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Thinking the ‘question’ of religion: The aporia of Buddhism and its democratic heritage in Sri Lanka
Religion 38 (2008) 174–180
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Thinking the ‘question’ of religion: The aporia of Buddhism and its democratic heritage in Sri Lanka Ananda Abeysekara Department of Interdisciplinary Studies, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, 209 Major Williams, Blacksburg, VA 24061, USA
a b s t r a c t (If an abstract can ever be ‘abstract’?) Buddhism (and, more generally, religion) has never been thought as a question – that is, as a question inseparable from the question of the political. The academic study of Buddhism continues to be dominated by an empiricist, humanist, and even humanitarian project, shackled by modes of knowledge production, within the garrisons of colonialist area studies. No textualizing, anthropologizing, historicizing approach – however, critical it may be – can avoid the trap of humanism. To think the question of religion, one must begin to think it and its heritage as an aporia, an irreducible contradiction. In reading Qadri Ismail’s Abiding by Sri Lanka, I argue that reflecting on the aporia of religion – whose legacy is not a ‘problem’ to be solved, inherited, or abandoned – might well enable us to imagine a notion of the political hitherto unheard of. Ó 2008 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
‘‘Would it still make sense to speak of democracy . when it would no longer be a political question?’’ Jacques Derrida, Politics of Friendship ‘‘No democracy without literature; no literature without democracy.’’ Jacques Derrida, On the Name
Buddhism, humanist history, and the ‘question’ I want to contend – and one might arguably contend for other ‘religions’ as well – that Buddhism has hardly if ever been thought as a question within Western academia, that is, as a question inseparable from thinking the question of the political itself. To jump ahead of myself here, I propose in this article that any thinking the question of Buddhism or religion will demand thinking it and whatever heritage of it – there is more than one heritage – in terms of an aporia, an irreducible contradiction. Such an irreducible contradiction can be neither present nor absent, alive nor dead. It can be neither inherited nor abandoned, neither remembered nor forgotten. The aporia of Buddhism is a haunting specter which refuses to go away, returning, without warning, evading our apprehension. How would one think (about) such a specter and its legacy? My proposition here is that if it is possible at all to think about this specter – which is better understood as an im-possibility irreducible to possibility or impossibility – doing so would be central to thinking the question of the political.1 (That is, of course, to consider the political itself as irreducible to what we know by the name of democracy.)
E-mail address: [email protected] My thinking here is guided by much of Derrida’s work. I take up many of these questions in Abeysekara (2008). I use the word ‘im-possibility’ in a Derridian sense. 1
0048-721X/$ – see front matter Ó 2008 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.religion.2008.05.001
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Such a way of thinking of Buddhism, I would insist, is a challenge foreign to the scholars of religion (and Buddhist studies in particular). Some would no doubt protest this statement. Has the question of heritage and history, one may query, not received any attention within the august field of Buddhist studies? After all, over the last few decades, a vast body of scholarship across disciplines has spawned a wealth of knowledge about Buddhism in terms of textualizing, anthropologizing, and historicizing it in relation to various cartographic locations of politics, nationalism, colonialism, violence, and whatnot. Even so, I argue, framed within the largely empiricist logic of such scholarship – animated by the colonialist politics of area studies, safeguarded within the garrisons of our Western liberal disciplines – the academic study of Buddhism principally remains an epistemological, humanist, and even humanitarian project. No matter how theoretically sophisticated it may be, the study of Buddhism within such a project can never become a question – much less a ‘political’ question – to think (with). Rather, it can only be an object of knowledge to be appropriated and consumed, not only by undergraduates in ‘Buddhism 101’ courses but also by better informed ‘professional’ area studies experts, who craft their careers out of researching and teaching the subject in the West. I would insist that no critical analysis, examination, or study can enable one to bypass the humanist and epistemological appropriation of Buddhism.2 Even a postcolonial approach that seeks to undermine and overcome the colonial essentialist knowledge about Buddhism/ religion, with a view towards producing sinuous and complex histories, with critical fidelity to the ‘native’ Buddhist traditions themselves, will not escape the problem.3 This is in part because any attempt to historicize Buddhism, to understand Buddhism within history, as something that remains out there, under a ‘sign of presence’ – to use Derrida’s phrase – always returns to the problem of empiricism. Needless to say, empiricism, in its relation to history, generates a whole host of other problems that lie at the forefront of genocidal–fascist distinctions (of modernity) such as Sinhalese and Tamil, Hindu and Muslim, Buddhist and Other. I will have more to say about the relation between such political–moral distinctions and empiricism later, but if we are to think ‘the question of Buddhism,’ we must radically rethink the very category of history itself. To anticipate my larger argument, I would suggest that radical ‘rethinking’ of history – if such a thing is ever possible – cannot be undertaken by continuing to emulate the Foucauldian art (or fad?) of (genealogical) historicization.4 This sort of historicization, which, as I have detailed elsewhere, has come to count for a sense of political responsibility these days, fails to offer us any new insights into the concepts of history, memory, and time, let alone on the question of the political (cf. Abeysekara, 2008).5 How, then, might we think about history differently, again if it is possible at all? To put this alternatively, if radical thinking of history without historicization seems almost an im-possibility, then thinking of the question of Buddhism (and religion) has to be conceived in relation to that im-possibility. Put more simply, if a new way of thinking about history is possible, it has to come from pondering the very im-possibility of history without historicization, so to speak. Can we – all of us – including the historians of religions who are so preoccupied with history – do it?
Postempiricism, literature, the ‘problem’ of Sri Lanka Qadri Ismail’s book, Abiding by Sri Lanka, opens up a novel conceptual site within which to ponder this question (Ismail, 2005). Novel it is, at least to the field of area studies anchored within disciplines such as religious studies, history, anthropology, and even postcolonial studies. Today, area studies – with a very few exceptions, and the exceptions, however, many there may be, do not do away with the general – remain paralyzed by a poverty of thinking the question of the political because of the apolitical politics of empiricist humanism, if you will. Abiding by Sri Lanka speaks poignantly and corrosively, passionately and impetuously, at times all at once, to the crippling limitations of empiricism in terms of meditating on the ‘problem’ of democracy and politics in Sri Lanka. One of Ismail’s cardinal contentions is that empiricism – whose modern day un-holy allies are the disciplines of history and anthropology – forms an ‘obstacle’ to thinking ‘the question of peace,’ which, by extension, is also the question of the political, in Sri Lanka. (Note here that Ismail thinks of peace as a question itself while speaking of democracy as a problem, a distinction to which we will return.) Ismail’s damning indictment is that empiricism – he may have in mind the Lockean, Humean, or Berkeleyan senses of it – cannot attend to the problem of the political because it is concerned with knowledge production. Empiricism and empirically minded disciplines such as anthropology speak for or speak of the (Sri Lankan) native. This anthropology does not (and cannot) ‘speak to’ the politics of her place. (Ismail borrows the phrase from Gayatri Spivak, but Fanon had already used it slightly differently.) To fast forward, even the overhauled and ‘good’ anthropology of the Cliffordian class – marked by its ‘interpretive turn’ – that claims to work (or coauthor) with the
2 Following Derrida, I understand critique to be very different from deconstruction. That which is critiqued can always be reconstructed or improved and even re-inherited. Deconstruction offers no such possibility. 3 For representative samples, see Lopez (1995) and Masuzawa (2005). On the inadequacy of mere politics of seeking to ‘overcome,’ among other things, the heritage of colonialism, see Scott (2004). 4 Here I am detained by the suspicion that the prefix ‘re’ in ‘rethink,’ ‘re-imagine,’ ‘refashion,’ and whatnot cannot do much except retain and work within the very constraints of the concept (e.g., history, politics, democracy, or Buddhism) that is supposed to be rethought. That is to say, to rethink/re-imagine a concept, one must begin with something already ‘thought’ or ‘imagined,’ something already existing and present, that is, need I say, the metaphysics of presence itself. Rethinking such a concept – understood this way – really does not deconstruct it, but merely attempts to ‘improve’ it. Without being able to say anything substantive about it, I would suggest that such a labor of rethinking/improving echoes the very progressivist sense of our modernity. 5 See ‘Postcolonial Community or Democratic Responsibility? A Problem of Inheritance,’ in Abeysekara (2008).
