The Creature: In Power and Pain

The Creature is an invitation to follow the mechanics between power and pain, which begets the creature. Creatures confront power in, and through, conjunctures of radical contingency. The casual use of power is an exercise in distraction. It is an abiding conundrum that those who endure affliction also exert it as a force over other living bodies in equal measure-not as acts of vengeance or bad faith, but through deeds of forgetful randomness. To ensure social indemnity and security, creatures exercise force over kindred embodiments through a process of collective mimicry. In the bargain, creatures begin to disfigure and distort each other. The line between mutual slaughter and mutual embrace begins to blur. Each transgresses its own soul. At other times, power is an opaque, magisterial and disdainful style of conveyance. It reveals itself out of nowhere. But the steadfast creature is as resilient as it is vulnerable. The more it endures, the greater its perdurance. Perduring creatures may sometimes gain a second sight, forged out of a sense of lyricality, love and abdication. But is abdication, or taking refuge in the wondrous, sufficient to release all creatures from the fatal loop of power and pain? Or will they have to slowly shed creaturely affliction by a rigorous process of decreation? Sifting through the writings of Giambattista Vico, Niccolò Machiavelli, Gabriel Tarde, Miguel de Unamuno, Jibanananda Das, Lev Shestov, Raymond Geuss, Jean Starobinski, Ernst Bloch, Simone Weil, Simon Critchley, Sarah Kane and others, this volume explores the creaturely predicament and its possibilities of freedom. The five chapters in Book I lay down fundamental questions for the creaturely condition: the question of mimicry, the relationship between taking initiative and being hounded, the bridge between senses and destitution, and the vehemence of radical contingency. Book II posits the question of skepticism, fideism and their connection to resilience and generosity in creatures. Book III is entirely devoted to various ways of conceiving the aesthetic: through the tragic, the epiphanic, the catastrophic and through militant material eruptions. Book II and III essentially delve into the sites of freedom that lurk within the condition of the creaturely. Book IV is constituted of a single chapter on the subject of decreation; it grapples with questions of attention, anonymity and abdication.

Table of Contents:
Introduction: The Omen of Nothing Book I The Imitative Creature The Hounded Creature The Creature Forlorn The Elsewhere Creature The Creature in Action Book II The Observant Creature The Generous Creature The Creature as the Spirit-Wrestler Book III The Plastic Creature The Creature as the Blasted Mortar The Creature Aflutter The Enchanted Creature The Upright Creature Book IV Decreature

About the Author :
Prasanta Chakravarty is Associate Professor of English at the University of Delhi and the editor of the web journal humanitiesunderground.org.

Review :
Prasanta Chakravarty's The Creature: In Power and Pain excavates the triangular foundation implicated in its title-the nexus of exposure and contingency that is sentient life-with a combination of breathtaking breadth and poetic precision. Picking up the implicit challenge of what was left unsaid by the humanistic presuppositions of Elaine Scarry's seminal The Body in Pain, in a series of variegated yet interlocking essays, Chakravarty compels us to confront the fundamental precarity that makes creaturely existence a realm, in equal measure, of agony and wonder. By distinguishing pain from averse feeling and suffering, The Creature takes us headlong into the recent philosophical debates on the phenomenology of pain. To the afflicted creature, there is no what-it-is likeness of the pain experience. Humanities, be prepared to inhabit the medical world of pain asymbolia and chronic pain, where pain is no longer a symptom or sign but a disease that needs to be managed more than cured. I started The Creature on a Good Friday and continued reading it over the Easter weekend. The book succeeded in invoking in me the holy shiver that must have gripped the crucified creature before the numb pain settled down to suffering. No regime of security or philosophical placebo can protect the wrecked mechanism of the creature caught between power and pain. Being stunned matter that cannot distinguish between mutual embrace and slaughter, the creature cannot be socialized through grief or compassion. The chapters in this volume explore our creaturely condition by delving into the works of some extraordinary thinkers, including Gabriel Tarde, Aniket Jaaware, Simone Weil, Oxana Timofeeva, Jibanananda Das and Ernst Bloch. This is a major work Philosophical gestures that tackle reality in its totality have become rare. All the more so when they attempt to grasp it in its most effective reality. This is what Prasanta Chakravarty dares to do by analyzing the relations of power and pain that form and deform what he calls creatures. These relations of power and pain make visible both the vulnerability and the resistance of creatures. Chakravarty follows this mechanics of power and pain in common experiences but also in extreme experiences, showing the moments when power and pain are reversed ... until we are confronted with the enigmatic possibility of a process of decreation. This is an ambitious, brave, intense and genre-defying study of the condition of creaturehood in its radical contingency: its fragility and its force, its desolation and its plenitude, its resilience and its precarity, its power and its pain. Expansive but in control of its tantalizing range, the book deftly straddles authors, texts, intellectual traditions and artefacts that stretch from Vico to Das, Unamuno to Kane, Tarkovsky to Bresson, to mine both the philosophical and the formal scope of creatureliness, and, finally, to reflect on its own undoings. A rare marriage of scholarship and minute attunement, rigour and imagination, textual and experiential, the book meets its subject on the threshold between affect, ethics and aesthetics. Its difficulty is no less than a challenge to dare to be fully human.