Theatre, Number, Event: A Second Appraisal

Prathama Banerjee

[ HUG reproduces a second appraisal and an early critique of Soumyabrata Choudhury's newly published book Theatre, Number, Event: Three Studies on the Relationship between Sovereignty, Power and Truth, IIAS, Delhi, 2013. The writer was a panelist in the recently organised session at C.S.D.S. , New Delhi on the occasion of the release of the book.  This is the concluding essay in this series.]

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Soumya is a very old friend from my university days, and it is a special feeling to be discussing his book.  In that it is indeed a discussion rather than a comprehensive review of the book, and I do not even claim to do justice to the book’s ambitious narrative and unusual analytic frame.  Soumya is an extraordinary mind.  He is a philosopher, a literature student, a performer, a director of plays, a teacher and now I see also a historian.  The book, therefore, like he himself, is a challenge for any friend and comrade, who like me shares his passion for politics and philosophy, but thinks very differently, perhaps even incommensurably.  What I shall say by way of discussing the book is then a kind of response to this intimate challenge that Soumya poses before me.

First, let me present briefly how I read Soumya’s book.  The book is about sovereignty – sovereignty as simultaneously political sovereignty and sovereignty of thought, sovereignty as that of philosophy on the one hand and on the other, of the king/Christ/state and eventually of that impossible, uncountable entity, namely the people.  Soumya works through a series of historical moments, though not chronologically (something to which we shall come back later) – 5^th century BC Greece with its theatre and its civic assemblies of gods, citizens, faceless slaves and women, 12^th century Europe with its notion of Christian theological kingship, 8^th-9^th century Byzantium with its controversy regarding the question of the icon and the idol and the worship and circulation of the same, 18^th century France with its revolution, terror and increasingly medicalised madness, and finally the contemporary with its war on terror and its democratic revolutions.  Soumya’s project is to tease out histories of the constitution of sovereign power in this long story of Europe (and he shall argue the world).

Soumya implies that the history of sovereignty is produced at two levels – one, as the story of the sovereign as a figure and two, as the question of the ground, the basis, the founding principles of sovereignty. The figures of sovereignty as they appear in history, and yet fail to acquire full presence and stability (which is what the whole story is about), are the Greek gods with their strategic intelligence and liturgical role, the consecrated Christian king backed by the notion of eucharist transformation that transubstantiates the inscrutable idea of divinity into flesh, and the post-revolutionary republican people, counted as a disassembled numerical order of populations and while being mobilized as the One, the singular Nation.  The ground of sovereignty on its part appears in two senses.  One as jurisdiction – of law, administration and taxation – that appear through history as fisc and empire and patrie, in different ways assigning a territoriality, a world-extension to sovereignty itself.  The ground also appears as the ground of thinking the power of the universal, which in the history of Europe appear as philosophy and theology and in modern times, mathematics.  Through what Soumya calls a  ‘commensuration’ of the figure and the ground, the book goes on to show that the ground of thought is also the ground of sovereignty, the ground which underpins the exercise of both power and truth.

Soumya’s story is full of fascinating moments – as when he demonstrates that the imperative of governmentality is as old as and indeed part of the imperative of sovereignty; or when he lays out the long history of tithes and taxes in Europe as a dialectic between the debt to and debt of the sovereign; or when he excavates an older history of the economy as a domain of regulation mapped by the circulation of Christian icons, making the economy into God’s worldly plan for the salvation of mankind.  We do not have time here to dwell on these details, though each of these by itself can be major point of discussion.  I shall only mention here that in Soumya’s imagination, all these discrete moments make up what he calls an ‘inconsistent’ history of sovereign power, i.e. a history without unity or necessity.  This means, in my understanding, that no straight-forward chronological or successional history is possible for sovereignty, precisely because the career of sovereignty is also repeatedly a history of its siege, its failure, its dysfunctionality – the manifestation of the groundlessness, the voiding of sovereignty, despite its cunning, its ruses and indeed its claim to truths.  In that sense, despite its historicity, sovereignty, at different times must be set up anew, following its own failure.  The place of the French Revolution in the book is precisely to show up such a moment of the failure of sovereign power and of the difficult search for a new ground and a new figure of sovereignty, namely the people.  As Soumya shows through his reading of Michelet’s history of the French revolution, it is not as if forms of sovereignty, power and truth make successive paradigm shifts in a long history of political society, but that everything must be recommenced, the present reinvented every time, by rewriting once again its past and its future, following upon the defaulting of an earlier form of sovereign presence.

Soumya’s account of the career of sovereignty is persuasive in its own terms, but in my eyes, the account comes up against a critical unresolved question – namely, the question of the relationship between history and philosophy.  Soumya imagines this relationship as a kind mismatch – sometimes there is the glimpse of geological metaphors, a faultine, an abyss – between the metaphysics of truth and the structure of possible actualisations of power, between the philosophical mandate and the historical logic. It is this perpetually restless, quaking faultine between history as actualization and philosophy as the axiomatic instance, as he aptly calls it, which causes what he calls torsion, a violent twisting, of thought – a torsion through which thought moves as it were.   In my reading, however, this formulation retains the place of history and the place of philosophy somewhat undisturbed, even though teetering on both sides of the abyss – while I would have thought that it were precisely those places, those habitations of history and philosophy that would come under question in his account.  My feeling is that this is because Soumya does not face squarely the different ways in which modern western philosophy has harnessed history to itself – or the ways in which history and philosophy have sought to take each other’s place through time.  Of course, in modern times and with Hegel, history itself – world history to be precise – was transfigured into a philosophy of global sovereignty.

But even if we consider the Hegelian moment passé, there is another way in which philosophy continues to harness history to itself even today.  In the western tradition, philosophy operates as always already history of philosophy, through which not only is an exclusive philosophical canon set up, but more importantly a strange contemporaneity is set up amongst philosophers of diverse times and contexts, from Plato to Marx, from antiquity to today, such that thought appears to undo its own historicity and assume an infinite, universal and eternal form, becoming in a way thought unto itself.  In other words, in this tradition philosophy becomes its own history in such as way as to pitch itself beyond the ephemeral and the contingent – that being the truth-procedure of western philosophy itself.  And even when a contemporary philosopher such as Alain Badiou – who seems to hugely influence Soumya – grants autonomy to history, he does so in the name of the Event with capital E – making true history incumbent upon emblematic dates, exceptional events and proper names.  But this precisely is the imagination of history against which subalterns have had to struggle incessantly, in the name of long durations as well as contingencies, of the everyday and the quotidian, of the anonymous and the defeated.

All this is not to argue against Soumya’s effort at bringing philosophy and history together within the same frame.  On the contrary, that is exactly the importance of the book. This is only to say that one cannot any longer presume to be innocent about the close complicity, and not just the antagonism, between history of a kind and philosophy of a kind.  Indeed, one cannot be innocent about history itself, and I do sense such an innocence in Soumya.  One cannot presume, in obedience to Badiou, that the event with capital E will show itself inexorably and obviously and force new thought, new truths, and new subject-bodies who appear purely in fidelity to the event.   Instead, it is in the very process of historicisation, in the assigning of a new past and a new future to it, that an event becomes an Event.  In other words, it is precisely through new periodisations that politics moves – as our experience with the regime of the modern tells us at our own peril. I think it is critical the way Soumya makes the choice and arranges the sequence of his historical instances – whether Greece or Byzantium or France, whether classical, medieval or modern.  But he hesitates to make the political stakes in his choice explicit.  I also think that he is too quick in the way that he extrapolates a global paradigm of sovereignty from these very particular and local European instances.  I am not quite certain that this seamless passage into the global is not the residual conceit of philosophy itself – even if this philosophy is humbled before the contingency of the event.

But Soumya does make a critical move away from the Badiou-kind of history-philosophy problematic – not only because he seeks to theorise sovereignty (taking Foucault on board, Foucault whom Badiou does not consider a philosopher) rather than truth or being or subjectivity, but also because he inflects his story of philosophy and history by a third entity – namely, theatre.  He does not use quite use theatre in the way that Badiou or Ranciere or Virno does – by raising questions of spectatorship, passivity, agency, publicity, community so on i.e. by making the question of theatre isomorphic with the question of politics itself.  Soumya invokes theatre from perspective of theatre itself, but he also does not reduce it to a generalized notion of performance which leads to trite observations such as politics is performative and so on.  Soumya counterpoises theatre with philosophy, and I shall add also history.  This is because theatre dislodges both the philosopher’s truth and the historian’s real.  As Soumya says, theatre puts forth the mask, the actor’s mask, which is in a disjunctive relationship with any natural, ontological or legal position.  Theatre also displaces the map of subjects and objects by distributing figures on the stage merely though a logic of positions rather than through epistemologics.  In that sense, Soumya reconfigures the history-philosophy binary into the evocative triad of history-philosophy-theatre.  But once again, Soumya does much less with theatre than he promises, tantalizingly, in the beginning of the book.  At the very end of the book, however, he quotes a long passage from Antonin Artaud, where he says (and I quote from the quote) “Once the plague is established in the city, normal order collapses. …At this point, theatre establishes itself.  Theatre that is to say the momentary pointlesslessness which drives people to useless acts without immediate profit or point.”  This Soumya proposes is a moment of exception to both the law and the liturgy of sovereignty – leading to a kind of activation beyond the limits of civic and cultural participation.   I really wish that Soumya would write more on this other notion of action and subjectivity that theatre helps us imagine.

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Prathama  Banerjee  is Fellow, C.S.D.S., New Delhi.  She is the author of the book Politics of Time: Primitives and History-Writing in a Colonial Society, published in 2006.

Theatre, Number, Event : An Appraisal

Saitya Brata Das

 

[The writer was one of the discussants in a recently organized session at C.S.D.S. , New Delhi, on the occasion of the release of Soumyabrata Choudhury’s book—Theatre, Number, Event: Three Studies on the Relationship between Sovereignty, Power and Truth. Here is the text that the writer has shared with HUG]

I feel honoured to be here today on this occasion of the book launch of Soumyabrata Choudhury’s much awaited book Theatre, Number, Event: Three Essays on the Relationship between Sovereignty, Power and Truth. The book is much awaited, especially for his privileged friends like me, friends who know that Soumyabrata has been working on a book for a long time. Some of us , and I am one among this “ us” , are fortunate enough to have had glimpses into the book in the process of its gestation and unfolding, a process from which certain “violence” is inseparable albeit a creative violence it is. Such violence seems to be inseparable from a book like this, given the formidable ambition and accomplishment of it, as we will be able to see now properly in the light of its publication. Such violence is audible in the very language of the work that does not welcome us immediately and the reader has to think a lot to decide whether she should pick up the book to read at all, not out of disrespect but precisely out of a profound respect, respect that we know to be a certain experience of distance or withdrawal. Such an “unattractive” or rather “attractive” quality of the book can be disadvantage only if the book does not have such formidable ambition and is thus impatient in soliciting the reader’s immediate attention and instant gratification. Sometimes such “indigestibility” or “unattractive” character proves to be good for the health of a work, especially if it merits serious attention from the reader who wants to read in a responsible manner.

Given the formidable character of the book that takes the reader into a labyrinth that seems to have a secret password connecting so many paths and counter paths, lanes and by-lanes and thereby weaving an intricate network of concepts, spaces, and times, it is impossible for me to talk about the book in a comprehensible manner. Moreover, one should leave the reader to the risk of the book, the kind of risk, or “wager”- a word that Soumyabrata is in love with – wager that book itself assumes. I should therefore let each reader to judge her/himself whether such a risk that the book undertakes is at all worth taking and whether the researcher has succeeded or failed in his attempt. I will just speak, within some minutes of clock-time, of one of the problems that book raises in a manner of a glimpse or in the blink of an eye. Obviously, it is going to be insufficient and even, perhaps, unworthy of me since I do different things, and raise some different problems in my works. So I will take up one problem, the problem with which the books begins, the problem that I am somehow more interested and little-bit more connected, which is: the problem or rather the scandal of “sovereignty” and the question of the political-theology.

The question that Soumyabrata appears to me to have raised is not so much to ask: ‘what is sovereignty or even, who is the “sovereign” so as to arrive at the “axiomatic” understanding of sovereignty or at the concept of the “political” as such.In fact, a good deal of the book is devoted to the even more preliminary discussion of the “axiomatic”, bringing out carefully the precarious or fragility that adheres in the “axiomatic” as such, the poros or the aporetic that ties and unties its claims to the status of the “immemorial”. The book rather raises the following uneasy question: ‘why is it that, and in what manner is it at all that the concepts/figures/modes of sovereignty assume the status of the “axiomatic” in such a way from which a certain claim of the “immemorial” is inseparable?’ Now this assumption of sovereignty and this intrigue of relation between sovereignty, axiomatic and immemorial itself, while being structural, is also historically variable, not just in a quantitative manner but in a manner of qualitative discontinuities. Thus from the liturgical foundation of sovereignty to the later Christus-Fiscus parallelism that justifies sovereignty, there is a discontinuity, in fact a violence that Soumyabrata delineates carefully with the help of Ernst Kantorowicz in a manner that will surely evoke much admiration for the reader. To answer the question he asks, Soumyabrata traces out a history or perhaps better, a genealogy of apparatuses of inter-linking practices and discourses alike by means of three interlinking fictions of concepts – “theatre”, “number”, “event” – to reveal the thread that tie and untie the “axiomatic” to the “sovereignty” and “sovereignty” in turn to the “immemorial”. It appears here as if the porosity or fragility of the one immediately brings porosity to the others: the porosity and aporetic binding or unbinding of the axiomatic claims of sovereignty to the immemorial.

