Dharmic-ethics: The Ethical Sociality of the Self in Postmodernism and Post-colonialism

Introduction

The motivation of my dissertation steins from a serious consideration of the failure of responsibility in Europe that has occupied some of the most prominent thinkers of this century. Where does one search in one's effort to (re)gain an ethical vindication for all action in life in the aftermath of countless wars whose damage on the human psyche as well as on ecology has been unparalleled in human history? My search is premised on synthesizing a comprehensive ethical perspective by engaging the vision of a fivethousand year old philosophical tradition, the Indian Darshna, in which Death does not exist at both the ontological and conceptual levels. As a

consequence, the framework of dharmic-elbics that I highlight enables an ethical understanding of human action that does not essentialize the Other. I initiate a dialogue between the Western ontology of the Self/Other and the Indian ontology of the ethical sodality of the Self. The dharmic-ethical framework gives the lie to the Western category of the "singularity" of an individual: singularity as a function of death, as an essential aspect of the otherness of the other's death. It is my view that the very philosophical foundation enabling singularity needs to be re-examined in any discussion of ethical responsibility as the twentieth-century draws to a close.

In my first chapter, I take up the question of Dftarmic-ethics vis vis some current investigations carried out by Western thinkers into the notion

of ethics and responsibility. I consider Jacques Demda's recent inquiry into personal versus absolute responsibility in The Gift of Death. The title of his book is itself indicative of a certain measure of incommensurability between thinking responsibility and ethics through death and thinking and, more

precisely, living dharmic-ethics. Derrida's recent work has been curiously occupied with coming to terms with an orisnary moment for ethics and responsibility. Derrida's intellectual preoccupation with responsibility signals both a fatigue with and response to the perennial detractors of his deconstructive philosophy, detractors whom Demda presents as accusing him with the following plaint "Ce que vous elites n'est pas vrai puisque vous questionnez la verity aliens, vous etes un sceptique, un relativiste, un niluliste, vous n'stes pas un philosophe serieux!" (17-18). The trajectory on

which I launch my discussion of Dhannic-ethics, which starts with Derrida, traces a path through the crucial biblical event of Isaac's sacrifice by Abraham. It is against this "originaryt'event that I set up the yapa performed by A q u a at the behest of Krishna, a y p a whose dharmic-ethical scope is the subject of

the Bhagvada Gita. The Bhagvada Gita serves as my primary philosophical text. This text,

which crystallizes the essence of Indian philosophy, is a chapter in the great Indian epic, the Mahabharafa. As an indicator of the quality and nature of

dharmic-ethics, of darshana and dharma, it is notable that the most important texts convey their revelation in poetic form. The Gita, as representative of Indian darshana/dharm (philosophy/religion), gives the lie to Emmanuel

Levinas's distrust of all tropic language as unethical. Levinas's philosophy of ethics is pointedly concerned with the experience of "Auschwitz," yet conceptualizes the "birth" of ethics only to couch it in the violence of a

confrontation. In opposition to Levinasian ethics, I consider the dynamics of

a maternal ethics as discussed by Cynthia Willett in Maternal Ethics and Slave Moralities. Willett proposes the reconceptualization of the ethical moment in the maternal caress as music and dance; while she does gesture in the

direction of dharmic-ethics, she remains within the confines of a Self/Other dialectic which arrests her thinking. Her work does, however, help me clarify the nature of dharmic-ethics as also the ethical sodality of the Self. Next, I consider the philosophical project of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari in Anti-Oedipus which, in my view, is an instance of thinking's becomingIndian. I conclude my first chapter with an invocation of Friedrich Nietzsche

and Mahatma Gandhi, as I share their concern for the technological "progress" in recent history.

In the second chapter, I elaborate the contours of a dhamic-ethics against some of the primary concerns in the academic fields of postmodernism and post-colonialism. A major thrust in my dissertation, entitled Dharmic-Etfa'cs: the Ethical Sociality of the Self in Post-colonialism and Postmodernism, is to read and apply dhamic-ethics in twentieth century postcolonial and post-modem literatures. The often-times dazzling theoretical sophistication of critical discourse in both fields seems again and again to elide the significance of ethical motivation in human action. I ask the following questions of literary criticism as it functions in American academia at the end of the nullenium: What is the relationship between literature and dfcarm ic-ethics? What is the rela tionship between literature, criticism, and

dftarmic-ethics? What is the value of focusing on dharmic-ethics in literary criticism? What are the dharmic-ethical motivations of the text at hand? What is lost in current debates that ignore the issue of d h i c - e t h i c s at the expense of post-structuralist language discourse? And, finally, what is the nature of the dftarmic-ethical investment of a critic vis-a-vis his or her

criticism? 1 explore these questions in the context of two prominent fields of

discourse in late twentieth century academia: post-mode-m coloni&m-

and post-

At a pMamphid level, 1 attempt to synthesize a

compr&emive ethical perspective through the injection of dhamic-ethics into the domain of literary &ticism. To focus my argument, 1 investigate the nafure of the academic divide ktweert post-modedm and postcolonidism. Both disciplines acquire their theoretical tools horn poststructuralist thought, yet both are considered as distinct and separate fields of

inquiry. In my d h a r m i c e ~ c dconsideration of these two fields and their theories*I engage the ideas of F~edericJmesun, Homi Bhabha, &if Dirlik, Robert Young, and Gayatri Spivak among others. Having introduced some of thte parmeters and the necessity for a dharmic-ethical revaluation of action, be it social, political, economic, academic, or critical, 1 turn my attention to the dhamic-ethical dynamics within fow literary texts, namely, Drazdpadi, a short story by Mahasweta Devi, Waiting fur the Barba~ans,by J.M. Coetzee, me M Q ~Last S Sigh, by S a h a n Rushdie, and Grauityrs Rainbow, by Thomas Ppchan. 1 have chosen these texts for their prominent status in post-colonid m d post-modem studiesDragipadi is a powerful account of the abuse of power by the police authorities against the armed Naxalite insurgents in Eastern India. The story ends with a post-htenoga~onDopdi, rapedt tom and bleeding, who in her nakedness appears victorious, and strikes hcomprehaible fear into the unperturbable police chief, Senanayak. Spivak, who has translated the stoq, reads the moment through a feminist, decommc~vistfilter whose Eurocentrism blinds her m d binds her to the politics of blame: in this case, man and male patriarchy. In contrast, my interpretation of the same

moment, which 1 discuss as one of atman-yapa or self--sacrifice,a b w s for an

m d e r s t m b g of Dopdi's actions beyond the rhetoric of blame and deconstruction.

Torture and the ethical crisis it admits recur as primary concerns in the South African writer Coetzee's novelBWaitifig fur the Barbarians. The magistrate, as first-person narrator of the events, shows a sensitivity for semiotics h his quest for a reconciliation with and justification for the events that turn his tranquil outpost in the empire upsidedom. Against the p r e d o a m f l y d h c o w - h a t e d criticism that this novel has generated?1 propose that the actions in the novel lead to a specific and univocal message about the nature of dhumie-eWcs in the world. This allows me to get

beyond the discursive impasse of paradox and contradiction that defies my analysis based solely on the operations of discourse. My reading allows for an mderstmdhg and mativation for action in the very face of the fact that there is an essential and unknowable mystery in the novel. Coetzee's novel

mobilizes a stark universe in which the ma@stratets only recourse, dharmicethicai in naturef is depicted through the Gandhim concepts of a h i m s ~@onviolence) a d satyapaha (passive resistance). S a h m Rushdie nee&

no introduction. His latest novel? The Muurfs

Last Sighf provides a complex inte&glhg

of races and cultures d s -

crossed with a weave of multi-national capitalist concern which leaves its protagonist, also a first-person narratorr befbddleci for the most part* The novel begins at the end of Moraes Zogoibytsstory, whof while recounting a carhsing saga, searches for an ethical vindication of the events in his turbulent history. h tracing out the dharmic-ethical trajectory of Moraes' talef 1 suggest that this novel crysta.&es

Rushdie's creative geniusBnamely,

the competition between two ontological determinations of selfhood, of

being: the Indian ontology of the Self and the Western ontology of the

SeE/Other. In dosingt 1&cuss the inorhate attention given to painting in this novel, and engage Merleau-Ponv's aesthetics to put in relief Rushdie's

dkarm ic-ethical vision.

Gravity8sRainbowt Thomas Pynchon's much celebrated postmodern text, serves fittingly as the last novel in a scheme of increasing complexityD Arguing that death does not exist in the urtiverse presented by Gravity's

Rainbow, 1 discuss that the impersonality of the novel combined with its explosion of ego-bound desire give the novel a tndy dhgmic-eWca1

character. Two major cosmo~ogieswhich confiunt each other in the novel

are h e Western and that of the Herera tribe. It is deax that the novel is critical of Chistian hypocrisyt and pointedly attacks the related histories of

colonizafion; in spite of this, a characteristic stzertgth of the novel lies in its refusal to perform any s b ~ g h ~ o m binary a d flip-flop that ends up simply

va10rizhg the hitherto suppressed, catonizedt or marginalized. 1 discuss the novelts imbrication of ted-motogy and nature through a dharmicee~cal

perspective, arguing that there is nothing new or dim afoot in its universe. 1 read Gravity's b i n b o w as a y a g ~ ~ celebration ic of the ever unpresentable and

unknowable in the universe.

