The ice within you: Sovereign impunity, unreadability, and the archive of November 1984

ABSTRACT

Jaspreet Singh's Helium, a novel concerning 1984's anti-Sikh pogroms, seeks to archive the impunity on which sovereignty is based. This basis remains indelible. Impunity's unconscionability contaminates conscience as we know it and as it allows us to know. The cruelty that imbues impunity impacts all social formations and compromises our ethics and politics in practice and in theory as we practice it. At stake in reading sovereign impunity, then, is its very readability. It may be unreadable or readable as unreadable. Fathoming how we are marked by what we resist, Singh writes about the (un)readable in the archive of 1984.

KEYWORDS:

• Impunity
• sovereignty
• complicity
• pogroms
• state
• violence

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 I should distinguish between terms for which my use of ‘figure’ at times serves as an ideal placeholder. ‘To use an anthropomorphism is to treat as known what the properties of the human are,’ Barbara Johnson notes (2001, 207; emphasis in original). ‘The uncanniness of personification,’ on the other hand, derives ‘from its way of putting in question what the ‘natural’ or the ‘literal’ might be’ (233). Etymologically, person gets us to a mask, which presupposes a face. Unmasked, a face can be defaced. Vis-à-vis the nonhuman and the inhuman, Helium personifies more often than it anthropomorphizes.

2 On this distinction, see the fifth session in volume two of Derrida’s The Beast and the Sovereign: ‘We shall be wondering whether, in death and in mourning, things are not the same as they are in love, and whether loving, then, does not mean loving so as to make it one’s loveable thing, to the point of having it at one’s disposal, to love eating and drinking it alive, keeping it in oneself, burying or burning it to keep it living-dead in oneself or right up close to oneself, which can also be as far as can be from oneself. Everywhere.’ (2011, 121; emphasis added). Derrida writes elsewhere of ‘remaining inconsolable before the finitude of memory. We know, we knew, we remember—before the death of the loved one—that being-in-me or being-in-us is constituted out of the possibility of mourning’ (1989, 34; emphasis in original). At stake here, for Derrida as for Singh (whether we read him as he turns to Derrida or as he turns to other texts), is something much more foundational than a poetics of intersubjectivity. For, if we are to be at all, then we only are precisely because of the mourning drive by which we are configured. To be at all, truly, is to mourn interminably others who flesh out oneself. The pregiven interminability of mourning (i.e., I will cease to mourn only when I cease to be) engenders mourning as being’s continuous predication, so that mourning might even approximate an experience of timelessness precisely because it conditions one’s experience of time: ‘The day I forget you / I will become a mortal,’ writes Singh in his poem, ‘Ma’ (2017, 33). In turn, because raw mourning is so constitutive, in the sense that I cannot be without the mortality of others, ‘true mourning’ apropos of fully grieving and letting go of the dead is an impossibility (Derrida 1989, 35; emphasis in original). I simultaneously interiorize or bear the other ‘in me (in us), at once living and dead’ and retain ‘a respect for the other as other’ that ‘leaves the other alone, outside, over there, in his death, outside of us’ (35). This simultaneity of melancholia and mourning, which ‘makes true mourning impossible’ (35; emphasis in original), is what subjects me to myself—as another. Driven by acts of incineration that seek to erase not only the evidence of atrocity but also any trace of those desecrated by it, state violence and its regimes of impunity inherently deny and work politically to negate this ontology of impossible mourning. As such, all demands for survivors to ‘move on’ or ‘let go’ or ‘get over it’ illustrate precisely how violent, how vile, an experience of true mourning would be.

3 Notably, Father, ‘a self-appointed saviour of Indian languages and culture,’ takes himself to be a translator (2013, 100); and indeed Helium is replete with translators, explicit and hidden translations, transliterations, lack of translation, invitations to translate, refusals and failures to translate, embedded transliterations and translations (including of the epigraph in Gurmukhi from Sri Guru Granth Sahib [94]), untranslatability, untranslated xeroxes (in more than one language), etymologies and their ties to translation, theories of translation, concerns for correct diction (‘the right word’), and forgetting words in one’s first language so that one must relearn it. If I could index all these elements, I would. But I can emphasize that the English word for which Nelly cannot recall the Punjabi equivalent is denial, and that it is this precise translatory failure whose domino effect leads her to relearn her mother tongue; she writes down the word when she finds it in a dictionary, but Helium denies the reader access to the equivalent (172-173). Reburying the other as the enemy, sovereign impunity’s denials spur this (denial of) denial.

