Material Love
Nandini Chandra and Jesse Ross Knutson Indeed, love is a many splendoured thing! Different categories of age and class appropriate romantic literature offer a guide to this tremendous variety. There is a virtual caste/class system operating in the love industry whereby some people feel real/authentic love in contrast to more debased others. But despite this hierarchy, love is for everyone, like in the Mira Nair film Monsoon Wedding. What is shared across this class system is a desire for another human being for sure. But the sexual feeling aroused in romantic hetero-normative love is a specialized one not to be confused with sex qua sex. The sex here has to be constantly negotiated and differentiated to a point where it is no longer sex, but a suitably inflected synonym for it. So while the Valentine’s day lovers may relate to each other via loud commodities, like heart shaped balloons, Archies’ greeting cards and red roses that have been frozen for weeks before February 14-the magic date, our subdued low-profile love in defiance of this blatant commodification is no less a type in the many splendoured index file of the culture industry. It was the Marxist theorist Theodor Adorno who pointed out that the dominant form of love under capitalism is romance. His exact words: love downgraded to romance! What is so debased about romance? Is there nothing beautiful or transgressive about it? How do we make sense of our defiance of love and, defiance in love in the same breath? One minute we are distancing ourselves from a love that needs the aids of the shopping plaza, and the next minute we are buying more things to shout to the world that we will love despite all the sri ram senas and the khap panchayats. Is that schizo or not? The answer must lie in the deep structure of alienated love that affects us all whether we like to acknowledge it or not. By alienated love is meant a love that has been taken away and then sold back to us, a love appropriated from our bodies’ capacity for sensual pleasure and then returned as a mechanism to mediate that sensuality—ways of loving, ways of kissing, ways of fighting and ways of making up via the market place that any reader of Cosmo or popular ads can immediately appreciate. This is not merely a market place of things, but also a market place of ideas and we would do well to believe Marquez, when he reiterates that there is a lot of cross-fertilization between the high and the low. At the same time, sexuality—the embodied experience of love—cannot be completely regulated by the moral police. The very fact that they are trying so hard must be reason to explore what it is that is getting their goat. For one, when people feel pleasure, it is a dangerous thing because they allow their bodies to come out of fear and start questioning the repression that is cajoled into them. Who to love, how to love, who absolutely not to love are some of the edicts laid down by the enemies of love. But the defenders of love, the liberal bourgeoisie, who have surrendered to the lure of the market and allowed their daughters and sisters to enter dating sites, marriage bureaus, internet chat lines, are not so different either. These exchanges of love are rife with caste and gotra markers apart from an implicit injunction for class and religious inbreeding. It is therefore important see the defenders or tolerators of love and the enemies of love not as opposite camps, but allied (maybe disparate) units trying to come to grips with the new products of sexuality, inaugurated by advanced capital. While the fanatics are merely crying foul at the loss of their hold over the women who are daring to marry outside caste and religion, the more entrenched capitalist class, who embrace modernity with riders, want to teach women lessons in self-censorship, so that they know the boundaries within which their pleasure is permissible. After all, romantic love is not necessarily liberating. It works very much within the auspices of patriarchy and accepts women’s subservience to men. Given the uneven development of capitalism, what we have are different faces of the same thing, rather than modern love versus barbaric opposition to it. The sooner we understand the different encroachments upon our sexuality, the better we will be able to fight the constant attempts to incorporate it for the love industry. For ultimately we need love—not for happy little families who can watch telly on increasingly upgraded technology, serving up programmes that perpetually leave them on the brink of a promised pleasure so close and yet so far away—but instead to create a pleasure that can truly belong to us, and then to learn to mould the world in the image of this pleasure. The question is not the content of this pleasure, the alternately authentic or debased love that we started with, and whether one should love this way or that. The question is the trajectory. The violence against those who would love in a socially unsanctioned or defiant way (which we can now begin to recognize as fascist) comes from precisely this: the uncharted territory where an economy of unpredictable, creative pleasure might lead. It could lead to the demand for a world of pleasure, a world in the image of desire, with full stomachs and moist throats, with freely moving bodies, and social relations that we want and invent, instead of those that we suffer for lack of any other available option. Sexual repression and frustration teach one to live with lack and invest one’s libidinal energies in the reproduction of lack that capitalism represents. Socialism put simply would start with the reproduction of plenty, which the spark of pleasure in its unpredictable eddies might begin to capture in microcosm before the pigs are ready. Nandini Chandra is Assistant Professor, Department of English, University of Delhi. Jesse
Politics and Ethics in Communist Practice:From the Margins of the Indian Left
