Colour of Olives
Prasanta Chakravarty Wartime _________ Our country is not warring right now With any other country Still, you have got to know A state of war has been declared Barbed wires at the borders, beyond that—prohibition In olive-coloured clothes Alertness of the woodlands And so, with much added caution One steps into the forest To the sound of bullets, a fusillade, do you hear it? Within wordlessness, now Are bitter words of wartime An explosion created by anger’s frenzied regret Is to be deflected—towards safety By lowering a trench that lies only within your heart Did you know this? Here, the worldly-being Recalls the honeyed moment Just before the war began The sanyasi Seeking peace after the war Sits bent-kneed Even the poets From the trenches, through their binoculars Watch the seasons turn The chilly winds of Magh Sweep memories in And depart with dreams This winter Is your dress smeared with the colour of olives? *** যুদ্ধকালীন __________ আমাদের দেশ এখন কোনোযুদ্ধ করছে না অন্য দেশের সঙ্গেতবু তুমি জেনে গেছযুদ্ধকালীন অবস্থা এখন জারি আছেসীমান্তে কাঁটাতার, কাঁটাতারের ওপারে নিষেধ-জলপাই রংয়ের পোশাকেবনস্থলির সতর্কতাঅতএব বড় বেশি হুঁশিয়ার হয়েএখন জঙ্গলে পা রাখাএখন গোলাগুলির আওয়াজ পাচ্ছ কি?এই নৈঃশব্দ্যের মধ্যেযুদ্ধকালীন কটু কথাক্রোধের উন্মক্ত আক্ষেপ যে বিস্ফোরণ তৈরি করছেতার থেকে সুরক্ষিত হতে নেমে যাবেএমন ট্রেঞ্চশুধু তোমার মনেরই মধ্যে থাকতে পারেতা কি তুমি জানো?এইখানে সংসারীযুদ্ধ শুরুর আগেরমধুময় মুহূর্তকে মনে করেসন্ন্যাসী এখানেযুদ্ধ শেষের শান্তির জন্যেহাঁটু গেড়ে বসেএমনকি কবিরাওএই ট্রেঞ্চের থেকে দূরবীনে দেখেঋতুর পরিবর্তন হচ্ছেমাঘের ঠান্ডা হাওয়াস্মৃতি নিয়ে আসেস্বপ্ন নিয়ে চলে যায়এবারের শীতেতোমার পোশাকে বুঝি জলপাই রং? Wartime is not war; though it could include actual conflicts. It is simply a tract of time, a signpost “wherein the will to contend by battle is sufficiently known; and therefore, the notion of time is to be considered in the nature of war,” Thomas Hobbes had averred. Indeed, wartime is a predicament and a temperament to which a whole people one day wake up and find themselves mired in. In fact, unbeknownst to them, they begin to gravitate towards such a state until it takes away their multiple private times and flattens those into a homogenous time-period for everyone. Such a mad ancient condition is renewed from time to time among socially interacting human beings. Could it be that otherwise a time of such unease and rancour could also offer possibilities of renewal and redemption from within its own belly? There have been quite a few distinct poems on war and its effects on daily living in Bangla (especially on the two world wars and the Bangladesh war of 1971), but the one written above by the actor, play-director and consummate writer and poet Soumitra Chatterjee stands apart for its psychological insight and modernist suggestivity. The first four lines constitutes the proem: ‘Our country is not warring right now / With any other country Still, you have got to know/A state of war has been declared’ A case is made in order to distinguish the temporal slice of wartime from the physical fact of warring: that one knows the time of war though one’s own country may not be going through an actual war. How could such a wartime have been ushered in? Who may have declared it? It could be that battles rage in and among other lands and the economic or political costs also have an effect on us. It could also be that some civil war takes place, within one’s own land, region or community for which no actual declaration of war is necessary. Still, it is not war that is important here. The ‘state’ of being in war is. Time has turned itself into a state of being for agents gripped by it. Perhaps such a state of war happens more at the level of individual agents and rages even within one’s own psyche? Wartime is a sudden realization; it dawns upon oneself— ‘you got to know.’ Everyone knows. The declaration of wartime is in the air, so to say. The next section elaborates on the actual predicament: the borders are guarded and wartime means encountering a certain alert watchfulness everywhere. ‘Barbed wires at the borders, beyond that—prohibition/In olive-coloured clothes/Alertness of the woodlands’ Barbed wires have arisen between us and a hush descends in everyday living. A pall marks wartime. Regular human interaction is suspended. A time of war is known to us by being aware of the limits and boundaries that cannot be trespassed—among friends, relations, even loved ones. One would perhaps not even cross the limits of one’s own imagination and mind-space. All movement is stymied. The state of war begins to choke you. You refrain from argument and affection alike. Breathlessness begins to congeal