A Viva Voce That Never Happened

Two anarchists speak. Like insects awaking into their Kafkaesque realities, they cannot quite grasp who they are—they never have—but it is not for the lack of trying. One has spent nearly two decades in academia, navigating, or rather escaping the disciplinary labyrinth well beyond her doctoral years. The other has just completed her viva voce. Both speak each other’s language—one that feeds their peculiar cynicism borne of years spent questioning ‘conforming’, that is, time spent lying on their backs, like Kafka’s cockroach, staring at the ceiling, unable to move or breathe. Both share a love of letters—without agenda, they are spiders preying only upon vibrations. One is trained in philosophy, yet she refuses the label of ‘philosopher’; the other yet carved out of scepticism of every discipline she has touched steps into the space of anarchist thought—a space that opens and closes not on whim but in a plane of permanence—overtly in her doctoral thesis. 390 pages of the thesis, “The Myth of the Political: An Anarchist Reading of the Narratives of Subjectivities of Resistance in Rural Nepal”, goes before an adjudication committee. The anti-philosopher listens in on the conversation between the cynic and her doctoral jury. Another conversation happens in a parallel reality as that of the viva voce, a meta-dialogue between the hardened anti-philosopher and the chronic cynic. The anti-philosopher stands in as the committee’s most ‘irrational’ voice, all that the committee dare not ask the cynic; the cynic’s responses, as the one defending her doctoral thesis, are therefore acerbic, sincere, and ‘rational’—they reflect all that the cynic did not spell out, yet would have, in her viva voce.

Here is that exchange, in retrospect:

G: Let us first introduce the thesis and talk about its contents, and about why we must talk about it today*? Why do you think political myths are a relevant lens to look at contemporary Nepal? And why anarchism? This is however also a conversation about your viva voce, so perhaps it would be good to give the reader a fair warning here. That we are both, in addition to introducing your work to an Italian-speaking audience, expressing an accumulative frustration with the way academic discourse, particularly in the Anglosphere today, treats anarchist thought. Like a thorn that wills itself into our skin, it leaves us without recourse but to dissect and puncture our own bodies. It is a hazard. But we realize we too remain hazards in the intellectual life of the worn-down wor(l)d of academia—us thorny passersby of disciplinary death traps. There is no love lost certainly. But what will follow is vitriol, but not of the vengeful kind—we feel rather that this conversation needed to have happened.* Because it never did. We aim to discuss how that which could not be said, the thorn on both sides, lodges itself in academic spaces today—why it perpetuates and what it corrodes.

A: I have always wished to be more naïve about the spaces of foreclosure in academia, because that way I could have really believed in its potential to resolve these areas of tension that sit with us, often and inevitably worsening with time. I began my doctoral research years lacking this belief in intellectual spaces and perhaps still harbour this disbelief—indeed what makes them appealing but theoretical aggrandizement? —but to do something, anything, with my body. That is how I often re-enter university each time—the compulsion to do something with the body. And because, in primary school, one perchance figures out that there is not a sliver of honesty in trying to think about what one is supposed to think, when one is supposed to think it, except for accolades and adulation. There is a political decision we make to educate ourselves, not entertain others; from a young age, the body yearns to make one’s own decisions. When I reentered university for my doctoral research, I decided to do something with this ‘political body’. The interest was, for the lack of a better perspective, personal, almost carnal, filled with desires and hatreds, of politics at large in my home country of Nepal. Nepal, for the unintroduced, is a nation-state in what is geographically mapped under ‘South Asia’, which institutionalized a federal democratic republic state as recently as 2015. It is a society that was constituted as one homogenous nationality under a Hindu monarchical rule for over two centuries and still continues to find ways to resurrect its archaic forms of domination. Indeed, the absolute power of the state, permanently revisited. It is therefore a country that has successfully sanitized its political history of ‘(de)colonization’ written against a bloodied civil war and armed resistance (1996–2006) deemed responsible for both the abolition of monarchy and federalization. This is, in a nutshell, what the thesis contends with: its mythological narrative of politics, or in Furio Jesi’s words, the mythological machine that generates the understanding of what politics ought to signify. Why it does so unapologetically, unsympathetically, but intently. And why it is not permissible in academia.

