Caste,Race,and Abjection: An Essay on Sub-humanity

Abstract

This article discusses continuities between the discourse of caste in ancient India, the racialization constitutive of the Enlightenment, and a similarly exclusionary, overdetermined conception of worthlessness—the lazy, immoral, deviant minorities—evident in contemporary racism as much as in the abandonment of a global underclass. We argue that the negative marking of a social condition or group as inferior and subhuman (on all kinds of grounds, moral, aesthetic, and intellectual) has been constitutive of the paradigms in which these societies subsist. The practices and project of all that is good is shadowed by this negative, its infectious, abominable presence. Analytically bringing together the politics of the homo sacer with the social psychology of abjection, we argue that such exclusion is as vested in politics and economic interests as in their psychic correspondences.

Keywords

race caste abjection homo sacer neo-liberalism

Personal Reflexive Statement

For a student of psychoanalysis and Weberian social theory, it is hard to ignore the uncanny (and nefarious) parallels in the modern discourse of race and ancient India’s caste ideology. Both systems betray stark contradictions between a theology of cosmic non-difference (Indian monism) or universal humanity (modern liberalism) and the most discriminatory juridical practices. We are intrigued by the role of the abject other—subhuman, disgusting, undeserving of any rights—in the production and coherence of the grand discourses of Brahman and Enlightenment equality. It is evident that the production of the subhuman other—whether as the pariah/ untouchable or the racialized subject—sutures these normative discourses ab initio as their constitutive outside. Mary Douglas in Purity and Danger provided a classic analysis of this role of impurity in the production of knowledge. Using Kristeva’s psychodynamic notion of the “abject” and Agamben’s analysis of the “state of exception,” we demonstrate how exclusion sustains the foundational pact between the ego and the social structure it inhabits. We believe this critical lesson is as important in understanding the politics of race and caste in ages past as it is in confronting the new age of social exclusion that is unfolding with global neoliberalism.

[E]very gesture, every event in the camp, from the most ordinary to the most exceptional, enacts the decision on bare life by which the German biopolitical body is made actual. The separation of the Jewish body is the immediate production of the specifically German body, just as its production is the application of the rule.

Agamben (1998:174)

Consequently, the exception explains the universal and himself, and if one really wants to study the universal, one only needs to look around for a legitimate exception; he discloses everything far more clearly than the universal itself…Generally, the difficulty is not noticed because one thinks the universal not with passion but with a comfortable superficiality. The exception, however, thinks the universal with intense passion.

Kierkegaard (1983:227)

Identity, Exception, and the Abject

Homines Sacri—All Around!

To insist on a hidden, negative referent for the unprecedented positive project of the modern democratic polity with all its rights and privileges of life and liberty appears at first glance a rather cynical adventure. But this is clearly the import of Giorgio Agamben’s far-reaching analysis of the politics of abandonment. Agamben (1998) insists that a primary activity of sovereign power in articulating culture from nature, bios from zoe, is the production of “bare” life—in modern politics as much as among the ancients (p. 181). This difference is, for example, underwritten in the notion of “people” in modern democracy. Thus, despite carrying the title of the sovereign, the “people” in almost all European languages retains an underlying meaning of the impoverished, disinherited, common folk. The inclusive and privileged sense of people with rights is of a categorical pair with the sense of people as bare life—“Where there is a People, there will be bare life” (p. 179). The “camp” then, instead of being an excrescence, a pathological development, in fact reveals the hidden architecture of modern democracy (Agamben 2000). Agamben’s inferences have been rightly criticized on numerous fronts to be sure—e.g. digging out an obscure figure of Roman law to devise a historical heuristic (Fiskesjö 2012), drawing “incorrect and even dangerous” (Ong, 2006: 23) analogies between Hitler’s murderous regime and modern liberal democracies. Yet, it remains the case few concepts of postwar political philosophy have been as widely empirically corroborated by across the world.

Examples abound. For instance, the homo sacer is the sex offender, banned from civic communities, and subject to the often arbitrary, constant threat of professionals and vigilante groups (Spencer 2009). Continually conflated with the category of pedophile, the sex offender is a condemned, depraved creature, whose life is one of “constant flight” (p. 234). The homines sacri are likewise the “terrorists” who may be killed with impunity, their corpses dragged around, as in Kashmir, or those in indefinite detention in Guantanamo Bay, unprotected by any law yet exposed to the full might of the modern administrative state.

The homines sacri are also the refugees in detention in Australia, Thailand, or Malaysia (Rajaram and Grundy-Warr 2004). They may be allowed two glasses of water a day, and succumb to diseases of malnutrition while being blamed for spreading disease, crime, and bad character. They may be raped, left to die, or excused depending on the decisions or whims of the guards or minor bureaucrats. They are at the mercy of the law in its totality, with all its ruses and lies, but without recourse to any of its protections. Barely alive in this hazy space of being violently exposed to the law yet unprotected by it, their abject condition works to reaffirm the status of true “citizens,” constantly reiterating and rearticulating their entitlements, reminding them of their privilege, and indeed their sovereign status. In a time of territories colonized by nation states, these transmitters of anarchy and threat from the outside—representing the dangers, the moral and epidemiological deformities that lie across the borders—give coherence to the law and justify its unremitting force.

Making sovereigns out of ordinary citizens on one side, giving them sense of limitless power, these vermins and cheats cannot even deserve a category like “refugee,” insofar as a term assigns a status in law. “They are nothing of the sort [refugee]…to use a term that is perhaps apt, they are a rejectee,” for the Australian immigration minister (Rajaram and Grundy-Warr 2004:46). The Israeli and American governments likewise rebuff any description of Palestinians forced to migrate to the Middle-East and Central American asylum seekers as “refugees” (Lynch 2018). The homines sacri thus are immigrants on the borders of Texas and Arizona, with their counterpart the citizen-sovereigns, heavily armed patrolling the borders with semiautomatic guns to track and hunt these “illegals” (Karlinsky, Crawford, and Effron 2017). Drinking toilet water is a “step up for them” roars the citizen (Moran 2019)! Much as in relation to the sovereign, everyone is in fear of being reduced to the homo sacer; in relation to the homo sacer, everyone is a sovereign. She is guilty in her very being. For being allowed to exist alone or having at all existed, she is perpetually a being-in-debt.

