Discrimination No Representation: Modernity & Plato
Rahul Govind ________________ Plato is one among the many unfortunate philosophers who are referred to more and more, read less and less. To this atrophied forgetting, Abrogast Scmitt’s Modernity and Plato: Two Paradigms of Rationality is a patient therapeutic mnemonic. Over 500 pages of closely argued text ambitiously proposes a fundamental critique of modernity, and its self-conceptions, in the light of a rigorous reading of Plato, and what Schmitt names the Plato-Aristotelian tradition (henceforth P-A). In the course of such a reading, the familiar clichés of the ‘theory of forms’, that orient not only Philosophy but also the humanities and the social sciences, are laid to rest. What strikes one first about Modernity and Plato is that it is simultaneously, a monumental historical diagnosis, a subtle and nuanced philosophical analysis, as well as a courageous conceptual thesis. The text is structured in terms of a series of conceptual propositions that are then extrapolated and established through various kinds of readings; some of which are detailed and pertain to key sections of the referred to canonical works. It integrates and goes on to transform themes that are conventionally kept distinct, such as the conceptual and the aesthetic. One of the most refreshing aspects of the book is the frequent illustration of the argument through everyday examples that seamlessly expresses, rather than attenuates, the rigour of philosophical labour. The singular voice that speaks through the text does so with an originality and spirit that is untrammelled by the jargon of thought. To get to the thesis that is never lost sight of. Schmitt argues that what is conventionally taken to be modernity, notwithstanding the debates around date and place, is characterized by a particular consciousness that believes itself to be at once “original and unique” (4)[i]. From the period conventionally designated as the Renaissance we find evidence of an attitude that “degraded” it’s immediate past not only in the specific domains of the fine arts, but on the more general registers of philosophical and scientific aptitude. Self proclaimed superiority of the latter lay in the ostensibly more exact understanding of the objects of the world in visual (artistic) and scientific (philosophical) ways. Thus a particular understanding of the function of art – a representation that was to replicate an individuated empirical experience of the world – was construed to be the essential characterization of art as such. Schmitt argues that there were deeper roots to this understanding and valuation of the world; roots that could be traced to the nominalists and the specific rehabilitation of a specific Hellenistic/Stoic philosophic thesis at the cost of the P-A tradition. Modernity, in following the former, foregrounds the individual object as immaculately received, making the infinite (and doomed) task of knowledge, to be one of faithful representation. The argument is illustrated through a discussion of Duns Scotus’s interpretation of Aristotle. Schmitt forcefully argues that this interpretation was in fact a radical misunderstanding of Aristotle in particular; but also simultaneously a profoundly debilitating misunderstanding of the whole P-A tradition that persists to this day in academic and more mainstream discourse. In his own reading of Aristotle, knowledge begins with perception (never without its own cognitive dimension), and yet, to (truly) know that which we perceive, we require a conceptual clarification which is the true knowledge of the object and its (sensory) properties. On the other hand, for Scotus, that which was arrived at through intellectual cognition is in fact truly something that is to have been already given to us in the “immediate intuition of the object”. The question and difference thus revolves around the status and making of the “individual object”. In Aristotle via Schmitt, intellect brings about unity among moments isolated by the mind-sense organs, with cognition taking place in a single act. There can be no clear ‘reception’ of the individual object, because such individuation requires the conceptual discrimination between what is essential and what is not. The circle drawn by chalk, is given as an example, one that is constantly returned to. Only a conceptual clarification can define the circle as having an essential characteristic property i.e. all distances from the perimeter to the centre are