Sujay Sood, sujaysood@gmail.

com --

Trigunatita, or, How Spivak drowned Mahasweta Devis Draupadi in Western Jargon

Of the four Mahasweta Devi stories in Bengali translated by Gayatri Spivak, Draupadi provides an excellent starting point for a discussion of the way in which postcolonial critics of the post-structuralist bent interact with literary texts from the excolonies. What better heavyweight than Spivak could Mahasweta Devi hope to find in order to communicate her literature to a global readership? Hers is a literature that addresses the outside-of-history status and the downtrodden nature of the tribal populations suffering in the fringes of "modern" India. Mahasweta's prose is powerful, deeply committed to representing the invisible tribals of India to the literate segment of Bengaland by extension and translation, of India and of the world--and to arousing political awareness of the situation in dire need of remedy through meaningful and organized action. In "The Author in Conversation," we are given a glimpse into the life and career of a remarkable activist whose efforts--political, journalistic, and literary--toward the betterment of the tribals' lives has been ongoing for more than three decades. Here are some of the salient revelations communicated by her: that there exists an infrastructural nothingness insofar as facilities and utilities--constitutionally and practically supplied by the Indian government to the rest of its "non-tribal" population--are concerned; that this lack is compounded in post-Independence India by the systematic "modern" exploitation of both the tribal forest lands and the tribal peoples (the latter through a perpetual bonded-wage labor system); that the devastation of these peoples' ecologically motivated life has robbed them of their sustenance, for "they underst[and] ecology and the environment in a way we cannot yet imagine" (x); that, broadly speaking, the tribals have not been a part of the decolonization of India even as they have paid the price; that the lip-service attention paid to the tribals by the government of India has not succeeded

in providing them with the merest of modern facilities, that the monies disbursed for their cause is swallowed up by corrupt executive parties; that, for the tribals, there is no education, no health facilities, no way of earning income; that according to at least some of the exploitative upper-caste landowners, tribals are regarded as an expendable and easily replaced species ranking below the husbandry animals; and, finally, that in spite of all this, they have retained their unique culture and oral traditions and that they deserve to be recognized and honored by the rest of India. Her stories enact disturbing moments in the lives of tribals, conveying a sense of their desperate predicaments through skillfully describing the interpenetration of the tribal and non-tribal universes. In The Hunt, miscegenated tribal Mary Oraon's brutal massacre of a tiresome city contractor, on the occasion of a women's-day-out-in-theforest ritual hunt, provides the unexpected by inverting the stereotypical outcome of rape and sexual exploitation of the hapless tribal woman at the hands of the non-tribal merchant class. Properly speaking, however, it must be noted that Mary's actions are not those of a tribal as she is twice an outsider: by blood, of an Australian father, and by special status given to her by the rest of the tribal community, as a result of which social custom as religious prohibition does not apply to her--so that she can consider marrying a Muslim vegetable vendor without inciting her tribe. Douloti, in Douloti the Bountiful, is not to have any of Mary's fortune. As the result of a dubious transaction which is represented as "marriage" by the Brahman Paramananda, poser godman and merciless pimp, to her fellow Nagesia tribals but which in practical terms forsakes her in the flesh trade, Douloti finds herself condemned to being a lifelong indentured whore in Paramananda's whorehouse. Her story offers no redemption; in the imagistic end she lies diseased and dead in the map of India which has been freshly painted for the celebration of Independence day: "filling the entire Indian peninsula from the oceans to the Himalayas, here lies bonded labor spread-eagled, kamiya whore Douloti Nagesia's tormented corpse, putrefied with venereal disease,

having vomited up all the blood in its desiccated lungs" (93). Hers is a shocking story which reveals at once the complete governmental neglect and complicity of the societal system in which Douloti-as-phenomenon can be possible, in which Douloti the Kamiyawhore can happen. No reader can dismiss the import of Mahasweta's observations, least of all selfprofessed "expatriate critic" Gayatri Spivak. She denounces the complicity of the migrant academic who reduces the potentialities opened up by her special trail into American culture by "museumizing" the culture they left behind: "...Cultural Studies in the United States today is also fed by the migrant academic's desire to museumize a culture left behind, gaining thus an alibi for the profound Eurocentrism of academic migrancy" (xxiv). For Spivak, hoisting the flag of deconstruction is a sufficient strategy to counterbalance the trend toward espousing "the myth of pure difference" (xxiv). As is Spivak's wont, she reminds her reader about Derridean diffrance and its salutary effects when applied to claims of untheorized essence or transparence. In this particular instance, she goes on to poke fun at the "East is east and West is west and never the twain shall meet" idea. Yet, the discourse on the subaltern seems curiously close to an attempt in thinking of modern India reconceptualized as West to a tribal or subaltern East. Draupadi is a short yet complex story whose range of signification is enriched by references to Hochhuth's The Deputy, David Morell's First Blood, Antonioni's films, the god Pan, Shakespeare and Prospero, to Sankhya Philosophy, Archimedes, and Gandhi. The story is populated by characters that represent the cultural diversity of the Indian population: we have Bengali (Senanayak), Sikh (Arjan Singh), the Santals, the larger group of the Austro-Asiatic Munda tribes, the untouchables, and even the influence of American soldiers who fathered Dopdi's betrayers; in terms of languages, we have Bengali, its dialects, English, Mundari language, the dialect of Maldah. The story also portrays complex socio-political world, a violent world of tribal cleansing by the Indian Army, of landowner killings by the insurgent tribals, a world in which left-politics,

fascism, the Indian constitution and the Indian village system the Panchayat are mentioned, in which "the young gentlemen" represent an educated left-wing sector inciting the tribals to armed insurgency, in which the system of landless peasant bondedlabor akin to slavery is normative thanks to a seeming collusion between the government and the landowner. Thus Dulna exclaims at the moment before he kills the landowner Surja Sahu, "my great-grandfather took a bit of paddy from him, and I still give him free labor to repay that debt" (OW 192). These are some of the elements of the ksetra or field described by Draupadi. It is a ksetra of combat, violence, and war. The universe we see represented involves police and army operations, exploitation of bonded and tribal laborers by the landowners, and the counter or terrorist actions of the insurgent rebels led by the "young gentlemen." While the landowners motivation for the exploitation of peasant laborers is maximizing profit in a capitalist economy, the police/army' s motivation is not similarly profit-- as an armed force, it is fulfilling its political, economic, and moral function of engaging in armed combat with the enemy. In this story, the enemy is the revolutionaries represented by Dopdi. They act in opposition to the army, and their tactical language coincides with that of the army; Arijit's rhetoric, couched in an unspecified communist agenda, is equally invested in war-games as that of the armed forces. Spivak's admonition to readers of texts in translation, to beware of categorizing the narrative as "realistic," needs to be equally extended to translators--Spivak herself included. In her Essay on Stanadayini, she points out that "Mahasweta's prose is an extraordinary melange of street slang, the dialect of East Bengal, the everyday household language of family and servant, and the occasional gravity of elegant Bengali." (267). Spivak is well aware that this polyglot aspect to literatures written in Indian languages removes it from facile and reductive "realism;" in a multi-lingual culture such as India's, literatures inevitably engage a polyglot textual world in which "languages throw light on one another: one language can, after all, see itself only in the light of another language."

