Toward a Politics of the (Im)Possible: The Body in Third World Feminisms 9781843318552, 1843318555

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Toward a Politics of the (Im)Possible

Toward a Politics of the (Im)Possible The Body in Third World Feminisms Anirban Das

Anthem Press An imprint of Wimbledon Publishing Company www.anthempress.com This edition first published in UK and USA 2010 by ANTHEM PRESS 75-76 Blackfriars Road, London SE1 8HA, UK or PO Box 9779, London SW19 7ZG, UK and 244 Madison Ave. #116, New York, NY 10016, USA Copyright © Anirban Das The author asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work. “Call to Prayer” in Gaganendranath Tagore: The Journal of the Indian Society of Oriental Art, March 1972, ed., Pulinbihari Sen, plate facing pg. 78. Published by Shrimati Tagore, Honorary Secretary, The Indian Society of Oriental Art, Calcutta. The verse in the dedication page is a free translation by the author from the lyrics of Rabindranath Tagore in Gitabitan Volume 1, Dey’s Publishing, Kolkata, 2007, pg. 86. All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested. ISBN-13: 978 1 84331 855 2 (Hbk) ISBN-10: 1 84331 855 5 (Hbk) This title is also available as an eBook.

For Rumela and Adira In the dense night of my unsaid words Your thought reigns like a star

CONTENTS Acknowledgements Introduction

ix xiii

1. Body, Power and Ideology Introduction Question of Power – The Hierarchical Constitution of Subjects Ideology and Spectral Embodiment

4 17

2. Thinking the Body: Metaphoricity of the Corporeal Introduction The Body, Thingness and Ideologies Actuality and (Im)Possibility: Descartes/Foucault/Derrida ‘The Woman in the Body’ – Metaphors of Embodiment Beyond Performativity: Universals and Other Generalities

37 37 39 46 54 61

3. Thinking the Body: Negotiating the Other/Death Introduction Medicine: Making Up the Normal The Body in Death: Beyond the Post/Modern Dying and the Dasein: Towards an Ontology of Death From Ontology to Ethics: Embodying Death

73 73 78 85 90 94

4. Thinking the Body: Beyond the Topos of Man Introduction The Woman in Ontological Difference Property Talks: The (Non)Space of the Name Figuring Sexual Difference: Multiple Singularities Yashobati’s Story – Maya in a Trace-Structure

1 1

105 105 109 113 120 127

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5. Violence and Responsibility: Embodied Feminisms Introduction Third World Feminisms: The Politics of Location and Experience Eating Others: An Inquiry into the Notions of Iterability and Responsibility

133 133 135 151

In Conclusion: Toward a Politics of the (Im)Possible

163

Notes

173

Bibliography

187

Index

207

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Arguably, and for diverse reasons, the most difficult part to compose in a book is the Acknowledgement. For someone who has shifted disciplines, interests, and ethical priorities over about a little more than two eventful decades, it is almost impossible to trace the innumerable and distinctively disparate influences that shaped his work. I suddenly face the sense of insignificance that arises out of the realization on the sheer number of persons who have sustained my thoughts and yet the meager accomplishments I can own up to. Professor Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak has been unstinting in her support for my work. The above sentence is shamefully inadequate to express the ways in which her comments, in the form of both written and oral exchanges, have foundationally structured the textures of this book. This, in addition to the overwhelming influence of her written oeuvre, is perhaps overtly recognizable in my scarce attainments. For Professor Sibaji Bandyopadhyay, I can only express a gratitude for the senses of respect, admiration and friendship that his being emanates. It might be somewhat embarrassing for the author to remember all the insights and turns of thinking Sibaji has provided for this book. My thoughts, and a large segment of the processes of my becoming, bear ineradicable traces of his pervading presence. Professors Udaya Kumar and Franson Manjali have read the dissertation from which this book develops in meticulous details and enriched the rewriting with their critical yet encouraging inputs. Both have provided an aura of friendly critique that is rare in its intensity and scope. I thank my thesis supervisors, Professor Shefali Moitra and Professor Pradip Kumar Bose, for bearing with my irregular patterns of work, bouts of enthusiasms for misplaced theories, and long stretches of intellectual hibernation. I take this opportunity to thank my parents, Laily Das and Dilip Kumar Das, for bringing me up as they thought it right, for bearing with me when I deviated, and for sharing a part of their life with me. To my extended family of relatives including my in-laws who put the word ‘laws’ under erasure, I remain grateful. A special fond and sad greetings to Nandita Roy, my mother(-in-law), whose mad appreciation for my alleged qualities shall continue to support me

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in rougher times, even after her early death. It is gratifying to remember those who made it possible for me to do the work of writing by doing menial jobs for the family, the (helping) hands that had unselfconsciously been friendlier than what the terms of a semi-professional domestic relationship dictated. Durgadi, who left us abruptly, would have been inordinately proud to hold a copy of my book. It is just not possible to name all those who haunt memories of learning and growing up. I thank Tapas Bhowmik, my early teacher of schooldays who passed untimely away, and Jayanta Bhattacharya, the friend and teacher of my early youth who continues to interrogate and engage with my thoughts. It is not possible to express my debt to the once comrades-in-thoughts like Bhaskar Bhattacharya, Dipayan Dhar, Nirod Baran Majumdar, Gargi Bannerjee, Ashis and Subhasis Goon, Debdarshan Dutta, Samrajnee Datta, Sudeb Saha, the younger Jayanta, and innumerable others who taught me how to live. Nirod’s silent approval and (not to ignore, even material) support have been invaluable in the last few years. Special and loving remembrance for the two Debasish, Das (who promptly provided me with a book I needed for the dissertation) and Ghosh, for growing up together. Appreciations for my work have always been forthcoming from Chirantan, Subrata, Santanuda and Pronita. My transition into the humanities was made possible with the help of Prof. Subhendu Dasgupta, the staff of the History of Science Program at the Asiatic Society 1995–1996 session, and through long hours of openminded and affectionate questionings from Prof. Arun Kumar Biswas. A specially tumultuous relationship has since been continuing with Prof. Ajit Chaudhuri, with early affections often turning into bitter contestations. The Research Training Program at the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta has been, to use a banal yet appropriate expression, a veritable eyeopener. This was the beginning of a long, uninterrupted and exceptionally rich interaction with the academic environment that distinguishes the Centre. The participants of an intensely vibrant reading group in the years 2005–2006 have enriched my thoughts in ways not always enumerable. I would specially like to thank Prof. Partha Chatterjee for being indulgent and retaining interest in my work, Prof. Gautam Bhadra, Prof. Pradip Datta, Dr. Anjan Ghosh, Prof. Tapati Guhathakurta, Prof. Janaki Nair and Dr. Manas Ray for providing me with comments, books and encouragement. The last couple of years, when I have been a faculty at the Centre, have shaped my ideas and articulations in profound ways. Dr. Rajarshi Dasgupta, Dr. Bodhisattva Kar and Dr. Priya Sangameswaran need to be mentioned specially for the interminable discussions on my work and diction. I thank Dr. Dwaipayan Bhattacharya, Dr. Rosinka Choudhury, Dr. Keya Dasgupta, Dr. Rohan Debroy, Dr. Mollica Dastidar and Dr. Manabi Majumdar for their

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

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friendly interest and interventions. Prof. Samita Sen has maintained vibrant and encouraging interest in whatever I was doing through her tenures in the two Universities, Calcutta and Jadavpur. I fondly remember the interactions with those colleagues in the Margins collective – Asha Achuthan, Ranjita Biswas, Anup Dhar and Nirmal Saha – the subsequent corrosions in relationships with whom have never been enough to erase the sense of enrichment, elation and respect that we then shared. I learnt a lot from my interactions in the extended reading groups and discussions with Anjan Chakrabarti (who also commented upon a paper that subsequently became part of my dissertation), Atanu Thakur, Arup Dhali, Bidwut Bannerjee, Debarshi Talukdar and many others. I remember the experience of sharing my thoughts with the M.Phil students in the Women’s Studies Programs at the University of Calcutta and the Jadavpur University. I also remember the students of the History of Science Program at the Asiatic Society, and the interactions on the few occasions when I communicated with people in Refresher and Orientation courses. The Wednesday seminars for Research Scholars at the Department of Philosophy in the Jadavpur University had always been an enriching experience. Parts of this book were presented on differing occasions at the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta, in the Departments of Philosophy, Comparative Literature, History, Sociology, and English and in the School of Women’s Studies and the Centre for European Studies at the Jadavpur University, in the Department of Political Science and the Women’s Studies Resource Centre at the University of Calcutta, in the Department of Philosophy at Rabindra Bharati University in Kolkata, in the department of Philosophy at the Assam University, Silchar, in the School of Languages at the Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, and in the Amsterdam School for Social Science Research in Amsterdam. I thank the respective Departments and Institutions for giving me the opportunity to share my views and all the participants for the enriching experience they provided. I thank the staff at the Jadavpur University Departmental Libraries in the Departments of Philosophy, Women’s Studies and Film Studies, the Central Library at the Jadavpur University and the National Library in Kolkata. For the staff at the library in the CSSSC, my gratitude for the warm, friendly, and the extremely tolerant way in which they have treated my incessant intrusions. Of course, Kalibabu warrants a separate allusion with his unerring memory and keen interest in everything academic. Earlier versions of parts of this book were published in from the margins (February 2002), in Thematology: Literary Studies in India, ed., Sibaji Bandyopadhyay, Jadavpur University, Kolkata, 2004, and in Rabindra Bharati Journal of Philosophy (2004). I thank the editors for letting me try out my ideas.

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Srila Roy has been generous in her assessment of my work, in sharing thoughts and incessant questionings. Durba Mitra was extremely encouraging and provided acute observations on Chapter Four at a late stage of writing the book. I am grateful to Moinak Biswas, Kaushik Ghosh, Aniruddha Chowdhury and Abhijit Ray who had been supportive of my endeavors in ways that went further than what I could expect. Sarthak Roy Chowdhury has been appreciative in his intelligent, ironic way and beyond. Amit Ranjan Basu needs a special mention for his consistent support and encouragement. With him I also share a pleasurable experience of reading in a group with Ritwik Bhattacharya and Abhishek Basu as the younger participants. These two, along with Hardik Brata Biswas, Samrat Sengupta and Rajlaxmi Ghosh continue to enrich me with endless discussions on praxis and theory. Barun Sarkar, magnanimously, read and edited the manuscript in painstaking detail. Pradip Bhawal has consistently been pestering with his doubts about seeing the end of my PhD. Without his mental and ‘infrastructural’ support, this manuscript would never be ready for submission. Interactions with Sourav Kargupta have been intermittent earlier (for cartographic reasons) but always stimulating and appreciative. In the final phase of completing the manuscript, his incisive and informed comments have been invaluable. I owe much of the specific articulations of this monograph to discussions with Sourav. Swati Ghosh had always been more than a caring, intelligent and understanding friend and continues to have confidence in and a critical engagement with my work. Her convictions lent vital support at difficult moments. Special and fond thanks to my two friends in two continents, Stefan Ecks in Edinburgh and Ben Baer in Princeton, who had been unstinting in their appreciations for my thought in the form of engaging in discussions, sharing of printed matters, extensive comments on writings, and hours of friendship. So much of my dissertation has been conceived in the interminable discussions, readings and disputes with Ritu Sen Chaudhuri over the last few years that a simple acknowledgement of her contribution remains perennially inadequate, almost an outrage to decency. Her influence has as well pervaded my diction of writing, that is, thought. To Adira, my daughter, I owe many hours (of study) stolen from what should rightfully have belonged to her, and lessons in ways of wondrous learning that only a child can impart in her first years of growing up. One can – with some crudity – remember midnight discussions, heavy with sleep, on still inchoate thoughts, and the first responsive interlocutor. But is it possible to thank someone for sustaining one’s thought, belief and confidence; for the day-to-day work of living, for the unbearable beauty in the experience of sharing the quotidian; in short, for one’s whole being? If it was, I could have named Rumela.

INTRODUCTION What shall I do with this absurdity – … I pace upon the battlements and stare On the foundations… “The Tower”, William Butler Yeats, 1926

The Argument Any form of Knowing has to negotiate the unanticipatable. By definition, the act of knowing has to know what is already not available to knowledge. To make known what already is known does not involve the process of knowing; it is the act of repeating the already-known. There are two basic ways to approach the unanticipatable. One is to make it derivable from what is already-known. The other is to respect the fact that it is underivable from the present. As we will see later, these two ways may not be mutually exclusive. To derive the unknown from the existing corpus of the known is not a homogeneous process. Some of the attempts that follow this process can also acknowledge that there are elements of indecision and uncertainty in the realm of the not-yet-known. This process tries to formulate a calculus of that uncertainty. Thus the range of indecision may be calculated. This calls for a new gloss on the notion of calculation. To treat the unknown as underivable from the present is not to deny the necessity of calculating the ways of reaching out towards the unknown. This calculus always has incalculable remains. The decision to know the unknown in a specific way is the decision to leap across an ineffable gulf toward a remainder not amenable to the calculations of the commensurable. Yet, without going through the calculus of the commensurable, the knower does not reach the ineffable remainder. Without the moves to define, elements within the fold of the knowable would easily be marked as ineffable. Variations

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of the same look like deviations from the norm if the reach and flexibility of the norm is not understood. Repetition would then be marked as break. As such, one must hold on to the two ends – the calculus and the incalculable. Trying to think about such a process of knowing, one has to think in terms of the present structure of knowing. To envisage this attempt to think I use the term figuration. Figuration – giving figures to thoughts, grasping thoughts as figures – is giving a body to knowing, embodying knowledges. Use of the words figure and body indicates a prior presence and its trans-formation. Here, thinking is not a simple re-presentation – a repetition of the presence of an already existing thing. Nor is it an imagining of a completely new unknown. ‘Figuration’ tries to give a sense of the tentativeness of the new and the tenacity of the old acting simultaneously in the process. When the body is conceived in terms of figuration – not as a threedimensional static space of a given presence – one recognizes that ideology is constitutive of the body. In the previous paragraph, my use of the term body anticipated this particular sense of the word. Yet it also hinted at and retained the sense of immediate presence that has so far accrued to the uses of the word body. As would be evident in the following discussion, my use of the term ideology professes and anticipates ideology as embodied, and thus is different from a standard version of ideology belonging to the ideational in an idea/body binary. Power differentials act through this space of ideological formation and themselves take part in the making up of the body. Embodiment of knowledge signifies that the process of knowing is a process of figuring this spectral body. If the body is not defined by the immediacy of an unmediated presence, how is it possible to think the specificity of a given body? The process of figuring implicates a number of generalities that intersect at the given locus of the body. The singularity of the body does not follow from a simple addition of these generalities. The number of generalities involved is never indubitably known, as there always remains the possibility of a new one coming to perception at a later instant. Moreover, singularity is structurally constituted by a certain unknown addendum to the said cumulation. The uniqueness of each moment involves a supplement of the unanticipatable. Naming the body involves the twin task of naming the generalities involved and retaining the (im)possibility of the unknown remainder. The prevailing notions of the body work within a metaphysics of ‘secular’ presence. As such, these notions have a continuity with (as elements which mark a break in) the Judeo-Christian notion of presence (that presupposes a single God and ‘his’ creations). Certain other generalities from a non-monotheist tradition might figure the body differently. Giving a name to the undecidable remainder is also a part of naming the body. The undecidable is multiple. So are the names/ figures of the body.

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Reality is perhaps the most all-encompassing of the categories that secular thought has figured in its bid to negotiate with the unanticipatable. Religions, monist or not, have tried to do the same in the form of the God/s, fate or a telos of any other sort. Knowledge, in the prevalent framework – be it secular or religious – is forever a bid to engulf the inscrutable other. The ‘body’, with its sense of impenetrable immediacy, remains to the act of knowing, the epitome of the unanticipatable as the given. The unanticipatable is so close here, so much wrapped in intimacy, that it seems not to need any thought, any reflection, any re-presentation. The perception of this presence appears to be beyond thought. The intimacy of the being renders it beyond thinking in the sense of not requiring the work of thinking in its perception. As such, thinking of knowledge as embodied – not in the spirit of a simple inversion of disembodied Truth, but as respecting the bodily enigma of truth itself – may point at a way of knowing and being that will bear responsibility to the ‘other’ as a singular moment in a politics ‘of the (im)possible’. Here, the ‘other’, so intimate as to defy description, calls for a response and the ability to respond to its unanticipatability. An ultimate other to the body as given presence, is death. Death is the moment of absolute futurity – not the future as a teleological presence – that defines the living body. It is the unanticipatable and incalculable supplement to the body. Knowledge tries to deal with death in the form of ways of dying. Different from the ways of dying, death is also constituted by a historiality that implicates generalities within and outside of the Judeo-Christian tradition. A respect for the death as an other to the living body involves, but is not exhausted by, a search for such other generalities. The differentiation of the body into the duality of the male and the female is at least as naturalized as the ‘presence’ of the body itself. In such a commonsensical way of thinking, when one speaks of the body, one presupposes the difference between the sexes. When one speaks of the body in a neutral register, almost always (except a few circumscribed discourses like gynecology) one speaks of the male body. For the woman, who remains equivalent to the body in a mind/body binary, the body spoken of belongs to the man. Such that one may assert, echoing a celebrated aphorism, while the man owns the body the woman is the body. Going beyond this bind needs figurations that chart the cartographies of the known body and, at the same instant, bear traces of non-spaces of the beyond. These figurations may be multiple, based on divergent generalities, yet open to the singularity of each enunciative moment. This work is an attempt to re(in)state the irreducibility of the unanticipatable to knowledge. The epistemological element of this effort consists in showing that the attempts to contain and calculate unanticipatability always bear their

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failures within their own logic. The ethico-political moment is in the reminder of a responsibility to the other. Each of these, the epistemo-ontologic and the ethico-political, flows into the other. I do not provide – remaining fully aware of the importance and necessity of the act – a substantive non-Judeo-Christian figure of the body. This book, on the one hand, shows how often such efforts of figuring slip inadvertently into a nuanced Judeo-Christian frame. On the other, it tries to recognize instances of such a figuring. The figure of the woman remains operative in these instances as constitutive of such efforts. This is not to pose a conscientious ‘religious’ stance against a thoughtless ‘secular’ one. I try to work, beyond the secular/ religious binary, on the continuities of the secular with the Judeo-Christian and point at the need to think of an interruption to this connection. Certain elements of non-monotheist mindsets are treated as possible rudiments of such figurations. Of course, these are not innocent of differentials of power or meaning. This book is not an attempt to give an answer to the question: “What is to be done?” Nor is it an attempt to chart unmarked (colonized, gendered, race- or caste-inscribed) spaces of discovery where old problems are acted out in new ways. Its humble effort is to trace certain presuppositions that die hard in fresh trials for alternatives and new terrains. The painstaking task of such enumerative clearing is necessary for the more substantive attempts, I submit. That is the only possible way to avoid repetitions looking as ruptures. And that is one of the tasks that describe (as always, insufficiently) the name ‘deconstruction’. Such a theoretical questioning of presupposed notions may open up the possibilities of thinking about what one may call embodied utopia. Embodied, as it is located in the space of the body. It is utopia, as it is in a no-space, located in non-topos. Yet, the body is always and already utopic in its ideological constitution, and utopia has to have a (body)space to be described. Embodiment as a category has itself to enact the work of embodying knowledges.

The Book To make a critique of universal knowledge, one uses the trope of embodiment. To mark the limits of disembodied knowledge perceived as a ‘view from nowhere’, one speaks of knowledge located in space/time/context, a view from somewhere. The ‘body’ is the figure that represents this location of knowledge. When one thus speaks of ‘embodied knowledges’, what notion of the body is one using? If the body is thought of as the simple opposite of mind or spirit then it gets defined by the same structure of binarism that operates in the notion of knowledge as disembodied. For this binary structure

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of thinking, knowledge processes occur in the realm of the mind or the spirit, a realm that is neatly distinct from the body. To blur this distinction is to go beyond a body/mind binary, which implies a going beyond of the thinking of the body in simple opposition to the disembodied mind/spirit. This would imply that embodiment is not simply opposed to disembodiment – the former bears within it constitutive traces of the latter. This book tries to figure out how embodiment can be thought of in terms of disembodiment and yet carry traces of a beyond. Deconstruction as processes immanent to thinking and being becomes helpful in this endeavor. This is opposed to a structure of reversal in which the embodied is immediately the reverse of the universal. This is an attempt to think of two terms that are analytically opposed – embodiment and disembodiment – as mutually constitutive yet distinctively different from each other. Not content with the analytic separation of the terms, this book tries to look into the processes of their becoming, in which they remain intertwined and conflictual. This focus on the entwined ways of becoming of the twin terms embodiment and disembodiment may be called phenomenological as opposed to the neat analytical divide between them, if one chooses to talk in terms of a binary. Again, this choice we are speaking of is at once an impossible and an inevitable choice. This choice is something within which one is already inserted, yet the terms of that insertion pushes one to go beyond. In the book, I try to act this double bind out in the conceptual space of the body. That act signals toward a dimension of ethics as an experience of the impossible being constitutive of the ontology of the body. This book works at the intersection of two related yet different fields. One is the heterogeneous feminist effort to question universal forms of knowing. The expression ‘embodiment of knowledge’ – deploying the notions of time (as history), space (as location) and politics (as partiality of perspective or standpoint) to interrogate the purported universality of knowing – is one important way in which feminist philosophies try to perceive the attempt. The second field follows from this: how does one think of the body when s/ he speaks of embodiment? In standard versions (of mind/body dichotomy), embodiment involves an act of simple inversion – valorizing the (material) body in place of the mind. On the other hand, if meanings are seen to produce the body as ‘a system of signification’, embodiment gets reduced to yet another form of the significatory mechanism. To come out of the impasse, I deal with the dynamics of the production of the generality called the ‘body’ with a focus on the ‘others’ (death, sexual and colonial differences) that fracture and define the notion of the body. An ethical responsibility to the ‘others’ consonant with this ontologically differentiated body distinguishes my notion of embodiment from standard versions of ‘third world feminism’. The development of this notion requires an elaboration of the ways in which power and scientific rationality

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work (epistemically) in a postcolonial setting. Finally, I point at how my notion of embodied knowledges is inseparable from a deconstructive politics of the (im) possible. The book starts with a discussion on the interrelationship of power, ideology and the body. Judith Butler (1997b) had tried to think of the relationship between power and the individual in terms of that between the social and the psyche: [ I ]f we refuse the ontological dualism that posits the separation of the political and the psychic, it seems crucial to offer a political account of psychic subjection in terms of the regulatory and productive effects of power. If forms of regulatory power are sustained in part through the formation of a subject, and if the formation takes place according to the requirements of power, specifically, as the incorporation of norms, then a theory of subject formation must give an account of this process of incorporation, and the notion of incorporation must be interrogated to ascertain the psychic topography it assumes. (19) It remains necessary to go into the workings of power in terms of the psychic apparatus provided one does not forget to refer to the fictionality of such a structure. Along with the social/psyche binary, the psyche/body binary must also be put under scrutiny. Otherwise, like that in many a simplistic attempt, the body would be reduced to the ‘body-image’ in the psyche. This is not to refute the importance of the body-image in the constitution of the body, but to remember the provisionality of a mind/body binary thus presupposed. My idea of the relationship between the body, power and ideology is different from, and in a protracted debate with, such a psychic reduction. In the post–Foucauldian era, ideology has become an unfashionable concept. Yet, at least since Althusser and Raymond Williams, ideology as a concept has been nuanced to address the Foucauldian ‘dissolution of the subject’. It can address the predicament in which subjects act as if they were securely intended. All subjects are ideological. I employ an ontological notion of power in conjunction with the acting of ideology as a ‘necessary fiction’. This move lets one think of an ethico-politics that takes the power-ladenness of one’s being into account while trying to mark the traces of a beyond to the dominant ideologemes. One can thus avoid pessimism of eternal subjecthood to an all-embracing Power as well as shun a hasty optimism of reversing the present order too easily by counter-posing a truth to the reigning ideologies. How does embodiment as a process involve processes of power? The question of power is treated here not in the sense of the macro-politics of states and social groups, not even singly in the sense of micro-dynamic of

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social institutions. Taking cue from a specific reading of Foucault’s notion of anatomo-politics, power is seen here to be ontologically constitutive of the body. A discussion of power in the theorization of hegemony is combined with the dimension of power as productive of the notion of being. This juxtaposition of power and ontology enables one to think of an ethicality that is co-constitutive with ontology – an ethics that has to take account of power relations, has to concede the inevitability of power in ways of being, yet does not have to leave out a notion of existential responsibility to the other. A juxtaposition of Foucault, Heidegger and Levinas is attempted at through Derridean categories. If idealization and embodiment are thought of as two analytic poles, then neither of these can occur without the other or without the mediation of power and responsibility. Ideologies and the body constitute each other. So, embodiment of knowledge is a condition of knowing, a condition that is often forgotten in the act of knowing, and a remembering of which becomes an ethical gesture. In its turn, this gesture opens the possibilities of thinking a different ethic. This ethic is expressed, at the end of the book, through the metaphor of ‘eating well’ – the inevitability and impossibility of a certain cannibalism in one’s being and a need to modify that cannibalism to minimize violence, to learn to ‘eat well’ – that points at the co-implication of power and being and the ethical imperative to go beyond this toward a responsibility to the other. There is a need to deal with arguments that, avowedly or not, treat or presuppose the body as unmediated substratum of existence. I begin with two intimately divergent opinions on the mind – that of Foucault and Derrida regarding a specific fragment of Descartes – a thinking of the mind, reason, and, for Derrida and Foucault, the mad. A Derridean thinking of the other in its absolute alien-ness (as of madness to reason) does not necessarily preclude a responsibility to the trace of the other in the self, to the trace as it appears to the self. Attempts to produce a definitional calculus of the other in its distinctness (as of madness through rational discourse) might, on the other hand, tend to naturalize the active traces of the self in the act of defining and be violent to the possibilities of the other. A valorizing of the irrational might valorize the rational ‘itself ’. I move on to deal with the body in its processes of being. These processes, as I trace, include the significatory and power mechanisms acting at multiple axes of identity. My focus is on the sexually differentiated body, as I find a discussion of bodily metaphors to lead inevitably to a discussion of sexual difference. The unthinking immediacy of sexual difference is commensurate with and a grounding instantiation of the given-ness of the body. The invocation of ‘cultural’ gender differences in contraposition to this ‘sexual identity’ can hardly point a way out of this predicament. I continue tracing how the ghost of other ideologemes animate the corporeal

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to subjecthood, speaking inevitably in terms which the mode of thinking I espouse tries to put under scrutiny. In the process I try to deal with certain inadequacies in the highly fruitful theoretical endeavors to conceptualize the body in Judith Butler, Jean-Luc Nancy and Partha Chatterjee. The body – which is the master-metaphor for location in space – is defined in the context of what the dominant view marks as its ultimate other, death. In this negotiation, for the deconstructive gesture that I propose, the body has to work at the aporia of thinking death in its intimate and unknown embrace with life, through a sense of respect and responsibility to the ‘other’. Historicizing the notion of the phenomenal self, one might easily be led on to conceptualize death only in the multiple histories of ways of dying. But then, what is ‘death’ as opposed to ‘ways of dying’? I try to emphasize as well as undermine this opposition while reading Derrida on Heidegger. My reading of a Bangla text by Manik Bandyopadhyay opens up the question of the historicality of death beyond the Judeo-Christian-Islamic traditions. It lets one think about the alterity of death in a religiosity that can embody its gods and goddesses. Embodying others might be thought of in different ways in such settings, I presume. Body-thoughts lead to the question of the sexual difference. The ‘case’ of the woman is not a ‘regional’ question in the ‘general economy’ of embodiment. The ideological work of embodiment involves the act of differentiating men and women. The de-naturalizing of the notion of sexual difference severely interrogates the purported distinction between sex and gender, a divide that much of feminist theory takes for granted. But what is the import of such an interrogation? This book tries to chart an itinerary of that attempt. The question it centrally raises is, how to mark a space beyond that of the heterosexualism of man if ‘space’ itself is already and always differentiated sexually in a heteronormative way. Does such an attempt only serve the known topos of the male desire? I trace the ‘desire of man’ in its fixity to see how the field of metaphoricity operates. I go on to deal with Irigaray’s notion of sexual difference and two names that Derrida uses to mark a space beyond – Khora and Geschlecht – to address these questions. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak tries to mark spaces which are more ontically connected to the ‘woman’. The clitoris and the mother are two such figures. On certain other occasions, Spivak chooses yet more particular figures in fiction. What is important for my contention here is the multiplicity of the modes of figuring the ‘woman’. Acting through and in the bid to go beyond the phallocentric morphe of the human, I bring in an other figure. I read a Bangla text by Kamal Kumar Majumdar to enact this gesture and its limitations. The non-repeatable ‘event’ness of the ethical encounter with the other is brought out by the figurations I thus proffer. The immediacy which ostensibly authenticates the body as a material unthought ground makes it possible for the body to be a resource for thinking

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an ethicopolitics of the beyond. What seems to be unthought is thus marked to be beyond thought. It can act as a metaphor for that beyond. The metaphoricity of the corporeal allows the corpus to open up the possibility of an other beyond the rules of the same. In the last part of the book I go on to deal with a notion of the politics of the (im)possible based on ideas of such embodiment. This politics is juxtaposed to the politics of the possible, where politics is thought of only in terms of elements that can be derived from the present. In such a present-centered politics, the body is conceptualized as a signifier of spatial location where the notion of space remains inadequately theorized. I point at multiple notions of space that try to speak of the singularities (non-reducible to the universal) of the politics of the (im)possible. I speak of an (im)possibility with the brackets around the ‘im’. The act of putting these brackets combines possibility and impossibility. What is possible is anticipatable from the elements of the present. This possible is knowable from within the bounds of ‘real’-ity. A politics of the possible works wholly within the realm of the knowable and the calculable and remains amenable to a calculus of action. What I call impossible is by the same definition unknowable, radically unanticipatable, and exceeds the calculus of action. Along the temporal axis, backwards it is the doubly forgotten – the forgetting of which is itself forgotten, as if, nothing had happened – and forwards it is the un-anticipatable. There are at least two ways of relating to the impossible that gives way to two different kinds of politics. There may be a non-relation to the impossible. That gesture leads on to the circumscribing of the politics to the realm of the possible alone. On the other hand, a relation to the impossible can occur through the experience of the impossible we call the ethical experience. An experience, that concomitantly calls for a responsibility, a responsibility to the ‘wholly other’ that radically escapes knowledge (epistemology, ontology) yet continue to haunt a pre-ontological undefined space. To remind, the concept of ethics is thus rendered different from that in a standard version. The subject of the book, though focused on a specific issue, has broad theoretical implications. It thoroughly reworks the notions of body and power and the nature of feminist epistemologies, and sheds new light on the relations of violence and communication implicit in our ways of being. As such, it puts forward a case (with sharpened theoretical tools) for a certain unusual way of setting to use of deconstruction in bringing about a change in the notions of the body and feminist theory in the first and the third worlds, with focus on a comparative perspective. As it tries to modify the notion of knowing itself, my language often strains towards the limits of existing usages of language. The reader will enjoy the challenges of those enunciations, I hope. To have a condensed review, the book deals with three interconnected themes – a deconstructive thinking of the body, a critical view of identity

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categories (woman, third world woman) in feminism, and a rethinking of generalities involved in an ethico-politics based on the singularities of events. As identity categories that work as foundations for a given (feminist) politics often refer to the bodily basis of such an identity, a critique of the naturalization of the body is a prerequisite for a problematization of such a politics. And such a problematization leads to a reappraisal of the notions of politics and ethics in a direction I try to trace. I do not begin with a traditional review of literature not because I am dismissive of traditions but because the literature involved would be too disparate to be dealt with together without a prior idea of the structure of my argument. In this introductory chapter I thus concentrate on laying out the overall plan, with the relevant reviews of literature in the respective chapters. In the book, I had to work across disciplines– trying to complement knowledge through one discipline by that through another – reaching aporia in each. The working through of the discourse on a topic in a given discipline had to be exhausted before going on to another. This is thus different from a hopping across disciplines. The process involves a charting of what happens to the categories when the limits and the possibilities of knowing these categories get blurred – limits become possibilities and vice versa. If the body is seen to set the limit to (purportedly disembodied) knowledge, following the processes of knowing results in the body appearing as that which makes knowledge possible, setting the shifting grounds of the possibility of knowledge itself. Even this general statement regarding the body and the knowledge cannot be articulated without particular enunciations in differing contexts. This monograph thus tries to act out the embodiment of theory in its very structure – its generalities are enunciated in particulars. The body in its turn also act here as an instance of embodiment – its specificity is that the concept of embodiment gives it an epistemological primacy. And this move reorients epistemology itself toward a co-implication with ethics. In Chapter One, I now go on to deal with the relations of ontology and power, and with how a certain notion of their relationship leads one on to a thinking of an ethicopolitics of embodied responsibility, an ethic of ‘eating well’.

Chapter 1 BODY, POWER AND IDEOLOGY Introduction There is no obvious connection between the body as a category and the categories of power and ideology. The obscurity of this connection is the symptom of a not so hidden assumption regarding the ‘body’. A belief – that the body is only a concrete, immediate presence in three dimensional space – prevents the understanding of the links between the body and the ostensibly abstract notions of power and ideology. This book does not rest content with the knowledge that power and ideology are as palpably concrete as any other formation. Nor does it constrain itself to the insight (acquired through decades of painstaking critical scholarship now available in monographs, articles and commentaries) that the body is always and already mediated through categories of meanings and power. If mediations of power and ideology produce the body as something unmediated, then some form of ideological work has to be performed in order to produce this leap from the mediate to the immediate, to make the shift from the abstract to the concrete. This book tries to trace the itineraries of this work. It tries to observe and make visible the processes at work in producing the concreteness of the body from the abstract workings of meanings. One way of doing this is to describe different concrete modes of producing the category of the body through differentiating it from other categories like death and sexual difference. I try to do that in the following chapters. In the present chapter, I indicate certain ways of conceiving power and ideology that make it possible to speak of their role in producing the ‘body’. The ideas of power and ideology I thus deploy are counter-intuitive yet, as I hope to show, possible logical extensions of the classical enunciations of these notions. In philosophical parlance, reification (or hypostasis) is the process in which abstract categories seem to be concrete. If one is ready to question the security of the division between seemingness and real existence, reification may very well be used as a category that makes sense of the production of concreteness from abstraction. As would probably be evident from the later sections, I have such a use of reification in mind when I try to describe the production of the ‘body’ through deployments of power and ideology. There is here a

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congealment, a transformation which is akin to the processes of commodity fetishism at work. This association will appear later in the chapter. For now, it is sufficient to point at the possibilities opened up by the use of my approach to the question. One such possibility is that of addressing the problem of embodiment of knowledge. Is embodiment to be thought of as a positioning of knowledge processes in the body, where the body is extraneous to those processes? If not, there has to be some commensurability between the register of the body and the register of knowledge. Reificatory processes let one think of such transformations across registers. To think about ‘embodied knowledges’ as ways of knowing that might be part of the move to resist dominant modes of thinking, one has to think through the very important category of hegemony. Thinking about ‘knowledge’ and ways of knowing in terms of hegemony indicates a concern with the relations of power that act in the process of knowing. To speak about ‘power’ or fields of force active in the processes of knowledge is to question the notion of a value-free neutral knowledge as a ‘view from nowhere’. As such, to go into an analysis of power relations in a discussion on knowledge would seem to be an act of pre-supposing one’s conclusion – assuming what one has to prove – of the implication of power in knowledge. In this chapter, what I am dealing with is the multiple ways in which processes of power may act between two or more spaces. This conceptual exercise is needed to unravel the workings of power in processes that seem to avoid hierarchy and avowedly work in a neutral setting. To discern the gradients of hierarchy operating in confirmedly disinterested spaces like that of knowledge, one has to forge tools perceptive enough to sense the different and complex ways in which differentials of power can work. One has to remember that this conceptual excursus, of making oneself aware of the complexities of the hegemonic process, is necessary but not sufficient to affirm the workings of these processes in the ways of knowing. This encounter with hegemony is but a prequel to a countering of hegemony. Such a countering may not take the form of a charting of counter-hegemonic moves. Instead, it might call for a responsibility in the face of the violence of violations. I will go back to these questions at the end of the book. Power and ideology are concepts that purportedly belong to two different theoretical narratives. These two narratives, as the received wisdom in humanities disciplines goes, do not meet. Foucault, thinking in terms of power, seems to be suspicious of using ideology as a productive theoretical category. For a Zizek on the other hand, the notion of power only serves to blunt and dissipate the theoretical rigor and effectivity of the tensions in ideology critique. In this chapter, I argue that the two can productively be used to complement each other. But for that, each of the notions has to be thought of in a certain register. Not that these registers are novelties that I invent to articulate the

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conjunction of the two categories. As I hope to show, these axes were there – necessary to the very structure of the notions – in the classical articulations of these concepts. Yet, as is the wont of many categories, even attentive later enunciations often passed by these registers. The ontology of the subject is the register where I see the notions of power and ideology interacting to produce ‘hauntology’, the displaced ontology of the specter. This in its turn enables one to think of possibilities of change in the repetitive structures of the subject, a politics that takes into account the relations of power and the working of ideologemes in performative enunciations. The question of the body emerges at this juncture. ‘Body’ and ‘subject’, evidently, are not interchangeable categories. The ‘subject’ is often treated as disembodied in the philosophical literature. The ‘body’ is oftener treated either as an object of intervention or as the passive receptacle – the object that contains – of the subject/soul/mind. These notions of the body and the subject are parts of a theoretical structure that I intend to interrogate. As already stated, I tend to figure ways in which the universality of knowledge claims – claims that pre-suppose a clear distinction between the body and the mind or the subject and the object – could be questioned. As such, my intentions are to probe the possibilities of thinking the body and the subject together. The thinking of this embodied subject makes possible a certain way of relating power and ideology. If one perceives the coming together of power and ideology in the making of the subject in a specific configuration, that perception itself succeeds in relating the subject to the body. Thus, a rigorous working out of the concept of the embodied subject needs to address the notions of power and ideology. In the post-Foucauldian era, use of the concept of ideology has become unfashionable. The term has connotations of intentions and a secure identity, which the notions of shifting micropolitics of power have seemingly bypassed. Yet, at least since Althusser and Raymond Williams, ideology as a concept has been made more nuanced to address the problems of the ‘dissolution of the subject’. It has the added advantage of being able to address the ways in which subjects act as if they were securely intended. I thus try to employ an ontological notion of power in conjunction with the acting of ideology as a ‘necessary fiction’. This enables me to think of the inevitability of lines of power in the constitution of the embodied subject as well as the functions of ideologemes in that constitution. That, in its turn, lets one think of an ethico-politics that takes the power-ladenness of ones being into account while attempting to mark the traces of a beyond; shying away from a pessimism of eternal subjecthood to an all-embracing Power as well as from a hasty optimism of reversing the present order too easily by wishing away the effects of power in a future utopia.

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The keywords for this chapter would be power, ideology and embodiment. Ideology, in the second section, is the term that lets one think about power in its embodiedness. Ideology in the modular form of religion is a process where the reified force-relations take the body of the fetish. This body, thus not only material, has the ghost’s spectral corporeality. It haunts as it becomes. But what is the dynamic of the process through which idea is materialized and matter (of the body) gets haunted by the spirit? A structure of iterability is presupposed in this ‘hauntology’ of the body. A structure that gets displaced as it becomes. It gives place to the ‘other’ deep within it. The making up of the self by the other is the flip side of the metaphor of eating. Eating that has the strong and undeniable element of violence in its logical organization. Is violence then a constituent of the body, of the intendedness of the body to the other? Is it constitutive of the responses of the self to the other and vice versa? Before going into all that in details at the end of the book, we have to start with the notion of ‘power’ as understood in this book. That constitutes the first section.

Question of Power – The Hierarchical Constitution of Subjects My objective…has been to create a history of the different modes by which, in our culture, human beings are made subjects. (Foucault 1982, 208) Following Althusser…, I understand by ideology a practice producing subjects. (Mouffe 1979, 171) Foucault’s work cannot work on the subject-constituting register of ideology because of its tenacious commitment to the sub-individual and, at the other end, the great aggregative apparatuses (dispositifs). (Spivak 1999, 252) When Raymond Williams was preparing an extended version of his Keywords (with the subtitle “a vocabulary of culture and society”) in 1983, he did not include the word ‘power’ in his list of words. Michel Foucault’s collection of interviews and some of his shorter pieces, Power/Knowledge (the pair of words that would almost disastrously be metonymic later for the entire oeuvre of Foucault) were already published in 1980. English translations of his other writings having some bearings on the notion of power had also been published by then (Discipline and Punish in 1975 and The Will to Know: History of Sexuality I in 1976). More than two decades later, it is now impossible for anyone to prepare a “record of an inquiry into a vocabulary: a shared body of words and meanings in our most general discussions, in English of the practices and institutions

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which we group as culture and society” (as Williams had characterized his book, 15) without the word ‘power’. And the uses of this word in the humanities and the social sciences have overwhelmingly been Foucauldian. Yet the meanings that have accrued to the word have been multiple and in no sense unambiguous. At least two notions – one implying a relationship of hierarchy to which one is subjected, the other as the gaining of an enablement – have constituted the poles between which these meanings vacillated. In Foucault, these two notions occur together, entwined with each other, inseparable. He himself has spoken of the notion of power in relation to subjecthood – …it is not power, but the subject, which is the general theme of my research. [ W ]hile the human subject is placed in relations of production and of signification, he is equally placed in power relations which are very complex. … We had recourse only to ways of thinking about power based on legal models, that is: What legitimates power? Or we had recourse to ways of thinking about power based on institutional models, that is: What is the state? It was therefore necessary to expand the dimensions of a definition of power if one wanted to use this definition in studying the objectivizing of the subject. (Foucault 1982, 209) In this study of the formation of the ‘subject’, the split nature of power that simultaneously limits and enables is often alluded to – “Power is exercised only over free subjects, and only insofar as they are free” (221). In a slightly different yet a related context, Etienne Balibar (1991) had spoken of the dual meaning of the subject – the subjectum and the subjectus – “in the equivocal unity of a single noun” (38). Referring to Heidegger’s notion that Cartesian cogito has been determined and conceived of as a subject (subjectum) – in the sense of cogito inaugurating the “sovereignty of the subject” –, Balibar perceives Heidegger to be at fault. Balibar interprets this move as a “projection of a transcendental category of the “subject” upon the Cartesian text,” (36) a projection which the text does not support. Balibar traces the source of such a perception of the subject – “as the originarily synthetic unity of the conditions of objectivity (of ‘experience’)” (36) – to Kant. Next he asserts that for Descartes, unlike Kant, the ego (cogito) is there as a ‘substance’ or as substantial, and not as a transcendental subject. According to Balibar, the name of subjectum (the Greek hypokeimenon) cannot be applied to the ego cogito. Instead, he speaks of the possibility and the necessity of asking the question of the sense in which the human individual “composed of a soul, a body, and their unity” (35) is the subjectus of a divine sovereignty. The notion

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of the subjectus, as Balibar affirms (depending on the theoreticians of absolute monarchy and medieval political theology), is the same as that of the subditus – “the individual submitted to the ditio, to the sovereign authority of a prince,… itself legitimated by the Word of another Sovereign (the Lord God).” (36) Balibar thus delineates the differences between the notions of the subjectus and the subjectum and traces a conceptual dynamic (whereby the former is forgotten in favor of the latter in the thinking of the transcendental subject of philosophy, at least since Kant) that rejects the substantiality and the phenomenality in the being of the Subject. Yet, as Balibar argues, the subject cannot fully avoid this enigma of personhood in which the subject is situated – “[a]fter the subject comes the citizen.” (38) He goes on to the conceptual and phenomenal making of the ‘citizen’ to show how this subject called the citizen also can and must act simultaneously as a constitutive element of the state and as an actor of a permanent revolution against the state. Balibar characterizes this phenomenon as a paradoxical unity of a universal sovereignty and a radical finitude. He describes Foucault’s attempts at delineating the transition from a world of subjection to that of rights and disciplines as a “materialist phenomenology of the transmutation of subjection, of the birth of the Citizen Subject.” (55) Foucault’s notion of power bears the mark of this duality acting in the figure of the citizen subject where repression and production, hierarchy and the making of equality, constitute and mask each other. This entwinement of the sets of opposed categories make this view of power relevant to our discussion of the relations between a universal knowledge and the particular (or situated and embodied forms of) knowledges. This ambiguous unity is also what relates this discussion to the name of Marx who did indeed investigate hierarchies working in equalities. What is Power, then? [ P ]ower is a relation between forces, or rather, every relation between forces is a ‘power relation’.1 (Deleuze 1988, 70) And what is force?2 Deleuze speaks initially of two qualities that characterize force. One is that force is already and always a relation, it exists in relation to other forces, its sole object and subject is force. The second is that violence is not the sole constituent of force and the relation between forces far exceeds violence. But the substantive definition of power/force comes a bit later – …force defines itself by its very power to affect other forces (to which it is related) and to be affected by other forces. To incite, provoke and produce…constitute active affects, while to be incited or provoked, to be induced to produce,…constitute reactive affects. (Deleuze 1988, 71)

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The relations of power thus involve the acts of affecting, of making effects on others; and if the effects of these others on the ‘self ’ are kept in mind, these acts affect themselves. The power relations are shifting, contingent, unstable and multiple. These are not amenable to knowledge, not known in a way. Although power and knowledge are intimately constitutive, the practice of power is not reducible to any practice of knowledge (Deleuze 1988, 74). In its relation to knowledge, power forms an outside. Deleuze goes into the dynamics of the knowledge processes outlined in The Archaeology of Knowledge (Foucault 2002–1972) to speak of ‘regularity’ as a property of the statement. In the Archaeology, the discursive structure of knowledge is centrally woven around the figure of the statement. For Foucault, the “vast field” of discourse “set free” by the suspension of the earlier modes of looking at known continuities (like those of tradition, influence, development, evolution, spirit, or even oeuvre), is “made up of the totality of all effective statements …in their dispersion as events and in the occurrence that is proper to them.” (29) Invoking a mathematical metaphor of coordinates of geometry, Deleuze speaks of the ‘regularity’ as “the curve joining individual points,” (78) where the statement, inducing regularity, joins the individual points of letters and figures. These individual points themselves, “with their relations between forces,” are external to the statement. The relation of the statement to the force-relations is stated as – [t]he statement-curve integrates into language the intensity of the affects, the differential relations between forces, the particular features of power (potentialities). (79) Differentiating between the two terms exteriority and outside, Deleuze asserts that exteriority, in relation to knowledge, is still a form that belongs to the category of knowledge though differing as a form. For him, the latter, outside, “concerns force” (86) that has no form and is irreducible to the inside. The structures of knowledge outlined in the Archaeology, arranged in regularities, are overdetermined by these lines of force that is the outside. The “appeal to the outside” (87) constantly reminds one of Foucault’s concerns with the processes of becoming of thought, where the work of thinking is not an innate exercise of a faculty but a work involving the affects of power as well. To repeat, these affects of power are affects of an outside to knowledge that is nonetheless constitutive of the inside. Thus, though they constitute it, they do not belong to the internal matter of knowledge. Deleuze meticulously works out the elements of multiplicity that mark the seeming duality – the ability to affect and be affected – of forces. He rightly affirms that this structure of dualism is dynamic and contingent and acts as

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a “preliminary distribution operating at the heart of a pluralism,” (83) so that the forces operate in “a multiplicity of diffusion which no longer splits into two” (83–84). Acting outside the regularities of the knowledge structures to structure them as knowledges, these relations of force are thus multiple, flowing into each other, diffuse, and irreducible to these knowledges. How is it possible, then, to think of the relations of power among and within knowledges? How are the gradients among knowledges – overdetermined by the relations of power outside – to be conceived? What happens to the hegemonic in the processes of knowing, over and above its references to the operations of power that act outside? Re-wording the last question, we may ask if it is possible to think of a notion of ideology in terms of power. If power is concerned with the process of the constitution of the ‘subject’ (the subjection/subjectivation combine), and ideology – as Chantal Mouffe comments referring to Althusser – is “a practice producing subjects” (Mouffe 1979, 171), there might have been a connection between the two. In an interview with Alessandro Fontana and Pasquale Pasquino (the famed “Truth and Power”), Michel Foucault has the following comment on the matter – The notion of ideology appears to me to be difficult to make use of, for three reasons. (Foucault 1980, 118) First, the problem of distinguishing ideology from something called ‘truth’ is far less important for Foucault than a historical understanding of the processes of the production of ‘effects of truth’ within certain discourses. The third reason, for him, is that ideology seems always to refer back to something like an ‘infrastructure’ to which it is derivative. Foucault’s second objection, the most pertinent in our context, is that ideology refers “necessarily” to “something of the order of a subject.” (118) This seems to imply that when Foucault goes on to assert the ‘subject’ as his general theme of research, he has in mind the historical analysis of certain ‘sub-individual’ and ‘meta-individual’ processes that go on to make the subject as the ‘object’ of research, rather than dealing with the dynamics operating in the register of the individual subject par se. The dissolution of the ‘subject’ into its constitutive fields of force and its disciplinary matrices does not apparently allow the analysis of the dynamics operating at the level of ‘the order of the subject’. As earlier mentioned, maybe this is what Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak has in mind when she asserts – Foucault’s work cannot work on the subject-constituting register of ideology because of its tenacious commitment to the sub-individual and,

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at the other end, the great aggregative apparatuses (dispositifs). (Spivak 1999, 252) This apparent paradox of not being able to speak of the subject while talking incessantly about the constitution of the subject can be made sense of if one remembers the so-called postmodern impulse of the dissolution of the subject. When the ‘subject’ dissolves, fragmented into its constitutive mobile elements to bring out the processes of its production, how can one possibly speak of the ideologies or the ‘intentions’ of a subject? How much of postmodern and postcolonial writings have not referred derisively to the (unconscious) retention of the intending subject in the pieces they criticize? On the other hand, how much of the ‘critiques of the postmodern’ have not spoken of the impossibility of any ‘agency’ in such a dissolute mélange that replaces the subject in ‘postmodern’ writings? And still more nuanced, let us remember the critically aware concerned attempts to speak simultaneously of the dissolution of the subject and the retention of a subjectivity, where the simultaneity is seen as (politically) obligatory and hence a pragmatic step. The deconstructive move of breaking down one’s own figures, while clinging tenaciously to them, resembles this latter pragmatism. The resemblance does not signify sameness. For the deconstructive gesture, unlike the pragmatic one, does try to account for its move. The subject-effect, once the processes of subjectivation have been analyzed, remains as an object of analysis. It remains somewhat like what has in a different context been referred to as vikalpa by Bimal Krishna Matilal (2001, 123; 2002a, 187) – a convenient fiction that works, which is inescapable in workability, yet lacks the ultimate truth-value.3 To quote Spivak once again, … the empirical subject, the intending subject, the self even, must be constantly assumed in radical calculations. (Spivak 1999, 252) One may use the category of ideology and continue to ‘assume a subject’ to address the dynamics of power that work at the level of the subject (and not only in the para-subjective registers). Ideology can be, and has been, used in a much more reflective manner than what is assumed in off-hand rejections of the concept.4 But before going into the details of these, I intend to dwell a little more on the question of power. “More on Power/Knowledge” (Spivak 1993c, 25–51) has an interesting take on the ambiguities in the dual repressive and productive effects of power. In the chapter on ‘Method’ in Part Four of his The History of Sexuality Volume I: An Introduction, Foucault says that his object of study is the analysis, in terms of power, of a form of knowledge regarding sex. To speak of what power is, he first goes on to explicate what it is not; he speaks of certain possible

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“misunderstandings” – Power is not a group of institutions or mechanisms, nor a mode of subjugation in the form of a rule, and not a general system of domination. One must not assume to be given the sovereignty of the state, the form of the law, or the overall unity of a domination.5 All of these are (terminal) forms of power, Foucault asserts. According to him, a moving substrate of local and unstable force relations that are by definition unequal, constantly bring in power to existence. The “permanent, repetitious, inert, and self-reproducing” (93) quality of power “is simply the over-all effect that emerges from all these mobilities, the concatenation that rests on each of them and seeks in turn to arrest their movement… ” (emphasis added) – One needs to be nominalistic,…it [Power] is the name that one attributes to a complex strategical situation in a particular society. (93) This act of naming Power is thus an act of putting a mark (of a name) to a process that is not stable, a process that constantly flows and shifts its location, its configurations, its points of applications and resistances. To be precise, the naming must always be inadequate to its task of signifying a referent, a referent that is, in its turn, lacking a stable name to signify it. The nominalism of Foucault, as Spivak aptly characterizes to be the property of all names, is catachrestic – the name is applied to a thing that it does not properly denote.6 Such a nominalism, catachrestic and just missing the mark while clinging on to it, works in what Spivak calls the general sense of Power. Power in the narrow sense would be the common sense use – the meaning that adheres to a word ordinarily by dint of the history of its (common) uses in a language. In the play of significations entailed between the general and the narrow senses of ‘power’, an element emerges which deconstructs the abstract and the empirical connotations of the respective senses. In the same chapter and in the page just after the one where he speaks of the nominalism of power, Foucault makes the following comment – Relations of power are not in a position of exteriority with respect to other types of relationships…, but are immanent in the latter; they are the immediate effects of the divisions, inequalities, and disequilibriums which occur in the latter, and conversely they are the internal conditions of these differentiations;…[relations of power] have a directly productive role… (emphasis added, 94) These immanent, immediate and direct relations (of power) are, somewhat paradoxically, the elements of an inadequate name (Power), and as such – through the reificatory principles of naming – involve the mediatory effects of

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a hypostasis. The reference to the ‘local foci’ of power/knowledge with which Foucault urges his readers to start the analyses of power can, as Spivak argues, be thought of in a different register if one remembers the colloquialism (in French) of the two words pouvoir and savoir. The translation of the doublet pouvoir/savoir by power/knowledge is a monumentalization of Foucault, Spivak asserts. This translation loses the everydayness, crucial to Foucault’s use, of the expression. For Spivak, the rendering would be somewhat like “being able to do something – only as you are able to make sense of it.” (1993c, 34) A sense of “can-do”-ness of pouvoir thus goes along the “homely verbiness” of savoir. And as the homely pouvoir is different from the stately puissance, so is savoir from the more ‘monumental’ connaissance – two distinctions that Foucault himself insisted upon. Spivak adds a third term to each series to speak of an imperfect homology between puissance, pouvoir, force on the one hand and connaissance, savoir, enonce on the other. In each series the first terms belong to the ‘monumental’ (above-the-subject) institutional register, the second to the everyday, and the third to the ‘sub-individual’ matrix. Of course, the homology is imperfect and the two series do not wholly mirror each other. The advantage of thinking of the power/knowledge doublet in such an ordinary sense is the easy conceptual link evident between the ‘making sense’ of, and the ability of being ‘able to do’ something; so that, when one makes sense of something in accordance with some lines of thinking, those lines in a way circumscribe the ability to do certain activities with that ‘thing’. The lines that circumscribe the range of activities make the activities possible. This has two related implications. Before going on to the ethical (the second) import, we deal first with the implication to ontology. The catachrestic naming (as Power) of an ensemble of processes immanent to the being of the self implicates these processes in the thinking of the ontic – Gayatri Spivak illustrates this in a counter-intuitive move. Relating the intimate (though for Foucault, not always evident) engagements with Heidegger in both Foucault and Derrida, she maintains that the notion of power is one attempt to think the ontico-ontological difference – how relations of force operate at a pre-ontic level to constitute the power-laden ontic to be understood in the disciplinary matrix of ontology.7 To think of power not only in terms of abstract relationships of hierarchy or dominance but as a relationship immanent upon the very beings of categories implicates the category of Being with that of Power. To anticipate a later argument, this mutual constitutivity of ‘being’ and ‘power’ enables one to think of hegemony in an embodied way. Here workings of hierarchies can be traced only in relation to their moments8 of immanence, although it still remains necessary (though not adequate) to take account of the different abstract mechanisms of hegemony. In another subtle and discerning move, Spivak relates the mutual implication of power and the