4 Triangles and triangulation are key to Helium’s archival geometry well beyond this scene. See Ben Baer’s contribution to this colloquium for remarks on the triangular mirror-forms of Police Chief-Mother-Father and Mohan-Nelly-Raj; triangular parathas; and a literary anecdote on a triangular amorous entanglement. Alongside the triangles that appear later in my reading (of Celan and Levinas vis-à-vis Helium), I would add another example of mirror-formed triangulation, one focused on two sets of three women: Raj’s ekphrasis of Amrita Sher-Gil’s painting, referred to as Three Women in Helium (53) but also known as Group of Three Girls (Sher-Gil 1935), which depicts ‘three ‘saviours’, enduring what comes from outside the frame, and the bigger pain woven or braided within. Big bird-like eyes averting the surveyors’ gaze, vividly coloured dresses, perfect locks of black hair. The longer one stares at those delicate faces, this one thought precipitates: those three must be out of their minds’ (Singh 2013, 53); and an inset photo (256), reproduced courtesy of Ram Rahman (288), that Raj appears to show to Father, who has paradoxically been made to read a newspaper article about 1984 that he refuses to read: ‘Look at the aching spectacle your created. I displayed a black-and-white photo. Three Women’ (256). The photo shows three women, one of whom holds a child whose back is to us, as well as half the face of another woman far in the background holding a child whose face we see from the side. A bicycle wheel and a pair of legs appear in the top right corner. Two pages ahead, from a newspaper clipping courtesy of Uma Chakravarty (288): a photo of three men, all police officers, standing casually near torched vehicles (258). Three uniformed men symbolically shadow the three women in the photo and the three women in the painting. The two women in the foreground look at their perceiver(s), facing the camera, whereas the gazes of the women in the painting are averted. Baer deftly notes the suspension of direct speech on page 257. The initial suspension, though, seems to occur with this indirect imperative ‘to’ Father (the symbolically charged ‘He,’ apropos of helium, in the prior sentence shifting to ‘you’ here) on page 256. We are told Father is made to read what he refuses to read, but apropos of the suspension of direct speech, we are uncertain whether he refuses to look at what Raj would force him to see. While I cannot here pursue a full-scale reading of the mirror-effect of the painting’s three women vis-à-vis the three women in the photo, I can crosshatch them in one respect. Raj’s ekphrasis refers to ‘three ‘saviours’, enduring what comes from outside the frame’ (53). Taken by Ram Rahman (Mander 2015), the full photo is in fact cropped in Helium. The painting gesturally indicates what its three women endure, inside out. The cropped photo in the novel includes fragments of what comes from outside, which the women and the children and the pair of legs near the bicycle endure. In the full photo, a snapshot of a terrorized community, we glimpse fourteen faces, some fully and others only in part; some gazes meet the camera’s, others do not. The legs on the top right are those of a boy. Several faces we cannot see at all. Those looking away and those looking at the camera: all endure what comes from outside, as Helium frames it.

5 This triangulating moment of ethical refraction, whereby Raj seeks to focalize what he takes to be Nelly’s critique of how he unilaterally reads Father, approximates Levinas’ concept of ‘the third’: ‘The third party introduces a contradiction in the saying whose signification before the other until then went in one direction. It is of itself the limit of responsibility and the birth of the question: What do I have to do with justice? A question of consciousness.’ (1998, 157). Is the third party here a pivot for the reader as a fourth party? Is our lens twice removed, qua Nelly’s perspective as Raj ethically imagines it? If a third implicates a fourth, then how should we grapple with the third’s emergence, and with it the emergence of justice, as signaling ‘an initial perjury [parjure]’? (Derrida 1999, 33; emphasis in original]. No matter one’s responses, the suitability of Levinas’ philosophy for reading Helium should be questioned. Certainly, reading Levinas has become far less fashionable than it once was. And understandably so, for Levinas infamously cannot imagine Palestinians as the other (Caro 2009; Butler 2012, 38–50). If we return to his oeuvre, then above all we should study ‘the ‘faceless’ in Levinas’ (Butler 2012, 39). In the context of Helium, this would surely encompass Nelly’s survival of an acid attack that ‘was most likely meant for her face’ (171). Levinas’ ethical philosophy cannot practice what it preaches, for it falls apart when it (de)faces the political. Yet as I hope to show, the chasm it reveals between ethics and politics is germane for reading how Helium stages the general predicament we (de)face when trying to practice our ethics while preaching our politics (and vice versa). For we have chasms, too. Chase (1989) offers critical guidance for readers similarly concerned by this article’s pivot to Paul de Man.

6 Sanders’ point computes with Elizabeth Pritchard’s argument against equating resistance or opposition with agency or agency with transcendence: agency ‘is not an attribute of subjects. Agents do not simply exist nor do they simply resist. At the same time we need to distinguish reconfigurings and disfigurings. Agents use tools and weapons. Agents build and destroy’ (2006, 280). See also Amanda Anderson on ‘aggrandized agency’ in literary criticism (2000, 44). For case studies that uncover related points in the context of November 1984, see Das’ ‘Three Portraits of Mourning and Grief’: ‘being subjected to violence does not somehow purify us. Even as the women [who survived the pogroms] became involved in some political processes, there were other institutions that continued to shape their subjectivities in directions where their voices were abrogated into the ongoing patriarchal projects. Not all such projects, however, ended up by closing political spaces’ (2007, 196).