as time turns prohibitory. You endure. At this point that poet puts forth a visual image—that of the forest. Is the state of war literally related to the forest? That is to say, are some secret battles rage within the innards of the country? Or is it that the forest is a metaphor for the state of the society as such? And alertness in the forest dons a colour too—olive. Olive is of course a Mediterranean tone and flavour. But it is also universal in its reach. We are all aware of its dark yellowish-green hue. We also know that it is widely used as a camouflage colour for uniforms and equipment in the armed forces. Olive is the colour of combat. But here it is used in a more universal sense—in order to denote the forest and watchfulness associate with the forest at wartime. Thickets are soothing to the eye, but underneath its foliage lurks mystery and danger. And at this point comes the first interrogative statement of the poem: ‘To the sound of bullets, a fusillade, do you hear it?’ From generality, now the poem turns specific and we realize that the poet-speaker is actually directing his words towards some interlocutor. What kind of interlocutor is this? A close friend may be, a lover, a family relation—with whom now things have turned frosty? Now the parity is drawn between the two sides with the sounds of bullets –which defines the wartime atmosphere.
Hereafter the Bitterness
Prasanta Chakravarty_____________________ It is quite agonizing when one fails to find a close enough word or phrase to convey certain words in the English language. In Bangla, once such cluster comprises of words like: স্নিগ্ধতা, শ্রী, লাবণ্য | Grace for labanya or softness for snigdhota actually does not do justice to either language. Sree is even more difficult—at once having a sense of financial well-being and an elegance that has more to do with poise. Likewise, I had a very hard time considering what the actual English equivalence of মাধুর্য is as I was recently rereading one of my favourite poems তারপরে যে তিক্ততা (Hereafter the Bitterness) from Prasun Bandyopadhyay’s later collection of lovely poems: Modhur Tumul/ মধুরতুমুল. The regular reader of Bandyopadhay who has followed him over the years knows how his acute observations of everyday activities, objects, relations and certain enduring institutions are framed within the chalice of a selfhood that is so brittle, confused and vulnerable that it often gives over its many fragments to the eternal flow of time and space. Though he has evolved over the decades, his best poems are playful, naughty, even sassy in bringing to us certain enduring home truths. In this one, he places two contrary attributes—tiktota and maadhurjo side by side and goes on to spin his tale. (Aside: with modhur/maadhurjo I toyed with—lusciousness, charm, softness, sweetness, grace, sonority—and eventually settled on mellowness. I am not happy—for mellow is more mature than sweetness, but then sweetness is too light a word to convey the immersive sense of the original. Sweetness lacks viscosity and affection.) Contraries make the whole, even if ostensibly the attributes may seem divergently directed. The initial move is to suggest that all bitterness must come to an end: for the walnut’s hardness is deceptive. It hides the luscious and soft kernel within. One can hope that all that is modhur shall triumph eventually. A hopeful beginning. The second stanza changes tack as the poet makes a startling resolution that he shall espouse and embrace bitterness as he would do with the mellower, more affectionate conditions of living. The two are subtly woven actually; entwined with each other in a far larger relationship. And here opens space for the second example: unlike the walnut, the colourful sweater is knit with contrary threads and antithetical movement—warp and weft. But the two units are not separate but unified in a mysterious, blended concoction: sweetbitterness. In the final stanza, with the sudden inclusion of the term bodhu/ বঁধু (sweetheart), we realize he has been actually recounting the secret of the universe to his beloved, who is obviously the contrary principle in attachment. The naïve realization of the first stanza—that bitterness would eventually fade, is now no more. Once the poet has confronted the true nature of the cosmos: that contraries clash and may stay as is without reaching any final resolution or stillness, he begins to accept that as life would bring to each one of us the honey (মধু) of care and immersion, so will it churn malignancy and bitterness. But it’s only when both the principles arrive shall we realize what is the nature of the hereafter—of bitterness and mellowness