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ontic with the question of ethic. She posits this as the “robust Heideggerian notion of ontico-ontological difference, understood as implying ontico-ethical proximity.” Spivak pits this against Heidegger’s own dealing of the matter so that ontico-ontological difference is – … not neutralized, as by Heidegger himself, by way of Dichtung or Lichtung. (emphasis in the original, 1993c, 39) Before going on to the ethical (the second implication of our reading of the pouvoir/savoir nexus), we shall dwell a little more on the register of the ontic. Recall Deleuze’s notion of force that constituted power (“power is a relation between forces”). Spivak puts ‘force’ in the register of the preontic – Force is the name of the subindividual preontic substance traced with irreducible struggle-structures in the general sense that enables and limits confrontation. (emphasis in the original, Spivak 1993c, 32) She differentiates between “the merely inductive force field” and “the strategic field of power relations.” (33) One’s analysis cannot start from the diffuse lineaments of the force field; it has to begin from the immanent “local foci” of power/knowledge. That does not imply one can leave the force fields away in blissful non-comprehension. The incomprehensible, specter-like, haunts the constitution of the known. Thinking in terms of the three-tiered register of the preontic/ontic/ontological allows one to address the dynamic of the subject proper (the ontic) along with those of the invisible force-fields (the pre-ontic) and the visible dispositifs (the ontological). The goods of the liberal subject (at the level of the ontic and the ontological) need not be rejected in order to address the dynamic of non-liberal force fields acting at the level of the pre-ontic. For, one can simultaneously speak thus in the register of the ‘subject’ and in that of the lines of force relations that go on to constitute the ‘subject’ from the “outside”, an outside that is inner than the innermost. To understand that, we have once more to go back to Deleuze – to the topological folds of subjectivation that he talks about. “Subjectivation is created by folding,” Deleuze (1988–1986, 104; the quotes in this paragraph, if not indicated otherwise, are from the same page) asserts in the last chapter – “Foldings, or the Inside of Thought (Subjectivation)” – of his book on Foucault. He speaks of four foldings, four entwined layers that fold in to each other to form the complex of subjectivity. The first concerns the material part of the self – the body and its pleasures for the Greeks, and the flesh and its desires for the Christians. The second is the fold of the relation between forces – “bent back in order to become a relation to oneself.” The

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third is the fold of knowledge – the relationship between truth and being that remains the formal condition for any knowledge. The fourth is the fold of the outside “itself,” which constitutes an “interiority of expectation” from which the subject derives hopes for “immortality, eternity, salvation, freedom or death or detachment.” Somewhat later in the chapter, where Deleuze represents this diagrammatically (120), he refers to the outside as the “turbulent, stormy zone” where “particular points and the relations of forces between these points are tossed about” (121). As such, relations of force seem to assort themselves in both the ‘strategic zone’ (the zone of power relations that is internal to the subject, where forces are arranged in shifting yet specific lines) and the zone of the inchoate, turbulent outside. The equivalent (though, to stress again, not the same) notions in Spivak’s terms would be the pre-ontic as the amorphous zone of lines of force that structure themselves as power at the level of the ontic. But what really is the ‘fold’? For Foucault, as Deleuze reads him, the fold is the answer to his attempt to think of the interiority of the subject. To remember, Foucault is thus not being inconsistent with his radical debunking of any interiority in the subject. He is speaking of “an inside that lies deeper than any internal world ” (96), an inside that is ‘merely’ the fold of the outside, in Deleuze’s evocative phrase – “as if the ship were a folding of the sea” (97). To quote again, The unthought is…not external to thought but lies at its very heart, as that impossibility of thinking which doubles or hollows out the outside. (97) This ‘double’ Foucault thinks of is not a projection of the inside but an interiorization of the outside within – It is not a doubling of the One, but the redoubling of the Other. It is not the reproduction of the Same, but a repetition of the Different. (98) The self here is a double of the other. The immanence of the self has, always and already, the other built into it. The ethical import of this figure will be evident if only one remembers that a prevalent mode of thinking views the Foucauldian and the Derridean positions on ethics in terms of an opposition between ‘Nietzschean heteromorphism’ and ‘Levinasian heteronomy’ respectively. In this divide, heteromorphism’s aim is seen to be “freedom from inhibition and blockage, freedom from…the weight of values…from everything that weighs the will down” ( John D. Caputo, Against Ethics, quoted in Ziarek 1998, 60), but Foucauldian heteromorphism is not perceived to accommodate an obligation to the other. For heteronomy on the other hand, “freedom is suspect, suspended, held in question, because it is aggressive, self-accumulative, and

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eventually, finally murderous. Heteronomism wants the other to be free while one is oneself held hostage” (ibid). The thinking of the fold does not fit in with this neat binarism between heteronomy and heteromorphism. The self, for Foucault, has the inapproachable fold of the other within – the ontology of the self constituted by the other seems to be a Levinasian gesture that would point at a shift from the primacy of the ontology of the self to an ethics of a responsibility to the other.9 Yet, there is a difference between the two. With regard to his relationship to Heidegger, Deleuze refers to Foucault’s major achievement as “the conversion of phenomenology [of the subject] into epistemology” (109). He notes the resemblance between a phenomenological project (of Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty) and Foucault’s notion of the fold but puts emphasis on the difference between the two. For him, the crucial point in Foucault is the irreducible doubling of knowledge – that involves the distinct categories of speaking and seeing, language and light. Speaking, the domain of language concerns the ‘language-being’, which has its own form of subjects and objects as ‘immanent variables’ in specific conditions. Seeing, referring to the domain of light, concerns the ‘light-being’, which produces the forms, proportions and perspectives of visibilities whose immanence is free of any intentional gaze. Language and light thus form two irreducible parts of knowledge, separate and self-sufficient. All intentionality collapses in the gap that opens up between these two monads, or in the ‘non-relation’ between seeing and speaking. (109) In Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty, as Deleuze reads them, intentionality – after having been initially surpassed – is founded in a new dimension in the fold of Being. For them the language of signification constitutes the light of seeing, and intentions get re-constituted in the space of the togetherness of light and language.10 For Foucault, unlike his phenomenological predecessors, one cannot speak of an intendedness to the other in the self. The ontology of the self is epistemically fractured into the elements of visibility and articulability, which remain entwined yet separate. The other that insinuates within the differentiated folds of the self remains faceless and inchoate as arbitrary lines of force. Spivak, as I have been trying to explicate, reads Foucault’s notion of Power in the register of the Heideggerian ontic, while implicitly relating to the Deleuzean fold of subjectivity.11 (In Deleuze’s take on the matter, Heidegger and Foucault work in different registers.) For her, and now I broach the second import of her (re)thinking of power/knowledge, this implies an ontological basis of an ethics that retains, and at the same time, goes beyond the mores of a liberal ethic. The register of the liberal ethic is in ontology, the inventory of

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the intending subject. To remember, this domain of the ‘subject’ is in no way a thing of derision, it is one of the necessary fictions that allow one to work, it is a “violating enablement” (Spivak 1993c, 44). It is worth recalling at this juncture the attempts of Balibar to speak of the tensions working within the lineaments of the ‘Citizen Subject’. The tensions are between the productive and the restrictive elements of that identity (which goes well with the dual workings of pouvoir/savoir). Balibar in fact speaks of the Citizen as a utopic figure (Balibar 1991, 54) in that it is (not unreal, but) the elementary term of an abstract state, an impossible figure in that its qualities (of equality, legality, public-ness or others) are rent into irreconcilable antinomies.12 At the same instance, he speaks of the facticity of this utopia. The constitutive ambivalence remains the ‘Citizen’s strength in his historical ascendancy. Spivak’s notion of the violating yet enabling liberal ethic resonates with this ambivalence of the Citizen. Yet, for her the Foucauldian pouvoir/savoir lets one think beyond this register. It can simultaneously think of the ontic and the preontic, the lineaments of Power and force-relations, strategies and force fields. And again, the registers in the three series of onticity, power and knowledge are not co-extensive. One cannot define and neatly classify the workings of pouvoir in the ontic, of force in the pre-ontic and puissance in the ontology. Each of these exceeds and floods into the other homologous categories. The relationship is never a tidy one to one relation.13 What is important in the ethical register is the suggestion of inadequacy of the ontological as the sole basis of analysis. Non-stratified workings of power and force become vital to the thinking of an ethics that, without ignoring the formal moment of the intending subject, tries to address the non-thematizable workings of the subindividual levels of the subject. Thus power, conceived in this manner, lets one think of the workings of the subject-effect and the dynamics active in its sub and meta levels. It lets one think of an ethics “[i]naccessible to Liberalism.” It accounts for the working of hierarchies in the seeming equality of Citizen-Subjects. It accounts for the workings of these hierarchies through the dynamic of sub-individual relations of force. But how do these hierarchies work at the level of the subject – the necessary fiction that one calls the subject? How do subjects hegemonize, one over another? For that we have to look into the intricate textures of another category, the spectral body of ideology. Yet, it might have been clear from our discussions so far, the necessity of this line of inquiry does not de-legitimize the importance of the notion of power in the thinking of hierarchy. The concept of power we have been deliberating upon is slightly, but crucially, different from the notion of power available almost as a dominant common sense in today’s humanities and social sciences. The focus in this dominant (may one, with trepidations, say ‘non-philosophical’) notion is on the

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technologies, the micro-processes, of production of the subject in immanent social practices. The attempt to define the force-relations would, in such a view, amount to an act of reifying the immanent, an act of philosophizing which Foucault – again according to this outlook – abhors. Of course, as our readings of Deleuze and Spivak have perhaps been able to show, Foucault’s writings remain open to yet another way of interpretation. This is not to disavow or to ignore the possibility of a reading according to the dominant mode. I try to keep open the possibilities of other readings, not to sweep them aside in smug scientism. A notion of power that remains aware of the nominalistic move in naming a shifting ensemble of fluid processes as ‘power’ allows one to think of the dynamic of the ‘subject’ power produces along with that of the dynamic of that production. To explain, this notion does not reduce the subject to the processes and the technologies of its production. This does not treat the subject in a way which would prevent the possibility of addressing the processes occurring at the level of the working of the subject itself. The workings of the dispersed field of production of power relations can thus take into account the overall effect of unity produced by this field. Processes of ideology look into the processes at work in this unified field called the subject. This view lets one think of the ideological processes at work in the register of the subject. The dominant Foucauldian view focuses on the dispersal to the extent at which it excludes the unity. This dominant view works in a way contrary to Foucault’s own emphasis (spelt clearly out in The Archaeology of Knowledge) on looking at unities in dispersal. To remember, our notion of power allows the perception of ideological processes at work. The need to address ideologies still remains and is not made redundant by this notion. Power – even when perceptive of the pre-ontic force-relations operative in the constitution of the subject as force relations and not merely as descriptions of technologies at work – can map the field of possibilities that circumscribe the structure of the subject. The analysis of power is not concerned with the play of unanticipatability through which the subject has to work, albeit within the limits of that very field. Power-analytics focuses on the charting of the limits of the possible, not on the possibility of shifts or of transgressions, not on the calls of the impossible. The suspicion of depth and the commitment to surface phenomena circumscribe theories of power. They tend to explain depth in terms of other surfaces, to see the observation of depth as productions of surfaces. As a result, surfaces assume a primacy and a reality that escapes scrutiny. Description of ‘what is’ obstructs the thinking of ‘what is not’; the past and the future become reducible to projections of the present. Changes become conceivable only as extensions of the present, as continuities. The body, as constituted by power, retains the fixity of a presence that imparts authenticity to what is called embodied knowledge. This authenticity inverts

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the power of the abstract universal yet works within the same economy of legitimation and authority. A nuanced theory of ideology, I submit, can retain the sensitivity to the impossible. Ideology, as something which has to speak of deep structures operative behind surfaces, can speak of ‘what is not’ in ‘what is’. If one can avoid the primacy of the deep in such a mode of thinking – treating the notion of depth not as a hidden presence but as a necessary trope to figure the absent within the observable presence of the surface – it may be possible to retain the traces of absence in the obvious fullness of presence. Change as break becomes amenable to thought. The body, as a reified category, is thus construed as not only the product of immanent power relations but also as the product of the ideological acts of hypostasis. This lets one think of a radical futurity in the constitution of the body that exceeds its palpable presence. The body becomes the figure of the unanticipatable and embodiment suggests the hauntology of the impossible instead of the ontology of the possible.14 Can one think of hegemony between elements solely in analytical terms? Analytical in the sense of a way of dealing with these elements where one does not think of their history or the history of their mutual interactions and instead deals with the elements as discrete and timeless categories. When I try thus to pose my question in terms of ‘elements’ rather than some ‘concrete’ moments, I repeat the same gesture. This gesture is necessary. My question remains – is this adequate to the task of an understanding of the phenomenon named hegemony? Can one chart the possible forms of hegemony as if talking about a ‘phenomenon’ shorn of its particular forms, detached from the histories in which its multiple enunciations operate?15 Even if one can, and has to, refer to a phenomenon, speak of an it, is not the generality implicated in such a move a contingent one, a generality dependant upon every particular moment, a generality in the ever-open process of becoming without a telos and not referring back to an originary? This differantial structure of the ‘phenomenon’ would make every attempt to calculate ‘its’ itinerary a failed and incomplete one. Irremediably futile yet necessary. The notion of power, as I have traced above in terms of nominalism and the ontic, tries to negotiate such a rethinking of hegemony.

Ideology and Spectral Embodiment The concept of ideology can be, and has been, thought of from at least two vantage points. The commoner among the two, especially after the works of Zizek, Laclau and Mouffe, has been the ground of hegemony. The workings of hegemony and those of ideology have been viewed as co-terminus in a literal sense – in that they both serve the same terminal purpose of inducing contingent closures upon an ever open (impossible) social. This view focuses

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upon the question – how does ideology work? The second stance has its focus on the twin questions – a) what is it that logically makes ideology possible, and b) why does the phenomenon we call ideology take the form it takes? Which is the same as b/) why is ideology necessary? I think that this view, whether it spells it out or not, works on the ground of the notion of iterability. It seems, to me, that these two views can profitably be made to work together – though leaving out much of the notion of Laclau-Mouffe-Zizek’s hegemony to work with a more ‘conventional’ Gramscian hegemony – to address the question we raised in the previous section regarding the hierarchies operating in the register of the subject per se. Then we might be able to conceive how the workings of hierarchies involve embodiment, and at the same time, how embodiments implicate hegemonies. The stress on the notion of iterability is not a simple pitting of Derrida against Zizek, as would be evident in how the latter in a way is seen to lead (albeit against his declared judgment) to the former. Yet a deep divide between the two is not to be glossed over and my position is more akin to a use of some of the latter’s insights within the structural frame of Derrida’s arguments. To stop anticipating my later contention, I start with certain other notions of ideology. Before moving on to these other notions, I would like to ponder upon the strength and weaknesses of the idea of hegemony as conceived by Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe (the most famous intervention being Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, 1985). I start with the varying notions of hegemony with respect to, and from, which Laclau-Mouffe’s concept can be differentiated. Imagine two theoretical spaces, space A and space B – one hegemonizer and the other hegemonized – separated by cultural differences. Our problematic is to theoretically enunciate the processes of interaction between A and B, to lay out the theoretical grid that captures the modes of articulations between the two spaces. A theory of simple hegemony (Chaudhury1988) would ascribe an essence to each of the spaces. The process of hegemonization would entail the dominance of the essence of one over that of the other – hegemony indicating cultural dominance. Simple Hegemony does not take into account the cultural differences even in a commonplace manner. Hegemony is said to occur when space B is made to obey rules of space A without the use of coercion or state institution. The essence of B is subsumed within the essence of A. If that does not happen, hegemony is said to have failed, the situation described as dominance without hegemony (Guha 1989). A theory of complex hegemonic power is somewhat more nuanced. It allows for cultural differences between two spaces, difference as a concept being used here in the sense of the everyday usage of the term as distinct from its discursive connotations. Space A and space B remain as Hegelian others.

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Their difference is grounded in a surrogate/imagined/posited sameness that makes them parts of a homogeneous cultural meta-space. The process of hegemonization then would involve the production of a surrogate universal by space A that assimilates, includes, parts of space B, yet on the whole, follows the rules of space A. The colonizer changes itself to include elements of the colonized, thus building up its complex hegemony over the latter. In the process, both the spaces, though undergoing some changes of form, retain their respective essences, which are subsumed within the surrogate (universal) essence. A non-essentialist theoretical frame that views all processes as being overdetermined, and in turn overdetermining each other, would shun such a theory of interactions between space A and space B. Space A is constituted, literally brought into existence, by space B, along with a number of other spaces and processes. The same holds true the other way round for space B. As such, when we say the two spaces are separated by cultural differences, the connotations of the word difference vary from that in the earlier theorization. Here, this indicates that the two spaces are complexes that cannot recognize themselves in terms of their own essences, but have to know themselves in terms of, among others, their differences from each other, i.e., as what the other structure is not. However, in such a hybrid field of overdetermined spaces, can one really speak of hegemony of one space over another in the sense of cultural domination? Laclau and Mouffe (Laclau and Mouffe 1985; Laclau 1990) start off from the (post-modern) presumption of the impossibility of any closed totality. They assert the infinitude of the social, the impossibility of society – “the social always exceeds the limits of the attempts to constitute the society” (Laclau 1990, 91). Their concept of hegemony derives from a provisional and contingent (discursive) closure to this otherwise ever-open overdetermined system – “a relative fixation of the social through the institution of nodal points” (Laclau 1990, 91). The nodal points structure the floating signifiers of the system through metonymic surpluses, the process of fixation being always contingent upon a complex process of mutual constitutivities. A hegemonic formation is thus constituted by the surplus meanings of the contingently privileged signifiers. The closing off of the ever-open social through these nodal points gives rise to forcible suturing of the gaps that constitute the social – these are the points of antagonism. Thus, hegemony as a relationship of two or more spaces is not a possibility here. This concept of hegemony is a theorization of the mode of the discursive closure of a single social space. It is inadequate for a theory of interactions between two or more such spaces, for example, the space A and the space B in our thought experiment.16 The concept of closure is also necessary and crucial for a theory of interactions. Perfectly open-ended

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spaces cannot interact – they engulf and move into each other to form hybrid spaces. Spaces cannot be defined except through the institution of nodal points (that are contingent), and so, relationships between more than one space is not conceivable at some moment before the institution of nodal points. The institutions of nodal points with the forgetting of their contingent nature are the moments of the ideological. Michele Barrett (1994 –1991) characterizes ideology, in this way of thinking, as the failure to recognize the open-endedness of the social – … ideology is a vain attempt to impose closure on a social world whose essential characteristic is the infinite play of differences and the impossibility of any ultimate fixing of meaning… (260) Her discerning observation is that this framework retains the distinction – characteristic of traditional Marxism – between knowledge (of the everopenness of the social) and ideological misrecognition (that forgets the contingency of the closures in the social). A little later on we will see how Zizek tries a striking way out of this impasse. Meanwhile I draw attention to another of Barrett’s perceptive suggestions regarding the distinctive features of Laclau-Mouffe’s efforts. She speaks of the attempt to come out of class reductionism in their concept of ideology. By class reductionism she means (quoting Laclau 1977) “the assignment of a class belonging to every ideological element”(Barrett 1994 –1991, 241). Laclau’s primary contribution in his earlier book is, according to Barrett, the clear effort to go beyond the presupposition in the Marxist tradition about ideology always belonging to a class as “the essential and formative category of an analysis of capitalism” (240). There it would not matter whether ideology was the expression of consciousness of the given class or a mystificatory principle serving the interests of the class. Laclau’s effort to move out of this view to an Althusserian concept – of ideology as an interpellative mechanism of constitution of subjects – enables one to think of the mixing of disparate ideological elements in a political discourse rather than looking at ideology as ‘belonging’ to a specific class. This in its turn makes it possible to think of hegemonic aspirations being carried out by one class in the language of ‘the people’ as a whole. Barrett points out that someone like Stuart Hall could now use terms like ‘authoritarian populism’ (that addresses ‘the people’) to describe and theorize ‘Thatcherism’ (that belongs to one section of the people). My contention is different from that of Barrett who goes on to trace the itinerary of Laclau’s thought to a ‘post-Marxist’17 position (Laclau and Mouffe 1985) where the ambiguities retained (in the unstated references to a use of populist ideology by specific classes) in the earlier argument gives way

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to the depiction of ideology as the forgetting of the contingency of social closures. I argue that, by moving the terrain of hegemony and ideology from the ‘subject’ to the ‘social’, Laclau and Mouffe – at the same time as they come out of class-reductionism – gives away the notion of the intending subject as well, not retaining it even as a ‘convenient fiction’. This makes their notion of hegemony inoperable in a thinking of hierarchies acting in the register of the subject.18 An avoidance of class reductionism does not necessarily lead to this step, I emphasize. For Laclau and Mouffe, the allusions to the closures in the social and the work of suturing involved could have been useful in thinking the subject-constituting register if they had engaged more with the question of what makes closures possible and necessary in the social. Instead, their overwhelming stress on the essential openness renders the ‘social’ an empty category, a disembodied generalization. I do not assert that it is conceived as an empty category. The way of thinking its fullness renders it empty in effect. To explain, for me, an empty generality is one that lends itself to use by assertions which contest the workings of the generality – the enunciation of the generality does not resist these uses.19 Interestingly, a too acute definitional calculus of the particularities of a purported universal can have this effect – the acuteness of the calculus can continue to be modified interminably in the face of exceptions – a Popperian unfalsifiable situation. Let me explain my argument with regard to the limitations of a Laclau-Mouffe notion of hegemony by discussing two instances where I pose a Derridean stance in the matter to be a more acceptable gesture, and as clearly discernible from it (though the said notion itself is couched in recognizably Derridean terms). I discuss a brilliantly condensed four-page essay by Laclau on the question of ideology where he deals with both the instances I want to emphasize – the infinitude of the social and the question of the subject. “The Impossibility of Society” (Laclau 1990) begins with the two approaches to ideology in the Marxist tradition, one of which places it at the level of social totality and the other treats it as false consciousness at the level of the subject. For both these approaches in the received Marxist wisdom, Laclau points to a desire for fixity and a “founding totality” (90). In the register of the social, the prevailing approach – in both its structuralist and historicist forms – treats the ‘social’ as an intelligible full unified object of knowledge, whether the mode of unification is synchronic or diachronic. In this view, the notion of the subject is of something whose identity is “positive and non-contradictory” (91, emphasis in the original). For Laclau, on the other hand, an ontological openness marks both the social – “the social must be identified with the infinite play of differences” (90) – and the subject – “any social subject is essentially decentered, …his/her identity is nothing but the unstable articulation of constantly changing

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positionalities” (92). It would now be easy for him to mark ideology in the act of positing closure into these ever-open fields – …we can maintain the concept of ideology and the category of misrecognition only by inverting their traditional content. The ideological would not consist of a misrecognition of a positive essence, but exactly the opposite: it would consist of the non-recognition of the precarious character of any positivity, of the impossibility of any ultimate suture. (92) The shift that Laclau institutes into this inverted retention of the earlier binary is the admission of the impossibility of the elimination of ideology. The utopic closure of the ideological is constitutive of the social and the subject, he asserts at the end of the essay. From this point of his argument, we can think of – and we do pursue immediately – two strands of movement that go beyond. One approach – that pursued by Slavoj Zizek – tries to retain the critical force of ideology critique through an act of identification with the point of antagonism that splits the ‘ideology of the inevitability of ideology’. The other way – associated with Derrida and deconstruction – is to think of an ethic that does not flow from an epistemological critique of ideology but is related to the spectrality of the ideological closure. The contingency and openness introduced by the admission of the ideological character of all closures of truth make possible the thought of ontology being haunted by unanticipatable ethic. To paraphrase Zizek’s arguments20 with the help of a simpler vocabulary, the reasoning would run something like the following. To admit the impossibility of eradicating ideology is to mark this impossibility as the truth running against an ideology which maintains the possibility of such elimination. The complacent move of ‘living with’ ideology only forgets and quilts the Lacanian real that lies disavowed beyond this easy acknowledgement. This move of admitting the inalienability of ideology, without an eye for the ‘symptom’ that rents ideology from within, is the ideological move per se – the unacknowledged move to go beyond ideology while declaring the act to be impossible. … when we denounce as ideological the very attempt to draw a clear line of demarcation between ideology and actual reality,…the only nonideological position is to renounce the very notion of extra-ideological reality and accept that all we are dealing with are symbolic fictions, the plurality of discursive universes, never ‘reality’ – such a quick, slick ‘postmodern’ solution, however, is ideology par excellence. (Zizek 1999, 70, emphasis in the original)

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In a way, this is to shift the criticism of ideology one step forward than Laclau. The thematic of ideology recurs incessantly in Zizek’s writings. I deal specifically with only one and have passing references to a few others in my discussion. In “The Spectre of Ideology,” Zizek reaches the above conclusion after giving a detailed account of three conceptual moments in the understanding of ideology, dealing with each of these in its historical background. In his ‘reconstruction’ of these moments, the first step is to approach ideology ‘in-itself ’, as a “composite of ideas, beliefs, concepts, and so on” (63) that is to be subjected to a critique through symptomatic reading. The second moment is about ideology ‘for-itself ’, which designates the “material existence of ideology in ideological practices, rituals and institutions” (65), in short, in its externalization.21 The final moment is the externalization ‘reflected into itself ’ when ideology is “the elusive network of implicit, quasi-‘spontaneous’ presuppositions and attitudes” that go on to reproduce the ‘non-ideological’ practices, the Marxian notion of commodity fetishism being exemplary in this regard. As Zizek is quick to note, this is the moment when the distinction between ideology and ‘truth’ dissolves, and he criticizes this in the quote of our earlier paragraph. For him, one has still to persist in one’s critique of ideology – … although ideology is already at work in everything we experience as ‘reality’, we must none the less maintain the tension that keeps the critique of ideology alive. (70) But now, after the ‘postmodern turn’, the ‘place’ from which one denounces ideology is “empty,” not occupied by “any positively determined reality” (70), Zizek asserts. Then he goes on to try to “specify this empty place.” To specify an empty place, if not only in terms of a formal analytical definition, is to speak of the body of emptiness, to speak of ghosts, one might surmise. Before going on to Zizek’s attempts to avoid this Derridean gesture, distancing himself deliberately from such a position, we digress a little into the relationship of ideology and fetishism that might have some import on the matter. When Derrida, in Specters of Marx, speaks of the absolute privilege that Marx grants to religion in his analysis of ideology in general, of “ideology as religion” (Derrida 1994a, 148), it seems it would help one understand the assertion if one refers back to the works of Sarah Kofman (1998) and Etienne Balibar (1995, 1988).22 Kofman reads the metaphor ‘Camera Obscura’ in Marx, Freud, Nietzsche and Descartes as a recurring metaphor for ways of knowing. The particular use each individual thinker makes of it is symptomatic of his own view, and in its turn, each particular use makes up a

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complex of meanings around the expression. The optical metaphor of seeing as knowing, when appearing in the form of the specific apparatus of the camera obscura, remains a comment on the ways of knowing itself. As Kofman shows, the concept of ideology, linked to “the Greek eidos and to the look” (6), appears in Marx in conjunction with the notion of the camera obscura and of religion (as Kofman’s quotes from The German Ideology describe on page one of her book). Referring to the famous link between the ‘holy family’ and the ‘earthly family’ in Marx’s critique of Feuerbach – “once the earthly family is discovered to be the secret of the holy family, the former must then itself be theoretically criticized and radically changed in practice” (Kofman’s (5) quote from the fourth of Marx’s Theses on Feuerbach) – we can speak of a two-step process being at work here. Kofman demonstrates these two steps at work in ideology. At one level, ideology is an inversion or a reflection – the holy family being a reflected image of the earthly family. But this makes it dependant upon the ‘fact’, the seeming autonomy of ideology not being accounted for. That the image of the earthly family appears as the holy family indicates that the image has to be sublimated as material, as something existing outside the realm of thought alone. Thus reflection and sublimation, both are at work in the production of ideology, or religion – the ideological per se – as the inverted image in the camera obscura. At the same instant, Kofman reminds us of the same two processes being at work in the fetishism of commodities. Following her (7–13), I quote from Marx in Capital – … it is a definite social relation between men, that assumes, in their eyes, the fantastic form of a relation between things. …[ T ]o find an analogy we must have recourse to the mist-enveloped regions of the religious world. In that world the productions of the human brain appear as independent things endowed with life, and entering into relation both with one another and the human race. So it is in the world of commodities with the product of men’s hands. This I call the Fetishism that attaches itself to the products of labour, so soon as they are produced as commodities, and which is therefore inseparable from the production of commodities. And again, Kofman quotes the example of the table-turning now rendered famous by Derrida in the Specters 23 (the name of the section of her piece where this appears is “The Turntable”) – The form of wood…is altered, by making a table out of it. Yet, for all that, the table continues to be that common, every-day thing, wood. But,

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so soon as it steps forth as a commodity, it is changed into something transcendent. It not only stands with its feet on the ground, but, in relation to all other commodities, it stands on its head, and evolves out of its wooden brain grotesque ideas, far more wonderful than ‘tableturning’ ever was. To quote more on the phenomenon where the instance is used to generalize, … consider the residue of each of these projects [of human labour]; it consists of the same unsubstantial reality in each, a mere congelation of homogeneous human labour, of labour-power expanded without regard to the mode of its expenditure. All that these things now tell us is, that human labour-power has been expended in their production, that human labour is embodied in them. When looked at as crystals of this social substance, common to them all, they are – Values. A two-step process – of (i) abstraction and (ii) the forgetting of a history of this abstraction whence the product of abstraction seems autonomous – is at work here. A process of reification of the abstract into the autonomous concrete remains active. The interesting point is that, there is no way out of this sense of autonomy, no easy dissipation of the falsity of this ‘illusion’. For this two-step process is constitutive of, inalienable from, the ‘relations between humans’. These must appear as the relations between things in order to exist at all – in order to continue the social calculus of value that holds the society, even in socialism. Only, socialism turns it more rational, it follows the rationality of the process through to the end – “the homeopathic use of the fetish character of (labour-power as) the commodity in the transformation of capitalism into socialism” (Spivak 1995a, 72–3).24 One could assert, using the comment in a totally different context, that “systemic Marxisms bloom, fester and fail” (Spivak 1995b, 109) in the gap between the two fetishes. I perfectly agree with Spivak (1995a, 72–3) that Derrida somehow misses the fact that “between Contribution and Capital, money is transformed into capital, via the Grundrisse.” Yet, the point I want to make is, Derrida’s formulation of a hauntology25 through a reading of ideology and fetishism presupposes (though not stating them overtly) certain notions of value which his explicit references to the matter contradict. We may profitably carry on with the direction he takes – despite and remaining wary of certain of his ‘mistakes’ – on the matter. Balibar is one who tries to think of the specificities of the two concepts, ideology and fetishism, while holding on to the commonality between the two. His discussion starts with the observation that after 1852, Marx never used the

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term ideology. The problems addressed by the concept were taken up under the heading of fetishism. Not a mere change of terminology, this was a real theoretical distinction, Balibar asserts. He goes on to tease out the differences on the basis of the commonality of their problematic and the divergence in the ways of approaching the problem in the two concepts. Not sticking closely to the letter of his argument, we might indicate that both the concepts try to make a sense of the ways (both the reason and the dynamics of the processes) in which isolated singularities (of individuals or groups) are connected to abstract generalities or universals that constitute the social.26 He assigns the cause of isolation between singularities, and between the singularity and the abstraction of generalities, to the universal division of labor. For Balibar, the division of labor is not a simple intellectual labor / manual labor divide. What he calls intellectual difference (1995–1993, 49) is also what he later speaks of as the “twofold character of labor” (62) – … as specialized technical activity transforming nature with the aim of producing certain useful objects and as expenditure of human physical and mental force in general: what Marx terms concrete labour and abstract labour, which are obviously just two different aspects of the same reality, the one individual, the other transindividual or collective… (62) Through this division in the realm of labor is created the possibility and the necessity of alienation of the ideas or generalities from their origin, as of abstract labor from the concrete, a concomitant forgetting of the ‘real origin’ (the history of production); and a projection/sublimation of the idea “onto an external ‘thing’, a third term” (76). This two-step process of the hypostasis of the alienated generality is common to both ideology and fetishism. What makes the difference between the two is the character of the third term produced. Ideology produces the idol – …an abstract representation which seems to exist all on its own in the ethereal realm of ideas (Freedom, Justice, Humanity, Law)”. (76) The vehicle of the other (fetishism) is the fetish – …a material thing which seems to belong to the earth, to nature,…(the commodity and, above all, money). (76) Balibar goes on to expand on the implications of this difference between ideology and fetishism. He perceives ideology as providing a theory of the constitution of power, and fetishism to deal with a mechanism of subjection. For example, as

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Balibar suggests, the problem of labor and production, when viewed from the point of ideology, would stress the forgetting of and the constraints upon the material conditions of production – how power produces a particular view of production. On the other hand, the theory of fetishism would focus on the form of commodity circulation and its links with the juridical notions of freedom to buy and sell. Going further on, he relates ideology to the realm of the State and fetishism to that of the Market. This last step shows, in my view, how a purported separation between ideology and fetishism presupposes a lack of acuteness of theoretical vision, an inadequacy that leads one to think of power in terms of “a mode of domination inherent in the State” (Balibar 1995, 78).27 At this point I want to recall, and posit against this, the intimate relation of power and the question of the subject that we have been discussing in the earlier section of this chapter. With that we move on to Derrida and his notion of spectral ideologemes. To summarize in a specific context what we have so far been observing, with Kofman or Balibar, as a two-step process – of alienation of the idea from the thing that is its source and a concomitant sublimation of that idea into a separate, autonomous thing – I use Marx’s succinct formulation as quoted in Bandyopadhyay (2006). He connects these steps to “the hegemony of the spirit in history” – 1. One must separate the ideas of those ruling for empirical reasons, under empirical conditions and as corporeal individuals, from these rulers, and thus recognise the rule of ideas or illusions in history. 2. One must bring an order into this rule of ideas, prove a mystical connection among the successive ruling ideas, which is managed by regarding them as ‘forms of self-determination of the concept’… 3. To remove the mystical appearance of this ‘self-determining concept’ it is changed into a person—‘self-consciousness’—or, to appear thoroughly materialistic, into a series of persons, who represent the ‘concept’ in history, into the ‘thinkers’, the ‘philosophers’, the ideologists, who again are understood as the manufacturers of history, as the ‘council of guardians’, as the rulers. (Marx 1976, 62 quoted in Bandyopadhyay 2006, 215–16) As Bandyopadhyay (2006, 213–30) treats this process to be a part of the hegemony of spirit, he can then move on to an enumeration of counterideological logic. Quite rightly he emphasizes in this counter-ideological move, the importance of a “tactic of de-autonomizing representations” – a “dislodging” of “idols who with popular consent coalesce to represent a concept, any ‘self-determining concept’” – a tactic consisting of a “historicizing

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[of ] the event of surviving.” Here, the sense of steady accrual – which has the effect of producing an idea of a self-present presence in the act of surviving – is being questioned. This questioning leads to an interruption in the order of (the signs of) survival. Though it is not evident from Bandyopadhyay’s piece whether he might subscribe to the view or not, for me this act of ‘de-autonomizing’ – so obligatory for countering an ideology – is itself an ideological move. Ideological in the sense that the act cannot posit a set of ideas indubitably commensurate with ‘reality’; by its own admission, it cannot bypass the mediation of ideality. It is of course legitimate to make a distinction between an awareness of the inevitability of ideation and a lack of that awareness. Even while operating with such awareness of the ideational mediation of the material, one has to work with the new (conscious) ideas as if they are only ideas. While enumerating this consciousness, one has to act as if the ideas can be handled away from materiality. This is the materialization of idea per se, a making up of the idea as idea – embodying idea in its specificity. The process is analogous to the act of holding on to the ‘intending subject’ as a ‘necessary fiction’ even while looking into its disintegration. This is a point that Derrida continues to emphasize. For him, this is the embodiment as the ghost of both (what one calls) the idea and the matter. It is not only the spirit that takes up a body to become a ghost (rather, the spirit is always, already a ghost, the taking up we are speaking of is logical), but the body does not cease to be haunted by the ghost. Hauntology takes the place of both ontology and epistemology. The charting of a counter-ideology has also to work through the uncertainties born of this hauntology. Here is how Derrida describes the ‘production of the ghost’. For him, the ‘ghost effect’ is not a simple autonomization of the spirit, idea, or thought. The ‘ghostly moment’ comes upon this alienating process as a supplementary dimension, as an adding of a body, flesh – For there to be ghost, there must be a return to the body, but to a body that is more abstract than ever. …Once ideas or thoughts (Gedanke) are detached from their substratum, one engenders some ghost by giving them a body. Not by returning to the living body from which ideas and thoughts have been torn loose, but by incarnating the latter in another artifactual body, a prosthetic body, a ghost of spirit, one might say a ghost of the ghost. (Derrida 1994a, 126) The ghost, in Specters, is not only the spirit getting a body, an embodiment of the idea. The ghost is also an a-physical body, a body that is also a spirit.

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This second aspect is much less noticed than the first. The “objectivizing expulsion of interior idea or thought” is also, at the same time, an “incorporation of autonomized spirit” in the body. And so, Derrida goes on to explicate, …there is always some mourning work in this incorporation of interiority, and death is on the program. (126–7, emphasis added) I deal with death thought in terms of an absolute other to the body in Chapter Three, as an other that continues to haunt the body – the ghost in the body. How does embodiment look when the body is ghostly, itself incorporating the spirit, a spirit that is also a ghost having a body? The question scripts the itinerary of this monograph. The process of ideologization, of fetishization, presupposes – if we remember our Balibar and our Kofman – a misconstrual of certain relations between humans as relations between things: the fetishization of commodities in a process that Derrida calls Capitalization. “The commodity thus haunts the thing, its specter is at work in use-value” (151). Yet again, “[t]hese ghosts that are commodities transform human producers into ghosts” (156). This is where Derrida comes very near to Spivak to make us speculate on the possibility of the double name Derrida/Spivak on this matter. And this is the point where they diverge unambiguously on the question of Capital. For Derrida, culture and Capitalization begins before humanity, in the spectralization inherent in iterability. For him, Capitalization implies exchange relations that imply iterability.28 For Spivak, Capitalization would be a specific form of iterability: iterability involving surplus value. This focus on the specificity of surplus value makes her insistent on the difference between industrial capital and commercial capital. At the root of this difference is a divergent opinion regarding Marx’s notion of use-value. Derrida sees use-value as Marx’s effort to posit a ‘real’ ontology against the spectral dance of exchange relations. Spivak, on the other hand, has been for long talking about the “textuality of the chain of value” (Spivak 1987a, 163) and the notion of use-value as a “theoretically necessary fiction” (1993a). This has made her wary of efforts that work on the analogy of the process of exchange with other cultural and symbolic processes (1987a). These efforts view Capital only in terms of exchange, reducing ‘use value’ to the realm of ‘real’ ontology. That in Marx, use-value was a far more nuanced category is evident for Spivak in Marx’s suggestion that it is the usevalue of labor-power as a commodity that produces surplus value which lends specificity to the relations of Capital: Labor power as commodity is the ghostliness of the body, (1995a, 73)

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she asserts in a perceptive comment. Thus for Spivak, the spectrality of the body is commensurate with the processes of the production of surplus value and with ‘Capitalization’ as a specific form of commodity relation. This very accurate observation, however, does not take away the import of the Derridean insights on the workings of the (ideational and material) ghosts in the model of the religious. In his (most of the times) unusually angry response to the interlocutors of the Specters of Marx, in the ironically named piece called “Marx and Sons” (a clear reference to the ‘patrimony of the idol’ of Marx in the self-proclaimed legitimacy of the ‘heir’), Derrida comes to the question of ideology at the end of his long essay. He is trying to distance himself from Walter Benjamin, to differentiate his own notion of messianicity from the ‘Jewish messianism’ of the latter. He starts by delineating messianicity unambiguously from that other term. Messianism for him implicates “the memory of a determinate historical revelation” and “a relatively determinate messiah-figure.” Messianicity not only excludes these twin determinations, but defines itself in the registers of two very different lines of thought. One of these is the ‘speech act theory’ where the reference of the messianic is to the ‘performative of the promise’ that organizes every speech act and every performative. The other is the ‘ontophenomenology of the temporal’ where the messianic alludes to a waiting “for an event,” the horizon of awaiting – for that which “must exceed and surprise every determinant anticipation” (251) – which constitutes our relationship to time. Derrida asserts – The figures of messianism would have to be…deconstructed as ‘religious’, ideological, or fetishistic formations, whereas messianicity without messianism remains, for its part, undeconstructible, like justice. … [ b]ecause the movement of any deconstruction presupposes it – not as a ground of certainty,…but in line with another modality. (253) But then, in a vein reminiscent of a typical Derridean argument, he complicates the situation. He asks – why, then, should he use the term ‘messianic’ in the first place? What are the traces in the word he wants to retain? Before approaching the question of ideology in this context, Derrida reminds us that “the event named ‘Marx’” is rooted in a European and JudeoChristian culture, and Marxist culture has also participated (in divergent ways, whether ‘it’ wanted to or not,) in the homogenizing process he calls “mondialatinization”29 – a ‘worlding’ of Latin and a Latinization of the world at the same time. Next he speaks of the distinction he wants to retain between on the one hand, the critiques of each determinate religion, and on the other, a

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censuring of faith in general. He wants to move beyond the latter censure even when he subscribes to the former critique – …the experience of belief, of credit, of faith in the pledged word…is part of the structure of the social bond or the relation to the other in general, of the injunction, the promise, and the performativity that all knowledge and all political action, and in particular all revolutions, imply. (255–256) At the end of this monograph, I will invoke this element of bonding that a relationship of ideology and hegemony presuppose, and that has to be addressed if one wants to remain responsible. Now, I deal briefly with the notion of ideology that we have been speaking of. Derrida refers to his own statements in Specters of Marx when speaking of the irreducible specificity of the ‘specter’ and the irreducible role of the religious model in the construction of a concept of ideology – Only the reference to the religious world allows one to explain the autonomy of the ideological. (1994a, 165) One cannot completely dissociate the ideological from the religious in this sense. It becomes equally impossible to speak of religion from the standpoint of a totally non-religious secular, analogous to the impossibility of forging a non-ideological theory of ideology. The ghosts of autonomous ideologemes in the ideological and the religious taint both the efforts. As Derrida rightly points out, the situation forces us to rethink not only the idea of ideology but the relationships among thought, philosophy, science, and ‘theory’. Here ‘thinking’ calls for the coming of an event, i.e., calls precisely for that which ‘changes’.30 (1999, 257) The event that thus haunts thought is not amenable to an other or a different ontology. The being (of course being is also an inappropriate approximation here) of the event does not subscribe to the logic of a prior calculus. The event is, as Derrida has painstakingly argued, not reducible to a secure ontotheology – an onto-theology which aspires to close off the undecidability in the singularity of the event ‘to come’ – of a determinate religion. A counterideological politics can only move in a tangent to, asymptotically with, a responsibility to the (im)possibility of such an event. Against the backdrop of such a call for a radical rethinking of thinking, the call of a response-ability to

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the other in the reflections on an unavoidable ideology, let us see how Zizek responds to such a move. Remember that Zizek is attentive to the paradox in the attempt to enunciate a non-ideological theory of the inevitability of ideology and yet wants to keep the critique of ideology alive. He wants to ‘specify’ the ‘empty place’ in the structure from where to denounce ideology operative in the structure. To account for the spectral character of ideologemes (referring approvingly to Derrida while invoking the specter), he turns to Lacan’s notion of the ‘reality’ being always already structured and constituted by symbolic mechanisms. But, Zizek is aware that, “there is no reality without the specter” (1999a, 73). Differentiating ‘spectrality’ from the fictionality of (symbolically structured) reality, he speaks of the ‘real’ (“the part of reality that remains non-symbolizable,” 73–74) as the source of the specter – …the spectre gives body to that which escapes…reality. (74) Referring back to the notion of antagonism as the forcible suturing of the social through the institution of nodal points, we might surmise, with Zizek: “the very constitution of social reality involves the ‘primordial repression’ of an antagonism” (77). Zizek’s criticism (not a critique) of ideology operative in the social flows from this “‘repressed’ real of antagonism” (77, emphasis added). Elsewhere, he calls the form of appearance of this antagonism symptom. Symptom is the expression of the real in the symbolic. In Zizek’s account, the symptom plays the part of what the specter is in Derrida’s parlance. But there is a difference between the two. Whereas the specter escapes the defining move of a counter-ideology, being present as absence, haunting the security of the ideological with its unanticipatability, the symptom claims an ontology to be posited against the ideological. Before going into that, one must attend to the logical definition of the symptom in a system – …the symptom is, strictly speaking, a particular element which subverts its own universal foundation, a species subverting its own genus. (Zizek 1989, 21) And again, referring to a certain logic of exception, Zizek states, …every ideological Universal – for example freedom, equality – is ‘false’ in so far as it necessarily includes a specific case which breaks its unity, lays open its falsity. (1989, 21)

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Zizek goes on to exemplify his point with the notion of freedom that has, in its fold, a specific freedom (of the worker to sell his labor power) that subverts the universal notion. He emphasizes that this subverting element is constitutive of the wholeness of ‘freedom’ – “the antagonism is inherent to universality itself ” (Zizek 1997, 53). The task of ideology-critique, as Bandyopadhyay (2005) closely follows Zizek’s argument (“charming in its simplicity”), is to “identify with the symptom itself.” For, in the false pretensions of the purported universal that carries the inalienable symptom within, the only true universal is the “point of inherent exception/exclusion, the abject” (1997, 53) – what is universally true in the field is the exclusion of this point. Identifying with the symptom as the counter-ideological move per se is a positing of a new ontology – basing one’s politics on the ontology of the symptom. Zizek is searching for the empty place from where to counter ideology, a place that is also a name, even if that is a void, a nothing in terms of the symbolic. Zizek’s search for the name of the place – antagonism, real, or symptom – is a positing of a named being, an ontology. At times, he names class struggle as ‘real’, as the scene of social antagonism (1999–1994, 74–75). At other instances, he implies that what would be marked as a symptom is dependant on the context (1997) – In a hierarchically structured society, the measure of its true universality resides in the way its parts relate to those ‘at the bottom’, excluded by and from all others – in ex-Yugoslavia, for example, universality was represented by Albanian and Bosnian Muslims, looked down on by all other nations. (54) The question is how to name antagonism or real? By definition, the (Lacanian) real is the failure on which symbolization cannot get a grip on. Neither capitalism, nor class struggle can be named the real. By being given the name, they enter the symbolic, even if they are understood in the symbolic to be disruptive.31 Is antagonism not the name of the radical incompleteness of the whole? To name this absolute antagonism is a move equivalent to the ontologization of the specter. Zizek cannot orient himself, make himself responsible, to the specter who is with and without ontology at the same time. He deliberately distances himself from Derrrida on the question of an ethical gesture towards the undecidable – …our primary duty is not towards the spectre, whatever form it assumes. … The act of freedom qua real not only transgresses the limits of what we experience as ‘reality’, it cancels our very primordial indebtedness to the spectral Other. (1999a, 80)

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The “act of freedom qua real” is a bid to ground politics on ontology: freedom based on the real. If Zizek did not insist on putting a name to it, the real in a Lacanian sense might otherwise be thought of in terms of not positing a ‘being’. Bandyopadhyay (2002b) has an interesting take on the notion of symptom when he asserts that the search for symptom is itself an ethical act. The search itself presupposes an ethical ‘pre-positioning’. k¤¢š²L¡W¡Ñj¡l A¢hѓRcÉ A‰ qÑuJ k¡ ¢h¢“Ræ, ja¡cnÑÑL p¤¤pwhÜ LlÑa k¡ ¢hpc«n qÑuJ clL¡¢l, ¢hpwNa qÑuJ BhnÉL, a¡l HL¢V ¢hÑno f¡¢li¡¢oL BMÉ¡ BÑR : "¢pÇfVj' h¡ "mrZ'z Hl j¡Ñe AhnÉ H eu Ñk Ñeq¡v k¡¢¿»Li¡Ñh ÑQe¡ k¡u "mrZ' - L¡Ñuj Ñk NWea¿» a¡l Jfl ky¡Ñcl Aes BÙÛ¡, A¢Q¢LvpÉ c¤hÑma¡, i¥ÑmJ ay¡l¡ c«Lf¡a LÑle e¡ "p¤¤hÉhÙÛ¡'l fÑr Aü¢Ù¹Ll ¢hLm ÑL¡Ñe¡ Aщl ¢cÑLz ... mrÑZl ne¡¢š² AaHh °e¢aL

¢el£r¡lC e¡j¡¿¹lz °e¢aLa¡l f¢lfËnÀ hÉ¢aÑlÑL pñhC eu A-p¤Ñ¤ Ml mrZ h¡ L¡lZ ¢eZÑu ... z (eSlV¡e Bj¡l - ¢nh¡S£ hѾcÉ¡f¡dÉ¡u, h¡wm¡ EfeÉ¡Ñp "Jl¡', 25) There is a specific conceptual category denoting the element which is an integral part of a logical structure and is at odds with it at the same moment: contrasting yet necessary, discordant but essential in relation to the structure, it plays a crucial role in organizing an ideology. It is ‘symptom’ or ‘lakkhan’. This does not however imply that the ‘symptom’ can be identified in merely mechanical ways – those who have an unflinching trust on and an incurable weakness for the prevalent system, will never set their eyes upon that dysfunctional organ that might impair the smooth functioning of the structure. … Thus locating the symptom is the same as being ethically motivated. It is not possible to explore the cause or the symptom of a dis-ease without an inquiry that is ethical … (emphasis added, Bandyopadhyay 2002b, 25, translation mine) Zizek, as we have seen so far, is not open to such an account. To repeat, his course is to reach symptom on the basis of an ontology of the exception. His prescribed course is intended for the (Slovenian?) ‘left’. But the question remains, why does the ‘left’ have to orient towards the symptom? Bandyopadhyay’s notion of the pre-empted ethical prises open a gap in Zizek’s logic. For me, Derrida’s hauntology of the specter retains the element of the ethical and also deepens its expanse. It points at the co-constitutivity of the ontological and the ethical in the call of radical exteriority in the form of the ghost, the ghost that is at the same time also the radically interior. What is it to be ethical? This book is not expansive enough to answer that abyssal question. In the last chapter, I will be able to put some initial concerns together in the form of unsolved queries. But before that, let us broach another

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point that has some bearings on the issue. While discussing the hegemonic notion of ideology, we could have noted that antagonism is but a name of the radical incompleteness of the whole. To name radical incompleteness as ‘antagonism’ is to stress the irreducible distance between the elements, to focus on the oppositional stance between them. The stress is on the marking of gaps in a totality, on the irreducibility of the loneliness of the elements. The question could very well be – with a reversal of perspective – how is the whole possible despite a radical incompleteness. Is the whole a false consciousness? Is it an ideology in the orthodox sense? Otherwise, sticking to a notion of a necessary and impossible whole, one has to think of communication across the elements of the whole totality inundated with a radical incompleteness. Is translation possible across incommensurable elements? The possibility of translation presupposes a commonality across difference, a structure of repetition with displacement, in short, iterability. This is what I meant by a conceiving of ideology on the grounds of iterability. A structure of iterability that allows for the notion of an inevitable othering of the same, responding to the other in and beyond the same. Maybe, this would be of help in thinking hegemony in an intimate field of (sexual) difference. Power – the name for the ensemble of micro-processes and dispositif – constitutes the embodied subject. This power restricts and enables the subject simultaneously. The insidious (albeit dynamic) structurality of this constitution does not allow the question of justice or of an ethics (in the sense of an intendedness to the radically other) to appear as part of its articulation. The changes imaginable in the structure remain circumscribed by the scope of the possibilities produced by the structure itself. Ideology, in the sense of a constitution of the embodied subject by specters of impossible articulations, allows the thinking of a radical break in the existing structure and of an ethics responsible to the (im)possibilities of those articulations. Ideology, in this sense of an interruptive constituent (that makes and interrupts at one go) of the subject, lets one think of a rupture inherent in continuity, of a disruptive interiority. It keeps open the possibility of an intimacy and a communication with power that one contests. The chain of my argument is simple. If power is embodied then embodiment is fraught with power. And if knowledge is embodied, it implies that embodiment involves knowing. Through the mediation of the body, power and knowledge gets implicated. To disavow these relationships is a founding move of universalist knowledge, a camouflaging strategy of power, and element of an active repudiation of the body in epistemology and ethics. The act of disavowal takes infinite particular forms (forms that together gather up to what is thus provisionally named and hypostatized as the disavowal) and constitutes ideology. Attempts to go beyond ideology, to remand the disavowal in declarations of complicity, remain implicated in the same move. Yet the

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forms of implication are not uniform. One has to decide, provisionally for the moment across an abyss of undecidability, on which way to implicate oneself in the move to counter ideology. The crucial point is, could this ‘one’ of whom we are speaking be an entity other than the individual. Is the singularity of the one necessarily premised upon the individual? My answer to the latter query would provisionally be in the negative. Likewise, contrary to the patent immediacy of intuition, the singularity of the body is not premised upon the individual. To question the obvious congruence of the body and the individual, one has to interrogate the evident thingness of the body, its palpable location in a given three dimensional space. This interrogation may easily lead to a reification of a principle of individuality into something transcending the body, into notions like the soul or the spirit or the atman. To avoid both forms of hypostasis – of the body and of the spirit – is to forestall any form of essentializing of the individual. In the following chapter, I move on to the diverse itineraries of the body-metaphor in its relation to knowledge and ethics.

