Tales of Power and Other Thoughts
Writing
is a dangerous supplement to speech.
– Jacques Derrida
By the central idea of Power, I understand it as a reservoir of strength or energy. Alongside this, there is another meaning of the word Power in Bengali, which also denotes a ball—a spherical object. In outer space, under intense rotation, this spherical shape emerges as the most natural form, one that carries the least distortion. From the perspective of linguistic analysis, this can be interpreted as follows:
– Jacques Derrida
By the central idea of Power, I understand it as a reservoir of strength or energy. Alongside this, there is another meaning of the word Power in Bengali, which also denotes a ball—a spherical object. In outer space, under intense rotation, this spherical shape emerges as the most natural form, one that carries the least distortion. From the perspective of linguistic analysis, this can be interpreted as follows:
The
above diagram is called a Saussurean Graphic System.
Within
the central idea of any word, each letter carries its own marginal idea,
already imprisoned there.
From the perspective of linguistics, in the case of the word Power, though the two distinct meanings share a common marginal idea—the consonant “l”—there is no logical connection between their two central ideas.
That is why the title Tales of Power produces, at first encounter, a rather perplexing mental image—
All these curses, disbeliefs, infernal oaths—
ecstasies, cries, tears, remorse, and frenzied hymns—
having passed through echo-splintered endless paths,
pour into the dying soul a narcotic, heavenly consolation.
From a thousand scriptural throats the same proclamation rises again,
from a thousand trumpets resounds the same campaign,
from a thousand fortresses blaze the inextinguishable torches,
and in vast forests is heard the lost hunter’s exalted summons.
What further proof is needed? O Lord, is this not supreme?
Is this not the flawless testimony of our radiant glory?
These fervent tears, that through the ages have labored ceaselessly,
only to dissolve at last upon the boundless shore of Your infinity.
From this confusion arises the idea of a contradiction. A contradiction embedded within the arrangement of letters that forms a word. For example, the contradiction between power and volume. To understand how far the primary meaning, generated through the interaction of central and marginal ideas (what linguistics might call the “binary code”), aligns with the evolved or secondary meaning, one must observe the evolution of a linguistic community over a long duration.
The meaning captured through a word and its utterance creates a concept in the matrix of the human mind; this concept, when expanded, develops into a culture or a civilization.
Take, for instance, the abstract notion of Power. One meaning of Power is formless—it signifies energy, which then develops in the human mind through multiple layers of meaning. The second meaning relates to form or volume—something tangible. The moment the word is spoken, our brain’s grey cells can recognize it. Yet the determinant shape can vary greatly across individuals and contexts: a football, a tennis ball, a ping-pong ball, the moon in the sky, or even the two testicles of the body. Both material and immaterial ideas depend largely on the mechanical and dimensional relativity of language.
And since these concepts have no fixed, permanent meaning, those who have bound civilization to language and written history through description or analysis cannot dictate a single interpretative method. Consider phrases like “sightless eyes,” “baseless night,” or “dark morning.” What do we usually understand? Take, for example, the line: “Sitting on the deserted steps of the cremation ground, Sunanda stared into the void with sightless eyes.” How many would assume Sunanda is literally blind? Likely none. Thus, “sightless eyes” does not necessarily mean blindness.
In fact, the effort to create meaning through language—an effort common to writers—can easily be reconstructed using this method. I cannot imagine what shape human civilization and culture would take if all the timeless poems of the world were to be reconstructed in this manner. The supposedly “abstract” concept of Power is not as transparent as we think. Power can mean energy, or form, or something in between. The reader must construct the meaning. And therein lies the delight.
Suppose one billion attentive readers worldwide have read the Bible, and one hundred million have read Macbeth. Among them, ten million have read both. Of these, three million read Macbeth first and the Bible later, while seven million did the reverse. Consider the permutations and combinations—enormous in scale—which we shall not compute here. And in reality, these readers have read countless other novels, stories, poems, histories, geographies, works of science, not to mention scriptures, spiritual texts, erotica, puzzles, and even the Hanuman Chalisa.
Given such endless variants, how many different conceptions of the Bible or Macbeth might exist—or have existed—in the minds of individuals, known or unknown? Each conception is distinct from the other, no two identical, just as no two genetic protein structures in humans are the same.
