Desiring Whiteness provides a compelling new interpretation of how we understand race. Race is often seen to be a social construction. Nevertheless, we continue to deploy race thinking in our everyday life as a way of telling people apart visually. How do subjects become raced? Is it common sense to read bodies as racially marked? Employing Lacan's theories of the subject and sexual difference, Seshadri-Crooks explores how the discourse of race parallels that of sexual difference in making racial identity (...) a fundamental component of our thinking. Through close readings of literary and film texts, Seshardi-Crooks also investigates whether race is a system of difference equally determined by Whiteness. She argues that it is in relation to Whiteness that systems of racial classification are organized, endowing it with a power to shape human difference. (shrink)

_HumAnimal_ explores the experience of dehumanization as the privation of speech. Taking up the figure of silence as the space between human and animal, it traces the potential for an alternate political and ethical way of life beyond law. Employing the resources offered by deconstruction as well as an ontological critique of biopower, Kalpana Rahita Seshadri suggests that humAnimal, as the site of impropriety opened by racism and manifested by silence, can be political and hazardous to power. Through the (...) lens of such works as Coetzee’s Foe, Chesnutt’s “The Dumb Witness,” Dr. Itard’s “wild child,” and aerialist Philippe Petit’s _Man on Wire_, Seshadri lucidly brings Derrida’s concept of the trace and his theory of sovereignty into conversation with Agamben’s investigation of the analytics of power. The task is twofold: on the one hand, to question the logocentric presumption that determines the separation between human and animal, and on the other to examine the conflation of this separation as an instrument of power in the practice of racism. Thus _HumAnimal_ details the differences and intersections between Derrida and Agamben in their respective approaches to power, claiming that to think simultaneously within the registers of deconstruction and biopolitics entails a specification of the political and ethical consequences that attends the two perspectives. When considered as the potential of language to refuse the law of signification and semantics, silence can neutralize the exercise of power through language, and Seshadri’s inquiry discloses a counterpower that does not so much oppose or destroy the politics of the subject but rather neutralizes it and renders it ineffective. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:diacritics 30.1 (2000) 25-48 [Access article in PDF] Postcolonialism's Archive Fever Sandhya Shetty and Elizabeth Jane Bellamy Jacques Derrida. Archive Fever. Trans. Eric Prenowitz. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1996. ________. Of Grammatology. Trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Baltimore: John Hopkins UP, 1976. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. "Can the Subaltern Speak?" Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture. Ed. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1988. 271-313. (...) 1. Reading the Subaltern Archivally--or, Back to Antiquity Many readers of "Can the Subaltern Speak?" have been disturbed by Spivak's controversial answer to her own question, which is that "no scene of speaking" can arise for the subaltern woman; no discursive space can emerge from which she could formulate an "utterance." 1 One way of rephrasing Gayatri Spivak's highly resonant question might be, Can there be such a thing as a "postcolonial archive"? The purpose of our essay is to demonstrate just how crucial the concept of an "archive"--perhaps even a "postcolonial archive"--is for a more sympathetic understanding of Spivak's now notorious "silencing" of the subaltern woman. The underread and scarcely commented-on third and fourth sections of Spivak's essay raise the question, Can we approach the gendered subaltern more productively if our project is to recover not "lost voices" but rather lost texts? In the process of unpacking the textual complexities underlying Britain's 1829 abolition of sati (the widow's self-immolation on her husband's funeral pyre), Spivak pushes us further back in time when she observes intriguingly that "the archival... work involved here is indeed a task of 'measuring silences'" [286, our emphasis]. 2 We contend that her [End Page 25] choice of the term "archival" is highly motivated and can serve as the long-overdue occasion for a return to the largely unread sections of "Can the Subaltern Speak?"We can think of at least two risks involved in our undertaking. For one thing, revisitations to well-known essays can often seem more regressive than innovative. We are well aware that we may have to overcome a certain indifference on the part of readers who, feeling confident that they know it well, judge that "Can the Subaltern Speak?" (now over ten years old) has had its theoretical "moment" and should now give way to more current efforts to locate nonelite, subaltern subjectivity within a politics of resistance. A second concern is that because our project of reading the subaltern woman "archivally" must necessarily reexamine and justify Spivak's career-long engagement with Derrida and with deconstruction, we must be aware of the extent to which her deconstructive feminism has been prematurely and unfairly associated with the supposed political shortcomings of Derridean deconstruction, the regrettable result being an almost reflex aversion to her deconstructive theory within both feminism and postcolonialism. Despite these risks, however, we hope that our use of the archive as the governing principle for our return to Spivak's essay can pave the way for a more sympathetic reading of Spivak's "silent" subaltern. Our essay will argue that "Can the Subaltern Speak?" deserves a foundational or canonical status within postcolonial theory and should experience a "staying power" on the current critical scene as far-reaching and significant as Edward Said's Orientalism.Spivak's essay at one point refers quite literally to the concept of an archive, that is, the colonial "archive" of the East India Company, consisting of the "correspondence among the police stations, the lower and higher courts, the courts of directors, the prince regent's court," and so on [298]--all the documents instrumental in British law's recodification of sati from "ritual" to "crime" (also, we might add, the archive of subaltern historiography). 3 However, as Foucault's concept of the archive reminds us, the [End Page 26] archive is not just "that whole mass of texts that belong to a single discursive [in this case, legal] formation," but can also be conceptualized more abstractly as the "law of what can be said, the system that governs the appearance of statements as unique events... (shrink)

