DIALOGUES-Second Critical Studies Conference-Aesthetics Justice-2

Abstract

The moment of decision is an aesthetic moment. The singularity of the event called justice is enacted at this moment. This is the moment when the senses, in following their own particular logics, exceed the logical. Exceed without erasing. The decision I am thus speaking of is decision that does not flow from prior calculations of the one who decides. The structure of calculability is stalled at, while leading to, this moment. Like, as Derrida suggests, the calculations of the Law leads up to and stops at the threshold of the dispensation of justice. The work of interpreting the law is, while adhering to the letters of the law, to go beyond its calculations. Interestingly, this points at the openings of law itself: law that is deconstructible yet in an embrace with the indeconstructible justice.

When I name the moment of decision in justice ‘aesthetic’, I have in mind the derivation from the Greek word aisthanomai (“to perceive”) that worked in Baumgarten’s coinage of the term ‘aesthetics’ in his Reflections of Poetry (1735). The connections with “sensory experience and the kinds of feelings it arouses” (Audi 1999) points at the term’s intimate relations to the body. In Terry Eagleton’s treatise on the “Ideology of the Aesthetic”, the body is treated as a resource for a “long articulate rebellion against the tyranny of the theoretical” (1990, 13). Even if one remains undecided over such a possibility for the ‘body’ as material, the body as metaphor is easily recognized as a resource for figuring a domain beyond the calculations of reason. Eagleton has indeed painstakingly traced the itineraries of such a figuration. To take the decision to interpret law in dispensing justice is thus, in exceeding the reasoned calculations of law, implicated in the sensate domain of aisthesis. Not that this exhausts the relationships between justice and the aesthetic. As I hope to show in my instance of a specific debate around the question of rights and responsibilities, visual and conceptual representations of certain figures through techno-scientific and discursive maneuvers play crucial roles in the making of a notion of the just. The central image I deal with is the figure of the fetus in the abortion debate.

The prevailing debates around the question of abortion revolve round two contending positions. The pro-choice argument asserts the rights of the woman over her body and life. As an individual, she has to have the freedom to choose whether to go on with her pregnancy, and whether she wants the changes in her ways of living that being a mother entails. The pro-life position argues for the rights of the fetus to life – as the fetus is regarded as a human being and a prospective or (in some arguments) even a real person, an abortion is an act of murder. A pro-life argument renders the woman invisible. Sometimes she is demonized, sometimes effaced, at other spaces reduced to a synecdoche, or even forgotten doubly (in the sense that the act of forgetting the woman is itself forgotten). A ready answer for the pro-choice argument obviously remains within a discourse of the rights of the individual. The feminist position speaks in the language of individual ‘autonomy’ and the conservative argument invokes ‘empathy’, a familiar trope in feminist ethical thinking. In India, the language of choice – of rational, free individuals – is hollowed out of its content. To abort (as an extended mode of contraception) no longer remains a choice. It becomes an imperative of development (through international agencies, science establishment, plans, modernizing impulse, etc.). Pro-choice legislation takes the strange and macabre twist whereby thousands of girl children are selectively aborted through connections of technoscience, family and the state. Sex selective abortion is the ‘neutral’ term that tries to bring this paradox of a phenomenon into the discourse of international civility.

The intimate connections of an ethics and a politics with the processes of knowing come to the fore. It becomes imperative to follow the logical dynamics of an embodied epistemology to its ethical/political implications and differentiate that from an ethics flowing from other dominant and non-dominant positions. These questions refer back to the general arguments that I plan to follow regarding the notion of the aesthetics of justice. I take up the question of abortion as a specific instance where the limits of thinking in terms of universal solutions to a problem become apparent. The abstract framing of the problem in terms of a pro-choice/pro-life binary acquires ‘flesh and blood’ once one goes into the thickness of specific and contextual enunciations of the event. Who is a mother? Who (What?) is a fetus? How do techno-scientific practices and instruments shape the definition of both and their interrelationships? How do relations of coloniality, gender, race or economy take part in, and ‘distort’ the contours of, the process? How does the abortion debate reappear in a displaced form in the debates on female feticide in the postcolonial nation state of India? As one looks critically into the terms and metaphors at work in the formulation of the matter in legal, medical and philosophical texts, and into the multiple intricacies of the situation, the seeming simplicity of the arguments dissolves. It becomes difficult, if not impossible, to comment on the desirability of a ‘stance’ with regard to the problem. The moment of decision in the incalculable figuration of justice highlights the aesthetic dimension of responsibility that would otherwise be imperceptible to the workings of the law.

