Musings of a Split Subject: A review of Brahma Prakash, Body on the Barricades: Life, Art and Resistance in Contemporary India

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• Musings of a Split SubjectA review of Brahma Prakash, Body on the Barricades: Life, Art and Resistance in Contemporary India
• Sandip K. Luis (bio)

Prakash, Brahma. Body on the Barricades: Life, Art and Resistance in Contemporary India. Leftword Books, 2023.

Body on the Barricades: Life, Art and Resistance in Contemporary India (2023), by theater and performance studies scholar Brahma Prakash, came to its readers already winning blurb praises for being "an insightful, and unusual guidebook" (Arundhati Roy), a "work of passion," and an invitation "to get enraged" (Santhosh Dass). It was presented as a "lyrical and searing … witness to the darkest, but also the most inspiring moments in the history of India" (Nivedita Menon). The numerous reviews of the book, which entered its third edition just a few months after release, were similarly laudatory. Prakash's extraordinary intellectual feat was received, to quote a reviewer, as a "literary haven, where philosophy and poetry intertwine, where the written word carries us on wings of thought" (Rani).

It is worth emphasizing, however, that this "literary haven," when originally conceived and taken up by the author, was anything but a place of intellectual retreat. Many of the book's chapters were written and published during the COVID-19 pandemic in the middle of the lockdown. As Prakash himself admits, quoting an anonymous reader's observation, "The book is written in a way as though the writer is gasping" (Prakash, "Conversations"). This unique feature, the practice of "visceral thinking" as Prakash puts it (Body 33), makes the book's overall contents, "the work" in other words, radically unworked—an "inoperative" text so to speak. Its carnal thoughts are expressed in a poetic style that is inevitably broken and elliptical, at times caught inside the infinity mirror of language. Demonstrating Alain Badiou's axiom of "democratic materialism" that "there are only bodies and languages" (Logics 1), and being deliberately devoid of prescriptions let alone "ideas," Body on the Barricades is anything but a "guidebook," contrary to Roy's estimation.

Yet, there is a guiding motto in Prakash's elegant and persuasive prose, silently undercutting the overarching and gloomy theme of curtailment experienced under a myriad of repressive conditions. That motto, which I express as a Beckettian dictum (Badiou, Logics 89), is simply to "Go on!", to continue fighting every form of cordon sanitaire. Anchored on this single maxim, which is the point de capiton of an otherwise nebulous text, Prakash undertakes a daunting project that is at once poetic and philosophical. To fully appreciate the author's efforts, one needs to start from the very tensions and contradictions to which Prakash subjects himself for the reasons specific to his writing.¹

The Poetic Prose and Its Split Subject

Despite Prakash's claim of following the "methodology of heart," a methodology of non-method in other words, it is possible to place Body on the Barricades in the line of the disciplinary innovation of lyrical sociology (Abbott). Against the teleological narrativity of historical disciplines and positivistic descriptivism of conventional sociology, advocates of the lyrical turn in the social sciences endorse the writer's reflective, sympathetic, and affectively intense engagement in the here and now of the subject. For all its lyricism, however, Body on Barricades complicates the methodological assumptions underpinning the lyrical turn, not just because of its excessive resort to poetic metaphors and philosophical contemplations but also due to an ironic desire for the narrative that it often expresses. This commitment, torn between the lyric and narrative—or the epic to be precise—produces an intriguing split subject in the text. One may outline Prakash's necessarily unstructured and stylistically fragmented writing through the following questions: Who is the subject of the book's poetic prose? Is it a body politic of the common masses that surpasses every logic of confinement in the most epic sense? Or, is it the author himself, a confessional subject expressing his feelings in the lyric mode and seeking, as we will see below, an intimate friendship with the reader? Or, should it be assumed, following the Lacanians, that the actual subject is located nowhere other than this split—between the epic and the lyric, the radical exteriority of...