisis' — the 'critical moment' and the 'judgment' —
which suddenly changes the configuration of history" (ibid. 224). It is difficult to
construct a narrative around non-crises, non-critical moments, points at which
history is not handing down the judgments we expect it to dispense. When we do
— take for example how the history of modern India uses Gandhi's march in
1930 to protest the salt tax — it can only be told in relation to violence,
suppressed at that moment but always potential, always on the verge of being
unleashed. Gandhi's salt march would have attracted no attention were violence not
present as a real threat. Violence gives non-violence its power, a borrowed power.
When "violence appears as the driving force of history," as Ricoeur (1965, 241)
phrases it in an essay he published eight years later, it seems impossible to
construct a history in which violence is not at least implied.7 Non-violence
exists only "on the level of the abstract, the customary, the institutional, on the
level of anonymous 'mediations' between man and man," not in the unfolding rush of
day-to-day events (ibid., 223). How then can the advocate of non-violence be
anything but a "purist on the fringes of history?", Ricoeur asks (ibid., 229). If
violence alone is deemed record-worthy, how can history be anything other than the
discipline that naturalizes violence? From Ricoeur's perspective, the most we can
hope for is that non-violence enter "a history which remains to be made," which in
turn depends on issuing "prophetic non-violence" as a challenge to "the harsh laws
of the present" — which means permanently deferring non-violence as a
historical principle (ibid, 232). There is no escape. Ricoeur's predicament reflects
his historical situation, following the most violent war in history and living
through the early phase of the Cold War. Under such world conditions, the efficacy
of non-violence as a mode of historical action seemed to be approaching zero.
Ricoeur's predicament derives from more than that. It draws from Christian
eschatology, which sees time as finite, locates redemption outside time, and expects
the passage to redemption to lie through apocalyptic violence. The burden of this
teleology, and the philosophy of diachronic but finite time that sustains it, weighs
heavily on what I need to historicize as eastern Mediterranean explanations of the
world. These seem unable to imagine non-violence as a form of agency. This profound
philosophical lack has inspired some European thinkers to delve into other
traditions that imagined time in other ways. Early in the nineteenth century, for
instance, the English Romantic poet Samuel Coleridge modeled human
time-consciousness by contrasting Europe's post-Edenic "historical time" with what
he called the "ethnographic rites and charms" of the non-European world. The former
was diachronic, bound to sequence; the latter was allochronic, capable of arranging
all times so that they may coexist in the present (Hughes 1995).8 Coleridge's
"ethnography" can be dismissed as yet another instance of Europeans using Europe's
other to turn their own world topsy-turvy in their search for new ways of making
sense of thing. But it was also an opening for imagining alternatives.
Coleridge's fascination with non-sequential time-consciousness is still with us.
Peter Hughes (1995) has noted that the poet's interest in ethnographic time
resonates with our contemporary skepticism about sequence, our alienation from time
as the ineluctable context of human existence, our fascination with the synchronic
and the syncopated over the diachronic and the regular. I raise this bit of
Coleridgean Orientalism to caution myself and the reader about the awkward exercise
I have undertaken in this essay. My desire to escape the violence of historical time
leaves me as vulnerable as Coleridge is to the critique that I have reduced Huayan
Buddhism to an "ethnographic rite" that will banish Mediterranean teleologies of
Armageddon, and have offered compassion as nothing more than an "ethnographic charm"
to summon up something better. Have I, in the face of terrible violence, simply
produced another dehistoricized Eurocentric construction of the Other?
Jean Baudrillard would think so. According to the argument he has advanced in the
trenchant essays he has written on the subject, I can be dismissed as one of those
"Americans" (for Baudrillard, a category, not a nationality) for whom compassion is
"the national passion of a people that wants to be alone with God," the twin sister
of whose compassion is "(as much a twin as the two towers) is arrogance" (2003,
60-61). Baudrillard directs his contempt at those who feel sorry for themselves
about 9/11. In his view they have no right to do so, the terrorist attack being the
natural product of the global system from which they benefit more than anyone. Only
those who attack the global system are permitted to earn transcendence through
sacrifice; for "Americans," "all the paths of sacrifice have been neutralized and
defused (there remains only a parody of sacrifice that can be seen in all the
current forms of victimhood)" (ibid., 102). God has left room for those who attack
to give their lives as a sacrifice; "the privileged beneficiaries of globalization"
who receive but cannot give are condemned to "terminal despair" (ibid., 104).
Under the weight of such potent jeremiads, Derrida's avenir of the
unanticipated closes. Baudrillard condemns us to nothing but a predictable,
programmable futur of global dominance, global discipline, and global
counter-violence. He may be right. Our "historical time" may have vaulted us toward
an Armageddon from which we can never escape until, he says, we "get beyond the
moral imperative of unconditional respect for human life" (Baudrillard 2003, 68).
With this bold declaration, Baudrillard enters a Faustian bargain with violence,
renouncing the mundane conditionality of existence for the fetish of absolute
submission to power.
Conceiving of moral authenticity in this way, as the transformation of the master
into the slave, belongs to a particular strain within European philosophy going back
through Georges Bataille to Friedrich Nietszche. This strain has a genealogy that,
from a historian's point of view, rests unambiguously on the history of export of
European violence outside Europe into its colonies, particularly during the
nineteenth century (think of European colonies in Africa or the Middle East).
Baudrillard's argument has the appearance of being political, yet once set in its
intellectual context and seen as the delayed counter-effect of French colonialism,
it begins to look as aesthetic, even theological, in its enthusiasm for redemptive
violence and pleasurable destruction. Rather than step forward and see what lies
beneath the gestures of terrorism, Baudrillard surrenders himself to the play of
violence, in effect retreating to the "ethnographic rites and charms" of apocalyptic
Christianity.
