Notion Press Old No. 38, New No. 6 McNichols Road, Chetpet Chennai - 600 031 First Published by Notion Press 2017 Copyright © Prasenjit Biswas 2017 All Rights Reserved. ISBN 978-1-946641-97-7 This book has been published with all reasonable efforts taken to make the material error-free after the consent of the author. No part of this book shall be used, reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the author, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. The Author of this book is solely responsible and liable for its content including but not limited to the views, representations, descriptions, statements, information, opinions and references [“Content”]. The Content of this book shall not constitute or be construed or deemed to reflect the opinion or expression of the Publisher or Editor. Neither the Publisher nor Editor endorse or approve the Content of this book or guarantee the reliability, accuracy or completeness of the Content published herein and do not make any representations or warranties of any kind, express or implied, including but not limited to the implied warranties of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose. The Publisher and Editor shall not be liable whatsoever for any errors, omissions, whether such errors or omissions result from negligence, accident, or any other cause or claims for loss or damages of any kind, including without limitation, indirect or consequential loss or damage arising out of use, inability to use, or about the reliability, accuracy or sufficiency of the information contained in this book.

Dedication This book is dedicated to the memory of my mother Purnima Biswas who left me on 13th March, 2013. Recount her favourite line from Tagore, ‘Hey, where would you get liberation?’

Contents Prefaceix Acknowledgementsxxi

Chapter-One: Between Philosophy and Anthropology: Aporias of Human Existence

1

Chapter-Two: Truth, Language and Cognition: Exploring Aporias of Meaning

29

Chapter-Three: Sociality and Subjectivity: Encountering the ‘Wholly Other’

63

Chapter-Four: Playing the Game: Language at Its Limits

88

Chapter Five: Self and Its World: Aporias of Phenomenology

110

Chapter Six: Conscious Genes: Aporias of Autonomous Agency

141

Chapter-Seven: Feeling as Aporia: Daya Krishna’s Notion of Sublime

160

Chapter-Eight: Tribal Life-World(s): Aporias of Doing Ethnophilosophy

187

Chapter-Nine: Being Human, Post-Humanities and Anti-Philosophy: Prose of Interlopers

213

Postscript: The Disutopia of Aporias: Badiou, Guru and the Situation of Life

249

Index255

Preface Derrida’s pathfinding argument that components and elements of both thought and language never represent each other opens up a distinctive line of thinking within post-structuralist Philosophy. Derrida arrived at this significant moment of a deconstructive notion of aporia by critiquing logos of language and reality that Heidegger considered as un-thinkable or un-thought of. Derrida questioned the very potential of thinking the paradigm of reason as ‘impossible’ that for Kant became the ‘condition of possibility.’ The human beings with their capability of relating to the concrete experience of ‘as such,’ for Derrida, have an indelible link with subjectivity that locates difference within itself as it identifies the self and the other. The precise ontological question is, where does one draw the limit for potentiality of the subjective? Derrida answers it in terms of difference of deconstruction, which is of delay, deferral and a condition of not being able to be able, none of which can ground the Other. This ungroundable Other reappears as infinite regress into the Self. The situation is explained by Markus Gabriel in his book entitled, Why The World does not Exist, arguing that any positive marker of existence is an object, but the location of the object involves an infinite regress into the appearance within appearance and so on in a field of sense that is apart from the world. Gabriel draws an example from Dr. Otto Hasslein’s example of how one understand time in the film Planet of Apes (1967). According to the physicist Hasslein, it is time that shapes appearance of objects of existence. But this appearence of objects is like looking at a painiting, in which, Gabriel explained, We saw a landscape in a painting. We know that someone painted the landscape. (…) Thus we can also imagine a painting in which we see the painter who paints a picture, in which the painter paints the original landscape and so on.1

1 Markus Gabriel, Why the World Does Not Exist? Translated by Gregory S. Moss, (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2015): 76.