Chapter 2 THINKING THE BODY: METAPHORICITY OF THE CORPOREAL Introduction So far we have been tracing – with a focus on the body of the subject – the dynamics of power and ideology as a set of intertwining processes. We looked at how ideology and power cannot work, cannot present themselves to be, in the absence of the bodily matrix of subjectivity. An ethics of responsibility corresponds to the very beings of the ghostly body and the subject, we observed. This ethics has to question the ideology of immediacy that is commonsensically ascribed to the body. In this chapter I move on to deal with the processes that produce the body in its purported immediacy of being. These processes, as I trace, include the significatory and power mechanisms acting at multiple axes of identity. My focus is on the sexually differentiated body, as I find a discussion of bodily metaphors to lead inevitably to a discussion of sexual difference. Although I later devote a whole chapter (Chapter Four) to a detailed appreciation of the notion of ‘sexual difference,’ my prevailing concern is the identity of the woman – how ‘woman’ as a category is projected in its immediacy to a relationship with the body. The act of naturalization of the body as something direct and unmediated is reflected and re-iterated in this move. The unthinking immediacy of sexual difference is commensurate with and a grounding instantiation of the given-ness of the body. The invocation of ‘cultural’ gender differences in contraposition to this ‘sexual identity’ can hardly point a way out of this predicament. Gender, in such an invocation, presents as a socially and culturally mediated domain amenable to interventions. This domain is distinct from sex as the unmediated natural matrix of gender difference. Gender opens up the space of intervention for a feminist undertaking while sex remains impervious to that endeavor. Opening up of the space of ‘sex’ to mediations creates its own problems. It becomes particularly difficult to differentiate, politically or ethically, between types of mediations. To make the work of distinction – between a justifiable or viable ( both terms open to contesting descriptions) position and that of its opposite – possible, one has to refer back to the notions

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of constitutive ideologies. One does not have to hover between a ‘real’ ground of the immediate body and an absolute dissipation in the metaphorics of (a bodily ground to) thinking. Speaking inevitably in terms of a clear distinction between the idea and the body, – terms which my probable mode of thinking puts under critical scrutiny – one may state that the ghosts of other ideologemes animate the corporeal to subjecthood. I commence with a discussion of certain ways in which the body attains an appearance of immediacy. As the argument progresses, one sees that the dissipation of the ideology of immediacy is not a non-ideological step in itself. One has to take decisions in choosing the ideologies one proffers in the face of inalienable links with the ideological. The choices are not wholly intentional but are rather ethical. The sense of the ethical here is different from that available in the discourse of the individual-based morality. The ethical is the experience of the impossible rather than a calculus of the possible determinant moral prescriptions. I dwell at length on the issue in the last chapter of this book. My approach to the question of the body is decidedly philosophical and feminist. Having broached in the earlier chapter the questions of power and the body in the processes of knowing, and assuming that I have made my point regarding the interdependence of the three, I now pose the body to be haunted by the ghost of the woman. This chapter begins with a discussion of the difficulties and the possibilities in thinking of the body as a ‘thing’. In what sense, if at all, can the body be thought of as a thing? What changes are brought about in the categories of the body and the thing through such a conception? Responses to these questions lead to a specific sense of thingness that presupposes mediations. Thinking the body as thing then involves the questioning of the ideologies that produce the body inevitably in terms of sexual difference. It becomes imperative to address the ‘ideological’ in addition to a description of the social inscriptions that mark the body. In the second section I deal with two intimately divergent opinions on the mind – a thinking of the mind, and the mad and reason. These two strands presuppose two different ethical and political positions in approaching the ‘others’ of the body, I argue. One of these speaks in terms of actualities of the situation in which the body is located and tries to think of the ‘others’ (mind, death, the feminine) in terms of these actualities. The other strand remains respectful of the (im)possibilities of the situation and points at an ethics of the impossible spectral. However, the separation of the two strands is analytical and they may work together in a single text. The third section deals with the problem of thinking feminisms through the actuality of ‘women’ and the spectrality of the ‘woman’ as the agent of feminisms. It traces various attempts to think of the metaphoricity and the reality of the body of the ‘woman’ together, yet in their specificities. It ends with a reference to the notion of performativity that tries to act this out in the context of thinking agency in a dissipated field. In the final section, I read certain problems into the notion of Butlerian performativity.

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A reduction of the materiality of the body to the processes of signification occurs here, despite efforts to avoid such a condition. The processes of signification are figured in terms of a recognizably Euro-centric field for Butler. And these processes, although referring to a contested field of competing universals, remain circumscribed again within a visible Euro-centric universal. The predicament does not have an easy way out. I end the chapter speaking of the necessity and the extreme difficulty of thinking of the body in terms of generalities other than those available to our easy western heritage.

The Body, Thingness and Ideologies The body, like all other things, cannot be thought, as such. (Spivak 1993, 20) In the above quote, one may read the moment of importance to reside not in the fact that the body cannot be thought “as such” but in that it is similar to “all other things” in this matter. In this almost casual reference to “things” coming from a conversation of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, it is possible to hear resonances of immense philosophical import. One has only to remember the importance of this word in the Heideggerian parlance. What is a thing is not a question to be dealt with at ease. The unease increases when one thinks of the conditions under which a body can be thought of as a thing. In this short section I will try to follow the consequences of the question of the thingness of bodies. The thingness of the body cannot really be dealt with in a straightforward manner. The complexity of the process comes out if one thinks of the intricacies of the concept ‘thing’. Things: Heidegger (1985), in his lecture at the University of Freiburg in 1935–36 (published as What is a Thing? ), was speaking of three senses in which the word ‘thing’ may be understood. The first (narrower) sense is that of the ‘present-at-hand’ inanimate and animate things like a rock or a rose. The second (comparatively wider) sense includes those of the first along with events like plans, actions or reflections. The third (the widest sense) includes the first two and also anything that “is something,” that is, anything which is “not nothing.” Heidegger had decided to adhere to a ‘narrow’ meaning of thing – in the sense of being present-at-hand (das Vorhandene)1: [A] rock, a piece of wood, a pair of pliers, a watch, an apple, and a piece of bread. All inanimate and all animate things such as a rose, shrub, beech tree, spruce, lizard, and wasp… (6). The reason, for Heidegger, is clear: the discussions and the question concerning thing start from – even when these involve the widest sense – the narrow meaning. This refers to the “most immediate,” that which is most ready to be

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grasped by hands. For Kant, this thing-at-hand, as ‘phenomenon’, is different from the thing-in-itself that is “not approachable through experience as are the rocks, plants, and animals” (Heidegger 1985, 5). Yet, the body “as such” reminds one of a Ding an Sich, which is not mediated by tools of thought and is thus unavailable to thought. The body is probably the epitome of such an immediacy, the un-thought obvious ground of all thinking. At this point one might remember that Heidegger speaks of two different modes of being of the thing.2 Even when he talks about the most immediate present-at-hand thing (das Vorhandene), he has in mind these two modes. One mode is the presence-at-hand, Vorhandenheit in German. This is the neutral positing of the thing, the thing not in use. Vorhandenheit is the natural and not the artifactual way of being. One has to remember that the two ‘modes of being’ do not refer to the thing as such but to the way of being of the thing; a natural entity may not be Vorhandensein if it is put to some use and an artifact may be Vorhandensein if it is kept without use. The other mode, which is defined in opposition to this, is the Zuhandenheit or ready-to-hand. As Inwood (1999) points out, Zuhanden, “lit. ‘to, towards, the hands” (129), is not a common word. Heidegger combines multiple historical uses of the word to refer to things that serve human purposes in some way. Inwood again reminds, “[o]nly nonhuman things are zuhanden. The mode of being of other people is Mitdasein, ‘Dasein-with’” (129). Interestingly, for Heidegger, Vorhandensein – neutrality as the mode of being of things – is reached through ready-to-handness, and not the other way round. Zuhandenheit is prior to Vorhandensein. We meet things as things for use and then conceptualize them in their neutrality. The ‘then’ denotes a logical sequence and not a temporal one. One way of making sense of this phenomenon is to understand the primacy of Dasein, the mode of being of the human, in Heidegger’s scheme. The usability of things to the ‘human’ is prior to the being of things as such. In the previous sentence, one cannot use the word ‘existence’ in place of ‘being’. For Heidegger, existence is a technical term that denotes the being of Dasein and not the being of things. The thing (Das Ding), for which the neutrality of the unmediated being is secondary to the mediations of usability, is thus – in a Heideggerian sense – not a proper description of the immediate presence of the body. Put in another way, the impossibility of positing an unmediated thingness itself is a symptom of the impossibility of positing an unmediated ‘body’. The thing, in such a parlance, itself becomes a term loaded with much theoretical weight. The thing (Das Ding) is opposed to the sense of the mere object, Gegenstand: An independent, self-supporting thing may become an object if we place it before us, whether in immediate perception or by bringing it to mind

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in a recollective re-presentation. However, the thingly character of the thing does not consist in its being a represented object, nor can it be defined in any way in terms of the objectness, the over-againstness, of the object. …from the objectness of the object, and from the product’s selfsupport, there is no way that leads to the thingness of the thing. (Heidegger 1971, 167) In “The Thing” (Heidegger 1971, “Das Ding”), his lecture in 1951, Heidegger differentiates thingness from mere objectness (Gegenstand). In the process he explicates his notion of the thing in detail. In a later famous piece (Heidegger 2008), he differentiates the thing from Bestand – “standing reserve” or “stock” – as an entity produced by the practices of technology. Through a discussion of the distinction between the thing (Das Ding) and the “standing reserve” (Bestand ), Edwards (2007) brings out the ethical import of the thing for Heidegger. Bestand, as product of technology, is a thing that vanishes into its use.3 The activity for which it is produced fully defines its being. This is different from the use implied in Zuhandensein – ready-to-handness where the use does not exhaust the being of the thing. In the case of Bestand, the use exhausts the separate being of the thing. The thing in the sense of Ding is different from Bestand. Heidegger speaks of the ‘thinging’ of the thing in the sense of ‘gathering’. He refers to the old high German word for thing (Dinc) that means gathering. The thing comes into being through the act of gathering what Heidegger calls the fourfold,4 the conditionalities of its being. The Bestand is that which forgets the conditions of its production through its use and the Ding retains the memory of the conditions that produce it, even when it is related to others through use. The thing, in such a sense, forces people to acknowledge their own conditionalities. To own a thing is also to be owned – brought to one’s own through memories of the conditions that produce the ownness – by the thing. This is an ethical work for Heidegger, as Edwards shows: To live in acknowledgement of our manifold conditions, to gather ourselves to ourselves and others through the gathering of things, is an ethical achievement. (466) If one thinks of the body as a thing, one thus has to ponder upon the sense of thingness one is using. Thingness, not in the sense of Bestand, is associated with a neutrality in the sense of being unrelated to other entities. Certain senses of the thing reach the state of neutrality through mediation of the thing’s relation – through usability – with others. But usability is not to be reduced

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solely to use. Rather, usability refers to the relation with others. In this sense, the thing occurs as beyond mediation by going through mediatedness. To think of the body as a thing, in this sense, is to think of the specificity of the body through the relatedness of the body to others, to other bodies, to those that are conceived to be other than the body. Ideologemes, ghosts, different sexualities continue to haunt the body. The body has to respond to these that constitute it and these in turn have to negotiate the body. Such a conception of the body shifts the argument on embodiment to a register different from that in which the body and the processes of thinking remain as separable entities. The focus of my discussion is different from the (commoner) sociological approach. The distinction between the two approaches is well brought out by a short two-page review of Judith Butler’s Bodies That Matter – that came out in 1993 – by Bryan S. Turner in the pages of Contemporary Sociology (May 1995, 331–332). Turner observes: There is little interest here in the materiality of the body in the sense that a sociologist might be concerned to understand the importance of odor, secretions and bodily decay in social relations. Butler’s poststructuralist approach to the discursive limits of sex precludes any focus on the phenomenology of sexual experience. (332) A little earlier, he had affirmed that Butler’s focus was very different from what Mauss understood by “body techniques” or Foucault by “discipline.” In a way Turner is right in his observations. The understanding of the body as something neutral and ahistoric, upon which societies and histories inscribe their mark, underlie many a sociological discussions on the body. Though Michel Foucault has been far from a classical sociologist, Butler (1989) had already discussed how his notion of bodily inscriptions, ostensibly avoiding a conception of the natural body, had retained the binary between the surface to be inscribed upon and the forces that inscribe. One may suggest a parallel with the notion of (Foucauldian) Power that seemingly inscribes the body with certain characteristics. Like all analogies, this also is partly operative. A discerning study of Foucault’s texts may argue that for him power produces the body and not inscribes the ‘inert’ body with meanings. The notion of anatomopolitics (Foucault 1990) clearly makes the point that anatomy itself is in a sense produced through processes of power. In the earlier chapter I have already discussed how power may thus be related to the ontology of the body. Such a reading opens up the notion of power to a relation with ideology, I had argued in the chapter. The commonplace Foucauldian sense of power does not allow such juxtaposition. The body when conceived of minus its relations with ideology, and thus of an

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intrinsic propensity to change, remains an inert surface to be scripted upon. It becomes imperative for feminism thus to address the question of the ideology of sexism as acted out in the space of the body. Such an addressal is facilitated, but not fully made, by Foucauldian notions of historicity of the production of the body. Indeed, studies focusing on bodily techniques or the disciplining of the body have rarely dealt with the notion of sexual difference at the level of being – at the level of bodily existence per se. For me, this gesture – of restricting the inquiry to the level of gendering, not addressing the ontology of the body – presupposes a scientistic (not scientific, if one has to talk in binaries, although I would rather point at the co-implication of the scientistic and scientific) divide between social gendering and corporeal sex. This does not even broach the possibility of questioning the latter. In some reverse cases, this involves a too easy denial of the social/corporeal binary – not waiting to think why and how it has continued to work. To me, a ‘philosophical’ questioning of the body as a mere ‘site’ does not preclude the ‘sociologist’s’ view but goes on to complement that by reflecting on its presuppositions. In his review of Butler’s book, Turner had made the comment, “[s] ex is more than a position in a social place; it is a potentiality organized by disciplinary practices” (331–332). This is a perfectly valid statement which points at the need to address disciplinary production along with the question of ideology (enunciated a little reductively as “a position in a social place”). It might be instructive to remember that the counter-assertion would equally be true. One may as well say, “[s]ex is more than a potentiality organized by disciplinary practices; it is a position in a social place.” This is the reminder I want to put to ‘sociological’ approaches to the body. For me, the twin ends of the sociological body and the ideological body are thus not as opposed as they seem to be. The processes of social inscription presuppose a prior body that has to be problematized. To interrogate the ideological positions which go on to constitute this prior-ness of the body, one has to refer back to the social and historical making of this body. Yet, the registers of social inscription and of ideological place-holding are separate with their own specificities. One can hardly ignore any one of them. A cursory look at the different ways in which the two categories ‘gender’ and ‘sex’ have been enunciated in feminist theories is enough to bring out the inalienability and the separation of the sociological and the ideological body. If one is aware of the constructed nature of ‘sex’ as a category, the problem becomes – following Sara Heinamaa (1997, 297) – “how physiological diversity adapts to a social dichotomy” (emphasis in the original), not a search for the dynamics of the inscription of gender-marks on biological sex. In a way, it may be claimed that it is gender difference acting socially which produces

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the difference between the sexes, and produces them as natural. The desire to maintain the gender differential remains active in the purported evidences in favor of naturalized sex-differences. What could be the import of a denaturalizing of ‘sex’ for feminist theory? Not many are aware of these effects. A perceptive exception is Tina Chanter’s argument on the consequences of the science studies critiques – of sex-division – for the feminist view of the sex–gender system. For a long time, at least since the 1970s, the sex–gender distinction has been one of the mainstays of critical tools for feminism.5 As Chanter (1993) discusses the reception of Julia Kristeva in the Anglo-American feminist writings, she points to the problem that the latter faces in dealing with any of the French Feminists – the serious engagement with sexual difference seems to undermine the primacy of gender in the Anglo-American tradition: The story that feminism tells itself is a story in which gender plays the lead role. Once we realized that femininity was culturally constructed, and not inscribed in our natures, we could change the ways in which gender was constructed … In effect, then, sex, nature, biology, and bodies are written out of the feminist picture. What is important for feminism is gender, culture, society, and history. (185) Through her division between the semiotic and the symbolic as analogous to the natural and the cultural, Kristeva is open to the charge of perpetuating this sex–gender divide. Her emphasis on the semiotic then becomes symptomatic of an essentialism. Chanter’s reading, as opposed to this, focuses on the interweave of the semiotic and the symbolic in Kristeva, where the semiotic cannot be expressed, however inadequately, without the symbolic. Our concern, whatever be the reading of Kristeva, is on the very important consequences of a shift of focus to the ‘construction’ of ‘sex’.6 Chanter returns to the theme in “Feminisms at a Millennium,” her short contribution to a special issue of Signs in the year 2000. She outlines three prevalent models in which either both sex and gender are treated as logically autonomous categories that have a relation of necessity or probability among them, or the assumption is that one category can be subsumed by the other. For a proper investigation of bodies and materiality, and also to be adequate to the complexities of identity categories like class, race, ethnicity, she wants to avoid the tendency to collapse one term into the other as well as the tendency to treat them both as having an initial integrity and independent existence to be later brought into relation with one another. We need a more porous model, in which neither category is evacuated of meaning but both are constituted, in relation to one another, as permeable and unstable. (1240)

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Sara Heinamaa (1997) shares this concern with Chanter. She speaks of two senses in which the sex/gender distinction is made in much of feminist theory – the substantive and the criterial. The ‘substantive’ differentiation is organized around a list of attributes that define each category. Roughly corresponding to the mind/body dichotomy, the mental and behavioral differences would constitute gender, and the genetic, hormonal or organic features would define sex. The ‘criterial’ mode does not depend on the content of the category but on a criterion for belonging to it. Approximating the nature/culture binary, sex refers to the ‘biologically given’ properties ( be they ‘mental’ or ‘organic’), and gender to the differences that have their origin in ‘society’ or ‘culture’. Sometimes, these two modes are conflated, and the mind/body and culture/nature distinctions appear to be coincident. Heinamaa refers to a ‘two-step move’ where …first the term “gender” is fixed substantively to refer to mental and behavioral features, and then it is argued that gender – thus defined – is a product of social and cultural forces” (294, emphasis in the original). She goes on to trace the ‘original’ context in which a sex/gender dichotomy appeared – Sex and Gender (1968), the work of psychoanalyst Robert Stoller. Heinamaa shows how two crucial factors in the work – the idea of a biological base for sexual differences and the causal explanatory framework (293–4) – are taken up and persist in the later feminist appropriations which nevertheless differ much from this work in other respects. She is similar to Chanter in professing that a focus on the ‘cultural’ construction of ‘sex’ is not the way out for feminist theory. Her emphasis, based on a reading of Merleau-Ponty and Simone de Beauvoir, is on “styles of being” (300–3). This view, acting on the presumption of the inadequacy of causal thinking in general, starts from a notion of the body as the condition that makes objects possible for us. The body, as “a seat of intentionality,” is “a sedimentation” of values and meanings created by former bodily acts (302). Sexual identities, no more defined in terms of attributes, then become modes or styles of being (301). And finally, Heinamaa underlines the importance of what I would call the structure of iterablity – she uses the expressions “repetition” and “repeated acts of deviation and subversion” (302) – in the becoming and continuance of the sexual identity. A rethinking (and a thinking through) of sexual difference is in order. The call of a Chanter or a Heinamaa for a blurring of the sex/gender distinction through a phenomenological rethinking of the body is analogous to a call for a dissipation of ideology (of sex/gender binary) through ideology critique. Is it enough? Does it account for the persistence of the said binary and the consequences of this persistence? Does it not work in a meta-binary of binarism/non-binarism, with a stress on the latter term?7 And if we remember our thinking of the body as the spectral body for-ever haunted by

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the ideological, is it not necessary to work through the ghost-binary of sex and gender even when one questions the logical necessity of this division. An epistemic critique of the notion of sex/gender division is barely adequate for its containment. As the body is rendered social, the social becomes corporeal. But this twin movement hardly calls for a dissolution of the body or the social. Instead, the interactions between these two non-natural, contingent yet ‘real’ entities become open to alternate scriptings. The alternatives may take the form of a reversal of relations or of a call for a beyond to the economy of these two. Woman, in both these cases, may act as the category privileged to lever an oppositional stance by virtue of its status of being hegemonized. The ethics and politics of feminism have to engage with the question of the ontology of the body. Feminism’s initial impulse to mark the constructions of the body had been active in questioning the androcentric posture of dealing with bodily differences as given and as the source of gender discriminations. Yet, feminism has somehow to deal with the identity of the ‘woman’ as a critical resource to resist patriarchal moves. The body of the woman, and extending the logic across the colonial divide, the body of the third world woman, is to be renegotiated from the zone of patriarchal forgetfulness if one wants to think of a politics of the (im)possible in a familiar space. As one tries to approach the writing of the corporeal with a corpus of writing, the “divisible borderline” between “two ‘bodies’, the corpus and the body” (Derrida 1985, 4–5) becomes blurred. If generalities are seen to be involved in the structure of the singularity of each body (defined contingently), the singularities that go on to constitute the general may be perceived in terms that avoid the model of the repetitions of the particular. The thinking of other generalities becomes a possibility in that case. A particular sense of thingness – whose neutrality is produced through mediations of other things and of use – allows the conceptualization of the body in terms of mediations by other generalities. Not all notions of the body permit such a thought. I deal with certain moments of enunciation of the body-thing as beyond mediation. The moments I deal with are not simple assertions of a techno-scientific presupposition of the unmediated body. These are nuanced attempts to come to terms with the necessity of such a presupposition while remaining aware of the inevitable metaphoric construction of the body. I discuss these in conjunction with modes of thinking mediation which do not remember the immediate.

Actuality and (Im)Possibility: Descartes/Foucault/Derrida Purportedly it all started with Descartes. He is said to have initiated the split, between the mind and the body, fecund enough to (re)produce the whole baggage of infamous binaries that have mobbed the modern beings. Yet – as

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Latour (1993) has so convincingly brought home – we, the moderns, have never been moderns. We failed irrevocably in our project of keeping the two poles of the binary apart. They fused into each other. Processes of incessant translations make the pure hybrid, the immaculate bastard. And of course, we are not naive enough to believe that this happens only in the space of hegemonic relationships. The hegemonizer and the hegemonized are each split internally. Each part of the split whole being constituted by and in turn taking part in the constitution of, all the other parts, as well as the whole(s). Of course, the part-whole relationship itself faces the same predicament of (in)definibility. The mind and the body, in turn the minds and the bod(y)ies, remain mutually, inalienably constitutive of each other. Yet, it would be fatally wrong to assert, in a mood of festive dissipation, that Descartes’ spirit has been laid to rest: ‘I’-s are plural. If the plurality of the verb pulls the bulk of one’s attention to a celebratory fragmentation, please don’t fail to note the lonely figure of the pronoun in its singularity. Forego no one of these. In this brief foray into the dense thickets of the problematic of the body and the woman, I hold on and look closely in to certain passages of the old master himself, to Descartes’ Meditations. I look into the readings that two of the ‘masters’ of the ‘postmodern’ age – Foucault and Derrida – have of Descartes. I write on Foucault and Derrida writing on Descartes and against their respective selves. Maybe, only then will I be able to posit two very intimately adversarial theories that try to make some sense of our (im)possible beings – a gathering in of sutured tapestries torn apart from within. And that’s also true for the theories. One note of caution. I focus on a moment of divergence, a point of disagreement, visibly charged with emotions, between Foucault and Derrida. That does not mean I imply an originary difference and a neat structural continuity in their respective theoretical ‘positions’. I would rather subscribe to a reading of the two proper ‘names’ Foucault/Derrida together as Spivak has done in her dealings with the notion of pouvoir-savoir (Spivak 1993, already dealt with in Chapter One). Together, yet not suppressing the slash. I would like to characterize my endeavor here as focusing on this slash while not forgetting the near equivalence. To remind, this also holds for the seemingly contending theoretical ‘positions’ I am speaking about. Yet another clarification. I am not much concerned with the detailed intricacies of the debate on Foucault’s Madness and Civilization; not even with the specific dynamics of the logical altercations that mark the category of the ‘mad’ and of ‘reason’ as proposed by the two thinkers. This chapter directs its attention not on that passage of Descartes whose meanings Foucault and Derrida wrench out with meticulous vigor, but on completely different ones. Ones that, though famous, are not referred to directly in the arguments but remain present in oblique references to their readings.

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And now, at long last, the two passages from Descartes: I have convinced myself that there is nothing at all in the world, no heaven, no earth, no winds, no bodies; have I not then convinced myself that I do not exist? On the contrary: there is no doubt that I existed, if I convinced myself of anything. – But there is some deceiver, in the highest degree powerful and ingenious, who uses all his efforts to deceive me all the time. – Then there is no doubt that I exist, if he is deceiving me; let him deceive me as much as he likes, he may never bring it about that I am nothing, so long as I think that I am something. So after every thought and the most careful consideration, I must hold firm to this conclusion: that the proposition I am, I exist, must be true, whenever I utter it or conceive it in my mind. (Meditations, Second Meditation, quoted in Williams 1978, 72) ...I noticed that, while I was trying to think that everything was false, it was necessary that I, who was thinking this, should be something. And observing that this truth; I am thinking, therefore I exist was so firm and secure that all the most extravagant suppositions of the sceptics were not capable of overthrowing it, I judged that I should not scruple to accept it as the first principle of philosophy I was seeking. (Discourse, Part Four, quoted in Williams 1978, 73) Descartes is meeting the skeptic’s challenge squarely in the face. At the seeming end of all-encompassing doubt, when all the knowledge gathered by ‘sensations’ become open to question, he reaches the only sure ground of certainty – that is, when I am questioning everything, even if I may not utter, may not speak it aloud, at least I am thinking. What follows from this, in a (pre-)supposed connection “between Descartes’s assurance that he exists, and his thinking” (Williams 1978), is one of the most discussed sentences in Western philosophy – Cogito ergo sum (I think, therefore I exist). Note here, as Rorty (1979) in a slightly different context makes it explicit, that the ground of surety, contrary to the commonsense ‘materialistic’ view of modern man and science, is the ‘mind’, not the ‘body’. Not that the abstract mind rules over the crass concreteness of the body. But the mind is the more im-mediate, more basic, and the indubitable, incorrigible ground of existence. The body vanishes into a tenuous, doubt-ridden field of deceitful sensations. Is it then, that the three-dimensional spatial structure called the body in modern conceptions of the self (and remember, this is the body that scientific medicine takes as its self-evident given, science being the natural yet unsaid oft-iterated ground of the modern ways of knowing8) bears within itself the sense of fallibility and disbelief which the philosophy of modernity per

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se had bequeathed it? And is it because of this that the notions associated with the body – like the feminine, the native and the nature – despite their down-to-earth materiality and their purported inferiority of status, are also the most deceitful, evading already and always, the encompassing view of the allknowing mind – the male, cultured and white –, the superior intellect baffled by cunning machinations of the base? On the other side of the political divide, attempts to valorize the body / woman / nature / native – that put stress on the infinitude of the phenomenal – do so within the secure confines of the dichotomy between the indubitable mind and the shifting body, in a way limiting the playful creativity of theorizing.9 Much of the current literature on the body – avowedly Spinozist celebrations of the ‘productive and creative’ body (Gatens 1988) or the invocation of Bataillean ‘materialism’ (as opposed to obsessions with ‘the ideal form of matter’) to speak of dismembered bodyparts in a ‘general economy’ of global circulation (Plotnitsky 2001) – are made to work within the same binary with their exclusive focus on the body. Resultantly, these remain haunted by the untheorized specter of the ‘mind’.10 For, again, here the mind remains transparent, that is, unmediated.11 I am not arguing for a theory of the body to look at it in singular, stable and foundational terms. I only point to certain pitfalls in the most radical arguments that remain oblivious to their own pre-suppositions, and spell out too easy solutions to age-old problems. The ethical political gesture towards radical solutions might a bit too often be complicit in iterating the structures that they tend to dismantle. Back again to our straying story. In “Cogito and the history of madness,” Derrida (1978, 31–63) concedes his ‘rereading’ of the Cartesian Cogito “in some ways [to] be the most classical, banal reading, even if not the easiest one” (33). Not dealing with the intricacies of his arguments, I would like to take up two of the many insights I read into his essay. In a vein of classical scholarship, Derrida subscribes to the view that Descartes resists the skeptic’s challenge with the indubitability of thinking. To the extent this thinking resists doubt and false beliefs, it is constructed as rational. Madness and dream are two examples where reason is hoodwinked by error and false perceptions. Between them, “the sleeper, or the dreamer, is madder than the madman,” for “the dreamer insofar as concerns the problem of knowledge which interests Descartes here, is further from time perception than the madman.” In a way, both these represent “the radicalization or… the hyperbolical exaggeration of the hypothesis according to which the senses could sometimes deceive me”(Derrida 1978, 48, emphasis in the original). Of course, Derrida does not stop here. He goes on to blow up the moment of madness that inheres in reason, to speak of “its possible menace at the very heart of the intelligible.” Playing

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on the figure of the hyperbole which “opens and founds the world as such by exceeding it.” Derrida asserts: The extent to which doubt and the Cartesian Cogito are punctuated by this project of a singular and unprecedented excess – an excess in the direction of the nondetermined, Nothingness or Infinity, an excess which overflows the totality of that which can be thought, the totality of beings and determined meanings, the totality of factual history – is also the extent to which any effort to reduce this project, to enclose it within a determined historical structure, however comprehensive, risks missing the essential, risks dulling the point itself.” (Derrida 1978, 57, emphasis in the original). This is in perfect agreement with Derrida’s overall critique of the Foucauldian project of writing a history of madness itself. “ Itself ”. Of course, Foucault is well aware of the contradictions that beset such a project – to catch madness “as it carries itself and breathes before being caught and paralyzed in the nets of classical reason,” to catch with the instruments and the very language of ‘classical reason’ itself, reason that has entrapped this very same madness. His unflinching attempt to pursue the project, rich in the knowledge of its own impossibility (the knowledge that might enable someone to speak of Foucault/Derrida in a certain mode of unity), thus suffers an uneasy lapse in consistency and a complicity with the very structure of rationalization that it tries to dismantle – a taking part in the very economy of “reason, madness and death” that it aims to transcend.12 In a radically different move, and that is the second theme I would like to speak on, Derrida would probably point at “the differance of the absolute excess,” the excess of silence and madness that, spectre-like, haunt the irreducible violence in speech: From the very first breath, speech…is able to open the space for discourse only by emprisoning madness. (1978, 60–61) In thus speaking of, as if invoking, a “vigil of the ‘powers of unreason’ around the Cogito,” Derrida is able, in a way, to refer to a sort of constitutive outside to the seemingly all-encompassing dictates of Reason. Here this outside is spoken of in the spirit of the Levinasian ‘other’, an other that calls for a responsibility to its absent presence, rather than an other to be engulfed within,13 At this point there appears the question, in-terminably repetitive and re-turning at every move, of the possibility of a politics in this politics of the (im)possible; as if the incalculability of the radically other closes down the

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possibility of ‘action’, as if there is no chance of taking decisions across the abyss of undecidability. This is to forget the call for a responsible decision which is to be taken only over the abyss of the undecidable, only when the decision doesn’t flow from a prior calculus in the form of a telos. For instance, this is to think that the aporia, the non-passage, between ‘justice’ and the ‘law’ makes both justice and the law impossible and ineffective. The ‘peculiar nature of the deconstructive embrace’ that asserts, “…justice is disclosed in law, even as its own effacement” (Spivak 1999, 427), that posits ethics as the “experience of the impossible,” is thus ignored. To quote Spivak again: Justice and law, ethics and politics, gift and responsibility are structureless structures because the first item of each pair is neither available nor unavailable. It is in view of justice and ethics as undeconstructible, as experiences of the impossible, that legal and political decisions must be made, empirically scrupulous but philosophically errant.” (Spivak 1999, 427, emphasis added). To forget, among the play of contingencies and radical incalculability, the imperative to the conscientiousness of being empirically scrupulous is to equate deconstruction with pragmatism – of course as Spivak says – as a rule of thumb and incurring the heavy toll of effacing discontinuities in the act of summarizing. A re-turn to the intimate separation of the two names, Foucault/Derrida. After a long detour (de’ tourner – ‘turn away’) into the snares of naming and propriation, a going away only to come back, the away always bearing the way, back within. “My body, this paper, this fire” is Foucault’s (1998–1972) parrying against the disciple – a disciple speaking with the master out and in – a counter move with all the ferocity of wounded concern. But what, then, is the obstacle, the resistance point of the exercise of doubt? (408) Foucault asks, following Descartes’ challenge to the skeptic’s doubt. His answer, though starting with a query, is clear and decisive: My body, and the immediate perception I have of it? More exactly an area defined as “the vivid and the near”…: I am here, wearing a dressing gown, sitting beside the fire – in short, the whole system of actuality which characterizes the moment of my meditation… Descartes here involves not the certainty that one may have in general of one’s own body but, rather, everything that, at this precise instant of meditation, resists in

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fact the carrying out of doubt by the subject who is currently meditating.” (408, emphasis in original) In an audacious move out of the ‘classical’ readings, Foucault confronts Descartes in a defiant spirit. His emphasis is on the instant of meditation and the actuality of the subject. The immediacy (and universality and indubitability) of the mind giving way to the centrality of the present moment – the body, the paper, “this heat from the fire” – the ensemble of the presences that gather up to constitute the presence of the “meditating subject.” The principle that grounds the actuality of this presence is Reason: If he really doubted all this system of actuality, would he still be rational? (408) Foucault goes on in the same vein: Clearly, it is not certain things that in themselves ( by their nature, their universality, their intelligibility) resist doubt but, rather, that which characterizes the actuality of the meditating subject (the place of his meditation, the gesture he is in the process of making, the sensations that strike him)… If I must begin doubting the place where I am, the attention I am paying to this piece of paper, and this heat from the fire which marks my present moment, how could I remain convinced of the rational character of my undertaking? (emphasis added). (408) For Foucault, this reason that constitutes the actuality of the author, is itself defined by a radical exclusion of madness. Madness, for him, is unique in that it is expelled, and assuredly differentiated from ‘dream’, or the ‘evil genius’. In a supremely indignant mood, Foucault accuses Derrida of “continuing the Cartesian exclusion” of the mad from reason. Derrida is said to have reduced the explicit exclusion of madness to a casual instance of an inferior form of dream, and to have misread the presence of madness in reason. In this move, Foucault sees “a historically well determined little pedagogy” – “a pedagogy that gives… to the master’s voice the limitless sovereignty that allows it to restate the text indefinitely” (Foucault 1998, 416). Madness, to read Foucault in a Derridean idiom, is the absent center that organizes reason; and reason here is that which forms the ground of actuality of the place in which the observer writes. In this reading, it is not the immediacy of the mind but the actuality of the situation flowing from reason that stalls the march of all-encompassing doubt in Descartes. Rationality, remaining as the principle of actuality, reminds one of the realm of ideology that constitutes the factual ‘body’ (that we have

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dealt with in Chapter One). Putting that aside for the time being, it becomes difficult to comprehend how Foucault would now face the central question that Derrida continues to posit for him – namely, if madness occurs in such exteriority with regard to reason (that Foucault himself now emphasizes so acutely), how is it possible to write a reasonable account of madness ‘itself ’. I find here, again, an echo – no, the utterance at the ‘origin’ – of some of the later critics of the Derridean thematic. The utterance indicates a failure to perceive the radicality of the wholly other. It is symptomatic of a blindness to the problems of positing a conceivable other to conception itself. The abyssal problem of formulating, in a rational discourse, a history of madness itself that is wholly beyond the rational is taken a bit too lightly. And so, for Foucault, when the problem of a reasoned enunciation of this incommensurable gap becomes evident – in Descartes’ dealing with the ‘evil genius’ in whom cogito risks madness through its excess – he tries to escape by asserting a difference and an opposition between the reasoned excess of the evil genius and the unreason of madness (413–415). The idea that the evil genius could be a symptom of the inalienability of ‘reason’ and “the rational enunciation of unreason” does not appeal to him. Almost two decades later, in a lecture delivered in November 1991, on the occasion of the thirtieth anniversary of the publication of Foucault’s Folie et deraison: Histoire de la folie àl’âge classique, Derrida (1998–1994) returns to a different instance of the problem of “speaking to unreason”. His earlier question, posed “on the side of modernity” (74), could (and should) have been directed to the “situation of psychiatry and psychoanalysis rather than toward a questioning of a reading of Descartes” (75), Derrida concedes. Now he deals with Freud, and specifically the text Beyond the Pleasure Principle, along with Foucault’s text on madness and reason. The Freudian moment of psychoanalysis reaches back into attempts of speaking to madness, beyond yet inexorably marked by the intervening moments that excluded madness in their constitution of the discipline of psychology and psychiatry – this is what he reads into Foucault’s text. Foucault’s dealing of Freud shows the dilemma between a positing of the latter in continuity with the exclusionary moments and an appraisal that points at the uniqueness that we just spoke of. In Derrida’s rendition, the drive to mastery in a Foucauldian discourse on power may be linked to the pleasure principle, and the problem of thinking beyond the ‘principle’: what one must stop believing in is principality or principleness, in the problematic of the principle, in the principled unity of pleasure and power, … (Derrida 1998, 117) He says he would like to ask Foucault, imagining the response coming through the absolute silence of death, the question whether Freud was not looking

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similarly for a name that would “remain forever heterogeneous to the principle of principle” (118) in the notion of the death drive. Is not it the opposition to ‘all monisms’ in the form of the duality implicated in the formulation of the death drive: a death drive that was no doubt not alien to the drive for mastery? And, thus, to what is most alive in life, to its very living on [survivance]? (118) A thinking of the other in its absolute alienness does not necessarily preclude a responsibility to the trace of the other in the self, to the trace as it appears for the self. Attempts to produce a definitional calculus of the other in its distinctness might, on the other hand, erase traces of the self in the act of defining and be violent to the possibilities of the other. A valorizing of the irrational might, negatively as a Hegelian other, come to valorize the rational ‘itself ’. Paradoxically, the charge of making the (b)order of the (master’s) discourse as ever-expanding and all-embracing may work against such a Foucauldian frame of thought.14 The making present of the absent has its tolls of erasure.15 Going far back into this essay, we might now recall the point where we started. Among all those much talked about binaries that remain active in (Western?) theories, even more than the reason/madness, man/woman, culture/nature or any of the others, the binary between the mind and the body is the most amenable to this move of valorizing the presence. For, whose presence is the more palpable, more intimate and more perceptible than that of the body? Who but the throbbing, pulsating body is the closest to the self-evident presence of reality? Only, it is worth re-membering at this point that the evident authenticity of the presence – the rational appraisal of the actual situation – hides behind its too obvious authority, an erasure of the small prefix re-, a forgetting of what it is to represent and the risks and inauthenticities linked intimately with the process. Ironically it was Foucault who had probably been the most successful of the theorizers of the social to call into question, to de-naturalize, the evident im-mediacy of the body through his studies of medicine (1976), sexuality (1978) and politics (1991). But more of this later.

‘The Woman in the Body’ – Metaphors of Embodiment Notwithstanding certain seemingly insurmountable pitfalls, Foucault, in a way, is able to posit a deep-laid anxiety that underlies all theorizing with a radical ethico-political concern. It is the question of articulating modes of agency from within structures that reproduce themselves indefinitely in infinite progression. I try, in a broad outline, to spell out the problem as it

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appears within feminism. It is an elementary knowledge in today’s academia that the journey from ‘women’s question’ to ‘gender trouble’ entailed a shift of focus from the question of sexual discriminations to the mapping of the mechanisms involved in the construction of gendered identities. If these ‘mechanisms’ are not to be considered invariable in space and time, and if these are to remain amenable to change through the agencies of feminist political maneuvers, one has to think beyond the structural dynamics of the sex-gender system in which these mechanisms reproduce themselves infinitely. For, to describe the system to be consistently operative over time is to bring out the dynamics of its own reproducibility. But then the agency of the active subjects who can bring about structural changes, in the sense of a variation beyond the dynamics of the reproduction of the system itself, becomes questionable. This is the classical structure/agency problem in social theory. Gender studies have often resorted to a purported agency in identity categories like the woman or the sexually deviant, which are not even mostly co-extensive. The possibility of knowing and identifying the subjects of feminism and the modes of their agency – agency as a concept would be defined differently in a non-patriarchal context – continue to raise seemingly irresolvable questions. Whether such agencies of change can be conceptualized in languages or acted out in performativities that remain too deeply implicated in the reproduction and the continuance of the same sexgender system becomes problematic. The gut response to a seeming dissolution of the active subject in a theory structuring itself in terms of a dynamic of in-terminable reproducibility is to valorize “the concrete experience of the oppressed” (Spivak 1988, 275). This involves a concomitant valorization of history and context. Yet the concrete experience of the woman located in a particular history as something to fall back upon has some inherent problems. To treat presence as a given foundational category, as if unmediated by representations (though not overtly), is to grant a certain authority of transparency to those who speak for the population who get represented. Modifying Spivak a little, one can speak of the consequence of a valorization of experience to be an unexamined benevolence on the part of “the…intellectual masquerading as the absent nonrepresenter who lets the oppressed speak for themselves” (Spivak 1988, 292, emphasis added).16 One reaches the problem of representation, of the identities of the subject and the object of representation, and the mediations implicated therein. Lineaments of power and meanings work to weave this mediatory milieu. This section deals with some attempts to focus on the irreducible materiality of the body. These are different from a phenomenological account of embodiment. The phenomenological view of the body is that of

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a ‘being-in-the-world’, as in a Merleau-Pontyian view of the body as “the existential possibility for culture and self ” (Csordas 1994, 12; Csordas 1999): the body is not an object, but the condition of all objects and all our knowledge of them. It is a necessary, mobile perspective that makes objects possible for us (Heinamaa 1997, 300). This phenomenological version of the body points at an ‘existential immediacy’, with its focus on the ‘lived experience’ (Csordas 1994, 1999) or ‘styles’ of being (Heinamaa). Yet this sense of immediacy is always and already mediated through ‘experience’ and ‘style’. As Csordas notes in his attempt to delineate the concept of embodiment from that of the ‘body’, the latter is “a biological, material entity,” whereas the former is “an indeterminate methodological field defined by perceptual experience and mode of presence and engagement in the world” (1994, 12). This distinction between the body and embodiment may thus be reminiscent of the body/mind binary that one is trying to come out of. At least, that would probably be the argument of a Vicky Kirby or a Pheng Cheah whom I will discuss later. A cursory glance at the Lacanian theory of the subject as self might be of some use at this juncture. Here, the processes of the constitution of the subject are, at the same instance, the moments of the dissolution of the subject. The focus is on the processes of making up and not on the fixity of identities: [P]sychoanalysis should not subscribe to ideas about how men and women do or should live as sexually differentiated beings, but instead it should analyse how they come to be such beings in the first place. (Mitchell and Rose 1982, 3) The conscious/sane/normal self is the self (re)constituted in the symbolic – the realm of the Law, the name of the Father. This process of constitution is marked by the castration complex – conceptualized by Lacan as “an external event, a law,” as something “that was not innate [to the child] but came from outside, from [one’s personal or social] history or prehistory” (Mitchell and Rose, 13–14). For Lacan the subject is constituted through language – the notion is of the subject being the subject of speech and the subject to the order of language at the same time. The process of its formation is a re-constitution for it constitutes, brings together, the disparate floating signifiers that remain in the unconscious, though themselves ‘structured like a language’. This bringing together is never complete. In two senses. First, the rem(a) inders of the realm of the real continue to haunt the symbolic order of language. Secondly, in the dynamic of the symbolic, the incompleteness is

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as if reflected in the tenuousness of the structure of language itself. If the structure of the language was stable, Lacan’s shift would be from the agency of the subject to that of the structure of language – a classical structuralist move. But here, this structure is itself ever-unstable, the simmering divide between the signifier and the signified remaining evanescent. And the subject, constituted in and through this shifting linguistic structure, haunted by the eruptions of the real, is always already in the process of being made, losing a secure definition for good. To continue with our concerns of thinking through the conceptual and the real17 spaces of the sex-gender system and the empire-nation exchange axes to a space beyond yet inexorably marked by them, I see two possible moves. In the second move, the question of history returns in the form of locatedness or an ontic specificity, maybe – in a dehistoricized form – through the body as lived and conceived. Before going into that, one has to think of the first move. The first is to posit the gender processes in the realm of meaning, to be concerned with the epistemo-ontological subject – woman – as the individual, unique site, acting as a cross-section of multiple overdeterminations. The ‘woman’ is here separated, at the level of analysis, from the ethico-political subject of feminism.18 This focuses on woman as a concept – the multiple, shifting, contingent processes that construct and fragment the meanings(s) of woman. Sensitive to the processes of continuous be-ing, to be in the present continuous, not to be fixed in an identity over space, time or any other conceivable variable, the woman remains the ever-moving, enigmatic meaning without any “adequate literal referent” for the word. This woman as a concept can act as a metaphor for the ‘other’, for otherness. That theoretical move which analytically fixes the category woman in the realm of meaning renders the phenomenality of ‘woman’ undecidable. ‘Woman’ is made to stand for, represent, otherness, being other to the categories of the self (the category like ‘man’ that is “the duped name of the undivided origin”) that remain fixed. In this sense, a feminist epistemology loses its specificity – being a metonym of other epistemologies, epistemologies that are others to the reigning epistemology of science. ‘Woman’ as concept-metaphor, ‘sexual difference’ as radical alterity – does this dissolve the identity of ‘woman’ in a seamless play of differences? Of course, we retain a sense of specificity in the category of gender at an analytical level – “a set of processes of defining one specific difference between people – literally what it means to be female or male – and distributing such meaning socially” (Fraad, Resnick, Wolf 1994, 3). Is this definition only a process of naming – arbitrary and contingent? Does it represent certain onticity, bear the traces of a certain presence?

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To think of the located woman is to think of the woman in her body. This has been the second theoretical move, undertaken by many feminist thinkers. This seems to be the natural extension of the logic where location is defined as the intersection of the infinitude of contexts and/constituting a certain element of pre-epistemo-ontological be-ing. In the perspective of the hegemonic western episteme that works within the binaries of male/female, mind/body, soul/ body, rationality/emotion, and culture/nature ad infinitum, with the natural privileging of the first of these terms, the valorization of the female/body would be a legitimately strategic move to resist. Strategic but flawed. For the move entails a working within the same binary that it seeks to transcend – a naturalized linking of the female to the body. Attempts to move beyond have focused on a re-definition of the body with stress on the inherent fluidity of body-boundaries or a notion of the abject borders of the body-image (Weiss 1999). Linda Nicholson (1994) has convincingly drawn our attention to one of the chief presuppositions at work in conceptualizing gender – the material basis of self identity. She asserts that “many who would endorse the understanding of sex identity as socially constructed still think of it as a cross-cultural phenomenon… because they think of it as cross-culturally similar social response to some ‘deeper’ level of biological commonality, represented in the material givens of the body.”19 I argue that we can think of the body in a number of ways that do not tally with Nicholson’s formulation. We may speak of the located body, not in the sense of a universal common denominator. Even at the plane of universality, the body may act as a metaphor of difference, not referring to a ‘biological commonality’. To think of the body-ness of the body is to think of the body in two different registers simultaneously – the general and the singular. The body acts as the general metaphor for singular bodies. The character that universally defines this metaphorical body is its non-universalizability, its opposition to the universality of the mind. Before going on to the explication of this predicament that rents the concept, I will deal with the two registers separately. At the level of the universal, if we are permitted to speak of a certain onticity of categories, we might refer to the ‘foundational’ role of sexual difference in the constitution of the subject. The use of the ‘castration complex’ as the metaphor for the process of the entry of the nascent subject into the symbolic, and the purported role of the phallus as the ‘transcendental signifier’ that interrupts the ‘mother-child dyad’ in a Lacanian–Freudian framework (Lacan 1977, 281–291, Mitchell and Rose 1982,74–85), beg important questions. Why phallus? Why castration? Is sexual difference being treated here as more foundational than the other differences? Is sex in some ways more biological, more essential than race, colony and the other registers of identity? Was not this positing of the sex as the most fundamental the patriarchal construct

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per se? Is there some way in which sexual difference can be linked to the body in a non-essential manner? Feminist thinkers have often opted for theoretical structures that combine (Derridean) differance with a Lacanian concept of subjectivation – a (continental Feminist) bid to deploy the trope of l’ecriture feminine, writing the female body, to mark the irreducible differance of ‘the woman in the body’. The tensions between the two frames have woven the different theories in multiple textures. To recall, the Lacanian theory enables one to work with a “notion of subjectivity that sees the self or ego as an introjection of the visualized or represented body” (Bray and Colebrook 1998). This brings in the question of representation in the production of the embodied subject and that of sexual difference in the production of identity. This notion of an originary and constitutive sexual difference is, as Grosz (1994) argues, pre-epistemological – “as it must preexist and condition what we can know” – and pre-ontological – “as it makes possible what things or entities …exist” (209). To quote: Sexual difference is the horizon that cannot appear in its own terms but is implied in the very possibility of an entity, an identity, a subject, an other and their relations…[ J ]ust as…pure difference can never appear as such because it must consistently erase its contribution to signification and linguistic value, because for it to appear as such is for it to transform itself… (Grosz 1994, 209) Here sexual difference is a universal that presents its already transformed selves always in particular subject-effects. Grosz goes on to conceptualize representations of the mind–body relations beyond the binary divide, beyond reductionism and a narrow causal relation. Her favored model – though she remains wary of the efficacy of models to represent – is the Möbius strip. She refers to the “infinite pliability of the body” – remember the problem of valorizing the infinitude of the phenomenal body that we have pointed out earlier – to assert that a number of other models may, in other contexts and for other purposes, be useful. Within her own concerns, this model remains insufficient in rendering the sense of becoming and transformation and even the fluidity and flow that she would like to stress upon. The question remains as to how other identity-categories (like race) as universals interact with the sexual difference; whether these are to be regarded as universals or only as moments that constitute the historical contingency of beings. To think the process by which the universality of sexual difference presents in the particularities of the individual bodies, yet retaining the sense of the universal, Judith Butler (1993) uses the category of performativity that is closely associated with the notions of citation and iterability. According to her,

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the ‘heterosexual matrix’ (the universal) is inculcated at the level of ‘bodily morphogenesis’ (the particular) through performativity, a kind of citing of the symbolic ‘law’ by the very ‘body’ that is being constituted through this process: The Deridean notion of iterability…implies that every act is itself a recitation, the citing of a prior chain of acts which are implied in a present act and which perpetually drain any “present” act of its presentness. (Butler 1993, 244) She differentiates performativity from simple performance – “a repetition of acts” separated by uniform ‘moments’ in time and space – and also from Foucauldian notions of “convergent relations of power” that, Butler argues, presume a dimension of time “not explicitly theorized.” She emphasizes: The nonthematizable differance which erodes and contests any and all claims to discrete identity, including the discrete identity of the “moment”. (Butler 1993, 245) In this process of performativity, she also points out the element of abjection – the exclusionary matrix that “forecloses and/or disavows” other identities as it takes part in the construction of the one.20 We might be interested in the ways in which both Butler (1993) and Spivak (1999) have used the category of foreclosure to deal with the processes of othering. Butler brings in the notion to explain ‘abjection’ – to mark certain “abject zones” within sociality that are “uninhabitable” and which “a subject fantasizes as threatening its own integrity with the prospect of psychotic dissolution” (243). Spivak brings this in to speak about the “discontinuity between race and sex differentiation” in her reading of Kant. She points at two modes of othering – one that is “argued into” its own dismissal and the other that is “foreclosed as a casual rhetorical gesture.” Of course these two may implode in any one site.21 Going back to our preliminary concern, we may indicate that the ‘body’ that Grosz or Butler speak about is the body that serve as a metaphor for the ‘bodies’ – though a particular with respect to the universal mind, this body itself is the universal with respect to the lived concreteness of ‘bodies’. But then, speaking/writing in language, can one really ‘approach’ the body? Working within the double bind of valorizing ‘experience’22 (thus taking part in a hypostatization23 of the ‘body’) and of celebrating the constructed nature of the body, what options does one have? There are thinkings of the systematicity of the body, there are value codings of the body. The body, as such, cannot be thought, and I

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certainly cannot approach it. (Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, quoted in Butler 1993). Keeping in mind the ontico-ontological difference that yawns unbridgeable yet impossible not to be bridged, we may end with a tentative reference to risk-takings that blow up and use, in certain ways, this metaphoricity of bodythoughts. Luce Irigaray tends to speak of sexual difference on the one hand as the metaphor for a radical alterity beyond the secure confines of a complacent multiculturalism, and on the other, as existing in and through the body of the woman: [ T ]he geography of her pleasure is far more diversified, more multiple in its differences, more complex, more subtle, than is commonly imagined – in an imaginary rather too narrowly focused on sameness. “She” is indefinitely other in herself. (Irigaray 1985b, 28) Maybe the singular ‘other’ bears far more charge of alterity than the multiplicity of ‘others’ that negatively concede centrality to the ‘same’. Of course this has its problems. Irigaray refers to the presence of alternative superior modes of conceptualizing the body that she finds in some “Eastern traditions,” a hailing of “cultivating [the sensible] until it becomes spiritual energy,” as she finds in the “Buddha’s gazing upon the flower” (Irigaray 1991, 171). Unlike Irigaray, Gayatri Spivak uses the force of two-ness without ontologizing the presence of alterity. In Chapter Four, I deal with her attempts to produce figures of alterity in the structure of sexual difference. Before that, a brief overview of Judith Butler’s notion of performativity is in order. This is an attempt to combine the multiplicity of reproduction (of the structures of the sexed body) with the notion of two-ness, to mark displacements produced in reversal.