Soumyabrata conceives that it is the philosophical task par excellence, the task of this strange discourse called “philosophy” – here I don’t go too far with what he understands by “philosophy” – to envisage, or better welcome the “new immemorials” that are eventive, aleatory and ever new contingent eruption that breaks into the historical continuum of the world. Here and this now of this “breaking into” is the place of the “new”, a space without a pre-given parameter of measurement and a time without pre-given measure of numbers. Such a possibility of thinking, for Soumyabrata, is given by a strange mathematics, now released from a dominant version of the “mathematizable” in the sense of the countable mathematics of number, a “contingent” or “situational” mathematics if at all one can use these words, mathematics that is not alien to “the logic of multiplicity” that constitutes and potentially deconstitutes each situation, each topos, each denomination, making hegemony of each and any nominative denomination broken. What, then, Soumyabrata seems to me to be concerned with are bruises, wounds or injuries that affect any claim of the worldly powers to sovereignty. If you read the text attentively in its performative gesture – and we all know that Soumyabrata is a great performer, a great actor – without hurrying to catch up with the core content or doctrine abstracted from the verbal character of the book, then you see these terms abound – especially the words like “wound” and “torsion”, beautiful words they are, but also violent. For Soumyabrata, each axiomatic claim of the sovereign to the immemorial is wounded and is potentially broken, and by a strange logic, is marked by a paradox, by paradoxes, because these immemorials are never true immemorials. Therefore this discourse called “philosophy” needs to be infinitely restituted in the name of the “new immemorials” wherein immemorial has nothing much to do with something that has passed by beyond memory, but an immemorial , or rather immemorials to come which will never be part of any speculative memory and will therefore never be appropriable to sovereignty.

This is his hope, and it is this hope and this promise that gives the energy and dynamis to Soumyabrata’s thought. In so far as such hope is unconditional, it can never be demonstrated or even validated by measures or numbers of what already exist as countable; they can thus only be “fictions”, not “fictions” opposed to “truth” but “fictions” that do not need to oppose to “truth” at all, but rather welcome it, immemorial and infinite truth. Where, in what discourse, in what trembling language, in what tonality and gestures, in what rhythms and caesuras that such “fictions” may break into and be seized if not in “philosophy” itself, this abyssal and dizzying landscape wherein fabulization of the world may be taking place even though it is the very discourse that wants us to be disenchanted with the mythic foundation of the world?

Here comes the strangest paradox among all the paradoxes: philosophy alone is the discourse that, precisely by absolving from the immediate stakes of the world in a immediate manner of urgency – and therefore for philosophy alone such a task of the immemorial can at all be a task, a unique and so absolutely singular task – such a discourse alone in a profound manner exposes us to the absolutely contingent, so irreducibly aleatory and such precarious moments of life as they appear to us without any pre-given measurement of numbers and without the calculability of the “count as one”. This is the problem of mortality. Soumyabrata never has raised this question in this manner, but he is so attentive to this strange paradox that ties and unties all sovereignty in advance. The sovereign must transcend any given situation that immediately exists as a generalizable order of law; as if the “halo of perpetuity”, the term that he borrows from Ernst Kantorowicz, has never ceased to determine sovereignty as such, even if such a doctrine is historically applicable only to a specific formulation of sovereignty. But at the same time, mortality haunts each figure, each contour, each icon, each idol of sovereignty, bruising each figure with the wound of mortality. If so, the immemorial task of philosophy to welcome the “new immemorials” can only be bruised, wounded, and therefore a mortal immemorial, the immemorial that is haunted by the sting of mortality, with the possible death of the world. How to think this connection between mortality and the immemorial in such a way that each and every hegemony founded upon the sovereignty of principle – principle beyond all principles – is destituted, in so far as the question of sovereignty is essentially the question of principle, of thetic and thus is of the nominative?

I will conclude my talk by taking you from Soumyabrata’s book to another work. In the posthumously published magnum opus, Broken Hegemonies – a book that Soumyabrata has not referred in his work – Reiner Schürmann calls us to be attentive to the connection between thetic, denomination, nominative and nomos , a connection that establishes the an-Archic arché of sovereignty , constituting thereby each linguistic regimes of hegemony. But mortality haunts each of such instituting and founding acts of natality, as if like an undertow, destituting each hegemony in turn and thereby rendering each situation, each historical condition tragic. Such a tragic is for Schürmann the true philosophical task of thinking that welcomes what he calls ‘singularization to come’.

Perhaps the time has come to ponder anew over the tragic condition of our existence, one that is historical, in such a manner that we never cease welcoming such singularity to come , a never ceased destitution of all institution in the name of such a ‘to come’. I congratulate my lovely brother and my dear friend – and I must now speak in this personal manner – for giving us such a work that will inspire to think such difficult questions once again. Thank you.
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Saitya Brata Das is Assistant Professor, Centre for English Studies, School of Language, Literature and Culture Studies, JNU, New Delhi.

 

 

 

Zollikon Seminars: An Evening’s Exchange

from  Z O L L I K O N  S E M I N A R S 1 9 5 9 – 1 9 69

 

[The Zollikon Seminars were a series of philosophical seminars delivered between 1959 and 1969 by Martin Heidegger at the home of Swiss psychiatrist Medard Boss. The topic of the seminars was Heidegger's  philosophical method as it pertained to the theory and praxis of medicine, psychology, psychiatry and psychotherapy. The protocols of the seminars, along with correspondences between Heidegger and Boss, were published in German in 1987 under the title Zollikoner Seminare, Protokolle- Gersprache- Briefe Herausgegeben von Medard Boss. The English version of the text was published in 2001. Here is a section from an evening's informal discussion ]

 

 

 

July 6,1964, at  Medard Boss’s Home 

But let us praise not only the sage
Whose name shines on the book,
For first of all one has to tear the wisdom from the sage.
That is why the customs collector should also be thanked.
He was the one who asked it of him.

Legend ["Legend of the Origin of the Book Tao-te-Ching by Lao Tzu on His Way to Emigration"]

                                                                                                                                                                                                         (Bertolt Brecht)

 

MARTIN HEIDEGGER: For once we must disregard all science in view of what we will now discuss, that is, no use should be made of it now. It must be asked then in a positive sense: How then should we proceed? We must learn a new way of thinking—a thinking which was already known to the ancient Greeks. Returning to the theme of our last meeting, we ask: Is this the same table which stands before me today?

SEMINAR PARTICIPANT: I remember it differently. It’s really not the same! It’s been exchanged.

MH:Suppose it is the same [derselbe]. Is it also alike [dergleiche]?*

SP: No, I remember it differently.

MH: In the aide-memoire [seminar protocol] which lies in front of you, the expression “pure and simple” is used. How about it?

SP: It has something to do with something simple and plain.

MH:  Yes, but is this “acceptance” [hinnehmen] actually so simple? Obviously not. Direct acceptance is not an absolute certainty. Does it have the character of certainty at all?

SP: It has a momentary certainty: It is here and now, not absolute.

MH: What characteristic of certainty does direct receiving-perceiving have?

SP: Empirical existence.

MH: It is an actual, but unnecessary existence. This is called assertoric certainty. This is in contrast to what is called apodictic certainty, for example, 2 X 2 = 4. Apodictic certainty is not absolute either, but it is necessary. Why isn’t it absolute? .. . In 2 X 2 = 4 “the same as” [=, equals] is presupposed. It is also presupposed that two always remains identical to itself; therefore, it is a conditional certainty. Now, we first described this table, but that is not what interests us. Only “the table which exists” is of interest to us. We took this existence for granted in the sense of what is called acceptance. Now, what does it mean to exist? Being is not a real predicate according to Kant, but we speak about the table’s existence. What is meant by this “real”? It indicates relating to the nature of a thing [Sachhaltifrkät]. In this sense, existence is not real. Nevertheless, we attribute existence  to the table. Existence belongs to it. How does it belong to it? What does existence mean?

SP: The table is in space.

MH: Does this belong to the nature of the thing?

SP: Extension is a property of space.

MH: How?

SP: It has extendedness [Ausgedehntheit]: how high it is; how wide, and so forth. These are its dimensions.

MH: Are extension and dimension different? What is the difference?

SP: Dimension is an arbitrarily selected extension.

MH: How do particular spaces relate to “space”?

SP: Space contains them.

MH: Space is not “the universal in relation to [particular] spaces, as with trees, for example, as the tree is [the universal] to particular trees. Now, what characterizes this space?

SP: It is space, which is demarcated.

MH: It is a space for living; it contains useful things. There is an orientation to things in space. Things have a special meaning for the people who live there. They are familiar to some [of the people], but strange to others. This space has characteristics other than “space.” How is the table in space now?

SP: It belongs to space; it takes up space.

MH: But how?

SP: It has a shape which limits it according to its space.

MH: Yes. Now you can see how it is with this aide-memoire, as they call it. What meaningless sentences! That’s why we*re so helpless with this scribbling on paper!

Now, we are asking whether this table would still be here if Dr. R. were no longer here to see it.

SP: Both of them are located in the space, which separates the observer from the table, as well as connects him to it.

MH: Separates? Are you sure? If something is separated, it must have first been connected.

SP: Better to say distant from, removed from.

MH: Distance [in the originary, ontological sense]  has nothing to do with separating and connecting. Now, last time we asked: If we put a wall between the table and Dr. R., [then] is the table still there?

SP: Then the table is no longer visible to the observer.

MH: But is the table still there?

SP: It’s behind the wall. It’s hidden.

MH: No, not even hidden.

SP: We don’t have an immediate perception [of it], but we can remember and imagine it.

MH: Do you see? It’s not so easy.

SP: For a child or for a primitive man, it wouldn’t be there anymore. Existence not only consists in its being seen.

MH: Close your eyes. Where is the table now?

SP: Concerning perception, the table is gone—but with [your] eyes closed you can still trip over it.

MH: Yes, that would be a particularly stark perception. Then, is the table only represented in my head?

SP: The table remains in its place, but that’s not absolutely certain. Someone could have taken it away…. When I close my eyes, I still have a particular relationship to it. It doesn’t make any difference whether the table is still there. ^

MH: Let’s assume you close your eyes. When you open them again, is the table gone? What then?

SP: Amazement, disappointment.

MH: What does disappointment mean?

SP: An unfulfilled expectation.

MH: Yes, exactly. Even when your eyes were closed, you were by the table. Dr. R. then perceives the table here from over there. How does this happen? Then where is R.?

SP: Here and there.

MH: R. is here and there at the same time, but the table cannot be here and there at the same time. Only the human being can be here and there at the same time.* The table is in space in a different way than the human being.

SP: R. has a relationship to the table, but the table does not have a relationship to him.

MH: But what about space?

SP: I move in space.

MH: How?

SP: I move myself. The table is moved.

MH: Then, how about this clock? Doesn’t it move by itself as well?

SP: No, its hand is moved by people.

MH: It runs by itself.

SP: No, a spring moves it. The spring is made by people.

MH: The spring belongs to the clock. The clock runs. That is part of it.

SP: No, the clock does not move itself, only the hand.

MH: Then the hand.. . . What part of the human being is in space?

SP: The body.

MH: Where are you yourself? I change my position like this. Then, do I only move my body? . . . The table does that too!

SP: Last time we reached the point where we characterized space as the open and as pervious. How does the human being relate to the open now?

MH: Yes, that’s the question.

SP: I am not only in space. I orient myself in space.

MH: What does that mean?

SP: I am in space, as far as I comprehend it.

MH: In what way?

SP: Space is open for me, but not for the table.

MH: Space is open through you. And how is it for the table in this case?

SP: Space is not open for the table.

MH: Is space anything at all for the table?

SP: The human being has space present to him.. . . The table was made. The human being has space and has [also] made the table.

MH: Can’t the table, which has been made, be in space the same way as the human being? Here “to make” [produce] means “to stand here.” The table has been released away from its relationship to production. The meaning of handicraft and art is that something has been made and can stand on its own. So what does it mean [when I say]: I orient myself in space, but the table does not?

SP: We suppose that the table doesn’t do it.

MH: Doesn’t the table have anything to do with orientation?

SP: The human being can orient himself or herself to it. For example, the table itself is oriented in relation to the four cardinal points of the heavens (N, S, E, W). It has a definite location and has been placed there for Professor H.

MH: It has been arranged in the room. It is oriented according to a way of living. Orientation has something to do with the rising of the sun. Why then not ocddentalization?

SP: “Orient” means the rising of the sun and of the light.

MH: With the rising of the sun, it gets light and everything becomes visible. Things shine. In certain burial rites, the face is turned toward the east. Churches are oriented in the same way as well. By the way, when the light is turned off, how is it then with the clearing [Lichtung]? . . . “Clearing” means “to be open.” There is also clearing in darkness. Clearing has nothing to do with light but is derived from “lighten” [unburden]. Light involves perception. One can still bump into something in the dark. This does not require light, but a clearing. Light—bright. “Light” comes from “lighten,” “to make free.” A clearing in the forest is still there, even when it’s dark. Light presupposes clearing. There can only be brightness where something has been cleared or where something is free for the light. Darkening, taking away the light, does not encroach upon the clearing. The clearing is the presupposition for getting light and dark. It is the free, the open.

SP: What is that—the free, the open?

SP: The free and the open is space. Is it only the free space or the space occupied by the table?

MH: If space were not free, the table couldn’t be there. Space frees the table. Space is then “occupied,” but that doesn’t mean it’s no longer free.

SP: Then is it the same space as the space of this room?

MH: The room belongs to it. Once more, you see that language is wiser than we think. “Space” comes from “making space” [for]. What does this mean?

SP: “To free”. . . but also “to make space for,” that is, to arrange, to put in place, or on the other hand, to make a place for.

MH: Space has places. To clear away [aufräumen], to make order among things that are not in place. That is something different from simply being present-at-hand [Vorhandensein].

SP: We also speak about “being cleared up” [aufgeräumt] if someone is in a good mood.

