[Reader-list] IF-Post 2.5 Revisiting 'pure politics' and the personal transformation of the public sphere

[ARNAB CHATTERJEE]

Dear Readers,
                               The immediate news is,
I’ve been struggling this one  month over an extensive
revision of the last posting that I had made, ( I’ve
given it a title later, ‘From Political pornography to
Pure Politics  : Notes  on the Personal Transformation
of the Public sphere) and the changes and additions
are so massive (Section 2.3.1 is nearly a new Section
in which I try to bring up a sketch of the history of
invectives from the Greek Cicero and Diogenes to
political porno pamphlets in contemporary Benaras
vis-a vis 15th, 16th century and the infamous 18th
century running down to Fascist persuasion etc)  that
I’ve decided to underline this piece ( inclusive of
this commentary and the paper)as falling some way in
between the  second and the third post, and will
function as a tremendous hyperlink in between the two.
To give you a breather, I’ll defer (with permission)
my third post which is also ready (titled ‘BIFURCATION
OF THE SIMPLE: GANDHI, MOTILAL AND THE PROBLEMS OF
INTEGRATIONSIM’) by a gap of atleast a few days.
	 The commentary I’m offering here--says many things
which have not been told  in the revised paper
reproduced below and thinks by jumping back and forth,
so I’ll request you to improvise a bit and take this
commentary seriously and link it with the formal
titled submission in its semi final draft reproduced
below with endnotes; last time the references were
missing. The finalization will borrow much from this
commentary too.

This revision is mostly based on informal comments
received on the draft since formal comments invited
from authors I admire - are still pending; and now 
that I would like them to read this draft rather than
the previous one, is enough fuel to disgust them
altogether which makes my hopes look really lean. And
while I say this, let me inform you   I’ve a lot to
talk and listen to my Fellow colleagues and their
pieces of research:  Sayan Deb Mukherjee’s corridors
and Foucauldian heterotopia, Mithun Bose’s mobile
folklore on urban transport, those Kolkata people
working on urban ponds, two student stipend winners
working on pornography and citizenship: I’m just
missing out on time to pack this up all  in a single
bag, what to say of other people ! I’ve no complaints,
since as some author, understanding the owes of
ordinary minds like us, had said, “I’m no Shakespeare
or Hegel, P. Lal or Arun Lal but I worked  hard as I
could on each of the things I wrote.” At times, this
has been, truly easy; at times exasperating—to both
others and me—myself. But the satisfaction of hard
work should linger on even if it is not complete. ( 
Because “full pleasure and complete satisfaction” (
and these adjectives are not reversible) can be
provided, it seems so, only by massage parlours
edifying our cities). But you see, we are still tucked
up, and quite dryly, at the level of the ‘message’.
Throughout this piece, I shall remain so.
                       Before going into some sort of
elaboration through conversation with texts as diverse
as Althusser’s book on Machiavelli to Suddhabrata
Sengupta’s ‘I/Me/Mine’..in the Signs Journal via
Lawrence Liang’s evocative piece on the SARAI list
‘Devastating Looks: Smirks, Quirks and Judicial
Authority ( 4 May’07)’, let me attempt a summary of
what I had said last time, and how it forecasts the
content to come, and what’s going to be my present
engagement.
             
 A SYNOPSIS of what I had said last time could be
offered now in three sentences :  1)An impersonal
public sphere, threatened by the deceptive nature of
the personal, was founded to ground political
modernity and  extended to  cover such remote
questions of personal charity which –some like Hegel
sought to replace by state related public assistance
or welfare. 2)This normalizing restraint was worked
upon even at the level of speech,  but through the
instance of personal attacks, the repressed narrative
of the personal seemed to recur at the cost of our
unease—a political pornography of sorts. 3) An
excavation informed us-----behind the masked ordeal of
innocent impersonality, there lurks  the obscene
narratives of manipulation, lying, backstabbing,
blackmailing, fraud, betrayal, malice by which persons
govern each other. But given the informal, impulsive
actuality of such events, all are not prone to making
personal attacks; a silent majority consume these
injuries and die without a whimper. 
  

 I’ll expand on this synopsis now but engage only with
the more disputed points. 
I started with  a will to know the real reason as to
why impersonality was called for or the personal was
sought to be driven out of the public sphere.  For the
moment I speculate there were two reasons of which
I’ve expanded only on one : the first  is the
anti-absolutist fear of the monarch who was sovereign
in person; and another was the fear of the 
incalculable and the irrational—the person steeped in
‘particularity’ and  armed with deception and 
fraud—one who can pursue self interest
monstrously—without a market measure. In this sense
Bataille was correct in stating that the ‘person’ is
feudal and pre-modern; capitalism is the order of
‘things’ and property is that which enjoins or
hyphenates persons and things. I’ll come back to this
point when I deal with the history of the personal in
my second next post. 

I had used David Owen’s commentary to make a good
summary but presently I’ve recovered Weber himself to
learn that 

“Objective discharge of business primarily means a
discharge of business  according to calculable rules 
and “without regard for persons.” Without regard for
persons”, however, is also the watchword of the market
and, in general, of all pursuits of naked economic
interests. 
Bureaucracy develops the more
perfectly
the more completely it succeeds in
eliminating from official business love, hatred,  and
all purely personal, irrational, and emotional
elements which escape calculation.”	

It follows that if we are able to prove that persons
don’t conform to the informal, calculable rules and
love, hatred, personal preference, and other
irrational, personal considerations abound in offices,
we move into our chosen domain. What we gather is, the
person and the personal is a threat that, in order to
be normalized, has to be bureaucratized. A bureaucrat,
to use Claude Lefort, in this sense is compelled
–apparently--not be an “egocrat”; the recipients of
his services are, presumably, better assured of a
just, impersonal and impartial distribution; they are
relieved too. Now, this same principle is shifted and
geared to higher levels    related to the public
sphere’s coming into being through discussion,.
opinion and will formation where a communicative,
cooperative, consensual apriori does not allow
discussion with a personal orientation. This is the
core-spirit of the modern public sphere. Instead of a
personal-issue based, personality oriented politics,
this view, true to its foundations, advocates an issue
based, principled politics. To pursue this, one has to
transcend the level of the personal to be integrated
to higher levels. But what could be shown, and I’ve
tried my best to make it explicit ( SECTION I BELOW),
this form of politics, is suited to self- interest
rather than large, universal, generalizable
interests—to which it pays a strong, very strong,
secular lip service; this could be also gotten from
the contractual civil law of such a state: liberty,
equality, property and already much has been written
about this. Now while you push this personal
orientation to politics, however feeble it may be, to
higher degrees we see nasty things springing up. What
is significant about this phenomenon is, throughout
and quite pervasively one notices that an ugly
narrative is erupting open to emerge free from the
reigns of this sobriety and calculation or from simply
a civil personal standpoint : this is  unmistakably
the personal but with a pornographic turn based on a
forgetting of the threshold with a form that defies
figurative and tropological deixis. All norms of
publicity and privacy are put to the winds; the
anatomy of all figural identifications are laid bare.
When Shuddhabrata Sengupta sets this example of a
‘hypothetical African Americam female janitor thinking
about the very real Condolezza Rice’ who mutters,  “
How come she looks like me and yields so much power
over my destiny that she can send my son to war in a
away that I thought only people who did not look like
me could do?” (1) ,   I think he could be thinking 
similar things about how  “familiar assumptions” about
the benefits of identification and how familiarity, if
taken for granted, might boomerang.  ( Now,
Pornography as the absence of tropes and figures and
how Machiavellism could set this on track, plz. see
the rewritten CONCLUSION part of my paper below. The
relevant section has been marked (****).
Similarly, our relational and other –even official
affinities—suddenly seem to have been tattooed, if we
look in this light,   by deception, betrayal, malice,
backstabbing, envy and other propaganda. And we find
it everywhere from our first orientation to the second
person to our last orientation to  third person plural
when we die or are killed. Examples are rife and
always happening:
--you are a very promising and perhaps more competent
significant young poet, you have criticized my poems
as not that good; I’ll see how you get published in
the upcoming anthology and I thereby ‘get in touch’
with the strings I know, and by pulling them well, I
ensure that you should be dropped from the collection
and you are dropped. What satisfaction! 
--You have submitted --an article with me for a
Bengali magazine or a newspaper-- which seems a better
piece than what I have written or what the readers
know I could write; if I can’t suppress it, I’ll
silently distort it in the name of editing and by the
time I finish, it will be one third of its original
glare. After all, ‘editing’ is my prerogative;  my
name is safe now, what pleasure! 
--You are  an aspiring actress and I’m a producer or
director whatever. In our firm  the invisible and
unsaid  conditions of acting are two: you’ll have to
act in a XXX  film ( don’t worry, it will be released
elsewhere) and prostitute yourself in order to raise
more funds for my films; we’ll pay you from that only.
 Not us, YOU’ll come and propose this or we dispose
you. There are others waiting to do “just anything”! 

What will you do? You decide what you do ! Consent is
holy and can cover up any sin!! Autonomy unlimited!!
There are no questions of ‘permissibility.’ Permission
is a category in deontological ethics! We know consent
and in what conditions it can be had and that’s all!  