7 Sanders’ succinct explanation of the discomfiting fact that each side is crosshatched with its other is indebted to the inimitable oeuvre of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, whose rigorous thinking on and through complicity ‘provided the conditions of possibility’ for Sanders’ Complicities (x). Thinking through complicity in more than one language, looking below to learn as a teacher without hero worship either above or below, and with eagle-eyed precision reading against the grain of bad faith as it winds its way through idealisms and defeatisms alike are tendencies watermarked throughout Spivak’s oeuvre. I cannot specify just one or two examples, although Spivak herself has in several public lectures pointed out that the very title of her book, Outside in the Teaching Machine (1993), carries the charge of complicity via defamiliarizing prepositions (not outside: outside in). Complicity is not to be found in the indices of either A Critique of Postcolonial Reason (1999) or An Aesthetic Education in the Era of Globalization (2012), which further indicates its watermarked presence. The double bind, a cognate of complicity, for its part features prominently in the latter book whose chapters ‘are in praise of learning the double bind—not just learning about it’ (2012, 1). To be so beholden to circuits of complicity may invite the challenge that such thinking is itself defeatist because of its fixation on the way things come undone in their doing (Spivak 1999, 421), or the way things cannot ever really be done or undone with finality. For example: the necessary call to abolish patriarchy will always be met with the reactive truth that ‘Fathers never die’ (Singh 2010, 192). Or: justice strictly speaking can only ever be the fragile condition for the perfectibility of law but never its realization as perfected (Derrida 2002b). Yet such a challenge seems misplaced, for its target does not even amount to a methodology or a politics that is reducible to defeatism – or to any ism (least of all relativism or postmodernism). It is rather (one cannot quite say merely) ‘what happens’ (Derrida 1990b, 85) – whether we like it or not. Many of our troubles really get going when the unforeseeable or incalculable element of what happens upsets (perhaps deconstructs?) our calculations, programs, and plans for what’s to happen, to matter, and to be. ‘Without venturing up to the perilous necessity of the question on the arche-question ‘what is’’ (Derrida 1997, 75; emphasis added), one must ‘fall back provisionally’ into the ‘traditional norms of scientificity’ one wishes to (or believes one can) transcend (74). Ben Baer offers a superlative reading of this passage (2016). This endnote is hardly tangential to Helium (whether we’re considering its scientificity or not), to November 1984, or to any of the (con)texts that shape Singh’s critical imagination. From its focus on how ‘Everything flows’ (2013, 7; emphasis in original) to its concern for the archive, Helium is absorbed precisely by what happens.

8 I read Nelly’s phrasing through the echo it carries from Sebald: ‘People’s ability to forget what they do not want to know, to overlook what is before their eyes, was seldom put to the test better than in Germany at the time [of the Allied bombings]. The population decided—out of sheer panic at first—to carry on as if nothing had happened’ (2004, 41).

9 This passage from Seventeen Tomatoes prefigures the sensation of the ‘lump of snow’ in Raj’s hand when he was a child with his father among ‘the highest mountains’ (2013, 158); the lump of snow ‘melted drop by drop’ through young Raj’s fingers, giving him ‘immense pain and pleasure, both at once’ (2013, 159). In realms of sovereign power, or more precisely along the path to embodying and executing that power reflexively, the experience of simultaneous pleasure (in feeling powerful) and pain (in not having yet sufficiently blunted conscience’s sharp edges) may be central to training oneself into committing atrocities as a matter of course. Singh’s excerpt from Primo Levi’s 1986 work, The Drowned and the Saved, marks precisely the color of that cognitive path: ‘A vast zone of grey consciences the stands between the great men of evil and the pure victims’ (2013, 112; emphasis in original).

10 The poetics of Helium’s homage to Sebald are at perhaps their subtlest as the novel closes. Helium’s shift from scientific imagery of light and heat to the descent of evening and coldness is an exact reversal of the drift of imagery that closes Vertigo. There, the extinguishing of light and the lengthening of evening’s shadows precede a drowsy reading of Samuel Pepys’ diary, which gives way to a dream sequence on a stony path through the Alps where ‘a myriad of quartz fragments glimmered’ as though the rocks ‘were being dissolved into radiant light’ (199, 261); ‘ice-grey shale’ (262), a subject of Raj’s monograph (Singh 2013, 267), then blurs into fragments from Pepys’ entry on the Great Fire of London. Sebald’s final images are ‘the jagged wall of fire’ and ‘a silent rain of ashes’ (1999, 263). Via Raj’s closing turn in the archives to the French scientist who came to Shimla in 1868, Helium parallels Austerlitz’s closing turn to the book by Dan Jacobson. Sebald’s final clause tells of ‘reaching [Mechelen] as evening began to fall’ (2011, 298).

11 It is notable how one may literally/surgically cut into Father to fix him on the inside, yet one may not cut (or axe) him figuratively to remedy him morally, ethically, or socio-politically. Of course, cutting and axing presuppose equally steady handwork and vision. Visuals of hands (Singh 2013, 269; Sebald 1999, 21) and eyes (Singh 2013, 77; Sebald 1999, 11, 75-76) in both Helium and one of its homage-texts, Vertigo, might accordingly steady us as readers.

12 Singh provides a xerox that captures most of the table of contents in The Periodic Table, specifically from chapter three on zinc to chapter seventeen on tin (2013, 15). Not pictured are chapter one on argon, two on hydrogen, eighteen on uranium, nineteen on silver, twenty on vanadium, and twenty-one on carbon. Helium supplements the absence of helium in this deftly fragmented xerox of Levi’s table of contents.