Spaces of academia are often accusatorily identified as left-leaning, so let’s start there—because this is why my thesis is both political and polemic, not so much for the people who find it repugnant because it is outright ‘anarchist’, but precisely for those who might think to engage with it because it is anarchist. Because in these spaces—let’s call it the ’leftist’ political spectrum (to Deleuze’s dismay!)—resistances have a special place, a sacred place, not just for analyzing but doing politics. As Jesi’s Spartakus reminds us, whether waged through moments of urban uprisings or through, in Nepal’s case, a decade-long civil war, resistance movements have emphatically, uproariously, and often victoriously shifted paradigms of government particularly towards democratically bound regimes around the world; acts of engaging such moments of revolt itself defining the ultimate political euphoria. This stupor of (or for politics) indeed makes it hard to critique a grassroots movement such as the Maoist ‘People’s War’, because doing so is imperatively, and quite hastily I might add, read as a mockery of the history of peoples’ struggles—from racial to slavery, of caste, class, and gender—that fuelled rebellions against domination at least since 1770. Yet, this is what my thesis does, knowing full well that this reading is held painfully alongside another one that, in effect, mocks the very legacy of politics (philosophized as the activity of ‘governing’) and all its accomplishments (realized as the ‘art of government’), categorically, systematically, and painstakingly through its inclusion (rather than exclusion) of individuals waging grassroots struggles against domination. It is indeed a technical labour of six years (or substantively a lifetime, whichever one chooses to read as scientific!) spent investigating how the political arena today, absolved of its colonial pasts and continuities and therefore amnesiac of its entrenched hierarchies, narratively and successfully resurrects those forgotten, archaic, forms of power that socially enables us all to unconsciously yet actively create conditions for politics to be participatory, inclusive, and representative of ’the other’, setting in motion those anti-political and anti-historical (here political and historical have a an anarchist register that is separate from political theory ‘as we know it’) narratives that actively create conditions of domination, indeed the very conditions, both symbolic and material, which the Maoist revolution is thought to have fought against. It contains an extended case study spread over three years in a village in rural, western Nepal, where my interlocutors tell the story of how revolutionary movements and moments are fated in everyday politics. Yet, it is not an attempt to predefine what revolution ought to be; revolutions do not occur at the cusp of a revolt but in its shadows, invisible, militant – anarchist! Fatalism here thus plays a very small part, because politics is both wilful yet full of deterministic contradictions: it articulates time through both historical continuities and discontinuities and yet attempts to escape them. This is where Jesi comes in. That is, in the interpretation of politics itself as myth, as history, as capacious narratives that inhabit our libidinal psyche—as that which creates conditions for ‘power’ and ‘domination’ at the same time. To be even more specific, we focus more on hierarchy (than power, or even government), revisiting the desire for the state despite its incapacities to create a non-hierarchical society. We bring into view this state (interchangeably government) but also its politics, promising us to give what we already possess—our freedom, our beliefs, and our ethics—in a battle-driven life of resistance against perpetually identifiable, mythicized, dehumanized enemy—the eternal Other. This is the anarchist reading I invite readers to engage in my thesis, which claims that resistances are indeed fated in statist regimes to reconfigure those conditions that uphold its logic—it cannot dismantle them.