Background: Risks to healthcare workers have escalated during the pandemic and they are likely to experience a greater level of stress. This cross-sectional study investigated mental distress among healthcare workers during the early phase of Coronavirus disease-2019 outbreak in India.Method: 140 healthcare workers of a tertiary care hospital in India were assessed for perceived stress and insomnia. A factor analysis with principal component method reduced these questions to four components which were categorized as insomnia, stress-related anxiety, stress-related irritability, and stress-related (...) hopelessness. Further statistical analyses were done on these factor scores to identify the predictors and investigate the differences between the different categories of healthcare workers.Result: Doctors had the highest level of anxiety among the healthcare workers. Both doctors and nurses perceived a greater level of irritability than the other HCWs. Compared to doctors and nurses, other HCWs were more likely to experience insomnia. Lower age, higher education, female gender, and urban habitat were associated with greater perception of anxiety. Older age, being quarantined, and single marital status were the significant predictors of irritability. Female gender, single marital-status, and higher number of medical ailments contributed to perceived hopelessness. Quarantine significantly predicted insomnia.Conclusion: Different categories of healthcare workers are experiencing varied mental health problems owing to their heterogeneous socio-demographic backgrounds. Tailored and personalized care, as well as policies, might help in alleviating their problems. Further research is warranted to explore the psychological distress and remedies among these frontline workers during and after the ongoing pandemic crisis. (shrink)

Contributed papers presented at International Conference on The Contribution of Advaita Vedanta to Humanity organized by Chinmaya International Foundation Shodha Sansthan in 2015.

JIPs are JNK interacting proteins and bind to JNK cascade kinases. JIP1 and JIP3 were known to be adaptors linking cargo to Kinesin‐I, a major molecular motor for axonal transport. Recent research sheds further light on JIPs' complex roles in axonal transport, namely in activation of Kinesin‐I and in cargo release. In Drosophila, APLIP1/JIP1 allows the Kinesin‐I complex to enable cargo release through activation of JNK signaling.1 In mammalian cell culture, JIP1 is necessary and, together with UNC‐76/FEZ1, sufficient for activating (...) Kinesin‐I.2 I discuss and compare the many roles played by JIP1 and JIP3 through interactions with several distinct players, in retrograde as well as anterograde transport. BioEssays 30:10–14, 2008. © 2007 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. (shrink)