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native does not break new ground, not only because it cannot really shake off its imperialist heritage of knowledge production, but also because it is sustained by the binary of insider/outsider that is fundamental to the history of imperialism itself. Historians and political scientists (e.g., K.M. De Silva and Jeyaratnam Wilson), as insiders themselves with political stakes in Sri Lanka, speak to it, but even they cannot really attend to the question of peace, because their historicist projects work within the limits of empiricism/historicism. Empiricism/historicism, governed by the questions of what did and did not really happen in the past – say, in terms of the histories of the Sinhalese and Tamils – always determine the question of how we ought to think about the contemporary demand for peace in Sri Lanka. Such historicist determinations of the contemporary questions cannot produce anything, but merely recycle a dog-eared politics of managing the supposed ethnic conflict between the Sinhalese majority and the Tamil minority. Thus, for Ismail, any attempt to speak to Sri Lanka will have to commence by demolishing the ‘epistemological space’ of anthropology/history and conceiving of a space for writing where the whole binary of insider/outsider remains unavailable. Needless to say, the mere status of ‘insider,’ according to Ismail, does not enable one to speak to Sri Lanka. There are innumerable Sri Lankan insiders who are hardly concerned with the country’s political questions. How, then, might one speak to Sri Lanka’s present and its (political) ‘debate’? To do so, Ismail suggests, one – the ‘postempiricist leftist’ – must turn to literature. In contrast to anthropology or history, literature speaks to and abides by Sri Lanka. As Ismail puts it, ‘Literature . allows one to learn from the problems it stages: at its strongest, most articulate, most imaginative, it presents problems, and not answers’ (p. xl). The ‘problems’ that literature presents do not demand interpretation or explanation or even analysis; rather, they demand intervention within the conceptual terrain of the Sri Lankan (political) debate, without trying to turn Sri Lanka – or, if I may interpolate, any other ethical–political name such as ‘Tamil,’ ‘Muslim,’ or ‘Buddhist’ that seems indissociable from it – into an empirical ‘object’ of study. What is called for, then, is a political endurance, indeed a responsibility of and commitment to, ‘abiding by Sri Lanka.’ That is, a commitment to ‘intervening within its debates, to taking a stand – to sticking one’s neck out if necessary, even at the risk of what might seem like a permanent frustration’ (p. xxx).6 Following the line of this argument, to see Sri Lanka non-empirically would mean the political impossibility of idling on the sidelines, of merely representing what is going on out there to the West and its consumers of knowledge, of remaining ephectic and refusing to take sides on matters of politics. But anthropologists who fancy the pleasures of ethnographies and who see their task as one of reporting and analyzing will blithely shrug off Ismail’s arguments. The sort of intervention that Ismail speaks of is, of course, not a passive call for some renewed kind of liberal activism; rather, for Ismail the ‘task is intellectual, not activist; interventionary, not interpretive’ (p. 27). This distinction between interpretation and intervention marks the difference between empiricism (anthropology/history) and ‘postempiricism’ (literature). Postempiricism, which marks the end of empiricism and its other intimate ally, Eurocentrism, is what should drive the labor of the future postcolonial leftist who seeks to abide by Sri Lanka and transform (Ismail’s word) the object. Postcoloniality – whose contemporary state remains gripped by empiricism – must become postempiricist in terms of re-evaluating its own reliance on history. Postempiricism ‘critiques’ ‘the very authority of history’ and refuses to let it determine the present (p. xxxix, 102, 164). As he claims in his detailed readings of the historicist narratives of (modern) Sri Lanka by De Silva and Wilson, history does not enable us to think of the present and its demand for ‘politics’ and ‘ethics’, because history always occupies a contested terrain where no single unassailable account of it is possible (p. 112). If we are to not let history determine the politics of the present, we can no longer see Sri Lanka as an empirical ‘place of violence’ between the Sinhalese–Buddhist ‘majority’ and Tamil ‘minority,’ as one more ‘case’ of analogy, to be compared (and contrasted) with other cases in the world, as a troubled place on a map, needing the mere analysis and explanation of an anthropologist or a political scientist. On the contrary, to understand Sri Lanka non-empirically (and non-analogically) is to understand it as a ‘text,’ that is, to think of Sri Lanka as a ‘problem, an intellectual and political problem – ultimately for the theory of democracy, not of violence, and not, either, for a theory of difference and one of the disciplines that authorizes it, area studies’ (pp. xxxii–xxxiii). Sri Lanka is thus urged to be understood not just as a text but as a textual ‘problem,’ a problem for democracy itself. This problem, it is implied, cannot and should not be (merely?) explained or interpreted in terms of history.
The heritage of Buddhism as a ‘problem’? What does this problem require then? Can a problem, by its very definition, also be a question that still demands thinking? This is to suspect that it might make no sense to speak – let alone think – of an old word like democracy ‘when it would no longer be a political question’ (Derrida, 1997, p. 104). If thinking (of) Sri Lanka as a problem is possible, how will such thinking bear on the question of the political? Does thinking a problem, if it is possible at all, constitute what Ismail envisions as intervention within the Sri Lankan debate? These questions seem important to me, not because they concern a mere difference between the two terms ‘problem’ and ‘question,’ but because that difference, as we will soon see, concerns the very question of the political that haunts Ismail in Abiding by Sri Lanka.
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Ismail ignores Seneviratne (1999), who, although moved by a humanist critique of modern Buddhism, speaks to Sri Lanka’s politics.
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Before I complicate these questions by way of a few more questions, let me state that no responsible thinker interested in the ‘responsibility’ of thinking and writing about not just Sri Lanka and its politics but also the general questions of religion and history, can possibly afford to ignore the text.7 The text is hardly just about Sri Lanka and its ostensibly narrow geography of politics that is often left to the caprices of area studies. Rather, Abiding by Sri Lanka, in its demand for a responsible way of thinking about the text of Sri Lanka – the call to abide by it is indeed a call to respond to its debate responsibly, if you will – is haunted by questions of religion and heritage. Ismail does not take up this profoundly problematic notion of responsibility itself, assuming that a politics of postempiricism can pass for a responsible way of responding to and abiding by Sri Lanka. Given Ismail’s own preoccupation with ‘rethinking . the problem of democracy,’ which counts and renders ‘minorities insignificant’ (p. xvi), he should show how his notion of abiding does or does not re-inscribe the democratic–juridical notion of responsibility/(ac)countability itself. This notion of responsibility – no matter how hard one tries to qualify it – is inextricably bound to an arithmetic of numbering and re-counting identities/differences, with a long religious–secular history, which smacks of the kind of ‘problem’ that Ismail desires to displace. This perhaps is one instance – there are others in the book – in which even as Ismail labors to escape the problem of history, he continues to be haunted and hounded by it, as it threatens to lure and throw him right back into the problem of humanism. Now, I say that Ismail is haunted by the questions of religion and heritage because no one can even begin to take on the problem of history in Sri Lanka without at least being concerned with the history and indeed the problem of Buddhism – if there is a thing so called. (Here we are beginning, slowly, to touch on the difference between question and problem). This is, of course, not to suggest that Sri Lankan history is reducible to religion or Buddhism. Rather, as Ismail (2000) himself has argued elsewhere, many writers tend to read Sinhalese–Buddhist history as an index to Sri Lanka, and vice versa. The Buddhist history is assumed to constitute the canonical heritage of Sri Lanka, in whose shadow all other histories remain eclipsed – if they remain at all. This sort of assumption, of course, takes on a life of its own in the hands of Sinhalese nationalist accounts of Sri Lanka. Ismail and I may disagree about what to do with this ‘Buddhist’ heritage of Sri Lanka, but we both, I suppose, realize that we must understand it non-empirically if we are to re-imagine the political. That is to say, more and more empirical/historical data that would seek to discredit the nationalist account will not resolve the historicist ‘problem’ of Sri Lanka, a point made by Scott (1999). How, precisely, does Ismail then propose we resolve the problem of Sri Lanka? Taken in its broadest sense, can the problem of Sri Lanka/history/heritage be also the problem of Buddhism (granting that the Buddhist heritage remains today – whether we like it or not – inextricable from the very name ‘Sri Lanka’)? If the problem of Buddhism/heritage, like the problem of Sri Lanka, cannot be explained and interpreted empirically, how are we to resolve this problem? This is where Ismail’s postempiricist project begins to pose a challenge to itself. The challenge has in part to do with Ismail’s conceptualization of Sri Lanka as a ‘problem’ itself, and this becomes compounded by the ‘alternative’ politics that Ismail envisions. Now the postempiricist project that Ismail imagines wants to displace the ways in which Sri Lanka’s political landscape has been defined in relation to history. That history, of course, is a history of the numerical–moral distinction between the majority and the minority, which, by extension, is a distinction between the Sinhalese and the Tamil, Buddhist and non-Buddhist. These kinds of distinctions are hardly neutral categories. They are anchored, as Ismail himself states, in a ‘structure of domination,’ which is also ‘the founding . principle of representative democracy: majority rule’ (p. xvi). It is this structure of domination that Ismail attempts to rethink when he speaks of ‘rethinking the problem of . democracy.’ And, if I may put it this way, this problem of democracy – Ismail does not say it quite this way – is embodied by Buddhism, whose very identity today depends upon the distinction between the Sinhalese–Buddhist (majority) and all others (minorities) in Sri Lanka. Seen this way, then, anyone who wishes to rethink these democratic distinctions of domination in Sri Lanka must also rethink the very heritage of Buddhism. (Saying, as some might do, that this heritage is not real Buddhism will hardly produce any intellectual-political breakthroughs.) Ismail seems to recognize this problem of the Buddhist heritage when he discusses how the master narrative of Sinhalese history – the sort provided by historians such as K.M. De Silva – grants a privileged status to the Buddhist ‘majority’ in Sri Lanka (p. 50, 69). According to such a narrative, the peace can become possible in Sri Lanka only when the minorities ‘realize what their place is, what the place is of any minority in any democracy – and accept it’ (p. xxxvi). Obviously, what is interesting here is not Ismail’s summation of this familiar nationalist narrative. Rather, it is what he seeks to do with it. To be sure, Ismail wants to delegitimize or displace the problem of the narrative, but he does not seek to do so by giving an alternative historical account in which the minorities can stand relegitimized, on a par with the Sinhalese majority, with more equal rights, as true equals. On the contrary, he wants to rethink the problem of the minority/majority distinction in a new way. The distinction, which is hardly natural, is possible only through the arithmetic of counting one group as major and the other as minor. In a word, then, Ismail wants to ‘transform’ the very numerical objects of this distinction, the Sinhalese as the majority and the Tamil (and the rest) as minority. He must do so because he is interested not in interpreting such objects but in transforming and/or displacing them. So, then, for Ismail, rethinking the problem of Sri Lanka in part must mean transforming it, which, by proxy, is also transforming its heritage of Buddhism and democracy. But – I ask once again – what does it precisely mean for Ismail to rethink/transform the problem of the democratic–Buddhist heritage of
7 In his review of Abiding by Sri Lanka, Rogers (2006) grossly misreads the book and claims with no basis whatsoever that Ismail thinks – nowhere does he do so in the book – that ‘‘history’’ can abide by Sri Lanka. Rogers goes on to dismiss the book out of hand in part for its ‘angry’ tone. Rogers proves right Ismail’s assertion that liberal historians and anthropologists, who often prefer quick and ‘sexy’ sound bites, have no patience to read texts carefully.