equal. This property is to be distinguished from the color white of the chalk that also might characterize the given circle. Such a distinction is involved in the conceptual act as a unifying and distinguishing operation in so far as it presents an individuated object: color of chalk and roundess along with other properties in the circle. Scotus’s major intervention lies in the fact that the function of “intelligence” — or conceptual analysis as a concrete distinguishing act — as it existed in Aristotle is elided and the unity of the object is said to lie in the object itself combined with the act of intuition i.e. perception and intellect. Reason is now assigned the function of distinguishing the parts in terms of an already given or received unity. Thus, reason/conceptualization is to be found (already) in intuition, which is itself dependent on the “individual object” that “includes all that can be found in terms of intellectual determination in every higher instance thereof”. The nature of conceptual clarification or analysis to be found in Aristotle has here been radically altered because in Scotus, such conceptualization (or thought) is now to be understood merely as a form of representation, and is only able to work ‘deficiently’ i.e. retrospectively ascertain or represent the object that is to be in itself (as a unity) already found in intuition. This construal of the individual object is what Schmitt characterizes as the “metaphysical overload of the individual object”. Thought is construed as always secondary while the individual object as it is experienced is endowed with a primary and foundational role. It is reduced to an exclusively “representative” character, a fundamental move that will later lead to the more recognizable contemporary distinctions and between the conscious (thought) and the unconscious. (22 – 30)[ii] The active function of thinking in the constitution of
Dead Writing: Barthes and Posterity
Supriya Chaudhuri ___________________________ Posteritati (To posterity) In 1971, Roland Barthes gave an interview, originally intended for a series of televised broadcasts recorded under the title ‘Archives of the 20th Century’, in which he was asked to reflect on his life and work in response to a detailed questionnaire prepared by Jean Thibaudeau. This was four years before he published his idiosyncratic ‘auto-biography’, Roland Barthes (1975), translated into English as Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes (1977). The interview was never televised so far as I am aware, not even, as Barthes speculated it might be, after ‘the death of the author’. This playful reference to a physical event, the cessation of a human life, through a phrase that the author had himself made famous as metaphor, comes at the very beginning of the published text of the interview in Tel Quel, Issue 47, a special issue devoted to Roland Barthes. The responses – which were in any case a ‘game’ to Barthes and Thibaudeau — had been rewritten for publication. Nevertheless, Barthes insists that ‘the effect of enunciation’, rather than the protocols of writing, is at work through the text, producing ‘an entirely imaginary and continuous first person’ (Barthes 1998: ‘Responses’, 249), rather like the subject of a novel who shared his birth date, 12 November 1915, with Barthes himself. Reflecting on the form of the interview, Barthes says: ‘What writing never writes is ‘I’; what speech always says is ‘I’; what the interviewer should solicit is thus the author’s imaginary, the list of his phantasms, in as much as he can reflect on them, speak of them in that fragile state’ (266). In Roland Barthes, he begins with the proviso, ‘It must all be considered as if spoken by a character in a novel.’ (Barthes 1994: 1) It is this Barthesian imaginary, this phantasm, then, who towards the close of the interview tells his interviewer: As for posterity, what can I say? It’s a dead word for me, which is giving it its dues since its validity is only established on the basis of my death. I consider I have lived well up to now … buried in the archives (of the twentieth century) perhaps one day I will re-emerge, like a fugitive, one witness among others in a broadcast of the Service for Research on ‘structuralism’, ‘semiology’, or ‘literary criticism’. Can you imagine me living, working, desiring, for that? If one day the relations between the subject and the world were to be changed, certain words would be dropped, like in a Melanesian tribe in which