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In other words, it is the field of sense that creates the affect of existence, which for Derrida is a field of difference, a field of possible experiences that creates the effect of the world as a natural corollary to the human sense that Jean Luc Nancy also described as as a condition of ‘being already’ someone.2 The human standpoint and the human senses only create this effect or illusion of self and world as a field of play of the very sense itself that cannot easily be subjected to a limit, but a limit is drawn in epistemology or metaphysics in terms of its knowability. Derrida keeps aside the function of knowability and raises an ontological question about the limit of knowability by questioning the very idea of limit as a question beyond the available field of knowledge. In a purported assumption that there are limits to knowing and limits to the field of the sense, there is a necessary breach between the sense and the world, as both Kant and Nancy seem to agree. ‘World’ For Nancy is a differential articulation of singularities that cannot get its own sense in a non-circular manner except curving back into its own singular sense from a field of sense as a possible world.3 This is quite similar to Hansson’s curvature of spacetime that return from an already possible future to the past. Sense does return to its own singularity of the field and the object in it with someone reckoning, while for Kant, condition of possibility of experience depends upon the very field of sense that creates a breach between a preceding outer intuition and the prior concept of an object in space, as per Kant.4 For Derrida, the problem is, how to expel limit from the limits of sense and world? In answering this question Derrida is ready to concede that sense is only relative to a point of view, or at best it is constituted in and by language which also represents a variety of possible relations between self and world. Such relations are neither ontologically prior or post for a deconstructive exercise of reason, as they only pose certain limits to human sense. Derrida argued that there is no unique or univocal origin or place for sense, as sense presupposes itself in language, thought and cognition and remain embedded therein only to reappear, quite in the way of infinite regress, as Markus had told us, without any foundation.

2 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason (1781/87), Edited by P. Guyer and A. Wood, (Cambridge:Cambridge University Press,1998):71 sections (A26/B42) and Jean Luc Nancy, The Sense of the World, Translated Jeffrey S. Librett, (Minneapolis:University of Minnesota Press, 1997):75. Abbreviated as CPR for Kant and TSW for Nancy. 3 TSW, p.78 4 CPR A25/ B41.

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One can only map sense of the world in sense and not in the world and hence there is a restlessness of the world in sense. Indeed one touches the rock bottom of sense here. Two questions remain, how to purge out limits of sense and does limit create an experience of aporia in our existence, thought and language and in a stronger sense in our very acts of cognition. In the Derridean vein of this work, the question reverberates for an answer, but the answer that is presupposed in the very question returns only as a question over and over again, as time makes an infinite regress to the question possible. This impossibility to arrive at a heremeneutic place of rest and a stable centre of reason has been the outcome of a radical negativity that not only negates ‘essence’ and ‘foundation,’ but puts into play its own elements against the ‘limits’ of both thought and language. Derrida drew large philosophical, political and social scientific implications from this play: an aporia that lies between language and what it means and inhabits in the entire corpus of representational idioms of human and social sciences. The book engages Derridean notion of aporia in a variety of ways. In Chapter one entitled, Between Anthropology and Philosophy: Aporias of Human Existence brings together Heidegger, Lyotard, Wittgenstein, Agamben, Derrida, Foucault and some insights from contemporary Indian Philosophy to characterize the move within and beyond language that presents ‘a vision of language itself’ at the limit of language. At the limit of the possibility of signification, language touches itself and by this act of auto-affection, it goes beyond its limit to show itself as the ‘immediate.’ This is a recuperation of the Anthropological machine in language, a machine that churns out a shifting and moving sense of the self-other relation by increasing the degrees of responsibility to each other in the open, a field of impossibility of subjectcentred reason and meaning. The chapter concludes by saying that Anthropology and other social sciences merely increases the degrees of freedom for a nonanthropocentric moment of understanding the human by facilitating a transition from an absolute being to imperfections and limitations of empirical human being, who comes after transcendence and for whom there is an extra time that remains after philosophy. This is how the very idea of being human encapsulates an aporia of relationship within, without diminishing its possibilities, while at the same time, it faces the impossibility of being human in the open. In chapter two entitled, Truth, Language and Cognition: Aporias of Meaning it engages the Postmodern abandonment of the notion of truth as a Derridean