Sociopolitical interpretation of the incarnations of Vishnu, Hindu deity, as depicted in the Bhāgavatapurāṇa.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Toward a Philosophical Anthropology of Nonhuman AnimalsKalpana SeshadriIn medieval iconography, the ape holds a mirror in which the man who sins must recognize himself as simian dei [ape of God]. In Linnaeus’s optical machine, whoever refuses to recognize himself in the ape, becomes one: to paraphrase Pascal, qui fait l’homme, fait le singe [he who acts the man, acts the ape].—Giorgio Agamben, Man and Animal[It is] then, not just (...) about animals. It concerns whether or not we can conceive of ethical relationships beyond either continuism or separatism, beyond identity politics or abyssal alterity.—Kelly Oliver, Animal LessonsI owe a deep debt of gratitude to the authors of the four provocative and challenging papers on HumAnimal: Race, Law, Language, not only for their thoughtful consideration of my work, but for pinpointing and interrogating an uncertain “failure” in my text, namely the absence of the animal as such. David Wood asks if it would be unfair to characterize HumAnimal as a work of “anthropocentric posthumanism.” Ellen Armour, too, wonders about animals and where they figure in my project. She suggests that HumAnimal doesn’t “quite cross the putative line between humans and animals as such,” but [End Page 197] she immediately and generously qualifies the observation as a “good thing, a productive thing.” Rebecca Tuvel, on the other hand, worries that in following Agamben, I appear to uphold “the binary logic that posits animals in opposition to humans because they lack language.” Animals, she suggests, “do seem to communicate with us in important ways, ways that are worth hearing.” These astute comments undoubtedly hit the mark; HumAnimal has nothing to say about animals as such, and despite the lure of the title, there is nary a squeak nor a snout that scuttles between the covers.Rather than explain or defend this absence, let me turn to the title of this response: Why a philosophical anthropology rather than a zoology of animals? Obviously, there is a paradox inherent in calling for an anthropology of autozoōn, instead of a philosophical zoology. The latter would perhaps entail theories of evolution and animal behavior, research areas better left to natural scientists than to philosophers and critical thinkers. The problem with zoology is the way in which the philosophical question is supplanted by biological fact. An anthropology of animals on the other hand, would mean that we focus on the question of what it means to be something. In other words, my sense is that the question of the animal in philosophy can only be raised as a question of human propriety. To lose sight of the fraught co-implication of human propriety and animal alterity is to lose sight of the contribution that philosophy can make to hum(an)animal studies. Thus, where the animal is concerned what we must think is not merely whether the animal has language, whether we are in some kind of biological or social continuity with it, or whether between the animal and human is a condition of implacable alterity, a gulf that cannot be breached. We must also think the kind of necessity charged by the animal as such for thought or for any thinking to take place, and for any interrogation of (human) being. In other words, to follow Derrida in his deconstruction of the animal as such, the animal that is only a word, (l’animot) an abstraction that refers to nothing and everything, an idea of nonhuman life predicated on the ideal of man, must we not abandon, once and for all, the natural attitude toward animals? Must we not begin with the acknowledgment that the animal as such cannot be spoken of, that animals as such do not exist, but what exists is the signifier “animal” as the necessary correlative to any thought, construction or deconstruction of human-being? And that now in our current epoch of posthumanism, the strategic concept of “the natural animal” serves as an inconceivable ideal directing our ethics and our politics? Thus, I suggest that what we must contend with today, what must be encountered not once and for all but repeatedly, is the logical non sequitur that confronts us; that is... (shrink)

Since the Second World War, Japanese firms have gone from being ridiculed in the West for poor quality products to being highly praised and imitated for their success in manufacturing innovation, quality standards and management philosophy. Arguably, however, one area in which Japanese firms can be said to lag behind their western counterparts is in the development and articulation of policies mandating ethical business practices. In its own markets, but particularly abroad, Japanese business has been accused of a variety of (...) ethical shortcomings, including racial and sexual discrimination, bribery, environmental irresponsibility and the flouting of local laws and customs. This article will consider the reasons for the apparent lag in conduct, examine the issues involved, consider the likelihood of imminent change and offer some personal observations on the subject. (shrink)