13 In neither instance is this a fault or a defect – that is, unless one’s reasoning takes an offramp to positivism, for which science (or logic itself) can or must be immune to all perceived inexactitudes of humanistic reading. ‘The more abstract the truth you want to teach the more you must seduce the senses to it,’ Nietzsche might retort to the positivists (1990, 99); some of whom may indeed not like teaching or may teach in a way that bypasses the labor of communicating abstraction sensibly, that is, via figurative language or (better yet) via language itself as essentially figural. Derrida’s opening question in ‘White Mythology: Metaphor in the Text of Philosophy’ – can anything be made ‘sensible except by metaphor?’ (1982, 209; emphasis in original) – is crucial within and beyond the compass of teaching: a compass central to Helium not only via the relationship between Professor Singh and Raj, but also because Raj himself becomes a professor whose textual staging of knowledge and experience are bound to teach us something. Nietzsche’s well-known figuration of truth as a mobile army or ‘host of metaphors, metonymies, and anthropomorphisms’ (1993, 84) would factor into a wider discussion of these truths, as would Paul de Man’s classic reading of literalness and figurativeness in Nietzsche (1979, 103-118). Parsing the latter, Bill Readings notes: ‘The literal, in its most rigorous sense, is a metaphor, and in that branch of Western philosophy named positivism, it has become the metaphor of metaphors’ for which there can be no footing ‘outside rhetoric, in a referential real abstracted from the figural’ (1989, 229).

14 For instance, (the Lacanian law of the) Father might be psychoanalytically identifiable with ‘‘He’ – the so-called noble gas’ (Singh 2013, 11): as noble as a supercop can be in a general society that worships police powers. Characterologically, too, Father, like ‘invisible ‘He’ atoms,’ seems to prefer ‘‘isolation’ or ‘solitude’’ (12), and it is notable that Singh places both ‘He’ and the personifying nouns in quotation marks that indicate the presence of figuration amid descriptive literalness. We might also associate the fact that the element itself ‘doesn’t ‘burn’’ and that ‘it keeps escaping our earth’s gravitation field’ with Father’s sovereign impunity qua his escape from accountability (12). Yet, apart from those properties that invite us to allegorize apropos of Hindutva and its mentality, superfluid helium is also instrumental to scientific work on planetary composition and the very ‘origin of mass’ (283). Helium in its non-superfluid state, moreover, is connected to the nature of vision itself, because seeing as we know it banks on solar particles – photons – that are linked to helium’s genesis (284). Like all things that in the end exceed the technological uses to which we put them, helium is not reducible to any one allegory.

15 ‘The behavior of subjects who are victims’ – or who are perpetrators, to recall Raj’s ethical reading of Nelly’s frozenness in the triangulation scene – ‘of trauma linked to mistreatment, war, terrorist attacks, captivity, or sexual abuse display striking resemblances with subjects who have suffered brain damage,’ Catherine Malabou notes (2012, 10–11). Malabou adds that ‘the border that separates organic trauma and sociopolitical trauma is increasingly porous’ (11). So too then, I would add, is the border between figurativeness and literalness in the context of trauma, but not only there.

16 Such neuronal ‘overcooking’ proffers another reading of what Raj says to Nelly, in earshot of Father: ‘it would have been best for all of us if this man had set himself on fire’ (263). Literal thermogenesis of brain tissues must be thought through carefully on a global scale, whether we imagine ourselves, our loved ones, or for that matter our unloved ones experiencing it across our aging societies: ‘Worldwide,’ according to the WHO, ‘around 55 million people have dementia, with over 60% living in low- and middle-income countries. As the proportion of older people in the population is increasing in nearly every country, this number is expected to rise to 78 million in 2030 and 139 million in 2050’ (WHO 2021). Helium reproduces a photo of Nehru on a horse (266). Whether Father is feigning or not, his doctor’s illustration of how Father’s brain will disremember the photo by dismembering it – defacing the face, muddling man and horse, seeing only the polka dots within it, then (re)cognizing nothing (267) – is emblematic of general society’s ‘collective amnesia’ regarding 1984, among related atrocities: ‘those stories of FIRE’ are not (re)cognizable in an amnesiac society that disremembers by dismembering (190; emphasis in original). Whether Father is feigning or not, Alzheimer’s and its thermogenesis alight on a metaphor of fire in the skull – ‘fires exert an irresistible pull on people. They leave everything standing and have nothing but the inferno in their heads’ (Bernhard 2006, 197) – that counterbalances, or elementally crosshatches, Chef’s epigraph from Bernhard on a dementing and brain-devouring coldness.