Chapter 1

No Other for Abraham, but Brahman As a first step in the direction of re-engziging ethics in the fields of post-

modemism and post-coio~&mf I will consider Jacques krrida's recent and enigmatic discussion in The Gift of Death. Uemda paintedIy organizes his analysis of responsibility, ethics and duty around the r ' ~ e o l o @ c o - p o ~ ~ c d l domain (pre)scribed by the religions of the Bmk, i.ef Judaismf C?uisti~ty,

and Idam. R h d a finds it appropriate to hyphenate the three into one entity? '~Judaeo~hi~timo-~sldc.~~ 'I'hough this unification reflects their belonwpess to the t'Bookf"it is inacmate insofar as it d o w s him to presume Islam within the fabric of Judaism md Christianity; after aIl, o d y the latter two are under his scrutiny. Isaac is notf for examplef Abraham's

*'odybeloved sunt' (68) if one takes into account the Ishail of the QoranThis presumption on Demda's part is significant in that it prefigures his later ex&apolatiom where he forces his Bookish view on all humanity, even for that portion of the world whose very ontologies are constituted properly other-wise. Given that Derridats trenchant dissection of the "failuretfof European responsibility is founded on the iteration of God as the absolute Other, as absolute alterity?and on the Selfs as well as the Other's irreplaceable

singularity, 1 find his enthusiasm as spokesperson-at-lage for all humanity dangerously misinformed and thus mcomcionable: Isaac's sacrifice conhues every day. Countless machines of death wage a war that has no front. There is no front between responsibitily and irresponsibility but only between different a p p r o p ~ a ~ o of n sthe same sacrifice, dgferent orders of responsibility~different other orders: the

religious and the ethical, the religious and ethico-politicalf the theo1cigicd and the political, the &eolo@cepoEticd,the theocratic and the eWcepofiticd, mci so an; the secret and the publicf the profane and the sacred, the specific and the generic, the human and the nono human. Sacrifiad war rages not only among the refigions of the Book and the races of Abrakimthat qressIy rder to the sacrifice of Isaacf Abraham, or brahimf but between them and the rest of the starving and even those worldf within the immense majority of hm-d living ...who don't belong to the people of Abraham or firahim, all those others to whom the names of Abraham and firahhn have never meant anything because such names don't conform or correspond to mything. (70; see a h 79)

Is Derrida's text here not just another instance of h e indwionary violence of Western logocentrisrn? If notf then how can one justify that in spite of recognizing the existence of non-conforming traditions and cultures Brrida conforms them-"the rest of the starving world-within a SeU/Other ontology? Perhaps k m d a has presaged my perplexed response when he says that, "I am sacrificing and betraying at every moment d my other obligations: my obligations to the other others whom 1 know or don't how, the billions of my fellows..my fellows who are dying of starvation or sicknesstt(69). And then again, perhaps notf for his disclaimer is not a sufficient response to my concern: that in at least one non-monoaeb~cand non-Book refison-fid&m-concepts

of respomib*~, duty, ethics,

sacrifice, and death are founded though a metaphysics and a cosmo~ogythat is irreconcilable with that of the Book The question of the moment becomes,

why continue to address the issues of duty and of respomibZv with a wilful1 blindness to any non-European conceptions of the same? One the one hand, Derrida admits that "modem civilization1'inasmuch as it is European "suffer[s] fiom ignorance of its history, from a failure to assume its resp~nsibiIity*~ (GD 4). 0x1the other hand, he displays a stubbornness, at least

an inflexibility, in his persistence not only to keep reading the European Book for a solutionf but also-and this is perp1exirtg-to make the book speak for the

condition of all the others, all those billions, starving and otherwise, all the world. If we are to speak for the universal concerns of all people on this planet, then why remain so firmly entrenched in the tradition of the Book whose human failure-a European failureis all too evident in the name of "Auschwitz?@' Can one, should one, must one not speak for all humanity other-wise? There is hope in Derrida's belief that Europe awaits a truer Christianity that is yet to be thought; my suggestion, which appears to be patently more practical, is to first consider the thought of a non-European tradition, Hinduism, with its ontology and cosmology in which no Other exists, in which death does not exist, and whose conception of dhamic-ethics

provides a philosophical tradition with a five thousand year history of what Judaeo-Christian Europe has opted not to think. As a preliminary address, as a brief suspension of suspense, and as a

suspended beginning, a few words about Death. The Bhagvada Gita, the

Hindu "Book" through which I will crystallize my understanding of the (ttarmic-ethics, unequivocally states that death does not exist. That which exists, exists; that which does not exist does not exist. There is no passage from that which does not exist to that which exists, and vice-versa: nasato

vidyizte bhavo / nabhavo uidyate satah... it is found that there is no coming to be of the non-existent; It is found that the not non-existent constitutes the

real...(a16,WBG 101). The importance of this conceptualization of the eternal nature of consciouness and of the transitory-transfornative nature of all bodies, of all manifestations of matter in the cosmos, cannot be overemphasized. For here begins an incommensurable difference from the

religions of the Book which threatens to nullify all discourses formulated around the preparation, the anticipation, and the "gift" of death. It is no accident that I begin with death and the lack of death, and with the eternal

consciousness; for Demda's discussion invokes the conscious self as much as it does death, the conscious self living in the face of death, that is, the conscious self living the ethical, the responsible life.1 For this text shows

more than any other a spiritual Derrida struggling with that one "essential interiority" which will not deconstruct: the conscious self. And in his attempt to binarize, perhaps, death occupies a similar slot as that which is equally unique and non-substitutable: "Death is very much that which nobody else can undergo or confront in my place. My irreplaceability is therefore conferred, delivered, "given," one can say, by death" (GD41). The conscious self and death, which one makes me me, which one makes me responsible? Derrida privileges death, and this one can say is the privilege accorded by the Book. But one can also privilege the conscious self, the

atman, and instead of limiting sacrifice to examples of dying-"dying for God, dying for the homeland, dying to save one's children or loved one" (42, italics

m i n e ) ~ n ecan conceive of y a p a as all work or human action (karma)

performed in the right spirit: "What ever thou doest, whatever thou eatest, whatever thou offerest, whatever thou givest, whatever austerities thou perfonnest, Son of Kunti; That do as an offering to Mef'(IX27, BG WBG 403)? It will be a propos to clarify karma, as it is a word that has worked its way into the popular media culture and has resultanfly had its signficance dispersed. Literally, karma means action. All karma, all action, is triple in its nature as it belongs in part to the past, to the present, and to the future. The

consequence of an action or karma is inseparable from the karma itself, Qhis is a good moment for me to introduce a tenninologicat clarification. The conscious self in Hinduism is denoted by the word i'afrnan" In common parlance, the Hindu a t m a n and the Western "soul" are often used interchangeably, and erroneously so. In the rest of this dissertation, the word 'self," when used in a Hindu context, refers to the a t m a n . at or a discussion of yagna sunatanam or the eternal sacrifice as the cause of the universe, see my introduction, pages 1-8.

"hence, all things are linked together indissolubly, woven and interwoven inseparably; nothing occurs which is not linked to the past and to the future" flbshi 109). At no point does this mean that one is "fated" by one's karma, nor that one is helpless because of accumulated karma. The analogy of a sailor on the seas is apt here: one can choose to be tossed by the waves and tides and be

transported in any direction whatsoever, or one may choose to be an active navigator in the same circumstances. Joshi emphasizes that "karma is not a finished thing awaiting us, but a constant becoming, in which the future is

not only shaped by the past but is being modified by the present" (116). Here, the analogy of an archer with an arrow already on its way makes for an apt

Instead of the gift of death, the gift of life and the atman, the conscious

self in its eternal aspect. What are the contours of such an ethics? What is to be gained from such a comparison, from such a comparative study? For one thing, debilitating relativism can be combatted by bringing an Eastern

philosophy to bear on a Western domain which has been saturated by the infinitely generative and self-reflexive discourses of language, power and knowledge, and which, in its saturation, has forgotten the essential mystery of life. It heartens one to see Demda broach this mystery as he grapples with the

gift of death; it does not surprise, on the other hand, that Derrida dares not to confront the conscious self. In the revision I propose, the atman, the conscious self, and the essential mystery of life are in the forefront-for death does not exist. Everything is at stake here, inasmuch as such a revision is 3 ~ h e r e are three kinds of arrows, each representing a different type of karma. Prarabdhan is the karma which already awaits and cannot be avoided. Only living through it will exhaust it. Sannchira Karma is the accumulated karma of the past, and determines the "character" of the agent. Varramdna karma is the one that is shaping the future ti venir; it is the arrow already on its way. At any moment, there is an arrow always already on its way.

necessary, for Derrida himself has underlined the importance of his project in no uncertain terms: The question of whether this discourse on the gift and on the gift of death is or is not a discourse on the sacrifice and on dying /or the other is something that we must now analyze. Especially since this investigation into the secret of responsibility is eminently historical and political. It concerns the very essence or future of European politics. (33, bold emphasis mine) At the end of the millenium, if we are concerned with the future of

Europe, we are equally concerned with the future of the world; and equally, if we are concerned, as Demda obviously is, with the so-called "failure of

responsibility" tainting Europe's past unto its present, we are also concerned with its historical impact throughout the globe-not least the history and legacy of Imperial colonization. Following the suggestion in Jan Patocka's

Heretical essays on the Philosophy of History, that "the Europe to come will

no longer be Greek, Greco-Roman, or even Roman [and hence will be truly "Christiari'r', Derrida wonders "what would be the secret of a Europe

emancipated from both Athens and Rome?" (GD52). W.B. Yeats wondered about this too and his vision in "The Second Coining" has intriguing echoes with this text: "...somewhere in the sands of the desert / A shape with lion body and the head of a man, / A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun, / Is

moving its slow thighs...And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, / Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?//" (1.13-22). The point being, of

course, that the Second Coming needs to be other than Judaeo-Christian, Yeats's poem, it would seem, prefigures Derrida's discussion of the failure of

responsibility ailing Europe?

*lt

is also significant, with regard to my discussion, that Yeatsts attempt in

Wheels to imagine a viable alternative cosmology, mystical and cyclical, has distinct similarities with Hindu philosophical thought.

