“That Curious Privilege of Immunity”

Here are the first words of Nasser Hussain’s first publication, a 1989 essay on Salman Rushdie’s 1983 novel Shame:

I may as well begin with an anecdote: on my last trip home to Pakistan, my parents, with a curious mixture of pride and shame, introduced me to their friends as a graduate student in history. One such friend asked me the question I had been dreading, “what history?” “British colonialism and Indian history, I suppose,” was my mumbled reply. The friend, horrified that I was using my father’s money to add to the body of knowledge of the “aggressors” across the border, retorted “and why not Pakistani history?” There were any number of reasons I could have offered. After all, I’m not even sure what Pakistani history is. Is it the narrative of the forty-two years that have elapsed since the Muslims demanded that the departing British rulers divide India into two states, one for the Muslims and the other for the Hindus? Or, since the nationalism that produced Pakistan distinguished itself on religious terms, is it the history of the Indian Muslims traced back through the centuries? Either way, I’m not very interested in the former and do not believe in the latter. I could have said that I do not believe in the concept of the nation itself, but that is not quite true, since a nationalistic strain is implicit in my critiques of colonial knowledge undertaken in a western academy. Finally, thinking that “interested” and “belief” were not terms this man would accept, and believing him to have the power to revoke a membership card that I was not quite ready to part with, I simply replied, “O yes, Pakistani history too.” ¹

The fact that these words appeared in a journal called Qui Parle (French for “who speaks?”) is food for thought. I say this because it seems to me that Nasser’s first published words help us respond to one of the questions that I think confronts us today, namely, the question of who was speaking when Nasser Hussain was speaking.

Nasser’s general purpose in his 1989 essay is to outline what he calls the “dialectics” of the post-colonial critic’s relation to the conditions of possibility for post-colonial criticism itself. ² In Nasser’s view, post-colonial criticism depends for its emergence on the very colonial education and nationalism it also criticizes, and it is therefore structured by its internal contradictions and complicities. ³ This is especially the case, Nasser argues, for post-colonial critics whose criticism is, as Nasser puts it, “additionally marked by a geographical displacement, an exile of sorts, both temporary or permanent, self-imposed or enforced.” ⁴ Through a detailed reading of Rushdie’s novel Shame, Nasser comes to a series of conclusions about what he calls “Rushdie’s position in the production of his texts.” ⁵

On the one hand, Nasser will argue, Rushdie writes as an historian of a certain sort. Rushdie’s writing, Nasser says, has the effect of “reminding nations of their odd beginnings, their tenuous existence, and even their impulse to forget.” ⁶ This position, Nasser continues, depends on Rushdie’s prior ability to “map out a space for himself, a space at some geographical distance to his subject.” ⁷ Rushdie can write critically about the nation’s cultural and political excesses – ranging from its consumerism to its military dictators, its corrupt civil servants, and its bought judges – only because Rushdie both belongs to and does not belong to the epistemic space opened up and determined by the nation. Rushdie can write a critical history, in other words, only to the extent that he remains exterior to and separate from the same space he also inhabits. For Nasser, it is precisely this curious position that is demarcated by the hyphen in the term “post-colonial.”

Hyphens are radically ambivalent signifiers, for they simultaneously connect and set apart; they simultaneously represent both distance and connection, belonging and not-belonging. What is even more curious about a hyphenated pair of words is that meaning cannot reside in one word or the other, but can only be understood in movement. Furthermore, I would argue that the “post” is figured in terms of a question: what does it mean to come after the colonial experience? ⁸

The hyphen, therefore: mark of a dialectical post-colonialism, a post-colonialism focused less on hybridity, orientalism, or the catachresis of subaltern speech than on contradictions and complicities whose movements are both historical (because they take place in terms of a “before” and, above all, an “after”) and spatial (characterized by exile, displacement, exteriority, separation, distance, and movement). Above all, mark of the question that emerges from this ambivalent dialectic: “What does it mean to come after the colonial experience?” This question amounts to a critique of the present, to be sure: it is a way to ask, “who are we, today? Where is this all going?” But it is also something more.

This is because, on the other hand, as Nasser will proceed to show, Rushdie cannot sustain the exteriority he requires in order to continue writing critical history. The very movement that is enabled by Rushdie’s distance and separation, his exile, also undoes its own conditions of possibility. The more the novel Shame proceeds, Nasser notes, the more that Rushdie begins to use the first person pronoun “I,” and the more Rushdie engages in discourse that could be classified as autobiographical. ⁹ But the more that Rushdie discovers that he cannot narrate a critical history of post-colonial Pakistan without also introducing himself into his own narration, the more he himself, in his living present, becomes a part of the past he criticizes, and the more he therefore undoes the very distance and separation, the very epistemic space, that enabled him to begin writing critical history in the first place.