MH: Yes, then one is serene [cleared up], free. Are space and clearing identical, or does one presuppose the other? . . . Now, that cannot be decided yet. There can be something else in the clearing: time. We haven’t talked about that yet. Let’s occupy ourselves some more with the difference between free and open, on the one hand, and with something empty, on the other.

SP: Something “empty” means “containing nothing.”

MH: Therefore, not occupied. “Free” also means “not occupied,” but in a different way.

SP: “Free” means “free for something.”

MH: It is able to be occupied. “Empty,” however, means “not occupied.” Space can also remain free, even when it is occupied. Something is empty only because there is the free.

SP: Is it possible then that unoccupied is different from not able to be occupied?

MH: The empty [avoid, a vacuum] is the unoccupied free [realm].

SP: The free has a ground [Boden], Under certain circumstances, the empty does not. You can have a groundless void.

MH: Outer space, for example. Isn’t it able to be occupied? It’s very much occupied indeed. There is no void without the free [realm]. The void is grounded in the free.

SP: What is meant here by “ground”? The ground for what?

MH: It is a relation concerning the nature of a thing, not a logical ground [between concepts].

SP: That’s difficult for the students because ground is always understood in the sense of logical conclusions alone. You say: having the nature of a thing [sachhaltig], But what kind of a thing [Sache] is this?

MH: Thing [as a subject matter] is that with which we are dealing.

SP: I cannot understand the open or the free as a “thing.”

MH: Is “subject matter” only a “thing”?* Indeed, there are non-perceptible subject matters. Space, or 2 X 2 = 4, for example. These are subject matters. Here “subject matter” means “something with which we are dealing.”

SP: Then what does being a “subject matter” mean?

MH: A ground for a subject matter means that one subject matter cannot exist without another subject matter. There cannot be a void without the “free. “Free,” that is, “capable of being occupied,” is more original than “void.”

SP: We feel that it could also be stated inversely: There is the “free” only because there is the void [empty].

MH: The difference between ratio essendi and ratio cognoscendi comes into play here. Something empty is the ground for knowing [Erkenntnisgrund]the free, but the free is the ratio essendi [Seinsgrund] for something empty. It is a ground for being, not a [physical] cause. Then how is the human being in space? Does the human being only occupy space, or am I in space in a different way?

SP: I use my place. I sit.

MH: Does the table sit? What does “it sits” mean?

SP: I can take different positions [verschiedeneHaltung] in space.. . . The human being fills up space.

MH: So does the table.. .. When I refer to the human being, I am already referring to space too.

SP: The human being and space belong to each other.

MH: How? Space also belongs to the table.

SP: The human being is able to comport [verhalten] himself toward space.

MH: He is always comporting himself [toward something].

SP: Space belongs to the human being’s essential characteristics. I comport myself toward things in space, therefore, also toward space. Space is open to the human being.

MH: For the table too.

SP: I’m already in this space in which I move.

MH: I walk by occupying space. The table does not occupy space in the same way. The human being makes space for himself. He allows space to be. An example: When I move, the horizon recedes. The human being moves within a horizon. This does not only mean to transport one’s body.

SP: Then how is it with an animal?

MH: Again, it is a different relationship toward space. The animal does not speak. The animal does not experience space as space.

SP: What does this “as” mean?

MH: The animal is acquainted with the ditch it jumps over as a simple matter of fact [Sachverhalt], but not as a concept.

SP: The animal cannot reflect.

MH: Is language so essential? Surely there is also away of communicating without language.

SP: Language and verbal articulation are confused with each other here.

MH:The human being cannot comport himself in any way without language. Language is not only verbal articulation. Communicatio is only one possibility. “To say” [sagen] originally meant “to show” [zagen].+

SP: When we talk about “occupying space,” the usual understanding is that we are there, where our body is.

MH: I sit here. I talk with you. I sit opposite the wall. I am related to things in space. The table as a table is not related to other things! To comport oneself to something as something means to speak and to say: I am open to space. I can move. I know where something belongs, but I don’t need to view space as space. Without paying attention to it thematically, without being occupied with it, I let space be as the open.

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Force and Adoration: Ambedkar’s Maitri

Aishwary Kumar

In his final work The Buddha and His Dhamma, Bhimrao Ambedkar returns frequently to the concept of maitri, which he most often renders, for the first time in his essay on Marx, as “fellowship”. “Maitri or fellowship towards all must never be abandoned”, he writes in “Buddha or Karl Marx”. “One owes it even to one’s enemy.” In deploying maitri in such a fashion, translating it neither as friendship nor fraternity, and finding its possibility in the actions of the soldier, bandit, magistrate, and even the executioner, the mature Ambedkar departs from the normative rendering of the concept in two ways. Firstly, he understands maitri categorically as that which refuses the foundational distinction between friendship and hostility. Maitri is a gesture that one makes towards the enemy; as such, it militantly exceeds the moral dictates of friendship and fidelity. In his final years, immersed into formulating a rigorously non-humanist and religious critique of religion, Ambedkar deepens the concept of maitri further, including in its ambit not merely the human but also the animal. “Maitri”, he claims in The Buddha and His Dhamma, “is extending fellow feeling to all beings, not only to one who is a friend but also to one who is a foe: not only to man but to all living beings.” Indeed, creaturely life, Ambedkar argues, is most proper to maitri precisely because the normative conception of love (karuna), which human beings express only towards their own species, excludes nonhumans. Maitri, on the other hand, makes both the adversary and animal its intimate subject. It is inclusive in a way that the Christian conception of love is not.

 Maitri too is religious and quotidian. Yet unlike love, which harbors despite its best intentions a sacrificial hierarchy at its source¾ in a remarkable and paradoxical neologism, Ambedkar calls religious love (bhakti), and the love for religion, “life-force”¾ maitri is anti-sovereignty and non-theological. Acts of sovereignty, manifest in the sovereign’s right to take life in the precisely name of keeping life sacred and safe, whose most violent instance is the death penalty, contaminates the ethical force of maitri. Even if it is marked by an irreducible religiosity, then, maitri resists the pernicious onto-theological alliance between religion and sovereignty. It does not take life in the name of keeping life unscathed. Nor does it give life in the name of charity or pardon. Instead, maitri gives life, even to the enemy combatant, in the name of absolute equality, in the name of forgiveness that refuses to be identified as such.

It is this religion without religion that Ambedkar thinks when he recovers the encounter between the Buddha and the dreaded bandit Angulimala in his masterwork. In that encounter, what converts the violent bandit is neither the sudden dawning of guilt upon him nor his momentary exposure to divine luminescence. What converts him instead is the truth manifest in the figure of the Buddha himself.  Only this “love of truth” founds the empirical ground of an egalitarian faith and establishes another mode of belief and adoration, one that exceeds both the religious and humanist conceptions of love. Hence Ambedkar’s perennial dissatisfaction with love, affirmed again in The Buddha and His Dhamma, “Love is not enough. What is required is maitri.” Perhaps the proper rendering of what the mature Ambedkar calls maitri, then, is neither fraternity nor friendship, even though he alludes to both throughout the 1940s and the 1950s, but rather adoration; an immeasurable gift of belief and compassion (mudita) across the abyss of species difference.

What does this radical reconceptualization of love, this forceful affirmation of life as such, gives us most to think? What might a “religion without religion”, which would, by its very name, also be a religion profoundly aware of its own ineluctable complicity with force and mastery, call forth? In trying to recover Ambedkar’s moral thinking from normative and humanist histories of equality, my intention here is to simply recall that what is living, what exists, and most ontologically, what is, for Ambedkar, is not that which is same but rather that which is wholly other, wholly unequal, and above all, wholly mortal. In this politicization of finitude, this foregrounding of the knowledge of impermanence (sunnyata), Ambedkar does not valorize death or sacrifice in the manner of a satyagrahi, even though he does not renounce the imperative of war and “general mobilization” either. Instead, he recovers in the consciousness of finitude the possibility of an unconditional and collective sacrifice of interest; a sacrifice from which equality amongst mortals might emerge. Thus, in Annihilation of Caste (1936), two decades before his masterwork, and right in the midst of his critique of the antidemocratic structure of Plato’s republic, Ambedkar had already called equality a responsibility towards the “incommensurable”; a responsibility heterogeneous to calculation, substitution, and measure.

A responsibility, in other words, that mobilizes force- and what is annihilation (ucched) if not a call to force- in the name of absolute singularity, in the name of the unequal’s irreproducible and each time unique birth and death.[1] It is on this affirmation of life amidst life’s impermanence that the mature Ambedkar’s ahimsaic adoration would come to hinge. In this paper, I offer an archeology of this adoration, of Ambedkar’s radical attempt to formulate the conditions of a love proper and adequate to politics. I will not trace the infinite variations in which this excessive love appears in his itinerary, in neologisms such as “love of truth”, “love of politics”, and so on. I will only attempt, in a necessarily delimited fashion, to follow the rhythms and vicissitudes of this adoration, this egalitarian excess, that the mature Ambedkar eventually calls maitri.

Mastery and Measure

 How does the late recovery of adoration (maitri) turn the thread of Ambedkar’s enduring thinking about force? Does the move away from sovereignty lead to its attenuation? Or is maitri itself the maturation of that militant critique of force that had begun to take shape as early as Ambedkar’s Columbia University seminars in the 1910s? Is maitri, by turns and simultaneously, force and adoration, founded in love yet necessarily in excess of it? An excess that Ambedkar captures in his equivocal tribute to Ranade when he declares, “I regard my feelings of hatred as a real force. They are only the reflex of the love I bear”? What kind of love is this? And what would this force, this “real force”, be?

In a remarkable passage in Philosophy of Hinduism that deals with the relationship between force and conduct, the later Ambedkar leaves some traces that we may follow. He compares the instinctive urge to satisfy hunger with the impulse to “forge a weapon against the enemy”. Both belong, he argues, to the order of biological and psychological force, in which the body simply makes movements that it deems necessary to survive. These movements, which might entail violence in that they veer towards killing the enemy or predator, are not immoral. They are simply “unmoral”. That is, they cannot be judged by the established norms of morality at all, for these acts are so instinctive, so incalculable, that they cannot be placed in a world of normative values. They cannot be “compared with others, valued, or chosen”. And yet, even if “governed by forces not as moral in purpose”, Ambedkar says, they are “as valuable in result”. Forging a weapon against the enemy is, thus, an ordinary and originary, indeed a pre-ethical, act. It is unmoral and invaluable because it comes before any measure of moral value, before any judgment of faculty or force has been established. “Psychologically” everyone possesses it; everyone must possess it.

In as much as it is not tainted by the “spirit of retaliation”, forging a weapon¾ that most ancient and originary movement of the hand¾ belongs to the order of quotidian and egalitarian force. It is not chosen, it is given equally.[2] Never does Ambedkar­- and we see this emerge in the most militant fashion in Thoughts on Pakistan- attenuate the significance of passion and mastery, of competition and honor for democracy proper. Instead, he renounces hostility precisely to reclaim the equalizing possibilities opened by war in its purest and most ethical sense. Maitri is another name, then, for love that is founded in difference, in an ethical and transformative violence even. It is a passion for that which is equal, if only because with it one shares one’s own finitude and anxiety, and in the final instance, one’s nothingness. Each time singular, maitri is inalienable yet shared, given to mastery and equality alike. Inasmuch it does not renounce difference, it does not give up on honor and competition either. That controversial question in Thoughts, “The Hindus have a difficult choice to make: to have a safe army or a safe border?” marks the founding paradox of that force which will conceptually mature and eventually take form as maitri.

Every now and then, Ambedkar’s conceptualization of force falls into the language of immunity and measure, of spiritual purism and national sovereignty even. Yet by giving it the name of religious responsibility, he also imparts his vision of force an ethical and immeasurable depth. Incandescently announced in the title of Annihilation of Caste, calling for an unconditional destruction of “irreligion”, this force measures itself against nothing but truth. “Religion”, after all, “is concerned with the love of truth.”[3] The annihilator (uccehdvadi) holds itself accountable to no authority or limit. In him, freedom and mastery subsume measure; responsibility comes to be marked by the religiosity of force alone. As Ambedkar memorably puts it, “The moment it degenerates into rules it ceases to be Religion, as it kills responsibility, which is the essence of a truly religious act…I have, therefore, no hesitation in saying that such a religion must be destroyed and I say, there is nothing irreligious in working for the destruction of such a religion.”[4] In sum, annihilating religion in the name of religious responsibility, seeking through immeasurable force what can only be called, thus, a religion without religion. It is the same logic of immeasurability that Ambedkar mobilizes again when a decade later he militantly proclaims, “the slogan of a democratic society must be machinery and more machinery, civilization and more civilization.”[5]

More machinery than whom? Measured against which other civilization? Where is this other democracy? Ambedkar does not say¾ he has perhaps America in mind¾except that this immeasurability is grounded in absolute equality alone. A very singular thought is at work here, one that often gets carried away in the most antidemocratic directions. For in Ambedkar, there are moments when certain forms of masteries, certain variations of the master-serf relationship even, tend to acquire a peculiar sheen of just benevolence, if not equality. But then, that is the very nature of democratic action, the very nature of critique of force, as Ambedkar himself concedes. One can never safely separate its evil from its egalitarian promises. Indeed, only when one is radically possessed by the idea of immeasurability, only when one is unconditionally given over to the emancipatory possibilities of generalized force, that one can write of equality in the manner that Ambedkar writes of it. “A society which does not believe in democracy may be indifferent to machinery”, he claims, “but a democratic society cannot. The former may well content itself with a life of leisure and culture for the few and a life of toil and drudgery for the many.” But not democratic society, he repeats. Authentic equality will come, he declares in a dizzying formulation, only “when machine takes the place of man”.[6]

