en

Ranjan Ghosh

2018

OpenAlex

“Let us space”—Derrida1 Caught amidst the wonderful circulation of ideas raised in this Forum—astute, probing, reflective, critical—I somewhat struggle to find my dwelling in the across: the metaphor for dialogue, the dialogue for communication, the communication for “thinking.” It is the investigation to locate dialogue in Thinking Literature across Continents (TLAC) that creates dialogue: the “dialogism” building around the loss, inconspicuity, the emergence, and the mute presence of dialogue across the book. If Laurent Dubreil hits the key of “incommensurability,” accenting the creation of conversation without creating the conditions for what we understand as dialogue, Andrew Way Leong strikes the note of dialogue in what he sees as the “fourth book” which is “neither-Ghosh-nor-Miller.” When Nicholas Royle looks for “thinking,” R. Radhakrishnan and Ragini Tharoor Srinivasan introspectively debate the “connect” and “disconnect” of a Ghosh–Miller dialogue that is absent, present, and absent–present in the same breath. Radhakrishnan laments missing more common ground; Marshall Brown sees a silent dissensus propelling the project forward and Ragini identifies communication in incommensurability: is dialogue all about exchanges only? Or can dialogue form out of an apparent lack of exchanges and the possible worlds that it generates or ungrounds?Ragini's observation—“It is enough that Ghosh and Miller desire dialogue; they desire the across”—is a good point to begin from. I like the loaded implication in Judith Butler's ascription of literature as “terrifying”: “What is literature for me? Does that mean my definition? Does it mean how does literature live or work for me? All these are terrifying questions.”2 If this “terrifying” connects with literature's inherent uncanny and ambiguity then we can with some measure rescribe the “across.” Allow me here to think for a while with Martin Heidegger. If being becomes “a real distress and a real liberation”3 how can the distress and liberation be effected and explored in the being of world literature, Viswa Sahitya? The question that at once inspires and bemuses me is what constitutes such a “being” and whether the being is explicable and accessible to enunciation. Heidegger's history of being leads us to rethink the “obvious” and this “obviousness rethought” can be the premise to begin thinking about world literature. If finding a text in a remote recess of a culture and rescripting its presence within the predominant circulation of the literary marketplace becomes an agenda that world literature is usually seen to promote, there is manifest profit in working through the obvious; this allows the unconcealment of truth to contribute to our thinking of the literary. How can world literature work through the “obvious”? What would it be, or it is, or be with?The obvious carries a “presence” with it, a kind of attainment which does not always pitch on the methodologies or protocols of reading. It has a pervading and pervasive history which most thinking on/around world literature has failed to acknowledge. World literature formations are not always conditioned and calculative; the obvious corresponds with the meditative, the truth of the unconditioned and the undogmatic. The obvious in world literature is what I see as the real standoff with the status quo of reception. What, then, can we interrogate in literature when there is a world prefixed to it? How does that open the world of literature, the being of literature? Knowing literature is, often, knowing the limits of questioning literature which does not mean knowing the points of exhaustion; rather, a reminder of our inability to question further. It is here that my understanding of the “across” changes and I start to engage with Ragini's query: “Reading across: Is it even possible to read in any other way?” The world being of literature is to question the conditions of knowledge generation; it tries to see literature as “existing,” as a phenomenon whose truths await to be discovered and are not always imputed and constructed. The truths of such findings lead us to see the “fundamental” of world literature where the fundamental is not merely about what “is there” but what essentially survives our investigation. This brings us to question the finitude of literature as performance and act: if Heidegger has inspired us to question the very role and dynamic of metaphysics in our thinking and understanding of life, I prefer to extend this to our thinking of both the world, literature and the world of literature. If every move, gesture, act, and performance comes with historicity as has been the idealized narrative of expectation and fulfilment in Western cultures, we are missing some part of the world that literature ungrounds and something that “world literature,” as I see, has not been able to realize.Interestingly, my introduction of the word “sahitya” (without the italics) in TLAC has met