The essay argues for a nuanced understanding of the notorious dissonance between Derrida and Agamben despite their shared interest in troubling the metaphysical separation between human and animal. I argue that a close scrutiny of their differing strategies towards the matrix of framing issues (such as sovereignty and violence) is salient for keeping the ontological question of species difference open. I suggest that the dissonance between the two thinkers is best understood in relation to systemic and rhetorical effects—namely, the encompassing (...) figure of the circle that structures sovereignty, and the rhetoric of hyperbole that disfigures the circle into an ellipse and the line. This ironic interplay appears through their mutually dissonant readings of the localization of life (human and animal) and the situation of power and violence in relation to sovereignty. (shrink)

First words on silence -- The secret of literary silence -- Law, "life/living," language -- Between Derrida and Agamben -- The wild child : politics and ethics of the name -- The wild child and scientific names -- HumAnimal acts : potentiality or movement as rest.

This study examined whether transformational leadership would be affected by the predominance of a particular guna in a leader and his or her belief in Karma Yoga. An experiment was conducted using a sample of 110 marketing executives working in a financial services firm in eastern India. A 2 × 2 + 1 factorial design was used to manipulate the three gunas and Karma Yoga. Sattva and rajas were crossed with Karma Yoga to produce four cells, with tamas being the (...) fifth cell. Transformational leadership was the measured variable. Results show that compared to rajas, sattva enhances transformational leadership, whereas tamas reduces it. Further, Karma Yoga enhances transformational leadership when the leader is sattvic, but does not enhance transformational leadership when the leader is rajasic. Results imply that organizations interested in enhancing transformational leadership should develop s attvic qualities in their managers and encourage them to be duty oriented. (shrink)

Aphoristic work on Nyaya and Vaiśeṣika school of Hindu philosophy; Sanskrit auto commentary with Hindi interpretation and translation.

We return to Derrida's 1974 Glas. It has probably never occurred to readers of Glas that it could have relevance for any kind of critique of empire - let alone a critique of empire via the Mediterranean. But Braudel's investigation of the difficult question of the `historical Mediterranean' is precisely the lens through which Glas's nascent critique of imperialism comes into focus. In this strange work, a `thinking' of passages emerges - disruptive passages moving from west to east, ceaselessly criss-crossing (...) the vectors of the western empire's seemingly `continuous' move westward. As a rigorous critique of origins and borders, Derridean deconstruction can provide a useful perspective on ongoing efforts to pinpoint the borders of a `historical Mediterranean' and on the ways in which medieval mercantile histories of the Mediterranean themselves serve as a critique of empire. (shrink)

The earthquakes which struck Nepal’s capital in 2015 were humanitarian disasters. Not only did they inflict tragic loss of life and livelihoods, they also destroyed parts of the Kathmandu Valley’s unique UNESCO World Heritage site. These monuments were not just ornate structures but living monuments playing central roles in the daily lives of thousands, representing portals where the heavens touch earth and people commune with guiding deities. Their rehabilitation was also of economic importance as they represent a major source of (...) tourist income and employment. Unfortunately, the social and political desire for rapid reconstruction resulted in the swift removal of many traditionally constructed foundations and their replacement with modern materials without assessments of whether they contributed towards the collapse of individual monuments. These actions, combined with the wholesale removal, mixing and dumping of modern and historic debris, contributed to a second, equally destructive, cultural catastrophe – irreversible damage to Kathmandu’s Medieval fabric, in a process which frequently excluded local communities and custodians. This case study draws from our collective reflections and lessons learned from our attempts to enable equitable and ethical research partnerships between UK and Nepali colleagues as well as local communities in the debris of the Kasthamandap, Kathmandu’s eponymous monument. After briefly describing the potential of mobilising archaeologists in post-disaster contexts and outlining the challenges of undertaking research in such a setting, our case study utilises the TRUST Code to assess the character and success of our multidisciplinary collaboration in a time of crises. (shrink)

Between the Psyche and the Social is the first collection that specifically features the field of psychoanalytic social theory emerging in and between psychoanalysis, feminism, postcolonial studies, and queer theory, and across the disciplines of philosophy, literary, film, and cultural studies. This collection of essays takes the psychoanalytic study of social oppression in some new directions by engaging—indeed, stirring up—unconscious fantasies and ethical tensions at the heart of social subjectivity.