melded. The equilibrium is achieved through the occasional clash of the two principles, not by skirting or striking out either of the two. The poet is perhaps trying to make us appreciate the configurations of various forms of vibrations (স্ফোট) effected through these apparently opposed principles, which are a part of a larger realized truth. Prasun Bandyopadhya has been a traveller who has tried to steer clear of political-cultural harangue (aapkhoraki/ আপখোরাকি) and discursive superfluity (maanbhasha/ মানভাষা) (which he considers to be forms of ‘fatal anaemia’) so that language and selfhood, by means of quitting inertness, can reach a certain ‘non-age time’ and a space (shawsthan/ স্বস্থান). He has often said that a mountain summit can be observed from many sides. Like the many-hued sweetbitter sweater perhaps? *** Hereafter the Bitterness________ so that the bitterness that rises hereafter can also come to an end at last, the hard walnut, in mellowness discards its shell to reveal the kernel *** to regard mellowness when bitter when mellow, not to banish bitterness on a route similar, commingled—shall receive in contrary-pairs whatever lies woven *** like a sweater many-hued still, a single one you wear the one you wore in Kalimpong Is it not a unit in partnership *** should mellowness churn honey no regrets then when bitterness arrives in realization coalesced, my sweetheart whatever originates in contrary-pairs _______________ adminhumanitiesunderground.org
Countless Transcendentals: Kant on Discourse and Quantity
Debajyoti Mondal “Always quantify writing.” – Deleuze & Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus This essay is a mad enterprise in dismantling Kant’s philosophy, particularly his project of ‘transcendental critique’, developed as the trial of reason’s own capacity to enquire after its limits and expected to lay the ground for philosophical cognition itself, along and around the idea that there was a more originary drive in the said ground-laying that estimated an augmentative rather than limitative outcome. The fancy goes that this will amount to an awakening or reawakening of Kant, this time not from the dogmatic slumber but an all-too-skeptical reality, which means this would be a reawakening to the dream, or softly, to some dream. In travestying the Cartesian shudder, the effort will be made to look into what is still living and adventurous in Kantian philosophy. We may begin by asking a rather vague question: What does a literature-lover have to learn from Kant? The figures of the beautiful and the sublime are what immediately comes to one’s mind. People are indeed, to some extent, interested in the Third Critique. But what about the critical project as such? What about the First Critique? Should one not try to understand, while reading about aesthetic judgment, how it is related to the project of an immanent critique of reason? Literature departments would not encourage such questions and will in all probability relegate the task to the discipline of philosophy. What’s more, they will find Kant himself standing on their side, endorsing the avoidance. He would like to keep philosophy innocent of the murky business called “writing”. Such a divisive denomination is no doubt intended and instituted by the critique. Kant steadfastly guards against what he terms “subreption”, by which we are to understand any confusion of the transcendental with the empirical. Such confusions, as evidenced in the Critique of Pure Reason, results, moreover, from the rhetorical situation of speech. Subreption, in Kant’s own words, is a sophisma figurae dictionis. However, Kant cannot simply correlate this form of sophism (a transcendental condition) with the bad intent of the sophist (empirical), because that would be reinstating the subreption itself, the algorithm whereof is inherent to discourse. Philosophy, if it must avert this danger, has to withdraw from the figurative resource of language and thus observe to its “discipline”, i.e. fashion for its use a model of scrupulously literal presentation. The self-disciplining of philosophy apparently rules out any possible correspondence with literature and its stylized diction. It will have certain consequences for the critical project itself. This time we will have to frame the questions from an obverse orientation: Why did Kant have to humble the project after beginning with a superlative ambition? Why did he arrive at the point of noumenal inaccessibility? Would we still have to see the declaration (of non-access) as absolutely necessary? If so, then, indeed, what efficacy is left to the critique, which was conceived with the aim of augmenting