Beyond Performativity: Universals and Other Generalities Judith Butler’s project is to understand the dynamics of production of the ‘sexually differentiated body’ – to give a theory of signification as an effect and token of sexual difference as well as the (differentiated) body as a matter of signification. In Bodies that Matter (1993), she founds her argument with an elaboration of the processes in the formation of the bodily ego. She starts with pain as a central element in the formation of the ego, the bounded self. The initial step is to link pain with the erotogenic impulse. The male genital is here the prototype of the organ sensitive to pain and also the prototype of the erotogenic part. Butler then unmoors erotogenicity from the penis and speaks of the general economy of erotogenicity with differential weights for different body parts. For her, the psychic idealization of a specific body part

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is an effort to resolve a prior, physical pain. Freud, for Butler, had forcibly produced a masculine original based on the projected centrality of the penis/ phallus. The phallus thus tries to disavow the transferability of erotogenicity to other body parts. The repression of that denial constitutes the sex–gender system internally and, at the same time, acts toward its destabilization. An initial impulse of Butler’s thought is to account for the formation of the ego in terms of bodily morphogenesis. Referring to Lacan’s discussion in the “Mirror Stage” (1977, 1–7), she describes the formation of the ego in the register of the imaginary, through the projective idealization of the wholeness of the body in the image that appears in the mirror. The production of the morphology of the body in its wholeness is distinct from the fragmented images of the body parts. The production of this morphology of the ‘whole’ body is the production of the ‘body’ itself. The disparate body parts have to be conjoined into the wholeness of the body through the giving of centrality to a single part, a part that organizes the image as a whole: [C ]ertain organs are caught up in (sont intéressés dans) the narcissistic relation, insofar as it structures both the relation of the ego to the other and the constitution of the world of objects” (Lacan II, 119, quoted in Butler 1993, 76–77). The morphogenesis and the identification occur by the privileging of the phallus as an effect of this imaginary structuration. This ‘part’ that one calls the phallus is thus a reification of the organizing principle of the bodily morphology. That Lacan – or Freud, who uses a different terminology – links this centralizing element to the penis is a contingent act appearing as a necessity, Butler argues. This becomes clear when Lacan later (1977, 281–291) places the phallus in the realm of the symbolic – a signifier that organizes the ‘imaginary’ body yet itself does not belong to the realm of the imaginary. The moment of privileged signification through the organ of the phallus/penis is the moment of emerging phallogocentrism. For Butler, unlike the avowed positions of Lacan or Freud yet as an extension of their logic of morphogenesis, the identity of the organizing center with the phallus becomes contingent. An assertion of a lesbian phallus would, in such a view, not only displace the privilege of the penis and the ‘man’ as a possessor of that organ, but would displace the whole structure of the phallogocentric symbolic where men ‘have phallus’ and the role of women is to ‘be phallus’. The possibility of women ‘having’ phallus, being an “alternative imaginary to a hegemonic imaginary” (Butler 1993, 91), has this radically destabilizing impulse on the symbolic order. What Butler does is to render the centrality of the phallus–penis relationship (the symbolic and the anatomy) problematic,

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so that it opens up the possibility of the ‘lesbian phallus’ – a rewriting of the morphological imaginary. What happens to the ‘real’ body in this play of the imaginary and the symbolic? Butler’s response remains equivocal. One of her concerns is to give an account of how bodies ‘materialize’. By ‘materialize’ she means: …how they [the bodies] come to assume the morphe, the shape by which their material discreteness is marked. (1993, 69) The question of materiality of the body becomes circumscribed within the process of materialization – a process that involves the symbolic or the imaginary rather than the “substance of the corporeal.”24 She speaks of two contending views on the process. For her, Kristeva’s argument on matter/ mater rests on the role of the materiality of the signifying sounds of the spoken language. Materiality is a displaced repetition of the ‘maternal body’ lost from infantile bodily relations. Though referring back to a certain materiality of the mater, in this view, language plays the principal role and “materiality is constituted in and through iterability” (1993, 70). Lacan’s efforts on the other hand displace the primacy of the maternal body and focuses on the dynamic of the imaginary. For Butler, Lacan’s “The Mirror Stage” (1977, 1–7) essay takes narcissistic relation as primary and the stress is on the morphogenesis of the body as an imaginary formation. The role of the Symbolic is also alluded to: Bodies only become whole, i.e., totalities, by the idealizing and totalizing specular image which is sustained through time by the sexually marked name. To have a name is to be positioned within the Symbolic…What constitutes the integral body is not a natural boundary or organic telos, but the law of kinship that works through the name. (72) Be it associated with Kristeva or Lacan, the concern with the process of materialization, as Vicky Kirby (1997) shows, deploys “the happy coincidence between the words ‘matter’ and ‘materialize’” (108) to reduce and displace the “body’s substance” (108) or “the stuff of matter as such” to signification. More nuanced than a simple invocation of a static matter, instances (Cheah 1996, Kirby 1997, Fraser 2002) of this critique point at the inherent anthropocentrism in the attempt to work through the matter/sign binary. The realm of the sign in such avowed non-binarism is unarguably the realm of the human in its symbolic, image-building or linguistic capacities – these critiques contend. Interestingly, the critiques often refer to Derrida’s notions of Writing and Textuality in their attempts to come out of this predicament. The attempts

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to reach back to the ‘body as such’ in its purported immediacy returns to the arche-writing of the body in its being. Butler’s second way of referring to the materiality of the body speaks of the disjuncture between the signified and the referent in the workings of language: This radical difference between referent and signified is the site where materiality of language and that of the world which it seeks to signify are perpetually negotiated. (1993, 69) She speaks of the co-implication of language and materiality and refers to the phenomenological attempts of Merleau-Ponty to view this irreducible interdependence as Chiasmic (Merleau-Ponty 2000–1968). The ‘physicality’ and ‘location’ of the body thus is viewed in their inalienable embrace with signification. In Butler’s invocation of these metaphors of mutual embeddedness or the Chiasmus, there is not much elaboration of the dynamic of negotiation of the ‘radical difference’ between the referent and the signified. What are the ethical and political imports of these problems of conceptualization? We now move on to a different take on the implications and shortcomings of Butler’s notions of embodiment. As we have just noted, some of the recent studies (Cheah 1996, Kirby 1997, Fraser 2002) have convincingly argued that the notion of performativity, despite its sincere efforts to theorize the intimate intermingling of the body and the ‘mental’ in the constitution of the subject of an identity, and a fair amount of success in doing so, ultimately works within a discernible knowing/being binary. The act of knowing remains circumscribed within an anthropocentric mould where to know is to know like a human being in (human) society. The active role of ‘matter’ is somewhat missed. I emphasize the disjunction (of signification from the body), which the notion of performativity implicitly works with. The ‘meaning’ is reiterated in the ‘body’. The ‘meaning’ needs the embodiment to become itself, to bring its own existence to fruition. At the level of signification, as a set of norms that can be differentiated from its moment of enunciation, it does not occur as embodied. Let us look a little more closely at Butler’s attempts to formulate the working of performativity in a broader context. To theorize the politics of performativity, she concentrates on the operation of hate-speech (Butler 1997a). For Butler, the process of subjection/subjectivation involves the mechanism of interpellation in which the subject becomes ‘one’ through identification with a norm. This process involves a concomitant repudiation that Butler calls abjection. Abjection is, according to Butler, a repudiation within sociality as opposed to a founding repudiation beyond the social that she calls, invoking

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Lacan, foreclosure. Yet, abjection is not a simple negativity. The negation of the abject is, at the same time, the founding gesture of interpellation of the subject. In this theory, interpellation and abjection are seen to be ontologically intertwined and co-constitutive. But the logic of abjection and interpellation remain distinct from each other. Hate speech would be a technique of abjecting its object. At the same time, it interpellates a subject opposed to the abject and also interpellates the abject as a negativity into sociality. Remember, this would not be the case with the foreclosed, which remains outside the realm of the social, and as such, that of subjecthood.25 In her attempt to theorize performativity, Butler (1997a, 127–163) tries to delineate two components: (a) the notion of citationality (Derrida); and (b) habitus (Bourdieu). She speaks of the problem with each one of these and the need to combine the two. According to her, Bourdieu places the performative within the social location, and ignores the iterability of the sign involved. Iterability is the characteristic of repetition with displacement whose possibility is inherent in any linguistic structure, and as such, it relates to writing rather than speech. For Butler, Derrida views the performative in its structural aspect, and ignores the social context (which is implicated in the notion of habitus, albeit one-sidedly).26 For Butler, none of these addresses the problem of how speech acquires its force. Butler, by referring to the act of acquiring of force by speech, implicitly disavows their co-constitutivity, and severs the question of force from that of speech. She speaks of materiality as practical activity, the activity that is fixed and empowered by convention. The specific can never be fully construed in terms of the universal. For the relationship is always already marked by both a functional and a structural slippage (Butler’s notion of slippage denotes a functional shift). A differencedeferral inscribes the iteration of the universal norm in the particular. Butler brings in the notion of the psyche to explain the mechanism of this iteration (see specially Butler 1997b). When the society is the universal and the individual the particular, the universal works in the particular through the workings of the psyche. She points at the intimate interrelations of the ‘social normativity’ with the ‘psychic reality’, which is “the instrument and source of [the social’s] continuing effectivity.” These two together produce the workings of the norm – “…no norm can operate on a subject without… the phantasmatic attachment to ideals that are at once social and psychic” (Butler 2000, 151). Yet this ‘psychic’ fantasy is seen to retain the workings of the norm rather than disrupt it: “norms are…incorporated and interpreted features of existence that are sustained by idealizations furnished by fantasy” (Butler 2000, 152). Speaking thus of a psychic internalization of the masculine norm in the production of the woman-subject is riddled with major difficulties. Firstly,

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the effort to link an ‘individual’ psyche to the exogenous ‘social’ norm is to defeat the attempts (in much of critical theory’s and Butler’s own greatest achievements) to problematize the notion of a secure self-contained subject, by smuggling in a psyche/sociality binary. The presupposition of the atomic (liberal) individual as the sole agent of a democratic politics looms heavily over this thinking. Secondly, this leaves little (if at all any) room for some ‘radical outside’ to the universality of the norm. The workings of the universal are dispersed and diffuse. Already decentered, the universal is everywhere and always operative. Two lines of query might disturb such an assumption. One line questions the possibility of a decentered universal, in a sense that to be universal there has to be a centering acting in the structure that evades the dynamics of absolute dispersal. This is an inversion of the logic that Derrida deploys to show the impossibility of a center in the structure. Another important query is related to the silence regarding the possibility of other generalities implied in an absolute decentering of one universal. Let us elucidate this point with reference to Judith Butler’s use of the concept. When Butler (2000) speaks of competing universals, at work in social movements, she does not invoke the ontological diffusion of the universalizing notion. What appears to be particular political demands are conceived here by Butler as “competing notions of universality.” Butler calls for “practices of translation” among these and asserts that “one task for the contemporary intellectual is to find out how to navigate, with a critical notion of translation at hand, among these competing kinds of claims on universalization.” As is evident from her statements, she presupposes a universal of democratic norms within which her universals compete. More importantly, the workings of the universals are dealt with only at the level of the political. At the level of epistemology, the dynamics of semiosis that overdetermines the political is not dealt with. Agency/performativity cannot be ascribed to the individual alone. Performativity is achieved. We think of it as an ascription when we think of the individual alone. Agency is interpellated not only by the ‘call’ of the ‘master’ but also by the performativities of multiple actors. If thought in terms of the individual/society binary, the individual seems to be interpellated by the structurality of the society. The ‘play’ and the unanticipatability of the processes of performativity thus get reduced to the static telos of the ‘structure’. The structure, on the other hand, remains a category reified as a homogeneous unity. A deconstructive understanding would call for a working of ‘other’ structuralities along with the play of the agent. Note, here we speak of ‘structure, agent and play’ and thus suggest the mutuality of the agent with the sign. The agent performs its work in and through a field of signification. The action becomes an action by virtue of its articulation in the signifying

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structure. Concomitantly, the structurality of the structure begins to simmer with manifold performativities of social and symbolic actors. The hypostatized universal that one calls the ‘structure’ is realized to be a dynamic and uncertain combine of disparate processes constituting each other. For Butler, the universal is a hegemonic generality. Universality is based on foundations, constituted through exclusion: this itself does not render the notion of universal questionable. This is not to assume a procedural and substantive notion of universality. The universal remains a site of contestation and re-signification. Though for Butler, this notion of the universal carries an ethnocentric bias – an example would be her invocation of the democratic principle for the US in its Iraq policy. Yet this is not a mere call for a more concrete and internally diverse, more synthetic and inclusive, notion. Butler wants to keep it open to future claims for inclusion – to keep it permanently open, contested and contingent. Her move is to authorize unanticipated and unanticipatable claims to be made under the sign of the universal. Under the sign of the universal – the expression is ambiguous – does she want many universals/other universals, or many other particulars that would/could speak in the language of the universal? Is the political context within the universal? The move has two aspects: (i) the inclusive move that tries to contain the unanticipatable; (ii) the enabling move that allows for the imagination of the ability of the unknown to participate/speak within the universal. Implicit in both these moves is a call for a founding violation of the unanticipatable other to make it commensurable with the available universal. Here Butler does not point at the predicament of such a situation. She wants to relieve the category of its foundationalist weight in order to render it as a site of permanent political contest; but she never talks about HOW such a contingency and avoidance of foundation can be achieved. When we say how, we do not mean a charting of a course; we mean the logical dynamics of possibility of such a move. For me, the nature of the other generality is different from the dominant generality acting as the universal. The nature of this difference is also different from that which Butler speaks of when she discusses the difference between ‘competing universals’. As is evident from her writings, she is concerned with the competing claims of different social movements operative from diverse vantage points of identity and politics. These points work within a broad political commitment to democracy. The universality of a ‘secular’ worldview – variations on the common theme of democratic politics – that bears the lineage of the Judeo-Christian heritage marks this space. To extend the logic, we would assert that the ‘other generality’ I am speaking of works in a space where the secular/religious binary – an invention of the secularmodern itself – does not operate. To remember, the other generalities do not occur in the colonial scene alone. Euro-American societies are rent by

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contradictory impulses of multiple generalities that do not always subscribe to the dominant. In the colony, thinking in binaries has often been resorted to without considering its semiotic viability in the specific setting. The dominant universal, with all its variations, cannot fathom the polysemic possibilities of the culture it has long been used to see as a homogeneous archetype, as against its own. The acting out of the tensions between these universals has been different in the colonial space. Yet again, the differing views on the world go on to constitute each other – the secular/colonizer shapes the contours of the ‘other’ which in its turn resides at the heart of the purported ‘secular’. Not on equal terms, we would say. Gender roles presuppose a sexed body that acts out the roles assigned to it. Performativity is a concept with a remarkable analytical consistency that brings out the dynamics of the interaction between the body (the sex in the sex/ gender binary) and the meanings (the gender) that get involved in constituting the existence of the person.27 In a ‘postmodern’ frame, the signifiers that get sedimented to construct the ‘material body’ are multiple in number and contingent in the mode of existence. At a given moment, both in synchronic and diachronic senses, there are some ‘nodal’ signifiers that structure the other floating signifiers. These hegemonic signifiers are the ‘nodes’ around which the contingent and ever-open fields of meanings are momentarily constituted. By definition, the constitution of such a field is always and already ridden with lacks, fissures and gaps that render it incomplete and transitory. These are the sites of constitutive antagonisms.28 Not going into the discussion of the antagonisms, we would, for the time being, focus our attention on the nodal signifiers. As the very brief introduction to the matter indicates, for a given site of discussion (the sex–gender system, race, may even be class), these would be different in different cultural systems. To remember, the category ‘cultural system’ is also not a fixed or stable one, with constantly shifting boundaries of definitions. Also within a particular cultural system, a multiplicity of privileged signifiers may act with mutual constitutive effects. Here is a quote from Butler on the relations of ‘agency’ to ‘signification’: ‘Agency’ would…be the double-movement of being constituted in and by a signifier, where ‘to be constituted’ means ‘to be compelled to cite or repeat or mime’ the signifier itself. …[A]gency is the hiatus in iterability, the compulsion to install an identity through repetition, which requires the very contingency, the undetermined interval, that identity insistently seeks to foreclose. …[ T ]he future of the signifier of identity can only be secured through a repetition that fails to repeat loyally, a reciting of the signifier that must commit a disloyalty against identity – a catachresis – in order to secure its future… (Butler 1993, 220)

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Instead of the single signifier acting for a single identity-category, as the above quote seems to imply, we can work with a multiplicity of signifiers with one or more privileged signifiers. Yet the mode of workings of these signifiers in this frame remains analogous to that of Butler’s. The nodal or privileged signifier gets distorted through a ‘disloyal’ repetition in the process of enunciation of the other signifiers, the distortion being by definition the condition of their existence and (re)production. It remains implicit that this distortion is not total; it retains strong bearings of the ‘original’. Otherwise, the process would not be a re-iteration. Remember, the binary Indic/secular modern is not tenable in our theoretical frame and is used here as a contingent, shorthand gesture. Let us elaborate on the difference in the dynamics that we are speaking of. In the 1990 meeting of the International Association for Philosophy and Literature held at the University of California, Irvine, the topic of discussion was the ‘body’. Jean-Luc Nancy’s contribution was later translated into English and published as “Corpus” in his collection of essays called The Birth to Presence (1993). In this book, Nancy is approaching the question of “presence”: Not the firmly standing presence, immobile and impassive, of a platonic Idea. But presence as a to-be-here, or to-be-there, as a come-to-here, or there, of somebody. Some body: an existence, a being in the world, being given to the world.” (ix) Here then is a thinking of the body in terms of presence, of the immediacy of being present, of the existence of/in the body. That was what I had started out to do in this chapter. Nancy traces the movement, not in the sense of a transformation, of the thinking of the body from the ‘body-cave’ in platonic thinking – conceived in the form of a cave, as a prison or tomb of the soul – to the ‘glorious body’ where the signs are inverted, the body of man is the image, the mimesis of the body of God. Yet “the philosophico-theological corpus of bodies” remains supported by the “spine of mimesis” (192). Nancy holds: [ T ]he body is the articulation, or better yet, the organ or organon of the sign: it is, for our entire tradition [emphasis added, other emphases in the original], that in which sense is given and out of which sense emerges.” (192) The work of the sense, working itself in and out of the body, continues to operate in the secular body of “our…tradition,” from the “sinner body” to the body-machine or the embodiment in phenomenology. The body as the weight of its own experience, the weight of experience acting itself through and in the body, operates with this same structure of the signifying spirit. Significations

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reside as the spirit in the body, the body the organ of the sign – the ghost in the body, the body-ghost or the ghostly body – ontology is hauntology. The dual sense of a separation and a sharing, acted out in the expression partage/la partage, continues to operate in between the body and the sense29: It is by touching the other that the body is a body, absolutely separated and shared [ partage]. …[ W ]e are calling on being as absolutely partitioned [ partage] from and by sense as such. A single body – if it is possible to isolate such a thing – exposes itself as the sharing [le partage] of its separate senses. (204) The sense of the touch as the sense of limit animates this structure. And finally Nancy reaches the point where he declares the primacy of the corpus, a catalogue without a logos, “which is logos itself ” (206), and not the primacy of the “substance” or the “subject.” There is no such thing as the body. There is no body, he asserts. Compare with this the notions of a Butler or a Kirby, and we get the continuity of “our entire tradition” in this radical rethinking of the body. The continuity – from the platonic cave to the sinner body to the secular, in the mimetic relation between the ‘body’ and the ‘spirit’ or the body of God or the senses – becomes evident. What then would be a thinking of the body in the space of the non-monotheist imagination? Will it repeat the Judeo-Christian scene? Can one think of the bodiliness in an Indic setting without approaching the question even? If woman is equated to the body and the body is thought of in terms of the body of the man, the woman does not have a body.30 How does this phenomenon look when the body we thus speak of is a different body, involving other generalities, is a question that I raise, tentatively, not going for an answer out of present incompetence. A question I want to keep alive in a bid to reach out to the singularity of the body in immanence, not reducible to a particular generality as the universal, nor to an unquestioned presence. I see this gesture as a humble attempt to “base our ontological commitments on various forms of coding” (Spivak 1993, 16), not on a singular code projected to be the universal.31 So far, I have only been charting out how sophisticated modes of thinking might also fall prey to such predicaments. At this point it will be interesting to remember Partha Chatterjee’s attempt (1992, later incorporated into the book The Nation and Its Fragments as “The Nation and Its Outcasts”) to think of the body marked by caste. Drawing the reader’s attention to the risk of an “easy, mechanical, transposition of the specifics of European history” (207), Chatterjee nonetheless shuns the Dumontian positing of the principles of homo hierarchicus against the homo equalis. Trying to avoid reading the phenomenon of caste in terms of – either

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sameness of or opposition to – Europe-centric categories, he does not fall back on any purported immediacy of the Indic particular. “[ T ]here is a more developed universal form of the unity of separateness and dependence which subsumes hierarchy and equality as lower historical moments” (208), he asserts. For Chatterjee, that calls for a search into the particularities of this higher universal: The point is to explicate the principles and to construct the concrete forms of this universal.” (208) He names this, albeit tentatively, as a democratic principle. The problem of taking the decision to name while being haunted by the sense of an impossibility of such naming is brought out by the hesitancy of his gesture. “For want of a more concrete concept of praxis,” “we may call this desire,” “in an admittedly abstract and undifferentiated sense” – three modifiers go on to qualify the naming of “a desire for democratization” (207). It will undoubtedly be somewhat reductive to treat Chatterjee’s act of assignation as a variant of Butler’s gesture – where she contains the possibilities of multiple universals within a democratic polity based on equality. Yet his concerns remain circumscribed by the limits of Western political thought, though almost avowedly, and with a keen sense of a beyond. This gesture, and this move, remains valuable, (unavoidably) necessary, but inadequate for our purpose. I cannot provide a substantive non-Judeo-Christian notion of the body. This book tries to pose the importance and necessity of figuring out some such notion. On the one hand, it points at the failure of some attempts (overt or covert) to accommodate any such effort at figuring within a nuanced Judeo-Christian frame. On the other, it tries to sketch instances of such a figuring. The attempts to trace/touch the other takes the form of shaping the unknown in terms of the known, while respecting its irreducible heterogeneity. The figure of the woman is operative in these instances – as it is in the overall theoretical endeavor – as constitutive of such an effort. Again, this is not to pose a responsible ‘religious’ stance against an insensitive ‘secular’ one.32 Looking beyond the secular/religious binary, I try to work on the continuities of the secular with the Judeo-Christian and point at the importance of thinking an exterior to this circumscribed space. Certain elements of the Indic polytheist mindset are treated as, not the only but, possible rudiments of such figurations, elements that thereby does not remain innocent of differentials of power or meaning.

Chapter 3 THINKING THE BODY: NEGOTIATING THE OTHER/DEATH Introduction An awareness of the inevitable metaphoricity of the corporeal does not refute the fact that the body, although constituted by language, is constituted as the body. As metaphor, it is no less ‘real’ than ‘reality’. For, in this theoretical frame, the real and the metaphor constitute each other and every ‘real’ or ‘metaphorical’ being has its own specificity. The blurring of the real/metaphor binary does not lead, of itself, to a blurring of the specificity of all conceptmetaphors. On the contrary, the understanding of the generality of the beings may lead on to a better perception of the particulars. In this chapter, I deal with how the notion of the body – which is the master-metaphor for location in space – negotiates with its ultimate other, death. In this negotiation, I mark two distinct moments. In one of these, the modern moment, the body tries to deal with death as a separate other to be won over in battle. In the so-called postmodern moment, an apparent dissolution of the body-death binary questions this separation. This moment thus seems to avoid the model of war and winning, only to lead on to a forgetfulness of the other/death. This act of erasure through non-definition remains equally, if not more, violent. The deconstructive gesture that I propose consists in working at the aporia of thinking death in its intimate and unknown embrace with life, through a sense of respect for and responsibility to the ‘other’. In the next chapter, I will go on to discuss the ‘other within’, the notion of sexual difference in its relation to ontological difference. My argument regarding the negotiations of the ‘body’ with death will form the background analogous to, yet different from, the body’s negotiations with sexual difference. To think of embodied knowledges in a responsible way calls for a re-thinking of the body in such acts of negotiation, I propose. What is at stake in the societal aspect, not in a one to one correspondence with this change in the relationship to death, is a shift from a focus on the rights of the sovereign over death to that on a control of the government over life. As Michel Foucault’s theorizations on governmentality and biopolitics

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(Foucault 1982, 1990, 1991, 2008) have shown, the production of ‘life’ as an object of knowledge for societal procedures and institutions is a phenomenon associated with modernity. The production of the ‘population’ as the site of intervention of governmental procedures is concomitant with a control – to an extent not attainable before – over processes that add up to something called life. This production of the notion of population is accompanied by what Foucault calls anatomopolitics – the production of the body of the modern individual. Thus life in a certain sense and the body in a certain sense get mutually implicated. It might be surmised that this is the moment when death really becomes the other of the body in a sense of being the opposed yet twin targets of modern medical and governmental rationalities. The self that is constituted by these rationalities is embodied in and as the living body. The notion of life presupposed here is disciplined in terms of normalcy and enumerable through governmental procedures. The embodied life or the enlivened body thus produced acts as the transcendental category that signifies immanence, the category which is transcendental immanence (Deleuze 2001, Lawlor 2006). When one works through the notions of immanence and transcendence at the same time – not opposing in separation nor conflating in union – can one seriously approach the question of the ghostliness of the body. The implications of ideology as symptomatic of the non-presence in presence are borne out in a consistent manner. Yet this non-presence is not a reification, not a making concrete of the abstractness of absence. The word death can, in its resistance to the reifying impulses of an easily available spiritualism, signify the infinite play of (im)possibilities in the absoluteness of a future which – though inevitable – will never be fully present. Its secrets are to be respected. This chapter deals with two related issues. The first is the role of medicine in the construction of the phenomenal self; and the second is the structure of the self/other dyad that constructs medicine with a dominant self (the normal) and its many others. The sense of the normal that is foundational in the sense of a modern self is not solely defined by medicine. Moreover, the normal in medicine is defined by, as it bears traces of, the multiple definitions of the normal in the different disciplines of knowledge. All these notions go on to make up the notion of the phenomenal self with a sense of im-mediacy and a fixed spatial location. The biological sciences, and specially medicine, remain vital in the construction of the ‘natural’, bodily notion of the self. Thus historicizing the notion of the phenomenal self, one might easily be led on to conceptualize death only in the multiple histories of ways of dying. But then, what is ‘death’ as opposed to ‘ways of dying’? At the end of this chapter, I would try to emphasize as well as undermine this opposition while reading Derrida on Heidegger. Before that, there is another question.

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How to Write (about) Death? Writing death evokes connotations of the death-sentence, of the blind judgment, of the concrete-clad courtroom, of guards in uniform. The impassioned violence of reason. Violence against violence. Violence welling up from springs of insecurity and the anxious logic of self-defense. The carnivorous centrality of logos and phallus exerting itself in violations of the others. Writing death carries the violent assertions of life within. Remember the metaphors of life bursting forth, the kernel coming out of its shell, the inevitability of a loss (of the shell) joyously assimilated in the act – the giving up of the cover to bring out the essence. So natural, it is not even a sacrifice. As if, writing about death is easy! Not going straight, moving about the direct encounter, to write about a thing, like anything else. We write about death from the standpoint of the living – a commonplace often forgotten. So the trans-historical ‘natural’ phenomenon of death gets written and written over by histories of life and living. The motif of death in literature and science is nothing but the recurring motif of life as lived and thought to be lived. Even the notion of death in the science of life, medicine, bears the marks of the histories of thoughts and acts that add on to make a science out of medical knowledge. Death, as known to medicine, has a tortuous history.1 The question probably changes – what is it to write about death? Is death the same when Nachiketa questions Yama (the famous episode in Katha-Upanishad) in a never-ending progress and when the elderly patriarch Ivan Ilych meets a seeming redemption at the end of Tolstoy’s tale (“Death of Ivan Ilych”)? Is there a natural, hard fact of death on which the ideational edifice of literary figuration is built? The singular motif of death – multiple in its enunciations, is scripted upon by these enunciations. The recurrence of the one dissolves into the plurality of the many. How does medicine, the science of life, deal with death, the seeming end and the ultimate other to life? The definition, the marking of the moment of no return, changes with transformations in the notions of the living body, healthy or pathological. Yet there might remain an unbroken thread to unify a concept in its singularity. Does the motif always or never change? Or, is there some element of both? The strange singularity of death as a discursive object lies not only in its inevitability. It is inescapable yet beyond recording. No one returns from its ‘bourne’ to tell the tale of dying. As a personal experience, it cannot be re-called. Memory fails to reach back. And no one, however intimate, can share the experience of another’s death.2 To think of trans-historical subjects like Man or the Hindu one has to think in terms that go beyond the body. As Bandyopadhyay (2002) traces the logical dynamics and the force of ‘trans-historical travelogues’ for the subject itinerant beyond death into the ruminations on the soul, one gets a glimpse of

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the elemental reasons that structure the ‘transcendental self ’. The ontology of the self as the ‘knower’ that dominates the scene of philosophy – the famous Cartesian mind – is thus compelled to avoid the ‘mutable’ and perishable body. The body is here the source of death, the ultimate hindrance to transcendence of the ‘here and now’. It will be interesting, though not our direct concern here, to think how Marx had tried to negotiate this problem in conceptualizing the ‘proletariat’ as a transcendental subject rooted in history. One easy way out would be to displace the notion of transcendence onto the concept of History. But certain strands of Marxian thought have been trying to avoid this simplifying move with varying degrees of success. The dominant self thinks of the other – as the woman, the colonized, the racial, the communitarian or the classed other – in terms of death or the vulnerability to death, or even as incursions of death into the living in the forms of disease, illness, disability – the abnormal. Paradoxically, as will be evident from the discussions in this chapter, even the concept of the normal body carries within it the traces of the deathless soul in terms of the inflexible normative. Knowledge that aspires to be eternal imagines itself as disembodied, away from the mortal limits of the body. Eternity as the ever-present tries to evade the future anterior of everpossible death. But then, what is this notion of self that I deploy here? The self is a much-contested terrain. It has been used with so many variations of meaning in so varied contexts across an array of disciplines that I am constrained to mark my own use among the innumerable shades that surround the word. Somewhat arbitrarily, I propose the following classification: (i) The predicative self – where ‘self ’ functions as the subject that predicates the ‘object’. In a classical Hegelian self/other dyad, this often implies a relationship of power and/or hegemony. When self is the word used, instead of ‘subject’, it obviously carries connotations of its other (metaphysical and phenomenal) meanings but remains, in this usage, a metaphor for the subject/ master/lord. The Marxian and Lacanian uses of self would be instances of this meaning of the self, especially when referring to the self/other dialectic; (ii) The metaphysical self – which is often, but not always, a transcendental. This idea of the self tends to define self-hood in terms of universal principles, trying to find out general rules of identity and its continuity and discontinuity. Often, these principles are traced historically, but still in universalist terms; (iii) The phenomenal self – with a sense of the everyday and a bodiliness. As I have already discussed in chapter two, this sense of the self presupposes an existential immediacy and an embodiment based on experience and processes of being. These last two together constitute the notion of the modern individual self – naturalized through what Foucault (2000, 2005) calls the technologies of the self. For me, the technologies of the self include a complex dynamic with historical interactions between the following: a) the Economic – the capital-market

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complex – with notions of the productive/consuming body; b) the Political – that involves the self as a citizen of the nation produced through the processes of governmentality; c) the realm of Meanings / the Cultural – disciplines of knowledge, religion and notions of care and affect. Foucault’s stress is on the political and the cultural with passing references to the economic. In the construction of the meaning of self and selfhood in the modern world, the scientific disciplines play a major role, being the role models for knowledge. Of course, the social sciences also affect the notion of the self in multiple ways – through the notions of the economy, politics, sociology, history, and literatures. I now turn to a specific instance of the dynamics of the embodied self. Readers of Bangla fiction have for long been reading about Shashi, the doctor protagonist of Manik Bandyopadhyay’s Putulnacher Itikotha.3 Of the tortuous and intricate network of the fiction’s web, I only deal with one situation in Shashi’s tryst with his village. The modern doctor faces an archaic death – this could be a facile description of the event. Jadab is a grihi-sadhak – a saintly man who has not renounced the family. Revered across villages as a siddha purush, something almost akin to the attainment of spiritual salvation, Jadab is known to have supernatural powers. His relationship with Shashi is made of love – almost filial an affection –, respect and a desire to win the nonbeliever into his fold. Shashi also has respect and love for the couple, Pagoldidi and her husband, Jadab. Their household is a space for respite from his perceived problems with the ‘life in the country’. A stray comment – thrown casually at an instigation of Shashi – from Jadab about the time of his death snowballs, paradoxically through some contingent happenings and unthinking utterances from Shashi, into a phenomenon of mass anticipation of his death on a given day. There is nothing noble about the individual components that go on to figure this phenomenon. Yet a certain nobility is born of the event. An inexorable greatness that drives Jadab and Pagoldidi to a voluntary death through opium. The modern doctor sees through the veneer of clairvoyance into the ‘real fact’ of opium poisoning. He, contrary to the impulse of his knowledge, cannot intervene. An interpretation without intervention paradoxically does not give rise to the anticipated sense of impotence (to use a sexist metaphor). It will come to the mind in the times of sorrow and pain. When life becomes rude and dry, one will have the courage to hope that it is possible, if one seeks, to find something that is greater than going on living. (1998, 418, translation mine) Shashi thought. Elements of a wish-dependant death, of something that Bimal Krishna Matilal (2002, 156) has called an ‘active religious suicide’, of

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far flowing evocations of the ‘sati’, of the destiny striking and making the tragic hero, have gone on to make the event. I would like to draw attention to the rugged historicity of death in modern times, of death that is not one to a modern medicine that aspires to be ‘one’.

Medicine: Making Up the Normal Trying to speak on the problem of the role of medicine in conceptualizing the phenomenal body, we started speaking about death. It is, in a way, inevitable to proceed thus if one wants to keep the question of the body viable, not closing it up within the obvious and too-evident notion of the living body. Before going into that, we try to delineate the specificity of medicine as a form of knowledge. Medicine, as we know it, is a modern form of knowledge. Knowledges about the body, about substances that cured people, about happenings that indicated that someone was sick, were definitely there from the earliest of human history. Then, in what sense can we really speak about medicine as something modern? Thinking about scientific knowledge, we seldom reflect upon the processes that make us know. In the sense that, when one thinks one knows something, what are the things that make that knowledge plausible? What are the criteria that mark some knowings as false, others as true, still others as dreams or delusions or fantasies? What are the things we count as evidence? If all these, and many other, questions are not to be summarily dismissed as abstract philosophizing (by implication irrelevant to our serious doings in life), we might look at the presuppositions that underlie our scientific knowledges as presuppositions and not as self-evident truths. And maybe then we can understand a little better, the dynamics of our own ways of knowing. It is in this sense that I speak of medicine as a modern knowledge form – its way of looking at things is commensurate with the ways in which the way of looking at things has been in modern times. What the medical knowledge tries to know and manipulate, for better or for worse, is the ‘body’. As such, the body is the object of medical knowledge. The subject of this knowledge, the erstwhile knower, is the doctor who is authorized by law and society to know the said object and pass judgments on its status. I do not hereby assert that the knowledge of the doctor is based wholly on the authority bestowed on him/her by the society. I am trying to bring out the logical dynamics of the processes that make the knowledge of the doctor seem authentic. For, as every practicing doctor knows in her/his inner conscience, a note of uncertainty pervades the field of medical vocation, an element of indecision that haunts the surety of confident prognoses. And as we all know, many a physician remain ardent believers in god and the supernatural in his/her

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bid to come to terms with the vagaries of this chancy profession. Yet, the knowledge of the doctor seems so invincible, so sure and authentic in the face of diseases and misfortunes. It seems to be so universal in its scope. The desire to be infallible is projected onto the structures of knowledge. As something that is not there, except as a desire to its existence. A violence accompanies this ‘force of a desire’. Munnabhai is an underworld don in Mumbai.4 He specializes in abduction and extortion of money. He mortally fears the possibility of his parents finding out his true vocation. To them, he is an established doctor with his own nursing home. Yet one day, the inevitable happens – the parents discover the truth. Now, Munnabhai would try to become a real doctor. He gets enrolled in the most famous medical college in the city. Munnabhai’s encounter with the world of medicine from inside the vocation turns the picture around. The thug turns out to be an angel and far more humane in comparison to the doctors around. Not that the physicians are corrupt or dishonest. It is a rare honesty to the profession that makes the doctor a cruel, insensitive monster. The rogue and the respectable change places. Or is it a comment on respectability? On how normal respect is constituted in a given society on the basis of a profound disrespect to the disreputable and the non-normal – its others. On how medical knowledge, in its own dynamics, makes an object of – objectifies – its target. On how acts of predication – of the subject over the object – violate; and be violent. We know it is an act of trivializing the political to read so much into a movie with so little respect to the ways of representations involved in the particular medium. I use the storyline to wedge in some of my concerns. Who is a normal person? The World Health Organization definition of health (“a condition of physical, mental and social well-being”) cannot avoid the subjective component of the sense of ‘well-being’. The neat calculations of definitive parameters for normalcy, more than often, remain inadequate (remember, we do not say completely unable but use the expression inadequacy that indicates effectivity that is incomplete) to securely mark the boundaries of the normal. An unacknowledged idea of (subjective) normativity acts as the base on which the idea of (seemingly objective) normalcy or health is built (Canguillhem 1978, Rabinow 1996). To explain – normal healthy condition may be delineated from two approaches. In one approach, the normal is calculable, objective, determinable by scientific method – the statistical average of a cohort; later in the essay we will see how even this objectivity is built on certain pre-given notions of statistics as a science. The other approach is that of a biological normativity that transcends objectivity. This flows from “the totality of our being in the world” (Gadamer 1996). The organism lives in an environment.

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Life posits a value judgment on the environment (normal/abnormal for the specific organism) and also on the organism (normal/abnormal for the specific environment). Biological normativity indicates normalcy with respect to the fluctuations in the environment. To be normal, healthy, would allow transitions to new norms to cope with environmental fluctuations. A pathological state would indicate a reduction in the margin of security within which the norms may vary. A cardiac patient would not tolerate the same amount of exertion that a normal person can undergo – her/his margin of security for fluctuations in the mechanism of circulation and pumping of blood is reduced. Normalcy is inseparable from normativity that is subjective, contingent on the environment, and individualized. A repetition of the same is always a repetition with a certain displacement, a citation of the original is never pure. Thus flows the difficulties of defining the normal. Despite novel and unthought of progresses in the technologies of diagnostics or therapeutics, the role of practical experience is irreplaceable and impossible to circumvent in medicine. This renders it particularly vulnerable to specificities of experiential norms. Systems of medicine that vary widely in terms of their theoretical underpinnings, their approach to the body and the disease, and practical remedial measures prescribed, continue to flourish in the same space and time. The medical knowledge of the body is not homogeneous. The anatomical body with its construction as relative configurations of extended structures in three-dimensional space varies from the physiological which stresses functional negotiations of processes in time, both of which are different from the biochemical that describes both anatomy and physiology in terms of chemical structures and reactions. Yet, all these different ‘bodies’ have to be integrated into the construction of the body in clinical medicine, which the practice of medicine deals with. The body of the patient in the clinic appears a united whole in its scope and facticity. The body, the patient and the clinic, all three are regarded as contextless universals (although in practice, all of them are invariably marked by their respective locations). This ‘body’ is the ‘object’ of knowledge in modern medicine, a ‘complex unity’ of unequal determinations by the different ‘bodies’ enumerated above, subject to heterogeneous influences by many other elements. The universal construction of the body is the construction of a universal body. Universal in the sense of an invariant, general pattern. A universal map in three-dimensional space—the anatomical structure—the “concept of where diseases are located” (Plotz 1997, 160–164). The shift is from an earlier focus on the ontology of the diseases (where the diseases had independent existences, prior to their experience in the body) to a focus on the ontology of the body.

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Let me explain what I mean by this shift. I quote from Michel Foucault (Foucault 1976, pp). The citations are two different descriptions of the body – to be specific, of diseases related to the nervous systems: (i) ‘Pomme saw membraneous tissues like pieces of damp parchment … peel away with some slight discomfort, and these were passed daily with the urine; the right ureter also peeled away and came out whole in the same way.’ The same thing occurred with intestines, which ‘… peeled off their internal tunics, which we saw emerge from the rectum. The oesophagus, the arterial trachea, and the tongue also peeled in due course… ’ (Pomme 1769) (ii) The following is how a doctor observed an anatomical lesion of the brain and its enveloping membranes, the so called ‘false membranes’… in…‘chronic meningitis’: ‘Their outer surface, which is next to the arachnoidian layer of the dura matter, adheres to this layer, sometimes very lightly, when they are separated easily, sometimes very firmly and tightly, in which case it may be very difficult to detach them. [ T ]he false membranes are often transparent, especially when they are very thin. …The organization of the false membranes also display a great many differences… ’ (Bayle 1825) The two descriptions occur about fifty years apart. Note the spatiality of the metaphors used in the second statement. To describe the body is to describe the space that the body occupies – the false membranes in the above quote – the color, the volume, the structure, the thickness, whether attached to other structures, and similar specific descriptions. The anatomic structure of the body is the reality of the body: that which can be touched, that with which one can touch. The other description, despite its overtly dramatic expressions of the organs peeling away in succession, is comparatively non-specific and vague. It is unable to give a clear idea of the changes wrought in the human body situated in the three dimensional space. This individual three-dimensional space becomes the site where diseases occur. The location of diseases shifts from the abstract hierarchy of classificatory schemes to the concrete form of the body, from classes to spaces (Foucault 1976, pp). Earlier, fevers were recognized by their types, the classes to which they belonged – continuous, intermittent or remittent; if intermittent, the periodicity of attacks, the associations with other symptoms. In modern medicine, fever is located in the body – resulting from a specific abnormality in a specific part (organ or tissue) of the body. The etiology of a fever becomes inextricably linked with a form of abnormality, namely inflammation, affecting a specific organic space. To know the disease is to know the changes it brings about in this anatomic space of the body.

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Seeing is a way of knowing – to know is to make visible what was indiscernible earlier. Like the fevers we have already discussed, a disease is known only when it is located in the visible space of the body. In the clinical gaze, the act of seeing is a composite act. It combines the triad of looking, listening and touching. The resultant perception follows the symptoms of the still secret disease, going into the depths of the body, brings them out onto the surface and projects them on the organs of the dissected corpse. The gaze touches, listens and sees at once. Only the visible is knowable. Seeing is a seemingly passive act (an oxymoron!). It does not bring about any change in the object that is seen. The doctor thus sees, and knows, the pure, undistorted existence of the disease. But the clinical eye is not passive. Its gaze is structured by a theory – medicine. What the mind does not know the eyes do not see is an adage in medical science. The claim is, having been built through observations of many real situations, theory can look at the real abnormalities from the outside, from an Archimedean position. The coming together of the visible and the expressible,5 this implosion of the passivity of observation and the active network of theory, is made possible by a specific construction of language. The object of vision, the object of knowledge and the object of expression coincide. As if, it is language that confers symptom-ness to the spatial changes in the body. These are symptoms, not the disease. Signs that signify something other than their own selves, signs that signify disease. They are, in a way, like language that, in this mindset, signifies some reality outside. And, language/symptoms, in their turns, construct meanings/diseases. Disease that is the other of the body, disease that signifies (potential) death. The presupposition of language as the mirror of nature structures the theme of symptom. In its turn, symptom acts as the motif that recurs in the medical knowledge of diseases. The disease is unthinkable, indefinable, without the symptom. Yet the definition organizes the symptom as exterior to it, as the mirror is to the real entity. We return to the construction of the body as a universal – a metaphysical self that is defined as phenomenal, and bears the marks of the phenomenal. It represents, contains and displaces the phenomenal at one go. As stated earlier, the universal body could accommodate individual variations at the level of logical constitution by defining itself at that level through statistical measures of dispersion. We quote at length from a medical textbook (Park and Park, 1989, 446–447): The daily calorie requirement of a normal adult doing sedentary work is laid down as 24000 calories. This clearly is not universally true. There must be individual variations…Even within the same subject, there may be variation from time to time. The questions that arise are: what is normal variation? And how to measure the variation?

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The answer does not address the question at the level of logical knowledge. Pat comes the readymade solution: There are several measures of variation (or ‘dispersion’ as it is technically called) of which the following are widely known…. Modern medicine does not have to think further into why these measures (such as Standard Deviation) should be treated as such. As a science it borrows these from another branch of science, i.e., statistics, unproblematically. Statistics, as a form of mathematical logic being applied to the medical knowledge of the body, becomes instrumental in the process of universalization. Statistics, that can accommodate deviations as variations, enables the universal properties of the body to accommodate particular empiric variations, such that the universal body becomes inconceivable without the particular bodies. The notion of the normal and the role of statistics, as a form of logic to define normal variations as opposed to abnormal deviations, are two of the elements that remain active in constructing the knowledge of the body. In dealing with these two, I do not thereby try to deny the ‘materiality’ of the body. Rather, this is an attempt to bring out the interactions of the material and the ideational that work in the formation of a category. In the process, the specificity of the category is defined in a sharper relief. We gain insights regarding the differentiation of the individual body (as understood in modern medicine) from the single body (as the instance where general principles like the ‘humors’ in Greek medicine or the doshas in Ayurveda unite in varying proportions). The body that seemed to be a topos, a literary commonplace to be referred to casually without a problem of historicity, is thus found to be a type, or even a motif, linked to specific situations – the Greek or the Indic or the modern world. Social sciences rightly point at the emergence of the idea of the individual at a specific juncture of history and society, specifically in the European context, that gradually acquired universal significance through intricate interactions of power, economy and significations. This does not mean that other spatial or temporal sites of human existence did not have the idea of the body/person in its singularity. On the contrary, especially for medical knowledge that has to negotiate the body of persons, the singularity has to be attended to. But in a way different from that of the individual. When ‘Greek’ medicine views the processes acting in the body as consisting of the three (or sometimes four or five – remember, this body of knowledge was far less systematized than modern medicine) humors, or Ayurveda explains diseases on the basis of an imbalance of the tridoshas (vayu, pitta, kapha), they imply that these fluid principles act and are constitutive of the bodies in their singularity.

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The normal healthy person (in body and mind) is something to be attained by medicine. This involves a notion of correctness and corrigibility, and a notion of the standard. But a standard of what? The parameters that constitute and define the normal, for example, the pulse rate, blood pressure, the color of the eyes or the sounds heard over the chest by a stethoscope, are both material and semiotic. The semiosis involves a hypostatization6 of certain universals. Universals that had come to be defined in a specific setting of knowledge, power and economy. Ian Hacking deals with this dual materialsemiotic nature of the objects of medicine when he speaks about the ‘making up’ of ‘people’ (Hacking 1999). He speaks of the construction of categories of the pathological like the pervert or the homosexual. Extending the logic backwards, and invoking Canguilhem and Foucault, we speak of the making up of the categories that mark the normal. Remember, the notion of the normal, and its negative – the abnormal – act as the motif that produces the type called the ‘homosexual’. The type forms a link between its constitutive motif and the theme, the concreteness of the individual patient. Being characters in the formative stage – not yet developed a valid symbolic prototype – the types do not establish ‘scientific’ traditions epitomized by specific personages: the definition of homosexual is in a flux, moving from the realm of the abnormal to the normal. We may assert that a bunch of universals go on together to constitute the ‘body’ – each of these universals form a single parameter. And the bunch itself is hypostatized into a concrete called the ‘body’. There is a related bunch of universals to constitute the ‘mind’. If the normal is the ‘self ’ in modern medicine, in the sense that it is the normative and the professed goal of medical practice, the normal has many ‘others’. It tries to negotiate with these others in multiple ways. The commonest mode of dealing with the other is to argue the other as other into the discourse of medicine – to define it as the abnormal or the deviant. This process leaves out, already and always, a radical alterity, the wholly other that continues to evade, and thus haunt, the knowledge of medicine. As a modern knowledge form, medicine continuously tries to bring this otherness into its defined territory of knowledge, into its defined categories of the abnormal. For doing that, it nuances its tools of defining. Statistics, when applied to the science of medicine (remember Ian Hacking tracing the birth of statistical mode of knowing in its initial uses in demography and medicine), is an instance of such a moment of nuancing. Socially, the processes of othering act at multiple levels. These include the level of the relationship of the doctor with the patient, that of modern medicine with other medical systems, of the knowledge of the body with its object that it knows – the ‘body’, and a number of other elements. At the level of practice and lived being, the different levels interact and constitute

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each other. As the doctor approaches the patient does s/he not approach a part of or the past/future of her/his own self ? When the patient, true to the adjectival account waits, had s/he not already encountered the doctor in lay knowledge, magazines or the first vaccination by the white coat (the needle, the syringe, the aseptic scent bringing in the fear of alien danger)? In and among the infinite array of alterities that surround and infiltrate the medical institutions, we choose only one final inalienable other – death.

The Body in Death: Beyond the Post/Modern The concept of the body is intimately related with the concept of death. At two different levels. Dissection, the opening up of the corpse, is the inalienable first step to reach the knowledge of anatomy. The three dimensional spatial structure of the living healthy body is known through the knowledge of the body that is dead. Clinic and anatomy are inseparable. A perceptual leap was required to combine the clinical gaze that perceives the body in a temporal dimension (how the body changes over time) with the anatomic concept of the body focusing on the spatial dimension (Foucault 1976). This perceptual leap involved in the process of relating the temporal dimension of disease with the spatial dimension of the body was possible only when the clinical gaze could detect signs of the disease in the space of the corpse – in the tissues, organs, membranes and the other static structures. The crucial move was to discover a cause and effect relation between the disease of the living and the abnormalcy in the visible body of the corpse. At a second level, normalcy cannot be defined without defining abnormalcy and, at the other end of abnormalcy, the presence of death. Death is in a sense the ultimate other that defines the normative dimension of health. Yet, in the spatial structure of the body death itself is not unidimensional. At every moment, when the superficial cells of the skin die, new cells are born inside. The skin as a tissue is living. In every cell, in every tissue, organ and the body, death is multidimensional, multi-temporal. The doctor in the intensive therapy unit knits his (more often than her’s) brow…The pulse is threading away. Breathing becomes labored, shallow. The intravenous drug is to be adjusted. One or two extra doses of life-saving (does it save? Are not all drugs life-saving or equally not so in certain situations? He might have ruminated) medicines to be administered. Maybe an artificial contraption is to be implanted somewhere on/in the body. The body that is going to die...or live.… What actually goes on in his mind? In the hightechnology modern ITU setting, how does the doctor react to such a situation? Does he remember his own grandfather in his dying bed? Thinks of his own, not too distant mortification? Maybe, that would only dissipate his reason,

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blur the all-knowing vision of the savior, knowledge. Maybe it is better the way it probably is – he confronts death piecemeal, fragment by fragment of the patient’s body, minute by minute, second by second of the timeless event, remaining oblivious of the finality of the phenomenon, the infiniteness of the finitude to come. The modern doctor a couple of years back would fight. He would be moved, even irritated by the defeat. The ‘postmodern’ doctor of today would do the needful, render his service dispassionately. He would hardly notice the difference when yet another piece of the body going into death renders the process irreversible. Not that the doctor in ‘real’ life does this. In a surreptitious way, he aspires to this. He bears within him traces of this numbness. A practicing Indian doctor in the UK writes as follows in a medical journal on death (this rather long quote seems unavoidable): Human life is not synonymous with the biology of living as a human body. Western medicine gives us excellent opportunities for care but does not grant us the right to reduce the dignity of life. When I had expressed my concern to my friend about his diagnosis of multi-vessel coronary heart disease, he replied: ‘I am not afraid of death. I was standing in front of my balcony in the most polluted corner of the city in the morning when the golden sun burst out under the eastern sky. The rays cut through the mist and the haze and struck right into my chest. I collapsed. I later learnt that I had severe coronary heart disease.’ ‘I knew the time for my final journey is near,’ my friend wrote, ‘I will probably go at the dead of night when everyone is asleep and no one will notice me silently walking away. I will kiss my wife softly in (sic) her lips for being so patient with me and bearing my children. I will kiss my sleeping toddler, but I’m afraid, his face will make my steps hesitant as I walk into the darkness. My child’s face, still moist from the touch of my lips, will make me ponder, Must I go even if I have to?’ By the time I was reading his letters on a distant shore, my friend became a composite engram in the cerebral neuronal network known as memory. At the dead of the night when the phone rings, I look at the angelic face of my sleeping three year old and ask myself, ‘Must I go, too?’ (Chaudhuri 2003, 484) Distinct traces of melodrama and magnanimous male protectivity notwithstanding, the statement remains a touching testimony to the faltering respect and the anxieties of the doctor regarding death. Death as the other remained earlier as an ever-present specter haunting the healthy body – the body whose existence was focused on maximizing

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productivity. In a newer paradigm of fitness, the body is tuned to consumption. Zygmunt Bauman (1998) speaks of this dimension in a different register. He speaks of a seamless, as if deathless, self that emerges at the postmodern moment. Bauman locates this moment in history. He points at the emergence of fitness as the aim of medical and health care sciences rather than health. The…body is first and foremost a receiver of sensations; it imbibes and digests experiences; capacity of being stimulated renders it an instrument of pleasure. That capacity…is called fitness…. It is not so much the performance of the body that counts, as the sensations the body receives in the course of the performance; those sensations must be deep and deeply gratifying – ‘thrilling’, ‘ravishing’, ‘enrapturing’, ‘ecstatic’. (226–227) If body is regarded as the theme that is a specific expression of the motif, health; with major changes in the character of the motif, the theme also changes. The transformation implicates other motifs like death. The health care profession turns into the body care profession and has infinite possibilities of random and endless interventions. Fragments move in to make and perpetually re-make the fit, consuming, receiving, body. Death has acquired an ambiguous familiarity that seemingly takes the sting out of its danger. It has become commonplace. Not even enough to perturb the sensibilities of civil and civic bodies with its genocides and organized mass murders. Murders become hyperreal. They are real, too real to be bothered about, just like everyday happenings or habits. Along with the trivialization of death, the sense of alterity is paralyzed. Not as cause and effect, but together, simultaneously. The earlier impulse of the ‘modern’ would be similar to – though undoubtedly different in its aggressive gestures to conquer – from that of Nachiketa when he responds to Yama’s proposition of choosing a different question than the one he had asked (on the real nature of death): On this point even the gods have doubted indeed, and thou, Death, hast declared it to be not easy to understand, and another teacher like thee is not to be found: – surely no other boon is like unto this… [ T ]ell us what there is in that great Hereafter. Nakiketas (sic) does not choose another boon but that which enters into the hidden world. (Max Muller 2003–1884, 6–7) This desire to reach into the unknown realm of death has elements of coldness accompanying the insatiable thirst for knowledge. This does not reduce it to the ordinary. There is a certain sense of respect in this reaching out. A respect

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that peters out in the consumptive society of Bauman’s postmodern (Bauman 1998). In a fascinating piece on “Death and the Self ”, Jonathan Dollimore (1997) asserts: [ I ]n the Western tradition the individual is always in crisis, energized and driven forward by the same inner divisions and deprivations which threaten its disintegration, and…at the heart of that threat is the force of a death which is doubly before (ahead and behind). (254) Dollimore thus relates the crisis of the ‘self ’ with the purported ‘death of man’ in the ‘postmodern’, asserting in no ambiguous terms that “…much postmodern theory desperately needs intellectual history” (252). The brilliance of his argument lies in his linking of death to desire, in the singular unearthing of the intertwining of thanatos in the eros that drives the individual self: [ M ]ore fundamental than the choice between humanism and antihumanism is that between sadism and masochism. (256) Dollimore’s detailed excursus into the world of Thomas Mann’s novels brings out the dynamics of desire leading onto dissolution and desire being born of illness and death. Yet, his presupposed object of inquiry remains the undivided self of the individual, only with a hole, a lack defining the interiority of her/ his selfhood. To him, the postmodern is far too unserious – in his own words, initiating a situation where the “jouissance is flirting with the death drive” (251). He fails to note that the crisis in subjectivity that a Foucault or a Derrida speaks of is different from the predicaments of a secure individual driven by something akin to an existentialist angst. His idea is different from the fragmentary idea of what he calls the postmodern – again different from what goes under the proper names of a Foucault or a Derrida – which is more neatly captured by Bauman’s ‘consumptive’ body. Not to forget, the strength of Dollimore’s argument does not diminish with his ‘mistake’. Unerringly, he points at the intimate yet divided relations between eros and thanatos, between the embodied self and death. A trifling sense of suspicion gnaws at the sanitized world of infinite consumption. Is the paralysis so passive, the forgetting – of the death as the wholly other – so naïve and complete? Is this foreclosure of death not symptomatic of a deep anxiety and a deeper sense of terror at the impending ever-present possibility of the unutterable thanatos – death rendered unspeakable, even unthinkable, in its ubiquity? The commonplace becomes the symptom of the extraordinary. The Levinasian call of the wholly other – of a radical, nondefinable, maybe transcendental, alterity – becomes relevant at this juncture.