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this minor/major distinction? Does this rethinking/transforming abandon/displace the problem of Sri Lanka, producing something drastically new? (The task of rethinking/transforming the problem of Sri Lanka, if it were to embody the zeal and the seal of the Marxist sense of the term radical, must uproot the problem, leaving no possibility of ever [re]taking root.) Or, counter to what Ismail himself asserts, does the sense of rethinking/transforming ironically retain the problem by way of resolving (and dis-solving) it? As we will see soon, to resolve/dis-solve the problem of Sri Lanka, if it is possible, is indeed to retain it.
The problem of the problem, the im-possibility of inheritance How would Ismail answer these questions? He would insist, I suppose, that his labor does not in any way resolve the problem in the sense of improving the relations between the majority and the minority. Rather, he critiques it. For Ismail, ‘critique’ plays an organizing role in the displacement of the dominant account of Sri Lanka, replacing it with another account, and making possible the ‘emergence of the other’ (p. xvii). Ismail might say that, after all, he wants to question the logic of ‘number’ that animates the major–minor distinction. This is why he argues that: ‘a minority perspective is best understood not numerically or relationally, not as that of a smaller or a cohesive entity that can be counted, in relation to another that is larger, but as one opposed to the placing of significance and value in number as such – one that, to phrase this differently, refuses to know its place’ (p. 126). This is, without doubt, one of the most powerful and original conceptual moves made – anywhere for that matter – to rethink and transform the very heritage of the major/minor distinction. Yet this is also where I diverge from Ismail concerning the very possibility, never mind the efficacy, of any effort to rethink and ‘replace’ anything that bears the ‘name,’ be it ‘Sri Lanka,’ ‘Buddhism,’ ‘minority,’ or whatever. That is to say, even as he tries to transform the logic of the minority, Ismail retains the very name/notion of it – however, differently he may qualify it. Thus, Ismail’s labor to rethink/replace/displace the problem of Sri Lanka attests, ironically, to the very im-possibility of doing so. (Even though he never uses the word ‘im-possibility’ in the way I am thinking of it, Ismail gives us clues as to how we may meditate on that which we can no longer rethink and resolve without retaining it.) This is the strength, not the failure, of the book. In that sense, the im-possibility of transforming the problem of the majority/minority distinction – and the problem of Sri Lanka – in fact, ironically, enables us to think of it not as a problem but as an aporia. Aporia – a word Ismail uses at least once, although in a very different sense – is that which cannot be rethought so as to resolve or transform it, without passage. If the aporia of Sri Lanka, which can no longer be problematized – because it has already become a problem – and which cannot be transformed or inherited, without retaining and enriching it, then it must demand something other, which I call here thinking.8 How does one think (about) it, and not try ceaselessly to problematize it? And how does thinking (about) the aporia enable thinking the very question of the political? Ismail’s attempt undoubtedly problematizes Sri Lanka and its history (at least the ways in which it is constructed by historians), but this problematization only points to the im-possibility of transforming the name, Sri Lanka, Buddhism, Sinhalese, or Tamil. Here Ismail does not realize that the word ‘problem’ itself has a long historical legacy, not just in its Greek connotation where problema means a shield or a cover behind which one can hide (Derrida, 1993) – but in its more recent uses by Nietzsche and Foucault who, as we know, popularized the term ‘problematization’ that was central to the very notion of genealogy. But Ismail might insist that he is not just problematizing Sri Lanka. He is really speaking to it, to create a space for ‘the emergence of the other,’ which he sometimes calls the ‘unverifiable’ or the ‘singular,’ and which he opposes to any binary between identity and difference, or to any notion like ‘purity’ or ‘hybridity’ (p. 172). It is the singularity of the other, who cannot be computable and whose stories and lives are not analogous but ‘rhyme,’ that Ismail wants to honor. This is what he labors to do in his singular readings of two literary works – A. Sivanandan’s When Memory Dies (a historicist novel) and Ernest Macintyre’s Rasanayagam’s Last Riot (an antihistoricist play). Ismail, who admires the antihistoricism of Rasanayagam’s Last Riot, argues that the play constitutes the finest example of a commitment to conceptualizing a politics of singularity because it, among other things, is opposed to separatism, ‘minoritizes the Sinhalese,’ ‘asks the Sinhalese to respect and foster Tamil distinctiveness,’ demands ‘the distinct to participate in each other,’ and recognizes that ‘Tamil culture is Sri Lankan and belongs in the country’ (p. 219). In so doing, perhaps more importantly, the play ‘imagines . an alternative community.’ As attractive as it may seem at first sight, is this conceptualization of singularity adequate? In other words, does the idea of singularity, producing (or produced by?) an alternative community, actually rethink and displace the problem of Sri Lanka/ Buddhism/democracy? Or does it merely attempt to resolve/dis-solve the problem by way of ameliorating the problematic situation between the majority and the minority? Needless to say, I cannot endorse strongly enough Ismail’s effort to think of a singularity that cannot be captured by the binary of sameness/difference. Yet I part ways with him as he sets out to understand peace – and singularity would be another name for it – in terms of Adorno’s notion of ‘distinction without domination,’ a formulation which, as we will see below, he eventually wants to abandon without really abandoning it. If the notion of distinction without domination constitutes the alternative Sri Lankan community that Ismail imagines, it does not produce something entirely new. Rather, the notion, dare I say, runs the risk of merely improving relations between
8
To note that this way of thinking is Derridian is only to note that it is not merely Heideggerian.
