Terror and the Literary:

An Introduction

Authors

  • Sourit Bhattacharya
  • Arka Chattopadhyay

Abstract

Terror and terrorism are probably the most frequent catchwords of the contemporary times. At the turn of the century, Hardt and Negri warned us that we are living in a world of Empire as biopolitical production, where transnational corporations operate the mechanics of governance, and can wage ‘just war’ and resolve conflicts with the moral policing of the NGOs (2001: 22-41). Terror is part of the surveillance and regulation of life, while ‘terrorism,’ in its delimited political use, is only one way of engaging with it. Agamben’s notion of ‘state of exception’ in fuller picture indicates that the practice of life in contemporary times is a conscious response to fear of an unknown, unaccountable death which may not always be the death of the body as corpse. As Elizabeth Dauphinee and Christian Masters note: “Livings and dyings are ruptured by survivings that are neither livings nor dyings, but which are otherwise: liminal spaces of abjection that are dangerously difficult to recognize.” (2007: xvi) If contemporary bio-politics frames life from a normative position of mortality, as Badiou argues, its ethics foregrounds a ‘victimary’ notion of the human subject. The task for Badiou’s ethics is to counter-emphasize the ‘immortal’ in man where he treats a situation from the point which is impossible in relation to that situation. To treat the situation qua its impossible point is to change the situation and replace it with a new one and this highlights the subject’s immortality over the ephemeral situation. If this change is premised on the evental dimension of novelty, it encounters the impossible, which is not without its horizon of terror and trauma.

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Author Biographies

Sourit Bhattacharya

Sourit Bhattacharya is doctoral candidate in English and Comparative Literary Studies at the University of Warwick. He works in historical crisis and literary realism in the twentieth century Indian novel. His broader areas of interest include colonial and postcolonial studies, especially South Asia and Southern Africa, world-literature, environment studies, materialist aesthetics, and crime fiction. 

Arka Chattopadhyay

Arka Chattopadhyay is an M.A, MPhil in English Literature, Jadavpur University, India. Having finished his MPHIL on Samuel Beckett and Alain Badiou, he is now pursuing his PHD at Writing and Society at University of Western Sydney on Samuel Beckett and Lacanian Psychoanalysis under the supervision of Prof. Anthony Uhlmann and Dr. Alex Ling. He has presented at conferences like 2010 and 2011 NEMLA Conventions, 2012 International Samuel Beckett Working Group and the 2014 Oxford Samuel Beckett: Debts and Legacies Symposium. His articles have been published in books, anthologies and journals like Miranda and Samuel Beckett Today / Aujourd'hui. He has edited the book Samuel Beckett and the Encounter of Philosophy and Literature with James Martell, published by Roman Books, London in 2013. Along with Sourit Bhattacharya, he is the editor of the peer-reviewed online academic journal Sanglap. He has a chapter titled ‘“I switch off”: Towards a Beckettian Minority of Theatrical Event’, forthcoming in Palgrave MacMillan’s 2015 book Deleuze and Beckett edited by Stephen Wilmer et al.

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Published

2021-09-27

How to Cite

Bhattacharya, S., & Chattopadhyay, A. (2021). Terror and the Literary:: An Introduction. Sanglap: Journal of Literary and Cultural Inquiry, 1(1), 1–10. Retrieved from https://sanglap-journal.in/index.php/sanglap/article/view/20