knowledge and was justified, originally, by this claim? Perhaps, in order to save the critique, one will have to read it a little lightly? Let’s say, a little figuratively? Or one may take what it says with grave seriousness, maybe only to discover, who knows, that at the end the critique reveals itself to have all along been literary. Which one is the case for what follows is left to the readers’ discretion. I. The Surreptitious Supplement There is an unbending tendency in the Critical project, arising from its dream of legislation, that can be correlated with a thoroughgoing distrust of the oblique. Much of the validity of the cognitive processes, and of the critique consequently, depends on their straightness, understood in both the senses of rectitude and literality. Kant’s temperament is such that only the upright and literal is taken for the lawful: whatever moves straight follows the path of truth, everything else is just metaphor, false ascription, unfortunate suggestio falsi. To falsities of such type he gives the name of “subreption”, as we know well by now. One might verily wonder, although, if that naming is not sullied with a metaphorical residue. Subreption (Subreption), compounded with quite the suggestive qualifier “surreptitious” (Erschleicht) [1], points to the movements of creeping and crawling, maybe in direct contrast to the stride of homo erectus. The question has been appropriately raised by Paul de Man: cannot the arbiter who judges on and prohibits subreption be found himself guilty of first having committed it?[2] One need not even rely on a rhetorical device to corroborate the point; the weakness is betrayed in what constitutes the veritative strength of the critique: the transcendental. It is the transcendental which desists the pure concepts of understanding from falling victim to incautious use. Standing at the divide between “canon” and “organon”, the transcendental is the self-reflexive awareness of limit on part of a-priori forms in general and of the faculty of logical explication in particular. Of course, the word “transcendental” was not new to philosophy. What Kant did was turn it into the differentiator between the empirical and the pure reflexive (alias conceptual) elements of knowledge. In short, it was cleverly devised in order to guard against the various internal errors of reason that issued from the confusion of the conceptual with the empirical. As Malabou recapitulates in her book on Kant, the transcendental has since been handed down to the philosophical posterity as an indispensable critical advance. However (and this she also points out), one must have to be able to see that the methodological nuance added by the transcendental thrives on the a-priori separation of the logical from the empirical, of pure thought from experience, to question which would be the condition enough to cast doubt on the legitimacy of the transcendental. What happens if we come to see that there is no such systematic separation between thought and experience? Wouldn’t it expose the transcendental itself as the site of a prior subreption? If a false ascription can results from the error of
Of Derrida’s Inheritance of Marx
Aniruddha Chowdhury More than one/No more one ~Specters of Marx In Specters of Marx, Jacques Derrida reaffirms his inheritance of the Marxist tradition. The reaffirmation is singular and timely. Derrida insists on the co-belonging, in an almost genealogical manner, of deconstruction and the tradition of a certain Marxism. “Deconstruction … would have been impossible and unthinkable in a pre-Marxist space.” 1 In his early career, Derrida, on more than one occasion, spoke of his allegiance to Marxist materialism, especially to its anti-idealist program.2 But the tone is unfailingly political now. Derrida deploys his notion of conjuration to remark on a veritable counter-revolution that tirelessly erases the memory of the Marxist or communist past in order to devastate its future possibility. “Conjuration”, Derrida explains, means primarily “conjurement” (exorcism) that “tends to expulse the evil spirit” through invocation, or better convocation — a political pact, a plot, or a conspiracy (SM, 47). “Effective exorcism pretends to declare the death only in order to put to death” (SM, 48). No one can really contest, Derrida notes, that there is a worldwide dominant discourse, a hegemonic discourse, on Marxism, International, universal revolution, and so on. “This dominating discourse often has the manic, jubilatory, and incantatory form that Freud assigned to the so-called triumphant phase of the mourning work… Marx is dead, communism is dead, very dead, along with