Life andWords A BOOK The Philip E. Lilienthal imprint honors special books in commemoration of a man whose work at University of California Press from 1954 to 1979 was marked by dedication to young authors and to high standards in the field of Asian Studies. Friends, family, authors, and foundations have together endowed the Lilienthal Fund, which enables UC Press to publish under this imprint selected books in a way that reflects the taste and judgment of a great and beloved editor. Life andWords violence and the descent into the ordinary Veena Das Foreword by Stanley Cavell university of california press berkeley los angeles london University of California Press, one of the most distinguished university presses in the United States, enriches lives around the world by advancing scholarship in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. Its activities are supported by the UC Press Foundation and by philanthropic contributions from individuals and institutions. For more information, visit www.ucpress.edu. Several chapters are revised versions of earlier essays, which are listed in the acknowledgments on pages 267–269. University of California Press Berkeley and Los Angeles, California University of California Press, Ltd. London, England © 2007 by The Regents of the University of California Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Das, Veena. Life and words : violence and the descent into the ordinary / Veena Das ; foreword by Stanley Cavell. p. cm. “Philip E. Lilienthal Asian studies imprint.” Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn-13, 978-0-520-24744-4 (cloth : alk. paper) isbn-10, 0-520-24744-2 (cloth : alk. paper) isbn-13, 978-0-520-24745-1 (pbk. : alk. paper) isbn-10, 0-520-24745-0 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Violence—India. 2. India—History—Partition, 1947. 3. Sikhs—Crimes against—India. 4. Riots— India—History—20th century. 5. Suffering—India. 6. India—Politics and government. 7. India—Social conditions. 8. India—Social life and customs. I. Title. gn635.i4d2662 2007 303.60954—dc22 2006003041 Manufactured in the United States of America 15 14 13 12 11 10 09 08 07 06 10987654321 This book is printed on New Leaf EcoBook 50, a 100% recycled fiber of which 50% is de-inked post-consumer waste, processed chlorine-free. EcoBook 50 is acid-free and meets the minimum requirements of ansi/astm d5634–01 (Permanence of Paper). For Saumya,Jishnu,and Sanmay— for their gift of love and Ranen— for the generosity of spirit with which he has nourished our life together contents foreword / ix 1. The Event and the Everyday / 1 2. The Figure of the Abducted Woman: The Citizen as Sexed / 18 3. Language and Body: Transactions in the Construction of Pain / 38 4. The Act of Witnessing: Violence, Gender, and Subjectivity / 59 5. Boundaries, Violence, and the Work of Time / 79 6. Thinking of Time and Subjectivity / 95 7. In the Region of Rumor / 108 8. The Force of the Local / 135 9. The Signature of the State: The Paradox of Illegibility / 162 10. Three Portraits of Grief and Mourning / 184 11. Revisiting Trauma, Testimony, and Political Community / 205 notes / 223 acknowledgments / 267 index / 271 foreword veena das speaks of her “repeated (and even compulsive) reliance on Wittgenstein” as playing a role in the philosophical friendship that has developed between us. Beyond the clear evidence for this observation, the truth of it, from my side of things, is further confirmed, if perhaps less clearly, in an early and in a late thought of mine, each expressing my sense of an anthropological register in Wittgenstein’s sensibility, thoughts not reflected in Wittgenstein’s well-known recurrence, in his later (or as the French put it, his second) philosophy, to imaginary “tribes” different from “us.” I would like to mark my pleasure in contributing prefatory words for Das’s wonderful book Life and Words by putting those easily lost thoughts into words, into the world. My early thought was directed to a passage in Philosophical Investigations that roughly sounds to me like a reflection on a primitive allegory of incip- ient anthropological work: “Suppose you came as an explorer into an unknown country with a language quite strange to you. In what circum- stances would you say that the people there gave orders, understood them, obeyed them, rebelled against them, and so on? The common behaviour of mankind is the system of reference by means of which we interpret an unknown language” (§206). This may, as other moments in Wittgenstein’s text may, seem either too doubtful or too tame to be of much intellectual service. “Common behavior” ix seems quite unargumentative in referring to the behavior of salmon and mallards and anthropoid apes, not quite in referring to that of human beings. But let’s turn the card over. Take it that the