The Unknown Something: Objects beyond the Economy of Use in Nabarun’s Short Stories
Samrat Sengupta
in Nabarun Bhattacharya: Aesthetics and Politics in a World after Ethics. Ed. Sourit Bhattacharya, Arka Chattopadhyay, Samrat Sengupta. Bloomsbury Academic, 2020.
Description: The objective of this paper is to ask if an anthropology of the revolutionary subject is possible through a study of Naxalbari movement, a radical Maoist resistance in West Bengal and its aftermath. A historical as well as anthropological distance is maintained between those who study and those who are studied in the humanist paradigm of thinking. However, in the post-humanist approaches man is not studied in terms of some apriori values central to the manifestation of his humanity.
Rather he is studied in terms of his constitutiveness through the events and experiences which makes and unmakes him. It can be suggested that the observer instead of sharing a common humanity with his object of study shares the lack of it – the lack of essence. After moving way beyond the ideological critical exercise of measuring the success and failure of revolution, giving it a value, it is not possible to return to a philosophically naïve position of an objective analysis who can determine conclusively what the revolution was all about and why. However, the crises of description are that it is non interventionist and gives a phenomenological fore-closure to the analysis. In a word, it shows things the way they are and therefore does not give any account of any counter-possibility. In this paper some short stories by the Bengali Indian writer Nabarun Bhattacharya has been studied to engage with this problematic.
Link:
Nabarun Bhattacharya