It would not be perfect, or well tailored  to call
these violence; since not war, this is politics in the
times of peace and why this is worst than violence
will be told later ( and this is also not ‘structural
violence’  giving rise to ‘social suffering’). I’ve
called them in the paper below, for reasons expounded
there,  ‘pure politics.’ Now so far as pure politics
is concerned Lawrence Liang in his beautiful piece
‘Devastating Looks: Smirks, Quirks and Judicial
Authority’ ( 4 May, SARAI Reader List) has remarked
well with irony, not with reference to mypiece
--supposedly, saying that it has been the philosophers
delusion when they have claimed that they are treading
on unsullied, unadulterated virgin, “pure” grounds.
Now, perhaps I’m aware of the problems that this pure
in phenomenology has suffered in the hands of—say--
deconstructive criticism. But I’m trying not to, (and
if I have failed I may be forgiven,)  deploy ‘pure’ in
the sense of absolute inwardness, solitary, free etc.,
I’m using in the Piercian sense of brute facts ( and a
few more words will be laid down below). This apart--
you will find in Derrida himself, if I’m not wrong,  a
catalogue of concept-metaphors designated  as
un-deconstructible : hospitality, justice etc. Now it
will be Liang’s turn to answer, will it be quite a
sacrilege  if undeconstructible is referred to as
pure?
         However,   I did not make it explicit—though
I mentioned-- that only a phenomenology of the
political could make sense or go near as to what could
be  pure politics, and how one could begin talking
about it is well said by Pierce ( who remains unsung
in this context with Husserl, Schutz and Ricoeur
hogging all the light),

 “ A court may issue injunctions and judgments against
me and I not care a snap of my fingers for them. I may
think them idle vapour. But when I feel the sheriff’s
hand on my shoulder, I shall begin to have  a sense of
actuality. Actuality is Something brute. There is no
reason in it.” (2)  

Secondly,  what I meant by ‘experiencing the
political’ wasn’t  an ever increasing stock of
happenings and events in a particular cognition; it
would rather entail, if I am correct,  what I would
call a feeling of the political or a bit more
inexactly ‘political feeling.’ This feeling, again
drawing from Pierce,  is not subject to psychological
laws  and is not within the contours of  what people
call political psychology. An intimate touch in the
bus may be likened to a good feeling of fondness or
may be revolting or anything else: it is nearly
impossible to generalize this at the level of the
feeling. “It is a state ..a quality of immediate
consciousness.” To foster this sense I had written---
the experience of the ‘pure’ political can be narrated
or told but a narratology out of it, is, quite distant
and more often than not, an impossibility. Do the
readers  agree?
                
To resume: pure politics is politics in the times of
peace. Politics in the times of peace is garlanded by
fierce politicking ( in Bengali this is sometimes
weakly and not exactly called kalkathi narar or kathi
korar  rajniti) and it has destroyed more people than
all wars and pogroms added;  so in order to dispel
some aura around it,  I had  also proposed a negative
theory of  peace. This theory does not entail
debunking peace—the way Rousseau does it in the text
below (“There is peace in dungeons, but is that enough
to make dungeons desirable?”), rather it would lead,
the moment we find its liaison with the politics of
dirty hands, to a state of neither war nor peace.  But
this teleology apart, what could be such a formulation
of peace? I confess I would not be able to elaborate
upon this since I have just undertaken it; some stray
thoughts though --are in order: I think one of the
primary theories of peace may be traced back to
Aristotle --where peace is connected to leisure since
“leisure which comes with peace” and also peace is the
end of war and leisure is the end of toil.  Peace is a
kind of virtue that is derived from leisure. (3)  
Now the state of political pornography which I tried
to articulate as a collection of statements on the
politics of dirty hands, can be had, derivatively from
the above. Peace with its alliance with  leisure gives
truth also its power of metal and governance. Truth is
tied to leisure and comfort and such a liaison can
take un-assumable forms—even that of lying. When its
alliance is harangued or broken, it tends to become
obscene and thus pornographic.  In the main text I
talk about it but in a sweeping mode. Here let me do
some tinkering.”
what we need to see does not involve
any interior secret or the discovery of a more
nocturnal world.” (4)  Rather it feeds, parasitically
perhaps, on the fact-sheet spread before us like bones
under non-violent light. So long as this mission is
maintained, in order not to sacrifice one’s own
nature, even lying is comfortable, ( in Bengali there
goes a saying, ‘It is better not to speak than utter
‘opriyo satyi katha” [uncomfortable truths]; this
endorses the observation that what establishes truth
as truth is its strategic kinship with comfort than
any substantive essence). And as I tried to designate
pornography by saying, it is “giving names to persons
or things beyond a threshold” I meant just this.
Related to the (un)speakable experience of the
political: the scream after being backstabbed or
betrayed-- here we are dealing with its felicity
conditions: Irving Kristol who dubbed Machiavelli,
following his neighbours, a political pornographer
thinks the following why he is so and why he must be
decamped ( this is not in the paper):  

Kristol begins by comparing Machiavelli to De Sade—the
father of pornography and a ‘sergeant of sex’ ala
Foucault : 

“What in our own time is so shocking about de Sade? We
know that the kinds of sexual activities he describes
do exist and play an important role in men’s lives.
Lust, adultery, sodomy, pederasty, and all the various
sexual aberrations have always been with us
Yet in no
country of the world may de Sade’s books circulate
freely. Our society seems to believe that unrestricted
knowledge of these subjects constitute pornography. 

And for de Sade, there is no natural and prescriptive
moral framework in sex, just as there is none in
politics for Machiavelli” ( Irving Kristol,
‘Machiavelli and the Profanation of Politics’ in
Reflections of a Neo-Conservative, Allied Publishers:
New Delhi, Indn. Rp.1986, p126.)  

Now, why does Kristol think that this political
pornographic knowledge  should be debunked? This is
because it adds to our “knowledge of evil” and
“corrupts” or “depraves our imagination”. But he has a
serious a more promising argument :

“ For if one allows that knowledge in and of itself
may be the supreme value, one must go on to say that
the knowledge of evil is as valuable as the knowledge
of good, from which it flows that a man  who is
engaged in adding to our knowledge of evil is as
virtuous as a man engaged in adding to our knowledge
of good—in short, that the difference between evil and
good is at most a matter of habitual terminology. This
is, precisely, nihilism” (Kristol, Ibid., p.127)
“ nothing that Machiavelli said  
was really novel to
his readers. They knew—everyone had always known—that
politics is a dirty business; that a ruler may better
secure his power by  slaughtering innocents, breaking
his solemn oaths, betraying his friends, than by not
doing so
Where Machiavelli was original was first, in
brazenly announcing these truths.” (Kristol, Ibid.,
p.127).

The only change I would suggest in regard to above is,
—that Machiavelli is a political pornographer—ought
not to be taken pejoratively anymore. But to grasp him
sensitively on our own grounds a further change should
be implemented.  Given my argument -- this phenomenon
of “the dirty business” of politics has to be
stretched to all departments of existence and not only
limited to the affairs of the State as Machiavelli and
 Kristol does, atleast that is the only way to reckon
with  Bengali novels where the middleclass bhadralok, 
will inevitably  scream atleast for once, “sala sab
jaigay politics” [damn it, everywhere there is
politics]). The problem of this extension I deal with
in the paper’s conclusion.


Now, an informal reader ( who did not want to be
named) asked this very difficult question: I’m quoting
her, “ If you are saying that  lying, deception,
betrayal, backstabbing—these are a  sorts of political
techniques, I’m wondering 
for instance whether they
are at all political or not!  Is lying or deception
innately political? Or there are conditions when lying
or deception become political?” I can hazard a guess
now and if you say I’m a bit correct I would expand on
this later. I don’t think lying or deceiving  are
innately political categories, I think they are
phenomenological ones and in this sense they are
pre-political (perhaps for this reason Althusser
credits and connects  Machiavelli with ‘primitive
political accumulation’): They provide the conditions
by which the experience of the political becomes
possible. And because they are a sort of apriori and
are, in this sense, pure, they cannot themselves be
subjected to the contingency of facts. A proof of
this? We know what lying is but still we are cheated
everyday. And Machiavelli is obscene when, as you’ll
find in the paper, he wants to regulate facts as
value-ideals to be adopted to be successful; he is
best when he says there are no fixed rules and he does
say so (5) . And Kant is bang on the point when he
discusses malice in this regard,: “Men prone to this
vice will seek, for instance, to make mischief between
husband and wife, or between friends, and then enjoy
the misery they have produced. 
 The defence against 
such mischief makers is upright conduct. Not by words
but  by our lives we should confute them.” ( 6)  The
undeconstructible, pure nature of this experience—does
it become explicit by now? If it has, I intend to
close up for now by following up once again how this
whole discussion is relevant to my subject: personal
as beyond private and public and personalist social
work and how this could be related to divergent but
related discussion on the same subject. Firstly,
Politics in the times of peace! --This is far from
defining politics as “the way to organize and optimize
the technological seizure of beings at the level of
the nation.” ( 7)  It is rather the technological
seizure of beings at the level of the  person. ( See
Sec. III below for more on this) We may begin or end
with this vision. But as we had begun :  personal was
required to be expelled from the public sphere for its
incalculable, irrational emotional deceptive
signification. There are several ways, which have been
tested throughout, to normalize this consequence:
Aristotle expounds virtues for the political speakers
and the moment we understand that these virtues can be
feigned ( some of his commentators do note that), we
are into the scandal proposed by Nietzsche and
Machiavelli. This deception at the level of the person
forms a cornerstone of my humble work. Infact it could
be archivally shown, by recovering documents, that the
argument for organized charity or welfare from Hegel
to those eager to institute the Welfare State, were
panicked by the deceptive, incidental nature of 
personal charity with its eternal arbitrariness and
contingency. Even Rammohan, before he becomes a
reformer,  would mediate for sometime on deception. 
I’ve whole long chapters to devote to all this.  But
as a preface, is my ground ready? And if it is, then
where  this discussion might lead to, falling in more
worthy hands, could be well pointed out by the help of
Althusser, who was, it seems to me, stumped by
Machiavelli and wrote this beautifully:  

“ ..we can say: there are not two ways of governing
men—by laws” [ I’ll say—by consent] “and by force—but
three—by laws, force and fraud. But as soon as this
statement has been  made, we realize that fraud is not
a mode of government like the others; it is  not on
the same level. Laws exist—let us say as human
institutions, recognized rules and opinions; force
exists—let us say as the army. In contrast, however,
fraud possesses no objective existence: it does not
exist.  If fraud is a way of governing, given that it
has no objective existence, it can be employed only
when it is based on laws or force. Fraud, then, is not
a third form of government;  it is government to the
second degree, a manner of governing the other two
forms of government: force and laws. When it utilizes
the army, fraud is stratagem; when it utilizes law, it
is political guile. Fraud thus opens up a space,
beyond force and laws, for diverting their existence—a
space in which force and laws are substituted for,
feigned, deformed, and circumvented. Mastery of fraud
in the Prince” [and all of us] “is the distance that
allows him” [ and us] “to play at will on the
existence of force and  laws, to exploit and, in the
strongest sense of the word, feign them.” ( 8) 

