The Absent Color. a/nil, Navayana, October 2023, ISBN 9788195539208. 104 pages
At the Beginning is an Inhibition
F
irst of all, it was my inhibition or hesitation – to review a book of poems, that too, on a book like this where the poet disjoins his own name with slash: a/nil, where the poet introduces himself or is introduced as “god’s favorite bastard” who “hymns god’s colorful absence”, he who is an “impossibility” and yet is “the real”. Who dares to read a book of poems like this, let alone speak on it, a book that leads “you down a rabbit hole – to a place of magic and strange logic”, a place where “you will be in the dark” and “you may feel foolish”? And apart from all these shock- effects, there is a line – on the very front cover page – from a grand philosophe named Slavoj Zizek, the master of shock-effects, who delights in and is delighted by the interminable tickling of witty pleasures, or pleasurable wits, which is even orgiastic at times, so some people say. “An authentic miracle”: nothing short of a miracle, not even that, nothing short of “authentic miracle”: so the grand philosophe intrigues us with. Despite this intriguing remark from the grand philosophe, there was an inhibition, or, there were inhibitions on my part. First of all, I don’t understand poetry, especially contemporary poetry, even more especially by someone like a/nil. But, then, the question that is anterior to it, asks itself, interrogating me in turn: does poetry at all belong to the order of understanding, let alone that of comprehension or knowledge? Or, does it sing in some other tongue, opens up another space, the space of the outside – other than the regime of intelligibility and of a visibility that offers itself for the comprehending gaze to fix it to something like “truth” with its gaze of the law, with its law of the gaze, and with its power of the concept that often operates like that of the law – the law of meaning, the law of means at our disposal, the means exhausted in realization of an end exterior to it? I cannot help envying the literary critics who understand poetry so well, and who can write so mellifluously about poetry, no less than the poems themselves.
At the beginning there was then an inhibition or indecision. There was another inhibition even more essential than the first one: I am a student of philosophy, primarily, and the inhibition lies in having to assume the risk of speaking in a language that, in the beautiful guise of praising poetry, surreptitiously would not hesitate to supply a set of norms, of constructions, rules of games, laws of the genre – in other words, a whole apparatus, regime or order of ascriptions and prescriptions. The dominant tradition of philosophy has not always been too far from assuming such disguises – in its very ebullient praise of poetry – and thereby, in a way difficult to understand, exercising a certain ontological violence, nothing short of what we can call “the violence of metaphysics”. Unless one learns to think philosophy itself in other tongues, opening up other spaces, to the point of exploding its very foundation set from its very inception: even here, even from this risk, philosophy has not been shied away.
Philosophy and poetry: such proximity there is between the two that it is easier to forget the distance which makes such proximity possible; or, it is not difficult either to forget the proximity which makes their distance, despite proximity, irreducible.
Nihilation
Why, then, have I decided to review such a book of poetry?: there is no convincing answer I can give to myself, let alone to the poet and to you, the readers. May be there is something in that monstrous gesture of disjoining one’s own name with a slash? The name of the poet is a/nil where even the capital letter, supposed to be proper to proper names – according to the rules of the grammar – is missing. May be the cover page which is horizontally divided between blue and black that fascinated me? Or, even more perhaps, this monstrous line that I read about the book – “The Absent Color is to language what Annihilation of Caste is to politics” – that provoked in me certain jouissance – this impossible jouissance, which is nevertheless the real, only real, even the Real? How do we understand this analogy which is not just between the two books, but also between poetry and politics? Is it the formal-analytical analogy grounded on the principle of similarity and that of formal proportion? Or, is it analogy that enthused me, an analogia which is even more radical, in the way that Saint Thomas Aquinas, and in our contemporary times Erich Przywara and Hans Urs von Balthasar want us to understand analogia as: “more similar, even more dissimilar” where, however, it is the theological and the ontological question concerning the relation between ens creatum and ens increatum that is at stake? Without bringing the theological question of analogia here, which too has its long and tortuous history, the question still remains for us: how this sentence – which almost sounds, or it in fact sounds like a “declaration” – makes sense? Does poetry declare? Is it in such a language of declaration that poetry sings?
So, it is declared: this book The Absent Color does something to language which is somewhat like what another book called Annihilation of Castes does to politics. Now this is a prodigious claim, to say the least. What this other book, a very well known and profoundly important book, does to politics?: it is not easy to give an answer to it. It is not that there are no answers, there are always answers – the poet reminds us, almost in a whispering tone, so easy to miss – “if we are willing to work for them, indulging in the risk he will have us take”. So far, as with a/nil, I am only “full of questions”. What is a question if not the absent color of infinity itself? And even more so, if an answer to each of the questions itself is a question in turn, then a book of poems would turn out to be like “a Bible”, so the poet poetizes, which is “without punctuation”. Now I am even more intrigued: what does punctuation do to language, apart from just giving us momentary pauses intermittently so that words can breathe in this empty measure of silence? Is the Bible in true sense of the term, which is the Book par excellence – not just because the word “ bible” itself means “ book” – such a continuous river of sense, overflowing sense, opening to the Real, in such a way where our breathing expires, precisely because there is too much real in it?