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outcome of deconstruction of language that brings forth a presuppositionless ontology of the world that goes onto an ontico-ontological difference, another aporia that stands between the world and the other of the world. This leads to a play between the inner and the outer to be subsumed by a Nietzschean will-topower that finally substitutes ontico-ontological split or difference by a critique of values. The chapter concludes by pointing at the possibility that Language is without a structure of representation of the ‘pre-reflective’ valuational capability of the humans that takes an immanent performative role of cognitive faculties only in the context of an ‘other intentionality’ in which it decentres itself. This mode of pre-reflective decentring frees language of an immanent subject-centred intentionality and allows it a perspectival right on every linguistically constituted view of the world. As the performance of the agent is beyond the ‘truth-conditions’ of contradictions and the ‘no-truth-conditions’ of subject centred acts, it can not be regressed to nomological regularities and transfinite ascription of values to such acts. Hence the différance between language and reality, between sense and reference that leads to an aporia of self-reference, an absence of origin in being different to oneself. Our cognitive apparatus moves from such location of difference to the beyond, which is a leap into aporias of human relations, a reaffirmation of the idea of social in language. Such a reaffirmation gives rise to an anticipation, a premediation of friendship and engagement without return, an indefinite longing without a destination, a suspension of time as externality. ‘It constitutes an essential moment, it regulates discursive asceticism, ‘the apparent referential vacuity that avoids empty delirium.’5 In chapter three entitled, Sociality and Subjectivity: Encountering the ‘Wholly Other,’ the idea of ‘sociality’ as a foundational notion of human relationship assumes the role of a ground or basis of all possible forms of human relationships-ethical, aesthetic and intellectual. But such an idea in its concrete shape produces a genealogy of belonging to a tradition or culture, in which every shift is considered as an ‘internal’ historical episode. Such episodes of shifting valuational and epistemic framework are attributed to interplay between reason and consciousness that always formed a basis or a ground. Hegel’s reading of Kant’s notion of Consciousness as noumenal being, a being that is in-itself and also a being of in-itself expounds the latter ‘initself’ only as a being-for-consciousness, which radically alters the very character 5 Jacques Derrida, “How to Avoid Speaking: Denials” in Jacques Derrida, Psyche: Inventions of the Other, Vol II, Edited by Peggy Kamuf and Elizabeth Rottenberg, (California:Stanford University Press, 2008):176