What holds for historiography goes double for epistemic space. Rushdie’s claim, Nasser notes, is that he lives in London, yet proposes to go home to Pakistan in his novels. ¹⁰ His positioning, Nasser writes, is therefore “doubly cartographic: Rushdie’s position is determined by a whole cartography of partition, migration, return, and Rushdie himself draws on this cartographic mode to develop an imaginative geography in which he can work out a new position of belonging and not-belonging.” ¹¹ And yet, the more that Rushdie writes, and therefore too the more that he goes home in his writings, the less his very writing can sustain itself with recourse to the distance from home that allowed it to begin in the first place. The more the novelist of exile writes his novels, the more he goes home; but the more he goes home, the more he undoes the exile that enabled his novels in the first place.

Nasser therefore arrives at the central question of his essay, which is also, he notes, “one that the texts themselves pose.” “Does not the critic’s position become vulnerable and lose that curious privilege of immunity that exile afforded it?” ¹² For Nasser, I think it’s safe to say, this will be a rhetorical question. Later in the essay, after all, Nasser will argue that the more that Shame (the novel) narrates shame (the emotion), the more the novel fails to contain or house shame (the emotion) within the content of its narration, and the more that shame (the emotion) contaminates the very narrator whose exemption from shame enabled his criticism of shameful things in the first place. “Thus,” Nasser writes, “as Shame collects the emotion of its title, exemption is a luxury the narrator is not allowed.” ¹³ Or, as Nasser will say later still: “Rushdie cannot exempt himself from the cultural contradictions he both chronicles and creates.” ¹⁴

The result is a dynamic Nasser will call “textual implosion.” ¹⁵ On Nasser’s read, Rushdie’s novel ultimately cannot withstand the pressure exerted upon it by its own enabling contradictions and complicities, just as Rushdie himself cannot maintain a separate, distinct position from the very past he also problematizes. When the novelist of exile goes home in his writing, therefore, he does not come closer to a homecoming. Quite the opposite: he comes closer to the impossibility of sustaining his own act of writing, since it was only a certain exteriority in time and space that allowed him to begin writing in the first place.

What Nasser seems to be after here, in other words, is the way in which Rushdie’s loss of “the privilege of immunity” – or, we might say, the gradual withdrawal of the epistemic “exemption” that initially enabled the writing of the post-colonial critic in the first place – puts Rushdie in a curious position, not only in increasing proximity to himself, but also in increasing proximity to a crisis immanent in himself, or even to the immanent crisis he himself is. This is, to be sure, an argument about the curious quality of shame in Rushdie’s writing, which operates, as Nasser points out, in the manner of a creeping and uncontainable liquid, of a collective disease. ¹⁶ The shame at work in Rushdie’s novel will therefore have a logic and dynamic of its own, and it is not hard to understand how a certain movement of shame will undo the hyphenated dialectic of the post-colonial. Over the course of Rushdie’s novel, after all, the attentive reader will note that the object of narration (shame) increasingly will merge with the subject who narrates (Rushdie as author). If this novel therefore should bear the title Shame, it is perhaps because its very plot consists of nothing other than this creeping movement, nothing other than the dialectic by which Rushdie’s narration of shame increasingly itself becomes shameful, increasingly itself assumes a shameful form. And yet Nasser’s attention to this contact between content and form, this contamination of form by content, suggests that he is after something else as well: an argument about literary form, or more precisely about the curiously implosive form shame assumes in Rushdie’s writing. For where the content of a narrative (in this case, shame) creeps into and saturates literary form, form is no longer form at all. It becomes non-identical with itself, or better, it begins to become identical with the loss of form, with the opposite of form, with formlessness itself.

“Textual implosion” would then appear to be Nasser’s term for, on the one hand, the inability of Rushdie’s literary form to contain or house the shame it narrates. If the critic of shame is also a critic who houses a crisis in himself, this is in part because shame would appear to gravitate toward itself, to pull itself in toward itself, to tend toward excessive proximity with itself, or in short, to implode. This would explain why the narration of shame itself becomes so filled with shame that it ends up overflowing with shame, eventually filling even its own narrator with shame. But because the resulting implosion also entails a complete loss of literary form, because it results in a complete formlessness, we should not be altogether surprised when this implosion should end up manifesting itself in literary content as its very opposite, namely, as an explosion. As Nasser points out, Shame (the novel) ends when Sufiya Zinobia, the figure who most allegorizes shame (the emotion), returns to her house. At the opening of the novel, she lived inside this house: it was able to contain her as well as the shame she embodies. At the close of the novel, however, she watches from outside her home as an explosion demolishes the house she used to occupy. Nasser will quote from Rushdie:

She stood there blinking stupidly, unsteady on her feet, as if she didn’t know that all the stories had to end together … that on the day of reckoning the judges are not exempt from judgment. ¹⁷

“Judges are not exempt from judgment”: Nasser will repeat this phrase once more, almost as a formula, before then moving on to his own conclusion, which in turn will make explicit the implicit doubling between his essay and Rushdie’s novel.