allegorical air comes rather from the fact that to ask a question of the form “In what circum- stances would you say . ?” is precisely Wittgenstein’s most obvious (ordinary language) procedure directed to and about us, about us as philosophers when we are, as we inevitably are, variously tempted to force our ordinary words to do what they, as they stand, will not do, disap- pointed by finitude. It is our language that is, or that we perpetually render, foreign to us. The point of the allegory would then be that the explorer coming into an unknown country with a strange language is a figure of the philosopher moved to philosophical wonder by the strangeness of the humans among whom he lives, their strangeness to themselves, there- fore of himself to himself, at home perhaps nowhere, perhaps anywhere. (I have spoken of the Investigations as a portrait more specifically of the modern subject.) Asking us either to find our behavior strange (seltsam), or not strange, is a familiar gesture in the Investigations, anticipated, for example, in Plato’s image of the everyday as a cave, and in Rousseau’s fantasm of the first word (the first naming of the human other) as a giant, and in Thoreau’s perception in the opening pages of Walden of his fellow townsmen as self-tormenting “Bramins” (Thoreau’s spelling). The intersection of the familiar and the strange is an experience of the uncanny, an intersection therefore shared by the anthropologist, the psychoanalyst, and the Wittgensteinian (Socratic, Rousseau-like, Thoreau-like, etc.) philosopher. (Here an anthropological perspective is the counter to what is sometimes called, and disapproved of as, a humanist perspective, satisfied in its knowledge of what humanity should be. What I call Wittgenstein’s anthropological perspective is one puzzled in principle by anything human beings say and do, hence perhaps, at a moment, by nothing.) This brings me to the second, later thought prompting the sense of Wittgenstein’s seeking perspective on his unknown culture. I once shared a podium to discuss, perhaps debate, Wittgenstein’s later views with a friend who is fully recognized as one of the most accomplished philoso- phers of our generation. In his introductory remarks he asked, in effect: Why is Wittgenstein content to accord the status of a culture or an imag- inary tribe to virtually any group of strange creatures with apparently the sole exception of philosophers? When my turn to speak came I replied that for Wittgenstein philosophy is not a culture, not one among others. It is x foreword without (no matter how persistently it craves to have) a persistently accepted and evolving language of its own, retaining only some local terms that will be disputed and repudiated by other philosophers; “houses of cards” Wittgenstein will call its parade of discourses. The locale of its originating form of life is the singular human being dissatisfied with itself, a fate inherent, or say natural, within any civilized human society. We (moderns, philosophers) are likely often to accede to the idea that philos- ophy has become a profession like others, say, since its incorporation into the Western university curriculum over the past two and a half centuries. But that is something Wittgenstein fairly clearly finds as strange as it is familiar. It seems clear to me that Das’s sense of compulsive turning to a com- panionship with Wittgenstein’s later work is her recognition that his address to the human other is, like her own, one that can be said to revolve characteristically around the study of pain. I have heard this tropism of Wittgenstein’s criticized as in effect making things too easy for himself, since the criteria of pain are epistemologically so well defined, the feeling so well known. This strikes me merely as one of numberless ways of defending oneself against Wittgenstein’s uncovering of philosophy’s defenses, say, against the everyday, against finitude. But the question of the sense of pain’s pressure in Wittgenstein’s text is a good one. Since I have for a long time been following out my sense of Wittgenstein’s work as directed to an understanding of skepticism, I am likely to regard pain as especially suited to be a philosophical example for him precisely because of its com- monness and its recognizability, something knowable about the other if anything is. And I would emphasize two other facts of the phenomenon, first that over a large range of its occurrences its manifestation is more or less repressible or disguisable (paradoxically more easily than the manifes- tation of joy or mild surprise or a prompting of laughter), so that one may be said in such cases to have to care whether to understand what is hap- pening; second, that unlike joy or surprise or laughter, with pain there is a moral demand to respond to its expression.