(Bakhtin 12). In contradiction to this essential feature of Indian literature exists the vast body of English translations in which the multiple planes of representation are subsumed with the view of making the textual presentation convivial with the dominant style of continental nineteenth century realism.i Spivak as translator is sensitive to both the language and the structure of Devi's story in Bengali; however, Spivak as critic performs a sophisticated reading which, though compelling in its attempt to reveal the subjugated subaltern in an economy of differential sexuality governed by the patriarchal, effectively amounts to no more than an inversion of the binary terms in the story--Senanayak/Dopdi and subjugator/subjugated, and all this at the level of discursive semantics. In the broadest sense, Draupadi engages issues of nation, revolution, (femininity,) and violence. In naming her character after the polyandrous wife of the five Pandava brothers in the Mahabharata, Mahasweta Devi has created a palimpsest tale which reenacts the public stripping of the epic Draupadi; while in the epic Draupadi's prayer to Krishna is answered by the miraculous infiniteness of her sari (a garment) so that she cannot be humiliated in the royal court, in Devi's story Draupadis shift is an unhindering rag, and she finds herself the victim of multiple rape by none other than the Police force. Draupadi provides a condemnation of the glaring lack of ethical imperative in the constitution of the State's executive organ as represented by the police force, and it seems to me that any critical appreciation of the story must begin by acknowledging the crucial centrality of the issue of ethical action in this aspect of contemporary Indian culture. Gayatri Spivak's sophisticated interpretation, however, completely ignores this issue in favor of appropriating the story to support her deconstructive theories of post-colonialism in her ongoing academic debates about femininity, "sexual differential," "disclosure of complicities," and the like. This is signified not least by what little interpretation Spivak provides of the Mahabharata itself. This lengthy epic, measuring over ninety thousand verses collected over an indeterminable period of centuries, represents the multifarious dimensions of

Indian experience and the ontological plurality of the Indian imagination. An ageless epic, the Mahabharata is influenced neither by the history of Imperial colonialism nor constituted in response to the Western gaze of Othering. The Mahabharata contains structures of cosmological determination and ontological plurality that are essentially Indian and that have, arguably, survived more or less unchanged in Indian culture for over two thousand years. And it is art--one that does not necessarily represent historical personages. In brief, the Mahabharata needs to be understood primarily in the Indian context and in Indian terms, and only secondarily in the Western context and by Western terms--and here I mean colonial and post-colonial. It is unfortunate that Spivak's understanding is entrenched only in the secondary consideration. She regards the epic primarily in its "colonialist function in the interest of the so-called Aryan invaders of India" (183). She happily attributes to the Draupadi in the epic a Lacanian "singularity," and consequently steers her discussion into the terrifying domain of the Phallus where, clearly, "no acknowledgment of paternity can secure the Name of the Father for the child of such a mother [one married to five husbands]" (183). Spivak outdoes Lacan himself in resourcefulness--whereas he went across the Atlantic and back a century to discover Poe's "Purloined Letter" in support of his post-Freudian and linguistic concept of the systemic displacement of the signifier and its determinative function in the unconscious, she goes all the way to India and takes the largest extant epic in the world to similarly support Lacanian schema: "In the epic, Draupadi's legitimized pluralization (as a wife among husbands) in singularity [read Lacanian] is used to demonstrate male glory" (183). Such a co-optation precludes any understanding of the Mahabharata through Indian value systems in which the traditional concept of Naritva (the female principle of the cosmos) holds "the belief in a closer conjunction between power, activism, and femininity than between power, activism, and masculinity," as it does "the belief that the feminine principle is a more powerful, dangerous and uncontrollable principle in the cosmos than the male principle" (Nandy

53-54). To say the least, Spivak's Lacanian approach treats the epic absolutely out of cultural context. It ignores the important cosmological and theological tenets that inform the Mahabharata. It ignores the following report made by Alf Hiltebeitel, who took the trouble of interpreting the epic event of Draupadi's disrobing in the royal court by researching not Lacan but classical Indian sources: ...the epic Draupadi is already an image of the goddess in her totality: not only as Sri-Laksmi, whom she explicitly incarnates, but as Bhudevi (the goddess Earth), Kalaratri (the "Night of Time"), Mula-Prakrti (primal matter), and with intimations of Durga and Kali; in her relations to Visnu-Krsna and to figures linked with Siva; in her role with respect to the turn of the yugas and the relieving of the Earth's burden; in relation to the Earth's potential dessication (it is the solar Karna who orders Draupadi stripped)...; and in connection with symbols that portray the further potential for the unmixing and unleashing of all the elements--earth, water, fire, air, and ether--that is prelude to the final dissolution or prakrta pralaya with its "unbraiding" of the "strands" or gunas of matter. (421n) Spivak is curiously oblivious to such complexity in the Mahabharata, and often her critical statements exemplify unconscionable reductionism: "Draupadi--written into the patriarchal and authoritative sacred text as proof of male power" (184), and, "She [the epic Draupadi] provides the occasion for a violent transaction between men, the efficient cause of the crucial battle" (183). The signifying nexus of "patriarchal," "authoritative," and "male power" resonates nicely within the discourse of Western feminist theory but is reductive to the sign Draupadi, if one only keeps in mind Hiltebeitel's analysis above. It is an epic whose world-view considers the feminine principle to be one of cosmic power (in a distinctly Indian sense) and whose narrative consistently intertwines its "human" and "divine" actors. Indeed, Spivak statements belittle the ontological complexity of the Mahabharata by attributing to it a very 20th-century and predominantly Western politics of sexuality. Furthermore, Spivaks claim that Draupadi is "the efficient cause of the crucial battle" ignores the potent history of causes that lead up to the great war in the