G: One of the most unabashed admissions—Shall we call it the “Jesi effect”?—made during the viva voce was about Jesi, whose works, only recently being introduced to the Anglophone world, are an integral part of your thesis’ analyses, presentation, execution. To quote a jury member, Jesi’s presence in your thesis was described as: “a conceptual universe on its own”. In admitting to not knowing Jesi’s works prior to reading your thesis, like an offering of mea culpa*, they admitted to being unable to fully accept its audacity: “it was intimidating”: the confession went: “to read your thesis”. Jesi effectively talked about the dangers of both ignoring or canonizing theory, particularly individualized, separated, and worshipped; warning us against holding on to its own myths by grasping on to its most solemnly comforting ideas that reinvigorate our belief in our own exaggerated powers rather than engage in auto-critique. You state this in your thesis in no uncertain terms. Yet to talk about Jesi’s philosophy seems to be a particularly challenging task when used to talk about political myths. Telling instances were when the committee members would admit to their “ignorance about Jesi” or indeed “this kind of literature” which couches a polite, but calculated, and thus violent indifference to Jesi’s works. Indeed, there are two ways of silencing* this kind of literature*: either sheer obliteration, pretending the work does not exist, and therefore deeming it unnecessary, your examiners being a case in point. Or there is hijacking, a stealthy thievery, that is non-declared (as Catherine Malabou declared for our sakes in* Stop Thief!)—although that does not only pertain to philosophy but to every other discipline. And perhaps there is a third mode of silencing: the most recent and minoritarian attempt of canonising it as a disciplinary sub-field like “anarchist geography”, “anarcha-feminism”, etcetera. What was going through your mind?

A: This ritual of confessing being unaware of some literature has its charms. It truly does. It is humble in its cold pretence. Of course, the modesty comes from not being familiar with or having read the work—we are limited. Not to state the obvious! Limits may be endearing, if not harsh on the over-achiever’s ego. Such as the jury pronouncing ‘Jesi’ as ‘Ge-zi’. But there is a self-posturing in my committee’s case that is far from being cute. It is stubborn in its indifference, not in its ignorance. It is indeed silencing in all the ways you have just mentioned: obliteration, thievery, and canonization (or pigeon-holing). Polite, calculated, violent. It is sheer hatred for this kind of literature—Jesi’s literature—due to its audacity indeed to inspire us to breach corporeal boundaries: to suspend innate judgements, to hold on to impossible contradictions, to engage the hypocrisies of the flesh. Not external but, crucially, one’s own. One that leaves our entrails feel as though they were momentarily ejected from the body, after being poisoned (by love, in Phantom Thread). This breaching is also violent, it is calculated, but it is deliberately not polite. It devours, obliterates—to be unafraid to create once again. This is the Jesi effect. Because it allows us to then to overcome our unconscious limits, our egos, desires, approbates, our biases, tendencies, and dependencies, to read myths where one refuses to see it consciously—particularly in the political left—where we indulge in the cruelty of optimism (as Lauren Berlant’s poetic text invites us to see), where our desire to fix the world by becoming powerful in it leaves us permanently battle-worn and broken within it. What a pernicious space to even begin to think about life—what worse cruelty can one inflict upon oneself than to live it?

Speaking of the political left, there occurs indeed something more than just silencing of any kind—we can call this theoretical sublimation. That is, when the jury asked: How different is the “mythological machine” from [say] ideology or hegemony"? Palatable, comestible rubrics of (post-)capitalist critique that can never be overused, according to some. We return once again to the problem with Jesi’s work, which is that it refuses to be a theory from the start; or a theory at least that is open to sublimation—interchange, transposal, or expendability. It remains at best a methodology that questions theory’s attempts to define once and for all how things work. Hegemony, and particularly cultural hegemony, effectively explains how casteism, caste-thinking, or caste-discrimination, maintains its dominance in Nepal and South Asia, and scholars argue its instrumentalization indeed by those oppressed, without its consciousness, needing then its intellectuals, saviours, comrades-in-arms. But it is this unconscious that the mythological machine attempts to not understand but quite viscerally inhabit, without the necessity of calling its most dominant ideas hegemonic, or naming its effects as ‘alienation’, because it does not take for granted how ideas become dominant or produce estrangement—and therefore neither ideology nor alienation may indeed be reduced to a fait accompli. Jesi asks us instead to allow the unconscious to surface, not to sublimate it by all means necessary. Neither does Jesi’s own bravura for using myths to ‘understand’ politics stretches itself any further than to allow the unconscious, to the extent it can, speak its own language; nor does mine.

