Theatre, Number, Event: A Second Appraisal
Prathama Banerjee [ HUG reproduces a second appraisal and an early critique of Soumyabrata Choudhury’s newly published book Theatre, Number, Event: Three Studies on the Relationship between Sovereignty, Power and Truth, IIAS, Delhi, 2013. The writer was a panelist in the recently organised session at C.S.D.S. , New Delhi on the occasion of the release of the book. This is the concluding essay in this series.] ———————————————————— Soumya is a very old friend from my university days, and it is a special feeling to be discussing his book. In that it is indeed a discussion rather than a comprehensive review of the book, and I do not even claim to do justice to the book’s ambitious narrative and unusual analytic frame. Soumya is an extraordinary mind. He is a philosopher, a literature student, a performer, a director of plays, a teacher and now I see also a historian. The book, therefore, like he himself, is a challenge for any friend and comrade, who like me shares his passion for politics and philosophy, but thinks very differently, perhaps even incommensurably. What I shall say by way of discussing the book is then a kind of response to this intimate challenge that Soumya poses before me. First, let me present briefly how I read Soumya’s book. The book is about sovereignty – sovereignty as simultaneously political sovereignty and sovereignty of thought, sovereignty as that of philosophy on the one hand and on the other, of the king/Christ/state and eventually of that impossible, uncountable entity, namely the people. Soumya works through a series of historical moments, though not chronologically (something to which we shall come back later) – 5th century BC Greece with its theatre and its civic assemblies of gods, citizens, faceless slaves and women, 12th century Europe with its notion of Christian theological kingship, 8th-9th century Byzantium with its controversy regarding the question of the icon and the idol and the worship and circulation of the same, 18th century France with its revolution, terror and increasingly medicalised madness, and finally the contemporary with its war on terror and its democratic revolutions. Soumya’s project is to tease out histories of the constitution of sovereign power in this long story of Europe (and he shall argue the world). Soumya implies that the history of sovereignty is produced at two levels – one, as the story of the sovereign as a figure and two, as the question of the ground, the basis, the founding principles of sovereignty. The figures of sovereignty as they appear in history, and yet fail to acquire full presence and stability (which is what the whole story is about), are the Greek gods with their strategic intelligence and liturgical role, the consecrated Christian king backed by the notion of eucharist transformation that transubstantiates the inscrutable idea of divinity into flesh, and the post-revolutionary republican people, counted as a disassembled numerical order of populations and while being mobilized as the One, the singular Nation. The ground of sovereignty on its part appears in two senses. One as jurisdiction – of law, administration and taxation – that appear through history as fisc and empire and patrie, in different ways assigning a territoriality, a world-extension to sovereignty itself. The ground also appears as the ground of thinking the power of the universal, which in the history of Europe appear as philosophy and theology and in modern times, mathematics. Through what Soumya calls a ‘commensuration’ of the figure and the ground, the book goes on to show that the ground of thought is also the ground of sovereignty, the ground which underpins the exercise of both power and truth. Soumya’s story is full of fascinating moments – as when he demonstrates that the imperative of governmentality is as old as and indeed part of the imperative of sovereignty; or when he lays out the long history of tithes and taxes in Europe as a dialectic between the debt to and debt of the sovereign; or when he excavates an older history of the economy as a domain of regulation mapped by the circulation of Christian icons, making the economy into God’s worldly plan for the salvation of mankind. We do not have time here to dwell on these details, though each of these by itself can be major point of discussion. I shall only mention here that in Soumya’s imagination, all these discrete moments make up what he calls an ‘inconsistent’ history of sovereign power, i.e. a history without unity or necessity. This means, in my understanding, that no straight-forward chronological or successional history is possible for sovereignty, precisely because the career of sovereignty is also repeatedly a history of its siege, its failure, its dysfunctionality – the manifestation of the groundlessness, the voiding of sovereignty, despite its cunning, its ruses and indeed its claim to truths. In that sense, despite its historicity, sovereignty, at different times must be set up anew, following its own failure. The place of the French Revolution in the book is precisely to show up such a moment of the failure of sovereign power and of the difficult search for a new ground and a new figure of sovereignty, namely the people. As Soumya shows through his reading of Michelet’s history of the French revolution, it is not as if forms of sovereignty, power and truth make successive paradigm shifts in a long history of political society, but that everything must be recommenced, the present reinvented every time, by rewriting once again its past and its future, following upon the defaulting of an earlier form of sovereign presence. Soumya’s account of the career of sovereignty is persuasive in its own terms, but in my eyes, the account comes up against a critical unresolved question – namely, the question of the relationship between history and philosophy. Soumya imagines this relationship as a kind mismatch – sometimes there is the glimpse of geological metaphors, a faultine, an abyss – between the metaphysics of truth and the structure of possible actualisations of power, between the philosophical