Post-modernity, paganism, and Islam 8176620378, 9788176620376

Table of contents :
Preface
Contents
1. Introduction: The Elusive Middle
2. The Age of Unreason
3. The Call of Animal
4. The Death of Man
5. In the Beginning was the 'Word'
6. The Greekjew
Bibliography (With Abbreviations)

Citation preview

POST-MODERNITY, PAGANISM AND ISLAM

Jalalul Haq

MINERVA PRESS

NEW DELHI MIAMI LONDON SYDNEY

POST-MODERNITY, PAGANISM AND ISLAM Copyright © Jalalul Haq

All Rights Reserved No pan of this book may be reproduced in any form by photocopying or by any electronic or mechanical means. including information storage or retrieval systems, without permission in writing from both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.

ISBN 81 7662 037 8

First Published 1999 by MINERVA PRESS A1/304 Safdarjung Enclave New Delhi 110 029

Printed & bound in India by BWP&P Ltd., New Delhi

POST-MODERNITY, PAGANISM AND ISLAM

No one knows who will live in this cage in future, or whether at the end of this tremendous development entirely new prophets will arise, or there will be a great rebirth of old ideas and ideals, or, if neither, mechanised petrification, embellished with a sort of convulsive self-importance. For of the last stage of this cultural development, it might well truly be said: specialist without spirit, sensualist without heart; this nullity imagines that it has attained a level of civilization never before achieved. Max Weber The Protestant Ethic, p. 182

To characterise the present, I would say that it is a post-orgy state of affairs. The orgy could be viewed as the epitome of the whole explosive movement of modernity, the movement of liberation in all domains: political liberation, sexual liberation, liberation of productive forces, liberation of destructive forces, liberation of women, liberation of the child, liberation of the unconscious desires, the liberation of art. It is the assumption of all the models of representation, of all the models of anti­ representation. The orgy was total. It was an orgy of the real, of the rational, of the sexual, of the critical, of the anti-critical, of growth and of growth crisis. We explored all the paths of production and of virtual overproduction of objects, signs, messages, ideologies and pleasures. Today, if you want my opinion, everything has been liberated. "Les jeux sont faits" (the die is cast), and we find each other together in front of this collective crucial question: What are we going to do after the orgy? Jean Baudrillard The Disappearance ofArt and Politics, p. 22

Preface Post-modernism is the new religion of the West. As a philosophical articulation of contemporary cultural experience, it is in the process of fast becoming the dominant ethos of our time - in fact, the spirit of our age. From being initially, in its more academic aspects, a new and radicalised way of critiquing literary and philosophical texts, it has come to be seen to represent a whole new perspective on man’s life and the world, and is even considered as a decisive rupture in the cultural history of West. It is the heir, moreover, to the ideology of romanticism, which had its life and times alongside Europe’s so-called ‘Age of Reason’. As such, it marks the coming into prominence of an idea which was Europe’s suppressed Other, but which, as the post-modernist philosophers insist, was also her very own self. It is important to realise that post-modernism is not anti­ modem ism. As we all know, the creed of Occidental modernity defined itself in terms of its rationalism and its auxiliary doctrines of humanism and positivism - this last term taken in its broad sense, which included in its ambit, the ideas of scienticism, economism, political ism and the socalled idea of progress in general. Now, in the great reversal that post-modernity accomplishes, these conceptualities are not rejected, not even claimed to be replaced with their counter-conceptualities, but simply subjected to an act of shaking, destabilising them and depriving them of their force. Post-modernism is not rationalism, but neither is it anti­ rationalism; nor, for that matter, anti-positivism or anti­ humanism. v

Post-modernism does not affirm, does not deny a position. It only transcends it. Its imperative is to transcend and transgress the boundaries within which a certain idea is confined in order to provide it peace and security. The idea is retained but at the same time neutralised, i.e. reduced to a position of being substanceless and empty; a void or a trace. Now, as one can observe, this kind of negative reduction and transcendence had been a popular practice with the mystics and mystically oriented philosophers of former times. They too generally expressed their belief in a God, a world and a soul, and a rationality and a morality, but also claimed to exceed these realities in their experience of ecstasy and rapture. Post-modernism in this sense is a reiteration of the old mystical doctrine of transcendence and negativity. And it is in this sense also that it circumvents (‘posts’) the modem positivity. Now, a doctrine of negative transcendence such as may be found in the older cults of mysticism or in present-day post­ modernism, always situates itself in that border area where both philosophy and religion can claim it. But though in philosophy it has enjoyed the support of history right from its Pythagorean-Platonic beginnings, in religion it has had the difficult experience of being placed between the two stools of ‘pagan’ and ‘prophetic’. For while accepted at a certain level by the practitioners of prophetic monotheism, it was often viewed with great suspicion by the more orthodox of them for having a pagan origin and a pagan constitution. Our own text, accordingly, while dealing with the views of post­ modernist thinkers, keeps paganism and, though less visibly, ‘prophetism’ as its subtexts. But while paganism is taken here as a highly philosophical and cultural idea, prophetism too is taken in the broader sense of its being a common Abrahamic legacy, of which the Arabian prophet claimed to be a late (and last) inheritor.

Philosophically conceived, the prophetic consciousness is the critical consciousness, in which our normal discriminative experiences of truth and falsehood, good and evil and pleasurable and unpleasurable are accorded absolute validity. In the pagan-mystic consciousness, on the other hand, these experiences are sought to be exceeded while their theoretical and practical necessity is still recognised. It is thus that in the latter scheme the gods (and goddesses) emerge as figures of supra-rational, supra-moral and supra-affective beings who in turn seek to displace the God as personifying the ultimate values of truth, good and beauty. The essence of a pagan world view thus lies in this idea of ‘excess’, whereas the prophetic credo stands fora ‘middle’, which is the middle of normality, sanity and criticality. Post-modernism too, as being self-avowedly a philosophy of excess, espouses the cause of hypercriticality, which, however, makes it end up in absolute uncriticality. For as hypercritical, the criticality becomes critical of itself, thereby losing its force. The loss of criticality or rationality is, however, also the loss of morality and of affectivity. It is the loss of man himself. Death of man follows the death of God. Post-modernism as a doctrine of what is supra-rational and supra-ethical, in a way, re-works the ideals of old GrecoRoman mysticism, and has accordingly its ‘saints’ as well as its clerics and lay adherents. In fact, as a doctrine fast gaining currency, it already has a ‘vulgate’ in circulation through the media and through august publishing houses. This of course exposes the ‘doctrine’ to the danger of the kind of vulgarisation and corruption that the mystics have always feared, and which made them such great esotericists. There is indeed an imminent possibility of a part of the significance of the idea being lost in its great public exposure. For although it is being taken as the fad of the time, the idea itself is of lasting importance, representing certain quintessential

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cravings of human nature, and being for that reason a perennial concern of man. It may be clarified that our work is not a ‘refutation’ of the views of the post-modern thinkers, nor even a critical study of them; though the reader might find in the text quite a few critical interventions. Our aim all along has been to study the idea by placing it in its philosophico-cultural context, and through it learn about the philosophical economy of our present history. Our world is presently in the throes of a feminist revolt, in which a mother goddess struggles to replace the father God, Jehovah, or Reason. It should be realised that it is this transition from a paternalistic to a maternalistic view of the world that lies at the back of the rising tendencies of irrationalism, political conservatism, ecologism, homosexualism etc., which are so supremely self­ confident and so determined to change the face of the earth. Post-modernism itself, though somewhat wary of their selfassurance and dogmatism, is however in sympathy with these tendencies, in so far as they epitomise the malaise of the present culture of civility and science and also help destabilise it. An era of history is certainly coming to a close, and standing as we are on the threshold of a (not so brave) new age, we may still try to make an attempt to intimate to ourselves what the future keeps in reserve. Post-modem ism, which philosophically reflects over this present-melting-intofuture, has quite a few lessons to teach us in this regard.

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Contents Preface

v

1. Introduction; The Elusive Middle

11

2. The Age of Unreason

57

3. The Call of Animal

139

4. The Death of Man

230

5. In the Beginning was the ‘Word’

317

6. The Greekjew

403

Bibliography (With Abbreviations)

487

Introduction

The Elusive Middle ...Maybe the target nowadays is not to discover what we are, but to refuse what we are. We have to imagine and to build up what we could be to get rid of this kind of “double bind”, which is the simultaneous individualization and totalization of modem power structures. The conclusion would be that the political, ethical, social, philosophical problem of our days is not to try to liberate the individual from the state, and from the state’s institutions, but to liberate us both from the state and from the type of individualization which is linked to the state. We have to promote new forms of subjectivity through the refusal of this kind of individuality, which has been imposed on us for several centuries.

Michel Foucault

The title of our present essay could as well have been “The Post-modern Refusal” or even, “The Post-modern Revolution”. For what this new philosophy, or as we shall realise later, this new religion of the West preaches, is a radical displacement of the existing modes of thinking; in fact, a radical transformation of our existing ways of being.

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Its message is to bring about what can be said to be nothing short of a total revolution. But then to talk of a revolution is very much a part of how we at present think, a part of what we at the present moment of our being are. It will therefore be a sort of self-contradiction to talk of revolution and yet to express our disengagement with our present, our today. Post­ modernism, then, as a philosophy of Great Refusal of the present, must shun any great talk of revolution, which is so much a characteristic of the present, and which even, in a way, defines the thinking of the present. The modem self, for sure, was a revolutionary self. It had its birth in the great French Revolution, the preparation for which was made by the philosophes of the eighteenth century; and it has had since then many duplications and imitations in other places, including the ones in the twentieth century under the name of Marxism. Marxism, contrary to the popular perception, was not an inversion but a retention of modernity, as what it had achieved through all its convulsions was to reiterate and reinforce the talk of revolution. Marxism was, moreover, an ideology of liberation and being as such it was again nothing but a repetition of the idea] which was espoused by the revolutionaries of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The common aim of all modem revolutions was to effect the liberation of self, and to constitute a liberated or liberal self. The common path to achieve this aim was the path of knowledge, of enlightenment, of ideology, of science. The modem self was constituted not on the basis of doubt or scepticism but on faith — a faith in a subjectivity, its enlightenment and its liberation. It was a religious self and also a political self. For the ideal of liberty or liberation of the subject was to be attained through subjection to state and its institutions. There was a ‘double bind’ of simultaneous individualisation and totalisation of power structures, a paradox of individualisation through totalisation. It was this paradox

13

which had to be circumvented, to be overcome by doing away with the whole discourse of revolution and liberation. There was a need for being liberated from liberation and revolutionising the idea of revolution. Therein consisted the great post-modern refusal and the formation of a new subjectivity as based on this refusal. Michel Foucault, the philosopher par excellence of post­ modernism and one of the two main protagonists of our present narrative, wrote the lines quoted above (Sp, 216) when he was approaching the end of his philosophical career and was looking back at the great labour of his life. (He died in 1984.) But in writing those lines he was not only concluding what was a long and sustained reflection on the conditions of his life and times but also following in the footsteps of the great German philosopher, Kant who, almost exactly two hundred years ago, has similarly reflected over the conditions of his time. Kant has asked the question, “What is Enlightenment?” and has found its essence to lie in the maturation of human reason. But Foucault, and along with him Derrida, the other main philosopher of post­ modernism, who both ask the same question, discover its reality in the great illusion that reason has suffered about itself. For Kant, human reason in the history of the Occident, after having a turbulent life, had found in Enlightenment its moment of peace and perfection. But for our philosophers, this peace was deceptive and the sense of perfection utterly false. Now, ironically and amusingly, in order to arrive at this anti-Kantian conclusion, these philosophers had to simply follow and not cross the path of Kant. For, as any student of history of philosophy knows, it was Kant who, while being a great apologist of reason, was also the one who wrote the most comprehensive critique of it. The new philosophers approve the Kantian critique of reason and make it a basis of their own comprehensive critique (i.e. their refusal) of Occidental modernity.

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Kant, as being both a believer and a critic of rationalism, epitomised the great paradox that constituted the Occidental modernity. For it was not simply a case of a philosopher individually committing a self-contradiction by admitting in his system two antithetical positions. It was, far more significantly, a case of reason as though by itself admitting a contradiction in its own being. There was certainly a selfcontradiction in Kant but was there also a self-contradiction in the post-modem philosophers, who were, as just seen, both Kantian and anti-Kantian. Habermas (himself, like Kant, a self-professed rationalist and a critic of reason) in his obituary essay on Foucault so justifiably described him to have made ‘the most lasting effect’ on the Zeitgeist or the spirit of the times. (CP, 154) But he was also a little unfair in speaking in a very condescending manner of ‘productive contradiction’ (or, ‘instructive contradiction’) on the part of the philosopher for the reason stated above. For if Foucault and Derrida were Kantians it was because Kant was a critic of reason; and if they were anti-Kantians it was because he still had his faith in reason intact in spite of his own criticism of it. This however doesn’t mean there was no contradiction in the philosophy or the philosophers of post-modernism. For, while writing their own critique of reason, they at each and every step were aware that any critique of reason would be in terms of reason itself - the critique itself, in fact, being the other name of reason. But this strange situation of a reason both critiquing and by that very same gesture saving itself creates a larger problem which we will have to encounter frequently in our discussion of the subject, and may fairly be left at this stage as it is. However, the problem that we must presently touch upon, albeit briefly, is the obverse situation of reason finding itself perpetually endangered in the very act' of its self-assertion. For, as was mentioned a moment ago, it was as if human reason, which was believed by the Occident

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to be beset by an inner split, had an internal paradox, so that it always faced itself as its own enemy. When the post­ modernists took up the cause of unreason against reason they made it clear that their work was not to take side of the former, considering it to be an enemy of the latter. No, reason had its opposite - unreason - within itself; and all that they had to do was to bring the latter from its place of hiding and awaken it from its slumber. The disintegration of reason was made possible by setting in motion unreason as the other side of reason, which was nevertheless also its same. The question that they posed was, why does reason always, ineluctably, relapse into unreason? Why is the age of reason also the age of unreason? But before we come to this, we need to note it in passing that there was a close association of this question with what was stated above to be the double bind of individualisation and totalisation in structures of power. There was for sure a politics of rationality; for man, the rational animal, was also man, the political animal. It was Aristotle who said that the state was the ‘whole’ which defined and determined the nature of an individual as its part. It followed then that man could realise his essentia! rationality and freedom only by submitting to the state, outside of which he would not even be a man (he would either be a god or a beast). Now, by and large, this was the theory which was upheld by thinkers and philosophers all through medieval and modem times; until one fine morning the thinkers of the Critical Theory school found the state to be oppressive and the principal condition of man’s unfreedom. They discovered further that the ultimate responsibility of this oppression by the state lay with the totalising tendencies of reason. Reason, as being the all­ knowing, all-present and all-determining reality, left little room for individual initiative. The state, being based on reason, was the law, the morality, the norm, the normality, , the collectivity and commonality. Since all men were rational

16 animals, it followed that all were same at least primarily and fundamentally, the differences among them being of a secondary and contingent nature. It is this espousal of the cause of the same by reason, and its consequent denial of creativity and freedom and also of race and rank, that is what made the new philosophers to be so critical of it. The Critical Theorists of the Frankfurt school were in a way the forerunners of the post-modem critique of reason, without however being historically its inspiration. The inspiration did not come from Nietzsche either, although it was he to whom nearly all of the distinctive ideas of post­ modernism went back. It is indeed quite interesting to know that neither of our two philosophers started with Nietzsche, though both of them reached him as if by some inexorable movement of their thought. The connecting link between them and Nietzsche was of course Martin Heidegger, who inherited the mantle of latter and even claimed to further radicalise his ideas. But, as it happened, he was also seen by his own post-modem disciples to have diluted and de­ radicalised the legacy of the master. The situation then, as it unfolded in their case, was to reach Nietzsche via Heidegger. Thus Foucault wrote in a manner of personal confession: ‘My whole philosophical development was determined by my reading of Heidegger. But I recognize that Nietzsche prevailed over him.’ (FL, 470) Expressing nearly identical sentiments, Derrida too would write: ‘Heidegger’s text is extremely important to me, and that it constitutes a novel, irreversible advance - all of whose critical resources we are far from having exploited.’ (Po, 54) But after saying that, he would also talk of his departure from him and pursuing a line that will be ‘more Nietzschean than Heideggerian’. (ibid., 10) Without however going any further into the question of genealogies, we can move straight into a discussion of the question of reason’s self-loss or its relapse into unreason. This question, as we mentioned before, was raised by the

17 post-modernists themselves; but instead of finding a clear answer to it, what happened in their case is that they got entangled in their own contradiction of being unable to do away with the reason which they still liked to challenge in the name of unreason. Clearly, there was a connection between the modernists* dilemma of defending a reason which they themselves find to be indefensible, and the post­ modernists* difficulty in challenging a reason which at the end they find to be unchallengeable. It would seem that the reason that the modernists were defending had some congenital defect, some deficiency which made its relapse into unreason inevitable. But the contrary possibility also suggests that there was something so essentially stable in it as to make its return necessary, despite its own movement towards self-disintegration. It should also be clear that the deficiency of reason can be explained only in terms of some excess of it, because only an excess can generate the deficiency and vice versa, as Aristotle would say. Put simply, if one admits some deficiency, some deficit of reason, one must also admit an excess of it. But before we come to determine the excess and deficit of reason, it is necessary to remind that these two notions are parasitic on a third notion which is the idea of ‘middle’. Both the excess and the deficiency of anything realise themselves with reference and with respect to what is a middle of them. Our whole problem then boils down to the question of this middle, of which an excess is excess and the deficiency the deficiency. Now, as it happens, the question of middle has not been a great problem in the tradition of academic philosophy, though a concern with it has not entirely been wanting in the philosophers and seers who had a more direct interest in the practical concerns of life and the world. Among the Indians, for example, the followers of Buddha are very proud of their teacher for having given them a ‘middle path’ (Madhyama

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Marga); and among the modem Hindu writers and thinkers there is no dearth of those who regard one or the other school of their ancient tradition to represent an ‘integral outlook’ on the life and the world. Christian scholars have of course been long known to claim to possess, in the divine' incarnation of Jesus Christ, a principle of integration of earthly and heavenly, of spirit and flesh. Muhammad, the prophet of Islam, similarly called the community of his followers as the ‘people of Middle’ (Ummat-i Wast). In this he was speaking not only on his own behalf, but in the name of all prophets who have gone before, particularly those of Israel, whose legacy he claimed to inherit. In the history of the Occident, on the other hand, the exhortation to avoid excess goes as far back as Hesiod, who wrote the stories of human beings and remained earthbound as against the poet Homer, whose imagination always made him fly up to the heavens, to live with gods and goddesses and tell the tales of their treacheries, transgressions and excesses. Latterly, when Socrates, Plato and Aristotle extolled the virtue of living a moderate or temperate life, (Meden agan), they were approaching in their own respective ways the same question of middle. For at least in the case of Plato it can fairly be said that ‘temperance’ was not for him a virtue among various other virtues, a simple act of piety; it was rather a comprehensive rule of life, a quest for an integral philosophy of life in general. The great question of course arises here whether any of the saints, sages or philosophers or prophets mentioned above were able to come to the grips of the Middle Path of Life that they were so earnestly searching for. We, however, only raise the question without attempting to reach a definitive answer of it. In fact, to avoid prejudgement, we may even have to leave the question to find its answer by itself. What however we must needs do is to attempt to determine broadly the parameters of this idea of possible

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middle, to capture, if possible, the essence of it, or to determine at least whether it has an essence, and is approachable, accessible. And we must do it here only with reference to the tradition of Occident, ignoring by and large the Oriental tradition which is outside the scope of our present endeavour. At issue here, as we must remind ourselves, is the reconciliation of what in older terminology was called the earthly and heavenly, the spiritual and material, or this-worldly and other-worldly. But since this sort of terminology is already loaded, we can discuss it in terms of what broadly we say as ‘ascetic’ and ‘indulgent’ perspectives on life. These we will find to be mostly at loggerheads, but they too struggle to eventually find a unity and integration. The dialectic of these two excessive-looking perspectives, in fact, generates in its wake many more oppositions, like that of transcendence and immanence, of pity and power (the famous ‘yogi and the commissarʼʻ), of hyper-sexuality and castration, of hypercriticality and irrationality and so on. The point to note here is that all these oppositions as representations of extremes inevitably find a point to meet, despite their being polar - or what nowadays is popularly called binary - oppositions. Extremes in fact meet not despite but precisely because they are extremes, i.e. because they are the excesses, and hence also the deficiencies, of each other. Let it not appear to anyone that by committing to a discourse of asceticism and its opposite, we are communicating with a reality which is archaic and which apparently has no relevance to our present-day living. For although asceticism is undoubtedly an ancient practice, it has also come to be something which is most modem - post­ modern, in fact. The truth of this statement will of course unfold as we proceed in the discussion of our subject, but it can be intimated even at this stage that post-modernism as indicative of a certain style of life is ascetic in its most

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comprehensive literal, historical and philosophical sense. Its main inspiration is Greek and its ideal the ascetic sectarians of the Stoic and Epicurean schools. It believes in an ultratranscendentalist metaphysical doctrine, denounces the state, preaches the renunciation of knowledge and art and science, and approves the virtue of asexuality and of withdrawal from the ordinary pleasures of life. It is in fact in these respects that it separates itself from and overcomes the ‘positivistic’ culture of modernity. But if, on the other hand, it also believes in a kind of immanentism, is power-centric and exults in the proliferation of knowledge and art and science and a general indulgence in sexuality and other physical pleasures induced by drugs, music etc., that does not make it any the less ascetic. For asceticism, being an excess of withdrawal, is also the other excess of extreme intellectual, political and sexual indulgence. If we take only one example of the school of Pythagorean asceticism (which is in a way the source of nearly all the subsequent mysticism of Greek, Roman, Christian, Jewish and Islamic traditions through Plato and the neo-Platonists) we find both the syndromes of withdrawal and indulgence to be present in it in equal measure. The Pythagoreans were great ascetics but also the inventors of mathematics; and while being apolitical, they also often indulged in terrorist activities against the existing rulers of their time. The spiritual anatomy of Plato’s ideal man was itself inspired by this Pythagorean asceticism and consisted of a general other-worldliness combined with excessive political and sexual indulgence. Now post-modernism, if one goes by the appearances, is a revolt against the so-called Platonic-Socratic rationalism, moralism and politicalism. Nietzsche, the real precursor of this new philosophy, maintained in his writings a constant diatribe against these two great figures of antiquity, holding them responsible for all the ills that befell the West in the subsequent centuries of its history. Plato’s was a life of

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knowledge, the vita contemplative, while for himself he chose the opposite ideal of the life of action or the vita activa. Socrates and Plato, moreover, were the worshippers of Apollo, whose motto was ‘Nothing in Excess’ and ‘Know Thyself - both asking man to live a temperate life and avoid extremism. This was seemingly in complete opposition to the ideal of extremism preached and practised by the other, rival god, Dionysos, whose follower Nietzsche claimed himself to be. Nietzsche imagined the Apollonian-Dionysian dichotomy, claiming the two gods to represent two antagonistic life philosophies, i.e. of reflection and aesthetic creativity respectively. The post-modernists, as self­ confessed Nietzscheans, are predictably the partisans of the Dionysian aestheticism as against the ApoIIonian-Platonic cult of rationalism and moderate living. Their point of departure from the tradition lies in their embracing the idea of excess. Nietzsche often described himself as a philosopher of excess and so do our post-modernist philosophers. Excess and transgression are the central motifs of their discourse to which they adhere unflinchingly and consistently. For one thing, they emphasise that theirs is not the attitude of rejection either of rationality or morality, these being in fact indispensable for a normal and sane way of living. But after accepting the general need for these, there comes the other imperative of going beyond them, of exceeding them and of transcending and transgressing them. Knowledge and morality should not be rejected but transcended; the rules should be retained but also transgressed; normality and sanity should be preserved but also breached. In short, this is to say that the humanity of man should be maintained but also exceeded, transformed into a ‘superhumanity’ which may be just the other face of subhumanity. The movement of transcendence, the moment of excess is the change from social to individual mode of existence; and this is also, as

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said before, the change from a rational to aesthetic style of living. The transcendence of humanity opens up the double possibility of being superhuman and subhuman at the same time, of being god and animal in the same moment. What a saint attempted through his ascetic exercises, through his transgressions of social norms and rules and through his resultant ecstatic raptures, was a mode of being which was above the level of humanity and which ultimately led to his being ranked as equal of the gods, to be a god as such. It is necessary to realise that the gods, as believed in by ‘pagans’ were either the hypostases (i.e. excesses) of the different forces of human nature like knowledge, power, sex or wealth; or, and this comes to mean the same thing, the deficiencies of the complete human nature. Even the God of the prophets becomes conceivable only through this idea of hypostasis, though in this case it is not the deficiency (or the excess) but the ‘completeness’ of the human nature that is hypostasised. Both the God and the gods had in this sense human associations, with the critical difference however that the former, being the ‘whole’, preceded man (i.e. was his creator too) while also being his contemporary. The latter, on the other hand, being only partial and embodying deficiencies or excesses, were only to come later, purely as products of the human imagination. The reality of God was in the perfection of human nature, while the reality of gods was in the excess and deficit of it. Now our post-modernist philosophers, in self-avowedly following this logic of excess and deficit, can be described without prejudice to their sensibilities as being the philosophers of paganism (or neo-paganism) and their logic also can be called pagan logic. For what makes them pagans par excellence is not some overstretched meaning of the word paganism, but a more direct indulgence in ‘god-talk’, along with all that such talk entails or presumes. As already seen,

23 Nietzsche, who was a post-modernist before even post­ modernism properly came into existence, was also an ardent follower of the orgiastic god, Dionysos; and Heidegger, Nietzsche’s disciple and the master of post-modernists, always lamented the flight of the gods and waited for the arrival of a god to save civilisation from its current fallen state and its imminent destruction. Both Nietzsche and Heidegger were, moreover, committed Hellenists, and regarded the time of pre-Socratic Greek (pagan) civilisation as the golden period of history. Socrates and Plato were accordingly denounced for corrupting and calling into question this pagan-poetic legacy, and substituting a culture of art with a culture of knowledge. Plato condemned Homer, the poet, the singer of popular ballads and the narrator of the stories of the immoralities of gods and goddesses. Nietzsche saw in those same immoralities, in those same transgressions, the true glory of the gods, and saw too a hope for the reaffirmation of the life of man and of life in general. Foucault and Derrida, unlike their masters, are not committed Hellenists; though their discourse refers to the Greeks more than to anyone else and generally breathes a pagan air. There is no return to the Greeks, nor a valorisation of their culture, but yet an association, a filiation and a sharing of spirit. Not altogether absent is an invocation to the gods, a Heideggerian lament for their flight and disappearance, and a hope or expectation of their return. Foucault, for once, reminds us of Nietzsche, who he says killed both God and man at the same time and thereby ‘promised with the Return the multiple and re-illumined light of the gods?ʼ (OT, 306) He further relates the same Nietzschean motif of the death of God and his own consequent annunciation of the death of man with the return of the gods:

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...Then, the task enjoined upon thought by that annunciation was to establish for man a stable sojourn upon the earth from which the gods had turned away or vanished. In our own day, and once again Nietzsche indicated the turning point from a long way off, it is not so much the absence or the death of God that is affirmed as the end of man... Thus, the last man is at the same time older and yet younger than the death of God; since he has killed God, it is he himself who must answer for his own finitude; but since it is in the death of God that he speaks, thinks and exists, his murder itself is doomed to die; new gods, the same gods, are already swelling the future Ocean... (ibid., 385)

It was most appropriate on the part of Foucault to have linked the death of God and man to the possibility of the return of the gods. For it is in the space vacated by the disappearance of man and God that the gods get their chance to appear and find a dwelling place. Now, as seen before, the death of man happens through his ascetic-yogic transformation into a superhuman (subhuman) being; and the death of God too happens through his transcendence, i.e. by making him into an ultra-transcendental being or non-being. God’s presence is not denied but transcended to an extent where he no longer remains a presence. The idea of presence in this scheme becomes an anathema, a blasphemy, a symbol of pagan idolatry. There is then an ostensible rejection of prophetism, it being characterised as the philosophy of site and presence, a kind of physiolatry, and treated accordingly as paganism. The ‘siteʼ was pagan and the ‘non-site’ non-pagan. The non­ site was transcendence, ultra-transcendence in fact, because the God was already a transcendence; a non-site in a sense, even a non-presence for that matter. But though a non-site and a transcendence, this God of the prophets was not yet a

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nullity, which is what the die-hard mystics of earlier and our own post-modem times would like him to be. In this latter thinking God must be reduced to a ‘trace’ to make him survive. But then there are some who will find this trace too to be physiolatrous and hence pagan-religious. See for example what Lyotard says, ostensibly referring to the Derridean notion of trace and non-origin:

...no, we do not subordinate our anti-religious, that is to say, our anti-capitalist, politics to knowing what the origin of meaning, that is to say, what surplus value really is, not even to know that there really is no origin and that it does not lack this or that, but is lacking as origin; we want and do a dismembered and unaccounted politics, godless for politicians... (LE, 6) Lyotard would treat all god-talk, even that of the Heideggerian-Derridean variety, as ‘Christian-pagan’ in so far as a trace, a critique, a religion still survives in it. For him the critique of religion is still a religion - a religion of critique (‘that critique is still religionʼ,as he puts it). Nothing short of an ‘atheism - the ‘atheism of the libidinal band’ would satisfy him, and it would also incidentally be secular and pagan. ‘We desire the atheism of the libidinal band, and if it cannot be critical, that is to say religious, then it must be pagan,’ says he. Great post-modernist that he himself is, he is entirely in favour of that ‘religion of Low Empire which Augustine detested and ridiculed’, i.e. the religion where ‘for the least hiccup, the least scandal, a copulation without issue, a birthing, a pee, a military decision, there was a god, a goddess, several gods and goddesses attending the act.’ (ibid.) One can notice here the irony and the paradox. As a great transcendentalist, Lyotard would not spare even Heidegger

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and Derrida for having a residue of site and presence, for being not transcendentalist enough and for being JudaeoChristian, Christian-pagan, or simply pagan. But then he himself is none other than a pagan who would subscribe to the ‘popular religion... of late Rome’ rather than a philosophy of non-origin and critique. He is anti-pagan because he believes any philosophy to be pagan which brooks the least quarter for site, presence or criticality. But he is nonetheless a pagan for exactly the opposite reason of its being a philosophy of non-site and non-criticality. Paganism in that way is both ‘site-ism’ as well as ‘anti-site-ism’, in fact, it’s extreme forms of both. This is incidentally also borne out by history, where the extreme transcendentalism of the philosopher-mystics has coexisted with the other extreme of physiolatry and immanentism. After all, it were the monists and transcendentalists like Plato and Plotinus who were also great believers in gods and goddesses, the so-called ‘nature’ deities. One reduces God to a nullity in the name of transcendence of site and presence, but finds oneself under the shadow of gods and goddesses, the representatives of same site and presence. The post-modernists, in fact, had a special difficulty with regard to Plato: whether to consider him a foe or a fellowtraveller, as it was the Platonic Idea as developed by Plotinus into an Absolute that was a perfect mirror image of Derridean ‘trace’ or what Lyotard calls a Zero. And we shall shortly see that Plato, inasmuch as he was the complete other of post­ modernist self, was also the very same of it, i.e. its alter ego. That apart, the important point to notice here is that paganism, whether Platonic or post-modem, moves between the two extreme poles of excessive transcendentalism and excessive immanentism, which relate to each other as cause and effect of each other in being the excess and deficiency of each other. It may also further be seen that this movement of excess and deficiency is not only in respect to this particular

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question of transcendence and immanence, as it invades the whole of discourse, whether metaphysical, ethico-political or regarding culture at large. For here what is being exceeded is the whole being of man and of being (Being, God) itself and that means that all aspects of man-God-world reality are implicated in the act of excess. There is indeed, one could say, a logic of excess and deficiency which affects all the words spoken, all the positions taken and all the discoursing committed. This is the familiar logic of ‘neither-nor’, or of ‘not this, not that’, which is so greatly cherished by the philosopher-mystics. The transcendentalist is neither a spiritualist nor a materialist; the trace is neither spirit nor nature, neither presence nor absence, neither existence nor non-existence and so on. But, as it happens, this neither-nor soon gives way to both-and and, as the two terms of dialectic are excessive, it further degenerates into becoming a case of either-or. In being neither a spiritualist nor a naturalist, the philosopher becomes both; and then, since he is both excessively, he alternates between the twin options of being either a spiritualist or a naturalist. At this level, the logic itself gets caught into the syndrome of binary extremes. For, as said before, where there is excess there must also be a middle, a point of merger, a place of meeting of the extremes. In the logic of excess, therefore, there is also a law of ‘included middle’ which as an excess itself is the other pole of the previous law of ‘excluded middle’ as enunciated by Aristotle. The post-modernists, accordingly, adhere to this ‘new logic’, which is based on the recognition of difference and in which the contradiction is made to disappear. Since rationality is criticality and criticality involves contradiction, in the old logic the law of contradiction was supreme. An idea must be recognised as being an other and opposite of its counter-idea. But the post-modernist disrecognises this kind of opposition and explains the difference between two ideas in terms of difference itself. Two apparently opposite ideas or

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theories are not in fact opposite but simply different. Thus his is not the logic of opposition or contradiction but the logic of difference.

The freeing of difference requires thought without contradiction, without dialectics, without negation; thought that accepts divergence; affirmative thought whose instrument is disjunction; thought of multiple - of the nomadic and dispersed multiplicity that is not limited or confined by the constraints of similarity...

Thus said Foucault in his Archaeology of Knowledge. (152) The conventional historians of ideas by and large suppress contradictions but also sometime overexpose them while studying a certain field of discourse. Foucault’s archaeological approach, on the other hand, forced us to respect contradictions and to recognise them for what they are, i.e. as figures of divergences and multiplicities. The two theories of evolution (say, for example, those of Darwin and Lamarck) did not contradict each other but were two different descriptive texts in the same discursive field, neither of which was true or false. There was no question of conciliation between the two, either; nor was there any need to transfer one to the more fundamental level and relegate the other to a secondary position. The divergences have to be localised and relativised while the descriptions themselves are juxtaposed. What is for Foucault a complex logic is for Derrida a ‘plural logic’, i.e. a logic which refuses the unification while encouraging the plurification of discourse. And this plurification itself is effected through the purification of statements by disinvesting them of their so-called factual contents. In the logic of unification, a statement gets its identity by contrasting itself against what is its opposite, the

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opposition itself being based on the correspondence or non­ correspondence of each of them with a supposed objective reality. But if this objective reality is removed, the opposition is automatically dissolved and the statements are juxtaposed. It does not then remain the case of either A or not-A, or even something of A and something of not-A, i.e. neither A nor not-A exclusively. There does not remain, in other words, any necessity to stick to a law of an excluded middle (of a ‘third middleʼ, as Foucault calls it). To experience the discourse in its aporetic form, i.e. in a double bind of double (or multiple) possibility, and to deny any exclusivity to any statement of truth, is what Derrida’s deconstruction is all about. Deconstruction was a ‘double dutyʼ or ‘double responsibility’, so that those being seen and without being seen may bring forth the aporetic nature of all discourse. But this can be achieved only when all the pretensions of ‘grounding the discourse has been droppedʼ. In post-modem ism, then, ‘logic’ is undone by positing the law of difference against the law of identity, the law of non­ contradiction against the Jaw of contradiction and (what may be called) the law of an ‘included middle’ against the law of an excluded middle. But is logic really undone? Is there any possibility of its really being undone? Are not the two sets of ‘laws’ still posited against each other, thereby effectively maintaining the same logic which is claimed to be deconstructed? Do we stick to the gesture of opposing the oppositions (contradiction) in these two sets of opposites with an infinite possibility of regress? Derrida, or even Foucault for that matter, would be only too happy to indulge in this regress, to take a plunge into the abyss of regress. This is because they are the philosophers of regress and abyss and death. The post-modernist, in any case, is critical of traditional Aristotelian logic as it creates and sustains the myth of truth arid presence, instead of recognising the truth and presence of

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the myth. The systematic attack on logic started with Heidegger, for whom the philosophy had already had a ‘fall’ in becoming an enterprise of reason; and its misfortune was only aggravated when it was further transformed into an enterprise of logic. Logic, said he, rather contemptuously, ‘arose in the curriculum of the Platonic-Aristotelian schools’ and was ‘an invention of schoolteachers, not of philosophers’. Logic was against the spirit of philosophy because it did not provoke the questioning of being and was rather a source of agreement and banality. The early Greeks were philosophers, but in the sense of being poets rather than logicians. Logic could of course be retained as a form of ‘straight thinking’ but, finally, the fact remained that ‘Logic itself is in need of an explanation and foundation in regard to its origin and its claim to provide the authoritative interpretation of thinking.’ (IM, 121) Now, coming to post-modernists, although they too are enamoured of Greeks and pursued their path, which began and ended with Heidegger, it was still not in their case a Greek path that led them to the deconstruction of logic. Heidegger, as we just saw, spoke of logic being an invention of schoolteachers, and it is interesting to find Foucault at one place talking almost in a similar vein; although the context does not permit the inference that it was written in the wake of a prior awareness of Heidegger’s piece. It is an interesting passage and worth quoting here. It reads: ...Is it necessary to recall the unchanging pedagogical origin of dialectics? The ritual in which it is reactivated, which causes the endless rebirth of the aporia of being and non-being, is the humble classroom interrogation, the student’s fictive dialogue: ‘This is red; that is not red. At this moment it is light outside, No, now it is dark.’ In the twilight of an October sky, Minerva’s bird flies

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close to the ground: ‘Write it down, write it down,ʼ it croaks, ‘tomorrow morning, it will no longer be dark.ʼ (LCP, 185) The post-modernist’s anti-logical agenda is all set out here, and in an amusing way. The dialectic of pedagogic practice, the schoolteacher’s invention, must give way to a new logic a logic which is not the science of logos, not the science of the truth of a statement. The statement by disinvesting itself of its so-called factual and psychological encumbrances feels liberated and rises in its self-esteem as being a mere sentence - a series of words rather than signs. Instead of having a reality, instead of being dependent upon a consciousness in the background and a thing in the foreground, it becomes a reality in its own right. What makes a statement true or meaningful is not its correspondence to a fact but its syntactical construction. The words too get their meaning not by referring to conceptual identities but in virtue of being elements of a linguistic field. Logic must be reduced to language, whose law is not the law of identity but the law of difference. There is always, as Derrida said, between two words a spacing, which is both spacing of space, and spacing of time, both a differentiation and a deferance. The identity of a word-sign is a creation of its difference from other word­ signs, in itself, in its isolation, it being nothing, which in other words means it is nothing itself. A nothing in fact intervenes between two signs and it is only because of this intervention that the ‘thingness’ of the sign realises itself, but which again in final terms makes it nothing. Logic as language is therefore the site of nothingness; it is fantastics or a fantasiology, neither having a truth, nor meaning, nor being. The extremist denial of logic and its reduction into language was a path that led the post-modernist philosophers to deny all truth, all meaning, all reality and all rationality of

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life; it was the path of the destruction of life itself. There was then a problem for the votaries of life, i.e. for those who take life as the necessary complement of death. Should and could they restore logic in order to restore life; or should they resign themselves to the undoing of logic and thereby the undoing of life itself? Is there or isn’t there any chance of having yet another kind of logic, which is neither exclusively the logic of contradiction, nor exclusively of non­ contradiction, but has both of them in some measure? Apparently, if we accept the idea of the middle and its excesses, the contradiction might be recognised alongside the non-contradiction without involving any contradiction. The middle of reason being an experience of criticality, it must stand for the actuality of contradiction and exclude even the remotest possibility of absolute non-contradiction. The latter however can happen when the rationality is exceeded, pretended to be surpassed as in the case of post-modem ism or, earlier, in mysticism or aestheticism; or, even, as nowadays, in the ideology of anti-scienticism. There can be no denial of reason as such; there can be only a transcendence or a transgression of it. In other words, there is no actual or possible domain of unreason or irrationality except as the other domain of reason itself. There are only actual or possible domains of, say, infra-rationality (as in scientific empiricism or linguisticism) or supra-rationality (as in mysticism and madness). But whether infra-rational or supra-rational, these domains are still recognised with reference to reason and rationality, i.e. their other (like the darkness in relation to light). Reason in itself is polymorphous; language, logic, aesthetic and mystical experiences and even a certain madness are its various forms and expressions and extensions. They however become the forms of irrationality when they are detached or isolated from reason, i.e. given a presence of their own. To make, for example, logic an extension of reason, is a gesture radically

33 different from one making it an excess of latter. For as an excess it must also have its deficiency, i.e. its relapse into language or empiricity or ecstatic delusions. Rationality in this way both restores and endangers the credibility of logic and language on the one hand and of mysticism and science on the other. In the case of logic it can be reiterated that when not protected by reason, it is nothing but the language, nothing of language. It is because reason upholds the principle of contradiction that the logic sustains itself and makes the scientific and philosophical discourses meaningful even those discourses where the meaningfulness of the discourses is attempted to be questioned. Heidegger was quite right in asking the question about the justification of logic, which actually lay in its rational origin and foundation. But let no one then ask the question of the foundation or justification of reason itself, as it is a meaningless question. There cannot be a reason of reason; all things require reason, but not reason itself; for the reason of reason will still be reason. Wherever there is a statement there is a possibility of its contradiction, a possibility of its being true or false. Now the more rational the statement, the greater the possibility of its being affirmed or denied on either of the criteria of coherence or correspondence. But the crucial thing to realise here is that the most certain and self-evident truth that there can be, may be nothing other than rationality itself, i.e. reason as an operation and experience of criticality. Reason is here, in a certain sense, a pre-given presence or power which needs to be actualised by its own internal dynamic nature. Reason, as Aristotle would say, is both the beginning and the end. Reason in its most primary and pure form, in its status as a value-ultimate or as God, could have its absolute opposite in irrationality; but in fact no such absolute irrationality exists. There can be no total breakdown of rationality wherever the fact of experience is involved, though it is true that the

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further the experience diverges from reason, the lesser the possibility of its being true or false. This happens to be the case, for example, in our sensual judgements where the truth content is of a diminished order, and hence the possibility of non-contradiction greater. To say for example that this table is brown always admits the possibility of the same table being not brown - or even of being brown and not brown at the same time. But that does not mean that the original statement is absolutely devoid of any truth content. The fact of the matter is that it is still true, though in a relative way. The table is in fact brown but only from a certain perspective i.e. when seen by a normal pair of eyes in normal light conditions. The statement is relatively though not absolutely true. The same may be the case with the statements made by mystics or artists or madmen. The authenticity of any type of statement increases or decreases in accordance with its compliance with the facts on the one hand and with its ‘criticisability’ on the other. Comparatively, the scientific statements have more truth value and the mystical ones less and those made by the madmen still less because their critical value decreases in that order. Two scientific theories belonging to the same discursive field (as for example those of Darwin and Lamarck, as said before) may be juxtaposed but not by dissolving their truth content, i.e. not by believing them to be equally truth-free, but in terms of the equal possibility of their success or failure in explaining a certain set of phenomena or, alternatively, because they are working on two different sets of facts which still belong to same field. This short discussion of the rational middle must be kept in the back of minds while we venture to understand the philosophy of life and world that our post-modernist philosophers have espoused. For all their deliberations were in a very fundamental sense an enlargement of this theme of middle, which was in their case inverted to become ‘unrationalʼ, or, as they would like to put it, ‘pre-rational’.

