A lively debate has been going on lately in Al Jazeera,
following the question posed by Hamid Dabashi in an article provocatively
titled “Can Non-Europeans Think?" Dabashi’s piece, published earlier in January
this year was a response to an article by Santiago Zabala, Research Professor
of Philosophy at the University of Barcelona. Zabala’s article, entitled
“Slavoj Zizek and the Role of the Philosopher”, was actually on an entirely
different issue, as will be evident from the title. Zabala attempts, in this
article, to read in Zizek’s persona and oeuvre, the possible implications for
the philosopher as such. He dwells on Zizek as a figure who is at once a
philosopher and a public intellectual – a role not very easily available,
according to him, to academic philosophers.
If most significant philosophers become points of reference
within the philosophical community, he says, “few have managed to overcome its
boundaries and become public intellectuals intensely engaged in our cultural
and political life as did Hannah Arendt (with the Eichmann trial), Jean-Paul
Sartre (in the protests of May 1968) and Michel Foucault (with the Iranian
revolution).” Zabala explains this rare ability/ possibility by invoking Edward
Said on the ‘outsider’ status of the intellectual and by underlining the direct
engagement of the thought of such philosophers with contemporary events. He
says:
These philosophers became public intellectuals not simply because of their original philosophical projects or the exceptional political events of their epochs, but rather because their thoughts were drawn by these events. But how can an intellectual respond to the events of his epoch in order to contribute in a productive manner?
In order to respond, as Edward Said once said, the
intellectual has to be “an outsider, living in self-imposed exile, and on the
margins of society”, that is, free from academic, religious and political
establishments; otherwise, he or she will simply submit to the inevitability of
events.
This is an interesting issue that has a lot of relevance for
the question Dabashi takes up in his response, namely that of non-European
thought. Unfortunately, Dabashi does not
go into this question at all – though it is very much at the heart of the issue
of intellectual life outside ‘the West’.
One cannot really blame Dabashi for not having any
particular interest in Zizek’s persona or oeuvre, for, as Walter Mignolo pointsout in a thoughtful contribution to the ongoing debate, the non-European
thinker may have “better things to do”. Or as my friend and colleague, Rakesh
Pandey puts it, tumhara gharana, tumhara raag! (Gharanas are schools of
classical Hindustani music and ‘raagas‘ are distinctive melodic compositions/
modes. Its meaning can be translated as “Your terms, your discourse, your
debates!”). Thus, a contemporary non-European thinker or scholar might prefer
to engage with her own times in more direct ways – that is to say, without the
necessary mediation of Western philosophy or thought; she might find, as many
indeed do, the elaborate invocation of the (Western) philosophical pantheon
before embarking on any journey of thought, irrelevant if not positively
irritating. S/he may not find discourses on ‘communism’ and the ‘truth of the
proletariat’ – as in the thought of a Slavoj Zizek or an Alain Badiou –
relevant at all to her condition. For
these are discourses which, with each successive defeat in the real world,
retreat one more step into abstract metaphysics, till there is no relation left
whatsoever between the actually existing ‘working class’ and the Zizekian
proletariat.
This is not to say, of course, that intellectuals in the
East are not interested in the struggle against capital and the questions posed
by the Marx’s thought. But perhaps in a very different way. Mignolo himself is
not interested in this exercise and concedes that though Zizek and others may
actually be engaged in ‘rethinking communism’, that can hardly be considered a
goal for all humanity.
He therefore puts it quite starkly,
My readings of continental philosophy are not in search of guiding lights to deal with issues of non-European histories, but an interest in what are “they” thinking, what are “their” concerns, what are “they” up to.
This is, to my mind, an important move that many
intellectuals in Asia and Africa have already effectively made. Not all among
such intellectuals might agree that continental or western philosophy is
irrelevant for us, but we surely do not see it providing “guiding lights” in
contexts vastly different such as ours.
So, if we set aside Zabala’s insistence on Zizek as “the
thinker of our age” (and it is debatable whether we all live in the same ‘capitalist’ age), his
question about the role of the philosopher nevertheless remains. This is an
issue of critical importance in the global south and I will return to it later
in this essay.
The End of Postcolonialism?
For the present, I wish to go back to Dabashi’s response,
which seemed to me to avoid this central issue and in fact segued into another
(no less important) question – though it was not central in anyway to Zabala’s
article. Dabashi’s response has to do with the following opening paragraph from
Zabala’s piece:
“There are many important and active philosophers today:
Judith Butler in the United States, Simon Critchley in England, Victoria Camps
in Spain, Jean-Luc Nancy in France, Chantal Mouffe in Belgium, Gianni Vattimo
in Italy, Peter Sloterdijk in Germany and in Slovenia, Slavoj Zizek, not to
mention others working in Brazil, Australia and China.”
Hamid Dabashi is legitimately irritated by what he terms
“the unabashedly European character and disposition of the thing the author
calls ‘philosophy today’ – thus laying a claim on both the subject and time
that is peculiar and in fact an exclusive property of Europe.” Dabashi is also
annoyed at the cavalier fashion in which philosophers from other parts of the
world are referred to (“‘working in Brazil, Australia and China’, not meriting
even a specific name”). But in letting his legitimate irritation get the better
of him, Dabashi misses an opportunity of posing a question that we all need to
contend with: Why is ‘philosophy’ today, always-already Western? Is it merely a
question of Zabala’s arbitrary selection of names that is at issue here, or is
there something more?