However, the monstrous question still remains for us: what the famous book Annihilation of Castes does to politics – does this book The Absent Color do to language? I don’t have an answer to this immense question, but I hope to take recourse to the words that appear in the respective titles themselves of these two books. To annihilate – if we take it in the verbal sense – is to render everything “nil” or “nihil” – of attributes, predicates, qualifiers. This nihilation or rendering everything nil does not so much merely de-constitute the regime of phenomena but thereby opens, first of all, the very event of phenomenality in its nudity. This affirmation is the abyssal opening moment of every act of negation that implies in this “ nihilation” or to render everything “ nil”, an affirmation which – since it goes beyond the mere opposition between the positing and negating – can only let itself be given to language: what Michel Foucault would call, regarding Maurice Blanchot as “the non-posited” or “non-positive affirmation.”¹ This affirmation is an infinite affirmation of an utter nudity where subtraction appears more radical than additions; and this is why it still speaks in the language of “nil”. a/nil speaks in this blue tongue of “nil”: for Nil is blue as much as it is nude of all colors. This is why the sky appears blue; since the sky in itself absents itself from all colors, it thereby makes the event of phenomenality itself appear in its nudity, not so much as “blue” – in the sense of a noun – but it blues all colors. Since it is other-than-all-colors, it may also happen to be the immemorial origin of all colors, an origin without origin, even without this Origin that we call by this impossible name “God”, if God is understood to be the legislative principium of the world, as the cause sui of an onto-theological metaphysics, as the arché of all potencies of the world. The blue is the color of the absence of colors: it is the ethereal element permeating everything, because in itself it does not allow itself to be something. This is after all what the name of the poet “Anil” – now without the mark of disjunction – implies: the wind blows from somewhere and goes towards somewhere else whose address of origin and end we don’t know. Without arché and also without telos, the spirit of the wind – or, the wind of the spirit – blows, everywhere and nowhere: turning everything into a new blue, the blue that never existed before, the blue out which everything flows, because it is in itself nothing.
The word “annihilation” – from which certain act of violence seems to be inseparable, especially if one takes it in the verbal sense – then does not so much mean nihilation of everything for its own sake: it does not narcissistically celebrate the closure of its own non-being. Rather, it makes appear the face in its nudity, as if for the first time, the face that was so filled with attributes, predicates, prescriptions, ascriptions which form an immense system of history which is as long as a millennium, may even be longer than that, the system of history – despite its amorphous traits – that we may call it “caste-system”. This task – some call it “ political” – is not exhausted in the famous ontological question: “to be or not to be” : for this great ontological question, which also raises the question of “ not to be”, appears to be hurrying too much to solve – so the poet reminds us – “ the future in the present”. As such, all such ontological questions are to be turned into refracted questions: this is what poetry does to language. By refracting the ontological question concerning non-being into another sort of question is to make the face appear itself, the face of the one who – in the history of beings, in the history of knowledge, in the history of a civilization from which a certain barbarism is indissociable – always has been reduced, by an arché-originary violence, into nothing, into a non-being without a face, a face that is only to be retained at the most rudimentary level of de-faced non-being, to be spat upon, to be mocked and to be degraded into a nothing.
There, then, appears here two different “nil”: there is the “ not to be” which is posited as opposed to the “ to be”; but there is the other “nil” which is outside of this opposition which forms totalities: the other “ nil”, the “ nil” that does not operate within the ontological circulation of time, and which does not participate in this intrigue of being, is the “nil” that truly releases futurity from being exhausted in the present: this is truly what we may call the “ event”. This event of futurity is not another present time that will come to pass away; it is otherwise than what is presently present, but inseparable from the presencing of this world; we may perhaps say that it is the futurity of the Now when – as the empty measure of time, as the distantiation of the “inter” – all intervention takes place. Perhaps this is how the political happens. Perhaps this how poetry too happens. Each in its own singularity, poetry and the political happens. There then takes place the transformation of language in poetry, and there takes place the political. That this Now is not what is now presently present, and yet is the womb of anteriority where the political and the poetical take place, soon to be born, a pregnant Now: this paradox is the very enigma that a/nil engages with, or rather it engages him, to the point of obsession and insomnia where one is at once vigilant with the urgency of a task, lest the immeasurable stealthily comes like a thief and passes away unrecognized.
The Absent Color is an impossible invitation – difficult to accept and difficult to refuse – to ask questions and to be asked by questions in turn. Like Edmond Jabès, a/nil is the poet of questions. The poet of questions is someone whose songs are essentially cries – that cry out in the wilderness, in the desert of time, so that even inanimate objects starts lamenting at once. When such a poet cries, even stones cry out – so sings a verse in the Bible (Luke 19:40). Perhaps such a lamentation of stones does not have punctuation marks.
Note 1 Michel Foucault, “ A Preface to Transgression” in Aesthetics, Method, Epistemology, edited by James Faubion ( New York: The New Press, 1998), p. 74.
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Saitya Brata Das teaches literature and philosophy at Jawaharlal Nehru University. He is the author of " Of Prayers and Tears: Essays on Political Theology " ( 2023).
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