17 ‘Conscience and desire are not modalities of consciousness among others, but its condition,’ Levinas claims (1969, 101). If this is so, then conscience and desire are also elements of the very cognition that, from a neuroscientific angle, subtends what we philosophically call consciousness: their impairment or rot predicate impairment or rot within material circuits of the brain. A substantial self – accountable to, responsible for, and constituted on a synaptic level via the social reality of others (or, one might say, via sociality as a pillar of cognition [Poey, Burr, and Roberts 2017] and via the social as a value that is ultimately sublime [Soni and Callebert 2016]) – would be one that takes its form continuously or recurrently at the troubled, and in practice troubling, junction of two subjections: to the other as ‘host’ (Levinas 1969, 99) and to the other as ‘hostage’ (Levinas 1998, 112). From one subjection to the other, torn (apart) between two subjections, such a subject would materialize in a grammar that ‘is from the start in the accusative’ (112) and in a syntax driven by a primordial ‘passivity of being persecuted’ into responsibility for the other that forms oneself (111). In theory, this is all very moving, and these specific passages have elicited the subtlest of readings (e.g., Butler 2012, 54–68). Yet who in practice can ultimately live up to the rigor of such subjections? Taking refuge in the literary by parsing these passages as figurations that stage how and what we may come to be, one must ask: Who (perhaps excluding an adventurous subset within kink culture) hosts to the point of becoming hostage? As I noted earlier, Levinas cannot do so in practice – or at least not in relation to Palestinians, who ‘remain faceless for him’ and may indeed be ‘the paradigm for the faceless’ (Butler 2012, 39). More generally, Derrida once stated ‘that if he had to respond to every face he would inevitably become irresponsible’ (39). As would anyone. Admitting this neither excuses nor cultivates paradigms for facelessness or defacement. If ethics are incalculable (i.e., others, including both oneself as another and even those one knows best, remain a mystery) and if politics are in the grip of calculation (i.e., tarrying with the other’s qualitative singularity may be an impediment to gaining quantitative power), then an ethical politics is an oxymoron. Yet the rupture between ethical theory and political practice in Levinas’ case (as in ours) is instructive for reading the cognitive impact of the unconscionable norm that Father epitomizes. Perhaps no one can be host(age) enough to become a subject in Levinas’ terms (for apposite reflections on hospitality and/as hostility, see Derrida [2002c; 1999]). And indeed: ‘A real subject would be really frightening’ and if you see one coming, you would do well to bolt (Terada 2001, 157). As we know, Father is not diabolical or evil, but is rather ‘so ordinary’ – so that any monstrosity ascribed to him is the result of him having ‘become literature,’ for instance via Helium, the archive it contains, and the evidence of November 1984 that exists ‘in libraries all over the world’ as well as ‘on Kindle’ (258). You would not run from Father, a frail old man, if you saw him coming. A question to consider here is that if, after a life of perpetration, Father’s cognitive damage (the superfluid stilling of his neurons and atrophying of his synapses) vitiates his ethical passivity and integrity as a subject, then is he inhumanly far more akin to a dense (quasi-nonhuman) object – ‘the hyle: stupid matter, slothfully hostile as human stupidity is hostile, and like it strong because of its obtuse [not ethical] passivity’ (Levi 1984, 154)? Is this yet another case of complicity to mark, namely between ‘Matter, with her sly passivity’ (39) and ‘Spirit, dear to Fascism’ (52)? One can certainly read sovereignty, and sovereign impunity too, apropos of stupidity (Ronell 2003, 37–93; Bennington 2009). In any event, Father’s distance from the perhaps unachievable subjecthood of Levinas’ ethics is not just any distance. His distance is not generalizable. Persecutory at heart, Father’s executive power and sovereign impunity immunize him from the deepest plane of responsibility that underpins Levinas’ recourse to persecution as a term that overstates how one becomes subject to the conscience, desire, and consciousness of substantial selfhood. Perhaps the practical failure to embody Levinas’ ethics signals that the latter would hardly result in being a subject at all. If one focused on the stupid matter of fascistic paternity and risked superimposing Levinas’ schema onto Helium, on the grounds that Father is more object than subject, then one might venture the following allegorical equation: Father hosts and is hostage to superfluid Hindutva. His immunity becomes his autoimmunity, which may be a factor of Alzheimer’s itself (Meier-Stephenson et al. 2022). The unconscionable norm he embodies is so toxic that whether he is feigning Alzheimer’s or really has it, brain damage remains the most apt descriptor.

18 Pliably defining the inhuman as ‘the indeterminate non/being non/becoming of mattering and not mattering,’ Karen Barad asks: ‘What if it is only in the encounter with the inhuman’ as ‘the liminality of no/thingness’ that ‘we can truly confront our inhumanity, that is, our actions lacking compassion?’; and might that encounter reposition the inhuman as that through which ‘we come to feel, to care, to respond?’ (2012, 216; emphasis in original). Arendt’s take on this matter should trouble all human rights enthusiasts: ‘The world found nothing sacred in the abstract nakedness of being human’ (2017, 392). There is no static human being: only processes of humanization and dehumanization occurring simultaneously. On the heuristic role of dehumanization in education, see Spivak (2017). For a different reading of these (non)human matters, see the aporia on elementality in Ben Baer’s contribution to this colloquium as well as the colloquium’s introduction, which collocates his contribution and my own.