Thus, a word can carry innumerable conceptions. A sentence generates an even broader range. And the process of comprehending a novel or poem—how vast and overwhelming it can be! Our conventional notions are so small in comparison to this infinite ocean of human thought that Derrida could dismiss those notions with a mere breath.
Knowledge and Language: A human perception, and the method of expressing it through language in written form, can indeed be explained by a linear formula.
Universe│Life ‹―│―› Writer│Poet│Philosopher ‹―│―› Reader│Hearsay
80% ‹―│―› 40% ‹―│―› 10% (word of mouth)
The total shape of worldly life, as perceived by a writer, may be likened to a pitcher full of water. But by the time it is committed to writing, 60% of that water is lost—simply because language is incapable of fully conveying the precision of human perception.
In the case of artists of the stature of Shakespeare or Milton, this loss remains at around 40%. But for the writers of Mills & Boon romances, 90% of the pitcher’s water is wasted, owing to their inability to grasp the reality of life. By the time their work reaches the reader, the vessel is practically empty.
Then, of the little water that does reach the reader, another 20% vanishes—erased by the differences in each reader’s judgment and capacity for perception. And when that reader, in turn, tries to convey the essence of his experience or delight to someone else, if even 5% of the water remains in the pitcher, we must count ourselves fortunate indeed.
Seeing all this, I can easily admit that what I understood of Macbeth was but a distorted form of its true spirit, one which my own life-conditioned perceptions helped to deform. For there is another reason: every conception of the world we hold about human beings comes only through the human mind itself.
This means that all our knowledge—history, geography, science, and literature—is necessarily as distorted as the human brain is prone to distort any pure idea, stirring it into a kind of khichuri and thereby rendering it imperfect. Our lives thus admit of no neutral or objective statement, since no alien intelligence has yet descended from the cosmos to interpret our thoughts with absolute impartiality.
O Ocean, who can ever know how many jewels lie hidden in your depths?
You two, consumed by envy, stand guard over your own mysteries!
And meanwhile, countless ages slip away—
Relentless, pitiless, yet you wage your ceaseless strife,
Finding strange delight in slaughter and in death,
Two eternal wrestlers, unforgiving brothers, locked in combat.
What did I read, and what did I think of it? Why did I think of it at all? What did I understand, and what will I ever be able to make others understand? Did the writing itself convey meaning, or was it the surrounding circumstance—the environment in which I read—that, filtered through my intellect, impressed a sense upon the mind? Is the writing secondary and the thought primary? Or is the writing itself the principal thing, while the state of the reader’s mind at that moment is decisive?
Consider how a poor book with a splendid cover can still give rise to a feeling of delight. Or how a particular mental distraction may cause one to read a text of love as if it were a text of war. Perhaps, then, it is the interplay of place, time, and context—the kala, the patra, the subtle conditions—that shapes the very instinct by which we come to grasp any writing at all.
Therefore, the formula is, Speech ―› Central │ Writing ―› Marginal
From this principle, what I understand is that all my comprehension rests upon a structure determined by a handful of men—the structure of language, or of concept. And upon its sequential order. That entire harvest which we call philosophical thought. Had Plato not existed, and only Voltaire remained, then Marx’s interpretation would have taken an utterly different shape. Had there been no Kant, only Nietzsche, Sartre’s existentialism would have assumed a wholly different form. Thus, there is a genealogy to human ideas—an inheritance that cannot easily be denied.
If I were not preparing a labyrinth in which I could lose myself, do not ask who I am and do not ask me to remain the same…
—Michel Foucault
In the end it appears that the poetic meaning of “Power” is a rounded mass of flesh (not perfectly spherical, but twisted like a coiled pipe—or perhaps instead of flesh it could be the very force of life itself). Power, then, becomes the primordial stage of the fable—the embryonic life of the narrative.
The free human will forever remain the lover of the Ocean!
The Ocean is your mirror; in its endless turbulence you behold the reflection of your own wave-stirred soul.
You too are a participant in its bitterness, in its bottomless abyss.
You love to plunge headlong into your own self-fashioning;
in its eyes, in its arms, your body delights in being embraced.
Your heart forgets its own rhythm, and longs, from time to time, to merge with the Ocean’s harsh, barbaric resonance of dominion.
Just as life does not exist outside of words, life itself may be a canvas of words. And the canvas of words is nothing but a play of differences. A play of presence and absence. A play of departure and of return.