And my beginner’s argument in the paper below as to
how the person-al overflows the public and the private
and can play with them  by fraud, deception and
treachery, I believe, now comes full circle. Perhaps
I’m correct but only perhaps

           


______________________________________________________
  

>From Political pornography to Pure Politics  : Notes 
on the Personal Transformation of the Public sphere


`Arnab Chatterjee


YOUR TEARS ARE NOT POLITICAL, THEY ARE REAL
WATER—ADRIENNE RICH

ABSTRACT : Previously I’ve  charted the personal as an
unstable, dangerously indeterminate compared to
private or public which are legal-juridical categories
and have stable indicators. Personal—I’ve argued is a
phenomenological category. Here is an instance where a
demonstrative proof of this takes place. We know that
personal contamination in modernity  is to be expelled
from the public sphere; why? Is it to stabilize 
behavioral expectations ? How does this take place? Is
it at all successful? If  not why? This contamination
reaches its summit in what has been called personal
attacks. The central question in this context is,  are
personal attacks always  attacks upon a person’s
privacy? If not then there are grounds to suspect that
the personal and the private meet and argue at the
site which is also  the agency of a person. Secondly,
the dangerously indeterminate and unpredictable
calculus of a person which plays upon the private and
the public through deception, treachery, lies and back
stabbing also shows how the person and the personal
emerges radically free from the stabilizing
constraints of behavioral expectations that emerge out
of  the generalizing  potentials of public or private
law: we’ve arrived at the person and his political
phenomenology—the way we experience the political
:I’ll use a simpler shorthand here—pure politics to be
designated and explored by personal attacks or
political pornography. How does it implicate the
private and the public --now trembling before the
personal to generate a conclusion? This chapter  to
engage with some of these questions.


	 

I.
 
Personal in politics : from the point of view of
disciplinary political science

The best description of modernity in terms of politics
is available in Max Weber through the paradigmatic
ruse of "political activity under Protestantism"( 9) 
With tradition, charisma and affective forms of
patrimonial monarchies ( Sultanism for example)
receding to the background, what emerged is--to borrow
Owen's brilliant capsule,  

“the impersonal rationalisation  of the social
organisation [providing] an impetus towards the
regulation of all public spheres of life on the basis
of formal legal norms" [or "legal rationalism on the
basis of a contractarian conception of natural law"],
and secondly, "the maximisation of the utility of
worldly resources [requiring]  the facilitation of
rational activity in all the life-spheres which
entails a conception of the state  as providing the
conditions  of activity but not interfering in this
activity" [ or "liberalism"] (Owen, p.117). 

The maintenance of this regime is ensured by a strict
separation of the public and private spheres where
personal is understood as partial and an offspring of
specific, accidental subjectivity of a person. The
formulation that it has in Weber is something like
this,

“Objective discharge of business primarily means a
discharge of business  according to calculable rules 
and “without regard for persons.” Without regard for
persons”, however, is also the watchword of the market
and, in general, of all pursuits of naked economic
interests. 
Bureaucracy develops the more
perfectly
the more completely it succeeds in
eliminating from official business love, hatred,  and
all purely personal , irrational, and emotional
elements which escape calculation. This is appraised
as its special virtue by capitalism.” ( 10)	 	

But this operation cannot be limited or short
circuited to just the response required by a
“complicated and specialized modern culture (975)”
since as Weber himself charts, it could be traced to
that of Roman  Law and late middle ages. Contractarian
Natural law evolved into rational natural law and this
rational law was “conceptually systematized on the
basis of  statues” (975). Pursuing this line of
argument,  the first signs of the modern
bureaucratized  impersonality were evident, according
to Weber, in legal administration. We shall get back
to this later and elsewhere. 

     Now, shifting the burden of this tangle  to the
domain of current discussion, we see how the public
and the public sphere comes to be invested with this
impersonality. The point is, “the regulation of all
public spheres of life on the basis of formal 
norms”—is it successful? In order to examine this we
can limit ourselves to exploring politics as the
sanctioned activity of the public sphere. Here it is
urged –what to say of political rational action,
politics even at the  level of persuasion or political
rhetoric is encouraged to become --in this discourse
--ostensibly--shorn of all personal benefits and
burden, personal mention and personal attacks through
our advocacy of principled politics. A few more words
are in order. 
By stating the political  we  stand to approach the
question of the personal through the disciplinary
deployment  of  the former. ( 11)  To go on with this
I first examine the  personally oriented politics as
against an impersonal issue based, principled politics
followed by that very famous register –and  that which
is  absolutely relevant and rehearsed in eternal
negativity -- is the notion of personal attacks 
condemned in the wake of an impersonal, objective,
issue based politics ( the question of civility added
to it) which  could be found to have been neatly
tailored to ground the public or public sphere in
terms of public reason and so on. And the temptation 
is understandable in as much as politics in modernity
with its concomitant notion of rights, public opinion
and  rational will formation  imagines to purge the
public, in order to refine it only,  of all personal
investments. Here we have apparently the classical
Weberian paradigm to guide us; ( 12)  further and
later it was Habermas who refined these arguments at
the level of language by rooting this metaphor in a
form of systematically undistorted communicative
practice. It is with Habermas that we have the
normative turn given to  political modernity or in the
words of Luhmann what Habermas did was to show that
all rational considerations may be shown to have had a
normative content. In later chapters I shall show that
the undertaking to institute modernity in the colonies
exhibit much against their intentions the
personal-particular core in  the public-universal
garb. The present exercise will preface this moment in
a significant manner.
            

1.1 Personality based politics vs. Principled
politics: a historic-theoretic view 

         Before we start to address principled
politics, let us try to inquire what do we mean by
‘principles’. A strong and interesting formulation is
found in Kant where principles are outlined as ‘the
subjective formal condition of judgement in
general’(13)  meaning “the laws by which judgement
judges itself” and which “ become principles through
which it” [i.e. judgement] “discriminates between the
conflicting claims of history.” ( 14)  To reckon with
this legal metaphor is to consent to Kant seeking 
“the discovery of a principle through an analysis of
the tradition of judgements and the constitution of a
system of judgements from a principle” (15 )  In
short, if we adopt Kant for the moment, a principle is
that which enables us to judge a judgment and by which
the judgment judges itself.
Taking cue from this, it may wisely be argued that a
principled politics is that kind of politics which
denies to compromise or undermine its founding
principles which is evidently not  compatible with the
culture of reaching  compromises—thus is absolutely
not in harmony with what we call democracy. It may 
further be  argued that an issue based principled
politics would be that which considers political wants
according to universalizable or widely shared ultimate
considerations which - in turn, would cater to public
interest rather than  private interests. (  16)  This
would require making large assumptions rather than
local or individual ones which in some sense is
comical  because  moral principles in contrast  to
ethical ones emerge not from individual standpoints
and are urged to be universalized. Ethical standpoints
suit them to particular life projects but are also 
susceptible to pragmatic questions. The classic
discussion opposed to  this speaks about something
called mediate political principles which are open and
subject to personal adoption and rejection, i.e. they
have the capacity of becoming my principles or your
principles.  (However,  principle based politics  in a
capitalist political culture is but expected to serve
in reality privately oriented wants rather than
publicly oriented wants— not withstanding the fact
that  the private individuals are still within the
formation of  the public. ) But consider this final
argument which says that it would not be unjust to ask
somebody his political principles. Because

“ To ask of someone, ‘‘What are his political
principles?” is not to ask for the irreducible,
ultimate considerations that weigh with him; but to
ask for indications of the line he would take on any
of a great number of possible issues. A difference in
political principles between two people will normally
be open to further argument since each will  be
willing to justify his political principles in terms
of more general considerations. In particular, a
difference in political principles may stem from
differing estimates of the effects  that policies (
nationalization, neutrality) or elements in states of
affairs ( inflation, independence of trade unions)
would have.” (  17)    

Therefore  as a starter it may be judged that
principles can be adopted personally and politically
can be productive when asked or examined. Therefore
the  binary that charts principled politics vs.
person-al-ity based politics as unprincipled one is
rendered empty. And even from within the realm of our
political culture, Gandhi, believing in the force of
the personal example would choose to go without
principles. (18)  This –which will be examined in
another chapter-- does not undermine but transcends
principled politics in unforeseen ways. 

1.2 Issues as states of affairs: a performative  view.
 
Having clarified so called ‘principle based politics’,
we may now legitimately ask, what are issues? “Issues
can be understood as states of affairs  where persons
are not used as means.” (19)  Where persons are a
means to promote states of affairs, it can be observed
that “promoting one  state of affairs for the sake of
another, where the second state of affairs is a
special one, it importantly involves the person in
some way and  the value of a person intrinsically
involves states of affairs”.(20)   But the
performativity of this construct would not be as
simple as this. It has also to be examined why
particular issues have been more useful in personality
based representative politics than others. No person
can be fully informed and no one can fully inform as
well, we lack an absolute informant and therefore s/he
would lack the ideal authoritative and normative force
of the hypothetical orator who internalizes issues and
draws neutrality from the depths of within. This begs
the question: would  s/he be neutral towards issues
also? What would it mean to be personally oriented
towards issues or impersonally oriented? To be
impersonally oriented towards issues would be to step
back from the point of view we occupy as persons and
critically reflect upon them (“ reflect on lives and
our selves”). But “our attempts to design vantage
points outside of us spring from our distinctive
capacity as persons for self-reflection and from a
desire to move beyond the limitations that come with
occupying a particular point of view.”(21)  In this
sense it could equally be argued that  the impersonal
is perhaps the second personal of the first person.
And with such a self distancing self interest is best
pursued. Briefly put, remember that the philosophy of
language  debates  on sense and reference raised the
question: do  I refer to myself when I sign? Likewise,
is it possible for me to go against  myself? “We can
neither be laid low by our own cutting remarks about
ourselves nor be buoyed by the thought that at least
we care for ourselves.”(22)  Darwall makes the point
that one can  adopt an impersonal concern to promote
one’s own self interest.  Self interest maximization
is not possible when one is so passionately engaged
with one’s own self without a distance that it 
results  in the  standpoint being consumed. Therefore
the easy dichotomy that posits issues as impersonal
concern of the agent and vouches for objectivity as
neutrality rarely stands rigorous examination. 

