Jerry Zee
Princeton University
In 1939, a surgeon died. He worked on the frontlines of a war shaped in a discord of interpretations, philosophies of History and their futures, and the cataclysmic violence of war-machines: liberal, imperialist, revolutionary. By the late 1930s, northern China had been devastated by Japanese invasion and occupation already for the better part of a decade. Dr. Norman Bethune, a Canadian thoracic surgeon, had traveled to Yan’an, the capital of the Revolution, in 1938. He served as a surgeon in the Eighth Route Army’s medical service. A year later, in the Wutai Mountains, at the frontier of today’s Shanxi province, he was dead. “To our great sorrow,” wrote Mao Zedong, he “died as a martyr at his post” (1939).
Mao Zedong, on the occasion of Bethune’s death, remembers him in order to theorize the future of the impulse that brought him from Canada to the warfronts of the Chinese interior. Healing, for Bethune, appears as a mode of combat, a practice through which the surgeon comes to embody the reconfiguration of militancy, tangling the meanings of violence and repair. In the death of Bethune, Mao marks the rebirth of a revolutionary and collective possibility, made in the unity of all, regardless of national origin, who support “the struggle of the colonial and semi-colonial peoples” of the world.
Eulogy is a genre made in the crosshatch where the disorientations of grief mesh into calls for the renewal of Revolution. It is where dying becomes a demand for the work that makes any future possible. When a life expires, eulogy yokes grief to History. It heaves its weight – the shock of its passing, pressing, pinning – into the momentum by which collectives reinvest in the memory of the future. The surgeon, Bethune, is one of the only westerners that receives this kind of adulation in the Maoist corpus, entering into it by dying.
Bethune was a knot in my conversations with Sam, when we were anthropology undergraduates together, and when he returned to graduate school in anthropology as a brief respite from his medical training. Bethune is one of several physicians in the firmament of Revolutionary China. His specter is unmistakable to me when I read Sam’s alarm in his own account of biomedicine and its foreclosures of structural critique, and it haunts his own account of his return to anthropology, which he describes in Against Humanity. Sam reflects in the book on an attack by El Sendero Luminoso, the Maoist Shining Path, on clinics set up by Partners in Health during Peru’s Fujimori regime (2018, 213), with its clear parallels to the book’s concern with violence and humanitarian interventions. The radical limit of humanitarian medicine’s political horizons, in this moment, become apparent as one embodiment of a collaborationist liberalism. As a Maoist insurgency, Sam suggests, The Shining Path theorizes with violence. Sam, as in his work with LRA ex-rebels, refused the pat moralisms that default violence into inhumanity, against the everyday violences structural to projects that speak in humanity’s name. He endeavored, then, to dwell in news of the attack on the clinic as a demand for a possibility in collective life, and, necessarily, a demand for a mode of medicine as itself a kind of radical critique. Violence and repair reconfigure as revolutionaries maraud clinics; as the field clinician fights by healing.
Bethune haunts. In Mao’s funeral theorization of surgery as a work of political importance, “[h]is example is an excellent lesson…for those who despise technical work as of no consequence or as promising no future” (1939). And Bethune makes an appearance in the final chapter of Against Humanity as a reference for Dubal’s polemical demand for what he calls an anti-humanist medicine. Sam writes that Bethune, martyr of the Revolution and avatar for an internationalist anti-liberal collective, “did not practice medicine in the abstract, apolitical service of the ‘poor.’ Instead, he went to the front lines of war to save the lives of soldiers fighting imperialism and fascism. He applied his skills in the service of politics rather than a ‘neutral’ or ‘impartial’ ethics” (2018, 227). The surgeon, a technician of a critical machinery. Here, “politics” does not stand in opposition to technical skill, and in an inversion of what James Ferguson, one of our first teachers, conceives of as an anti-politics machine (1994); technical practices do not undo the political. Instead, they can become the very substance of political thought and action.
One surgeon reflects on another. Eulogies bleed into one another, as blood and grief pool beyond comprehension or closure. Bethune’s death lives again, for me, in Sam’s death and the reflection of the work of his clipped life. Together, they dare us to imagine another kind of medicine, another framework for valuing life and death, one that dances in the wake of the human. A life, as Sam argues, is not abstract, but neither is it individual. The allures of liberal humanism seek to contain the body within its own undoing. But a patient, for Sam’s antihumanist medicine, exists as “a manifested structure” through which the “orders of recognition of violence” (2018, 224) are made to shift phase. One could say the same of a doctor, who, in Sam’s reading of Bethune, must learn with others to offer healing as a demand for other schemas through which collective survival can be sought. The wound is not patched, so much as it is amplified into a site of structural violence, the mark of collective failings, neglects, and designs that refuse to remain localized in the skin of an abstracted, individualized human. Manifested structure, then, renders the individual into a knot of violences. Injury is an event in which the corporate body is indicted and diagnosed as a site as unevenly distributed necrosis. Surgery, Sam’s specialty, is an enactment of anti-humanist medicine that locates injury not in the broken bone but the social form whose proper functioning generates and concentrates violences.
This paper is not a eulogy, any more now than when it was first written in the immediate wave of Sam’s disappearing and presumptive dying. I am not there yet. There is a gap in me that I do not seek to fill. I do not know what healing could be after Sam. And I cannot ask Sam what he would think. I do not yet want to cross the bridge that requires loss to be a future. But I feel, in reading his words, a collective, a structure manifesting in what we cannot yet feel: what Sam describes, following Alexander Weheliye, as a “movement toward another kind of freedom (which can be imagined but not [yet] described)” (217). Sam, in his exhilarated citation of Weheliye, reproduces the quote, but quietly adds this word, “yet” in square brackets. In this [yet], he occupies the gap between the imagination and its description, a small accommodation of that gap toward the past-present-future he called Revolution. The square brackets are a small respite that he insists that we allow to ourselves, a space of expectation and possibility in the uncanny temporality of his own work. But he is gone, and the eulogy’s demand for narrative, for History, for future will hold no court here. I can imagine what comes after him, but I cannot [yet] describe it.
Works Cited
Dubal, Sam. 2018. Against Humanity: Lessons from the Lord’s Resistance Army. Oakland: University of California Press.
Ferguson, James. 1994. The Anti-Politics Machine: “Development,” Depoliticization, and Bureaucratic Power in Lesotho. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Mao Zedong. 1939. “In Memory of Nathan Bethune, December 21, 1939.” https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/selected-works/volume-2/mswv2_25.htm