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
The Equitable Force of Destitution
HUG reviews: Nund Rishi: Poetry and Politics in Medieval Kashmir by Abir Bazaz. Cambridge University Press, 2023 What happens to the one who has drunk the nectar and found taste in wild vegetables? The same one is seized by the leopard that is death in life itself. And in solitude such a being can hear the rumblings of a day when the sky shall melt like molten copper and mountains look like fluffs of wool. Abir Bazaz has crafted a tapestry of patient, utopian and life affirming possibilities by explicating the inner workings of affirmative negation that is non-dual gnosis; in this particular case, that of sahaja Islam, as felt and realized in the many utterances (especially through the shruk—a quatrain that expresses a single thought) of Nund Rishi (1378-1440)—Kashmir’s most revered saint-poet and founder of the Rishi Order. Once he has given us a sense of what might be the contours of the sahaja vath (path) in Kashmir and what its similarities and differences are with other such traditions on the subcontinent and in wider South Asia, Bazaz delves deep into three intimate ideas and their relationship with each other in shaping such a sahaja world: the trope of ‘death before dying,’ the unity of negation-affirmation, and the apocalypse of the ‘afterworld’ which is also immediate and political. Love is taking a Beehive into your Coat What is syncretic in gnosis is also esoteric. The fragrant secret of the subtle knot is not to be divulged always in ecstasy. One of the finely-drawn threads in this work depicts how Nund Rishi was carefully trying to finding a way through the Shari’ah (from shara-road) and more ecstatic Sufi utterances (shath). It is not easy to place him. Indeed, for Nund Rishi, Shari’ah is the sahaja path. It is a bank to the river of human action. What is important is creating the common conditions of self transformation. The transformation is at once within selves, and also a possibility open to common humanity if it can realize the workings of such gnosis. All charlatanry in teaching and accepting knowledge must be abandoned if one has to enter such a zone of transformation. One cannot pretend to be an elder in the exchange of knowledge—Bazaz introduces a sense of radical equity right there. Decoding the hermeneutics of the shruks is not only about the pyrotechnics of kalam. The authentic faqih (jurist) and alim(scholar) must invoke the idea of amal (action) and other practices of the self. The book is about achieving a difficult sobriety. Bazaz tells us about the ecstatic utterances and martyrdom of the Sufi saint poet— Mansur al-Hallaj. He was maimed, quartered and stoned to death. Hallaj’s divine realization is beyond doubt but his error was in divulging the inner truths of gnosis, and the fragrance of unity was thus dissipated. He could not “bear the blow of the divine flash” and got “his windpipe shattered.” Nund Rishi, by contrast to such an ecstatic Sufism, seeks a more “simple, navigable path.” The ‘way of going” is rather a patient and difficult talk, he suggests—a commitment to a universalism that has to be earned from the pain that is love and total abandonment. Only the one who is cast out turns into a sahajia. At this point Bazaz tries to tackle one of the unresolvable but productive dilemmas of such gnosis: after such knowledge, does the vath lead to a supraconscious state of void (sunyata) or to a total immersion in life’s flow and trans-religious variegatedness? At times Bazaz (with cues from the likes of Rahman Rahi) seems to suggest that the latter was the path of Lal Ded (and is she therefore more poetic?) rather than Nund Rishi. The former is sweet and ecstatic, the other, serious and heavy. But more often than not in the book, the two of them are placed as carrying forward the same tradition. Shops after Closing Time Death is a stealthy thief: “that which leaves nothing intact.” The shruks are aporetic knots. These are ‘touchstones’ that are often paradoxical and therefore cannot be reduced to a belief-system. Feeling the power of each shruk is a mode of living, a process of transformation. They burn down the ego. One realizes that the night is dark, and death, imminent—for death has “shattered our youth”—“the way water is absorbed by new clay channels/the way shops are abandoned at closing time.” One waits in the abandoned bazaar—for ruination and complete desolation. Since death is universal, no one will be cured without dying. Death is a sense of the passage of time, and preparing for death is such a realization. A powerful shruk tells us about the intimidating quarters of the rich, who shoo poor people away. Beautiful women singing in the palaces, until “dust is being swept with chowries,” and “people grow cotton over there.” Time elapses. It leaves its mark. Ruination is equity. Hence, death before dying is freedom—since to live in such a cataclysmic condition of the outcast leaves nothing intact. But in the process, the ruined one gains a second life in eternity: which is a process of kenotic self-emptying. Dying before death joins us to one another. The political question of fraternity is passed through the bridge of equality. This is the power of living in death—in transforming individual and common living. Show me Your Face in the Clay La Makan (no place) is the address of the outcast. Solitude is a form of preparation. Slow ruination gradually leads to no-place or nothingness. Ruination is therefore an invitation to poetry—which celebrates the temporal movement in and through life. The bereft is bound to all creatures and to every substance around him—“abandoning existence, I found presence/Thus have I reached the place-less place.” In this section on place-less place in the Rishi tradition, Bazaz deals most intricately and intimately with the question of what is affirming in negative theology—about the relationship between nafi and isbat (a discussion he had already initiated in the introductory pages
What Are You Going Through?