with an intriguing panorama of responses. In fact, the use of the word sahitya in its original Sanskritic context lacks the “fundamentals” that I have been arguing for. If world literature, through a technology of thinking, permits and promotes certain protocols and procedures of doing and performing, it can also make allowance for certain unmapped categories and experiences. Here world literature confronts its own “poetic”; this is not merely the uncanny but a nonappropriative relation to the being of literature. Is not there a way to understand literature nontheoretically? Admittedly, this builds an “across” that escapes a method and obviates a method after one has built a connection with the text. Thinking with Heidegger, I call this the unconditioned across, the across that is more fundamental than we ever could think out; it has its own tribunal of reason. I claim the power of the “ordinary” and the “obvious” in a text and extend the notion of the “across,” as exemplified in TLAC, through terms that are more fundamental, associative, preconditioned, prereflective and, hence, less settled in the “said” than in the “saying.” What I mean is that all understanding is not theory; some understandings “happen,” not necessarily awaiting to be theoreticized and “technologized.” Understandings can be potentials, “out of condition” thinking, and mere empathetic responses also. This, however, need not be confused with the aesthetics of “excess” and lack, the surplus and suture.Working through Heidegger's idea of the world then we encounter a space which is “unintended” and present in an “unprominent way,” somewhat outside the conscious formalization of understanding and thought. Following on that, we may argue that the “literary” is in world literature and exists in the world of literature. So what stares back at us is the articulative difference between world literature and what is “out there” in the world of literature: representation and constructivism need not always find their way in the ways of the world of literature. Is world literature both being-in-world and “attunement” (Stimmung), an always already across that shows up its own mattering and is not always a part of theoria? In fact, my trans(in)fusion takes advantage of this Heideggerean reading to work through “representations” and “correspondences” and a world-hood which is impossible to evade and live without. The world of literature is “there”; but world literature is, mostly, reductionist. Before we see a text as belonging to a culture, a particular background, a relational context, and a timescape—the analysands that help put the whole structure together—the world of literature precedes our reductive experience counterintuitively. This, for me, contributes to how we see world literature, presenting and “presencing” its formation not in isolation or apartness but by living holistically; this is the “opening forth.” If the prereflective and prediscursive experiences are pressed into play then the dasein of literature works around a “poetic” where mattering and presencing oppose the tyranny of the theoretical. So what kind of truth are we exposed to? This brings us to the “imperative” to understand the experience and truth of “uncoveredness”; for instance, more than what Samuel Coleridge says or represents, we vector toward what unconceals Coleridge, the world of Coleridge, the obvious Coleridge, his being-in-the-world: this is not what Coleridge does or can be theorized about and, hence, reduced to explanatory parts and his own constructivism but the Coleridge as an existing being that has always been on attendance upon aletheia. We uncover Coleridge (technized) as much as Coleridge is always attending an unconcealment and “openedness.” So would it be wrong to say that the world of literature determines world literature? Sahitya is “present,” always caught in the “clearing,” un-worlded; it cannot be without norms, forms and doxa; but sahitya cannot also be without the being when the poetic is seen to work at both levels—the discursive and the prereflective, the mode and the mattering. Here I see sahitya as a philosophy and art getting released from several misconstruals that TLAC could not escape suffering from.The literary, I would like to argue, awaits to be rescued from literature. So are we to infer saying that in the “resistance of the literary” against the prospective subsummation under the protocols and logic of reading and reception that one sees the development of the valence and variety of the across? Interestingly, the postliterary need not be seen as a concept or a space to pursue or serve; the postliterary is an experience that resists calcifications within certain subsets of philosophy, metaphysics, criticism, and aesthetics; it is strictly not a deconstructive space either. The poetic of the postliterary is always an other to itself where creativity is an opening up without ignoring the Open that is at once intrinsic to it and is also