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The principle of ‘middle’ was recognised by Derrida and before him by Hegel too. But in both cases it was a neutral or neutralising middle. Derrida’s was, as just seen, an ‘included’ middle because in his case the terms of opposition had those oppositions within them. ‘It appears,’ he said, ‘to be paradoxical enough that the partitioning among multiple figures of aporia does not oppose figures to each other, but installs the haunting of the one in the other? (Ap, 20) This kind of non-exclusion of one term from inside the other term leads to three consequences. One, the oppositions are seen to be artificial or superficial and two, when seen as opposites, they create the impasse of aporia spoken above. The third and most important consequence is that the two terms cancel each other out. Thus the language and logic are seen either as two binary opposites, each containing the other and in that way also negating and neutralising each other, or as autonomous regions admitting no interactions among each other. But when they are treated as two complementary opposites, their identity, their difference, and their opposition all remain intact; and yet they have a meeting ground which is the middle ground of rationality itself. In fact, the oppositions are seen as the productions of that middle and the middle itself as the presupposition of those oppositions. The rational middle is in this way a productive middle as against the unproductive middle (what he calls ‘originary synthesis’) of Derrida. Hegel’s ‘synthesis’ was also similarly always ‘produced’ and though as a higher thesis it generated its anti­ thesis, the two terms became merged into each other as soon as they were produced. The event of generation was therefore also the event of dissolution, which fact made the actual occurrence of the events impossible and the whole movement of thought to be in the domain of nullity. Ultimately, Hegel’s pure reason, as we shall see later, was nothing but Derrida’s own pure experience of which many Indian ascetics have also spoken.

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The dialectic of the ‘rational middle’ is respectful of the law of identity which constitutes its essence but is not averse to the law of difference. Ultimately, the A must be A; but since in the restricted economy of experience the A can be grasped in multiple ways, there is always the possibility of plurification of discourse in a given discursive field. The difference however is the difference of identity and must subsume and sustain the latter. In its own self-existence it inevitably dissipates itself, coming to the level of a mere linguistic construction, as suggested by the post-modernists. The anti-scientist's endeavour to preserve the meaningfulness of multiple discourses, while denying their prior ideal rationality and unity, has clearly failed. The fact of the matter is that it is only in their ideal unity and not in their actual or possible plurality that the differences can subsist. The not-A does not have an existence of its own; it does and can live only under the. shadow of A. The post-modernist’s insistence therefore on an infinite possibility of interpretation of a given text or of a given set of observable facts is as excessive and (hence) deficient as the logicist's on a univocal discourse. In the originary synthesis of Derrida, the figure of included or unproductive middle is to be conceived in the image of a woman - but a woman who is a hermaphrodite. It cannot be a normal woman as the normality implicates both penetrability and procreativity. The Derridean middle, on the other hand, is penetrable (the other way though) but by its very nature is not productive. The act of (pro)creation, of generation, is phallic and includes both the male and female and their mutual dependence and integration. But in the new logic the guiding idea is not integration but assimilation, that is, a complete merger of male and female to make a single neutral, neuter non-reality. This is the new-generation feminism, which does not clamour for equal rights or equality but in fact disdains it as a perpetuation of

37 conventional phallicism. For, according to it, to be equal to man is to be like man, to be the same as man whereas what is required is to be the other of man. And being the other of man is not being other than man, being a (normal) woman, but a ‘woman’ - which is neither man nor woman i.e. a notman-not-woman i.e. a hermaphrodite or asexual. This asexuality, of course, as a deficiency, would implicate the excess of polysexuality and hyper-sexuality; for only through the latter that the force of sex can be neutralised, can be desexualised. The post-modem logic is feminist because the old Aristotelian logic was supposed to be ‘masculinistic’ (phallic) in admitting the idea of generation - the generation of truth. But this is a misperception, as this so-called traditional logic was as unproductive and non-originary as Derrida’s own. Take for example what textbooks call ‘inductive reasoning’, which turns out to be no reasoning at all. For if up to nth cases the crows are seen to be black, that doesn’t prove that in nth +1 case also it will be same. Similarly, deductive reason too was infructuous in being intrinsically conditional. The mortality of Socrates could be established only on the condition of its being known that all men were mortal. But since there was no way one could ascertain this fact the whole exercise came to nothing. A similar fate awaits the so-called laws of reasoning. That A is A and that it cannot be at the same time not-A, and further that A and not-A at the same time involves a contradiction, are all self-evident to the point of being tautological. The logical and tautological are therefore no different from each other. That the coherence and correspondence theories of truth are similarly in a situation of foundationlessness, is Father too well known to the student of the philosophy of logic. Logic thus as ‘tautologic’, as language, was not masculine but feminine, lesbian and unproductive of truth.

38 The logos of logic, too, which was represented as masculine, as phallic and generative, was actually equally non-generative. For like the Derridean feminine which was not to be normally feminine, the logos too was masculine but not of the normal kind. For it lacked the power of penetration; it was much too transcendental and evanescent to come in touch with its counter-principle, which was itself no less evasive. It is true that in Platonism the form imposed itself on the matter, but as Aristotle later showed, the two principles were not to be apart but part of each other. The matter the woman was only becoming of the form the man, and the latter itself - was nothing but the former actualised, the actualisation itself being nothing but a feminine potentiality aspiring to be masculine actuality, and this process was endless. The masculine forever remained feminine and the feminine an aspiring masculine. The form and matter, the masculine and feminine, remained within each other to be a neutral presence-absence, i.e. neither presence nor absence; or, in still other words, either presence or absence. Platonic logos was thus same as the Derridean trace; a pyramid that was also a pit, as Derrida would himself admit. The Platonic phallicism and the Derridean aphallicism are thus the counter-images and yet mirror images of each other. The logos-phallus is either overly huge (like that of Indian Shiva who though, in his another incarnation, is a halfman/half-woman deity) or minimal to the point of being non­ existent (as in the case of Greek Dionysos, who too preaches a cultus of unrestrained sexuality). In both cases it is incapable of being grasped and incapable of performing the act in a natural, normal way. The logos, like the trace, is unproductive (it is male hermaphrodite); the world is not a creation of logos but its emanation or extension. It is much too real to tolerate the reality of the world but also too evanescent to be itself real. Platonic ‘masculinism’ coincides

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with the Denidean feminism; the invasive male god automatically invokes the nostalgia and the wait for a female god: ‘A female god is still to come,’ says Luce Irigaray, a new-generation feminist in one of her works. (SG, 67) The logos as the father god of the West and trace as the mother goddess are two faces of the same figure whose sameness is occasioned by their mutual exclusiveness and excessiveness. The arrival of the mother goddess does not signal the departure but the further entrenchment of the father God. In the pagan economy of beliefs, the feminine god calls for the return of the masculine god of the phallus, as is seen in India where it is Parvati who pursues the reluctant Shiva for cohabitation. In the West too, the coming of the Mother does not coincide with the fall of reason or God. The Phallus God, however much the ‘nihilist may repeat that “God is dead,” is alive and well,’ says the same author at another place. (IR, 45) The father and mother, the phallus and womb, however, are not a normal couple and so are incapable of normal coitus. As excesses they must neutralise each other, must form a neuter half-man/half-woman deity. Both the god and the goddess are neuter, negative, non-present. They are non-present because (and hence) they are neither God nor nature. In gods both the God and nature die. The logos/trace as the representation of the figure of an unproductive god/goddess must be contradistinguished from the possible thinking of a God who is neither male nor female and both male and female but not excessively so. In the thinking of the Occident, the God is either masculine exclusively or feminine exclusively; in other words, both excessively - which, as excesses, must converge in a neutral middle ground to make the neuter hermaphrodite God spoken of above. But on the other side of the fence is the middle, which is not the excess itself but is that of which the excesses are excesses and deficiencies the deficiencies. This other middle, this other God, the God, would be productive insofar

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as the male-female principles meet in it without however being merged. This would, moreover, be in accordance with normal experience, in which every male principle lives side by side with the female principle and vice versa, but in such a way that the male-female identities are created without prejudice to their ultimate co-presence. This possible God of the prophets as distinguished from the god/goddess of pagans is neither exclusively or excessively male nor exclusively or excessively female but both male and female in some measure. One must be clear that the male God that the West has worshipped is not the God of the prophets but the God or the logos of pagans. For even in Christianity, in the beginning was not God but the Word, i.e. the logos, i.e. God’s own unholy ghost. The prophets’ God is the other, the productive middle which we have already described as the rational middle, as opposed to the unproductive middle of unreason, which was the reality of the reason of the West. (That means we have basically two middles, one being the unproductive and unrational and the other productive and rational; and if we call the former as pagan, the other must be named prophetic after Abraham the prophet, who also happened to be the father of anti-pagan philosophy.) It is a point of immense significance that neither Plato’s Idea, nor Aristotle’s Prime Mover, nor the subsequent neo-Platonic Absolute, were creative beings; and the Christian God too had his creativity interfered with by the presence of the Greek logos, of which the former were three names. This absence of creativity has happened because the being was conceived in terms of knowledge, not experience, which, in comparison with the unidimensionality of the former, was multifaceted and multi­ dimensional. Knowledge was of course also experience, but only with reference to it and as part of it. Knowledge was not the whole of experience but only the cogitative part of it, which helped in having the conception of reality, not the

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complete experience of it. To conceive is to experience but to experience is not merely to conceive. The conceptual mode of grasping reality when considered in itself is partial, incomplete, deficient and hence also excessive. It also leads to a static comprehension of reality in which the dynamic and creative aspects are either ignored or altogether denied. But reality, as far as the experience of it goes, is more dynamic than static, is more creative than conceptual. To take notice of the creative dimension of the reality is to posit the creativity in the experience itself, for the reality is in experience, is nothing but the experience itself. Experience, while being rational-critical, is also creative. It is only in terms of a critical-creative experience that the existence of the word, the work and the world can be explained whatever be their ultimate ontological status (even as illusions they will be experiences). There cannot be an existence before experience, for it is a self-contradiction to say that a thing exists without being known to exist, as Berkeley argued. It is of course not necessary that the thing should enter into the restricted economy of one’s sense-experience in order to exist. It is rather a logical impossibility involved in the thing existing without being a part of experience as such. Individually, things become known only after being sensed and experiences therefore assume the prior existence of things. But existentiality of things as such requires the prior reality of experience for it to happen. Existence happens only in-experience. We do not hear the bell, but the sound; we do not taste the apple but the sweetness; we do not see the table but the colour or shape or size and so on, all of which are sensations (experiences) which we unjustifiably externalise, i.e. associate with the existence of external objects. Existence does not make the experience possible but rather it is the Experience that makes the existence possible. Experience creates the existence, experience ‘existentialises’. But while existentialist ng, it does not become existence itself. It

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remains transcendental to what it effects, as the effect itself gets a reality of its own after being thus produced. The unity of experience and existence as attempted by the idealists and monists is destructive of both terms, as the two realities neutralise each other. God transcends nature but is not himself nature, nor does he nullify nature. In fact, for his own transcendence he ensures the existence of the world, which in itself, however, would have been nothing. Experience in its broad, extended sense (in its general economy) is originary and prior to individual sense­ experiences. It is also for that reason ultimate, which is undefinable except in its own terms butwhich can define everything other than itself in its terms. It is not existence, nor is it a concept, nor perhaps even an act (of a subject, though it may have a subject). All concepts, events and acts acquire their meanings only after being illumined by the light of experience. Even existence is a derivative concept, for, as just said, the very event of existentialisation takes place within the space of experience. Existence requires experience and though experience also in a certain sense requires the existence in order to maintain the economy of its presence, in the logical order of priority, it is the experience which comes first. In other words, while the experience is self-explained, other things are explained in terms of experience. Experience also does not need any proof to prove itself and any attempt to affirm or reaffirm it would be tautologous, since that would presume rather than lead to its reality. Moreover, just as there is no affirmation of experience, there can also be no denial of it. Because, again, all denials have to take place within the domain of experience and not outside of it, as there is nothing outside experience. There is, lastly, no sense in speaking of an experience of experience, as that would be a pleonasm; experience of experience would be nothing but the experience itself.

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To accept the sovereignty of experience is also to know that the experience is something more than, though not other than, the sense-experience, as it is also something more than though not other than the experience by ‘reason’. Reality is more than its concept and its percept. When for example a flower is experienced it is not only its colour or shape or size or other qualities or even its idea that is experienced. One also experiences, for example, the ‘beauty’ of it at the same time. The experience is, therefore, also aesthetic while being cognitive. Now, in the tradition of philosophy, there is no denial of this aesthetic part of the experience of reality but a clear recognition of it. But then this recognition is accorded in such a way as to set it completely apart from the cognitive experience. Again, there is a necessity of such a separation since the two kinds of experiences are not the same. But it is also no less clear that both are experiences and happen almost simultaneously and involve the same faculties of the senses. In other words, while being different from each other, they also have their integration in the larger economy of experience as such. Thus while epistemology has to be segregated from aesthetics, there also needs to be a higher science which can deal with this integral experience. In the cultural profile of the West, the total segregation of epistemic and aesthetic has led to the conception of two different lifestyles namely, the vita contemplativa and the vita activa which are said to be the opposites of each other. The way of contemplation or knowledge is that of the philosophers and scientists. Here, the goal is to find the truth, which is impersonal and beyond. In the life of action, on the other hand, the aim is to have a life of spontaneity and to live in accoidance with one’s aesthetic choice without bothering about the truth dr the knowledge (or good or bad) of it. Knowledge and art, truth and beauty are separate domains dnd their paths run parallel to each other with absolutely no ptfint of convergence. This absolute separation was

epitomised in the familiar dichotomy of the Apollonian and Dionysiac or Platonic and Nietzschean as we saw before. It is true that Plato referred to his Idea also as Beauty, but the latter was still an idea, that is, the idea of Beauty, which was an object of contemplation rather than enjoyment. Idea and Beauty were not integrated to make a single reality of experience which could be both known and enjoyed. And this unidimensionalism, this reduction or excess, happened to characterise the positions of both parties of the dispute. In fact, it was because there was no integration, no middle path and because both positions were excessive and deficient that such a dichotomy was allowed to arise and was also maintained with such great consistency. The excess of contemplation created the deficiency of the aesthetic, and the deficiency of the aesthetic generated the excess of the cognitive. And since the excess must live with the deficiency, both as mutual friend and foe, the contemplative and aesthetic also were contemporaneous in the sense of one implicating the other. There was a Nietzsche in Plato (as we shall shortly see) and a Plato in Nietzsche. To speak of this with reference to our post-modernists, who were thoroughgoing Nietzscheans and aestheticists, one finds in them a denial of knowledge but also at the same time an exhortation to proliferate it, i.e. to indulge in it excessively. Knowledge, like sex, they said, could in fact be neutralised only by having more and more of it. And not only knowledge or sex but everything else, including art, was neutralised similarly by having them in excess. In post-modernism, therefore, aesthetisation itself degenerates into a programme of de-aesthetisation. All ends in a Derridean trace or a Lyotard ian (or Buddhist) Zero. Post-modernism as a cultural idea wants the ‘modem’ ethos of knowledge to be replaced by the ethos of art and aesthetics. It of course does not want the practice of philosophy and science to come to an end; they must be

45 retained - even augmented - but only after eviscerating them of their truth content, i.e. after transforming them into the practice of art. But art itself is not what ordinarily goes under that name. Apart from its having nothing to do with knowledge and truth, it implies a commitment to life in its original animal form, that is, committing oneself to a life of impulsive action. This commitment obviously involves doing away with the consciousness or the soul, which actually inspires the search for knowledge to take place so that it can liberate itself through it. The soul is a great encumbrance, a big burden on the body, and the sooner it gets rid of it the better for its salvation. The goal of life, then, is self-loss, the formation of a ‘new subjectivity’ without consciousness and without knowledge. In order, moreover, to help realise this self-loss, one would have to devise one’s own strategy, one’s own ‘technology of self, i.e. an ascesis in which sex, drugs, music, writing and death will be the main figures to invoke and depend on. For these are the chief means of producing the ecstasy which leads to the goal being sought after. In the aesthetic-ecstatic experience the individual returns to its animal self, realises the moment of the merger of the superhuman and subhuman possibilities of its existence. From being a man with a soul or consciousness, he becomes a superman in being no longer constrained by the limits which his humanity imposes on him. But the same abolition of constraints also makes him subhuman. Man breaches his humanity by transcending it, i.e. by going both beyond and beneath it in one and the same gesture. The time of post­ modernity is the time of the death of man. The ecstasy is the sleep of consciousness and the awakening of the body. When the mind is lulled into silence, the body begins to speak. The body becomes its own law - an outlaw, that is. It sexualises, (normal sex being a small part of this polymorphous, profligate exercise) dances, destroys qncj kills - kills other bodies and itself. This is the new-old

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religion of Dionysos as represented in our times by the Michael Jackson cult of music, sex and drugs. Dionysos, the feminine god, bom of the secret meetings of Zeus and a human, Semele, was not accepted by the pantheon of Olympian gods as of their own, although he sided and helped them on many an occasion in their fight against the Titans. Angered and vowing to take revenge, he bided his time and returned to the city of the gods to popularise among its people a cultus of sexual orgy and drunkenness. The spell that he cast upon them, especially the women, made them self-forgetful; and it was in such a state that a herd of women, which included the mother of Pentheus, killed and tore into pieces the body of latter, who as the guardian of the city, had tried to prevent them from indulging into their unsocial activities. It was like Michael Jackson - the man becoming woman, the black becoming white, caught between the two worlds of his naturalised birth and alien roots, unsure of his identity, unsure of his sexuality - seeking revenge for the exclusion suffered by him and his people at the hands of new Olympians of a superior white race by making them swing and sway to the beats of his soul-killing and body­ awakening music. Like his Bacchanalian ancestor, he forces his entry into the new city of the gods, which is still ruled by a pantheon consisting of Athena, the knowledge goddess; Aphrodite, the goddess of sex; Ares, the war-monger, Hephaestus, the technocrat; Hennes the media expert and Apollo, the amoral moralist. The way of ecstasy was the Dionysian -Nietzschean/post­ modernist way of action which they posited against the Apol Ionian-Platonic/modemist way of knowledge. But were the two ways, the two paths, so entirely parallel to each other that there was no point of intersection? To find an answer to this question one has once again to retrace one’s steps in order to hear what the great narrators of the ancient story say. When Dionysos began to preach his orgiastic doctrine of sex

47 and intoxication, it should have been clear to everybody that he was preaching nothing new. For the gods would not be gods without such indulgences, without such transgressions and without such transcendence. What then worried the gods and their minions (the ascetic-priests) was the fact that the path was being opened for the commoners, although it was meant to be the preserve of the elect. They were of course concerned about the implication of this development on the health of society; but much more than that they might have thought it would obliterate the difference they have so assiduously maintained between themselves and the rest. They therefore acted the way they should have, i.e. invoking the authority of Delphi and ascribing to it the commands of ‘Know Thyself and ‘Nothing in Excess’. For ‘Know Thyself in its expanded form became ‘Know that thou art (but) man’, which contained the implicit warning for the commoners to not aspire to be gods or like gods, and keep within the limits. It was a strict advice for them not to cross, not to exceed the boundaries and realise their station in the world to be different and inferior to gods and priests. That there was no actual rivalry between Dionysos and Apollo comes out from several facts as recorded in history. The most telling of these is the fact that at a certain stage it was decided that while for nine months of a year Apollo would be worshipped at Delphi, the headquarters of the god, the other three months would be reserved for the other god to rule the roost. It indeed seems that Dionysos ultimately found his peace with Apollo, as he was buried after his death at Delphi itself. Besides this, paintings have been found in which the two gods face each other along with their cohorts with a friendly demeanour or even extending hands to each other. The relation between these two gods, then, was by no means one of rivalry but of friendly coexistence and mutual adjustment. And the determining idea of this coexistence was that while ordinarily it would be the common rituals and the

48 rules and conventions that should govern the conduct of life, in certain individual cases or on some especial occasions it would be permissible - even desirable - to breach the rules, to let the frenzy and ‘enthusiasm’ (literally meaning ‘divine in man’) take over the normal, sane life. Put another way, it meant that while the greater part of life should be lived in accordance with rules and norms and conventions, the ultimate aim is to attain ecstasy, and through it the sainthood and godhood where those rules and conventions would no longer be valid or binding. A life of morality should keep a quarter for its eventual end in the life of amorality. Now this is precisely what our post-modemist philosophers preach. As they are not against rationality, they are also not against morality and even consider it necessary for the maintenance of social order. But then they too would like the codes not to be absolutely binding on all occasions or for all the people. A minority must be allowed to fashion its life according to the creative demands of its nature, to practise an ascesis and to exist artistically. And in this they by no means go against the theory or practice of Plato. For while Plato is the philosopher of rationality and knowledge and truth and morality, he is also at the same time a philosopher of ecstasy, love and beauty and transgression. One can see what kind of man Plato is there iA his Phaedrus or in his epistles or even elsewhere. There he is a mystic, a mystery-monger, an esoteric and a lover. The liberation can be achieved not by knowledge but by love - love of boys to be exact. In this ‘Platonic Jove’, in this Platonic lovemaking, while the utmost care is taken to not finally commit the ‘act’, yet if this gets to happen while a man is sharing a bed with his boyfriend or as an end result of kissing and caressing him, or under the influence of wine, that is nothing to wony about. Plato of course wrote the greatest indictment of homosexuality, but that was against it as an ordinary rule and was also aimed at the commoners (both Socrates and Plato

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were personally homosexuals). The philosopher-guardians of his ‘ideal state* had no moral code to observe and were sexually promiscuous to the extent of being unrestrained even by the prohibition of incest. Also, during the festivals that Plato instituted for his republic, the observance of rules was made to be non-obligatory, as wine was drunk and other immoralities committed. Plato’s inspiration, as is well known, had come from the Pythagoreans, who were strict disciplinarians but also men of ecstasy and enthusiasm. Both Pythagoras and Plato were devoted equally to Apollo and Dionysos. The Apollonian moderation, then, not only did not question the ultimate legitimacy of the Dionysiac excess but in fact considered it as its own end. It did not want the end of ecstasy, but only its being regulated and made the privilege of an exclusive circle of ascetic-priests. What the two gods jointly propagated was an ascetic transcendentalism in which the criticality and consciousness were sought to be surpassed through world withdrawal, renunciation of knowledge, apoliticalism and celibacy. In this sense even Buddhism and Christianity were ascetic as they too, while frowning at the excesses indulged in by the ‘saints* in their ascetic labours, remained committed to a path of saintly withdrawal. There was in the case of these two doctrines the same Apolline double morality, i.e. one for the commoners, the men, and the other for the saints, the superior men. In the case of Buddhism, in fact, the superior man took only a short time to become a superman, a god. Christianity, on the other hand, under the influence of prophetic humanism, made itself wary ofthis tendency and kept itself content to extend the privilege of being a god to its Christ alone. A grain of Dionysian metaethics was however retained in both, as the ascetic­ priest, a Bodhisattva or a Pope was still considered to be above moral censure. b r

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The end of Apollonian moderation in Dionysian excess signalled what we have previously called as the relapse of Platonic reason into unreason. And, as should now be obvious, this relapse was made possible because rationality, as being a mere cogitative agent, suffered the deficiency of its aesthetic part; and this fact made it in respect to the latter excessive in itself. And as a deficiency of an excess it had to compensate itself by being equally excessive in respect to the aesthetic. The cognitive and aesthetic, as already said, are separate, but they also form at another level a unity which though does not dissolve their difference. The difference is dissolved when as excesses and deficiencies of each other they merge into each other, as seen in the case of Plato. In Occidental discourse, then, the cognitive was either absolutely separate from the aesthetic or the two were merged into each other. There was no middle position of keeping both unity and difference, although it was a clear fact of experience. Apart from their both being grounded in the same reality of experience, one could also take note of the fact that the aesthetic judgements were not irrational or unrational insofar as they were judgements about beauty, about the (aesthetic) value of an objective reality. It is true that the aesthetic judgements are by nature more subjective than the epistemic ones; but that does not take away from them the criticality factor, which is said to be the distinguishing mark of the latter. But it was not only the deficit/surfeit of the aesthetic that made the rationality of Plato, or, for that matter, of Descartes, deficient. Another critical element missing in their schemes was the conative one. In fact, in conventional rationalism, while the aesthetic was still given some recognition, even though in a distorted manner, the conative element as a separate category aiming at ‘good’ was made to be entirely absent. It was again not the case that there was no recognition of ‘good’ as such, for a highly developed science of it existed

51 from the start under the name of ethics. But this ‘ethics’ was either part of cognitive science, the good being considered as an idea; or they were identified with the so-called ‘affective’ self, which was more aesthetic than conative. In Aristotelian psychology, as is well known, there was an appetitive, an affective and a rational self but no conative self. There was, in other words, besides the animal part, a thinking faculty and a faculty of emotions and feelings - but no faculty of will in the human constitution. If there was a will, it was in the form of affectations and it had no reality of its own. This was however again a violation of the fact of experience, because clearly an idea or a thought by itself does not lead to action but requires the force of will to activate it. Thoughts are in themselves inert, though feelings could be said to be more activating in this respect. But still the domain of feelings could not be identified with the domain of volition in which the tenderness of the former is substituted by the force of the latter. One could not, for example, say that our decision to act or not to act, or to act this way rather than the other way in a certain critical situation, is determined entirely by the way we feel in that particular situation. The feeling is of course there, as is also the thinking; but the real force that galvanises us into action is the will which is different from either of these two. The omission of the will from the rational experience was serious and had far-reaching consequence for man’s personal and interpersonal living. Sweepingly - though not unrealistically - it can be said that this was the one single factor among all that made and maned the civilisational History of pot only the Occident but of others too which in some or other way touched it. For one thing, the reduction of ther conaiive to affective made the will to be exclusively a ‘.will to pity’ which either made the ‘will to power* completely assimilated into itself or completely outside of itself. The syndromes of pity and power, instead of being

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elements of an integral experience, instead of making a unity of difference, entered into a relation of either mutual subjection or mutual hostility. In Plato and in ‘Empire’ the pity is totally subdued by power while in Christianity it is the other way round. In Nietzsche and post-modem ism it again becomes a case of reverse order, and so on. There is a dialectical movement in which an idea traverses in a direction but returns in the same moment of time almost in the manner of eternal recurrence. For where there is a subjection of power by pity there is also a simultaneous subjection of pity by power and vice versa. In both Plato and ‘Empire* the official philosophy was still the ascetic doctrine of ‘love’ of humankind and justice for all. Similarly, it was the same love philosophy that served as the underlying support of the royal tyranny of a thousand years of dark ages. Anti-power rhetoric is also not missing in the Nietzschean or post-modernist discourses, although any struggle against the macro­ structures of power is greatly frowned at. One must not however consider these contradictions to be the inconsistencies of practice, for they followed the logic of excess and deficiency and as a result could not take any form other than they took. It was the excess of love in Platonic and Christian asceticism that created in their doctrine the deficit of power which required its supplementation by the other excess of power, of ‘apotheosis of power’ as it is said in the case of Roman Empire. And it was similarly the absolute ‘will to power’ of a lion that in its further progress turned around to become the ‘innocence of a child’ in Nietzsche. A moral economy of pity keeps in both its background and foreground a metaphysic of love, a loving feminine god, a mother goddess who would be the counter-image of the fatherly god of power and tyranny. A feminist ethic must support and be supported by a feminist theology. Thus, according to Julia Kristeva, another great name in what we have called as the new-generation or post-modem feminism,

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Tn the beginning was Love’ (the title of her 1982 book), the ‘love’ here being described as the ‘bond between man and externality, God, and things.’ (TL, 155) But was this originary love (the ‘affect’), the other of the Word which St John said was there at the beginning. Kristeva, after much toil and labour, concludes that it was none other than what the Christian mystics of the Middle Ages spoke about, in fact, finally none but the Christian God itself. Love was the Word and the Word was love; the rational and affective were identical, the same. Kristeva further identifies this love with the Platonic Khora, the matter, the receptacle, the receiver of form, which was however not the counter-principle of the form as it was rather the non-principle. It was a woman who was however also a non-woman, a mother which would not procreate, a hermaphrodite mother. It was the same Khora that was earlier described by Derrida as the trace or the ‘word’, which according to him was at the beginning. It would then seem that the Word, Love, the Khora and the ‘word’ were all same. It would then also seem that the wait for the ‘female god’ was unnecessary, as such a god or goddess was around continuously, i.e. right from the Platonic times to Middle Ages to our own post-modern times. Now the interesting point to notice here is that insofar as this feminine god of love is identical with the Word or Logos of Christianity (if not of Plato), it must also be ‘masculine’ al the same time. The god of love as being feminine is also masculine; it is both male and female, a middle, a ‘place between’ (as Kristeva calls it) the masculine and feminine. The loving mother is none other but the tyrannical father itself. ' The end of feminism was in its opposite i.e. a tmasculinism’. The denial of will, the will to create in rationality, not only made it a limping and lame duck god but led it to precisely the place which was sought to be displaced by making it affective. Clearly then, an experience of

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rationality in which conalive is admitted along with reflective and affective not only returns to it a creative action but also makes it an integral reality comprising all three experiences. Rationality in its critical and creative moment itself becomes an integral experience, a unity of difference of idea, good and beauty. This integral experience is still Love, a Logos, but the elements that constitute it are no longer separate or antagonistic realities which however ultimately neutralise each other to make a non-reality or trace. There has to be an ‘originary synthesis’, a Middle, but it needs not be of the negative, inverse kind that Derrida professes or to which conventional logic leads. The middle, the other middle, in its positive, obverse figuration, is a higher synthesis of Love. In it pity and power do not contradict each other, nor do they assimilate each other, but support and help each other. God as Love and Love as God is pity and power both, male and female both, but in a positive and productive way. The reality as rational experience, as Love, in its creative moment must be in the beginning in some obscure sense (for ‘Time’ is still a reality whose essence it is almost impossible to fathom) while as Truth it must come in the end. Experience is transcendence, the transcendence of what it creates (i.e. the existence) and also the transcegdence for what it creates. As transcendence it pursues and is in turn pursued by what it creates. As rational and critical transcendence, moreover, it must be pursued as Truth, as Good and as Beauty. It is in the pursuit of these values that the Love (or Logos, or God) as a value-ultimate is realised, experienced. This realisation is a never-ending process, a limitless event, a perpetual search for an elusive reality. But its elusiveness does not mean its ungraspability or unrealisability, as in the case of the negative middle of the post-modem i sts, whose ultra-transcendence makes it utterly unrealisable, i.e. the more it is sought to be realised the more it eludes. The positive-productive middle, on the other hand,

55 is elusive but in such a way that the more it eludes the more it is realised.

Note Above all, it is Jean Baudrillard, the ‘cultural’ post­ modernist, who has realised and given expression in the Clearest possible terms (without however philosophically working it out as we have done above) to the dialectic of excess and the presence of the neutralising middle which follows it and constitutes in turn the moment of modemism/post-modemism in Western culture. Thus, in an essay entitled “Transpolitics, Transsexuality, Transaesthetic” which he contributed to a volume on his philosophy, he wrote:

Each category (the political, the sexual, the aesthetic) is elevated to its highest degree of generalization, to its largest totalization. But each category loses - in the same move - all specificity , and reabsorbs itself somehow in the others. When /Everything is political, nothing is political any longer, the word loses all meaning. When everything is sexual, nothing is sexual any longer; sexuality loses all determinacy. When everything is aesthetic, nothing is either beautiful or ugly any longer and art itself disappears. This strange and paradoxical state of things which is the total accomplishment of an idea, the perfection of the “modem” movement and at the same time, it is its denegation, its liquidation by reasons of its very ■,- excess and extension beyond its own limits. It is this strange state of things which I shall call by the -..■same trope: the transpolitical, the transsexual, the — transaesthetic. And I will analyze together, not by

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analogy or transfer from one domain to the other, but according to the law which is imposed on us by the situation itself and which we can call postmodem: that is, the law of confusion of genres and genders. (JB, 10)

It is this law of confusion of genres and genders that makes the whole contemporary culture a representation of transvestism and transsexuality. Baudrillard thus talks of the ‘triumph of transsexual and transvestism’ and a ‘sexual revolution’ which, according to him, ‘will have been a decisive stage toward transsexuality’. The regime of transvestism in fact, he says, ‘has become the .very basis of our institutions’ as ‘one will find it everywhere: in politics, in architecture, in theory, in ideology, even in science.’ In the end, he declares, ‘we are all potential transsexuals’, (ibid., 20-1)

Chapter Two

The Age of Unreason ^ost-modemism is the celebration of unreason. It promises to unsettle the ghost of reason, which has taken possession of the animal in man and has oppressed it for so long. The animal in the body, in the trepidations of its feverish dreams, has come to think of being divine, of having a soul, of possessing a reason. In that very same hallucinated state, it turned what was its original act of virtue into an original sin, the resultant shame of which it tries to cover with the fig leaf of reason - which however turns out to be just a fig leaf, barely covering what it tries to hide. Through the false consciousness that it has since come to have, it perpetually aspires to be a rational animal, leaving behind its natural and original animality. The rationality which was just an appendage has come to cast its large shadow over the body, ' has overshadowed and eclipsed the body, and has turned the body into its own appendage. The decline of the animal is the rise of reason; the loss of body is the gain of soul. Post-modernism mounts this decline and loss of body. It looks askance al the classicists’/modemists’ celebration of reason and wants unreason to be returned the honour that was fys due. The dethronement of the usurper, however, is a task Which does not involve bringing an army from outside; it has father by its very nature to be an act of internal sabotage, an '^ippsing which unseats the king but keeps the throne empty ^forever. The unreason is not the other king, not the other **j^son; it is the other of reason. It is the proverbial clothing

58 of the naked emperor in which he thinks he is fully covered. There was a reason to be displaced but no unreason to be brought from outside to replace it with. Western rationality has always had an irrationality ingrained into itself, and to bring out that irrationality from its place of hiding, to place a mirror before the rationality where it could see its own image, its own unreality, was the task that the post-modernist philosophers set before themselves in earnest. In the West, strangely, the marriage between the rational and animal was solemnised in spite of the full knowledge that the two were antagonistic principles. And that was probably the reason why the couple, in spite of a long cohabitation, never felt happy or settled in each other’s company. Reason all along has displayed an overbearing attitude, a tendency to keep aloof, impatient when hearing the voice of the animal. But, ironically, the more the reason attempted to wrap itself within, the more it was found outside itself, nearer to the animal whom it detested and whose voice it tried to suppress. In classical Pythagorean Platonism, the peak of rational cogitations was the state of ecstasy in which the reason lost its criticality, its very own self, to become a contentless, pure consciousness - a non-consciousness, an animality. This rationality in its heightened state was a condition of being divine, but also at the same time having the face of a demon, of an animal. It was Diogenes, ‘the dog’, who came at the end of the development of thought which was initiated by Pythagoras and Plato, who were both divine and descendents of gods. That the modem, secular rationality had to suffer a similar nemesis as a result of the same kind of internal contradictions was the problem with which the post-modernist philosophers were concerned and which is largely the subject matter of this chapter of our essay. But before we come to that, it is appropriate to recall that even the classical reason at one level had had a Janus-like face. For while on the one hand it

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^presented itself as an abstract, ‘dry as dust’ logic, its other jpcamation was a physically indulgent empiricism. Further, yr logic too, while language was posed as its adversary, it turned out that logic was nothing but the language itself, i Reason as logos was both logic and language, the Word and the. word. Logicism, as being a face of rational extremism, had to admit its own enemy of linguistic ism within itself as seen before. F The apogee of the reason of logos into the unreason of language is what the post-modernists use as the central argument in their deconstruct!ve enterprise. The logocentrism which at one level gives way to biocentrism also leads to a Kind of lingocentrism. By rekindling the old enmity between the logos and language, what post-modernism seeks to establish is a counter-culture of unreason and of madness and death. The pertinent question here could be whether the logos and .language were really natural and all-time enemies, or could they be seen also as close allies, in fact so close as to ipake it difficult to distinguish one from the other? Was it not a fact that the ancients, when they spoke of a rational self, also identified it with the speaking self? In many a discourse, in fact, the logos was nothing other than language, a capitalised word though endowed with meaning and presence. Logos and language, thought and speech, cogitation and expression were two sides of the same coin, two dimensions of same reality. r But this question of relation between the logos and language will be a theme of major interest for us in a forthcoming chapter and can be conveniently left at this pj&int. What may however be noticed here is that the language as the contrary principle of reason affects the analytic of man in another decisive way. And here it is not the- disintegration of the elements of rationality that is involved but rather its total disruption. This is the situation of what we call the loss of sanity, i.e. the state of insanity or

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madness. For what is madness except an inability to articulate and conceptualise, a relapse into incoherence, a loss of meaning and truth? Madness as counter-principle of rationality is to speak sense-lessly; there is a speech but there is neither a referent nor a referrer. It is the situation of the word being detached from the thing and also from the consciousness. The language no longer carries any meaning but becomes self-serving and self-referring. Madness in this sense is the autonomy of language; it is the language itself (or, in other words, language is madness). And it is so in both a sublime and a degenerate way. The mystics were often considered as madmen precisely because of their incoherent talk which was a result of their self-induced ecstasy. The ‘other* madmen, i.e. those suffering from some mental illness, shared this disability with their relations of the former kind, though for some incomprehensible reasons they provoked laughter and pity instead of reverence and awe as in the case of former. The former was superhuman, the latter subhuman. But whether superhuman or subhuman, the madman was no longer human because he had lost his reason, because he was no longer a rational animal. It may also be noted here that in the case of the mystic the madness has resulted because of the ‘excess’ of reason (Plato), while in the case of insane it was the ‘deficit’ of reason which was the cause of it. But since the deficit itself is die other kind of excess, i.e. the other excess, it would mean that both the madness of a mystic and of an ordinary madman were excesses of a rationality, which was in the middle but which was not as concretely manifested as its two excessive expressions. As against the latter, the rational middle is never realised; its truth is rather in its elusiveness, in its realisability, which is possible through the recognition of and escape from its excesses. Its elusiveness, however, did not mean that it is unrealisable for it was realisable precisely because it was elusive. The rationality is in its very essence a

61 search; it is criticality and creativity on the one hand and the positivity of volition and affection on the other hand. As a creative experience it was self-expanding, but as criticality ajso self-restrictive and discriminative. The rational middle had both logic and language on one hand and the mysticism and madness on the other, without being identified with either of them. In their moderate economy they were all manifestations of reason but in their excess all its contraventions. Mysticism was the loss of will, while madness was a surplus, a surfeit of it. Now if the will was also a rational experience in the sense that it involved an evaluative and discriminative exercise (between good and eyil), clearly the two events were the bi-polar expressions of the same middle experience. In all such discourses, therefore, where the issues of logic and language on the one hand and mysticism and madness on the other are involved, this dialectic of excess must be kept in mind. For it was the failure on this count that both modernism and post-modemism have maintained their interrelationship of polar opposition while yet being each other’s support. For the Cartesian reason on which the modernism based itself was not the creative reason which we have just talked about. In its internal structure it was still Platonic, reflective, mathematical and dialectical; though it had also another face which was directed towards the phenomena of the world. With this excess of onedimensionality, it was natural that it would end up in its own negation. We can see this in the ‘panlogical’ philosophy of Hegel on the one hand and the different voluntaristic, romantic, existentialistic and, finally, the post-modernist irrationalisms on the other hand. Man, the rational animal who ushered in his modernity with the assertion of the supremacy of rationality, has found his fate sealed in the sh^er naturality of his animal-existence. k

62

Hegel’s reason, it may be recalled, was sovereign, authoritative and imperial; and yet as soon as it made its appearance, it found itself surrounded by all kinds of enemies. Fichte and Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard and Dostoevsky, Marx and Feuerbach, and then Husserl and Heidegger, all united to fight their common enemy. But the greatest danger to Hegelianism came not from these ‘others* who attacked it from outside, but from an enemy who was present within. The dialectic of Aufhebung, as we know it, was a process of thought in which the opposition necessarily gave way to resolution. The end of this process naturally was a final resolution, the end of all oppositions and hence all progress. The consciousness at this point became pure and absolute, admitting no other or opposite at all. Since there was no opposition, there was also no dialectic and no logic. The end of logic was the end of logic. ‘Panlogism’ was only the other name of non-logism. We shall see how it was precisely this end of logic, as emerging from the logic itself, that was made to be an argument by Derrida to establish his own anti-logoistic philosophy. The various reactionary tendencies apart, what could be considered as a real revolution is the linguistic discovery of Nietzsche. He not only exposed logic for what it was worth but also heralded the arrival of madman. Hence the post­ modernist’s debt to him. For it was no more a mere matter of resisting or protesting, or even attacking die enemy. It was now to be a complete overthrowing of despot, a total revolution, a final solution through the replacement of logic by language. Panlogism would have to be fully replaced by panlinguism. The post-modernists accepted Nietzsche as their master - but before reaching the master, the god, they had first to see the intermediary, the great Heidegger. Both Nietzsche and Heidegger spoke the language of unreason. They ridiculed the claim of reason to find one the truth and condemned it for its oppressive and totalising