To put the matter slightly differently, why is all thought
in the ‘non-West’ always colonized by the political? If one looks at the
situation in India, there is little doubt that there were pretty robust
traditions of abstract philosophical thought – preoccupied with questions of
logic, epistemology, causation and being, disquisitions on language and meaning
and similar questions – in the pre-colonial period. Why is it that from the
19th century on, ‘politics’ takes centre stage? It is not just that ‘politics’ becomes
the key object of inquiry; rather it is that all inquiry and thought comes to
be colonized by it. This is not a simple matter and a lot more work needs to be
done on it. However, one thing seems quite clear – in the ‘cramped space’ of
colonized life, politics alone provides the space from where a challenge to the
colonizers’ knowledge can be mounted. Philosophy retreats into the mists of
time – in the Indian case, into an excavation of Buddhist, Vedic or Vedantic
philosophy, except where it concedes defeat and adopts various forms of
colonizers’ philosophies (positivism, utilitarianism and so on). Marxism
perhaps was an exception because, for the Indian – and I suspect generally
colonial – subjects, Marxism is not philosophy properly speaking but a discourse
on politics, that provided at once a language to critique colonialism and one’s
own tradition.
At one level, politics becomes the key issue – one that
defines the oppositional character of thought of the colonized in relation to
that of the colonizer. Politics comes to define not merely issues that are
explicitly political but for a subject population, often comes to provide a
route to thought in other domains as well – reducing all intellectual questions
to questions of justice and power. This is a very complex issue that I cannot
go into here but hope to come back to at some point later.
Unfortunately, Dabashi ends up spending a lot of his time
and energy in supplying specific names from India, Africa and the Arab world.
He marshals a formidable list of names which include Ashis Nandy, Partha
Chatterjee, Wang Hui, Sudipta Kaviraj, Henry Odera Oruka, Ngugi wa Thiong’o,
Wole Soyinka, Chinua Achebe, Okot p’Bitek, Taban Lo Liyong, Achille Mbembe,
Emmanuel Chukwudi Eze, Azmi Bishara, Sadeq Jalal Al-Azm, Fawwaz Traboulsi,
Abdallah Laroui, Michel Kilo, Abdolkarim Soroush. They are undoubtedly very
important thinkers but are they actually doing philosophy? I think some of them
are, but most of them think at the borders of philosophy. I think it is important
to raise this question for reasons I will return to shortly.
One consequence of this exercise is that it draws Dabashi
into the same West versus Non-West binary that in a sense, he has himself been
trying to dismantle over the past few years, laying his intervention open to
attacks like the one by Michael Marder. Marder’s is an attack that depends to a
large extent on caricature and oversimplification. Consider this:
In contrast to this simplistic construal, post-colonial theorists agree that there is no strict division between the coloniser and the colonised; that both colonial and post-colonial structures of power and domination are complex and multilayered, as they are shot through with class, gender and other differences; that claims to a rightful political representation of the subaltern are usually ungrounded, as they are voiced by those most privileged in the colonial or post-colonial societies – men, wealthy elites and so forth. (emphasis added)
Which postcolonial theorists are these who ‘agree’ that
‘there is no strict division between the colonizer and the colonized’? And what
precisely is meant by the statement that ‘claims to a rightful representation
of the subaltern are usually ungrounded, as they are voiced by those most
privileged in the colonial or postcolonial societies – men, wealthy elites and
so forth’? While there is a grain of truth in each of the above statements, the
sweeping assertion of the order suggested above – almost implying that there is
really no difference between the colonizer and the colonized – is nothing short
of a caricature. A recognition of the multiple layers of power and domination
within ex-colonial societies does not by any stretch of imagination exonerate
colonialism for the multiple layers of violence that it has perpetrated on the
societies it colonized. Nor does it exonerate Western theorists and
philosophers of the charge of smugness –
even those who have lately begun to
recognize that some thought possibly takes place outside the precincts of their
academies, but who seem to be content with making some superficial gestures to
that effect, without letting that thought disturb their own philosophical
apparatus in any way.
A good example of this would be Zizek himself, whose Living
in End Times, published after a flying
visit to India [1], displays characteristic audacity in making theoretical
pronouncements about India and Indian tradition to which I will return below.
He also makes some passing references to conversations he had with some
individuals and throws in some references – now mandatory for all those
claiming to be radical – to ‘untouchability’ and the Dalits. These references
are actually nothing more than ‘authenticity gestures’ in the Western academy.
In other words, despite the multi-layered and complex nature
of both colonial and post-colonial structures of power and domination, the
divide is quite stark. And radicalism of any sort is no guarantee that a
Western/ European philosopher will even attempt to transcend his/ her
geographical, historical and cultural limits.
This is not to say that postcolonial theory is free of all
problems. For many of us living in India, the moment of postcolonial theory,
inaugurated by the work of Edward Said but also, in our context, by the work of
Ashis Nandy and Subaltern Studies, constituted a crucial and liberating moment.
For the first time the enterprise of social sciences, of political and social
theory and of Marxism, began to be examined as specific knowledge formations
that arose in a specific historical context, in a specific part of the world.
In other words, both the universalist claims of these knowledge formations as
well as their intellectual and cultural hegemony came to be challenged over the
subsequent decades. The effects of this recognition were dramatic. For it
initiated a renewed engagement with our own intellectual traditions alongside a
serious scrutiny of the received wisdom of Western thought. But there was a
serious difficulty here as well. The critique of Western knowledge and
philosophy soon got inserted within a very unproductive discourse of
‘indigenism’ that draws on a diet of a high-pitched anti-Western rhetoric.