Just as Rushdie’s “novel of leavetaking” does not end as a moment of departure for the narrator but only emphasizes further that “judges are not exempt from judgment,” so the circuit of critique and complicity of my text’s travels cannot end with its closure. Ultimately, the post-colonial critic’s relationship to history and cultural identity is one of possibility, perhaps, but always a fait accompli. ¹⁸

No one who attentively reads Nasser’s essay from start to finish will disagree that this ending comes suddenly and out of nowhere, that it arrives way too soon and far too unexpectedly. “Unexpectedly,” in fact, is exactly the word that Nasser himself uses to describe what he calls the “leave-taking” in Rushdie’s text, which he here positions explicitly as the double of his own. ¹⁹ It is hard to tell whether this ending is more startling than enigmatic, or more enigmatic than startling. That Nasser himself says that it is no ending at all – his text, he says, “cannot end with its closure” – puts his text’s end in a curious relation with his text’s beginning. This is an essay, remember, that opened by saying “I may as well begin …” which is nothing if not a curious way to begin. In its standard usage, the idiomatic phrase “I may as well …” typically suggests that one has arrived at a decision despite profound ambivalence or perhaps even undecidability. Nasser’s use of it at the opening of his essay is consistent with its standard usage: it will not be long before he positions himself in the no man’s land between two discourses, the nationalist and the religious, that would have provided him with unambiguous answers to the question, “who speaks?” (“I’m not very interested in the former,” he says, “and do not believe in the latter”). And yet Nasser’s use of this idiom is also considerably more intricate, considerably more wry and ironic, than its standard usage, since he will put it into relation with the very speech act in which he is also engaged. To begin with this phrase is therefore, in an important sense, not to begin at all, since it is to begin by positioning oneself in the midst of unspoken deliberations that already are underway about whether or not to begin. It is to begin by suggesting that one already has begun, with reference to an implicit beginning that already is underway, and to which one’s own explicit beginning is but a response. One is reminded of the beginning of The Merchant of Venice, which opens with Antonio saying “in sooth, I know not why I am so sad.” ²⁰ When Antonio begins in this way, he makes reference to a prior sadness that is not only unspoken but also remains unspeakable, a sadness that occasions the ensuing drama without also ever itself becoming fully legible in that drama.

It would make sense, in any case, for an essay that opened in this way – that began by implicitly calling into question its own act of beginning – to end by explicitly calling its own ending into question as well. It’s as if there were no good way either to begin or to end, as if both beginning and end alike were saturated with an undecidability that cannot be escaped or avoided, only accepted. Both beginning and end, therefore, and end perhaps even more than beginning, raise profound questions. Start with the essay’s last word, accompli, which contains inside of itself the root of another word Nasser uses repeatedly throughout his essay: “complicity.” In both cases, we are looking at Latinates and in particular at legal Latinates: “complicity” is the name for the crime of conspiracy under Roman Law; and fait accompli, the last word of Nasser’s essay, is a technical term designating an irreversible decision about which I first hear only after it has been made, such that my only possible relation to that decision is belated acceptance. ²¹ Continuing to work backwards, moving from end to beginning, we find Nasser’s essay to be populated by still other juridical forms. He will speak, in particular, of the judge who is not exempt from judgment, of the narrator who is not exempt from the contradictions of his own narration, and above all of the critic who loses “that curious privilege of immunity.” Exemption, privilege, immunity: a series of juridical forms that all are structured around the same paradox, namely the possibility of a lawful exteriority to law. And in each case, what Nasser seems to be after is the way in which law’s loss of its own lawful exteriority to itself does not assume the form of twilight or desuetude, of evanescence or diminuendo, but instead of an extreme and explosive compression the dynamics of which resemble nothing so much as the physics of nuclear fusion.