63 gestures. Now, as it also happened, Nietzsche happened to be among the initiators of the ideology of Nazism and Heidegger its great post facto philosophical apologist. The Fiihrer was valorised because he represented a naked will to power, i.e. a will which was unaffected by the moderating elaims of reason and unfettered by the considerations of good and evil. Not less important was the fact that he waged a war against the ‘democratic’ Europe, democracy being obviously seen as an affiliate of rationality. (It was the surfeit of reason in Hegel that led him to see in Napoleon the march and conquest of Reason. Hegel was a panlogist which, as just said, in other words meant that he was a non-logist i.e. a believer in the cultus of unreason.) Democracy in any case Was the rule of people, the base rabble; it was the rule of the men who were rational animals but animals nevertheless. The will to power represented not humanity but superhumanity, and only the superhuman had the right reserved for him to rule over the herds of human animals. It is however interesting to note that while the commoners were disparaged for being rational animals, at another level, it were the same common folk, the Volk, who were idealised in the Nazi philosophy. The folk were, however, perhaps not human, as perhaps they were not rational animals - not being yery civilised, they could indeed be unralional animals. The folk inhabited the countryside, away from the cities of culture and corruption, while the townsman was civilised, having his civic ‘sense’ and etiquettes. The latter had alienated himself from his ‘spiritual’ nature through science and technology and did not live by his hands and with his earth; he rather lived by his machines. And further, instead of being a Cultivator and artist he chose to be a technician, a trader, an office goer, a politician or even a professor. It was all an ynspiritual life governed by the instrumental reason. The life gf the country, on the other hand, was the life of nature unpolluted and uncorrupted. There was here a harmony and a

64

melding of nature and human nature. A life of nature, of nature which was spiritual, harmonised well with the spiritual nature of man. This spirituality, however, was not that of man’s soul, not of his rationality, which set him apart from nature; it was the spirituality of nature itself. The goal was not for man to live a rational but a natural, a passionate life i.e. a life of passion not fundamentally unlike that of an animal. Thus nature was the spirit and modem scientific culture a violation of the innocence of that spirit. -Heidegger, the typical pagan, famously described the area of present civilisation as the one which the gods find it unworthy to dwell in. There was, as he said, a ‘spiritual decline of the earth’ which was in quite an advanced stage and which had resulted in the ‘darkening of the world’ and the ‘flight of gods’, in the ‘destruction of the earth’ and the ‘transformation of men into mass’. He also spoke of ‘dreary technological frenzy’ and the ‘unrestricted organization of average man’, and also of the globe having been ‘conquered by technology and open to economic exploitation’. All this had already happened in America and also in Russia, which with all their pretentious differences, were from ‘a metaphysical point of view’, the same. To tips sameness, Europe ‘in its ruinous blindness forever on the point of cutting its own throat’ was also in the danger of falling a victim. The danger was greater for Germany (‘our nation’) which, being situated in the centre, ‘incurs the severest pressure’. But even with all that it was also the most metaphysical of the nations. And, finally, what all this implied was that ‘this nation as a historical nation, must move itself and thereby the history of West beyond the centre of their future “happening” and into the primordial realm of the powers of being’. ‘If the great decision regarding Europe is not to bring annihilation, that decision must be made in

65 terms of new spiritual energies unfolding historically from out of this center.’ (IM, 38) Heidegger was the philosopher of Being which was not God, not nature, but a reality which was before God and nature. The spiritual decline of Europe then meant a kind of falling away from this authentic Being, which had been its reality a long time ago. The present state of Europe must not be understood in terms of a future happening, but in the context of a movement back to antiquity - to Greek pagan antiquity more precisely. It required a reference back to ‘the primordial realm1 from which it has fallen away through its history. This falling away, this ‘fall’, which has been historical and also necessary, was epitomised in the appearance of reason, for which Plato and Aristotle were chiefly responsible. The primordial realm of the ‘powers of being* was not the realm of reason but unreason. It was a realm in which the aesthetic rather than the rational, nature rather than culture, art rather than science, poetry rather than philosophy, gods rather than God held sway. Greeks had of course had their poets and artists, but there were also those among the pre-Socratics who are known as philosophers but Were in fact poets. They were the poets of ‘physis’, of pre­ nature and of Being, and they were certainly not the philosophers of logos. The rupture was no doubt caused by Socrates, who in all his enthusiasm for making the people good in fact corrupted them - and was so accused by the Athenians. Plato and Aristotle of course made the chasm wider and the fall quicker and harder. mind or a consciousness too could not remain far away. The primordial unity was splintered into a three-fold multiplicity (of thinker, thinking and thought). Philosophy, instead of being the being itself, became the theory of being and beings. There now for the first time arose the perspective for looking at being as if there was some space, away from or other than being, which could be occupied to gaze at being. Although not in Plato himself, but through his objectivisation of reality and of making it represented, the path was prepared which led to the emergence of the subject as a reality in its own right. In fact, latterly, this subject or mind instead of being merely a thinker

67 b£reality became almost the inventor of it. Man, instead of being ‘a shepherd of Being’, became ‘a lord of beings*. £ ^Plato’s discovery of Ideas, leading to the birth of a subjective consciousness and then to an objective world, (nakes philosophy an enterprise of thinking and the fflulosopher himself a thinker of philosophical ideas. But the philosophers before Socrates and Plato were not thinkers in this sense of being people who would detach themselves from reality and reflect over that reality from that detached point of view. They were not detached, not even attached from outside, but rather one with the reality. In their experience of poetic rapture they realised the essential unity ofthe thinker and thought, the mind and the world. In their philosophy one does not find a mind or reason which could capture the world through its mysterious powers. There is no mind as such and what exists is only nature or pre-nature or Being. Being is both mind and world, the God and the gods, the creator and the creation. In fact, the notion of God was an extension of the belief in the mind; God as a super or infinite mind would know all things, would keep all things in his mind as his ideas. The gods, on the other hand, had no such pretensions, as they were nature itself. The gods as natural beings were not the creators of nature; they were not its originators because the idea of origin itself was redundant and an affiliate of the ideas of mind and God. If there was a God at all, He was the Being itself - which was however not a mind, not even an infinite mind and which did not either 'think or create or cause the world. The Being, the God, the World were all same. r The world, however, which is identical with Being, is not the world of things. Being indeed, according to Heidegger’s -interpretation of ancient philosophy, was what things were not. For about things we can say that they exist or that they do not exist; but in the case of Being such determinations of existence and nomexistence are invalid. Being is that which

68 makes the existence and non-existence possible while itself being neither existence nor non-existence, neither present nor absent. Now the sin of Platonic philosophy was to talk of a ‘reality’, that is, an existence which was absolute and a priori and all-encompassing. The existence or reality however was, as just said, the quality of things or beings. Therefore, to call the Being ‘existence’ was to reduce Being to the level of things. Being could not be reduced to things but that did not mean Being was something above or beyond things. Being was not a transcendental being. It was also not beneath or behind the beings i.e. a substance or substratum of beings. For to call it transcendental or substance was still to think of it in terms of existence and presence, which it v as not. Being in fact was what the world, the God, substance, the mind, ideas were not. In relation to these indeed it was nothing. The idea of an ultimate, irreducible presence has been the sine qua non of philosophy, of history of philosophy and of philosophy of history. And it is for this reason that Heidegger, the philosopher of Being, called the whole history of philosophy a fall from the real philosophy of the ancient Greeks, who were poets rather than philosophers. This history of philosophy was called by him a thinking of ‘ontotheology’ as it in one form or other kept the idea of an ‘origin’ of the world, in relation to which it treated the world as secondary, derivative and unreal. The reality as origin as God as presence was also to be called logos which in turn was placed at the heart of philosophy. The history of (Occidental) philosophy had then a ‘logocentric bias’ which Heidegger thought deserved ‘destrukiiori1 - ‘deconstruction’ in the terminology of Derrida, Heidegger’s post-modem disciple. This logos must be shown through the deconstructive reduction to be a nothing, a trace, a mere word; a word, however, which quite often pretended to be a capitalised Word. Here then is an initial summing-up of the whole philosophical problem of post-modernism.

afai 1. The subordination of the trace to the full presence toipunimed up in the logos, the humbling of writing *lhbeneath a speech dreaming its plentitude, such are $t£he gestures required by an onto-theology ■ determining the archaeological and eschatological i meaning of being as presence, as parousia. as life without difference: another name for death, historical metonymy where God’s name holds death in check. That is why, if this movement begins its era in the form of Platonism, it ends in infinitist metaphysics. Only infinite being can reduce the difference in presence. In that sense, the ’*!• name of God, at least as it is pronounced within 'classical rationalism, is the name of indifference itself... We must not therefore speak of a ' •“theological prejudice”, functioning sporadically u> when it is a question of the plentitude of logos; the ■ ' logos as the sublimation of the trace is theological. ‘Infinitist theologies are always logocentrisms, whether they are creationisms or not... (OG, 71) 1110 history of metaphysics, in other words, was the histoiy elf logos. And it was so in the double sense of a logos being perennially a subject of discoursing and the discoursing itself being a function of logos. Logos as presence was not only God but also the Idea, the mind, reason, Being, nature and even matter. Insofar as these are held as realities, theorised as substances, they could be regarded as the different incarnations of logos even as sometimes the logos as an idea Was denied or disparaged. (Socrates, who spoke disparagingly of logos in his Apology, was also in a sense the father of logos because it was he who spoke of the ‘concepts’ which later became the Ideas of Plato.) There was no metaphysics, whether theological or atheological, which was

70 not logoistic; even the denial of logos was an exercise in the domain of same logoism. The post-modernist gesture then consisted in showing this logos to be nothing more than a trace, a myth, a ‘white myth’ which was Occidental but which also aspired to be universal.

Metaphysics - the white mythology which resembles and reflects the culture of the West: the white man takes his own mythology, IndoEuropean mythology, his own logos that is, the mythos of his idiom, for the universal form of that he must still wish to call Reason. (Ma, 213)

But though there has been in the history of Occident an obsessive preoccupation with logos, there has been a parallel history, a non-history of non-logos, of non-presence and trace, of a Being which was nothing. The citadel of Occidental-universal reason was attacked from outside but also often stormed from inside. The logos of reason, in spite of its apparent security and unassailability, has indeed had a tormented history, which was more a result of its own internal split constitution than due to the strength of its enemies. There was an unreason, as Derrida would say, within the reason - a language, a madness, 3 death, which would contest the life of logos. The Socratic logos as much as the modem/Cartesian one had a prior non-logos, of which it was a product and which effaced it as persistently as it made its claim of presence and power. The history of the modem effacement of logos through language and madness began with Nietzsche. But as the voice of the philosopher appeared to his sane and rational contemporaries as the cries of a madman, as a voice of madness itself, it was rejected and ignored by them. But then there appeared a sane and sober philosopher who made that voice of insanity his own, who breached the being of logos

71 by the Being itself and created thereby a counter-history of it to be latterly appropriated by the post-mod emists. As we know, Heidegger’s philosophy of Being was in line with the romantic ideology that developed in Europe after the eighteenth century. This was both anti-rationalistic and antiscientistic on the one hand and anti-spiritualistic and antimaterialistic on the other hand. But while being antiinaterialist it yet professed to be a philosophy of nature; and while discarding the religious spirituality it yet spoke of a spirit as being at the centre of its thinking. i.i The ‘spirit’ indeed was here the key word, and an understanding of it is necessary to understand the post­ modern Weltanschauung, insofar as it leaned on a Heideggerian-Nazi credo. In a nutshell, the spirit was neither the ‘soul’ of man nor its macroscopic enlargement, the God, so called. If anything, indeed, this spirit (as Being) was pre­ nature, which however primarily manifested itself in nature though secondarily and in a phenomenal sense also in what is called the human ‘soul’ or human consciousness. The true nature of man was nature itself, though it was true that at this level nature was heightened and consolidated to produce the illusion of distinction and even superiority in those who possessed it. But as nature was already a breach in the reality/unreality of pre-nature, the soul was only a further intensification of that breach. The soul was indeed a sign of the spirit’s having fallen away from itself, having become material or spiritual and being no longer in the company of its own essence. The soul was a violence against the spirit; and all those conceptualities, values and ideologies which based themselves on the soul, keeping it at their centre, were equally a violence against the true nature of man. ' With the idea of an exclusive human nature were associated the notions of rationality, ethics, culture, transcendence, progress, etc., which were all empty and dangerous notions. Nietzschean-Heideggerian philosophy

72 was a clarion call to do away with all kinds of rationalisms, moralisms, culturalisms and transcendentalisms. It was also a call for man to return to his biological essence in order to commune with his deeper reality of non-existence. Man must transpose himself to the level of superhuman in order to become again unhuman. He must espouse not knowledge but action, not rules but instincts, not humanity but animality, not emotion but passion, not transcendentality but blood and race, not God but gods. All choices hitherto considered as venerable must be abandoned in favour of the real ones. The culture of knowledge, of ‘intelligence’, of science and technology, of culture itself must come to an end. ‘Culture’, as it prevails in America, in Russia, and in Europe in general, is all demonic, an indication of ‘the emergence of demonism’, and a betrayal or emasculation of the spirit. Spirit was not intelligence, not a mere ‘serviceable tool which, along with its product, is situated in the realm of culture’. The identification of the spirit with ‘utilitarian intelligence’ was the end of the spirit. The spirit was not only opposed to science, but also to poetry, art and culture in general.

As soon as the misinterpretation sets in that degrades the spirit to a tool, the energies of the spiritual process, poetry and art, statesmanship and religion, become subject to conscious cultivation and planning. They are split into branches. The spiritual world becomes culture and the individual strives to perfect himself in creation and preservation of this culture. (IM, 47-8) As we progress, we will find a fair sprinkling of all these ideas in the writings of our own post-modern philosophers. But before we proceed to show that, it may just be mentioned by the way that it was this anti-humanist, anti-cultural

73 philosophy which Heidegger called as ‘the inner truth and - greatness’ of National Socialism (ibid ., 199) and of which he Remained an unrepentant defender till the end. In fact, if he occasionally made some apologies, it was not for his having Changed his faith a bit but only for the deviation that the state apparatus effected from the original ideals and which Heidegger could not appreciate at the time, but which he Nevertheless kept mum about as a committed worker in the Nazi cause. Quite like Socrates, his pagan ancestor, he made others suffer and then suffered himself while remaining steadfast in his faith in the doctrine. And as it happened in the case of Socrates, who found among his disciples a genius like Plato to write an apology on his behalf and then extend and expand the realm of his ideas, Heidegger too was fortunate to find in Derrida a loyal disciple and a trusted apologist. (The fact that Derrida was a Jew and has himself suffered all those agonies which was the fate of his co­ religionists in Europe only enhanced the credibility of his defence.) Derrida, however, defended not only Heidegger; he also defended Nazism. There were in his view certainly not one but many Heideggers, and there were equally certainly not one but many Nazisms:

' J1 K . te'

# t1 4

The condemnation of Nazism, whatever must be the consensus on the subject, is not yet a thinking of Nazism. We still do not know what it is and what made possible this vile, and yet overdetermined thing, shot through with internal contradictions (whence the factions and factions among which Heidegger situated himself - and his cunning strategy in the use of the word ‘spirit’ takes on a certain sense when one thinks of a general rhetoric of the Nazi idiom and the biologizing tendencies, a la Rosenberg, that won out in the end). After all, Nazism did not grow up

74 in Germany or in Europe like a mushroom... (Poi, 184)

Biologism, it was - a la Rosenberg - ‘that won out in the end’: Derrida here speaks as if Heidegger’s was only one of the factions that comprised the multiple entity that was Nazism and which somehow got confused with an unfortunate use by Heidegger of the term ‘spirit’. We shall soon see how Derrida himself had the same biologism to uphold, along with Foucault, to make it as the dominant theme of his post-modem philosophy. But let us cite further what he said by way of completing the statement that he had left incomplete. Challenging the anti-Nazi rhetoric of Heidegger’s detractors, he said: In order to think Nazism, one must not only be interested in Heidegger, but one must also be interested in him. To think that the European discourse can keep Nazism at bay like an object is, in the best hypothesis, naive, and in the worst it is an obscurantism and a political mistake. It is as if Nazism had no contact with the rest of Europe, with other philosophers, with other political or religious languages... (ibid., 185)

Was then Derrida a Nazi whole and sole? This is of course too much to say or expect. But then it is also a fact that if Heidegger could talk of the inner truth and greatness of Nazism, Derrida too would speak of ‘a more “revolutionary” and purer Nazism* which was in his view ‘opposed to actual Nazism’, (ibid., 183) There was also his description of it as ‘that enormous, plural, differentiated continent whose roots are still obscure* and of ‘Heideggerian thinking* as being multiple, provocative, enigmatic, and ‘still to be read’, (ibid., 182) Incidentally, earlier, at a different place and in a

75 Afferent context, he had similarly described Nietzsche’s ^azism also as a ‘still to be read’ text: ‘I am also not suggesting that we ought to reread “Nietzsche” and his great politics on the basis of what we know or think we know that Nazism to be. I do not believe that we as yet know how to think what Nazism is. The task remains before us...’ (EO, 31) The fact of the matter however is that Nazism is neither sp very plural or differentiated, nor is it a continent with qbscure roots. Similarly, Heidegger’s discourse, while provocative no doubt, is not yet quite as multiple or enigmatic. If indeed there is anything remarkable about Nazism, it is not the differentiation but the amazing degree of convergence of the views which so many men from so many different backgrounds and for such a long period of time entertained about it. And also if there is anything provocative in Heidegger it is not any prevarication or equivocation on the part of the philosopher but how consistently and completely he adhered to it. Our concern here, however, is not Heidegger or his Nazism but the two in their interrelationship and as they together relate to the post-modem view of life and world. The essential thing to realise in this connection is that this latter philosophy shares with the former the approach of rbiologism’ which was expounded by the most important of Nazi thinkers. This biologistic philosophy is present in Foucault with all its academic platitudes. In Derrida too it finds its expression, though in a more ‘religious1 form. Quite early on, in an essay entitled ‘Ends of Man’, Derrida has i^hown Heidegger, and many other philosophers who have spoken of the end of metaphysics and the end of humanism, Rp be still trapped in the language of metaphysics, accepting ‘through different subterfuges the subjectivity of man - the -'Subjectivity which in some way identifies itself with "^gnsciousness. But in a late interview published under the f^tle ‘Eating Well’, he makes the bold suggestion that

76 Heidegger was till the end nothing but a Judaeo-Christian thinker. This was because he spoke of man as being a reality other than or even in some decisive way superior to the animals. This violated in Derrida’s view the real nature of difference between the animal and man which was that of ‘difference’ itself rather than that of opposition or superiority/inferiority. It was however not merely the question of difference between the human and animal kingdoms that was crucial as ‘the difference between “animal” and “vegetal” also remained problematic*. (Poi, 269) In fact nothing can be excluded from this regime of differentiation - the non-living, the vegetal, the animal, the man and the God. These are elements which admit differentiation among themselves, but only in such a manner that they are differences of sameness or sameness of difference - but never the opposite or the other of the other. From the so-called lowest to the highest, in other words, there was an order of sameness, and an order of like differentiation which forbid the possibility of hierarchisation or any qualitative demarcation at any particular level. Now this was, as one could discern, fundamentally the same elementalism of which Empedocles spoke among the ancients; and it had been upheld since then by all the pagan ascetics and philosophers, including Aristotle and the modem Nazi writers. While for the thinkers of Judaeo-ChristianIslamic tradition the issue was the difference at the human level, for the pagans it was that of‘difference between living and non-living’ and consequently of the essential inhumanity of man. To not recognise man as human or as divine was of course not to call him ‘inhuman* but still it was ‘perhaps more “worthy” of humanity to maintain a certain inhumanity*, (ibid., 276) It is no doubt quite easy to enumerate certain peculiarities which humans are supposed to admit and animals do not, but that is only an incorrect way of formulating the question. Once the distinction between the

77 %iiman and animal as being based on logos or reason is jgKposed and the being of the latter liquidated, the distinction ’also disappears forever. What indeed sustains the alleged distinction is not only the logocentrism but also the ^hallogocentrism, i.e. an order of discoursing which is

'^formed by the idea of domination - domination of male j^ver female, of rational over animal. Whenever a ‘subject’ is ^constructed, its underpinning will always be that of a .masculine rather than feminine subject. (‘Authority and Autonomy... [are] attributed to the man rather than to the twoman, and to the woman rather than to the animal.’) The phallus has a interiorised presence in all subjectivist ‘discourses - a ‘necessity of its passage through the mouth’. (ibid., 280) The subjectivist discourse also can realise its possibility in rihe presence of a ‘sacrificial structure’. There is this idea of ^Hon-sacrificial killing’, i.e. an animal being killed without Causing any offence to law or to one’s conscience. The morality is the morality of man, of not killing the other man and not that of not killing a living being in general. In the ‘judaeo-Christian tradition, even in Heidegger, ‘it is not ?Arbidden to make an attempt on life in general, but only on ^fiffiman life’. The subject must be a sacrifice^ a flesh-eater, a ^Srhivorous being. The phal logocentrism is also *f a counter-rationality, a counter-science and a counter­ vulture at large. But before and above all this is the task of {demystification of ‘knowledge’ as a principle of .^mancipation and liberation. It hardly needs recounting that from sixteenth century Iirds there has been this bel ief among the protagonists of lution that the key to human emancipation lies in the ng of people’s minds from dogmatic idolatries through pread of knowledge. Indeed, the ‘light’ that dawned on pe in the modem phase of its history was without doubt ight of knowledge as against the ‘dark’ times which it rienced in the preceding era. And ever since the ulation of this view in what is now a bygone time, it has inly found almost universal acceptance in Europe but has adopted elsewhere too. It has indeed enjoyed the status ring ‘a postulate of our Western civilization’. But for the rionist Foucault, the fact may just be the reverse, i.e. the sation that ‘the formation of the great systems of vledge has also had the effects and function of subjection rule’. And that leads one ‘to re-examine more or less ely the postulate according to which the development of vledge is undoubtedly the guarantee of liberation’. (RM,

106 165-6) The project here was not soft femilean critique according to which knowledge was a breach of nature, a cultural construction which could be tolerated as the imposition of fate. In the new critique there was no nature as such to be breached or violated, and nature and culture both were constructions of the knowledge itself. The deconstruction of knowledge in the new philosophy takes a variety of forms and is accomplished in quite expected ways. There is in the first place the rejection of what has since come to be called the ‘grand narratives’. The great systems of the great philosophers are now viewed as great fictionalisations woven under the mistaken belief that there is a universe of factuality which can be mentally projected to create a verbal counterpart of it. But the truth of the matter is that there is no world of facts to speculate on, no arche to be reached and no causality to make explanations and understanding possible. The ‘reality’ is a surface, a trace whose only abode is writing or verbality, its different modes and formulations, its contextualisation and enunciation being within that same domain of language. It is the self­ proliferation of words that creates the illusion of an objective reality to be understood and also a ‘subject’ as the agent of that understanding. The above is, however, the case only in an ultimate sense; at a workaday, phenomenal level, the attempt is not to change the knowledge into ‘non-knowledge’ but only to disinvest it of its ‘power’. The end of the regime of knowledge of which mention has already been made can be realised only by effecting a decentralisation or regionalisation of it. Knowledge, like sex, must be dispersed to make it a situation of ‘knowledges’, small discursivities, all self-enclosed, self­ justified. No special value should be attached to a theory being either called ‘philosophical’ or ‘scientific’. It is for example quite absurd to ask whether the Marxist or psychoanalytical theory is scientific or not, as this question

107

I

’jjresupposes an absolute distinction between scientific fen-scientific, besides adding a premium to the former. ?i3ue situation is that these theories - or any other for Waiter - are neither scientific nor non-scientific, neither

and The that true

fljor false. They are not founded on facts as no facts exist, and S^hey have not been reached through a procedure of reasoning, ■fe this reasoning is also absent rather than present. In fact, She so-called scientificity of a theory is itself a reason enough $F©r a theory to make it suspect, insofar as it begins to make a ^claim of authority which does not belong to it. Accordingly,

$111 that can be permitted in the name of knowledge are the Verbal constructions which have affectations of truth without ^oeing true in themselves. The ‘theories’ are thus rejected not for the reason of their being speculative or for being unscientific but precisely for 'the reason that they are scientific or make a pretence of being ^sb. Insofar as they claim to represent the facts of history, of

Jfriner history, or of world at large, they are already rendered ’Unwelcome in a serious discourse of ‘truth’. Positivism is ^therefore no criteria for assigning a value or disvalue to a

theory, nor so is ‘scientism’. As attitudes these are as hollow ^rhd unfounded as the attitudes and applications they deride in Sheir self-righteousness. A genealogical (as opposed to Ifeundationalist) way of seeing the event of knowledge rejects ^Bbth positivism and anti-positivism. Genealogies, as Foucault ftlys, are ‘not positivistic returns to a more careful or exact Inn of science. They are precisely anti-science’. (PK, 83)

; It needs to be clear, however, that what is rejected in these eories is not the construction of the theory as such, but the aim of their scientificity or rationality or truth. Following ietzsche, there is again here an emphatic rejection of a ipscendental truth which is discovered by the labour of tional application or scientific experiments. What is present jthe theories is not the truth but the ‘effects of truth’; and oat a rational/scientific inquiry involves is not the search of

108 truth but a ‘game of truth’. A theoretical construction is distinguished from a non-theoretical one not because of its having a quality of truth, which it attains by meeting some criteria of coherence or correspondence, but because it follows certain rules produced by itself and certain affectations which are not found in any discourse of the latter type. No discourse for any reason whatsoever is either true or false, except in the sense that it produces certain kinds of effects on its audience. There is no truth waiting to be discovered and also none to fight or live or die for. What one does and can do is not a discovery but a production of truth, and fighting for the truth is nothing but a battling around it. The battle lines are drawn between parties who are affected by their own respective fictions and fixations; the war is always between two fictions, two opinions, two interests rather than two truths. This question of fighting or battling over the truth had especially its backdrop in the party lines created in the circles of Marxists and psychoanalysts. They not only dubbed other political or psychological theories as unscientific but were in themselves undergoing sectarian divisions and schismatic factionalisms much like the older religious cults. In fact, in their very claim to being scientific, they assumqd dogmatic postures and displayed same arrogance of finality and intolerance of rival theories as the sectaries of the traditional religions. Now the appearance of post-modernism was not for effecting peace among the disputing parties through some message of tolerance. There was to be sure a certain weariness, an admission of being disturbed over what were seen to be petty disputes or the ‘grand theme of ideological struggle’ which created enemies on class lines and produced a ‘war model’ that was not only ridiculous but also dangerous. But, in final terms, the vacuity of all these disputations is realised in seeing that ‘the theoretical co­ ordinates of each of us are often, no, always, confused and

109 ^fluctuating, especially if they are observed in their genesis’. j&M, 181)

gfa The question of the genealogy of theoretical knowledge is u&wever a large subject and we will have the occasion to |mm to it later and discuss it in some detail. Presently what fee need is to notice the fact that whether it is Marxism or Psychoanalysis, both of them are still regarded as great g&hievements, though their greatness is not seen to derive their alleged scientificity but from the fact that they been effective in bringing about decisive changes in the ^rcablished modes of thinking and living (irrespective of the fi$?t that the effect was good or bad, because good and bad jy|e true and false do not exist). Psychoanalysis particularly w a specific credibility for being, along with the ‘^tbnology’ (anthropology of Levi-Strauss) a ‘counter­ science’. These two fields of discourse were rather meta'(Jiscourses, insofar as they put the very ideas of knowledge and science in question and because they also problematised .fjpan*, who has been the sine qua non of this science and this jjQgwledge. Man, in the conventional paradigm, was a Rowing animal’ and this knowing itself was either a QE^duct of a consciousness or had a necessary reference to it. tij&y since both psychoanalysis and anthropology have gy$$essfiilly shown the disposability of man as the site of I’ jciousness and knowledge, their revolutionary ificance is rather self-evident. They are, indeed, not icular disciplines like the other so-called human sciences; r significance lies in ‘that they span the entire domain of ie sciences, that they animate their whole surface... and able to propound their methods of decipherment and their rpretation everywhere’. (OT, 379) It were these rather i; the Marxist or other historical philosophies which lly reversed the trend of ‘anthropologisation’ in human hces. It were they again who awoke knowledge from its hropological sleep’.

no The counter-sciences of anthropology and psychoanalysis certainly call for the beginning of the new era of what may be called counter-Enlightenment, where knowledge instead of being regarded as a liberating event begins to be seen as the principal instrument of oppression and subjection. An analytic of the complicity of knowledge with the given power structures of society and its entanglement into individual’s own biology and biography leads to a more emancipated view of the life of individual in his collectivity. Knowledge or truth is by itself of no consequence; what gives it the value of acceptability and authority is the force of institution and the truth games it plays. The game that the truth plays, moreover, is a political game - there is a politics of truth which is more important than the politics generated in the name of truth. The event of knowledge is, in other words, entwined with the event of power. It is however trite to say that knowledge engenders power, the more important fact being that the power engenders knowledge. The ‘politics of truth’ or the ‘politics of knowledge’ is a large subject with Foucault; but in Derrida too it makes sporadic appearances and even serves as the underlying theme of his deconstructive enterprise. Quite early, i.e. in his Of Grammatology, he made the line or linear writing responsible for all authoritarianisms, of power [flays and even wars. The writing of linear signs requires writers or scribes who then as authors become authorities or priests or kings. The sign as logos thus gets entangled into a game of power even as it engenders a culture of knowledge and a knowledge of culture. The transition from logocentrism to phallogocentrism is always smooth. To write is to enter into the realm of right and truth, make a party out of it, lobby for it, create enemies, accumulate weapons, conduct diplomacies, fight wars, in short, make a whole statecraft for its promotion and preservation. In fact, ‘the very sense of power and effectiveness in general, which could appear as

Ill guch, as meaning and mastery... was always linked with the KKsposition of writing’, said Derrida. (OG, 93) It is, however, not merely that the culture of knowledge is fot the back of the strategies of power and domination. The fjjirth of knowledge itself is in the relations of power. Thus ^bucault too, in his very first work, would write (the full

t

citation will appear at another place) that ‘...all knowledge is linked to the essential form of cruelty’. And latterly,

phrasing Nietzsche, he would write, ‘...the historical ysis of this rancorous will to knowledge reveals that all vledge rests upon injustice... and that the instinct for vledge is malicious (something murderous, opposed to happiness of mankind)*. (LCP, 163) It was indeed this to knowledge that became for the later Foucault a great ccupalion which he pursued till the end. What made all different human sciences instruments of repression, stice and untruth was their very self-perception that they I' >d for emancipation, justice and truth. Even ‘sex’, though insically a biological event and hence a principle of ration, was caught up in the binds of prohibitions and rdictions through this propensity for discoursing and wing. Knowledge was at the base of morality, which was urn the chief source of slavery and suppression.

112 punishes the individuals. Truth is empowered by the powers that be and truth itself returns the favour by favouring those same powers that be. Truth is king and king is truth. In this economy of power-knowledge, innocence is lost, the nature perverted and body sacrificed. Indeed, while power is by itself both repressive and counter-repressive, the power­ knowledge is only repressive and necessarily so. Post-modernism is not so much a revolt against power, which is undoubtedly repressive, but against knowledge, which is even more so. Power is moreover a fatality, the body itself. But knowledge is a superfluity, a construction and interdiction, an interruption of the body. Indeed, had the power not been productive of knowledge, it would hardly have merited any type of censure. Knowledge is repressive because it arouses a 'will to power i.e. a will and a consciousness or soul. Knowledge produces the soul and then brings the body under the suzerainty of that soul. The body .is thus enslaved through the stratagems of knowledge. The crucial question which at this point arises is that if knowledge was productive of soul it must be prior to soul, and if it was indeed so, then what was its site? Was it the body that had the knowledge with itself? If so, then knowledge must be ‘natural’ for the body as much as is power. The other question is whether it is at all possible for a bio-reality to be the site of a principle which is derided precisely because it is transcendental. Finally, why should knowledge be derided when it is known that there is no going back on it? Knowledge is as much a fatality as power and if the two are entangled with each other, it is a situation that cannot be helped, that cannot even be mitigated. For knowledge, once it has happened, not only maintains its presence but has an inherent tendency to expand itself, to multiply itself. The fatality of knowledge cannot be reversed, nor its movement slopped. But even as the movement of knowledge cannot be stopped, its directions are amenable to

113 f grange. That is, it can be made more mystical, or more Rational or more scientific, or, even, more aesthetic. It is in tract not inconceivable to visualise a situation where all can Be had in a proportion and measure which is that of balance i,Snd moderation. : V The above was, however, only for the sake of argument. fThe position which is more amenable to common sense is Biat the site of knowledge cannot be the body, insofar as the former involves transcendentality while the latter is Characterised by the absence of it. Its site must be the non­

Body, the soul in other words. Neither the knowledge nor the sbul can be said to be a breach of nature or of some primordial pre-nature, when it is evident that these latter themselves appear only as factors of knowledge. Whether it fe? body or nature or pre-nature, they are all recognisable, Identifiable, acceptable only in the context of knowledge. They exist only because they are known to exist. Knowledge ftkelf is primordial - in its creativity and criticality. The first Human couples learnt the names of the things as soon as they discovered their humanity. The fact however that they discovered’ it does not mean that it came later and was preceded by a pure physicality or biologicality. For how

unter-scheme of amoral transcendence. There is here, on pne hand, a Paul-like aversion to law and, on the other, an erne hedonisation of body to be used as a means of re­ eling the self-loss. In order to realise one’s original pality, it is not enough to disrationalise, but also to ^cialise and de-ethicalise. For, in the end, it was the ?nal self which was also the social and ethical self. It was, lly, in the domain of reason that the tendency to ^ersalise and to make judgements consolidated itself. The 1 to know was also the will to judge: the Truth was also .Right and vice versa. One must therefore tum one’s back n morality as one recoils from the quest of knowledge truth. 'he ethic always moved in the realm of thought and if ght is shown to be moved by unthought, by an inert g, then the possibility of an ethic becomes permanently srmined. Insofar as the post-modernity realised the ial possibility of the unthought, it also restrained itself i proposing ethical or moral codes. The thought is itself a i of action, and so are therefore our so-called moral ements. They are no more the productions of our derations or even for that matter the dictates of our pence. Nor are they social conventions or utilitarian ces. All judgements, like all thoughts, being actions are fally neutral. For one action cannot be the judge of her action. The cult of morality, whether of a personal or :ical kind, was as repressive as the cult of knowledge. It ( repressive because it formed part of the powerw I edge syndrome, which by creating a fiction of self

142 proceeded to make it a good or bad self. What was then required was not so much to go beyond the good and evil as to move behind or beneath them, to realise a state whicti is that of ‘before’ of that distinction. From thought to action, from deliberation to impulse and from judgement to mon­ judgement - these were the factors that constituted the post­ modern displacement of conventional moralism. ‘Modem thought has never, in fact, been able to propose a morality.’ And further, for modem thought, ‘no morality i s possible’. This was realised by Foucault early on in his TT'ie Order of Things (328) i.e. when he had not yet come to systematically think, as he later did, on ethical and political issues. For a long time Europe has acquiesced to an ethical paradigm which was determined either by Stoic or Epicurean conceptualities and which was not substantially changed in modem times either when morality was secularised or rationalised. The real break occurred with Nietzsche and Freud and Marx who demonstrated in their own respective ways the untenability of morality as they also uncovered the realm of unthought. But while Freud and Marx occa-siona-l ly wavered, or at least their followers tried to extract some moral imperative from their systems, Nietzsche alone stood his ground, as he spoke of ‘beyond good and evil* and also ‘trans-valuation of all values’. Heidegger,* Nietzsche’s disciple, was even more severe in his moral rejectionism, even as he accused the master of being still a bit accommodating of it In Nietzsche’s projected endeavour to ‘revaluate all values’ and to ‘establish new values’(as he phrased the subtitles of his magnum opus The Will to Power) Heidegger would see ‘his entanglement in the thick-et of the idea of values’ and ‘his failure to understand its questionable origin’. The philosopher, accordingly, in the estimate- of Heidegger, ‘did not attain to the center of philosophy... ’ (1M, 199)

M3 For Heidegger, as for Nietzsche also, ethics, like many of jer branches of philosophy, was a Socratic invention, ilosophers before him having neither philosophy nor tics. In fact, it could be said that the Greek world before crates as a whole did not have any ethics at all. It was a >rld illumined by the penumbra of gods who always only Ed and never did any thinking or theorising; they preferred be amoral rather than caring to be either moral or immoral. ie gods however fled when Socrates began to speak of towledge’ and ‘virtue*. Though still not daring to be an believer, his faith in the gods was not of unflinching kind d he also occasionally expressed his disgust at the moralities indulged in by the gods and goddesses. His ^cessor and follower, Plato, though more stubbornly thful, was still a bit wary of the ‘stories’, which he desired t to be narrated before the common uninitiated audience. It is, moreover, he who sowed the seed of confusion by. Hing the highest idea as the ‘Good’. Though the idea of kxI was still not for him what in a conventional sense is ,en to be morally proper, it was yet a mo.del, a model of all )dels, a supreme model, a perfection. A certain kind of Jue then came to be attached to it as the value itself was vested with a certain kind of being. Aristotle and the Stoics M Epicureans completed this process of progressive Realisation of being and of reification of values. 'This mini-narrative of progressive spiritual decline, bugh not incredible in itself has, however, another side rich while not being any the less significant in itself, also mplements and completes the picture. In this other part of iry, the gods, while appearing to make an act of appearing, do not disappear at all. That is, both Plato and crates on the one hand and Aristotle and his successors on other, remained under the shadow of gods and the orality characteristic of them. Socrates never acquiesced the charge of atheism and Plato proposed severest

144 penalties for all potential and suspected unbelievers. For Socrates, moreover, (though he moralised a lot) the highest virtue was still the ‘knowledge’ i.e. a quasi-mystical intuition of concepts. He also often claimed to have been restrained by his ‘ daimon’ in his misadventures, though this good daimon never stopped him from his believing in an Apollo or Athena, in being a drunkard and homosexualist and a teacher of ‘tyrants’. Socrates, in fact, could be said to be the first known practitioner of that peculiar saintly morality in which the ordinary mortals remained bound by the ordinary codes of ethical rules while the saint himself lived above those rules. Socrates worshipped Apollo and followed its ethic of moderation, as against the Dionysian counter-ethic of excess. But while observing Apollo’s motto of ‘nothing in excess’ Socrates was still holding on to a doctrine of rationality and science which made him take a plunge back into the same Dionysian orgiastic excess from which he claimed to separate himself. Needless to say, Plato followed his mentor in all these aspects of his faith and practice, being even more under the influence of Orphism and Pythagorean ism, which were variations of Dionysianism. In this historical scenario, Aristotle’s case seems to be a little apart. Being less of an ascetic, and genuine rationalistic tendencies being stronger in him, he was less prone to fall to the lure of saintly meta-ethicalism than were his predecessors and successors. Though at a certain level he does give in to many pagan proclivities and retains the Socratic-Platonic fascination for contemplative life, ethics attains in him a certain kind of autonomy. In him also, as we know, man for the first time comes to be recognised to have a ‘social instinct’ and is said to aspire to live a good life - the ‘good’ here not being a mere idea as in the case of Socrates or Plato. He, moreover, realised the importance of striking a balance between contemplation and action; and in his famous idea of

145 re golden mean, he virtually established a golden path of frtuous living. But insofar as the gods still cast their shadow, Bntemplation remained the highest virtue and morality’s elapse into non-morality remained an important element in system. The philosopher in his ideal state was still a Warrior and a councillor who had the natural right to rule and aTpress the common people and the barbaric aliens. The will 3 pity in him too was not supplemented but supplanted by ip will to power. For Aristotle, man was not merely a social but political pimal, i.e., while being social was for him a matter merely S’ instinct, being political was the expression of his whole

atlire. Man’s living a family life was the manifestation of ffis social instinct, but his being a citizen of a state was the ?su!t of his political nature. Far from being a mere accident, bfall or an evolutionary product, the state was the ‘whole' Sjhich lay as much at the beginning as at the end of man’s natural history. The state as a collective organism contained flSn’s individuality as its part and as its creation. The state, Moreover, was founded on the will to dominate and sbjugate, as against the.family, whose basis was merely the fill to associate and co-operate. The first was political with Bower as its essence while the second was social with pity as internal nature. Although both had good as their goal, political good was not the same as ethical good. Ethical good gas courage, temperance, friendship, etc., but the realisation Ff political good was in the establishment of justice through fegression and domination. The slave, the women, the alien ltd the commoner must be brought under the rule of the pilosopher-warrior-priest. The latter category was human or uperhuman while those of the former were subhuman, who Could be fed, guided and trained so that they could serve and fenserve the humanity of the former, their natural masters. b

W It is essential for our forthcoming discussion of post­ modern ethics and politics to understand the reason behind

146 the Aristotelian relapse as mentioned above. Aristotle’s rationalist promise betrayed itself precisely for the reason that the reason the philosopher promised was still the traditional Platonic reason, which was contemplative without being conative. For him the world was still an idea with no will, and God too was only an unwilling cause of it. Even at the human psychological level, all he could think of was an affective self being squeezed between the higher rational and the lower appetitive selves. Now, the affectivity was an element of the pity syndrome, a principle of the ordinary love and affection giving birth to family and neighbourhood. It excluded the power principle which, thus excluded, naturally sought refuge with the higher contemplative self to make it a case of knowledge-power, as realised in the reality of the philosopher-king. Power was thus made to come under the guidance of knowledge and liberated from the constraint of the softer values of compassion and love. It is true that Aristotle spoke of equality and justice but, as in the case Of Plato, this equality was always the equality of equals, i.e. the philosophers (warrior-priests); and justice meant the subjugation of the common populace and non-Greeks. The pity principle was set at loggerheads with the power principle, with no possibility of reconciliation. It did not occur to Aristotle and to the Greeks in general that these two principles of pity and power could be reconciled, even integrated, only when they are seen as the twin manifestations of a higher principle of Love, which is itself integrated with the critical rationality. This higher rational love would not exclude the syndrome of values centred around the principle of power, as in the case of ordinary affective love, which is only another name for pity. It would also happen in this case that power would remove its distance from pity and would accept the latter’s restraint and guidance, as would the latter with former. Power and pity,

ermediate character’, as against the Europeans from ler climates who were spirited but not intelligent, and the ans from the warmer regions who were intelligent but not ited enough. Greeks were best becausewould they thus werereturn both sad of being two autonomous excesses, lligent spirited to enslave others and nd issueand forth from and theirtherefore originaryfitsource of Love, which free themselves. Being ‘spirited ’ here, however, was a ild also be a rational rather than irrational experience. lity of passion and not rational love; and this meant in this e one was either excessively loving or excessively hating e one in fact led to the other. In Aristotle, therefore, it was from the case of a right balance between either temptation and action or between acting with pity and I passion and acting with power and passion.

