Arka Chattopadhyay

In this essay I extract an ethic from Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s concept of
“planetarity” in the context of world literature, which highlights the notion of
transnational literary circulation. I argue for a planetary ethic of absolute
otherness that interacts with the way a story travels across national
borders. I take this dialogue through the Bengali-Indian writer Sandipan
Chattopadhyay’s short story “Shonali Danar Igol” (“The Eagle with
Golden Wings”), where we see this alterity in sync with a fantasmatic
narrative passage that transcends national imagination. Delving into the
psychotic fantasy of the story’s Anglo-Indian protagonist allows us to see
how dangerous a transnational literary transmission can be. I hope to show
how planetary ruptures interrupt the continuities of the global and how
planetarity itself becomes an ethical tool to respect the untranslatable in the planetary non-human Other. Sandipan’s story contributes to this critical
dialogue by introducing psychosis as the fallout of translating the
untranslatable alterity of the planet.

This article examines the function of the static body, both with and without speech, in the plays of Samuel Beckett. Zooming in on bodily stasis in Beckett allows us to see how he develops a corporeal discourse of inertness that goes beyond words to establish and formalize what words cannot say. The article probes into the complications of defining life in a static silent body. Gaze and affect work in a politically charged network to create resistant traces of life in inert bodies in Catastrophe and Rough for Theatre II while speech in all its kinetic prowess fails to animate them in Happy Days and Play.

Résumé Cet article considère la fonction du corps statique, parlant aussi bien que muet, dans les pièces de théâtre de Samuel Beckett. L'inspection de la stase corporelle dans l' oeuvre beckettienne met en évidence la façon dont il a mis au point un discours corporel de l'immobilité qui va au-delà des mots afin d'établir et de donner forme à ce que les mots ne peuvent pas dire. L'article interroge les complications liées à l' effort de définir la vie dans un corps muet et immobile. Le regard et l'affect opèrent dans un réseau politi-quement chargé pour créer des traces de vie résistantes dans les corps immobiles de Catastrophe et de Rough for Theatre II, tandis que le discours dans toute sa force ciné-tique ne parvient pas à ranimer ceux de O les beaux jours et de Comédie.

This article examines the structure of Samuel Beckett's What Where (1983) from a Lacanian point of view to show how Beckett deploys a logical framework and follows it to its own wreckage with telling political underpinnings. The play's auto-deconstructive structure locates a point of impossibility for its own operations that I approach through Lacanian discourse theory in which the Real is posited as the impossible qua discursive formalization. As a play on the vicious cycles of torture,

Building on the dialectical tension between neuro-cognitivism and Lacanian psychoanalysis , this article approaches the Beckettian text to localize acts of writing that take place between psychoanalysis and literature. In opposition to the cognitivist model of neuronal relationality, it uses the Lacanian logic of Real non-relation as an inroad into Beckett to explore the material frontier of Beckettian writing where relational meaning reaches its limit. At this limit, we are left with a complex writing between speech and inscription that makes the body of the signifier write against its sense.

This article of mine on Beckett and Lacan was published in Slovenian translation in Problemi 9-10/15, The Journal of The Society of Theoretical Psychoanalysis, Ljubljana. Here is the English abstract:

The article explores the Beckettian logic of narrative detritus in The Trilogy from a Lacanian perspective by examining the “ill said” stories, progressively “worsened” with every act of narration. Reading these obsessive-compulsive moments of narrative as reiterated failure, the article sheds light on the various techniques and implications of this experiment that ranges from freezing a narrative into stasis to pushing it toward the limits of speculation and from forcing the narrative to revolve around its tangential exterior to underlining its artifice through narratorial intrusions. The article focuses on the vestigial story-function in The Trilogy to underscore the paradoxical status of Beckett’s narrative impulse. And it demonstrates how the drift of these narrations relocates storytelling from the subjective space of the “I” to the opacity of language as a field of the Other and finally into the originary and the terminal silence that conditions narrative. The article reads Beckett’s assaults on the realistic narrative logic of the novel in tandem with an aporetic narrative logic that emerges from Lacanian psychoanalysis with its emphasis on the Real as opposed to realism. How this speaks to the transitional narrative cultures of Modernism and Postmodernism is of interest to this article.

The paper will focus on the function of the literary in psychoanalytic practice and vice versa in relation to a Real logic of non-relation where they share a "littoral" that both unites and disunites the two. Using Lacan's insights into truth as invention, the paper will propose a poetics of truth in the Real where the literary embodies the order of "half-saying" by distinguishing the saying from the said through symptomatic belief. Interweaving psychoanalysis and literature can offer an alternative model of critical faith or faith without religion which is where the question of a Lacanian poetics of the Real would be posed.

