Towards Promising Intellectual Projects
Sunalini Kumar
instances, and barely so. For the rest of the time, the reader is provided with scant evidence (evidence not in a crude empiricist sense, but in terms of an evidentiary structure of argument, empirical or theoretical) of the existence of the political subject. As a result, the category is made to work too
I
Ranabir Samaddar revisits and builds
on lines of inquiry inaugurated by his earlier work on “migrants, illegal immigrant groups, refugees, informal labour, fleeing peasants, displaced population groups...” (p xvii). The scope of this selfprofessedly experimental work is ambitious, covering a wide swathe of topics and approaches. The first section of the book is titled “Situations” and include, on the one hand, philosophical meditations on the idea of the political subject and its relationship with phenomena like death, dialogue, singularity and resistance; and on the other hand, more archivally-oriented chapters – featuring among other things, transcripts of a contemporary interview with Nagalim leader Isaac Muivah and records of anti-British rebellions by wahabi sects in the 19th century. The second section of the book is called “Positions” and contains chapters on the relationship between memory and labour, on the theory of constituent power, possibilities of transnational citizenship and finally on empire, globalisation and the subject.
If there is a common thread running through these diverse preoccupations, it is apparently to celebrate the (postcolonial) political subject. A subject, who in Samaddar’s words, is “authoring politics”, a source of political action and politics per se – originary (even if Samaddar does not use the word), uncorrupted and unmediated by the words and actions of theorists, and devoid of ideological manipulations of her or his subjectivity from above. In other words, the political subject as the primal font of action, or to use Samaddar’s language, as the constituent power of society. Samaddar is deeply invested in the idea of the materiality or physicality of politics; this conviction appears to be the basis for his argument contra (Giorgio) Agamben that the political
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The Emergence of the Political Subject by Ranabir Samaddar (New Delhi: Sage Publications), 2010; pp xxxii + 313, Rs 795.
subject must be understood not merely as “naked life” or “bare life”, but as bare body. The metaphor of bareness is deployed by Samaddar to argue that the sovereign is one who “clothes” bare bodies of subjects in juridical systems in order to make them docile; to destroy their capacity to disrupt, terrify and displace order. Consequently, the political subject is a body that resists sovereign power in multiple ways – through dialogue and dialogic means of engagement but also through contentious interactions and encounters including war, terror, and even death as forms of politics.
Chapterisation
The most interesting chapter in the book is on the wahabis, drawing on original Bengali sources from Bangladesh. The concluding chapter on empire and globalisation is also well-written, engaging debates on migration, stateless refugees and post-national citizenship in a lively manner. However, these chapters and case studies fail to overcome the primary shortcoming in this work – an unsubstantiated, featherweight central character in the form of the always-already radical, resisting political subject. At a historical moment when a crisis of violence seems to have gripped politics and the imperial logic of power is apparent everywhere, an argument for widespread political resistance, and for the (apparently omnipresent) resisting political subject needs to be painstakingly and thoroughly presented. In this work however, while the term political subject is mentioned repeatedly and in diverse contexts, it remains a shadowy category, coming to life in a couple of
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hard in the text and carry unfeasible burdens – for instance, to “free politics from metaphysics” (p 232), to demonstrate “the impossibility of settled rule” (Chapter 2) or to prove the existence of “citizen-militants...political actors, deeply local yet firmly cosmopolitan” (p 242).
The trouble seems to lie not in Samaddar’s politics, or in his moral purpose which is strong and strident, or in the questions that he hints at are the important ones in our world (migration, globalisation, justice, resistance, multitudes, action, the small voice/s of history, the relationship between language, materiality and political behaviour) but in the manner of argumentation. In the introduction, Samaddar attempts a definition of the central construct of his work,
At one level the political-subject is the citizenmilitant fighting at the barricades, raising manifestos, assembling crowds, organising parties, writing and speaking on behalf of collectives, joining all these, voting with fervour or with feet, marching on to parliaments with petitions, organising peasant demonstrations, refusing to pay rent and other taxes, leading attacks on landlords or hunger marches, and declaring millenarian rule...At another level, the political subject is less of a citizen because s/he has either opted out or s/he has not been taken in as a legitimate member of the political society. Refugees, dismissed workers, fleeing peasants, persecuted minorities, or groups or collectives demanding self-determination, or women claiming autonomy and agency in politics.... At the third level, we can see how the political subject is ‘subject’ to given politics, but aware of the subjection wants to subject politics to its own visions, is authoring politics. At yet another, the fourth level, this figure does not indicate an individual militant but indicates a collective pheno menon in politics...the political subject is a product of democracy...mass politics... (p xix).
The text has several other similar passages which assume congruence among a wide range of attributes and activities undertaken (according to the author) by the political subject, a congruence that is
BOOK REVIEW
not immediately apparent to the reader. In thus being defined too broadly, Samaddar’s political subject runs the risk of being defined out of existence. To give credit where it is due, the book’s introduction does provide more than a hint of the theoretical formulation that may help ground some of the disparate forms of political subjectivity listed by the author above. Following an impressive summary of Agamben’s thesis on bare life and Foucault’s biopolitics, Samaddar introduces his own understanding of political subjectivity with these words, “Who would have reckoned with the possibility of bare life refusing (the sovereign)...political actions, revolts, in short politics, exceeding the legal power of the sovereign...” In the next paragraph he states his premise somewhat more clearly, “Because ‘bare life’ is ultimately never ‘bare’, but always socially constituted, it occasions exceptionality, also it occasions resistance” (pp xxiii, xxiv).