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Let me put the outlines of my argument so far, bluntly, without the embellishments of facts, metaphors or examples – an impossible task as everybody knows. Prevailing notions of the self presupposes, as all other fixed concepts, a philosophy of presence. The philosophy of presence that Derrida ascribes to the whole of western metaphysics takes on a specific configuration in the ‘modern’ West. (An elaboration of this concept and this happening of the ‘modern’ would require a separate treatise at the least. I use it in a commonplace manner, risking the decision of keeping a soft spot in the argument, that can, at any possible moment, be prised open.) Science, a form of knowledge that is oriented towards, aims at, “the appropriation of truth in presence and self-presence”, is a vital element in the configuration of this presence in the ‘modern’, in the notion of the modern self. The biological sciences and medicine are specifically those subdivisions of science that actively constitute the notions of the phenomenal self. Death is an ultimate other, the extreme end of the spectrum of others, which circumscribe the notion of this phenomenal self that medicine constitutes and presupposes at the same time. From within the philosophy of presence, the other can only be engulfed/vanquished and remain as a source of perpetual anxiety. Putting the presence under erasure – not a disavowal or destruction of presence but learning “to use and erase…at the same time” – might point at a response, respect and a responsibility to the other. The knowledge and practice of medicine works within an overarching frame of a closed presence yet harbors within it an irreplaceable supplement of alterity. In its parleys with the phenomenon called death, both these moments in medicine – of the fixity of a closed presence and that of the undecidability of the ‘other’ – come into play. The ethics of responsibility may work with the traces of this unanticipatable, intimate other. Medicine’s negotiations with death may have some wider implications for the self in the modern world in its negotiations with the unanticipatable. And finally, one should be wary of the fact that this mode of dealing with the other is not the only acceptable mode for all times and on all occasions. It is one of the (often forgotten) ways of response. It was Giorgio Agamben who spoke of the bond of death with politics. Agamben (1998) defines his figure of the political, which he calls homo sacer (the sacred man), as someone who can be killed but not sacrificed. Homo sacer can be killed by anyone without incurring the punishment, even the judgment, for homicide. His killing is not a homicide. He is beyond the law of the human. He cannot be sacrificed in the name of god. He is beyond the law of the divine. Beyond both human and divine laws, homo sacer is always and already vulnerable to death. This vulnerability to death is the Power that is the subject matter of politics. This is ‘bare life’, the ultimate subject and object of the political. Conceptually shorn of the embellishments of the economic or the ideational and abstracted

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from the matrix of history, this is what, according to Agamben, Power stands for. The inverse of this logic, the reverse of the same coin, is the ‘man’ in the modern democratic society, whose life is invulnerable on principle. The invulnerability of life in modern society is the exact opposite, hence guided by the same economy of death, only in the reverse, of the absolute vulnerability of the homo sacer. Thus death determines the power over/of life. But what is death? We have already discussed the problem of defining death from the vantage point of the living, even for the supposed acme of the knowledge of man, science itself.

Dying and the Dasein: Towards an Ontology of Death To go once again back to our concerns about the relationship between life and death that acts as a certain metaphor for the relationships of ‘what is’ with ‘what is not’, the relation between a certain possibility and an impossibility, remember Derrida’s (1993) linking of the moment of aporias with death. Aporia, the moment of a founding paradox of an argument, is the experience of reaching the limits of an argument where the inference from the earlier step opposes the presuppositions of the argument and brings it into crisis. This is very similar to, yet different from, a paradox. The former concept’s associations with the element of experience makes it a phenomenological rather than an analytical category, if one speaks from within that well-known binary.7 Derrida (1993, 27) refers to the discussions on the ‘existential analysis’ of death, a “non-regional onto-phenomenology” that, as Heidegger asserts, is “before any ‘metaphysics of death’ and before all biology” (Heidegger’s discussion occurs in his Being and Time, which is extensively quoted and referred to by Derrida in Aporias). As such, here is a discourse on death that attempts to transcend the limitations of all hitherto made speculations based on the histories of dying. The modes of dying had been varied in different moments of the history of ‘man’. But none of these, not even a description of death (that is in reality a description of dying) by the science of life, medicine, has attended to the existential analysis of death ‘itself ’, Heidegger assumes. Heidegger’s deliberations on death in relationship to Dasein is said to be the necessary pre-understanding of all the variegated notions of death that operate across cultures and time. It is non-regional in this sense of the general that makes explicit the ontological presuppositions common to and active in these differing notions. As such, it is not enclosed within the borders of the ‘cultural, linguistic, national, religious’ or even the ‘sexual’. Derrida points at the aporia working within such a conceptualization of death where Death, the most proper possibility of Dasein, is the possibility of Dasein’s impossibility, and as such, becomes the most improper and ex-propriating possibility – the possibility becomes the impossibility.

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Hence death becomes the ultimate metaphor for aporia – “the ultimate aporia is the impossibility of aporia as such” (Derrida 1993, 78). And death becomes the impossible possibility of the unanticipatable to come, the always ‘future anterior’ (not the future as a future present) that calls for the responsibility to the ‘wholly other’ – an other that is not derivable from the present self. In “Can I Die? Derrida on Heidegger on Death” (1999), Iain Thomson has dealt with Death’s relationship to life as a certain possibility and as the certainty of impossibility. In this short yet incisive piece, Thomson refers to the notion of ‘possibility’ that Heidegger uses in relation to Dasein and death. In Aporias, Derrida had spoken of the two senses of ‘possibility’ in the expression ‘die Möglichkeit’ – one is that of ‘virtuality’ or of ‘the imminence of the future’, ‘that can always happen at any instant’; the second sense being that of ‘ability’, ‘of which I am capable’ (62). Thomson refers to Heidegger’s distinction of existential possibility, his own use of the word, from two other common philosophical usages, logical and categorical possibilities: The Being-possible [Möglichsein] which Dasein is in every case is to be sharply distinguished both from empty logical possibility and from the contingency of something present-at-hand. …As a modal category of presence-at-hand, possibility signifies what is not-yet actual and what is not at anytime necessary. It characterized the merely possible. …On the other hand, possibility as an existentiale is the most primordial and ultimately positive way in which Dasein is characterized ontologically” (Being and Time, pg 183, quoted in Thomson 1999, 40 fn 31) Dasein as Being-possible is, for Heidegger, ‘[l]iving through possibilities rather than grasping them theoretically’ (Thomson 1999, 32). The focus on this experience of living rather than that on the epistemic dimension is commensurate with the ‘thrownness’ of Dasein. This being-possible, according to Heidegger, is in a negative relationship to Dasein’s ability-to-be: As Being-possible [Möglichsein]…Dasein is existentially that which, in its ability-to-be [Seinkönnen], it is not yet” (Being and Time, pg 185–186, quoted in Thomson 1999, 32) Death is related more to this Seinkönnen, ahead of Dasein in absolute futurity. Thomson argues that in thus linking death to a radical futurity rather than to a present ‘possibility’, Heidegger’s position resists Derrida’s contention that death as the possibility of the impossibility of Dasein brings the whole project of the analysis of Dasein into crisis. Death is in the Dasein as its absolute futurity, Thomson asserts.8

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My point in relating this contention is that, whether this thought has already been present in Heidegger or not, death as the future anterior9 to presence – not only as a possibility flowing from the present – is a metaphor and a source for futurity as such, a metaphor for an other, as such, to presence. Reading certain texts of Rousseau as he writes on the “Essay on the Origin of Languages”, Derrida (1994b) refers to Death as the ‘master-name’ of the series of ‘supplementary differance’. Here death belongs to the series of attributes that differentiates the ‘human’ from the ‘animal’: The difference between human desire and animal need, between relationship with the woman and relationship with the female, is the fear of death. (184) Of course, Derrida would problematize such a neat distinction between the spheres of humanity and animality. Yet he maintains the importance of the relationship between death and the thinking of futurity. The ‘anticipation of death’ and ‘imagination’ belongs to the same chain of significations. Imagination, fundamentally, relates to the relationship to death. Life’s ‘own wish for a supplement’ (184) is presented in the representation of the image, which, in a sense thus, is death. And Derrida promptly reminds us, these are the qualities that Rousseau recognizes in writing. Death, writing, imagination, supplement, form a series. If death were a ‘non-being’, to the living that ‘is’ a ‘being’, it would not qualify as an experience. It would be so incommensurable with the fact of living that nothing, not even a respect or a response-ability will be able to go beyond the gulf between these two. On the other hand, a respect for death does not entail an embracing, a going forward to death. Or maybe there is an embrace, an embrace whose intimacy explains the love of life as nothing else but the love of death that sleeps within the warmth of living. And by the same logic, extended in its tortuous course, the respect for death enhances the responsibility to life. The healer is awe-struck with the fullness of dying, experiencing it in every moment of his vocation of wrenching out life from death, feeling all the time the inextricably loving embrace between the two. Agamben’s relating of death to politics – death as the perennial possibility or the absolute impossibility that defines the realm of politics – is different from the ethico-politics of responsibility to death. In the former, ‘death’ itself is not scrutinized; it is treated in a commonsense manner instead. Its (im)possibility haunts the political. In the latter ethico-politics, the ontology of death is thought into, and death’s relation to life forms the impossible experience of the ethical – the ethical as the impossibility of embracing and effacing the other. Agamben (1998, 144–153) speaks of the principles of a new biopolitics that brings politics

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and life together in an immanent embrace. Politics, that earlier inhabited a public space of ‘the fight against the external and internal enemies of the state’ (147) now coincides with the functions of police,10 ‘the care of life’. Eugenics, the science of genetics deployed for the improvement of the population, lets ‘race’ be defined through the localization of genes in chromosomes (an act that enjoys the prestige of scientificity, yet is known to be incorrect – it is impossible to identify a pure race by means of genetic determination) and at the same time, lets ‘race’ be the object of political maneuvers. Agamben marks the novelty of such a biopolitics in the ‘fact’ that, the biological given is as such immediately political, and the political is as such immediately the biological given” (148, italics in the original). The natural given thus presents itself without mediation as an object for the maneuverings of political task. The “immediate unity of politics and life” (150) in the modern biopolitical regime, a source of the possibility of the politics of Fascism, reminds one – in both its historical and logical entwinement – of Heidegger and his notion of Dasein. Dasein, the Being-there of the human being, inexorably connects the being of the human in its authenticity and ‘facticity’ to its own ‘ways of being’ – being becomes inseparable from the situation, the ‘thereness’ of being. In a way, this speaks of a mode of embodiment, where the mind cannot be thought of as dissociated from the body. Yet embodiment, in a certain perspective, may become a source of fascist politics. Agamben provides a sharp insight, quoting from Levinas: [ The] feeling of identity between self and body…will…never allow those who wish to begin with it to rediscover, in the depths of this unity, the duality of the free spirit that struggles against the body to which it is chained. …The biological, with the notion of inevitability it entails, becomes more than an object of spiritual life. …Man’s essence lies no longer in freedom but in a kind of bondage. …Chained to his body, man sees himself refusing the power to escape from himself. (“Quelques réflexions” [1934] by Levinas, quoted in Agamben 1998, 151–152)11 The indivisibility, and the givenness of this unity – between the self and the body – becomes the object of machinations by modern technologies of biopower, once the body is defined to be the self-present locus of ‘objective’ racial determinations. The immediate unity of ‘bare life’ and politics in homo sacer, when governmentalized into the calculus of biopolitics, becomes amenable to the interventionist violence of Eugenics – a common

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factor between modern technocratic regimes and Fascism. If calculations that enumerate life’s parameters in a scale of value and non-value were applicable to bare life that is itself the political, then these calculations become instrumental in the algebra of political decisions that perpetrate death. Biopolitics turns into Thanatopolitics. Agamben differentiates such a deployment of the ‘facticity’ of life from Heidegger’s notion of Dasein. For Heidegger, homo sacer becomes Dasein, Agamben asserts (153). Not acquiescent with the determinations of biology and eugenics, Dasein ‘withdraws from every external decision’ in its inseparable unity of Being and the ways of Being, and evades the sway of Power. The immanence of bare life remains, for Dasein, outside the machinations of the calculus in the politics of life. Yet, the seeming neutrality of Dasein becomes open to certain other questionings when the focus shifts from ontology – as in Heidegger, and approvingly referred to by Agamben – to that of (a Levinasian) ethics. But why is such a shift required at all?

From Ontology to Ethics: Embodying Death The problem of the relationship between the living body and death is articulated centrally through the relationships between what is known, the act of knowing, and the unknown. Through the reading of a couple of essays by Evelyn Fox Keller (1992), one may have an idea of how the question – articulated in a relation between science as a way of knowing and its object – becomes gendered. For Fox Keller, the crucial question is: what is a secret? Not, what is secret? The latter question refers to the things that are secret, to a specific thing that one deems to be secret. The former question is that of secret-ness as an attribute. It refers to what one means when one refers to something as secret. So, the question is what is a secret? The question, as Fox Keller shows, is not irrelevant or innocent. For, the change in the meaning of ‘secret’, and the relations to the secret are at the heart of the scientific revolution and the purported progress, the developments, in science. Fox Keller not only marks the break in the meaning of secretness at the moment when science differentiates itself from earlier forms of knowing but follows it through to later incarnations and variations – thus secrets of God, secrets of Nature, secrets of Life and secrets of Death are described in their lineages of breaks and associations. The earlier view, the enchanted view of the secret had been that of God. There are secrets that belong to God. These secrets are not for human understanding. Thus secrets remain, by definition, unknown. Knowledge dare not reach out to them. These formed the limits to knowledge, limits that are not to be crossed. So, one could say, knowledge was potentially truncated, fearful, and reticent. But, one could also

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thus declare, knowledge was respectful to non-knowledge, to the unknown. Probably too much respectful, a respect that was articulated in the language of interdiction. Fox Keller focuses on the element of respect that was to be destroyed with disenchantment.12 Secrets, as the referent shifted from God to Nature, became not only amenable to, but the veritable objects of, aggression and destruction. If secrets of God were inviolable, secrets of Nature became invitations, tantalizing in their attraction, to violence. These secrets were to be won, and known. So, there is, here, a shift in the attitude to non-knowledge. Here, what is not known is to be forcefully brought into the realm of the known. Limits of knowledge are there to be crossed. One may remember that Weber spoke of disenchantment as the belief that, in principle, one can master everything through calculation. No outside to knowledge is sanctioned as the sacred. The ethics of knowing is an ethics of transgression, not respect. But, one can ponder upon the view that only this possibility of transgression provides, for the first time, the real possibility of reticence. For reticence, earlier, was forced upon, given, naturalized. Only now does it become a matter of decision. Fox Keller herself does not go into this prospect. She brings in a separate dimension to the issue. She speaks of the relationship between God/Nature on the one hand and man/woman on the other. With reference to the notion of secrets, a shift in the earlier axis from God to nature, from secrets of God to secrets of Nature, is necessarily, along its own immanent logic, associated with a shift in the later axis from man to woman. Secrets of nature, secrets that invite and incite penetration by knowledge, presuppose an equation between nature and woman. In this structure, man becomes Godly. Let us be cautious in following the argument. In the enchanted world, man and god were divided. Man could not reach out to the secrets that belonged to God. With disenchantment, man (with a capital M) takes over certain attributes of God, most importantly, the limitlessness of his reach. This taking over is possible because, as Fox Keller indicates, man had already occupied a special place in (the Christian) God’s world, arriving on the seventh day of creation. With God becoming irrelevant to the scheme, another division is put into its place – that between man and woman. Now the secrets belong to the womanly nature, nature as woman (for that matter, as any of the others of the modern Man, like the colonized or the black). Man, who is now Godly, is not the reservoir of secrets. He is the opposite, the hunter for knowledge that potentially destroys the secrets. Woman and the world of objects, as the passive receptacle of man’s action, entice the acts of knowing into them. There is yet another angle to the matter. Why is woman the purveyor of secrets? Because, she bears the secrets of birth within her. This is a secret that man definitionally had been incapable

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of winning. A third term is added onto the dyad of woman/nature. This term is life. The enigma of genesis and generation had always evaded the reach of man. Now, with the establishment of its links to woman and nature, it logically enters the domain of the knowable. Logically, yet not overtly for a long time. In her essay “From Secrets of Life to Secrets of Death”, Fox Keller (1992) describes the moment in the history of science when the secrets of life was opened up to man’s scientific scrutiny. This moment, famed as the discovery of the double helical structure of the DNA molecule, belongs to the domain of science called molecular biology. Before going into the import of that event, I digress a little to speak of certain interesting transformations in a related field in Biology. In that field, the changes that happened were in a direction opposed to that of the celebrations in the tearing up of the veil of life’s ultimate secret. My instance is from developmental biology, an area of biology that encompasses the rival streams of genetics and embryology. Women have been unusually (for the sciences) numerous, and often leaders, in the field. This area, moreover, is concerned with the processes of reproduction and is often visibly structured by gendered norms. Finally, the problems addressed in the area involves the ways of formation and development of the human being in the earliest phases of life and resist resolution in terms of centralized actions of ‘master molecules’ in favour of a complex interactive web of events. History of biology, from about the Second World War years, shows a distinct shift of focus from embryology to genetics, and concomitantly a shift in attention within the cellular structures from the cytoplasm to the nucleus. The move (from a German/continental point of interest to an American one) is away from the question, “how does an egg develop into a complex, many celled organism?” to “how do genes produce their effects?” The effort is to build explanations on the model of centralized functioning apparatuses, in this case the sole agency being relegated to the ‘genes’ residing in the nucleus. The other parts of the cell seem to act as passive substratum and to obey orders from the genes. Traditionally, and in biology, the nucleus and the cytoplasm are tropes for the male and the female. This is most conspicuous in the popular and textbook renditions of the process of fertilization between the sperm (coming from the male) and the ovum (from the female). The much larger ovum has a large amount of cytoplasm whereas the sperm is almost wholly occupied by a nucleus. The popular view is of a highly agile ‘penetrating’ sperm acting upon a bulky ‘static’ ovum. The language of science and male-domination bolster each other to hold this view up for a long time. It is interesting to note that this whole view of the controlling male agent acting upon the passive female recipient has been under serious and decisive scrutiny for the last two decades or so. The sperm-egg interaction

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is found to work both ways, with active molecules on the surfaces of each. As more has been learnt about the actual mode of working of the gene in complex organisms, the locus of control shifted from the ‘gene itself ’ to the complex biochemical dynamics of cells (between proteins, nucleic acids and other organic molecules) in constant communication with each other. ‘Gene activation’ is the new buzzword and Scientific American (August 1991) can assert, “organisms control most of their genes.” In this major change of stance, the role of technological changes (like new technologies for manipulating genes and labeled antibodies) was crucial but not enough. Certain very important work, like that which established the critical role played by cytoplasmic structures of the egg prior to fertilization, is said to have been possible since forty years, with the techniques then available. It could be done, “if anyone had the idea.” This ability, that anyone in the scientific establishment had lacked earlier, to have the idea may be traced to multiple factors. Significant among these is the likelihood to think of an active maternal role – arguably an effect of feminist contentions – in fertilization. Of course, there is not a simple cause-effect relation. Feminism is not the cause of such transformations. It is one of the several interconnected factors that lead to certain changes in scientific ideas. And there is the question of ‘women in science’. The complex and often avowedly antithetical positions of women in science to feminism are colored by multiple hues. Fox Keller (1997) had talked about one such woman, Christiane Nusslein-Volhard, the only woman named to the position of Director of a Max Plank Institute and the recipient of the Nobel Prize in 1995. She had also spoken of the myriad factors that lead on to the participation of women in a certain field of science – maybe the simple reason that many women had worked on the maternal effect in developmental biology was that it was hard, tedious and often unrewarding work, likely to be the only job assigned to the women in the laboratory. The relation of feminism to science thus remains unmistakably intimate yet complex and contingent. To come back to our concerns, it is interesting to observe that the triumphal claim of Watson and Crick’s discovery (of the structure of the DNA molecules) of piercing the veils of life’s ultimate mystery was already in the process of being hollowed out. The march of molecular Biology with its focus (in the given context) on the molecular structures and dynamic of cellular function was being interrupted – at the level of laboratory science – by its sister, Developmental Biology. The interruption, however, was drowned in the ecstasy of the new discovery. Man, ultimately, was tearing the covers over the last secret of nature/woman – the secret of birth. Yet, as Fox Keller shows poignantly, the secret that was thus being penetrated was hardly the secret of the living flesh. The molecules had already replaced

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the human. The secret of human birth had already been reduced to the secret of molecular replication. The birth of the new man was already supplanted by the repetition of the old structure of DNA molecules. We could recall Donna Haraway’s acute observation on human reproduction: [ W ]here there is sex, literal reproduction is a contradiction in terms. The issue from the self is always (an)other. (1990, 143) Sexual difference and reproduction, even when they perpetuate the continued production of the Western Man, perennially belie the project of generational continuity. They always produce difference, as they are out to (re)produce the same. For sexual reproduction always takes two. And neither parent is continued in the child. The child remains a “randomly reassembled genetic package.” The randomness of this re-assemblage notwithstanding, the celebratory emphasis in the discovery of the structure of the molecular basis of generation is on continuity. Continuity of the basic structure of the threedimensional double helix is stressed despite the huge number of possible combinatories in the base sequences of the DNA molecules. The focus on continuity is made possible by relegating the infinite possibilities of shifts – in the ever-changing living body – to the background. The molecules seem to replace the living body as the focus of attention. Fox Keller calls this condition “lifeless.” She relates this logically to another important scientific event in the twentieth century, the invention of weapons of mass destruction at an unheard-of scale in the form of the atom bomb and its successors. She calls the phenomenon “the displacement of flesh and blood reference – of life itself.” Generation/creation and destruction, both get detached from their associations with the living. They come to refer only to “lifeless” objects like the molecules or the targets. To quote: [ I ]t is with the move away from the life itself that the enormous gap between the production of lifeless, devivified forms and the production of life-destroying, devivifying forms,...achieves a curious kind of closure. (52) The attempts to penetrate the secrets of life converge with those of comprehending the secrets of death. The itinerary of the meaning of the word secret reaches its end in death. From secrets of God to secrets of Nature to secrets of life and secrets of death. Exclusions of nature and the woman (and a host of other others to the modern scientific self ), and a reduction of life to molecules and of death to impersonal targets, accompany the process. Fox Keller’s indictments are forceful and persuasive. One may, hesitatingly, question the formulation of the last step in the process. Is not there a too easily preconceived, naturalized notion of ‘life’

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lurking in the enunciation? What is it to posit life as opposed to molecules? Agreeing with the way she points at the workings of sexism in the articulation of the ends of science, one may still be wary of her positing of real “flesh and blood referents” against the artifactual presence of the molecules or the weapons. To oppose the destructive violence of atomic bombs, is it necessary to reduce bombs to mere instruments? Taking the risk of being counter-intuitive, one may still, in the vein of Bruno Latour, argue for a notion of quasi-objects, or like Donna Haraway, treat men and non-men, animals and objects, as material-semiotic actors. Is not the destructive force of “flesh and blood” to be reckoned as well? Life – Marxists and Foucauldians, feminists and followers of Agamben, deconstructionists and postcolonial theorists have all taught us – is not so easily relegated to the domains of the natural. Questioning, not ignoring or abandoning the subject/object, culture/nature, man/animal, and innumerable other binaries is associated with a questioning of the break between science and the sacred. Breaks and neat binaries are the prerequisites of moderns which, as Latour argues, hardly work in the “modern” world. He questions even the divide between the act of neat division and of the blurring of divisions. So, one is obliged to hold on to both ends of a binary, to question divisions while holding on to them. Maybe, the reduction of “life” to molecules can be condemned at the same moment when one speaks of the life of molecules and the molecular nature of life. The specificities of science and the sacred may well be addressed at a time when one questions the neatness of the rupture between the two. Life and the body, constructions of disciplinary, governmental and knowledge processes, are related to death in an intimate separation of the relations between the knowers and the (un)known. How does Dasein, the Being-there of the human, relate to death?13 We have already addressed the question, partially. Death resides in Dasein as futurity, as the ability-to-be, always ahead as future anterior – not a future-present that can be charted beforehand in the present – and not available as a projection from the present. There is another dimension of death’s relationship to this Being. For Heidegger the mode of being of the human is called ‘existence’ (existenz) as opposed to the mode of being of the inert things that he calls ‘presence’ (vorhandenheit). ‘Existence’ is the way in which Dasein is temporal, the way of Being “proper only to man,” “that in which the essence of man preserves the source that determines him” (Heidegger’s “Letter on Humanism”, quoted in Derrida 1982).14 The attempt is to mark Dasein’s (Being there) being-in-theworld as a modality of the authentic or the event of being. The understanding of Dasein would already belong to the very event of being and not reducible to mere logical thought. In the search for the authenticity in which the event of being is situated, primordial importance is given to one’s own being, the unalterable mine of the human. The stress is on the genuineness of being or of thought as the gathering and articulation of the event of being – a

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kind of fullness of the mine – a mineness or Jemeinigkeit. For Heidegger, the Jemeinigkeit (mineness) is constituted in the Being-towards-death; death is the most personal (impossible) experience that marks Dasein. Levinas reads the mode of being of Dasein in a way that inverts this classical perception. In “Dying for…” (1998), a lecture delivered in March 1987 at the College International de Philosophie in Paris, he refers to Dasein’s mode of Being-in-the-world.15 For Levinas, Heidegger’s Being-in-the-world signifies being near things. And these ‘things’ – before appearing in the ‘neutrality’ of objects as Vorhandenheit – give themselves originally in the mode of ready-to-hand (Zu-handenheit), a mode of being of things that appeal to the skill of a hand already grasping things in their functions. Thus these things presuppose a context of meanings in which these make sense, and hence a context of a common world of signification, the context of other people. Thus being-in-the-world is immediately to be with others. The care for the self presupposes the being-in-the-world that implies being near things, things that are placed in the context of others. Thus, according to Levinas, concern for the other man, the care of one for the other, ‘is not added onto being’ and is ‘a constitutive articulation of the Dasein’ (Levinas 1998, 212). A care not belied by the actual solitude of the solitary or the indifference to others. These only accentuate the significance of the care for the others. Being-there, in its very authenticity, is being-for-the-other. Mitseinandersein, being with, is a being together in mutual reciprocity. As Levinas traces Heidegger’s tortuous logic along its course, he speaks of a ‘mixing up’ of the ‘being with’ with the impersonal anonymity of the ‘they’. As if, for Heidegger, the authenticity of ‘being there’ gets lost in the mediocrity of the everyday under the dictatorship of the ‘they’, which thus acts as “a legislator of morals, fashion and opinion, taste and values” (213). In a bid to recover the authenticity of Dasein, a being proper – Eigentlichkeit, an ‘authenticity altered by nothing’, to depart from the ‘they’, Heidegger invokes being-for-death. Being-there as being-for-death. Here death is the ownmost potentiality for being, the most authentic: With death, Dasein stands before itself in its ownmost potentiality-forBeing. This is a possibility in which the issue is nothing less than Dasein’s Being-in-the-world. …If Dasein stands before itself as this possibility, it has been fully assigned to its ownmost potentiality-for-Being. When it stands before itself in this way, all its relations to any other Dasein have been undone… [ D]eath reveals itself as that possibility which is it’s ownmost, which is non-relational, and which is not to be outstripped. (Heidegger 1962–1926, 294, italics in the original)

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This calls for a notion of an authentic Dasein where there is dissolution of all relationships with the other. The notion of absolute futurity being associated with death (as we have been discussing earlier), the notion that the beingfor-death is ahead-of-itself, describes only the structural aspect of concern open to itself as ‘ahead of itself ’. This again indicates a fundamental priority of ontology commensurate with the Heideggerian program. For Levinas, though related to ontology, the question of death raises more important ethical matters. The figure of non-separation in death is important for him. Worry over death of the other comes before care for self. Death warrants responsibility for the other man (sic). This is in opposition to Heidegger’s stress on the solitude and uniqueness of each death – I cannot share my death with anyone else. This has two important associations. One is the impossibility of experiencing even one’s own death – the experience of dying is not synonymous with that of death. The second is the shift in meaning that ‘dying for another’ undergoes. Dying for another does not imply substitution. I cannot die the death of another, not in the place of the other. I can die so as to postpone the other’s death, “in some definite affair”: No one can take the Other’s dying away from him. Of course someone can ‘go to his death for another.’ But that always means to sacrifice oneself for the Other ‘in some definite affair.’ (Heidegger 1962–1926, 284, quoted in Derrida 1995, 42) It is the notion of sacrifice where Levinas differs definitively from Heidegger. For him sacrifice does not find a place between authentic and inauthentic – it is a ‘beyond ontology’ or a ‘before ontology’. Levinas treats death as the most intended towards the other, the ultimate bearer of responsibility to the other. The ontological presuppositions on which this notion is based are: (1) the self is always already made of the other (sameness of myself derived from the other); (2) the self and the other are non-derivable from one another, yet dependant on each other in an originary sense. Chanter (2001) speaks of Levinas’ reference to the discovery of God’s infinite perfection in Descartes’ Third Meditation, which Levinas reads as a retroactive grounding of cogito in a way that gives independence to the cogito (self) and God (Other). Thus he treats the ego as a subject, “understood not primarily as an autonomous, rational, free subject but in terms of the response that the concrete I takes on before the other” (Chanter 2001), and thus transforms it to a subject that is for the other. For him, death is not simple annihilation or non-being (as it is in Heidegger – being towards death as giving authenticity to Dasein in its solitude), it is responselessness. The relation to death here is more ancient than being/non-being.

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In a Hegelian framework of the self/other dyad, the other of the body is something to be conquered, to be avoided at all costs – the aggressive war waged by the doctor against death, disease and disability. A Levinasian ethic conceives this otherness in a different spirit: Death: not, first of all, annihilation, non-being, or nothingness, but a certain experience for the survivor of the ‘without-response’. …It is the murderer who would like to identify death with nothingness;…this question of the without-response, would thus be underivable, primordial, like the interdiction against killing, more originary than the alternative of “to be or not to be.” (Derrida 1999, 6) An instituting of responsibility – of dying oneself for the other and including myself in the other’s death. Offering one’s life, one’s death, is the ethical dimension of sacrifice. Because the other is mortal, my responsibility remains singular. The irreplaceability of death calls for responsibility. Everyone must assume his own death – a gift beyond the calculus of the economy of living. Therein resides freedom and responsibility. As Derrida (1995–1992, 47–48) points out, Levinas’ criticism of Heidegger is not only that Dasein privileges its own death. The thrust of the critique is on the consideration of ‘the gift of death’ as a ‘beingtowards-death’, inscribed wholly within the horizon of the question of being, where it appears as a simple annihilation and a passage to non-being. Into these exegeses on the general economy of the ontology and ethics of death, Derrida brings in the question of history again. In Aporias (1993), he speaks of the ‘hereness’ on which an existential analysis of death rests. It is not ‘immanence’ – he refers to Martineau’s slight mistranslation in the standard English text of Being and Time (1962) – but rein “diesseitig”, ‘on this side’, on the side of the Dasein from where one speaks of death. One can extend this assertion a bit further, Derrida assumes, in thinking of one’s relation with the ‘difference over there’; to start from “the idiomatic hereness of my language, my culture, and my belongings” (1993, 52). To note, this is not a concern with merely the ways of dying that Heidegger had opposed to his existential analytic of death, but an inalienable historicality of the ‘Being there’, the embeddedness of the existential as such. In a way, this works with, yet undermines, the previous opposition of death and ‘ways of dying’. At another level, and along with this, he speaks of the dependence of the analytic of Dasein on ‘Christian onto-theology’, and even further: [ N ]either the language nor the process of this analysis of death is possible without the Christian experience, indeed the Judeo-Christiano-Islamic experience of death to which the analysis testifies. (1993, 80)

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Derrida extends the scope of this comment to Levinas, and by implication, also to his own endeavor.16 That opens up the question of the historicality of death beyond the Judeo-Christian- Islamic traditions. It lets one think about the alterity of death in a religiosity that can embody its gods and goddesses, an exercise that I do not indulge in here. Embodying others might be thought of in different ways in such settings. In Chapter Five, I would try to imagine one such form in the figure of the woman-devi in certain Indic religions. The radicality of the otherness of death calls for a response with respect and non-aggression, not the drive to battle. One might recall, at this juncture, the almost erotic exhibition of the ‘death-drive’ in Jadab and Pagoldidi – an embracing of death that speaks of a deep respect for the life they espouse. A taking up that consists in giving away. Yet the act of giving, of sacrificing the self is barely innocent. The commitment, till death, towards one’s own vocation, a tinge of pride in one’s faith colors the act. At times, in a different setting, this might perpetrate violence. To remember, that violence carries within it a certain nobility of sacrifice. Thanatos and eros, respect and violence, interpenetrate and constitute each other. Medicine, as any other discipline of thought and act, has to work through and in this fraught field of mistaken identities. After all, it remains a tale of the most intimate fiction called ‘my body’. The recurrent and polyvalent motif of death that structures the plot called the science of medicine is unique in its radical externality to the subjectmatter, the stoff, life itself. The doctor experiences the ethical in his respect for the adversary, death. The ultimate singularity of this one event reflects the unanticipatability of the event – of any event not reducible to the predictions of a prior calculus. Probably not only the doctor… Probably not only the practice of medicine… With the possibility of total nuclear annihilation smiling its content face over the entirety of a globe, a respect for the nonthinkable infinitude of non-presence may be the only responsible way to respond to the familiar entity called death, death that surrounds the near alien experience of living. In the next chapter, I deal with a difference that rends the living body – the difference sexuale – to mark an immeasurable space of alterity within. This attempt to define a space would then become the impossibility of space and the impossibility of defining – the description of a non-place in and out of the (corpo)real.

Chapter 4 THINKING THE BODY: BEYOND THE TOPOS OF MAN Introduction The body is not one. This is a commonplace in the postmodern parlance. But how is the body rendered many? If the body of the individual is the unit of this multiplicity, that is, if bodies are many by virtue of the multiplicity of individuals who have bodies, at least two problems arise. The first, the logical problem, is that of defining the features of this universal category named the body – by what logical step does one mark and name a generality, the body, out of the particular individual bodies. The second problem arises out of the historicity of the category of individual – what about bodies of people who themselves do not mark their selves as individuals bounded by the proper definitions of the body.1 And both these questions show that once the im-mediate presence of the three dimensional space of the body is put under scrutiny, the obviousness of the individual as the unit of multiplicity gets displaced. One can then think of the singularities of the body at different registers – across identities (the body marked by caste, class, coloniality or gender) – being haunted by its others in each of these registers. In Chapter Two, we have discussed the need of addressing the roles of ideology along with those of power in the construction of the neutrality of the sexed body as a thing. An ideological work is implicit in attaching a primacy to the sexual difference among the infinite array of differences that rend the beings of bodies. A feminist task has not only to address the technologies of production of this sexed body but also to posit counter-ideological moments. The contingent and multiple dynamics of such counter-ideological moments is the subject matter of this chapter. As would probably be evident in the way I address the issue, I try to make sense of the multiplicity of these moments in terms of their singularities. Singularities, here, bear a certain relationship akin to family resemblance with generalities. The singularities need the generalities for their enunciations yet are not reducible to the generalities. One cannot enunciate the singularities without referring to the general. Yet the

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generality does not exhaust the import of the singular. This is different from the relationship between the universal and the particulars where the latter are instantiations, and as such are assimilable into the universal. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (1993, 16) had spoken of the need to assume “one’s ontological commitment as susceptible to an examination of value coding and then to presuppose a catachrestic name in order to ground our project and our investigation” so that s/he can be “thoroughly empirical without necessarily being blind [essentialist].” In this chapter I take that catachrestic name to be woman and try to think of multiple value codings that accrue to this name. The empirical ground – not necessarily ‘factual’ in the sense of non-fictitious – of a fiction provides the edifice where I trace these codings. This one name, woman, lead on to the implications of genre, community, property and propriety. The intimate difference between the workings of gender and that of sexed identity becomes crucial. The de-naturalizing of the scientific notion of the difference between sexes severely interrogates the purported distinction between sex and gender, a divide that much of feminist theory takes for granted. Again, the question of singularity of the ‘woman’ in its incalculable registers, as opposed to the universal called ‘woman’, comes to engage attention. Identities, in theories that famously come “after the subject,”2 are not entities with fixed structures or unmediated grounds. Each identity is not only defined contingently in terms of differences from a shifting array of other entities but is internally differentiated in temporal and spatial dimensions. Yet, in the dominant mode of thinking, certain identities – like that of the male, the white or the colonizer – are fixed in the sense that they set the terms of definition of other purportedly subordinate identities. Thus the displacements that rent all identity are straightened over in certain cases. Interestingly, the subordinate ones – like the woman, the black or the colonized – gain a flexibility that is thereby not accorded to the dominant. They often become metaphors for these displacements or slippages. Is it possible to resist the exclusionary moves thus instituted and, at the same moment, to posit a different ethical and political stance based on the metaphorics of displacement? What would be the specificities of each metaphor in the enunciation of the ethic? What is the specificity of ‘woman’ as one of such metaphoric resources? How does this use of metaphoricity relate to the ‘real’ women? How does the plurality of women negotiate the use of ‘woman’ as metaphor? Are these – the metaphoricity and the plurality – contradictory or are they reconcilable through a certain notion of singularity? These are some of the concerns I address, perhaps inadequately, in this chapter. Before going into the intricacies of my argument, I begin this introduction with some elementary reflections on the question of the body as one such concept that stands in for the unanticipatable in the quotidian.

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As I hope to show in the following sections, I want to use this metaphoricity of the corpus for figuring an ethico-politics of the (im)possible even when I interrogate the production of such a metaphor. Body-thoughts lead one to the question of the ‘woman’. The differentiation of the body into the duality of the male and the female is at least as naturalized as the ‘presence’ of the body itself. In such a commonsensical way of thinking, when one speaks of the body, one presupposes the difference between the sexes. When one speaks of the body in a neutral register, almost always (except a few circumscribed discourses like gynecology) one speaks of the male body. For the woman, who remains equivalent to the body in a mind/body binary, the body spoken of belongs to the man. Such that one may assert, echoing a celebrated aphorism, while the man owns the body the woman is the body. Going beyond this bind needs figurations that chart the cartographies of the known body and, at the same instant, bear traces of non-spaces of the beyond. These figurations may be multiple, based on divergent generalities, yet must remain open to the singularity of each enunciative moment. This chapter evidently deals with the relations between deconstruction and sexual difference. It tries to put into a productive conjunction the ethicopolitical implications of the former with the feminist concerns of the latter. Though there is a not quite small literature on the theme, I hope to intervene through a rethinking of the spatiality of the body. A close reading of certain key Derridean texts on the issue enables me to trace Derrida’s take on the term ‘woman’ as the philosophical language of ‘man’ constitutes it. The question of the body as the space of enactment of sexual difference becomes central in the endeavor. I combine readings from other Derridean texts to bring out certain possibilities of going beyond the phallogocentric closures. As with Derrida’s other writings, possibilities appear to be impossibilities at the same instant. I end with some other deconstructive takes on the issue of sexual difference, most prominently with those of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Whenever one speaks of the body, almost always it bespeaks of a sexually differentiated body. Even when the body involved is purportedly neutral, it refers to the body of the ‘man’. Sex differentiation is so internalized here that the absence of the ‘woman’ is not even noticed. For the woman, the body – the only realm she has to her self (as opposed to that of the mind) – is not her own. It is already and always masculine, in the model of man. The question of the body gets implicated with a feminist interest. The question then becomes, how does one mark a space beyond that of the heterosexualism of man.3 Is such an effort not only destined not to succeed but not to be ‘productive’ as well? Does such a u-topia – of a woman’s space beyond the space of man – only serve the known topos of the male desire by reproducing the tantalizing allure of the ever-unknown enigma called the woman?

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In other words, the debate centers on how to place the ‘woman’ with respect to the world of man. If she was placed inside that world but as the dominated, the task of feminism would simply be to bring about a reversal in her position. The dissent would be, this act constrains her imagination to a view that belongs to the man. If the ‘woman’ is placed outside as well as in a dominated inside, she might, in addition to her struggles within, act as a resource for alternative imaginings. The disagreement would then be that this would rob her of her ‘real’ existence and convert her into a metaphoric resource. I begin in the first section (following this introduction) by tracing, through a reading of Derrida’s Spurs, the ‘desire of man’ in its fixity to see how the field operates by turning the ‘woman’ into a metaphor of slippage. In the next section, I will go on to deal with the notion of sexual difference and with two names that Derrida uses to mark a space beyond – Khora and Geschlecht – the sexually marked space. I will refer to two different uses (by Derrida and Butler) of the concept khora that bring out two divergent positions on the imagining of such a space. Again, I remain partial to one of these (Derrida) without letting go of the other altogether. For Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, whom I deal with in the third section, the figures she chooses to signify a space beyond are more ontically connected to the ‘woman’ and bear the marks of intimacy in disquiet of proximity. The clitoris and the mother are two such figures. On certain other occasions, Spivak chooses yet more particular figures like the characters of Mahasweta Devi’s novels ‘Dopdi’, ‘Jashoda’, ‘Douloti’, or the Pterodactyl, and sometimes the ‘Devi’ in an Indic setting, or ‘Lucy’ in J. M. Coetzee’s novel Disgrace. What is important for my contention here is the multiplicity of the modes of figuring the ‘woman’ that Spivak or Derrida seems to point at. The existing literature on each of these modes of figuration – like the khora or geschlecht – deals in detail with the dynamic of the specific figure and how that dynamic relates to the ethico-political concern of going beyond a structure with the help of tools that belong to the present structure. My focus is on the (im) possibility of any one of these figures to address the concern in its fullness. These figures are multiple, each unique in its own singular enunciation, and yet have traces of the generality of the ethical gesture. In the final and the fourth section of the chapter I bring in an ‘other’ fictive apparition. The figure – the woman/maya – bears the weight of fictional attempts at such figurations. I read a Bangla text by Kamal Kumar Majumdar to enact that gesture and its limitations. A deconstructive move to go beyond the phallocentric morphe has to posit the generality of ‘sexual difference’ through multiple singularities rather than through one universal u-topia. The figurations thus proffered bring out the non-repeatable ‘event’ness of the ethical encounter with the other. The tensions between the generality of the ethical gesture and the singularities of

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the enunciations weave the texture of this chapter. These tensions – as I hope to make clear in the course of my writing – do not repeat the relationships of assimilation and instantiation between the universal and the particulars.

The Woman in Ontological Difference The title for this lecture was to have been the question of style. However – it is woman who will be my subject… (Derrida 1979, 1) In Derrida’s use of the word ‘subject’ in the above quotation, he alludes at least to three meanings. First, woman as the theme of his lecture, subject as subject matter, the object of discussion. He wants to talk about the woman, about the identity of the ‘woman’, about her being and non-being, her ontology and the property of the proper. Second, woman as the agent-subject, the ‘owner’ of this writing that is being written under the proper name Derrida. As if Derrida, in this text, in the structure and dynamic of writing, is becoming woman, Derrida-writing-woman-writing-Derrida… The steadfast forthrightness of truth is supplanted by the elusive enigma of womanliness. The sharp metallic edge of Spurs is replaced by, covered over with, the smooth folds of cloth – the sail furled around the oblong pole, the mysterious textile crease around the umbrella rod. The subject here bears the connotation of the agent. And the third, one can hardly forget, is the association of subjection – of the relation between the master and the slave – in the notion of the subject.4 The woman is thus, at the same time, the object, the agent, and the subjectus to the sovereign. In the unapproachable folds of her object-ness and her subjection resides her enigmatic agency. [ I ]f style5 were a man (much as the penis, according to Freud is the >), then writing would be a woman. (57) There is no such thing as a woman, as a truth in itself of woman in itself. (101) Of course, this allows for the woman (as writing) a certain supplementary excess that cannot be derived from the rule of man (the stylus and the style). Yet does it not replicate that eternal male imagination of possessing the penetrating, rigid agent of creation? Is not this inevitable, as Derrida’s discussion has as its center the famous misogynist Nietzsche and his Heideggerian exposé? This positing of ‘woman’ as a radical other does not entail the giving away of feminist politics, but implies an understanding of the limits of feminism in the spirit of deconstruction. The search for a secure ethical ground for feminist politics goes against this spirit and is perhaps symptomatic of a forgetting of

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the undecidability that rents proper names like ‘man’ and ‘woman’. This search is symptomatic of a desire to be in the process of propriation “(appropriation, expropriation, taking, taking possession, gift and barter, mastery, servitude, etc.),” a process “that organize[s] both the totality of language’s process and symbolic exchange in general.” (Derrida 1979, 109–111). I am not asserting that it is possible to go way beyond the limits of property and propriation. My concern is a certain negligence. Shifting metaphors in quick succession, it is the question of turning a deaf ear to – even if not bringing in to visibility – the ‘call of the wholly other’. My aim is to speak of the allure of touching the abject domain of alterity. We may shift our attention to the argument that Derrida weaves, with and around Nietzsche’s ‘umbrella’. Spurs 6 starts with a few quotes from a letter of Nietzsche. This is followed by thirteen small chapters or sections – some of which run only for a page or two. Together, they constitute a longish, loosely knit conversational essay. The argument, nevertheless, is complex and well knit. And as is Derrida’s wont, the argument follows subtexts and associations at least as much as it follows a rigorous logical order. The second section, “Distances”, starts with the comment: In the question of style there is always the weight or examen of some pointed object. (37) This assertion follows the association of ‘style’ (the Latin Stilus) phonetically and etymologically with the sharp and pointed ‘stylus’. Extending the associative contexts further, Derrida links the question of style to the violent penetration of a stiletto or a rapier, to the quill that secretes writing or the phallus that penetrates the hymen, to the prow of a sailing vessel or the “projection of the ship which surges ahead to meet the sea’s attack and cleave its hostile surface” (39). It can even be …that rocky point, also called an eperon, on which the waves break at the harbor’s entrance (39). And yet, Derrida is tireless in reminding, style is not solely an instrument of ‘vicious attack’, it can also be used as “protection against the threat of such an attack” (37). Style uses its spurs as a protective against “the terrifying, blinding, mortal threat (of that) which presents itself, which obstinately thrusts itself into view” (39). And style protects “the presence, the content, the thing itself, meaning, truth” (39); a truth that does not seem to bear the chasm of difference within. Style protects the presence of truth or the logos from that which is already effaced, from that which has already been excluded.7 And the

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chasm of non-being (Derrida mentions death and the ghost) inscribes itself on the body of the (present) being. The body that always is terrified. The ghost that watches without the blink of an eye is …like calm, gazing, gliding, sweeping neutral being (Mittelwesen). (45) The reference to the ‘neutral being’, as is evident in the Geschlecht series of writings and in the interview with Christie Macdonald (“Choreographies”), is important for Derrida in a thinking of a beyond to sexual difference. I shall discuss it a bit later. Woman, as opposed to the intimate attack of the sharply pointed style, works (is it in absence?), “seduces” (49) “from a distance”. She works under the cover of distance’s very chasm, the veiled enigma of proximation. The third section of Spurs is called “Voiles/Veils”. Derrida follows Nietzsche’s argument to its limit. Woman, according to this argument, is a non-identity, a non-figure, a simulacrum, in short, non-truth. But, Derrida tells us not to forget that, for Nietzsche the “abyssal divergence of truth” (51), that untruth, is truth. What is the woman then – the untruth that is the truth? And then, the epistemology of truth changes: [ T ]ruth is like a woman. It resembles the veiled movement of feminine modesty. …[ T ]he complicity (rather than the unity) between woman, life, seduction, modesty – all the veiled and veiling effects –…is a deadly problem: that which reveals itself but once (das enthult sich uns einmal). (51) If truth is illusion and woman the illusory representation of truth, then, woman is truth. And, unlike the ‘credulous philosopher’ who dogmatically believes in truth and woman – thereby understanding ‘nothing’ – “she at least knows that there is no truth” (53). Identity is the non-place of this mise-en-abyme, in the middle of the two surfaces that reflect each other infinitely. Remember the body that the woman is, is the body of the man. And so, what is this body that the man owns and the woman is? The question looms abyssal for the (wo)man. Let us track the logical progression of the argument to a point before proceeding further. To think seriously about any ethics or politics like feminism, class struggle, anti-colonial struggle, which locate their sources in specific identities (the woman, the proletariat, the colonized, the black, or some other criterion), one has to think about the identity around which the ethico-politics is constructed. In the endeavor to understand what a specific identity is, in trying to follow the itinerary of the construction of the self, one may reach the question of the (im)possibility of a ‘pure’ being. That being is not dependant on a concrete identity-category. One reaches the ontological question of the

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ontico-ontological difference. This is definitely not the only end-point of such an inquiry. A historical charting of genealogies of identities is a very important object of questioning. But that does not exhaust the possibilities of the search. On the contrary, an ontological questioning may very well complement and enrich historical investigation, and vice versa – a point barely recognized by presentday social sciences despite their claims to ‘high theory’. The complementing of the ontological and the historical is counter-intuitive to the received vision of the division of ‘theory’ into the historical and the phenomenological. I speak here of a complementing through interruption, where the interrupting of the historical through ontology is necessary for a conceptualization of history in terms of the trace-structure as opposed to a sense of history as full presence. Similarly, ontology needs to be interrupted by history to bring in the sense of deferral that haunts presence in its purported fullness. Derrida, in Spurs, reads Heidegger to have affirmed a primary role of ontico-ontological difference in the making up of the identity of a self. This difference is primary in Dasein, the being there of the human. The other differences – of sex, class, race, or caste – are premised on, and in their turn affect, this fundamental difference. Derrida puts into question the primacy of this ontological dispersion: [ T ]he question of sexual difference…[is] not at all a regional question in a larger order which would subordinate it first to the domain of a general ontology, subsequently to that of a fundamental ontology and finally to the question of the truth of being itself (1979, 109). For him, sexual difference is not a regional problem within the larger field of ontology. Ontology assumes the problem of being proper, of propriety and property – ontology presupposes propriation. The question of being proper opens up the question, ‘proper to what?’ It brings in the import of the name that this ‘what’ implies. Being proper means to be adequate to the name that marks being – to inhabit the space cleared by a name, within a name, marked by a name. Derrida points at the intimacy of the name and the being. Proper name presumes sexuation: in the process of propriation into the ‘proper name’ sexual difference is axiomatically presumed. Thus sexual difference remains an essential condition for being as such. Does this gesture – by positing sexual difference as fundamental to ontology – undermine the blurring of the sex/gender binary? Or, on the contrary, does this move squarely bring back the question of sexual identity into the realm of construction, thus de-naturalizing it, and goes on to trace the dynamics of the process of the figuration to a pre-ontological substratum? This move questions any pure existence beyond making.

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The social/linguistic dimension of propriation is an unassailable part and preserve of being in Derrida. And sexual difference is an element of this preserve. Sexual difference as a metaphor of difference works in the realm of ontology. Ontology is in its turn placed within the primacy of the onticoontological difference. This ontico-ontological difference presupposes sexual difference. Thus, sexual difference is a metaphor placed within the name and existence of sexual difference. Its metaphoricity is linked to the ontic. But then, is it possible to think of a ‘space’ beyond that of the inalienable being in/of sexual difference? The following section deals with the economy of such a gesture.