But is the impulse for the homo sacer, apparent as it is, constrained to the level of the juridical system? Can it only be seen and articulated in the sutures of the juridico-political sphere? If the exception is as deeply constitutive of the polity, as Agamben (1998, 2000), Arendt (1973, 2017), or Kierkegaard (1983) assert, it must too manifest in the constitution of the subject—the sovereign or citizen subject, so to speak. That is, if the subject is the product of a discourse, which sutures through the exclusion of the homo sacer, then the latter must be manifested as the (lack of) qualities that are the negative condition of the ego in its project and possibility. It would be reasonable to assume that to the extent that the homo sacer is the constitutive externality of the discourse, this horrifying prospect must be foreclosed for the formation of the ego, and the foundational social pact that sustains it.

Identity and the Social Pact: Abjection and Its Subjects

It is no surprise then to see Kristeva (1982) insist on the priority of such overdetermined horror—the “abject” as she calls it—in the history of the subject, as much as of the society. Abjection is the social psychological production of the “excluded” at the level of individual and group behavior. Preceding even the consciousness of the “I”—as a mimetic process in which we become homologous to one another—abjection is a primal bond that connects the individual with the social. “Even before being like, ‘I’ am not but do separate, reject, ab-ject” (p. 13). The expulsion of the abject (which, unlike repression, leaves little for symptom) is the condition of ego development, insofar as the ego must model itself after the ideals set by the harsh master, the superego—whether the introjected parents, society (“the real external world” from which “they were drawn”), or indeed God (Freud 1961:159-70). The excreta, Freud points out over and over again, arouses no disgust in children; indeed, it seems invaluable to them. It is social censorship (by means of a superego armed with the powers of the reality principle) that makes it “worthless, disgusting, abhorrent, and abominable” (p. 100). The abject, that which even the dream refuses to acknowledge, is of “a reprehensible nature, repulsive from the ethical, aesthetic and social point of view—matters of which one does not venture to think at all or thinks only with disgust” (Freud 1989:175).

The “abject” is not merely a social group, but the object of an affect, something simultaneously moral and physical: “The jettisoned object is radically excluded and draws me toward the place where meaning collapses…radically separate, loathsome” (Kristeva 1982:2). The abject is the looming possibility, attraction that must be ejected, without a thought, before the subject, so the system can enact the facade of its integrity. The exclusion of the abject is the a priori condition for the simultaneous accomplishment of morality, knowledge, identity, and social structure. It threatens to disturb, strike the whole social game. Its expulsion is the condition for the existence of the ideological system; for it obeys no rule, it is the threat of cataclysmic anarchy at once for the society and the individual faced with the unbearable anguish of letting go everything. The abject may be countenanced only at the risk of losing everything, that is, symbolic death.

Kristeva provided a compelling history of the abject, beginning with the extensive series of abominations in the Jewish faith. While Douglas (1966) had already demonstrated the role of the fear of ambiguity (impurity) in shaping Levitical abominations and thereby Biblical law and society, Kristeva shows how the extensive system of prohibitions that run through the Bible tie dietary taboos with contempt for incest and physical deformities. External impurity is supposedly a sign of the impurity within, and the faithful must completely shun such abject being to be loyal to God; for He who is pure, whole, and holy must not be contaminated by such wretchedness. The leper, whose disease betrays his rottenness, or the disabled whose physical deformities are anathema to He who is Whole and Holy, is emblematic of the exclusion that shapes the law and society of the old testament—that is, its abject.

Christianity was revolutionary in the context of the Jewish faith, precisely because it embraced this abject. Instead it found flaws in the moral qualities of the individual.¹ The Christian revolution transforms the abject from a constitutive externality underlying the moral order to sin or guilt within, predicated on a covenant with the one who forgives. This, however, does not mean that the problem of abjection has been settled. Quite to the contrary, as the dark and violent history of the crusades and the inquisitions show all too well, fealty to the purity of the discourse of forgiving—the gospel—only establishes a new field of judgment and persecution. Where Agamben (1998) demonstrates from a political perspective, “where there is a People, there will be bare life” (p. 179), the “abject” elaborates the social psychological correlative of the foreclosed, the abandoned.

Caste, Race, and the Abject

This article uses the motif of exclusion—abject, homo sacer—at once in the constitution of the subject and the juridical system to understand India’s caste system and modern racism, and the parallels thereof. We argue that the negative marking of a social condition or group as inferior—on all kinds of grounds, moral, aesthetic, and intellectual—has an axiomatic significance for the positive construction of the paradigm, or the dominant worldview, in which these societies subsist. The practices and the project of all that is good is constitutively shadowed by this negative, its infectious, abominable presence.

We begin with an analysis of the formative moments of the caste discourse to argue that obsessed distancing from a condition of abjection (marked variously as “sudra,” “untouchable,” “candala,” and so on) was the cohering factor of early Hindu worldview and society. Next, we make a somewhat parallel observance about the formative significance of race in the modern world. We then discuss the wider historical and epistemological significance of this comparison, and lessons on the play and consequences of similar affects in contemporary global society. We especially stress continuity with a similarly exclusionary, overdetermined conception of worthlessness—the lazy, immoral, deviant races—evident in contemporary racism as much as in the abandonment of the new homo sacer, a global underclass held responsible for its own doom (see Bonilla-Silva 2006; Hadis 2014; Goldberg 1993; Steinberg 2001; Young 1999).

Heuristics of Caste

Scholars of caste—social anthropologists, psychoanalysts, and historians—note the significance of the two extremities of the caste hierarchy. On one end of this hierarchy is the Brahmin with his high social status, and the ritual obsession of his class with purity. Ritual status being his real wealth, distinction, and identity, attention to purity is a matter of great anxiety and importance for the Brahmin individually and as a class. The fine detail and severe authority with which risks and precautions surrounding defilement are described in the texts mirror the Brahmin’s traditional repugnance and fear of pollution, whereby the most ordinary of things such as cleaning one’s teeth, going to the toilet, bathing, or eating a meal must be performed with pedantic ritualism (see Berkeley-Hill 1921; Dubois 1906; Kane 1941; Pollock 1985; Srinivas 1956). This level of attention to the minutiae of daily life may appear excruciating and tedious to an outsider, but they were so much an ingredient of everyday life and social hierarchy that they would be anxiously wrought into one’s person as second nature. As the Dubois (1906, p.179) observed in his travels more than two centuries ago:

The predominating idea in their [Brahmins’] general conduct, and in their overly action in life, is what they call cleanness; and it is the enormous amount of care that they take to keep themselves’ clean, to prevent any sort or kind of defilement, and to purify themselves from any uncleanness that they may have contracted, which gives them their ascendency [over] other castes

The heightened sense of duty, compulsive ceremonialism, and the elaborate purifactory ritual forms through which the Brahmin attends to bodily excretions and guards himself from contamination have led scholars see his behavior as reaction formation against anal eroticism (Berkeley-Hill 1921; Vallabhaneni 2015). Social anthropologists have in turn ascribed the Brahmin’s purity-determined lifestyle and worldview a formative role in the structuring of India’s society in which status-based hierarchy has subsumed the ideological significance of distinctions of power and wealth (Bouglé 1971; Dumont 1980). From this orientation, the caste system appears unique, a society sui generis (even if it shares some likeness to ancient Egypt or Judaism, among others [see Bouglé 1971]).