Misophonia has been characterized as intense negative reactions to specific trigger sounds. However, recent research suggests high-level, contextual, and multisensory factors are also involved. We recently demonstrated that neurotypicals’ negative reactions to aversive sounds are attenuated when the sounds are synced with positive attributable video sources. To assess whether this effect generalizes to misophonic triggers, we developed a Sound-Swapped Video database for use in misophonia research. In Study 1, we created a set of 39 video clips depicting common trigger sounds (...) and a corresponding set of 39 PAVS temporally synchronized with the OVS videos. In Study 2, participants rated the 39 PAVS videos for their audiovisual match and pleasantness. We selected the 20 PAVS videos with best match scores for use in Study 3. In Study 3, a new group of participants observed the 20 selected PAVS and 20 corresponding OVS and judged the pleasantness or unpleasantness of each sound in the two contexts accompanying each video. Afterward, participants completed the Misophonia Questionnaire. The results of Study 3 show a robust attenuating effect of PAVS videos on the reported unpleasantness of trigger sounds: trigger sounds were rated as significantly less unpleasant when paired with PAVS with than OVS. Moreover, this attenuating effect was present in nearly every participant regardless of their score on the MQ. In fact, we found a moderate positive correlation between the PAVS-OVS difference and misophonia severity scores. Overall our results provide validation that the SSV database is a useful stimulus database to study how misophonic responses can be modulated by visual contexts. Here, we release the SSV database with the best 18 PAVS and 18 OVS videos used in Study 3 along with aggregate ratings of audio-video match and pleasantness. We also provide detailed instructions on how to produce these videos, with the hope that this database grows and improves through collaborations with the community of misophonia researchers. (shrink)

Compendium of Advaita school in Hindu philosophy with Naiṣkarmyasiddhicandrikā by Jñānottama Miśra and Sandhyā-Sudhā Hindi commentaries.