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148 totalitarian counterparts. But although in all these cases the power principle apparently separated itself from the pity principle, it was practically impossible for it to totally ignore or dispense with the latter. Power in fact needed pity to sustain itself; the first often opposed the second, but no less often supported it - if only to get its support in return. The Pope and king opposed and yet collaborated with each other, and even politically repressive regime of the Nazis had a romantic facet in which pity was almost absolutised. Absolute power always coexisted with absolute pity, and internal harmony could not be effected between them. The mklaise of this unnatural separation and association is present with equal force in the post-modem axiology, although here the old Greek paradigm of knowledge-power is inverted to make it into a paradigm of power-knowledge, and the modemist ethical positivism is replaced with a certain ascetic kind of amoral negativity. A radical denunciation of self and knowledge on the one hand and an equally radical renunciation of power and pity on the other, though somewhat unique in the history of Western thought, has had, however, its parallel in a creed like Buddhism. Here too nirvana is said to consist in self-loss and the denial of will. The denial of self indeed leads to a denial of will and this amounts to denial both of will to power and will to pity. All that remains is a body and its impulses and actions, which are in themselves ethically neutral; though for some reasons of social convenience they might subsequently be invested with value and may even accordingly be praised or censured. Pity and power, divested of their subjective reference, become objective forces to be studied and analysed and also to be exercised and suffered. Unlike in Buddhism, however, where pity somewhat overshadows power, in post-modern thought a reverse situation obtains. The idea of power here predominates in the discourse (though what sustains it from behind is still nothing but the same pity idea) after having

149 isformed itself into ‘biopower’. Power is biopower ^use there is no will to power. The site of power is an ividual’s body and not his mind. Man, in the new political course, is a body which exercises power, which is litical. Man thus here remains a political animal, as before; fact, he becomes more strictly and literally so. Jt may be appropriate to recall here that even for a ilosopher like Nietzsche, power was still understood in ms of a ‘will to power’. But for Foucault, Nietzsche’s lent disciple, the will must altogether be done away with that power is analysed in its pure externality and in its alb *vasiveness. Power as biopower defined human reality, jch was biological rather than mental or rational; and as :h, says Foucault, it permeated the whole of its individual d collective existence:

But in thinking of the mechanism of power, I am ^ thinking rather of its capillary forms of existence, the point where the power reaches into the very (grain of individuals, touches their bodies and inserts itself into their actions and attitudes, their discourses and learning processes and everyday Jives. (PK, 39) je attempt here, however, is not so much to shift the power )m a subjective to an inter-subjective or from a ychological to a social level (insofar as the social and interbjective still have reference to a self or subject) as to effect ‘de-intemalisation’ of it. It was, in other words, to study >wer not from its ‘internal point of view’ but rather in ‘its iemal visage’. The question in this changed perspective is > longer, WHO exercises the power over WHOM? Or WHAT is s condition of mind and what the aim when an individual lercises the power? from being a matter of internal iperience (enjoying or suffering it), it becomes a matter of

150 application and exercise. There is a ‘field’ where the event of power works, where it finds its subjects and objects, and where it meets and mingles with actions, other events and processes, which are conventionally called subjective or social. Power originates from the body (which can neither be subjective nor social) and effects a self which, says Foucault, in turn, in its relation with other similarly effected selves, creates society. This is one of the important theses suggested by Foucault which he connects with his rather central and larger theme of power-knowledge. But before we enlarge upon this theme, it is necessary first to consider the precise nature of extension that the concept of power undergoes in his hands and where we can say he follows the right track before losing the way. We saw a little while ago how Aristotle held power to be essentially an affair of state and how he excluded the family from the ambit of its operation. He did this in spite of the fact that he regarded the master-slave relationship to be equally an ingredient of the family life along with the one obtaining between husband and wife. But what lay at the heart of this relationship between the master and his slave, if not that of domination and power? And was not even the husband invested with power in being regarded as the master of household? Indeed, it could not even be said that in these relationships the flow of power was one-directional, i.e. the man exercising power over the women, children and slaves. The latter in their own different ways and in different degrees and measures would attempt to exert power over the former. Power may thus have a more diffused operation than its conventional Aristotelian'view would allow it. The state, indeed, may or may not be an extension of the family (Aristotle said it is not) but the power principle cannot be said to have a movement only of descending order. The movement of power must be seen to be both of descending as

151 Bell as ascending order. The subjects of a stale are never Rreft of power, as they have a measure of power which they fen exercise through acts of dissent and protest and even by Eking in revolt against the rulers. But, more importantly, in

ftieir own daily commerce with each other, i.e. as members of fefamily, a neighbourhood, or a community or nation, they remain in the vicinity of power. Power, indeed, can be said to fe'the built-in feature of all societal relationships, whether

pey are of a ‘primitive* or civilised order. fe But while correcting the conventional

error

mderstanding power as an event which percolates oom the upper echelons, one also needs to be on guard femmit the opposite error, i.e. of thinking it to Movement only in an upward direction. This is

of

down to not be a what

Hhfortunately has happened with Foucault, who while rightly rejecting the Aristotelian position, made the opposite mistake conducting merely ‘an ascending analysis of power’. In mis other strategy, one would rather start from power’s k k. jk k

...infinitesimal mechanisms where each have their own history, their own trajectory, their own techniques and tactics, and then see how these mechanisms of power have been, and continue to

kr be, invested, colonised, utilised, involuted, p transformed, displaced, extended etc. by ever more n> general mechanisms and by forms of global k domination, (ibid., 99).

®ne perhaps does not really need this descending or ascending view of the movement of power which, as Eoucault himself says, is rather something ‘which circulates’ and functions ‘in the form of a chain’. While the danger in me former view is that power becomes too much identified kith the ‘state’ and its related categories of sovereignty,

gpbjugation etc., in the latter view it becomes excessively

152 ‘localised*. The phenomena such as ‘global domination’, ‘state repression’ etc. need not be explained in terms of the operation of power ‘at the base’ but in their own terms, i.e. as manifestation of the general and universal presence of power in all of our interpersonal interactions, whether at the top or at the base. The above may be a minor point of criticism which should perhaps not have been brought into our discussion. Bui it assumes a certain significance in the context of post­ modernists’ general (and Foucault’s particular) bias towards ‘localism’ (local knowledges, local struggles, local history etc.) which is at the expense of macro-level analyses and struggles, as we shall see later. To be fair to him, however, he does not underplay the role of state or its related institutions like the army, police, judiciary etc. as effecting power at a micro level: ‘I do not say that the state is not important; what I want to say is that relations of power, and hence the analyses that has to be made of them, necessarily extend beyond the limits of state.’(ibid., 122) This is as reasonable as it could be. There is always a sense in which one can say that power is not only beyond but before the state. It is not the state which effects the power, it is rather the power which effects the state as it effects so many other institutional devices to regulate or repress (as the case mpy be) individuals. The state effects other relations of power but is also, in turn, effected by them. The state is, in fact, an element, though a massive one, in a large field of power relations which precede it, mould it and modify it. The slate power as ‘meta-power*, though invasive and to a large extent also oppressive, is yet rooted in some more basic forms of power applications, with their prohibitory and repressive effects. The view of power as being identified with subjection and subjugation was popular during medieval and even postmedieval times. It underwent modification but was not

153 istantially changed when, in the eighteenth century, losophers mooted the social contract idea in political ory. For while the king was now displaced or empowered, the state was still safe with all its affiliated titutions of coercion and control. The sovereign, while sinvested of his divine right was not divested of ‘right’ as h. The people now vouchsafed him the right and this fact de him no less self-legitimated in his eyes and hence no ; determined to exercise it over the people. The plutionaries who shouted ‘Death to the king!’ and tnoured for liberty were not yet quite emancipated from .desire for subjugation by a sovereign. They willingly rendered all the powers they had at their disposal to this ereign in return for the safety of their life, property and tour. Instead of challenging his powers, they would rather □lore him to exercise power over them. The head of the ,g was never cut off in the domain of political theory, said ucault. The substantial change, however, occurred when Marx reduced into political theory the ideas of class and class pggle and redefined power in terms of class oppression. ie old equation of a king and his subjects or the ruler and j ruled was replaced by a new equation of oppressors and e oppressed. The distinction of one class from the other, ?ugh originally made on economic lines, was later allowed jassume a political dimension too. The state too was no □re an expression of human nature ora divine chastisement even a breach in the ‘state of nature’. In the new nception it was a by-product of some socio-economic pcesses of history in which the dominant classes used it as strument to perpetuate their exploitation of the deprived asses. Ibis was an economistic theory of power because ire the forces of production were made to be responsible for e circulation of power in a given historical or cultural jlieu. And although it differed in many ways from the

154 classical and eighteenth century theories of power, it was yet in certain crucial respects a retention of the latter. For the social contract theories too were not without their economism, insofar as they considered power as a commodity possessed by people which they could barter or exchange in expectation of some tangible return. As for the ‘non-economic analysis of power*, one can find during this time two main theories competing with each other. One was ‘Reich’s hypothesis’ (more easily identifiable with the name of Freud). This defined power essentially as a mechanism of repression i.e. the repression of nature, of instincts and of individual personality in general. The other approach, called ‘Nietzsche’s hypothesis’, described power in terms of a war of all against all. Power, instead of being invested in individuals, or in groups, or in classes or institutions, is regarded as man’s basic propensity to either commit aggression against others or fight the aggression committed by others against himself. The aggregative man, according to this view, is in a state of perpetual warfare and it matters little whether the war waged is in the name of defence or offence. A war is fought not only when two groups or two classes or two countries confront each other as mutual enemies; the war continues even when the peace reigns, when everything is in its place, when there is no apparent sign of aggression or violence or conflict? The will to power is insidious and does not require actual conflict for its material self-manifestation. Man plays the game of power even when he is in love (Nietzsche) or when he makes love (Foucault). These two models have the theme of repression as a common element, and together they can be called the ‘repressive hypothesis’. This hypothesis, quite popular in the later half of the nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth century, explained the power in terms of‘war-repression’ as against the ‘contract-repression’ scheme of the eighteenth

y

155 jtury, in which power was a matter of barter and bargain. >both the schemes, however, the power was a negative jgjit, an overbearing force, a principle of prohibition and ferdiction. It materialised itself through the state and pugh a law whose essence was ‘thou shalt not’. It, groover, operated in order to curtail the liberty of individual jot Lo actually enslave him. Though otherwise necessary, it te yet an evil which could be tolerated but never positively predated. Like the medievalists and eighteenth century fctract theorists, Freud, Marx and Nietzsche also regarded jyer as a negative force which would bring no good. The Terence in their individual standpoints was that while Marx taalised the eventual withering away of the state and Freud ? Jheld it as his pious hope, for Nietzsche and others it was inevitability which man was made to suffer at the hands of kuel nature. Modem political theory, evidently, has moved

kaway from the old Aristotelian view of the state as the pediment of power and something which represented od and justice, besides being a total expression of human fere. ut would then seem that the modem Europe, in spite of its Mjlar revolt, was still burdened with the medieval legacy of fel and Augustine, in which power was a denizen of the city world, a sin and a symbol of lust for glory and aggression, fe pursuit, the exercise, the enjoyment of power was

Saintly and a violence against nature, whose command was per love, pity and self-abnegation. The will to power must Suppressed and surpassed by the will to pity. But, as it ripened, this view while preaching the supremacy of pity er power, also at the same time accepted in principle the |£ne right of a king to rule and oppress; and sought to uce, in principle again, the power of priests greater than the Sver of the king. The new secular Europe, after denouncing ? power principle, indulged it with great elan - though, £restingly, all in the name of individual liberty and social

156 amelioration, i.e. pity itself. Countries were colonised under the principle of compassion (to shed the white man’s burden) and wars were fought to establish in other countries equality and liberty. Europe’s involvement with power, therefore, was in the nature of both an excessive abnegation and excessive indulgence. It never occurred to European political theorists that power was as much a positive force as pity, and also that pity could be in a great many situations as much a source of evil as the power in certain other situations. They could not theorise about a view of human nature in which pity and power could both be positive and negative forces at the same time - positive in the a priori synthesis of love and negative in their excess and their mutual exclusion. For it was by separating itself from power that pity became isolated and excessive and, as a result, even more tolerant of power, making it thereby itself become isolated and excessive and oppressive. Neither classical, nor medieval nor modem thought could ever conceive of this higher conception of love. Love was always thought to be at the level of pity, which was only an aspect of it, and could even be its negation when made excessive. Power too was negatively estimated, as it was not seen as being merely the other side of pity and the manifestation of the same love icjea. Europe surrendered to the cult of power through its obsession with the axiology of pity. Does post-modernism reverse this negative order by recognising in its turn the positivity of power? Read for example the following:

...But it seems to me now that the notion of repression is inadequate for capturing what is precisely the productive aspect of power. In defining the effects of power as repression, one adopts a purely juridical conception of such power,

157 one identifies the power with a law which says no, power is taken above all as carrying the force of a prohibition. Now I believe that this is a wholly negative, narrow, skeletal conception of power, one which has been curiously widespread, If power were anything but repressive, if it never did anything but to say no, do you really think one would be brought to obey it? What makes power to hold good, what makes it accepted, is simply the fact that it doesn’t only weigh on us as a force that says no, but that it traverses and produces things, it induces pleasure, forms knowledge, produces discourses. It needs to be considered as a productive network which runs through the whole social body much more than a negative instance whose function is repression... (ibid., 119)

t this statement, while on the surface clear and categorical, fet not free from its ambiguities. To say, for example, that ver is productive is not same as saying that it is positive, least not for Foucault who wrote the above. It is true that er produces things, events, discourses, self etc., and is probably at the heart of social progress. But are not the social progress, knowledge el al. the very things which the eyes of philosopher constitute the prison in which ’s body is trapped? Power therefore here remains ressive in spite of - or, even perhaps for the very reason of t’s being productive. One can indeed see in Foucault’s pus of ethical writings a most devastating critique of /er, especially as it manifests itself in the form of powerwledge. The positive (‘the creative’) side of power, however, erges where it functions as a principle of resistance against ^apparatuses of power. It is important to remember that the srcise of power takes not only the form of oppressing

158 others; it also equally means to struggle against the oppression. The essence of power does not lie only in the affirmation of it but also in the negation of it. The application of power is both in repression and resistance. The latter indeed has an importance of its own as one could easily say that if there was no resistance, there would be no power relations. We are all in a situation of struggle, (‘in a strategic situation towards each other’) where the state and the state apparatuses are ready to subdue us by their force. But on the other hand we also have this ability to say no to this apparatus. This resistance is therefore the main word, the key word in the dynamic of power relations. To define power, however, in terms only of repression and resistance is to recognise it only in its two excesses and to miss what is its middle term. It is for one thing not entirely correct to say that power, when it is on the side of state apparatus, is wholly repressive. The state and its allied institutions, as the conventionalist would say, may have their own positive role to play in the establishment of peace and justice, in providing for the needs of its citizens and in putting up resistance against an aggressive neighbour - in which cases the so-called resistance against it will rather be an undesirable exercise. Both the repression and resistance in this view can alternately be good and evil. But to approach the question of power from the point of view of good and evil is, according to the post-modernist philosopher, to beg the very question that is at issue. For his standpoint is not that of a moralist, moralism being an ideology which carries the prejudices of a moral consciousness, or of the naivete of‘good conscience’. But no such consciousness or conscience exists, or if at all it exists, it is because of those very processes which are here being considered as repressive. Repression and resistance are not moral but amoral categories, morality itself being an element of the power syndrome:

159

And moral ideology - for what are our moral values but those which are over and over again ^associated with and reconfirmed by the decisions 'of the courts - this moral ideology... must be 'submitted to the scrutiny of the most severe icriticism... (ibid., 36)

is rather severe criticism of ethics was evidently in hsonance with the spirit of Heideggerian extreme ioral ism, which would not even tolerate a revaluation of fetes or invention of any new values. It was also in keeping pi the post-modemist rejection of rationality and truth. The ^rerne apoliticalism coincided with extreme amoralism: the aunciation of the principle of power led to the sunciation of the principle of the pity itself. fDerrida, who is not as prolific on matters ethical and litical as Foucault, nevertheless agrees with him gipletely on this issue. He too repeatedly asks whether ier the disappearance of consciousness and subject it is still propriate to talk of ethics and politics. His plea too is that ^universal judgements, whether made in the realm of truth (i morality, should be subjected to an even higher Igement, an even higher law of antinomy, if only to retain y residual notion of ethical or political responsibility: k £.To have at one’s disposal, already in advance, the generality of a rule... to have at one’s disposal as a given potency or science, as a knowledge and power that would precede, in order to settle it. the singularity of each decision, each judgement, each ■experience of responsibility,., this would be the ^surest, the most reassuring definition of [responsibility as irresponsibility, of ethics

160 confused with juridical calculation, of a politics organised within techno-science... (OH, 72)

We will come to the question of ‘responsibility’ and ‘irresponsibility* in Derrida’s philosophy a little while later. What in the meanwhile is clear from the above citations is that in opposing ethics and politics, what the philosophers are opposing are the codes of prohibitions and a politics rooted in the culture of knowledge. And this is what can be said to be a great mystification of which their discourse in general is a victim. For it is not at all possible to completely escape or skip the notion of value, or for that matter of good and evil, while writing on an issue like that of power and knowledge. To say for example that power-knowledge is repressive is already to enter into the domain of value; the same is the case when resistance is made out to be a great virtue (i.e. whether or not one calls it a virtue). Resistance is what makes the power creative and positive. Ultimately, liberation or emancipation remains the highest ideal; though it is another issue that what is here meant is the emancipation of the body and not the emancipation of the soul. The philosophical post-modernism realises the crucial importance of political action in the aggregative life that man lives in society. But keeping with its de-theorising pretence, it is averse to dabbling into the questions of the origin of state, of its being in accordance with or opposed to human nature, and of there being an ideal state etc. Far from envisaging an ideal state or fixing ideals for state, it sets as its principal task the criticising of all such idealisms, besides exposing the hidden and not so hidden processes whereby the state subjects the life of individuals. The state, along with all its allied institutions, has its historical origin, and is hence the proper subject matter of an historical criticism. This may at one level be an academic exercise; but more than that it is also a form of action which resists the state repression. The

161 ifference of this practice with the older idea is that while in le latter the resistance or struggle is waged in the name of a igher idea or ideal, for the former no such ideal exists and ■« struggle is a continuous and natural process. The dominant word in the conventional political axiology of course ‘justice*. It is both a personal virtue to be iltivated and an object of our collective political action. Our niggles and our wars are waged in the name of it and it is so often made to be the chief concern of the state. But isn’t justice always been an elusive and a highly abstract leal, which is more talked about than really realised? Plato Id Aristotle spoke so much about it, and yet for both of fem it led to a notion of class hegemony by philosopheramors. Further, neither the royalist reactionaries nor the emocratic libertarians nor the socialist revolutionaries can e said to have succeeded in realising a reign of justice. That je recent endeavours of Marxists to create a just society ave ended up in the creation of gulags and concentration mps is now a well-known fact. Keeping in view these storical experiences, isn’t one justified in concluding that hatever model of political action one chooses, the lainment of justice remains rather a doomed exercise. It is however not man's historical failure to come up to his vn ideal of justice that keeps the post-modem philosopher ray from it. In his case, there are more theoretical reasons, le first is of course that there is no ‘nature’ of man as such give him really a concrete model for just actions, scondly, he does not believe that while waging a war ;ainst an enemy, an individual (or a group) is goaded by the nsideration of justice, even though he may make a great etence of it. The class struggles and wars are political tions whose essence is a quest for power and not a search r justice. Justice is always an afterthought, a ‘thought’ and ■ such merely a facade for the actions that the party hcemed involves itself in. Not war in the cause of justice

162 but justice in the service of war is the reality of our political existence. In a debate with the famous linguist, Chomsky, Foucault proposes the above view bringing in his support the unlikely authority of Spinoza: ‘The proletariat doesn’t wage war against the ruling class because it considers such a war to be just... (But because) it wants to take power. And because it wants to throw off the power of the ruling class it considers such a war to be just? It also, moreover, happens that while the ruling class invokes talk of justice in order to serve its purpose, eventually, it is the weak and the oppressed that seek benefit from such talk. Nietzsche is here appropriately remembered and referred to:

If you like, 1 will be a little bit Nietzschean about this; in other words, it seems to me that the idea of justice in itself is an idea which in effect has been invented and put to work in different types of societies as an instrument of a certain political and economic power or as a weapon against that power. But it seems to me that, in any case, the notion of justice itself functions within a society of classes is a claim made by the oppressed class and as justification for it. (FHI, 138) *

It may be repeated that what is being questioned here is not this or that conception of justice but the concept of justice itself, which is held to be a theoretical construct and a product of rationalisation. As a concept, naturally, it belongs to the secondary domain of mind and not to the primary reality of body, whose characterising features are instincts, impulses and actions. The mind thinks of justice while the body exerts power. The body exerts power or resists it or surrenders to it or flees from it. Justice is about motives and

I be completely just. Further, given human frailties, it is 163 impossible too that one’s ideas about justice are flawed, do any of these considerations, or even all of them put ether, take away isthe genuineness of reactions. the idea of justice Mentions but power about actions and Although f isIf? not said in so many words, the call here to reawaken in

han the voice of his animal self can hardly be missed. Foucault, as just said, was here in conversation with omsky who, despite having himself a position which dered on anarchism (‘anarcho-syndicalism*, as he calls it), > yet not prepared to subscribe to an absolute reduction of lice and to believe instead into a cult of power and mality. His arguments are simple and commonsensical. len, for example, someone engages in some kind of itical struggle it is often, though not always, due to the ception that the existing conditions of society are unjust, t they are exploitative and oppressive and that the new iditions that he envisages will prevail as a result of the cess of his struggle will be just, or, at least, more just. For it is possible that ‘just’ or ‘unjust’ may after all be only relative categories, aspiring, but never managing to be Absolute. It is also quite obvious that no social system, ivever competently its bases may have been constructed,

I

164 individual level it is more probable than improbable that a person allows his prejudices to mar his perception of true justice, are all arguments in favour rather than against the idea of justice. For the more one falters in giving or getting justice the more one cares about it, thinks and feels about its need and its possibility. But though justice in this sense may be an intellectual and emotional need of man, Foucault - as an anti-intellectualist and also an anti-emotionalist - persists in explaining justice exclusively in terms of power. But if justice is at stake in a struggle, then it is an instrument of power; it is not in the hope that finally one day, in this or another society, people will be rewarded according to their merits, or punished according to their faults, (ibid., 136) Or, further:

I do not think that as far as aim which proletariat proposes for itself in leading a class struggle is concerned, it would be sufficient to say that it is in itself a greater justice. What the proletariat will achieve by expelling the class which is at presept in power and by taking power itself, is precisely the suppression of the power of class in general, (ibid., 138) But isn’t ‘the suppression of the power of class in general’ by itself intended to serve the cause of justice? Foucault, evidently, does not believe this to be so, as in his view it is never a case of power for justice or even power against injustice but rather a case always of justice for power or power against power. It is of course obvious that the question ofjustice is entangled with the question of power and that the

165 lisation of the first almost entirely hinges upon the linment of the second. The struggle for power therefore t the proletariat wage against their oppressors may at least bretically be also a struggle for justice. It should of course be nobody’s case that in all possible Nations power serves the end of justice, or even for that tter, that in all cases it serves the cause of injustice. It was eed because of Foucault’s own convoluted belief that Ver, especially emanating from the powerful classes, is ressive, that he ruled out any possibility of a harmonious itionship between power and justice. It would never occur lim that power could be both just and unjust - and on the ' of both the powerful and powerless. The truth of the tter is that while there are power struggles waged in the ne of justice, there may also possibly be power struggles the sake of justice. In the debate Chomsky refers to his own personal iggles against the establishment, especially the one he ged on the Vietnam War issue to drive home the point that tice was a real concern and not merely a ruse for personal class power. But to understand Foucault’s position, one i take an episode from his own life which demonstrates st tellingly both the strength and weakness of his ument. One day while watching on television a iumentary on the Palestinian struggle, he heard the ement of a soldier saying that he did not really know the se he was fighting for and yet he was fighting because he I in him this urge to fight and win the battle. And this de Foucault exclaim, ‘that is it!’ The identity of the soldier s not revealed, nor was it necessary, for he could be from ler side of the battle. The conclusion that Foucault drew m the statement was that wars and struggles are waged der the condition of an animal impulse to fight, to minate and to conquer and not for the sake of some ideal freal justice.

166 Now one can be entirely blameless in wondering whether Foucault is justified either in his argument or his conclusion. Can one say with any claim to plausibility that in the above case no issue of justice was involved? For, given all the historical reasons, only one party of the dispute could be on the right side, putting the fight of the other party on the wrong side of justice. This is not to say that the issue of power is not involved. Power is involved here on both sides of justice and injustice, though one can have one’s preference which party one chooses to side with. After all, it was Foucault himself who took the side of the Israelis, despite his revolutionary sympathies; and Chomsky supported the Palestinians despite his being a Jew. Clearly, for both it was not idiosyncratic prejudgement but their individual sense of justice that decided their respective sympathies. A radical critique of the idea of justice leads Foucault to make an equally radical critique of the ‘administration of justice’, involving the courts, the judges, the judiciary and the law on one hand and the police, the prison, the penal system etc. on the other hand. It was necessary to recognise in the first instance that a revolutionary condition will brook no quarter for either the courts or the judges; these may even be the primary objects of attack by the revolutionaries before the success of revolution. This is because they are the foremost among the institutions which perpetuate the oppressive order; they are the main symbols of a state’s repressive apparatus and the preservers of its ideology and interests. The courts certainly do not represent the interest of the masses as they are not established, nor run by them. It wasn’t the peasants, nor any other section of the pleb, who invented the judiciary. It was rather the intellectuals, who arrogated to themselves the authority to formulate and legislate laws, appoint judges and provide the judicial machinery with the support of the anny and police. They claimed they knew the requirements of society and would meet them with the ends of justice. But

The judiciary is the state’s bureaucracy, and as 167 all eaucratic apparatuses would be abolished in a The judges,state, however much theyjudiciary. may make to the olutionary so will be the Itsclaims retention justice they conceived and administered was entirely in [bontrary, are neither third nor a neutral party. They are part form, whether onaaown temporary or permanent basis, would service of their class and against the common W the bourgeoisie and represent their interest in full. Who aunt pie. to retention of state itself and might eventually prove rafter all gave them their ideas of justice, and the right to undoing of the revolution. Revolution, insofar as it [enforce it upon others? They are also the beneficiaries of the )licates mass action, is synonymous with the termination > System in terms of salaries, perks and their distinguished any judicial system. For its status in the ordinary ^social status. They not only exert but also exude power by idnditions of society is that of a mediator, of a third party I sitting in the middle while making the two parlies of a Phich supposedly arbitrates between the class and the mass, .dispute stand on either side of them. Through their seating £hich takes the two sections to beserious on equal footing and "arrangement, their attire, gestures, demeanour, and Maims totheir represent the interests of both. indeed thinksThey that & through neutralist pretension, they It create justice. £he two classes have a common need to be protected by a pronounce one side as guilty and the other side as innocent in teommon civil and criminal law. But neither are the interests a manner which suggests they already know and have with W the two classes the same, nor can the application of the | them a fixed definition of guilt and innocence. A person l^ame laws grant justice to both in an equal manner. The justice meted out in this situation would be the justice of the ^bourgeoisie and for the bourgeoisie.

i

168 indeed becomes guilty not so much because of his actions as because of the judgement pronounced on him by the judge. The system of dispensing justice as it obtains in our culture, contrary to popular assumptions, has not always been there but is a result of the corruptive influence of growing civilisational tendencies. Earlier there were neither permanent judges nor codified laws, nor an army or a police or prisons as instruments for administering justice. It used to be a simple matter of two disputing sides agreeing upon a third party to arbitrate on the matter of dispute. But during the Middle Ages, the propertied class began to appoint judges as it saw in them a potential source of revenue and also the exercise of power. The ‘judges’, who came from the same landed class, earned a lot of money by imposing fines on and confiscating the properties of those whom they pronounced guilty. For the victim, on the other hand, it meant being rendered financially destitute. But apart from this ‘fiscalisation’ of justice, an inversion also took place in its dispensation as it was no longer considered to be a matter of right for the victim to receive, and a duty for the arbiters to provide, justice. Justice rather became a right of those in power and an obligation for those who were at the receiving end. When the king’s power grew, this system consolidated itself by bringing into existence the instruments oftthe army and police. For all these historical reasons, Foucault is totally opposed to. the present system of dispensing justice and would like to replace it with what he calls ‘popular justice’. This popular justice is so called because its execution is handled entirely by the ‘people’ - and not by the ‘people’s courts’, where a few members of the revolutionary army fixed the amount of guilt and punishment to be given to class enemies. It was also not some kind of‘counter-justice’ where an alternative strategy to bring the culprit to book would be envisaged, still involving the judges, the courts and court

169 reedings. True revolutionary or popular justice would er entirely dispense with courts and judges, just as it ild also do away with the procedures of law, which is in i backed by the police and prisons and penal system. The ges would have to be removed, precisely for their claim of ig third parties and upholders of law and representatives universal justice. The revolution should abhor resentation in any form as it is the basis of all kinds of dlectualism and conservativism. Revolution means setting : masses against their class enemies in a straight bloody counter, in letting power confront power. It should be just it was during the French Revolution when ‘prisons have en opened, the judges thrown out and courts closed down’, pular justice is vengeful besides being anti-judicial and ^-judicial.

In the case of popular justice you do not have three elements, you have the masses and their enemies. ^Furthermore, the masses when they perceive lsomebody to be their enemy, when they desire to .punish this enemy - or to re-educate them - they do not rely on an abstract universal idea of justice, they rely only on their own experience, that of injuries they have suffered, ...and finally, their decision is not an authoritative one, that is, they are not backed up by a state apparatus which has the power to enforce their decisions, they purely and simply carry them out... (PK, 8-9) i one already scents blood in this account, a fuller picture is ven which is also suitably exampled: I

..... it seems to me that a certain number of habits r which derive from private war, a certain number of ancient rites which were features of ‘pre-judicial’

170 justice, have been preserved in the practices of popular justice: for example it was an old German custom to put the head of enemy on a stake, for popular viewing, when he had been killed ‘according to rules’, or ‘juridically*, in the course of a private war, the destruction of a house, or the burning of timberwork, and the ransacking of the contents of house, is an ancient rite which went together with being outlawed; now these are acts which predate the setting up of judicial system and which are regularly revived in popular uprisings. The head of Delaunay was paraded around the captured Bastille; around the symbol of the repressive apparatus revolves, with its ancient ancestral rites, a popular practice which does not identify itself in any way with judicial institutions, (ibid., 6) An event of popular justice though necessarily involving blood and gore, however, may not necessarily be a mindless upsurge, but can as well be based on deliberation and collective decision.

I think... that acts of justice by which the class enemy is repaid cannot be limited to a kind of thoughtless, instant spontaneity, unintegrated into an overall struggle. It is necessary to find forms through which this need of retribution, which is in fact real among masses, can be developed, by discussion, by information... Or, a little later ‘there will be discussion among the workers and a collective decision, before any action is taken*, (ibid., 29) But, as the use of the word ‘limited’ in this citation shows, the dominant mode of action would still be a

171 feciless elimination of enemies propelled by the fentaneous urge to take revenge and with an utter disregard Sthe so-called norms of justice and fair play. In fact, the festion of inode of revenge is not important in itself; what is ffiportant is rather the fact that for centuries the masses have fefered at the hands of the state, its judiciary and its police ma army. And it is necessary to root out these apparatuses by ffly means available and in such a manner that no return of fem in any form is possible. The stick must not only be bent Sd turned to other direction; it should rather be permanently feken.

■ The message and import of the above citations must be ^arly recognised. The masses must not seek justice but feenge; and in seeking revenge they should not bother about feng justice themselves. For what is important is not getting ^giving justice but power, and the power lies in exercising fffhrough resisting it. There was then the paradox: power repressive and must be resisted to eliminate it; but the Esistance was possible only through accumulation of more fever, by setting mass power against class power, by ^pressing the oppressor. The power as a repressive force fes not eliminated but consolidated further, sustained in a ks

lightened form. The stick, far from being broken, was rather feained, though wielded by other hands. The goal of the end ^power found its apogee in the further strengthening of it. It was perhaps futile on the part of Foucault to have desired the pnd of power and perhaps also to think of power only in aegalive terms. Power is not only repressive or productively Qgpressive but may be made to have a positive, nonspressive dimension if applied in conjunction with the ideas Injustice and fair play. To retain this idea and ideal of justice uas the only way to avoid the paradox suffered by the nucauldian - or post-modernists’ in general - theory of Bgative power.

172 Be that as it may, Foucault was quite consistent in his proposition that not the thought but the action was important and the action, whether impulsive or deliberated, should be organised around the principle of resistance. The struggle might have an external veneer of some religious or secular ideology or some moral idea], but in its interior it should be entirely governed by the quest for domination or resistance to domination. It was for this reason that he supported the revolution in Iran, much to the surprise of his fellow intellectuals. This revolution was no doubt carried in the name of Islam, but from Foucault’s own point of view that was not in itself the essence of the event. The essential element was the frenzy, the intensity of commitment and involvement on the part of the whole mass of people, their readiness to indulge in violence and their preparedness for sacrifice. There was ‘demonstration’ in the most literal sense of the word of an ‘absolutely collective will’ which was not, like its Western counterpart, a ‘political myth’ or a ‘theoretical tool’ which ‘one would never encounter’. There was, moreover, ‘in these demonstrations .an act, a political and juridical act, carried out collectively within religious ritual - an act of deposing the sovereign’. (MPI, 216) Revolution was to be welcomed not for its ideals,„not for its lasting capacity - which was suspect - but simply for being an act of resistance, for its mass involvement and for peoples’ sheer desire to change their subjectivity, for seeking ‘something quite different’, for being a revolution as such. Ten years before this Iranian revolution, in March, 1968, Foucault had had the ‘good fortune’ of witnessing and in a sense participating in an event of similar nature which he said made a lasting impact on his mind and which almost convinced him of the truth of his political choices. During his stay in Tunisia as a university professor, there was on the campus a student agitation ‘of incredible violence’ which had Marxist undertones but which again was for Foucault ‘an

173 itirely secondary question* - not ‘the essential thing*. The pdents hardly knew much about the niceties of Marxist eory and yet their dedication to fight the oppressive system as total and ‘without the slightest ambition or desire for ofit or power*. (But doesn’t it go against Foucault’s own mention that struggles are always for power? The struggle s not for power and not for justice, and there was no :ological involvement either. Was it then a mere physical ponse to the physical oppression suffered by the students? ucault would say, probably yes. But if it was a physical ponse to a physical stimulus, where was the need of nging into the picture the question of ideology?) Foucault, in any case, praises the whole uprising as a iple act of resistance involving the risk of injury, arrest I even getting killed. What was resisted was of course wer’ - and not only the state power, but also the power t was ‘exercised within the social body through extremely erse channels, forms and institutions’. As compared to this le political experience’ the student uprising of May ‘68 in nee (though again ‘an experience of exceptional >ortance*) was rather a tame affair, in spite of the media >e that it received at the time and the changes that it ered into. The crucial difference between the two events > that while for the young people of Tunisia ‘Marxism did t represent merely a way of analyzing reality’, but also ‘a id of moral force, an existential act that left one stupefied*, , France it was a matter of endless debate, controversies, ctionalism, dogmatism etc. In conclusion, Foucault said, ‘It isn’t May of ‘68 in France that changed me; it was March ‘68, in a third world country.’ (RM, 132-44) . To move from Foucault to Derrida, one finds the position loth the reason and rhetoric of it - to be very nearly the me. With reference to the same ‘68 upheaval, he says hough he did not like a ‘cult of spontaneity* or even ‘a rtain naturalist utopianism’, he would certainly not

174 disapprove of it (he in fact confesses his participation into it). But what was of real importance was the following personal fact:

I would be tempted at first to say: I work without “imperative,” I work on the imperative... but of course this is not true. I obey and it is even probable that I bow down before an “imperative” with which I am at the same time trying fiercely to negotiate; only this imperative does not have an ideological, moral or political form that could serve as a representative relay of the one that has hold of my body and unconscious, like that other thing that watches me, that concerns me, heteronomizes me or erotonomizes me... (Poi, 59) As one can see, there is here same Foucauldian physicalism and an urge to act at the spur of moment and without recourse or reference to the demands of ethics, politics and ideology in general. Derrida reiterates this position again and again in different contexts in his later texts and interviews. We can probably afford to cite one more abbreviated passage where the same message is delivered with reference to the Gulf War:

And a decision (for example in politics) is always made at a moment when the most critical theoretical analysis can no longer modify irreversible premises. No matter how necessary and rigorous case one makes against Western, Israeli, and Arab-Islamic politics... the decision to be made (embargo or not, war or not, this or that ‘goal of war’) has to be made in a “today,” at a unique moment in which no past error or wrong can be effaced or repaired any longer. This

175 1 terrifying strategic wager cannot be guaranteed in advance, not even by the computation (always ; necessarily speculative) that a contrary wager I would have led to the worst... 1 merely wanted to suggest that any assumption of assurance and of non-contradiction... (is) an act of good conscience :and irresponsibility - and thus it is indecision, ' profound inactivity beneath the appearance of ' activism or resolution, (ibid., 361)

Sere was then in Derrida certainly a cult of spontaneity and so a call for return to a naturalist utopia (or dystopia) ore signs of which we will witness later. But though this is hat substantially unites him with Foucault, there is also a tint of difference which needs mention. It lies in the fact &t while Foucault speaks of ‘demonstration of collective 11’ and ‘mass action’, Derrida is individualistic and would, efer to be content with ‘quasi-communitarian’ struggles. i thus warns against ‘a fusionist, anti-unionist euphoria’ fd confesses his ‘trouble vibrating in unison*, (ibid., 348) deed, he doesn’t like at all the use of the word ‘community’ [ am not even sure I like the thing’) insofar as it implies, as ' often the case, ‘a harmonious group, consensus, and ndamental agreement beneath the phenomena of discord d war...* The difference between a community and a lasi-community is that while the former can easily be found formed, the latter is elusive, always to come, something rhich is coming’ but (therefore) “has not happened”. The oment it is found or founded, it will also be lost in the very -me gesture and at the very same moment. In this kind of ggregation, moreover, people will come together only bcause they ‘like the stuff and ‘signal their reception by oing off elsewhere, reading and writing in their turn together differently’, (ibid., 351)

176 This is, however, a theoretical position and has the additional merit of fully conforming to the deconstructionist formula. What one is not sure about is whether reading and writing ‘altogether differently’ would also permit accepting a human subjectivity; and also, what if someone doesn’t really like the stuff? The more important thing however here is to see that in all ascetic philosophies such as this where the power is denigrated as necessarily evil, the divergent tendencies of extreme individualism and quasi­ communitarianism on the one hand and of a collective mindless actionism on the other make their necessary appearance. This is because the identity of the ascetic is formed on the basis of his or her distance from the community. The proclivity for renunciation, however, does not prevent the aspiring saint from entering into eremetic orders or communes which are in their structure quasi­ communitarian. On the other hand, there have existed ascetic orders which revelled in underground conspiracies and terrorist activities. Right from the early Pythagorean sectarians to ‘Muslim’ sects such as the Assassins and many modem Western, Asian and Indian cults, the legacy of militant asceticism has perpetuated itself. Having renounced social living, an ascetic has also left behind the rules and norms and has consequently no compunction in pursuing an anti-social and anarchistic programme. The hatred of power, of centres of power, makes him or her suspicious of all kinds of authority and govemmentality (as has been presently seen to be the case with Foucault). This then leads him to think of overthrowing them by ‘revolutionary’ means. It is indeed a very strange situation, and yet quite natural. It is the evil of power that makes the ascetic apolitical, a political. renunciant. But the same fact also makes him politically hyperactive, to be combative and violent. He does not recognise the obvious fact that power is not inherently evil but evil only when artificially dispossessed of its internal

177 f content, when it is isolated from pity and made thereby •possessed. His predicament comes from his having led over the power to his ‘other’ (to king, state etc.) and ring only the pity to himself; and then realising that the T has come to reside in himself, that actually the other never outside him, never other than him. In his ideology, pity must be without power as the power must be without . But what actually happens is that power catches him up oon as he leaves it behind. In the name of pity he must t against the evil of power but a fight against power ady involves power. On the other hand, if he chooses not ight, this would amount to accepting the regime of power, jot rejecting the power. He would therefore sometimes it and sometimes withdraw but in both cases his position vulnerable from the point of view of his own ascetic Both Derrida and Foucault, as philosophers .of asceticism, 5 this acute dilemma and make strenuous efforts to get out it. Derrida, when presented with the alternatives of a Jitical voluntarism’, which he says he mistrusts, and its ►osite of ‘political involuntarism’, of which he says he is less wary, says that both should be practised and practised. He would admit to there being ‘silences’ and ‘a tain withdrawal* but would warn against exaggerating igs. (ibid., 86) One must take decisions and must go for ion but never forgetting the other imperative of indecision I inaction. Deconstruction requires and permits both, ere should be no mistaking of it being of ‘immobilist’ port, nor should it be misread as a formula of political Itique. It should be clear that there can be no political #rvention without voluntarism, morality and humanism, d that is enough reason to retain them in the register, but mgsidc this register, there should be another register for tering the criticism of these very doctrines. This double

178 gesture of keeping a register involving ‘two unequal necessities together’ is what deconstruction is all about. This deconstruction therefore remains a political act but its politics is so far removed from the normal type of politics (both of‘Left* and ‘Right* variety) that the term can easily be taken as being apolitical. There can be any number of issues (imperialism, colonialism, sexual violence, techno-scientific culture, etc., etc.) on which we must take an oppositional stand; but the opposition should not be done with the selfassurance of someone who thinks he possesses the truth or has the panacea for all political ills. The politics of deconstruction does not involve a critique of prevailing political ideologies or a critique of a particular event from the point of view of any of these ideologies; it rather involves not having a point of view at all and yet criticising, rejecting and resisting. To displace a political idea with the help of another political idea is to effect not displacement but only a replacement - it is a reversal that traverses itself. One can move a political idea from its place only by not moving it from its place or, and that comes to the same thing, constantly moving from one place to another place and not having a place, by making it ‘nomadic’ and marginal. Deconstruction, in fact, itself does not have a place, of its own to replace or displace any opposite of its own. In not having a place or perspective of its own, in not having a point or point of view, deconstruction normally disallows itself any right or any duty to oppose or destabilise any of the prevalent political ideologies. But the destabilisation of those same ideologies is still one of its foremost concerns. This double bind of course involves a self-contradiction and an aporia, but instead of being apologetic or defensive, Derrida makes a great virtue of it. To be caught up in this bind - to act while not acting and not to act while acting - this is not only an inevitability but the only act of responsibility conceivable. To act responsibly in a

179 yentional way, to act with ‘good conscience’, is in fact sponsible conduct, which is neither inevitable nor irable. The deconstruction of politics which in this way 11 ts from the politics of deconstruction, says Derrida, is in way an invention of his own. It was rather the hidden nda of modernity, something essentially implicate in dem political democracy. Democracy confronts its limits, closure as soon as it begins to operationalise itself. For in name of democracy one cannot say that only the antinocratic programmes can be opposed; in the name of nocracy, in fact, anti-democratic programmes cannot be >osed. It would be an act of reversal, an anti-democratic not to tolerate those who avail of their democratic right I choose to oppose the tenets of democracy. But political democracy is not opposed to itself as though n outside; it already carries a conflictual tissue inside If. In its original theoretical construction, it based itself on divine right of the ‘general will’ which in our times has ie to have a more mundane incarnation in the form of |blic opinion’. But where exactly is the place for this jlic opinion to take root and reside? Does it reside in the resentative bodies of parliament or outside it? Is it the d of state who embodies it or is it the intellectuals, social iyists, public interest litigationist’s etc. who articulates it? es it find its voice through the editorial columns of daily ^yspapers or is it the opinion polls that really concretise this sive ‘god of a negative politology’? Finally, is its best session to be found in the private views of philosophers, in what is alternately called a ‘silent majority’ or ^instream’ etc. Everybody knows that public opinion does i have an existence of its own, but is constantly created ough all these means. It is moreover always shifting, /ays changing its place, always ‘ephemeral’, meaning srally that which lasts only for one day. Now, something it has such a fleeting, nomadic existence cannot be

180 converted into a place for looking at others without doing a violence to itself. The present democracy, therefore, is no democracy insofar as it judges what it does not consider as its own to be its other. The place of democracy is not in the homogenised opinions of opinion makers, nor even in a ‘free press’, whose very name is the guarantee of censorship. The choice is not between concentration and dispersion but between the unilateral and the multilateral in the relations of the media to the ‘public’, to the ‘publics’. Responsibility, that is the freedom of the press and before the press, will always depend upon the effectiveness of a right of response', a right that allows the citizen to be more than the fraction... of a passive, consumer ‘public’, necessarily cheated because of this. Is there democracy without reciprocity? (OH, 105-6)

Democracy thus consists in the ‘right to response*, in right to respond, to- react, to resist. A persistent effort of resistance and refusal - that is what constitutes the act both of democracy and deconstruction. And this involves the refusal of democracy itself as also of deconstruction itself. In other words, if one refuses to bow before the negative god of democracy, or what may be called the ‘most nocturnal face of democracies as they are, presently', the act would be anti­ democratic, yet would not be condemned in moral or political terms. The ideologies of Fascism or Nazism are not to be morally condemned but only resisted, as also is democracy. If there is before one the fact of National Socialism, or even the Holocaust or Auschwitz, one always has the right of response and the duty to react, but also the duty to condemn it not and the right to remain silent, even to be silent over this silence.