Property Talks: The (Non)Space of the Name [ W ]hat if we were to approach here…the area of a relationship to the other where the code of sexual marks would no longer be discriminating? (Derrida 1997a) To address the above question, I deal with two names that Derrida uses to mark such a space of non-discrimination – Khora and Geschlecht. Of course, the addressal does not guarantee answers. I start with the two different uses (by Derrida and Butler) of the concept khora that bring out two divergent positions on the question. I remain partial to one of these (Derrida) without letting go of the other altogether. But before that, a brief discussion on the marking of the space within, a charting of the discriminatory terrain of man is in order. Is it then that we remain always already inserted into a structure, which constitutes a destiny, of being, propriation and sexual difference? For Derrida, this insertion, the closure of identity, becomes possible by making a leap across the abyss of unanticipatability, without a prior calculus. It is a gift. Elsewhere (Derrida 1992), he has spoken of the gift in its relation to economy. The concept of this gift is a beyond to – an interruption in the circulation of – a circular economy of giving with its anticipation of return (the economy of a Maussian rendering of the structure of the gift). To quote Derrida: [ E ]conomy no doubt includes the values of law (nomos) and of home (oikos, home, property, family, the hearth, the fire indoors)… [ E ]conomy implies the idea of exchange, of circulation, of return. The figure of the circle is obviously at the center… [ I ]s not the gift, if there is any, also that which interrupts economy? …That which opens the circle so as to defy reciprocity or symmetry, the common measure,…[ T ]he given of the gift…must not come back to the

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giving… It must not circulate, it must not be exchanged, it must not in any case be exhausted, as a gift, by the process of exchange… If the figure of the circle is essential to economics, the gift must remain aneconomic. (6–7) And he goes on to add, “the gift is the impossible” (7). Of course, this is different from a humanist ethic of giving, an ethic that empirically does not expect a return and thus gets the return of a good conscience. This is the structure of an event (“which is one meaning of ereignis”, see Derrida 1979, 119) that interrupts the structure of economy with a suddenness.8 It is a sudden, unanticipated break in the economy of sexuality and identity, not determinable by prior machinations, an impossible burst of possibilities: The history of Being becomes a history in which no being, nothing, happens except Ereignis’ unfathomable process. The proper-ty of the abyss…is necessarily the abyss of proper-ty, the violence of an event which befalls without Being. (Derrida 1979, 119) What is it to treat the event called sexual difference as a gift beyond the economy of proper identities, as a gift that goes on to make possible the very premises of being? One import of the move is the ‘gendering’ of the gift. It is to remember that the aneconomic gift of being is already, and in itself, gendered. Sexual difference marks the very structure of the gift. The gift of the name is always and already marked by the sign of the phallus. For Derrida, in his series of Geschlecht writings,9 this paradoxically relates to a certain neutrality of the Dasein. He (Derrida 1991a, 384) quotes Heidegger: For the being which constitutes the theme of this analytic, the title ‘man’ (Mensch) has not been chosen, but the neutral title ‘das Dasein’. Just a little later, Derrida marks this neutrality to be in the direction of sexual neutrality, and a certain asexuality [sexlessness – Geschlechtslosigkeit]. He goes on to explain that this neutrality is, for Heidegger, neither negative, nor necessarily related to sexual difference. On the contrary, in his later texts, “thirty years later” (385), the word Geschlecht “will be charged with all its polysemic richness: sex, genre, family, stock, race, lineage, generation” (385). But Derrida does not miss the import of the fact that …among all the traits of man’s humanity that are thus neutralized [signified by the word Geschlechtslosigkeit], along with anthropology, ethics, or metaphysics, the first that the very word “neutrality” makes one think of, the first that Heidegger thinks of in any case, is sexuality. (385)

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The body is so much naturalized as the sexed male body, that neutralization almost ‘naturally’ refers to a passage from the masculine to the neutral. Still later in the essay, Derrida points out that the neutralization refers not as much to sexuality as such, as to the marks of difference, and specifically, sexual duality (387). Differentiating sexual duality from difference as such, his reference is to a certain positivity of, and not a negative implication to, the asexuality being spoken of. He quotes Heidegger (387) again: But such asexuality is not the indifference of an empty nothing…, the feeble negativity of an indifferent ontic nothing. In its neutrality, Dasein is not just anyone no matter who, but the originary positivity…and power of essence… For Derrida, …here one must think of predifferential, or rather a predual, sexuality – which does not necessarily mean unitary, homogeneous, or undifferentiated… (387–388) Thus the ‘absence’ of Geschlecht in the Dasein is, here, a positive potential rather than a negation of ‘presence’, an inversion of the unanticipatability of death gone (to the) past, a possibility of sexual multiplicity rendered impossible by sexual duality that marks the presence of the being. It may lead to the question: [ H ]ow does multiplication get arrested in difference? And in sexual difference? (401) In a slightly later text marked by the proper name Jacques Derrida, an authorless yet authorized text called “Women in the Beehive: A Seminar with Jacques Derrida” (1987–1984), the “speaker referred to as ‘response’,” that gives the account of the responses of Derrida to queries of the seminarparticipants, tries to unravel the connections of the gift and the neutrality of the Dasein. Through the incalculable suddenness of the gift, Dasein’s neutrality becomes the impossible (remember, “the gift is the impossible”). The gift of sexuality is not of non-sexuality but of sexual non-determination in the sense of opposition. It is sexuality out of frame of the known duality, “totally aleatory to what we are familiar with in the term ‘sexuality’” (1987–1984, 198). Of course, Derrida is aware of a type of neutralization that “can reconstruct the phallocentric privilege,” the neuter in the model of man. But what he is speaking of here is in the order of the incalculable, of absolute heterogeneity

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and undecidability. He calls this a liberating of the field of sexuality for a different, multiple sexuality: At that point there would be no more sexes…there would be one sex for each time. One sex for each gift. A sexual difference for each gift. That can be produced within the situation of a man and a woman, a man and a man, a woman and a woman, three men and a woman, etc.”(199) The gift of Geschlecht, if we can speak thus, is a figure of a beyond to the familiar terrain of sexual difference. Interestingly, it has certain other connotations. Tina Chanter, in a short piece (1997),10 has noted how the multiplicity of meanings of the word Geschlecht can be productive of a sensitivity to associations of the issue of sexuality to other issues. In that piece, she discusses race. Another very important matter that Derrida’s writings in this series address, and which has been discussed in detail by Spivak (1994) and Krell (1992), is the question of animality. In Geschlecht II, Derrida explicates the “problem of man, of man’s humanity, and of humanism” (1987, 163). He marks the use of the word Geschlecht as “an ensemble, a gathering together…, an organic community in a nonnatural but spiritual sense, that believes in the infinite progress of the spirit through freedom” (163), as an ‘we’ that becomes in the end, humanity. The role of the ‘hand’ in the definition and the partition of the human from the animal are discussed in detail. Derrida starts with a discussion of the mode of presence according to either of the two modes, Vorhandenheit (independent presence to hand) or Zuhandenheit (ready to hand). Dasein is neither. But the other in whose relation Dasein presents itself has to be present in either of the two modes. Derrida puts the question thus: What hand founds the other? The hand that is related to the thing as maneuverable tool or the hand as relation to the thing as subsisting and independent object? (176) And he goes on to quote Heidegger (182): Man has no hands, but the hand occupies, in order to have in hand, man’s essence. This hand that Heidegger speaks of is related to writing, not to caress or desire. This hand is in the singular. It is not the prehensile organ that the apes also resemble to have, but the singular hand of the man which speaks and writes. The general principle of difference that is at work in the ‘arresting’ of

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multiplication of sexes in a sexual difference as duality, thus works at the level of the differentiating principle of the human from the animal: [ E ]very inauguration of the world by Dasein is struck through by the inaccessible animal. (Spivak 1994, 31) Elsewhere (1991), Derrida has spoken of how the declaration of “Thou shalt not kill” had not included the whole of the living in the Judeo-Christian tradition. It has been the indictment against the killing of the other man, not the killing of the living in general, and Derrida has spoken of a ‘general animality’ in Of Spirit (quoted by Spivak 1994, 32). I do not go into the details of Spivak’s clear indictment, following Derrida, of the Heideggerian attempt to mark the animal “off from Dasein”. Although – as she emphasizes – “the animal has some relationship with the world” (31), I stress the point that, for Derrida, even the space of Geschlecht is not a pure unsullied reserve of multiple possibilities. It is also marked by the discriminating and dualizing powers of/ in being. Derrida prefers not the word u-topia, not a non-topos, but a different name for the space he, in a way, aspires for – khora. A brief introduction to the concept of khora itself is in order. Derrida’s argument regarding the ‘place of the woman’ is now quite well known through his exchanges (1997a, 1984) with Christie Macdonald and Verena Conly.11 What is the place offered to the woman in his theory? To such a query, he responds by rendering problematic the notion of ‘a place for woman’. It reminds one of the home and the kitchen. He speaks of a choreography of voices, the multiplicity of sexually marked voices, rather than a place for the woman. If one relates this unease with the place with a prior focus on the space named khora in his writings, it might be productive of a different figuration for the ‘woman’, I contend. Hans Ramo points out that the term ‘choreography’ (writing dance) derives from a root (Greek word for dance, choreia) different from that of ‘chorography’ (mapping a region) that derives from the Greek word for space: chora. “Still, there is an element of similarity in that the Greek word for dance originally had a connection to a (certain) place” (1999, 324), he admits. Derrida’s khora is a variant spelling of this chora with the connotations of space. But what kind of a space is it? Ramo speaks of two types of space in Greek thought, analogous to the two divisions of time. Chronos-time is abstract (homogeneous?) time and kairos-time is meaningful, ‘value’-laden time. Topos is concrete place and chora abstract space. He refers to the Homeric (Iliad 8.491) use of chora as a definite space, a piece of ground that is clear of the dead (not filled by the deadly or the dead). There is a later shift in the meaning of the term to an indefinite, partly occupied space

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(not void). Chora is thus not emptiness, but also not the “condensed, concrete, and meaningful” place called topos. According to Ramo, for Plato, …chora is a non-place of non-origin and a ‘space’ for giving and creation. (314) Derrida inaugurates the discussion on what he calls khora with the short and incisive sentence: Khora reaches us, and as the name. (1995, 89) That which is a non-place, cannot lay claim to the proper place of a name, is thus given a name, khora.12 That this name, the (by definition) non-present referent of the name, defies the “logic of noncontradiction” is evident. Derrida refers it to a “third genus” that is neither “sensible” nor “intelligible”. It is said to belong to a third genus of discourse, beyond the mythos/logos binary. And the name khora is by definition, from its inception, a misnomer, a mistranslation of a non-referent, for it is not amenable to reference. Interpretations, if we remember the form/matter binary of Greek thought, tries to give form to it, determine it by naming. Khora, named receptacle (dekhomenon) or place (khora) in Timaeus where Plato discusses it in detail, remains …inaccessible, impassive, “amorphous”,…and still virgin, with a virginity that is radically rebellious against anthropomorphism… (95) Derrida raises the point of ‘its’ association with the ‘woman’. Plato compares khora to a mother or a nurse. Derrida is aware of the intricate twinings of the text that places this fiction told by someone who has heard it from someone else and then on to a far back teller of tales, in a text that is ambitious enough to speak of the origins of the Platonic world, of a genealogy of the great Solon – it speaks of the origin of the human race, and that is the same thing as the origin of the world. Derrida repeats the word anthropomorphism, a morphe, the body of the anthropos that underlie the discussion. He untiringly reminds us that the figures that ‘describe’ khora are, of necessity, inadequate, false; the figures of receptacle, mother, nurse, or imprint-bearer. Philosophy cannot speak of these directly: Philosophy cannot speak philosophically of that which looks like its ‘mother’, its ‘nurse’, its ‘receptacle’, or its ‘imprint-bearer’. As such, it speaks only of the father and the son, as if the father engendered it all on his own. (126)

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At the end of the essay, Derrida points at the Aristotelian interpretation of khora as matter (hyle) but reminds us that Plato never used this term to qualify khora. Judith Butler approaches the idea of chora, differently, in her discussion of matter in the context of what she calls the feminization of matter. Depending on the discussion of Irigaray, she brings up the two ways in which the feminine is treated by the masculine. The subordinated other within the binary is called specular feminine, and that which is excluded through an erasure is the excessive feminine. She is perfectly aware of the impossibility of naming the excess, which, by definition, cannot be named. Yet, in a nuanced argument, Butler is able to make the point that the excluded gets the figure of the feminine and the included gets defined as a binary other of the masculine. Thus the ‘woman’, if she is, is outside the symbolic domain of the man. Remember my earlier reference to the woman defined as the body and the body defined in the model of man, so that the woman is and does not have the body. Butler, in discussing chora and Plato’s concept of materiality (hypodoche), succinctly marks that this discourse on materiality: …does not permit the notion of the female body as the human form. (1993, 53) Agreeing with Derrida that the chora cannot be identified with the feminine, Butler claims to take the argument a step forward. To me, there are two aspects of this step she speaks of. One, naming it a “nonthematizable materiality” (42), Butler characterizes the feminine as the necessary foundation to the thematized symbolic, the feminine that is rendered impossible by the structure of the symbolic that it itself brings into existence.13 As such, the possible resisting move to this exclusion is an inversion – to bring in the feminine to the symbolic as a resource for resistance. This possibility flows from the second aspect I want to point at, that of the Irigarayian mimesis of the dominant as an act of insubordination. This is to displace the originary displacement perpetrated on the feminine. The strategic move for the ‘woman’ is to mimic the rules of the ‘male’ symbolic. As ‘woman’ is by definition excluded from this symbolic, the act of mimicking becomes an act of transgression. To speak of the ‘woman’s place is to displace the displacement of the ‘woman’ from space. And we may very well remember, this is in perfect agreement with Butler’s notion of the Lesbian Phallus as an oppositional move to phallogocentrism. Is Khora a figure of a possible inversion, or that of an impossible responsibility that would question the act of figuration itself ? Put into such binary terms which neither Derrida nor Butler seems to imply –they differ in point of stress – I would choose the latter. To remain within the logic of inversion, even when

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one extends the implications of inversion to a displacement, is to remain oblivious of the many unanticipated possibilities of the impossible. This logic correctly reminds that imaginations of the radical outside have to be derivable from the present; these imaginations need to be rooted in the ever-inadequate present. Yet this tends to forget that the future-to-come is not wholly derivable from the present. It is important that the ethical moment has to bear the marks of a radical unanticipatability. What is vital for my contention here is the multiplicity of the modes of figuring the ‘woman’ that Spivak or Derrida seems to imply and employ.

Figuring Sexual Difference: Multiple Singularities Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s submission is that, as the male philosopher dissipates the fixity of the identity of the man in the enigma of woman, the woman philosopher might turn her attention to the transparent rigidity of man. The question she addresses is: What is man that the itinerary of his desire creates such a text? (Spivak 1997a, 62, repeated with emphasis in 67) Let us try to trace her argument’s course. All human beings are irreducibly displaced, whereas, in the discourse that privileges the center, women alone have been diagnosed as such.14 For Derrida, miming the privileged discourse while unsettling it, woman is the name/metaphor of all displacements, and displacement is the event which he tries to bring about in all centric figures. The woman who is the ‘model’ of this deconstructive discourse remains a woman generalized and defined in terms of the faked orgasm and other varieties of denial in acceptance. Spivak goes on to mark the ‘masculine’ location from which this double displacement of the woman acts. She refers to the scene of Derrida’s discussion of a pantomime commented on by Mallarme – “faking a faked orgasm which is also a faked crime” (50). The woman ‘fakes’ the desire of man, for that is the only desire available to her. Her orgasm is already faked. Yet for the (male) philosopher Derrida to trace this displacement of the woman is to perpetrate another displacement on her, a doubling. For Spivak: [ The hymen’s] ‘presence’ is appropriately deconstructed, and its curious property appropriated to deliver the signature of the philosopher. (51) Man can problematize but not fully disown his status as a subject. Deconstruction thus may be viewed as an attempt to a feminization of philosophy and not a

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masculine use of woman as instrument of self-assertion. Yet this feminization still remains ‘of ’ philosophy itself. The language of a woman’s desire does not enter this enclosure… [ I ]t is the phallus that learns the trick of coming close to faking the orgasm here, rather than the hymen coming into its own as the indefinitely displaced effect of the text. (50–51) Women remain as the instrument of male self-deconstruction. [ Derrida,] differentiating himself from the phallocentric tradition under the aegis of a(n idealized) woman who is the ‘sign’ of the indeterminate… cannot think that the sign ‘woman’ is indeterminate by virtue of its access to the tyranny of the text of the ‘proper’…that [Spivak has] called the suppression of the clitoris… (Spivak 1987–1986, 91). Spivak uses two concept-metaphors to point at ways beyond – the clitoris and the mother. How is Spivak’s critique of Derrida different from those other feminist criticisms which point at the attenuation of the possibility of women’s agency when one posits the woman as the radically other? When she characterizes Derrida’s attempt in deconstructing male desire as man’s ‘proper’ appropriation of the displacement of ‘woman’, she seems very near to such a position. Yet she is always wary of the fact that Derrida’s move is different from the ‘masculine use of woman as instrument of self-assertion’. Spivak appreciates the call of the wholly other and is far from reducing politics to a calculable cartography of possibilities thought from within the dynamic of the self. Aware of the inevitability of figuring the other in terms of the within, she points at some problems of figuring the other as ‘woman’ in the way Derrida does. She wants to keep possibilities open for figures less general and more intimately associated with the ontology of the woman. The clitoris and the mother are two such figures. In certain other occasions, Spivak chooses yet more particular figures like the characters of Mahasweta Devi’s novels ‘Dopdi’, ‘Jashoda’, Douloti, or ‘the Pterodactyl’, and sometimes the ‘Devi’ in an Indic setting, or Lucy in Coetzee’s novel Disgrace. These singular figures bring out the intersection of generalities in more intricate and minute details. Feminism, for Spivak is inevitably multiple-issued as opposed to a base on a single issue of the ‘woman’.15 Maybe, the singularity of each event is thus figured in better, though not thereby doing away with generalities. On the contrary, this might open the way to a perceiving of other generalities.16

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Spivak has posited the figure of clitoris as signifying an excess to the dominant economy of the uterus – clitoral as sign of excess in/of the woman, a clitoral economy vis-à-vis the uterine economy – in multiple instances. If we remember the notion of gendering the gift of being, Spivak’s gesture would be something like proposing a gift of the clitoris instead of the gift of the phallus, to institute the name. She has used the practice of clitoridectomy as shorthand for the forcible exclusion of the woman’s desire acting in the proprietorial rule of the man. The figure of motherhood, for her, does not necessarily exhaust itself within the uterine economy. Especially in “French Feminism Revisited” (1993), she has dealt with the matter in detail. The figures of four women philosophers/thinkers – Simone de Beauvoir, Helene Cixous, Marie-Aimee Helie-Lucas, and Luce Irigaray – structure her argument. Not going into the details of that labyrinthine reasoning exquisitely executed, I broach a few points relevant to our discussion. One, almost opposed to the Derridean project of making ‘woman’ occupy the place of a general critique of the history of western thought (Spivak 1984) as an act of unfleshed figuration/nomination, the name of the mother bears the paleonymy of embodied women, “homogenizing multiplicity into intelligibility”. The ontological inaccessibility – in that, in the dominant view, the womb is not accessible to the ontology of the full person and remains as a precursor, not yet full, a person – of the womb marks it a prepropriative site. Two, despite differences among the four thinkers referred above, Spivak has woven a common textile with them around the figure of the mother and the ethical imperative of sexual difference. Beauvoir’s female body in gestation is not biologism, Spivak asserts. For her, the pregnant body is conceived as species-life rather than species-being, a site of a wholly other rather than man-consolidating other. It is the prepropriative space before access to the properness of the species-being of each female subject. Mother is the situation that cannot situate itself but must take responsibility. With Cixous, woman must be faithful to the subversive logic of plurality and thus become part of the body of all struggles. The fundamental struggle is to split, open, and fill all generalized, unified struggles with plurality. The “production of individuality” for her is not merely an exclusionist repressive construction, but a necessary underived fiction, the agent’s springboard for a decision in the face of radical undecidability. Helie-Lucas calls for true internationalism that can be read not as inter but antre17 – speaking of the pouvoir/savoir of the feminine. She places the female individual in a political rather than the familial collective. For Irigaray, the maternal-feminine is a limit, an envelope, the other place consolidated into her norm. Mother-woman is the place separated from “its” place, not having its own place it becomes the place for the other, the “him”. The propriety of the ‘mother’ is in hosting the ‘proper’,

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in being the place where the proper is ‘born’, and as such, in not having a proper place of her own. This brings us to the third point I want to talk about – sexual difference for Irigaray as Spivak reads her. Sexual difference here, not a decisive biological fact, is posited as the undecidable in the face of which the now displaced “normal” must risk ethicopolitical decisions. Sexual difference is the limit to ethics. An ethical position must entail universalization of the singular, and one universal cannot be inclusive of difference. For Irigaray, the positing of the multiple is not the solution: At best, this singular act would allow for a balancing act between the one and the many, but the one remains the model which, more or less openly, controls the hierarchy of multiplicity: the singular is unique and/ but ideal, Man. Concrete singularity is only a copy of the ideal, an image. [ P ]rivileging concrete singularity over ideal singularity does not allow us to challenge the privilege of a universal category valid for all men and all women… To get out from this all powerful model of the one and the many, we must move on to the model of the two, a two which is not a replication of the same, nor one large and the other small, but made up of two which are truly different. (Irigaray 1995, 11) So Irigaray takes the risk of positing two universals – sexual difference – two different ethical worlds, opened up by the gender-divided caress. Woman is to become the fecund agent of the caress. In a Levinasian phenomenology of eros, within the confines of a ‘reproductive ethics’, fecund caress can become indistinguishable from violence. Irigaray degenders the active-passive division (in erotic love). Both partners do things and are not inevitably heterosexual. The caressing hands may then remind the other of the prepropriative site, the impossible origin of the ethical that can only be figured, falsely, as the subject as child-in-mother. Irigaray thus gives the woman to the other, to rememorate being-in-the-mother as the impossible threshold of ethics (not inaugurating the law of the father). This is a rewriting of the fecundity of the caress as the figuring of the prepropriative into an (im)possible appropriation. Here again, Spivak brings in the question of the colonial divide that (French) feminism tends to forget a bit too soon. How does sexual difference mark the struggle for the equality of men and women? Despite a suspicion that the former undermines the latter, they can be shown to complement each other at one level. The fight for equal rights is not for the same set of rights. Equality and sameness may (though not necessarily) act at different registers. The woman’s body, marked in a specific way for the

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proper reproduction of the ‘human’ in society, may demand some special ‘different’ rights within the ambit of equality. The sexual difference we are speaking of has a separate itinerary – it “frames in undecidability the sure ground of decision” (Spivak 1993, 159). Yet when the ‘minimum’ requirements for ‘life’ – the defining of normative notions have problematic implications, yet one has to take decisions over the undecidable – are at stake, it is foolish to not work for them within the boundary of sameness. Conceptually, one has to work through and with the parameters of equality to reach their limits; difference is inconceivable without sameness. To put sameness to question, threatening it with undecidability, the moment of sexual difference has to inscribe its course on the body of the same. Only, it re-members the calculus of equal rights, respectfully. Otherwise, the violence of androcentric hierarchy is repeated. For that, one has to go back to the story of man and the itinerary of his desire. Well aware of the gradients in power and economy operating across the imperial/colonial divide that mark their traces upon the post-colonial theater of ‘independent’ nation states, of the inequities and imbalances that enmesh the cosmopolitan playground of global capital and national identity politics, Spivak remains wary of rejecting the goods of sameness in their entirety. Consistent with her refusal to forget the centering of the subject in a deconstructive move, she favors the “risk of responsibility” to decide, to take “decision[s]” that “[require] persistent supplementation”. Working both in and out of the universals in the registers of global political economy, culture and continental feminisms, not oblivious of the sanctioned ignorance even of the latter,18 Spivak points at the paleonymy – the traces of the history of the uses that cling tenaciously to words – that undercuts many a resisting move, even those that highlight the body in its sexual difference: Sexual difference is the critical intimacy…that can presumably think sexual difference as radical alterity, always from within sexual difference, of course. (Spivak 1993) For Spivak, the body of the third world woman – as it bears the burdens of paleonymy, not only of the ‘uterine social organization’ that structures western norms of womanhood but also that of the purported traditions of the ‘oriental societies’ – signifies an economy of excess. This is an excess to the economy of reproduction materialized in the womb, the excess figured in the organ clitoris. The womb is everything that the woman as an object of “exchange, passage, or possession in terms of reproduction” signifies. Situated in the haloed circle of motherhood and the family, the womb keeps in motion (im)perceptible machinations to crush the

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girl and the child even as it (re)figures them. The clitoris is the organ effaced along with the ap-propriation of the womb, as it “escapes reproductive framing”, representing the multiplicity of female orgasmic pleasure disjointed from the reproductive act (vis-à-vis the singular connection of the male orgasmic pleasure to the reproductive function of semination). The danger of putting “the female body at the center of a search for female identity” notwithstanding, and knowing fully well that a reclaiming of the excess of clitoris “cannot fully escape the symmetry of the reproductive definition”, Spivak, in order to de-normalize uterine social organization, would suggest an investigation into the “effacement of clitoris – where clitoridectomy is the metonym for women’s definition as ‘legal object as subject of reproduction’…,” the effacements active in a discontinuous and indefinitely context-determined manner. The figures she uses as tropes to make her point include Douloti “the bountiful” – the bonded prostitute beyond and below the capital-family nexus, with her “tormented corpse, putrefied with venereal disease, having vomited up all the blood in her dessicated lungs” lying spread-eagled on a map of India the “independent nation” – the ex-cesses of gender-nation-capital, a sad caricature of signifying the excesses of the sexed body. Likewise, Draupadi or Jashoda,19 in different ways, act out the context-determined markings of the trauma that clitoridectomy entails. Both Spivak and Irigaray work with(in) the metaphoricity of the body, bringing out the overdeterminations that mark its multiple presences – a metaphoricity inevitable in body-talks, the process of writing (on) the body. The risk of marking these presences with a certain correspondence with the pre-ontological onticity – not in the sense of a universal phenomenology but as located being – lies in an essentialization of presence. This position aims at the unveiling of an agency in the body as such, which all theories – being articulated in language – tend to obscure. More than Spivak, Irigaray remains open to this possibility. Yet, this risk seems to be worth taking, and unavoidable. Attempts to move beyond the mind/body or man/woman dichotomies remain marked by the same dichotomies nevertheless, working with and in the multiple, shifting constitutivities that make up our (past–present–future) continuous be-ings. Descartes’ elusive body haunts the projects of authentic bodily experience, as do the immediacy of the Cartesian mind in the metaphors of embodiment. So, what is the way out of this dilemma between the authority of the biological body and the dissipated pragmatism of the socio-cultural practices of embodiment? One step is to complicate the links between the ontological commitment and the ethico-political positions. To remember that a belief in the ground level ‘biological fact’ of the ‘body’ can go very well with a pragmatic ethical view, where the fact of biology is seen not to affect the desirability

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of a political stance based on identity. And, an awareness of the constructed nature of identity can equally match a political commitment based on the ‘just’ bases of that identity. Pointing at the dangers of falling back into the end of the bodily mystique, I reach my own contention of a need to think of ‘other generalities’ when writing (of) the body. Reaching out into singularities has to negotiate the metaphors of the general and the particular, responsibly. The question of generalities is related to that of singularity. Singularity, as I see it (see Deleuze 1990, Spivak 2005 b), is the immanence of the moments of becoming. Singularities are not particular instances of the universal but the repeated unrepeatable units of the general. Unlike the relationship between the universal and the particular where the particular instantiates the rule of the universal, singularities act out interruptions in the general, interruptions that constitute the dissipated becoming of the general. Singularities and the general become co-implicated in (im)possible ontologies. As such, the notions of the general and other generalities lead to the thinking of the (im)possibility of beings and their interconnectedness. The experience of the impossible thus enacts the ontological link between the self and the other. And this link calls for a responsibility to the other in the very being of the self – conceptualizing ethic as not something to be added on to ontology but as an inalienable constitution of ontology itself. The thinking of other generalities, even in the realm of the episteme, thus might clear the opening to an ethics of the (im) possible. Of course, these epistemic generalities are not thought of in terms of closed epistemologies. How can the body act as a resource for thinking an ethicopolitics of the beyond? The immediacy which ostensibly authenticates the body as a material unthought ground also makes it possible for the body to be a resource for a space beyond the prevailing structures of thought. What is unthought is marked to be beyond thought. It thus has the potential to act as a metaphor for that beyond. The metaphoricity of the corporeal allows the corpus to open up the possibility of an other beyond the rules of the same. That enables one to think of a notion of the politics of the (im)possible based on ideas of embodiment. Such a politics is juxtaposed to the politics of the possible, where politics is thought of only in terms of elements that can be derived from the present. In such a present-centered politics, the body is conceptualized as a signifier of spatial location where the notion of space remains inadequately theorized. Discussing sexual difference in conjunction with ontological difference, I deal with a different notion of space. Following Derrida, I speak of khora (not topos) that is – strictly speaking, one cannot speak of khora in terms of is-ness – a nonspace and a beyond space which defies and grounds the ipseity of space itself. If the spatiality of the body is thought of in terms of khora and not that of topos, one may get a hint of such a politics of the (im)possible based on embodiment.

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Yet, replacing topos with khora is not the sole answer to the problem of going beyond the heterosexual universal. The diversity of figurations of the (im) possible exceed the calculus of a single name. Multiple singularities go on to mark the spaces in and out of sexual difference. Acting through and in the bid to go beyond the phallocentric morphe of the human, I bring in an ‘other’ figure in the next section of this article. The figure – the woman/maya – I discuss in this section bears the traces of a fictional attempt at such figurations.

Yashobati’s Story – Maya in a Trace-Structure20 Kamal Kumar Majumdar’s21 Bangla novel Antarjali Jatra was published in the 1960’s, built on a theme set in early nineteenth century Bengal. This was later put to the cinema in the 1980s by Goutam Ghose, a filmmaker well known among the Indian non-mainstream directors.22 The storyline of the novel revolves round the ‘journey into water’ (antarjali jatra) – a specific expression denoting the last rites of a man that involves immersion of half the body in (holy) water – of the dying old Sitaram, which becomes literally true for his beautiful young wife, Yashobati. Yashobati is married to the man at the cremation ground, even as he is waiting to die, brought to the cremation ground on the bank of the Ganga to complete the final rites. The not-so-tacit understanding between Yashobati’s father, the sons of Sitaram, and the scheming Brahmin ‘purohits’ is that she would commit sati23 when her husband dies. This would rid the father of his burden of an unmarried daughter, would provide money and gold for the Brahmins in the ceremony of sati, and mean nothing but a gain in prestige to the sons. Outside this caste Hindu Brahminic nexus of cash and tradition is Baiju – the chandal – the outcast who burns corpses by profession. The novel flows on from a vivid dialogic narration of the scheming and of the tensions among the authors of this incident and the somewhat forced participants like the Kabiraj (the Ayurvedic doctor) to the utter inability of Baiju to come to terms with the injustice, dishonesty and cruelty of the event to come. The relation between the young bride and the dying old groom slowly acquires multiple dimensions in this setting. The narrative shudders as Baiju’s brute, defiant, desperate attempts to save Yashobati confront her shifting, tremulous, tentative yet pliant resistance, a resistance that implicates the tentacles of patriarchal norms constituting the selfhood of the woman, as much as something beyond that, a sense of ‘maya’, the fiction/affection of myth and life. The narrative explodes into the time and the space where the untouchable, passion-ate Baiju and the sati Yashobati come together. Their bodies touch, with Yashobati’s willingness. Earlier on, Baiju had touched her, even in nakedness. But she had remained untouched. This was the first

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time she moved out, burst out of defilement into desire. Did they make love? That was not relevant. The bodies touched. And separated. The tides came. As the flood washed away old Sitaram, the funeral pyres, the ground beneath and the clay utensils, Yashobati jumped into the water; “and then only the blood-red waves! For now the moon is red.” Yashobati had to bite through Baiju’s flesh, and spit his hairs off, to reach this end. How do we read such a narrative?24 I whisper certain conjectures, build shadowy figures out of my own affective fictions, into images in theory. Yashobati and Baiju are the evident outsiders. Of course not in the sense of a Meursault who bears the ennui and existential vacuity of a modern bourgeois life (Camus 1982). (Meursault’s existential crisis explodes, albeit in a seemingly commonplace manner, in the killing of the Arab. That is not our concern here.) The woman enters the novel in a ‘duli’, the small improvised palanquin with a cloth-cover printed in red fabric, “the bearer of an impossibly sad dim crying sound.” She is the sati-to-be, who almost remains the object of male maneuvers and finally is drowned in the tidal flood. The ‘chandal’ – the ‘chnardal’ in colloqui – the man cast out by birth into the burning ground for his profession, the only one who roars, howls and bodily tries to break the decrepit orders of tradition, is finally left foiled in his effort to save the woman. Both of them are outsiders in a sense more phenomenal. Yet they are marked by the ‘inside’, by the orders that exclude (them), in ways more than one. In one sense, each empirical site, be it an individual or a phenomenon or a process, is ever always crisscrossed by a number of structural identities – structural in the sense of playing out a role (fixed or contingent) in a specific analytical structure, subject to ‘multiple overdeterminations’. As such, no protagonist – in life, in fiction – does ever ‘represent’ a single identity corresponding to a fixed playing out of a single role. Baiju has the marks of the inside of the great Hindu tradition in a fundamental sense. Chandal, in the scriptures, is defined to be the son of a Sudra – lowermost of the castes – father and a Brahman –uppermost in the caste hierarchy – mother. The whole theme of pollution and miscegenation hovers above him. The English translators of the Manusamhita, in the index, refers to the Chandal as the “Fierce” Untouchable and comments that the term is …the paradigmatic Untouchable, often used as the generic term for any Untouchable. (Doniger and Smith 1991, 317)25 And again, in this genealogy, the female mother is being polluted by the male father, an act destined to be irreversible in a heavily gendered context. Baiju has something of the (polluted) Brahman in him. Maybe this is what makes him so irresistibly tragic. At the same time, he bears the distinctive traces of a modernity that is inexorably to take the place of the bonds of traditions.

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“Baijunath definitely can bear with the corpse but not with death!” Foucault, among others, has drawn our attention to the intimate engagement of the modern (man) with the corpse that had opened the knowledge of the body to him simultaneously as he had learnt to abhor death. He delves into (the body of) the dead in order to keep death away from his own body. With his heroic attempts to save the woman from dying; to save the beautiful, stereotypical sati; with his penetrating gaze into the society and the female body at the same instance, Baiju has in him elements of the lone bourgeois hero. Baiju as a character bears traces of both the margin and the center. He brings out the impossibility of choosing between the two. The traits of marginality are ever always present in the discourses of the center (to be), as gaps that both constitute and disrupt the center. Baijunath is not only an individual but a ‘chnardal’– drunken, corporeal, brute, animal-like, who saves the woman, saves her from her irredeemably self-imposed fidelity, to kill her through a paradoxical agency born of shame, guilt, a sense of selfabnegation enhanced by its momentary transgression in pleasures of the body, and, perhaps, something called ‘maya’. This woman, the girl who is the real pilgrim to the water, has a multiplicity of selves to call her own. She is the small girl who is the victim of patriarchy, a passive victim to the machinations of the male actors like her father and the ‘purohits’. She, at least at times, is a willing victim who seems to choose the role of sati allotted to her, steeped in the ideologies of womanhood, plunging away from the moment of pleasure, deep into the torrential streams, following her husband. Yet the seams tear for a moment, Yashobati calls out, “father.” [ T ]he utterance bore lingering traces of the frightful battle between the cat and the bird. This is not all. The same girl undergoes other changes: [ D]esire was born of rage, all the quarters of the earth darkened, alone in the dense clouds, she dared to enter her own long blank sky, she came out of her own possession. Yashobati touched Baiju. For one feminist critique (Sunder Rajan 1993), this event signals a blatant foregrounding of the woman’s body, yet falls short of the “potency and potential anarchy of her sexuality.” One could ask, tentatively: does not this conceptualization of a woman’s sexuality posit the woman as the Hegelian other of the civility of the man, as the negative of the (moral/ linguistic) order, and as such, a derivative of that same order. Can we not look at this primal, primeval surge of the (woman’s) body as a way in which the

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symbolic (order) views, grapples with, the unsymbolizable: in its own (i.e., the symbolic’s) terms. When the others of the other surges in, they seem to be a variant of the other modeled as just negatives of the self; negatives – tongue in cheek, I submit – that might easily be, with some appropriate treatments, turned to black and white photographs. Kamal Kumar works within a mind/body binary that acts itself out in the reason/emotion dichotomy. Yet there is a certain twist in his usage. The reasonings of the petty schemers serve the irrational urge of tradition while the bursting out of emotions in the two central characters seems to answer, in essence, the call of (universal) reason. As these ambiguities are played out in/by the bodies of Baiju and Yashobati, they react differently to the impulses. Baiju, the miscegenated Brahman, maintains a distance (of the observer?), even spatially, as he cruelly and unambiguously strikes the edifices of the socius, physically. Maybe this distance saves him from death, but leaves him defeated. Yashobati is more intimately implicated in the moves that tie and, at the same time, constitute her. For the dying old man to whom she is married, she has the sense of affection that surely goes beyond the stereotype of the dutiful wife. But maybe this is how stereotypes work, by conferring subjecthood in the dual sense. And maybe, the tacit invocation of the (il)legitimacy of the construction of a sterile non-desirous decrepit old man is the familiar ploy of the cunning of patriarchy. Ambiguities of the situation notwithstanding, Yashobati has to destroy her body to come to terms with it. The body that made her transcend her mind cannot bear the weight of the transgression, the body that goes over the bounds is irremediably polluted – the self that is marked by this body is marked for/by absence, beyond redemption. Women writers in Bangla at the end of the twentieth century have spoken eloquently on the sense of abjection26 that the body entails (translations, if not otherwise stated, are mine): I am afraid of walking, afraid to stand up. Constantly apprehending the danger of the piece of cloth coming out in the open. Slipping casually down before the eyes of the people. Lest everyone come to know. Lest the floor be flooded with stinking blood. And the people burst out in cruel laughter. My own body. This body is putting me into disgrace. Drowning my own self down the gutters in broad daylight. (Nasrin 1999, 194) And specially the sense of being irrevocably polluted after an unwanted and sudden sexual encounter: I started thinking of myself as a sinner. Was it my sin that Sharaf uncle undressed me alone in a room! (Nasrin 1999, 72)

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Being silenced by pain led on to a still greater loss of speech for Paramita, the protagonist of a novel by Jaya Mitra. She lost all her strength to resist, to hate and even to save herself. Now she was totally alone with herself. This is her waking up to her body. What a way to wake up! Configurations of her own flesh and bones have brought her fear and disgust. (Mitra 1993, 59) These feelings of shame, guilt and helplessness are, as the authors themselves know, consistent with the constructions of the gendered body.27 They are enraged by this, by the constitutive injustice and cruelty of the predicament, trying to forge ways in and out of their (im)possible selves. In the process, the elements of class, coloniality, religion and other identities overdetermine their attempts. Jaya Mitra gets involved in the war between the classes, retaining a rare sensitivity to class differentials even in her march for what she herself calls womanism. A not-too-disguised valorization of motherhood as creative of life and the human underlies her project. Taslima Nasrin, implicated intimately in the circuits of global cultural production, remains acutely aware of the coercions of the family – “the machine for the socialization of the female body through affective coding” (Spivak 1993, 82) – bringing out the (im)perceptible machinations that work within it to crush the girl and the child even as it (re) figures them. Her rage at the cultural powers of religion and patriarchy is deeply marked by the empire-nation reversal axis. As such, Nasrin is not able to avoid complicity with the latter. Brown women rescuing brown women from brown men: a forgetfulness of the traces of the white in the brown and the men in women would entail an erasure of the marks of situatednesses – a violence of omission. The same violence accompanies a good-natured attempt to theorize the located body in a universal frame. Not to forget that this is a necessary gesture, something that we cannot not do. What Kamal Kumar weaves into Yashobati is a displacement of the sense of abjection which the contemporary women writers produce in their narratives. There is a continuity between the two. Yashobati’s action shares a sense of pollution akin to the abjections of the body in those other narratives. It also produces an action. Yashobati goes into water. She escapes the fire of sati. Yet both water and fire destroy the body of the woman. The numbness of abjection is displaced onto the plunge for destruction. The figure woman/maya is produced at the twin moments of the desirous touch and the death-driven plunge. No one of these moments is enough to describe the figure. The form thus produced is at a certain remove from the lineage of the ‘woman’ in the secular break-in-continuity to the Judeo-Christian traditions. It is placed within the frame of references of the subject who inhabits

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the “heteropraxic cultural system” (Spivak 1992, 800) of a Brahminic world view. Instructively, this figure shares a similar fate of presence-in-absence with the ‘woman’. The dissipated structures of reproductive heteronormativity work through and in multiple singularities. The novel Antarjali Jatra ends with a certain possibility: A single eye, like eye mirrored in hemlock, was looking at her, the bride desiring union; the eye was wooden, as painted on a boat, it was painted in vermillion and moist with incessant tidal waves, able to shed tears; and so, somewhere maya still remains. I do not dare to translate maya, the sense of fiction/affection with its referentiality to the philosophical, religious and colloquial tonalities of usage.28 Unlike Partha Chatterjee (1997), I cannot assert that “the driving force of our modernity was our maya for the past.” I want to retain some elements of evanescence and specificity – characteristic of a different structure of feeling – in the category, which makes it difficult to speak of maya as driving force. It can be argued that maya as referred to above is a construction of the patriarchy which it allegedly transcends, albeit in an eternal momentariness. Maya can be seen to flow from the same role-playing of women as nurturer, affectionate and tenderhearted, vis-à-vis the male qualities in the opposite. The novel might be seen to bring this out: Yashobati’s maya for her husband acts as the patriarchal ploy to constitute her (subordinated) subjectivity. I would argue that even in the tender moments of her brief nuptials, there remained a sense of fictive affection that transcended the role-playing of the loving wife. And as the woman destroys her own corporeality – torn between the blatant objectification of traditional patriarchy and the aesthetic and moral objectifications inherent in the bid of the modern to save the body-beautiful – what remains is maya. It remains in the glimpses of fiction/affection with the old man and in the tearful painted eye in wood. It remains eternal yet evanescent. Evanescent yet inalienable. I thus try to speak about the (im)possibilities of conceiving the slippage of an evanescent category and its concomitant moorings in the persistence of/in one’s being. That is how this fiction falteringly tries to mark the symptoms of ‘womanhood’. In men, women and perhaps for in-betweens.

Chapter 5 VIOLENCE AND RESPONSIBILITY: EMBODIED FEMINISMS Introduction A common allure and risk of academic writing is to treat theoretical arguments as transparent and belonging to obvious ‘positions’ marked by a certain proper name (Foucault, Derrida, Marx) or a denotative common noun (structuralism, phenomenology, hermeneutics). It is as if one need not engage with the specific dynamics of the proposition, once the ‘lineage’ is properly established for all to gloss readily over.1 Of course, the elementary trainings of writing continue to deal with this as a simple problem, as something s/he has to bear with if one wants to enunciate anything clearly and without ambiguity, a small trick of the trade. Does this innocuous operation indicate something more? Does it point at a concealed commitment to a very specific – albeit dominant and ubiquitous – mode of thinking, being and/or doing? A manner of working with concepts in which the history of the uses – to which a word has been put to – is erased at the moment when the ‘meaning’ of the word is fixed. A forgetting of the fact that these other past/present/future uses shape the shades of its meaning as much as its present intended use. Paleonymy – the traces of the history of the uses that cling tenaciously to words – is the expression Spivak (1993) uses to mark this forgotten phenomenon. Throughout this chapter, when I discuss certain ‘positions’ I try to address the specific nuances of their enunciations, to attend to the paleonymy of utterances, and not to chart them along pre-given classificatory grids. I remain a conscientious reader of related proper names. If one follows the Derridean thematic of the subject – if at all there is something like that – allegations run that the historicity of processes of subjection/subjectification are erased in the timelessness of deconstructive gestures. As each moment of the ‘subject’ is unique in its perennial and interminable difference – its ‘always and already’ being at a move from its own being – the specificities of the singular moment gets effaced. In the ever-open field of difference, everything looks the same – there remain no overarching axis, not even time, on which differences can be marked. Extending the logic to the case of the ‘woman’, Derrida is accused of obliterating the phenomenality

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of the woman’s differences from the man and reducing her agency and presence to something standing for the fulfillment of the man’s desire for heterogeneity.2 Referring to the earlier discussions on the matter of sexual difference in Derrida, this chapter tries to use the notions of re-iteration or citation of universals in the construction of identities to bring out a single aspect of the woman as she was imagined in a colonial public space. The elements of creativity and innovation implicated in the Derridean use of these notions help us to think the specific form this imagination takes in the given context, while retaining the generality of the objectifications, power-differentials and economic exploitations involved in the continuation and reproduction of ‘sexual difference’. I cannot offer alternative forms of hospitality or senses to reach out to the other but want to point at the inevitable newness of each encounter, the (im)possible figurations through known and other generalities. This chapter goes on to link the discussions on embodiment and feminist deconstructive ethics to the concerns of a feminism in the third world. I argue for multiple figurations that deploy generalities beyond the familiar ones centered on the West, to reach out to an (im)possible ethico-politics of responsibility to (un)known others. The feminist attempts to think of the agency of women in the context of India have to negotiate intimately with the nationalist forging of the women’s question. The way nationalist thought in its hegemonic articulation figures3 the role of ‘woman’ is not to be confused with the ways in which women in the cartographically bound space of India perceive their ‘own’ subjectivity and agency. Yet these are overdetermined processes, constitutive mutually of each other. Not going into the details of this mutual constitution,4 I focus here on the conceptual issues involved in a feminist rethinking of the question of the woman in India. When one thinks of ‘woman’ from within the feminist discourses that work in the context of the third world, one often tends to think in terms of her ‘presence’. A ‘presence’ that goes beyond the nuances of the purported ‘highfeminist theory of the West’. The presence is marked by the particularity of the location in the third world – its politico-economy and ethico-religion – the non/secular, non/modern, non/capitalist economies of being. As if, the woman is present only as she experiences. An experience that is not mediated by discourse/s, that does not wait for the discourse and the subject to constitute each other and make an experience semantically possible. The unmediated experience that validates and valorizes the presence of the third world woman presupposes her subjectivity; and so leaves it unraveled. Yet this subjectivity reveals itself in multiple forms. Blindness to the many generalities involved in the making of such subjectivities renders a text, feminist or not, inadequate to the intricacies of the situation. In this chapter, following a detailed discussion of existing writings on ‘third world feminism’, I look at how such writings

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tend to retain a given notion of experience with different modifications. I try to find how a shift from this authentication of the presence of experience might look. In the process, third world feminism as a concept is defined in a different way. Perceptions of ‘other generalities’ acting in the space of sexual difference in the third world leads on to an openness to the irreducible singularity of each ethical encounter with the other, singularities that retain the axes of generalities involved without striving for the universal. This leads on to embodied feminisms with a different notion of the body, in short, to a politics of the im/possible. Possible pitfalls in writings on feminism – as it is for any ethicopolitics based on identity-categories – may be grouped under the following two articulations in the form of a binary, though they, as in all binaries, seldom present themselves in unadulterated forms. 1. Intricacies of ‘high theory’ failing to retain their contact with the ‘reality’ they are trying to make a sense of. This is marked by an excessive stress on abstract theoretical principles. This move tends to use jargons known to a few initiates. The proposed solution to the problem is that – even if the use of nuanced theoretical concepts were inevitable – they should be expressed in simple, ready-to-beunderstood terms. 2. A concern with multiple facets of ‘reality’ tends to treat each facet in its particularity in a slipshod fashion. There is no effort to think through the conceptual tools one is using. This makes the writings not only understandable but also eminently anticipatable and, may the use be forgiven, banal. Feminist theorists and academics, from their probable experience in the context of Euro-American or continental feminisms, continue to treat the first one as the overwhelmingly greater hazard. My (arrogant?) contention is that in the Indian context, the second is the more pervasive problem and needs far more attention specifically in the case of feminism. At least for another theory that had a concern with praxis, namely, Marxism, it continues to produce disasters. Trying to find Indian answers to problems of Euro-American academy would be a mildly provocative way of putting the issue.

Third World Feminisms: The Politics of Location and Experience The word experience is…as mysterious as the mother tongue, something one is inserted in… That experience makes the strongest bond and also

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produces the greatest impatience with antiessentialism as a battle cry. (Spivak 1993, 11) Feminisms – like any theory that tries to base its ethical or political objectives on a certain form of identity – have to negotiate the tensions between the particularities of their ostensible existential foundations and the generality of their declared ethico-political principles. Raising the question of the ‘woman’ in the purportedly neutral register of the ‘human’, feminisms can hardly afford to sustain a thoroughly universalist position. Yet, they cannot get rid of the generality called ‘woman’. In the last few decades of the twentieth century, worldwide questioning of the category ‘woman’ has become one of the most important concerns for feminisms. The initial impulse in this questioning was to posit identities other than gender – race, class, caste or coloniality – to speak of the internal differentiations among women. An implicit challenge – of differentiating the ‘human’ into the ‘man’ and the ‘woman’ – to processes of homogenization informed this positing of other identities. The move was to challenge – on behalf of a given group identity, speaking politically for the concerns of that group – the dominant construction of ‘woman’ as a homogeneous identity. Initial impulses in third world feminisms also reflect this trend. To speak of ‘other’ feminisms is to think about others that are, after all, feminisms. Not external or opposed to the concerns of feminism, these modify the latter in specific ways. The attempt to use the expression ‘third world’ as a necessary qualifier to ‘feminism’ or the ‘woman’ is to bring in history into the ethical or epistemic universals implied by the latter two terms. At least, I argue, this gesture of bringing in history remains the implicit presupposition or the overt declaration in the bulk of the literature on third world feminisms. Not that I am opposed to the idea. I only point at the need to unpack (another muchvaunted word in want of unpacking) the use of ‘history’ to bring out, along with the dimension of time, the multiple dimensions of spatiality (location/ situation/partiality of perspective) implicated in the word. This section goes on to trace the conceptual bases, almost always unstated, on which such a theorization of a ‘third world’ in ‘feminisms’ rests. It also tries to unravel the consequences of not stating (implying a lack of awareness about) these theoretical assumptions in the literature involved. The attempt again is not to come out of a certain ideology to a true depiction of realities but to speak of the inalienable role of ideologies in the production of knowledges. The ethical standpoints of embodied feminisms do not flow from secure epistemologies. In the prevailing theorizations of third world feminism on the theme of historical location, two large strands have been operative. One of these has been more influential in the women’s studies circles in terms of prestige,

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references, and further usage. For us, the history of differential reception of the two concepts has some theoretical and political implications. We now move on to describe this phenomenon we call differential reception and try to unravel its dynamics. That does not imply that we subscribe to any one of these, whether it is dominant or not. Julie Stephens’ (1989) tentative attempts – made in abstract epistemological terms – to deal with some “universal” problems in the feminist discourse regarding the construction of ‘the third world woman’ faced a vitriolic rejection. In this rejection, her effort was branded as “harmless enough” (because insufficiently theorized), “initial” (by implication, immature), “somewhat mechanical – exploration of new found tools and concepts,… [ p]rematurely applied and altogether inadequate,” and finally as “politically irresponsible.” She is said to “have no stakes in the game, no commitments any where,” maintaining a “sterile, ‘objective’ distance from the discourse it dissects” (Tharu 1989). Chandra Mohanty’s now famous essay (1988) had a fate very different from that of Julie Stephens. I see this as a curious example of the ‘authority of history’ in feminist discourses. Dealing with almost the same problem of the construction of “the third-world woman as a monolith,” Mohanty sets out to uncover “a latent ethnocentrism in particular feminist writings on women in the third world.” Both Stephens and Mohanty indict the homogeneous construction of the ‘woman’ based on notions of Western feminisms, against which Mohanty invokes the “historical materiality on the level of specific oppressions and political choices,” along with the “general discursive representations,” and “the production of women as socioeconomic political groups within particular local contexts.” On the other hand, Stephens questions the facile solution of “putting women back into history.” She underlines the uncertain epistemological status of the category ‘women’s experience’, ‘experience’ being thus treated as an objective category, and asks “what constitutes ‘experience’ in the discourse and how do some subjects of feminist research come to be unqualifiedly valorized?” She asserts, “subjecthood is not granted to just any woman. Certain women, or groups of women, qualify by fulfilling a set of criteria... ” And again, “experience is a contingent, subjective, textually woven fiction.” In the process, she points at what she calls the uneasy relationship between feminism and history. Whereas a note of flamboyance marks her assertion of the fictionality of ‘fact’ and ‘experience’, this could definitely provide valuable insights into certain problems of feminist theories; being not at all eligible for summary rejection. Stephens raises the problem of putting women back into history at the level of discursive practices. She points at the fact that the West–non-West distinction remains at the very core of the writings on third world feminism. Speaking of the obvious naturalness of third world difference in such writings, she moves on

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to the epistemological status of the category woman’s experience. As she shows, this is the discursive category that grounds the difference unproblematically. This category is linked to the problem of universals in feminist politics – how these universals, those that together define the category ‘woman’ as a monolith, are treated as unquestioned bases of ‘feminism’. It becomes easy, on the bases of these universals, to describe empirical differences – operative between the first and the third worlds – that define the homogenous subject called the ‘third world woman’. Stephens links the production of the homogeneous subject with the problem of feminism and history, with how feminism deals with history in its discursive strategies. She divides her essay into three parts – “The Said”, “The Already Said”, “The Never Said”. The first section describes the construction of the ‘field’ as an unmediated object of investigation in certain feminist texts. It looks at this construction as a discursive technique. The problem of representation is addressed thus and reference made to the narrative technique of realist fiction being used. Denying the textuality of their own production, these feminist texts make the investigating subject invisible. The text seems less textual (99). Stephens calls this a journalistic technique of representation. The second section deals with the formation of the sovereign female subject within an orientalist problematic. She speaks of two solutions to subjecthood within the problematic: the feminist and the nationalist-feminist. The former (like Omvedt 1980) consists of self-abnegation on the part of the women writing in the ‘third world’ while the latter (Kishwar and Vanita 1984) calls for the abnegation of the self and the Western woman. In this view, non-nationalist, non-elite women are repositories of subjecthood – elite women are somehow less authentic and more Westernized. Differences within third world women are erased – class differentials, elite/non-elite distinctions. The maintenance of universal sisterhood (108) – many voices one chant – implies maintenance of biological commonality (experience) as against cultural third world (109–110). The third section, the “Never Said”, opens up the query, what constitutes experience in a discourse? It calls for dealing with experience as a contingent, subjective, textually woven fiction. On the whole, Stephens’ focus is on the discursive construction of the ‘third world woman’ in feminist texts. Tharu’s comment, as we have already discussed, is extremely abrasive in its dismissal of Stephens’ piece. In feminist writings, one should search for Foucauldian regularity of discursive practices and not for a totalistic system, it asserts. Stephens searches one-sidedly for structural causality, says Tharu, thereby erasing multiple accents within feminism. According to Tharu, this makes the piece blind to subversions. So Stephens is said to have completely missed the heterogeneous history of the struggles, and she fails to see discourse in a socio- political context. In Tharu’s response, there is a barely concealed

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stress on the authenticity of the majority (129); of course, for her, this is the majority who writes and thereby represents the majority of women. As we have already pointed out, this is radically different from responses to Mohanty’s writings. Yet, both Mohanty and Stephens look at how Western feminist discourses figure the third world woman. Mohanty, though not explicitly, has an implication of the difference of third world woman on the basis of the authority of history / lived experience. Stephens, not going into the question of difference, focuses on the discursive technologies of exclusion and reduction. Chandra Mohanty’s seminal essay “Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses”, first published in 1986, starts with the following enunciation of the problem: Any discussion of the intellectual and political construction of ‘Third World feminisms’ must address itself to two simultaneous projects: the internal critique of hegemonic ‘Western’ feminisms and the formulation of autonomous feminist concerns and strategies that are geographically, historically, and culturally grounded. The first project is one of deconstructing and dismantling; the second is one of building and constructing. (17) A later collection of essays Feminism Without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practising Soldarity (2003) addresses and elaborates upon this issue. Consisting of an introduction and three parts – Decolonizing Feminism, Demystifying Capitalism and Reorienting Feminism – the book echoes Mohanty’s own shift of focus from the first to the second task, namely, from that of dismantling the hegemonic to that of constructing a counter-politics. This very first enunciation of the problem contains almost all the elements of strengths and weaknesses in her program. In the act of unraveling the task into two distinct “projects”, the analytical clarity is unmistakable. Hardly anyone can disagree with her specific definition of these undertakings; specially if one remembers the veracity with which Mohanty carries out her first project – that of an “internal critique” – not only in that particular piece but in a number of essays in the volume. She traces the discursive terrain of hegemonic feminisms to point at both the explicit statements and the implicit presuppositions that project third world woman as a particularly homogeneous category defined only in terms of its oppositions to another homogeneous entity called the “western woman”. Even if the latter is sometimes accorded some form of heterogeneity in agency and constitution, for these dominant feminisms the former remains a single undivided block. Notions of universal sisterhood of women and the presumption of a status of victimhood for the third world woman leads to an attitude of patronizing benevolence on the part of the “western sister”.