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the majority and the minority because it – if one follows it closely – has the modernist and indeed the democratic sense of wanting to have something ‘without’ the substance that constitutes it. Put alternatively, the preposition ‘without,’ as Derrida (to a greater extent) and Zizek (to a lesser extent) have argued, is not as harmless as it appears. The logic of the preposition animates all our democratic, modernist, and capitalist labors of being and belonging, that is, to have the name without the name, community without community, Sri Lanka without Sri Lanka, or to be Sinhalese without being Sinhalese, White without being White, and so forth. Or, as Zizek (2000) might say, rather crudely, wanting to have the name without the substance that makes it up captures the same capitalist–consumerist logic that goes into the logic of having coffee without caffeine or Coke without Coke (which is Diet Coke). Or, more profoundly, as Derrida would argue, the proposition is implicated in all our modernist attempts to ceaselessly neutralize one predicate with another. And, in that sense, the logic of the name without the name becomes – and I cannot do much more than make this claim here – complicit in self-arrogated and haughty efforts to neutralize the rampant cultures of racism not just in Sri Lanka but also in the West/Europe as well. Ironically, then, in having the name without the name (i.e., being White without being White), one acknowledges the ‘problem’ with the name, given its obviously racist and even genocidal heritage, but this position hardly disavows the personal–political privileges that continue to inhere to it. Thus, the notion of the ‘problem’ merely affords one the benefit of the progressivist belief in working towards improving the very conditions that give rise to the problem. This is the problem of the problem, or the law of the problem, if you will. To have distinction without domination, to have the name without the name, is to retain this space of a progressivist politics. Ismail’s notion of singularity without doubt wants to undermine this kind of racist belief, but the confusing way in which he goes about framing it sometimes tends to mitigate the force of it. It seems to me that that the logic of distinction without domination cannot do justice to the idea of the singular, the unverifiable. (Yes, justice cannot ever be done to the unverifiable, since it will never be a juridical notion.) Ismail may suggest that I am making too much out of this Adornian phrase, which he uses in a qualified sense. Yet I maintain that Ismail cannot easily break free from the logic that animates it. Take, for instance, how early on Ismail invokes Jean-Luc Nancy’s phrase ‘singular plural’ to think against the idea of the common that inheres in the sameness/difference binary. Ismail (pp. 86, 255 n47) quotes Nancy (in Being Singular Plural): ‘What I have in common with another Frenchman is that I am not the same Frenchman as him.’ This, in my view, hardly attacks the notion of the common. Rather, as Derrida would say, Nancy’s is still a way of being without being.9 Yes, one Frenchman may not be the same as another, but, no matter what, at the end of the day, the (common and indeed brotherly) name ‘Frenchman’ always remains. Also, particularly given his resistance to letting history determine the present and allowing number to determine singularity, one may ask why Ismail accords the kind of weight he does to the notion of ‘an alternative community’? Is the idea of community, however ‘alternative’ it might be, not deeply implicated in a colonial history of counting, computing, and verifying identities and differences? Does this idea not threaten to bring Ismail right back to the problem of retaining the problem without the problem, of having the name without the name? One of the virtues of Abiding by Sri Lanka is that it does not merely resist history’s determination of politics; it also resists the humanism that is inseparable from that determination. It contains at least the powerful suspicion – even though it is not sufficiently developed – that historicist humanism cannot produce a non-binary singularity. That is, it puts forth the suspicion – and I am no longer using Ismail’s terminology here – that if we are to re-imagine the political, it must not be reducible to something that already exists, in terms of a given political party or religious organization. Ismail suspects that peace in Sri Lanka will never be possible without such imagination. And such a sense of the political, he argues, would be ‘ultimately committed neither to identity . [n]or to difference . (and so [it] eventually departs from Adorno, in whose formulation one cannot think beyond identity)’ (p. 237). This captivating proposition seems to trounce the possibility of any insinuation that Ismail is even remotely concerned with merely alleviating the differences between the Tamils and the Sinhalese. But in addition to the two sentences I just quoted, Ismail rashly and recklessly invokes Levinas’s idea of the ‘neighbor’ to explain the relation between alterity (irreducible to identity/difference) and peace. ‘This I think is what Emmanuel Levinas means,’ Ismail writes, ‘when he asks us to understand peace not as ‘‘the absorption or disappearance of alterity,’’ . but ‘‘as the fraternal way of proximity to the other,’’ with the other being understood as a ‘‘neighbor’’: literally someone who is not distant or radically different but one who is close by, who lives next door’ (Ismail, 2005, p. 237). Such a conception of peace, Ismail declares, does not confirm ‘‘‘oneself in one’s identity’’ or be exclusivist, but be prepared to put ‘‘that identity itself in question’’’ (ibid.). I cannot even begin to unpack the conceptual–political danger of the idea of the ‘neighbor’ here, except to say that its Christian history/legacy threatens to hurl Ismail right back into the lap of its humanism. I do not oppose the notion of the neighbor simply because it is Christian, but because any thinking of the political/peace in relation to that notion will inevitably retrieve and reclaim its (phallogocentric) heritage of historicist humanism. Ismail seems unfamiliar with Nietzsche’s (1995) assault on the idea of the neighbor (well before Freud’s [1989] denunciation of it), by way of his anti-humanist injunction to ‘flee from the neighbor’ and love the ‘farthest’ and the most distant; or with Derrida’s (1978, 2005a, 2005b) criticism of Levinas’s (Christianized) idea of the ‘face,’ to which the idea of the familiar, the one who lives ‘next door,’ is intimately linked. My point must be obvious now: if at some critical points Ismail tends to undercut his own arguments about the limits of history, it is because he sees Sri Lanka as a problem itself. Once one proceeds from the conceptual premise of a problem, one cannot help but be bound by the law of the problem, the law to resolve and retain
9 This is even as Nancy (1979: p. 158) criticizes elsewhere the ‘Cartesian experience’ as ‘the experience of the sub without any stasis or stance’ (Derrida, 2005a, 2005b, p. 27).
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it, to reshape and (re)work the very conditions (i.e., the moral–political distinctions between names such as the Sinhalese and the Tamils) that produce the problem. In that sense, there can never be a moving ‘beyond’ the problem/problematic (31), displacing it. Any attempt to rethink the problem always returns to the problem of resolving/retaining itself, with no guarantee when it will need further resolutions. This is the law of the problem. Now perhaps this is why, almost at the end of the book, Ismail avows more humbly – at the risk of contradicting himself – that he does not ‘wish nationalisms away’; rather he wants them to ‘change’ (p. 244). Part of the difficulty with Ismail’s project is that he conflates deconstruction with critique. At times, he seems to make out that his thinking about Sri Lanka, history, democracy, and the majority/minority problem is deconstructive even as he tirelessly emphasizes the idea of critique. But critique, as Derrida has argued, is not deconstruction, a point that is lost on those who reckon themselves to be deconstructionists. Unlike critique, deconstruction does not seek to move beyond, replace, improve, or change the ‘text.’ As Derrida (2005b) reminds us, ‘I can interrogate, contradict, attack, or simply deconstruct a logic of the text that came before me, and is before me, but I cannot and must not change it’ (p. 142). Yet, of course, contrary to this way of reading the text, Ismail wants to change the text of Sri Lanka. Surely, one cannot ever speak of changing a text without wanting to re-inherit it in its changed form. But this is an im-possibility. It is precisely like wanting to have the name without the name. (And no anti-essentialist, apologist claim that identity is composed of many aspects will ever get rid of the ‘name’ – Sinhalese, Buddhist, or White – without which identity cannot ever be.) Here, then, is a challenge that I would – in part moved by Ismail’s courage if not his conviction – reiterate to those disciplinary empiricists and historians of religion (and Buddhism). If we are to think of religion (Buddhism) as a text itself, a text that we can deconstruct but cannot change or enrich (and hence cannot re-inherit), then we must think of it as an aporia. The aporetic text of religion (Buddhism) and its heritage is not something we can move beyond. There cannot ever be an end or a death of the (deconstructed) text. But nor is it simply alive or available for reuse. It cannot be replaced or supplemented. It may be a ghost that will haunt and survive all of us, the deaths of us all, and live on. We can neither forget nor remember such a ghostly heritage, whenever we want, for whatever reason. The ghost returns, as all ghosts do.10 Is there something still to be thought about such a ghost, such an aporia? And can we learn to speak to it? (Yes, perhaps, just the day before yesterday, Shakespeare in Hamlet demanded precisely such a task when he commanded, ‘Thou art a scholar – speak to it, Horatio’ [emphasis added]). If such a task seems im-possible to us, today, then we must only think about its im-possibility. Thinking about the im-possibility of inheriting the aporia of the heritage of religion, is also a way of thinking about whether or not religion can ever be a question. Thus, then, thinking about the im-possibility of religion must mark the im-possibility of its question. There cannot ever be any thinking of the political that is irreducible to what we know today as ‘politics’ or even ‘ethics’ apart from meditating on this im-possibility.
References Abeysekara, A., 2008. The Politics of Postsecular Religion: Mourning Secular Futures. Columbia University Press, New York. Derrida, J., 1978. Violence and metaphysics. In: Writing and Difference. University of Chicago Press, Chicago. Derrida, J., 1993. Aporias: Dying – Awaiting (One Another at) the ‘Limits of Truth’ (Thomas Dutoit, Trans.). Stanford University Press, Stanford. Derrida, J., 1997. Politics of Friendship (George Collins, Trans.). Verso, New York. Derrida, J., 2005a. On Touching – Jean-Luc Nancy (Christine Irizarry, Trans.). Stanford University Press, Stanford. Derrida, J., 2005b. ‘Others are Secret because They are Other,’ in his Paper Machine (Rachel Bowlby, Trans.). Stanford University Press, Stanford. Freud, S., 1989. Civilization and Its Discontents (James Strachey, Trans.). W.W. Norton & Company, New York,. Ismail, Q., 2005. Abiding by Sri Lanka: on Peace, Place, and Postcoloniality. University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis. Ismail, Q., 2000. A flippant Gesture toward Sri Lanka: a review of Michael Ondaatje’s Anil’s ghost. Pravada 6 (9), 1024–1027. Lopez Jr., D.S. (Ed.), 1995. Curators of the Buddha: the Study of Buddhism under Colonialism. University of Chicago Press, Chicago. Masuzawa, T., 2005. The Invention of World Religions: or, How European Universalism was Preserved in the Language of Pluralism. University of Chicago Press, Chicago. Nancy, J.-L., 1979. ‘Unum Quid,’ in Ego Sum. Aubier-Flammarion, Paris. Nietzsche, F., 1995. Thus Spoke Zarathustra: a Book for All and None (Walter Kaufmann, Trans.). Modern Library, New York. Rogers, J., 2006. Review of abiding by Sri Lanka. Journal of Asian Studies 65 (4), 849–850. Scott, D., 1999. Dehistoricizing History. In: Refashioning Futures: Criticism after Postcoloniality. Princeton University Press, Princeton. Scott, D., 2004. Conscripts of Modernity: the Tragedy of Colonial Enlightenment. Duke University Press, Durham, N.C. Seneviratne, H.L., 1999. The Work of Kings: the New Buddhism in Sri Lanka. University of Chicago Press, Chicago. Zizek, S., 2000. The Fragile Absolute: or, Why is the Christian Legacy Worth Fighting for? Verso, New York.
Ananda Abeysekara is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University. He is (more recently) the author of The Politics of Postsecular Religion: Mourning Secular Futures (2008. Columbia University Press, New York), published as part of the series ‘Insurrections: Critical Studies in Religion, Politics, and Culture.’
10 ‘‘Such a spectral notion of ‘time’dthe specter is never bound by any (ontological) concept of timedshould call into question the very idea of the ‘present’ that Ismail leaves untheorized.’’