It is quite conceivable, even apparent, that the Brahmin and his aura of purity may have been the hegemonic positive object of the social consciousness of pre–modern Hindus. In fact, if we account for the Brahmins’ monopoly of texts and learning—over intellectual products in which description merged with prescription, “models of” human conduct became indistinguishable from “models for” human conduct—their hegemonic status seems solid and irrefutable (Pollock 1985). Caste then would be an Indian peculiarity, of historical value, but of limited significance to comparative sociology. But if we refrain from taking the Brahmin’s discourse at face value and instead heed Kierkegaard’s (1983:227) wise counsel to look for the exception that which “thinks” or represents the system with “intense passion,” is it possible we may arrive at a different, more socially vibrant disclosure of the caste system? This article attempts to fathom and illustrate the significance of the negative, those condemned and abandoned, for the internal coherence and practical viability of caste (and race); that is, demonstrate the analytical value of the other end of this structure, the negative referents of this purity—the outcasts “shut out in their filth and poverty” (Berkeley-Hill 1921:308).

The Portuguese-origin term “caste” describes the myriad jatis (genus, source), endogamous social groups that are amalgams of ethnic (nations, tribes) and occupational identities, which are frequently imagined through a superimposed hierarchical relationship based on varna (color, category), the division of the populace into four categories as provided in ancient law codes (dharma sastras). The four categories in descending hierarchy are the following: Brahmins, Kshatriyas, Vaisyas, and Sudras.

The conflation of “varna” and “jati” (here as description there prescription), a product of inevitable vicissitudes of history, locality, circumstance, perceptions or whims of countless authors, and further compounded by the modern term “caste,” represents a murky and paradoxical social reality that resists neat categories. If there is some clarity, it lies at the extremities of the caste hierarchy. The Brahmin jatis are usually clearly recognized² (often “Brahmin” is a jati by itself) and usually regarded as having a higher religious status.³ On the other side, certain jatis identified with occupations that are considered menial (pottery, gardening, oil crushing, etc.) or polluting (e.g., cutting hair, washing clothes, butchery, leather work, and above all sweeping, and cleaning up excreta of humans and livestock) are usually considered low.⁴ In the middle, however, ambiguity rules, and there is a good amount of hubris, where every jati regards itself highly, and has a ready stock of legends and myths to proclaim its distinctive noble origins (Gupta 2000). Hierarchical status here is only another term for power, and power usually lies with the jatis that are the major landowners and are numerically preponderant in the village/area (Srinivas 1959).⁵ Such jatis are dominant, and if they have sufficient muscle, they exercise de facto power and authority, including over Brahmins.

As we can see, the varna categories exert only a loose hold on social relations among the castes (jatis). In nomenclature, and for the most part in description, the varna model overlaps with the actuality of caste relations only for the Brahmins, who curiously enough have also been for ages the authors, interpreters, and privileged beneficiaries of this imposition. And yet it would be imprudent to underestimate the significance of varna in India’s social history; indeed, the messier the social reality, the greater the desire for a schema to make sense of it. For all its emptiness, varna provided Indian society with an overarching cognitive framework, an elaborate ideology to render the society coherent, meaningful, and legitimate in the face of its obvious dissonance, social injustices, and material conflicts and contradictions. This casuistry is “oriented less to the practical needs of the groups concerned than to the needs of the uninhibited intellectualism” of the scholars, the priestly class (Weber 1978:789). It is practical only insofar as it reiterates and reasserts the status quo, maintaining through reinterpretation “the practical applicability of the traditional, unchangeable norms to changing needs” (Weber 1978:817). Albeit considered the source of all law, the ancient legal codes (dharma sastras) with their general law based on the varna divisions was of secondary importance, as matters of daily life were usually decided by the laws of the separate castes. Ignored in priestly doctrine, however, the laws of the castes and vocational groups were never the subject of any sustained scholarship and rationalization, and the elaborate varna-based Brahminical casuistry of the ancient legal codes remained binding in theory, although for the most part, it was redundant to matters of daily life (Weber 1978:817).

The dharma strictures were relevant mostly to the affairs of the priestly class and matters concerning it. Sociologically, however, the real significance of these texts lies in that they provide a theodicy or an efficacious and authoritative legitimization of social inequalities, validating in particular the dreaded misfortune of the outcasts, the forsaken shut in their poverty and wretchedness. Providing a compelling rationalization of apparent social injustices, these texts reiterated, reaffirmed, and exalted the extant social order. Deploying all the pomp, authority, and esoterism of Brahminical language and ritual, they gave the fortunate the moral satisfaction of deserving their fortune and social etiquettes with the added pleasure of being able to blame the unfortunate for their unhappy lot (Guru and Sarukkai 2012; Weber 1978).

But when it comes to this primary ideological function, the varna division into four classes does not cut it—it becomes a question of being in or out, either part of the society’s sacred or the pariah who will be the condition of its certitude and gloating satisfaction. At the very beginning of the ancient law codes in about the second century, the priestly authors make this binary distinction very clear through the idea of “twice born.” They give the Vedic initiation ceremony the status of a “second birth”—an essence available only to the three higher varnas. “This structural feature is the very opening of the Dharmasutras; they all begin with the rite of Vedic initiation, the rite that qualifies a person to engage in dharma prescribed in these documents” (Olivelle 2012:126).

