…dass der Vater doch schon gestorben war und es nur nicht wusste.
[…the father was quite dead, only he did not know it.]
—Sigmund Freud (2006: 428)

 

A hero of neo-colonial times

ACCORDING to Ashis Nandy, a no more unknown Indian, Sigmund Freud once claimed that the state had forbidden to the individual the practice of ‘wrong-doing’ not because of a desire to abolish it but because of a desire to monopolise it herself. (Nandy 2005: 90) I cannot bet it if Muhammad Yunus has ever read Freud but I think it not impossible that he read Asish Nandy. Today he is pushing his own right to ‘wrong-doing’, very hard into the political culture of Bangladesh.

Muhammad Yunus is a great prize winner. Arguably is also a good fighter for many other things, including political power. He even floated, thank god, a stillborn political party. Even so, Yunus admits of no wrong-doing in holding on to a job close to twelve years beyond legal tenure.

In claiming his own he, nonetheless, is now rubbing shoulders with the nation’s administration. The question to ask is: is Muhammad Yunus in politics, or is he not? Is he inside and outside the beast? Partisans are going perhaps beyond ‘the reality principle’ in telling us that as ‘the father of micro-credit’ Yunus may stand above the law of the land. A prize-winner or a founding father, presumably, could have done no wrong.

A founder never gets old, they seem to argue. They seem to be pushing that a father is indispensable for man. The father of something need not be a subject to anything, even to ethics of accountability, partisans are arguing. They only forget that, not long ago, in his Nobel lecture Yunus himself admitted: ‘Of course, politics can mean accountability.’ (Yunus 2007: 9)

Respectable newspapers, even the outspoken arch-nationalist New Age, seem to be mum on the legitimacy or otherwise of imperial homilies on this national question. Who is who in this growing empire at home? If a government supposedly representative of the people can do aplenty, why can’t I too do my fair share of wrongs? The Yunus partisans seem to be asking just this much.

Why resist a review, let alone a full-scale probe? A review can do you no harm, especially if you have nothing to lose? It can’t hurt especially if you are a father? The question, however, is not who is the father. On the contrary it is as Freud asked: ‘what is a father?’ The only good father is a dead father, as the founder of psychoanalysis suggests.

My own Freudian temptations are stirred in a crucial interrogative: where does an idea begin to hurt, where resists it in becoming? Where does a story precisely begin to make no sense? Where, in other words, is this will to ignorance—the resistance to knowledge—located? What is it, I ask in this essay, that our self-proclaimed daughters (and some sons too) of micro-credit are trying to rescue us from? If the son solved the riddle, he became the father, i.e. the King, as did Oedipus in that myth of myths. Besides, he married the queen Jokaste as a surplus value. That the queen happened to be his real mother was part of the problem. A lad may not know that he had already got his dad killed but only fleeing from killing the imaginary one.

 

An imaginary father

THE Yunus affair drew out, in its sub judice state, plenty of public reaction. It felt perfectly at home in empire. Forces of right and left, of nation and empire, politicians and pimps, women and men, journalists and lawyers, eleven and one, radicals and police-spies of sorts—all of them have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise a great wrong done by a small government.

The US ambassador in Dhaka lost no time saying his government was ‘deeply troubled’. High-profile statesmen as US Senator John Kerry felt obliged to express their ‘deep concern’. As a lead story in New Age put it, the government action ‘sparks protests all over’. (March 6)

A notable protest stands out in my eyes. My eyesight is weak for many years, yet I see a whole circle of reasons here. As New Age puts it, nineteen ‘women activists’ in a joint statement expressed concern at the ‘harassment’ of Muhammad Yunus, who in their estimation had contributed to the empowerment of the poor, especially rural poor women, through alleviation of their poverty.

New Age quotes a big chunk of the statement. ‘Today,’ the statement reads, ‘nearly 20 million poor women of Bangladesh have been empowered through micro-credit and they contributed to the development of the country.’ ‘It should be realised by all concerned,’ the statement contends, ‘that showing disrespect to the father of micro-credit is tantamount to disrespecting the 20 million women.’  One wonders, why? By what logic, one may ask? Why should asking one to retire at a certain age, by law or by custom whatsoever, should be seen as some ‘disrespect’ or worse, ‘harassment’?

‘Millions of women of Bangladesh,’ this quite extraordinary statement warns, ‘will not tolerate this insult.’ ‘We women of the country are shocked and offended by the government’s action and demand an end to this situation in a proper and graceful manner,’ said the statement. I, for one, sense trouble with such a reading.