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Thinking the ‘question’ of religion: The aporia of Buddhism and its democratic heritage in Sri Lanka Ananda Abeysekara Department of Interdisciplinary Studies, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, 209 Major Williams, Blacksburg, VA 24061, USA
a b s t r a c t (If an abstract can ever be ‘abstract’?) Buddhism (and, more generally, religion) has never been thought as a question – that is, as a question inseparable from the question of the political. The academic study of Buddhism continues to be dominated by an empiricist, humanist, and even humanitarian project, shackled by modes of knowledge production, within the garrisons of colonialist area studies. No textualizing, anthropologizing, historicizing approach – however, critical it may be – can avoid the trap of humanism. To think the question of religion, one must begin to think it and its heritage as an aporia, an irreducible contradiction. In reading Qadri Ismail’s Abiding by Sri Lanka, I argue that reflecting on the aporia of religion – whose legacy is not a ‘problem’ to be solved, inherited, or abandoned – might well enable us to imagine a notion of the political hitherto unheard of. Ó 2008 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
‘‘Would it still make sense to speak of democracy . when it would no longer be a political question?’’ Jacques Derrida, Politics of Friendship ‘‘No democracy without literature; no literature without democracy.’’ Jacques Derrida, On the Name
Buddhism, humanist history, and the ‘question’ I want to contend – and one might arguably contend for other ‘religions’ as well – that Buddhism has hardly if ever been thought as a question within Western academia, that is, as a question inseparable from thinking the question of the political itself. To jump ahead of myself here, I propose in this article that any thinking the question of Buddhism or religion will demand thinking it and whatever heritage of it – there is more than one heritage – in terms of an aporia, an irreducible contradiction. Such an irreducible contradiction can be neither present nor absent, alive nor dead. It can be neither inherited nor abandoned, neither remembered nor forgotten. The aporia of Buddhism is a haunting specter which refuses to go away, returning, without warning, evading our apprehension. How would one think (about) such a specter and its legacy? My proposition here is that if it is possible at all to think about this specter – which is better understood as an im-possibility irreducible to possibility or impossibility – doing so would be central to thinking the question of the political.1 (That is, of course, to consider the political itself as irreducible to what we know by the name of democracy.)
E-mail address: [email protected] My thinking here is guided by much of Derrida’s work. I take up many of these questions in Abeysekara (2008). I use the word ‘im-possibility’ in a Derridian sense. 1
0048-721X/$ – see front matter Ó 2008 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.religion.2008.05.001
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Such a way of thinking of Buddhism, I would insist, is a challenge foreign to the scholars of religion (and Buddhist studies in particular). Some would no doubt protest this statement. Has the question of heritage and history, one may query, not received any attention within the august field of Buddhist studies? After all, over the last few decades, a vast body of scholarship across disciplines has spawned a wealth of knowledge about Buddhism in terms of textualizing, anthropologizing, and historicizing it in relation to various cartographic locations of politics, nationalism, colonialism, violence, and whatnot. Even so, I argue, framed within the largely empiricist logic of such scholarship – animated by the colonialist politics of area studies, safeguarded within the garrisons of our Western liberal disciplines – the academic study of Buddhism principally remains an epistemological, humanist, and even humanitarian project. No matter how theoretically sophisticated it may be, the study of Buddhism within such a project can never become a question – much less a ‘political’ question – to think (with). Rather, it can only be an object of knowledge to be appropriated and consumed, not only by undergraduates in ‘Buddhism 101’ courses but also by better informed ‘professional’ area studies experts, who craft their careers out of researching and teaching the subject in the West. I would insist that no critical analysis, examination, or study can enable one to bypass the humanist and epistemological appropriation of Buddhism.2 Even a postcolonial approach that seeks to undermine and overcome the colonial essentialist knowledge about Buddhism/ religion, with a view towards producing sinuous and complex histories, with critical fidelity to the ‘native’ Buddhist traditions themselves, will not escape the problem.3 This is in part because any attempt to historicize Buddhism, to understand Buddhism within history, as something that remains out there, under a ‘sign of presence’ – to use Derrida’s phrase – always returns to the problem of empiricism. Needless to say, empiricism, in its relation to history, generates a whole host of other problems that lie at the forefront of genocidal–fascist distinctions (of modernity) such as Sinhalese and Tamil, Hindu and Muslim, Buddhist and Other. I will have more to say about the relation between such political–moral distinctions and empiricism later, but if we are to think ‘the question of Buddhism,’ we must radically rethink the very category of history itself. To anticipate my larger argument, I would suggest that radical ‘rethinking’ of history – if such a thing is ever possible – cannot be undertaken by continuing to emulate the Foucauldian art (or fad?) of (genealogical) historicization.4 This sort of historicization, which, as I have detailed elsewhere, has come to count for a sense of political responsibility these days, fails to offer us any new insights into the concepts of history, memory, and time, let alone on the question of the political (cf. Abeysekara, 2008).5 How, then, might we think about history differently, again if it is possible at all? To put this alternatively, if radical thinking of history without historicization seems almost an im-possibility, then thinking of the question of Buddhism (and religion) has to be conceived in relation to that im-possibility. Put more simply, if a new way of thinking about history is possible, it has to come from pondering the very im-possibility of history without historicization, so to speak. Can we – all of us – including the historians of religions who are so preoccupied with history – do it?
Postempiricism, literature, the ‘problem’ of Sri Lanka Qadri Ismail’s book, Abiding by Sri Lanka, opens up a novel conceptual site within which to ponder this question (Ismail, 2005). Novel it is, at least to the field of area studies anchored within disciplines such as religious studies, history, anthropology, and even postcolonial studies. Today, area studies – with a very few exceptions, and the exceptions, however, many there may be, do not do away with the general – remain paralyzed by a poverty of thinking the question of the political because of the apolitical politics of empiricist humanism, if you will. Abiding by Sri Lanka speaks poignantly and corrosively, passionately and impetuously, at times all at once, to the crippling limitations of empiricism in terms of meditating on the ‘problem’ of democracy and politics in Sri Lanka. One of Ismail’s cardinal contentions is that empiricism – whose modern day un-holy allies are the disciplines of history and anthropology – forms an ‘obstacle’ to thinking ‘the question of peace,’ which, by extension, is also the question of the political, in Sri Lanka. (Note here that Ismail thinks of peace as a question itself while speaking of democracy as a problem, a distinction to which we will return.) Ismail’s damning indictment is that empiricism – he may have in mind the Lockean, Humean, or Berkeleyan senses of it – cannot attend to the problem of the political because it is concerned with knowledge production. Empiricism and empirically minded disciplines such as anthropology speak for or speak of the (Sri Lankan) native. This anthropology does not (and cannot) ‘speak to’ the politics of her place. (Ismail borrows the phrase from Gayatri Spivak, but Fanon had already used it slightly differently.) To fast forward, even the overhauled and ‘good’ anthropology of the Cliffordian class – marked by its ‘interpretive turn’ – that claims to work (or coauthor) with the
2 Following Derrida, I understand critique to be very different from deconstruction. That which is critiqued can always be reconstructed or improved and even re-inherited. Deconstruction offers no such possibility. 3 For representative samples, see Lopez (1995) and Masuzawa (2005). On the inadequacy of mere politics of seeking to ‘overcome,’ among other things, the heritage of colonialism, see Scott (2004). 4 Here I am detained by the suspicion that the prefix ‘re’ in ‘rethink,’ ‘re-imagine,’ ‘refashion,’ and whatnot cannot do much except retain and work within the very constraints of the concept (e.g., history, politics, democracy, or Buddhism) that is supposed to be rethought. That is to say, to rethink/re-imagine a concept, one must begin with something already ‘thought’ or ‘imagined,’ something already existing and present, that is, need I say, the metaphysics of presence itself. Rethinking such a concept – understood this way – really does not deconstruct it, but merely attempts to ‘improve’ it. Without being able to say anything substantive about it, I would suggest that such a labor of rethinking/improving echoes the very progressivist sense of our modernity. 5 See ‘Postcolonial Community or Democratic Responsibility? A Problem of Inheritance,’ in Abeysekara (2008).