Already the point of departure for the oldest of the law codes, the Apastamba Dharmasutra (about second century BC), which reiterates the importance of the new life inspired by the teacher to the disciple, in subsequent texts this essence gets a name, “dvij” (twice born), and becomes a fundamental term standing not only for the initiated students but for the three higher varnas (dvijati) who could be administered this ceremony and attain such status (see Apastamba 1897; Baudhayana 1882; Gautama 1897; Olivelle 2012, 2018; Vashistha 1882).

Eligible to learn the Vedas, Sanskrit (the language of the gods or culture), and for all kinds of sacraments and religious ceremonies, they are party to the sacred pact of the society and are advised to own property and accumulate wealth and merit. On the other hand, the last group, the Sudras, are not eligible for initiation and are shut off from access to Vedic knowledge and any say in the society. The texts are unequivocal about this status. Says the “Vasistha Dharmasutra” (1882): A Sudra “shall not receive the sacraments, [since] ‘He [God] created the Brāhmana with the Gāyatri (metre), the Kshatriya with the Trishtubh, the Vaisya with the Gagati, the Sūdra without any metre” (Chapter 4, Verse 3). And before that, “To serve those [the other three castes] has been fixed as the means of livelihood for a Sūdra” (Chapter 2, Verse 20). The “Manava Dharmasastra,” the most widely known and authoritative of the ancient religio-legal codes, is likewise categorical, “The Brahmana, the Kshatriya, and the Vaisya varnas are the twice-born ones, but the fourth, the Sudra, has one birth only; there is no fifth(varna)” (Manu 1889: Chapter 10, Verse 4).⁶ The word and the world of the Vedas is simply closed to the Sudra, rejected and “excluded…from all the duties and rights of an Aryan” (Chapter 2, Verse 103). The Sudra (and a fortiori groups that are marked as products of miscegenation between the varnas, e.g., “candalas”) is by no means a part of this sacred pact; instead, the social pact is shaped by the active denunciation of the Sudra as the excluded, the exception.

Theology and Justice as Abjection

The theoretical robustness of this binary division propounded by the Dharma texts in the early days of the caste system, its consistency with empirical facts and affects, has been subjected to theological tests over the ages. From our perspective, the most interesting of these tests come in the context of the monistic strand of ancient Indian theology. Such a monistic tendency is apparent in Indian thought since the Rig Vedic hymns from about 3,500 years, the most ancient of extant Indian texts. This aspect is further reinforced in the aphorisms of the primary ancient philosophical texts, the upanisads. The “Chandogya Upanisad” (1879) famous for its celebrated refrain “tat tvam asi” [that art thou] (6.8.17) further illustrates, “That light which shines above this heaven, higher than all, higher than everything, in the highest world, beyond which there are no other worlds, that is the same light which is within man” (3.13.7). The “Brihadaranyaka Upanisad” (1884) elaborates, “He who worships another deity, thinking that the deity is one and he another, is not wise…to be able to say, ‘I am Brahman,’ is to become the self of all things…even of the gods” (1.4.10). And the “Taittiriya Upanisad” (1884) adds: “that from which all these beings come into existence, that by which they live, that into which they are finally absorbed—seek to perceive that! That is Brahman!” (Chapter 3, Verse 1).

The problem facing the ancient theologians is clear. If God or Brahman, the universal intelligent substance, is identical in all existence and knows no difference or discrimination, how can some genera (jatis) be condemned as wretched and filthy? In other words, we are thrown back to the familiar stumbling block of theological idealism—divine justice confronted by brutal social injustices. If God is good and just, how can such cruel fate and ill treatment be justified (see Weber 1978:518-40)?

This contradiction is the most directly confronted in the Vedanta Sutra Bhasya of the great eighth-century monistic philosopher, Samkara, an avid proponent of the nondifference of Brahman and the identity of the universal and the individual self. In Samkara’s thinking, “All appearance of multiplicity is a vain illusion, that the Lord and the individual souls are in reality one, and that all knowledge but this one knowledge is without true value” (Thibaut 1962:xcix). But this knowledge, this self-understanding and practice must be denied the Sudra, says Samkara citing the authority of the scriptures: “the ears of him who hears the Veda are to be filled with (molten) lead and lac…. His tongue is to be split if he pronounces it; his body is to be cut through if he preserves it.” Since all true knowledge is sacred knowledge in that society, the exclusion of the Sudra is imperative. The Sudra has no educational potential, and is fit only to serve. “Nothing is to be learnt by a Sudra. The Sudra is a walking cemetery” (Samkara 1962:1.3.34-38).

But is this not unjust? No, says Samkara (1962), that’s no injustice on the part of the Lord. Such fate is determined by one’s own deeds, that is, karma. “Karma and inequality, are like seed and sprout” (2.1.35). You get what you sow. The debits and credits of karma span over any number of life cycles, or reincarnations of the soul, which explains birth in a condemned versus exalted group. Tasked with rationalizing social injustice, an otherwise robust system of monistic philosophy rapidly devolves into tangled speculations about transmigration and accounting of karmic dividends over scores of lives (see Singh 2018). As Weber demonstrated, the doctrine of karma was a most effective solution to the problem of theodicy. On one hand, it allowed the high to bask in their perceived sense of moral excellence. On the other, it encouraged the downtrodden to meekly suffer their fate in this life in hope of redemption in a future life. This was a truly resilient doctrine: sometimes karma and fate (vidhi, niyati) would be seen as same, at other times held in explicit contrast (O’Flaherty 1980:xxiii).

Whether with the “dvij” of the legal codes or Samkara’s metaphysical reasoning, the key ideological artifice is not found in shades of difference between normative social groups, but in the mark of exclusion, or abandonment. The exception, marked as “Sudra”—and in other places as “Candala,” “untouchable” and so on—is the excluded outside that shapes the self-coherence and intelligibility of the society and its laws (see Kane 1941; Olivelle 2012, 2018). In this distinction, “varna”—previously marking the opposition between the sacred Aryan community and the aboriginals outside (e.g., Rig Veda 1896:3.34.9, 4.16.13, 9.41.1, 1.130.8)—becomes a demarcation of the externality within. “In the earliest period, we find the word varna associated only with Dasa and with Arya…the only water-tight groups that are positively or expressly vouchsafed by the RigVeda are arya and dasa or dasyu” (Kane 1941:27). After the battles have been decided, the Arya/dasyu opposition which is everywhere in the Rig Veda morphs into the dvij/Sudra opposition of the Dharma Sutras and the smriti literature—the mortal enemy outside is replaced by the vile impurity within. Once integrating the Vedic society, its sacred calls, as a dreaded outsider, this entity now structures the social consciousness as the abject within.