Mahabharata. Most strikingly, it ignores the theological and philosophical discourse contained in the chapter prior to the engagement of the crucial battle, the chapter popularly entitled Bhagvada Gita or song celestial. The occasion for this discourse is prompted by Arjuna's (Draupadi's first husband) refusal to kill his kin, for after all the conflict opposes first cousins of the same dynasty. This chapter relates god Krishna's response to Arjuna's lack of motivation, and provides reason after reason why it is Arjuna's duty to engage in battle and kill his cousins. That Krishna's reasoning provides a synthesis of various schools of Hindu philosophy in which the constant is that there is no ontology of the Self/Other but only that of the Self/self. More pertinently for this discussion, not once does Krishna indicate Draupadi's disrobing as the clinching cause for Arjuna to engage in the battle. It is symptomatic of the functioning of Post-colonial studies that Spivak's reductive gaze that simplifies the complexity of the Mahabharata and of the epic Draupadi gains easy acceptance; after all, it does employ the correct jargon of French structural psychoanalytic discourse, and thus, it does lead to an interpretation of Mahasweta's Draupadi which fits within the parameters of theoretical feminist discourse in the West. This type of post-colonial exercise perpetuates a reductive othering of the non-West, bestowing on it an impenetrable objecthood. It fails to engage with cultural formations on their own terms, formations that do not owe their existence to an encounter with the West, formations that existed before, during, and after the colonial encounter with Europe. In the present case, this allows Spivak to read the crucial moment in Mahasweta's story as an indictment against male authority and man's history. Man the scapegoat may, perhaps, be pleasing to the Western feminist ear but in this instance it sounds like a tired theme caught in the fruitless flip-flop of binarism. Yet another oversight that Western-oriented post-colonial criticism perpetuates is that it fails to address the nature of ethics as it is conceived in non-Western ontological domains.

Let us consider the political climate in which Draupadi is situated. The story is set in 1971 West Bengal. Spivak reminds us that the date is significant because it marks the occasion for the Indo-Pakistan War; what puzzles the reader is that she asserts that India's participation in the war was simply the result of India's sudden discovery of cooperation-operation between the Naxalites of West Bengal (the properly Indian State) and the forces of East Bengal (what is today known as Bangladesh): "at a crucial moment in the struggle, the armed forces of the government of India were deployed, seemingly because there were alliances between the Naxalites of West Bengal and the freedom fighters of East Bengal" (182). This generalization is so completely off the mark that it necessitates a brief detour here for the discussion of the geo-political context of this war. The impending disaster that was to strike the constitution of East and West Pakistan, putatively one country united by Islam but realistically two very different cultures speaking different languages and separated by more than a thousand mile stretch of India, came to a head in 1970 when Sheikh Mujibur Rehman of the East won an overwhelming victory in the National Assembly election of December 17. This meant that the Bengalis of the East would effectively form the government and wield power over the Punjabis of the West, the traditional power-brokers. That this was patently unacceptable was confirmed when the martial regime in the West took affairs in its own hands and deployed general Yahya Khan in East Pakistan with an intent of inflicting terror on its Bengali population (and the descriptions of the inhuman operations carried out at his orders are not unlike the ethnic cleansing that has taken place more recently in Yugoslavia). The Indian government aided the undermanned and ill-equipped Banladeshi Resistance movement, Mukti Bahini, by providing arms, ammunition and training across the border in West Bengal. As the conflict escalated, more than six million refugees poured across the borders into West Bengal. Finally, executing an operation that had been in the works for almost a year, the Indian Armed forces engaged

in War with the Pakistani armed forces, with the intent of aiding Bangladesh's liberation. That the objective was accomplished in twelve days is a remarkable modern day military achievement: "the Indian armed forces executed, within the brief period of 12 days, the most decisive liberation campaign in military history--giving a nation of 75 million people its independence in one lightning strike" (Palit 17). Clearly, the Indo-Pak war of 1971 constitutes a political event far larger in their scope than Spivak's assertion of the purported alliance between the Bangladeshi Mukti Bahini, who were being trained and armed in India by the Indian Army, and the Naxalite rebels. Historical simplification aside, a central problem with Spivak's reading is that it ignores the structural play in Draupadi which disperses not only any "realistic" representation but also any interpretation that seeks a response in kind to the aggressive, male world represented by Senanayak. In paying close attention to the language, Spivak has critically ignored the story's dissipation of conventional narrative strategyi.e., a single narrator with a cohesive point of view. Instead of employing a single subjectivityone with a bonded identity and cohesive intentionalitythe author uses a strategy of storytelling that creates the dispersal of unique, bonded subjectivity. When this structural dissipation is combined with the language, one can reconcile this strategy with its meaning only through a recourse to the ramifications of an ethical nature that does not rely absolutely on a bonded subject. Such an ethical consideration is more appropriate and, I feel, more productive than premising all interpretation on the cohesive subject of the "subaltern" in Draupadi. There is a deliberate ambiguity in section 1 in the manner in which the narrative voice functions throughout the story. The story more or less begins with a dramatic dialogue between two "liveried uniforms" to be followed by the documentative "dossier" section which begins by stating what is apparently the summary of the official take on the Dopdi/Dulna case. However, this objective tone is undermined by the insertion of a humorous and subjective description of the architect of Bakuli, Arjan Singh, "whose

blood-sugar rose at once...diabetes has twelve husbands, among them anxiety." (OW 187). The narrative then proceeds with an omniscient narrator's voice which soon asserts itself in the first person. This little trip into the narratorial "I" becomes intriguing as it is graphically merged with Senanayak's "I": "All will come clear, he says. I have almost deciphered Dopdi's song" (190). This vocal superimposition complicates not only the manner in which the reader's sympathies' are to be engaged and deployed but also the meaning in the third and final section of the story, in the latter half of which there is no direct speech, be it Draupadi's, Senanayak's, or even the guard's; the use of quotations, which signals distinct speaking-subjects, is abandoned altogether. Army jargon is employed by both parties, Senanayak's and Arijit's. As employed by Arijit, its use signifies the inadequacy of the revolutionary movement to exceed or transgress its allotted space--one of officially sanctioned resistance to the system. The army jargon as a unit serves another purpose: it acts as a territorial stake in counterpoint to the latent threat of the nomadological counter-signifying semiotic of the tribal forest.ii The forest, with its otherly coded flows, exists in topographical counterpoint to the striated space inhabited by Senanayak's army. The early Draupadi and her gang are differentiated from the "poor harvest workers" and the "tribals" of the "primitive forest," and are thus inhabitants of Senanayak's ksetra, inasmuch as they may take to the forest for cover--they are and behave like the enemy. Here the (narrator) tells us quite clearly that Draupadi's operations are as manual-oriented as Senanayak who lives by such knowledge as prescribed by the Army handbook (188) and the "anti-fascist paperback copy of The Deputy (190): "The ones who remain [Draupadi] have lived a long time in the primitive world of the forest...They must have forgotten book-learning. Perhaps they are orienting their book-learning to the soil they live on and learning new combat and survival techniques." (191). However, the fact that Draupadi is apprehended tells us that her group has failed to forget the book; her capture is possible because she continues to behave and think in the manner prescribed for the enemy. In this way she remains within

