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
Marginal Habitation, Spectacular Presences: Ramkinkar and the Elasticity of Margins
Pradip Kumar Datta In common usage the idea of the margins indicates a position that is outside the mainstream yet related to it. This provides a rich vantage point to critique the structures of the mainstream. Very often the epistemic position is elided with the social constituency/position with which this is associated. Often neglected in the advantages of this critical positioning is that it is a mobile one. What is marginal may move sometimes to the mainstream and even if it does not, may then migrate somewhere to a position that is an ambivalent one. This is often true of movements of art or of individual artists with their works – and even of intellectual and ideological movements. Ramkinkar’s life and work appears to me paradigmatic of the mobility of the margins. This is not simply in terms of the fabled recognition (and market price) of the signature of a once neglected artist achieving success and fame. Elements of Ramkinkar’s career – specifically his life and environmental sculpture – suggest a trajectory that is more subtle. Very little is known of Ramkinkar’s early years, but even the little information yields a life that was not tied to a fixed social position. Born in the little known Jugipara in Bankura district (now an urban area), he was from the barber caste. However, from his youth, he was attracted by the clay modelling of the kumars or potter caste and attached himself to one of its leading practitioners, learning by seeing them at work. It was here that his talent was first recognised by Anil Baran Ray, a touring Congressman who set him to work on nationalist banners and posters. The nationalist connection exposed him to Ramananda Chatterjee, editor of the Modern Review – an early nationalist journal that publicised a great deal of contemporary Indian art – and whose roots also lay in Bankura. A close friend of Rabindranath with institutional connections to Visva-Bharati, Ramananda arranged for Ramkinkar to formally study art in Santiniketan. The turn to nationalist mobilisation which enabled new linkages between the elite and their social others, provided the conditions for leaping across social milieu. Ramkinkars’ social mobility ensured for him a position of autonomy – but it also marginalised him in relationship to the collectives around him. Equally significant and far more decisive was the nature of the new milieu that he entered. While drawing primarily on the middle class, Visva-Bharati was founded on a dissenting vision of the world. It produced a new mode of marginality. While Visva-Bharati has become a venerable – indeed a defining – institution of modern Bengal if not of independent India, it did not occupy the same position when Ramkinkar entered it as a resident student in 1925. It can be argued that Visva-Bharati emerged from Rabindranath’s dissenting position on the imaginary of the Nation-State which he called Nationalism, a critique that was crystallised by the Great War of European nations. Visva-Bharati’s location indexed its commitment. Situated about a hundred miles from Calcutta, then the second city of the Empire, it was connected to it – but from a distance. On the other hand, it also sought to service its surrounding villages for self-empowerment through collective functioning and technological infusions. What we have here is an attempt to produce new kind of habitation drawing on an inter-embedding of the rural and the urban while creating networks – through Calcutta, with global connections. In other words, it sought to produce a marginal world with its own ecology that would provide an exemplary model for both the developmental needs of the colonised country as well as an outpost of peace and inter-connectedness for a post war world. To put it differently, its marginal position aspired to re-produce the mainstream. Within Visva-Bharati, Kala Bhavana, the arts school of Santiniketan where Ramkinkar studied and then stayed on as a teacher of sculpture, occupied a significant position. Its art practices moved away from the preoccupation with mythology, history and portraiture that had characterised modern Indian art till then. Instead of working within studios, Kala Bhavana pioneered a move to outdoor painting, representing rural workers and landscapes. In doing this, Kala Bhavana consolidated and enriched the linkage between the middle class world of Santiniketan and the rural world that surrounded it. Ramkinkar occupied an interesting position within this practice. If he had lead a “normal” career his low caste status may well have qualified him to have been an object of this art practice; instead he became the artist who had the privilege to represent what could have been his people. The in-between position of Ramkinkar needs a little more elaboration. I should mention here that Ramkinkar occupied an anomalous position in the actual middle class life of Santiniketan. It is true that he recalled the early days of Santiniketan with great affection, bemoaning its family-like intimacy. It is also true that he was given a great deal of support by Nandalal Bose who headed Kala Bhavana and recognised his talent; and it was Rabindranath who it is reported, upon seeing Ramkinkar working, promised to support him in sculpting massive figures and compositions despite the continuously cash-strapped condition of the university. At the same time, Ramkinkar left behind traces that indicated he was not quite comfortable in his environment. The social boundaries of Santinketan were never quite overtly asserted, but what Ramkinkar’s presence did was to crystallise these. In his memoirs he recollects having been asked about his name; his initial, awkward appearance clad in khadi also roused humour in his classmates. These were powerful intimations of the caste marginalisation that lay in store for him – and which is reflected in the fact that he changed his surname and once even hid his name. More consequential is the fact that he consolidated his marginal position himself. He quite openly drank liquor and had a live-in relationship with Radharani, a low caste widow who was initially his domestic worker and then became his model and muse