The process is similar to the transformation of the struggle between warring “races” in the medieval world, as Foucault (2003) has argued, to a modern racism “that society will direct against itself, against its own elements, and its own products. This is the internal racism of permanent purification” (p. 60). The clear in-group/out-group distinction is replaced by an internally differentiated monism and the varna ideology that must, insofar as the anomalies will be blatant, extensively enact the facade of logical and moral coherence and require unquestioned submission. The darkness of a lack, unfit for moral education and upliftment, doomed to a metaphorical state of nature, a no-good state useful only for unquestioning servitude, is the negative condition of the post Vedic consciousness in which caste is systematically articulated. So vile and despicable is the Sudra:

For killing a flamingo…a musk-rat, a dog…and so forth, (the offender shall pay) the same (fine) as (for the murder of) a Sudra. (Baudhayana 1882:1.10.19.6)

If a Brahmana dies with the food of a Sudra in his stomach, he will become a village pig (in his next life) or be born in the family of that (Sudra). (Vashistha 1882:Chapter 6, Verse 27)

Let (the first part of) a Brahmana’s name (denote something) auspicious, a Kshatriya’s be connected with power, and a Vaisya’s with wealth, but a Sudra’s (express something) contemptible. (Manu 1889:Chapter 2, Verse 31).

The not-Aryan, “dark” feared Dasyu of the Rig Veda already becomes the “dark”, not-Aryan Sudra of the Taittriya Samhita (roughly about 1,000 BC)—“not fit for sacrifice”, and thereon, “he who does not go beyond washing the feet”—born without a deity (Pancavimsa 1931:6.1.11), “at the beck and call of others” who can be made to rise and be beaten at will (Kane 1941:35). He is “untruth,” “toil” (Sabara 1923:6.1.38).

From its earliest moments then, the varna system formulates itself through an intuitive association of purity, righteousness, light, and goodness, as opposed to that which is dark, corrupt, stolid, and impure. This synthetic judgment preempts the faintest effort at accountability and analytical reasoning. As opposed to the other varnas which are dominated by sattva (truth) and rajas (power), the Sudra, we are told, has a preponderance of tamas (darkness)—that is, “covetousness, sleepiness, pusillanimity, cruelty, atheism, leading an evil life, a habit of soliciting favors, and inattentiveness” (Manu 1889:Chapter 12, Verse 33). This makes them “unsteady, vulgar, obstinate, deceitful, malicious, lazy, down-hearted, procrastinating,” adds the Bhagavad Gita (1983:Chapter 18, Verse 28). The touch of the Sudra pollutes even the corpse of the Brahmin, who personifies sattva—purity, Being, goodness, righteousness, and so on (Manu 1889:Chapter 5, Verse 104). Given the disgust that defines it, this exteriorized internality is destined to a free fall in social status—from the “Sudra” fit only to serve, to the ati-sudra (excessively sudra) Antyaja, Svapaca, or indeed the Candalas, who are of the order of dogs and crows, and condemned to live outside the village, eat from broken vessels, wear clothes off corpses, wander from place to place, and announce their entrance in a place or market by beating a piece of wood so that they may be avoided (Kane 1941: 82; Kautilya 1992: 4.13.34, 35; Manu 1889:Chapter 10, Verse 52; Samkara 1962:Chapter 16, Verse 14). And for all the debate on the genealogies of caste in modern India, it would be hard to deny the horror at the extreme of the caste society against the untouchable, the ati-sudra (see, e.g., Ambedkar 2014; Ghurye 1969; Shah et al. 2006; Shepherd 2019; Valmiki 2003).

We find that in post–Vedic Hindu society, the dvij (twice born), initiated into and tied by the sacred bond of the word of the Vedas and its corollary universe of rituals and sacraments, and thereby entitled to status, wealth, and security, is only intelligible in reference to the subject that is cut off these privileges in the most unequivocal terms. That subject is the negative reference for all that is “good”; and this splitting of the good and the bad, as psychoanalysis tells us very eloquently, orchestrates the primal constitution of the ego, as much as it does the historical formation of knowledge and judgment. The subject and the knowledge/objects in reference to which the ego takes shape are both constituted through repudiation. Says Freud (1962), “What is bad, what is alien to the ego and what is external are, to begin with, identical” (p. 237). While affirmation belongs to the eros, repudiation belongs to the destructive drive, which in endowing the subject with “a first measure of freedom from the consequences of repression and, with it, from the compulsion of the pleasure principle,” makes possible the “genesis of judgement, that is, in short, a genesis of thought” (Hyppolite 1991:292-96). What is repressed through negation—matter impure, stupid, disgusting—is a reserve that thought can come back to, and draw on yet again for another round/leap of intellectualization.⁷ The abject state of being Sudra/Untouchable is the repulsive reference for the Upanisadic Brahman with all its positive attributes, as well as the pure, pious intellect of the Brahmin, and the power and status potentials for the dvij as such. The good requires the abject for its self-definition and certitude.

This horror at the extremes, projected as at once the state of nature and of darkness, immorality, stolidity, filth, excreta, and disease, marks the boundary of the social structure. It is a perceived state of formlessness, of dissolution, a no-good condition, whose expulsion, summary rejection is the condition of knowledge and of social composure, interaction, and intelligibility. The outcast is an abandoned state barely protected by law but condemned to its full vengeance. The abandoned being can save himself “only in perpetual flight” (Agamben 1998:183). It is a state guilty in its very being, always in arrears and therefore subject to extreme punishment on the flimsiest of excuse, by just about anybody. A being-in-debt is materialized, whether on account of the myth of karma from this or previous lives. For whether in law, which indeed constitutes its rule in relation to this state of abandonment, or in language—for “to speak is, in this sense, always to speak the law”—this is a condition that is truly at the mercy of others (Agamben 1998:21).