In Demdafsenigmatic and slippery discussion where one is ofien hard put to differentiate his voice from Patocka's, and in which Abr&amPs story, which motivates the discussion of r ~ u d a e w ~ s t i ~ eethics, k ~ ~isc " Mated to indude Kerkegaard's musings in Fear m d Trmbting along with the '*sacredr'biblical textsf Demda undertakes a critique of the "disease of hespomibaw" of Western civilization. Demdars text launches itself from Patocka's hereticd essays about the Mure of responsibility in the Christian tradition and about the yet-to-come true Christianity, one which would begin to be reached once one began to think the nature of the Person who gazes

without being seen. Patodca argues that individud singularityfwhich in its exteriorkitable functions is used to represent cornmmal ethicsf hides the mystery contained in the interior of h e unique person. He is concerned with the ascendance of the being of quantifiable power at the cost of the

"authentict' unique personf one who hciions with an interiorized secret- It is the discourse of ethics as interiorized individual responsibility which has been found wanting i n the technological discourses of posmodedsm.

tkmda's reading of Abrahaxnlssacrifice enables him to discuss the "instantr*of ethics as *'inespomib~ation/that is, "as an insoluble and paradoxica1 contradiction between responsibility irz genera1 and absolzite responsibilityr'(61). Respomibiuv in general refers to the kind due to others

in one's community, whereas absolute responsibility is that due to God. The paradox lies in the fact that once entrusted by God with the task of s a d i c e , Abraham c a ~ odisclose t it, c o m h c a t e it to othersf he must keep it secretf one's even though ethics consists in answering for oneselff c o m m i c a ~ g intentions before the others. Paradoxically then, the unique hdividua1 who interiorizes responsibility towards God in secret becomes irresponsible in the

realm of public ethics. By Gadf Derricia finally understands an essential

interiority which is the principle structui.~gJ u d a e ~ M t i m e k l d c

Gad is the name of the possibility I have of keeping a secret that is visible from the interior but not &om the exterior. Once such a strucfue of conscience exists...once 1 have within me, t h n k to the in~sibleword as suchr a witness that others c a ~ osee, t and who is therefore at the same time other than me and mure intimate with me than myse5 once I have a secret relationship with myself and not tell everything, once there is secrecy and secret witnessing in me, then what I call God exists...God is in me, he is the absolute "meFr or Frse1f"...(108-9; bald emphasis mine) It is intezesting to note that in limiting himself exclusively to the religions of the Book, Judaism, Christianityrand Islamf and in daposhg the ailment of a European culture that is yet to think through to its "true1'Christianity, Derrida patently ends up strangely adjacent to precepts of the polytheistic

religion of Hinduism. Adjacent but also always parallelr for here the history of God which is the history of secrecy, remains the story of the indiuidzial's "desire and power to render absolutely invisible and to constitute within oneself a witness to that invisibility" (109). The lfindividual''according to Derrida: the unique person with his or her own absolute singularity. With a view to reading responsible md ethical action in the twentieth century texts and in the act of reading itself, it becomes necessary here to introduce, against the Judaeeektim-hl&c

histoire being recounted by

Derrida, some of the definitive precepts of Hinduism. And as Derrida frames his discussion with the story of the Sacrifice of Isaac by Abrham, 1 will kame

my discussion with the story of Arjuna's impending sacrifice in the Mahabharata, which is the occasion and also the instant of the discawse of the Bhapada Gita, the Song Celestial, by Kihhna revealed to Arjua. The moment that the Gita records is that which takes place before the climactic war, the Mahabharata?is engaged. Two armies face each other across

the battlefield K u r ~ k s h e t r aa~ d kjuna, the King of the Pandava m y f has a crisis faced with the task of massacre that awaits him and given the fact that

the "enemy" is none other than his kith and kin, the Kauravas who are also his cousinsf Arjma cannot justify his impending action- The system of ethics

and responsibility that has guided his Iife until this point fails to sanction his engagement in the ixmnhent war. He drops his weapons and tells K k i s h , who has agreed to be A.rjuna's charioter for the war,that he wiU not fight

0 Madhwuciana, when teachers, fathers, sons, gran&aihersf m a t e d uncles, fathers-in-Iaw, grandsons, brothers-in-law and other relatives are ready to give up their lives and properties and are standing before me, why should 1 wish to kill them, even though they might otherwise kcill me? 0 maintainer of all living entities, I am not prepared to fight with them even in exchange for the three worlds, let done this eaxth. (I.32-35;PBG 61)h response to this incapacity and confusionf Krishna the god-hcmate provides Arjuna with a series of dharmic-darshanic reasons for engaging the battlef for Idling all his kith and kin. h what is arguab1y a q s m a t i o n of the h d m e n t d precepts of Hinduism, W h n a discourses on the necessifies

of adhering to an absolute ethics beyond the r e a h of worldly ethics and according to whichf all human action must be performed as a yaps or

sacrifice to the etemd Self residing within the comcious seIf of all beings in the universe.

h Hindu terns, specifically in the revelation of the Bhapadu Gituf it is the mutable egoistic self-the atman laden with ukamkara (I-rnahg)--wK&,

through a series of y u p i c actions, begins to witness the secret of the immutable Self, Pztr~sha.Parusha begins to be revealed and realized only through y a p i c sacrifices which need to be performed without desire, whether it be material, sexual, or spiritual. An important stage in the realization of the Pzvusha is the howledge that the atman or self in others is an identical

atmm, one governed by the t h e e p n a s or qualities. Properly speaking, the other is never really Other: "With the self [ a ~ ~ mpresent z] in all beings, And a l l beings present in the selfgthe self of him who is disciplined by Yoga sees

the same (sew at a l l times" (W.29, WBG 300)-5 The impact ofthis formulation is far-reaching for it contradicts the privilege given to Mterity and Otherness which forms the unquestioned base for most of Western

philosophy. As we shall see, the justification for ethical action is premised neither on the existence of God as absolute Other, nor on the inter-face of self with the other, that is, the encounter with the absolute Mterity of the Other.

For the sake of simpIificationf it can be said that the system of dhamic-ethics

and responsibility as it is delineated in the Gita applies if there is but uric conscious self anywhere in the universe or on the pimetg for its justifkation is not founded on the Other, but on Purgsha and Prakriti. It can be said that Arjuna performs a y a p , the ultimate sacrifice on the battiefield of the Kumkshetra. The Gitiz is the doctrine justifying that

y a p a r that karma or action which is violence and slaughter of warf and which must be offered up by hjuna. Three aspects must be set up here as

they are in fundamental opposition to the sacrifice of Isaac by Abraham. First? Abraham's action is a call for faith, a faith which remains b h d as it is substantiated neither by revelation nor by hawledge. Abraham is never told why he must sacrifice his son Isaac, the sacrifice is commanded of Abraham

in the following words: "God did tempt Abrahamgand said unto himt 5 ~ h ebracketed (self) in this quotation results from the difficulty of translating the Sanskrit word Samada rsana. Sargeant directs us to Ramanuja's explanation for this term: "A persan who has brought his atmaa [soul] into Yoga, will see similarity in all mmurzs when separated from Prukriti (material nature); he will see that all beings are in his own iztmarz; in other words he wifl see that his own amaR has the same form as the atmaas of all other beings and contrariwise, so that he has seen all that is arman when he has seen one arman'' (WBG 300n.)

Abraham: and he said, behold0here 1 am. h d he said Take now thy sonp thine only son lkaac, whom thou lovest, and get thee into the land of Moriah;

and oEer him there for a bumt offering upon one of the mountains which 1 will tell thee of' (KJV 21-2). This absolute cornand leads to the secrecy and titus to the paradox, "the aporia of r e ~ o m i b (61) ~ ~that " Demda discusses as being imperative to maintaining the absolute singularity of the ethical

person- At the momat of divine htewentionOthe "instant" at which Abraham has dl but committed the act, it is notable that not God (as Demda has mistakenly written on page 71) but the "angelof the Lard communicates: '*Andthe angel of the LORD called unto him out of heaven and said,

Abraham, Abraham: and he said Here atn I. And he said, lay not thine hand upon the lad, neither do thou any thing unto him for now I know that thou fearest God, seeing thou has not witheld thy son, thine only son, from metr (Gen.2211-12).6 At this moment0God is vindicated as the fearsome Other

who gazes irt judgment from the distance- In contrast, w u n a receives hawledge, gpm,from W h n a the Divine teacher and auatar. The concept of Avatarhood as exemplified by fiishna demonstrates yet again that Gad is

not a fearsome, inscrutable and inaccessible entity: ''Mtlwugh 1 am birthless

and my self imperishable, dhough I am h e lord of all beings0Yet, by 6 ~ h eambiguity of the term "angel of the Lordst is significant in terms of deciphering the meaning of this originary (for Derrida, at least) moment. Though the teem "angel of the Lord" is an epithet for God in the Jahwehite Writer's tradition, it is usually used to indicate a degree of remove from God. This remove is motivated by respect for and fear of the powerful nature of God. However, the rest of the text indicates quite clearly that God is "calling" to Abraham at this moment, and not appearing to him- This seems to suggest that the epithet angel is quite unnecessary as the remove is semantically signaled as it is. Of course, due to the nature of the Bible and its combination of the four Writerly traditions, it is impossible to go back to the source; our only recourse is to conjecture why "angel of the Lord" was used at that moment by the Jahwehite Writer--assuming all the time that it is indeed himithem, and not the Priestly writer's whimsy at hand. For an excellent discussion in this regard see Victor P. Hamilton's The 800k of Genesis, William B. Eerdmans Publishing Ca, Grand Rapids, MI, 1990, especially pp. 1-75.

controlling m y own material nature, I come into being by my own supernatural power" (TV.6, WBG 206). The theme of divine descent for humanity's sake is not unfamiliar to the Judaeo-Christian tradition; there is, however, a peculiarly Hindu possibility of achieving avatarhood by human

ascent, by realizing the Purusha in the atman, the Self in self, through a movement obnadbhmam agatah. Ignoring this double aspect of Avatarhood is to miss the purport of the Gitafs teaching, and Aurobindo is adamant about

this: "Other wise the Avatar idea would be only a dogma, a popular superstition, or an imaginative or mystic deification of historical or legendary supermen" (EG 140). k j u n a is not tested for his faith nor for his fear of God,

but is taught, directly by the Avatar, to recognize and love the principle of Brahman as firusha or Self in his atman or soul, and having acceded to the Self, to commit all karma as y a p a , all works as sacrifice. Second, Arjuna's knowledge is complete, complemented by action in the battlefield. After Krishna's discourse, Arjuna engages the War, the