Saving Virtue

This materialist, almost utopian, dream of the automaton appears in the same threshold decade between 1930 and 1940 that annihilation (ucched), with its explicit call for mastery and mobilization, for religiosity and action, has also entered Ambedkar’s lexicon. Nothing that Ambedkar writes in this decade remains untouched by the categories, figures, tropes, rhetoric, and facts of World War. In works that appear towards the end of the war, Ambedkar returns to an intermittent but unconditionally hostile critique of fascism. If his responsibility towards Nietzsche and nihilism had always been marked by equivocation, his repulsion to Nazism’s claim to spiritual mastery remained unambiguous. It is suggestive that Ambedkar’s most explicit attempt to rescue Nietzsche, the latter’s ethical nihilism even¾ by which he simply means Nietzsche’s capacity to understand the immeasurable virtuosity of force¾ comes in Philosophy of Hinduism. And this equivocal defense is mounted precisely as a critique of those who, in their petty understanding of mastery, have extrapolated and vulgarized Nietzsche’s thinking of force. Of course, Ambedkar clarifies

It is not difficult to see that his philosophy can be as easily applied to evolve a super state as to superman. This is what the Nazis have done. At any rate the Nazis trace their ancestry from Nietzsche and regard him as their spiritual parent. Hitler has himself photographed beside a bust of Nietzsche; he takes the manuscripts of the master under his own special guardianship; extracts are chosen from Nietzsche’s writings and loudly proclaimed at the ceremonies of Nazism, as the New German Faith. Nor is the claim by the Nazis of spiritual ancestry with Nietzsche denied by his near relations. Nietzsche’s own cousin Richard Ochler approvingly says that Nietzsche’s thought is Hitler in action and that Nietzsche was the foremost pioneer of the Nazi accession to power. Nietzsche’s own sister, few months before her death, thanks the fuehrer for the honor he graciously bestows on her brother declaring that she sees in him that incarnation of the Superman foretold by Zarathustra.[7]

Yet precisely because of this vulgar filiation between philosophy and street politics, Ambedkar sees in fascism’s will to mastery not a love of Nietzsche, nor a fidelity to force, but a betrayal of adoration. How can people who shamelessly consecrate an all too human thinker be authentically Nietzschean? Hitler is a perversion- Gandhi will terrifyingly say exemplary- of what Ambedkar usually associates with “direct action”. This perversion contaminates the equality that might have been accomplished in an authentically fought war.[8] Fascist action, given over to idolatry, bust-worship, and ceremonial politics of the street¾ hence, Ambedkar’s comparison of the “gangsterism” of the Muslim League and Hindu Mahasabha with the NSDAP¾ destroys the purity of war.[9] Adoring Nietzsche, fascism attempts to annihilate tradition, seeks to break away from religion, tries to gather unparalleled technological energy in the interest of national reparation, and fails. Nazism, then, is repulsive not because it is nihilistic. Instead, it is a colossal failure because it is not properly, ethically, forcefully, annihilative (ucchedvadi).

Ambedkar himself is scrupulous in his reading of the Anti-Christ and Thus Spoke Zarathustra; rigorous in distinguishing Nietzsche’s own faith from the unfaithful interpretation of his lovers; careful to mark out one Nietzsche text from another. Accustomed by now to being misunderstood by followers and antagonists alike, he is drawn to that Nietzsche who “foresaw for himself a remote public, centuries after his own time to appreciate him.”[10] This poignant line, a direct reference to the confessional sentence that appears in the foreword of The Anti-Christ, also illuminates the mature Ambedkar’s own reconciliation with nationalist grudge over his own mastery of philosophical sources, or as Nietzsche might put it, his “honest [y] in intellectual matters to the point of harshness.”[11] “Nietzsche’s philosophy had become identified”, Ambedkar says, “with will to power, will to violence and denial of spiritual values, sacrifice, servility to and debasement of the common man in the interest of the superman.”[12] It is not Nietzsche himself, not his demand for sacrifice, not his “courage for the forbidden”, not his dream of the Superman that debases force. It is the appropriation of sacrifice by the unfaithful few, paradoxically, that vulgarizes it.

Despite his absolute rejection of equality as sameness, Ambedkar’s Nietzsche believes¾ any philosopher worthy of the name must uncompromisingly believe¾ that at the heart of every revolution there lies the authentic demand for incommensurable equality; that is, equality that refuses to subsume difference. Ambedkar’s Nietzsche, perhaps most importantly, is a thinker of the future, one who “took comfort [and gave Ambedkar some comfort, one might add] by placing himself among the ‘posthumous men’”, and in whose ideas virtue and force were emancipated from their petty cruelties and hierarchical perversions.[13] Even as he finds deplorable resonances of the Manusmriti in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Ambedkar refuses to deny the genius of Nietzsche’s selfless ambition: conceiving mastery that would be grounded in disinterest (upeksha) and authentic love.

What Ambedkar always feels compelled by, then, is the immeasurable virtuosity of war between those equal in virtue. The promise of equality that comes by way of mastery, even militarized sovereignty, never fails to attract him. This mastery is not of one over another; instead, this is a relational mastery, one that forges kinship between equals. Everyone must equally and dutifully prepare for such an “equalitarian” war. Nonviolence, after all, might be construed as truthful, meaningful in its extra-moral, that is, non-hegemonic and non-normative sense, only when everyone is a soldier, when everyone has the equal right to sacrifice, when each has equally mastered the virtue of selfless war and nonviolence alike. Virtue itself, above all, might sometimes necessitate war. “We wage war, 0 disciples, therefore we are called warriors”, Ambedkar’s Buddha tells his followers. “Wherefore, Lord, do we wage war?” they ask him. “For lofty virtues, for high endeavor, for sublime wisdom—for these things do we wage war: therefore we are called warriors. Where virtue is in danger do not avoid fighting, do not be mealy-mouthed.” An incommensurable equality then, equality not of measure but of immeasurable mastery: this is where Ambedkar is most Nietzschean, never shying away from virtuous war, never renouncing the ethical value of difference¾ and sometimes competition¾ amongst equals.

 Just Force

If love, freedom, mastery, honor even, are necessarily conjoined, what is, for Ambedkar, mastery proper, mastery that is virtuous and egalitarian? Who is worthy of being such a master? It is that who respects suffering and finitude; who relinquishes civility (vinaya) not even in war; who renounces transcendence for a scrupulous ontology grounded in the unequal’s quotidian and unspectacular mortality alone. Thus, fascism’s spectacle of spiritual ancestry contaminates what might have been its authentic “leveling force”.[14] Let us briefly pause here, on this term “leveling force”, which is a singular way of describing equality, of thinking equality as an extenuation of force. In a vertiginous formulation, Ambedkar describes “unfettered slavery”, that is, the equal right of everyone to own slaves, as an “equalitarian principle”. As long as everyone is a master, as long as one class (Shudra) alone is not enslaved and devoid of mastery, slavery retains its “leveling force”. Barely three passages earlier, Ambedkar had already declared, “In short, justice is simply another name for liberty, equality, and fraternity”.[15]

Now the problem of whether general slavery, while it is certainly egalitarian inasmuch everyone can be a master, is also just, Ambedkar does not resolve. However, it is clear that for him equality within the system of generalized slavery ensues from the fact of equality in virtue. Everyone, without discrimination although not without competition, is seen as equally deserving of having property. Which means, rather than being grounded in charity or compassion of one dominant group towards another, general slavery universalizes¾ no, radically frees¾ responsibility and even maitri. Each touches another freely; each is obliged to another; each defends his neighbor equally; everyone and not the benevolent abolitionist alone are equally responsible for freedom. Everyone, above all, is righteously and legitimately armed. Only in this mastery can authentic nonviolence and love of equals take root.

Assuming there is a grievance, assuming there is consciousness of grievance; there cannot be a rebellion by the lower orders against the Hindu social order because the Hindu social order denies the masses the right to use arms. Other social orders such as those of the Muslims or the Nazis follow the opposite course. They allow equal opportunity to all. They allow freedom to acquire knowledge. They allow the right to bear arms and take upon themselves the odium of suppressing rebellion by force and violence. To deny freedom of opportunity, to deny freedom to acquire knowledge, to deny the right of arms is a most cruel wrong. It mutilates and emasculates man…The Nazis had indeed a great deal to learn from the Hindus. If they had adopted the technique of suppressing the masses devised by the Hindus they would have been able to crush the Jews without open cruelty and would have also exhibited themselves as humane masters.[16]

This is a giddy passage. After all, there is something peculiar¾ something given over to violent measure¾ in a critique of cruelty that nevertheless redraws the world according to a hierarchy of sufferers whose fates, Ambedkar knows fully well, are equal only in their incommensurable suffering. Why this resort to a hierarchy of incommensurable sufferers and unequals? Does such a hierarchy not reduce equality precisely to that which Ambedkar abhors, which is measure? Why does the untouchable have to be the most sovereign unequal, most unequal amongst the world’s unequals? What is at work in this contamination of Ambedkar’s immeasurability, his pure ethics, by mastery and measure?  There is, beyond doubt, a strain of radical conservatism in Ambedkar’s itinerary; one which is often compelled by a vision in which nothing seems more degrading than being banished from the world of senses, barred from light and touch, consigned to shadows and corners. In a fragment of his autobiography composed a few years before Auschwitz, Ambedkar speaks evocatively of his life in a dungeon, away from humanity and light, in the company of animals alone. And this was no incarceration or confinement of the Nazi type. This was life, ordinary, routine, solitary, often homeless, and marked by sleeplessness and death, right in the heart of modern India.

We will have to let go for now this singular moment in Ambedkar’s itinerary of the self¾ indeed that which becomes the very ground of his radical selflessness (anatta)¾ for another occasion. Here, let us only mark that it is this experience and the plea for its singularity that aggressively shapes Ambedkar’s comprehension of suffering of those distant from him in time and place. And yet, while the demand for incommensurability sometimes forces him into seeing elements of freedom even in Roman bondage in ways he finds unavailable to the Hindu untouchable, while it forces him into remorselessly describing even slavery as a “vague gift” for the slave, it is also his intimate knowledge of servitude and confinement that enables him to recover from the Jewish migration from Egypt an exemplary religious force. A militant extenuation of force, a general mobilization of virtue on industrial scale, then, will have always mediated Ambedkar’s religiosity. A revolutionary and ethical violence will have, in his eyes, never compromised his nonviolence (ahimsa). In Ambedkar, religion and machine, maitri and force, faith and knowledge, often cohabit, inseparable yet heterogeneous to one another. For what Ambedkar calls the love of truth is also a certain adoration of force, an affirmation of life in the right to mobilize. Perhaps that is why in The Buddha and His Dhamma, it is the aporetic and sacrificial figure of the soldier that returns most often as the exemplar of maitri, as the true affirmer of species life as such.

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Aishwary Kumar is assistant professor of intellectual history and political theory at Stanford University. The essay first appeared in Seminar 641, January 2013.

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[1] See Ambedkar, Annihilation of Caste, in Babasaheb Ambedkar: Writings and Speeches (Govt. of Maharashtra: Education Department, henceforth BAWS), Vol. 1: 60.

[2] See Ambedkar, Philosophy of Hinduism, BAWS, Vol. 3: 82.

[3] Ambedkar, Philosophy of Hinduism, BAWS, Vol. 3: 86.

[4] Ambedkar, Annihilation of Caste (Jalandhar: Bheem Patrika Publications, 1936), 87-88

[5] Ambedkar, What Congress and Gandhi Have Done to Untouchables (Lahore: Classic, 1977; originally published 1945), 295. [Emphasis added]

[6] Ambedkar, What Congress and Gandhi Have Done to Untouchables, 295.

[7] Ambedkar, Philosophy of Hinduism, BAWS, Vol. 3: 74-75.

[8] “Direct action” is one of Ambedkar’s most insurgent and prolific expressions. See for one example, Ambedkar, Essays on Untouchables and Untouchability: Political, BAWS, Vol. 5: 375.

[9] Ambedkar, Pakistan, Or the Partition of India (Bombay: Thacker & Co., 1945), 260.

[10] Ambedkar, India and the Prerequisites of Communism, BAWS, Vol. 3: 117.

[11] “These [with courage for the forbidden] alone are my readers, my rightful readers, my predestined readers: what do the rest matter?¾ The rest are merely mankind.” Nietzsche, The Anti-Christ, (London: Harmondsworth, 1968), 114.

[12] Ambedkar, India and the Prerequisites of Communism, BAWS, Vol. 3: 117. [Emphasis added]

[13] Ambedkar, India and the Prerequisites of Communism, BAWS, Vol. 3: 117.

[14] Ambedkar Philosophy of Hinduism, BAWS, Vol. 3: 26.

[15] Ambedkar Philosophy of Hinduism, BAWS, Vol. 3: 25.

[16] Ambedkar, India and the Prerequisites of Communism, BAWS, Vol. 3: 126-27. [Emphasis added]

The Politics of Shaming

 Manash Bhattacharjee

As the 5th annual gay parade in Delhi walked the streets with colourful pride on 25th November, 2012, I remembered the outrageously disturbing story two years back, which shook every gender sensitive conscience: the alleged suicide of Dr Shrinivas Ramchandra Siras. The possibility of Dr. Siras committing suicide didn’t hold much conviction in the face of everyone’s disbelieving shock upon receiving the news. Those who were empathetically in touch with the AMU professor claimed he was happy about the Allahabad High Court’s decision to stay his suspension. Dr. Siras was also quoted as saying he wanted to go to America, where he would be allowed to live freely as a gay man. He wanted to spend the rest of his life fighting for gay rights. It’s tragic he had to fight the first battle, without luck, for his own life.

 

The Question of Evidence:

If it is a Miracle, any sort of evidence will answer, but if it is a Fact, proof is necessary.