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Mohanty is implicitly aware of the logical fallacy that might follow from her stance of proposing the negation of a “universal sisterhood” – working in favor of heterogeneity among women – along with the positing of “third world feminism.” If women in the third world are existentially heterogeneous, how can one speak of a feminism that belongs to the third world? Whence flows the commonality of their politics? There have been attempts, and Mohanty is not abhorrent of them, to treat ‘third world’ metaphorically, where racial or cultural differences are also referred to by the invocation of this term. Her answer to the question of commonality, however, is ‘struggle’. The unity of the women who are the subjects of third world feminism is not in their victimized experience but in their active resistances, Mohanty submits. The notion of history she invokes is a notion of struggles in history. The concept of location that Mohanty invokes is again the location in history and politics. And as is wont in such a concept of struggle, her insidious and almost imperceptible shift – reflected in the structure of the book itself, in the shifting concerns of the essays thought temporally – is from the specificity of the ‘third world’ to the generality of the ‘woman’ in a globalized world. Solidarity, for her, is the word that accompanies location. Solidarity, for her, replaces “universal sisterhood”: The differences and borders of each of our identities connect us to each other, more than they sever. So the enterprise here is to forge informed, self-reflexive solidarities among ourselves. (250–1) Who are these “ourselves” if not the struggling women throughout the world? Inaudibly, “woman” replaces “third world woman” as the preferred subject. My contention is not that this is politically dangerous or a particularly bad argument. My concern is the omission of some issues that might prove vital for a rethinking of feminist politics and ethics. Before going into that, one should be aware of the implications of this criticism. It is easy for hindsight to pick faults in earlier path-breaking narratives. One has to remember that often the approach to problems in a given theoretical enunciation, works through the said theory itself. In that sense, the theory paves the way for its own critique. My questioning of Mohanty’s attempt works in such a terrain of shared concerns. Though she stresses the simultaneity of the twin project of dismemberment of the dominant and making of a resistant, Mohanty’s own work neatly divides the two. For her, these two processes remain separate in their simultaneity. A co-implication of the two where the theorist of resistance herself cannot escape the shadow of the dominant within her is never alluded to. To explain, even if there be certain declarations of one’s own location in the North American

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academy, the effects of this situation on her own theorizing is never a problem for Mohanty. This brings us to the second point I want to make. Mohanty never seriously engages with the insights due to a purported postmodern turn in thinking. She refers to an epistemological position of ‘realism’ that Satya P. Mohanty has developed and which, for her, goes beyond both a non-critical realism of the old variety and a postmodern skepticism for the real. Her own work however does not address the problem of representation for the theorizer of the oppressed though it competently criticizes the same problem occurring in the dominant. We barely know from her writings about how her variant of realism might approach the predicament. This is in stark opposition to someone like Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak who has been addressing the same issues at about the same time from an informed reading of deconstruction and the problem of representation. Mohanty’s avowed project is an ‘internal critique’ of hegemonic Western feminisms. She concedes the need to formulate “autonomous, geographically, historically, and culturally grounded feminist concerns and strategies” (172), but characterizes her own work as an instance of critique, not of positive formulation. Her critique is grounded on her notion of ‘location’, that, as Kathleen Kirby (1993) has shown, lacks a developed notion of space: For Mohanty, the subject is a flat space that can be mapped on the terrain of discursive relations or a fleeting intersection of conflicting political initiatives… Mohanty rejects all of the interiority implied by vessels and containing structures. (176–7) Mohanty’s search for “a fundamentally productive mode in designating overlapping areas for cross-cultural comparison” (a mode she wants to place beyond the deconstructive) involves a re-positing of the ‘human’ in a posthuman context (197). Yet, there barely is an element of a ‘beyond human’ in her project except the locations in ‘real’ space (geography) and time (history).5 Her concerns with the discursive hegemonies leave the notion of ‘presence’ unquestioned, and thus, presupposed. Primacy of the presence that constitutes the third world woman as a category, in a way also marks the specificity of the being of the third world woman in this view. She not only gets noticed in her locations, but also acquires the identity her subjecthood was seeking for. It is her presence; her locatedness in the topos, and the chronos of history that constitutes her subjectivity. Her non-being in a certain mode of universal feminism thus tends to get redressed through a bestowal of a place, through a giving of a ‘presence’ to the otherwise forgotten. To remember, the ‘woman’ of feminism also tends to get her place in a like manner in the masculinist schema of universal humanism.6

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Let us ground our logic in certain problems. Does the presence of black women, or third world women, or women laborers, fracture the category ‘woman’? Alternatively, does the category ‘woman’, in its bid to homogenize in the model of white, Western, middle-class identity, do violence to the aforesaid categories? Is the presence of other identity-categories – like race, class and colony – the element that fractures the identity, ‘woman’. Despite received wisdoms in majority of feminist literature, the answer for me would be a ‘no’. No, because the presence of other identities, even if concentrated in a single individual, does not fracture the analytical definition of a single identity-category. Efforts to define the category ‘woman’, in spite of its homogenizing tendencies – definitions, as a rule, homogenize – may or may not do violence to a specific category of race, class or colony. To the contrary, a nuanced definition of a single category might help to establish communications with other similar ones. One has to know one’s enemies and friends, one’s own weaknesses and strengths. One has to know the limits to the definitions of identities. The category ‘woman’ is fractured in a more basic sense. It is dissolved in the differences in the innumerable categories and histories that constitute it, in its own differance – its own ever-being and deferred (non)attainment of being. Location has often been used to define the specificity of woman in the third world in the twin sense of the cartographic and the historical. Ultimately, it has been made to imply lived experience that structures identity. Experience reifies the self to erase subjectivity – as it derives and defines the self through experience. The uniqueness/singularity of the self as subject, a singularity in taking decisions beyond structural or experiential determination, is thus effaced. There is a reification of the subject; and agency of the subject becomes unimportant. We need to go beyond this notion, to realize that location is both discursive and spatial – embodying location. As Kathleen Kirby (1993) argues, when experience is treated as unmediated, the act continues to use the mediated trope of experience, which remains “unconsciously” discursive. For, the talk of unmediated experience occurs in discourse, which, if unavowed, engulfs the whole discourse on experience. Unmediated experience has the appearance of being material and nondiscursive. The denial of dependence on the discourse occurs through the authenticating power of presence, which itself is authorized by and in turn authorizes, the same discourse. The materiality of the experience is not gained from the non-discursive ‘material’ outside. The materiality of experience is in its discursive construction, when charted. Hence the need to attend to the materiality of experience in this extended sense. The concrete experience of the woman located in a particular history as something to fall back upon has some inherent problems. History can barely

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avoid the invocation of presence as a foundational category that authenticates theory: [ History] has always been in complicity with a teleological and eschatological metaphysics,…paradoxically, in complicity with that philosophy of presence to which it was believed history could be opposed. The thematic of historicity…has always been required by the determination of Being as presence. (Derrida 1978, 291) Derrida, in the same breath, speaks of the dangers of falling back on structurality, “an ahistoricism of a classical type”. But that does not clear history of its pitfalls. Treating presence as a given category, invoked as if unmediated by representations – despite assertions to the contrary on the part of the theorizers – confers a certain authority of transparency to those who speak for the constituency of the represented. To go back to Spivak, the valorization of experience involves an unexamined benevolence on the part of “the first-world intellectual masquerading as the absent nonrepresenter who lets the oppressed speak for themselves” (Spivak 1988, 292).7 The invocation of the term ‘third world’ as a corrective to ‘feminism’ is an invocation of history.8 There may be at least two different enunciations of the problem. In the first, Mohanty defines the location where the ‘theory’ of feminism has to be rewritten – the location and the theory are defined separately and the latter get fragmented by the former. Mary John’s extremely nuanced dealing of the problem is the second enunciation. She points at: (i) the need to produce articulations of the term gender with other terms of analysis and with an acute sense of history; (ii) the need to trace the “discrepant dislocations” that partial and composite theories undergo when they “travel”. Here, the theories are internally fragmented and have multiple enunciations in history. But the sense of history remains authenticated by presence. Though John’s position is somewhat more complex, this remains a problem worth speaking about in some detail. John declares that for feminism in India, unlike American feminism, the chief debates are not structured around the nature/ culture binary (sex –gender distinction). It is quite evident to her that “the structures of patriarchy and sexual difference are fully social and cultural and therefore transformable” ( John 1998, 204). The theories of cultural construction and signification that question the essentialist notion of ‘nature’ tend to leave out questions of contexts, locations and histories. For India, John proposes that a different pair of terms, culture/politics – analogous to the nature/culture divide – is operative in shaping feminist contentions. This is a discrepant dislocation of theories from the West. But ‘culture’ in the Indian context, unlike ‘nature’ in the American, is not a category waiting to be

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released from the clutches of essentialism. It already remains within the field of diversity and difference. Diversity becomes a central motif to freeze that which is in a state of flux. Madhu Kishwar deploys ‘diversity’ as a justificatory principle for the claims of cultural autonomy. John reads the reactions for and against ‘cultural autonomy’ as logically non-essentialist because these do not posit any essence of culture. For her, the debate is not very productive in the Indian context. She finds this to be a reflection of how dislocated ‘Western theories’ – in this particular case, the anti-essentialist ‘postmodern’ thought – encroach our theorization. These dislocated theories are problematic, as they do not take care of the “discrepancies between contexts”. For John, antiessentialism is not the moot point in formulating a feminist position in India. Keeping in mind the specificities of locations and histories, John’s point is to politicize the realm of culture as also to relate the cultural with the economic. For her, to historicize is automatically to be anti-essentialist. John forgets that, as we have so far been discussing the authenticating ‘presence’ in many a historicist move, one may remain an essentialist while working in the realm of history. Thus anti-essentialism as a stance, far from being element of an ‘encroaching’ western theory, remains vital to Indian feminist thought. Only, and this is also not a novelty in feminist thinking,9 the ways of working of essentialism are different in India. A focus on the culture/politics binary need not, necessarily, do away with the nature/culture binary. A tentative move to come out of the problem of the authenticating ground of ‘experience’ is through the invocation of the category of ‘struggle’ to replace that of experience. Kavita Panjabi (1996), following Mohanty, tries to shift the focus from the debilitating discourses of truth and reality of experience and to emphasize political criticism and active resistance to class, race, caste and patriarchal oppressions. Yet certain problems remain: i. To make a new word (struggle) in the place of an old one (experience) is to run the risk of forgetting the problem or believing it to be solved. Often this step only shifts the onus of explanation to a new word. We saw this in case of Chandra Mohanty. ii. Panjabi remains within the problematic of ‘conflict and resolution’ (as she reads Draupodi, a story by Mahasweta Devi), within the ethical space of well defined binaries. The possibility of the conflict being carried over into the resolution does not inform her move. Thus struggle, for her, gains an authenticating fixity of presence ( just like that of ‘experience’). The dynamism that ‘struggle’ could infuse into ‘experience’ remains apparent, ultimately to be resolved in a teleological solution. The question is how to account for the primacy of the struggle of the dominated (as opposed to that of the dominant) in a resisting move. Logically,

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this primacy has to flow from the experience of the dominated – the struggle of the dominated flows from the experience of domination s/he faces. Experience still remains the category that authorizes this struggle. Another interesting move to tackle the problem of experience is to posit immanence of small histories against big History (Sarkar 2001). This move is mostly combined with the political effectiveness of the invocation of history and experience. Here, epistemic standpoint is justified by political efficacy – the standpoint advocated remains a means to an end. This prevailing form of third world feminist thought is a combination of the immanence of history with the argument of ethico-political efficacy. Janaki Nair, in her “On the Question of Agency in Indian Feminist Historiography” (1994), tries to theorize agency from what she calls a feminist viewpoint. She does not want to speak of the woman as victim, or as a rebellious heroine in a reductive conception of female agency, and not to mark a ceaseless notation of female presence in history. She speaks of the negative critical task of unmasking gender-neutral methodologies and the development of a complex and dynamic conception of female agency which does not treat victimhood and agency in a contradictory mode. Yet, in a paradoxical relating of postmodernism with liberal politics, she remains wary of a dissolution of subjectivity: [ T ]he rethinking of female agency that has been prompted by poststructuralism cannot easily be transposed to the Indian context since the emphasis on the subjectivity of victims of oppression could, and does, pave the way for liberal assertions of the freedom of the individual to act against or despite oppressive conditions. She wants to resist this move by critical contributions to Indian historiography. The logical opposition between ‘post-structuralist’ accounts of female agency and a ‘critical contribution’ to historiography is not very clear from her rendition. Her idea of female agency is neither in terms of structures of oppression, nor in terms of an unmediated presence of women. Her focus is on the presence of specific contexts, where the idea of agency is heterogeneous. The specificity of women’s agency is not asked for in this scheme – it seems to be the same as human agency. She does not want to go into the question of what constitutes consent, transgression and subversion but to fix parameters of women’s subjectivity in specific contexts – context-sensitive parameters, parameters that are universal yet sensitive to the particular. But she also wants to avoid speaking in terms of universal structures. She speaks of parameters, and parameters ought to have elements of universality; yet she avoids speaking of universality. This leads to a situation where she uses universal categories, though context-sensitive, not theorizing the universal. So she is bound to work with the existing (humanist) universal.

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For Nair, techniques of the archive are to be critiqued and gender-neutral categories of historical analysis to be challenged. It remains unclear as to what she means by the gendering of historical archive? What would it be except addition of women/gender perspective to existing accounts? In a way, Nair’s call is for an addition of ‘gender’, instead of the earlier focus on the addition of ‘women’, to the standard accounts of history. For her, the notion of gender remains confined within the purview of social structure. The question of ontology remains external to the concern. So although acute in analytical rigor within the bounds of its theoretical frame, Nair’s critique stands out as a representative of the dominant concerns in feminist historiography that rests on an ultimately unquestioned notion of presence in history. A historicizing of the category ‘woman’ makes the category of woman fractured. But history and experience are not the only registers that fracture ‘woman’. The generalities of class, caste, race, or any other identity-category are not reducible to their foundations in an unexamined ‘historical experience’. Moreover, there is a constraint to the fracturing that occurs through history alone. This rupture cannot account for the ‘whole’ – how is the category ‘woman’ made possible despite its broken historicities. To think of the woman as a name with a clear referent, as Nair herself continues to do, then becomes either a pragmatic move for action or a disavowed acquiescence to the dominant. Her acute observation on the distinction between “women’s transformatory capacities for a feminist agenda and the agency of women within patriarchal structures” (96) is helpful as a preliminary thinking tool. Yet to forget that this distinction is precisely an analytic tool for bringing in clarity in a blurred field, that this working in neat binaries is a contingently necessary and impossible move, is to give in to the same universalism that she abhors. That would lead to a prior charting of “feminist aspirations” (95) – defined, even if not avowedly, in terms of structures of gendering – for women who are otherwise led astray by false gods.10 To go back to the initial concerns of charting the dynamic of a differential reception of two modes of theorizing located feminisms in the third world, the picture that emerges is one of a propensity to understand location ultimately in terms of an authenticating presence. Concomitantly, there is an unease with the discursive analysis of the production of this presence. The unease is articulated not in terms of a blanket refusal but in the form a constitutive distrust of such attempts as incursions of Western ‘theory’. We may think of Spivak’s way of historicizing experience/archive in contrast to this. She speaks about the constructed nature of the archive. She retains history as a resource, but not an authenticated one, and treats archive as supplement, not as a source to history. The act of historicizing is not homogeneous for her. One way of historicizing may be complacent with the falling back upon experience as an

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unmediated access to presence. This presence authenticates the epistemoontology and the ethico-politics that cling to it. The other mode, that Spivak follows, is relentless in its historicizing so that neither archive nor experience or presence can evade the reach of that act. How to define the location from where one speaks? Is it enough to mark the axes of standard identity categories like sex/race/class/caste along with broad historical/political divides like first world / third world, feminist, left, et cetera? The contingencies of location are related to ideas of space, to positions in social hierarchies other than the standard ones. Sometimes, one’s presuppositions regarding modes of clarity and argument (different in analytic and continental traditions), ones access to particular practices and thoughts may become important. This is where deconstruction’s relentless questioning of the ground one stands on becomes relevant. One needs a questioning that is not to be stopped through prior calculations at a particular register, sending the remainders to oblivion. To be reminded forever, be haunted by specters of the others persistently, is the inscription that marks the itinerary of such thinking. Here, the inexhaustible singularity of location does not get reduced to the particularity of a universal theme, yet the generalities implicated are not lost sight of. Of course, keeping in mind that some generalities as also the unanticipatable in the singular escape this act of seeing. Before broaching my own take on the notion of experience, I discuss the pitfalls in a way of thinking that – though nuanced – treats experience as a linguistic construct per se. Joan Scott, in “The Evidence of Experience” (1991), holds that historians who tend to retrieve the voices of racial minorities, women, lesbians, and gays believe in experience as incontestable evidence based on transparent and selfevident meanings. Thereby, experience is rendered foundational in canonical history writing. Scott speaks against the production of such an unmediated notion of experience that authenticates the history of presence. She contends that experience is mediated by discourse and the subject is also produced discursively. Experience is linguistic in nature as it happens; it becomes meaningful only within the established semiotic structure. Experience is thus inalienably linked to language. But this link would not limit experience to “a fixed order of meaning,” neither would it resolve the contradiction between competing discourses. It would rather keep open the possibilities for multiple meanings. Scott does not want to substitute the foundation of experience by language. She looks for a discursive interpretation of experience that is contingent, contextual and contested. Scott, thinking about the subject of experience, deems the subject to be a product of discourse. Again, this is not a denial of agency. It is to remember that agency is created through situation and statuses conferred on the subject. S/he is endowed with choices that work in the social, political, economic,

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ethical or other fields of signification. When experience disavows the discursive mediations of its genesis it reifies the self and erases its subjectivity. The self is now derived and defined through experience. The uniqueness of the self as subject, a singularity in taking decisions beyond structural and experiential determination, is thus effaced. Scott insists that talking about experience uncritically naturalizes the existence of individuals. Rather than asking how conceptions of selves, subjects and identities are constructed, we take the existence of individuals for granted. [ H ]istorical processes…, through discourse, position subjects and produce their experiences. It is not individuals who have experience, but subjects who are constituted through experience. Experience, in this definition, then becomes not the origin of our explanations, not the authoritative (because seen or felt) evidence that grounds what is known, but rather that which we seek to explain, that about which knowledge is produced. To think about experience in this way is to historicize it as well as to historicize the identities it produces. (1992, 25–26) For Scott, the category of experience can be an interpretation and something to be interpreted. Something that has some meaning of its own, a meaning that might stumble on the available techniques of knowing. But she would at once evoke the insurmountable force of the discursive field. Subjects are constituted discursively, experience is a linguistic event (it doesn’t happen outside established meanings), but neither is it confined to a fixed order of meaning… Experience is a subject’s history. Language is the site of history’s enactment. Historical explanation cannot, therefore, separate the two. (1992, 34) To treat experience as a linguistic event is to come out of the given notions of unquestioned experience and ‘reality’. To treat experience as only a linguistic event opens itself to scrutiny on at least two registers. One is the abandonment of any extra-linguistic materiality in favor of a linguistic essentialism. The form this takes in a Butlerian gesture is not to disavow materiality but to perceive it as flowing from, marked as the material in, language. The other critique, more relevant in our present context, is a neglect of the ‘sub-linguistic’ register of experience – which might be named the unconscious in a psychoanalytic view or the ontic in post-Heideggerian phenomenology. The mediation, through language, of the identity of the subject occurs through registers of ‘sub-individuality’ that are the grounds of power-gradients and immanent force-fields. That ideology, power and the subject are co-constitutive, they

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bring each other into existence, can only be appreciated if one comes out of linguistic determinism. A determination by language inevitably leaves certain gaps in the conceptualization of the subject that can only be filled either by a whole-hearted return to an essentialism based on power or matter; or by a pragmatic invocation of holding on to both matter and language without going into the dynamics of the processes involved. My view of experience is an attempt to come out of the duality of the question – is experience an immediate presence or is it mediated by discourses and histories. An answer that gravitates to the latter is the easy solution of unexamined culturalism. It focuses its attention on the cultural construction of experience, builds systemic structures based on the elements under scrutiny at the moment of the particular theoretical enunciation, and rests assured about the inevitable exclusions perpetrated on other elements (not deemed ‘relevant’ to the particular discussion in question), complacent with the inevitability of choosing a moment to start. As such, the element of the unanticipatable remains untheorized, not taken cognizance of within the blanket term of immediacy. In an insightful discussion on the affinities and divergences of Deleuze and Derrida, Leonard Lawlor (2003) brings out the co-implications of im/mediacy. He speaks, in the conceptualization of the simulacrum (“a repetition, an image, that has no model or original”, 68), of a Deleuzian stress on immediate duality (of immanence and transcendence) vis-à-vis a Derridean focus on mediate unity. The important point here, for me, is that these two views, though differing in the aspect that it stresses, are convergent in their implications. For Deleuze, the irreducible immediacy (immanence) of the event is always dual: “[t]wo presences or two positivities (sense and nonsense) constitute the Deleuzian immediate duality” (81). For Derrida, the unity or sameness (transcendence) of the formal is already mediated: “[p]resence and non-presence, a positive and a negative (sense and nonsense) constitute the Derridean mediate unity” (81). Both immanence and transcendence of the event called a given experience is incomplete in itself, constitutively lacking the other. Think experience as an event, the gift of an event beyond an economy of expectation. The unanticipatability and surprise of the gift is built into the singularity of the event. One may try to understand what Deleuze (1990– 1969) means when he says: What is an event? It is a singularity – or rather a set of singularities… (52) He goes on to explicate: [S]ingularities, however, should not be confused either with the personality of the one expressing herself in discourse, or with the individuality of a

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state of affairs designated by a proposition, or even with the generality or universality of a concept signified by a figure or a curve. The singularity belongs to another dimension than that of denotation, manifestation, or signification. It is essentially pre-individual, non-personal, and a-conceptual. (52) We may discern two distinct views of this singularity that is the event. In one of these, it is juxtaposed to generality, to anticipation, and to the form.11 In the other, singularity and generality, “interiority of expectation” and “exteriority of surprise,” “receptivity of the subject” and “activity of the object,” are seen to be ‘strangely’ coincident (Dastur 2000, 187). The latter, for me, is the more convincing, although the difference between the two is often only that of a slight separation of the point of stress in the enunciation of the problem. I want to point at the radical undecidability that haunts experience, the inherent multiplicity of the immanence of experience, without letting go of the unity and the expectable construction (through discourse, power, history) of the event – to bring in “contingency, unpredictability and chance” into the calculable world of experience. As critiques (Lawlor, Dastur) have eloquently indicated, both Deleuze and Derrida have been aware of the central role of death in the thinking of this unanticipatable as the future anterior. One may also add the name of Freud (as in “Beyond the Pleasure Principle”) to this list. Undoubtedly, this is a secular bid to come to terms with the unanticipatable in ways of knowing, being and doing. Other-than-secular modes of thought have other ways to approach the problem. Maybe, too dependent on the lone universal of the secular, we had been too attentive to the secular/non-secular divide. To the point of not lending our ears to learn across the divide. And pace Rajeswari Sunder Rajan (2002–2000, 282), a secular bid to learn from the polytheist mindset can hardly be called ‘bad faith’, of course, if one can come out of the arrogance of righteousness. As the present book has been trying to do all along, I once more attend the supplement that haunts sure grounds of experience in the wo/men of multiple worlds. Opening up the grounds of experience lets one think of ways of communicating across experiences, and finally allows the thinking of an ethics of responsibility based on the iterable repetitions of the event called experience. The next section goes on to show how a politics based on a spectral notion of experience – its definition haunted by the unanticipatable – opens itself to an ethics based upon responsible relations with multiple singularities of other iterations. The structures of iterability that construct experience also open it up to responsibilities. I end the chapter by pointing at possible changes in the economy of violence that responsibilities might entail. The possibilities thus spoken of are, not to forget, simultaneously impossible.

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Eating Others: An Inquiry into the Notions of Iterability and Responsibility To outline my argument, I begin by treating experience as mediated by discourses and histories. We get to know about the discourses and histories through experience. Do we then get back to experience as the starting point of knowledge? That is not a logical necessity, for, if we do not presuppose something that stands unmediated it would not require thinking in terms of a starting point of knowledge or experience. When we say that we know about the discourses and histories through experience, we talk about the mutual constitutivity of discourse and experience. It is ideology that links up the mutually constitutive process. Any kind of signification or re-presentation is structurally ideological. It is the discourse/s that structurally hold/s the ideology/ies. I think of experience in terms of a knowing/being/doing continuum. Now that we think of experience mediated by discourse, language, history, sociality, we come to question the how of the mediations. Such that, experience gets plural, a plurality that is not marked by repetitions of a single particular. A phenomenology of experience and reason can bring the questions of this plurality of experience to our view. And as we will realize in a moment, this plurality is inalienably linked to the spectral – experience in the plural is always already haunted by specters of the non-experiential. To think of experience in terms of the ‘real’ is to authenticate with the ‘facticity’ of the presence of experience. One possible move to avoid this is to understand the discursive and the linguistic nature of experience. I want to point at the structure of writing – in a Derridean sense – that constitutes experience. In this structure, the presence always bears the traces of absence within its very being. The presence of the now is inscribed upon the palimpsest of earlier presences, the paleonymy of earlier uses haunt the present uses. The future of this presence is not a future present but a radical futurity in the sense of being underivable from the present. This move – from language to writing – enables one to recognize the unanticipatable in experience. The structure of language, even as it unmoors experience from the authenticating ground of the ‘real’, creates its own circumscribing web of signification. I invoke the complex theoretical implications of iterability – that marks the structure of writing – to theorize the simultaneous questioning and retention of the category of experience. My point is not to valorize experience as truth or to disregard it as ‘mere linguistic construction’. It is not that I add a degree of undecidability to the presence that authenticates experience. I think of experience as a work of re-presentation that remains structurally undecidable. The politics and ethics of feminism, when thought of in terms of a reworked notion of location and experience, get oriented in new ways. The

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notion of third world feminisms may give way to what one may provisionally call embodied feminisms. Embodied in the sense of located in the body. But the notion of body is here different from the standard notion of body in body/ mind dichotomies. As this book has so far been trying to clarify, such a notion of embodied feminisms does not call for an authentication flowing from located experiences. It posits a generality that remains open to singularities not derivable from that general. But how do embodied feminisms transform hegemonic relationships? That is the question I now attend to. The structure of iterability – within which the ontologies of embodied feminisms work – calls for a horizon of im/possible politics within and beyond hegemonies. A certain shift in the structures of violence that inhabit our beings accompany this im/possible horizon. The question that animates this shift is: how to relate to the other, responsibly. In tandem with our effort to think of hegemony in terms of iterability – which, in our framework, is the general economy of communication – Shefali Moitra’s attempt to classify and categorize general forms of hegemony (Chapter Three, “The Hegemony of Reason”) in an analytic frame leads on to the notion of communication in her very next chapter (“‘Speaking to…’ and ‘Speaking with…’”) of her book (2002): Domination has been naturalized through existing patterns of communication. (80) Rare and almost unique in the existing literature, Moitra stresses the need to (re)think communication in order to conceptualize hegemony in its hierarchical form, not treating the general structure of ‘articulation’ among elements as a backdrop to that effort. Her use of analytical vocabulary strains toward a phenomenological description. For example, when she speaks of the ‘individual’, she tries to posit “a unique individual” “without positing some unchanging characteristics,” in the “dual position of role playing and personal construal”: Authorship should be understood as a combination of being-for-oneself and being-for-others where being-for-oneself is situated in a context, of course in a unique configuration… (2002, 84) This lends her seeming allegiance to the discrete analytical categories a phenomenological twist. This twist treats these categories as fictive tools of the bricoleur rather than fixed instruments of an engineer. One should keep this in mind while reading her work. With the above caveat, I move on to a discussion on Moitra’s notions of communication in a conceptualization of hegemony.

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She starts with an enumeration of the contexts through which a mainstream notion of communication defines itself. These, according to her, are: (1) the paradigmatic context based upon the “wider cognitive structure of the human race” (82); (2) the local context that represents the “stabilizing features of the cultural group” (82); (3) the form of life in which communication conventions are created and reproduced; and (4) the gender context. Next she brings in the role of the individual “qua individual” (in a sense that we spoke of in the last paragraph), which works in conjunction with the ‘contexts’ in the act of communication. Depending on these conceptual parameters, she goes on to speak of two modes of communication: ‘Speaking to…’ and ‘Speaking with…’. The ‘Speaking to…’ mode is the preferred way of thinking of communication in the Anglo-American tradition. Here the notion of power is disavowed – and thus remains entrenched deep within – and a neutral transmission of objective knowledge is sought for. Even when it is more nuanced than a routine communication where the speaker thrusts a message unilinearly on the audience, to a thinking in terms of a turn-by-turn ball game, “the speaker is given more importance than the hearer while keeping within the orbit of sharing” (86). Language is used as an instrument, a passive conveyer of information. Even for a resisting political position, the ‘ball game’ model of communication provides only a scope of a reversal of power equations. Here, both the speaker and the hearer have fixed ideas regarding the meaning of justice yet the conversation is in the mode of question and answer. (92) In contrast to the above, the ‘Speaking with…’ mode is rooted in ‘cognitive anxiety’ where one has inadequate information and comprehension to “judge, organize and plan” (92), and can construe events and their implications partially. This mode acknowledges an irreducible plurality of perspectives (93), and is open to the suggestion that “parallel perspectives may actually reveal different worlds and enrich our understanding by broadening our horizon” (94). In contrast to the ‘Speaking to…’ mode, this view can think of modes of communication other than the spoken/written language. For the communicating subject in this mode, the body (while retaining a “commonality at some level of abstraction”) as a purveyor of “structures of privilege and power” and made of “contingent and variable social meanings” (95) is a major component. Moitra marks this mode as a “phenomenological mode of communication” with a necessary element of respect for the ‘other’ (93). Depending on a mutuality of interaction, the ‘Speaking with…’ mode puts importance on reciprocal listening. Listening is not the same as yielding. Here

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the act of listening to the other occurs with a detachment from ones own voice. The interaction is not viewed in terms of gaining ground against another in a battle of influence. A ‘power-with-power’ configuration is being aimed at rather than ‘power-over-power’. The liberal analytical tradition of thinking sees this mode as complementary to the ‘Speaking to…’ mode, though by its own way of conceptualization, it is a bid to radically displace the other one – to replace the ethos of a “de-animated communication” with that of “strength and sharing” (99). As we have already discussed, the ‘Speaking to…’ mode of communication deals with language as if it is an instrument to be used at the users’ will. To think of the ‘Speaking with…’ mode as a radically different approach, language has to be conceptualized in a different way. This is not to treat language as the repository of all communicative activity reducing the role of the user to a naught. The mutual interaction of the ‘user’ and the ‘language’ has to give an account of a structuration and a radical undecidability in language – where every utterance is singular in its eventness – and an account of a similar constitution and singularity of the ‘user’. The notion of iterability is one such ‘name’ which describes the ‘event’ of language in this manner;12 of course, setting the correspondence of the name to an event problematic in its very enunciation. It is a name that allows one to think of the ethical and the ontological link of the ‘other’ to the ‘same’ – to remember that “[t]he word in language is half someone else’s” (Bakhtin 1994, 77). In “Signature Event Context” (1988), Derrida begins by rendering problematic the notion of communication. He refers to non semio-linguistic communication – such as the transmission of a tremor – that might indicate a vision of communication broader than, and containing within it as an element, a semio-linguistic communication. Then the role of language would be secondary to that of the wider field of communication. Yet, as Derrida shows, a displacement (of ‘meaning’) from non semio-linguistic to semio-linguistic involves metaphorical representation that presupposes the metaphor-real relationship of secondariness and primacy. The movement is thus presupposed in this relationship and the argument turns out to be circular. Language comes to occupy the whole of the field of communication. But, it is imperative to remember that the concept of this language that expands into the general field is constituted by the concept of it being regional and secondary to the whole. One has to work within this double bind. Another notion that might have been useful in localizing and defining the field of communication is context. But what is a context? Is it definable, determinable as a concept? Later on, Derrida (1988) would put this concept of the concept under scrutiny. He shows that the whole ‘discourse’ on the rethinking of communication, writing, context, and so on, a rethinking of the presence of the ‘graphematic’, is dependent on, it

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presupposes, a rethinking of the concept of the concept. He names the terms iterability, differance, trace, and a few of his own categorial innovations as: a conceptual concept or another kind of concept, heterogeneous to the philosophical concept of the concept, a ‘concept’ that marks both the possibility and the limit of all idealization and hence of all conceptualization… (118)13 Is not the ‘naturalness’ of the context under question when the utterance of the language as the central event in ‘communication’ gets displaced by that of the iterability of ‘writing’? The context is then never absolutely determinable – a structural inadequacy to define its structure marks the notion of the context. Spivak (1984, 19–20) had ingeniously written on the supplanting of the ‘context’ by the notion of the ‘scene of writing’ that retains the lack of determination in its structure. Derrida’s move is to expand the concept of writing to circumscribe the realm of communication within it. This involves two related steps: (1) a displacement of writing, no longer in the sense of the limited concept of the transmission of meaning; and (2) a displacement of communication, to be inscribed in the general domain of writing as a particular. The primacy of writing that we are speaking of is not in the sense of the ‘reality’ of the act of ‘empirical’ writing, but as the primacy of a structural feature inherent in writing that acts as the presupposed ‘ground’ of all communication. Speech is also writing. Here writing is thought of as a broad system of uses of signs that acts as a system even in the absence of the users of the system. Textuality, in a specific sense, pervades the scene of all experience: [ T ]he text is not the book, it is not confined in a volume itself confined to the library. It does not suspend reference – to history, to the world, to reality, to being, and especially not to the other, since to say of history, of the world, of reality, that they always appear in an experience, hence in a movement of interpretation which contextualizes them according to a network of differences and hence of referral to the other, is surely to recall that alterity (difference) is irreducible. (Derrida 1988b, 137) What one calls the ‘scene of writing’ (context) gets continually inscribed by the marks of alterity. Writing as communication does not need the presence of the sender or the recipient. It needs the presence of the mediator, the medium in which writing is inscribed. It is inalienable from a certain presence. Thus, writing does not dispense with presence altogether. It displaces the presence into a role of mediator, not the origin (sender), not the telos (recipient). As a mediator, its presence is also not fully self-contained, in that it needs the

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structure of signs to become a mediator. The sign-structure is also only a trace-structure, not a fully present structure. Thus thinking in terms of iterability – “not simply a repeatability”, Derrida is never tired of repeating – is not to get rid of intentions. It would seem that it is enough to recognize that for intention, an “adequation between intention and expression” (128) is the point toward which end it necessarily tends, but which it may not reach – a “movement toward plenitude” and not an attainment of plenitude is the necessary condition of intentionality. Derrida goes beyond that. For him, intentions imply ‘pure’ plenitude as telos, “but the structure of this telos is such that if it is attained, it as well as intention both disappear” (129). The non-attainment of the goal is a structural necessity for intention, the plenitude “belongs to it as its most intimate and its most irreducible other, as the other itself in it” (129). In this context, iterability is at the same time that which tries to attain plenitude and that which bars access to it. Through the possibility of repeating every mark as the same iterability makes way for an idealization that seems to deliver the full presence of ideal objects…, but this repeatability itself ensures that the full presence of a singularity thus repeated comports in itself the reference to something else, thus rending the full presence that it nevertheless announces. (129) This brings us back to the possibility of a ‘communication’ in the spirit of ‘Speaking with…’, where the identity of the sender, that of the recipient, and even the definition of the mediator, are made undecidable – which, as Derrida argues, is different from ‘indeterminacy’ in that undecidability is a “determinate oscillation between possibilities,” possibilities that are themselves “highly determined in strictly defined situations,” (148). As he goes on to write, Derrida cannot but refer to the notions of ‘force’ and ‘power’ at this juncture to designate, somewhat uneasily, “something irreducible” (149). Does ‘Speaking with…’ eliminate force/power, does it abolish, or minimize, violence? We now move on to the question of violence, relating it to the dual notion of empowerment and hierarchy implicit in power – as we have already discussed in the first chapter of this book – in the form of an inalienable economy. That might, in my opinion, point at a concept for negotiating the hegemonic in an iterable frame.14 To make any sense of a particular mode of violence, however extreme and unusual the said instance may be, perhaps one has to think of a general economy of violence. In the days of a heightened sense of fragmented and historicized ways of theorizing – not that the two adjectives are congruent or the two moves have the same effects – it is particularly relevant to remember the generalities of violence that implicate our very beings. Why think about the

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generalities of violence? Does it not shift attention away from the specificity, the uniqueness, of that one (is it one, or many?) extra-ordinary event that is marked as violent? And does generality not smuggle the quotidian into the extraordinariness of those events to reduce the force of their signification? Yet the signification of the force of this event gets lost in the solitude of exclusivity once we fence it away from the universal, one might argue. To speak about the generality of the problem is not to deny the specificity of the particular. It is the way to define the particular in more rigorous terms.15 And then, let us not forget that the space from which, in which I am speaking is the space of the academy, the pedagogic, the ‘teaching machine’ in Spivak’s evocative phrase. At least, one of my concerns is to mark this space where we continue to write and produce meanings and value on the subject of violence. For, speaking on the political or ethical implications of an event or a phenomenon, the stress is too often on the changes to be brought about in the object of discussion, seldom on the people and the space that represent and ruminate upon this object. And too often, academics have dealt with problems of larger political import in a way that can only be marked as the ‘god’s eye view’ or the ‘view from nowhere’, dealing their own, the academic’s privileged position as the disinterested visionary from a distance as unproblematic. This move of forgetting the ground beneath the feet has made it possible to delegate one’s responsibility as an academic – following an academy/activism binary – in favor of a role of an activist. Attempts to chalk out strategies for certain forms of activism and to formulate ethical prescriptions applicable to the society at large may delegate one’s responsibility as an academic activist. It may sound strangely conservative to be reminded of one’s role in the position one continues to occupy with all its attendant privileges. Why think in terms of an economy of violence? For me, thinking thus would allow a rethinking of the present ‘economy’ in terms that are beyond, and at the same time in, an intimate connection with the ‘now’. I have in mind the attempts to think of a different yet related economy. In Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920), Freud speaks of introducing an “‘economic’ point of view” into his work. He deals with the economy at work in the working of the ‘pleasure principle’, where, the course of...[mental] events is invariably set in motion by an unpleasurable tension, and…it takes a direction such that its final outcome coincides with a lowering of that tension… (Freud 1991, 275) This is an effort to explain the workings of the ‘mind’ through principles of ‘economy’, of minimization and maximization of certain elements. In a short footnote at the end of the essay, Freud excellently summarizes his steps of

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conceptualization.16 If one remembers that in the essay, Freud himself speaks little on thanatos in positive terms except the logical inevitability of such a concept and defining it only as a differential – that which is opposed to, different from, eros – one might get an idea of this conception of an ‘economy’ that is defined by its beyondness to the dominant. It may be convincingly argued that to conceive the ‘beyond’ in terms of an economy is to foreclose the sense of exteriority and excess. To define it (as an economy) is to erase it. Yet again, the mutual constitution of the inside and the outside, even that of the radically outside, is not to be ignored. Lacan’s attempts (Lacan 1985) in coming to terms with the problem of this excess in desire, to name and define something called the jouissance of being, also has to differentiate between ‘what the phallic function designates as jouissance’ and the ‘supplementary jouissance’ that is ‘proper to’ the woman. One may use the figure of the ‘economies of pleasure’ to denote a space beyond the ‘economies’ of the uterus and the phallus that dominate our thinking – a space marked by the laws of economy nevertheless. I remain a believer in trying to think beyond these marks. Yet, thinking of a general economy of violence, even if with a focus on the generality, would entail a reflection on at least two aspects of the contemporary ways of being in the world. The logic of self-preservation – that one should violate others to defend one’s own existence and life – active in the evolutionist Darwinian logic that prevails in common sense views of survival, is undeniably a logic of violence. As we will discuss in some detail, this involves the logic of need, the need to eat (others). Can we think of an ethics or a politics based on a responsibility to the other rather than a target of a freedom for the self ? Do we recognize the presence of the other in the being of myselfhood? So that, an ethics of the self is always and already an ethics oriented to the other. If possible, how does such an ethic negotiate the need to eat? Before going into the details of that predicament, I briefly mention the other aspect – I call this a certain anaesthetization of death. The concept of the body is intimately related with the concept of death as its ultimate other. How the notion of death as the other changes in a seemingly ‘postmodern’ context into that with a disregard through ubiquitous familiarity is dealt with in Chapter Three. To move on to the motif of eating and the need to eat others in the logic of self-preservation, an essay by Penelope Deutscher (1998) brings up, along with certain other notions, Derrida’s and Irigaray’s concepts of cannibalism. Following her, I try to trace certain attempts by Derrida to figure relationships to the ‘other’ with the trope of eating. Interestingly, Deutscher broaches the question of cannibalism through the problem of mourning the friend. The other about whom she speaks is a genial other, a friend. To me, this attempt to conceptualize the relation to the other in terms of the relation to a friend is a

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move that lets one think beyond the familiar view of thinking this relationship in terms of enmity. The Master/Slave dialectic of Hegelian Phenomenology dominates our thinking in this regard to such an extent that we tend to miss out the singular import of this move. The struggle to death stalled by a surrender of the slave animates the metaphorical scene of thinking a relationship to the other. This perception of the situation forecloses other metaphors, for instance, the metaphor of ‘an other as a friend’. This is not to advocate a liberal friendliness to the hegemonic other. But to remind oneself of a foreclosed supplement to the relation. A supplement that, when taken into cognizance, can paradoxically enable one to deal with processes of othering in a ‘friendly’ setting. A gendered relationship comes very near to replicate such a setting, I propose.17 To think of such a relationship in terms of the metaphorics of eating indicates that I do want to retain the violent connotations of the event, but without reducing it solely to that of violence. What is eating? How is this metonymy of introjection to be regulated?… ‘One must eat well’ does not mean above all taking in and grasping in itself, but learning and giving to eat, learning-to-give-the-other-to-eat. … It is a rule offering infinite hospitality…respect for the other at the very moment when, in experience,…one must begin to identify with the other, who is to be assimilated, interiorized, understood ideally… (Derrida 1991, 115) This is one way of thinking hegemony in terms of iterability. Deutscher (1998) refers to Derrida’s speech after the death of Paul de Man where he talks about his friend becoming, in and through his speech, an object of Derrida’s memories and Derrida’s speculations. The act of speaking to and with him has to give place to that of speaking of him. Yet, as she points out, in contradistinction to an earlier essay by Montaigne where the mourning for the friend is speakable and nameable, and hence contained in the memory of the living, Derrida emphasizes the “resistance and excess of de Man to his memory.” Invoking Abraham and Torok’s use of Freud’s distinction between mourning and melancholia, Deutscher speaks of an encryptment of the other within the self that exceeds the digestive assimilation of the other in mourning. Here is a binary that opposes ‘introjection’ of normal mourning – that kills the dead other and interiorizes it totally so that it is no longer an other – to ‘incorporation’ as a failed mourning where the other “continues to inhabit me, as a stranger”.18 Derrida questions this introjection/incorporation binary by questioning the ‘success’ of a ‘normal’ mourning. He converts the issue of mourning to that of an ethics of alterity and points at the inevitable remains of the other that constitute the self. Mourning becomes a figure to think the self.

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The remains of the other are logically always and already a part of the self once one becomes aware of the dynamics of the constitution of the self where a desire to center the structure is operative in a radically decentered self. Here, the act of incorporation is not an engagement with the other; it is simply enveloping it within. So that the encrypted other remains unavailable in the making of the self, bounded within the secure confines of ‘selfhood’. And then, maybe, digesting the other – an introjection – would be a metaphor for negotiating with the other intimately, in a way that sees the flesh and bones and blood and the sinewy body to be made up, molecule by molecule, with elements of the other. Again, the deconstructive move remains weary of a valorization of this metaphor into the only possible figuration of the other. It criticizes and embraces at one go.19 We can only live this experience in the form of an aporia… where the possible remains impossible. Where success fails. And where faithful interiorization bears the other and constitutes him in me…and then the other no longer quite seems to be the other because we grieve for him and bear him in us… And inversely, the failure succeeds: an aborted interiorization is at the same time a respect for the other as other, a sort of tender rejection, a movement of renunciation which leaves the other alone, outside, over there in his death, outside of us. (Derrida, Memoires: For Paul de Man, 35; quoted in Deutscher, 1998, 167) Earlier, Derrida had discussed how discourses on the being and the ethics of/in being remains profoundly anthropocentric even in the writings of Heidegger or Levinas, writings that definitely ‘disrupt’ a ‘certain traditional humanism’. He calls this element the “sacrificial structure” of these ‘antihumanist’ discourses, a structure that leaves open within its very structurality a discernible place for ‘sacrifice’ – “a noncriminal putting to death” (Derrida 1991, 112). Although not explicitly stating in these terms, the underlying logic of this structure implies the following: The subject (in Levinas’s sense) and the Dasein are ‘men’ in a world where sacrifice is possible and where it is not forbidden to make an attempt on life in general, but only on the life of a man, of other kin, on the other as Dasein. (113) Derrida calls this “carno-phallogocentrism” (113) and situates this in the structure that dominates the concept of the Western subject. This subject, he claims, is not only out to master and possess nature, but to accept sacrifice and eat flesh as well (114). The implicit heroic virility of the schema

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translates femininity or homosexuality into itself, even when these are tolerated. Anthropocentrism turns to (as it always is,) anthropophagy. Eating well as metonymic modes of encountering the other tries to go beyond this “carnivorous virility” (113) while continuing to be haunted by its traces. Thinking of the self as ever always a cannibal self, Derrida knows the impossibility and the inevitability of this cannibalism: The moral question is…not,…should one eat or not eat, eat this and not that, the living or the nonliving, man or animal, but since one must eat in any case and since it is and tastes good to eat, and since there’s no other definition of good…, how for goodness’ sake should one eat well…? (Derrida 1991, 115) With that question hanging in irresolution, I think of the academic’s bid to negotiate an object of knowledge that itself bears intertwined traces of violence and care. The academic, as she tries to face the other as event, has to speak in terms of certain generalities. To remember, not all generalities “suppress singularity in order to establish a ‘fact’” (Spivak 2003b, 44). One has to negotiate certain ‘unverifiable’ generalities – not “tied to a single ‘fact’” – in order to be responsible. Cautiously s/he makes an attempt to explicate the nature of this responsibility. For, a blanket ethic of responsibility for all constitutive others may amount to a non-response to each – it becomes just a naming of a relationship that blurs all specificity in the obligation for any one. The relationship to each ‘other’ is a singularity. The alterity of each is unique, as is the singularity of the ethical subject. In the context of violence and embodiment, the ultimate singularity of the one event, death, reflects the unanticipatability of the event – of any event not reducible to the predictions of a prior calculus. In the next chapter, I move on to the (im)possibility of thinking the singularities of the ‘other’ in terms of the body – to a metaphorics of embodied others. I propose that power and knowledge present themselves in bodies, as embodied, intertwined with each other. That means, on the one hand, neither power nor knowledge can be thought of in disembodied, universalist terms without a reductionist and violating move of excluding the constitutive particular enunciations; and on the other, the ‘body’ cannot present itself only in particularist terms without a forgetting of its general enunciations of power and knowledge. The hegemonic relationships, indicating a notion of power differential, involve ideological moves. Again, ideology is constitutive of the embodied ‘subject’ (as is power). Thus notions of hegemony (or power, or ideology) cannot be thought of only in universalistic terms. Hegemony is embodied in particular enunciations and expands beyond

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analytic generalizations, though not abandoning them altogether. To think of hegemony in an embodied way is to think the question: what makes hegemony possible among certain elements. Why does hegemony work? It can work because the two sides try to communicate, to come to a relation. That brings us to the question of language in a broad sense, of iterability, to displacements engendered through iterations. Two consequences follow. One is the possibility of thinking the ‘becomings’ of hegemony in its multiple particulars. The other is the thinking of the ontological link between elements that are coupled by hegemony – though not ignoring the power differentials produced thereby and the need to resist that – which leads on to a notion of ethical responsibility to the other. This responsibility that one calls ethical is again an experience of the impossible. It exceeds the bounds of possibility of a non-violent relation. Yet it is also circumscribed by, in the sense of being structurally caught up in, the call of non-violence. There is no one general answer to the question, how to eat well. Yet that is one of the general enunciations of the problem. One (dies and) lives in the aporia of that question.

In Conclusion TOWARD A POLITICS OF THE (IM)POSSIBLE Start with the ultimate question in politics. What is to be Done? May one (can one?) question the question itself ? Question the primacy of this one question that circumscribes – limits, defines, paradoxically deifies – theory? Puts theory to the ultimate test of effectivity. Can one seriously contest the word is between the query ‘what’ and the phrase ‘to be done’, question the surety in the be-ing of the act? As Simon Critchley (1999a, 2) reminds us, “… the copula in predicative propositions – S is P – is one of the principal targets of deconstruction”. But remember, questioning does not mean a forgetting, not a total abandonment of the matter at hand. One engages as one interrogates. What is to be done? How to engage with the problem, responsibly? The history of the more than hundred years that separate us from Lenin’s raising of that question is not innocent enough for an easy response. Before embarking on the seemingly fashionable gesture of deconstructing the query, before the ‘petty’ squabbles about words that irritate the propriety of the ‘responsible’ theorizer, let us move on to another sentence known well for its direct condemnation of ‘armchair theorists’ and an almost unequivocal call to action: The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it. Let us remember the way Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (1985, 346) has dealt with the word ‘change’. Regarding the German expression used by Marx ‘verändern’, she points out that it is not the commonest word for ‘change’ in German, not even matching the ‘haben interpretiert’ in its ‘signification of

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propriety and completion’. Her rendering of ‘zu verändern’ into English would be ‘to make other’. I focus on this expression for change that Marx uses. ‘To make other’, as Spivak rightfully stresses, is a far more open-ended term. Let me elaborate a little on the character of this open-endedness and its import for my vision of a politics. Politics for a leftward intellectual, and in a very broad sense, is to change the present. If, to change what is now present is not to be confined within the limits of a critique – I act as the devil’s advocate and do not commit myself to this position without major qualifications – a change in the present entails a positive substantive content, a bringing into presence of something that is not yet present. For what I call a ‘politics of the possible’, this something is wholly derivable from the present, even if it is pluralized into multiple presences. A ‘politics of the (im)possible’, for me, creates things that are not fully derivable, nor even anticipatable from what is present. In that sense, it ‘makes other’, other than that which is now here. Of course, this calls for a detailed discussion of modes of othering and the varieties of the ‘others’ thus available. Let me submit, for the moment, that a politics circumscribed within the ‘possible’ is destined to replicate the structures of the present in any order of transcendence; while that aspiring to a total impossibility – without a whole-hearted engagement with the ‘present’ and the ‘possible’ – is hardly worth the name. That probably explains the parentheses around the letters ‘im’ that I propose to add to the title of this section – retaining and working through the ‘possible’ to reach its limits and the trace of the ‘impossible’; a hanging on to both ends of the binary. I now present a caricature of the position I contest. As a mode of arguing, this is questionable. Yet caricature, in its literal meaning – “a depiction of a person in which distinguishing characteristics are exaggerated for comic or grotesque effect” (Concise Oxford English Dictionary) – is useful as a tool to underline the elements of a given outlook one wants to speak against. This is a popular story on Mollah Nasiruddin, a folksy character with raw wit in an oral chain of stories often ending up almost like a parable. A moonless night. Walking along the rather shady lane, I see Nasiruddin looking frantically for something in the small gray zone just by the streetlamp. Beyond, it is dark. “What are you looking for, Nasiruddin?” “Oh! Its my wedding ring,” he answered, “I have been searching for the last two hours.” “What luck! Are you sure it fell down here?” “Surely not. That was about a kilometer back.” “Then why are you searching here?” I retorted. “But there was no light there.”

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As might be clear to the most casual of readers, I call this the ‘politics of the possible’ – to search where the light is. This is a grossly reduced version of the ‘position’. But, maybe, it brings to light the scale of absurdity often reached by such a mindset. And of course the story, unless violently modified to make Nasiruddin totally unaware of the place he lost the ring so that the possibility of his finding it in the en-lightened space is not fully ruled out, does not give a hint of the (im)possibilities I want to speak of. Let us move on to a text that scrupulously tries to work out multiple aspects of the possible. “The Politics of The Possible” is an essay, deemed important enough to provide the name to the book (1999) that includes it. Kumkum Sangari also adds a qualifying phrase as the subheading, “or the perils of reclassification”. The essay focuses on the “nonmimetic narrative modes” of Gabriel Garcia Marquez (also called “marvellous realism” at some moments) and Salman Rushdie, and the “ease with which a reader may be persuaded to traverse the path between such nonmimetic modes and postmodernism.” Sangari’s concern is the mode of consumption of certain ‘third world texts’ in the ‘west’. Throughout the article, she neatly separates the histories of the specific ‘third world’ locations of these authors from the singular History of the dominant ‘west’. I now go into the detailed argument on Garcia Marquez. “Gabriel Marquez’s marvelous realism is a mode of perception grounded in the political and historical formation not merely of Columbia but of Latin America,” she asserts, and goes on to explicate her statement: The simultaneity of the heterogeneous is a matter of historical sedimentation that results from the physical coexistence over time of different ethnic groups…, each laden with its respective cultural freight of language, myth, oral narrative, magic, superstition, Roman Catholicism, Cartesian education, and modern rationalism. Simultaneity is a restless product of a long history of miscegenation, assimilation, and syncretization as well as of conflict, contradiction, and cultural violence. (2) And again, [ M ]arvellous realism embodies a specific social relation. The apparent ‘novelty’ of marvelous realism results from its immersion in a social matrix wherein improvisation is not merely a formal literary reflex but a function of living in the world… (3) Sangari distinguishes between what she calls “the cultural simultaneity of Latin America” from the “cultural synchronicity available in the so-called ‘first world’” by the differences in their purported histories. While the former is

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characterized by its “historical conjuncture,” the latter is the “end product of the now discredited linear time of modernity and progress,” …a joint apogee of a cultural modernism and a consumer culture, the instant availability effect of the spatialization of the museum and of the push-button archive, as well as a matter of the recurring renovation of style through new juxtapositions… (4) According to Sangari, the distinctions between the heterogeneities in the two ‘worlds’ are: 1. that between a “realized difficulty of knowing” (third world) and “the preasserted or a priori difficulty of knowing” (first world); and 2. that between an assertion of “another level of factuality,” a casting and resolving of issues of meaning “on another, more dialectical plane” (for the third world) and “a felt absence of the will or the ability to change things” that leads on to an “epistemological despair”(for the first world). To me at least, these distinctions are presupposed as they are seen to be flowing inevitably from the differences of the respective histories, and are not worked out in the text. As such, the claim (perfectly legitimate in abstraction) “that the epistemological problem is itself a historical one” remains unfounded on the bases of the evidences provided. The ‘evidences’ assume the inference. In the process, the fine and tenuous distinction between a ‘base superstructure’ model where the latter flows from the former, and the mutual constitutivity between the base and the superstructure hinted at by the use of expressions like marvelous realism embodying a specific social relation gets blurred in favor of the former. Our concern is more with the characterizing of Garcia Marquez’s realism as a “transformative mode” that “has the capacity both to register and to engage critically with the present and to generate a new way of seeing.” The newness of the way of seeing is at stake. Don’t forget, I am not speaking of Garcia Marquez, but of Sangari’s reading of a specific kind of politics into his narrative. At least on one occasion, I hope to bring out the one-sidedness of the reading. Let me quote at some length: As a mode, marvelous realism is attached to a real and to a possible.…do the incipient rebels in the Autumn of the Patriarch actually slice up and dine on the cooked corpse of their comrade? Are two thousand children really kidnapped and massacred because they have discovered how the general rigs the lottery so that he can win everytime? The unanswerability of the

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questions throws them onto another plane. …The brutality of the real is equally the brutality and terror of that which is immanent, conceivable, potentially possible. …Marvelous realism discovers a figurative discourse that produces a knowledge inseparable from its performance in language, image, and metaphor, and that can be understood in its total configuration but not necessarily explained. (6) And now the most important part for our concerns: Garcia Marquez legitimizes the status of the possible as valid knowledge. He realigns a notion of history as a set of discoverable facts with a notion of history as a field of diverse human and cultural possibility…reality is alterable only because it is both relative and determined…it is necessary to prevent a foreclosure by a single meaning so that different meanings may become possible. The characteristic of Sangari’s ‘transformative mode’ that I call a politics is the recognition of the possible along with the real. Not only a ‘possible’ but possibilities in the plural. The rich and variegated openings that the text calls for have only one unavoidable closure – the forgetting of the impossible. It is instructive of how a text working within the classical conceptual frames of the signifier (fiction) and the referent (history), of almost a one-to-one correspondence theory of representation, can open itself up to a multiplicity of possible worlds. It also shows its limits – its dogged trail to remain within the bounds of certainty and secure well-defined options. Speaking of the use of long sentences in “the autumn of the patriarch,” Sangari highlights, in Garcia Marquez, “the fecundity of the repressed” and “unopened possibilities,” pitting him against Faulkner. Garcia Marquez is not uncertain, she asserts. This unease with the uncertain couched in terms of a disdain for the postmodern is symptomatic of a desire. A desire that forecloses the thinking of an impossible, an impossible other to the sameness of our shared (maybe fractured or even multiple) modernity. Speaking of the “attentive, factual rendering of many voices by a single narrator” and a “scrupulous reconstruction of the movements of both victims and the killers” in the narrative of The Chronicle of a Death Foretold, Sangari asserts that here the narration “…consciously attempts to compensate for its own inadequacy.” The prospect that these very elements might point to an attempt to show the limits of adequacy, with glimpses of the ever-open field of the unanticipatable and the illogical, does not occur to her at all. In this mindset, the “unsolved enigma” is by definition, a “failure…of the will of the people,” and never “an index of an indeterminable reality.”