Permit me to ask: why, what are the stakes, then. One can just as well not refrain from asking either: who fathers the father? There are cases, one knows, where you might as well grow up without a father, sometimes with a just substitute. ‘Like it or not,’ Fanon famously proclaims, ‘the Oedipus complex is far from coming into being among Negroes.’ That philosopher with aplomb advances the claim that ‘in the French Antilles 97 percent of the families cannot produce one Oedipal neurosis.’ (Fanon 1952: 123-24; 1970: 108)

Fanon, unlike Malinowski, argues that the matriarchal structure is not the only cause for the absence of Oedipus complex in the Antilles. It is colonialism, stupid, says he in so many words. ‘In the Antilles,’ Fanon contends, the dominant ‘view of the world is white because no black voice exists.’

‘A European familiar with the current trends of Negro poetry, for example,’ Fanon wrote in 1952, ‘would be amazed to learn that as late as 1940 no Antillean found it possible to think of himself as a negro. It was only with the appearance of Aimé Césaire that the acceptance of negritude and the statement of its claims began to be perceptible.’ (Fanon 1970: 108)

 

Anxiety of discovery

IN HIS Nobel Prize lecture delivered in Oslo, Norway on December 10, 2006, Muhammad Yunus went to recount it all, the story of his fathering micro-credit. He told the world how he decided and eventually succeeded in 1983, to create a separate bank for the poor. ‘In 1974,’ reminisced our speaker, ‘I found it difficult to teach elegant theories of economics in the university classroom, against the backdrop of a terrible famine in Bangladesh.’ ‘Suddenly,’ added Muhammad Yunus, ‘I felt the emptiness of those theories in the face of crushing hunger and poverty.’ (Yunus 2007: 239; emphasis added)

On hearing it all, the signifier ‘suddenly’ to be precise, I couldn’t help recalling George Orwell’s famous old essay ‘Shooting an Elephant’, published in 1936. It is hardly necessary to recapitulate it here. Ranajit Guha, another once upon a time unknown Indian, puts it in a capsule. (Orwell 1950, Guha 2005)

On being called upon to deal with a rampaging elephant, a small town police officer in Moulmein, a town in late colonial Burma, arms himself with a gun. The animal in a state of must had gone berserk, killed its mahout, destroyed parts of a slum, and was on a rampage threatening more lives and properties. On approaching closer, however, the police officer realises that the animal had already calmed down and there would be no point shooting it. However, a large crowd of onlookers, perhaps two thousand strong, had gathered there.

‘And suddenly I realized that,’ Orwell reports, ‘I should have to shoot the elephant after all. The people expected it of me and I had got to do it; I could feel their two thousand wills pressing me forward, irresistibly.’ That suddenness of realisation, let me suggest, resonates well with Yunus’s own sudden realisation of emptiness, a phenomenon of anxiety.

The year, in Yunus’s own telling, was 1974. One listens not only to what you are saying alone. Silence, sometimes, speaks louder. Yunus doesn’t speak, not even all of a sudden, of that famous ‘assault on world poverty’, punched right through the world’s ear by Robert McNamara or the World Bank in the early 1970s. Is Yunus afraid or ashamed too of naming names, even of such illustrious ones at home as General Ziaur Rahman’s or of HM Ershad’s? A father in heaven sometimes serves better.

Muhammad Yunus had returned home, in June 1972, to Bangladesh after resigning his position as assistant professor at Middle Tennessee State University in the United States. His decision to return, he tells us, ‘was stimulated by the battle for Bangladeshi independence,’ and he was eager to do his part to help build a free and prosperous new nation. (Yunus 2007: 44)

 

The uncanny

LET’S then return to shooting the old elephant. The English police officer, called to help, felt beleaguered as he found thousands of the Burmese closing in to watch him shoot the beast. In a situation ‘packed with crowds and action,’ there was no time for a liberal conscience to waste. The dilemma, lucidly formulated by Guha, was hanging between two poles. An uneasy, doubt-ridden, yet dutiful colonialist overwhelmed by a sense of isolation from the people he rules and hates as a racially and culturally inferior species and who yet cries for his own freedom was the first. The second pole was ‘the dirty work of Empire’—an empire he knows is oppressive, exploitative, and even evil. The evil, in turn, takes her revenge, victimises her instruments.