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native does not break new ground, not only because it cannot really shake off its imperialist heritage of knowledge production, but also because it is sustained by the binary of insider/outsider that is fundamental to the history of imperialism itself. Historians and political scientists (e.g., K.M. De Silva and Jeyaratnam Wilson), as insiders themselves with political stakes in Sri Lanka, speak to it, but even they cannot really attend to the question of peace, because their historicist projects work within the limits of empiricism/historicism. Empiricism/historicism, governed by the questions of what did and did not really happen in the past – say, in terms of the histories of the Sinhalese and Tamils – always determine the question of how we ought to think about the contemporary demand for peace in Sri Lanka. Such historicist determinations of the contemporary questions cannot produce anything, but merely recycle a dog-eared politics of managing the supposed ethnic conflict between the Sinhalese majority and the Tamil minority. Thus, for Ismail, any attempt to speak to Sri Lanka will have to commence by demolishing the ‘epistemological space’ of anthropology/history and conceiving of a space for writing where the whole binary of insider/outsider remains unavailable. Needless to say, the mere status of ‘insider,’ according to Ismail, does not enable one to speak to Sri Lanka. There are innumerable Sri Lankan insiders who are hardly concerned with the country’s political questions. How, then, might one speak to Sri Lanka’s present and its (political) ‘debate’? To do so, Ismail suggests, one – the ‘postempiricist leftist’ – must turn to literature. In contrast to anthropology or history, literature speaks to and abides by Sri Lanka. As Ismail puts it, ‘Literature . allows one to learn from the problems it stages: at its strongest, most articulate, most imaginative, it presents problems, and not answers’ (p. xl). The ‘problems’ that literature presents do not demand interpretation or explanation or even analysis; rather, they demand intervention within the conceptual terrain of the Sri Lankan (political) debate, without trying to turn Sri Lanka – or, if I may interpolate, any other ethical–political name such as ‘Tamil,’ ‘Muslim,’ or ‘Buddhist’ that seems indissociable from it – into an empirical ‘object’ of study. What is called for, then, is a political endurance, indeed a responsibility of and commitment to, ‘abiding by Sri Lanka.’ That is, a commitment to ‘intervening within its debates, to taking a stand – to sticking one’s neck out if necessary, even at the risk of what might seem like a permanent frustration’ (p. xxx).6 Following the line of this argument, to see Sri Lanka non-empirically would mean the political impossibility of idling on the sidelines, of merely representing what is going on out there to the West and its consumers of knowledge, of remaining ephectic and refusing to take sides on matters of politics. But anthropologists who fancy the pleasures of ethnographies and who see their task as one of reporting and analyzing will blithely shrug off Ismail’s arguments. The sort of intervention that Ismail speaks of is, of course, not a passive call for some renewed kind of liberal activism; rather, for Ismail the ‘task is intellectual, not activist; interventionary, not interpretive’ (p. 27). This distinction between interpretation and intervention marks the difference between empiricism (anthropology/history) and ‘postempiricism’ (literature). Postempiricism, which marks the end of empiricism and its other intimate ally, Eurocentrism, is what should drive the labor of the future postcolonial leftist who seeks to abide by Sri Lanka and transform (Ismail’s word) the object. Postcoloniality – whose contemporary state remains gripped by empiricism – must become postempiricist in terms of re-evaluating its own reliance on history. Postempiricism ‘critiques’ ‘the very authority of history’ and refuses to let it determine the present (p. xxxix, 102, 164). As he claims in his detailed readings of the historicist narratives of (modern) Sri Lanka by De Silva and Wilson, history does not enable us to think of the present and its demand for ‘politics’ and ‘ethics’, because history always occupies a contested terrain where no single unassailable account of it is possible (p. 112). If we are to not let history determine the politics of the present, we can no longer see Sri Lanka as an empirical ‘place of violence’ between the Sinhalese–Buddhist ‘majority’ and Tamil ‘minority,’ as one more ‘case’ of analogy, to be compared (and contrasted) with other cases in the world, as a troubled place on a map, needing the mere analysis and explanation of an anthropologist or a political scientist. On the contrary, to understand Sri Lanka non-empirically (and non-analogically) is to understand it as a ‘text,’ that is, to think of Sri Lanka as a ‘problem, an intellectual and political problem – ultimately for the theory of democracy, not of violence, and not, either, for a theory of difference and one of the disciplines that authorizes it, area studies’ (pp. xxxii–xxxiii). Sri Lanka is thus urged to be understood not just as a text but as a textual ‘problem,’ a problem for democracy itself. This problem, it is implied, cannot and should not be (merely?) explained or interpreted in terms of history.
The heritage of Buddhism as a ‘problem’? What does this problem require then? Can a problem, by its very definition, also be a question that still demands thinking? This is to suspect that it might make no sense to speak – let alone think – of an old word like democracy ‘when it would no longer be a political question’ (Derrida, 1997, p. 104). If thinking (of) Sri Lanka as a problem is possible, how will such thinking bear on the question of the political? Does thinking a problem, if it is possible at all, constitute what Ismail envisions as intervention within the Sri Lankan debate? These questions seem important to me, not because they concern a mere difference between the two terms ‘problem’ and ‘question,’ but because that difference, as we will soon see, concerns the very question of the political that haunts Ismail in Abiding by Sri Lanka.
6
Ismail ignores Seneviratne (1999), who, although moved by a humanist critique of modern Buddhism, speaks to Sri Lanka’s politics.
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Before I complicate these questions by way of a few more questions, let me state that no responsible thinker interested in the ‘responsibility’ of thinking and writing about not just Sri Lanka and its politics but also the general questions of religion and history, can possibly afford to ignore the text.7 The text is hardly just about Sri Lanka and its ostensibly narrow geography of politics that is often left to the caprices of area studies. Rather, Abiding by Sri Lanka, in its demand for a responsible way of thinking about the text of Sri Lanka – the call to abide by it is indeed a call to respond to its debate responsibly, if you will – is haunted by questions of religion and heritage. Ismail does not take up this profoundly problematic notion of responsibility itself, assuming that a politics of postempiricism can pass for a responsible way of responding to and abiding by Sri Lanka. Given Ismail’s own preoccupation with ‘rethinking . the problem of democracy,’ which counts and renders ‘minorities insignificant’ (p. xvi), he should show how his notion of abiding does or does not re-inscribe the democratic–juridical notion of responsibility/(ac)countability itself. This notion of responsibility – no matter how hard one tries to qualify it – is inextricably bound to an arithmetic of numbering and re-counting identities/differences, with a long religious–secular history, which smacks of the kind of ‘problem’ that Ismail desires to displace. This perhaps is one instance – there are others in the book – in which even as Ismail labors to escape the problem of history, he continues to be haunted and hounded by it, as it threatens to lure and throw him right back into the problem of humanism. Now, I say that Ismail is haunted by the questions of religion and heritage because no one can even begin to take on the problem of history in Sri Lanka without at least being concerned with the history and indeed the problem of Buddhism – if there is a thing so called. (Here we are beginning, slowly, to touch on the difference between question and problem). This is, of course, not to suggest that Sri Lankan history is reducible to religion or Buddhism. Rather, as Ismail (2000) himself has argued elsewhere, many writers tend to read Sinhalese–Buddhist history as an index to Sri Lanka, and vice versa. The Buddhist history is assumed to constitute the canonical heritage of Sri Lanka, in whose shadow all other histories remain eclipsed – if they remain at all. This sort of assumption, of course, takes on a life of its own in the hands of Sinhalese nationalist accounts of Sri Lanka. Ismail and I may disagree about what to do with this ‘Buddhist’ heritage of Sri Lanka, but we both, I suppose, realize that we must understand it non-empirically if we are to re-imagine the political. That is to say, more and more empirical/historical data that would seek to discredit the nationalist account will not resolve the historicist ‘problem’ of Sri Lanka, a point made by Scott (1999). How, precisely, does Ismail then propose we resolve the problem of Sri Lanka? Taken in its broadest sense, can the problem of Sri Lanka/history/heritage be also the problem of Buddhism (granting that the Buddhist heritage remains today – whether we like it or not – inextricable from the very name ‘Sri Lanka’)? If the problem of Buddhism/heritage, like the problem of Sri Lanka, cannot be explained and interpreted empirically, how are we to resolve this problem? This is where Ismail’s postempiricist project begins to pose a challenge to itself. The challenge has in part to do with Ismail’s conceptualization of Sri Lanka as a ‘problem’ itself, and this becomes compounded by the ‘alternative’ politics that Ismail envisions. Now the postempiricist project that Ismail imagines wants to displace the ways in which Sri Lanka’s political landscape has been defined in relation to history. That history, of course, is a history of the numerical–moral distinction between the majority and the minority, which, by extension, is a distinction between the Sinhalese and the Tamil, Buddhist and non-Buddhist. These kinds of distinctions are hardly neutral categories. They are anchored, as Ismail himself states, in a ‘structure of domination,’ which is also ‘the founding . principle of representative democracy: majority rule’ (p. xvi). It is this structure of domination that Ismail attempts to rethink when he speaks of ‘rethinking the problem of . democracy.’ And, if I may put it this way, this problem of democracy – Ismail does not say it quite this way – is embodied by Buddhism, whose very identity today depends upon the distinction between the Sinhalese–Buddhist (majority) and all others (minorities) in Sri Lanka. Seen this way, then, anyone who wishes to rethink these democratic distinctions of domination in Sri Lanka must also rethink the very heritage of Buddhism. (Saying, as some might do, that this heritage is not real Buddhism will hardly produce any intellectual-political breakthroughs.) Ismail seems to recognize this problem of the Buddhist heritage when he discusses how the master narrative of Sinhalese history – the sort provided by historians such as K.M. De Silva – grants a privileged status to the Buddhist ‘majority’ in Sri Lanka (p. 50, 69). According to such a narrative, the peace can become possible in Sri Lanka only when the minorities ‘realize what their place is, what the place is of any minority in any democracy – and accept it’ (p. xxxvi). Obviously, what is interesting here is not Ismail’s summation of this familiar nationalist narrative. Rather, it is what he seeks to do with it. To be sure, Ismail wants to delegitimize or displace the problem of the narrative, but he does not seek to do so by giving an alternative historical account in which the minorities can stand relegitimized, on a par with the Sinhalese majority, with more equal rights, as true equals. On the contrary, he wants to rethink the problem of the minority/majority distinction in a new way. The distinction, which is hardly natural, is possible only through the arithmetic of counting one group as major and the other as minor. In a word, then, Ismail wants to ‘transform’ the very numerical objects of this distinction, the Sinhalese as the majority and the Tamil (and the rest) as minority. He must do so because he is interested not in interpreting such objects but in transforming and/or displacing them. So, then, for Ismail, rethinking the problem of Sri Lanka in part must mean transforming it, which, by proxy, is also transforming its heritage of Buddhism and democracy. But – I ask once again – what does it precisely mean for Ismail to rethink/transform the problem of the democratic–Buddhist heritage of
7 In his review of Abiding by Sri Lanka, Rogers (2006) grossly misreads the book and claims with no basis whatsoever that Ismail thinks – nowhere does he do so in the book – that ‘‘history’’ can abide by Sri Lanka. Rogers goes on to dismiss the book out of hand in part for its ‘angry’ tone. Rogers proves right Ismail’s assertion that liberal historians and anthropologists, who often prefer quick and ‘sexy’ sound bites, have no patience to read texts carefully.