The straight rows of pillars, vast and dependable,
the sunlit waves of the painted sea, blazing with endless colors,
like immense caves at dusk—proud, formidable—
in that enchanted light I have spent a thousand years.
The patterns of the sky sway with the surge of waves;
in that profound, solemn rhythm mingles the wealth of colors
reflected in my eyes from the setting sun,
raising a chorus like the music of supreme power.
At the wrong time, in adverse circumstances of place, time, and setting, nothing carries its true meaning. Meaning becomes secondary to intention. To the entire world, it is an ill-fated hour. From the womb of the earth, a stream of black water rises. That water is the life of humankind. Its unhindered emergence is called peace. Democracy. In the Middle Eastern countries, this revolution is drawing near. In every book of poetry, every novel, every painting, I can see only this invisible current of black water. If one lights a matchstick and sets fire to the edge of that waterline, the entire universe would burn to ashes.
Language has refined it, made it rational—
but my youth was nothing more than a storm of darkness,
brightened only rarely by the slanting rays of the sun.
My garden, broken by thunder and rain,
bore only one or two blood-red fruits.
Now, at the edge of my mind, autumn approaches.
This time I must be busy with spades and shovels—
only then might the land, washed away in torrential floods,
be saved, its surface torn open with wounds like broken graves.
The new blossoms I ceaselessly envision in dream,
rooted in this soil damp as a seashore—
will they ever receive that nourishment of light
which alone can store up their strength?
Spinoza once declared that sin and virtue, justice and injustice, good and evil—these are nothing but human inventions. They have no correspondence with the order of Nature. Nature is indifferent to human ethics. The death of a man of great stature is no greater than the death of an ant.
All around us there is conflict, political assassinations, genocides, communal riots. People are dying. Some hearts are disturbed by this. But why? Should a philosopher be unsettled by death? Perhaps a poet, or an emotional writer might be. Yet who has ever paused to judge the “death” of a chicken while tasting its meat in a richly spiced dish?
On January 3rd, 1889, in Turin, a coachman was mercilessly whipping his horse. The animal had disobeyed its master’s command. Friedrich Nietzsche rushed towards the coachman in a frenzy, almost in a violent rage. And then, just before madness overtook him entirely, he flung his arms around the horse’s neck and broke down, weeping uncontrollably. Moments later he collapsed unconscious in the street. His friends barely managed to prevent his arrest, and carried him away. After two days of delirium and incoherent speech, he was confined to a mental asylum. Nietzsche lived for another eleven years, but as a complete lunatic.
What Nietzsche could not endure—the inhumanity of civilization—is precisely the condition in which we live day and night. In a society where the death of an ant, or the lifelong bondage of a horse, is taken as a natural fact, why should the killing of an innocent man be regarded as a crisis of morality? The daily massacres of Bosnia, Syria, Afghanistan—such scenes are now woven into the fabric of normalcy for modern society. Human civilization has certified them as “ordinary.”
Or perhaps the opposite may be true—that all the knowledge we have acquired is false, and that this so-called great civilization of man has no great purpose at all (nor even an ignoble one).
O Death, the time has come! This land is weary in its sorrow.
Come, let us gird our loins, lift the anchor—O ancient Death!
You, the helmsman, know well: beyond the dark sky, beyond the sea,
there lies the sunlit shore of our living spirit.
Pour forth that venom of yours which strangely holds a spark of renewal!
Ignite that fire through which we may seek immersion in the unfathomable depths!
Whether it be Heaven or Hell—what difference does it make,
so long as in the womb of the Unknown we find ever-new beginnings!
Thus, again and again, the central idea of bal (power) resurfaces.
The conflict and collusion between the strong and the weak become ever more intense. Rousseau said: Nature is innocent, pure, natural. Civilization and culture are corrupting, perverse. Nietzsche, on the contrary, claimed: Nature is neutral, indifferent. Culture is powerful, moral.
The entire world stands suspended on this thread of binary opposites. The marginal concepts are cornered, while the central force (bal) presses down upon them to rise. After the fall of Marx, this perhaps remains the only postmodern dialectic. Here, the role of the material is negligible; in truth, most of this is driven by the metaphysics of matter.
From the perspective of linguistics, in the case of the word Power, though the two distinct meanings share a common marginal idea—the consonant “l”—there is no logical connection between their two central ideas.