~ Mark Twain

The police and others said it couldn’t be murder as the doors were locked from inside. As if locked doors were such a conclusive clue. The farce of prima facie evidence had always sought to transform countless murders into suicides. Suicide is the official euphemism for murder in India. It has become the most convenient cover-up story. What comes readily to the investigating police officer’s lips is “suicide” whereas the most obvious possibilities of deliberate poisoning or other subtle ways of stage-setting a murder as suicide doesn’t seem to occur to the qualified gentleman. Such a defensive strategy raises more suspicion than hope. Worse is the tacit assumption that suicide is an angst-ridden private act whereas the reasons behind even legitimate suicide cases are socially instigated.

 

The Question of Shame:

Thus speaketh the discerning one: shame, shame, shame – that is the history of man!

~ Nietzsche

The lure of shaming others publicly now has a lethal weapon: the spy-camera. The spy-camera, used to shame something ethically private before the eyes of the public, gets into a dangerously unrestricted territory of manipulation. It ends up being a bizarre syndrome where neo-perverts exploit others for money or revenge. The film LSD showcased how women are used as tools into unknowingly performing sexual acts before a hidden camera for the sake of profit. Other people are made victims of hate because of their queer sexual identity. Their sexual practices are termed ‘immoral’ by the moral police who comprise religiously conservative, heterosexual goons. This psyche was exemplified by those students who surreptitiously filmed Dr. Siras’s consensual sexual act. As if Dr. Siras being gay posed a threat to the paranoid norms of the hyper-masculine, heterosexual brigade. They decided to strike back at the professor with a fascist mindset. It was a premeditated act by the students in the name of stirring up an utterly reactionary public scandal. They saw themselves as representatives of the entire heterosexual community’s moralistic concerns. This seemed to legitimise their act. They gave the impression, as if acting in the larger interest kept them outside charges of private motivations. But what is most private is the pleasure involved in shaming. The pleasure of shaming occurs in the individual, even though it is shared in the larger realm of public consumption. The pleasure of shaming comes from the desire to humiliate. Humiliation is instigated by the breakdown of erotic and altruistic ties among human beings. In such an exceptional situation, hate wages war against shame. Shame is the irreducible, ethical essence of a human being. Humiliation is aimed at the dis-possession of the other’s shame. But it includes the violator’s shamelessness. Shamelessness is the most consciously violent mode of terrorising shame. It can be best defined in modern times as possessed rationality. Humiliation is the most venomous form of shamelessness, while shame, always exposed to the possibilities of assault, is the most vulnerable part of our solitude. Kafka had painfully discovered “the violation of solitude”(to use Milan Kundera’s phrase), chased by the state’s secret police. Dr. Siras had discovered a similar kind of violation in the shape of a bunch of heterosexual moralisers hell-bent on exposing his private life to public gaze in the name of social duty. What is common in both cases is the desire to humiliate the victim and try and ensure that “the shame of it must outlive him”, to quote the last line of The Trial.

 

The Question of Justice:

Murder is not the crime of criminals, but that of law-abiding citizens.

~ Emmanuel Teney

The question of justice takes on a different dimension after the victim’s death. It shifts the whole responsibility to the public who are concerned about the victim receiving justice at the hands of the state. Dr. Siras symbolised a collective cause – of gay rights and a respectful place for sexual minorities in Indian society. The question of justice in Dr. Siras’s case encompassed a larger justice which is awaited in favour of the gay cause in India.

Emmanuel Teney seems to tell us, we cannot make easy distinctions between criminals and law-abiders. People follow the law to keep their own hegemonic interests intact. The law itself is a product of and run by the dominant class. It suits this class to be within law. But once the hegemonic order is threatened by people who challenge their social, cultural and sexual norms, the dominant class takes recourse to violence outside the law, in the name of another law. It is the notion of justice before justice – a pre-judicial justice, violently meted out by the moral vanguards of society. It challenges modern law and the foundation of its secular institutions. These institutions have to be predisposed in favour of the victimised crusaders and act against such criminal law-abiders. Or else these institutions of justice would be accused of being complicit in fostering pre-judice.

Dr. Siras’s case was a reminder for the law to push its horizons further in order to expand its vision of justice. It asked of law to empower those identities struggling to gain a foothold in our society. In a democracy people should have the right to have sex, ideas and values according to their human dis-positions. The state of hypocrisy and denial in our society can’t be cajoled by the institutions of justice. It will be a national shame if people who want to live truthfully are made to live in fear.

The acts of pre-judice which provoke hate-crime and push people towards death needs to be redeemed by the law. Until then, justice will elude the victims of endless violence.

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Manash Bhattacharjee  is a writer and scholar in political science, working from New Delhi.

Professor Morrie and Revolutionary Literature

Ashim ‘Kaka’ Chatterjee

Tuesdays with Morrie disturbed me. This book disturbed me a lot. The story of Professor Morrie Schwartz is distinctive. There is not much of action here. Not too much description of life’s experiences. Colourful characters do not clash with each other in order to create a dramatic situation.  What one encounters instead is death—in its full glory—and life arising out of death. Tuesdays with Morrie is a story of an old professor and his not-so-old student.

What kind of a man is Professor Morrie?  He teaches sociology at Brandies University. Not merely chhatra-dardi or chhatra vatsal—to brand him thus will be saying a lot less about his relationship to his pupils. Students are his life. Naturally his home, the restaurants near his university, the lawns  and nooks—all are sites for nurturing a peripatetic world of examined life with his students. His love of books and ideas is infectious. Love of life, even more.

He arrives at a class. A hall full of anxious young minds—waiting. But Morrie is silent. For 15 long minutes. First the students are bemused, mild jokes hover around, notes get exchanged, a certain uneasy restlessness pervades. Then there comes a moment of pin-drop silence. Hush. The professor begins. His subject of the day: the influence of silence in human relationships. Why do we get bothered by silence? Wherefore peace in utterance?  This is the way the man wins over his students, commands respect and love. He is not as dexterous as his more famous fictional rival in To Sir With Love nor as historically vexed as Coetzee’s Professor Lurie. But Morrie is not against life. Though he cannot manage his steps, he would dance. Not a good singer, he would be immersed in music.  Not a particularly skilful swimmer, he would love to go for a dip.

His student, who is narrating Morrie’s life, is bringing this world, a cosmos really, into being with utmost care and craft. The university life being over and done with, his students bring Morrie a brief-case, embossed with his name. They embrace—the teacher and his pupils.  And part silently.

In such a lively man’s life there arrives a terrible tempest. All in a flash. Morrie gets infected with Lou Gehrig’s Disease (ALS)—a motor neurone predicament. We all are familiar with Stephen Hawking and his encounters with this disease. Not much has been discovered yet about this condition and not much preventive or curative stuff is available yet. But death is imminent. Maximum duration of possible survival is 5 years. In Morrie’s case, it is 2. As Morrie comes out of the diagnostic centre, he notices the busy world going on with its daily activities. As the world refreshes, he withers.

Gradual, little, incremental changes are making him give up the small pleasures of life. He discovers in the morning that he can’t fix his car’s brakes—driving as an option is gone. Begins to trip as he walks and therefore requires a walking stick—end of independent walking days. In the locker room, in order to change his outfit, he needs manual help—end of privacy. Appears before his students one morning and announces that he might not finish his quota of coursework that particular semester and so they can opt for other courses or may drop out—end of his secret pride.

ALS, the writer tells us, in an evocative phrase, is like a burning candle. It will burn out and melt your nerves  into a waxen residue. The process starts from your legs and usually travels up. After a while, you cannot stand on your feet. And then sitting too becomes impossible. Finally, if you are still alive, a rubber tube will facilitate your breathing. And all this, when you are fully conscious of the rapid changes taking place in your body.

The professor takes a profound decision: that he will utilize fully the rest of his living days. There is no need to feel embarrassed about the inevitable.  Why not make his death a case for research? Is it not worth it to travel the boundaries of life and death and think afresh?  With this thought in mind, Morrie begins to disseminate himself to others, to everyone.  He gives a clarion call for meetings in his apartment in order to discuss the many variations on death threadbare. Not empathy or sentimentality he needs—but interviews, new connections, telephonic conversations— with an urge to examine life through death is what he would rather like to indulge in during the remaining period of his existence. He walks into TV studios. His student and now a well known newspaper columnist Mitch Albom had promised to keep in touch after they parted upon Mitch’s graduation from the university.  He could not fulfil his promise. The rat race got him. Mitch responds now—after 16 long years and they start a new research agenda, like the old times: meeting his professor every Tuesday and thrashing out issues of life in their many hues—Society, Rights, Guilt, Death, Fear, Aging, Greed, Marriage, Family, Forgiveness and so forth.  By that time Morrie is unable to conduct his everyday activities. Every Tuesday is downhill. But he is unfazed. He requests in a matter of fact fashion to a guest, “Can you please hold on to this bowl—need to take a piss?” Since he has no other option but to rely on others, he has no qualms or feelings of guilt.  When asked in a television show about what bothers him about this dependency, pat comes his reply: “Soon someone has to wipe off my arse.” The final Tuesday was reserved for ‘Adieu’—as a subject of discussion. Only a few words. Morrie breathes his last the Saturday next.

Discussion on death and human preoccupation with death is timeless really. Yet it is also historicised in specific circumstances. The sons and daughters of Amrita have not been able to transcend death fully.  The idea actually is not to transcend death but to encounter it, as part of our material living. The cells die. So do our bodies. Eventually. Those who think of decay and effacement in negative ways, will think of transcending death. They do not love life.

I remember my days in the 70s. I am not trying to personalize here, but actually trying to think through some moments. I remember Brihannal’s mother.  She was an illiterate mother whose son, Brihannal was absconding, underground, farar owing to state surveillance and atrocities. His mother came to ask me to get back her son. Her son was not into any unethical work—why was she so troubled then? “Baba, my son will die,” she said. I replied, “Yes, your son may die in this warfare. Take him back. But promise me that he will never die. Until the sun and moon and stars remain in the firmament, your son shall live.” I gave her three books to read that day—about those some other day. I do not yet know what that mother understood. Nor was I trying to act the teacher. It was an exchange. She left on her own, without her son. Was she demoralised? Was she proud?

Morrie’s book is a best-seller  So, it may be considered a popular read. Not deep enough. But I don’t know, I really don’t—why it reminded me of The Old Man and the Sea. Does a revolutionary have the right to feel good about such books?

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Ashim Chatterjee was a student leader of (CPI(ML). Chatterjee broke ranks with Charu Majumdar in 1971 after the failure of the attempts to build an armed movement in the Debra-Gopiballavbur area iand due to the opposition of CPI(ML) towards the liberation struggle of Bangladesh. He was imprisoned during 1972-78. Chatterjee formed the Bengal-Bihar-Orissa Border Regional Committee, CPI(ML)as a separate faction. . Later Chatterjee formed the Communist Revolutionary League of India.

Accidental Insights Into Reading

Manash Bhattacharjee

The new Seminar issue, ‘A Country of Our Own’ (April 2012), became an interesting prospect when I saw Nauman Naqvi’s name among the contributors. I started reading his essay the night I got the issue, but other matters intervened and I kept it for later. The next day I took the issue with me to read on my way to JNU. I opened the Nauman essay and began to read earnestly.

Before I began to read, I vaguely remembered Nauman mentioning in the beginning a “repetitive writer” named Intizar, but I had turned the first page which I had already read, and was eager to go on from the second. I read about Nauman’s summer holidays in his native village in Barabanki where he was joined by Pakistani cousins. He mentioned how as children they were invariably divided into Pakistani and Hindustani groups and teams in discussions and games involving the partitioned countries. A few “Indian cousins” would support Pakistan in the cricket and hockey matches to not only stamp their displeasure against Indian Muslims being discriminated against but also from a fear of Islam being under threat in India. When it came to hockey matches, the same cousins would desire that Zafar Iqbal and Mohd. Shahid score goals for India, but that Pakistan win in the end. Nauman slowly realised, in his gradual visits to Pakistan, there being more to Partition than the Hindu–Muslim divide.

When he visited Pakistan after the Sikh riots, Nauman found Muslims having relinquished Hindustani for Punjabi, with a majoritarian refrain against the migrant Urdu speakers. Nauman then recollects how his own family was divided between the two nation-states during Partition and how the matter was more complex than children’s games. Nauman pauses to see how even those games as children were coloured in turn by what happened during Partition. With interesting tales about the difficulties of visas to Pakistan, Nauman ends by pointing to the ridiculous problems thrown up by the nation and seriously questioning its legitimacy.

I finished reading the essay, glad to know much more about Nauman’s life, and felt a little more enriched. But the moment my eyes drifted towards the next essay, I read: ‘A Secret South-Asian Meta-utopia’ by Nauman Naqvi. Needless to say, I was flabbergasted. I turned back the pages to find out whose essay I had been passing off in my head as Nauman’s. The essay titled ‘Family Chronicles’ bore the name Jamal Kidwai. I had met Jamal at a party once, and knew he was from Aman Trust. But I had never read him before. I had never read even Nauman before, though I had heard his video lecture on ‘A Muslim Meditation on Violence’. Nauman, I knew, was from Karachi. So how could I have glossed over the fact that the account I was reading was of an “Indian” Muslim? How could such an error happen?