at death a few elements of the lexicon are suppressed as a sign of mourning; but it would be rather as a sign of joy; … this would happen doubtless to the word ‘posterity’, and perhaps to all the ‘possessives’ of our language, and, why not, to the word ‘death’ itself. (266-67) But posterity is not a possessive, as Barthes knew well: it is a substantive based on the Latin posteritas (‘descendants’), from posterus (‘coming after’, from post ‘after’). That Barthes links it to all the ‘possessives’ of our language indicates that he has in mind the genealogical notion of descent, that he wishes to disclaim the unborn generations claiming filiality with the dead author, and to say that they are dead to him. That is, we, who celebrate Barthes today, who call upon him to bear witness to structuralism, semiology, literary criticism, we are dead to him: and ‘if the relations between the subject and the world were to be changed’, both posterity and death would disappear from the lexicon. Rarely has an author spoken with more authority from his grave to disallow a memorial celebration. Still, if Barthes disclaims posterity, he does not in fact disclaim death, which may be why Jacques Derrida, in the first chapter of The Work of Mourning, uses the possessive case to speak of ‘The Deaths of Roland Barthes’. In effect, this is to remind us not only of the dead author – dead in physical fact at the time of writing – but also of the deaths by which he was moved and of which he wrote, the inscription of death in his writing, contrasted with the ‘literal’ impossibility of his actually saying ‘I am dead’ (Derrida 2001: 52, 64-65). Yet, as Barthes says elsewhere, ‘the voice is always already dead, and it is by a kind of desperate denial that, we call it living; this irremediable loss we give the name of inflection: inflection is the voice insofar as it is always past, silenced’ (Barthes 1994: 68). Writing insistently, obsessively, of death, throughout his life as a writer, Barthes may seem to avert his face from ‘his posterity’ (I use the possessive deliberately), but he is always addressing the ghosts, the spectral presences, released by the knowledge of death, his own and those of others. In his ‘auto-biography’, Roland Barthes, published five years before he died, Barthes positions himself, as Petrarch had done six centuries earlier in his ‘Letter to Posterity’, (‘Posteritati’, Seniles 18.1) within the binary of portrait and biography: offering us a choice of two representational modes, synoptic and chronological. The first is a selection of photographs mainly from his childhood and youth, haunted by that deathliness that Barthes associates with the form of the photograph itself; the second is a set of notes about a historical person, incomplete because he is still living, but anticipating death as the punctum that will make them meaningful. Yet, curiously, Barthes associates narrative with the first form of representation: the photographs tell a story, though one that is entirely ‘imaginary’, they are a succession of images, of a body now irrevocably lost, no longer that of the writer, ‘figurations of the body’s prehistory – of that body making its way towards the labor and the pleasure of writing’ (Barthes 1994: 3). That remembered, imagined narrative of youth is interrupted by the subject’s fall into text: Once I produce, once I write, it is
Cataloging from the Kitchen: The Luminous World of Arun Ghosh
Sarmistha Dutta Gupta _____________________ Arun Ghosh (1933-2015), phenomenal librarian and archivist who guided many humanities and social science researchers of Kolkata for over four decades, passed away last February unsung in death as in life. Arun-babu, as he was widely known, was the founder librarian of Centre for Studies in Social Sciences (Kolkata). Late in life he also built from scratch the Bhabani Sen Library of rare communist periodicals and books in Bhupesh Bhavan, the headquarters of the CPI in the city. The Moments of Bengal Partition : Selections from the Amrita Bazar Patrika, 1947 – 48 is the outcome of Arun-babu’s meticulous research and offers a selection of news and editorial articles from the Amrita Bazar Patrika, the leading ‘nationalist’ daily of the time, in the months immediately before the Partition and after. Towards the end of his life, Arun-babu was engaged in another significant compilation as he was editing a dictionary of Bengali terms associated with books, reading and library usage. In remembering Arun Ghosh a year after