19 Of course, what really happened to him apropos of what he himself did is not altogether mysterious. ‘‘Don’t quote me on this, son,’’ says Gopal Uncle: ‘‘Several complaints were also lodged by the rights organizations against his ‘interrogation methods’’ (217). To become a torturer, and to excel enough at it to be promoted and heroized, one must already be sufficiently contorted (or, in apprenticeship, already well on the path to sufficient contortion) in one’s cognition and mentality. But this is not to suggest that such contortion is without certain subtleties: Fanon provides a psychiatric report about a European police officer whose work as a torturer in Algeria at first made him laugh but eventually led him into severe depression because his victims’ screams haunted him at home; when at the hospital to seek out Fanon for an appointment, the officer spots a former victim, which precipitates a panic attack – even as the victim recognizes the officer and tries to commit suicide (2004, 195–196). This is an instance of how torturer and victim remain folded together through the violation that (however unevenly) links them, but it also shows how Father’s executive distance from the atrocities of November 1984 might factor into his lack of depression, remorse, or haunted depth. The damage runs so deep that it stills him in the shallows. The fact that the formative stages of such deformation occurred for him in border zones of the nation-state, where ‘national security’ covers a multitude of illegal or extralegal practices that take ‘security’ to its autoimmunological conclusions, marks how the literal margin of territorial sovereignty brandishes its center. ‘The center is not the center,’ one can say (Derrida 1978, 279). Or: the margin is never strictly marginal. Validating violations of national and international law in the name of self-protection, national security justifications for torture mark how that which is ‘committed to preserving itself uncontaminated’ is ‘inhabited by an irresistible tendency to turn its self-protective mechanisms against itself’ and ‘protect itself against itself’’ (Miller 2007, 271). Crosshatching margin and center, November 1984 shows how ‘interrogation methods’ in borderlands come home to roost. Borders that elicit national security justifications for atrocities of collective punishment can suddenly spring up in one’s neighborhood, or on a commuter train platform, with fellow civilians casting themselves in the role of counterinsurgency agents. Before immolating Professor Singh, a thug asks: ‘‘Sardar-ji, our mother is dead and you are not crying? Cry, behnchod’’ (30). However perfunctorily, an interrogation method is on the scene here – a scene loaded with snapshots of impunity: a thug kicks a photojournalist ‘in the balls, snatches the camera, destroys the roll’ (30). Grammatically, the thug’s interrogative mood blurs into the imperative before terminating in a declarative statement that channels sovereign violence at its most diffused: ‘‘Gadar, now we kill you’’ (30). Ensaaf (2022) and Axel (2001, 121–157) on disappearances, rape and other fixtures of torture, and custodial killings in Punjab from the 1980s to the 1990s, including their implications for understanding diaspora formation, offer further cases in point for examining this violent plasticity of centers and margins. By referencing the U.S. Alien Tort Claims Act (2013, 260), Helium invites into its archive a further discussion that would vastly expand the center-and-margin discourse by following the trace of November 1984 from the nation-state judicial context into the contingencies and far weaker sovereignties of international law. While canvassing court filings themselves and subsequent judgments, that discussion might also draw on several texts in legal studies concerning the ATCA and impunity in international law more generally (e.g., Davis 2008; Engle 2003; Stephens 2004; Stephens 2011; Bellia and Clark 2011; Viñuales 2007). Derrida (2005a) is germane here too for reading sovereignty at its strongest and its weakest. Arendt sums up the matter by reminding us that international law ‘operates in terms of reciprocal agreements and treaties between sovereign states’ and that a sphere of enforcement ‘above the nations’ does not exist (2017, 390).

20 Helium’s stylistic homage to Sebald may extend to the theme of paternal inheritance. In her biography of Sebald, Carole Angier (2021) explores his depressions, breakdowns, and his oeuvre’s genesis in terms of the shame, disgust, and complicity he felt at his father’s military service to (and the benefits his family received from) the Third Reich. While one certainly should not reduce Sebald’s literary output to a raw psychoanalytic account of the torment he experienced upon realizing the meaning behind his parents’ silence about WWII, that account must factor somewhat into how one reads the theme of inheritance in his works. In turn, this factor informs how we might read Raj in relation to Father, alongside many other aspects in Helium: from its second epigraph from Sebald on the inherited burden of national belonging to such details as Nelly’s ‘destruction or decreation’ of her bird sketches (2103, 175), a detail profoundly connected to the novel’s first epigraph from Sri Guru Granth Sahib on inheritance qua generations of birdlife. A reading of that complex connection can only be glimpsed here. ‘Fathers never die,’ Chef reminds us (2010, 192). As it ricochets through Helium, this line and its Sebaldian backdrops find an important anthropological register in Das’ critique of Hobbes’ paternal state of nature vis-à-vis mass abductions of women during Partition (2007, 18–37) and case studies of law and paternity in India (2006).