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of consciousness as a being-toward in-itself of the Consciousness.6 Such a being is ‘being’ of conscious facts, as in psychology, while at the same time, it remains a being that possesses such conscious facts as an opening towards the Other. Such a being cannot anymore be the being of ‘in-itself’ as in-itself is now altered into the ‘being’ of in-itself, which is Consciousness itself. Such a being of in-itself manifests in thought and representation, suspends all its ‘content’ in the moment of decentring itself in the flow of time just as a ‘spectator.’ Subject as spectator has already brought an end to the temporal connectedness between various instants of the time-consciousness and instead produces a lapse and delay between the ‘no-longer’ and ‘not-yet.’ In Chapter Four entitled, Playing the Game: Language at Its Limits, the essay aims at investigating into the plurality of discursive techne in claims of identity by various ‘forms of life’ in order to understand the modes of inclusion within the representational domain of Language. As artefacts of representation engage itself in contests over plurality and authenticity, any form of Anthropocentrism calls for foundational understanding of the life-world and worldviews of affirming a distinct self-identity. It can be observed that constructions of life-world bases itself primarily on a specific world-view with its intimate responsiveness towards lived experiences, albeit, with an amount of ‘universality’ in the inner resources of discursive construction of the ‘self.’ But this directedness towards oneself most often derives its ‘intentional contents’ from ‘representations’ of the Other without being necessarily distinguished from the Other. This directedness essentially produces an erasure of both self and other in an entanglement within a shared space.7 This space is the lived space of experiences and not an apriori intuitive matrix of social relations. The erasure of the self and the other takes the form of a monologue that does not listen to the Other, but imbricates the Other in a trajectory of simultaneous openness and closure.8 One can characterize this process of opening and closing as a dialogic encounter with the Other which is paradoxically inter-cultural as well as ascriptive of a strong sense of difference with the Other. 6 G.W.F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, tr. A.V. Miller, (Oxford:Oxford University Press, 1977):55–6. 7 I have adopted this argument from Arjun Appadurai’s statement that global cultural flow occurs through several disjunctures, such as disjunctures between ethnoscapes, technoscapes, mediascapes and ideoscapes. See, Arjun Appadurai, “Disjuncture and Difference in Global Cultural Economy” in Simon During (ed.), The Cultural Studies Reader, 3rd edition, (London and New York:Routledge, 2007):216–26 8 Ernesto Laclau, Emancipations, (London:Verso,1996):53–4.

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Chapter Five entitled, Self and Its World: Aporias of Phenomenology discusses how philosophers such as Galen Strawson and Dennett built on the received understanding of Intentionality that goes in the circle of ‘representation’ and ‘action,’ both of which assume Intentionality. In effect, Husserl’s understanding of Intentionality as ‘directedness’ is given a peculiarly phenomenalistic turn that reduces the sense-data as ‘constitutive’ to the very notion of the ‘world’ that the self as subject cognizes. Intentionality does not recover this universalizing capacity of consciousness neither in the underived aboutness of the non-experiential beings nor in the experiential qualia of minimally intentional creatures. Hence, an enactive subjectivity is a subjectivity-in-relation that merely is not a pre-reflective awareness of self’s relation with the world, but it is a structure of transcendental relation that is enacted in intentionality and cognition by leaving consciousness as a residuum over and above what is ‘constituted’ by acts of cognition. Husserl articulates the situation in terms of the way the world is posited by consciousness as sense-data or representation, which is one of the constitutive elements of the sense of the world as given by a personal-subjective Self and Consciousness that needs to be separated and excluded as a residuum of the cognitive acts of ‘senseconstitution’ in order to bring ‘reality’ back to itself. Chapter Six entitled, Conscious Genes: Aporias of Autonomous Agency discusses the constitutive character of genes in making autonomous conscious agents who then enacts a worldly role in close parallel to other conscious creatures. In the case of autonomous agents (AA), such a self-organizing process enters into an intersemiotic identification of functions like reading, copying and reproducing. Such an intersemiotic identification of processes are mapped into the complexity of organization of autonomous agent. In other words, determination of conditions of identification of processes implies a space of distribution of singularities such as synthesis/folding of protein that goes for determining the very character of genetic information. Protein acts as the space for self-determination of the genes. The relationship between genes and proteins are reading and construction processes that find its basis at the level of molecular autonomy. It can be observed that DNA as material components of dynamic regularities that arise in protein interactions do not play a causal role. It is rather the information DNA stores to produce RNA and proteins that is relevant. This runs parallel to the organization of self-sustaining architectures of AAs. Just as in the case of cellular interactions as discussed above, the embedding of information from material constituents affords the emergence of dynamic self-organization. The probable protein

