Obscene Supplements, or, What we write about when we write about death

Ich bin an die Wand gegangen, ich gehe in die Wand, ich halte den Atem an. Ich hätte noch auf einen Zettel schreiben müssen: Es war nicht Malina. Aber die Wand tut sich auf, ich bin in der Wand, und für Malina kann nur der Riß zu sehen sein, den wir schon lange gesehen haben. Er wird denken, daß ich aus dem Zimmer gegangen bin. ... es ist etwas in der Wand, es kann nicht mehr schreien, aber es schreit doch... Schritte, immerzu Malinas Schritte, leiser die Schritte, leiseste Schritte. Ein Stillstehen. Kein Alarm, keine Sirenen. Es kommt niemand zu Hilfe. Der Rettungswagen nicht und nicht die Polizei. Es ist eine sehr alte, eine sehr starke Wand, aus der niemand fallen kann, die niemand aufbrechen kann, aus der nie mehr etwas laut werden kann.

Es war Mord.

[I have walked over to the wall, I walk into the wall, holding my breath. I should have written a note: It wasn't Malina. But the wall opens, I am inside the wall, and Malina can only see the fissure we've been looking at for such a long time. He'll think I've left the room ... there is something inside the wall, it can no longer cry out, but it cries out nonetheless... Steps, Malina's incessant steps, quieter steps, the most quiet steps. A standing still. No alarm, no sirens. No one comes to help. Not the ambulance and not the police. It is a very old wall, a very strong wall, from which no one can fall, which no one can break open, from which nothing can ever be heard again.

It was murder.]

(Ingeborg Bachmann, Malina)

A murder of no/body. A murder that ends writing, that encircles a text, that closes a text. A murder that happens nowhere but in and through writing. That is a blank, a not-quite-empty space. A murder that breaks with a signified, breaks with the body, a murder that belongs to no one, to which no one belongs, that answers for itself, that answers no one.

But first: the death of women is not a singularity. It is not a death that can be remembered, in the sense of "never again," or "never forget." No monument bears it, no testament invokes it. It is not present, it is not self-sufficient. It is often spoken, but as such in the "mirage of immediacy," as speech never fully there to itself. Derrida writes in "... That Dangerous Supplement ..." that all speech functions thus; that all speech needs a supplement, is only ever a supplement itself. But women's death is differently and particularly supplemented, it is supplemented obscenely, it is supplemented willfully. What the supplement testifies to in this instance is, yes, the "anterior default of a presence," (145) but it is a default that is subsequently deployed, to effect erasure, to effect insulation against recognition.

Women may die, indeed, as "people," even as "humans." As a mass grave, a release of smoke, as a tangle of bones, as the compound womenandchildren. Women may not die, singularly, as women. They have never done so. We read: a woman returns to the refugee camps Sabra and Chatila after the slaughter in 1982 by the Israeli-supported Lebanese Christian Phalangist militia. She reports that the worst sight, in house after house that she entered, was all the dead women lying on beds with their legs still spread apart from the raping that either preceded or followed the killings. We do not retain this image. We pan out, we pull back to the sweeping description: slaughter, murderous rampage, massacre. The words that speak for themselves. Words that can form a chain, linking violences and hatreds, a chain structuring history in a series of identifiable injustices. Words that are not like rape, which is never linked at all, which never forms a chain of identification. Despite the repetitions: Bosnia, Kosovo, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, Zimbabwe, Tanzania, on and on. And here we experience the supplement of women's death in three different and interrelated ways: A woman's death must be supplemented by others. By other victims with other names: civilians, children, refugees; by larger narratives: genocide, ethnic cleansing, Holocaust. Her death is not enough, is not wholly there or present to itself. But also: woman's death here is always-already supplemented, by rape. It is not enough to kill her. But furthermore: to be recognized as an injustice, rape must be supplemented by death. Being raped is not enough.

The supplement supplements. It adds only to replace. It intervenes or insinuates itself in-the-place-of; if it fills, it is as if one fills a void. If it represents and makes an image, it is by the anterior default of a presence. Compensatory [suppléant] and vicarious, the supplement is an adjunct, a subaltern instance which takes-(the)-place [tient-lieu]. As substitute, it is not simply added to the positivity of a presence, it produces no relief; its place is assigned in the structure by the mark of an emptiness. (145)