That is why the title Tales of Power produces, at first encounter, a rather perplexing mental image—
All these curses, disbeliefs, infernal oaths—
ecstasies, cries, tears, remorse, and frenzied hymns—
having passed through echo-splintered endless paths,
pour into the dying soul a narcotic, heavenly consolation.
From a thousand scriptural throats the same proclamation rises again,
from a thousand trumpets resounds the same campaign,
from a thousand fortresses blaze the inextinguishable torches,
and in vast forests is heard the lost hunter’s exalted summons.
What further proof is needed? O Lord, is this not supreme?
Is this not the flawless testimony of our radiant glory?
These fervent tears, that through the ages have labored ceaselessly,
only to dissolve at last upon the boundless shore of Your infinity.
From this confusion arises the idea of a contradiction. A contradiction embedded within the arrangement of letters that forms a word. For example, the contradiction between power and volume. To understand how far the primary meaning, generated through the interaction of central and marginal ideas (what linguistics might call the “binary code”), aligns with the evolved or secondary meaning, one must observe the evolution of a linguistic community over a long duration.
The meaning captured through a word and its utterance creates a concept in the matrix of the human mind; this concept, when expanded, develops into a culture or a civilization.
Take, for instance, the abstract notion of Power. One meaning of Power is formless—it signifies energy, which then develops in the human mind through multiple layers of meaning. The second meaning relates to form or volume—something tangible. The moment the word is spoken, our brain’s grey cells can recognize it. Yet the determinant shape can vary greatly across individuals and contexts: a football, a tennis ball, a ping-pong ball, the moon in the sky, or even the two testicles of the body. Both material and immaterial ideas depend largely on the mechanical and dimensional relativity of language.
And since these concepts have no fixed, permanent meaning, those who have bound civilization to language and written history through description or analysis cannot dictate a single interpretative method. Consider phrases like “sightless eyes,” “baseless night,” or “dark morning.” What do we usually understand? Take, for example, the line: “Sitting on the deserted steps of the cremation ground, Sunanda stared into the void with sightless eyes.” How many would assume Sunanda is literally blind? Likely none. Thus, “sightless eyes” does not necessarily mean blindness.
In fact, the effort to create meaning through language—an effort common to writers—can easily be reconstructed using this method. I cannot imagine what shape human civilization and culture would take if all the timeless poems of the world were to be reconstructed in this manner. The supposedly “abstract” concept of Power is not as transparent as we think. Power can mean energy, or form, or something in between. The reader must construct the meaning. And therein lies the delight.
Suppose one billion attentive readers worldwide have read the Bible, and one hundred million have read Macbeth. Among them, ten million have read both. Of these, three million read Macbeth first and the Bible later, while seven million did the reverse. Consider the permutations and combinations—enormous in scale—which we shall not compute here. And in reality, these readers have read countless other novels, stories, poems, histories, geographies, works of science, not to mention scriptures, spiritual texts, erotica, puzzles, and even the Hanuman Chalisa.
Given such endless variants, how many different conceptions of the Bible or Macbeth might exist—or have existed—in the minds of individuals, known or unknown? Each conception is distinct from the other, no two identical, just as no two genetic protein structures in humans are the same.
Thus, a word can carry innumerable conceptions. A sentence generates an even broader range. And the process of comprehending a novel or poem—how vast and overwhelming it can be! Our conventional notions are so small in comparison to this infinite ocean of human thought that Derrida could dismiss those notions with a mere breath.
Knowledge and Language: A human perception, and the method of expressing it through language in written form, can indeed be explained by a linear formula.
Universe│Life ‹―│―› Writer│Poet│Philosopher ‹―│―› Reader│Hearsay
80% ‹―│―› 40% ‹―│―› 10% (word of mouth)
The total shape of worldly life, as perceived by a writer, may be likened to a pitcher full of water. But by the time it is committed to writing, 60% of that water is lost—simply because language is incapable of fully conveying the precision of human perception.
In the case of artists of the stature of Shakespeare or Milton, this loss remains at around 40%. But for the writers of Mills & Boon romances, 90% of the pitcher’s water is wasted, owing to their inability to grasp the reality of life. By the time their work reaches the reader, the vessel is practically empty.
Then, of the little water that does reach the reader, another 20% vanishes—erased by the differences in each reader’s judgment and capacity for perception. And when that reader, in turn, tries to convey the essence of his experience or delight to someone else, if even 5% of the water remains in the pitcher, we must count ourselves fortunate indeed.