separated from it. So the world of world literature exists as the Open. The postliterary then is often the Heideggerean Earth for me: radical, subversive, contributory, resistant, withdrawn, romantic—a truth and a part of a truth that is conditioned and unconditioned at the same time.Brown, quite appropriately, embeds dialogue in—“Reading around, beneath, across, through.” So on a separate “plateau” I indulge my “across factor” (read dialogue-factor, if you like) for a while by thinking with Gilles Deleuze. Thinking is about creating problems: Deleuze sees it as creating difference. So our encounters with world literature/visva sahitya through Deleuze do have to be on the performatics of worlding. Perhaps the Deluezian contribution to our thinking of world literature comes from thinking “outside” structures that go to make literature in particular and world literature in general. This thinking outside structures is comparing structures and producing structures—initiating difference and seeing difference emerging on its own. It speaks of the unconditioned “fundamentals” of the phenomena of literature which is what constitutes the being of the prefix: the world, the visva. This brings me to argue how world literature can live out of literature and develop its correspondences (our dialogue) with mathematics, politics, religion, sciences, and other issues and disciplines. It is an “act of thought,” the untimely reason of structuration and structuring. World literature can be the pretext and the occasion to release the “reason” from our doing of humanities—a liberation of reason from critical thinking. It promises both difference and the advent of reasonableness.If thinking literature is becoming literature does the “literary” stay as an image of something, a phenomenon, or a flow? The literary, for me, is not always about a phenomena or an image owing itself to a structure, an idea, and a foundation. The literary is not always a theory to be read and experienced; it exists as a question, as a difference effecting “thousand plateaus” to our understanding; the literary, then, is, often, annoyance, a con-text. Deleuze was for shock affected through literature; in fact trans(in)fusion budgets for it too. To put it differently, transfiguration as across comes to us not from what we have and how we do; it promotes a singularity that literature does not engage with but is made to engage with. The literary must urge us to think what thinking can possibly do. Can across be interpreted as a possibility of producing the life of thinking and the literary? Is across the very possibility of “difference”? Then if “across” becomes tamely synonymous with transdisciplinarity, thinking becomes ossified into an academic discipline. I would like to change the tenor of across here with Deleuze by qualifying it as “power”: generously tempted again to ask whether across serves life and does not merely become a mere functional principle for greater transcultural payoffs. If the way in which I have argued “across” in TLAC demonstrate, on occasions, a conceived or preconceived doing and motivation, this across, thinking with Deleuze, gives me a sense of change as a happening analogous to the happening of life and the emergent power thereof. It is this across which is my “poetic” between philosophy and literature—not necessarily the poetic that produces thought but that which allows and clears the space for thinking. I agree that I proposed “across” in TLAC with already an image of across and, hence, disallowed, to an extent, the “power” of the literary. I tried to build a fresh power but possibly could not unconceal another dimension of the across caught somewhere within constellative formations. Trans(in)fusion connects better with the “life” and “power” that Deleuze talks about. My proffering of “concepts”—like trans-habit—produces a direction in thought formations, in the entangled power of the literary; but, I agree, we need an extension, a rearticulation, that might aggravate the power of interpretation that trans-habit proposes. I shall argue on this line to see trans-habit as the expression of the obvious, the fundamental to our very modes and ontology of thinking. Trans-habit, in such a reading, is both an orientation, a process, a happening, a conceptual modality, and a Deleuzian power.In a way, I would like to see the postliterary and its welcoming disability to subscribe to a norm and form as a Nietschean happiness—an “active” motion which stylizes thinking: the postliterary as “intensities.” Trans(in)fusion is less a concept and more an experience; experiences can be our ways of life. The across factor in trans(in)fusion comes often as an affect. Is the postliterary—what I have argued in my chapter on the ethics of literature in TLAC—the “becoming aesthetic”? It is both cultural and acultural, historical and ahistorical: not meaning what has been set to mean, not meaning what agreeability would have us believe, not meaning what