References:

Audi, Robert.1999. The Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy, Second Edition. Cambridge, New York: Cambridge University Press.
Eagleton, Terry. 1990. The Ideology of the Aesthetic. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers.

Bionote

After graduating in medicine, Anirban Das shifted to the humanities and specifically to studies on gender, science and postcoloniality. He has recently completed a Ph.D. in Philosophy at Jadavpur University, Kolkata and is Visiting Fellow at the School of Women’s Studies, Jadavpur University. He has edited a collection of Bangla writings on deconstruction, Banglay Binirman/Abinirman and has contributed articles in English and Bangla to journals (Indian Journal of History of Science, Rethinking Marxism, History Compass, from the margins) and to edited books. Currently working on two book projects: one is on the body in third world feminisms, and the other (co-authored) is on the general notion of third world feminism as it works in certain instances in the Indian subcontinent.

Abstract

This paper discusses a vital aspect of the critical relationship between nation state, displacement and justice. Though it has general implications, I underscore here the manifold nature of violence in nation-formation and norms of belongingness in South Asia, which haunts the experience of freedom, especially for the Partition refugees. We will misunderstand this violence if interpreted solely in terms of communalism. My contention is that there is an entirely different discourse of freedom and justice waiting to be recognized in the articulation of refugee experience, which cannot be translated into a juridico-legal language, as a charter of demands possible to legislate. One of the important properties of this articulation is that it situates the question of justice before a perspective that stretches much wider than the nation state, into the inflections of immediate history as well as a timeless past, imaginary state of nature. At the same time, it poses, not in programmatic terms, but as an ethical principle, a sense of future in terms of a different collective horizon, going beyond self and human society. The paper tries to locate this discourse in select fragments of speech and recollection, autobiographical and literary writings of those who had experienced displacement in divided Bengal. I will try to show how a vivid idiom of theoretical landscape and a certain form of poetic narration creates space for this kind of critical articulation, that stake for a different kind of truth claim, unusual style of witnessing and a singular way of negotiating justice. They provide, in a sense, a counter-register of perception to the experience of nation state, which is not only eminently political but also becomes the seedbed of hope that fuels the construction of future politics. This is the key argument of the paper, whereby it proposes a fresh engagement with the penumbral locus of the postcolonial citizen-subject, who is homeless and un-free, and sees the lie of both extant and anterior freedom, when it looks to justice with hope.

Bionote

Rajarshi Dasgupta is a Fellow in Political Science at Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta. He has worked on the cultural politics of Marxism in Bengal and received his D. Phil. from Oxford University. His recent research addresses the questions of belongingness, territoriality and experiences of displacement in Bangladesh. He has also worked on changing patterns of village politics in West Bengal and taught a course on democracy and development. His publications include “Rhyming Revolution: Marxism and Culture in Colonial Bengal”, Studies in History, 21:1 (2005), 79-98; “Manik Bandyopadhyay: The Word and Work of Bengali Marxism”, History, VII: 1 (2005), 43-58; “Representations of Communalism: A Study of Recent Print Media Reports in Bangladesh”, Asian Studies, 22:1-2 (2004), 39-63; “Marxbader Bhut Bonam Marxbadir Gotro”, (Bengali), Abobhash, 6: 1-2 (2006), 31-64. He is working on a book-manuscript titled Becoming Declassed: A Critical History of Marxism in Bengal.