It is worth noting that the word Nasser uses to describe this dynamic – “implosion” – does not appear at all in Rushdie’s Shame. We might not then be off the mark to treat this term as a point where Nasser’s otherwise systematic doubling with Rushdie begins to fail, and productively so – a point, in other words, where we begin to learn something about who was speaking when Nasser Hussain was speaking. Rushdie, as Nasser notes, writes of shame as a communicable disease, as an affect that effects a contamination between content and form, between narration and narrator. Nasser, by contrast, will write of shame as an explosive implosion of a series of juridical forms all structured around the paradox of lawful exteriority to law. The post-colonial critic whose portrait comes into view here is one who asks the question of what it would mean to write – or, in other words, what sort of curiosity is possible – when the critic lacks immunity to that which he critiques, and who therefore dwells in immediate and direct community with that from which immunity otherwise would seem to protect the critic, namely, shame understood in juridical terms as complicity. Whenever such a critic writes, and whatever else he writes about, such a critic would then write not only about shame but also about complicity, and indeed would treat the implosion of shame as the point of departure for writing about an explosion of complicity. Above all, the critic who is alive to this explosive implosion, the critic who treats his excessive proximity to his own shame not as the end of a novel but as the beginning of an inquiry into his own contradictions and complicities, would be anything but a critic who stops writing and withdraws into silence. He would be a critic who takes from Rushdie’s Shame the conclusion that “judges are not exempt from judgment,” and who finds that conclusion – precisely – curious.

And that, I think, is what I will most remember and miss most about hearing Nasser Hussain speak, namely, a style of curiosity that was, in every sense of the word, itself curious. Nasser had an unusual way of being intrigued by the world. He had a desire to know that was more than just a little bit peculiar, more than just a little bit at “a slight angle to reality,” ²² more than just a little bit askew and aslant, more than just a little bit funny or indeed queer. His manner of being inquisitive was always also, above all, consistently surprising and consistently extraordinary. And nowhere was his curiosity more pronounced, it seems to me, than when he would bring it to bear upon the extraordinary measures internal to law itself, which he did consistently in the writings he would publish after 1989. In 1995, for example, he would defend a dissertation outlining another explosive implosion of another form of lawful exteriority to law – the jurisprudence of emergency and martial law under conditions of colonial rule. ²³ In the year 2000, the newly credentialed legal historian, writing now with Melissa Ptacek, would produce one of the earliest and best reviews of Giorgio Agamben’s study of the sovereign exception, which is nothing if not a legal suspension of law. ²⁴ In 2004, meanwhile, he would turn from the theory of law to jurisprudence proper, writing the history of the lawful exteriority to law in the form of the amici briefs he helped write for two Supreme Court cases. ²⁵ And between 2004 and 2006, writing now with Austin Sarat, he would examine not only another legal suspension of law, this time the “lawful lawlessness” of the sovereign right of clemency, but also the complicities and contradictions at work in the “pardon tales” of those who exercised that notoriously slippery right. ²⁶

One could go on. It would be interesting, for example, to develop a reading of Nasser’s 2006 essay on Guantanamo and his 2007 essay on hyperlegality alongside his 1989 arguments about implosive explosion, since hyperlegality in Nasser’s analysis is nothing other than an “explosion” of bureaucratic “race thinking” that occurs when extra-legal measures are legalized (an iteration of the dynamic that, in 1989, he called “implosion”). ²⁷ The point, in any case, should be clear. A dog never sniffs just once, and part of what made Nasser so extraordinary was just how doggedly he tracked the various iterations of the curious paradox he outlined in 1989 – namely, that to think the post-colonial is to think an explosive implosion of the forms by which law attempts to establish its own exteriority to itself. In his writings over the next two decades, it seems to me, this paradox would not cease to make him curious, and he would not cease to be after it, in exactly the manner of a dog who is after a scent that is imperceptible to everyone else but captivating to him. In so many publications, and across so many years, throughout so many genres and disciplines, Nasser dealt again and again with the same basic problematic. If we were to translate that problematic into a claim, it might sound something like the following: it is both possible and desirable to use precedents from colonial law to understand the ways in which various forms of lawful exteriority to law have imploded so explosively in the curious complicities of our shameful present. That this is a highly original mode of post-colonial critique, a highly original approach to the critique of the present, seems to me to go without saying: we simply do not find this problematic developed with such rigor or clarity, if at all, in any of the field’s other leading lights. Whatever else he taught us – and there was indeed much, much else – Nasser Hussain taught us how and why this problematic should intrigue us. He taught us how and why it should make us curious, how and why we should not exempt ourselves from the complicities that lead us to it and that result from it, how and why we should not cease to be after its scent. This is a teaching that can and should still guide us even today, especially today, as we reel from the loss of the one who taught us to follow it.