The Return of the Stone Age
[R. Chetankranti, Aatmadroh: New Delhi, Rajkamal Publications, 2023] Nothing catches the pungent flavour of masochist masculinity — and the helpless, misplaced obverse of such a state—which flags our schizoid times, as does the poetry of Ramkumar Chetankranti. His third volume of poetry आत्मद्रोह (Self-Mutilation) arrived yesterday by post. And everything else has receded to the background since. The power of what is pent up right now is given a ruthless channel in his phrases and metaphors: a torrential flow of politico-psychosexual-garish-melancholic-self-defeating desire. A world of relentless self-flagellation, which drowns itself in a cocktail of vengeance and carnival mania—hoping to arrive at an ever-elusive somewhere. This is a greatly risky zone to traverse, for the language and world that the poet shows us will not be easily digested by the kind of people who wish to stay ostrich like, scared of entering the zone of vengeful, amoral outbursts of the immediate quenching of desire which occupies our times. The first lines of the title poem have already turned into a prophetic epigram of sorts:और फिर देश यातना के लिए हाथ जोड़कर खड़ा हो गया सब एक आवाज़ में बोले, हमें दुःख दो और ज्यादा दुःख और ज्यादा यातना और ज्यादा पीड़ा वे सुख से ऊब चुके थे… (And then the country , beseeching pain, with folded hands, stood up/ And uttered in one unified voice/ Give us torment/ Afflict us with agony/More stinging agony/Even more pain/ They were bored of happiness…) Slavoj Zizek, his curiosity piqued about the industrial production of testicle-crushers in Nazi Germany which were used against Jews and gypsies, tries a Google search, and is bemused to find that there are all kinds of ball-crushers available in the market—stainless steeled, diamond-studded, spare, ornate or custom made. Pleasure in renunciation is a deadly mission. Genuine puritans are able to master it to the hilt and spread it among the people. Chetankranti has been showing us the mirror right from the piercing utterances in शोकनाच /Shoknaach. A generation (or does it really change every decade as claimed sometimes?) is coming into being after the 1990s and its contours are becoming more pronounced as the new century moves forward—“we were not revolutionaries/we were merely restless beings”: हम क्रांतिकारी नहीं थेहम सिर्फ अस्थिर थेऔर इस अस्थिरता में कई बारकुछ नाजुक मौक़ों परजो हमें कहीं से कहीं पहुंचा सकते थेअराजक हो जाते थेलोग जो क्रांति के बारे में किताबें पढ़ते रहते थेहमें क्रांतिकारी मान लेते थेजबकि हम क्रांतिकारी नहीं थेहम सिर्फ अस्थिर थे This applies to all hues of ‘revolutionaries’ of our times (barring very, very few resolute exceptions). His readers know that this very realization has led to Chetan’s Seelampur—a representative metaphor for the masochist location of pent up and self destructive desire. The educated are totally alienated from those who are being used, are dangerous, are preyed upon, are trapped, are naïve too—in Seelampur. Those who read books look at the denizens of this other world, and instead of walking halfway and offering a helping hand, turn themselves into numb ostriches: पढ़े-लिखे लोगों के लिए/वे पहेली थे/वे बैठे उन्हें बस देखते रहते/उनकी समझ में न आता/ की वे कब कहाँ और कैसे बने/क्यों हैं कौन हैं क्या हैं! To describe this class of the petty bourgeoisie, happy in its world of self-gratification, Chetan deploys a lovely phrase: छोटे छोटे बड़े लोग (Little big people). But as hinted earlier, this zone is an amorphous one to get into. For there cannot be any clear answer as to how much the poet listens to the sound and tenor of such self-mutilated bands and how much he castigates such mass ardour. Is his poetry a realist assessment of deep psychic turbulence? Or is it laid out to provoke and shake us from our slumber? Are his utterances being read by the people he addresses, beyond the polarized universe? This much is certain though: he is less forgiving of those who are managing the show, the magicians who stay in the background rather than the puppets who walk into their hands. For the former are the demagogues who enjoy most the conversion of people’s happiness into the black rain of blood and semen over very changing seasons. For the God stands aloof, with a purpose: एक हाथ में शिशन और एक हाथ में चाकू लिए खड़ा हो | (Penis in one hand, knife in another). To use James Joyce’s pregnant phrase, used in a different context: “invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails.” Such all engulfing desire for holding on to power has only one dread, a singular worry— पावर में इक कमी थी, तन्हाई से डरती थी (‘वीरता पर विचलित’ से उद्धृत ) | Power fears aloofness. This is the lyrical zone of detachment which Chetan has kept aside for the kindred. The outside. Only this much. Is aloofness poetry then? Beyond dreams and greed: वह तुम्हारे झुलसे बालों में/ बारिश करेगा/ वह तुम्हें रोने की जगह देगा| Not unlike in his previous anthologies, here too, Chetan takes us to the nadir of expectations, but his poetry never despairs about the future, for one day—all news cycle, busy printing presses, television anchors, rapt spectators –everything must fall silent: for everyone shall understand what is going on, with a collective sense of helplessness. On that day: हैरानी हैरान /और शैतानी निस्तब्ध| (Bewilderment shall be bewildered/ And devilry cold). One can stop at this point. But it needs mentioning that there is another track of poems blossoming in all three anthologies which acts as a balm to readers who dare to pass the volcanic lava and soot of his generational outcry. This set of poems shows the other side of Chetankranti—softest of souls that he is: and that line wrestles with fathomless love and pain. On pain, for instance he says: वह भीतर कहीं बो दिया होगा /बहुत पहले कभी /और सींचा नहीं गया होगा /इसलिए पानी-पानी पुकारता रहता है | (Not irrigated, the embedded seed of pain cries: Water, Water!) But that story must be saved for some other day. *** adminhumanitiesunderground.org