the Senanayak's signifying regime and justifies his strategy: "In order to destroy the enemy, become one. Thus he understood them by (theoretically) becoming one." (189). In this he, too, remains well within the purview of the State semiotic, which is what creates the space for the "enemy" to exist in to begin with. In this context, then, it is hardly surprising that Senanayak has all their actions measured. except for the climactic last one by Dopdi. When Dopdi is captured, Senanayak's reaction is one of triumph and elation but also despondency and unhappiness. His theoretical savvy of anticipating the "enemy's moves has been confirmed yet again in practice: "if you want to destroy the enemy, become one...As long as six years ago he could anticipate their every move. He still can. Therefore he is elated" (OW 194). He is unhappy not only because the enemy behaves predictably but also because he sympathizes with the peasant's cause; his sympathy for Dopdi and her cause is, however, of no practical consequence since Dopdi is also the enemy and will receive the treatment an enemy deserves: "he supported this struggle from the point of view of the field hands. Dopdi is a field hand. Veteran fighter. Search and destroy. Dopdi Mejhen is about to be apprehended. Will be destroyed. Regret" (OW 194). Of course, Senanayak makes no ethical reflection on the fact of his assigning the role of enemy to Dopdi. This lack on Senanayak's part is part of the reason of his fear at the climactic end of the story. The smooth space of the forest has its own language, a "savage tongue," (188) which interestingly enough, is foreign to the State's. Senanayak's "tribal-specialist types" (189) are unable to translate Dulna's dying cry, "Ma-ho." and have to rely on the interpretation given by Chamru, the lowly water-carrier in the camp. It is evident that this event can be read as paradigmatic of the colonial enterprise in general, one which published with certitude facts about indigenous cultures, forgetting that these facts relied not only on the contamination of translation but on the wiles of a native translator; the humorous if not farcical endeavor of the specialists flown in by the Defense Department

is further accentuated by the irony of their having to consult dictionaries put together by European scholars in the by-gone Imperial era, "by worthies such as Hoffman-Jeffer and Golden-Palmer" (189). (Sadly enough, it is also typical of Spivak's scholarship as reflected in her essay on Draupadi; her understanding of the Naxalite movement in West Bengal is substantiated by the work of none other than an "ex-Maoist French "New Philosopher" Bernard-Henri Lvy.) But the more intriguing aspect of the Chamru episode is that it highlights the transsemiotic aspect of semiology--due to the surplus value generated by overcoding; at no point can one decisively present any one particular semiotic regime as unproblematically dominant. Instead, we see that Senanayak's State semiotic, Chamru's semiotic, and the Maldah semiotic (if Chamru is to be believed) are simultaneously operative; and transformational statements such as "Ma-Ho" signal the way in which the State's signifying semiotic "translates for its own purposes a statement originating elsewhere [from the Santals of Maldah], and in so doing diverts it [by reinscribing into the terrorist code a statement originating in the Gandhian era], leaving untransformable residues [Dulna's corpse] and actively resisting the inverse transformation" (MP 136). The fact that the media reified State language is communicated in English in a Bengali text points significantly to the standardization of the Nation-State as the globally dominant and normative model for the socius today. In section two, for example, Devi makes interesting use of italics for representing that which is media disseminated information (newspaper: Killed by police encounter...unknown male...age twenty-two..." (192); and, when employing army jargon for all military maneuvers (Cordon up, round the clock, cordite, close canal approach (193), Veteran fighter, Search and Destroy (194)). This authorial strategy highlights the functioning of a State apparatus that is bent on the elimination of insurgent elements detrimental to the upkeep of the State's dominant regime of signification. Competing semiotics are always present; and in pointing out that "the fighting words on both sides are in English" Spivak ignores the war-call "Ma-ho,"

which the texts clearly tells us was used by the Santals of Maldah "when they began fighting at the time of King Gandhi! It's a battle cry" (189). Spivak chooses not to hear this cry perhaps to aid her in concluding that "Nation-state politics combined with multinational economies produce war." This glib formula is motivated more by Spivak's post-Marxist intellectual make-up than by the effective arena of the story, where the appropriation of fighting English on the rebel side is in supplement to the pre-existing tribal war language suggested by "Ma-ho." This tribal fighting language is further complicated by the association to Gandhi's struggle of Non-violence made by Chamru; it becomes uncertain as to whether the Santals of Maldah "fought" with or against "King Gandhi." Perhaps it signifies Chamru's understanding of the Gandhian effort as "battle" and "fighting" that marks the power inherent in the ethic of non-violence and passive resistance. Whatever the answers may be, what remains clear is that the use of English army jargon describes the confrontation in one semiotic regime, and that one should be careful to not extrapolate from this a transcendent semiotic realization, such as "NationState economies combined with multinational economies produce war" (Spivak 185)! At the level of the nonc, Draupadi's body becomes the instance of a "terror" statement that reifies the dominant signifying regime. The terror manifests itself as and when Draupadi and her troop engage in acts of retribution--it is easily seen that her kind of violence merely mirrors the violence heralded by the figure of Senanayak--and as and when the figure of Draupadi is "countered" with rape, torture, and humiliation: both circles of violence are equally terroristic. In terms of effecting a "discursive displacement," then, Draupadi's violence is all for naught (Spivak calls function changes in sign systems "discursive displacements"). Though Spivak would like to see Draupadi as the properly insurgent or subaltern figure, in whom the agency of change is located--a figure able to effect change through the violent force of a crisis--the violence of her terrorism remains within the bounds of what the State machinery can both produce and contain: as Spivak tells us, "the men easily succeed in stripping Dopdi--in the narrative it