This article examines the structures of the epico-Purāṇic divisions of time (yugas/sandhyās/kalpas) and asks what is joined by the Purāṇic ages known as yugas or joinings. It concludes that these structures reflect a combining of three systems of number—Greek acrophonic, Babylonian sexagesimal and Hindu decimal— represented as divisions of time. Since most interpretations of these structures, particularly yugas, focus on questions of dharma and its decline over the various ages rather than on number, it asks in conclusion if there is (...) any necessary relationship between number and dharma. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:HumAnimality:The Silence of the AnimalDavid WoodDrawing Especially on Derrida and Agamben while looking over her shoulder at Foucault, Kalpana Seshadri’s central claim is that silence is not merely inscribed in discourse or in political life as the absence or negation of power, but can also be a site for transformation and resistance (Seshadri 2012). Derrida’s deconstruction weans us from any desire for a pure presence, whether in (...) speech or in silence, and draws us into the essential exteriorization he calls writing, which as gramme, trace, and program, opens onto the history and future of technology, and thereafter, the operations of power, in particular biopower, in the articulation of which Agamben in a way synthesizes Derrida and Foucault.Seshadri takes seriously the analogy between race discrimination and the human oppression of the animal. And yet the analogy is incomplete. Racial discrimination can be detected within unproblematically humanistic discourse and often in established legal concepts and frameworks, whereas speciesism needs to be more creative. Outcries over expressions such as “animal holocaust” show just how charged such analogical claims can be, and bring to the surface the complexities of their inscription in our political life and discourse.Seshadri focuses particularly on the paradoxes of autoimmunity (with Derrida) and sovereignty (with Agamben), the points at which the logics of life, power, and language break down, a process that can license both the reduction and curtailing of life (in slavery, in political oppression, and in factory farming), but which also allows for a different response. She writes of [End Page 193] “the possibilities that arise within regimes of domination to effectively annul, neutralize, or escape power in the very moment of its exercise” (Seshadri 2012, 19).Heidegger distinguishes between two reading strategies available to us when dealing with great thinkers, but which in effect are generalizable to anyone worth reading—first, frontal critique, going counter to the other, as he puts it, and second, going to their encounter (Heidegger 1976, 77). He adds that to take the latter path, one has to bring one’s own fundamental questions to the table. This may seem somewhat portentous, and it may seem too that one is merely using the other’s writing as a vehicle for exercising one’s own obsessions, but he is surely right. One’s own deep questions are never wholly personal, and there is no substitute for engagement with what is finally at stake.This is all to justify the line of response I am taking here. As I see it, Seshadri’s articulation of the “humAnimal” largely works on our conceptual protection and demarcation of the privilege of a certain concept of the human and the human subject, which, in the case of sovereignty, has a range of consequences that include but are far from limited to race and animal relations, and may even be distinctively applicable, as Spinoza or Deleuze might say, to what we imagine our bodies to be capable of. In this latter case what is being marked is not the plight of the animal but the impact of a certain discipline of life on the ways in which we live our own bodies. I am thinking in particular of that part of chapter 7, “HumAnimal Acts,” that deals with Philippe Petit’s high wire activity, in his particular his “agility” and, in a beautiful phrase, “exuberant body.”To be clear, this account is tied to Agamben’s rethinking of potentiality and Heidegger’s discussion of dynamis in Aristotle, each contributing to a renewed understanding of movement and life. For Seshadri, this also opens onto another kind of silence, an exuberant ethics, a politics of gesture, of “pure means,” creativity, the good life, the happy body, and so on. In the fascinating chapters 5 and 6 on the “Wild Child,” the upshot is a certain discombobulation, making the Human/Animal distinction tremble, as Derrida would say, arguably helping us live our humanity less dogmatically as well as helping us toward a more complex understanding of the various species of silence. But in each of these cases it could be said that while the shape and tenor of human animation is tweaked, critiqued, and deepened... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Border CrossingEllen T. ArmourAs a philosophical theologian deeply formed by a long apprenticeship in continental philosophy, I find more points of entry into Kalpana Seshadri's HumAnimal: Race, Law, Language than I can possibly pass through in the space available to me here. Inevitably, whichever point of entry I take will violate what I take to be a core responsibility of a respondent: to hew closely to the text (...) in question, to trace in one's own words its outline in order to open it up to those who have not had the privilege to devote time and attention (those most valuable of assets for academics, it seems) to the project in question. Such a model of a responsible response itself bespeaks the central problematic of the project: the relationship between speech and silence, language and law, ethics and politics.And so I begin with a de-cision that