Needless to say, this division unwittingly reinforced the old nationalist one
of ‘Indic tradition’ versus the West, sometimes despite itself. Everything of
Western and colonial provenance was considered worthy of being rejected. The
‘long amnesia’ inaugurated by nationalist thought enforced a certain
territorial closure on a thought-tradition that had thrived on long exchanges
with Greek, Chinese, Arab and Persian traditions. There was no unadulterated
‘Indic’ tradition, it had been severely and seriously internally contested.
(For a sophisticated recent exploration of the impact of one aspect of this
precolonial philosophical confluence in India, see Jonardon Ganeri, The Lost
Age of Reason: Philosophy in Early Modern India 1450-1700, Oxford University
Press, Oxford, 2011).
It is for this reason that some of us based in South Asia
prefer to speak of the ‘postnational’ condition, rather than the postcolonial
(See the set of essays in ‘The Postnational Condition‘ Economic and Political
Weekly March 7, 2009). For it is clear that the internal conflicts within this
so-called tradition had often been so violent that it was always the presence
of the ‘outside’ – now in the form of Islam, now in the form of colonial rule –
that proved empowering to the excluded and dispossessed. No wonder then that
numerous lower caste movements through the late 19th and early to mid 20th
centuries, found in the colonial power an ally. It is the presumed unity of
‘the nation’ that becomes the object of investigation now, rather than the
formations of colonial power – on which we have by now have a substantial body
of very serious work.
A caveat is however, necessary here. There were other
oppressed sections, especially the tribal/ indigenous people, the peasantry and
the urban working class, who found themselves in serious opposition to the
colonial power – their struggles often going beyond the confines of nationalism
– a point that Subaltern Studies scholars have been at pains to underline. The
anticolonial struggle is therefore not reducible to nationalism – nor was it
merely the struggle of a middle class elite. This is a complex story – not
easily amenable to Marder’s oversimplified account of the colonial/postcolonial
relationship.
To return to Dabashi then, one is a bit puzzled as to why he
resorted to this West versus non-West rhetoric, when his own work over the
years has tended to warn against this false polarity. After all, in his recent
book The Arab Spring: The End of Postcolonialism (Zed Books, London, 2011), he
had very forcefully put forward the argument that “these revolutionary
uprisings are post-ideological, meaning that they are no longer fighting
according to terms dictated by their condition of coloniality, codenamed
‘postcolonial’” (p. 11). In an interesting formulation, he had argued that
these movements represent a new constellation where a societal modernity
supersedes political modernity. Political modernity, he suggested, was
ultimately a defeated project because it was predicated on the dichotomous
frame that pitted it against European colonialism and American imperialism,
where
These direct contestations had produced three distinct (prototypical)
ideological grand narratives: anticolonial nationalism, Third World socialism,
and militant Islamism (p. 13)
He therefore argued, even more starkly,
We need to overcome the anxiety of Orientalism and shift our theorizing lens to our evolving history and stop trying to explain things to that fictive white man who sat in Edward Said’s mind for a lifetime. That fictive white man is dead – he was never alive. He was a chimera manufactured by a postcolonial age that had prolonged the life of the grand illusion of ‘the West’ with its corresponding ‘the Rest.’ (emphasis added, p. 75)
Clearly, ‘postcolonialism’ defined in this way is an
entirely different entity from what we identify as ‘postcolonial theory’ or
‘postcolonial studies’. And yet, in
terms of its defining binary, postcolonial theory too shares a common
ground with this ‘political postcolonialism’ – and Dabashi’s call to move
beyond it is an important one that we need to take seriously.
Zizek, Thought and the Non-European
Before we discuss what I see as the major challenge before
non-European thought, let me turn to Zizek’s thought insofar as it concerns us,
non-Europeans, directly. Zizek here is only an instance of what I understand to
be a more general problem of the Western philosopher. (Another recent instance
of this sort is the more pernicious but also more trivial book by Perry
Anderson, The Indian Ideology, that basically takes to task almost all Indian
intellectuals for not criticizing what he calls
‘Indian Ideology’ – while actually drawing all the elements of his
so-called ‘critique’ from the work done by Indian scholars.)
I will confine my remarks here to some sections of Zizek’s
recent Living in End Times (Verso, London/ New York 2011) as an exhaustive
treatment of Zizek’s thought does not interest me. Zizek is only the most stark
symptom of a wider syndrome. At the very outset, Zizek lays his philosophical
cards on the table:
“Though one may be tempted to oppose these perspectives –
the dogmatism of blind faith versus an openness towards the unexpected – one
should nevertheless insist on the truth contained in the second version: truth
as opposed to knowledge is like a Badiouian Event, something that only an
engaged gaze, the gaze of a subject who ‘believes in it’, is able to
see…Lacking this engaged position, mere description of the state of things, no
matter how accurate, fail to generate emancipatory effects – ultimately they
only render the burden of the lie still more oppressive…” (Introduction, p.
xiv)
This is something a good Hindu or a good Muslim too would
say: you have to have faith in the word of God to be able to see Him.
Structurally, both these claims are of the same order: ‘Truth’ is a priori, and
the empirical world always a corruption, always ‘Maya’ (an ontological
delusion) as a good Hindu would put it. I should therefore lay my own
philosophical cards on the table: I begin from this, messy, disorderly
empirical world. Even though I agree that we have no direct access to it –
outside of our categories of thought, that is – I nevertheless insist that the
real challenge to thought is to confront this world, over and over again, each
time the encounter with the empirical reveals the limits of our
thought-categories.