is the culmination of her political punishment by the representatives of the law." (185). As signs, both Senanayak and Draupadi refer to the supreme signifier, the State, which presents itself both as lack--signaled by his fear, and her taunt at the end--and as excess--the evident suppression of Draupadi as enemy of the State. Draupadi, her partner Dulna, her group of Naxalites, form no more than the "counterbody" to the body of the State-as-god: "...the body of the condemned [wo]man; [s]he, too, has [her] legal status; [s]he gives rise to [her] own ceremonial...in order to code the lack of power with which those subjected to punishment are marked. In the darkest region of the political field the condemned [wo]man outlines the symmetrical, inverted figure of the king" (MP 116). In the light of this state coding, Spivak's following contention regarding Draupadi's selfinsistent nakedness appears as a somewhat hasty gloss: "Once Dopdi enters, in the final section of the story, the postcript area of lunar flux and sexual difference, she is in a place where she will finally act FOR herself in NOT "acting," in challenging the man to (en)counter her as unrecorded or misrecorded objective historical monument." (184). Paradoxically, this statement relies on the essentiality of sex (Senanayak=man=male) as it tries to assert the deconstructive potential of sexuality (Dopdi=countered=unknown). Further, though Dopdi does not "act" in accordance to what is prescribed, to what extent is she acting for herself if her gesture is to act as "counter" to Senanayak's enterprise and expectations? It is basically here that Spivak belies the Orientalist underpinnings of her enterprise, one which dictates the articulation of the subaltern as ultimately no more than the political articulation of the identical: My point is, of course, that through all of these heterogeneous examples of territoriality and the communal mode of power, the figure of the woman, [moving from clan to clan and family to family as daughter/sister and wife/mother,] syntaxes patriarchal continuity even as she herself is drained of proper identity. In this particular area, the continuity of community or history, for subaltern and historian alike, is produced on...the dissimulation of her discontinuity, on the repeated emptying of her meaning as instrument." (231)

If, on one hand, the subaltern (or historian) is an essential instrument for the upkeep and maintenance of the patriarchal or state machine, then how, on the other hand, can she be drained of her "proper" identity? An immediate conceptual problem here is that Dopdi or the subaltern is conceived of as "instrument" or tool, and not as "machine" in Deleuzian/Guattarian terms: "A machine may be defined as a system of interruptions or breaks (coupures)...every machine, in the first place, is related to a continual material flow (hyl)" (AO 36). As machines, we are connected in multiple couplings, all of which traverse our bodies simultaneously and variously. This reconceptualization, the functioning of the agent as machine and not as tool, is crucial to getting beyond the metaphysics of historical representation and into an analysis proper of the possibilities of revolutionary transformation.iii Aided by her best deconstructive intentions, Spivak ends up privileging the Judeo-Christian conception of History and Being.iv Dopdi cannot be an unrecorded or misrecorded historical monument if she is at once the subaltern "instrument" driving official History; to the contrary, the history-machine and the Dopdimachine exist here in a harmonious conjunctive-disjunctive synthesis. And just as the official History machine is not the only history-machine, the "subaltern" is conceivably engaged in the production of its own history "If what is called history is a dynamic and open social reality, in a state of functional disequilibrium, or an oscillating equilibrium, ...comprising not only institutionalized conflicts but conflicts that generate changes...then primitive societies are fully inside history..." (AO 150). And in this point especially Spivak's formulation--that the subaltern cannot speak--is wrong. In terms of the gunas of nature, the following can be said about the two of them: Senanayak's nature is primarily rajasic with a slight sattwic streak. The sattwic impulse shows itself in the firm belief Senanayak has in the principles, such as those in the Army Handbook, that inform the course of desirable actions in Senanayak's ksetra or field. He demonstrates a certain amount of technical reflection on his activity and desires to communicate his knowledge to other humans--in this too, he demonstrates a sattwic

tendency. The problem, of course, is that Senanayak's knowledge and reflection is exclusively about the ksetra and not its Ksetrajna or knower--i.e.., himself. The little insight we have into his thoughts are focused entirely around his metier, never on himself. His self-satisfaction with his station and function in life hints at a sattwic poise, but ultimately one sees that the rajasic proclivity dominates his nature, especially in his arrogance at his own expertise at being an accomplished general who out-thinks his enemy. Senanayak reflects the rajasic man who "flings himself into the battle and attempts to use the struggle of forces for his own egoistic benefit" (EG 49). Dopdi's natural make-up in the story is more complex. She has presumably overcome a tamasic inertia that dominated her nature until she rebelled and now is primarily motivated by rajas. Indeed, we see that Dopdi's actions in the ksetra are impelled by a passionate necessity for action and that her emotional state is in turmoil. Having become an outlaw and being wanted "dead or alive" at all costs by the government powers, Dopdi participates in organized guerrilla warfare, and shares the ultimate idealistic goal stated by Dulna regarding the point of their "work" around the Jharkani belt, that "landowner and moneylender and policemen might one day be wiped out!" (193). She acts primarily as an informant, always on the move from one village to another. There is no ksetric reflection in Dopdi as to the purport of her agency other than slaying the enemy; if any cohesive ideology informs her actions, then it comes from the leadership of the "young gentlemen" revolutionaries, whose ideology is not specified beyond the hinted Marxism. It is interesting that Dopdi's knowledge of the field is from immediate and lived experience, which in this aspect is opposed to Senanayak's knowledge supplemented by research and literature on the field. It is perhaps because of this that her knowledge of the field is coupled by a striving to seek knowledge of herself as the Ksetrajna or knower of her field. The insight we are shown into Dopdi's mind reveals that she is still confused about the recent events in her life. Her ruminations about her own existential make-up

lead to a recall of the purity of her ancestral line and pride in the ethical loyalty of her forefathers: "Now she thought there was no shame as a Santal in Shomai and Budhna's treachery. Dopdi's blood was the pure unadulterated blood of Champabhumi...Dopdi felt proud of her forefathers. They stood guard over their women's blood in black armor" (193). The ethical principle of loyalty is figured in the following image: "crow would eat crow's flesh before Santal would betray Santal" (193). An important indicator of her sattwic countenance is seen in her decision that her life is worth sacrificing for the revolutionary cause. She is certain that she will not betray her team by giving out any information, and has reached a sattwic degree of self-detachment from the strife and violent world-energy of which she is a part. This is evident in her reply to Mushai's wife's question, "Can't you run away?": "No. Tell me, how many times can I run away? What will they do if they catch me? They will counter me. Let them" (192). Soon thereafter, she is being pursued and resolves to say nothing under torture and/or capture: "I swear by my life. By my life, Dulna, by my life. Nothing must be told" (193). Her reaction shows Dopdi to have reached a degree of detachment from her body and from her involvement within the ksetra, even though she will continue her actions as terrorist and informant. Her commitment to self-sacrifice reflects an inkling towards the Gandhian system of passive-resistance or satyagraha. Gandhi is adamant about the power and effectivity of passive-resistance and the virtue of self-sacrifice: "Satyagraha is referred to in English as passive resistance. Passive resistance is a method of securing rights by personal suffering, it is the reverse of resistance by arms" (245). This resolution shows Dopdi's incipient trigunatita--being beyond the gunas of nature--which become evident at the climactic ending. The third and climatic section of the story begins with a mention of Dopdi's formal interrogation which lasts an hour and during which no one touches her. The details of this interrogation remain unstated in the story, which is interesting considering the attention accorded to Dopdi's self-preparation for action in the eventuality of an