his passing, I offer excerpts from a long interview with him that I did in 2012 for the golden jubilee archive of IIMC, Joka (reproduced with permission). Arun-babu had also served IIMC as a young librarian in its initial years. In the interview he came across as a great raconteur with an inexhaustible stock of anecdotes. These excerpts largely trace the extraordinary journey of a young man growing up in Calcutta in a refugee family in the late-40s and early 50s, who began as a worker at the Ichhapur Gun and Shell Factory, spent a few years working at the office of the Providend Fund Commissioner—spending much time browsing and reading on his own all this while—and finally chose to be a librarian for his love of books. On his childhood and growing up, Independence and Partition I was born on 24 July 1933 in a village in Barisal in East Bengal [now Bangladesh]. My father used to work in Kolkata, and we came away here. I distinctly remember that when I got admitted to school at the age of 5 or 6, my father had rented a house in Agarpara. This would be around 1939 or 1940. There was no school in Agarpara then. So I would have to commute by train daily to the nearest school. Now for a child of that age, commuting by train posed certain dangers. At this point my grandfather, who was a teacher in a school in Ulpur in Faridpur district of east Bengal, wrote to my father, saying, if you send the boy to me, he can stay here and study in my school. So at age 7 I was admitted to class III in that school. When I was in class IX my grandfather was taken seriously ill. My maternal uncles brought him to Calcutta and I accompanied them and began living with my grandfather in a rented house in Dakshineshwar. That was 1946. Partition came within a year. I was admitted to a school here in 1947 in class IX. On Independence Day I heard that one could travel free in buses coming to Kolkata, and that they would take you to Fort William. Along with a few of my classmates I came to Kolkata and took the tour. I remember it distinctly. But the euphoria vanished within a year. In 1948 when Gandhiji was assassinated, I was thinking a bit differently, perhaps I was getting to be politically aware. I remember, when the news came to Dakshineshwar I fasted the whole day. Maybe I had thought that bereavement could also be expressed through fasting. This reaction was very spontaneous. Another memory that haunts me to this day is the memory of refugees coming from East Pakistan in hordes, including several of my very close relations. They were gathering in the vicinity of our house, and looking for places for shelter. I was seeing all this. And then gradually I lost the feeling of joy that I had about Independence just a year ago. I was seeing my own close relations suffer. I was seeing refugee life in Sealdah station. It was terrible. I was reacting to all this happening around me and I could no longer concentrate on my studies. I somehow took my Matriculation in 1949, and just managed to scrape through. My younger brother and sisters were all in school. Some of my close relations from our native place were staying with us in that small one-roomed house, some were shacking up in the verandah, and some were putting up in accommodations in the locality. My father just had his small income to support all of them. I initially got admitted to a college for my Intermediate. It used be IA then. We had moved to Sodepur during this time. My father told me, ‘I won’t be able to afford your IA expenses. You’ll have to buy books, commute from Sodepur to the college. Since you are a Matriculate now, why don’t you look for a job? I’ll try to look around too.’ I was only 16 years old then. I had to quit college and look for a job. Highly qualified individuals from east Bengal were also looking for jobs, and they were taking up any job that came their way. They were even taking up jobs of labourers, or some small odd jobs in shops, or even working as domestic help in rich families, so that shelter and food would be provided for. Checking gun parts for a living and studying at night Anyway, I registered my name in the Barrackpore Employment Exchange. I was called for a job interview of a ‘Viewer’ at the Ichhapur Gun and Shell Factory. The job title was rather showy, but my job was to measure the separate components of the rifle to check whether they were of the correct size. So I was basically ‘viewing’ whether the shapes and sizes of the gun parts were okay or
There is Justice in this Book !