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this minor/major distinction? Does this rethinking/transforming abandon/displace the problem of Sri Lanka, producing something drastically new? (The task of rethinking/transforming the problem of Sri Lanka, if it were to embody the zeal and the seal of the Marxist sense of the term radical, must uproot the problem, leaving no possibility of ever [re]taking root.) Or, counter to what Ismail himself asserts, does the sense of rethinking/transforming ironically retain the problem by way of resolving (and dis-solving) it? As we will see soon, to resolve/dis-solve the problem of Sri Lanka, if it is possible, is indeed to retain it.
The problem of the problem, the im-possibility of inheritance How would Ismail answer these questions? He would insist, I suppose, that his labor does not in any way resolve the problem in the sense of improving the relations between the majority and the minority. Rather, he critiques it. For Ismail, ‘critique’ plays an organizing role in the displacement of the dominant account of Sri Lanka, replacing it with another account, and making possible the ‘emergence of the other’ (p. xvii). Ismail might say that, after all, he wants to question the logic of ‘number’ that animates the major–minor distinction. This is why he argues that: ‘a minority perspective is best understood not numerically or relationally, not as that of a smaller or a cohesive entity that can be counted, in relation to another that is larger, but as one opposed to the placing of significance and value in number as such – one that, to phrase this differently, refuses to know its place’ (p. 126). This is, without doubt, one of the most powerful and original conceptual moves made – anywhere for that matter – to rethink and transform the very heritage of the major/minor distinction. Yet this is also where I diverge from Ismail concerning the very possibility, never mind the efficacy, of any effort to rethink and ‘replace’ anything that bears the ‘name,’ be it ‘Sri Lanka,’ ‘Buddhism,’ ‘minority,’ or whatever. That is to say, even as he tries to transform the logic of the minority, Ismail retains the very name/notion of it – however, differently he may qualify it. Thus, Ismail’s labor to rethink/replace/displace the problem of Sri Lanka attests, ironically, to the very im-possibility of doing so. (Even though he never uses the word ‘im-possibility’ in the way I am thinking of it, Ismail gives us clues as to how we may meditate on that which we can no longer rethink and resolve without retaining it.) This is the strength, not the failure, of the book. In that sense, the im-possibility of transforming the problem of the majority/minority distinction – and the problem of Sri Lanka – in fact, ironically, enables us to think of it not as a problem but as an aporia. Aporia – a word Ismail uses at least once, although in a very different sense – is that which cannot be rethought so as to resolve or transform it, without passage. If the aporia of Sri Lanka, which can no longer be problematized – because it has already become a problem – and which cannot be transformed or inherited, without retaining and enriching it, then it must demand something other, which I call here thinking.8 How does one think (about) it, and not try ceaselessly to problematize it? And how does thinking (about) the aporia enable thinking the very question of the political? Ismail’s attempt undoubtedly problematizes Sri Lanka and its history (at least the ways in which it is constructed by historians), but this problematization only points to the im-possibility of transforming the name, Sri Lanka, Buddhism, Sinhalese, or Tamil. Here Ismail does not realize that the word ‘problem’ itself has a long historical legacy, not just in its Greek connotation where problema means a shield or a cover behind which one can hide (Derrida, 1993) – but in its more recent uses by Nietzsche and Foucault who, as we know, popularized the term ‘problematization’ that was central to the very notion of genealogy. But Ismail might insist that he is not just problematizing Sri Lanka. He is really speaking to it, to create a space for ‘the emergence of the other,’ which he sometimes calls the ‘unverifiable’ or the ‘singular,’ and which he opposes to any binary between identity and difference, or to any notion like ‘purity’ or ‘hybridity’ (p. 172). It is the singularity of the other, who cannot be computable and whose stories and lives are not analogous but ‘rhyme,’ that Ismail wants to honor. This is what he labors to do in his singular readings of two literary works – A. Sivanandan’s When Memory Dies (a historicist novel) and Ernest Macintyre’s Rasanayagam’s Last Riot (an antihistoricist play). Ismail, who admires the antihistoricism of Rasanayagam’s Last Riot, argues that the play constitutes the finest example of a commitment to conceptualizing a politics of singularity because it, among other things, is opposed to separatism, ‘minoritizes the Sinhalese,’ ‘asks the Sinhalese to respect and foster Tamil distinctiveness,’ demands ‘the distinct to participate in each other,’ and recognizes that ‘Tamil culture is Sri Lankan and belongs in the country’ (p. 219). In so doing, perhaps more importantly, the play ‘imagines . an alternative community.’ As attractive as it may seem at first sight, is this conceptualization of singularity adequate? In other words, does the idea of singularity, producing (or produced by?) an alternative community, actually rethink and displace the problem of Sri Lanka/ Buddhism/democracy? Or does it merely attempt to resolve/dis-solve the problem by way of ameliorating the problematic situation between the majority and the minority? Needless to say, I cannot endorse strongly enough Ismail’s effort to think of a singularity that cannot be captured by the binary of sameness/difference. Yet I part ways with him as he sets out to understand peace – and singularity would be another name for it – in terms of Adorno’s notion of ‘distinction without domination,’ a formulation which, as we will see below, he eventually wants to abandon without really abandoning it. If the notion of distinction without domination constitutes the alternative Sri Lankan community that Ismail imagines, it does not produce something entirely new. Rather, the notion, dare I say, runs the risk of merely improving relations between
8
To note that this way of thinking is Derridian is only to note that it is not merely Heideggerian.