Very early on in the book (p.x), we read about the
underlying premise of the book (a simple one, according to him): “the global
capitalist system is approaching an apocalyptic zero-point.” And we can easily
see that this is the ‘end time’ referred to – the end of time, according to
Christian theology – though many cultures across the world may find it
impossible to understand this idea of a beginning and an end of Time. In many
cultures, time is eternity: there is no sharp distinction between Eternity and
‘historical Time’, marked by the Fall. But more interesting is the implication
here that this end-time is not merely the end of ‘global capitalism’ but of
Time as such. This is the corner that many Western Leftist philosophers have
painted themselves into – they have made
capitalism integral to the ontology of the human condition. That is why Zizek
often says that it is easier to imagine the end of the world rather than the
end of capitalism.
Zizek explains this condition with reference to ‘four riders
of the apocalypse’ (another Christian metaphor), namely, (i) the ecological
crisis (ii) the consequences of the biogenetic revolution (iii) imbalances
within the system itself (intellectual property, forthcoming struggles over raw
materials, food and water) and (iv) the explosive growth of social divisions
and exclusions. Tellingly, he then ‘takes up only the last point’ for
illustration for it signifies something very specific to him. Consider the
following statement: “nowhere are the new forms of apartheid more palpable than
in the wealthy Middle Eastern oil states – Kuwait and Saudi Arabia.” He talks
of how “hidden on the outskirts of the cities, often literally behind walls,
are tens of thousands of ‘invisible’ immigrant workers doing all the dirty
work..” (p. x) “A country like Saudi Arabia he says, “is literally ‘beyond
corruption’: there is no need for corruption because the ruling gang (the royal
family) is already in possession of all the wealth…” (Ibid). He goes on in this
vein till we come to this gem of a statement:
“Should the situation persist, can we even imagine the change in the Western ‘collective psyche’ when (not if but precisely when) some ‘rogue nation’ or group obtains a nuclear device, powerful biological or chemical weapon and declares its ‘irrational’ readiness to risk all using it? The most basic coordinates of our awareness will have to change, insofar as, today, we live in a state of collective fetishistic disavowal: we know very well that this will happen at some point but, nevertheless cannot bring ourselves to really believe that it will. The US attempt to prevent such an occurrence through continuous pre-emptive activity is a battle that has been lost in advance…” (p. x)
A number of things need to be noted. The ‘we’ who live in a
‘collective fetishistic disavowal’ – the addressee of this discourse – are the
inhabitants of the ‘West’. That is precisely why this European philosopher can
make the statements about nuclear, biological and chemical weapons that he does
without a moment’s pause. Is he really not aware that only once have nuclear
weapons been actually used – not by ‘Middle Eastern’ lunatics but the very USA,
who he thinks is fighting a legitimate battle – lost but not unjust? And is it not
true that western powers still remain the ones to have used biological and
chemical warfare most prolifically? Where then do Zizek’s confident claims come
from? It seems to me, they come from a continuing understanding that it is in
the West alone that ‘world-historical’ agency lies – all others are lunatics
and ‘irrational’ people. Notice how the apocalyptic crisis of capitalism is
ultimately reduced to its Saudi Arabian and Kuwaitian avataar! That is where
the end of time ‘begins’. Not unsuprisingly, Zizek is of course, the same
philosopher who had once made a “Leftist Plea for Eurocentrism“?
No less important is the completely cavalier attitude with
which he treats his non-Western ‘subjects’ – for they generally figure in the
book to show that he is no longer ‘Eurocentric’ in the way he once was, he is
now familiar with the world beyond. A few instances should suffice. Having
talked about the apartheid in ‘middle eastern’ cities, he then comes to his new
discovery – the slums of India. His observations are simply breathtaking:
“A more standard form of ‘inclusive exclusion’ are the slums – large areas outside of state governance. While generally perceived as spaces in which gangs and religious sects fight for control, slums also offer the space for radical political organizations, as is the case with India, where the Maoist movement of Naxalites is organizing a vast alternate social space.” (emphasis added, p. xi)
Where did Zizek get his information about the Maoists? A
half-way intelligent journalist knows that the Maoists existnowhere in urban
slums in India. Their areas of activity are in dense forest areas, generally
inhabited by indigenous people (adivasis). Equally stunning is his claim that
‘slums are large areas out of state governance’. Clearly Zizek has not read any
of the most easily available material – empirical and theoretical – on
contemporary India but has the gumption to opinionate – indeed philosophize –
on its condition. Any study – and certainly the now very influential and easily
available work of Partha Chatterjee on ‘political society’ – would have made
him see that slums of all places are hardly outside governmentality (state
governance in his terms). But I doubt that such an enormous factual error would
embarrass him.
In the very next sentence he then quotes “an Indian state
official” on how lack of governance creates the space for Maoists – here we get
a footnote to Sudeep Chakravarti’s well regarded book on the Maoist movement
(The Red Sun). Tellingly, Sudeep is spelt Sudep – imagine if I were to spell
Zizek as Zizik. The point is that ‘Sudep’ does not matter. For despite the
citation, Zizek is unable to understand that the Maoist movement simply does
not exist in the cities but in remote and inaccessible forests. The dishonesty
of the citation is also worth underlining for this pernicious style of citation
runs through the book. Sudeep Chakravarti is cited not for his work on Maoism
but as a native informant from whom Zizek simply takes the quote of the
anonymous Indian state official.