is, simultaneously, an in-cision; I enter this text through this opening, not that, and in doing so, I relegate to a spectral silence of not-saying what other (in/de)cisions would bring to speech and/or to the invisibility of not-writing what other (in/de)cisions would render legible. In the spirit of a Derridean supplément, I hope to productively open and extend for you, if not precisely retrace, Seshadri's project.HumAnimal: Race, Law, Language (Seshadri 2012) is a brave book in many respects, but particularly in its attempt not just to delineate but to map out certain contested yet liminal spaces. In addition to those I've already mentioned, [End Page 175] let me add those between literature and philosophy, theology and philosophy, work and play, Agamben and Derrida, deconstruction and biopolitics, human and animal. (Any one of these alone would have been plenty for one book.) I take my mark from the site where these last two (or perhaps three) liminal spaces meet. First, allow me to indulge in a bit of intellectual autobiography: I began my career as a Derridean (and may yet end it that way … that remains to be seen), but have in the last few years, taken a decidedly more Foucauldian turn. Reading HumAnimal made me keenly aware of how profound a reorientation I have undergone in the process. And yet I entered into that process of reorientation (perhaps quite naively) sensing that, for all that separated Derrida from Foucault, deconstruction from biopolitics, they were not unconnected (please note the double negative). Thus, I found myself in deep sympathy with Seshadri's project in many ways. Whatever separates projects that foreground the machinations of power (as constitutive of knowledge, and vice versa) as object of analysis and those that foreground language (as constitutive of knowledge, and vice versa) as object of analysis,1 Seshadri's detailed readings suggest they share important points of overlap (which is not to say sameness). To a degree, then, HumAnimal undoes the very delineation between these kinds of projects that I just articulated. To be sure, Seshadri is aided a great deal in this by the fact that Agamben's own work invokes (though not uncritically) both Derridean and Foucauldian antecedents framed largely though not exclusively in and through the relationship between sovereignty and (bare) life.The book's title, HumAnimal: Race, Law, Language, names both the stakes of and framework for Seshadri's incision into this shared but contested space. Her neologism humAnimal marks a boundary integral to sovereignty's exercise, that between human and animal. The subtitle marks the forces at play in sovereignty's construction and its deployment. Race has often figured as the border demarcating those served by the law and those served up by it; those granted access to language and those denied it. Consignment to the nether side of law and language entails as well consignment to the nether side of the human/animal divide. The American practice of chattel slavery serves as one constitutive exemplar of a biopolitical and legal/linguistic regime in HumAnimal, as it will in my comments. But Seshadri seeks out the possibilities for resistance from this nether side; of possibilities opened up by and in silence, the suspension of law, and even... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Secret Name, or the Secret of a NameAlison SuenIn HumAnimal: Race, Law, Language, Kalpana Seshadri carefully examines the secret of silence, the nonsovereign power of silence. She wants to conceive of silence as neither repressive nor transcendent; that is, on the one hand, she wants to resist the temptation to restore silence to speech, but on the other she also wants to resist the temptation to posit silence (...) in opposition to speech, as something above and beyond language. Rather, she wants to think of silence as "an empty space where the regulatory power of discourse is nullified" (Seshadri 2012, 35).Seshadri powerfully illustrates silence as an "empty space" that invalidates the power of speech through her provocative reading of Charles Chesnutt's story "Dumb Witness." In this story, about a mute slave who holds a secret, silence becomes a most unexpected secret weapon. The slave is mute because her master's nephew has brutally cut off her tongue. The irony of this story is that the nephew realized, only after cutting off her tongue, that the slave is the only person entrusted with the secret of the will—the will that the nephew needs in order to claim his right to his uncle's property, which would include the slave woman. As the story goes, the slave woman refuses to disclose the secret until after the nephew is dead. Her refusal is made possible by the wound of her tongue, by the brutal punishment inflicted by the nephew. As Seshadri points out, the secret of the slave woman's silence exceeds her knowledge of the will. This is the case because the slave woman's silence is not a simple silence, but rather "a capability of silence, which manifests as a withholding" (Seshadri 2012, 107). Indeed, it is through her silence that the law is rendered unenforceable. It is through her silence that the nephew failed to properly own her. [End Page 182]In Seshadri's reading, the silence of the slave woman is not a deprivation of speech, but rather a capability to withhold, a silent treatment designed to punish. I am fascinated by this notion of silence as an active resistance—a subversive power that confounds the law. Nonetheless, what is the political efficacy of this silence? Specifically, what can we do with this nonsovereign power, a power that seems contingent and conditional? After all, even if the slave woman was able to use her silence to outsmart her (would-be) master, at the end of the day she is still