The Race Exception

And do we not see the same “exceptionalism” in the foundations of liberal modernity—the marking of a homines sacri, of groups as subhuman and unfree, operating within a monistic discourse of universal equality and freedom? The modern conception of universal humanity, it appears, has from its roots been based on the sub-humanization of the other as raced, such that the European man alone is truly universal (see, e.g., Bernasconi and Mann 2005; Eze 1997; Goldberg 1993). Thus, the history of race, colonization, and slavery is already present and foreshadowed in Locke, the indefatigable proponent of man’s inalienable rights (see Locke 1982). Whether it is the central role in his political thought of “property”—conceptualized in private appropriation through labor out of the Biblical God’s free gift of nature to man, and for which Locke (1982) insistently uses the native Americans' “failure” of appropriation as the negative case (pp. 37, 43, 49)—or the room left for enslavement by means of a “just war” (para. 86, 180), this political theory is already constituted by difference between the rights of English subjects, and those (to be) enslaved and colonized in Africa and America (see Bernasconi and Mann 2005; Higginbotham 1978; Locke 1982).

Locke, of course, is but one in a tradition of Enlightenment philosophy (foundational to the West) whose first major project was to liberate the individual from the mercy of paternal or despotic power; here politics and philosophy are in lock step (Eze 1997; Foucault 2008; Goldberg 1993; Valls 2005). This requires simultaneously the demonstration of men as capable of rational and moral behavior, and the establishment of freedom as a right. And, for both purposes, Judeo–Christian theology functions both as authority and idiom. Hence, Locke’s social contract theory, where man apparently agrees to relinquish some of his natural rights to the sovereign, in his own greater interest. Most significantly, this rational individual is necessarily constructed in a binary, in contrast with savages, incapable of purposive moral behavior and living in a (presumably brutal) near state of nature, without a government of laws (Foucault 2003; Hobbes 1900; Locke 1982).⁸ The binary other is at the same time conceptual and historical, as existing in America, Africa, or Asia. Their savage, irrational character is as much a consequence of a lack of training and education; it is both the effect and the cause of the lack of a commonwealth. This other is a child, incapable of morally rational action who (unlike the white man, an adult) requires paternal control (Hume 1768; Kant 2003). The assessment of these children’s potential varies; while some would find signs of their ability to assume civilized forms of social life, a voice of (European) equality as strong as Voltaire (1989) would see in them fundamental, biological inferiority—”[Whites] are superior to these Negroes, as the Negroes are to apes and the apes to oysters” (p. 82). In any case, they were not (yet) “the kinds of subjects to be bearing full social rights” (Goldberg 1993:221).

The European subject frees himself from the yoke of divine/paternal power of the monarch by citing his rationality only to assume absolute power over the raced others—power divine (like the one God gave Noah) over beings half-human, half-beast living in a state of nature. Modern political philosophy’s drive to safeguard the freedom of European subjects vis-à-vis the ruler is implicated, from the very beginning, in furthering their power to rule over others. These are Hobbes’s savages in justifiable servitude since they wouldn’t fight to death for freedom, Locke’s irrational individuals and captives of a just war, Hume’s “naturally inferior,” Mills’s “hideous,” and Kant’s “stupid” (Hobbes 1900:Chapter XX; Hume 1768; Goldberg 1993; Kant 1799). No master (or free man) without a slave as it were!

For an empiricist such as Hume (1768) the inferiority of these others is proven because they had never produced anything notable: “There never was a civilized nation of any other complexion than white…No ingenious manufactures amongst them, no arts, no sciences…NEGROE slaves dispersed all over EUROPE, of which none ever discovered any symptoms of ingenuity” (p. 235). Immanuel Kant, philosopher par excellence of Enlightenment modernity, systematically works through the enigma of these subhumans. In his Critique of Pure Reason, Kant (1965) establishes that while the idea of freedom is required for Reason to imagine, as is its wont, a free or first cause beyond the limitations of empirical observation, Pure Reason is unable to prove the fact of human freedom and to guide human action. In the Critique of Practical Reason, Kant (1954) then identifies freedom in the human ability to follow the call of duty in the pure form of the moral law, notwithstanding particular interests and circumstances. But the moral law itself is pure form for Kant and still provides no empirical clues to recognize what is morally good. In further addressing this problem in the Third Critique, Kant (1952) notably arrives to the postulation, “Now, I say, the beautiful is the symbol of the morally good…Taste makes, as it were, the transition from the charm of sense to habitual moral interest possible without too violent a leap” (p. 228).

Thus, morality, beauty, and the intellect (as the ability of reason) are quite well tied to one another; such observed affinity would be a synthetic a priori, an intuitive association of separate predicates, “which anticipate experience” (Kant 1952:608). Hence, it is quite consistent with the philosophy of the Critiques—and indeed, we would argue with Enlightenment thought in general—for Kant (1799) to surmise, “this fellow was from the crown of his head to the very soles of his feet jet-black; a direct proof, that what he said was stupid” (p. 76). And, “The Negroes of Africa have by nature no feeling, which rises above the trifling” (Kant 2003:110).

For Kant, the Enlightenment is at once a historical moment and a moral obligation to apprehend the present with the freedom of reason rather than be governed by dogma or someone else’s authority. The distinguishing quality of “human nature” is moral, not (like Rousseau) an uncorrupted primeval nature to which they ought to return, but a teleology, a goal for what humans ought to become (Kant 1999, 1960). This cultivation of rational–moral character requires talent, “natural predisposition” independent of instruction, a “gift” of nature, which nonwhites lack. Only “The white race possesses all motivating forces and talents in itself” (Eze 1997:117). As for the others:

The race of the American cannot be educated. It has no motivating force, for it lacks affect and passion…The race of the Negroes…can be educated but only as servants (slaves), that is they allow themselves to be trained…The Hindus do have motivating forces but they have a strong degree of passivity (Gelassenheit)…they can never advance, although they began their education much earlier. (P. 116)

Beyond these specifics, however, there is no gainsaying that Kant subscribes to a system of thought, which assumes that “‘black,’ is bad, evil, inferior, or a moral negation of ‘white,’ light, and goodness…” (Eze 1997:117). Such an association may not have the status of the laws of pure or practical reason, but it would be an a priori principle of judgment, one of those empirical laws whose “lucky chance,” the evidence of a “systematic unity” in nature, makes us rejoice, or “properly speaking, relieved of a want” (Kant 1952:19). Kant fails to recognize (despite betraying a sense of apprehension) that the illusions of what he conceptualized as transcendental links between nature and the Gemut—”this nature of our reason”—may actually have something to do with the Geist (Foucault 2008:65). Accepting the Geist “at the root of the possibility of knowledge,” as “indissociably present and absent in the figures of knowledge”, however, would be the return in a form invisible and infinite of the ghost of the very empirical contingencies that Kant’s (1952) thought had so labored to dispel and to transcend (p. 66). Kantian judgment may recommend training the Negro using “a split cane rather than a whip” only because, “thanks to transatlantic mercantalist slave trades, Kant sees and knows that, in fact, African slaves are flogged, ‘trained’ in his words, as European labor” (Eze 1997:116-17).