But as if this was not enough, Zizek performs another
mind-boggling feat within the next few pages. This time he philosophizes on the
Hindu tradition of ‘Tantra’ – all on the
basis on having read one book! The book in question is Hugh Urban’s Tantra: Sex,
Politics and Power in the Study of Religion, (University of California Press,
Berkley 2003). Urban’s work too is generally very highly regarded in the field
but can anybody from the non-West have the audacity to write about some
spiritual practice in England or France or Germany on the basis of having read
just one book? My point is the audacity of the assumption that all you need to
know about India (or the non-West) are ‘facts’ which you can pick up from
anywhere. After all, these are places where no intellection or debate takes
place. Dabashi’s question, ‘Can the non-European think’ hits you with full
force, when you encounter Zizek.
But what about the argument itself? What exactly is Zizek
telling us here? Sample this:
“The gap between the official text of the Law and its obscene supplement is not limited to Western cultures; in Hindu culture, it occurs as the opposition between vaidika (the Vedic corpus) and tantrika – tantra being the obscene (secret) supplement to the Vedas, the unwritten (or secret, non-canonic) core of the public teaching of the Vedas, a publicly disavowed but necessary element. No wonder that tantra is so popular today in the West: it offers the ultimate ‘spiritual logic of late capitalism’ uniting spirituality and earthly pleasures, transcendence and material benefits, divine experience and unlimited shopping.” (emphasis added, p. 7)
Now, for one thing, Tantra is something that pervades both
Vedic and non-Vedic (nastika) faiths like Buddhism, Jainism and even Sikhism.
It is not something that is simply reducible to the ‘supplement’ – obscene or
otherwise – of the Vedas – as a disavowed but necessary element, as he tells
us. Zizek’s mode of theorizing however should not surprise us, for this is
simply the Western Left’s theorization about capital(ism) projected backwards
in time and sideways in space. Just as capital alone has agency and posits even
its own ‘outside’, its heterogenieties, so here the philosopher sees the
diverse practices of Tantra as mere appendages or outgrowths of ‘Vedic
teaching’ – whatever that means.
More significantly, Tantra as it existed in India, from at
least the 5th century CE onward, can only be read by the European philosopher
‘retroactively’ – through the experience of some 21st century fad in the West (the
‘spirit of late capitalism’!). Can one do any better in reducing the non-West
to an Europe’s ‘obscene supplement’ – the non-West exists only to the extent
that it is ‘posited’ by Europe/ West?
It may be useful at this stage now, to contrast what Zizek says
to what scholars in the field – both Western and Indian – who have spent years
studying the phenomenon, have to say about Tantra. Notice the huge diversity of
meanings and practices that Tantra embodies, according to these scholars. In
the words of Paul E. Muller-Ortega, Abhinavagupta, the 10th century Kashmiri
Saivite philosopher, shows
“(The) early Hindu Tantra rejects the dry vistas of
traditional philosophical debate, which seek only representation of the
Ultimate through conceptual truths. It rejects as well the self-enclosing
renunciation of traditional Indian monasticism, which protectively seeks to
isolate the monk from the imagined stain of worldliness. Transcending the
dualities and distinctions of conventional thought and morality, the Tantra
demonstrates an outward gesture of embracing delight in all of reality. ”
(cited in ‘Introduction’, by Robert Brown, in The Roots of Tantra, (ed.
Katherine Anne Harper and Robert L. Brown, State University of New York, New
York, 2002, pp. 10-11)
Robert Brown himself observes:
“The way for Tantric practitioners to reach dual goals, comes by connecting themselves to a power that flows through the world, including their own bodies, a power usually visualized as female. Tantrins identify the power, locate it, activate it, and use it for their own desires. ” (Ibid: 3)
He sees Tantra as “an
accumulation of practices and ideas from various sources distributed unevenly
in different times, places and among individuals.” (emphasis added, Ibid: 1)
Andre Padoux underlines:
“The use of sex is not found in all Tantric traditions. It is not prevalent but present nonetheless in the Saiva and Sakta groups that have a Kapalika origin or background and that have kept, if only symbolically, the Kapalika culture of the cremation ground with its cult of the Yoginis and its erotico-mystic rites and notions.” (Padoux, ‘What do we Mean by Tantrism?’ in Ibid: 20)
These are just a few citations to illustrate the complex set
of practices that constitute Tantra. Let me now turn to Zizek’s philosophizing
on Indian civilization and culture at large. Here is what Zizek has to say in
one crisp and pregnant paragraph:
“What we find in the Veda is a brutal cosmology based on killing and eating: higher things kill and eat/consume lower ones, the stronger eat the weaker; that is life is a zero-sum game in which one’s victory is another’s defeat. The ‘great chain of being’ appears here in the ‘food chain,’ the great chain of eating: gods eat mortals humans, humans eat mammals, mammals eat lesser animals who eat plants, plants ‘eat’ water and earth…such is the eternal cycle of being. So why does the Veda claim that the top social stratum consists not of warrior-kings stronger than all other humans, ‘eating’ the all, but of the caste of priests? It is here that the code’s ideological ingenuity becomes apparent: the function of the priests is to prevent the first, highest, level of cosmic eating, the eating of human mortals by gods. How? By way of performing sacrificial rituals. Gods must be appeased, their hunger for blood must be satisfied, and the trick of the priests is to offer the gods a substitute (symbolic) sacrifice: an animal or other prescribed food instead of human life.” (emphasis added, pp. 16-17)
Zizek begins this section with a prefatory sentence which
says, linking to an earlier discussion on Confucianism, “This same materialism is also clearly discernible in the
Laws of Manu…“, where a footnote attached to ‘Manu’ gives the following
reference: “Laws of Manu, trans. Wendy Doniger, New Delhi: Penguin Books 2000″. Two
other references to this text follow two pages later, after a long discussion
where Zizek seems to be talking as though he has full command of the original
text. This second footnote refers to the ‘Translator’s introduction’! Either
Zizek himself does not know or he wants to deliberately mislead his readers:
Wendy Doniger is a scholar of many decades’ standing on Hinduism and not merely
a ‘translator’ whose introduction the philosopher so dishonestly cites.