When Ashish Avikunthak, the experimental Indian film director adapts Samuel Beckett’s 1965 ‘dramaticule’ Come and Go into his 2005 Hindi short film Antaral or Endnote, he unsettles the mathematically precise structure of Beckett’s play. Avikunthak plays around with the order of entries and exits of the three women who participate in the haunting transmission of an inaudible secret in Beckett’s play. And his playful rearrangements underline the fundamental question about the number of secrets travelling among the women. Is it one or more than one secrets they share? The article answers this question through a thorough reading of the play’s structure concentrating on differences between the play and the film in a comparative analysis of the original and its decisively deconstructive adaptation. The article seeks to illuminate the inter-penetration of form and content in Beckett’s work and see how Avikunthak’s manifold modifications are uncannily haunted by the principle of the Beckettian structure. The comparative study unravels the precise logic of Beckett’s structure, its explicit and implicit rules and the rationale behind its precise points of commencement and termination.

This article seeks to examine Samuel Beckett’s subversive and countercanonical use of the canonical literary intertext by studying some of the diverse instances of his variable, playful and deliberately erroneous citations from early to late works, cutting across genres and media. I want to contextualize this discussion with Harold Bloom and Maurice Blanchot’s mutually contesting claims about Beckett as a preserver of the literary high canon or
as a counter-canonical writer. I would argue for a trajectory in the Beckett canon where the references gradually disappear from the textual surface into the depths of speech itself, which is increasingly perceived as a ventriloquist’s conjuring of Other’s words and voices. If this internalisation marks the inter-subjective nature of the field of speech, taking my departure from this point I will read Blanchot’s favourite Beckett text How It Is and highlight the way it subverts the canonicity of knowledge formation and its
disciplinary inculcation. This approach involves a deepening of Beckett’s complex relation with the intertextual practice of citation as the author challenges the fundamental property at the heart of citation i.e. knowledge in its always already canonised status.

The article proposes to explore the contestational relation between Samuel Beckett’s textual practice and the discourse of the university in terms of his own stint as a university professor and the problematic of teaching his works, especially the challenging later texts inside the classroom. Developing on Jacques Lacan’s ideas on the university discourse and its supplementary form in the psychoanalytic discourse, the article studies Beckett’s emphasis on non-knowledge as a gesture, away from the encyclopedic mastery of the professorial position. A close reading of Beckett’s variously anti-academic gestures, a paradoxical acceptance of literariness, the materials relating to his own pedagogic practice like student feedback and class-notes make for a fascinating read as on the basis of this we can arrive at an analytic ethic of teaching which resists totalization by marking and re-marking the limit of knowledge. Beckett informed by Lacan and Lacan informed by Beckett enable us to make a move towards a radically egalitarian pedagogy where system is replaced by non-system and knowledge by non-knowledge where truth is glimpsed.

"The article seeks to study Beckett’s (in)famous abstractionism in the light of his engagement with the discursive borderline of philosophy and literature with recourse to Alain Badiou’s texts on Beckett and his meditations on the philosophy-literature interface. Through a close textual reading of a series of Beckett’s late prose-texts, I argue that Beckett as a creative writer appropriates the reflexive locus of subjective thought which philosophy tries to claim as its exclusive belonging. This goes contra to Badiou’s idea of philosophy being  sutured to literature. In this problematic dialogue of the two discourses, Beckett’s obsessive abstractification renders the concrete as a remainder in the rigorous process of subtracting all particularities to arrive at a generic locus of thought. Beckett’s abstractionism is processual and non-absolute. It consists in the appropriation of the philosophical thought which thinks itself
without an object and as its own subject."

The paper will deal with the narrative structure of Sandipan Chattopadhyay’s novel Dhangsher Modhye Diye Jatra in terms of a postmodern theory of narratives in all its self-reflexive and auto-deconstructive dynamics. Set in an asylum of Dubrajpur, the novel offers a curiously inside-out narration of the manic depressive Achintya Ghoshal who claims himself to be an-other person. Featuring a complete spatio-temporal dislocation and an unreliable and random memory, the de-structured narrative wanders through the amnesiac and aphasic aporias of the psychotic narrator. What shapes itself in this narrative parambulation is a postmodernist pastiche of the popular genre of whodunit where we are looking at a series of battered stories through failed memory and cinematic jump-cuts. The sub-liminal consciousness of psychosis emerges as the metaphorical murderer and the novel becomes what can be called a “narrative whodunit”. With a pervasive critique of realistic representation [involving different art forms especially the painting as Achintya is a masterful painter], the stop-gap narrative combines a psychic polyphony of voices and a metafictional commentary on the genre of the novel and the author function.  An intertextual link between Vincent Van Gogh’s letters to his brother Theo from Saint Rémy asylum and Achintya’s brother’s letters to him further complicates and obfuscates the conventional realistic narrative. One of Van Gogh’s letters to his brother is cut up into Sandipan’s text. Using Jameson’s Lacanian leads on psychotic language-disturbance and a schizophrenic splitting of the time-space coordinate as integral to the postmodern condition, the paper will read the anti-narrative of  Dhangsher Modhye Diye Jatra, in the process, throwing some light upon the cultural appropriation of Western postmodernism into the Indian vernacular literary tradition of Bengal.