        					 II.

2.1 Political rhetoric and the personal : The 
‘personal’ virus and the health of dialogue in
politics.

While inspecting the personal in the discourses of
politics, we have addressed ourselves to  a personal
orientation to politics as against principled politics
or issue based, impersonal politics where issues are
understood as states of affairs. Subsequent to the
completion of examining the  objection which
prioritizes a principled, “issue based politics” over
personal issues and personal attack based politics, we
must reckon with the fact that it  also invokes and 
locates the personal at the level of rhetoric and
states--  political rhetoric unless healthy and
respects the other participant, violates the rules of
debate and deliberation. It entails  albeit implicitly
that democracy being a procedure to peacefully and
procedurally disagree, personal attacks imply more
than disagreement: by trying to impeach the
credibility of a democratic witness, it denigrates
democracy itself, because what is democracy if not its
culture! Let us see whether this argument stands the
test of scrutiny. Also note we are entering,
discretely though, the slippery terrain of  personal
attacks and politics.
                                                      
                                   
2.2 Disagreement ( democracy) and the question of
culture.
                             
The question could be rephrased thus:   -- in a
democracy  which intends to be— “ deliberative” in
nature i.e. wants to see the major issues that have
consequences for the public settled by free and
rational deliberation of all concerned, could
political invectives at all be  productive?  Let us
try in brief to examine the theoretical problems
involved. The claim is of course made firstly (and
perhaps lastly) from the stand point of  civility. 
And a certain reference to the norms of deliberation
in a ripening, “developing” democracy is often made
too. But is it possible to sustain such a claim? For
this it will suffice to review the position espoused
by Gary Shiffman (23)  where he forcefully argues and
with much justification that consensus seeking and
civility in constitutional debate cannot be obtained
at the same time. He concludes  that 

“Would be-arbiters of  public deliberation like Rawls,
who simultaneously insist on consensus seeking and
civility in constitutional debate, cannot have it both
ways. They can-—and should—endorse a norm of consensus
to govern constitutional deliberation, but must also
not insist that such deliberations be conducted
according to norms of civility. Serious public debate
of constitutional questions necessarily runs the risk
of rhetorical vehemence, of mutual castigation by
adversaries. Demanding pursuit of consensus while
hewing to civil comportment amounts to insisting on
two incompatible norms at once, consensus and
dissensus.”(24)  

And now perhaps we are convinced about the legitimacy
of the  formulation for nation states with colonial
histories-- that civility is the stuff of modernity;
disagreement is the stuff of democracy. Given the
hiatus and the bastardization of apposite growth of
these two entities historically noticeable in
postcolonial societies like India, they  are not
compatible in a foundational sense. Therefore for an
Indian case the argument for the difference between
modernity and democracy is made at another remove.
Here both modernity and democracy are imputed unlike
the west European cases. ( Or is it possible to read
so much against the grain that democracy can be shown
to have been imputed even in the classical modular
formations?) However, all along, the colonizing logic
or ruse of colonial governance was to bring the native
to some kind of deliberative and decisive competence
for self ownership. Here therefore the deliberative
competence that is often asked for  is seen with some
justifiable and historically evolved suspicion. This
is not unfounded. The communicative competence to
insert civility into political questions would have to
undergo perhaps for always a hermeneutics of
suspicion. This historically correct caveat would
precede any requirement for an  impersonal civility to
be instituted through  impersonation and smuggled to
the domain of  democracy.
	That is again enough to give debates particularly
among political executives in the Indian democracy on
constitutional questions a specific and undecidable
turn eternally subject to the contingencies of local
party politics and the decisive imagination of
professional  politicians; same applies for complaints
against misbehavior. Incivility can then feature only
as a political question and as a kind of original
contamination felt by constitutional questions.
Byaktigat or personal inscribed within the norms of
bhodrotabidhi or norms of civility is very differently
political here. And this difference can be
historically recovered  the moment we push the
question of personal attacks to higher degrees:
political pornography where the political and the
erotic or the uncivil interrupt each other at the
moment  when power erupts and corrupts even the
absolute. 

2.3 Personal attacks to Hate speech : the emergent
topos of  political pornography.
             

               There are three phases of ‘personal’
invectives or uncivil rhetoric  in the western
political history of humanity. One, the Greek sources
with Cicero or Diogenes pioneering the first and
Aristotle giving us the theory. Second, against the
church in the fifteenth and sixteenth century and the
third during the 18th century which interestingly
turned against the state. 

2.3.1 Invectives present in the corpus of assembly 
speeches delivered in classical Athens portrays the
master orator—Cicero in his Philipic speeches
asserting with fury the following words :

“Surely that is real moderation—to protest about
Anthony and refrain from abuse! For what was left of
Rome, Antony, owed its final annihilation to yourself.
In your home everything had a price
Laws you passed,
laws you caused to be put through your interests, had
never ever been formally proposed
.You were an augur,
yet you never took the auspices. You were a consul,
yet you blocked the legal right of other officials to
exercise the veto. Your armed escort was shocking. You
were a drink-sodden, sex ridden wreck. Never a day
passes in that ill –reputed house of yours without
orgies of the most repulsive kind. In spite of all
that, I restricted myself in my speech to solemn
complaints  concerning the state of our nation. I said
nothing personal about the man.”(25) 

It is perhaps no wonder that Cicero would thus settle
for a strategic catch phrase and would utter, “ Men
decide far more problems by hate, or love, or fear or
illusion, or some other inward emotion, than by
reality.”(26)  But an interesting point in this
context is, the ruling templates of the time, did
sanction Cicero’s venom, while, and this is what is 
historically interesting, what we call
modernity—devises in the wake of public opinion, also 
being tied to an impersonal rational public sphere—an
ethics of deliberation for the first time. 

         Aristotle—if taken in entirety—would be
difficultly poised  to intervene in this debate since
he both approves and disapproves the Ciceroian gesture
in the same breath.

Firstly let us consider the way he would censor
Cicero: For children being susceptible to imitation or
the art of acquiring “a taint of meanness from what
they” [first] “hear and see”, the “ legislator”
Aristotle urges,  “should be more careful to drive
away indecency of speech; for the light utterance of
shameful words leads soon to shameful actions.”(27)  
But not only this, he goes so far as to promulgate a 
sort of  indecent representation Act of ours: “ And
since we do not allow improper language, clearly we
should also banish pictures or speeches from the stage
which are indecent.” (28)  
The second moment  --the way Aristotle would endorse
Cicero is reflected in as much he reserves  a category
for “ speeches of eulogy and attack.” (29)  

“All eulogy is based upon the noble deeds –real or
imaginary—that stand to the credit of those eulogized.
On the same principle, invectives are based on facts
of the opposite kind : the orator looks to see what
the base deeds—real or imaginary—stand to the
discredit of those he is attacking, such as the
treachery to the cause of Hellenic freedom
”
(Aristotle, p.1418).

Further, in absolute concurrence with Cicero,
Aristotle  urges the skilled speaker’s “power to stir
the emotions of his hearers”(1318). Cicero thereby was
then a representative who pushed this thought to
extremes. 
With this we  reach a certain benchmark of the first
phase of invectives—and the way to understand them.
But Cicero apart there was Diogenes.  Hegel while
wanting to address the cynics and talking about
Diogenes - remembered him for “his biting and often
clever hits, and bitter and sarcastic retorts” (484),
and  narrates to us an illustrative anecdote: 

“In Plato’s house he once walked on the beautiful
carpets with muddy feet, saying “ I tread on the pride
of Plato.” “Yes, but with another pride,” replied
Plato, as pointedly.” (30)   

But could Diogenes’s bitter retorts be taken as a
precedent for invectives in political modernity?
Hardly so; Diogenes’s cynicism was,  Hegel points out,
“more a mode of living than a philosophy” (484).  This
‘mode of living’ in Diogenes bore peculiar results :
He is said to have been gifted with the habit of
masturbating in public. When asked he is believed to
have said,  he was experimenting whether hunger could
be appeased in a similar manner—just by rubbing the
stomach.(31)       
  In this light, what is so distinctive about
Aristotle   and which  cannot be invoked in justifying
today’s deliberative democratic reasoning is that,
political deliberation in Aristotle is enframed within
an art of rhetoric as a form of skill or technique
giving directions to decisions and a particular way of
life. While it was to persuade the hearers about a
particular action ( like whether Athens should go to
war); today’s political deliberation begins with the
vow to settle disagreement. Aristotelian deliberation
is not a means eschewed to pursue political legitimacy
as in today’s governance. It is rather oriented to a
form of  practical rationality. And perhaps for this
reason he had a place for invectives and emotions
because they invoke separate kinds of proofs and
syllogisms. This supreme rhetorical necessity ( not
being a rational necessity) is unimaginable in 
political modernity. And therefore contemporary
attempts at trying to revive relevancy for Aristotle
or ancient Indian argumentators or Jayantabhatta  in
order to redefine a contemporary deliberative
(Habermasian or Rawlsian) project, seems to me,
absolutely misplaced.(32) 
       

2.3.2 Now coming to the medieval imagination of
invectives, the most famous legacy has been borne by
anti-clerical writers “ in the generation immediately
preceding the reformation”(33)  who were energized by
the writings of Luther. A historian studying this
lineage mentions,  “Much of the resulting literature
of invective and abuse had been produced by the most
learned humanists of the age, but they had  generally
written in  self-consciously demotic style, usually
publishing in the vernacular and often presenting
their arguments in the form of plays and satires in
verse” (27). The bulk of its abusive content is its
attack on the church who is “depicted as Mother Fool”
and who “spends her time plotting and machinating with
all the fools of the age” (28). This results in the,
expected, insistence “that all clerics are lecherous,
and that all money given by the pious laity for the
saying of masses is ‘spent among wanton lasses’ ”
(29). 
         The next turn is marked by invectives 
turning against the state itself.

