In "Before the Law", Franz Kafka portrays a compatriot who can only be forever "before the law", but never entering. "It is possible" to enter, says the doorman, "but not at the moment." The man grows old and is about to die, and only now does he understand that the door was meant for him! “No one else could be admitted here, as this gate was made just for you. Now I'm going to close it."
Kafka takes us to the interplay of overinvestment and underinvestment in our relationship with law, which drives a spiral of activity toward a goal that perpetually recedes into the future. At the very least, Kafka suggests that the law the protagonist seeks to enter into might not be what he believes it to be. The law is a self-referential bubble without concrete determinations of any kind. Jacques Derrida was right when he pointed out Kafka's message: "To be invested with its categorical authority, the law must be without history, genesis or possible derivation."1
Director: Ramesh Thete
Writer: Ramesh Thete
Stars: Sunny Leone, Arjun Rampal, Digangana Suryavanshi
This may remind us, as Evgeny Pashukanis shows, of how Karl Marx argued that under conditions of commodity exchange, social relations tend to take the form of legal relations. The principle of equivalence in the "commodity form" is inseparable from the equivalence that underlies the "equality of all" before the law in a democracy. Legal relations are not really an abstraction of social relations, but the form of appearance of social relations.2
The categorical authority of the law, combined with its abstraction, generates a lack-driven overinvestment in the imagined future and freedom—futuristic freedom—homologous to the futurist movements of capitalist accelerationism.3 Progressive left politics is trapped by this futurism. , which is about erasing the past, which is considered regressive by definition. Let us not forget that Futurism, as it first came through the pen of Filippo Tommaso Marinetti in Italy in the 1910s, later influenced Fascism and, above all, the communist avant-garde of the time. Faced with this futurism-fascism nexus, we can find works by authors such as Walter Benjamin and Pier Paolo Pasolini.4
Bhima Koregaon is that rare sequence in Indian politics today that can challenge this vaunted futurism and reveal the true powers of being able to retroactively "change the past" to liberate the future, much in the manner of Marx's historical materialism. Caste oppression as inseparable from the question of the past is embedded in the modern spiral of surpluses and shortages enunciated by law, sovereign violence, and the logic of capital. Bhima Koregaon is, empirically speaking, so steeped in historical memory and the legacy of caste oppression that the so-called progressive left would rather take refuge in the rarefied, past-erasing realms of the futuristic no-world of constitution and innate rights and liberties. that it supposedly guarantees to all citizens. Before the law, any day!5
Look at the way the Bhima Koregaon case is playing out between the state and activists. The prosecution is promoting the conspiracy angle: that the activists, in coordination with the Maoists, were plotting to overthrow the Indian state. The defense, in turn, seeks to challenge this by invoking the constitutional rights and freedoms (articles 19 and 20) of the defendant. The main line of defense is that there is no evidence to suggest that the activists were in any way involved in such a conspiracy. Those mounting the defense include activists, lawyers, and civil society dissidents, some of whom arguably share strong affinities with what Catherine Liu, in a powerful phrase, calls “virtue hoarders.”6
Sovereign violence and extrajudicial means, such as with the draconian Illegal Activities Prevention Act, were mobilized for the arrests of Bhima Koregaon.7 On the other “opposite” side, we have those who stand before the law, seeking justice for those arrested for reasons of individual liberties. One uses direct state repression and extrajudicial violence; the other seeks reparation by resorting to the liberties guaranteed by law.
Both positions mutually imbue the law with that ahistorical and self-referential “categorical authority”. What we are dealing with is the law which, in the words of Giorgio Agamben in his discussion of Kafka, "is in force without meaning." Agamben is discussing the contours of the "messianic task" today. He states: “He (the Messiah) must confront not simply a law that he commands and forbids, but a law that, like the original Torah, stands in effect without meaning. But this is also the task that we must reckon with, who live in the state of exception that has become the rule.”
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