Mahabharata, vanquishes and kills his enemies which are also his kith and kin. This is the bloody y a p a which he must perform and which he does perform, uniting the knowledge (eyaan) and the works (karma) and devotion (Bhakfi). In contrast. Abraham's sacrifice does not actually take place. The

moment in which he is ready to use the blade on his son is the moment or "instant" in which he has passed the test, and when a goat is provided in Isaac's stead. Third, Arjuna accedes, through his yagna or sacrifice done without

desire or motive for gain, to the spiriti of Brahman in himself, that which is also present in all manifest reality. The Karma and the yagna, the action and the sacrifice, are not justified by conventional ethics, but by the surrender of the self to the Brahman. The action and sacrifice performed by Arjuna is not

only performed after the renunciation of desire but also with the knowledge that he is not the doer of the works, but that the works are the operation of the active, unequal, mutable universal Force of Nature, or Prakriti. Arjuna realizes that the supreme firusha, Purushottma, governs Prakrifi, and the atman or conscious self is a partial manifestation of the Purushottma. All works in the being and becoming of the universe have the one cosmic cause, Pitrushoffama (or Braman), which generates both Purusha, as Self, and

Prakriti; as Nature. The conception here is monistic-ultimately, there is no qualitative difference between Purnshoftama and atman or self, it is a case of reciprocal containing; whereas, in Abraham's case, there remains a fundamental separation between the nature, quality, and being of God and that of his own self. The "instant" in which Abraham has decided to murder his son, to consummate the sacrifice, the "instant" that Derrida finds decisive in terms of its commitment to murder, is the moment of divine intervention

when the angel appears to provide a sacrificial lamb. Abraham is not reasoned with. Abraham's god exists in a "dissymetrical alliance" with Abraham, for God says to Abraham that "Ican see right away [d I'instanf] that you have understood what absolute duty towards the unique one means, that it means responding where there is no reason to be asked for or given"

(GD

72, emphasis mine). Derrida's dicussion demonstrates an incongruity

between responsibility and duty to the absolute and responsibility towards the family, the human species, the generality of the ethical (73). It can be said that

this split, between the absolute ethical and the mundane ethical, exists also in the discourse of the B h a m a Gita but with a crucial difference. A realization of the Divine, the order of the absolute in Derridean terms, teaches first and

foremost that the "unique" "singular"person is a hoax, that the ego is delusion, and that the atman or self must realize that it is not the doer of

action: "it is Prakriti, it is Nature, it is the great Force with its three modes of action that works through him, and he must learn to see that it is not he who does the work. Therefore the right action is an idea which is only valid so long as we are still under the illusion of being the doer...all pragmatic egoism, whether of the claim to fruits or of the right to action, is then at an end" (EG 33).

Finally, in Hindu terms, the sacrifice of Isaac by Abraham demonstrates the first of "three great steps by which action rises out of the human into the divine plane leaving the bondage of the lower for the liberty of a higher law"

(34).

In the first step, man is the doer of the yapa (sacrifice) performed to a

Deity who is the supreme and only Self, though not yet realized in the being of the doer: "this first step is Karmayuga, the selfless sacrifice of works and here the Gita's insistence is on action" (35). Abraham's sacrifice can be seen as a partial fulfillment of Karmyoga. In the second step, Jnanayoga, the sacrifice

of works continues but with the self-realization that is the loss of self and knoweldge of "all works as simply the operation of universal Force, of the Nature-Soul, of Prakriti, the unequal, active, mutable power" (34). And lastly, in the third step, Bhaktiyoga, sacrifice of works, yagnic karma, continues but

with the added element of devotion to the principle governing Prukriti, "of

whom the [conscious self] in Nature [Prukriti] is a partial manifestation, by whom all works are directed" (34). It is emphatically stressed that the three modes co-exist in a triune way of works, knowledge and devotion. A pause must be made here in order to make explicit the interest in

introducing aspects of Hindu d h a r m and darshana, a tradition which Demda pointedly avoids in his discussion of the European (*responsibility.

The interest lies principally in the cause of a comparative approach which will allow a genuine move in the direction of providing a "positive

orientationr' to the movement of history its&.

Against the dominant

Western (Ewopean) experience in the twentieth centuryf with its "failure of resp~mibfiy,~' with its "AuschM&,'* with its postmodem r e c o & ~ a t i o m of lived experience, with its ascendant technological culturef it becomes urgent to think a revaluation kom the very foundations of ontology, cosmology, and metaphysics. If the Western desc~ptionhas proven catastrophic, it is time to consider another description which is different and which is not ndLified by hmmo-temporal events. Clearlyf for me, I-Endu thought provides such an ontology, cosmology, and d h a m i c e ~ c adescription; l and is seeing, especially, Demda's insistence to not only remain within the Western "Book but to speak for all humani& through it, that 1 am motivated to begin

introducing the scope of dhannic-ethics. k m d a asks some h d m e n t d questions abaut how we Iive our lives

in a responsible manner. h c i having set up, in good Demdem fashion, the "ap~riaof respomibsv," he is faced with the paradoxicd inevitability that being responsibIe to the one means failing his respansibiIity to the other.

This means that "I can never justify the fact that 1 prefer or sacrifice m y one ( m y other) to the other" (70).This declaration is what instigates Demda's musings as to how we can justify in the name of responsibility one*svery existence when at every step in life, at every responsible and sacrificial moment in life, we are being irresponsible to the other others perishing at every moment for want of our attention. At fixst glance this idea seems farfetched; however, Derrida himself has stretched the thought to its M t :

"Howwould you ever justiv the fact that you sacrifice all the cats in the world to the cat that you feed at home every mo&g

for years, whereas other

cats die of hunger at every instant? Not to mention people?" (71)- Yet, this

s h p h t i c and exagerated question is also the most profound for the issue at hand, the issue of ethics and dhamic-ethics; it must be addressed. b m d a has made a couple of questionable judgments. He has assumed the

event of an orighary moment in which the c d to responsibility OCCWS,

and, additionally, it is a moment in which one (Abraham) has the choice to refuse the caIl to responsibility. For b m d a , the response "Here 1 a m " is optional even as it, and perhaps, espeady as it sign& the madgesture

which defines the system of S h N ~ v - ~ ~~ep r e s m t a t i oofnthe "Here 1

am,"here I stand finally defined as an individual, a singular being in the system of ethics: 'Were I ams': the first and only possible response to the c d by the other [why not '*Thereyou are"?] the uri@nary moment of responsibility such as it exposes me to the singulm othex, the one who appeals to me. "Here I am" is the only seU-presmta~onpresumed by every form of r e q o m i b s ~ I: am ready to respond, I reply that I am ready to respond" (71, italics mine).

Why does he miss the logic of the story? The logic of the biblical story is not that Abraham is a good guy because he "ch~oses'~ to do what God commands him to do without giving hkn any reason for it. To the contraryf the logic is to show that the biblical God cannot be asked to justify his waysf that the Divine is beyond the human economy of question and answer, that therefore

faith must be blind and God must be feared. This is the moral of the storyf and Derrida errs when he interprets the moral along the following k e s : "God leaves him free ta refuse-and that is the test" (72). That is not the test,

especially for an Abraham who has already lived the better part of his life in responsible fdfihnent of the word of God, for an A b r h m who is circumcised in compfimce with the Covenant and who is over a hundred

years old (Gen 171-26).

In fact, I find it p u z h g that both Kerkegaard (in Fear grid Trembling) and Demda, centuries apart, give averarching p r o d a c e to Abr&amls sacrifice as constitutive of the individual's shgdaxity and choice. Consider,

for instance, the fact that Abraham struck not one but two covenants with God prior to his act of sacrifice (Abrm becomes Abraham. during the contracting of the second covenant, see Genesis 17). During the compacting of the first covenant, a freewheeling and dealing Abram is asked to sacrifice

anim& in a riualistic manner which demands that they be sliced in half, whereupon both the parties making the covenant with each other are made to walk in between the halves. This is a symbolic gesture which signifies that,

should they fail in their h U e n t of the covenmt, a similar fate as that of the animals awaits them.'

Abram, after he has sliced the anhtds, is visited in a "deep sleep" by a "deep and terrifying darkness:" ''As h e s u n was going down, a deep deep [eksiasis] feu upon Abram and a deep and terrifying darkness [phobos] descended upon himrr(Gen 15:12). This deep darkness is customary for the visitation of God in his immediacy (see Moses in Exodw 19:9). As the sign of

the forging of the first covenant, a mixadous act takes place: ' m e n the sun had gone down and it was dark*a smoking fire pot and a flaming torch passed

between these pieces'' (Ga15:17).8

Abram is on h e way to becoming

Abraham, an Abraham who has witnessed in the miracle of the covenant the

power-disyme~cal, as Demda emphasizes-of God.

his is an ancient near-Eastern Hittite tradition, and is a custom described in Jeremiah 34: 18-19. 8 ~ h epieces refer tat eh split open pieces of the animals that were prepared by Abcaham for the covenant. Note the resonance here with the pillar of smoke and the pillar of fire with which God led the children of Israel out of Egypt in Exodus.

Abraham's cataclysmic experience with God occurs in 15~12,which is the only instance in which God visits Abraham with the first intimation of the covenant.9 Demda's emphasis on the dynamics of the later sacrifice

elides the point of a sacred, bibilical story-we already know that the twice contracted Abraham is going to respond. What we don't know is what divine

Wade awaits his action this time.io The story of the sacrifice of Isaac,

h d y , is a story about the awesome nature of Abr&axnPsGod, of his God as the absolute m e r e As long as we are in the economy of the Other, absolute responsibility is in contradiction with public respomibSy-a Demda has well shown.

h

the economy of the

Self, however, a different story is being told. What does

W h n a tell Axjuna

propus of the sacrifice, the yaps that Arjma must

perfom? CmaaUy, that there is no existace outside of responding- Lile is the combination of a process of Prizkriti wiih its gzinas rumhg through

everythbg that is Prakriti and of the comdmce of self, which is an aspect of Purziska and a. h a p e n t of the cosmic consciousness, witnessing Prafiti- In

such a process everything is already a response, there is rzu originmy mumeat zuhen respondi~gbegins, when one is given he choice of whether or enter the economy of respomib*v.

to

1 see myself and my Self in all Nature.

9 f ' ~ the s sun was going down, a deep sleep fell upon Abrarn, and a deep and terrifying darkness descended upon him.'* This descent is presumably that of God, who then speaks to Abraham of the Cuvenant* It is interesting to note that the Greek variant for sleep is Ekstasis, which is closer to the EngIish trance or dream-like state. I01 get the impression that the very command of being asked to sacrifice one's son seems to defy Kierkegaard's imagination. However, in the times that that bibiical laws were being forged, the practice of child-sacrifice seems to have been not so out of the ordinary. In Levictus 20~2-5,far example, God tells Moses the foIlowing: nAny of the people of Isme!, or of the aliens, who give any of their offspring to MoIech shall be put to death." It was customary to offer meis offspring as burnt-sacrifice; to state the obvious here: it is because the practice exists (seems rampant? by the sound of it) that a Iaw is being rather vehemently stated against it.

