Daily Times

“Music, when soft voices die, vibrates in the memory; Odors, when sweet violets sicken, live within the sense they quicken.” In Shelley’s famous poem, sorrow embracing romance sets the gloomy symphony of an obituary. Not many people have the knack to turn an obituary into a romance.

While writing obituaries, people keep their cards close to their chest, which in normal circumstances is used for thumping. The idea is not to mention the weaknesses of the deceased, even if it requires weaving a red herring around his memory to make him appear gentle, benign and possibly a saint. If his shortcomings are too embarrassing or vivid, they are presented in a way that they look no more but mere tongue slips.

The deceased’s qualities, the mere quantities of the rare virtues of the society are exaggerated profoundly even when a society has already lost its reason and judgment has fled to the brutish beast. The obituary is usually a pretension as if his “heart is in the coffin there with Caesar”, and he “must pause till it comes back” to him (Shakespeare).

The narrative of intellectual honesty, usually dishonest, leads to the sabotage of reality, and when reality itself is paranoid, “paranoid thinking becomes the rational response” (Adorno). The evil that men do, Shakespeare says, lives after them but for Freud, the crime of the individual has its genesis in the crime of the collective. Hence, labeling an individual is exonerating the society while stereotyping the individual.

Is it important to write an obituary of an individual, a mere ensemble of social relations who has little or no control over the conditions of his life? Following the relative nature of truth, probably there is nothing right or wrong about it. In grief, in sorrow or in a fit of self-projection, people seek their catharsis or gratify their narcissism by writing obituaries though they are least helpful for the person who has walked away from the world of alienation and persecution.

However, one question remains pertinent: On what authority a writer can pen down an obituary? Who gives him the right to restore a person to a pedestal or pillory without his prior permission? And most of all when one’s own claim of existence depends upon conformity and the fragile being has already been banished for his position in the productive processes that refuse to give him enough room to think. Can a walking shadow, a breathing dead man write an obituary, a history of a deceased individual, in reality, a continuation of the history of humankind?

Cadavers do not write; they surrender their rights to express themselves. This is what death is, a defeat, a scientific failure to address the biggest challenge faced by humanity, a lost utopia, and liberation without freedom. “How terrible to face death without ever having claimed the freedom even in all its dangers”, Nietzsche inquires.

People do not follow Nietzsche’s advice of dying at the right age that is why death has not turned into a festival. They die in pain, in misery and suffering. A cursory glance at Palestine, Kashmir, Middle East and close to home in Balochistan will prove the point. A drone kills dozens; a midnight operation sweeps many a youngster from their homes and they eclipse as if they never existed. The unending holocaust persists and history or the pre-history of humankind continues to repeat itself in the shape of a tragedy.

Contrary to an individual’s death, the annihilation of masses is no moment of celebration. A hideous and grisly tragedy of this proportion and magnitude numbs the mind. It needs no obituary because people especially writers do not align themselves with them. An anonymous death does not need a mention since it creates no sense of belonging or identification. The multitude that die are not people but collateral. It is a catastrophe, but the catastrophe of the unknown, of an alienated mass of an alienated world. Death of a mass, a faceless crowd does not stir emotions, hence it rarely influences the writers to write an obituary. For the army of superfluous people, not useful for the productive process, the absence or presence becomes meaningless.

However, some writers bound by their humanity and professional integrity chose to write the obituary of the ordinary people, the unnamed and unsung martyrs whose sacrifices were indispensable to the outcome of any battle. The obituary of those massacred in Hiroshima, My Lai, Santiago, Gujarat and several other places where imperialist terror pulverised and annihilated humanity testifies to the fact that some historians continue to honour their promise with the people because people and not heroes make history. However, the process is not one-dimensional, it too has a grisly side to it.

Not long ago, Europe crazed by its wits embraced fascism and created Auschwitz laying the foundation of the modern Holocaust, the infernos against Marxists, gypsies, and Jews. Under the new capitalist world order, the US and Lord Moyne both turned their backs on the Jews. The persecution of Jews, Adorno states, “like any persecution cannot be separated from that system of order. However, successfully at times, it may be concealed, force is the essential nature of this order”.

Immediately after the war, the victors, the beneficiaries largely wrote the history of the grisly crimes. The exercise Bordiga says is to make sure that “the horrors of capitalist death must make the proletariat forget the horrors of capitalist life and the fact that the two are indissolubly connected. Using the corpses of the victims of capital to try to hide the reality, to have the corpses serve as protection for capital, is the most despicable way of using them to the ultimate degree”.

Since then, the plague of capitalism has inundated the world. Religion, racism, and nationalism have turned human existence into a farce. The human being is no more autonomous, the nullity has taken over his subjectivity. Love thy enemy has long been changed into burning the heretic on the stake, buying bombs and blessing them and destroying the countries to produce more bombs. God has been excommunicated. From Gaza to Delhi and from Idlib to Golan, history is writing the obituary of the human being who once was alive but killed by the vampire of dead capital. Trump, Modi, Bolsonaro and the generals are faces of the faceless vampire. The vampires are living cadavers, the guillotines. Neither machines nor cadavers can write the obituaries and least of all their own.

The writer is an Australian-Pakistani based in Sydney. He has authored several books on Marxism (Gramscian and Frankfurt schools) and history