Jugalbandi

"Let us space"

—Derrida¹

Caught amidst the wonderful circulation of ideas raised in this Forum—astute, probing, reflective, critical—I somewhat struggle to find my dwelling in the across: the metaphor for dialogue, the dialogue for communication, the communication for "thinking." It is the investigation to locate dialogue in Thinking Literature across Continents (TLAC) that creates dialogue: the "dialogism" building around the loss, inconspicuity, the emergence, and the mute presence of dialogue across the book. If Laurent Dubreil hits the key of "incommensurability," accenting the creation of conversation without creating the conditions for what we understand as dialogue, Andrew Way Leong strikes the note of dialogue in what he sees as the "fourth book" which is "neither-Ghosh-nor-Miller." When Nicholas Royle looks for "thinking," R. Radhakrishnan and Ragini Tharoor Srinivasan introspectively debate the "connect" and "disconnect" of a Ghosh–Miller dialogue that is absent, present, and absent–present in the same breath. Radhakrishnan laments missing more common ground; Marshall Brown sees a silent dissensus propelling the project forward and Ragini identifies communication in incommensurability: is dialogue all about exchanges only? Or can dialogue form out of an apparent lack of exchanges and the possible worlds that it generates or ungrounds?

Ragini's observation—"It is enough that Ghosh and Miller desire dialogue; they desire the across"—is a good point to begin from. I like the loaded implication in Judith Butler's ascription of literature as "terrifying": "What is literature for me? Does that mean my definition? Does it mean how does literature live or work for me? All these are terrifying questions."² If this "terrifying" connects with literature's inherent uncanny and ambiguity then we can with some measure rescribe the "across." Allow me here to think for a while with Martin Heidegger. If being becomes "a real distress and a real liberation"³ how can the distress and liberation be effected and explored in the being of world literature, Viswa Sahitya? The question that at once inspires and bemuses me is what constitutes such a "being" and whether the being is explicable and accessible to enunciation. Heidegger's history of being leads us to rethink the "obvious" and this "obviousness rethought" can be the premise to begin thinking about world literature. If finding a text in a remote recess of a culture and rescripting its presence within the predominant circulation of the literary marketplace becomes an agenda that world literature is usually seen to promote, there is manifest profit in working through the obvious; this allows the unconcealment of truth to contribute to our thinking of the literary. How can world literature work through the "obvious"? What would it be, or it is, or be with?

The obvious carries a "presence" with it, a kind of attainment which does not always pitch on the methodologies or protocols of reading. It has a pervading and pervasive history which most thinking on/around world literature has failed to acknowledge. World literature formations are not always conditioned and calculative; the obvious corresponds with the meditative, the truth of the unconditioned and the undogmatic. The obvious in world literature is what I see as the real standoff with the status quo of reception. What, then, can we interrogate in literature when there is a world prefixed to it? How does that open the world of literature, the being of literature? Knowing literature is, often, knowing the limits of questioning literature which does not mean knowing the points of exhaustion; rather, a reminder of our inability to question further. It is here that my understanding of the "across" changes and I start to engage with Ragini's query: "Reading across: Is it even possible to read in any other way?" The world being of literature is to question the conditions of knowledge generation; it tries to see literature as "existing," as a phenomenon whose truths await to be discovered and are not always imputed and constructed. The truths of such findings lead us to see the "fundamental" of world literature where the fundamental is not merely about what "is there" but what essentially survives our investigation. This brings us to question the...