This is not to say that Baudraillard may not be right about globalization: we may
have passed the point of escape. Perhaps all is simulacra and nothing can ever occur
again in real time; perhaps there is no endgame in the contests that now arise
against the fantastic power of the one superpower, only endless sabotage and endless
retaliation. But this analysis robs me of agency even more fiercely than does the
usual "clash of civilizations" hypothesis, and I decline to accede to it. I prefer
to look for another way to write the history of 9/11, which is why I venture to
suggest that the Huayan concept of dependent origination gives us far more to work
with than the hegemonic discourses of our age. If one goal of such working-through
is the realization of compassion, then the task in its fullest sense is not the
subjective exercise of gaining maximum room in which one's own agency can manoeuvre,
which seems to be how Baudrillard understands compassion. It means the more
demanding task of accepting the agency of others. Violence precludes such an
acceptance; non-violence opens its possibility.
This argument is unlikely to rescue non-violence from being an awkward principle of
justice, an even more unworkable mode of international diplomacy, and an absence in
historical time. My purpose, which I stated at the beginning, is both more modest
and more ambitious: it is to find the roots for a new practice. Confirm the
time-worthiness of violence and you get it; provide compassion and something else
might happen. Given that historical writing has been moving from teleologies to
narratives of contingency, from structures to conjunctural, path-dependent
explanations, I suspect that I am not the only person with an impulse to reformulate
the practices of history in the hope of encouraging a reformulation of the practices
of politics.9 By situating events that turn the world upside down within
synchronic fields of interdependence, by showing them as continuities rather than
breaks, the historian can contribute to the work of acknowledging the responsibility
of all for all. 9/11 did not turn the world upside down. It still has the capacity
to do so. But it will not until the parties in the present conflict abandon their
convictions, secular or sacred, that the future can be guaranteed. It will not
happen until we are able to greet the Other as it arrives and prepare for
l'avenir as an always opening future into which we carry the Huayan vow
"always to benefit other beings."10
Works Cited
Baudrillard, Jean. 2003. The spirit of terrorism. Revised ed.
New York:
Verso.
Brook, Timothy. 2001. The Tokyo judgment and the rape of Nanking. Journal of Asian Studies 60
(3):
673-700.
Chan, Wing-tsit, trans. 1963. The treatise of the golden lion. In A sourcebook on chinese philosophy. Princeton:
Princeton University Press.
Cook, Francis. 1977. Hua-yen Buddhism: The jewel net of Indra. University Park:
Pennsylvania State University Press.
Desai, Radhika. 2002. Tryst with fate: India and Pakistan in the "war on terrorism". In Response to terrorism: An analysis,
ed. Catherine Morris et al,
Victoria:
University of Victoria.
Gyatso, Tenzin. 1999. Ethics for the new millennium. New York:
Riverhead.
Hughes, Peter. 1995. Ruins of time. In Time: Histories and ethnologies,
ed. Diane Hughes and Thomas Trautmann,
269–290. Ann Arbor:
University of Michigan Press.
Johnson, Basil. 1993. Ojibway tales. Reprint ed.
Lincoln:
University of Nebraska Press.
Ricoeur, Paul. 1965. History and truth,
Trans. Charles Kelbley,
Evenston:
Northwestern University Press.
Ricoeur, Paul. 1984. Time and narrative, vol 1,
Trans. Kathleen McLaughlin and David Pellauer,
Chicago:
University of Chicago Press.
Sale, Kirkpatrick. 1991. The conquest of paradise: Christopher Columbus and the Columbian legacy. New York:
Penguin.
Wallerstein, Immanuel. 1999. The West, capitalism, and the modern world-systems. In China and historical capitalism: Genealogies of sinological knowledge,
ed. Timothy Brook and Gregory Blue,
Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Notes
1.
Interview with Jacques Derrida, in Derrida, produced and
co-directed by Amy Ziering Kofman (Jane Doe Films, 2003). Quoted with the permission
of Amy Ziering Kofman.
2.
Tenzin Gyatso (the 14th Dalai Lama) gives a readable account of
dependent origination in his Ethics for the New Millenium (Gyatso 1999). Specially,
see pages s36-42.
3.
Translated and lucidly explained by Francis Cook (1977,
78-79).
4.
As Leonard Priestley observed to me in a personal communication,
"the Huayan treatment of time is simply an application of the general principles of
their philosophy." I am grateful to Leonard for sharing his insights and providing
bibliographic references.
5.
Bertrand Russell famously suggested that it was impossible to
construct the entire causality of anything, as that would require taking into
account everything that has ever happened.
6.
I borrow the concept of "even justice" from Radhabinod Pal, the
Indian judge at the Tokyo trial. See (Brook 2001, 696).
7.
Ricoeur narrows his focus in this essay on the state as the power
source for violence. As he puts it, "The political existence of man is watched over
and guided by violence, the violence of the State which has the characteristics of
legitimate violence" (1965, 234).
8.
I understand diachronicity as the conceptualization of all moments
of time as existing in sequential separation, and allochronicity as the
conceptualization of all moments of time as simultaneously present.
9.
One example of this shift is Immanuel Wallerstein's (1999)
"conjunctural explanation" for the rise of capitalism, which he too relates to a
call for a change in global political practice. The status of contingency in
Ricoeur's philosophy of history is ambiguous. See, for example, (Ricoeur
1984).
10.
This is the ninth of the ten vows of Samanthabhadra, which
express the core commitments of the Huayan Buddhist monk. See (Cook 1977,
78).