181

...The surplus of responsibility of which 1 was just ' speaking will never authorize any silence. I repeat: responsibility is excessive or it is no responsibility. r A limited, measured, calculable, rationally

- distributed responsibility is already becoming-right of morality; it is at times also, in the best * hypothesis, the dream of every good conscience, in r the worst hypothesis, of the petty or grand 1 inquisitors. I suppose, I hope you are not expecting me simply to say “I condemn Auschwitz” or “I ' condemn every silence on Auschwitz.” (Poi, 286)

Kherrida was here defending Heidegger’s infamous silence jSker Auschwitz and his own silence over that silence. But in |^re sequel he also goes on to speak contemptuously (‘a bit IIndecent; indeed obscene*) of the mechanical nature of trials instigated against those who supposedly kept silent, or at st were not as eloquent as the accusers thought they should ze been. If indeed a trial were to be held, then many more ngs would have to be brought into consideration - for imple, Heidegger’s existential analytic, his deconstruction subject and the resulting elimination of the categories of lies and politics.

182 What right one has to force avowals of resistance or nonresistance upon others while giving oneself the assurance of a good conscience? There are these and a host of other questions to be answered before Heidegger, or, for that matter, anyone else is brought to trial. Silence on Auschwitz is unpardonable but so is the moralistic indictment of those who keep silent. To sum up, there is always an imperative of non-silence, of acting and reacting, but there is also at the same time the other imperative of silence, of not speaking in a mechanical fashion, a responsibility of withdrawal. This responsibility must be excessive, must not be measured, calculated or rationally distributed; not the prophetic ethic of moderation but the pagan meta-ethic of excess. In the prophetic-rational morality the imperative is ‘never exceed’. Resist evil by all means but never exceed. And if perchance you are unable to resist, in that non-resistance also do not exceed. When not in a position to put up a violent resistance, you should al least not keep silent or at least think against the evil. And when putting up a resistance, still do not go beyond the limit, beyond the measure i.e., becoming yourself an oppressor. A rationally distributed responsibility always takes a middle course - of neither being excessively withdrawn and silent nor being excessively indulgent with the desire of Retribution. This is a programme of neither-nor, which is the inverse of the neither-nor of the ascetics, where both silence and non­ silence are excessive i.e. in the form of either excessive silence or excessive non-silence. One observes excessive silence in keeping silent over Auschwitz (as a singular event or as an instance or metaphor) or keeping silent over that silence. This silence when not condemned, condemns itself; and when it does not condemn itself it condemns those who condemn the silence. Thus in condemning others, its other, it becomes self-condemning. In the older asceticism the silence hid itself behind the cloak of

183 y and forgiveness but it was this- pity which allowed pchwitz to perpetuate and multiply itself. In post-modem eticism the pity is made to disappear, at least from the Eace. What is on the surface is power which is either jressive or counter-oppressive. There is no forgiveness, y revenge, as there was earlier only forgiveness and no enge. Europe docs not explore the possibility of an ethic ich permits both forgiveness and revenge, both pity and yer in their mutual sync as resulting from their noness. yhere is no will to pity, no will to power, no will at all I that is the guarantee both of silence and non-silence, of ision and decision:

To remain undecided means to turn oneself over to jhe decision of the other. There has to be a decision, as 1 was saying a moment ago: don’t take my picture. This means that in front of me there is another, with his or her camera and look... Indecision, from this point of view, is in fact being unable to decide as a free subject, “me,” free consciousness, and thus to be paralyzed, but first of ^11 because one turns the decision to the other. In the case of Abraham, it is effectively God who decides. That doesn’t mean Abraham docs nothing; he does everything that has to be done, but he knows in a certain sense that he is obeying the Other; it is the Other who will decide what “come” means; that is where response is.’ (ibid., 149) That is where response is’ is, however, only half of the tence, the other unwritten half possibly being ‘that is

ditional type of determinism, its effect is to reduce man’s itics to a monkey business in a Pavlovian laboratory. In

184 post-modern discourse it is not only the reason that is to be exceeded but the will too. The responsibility is response­ ability i.e. an animalistic ability to respond and react. Not the mechanicality of reason and elhics, but a mechanicality which should still govern our conduct. We reach back to Foucault’s animalism with the only difference that reason and ethics here are not rejected but only transcended, exceeded. Our apparent decisions are in no case ours but some other’s; it doesn’t matter whether this other is a God or a demon or an animal. Abraham surrendered his will to the will of God; Derrida, his distant descendent, surrenders it to the animal of his unconscious. But is God really the other of Abraham and not his own subjectivity, as Kierkegaard said? Can one not say that it was the voice or will of God that kept itself behind and before the voice and will of Abraham? Can one not take the line that it is the will of God that guarantees the will of man and the absence of one implicates the absence of other? Should it ever be possible to say, I will, therefore [ exist and therefore God exists? Or, in a reverse way, that God wills therefore God exists and therefore man exists? Insofar as God and man are homologous figures, the will of one must imply the will of other and that means not only that God’s will is man’s will but also the other way round. What is important in this axiological scheme i» that there does not remain a movement from extreme passivity to hyperactivity and back, as in the case of both Derrida and Foucault, who remain the contraristic figures of extreme resistance and extreme non-resistance. In one of his late interviews, for example, when it was mentioned to him that the reading of his books had an absolutely anaesthetising effect on the social workers in the prisons, Foucault did not deny the insinuation but admitted as much to be the case. (FL, 283) But then he went on to say that this was what was exactly intended to happen. He was after all not a philosopher who would give the ‘social workers* a

185 lilosophy or a programme or strategy of action to work ith. He would, in fact, not really approve of these social jrkers having a philosophy, or even going on with their dgramme of social work. What right or duty did either tucault or social workers have to meddle in an affair that is strictly between the prisoners and their oppressors? A lilosopher must not be a reformer or a revolutionary or a int or a prophet. A moralistic critique of the system is adequate from the start, as also its defence. Foucault indeed, like Derrida, was ever eager to ttinguish himself from his Marxist peers who had erything in their intellectual kitty, namely, a political rilosophy, political ethics, political programme and strategy d so on. For himself, he said, none of these can really jrk, nor is there any reason for anyone to work himself on sm. And it was not only Marxism that suffered this sability - the disability extended to all past and future Jitics. In fact, the more the language of revolution is oken, the more will there be a continuance of the reign of wer. If the power is to be eliminated, if the stick is to be bken, the motivated action must be shunned even if it Bans demobilisation. ‘ With this kind of ‘unrevolutionary’ stand, it was natural at both Foucault and Derrida were constantly harangued by b leftist intellectuals who charged them for being neohservatives, reactionaries and even the last bastions of urgeois resistance. This last of the epithets was used by ne other than Sartre against Foucault, who in his turn was lick to remind him the days when he [Foucault], as a ember of the Communist Party, had made the same charge ainst the senior philosopher. Besides their anti-leftist etoric, there were some more positive reasons for these ilosophers to be seen on the side of status quo. The chief tong them was undoubtedly the ‘localism1 with which they ed to replace the universalis! politics of the Marxists as

186 well as the liberals and democrats who preceded them. Foucault, particularly, who had already talked of local knowledges, local rationalities etc., extends this peculiar idea to cover the domain of politics as well. Since power does not percolate from the top downwards but has instead an ascending movement, it is natural that the dismantling of power structures should start from these lower strata. Thus it is not the sovereign or his strategic allies who have to be overthrown, or a revolution brought out along class lines. The resistance and struggles must be directed against the more immediate enemies like the landlord, the contractor, the prison official, the local police, the judge etc. There has certainly to be a struggle; but it must be spontaneous, unmediated and localised, instead of being on a grandiose scale and mediated by intellectuals or a party of revolutionaries or social workers. . The idea of a local struggle invokes the figure of a ‘specific intellectual’ who is the counter-image of his predecessor, the ‘universal intellectual*. The latter is a man of universal knowledge and an upholder of the cause of truth and justice; he is also the representative, the spokesperson, the consciousness and conscience of the oppressed masses. He possesses a grand schema of social transformation and also a grandiose strategy for effecting it. The specific intellectual on the other hand is man of local knowledge, of local concerns and expertise, a specialist of his subject. His struggle is at the level of housing associations, hospitals, prisons, universities and schools and family and sexual relations, etc. As he is involved with such ‘everyday* affairs, his is hardly an engagement that can be called political in the usual sense of the term. In this latter sense, he can even be called apolitical. But his is still a political concern insofar as his action is where the real power is located. This alternative form of political engagement and this figure of the specific intellectual have indeed been present in

187 Europe ever since the end of Second World War. While it fas the physicist Oppenheimer who gave the lead, his xample has been followed by many of his second-generation uclcar scientists, along with biologists and more recently the harmacologists, computer experts etc. The specific Hellectual, moreover, is not a ‘writer’ either of the failosophical or literary variety. He does not write satires

gainst the system nor does he make a holistic critique of it. Hstead, drawing on his own specific experiences as the pecialist of his field, he raises the specific issues which pncem the specific groups. He uses his expert knowledge to R reate n the existing centres of power and is in tum nireatened by them. There is then a direct struggle between

ne repressive apparatus and this ‘intellectual’, who is no nore the spokesperson of others speaking for and above ;nem. Foucault, for obvious reasons, empathises with this figure fthe specific intellectual, though he says his function should e reconsidered (‘reconsidered but not abandoned’), without pwever specifying in what respects. What he might have J ad in his mind was the example of his own work in ssychiatry, particularly his book The Birth of Clinic, which rested a stir among professional psychiatrists who felt ireatened by it. The psychiatrists of course represented the Establishment of mental healing and were a fit case for being attacked. It was, further, Foucault’s Discipline and Punish mat made the prisoners rise in revolt against the prison Officials. This event made the philosopher quite satisfied with me effect he had wanted to produce with his book. In both mese books what had happened was that, instead of making Sny claim of discovering the truth or conveying it to his

mtended audience, he said he had produced ‘truth-effects’ which made the sections of affected people react the way Key should have done and also made the oppressors angry gvith his work. The crucial point here was not to let the

188 prisoners know what they should do, but to induce them to react and respond, to resist and retaliate. So while it was true that the social workers felt paralysed or anaesthetised, it was also true that the two involved sides were galvanised into action. The main idea here was to de-schematise the responses and allow the party concerned to improvise them in the given situation and at the given moment. For in any given situation of repression there may be thousands of ways in which an individual or a group might respond, and any attempt to restrict or prescribe it would be to fall into the trap of ethics or ideology or even party politics. As Foucault says:

And if I don’t ever say what must be done, it isn’t because I believe there is nothing to be done; on the contrary, it is because there are a thousand things to do, to invent, to forge, on the part of those who, recognising the relations of power in which they are implicated, have decided to resist or escape them. (RM, 174) In an almost identical language Derrida too would say: ‘Since the event in each time is singular, on the measure of other’s alterity, one must each time invent, not without a concept but each time exceeding the concept, without assurance...’ (Poi, 360) All in all, both philosophers believe in action and transformation but not of the kind the philosophers prescribe or formulate beforehand, i.e. before the event actually having materialised itself. It is clear that the local struggle, with whatever intensity and involvement it is waged, it still leaves the system essentially unharmed. But that is no reason to abandon this idea in favour of some universalist politics. Here the conservative face of the doctrine comes into sharp relief. But there is also another face, the other extreme, whose

189 icalism requires the ‘state’ to be undone through the ilisation of the masses on a large scale. There is again a 1 here - of local and specific struggles on the one hand of a totalistic upheaval on the other. Apparently, despite conscious attempt on the part of philosophers to deersalise their political discourse, they find it to be an ossible task. This was especially the case with Foucault , despite his anti-Marxist posturings, kept his line of munication with revolutionaries intact. He still talked of t transformations and used specific Marxist vocabulary i as ‘bourgeoisie’, ‘proletariat’, ‘struggle’ etc. He also i participated in anti-American and anti-establishment itions (to which however he made the dishonourable sption of keeping out whenever a demonstration was held nst Israel). Derrida too, as we have seen before, was an rist of sorts, though he always expressed his uneasiness eing a part of any collective or communitarian venture. Really, he said he was not an intellectual of Sartrian type, pven of Foucauldian type. To sum up this part of our discussion, we can say that e was in post-modem politics an unresolved tension veen localism and universalism, between conservatism ^.radicalism and between action and inaction in general, re was also a wide-ranging critique of prevalent as well Itemative systems, although at the methodological level it claimed that no ethical or ideological critique as such is sible. Furthermore, in spile of great disclaimers with ird to being visionaries or prophets, the tendency to jhesy was not altogether absent. See for example the owing comment from Foucault: ' think that in the history of the West we can dentify a period that in some ways resembles our >wn... I am speaking of the period following the Middle Ages. I mean that from the fifteenth to the

190 sixteenth centuries an entire reorganisation of the “government” of the people took place. Protestantism, the development of the great nation­ state... It seems to me that we are not very far from a similar period today. All relationships are again being questioned, and the first people to do so are evidently not those who manage and govern, even if they cannot fail to notice the existing difficulties. We are, I believe, at the beginning of a huge crisis of a wide-ranging re-evaluation of the problem of “government”. (RM, 176-7) We have already had the occasion to see similar sentiments being expressed by Derrida too. And that goes to show that in spite of their best efforts, the philosophers were yet not able to completely shake off their indulgence in an enterprise which can only be called rational-ethical. In fact, neither Foucault nor Derrida ever shied away from talking about the ‘transformation of reality*, though it is true that the terms in which they envisaged this transformation went beyond much of the conventional wisdom, including that of Marxism and liberalism. They of course did not work out any detailed schemes for their ideal societies, in the manner of Plato or Aristotle. But, then, it is not too difficult to visualise the scenario in the light of all that they said. This is indeed a task that we must dabble in even at the risk of eventual disavowal by our philosophers. It is of foremost importance to notice that in the post­ modern scheme the struggle eventually aims at overthrowing the stale apparatus along with its allied institutions of repression, viz. the army, police, judiciary etc. But though these centres of power will be dismantled, the power would still circulate though its locus will shift from ‘soul* to body, from social individual to ‘individual’ as such. Power, in this situation, will no longer be a principle of ‘governance’ but

191 [11 express itself through repression or resistance. Some dividuals would have a natural urge to dominate and press while some others, equally fiercely, would resist and ht. There might at first be a third category consisting of ![£ se who are too weak to put up sufficient resistance, and zZj naturally be wiped out from the scene for the gnventional, protection of ‘law ‘ will no longer be available tthem. The new scheme certainly does not recognise any w except the law of revenge and retribution. Conventional w belongs to the realm of the soul, civility and sociality, pile the new law belonged to the domain of body. In mventional parameters, moreover, law meant prescription, hibkion and negation, which made it interfere with the rthm of the body. The body, instead of acting and reacting its own natural way, becomes subject to governmentality loses its elan. aws, in any case, are already a form of revenge though ?his case they have been appropriated by the state. As civil /s they produce a number of repressive apparatuses, like legislature, judiciary, police, prisons etc., which as lawing and law-enforcing agencies and acting in the name of ^tecting the weak actually become a source of domination £1 centres of power in their own right. In the name of □tecting the weak they in fact protect the strong. Because it the name of law that they prevent the masses from rising |Revolt against their oppressors. It is for this reason that the ses never like laws or the law-enforcing agencies. It is, ifer all not their law; it is not made by them but by others the bourgeoisie, who perpetuate their domination by }aking the masses law-abiding citizen, by imposing laws n them. The political theoreticians have also invented a of social contract, in which the masses have ndered their right of retribution to a sovereign who is hself thought to be above retribution. The sovereign

192 punishes generally' but is punished exceptionally. Laws always serve the cause of the oppressors. The most sinister aspect of the law is that it hinders the body from speaking its natural language and almost inverts the real face of justice as revenge. In the civic order, the offender is never punished for punishment’s sake; he is not chastised, not repaid for the offence he has committed. He is punished only so as to warn him not to repeat the act in future, to improve his behaviour, to teach him to behave. He is punished also in order to wam others that they should take the lesson and not think of committing misdemeanours. The punishment is therefore an exercise in giving moral lessons, an act of expiation and reform and an endeavour towards preserving the social order. The judge himself assumes the role of reformer, teacher and technician of the body. The judge doesn’t punish; he only corrects. He is a doctor who improves the condition of individual and society; he prevents these from falling into disorder. The judge also works for the elimination of violence and establishment of peace; he speaks for justice rather than vengeance. He stifles the voice of the body, restricts its movements and proscribes its desires. ‘When you are taught not to like violence, to be for peace, not to want vengeance, to prefer justice to struggle... you are being taught that it is better to have a judge than vengeance.’ (FL, 92) This is the work that the intellectuals and schoolteachers have done to great effect, and this is the work that social workers are still continuing to perform with great indulgence. In the light of an altered view of justice and punishment, the face of crime also changes. In the new perspective, the crime is no longer considered a sin or an offence against society. 'This latter view of a criminal act being a breach of social norms is untenable firstly because no such thing as society or nonns exists, except in the minds of some muddleheaded theoreticians; and secondly because it is a legacy

193 n former times when every criminal carried in him ‘a n of regicide’, and every criminal act was considered an 1 of rebellion against the king. As for crime being sidered in moral terms, Foucault is convinced that this is ly a bourgeois phenomenon. The bourgeoisie invented le*, appropriated it, eulogised it and sustained it only to itain their hegemony over the masses. There was a time n many acts of delinquency such as theft, murder, der etc. were considered more as acts of rebellion than as e. As late as until seventeenth century, thieves and lits were viewed as heroes by the masses and were even tologised. It was only later when the industrial society m to take shape that the petty thefts became costly and s considered as a public threat. It was the propertied class not the people who demonised the thieves, censured their ■and put them to death or into prison. The idea of theft is ntially linked to the idea of private property and a thief d as well be considered as ‘the redistributer of wealth’. ji a way one can say that crime as an ethico-penal gory was bom in our modem industrial society. What iened was that during this time there existed a class of !e other than the proletariat consisting of idlers, bonds, ex-prisoners, homosexuals etc. which was ;ed with a very high degree of suspicion by the emergent geoisie class. In the work and wealth culture which then ailed the presence of such people was regarded as of tivc consequence, while some of them were viewed as 3g a grave threat to the system. In order to suppress these finalised people and at the same time to use them in their interests, the dominant class began to call them inals making them thereby actually criminals. While actions were condemned as acts of mortal sin, the riders themselves were put into prison in order to offset (potential threat coming from them. In the name of ility, this class of non-proletarian plebs was set against

194 the proletarian plebs (the morality being the ‘marriage contract’ between the proletariat and petty bourgeoisie during the entire second half of the nineteenth century) in order to benefit from their mutual conflict. The bourgeoisie worked on this particular class also in a variety of ways. A section of them was conscripted into the army which in turn was used to crush the workers’ protests. Secondly, a significant number of them was sent to colonies as cadres, administrative officers, police etc., to do the same kind of work of quelling the uprisings there, (Racial prejudice was inculcated in these people as they were taught to look down upon the natives.) The third and more longlasting course was to put them into prison calling them moral and social offenders. In prisons, moreover, they were taught ‘moral ideology’ so that they could develop in themselves a sense of guilt and being guilty. Lastly, the existence of crime and criminals.was made necessary for the simple reason that it justified the presence of police and prisons etc. For no crime meant no police and no prisons. The masses could be controlled, could be put in a state of perpetual fear and could also be prevented from a possible act of rebellion only through keeping this system of police, prisons, judges and the idea of crime. The ordinary masses could tojerate these coercive apparatuses only out of a fear of criminals and their possible criminal acts. The marginalised people were thus in every way a political class, a class of rebels who, unlike their proletarianised cousins, at first refused to subscribe to bourgeois notions of morality and peace and order. But, latterly, this class loo became ready to serve as the tool of repression in the hands of bourgeoisie. Crime in any case was a political event both from the side of oppressors and resisters, the bourgeoisie and the pleb. While foi the former, crime and criminal were useful categories in their scheme of domination, for the latter it was a way of demonstrating their

195 iance and contempt of an exploitative order. In the French rotation both the proletarian and non-proletarian masses k part and even now, in our own times ‘...there exist plutionary forces made up of just those strata which are irly integrated into society, those strata which are petually rejected and which in their turn reject the irgeoisie moral system.’ (ibid., 121) The ‘new revolutionary forces’- consisting of women, nosexuals, drug addicts, the voluntary unemployed, soners etc, - are engaged in a profound political battle linst society and its moral-political guardians. Insofar as y are attacked by society as criminals and insofar as they criminals attack society, they are the true post-modem olutionaries making up for the other segment of post­ dem politics. All criminality is politics and all true politics minality. The attempt by some Marxists to call themselves ilitical criminals’ as against the other ‘ordinary criminals’ lardly justifiable. A criminal is revolutionary and a crime a ip d'etat from below, (ibid., 120-1) iBut while politicalising the criminal all the way, in jther context Foucault says, his is no apology for crime or iromise of reward for the criminal. For though crime was a litical act, it could still be treated as an act of aggression ough again not as sin or breach of law) which would call * resistance and retribution. The ideas of crime and nishment may be retained but only in the forms of gression and retribution which have, however, no relation th the state or law. Physical assault, rape, murder or theft, must be avenged, though not by the state but by the fected party or person. Left to themselves, of course, these ople may ask for a punishment which would appear to far ceed the intensity of the crime committed. But that is no ison for a third party to mediate in the conflict. The fact, e logic of repression and retaliation would generate a lance of its own not requiring thereby the assistance of that

196 so-called third party. (In the name of mediation, indeed, it will act by itself as an oppressive agency.) Moreover, the ‘excess* in retaliation is not by itself bad, insofar a_s it involves bloodletting and torture. Foucault was full of praise for the Soviet system of punishment, which was at the time more physically oriented than the Western system. There may be contradiction in the Soviet penal system but ‘these are theories that kill, and bloodstained contradictions’. 5Vhal in fact is wrong in any system is not violence or torture but the ‘fear’ that it instils in the individual. Aside from the systems of justice and crime and punishment, Foucault had some very interesting things to say about the ‘bourgeois origins’ of the police, prisons and penal legislation. But in order to avoid making the discussion too lengthy, we may, for the present, gloss over them and Just note the fact that he, in all these critiques, was pursuing an uncivil agenda, though without ever giving explicitly any call for going ‘back to nature’. Unprecedented perhaps in the history of thought, either Western or non-western, there was here an assault on the very idea of civility, of a social mode of living and of norms and values. The presence of judges and the judiciary, of police and prisons, of democratic legislation, etc., which are otherwise considered to be sign s of civilisation and the progress of civilisation, are here condemned in categorical terms. Coupled with the eulogisation of crime and criminals, the whole discourse assumes the tone of being an uncivil philosophy and gin invitation to a total re-patteming of our individual -and collective living. But has Foucault gone entirely wrong in his critique of modernistic ideas of progress and civilisational positivity*? We, for one thing, need to leam to appreciate the many fine historical and critical points he makes with regard to the origin and functioning of the institutions that presently fill up our socio-political space. It is indeed quite possible that we

197 /ing in an over-civilised world and that we have taken ea of the neutrality of judges-, of the administration of 5 through penal legislation and through the institution of i and prisons too far. It is al so quite possible that by oning the idea of retribution in favour of ‘reform’ we not entirely served the cause of ‘natural’ justice. And irly, in general, one can legitimately argue that the law, morality, the system of justice and punishment as ring in our times is subtly more oppressive than it rs on the surface.

I

198 What post-modernism has totally ignored is the necessary in-built human urge to seek and deliver justice and to judge every issue in the light of the ‘facts of the case* and following certain civic procedures. There is (again) a necessary elementary civility in any practice of justice, even if it is predominantly based on the idea of retribution. At the most essential level, there is hardly a contradiction between the ideas of natural and civic justice, civility itself presumably being the extension of nature, at least of human nature. To describe justice entirely in terms of retribution and to shift its operationality from socio-civic to physical and individual levels, are reductive exercises which can never be part of human history. What is impossible to attain is not only the ideal of perfect or complete justice but also the ‘non­ ideals’ of uncivility and non-justice. The crucial difference, however, between these two impossibilities is that while the pursuit of the former may be a productive exercise leading to realisable consequences, the latter is a path sure to end in anarchy and dystopia. At the deepest level it is the difference simply of positivity and negativity, of moderation and excess. It may be emphasised again that the fault in Foucault’s thinking is not in his rehabilitating retribution but in doing it in a manner that excluded any possibility of reform. This was a reverse fallacy as compared to the modernist thinking that the age of retribution was finally over and that any falling back on it would be tantamount to a return to pre-civilised conditions of living. Both parties evidently agree that retribution belongs to savagery while the domain of reform is civility and society. Besides, there was also here the traditional presumption about the supposed dichotomy of soul and the body, of society and individual. In the attack on the reformist theory it is presumed that the soul and society are historical accidents and man was originarily an unsocial animal. On the other hand, the partisans of reform take it for granted that in coming to have a civilisation man has

199 together overcome what he thinks was his pre-human wagery, and there is an absolute impossibility of return. E,These were, however, highly questionable assumptions, as fc facts of case might be totally the reverse. The soul, * iety and civility, even history itself, has accompanied the

-(

jvidual body ever since the human complex has made its ance. One does not question here a pre-human phase fhis complex, but the claim that man is finally only his ly and no soul or that the presence of soul is in ignorance ■ dj knowledge. The reverse reduction - that man is only his oil and the body the soul's imagination - also needs to be picketed. What one needs to realise is that man is both his jjil and body, with the important rider however that while Se body exists in the soul, the soul does not exist in the

a

gdy. There is a fact of cohabitation which is neither ecidental nor reversible for either of them. It is therefore ntenable to think of a de-socialised retribution or a reform at Je expense of body’s urges. Power, both as repression and distance, has a necessary collective dimension which fact gwever does not take away the body’s or individual’s right full recognition. Man is his soul and also his flesh and hpod. There is in man the call of the animal, the call of njnger, of sex and of revenge alongside the soul’s own ravings for love and justice. The God of man must be both avengeful and merciful. jt.A balanced and integral outlook on the nature of the g|ationship between the body and soul on the one hand and retween the individual and society on the other would have ayed both the parties of modernists and the post-modernists rom the excess and deficiency of their respective positions m the question of law and justice. The modernist humanists g course suffered the illusion that a culture with secular Spowledge and a democratic procedure of law-making would msure social decontrol and a condition of human freedom, put the society whose freedom they pursued was the result of

200 a ‘contract’, and the soul whose emancipation they sought was a part and product of body. The modem soul was thus a ghost of its actual reality, and the society external and accidental (rather than internal and integral) to the individual. It was this fundamental misconception that made modernism such a colossal failure and caused the rise of an enemy from within itself. In the post-modem reversal, the philosophers attempt to dispense altogether with the notions of law and social justice, as they also try to exorcise the body of its ghost. The dispossession of the body, however, is not accomplished with a view to restoring it to its real owner, to its reality of soul, but to making it a reality in its own right which is an impossible task by any means. For a human body was a human body, a body of a soul, a soul which, moreover, was social and civil, creative and cultural. A socially appropriated justice was therefore not a condition of unfreedom nor the institutional control necessarily a form of. repression. But while calling post-modernism an exercise in reversal, it should not be forgotten that this reversal was internally motivated. For while between it and modernism there was a relationship of contrariety, there was also, and as jts cause, a fundamental commonality at the base. There was already a reduction of soul in modem philosophy which was seized upon by the post-modernists, who then attempted to unravel what was implicated in that reduction. For it was quite inconsistent on the part of modernists to disbelieve the reality of soul and yet go on with the programme of its edification. The fact of the matter was that all the notions of law, justice, social order, civic progress, etc., hinged on the idea of soul. And, consequently, it was impossible to jettison the soul and yet keep those notions except in a very precarious manner and on very shaky grounds. The post-modernists thus were not attacking the modernist beliefs on these issues from

201 butside, from a different vantage point, but from the same perspective and same vantage point.

A

It should be clearly kept in mind that post-modemists’ Sial target of attack was not so much the anti-democratic Sblitical ideologies or regimes as the ideal of liberalism and

ffis contemporary political manifestations. Indeed, if anything, pey partly empathised with the former, as is evident from the lualified condemnation of Nazism by Derrida and the Qualified non-condemnation of Stalinist rule by Foucault. These supposedly repressive regimes were agreeable to the Sctent they incorporated violence in their exercise of power, this advantage, however, they lost by otherwise imitating meir democratic counterparts in establishing a rule of law md a system of justice and juridical punishment. They were Enable to save themselves from the spell of the ideals of Kvility and social reform and from the ‘philosophies’ of rationalism and humanism. Finally, they also aimed at producing not a fearless body but a free soul, a good soul which will hold its tyrannical sway over the body and will restrict its free movement. They designed their strategies to ultimately produce docile subjects, subdued and wellKehaved citizenry and impotent bodies incapable of putting Sp resistance or doing individual or collective violence. They

Sso, again, like the democratic societies, handed over the fcsk of body management and body control to rchoolteachers, intellectuals and doctors etc. The two systems, therefore, while maintaining their nitward differences, were united at a ground level in their BEfrnmon belief in the cultus of law, justice and knowledge­ far as their ultimate acceptability was concerned, neither Md any advantage over the other and would not be accepted Sther for liberal or revolutionary reasons. Liberal ideology

F

s'

rad established itself as a result of a bloody revolution and mere was already enough liberalism in Marxist-socialist Evolutions. There was however a small difference in that

202 socialism’s was a borrowed evil, while the sin of liberalism was original and absolute. Foucault, in any case, was not prepared to buy the argument that liberalism, at the level of its principle, if not practice, was unexceptionable or unquestionable. ...There is a tendency that I wouldn’t give much credence to - of absolving a certain political regime of its responsibilities in the name of the “principles” that inspire it. It is democracy - or better still, the liberalism that matured in the nineteenth century - which has developed extremely coercive techniques that in a certain sense have become the counterbalance to a determinate economic and social “freedom.” Individuals certainly could not be “liberated” without educating them in a certain way. I don’t see why it would be a misunderstanding of the specificity of a democracy to say how and why it needs, or needed, a network of techniques of power. If these techniques are taken up by regimes of totalitarian kind, well: why should individuating the fact and putting it in evidence cancel the difference between the two realities and The regimes? (RM, 172-3)

It needs to be clarified here that what is wrong with liberalism - in both its principle and its practice - is not that it is less liberal, less than liberal, but the fact of its being liberal as such. Its evil lies in its spreading a culture of knowledge, its acceptance of the ideology of morality, its abhorrence of violence and its general programme of humanisation. It takes knowledge to be a source of emancipation, morality as a factor of social harmony and violence as savagery. It also tries to make the individual more and more human, more and

203 more humane, thereby creating a society in which crime is Bfcs and punishment more criminal. While not believing in

me transcendental soul, it yet believes in a phenomenal soul, care for it and in the process relegates the body to a Ew level. In the ideology of liberal humanism, the body does B>t remain a source of crime of a subject of punishment. The mows

K>dy is eclipsed, its calls ignored and its movements restricted - all in the name of a fictitious humanity. ■ The ideology of liberalism invites to itself its fundamental mticism from the perspective of power-knowledge. It may ® noted that power, when it is divested of its connection with justice, it begins to be understood solely in terms of Impression and resistance and its seat is also realised to be in me body rather than in soul or society. A body attempting regression on the one hand and another body trying to' resist on the other are the two ends between which power Sarculates and maintains a semblance of balance in the

gollectivity of individuals. This natural balance, however, is disturbed when the space for the movement of body is relocated, making it become rather a reciprocity between the Rate and its subjects or citizens. Now, obviously, while the Sate acquires the right to oppress from the consenting

mdividuals, these people also give up those rights in the felief that they have those rights. The social contract

neorists have invented for the fulfilment of their own purpose the idea of a juridical subject who willingly confers Spon the state the right to control and to punish him. This Subject was certainly not the ‘soul’ to which it succeeded in imc and which was a sovereign in its own right. It was rather ^subject - a subject of inquiry, investigation, domination and manipulation. The liberal idea established itself through this heory of subject and its subjugation by deploying a very vast md complicated grid of power-knowledge. r The subject was, however, not exclusively a liberalrumanist invention, based as it was on an earlier conception

204 from medieval times. The king at that time was considered to be a repository of surplus power, a proud owner of a double body, one of which was earthly and mortal and the other divine and immortal (the king always outlived his death). As against the body of the king, there was the body of the common man, which was docile and deficient. It was a minimal body, the ‘least body’, a non-body, a soul or a subject. The ‘soul’ was not ah illusion but a reality. It was not an image or affair of God and not tormented or punished for its original sin. It was a product of the elfectivity of power and tortured and punished by it. The liberal modernists accepted this medieval conceptuality, appropriated it by replacing the body of the king with a ‘body politic’- the state so called, as founded upon a ‘general will’ instead of a divine right. They mystified their discourse by not talking of soul but instead talking of a subjectivity or a mind or a consciousness. Theirs .was, moreover, a high-pitched moral discourse on freedom - the freedom of mind and by implication the unfreedom of body:

The man described for us, whom we are invited to free, is already in himself the effect of subjection much more profound than himself. A ‘soul’ inhabits him and brings him to existence, which is itself a factor in the mastery that power exercises over body. The soul is the effect and instrument of a political anatomy; the soul is the prison of the body. (DP, 27-30) In the liberal economy, the soul was the prison of the body and not the body the prison of the soul, as the ancients like Pythagoras or Socrates or Plato thought. But was there in this philosophical modernism a situation of reversal or reiteration? Had philosophical thought come full circle? For to say that the sbul was the prison of the body and to say the

205 itrary finally come to mean the same thing. When the hagorean ascetics uttered their formula, they aspired to pct the detachment of soul from the body, which aim the dem positivists also had in mind when they turned it und. There was certainly here a paradoxical situation ich could be explained only through the common uctionism that underlay the two apparently contradictory iroaches. There was also, moreover, in them (as said ore) a common assumption that the body and the soul re two opposite principles which would not happily labit but demand mutual isolation and sacrifice. Postdemism recognises the paradox but has no will to resolve >y doing away with the reduction. In fact, it not only sists with the reduction but also builds upon it its own fice of absolute negation. Modernism, while thus agreeing ough paradoxically) with the classical paradigm, had also plicated the post-modem valorisation of body.. ,,The modernist decapitation of body leads to some very inge consequences. For one thing, it leads to thinking that ;n criminal acts belong not so much to body as to the soul, tead of being taken as physical, which they are, these jpns are always psychologically contextualised, the ;stion of motive and intention raised and many other raneous (or, shall we say Tntraneous’) considerations jught in to explain them. Thus a rape is not simply an act aggression committed by one body against the other body ^-something more than it, something other than it, viz. a lent manifestation of some psychic disorder, some past ression, some abnormality and so on. Similarly, someone jht commit theft because of poverty, but since not all poor n steal, there must be something psychologically also >ng with this particular person to have committed this tic u I ar offence. An act of criminality, in other words, is ■er a real offence, never an act of aggression but only a inquency, an aberration.or abnormality. The criminal is

206 also hence not really a criminal but a patient who needed care and cure rather than punishment. Judges too, before passing their verdict, before determining the severity of crime, must first determine the extent of responsibility on the part of the offender. If for example he turns out to be a madman he is exonerated from any responsibility and declared innocent. In a criminal case, in fact, the judge alone is not the one who judges; before him comes the doctor-judge (remember, we have already met the judge-doctor) who passes judgement on the ‘state of mind* in which the criminal acted the way he did. A medical report is necessary on the sanity or otherwise of the accused. The doctors and psychiatrists, moreover, not only diagnose the mental condition of the accused but also tell whether he is dangerous to society, whether his disease is curable and whether he should be sent to a mental hospital, an asylum or a rehabilitation centre. Their services are also needed to actually help the convict in his rehabilitation as a normal and useful member of society. The medical jargon overshadows the penal one as the crime is reduced to a case of psychological failure. It would seem that in a given case of criminality, what is on trial is not the action of the accused but his soul. The soul is judged and the soul is punished. The action is at most a secondary element in the larger configuration comprising passion, instincts, infirmities, maladjustments, the effects of environment, heredity etc. A rapist or a serial killer may thus be sentenced for his offence but the judges will keep in mind his ‘perversity* or his ‘abnormality’ while passing the sentence. And in doing so they will also make it clear that what is being punished is not the crime but the criminal himself for his deviant behaviour, for his having strayed from the ‘normal* course of action. The sentence too, while apparently involving the body, will ultimately touch the soul. The condemned man will of course suffer in prison privation,

207 Jtrictions on food and clothing, sexual deprivation, etc., but l these are only meant to chasten him and remind him of his ligation of good conduct. In sending him to prison, oreover, care is increasingly taken that he should be put to inimum physical discomfort, and that other than his ivations, all other needs are well taken care of. Finally, if e prison conditions are not found to be up to the mark, if e administration concerned or the officials are failing in eir duties, there are the ‘social workers’ to remind them of eir obligations. The judges* own attitude towards the crime and criminals £ undergone a sea change. If the judge punishes, he does it Ith the utmost reluctance, almost apologetically, without ally any intention to punish. A delinquent, as a sick person, Jserves pity and not punishment. The question is also often ked whether punishing a murderer with death is not in itself :rime of the same kind; even, whether to punish itself is not :rime. The crime indeed is always committed in a disturbed ate of mind while the punishment is deliberated and blivered by sane and sober minds. To punish would erefore be a greater crime than committing the crime itself. any present-day liberal system, there is a universal horror r the death penalty. This is for the reason that the ychiatrist is never sure whether the accused has committed e murder in a normal state of mind. The judge himself is it quite sure whether he can order someone to hang whom i does not fully and properly know. Even otherwise, if stice is all about correction and transformation of one’s ul, the death penalty would be a useless exercise, perhaps a iminal exercise. To condemn someone to death is possible ily when there is a direct relationship between the offensive t and the punishment given for it. Punishment as justice, mishment itself is possible only in the form of retribution tting off of a hand for theft, castration for rape, beheading r murder, etc. (FL, 246)

208 One can easily imagine, however, what great horror such a code of justice would arouse in a modem liberalist. To him it is all savage and a return to a barbaric age. He has a fear of blood and considers violent retribution as tribalislic and uncivilised. Punishment should involve the body only minimally and must exclude torture and direct physical pain. In fact, not inflicting pain on the condemned man’s body and carrying out the sentence as secretly as possible are the hallmarks of the modem liberal system of punishment. Earlier, i.e. before the eighteenth centuiy, punishment meant both torture and the public spectacle of it. No punishment would be complete without torture being a part of it and without its being accomplished in full view of the crowd. Whether it was flogging, dragging, hanging or beheading, it was all done publicly and always involved the maximum amount of pain and bloodletting. The transition from the pre­ modem code to the modem one was an important moment. ‘The old partners of the spectacle of punishment, the body and blood, gave way. A new character came on the scene, masked. It was the end of a certain kind of tragedy; comedy began...’ (DP, 16-7) The comedy was of course the comedy of humanism and reform and the new, masked character was none but the liberal humanist himself. He was the one who spoke of humanising the punishment, of making it free of blood and torture but in turn made the whole society look like a ‘carceral’ or prison. Foucault speaks of a great ‘carceral continuum’. It would of course be an exaggeration to say that our whole society is a huge prison or even that the American or European prisons are the reflections of their respective societies. But even though not a prison, a liberal society is yet a carceral society insofar as it imposes on its people a very rigorous system of surveillance and discipline. A liberal society is a disciplinarian society because it discourages the individual’s right of independent action, ft will not only not allow an

209 dividual to kill or rape or steal but would also prevent him )fn taking revenge when he or she is attacked. It sees its rfection to lie in its ability to oversee, supervise, check, tin, regulate and control the individual behaviour. And it ways aims at normalisation. In the expanded carceral that we are in, each and every tion of ours is constantly observed and judged on the iteria of its conformity to norms and rules. In fact, it would •t be an exaggeration to say that we are living in a society judges: there are, besides the judges sitting in the courts, fe teacher-judges, the doctor-judges, the educator-judges, e social worker-judges and so on. The schoolteacher iches morality besides the alphabet; the doctor takes care of r health (both physical and mental) and the social worker rries the heavy burden of setting everything right. The Ages of normality have appropriated the right to punish and ►ndemn, exclude and confine all those who are not ormaT, who are aberrant, deviant, delinquent or criminals, fey keep a double register by having a right to punish on e one hand and doing it in the name of natural justice on e other hand. Justice is naturalised in their hands but at the e time de-natured. In the great social carceral the dividual is not only punished but also made to willingly cept the punishment. i It perhaps needs to be clarified here that in his critique of >eral attitudes towards crime and criminals, Foucault was vocating a position where crime would be taken more riously and the punishment given more severely. And this ^despite his earlier having spoken in praise of criminals and ^scribing criminality as an act of rebellion against the ptem. This was however by no means being inconsistent or ptradictory. For in decriminalising the criminality, he was ntesting the idea of crime as a moral-penal categoiy while ! regarding it as an act of aggression which called for enge. The crime was physical and morally neutral but

210 these qualities were snatched from it by a socially oppressive order and a system of institutionalised punishment. Crime as an act of aggression was something extremely serious and deserved severe punishment - but only by the aggrieved party. The evil of liberalism lay then in its reduction both of the seriousness of crime and the severity of punishment. The liberal society, moreover, while taking the individual out of prison, pushes him into the larger prison of a civil society, with its schools, universities, clinics and hospitals, etc., where the repression is more invasive though subtle and unseen. Foucault also bemoaned the disappearance of the ceremonial of torture and wanted the body and blood aspect to return. Above all, he was questioning society’s right to judge and punish. Man was a political but by no means a social animal. He was a political animal because he was caught deep into the network of the relations of power; he both enjoyed and resented power. But this did not mean that there was a society or a state whose job was to control and discipline the body. Both crime and punishment must be physical and justice too an individualised affair. One hardly needs to make any large critique of the extravagant suggestions made above except to reiterate the point that the ‘social’ is by no means extraneous to the ‘individual’. Moreover, since the circulation of power always takes place in societal relationships, bio-power as such cannot exist except in the form of socio-bio-power. Further, since this movement of power has its horizontal and vertical dimensions, some form of political organisation is inevitable. In other words, there is not only a need to retain justice as a socio-political category but also to provide room for reform in the domain of social engineering. The neglect of body cannot be recompensed with a corresponding neglect of soul. It must be recognised that the so-called individual cannot go back to his pre-social animality and that a ‘humanity’ is his fate and destiny. To recognise this humanity, to respect and

211 ork for it, is the raison d'etre of a given political ■ganisation, whether or not it takes the form of a ‘state’. iis organisation may be faulted for being too liberal or, en, for that matter, for not being liberal enough; but not for i liberalism and humanism as such. Be that however as it may, the greatest deception in the love analytic comes in the fonn of suggestion that a soul - a al soul - is produced by the relations of power instead of ting presupposed by them. It is of course always possible to ink that the relations of power, as also of pity, always volve the soul, or even that the reality of soul is materialised’ through those relations. But to say that the soul ' self comes at the end of a process whose source lies in a jdy is to violate all common sense. Traditionally, the gument has been that since animals do not exhibit any of ese relations, they are not to be recognised for having a self ither. But if it is argued that animals too have the tendencies f aggression as well as affection, the question then arises /hy are they not seen to have a self in the manner of humans i.e. a self with creative and critical abilities, and also not aving a state. The bind here is that on the Foucauldian ssumption either one admits the ‘real soul’ in animals too, it denies the relations of power and pity among them. If the ormer possibility is excluded and it is admitted as a onsequence that these relations exist among humans alone, hen the conclusion will clearly be that soul precedes the elations rather than follow them. For it cannot be argued that mly in some cases of animals the relations produce a soul while in others they do not. The more sensible and simpler hypothesis, then, is to believe the primacy of experience and its subjectivity in relation to the body, instead of reversing this equation. In other words, while there is a politics of experience, there is also an experience of politics which is also probably primary in the order of representation.