Anyway, an error is simply an error, and all I had to do was re-structure my rational sensibilities, acknowledge the Jamal story as Jamal’s, forget the associations I had made of the story with Nauman, and move ahead to read Nauman’s piece with a better hold on error-prone possibilities. I did read Nauman’s piece finally. I did not, finally, take the rational line of editing out the writing titled ‘Family Chronicles’ from the associations I had developed from it with Nauman Naqvi. In other words, I did not hold my error of reading as an error of judgement or an error of ethics. I found my error simply circumstantial and not burdened by the discourse of truth or truth-reading. I was not reading into any truth; I was reading a narrative signed by a person whose name I merely misplaced. But does that misplacement amount to an aesthetic or ethical crime regarding the author and the author’s name/signature? To my understanding, it is not, because the author, alive or dead, is a singular register only because his name is NOT another name. Nauman is NOT Jamal. At least that part of the error was, willy-nilly, “rectified”. I couldn’t do much about it, but I still wanted to read Jamal’s story with Nauman’s presence in it, as if it was Nauman’s story. And I looked for reasons about why it is possible to do so and take this erroneous reading further. I wanted to see where an error-prone road could take me. Is there anything as a wrong road in a journey where the destination wasn’t chosen in the first place? How to read the signposts then? I decided to go ahead.

Does it really matter, in the first place, if Nauman is from Karachi and Jamal from Delhi or Lucknow? The narrator of ‘Family Chronicles’ was moving in and out of India and Pakistan, having family members in both the countries, and it didn’t matter whether he was an Indian moving in and out of Pakistan or a Pakistani moving in and out of India. Jamal’s story is obviously capable of being told in reverse (with slightly different anecdotes) by a Pakistani. The story of Partition was a mix-up of lives and habitats, of lives and histories getting in the way of each other, of memories getting in the way of each other. In this scenario, why couldn’t Jamal’s story be Nauman’s and vice-versa? Jamal’s story accidentally got misread as Nauman’s, but the rational error also gained a larger perspective, as a larger and more complex sensibility got added in the process of thinking about reading, the author’s name/signature, and the relationship between the two.

The context being Partition, Jamal and Nauman are two names of Partition, partitioned names, moving in and out of two countries like a name halved into two slices of history. How much did Nauman find himself in Jamal’s story? Maybe he did find a few things, if not in common, in a familiar un-commonness. After all, Jamal was Nauman’s other half, the half who lived in India and visited Pakistan. Maybe their relatives in Pakistan met, or knew of those who met. If anyone did a field research, maybe certain meetings, if not connections, can be found in the story. And the two stories will finally connect into a larger story of partitioned people. Without my error, which mixed up Jamal’s story with Nauman’s, the essence of Partition’s story would have been missed. I had grasped the crux of the matter.

There is a term in Greek called hamartia. It refers to an injury committed in ignorance. It is a term developed by Aristotle in his Poetics. The word hamartia is rooted in the notion of missing the mark (hamartanein) and covers a broad spectrum that includes ignorant, mistaken, or accidental wrongdoing, as well as deliberate iniquity, error, or sin. My act of reading, seen through hamartia, would then try and propose such an act of missing the mark as a necessary—albeit accidental—way of re-cognising the missing-marks, the accidents, the errors and the wrongdoings of history. This hamartian reading of Jamal’s text, by replacing the name of the author, gets nearer to what the story of Partition meant to everybody who suffered it: stories which are impossible to individualise, because the subject of that story can no longer affirm his subject-hood without falling prey into the fractured subject-making discourse of the nation. The subject of Partition, in order to free his subject-hood from power, has to flee the name and look for a pseudonym, to become another, the way Manto becomes Toba Tek Singh. Toba Tek Singh helps Manto flee his own story and find refuge in the madness of his character. It is a deliberate act of fictionalising one’s subject-hood in order to re-appear as mad in the guise of another character.

But in my case, it wasn’t Jamal or Nauman who faced the possibility of madness, but myself, the reader. The accidental act of reading created a schizophrenic moment where I could not go back to the original moment of the accident and found myself split into two: much like a post-Partition subject reading on Partition. I could had to save my madness by simply rationalising the act, which I did not end up doing. I wanted to face the depth of this accident and see what strange conclusions I would find there. The first relation I could deduce from it was that just like Partition was a catastrophe, my reading was a catastrophe within that catastrophe.

The past, Nauman writes in his ‘correct’ text, is “no longer a clear and determined relation” but a “bundle of relations, whose tips come into their grasp only to slip away, and nor are they convinced of the truth of these relations”. If the clear and determined relations of the past slip away at the tip, there is no relapse into a relation-less sphere but those relations being replaced by the unclear and undetermined relations of the world. The moment the ‘truth’ of relations vanishes, the hamartia of relations begins. There is no other way to re-enter history unless through an original hamartia that catastrophically mimics the other catastrophe, history, and refuses to part with that relationship of everlasting death and remembering.

As a reader who turns interlocutor, I marked a relationship between Jamal and Nauman, which strikes at the heart of the secret South Asian meta-utopia. The secret is perhaps the error of reading itself, of finding itself error-prone in the reading of loss and its relationship with one’s past and one’s world, forever ruminating at the vanishing tip where those near leave and those afar draw near, and the variety of loss overwhelms its subjects.

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# I am indebted to my friend Rajarshi Dasgupta for insightfully adding to my direction of thought.

(The author is a political science scholar and writer, living in Delhi)

Fairly Directly to Death

Prasanta Chakravarty

Stanley Cavell’s magisterial memoir Little Did I Know, Excerpts from Memory (Stanford University Press, 2010) begins by telling us that his will be a story of the detours on the human path to death: “…accidents avoided or embraced, strangers taken to heart or neglected, talents imposed or transfigured, malice insufficiently imposed, love inadequately acknowledged.” These he has authorization to speak of.

In a way it is a story of embracing a certain blindness—like the agnostic philosopher and musicologist Vladimir Jankelevitch who would not listen to German music or mention German philosophy. It is like keeping one’s eyes closed and moving through a familiar room in order to imagine what it would be like to be blind so that one is able to tiptoe back and forth between remembering and forgetting.

Forgetting and acceptance does not mean that the disagreements with the alleyways of life are now agreed with: it means finding a further life—in the practice of philosophy. Philosophy then, is often an abstraction of autobiography. So, Cavell reminds us, how Wittgenstein would habitually think and share ordinary language, not advance theses in philosophy. Philosophy, like autobiography must be for everyone and no one—as Emerson in his notebooks or Wordsworth in The Preludes allude to us.

This attitude, this discriminating posture, would seem pretentious to those who write out of a sense of a history of oppression. Not enough representative of culture or race or sex, it would seem. What then is Cavell doing as a Jew? His Jewishness—always marked a tinge sharper in America, in growing up in the East side of Atlanta and then in Sacramento, in his obligations to Semitic purity, his explorations of the subtle biases in European philosophical tradition, are not matters of cultural identity, he tells us, but “identities compacted in my existence.” As he thinks about identities and scruples of purity he simultaneously wonders about his sedation and isolated concentration of lights in the midst of a complicated recent heart procedure, and speculates, might we not all be headed for exciting interplanetary travel? And yet Cavell humbly underlines that his words can be at best excerpts from an American academic’s life—alternating between the common and the singular.

In a book peppered with dazzling encounters with some of the sharpest minds of the 20^th century, two men stand out. One is the philosopher J.L. Austin. And the other, Cavell’s father: “We see our fathers naked. We men,” Cavell would confide,  as he painstakingly details his old man’s  ruthless melancholia and acutely vulnerable Jewish relationship to a new country and what he has bequeathed to the junior—dispassion and attachment in equal measure. A bereft and incoherent professor, unsure in things he ought to be an authority on, as we espy quite early. But beneath the raw murmurings and unbridgeable rancor also lie a subtle bond of empathy, like when the unschooled, pawnshop-owner father takes the son to a manufacturer of academic robes when Cavell prepares to defend his doctoral dissertation. It was a private ceremony and the rigorous philosopher, from a distance, wonders about the requirement of such ceremonies in our lives: “Ceremony in human existence is no more measurable by its utility, though philosophers seem to sometime argue otherwise, than the possession of language is, or living in common; you might as well argue the utility of possessing a human body.”  And once, when Cavell asked his mother why she ended up marrying his father, she replied, “He is a serious man.” Her silences, Cavell tells us, when not terrifying, were often golden. At its profoundest, this journey of a book is about silences and postponement and the price we willingly, knowingly pay for these decisions. It is a mad world, my masters!

And it is these that have always driven Cavell to his readings.  The kaleidoscope of subject positions and the inexhaustible joy in trying to relate to those take Cavell to intellectual inquiries. He wonders about Thoreau acquiring wood for his new cabin by destroying the old shack and recalls a particular passage from Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations. ‘our investigation seems only to destroy everything important,’ but insists that he is ‘destroying nothing but houses of cards.’ But if the world remains, as it is, pointlessly, what counts as defense against another’s moods?

Between these bouts of inwardness, Cavell narrates some exuberant and universal teenage moments too—his awkward awe and sleeplessness at spying a local beauty, naked in a local performance rehearsal, his brave 1935 apple-green Oldsmobile coupe, high school bowling matchups—sometimes played for money, his music band and music album collection that he so treasured and then let go. There is this hilarious anecdote about his own precociousness as a kid as his teachers tested him on skipping him to the second grade a year earlier. After the teachers finished testing Cavell with a string of questions and making him do things with blocks, he shot back: “You have asked me a lot of questions. Now I am going to ask you a question. What is the difference between a hill and a pill?” To his bemused teachers who had no clue whatsoever, after a brief pause, Cavell coolly informed—“A hill goes up and pill goes down.” When he came out, he told his mother that his question was not good enough since a hill could both go up and down. There is a sense that this precociousness, and a keen sense of it, was both a source of pride and perpetual misery to him and to his close ones.

While in the hospital after a road accident he felt like Proust’s narrator describing his stages of awakenings! Are accidents, unlike events, disproportionate to causal causes, of threads forever lost? But then he wonders whether accidents, encounters, excuses and misses could at all happen after cell phones. O yes, they could indeed, “what if the cell phone melts or a goat eats it.” Things will continue to happen comically, at unripe times, in the wrong tempo. It is in these circumstances that Cavell recalls one of his rich and admired uncles who gave some worldly-wise advice: “Don’t concern yourself with what you hear about anti-Semitism. Just be three times better than your competition and you’ll be all right.”

Music is a religion, outlasting Judaism and Socialism. (There are two other religions in this book—Eros and Philosophy). But he spends a lot of time narrating his interest in the extraordinary ordinariness of music—a metaphysical world that suffuses his material conditions of living. Helps him keep his head above water. Outside of academe. But sometimes with academe. A young miner in the North of England, Cavell recalls, became enamored of classical music and would whistle snatches of it as he went to work. An old miner provided him with a further education: “You ought not to whistle Beethoven when you go to the mine. You hear the whole orchestra when you whistle. What the rest of us hear is only your whistling.”  And Ernest Bloch in Berkeley gives Cavell and his graduate classmates a glimpse of what it meant to be an intellectual and an artist at the same time. There is a touching exercise in the economy of music when Bloch tells his class and then goes on to demonstrate how conducting is just clapping when the conductor gives the clue. The rest is detailing. Years later, during the political upheavals of the sixties, Cavell remembers that the same Bloch had said to his class: “When the city of San Francisco, for my seventieth anniversary, dedicated a day to me and gave a large luncheon in my honor, I began my speech by saying: ‘This is the unhappiest day of my life.’ ” Such was the stoic power of equitable utopia in music.

Cavell sketches the impetus for his own formidable oeuvre as a part and parcel of his growing up days. The Claim of Reason, for instance, was written from a fear of inexpressiveness and over expressiveness and to discover the role of therapy in philosophy. No wonder, then, that a despairing isolation and bouts of intellectual ecstasy joust for primacy in each of Cavell’s works. One of the important personal and poignant sections of the book is Cavell’s observation of how Jewish pawn-brokers (not unlike Dickens in the blacking factory?)  like his father would often read Chapter 24 of Deuteronomy from the Torah in which laws of usury are promulgated, requiring respect from those who have borrowed along with the law against gleaning, to confess the knowledge that once that whole community was enslaved.  This taught them to take the pledge of pawning almost as a therapy. This poetry of uneasy redemption and grace are the first suggestions that lead to many others about the deeply therapeutic role of philosophy—and Cavell is not sure whether philosophy is supposed to provide you with any answers.  But it is for this spiritually divided selfhood that young Cavell got attracted to Thoreau’s Walden, as he wondered how a work so clearly and incessantly written to highlight the economic dimension of human existence is also so deeply reflective. Was the writer of Walden influenced by German idealism, then?

Pawn shops and old school salesmanship also meant a knowledge of elaborate codings and decodings, before the days of computers, and that meant a spirit of the wanderlust—driving him towards riddles and poetry in philosophy. This double vision of philosophy, sometimes competing—between moral claims and the wandering/wondering spirit—leads to a certain discomfort as Cavell encounters two books( A.J. Ayer’s Language, Truth and Logic and Charles Stevenson’s Ethics and Language) early on,  that ‘reasonably’ claimed that moral judgment is, at its best, an expression of emotion meant to move and persuade. Is this like reporting a lost and found dog—the aim of moral philosophy? And what about wonder—how do we learn to inject desire and disturbance in reflection? Wonder means something opposite to teaching and instruction—and Cavell wonders about the point of speaking altogether. Is it worth it, to open one’s mouth? This question suffuses the opening essays of Cavell’s first book—Must We Mean What We Say? And he acknowledges his divided allegiance to moral philosophy and its uselessness at various points: “Perhaps this texture of fear and constricted knowledge, with its anticipatory echo of the endowed Chair of Aesthetics and the Theory of Value I occupied at Harvard during my last decades of teaching amounts only to some private joke certain lesser gods are reduced to telling one another.” Once his teaching assistant remarked that when logic got really interesting and powerful it left natural language quite behind, which was too hopelessly vague and ambiguous to serve as a medium of serious philosophical analysis. Cavell was disappointed. Academia is also another form of nomadism as one evolves and shifts gear, and also as one’s students get dispersed to the winds after companionable labour and nourishing conversations. Consequently, Stanley Cavell’s universe is marked by a certain restiveness (what he calls ‘random extravagance’) along with intense philosophical professionalism. So, we see someone who consistently argues for an ethical compass jumping headlong into music and performance in the black Tougaloo college in Jackson, Mississippi during the restive sixties and transfiguring Harvard philosophy classes by including Marx in the syllabus.