Rajarshi Dasgupta Let me begin by explaining the subtitle, which should be relatively easier than the title. Who or what exactly belongs to the margins of communist politics in India? First, let me tell you about certain practices – activities and forms of activism that are no longer paid much attention practically nor thought through in theoretical terms by the dominant communist parties today. In fact, it is doubtful how far communists will currently like to identify the core of their work with such activities. Secondly, I am going to look briefly at a history, or rather micro histories of a movement, consigned to anodyne hagiographies in places like West Bengal, where communist memories primarily dwell on the heroic nostalgia of creating a hegemonic regime. Thirdly, my attempt is to tackle these issues and frame them conceptually in such a manner, which the available communist vocabulary does not allow. It does not possess the resources, which are necessary for a critical hermeneutic of the political and the ethical in the field of everyday practice. That is why I would like to turn to a different set of categories and reading strategies sidestepping the familiar Marxist methodologies here. But is it not paradoxical to study the communist movement in terms that are distant and alien from its own forms of discourse? I would say no, for we are going to study these very forms of discourse – the practice of putting them together, constituting them, building them word by word, act by act, point by point. The specific problem I have in mind is the practice of speaking the truth – its implications for the self and its relation to other/s. There is little doubt that the question of relating with the other is of paramount importance to a communist. I have discussed on other occasions how an entire set of maneuvers – physical and mental – ascetic exercises were geared to a passage of ‘becoming declassed’ which ensured a normative identification with the masses – the workers and peasants as communists saw them. This was an extremely fraught process – what we usually describe as rooted in the ordinary people, having to compete with other models like that of the satyagrahi, not always successfully but often ending up in a subterranean conversation. Unlike Gandhi’s soulforce and karmayoga, the Indian communists traded in historical materialism and labor. But the question of speaking the truth was never too far from the political performances across the spectrum. How did communists see the status of truth-speaking as an activity intrinsic to politics? What were the kinds of truths invested in such contexts? This is where we must leave the customary communist pedagogy behind and look for other kinds of truth and, as we shall see, other kinds of relation to truth. Speaking the first type of Truth: Utopian Broadly, I would say there are three significant kinds of speaking the truth in communist practice. The first kind of truth is very strictly speaking what is not true in an objective sense – that is, it is not out there in the reality around us but symptomatic of a possible future – a truth that is teleological – that states what is to come as per the law of history tomorrow. But this does not mean it is a determinist thing, a rhetorical article of mechanical faith in progress. It is in fact a far more unpredictable and complicated move that arises out of trying to understand the other. And its function is to fiercely combat accepted wisdoms, in particular, the cynicism of the common sense that wryly explains why certain things never change in a desirable manner, why the status quoist inertia finally comes to win the day. This is of course the truth about utopia – which is not based on the existing state of knowledge but on its profound subversion – the place of an ‘as if’ which breaks down and reassembles the sense of reality in a way that makes it more meaningful and productive. Let me give you a concrete example. For much of the middle of twentieth century communist activists and intellectuals have racked their minds to understand why the peasants – reduced to dying of hunger in thousands in the infamous famine of forties – never rebelled. Was the very impulse of rebellion basically alien to their class character as peasants? The question is actually not very distant for us at a time of mass suicides and predatory dispossession of land today. However, one of the ways in which the communists sought to address the question is to search for something like an organic intellectual – a poor peasant cum Marxist theorist who would be able to answer the riddle. The question took many shapes within the communist movement and became the subject matter of a number of cultural productions – plays, poetry and short stories. I want to draw your attention to one particular short story, titled ‘Chhiniye Khayni Kano?’ roughly translatable as ‘Why did they not loot and eat?’, given the well-known fact that there was widespread hoarding of foodgrains at this point. The communist author of the story, Manik Bandyopadhyay, plotted the story around a conversation between a bhadralok babu communist who wonders if the peasant is submissive by nature and an old robber, Jogi dakaat, who explains to the babu how hungry bodies can only rebel after a square meal and how they give up when the hunger multiplies: there is no energy left, the body survives at the bare limits of life. The important point to note is not this reason that is no doubt worth serious consideration but the character of Jogi dakaat. What we are looking at in such a character is precisely that organic peasant intellectual that was not there to be found in reality. Jogi dakaat is more of a horizon than an esoteric social bandit dear to Eric Hobsbawm. He is coming from the future into a short story that turns
Spritual Politics as Marriage of Opposites
