Bios, Pathos, and Life Emergent

The fifth and final chapter of Life, Emergent brings together the various strands of life and the social that have woven a swath of arguments that directs an excavation of life within an emphatic imagination of the social. This essay also approaches a reflection on the possible nature of a politics of and in life that the discussions so far lead to.

Wounding Attachment

The third chapter centers around the events of the Sikh Carnage of 1984, where the assassination of the Indian prime minister by her Sikh bodyguards led to a genocidal killing of Sikh men in many locations around India. Going against the grain of those arguments that suggest that communities, bound together by ressentiment, imbue a sense of political solidarity as well as succor to their members, the book’s ethnography traces the lines of separation and those that tenaciously sustain integration.

Emotional Geographies

The fourth chapter explores a span of civil violence in Beirut, Lebanon where the emphasis is about recognizing physical space as an immutable condition of violence and its afterlife - a condition that prolongs the emplacement of embodied experiences of violence in the social texts of suffering. For a city/nation that was organized around strictly defined neighborhoods of confessional communities, the onslaught of continuing violence inscribed itself onto these neighborhoods and marked them into territorially bounded places, literally transforming the ideal of a multicultural urban space into a patchwork city of confessional emplacements, which often led to extreme hostilities. The infusion of faith- based identity and experience in the density of a city scarred by violence, the afterlife here considers emotions of lost urban ideals and anxieties of destabilized cosmopolitanisms that are made acute by the memories and anticipations of devastating hostility.

Compassionate Citizenship

The second chapter explores the making of a ‘justice movement’ called Nyayagrah in the context of an episode of Hindu--Muslim violence in Gujarat, India. The unleashing of unprecedented violence across the state against Muslims is a well- documented occasion of “communal” violence in recent times in India. However, the afterlife that the authors visits here is the making of a justice movement that is currently gaining subterranean ground in the state but has not seen any academic reflection. Following Gandhian principles drawn from the anti-colonial movement, Satyagraha, but reincarnated in current India, Nyayagrah insists on claiming democratic citizenship through the process of legal redress.

The International Social

The first chapter focuses on the civil wars of Sierra Leone, exploring the convictions that were made in the Special Court of Sierra Leone for the first time in international criminal law under international humanitarian regimes. Delving into what makes for the meaning of humanity in “crimes against” it, the author traces the inscription of formal humanitarian discourse and practice in the making of law. In particular it looks at the international emotional response to suffering of the professionalized expression in law when it is located in the figure of violated childhood— channeling a sense of protected humanity through that figure.

Afterlife

The introduction of Life, Emergent lays down the main theoretical anchors of how the privileging of the social over the biological in contemporary bio--political theory is apprehended in this book. Two philosophical tropes, bios and pathos, are anchored and the query of life positioned for exploration in ethnographic and empirical contexts.