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unfolding from the interaction between proteins as activated by information received from material sources reproduces the context of activation that affords a self-referential function of ‘being oneself.’ This is a metaphysically substantive notion, as a specific self-organizing architecture that not only has stable physical properties, but it also has recursive use of material and processes that sustain itself by giving rise to contexts of embedding such processes in the architecture of the self-organization. To put it in simpler terms, processes internal to selforganization are self-sustaining and such processes are not only physical, but they also are a response to various products of these self-sustaining processes. In other words, internal processes and their products are embedded into each other and such a relationship of embedding sustains them both. Therefore these processes are self-referential and they form a circuitous and looped connection turning themselves essential for their own sustenance. One can say that self sustaining processes are about themselves and they bear the content of emergent ‘ontic’ states of the system, which are again an essential part of self-organization. Such ontic states of the system are embedded in a self-referential way in the system and hence they are holistic. This kind of an explanatory mechanism remains open to an ontologically relativistic perspective on itself, another name for a conscious perspective. Chapter Seven entitled, Feeling as Aporia: Daya Krishna’s Notion of Sublime, contemporary Indian philosopher Daya Krishna (DK)exposed the transcendental illusion that knowledge assumes by subsuming the external reality under its abstract concepts and categories. DK goes onto establish that knowledge in the Post-Kantian world cannot any longer be a critique of the sensible, as such a critique presupposes a transcendental framework of self-world relationship. DK advocates a radical departure from Subject-Object dualism of idea of knowledge and shows the way to shift the compass of reason from epistemology to art. Rational action is judged from the perspective of its justifiability, while creative acts are evaluated from the ‘norms’ arising out of the relationship and engagement of the creator with the ‘object’ of creation. DK places rational action and valuationalnormative action side by side in order to explore the possibility of disinterested reasons that bind the actor to an obligation to work for it only for the love of it. This disillusion and detachment from the assumed centre of subjectivity needs to be supplemented by a desire for the other, which is a desire to thrown oneself up to the other. This is also a cure from the delusion of transcendental nature of the self or ‘I-centric” sense of being to correct oneself by the knowledge of the other,

Between PhilosoPhy and AnthroPology Between Philosophy and Anthropology: Aporias of Language, Thought and Consciousness In the encounter between Philosophy and Anthropology in some nine chapters of this book, some of the key questions like subjectivity, consciousness and meaning as presented within phenomenological tradition are discussed in an open-ended manner. Protagonists like Hegel, Husserl, Derrida, Dennett, Heidegger, Nancy, Wittgenstein, Agamben, Nietzsche occupy much of the space with their embedded, enworlded and transformative mode of arguments, averments and other serious and non-serious surmises concocted from their diverse corpus. It tells us a story of philosophization that memes in India grapple with a reasoned trepidation. Our very own Gopal Guru, Daya Krishna and Mrinal Miri figure as ‘singular-plural’ and as ‘alterity’ to the global encounters between Philosophy and Anthropology. Coming from India’s Northeast, the text provides an anchor to global-cosmopolitan and the planetary in a fresh and diverse ethnological setting, the present work developed between 2008–16, portrays an aporetic thought structure that refuses to settle for fixed, inferential and perspicuous notions of being and thing. The book offers desistant-ial strands of partial and local discourses that ought not to lead to a ‘final vocabulary.’ The book holds back from spelling out specificities of philosophical aporias, as it promises more dialogic encounters. Prasenjit Biswas is an Associate Professor at the Department of Philosophy at North Eastern Hill University, Shillong. A practising deconstructionist, an empathic learner of new ways of thinking and a compassionate reader of continental and Indian traditions, he is concerned about the sublime and the marginalized. His writings span phenomenology, politics and social theory with a sensitivity to address some of the intricate questions about humans, non and trans-humans and their life-worlds. His published works include Ethnic Life-Worlds in Northeast India (co-authored, Sage, 2008), The Postmodern Controversy (Rawat, 2005), Construction of Evil in North East India (co-edited, Sage, 2012), Political Economy of Underdevelopment of North East India (co-authored, Akansha, 2004). Forthcoming books include Tribal Philosophy and The Coming Aporias. He published in the areas of consciousness studies, deconstruction, ethnic studies and identity politics. Price 399