This absolute ethics in the Gita is based on the fact that everything is already

in process, that everything is a manifestation of divine energy. What matters it that you call the energy divine or not? For energy exists. The conception of

the universe in the Gita is not unlike that of modem-day particle physics; David Bohm offers the following proposition in Wholeness and Implicate Order: "The totality of existence is enfolded within each region of space (and time). So whatever part, element or aspect we may abstract in thought, this still enfolds the whole [172]"(WBG 11). We find in modem physics not the discourse of the Other but of the Self. But the story of physics, of course, is half the story of the gzinas, as only the energy of Prakriti or Nature. The gunas refer also to the qualities of Prakriti or Nature-all energy has quality.

Furthermore, the gunas are complemented by the inherent potential of t& One Consciousness, which Aurobindo calls Purushottama. And this combination of the Purusha as Selfand Prakriti as Nature as manifestations in the universe with the one originary cause means that the dhamic-ethical

nature of responsibility in Hinduism, is conceived without any recourse to the Other. It becomes curious horn a Hindu darshanic viewpoint, in fact, that so

much in Western thinking can be based on the Other. The answer to Demda's cat question, then, from the Hindu viewpoint of the Gita is dear: I am always already responsible for all of existence, for my

Self is present in all. When I feed my cat I perform a y a p , a sacrifice to the Self, upholding the Dharm of existence, and this Self includes me, my cat, all

the cats, and everyone else in addition. And when, to the contrary, I propose that, "What binds me to singularities, to this one or that one, male of female,

rather than that one or this one, remains finally unjustifiable (this is Abraham's hyper-ethical sacrifice), as unjustifiable as the infinite sacrifice I

make at each moment" (71) I should realize that this formulation is nothing

other than the rule of Maya. Maya is a complex concept which has come to be trivialized in popular glogal culture as merely "illusion." In its ancient d w s h i c conception, m a y refers to two levels of organization. At one level,

mya is the principle which facilitates the creation of reality for the temporal and phenomenolo@cd being in the universe. In a universe of eternal, infinite being and becoming, "to settle upon a fixed truth or order of truths

and build a world in conformity with that which is fixed, demands a selective faculty of knowledge commissioned to shape finite appearance out of the infinite reality" (Sourcebook 596); maya is the name given to this selective faculty. At another level, maya is the illusion of reality become real, it is that

which abets an idea of singularity, of a monad and separate ego, of

making: "muya persuades each that he is in all but not all in him and that he is in all as a separated being, not as a being always inseparably one with the

rest of existence" (596). It is keeping these both levels in mind that the idea of tearing the veil of maya must be understood, a tearing which realizes the truth of maya, "where the "each" and the "all" coexist in the inseparable unity of the one truth and multiple symbol" (597).

In a dharmic-ethical universe there is ultimately no separable or essenatial "singularity," no individual in the Western sense, nor is there an Absolute Other who Gazes in judgment without being seen-for this is in direct opposition to the conception of firushottam or Brahman who is the

most intimate Self in my atman or conscious self, your self and all other selfs.

The Divine Soul, Narayana, co-exists with the human soul, Nara. It is the duty of the human soul to tear the veil, often referred to as Maya, the veil which keeps man within the world-bound, prey to the material and to the impulses of an ego, and get behind the ultimate secret, uttamam rahasyam,

which is to awaken to the eternal principle present within and to begin to live

in Brahman. And the emphasis is that this @vhg up of self, of personhood, of hdividuality is a goal that must be striven for and attained in the living moment; it is not a reward that lies beyond the threshold of Me. This ultimate secret is to be attained though gyam or knowledge, and knowledge itself is to be attained through action, through works or karma, in the material world. For the secret gives accession to ''livingcomciously in the Divine and acting from tisat comciousness" (JZG 23). Nowhere is there a conception of death, of death as being a gift. Justas there is no judging gaze of the absolutely Other, there is no salvation that lies beyond the threshold of

life- if there is a aosshg-over, it takes place here in Me, it is the crossing of the veil. And once the consc5ous self gains consaousness of its &vine and eternal nature, its function is to fulfill the works or kartng as yapcx, as sacrifice: "For the action must be performed, the world must f W i U its cycles,

and the soul of the hman being must nat tum back in ignormce from the work it is here to do'' (EG25)- h Arjma's case, this work is slaughter of his closest relatives in the Great War- That he must engage in the action which means he must kiU his kith and kin-this is Krishna's divine revelation.

To deny the p r h d significance of the inter-face with the Other, as 1 have suggested above, is aIso to subvert the premise of Levinasian ethics.

That this subversion is intended and necessary for my project should be apparent, but it must be pointed out that it follows a subtler undermining that takes place in Demda's text. 'This occws at the level of the "~acredness'~

of a text, specifically, the Bible. Demda seems to give no weight to the fact that

Abraham's story in the Bible is belongs ta a genre of writing which is

more primary than Kierkegaard's Fear and trembling in terms of originating the ethics of Judaeo-CMstibv; in his presentation of ethics, Eerkegaard's exegetical hypotheses function at the same level as that of the BibIical

revelation- Levinas?on the other hmd, has maintained throughout his career not only reverence for the k m m d m t d possibilities contained in the ethical structures and characters of the BibIe but also the imperative necessity of not forgetting the primacy of the Biblical text to dl subsequent and thezefure secondary philosophies8going so far as to say that "toute pede

pMosopfique repose SIX des eq6riences pr&philowpKques et que la lecture de la Bible a appartenu chez moi 2 ces exp&imces fondatrices''(I3 14)-

Equally significant is the oppositional emphasis placed by each philosopher on what constitutes h e core of individual singularity. Demda locates the essence of subjectivity in the non-emferabGv of death: "Death is very much that which nobody else can undergo or conf?ont in my place- My beplaceabSV is therefore conferred, deIivered?"givenr'*one can say, by dea&...It is from the site of death as the place of my k e p l a c e a b s ~that , is, of

my shgdarityf that 1 feel cdied to responsibilityt'(GD41). Levinas has expounded on the concept of the 'texisfer"in Le Temps et Z'autre, arguing that the subject's singular existence is what constitutes &at which can be comunicated but never shared: "Je suis tout seuIf c'est donc l' &re en moi,

le fait que j'edte, mon exister?qui constitue 1'616ment absolument intransitif, queique chose sans intentionafite, sans rapport. O n peut tout &changerentre &resf sauf l'exister. Je sub monade en tant que je st& [21]"

(51). Where can one find a more succht and direct opposition of the meaning of life and of death? Levinas locates the c d to responsibility in the living moment of the face to face with the Other?and this face-off constitutes the ariginary moment of the call to responsibility. And yet, strangely enough, this is where death re-enters the Levinasian scene: fur the originary call spells

out the foUawhg c o m m d : "Tu ne tueras point." You are not to killg This

sets up a troubling economy for sociality and ethical individuality.

One of the things that Levinas is womed about is emphasizing the

h c o m a w a b f i v of the inteefacial human experience. IR fact, dl thinking that ignores the infinite in the human encounter, that wants to

reduce the Other to the Same, and reduce difkrence to equality is a sign of absolute system, of Totaiity. It is against this that he projects his vision of the face of the Mer. k v i ~ doesnet s shy away kom critiquing the entire

tradition of Western pMosophy which he interprets as the search for a universal synthesis, a reduction of all experience, of d that belongs to the sensibIe, to a totaIity in which conscience embraces the world, leaves nothing ather outside itself, and thus becomes absolute thinking. The conscience of

self becomes at the same time the cunsaence of id (85). In other words?the totahtarian philosophy that Levinas is wary of occurs at that moment within the Western ontology of the Self/CMer when the Other is demy~tified~ and absorbed by the Self, as monad, as individud?as singular, in a uniformed description* Levinas's wariness against the latent?impending, or patent tyranny of the totalizing Western Self is well taken. It is as a stratagem

against this tyranity that he stresses the irreducibility of the properly Other, the mysterious message of the face of the Other. When the Western

conscience Levinas speaks of embraces the world, art operation of reduction

and tyranny is perfumed. The self as individual, as subject, as monad in command of its h t e n t i o n a h v - ~Western %If's conscience embraces the

world only in a gesture that reinforces its uniqueness against the world it occupies m d inhabits. And in such a reinforcement it reduces the difference of the Other's conscience to a version of itself?leaving no place far difference

to assert itself except a a suborhated and distanced term.

The "universal synthesis" that Levinas warm against is an operation of this

kind. But in taking up anxu for the reconcepmakation of ethics and

responsible philosophy in the experience of the m e r and the face of the Otherr Levinas can only get so far. 'I'he problem lies where Levinas is urtwib~gto look-in the Western (and Levinasian) perpetuation of the

unique Self and unique O&w. We must remind owselves here that Levirtas

does not think beyond the confining ontdogy of the %lf/Oiher itseIf' which

is inbinsic to that very tradition and its ~ c o n t ~ ~ - ' * A u ~ w to iname ~,'* h e obvious-that he is wary of.

The Indian ontology t e k a different story. Heref the atman, the conscious self's embrace of the universe results in a loss of aU ego-sensef of alI

ahamkaram or "I"-making. The attainment of freedomr of bliss, of At~anda

which results born this surrender is a consequence of realizing h e conscious principle of the cosmosf B r h m , hidden in the atman or WE

' t R e h q u k h gegotismf force, arrogancef desire, anger and possession of property; unseifish, tranquil, one is fit for oneness with B r h m ' * (XVDI-53,

WBG 714).

