Fierce pajamas

Desires of planning and the planning of Desires: Vignettes of a Rape Culture and Beyond:

{first published, with revisions, in Kafila}

Each person, withdrawn into himself, behaves as though he is a stranger to the destiny of all the others. His children and his good friends constitute for him the whole of the human species. As for his transactions with his fellow citizens, he may mix among them, but he sees them not; he touches them, but does not feel them; he exists only in himself and for himself alone. And if on these terms there remains in his mind a sense of family, there no longer remains a sense of society.

~Alexis de Toqueville (Epigraph to Richard Sennett, The Fall of Public Man)

 

Friends! You drank some darkness

and became visible

~Tomas Tranströmer (“Elegy”)

An hour is what it took for a band of six males to show a woman, a paramedic, ‘her place’ in contemporary Delhi (December 16, 2012). Often, in our pathological public places, it takes a mere moment. This case is different because it compels us to think through the limits of brutality of the living; it compels us to confront the limits of our capacity to inflict violence. But the night of December 16, 2012 also confronts us with the kind of cities we are building and the kind of places we want to inhabit. It is a different, by no means less important, matter that this woman—from whatever one has gathered these past weeks through the periodic medical bulletins—has battled to compel us to confront all of this and more, for the pain of her body and the brutality of an experience that she had survived for two weeks, serves a specular role—through it, we bear witness to ourselves, or so one hopes.

Plenty is being written about ‘what now needs to be done’, as well as about the very anatomy of rape. Some have spoken and voiced the outrage that this episode has engendered. Others have commented on the culture of impunity—bureaucratic, legal and familial; some also speak of the symbolic, material and affective construction of womanhood in our times—a construction and a culture that underlie the very construction of our rape society. These are all very valid concerns, and I am glad that we are beginning to think about them. I only wish to add a few points of my own, admittedly disjointed, as I try and think through the miasma of brutality and impunity, as I confront the terrible transformation of a school-bus in Delhi into a mobile site where dark fantasises of phenomenal violence have been enacted, as we all (re)confront societies where women’s bodies for long have been made the objects of a certain kind of politics, a politics if not of death then certainly of dehumanization.

 

Thesis: Pathological Space

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