The  paper seeks to engage with the economic themes in Australian fiction writer Peter Carey’s short stories: ‘Report on the Shadow Industry’, ‘American Dreams’, ‘Conversations with Unicorns’, ‘The Puzzling Nature of Blue’ among others and explore the problematic ethical relationship between these themes and the literary institution as such.  In Carey’s portrayal of the economic themes, there is a curious fascination with literature as a product of industrial economy. In ‘Conversations with Unicorns’, the narrator’s ironic failure in making the animals aware of man’s economic evil only points to the impossibility of a simplistic literary protest against increasing commercialization. Carey is subtly aware of the industrialization and the commercialization of literature as an institution and he is never hesitant to textualize this awareness. I would even argue that Carey turns this into his aesthetic credo. This acknowledgment and its aestheticization give an ethical edge to his portrayals. At the end of ‘Report on the Shadow Industry’, he considers the story itself as a shadow which he has produced. The aesthetic and the economic processes of production get intermingled here and Carey admits his complicity to the business of literary production. If we read the “shadow industry” as an allegory of industrial evil, luring us to buy illusory shadows and participate in a vicious game of identification with them, literature seems to admit its status as a marketable shadow-product too. Is this merely an ethics of admission where the only affirmation lies in admitting the commercial compromise a writer has to make in an age of economic globalization? The paper would argue that a room for ethical empowerment is opened up by the intermeshing of the creative and the economic processes in these stories. Thus, the literary report on the shadow industry becomes a shadow in itself. Gleason’s Wall [in the story ‘American Dreams’] with his immaculate and prophetic model town is something which can sustain itself as an artwork only through economic assistance as the tourism minister turns it into a great tourist spot. In ‘The Puzzling Nature of Blue’, Vincent, the Irish poet, turns out to be an economist and insists on seeing business as a creative act a la Koestler. On the one hand, Carey highlights the ineluctability of the economic in the sustenance of literature in the contemporary world but on the other, he also appropriates the economic, turning it into a literary process by seeing business as a creative act and vice versa. In this literary appropriation of the economic, Carey always underscores the “beauty” of the commercial object e.g. his own report as a shadow object or Gleason’s Wall or the Blue of Eupholon. I would define this as an ethical function of literature where it beautifies the economic. But the appropriation is not only about beautification, there is a strange opaqueness in the beauty of the economic object which goes beyond linear commercial logic. This literary opaqueness is capable of stumping the economic trope of totalization and mastery. This is where I would like to locate the ethical space of empowerment. My chief example would be the story ‘Report on the Shadow Industry’ where the mysteriously beautiful instability regarding the meaning of the shadow-story or the story-shadow subverts the absolutist knowledge of politico-economic totalitarianism.  As theoretical support for my argument regarding literary ethics, I will be referring to Alain Badiou’s ethical insights.

This paper will explore the Beckettian logic of narrative failure in The Trilogy by examining the ‘ill said’ stories, progressively ‘worsened’ with every act of narration. Reading these obsessive-compulsive moments of narrative as reiterated failure, the paper will attempt to shed light on the various techniques as well as implications of this experiment, ranging from freezing a narrative into stasis to pushing it towards the furthest limits of speculation and hypothesis and from forcing the narrative to revolve around its tangential exterior to disclosing its constructedness through deterministic narratorial intrusions. Instead of dwelling on metafictionality or the way in which discursivity interrupts narrative or even the generic nature of Beckett’s work where the anonymity of the general envelopes the ‘demented particulars’ the paper will analyze the actual ‘stories’ to underscore the paradoxical status of his narrative impulse where the nothingness of stories meets the necessity of storytelling. The drift of these narrations relocates storytelling from the subjective space of the ‘I’ to the opacity of language as a field of the Other and finally into the originary as well as the terminal silence that defines narrative. The rest of the paper will deal with the consequences of Beckett’s assault on the realistic narrative logic of the novel by connecting it with the aporetic narrative logic that emerges from Lacanian psychoanalysis with its emphasis on the Real as opposed to realism. Finally how this speaks to the transitional narrative cultures of Modernism and Postmodernism is of
interest to this paper.

