Veena Das

296 Pages·2006·1.14 MB·English

Life andWords
A
B O O K
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Life and Words
violence and the descent into the ordinary
Veena Das
Foreword by Stanley Cavell
university of california press
berkeley los angeles london
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Several chapters are revised versions of earlier essays, which
are listed in the acknowledgments on pages 267–269.
University of California Press
Berkeley and Los Angeles, California
University of California Press, Ltd.
London, England
© 2007by The Regents of the University of California
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Das, Veena.
Life and words : violence and the descent into the
ordinary / Veena Das ; foreword by Stanley Cavell.
p. cm.
“Philip E. Lilienthal Asian studies imprint.”
Includes bibliographical references and index.
isbn-13, 978-0-520-24744-4(cloth : alk. paper)
isbn-10, 0-520-24744-2(cloth : alk. paper)
isbn-13, 978-0-520-24745-1(pbk. : alk. paper)
isbn-10, 0-520-24745-0(pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Violence—India. 2. India—History—Partition,
1947. 3. Sikhs—Crimes against—India. 4. Riots—
India—History—20th century. 5. Suffering—India.
6. India—Politics and government. 7. India—Social
conditions. 8. India—Social life and customs. I. Title.
gn635.i4d2662 2007
303.60954—dc22 2006003041
Manufactured in the United States of America
15 14 13 12 11 10 09 08 07 06
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
This book is printed on New Leaf EcoBook 50, a 100%
recycled fiber of which 50% is de-inked post-consumer
waste, processed chlorine-free. EcoBook 50is acid-free
and meets the minimum requirements of ansi/astm
d5634–01(Permanence of Paper).
For
Saumya,Jishnu,and Sanmay—
for their gift of love
and
Ranen—
for the generosity of spirit with which he has
nourished our life together

contents
foreword / ix
1. The Event and the Everyday / 1
2. The Figure of the Abducted Woman:
The Citizen as Sexed / 18
3. Language and Body:
Transactions in the Construction of Pain / 38
4. The Act of Witnessing:
Violence, Gender, and Subjectivity / 59
5. Boundaries, Violence, and the Work ofTime / 79
6. Thinking ofTime and Subjectivity / 95
7. In the Region of Rumor / 108
8. The Force of the Local / 135
9. The Signature of the State: The Paradox of Illegibility / 162
10. Three Portraits of Grief and Mourning / 184
11. Revisiting Trauma, Testimony, and Political Community / 205
notes / 223
acknowledgments / 267
index / 271

foreword
veena das speaks of her “repeated (and even compulsive) reliance on
Wittgenstein” as playing a role in the philosophical friendship that has
developed between us. Beyond the clear evidence for this observation, the
truth of it, from my side of things, is further confirmed, if perhaps less
clearly, in an early and in a late thought of mine, each expressing my sense
of an anthropological register in Wittgenstein’s sensibility, thoughts not
reflected in Wittgenstein’s well-known recurrence, in his later (or as the
French put it, his second) philosophy, to imaginary “tribes” different from
“us.” I would like to mark my pleasure in contributing prefatory words for
Das’s wonderful book Life and Wordsby putting those easily lost thoughts
into words, into the world.
My early thought was directed to a passage in Philosophical Investigations
that roughly sounds to me like a reflection on a primitive allegory of incip-
ient anthropological work: “Suppose you came as an explorer into an
unknown country with a language quite strange to you. In what circum-
stances would you say that the people there gave orders, understood them,
obeyed them, rebelled against them, and so on? The common behaviour
of mankind is the system of reference by means of which we interpret an
unknown language” (§206).
This may, as other moments in Wittgenstein’s text may, seem either too
doubtful or too tame to be of much intellectual service. “Common behavior”
ix