G: The title of your work says it all: ‘An Anarchist Reading’ of politics. Yet, the committee clearly avoided uttering the words: anarchist, anarchism, anarchy. Anarchists are no strangers to censorship, even auto-censorship, when the situation demands it. But none of the questions you were asked remotely teased the content of the 50 plus pages dedicated to your anarchist reading. In fact, the chapter was deemed all but “unnecessary” to make your thesis’ arguments, which was, according to the committee, “empirically all there”. How should we read this?

A: Ah the love of all things empirical! If only we could get rid of theory and live in the present! As Amedeo Bertolo said: like a passively floating cork. I hesitate to begin a thought this way, but we do live in a society where our faculty to project, to imagine, to choose how we live, or indeed how we must die, is no more our prerogative. We are not authors of today’s hyper-realities; worse, we have ceased to even be spectators: we are fast becoming its casualties. My hesitation of course comes from the belief that this prerogative, to choose life, may not be permanently lost. But in this world of (Jean Baudrillard’s) simulacra, we merely flinch at the televised genocide of Palestinians, zealously justified against readily digestible narratives of sacred ‘spoken for’ Jewish homelands, deceptively upheld colonial treaties, and globally sanctioned psychopathic nation-state ambitions, while Palestine becomes an open-air concentration camp for charring, putrefying, expendable ‘species’: the Palestinians. And the entire United States’ war economy, the mightiest of all, is being mobilized to create this reality. Against such an overwhelming scenario, perhaps we should ask: do we even seek to author our own realities, or are we just waiting to become collateral pieces in it? To redeem this thought, or perhaps to pinpoint its blatant, consistent, recurring irony, I reprise the words of Rossella Di Leo: that ‘it is sweet and fitting to die for the homeland, while crossing the red light is just stupid’! Di Leo’s incredulity, more than the irony she points to, demonstrates for us why we choose what we choose, and how our choices follow a narrative that is at once external to but inextricable from our decisions. It points to our contradictory reality where people often tend to unsee what they are presented with, seeing what they want to see, because seeing is clearly believing! Indeed, in this empirical world, the perceivable, observable world, a world where evidence matters, our experience cries in unison: one dares not question reality! Because, and more importantly, one dares not question belief!!!

The entire theory chapter does this: it simply questions our belief, indeed as academics, in canonical theories (particularly structuralism, poststructuralism, postmodernism, postcolonialism, etc.) that make concepts (like government, territory, identity, or the most overworked concept of all—power) makes sense to us. Indeed, it therefore draws heavily from these theories too, but it does so to question its conceptual biases, indeed, our conceptual biases as we deploy them, our ideological dependencies, and our critical capacity to acknowledge political realities both within and beyond our impulse to explain our realities rather than seek to transform them. Theories and concepts in this sense challenge their own potential, knowing its totality cannot be achieved (as it is hardly the ambition), opening themselves thus to critique continually. Anarchist thought, loosely defined, particularly through your volume, Thinking as Anarchists, provides this dialogical opportunity, and nothing more. This is why the chapter is called an anarchist ‘reading’, and not ’theory’, of politics. Because reading stays in that chaotic (not to evoke a misreading of ‘anarchy’ in its crudest most capitalist sense!) space of control and forfeit, unclarity and lucidity, contempt and passion. The committee probably saw this as an aberration to what a thesis should do, not only because the text is holding in its heavily pregnant body this ‘anarchist’ foetal twin—theory against theory—but also because its readers, us the so-called intellectuals, must then involuntarily respond to this call for capitulation—that attention—to the plenitude of life’s fecundity, its desires that are better off being indulged, rather than denied, supressed, or, worse, sublimated. Unfortunately, however, some of us still believe in immaculate conceptions of ideas.

And therefore, another attempt in this chapter was to bring the strands of Italian anarchist thought and mythology (particularly through Jesi) together. Luckily for me, both literatures were being or had recently been translated into English when I wrote my dissertation; and you, my reluctant intellectual companion, pointed me towards them. Until then, anarchism and symbolism (whence mythology derives) were admittedly disparate inclinations for me; the former I simply could not accept as another ‘-ism’, another ideology, that is (as it can very quickly become one!), and the latter I engaged through being trained in the Franco- and Anglosphere of academia (particularly through literary and political theory).