A brief critical introduction to Ashish Avikunthak's 2015 film Kalkimanthankatha which among other things is an adaptation of Samuel Beckett's play Waiting for Godot, set in the Mahakumbh. This piece was published in the Chatterjee and Lal print-catalogue (2015) with other brief articles, introducing the film in its Indian première.

If counterrevolution is only extremely and superficially connected with a social revolution by its procedures, but in its actual content is much more closely related to the further evolution of a given social system, and is in fact a particular historical phase of that social evolution, then it can no longer be regarded as a revolution in disguise.

This is an essay on Lacan's tenth seminar Anxiety which focuses on Lacan's discussion of this one affect which does not lie. It also takes issues with Adrian Johnston and Catherine Malabou's critical reading of Lacanian affect and defends Lacan's point of distinction between the signifier and the affect. Building on Lacan's suggestions, it then seeks to develop the possible horizons of affect in later Lacan through notions like 'jouissance' and 'lalangue.'  In doing so, it eventually proposes a Real logic of non-relation between the signifier and the affect.

২০১৫র বইমেলায় বিজ্ঞাপন পর্ব পত্রিকায় প্রকাশিত .

This article written for a special Bunuel issue of a Bengali magazine in 2015 traces the question of love and the absence of sexual relation in Lacanian psychoanalysis through Bunuel's last film That Obscure Object of Desire and shows how Bunuel treats this question not only at the level of the theme but also at the level of the cinematic medium by  sabotaging realism with the Real.

This paper examines the process of historical retelling by which, Peter Carey, in his novel My Life as a Fake (2003) looks back at the famous “Ern Malley” hoax of Australian literature. Carey’s reconstruction marks the actual event through a pattern of repetition [the novel does not deal with David Wiess’s (the Max Harris counterpart) reception of Bob McCorkle’s (the Ern Malley prototype) poetry in 1946 but Sarah Wode-Douglas’s editorial act in relation to McCorkle’s work in 1972] and an act of spatial splitting, which sees the original action, rooted in Australia, scatter into Malaysia and Indonesia, thus problematizing Australia’s dual relationship with Europe on the one hand and Asia on the other. The focus of the paper, however is the issue of authorship- as embedded in the hoax of 1941 and as re-fashioned by Carey in his novel. The “Ern Malley hoax”, originally was a conservative and partly nativist attack on the entry of European Modernism into Australian literature which was then subversively incorporated by Max Harris as a vindication of the very elements of Modernism that the hoax makers (Harold Stewart and James McAuley) were trying to go against. Carey’s literalisation of Harris’s comment “I still believe in Ern Malley” gives an actual life to the Malley counterpart Bob McCorkle. Carey, in giving physical presence to Bob, extends the idea of fake authorship into a truth of the fictional process, the novel revisits the Modernist debate in a Postmodern trajectory of the created character, turning real to haunt the authority of the author. This is what dismembers narrative authority as well as the divide that distinguishes the real from the textual or the discursive. Bob McCorkle’s missing text, also called “My Life as a Fake” (not incidentally at all!), is the ‘metaleptic’ device that collapses the real into the hyper-real. What Carey’s narrative does, with echoes from major European texts like Frankenstein, The Trial, Lord Jim and Paradise Lost is to re-enact the attempt to de-centralize Australian literary culture and thus perform a Poststructuralist breakdown of monolithic authorship. This implies a liberation of literature as well as its authorial topos into the global network of texts and cultures while trying to re-imagine Australia and its literature at the same time via the global map. In the process, the paper also goes on to comment on Carey’s own problematic relation to Australian literature, in the light of his alleged Americanism and relate his own handling of his author-function with the view of authorship that My Life as a Fake espouses. Does Carey’s harking back to a Modernist past in the post- Globalization world suggest a rhetoric of continuity or one of radical break? This remains a very important question, supposed to be addressed in the paper

It's a paper I presented in my Post-grads days in JU on Harold Pinter's last play Mountain Language. It was meant to be a tribute to the playwright who had died that year only.

I upload it as a work in progress piece without a bibliography!