212 Conventional wisdom has made the exercise of power not only a matter of experience but also one which involves ‘freedom of will*. But this freedom is altogether ignored by Foucault to the extent that one hardly finds any mention of it in his prolonged deliberation on the problem. In any event, his animalism would have disallowed any such indulgence. But, surprisingly, towards the close of his career, that is, a little before his death, in an essay he not only accepted the possibility of freedom but asserted it in strident tones. Since this represents a certain retraction on his part of his earlier stand, we quote the passage in full: When one defines the exercise of power as a mode of action upon the actions of others, when one characterizes these actions by the government of men by other men - in the broadest sense of the term - one includes an important element: freedom. Power is exercised only over free subjects, and only insofar as they are free. By this we mean individual or collective subjects who are faced with a field of possibilities in which several ways of behaving, several reactions and diverse comportments may be realized. Where the determining factors saturate the whole there is no relationship of power; slavery is not a power relationship when man is in chains. (In this case it is a question of a physical relationship of constraint.) Consequently there is no face-to-face confrontation of power and freedom which is mutually exclusive (freedom disappears where power is exercised), but a much more complicated interplay. In this game freedom may well appear as the condition for the exercise of power (at the same time its precondition, since freedom must exist for power to be exerted, and also its permanent

213 f support, since without the possibility of F recalcitrance, power would be equivalent to a |j. physical determination). (SP, 221; see also FF, 12)

Blear and categorical as is the message of the above citation, gie element of ambiguity however re-enters when in the Rnmediately following passage, Foucault again talks of not Breaking of ‘essential freedom* but of an ‘agonism’ of a relationship which is at the same time ‘reciprocal incitation pad struggle; less of a face-to-face confrontation which Paralyzes both sides than a permanent provocation*. It would pen seem that Foucault was still not ready to renounce his Basic position of man being in a fierce power struggle based gin mutual provocation and involving a situation of physical Rom bat.

> In the course of the development of his thought, indeed, boucault not only never felt obliged to review his

jphysicalistic position hut made it further complicated by Adding a new element of pleasure in the power-knowledge Krid to make it three-dimensional. Power, he said, not only produced knowledge and a knowing subject but also desires land a desiring subject. There was certainly, again, not already pt hand a subject or self with its desires; it rather came into existence as a result of same mechanisms and processes of [power which were responsible for the creation of a cognitive

pSelf. Power created desire instead of being created by it and it ^aroused desire instead of repressing it. Foucault here again ^overturns the established position of the Freudians, who said Jjthat power is repressive as it forces the desires to go ^underground and take refuge in the domain of the ^unconscious. He completely rejects what he himself calls the ^repressive hypothesis’, saying that there is no proof of it

I either in history or in philosophy. Power is not only not ^negative in the realm of politics but it is also not so in the peconomy of desires. Power is productive as it incites and

214 excites. It produces a discourse of sex, sets in motion the processes which finally culminate in sexuality and then in sex itself. It is power which brings sex to the centre of man’s desires and pleasure and eventually defines man’s self­ identity. Sex, like man, according to Foucault, was a nineteenth century invention, which came close on f > heels of the discovery of sexuality in the eighteenth ce .ury. Before that, i.e. until the end of seventeenth century, aere was no sex or sexuality; it was only ‘flesh’, with all its trappings and temptations and callings and confessions. The body was the seat of desire which had sinned at the moment of its origin and had continued sinning ever since. The shame and guilt of desire had therefore to be kept hidden or else given expression in the confessional box. The individual submitted his conscience to the authority of a director who in turn took cognisance of.it and gave advice. Power in this way intervened between the individual and his desire leading to the production of a discourse of it. The technology of confession employed during the Christian centuries did not come to an end with the close of the Christian era. In the following centuries the authority to extract confession was given over to doctors, parents, teachers and finally to psychiatrists. From the confessional box to the couch, sexuality travelled a long journey without however changing its basic form. There was on the one hand inquisition, inquiry, observation, prohibition, penance and gaze and on the other hand a plethora of discourses of both moral and medical types in which the desire and sexuality were determined. In our own times, this proclivity for discoursing expresses itself through erotic literature, magazines, pornographic films and such other sources. The representational nature of these media obviously obstructs the body from the realisation of its truth.

215 But though the technique of confession in its various es provides us with a thematic of continuity running from Middle Ages down to our own times, many important iges also occurred during this time. Beginning in the 'enteenth century, for example, there emerged the dency of the increasing ‘somatisalion’ of sexual desire, e shame and guilt attending it are no longer defined in ns of the relationship between two bodies - it is no longer sent in rape, sodomy, incest etc. Sexuality recoils in the .ividual’s own body which in turn becomes the centre and irce of all erotic delights and fantasies. Formerly, even rturbation was sex with another person, though in his or physical absence. But now all sexuality was a variation of asturbation. This auto-erotic paradigm, which lasted for put two centuries, eventually underwent a conspicuous in the eighteenth century when a new ‘pedocentric’ tase started. This was the time when infantile sexuality was scovered and made an object of intense surveillance and ntrol. A whole lot of discoursing, both of medical and pral kinds, took place in analysing this disturbing lenomenon. An inquisitorial gaze pursues the child in his sdroom, in his school, playground and such other places, le doctor declares it to be a great sickness and the moral ;ian a great sin. The greatest and by far the most significant change, wever, occurred in the nineteenth century when a ‘science sexuality’ was invented and along with it also ‘sex’, xuality was no more an instrument of pleasure but a easure in itself. It was an object — an object of desire, of nging and of knowledge. Sex became a truth in itself stead of being a truth of something else. It is true that there id been a ‘knowledge’ of sex earlier as well, but there was irdly as much theorising, as much observation and Lperimentation, as much discoursing and as much citement and inducement. In other cultures, among the

216 Chinese particularly, knowledge was always subordinate to pleasure. Whatever discoursing took place, whatever techniques or potions were invented, they were for the enhancement of pleasure through sex but not for the enthronement of sex. In modem Western culture, on the other hand, sex rules all the way; sex constitutes the essence of pleasure. Foucault himself wants this ‘monarchy of sex’ to come to an end. For too long, the Western man has been obsessed with this fetish of sex, considering it to be the very principle and ‘code’ of pleasure. He has also harboured the illusion that if he decodes this principle, if he removes all the interdictions, he will be able to experience more of his life. But what is required is not any decoding or any movement of sexual liberation or even any ‘revolution’. More sex would never lead to more pleasure nor more pleasure required more sex. One must rather work for the desexualisation of pleasure, and desexualisation of body. What we require is a revolution of other kind where the war cry is not more and more sex but the end of sex (like the ‘end of politics’ before). Foucault in this context praises the feminist idea, but only in that part of it where the female is denied being tin ‘object of sex’; not where the refusal is about her being a second or secondary sex. For the same reason he is highly depreciative (despite being himself a practising gay) of the current homosexual movement, which is centred entirely around the idea of sexual gratification. The restricted economy of sex must give place to the general economy of pleasure. Foucault, like Derrida, would rather like all sexual identities and all sexual differentiations to be completely abolished. There was, as Derrida said, a need for liberation from ‘liberation’ and the end of the gender identities.

Why don’t we turn our ears toward a call which addresses... above and beyond whatever says

217 t "me”, “my body”, as a "man”, or a “woman”, or tmy sex... To turn one’s ear to the other when it

speaks to “whom”, to “what”, to this “who” which [ has not been assigned an identity or, to either one fcsex or the other. (Poi, 163) h

aucault, on the other hand, sees peration/revolution to have already arrived:

this

other

B*■i

F A movement is taking shape today which seems to f me to be reversing the trend of ‘always more sex’,

Lof ‘always more truth in sex’, a trend which has E doomed us for centuries: it’s a matter, I don’t say Lof rediscovering, but rather fabricating other forms F of pleasure, of relationships, coexistences, Lattachments, intensities. I have the impression of Lhearing today an anti-sex grumbling... as if a ^thorough effort is being made to shake this great

r ‘sexography’ which makes us decipher sex as the f universal secret. (FL, 218) pe end of the regime of sex, however, cannot be effected Rough an ascetic type of renunciation of sex, but only by Tving a free rein to it, by giving it a multiple form, by olymorphising it. [Derrida calls it polysexuality: ‘No tonological discourse - and by that here I mean mono-sexual iscourse - can dominate with a single voice, single tone the dace of this half-light... I have felt the necessity for a poms, for a choreographical text with polysexual lgnature.'(Poi, 107)] This polymorphous sexuality would of burse admit any conceivable perversity, including the ractices of sado-masochism, homosexuality, incest etc., fovided they are indulged in for the sake of pleasure rather tan for sex itself. But before this is done, it is of greatest Importance to do away with both the interdictions and

218 inducements and, above all, with the propensity for discoursing. For it is this propensity of discoursing which prevents us from transcending our Victorian fixations, that makes us remain being a Victorian, the ‘other Victorian’. For what marks Victorian sexuality is not its prudery, not its hypocrisy or repression but simply its tendency to put itself into discourse. The urge to conceal sexuality never stopped the Victorians from speaking and writing about it, confessing it, justifying it and explaining it theoretically. There was repression but also expression. It was wrong to say that because sexuality was repressed that it took refuge in the brothels. No, the Victorian concealment and the exhibitionism of brothels both were the symptoms of same power-knowledge-pleasure syndrome. Far from being enemies, Queen Victoria and brothels were twin brothers. In the twentieth century, especially the decades following the world wars, the sway of the sexual regime has become complete. Sexuality is the new religion of our times and the pornographers its new ministers.

Today it is sex that serves as a support for the ancient form - so familiar and important ip the West - of preaching. A great sexual sermon which has had its subtle theologians and its popular voices - has swept through our societies over the last decades; it has chastised the old order, denounced hypocrisy and praised the right of the immediate and real; it has made people dream of a new city. The Franciscans are called to mind. And we might wonder how it is possible that the lyricism and religiosity that long accompanied the revolutionary project have, in the Western industrial societies, been largely carried over to sex. (HSl,7-8)

219 ere was clearly again the need to revolutionise the solution and liberate the liberation. By doing away with objectification, representation and pourse, one can return to the body its spontaneity and its -jdom of action. If, for example, a child is found to have >erotic tendencies, this cannot be condemned, either in ns of some morality or medical sickness. Similarly, in the e of an incestuous relationship between a father/stepfather I his daughter, it cannot be presumed that the former has Jed himself upon the latter. The use of force of course uld necessitate retaliatory response, but in the absence of ' sign of it the act by itself cannot be said to merit censure punishment. The child’s body can be expected to have de its own appropriate responses in the wake of the iative coming from the other side. The question of consent ilso redundant here. For, as a legal-contractual concept it ongs to the domain of representation and hence poweriwledge. Incest, in a word, cannot be prohibited in the ne of its being a mark of break between the animal and man kingdoms or between nature and culture. What is to h prohibited is indeed the prohibition itself as a sign of ellectuality and moral interdiction: I think that where tolerance is concerned we allow t ourselves a lot of illusions. Take incest, for example. Incest was a popular practice, and 1 mean by this, widely practised among the populace, for a ( long time. It was towards the end of 19th century i that various social pressures were directed against rit. And it is clear that the great interdiction of incest is an invention of the intellectuals. (FL, 333)

ie force of rape often assumed in incest, indeed, does not in man’s seducing the child but keeping a watchful eye on ; latter’s sexual choices, be it auto-erotic, homosexual or

220 incestuous. Foucault was especially sympathetic to the practice of homosexuality, though he was far from being satisfied with the way its ritual was observed in Europe where it was taken as a short-term affair with no courtship and no lasting commitment, and directed entirely at the immediate pleasure of sex: ‘two young men meeting in the street, seducing each other with a look, grabbing each other’s asses and getting each other off in a quarter of an hour’. The pleasure of it, moreover, does not lie in anticipation but in consummation (not when one climbs the stairs, but when the lover leaves in the taxi). On a slightly higher plane, it is presented as an attempt to carve a different sexual identity, or an act of defiance and deviation. But to approach sex between two men or two women as an alternative form of sexuality is to fall in the same trap of mono- or hetero­ sexuality from which one thinks one is liberating it. Homosexuality must not be taken as simply a ‘different’ or ‘another’ form of sexuality but rather as a principle of sexuality which is the other of both mono- and hetero­ sexuality; it should be taken as a principle of non-sexuality. To be homosexual is not to be bound up with this or that form of sexuality, and to look also beyond the narrow horizons of sexuality. The true realisation of homosexual relationship lies in being polysexual and anti-sexual. To be homosexual means, in sum, to remove the sex from the centre of relationship and to make it more broad based. It is not to exclude sex completely but to make it an element of a larger constellation where the feelings of affection, tenderness, friendship, fidelity etc. figure more prominently. From being a matter of ‘casual sex’ it should be changed into a mode or a way of life. To be ‘gay’ is not to identify with certain psychological traits but to develop a way of life. As a way of life, then, it would have its own ethics, which would not be the ethics of ‘codes* but of living one’s own kind of life. It would be an open and creative lifestyle where every

221 [icnt one would invent one’s responses to various stimuli xual or otherwise. To be gay is to be continuously tive, while not to be gay is to limit one’s sexual or deal choices, to be completely stagnant, to be unwilling hange one’s life. To be gay, finally, is to be continuously . state of becoming. Indeed, one needs not necessarily be a ; what is necessary is to become one. 2>ne must not, however, think that Foucault was here ionising something that in his own eyes has become too ;s and sex-centred. The question of humanisation was ainly to be ruled out, as the whole philosophy was cted to a programme of dehumanisation in a very literal se of the term. What instead was being pursued was an etic agenda with all its contradictions and paradoxes. For ;r endorsing a culture of body and related hedonism, after uking all kinds of prohibitions and interdictions, the very h of sex was refused; and that again was made to be ompanied by indiscriminate indulgence. There are esses both of extreme sexualisation and desexualisation istration’) which have been a characteristic of ascetic tarians in all the historical cultures. It was, for example, je other than Plato who made his philosophers both great iunciants and also sexual communists. Foucault, indeed, in emphasis on the love and tenderness for one’s lyfriend’, was only reviving this old pagan-Platonic ideal ‘friendship’ which was related to the famous ‘Platonic e\ A man’s relationship with a boy should not primarily sexually oriented, though that does not mean that it should elude sex. The aim of the relationship should not be the asure of sex but rather a higher, more spiritual kind of isure in which sex happens as an accidental by-product. Plato believed that sexual consummation would just pen when the lover was in an inebriated condition and already covered some distance in the expression of his action to the boy. It would be the end result of a process

222 which was preceded by a lot of labour of courtship, emotional commitment and physical devotion. Foucault would agree with this whole syndrome of love and friendship - with minor differences, of course. He too is after pleasure, but not of the kind defined and determined by any sexual norm. The principle of this pleasure is also not that which is legally or socially sanctioned man-woman relationship, but a man-man relationship which is outside law and outside morality. The love and friendship which he is seeking is not one that is lawful but one which is based on transgression and excess. The pleasure that one seeks in this kind of ascetic state, as just stated, is not of an ordinary kind. It is very rare, very intense and very difficult to get at. It does not lie in the possession or enjoyment of ‘things’ or living a good and moderate life. If anywhere, it would lie in the renunciation of things and in contravention of rules. It could also possibly be experienced through drugs and in death. (Foucault was himself addicted to drugs and says the only time he could experience that extraordinary pleasure was when he had an accident with a vehicle and thought he was going to die.) Death and drugs were indeed at the top of Foucault’s agenda: No doubt we have missed on a lot of pleasures and we have had some that were pretty mediocre... we should consider ourselves lucky to have at hand (with suicide) an extremely unique experience... a fathomless pleasure whose patient and relentless will enlightens all your life, (ibid., 296)

Instead of life, it is death which needs to be celebrated, as happens in Japan or China. Instead of having ‘dreadfully banal’ funeral homes of the sort found in American cities, one should have suicide festivals and orgies as possible methods of experiencing that ‘utterly simple pleasure’.

223 [As for the question of drugs, the position is simpler. Bofar as the construction of pleasure cannot be confined

crely on the bases of eating, drinking and fucking, the body fet devise multiple ways of attaining it. And this would of

rarse include the use of drugs too. Drugs must be made into Subject of experience, of an experience of pleasure, instead nnaking them tangled up in the questions of freedom and ohibition. Drugs must indeed become part of our culture, iere is in any case no room for absolute prohibition or nitanism and no room either for unconditional commendation. There are. good drugs and bad drugs and ere is every reason for the former to be promoted and for e latter kind to be prohibited. Fit is interesting to notice here that Derrida, whose writings roress a similar obsession with death, also has almost entical things to say on the question of drugs. According to m, the naturalist’s plea that the body should be permitted to we its own experiment with pleasure unfettered by the msideration of social morality is as unacceptable as the pralist’s prohibition of it in the name of maintaining social Ser. Any decision about the drugs must rather come from !e*s own individual initiative and the particular situation re is in. There are certainly bad drugs, the classified ones, meh need to be banned. But then there is also the problem *AIDS, which requires being fought by the spread of Singes, in a way of playing the bad against the worst.

r The problem of drugs was also, finally, not unconnected fth the question of pleasure {la jouissance). Ordinarily, in Jot, when the use of drugs is denounced it is not because of I pleasure that it induces but because of the pain that it is fcompanied with and the adverse consequences it is Jiposed to have for the socius. In the West, drugs are seen ^present a counter-culture which is against the culture of

fionality and social subjectivity - drugs promote an ethos of fesponsibility, avoidance of work and even madness. This

224 perception, however, is so different from the approach in the Orient, where the ascetic schools, far from frowning on the use of drugs, have integrated them into the general scheme of their life-experience. It is because in the West ascetic individualism is suspected and the boundary between the private and public is obliterated that drug addiction is so severely censured. ‘The Enlightenment (Aufkldrung), identified essentially with the motif of publicity and with the public character of every act of reason, is in itself a declaration of war on drugs.’ (Poi, 250) But now, since this enlightenment rationalism is discredited and a new and pure individualism is taking its place, the whole problem of drugs needs to be revisited. Now is the moment for one to turn one’s back on the Apollonian ethic of moderation and endorse the Dionysian meta-ethic of bacchanalia, with its constitutive elements of sex, drugs and extreme cruelty. The new Dionysian turn in the history of West, then, implicates a new ethic, a transcendental or meta-ethic which is not a repudiation of conventional morality but its transgression in the form of its deconstruction. For there is on the one hand a categorical affirmation that the conventional distinction of good and evil is inevitable and indispensable: ‘All those who say you should stop thinking in terms of good and evil are themselves thinking in terms of good and evil’ Nietzsche being no exception. (FL, 137) But, on the other hand, is the other imperative of going beyond the fixed boundaries, shifted, shaken and overcome every time, and in every situation a new response determined. There is to be sure no fixed code of law and no fixed responsibility before it. The responsibility itself needs to be integrated with irresponsibility. Abraham was a responsible man but when he heard the voice of God he became ready to act with the utmost irresponsibility by killing his own son. It was an act of irresponsibility but also an act of higher responsibility, viz. the responsibility not before society or his own conscience

Version of it? It is true that the traditional asceticism at one level required the renunciation of ordinary pleasure but, as 225 already seen, this renunciation is not absent but conspicuously present in both Foucault and Derrida. On the otherstore hand,God. the ‘The intense ’ (and impersonal) ecstaticto pleasure as responsibility which seemed give way recommended by them was alsoaround the goal older aascetics to irresponsibility turned to the become higher nsibility. God, however, having since long died and his taken over by the demon of unconscious, it is man who jw to be made responsible and only before the iscious of his own body. There is a new responsibility, esponsibility in a more literal sense: the ability to nd - to ever-changing stimuli - in ever-changing ways, s against the coded, common morality acceptable to all, iew ethic is individualistic, creative and libertarian. It in fact, more appropriately be called an aesthetic rather an ethic. It is an art or aesthetic of existence, an maeavour for improvising one’s own style of living, a pchnology of self-creation and self-formation. The Greeks possessed and practised this technology, which was however ost in medieval Christianity when the law and obedience to God’s will took its place generally (with the exception, however, of a few Christian mystics). But since the idea of

I

coded morality is again disappearing, the new aesthetic morality should take its place. The new asceticism, the ^skesis, though inspired by the practices of Greeks and Christian saints may, however, not exactly be same as theirs. ^Asceticism as the renunciation of pleasure has bad .connotation. But the askesis is something else: it is the work fhat one performs on oneself in order to transform oneself or make the self appear that happily one never attains.’ (ibid., ,309)

226 sought to achieve, calling it Ananda or nirvana. They also had recourse to drugs and illicit sex to experience this pure pleasure and attempted a self-annihilation through self­ formation. There was therefore no big question of having to ‘rid ourselves of asceticism* or ‘an advance into a homosexual askesis* that was new or inventive or improbable. There was same movement, same ethos and same paradoxicality. The asceticism, whether classical-pagan or neo-pagan, was both a renunciation and a quest of pleasure, a technique of self-formation and self-destruction. This was besides their common adherence to a cult of cruelty, both in the form of either perpetrating it or not resisting it. The technique of self-formation and self-transformation involves, besides the use of drugs, homosexuality and cruelty and writing and ‘knowledge’. This is, however, not knowledge for the sake of knowledge; nor does it mean so much knowledge in the customary sense. The knowledge is here rather a kind of non~knowledge and a way of effecting a transformation of self. Thus Foucault, like a mystic of former times, says: After all, what would be the value of the passion for the knowledge if it resulted only in a certain amount of knowledgeableness and not, in one way or another and to the extent possible, in the knower’s straying afield of himself? ...The “essay”... is the living substance of philosophy, at least if we assume that philosophy is still what it was in times past, i.e. an “ascesis”, askesis, an exercise of oneself in the activity of thought. (UP, 8-9)

It is the writing, the proliferation of knowledge that leads one s way to the bliss of nescience and it is the ever-

227 Ehanging disposition of self that results in absolute equipoise.

Ki this state of self-forgetfulness the individual returns to his gpdy and unconscious. The animal returns and regains its lost ground. In writing, says Derrida, ‘A sort of animal movement feeks to appropriate what always comes, always, from an External provocation...* (Poi, 52) Foucault is more explicit: fefou see, that is why 1 really work like a dog and I worked

Bke a dog all my life.’ (FL, 379) (Foucault’s was evidently a return to the cult of Diogenes, the dog.) E To take, however, notice of this return of ‘animal’ is to teach back to the question whether in the discourse of post­ modernism one should see the promise of a naturalist utopia Kpr dystopia) and what could possibly be its relation with Blato’s so-called ideal state. Put in other words, the question p: Are the new philosophers proponents of the philosophy of Ignimalism’, interested in the establishment of some kind of bnimal farm, or simply the saints of the cult of body? The philosophers themselves would probably not admit to the Affirmative possibility on this question. For, according to jjxem, if there were reasons for someone to reject the philosophy of spiritualism, the very same reasons would also

(prompt him to reject naturalism, or any other ‘ism’ for that piatter. Derrida refused adherence to the cult of natural utopianism, chiding even Foucault for having overworked his thematic of body. Didn’t the centralisation of the body in the discourse make it look like a soul, a soul in fact as such? For the soul was soul because it was considered to be at the pentre (or to be the centre itself), and to replace it with body Iran this central place was to achieve nothing. Similarly, a .philosophy of animalism or naturalism was no displacement f spiritualism. It is true that at the moment there is an nperative to pass on to the ‘other*, (the “good side”) of aturalism, of madness, delinquency and sex; but this is only .bridge which is to be finally crossed over so as to reach the lace from where the two sides of naturalism and

228 spiritualism, of rationality and madness, of intoxication and sobriety make their appearance. To reach back to this originary site (not side) is to dissolve the contradiction and the illusion of being on this side or the other side. The architectonic reality/unreality was not spirit and not nature, but that which preceded them both. But though it was both pre-natural and pre-spiritual in equal measure, the way to aproach it, as just noted, was through the negation of spirit and affirmation of nature. Thus even though there was not to be a philosophy of either naturalism or animalism, there was yet a positive concern with nature, with body and with animality. Foucault’s complaint against Sartre was that he longed for authenticity and not creativity in man (i.e. the ‘creativity’ in the specific Foucauldian sense and not in the sense in which for example Chomsky used it, which Foucault explicitly rejected) and Derrida’s grudge against Heidegger was that his Dasein would never be an animal. Heidegger could not hear in man the voice of animal because he could not hear the voice of man in animal. It was Pythagoras, the distant teacher of Plato, who recognised the voice of his dead friend in the cries of a dog. And Plato, the faithful disciple himself, did everything to give back to his ‘ideal’*men, the philosophers, the voice of animal by investing them with absolute power of violence, with incestuous sexuality and the bliss of ignorance. The Pythagorean-Platonic ‘man’ was both an animal and a saint, an animal-saint or a saint-animal. Theirs was a pendulum-like movement, with the animal (the dog) at one end and god at the other; a movement between the subhuman and the superhuman which would not recognise the middle place of ‘human’. The post-modemists, the friends/enemies of Plato, retain the pendulum and its polarism and the absence of middle. Man could possibly be a rational animal but, according to Derrida, he was ‘also an athletic animal’: ‘I would bet that someone will recognize in sports the essence of man.’ (Poi, 249) The athlete was his

229 &dy, his animality but yet also someone who was more man, Sore man than man, a superman, a hero, a god. It was iradoxical but not at all ironical that it was precisely the ivent of an athlete (the boxer) that made Heidegger lament ie ‘flight of gods’ from the contemporary cultural |rmament; and it is that very event that makes his disciples gjoice over the arrival of gods. The flight of gods was also sure the return of gods - the return of very same gods, as Joucault is earlier cited as having said.

Chapter Four The Death of Man Ever since Nietzsche announced the death of God in Europe, an apprehension about the imminent death of man was very much in the air - Nietzsche himself, in fact, having an almost clear premonition of it. But although it took over threequarters of a century for Foucault, ‘the French Nietzschean’, to break this news from the pulpit of philosophy, many other writers and thinkers have worked overtime to bring this hidden agenda of the project of modernism to its successful realisation. It was a hidden agenda because what at more overt level was envisaged in the project was the centrality and sovereignty of man as man and not in the capacity of his being a shadow or an image of God. The removal of God from the scene, the modernist philosophers thought, would ensure the arrival of a truly human epoch, a rebirth of man, where man, not God, would be the measure of all things. But Foucault, the post-modernist, and all others along with him, insisted that what must coincide with the death of God is not the birth but the death of man. It is perhaps not fortuitous that a thematic of the death of man made its first articulate appearance in the philosophy of Heidegger, whose proximity to Nietzsche’s horizon of thinking was well confessed. And it is also not a pure coincidence that it became a popular academic idea in France which, ever since Descartes and through the eighteenth­ century Enlightenment thinkers and subsequent believers in the ‘religion of humanity’ (Saint-Simon and August Comte),

231 jad been a bastion of subjectivism and humanism. From trance it of course travelled to America in the late Seventies [nd Eighties of this century to enjoy the status of being the |fficial theory. While the idea of ‘dehumanisation’ of man in |n over-technologised society had already taken firm root in ^.merica through the labours of philosophers of the Frankfurt school, it had not yet found sound philosophical basis. Eventually, Derrida’s deconstructionist theory provided this, jnd to it was added the further excitement of the convergence Ei Foucault of the twin themes of ‘homocidism’ and omosexuality. But before its passage to America, the above idea had its own trajectory of movement in France. For it was not before me late Forties and early Fifties of this century that the new french philosophers made the discovery of Hegel and along |yith him also of Husserl and Heidegger. In this first brush jhe.* first reading’ which Derrida in his essay ‘Ends of Man’ Characterises as ‘misreading’ - the threesome were seen to be jhe philosophers par excellence of humanism and gnthropologism. A typical and most famous example of this Sn is interpretation was none other than Jean Paul Sartre who pmously pronounced his philosophy of existentialism as (humanism. But as Heidegger, the master himself, disowned |jn most clear terms this misreading of his text, there was felt the general need for a rereading or a ‘second reading’ of (these philosophers. In it they were found out to be the real ^precursors of the idea of the death of man as occasioned by :the idea of the death of God. For himself, Heidegger said that the apprehension of ‘man’ as a transcendental principle is part of the metaphysical project of onto-theology, and for that ^natter the expression ‘atheistic humanism’ was a Contradiction in terms. Foucault and Derrida most readily Egreed. Sartre’s existential ism-human ism was demeaned and ui philosophy a new post-Sartrean, post-existentialist and |»ost-humanist era began. And with this development

232 coincided also the structuralist discovery that anthropology, the so-called science of man, was actually the science of the ‘end of man’. The philosophical problem of the exact nature of the relationship between man and God and between their respective and reciprocal living and dying may be discussed with or without reference to Sartre. What is however necessary is to raise the general question why is it that a line of thinking whose starting point was an emphatic affirmation of the positivity of life in general has so inexorably progressed to end up in the absolute negativity of death? For in its alleged revolt against the negativity of the medieval self, which valorised death over and against life, the ‘modem’ enlightened self defined itself in terms of life’s affirmation in the name of life itself. But, as it happened, death now threatens life not from outside but very much from inside. It would then seem that the Western act of affirmation of life and its cultural positivity in general must have contained within itself the possibility of its negation and death from the start, that whatever notions of reality or realities it had started itself with must have been non-realities disguised. And finally, that the death of God in philosophy, of matter in science, and of man in human science were the successive manifestations of the Western selfs own progressive cultural unfolding. At a more specific level, the failure discussed above can be said to be the failure of the Cartesian cogito. While in ordinary historiography, this cogito has been seen to be the harbinger of a real revolution, it should not be forgotten that, in ultimate terms, this was nothing other than a medieval concept and through it, a Hellenic nous or mind, a shadow of logos. The T, the man, was a thinker, a thinking substance, self-enclosed and isolated from the world, thinking along the ideas or representations. Besides having only a mediated contact with the world, it was also unhistorical and asocial.

233 bscartes, as a medievalist-modernist, never mentioned the ality of aggregative relations in his discussion of mind, his in all along being to show the non-material ity and hence ^mortality of it. Neither does he ever mention the conative id aesthetic dimensions of it. Man as mind was a thinker of oughts, perhaps even, as in Greek logos, a unity of thinking id thought, perhaps only thought. Hellenism and Hellenic tiristianity had always sought to assimilate reductively rtology into epistemology and it is no wonder that despite e best efforts of all the philosophers, Western philosophy is had this inherent tendency to keep relapsing into ealism, phenomenalism and phenomenology. Through srkeley, Hume, Mill and Russell on the one hand and linoza, Leibniz, Kant and Hegel on the other, it has shown inability to hold on to a dualistic view. Hegel’s absolute istemologism was undoubtedly an apogee of the tendency ■eady present in the interiority of the Cartesian cogito. The phenomenologies of Husserl and Heidegger and the enomenological ontology of Sartre, as the post-modernists e apt to point out, have been a great failure in rescuing the iliman self from its self-imposed isolation. The failures are iowever not of the same degree or at the same level, as at east in the case of Heidegger there has been a very conscious attempt to historicise the self, thus breaking the cocoon in fhich it was imprisoned - hence the Heideggerian debt to ost-modemity. But Heidegger himself was a philosopher rtio belonged to a long legacy of philosophical historicism, t the end of which was the towering figure of Marx. For im, the ‘self* instead of being a creator, evaluator and nlooker of history was actually constituted by history, was istory’s own creation. For the post-modernists, who appened to be in some sense post-Marxists too, a man’s self j immanent, though not so much in history as in his body’s esires and in his social relations and functions. Libido, ibour, life and language all together generate an idea of self

234 which thinks itself to be a thinking, willing and affective agent, transcendental and immortal. This fundamental uncertainty of Western man about the nature and circumstance of his own birth explains the whole experience of schizoid tendencies that characterised his history right from its Greek beginning. While on the one hand he had a kind of philosophical assurance of his transcendence, on the other hand was his realisation of an undivine, mundane and historical immanence. In the discourse of Occidental modernity, man was either transcendental or historically immanent and it was supposed that the two possibilities completely excluded each other. It has also moreover happened that these two reductions, these two one-dimensionalities or two excesses appeared ultimately amenable to a fundamental reconciliation - not in the manner of Hegel’s dialectical synthesis but through the other dialectic, in which an idea contains Jts counter-idea not inside but outside itself, as its other. For every thesis must have its antithesis; but if the latter is made to be already contained in the inferiority of former, the two are bound to be neutralised by each other’s presence, thereby reducing the whole dialectical movement to a play in the* realm of nothingness, as happened in the case of Western philosophy and culture. It was because Western reality - whether in the form of logos, God, Idea, matter or Being or consciousness or life - did not take care to keep its other outside itself as a relative and notional opposite, that it kept succumbing to its own self-nihilation. A negative cogitology, just like a negative ontology in general, was to be by its very nature self-deconstructive. That modem positivity has given birth to post-modern negativity was because it was itself bom of (medieval) negativity and had retained its negative nature within its soul. But negativity is the other name of reduction which manifests itself in a dialogy of excess and deficit. The opposite

235 fcptions of man as either being an unhistorical scendentality or a non-transcendental historicality may be

sn to serve as the best example of the operationality of logic of excess and reduction and thereby of negativity, idea of excess however, as said before, presumes the i of a ‘middle’, which for that matter precedes the nents of its excesses (rather than following it or being a iuct of it, as in the case of Hegel, or even in Aristotle). originary middle, in the present context, must realise If in the possibility of an affirmative recognition of a ijectivity which is both transcendental and historical. This iiild not be a very difficult achievement as it is a most imon observation that it is human transcendental ity that ces history possible, and conversely, without history no scendentality remains to demand recognition. Only a ig which is transcendental can claim a history for itself having a history already means being transcendental, n’s transcendence and historical immanence do not follow h other but are coextensive, coeval and coterminous. The isicists were therefore as wrong in making transcendence cede man’s history as are the post-modernists in their >r of reducing the transcendence to a mere historical duct. The fact of the matter is that however much the ilosophers try to persist in their excess of onenensionality, the excess itself is never strong enough to rsist in its error of excess. It is for this reason that we see even the greatest transcendentalists, such as Plato or jgel, could never forsake history; nor could those who ampioned the cause of historical immanence of self tirely do away with the transcendence of that same self. leed, in the Western history of ideas, one comes across the ge spectacle that the greater the emphasis on iscendence, the more the preoccupation with history - and versely so. After all, it was Plato’s ideal man who was

236 politically most indulgent; and it was the nineteenth-century historicists and romanticists who raised the banner of revolt against the de-humanising powers of science and scientific technology, supporting thereby the cause of human transcendence. That the motif of subjectivity keeps returning despite its suppression in all the phenomenological, existentialist and even structuralist discourses cannot be explained away by invoking the Togo-centric bias' as has been attempted by Derrida in his readings of various philosophers. Derrida was right in ‘accusing’ Heidegger of committing the same mistake of subjectivism after showing the way for Dasein’s necessary immanence. But he too had often to affirm the indispensability of accepting a human subjectivity which though he said must be ‘situated’. Foucault is of course as famous for his statement on the disappearance of subject as he is finally for his claim in a certain sense of its reality and return. Coming back, however, to the contemporary French entanglement with Cartesian cogito, it may be recalled that Sartre had his own ‘Cartesian meditations’ after Husserl, his mentor in philosophy, who had recast the said problem in the question of ‘subjectivity’. But while reaching Descartes through Husserl, Sartre had also met on his way Heidegger, and changed his own problem into the problem of ‘phenomenological ontology’. Thus, for him, as in the case of Descartes, there was a consciousness, even a consciousness of consciousness which, however, unlike Descartes, was not a substance, but had yet (as in Heidegger) a being of itself. Actually, it was this being of consciousness which Sartre described as the consciousness of consciousness. The consciousness which precedes our ordinary consciousness could not be the same as latter, for in that case it would be self-repetitive and its expression in language pleonastic. The originary consciousness must be other than simple awareness i.e. a kind of pre-comprehension and precondition of the

237 ter. The ordinary consciousness was just there, immanent the objects it was awareness of and yet by that very fact a pscen dental being. Its thereness, its being there eidegger’s Dasein) was what made it both an immanent d at the same time transcendental. Its transcendence, its [ng a being-for-itself was realised precisely in its being bsumed into its object. There were, strictly speaking, no jects to be known, and hence no subject to know those jects. Both epistemology and metaphysics were excluded .this new relationship of consciousness with what it was jsciousness of. The subject and object, the mind and the ing’ were merged in the single occurrence of being as rearing, as phenomena, as ‘revealed revealing’. From what is said above (and which was only by way of imation rather than elaboration), it may easily be seen that rtre, at least in respect to the present issue of our interest, is treading what was basically a Heideggerian path. There is the same reduction of consciousness to unconsciousness 4 the same reduction of being to nothingness - for to say at nothingness is being is not much different in its final jport from saying that being is nothingness. Sartre shared jth Heidegger and Hegel (and with many others in the festem philosophical tradition) the relapse into a neg; tive dology, an anti-Iogoism or an ‘anti-logocenlric bias* which aintained its constant entry on the register alongside an itology of plentitude and presence. But, despite this general negativity, there have also been i the other hand certain nuances in Sartre’s texts, especially e later ones, which indicated a regress or a kind of apparent i-radicahsation of Heideggerian negativism. For one thing, ere was a clear fallback on a ‘moralisin’, which reminded re of the Kantian categorical imperative - a certain eoccupation with the notions of ‘freedom’, ‘responsibility wards humanity’, ‘kingdom of ends’, even ‘human gnity’, etc. Then there also appeared an explicit statement

238 that existentialism was humanism, with such elaborations as, ‘Our point of departure is, indeed, the subjectivity of the individual,* and that the truth consists in ‘one’s immediate sense of one’s self. And further that ‘this theory alone is compatible with the dignity of man* and ‘does not make man into an object*. Further on he denounced materialism and the reduction of man into table, chair, stone etc. The human kingdom had a ‘pattern of values’ which was absolutely distinguished from the material world. It was, however, clarified that this was no ‘narrowly individual subjectivism’ like that of Descartes or even Kant. The new subjectivity was also inter-subjectivity, because the ‘other is indispensable to my existence*. Furthermore, although there is no universal essence of man, there is still ‘a human universality of condition ’, and this meant ‘all the limitations which a priori define man’s fundamental situation in the universe*. There is, to be sure, an objective dimension of these human conditions or limitations because these are met and recognised everywhere; but there is a subjective dimension too, because they are always lived experiences which happen to man universally. Finally, despite all his differences, man maintains a certain communicability, a common purposiveness which is also universal in the sense that ‘every purpose is comprehensible to every man*. (All quotations are from Existentialism as Humanism.) Now, whatever the final idea, and whatever the further qualifications and clarifications that Sartre would put on the above formulations, and also, further, whether or not it was at least in some respects a regression from Sartre’s own earlier Heideggerianism, it is nonetheless clear that from Heidegger’s own point of view, the whole language of the formulation was offensive to an extreme degree. For one thing, however, Sartre and Heidegger never involved themselves in any philosophical polemic, choosing rather to avoid any direct confrontation. What is, however, on record