21 ‘You have become literature, Papa, a monster,’ Raj figures (258). The link to plumb here is between the metaphor literature and the metaphor monster, with emphasis on the latter not being synonymous with evil (258). How then are ‘literature’ and ‘monster’ synonymous? Perhaps they are so because, like Father, literature harbors no secret: ‘Literature keeps a secret that doesn’t exist, in a sense … A character’s secret, for instance, does not exist; it has no thickness outside the literary phenomenon’ (Derrida 2005a, 162–163). Elsewhere in Helium a character’s ‘right-wing views, contradictions, and attempts to explain himself in a frank, open manner carried a literary potential’ (193; emphasis added). Father’s first words (conveyed via email) in the novel do not carry ‘much sarcasm or hidden meaning’ (3). That depthless surface, shorn of the multidimensional other whose incalculability comprises the substantial self, only persists. As a representation of law in the vein of Kafka’s ‘Vor dem Gesetz,’ Father ‘has no essence’ in the sense that law ‘guards itself without doing so, guarded by a doorkeeper who guards nothing, the door remaining open—and open on nothing’ (Derrida 1992, 206). A monster, then, the monstrosity of law in this case, might be a figure that stupefies because it has nothing really to hide; this would be another way of saying that monstrosity results from ‘systems that close in upon themselves as truth’ so that ‘concealment is out of the question, and stupidity remains a phantom of the truth to which it points’ (Ronell 2003, 43–44). ‘‘Oh, the Sikhs we can handle,’’ says Father with utter nonchalance when confronted (Singh 2013, 253). A monster’s apparent monstrosity reveals all that it is. Whereas, perhaps, evil might dissimulate – even if only banally. A full-scale discussion of this point would address whether the line, ‘Others are secret because they are other’ (Derrida 2005a, 162), may not quite apply to the otherness we ascribe to Father. ‘Subtracted from space, the incommensurable inside of the soul or the conscience’ that generates ‘both the end and the origin of the secret’ (Derrida 2008, 100) may be hollowed out into raw commensurability (as in ‘‘I had no choice’’ [Singh 2013, 259]), in his case.

22 Fortuitously for the elements of this article, de Man’s reading of the passage from Swann’s Way pivots on Prout’s ‘dazzling fire- and waterworks of figuration’ (1979, 14).

23 Reading Rousseau, de Man directs us to ‘the metaphor of readability in general’ which, under scrutiny, ‘in fact puts in question the status of referential language’ precisely because it ‘conceals the radical figurality of language behind the illusion that it can properly mean’ (1979, 202). As an assumption, readability ‘cannot only no longer be taken for granted but is found to be aberrant’ (202). Apropos of its significance for reading sovereign impunity, the undecidability of Father’s diagnosis stages precisely this fissuring of the metaphor of readability in general, even as the more particular textual metaphor of the ice within (text here connoting the stilling of conscience amid the stilling of neurons and atrophying of synapses) retains its force by positioning Raj and the reader on the contaminated margin outside the fold of Father’s monstrosity. It is interesting to note that the initial appearance of de Man’s phrase, ‘allegory of unreadability,’ in Allegories of Reading spirits us immediately to the question of ethics, which is of gravest concern to Raj (and to us too I hope) but not to Father: ‘Allegories are always ethical, the term ethical designating the structural interference of two distinct value systems. In this sense, ethics has nothing to do with the will (thwarted or free) of a subject, nor a fortiori, with a relationship between subjects’ (206; emphasis in original). Allegorically speaking, Raj and Father are in a relationship of inheritance that is (in this scene of impure opposition) without relation or correspondence, even as the law of complicity abides. The fact that one can ‘read’ an allegory of unreadability marks the paradox that all such allegories remain ‘hyperlegible’ (Mieszkowski 2007, 32). For an inimitable reading of unreadability, see Gasché (1998, 218–233).

24 On the same grounds, the forgiveness sought via various national commissions of truth and reconciliation that arose during the latter half of the twentieth century and for which Raj would, if he could, force his father to plead (264) turns out to be impossible: only the dead ‘could legitimately consider forgiveness. The survivor is not ready to substitute herself, abusively, for the dead. The immense and painful experience of the survivor: who would have the right to forgive in the name of the disappeared victims?’ (Derrida 2001, 44). The agony of such a case, which may seem exceptional because extreme, in fact broaches a generalizable truth: ‘it is necessary, it seems to me, to begin from the fact that, yes, there is the unforgivable. Is this not, in truth, the only thing to forgive? The only thing that calls for forgiveness? … From which comes the aporia, which can be described in its dry and implacable formality, without mercy: forgiveness forgives only the unforgivable. One cannot, or should not, forgive; there is only forgiveness, if there is any, where there is the unforgivable. That is to say that forgiveness must announce itself as impossibility itself’ (32-33; emphasis in original).

25 I use this phrase not quite in the letter of Derrida’s deployment of it early in ‘Force of Law,’ where it is synonymous with ‘making law’ (2002b, 241; emphasis in original), but my usage is in keeping with the spirit of how he finesses the fissures that enable any (non)relation between law and justice.

26 I elaborate on this point in my introduction, ‘To Ashes, or Disclosing Impunity.’ The gist concerns trying to fulfill an ‘impossible promise that precedes the recounting of events ‘just as they were’ and presupposes a constituency to whom the promise is given, the dead others who cannot speak for themselves’ (Wyschogrod 1998, 38). As Nelly’s ultimate task in Helium (137), this impossible promise begins where it ends: by tracing and accounting for those who may have neither a trace nor an account.