Kant’s statements on the ownership of a servant (or a wife) “like a right to a thing” is likewise a judgment based as much on gaps in the legal determinations of bourgeois society, as on the practices and prejudices of an epoch as suspended between a feudal and an industrial order, as between the state of freedom and chattel slavery (Foucault 2008:40). In modern thought as much as in colonial capitalist practices, this abject lacking in understanding and morality, whose dark, disgusting exterior itself signifies internal worthlessness (a childish man who may be trained by beating only), will be transformed into an object. Objectification desiccates the pathos of his humanity, thus minimizing the possibility, the risk of association, and the angst of a shared identity. Such alienation from the self, from identity, is the condition of the appropriation of the other as property, an object of commerce and exchange—not merely “particular bodily and mental aptitudes and capabilities…impressed with a character of alienation,” but the conversion of “the substance itself…[his] general activity and reality…[his] person, into the property of another” (Hegel, cited in Marx and Engels 1887:146). What would have otherwise aroused angst or perhaps disgust becomes instead a commodity, an object of utility or fetish—a curious object of the sciences of anthropometry, phrenology, and eugenics, and a target of jokes.⁹

In these lights, the abandoning of the other in the name of race is productive of the privileges of “sovereignty,” “freedom,” and “equality” of the normative subject as “white.” The abandonment of the raced homo sacer lies in the foundations of liberal modernity itself. This, of course, has essentially rather little to do with so called physical, biological, or cultural differences; such differences function as but signs—more or less invented—in a practical grammar of privilege distribution and denial.

Exceptions Old and New

We see that both modern race and caste in ancient India are quite similar mechanisms for peremptory social exclusion. Marked first as distinct, and of foreign origin, the other race eventually comes to indicate a subhuman—a deviant, inferior entity infiltrating into the social body and posing a biological and moral threat for the one true race. The seeming paradox of the construction of an order of freedom and individual liberty in the modern world at the same time as the “revival of an institution of naked tyranny” is structurally similar to the formation of caste in India, where extreme social inequality evolved paradoxically in a religious world that preached ontological non-difference (Lacy 1973:22).

Such overdetermined exclusion was as much a counterpart of the radical monism of Vedanta as it has been a part of the sweeping Enlightenment discourse of equality and freedom (from Locke to Kant), and in both cases of the political realities of caste and race in which these discourses were embedded. These assessments support Agamben’s (1998) emphasis on the role of the exception, the abandonment of a marked group, “a fundamental biopolitical fracture” in the social and moral coherence of the modern order (p. 180). Where Agamben demonstrates from a political perspective—again, “where there is a People, there will be bare life” (p.179)—the social psychology behind this exclusion is articulated in its fullest in Kristeva’s (1982) concept of the abject. In the case of both caste and race, the abject is localized to the state of abandonment—of the Sudra/untouchable/Candala et cetera in one case, and the colored in the other. And whether rhetorically formulated as the state of nature or as internal to the law, this state of exception is the surety, the assurance of the social, ideological structure, and the self-consciousness of its own self-same identity in which the individual subject is more or less complicit. More succinctly put, it is the (pre)condition of identity and meaning. We have seen this in our discussions of ancient India’s caste society and the evolution of modern discourse of race. But how about current social conditions? Who are the homo sacer today?

Both in ancient caste and modern race, as we have seen, the individuals structurally consigned to misfortune are marked as ignorant, lazy, corrupt, and deceitful et cetera, as apparently evident through physical and behavioral symptoms. Ancient India marked that through caste names and categories, the modern world through skin tones and other “scientific” indicators of racial inferiority. The contemporary homo sacer, if and where there is such a group, would be similarly characterized: inferior, disposable, condemned to risk, and worthless in life and in death. Banished, and beyond the pale of the actuarial society, they would have no voice or significance in contemporary systems or vocabularies of accreditation. Their lives have no value; hence their death by commission or omission is no sacrifice—much like in Mississippi of the 1930s: “to kill a Negro wasn’t nothing. It was like killing a chicken or killing a snake” (Litwack 1998:284). “Good gracious! Anybody hurt?” asks Mark Twain’s (1992) Aunt Sally. “No’m, killed a nigger” is the response (p. 336).

Perhaps this homo sacer today is the global underclass. They are the ones: living by the landfills, in abandoned toxic waste sites, the smokestacks of Cancer Alley; or getting crushed by falling steel in the ship breaking yards of Chittagong, Along, and Gadani; begging for alms or disappeared from the streets and railway stations of Delhi; and succumbing to disease and violence by flooding cesspools in Annawadi, in the shadow of luxury hotels and Mumbai’s international airport. They are the desperate Guatemalan immigrants being robbed and pushed off freight trains by Mexican gangs (Stelzner 2006); the asylum seekers pleading cover for their children from drones as much as from bombs; the Navajos living in the nuclear sacrifice zones of the desert South West (Kuletz 1998); the “‘dirty’ street children and poor young black men” of Timbaúba cleaned from the streets by death squads (Scheper-Hughes 2013); or the minorities in American inner cities and industrial prisons abandoned into a vortex of criminalization, unemployment, and street violence (Wacquant and Wilson 1989).

They are the included excluded of what Young (1999) calls the bulimic society, banished to unmitigated risk, marked as dangerous threat to gated communities that “fort up” with their commodified protections. Irresponsible, lazy cheats, unhygienic, carriers of disease, they are a pest on the hard-earned protections of the “middle class” (Ghertner 2012; Hadis 2014). The moral threat from their contaminating dispositions is as great as the eyesore that is their physical presence, and their unscrupulous and insatiable encroachment on the hard-earned resources of the middle class. A multiplicity of speech acts that seamlessly shift between common sense aesthetics and economic wisdom, to the registers of environmental protection, health and hygiene shape a discursive formation that demarcates this “other,” and provides a “scheme of perception” to organize the social world (Bourdieu 1984:480). These shared perceptions of the social world, and its abject, enable effortless synergies between, say, everyday narratives of neighborhood security and hygiene to civic organizations, court decision-making, and government rationality.