Seeing all this, I can easily admit that what I understood of Macbeth was but a distorted form of its true spirit, one which my own life-conditioned perceptions helped to deform. For there is another reason: every conception of the world we hold about human beings comes only through the human mind itself.
This means that all our knowledge—history, geography, science, and literature—is necessarily as distorted as the human brain is prone to distort any pure idea, stirring it into a kind of khichuri and thereby rendering it imperfect. Our lives thus admit of no neutral or objective statement, since no alien intelligence has yet descended from the cosmos to interpret our thoughts with absolute impartiality.
O Ocean, who can ever know how many jewels lie hidden in your depths?
You two, consumed by envy, stand guard over your own mysteries!
And meanwhile, countless ages slip away—
Relentless, pitiless, yet you wage your ceaseless strife,
Finding strange delight in slaughter and in death,
Two eternal wrestlers, unforgiving brothers, locked in combat.
What did I read, and what did I think of it? Why did I think of it at all? What did I understand, and what will I ever be able to make others understand? Did the writing itself convey meaning, or was it the surrounding circumstance—the environment in which I read—that, filtered through my intellect, impressed a sense upon the mind? Is the writing secondary and the thought primary? Or is the writing itself the principal thing, while the state of the reader’s mind at that moment is decisive?
Consider how a poor book with a splendid cover can still give rise to a feeling of delight. Or how a particular mental distraction may cause one to read a text of love as if it were a text of war. Perhaps, then, it is the interplay of place, time, and context—the kala, the patra, the subtle conditions—that shapes the very instinct by which we come to grasp any writing at all.
Therefore, the formula is, Speech ―› Central │ Writing ―› Marginal
From this principle, what I understand is that all my comprehension rests upon a structure determined by a handful of men—the structure of language, or of concept. And upon its sequential order. That entire harvest which we call philosophical thought. Had Plato not existed, and only Voltaire remained, then Marx’s interpretation would have taken an utterly different shape. Had there been no Kant, only Nietzsche, Sartre’s existentialism would have assumed a wholly different form. Thus, there is a genealogy to human ideas—an inheritance that cannot easily be denied.
If I were not preparing a labyrinth in which I could lose myself, do not ask who I am and do not ask me to remain the same…
—Michel Foucault
In the end it appears that the poetic meaning of “Power” is a rounded mass of flesh (not perfectly spherical, but twisted like a coiled pipe—or perhaps instead of flesh it could be the very force of life itself). Power, then, becomes the primordial stage of the fable—the embryonic life of the narrative.
The free human will forever remain the lover of the Ocean!
The Ocean is your mirror; in its endless turbulence you behold the reflection of your own wave-stirred soul.
You too are a participant in its bitterness, in its bottomless abyss.
You love to plunge headlong into your own self-fashioning;
in its eyes, in its arms, your body delights in being embraced.
Your heart forgets its own rhythm, and longs, from time to time, to merge with the Ocean’s harsh, barbaric resonance of dominion.
Just as life does not exist outside of words, life itself may be a canvas of words. And the canvas of words is nothing but a play of differences. A play of presence and absence. A play of departure and of return.
The straight rows of pillars, vast and dependable,
the sunlit waves of the painted sea, blazing with endless colors,
like immense caves at dusk—proud, formidable—
in that enchanted light I have spent a thousand years.
The patterns of the sky sway with the surge of waves;
in that profound, solemn rhythm mingles the wealth of colors
reflected in my eyes from the setting sun,
raising a chorus like the music of supreme power.
At the wrong time, in adverse circumstances of place, time, and setting, nothing carries its true meaning. Meaning becomes secondary to intention. To the entire world, it is an ill-fated hour. From the womb of the earth, a stream of black water rises. That water is the life of humankind. Its unhindered emergence is called peace. Democracy. In the Middle Eastern countries, this revolution is drawing near. In every book of poetry, every novel, every painting, I can see only this invisible current of black water. If one lights a matchstick and sets fire to the edge of that waterline, the entire universe would burn to ashes.
Language has refined it, made it rational—
but my youth was nothing more than a storm of darkness,
brightened only rarely by the slanting rays of the sun.
My garden, broken by thunder and rain,
bore only one or two blood-red fruits.
Now, at the edge of my mind, autumn approaches.
