Theatre, Number, Event : An Appraisal
Saitya Brata Das [The writer was one of the discussants in a recently organized session at C.S.D.S. , New Delhi, on the occasion of the release of Soumyabrata Choudhury’s book—Theatre, Number, Event: Three Studies on the Relationship between Sovereignty, Power and Truth. Here is the text that the writer has shared with HUG] I feel honoured to be here today on this occasion of the book launch of Soumyabrata Choudhury’s much awaited book Theatre, Number, Event: Three Essays on the Relationship between Sovereignty, Power and Truth. The book is much awaited, especially for his privileged friends like me, friends who know that Soumyabrata has been working on a book for a long time. Some of us , and I am one among this “ us” , are fortunate enough to have had glimpses into the book in the process of its gestation and unfolding, a process from which certain “violence” is inseparable albeit a creative violence it is. Such violence seems to be inseparable from a book like this, given the formidable ambition and accomplishment of it, as we will be able to see now properly in the light of its publication. Such violence is audible in the very language of the work that does not welcome us immediately and the reader has to think a lot to decide whether she should pick up the book to read at all, not out of disrespect but precisely out of a profound respect, respect that we know to be a certain experience of distance or withdrawal. Such an “unattractive” or rather “attractive” quality of the book can be disadvantage only if the book does not have such formidable ambition and is thus impatient in soliciting the reader’s immediate attention and instant gratification. Sometimes such “indigestibility” or “unattractive” character proves to be good for the health of a work, especially if it merits serious attention from the reader who wants to read in a responsible manner. Given the formidable character of the book that takes the reader into a labyrinth that seems to have a secret password connecting so many paths and counter paths, lanes and by-lanes and thereby weaving an intricate network of concepts, spaces, and times, it is impossible for me to talk about the book in a comprehensible manner. Moreover, one should leave the reader to the risk of the book, the kind of risk, or “wager”- a word that Soumyabrata is in love with – wager that book itself assumes. I should therefore let each reader to judge her/himself whether such a risk that the book undertakes is at all worth taking and whether the researcher has succeeded or failed in his attempt. I will just speak, within some minutes of clock-time, of one of the problems that book raises in a manner of a glimpse or in the blink of an eye. Obviously, it is going to be insufficient and even, perhaps, unworthy of me since I do different things, and raise some different problems in my works. So I will take up one problem, the problem with which the books begins, the problem that I am somehow more interested and little-bit more connected, which is: the problem or rather the scandal of “sovereignty” and the question of the political-theology. The question that Soumyabrata appears to me to have raised is not so much to ask: ‘what is sovereignty or even, who is the “sovereign” so as to arrive at the “axiomatic” understanding of sovereignty or at the concept of the “political” as such.In fact, a good deal of the book is devoted to the even more preliminary discussion of the “axiomatic”, bringing out carefully the precarious or fragility that adheres in the “axiomatic” as such, the poros or the aporetic that ties and unties its claims to the status of the “immemorial”. The book rather raises the following uneasy question: ‘why is it that, and in what manner is it at all that the concepts/figures/modes of sovereignty assume the status of the “axiomatic” in such a way from which a certain claim of the “immemorial” is inseparable?’ Now this assumption of sovereignty and this intrigue of relation between sovereignty, axiomatic and immemorial itself, while being structural, is also historically variable, not just in a quantitative manner but in a manner of qualitative discontinuities. Thus from the liturgical foundation of sovereignty to the later Christus-Fiscus parallelism that justifies sovereignty, there is a discontinuity, in fact a violence that Soumyabrata delineates carefully with the help of Ernst Kantorowicz in a manner that will surely evoke much admiration for the reader. To answer the question he asks, Soumyabrata traces out a history or perhaps better, a genealogy of apparatuses of inter-linking practices and discourses alike by means of three interlinking fictions of concepts – “theatre”, “number”, “event” – to reveal the thread that tie and untie the “axiomatic” to the “sovereignty” and “sovereignty” in turn to the “immemorial”. It appears here as if the porosity or fragility of the one immediately brings porosity to the others: the porosity and aporetic binding or unbinding of the axiomatic claims of sovereignty to the immemorial. Soumyabrata conceives that it is the philosophical task par excellence, the task of this strange discourse called “philosophy” – here I don’t go too far with what he understands by “philosophy” – to envisage, or better welcome the “new immemorials” that are eventive, aleatory and ever new contingent eruption that breaks into the historical continuum of the world. Here and this now of this “breaking into” is the place of the “new”, a space without a pre-given parameter of measurement and a time without pre-given measure of numbers. Such a possibility of thinking, for Soumyabrata, is given by a strange mathematics, now released from a dominant version of the “mathematizable” in the sense of the countable mathematics of number, a “contingent” or “situational” mathematics if at all one can use these words, mathematics that is not alien to “the logic of multiplicity” that constitutes and potentially