Vasanthi Srinivasan Ananda Coomaraswamy, known primarily as an art historian, deserves attention also as a philosopher of spiritual traditions. As a keeper of the Indian collection at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts for three decades, he relentlessly espoused the spiritual basis of Indian, especially Hindu art. For him, spirituality was essentially about tuning in to the ‘true reality’ and the ‘one immortal source’ that manifested itself both immanently and transcendentally. Saying that ‘he never thought for himself’, he devoted himself to clarifying and expounding the metaphysics or first principles as articulated in different religious traditions. In his words, ‘philosophy or rather metaphysics represents a theory or vision and religion a way to the verification of the vision in actual experience.’ While philosophy was contemplative, religion was an active quest. But this did not mean that philosophical exegesis was only an academic exercise. For him, it prescribed the right order both within the soul and society. Consider the opening lines of his Spiritual Authority and Temporal Power in the Indian Theory of Government: ‘It may be said that the whole of Indian political theory is implied and subsumed in the words of the marriage formula “I am That, thou art This, I am sky, thou art Earth” and so forth addressed by the Brahmin priest, the Purohita, to the King in Aitareya Brahmana. Focusing mostly on the ritual texts (Brahmanas), he sets forth a ‘traditional’ theory according to which right order requires that temporal power be guided by and subordinated to spiritual authority. According to him, the marriage formula invoked during the coronation rites, is uttered not so much by the king as is generally held but by the Brahmin priest thereby establishing the primacy of the contemplative over the active life. Given that the king is the feminine party in the marriage, he claims, it is ‘inconceivable’ that they could have been uttered by him. The king, in his turn, is the masculine party in the relationship towards the earth/realm. In this role, he is the ‘voice’ that gives effect to the purposes of spiritual authority. The marriage brings together “counsel and power, intellect and will, right and might. Through this marriage, the ‘purohita (priest) becomes the alter ego of the kshatriya (king)’. He insists that in this marriage, there is no reciprocal equality; the relation of the king to the priest is that of part to the whole. Underlying this relationship is a metaphysic that counsels the rule of the intellect over the emotional—a rule that implies right and proportional ordering of the emotional and erotic elements in the psyche and society. In ritual terms, this marriage re-enacts the sacred marriage of divine archetypes of priesthood and rulership namely Mitra and Varuna or Agni and Indra mentioned in connection with the Soma and fire altar sacrifices. This marriage of the priest and king, as a homologue of sacred marriages, brings about peace and prosperity to the realm. The priest supposedly mediates with and evokes intra-cosmic deities through his ritual expertise. Coomaraswamy also compares the priest to Plato’s philosopher-educator who ‘fathers’ strength and skilful speech in the temporal power through counsel. The priest seems to acquire wisdom through the study of scriptures and meditative reflection on the cosmic vision underlying them. Without priestly guidance, he insists that the ship of the state will destroy itself. Throughout, Coomaraswamy alludes to Plato, Neoplatonists such as Philo and Christian theologians in order to make his point about right ordering of the sacred and temporal powers. But it appears that the establishment of right order even in the cosmos involves considerable conflict and violence between naturally antagonistic principles. Coomaraswamy recognizes the references in the texts to the natural opposition between Mitra (representative of priesthood) and Varuna (representative of royal power). Further, the Satapatha Brahmana says “the ksatra takes no delight in the Brahma, nor does the brahmavarcasa delight in the ksatra. But he goes on to add that the marriage effects a reconciliation that reflects their ‘transcendental unity’. For him, this unity emanates from the common source of both which is Brahma; the latter is described as the Infinite that encompasses the finite. The Brahmin priest is apparently representative of this ‘infinite source’. But the texts do not unequivocally confirm the priority of the Brahmin priest nor do they identify him solely with the contemplative life over the passion-ridden active life or the masculine over the feminine. The Brhadaaranyaka Upanisad is quite ambiguous and mentions in the same passage that there is nothing superior to the ruling power and also that the priestly power is the womb of the ruling power and ought not to be harmed. Secondly, the priest is not presented as a benevolent philosopher guide. The ‘purohita is originally Agni Vaisvanara of the five wraths, and if he not be pacified and endeared, he repels the sacrificer from the world of heaven It has been noted that the priests did not just perform priestly functions but also warrior-like functions as charioteers and generals. Aitareya Brahmana, which he cites often, also presents the priest who, as a ritual expert is, ‘a receiver of gifts, a drinker of soma, a seeker of food and liable to removal at will.’ The king is provider of food for the Brahmin. Far from being independent, the priest was dependent on royal power and needed the protection of the latter. In the rajasuya, the royal consecration ceremony, the Brahmin pays homage to the Kshatriya from a lower position. Also, every sacrifice involved a fee and lavish bestowal of gifts. Coomaraswamy interprets this exchange from the standpoint of the priest; he claims that this patronage is only ‘proper’ to the king because he follows the path of action, a path that implies virtues such as generosity. Thus, royal bestowal of gifts should not be seen as one of gratitude for advantages or a fee for services. For that would compromise the superiority of the Brahmin. Rather, by receiving gifts, the Brahmin gives the king an opportunity