This time I must be busy with spades and shovels—
only then might the land, washed away in torrential floods,
be saved, its surface torn open with wounds like broken graves.
The new blossoms I ceaselessly envision in dream,
rooted in this soil damp as a seashore—
will they ever receive that nourishment of light
which alone can store up their strength?
Spinoza once declared that sin and virtue, justice and injustice, good and evil—these are nothing but human inventions. They have no correspondence with the order of Nature. Nature is indifferent to human ethics. The death of a man of great stature is no greater than the death of an ant.
All around us there is conflict, political assassinations, genocides, communal riots. People are dying. Some hearts are disturbed by this. But why? Should a philosopher be unsettled by death? Perhaps a poet, or an emotional writer might be. Yet who has ever paused to judge the “death” of a chicken while tasting its meat in a richly spiced dish?
On January 3rd, 1889, in Turin, a coachman was mercilessly whipping his horse. The animal had disobeyed its master’s command. Friedrich Nietzsche rushed towards the coachman in a frenzy, almost in a violent rage. And then, just before madness overtook him entirely, he flung his arms around the horse’s neck and broke down, weeping uncontrollably. Moments later he collapsed unconscious in the street. His friends barely managed to prevent his arrest, and carried him away. After two days of delirium and incoherent speech, he was confined to a mental asylum. Nietzsche lived for another eleven years, but as a complete lunatic.
What Nietzsche could not endure—the inhumanity of civilization—is precisely the condition in which we live day and night. In a society where the death of an ant, or the lifelong bondage of a horse, is taken as a natural fact, why should the killing of an innocent man be regarded as a crisis of morality? The daily massacres of Bosnia, Syria, Afghanistan—such scenes are now woven into the fabric of normalcy for modern society. Human civilization has certified them as “ordinary.”
Or perhaps the opposite may be true—that all the knowledge we have acquired is false, and that this so-called great civilization of man has no great purpose at all (nor even an ignoble one).
O Death, the time has come! This land is weary in its sorrow.
Come, let us gird our loins, lift the anchor—O ancient Death!
You, the helmsman, know well: beyond the dark sky, beyond the sea,
there lies the sunlit shore of our living spirit.
Pour forth that venom of yours which strangely holds a spark of renewal!
Ignite that fire through which we may seek immersion in the unfathomable depths!
Whether it be Heaven or Hell—what difference does it make,
so long as in the womb of the Unknown we find ever-new beginnings!
Thus, again and again, the central idea of bal (power) resurfaces.
The conflict and collusion between the strong and the weak become ever more intense. Rousseau said: Nature is innocent, pure, natural. Civilization and culture are corrupting, perverse. Nietzsche, on the contrary, claimed: Nature is neutral, indifferent. Culture is powerful, moral.
The entire world stands suspended on this thread of binary opposites. The marginal concepts are cornered, while the central force (bal) presses down upon them to rise. After the fall of Marx, this perhaps remains the only postmodern dialectic. Here, the role of the material is negligible; in truth, most of this is driven by the metaphysics of matter.
It
should be noted: in the post-Marxist world, institutionalism has exchanged
places with capitalism. “You are a believer, you are a communist, you are a
fascist.” In the very notion of Bhubanagram itself, the imagination
of our future state has already been inscribed.
Chasing after the rhythm of the waves, restless in the swell,
we dance the Infinite along the boundaries of the sea.
Some rush away, abandoning their corrupted homeland,
others are eager to cross the terrors of childhood.
At times, an astrologer drowns in the eyes of a woman—
a drunken Circe, surrounded by deadly exile.
After five thousand years of toying with human emotions, humanity has finally arrived here. In this Middle Eastern moment of immense agitation, amid the panic of SARS, in an age of state-controlled media, in countries emptied of democratic opposition—unless the inevitable Baudrillardian Fatal Theory descends, no proper judgment can ever be made between the rapist and the raped. This is indeed an era of personal nihilism—as if humanity has no other purpose left except earning dollars.
Knowledge takes the form of Power-Knowledge, from which the ideal of the Will to Power spreads. Foucault imagined a warfare society replacing the welfare society. All social activities, in his framing, can be explained as struggles between different sections of society.