exhaustion of meaning would reach us to. The postliterary would know how to make no noise and yet be a bustling metropolis.Is staying across then meant to be a jugalbandi which, etymologically, refers to “entwined twins”? Staying across means the jugalbandi where both perform as lead actors keeping a play in between; it evokes a performance where both stand in the frame and yet know that they have their game to play and pursue. Among many forms of jugalbandi in Indian classical music the Jasrangi (credited to Pandit Jasraj) is eminently innovative. Here a male and a female vocalist sing “two different ragas at the same time in two different scales, based on the Moorchhana principle of Indian classical music. The two singers give prominence to the Shadja-Madhyam and Shadja-Pancham Bhav, in which the ‘ma’ note of the female voice becoming the ‘sa’ of the male voice, and the male ‘pa’ becoming the female ‘sa’. Since both the singers sing in their own pitch the tonal quality in the music is not lost.”4 Jasraj explains that he devised the duet “like the yin and the yang, or Shiv-Shakti.” The Jasrangi is a sensuous fusion of the Purush (male) and the Prakiti (Female), harmonious blend wherein the male and female singer, each with individual accompaniments, sing different ragas at their own respective scales, interweaving them into a wondrous whole.”5 Hillis and I thought and wrote in our own pitch, in two different voices—the Anglo-American contrasted with the trans(in)fusionist—where my pitching on theory is Hillis's accent on the text and the rhetoric, where dialogue is not often eased out but is teased out of differences and particularities: the jugalbandi is in the apparent incommensurability. I cannot agree more with Brown when he argues that “the dissensus that shapes a dialogue keeps both authors on track towards opening new world … Ghosh articulates the aspirations; Miller outlines method.” TLAC has a different music to offer. Jugalbandi, as it connects with sahitya, then, complicates the bond and the binding. Where are the boundary and the release in the bandi? How singular is the jugal and how can one twinize the singularity?Sometimes, more than dialogue, this becomes a dialogue in progress; “not happening” as “yet to happen.” Not all exchanges I admit have their “daylight.” There is a “murmur” to every chapteral progression. Hillis and I spoke and if “speaking across” did not find many points of conspicuous connect, the speaking itself created its own narrative of cross-communication. For me, this is Leong's not Ghosh-not Hillis book: the book that one might, under the cover of Maurice Blanchot argue, as the “still to come,” the book getting written in the speaking: “He did not know her very well. But he did not need familiarity to get close to other beings. Was chance, which had assigned him to this particular room, responsible for their becoming so intimately involved with each other?”6 We came together by “chance,” have waived at each other ever since, need not require familiarity to get closer, did not need much daylight to make sense of our days: it has not prevented speaking despite others being allowed to occupy spaces in between. Continents are not always built through crossings; looking back at each other, a conversational emblem and gesture and even waiving points of contact can construct continents. Jasrangi Jugalbandi is singing where one need not know the other well enough; but a performance that knows how it can form a “hotel room” meant for sojourns without erasing the vector of travelling. It is not a home where rest and settlement can set in. TLAC sees us in a hotel room to stay without forgetting to travel when the stay is meant to provide a break from travelling. The game of across can be seriously interrogated on this note of hospitality.The across discussed in such a range does not make “Me” confine itself to Hillis only. My understanding of across in the book and in the present pages of this essay render the “You” beyond “grammatical thinking”: not just “symphilosophizing” partners, but a redoing of the “I” whose investments are mostly directed to stray away from a unitary principle of system philosophy: “The very event of dialogue is therefore a concrete site of nonidentity between I and you. To speak and to listen to another is to recognize the underivable singularity and novelty of the other who may always surprise me with her perspective, objection, or silence. The other of dialogue is not an a priori category of knowledge, which I already possess, but rather a mystery that continually dispossesses me in the direction of the unknown and the unknowable.”7 Hillis and I dialogued our past with a singularity, dialogued ourselves, left certain spaces tantalizingly close to the conventional dialogue zone and kept resonances that transcended dialogic conventions and principles; often, we did not dialogue at all. If Miller has advocated world literature, Ranjan Ghosh has, through his “intra-active