interrogation--that she will not reveal any information even if it means her death. What the interrogation shows is that information-retrieval is at best a secondary motive of her capture; it may be argued that there isn't much she can tell Senanayak which he doesn't already know or cannot already divine about the enemy. The story also ends without imparting any information regarding this matter. What is certain, however, is the fact that rape as torture is very much the point of capturing Dopdi; in this her expectations are not deceived--she is indeed "countered" by the police force in a close approximation of the way she envisaged such a counter: "When they counter you, your hands are tied behind you [in her case, she is spread-eagled and tied to posts]. All your bones are crushed, your sex is a terrible wound" (OW 192). Though Dopdi's vision of a counter here is based on what happened to a male prisoner, it is significant that her own horrific experience as a female prisoner is not far removed: She too is tied down, spread-eagled and to posts, and as a consequence of gang-rape she too finds her sex to be a terrible wound: "Something sticky under her ass and waist...she senses her vagina is bleeding...her breasts are bitten raw, the nipples torn" (OW 195). This "making" of the prisoner--Senanayak's casual and parting command to begin the procedure: "Make her. Do the needful."--is quite literally the unmaking of the dignity of a human being, be it a female Dopdi or a male Rana. What I am saying here may offend feminist sensibilities, for I am , after all, equating the suffering and humiliating experience of a woman's rape as equal to the suffering and humiliating experience of a man's torture (with or without the added possibility of homosexual rape). However, I think that I must make the claim that both males and females can be equally humiliated, tortured, and "unmade," that is, made to lose their human dignity. This loss signals the failure of and absolute violence against an ethical code. It is certainly against all dharmic-ethics, an act that must be condemned. As an adharmic act, it is one that has lost all sense of the uniting Self, and thus unnaturally worships satisfaction of the self and perpetrates an Asuric willful doing of injury to others; it indicates a world "with Desire for its cause and seed and governing

force and law...a world devoid of just relation and linked Karma, a world without God, not true, not founded in Truth" (EG 457). What then, is a tortured, bleeding, unmade Dopdi to do in her situation? How is she to react to her unmaking? The reactions expected from her are not described by the story, though we can surmise at the very least that she is expected to behave docilely, cover her body and wounds with her cloth or sari and be escorted to her next interrogation. The way in which Dopdi does react, however, is absolutely against what is expected from someone who has been raped and unmade. The first signal that she gives of her defiance happens when she tears the cloth or sari thrown at her by the guard and when she spills the pot of water on the ground--refusing to satiate her ravaging thirst and of washing her wounds. These actions demonstrate that Dopdi is willfully accepting further self-suffering and that she is prepared for self-sacrifice; clearly, she has not been unmade. Her action here and subsequent defiance of Senanayak spell out the Gandhian ethic of Satyagraha: "When I refuse to do a thing that is repugnant to my conscience, I use soul-force...If I do not obey the law and accept the penalty for its breach, I use soul-force. It involves sacrifice of self" (245). And in these terms, one can see that Dopdi has undergone a transformation, from being a terrorist to being a satyagrahi; whereas earlier her defiance of the law depended on the guerrilla tactics of surprise attacks, killings, and evasion, her present defiance constitutes an unarmed confrontation with the law with the knowledge that she will endure further pain, torture, or death. This transformation is evident from her willingness for self-sacrifice and continued personal suffering. Draupadi as terrorist could see violence as the only option to fight against Senanayak--that Draupadi was effectively "countered." Draupadi as satyagrahi, on the other hand, rejoins politics and religion and begins to perform "every one of [her] actions in the light of ethical principles" (MP 299). Dopdi's self-reorientation is such that it can said to exceed the codes of the Army Handbook (something which she cannot said to have done at any

earlier point in the story); thus the flummoxed guard who "doesn't know what to do if the prisoner behaves incomprehensibly" (196). And when a naked and bleeding Dopdi confronts Senanayak, he too cannot understand the meaning of her behavior, and particularly of her "indomitable laughter." What kind of laughter is this? Clearly, it is not a demented or depraved laughter, since such a reaction would be very much within the parameters of the official expectation. It is most likely this impetus of passive resistance which prompts her to offer herself up for further self-suffering and puts the fear of god in Senanayak. In the context of re-making the self, I would like to consider Kavita Panjabi's article, "Physical Torture and Modes of Creative Expression: A Study of "Cambio de Armas" and "Draupadi", which provides an attempt to invest a creative charge to the remaking process. In doing so, however, Panjabi makes two significant errors. She takes it for granted that the re-making is going to be new and creative, and not simply dictated by the power-structures which were responsible for the unmaking (and the original madeself) in the first place. The second error occurs when she relies on an identity that is kept constant in the un-making and re-making processes. The following excerpt is problematic and serves to illustrate both points: And in both stories the dialectics of the loss of power versus the desire to control one's own existence leads to a process of regaining agency in which each woman's subjectivity is recodified through creative strategies in terms of psychic phenomena and political action simultaneously deriving from, and restoring, identity. (88, emphasis mine) It is hard to guess what, if anything, the italicized portion signifies. What makes the rebuilding process creative? How can it be creative if it depends on the identity that has been unmade? And how can an unmade identity still perform as itself and simultaneously as a restorative force? As long as it is "subjectivity" that is being "recodified," how can this lead to a different subjecthood? And finally, to address an implicit assumption of her text, what makes this process unique to a female victim? In