The paper seeks to analyze the political function of silence in Mountain Language not only in terms of the issue of the Kurdish language which is the political context for the composition of the play but also in terms of Pinter's complex response to and critique of realism. I refer to certain performances of the play too in order to further my point. Drawing on Beckett's insight into the torture mechanism, I try to bring out the autonomous outside to the process of torture that is constructed through a silence of resistance. It is also about resisting an imposed notion of liberty and Pinter's fascinating use of words that qualify and inform what I call his political resistance to the signifier. There are passing references to other Pinter plays, especially belonging to his last and overtly political period.

This paper reads the subjective logic of a contingent community in Beckett’s How It Is (1961) in relation to Lacan’s Borromean knot of R-S-I. It offers a literary perspective on the social bonds of psychoanalysis by thinking through the question of a collective subjectivity in Lacan’s Borromean logic which allows infinite knotting in the Borromean chain but the Borromean property of the “plus one” maintains a special status of the One. If any one of the rings is cut, the whole chain dissolves. While this focus on the One may appear to be undemocratic from a communal perspective, the emancipatory aspect lies in the fact that it could be any one. The Borromean knot figures a coexistence of the One and the not-One and this speaks to Beckett’s novel, oscillating between solitude and company. Beckett arrives at a logic of collective subjectivity via the “not-all” without letting go of the One.

The paper, presented at the NEMLA 2010 Seminar on the Letters of Samuel Beckett takes Beckett's comments on Murphy as a point of departure to read some fresh insights into the text. It seeks to explore the corpus in terms of certain conceptual frames, derived from the references to the novel in the letters, thereby evoking themes, issues and ideas, often considered exclusive to Beckett's later works. It thus intends to reassert the importance of Murphy in the canon and in the growth of Beckett's writing.

In this paper, I am interested in studying Lacan's various evocations of number as self-same materiality as part of his mathematical treatment of the Real. I will go through later Lacan's major interventions into number and its iterability from the Fregean logic of the '+1' to the mapping of that
logic on the Borromean structure and the set-theoretical framework to argue for number as a potential domain to mark the Real of the subject. Evoking Alain Badiou's work on number and the famous debate between him and Miller on the status of lack in numerical structures, I will foreground the question of numerical infinity and see how a Lacanian complex of infinity plays out against notions of limit and limitlessness. What is it that passes from one number to another and what is it that doesn't pass? Is this passage the essence of number? Can there be a subjective accumulation in the number sequence which is not reducible to addition? Does the serial constitution of the subject in sinthomatic letters open up the numerical 'letter' as the Real break in the speaking-being? Is this Lacanian subject finite as Badiou would have it? If so, can this finitude
be seen in binary opposition to subjective infinity? Lacan's numerical logic would speak to these questions.

The paper is interested in probing into the materialist dialectic of numbers in J.M. Coetzee’s latest novel The Schooldays of Jesus (2016). As a sequel to The Childhood of Jesus (2013), Coetzee’s new novel consolidates little David’s anxious fascination with cracks between numbers by developing an elaborate philosophy of numbers. This philosophy maintains a dialectical structure by contesting a mundane mathematical realism where objects represent numbers with an alternative metaphysics of numbers in which numbers are themselves and nothing else. These mythical numbers reside in the stars and the dancing body becomes a corporeal site to enact this cosmic materiality of numbers. In this paper I will explore the political resonances of this mathematical philosophy in the novel and show how the numerical dialectic offers a platform to critique the instrumental rationality of the state and opens up a subversive mythology of numbers that resists the statist reduction of migrant identity to a rigid numerical schema. Coetzee’s novel subtly questions the politics of census by foregrounding the migrant society in the allegorical Estrella. As Simon and Ines hide David from being counted in the census, the little boy himself incarnates a crack in the statist number game. Coetzee raises the political dimension of numbers by connecting it not only to the contemporary global crisis of the ‘precariat’ but also to the question of pedagogy. Through the seemingly metaphysical but acutely material and affective mobilization of dance to invoke the self-same cosmic numbers, Coetzee shows us an alternative mode of education which echoes his own critical interest in the function of academia. To underline the political critique of what Coetzee calls ‘ant numbers’ in the novel, I will make use of Alain Badiou’s philosophical work on numbers in Number and Numbers (1990) and elsewhere. In his sophisticated mathematical ontology, Badiou is intensely conscious of the late-capitalist regime of numbers and his philosophical system breaks into the political-numerical law to suggest a radical possibility of that which cannot be numbered. I would argue that Coetzee is keenly aware of this political dialectic of numbers. If Badiou’s mathematical interventions offer a philosophical opportunity of theorising numerical ontology as an infinite failure of the countable, Coetzee’s novel makes a literary contribution towards a thinking of number as corporeal ontology that creates a mysterious shroud over the nation-state’s ideology of palpable calculations.