transculturality,” argued for “more than global”; if Miller has brought Wallace Stevens and metaphor, Ghosh has brought Robert Frost, and the Sanskrit and Chinese interpretations of metaphor. I do not think there was a nonengagement here; rather, a relational process that transcreated a space beyond what system-dialogues or a point-counterpoint commentating would allow. Was this the “distance of proximity”? Is this what I have argued elsewhere, to quote the physicist Abner Shimony, the “passion at a distance”?8In fact, this spirit of jugalbandi stands to inform how we do comparative/world literature. It is where gradient, pitching, spacing, and rhythm and scale matter: a complicated understanding of these units make for a fraught lease of life for sahitya. My “shameless” enthusiasm here inspires me to see kire-tsuzuki (cut-continuity)—an interesting paradigm in Japanese aesthetics—as a way of explaining this dialogue-syndrome in this book. Hillis and I are “cut” off from each other through our background, training, orientation, preferences, and style; but the cut was the way to find our voice of communication; the cut inspired continuity in that correspondence across issues emerged from the cut-zones of our initiation, the premises of emergence and takeoffs. The Japanese notion of ikebana is a good explanatory point: ikebana means “making flowers alive” which ironically happens after the flowers are cut from the plants. As Nishitani Keiji points out that this “cut” is what lets the “true nature of the flower come to the fore.”9 Flowers cut find their “home” in flowers arranged: the cut contributing to their emergence within a separate aesthetic premise. The flower in its two states of existence—in the plant and cut off from the plant—builds its own aesthetic and correspondence. Can we then argue for a fresh dialogical poetics supervening the cut? The dialogical event is about letting my roots be challenged, to let something else flower, hitting at the radical roots of impermanence with which most concepts exist and find their lives. Scholars from across the continents can claim a cut, a severance from how they understand literature within their “homely” background of reception; the cut becomes the space to understand the transience and travelling-differential of concepts and ideas; the cut unconceals the sacred of sahitya. It is not merely the awareness of the cut but the ontological necessity of the cut that transcultural poetics must learn to evolve with—the cut-continuation, I say, somewhat in mootness, the kire-tsuzuki in world literature studies.A common sound that then fills the pages of this Forum is the contemplative and performative exuberance that I bring into this book: Leong sees “an inundative series of references” where “Ghosh's (in)fusion tends to immerse us within wave-like, or oceanic, economies of excess and supplementarity”; if Miller's orientation is inductive, Leong claims that Ghosh's (in)fusion approach reads to him as “profoundly un-ductive.” Brown rightly sees an overflowing “enthusiasm” in Ghosh; he, in perceptive elegance, points out that “Ghosh's stylistic excesses preach and practice trans-reading not just across but beyond continents … He feels, and communicates, excitement rather than shame.” So when Brown sees me as someone who “dazzles” I take to it with a politics of trying to see sahitya as restive, of consciously thinking “shamelessly aloud,” risking thinking with a view to expand the domains of literary neighborhoods. Dialogue, then, need not involve two anthropogenic interlocutors for I claim to have built some annoyance and unease through my “exhilaration” which Brown finds inspirational, considers as “extreme fusion” of “omnivorous multilingualism” and “impassioned” drive “to reach beyond—‘far beyond’—crossing barriers and forging links.” Dialogue, as one might note, is built in an across that shoots through the exhilarative restlessness of thoughts and references; here, the grammatology and geometry of thinking is more about how my shamelessness of referential immersion stokes strands of dialogue among characters as disparate as Deleuze and Tagore or rasa theory and Heidegger. If such a “thinking” annoys, then, annoyance is the inspiration to locate the dialogue not between Hillis and Ghosh but in the Ghosh whose irony of survival is not in sojourning a continent but in subterfuge, in perverse restivity, in the shamelessness that he could not find a home.Have I not found a home?And, if I have, has my finding been chiasmatized by a loss?Does the confusion over my identity—a postcolonial, Indian, not Indian, more than Indian, perhaps, a deconstructionist—show how I impersonate the dialogue?I relish being caught in the across, on the edge of chaos, dithering around my identity.I am (the) dialogue.The jugalbandi can begin here, too.

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Comparative Literature Studies

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