other words, what is the transition between unmaking--forced by a male ideology and power-structure--and the creative remaking attributed to woman? There is no substantiation provided in answer to these important questions that are nonetheless raised by Panjabi's text. The answer, I feel, lies beyond the exigencies of discursive flip-flop and in the realm of the dharmic-ethical processes animating all human inter-actions. In Dopdi's case, for example, we see intimations of a sattwic surge even before she gets captured and undergoes her ordeal (I refer to the her insights about self-sacrifice). Without this sattwic awakening, her defiant response after the ordeal would not have held any force of conviction. Thus, Panjabi's feminist bid to force a male-female axis on the orientation of her interpretation is superficial and inaccurate; the truth of the matter is far removed from the following statement: "Draupadi derives the power of agency from the strength of her identity, her identity as a woman challenging a male oppressive act" (93). One sees in stead, that Dopdi as a human agent derives her force from espousing selfsacrifice and self-suffering as she resists to become a player or counter-player in an inhuman system bereft of ethical values. Panjabi's claim, that "Draupadi regains [her agency] in the use of her own body, the victim of the attack, as a weapon of attack" (94, emphasis mine), misses the project of the story entirely, and does so because her interpretive approach is sold on the Western binary of Self and Other, which in this case is recast as the oppressive male/victimized female. In the flip-flop that leads nowhere, Panjabi sees the female reversing roles. So that in Panjabi's end, Senanayak is afraid when Dopdi pushes him with her two mangled breasts because those breasts are "weapons of attack"! This interpretation finally reduces the import of the story to a ridiculously simplistic if not farcical physical plane. Panjabi is not alone in forcing the urgency of a feminist reading upon the text. Spivak sees the project of the story to "break this bonded identity [man's apparently selfadequate identity, which sustains his theory-practice juggling act] with the wedge of an UNREASONABLE fear"--as opposed to "reasonable" fear, I suppose--(179). The fear

referred to is one felt by Senanayak at the end of the story when a naked, torn and bleeding Dopdi rubs her breasts against him in the courtyard, challenging him to "counter" her--"come on, counter me--come on, counter me--?"(196). Structurally, however, the text suggests that Senanayak's identity is, at this point, no more or less bonded than Dopdi's, or the guard's, or even the narrator's. What the story tells us supports Spivak's assertion; however, the manner in which it is told suggests that the subject-positions have been dis-closed in a way that makes Spivak's reading inaccurate. In fact, it can be said in Spivakian terms itself that the story (nonc) takes us to the brink of (but not beyond) a discursive displacement from militancy to differential sexuality, whereas the text as statement (nonciation) performs a translation from the discourse of dialectic into that of deterritorialization.v The following question arises here: if the subaltern reveals herself in direct contradiction to patriarchal hegemony and thereby makes her voice heard only as the shout of a hitherto silenced term in the Binary, what is the effective strength of her ethical subject position? Spivak's suggestion that the project of the story is "to break [Senanayak's] bonded identity with the wedge of an unreasonable fear" (185) does nothing to represent the "subaltern" as a viable alternative subject and voice; on the contrary, her suggestion is yet another instance in which the name of the subaltern is sublated to the higher requirement of patronymy. In fact, no effective "translation" is shown to have taken place; that is, It is ironic, then, that when Spivak finds in Senanayak "the closest approximation to the First-World scholar in search of the third world" (OW 179), not only does she admittedly find herself, but I would argue that she finds herself as a First World Orientalist capable only of reproducing the terms of enlightenment, of Western humanist discourse. The moment when Draupadi begins to figure as the deterritorialized body without organs occurs just before her final "engagement" with Senanayak:

[Senanayak] sees Draupadi, naked, walking toward him in the bright sunlight with her head held high. The nervous guards trail behind. What is this, he is about to cry, but stops. Draupadi stands before him, naked. Thigh and pubic hair matted with dry blood. Two breasts, two wounds. (OW 196) Senanayak's silence heralds the advent of Draupadi's body without organs which announces the transformative movement from one semiotic into another, specifically from the signifying semiotic, in which "overcoding is fully effectuated by the signifier, and by the State apparatus that emits it," into the postsignifying semiotic, "in which a sign or a packet of signs detaches from the irradiating circular network and sets to work on its own account, starts running a straight line, as though swept into a narrow, open passage." (MP 121, 135). As a body without organs, Draupadi has become the schizo deliberately scrambling the codes of Senanayak's signfiying regime: "the schizo has [her] own system of coordinates for situating [her]self at [her] disposal...she has at her disposal her very own recording code, which does not coincide with the social code..." (AO 15). So it is that the signifier "man" used by Draupadi in her address and taunt--"you can strip me, but how can you clothe me again, are you a man?" (196)-- is not so much the indictment of man's self-adequate identity , as Spivak would have it, but of a gendered and repressive historical State apparatus. At this moment "man" itself is emptied of meaning as it is torn from its circle of signifiance and plunged into the realm of a delirious deterritorialization. In the end, the final moment of the story--"Draupadi pushes Senanayak with her two mangled breasts, and for the first time Senanayak is afraid to stand before an unarmed target, terribly afraid." (196)--shows Dopdi victory at having effected a transsemiotic fissure. The anti-Oedipal framework brings us closer than Spivak's deconstruction with a feminist bias to the "truth" of the story. But what good is a transsemiotic fissure if it is not accompanied with an agenda or a meaningful course of action, or, an ethical justification? The moment when the naked and bleeding Draupadi confronts Senanayak is, as we have seen, the moment of deterritorialization. Useful as the concept of

deterritorialization appears in aiding a critique of literary theories which privilege the constructedness of language along with its inherent deconstructive aspects, it ends up in a dead end by not being able to impart to the deterritorialized object a course of action that is more meaningful than the delirious and almost psychopathological escape through "lines of flight." In fact, deterritorialization of this kind seems nothing more than yet another ethically empty ritual of the kind that Ashis Nandy, speaking from a self-avowed Gandhian perspective, declaims: "it has become more and more apparent that genocides, eco-disasters and ethnocides are but the underside of corrupt sciences and psychopathic technologies wedded to new secular hierarchies which have reduced major civilizations to the status of a set of empty rituals" (x). Clearly, Draupadi in her mangled and violated condition represents extreme suffering. At this point, her message to Senanayak can be understood only by recalling the imperatives of dharmic-ethical action as outlined in the Gita. It is interesting that the third section shows only the exterior of Draupadi--no inner thoughts, no insight to what's going on in her mind. This supports my claim that we are dealing primarily with forces and processes of Nature and the Self, and secondarily with identifiable "subjects;" our interpretive recourse is solely to the external actions performed by Dopdi. Her actions can be seen as a sattwic sacrifice performed for the sake of a higher truth, an ethical failure that she has suffered through and that she must contest. Her contestation, as it is depicted, becomes an instance of "Work done with a disinterested religious faith or selflessly for humanity or impersonally from devotion to the Right or the Truth" (EG 471). Dopdi's behavior is not predicated on the motive of revenge, as Spivak has erroneously concluded in a more recent introduction to the story: "In Draupadi, what is represented is an erotic object transformed into an object of torture and revenge where the line between (hetero)sexuality and gender violence begins to waver" (BS vii). It must be said here that Spivak's eroticization of Dopdi is unwarranted by the thematic and structural economy of the story. Spivak's assignation of "revenge" to the story is also