But let that pass for the present. Let us look closely at
the quote above. His claim about the great chain of being becoming the ‘great
chain of eating’ is not his at all, but a formulation of 19th and 20th century
scholars of Indology like Sylvain Levi and Francis Zimmerman whose work Wendy
Doniger discusses at some length, all three un-cited of course, by Zizek. In other words, it is a specific reading and
not just some ‘Truth’ about Indian civilization. It is an important and interesting
formulation but one that is, like everything else, open to debate. Doniger
herself does not present it as anything more than a much discussed but
plausible proposition. It is once again the Philosopher who steps in to
transform this specific reading into a truth about an entire civilization. And
then, most amazingly, the emergence of ‘priesthood’ and its special place in
this culture is reduced to a simple matter of an expedient, a ‘trick’ to
deceive the gods! This point too, with the added grandiose philosophical
flourish of course, is drawn straight from Doniger’s work but presented as
original insight.
“This”, says Zizek with great flourish, “was the first
contract between ideologists (priests) and those in power (warrior-kings),”
(17) extending without any self-consciousness, the modern Western fiction of
contract onto a civilization whose history and thought he has no clue about.
This breathtaking reduction of an entire civilization to a
matter of trickery and contract is done entirely on the basis of the reading of
a single text in the English translation by one scholar. For Zizek’s
information, we could mention that there are at least three other English
translations of the same text, by different scholars (starting with William
Jones in the 18th century), with their own readings of the text – not to speak
of entire libraries of books in Sanskrit, Persian, Pali and other regional
languages that give a sense of the mind-boggling range of beliefs, practices
and intellectual debates that comprises the thing we know as ‘Indian
civilization”. Scholars working in the field have long grappled with this ocean
of material – but the Philosopher requires none of all that nonsense. His
engaged subjectivity gives him direct
access to ‘the truth’, merely on the basis of a superficial reading of a single
translation of a single text.
If Zizek had even read a fraction of what serious scholars
of Indian thought and politics have been writing for the past decades, he would
have realized how ridiculous his ‘theorization’ sounds. It is not for me to
give Zizek the reading list for these texts but he could profitably look up the
works of Sheldon Pollock and his students, for starters. He could read the work
of David Shulman whose recent work explores the relationship of imagination,
thought and reality in South India or at the work of Lawrence MacCrea that
shows that up until the 8th and 9th centuries, Indian philosophy was largely
materialist in its orientation. He could read the works of 20th century Indian
philosophers like KC Bhattacharya, JL Mehta, Bimal Matilal, JN Mohanty and more
contemporary scholars of Indian philosophy like Jonardan Ganeri, Arindam
Chakrabarty and others. I am not sure though that even all this will encourage
the Philosopher to revise a word of what he has to say, or that he will start
treating the non-West as anything more than a field of native informants –
after all, his philosophy is a priori and other worlds are merely posited by
what he believes to be the higher life-form.
However, let me not complain here any more about Zizek’s
ignorance about India, for my problems with him are in fact far more
fundamental.
In an argument with Badiou regarding the status of ‘classes’
in ‘society’, Zizek accuses Badiou of “reducing classes to parts of a social
body”, apparently “forgetting the lesson of Louis Althusser, namely that ‘class
struggle’ paradoxically precedes classes as determinate social groups, that is
that every class position and determination is already an effect of the ‘class
struggle.’ This is why ‘class struggle’ is another name for the fact that
‘society does not exist’ – it does not exist as a positive order of being.”
(198)
So far so good, and one could perhaps agree with the latter
part of the statement (society does not exist as a positive order of being)
without necessarily agreeing that something called ‘class struggle’ is what
accounts for it. Anybody who has read Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe’s Hegemony and Socialist
Strategy (written in the mid 1980s) would be familiar with this idea of the
‘impossibility of society’ and the difficulties of taking the ‘positivity of
the social’ for granted – though one might not agree with the details of their
elaboration. However this is not where my problem lies. It lies rather in the
further explication of this proposition through a theoretical instance:
“In other words, one should always bear in mind that for a true Marxist, ‘classes’ are not categories of positive social reality, parts of the social body, but categories of the real of a political struggle which cuts across the entire social body , preventing its ‘totalization’ (emphasis added). True, there is no outside to capitalism today, but this should not be used to hide the fact that capitalism itself is ‘antagonistic’, relying on contradictory measures to remain viable (emphasis added) – and these immanent antagonisms open up the space for radical action. (198-199)
Zizek, like most Western Marxists, finds himself in a bind
here [2]. Having once proclaimed ‘capitalism’ to be a ‘totality’ with its own
internal logic and then having proclaimed – on the basis of their own narrow
experience – that ‘there is no outside to capital’, how is he to understand
dissonances and ‘radical political action’? How then do you understand
practices that do not quite fit the notion of an immanent ‘logic of capital’?
