Slavoj Žižek has brought attention to the fact of the guilt that is felt by individuals and collectives in the developed world owing to the perceived atrocities that these societies might have perpetrated and might still be perpetrating on other societies and cultures that were considered as less ‘advanced’. Žižek has with characteristic acumen foregrounded the fact that this sort of guilt felt in the west elides the progressive aspects of western influence over other cultures and civilisations. The sort of guilt epidemic that pervades the global north has to be tempered with realism. The progressive left in the advanced world indulges in this sort of self-flagellation without admitting even the remote possibility of a potential progressive effect of European dominance. This is made anathema by pernicious doctrines like the infamous ‘Case for Colonialism’ which was an attempted defense of the colonisation of oriental cultures.
While the guilt that is felt in the west might have justification in historical fact, the emancipatory elements inherent in the Islamic-Christian streams of thought are also relevant. The cancellation of this legacy makes this guilt self-defeating and pointless. Interesting to add here, would be a symmetric guilt that is felt by the migrant in the west, who is portrayed in the right wing media as trying to snatch the bread away from the mouths of infants. This is nothing short of atrocious as most migrants have made immense sacrifices on their way to so-called better-lives in the west. The guilt that they feel for being there is also totally unjustified. But there is a systematic nurturing of such guilt in the occidental societies, which have effaced racism from the public sphere, but only for it to return in systematised form such as detention camps. Do the inmates in these camps feel some sort of guilt? If they are educated and have prior exposure to Western intellectual traditions in their home countries, chances are that they might feel a sort of guilt.
The elite from the orient also have reason to feel guilt about the injustices that have been perpetrated upon the subalterns and non-dominant castes and classes in the east. Thus the guilt of the elite migrant and the citizen of the ‘advanced’ world are mutually entangled. That sort of guilt takes the form of shame and an inability to sense what one feels in the body for in a state of guilt the human impulse is to try and escape the body which has become uninhabitable owing to the shame.
Umar Nizarudeen is at Goldsmiths, University of London. He has a PhD in Bhakti Studies from the Centre for English Studies in JNU, New Delhi. His poems and articles have been published in Vayavya, Muse India, Culture Cafe Journal of the British Library, The Hindu, The New Indian Express, The Bombay Review, The Madras Courier, FemAsia, Sabrang India, India Gazette London, Ibex Press Year’s Best Selection etc.
Žižekian Analysis 