equally inappropriate. Punishment not revenge is that which motivates Dopdi's rape and torture by the police; when Dopdi pushes Senanayak with her mangled breasts, it is hard to see how her act "does hurt or harm to another in return for wrong or injury suffered" (OED). Senanayak suffers neither injury nor pain from Dopdi's action but fear. And as I have argued above, it is fear of the unknown, precisely the fear of ksetrajnic ignorance, a realization of the inhuman lack of adharmic-ethical basis for his ksetric dispensations. Senanayak's mute and fearful reaction is the reaction of an Asuric official confronted by the superior power the Devasic Dopdi. Senanayak's fear is occasioned by Dopdi's superior knowledge that has combined the knowledge of both the ksetra and the Ksetrajna. At this moment, Dopdi offers a sattwic sacrifice, her action is done without a personal motive, certainly not revenge, and as there is no personal action there is likewise no personal fruit that she seeks. In sum, Dopdi's sattwic action is "done impersonally, universally, for the good of the world, for the fulfillment of the divine will in the universe" (EG 471). It is thus not at the deconstrutive, nor feminist, nor solely deterritorial planes that the story makes its impact but at the dharmic-ethical plane. This is not to say that Spivak's criticism is unethical but it comes close in its obeisance to the discursive GOD. It is Spivak's deconstructive framework which allows her to conceive of and discuss "ethical singularity" as a "secret encounter" demonstrated by the "impossibility of "love" in the one-on-one way for each human being" (xxv); it is through the ethical moment so conceived that she makes the following claim: "This is why ethics is the experience of the impossible" (xxv). Spivak's claim makes perfect sense in the world of the displaced and displacing signifiers, which admittedly is undeniable deconstructive function of all signs; pragmatically speaking, however, her statement is meaningless and does blatant disservice to the work of such an author/activist as Mahasweta Devi. The lived reality of ethics, and of dharmic-ethics in particular, makes no claim to a significatory selfsufficiency nor to a logical rationality; to the contrary, dharmic-ethics signals the non-

discursive interconnection between the self and Self which is the inescapable quality of the fabric of being and existence. Spivak comes curiously close to broaching this non-discursive truth, in her introduction to the Breast Stories, at the moment when she briefly discusses maternal ethics in the moment of breast-feeding: The infant has one object with which to begin to construct the systems of truth (meaning) and goodness (responsibility) which will make it human. This object is its source of nourishment, deprivation, and sensuality--usually the breast. At weaning and before, the breast--and, secondarily, other part objects--become "symbolized" and recognized as whole persons. (BS xv). What this formulation belies is Spivak's own attachment to the breast of discourse. It is replete with problems, all of which center around her blinkered viewpoint which sees nothing apart from the discursive possibilities of a breast-feeding situation. To say that the infant has but one object of the breast to begin constructing its truths and responsibilities can make sense only if this Spivakian breast-feeding takes place in an environment of absolute sensory deprivation of any other kind of stimulus! For it ignores nine of the "ten senses and one" outlined in Gita: the eye, ear, skin, tongue, nose, and the organs of action, the hand, foot, mouth, anus, and genital organ, and the mind (I have discussed these in my second chapter). The experience of breast-feeding is but a minor part in the experiential realm of the child. Clearly, Spivak's infant sucks in the vacuum of discourse. In assuming a symbolizing function to the child's activity, she again forces it into a discursive realm and attributes a subjectivity to the child's actions. How is a child, if indeed a clean slate of sorts, assimilate "partial" objects as "symbols" for "whole" persons? In this regard, I refer the reader to Cynthia Willett's discussion of maternal ethics, who at the onset acknowledges the importance of her personal motherhood experience in her text, and does so as she is aware that the mother child relationship is a primary sociality between a pre-subject and a subject, that the tactile experience of caress is all-important in the development of this sociality, and that the social bond is music and

dance. Spivak's short-sighted and erroneous claims are useful in demonstrating the inadequacy of discourse worship, especially when it comes to question of formative ethics and of dharmic-ethics. It leads to the self-deluded tamasic satisfaction of stating that "ethics is the experience of the impossible." CUT AND ADDED STUFF BELOW: Draupadi provides an excellent point of departure for a discussion of the moral ambiguity that marks recent post-colonial criticism (more often than not of the poststructural bent). The absence of an ethical code manifests itself as and when literature gets analyzed and interpreted more with a view to supporting one theoretical framework against another, and less with a view to exploring themes which can help in an understanding of the ethical nature of human interaction with and within a complex endof-millennium world. In the academic realm of high theory it has become more important to elaborate structures of power and knowledge based on the inherent constructedness of all discourse than to discuss the pre-dominantly extra-discursive ethical aspects that continue to inform human action.
i

For an excellent post-structuralist discussion of the colonial enterprise of translation, its underpinnings and its consequences, see Tejaswini Niranjana's Citing Translation. ii I think that it is necessary here to invoke Deleuze and Guattari's anti-oedipal argument which brings together in one interactive economy the discourses of philosophy, psychoanalysis, capitalism, geography, and anthropology. They lay bare the repressive ideology shared by modern disciplines through their emphasis on the simultaneity of semiotic regimes and the reconceptualization of human agency as a schizophrenic urge for "desiring-production." It is, in my view, the only post-structural approach that effectively injects the consideration of pragmatics into any discussion of semiotic systems. Their thinking is properly extra-disciplinary as it is not limited by categories; however, it is this very quality which leads them to embrace a dispersal of individual intentionality down the path of a delirious "line of flight." I will suggest later that the Deleuzian/Guattarian critique takes us to the point where the necessity of a dharmic-ethical recuperation of moral action becomes all-important.
iii

In Anti-Oedipus: "Hence we are all handymen: each with his little machines. For every organ-machine, and energy-machine: all the time, flows and interruptions." (1); also, "Oedipus presupposes a fantastic repression of desiring-machines." (2). iv In Anti-Oedipus: "the idea primitive societies have no history, that they are dominated by archetypes and their repetition, is especially weak and inadequate. This idea was not conceived by ethnologists but by ideologists in the service of a tragic Judaeo-Christian consciousness that they wished to credit with he "invention" of history." (150).

I refer to her statement regarding Stanadayini: "At this point, if, therefore, the story (nonc) tells us of the failure of a translation or discursive displacement from religion to militancy, the text as statement (nonciation) participates in such a translation...from the discourse of religion into that of political critique." (266)