SRI LANKA, POSTCOLONIAL ‘LOCATIONS OF BUDDHISM’, SECULAR PEACE

Abstract

The postcolonial (anthropological) thinking about the relation/opposition between religion and politics, peace and violence rests on the sovereign law of ‘decision’. This postcolonial thinking is a necessary thinking about the question of what constitutes secular life/politics. The postcolonial thinking about politics is then as much decisive as it is critical in that it must always decide to separate (secular) life from violence. In a detailed reading of a historicist postcolonial text, I argue that once the possibility of decision is unavailable to the postcolonial sense of secular politics, the seeming relation/opposition between violence and life also becomes unavailable. It is where we have no recourse to such sovereign decision that a different postcolonial thinking (and writing) about ‘politics’ may have a chance.

Keywords:

• decision
• division
• force
• life
• peace
• religion
• sovereignty
• violence

Acknowledgements

I thank the anonymous reader and the editor of the journal Robert JC Young for their comments on the paper. Nirmala Salgado, Brian Britt, SherAli Tareen, Deegalle Mahinda, and Edward Weisband read drafts of it. I presented some of its concerns at Virginia Tech, University of Colombo and University of Southampton in 2010 and 2011.

Notes

¹Blackburn carelessly speed-reads Chakrabarty's phrase ‘disjuncture of the present with itself’. Chakrabarty does not use this idea to imply modernity's break with the past, as Blackburn surmises. The phrase, which owes to Derrida's thinking, alludes to the irreducibility of time to logocentric temporal divisions (Abeysekara 2008a). Derrida (2002) deconstructs precisely such a concept of time, from Aristotle and Hegel down to Heidegger.

²Here, too, Blackburn secularizes Buddhist life. Whether there are ‘natural modes of reflection’ and whether they are ‘expressed’ or expressions are profoundly difficult questions, to which Locations of Buddhism hardly attends. The idea that lived life can be subjected to and thereby can be recognized by way of some expression is modern. This is why Asad (1993a: 36) has argued that ‘it is a modern idea that a practitioner cannot know how to live religiously without being able to articulate that knowledge.’ Heidegger would say that when life becomes subject to expression(s), it becomes projected out, already necessitating a separation between life and its representation/expression.

³Elsewhere (Abeysekara 2011a) I have suggested that there can be no ‘creative’ life as such.

⁴This absolutely false idea of agency is used (with reference to the early work of the author of Locations of Buddhism) by recent postcolonial works on colonial Buddhism in Southeast Asia (Hansen 2007: 9; McDaniel 2008: 209). In Blackburn's rather dramatic-sounding words, these texts are part of a ‘movement now underway to depart from rather narrow colonial stimulus–local response analyses of colonialism and Asian modernity’, a ‘movement’ to grant ‘moral agency’ – Hansen's words – to locals (see Blackburn's blurb to Hansen's book).

⁵Some Sri Lankanist scholars such as John Rogers and Richard Young (who calls me a “Sinhalese,” “bete noire”) accuse me of denying natives their agency because my work supposedly ‘imposes Western disciplinary knowledge on Buddhism’ (Rogers) and commits ‘Orientalism in reverse … depriving the subject of its voice’.

⁶For literature that has discredited this idea of agency, and which the author of Locations of Buddhism, and those who follow her, unaccountably ignore, see Asad (1993b, 2003), Scott (1999, 2005), Mahmood (2005), Abeysekara (2008b); see also Mandair (2009).

⁷I have attempted to think the problem of the ‘problem’ (Greek problema) in relation to the question of aporia elsewhere (Abeysekara 2008a). Many of Derrida's works attend to this question of aporia.

⁸Asad's work does much more to complicate this question of agency.

⁹The very idea of ‘location’ itself remains unthought in Locations of Buddhism. A vigorous attempt to think about the question of location in relation to ‘anthropological locations’ of violence in Sri Lanka can be found in Jeganathan (1995).

¹⁰For a discussion of this point, see Ismail (2005: 183–4). Ismail too is unaccountably, if not decisively, disregarded by Blackburn.

¹¹I do not know if it is an accident – who knows these things? – that Steve Collins, who hails Locations of Buddhism as the ‘best study of Buddhism and colonialism in Sri Lanka’, also describes it as a ‘deeply humane’ work; that is, the best study that turns locals into secular agents ends up being ‘humane’ towards them, granting humanity to them in terms of representing them (as those who can make choices).