239 £ that Heidegger’s famous ‘Letter on Humanism5 was bitten in the full gaze of this Sartrean ‘reduction’ of scistentialism into humanism. If the existentialism was anonymous in any sense with humanism, Heidegger was eady to renounce the claim of his being an existentialist. k Sartre thought he had broken through the shackles of

netaphysics by repudiating the thesis of idealism and Materialism. But Heidegger disagreed. For him the essence md existence were both metaphysical categories and any ^course to them whatsoever would make one remain in the Cbm a in of metaphysics. It does not make much difference whether essence precedes existence or it is simply other way pund. To make existence have a priority over essence is still ® recognise an essence of man and thereby unrecognise the ^culiarity and proper dignity of man. Man was not a Metaphysical but a historical being. Marx, through Hegel, lad realised this essential his topicality, but not Sartre or his iientor, Husserl. The ‘fall’ of man in history and through iistory is a fact whose recognition could make a ‘productive dialogue with Marxism* possible. But this was a dimension which is missing both in existentialism and phenomenology. ■ For Heidegger himself, humanism is an untenable loctrine because man not only does not have an essence but le has no existence as well. Man does not exist. Man is not a jeing among other beings but has in his being a special kind jf relationship with Being. Man is not a superior being, not a ford over other beings. His differentiation with other beings ies in his being a shepherd of Being, a neighbour of Being. lives in and with Being and Being lives in and with nan. The essence of man is not his humanity, not his rationality but his dwelling with Being which is decidedly his King more than being, more than even a human being. When Ran lives in the wakefulness of Being which is his essence, ie cannot merely be said to exist; he rather begins to ‘ekiist’. Heidegger, however, clarifies that to emphasise this

240 ecstatic dimension of a human being is not to disavow man’s rationality or his ration al-animality, but only to underscore the point that rationality still does not express the full dignity which is man’s due; rationalism as the essence of humanism still does not come up to the level where it can touch the real essence of man. It is only in this sense that Heidegger says that his thinking is ‘against humanism’. (BR, 233) It should appear from above that in his talk of the ecstatic dimensions of human reality what Heidegger was looking for was some ascetically inspired possibility of superhumanism. He also makes a rather strange suggestion that the addition of rationality to man’s animality does not effect any qualitative change in the being of man in comparison with his otherwise defined status as a simple biological being. To apprehend man as a rational animal is still to apprehend him as finally being an animal. As Heidegger says:

In principle, we are still thinking of homo animalis - even when anima (soul) is posited as... (spirit or mind), and this in turn is later posited as subject, person or spirit (Geist). Such positing is the manner of metaphysics... Metaphysics thiqks of man on the basis of animalitas and does not think in the direction of his humanitas. (ibid., 227) But this proposition, at least on the face of it, seems to be very problematic. What one could understand was that rationality as defined in Western parameters did not comprehend the whole of the humanity of man; and that either this idea of rationality should be altered/broadened to include in it man’s conative and affective dimensions, or, as *he mystics say, it should be transcended and made to be surpassed through the intuitional forms of experience. Heidegger is certainly inclined towards the latter possibility, but with this important difference: that the Being to be thus

241 finalised is not a logos but an absolute abstraction bordering bn nothing. The derationalisation of man, in this case, while opening an avenue for some superhuman possibilities, also iads to a kind of subhumanism, as Heidegger later came to palise. What is at issue here is whether or not rationality, at past in its modified sense, defines the complete humanity of han. Is or isn’t the ‘eksistential’ a valid repudiation of man’s Xistcnce? For Heidegger, of course, there is no repudiation >f man as such, as man is in some sense rational - though to je rational may mean no more than being biological, ) iochemical or even physio-chemi cal. None of these descriptions of man are incorrect, but then none of these even jemotely touch what is most essentially essential in man. Vian even has a body different from the animals and so biologism can never be a real science of man. The real science of man cannot be had by adding to the body a soul or a mind and then singing louder than before ‘the praise of mind’. Even the ‘nature’ cannot be explained purely in naturalistic terms, much less so the organism and the man. £ But why should a ‘rational account* of man be scientifically at the same level as an account of him in purely biological or physical terms? Because the rational man is still (a man, with a reality and with a substance. He is a being ►there, to be approached and understood - from outside. This pidea of the substantiality of man is the underlying assumption rbf all philosophies, all sciences and all pseudo-sciences ►which man, especially Western man, has had since ancient >times. When Descartes spoke of his cogito, he made no revolution in the customary ways of thinking practised earlier i.by medievalists and before them by the Greeks. Even the F approaches of anthropology (of Scheller), of psychology (of fDilthey) and of phenomenology (of Husserl), who (complained so loudly about the reification of human consciousness, still had a residue of the ontic type of i substantial ism in their account. What all these various

242 approaches fundamentally missed was their own ontological premise. To define man as substance, soul, subject, consciousness, person, etc., does not mark in itself a wrong strategy; its error lies in the forgetfulness of the ontological background (not the ground) which gives these characterisations their meaning. Descartes was not wholly incorrect in his thinking of cogito as a thinking being - his error was rather in not giving due consideration to the other part of his own dictum, viz. the sum. The ‘I exist’ may be a derivative judgement of its premise *1 think’ but both the thinking I and the I that comes to exist through it presuppose their Being, and so this problem of Being should be our first concern instead of cogito or the sum. But this prior problem of Being is not ontology in the traditional sense of being the problem of substance. A thematic of the substance of ‘I’ is not ontology in the Heideggerian sense; it is just the converse of it. It is the very rejection of the idea of T as a substance or a subject or subjectivity. The latter implies the reduction of the Being of I into a being. In order to be properly ontological, one must be anti-ontological; and only then the essence of man can be grasped. It may be noted here in passing that it was this anti­ ontology, or, ‘negative ontology* as we may cal Lit, that led to the deconstruction of subject (‘death of man’, as they [ater called it) by the post-modernist philosophers. But it also needs to be realised that the subjectivity cannot be deconstructed without at the same time deconstructing/desubstantialising the ‘object’. The subject and object both live and die together. Therefore, if the subject has to disappear, it can do so only by eliminating the objectivity also. This important fact was traditionally appreciated, as even the most extreme subjectivists in the history of philosophy had objectivity, at least in the form of idea or concept if not as matter or ‘thing’. But if belief in subject implies a belief in object, the converse also holds true i.e. if one insists on

243 Sieving in a world one also must accept the existence of a md or a self as the apprehender of that world. Thus, while it wrong on the part of the modernist thinkers to have Sieved in the objects without believing in the subject, our St-modern i st thinkers, consistently enough, denied the

md only after denying the ‘world’, whether it was a world Shings or world of Ideas. This was indeed what made them Scifically posr-modemists as against being simply Sdemists who kept their faith intact in the reality of the

rid after denying the subjective ideality. Heidegger iself advocated anti-realism as part of his anti-ontologism, Ugh his opposition to idealism was not quite as equivocal (as he retained a sort of empathy with Hegel till end). Heidegger, as we mentioned a little earlier, emphathised h Marx for his historicism and for his Hegelianism. What s common to Heidegger, Hegel and Marx was their nmon immanentism, i.e. the idea of subject’s merger into historical objectivity; though the nature of this merger s conceived differently in their respective philosophies, e post-modemists inherited this common legacy and ther radicalised it by removing the idealistic/positivistic stiges in their predecessors’ systems. Heidegger was, wever, their more immediate source, and his influence rticularly on Foucault in his historical preoccupations ide him, in this respect, a better representative of this >ect of post-modernity. Heidegger’s analytic of Dasein operated on two planes ich were differentiated at least on the level of appearance, i the one hand was a highly subjectivistic undertone in iich human reality was presented as a unique, nscendental being which alone among other beings pestioned Being and which alone was for that reason the site f revelation of Being. It was a being moreover which ontained the principles of care, understanding, anxiety and

244 death. But, on the other hand, this same reality was also immanent and dispersed into the appearances of the world. There was no subject as such which could look at, know and understand or even enjoy the world as though from outside. This was obviously a typical example of what Derrida would call a double writing or a double register of writing which, quite naturally, would be an occasion for double reading. One instance of this was Sartre, who struggled without success to cross the threshold of modernism and subjectivism; and the other was that of the post-modernists, who made a final decision about the absolute dispersion of the subject into the objects which it had itself given birth to after having been bom of them. The difference, however, between Heidegger on the one hand and the post-modernists on the other was that the latter entirely dispensed with the phenomenological residue present in the former, and accomplished their objective through reflection on language and disciplinary discourses, the inspiration for which came from none but Heidegger himself. From the post-modernist’s own point of view, Heidegger’s lasting contribution to philosophy was where he tried to liberate language from what he himself called the domination of the ‘metaphysics of subjectivity’? In the traditional view, a speaking self was also a thinking self, the speech being the guarantee of the presence of the self. The transition from ’thought9 to ‘speech’ took place in the interior regions of human soul, which suggested an intimate bond between man’s spirituality and his primitive linguistic accomplishments. At a broader level, this bond was projected to suggest an identity of spirituality and language in logos, of which the human soul was said to be a microcosm. The fact that man speaks and man alone speaks is because of his partaking into the nature of divine logos - a privilege denied to other beings who remain the counter- or derivative principles of logos. Heiddegger would appear to be basically

245 ng with this position, except for the fact that for him r primary reality nor man is logos in the sense of being ousness. Primary reality, the Being, is showing, and so language as speech or saying; and these two have a 1 connection with man. Hciddeger would indeed go so to suggest that the showing of language as it happens, ns only because the man is there to accomplish it. Man ;s to language (not logos) as its protege and as its w, though the converse fact that the language also ?s to man alone is also true: ‘If speech as listening ige lets itself be told in the saying, such letting can be only in so far - and in so near - as our essence is d entry into saying. We hear it only because we belong BR, 411) is view is of course radically different from the ntional view of language as one function of man’s soul g many others - as, for example, when we use the ssion ‘man speaks’ it is in the same vein as we say ‘man 1’, ‘man desires’, etc. Language indeed is not a function il but the soul a function of language. It needs to be ed that our speaking is first our hearing of language and (imply reiterating what we have heard. We cannot speak s we already know what we are going to speak, unless *e already told what to speak. Language in this way des human speech, and precedes man himself, since it is h that makes man what he is, i.e. a consciousness, a There is therefore no question of language being in the pervice of man as a tool (‘in the toolbox’, as Wittgenstein paid) or a function of his soul. It is true that language needs Jiuman speech to be spoken but it is nonetheless not the mere contrivance of our speech activities. Language is not in the ^service of man; it is, rather, the man who is in the service of Janguage. Man is ‘remanded’ by language so that it can say/show itself in saying and showing. Language is not

I

246 obliged to man, but man to language, as it is language which bestows on man what is essential to him. This in plain words means that what is called a human self, i.e. man’s humanity, itself is a creation of language rather than being its creator. There is hidden in our primordial language a power which enables the language to live both in its essential hiddenness and its expressive clarity. This power is also responsible for the generation of an external reality as well as an interior space, i.e. the ‘self so called: ‘It is the dawn and the daybreak’ and it is that with which ‘the possible alternation of day and night commences.’ (ibid., 414) It is also the origin of human speech, which in other words means nothing less than its being the generator of human presence itself. For man can exist only insofar as he can speak, and he can speak only insofar he can hear hear the language speaking to him. Man thus exists by listening to language, by belonging to language, by residing in the house of language, permission for which has been given him by the language itself. The speaking of language, the human languages of history, whether natural or articulated, are themselves engendered by the language which is essential and primordial. Language creates man, who in turn creates his language - but only after hearing the voice which has given him birth. In language is man bom, and in language is also his death. Heidegger says that the language as saying is showing, i.e. a revelation, an appearing, an ex-pression and that is what makes it synonymous with Being. But if the language as saying is showing, this word ‘showing’ here cannot mean anything other than what in more ordinary terms is called ‘meaning’. For what can the speakers show to each other during a conversation except by revealing a certain content of meaning? But meaning is unavoidably mental for even when not tied up with an object, it at least requires a subjectivity fpr its origination and sustenance. Meaning or showing,

247 ther objective or non-objective, cannot fall on to words i nowhere. While it may be true that words are uttered ’ in the aftermath of a prior listening to language, this le operation, nevertheless cannot be in a vacuum of mscious nullity. Subjectivity also, as a principle of scious presence, cannot have an unconscious ontos emeath it, though the reverse is not unimaginable, degger, to be sure, was not totally averse to either 'jectivity or consciousness, though he would like to have ordinated them to unconscious of Being and language. if, as we said, all showing is also seeing, i.e. eriencing, the experience must come before and be more nordial than being or, alternatively, this experiencing If is the Being. As said before, post-modernists* deconstruction of the ject and subjectivity owed much to Heidegger, especially is ingenious idea that at the back of every act of speaking lie prior existence of language. Man speaks a language ause there is already a language to speak, and it is not ly the man who speaks the language but the language that iks man. But while they would appreciate the Josopher's ingenuity in this regard, it also annoyed them end that the same philosopher also fell for the lure of ijectivism and humanism, even though he was the first and foremost in denying these spurious notions. They could ore or disparage Sartre for his humanism, calling him a se prophet, an impostor and a corrupter of the teachings of > great masters (Hegel, Husserl and Heidegger himself), it Heidegger’s own self-betrayal was something that they uld not understand or appreciate, especially as that ipinged on their own deconstructive endeavour. There was thout doubt an inconsistency, if not a reversal or a ntradiction, in the path of the great philosopher. As Derrida id, his existential analytic ‘overflowed the horizon of a lilosophical anthropology’ but yet, conversely, in him ‘“the

248 proper of man” will not cease to direct all the itineraries of thought’. (Ma, 124) Heidegger’s ‘Letter on Humanism’ was certainly a protest against Sartre’s attempt to dub existentialism as humanism, just as it also pretended to reject the theory of what it called metaphysical subjectivism. But while the notions of man and humanity were called into question, there was also repeated mention in the same essay of the phrases ‘essence of man’, ‘essence of humanity’ or even ‘proper dignity of man’, etc. One indeed got the impression that the philosopher was not against humanism as such but only against a certain form of it which was traditional, and that perhaps he was rejecting it because it was not humanistic enough, that in it the real glory of man was still unrecognised. On the positive side, the essay reiterated the old thesis that the proper dignity of man lay in his proximity to Being, to his being ‘claimed* by the Being. In his Being and Time,.Heidegger has emphatically clarified that the human being there was not a being among other beings but bore a very close relationship with Being in being a place of its revelation. There was a relation of intimacy and proximity between the being of man and the being as such which was unique and which made the foroier quite distinguished in the order of beings. The distinction of course lay in the fact that the questioning of Being was an issue for man alone among all beings and this questioning itself was possible because of his dwelling in Being. Being as showing could show itself in the transparent reality of man. This transparency was of course not what the metaphysicians called consciousness, but it was still a mode of being which allowed the showing to show itself. Man, in short, not unlike the previous theological view, was still the witness and the bearer of the truth of Being. He was no longer a man but still nothing other than man. The ‘subtlety and equivocity* of the Heideggerian gesture no doubt permitted and, in a way, justified the

249 Ehropologistic deformation’ of the philosopher’s early available to his followers in France. But the equivocity ffi* subtlety were not features characteristic of Heidegger Jie, as in Derrida’s view a similar double reading was EJsible of the other two philosophers i.e. of Hegel and ■sserl as well. Like Heidegger, Hegel too was subjected to Ranthropologistic reading in France, although in his system R*restricted economy of human consciousness was made to

p way to the general economy of consciousness, which Rs in fact no consciousness at all. This was a position not wy unlike that of Heidegger’s or even that of Derrida Hhself. whose trace was precisely this kind of unconscious V* absolute consciousness. (It was, incidentally, this pdamental sharing of the idea that made both Heidegger Derrida feel at home with Hegel, despite the great Bferences in their respective standpoints on the surface.) In re case of latter, in fact, the real issue was, given the mbiguity and equivocity of the philosopher, which side of un should be emphasised and adopted - and not whimsically ^arbitrarily, but keeping in view the trend of the argument

Resent in the text in question. From this methodological antage point, Derrida was sure that not only Heidegger but pgel and Husserl too were amenable to an antinthropoligistic interpretation, which would be more faithful the original intentions of the philosophers, or al least rould be what they must have believed, had they been insistent enough and not fallen for the lure of bnventionality.

* Derrida wrote a good deal about Hegel and a lot more on leidegger, but in his career the real break came from his eading of Husserl. He started with a translation of the litter’s work on mathematics and simultaneously did a close hading of his other texts. Now, as we know, Husserl was a ihenomenologist and a great believer in consciousness. He Iso made a distinction between the transcendental and

250 empirical consciousness, which roughly corresponded to our own distinction of the general and restricted economies of it. As for the question of language, to simplify the matter a little bit here, he said the language as being basically an expressive event is purely an internal affair of the consciousness. The ‘expression’ that a speaking subject uses is always aimed at an ideal object and while being founded on a pre-expressive ‘sense*, it carries out the task of speaking by attaching that sense or meaning to a word which is a phonic sign. Now the significant point here is that this whole process takes place within the inferiority of the experience and never ventures outside it. The subject is of course the transcendental ego and the objects, though not the Platonic abstractions or ideas, are, however, the noematic idealities, which have the ability to let themselves be experienced and expressed repeatedly without losing their sameness or identity. When this ideality carrying the sense is made to be identical with an internal voice or phoneme, the expressive event completes itself. The internality of the expressive event which is the language proper also points to the fact of absolute intertwining of ‘speech’ and ‘consciousness*. To speak is also to hear oneself, to be heard by oneself. One always talks to oneself before talking to others. It is due to and through this talking, through hearing oneself speak, that one becomes aware of oneself, and one begins to think oneself in terms of subject and subjectivity. Thinking is talking (‘the voice is consciousness*). When one ‘thinks’, one is actually talking to oneself; and since talking involves the use of words, these words are nothing but a unity of sense and the phone or voice. But this ‘word’ which is voice (not the physical sound), as pregnant or alive with sense, cannot refer to an external ‘thing* because both the sense and sound are mental; and as mental they can only aim at a mental object. The words as signifying the ideal objectivities can be reiterable. The physical things in their spatial delimitations, on the other

251 fend, cannot be the referents of the words which as unities of apse and phone are temporal i.e. only in time. It is of course pl legitimate to say that the words refer to things but then fese ‘things’ must be seen to exist in the mind, i.e. exist as Kperienced things. If there are things outside the mind then fertainly the words would be essentially meaningless, gpsmuch as they would then become out of touch with those Kings. Words and things have their meeting point only in fensciousness. L On this idea of the non-dependence of the sign on the Ktemal object for its meaning, Derrida builds his own adical theory that ultimately, in fact, it is not the presence fet the absence of the object (and also the subject) that is

muired for the meaningfulness of a sign to realise itself. For, s he argues, whenever an expression is made manifest to |fer to an objective situation, it is implied that the meaning

I that expression was known before the actual perception, so s to be applied to the given perceptual situation. This xpression would also be understood by those who are not aemselves the percipients of that situation. Even if a person ftting next to me is seeing the same event which I have spressed through my statement, he is not having the same potent in his consciousness which is being had by me. This leans that the expression or statement was understood by the per person because it actually aimed at its object by its own ntemal structure. The meaning of the expression, in other fords, was not in the object but in the expression itself. The ibaning abides and survives the absence of the object and (ren the absence of the subject, the speaker. When, for Sample, I say ‘I see a car passing by’, the very next moment fter I said it, the car is no longer present in my experience, Jit I still perfectly understood the meaning of what I said fhen I was seeing the event in question. And this expression fill also be perfectly understood (by others), when Zam no jnger there to perceive the fact or make the statement. The

252 fact of the matter is that I would not have used that particular expression precisely unless I already knew the meaning of that expression and also knew that other people would know it, even though neither I, nor the object is before them. Thus Derrida says:

...The absence of intuition - and therefore of the subject of intuition - is not only tolerated by speech; it is required by the general structure of signification, when considered in itself. It is radically requisite: the total absence of the subject and object of a statement - the death of the writer and/or the disappearance of the object he was able to describe - does not prevent a text from ‘meaning’ something. On the contrary, this possibility gives birth to meaning as such, gives it out to be heard and read. (SP, 93)

It is also ordinarily supposed that in a normal kind of situation, a subjective statement can be understood only when one knows who is making that statement and in what circumstances. But, as against this, Derrida insists that what is ‘normal’ about an ordinary objective expression is normal also for the so-called subjective statements. Just as in the case of former, the actual perception of the object is not required for the expression to be meaningful, in the case of latter too the presence of an intuition of self is unnecessary. Rather, the absence of the real / is required if such subjective statements have to operate on their own as, in this case, they will be understood generally to make the language possible. All subjective statements where a subject is empirically specified is meaningful only because it is an instance of a generalised statement with a subjective reference. Even when I say ‘I am’, this can make sense to me when there is already a meaning to this expression. It is not my intuition of myself

253 t primarily makes it meaningful to me. Any identification one subject with the word I (as Husserl would like to do) uld make interpersonal comprehension and nmunication impossible. The absence, the death of the T required for the expression “I am” to be meaningful, irlier’, says Derrida with his usual penchant for imatisation, ‘we reached the “I am mortal” from the “I here we understand the “I am” out of the “I am dead.” id this is just the ‘ordinary story of the language’, ‘the rmal situation’, (ibid., 97) Before we proceed further, it may be emphasised that the ;ument about the mortality of man in language, as given ove by Derrida and before him by Heidegger, lies at the art of the whole post-modernistic discourse on the death of in. Given thus its crucial importance, it is necessary to ve a closer look at it, if only to realise its nuance and its aring upon our thesis of cogito as a principle of complete perience. One thing which is pretty clear is that the irridean-Heideggerian thesis of language as being a prior id primordial reality which lets the consciousness and the orld happen is by its very nature a highly metaphysical eory. The denial of an ontological status to the language or ie word does not in any way take away the profundity that is nplied in the statement as made above. For even as it is said ►at the ‘word’ refers to no matter and no idea, it still must ave a reality of its own in order to let the phenomena of the lind and the world happen. Language, if not the ground, is at sast in the background of empirical reality and in this very apacity it cannot be the name of a nothing. It can of course e said to be a no-thing, a non-substance or even a nonxistence, but to say it is a nothing is to stretch the magination to unmanageable limits. Even if one could say vith any degree of justification that language was originary, he statement would be of the same genre as the conventional tatements about metaphysical reality. In fact, when the old

254 philosophers spoke of matter or idea as reality, these words hardly referred to any concrete existence, though it also cannot be said that they were mere words. The matter of philosophy was never empirically material, nor an idea a thing or an object in the usual sense. Indeed, if anything, the idea was conceptualised entirely as a no-thing and was no less abstract than a word in language. As for its rational comprehensibility and conceptualisability, these characteristics would apply no less to the word or trace. For the very fact that they are spoken and argued about establishes them irredeemably in our faculty of conceptualisation and comprehension. If at all, in other words, we can speak about language (i.e. the fact of its speakability itself and not its actual spoken status) it cannot be anything but an event in the underworld of our rational consciousness. The words that we hear before speaking constitute the substratum of our consciousness; they are, in other words, embedded in our consciousness just as our consciousness is embedded in language. But to say that language and consciousness are embedded in each other, or that the first is the substratum of the second, does not mean that the language is unconscious or a nothing* Language cannot be nothing if it lets realities happen, especially the reality of consciousness, which is the site of our different experiences of pain and pleasure besides being the ‘knowledge’ of things. It is necessary to realise that the world is not merely a world of knowledge. Had it been so, it would perhaps have been easy to reduce it into a trace or a language. But the world that we inhabit is also the world of ‘experience’; it is indeed my world of experience or my experience of the world which is also pleasant or painful. The experience of pleasure and pain, especially the latter, would forever resist the reduction of the world into the nothing of language, just as it has resisted its characterisation as an illusion or maya in the

255 Ud oriental philosophies. Pain can never be unreal, nor can it Rve an unreality as its ground or background. Moreover, it

gnnol be objective; nor can it be described as being neitherrojective-nor-subjective. Pain is always, irreducibly, Objective. Which means that if pain is there, a subject is also Bere. I suffer therefore I exist. It is not that I exist therefore 1 ndTer (as Buddha said), or that 1 exist, therefore I think or wen that 1 think therefore I exist. All these formulations are kptial and incomplete. Existence and experience, as

Snbedded into each other, constitute in turn the subjectivity apd objectivity of the reality. | The ‘reality’ of language lies in the domain of Subconscious, which is not unconscious. It belongs to the general economy of consciousness which is however, again, apt the absolute consciousness of Hegel or Shankara. The Word as the word of consciousness is the voice of God, who k himself originary and primordial without however .being

necessarily a ground or substance in the ontological sense, pie cogito, the restricted economy of consciousness, as being moulded in the image of its general economy and sharing its nature, also has language embedded in it, much in the way Chomsky would like to describe it. For language as the language of God is creative and as creative it creates a self ^nd a world. The self that it creates is moreover not mortal

£ut immortal (as being in time and not in space), as against l|he world whose mortality is ensured by its spatiality, language is thus the principle not of the death but of the eternal life of man. The word, as Derrida said above, is in Time, is temporal, as against the ‘thing’, which is in space. The word is therefore eternal while the thing not so. But the eternity of the word and time is realised only in the consciousness and not outside it, that is, not in space, where Jt would become mortal. Given this fact of the eternity of consciousness, of the immortality of soul, it is immaterial

256 whether one already knows or does not know the meanings of the words and expressions one uses to describe a situation. In a nutshell one could say that the language as being originary and creative, as being in time only, cannot be disengaged from consciousness. It perhaps constitutes the very structure of consciousness in both of its general and restricted economies. To integrate language with consciousness is to have a demystified view of it as against the Derridean view, in which its alleged presence-absence becomes an unfathomable mystery. The arche-language, if not God, is God’s own voice, is the Word which was in the beginning and through which God created the universe. It was not the logos of the Greeks, which was mere intelligence and an ‘emanation’ from the Absolute or the One. God is consciousness in its trilogical simplicity and complexity i.e. as a principle of knowledge, will and affectivity, as said before. God is not ‘pure’ language, as Derrida would like to believe; nor is he the pure logos of the Greeks (the two statements in fact mean the same thing). God is originary language, an experience, a value-ultimate. As a creator of man he is also the guarantee against his mortality and death. In God is man’s life and no death; away from God is man’s death and no life, as the post-modernists correctly said. In post-modem thinking, as seen before, the mortality of ‘I’, the death of man as following upon and implicated in the immortality of his life, is made to be the essential motif of all great philosophical thinking. If metaphysics speaks of an ‘end’ of man’s life, it cannot be anything else but the end of life itself. The teleological must be seen to merge into the eschato-teleological: the two ends must meet. In our own times, this task was to be accomplished with reference to Hegel arid Husserl, who were the philosophers of meaning and truth, but who were also the figures with whom death stared at these same points. The thematic of death also found its life in Heidegger before its relapse into anthropologism,

257 1 that fact has to be recognised in its subtlety and hplexity. The three great moments of modem philosophy fst be liberated from their own self-inversion and that ans doing away with all kinds of phenomenologies tegelian, Husserlian, Heideggerian and Sartrean). r k hNow, if one considers that the critique of f anthropologism in the last great metaphysical

systems (Hegel and Husserl, notably) was executed < r in the name of truth and meaning, if one considers that these ‘phenomenologies* - which were metaphysical systems - had as their essential motif a reduction to meaning (which is literally a Husserlian proposition), then one can conceive that j the reduction of meaning that is, of the signified [ first takes the form of a critique of

[ phenomenology. Moreover, if one considers that • the Heideggerian destruction of metaphysical r humanism is produced initially on the basis of a

hermeneutical question on the meaning or the truth I of Being, then one also conceives that the ’ reduction of meaning operates by means of a kind of break with a thinking of being which has all the characteristics of a releve (Aufhebung) of humanism*. (Ma, 134) he releve of humanism, i.e. a synthesis of superhumanism nd its antithesis, subhumanism, i.e. the two great moments f excess, (the two ‘eves’, as Derrida calls it) between which i placed the destiny of the Occident. The time of henomenology is over and along with it has ended the age f man and his subjectivity. With this end of man has begun ie era of a non-man, a superior man or a superman. But one as already left behind the superior man of Christianity and feidegger and has perforce to wait for the superman of

258 Nietzsche to arrive. The security of God and Being is no longer available to man; it was perhaps never available to him before. Even if one waits, with Heidegger, for a god to come and save us, this wait for the god may well turn out to be a wait for the godot. Man is no more a lord of beings, no more a shepherd or neighbour of Being. There is no nearness, no proximity, no security left. Derrida asks a question and answers it himself:

Is not this security of the near what is trembling today, that is, the co-belonging and co-propriety of the name of man and the name of Being, such as this co-propriety inhabits, and is inhabited by, the language of the West... and such as it is awakened also by the destruction of onto-theology? But this trembling - which can only come from a certain outside - was already requisite within the very structure that it solicits. Its margin was marked in its own (propre) body. In the thinking and the language of Being, the end of man has been prescribed since always, and this prescription has never done anything but to modulate* the equivocality of the end, in the play of telos and death. In the reading of this play, one may take the following sequence in all its senses: the end of man is the thinking of Being, man is the end of thinking of Being, the end of man is the end of the thinking of Being. Man, since always, is his proper end, that is, the end of his proper. Being, since always, is its proper end, that is, the end of its proper, (ibid.. 133-4) The end of man was always implicated in the thinking of Being, as the latter too was nothing but the other name of the end of Being. The end of man and the end of Being were

259 incidental both in teleological and the eschatological nses. It was just as it was in the case of a (Hellenic) God of gos, whose life implied a simultaneous death of man, cause God himself was the name of death, a self-death, an dies in language, in Being and in logos. 1 Now, as it happens, this thematic of the death of man as ring coeval with the death of God, which comes a little frequently in the thinking of Derrida, finds a more lively rice in Foucault. He too, like Derrida, believes the end of an to be the fate of the West. The end of man for him too is ie end of the history of the Occident, the end of history self. Both Derrida and Foucault, it may be recalled, grew up i a milieu which was dominated by the thought of tructuralism, whose chief proponent at the time was LeviItrauss, who had declared that the human sciences, instead of onstituting man, rather dissolve him. The post-modemists as lost-structuralists, carrying this idea of the mortality of man iirther, made the idea of science itself antagonistic to the dea of man. Man must die not only in the science of mthropology but more generally in his knowledge of rimself, in his psychology, in biology, in economics and in niman science in general. Man must die in his body, in his vork, in his language and in his history. Foucault’s methodology is to read history in order to effect the end of history and thereby to effect the end of man. The end of history, at least the history of ideas, must be effected in order to do away with the notions of subject and object, of ideality and positivity, since it was history which has been a condition of these notions while also being their consequence. It is not that the history of ideas was to be rewritten; rather, the idea of history itself needs to be re­ exam ined and recast. The trad itional h istoriography of science, for example, was based on the ideas of contiguity, continuity, gradual, step by step evolution, influence and paradigm, etc., besides a description and analysis of the

260 internal structure of theories themselves. But, aside from these, there was the scientist himself who would appropriate the influence and build upon those foundations a new edifice by the force of his own ingenuity and industry. Now in the new historiography, all these notions become extremely problematic. What especially is not to be tolerated is the ‘scientist’, the subject, his authority, autonomy and originality. As in the case of Derrida, in Foucault too the starting point of philosophy is the rejection of phenomenology and its ideology of consciousness and subjectivity. In the Foreword to the English edition of his The Order of Things, Foucault wrote thus:

If there is one approach that I do reject, however, it is that (one might call it, broadly speaking, the phenomenological approach) which gives i bsolute priority to the observing subject, which attributes a constituent role to an act, which places its own point of view al the origin of all historicity - which, in short, leads to a transcendental consciousness. It seems to me that the historical analysis of scientific discourse should, in the last resort, be subject, not to a theory of knowing subject, but rather to a theory of discursive practice. (XIV)

This extreme looking rejection of authorial transcendence is however tempered a little by an earlier statement: ‘I do not wish to deny the validity of intellectual biographies...’ This would then suggest that a categorical anti-subjectivism was not to be quite unequivocal or unproblematic. But before we proceed further in this direction, it is necessary to make a digression to note the point that this suppression of subject in history, which led Foucault to proclaim more formally the subject’s disappearance, had a subtle Heideggerian debt while on the surface appearing more to do with Marxism,

261 sychoanalysis and structuralism. Foucault often said that in |s new historiography, it was his aim to discover the Unconscious’ of science:

i Underneath what science itself shows is something L it does not know; and its history, its becoming, its L periods and accidents obey a number of laws and L determinations... an autonomous domain that

t would be the unconscious of science... just as the L individual human unconscious has its own laws L and determinations. (FL, 54)

For sciences have their rationality and their methodology which they consciously pursue to arrive at theories within ffieir respective domains. This is what may be called in Freudian terms the ‘ego’ of science behind which, however, an ‘unconscious’, a force and a system of rules, correlations and commonalties, of which they themselves remain largely unaware. This unconscious, while being the other of rationality, is still a factor which governs the scientific deliberation from inside. What is then required for uncovering this underlying force is not the familiar method of epistemology but some other method which can enable pne to unearth the hidden structures; this may not simply be a psychoanalysis of individual unconscious or Marxian dialectic of historical unconscious, or even the structuralist’s jway of explaining social beliefs and behaviours. What is peeded is an ‘archaeology’ of sciences which can displace the claims of epistemology as the science of sciences, as a ^uperscience. I Now, as can be seen, at a more systematic level this displacement of epistemology was effected by none other |han Heidegger, whose Being was precisely the unconscious principle, the anti-logos which Foucault was looking for in history and the history of science. It was the negation of

262 consciousness and rationality at a more generalised level that led both Heidegger and Foucault to effect the reduction of subjectivity in philosophy and the philosophy of history. The essence of man was not his ability to rationalise or conceptualise, not his so-called unique capacity to talk to himself, but in a reality which was actually a non-reality. Man was rooted in the nothingness of Being; that is why his most immediate encounter with himself was not when he felt he came face to face with his being but rather when he was confronted with nothing, when he was in a situation of dread or suffered anxiety. As we know, anxiety, with Heidegger, was objectless - as against fear, where one knew what it was that one was afraid of. It was when one was afraid of nothing that one had anxiety and a moment of self-realisation. The realm of anxiety was the realm of the unknown, of uncertainty, and of death. The unconscious and anxiety are in fact intimately related to each other: ‘Thrownness into death reveals itself to Dasein in a more primordial and impressive manner in that state-of-mind which we have called “anxiety”.’(BT, 295) It is the death, the own-most, immediate and impending possibility, as revealed in anxiety, which makes man the whole of what he is most primordially and originarily. Now Foucault had had an early brush with this motif of anxiety before his coming to the formulation of the idea of death of man. In one of his earliest works, Mental Illness and Psychology, he shows indulgence with this idea of anxiety as being the governing principle of the human psyche and even refers to it as a replacement of Freud’s libidinal id. Pathological phenomena were not to be explained in terms of Oedipal repressions or ambiguities since their symptoms and the repression itself are not same in different individuals. What is the same in all individual histories is the presence of anxiety, which determines the normality or the so-called abnormality of those same histories. The different levels of

263 ty and insanity are, in fact, different abilities to overcome

ot to overcome the individual’s own history of anxiety: t is anxiety that is to be found beneath the web of all ological episodes of a given subject.’ Anxiety is not a ptom of individuals’ traumatic experiences; it is rather preceding cause, the origin of the traumas, the origin and idation of existence itself. ‘If anxiety fills an individual’s jry, it is because it is its principle and foundation; ...it is rt of a priori of existence.’ (MIP, 42)

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264 Among the early formulations of this psychological phase, there were two principal ideas which remained with Foucault till the end. Of these, the first was that the distinction between the normal and pathological was not quite as absolute as it has been made out to be by the scientists of psychology and the psychiatrists. And secondly, he said that this distinction is historical rather than existential. To begin with the first, it has just been seen that for Foucault anxiety was at the heart of mental disorder and it was also the defining essence of human existence. This would clearly imply that disorder itself was an essential element in the structural constitution of man. Classical psychology explained pathological phenomena in terms of regression, i.e. an adult going back to the original forms of his experience of his childhood when he was as yet a monological animal bereft of the complexities that he later acquired through progressive socialisation. But for Foucault there was no primeval personality of man as such, no archaic substance which, instead of growing in a ‘normal’ way, was subjected to some kind of relapse, a reversal where the dialogical content was for some reason impaired or had disappeared. The fact of the matter, on the other hand, is that all human beings suffer anxiety and are accordingly* subject to pathological illness of some kind or other. The difference is basically a difference of intensity and not that of total collapse of consciousness in one case and of its total presence in the other case. The disorder is of varying kinds, ranging from obsessions, mania, depression and paranoia to schizophrenia and the more extreme form of dementia. But in none of these does a mad person suffer a total loss of world. He rather remains on the borderline, moving over to either side of sanity and insanity on different occasions of his life. The psychic patient is not the exact opposite of the psychiatrist who treats him for his supposed illness. There is

265 >tal disintegration of the personality as there is no total ration of it. /hat differentiates the patient from his doctor is that 3 for the former the knowledge of his illness is active, for the latter it is objective. For the doctor, the nt’s illness is an objective event which he can observe, /se. investigate and cure. But for the patient it is an nal experience of anomaly, of paradoxicality, of swings instability in mental stales etc. It is indeed this loss of lity and the knowledge of it that makes the patient the

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266 nothing to discursive analyses, mechanistic causality, ...a method that must never tum into biographical history, with its description of successive links and its serial determinism.’ In the new method, the method of phenomenology of intersubjectivity (Foucault until this time was a phenomenologist of sorts), we are able to place ourselves ‘at the center of this experience’ (i.e. the experience of anxiety) and reduce or eliminate the distance that the scientific objectivity creates:

...the naturalist analysis envisages the patient with the distance of natural object; historical reflection preserves him in the alterity that makes possible explanation, but rarely understanding. Intuition, leaping into the interiority of morbid consciousness, tries to see the pathological with the eyes of the patient himself: the truth it seeks is of the order not of objectivity, but of inter­ subjectivity. (ibid., 45) Foucault, of course, had soon to abandon this whole vocabulary of‘experience’, ‘intuition’, ‘truth’, ‘subjectivity’, and ‘inter-subjectivity’ - in fact, phenomenology itself. But he would not abandon the conclusion of his ‘phenomenological analysis’ which, as he safd, ‘no doubt rejects an a priori distinction between the normal and pathological’. Even more importantly, he would not abandon the idea of psychiatry being a pseudo-scientific discipline aimed at understanding and possibly also causing mental illness. The debunking of psychiatry indeed would be his main concern later in The Birth of Clinic, where he would expose through his archaeological method the historicity of this science and its fundamental weakness. But before he could do this the ‘historicality’ of madness would have to be established. For, after all, as he said, ‘the morbid manifests itself in the course of investigation as the fundamental

267 racteristic of this world’. It is a particular aspect of man’s slvement in the world that makes him experience his ormality. Man takes a plunge into the world, but through : very act he also becomes alienated from the world. His ture from the world forces him to retreat in his own jectivity, which is however nothing other than a realm of ectivity of a different, non-norrnal kind. ‘The nucleus of illness is to be found in this contradictory unity of a fate world and an abandonment to the inauthenticity of the •Id.’ Someone who is mentally ill is a prisoner of his own jectivily, but has also fallen into the ‘worst of ectivities’. (ibid., 56)

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268 in Middle Ages being instead lepers); the Renaissance in fact tolerated, even praised certain forms of madness. It was only around the time of the French Revolution that these madmen became universally an object of disparagement. With the new bourgeois work ethic, work-shyness, sloth, idleness, etc., became subjects of serious censure. All such people, together with criminals, beggars, the poor and disabled, etc., were subjected to institutionalised isolation. The mentally deranged naturally also found a home in places of internment. What was common to all these various categories of people was their shared defect of not being useful to society, their not being productive. They were of course to be helped, protected and patronised by society, but this help and patronage was founded on their being perceived as less human than others. They were the new age’s lepers. It was like earlier times when pious churchmen treated lepers as being at once the sign of wrath of God and an object of Christ’s mercy. Madmen were victims of the new morality of secular modernity. The traditional concept of a madman as basically being a non-normal personality is not quite correct in the light of both the archaeology and history of madness. The shaman, the medicine man or the priest in a primitive Arfrican tribe showed all kinds of deviant behaviour but he was precisely for that reason considered holy and given the highest place in society. Similarly, in the medieval times there were ‘possessed* people who showed all the signs of madness but were yet not considered especially mad. It is the theory and practice of modem psychiatric medicine that cause a man of abnormal behaviour to be seen as mad or mentally ill in a prejorative sense. Insanity during earlier times was taken as an independent category, separate from the phenomena of ‘possession’ or the mystics having their ecstasies. The fathers of the Church regarded some extreme forms of the latter to be deviant but not for that matter as sign of madness. Madness

269 he to be an obvious concept only when the idea of mnality’ was brought into the centre as a result of the Hies of madness itself. Sanity then became normality, Bmality rationality and rationality humanity. But this tstemological-ethical nexus of sanity-normality-rationality humanity did not have a spontaneous self-birth. When nascent scientific gaze studied the pathological and kiant behaviour of some individuals, it became aware of k sanity/normality/rationality/humanity of the majority of feple at large.

iBut was not this ‘rationality’ an old attribute of man that feted with the history of the West itself? Was it not crates who first invented dialectics and was it not Aristotle io first defined man as a rational animal? Foucault of brse knows all these historical trivia; but, he says, there is >• important distinction to be made between classical Sionalism and modernity being characterised as an age of tison. The Greek logos had no contrary of it and this meant fere was no condemnation of insanity as irrationality, ladness remained an ‘undifferentiated experience* for a long me until it was discovered at the end of the eighteenth mtury, and then began to be studied in the nineteenth Sfitury by the community of scientists. It was the men of /chology and psychiatry who founded a new ‘merciless ftiguage of non-madness* which they also characterised as le voice of reason. A permanent chasm was created between pson and unreason and the former was given the absolute feht to repress the latter. F For antiquity, on the other hand, despite its general Isparagement of man*s body, the body was still not "'0' ansidered as synonymous with bestiality, and the latter itself Iras not totally identified with unreason or insanity. It was ie doctor in modem times who thought that by brutalising ie madman he was actually fighting against the animal in im. In his identification of body and animality with

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270 unreason, he forgot that it was these same realities which were the sites where the reason was located. Insofar as man was a rational animal, he was also the locus of an intersection of animality and rationality, and in this intersection the former preceded the latter. Rationality, having been bom out of animality, could not be its enemy the way it was made out to be in later times. But for the new thinking, animality representing unreason was a domain of unfreedom, while rationality itself signified the freedom of nature. Human nature was set against animal nature, nature itself, and rationality divorced from unreason. Modem man has travelled far away from that ‘zero point’ of history where unreason was not an enemy of reason, where madness was still not a scandal or a reversal of humanity. Unreason, in fact, was glorified by the early Church fathers, who spoke of the fact of the God-bom-as-man being a scandal of reason and denounced the latter as a symbol of pride and hubris. Reason, for them, was probably more connected with the passion of the body than being a function of the soul which still, to them, found its edification in the wisdom of unreason, of madness as such. However, there came a time when Christianity started to shy away from its essential irrationality, when ujider growing Hellenic influences, a ‘rational theology’ was sought to be developed. But though this was done quite consciously and systematically, Christ’s own ‘madness’, his patronage, of lunatics and the mentally infirm, his final apogee in the play of passion etc., were still upheld quite as emphatically. There was, in other words, a fundamental adherence to the principle of unreason, though also at the same time a drift - an association of unreason with immorality and inhumanity. One could here see

...why the scandal of madness could be exalted, while that of other forms of unreason was

271 . concealed with so much care. The scandal of unreason produced only the contagious example of > transgression and immorality; the scandal of . madness showed men how close to animality their Fall could bring them; and al the same time how far divine mercy could extend when it consented to save them. (MC, 81)

This dual attitude of Christianity towards insanity found its way also into the modem experience of it, where madness would continue to be considered a form of unreason and Would on that basis be isolated and condemned. A madman was no longer a man; in the fury of his passion, in the depth of his unreason, he had gone beyond the limits of humanity, 'fallen behind and short of his humanity. In the dark domain 1 of his irrationality, he was no longer free, no longer human. The clear association of moral ism with rationalism and of rationalism with humanism was both a continuation and a point of departure of modernity from medieval attitudes throughout the Renaissance and post-Renaissance periods. The doctor, in fighting against the animality of insanity, was doing a moral duty; he was fighting for the cause of humanity. In his new-found humanism, he treated his patient 1 not with contempt but with sympathy and respect - exactly 1 the way the Church fathers had behaved with lepers. But unlike the latter, he no longer treated his patient as symbol of divine grace, as his being in a way proto-Christ. The madness was for him rather a fall into bestiality. And if this beast was l' to be chained, confined, brutalised, it would all be in strict conformity with the demands of humanity. The insane man, being mentally ill and fallen, must be watched, his behaviour , controlled - and studied. Man’s animality in madness should be a subject matter of objective and positive knowledge. . There should be a science of psycho-pathology or psychology in general, whereby the insane person is cured of

272 his malaise, his humanity restored and himself liberated from the clutches of animality. The psychology, the so-called science of mind, was bom, according to Foucault, out of an unholy conjunction of spurious moralism and pseudo­ humanism.

