Tuhin Bhattacharjee

This paper examines an unexpected encounter, and the conversation that unfolds, between Orestes, the ancient Greek prince, and Parashuram, the ancient Indian sage. This dialogue, found in Sisir Kumar Das’ Bengali collection _Aloukik Sanglap_ (_Unearthly Dialogues_ , 2011) contains a series of speculative conversations, in modern Bengali, between ancient Greek and ancient Hindu characters, forming a fascinating triangulation of cultures. But how does such a conversation become possible? What does such an impossible translation bring to light? This paper will analyze the dialogue titled "Dui Matrighati" (“Two Matricides”), referring to Orestes’ and Parashuram’s crime of murdering their own mothers. Drawing on the works of thinkers like Judith Butler, Julia Kristeva, Emanuela Bianchi, and Iris Young, I will consider how ancient Greek and Hindu thinking about the maternal-feminine (fails to) translate into each other. I shall read this dialogue in the context of ancient representations of the mother, the law of the father in psychoanalysis, and the possibility of unpredictable friendships grounded on the untranslatable. Keywords: Orestes; Parasurama; Mahabharata; matricide; female sexuality

In the wake of postmodern critiques of the totalizing project of Western philosophy, cultural theorists have had to reconsider the ethical dimensions of their engagement with the other’s singular alterity without subsuming it within the epistemic coordinates of the Western subject. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s Death of a Discipline (2003) is an important intervention in reformulating this question within the institutional politics of Comparative Literature in the American academia. In imagining a “new comparative literature,” based not on globalization but on “planetarity,” Spivak highlights the ethico-political stakes of translation and the risks that must be taken in reaching out to the subaltern other. This essay locates Spivak’s text in the larger ‘politics of love’ that philosophers like Emmanuel Levinas and Jacques Derrida have tried to limn through their work on the other’s irreducible figure. In her writings, Spivak posits the intuitive openness of love as an alternative to hyper-rational, Enlightenment modes of dealing with nature and the environment. It is only by supplementing political activism with the patient, attentive, often painful, act of love that it is possible to establish ethical singularity with the other, even if it is equally possible that this love will not be returned, even if the consummation of this love remains an impossibility. In this essay, I read Amit V. Masurkar’s Hindi film Newton (2017) in the light of Sean D. Kirkland’s distinction between dromoscopic and aporetic temporalities and argue that this act of love is infused with intimations of the tragic, a ‘double bind’ that leads to an acknowledgement of the aporetic dimension of the endeavor, at the end of which there are no ways (Gk. poros) left, and yet an impossible translation remains the only ethical imperative. Keywords: Spivak; planetarity; translation; tragedy; Bollywood

Both Judith Butler and Lee Edelman—in spite of the many differences in their respective positions—see Antigone as an anti-natal figure who disrupts social order by refusing to perpetuate the heteronormative cycle of reproduction and reproductive futurism. In this essay, however, I will argue that in resisting what Jacques Lacan calls the “second death” of her brother, Antigone emerges in the maternal position precisely through her power both to suspend and to allow (re)generation. If the fantasy of “second death” is to push back generation to the realm of nothingness—an absolute extinction of the cycle of life—Antigone refigures this “nothingness” of ex nihilo as the maternal body in all its traumatic fecundity. Reading Lacan’s Antigone alongside Adriana Cavarero’s feminist explication of the Demeter myth, and resituating Lacan’s notion of “second death” in the light of Cavarero’s “birth-no-more” would, I hope, serve to enrich our understanding of the sexuate dimensions of Antigone’s desire. I shall also engage with the writings of Julia Kristeva, Luce Irigaray, and Emanuela Bianchi in order to imagine a queer maternal politics that has place both for the mother and the child, even as it resists resorption into the normative logic of reproductive futurism.

This essay investigates the concluding myth of Plato’s Republic, as well as the section on anankē and the chōra in the Timaeus, to demonstrate that the maternal figure of Necessity (Anankē), appearing in the myth of Er as the ground of logos, serves as a fecund site for an engagement with the question of sexual difference in Plato’s works. Feminist thinkers have long noted that the image of the originary, powerful mother in ancient myth works as an ambivalent surface for the projection of masculine desires and anxieties, fantasies and transferential projections. In this essay, I draw on both Platonic and feminist scholarship to examine the imaginal architectonics of the scene of Necessity in the myth of Er. By comparing this maternal figuration of anankē with its appearance in the Timaeus alongside the errant, maternal chōra, I argue that the conclusion of the Republic invites a feminist mythmaking that can generatively engage debates around language and sexual difference in the works of Plato.