¹²Kant's linking necessity to ‘duty’ is well known. Hegel's (1977: 443) concept of necessity, opposed to Kant's, is what he calls the ‘unity of the Notion’. ‘Necessity … is the unity of the Notion, which brings under control the contradictory substantial being of separate moments.’ This is in part an attempt to overcome what Hegel calls the ‘irrational void of Necessity’.

¹³See also Derrida (2009: 84), with regard to Machiavelli's sovereign ordering of the relation between the beast and the man when he says in The Prince: ‘Therefore it is necessary for a prince to know how to use as appropriate the beast and the sovereign’. Derrida (1994: 73) alludes to the connection between necessity and law when he says: ‘This “it is necessary” is necessary, and that is the law’ (cf. Abeysekara 2008a).

¹⁴It is not of course that one should never say ‘it is necessary’. It is that one had better be darn careful about the demand that the phrase places on oneself, and the enormity of the obligation one will have to live up to in making sure that necessity invoked is never reduced to itself, making it a fact. For example, Derrida often says ‘it is necessary’, only to think of obligation and responsibility of writing in cautious and demanding ways that attempt to deconstruct the ancient heritage of the concept, which is very difficult, if not impossible, to do.

¹⁵The claim to not ‘disrespect’ Sri Lankans also assumes that only Sri Lankans would be disrespected, removing the non-Sri Lankans (including the author herself) from the vulnerabilities to the ‘local’ vicissitudes of offense.

¹⁶Derrida here is reading and arguing against Hobbes, who, like so many others, says that the beast or the animal, in some ways like the sovereign, does not respond, in part because the animal has no language, which Derrida says is ‘brutally false’. I suspect that Derrida may say at the same time that nobody can state with any assurance that we can ever know whether or not the sovereign, whether it is question of who or what, responds or does not respond. Perhaps the sovereign, unlike the animal, responds without ever responding.

¹⁷I can only cite a tiny sample of works, to which Locations of Buddhism does not even refer, and which hardly make the kinds of claims about colonialism that the text accuses of a ‘generation’ of postcolonial literature: Asad (1993b, 2003), Spivak (1999), Scott (2005), Mbembe (2001), Mahmood (2005).

¹⁸Does Sri Lanka really consist of just one island? Michael Ondaatje's novel Anil's Ghost also wants to examine a map of Sri Lanka with limited names, but it at least recognizes the geography of the ‘island’.

¹⁹There is not just one first in Locations of Buddhism, in that it is hardly the first text to have chosen this alternative first. Indeed, Locations of Buddhism itself notes that there have been others who first chose the alternative to tell, at least in the form of articles, the story about local agency and ‘local achievement’ during colonialism. Nonetheless, Locations of Buddhism must be the first to tell us who did so first.

²⁰As for ‘local achievement, ‘a phrase that the author borrows from Charles Hallisey (1994), doesn't it already make it seem as though something must be lacking in, if not wrong with, locals, unless they achieved something? So it is good for (some) locals that they achieved something! But what about so many other locals whose life/work does not measure up to the standard of achievement, who may never have achieved anything? What after all is an achievement (if that means completing or bringing to a head something successfully)? Is life/living really measurable or understandable in terms of such achievement? Doesn't capitalism, if not colonialism, also extol the success of achievement?

²¹One here thinks of Heidegger's use, against that of Husserl, of the word ‘horizon’ in his discussion of the temporality of existence beyond which we cannot move. And Gadamer's ‘fusion of horizons’, which, without doubt, owes to Heidegger's influence, already grants the limitedness of human existence and understanding.

²²Derrida (2009) tries to avoid reducing sovereignty to a question of who or what.

²³Binary divisions and their sovereign morality are central to this text as well. Here, following her teacher Steve Collins, Blackburn understands the eighteenth-century monastic world only by dividing Buddhist practice/life in terms of the ‘practical’ canon vs. the ‘formal’ canon. There are other divisions such as (colonial) elite and (local) non-elite. But Blackburn's divisions are products of her own understanding of power in moral and negative terms, central to other studies of Theravada Buddhism. See Abeysekara (2011a).

²⁴It would be interesting to think about the relation between the history, the past, and animal and human life in terms of the question of rebirth or the possibility of humans being reborn as animals within the tradition of Theravada Buddhism.

²⁵ Abeysekara (2011b) explores this question of the inseparability of life from religion/religious life.

²⁶Again, I can only note here that it is with the impossibility of such separations that the separations between inside and outside, western and non-western, and so forth may also become unsustainable.