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But then, what is the impossible I am speaking of ? Let us recall. I was advocating an (im)possibility with the brackets around the ‘im’. It combines (is constituted by) both possibility and impossibility. What is possible is anticipatable from the elements of the present, which Sangari calls the ‘real’. As such, it is knowable from within the bounds of real-ity. Knowable, calculable and amenable to a calculus of action. A politics of the possible works wholly within this realm. What I call the impossible is by the same definition, unknowable, radically unanticipatable and exceeds the calculus of action. Along the temporal axis, backwards it is the doubly forgotten – the forgetting of which is itself forgotten, as if, nothing had happened – and forwards it is the un-anticipatable. And there would at least be two ways of relating to ‘it’ that gives way to two different kinds of politics. There may be a non-relation to the impossible. That leads on to the circumscribing of the politics to the realm of the possible alone. A relation to the impossible can occur through the experience of the impossible we call the ethical experience. An experience, that concomitantly calls for a responsibility, a responsibility to the ‘wholly other’ that radically escapes knowledge (epistemology, ontology) yet continues to haunt a pre-ontological undefined space. To remind, this concept of ethics is different from that in a standard version.1 The following is from a famous and perceptive analytic philosopher: [ E ]thics is meant to govern action, not just belief…[i]t begins not with pre-reflective ideas about what the world is like, but with pre-reflective ideas about what to do, how to live, and how to treat other people. (Nagel 1991, 144) As if, what to do can be talked about without a reference to ‘who is doing’. The assumption is of a possibility of a ‘view from nowhere’. Whose ethics is one speaking about? How does the subject of this ethics define her/his self ? How does s/he see the ethical agency being related to this subjecthood? Addressing these questions responsibly, aware and not threatened by the possibility of not providing a satisfactory answer to any of these, yet attending to the necessity of pursuing them to the end, may one reach the verge of the idea of ethics as “the experience of the impossible” and politics as “the calculus of action,” the two remaining, in Spivak’s (1999, 427) evocative phrase, intimately in a “deconstructive embrace” as ethico-politics of the (im)possible. Be cautious. The linking of the ethics with the location of the subject is not spoken of as a substantive assertion. Like what some of the standpoint theorists would say, as I understand them, this connection is a logical inevitability. Playing on and against the classical Hegelian binary of the ‘self ’ and the ‘other’, this theoretical structure tries to conceptualize the ethical experience

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as a process of constitution of the self through a responsible negotiation with the ‘wholly other’, an “ ‘unlimited’ responsibility that exceeds and precedes…[the self ’s] freedom” (Derrida 2001, 201). The process of formation of the subject throughout the dominant strand of western metaphysics is seen here to be complicit with a bid to ‘contain and control’ the autonomy of the other. Knowledge, in the dominant theorization of ethics, is an attempt to engulf the other: Knowledge is a relation of the Same with the Other in which the other is reduced to the Same and divested of its strangeness, in which thinking relates itself to the other but the other is no longer other as such; the other is already appropriated… (Levinas 1996, 151) As opposed to this, the said theory tries to conceptualize the experience of the ethical as the experience of facing the other, facing alterity. And remember, ethics is thought of here as experience and not as an ensemble of mores or prescriptions. The infinitude and incomprehensibility of the other is respected and responded to: The ethical relationship – a nonviolent relationship to the infinite as infinitely other, to the Other – as the only one capable of opening the space of transcendence and of liberating metaphysics. (Derrida 1978, 83) Not that closures are to be discarded. The deconstructive move clings tenaciously to its own figures while breaking them down. Spivak (1993, 132) has insisted that the subject remains centered, but she looks at this centering as “an effect-structure with indeterminable boundaries,” a structure that nonetheless gets “deciphered as determining.” Concepts of law as jurisprudence or even as moral laws might be considered as providing a fixity and a closure that ethics as experience would seemingly abhor. But in the deconstructive move of the experience of the impossible, even law is not something to be derogated. It acquires new meanings: …the law as straightforwardness or uprightness [droiture]: to speak straight on, to address oneself directly to the other, and to speak for the other whom one loves and admires, before speaking of him. (Derrida 2001, 200) The law is the ‘straightening of the curve’ that is reductive, yet impossible to avoid in the active agency of the ‘subject’. A straightening that, maybe, is something inalienable to the process of knowing.

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But how to differentiate between a ‘call of the wholly other’ from a paralyzing of action? Even from a liberal assimilation of the ‘internal other’? Does not inversion of existing power relations or a call to go absolutely beyond the present structure of oppression/exploitation, provide a far more radical edge to an ethico-politics? In the neatly defined world of analytic precision, these are probably unanswerable except in the form of paradox. A deconstructive insight would make one sensitive to the circularities of the logic of inversion and the attainment of an absolute beyond not as something unwanted or expendable at will but as something into which one is inserted and which one cannot not want to be got rid of. To remember, as Sara Ahmed (2000) shifts one’s attention to, the act of marking the other as the infinitely other – not amenable to the calculations of the self – might work to homogenize the infinite multiplicity of others into a single otherness. Paradoxically, this would not look at the singularity of each other. Ahmed calls for the gesture of attending to the encounters with the others in finite and particular circumstances. That may, in her opinion, “open up the possibility of an ethics that is not only ‘beyond being’, but which also resist thematizing others as ‘the other’” (144). The particularity she speaks of is not a ‘simple’ presence of the body or ‘face’. The particularity is inextricably constituted by generalities. To attend to the singularity of each situation, each encounter, is to reach the generalities that go into the making of each, not to the repetitions of the singular. The non-repeatable ‘event’ness of the ethical encounter with the other is brought out by the figurations I proffer. Unlike Ahmed, I cannot offer alternative forms of hospitality or senses to reach out to the other. Extending and sticking to her own logic, I want to point at the inevitable newness of each encounter, the (im)possible figurations through known and other generalities. These generalities, dispersed in interruptions of the singular, allow the thinking of (im)possibility of beings and their interconnectedness. The ethic of responsibility to the others remain at the very heart of ontology, not as something extraneously added onto it. The ontological connection between the self and the other enacts the experience of the impossible. The thinking of other generalities is thus linked to the politics of the im/possible. It is not a question of going beyond one (Western) episteme and trying to understand (know) in terms of other (eastern/feminine/mad) epistemes. To think that as a possibility is to render epistemology and the act of knowing, an ontological primacy. As if an episteme is not one, only one of the many factors that make one live and think. As if, the everyday practices of living and thinking depend wholly on the (? rational) decisions of the subject to think as it wants. Much of analytic philosophy, not to say the whole gamut of prescriptive (maybe, also the descriptive) sciences of the socius, works on

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this assumption. As if an episteme can, at the will of the thinkers, come out of the overdeterminations of other aspects of being, and, independent of the other factors, change its own nature. And paradoxically, it is the same ignoring of its constitutive others that would make an episteme seem permanent and unchangeable. Then what else to do but to try thinking in other ways, try changing epistemes – using elements of, and living, the one s/he resides in – remaining well aware of the limits (and the radical contingency and unknowability of these limits) that render the endeavors unrealizable though inalienable, something that one cannot receive but ‘cannot not want’. And again, even at the level of the episteme, it is the imaginations and the efforts to move beyond that keep a radical ethico-politics going. Only to re-member – our imaginations, like our beings, are already and always pregnant with the play of (im)possibilities. An optimism of the intellect – for who says intellection needs a sure ground for optimism? What is to be done? An interrogation of the being of this question leads on to a questioning of the being, the experience of the (impossible) other within the self of the interrogator. Does it negate the validity of the question? Of course, NOT. For the experience, by definition, also marks the being of this second question – the questioning of What is to be done. A forgetting of this sometimes marks the ‘masters’ of deconstruction itself. Remember Spivak’s admonitions against Derrida: [ Y ]ou can’t catch at any specter…if you don’t attend to the ghost’s signature… (1995, 65) A meticulous and sustained attention to the signature should not conflate it with a full presence. This act does not equate presence with “sensuousness as practical, human-sensuous activity” (Thesis V in Marx 1964, 615). Nor should the care and responsibility of that attention be uneasy with the vagaries of this chancy, messy, unforeseeable world, I humbly submit.

NOTES Chapter 1: Body, Power and Ideology 1 See Foucault (1990–1978) – [ P ]ower must be understood in the first instance as the multiplicity of force relations immanent in the sphere in which they operate and which constitute their own organization; as the process which, through ceaseless struggles and confrontations, transforms, strengthens, or reverses them; as the support which these force relations find in one another, thus forming a chain or a system, or on the contrary, the disjunctions and contradictions which isolate them from one another; and lastly, as the strategies in which they take effect, … (92–93) And again, It is in this sphere of force relations that we must try to analyze the mechanisms of power. (97) 2 This question is rarely raised in the literature of Foucauldian critical theory. Defining power in terms of force – thus shifting the onus (of explaining) from one term to another, from ‘power’ to ‘force’ – remains the common move, ignoring thereby the need to go into the details of one’s theoretical tools. Deleuze and Spivak remain two who desist from this laxity in a significant manner. 3 To remember, the fictionality of a category does not render it ‘unreal’. Fictions, like that of the nation, the family, or the self, play a ‘real’ role in the daily world. The fictionality of the real only works in conjunction with the reality of fiction. One is reminded of Althusser’s nuanced attempts to come to terms with this view within a Marxian framework in Reading Capital (1970). 4 A little later on, I will deal with another use of the concept of ideology that is not a rejection and yet seems faulty. I mean the uses of ideology and hegemony in the manner of Laclau, Mouffe and, to the extent that he remains tied to them, Zizek. 5 It might be interesting at this point to recall that the notion of ideology requires the thinking of an overall unity in a system of domination, even if the unity is not thought of as given but perceived to be ‘produced’ through processes. As such, it may productively be put to use with ‘power’ in a complimentary way, and these two are not necessarily exclusive of each other. 6 Note the use of ‘properly’ in the above sentence. Catachresis does not imply an absence of a referent, but the absence of a proper referent – the act of signification is not false

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but inadequate. To quote an early use where Derrida (1982, 255) quotes Fontanier (“Préface au Traité général des figures du discours autres que les tropes” in Les figures du Discours, ed. Gérard Genette, 1968, Paris: Flammarion, 213–214), Catachresis, in general, consists in a sign already affected with a first idea also being affected with a new idea, which itself had no sign at all, or no longer properly has any other in language. 7 Spivak puts it thus – …there is an asymmetrical homology between enonce-savoir-connaissance and forcepouvoir-puissance that has something like a relationship with subindividual-onticontological. (1993c, 41) The careful phrasing of “something like a relationship” indicates that the correspondences between the series are tenuous and far from one-to-one. 8 Throughout this dissertation, the word ‘moment’ presupposes a dynamic system where this momentariness is located. To quote a clear formulation by Martin Nicolaus (1973) on the use of this term by Marx – Because movement is the only constant, Marx, like Hegel, uses the term ‘moment’ to refer to what in a system at rest would be called ‘element’ or ‘factor’. In Marx the term carries the senses both of ‘period of time’ and of ‘force of a moving mass’. …Hegel’s usage was more mechanical, and time was absent from it. (29) Whether the assertion regarding Hegel in the quote above is true or not, I concur with this Marxian use of the term. 9 This provisionally explains the subtle shift in Spivak’s position in the question of power and ideology from “Can the Subaltern Speak” to “More on Power/Knowledge”. In the first, she was unequivocal about the inability of the register of power to speak of ideology. In the latter, she explains how the notion of power in a very specific sense gives “a much “truer” view of things than most theories of ideology will produce” (35). Although both of these remain valid as observations not totally incompatible with each other, the change in attitude working in the production of the double name Foucault/Derrida is clear. Here is a case for the epistemology of the self as an initial ethical move – …if the ethical subject is not taken to be without historical, cultural, linguistic limits, then a study of its constitution(s) is the place to begin ethical investigations. (Spivak 1993c, 40) 10 One can remember Spivak’s comment on the ‘neutralization’ of the ontico-ontological difference by lichtung. This is a word customarily used to stand for a ‘clearing’ in the woods but in its use by Heidegger, also bears the mark of being a cognate of the noun ‘Licht’ (light). See Heidegger’s discussion in Being and Time on the “there”-ness of Dasein where he relates the disclosedness of Dasein with the ‘clearing’ of the Being-in-the-world; see also the translators’ footnote (1962, 171). 11 Spivak’s piece goes into the details of an exegesis on Foucault’s work and forcefully puts forward her own take vis-à-vis that of the others. Here, the positions of Spivak

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and Deleuze are discernibly similar in their treatment of Foucault in a philosophical spirit and in the use of topological metaphors in discussing subjectivity. Compare the following from Spivak on the constitution of the subject with our discussions of the Deleuzean frame so far – …lines of knowing constituting ways of doing and not doing, the lines themselves irregular clinamens from subindividual atomic systems – fields of force, archives of utterance. Inducing them is that moving field of shredded enonces or differential forces that cannot be constructed as objects of investigation. Ahead of them, making their rationality fully visible, are the great apparatuses of puissance/ connaissance. (1993c, 37) 12 The Citizen’s equality is an absolute concept in that in its symbolic form, it allows of no exception and real equality calls for the negation of all effects of power that constitutes society. The citizen should be above the law as the promulgator of the law and below it as its subject. The peculiar character of the public life of the citizen does not call for the abolition of the private life but assumes its transparency. 13 The diffuseness in the definition of the registers is vital to this mode of thought. The neatness of classificatory schemes would indicate a trimming down of the singularities of each series in the interest of ready workability, a disavowal of the undecidability that marks the articulation of these structures – something a deconstructionist like Spivak will always abhor, without thereby shirking from the responsibility of taking (non-teleological) decisions to define. 14 Later in the book I will clarify the use of (im)possibility as a category that retains both possibility and impossibility. The stress is, however, on exceeding the notion of the only possible. 15 Ajit Chaudhury (Chaudhury 1988, and Chaudhury, Das, Chakrabarti 2000), and Shefali Moitra (2002) are two theorizers who try to chart possible forms of hegemony in brilliantly nuanced ways. While the latter shows an awareness of the impossibility of such an endeavor to strain toward a phenomenological account, the former remains a prisoner to his own ever-sophisticating mathematical maze of structures of hegemony. 16 Unless, extending the structure in a route beyond its focus, relationships are established between the nodal points of two or more spaces. This is the attempt made by Chaudhury, Das, Chakraborty 2000. The attempt, trying to speak of a sort of meta-hegemony among hegemonic spaces, does fail to address the question it itself poses: for a hybrid field of overdetermined spaces among which hegemony would purportedly operate, how is it possible to define one space from another? Yet it has been productive in other ways. 17 As Barrett points out, this is post-Marxist as well as post-Marxist, in that it works through and retains traces of ‘Marxism’ as it goes beyond. 18 As we have been arguing in the previous section, Foucault speaks of the processes and institutions that make the subject up without reducing these to some specific classontology, and is yet unable to address the register of the subject directly. 19 Barrett (256–7) writes about the “substantive social/historical account” in Hegemony and Socialist Strategy repeating a logic of speaking about the society in the order of the economy, then state, ideology, “culture” – a deterministic organization of concepts. She also shows the retention, in their account of Capitalism, of the idea of “capitalism,” essentially concerning “commodification,” as a process that does not involve the “noncapitalist” relations in the ‘private domain’.

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20 I owe this paraphrasic reading of Zizek’s argument to Sibaji Bandyopadhyay’s oral and written comments on Zizek’s writings. Of course, he is not responsible for the specific use I make of it here. 21 It seems natural that at this point of his discussion, Zizek goes on to pit the Althusserian notion of the Ideological State Apparatuses (ISA) against Foucault’s Power. For him, the latter is “a clear case of patching up,” using “the extremely suspect rhetoric of complexity” (66). Zizek, like the early Spivakian gesture in “Can the Subaltern Speak?”, prefers the ISA for its clarity in dealing with the hierarchies operating in their materiality. Of course, Spivak was still then aware of the importance of Foucault for dealing with ‘subindividual’ registers. I refer to the first section of this chapter for a detailed line of reasoning. 22 It seems that Spivak’s reading of the Specters is a bit hurried in this regard. When she speaks of the different addressees of ideology (the intellectual in German Ideology) and false consciousness (the worker in the phase of Capital), she is a bit hasty in not attending to the continuities and the displacements between ideology and commodity fetishism that Kofman and Balibar had already spoken of. Actually this might profitably be read, as I intend to do a bit later, along with her own insistence on the ‘homeopathy’ of the rationalization of labor power. 23 As we will soon witness, Derrida produces his ‘ghost’ out of the wooden brains of this table. My only submission is that this ghost had her antecedents. 24 In another piece published more or less at the same time, Spivak speaks of the differance between socialism – the realm of the calculable – and, communism – the incalculable, the realm of the impossible – and, of the need to “calculate with the incalculable” (1995b, 110–111). 25 I will shortly deal with the general structure of Derrida’s hauntology in some detail. 26 Balibar speaks of the situation of the ‘bourgeois era’ where capitalist relations predominate. I try to enunciate the problem in a broader stroke, keeping in mind the generality and the relevance of at least ‘ideology’ for other forms of the social. For Balibar, what I call the ‘singular’ is the ‘individual’. I do not conflate the two terms whose divergence I elaborate later in the book. In some specific instances, like that of a particular way of theorizing a particular concept (here, the ‘bourgeois era’), the individual may play the role of the singular. Of course, that impoverishes the theoretical import. This is what happens with Balibar in this occasion. 27 Keeping in mind his earlier piece (1991) on the ‘citizen-subject’ and the general tenor of his arguments, it is hardly possible to accuse Balibar of a naïve statist notion of power. Yet, even if the reference to State here is present as indicative of an inevitable hierarchic gradient in Power, the simple idea/matter binary at work is itself problematic. Of course, this does not nullify Balibar’s insightful analyses of the phenomena on other occasions. 28 To refer back to the beginning of our discussion on ideology, this is the way Derrida deals with the question, what makes ideology possible (logically): iterability. Exchange can occur between different things which have a commonality that makes calculation of equivalence possible. This commonality with a difference is equivalent to the structure of repetition with a displacement that marks iterability. For Derrida, Capitalization presupposes exchange. 29 The translator of the piece (2002b) uses ‘globalatinization’, mentions it in a footnote (50) and adds that he thinks it significant that the predominant language that instrumentalizes ‘mondialatinization’, the language of the Anglo-American world, has to render the ‘world’ by the ‘globe’ in the given context.

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30 In the last chapter of this book, I deal with this call and the awaiting of the ‘event’ beyond a calculation of possibilities in a section on the ‘politics of the (im)possible’. 31 See Laclau 2000, 291 for a detailed discussion of the problem.

Chapter 2: Thinking the Body: Metaphoricity of the Corporeal 1 In Chapter Three, I deal with how Levinas treats this being-at-hand-ness of the thing to argue for an ethic of responsibility to the other. 2 The most detailed references to the two modes of being are in Being and Time (Heidegger 1962). For other discussions, see Heidegger 1985, Heidegger 1971, Brandom 2007, Edwards 2007, and Inwood 1999. 3 The distinction between Ding and Bestand have important ethical imports even if one disagrees with Heidegger on whether Bestand may thought to be associated only with what Heidegger calls “modern technology”. Thus one may question his distinction between an earlier techne and a modern technology on the basis of the specific ways of unconcealment that these are related to, and still use the distinction between Ding and Bestand. 4 Namely, earth, sky, mortals and divinities (Heidegger 1971). I refer to Edwards’ discussion on the matter for a detailed exposition. Only to remember that the fourfold here represent the conditionalities that produce the thing and not the literal meanings of the terms. 5 For a detailed explication of the matter in its historical and conceptual complexities, see Haraway 1991b. I also owe much of the arguments that follow to this article. 6 For someone like Elizabeth Grosz (1995), the consequence is to make gender irrelevant for the discussion. For her, sex refers to the morphologies of the body, not to sexual impulses, desires, wishes, hopes, bodies, pleasures, behaviors, and practices. It is always already expression and does not need any second order expression called gender. Here, I deal with the opinions that point at the mutual constitution of sex and gender and not a collapsing of one to the other. 7 In this context, one can trace an analogy to Latour’s (1993) theorizing of the a-modern. Latour speaks of two axes of division in theory with two major zones: (i) Purification, where two entirely distinct ontological zones, that of the human and the non-human, are differentiated; (ii) this entire field of purification, as distinguished from the field of translation, where hybrid, integrative networks of relation are stressed. Latour would assert that even if we ignore the first axis of division, remaining wholly in the realm of translation, we work within the field of modernity. When we problematize the second axis of differentiation – be aware of the simultaneous working of the purificatory and translatory processes – we are a-modern, going beyond the modern/non-modern dichotomy. One may thus move on to a sense of contingency of not only the human/ non-human divide but also to the blurring of a distinction between the division and non-division of the categories; enabling one to work through the practices of division along with those of non-division. 8 Drawing on the ‘classical’ literature on the body (Canguilhem 1978–1966, Foucault1976, Merleau-Ponty1996–1945 and others), Das (2001) gives a brief overview of the epistemologies of the medical knowledge of the body. 9 For an interesting introduction to the ‘Will to Play’ and its relations with the ‘Will’-s to truth, power and record, see Bandopadhyay 2001. 10 As, too often than not, attempts to study women suffer the haunting presence of the ‘soul’ of man.

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11 Bandopadhyay (2002) starts a discussion into the logical dynamics of this process. 12 Let us recall Spivak’s attempt to read “the proper names of Foucault and Derrida in to each other,” (1993, 38) where she comprehends ‘madness’ as “the catachrestic name given by early Foucault to that ontic dimension of Being which eludes Reason’s ontology” (38, emphasis added), and not as “an ontologically displaced physicomoral condition” (38). 13 Derrida’s (1979) use of the name “woman” to denote such a radical outside is dealt with in Chapter Four. 14 Spivak (1993, 25–51), in a brilliant exposition, shows how neither Foucault nor Derrida can be summarized in terms of positions and can be read one into the other, at the same time retaining the sense of difference. 15 Sara Ahmed’s (2000) Levinasian amendment of the being presentness of the ‘other’ as a ‘known other’ does not go against this radical alienness. 16 This does not necessarily imply an act of dehistoricization. Indeed, history has been a major resource for feminism, in letting one think beyond the naturalness of the sexual divide. Yet, I propose, following a rich current of feminist thought at least since the eighties of the last century, a problematization of the sex/gender binary. My contention is, history as a resource should not be treated as unproblematically authentic. See chapters four and five for detailed discussions. 17 Being well aware of the tenuousness of such a division between the concept and the reality, I use these in the pragmatic spirit of a writer trying to come to terms with the conceptual tools s/he uses yet tries to undermine. 18 I would like to take the cue from Fraad, Resnick and Wolff (1994) in the positing of gender in the locus of meaning, thus enabling one to look at the gender processes loosened from processes of power and labour and to realign with them in a specific site of analysis. “Each person can be thought of as a unique site, a special cross-section of particular biological, cultural, political, economic, and psychological processes.” (Fraad, Resnick and Wolf 1994, 113) For the tensions acting between the epistemo-ontological and the ethico-political subjects of gender/feminism, see Spivak (1993). 19 Against this she posits the concept of ‘woman’ ‘‘in the same way that Wittgenstein suggested we think about the meaning of game, as a word whose meaning is not found through the elucidation of some specific characteristic but is found through the elaboration of a complex network of characteristics,” through ‘family relationships’. According to her, this is helpful as it has a “nonarrogant stance” towards meaning. 20 In the next section of this chapter, I deal in more detail with the issue of performativity and some of its critiques. 21 See Spivak (2002) for a detailed discussion. 22 See Scott (1992) and Moya and Hames-Garcia (2001) for a related debate. I deal with the matter in some detail in Chapter Five. 23 “Hypostasis (from Latin, ‘substance’), the process of regarding a concept or abstraction as an independent or real entity.” (Audi 1999, 409) 24 Vicky Kirby’s book (1997) deals with the issue in detail. 25 Ritu Sen Chaudhuri’s ongoing dissertation Interrogating the Nature of Construction: Bengali Woman in Retrospect deals with the notions of praise and hate as non-symmetrical opposites, and the implications of this distinction for the processes of interpellation. I have gained immensely from working with her in my thinking of the performative in Butler. 26 This is a surprising reduction of Derrida’s notions of textuality and iterability, both of which presuppose the social and is by no means restricted to the structure of language alone. 27 Butler (1993), critiqued by Cheah (1996).

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28 Laclau and Mouffe (1985), Butler, Laclau, Zizek (2000). 29 For extensive dealings with the idea of the partage, see Janicaud (1994), specially chapter Eight, and Derrida (2005), specially Part II. 30 For a detailed discussion on this aspect of sexual difference, see Chapter Four of this dissertation. 31 For a critical review of Nancy’s position worked out in far more nuanced details, see Spivak 1994b. 32 See specially Nandy (2002 and 2003) for some such binary notion of the religious and the secular.

Chapter 3: Thinking the Body: Negotiating the Other/Death 1 See Illich (1990, 179–211) for a detailed discussion of six stages in the conceptualization of death since the fifteenth century. One may not be in agreement with the specific form of staging proposed, but the force of the argument for a historicization of the conceiving of death is hardly escapable. 2 A vast literature in the phenomenological tradition deals with the relations of death to the question of being. Heidegger, Levinas and Derrida are but three instances of theorizers who speak on the subject. See Bernasconi (2000) for a brief introduction to the problem of a philosophical articulation of death in different cultures. 3 Published in Bangla as a book in 1936 with about twenty editions and reprints till date, and translated into English by Shachindralal Ghosh as The Puppets’ Tale in 1968. 4 Munnabhai MBBS, a Hindi film of the ‘popular’ genre. 5 For a detailed discussion on the two parts of knowledge, the visible in light and the expressible in language, see Deleuze (1988, 47–69), and Chapter 1 of this thesis. 6 “Hypostasis (from Latin, ‘substance’), the process of regarding a concept or abstraction as an independent or real entity.” (Audi 1999, 409). 7 “Aporias are distinguished from logical categories such as dilemmas or paradoxes; as experience is from presupposition. Aporias are known in the experience of being passed through, although they are non-passages; they are thus disclosed in effacement, thus experience of the impossible.” Spivak 1999, 427. 8 Thomson’s piece (1999) is more nuanced and rests on a number of additional arguments. I deal with one of the points he raises. 9 The future anterior is, grammatically, of the form ‘will have been’. Thus, the expression ‘I will have died’ is possible grammatically, but not philosophically. 10 For the specific (medieval European) meaning of police – the art of government in which principle of “individual behaviour and the running of the family” is seen to be in continuity with “the good government of the state” – see Foucault’s (1991) essay on “Governmentality”. 11 See also Chanter (2001), 170–188 for a related discussion. 12 Remember that for Weber (1989), disenchantment had been the belief that one could, in principle, master everything through calculation. Disenchantment is a possibility of the final doing away of the secrets and of incalculability. 13 My concern here is not to trace the authentic Heideggerian thought on death and its relation to Dasein. I try to follow a line of thinking that deploys Dasein as a category to establish relationships between ontology and ethics. For that, I have to refer to a number of discussions on Heidegger.

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14 “… man essentially occurs only in his essence … where he is claimed .. by Being. Only from that claim ‘has’ he found that wherein his essence dwells. Only from this dwelling ‘has’ he ‘language’ as the home that preserves the ecstatic for his essence. Such standing in the lighting of Being (Lichtung des Seins) I call the ek-sistence of man.” (Heidegger’s “Letter on Humanism”, quoted in Derrida 1982). 15 In the following discussion, I have largely relied on Tina Chanter’s (2001) expansive treatment of the matter. 16 See also Derrida (1995) and Bernasconi (2000) for discussions on the theme.

Chapter 4: Thinking the Body: Beyond the Topos of Man 1 The problem is evident in an anecdote by the missionary anthropologist Maurice Leenhardt quoted in Csordas (1994). In response to Leenhardt’s suggestion that the Europeans had introduced the notion of ‘spirit’ to the indigenous way of thinking, his interlocutor, an indigenous Canaque philosopher, said they had always been acting according to the spirit and, “… What you’ve brought us is the body” (6). 2 The allusion is to the canonical anthology of essays Who Comes After the Subject? (1991) edited by Eduardo Cadava, Peter Connor and Jean-Luc Nancy on the question of the subject in theories that are often clubbed together by the epithet post. 3 Is there a heterosexualism of ‘woman’? The subsequent discussions on sexual difference would point out that there is no simple answer to the question, as the positions of sexual two-ness and sexual multiplicity remain implicated in a mutual non-resolution. At this point I suspend the query to deal with the problem of going beyond a heterosexualism that is marked by ‘man’. 4 Among a vast literature on the co-implication of subjection and subjectivation in the word subject, I draw attention to Balibar’s (1991) reference to the two words subjectum and subjectus being active in the “equivocal unity of a single noun” called the ‘subject’. See Chapter One for a detailed discussion of the issue. 5 “The style-spur, the spurring style, is a long object, an oblong object, a word, which perforates even as it parries. It is the oblongi – foliated point (a spur or a spar) which derive its apotropaic power from the tout, resistant tissues, webs, sails and veils which are erected, furled and unfurled around it.” (Derrida 1979, 41). 6 A large part of the small literature on Derrida and feminism has taken up this small book, which is rather a single long essay, for meticulous scrutiny. See specifically the essays in the two books Holland 1997 and Feder et al 1997. Refer also to works of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Drucilla Cornell and Elizabeth Grosz among many others. 7 One may productively treat this as a deconstruction of Sara Heinamaa’s (1997a, b) notion of sexual identities as modes or styles of being. Heinamaa’s effort, based on a reading of Merleau-Ponty and Simone de Beauvoir, is to complicate the notion of a constructivist theory of sexual difference. For her, an attention to the constructed nature of the man/woman divide may very well retain a causal explanation with sexes being defined as ensembles of acquired attributes. Her way out is by pointing at the nature of the body as the iterable condition that makes objects possible for us. Even this view may very well retain a domineering ethic of masculinity, Derrida’s discussion seems to suggest.

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8 Francoise Dastur (2000, 187) treats Ereignis as a word by means of which Heidegger tried to think the “almost unthinkable coincidence of Being and “man””. The coincidence of “the interiority of expectation” and the “exteriority of surprise” – Ereignis means not only “happening” … but also, following its double etymology in both popular and scientific use, “appropriation” and “appearing to view”. (187) 9 I could use three of the Geschlecht pieces (I, II, and IV, 1991a, 1987a, and 1993, respectively) and the book called Of Spirit (1989), which David Farell Krell (1992, 252) characterizes as “the volume that interrupts the genetic transmission from the…third to the…fourth generation [of Geschlecht].” Geschlecht III, probably unpublished in English till now, was unavailable to me. The word Geschlecht could mean “sex, race, species, genus, gender, stock, family, generation or genealogy, community” (Derrida 1987a, 162). 10 Also see Chanter 2001. 11 Ritu Sen Chaudhuri’s essay in Bangla (2007) deals with the issue in detail and offers a close reading of Derrida’s text on ‘woman’. I owe much of my argument here to this essay. 12 To remember, khora, as also gift, or the trace, is one of those differantial markers that continue to appear in Derrida’s writings as they strain to speak (of) the unspeakable. See also Derrida 1989b for a detailed dealing of the matter. 13 Butler invokes Kristeva’s use of chora as being similar to her own (41), but Chanter’s (2000a) detailed comment makes Kristeva’s position look more complicated. I do not go into the details of the arguments here. 14 Displacement – Freud’s word is entstellung (usually tr. as distortion, Spivak 1997–1983, 47, this footnote follows her discussion) – in general: dream as a whole displaces text of latent content into the text of manifest content. (Not as in displacement in the dream work.) This sense is extended to the general working of the psychic apparatus to problematize the subject. This originarily displaced scene of writing is the scene of ‘woman’ – displaced out of primordial masculinity. 15 See specially Spivak (1987b) for a discussion of “a blindness to the multinational theater” in “bourgeois feminism” (91). 16 For a hint of a different generality, see Spivak’s “Moving Devi” (2001). 17 The argument in this paragraph reflects those in Spivak 1987a. 18 For Spivak’s indictments on this register, see specially (1987). 19 Draupadi and Jashoda are two characters in two short stories by Mahasweta Devi. For detailed discussions on them, see Spivak 1993a and Spivak 1987a respectively. 20 Spivak (2005a) speaks of how Derrida “slips the trace into [reproductive heteronormativity]” (103) and then goes on to ask, “What, then, is a trace?” (104). Her answer is: It is or is not, or, more important, is in the possibility of always not being, the material suggestion that something else was there before, something other than it, of course. Unlike a sign, which carries a systemic assurance of meaning, a trace carries no guarantees… I am my mother’s trace. The Father’s name is written within the patronymic sign system. (104) 21 Majumdar (1914 –1979) was a versatile man. He had interests in mathematics, literature, drama, woodcuts, and a host of other subjects and activities. He is one of

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those rare persons who are acceptable to, almost revered by, both the mainstream and the avant garde of the Bangla literary world. It might be instructive to remember that the narrative I deal with below is written in post-colonial India by a man in whose writings sexism is not often under erasure. He writes, among other things, of a woman in colonial Bengal. 22 The film has been dealt with, among others, by Rajeswari Sunder Rajan (1993) and Gayatri Spivak (1992). Spivak’s indictment of a brash reduction in the film – of irreducible lineaments of identity and figuration in the novel – in the interests of an international audience receptive to ready character-lines is, to me, absolutely on the mark. 23 ‘Sati’ is a much contested figure in the postcolonial feminist literature. The writings on the sati are varied, rich and present a multitude of positions and interests. Lata Mani (1989) in some of her writings, and Ashis Nandy (1995), had dealt with sati as a concrete site to bring out colonial and post-colonial discursive encounters. Mani’s brilliant discussion did empirically try to show how the British almost literally invented the authentic Hindu tradition, as they built it on the bases of scriptures and a canonization of disparate popular practices. Gayatri Spivak’s (1999) insightful accounts did pose important foundational questions regarding the (im)possibility of representing the ‘subaltern’. Here, sati acted as a trope through which Spivak is able to explicate her point. Interestingly, she deals with two characters who were not satis, characters who either resembled sati or failed to be one. The problems of agency in a (third world, discursively mute) woman are brought out poignantly in her essays. Rajeswari Sunder Rajan’s (1993) efforts to (re)constitute the ‘subject’ of sati, at the same time addressing the problems of representation, are rich and variegated in texture. Yet, as she moves on to and from attempts to trace the discursive nodes that mark the pre- and post-colonial narratives on sati, and a search for “pain as a specific, gendered ground for subjectivity”; she seems to be caught up, a bit uneasily, between the symbolic and a positivistic real, between (analysis of) discursive constructions and the (somewhat under-problematized) phenomenal existence of the ‘body in pain’. 24 Masterfully, Spivak points out that What the author of the novel is trying to do takes as understood a fully formed ideological subject, to whom the reader is invited to be ex-centric… Majumdar expects the reader to have enough internalized perception of a certain kind of Hinduism, as a heteropraxic cultural system… This text is exactly not for the outsider who wants to enter with nothing but general knowledge, to have her ignorance sanctioned. (1992, 800).

25 26 27

28

In “Moving Devi”, Spivak herself goes on to weave such a text resistant to easy appropriations by the unconcerned onlooker, I would conject. For the caste origins of the chandal, see Manusamhita 10.12 and 10.16 (Doniger and Smith 1991 and Bandyopadhyay 1999). See Butler (1993), Grosz (1994). In spite of the generic difference between the novel and the autobiography, I have used quotes from both to refer to the sense of abjection being written in the works of women authors across boundaries of genre. Spivak (2001) translates maya as “fiction”, not as ‘illusion’, as it is not just ‘false’. She wants to “carry the paradox of the range of power of this antonym to “truth.” In

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the essay she speaks on the difference between the female unitary devi and the male multiplicity of deities – “...she does through fiction and they...through method.” She also points out: “[f]or reverence for fiction (maya) as female to be unleashed,...the female subject exit sociality.” Not going into the dvaita mindset of which Spivak speaks here (undoubtedly a probable productive arena of talking in our context), I would instead refer to the associations of femininity, fiction and female subjectivity with the notion of maya. Chatterjee’s (1997) use of maya, though insightful, is somewhat loose, and does not go into the gendered connotations. Again he is dealing with a different problematic. I invoke ‘maya’ as a figure used in the novel to indicate the slippage as well as the moorings of/in one’s being a ‘woman’. I do not comment upon whether ‘maya’ as a philosophical category can bear the weight of such representation. Moreover, there is a slight but definite shift from the connotations of the word in philosophical Sanskrit (available in short introductory texts like Sharma 1944) to that in the commonsense Bangla use where the sense of affection is unmistakable (like that in the dual word mayamomota, an expression which denotes care and affection).

Chapter 5: Violence and Responsibility: Embodied Feminisms 1 In this book, I have been trying to be careful in retaining a sense of tentativeness and contingency in my uses of such ‘proper names’ or ‘common nouns’. Indeed, in certain cases, my attempt has been to follow the specific dynamic of the name or the noun to upset standard ‘positions’ pertaining to these. 2 See Chapter Four of this book for an extended discussion that work to dispel this understanding. 3 I use figure as a verb (‘to figure’) here to bring out embodiedness in the act of configuring. To assign a role in the realm of meaning is also to shape the bodily existence. This does not mean that nationalist thought has been aware of this dimension of con/figuration. The act of figuring, as I have mentioned in the “Introduction”, connotes also the implication of the old in the making of the new. To be aware of this is a step out of many imaginations of politics informed by the body/mind binary which render these imaginations mere repetitions of the dominant in the guise of breaks. 4 The ideational dynamic of the figuring of the woman in the context of Indian nationalism has been dealt extensively in Das and Sen Chaudhuri (2007). 5 Again, her quotes and references to Adrienne Rich do not, in my view, reflect a theoretical proximity to the extent they are deployed. 6 See “Choreographies” (Derrida 1997) and Chapter Four of this book. 7 This is not to forget the enablements that history has produced. “Always historicize” this trenchant call uttered in a different context, had no doubt enabled feminism to come out of a universal construct of ‘the human being’ in the ahistorical model of ‘man’. History has been, and still is, a major weapon in “the political and epistemological effort to remove women from the category of nature and to place them in culture as constructed and self-constructing social subjects in history,” a category “too useful in combating the pervasive biological determinisms constantly deployed against feminists.” Historicization of the category of ‘gender’ has later been extended across the sex/gender divide to the categories of ‘sex’ and the ‘female body’ to bring out their constructions and posit the “categorical and overdetermined aspect of ‘nature’ or the ‘female body’ as an oppositional ideological resource.” This, in its turn, has undermined

184

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9 10

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the valorization of these categories as some “saving core of reality distinguishable from the social impositions of patriarchy, imperialism, capitalism, racism, history, language” (Haraway 1991). My contention would be, without belittling the importance of historicizing or of localized experiences, that we should be deft enough to use abstract universal categories ‘unmoored from history’ to bring out their negotiations in concrete circumstances – that the richness of specific histories are better appreciated when the generalities implicated in them are demarcated and separated out in more nuanced and finer details. I have dealt with the theme in Das (1999). Against this move can be posited structural universals with calls for being ‘intelligent and critical citizens of our nations as well as informed participants in a world’ (Narayan 1997) – structural universals in the form of commonalities among women and peoples. For a clear and elementary enunciation of the varying modes of essentialism in an abstract frame, see Grosz 2002. This is the move she takes in her discussion of the Hindutva politics of aggressive communalism. She has, like many others, to leave the question of the dynamic of this imagination unattended. Ideology-critique, without the awareness of the ideological nature of all truth, is blind to its own making. In Deleuze (2004–1994–1968), generality (and the particular) occupy a different register than singularity (and the universal): Generality, as generality of the particular, thus stands opposed to repetition as universality of the singular. (2)

12 13

14

15 16

This is slightly different from the use of the two terms by Lawlor (2003). See also Spivak 2005b for a related discussion. Notions on language in later Wittgenstein may very well be compared to this thinking. This is not to imply a blanket dismissal of rigorous conceptualization. On the contrary, Derrida is responsible to the philosophical task of forming philosophical concepts according to the logic of “all or none.” Even when he, in accordance with his prime imperative, thinks otherwise and deconstructs, he adds the supplementary complications in a most rigorous manner, defining the limits which he is trying to go beyond. (See Derrida 1988 for a detailed discussion.) This goes well with the words of the above quote. The work of Derrida I quote here constantly refers to iterability in conjunction with an ‘idealization’. In Chapter Two, I have dealt with the structure of iterability in embodiment and the vicissitudes of that juxtaposition. For the relationship between the ‘general’ and the ‘narrow’ senses in the active articulation of deconstruction, see Spivak 1993c (28). The pleasure principle seems to consist in the play of two opposing ‘instincts’ – the life instinct and the death instinct, eros and thanatos – “supposing that these two instincts were struggling with each other from the very first” (334). For Freud, eros denotes the “self-preservative sexual instincts” (328) linked to the drive to preserve, to repeat, and to reproduce – “…conservative…in that they bring back earlier states of living substance; …conservative to a higher degree in that they are peculiarly resistant to external influences;…conservative too in another sense in that they preserve life itself for a comparatively long period” (313). Evidently, here the meanings of the words ‘pleasure’ and ‘sexual instincts’ are at a remove from their everyday usages. Though,

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I want to emphasize that Freud had started from such commonplace notions and these two registers of meaning have overdetermining effects on each other. As such, the realm of eros is within that which other theoretical frames would call an uterine/phallic economy; for the time being, I ignore the very important distinctions between the two. 17 That the dominant way of thinking the self–other dyad is the Master–slave dialectic is also associated with our habit of thinking it in the context of colonialism rather than that of gender. The inter-communicative aspect of the relation is far more evident in the latter, I presume. 18 For a detailed discussion on the notions of incorporation and mourning, see Spivak’s (1977) writing on ‘cryptonymy’, a gesture of mourning, where she defines the crypt as a “false unconscious created within the ego where the name is held as a thing” (24). 19 I deal with the possible modes of encountering the other in the perspective of feminisms in the third world, reading, among others, Sara Ahmed’s (2000) fascinating book on “embodied others in post-coloniality” in the concluding chapter of this book. Here I deal with the general enunciations of the problem in the metonymy of ‘eating’.

In Conclusion 1 A standard textbook on ethics writes: Ethics is a branch of philosophy; it is moral philosophy or philosophical thinking about morality, moral problems and moral judgments…sometimes it is used as just another word for “morality”, and sometimes to refer to the moral code or normative theory of an individual or group… (Frankena 2001).

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INDEX abjection 60, 64–65 Agamben, Giorgio 89–90, 92–94, 99; on death 94 agency 9, 38, 54–55, 57, 66, 68, 96, 99 Ahmed, Sara 170 Althusser, Louis on ideology xviii, 3, 4, 8, 20 alterity xx, 57, 61, 84, 87, 88–89, 103, 110, 124, 155, 159, 161, 169 anatomopolitics 42, 74 animals/animality 40, 92, 99, 116–117, 129, 161 antagonism 19, 22, 32–33, 35, 68 antarjali jatra 127, 132 aporia xxii, 51, 160, 162, 179n7; and death xx, 73, 90–91 Aporias 102 Balibar, Etienne 5, 6, 15, 25–27, 29, 176n22, 176n26, 176n27, 180n4 Bandyopadhyay, Manik xx, 77 Bandyopadhyay, Sibaji 27–28, 33–34, 75, 176n20, 182n25 Barrett, Michele 20, 175n17, 175n20 Bauman, Zygmunt 87–88 being xv, xvii, xviii–xix, xxi, 3, 6, 11, 13–14, 31, 33–4, 37, 40–1, 43, 50, 56, 59, 64, 73, 84, 92–4,99–102, 105, 109, 111–15, 117, 122, 125–6, 132–4, 141–3, 150–2, 155–6, 158, 160, 170–1, 177n2, 178n12, 178n15, 179n2, 180n14, 181n8, 181n20; being-for-oneself/beingfor-others 152; being-in-the-world 56, 69, 79, 100, 158, 174n10; being-possible 91; being present-athand see Vorhandenheit; being-there

see Dasein; being-towards-death/ being-for-death 100–2; being-inthe-mother 123; species-being 122; styles of 45, 56, 178n7 Being and Time 90–91, 102, 174n10, 177n2 Benjamin, Walter 30 Bernasconi, Robert 179n2, 180n16 body and death 73–103, 158; and embodiment xiv, xx, 28, 56, 103, 142, 152, 166; and mind see mind and body; ideology and power xvii, 1–36; also see power, also see ideology; and sexual difference see sexual difference; and space 48, 81–83; and subject see subject; deconstructive thinking of xxi, 180n7 also see Derrida; medical conception of 78–90, 177n8; non Judeo-Christian notion of 70–1, 103; and presence/materiality 40, 46–56, 63, 68–9; sociological discussion 42–3; spectral body xiv, 15, 29–30, 32, 45, 70; as thing 38–46, 58; and woman see woman Butler, Judith xviii–xx, 38–39, 42–43, 59–71, 108, 113, 119, 148, 178n25, 178n27, 179n27, 181n13, 183n26; on body xx, 38–42, 60–71; and Derrida see Derrida; performitivity 38, 59–60; on power xviii, Bodies That Matter 42–43, 59–60 Camus, Albert 128 Canguilhem, Georges 84, 177n8 cannibalism xix, 158, 161 Caputo, John D. 13 Catachresis 68, 173–4n6

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Chanter, Tina 101, 116, 179n11, 180n15, 181n10, 181n13; sex-gender system 44–5 Chatterjee, Partha xx, 70–1; on maya 132, 183n28 Chaudhury, Ajit 18, 175n15, 175n16 Cheah, Pheng 56, 63–64, 178n27 Chritchley, Simon 163 chora see khora choreography 117 Conly, Verona 117 Csordas, Thomas 56, 180n1

eating xix, xxii, 4, 6, 151–62, 185n19 ereignis 114, 181n8 event xx, xxii, 7, 28, 30–1, 39, 56, 77, 99, 103, 108, 114, 121, 127, 148–50, 153–5, 157, 159, 161, 170, 177n30 exchange 29, 110, 113–14, 124, 176n28 experience xvii, xxi, 5, 38, 51, 55–6, 60, 69, 75–6, 80, 90–2, 100–2, 125–6, 151–3, 155, 160, 162, 168–71, 179n7, 184n7; and third world feminism 135–50

Das, Anirban 177n8, 183n3, 184n7 Dasein 40, 90–4, 99–102, 112–14, 160, 174n10, 174n11 Dastur, Francoise 150, 181n8 Deleuze, Gilles 6–7, 12–14, 16, 74, 126, 149–50, 173n2, 175n13, 179n5, 184n11 Derrida, Jacques xx, 18, 22–25, 27–32, 34, 63, 89–92, 99, 101–3, 107–21, 126, 133–4, 143, 149–50, 154–6, 158–61, 169, 171, 174n9, 176n23, n25,n28, 178n12,n13,n14, n26, 179n29, n2, 180n14, n16, n5, n6, n7, 181n9, n11, n12, n20, 183n6, n13, n14; and Butler 65–66; on Descartes xix, see also Derrida and Foucault; and Foucault xix–xx, 11, 46–54, 88, 133; ideology 18; “Cogito and the History of Madness” 49; Specters of Marx 23–4, 31; and Zizek 27–32, 34 Difference in Derrida 65, 67, 102, 110, 133–4, 142, 155, 176n28, 178n14; sexual difference xv, xvii, xix–xx, 1, 35, 37–8, 43–5, 57–9, 61, 73, 98, 103, 105–8, 111–17, 120–7, 134–5, 143, 179n13, 180n3, n7; onticoontological see ontico-ontological difference Descartes, Rene xix, 5, 23, 46–49, 51–53, 101, 125 Deutscher, Penelope 158–160 Dollimore, Jonathan 88

fetish/fetishism 2, 4, 23–7, 29–30, 109; commodity fetishism 2, 23, 176n22 Foucault, Michel xix, 2, 4–14, 16, 42, 46–7, 50–4, 73–4, 76–7, 81, 84–5, 88, 129, 133, 173n1, 174n9, 174n11, 175n11, 175n18, 176n21, 177n8, 178n12, 178n14, 179n10; Derrida and see Derrida; Madness and Civilization 47 force 2, 4, 6–8, 11–16, 22, 26, 31, 41–2, 45, 61, 65, 75, 79, 88, 95, 98–9, 127, 132, 148, 156–7, 173n1, 173n2, 174n7, 174n8, 174n11, 175n11, 179n1 Fox Keller, Evelyn 94–8 Freud, Sigmund 23, 53, 58, 62, 109, 150, 157–9, 181n14, 184–5n16 Gadamer, H. G. 79 Garcia Marquez, Gabriel 165–7 Geschlecht xx, 108, 111, 113–17, 181n9 Gender xvi, xix–xx, 37, 43–46, 55, 57–58, 62, 68, 105–106, 112, 123, 125, 128, 131, 136, 143, 153, 159, 177n6, 178n16, 178n18, 182n23, 183n28, 183n7, 185n17; and death 94, 96; and gift 114, 122; see also Geschlecht 181n9; gendering history 145–146 gift 51, 102, 110, 113–16, 122, 149, 181n12 Grosz, Elizabeth 59–60, 177n6, 180n6, 182n26, 184n9

INDEX Hacking, Ian 84 Haraway, Donna 98–9, 177n5, 184n7 hegemony xix, 2, 11, 17–19, 21, 27, 31, 35, 76, 152, 159, 161–162, 173n4, 175n15, 175n16 Heidegger, Martin xix–xx, 5, 11–12, 14, 74, 99, 109, 112, 114–117, 148, 160, 174n10, 181n8; on death 90– 94, 100–2, 179n2, 179n13, 180n14; and the thing 39–41, 177n2, 177n3, 177n4 Heinamaa, Sara 43, 45, 56, 180n7 ideology xiv, xviii, 3, 8, 16–18, 20–8, 30–4, 35–6, 38, 42–3, 45, 52, 74, 105, 136, 148, 151, 161, 173n4, 173n5, 175n19, 176n22, 176n26, 184n10; and fetishism 25–7; and iterability 35–6, 176n28; and power xviii, 1–4, 8, 37, 42, 174n9; and religion 23–4, 30–1; and subject 3–4, 8–9, 15, 20, 35 Illich, Ivan 179n1 Irigaray, Luce xx, 61, 119, 122–3, 125, 158 iterability 4, 18, 29, 35, 59–60, 63, 65, 68, 150–2, 154–6, 159, 162, 176n28, 178n26, 184n14; and responsibility see responsibility Janicaud, Dominique 179n29 John, Mary 143–4 Kant, Immanuel 5–6, 40, 60 Khora xx, 108, 113, 117–9, 126–7, 181n12, 181n13 Kirby, Kathleen M. 141–142 Kirby, Vicki 56, 63–64, 70, 178n24 Kofman, Sarah 23–24, 27, 29, 176n22 Krell, David Farrell 116, 181n9 Lacan, Jacques 56–59, 76, 158; and Butler 62–63, 65; and Zizek 22, 32–34 Laclau, Ernesto 17–23, 173n4, 177n31, 179n28 Latour, Bruno 47, 99, 177n7

209

Lawlor, Leonard 74, 184n11; on Deleuze and Derrida 149–50 Levinas, Emmanuel xix, 50, 88, 93–94, 123, 160, 169, 177n1, 178n15; on death 100–103, 179n2; on heteronomy 13–14 Location xvi, xvii, xx–xxi, 36, 58, 64, 73–4, 126, 134, 135–51, 165, 168 Macdonald, Christie 111, 117 Majumdar, Kamal Kumar xx, 108, 127, 181n21, 182n24 Marx, Karl 6, 20–21, 23–27, 29–31, 76, 99, 133, 135, 163–164, 171, 173n3, 174n8, 175n17 Matilal, Bimal Krishna 77; and vikalpa 9 Mauss, Marcel and body techniques 42, and ‘gift’ 113 maya 108, 127, 129, 131–2, 182–3n18 melancholia and mourning 159 mind and body xv, xvii, 45–47, 49, 54, 56, 58, 59, 64, 84, 93, 107, 125, 130, 152 Mohanty, Chandra 137, 139–41, 143–4 Moitra, Shephali 152–3, 175n15 Munnabhai MBBS 79, 179n4 Nagel, Thomas 168 Nair, Janki 145–6 Nancy, Jean Luc xx, 69–70, 179n31, 180n2 Nasrin, Taslima 130–1 ontico-ontological difference 11–12, 61, 73, 118–113, 126, 174n10 other xiii, xv–xxii, 4–6, 13–14, 18, 26, 29–33, 35, 38, 41–2, 50, 53–4, 57, 59–62, 66–8, 70–1, 108–10, 113, 116, 119, 121–2, 126–7, 129, 134, 149, 164, 167–71, 177n1, 178n15, 185n17, 185n19; as death 73–104; eating others 151–62 Panjabi, Kavita 144 partage 70, 179n29 particular xiv, xx, xxii, 6–7, 13, 17, 21, 35, 37, 46, 59–60, 65, 67, 70–1, 73, 83,

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particular (Continued ) 105–6, 108–9, 126, 134–7, 139–40, 145, 147, 149, 151, 155–7, 161–2, 170, 184n11 performativity 31–38, 59–72, 178n19 phallus 58, 62–3, 75, 110, 114, 121–2, 158; lesbian 63, 119 power xiv, xvi–xxii, 1–38, 42, 48, 50, 53, 55, 60, 65, 71, 76–7, 83–4, 89–90, 93–4, 105, 115, 117, 124, 131, 134, 142, 148–50, 153, 156, 161–2, 170, 173n1, 173n2, 173n5, 174n9, 175n12, 176n21, 176n27, 177n9, 178n18, 180n5, 182n28; and body and ideology see body; and force see force; and ideology see ideology; and knowledge 4, 9, 11–12, 14, 174n9; and labour, labour power 24–6, 178n18

Stephens, Julie 137–9 subject xviii, xx–xxi, 3, 4–18, 20–3, 26–8, 35, 37–8, 52, 55–60, 64–6, 70, 75–6, 78–80, 82, 88–9, 99, 103, 105–6, 109, 120, 122–5, 128, 130–4, 137–8, 140–2, 145, 147–49, 153, 157, 160–1, 168–170, 174n9, 175n11, 175n12, 175n18, 176n27, 178n18, 179n2, 180n2, 180n4, 181n14, 181n21, 182n23, 182n24, 183n28, 183n7; and body 3, 37, 152; subjectification 133; subjection xviii, 6, 8, 26, 64, 109, 133, 180n4; citizen subject 6, 15, 176n27 Sunder Rajan, Rajeswari 129, 150, 182n22, 182n23

race xvi, 24, 44–5, 58–60, 68, 93, 112, 114, 116, 118, 136, 142, 144, 146–7, 153, 181n9 Ramo, Hans 117–18 responsibility xvi–xvii, xix–xxii, 2, 14, 31, 37, 50–1, 54, 73, 89, 91–2, 101–2, 119, 122, 124, 126, 168–71, 175n13, 177n1; iterability and 151–62; violence and see violence

universal xvi–xvii, xxi, 3, 4, 6, 17, 19, 21, 32–3, 35, 39, 52, 58–9, 77, 79–80, 82–4, 105–6, 108–9, 123–7, 130, 131, 134–141, 145–6, 150, 157, 161; and generalities 26, 61–72

sati 78, 127–9, 131, 182n23 Sangari, Kumkum 165–8 Scott, Joan 147–8, 178n22 sex 116–7, 143, 147, 177n6, 178n16, 181n9, 182n21, 183n7; also see sexuality, sexual difference sexual difference and body 37, 59, 61, 68, 73, 105–132, 177n6, 183n7 sexuality 54, 114–6, 129; also see sex and sexual difference singularity xiv–xv, 26, 31, 36, 46–7, 70, 75, 83, 103, 106–7, 121, 123, 126, 135, 142, 147–50, 154–6, 161, 170, 184n11 speaking to and speaking with 51, 53, 152–4, 156, 159 Spectres of Marx see Derrida Spurs 108–12

Turner, Bryan S. 42–3 Tharu, Susie 137–8

violence xix, xxii, 2, 4, 6, 50, 75, 79, 93, 95, 99, 103, 114, 123–24, 131; general economy of 156, 158; and responsibility 133–62 vorhandenheit/present-at-hand 39, 177n1 woman xx, 37–8, 46–7, 49, 54, 65, 76, 92, 95, 97–8, 103, 106–9, 116–29, 131–4 ; and the body xv–xvi, 54–61, 70–1, 136–42, 146, 158, 178n13, 178n19, 178n25, 180n3, 180n7, 181n13, 181n14, 182n21, 182n23, 183n28, 183n4; third world woman xxii, in ontological difference 109–113 writing 59–60, 63–65, 75, 92, 109, 116–17, 123, 126, 151, 155, 160, 180n14; arche-writing 64 Zizek 2, 17–18, 20, 22–3, 32–4, 173n4, 176n20, 176n21, 179n28 Zuhandenheit/ready-to-hand 40, 116