In his research on Delhi’s neighborhood aesthetics, Ghertner (2012) shows such discursive complicities actively constructed the illegitimacy of slum dwellers’ claims on urban space and resources while scaffolding the aggressive demolition of slums and the banishing of millions from the city as “nuisance.” “Everyday depictions of slums as dirty, uncivil, out of place” by housing associations were accepted by the courts, which would order demolition (p. 1162),

“Because it deprives the rights of citizens of Delhi” to civic amenities and degrades public space…“The right of honest citizens…cannot be made subservient to the right of encroachers,” where the former were defined as those who “pay [a] handsome price for acquiring land” and the latter as “unscrupulous elements.” (Pp. 1168-78)

The felt obligation to fortify and securitize the neighborhoods, and protect the civic rights of good, honest citizens is further embedded in a consensus on the developmental, nationalist imaginary of making Delhi a world-class city, “modeling the Yamuna on the Thames in London and clearing all slum settlements from sight” (Ghertner 2012:1180). Thus, the good society abiding by law and order, and the right to accumulate and enjoy property, is only made possible through the violent exclusion of the other as essentially vile and filthy in the same discursive acts.

It is not hard to empathize with the residents’ concerns about personal safety, living standards, and protection of their interests. The real issue is systemic, where a neoliberal ideological hegemony constructs safety, health, and hygiene as scarce commodities to be privately paid for. And this politics, “in which some lives, if not whole groups, are seen as disposable and redundant” is a global phenomenon (Giroux 2012:156; Singh 2017). A bio-cultural logic of just desserts exclusively blames this homo sacer for its precarious condition (see, e.g., Goldberg 1993; Steinberg, 2001). The state and the courts assume their primary responsibility to assure a lawful accumulation of capital and its consumption, protecting it from the encroachments of the others, who are but a nuisance and must be abandoned. Thus, routine, apparently arbitrary acts of prejudice and intolerance, are rigorously embedded in state practice and sophisticated economic theories of human capital and rational choice. Such aversion is not just an expression of group interests but the abject status of this other, who is an overdetermined signifier of something despicable, a degree zero of value whose prospect conjures dread, and hence must be contemptuously banished from sight: a combination of fear, disgust, and loathing.

If the exclusion of the Sudra/untouchable defined the sacred order of ancient India’s Brahmanical society, and value zero of nature undeveloped and the concomitant inferiority of non-Europeans defined Enlightenment rationality, the contemporary neoliberal social world is structured in reference to these “racial rogues” (Goldberg 2011:348), “the social impurities of the late modern world” (Young 1999:20). It is in disavowing them, disapproving their copresence that the neoliberal social world constitutes itself in theory as much as in practice. The theoretical formulation of these practices is surely American neoliberalism, which stretches the market metaphor to every dimension of meaning and social existence (Becker 1993; Foucault 2008; Giroux 2012; Goldberg 2011). The negative referent of this accumulation is the subject with zero capital, no good, who has no economic and social value and is therefore lawfully abandoned. All kinds of social practices and laws that integrate the society are formulated through the disavowal of this homo sacer—at once as a group and as a societal and personal eventuality.

Such confusing effect of the “vicissitudes” of class and race should not be construed as a commingling of discrete social forces. One must be wary of reifying the analytical categories of “class” and “race.” It is as important to be at guard against the taken for granted of everyday life, which Schutz (1973) called “the epoche of the natural attitude,” as of the “scholastic disposition,” which “leads to prenotions about race [or class] that, in the cognitive realm, neutralize the specificities of its practical logic” (Desmond and Emirbayer 2012). The future of racism (and the exclusion of any host of underclass categories) globally will be determined less by the willful solidarity of groups today identified as “whites” or any other but by the extent to which the overdetermined exclusion of particular groups remains critical to the coherence and efficacy of a collective consciousness that can converge economic interests (and anxieties) with moral and aesthetic certitudes in the changing market and labor conditions of global capitalism. This collusion of factors is likely to remain as important to the future of race as it was to the production of the raced other within the contradictions of the putatively egalitarian ethos of liberal political and moral philosophy, and the colonial conditions—and class divisions—of early capitalism.

In recent years, scholars have often underscored the exclusionary operations of neoliberalism. They have repeatedly shown the constitutive underbelly of the late modern world identifying with ideals of freedom, democracy, and high-tech cosmopolitan cultures and lifestyles. This world is secured through the exclusion, the abandoning to absolute risk of a growing section of the world population (see Goldberg 2011; Giroux 2012). This is often depicted as a specific characteristic of late modern neoliberal societies. This article, however, demonstrates that such overdetermined exclusion, within self-righteous ideologies of “reason” and nondifference, has as much been a part of India’s caste society for more than two millennia and of the racialization constitutive of modern liberalism since the sixteenth century. This not only challenges the exceptionalism, which has held so much sway in the scholarship and popular thinking on caste, but also shows us how race and caste converge in emergent forms of social exclusion. In race as much as in caste, an ideology of karma, that is, just deserts for one’s behavior or works, is conjured to explain away dizzying social discrimination and inequality within the frame of a broader discourse of absolute individual equality (Bonilla-Silva 2006; Singh 2018; Steinberg 2001). The extensive accounting of behavior accruing and spent over different life cycles, speculated by Indian metaphysicians, is quite in accord with the fine calibration of reward and merit—across generations—in contemporary cultural racism.

It has not been our purpose to make a positivist claim, but rather to inductively bring attention to something insidiously timeless to social exclusion in the consciousness, the cohering ideologies of these societies far and wide. There is an uncanny resemblance in how very different cultures ideologically converge aesthetic, moral, and intellectual factors to mark a social group with inherent, irremediable inferiority as socially indigestible and to attribute it to their own behavior or karma. The distinction is overdetermined and can often be explained independently on multiple planes (economic, historical, political, psychological, or cultural), but the social effect of marking out a pariah group is recurrent. Analytically bringing together the politics of the homo sacer with the social psychology of abjection, we see that such exclusion is as vested in politics and economic interests as in their psychic correspondences. A unifier of the collective, its conscience (its “good”), it is a ready location for the sociologist to go about the truths of society that hide in plain sight. The abject is the exception that helps us study the general, a backstage, where our society’s suppressed core displays itself with great abandon.

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Notes

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