Why does Levinas want tor need to Iocate rn h c o m e w u a b f i ~in the human encounter, and more importantly, why is death given such a praminent role? Againf why is not the encounter a call to love, why is not the founding experience of the ethical a possibility of the celebration of life? Levinas' experience as a Jew in the Stalag during World War II must be

brought to bear on his phenomenolo@cal desire to constitute the foundational ethical experience as a non-reciprocalr non-symmetric assmption of responsibility in the face-to-face encounter. His first original treatise entitled De l'existmce

1'existant was written during his confinement

in a stalag during WWI. It broaches the "il y d* as a profoundly terrifying i n b a t i o n of "there being." The i2 y a, Levhas insistsFis that impersonal and horrible tiers excZzt the excluded third of nothingness and beingf and

occupies the absolute emptiness before creation its& (3&39). A child passing

a wakefd night and an insomniac whose conscience is ~person-ed

by the

inability to master sleep are used by Levinas as ready examples of the frightening experience of the if y a. Nights in the stalag not withstanding, it is dear that L,evi.nasr universe has the possibility of a feasfd and lurking violence in the 2 y a. The il y a cannot be thought of as loving, nurturing, nor caring. As such it signifies Levinas' loss of faith in a moral universe. And it can be said that his subsequent efforts have tried to resurrect an ethics

which would not result in the irthmm failure of the Nazi experience. It is to this end that Levinasim subjectivity conditions itself in response to the Other and its rule becomes not simply revomibZq to the Other but responsibility for the Other's responsibsv. Levinas is unequivocai about this: "je suis responsabIe des pers6scutions que je subis. Mais seulement

moi! ...Puisque je suis respomable meme de la responsabilit6 d r a u W *(95-96). 1 find that this mo&odox formdation brings him yet again adjacent to the

domain of h d u thought. But here the distance is great not only because the

Hindu seLf's responsibility is always to the absolute Self present in me and all others, but because the i2 y u doesn't exist in the m d u universe, it is Brahman that does, with its principle of sad-chit-ananda, existence-

comciousness-bliss. The il y a is the antipode of sociality. The experience of the i2 y a relies 0x1 singularity

in terms of isolation. The I2 y a is the anti-matter to creativity,

to creativity as poetry and art. Levinas' distrust of tropic language can be

traced back to the immanent black hole of the il y a which threatens to reduce

all osciliations to the flat-he of its homble signal. h the Levinasian economy, the 2 y a exists before sociality, it in fact motors sociality; it is to get

away from the il y a that the isolated I is forced to forge the bond of sociality

with the Other. Yet, the il y a also is the figment of a male imagination which

tries desperately to prioritize and locate the originaxy moment for ethics;

paradoxically, Levinas distrusts tropic language, for such language forefronts the impossibility of systematizing from any origin or originary moment. Levinas distrust of tropic language has been related to the necessity of

his rnasculinist ethical vision by Cynthia Willett in her important discussion of Maternal Ethics and Slave Moralities. hi a compelling feminist critique of Levinasfethics as privileging the fraternal and as the iteration of the

"masculinized metaphoric of the warrior" (551, Willett links poetry with the "rnamae~e,~' that which has been disparaged or ignored by all rational philosophies and patriarchal politics. Willett seeks to relocate the originary moment of the social bond in the joyous moment of sociality, one that is pre-

discursive as well as pre-intersubjective: the tactile sensuality between nurturer and child (42). She critiques Levinas for his conception of ethics as a response to the face in the visual register, and instead brings to the fore the importance of tactile contact which is at the base of a sociality that is also always erotic. Willett points out that Levinasian ethics repeats the mistake of man's creation ex nihilo, according to which myth "men give birth to themselves, they are fully self-responsible...these self-created men participate in an ideology of freedom that mystifies their interdependencies upon feminized dimensions of the self' (80). At one level, what Willett is saying and where she is taking the question of ethics is clear: after all, the Levinasian self at the moment of encountering the other is, quite obviously, not a two month old

child but an adult, preferably male. The simple question is how did he get there? Willett's work answers that very question-he got to the point where he can see the face of the other only after having lived through the erotic

caress and nurture of his mother or caregiver. She reminds us that Western creation stories share the same missing element-the mother. In a bold and refreshing move that marks the general tone of her work, she "mothers"

Levinas's it y a: ..already in the uterus, the fetus experiences rhythmic changes in energy levels that come over the mother. The horizon of existing, the pure il y a that precedes the categorization of the world, the elemental climate, is not the airy nothing of patriarchal mythology but the temperament of the mother. Nor is the i7 y a of existence, as Levinas assumes, neutral in its genealogy. It varies with the diffuse moods and directed attitudes of the mother. (78) Willett's attempt to counter the history of a male pathology that has divorced the body from the mind and then ignored the former is centered around the bodily and tactile origins of the experience of sociality. Upholding Iragaray's argument that "the hierarchies of the visual register of experience-are complidt in the patterns of oppression that define modernist social structures" (39), Willett highlights the precedence of tactile sensuality to the discursive realm in a parent-child relationship which is forged on nondiscursive expressions of the touch, the sounds, and the movements (mamaese): "the infant reciprocates parental overtures with its own score of movements. The ethical bond begins with an attunement that is musicality

and dance" (43). Willett's relocation of the origination of ethics is salutary not only as it exposes the blind-spot of the Western tradition but also because it is formulated such that ethics becomes the experience of erotic joy and nurture whose motivation confounds Hegelian recognition. This is a far cry from the Levinasian "tu ne tueras point, you are not to W*! But this feminist relocation insofar as it also seeks an origin to ethics,

an originary moment, begs the following questions: Why sociality? Where does the mother or caregiver get her ethics from? The force of Willett's

feminist appropriation of o r i e a r y ethics lies in the fact that it brings us in contact with the moment in which one is constantly faced with the sweet mystery of life and the eternal mystery of creation. Yet, what becomes evident is that while the desire for sodality is seemingly inborn, its origin is at the

same rime unknowable~indiscussing and proposing ethics we are always already in the realm of Faith and Fiction. For any deliberation on originary ethics relies on speculations that surpass the economy of proof, the methods

of evidence. Ultimately, Ethics is nothing more and nothing less than a fabrication designed to give ourselves a meaningful experience of Life. What is important is that the fabrication according to which we build our lives gives our existence joy where no ultimate answer is to be had.

Broadly

speaking, one can say that all ethical structures assume sociality-this is an empirical truth. It is also inevitable that in discussing ethics one is always in the middle ground between religion and philosophy. Hegel recognized this

in his discussion of the Bhagavada Gita : "The basic relation of all religion and philosophy is first the relation of the spirit in general to nature and then that of the absolute spirit to the finite spirit" (85). Critiquing the dialectic of

recognition which structures Hegel's master-slave ethics but always agreeing with the assumption that the desire for recognition from the Other is at the core of the (Hegelian) self (see Willett 105-119), Willett's feminist endeavor pinpoints the child-nurturer bond that is sociality as erotic ethics. The force of Willettfswork is that she has created a space in which Ethics is an act of love and sociality is born of the caress. In the end, however, she too remains firmly entrenched in the dichotomy of Self and Other and doesn't escape the Western problematic of distancing. For as long as one stays within the fundament of the Self and the Other, there exists a distance between the two

which is traversed only by making difference a quality of identity-the self and

the other are identified in a reflexive simultaneity, a moment in which identity is founded as being non-identical. There is nothing wrong with this formulation as it expresses Western thought; however, this neutralizes Willett's project in so far as she continues thinking the dichotomy of Self and

Other; ultimately, her assertion, that "practices whose genealogy is female

provide the basis for conceptions of subjectivity that cannot be schematized through the dichotomies that perpetuate the pathologies of Western culture"

(1441, is invalidated-for such pathologies, I am arguing, are built on the Self and Other as o r i g h q cause (orighary male cause, to be sure; yet, Western feminism is yet to travel to a point beyond/before this origination).

There are two fundamental models or fabrics that concern me here: the Judaeo-Christian sociality of the Self and the Other, and, the Hindu sociality of atman and purusha. the self and the Self. As an instance of the latter, the Gita tells us that there is no originary moment for ethics because the Self exists always, before and after birth, and also that the Self exists in all Prakriti

or Nature. There is no originary moment for the beginning or formation of ethics in a universe which is perpetual process and has as its cause one principle, the eternal principle of Brahman. This process consists of the twin principles of Purusha and Prakriti. Purusha is the Cosmic Conscience by whom all Prakriti exists and by which all karma or works are directed. The

aim of life is to attain the state or condition of dehi, the conscious embodied soul, through the combination of knowledge and consdent works-ffyaanand

yoga. By gyaan is meant the recognition of the illusion of desire-ridden ego.

By yap is meant "the selfless devotion of all the inner as well as the outer activities as a ygm, a sacrifice to the Lord of all works,offered to the Eternal as master of all the soul's energies" (EG 64).

ICrisha's presentation tmubles kjunats mind, whose skepticism reflects the Westem mind's perplexity at being confronted by a system which wodd seem, in its advocacy af the impersonal performance of duty8higMy unethical. That is, there apparently remains no base for respecting and assuring sociality. But as 1 have already suggested above, this codusion s t e m from a mind used to assuming its identity as absolute or absoluteiy other-not to mention the 0therrs identity. A crucial conception without which the philusophy of the Gita cannot be apprehended in the right spirit is Dharma. The Sanskrit root of Dharma is dhr which means "to hold." Dhgrma quite literally means that which holds things together, "the Iaw, the normf the d e of nature, action, and lifer' (EG23). Dhama is the Sanskrit word that comes closest to the Western '*refigion? it is?however, the religion of dharmicethics as sociality of the Self. It is a conception that a ~ o w l e d g e the s entire

network of existence and energy and c m o t at any point be limited simply to a h u m - t w h m a n or even h u m - t o - m d scale of response and

respomibsq. Aurabindo explains the threefold nature of Dharma as

Dharma in the Indian conception is not merely the good, the rightf morality and justice* ethics; it is the whole government of all the relations of man with other beings? with nature, with God, considered from the point of view of a divine principle working itself out in forms and laws of action, f o m of the inner and the outer life8orderings of relations of every kind in the world. Dhama is both that which we hold to and that which holds together our h e r and outer ac~vities ...Secondlyf there is the divine nature [the Sew which has to develop and manifest in us, and in this sense Dharma is the law of the inner workings by which that grows 21our being. Thirdlyf there is the law by which we govern our outgoing thought and action and our relations with each other so as to help best both our own growth and that of the human race towards the divine ideal. (162-63) The law of D h a r m as one of oneness in the universe is complex but dsu