Perhaps writing itself no longer has anything left to explain to humans. Across the world, an enormous intellectual power of mediocrity has arisen. The use of language has been corrupted under their dominance. The ruler’s speech echoes in the writings of journalists, intellectuals, scriptwriters, translators. This form of intellectual anarchy can be represented in a linguist’s model diagram in the following way—
Chasing after the rhythm of the waves, restless in the swell,
we dance the Infinite along the boundaries of the sea.
Some rush away, abandoning their corrupted homeland,
others are eager to cross the terrors of childhood.
At times, an astrologer drowns in the eyes of a woman—
a drunken Circe, surrounded by deadly exile.
After five thousand years of toying with human emotions, humanity has finally arrived here. In this Middle Eastern moment of immense agitation, amid the panic of SARS, in an age of state-controlled media, in countries emptied of democratic opposition—unless the inevitable Baudrillardian Fatal Theory descends, no proper judgment can ever be made between the rapist and the raped. This is indeed an era of personal nihilism—as if humanity has no other purpose left except earning dollars.
Knowledge takes the form of Power-Knowledge, from which the ideal of the Will to Power spreads. Foucault imagined a warfare society replacing the welfare society. All social activities, in his framing, can be explained as struggles between different sections of society.
Perhaps writing itself no longer has anything left to explain to humans. Across the world, an enormous intellectual power of mediocrity has arisen. The use of language has been corrupted under their dominance. The ruler’s speech echoes in the writings of journalists, intellectuals, scriptwriters, translators. This form of intellectual anarchy can be represented in a linguist’s model diagram in the following way—
Restless,
like your destiny,
and fearful, the ashen vault of heaven
unceasingly lowers some nameless thought into your void.
Licentious one, speak!
My thirst has not yet learned contentment,
it still wanders in the darkness of uncertainty.
But deprived though I may be of the Latin Paradise,
never shall I weep like Ovid in exile.
Beyond the Renaissance and Romanticism, nowhere around the oilfields can one find love. The reign of maintenance allowances and the arrogance of swapping technologies has become so sharp that it is nearly impossible to discover love without manuscripts. Love itself has turned into the name of a miraculous sorrow. To the one who can rise above binary oppositions and analyze life from that vantage, the entire consciousness of the world seems to be waiting.
There is nothing more left to say. From birth to death, life is nothing but becoming part of that great narrative of power. Perhaps, in another way, the Ball Epic—the Tale of Power—will once again begin its journey, from formlessness toward form. Therefore…
O my sorrow, be wise, and learn at last to hold steady.
You longed for evening—see, it comes, it is at hand.
A dim halo slowly covers the city,
Soothing some hearts, while others sink under care.
Now let them rush on—those merciless executioners of joy—
Cracking their whips over the vile, the weary crowd;
Let them pay back their slavery to pleasure with repentance.
But sorrow, come—place your hand in mine.
Let us depart together, far away. Look—
Upon the balconies of the sky, all the years now spent
Lean down in solemn antique attire.
(A poem by Charles Baudelaire, in Buddhadeb Basu’s translation)
and fearful, the ashen vault of heaven
unceasingly lowers some nameless thought into your void.
Licentious one, speak!
My thirst has not yet learned contentment,
it still wanders in the darkness of uncertainty.
But deprived though I may be of the Latin Paradise,
never shall I weep like Ovid in exile.
Beyond the Renaissance and Romanticism, nowhere around the oilfields can one find love. The reign of maintenance allowances and the arrogance of swapping technologies has become so sharp that it is nearly impossible to discover love without manuscripts. Love itself has turned into the name of a miraculous sorrow. To the one who can rise above binary oppositions and analyze life from that vantage, the entire consciousness of the world seems to be waiting.
There is nothing more left to say. From birth to death, life is nothing but becoming part of that great narrative of power. Perhaps, in another way, the Ball Epic—the Tale of Power—will once again begin its journey, from formlessness toward form. Therefore…
O my sorrow, be wise, and learn at last to hold steady.
You longed for evening—see, it comes, it is at hand.
A dim halo slowly covers the city,
Soothing some hearts, while others sink under care.
Now let them rush on—those merciless executioners of joy—
Cracking their whips over the vile, the weary crowd;
Let them pay back their slavery to pleasure with repentance.
But sorrow, come—place your hand in mine.
Let us depart together, far away. Look—
Upon the balconies of the sky, all the years now spent
Lean down in solemn antique attire.
(A poem by Charles Baudelaire, in Buddhadeb Basu’s translation)
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