Here we are presented with a ‘subterfuge’: capitalism is self-antagonistic –
that is to say, in order to remain viable, it also posits its own potential
negations. Thus, as an instance of this process, Zizek says: “If, say a
cooperative movement of poor farmers in a Third World country succeeds in
establishing a thriving alternative network, this should be celebrated as a
genuine political event.” (emphasis original, 199) Notice that this is very
different from Marx’s claim that capitalism brings with it its own grave-digger
in the form of the proletariat – which in his scheme of things was the
necessary consequence of the uprooting of ‘precapitalist’ life-forms, on which
alone the edifice of capitalism could be erected. In Zizek’s case, on the other
hand, it is clear from his very example that between Marx’s time and his, the
‘poor farmers in the third world’ have not disappeared into the pages of
history; they are alive and kicking, fighting and forming cooperatives.
Nonetheless, for Zizek there ‘is no outside to capital’ and these poor farmers
are doubly poor in that they do not realize that they “are posited by capital
itself”, by the very force they are supposedly fighting.
The problem here with Zizek as with most Western Marxists is
that they have no way of seeing dissonances and life forms other than capital
as anything but the effects of capital, just as in some other variants, they
are seen as the effects of modernity: there is no such thing as ‘tradition’
(even reconstituted tradition), but something that is already an effect of
modernity. If one were to trace the philosophical genealogy of this idea, one
would have to go back to the Hegelian/Marxist (but also the Enlightenment)
moment where all these societies outside the ‘modern’, capitalist west, were
seen as societies/ peoples without history, without change or the capacity for
change. They were inert masses brought into the orbit of history and
civilization by the West. Anything that produced change in them could only have
been introduced from outside.
The world looks very different, however, when seen from this
side of the divide. That is why the 1960s debate on capitalist development in
the ‘peripheries’ – dependistas and unequal exchange, for instance – was marked
by this anxiety among Marxists as to why capitalism was not developing in the
non-West. That is why, when Subaltern Studies scholars began to engage with the
history of peasant revolts and the working class movement, they had to
inevitably confront the history of capital in India. They came to the
conclusion that the ‘universal history of capital’ had failed to play itself
out in these societies. This is why Dipesh Chakrabarty refers to ‘two histories
of capital’ (H1 and H2), where the latter refers to lifeworlds that are in some
sense external to capital’s universal history. Zizek enters into a debate with
Chakrabarty’s Provincializing Europe and follows the latter’s argument through
parts where Chakrabarty seems to concede that co-existence of non-capitalist
lifeworlds, gods and spirits and so on with capital may actually have been a
more general condition (pp. 280-285).
Zizek’s response is not unexpected:
“Such co-existence holds not only for India, but is present everywhere, including in the most developed societies. It is here that one should apply the properly dialectical notion of totality: capitalism functions as a ‘totality’, in other words, elements of pre-existing life-worlds and economies (including money) are gradually re-articulated as its own moments, ‘exapted’ with a different function. What this means is that the line separating H1 and H2 is by definition blurred: parts of H2 ‘found’ by capitalism to be external to it, become permanently re-articulated as its integral elements.” (284, emphasis added)
So thinks the philosopher for whom capitalism as a coherent
totality is an a priori assumption (though he has forgotten his own subterfuge
by now – that ‘class struggle prevents totalization’). Needless to say, such an
a prioriassumes a highly problematic form from the perspective of those who are
not only challenging, resisting or fighting their integration into the totality
but also from the standpoint of those who continue to engage in practices that
capital/ism cannot really always deal with or articulate within itself. This is
an argument that needs to be both demonstrated empirically and argued
theoretically – a task that is not possible within the confines of this essay
but which I have undertaken elsewhere (‘Molecular Economies: Is there an
‘Outside to Capital?’, in Menon, Palshikar, Nigam (eds), Critical Studies in
Politics, Orient Blackswan and IIAS, forthcoming 2013). As an a priori
assumption, however, it makes more sense for us to see these opposing forces as
forces arrayed in battle, none really able to contain, appropriate and
re-produce the other as its own moment. That is to say, it makes more sense for
us to see them as what Laclau would say is the ‘failure of the structure to be’
– a structure that is always threatened, indeed,constituted by its ‘outside’.
In such an understanding, the ‘structure’ has no existence except as what its
conditions of existence make it out to be. It is a structure that is therefore,
never in control of itself – things always escaping it, if one were to get
Deleuzian.
All the empirical instances that Zizek marshals in order to
demonstrate that capitalism can appropriate all dissonant elements and
re-produce them as its own moments, will then appear in a very different light.
Capital, at the end of the twentieth century, before the onset of
neo-liberalism, was not a totality in command of the universe but actually
seriously threatened by the combined power of labour and environmental
movements. The victory of neo-liberalism and the collapse of the Soviet bloc
gave it a shot in the arm that was certainly not immanent to capital’s inner
logic. Indeed, the debate around the social clause in the mid-1990s, during the
final stages of the Uruguay Round of the GATT negotiations, when the WTO was
being put in place, showed serious fissures and divisions between capital in
the west and Western governments, between capital in the west and capital in
the ‘third world’ – so much so that western governments were willing to demand
union rights and other important labour and environmental standards of their
rivals in the third world. They were prepared to go so far as to link these
standards to ‘fair trade’, not because they represented the ‘enlightened
bourgeoisie’ of the ‘advanced West’ but because this would help undercut the
trade advantage that these gave their rivals. There was no immanent logic of
capital in evidence here – only various components of ‘capital’ in
confrontation with each other. We could go on but let these instances suffice for
now.