Prasanta Chakravarty “Secretum meum mihi: the absence of reticence among many modern writers, the taste for autobiography and confession, the habit of admitting the public to the innermost recesses of an intimacy stripped of all reserve have never failed to surprise and scandalize me.” ~ Gustave Thibon (Introduction to Gravity and Grace) A human body that has surrendered to gravity, and therefore has experienced free fall, is a strange creature—at once a corpse and a throbbing entity. Her will, desire, or outcome is irrelevant once the inevitable routine for the fall is initiated. The significant aspect for the creature in the clutches of force is that even with some kind of a harness, gravity does not go away. Its presence lurks about. A body under gravity realizes that it is subject to forces that are beyond its mastery. The universe, as it were, enters into the body in pain. How do we become mindful of such primal vulnerability without immediately seeking protection that refuses to arrive? Can we sustain corporeal integrity by resisting free fall? Isn’t such falling as natural as the falling of ripe fruits, water, or a meteor? And then the final act of gravity: to be pulverized into utter oblivion. Gravity is an edict. As a response to this conundrum about force, an astounding claim has been made by Weil scholar J. Heath Atchley: “If one could learn to live with the body rather than in it—if one were body through and through rather than a kind of ghost occupying an empty shell—would not that change things, somehow?” Or, in Weil’s own words: “One does not consent to [affliction] with abandon, but with a violence exerted on the entire soul by the entire soul.” This is the sense we get when Weil refers to the soul-killing lacerating force that is manual labour. There is no explanation as to why the labourer was selected for such crushing alienation in thus eking out her life. As a manual worker, Weil herself was left “in pieces, soul and body . . . the affliction of others entered into my flesh and my soul. . . . There [in the factory] I received forever the mark of a slave, like the branding of the red-hot iron the Romans put on the foreheads of their most despised slaves. Since then I have always regarded myself as a slave.” Henceforth, to be marked to lead a life of the afflicted suffuses all her thoughts and pronouncements about love, fairness and justice in a world that is at once callously ruthless and also fated to affliction. Beings are at once perpetrators and sufferers. The Quartering of the Self Fated affliction is one of the faces of the divine. The other face is love. But there is a process of labour through which one might touch such grace. Weil gives it the name of attention. How might attention look like? Here is a clue how Weil thinks about the subject— “Attention consists of suspending our thought, leaving it detached, empty and ready to be penetrated by the object. It means holding in our minds, within reach of this thought, but on a lower level and not in contact with it, the diverse knowledge we have acquired which we are forced to make use of. Our thought should be in relation to all particular and already formulated thoughts as a man on a mountain who, as he looks forward, sees also below him, without actually looking at them, a great many forests and plains. Above all our thought should be empty, waiting, not seeking anything, but ready to receive in its naked truth the object which is to penetrate it” One can detect in the passage the playing out of two movements. The attentive being awaits the object of its attention to penetrate its body and soul. The being itself does not have any agency by which it can petition the object of attention so that it could be granted grace gratis. Instead, grace, if it ever appears, must surprise the beseecher. The other factor is even more crucial: the seeker does not actively seek, but her mind is receptive to waiting. Waiting is the emptying of the self, a manner of ‘spiritual quartering.’ For naked truth to shine forth, grace must penetrate the soul of the receptor, but the receptor herself must remain passive. Using knowledge for understanding has nothing to do with attention. The key is to suspend all thought. Readiness to receive grace means cultivating a kind of severe lateral vision like the man atop the mountain— simultaneously looking forward and below. Such passivity is required in order to counter our self-centeredness, which hopes to protect itself from the privations of body and soul. In such a state, one begins to see things only as one wants to see them or give in to a condition of fear and insecurity. Weil says: “The principal claim we think we have on the universe is that our personality should continue. This claim implies all the others. The instinct of self-preservation makes us feel this continuation to be a necessity, and we believe that a necessity is a right. We are like the beggar who said to Talleyrand: “Sir, I must live,” and to whom Talleyrand replied, “I do not see the necessity for that.” I live by constantly inserting my personality in the world of relevance. To the world that is of little significance. Is there a way to reverse this process and speak incidentally of myself? Attention is this process by which we turn outside, away from our selves. It requires us to alter the direction of our heed and awareness. Attention makes us face the world on an altered gradient. What might we direct our visages to? The act of love is the highest form of attention. In love the creature is gratuitous and generous to the point of being disinterested, oblivious to the presence of the infinite. Is attention that aspect of one’s being which is not tied anymore to the vagaries of necessity