2.3.3 In 18th century  we’ve to reckon with  the
hatching of a political pornography in a descriptive
sense---the theorization of which is derivatively
derived from porno-theorists ( Sometimes called low
life litterateurs of the French Revolution and 
excavated by  Low Literature Historians like Darnton.
(34)  and directed against the state. (Though
enlightenment hero’s like Diderot would—through
Memoirs of a Nun  still explore the sexual corruptions
of the church but that critique had become, by then,
clearly redundant.) 
These researches reveal that intense
personal-political attacks based on pornographic
‘scatological imagery’ in pamphlets performed a
historical and revolutionary role (35)    against
Marie Antoinette during the late eighteenth century;
while the Bourbon Kings--Louis XV was dubbed as
sexually promiscuous - libertine, pornographic
pictures of Louis XVI  were circulated among the
population showing him as impotent. These, according
to an author, went on to “discredit the monarchy as an
institution and to desacralize the King’s body...the
aristocracy, and clergy.”(36)  To instantiate the
emergence of political pornography in India, one such
essay by the anthropologist Lawrence Cohen titled
‘Holi in Banaras and the Mahaland of Modernity’.(37) 
could be considered in which Cohen documents an
interesting cartoon among numerous   others  showing a
man labeled as the sikhandin janata (meaning eunuch or
helpless people) having in his mouth the member  of a
man with a politician’s congress cap ( labeled as the 
‘gandu neta’) while being sodomised by a man standing
behind in police uniform (with the label  ‘jhandu
police’) The circulation of these thin booklets
particularly during the immensely popular holi
festival in Benaras exhibits its incorporation within
the ritual paradigm of festivity and the element of
obscenity, -that is well taken. But what is remarkable
about these are – the common motif of condemnation
(38)  where the victim is the member of the ordinary
public, and which overrides all party lines. The
assaultive speech debate is taken a step further by
this. Should usual feminist condemnations and
critiques  of pornography be applied on these? And
could they be successful? I have grave doubts. Well
then the way these have been received in  the
contemporary Indian case  is hereby available  by a
well known political commentator. A note on the
quotation below will  lay to rest many suspicions and
ambiguities relating to invectives or personalized
attacks lodged within the confines of particular
discourses.

“Foul language is the jargon of fascists who detest
free debate. ..True enough that sheer abuse or racial
or communal libel is not permissible. The true test is
whether the speech is a real provocation to violence.
The sensitivities of the listeners are relevant only
in this context. As the supreme court of India has
ruled, it is the duty of the state to uphold the
exercise of the right to free speech and to suppress
violence intended to stifle it.”(39) 

Now as a comment on the above, it is a sheer
miscarriage of observation which propels us near to
understanding the Fascist propaganda as sheer racial
libel provoking  the German public to undertake
anti-Semitic violence. One who studied this project in
some tenuous but reliable detail is Theodor Adorno who
starts with a very helpful, thumbnail observation: 

“ It is personalized propaganda, essentially
non-objective. The agitators spend a large part of
their time in speaking either about themselves or
their audiences. 
 they incessantly divulge real or
fictitious  intimacies about their lives and those of
their families. Moreover, they appear to take a warm
human interest in the small daily worries of their
listeners
   Another favorite scheme of
personalization is to dwell upon petty financial needs
and to beg for small amounts of money.” (40) 
 
Their identification with the audience being complete,
they pretend as being mere means  or “messengers’’ of
the person or the Messiah to come (“substitution of a
collective ego for paternal imagery” [219’] ) and thus
limit themselves to elaborating on the means of the
movement as the immediate task and avoid explicating
its positive ends or a concrete future. With this “
propaganda itself becomes the ultimate content
 a kind
of wish fulfillment” (220). 

“This is one of its most important patterns. People
are “let in,” they are supposedly getting the inside
dope, taken into confidence, treated as the elite who
deserves to know the lurid mysteries hidden from the
outsiders. Lust for snooping is both encouraged and
satisfied. Scandal stories, mostly fictitious,
particularly of sexual excesses and atrocities are
constantly told; the indignation of filth and cruelty
is but a very thin, purposely transparent
rationalization of the pleasure these stories convey
to the listener” (220).

Supposedly for Adorno the fascists thus aim the
irrational and can successfully impart their “mental
defects’’  to the listeners but this they do not do by
sheer abuse but by a crafted method of persuasion(41) 
( later I had shown in the wake of Cicero how this has
had its sources and justifications in Aristotle’s
Rhetoric.) It is irrational because -- as Adorno tells
us, it is non-argumentative, anti theoretical and not
based on a discursive logic of reasoning made to
convince people. What is its substance then ?
According to Adorno they are “oratorial exhibitions,
what might be called an organized flight of ideas.
(222-23)”. 

	But “discursive logic” instead of personalized
persuasion—is it enough? The liberal argument will
disagree. They would not be acceptable even if
discursive-- when  the circumstances in which they are
expressed are such as to constitute their expression a
positive instigation to some mischievous act or
violence ( and such a paraphernalia –as we’ve noticed
- has nothing to do with Fascism as such). This as we
could  see  – is totally in agreement with the
classical liberal formulation of John Stuart Mill--
who outlines a grave example.

“An opinion that corn-dealers are starvers of the
poor, or that private property is robbery, ought to be
unmolested when simply circulated through the Press,
but may justly incur punishment when delivered orally
to an excited mob, assembled before the house of a
corn-dealer”.(42)  

Only sheer propositional, issue based statements are
therefore  not enough, they should not be delivered
before a corn dealer’s house i.e. much will depend on
the mediation that will render it objective, harmless
without a bite.  An aesthetics of reception will
matter more than its production.
There we have the abusive or assaultive paradigm in
some other form  (excitable speech (43)  to use the
proper word). To answer the contemporary as well as
the classical tenet of non-violent speech advanced
here as permissible, we could  take recourse to
another thinker when he was commenting on the
impossibility of deriving the right to kill the
vanquished from the state of war; there he concedes
that 

“Men living in their primitive conditions of
independence have no intercourse regular enough to
constitute either a state of peace or a state of war;
and men are not naturally enemies. It is conflicts
over things, not quarrels between (men)(44)  which
constitute war, and the state of war cannot arise from
mere personal relations, but from property
relations”.(45)  

An extension of this Rousseauistic finding will lay to
rest any theory formulating violence as aberration or
disturbance as ‘injury by design’, since the state of
peace can similarly be construed as imputed from the
outside, or having been imposed  - resembling an
aberration.(46)  From this we could argue that, in the
wake of “personal attacks” being understood as a
generic speech figure and  articulated as disturber of
peace (47) , it urges us to look at the varieties of
peace available in the political market. What happens
in the times of peace?

        With violence the stakes are clear but with
peace—we enter into something more than violence
producing speech. How truce or peace could be
politically deployed or be subsumed under the
political rubric,  is offered in the next Section for
examination.
					

III.

Politics in the times of peace : “personal attacks”
(48)  as itemized within a pure political imaginary  
             
            Politics in the times of peace! This is
far from defining politics as “the way to organize and
optimize the technological seizure of beings at the
level of the nation.” (49)  It is rather the
technological seizure of beings at the level of the 
person—the stuff of what some folks in the west have
thinly called “the politics of dirty hands” and what
we shall call “pure politics” made up of deception,
betrayal, treachery, malice, lying and such others.
And an impossibility of refusal to accept these—say an
affirmative denial—juridically or what ever, projects
a recluse only in personal attacks which might end up
even in a murder. Given a chance  such perpetrators(s)
would  confess in these words,

“ I’ll lie when I must, and I have contempt for no
one. I wasn’t the one who invented lying. 
We shall
not abolish lying by refusing to tell lies, but by
using every means at hand
.”; 
[or ]
“For years you will have to cheat, trick and maneuver;
we’ll go from compromise to compromise” (50) . 

3.1 Lying is dirty mouth, though trying to deal with
every means at hand. But what is the phenomenon of 
dirty Hands itself?. 

This designation “dirty hands” might have been a
product of a meditative listening to Sartre wherefrom
this excerpt would be informative.
        
‘ “Hoederer:  How afraid you are to soil your hands!
All right stay pure! What good will it do?
To do
nothing, to remain motionless, arms at your sides,
wearing kid gloves. Well, I have dirty hands. Right up
to the elbows. I’ve plunged them in filth and blood.
But what do you hope? Do you think you can govern
innocently?
Hugo: You’ll see some day that I’m not afraid of
blood.
Hoederer: Really ! Red gloves, that’s elegant. It’s
the rest that scares you. 
” (51)  
       
Now, is it possible to make sense of the politics of
dirty hands in a phenomenological manner? This is
necessary because we’ve been listening to the politics
of dirty hands as far as the manifestation of certain
effects are concerned. But what form does it take to
an experiencing consciousness? I’ll answer that the
form is dictated by an empirical absolutism and as
hinted at before,  I shall call it pure politics.

