(Su)staining the Law

As I have been developing thus far, V resists attempts to look 'behind his mask'. This characterization of V rejects the impulse towards humanization and rather reflects V's reduction to 'non-human' within the discourse of the law. It is how V mobilizes his own monstrosness as the point of exception to that legal discourse which transforms him from a victim to a revolutionary agent. The following post will present the Vendetta version of the Watchmen's 'the abyss gazes also'.

V never tells us his own story. Our only access to it comes in the form of the journals left by Dr. Delia Surridge detailing her time conducting research and experiments on living subjects at the Larkhill concentration camp facility. Her attitude towards these human guinea pigs clearly indicates their status as bio-political excess, bodies who are classified as non-human under the law in order to justify violence visited upon them: 'They're so weak and pathetic you find yourself hating them. They don't fight or struggle against death. They just stare at you with weak eyes. They make me want to be sick, physically. They're hardly human' (80.5). Here, the status of her subjects as 'non-human' dictated by the law is inverted into the assumption it is because they are hardly human that the law classifies them as such.

V is of course amongst these prisoners who are reduced to nothing but 'bare life' under the medical gaze. We do not gain any insight into him as a 'rich human being', but we do discover, however, that he takes his name from his cell (roman numeral "V"). This detail indicates how V derives his identity as a revolutionary from his treatment in the facility. Unlike the other victims who look at the doctor with their 'weak eyes', V turns his condition as biopolitical excess into a source of power.

This transformation is indicated by his reversal of the medical gaze. Once V has set his plan into motion, torching the facility with his home-made explosives and napalm, the doctor relates how he, to her horror, emerges out of the flames: 'And in the yard, I saw him. He had the flames behind him. He was naked... He looked at me. As if I were an insect. Oh God. As if I were something mounted on a slide. He looked at me' (83.7-9). Whereas the victims in the facility were once subjects of experiments that killed them one by one while the doctors watched them as if they were insects 'mounted on slides', the doctor feels horrified that V looks at her just as she had once looked on him. In this sense, he returns the gaze of the law in its inverted form. Once excluded as an excremental excess, he turns that status as excessive against the law that does not have a place for him. His emergence functions as the 'stain' on the legal order, an irritating rem(a)inder of the exceptions and contradictions which define it.

The presentation of him as cloaked in silhouette as he walks towards the picture plane emphasizes his status as such an opaque 'stain' on the law. In a motion similar to a cinematic jump cut the narrative perspective shifts from a more neutral observational stand-point (we see the scene from the perspective of no one in particular at first, 83.7) to the subjective stand-point of the doctor (we see it through her eyes, 83.8-9), the novel isolates this stain; V's gaze falls on the doctor and on us as the supporters of any law that could justify its actions by classifying him or anyone else as non-human filth.

His anonymous appearance also contains another hidden truth: under such exceptions to the law, anyone is potentially non-human. As I hope is coming through here, this has two implications: (1) anyone could potentially be placed outside the law and (2) since this is every one's potential position, the realization of it can serve as revolutionary motivation. In my next post I want to develop, through a reading of the torture of Evey Hammond and V's critique of 'happiness', how this theme in the novel actually argues against the impulse towards humanization: we are not all 'rich human beings', we are, in the end, excrement in the eyes of the dominant state and ideological apparatuses and so we must realize ourselves as such.