missing her tongue, and her nonsovereign "power" over the nephew may simply be a consolation prize.I am equally fascinated by the idea that silence is a "capability." Recasting silence as a kind of "capability" is noteworthy in light of contemporary debates on animal ethics, which often revolve around the kind of capacities that animals have. As is well known, Peter Singer, following Bentham, makes the capacity to suffer the ticket to the moral community, while for Tom Regan, one needs the capacity to experience life in order to become a moral patient. In other words, recasting silence as a capability actually conforms to, rather than challenges, a typical strategy in animal rights discourses.What is at stake in this story is also the power of the secret. In her chapter on literature and the secret, Seshadri articulates different ways the secret manifests itself in literature. She writes, "literature is allied to the secret because it emerges from what is suspended (for example, meaning, truth, the word, a determinate context) and therefore can only be read and interpreted as a sign" (Seshadri 2012, 46–47). Literature always harbors secrecies because its interpretation is never exhaustive. In this sense, language itself is also secretive because meaning is necessarily excessive of the sign. In a paradoxical way, every time we speak, we are necessarily withholding.I will say more about secrets and silence as a mode of resistance in the context of animal advocacy at the end of my commentary. For now, I want to turn to Seshadri's excellent discussion on "naming" and hospitality. Specifically, I want to connect it to questions of secrecy and resistance... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Where the Wild Child IsRebecca TuvelSeshadri's book challenges us to consider the political potential of silence for race and animal studies. While acknowledging the many ways in which animals and inferiorized races have been (and continue to be) consigned to realms of speechlessness, their words rendered mute and ultimately irrelevant, Seshadri seeks the neutralizing power that resides in such exiled spaces. She asks: "When power uses a concept (...) of language to silence the other, to render this other a wretched hybrid of human and animal…is there, however, a possibility that in turn silences or further neutralizes power?" (Seshadri 2012, 13). Counter to intuitions that the space of silence is powerless, Seshadri urges readers to consider what this space opens up (rather than closes down). Seshadri asks: What happens when "powerful silence functions as a mode of refusal" (21)? Might silence open a "space for opposition" (21)?An engagement with Derrida and Agamben, among others, suggests yes—that insofar as the space of silence exposes the very operation of sovereign power, it can resist that power. Here lies what Seshadri calls silence's "nonsovereign power" (13). Consider the following: traditionally, you become a subject under the law only if you have speech. Even if it is not your own speech, if the law applies to you, someone speaks on your behalf (someone has given a "voice" to your "voicelessness"). The case of animal rights is exemplary here. By giving animals a voice, we bring animals under the law. When the protection of the law is withheld from you, however, you are silenced; you are denied access to speech. In short, your voice does not matter. The screams of an animal, the protests of a slave—they are simultaneously consigned to a realm of silence (either meaningless babble or speechlessness entirely) and to a realm beyond access to the law. In short, language and law are co-implicated. [End Page 186]And yet, if silence is a part of language, and this part of language has been exiled or liberated from the law, does not this also open a space where power can be offset? Following Agamben, Seshadri's logic here runs as follows: the law, in attempting to consign speechlessness to a realm outside the law (a realm of exile or a space of nonsubjection to the law) is by this very attempt admitting there is a space outside the law. It does this in two ways. First, in order for the sovereign to say who does and does not speak, the sovereign itself must in a sense be outside language and the law, for he can only create the rules from a place beyond the rules. Second, in order for the sovereign to push anything to a realm "outside" the law, the sovereign is admitting there is a space outside his totalizing control, a space of silent yet potent resistance.In what follows, I explore some implications of Seshadri's thesis concerning silence's neutralizing power for race and animal studies. I do so by focusing on Seshadri's discussion of the "wild child." Seshadri claims that the wild child represents the space of silence par excellence. The wild child refers to those cases of feral children seen in the woods at the outskirts of villages, captured, and brought into cities where attempts are made to civilize them. Peter the Wild Boy is a famous example. This feral child without language, home, or society, who lives among the animals, sits on the fence between humanity and animality—she is what Seshadri calls a humAnimal—a figure that ultimately eludes the law. The wild child comes with neither an identity card nor a language that might enable us to identify her, locate her origins, or her race. In short, the wild child has no belonging. But by virtue of her exile from the law and shared language, she occupies a space of powerful silence.In the interest of exploring the potential of the wild child figure further, I here pose two questions for consideration. First, exactly how might Seshadri's reflections on the wild child figure be productively extended to race and animal studies? And, second... (shrink)