These sentences point to creative engagements with influential contemporary political ideas that could blossom into wider arguments on postcolonial political subjectivity. However, Samaddar does not follow these insights to their logical conclusion; the result is that the reader is asked to accept the existence of resistance almost as an article of faith. This becomes especially difficult when the work reifies as acts of political resistance, behaviour that seem to be instances of desperation – fleeing tyrannical power (dismissed or exploited factory workers), accepting dismal alternatives to settled civil and social life (refugees), and even dying (illegal, impoverished or criminalised populations of all kinds). It is not that a convincing case cannot be made for understanding everyday acts as political acts or acts of resistance – in a James Scottian mould. However, such an exercise would require a far more rigorous theoretical lens or archive. What we have in this text instead are eclectic laundry lists of subjecthood and action that are noted with approval by the author; their internal logic remaining largely obscure to the reader.
Political Subject
One is ultimately left wondering who precisely is this political subject Samaddar refers to? Where does she reside – either in material-empirical terms or in conceptual-theoretical terms. Where do the borders of subjectivity begin and end for the author? Is it lack of privilege, of being outside the bounds of political and civil society, not to mention national and capitalist imaginaries, that is the defining marker of political-ness, or indeed of subjecthood? Then why not name it through available categories of caste, class or nation – dalit, working class, proletariat, subaltern, illegal immigrant, displaced person, refugee, and so on? If, as seems to be the implication in this work, available categories have lost their capacity to answer our questions, to describe or illuminate the reality of the here-and-now; then the author would need to demonstrate his challenge of those categories clearly.
It is nowhere self-evident in this text that an overarching term such as “political subject” serves as an improvement on other categories of subjecthood or identity. The problem may arise from Samaddar’s refusal to name the anxiety that informs this work – “how do we make sense of a post-Marxist universe?”. This is a valid anxiety, perhaps the most valuable one of our times, given the upheavals of the post1989 era. It seems apparent enough to this reviewer that Samaddar’s location and his intellectual and political intervention are very much a product of this particular historical moment, when following the loss of the emancipatory horizons of the 20th century the subject of radical politics has been rendered obscure to the intellectual gaze. If this is the case, and Samaddar seeks to revisit old debates through contemporary developments, a direct engagement with these questions and indeed with the legacy of Marxist debates would be of immense help.
However, Samaddar declines to undertake this project, depending instead on veiled anti-Hegelian polemics to push the subject (pun intended) forward. Consequently, the weakest parts of the book are the sections on Frantz Fanon, subaltern historiography, cultural studies and literary criticism. Discussing language, representation and culture as they relate to political agency and subjecthood, Samaddar’s argument in these sections often rehearses fatal dualisms, assuming schisms between materiality and language, between theory and experience, between the real-radical and psychoanalytic (read: lily-livered) readings of Fanon – readings that the author terms “petty bourgeois attacks by cultural theorists” (Chapter 8). Samaddar’s reading of Stuart Hall, dismissing his writing as “western” and “white” (!!) comes across as excessive in the absence of substantiation; and the trenchant but curiously roundabout critique of Dipesh Chakrabarty in the previous section on sublatern historiography remains at the level of broad insinuation. Further, these critiques seem a little dated now, nearly two decades after the “post-turn” in academia launched a thousand departments, books and journal debates.
Most Problematic
The most problematic part of this work however, may be the blurb – it states that the aim of this work is “to demonstrate why we need less of western political theories and philosophies to understand colonial and post-colonial political life”. This reviewer’s submission is that in fact this work cannot be understood without seeing it as a response to several fashionable western interlocutors – these include Agamben (Samaddar’s idea of the “bare
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body” as against bare life; Foucault – the counterposing of postcolonial subjecthood to individualised cultures of the self; Schmitt – the idea of constituent power as against constitutive power, as well as the claim that the postcolonial political subject resists “rule” with “friendship”; and Hardt and Negri, specifically their notion of the multitude; and Etienne Balibar – whose work on European citizenship finds repeated mention in the concluding chapters). Samaddar does state in the epilogue of the book that his aim was not to counterpose
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-western theorising with eastern theorising in any simplistic way, but the blurb and the tone in a bulk of the text belie this claim.
Finally, a note on language. Samaddar’s preoccupations are as indicated above, important, and there are several moments in the book that the reader comes close to glimpsing an unusual insight or revelation. However, his proclivity to opaque, oblique and idiosyncratic language detracts from the argument at hand. Another irritant is the author’s
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--habit of quoting excessively from other works – often for several pages – without making an overt effort to relate the quote to the rest of the text. In sum, The Emergence of the Political Subject may be understood more as a set of sketches towards promising long-term intellectual projects, and less as a work that stands by itself.
Sunalini Kumar (sunalini.kumar@gmail.com) teaches at Department of Political Science, Lady Shriram College, New Delhi.
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