Thinking Otherwise
This brings us then, to our final question. If even our most
basic engagement with the empirical must take some a priori assumptions as our
starting points, we will do well to reject the totalizing metaphysics of the
Hegelian-Marxist kind and look for other metaphors. My own preference, as I
have indicated above, is for the idea of a ‘structure’ that is constituted by
its ‘outside’, and therefore always incomplete. We can also see the encounter
of these different forces in terms of other metaphors – such as that of
‘confluence’, as used for instance, by Ranjit Hoskote and Ilija Trojanow (in
their book Confluences) - which are not simple flows merging together but
complex processes involving conflict as well. The idea of confluence works
especially in the case of ideas in the precolonial context where it was not the
power of the barrel of the gun that settled the superiority of ideas. Indeed,
superiority and in inferiority were not even terms in which these exchanges
took place. One thinks of the great centres of learning in medieval Baghdad or
Cordoba where scholars from all over the world were invited, where translations
and transmissions of different texts and ideas from China and India took place.
One thinks likewise of the influence of Arab philosophers like Al Farabi, Ibn
Sina and Ibn Rushd in the early European institutions of learning – especially
from the 13th century on. Colonial domination and capitalism transformed even
this terrain of intellectual and cultural transactions – the battle of ideas ,
never an easy or simple affair, now became akin to a real battle across
cultural divides where political power determined the ‘superiority’ or
otherwise of ideas.
I take Dabashi’s injunction mentioned above – that of the
need to transcend the West versus non-West binary instituted by the colonial
condition and continued through the postcolonial, seriously. In so doing, I
also want to raise some questions about the challenges for the non-European
thinker today.
One way of taking Dabashi’s injunction seriously is to move
beyond this need to say that ‘we also have philosophy’ or ‘we also have
thought’ – to the same white man who he describes as a chimera. For some us
grappling with the issues of what it is to think in India/ South Asia today, it
is becoming increasingly clear that this task is impossible to accomplish – indeed even begin meaningfully – without
challenging the canon itself. The canon of philosophy in particular. For there
is a certain self-referentiality within which philosophy circulates – its
universalism is always already established, a priori - such that it can
endlessly talk to itself, in endless circular exegeses. Plato, Aristotle, Kant,
Descartes, Spinoza, Hegel, Heidegger, Deleuze, Badiou, Zizek, Ranciere…the circle
sometimes expands a bit to induct a Spinoza or Heidegger or a Ranciere – but
never an Al Farabi, Ibn Sina, Ibn Rushd or Ibn Khaldun. The charmed circle is
impossible to break into – unless of course you decide to reconcile yourself to
the terms laid out and leave your skin behind – which is to say, the history
that makes you! Every time you want to do philosophy, you must demonstrate that
you are ready to undergo plastic surgery, change the colour of your skin and
with it, the mind that you possess.
In the list of philosophers that I have mentioned above,
there are some easily recognizable absences – Marx, Foucault and lately Latour.
All considered to be lesser philosophers but perhaps precisely for that reason,
closer to our notion of what philosophy might be or can be. For neither Marx
nor Foucault nor Latour demand that before you start reading them you must
first bow before the great canonical figures of philosophy. On the contrary,
they invite you to read and engage with them from your own vantage point. If
you want to understand capital or power, the modern institutions of discipline
and labour, human relationship with the non-human, then the door is wide open
for you to enter. In a manner of speaking, bringing up Marx and Foucault, in
particular, also brings up another important issue: that of the relationship
between philosophy and history.
Note that what I am talking about here is the style and mode
of ‘doing philosophy’ by bringing it down from its metaphysical heights into
the messy world of the social and the historical. It is not that Marx or
Foucault are exempt from Eurocentric assumptions but the point is that they are
engaging with their times in ways that are open – and in so far as such
processes, institutions and disciplines exist outside the West, these
‘philosophers’ might have something to say to thinkers in other contexts as
well. In a sense, the challenge of doing philosophy in the non-West too
involves a similar move – of bringing thought down from its assumed
universalist pedestal to speak to different histories – in other words, to
become historical.
Instead of claiming that ‘we too had/ have philosophy’, it
is important, it seems to me, to underline that we have today the
responsibility to think differently. To think in ways that are at once
historical and philosophical. Or to put it somewhat differently, the challenge
is to think at the borders of history
and philosophy. We do not have the luxury of indulging in the universalist mode
of self-referential philosophizing that philosophers in the West have. For
them, every thing has always been already thought in its essentials from the
narrow ground of their experience, and every new philosopher has to prove
himself or herself to first be an exegete – whose only point of reference is the
text. For us, on the other hand, thinking involves challenging the given-ness
of that universality of thought; it involves challenging the canon itself. And
for this reason, more importantly, thinking for us involves a withdrawal, a
stepping back, from entering into ‘a dialogue’ with Western philosophers, the
terms for which are always-already set for us. A dialogue, we might say from
our experience, is not always a desirable thing.
This may be the reason why the names that Dabashi cites as
‘philosophers’ are not easily recognizeable as philosophers. Perhaps these
thinkers have already made the first move in the manner stated by Mignolo, from
pure, speculative philosophy to thinking at the borders. Let us recognize that
this move, however, is only the first step of a long journey. A critique of
Eurocentrism is all very good but the task of reconstituting thought and with
it the human sciences has just begun.
[Many of the above ideas have been developed in ongoing
conversations with Nivedita Menon and my friends and colleagues Rakesh Pandey
and Prathama Banerjee. It may be difficult to disentangle the authorship of
many ideas expressed here.]
[1] Nivedita Menon’s response to Zizek after his talk in
Delhi (2010) – The Two Zizeks
[2] My earlier 2-part critique of a certain Western Marxism
written after attending a star studded conference in London “On the Idea of
Communism” (2009)