An instrument loses its freedom invariably. In the register of anxiety, the coloniser loses paternity. ‘Trapped in the image of the sahib fabricated by sahibs themselves in order to impress the natives,’ remarks Ranajit Guha, ‘he is now forced to live up to it by doing what the natives expect a sahib to do. They expect him to shoot the elephant. He does not want to shoot it. He must shoot it.’ (Guha 2005: 45)

Clearly at issue in this dilemma is the possibility or otherwise of freedom staring the liberal in face. Suddenness of confrontation unsettles the liberal, practitioner of freedom; its urgency is fraught with a terror he finds hard to bear. ‘Seized by anxiety,’ Guha notes, ‘he has to decide whether to throw off his mask or continue to wear it, to assert his own will or be guided by that of others, to play or not to play sahib before the natives—in sum, to shoot or not to shoot the elephant.’ (Guha 2005: 45)

The dilemma of having to destroy an animal the officer would rather leave alone, at this moment, leaves only himself alone. ‘Fear’ thus becomes ‘anxiety’. ‘Anxiety is always defined as appearing suddenly, as arising,’ says Jacques Lacan. (Lacan 1988: 68)

In the event, as we all know, George Orwell decided to act as a white man must and shot the animal. His moral dilemma had to be resolved in a way that couldn’t live up to its profession of faith, freedom of conscience. The ‘glimpse’ of what the colonialist called ‘the real nature of imperialism’ turned out, on close inspection, to be a rather different beast from his initial take of empire as a tyranny imposed on the natives.

Orwell, that supposed liberal, a hero of the British left, overcame his anxiety of freedom by coming firmly down on the side of un-freedom. This was unmistakably ‘an un-freedom articulated doubly as the native’s subjection to colonial rule and the colonialist’s to native expectation about what he must do in order not to lose face.’ (Guha 2005: 45)

It is all coded in the signifier ‘suddenly’. It deflects, in other words, from the path of liberalism and embraces empire. ‘Yet,’ to recapitulate, ‘as the crisis ticks away, a terrible sense of isolation gathers in the midst of that tumult, lifts off, and extends beyond the town to all of the empire—to all that goes by that name territorially as well as conceptually.’ (Guha 2005: 42)

A two-fold transformation takes place in our own neo-colonial order. It now is the turn of the native. He is seized by anxiety and lives up to the expectation of the neo-colonialist on what he must do in order not to lose face and to resolve his own moral dilemma. Anxiety is overcome by way of exclusion, by opting openly for enthusiasm, a mood ‘consonant with all the triumphalist and progressivist moments of imperialism’—not excluding ‘its wars of conquest, annexation, and pacification’.

The native inherits that anxiety of empire and pretends he is pristine, almost primitive. ‘I originally became involved in the poverty issue not as a policy maker, scholar, or researcher, says Muhammad Yunus, self-made ‘banker to the poor, ‘but because poverty was all around me, and I could not turn away from me.’ (Yunus 2007: 44)

Anxiety, as Heidegger says, is not only anxiety in the face of something, but as a state-of-mind, it is also anxiety about something. Anxiety thus takes away from ‘the being’ the possibility of understanding itself, as it falls, in terms of the ‘world’ and the way things have been publicly interpreted. ‘In anxiety,’ as Martin Heidgger says, ‘one feels “uncanny”.’ (Heidegger 1962: 233; 1996: 176)

Now come listen to the baby throwing his own birth-water away. He attributes it all to suddenness. To wit: ‘I joined the Economics Department at Chittagong University and became chairman of the department. I enjoyed teaching, and I was looking forward to an academic career. But something happened that made this impossible—the terrible Bangladesh famine of 1974-75.’ (Yunus 2007: 44)

‘Today,’ it is in late 2006, as Yunus was speaking at Oslo, we are told, ‘Grameen Bank gives loans to nearly 7.0 million poor people, 97 percent of whom are women, in 73,000 villages in Bangladesh.’ Since Grameen Bank introduced housing loans in 1984, as Muhammad Yunus informs the auditorium, ‘they have been used to construct 640,000 houses.’

‘Since it opened,’ continues Yunus, ‘the bank has given out loans totalling about US $6.0 billion. The repayment rate is 99 percent. Grameen bank routinely makes a profit.’ That Muhammad Yunus avoids saying how much is unmistakable. He would not stir the lower regions.