One comes across a few choicest anecdotes and insider stories of the Atlantic academic world during the second half of the twentieth century. In 1963, when Cavell meets Bernard Williams for the first time over dinner at Princeton, Williams informs him rather quizzically about how the cold and ‘insufferably dogmatic’ Austin pushed his Oxford graduate students and younger dons to read Cavell’s early essays, who bristled at the thought of reading philosophy from another fellow graduate student and an American at that!

Then there is the legendary music teacher at Berkeley, Marjorie Petray, who wishes to test Cavell by asking him to play for 60 seconds Liszt’s D-Flat Fantasy impromptu and at the end of it, turning to the class, remarks: ‘Isn’t it fine to hear a man’s touch at the piano?” That daring invidious compliment lead to an adolescent crush as he looks for excuses to be in the magic presence of this ‘full woman.’ He begins to think about Tannhauser’s curse—whose singing attracts the passion of women, and to each of them he comes to sing the wrong song or sings wrongly to each. Only one woman successfully intercedes for him, once for his life, once for his redemption. Marjorie Patray committed suicide, leaving two children and a rich husband.

Cavell fondly recalls how Terence Malik, whose academic major was philosophy at Harvard and who was actually immersed in Heidegger and in films, of course. Such sharpness of mind and the quick daring of considering Heidegger a philosopher at Harvard will not go down well, Cavell feared, with his external examiners. But Malik was unmoved, and began instructing his instructors instead. His grades ensured that even if he failed in the interviews, he would still graduate with the highest honours.

Or one of those stories expatriated Harvard graduates like to tell to convey to the less fortunate the unrivaled swank of Harvard that Cavell tells us with some irony. “After dinner, around the fire in an adjacent common room, George Santayana was talking with a few of us carefully but effortlessly well-dressed young men, and asked us: ‘Can you read Goethe in German, Dante in Italian, and Lucretius in Latin?’ No one claimed to be able to read all three. Santayana replied: ‘I too am very ignorant.’ And then added, ‘Not that ignorant.’

The other one is about Thomas Kuhn, who after a late night drink or two with Cavell, blurts out with a tortured look: “I know Wittgenstein uses the idea of ‘paradigm.’ But I do not see its implications in his work. How do I answer the objection that this destroys the truth of science? I deplore the idea. Yet if instruction and agreement are the essence of the matter, then Hitler could instruct me that a theory is true and get me to agree.” Cavell’s reply I cast as follows: “No he could not; he could not educate you in, convince you of, show you, its truth. Hitler could declare a theory to be true, as an edict. He could effectively threaten to kill you if you refuse to, or fail to, believe it. But all that means is that he is going to kill you; or perhaps kill you if you do not convince him, show him, that you accept and will follow the edict. I don’t say this is clear. But it is something I cannot doubt is worth doing whatever work it will take to make clear.” Kuhn’s reaction was startling. He rose almost violently from his chair, began pacing in front of the fireplace, and as Cavell narrates, muttered something like, “Yah. Yah.” What causes conviction? What, perhaps rather, may undo an unnoticed conviction?” After that night both arranged to meet for lunch and regularly discuss ideas which would later appear as The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.

In a manner, Cavell’s book is the quintessential tale of the immigrant in America. And ruthlessly introspective, as the best of such tales have always been. He reminds us that while United States is a synonym for chauvinism, America might not be (patriotism has become a maggot in his nation’s consciousness). Has this something to do with US’s chronic skittishness about philosophy and original intellectuality? A typical example is the writings in the New Yorker which share a particular claim to sophistication among the literary and the tasteful class. And yet, Cavell tells us how he came across an essay on Emerson on his two hundredth birth anniversary by the celebrated John Updike, who was able to, and willing to, string out a list of careless and banal criticism of Emerson’s pretensions, but unwilling to explain subtly and accurately by contextualizing those very sentences. Cavell asks: Who was Updike protecting? What public service was he thereby performing? It is this cultural dispensation, of hasty and gleaming smartness, that Cavell has been cautioning us in all his works. As he sums up: “Snobbery readily presents itself as a form of tastelessness manifested by those with some real taste.”

In a brief spurt of inspired wonder at the relationship between poetry, philosophy and more practical activities, Cavell recalls Wallace Stevens’ and Santayana’s repeated claims upon philosophy and asks why The Magic Mountain might open with the question ‘What is Time?” He responds to Stevens’ claims of virility in poetry by considering Euripides’ Hippolytus, as a study of the dangers of promising and Racine’s Phedre, which is about the treacherousness of speech.  Poets have to risk both—accept the promise of poetry before they can withstand consequent prophecy/poverty and contest with monsters the right to assert their own language and imaginative cosmos. In the background is Wittgenstein’s famous tag at the end of Tractatus: “Whereof one cannot speak, therefore one must be silent,” which was in response to Nietzsche’s admonition at the beginning of his second volume of Human, All Too Human, “One should speak only where one must not be silent.” But when a culture unnoticeably learns to read and converse silently, its implications are vast.  Cavell’s own literary-artistic sensibility was largely guided by his discovery of writers of stories, like Saul Bellow, Isaac Rosenfeld, Bernard Malamud, Robert Warshow and the likes of Kafka and Mann. The legacy, for which he is permanently grateful, he calls non-Stalinist socialist aspirations living somehow with a commitment to high modernism. But he was often bored in literary theory and psychology classes, which seemed formless and far too uselessly abstract. In this case he had to be partisan:  “…in both psychology and literature classes, names of members of the philosophy department began to be invoked by students asking the most interesting questions…” But this reaction comes from an intense love of art, not dismissal. What he dismisses is pedantry. Without fail.  Cavell, in continuation to a rare tradition in philosophy, has always sought philosophy’s rapprochement with art, two ancient rivals: “I am not willing just to say that Shakespeare, Racine, Dickens, George Eliot, Ibsen, Proust, Kafka, and so on evidently know intuitively what philosophy responds to conceptually. These writers also evidently respond conceptually.”

Music is a constant presence and so are films. As he writes the musical score for a professional production of King Lear (songs, fanfare, tuckets, alarums, storm effects and a concluding dirge), Cavell underscores the fact that to imbibe theatre’s intellectual ambience means not only a familiarity that exceeds mere literary study but also the enlargement of scope, because a production systematically and explicitly demands the exercise of imagination, articulation, interpretation, surprises and mood. Cavell is inordinately happy when his Cities of Words gets mentioned by two reviewers in connection with the film Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. That some of his works are long forgotten save a specialized readership and yet are referred to in relation to this film or that composition makes it still alive and pertinent. Similarly, a publication of a collection of essays Contending with Stanley Cavell, on his works, with his responses in it, makes him pleased as a peach. We observe, to our utter delight, how common our humanity is actually—with its similar worries and fears, its stubborn foibles and tribulations.

At one level the book is also about academic institutions. And at a time when institutions are being undermined and faculty humiliated by all kinds of high handedness, certain observations demand special attention. Like when he observes in general how “Large and ambitious universities are on average probably no less complex, and no subtler, at making decisions about hiring and promotion, and generally no more or less rational in evaluating and balancing talent and productiveness and promise and reputation and loyalty and simple affection, than law firms or insurance companies or sports teams. It is true that the latter have measures of winning and losing apparently more objective (cases handled successfully, policies written, league standings) than universities do. Yet one imagines universities to have the freedom to be better, at once juster and kinder and more imaginative.” At several points the book reminds us how lectures need not necessarily be displays of individual accomplishment rather than invitations to participate in professionally working things through and how graduate students ought to be regarded as participating in a common enterprise with their professors. Cavell, ever so persistent in highlighting the kind of seriousness that academic pursuit demands, is at the same time ruthlessly dismissive of academe’s false pretences. To the popular adage meant to explain the compounding decline of an academic department’s importance, or perhaps to decry a new appointment to the faculty: “Second-rate people like to be around third-rate people. First-rate people like to be around first-rate people,” Cavell has to say this: “Do first-rate people speak so—except in their fourth-rate moments?”

And a very touching, poignant episode comes late in the book that shows how this man thinks about the academe. Gilbert Ryle comes to Harvard, and among other things, gives an informal lecture in the students’ common room. As Ryle holds forth, a senior Harvard faculty, Henry Aiken, arrives volubly drunk and creates a commotion. A student host takes him out and just as Cavell was thinking the situation was well handled, the student returns and takes his place again near Ryle. When Cavell asks the student later about why he would leave Aiken to his disgrace, he said he did not wish to miss the lecture. This sets Cavell thinking about the level of refinement and prestige that moral philosophy has achieved these days. And a consequent casualness in everyday actions: “A talented teacher to whom you owe gratitude for repeated past kindnesses, and whose disgraceful conduct will be underscored by the consciousness of your rebuke, deserves better of you than being deftly turned out of doors, when the only cost to you to help him preserve a tatter of dignity is the mild disappointment of missing the end of a public conversation.” There is something quaint enough to learn from someone who refuses to recognize competitiveness (or moral stinginess) where it entails a lack of respect. The way to make winning pertinent, or rather irrelevant, is to win in such a way as to be beyond or outside evaluation.

There is an important section towards the concluding part of the book which shows how vexed and attracted this professional philosopher is towards French post-structuralist writings. On the one hand, Cavell is moved intensely by intentions of exchange and challenging claims in philosophy. The whole point of doing philosophy is a right to confront (“…a confrontation that draws blood, or stops or boils or cools or heartens it.”) and examine each other in our daily existence. This is a rational position. On the other, he is profoundly disturbed that philosophy has put a distance between itself and theology. This leads him to Lacan and Blanchot who feel that human beings are made so as to bump into each other. Philosophy ought to be the unblushing publishing of one’s guilt within the everyday. And yet that it chronically avoids the everyday is a predicament Cavell painfully confronts. His first encounter with Derrida (with Cavell’s book in hand) sums it up in manner. He can see how both of them are thinking together on the conditions of our existence and yet the ways of this French articulation he cannot fathom. The phantasmagoria of fashionable American espousal of French thought bothers him and yet he walks close to them in every manner. The result is the acknowledgement of a profound conundrum within the American humanities world itself in the last century: “American dispensation of humanities, formed in the absence, indeed the shunning, of the study of philosophy, left it incapable of evaluating claims made in the name of philosophy by philosophers from the other side, whereas professional philosophers on this side were on the whole too contemptuous of these claims to study them.”

This is a book about a way of living. This is also, to a large extent, the inside story of the American academia as it developed in the previous century. And within all this lies the story of the evolution of philosophy. What does a commitment to philosophy look like? With what right, out of what need, might or should a teacher question it? Certainly not by creating works, but by going back over one’s expressions, leaving nothing standing, or perhaps, as Emerson, one of Cavell’s heroes, puts the matter, always just approaching. To trace a path, crooked and unpredictable—that is what has been Stanley Cavell’s aim in this journey. No harm indeed in saying again, It is a mad world, my masters—I speak as a child.

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Links:

Vladmir Jankelevitch, ‘Should we Pardon Them.’
http://www.du.edu/cjs/documents/jankelevitchshouldwepardonthem.pdf

Ralph Waldo Emerson, Complete Works
http://www.rwe.org/

Richard Wagner, Tannhauser Overture,

Deuteronomy, Chapter 24
http://www.mechon-mamre.org/p/pt/pt0524.htm

Euripides, Hippolytus
http://classics.mit.edu/Euripides/hippolytus.html

Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
http://insitu.lri.fr/~mbl/Stanford/CS477/papers/Kuhn-SSR-2ndEd.pdf

J.L. Austin, Other Minds

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Prasanta Chakravarty teaches English at the University of Delhi.

Augustine on Memory: A Note on Confessions 10.8-37

Amlan Dasgupta 

 

The Greek word for truth – or more correctly, one of the several words that appear to have been used – is aletheia. The word figures largely in NT Greek and is usually rendered in Latin by the word veritas.  Literally, however, aletheia, from the verb lanthanō with the alpha-privative, would mean that which is unconcealed or even unforgotten, that which does not escape memory.  The river Lethe in the Greek underworld is the river of forgetting, by crossing which mortals forget their past lives.  This view was famously held by Heidegger, who pointed to the pre-Socratic, specifically Homeric, sense of the word. In the oral world of the Homeric epic it is the poet’s commemorative power that enables him to cross the boundary between the living and the dead, between presence and oblivion. Charles Segal writes: “what is truthful for the archaic poet is not the so much what is factually exact as what successfully resists the corrosive darkness of forgetting”.

There are many powerful characterizations of memory and remembering in Greek philosophy which may usefully serve to contextualize Augustine’s own reflections on the subject. Starting from the Platonic discussion of memory in the late dialogues, through Aristotle’s subtle distinction of recollection and memory, to the Stoics, there were a number of important theoretical statements to choose from.  Even as Augustine inaugurates a new ethic of memory, there is much he carries over from the past, which is only natural considering his deep immersion in classical culture in his early life. Augustine was certainly familiar with the main arguments of his predecessors, and his own treatment has certainly both Platonic and Stoic resonances. We might briefly point to the fact that Augustine tacitly adopts a position popularized in Stoic physical doctrine, that the human soul, or a part of it, is the controlling principle of the human organism. It is to this regulating, rational faculty that the Stoics gave the name hegemonikon; technically part of the soul, pneuma, it regulated ideally the other parts, namely the five senses, the reproductive faculty and the speech faculty. It was the hegemonikon which received sense-data and retained it either as “imprinting” (tuposis) or an” alteration” (alloiosis). The fundamental power of the hegemonikon was to form presentations or phantasiai, which were conveyed by the senses. Memory was stored phantasiai, but they could produce complex structures: conceptions (ennoemata) or even fictional and non-existent things. Marcia Colish points out that Augustine’s own notion of the soul, while retaining traces of the Stoic position, is immeasurably more complex: he integrates into the Stoic concept of the faculties the distinction between the vegetative, animate and rational soul as put forward by the Peripatetics and the Neoplatonic  valuation of the spiritual over the physical aspects of human nature:  to this Neoplatonized and Aristotelianized conception of the Stoic hegemonikon he adds “the Christian goal of spiritual renewal and communion” (1990:206).