3.2 While the legal juridical discourse and the
bureaucratic-administrative apparatus do administer
various  applied notions of the person, public or
private, the political deployments of such categories
–that  too with the cultural unconscious in action
–would be fluid, strategic and success oriented—  is
perhaps expected. The question of distant, objective,
impersonal reflection on value-neutral questions and
disagreement in both politics and culture are always
already delivered to be governed by  practical
political imperatives—- whether it entails  instances
of political deliberation or cultural expectancy. (And
normative deliberation can be practiced only when it
is freed from empirico-practical and
practical-political considerations.)
                   Now, to subject everything to the
practical and eternally immediate as well as deferred
exigencies of  ‘dirty’ politics, we approach what I’ll
call the appearance of a  pure political imaginary of
the person whose comportment is towards other persons;
as evident  this cannot be restricted to the mere
“publicalization” of private problems and in this
sense I differ harshly from the feminist and other
understandings of the political.  ( I use pure in the
sense where an object’s  form and content cannot be
distinguished and imaginary in its now established
usage as “not a set of ideas; rather
what enables,,
through making sense of, the practices of a society”
(52) . Contextually, a political scientist commenting
on violence and its relation to Sadat Hasan Manto
notes, 

“Manto’s uniqueness lies in the fact that he refused
to accept the parameters of either ethics or economy
in talking about the violence of 1947. He had no
recourse to a morality that was given to him either by
god or by transcendental reason. Nor would he allow 
himself to be seduced by the economic calculations of
governmental violence. For him, the violence of
partition called for a response that was, if I may put
it this way, an act of pure politics, where morality
and economy had to be created all at once, all by
oneself, de novo, from the bare elements of human
interaction.”(53) 

 This I think is a Machiavellian moment and we’ve
talked considerably about it.(54)  The moment has
approached all politics—slowly but decisively and now
it only awaits a fair chance.  And  to address this
question of the Machiavellian ‘pure’ (55)  moment
where the content of the experience and the experience
cannot be distinguished, we need a political
phenomenology—the way we experience the political(56)
. To exemplify such a phenomenology, to capture this
moment and illustrate what is pure politics, here is 
an example; better said, here is a narrative and a
figuration. I quote parts of  a news report which
appeared in The Statesman on 4 Feb. 2000.
“Bhubaneshwar, Feb.3.- 

“Mr Navin Patnaik today expelled BJD political affairs
committee chairman, Mr Bijoy Mohapatra from the party.
He also snatched Mr Mohapatra’s  Assembly nomination
and gave the ticket to a local journalist instead. Mr
Mohapatra was left too stunned to react. All he could
say was he had been back stabbed. BJD leaders and
workers were outraged. Mr Patnaik’s completely
unexpected move was described state wide as
“treacherous”. 
The move that removed the ground from
under Mr Mohapatra’s feet was obviously planned
meticulously and timed brilliantly by Mr Patnaik. The
rebel leader with whom Mr Patnaik  had ostensibly
signed a truce, was sacked and debarred from the polls
at the eleventh hour
.too late for Mr Mohapatra  to
file papers as an Independent, and the outwitted 
rebel had no choice but to watch helplessly... No one
could read the BJD chief’s mind. Mr Mohapatra had been
the party’s key negotiator during the tortuous seat
sharing talks with the BJP. He had had a major role in
selecting candidates for various seats. Even Congress
and BJP circles who consider Mr Mohapatra as the lone
political leader of mettle and strategist in the BJP,
were taken aback”. 

With all italics mine, what kind of political science,
political sociology would explain this enchantment?
All such disciplinary categories as civil society,
political society, family and the State just vanish
into thin air before this. Because we all have had
such moments in our lives but rarely have felt that
those narratives would be included in  political
science textbooks. Those losses were ours and they
will remain ours, those secrets will die with us—each
separately-- lest mentioning them would amount to
“personally attacking”  some  very “nice” people. ‘Too
stunned to react’ is an adequate description because
reaction could  be a meditation on a prior act. Here
is an action without a reaction. In the disciplinary
study of politics and criminal offence stabbing being
a metonymy of murder  and violence has often been
mentioned or studied; where do we get to know what is
‘back stabbing’? The third phrase  in italics is 
‘timed brilliantly.’ What does this mean? Is this
football or cricket? It is more dangerous than both.
Punctuality is to go  according to other’s time.
Passive timing. Timing in politics is the dominative
monitoring of others according to one’s own time where
he himself is the frame of reference. Active timing.
I’m waiting for the right moment to teach you a
lesson, I know it, you  don’t, I’m waiting for you to 
enter my duration. Here time is a trap and emerging as
a “means of orientation”(57)   is destructive of
other’s time: the space in which the victim thrived
and swam along his moments. So I ‘ostensibly sign.. a
truce’, give him a show of importance to mislead him
and then ‘remove  the ground from under’ his ‘feet’.
Notice the word truce: a signifier of peace and how it
has been deployed. When we were dealing with speech
generating violence, this is the point we wanted to
argue: let us look at the varieties of peace and how
they are being used for what purposes. Truce used to
back stab? -Here is the moment. 
                                Where do we end then?
What is the use of studying this phenomenon called
personal attacks? ( Someday with the liberal noose
tightening around our necks,  we may be able to invent
separate names for them.)We shall be stunned when we
are cheated, betrayed, fired, suppressed, deprived,
raped or  murdered. ( and be ‘too stunned to react’)
Those are the moments when we shall feel the hand of
politics on our back, but nothing will save us, no
category; they will be moments of pure experience. The
politics of dirty hands will cleanse everything,
remaining residually and strictly alive on the
borderlines of our everyday being. We might feel
exploited but that will remain only as a moral
feeling, because the apparatus required to structure
the feeling has been  slowly but evenly
de-contextualised:  the state socialist project was 
criticized as being one of the most ruthless regime of
techno-scientific, objective, impersonal, 
instrumental rationality where human beings without a
personal touch were simply lost in loveless ness. The
grand narrative of only liberal capitalism ought to be
 alive; the death of the  revolutionary grand
narrative thereby has  been conveniently announced:
fine! The theoretician of pure politics will argue,
with the death of grand narratives, let us start
talking about each other’s sexual lives then! No? Why?
Embarrassed? How? Because to pure politics - the
fragment or the micro-local is not a metaphor of
place; for him, the fragment is that what you resist
from being publicized, that what you want to repress
and hide. Then - abandoning grand  investigations  we
need to undertake studies of  the  micro politics of
dirty hands: office politics, the politics within a
feminist group, or  how does the cunning mediocre
rule? How do we read the narrative of manipulation
between two singer sisters in the film Saz? Why before
a one month ( extendable) contract, all laws of sexual
harassment fail? Why nobody in Bollywood talk about
the casting couch? “Power thus relies on an obscene
supplement – that is to say, the obscene nightly law
(superego) necessarily accompanies, as its shadowy
double, the ‘public law’. 
Obscene unwritten rules
sustain Power as long as they remain in the shadows;
the moment they are publicly recognized, the edifice
of Power is thrown into disarray.”(58)  Pure politics
deals with this obscene underside of public and
private law  and for this personal attacks are its
primary raw materials. We need to have then narratives
of manipulations, machinations, intrigues and
malice---more sinister, more ghostly than violence
causing speech or violence itself: here is Kant, “He
who openly declares himself an enemy can be relied
upon, but the treachery of secret malice, if it became
universal, would mean the end of all confidence. This
type of wickedness is more detestable than
violence;”(59)  
But history cannot stop simply by condemning; it has
to address events where an open declaration of enmity
is absent and such wickedness –so to say--runs riot.
Now, it appears as a lesson to be learnt and exists
only as a secured item in the inventory. A simple
guilty conscience hardly suffices and therefore what
is required is such a counter-declaration, 

“To sell oneself for thirty pieces of silver is an
honest transaction; but to sell oneself to one’s own
conscience is to abandon mankind. History is apriori 
amoral; it has no conscience. To want to conduct
history according to the maxims of the Sunday school 
means to leave everything as it is.” (60)  

We’ve returned to Machiavelli and the unspeakable
confessions or suggestions of wickedness it entails.
We are convinced about the personal nature of this
politics. But it might be argued as an objection that
in the absence of a private language, this genuinely
personal would not be, and quite truly, communicated.
But still this experience could be narrated. And that
is the stuff of pure politics. 

CONCLUSION

 
Let us have a quick recap before we conclude. We began
by examining the impersonal nature of the public
sphere in the wake of political modernity. At a
particular site i.e., politics at the level of
rhetoric we engaged with a   concrete counter
discourse which registered  complaints like-1)
personal attacks push out issue based, public interest
related impersonal discourse of ‘principled
governance’, development and administration. 2)
Byaktigat arowp pollutes  a democratic political and a
growing, albeit good civic culture. It was revealed
among other things that in a moribund capitalist
political culture the so called impersonal issues are
in the end used to serve grand private interests. And
philosophically it was shown that an impersonal or
critical self distance is best tailored to serve 
private self interests. Now in such a context where
the personal-particular subverts and transcends the
public-universal garb, it is often that personal
attacks try, with or without success to pierce this
silencing, civil veil and address  the illegitimate.
And for the second objection—in this context--  it was
easily concluded  that the notion of civility in India
today is a matter of political sphere and not at all
of civil society, therefore an advice of civility has
to be politically negotiated than received as
‘unmediated’ discourse on civic virtues. In short,
civility and violent disagreement could never go
together. How  peace and civility could be seen as
being complicitious with an “un”fairly ( I’m
remembering Rawls here) unjust system was also
examined in the wake of the phenomenon of agreement 
with approved ways of protest. While we do a lot of
lip service against violence, let us not forget to
examine peace too. Pure politics or politics of dirty
hands made up of betrayal, malice, fraud, deception
and treachery is politics in the times of peace: this
was Machiavelli with a modern turn. 
                        
                              Now,  If you’ve been
this far with me; what does it seem? Now please do not
be mistaken about the fact that I’m engaged in that
infantile tryst to justify the personal through
personal attacks. It would be similar to arguing like
Mandeville that private vices necessitate public
benefits and  exposure of such vices would reap public
benefits. To those aggressive practitioners of this
theory, this mutual castigation through personal
attacks is perhaps not wrong. Followed continuously,
this mutually focused political aggression turns
itself into a ritual and finds itself involved in
another unintended radical translation. Despite  their
private intentions, their public conduct becomes the
same ( in a Kantian sense) thus giving Mandelville’s
formula ‘Private vices: Public benefits’ more than an
agreeable twist (61) .  
Such an argument would rarely look insurmountable
today for various predictable reasons. A rational
choice theory would surmise that if private interests
are at stake equally—it may be so—that both will avoid
exposure beyond a threshold. Further, they can be
feigned, they can be staged and they might just be
deployed to override the propositional form of public
reasoning. They can be used as a convenient form of
silencing or listening.  My argument is not at all
this. I was just trying to show personal attacks did
reveal to me the overriding nature of the personal
over the public and the private. It helped me arrive
at the examination of the public nature of political
modernity itself. And the moment I ventured  into so
called ‘political pornography’, dangerous vistas
appeared. 
        