‘Financially,’ as the story goes on, ‘it is self-reliant and has not taken donor money since 1995.’ Deposits and own resources of Grameen Bank today, we are told, amount to 143 percent of all outstanding loans. ‘According to Grameen Bank’s internal survey,’ claims Yunus, ‘58 percent of our borrowers have crossed the poverty line.’ To crown it all, Muhammad Yunus adds, 80 percent of the poor families have already been reached with micro-credit. ‘We are hoping,’ he adds, ‘that by 2010, 100 percent of the poor families would be reached.’ (Yunus 2007: 241)

 

Seduction of the nineteen

THERE is of course reason for many women to be grateful to Muhammad Yunus. ‘Thanks to your prize,’ as Yunus tells the Nobel Committee, ‘nine proud women from the villages of Bangladesh are at the ceremony today as Nobel laureates, giving an altogether new meaning to the Nobel Peace Prize.’ (Yunus 2007: 237)

Muhammad Yunus gives the reason why 97 percent of Grameen Bank loan recipients are women: ‘We focused on women because we found giving loans to women always brought more benefits to the family.’ (Yunus 2007: 240)

Yunus, unfortunately, never gives the macro picture, but even the meagre information that he provides can speak for itself. If 80 percent of the poor families have already been reached with micro-credit by 2006 and as projected then 100 percent by 2010, it certainly amounts to a revolution.

Secondly, a question one can certainly ask is this: in talking of crossing the poverty line over why does the Nobel laureate cite only Grameen Bank’s internal survey data? And lastly, whatever happened to the remainder? There is also some truth in his statement: ‘Grameen Bank routinely makes a profit.’ But he does not cite a percentage.

That is part of the reason I was taken in by the vociferousness of the nineteen ‘women activists’ statement. People have a right to know. If Grameen Bank and its affiliated corporations are transparent then what is it there for them to fear? Why resist the inquiry or in official jargon the review. Why has the fear turned to an anxiety?

‘Government is often good at creating things but not so good at shutting them down when they are no longer needed or become burdens,’ no less a person than Yunus has not long ago written this. ‘Vested interests—especially jobs—are created with nay new institution,’ added Yunus. ‘In Bangladesh,’ Yunus remarks, ‘for example, workers whose sole job was to wind the clocks on the mantelpieces of government administrators retained their positions, and their salaries, for many years after wind-up clocks were superseded by electrical timepieces.’

Muhammad Yunus agrees that politics also stands in the way of efficiency in government. ‘The fact that groups of people demand that government serve their interests and put pressure on their representatives to uphold those interests,’ writes Yunus, ‘is an essential feature of democracy.’

Needless to say, he does like it. By asserting at appoint that ‘politics,’ can of course mean ‘accountability’, Muhammad Yunus unmistakably tells it all on the mountain, it usually doesn’t. He cites the wretched example of ‘the illogical, jerry-rigged, and inefficient health-care system in the United States as a case of the failure of democracy. ‘Reform of this system,’ Yunus thinks, ‘has so far been impossible because of powerful insurance and pharmaceutical companies.’ (Yunus 2007: 9) Yunus, alas, would not tell us how to go about finding a solution to this riddle, except opting for social business, defined as some ‘no loss, no-dividend’ enterprise.

 

A useless passion?

IN PSYCHOANALYTIC lore, the great solver of riddles is Oedipus, who answered the riddle of sphinx. Faced with the riddle of riddles, social business that is, we are in the difficult position of Oedipus sitting face to face with sphinx. At that point in his story Oedipus had already killed his father, but he did not yet know it.

In the Semitic lore, the myth of the accursed apple explains and epitomises human knowledge, suffering, and ultimately the fall of man. Adam is all man in sufferance. In the Greek myth, as we all know after Freud, everyman has an Oedipus complex. Oedipus mythically epitomises the desiring subject.

Whatever happens to the subject?  The Greek myth tells us that after Oedipus solves the riddle he becomes King, successor to his father, but in a perverse sort of way, after killing him and as a reward too. He gets married to his mother, but far from knowing the mother as mother. When Oedipus, that dauntless seeker of knowledge and truth, eventually comes to know the fact of his imaginary father’s death, he was afraid of his destiny foretold, of ending up marrying his good old imaginary mother. He only didn’t know it yet.

Eventually the knowledge proves to be tragic. Oedipus blinds himself, is exiled and disappears (albeit quite afterwards) in exile. Knowledge thus proves to be killing to its subjects.

In his essay titled ‘Formulations of the Two Principles of Psychic Functioning’ Freud challenges us with deciphering a neurotic man’s dream in which the dreamer’s father is dead, only he did not know it. In Freud’s own telling we read: ‘A man who had looked after his father during his long and agonizing fatal illness, reports having repeatedly dreamt in the months following his death: his father was alive again and was talking with him as usual, But at the same time he felt extremely distressed that his father was nevertheless dead, and only did not know it.’ (Freud 2005: 8; translation modified)

In the Oedipus story, it is the son who didn’t know that his father was dead. In the Freudian narrative of the neurotic’s dream, it is clearly the father who does not know: that he was dead. From the story to the dream, what changes is the subject who does not know. In the myth it is the son who does not know, and in the dream it is the father. In both cases it is a question of a subject of knowledge who does not yet know.

