We have the challenge to take hurt seriously. While we resist the republic of hurt, we cannot simply dismiss the fact of hurt. We, therefore, ask: Who is hurt? Who can hurt? What is the condition of getting hurt ? Who can get hurt? What hurts? What is the response to hurt? Hurt affects different people differently. In the powerful the hurt turns into rage and hate and looks for retributive action while in the poor and weak hurt turns into helplessness and remains hidden as traumatic spur or thorn struck in the flesh. Hence, when the hurt is real, we cannot trivialize it. Hurt can be what Cornel West calls ontological wounding. Caste is an ontological wound. One cannot escape it in one’s entire life. Unfortunately, politics that is premised on hurt has lost credibility. Often it is looked upon as opportunistic politics. Hence, we may have to critically consider the real of the politics of hurt.
The experience of hurt finds its home in the Real of Lacan. It remains hidden in a non-symbolized manner. In the poor and the weak , it pushes the hurt into Lacan’s register called Real. There is no Manichean world here. Hurt stays in the secret hidden place. Hence, we enter into the Politics of the Real. We, thus, enter into dialogue with the Real of the Politics and the Politics of the Real. It is a kind of Other Politics and Politics Other. Thus, the truth of hurt holds onto the Real. Its pulsation haunts one who is hurt all his or her life. Hurt therefore, becomes an hauntology as it lingers in his/her being. The victim of hurt is not always anointed. When the victim is anointed he/ she becomes a new aggressor. Often the old victim becomes a new aggressor in a new our postcolonial condition and produces the same violence on the weak who too was a co-victim of the past. The double victim refuses to be directed by the master (victim turned aggressor) . The master is the one that hurts. Hurt thus, cannot be assimilated by the symbolism of the master. The question of hurt, therefore, remains outside the language and the symbolic order of the master. It becomes a void in the being. Hurt ,therefore, is at once impossible to possess and impossible to live without. In some way hurt remains away from the linguistic foreclosures and policing elements of the master symbolic architecture. This is why hurt is crypt. It is a secret. Thus, the politics of the master hurts but does not offer the luxury of assimilating the hurt within the symbolic of the master. This is why the master cannot fully understand the damage he/she does. Hurt secretly bleeds its subject. Hurt remains in the primordial unmediated experience that we forever lost when we entered language (Real of Lacan). Hurt structures the victim with lack that profoundly haunts him or her and makes it’s difficult to live fuller and wholesome life .
The victim that is anointed by the power of the new postcolonial condition (like the majority in our country) feels interpellated by the experience of the other. The other is viewed as a lacking self. The lack is construed on the basis of culture or nationalism. The demand for the other to fall into the self-sameness accentuated by the new aggressor, the anointed victim who thinks that he/she is putting things back in their place after the disruption of colonization is a demand to strip the other of his/her of its otherness. We can see this demand for a decaffeinated other ( using Slavoj Zizek’s term ). This demand to de-substantialize the other is mimicking the colonizer. But the fact the victim that turned the aggressor does not know that he/she is become a mimic men of the colonizer. He/she is sacredizing what he/she does. Hence, it is difficult imagine that mimic men of the colonizer will have a change of heart. Hence, it for the victim as well as the other non-victims to interrogate the anointed aggressor. The anointed aggressor has institutional as well as political sanction. This is why it is difficult for him to come to self realization. He/ she become blind to his or her imperialism. Hence, it is the hurt who seems to be in position to redeem himself or herself as well as the new anointed aggressor who mimics the colonizer. The anointed aggressor is alienated From the real condition that afflict him/ her as well the the other who is the double victim. victim of the coloniser as well as the anointed one.
The therapy to the hurt is in the ability to find one’s voice. Hurt being locked away into the crypt has to find its talking cure. It has to disrupt the hegemonic space populated by the anointed aggressor that mimic the coloniser. This talking back is emancipative but is difficult to achieve. Hence, one may take another road. This road is the courage to let things be there appears to be a road to therapy. Healing is in finding a mediating language. The awareness of being fallen into experience that cannot be mediated (Real of Lacan) is the beginning of our therapy. It is this awareness that can enable the hurt to be accepted, forgiven and detached. The more one tries to hold fast to the hurt one cannot be healed. Hurt then remains a wound that continuously wounds the hurt self and its other. Letting things be is the best way to set oneself free from the entanglement of politics of the real that haunt the person/ community who carries the burden of hurt. It is best to let the past be what it is/ past. It is the challenge to stay real and not be premised the ideal. When it is premised on the ideal it will descend into the Real of Lacan and begin to afflict its lacking subject. An attitude that lets the past be past and the present be present is salubrious. Hurts are real but when they are locked in the Real of Lacan, they can become damaging for the individual as well as the society. Hence letting bygones be bygones and opening the present and future to forgiveness, trust and hope is the way building salubrious society.