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the majority and the minority because it – if one follows it closely – has the modernist and indeed the democratic sense of wanting to have something ‘without’ the substance that constitutes it. Put alternatively, the preposition ‘without,’ as Derrida (to a greater extent) and Zizek (to a lesser extent) have argued, is not as harmless as it appears. The logic of the preposition animates all our democratic, modernist, and capitalist labors of being and belonging, that is, to have the name without the name, community without community, Sri Lanka without Sri Lanka, or to be Sinhalese without being Sinhalese, White without being White, and so forth. Or, as Zizek (2000) might say, rather crudely, wanting to have the name without the substance that makes it up captures the same capitalist–consumerist logic that goes into the logic of having coffee without caffeine or Coke without Coke (which is Diet Coke). Or, more profoundly, as Derrida would argue, the proposition is implicated in all our modernist attempts to ceaselessly neutralize one predicate with another. And, in that sense, the logic of the name without the name becomes – and I cannot do much more than make this claim here – complicit in self-arrogated and haughty efforts to neutralize the rampant cultures of racism not just in Sri Lanka but also in the West/Europe as well. Ironically, then, in having the name without the name (i.e., being White without being White), one acknowledges the ‘problem’ with the name, given its obviously racist and even genocidal heritage, but this position hardly disavows the personal–political privileges that continue to inhere to it. Thus, the notion of the ‘problem’ merely affords one the benefit of the progressivist belief in working towards improving the very conditions that give rise to the problem. This is the problem of the problem, or the law of the problem, if you will. To have distinction without domination, to have the name without the name, is to retain this space of a progressivist politics. Ismail’s notion of singularity without doubt wants to undermine this kind of racist belief, but the confusing way in which he goes about framing it sometimes tends to mitigate the force of it. It seems to me that that the logic of distinction without domination cannot do justice to the idea of the singular, the unverifiable. (Yes, justice cannot ever be done to the unverifiable, since it will never be a juridical notion.) Ismail may suggest that I am making too much out of this Adornian phrase, which he uses in a qualified sense. Yet I maintain that Ismail cannot easily break free from the logic that animates it. Take, for instance, how early on Ismail invokes Jean-Luc Nancy’s phrase ‘singular plural’ to think against the idea of the common that inheres in the sameness/difference binary. Ismail (pp. 86, 255 n47) quotes Nancy (in Being Singular Plural): ‘What I have in common with another Frenchman is that I am not the same Frenchman as him.’ This, in my view, hardly attacks the notion of the common. Rather, as Derrida would say, Nancy’s is still a way of being without being.9 Yes, one Frenchman may not be the same as another, but, no matter what, at the end of the day, the (common and indeed brotherly) name ‘Frenchman’ always remains. Also, particularly given his resistance to letting history determine the present and allowing number to determine singularity, one may ask why Ismail accords the kind of weight he does to the notion of ‘an alternative community’? Is the idea of community, however ‘alternative’ it might be, not deeply implicated in a colonial history of counting, computing, and verifying identities and differences? Does this idea not threaten to bring Ismail right back to the problem of retaining the problem without the problem, of having the name without the name? One of the virtues of Abiding by Sri Lanka is that it does not merely resist history’s determination of politics; it also resists the humanism that is inseparable from that determination. It contains at least the powerful suspicion – even though it is not sufficiently developed – that historicist humanism cannot produce a non-binary singularity. That is, it puts forth the suspicion – and I am no longer using Ismail’s terminology here – that if we are to re-imagine the political, it must not be reducible to something that already exists, in terms of a given political party or religious organization. Ismail suspects that peace in Sri Lanka will never be possible without such imagination. And such a sense of the political, he argues, would be ‘ultimately committed neither to identity . [n]or to difference . (and so [it] eventually departs from Adorno, in whose formulation one cannot think beyond identity)’ (p. 237). This captivating proposition seems to trounce the possibility of any insinuation that Ismail is even remotely concerned with merely alleviating the differences between the Tamils and the Sinhalese. But in addition to the two sentences I just quoted, Ismail rashly and recklessly invokes Levinas’s idea of the ‘neighbor’ to explain the relation between alterity (irreducible to identity/difference) and peace. ‘This I think is what Emmanuel Levinas means,’ Ismail writes, ‘when he asks us to understand peace not as ‘‘the absorption or disappearance of alterity,’’ . but ‘‘as the fraternal way of proximity to the other,’’ with the other being understood as a ‘‘neighbor’’: literally someone who is not distant or radically different but one who is close by, who lives next door’ (Ismail, 2005, p. 237). Such a conception of peace, Ismail declares, does not confirm ‘‘‘oneself in one’s identity’’ or be exclusivist, but be prepared to put ‘‘that identity itself in question’’’ (ibid.). I cannot even begin to unpack the conceptual–political danger of the idea of the ‘neighbor’ here, except to say that its Christian history/legacy threatens to hurl Ismail right back into the lap of its humanism. I do not oppose the notion of the neighbor simply because it is Christian, but because any thinking of the political/peace in relation to that notion will inevitably retrieve and reclaim its (phallogocentric) heritage of historicist humanism. Ismail seems unfamiliar with Nietzsche’s (1995) assault on the idea of the neighbor (well before Freud’s [1989] denunciation of it), by way of his anti-humanist injunction to ‘flee from the neighbor’ and love the ‘farthest’ and the most distant; or with Derrida’s (1978, 2005a, 2005b) criticism of Levinas’s (Christianized) idea of the ‘face,’ to which the idea of the familiar, the one who lives ‘next door,’ is intimately linked. My point must be obvious now: if at some critical points Ismail tends to undercut his own arguments about the limits of history, it is because he sees Sri Lanka as a problem itself. Once one proceeds from the conceptual premise of a problem, one cannot help but be bound by the law of the problem, the law to resolve and retain
9 This is even as Nancy (1979: p. 158) criticizes elsewhere the ‘Cartesian experience’ as ‘the experience of the sub without any stasis or stance’ (Derrida, 2005a, 2005b, p. 27).
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it, to reshape and (re)work the very conditions (i.e., the moral–political distinctions between names such as the Sinhalese and the Tamils) that produce the problem. In that sense, there can never be a moving ‘beyond’ the problem/problematic (31), displacing it. Any attempt to rethink the problem always returns to the problem of resolving/retaining itself, with no guarantee when it will need further resolutions. This is the law of the problem. Now perhaps this is why, almost at the end of the book, Ismail avows more humbly – at the risk of contradicting himself – that he does not ‘wish nationalisms away’; rather he wants them to ‘change’ (p. 244). Part of the difficulty with Ismail’s project is that he conflates deconstruction with critique. At times, he seems to make out that his thinking about Sri Lanka, history, democracy, and the majority/minority problem is deconstructive even as he tirelessly emphasizes the idea of critique. But critique, as Derrida has argued, is not deconstruction, a point that is lost on those who reckon themselves to be deconstructionists. Unlike critique, deconstruction does not seek to move beyond, replace, improve, or change the ‘text.’ As Derrida (2005b) reminds us, ‘I can interrogate, contradict, attack, or simply deconstruct a logic of the text that came before me, and is before me, but I cannot and must not change it’ (p. 142). Yet, of course, contrary to this way of reading the text, Ismail wants to change the text of Sri Lanka. Surely, one cannot ever speak of changing a text without wanting to re-inherit it in its changed form. But this is an im-possibility. It is precisely like wanting to have the name without the name. (And no anti-essentialist, apologist claim that identity is composed of many aspects will ever get rid of the ‘name’ – Sinhalese, Buddhist, or White – without which identity cannot ever be.) Here, then, is a challenge that I would – in part moved by Ismail’s courage if not his conviction – reiterate to those disciplinary empiricists and historians of religion (and Buddhism). If we are to think of religion (Buddhism) as a text itself, a text that we can deconstruct but cannot change or enrich (and hence cannot re-inherit), then we must think of it as an aporia. The aporetic text of religion (Buddhism) and its heritage is not something we can move beyond. There cannot ever be an end or a death of the (deconstructed) text. But nor is it simply alive or available for reuse. It cannot be replaced or supplemented. It may be a ghost that will haunt and survive all of us, the deaths of us all, and live on. We can neither forget nor remember such a ghostly heritage, whenever we want, for whatever reason. The ghost returns, as all ghosts do.10 Is there something still to be thought about such a ghost, such an aporia? And can we learn to speak to it? (Yes, perhaps, just the day before yesterday, Shakespeare in Hamlet demanded precisely such a task when he commanded, ‘Thou art a scholar – speak to it, Horatio’ [emphasis added]). If such a task seems im-possible to us, today, then we must only think about its im-possibility. Thinking about the im-possibility of inheriting the aporia of the heritage of religion, is also a way of thinking about whether or not religion can ever be a question. Thus, then, thinking about the im-possibility of religion must mark the im-possibility of its question. There cannot ever be any thinking of the political that is irreducible to what we know today as ‘politics’ or even ‘ethics’ apart from meditating on this im-possibility.
References Abeysekara, A., 2008. The Politics of Postsecular Religion: Mourning Secular Futures. Columbia University Press, New York. Derrida, J., 1978. Violence and metaphysics. In: Writing and Difference. University of Chicago Press, Chicago. Derrida, J., 1993. Aporias: Dying – Awaiting (One Another at) the ‘Limits of Truth’ (Thomas Dutoit, Trans.). Stanford University Press, Stanford. Derrida, J., 1997. Politics of Friendship (George Collins, Trans.). Verso, New York. Derrida, J., 2005a. On Touching – Jean-Luc Nancy (Christine Irizarry, Trans.). Stanford University Press, Stanford. Derrida, J., 2005b. ‘Others are Secret because They are Other,’ in his Paper Machine (Rachel Bowlby, Trans.). Stanford University Press, Stanford. Freud, S., 1989. Civilization and Its Discontents (James Strachey, Trans.). W.W. Norton & Company, New York,. Ismail, Q., 2005. Abiding by Sri Lanka: on Peace, Place, and Postcoloniality. University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis. Ismail, Q., 2000. A flippant Gesture toward Sri Lanka: a review of Michael Ondaatje’s Anil’s ghost. Pravada 6 (9), 1024–1027. Lopez Jr., D.S. (Ed.), 1995. Curators of the Buddha: the Study of Buddhism under Colonialism. University of Chicago Press, Chicago. Masuzawa, T., 2005. The Invention of World Religions: or, How European Universalism was Preserved in the Language of Pluralism. University of Chicago Press, Chicago. Nancy, J.-L., 1979. ‘Unum Quid,’ in Ego Sum. Aubier-Flammarion, Paris. Nietzsche, F., 1995. Thus Spoke Zarathustra: a Book for All and None (Walter Kaufmann, Trans.). Modern Library, New York. Rogers, J., 2006. Review of abiding by Sri Lanka. Journal of Asian Studies 65 (4), 849–850. Scott, D., 1999. Dehistoricizing History. In: Refashioning Futures: Criticism after Postcoloniality. Princeton University Press, Princeton. Scott, D., 2004. Conscripts of Modernity: the Tragedy of Colonial Enlightenment. Duke University Press, Durham, N.C. Seneviratne, H.L., 1999. The Work of Kings: the New Buddhism in Sri Lanka. University of Chicago Press, Chicago. Zizek, S., 2000. The Fragile Absolute: or, Why is the Christian Legacy Worth Fighting for? Verso, New York.
Ananda Abeysekara is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University. He is (more recently) the author of The Politics of Postsecular Religion: Mourning Secular Futures (2008. Columbia University Press, New York), published as part of the series ‘Insurrections: Critical Studies in Religion, Politics, and Culture.’
10 ‘‘Such a spectral notion of ‘time’dthe specter is never bound by any (ontological) concept of timedshould call into question the very idea of the ‘present’ that Ismail leaves untheorized.’’