Oedipus kills his father but does not know it yet. He solves the riddle and wins the prize, the kingdom and the queen too. Only that he does not know that the queen is mother. As long as he did not know he was safe, reigning supreme. But he eventually comes to know and that knowledge became his unravelling.

In the dream as long as the father doesn’t know he can be present, but as soon as he knows, he will disappear; as soon as he knows he is lost: ‘He didn’t know… He was to know a bit later. Oh! may that never happen!’  (Lacan 1966: 802; 2006: 679)

If this figure of the dead father subsists only by virtue of the fact that one does not tell him the truth of which he is unaware, what then is the status of this I, remarks Lacan, on which this subsistence depends? Oedipus and the dreamt, dead father, as well as Adam of course, are all at one point ignorant of something knowledge of which will bring their downfall.’ (Gallop 1985: 158)

Before we can triumphantly answer who is micro-credit’s father, we may perhaps do well to research the question with which Freud began: ‘What is a Father?’  And it will not be long before we hear his answer: ‘It (the only good father) is the dead father.’ The father is not only the name of an accident of history but also a desire for desire (certainly not ‘a useless passion’), a fact that requires the assistance of structural elements—‘which in order to intervene, can do very well without these accidents.’

‘We would be mistaken,’ Lacan ruthlessly says, ‘if we thought that the Freudian Oedipus myth puts an end to theology on the matter.’ (Lacan 1966: 812, 2006: 688) The Semitic myth of an ‘accused apple’ explains and epitomises human suffering; with Adam and Eve representing the condition of fallen humans, a fall into knowledge, suffering, and death where a woman is allotted a cretin’s lot. A tale of cretins told by other cretins for still other cretins cannot but go by the name of theology. They had to of necessity invent the doctrine of original.

Freud had to invent the primal scene instead. The Greek myth for him serves to represent man’s unhappy fate. It is of no more use, perhaps except for the fact that it is less cretinising. No matter how hard you try to avoid it, your destiny will not leave you alone.

In order to decipher the hidden meaning of the Greek myth Jacques Lacan returns to Freud’s dream, which illustrates the subject’s fate: a dream of a dead father who did not know that he was dead.

 

References

1. Staff Correspondent, ‘Yunus’s removal sparks protests all over,’ New Age, March 6, 2011.
2. F. Fanon, Peau noire masques blancs (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1952).
3. F. Fanon, Black Skin White Masks, C. L. Markmann, trans., reprint (London, Paladin, 1970).
4. J. Gallop, Reading Lacan, 3rd print. (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991).
5. R. Guha, ‘Not at Home in Empire,’ in S. Dube, ed., Postcolonial Passages: Contemporary history-writing on India, reprint (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2005), pp. 38-46.
6. S. Freud, ‘Formulierungen über die zwei Prinzipen des psychischen Geschehens,’ Werkausgabe in zwei Banden, B.1: Elemente der Psyschanalyse, Herausg. von A. Freud und I. Grubrich-Simitis, Neuauf. (Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer Verlag, 2006), s. 423-429.
7. S. Freud, ‘Formulations on the Two Principles of Psychic Functioning,’ in The Unconscious, G. Frankland, trans. (London: Penguin Books, 2005), pp. 1-10.
8. M. Heidegger, Being and Time, J. Macquairrie and E. Robinson, trans. (London: SCM Press, 1962).
9. M. Heidegger, Being and Time: a translation of Sein und Zeit, J. Stambaugh, trans. (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1996).
10. J. Lacan, Écrits (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1966).
11. J. Lacan, Freud’s papers on technique 1953-54: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, vol. 1, J. Forrester, trans. (New York: W.W. Norton, 1988).
12. J. Lacan, Écrits, B. Fink, trans. (New York: Norton, 2006).
13. A. Nandy, ‘The Illegitimacy of Nationalism,’ in Return from Exile, reprint (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2005).
14. G. Orwell, ‘Shooting an Elephant,’ in ‘Shooting an Elephant’ and Other Essays (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1950), pp. 3-12.
15. M. Yunus (with K Weber), Creating a world without poverty: social business and the future of capitalism (New York: Perseus Books, 2007).

 

March 19, 2011

First published in New Age
Image courtesy: www.humanrights.com, https://thediplomat.com