Soumyabrata Choudhury _________________________ Towards the end of its compelling career, Aishwary Kumar’s Radical Equality: Ambedkar, Gandhi and the Risk of Democracy, says that Gandhi’s and Ambedkar’s were two incommensurable ways to the question of justice, that is to say, the thought of equality. The book, then, must be about at least three things—the two incommensurable ways and the thought as such. I intend this statement to be more than just a logical inference. It aims to go to the heart of the author’s profound concern with what will appear in the book as an insistent motif, the motif which is also a fundamental problem of “means and ends”. The problem is the following: Even before posing the moral question whether an end justifies the historical means adopted to reach it, one must ask, can there be historical ways and means adequate to an end insofar as that end is a “thought”? That is to say, the thought of equality, if it means anything, must mean the thought proper to a principle. So the basic problem turns out to be—how can there be an empirical, historico-human path, even if as fabulous, singular and, in Aishwary Kumar’s words, “incommensurable” a path as Gandhi’s or Ambedkar’s, to the perpetual pre-existence of a principle and its true thought? For this true thought or thought of the perpetual anteriority of a principle, the book creates another insistent motif, which is the motif of sovereignty, and the rhythm of the insistence is theological. Clearly, theology can provide a kind of model for perpetual anteriority of existence in the form of divine sovereignty or God’s sovereign pre-existence. “Religion” would be the common name of the terribly inadequate means and variously traced ways to the divine end and in accordance with the image and model of historico-human subjection to theological sovereignty. Strangely, the first casualty of such a subjection is the very stakes of the thought in question—the thought of equality. The theological model seems to turn the very passion of that thought towards a power so sovereign, so sovereignly other that it becomes radically unthinkable. And therein would lie its transcendental force to which no thinkable form of a principle can correspond, no principle of equality can be equal to this divine condescension. And yet the author of Radical Equality knows that the subject of his pioneering investigation—I do think he is the first of his kind in a certain field of research, something I will talk about later—is not an affair of mere empirical measurement of a humanist principle in its historical realization. At the same time, the thought of equality is a historical declaration of that thought and opens up an epochal thinking in history that Aishwary Kumar has no hesitation in identifying as revolutionary. He is, indeed, a pioneering archivist of such revolutionary thinking in modern Indian history. The complex formalizing statement to provide overall support for the epochal research is the following: Not only is there a fundamental incommensurability between the ways, means and historical measures of equality; but also there is an incommensurability at the heart of the very thought of equality as such. Which is that the declaration of the principle of equality is an absolute yet utterly immanent interruption of the history of inequalities which is the only history there is. The evaluation and arrangement of the archives of history take place along the axes of differentiation and commensuration. The axis of commensuration institutes historical measures and regimes that articulated with the axis of differention, converts differences into inequality, of which equality is only an empirical and relative variation. The declaration of equality as a principle, on the other hand, to speak like Neitzsche, breaks history in two: the old regime of inequality and a revolutionary epoch for which there isn’t and mustn’t be, measures, indices and proofs of equality; instead there will be post-egalitarian acts and dispositions. It is at this point that the sceptic might as well speak up and ask, is there nothing in-between? Some sort of transitory dialogue or talks of temporary peace at the barricades? Or, what about the history of power, that runs deeper and at a diagonal with respect to sovereignty, whether theological or revolutionary? And aren’t these aspects the really meaningful parameters by which modern Indian history, since the epoch of Ambedkar and Gandhi, needs to be judged in all its radical hypotheses and rotten realities? Let me withhold any comments of my own and try to be the medium for Aishwary Kumar’s possible response to these very crucial sceptical queries. Kumar, to my mind, will cite at least two key phrases here from his book, “egalitarian sovereignty” and “insurrectionary citizenship”, as idiomatic, even contradictory, constructions for the inconsolable betweenness of our times that we sometimes also call democracy. However, it seems the medium has started lending its partisan tonality to the original voice in question; so let me resume speaking on my account. I think that the book declares “radical equality” as a sort of lightning-flash across the archives of history to re-localise the force of the declaration in the materiality and force-field of historical texts—mainly Ambedkar’s and Gandhi’s texts. In this, the author seems to join a line of distinguished writers, from at least D.R. Nagaraj to Arundhati Roy recently, who as it were, stage the Ambedkar-Gandhi sequence in theatre of history as protagonist-antagonist, as duellists wearing their swords, masks and grimaces. Yet it seems to me, Aishwary Kumar is a pioneering departure in that he perforates the borders of Ambedkar’s and Gandhi’s texts, as well as others, to open their constitutive figurations, the play between them, to a performativity, a vector of force, which surpass the commensuration the imagination of a theatre produces between the protagonist and the antagonist. Indeed, Gandhi and Ambedkar, more than dramatis personae, are scintillating effects of Aishwary Kumar’s own singular text. The immanence of the two historical figures to the text is the same as the utter exteriority of the declaration of