There are three major locations for studying Augustine’s thought on memory and remembering, though the subject is an important one to him, and one to which he frequently turns.  Significantly they span a great part of his career, and it is quite obvious that there are some differences in approach. The three primary texts are De Magistro, dating from about 389, Confessions 10, probably composed somewhere between 397 and 401, and De Trinitate, completed not before 422. I shall look today solely at one of these texts for reasons simply of easy accessibility: but also the Confessions are not only the most widely read of Augustine’s works, but from the point of view of the present discussion, clearly one that allows us to form a cogent idea of some of the leading notions that inform Augustine’s thought on the memory.

The first 9 books of the Augustine chart the story of his early life bringing us to the critical point of his baptism, his abandonment of the study of classical rhetoric and his consequent entry into the Christian life. The 9^th book describes also a number of personal tragedies: the death of his mother Monica and the death of his friends.  The 10^th book is in some senses the beginning of a new section, which includes the discussion of memory, time (11) and language (12). The reflections in this concluding section turn back on the nature of personal recollection: what kind of truth value can be attributed to this narrative of personal experience? Do past memories influence behavior, and if so is the result for the better or the worse? The discussion of memory in Book 10 thus introduces a new form of self reflexivity into the narrative: the product of memory now leads to a discussion of the faculty of memory and the process of remembering. Augustine encounters memory in the course of a journey of self realization and self expression: to realize himself through his record of personal experience, and to present to his readers a life that can be read, that is turned into writing. Thus Augustine’s “confessions” in front of God has another kind of audience, that of the readers and hearers of the Christian community for whom it must be an exemplary exercise.

In 10.7.11 Augustine says that will transcend even the natural power by which he lives and has the experience of the senses, as this is enjoyed by baser animals too: and in doing so he encounters memory, which for Cicero distinguished man from beast (Tusc. 1.24.57ff).  The wide fields and roomy palaces of memory that Augustine describes in the inaugural section (10.8.12) are a storehouse (thesaurus) of images (imagines) which are conveyed to it by the senses. It appears thus to be a repository, a place, essentially a passive faculty, in which the information provided by the senses is stored up: all that which has not been taken away (absorbuit et sepelevit, lit. devoured and buried) by oblivion. It may be noted that the use of memoria is however not wholly fixed, sometimes referring to something like a “container”, sometimes encompassing imagination and conception. In De Magistro,12,  Augustine makes the curious observation that when we consider the sense data of past experience, i.e. the primary content of memory, “we do not speak about the things themselves, but of images impressed from them on the mind and committed to memory”. Gareth Matthews points out how Augustine seems to be saying that instead of speaking of the things themselves, we change the subject and talk about the memory images instead. Augustine here seems to be making some kind of distinction between the experience of the present (where there is knowledge of things themselves) and the past (where there is knowledge only of traces left behind by sense perception). The early view seems to be closer to the Stoic (specifically Zeno’s) view about sense data” imprinting” itself on memory  (tuposis); in Confessions even though the passive nature of the memory per se is retained, it is seen as being interpenetrated by other, and more active, faculties.

Augustine marvels at the apparently inexhaustible resources of memory. All the evidence of the senses are stored up it, neatly docketed and labelled, in its “indescribable departments”, waiting to be recalled to the present. Whatever he seeks to summon appears immediately: Augustine is struck by the fact that even in silence and darkness he can relive sight and sound. The ensuing sections (17-18) are particularly dense and change our understanding of the memory simply as a receptacle for sense data. For when we hear a word being spoken we form an image of the thing that the word indicates. However the thing itself is not an object of sensory experience. The sound of the word fades away as soon as it is uttered, but the things remain in our minds. Augustine here seems to move towards a Platonic assertion that knowledge is pre-existent in the mind (Augustine uses cordi, in the heart) but not in memory.

In my heart then they were, even before I learned them, but in my memory they were not. Where then? or wherefore, when they were spoken, did I acknowledge them, and said, “So is it, it is true,” unless that they were already in the memory, but so thrown back and buried as it were in deeper recesses, that had not the suggestion of another drawn them forth I had perchance been unable to conceive of them? 10.10.17

 

It is here that one might also insert a role for language even though Augustine does not directly allude to it. All that we remember is already present in the mind: the function of the learning process is to take what is “random and unarranged”, and organize them into a systematic body. Language may hold the key here.  Augustine writes:

 

I do indeed hold the images of the sounds of which those words be composed, and that those sounds, with a noise passed through the air, and now are not. But the things themselves which are signified by those sounds, I never reached with any sense of my body…

 

The structure of language mirrors the contents of memory, newly retrieved from their disorganized state in the human heart, and stored up for use. The memory itself is a site in which the objects of knowledge continually shift and exchange places. We find out things and place them close at hand and say that we have learned these things. But soon as we cease to call them up, they slide into deeper recesses of memory, and if again required for use must be drawn together again. The object of thinking (cogitare) is really that of re-collection, not that which is collected anyhow (cogere).

 

Augustine probes into several of the psychological singularities of memory. He explores for instance the problem of knowing falsehoods (in that we truly know that we remember false things) and also that we remember things differently at different times. I may in fact remember knowing something in a certain way at one point of time, and in a different way at another. We thus remember remembering: at a later time I shall be able to recall that at such I time I remembered these things. We also recall past emotions: moments of pain and fear can be recollected without the sensations of pain and fear. In fact we might remember sorrow with joy and joy with sorrow. Augustine applies a striking analogy at the end of 14.21, saying that the memory is the belly of the mind: it contains joy and sadness as the stomach contains sweet and bitter food. The memory, like the belly, is unable to determine the nature of the emotion by itself. That we contain the experience of intense suffering within oneself does not affect one all the time: even when they are recalled from the memory by the mind, one might not have to undergo the same suffering. Yet there does seem to be a difficulty here. Undoubtedly we find in the memory the affect of experience, which is not something which inheres in the nature of experience but the affectations of the mind which receives them.

 

And yet how could we speak of them, if we did not find in our memory, not only the sounds of the names according to the images impressed by the senses of the body, but very notions of the things themselves? Things we never received by any avenue of the body, but which the mind itself perceived by the experience of its own passions, and committed to the memory? How could the memory  retain the passion of the mind without experiencing that passion?  14.22

 

The relationship of mind and memory remains difficult to understand.  At one point Augustine seems to willing to give up this relation: “Does the memory perhaps not belong to the mind? Who will say so?” (14.21) Augustine returns to the problem of mental images once again in the context of naming.  Images take their place with conceptual entities, affections of the mind and bodily states as being the content of memory. But at every step there arise new difficulties: when I name forgetting I remember it and understand it. Not only do I know the word “forgetting” but I also know what it means, which is a privation of memory. So the memory knows both itself, that is memory remembers “memory” and also remembers its absence. Consequently, we cannot say that forgetfulness itself is present in our mind when we remember it but only its image, for  “if forgetfulness were present through itself, it would not lead us to remember, but only to forget. Now who will someday work this out? Who can understand how it is?”  The text at this point falters, and reveals the strain of pursuing this line of thought. For it is not some abstruse, distant question that we are considering, like the distance between the stars or the weight of the earth. It is strictly personal, for “it is I – my mind – who remember”. There is nothing which is closer to me than myself obviously, and he seems to conclude that the question of forgetfulness is at the end a paradox of self-knowledge, that exists but cannot be rendered fully as a rational argument.

 

In 17.26 Augustine goes on to distinguish finally among the knowledge of sensory things present to us as images (imagines) , the knowledge of sciences through their  methods (praesentia) and the knowledge of emotional states through a kind of mental system of notation (notiones vel notationes).  Augustine is deeply moved and even fearful at this manifold power of the memory, as of the human mind of which it is the characteristic faculty.

Great is the power of memory, a fearful thing (horrendum) my God, a deep and boundless multiplicity. And this is the mind and this is me. What am I then, O my God, of what nature am I? …Behold in the plains, and caves, and caverns of my memory, innumerable and innumerably full of innumerable kinds of things, either through images, as all bodies; or by actual presence, as the arts; or by certain notions or impressions, as the affections of the mind, which, even when the mind doth not feel, the memory retaineth, while yet whatsoever is in the memory is also in the mind—over all these do I run, I fly; I dive on this side and on that, as far as I can, and there is no end. So great is the force of memory, so great the force of life, even in the mortal life of man. 10.17.26

Brian Stock astutely observes that Augustine’s concern with memory is never at a purely philosophical level, and that he is adept at creating decoys behind which his practical objectives are masked.  In the Confessions his discussion brings him to the paradox that God cannot be contained in the memory.  The curious vacillations that we have seen serve to define the problem of the knowledge of God: is it something that is contained in memory or is it beyond memory? Both remembering and forgetting have a part to play in setting out the problem. In 18.27 he uses the parable of a woman who has lost her money but finds it after she searches for it with a light. When she finds it she is happy, because she has found her money, the one that she was looking for. The women needs to forget to have the pleasure of rediscovering: and this turns out to have a greater significance, for like the woman Augustine has also searched for many things and has been confronted with many objects with the question “Is this it?” His answer has been “No” until he recognizes the object that he actually lost.  This is what appears to be the case when is looking for God. For searching for God is searching for the good life, the life in which the soul lives. It is something that has to be forgotten for us to seek it, and that appears to be the nature of human life: the inevitability of forgetting as well as the need for continuing the search incessantly. But how is happiness to be recognized? Did it pre-exist in his soul? Or to put it differently, did God exist within him so that he is able to recognize happiness when he experiences it? Evidently this is not like remembering Carthage, for it is not an object or assemblage of objects.  Augustine is at pains to demonstrate that happiness in this supreme sense is not the object of any possible kind of physical perception, thus entirely different from the memory of joy. But we have not experienced God, nor have we experienced happiness. Those who are content with the joy that conforms to their expectations and experiences are evidently different from the seeker who seeks God.  Stock describes the situations succinctly:

It is clear why individuals are not happy. They are unable to break with the past. They take greater pleasure in things that will not make them permanently happy, since these are easier to recall..(.)

If Augustine began by praising the infinite capacity of the memory to contain experience, he now feels that creates an over-dependence on the past, a slavery to habit and custom, and consequently an orientation to vice than to virtue. God is known neither by experience nor properly by pre-existent knowledge, but by the grace of God himself in making available to us: I  discover nothing about God that God has not taught me.

If God enters the memory at all it is not by finding a place in the container. God remains in man’s changeable mind through an act of his own willing, not that of human design.

For thou art the Lord God of the mind and of all these things that are mutable; but thou abidest immutable over all. Yet thou hast elected to dwell in my memory from the time I learned of thee. But why do I now inquire about the part of my memory thou dost dwell in, as if indeed there were separate parts in it? Assuredly, thou dwellest in it, since I have remembered thee from the time I learned of thee, and I find thee in my memory when I call thee to mind. 26.37

Augustine finally finds a place for God in the memory by delocalizing him. God exists in memory as much as outside it. We go backward and forward, he says, but there is really no place which may be assigned to God “save in thyself beyond me”. It is as the interior teacher that God exists in us. In the remainder of Book 10 Augustine “remembers” the sins and temptations that have assailed him up to now, but only to seek deliverance from them with divine aid. The act of confession, an act of memory, now inaugurates a process of self-remaking and reform.

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Amlan Dasgupta is Professor of English, Jadavpur University, Kolkata.

 

A Muslim Meditation on Violence

Nauman Naqvi

What is the source of Islam’s potential for a beautiful, passive revolution today? How are the greater and lesser jihads distinct and entangled? What are the experiences of force given in the Muslim tradition? What are the relations between beauty, divinity, history and the forces of peace, truth and violence in this tradition? These are the prayers, the questions silently addressed in this filmic presentation of the anguished work of poesy and asceticism against historical violence in the painter-poet Sadequain (1930-87) – a presentation of the experience and logic of another force given in Islam, and dramatized in the life and oeuvre of this postcolonial Pakistani artist. Through a range of effects – including a generous and dynamic display of striking images juxtaposed with ravishing lyric from both Sadequain, as well as the larger Indic-Muslim and affinate traditions of the pre- and post-colonial modern period – this lecture-film enacts the experience and logic of this other force in three dramatic scenes of a performative lecture given by Nauman Naqvi at The Second Floor (PeaceNiche) in Karachi. The scenes – the hand, the head, and gesture – are scenes of what Sadequain called the technique of ‘mystic figuration’ in his painting: a certain tortured entanglement of the aesthetic, the ethical and truth in Muslim inheritance. An anguished entanglement of beauty, the good and truth in their ecstatic appearance in the secular world – the world of sight and sound – that is inseparable from the demand of sacrifice, of a strenuous self-canceling intention given in the aspect of a subtle violence of immanence in the Muslim understanding of being and existence. In tracing this haunting, subtle force of life, the lecture-film gestures towards the potential inheritance of a radically ethical politics of universal grace in Islam.

Please click the link for viewing the lecture film:  

HumanitiesUnderground thanks Nauman Naqvi for providing and allowing us to publish the video text.