p q o is~to miss the point altogether. Hegel is one such reader whof despite

his best intentionsf has entirely missed the sipficmce of the Gitaf and being thoroughly disgusted with the f'tediousness of the Indian verbosity and repetitions," seeks repeatedly to codom the philosophy of the Gifa into something recognizable and palatable for his Western sensibility- He fails to understand what ''duty as the performance of disinterested actionpicould possibly mean other than performing the action in ignorance: "the more senselessly and stupidly an acfion is pmfumed, the greater the involved indifference towards the succ~s''(47)- He misreads the scope and forms of yoga, relegating it to a passive and empty &&ed&ess

kom the material

world of action: "in it that kind of reflection ...is at work whichf without reasoningf through meditation strives after a direct awareness of the tmth as

such'*(311, andf "Yoga is rather a meditation withoat any corztmts, the abandoning of all attention towards external things...the silence of all inclinations and passions as also the absence af images, imaginations and concrete thoughts" (45). That h i s is a blatant misreading of the yoga doctrine is clear if we look at but one verse of the Gih: "he who performs that ritual action which is his duty, while renouncing the fruit of actionf is a renouncer (sanrzyasi) and a yogin; Nut he who is withoat a consecrated fire, a d mko fails to peflum sdcred rites. (WolfWG272, emphasis mine). Hegel's yogi is exactly the one who f d to perfom-for the Gifa is a doctrine of performance

and actian in the material world and nothing otherwise. One must not take Hegel's misreading lightlyf for it does not stop him

from making an all out indictment against hdian dkarma and darshana as caste-bound and thus unable of providing "any elevation to moral freedom"

(51If where "the work permanently performed by M s h a is the conservation of caste distinctions1'(55)f and which promotes detachment en posse such

that "he Indian isolation of the soul into emptiness is rather a stupefaction which...cannot lead to the discovery of true insighis, because it is void of contents'' (65). Hegel's employment of the word "mdf"a concept whose metaphysical lineage can be traced back to the Greek pszichi and Platoss

~ 36e), a d signifies discussion in the Timeus (especidy sections 3 4 to something very Merent from the conception of atmaw as the conscious self,

is an apt indicator of his blinkered reading. Hegel's Eurocentric righteousness and atisreading can be forgiven as a product of his times?but the same cannot be done in good faith for any camcien~ausintellectual or philosopher of our avowedly global and "multi-dtural" times. 1 wodd in fact argue that Hegel's misreading, his inability to comprehend the nature of and described

by the Bhapada Gita stems from his reliance on a SeU/O&er dialectic which is patently absent therein.

h e of Hegel's oversights is that he takes the p n a s to be attitudes and not the primary qu&~es-aenermof a l l Prakriti or Nature: S a f f ~Rajas, a ~ and Tamas?are the modes of world-energy in nature and also of human nature itself. Briefly, Saftua is the mode of poise, knowledge and satisfaction; Rajas is

the mode of passion, actionf and struggling em~tion;a i d f Tamas is h e mode

of ignorance and inertia. AH three interact with each other as they traverse both nature and being: "all the attitudes adopted by the human mind towards the problems of life either derive from the domination of one or other of these qualities or else from art attempt at balance and harmony between them" (EG49)But is the Hindu viewpointf as it is seen and described in the Gita, masmihist? For one cannot deny that its setting is War, its interlocutors are the ultimate Warrior and the God-as-d~oter.This would seem to put the discourse of the Gifa firmly within what WUett has described as "male

metaph~ricof the wamior." Yet? the case is not so simple for the very reason h a t it is not a co&onta~ond philosophy of Self and Other that the Gita develops. 1would argue that the G i t ~is a philosphy of ethics expressed in the ~anguageof the "rnamaese"-it defies rationality and rational system8always

forefronting the natural forces and the unknowable mystery of creation. A reflection of this d o w a b z is~ the fact that its doctrine is expressed in

poetic form. It is a mamaese that defies the Leuinasian claim that literature cannot be ethical. The Gita is written in elegant metered Sanskrit verse

which is meant for pleasurable readins and hearing experience- And it is consistently the expression of a system of ethics, the description of m ethical universe. It is also about love?about aeativiv and joy. But it also constantly reminds LBthat all language is ambiguous and d t h a t e l y only a pointer in the direction of the eternal mystery.11 It calls for a recognition that must be

made of the one %If h d8 and consequently, for a sociality which is always already forged; the god is to "perceive the self in the self by the self'' (XIE24)

and realize that the ~ t m mof others is identical with one's own atman:

"Seeing indeed the same Lord established everywhere8he does not injure the self by the sew' (XE28; WBG 556). In this it takes us beyond or before feminism8for it tells us that the "diffuse moods and directed attitudes** of the mothered i2 t j in that amniotic and primeval space is already traversed by

-

IOf course, Deconstructive critiques of language have already shown that language always displaces itself, that ciifferance is the norm. With this in mind* 1 find Levirtas' distrust of tropic language blinkered, as all discursive expression is inherently tropic. In terns of ambiguity of language, Sargeantrs comment about the complicated nature of Sanskrit language is exemplary: "it may be remarked that Sanskrit is a very ambiguous language in which a single word may have scores of meanings* sometimes contradictory ones. Thus the common verb dhu ...can mean put, place, take, bring, remove, direct, fix upon, resolve upon, destine for, bestow Qn. present, impart* appoint, establish* constitute, make, generate, produce, create* cause, effect, perform* execute, seize, take hold of, bear, supportp wear, put on, accept, obtain, conceive* get, assume, have, possess, show* exhibit, incur, undergo* etc/ (8)!

the essentid modes of nature, the gunas. Soaality is inherent in any c o ~ c i o u self-the s afmm contains the Self and smiles at the world. There is no originary moment fur ethics and responsibility to begin- Soadity

he

law of the universe, since everything is intercomected and traversed by the same Self. This Hindu aspect of sociality is pmmhd on the fact that Life does not

"lack'' mything- This lack of lackRso to speak, &a contradicts the Western pMos~phicdtradition?going back at least to Plato, where lack has been that and the Ideal, the hmm and the divine. ConsiderRfor example, the tyranny of Socrates in the Symposium as he d e h e s love or Ems to Agathon: S: ...that is, does love desire that something of which love is? A*. Yes, surely. S: And daes he possess, or does he not possess that which he loves and

desires? A: Probably not?I should say. S: Consider whether '*necessarilyr* is not rather the world ...instead of probably. The ~ e r e n c that e he who deskes something la& it, and that he does not desire something if he does not lack it? is in my judgment, Agathon, absutgfeZy and necessmily true. (59, emphases mine) If Agathon was weU-versed in the Gita he might have challenged Sacrates with the assertion that nothing is lacking in the universe which is comprised

everywhere of the Self and the pmas; that sensual desire is motivated by seme-ga~ficationand marks the reign of the fake ego, and that spiritual desire is for the recognition of the Self seated in the heart of all afmms or conscious selfs. In this regard, that desire is nowhere a lack? the anti-oedipal work of Delewe and Guattari, their critique of Western knowledge and their reconcep~afiza~on of desire as desiring production provides some interesting resonances with Hindu pkdosophy and d e s e ~ e ssome attention.

Deleuze and Guattari's critique of capitalism and schizophrenia in their anti-Oedipal argument brings together in one interactive economy the discourses of philosophy, psychoanalysis, capitalism, geography, and anthropology. The repressive ideology shared by modem disciplines is laid bare by Deleuze and Guattari through their emphasis on the simultaneity of semiotic regimes and the reconceptualization of human agency as a schizophrenic urge for "desiring-production." In their formulation, the subject is always a "residue" effect of the processes of social production. Such a subject is never truly representable in terms of a unified ego, and even less so in terms of the repressive and normalizing Oedipal triangulation. Their claim that the myth of Oedipus as it has been employed in Western psychoanalysis has no truth value other than the fact that it takes part "in the

work of bourgeois repression at its most far-reaching level, that is to say, keeping European humanity harnessed to the yoke of daddy-mommy" ( A 0 SO), is representative of what Foucault sees as the anti-fascist nature of their

project. The alternative offered by them is one that challenges the entire tradition of Western metaphysics, at least all the way back to Plato, where

desire has mistakenly been assigned to acquisition and not to production. As a result, the history of desire has been &written as the story of a "lack,"

whereas, in anti-oedipal schema, desire is first and foremost the energy of production. Hence: desiring-preduction. The consequences of desiring-production are far-reaching. All activity in the world becomes the interaction of binary machines that are always

connected to each other linearly. For example, the breast is a machine that produces milk, and the mouth is a machine coupled to it, and in turn, the mouth is also coupled to the stomach as machine. Though this series extends infinitely, it is never simply a binary series for a third term is always being

produced which is the body without organs (BwO). This B w O is the surface upon which all production is recorded, and from whose recording surface all production seems to emanate. The BwO is, however, unproductive, sterile,

unengendered, and unconsumable. For example, Capital is the BwO of the capitalist being. The "subject" is that which wanders above the B w O and exists peripherally to the desiring machines, having no fixed identity and coming into being only as it consumes various states made available through the recording surface of the BwO. Such a subject can situate itself only in terms of the disjunctions of a recording surface and is born and reborn with each new state it consumes.