In Heidegger’s Hut
Amlan Dasgupta In 1966 or 1967 (the year is variously reported) the poet Paul Celan journeyed to a place called Todtnauberg , in the Black Mountains in Germany. He was visiting the mountain cabin, or as it is famously known, the hutte or hut, of the philosopher Martin Heidegger. Little is known of what transpired between the two that day. Heidegger had – albeit idiosyncratically – supported the Nazi regime, and had abandoned his major work on the Pre-Socratics to take up the rectorship of Freiberg in 1933. During the denazification years, he had increasingly withdrawn to his mountain retreat. Celan, survivor of the Nazi labour camp, was an unlikely guest, but there is no doubt that the two were drawn to each other intellectually, Heidegger to the poetry, Celan to the philosophy of language, which he commented favourably on several times and incorporated into his poetry. On this enigmatic occasion, Celan signed his name in the visitor’s book, and apparently went on a walk with his host. There are many reconstructions of this day’s events, some based on the poet’s later comments on the experience. More to the point is the poem that emanated from the encounter: one of Celan’s richest and most puzzling poems, one that teases the imagination and challenges hermeneutic skill. Todtnauberg Arnica, eyebright, the draft from the well with the star-die on top, in the Hütte, written in the book – whose name did it record before mine – ? in this book the line about a hope, today, for a thinker’s word to come, in the heart, forest sward, unleveled, orchis and orchis, singly, crudeness, later, while driving, clearly, he who drives us, the man, he who also hears it, the half- trod log- trails on the highmoor, humidity, much. Did then Celan first refresh himself with water from the well, washing the dust from his eyes, the water itself like the old remedies for failing eyesight, arnica and eyebright? But was he also struck by the star engraved on wood (star-die) on the top of the well: the star that must have reminded him of the yellow star worn by Jews in Nazi Germany. Heidegger is said to have commented on Celan’s knowledge of botany, and perhaps the two conversed on the flora of the mountain. Celan speaks of “a hope, today for a thinker’s word”; that word never came, the begegnung, encounter, remaining unproductive. The word encounter was favoured both by the poet and the philosopher, and Celan was later hurt at Adorno’s judgement that the word had been impossibly corrupted by its use by the Nazis. The two seemed to have walked casually and separately, (“orchis and orchis/singly”), the walk itself being interrupted and half finished. The thinker’s word does not come: Celan may have hoped for some formal word of apology or expression of grief from the philosopher, heute, today, on that day itself: a word bearing burning force in the poem. The moment of encounter – or failed encounter – remains uneasily in the relationship. For a relationship it was: Celan, retaining his interest in Heidegger’s thought, and the latter continuing to value the poet’s work openly. In a letter of 1971 to his friend Klaus Demus the old philosopher wrote warmly about a gift of an original manuscript poem by Celan that he had received. Demus had written that Celan had remembered Heidegger in one of their last encounters (Begegnungen). This had emboldened Demus to send him the poem. Heidegger responded with generosity and enthusiasm: When I opened your letter of Easter Sunday, my glance fell first on the sheet with the familiar handwriting of the “untranslatable” poem by Paul Celan that I know by memory, or more elegantly, par coeur. I don’t know how to thank you both for this valuable gift. After my death, it and your latter, as part of my posthumous manuscript papers, will go to the German Literary Archives in Marbach am Neckar. But even a detailed enquiry into the circumstances of the relationship between Heidegger and Celan, does not further clarify the event on Todtnauberg, the grimly and suggestively named location – Todt is death in German. What happened in the hut, and on the mountain, it remains in some sense unrepresentable, beyond representation. So much of Celan’s poetry grapples with the unrepresentable, and this is certainly a place where his engagement with Heidegger becomes particularly important. Two major valuations of Celan have come from two writers themselves deeply marked by Heidegger’s thought, Jacques Derrida and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe. I will not detain you with summaries of these richly suggestive readings, beyond drawing attention to a place in the essay “ Shibboleth for Paul Celan” in which Derrida meditates on the word shibboleth, the word of life and death in the OT with which the inhabitants of Gilead tested the Ephraimites: Gilead then cut Ephraim off from the fords of the Jordan, and whenever Ephraimite fugitives said, ‘Let me cross,’ the men of Gilead would ask, ‘Are you an Ephraimite?’ If he said, ‘No,’ they then said, ‘Very well, say “Shibboleth”.’ If anyone said, “Sibboleth”, because he could not pronounce it, then they would seize him and kill him by the fords of the Jordan. Forty-two thousand Ephraimites fell on this occasion. (Judges, 12) Derrida speculates on how the word (if it is one) names in the broadest sense the most insignificant and arbitrary mark – like the phonemic difference between Shi and Si – that becomes discriminative, decisive and divisive. For Derrida the difference, meaningless in itself becomes that essential property that one needs to inhabit a place – a hut, a mountain, a poem, a place of death – to be within, to be enclosed by the border, to have the right of asylum, the legitimacy of habitation. It is not enough to