What one discovers under the name of the ‘psychology’ of madness is merely the result of the operations by which one has investigated it. None of the psychology would exist without the moralizing sadism in which nineteenth-century ‘philanthropy’ enclosed it, under the hypocritical appearances of ‘liberation’. The birth of psychology as a positive science had behind it the hidden cruelty of humanism and moralism.

It might be said that all knowledge is linked to the essential form of cruelty. The knowledge of madness is no exception. Indeed, in the case of madness, the link is no doubt of particular importance. Because it was first of all this link that made possible a psychological analysis of madness; but above all because it was on this J ink that the possibility of any psychology was secretly based. It must not be forgotten that ‘objective’, or ‘positive*, or ‘scientific’ psychology found its historical origin and its basis in pathological experience. It was an analysis of duplications that made possible a psychology of the personality; an analysis of compulsion and of the unconscious that provided the basis for a psychology of consciousness; an analysis of deficits that led to a psychology of intelligence. In other words, man became a ‘psychologizable species’ only when his

273 ! relation to madness made a psychology possible, fthat is to say, when his relation to madness was ’defined by the external dimension of exclusion and ^punishment and by the internal dimension of moral

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’assignation and guilt. In situating madness in I4relation to these two fundamental axes, early 1 nineteenth-century man made it possible to group t;madness and thus to initiate a general psychology. E(MIP, 73)

274 general, indeed, need not pretend to understand .or master the event called madness; but rather it is madness'which should be called upon to explain psychology. The supreme goal of the post-modern enterprise then is not to rehabilitate human science in the soil of reason but to uncover that subterranean domain of unreason in which it is already grounded. Madness must be reunited with the general unreason of which it is only a form, and the unreason itself considered as a general condition of human existence. This of course involves a severe reduction of rationality and, along with it, of humanity, or at least, of the scientific perception and conception of man. The reduction of psychology is the reduction of homo psychologies, who was bom only recently but whose birth was foretold long ago by Descartes. Insofar as modem psychology talked of mental illness rather than illness as such, it segregated the mind from the body, made it a domain excluded from its physical environment and, finally, confined it to live in its own splendid interiority. Psychoanalytical practice realised the Cartesian ideal of a cogito into a ‘subject’ rather than deconstructing it through its own theoretical idea of libidinal control. - For Foucault, then, a new cogito had to be created which would be Heideggerian rather that Cartesian.* In this new cogitology, the ‘I think’ will not be the cause but probably a consequence of ‘1 am’ - but, again, not in the way Sartre would wish it. The new cogito will not be a being, nor even a nothingness; it will rather be that which raises the question of being and nothingness. The new cogito will not be a thinker of the world or of itself but one which will constitute the worldly reality while being constituted by it. It will, moreover, not be a transcendental a priori in the Kantian sense, where it may impose the forms of its own constitution on the formless reality of the world. No such transcendental or original mind exists to create the world, to think of it or to change it. The self is rather a historical a priori, a formation

275 ahistorical forces over which it has no control and which Sve as the external presence in which it allows itself to selfjenate. These historical forces constitute the ‘unthought’ Sder whose tutelage it is able to acquire its distinctive power

wthinking and of being. I When man thinks, what he thinks cannot be thinking Eblf; there has to be an object, a being which must precede Rb thinking but which must also be within thinking; because Kierwise thinking cannot grasp it, cannot comprehend it. mere is no real external world to be comprehended by a find from outside but then that itself means that there is no

wind to apprehend the world from outside. The mind or the Object comes into existence only in its relation to Objectivities and these objectivities themselves become what Key are when thought by a subject. The objectivities, the realities of the world, envelop the subject and are, in turn, Rlumined by it. Things must needs be reduced to thoughts glit the thoughts also stand in need of a concomitant reduction into the non-thoughts. Both the philosophical options of realism and idealism are therefore spurious for Foucault, just as they were spurious before for Heidegger. EThe rejection of these two theories does not lead them however to look for some ‘neutral stuff as in the case of some Anglo-American philosophers, who propounded a new ^doctrine of ‘neutral monism’ in order to get over the difficulties of their earlier phenomenalistic reduction. The tease here is not of reduction but rather of a drastic negation the negation of external being by thought, and of thought by ^unthought.

i As one can see, Foucault has been writing on this most ^crucial part of his philosophy very much in a Heideggerian vein. But unlike him, instead of talking of an abstract Being, [he mentions concrete existential forces as constituting the ;realm of unthought. There is in the first place the force of life represented by the body, in which the soul is imprisoned, and

276 which for that matter must dictate what it has imprisoned within itself. Man is a subject of desires in having no control over them and in being controlled by them. Secondly, man must work and so be subject to the law of economic production and consumption, which again govern his life rather than being governed by it. Last, and most important, is language - again, not a creation of man, not in his control but controlling him through his thoughts. Life, labour and language are thus three forces whose externality is ensured by the authority and determination they exercise over man, but which nonetheless have no presence outside man’s thought, Only man has desire, only he works and only he speaks and thinks and so these must be integral to the notion of humanity. But by the very fact that they constitute man’s humanity, they also negate that same humanity. Insofar as they give birth to subjectivity, they also keep this subjectivity under a stem and ruthless power of their own, denying thereby any independent authority or identity for it. Man loses his identity, his humanity in what he has inside him and in what he alone has inside him. Man thinks that which is already present in him, before him and with him, i.e. the unthought which is unthought because he could not think of it before, but which has made his thinking of it possible. It is this unthought which Foucault calls man’s double, his ‘archaeological contemporary’, a kind of dark shadow which must accompany man, or a demon which can never be exorcised. It has been recognised before by other philosophers such as Hegel, Schopenhauer, Marx and Husserl, and not the least by Descartes himself. For, after all, it was he who arrived at his ‘I think’ on the basis of illusions, errors and dreams, etc., to which he said he was always susceptible. But the ‘evil demon* which would lead him astray through its stratagems was also the one which opened up the possibility of finding the certainty of knowledge through those very stratagems. If there was no darkness of

277 joubt, there could be no light of knowledge. As for pescartes’ belief that once knowledge is reached, the demon ?f uncertainty is cast off forever, Foucault’s retort is that the ^rtainty of knowledge was itself an illusion which the same jvil demon was causing, though it now called it knowledge nstead of non-knowledge. Man is more deceived in his mowledge than in non-knowledge. The so-called certitude of J am* is still a deception, a greater deception in fact, as compared to the deception which came in the form of T am iot‘. I am neither the desires I suffer, nor the works of labour undertake, nor the language I speak. I can be there in all of these and yet none of these are really me. They are principles jpoth of my presence and my absence. r The dialectic of thought and unthought, of presence and absence, constitutes the language of transgression which is best represented by sexuality. It is wrong to say that sexuality makes man a member of the extended family of animals. teFoucault is antipathetic towards any effort to animalise man. fcMan is, in a most fundamental sense, a subject with a (consciousness of himself, though this latter has its time of |limit - in the unconscious of libido. Sexuality was there ^before too, in medieval times, in the discourse of mystics, as |khey talked of sins, of fallen bodies, of rapture and of ^penetration and ecstasy. But there these manifestations led ►man to expand himself into an infinity of consciousness, to Emerging into God, as they would describe it. Modem Asexuality, on the other hand, leads consciousness to its ^closure of the unconscious. But wherever there is closure or > limit, there is also a transgression, an endeavour to go i beyond, to commit excess, to experience exhaustion. The language of sexuality is in this way the language of excess; it is the language of death. The greatest folly of modem man was to assure himself that once the shadow of God is removed he would be secured of the light of his human presence. That is why with determination he

278 proceeded to kill God. But what is this act of killing the God except an act of killing oneself? God is a ghost and no one can kill a ghost. Man in his somnambulant state, in the awakened state of his sleep, thought he was killing the ghost of God, but in fact he was killing himself. The death of God, more than its being a death of God, was the death of man. The libidinous unconscious of the consciousness empties the latter of all its supposed contents. In Descartes* cogito resided the ideas of God and of the world. But the nausea of libido disembowels the cogito of God and world; it even empties itself of itself. Nothing is left to be represented in the consciousness and that means that absolutely nothing is left. The emergence of sexuality is, thus, tied, in F jucault’s own words, to the ‘death of God and ontological void’, and more importantly, to ‘the faltering of speaking subject*. (LCP, 50) Sexuality has its own unique language which is totally different from the language of metaphysics. The latter is engendered by what it engenders i.e. the presence of self, of God and the world. But sexuality removes all this in one stroke. On the day the sexuality began to speak and to be spoken, language no longer served as a veil for the infinite; and in the thickness it acquired on that day, we now experience finitude and being. In its dark domain, we now encounter the absence of God, our death, limits and their transgression. (ibid., 51)

In sexuality, language transforms itself because the operation of the unconscious exorcises the words of the ‘meanings’ which they are supposed to possess, i.e. possessed of. Thus dispossessed of meaning, the words acquire a life of their own. Language, instead of depending on what is before and beyond it, becomes self-existent. And after thus existing by

279 it undoes the illusions of man, God and other realities,

rth of the language of sexuality and the death of God ntemporaneous events. This is the message that we get le Sade and Freud, though it was Nietzsche who led •ain of thought to its logical destination when he need (though hesitantly) the death of man. And after che, for sure, this has become the destiny of Western Foucault often talked of the shaking of the ground on the edifice of Western culture has stood and withstood mors generated by the death of God. But after de Sade, and Nietzsche it can no longer do so. Not only is there bling of the base but the house itself is no more than a of cards. There is no way one kills the God and saves in.

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280 death in that same knowledge, i.e. when he discovers that his knowledge of himself is nothing but a work of language. Foucault’s archaeology is, however, a large and difficult subject and we can ill afford to discuss the issues in a hurried manner. It is of the utmost importance firstly to know what the archaeological approach does not presume or preoccupy itself with. When a traditional philosopher or even a scientist with philosophical pretensions approaches man, he finds in him some ‘essential’ traits - the traits of freedom, thinking, will, creativity, language, affectivity, work and so on. These then become for him the matrices through which he extracts a definition of man. Man, in short, begins to be seen to have a ‘nature*. But Foucault says he would rather ‘mistrust the notion of human nature a little’ (FHI, 110), and for all his archaeological reasons. For him the concept of human nature is not a ‘scientific’ concept at all, and its status is no more than that of being an ‘epistemological indicator’ or an element in a certain type of discursive practice. Human nature was formed as part of a discourse which was designed either in relation or in opposition to the discourse of theology or biology or histoiy. Outside this discourse neither human nature nor man himself had any reality. * The above position was maintained by Foucault in his debate with Chomsky to which a reference has been made earlier. This debate is additionally significant insofar as it is probably the only occasion when Foucault condescends to confront a traditional way of dealing with the issue at hand, his general strategy being rather to completely ignore it. For, as just said, he never encountered the question of human nature, or, for that matter, any other related issue straight away, his preoccupation being always with the discourses, that is, the literary archives in which those discourses were inscribed. It has been his conscious endeavour to have a parallel style of thinking and writing without crossing the path of his possible interlocutors. He generally dismisses any

281 of human nature without even bothering to ask the tion whether human nature exists or not. iut although in the present dialogue the two philosophers ly succeed in interpenetrating each other’s monologues, )uld still be relevant to delve into it, even if it is only for ake of understanding the circumstances which prevented i from succeeding. Chomsky stresses the highly complex creative nature of man’s linguistic activity, which he says ot entirely be explained in terms of the informative data he receives’ through the period of his maturation. For i data are too dispersed, too fragmentary and too itive to enable him to create on the basis of them an nised and schematised discourse. Even an ordinary man »s creating newer and newer forms of speech which is not interpersonally communicable but which also etimes pretends to represent ‘reality*. Language of course tions meaningfully only within a certain set of rules; but ; rules, rather than being restrictive, ar ford a vast horizon which the communicability and representation are itained by language. Clearly, all this can be explained in terms of the creativity and the organising principle g innate in the human mind - the latter itself being not dy a biological and thereby a physical configuration, msky is anti-reductionist and adheres to orthodox ^artesian theory that the mental substance must be held to be £ counter-reality of the body substance (though at one place ^e intriguingly talks of a ‘neural region’ as the place of

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inental activity).

282 which fact conditions him to emphasise the creativity factor. Whereas, for himself, he encountered in the history of ideas and of science an undue stress on individual ingenuity. His was also thus a conditioned response in which the author, his ingenuity, his authority and his freedom, etc., were drastically curbed, even cancelled. Clearly, here, there was a bleak allusion to the stimulus-response approach which Foucault had shared with Derrida in order to explain the choices man makes in different critical moments, including where the issue involved is of a moral or intellectual nature. Like any other action, theoretical action too was a physical exercise and therefore shaped by antecedent conditions. (Foucault indeed might have here thought that to argue his position would amount at least partly to conceding victory to his opponent.) There was no supra-contextual criticality, as there was also no creative choice for one to opt for one position rather than the other. One set of theoretical choices was as much contextually determined as the other. Both Chomsky and he himself, therefore, were responding to the varying intellectual stimuli with which they happened to be confronted. Foucault, indeed, takes his position to a further point where not only the nature or creativity of man is*denied but his life too is called into question. Like human nature, ‘life’ too was not a scientific concept, because biology, the socalled science of life made a very late appearance on the intellectual scene. Life, in fact, did not exist before the nineteenth century and if it has come to exist since then, it is again only as an epistemological indicator; or, in other words, only as an ingredient of a larger epistemic scheme which functions under a set of practical rules that creates as well as sustains that scheme. Hence Chomsky’s suggestion for biology to effect a decisive self-expansion as a way of accounting for life-transcend)ng phenomena was irrelevant.

283 Foucault had of course with him all his intricate ;haeological points to explain away the apparent freedoms d creativity of man, so called. But as the present debate 5 not the occasion to go into them, he contented himself th merely pointing to the fact that whenever a new concept ich as ‘life’, ‘madness’, ‘man’ etc.) makes its appearance the discursive practice of a certain time, it is inextricably und up with all the other elements of the same practice rich holds sway contemporaneously and is also quite often gendered by the unconscious forces that surround the mentor of the concept and the concept itself. The alleged nativity of an author of a literary work, of a scientist, or of ordinary man is more of an impersonal than a personal ue. A new scientific or philosophical idea takes birth not >m some interior region of mind but from a ‘field of human practices’ such as the economics, technology, politics etc. of jhe time. The real point of difference, then, between him and D horn sky was this:

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284 relations of power, of power-knowledge which came, in its turn, as a by-product of those same relations. It was thus, as said before also, not the mind but the mechanism of power which served as the site of the production of scientific works .

I would like to know whether we cannot discover the system of regularity, of constraint, which makes science possible, somewhere else, even outside the human mind, in social forms, in the relations of production, in the class struggle, etc. (ibid., 123)

The reference here to ‘social form’, ‘class struggle’ et al. was, however, in a lighter vein, for Foucault believed neither in society nor in class struggle except in a very relative sense. What in depth he was referring to was the trilogy of the forces of life, labour and language. But this was for sure a very debatable point. For it appeared to be a tall order to say that (for example) an unconscious libido would give birth to all those abstruse theories which man has constructed in science or philosophy. And the same also goes for the relations of power, and even, for that matter, for the so-called discursive practices. If anything, these forces of the unconscious, at whatever level may they exist, require still a consciousness to conceive them in the first place. It is the fate of any reductionistic thinking that in its own progressive movement it would regress back to the place from where it had started. For the force of unconscious cannot but be a force in thought. Sexuality, work and words too, accordingly, as objectivities have their reference to the subjectivity of experience. It is much more difficult to believe that the conscious is a product of the unconscious than to think that the consciousness is the consciousness of unconscious forces or elements.

285 Be that as it may, we still have to go some distance to aw the post-modernist’s detour which led to the Btegration of the creative self, the destruction of the S'idual as the author of his words and works and, finally, pe death of man as such. As it happened, at the time e'ault and Derrida philosophised, a certain talk of the rth of the author’ was already in vogue in French literary fes and from which both of them derived their arguments, fas the poet Mall arm e (to whom they frequently refer) > formulated the question in its radical form of what, bad of who, is an author? The implied suggestion was that bld practice of giving priority to an author over his works

Mhe supposed relation of creator and creation between the j; were highly problematic. In a ‘piece of work’ what Ife was not the author but the word itself. The work as ting, instead of immortalising the author was, in fact, the linger of his death. Writing, as Derrida said, and Foucault red, was death itself. The ritual of writing was the ritual sacrifice in which the victim was none but the author self. Philosophically, at stake here was the question of the htity of the author, who supposedly remained one and

i‘c in the dispersal of his multiple works - ‘the collected fks* or ‘books’ so called. And while the identity and ktivity of the author were called into question, not less iblematic was found to be the supposed created status of ibook and its identity. The first question then was: Does iword ‘book’ refer to any single ideal signatum whose ferial manifestation is what we call as book? In our inary conception a book has first a material unity (a set of nged papers, traces of ink, its price, etc.) which contains tin its bounds a set of ideas that have supposedly emerged )1 n the mind of its author. But are all books of one and the e kind? An anthology of poems or a posthumous ection of fragments, etc., cannot be called books in the

286 same sense as, for example, a book written by Dostoevsky or Descartes. As for the discursive content of the book, the ‘unity’ of it is even more unspecifiable. The text of a book is not something which emerges straight from the author’s mind, all original, impeccable and virgin. It refers rather to a plurality of other texts and other ideas - ‘it is a node within a network’. It presupposes and contains obliquely and directly a number of other ideas, internal motivations, external influences etc. Seen from this perspective, the book’s supposed unity becomes a little suspect. It may also be noticed that a book is not simply a piece of writing. A laundry bill, a poster on the wall, a contract letter are all writings but they don’t have an ‘author*. There is a clear difference between a discursive and a non-discursive writing and only the former can be said to have an author. This fact indicates that the discursive event keeps a wider field as its context, which in turn becomes responsible for the said event to appear rather than the ingenuity of the author. For without that context, without that field to supp rt it from behind, it was more likely that it never appeared at all. On the other hand, there may be books with no names of the author attached to them, as for example the books of mythologies, which seem to have come from nowhere. Moreover, there may be books with the name of an author but the ‘author’ in question is not one person but many persons, as in the case of Homer. Books are also often written pseudonymously or anonymously. All this goes to show that while a book has an author, the ‘author’ itself is by no means an unambiguous idea. The relation of an author to his or her work therefore remains a problem to resolve. Who, or, what, then is an author? An author, even in the capacity of having a proper name cannot be said to refer to a single entity. To say, for example, ‘Aristotle* is to use a word which may mean a series of descriptions of the type: ‘the author of Analytics', the ‘founder of ontology’ and so forth. It

287 also not necessary that the ‘author’ and the name of the hor be identical. If some day it is discovered that a certain )k is not written by the author with whose name it is ked but by someone else, the author in this case will train same but the name will change. In another situation it y happen that an author’s name, such as Shakespeare, is ociated with a certain place of his birth but later found to wrongly so. Here the surprise would not be of the same td as it would be for example if it was discovered that the inets he is supposed to have written were actually written someone else. In the former case Shakespeare as the thor will remain the same Shakespeare; but in the latter e his position as author will be compromised. It would be also if it was found that the books known to be written by aeon were actually written by Shakespeare. These and other considerations lead Foucault lo conclude us:

The name of an author is not precisely a proper name among others. Its presence at best is functional in that it serves as a means of classification. A name can group together a number of texts and thus differentiate them from *others. A name also establishes different forms of relationships among texts. Neither Hennes nor Hippocrates existed in the sense that we can say Balzac existed, but the fact that a number of texts were attached to a single name implies that relationships of homogeneity, filiation, reciprocal explanation, authentification, or of common utilization were established among them. Finally, the author’s name characterizes a particular manner of existence of discourse. Discourse that possesses an author’s name is not to be immediately consumed and forgotten; neither it is

288 accorded the momentary attention given to ordinary, fleeting words. Rather, its status and its manner of reception are regulated by the culture in which it circulates. (LCP, 123) There is however a need for the reader to pause here. One, for sure, recognises all the great difficulties involved in the functioning of the proper name of an author, especially in relation to his real(?) persona, his relation to his own works and to others’ works, etc. But do these difficulties completely obviate the need to have the notion of an author and his simple relation to the books he is known to have authored? Isn’t there some kind of obvious simplicity in believing Michel Foucault as the author of Madness and Civilization which overrides the subtle analytical nuances prelending to dissolve both the author and the book? One may agree that a literary or a scientific work is not a self-contained discourse but an element in a larger discursive field whose frontiers stretch to unknown limits. But does it mean then that the work itself has no identity of its own and that a cognitive, creative experience is entirely dispensable? Is not such an experience still required to at least appropriate the elements from the vast field and then express them after modifying them? Is not the subject required to serve as the medium through which one discursive formation is transformed, transmitted, extended and transported to another formation? One doesn’t find an answer to any of these questions in Foucault, nor is there any sign of a willingness on his part to even confront them. What on the other hand one comes across are blatant denials and dogmatic refusals. That ideas have something to do with a place which is outside oneself is obvious. But that this does not fully explain their sporadic appearance is by no means less obvious. A creative experience as the site and source of ideas is necessary to

289 EpJain not only the emergence of new ideas but of ideas as Ech.

I The reductive strain, however, is continued, as it is farther Rid that a work does not really require an author to be fcognised as such. A work on mathematics, for example, has re value of reliability independently of the fact of who has whored it. The works dealing with scientific theories also, jmilarly, once they gain currency, no longer need the name H;their original propounders for their further dissemination. E. former times, moreover, mythological stories were read without anyone bothering to enquire who was their author, jhe requirement for the name of the author to be known, says Ipucault, came in fact in medieval times when writers adopted a peculiar style in which every idea or argument was sought to be legitimised by invoking the authority of a Classical writer. This tendency was continued by the modem

pterary critics who analysed the works of literature with Reference to their authors. The ‘modem author* indeed, Eoucault says, was bom in quite dubious circumstances. In a Culture obsessed with truth and nonns, it was natural that £very work was either sacred or profane, lawful or unlawful, juhose works considered to be on the wrong side of normality were proscribed and their authors hunted and victimised. Books thus came to be known by the names of their authors. And it was much later that, by way of consolidating this tendency, a work came to be considered as property and Copyright laws were codified to legally consecrate the Authorship of a work. Besides the very contingent nature of the use of the name rof author and his relationship with his work, what is of [greater importance is the fact that the ‘author' is not quite (identical with the person who is believed to have produced [the work. For while the latter is a concrete individual, the [former is a logical construction comprising multiple selves.

(The ‘author* by himself is not the intelligent creative being

290 who supposedly creates a work out of nowhere, i.e. from some mysterious region of his mind. The author is rather more like an ‘author function’, in other words, a projection which takes place in the acts of handling certain types of texts and discourses. A literary critic or a historian of ideas, while writing on his subject, seeks to determine the textual backdrop in which the piece was written or the new idea generated. In other words, he tries to find out the existential channel through which what has happened before was passed on in the modified form of what happened later. But this is unnecessary. The preceding discourse and the extradiscursive factors are by themselves sufficient to explain the discursive event that is presently being studied. The role of ‘creativity’ - and for that matter a subject - is here quite marginal and hence dispensable. The author is, moreover, not a single, unitary self but a multiplicity, a whole family of selves. This aspect of the matter can be appreciated in the case of a novel where the main protagonist narrates the story in the first person. What is being narrated here, clearly, is as well as is not the word of the author. The narrator in a way constitutes the ‘second self of the author. In a similar but different case, when someone writes a text on mathematics and after completing it writes a preface on it, two different types of authorships are realised. The text itself is highly impersonal but the preface must needs be very personal, indicating the author’s inclinations, intentions, the circumstances of his writing the text, etc. The authorships or the author-functions also vary depending upon the nature of the treatises that are being written and the dispersion they achieve. There are authorships which might be described as ‘initiators of discursive practices’ like those of Freud and Marx, whose works established ‘endless possibility of discourse’. On the other hand there are the authorships of the great works of literature which would be imitated in their style, language, characterisations or even

^uthor was a fiction, its reality being nothing more or nothing other than the multiple functions that it implied or implicated, ^ut it may be noticed that what is being problematised here 291 •is not the actuality of the author of a work but the concept or £heeas idea of it. The not dispersal disintegration that is of effected ’, but would be the or cause of the production novel js in the ‘author* as a universal concept which supposedly :as which are different and yet an extension of the old idea, overrides the subtle variations that the word ‘author’ carries, e authorship of scientific works is also of a different kind, for what is being contested is the universal application of the hough these too are characterised by extensions, impacts, word in all the varied situations in which it is used without iseminations and transformations. The works of Freud and realising the change of meanings that it undergoes. There are irx are unaffected by the modifications introduced in their certainly multiple uses and multiple meanings of the word, stems by the succeeding generations; whereas in the case which fact according to Foucault goes against the unitaristic Newton and Galileo ‘the founding act is on an equal conception of it. Now if what the philosopher is denying is tooting with its future transformations’. the universalisation or the idealisation of the idea of author, then there hardly remains any novelty in the thesis being propounded by him. The denial of Platonic universals is an old philosophical hangover which philosophers have suffered from the time of Plato himself. We do not need to go into the arguments that are given in support of the Platonic theory which are familiar and have evident cogency. What, however, with reference to our present context, can be said is that in despite of the multiple uses and the great complexity that attend on the word ‘author’, it still makes sense to apply it in all the variety of the situations that Foucault has enumerated. The word of course may be made more rigorous,

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292 its ambiguities and ambivalences removed and its application restricted. But one cannot recommend abandoning the use of the word itself, even if it is ultimately used in the sense of being only an author-function. This latter phrase itself, in fact, indicates the presence of an idea of author realising itself in the multiple situations by undergoing modifications according to them. What, in other words, cannot be denied is the presence of a creative agency which collects, organises and modifies the ideas it is in possession of. Foucault may or may not be justified in his rejection of the ‘ideal’ author or in his reduction of it into author-function. But he is clearly wrong in his denial of subjective creativity. The reduction of the author was however, in the case of Foucault, a preamble to the larger project of r^ecentring the ‘subject’ as a conscious creative entity, the site of the origin of the discourse and in a way also its end. This was attempted and accomplished in his famous Archaeology of Knowledge, a relatively short treatise but with a long drawn argument and a highly prosaic style. The project was so called precisely because it dealt, as said before, with the monuments of discourses, i.e. the documents - a whole archive of them. The study of the archive revealed the presence of a field in which all the various forms of discursive practices converged under a law of regularity, a law of systemisation and*unification. Being governed by its own laws and being self-contained, the discourse not only dispensed with subject but also with the world and the ‘Word* and then the word itself. The discursive irruption had no arche, no telos, no underlying structure, no hidden meaning and no surface as well. The word makes its own hasty departure after forcing out (i.e. after disinvesting itself of) the ‘meaning’. What is then left is an emptiness, a silence, a domain of complete darkness and death. The project of archaeology of knowledge was conceived as an alternative way of reading history, i.e. as a

293 odological replacement of the traditional way of writing

ry of ideas. At the centre of this traditional method was lotion of continuity backed up by the ideas of a fixed n and also, though less assuredly, a fixed end. All minational histories, and history as such, were a nym of a great continuity which maintained itself in the me names of tradition, influence and evolution. But in nethod of archaeology this whole ensemble of concepts ; way to what are almost their exact opposites. There is istory no origination but irruption, no end but return; ( is circularity instead of linear progress; and finally, no nuity or evolution but rupture and revolution. There are jurse ‘periods’ of history but no ‘transition’ from one id to another. One period follows another admitting in een a sudden break, a complete rupture. The rules of the i change, the underlying epistem ic structure is lutionised; one era comes to end and another begins, e is no movement as such but only shifts, not layer after ■ in a geological manner but in a framework where there temporal verticality but only a horizontality of space, he archaeology of knowledge, as already said, is a large xt, its elements, assumptions and implications being all ifarious and its overall aim an absolute reduction of all logics. But since our aim here is limited to showing its [alleged ability to dissipate the man or decentring of the subject, we will not need to go into all its intricate details. But though this is repeatedly claimed to be at the heart of the whole enterprise, there is not much in the text which is either decisive or persuasive. What is decentred is still the man as author, the ‘ideal author’ - that is, the real existential man, the man who thinks, wills and enjoys or suffers remaining untouched, unapproached.

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294 this ‘subject’, and what is his relationship with the statements he makes? Assuredly, there is not a ‘doctoral consciousness’ in which the statement is first originated and then committed externally to a system of signs whether written or spoken. The ‘doctor’ is indeed himself an element in a very complex network of discursive and extra-discursive practices. His being a doctor, for example, means in the first place a certain status which is itself dependent upon the kind of socialisation to which he is subjected, viz. his education, his relation of subordination or superordination with other individuals, his status in terms of the legal, conventional and traditional practices of his culture etc. Besides, it is also important to specify from what kind of other people he is distinguished in terms of status, occupation, competence, formal associations etc. A doctor is doctor as much by his own professional role as by the fact that he is not a judge or a priest or a politician and.so on. The roles and the functions etc., moreover, that a doctor performs keep varying from one cultural milieu to another and from one era of a culture’s history to another. Besides his educational, economic and social status and the differentiation that he has from other individuals in those same terms, a doctor’s enunciative role (his authority) also emanates from the material and institutional situation in which he is placed. A doctor, in order to be a doctor, must work either in a place called hospital, or a clinic, or a nursing home, etc.; he must be able to use certain kinds of instruments, be surrounded by a staff, etc. He is also often expected to work in laboratory, or sit in the library where certain kind of books, periodicals and other documents are available to him. In short, being a doctor always involves being attached to ‘sites’ which also keep varying from place to place and from time to time. More importantly, the doctor is also a multiple self, i.e., one which keeps changing itself according to multiple roles it is asked to perform in different situations and in relation to different objects. When, for

295 •xample, he interrogates the patient about his ailment, he is a juestioning subject but when he sits in the library or attends | lecture by a senior colleague, he can be said to be a jstening subject. Similarly, in certain conditions he may be a seeing subject while in certain others an observing subject ind so on. : A subject of the statements of clinical discourse, thus, >eing not a unitary but a multiple subject, together with the facts of its being necessarily placed in an institutional context rand its own aptitudional and professional status, makes up, |for Foucault, enough reason to deconstruct that subject. His fcis, however, an old device used much earlier by Buddhists band many other schools of Eastern and Western philosophy. pThey too similarly dispensed with the self by showing it to be ([a construct of various perceptual elements and relations and ^denied it thereby its synthetic unity. One can, however, still !argue that a .doctor’s - though not a specific doctor’s tconsciousness - is, nonetheless, a consciousness which keeps company with all the verbal and extra-verbal elements ?spoken above, but is not reducible to them. It is true that not any human individual can be a doctor but it is also true that only a human individual can be a doctor. The cluster of conditions that goes into the making of the subject of ‘doctor’ is specifically human and totally absent in any other order of being. The conditions are, to put it in conventional terminology, the conditions of culture, which is an exclusive human accomplishment. These conditions, moreover, are the creation of a general economy of experience in which inhere the powers of creativity, criticality and collectivity. They are not for sure simply the product of rules and usages of language, the language itself being rather a part of that economy. It is, again, true that individuals do not create collectivity or culture, these being rather themselves the conditions of an individual’s creation. But it also cannot be overlooked that they actualise themselves only through

296 human agency. Culture - the discourse, institutions, relations, regularities, systems and unities, the episteme and archaeology in general - is a human event implicating in itself an irreducible economy of experience which may be both restricted and general. This difficulty remains with Foucault when he makes a transition from the subject of the statements of a specific discipline to the subject of ordinary statements. In a case where we say that a subject has made a statement, the relation of the former with the latter is not of a primary but of secondary nature. A statement is true or false, meaningful or meaningless not because of the writer or the speaker who writes or speaks it, or even because of the external fact which it is supposed to represent. The very fact that a statement is deployed to perform its function shows that it was already there - to be used by a subject and for representing the fact. Ih the case of certain .types of statements, like those of mathematics or logic or grammar, it is immaterial who speaks and they also do not refer to any fact at all. When, likewise, even an ordinary statement like ‘it is raining’ is made, it may be presumed that it had its presence and usability before falling into the possession of the subject: ‘To describe a formulation qua statement does ndt consist in analysing the relations between the author and what he says... but in determining what position can and must be occupied by any individual if he is to be the subject of it.’ (AK, 95-6) In other words, the enunciative site is a function (not a subject or mind), ‘a vacant place’ which can be occupied by many individuals at one time or by same individual at different times. But this (Derridean) argument too admits the clear possibility of being turned around. For it could equally arguably be said that since the use of a statement can happen only in and through a human subjective medium, the latter too is a necessary element in the actualisation of the former. This situation of interdependence

297 srtainly undermines the endeavour to relegate the subject to Secondary position, as it also does not allow it (the subject) ^precede the statement. I Be that as it may, a related issue was the issue of meaning, recording to traditional theory, words or statements in aemselves were dead traces which were brought to life by Ifusing into them the spirit of meaning that emanated from Be speaker/writer and reached the listener/reader to institute an incident of meaningful communication. But for toucan It, as also for Derrida before, the words or statements fever had any ‘intended1 meaning beyond or behind pern selves, certainly not in themselves. Their meaning happened to them because of the associated linguistic or

pscursive domain in which they happened to occur. The Statements, being different from the simple grammatically instructed sentences and logical propositions, acquired their

feality and their meaning only through being connected with a number of other statements which shared with them their enunciative nature, epistemological status and archaeological setting. But, unlike the other two, a statement could never nappen in isolation: ‘A statement always has borders with pther statements.’ (ibid., 97) In the company of other statements, presuming them conceptually and succeeding pern materially, the statement always creates the possibility bf producing further statements which will be meaningful [with reference to it and which will also render it meaningful. [There are also backward and forward references - both implicit and explicit. Finally, the statements are grouped, placed in the company of each other on the basis of their ^common enunciative field - their common literary or scientific value, their shared institutional site, their past >sanctity, future acceptance, etc. t Many questions however arise here. Firstly, if words Stwhich are said to be ‘as deliberately absent as the things themselves’ (ibid., 48) - do not make sense individually, how

298 can a series of them do so, even after being contextualised? Secondly, a statement in order to be a statement must be a sentence first, which means that it should be constructed according to the rules of grammar. Now the words by themselves cannot be said to have the capacity to choose this option of observing the rules, and an external agency must be required to give them a proper construction. (This is beside the question whether the ability to apply the rules of grammar upon words is innate in the human mind or not.) Thirdly, the series of statements which makes up a particular discursive formation requires a proper arrangement, which again cannot be brought by the statements themselves. Fourthly, the question of their contextualisation is also highly problematic. When a particular statement is seen to find a place in its discursive milieu, it cannot be chance or the choice of the statement itself which makes it appear exactly at that place. Finally, is it conceivable that statements have.the potentiality to produce other statements without first passing through a syncretismg agency? One can indeed say in a nutshell that all appearance and disappearance of statements, all their operations and enunciations, all of their unities and fragmentations, can happen on ly in antj through a consciousness, however it may be conceived. Foucault further insisted that his archaeology of knowledge was not an interpretative discipline. It was rather a purely descriptive exercise, a labour of simply rewriting the text already written. It does not seek to interpret the text because it does not believe in the text having a meaning beyond itself. There is also no original meaning of the text as there is no place for the meaning to originate, i.e., in other words, no mind or consciousness. Archaeology rejects both origin and origination and therefore also the originality. There is nothing beyond the text to know or understand, no treasure in the safe keeping of the author to be snatched from him.

299 low, the important question is whether it is even □tely possible for any discursive exercise to be purely riptive? As any psychologist, with the possible exception ixtreme behaviourists, would agree, the interpretation s as soon as a child begins to understand the reality nd him and continues when the experiences begin to be lalised. Archaeology is itself presented as a different kind rationality, a new perspective or method to yse/describe the discursive positivities and intertivities and as such cannot avoid interpretation. It should , moreover, be understood that even a descriptive :rprise is never merely a one-sided affair. For there cannot be a speaking subject; there has also to be a listening ject to complete the communicative event. If this is so, it npossible for the text to fulfil by itself the function of this ;r part. The text may speak by itself but it cannot also :n to itself. It is only by keeping the listening subject side the text that the plurivocity of the latter can be saved. , again, if the words are their own meanings, they must be vocal. But as we know, and as both Foucault and Derrida along insisted, neither the words nor the texts were ever inivocal. They indeed here took the extreme position of a ext having the possibility of as many readings (interpretations?) as the number of readers. But yet, contradicting themselves again, Foucault quite often, and Derrida no less often, complained of their being not properly understood, of being misunderstood, even un-understood. The question is, how could an author be misunderstood unless there was already there with him an ‘original* meaning of the text he wrote?

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300 even if one denies the idea of progress and likes to consider history in a more horizontal fashion, a certain place for ingenuity still needs to be accepted. For otherwise the explicit variations and expansions that the history of ideas exhibits cannot be explained. But Foucault, as part of his archaeological method, nearly obliterates the originality­ banality distinction in the history of discourse (or discourse of history). ‘Archaeology/ he says, ‘is not in search of interventions; and it remains unmoved at the moment (a very moving one, 1 admit) when for the first time someone was sure of some truth; it does not try to restore the light of those joyful mornings.’ (ibid., 144) What, in place of creativity and progress, it believes is the alterity and regularity of discourse? There are both repetition and change but none of these has a priority of value over the other.

The whole enunciative field is both regular and altered: it never sleeps; the least statement - the most discreet or the most banal - puts into operation a whole set of rules in accordance with which its objects, its modality, the concepts that it employs, and the strategy of which it is a part, are formed, (ibid., 146-7) However, ‘the least statement’, putting into operation ‘a whole set of rules* can only be a manner of speaking. It is impossible to suppose that the ‘modifications’, ‘transformations* and, above all, ‘ruptures’ of which Foucault speaks so much are auto-operative. Equally questionable and self-defeating is his attempt to dissipate the rationality of discourse. As can be understood, an interpretative meta-discourse tries to minimise and reduce, and where possible, to eliminate the ‘apparent’ contradictions in the domain of discourse it is analysing, in order to restore to it what it considers as its fundamental underlying unity.

301 wt in this process of resolution of contradiction, there also

merges an event which is of converse import, viz. the fescovery of as many number of contradictions as the Imaginative competence of the interpreter can allow. Within Miscursive field, the contradictions are treated as the cause S' progress; for it is only in order to remove the hntradictions in the text of an author that another author tdiether contemporary or of a succeeding generation - in the espective field writes his own. The contradiction in this way bcomes both a place of hiding and of discovery for the

nterpreter in his search for coherence. But for the ffchaeologist, on the other hand, the law of contradiction k>es not hold. If at all there are contradictions, they are pcalised and effective ‘intrinsically’, i.e, at the level of tiscourse itself. Two different authors in a certain field may hal with their objects in their respective manners giving jirth thereby to two different systems of thoughts or theories, vhich in turn may lead to varying discursive and extra[iscursive results. But none of them can be subjected to the jest of a transcendental rationality or truth. In place of unity and hierarchisation, therefore, archaeology believes in juxtaposition and dissension. k

. In relation to a history of ideas that attempts to melt contradictions in the semi-nocturnal unity of an overall figure, or which attempts to transmute them into a general, abstract, uniform principle of interpretation or explanation, archaeology describes the different spaces of dissension, (ibid-. 152) 3ut this was a claim of which Foucault himself never felt