It is worth making note here that the system offered by Deleuze and Guattari always exceeds binary enclosures. Desire, which is what causes the "current" to flow between machines, always flowing itself and breaking flows, leads to three types of production. The first is the production of production

and its energy is the Libido. Labor is the sign of this process. Here, the synthesis is one of connection. A part of the energy of the libido becomes the

energy of the recording process, Numen, and this leads to the production of recording. This takes place on the BwO, or capital, and the synthesis here is one of disjunction. The energy of the Numen leaves a residual energy of Voluptas which is the energy of consummation. This leads to the production of consumption. It is at this juncture that the subject is formed, through consuming, and through the conjunctive synthesis. The anti-Oedipal universe describes a domain of perpetual processes without beginning and

without end, of energies traversing all partial objects which are continuously

engaged in machinic operations of conjunctions, disjunctions, productions, etc. This world-view parallels the Hindu world-view of interconnectedness

of all phenomena and consciousness: "each finite working of force is an act of

infinite Force and not of a limited separate self-existent energy labouring in its own underived strength" (EG 144). Deleuze and Guattari's anti-Oedipal critique of normalizing and oedipalizing structures in Western life is based on the compelling argument that the Western civilization with its tyranny of a psychoanalyzable subject is

constituted on the repression of desiring production, on repressing desire because "desire is revolutionary in its essence" (116). Desire threatens Laws, hierarchies, established orders, and therefore, desire has been conformed to

the something of a Lack-in contemporary Western society, this has meant

crystallizing desire on the consumption of material goods-where desiringproduction has been transformed into desiring products; of normalizing and advertising desires through the ubiquitous influence of modem media; and

finally, on essentializing the other as Other as an incentive for submitting to the Law. There are numerous resonances between the anti-oedipal scheme

and the Hindu philosophy of the Gita, the complete lay-out of which is beyond the scope of this dissertation. However a couple of elements can be

mentioned in passing. The Hindu self can be seen as a "detachablepartial-object" instead of

complete objects detached (Phallus). The partial object doesn't allow the formation of the subject but instead is propelled by d r i v e s ~ s ? - and connects with a multiplicity of other partial objects: its sole subject is "not an "ego," but the drive that forms the desiring-maclune along with it, and that

enters into relationships of connection, disjunction, and conjunction with

other partial objects" (60). Furthermore, when Deleuze and Guattari state that, "the three errors concerning desire are called lack, law, and siemfier

[whichdrag] their theological cortege behind-insufficiency of being, guilt, signification" (Ill), it is evident that the theology being referred to is that of

the Book- Clearly, in Hinduismf desire is conceived of as a positivity, the ego is dways on the verge of deperwn&a~on with the discovery of the &lff and

echoes the s c h i z o p ~ process c which R.D. M

g described as a "voyage of

hitiation, a wwcendmtd experience of the loss of the Ego, which causes the

subject to remark: ''1had existed since the very be-g---kom f o m of Ue-..to the present

the lowest

The Hindu afmm or conscious self is

always on the way to overcoming the mayu of becoriing a "global person'' who exists after fhe repressive sructures of the state have been internalized along with a corresponding creation of the subjugated subject. The atmanf on the contrary, comprised of the quditative merm-&ves of the gunas, seeks the g y a m or knowledge for a realization of purusha in afmanf that is, of the self in the self.

Dedeuze and Guattari's discourse reveals an intriguing comection with the philosophy of the Bhapada Gita, especially in terns of the

reincamatory character of the subject of consuxrunation. As Deleuze and Guattari define itf the anti-oedipal subject [is]produced as a residuum dongside the machine, as an a p p a d k r or as a spare part adjmcent to the m a W e p w w s through a l l depees of the circle?and passes from one d e l e to another. This subject itself is not at the centerf which is occupied by the machine, but on the periphery, with no fixed identity, forever decentered?defined by the states through which it passes. (20)

Reconceived thus, subject fornation is a secondary or residual aspect of the natural processes of desiring machines. This subject c m o t be said irt anyway to be a bourgeois monad or to possess an interior and essential ego-the bourgeois monad with its anomie is nothing more than the result of repressive apparatii enforced on the subject in one stage of its becoming* The nomalization of the bourgeois is myth sedimented as realityr the "individual" and the "rightsitof the individual are products of the power of

Kera&a~on. Against &isf Deleuze and Guattarirsproject aims at a de-

hdi~du&ation

though active dispersal and reconstitutionpthrough

multiplication and displacement, and though iemtori&aGon and de* territo~aka~on. The anti-oedipd subject that is being born and reborn along side the various states of the deskhg-ma&es

in the same neighborhood as the

Pzlr~tshaor Self and Prdcriti or Nature. Here Prabiti with its thee modes takes the place of desag-production. The ego or individual subject is an illusion of the seIf as long as it is believe:

2 is the doer of h e action.

Once the self realizes that it is the forces of Prabiti that are responsible for

actionf the self then loses its illusion of a pragmatic or intentiond ego. All action continues to course through the self but a self that is properly detached: in this sense?then,the Hindu self/%lf can be said to be a body without

organsf a surface of recording and detachments. Foucault is correct in seeing the anti-oedipal pcoject as profoundIy one of ethics: "1would say that A~ti-Oedipzis...is a book of ethics?the first book of ethics to be written in France in quite a

long b e 1 *(xii); howeverf here is a

moment where the anti-eodipal machine reaches a limit or point of

redundancy. At this pointf its ethics fly outf or escape through the h e s of flight? the detemiodakatiom. Anti-Oedipus remains, in my view, the only p o s t - s m c ~ & s tapproach that effectively injects the consideration of

prapatics into m y discussion of semiotic systemsf and is properly extradisciplinary as it is not M t e d by categories. It is this very quality which leads them to an embrace of the dispersal of ethical intentionality down the path of a delirious " h e of flight." Useful as the concept of detenitorhation appears

in aiding a critique of literary theories which privilege the commcte&ess of language along with its inherent decomtructive aspects?it ends up in a dead

end by not being able to impart to the det&tofi&d

subject a c o w of

ethical action that is more meanhgfid than the de@ous escape through

"linesof fight." h fact, d e t e ~ t o ~ & a ~ of o nthis kind seems nothing more than yet another ethically empty ritual of the kind that Ashis Nandy,

speaking born a WE-avowedGadhian perspective#d e c I W : "it has become more and more apparent that genocides, eco-disasters and ethnocides are but s to the underside of corrupt sciences and psychopathic t e ~ o l o g i e wedded new secular hierarchies which have reduced major civilizations to the status of a set ofempty rituals'' (XI.The anti-Oedipal line of flight seeins to be one

such empty ritual, even though it takes off &om a terrain of proWerations

and disjunctions which is the very opposite of structures grounded in pyramidal (and secular) hierarchies. There is a striking resemblance between desiring production-wK& is the condition of a machine without beginning and without end, a machine

which proliferates to infinity, and Prukfiti-w&& is driven by the three gt~nas and fdfiUs the will of the Divine through endless and chaotic cycles of

creation and destruction. Desiring production is fundamentally a religious conception but not one that is of the Book. The dosest Western andogue for the anti-Oedipal system can be found in the Nietzschean concept of the Will to Power and of the Eternal Retum#both of which exceed the restrictive economy of Self and Other. But why should desmg-prduction exist at all?

For while Prukriti as a process is conjoined with Brahmanic consciouness as its cause and witness, d e s ~ g - p r o d u c ~ oinn,its efforts to undermine the

individual and cohesive subject of intentionality, relegates subjectivity to the status of a by-product. It unleashes the unconscious and its positive energies of desiring production at the cost of the Conscious. In doing so, it makes the mistake of displacing if not erasing altogether the gtman or conscious self of

the person; the entire m a M c edifice becomes a process without a witness-

h this regard it remains hcomp1ete when compared to the Hindu conception of life as flowing from the one eternal causef B&anf

whose materid

m e e s t a ~ o mh the universe carry the potential for the realization of atman

and pz~rz~sha.In his ontologyf perpehd drives inherent in P r a ~ t lead i to processes of creation and destruction h which the sum totd of aU energy is always conse~ed.Brahman is the one cause of consciousness and material processes? so that a l l processes in the universe are interconnected with the same threads of quaties-asenerw, the gzmas of rajasfsatmar and tamas "in

every f'inite working of wilI and howledge we can discoverf supporting it, an act of the infinite &will and &-howledge'' (EiG 144). Anti-Oedipus is

ethical as it exposes the various kinds of "fascism1'hidden and operative in the construction of a nunnative Western reality but it spirals out on its own

line of fight without being able to providef by definition almost?an ethical alternative. It may be a p e d that this is perhaps on purposef that perhaps &is is altogether the pointf but do so wodd be to miss the point of my

discussion of the dhamic-ethical sociality of the seU/Self based on the concept of Brahmanf the eternal principle of the miverse. There is,

however, a proximityf a "neighbodgt' to LEX a Heidegerian termf between the Indian ontology and the anti-Oedipal framework, and 1 propose that a dharmic-ethical base would provide a positive orientation for all

In closingf 1 wodd like to turn briefly tu the pMosophica1 work of Friedrich Nietzsche and Mahatma Gmdhi. To pair them within the same rubric may seem somewhat erroneous if one understands Nietzsehe's oeuvre

as the meditation towards a supremacist wamor-like Overman driven by an asocial Will to Power and Gandhi's work as the pacifist d u c h e of a religious

man who preferred to amid conflict and violence at all costs* These gaer&atiom ase gross as they are fdse but they serve the purpose of indicating the general and enaneous regard in which the two men are held. The convergence between Nietzsche and Gan& exists a t the level of reorg&hg

an ethical imperative within the context of a rapidly transforming

world in which technoIo@cd "progress" was b e c o m g h e standard of measure for a fdfilled experience of Life. Both W e r s foresaw the pathologies of violencef racismf and exploitation whi& have been the insufficiently chdenged norm of the twentieth century- A little juxtaposition is enlightening: And perhaps a great day will come when a people...will exclaim of its o m fiee will, "We break the sword,"..-the so-called m e d peace, as it now exists in all countriesf is the absence of peace of mind. One trusts neither oneself nor one's neighbor andf half from hatxedf half from fea, does not lay down arms. Rather perish than hate and fearf and twice rather perish than make onesdf hated and feared-& must someday become the highest maxim for every single c o m o n w e a l ~too. , (inK a h m 178)

Wherein is courage required-h blowing others to pieces from behind a cannonf or with a smiling face to approach a cannon and be blown to pieces?...Believe me that a man devoid of courage and manhood can never be a passive res&ter...Passive resistance is an all-sided sword, it can be used anyhow, it blesses him who uses it and him against whom it is used. Without drawing a drop of blood it produces far reaching resd&...One who is free from hatred requires no sword. ( h P W 248) This is only one instance of the numerous and striking resonances between the philosaphies of Nietzsche md Gm&.

Both thinkers expound radical

critiques of a "modem" civilization seemingly destined to ovemhelming te~o~ogical

Both are wary of the accompanying evanescence of

ethical codes which were rapidly becoming outmoded. And where Nietzsche undertakes a revaluation of morals through a philosophy of seU