             How do we conclude then? The personal to
impersonal transit in modernity   proposed by Weber
undergoes an abortion  because of an illegitimate
marriage between Nietzsche and Machiavelli ? Or to put
more sharply, Weber destroyed by Nietzsche? Does the
text comment on the theory of modernity which harps
again and again on the private/public division wanting
to forget that a person and the personal  is capable
of playing with both? But Weber was not so naïve;  in
the wake of the scienticization of the public sphere,
he did see a withering away of the value- ideals with
rational scientific activity failing to fill the lack
of  what it has destroyed. What Nietzsche showed was
that these values, considered genealogically, could be
shown to have been inconsistent: altruism for
weakness, honeyed  words for wickedness etc.,
Machiavelli’s counter work  was to re-state these
facts as values: For instance this  was formulated by
Machiavelli way back in 1513, ‘Everyone sees what you
seem to be, few know what you really are and those few
do not dare take a stand against the general opinion.
The masses are always impressed by the superficial
appearance of things
”(62) . This was unnecessary
since we already live in the world of these facts.
People misunderstand Machiavelli by alleging that he
had documented anti-values wanting to regulate them as
‘virtues’; but this is mistaken; he was involved in an
impossible project where facts and values suffer a
reversal: he restated facts as values and scandalized
everybody. But this is unnecessary and excessive, in
brief—giving names to things and persons beyond the
(empirical) threshold and thus an act which is
pornographic. Irving Kristol sensed it quite well but 
touched the wrong place when he called him a political
pornographer. Kristol may have intended a discourse
---which while stating facts in this way avoids  a
figurative language that could have hid much of its
sting. In this sense also, the description is apt :
what is pornography if not the absence of figures or
figuration (****).  But this also, considered at a
higher level,  goes against the primary description of
the political as pertaining to the problem of identity
as founding fiction masquerading as  the essence of
the political. In recent attempts to isolate the
“poetic or figural ( figurative, even) essence of
politics” (63)  and therefore hit at the institutional
root of  western political thought, it would not be
too fanciful  to find its beginning in these
Machiavellian insights. Meaning when takes figure
becomes totalitarian truth or truth in itself is
totalitarian in as much as it “effaces
transcendence”(xxv); but the Machiavellian in his
affirmation to open up, always,  to the unstable play
and ploy  of figural identification in politics,
denies to settle at a particular site of
identification and therefore the recent interrogation
marked by questions like, “Is there something which
would allow the political to be thought outside of the
will to figure? Can the political be thought, finally,
in a way which does not stem from the will to realize
its essence as figure? ” (xxv.)  has to be
acknowledged as having been originally, though
differently, formulated by Machiavelli. (Machiavelli
having not had access to our modernity addressed
himself to the person of the sovereign— this should be
remembered well and all the time. The deeply debated
distinction between facticity and validity or between
facts and norms was not available to Machiavelli in
the contemporary sense. Nevertheless one finds even
Althusser in his book on Machiavelli rightly
celebrating him for reasons that are our own. )
       	Finally, back to Weber again. While he was
charting the disenchantment of the personal world of
informal communities in modernity, couldn’t he sense
this? He did but he offered no solution. Through the
structure of ‘probity’ the person in an act of
self-legislation has to choose or abandon value-ideals
within a particular life-sphere: henceforth, virtue or
sin nothing comes with a  guarantee any more—which 
means---the person will tell Aristotle to end
preaching his catalogue of virtues; s/he will tell
Machiavelli or De Sade not to display their  table of
brute “facts” to be adopted as a value-ideal too. No
general option can be regulated because and this is
what is interesting in Weber in as much  what he tried
to show was that modernity has entailed the
differentiation of life-spheres into irreconcilable
compartments : political, aesthetic, religious,
economic etc. Irreconcilable because as Weber and
Habermas have reminded us, they have emerged with
their own criteria of  validity. But there is a twist
here; Weber has an interesting item to add  : the
erotic. ( Habermas has a list too: Science, Morality
and Art but as far as I remember—the erotic is missing
and when he addresses Bataille ( in The Philosophical
Discourse
.)  he does not refer to the self criteria
of the erotic. Now this is interesting. The erotic is
then not reconcilable with the political.( Hannah
Arendt and Habermas would insist much against feminist
fury that  ‘take the private to the public’ for
redressal is finally meaningless in the face of their
own distinctive validity claims.) What happens then to
 political pornography, pure politics etc etc. of
which I’ve talked a lot?   

                                 I’ll end today just
by posing this question so that I can help bring my
own text to a crisis but as a resolution promise how
this will be dealt with in the future. Just dramatize
this energy of irreconcilability by recalling how one
Amit Kumar, or a Benoy Sarkar or a Malay Roy choudhury
embedded in the worlds of music, social science or
literature  would complain of politics again and again
happening to them? How is this possible? But while
such complaints can be made and even entertained, they
cannot be resolved within these life spheres—and that
is the reason why such people feel helpless; helpless
being challenged by the internal norms of validation 
of  these departments of existence. I’ll  present you
with a case study where such an irresolution reaches
an interesting impasse from where we can take off and
enter well into our main text.

It was Gandhi who made an experiment in reconciling
the private and the public at the level of the
personal ( and not what numerous cultural historians
or what Rudolph and Rudolph have been claiming that he
wanted to make the private and the public meet—since
by their own distinctive validity claims they would be
found  irreconcilable).  But while doing this we
should not be surprised to know why he excelled in the
politics of malice, back stabbing---and cunning
wickedness  with the more conclusive symptom of such
an  experiment being his engagement with the
boundaries of the erotic and the rude  confessions of
the flesh. So far as personal, pure politics and
political pornography is concerned—he is really an
“ALL in one”” instance.

    	And nothing could be better than to follow up
this chapter with, not Aristotole this time, but
Gandhi---his ‘enthymeme’ and ‘example’.



ENDNOTES

(1) Shuddhabrata Sengupta, ‘I/Me/Mine—Intersectional
Identities as negotiated Minefields’ in  Signs:
Journal of Women in Culture and Society 2006,
pp.629-639, 31 (3), p.637.
  (2) Charles Sanders Pierce, ‘The Principles of
Phenomenology’ in Philosophical Writings of Pierce,
pp.75—97, Justus Buchler (ed.),Dover Publications :
New York, 1955, pp.75-76. 
(3)Aristotle, Politics in The Basic Works of
Aristotle, pp.1114-1316, Ed Richard McKeon, The Modern
Library: New York,2001, Pp.1299-1300.
(4)Michel Foucault, ‘A preface to Transgression’, in
Essential Works, Vo.2, Aesthetics, Method and
Epistemology,   Penguin: Books: London,  2000, p.82
(5)Niccolo Machiavelli, The Prince, Trans. & ed. By
Robert M. Adams, W.W Norton & Company : N.Y, 1992,
p.29.
(6) Immanuel Kant, Lectures on Ethics, Transl. Louis
Infield, Harper and Row Inc. : N.Y , 1963, p. 219.
(7)Miguel de Beistegui, Heidegger & the Political,
Routledge: London, 1998,  p.71.
 (8) Louis Althusser, Machiavelli and Us, Transl.
Gregory Eliott, Verso : London, 1999
 (9) David Owen, Maturity And Modernity : Nietzsche,
Weber, Foucault and the ambivalence of reason,
Routledge: New York, p.118. 
( 10)Max Weber,.  (1968) 1978. Economy And Society :An
Outline of Interpretive Sociology. Vol.II. Eds.
Guenther Roth and Claus Wittich. University of
California Press: Berkeley, p.975.
  (11 )That is,  not by the sheer unpacking of the
strategic feminist slogan ‘personal is political’--
which I’ve pursued --as it was necessary, elsewhere.
Because if that is taken literally then even if I
launch personal attacks upon a woman and revoke
personal is political’—clearly would be disapproved.
What that means is, the feminists actually have a
normative notion of the political which is not
explicit in this coda. I’m trying to explore this
issue here by taking a reverse route:  personal
attacks would be condemned as non or wrong
political—how, why and when? In that it will have to
negotiate ( even agree) with the public-normative
nature of the public sphere. I begin by examining 
this issue  (Sec.I).

(12)I’ve already stated the Weberian position. A note
on my differences would be a reminder here. 
Apparently Max Weber did articulate in the wake of an
emergent disenchantment of the world a corresponding
journey from the personal bonding of informal
communities to formal, impersonal bureaucracy marked
by the anonymous transit of symbolic movement of the
‘file’ in the office.  But one thing, personal in
Weber is nearly commonsensical and provisional;
secondly, it is the impersonal which is at the center
of the Weberian project; thirdly,  he does not
distinguish it or relate it to private and
public—which are at the core of modernity as I try to
describe it; fourthly, his project does not, to my
mind,  include showing how personal becomes a pale
shadow of the private; fifthly and finally, allowed to
pursue further, my work will try to give prove Weber
in  reversed manner. In any case, irrespective of
these disagreements, no doubt the paradigm of 
impersonal bureaucracy is a good starting point for
all this and I neatly adhered to it.

(13) cited in Howard Caygill, Art of Judgement, Basil
Blackwell : U.K, 1989, p.351.