Why must rape be supplemented? Why is it like a "void," why is it need of some exterior addition to make it recognizable as an atrocity? For despite the extraordinarily high incidence of so-called "domestic" rape in Western societies, it is not an issue that makes headlines, like the murder by dragging of a black man in Texas, or martyrs like the young gay man beaten to death by homophobes. It is not even a "hate crime;" its aggression bears no name that encourages political mobilization or condemnation. Racism, anti-Semitism, white supremacy, these we recognize as the background from which violence emerges against certain races or minorities. But what is the background of rape? Does "misogyny" cover it, or is that merely a word used mostly in universities? Perhaps "sexism" - but that is more of a neutral description of social environments than an identifiable source of violence. These lukewarm labels bear almost no relation to the reality of a crime that is committed against women almost exclusively, a crime that explicitly targets a woman's sexual identity. The absence of such a category by which to identify a malicious attack against women's sexuality is not a coincidence. Rape is invisible to political agency; it simply does not say enough. It is not clear enough, not atrocious enough, not straightforward enough, not far enough away from what the average (male) citizen can bear to think about. It is, in fact, singularly bearable. There is a gap, a space, in rape which doesn't completely cover. This gap is the fantasy-potential, the seductiveness of the imagined female body, which, over and against any questions of consent or violence, is infinitely supplementable by a socialized and automatic erotic machinery. It is only at the point of death - and, as we shall see, increasingly not even then - that it becomes possible to shut off the ambiguity, for death sometimes goes far enough - in the direction of mutilation, of finality, of legality - for the violence to register as violence. Then we can speak of murder, a fixed and recognizable crime, and the rape may be reported by the way.

But the man who must kill as well as rape has become aware that, as Derrida reads Rousseau's Emile, "all evil comes from the fact that 'women have ceased to be mothers, they do not and will not return to their duty.'" (152) The rapist must then attempt to supplement that absence by sexual force, to put the woman "back in her place." However, the woman can never remain in that place, as that place of the mother is itself is a supplementary and imaginary one. It is a projection of the childish desire for immediate gratification, a longing for a state of satisfying auto-affection which never in fact existed to begin with. Thus Derrida writes of the need for the mother to "be invisible and not see" (152) - the frustration produced by the ultimate failure of this "putting back into place" provokes a further violence, one that is enraged not only by the lack of satisfaction but also the exposure of the rapist's neediness for and dependence upon the woman. He imagines her gaze taking in his impotence and vulnerability and must therefore shut it off - must hide from himself that he requires her for his gratification, (thus the need to make her "invisible" and re-establish a fantasy of transparent desire and satisfaction) and she must not be able "to see" him in his dependency.

And the fact that a woman's death is always-already supplemented by rape is then the converse of this sexuality-unto-death, a crossing back and forth of the same line. To kill a woman is not enough - indeed, in Bosnia and in Kosovo, the soldiers often deliberately let the women live after raping them. Why did they not simply butcher, instead of also raping, the women whose dead bodies they threw out of a window? The rapes were super-added to prevent recognition, to prevent the straightforward identifiability of a woman's death as a death, to refuse it its totality, its singularity. A woman must not die like a man, she must to the last instant be a woman, whose murder is made ambiguous via the violent "taking of pleasure." That is why Serbian soldiers so often went out of their way to make this absolutely and physically clear: lest anyone overlook the intimate and interior proof of the assault, they would cut off the women's breasts and genitals, to render visible the sexual nature of the violence. A woman must not own her own death, must not be present unto her own death. That her murder must be enacted in tandem with an exterior, superadded violence testifies to the fact that the mere loss of life cannot satisfy the desire to make her suffer. The death of a woman is conceived as being not quite all, not quite absolute, not quite the violation that is most effective and most complete. It is as if the soldiers knew all too well the sentiment of one young Albanian woman: "I wasn't afraid of the killing. I was afraid of the raping."

We observe: a woman cannot die her own death. A woman cannot write her own death. The supplements to her death crowd out the possibility of remembering, of reacting, of writing, even as, as Derrida maintains, writing is always-already a supplement itself, and the text is itself an inter-text made up of a chain of supplements. For a woman's death is obscenely supplemented, there is, as it were, a chain of supplements willfully super-imposed upon the always-already present chain of supplements. And this double chain drags the woman's death continually into obscurity, away from historical consciousness, away from political identifiability, away from the possibility of shock.

Is there then no way to escape the double chain, no way to answer the oblivion into which it disappears? Is the death of a woman consigned to this blankness, this overlaying of supplements which blocks out resistance, judgement, a cultural memory of atrocity? We return to Bachmann, to the indicting last line of Malina: "Es war Mord." It was murder. Is this a possible sentence? A murder without a body, though with many traces. An escape from corporeality, from the machinery of eroticization, from the incessant demand of encore, en-corps. An indictment in writing, a text broken off by its own conclusion. A death written into language, into the supplement, as a protest against the supplement, but within the possibility of exorbitance, of articulating that double-chain, of adding something to the robbed:

death, which is neither a present to come nor a present past, shapes the interior of speech, as its trace, its reserve, its interior and exterior differance: as its supplement. (315)