That the committee found this engagement utterly redundant is something I, to this day, cannot process—these words, these thoughts, indeed the empirical too, are all there in the thesis! I cannot help but think what the jury eventually read—what did they want to read?

G: Your ‘postdisciplinary’ approach is central not just to your thesis but your anarchist research approach. Let us talk about this because postdisciplinary throws off many ‘interdisciplinary’ or ‘crossdisciplinary’ scholars—which, to be fair, it should. The ‘post’ prefix stirs something in academics—including or perhaps especially those who seek to build themselves fortresses of intellectual irreproachability—because ‘post’ carries a critical connotation, of transcendence of thought, or perhaps of moving beyond (as with the hyphenated prefix ‘post-’ meaning ‘after’) a particular concept, discipline, or discourse. Yet, the movement cannot be total. Poststructuralism critiqued structuralism, postcolonialism critiques colonialism, and so on, because they push against their precursors, let us say. In that sense, why push against disciplinarity?

A: I do think we might be in a ‘posthyphen’ place in academia, in general. Can a discourse ‘move on’ from what it pushes against? Is an exhaustive engagement with any discourse even possible? In using the prefix ‘post’, there is often an assumption what is being proposed is something is entirely, radically, opposed. A severance, of roots, of origins, of history. In this sense, the prefix serves its more literary purpose of creating tension between two discourses but also emphasizes an irreversible movement from one to the next. In response, then, ‘postdisciplinarity’ is strictly not a successor of disciplinary thinking, neither does it declare severance from disciplines.

As an EU Horizon 2020 funded project, my research was placed within Oslo’s department of human geography. There, I often revisited what Simon Springer wrote in 2013: ‘anarchist thinking is what geography still ought to be’! Fair caution against reading ‘ought to’ as a truism—I am neither a geographer not its gatekeeper! I read it as a warning against an overconfidence that inflicts geographers about their intellectual ability to breach disciplinary boundaries while being oblivious to its own obsessions with frontiers, borders, or limits—pun indeed intended! Of course, these are argued as temporary rubrics to think a finite world with, but they also create intellectual dead ends, particularly when we discuss the limits of the state, for instance, or the act of breaking borders or breaching frontiers—that is when we think of resistances through state’s limits. Indeed, how to think of resistance despite the state without thinking of the state? Our pink elephant in the room. The question here perhaps should not be ‘how to not think of the elephant’ but ‘what happens if we step out of the room’. In this sense, ‘disciplinary thinking’ itself is an oxymoron; because discipline, by its very nature, constrains thought—it constraints thought because, in effect, it must respond to the historical demands put on it.

This is where anarchist thinking comes in. I like to call it the jack of all disciplines and the master of none—and deliberately so!—because it thrives on the movement of thought while being grounded in its history at the same time. To borrow from, Nico Berti, which you translate as being ‘in and yet against history’. Postdisciplinarity then does not mean transcending disciplinary thinking in the sense that it severs itself from the (particularly colonial) history of the said discipline. It is rather to engage disciplinary thinking continuously without the need to be protected by its legacies. Without the need to belong in it. Without, that is, the need to become its gatekeeper, its exponent, its custodian. To borrow from Jesi’s approach, my postdisciplinarity is an embrace of auto-critique of disciplines—a way to test how ideas move beyond their original contexts into some place new, only to return to those contexts to challenge perimeters of both. In practice, this meant, for me, working with a polysemic, polyphonous concept such as ‘politics’ without feeling bound by the disciplines that claim ownership of them. In the same way, methods I used, ethnography and narrative analysis, both thrive on encounters—not just with people, but with shifting ideas and interpretations—and these encounters neither fit into one discipline nor do they seek to be disciplined. I have never been preoccupied with permanent belonging—whether to a place, a thought, or a people. But my appetite for reading, writing, and thinking however spans literature, politics, and history, and fortunately, nothing stops one from poisoning the other.