it its hopes, its discourse, its theories, and its practices. It says: long live capitalism, long live the market, here’s to the survival of economic and political liberalism!” (SM 51-52). Derrida analyses the distinct forms of this conjuration: political, cultural, and scholarly. There is a spectrality to the dominant “conjuring trick.” There is a disavowal in this triumphant conjuration, it hides from itself, from the fact that that whose survival is championed is as threatening as it is threatened. It invokes the ‘red specter’ in order to put it to death, which is impossible. How can one put to death a specter? Derrida returns to Marx, it is an unheard-of return – neither a phenomenology of life nor structural Marxism, but a certain post-phenomenological, post-critical ‘philosophy’, a quasi-atheistic religion of revenant and arrivant. In contrast to early Marx’s ‘life-philosophy’ and Michel Henry’s” hyper phenomenology” of life, Derrida posits sur-vie as opposed to la vie: “We are attempting something else. To try to accede to the possibility of this very alternative (life and/or death), we are directing our attention to the effects or the petitions of a survival or of a return of the dead (neither life nor death) on the sole basis of which one is able to speak of “living subjectivity” (in opposition to its death)” (SM, 187). Inheritance is never homogeneous, let alone self-identical. Inheritance involves decision, it involves affirmation through choosing. Derrida decides on Marx, his spirit, to choose one instead of another. For the Marxist tradition is anything but homogeneous. More importantly, there is a spectrality to Marx and the Marxist tradition that Derrida affirms, so to speak, against Marx. Marx invokes spirit and specter, but, “with a burst of laughter,”Marx too chases away the specters, and wants to annihilate them in the name of life and reality. “Marx does not like ghosts any more than his adversaries do. He does not believe in them. But he thinks of nothing else” (SM 45-46). Marx too conjures away the ghosts like his adversaries. Derrida, it is important to note, distinguishes his ‘return’ to Marx as something other than merely scholarly exercise and discourse. It is to a certain spirit of communism to which Derrida seeks to ‘return,’ – and that’s certainly how Derrida would have intended the work to be read, – which Derrida does not hesitate to call (pace Postmodernism?) a certain spirit of “emancipation” (SM, 75), a certain spirit of emancipation that Derrida calls eschatological. “Deconstruction has never had any sense or interest, in my view at least, except as a radicalization, which is to say also in the tradition of a certain Marxism, in a certain spirit of Marxism” (SM, 92). So, it is a matter of spirit whose paradoxical phenomenality is a specter, which is thus “almost” distinct from the speculative discourse of spirit a la Hegel. “Almost,” because the spirit in Hegel, Derrida reminds us, is also a specter. “The semantics of Gespenst themselves haunt the semantics of Geist” (SM, 107). Yet, it is of utmost importance to separate specter from spirit despite their common ‘genealogical’ co-belonging. What separates them “is doubtless a supernatural and paradoxical phenomenality, the furtive and ungraspable visibility of the invisible, or an invisibility of a visible X … it is also, no doubt, the tangible intangibility of a proper body without flesh, but still the body of someone as someone other. And someone other that we will not hasten to determine as self, subject, person, consciousness, spirit and so forth” (SM, 7) This paradoxical visibility of the invisible, in Hamlet as in Marx’s The German Ideology, is what Derrida terms the visor effect: we do not see who looks at us (SM, 7). There is an uncanniness, even despotism, in being observed by someone other who hides from visibility. This simulacrum that is “virtually more actual than what is so blithely called a living presence” (SM, 13) is what causes not only fear but also anxiety. The visor effect, Derrida suggests, is what destabilizes synchrony, and its uncanniness consists in being referred to “anachrony.” Anachrony is the time of the specter and it is the anachrony of the visor effect that “makes the law” (SM, 7). It is the visor effect on the basis of which we inherit from the law. The anachrony is also diachrony: repetition and thefirst time, which is the question of the event of the ghost, a spectral event (SM, 10). A ghost or a revenant “begins by coming back” (SM, 11). Repetition and the first time and also the last time. Each visitation is singular without being self-identical. The extremity of the eschaton is also a