(14)Ibid.,p.2. How this evokes the riddle of pleasure
without solving it is an interesting part of Caygill’s
argument.
(15)Ibid.,p.285.
(16)In fact tradition would be sustained publicly in
order to be examined. Even Kant augurs with this
proposition also when he elsewhere argues that that is
moral which can be publicized.
(17)Brian Barry, Political Argument, Routledge & Kegan
Paul : London 1965, p.36
(18)For a brilliant argument on this see Akeel
Bilgrami, ‘Gandhi,the Philosopher’, Economic and
Political Weekly, 38 (39), Sept.27, 2003,
pp.4162-4163.Quoting Gandhi “When one chooses for
oneself, one sets an example to everyone”, Bilgrami
rightly argues that Gandhi does agree with the
tradition which says ‘When one chooses for oneself ,
chooses for everyone’, but Gandhi’s originality,
according to Bilgrami, lies in denying, that by
setting an example, one sets   a “ meaning that 

generates a principle and imperative for everyone.” 
Ibid.,p.4162.
(19)Nicholas L. Sturgeon, ‘Reasons and Values’,
Ethics, April 1996, 106 (3), p.517.
(20)Ibid. 517
 (21)Connie S Rosati, ‘Persons, perspectives, and Full
Information Accounts of the Good’, Ethics 105 (2) Jan.
1995
 (22)Stephen Darwall, Impartial Reason, Ithaca: 
Cornell University Press, 1983, p150
(23)Gary Shiffman, ‘Construing Disagreement: Consensus
and Invective in “ Constitutional” Debate’, Political
Theory, 30 (2), April 2002, pp.175-203.
(24)Ibid., P175.
(25)Cicero, ‘Attack on an enemy of Freedom (The second
Philippic Against Antony) in his Selected Works,
Transl. M. Grant, Penguin Books, 1981,
(26)Ibid., 
(27)Aristotle, Politics in The Basic Works of
Aristotle, pp.1114-1316, Ed Richard McKeon, The Modern
Library: New York,2001, p.1304.
(28)“ 
except in the temples of  those gods   at whose
festivals the law permits even ribaldry
” ; within the
realm of his permission, Aristotle tends to include
mature people also. Ibid., p.1304.
(29)Aristotle, Rhetorica in The Basic Works of
Aristotle, pp.1325-1451, Ed Richard McKeon, The Modern
Library: New York,2001, p.1409.
(30) G.W.F Hegel, Hegel’s Lectures on the History of
Philosophy,Vol.1, Transl: E.S. Haldane, Routledge &
Kegan Paul: London, (1892) 1955 (Rp.),  p.486.
(31)David Sacks, Encyclopedia of the Ancient Greek
World, Facts on File, Inc: N.Y, 1995, p.83.
(32)See for attempts of such kind, Bernard Yack,
‘Rhetoric and Public Reasoning: An Aristotelian
Understanding of Political Deliberation’,  Political
Theory, 34(4), August 2006, 417—438; Amartya Sen, The
Argumentative Indian Penguin: London, 2005 ; Arindam
Chaudhury gave a similar seminar at CSSSC, Calcutta
last year in which he invoked Jayantabhatta’s
argumentative virtues for modern democracy. Also in
this context I feel that if expressed in  Aristotelian
language-- today’s parliamentary deliberation which
has become a model of democratic deliberation in a
sense, is simply ‘ceremonial’; emptied of all content 
it has no precepts to offer to action.
(33)Quentin Skinner, The foundations of modern
political thought, Vol . Two: The Age of Reformation,
Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, (1978) 1992
(Rp.), p.27.
(34)See esp. Robert Darnton, The Forbidden Best-
Sellers of Pre- revolutionary France, N.Y: Norton,
1995.
(35)But how such radicalism could  degenerate into 
underground commercial pornography as well, see Iain
McCalman, Radical Underworld, Prophets,
revolutionaries, and Pornographers in
London,1795-1840, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1993.
(36)Mary L. BellHouse, ‘Erotic “Remedy” Prints and the
fall of the aristocracy in eighteenth century France’,
Political Theory, Vol. 25, No.5, Oct.1997, p681 
(37)Lawrence Cohen, ‘ Holi in Banaras and the Mahaland
of Modernity’, Gay and Lesbian Quarterly, Vol.2 1995.
Nearly all issues like communal peace etc. and all 
the national leaders have been picturesquely’
‘addressed’ in  these books.  I’m grateful to Prof.
Pradip Bose for suggesting and providing me with this
reference.
 (38)In West Bengal’s institutional politics how such
gossips through condemnations and affirmations become
sanctioned instruments of mobilization and
manipulation and how the image of the leader or
parties are created, the village agendas are set 
within the informal and personal realms of gossip, see
Arild Engelsen Ruud, Poetics of Village Politics: The
Making of West Bengal’s Rural Communism, Oxford
University Press :New Delhi, 2003, pp198-200.
(39)A.G.Noorani,  ‘Free Speech and Provocation’, in
Economic and Political Weekly, October 9,  1999,
34(41), p. 2898.
(40)Theodor Adorno, ‘Anti-Semitism and Fascist
Propaganda’ in The Stars Down to Earth and other
essays on the irrational in culture. pp.218-231, Ed.
Stephen Crook, Routledge classics, Routledge :
London,2002, p.219.
(41) “The relation between premises and inferences is
replaced by a linking up of ideas resting on mere
similarity, often through association by employing the
same characteristic word in two propositions which are
logically quite unrelated. This method not only evades
the control mechanisms of rational examination, but
also makes it psychologically easier for the listener
to “follow.” He has no exacting thinking to do, but
can give himself up passively to a stream of words in
which he swims” (Ibid., p. 223).
(42)John Stuart Mill, ‘On Liberty’ in Utilitarianism,
Liberty and Representative Government , JM Dent and
Sons Ltd. N.Y. (1910) Rp 1936, P114
(43) See Judith Butler, Excitable speech, A politics
of the Performative,Routledge, New York, 1997  for an
interesting exposition.
(44)Wars  over (wo)men –when pointed out, will be, 
according to such an argument –are possible when they
are considered as things.
(45)Jean Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract,,
Transl: Maurice Cranston, Penguin, 1984(Rp) pp. 55-56
(46)A state of curfew for instance. Curfew is an
instance of violent peace.
(47)Rousseau has more things to say on peace: “What do
people gain if their very conditions of Civil
tranquility is one of their hardships? There is peace
in dungeons, but is that enough to make dungeons
desirable?  Rousseau, Ibid. p. 54
(48)Throughout I’ve taken “personal attacks” as they
have been projected ( within quotation marks) without
distinguishing it from assaultive speech, libel,
abuse, insinuation, invective and insult in terms of
rhetoric and oratory; excluded also are the  notions
of self and individuality—which get modified in regard
to persons and the personal. I address  them
elsewhere. 
(49)Miguel de Beistegui, Heidegger & the Political,
Routledge: London, 1998,  p.71.
(50)The problem of Choice in Philip Green and Michael
Walzer (eds.) The Political Imagination in Literature,
pp.206-219, The Free Press : New York, 1969 p. 210,
208.
(51)Jean Paul Sartre, from Dirty Hands, in Philip
Green and Michael Walzer (eds.) The Political
Imagination in Literature, pp.206-219, The Free Press
: New York, 1969 210.
(52)Charles Taylor, ‘Modern Social Imaginaries’,
Public Culture, 14 (1), 2002, p.91.
(53)Partha Chatterjee, ‘Democracy and the violence of
the State: A political negotiation of death’, paper
circulated for   CSSS cultural studies workshop at
Bharatpur Rajasthan,1999.
(54)And  Machiavellism with all its moral pessimism
and secular empiricism  “ can be applied with the same
force not only to the work of Kautilya but to the
entire range of Hindu economic, legal and political
literature”. Benoy Kumar Sarkar, The Positive
Background of Hindu Sociology, Introduction to Hindu
Positivism, Motilal Banarasidas: Delhi, 1985(Rp.),
p.640.
(55)“Pure violence ‘shows’ itself precisely in the
fact that it never appears as such”. For instance,
lying or deception in order to be successful resembles
a truth structure. This is the figurative essence of
politics as I understand it and agree that  they have
the force to foreground identities. But I do not use
it in the sense that it is the condition of every
performative act ( like saying ‘all truths are
fictions’ or falsity is the phantasmatic base on which
truth, indispensably, operates) entailing an
unmediated immediacy or “pure mediacy” so much so that
“that would mean, then, the death of the subject
because the duality subject/object would have been
entirely eliminated.” Ernesto Laclau and Lilian Zac ‘
Minding the Gap: The Subject of Politics’ in Ernesto
Laclau (ed.) The Making of Political Identities,
pp.11-39,  Verso: London,1994,  p.26, p. 27. In this
sense I retain the Kantian use of ‘malice’ as
something more than violence ( and therefore different
from violence as such) and I use the rubric ‘politics’
to refer to all of these.
(56)  Lester Embree and Kevin Thompson, eds.
Phenomenology of the Political,Boston : Kluwer
Academic Publishers, 2000,  
(57)I borrow this phrase and use it to my purpose from
Norbert Elias, ‘Time and Timing’ in On Civilization,
Power and Knowledge: Selected Writings, Ed  S.Mennell
J.Goudsblom, The university of Chicago Press :
Chicago, 1998, pp.253-259.
(58)Slavoj Zizek, The Plague of Fantasies, Verso :
London, 1997, p.73
(59)Immanuel Kant, Lectures on Ethics,Transl. Louis
Infield, Harper and Row,1963, p. 215
(60)  Arthur Koestler, (excerpted from  Darkness at
Noon , in Philip Green and Michael Walzer (eds.) The
Political Imagination in Literature, pp.192-205, The
Free Press : New York, 1969, p.199.
(61)Luxury, expenditure and corruption of convenience
-- according to Mandelville result in industriousness.
In nearly an anarcho-capitalist discourse, Mandevile
argues how vice produces civilization and makes
society necessary for the physically deficient;
secondly, vice in the sense of moral defect (greed,
lust, luxury and envy) makes production and  social
co-operation desirable. M.M Goldsmith, Private Vices,
Public Benefits:  Bernard Mandeville’s Political
Thought (Cambridge University Press: Cambridge,1985),
pp 40-41. Goldsmith also argues that  this view
attacked the existing ideology  of early 18th century
Great Britain.
(62)Niccolo Machiavelli, The Prince, Trans. & ed. By
Robert M. Adams, W.W Norton & Company : N.Y, 1992,
p.49.
(63) ‘Editor’s Introduction: Political; Ficta’  in
Retreating the Political by Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe
and Jean -Luc Nancy, (Ed.) Simon Parks, xiv-xxviii, 
Routledge: London 1997, p. xxi.
______________________________________________________
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS:  Parts of this text  were used   in
“‘Personal Attacks”, Assaultive Speech and Indian
Politics: Towards a pure political imaginary’” paper
read   at the Participatory Democracy conference at
Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi  organized by
the Centre for studies in Social Systems, JNU on 22
Feb, 04. and  ‘From consent to permission: Towards a
post -conventional moral semiotics of assaultive
intimacy’ –paper read at ‘Reorienting  Orientalism’
seminar at Jadavpur University, Kolkata, on 14 August,
2004. 












           			
 




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