27 If justice is indeed ‘an experience of the impossible’ to the same extent that law ‘is the element of calculation’ and if ‘it is just that there be law, but justice is incalculable’ because ‘it demands that one calculate with the incalculable’ (Derrida 2002b, 244), then those whose survival pivots on justifying law inhabit an experience of the impossible that is perhaps too tortuous qua its ordinariness for most of us to imagine. This is a point whose gravity does not go unnoticed by Singh himself: ‘Before I started Helium, my literary life could be neatly contained within a line by Adorno: ‘For someone who has lost their [home], writing becomes a place to live.’ Little did I know it would be nearly impossible to live within monoatomic Helium’ (2021, 157).

28 ‘Aschenglorie hinter / deinen erschüttert-verknoteten / Händen am Dreiweg’ (Celan 2014, 62): ‘Word-for-word translation is already impossible’ (Derrida 2005c, 69; emphasis in original), even as the third line – rendered by Pierre Joris as ‘hands at the threeway’ (Celan 2014, 63) – folds into my reading of Helium’s pivotal scene of triangulation between perpetrator (Father), survivor (Nelly), and witness (Raj). In Joris’ rendering: ‘Ashglory behind / your shaken-knotted / hands at the threeway’ (63). For Raj as Helium’s primary and unsettling lens for ourselves as readers as well as for Nelly, whose account as both survivor of and witness to atrocity often reaches us via Raj’s perspective, one might also triangulate Celan’s concluding lines: ‘Niemand / zeugt für den / Zeugen’ (64). ‘No one / bears witness for the / witness’ (65). This triangulation may best occur through Derrida’s reading of witnessing in Celan (2005c). For its part, ‘Aschenglorie’ (‘Ashglory’) gives us light in ashes: alongside splendor, magnificence, and eternity (that is, living on), glory connotes ‘a ring or spot of light: such as a: AUREOLE’ and ‘b: a halo appearing around the shadow of an object’ (Merriam-Webster.com). Or: appearing spectrally from such a shadow in the ashen afterglow of ‘the light and shining brightness of fire’ (Derrida 2005c, 69). I think here of a passage in Vertigo that describes a light so diffused it ‘seems to have been painted as if through a veil of ash’ (Sebald 1999, 51). See also Levinas on ‘the glory of the Infinite ashes’ (1998, 143). ‘Light is also knowing, truth, meaning’ and in Celan’s text it is ‘no more than ashes’: ‘it becomes ash, it falls into ashes, as a fire goes out. But … ashes are also of glory, they can still be renowned and renamed, sung, blessed, loved’ even as all such glory is irreducible ‘to the fire or to the light of knowing’ (Derrida 2005c, 69; emphasis in original). We will never know. In turn, never knowing, I ask: How far might a reading of the Celanian intertext in Singh’s November, traced via Derrida’s focus on ashes in Celan’s poetry, travel? Certainly, as far as the Punjabi idioms of ash traced in my introduction. Perhaps as far as WWII’s Allied bombings whose victims had been ‘so badly charred and reduced to ashes [recalling one of the Punjabi idioms] by the heat, which had risen to a thousand degrees or more, that the remains of families consisting of several people could be carried away in a single laundry basket’ (Sebald 2004, 28). Or as far as a certain daunting labyrinth of philosophy whose paths one must tread carefully, and about which one may speak ‘du revenant, de la flamme et des cendres’ (Derrida 1990a, x). Or as far as all the cinders in Cinders (Derrida 2014), cinder being ‘a term orphaned from language, a term so defaced or obliterated that, like ash, it is only a residue of language and, as such, nonidentifiable’ (Rapaport 1998, 78). Can one stop there? Or is the nonidentifiable still identifiable because perhaps it had a witness or been witnessed, even though no one bears witness for the witness? After all, among the remains, the unreadable may yet remain ‘readable as unreadable’ (Derrida 2005c, 40).

29 Apart from Nietzsche on kissing while biting, a clause from Bernhard may inform one’s sense of such icy and calculative gnarling: ‘‘the cold brought out a new illness in us’’ (2006, 297). By contrast, it is ‘by a thorn burning in the flesh’ (Levinas 1998, 50) – ‘une écharde qui brûle la chair’ (Levinas 1978, 85) – that we are to become ethically sensible to and radically passive for the other whose reality enables our own. For Levinas, we are constitutively ‘burning for the other’ (‘brûlant pour l’autre’), and that persecutorial fire consumes us (1978, 86). This ‘consummation’ (in the French one finds consumation, from consumer: to consume or to burn; whereas the English translation renders consummation, which carries a rather different set of meanings) consumes ‘even the ashes’ of its event through which ‘there would be a risk that everything be born again’ (1998, 50; 1978, 86). Celan’s ‘Aschenglorie’ may yet haunt us (2014, 62).

30 The generalizability of this mentality within the fold of the ordinary features prominently in the analogy Mr. Gopal draws between representative citizenship and cultures of amused or entertained spectatorship: ‘Ordinary citizens were mere bystanders; they watched the pogroms the way one watches the Republic Day parade or a cricket match. And yet nothing was spontaneous’ (218). Many bystanders are predictably enthusiastic about their nation or otherwise keen to support their team: ‘‘This is the way to teach the Sikhs a lesson,’ says a bystander’ who is consuming the spectacle of Professor Singh’s murder (31). Nevertheless, that every crowd attending national parades and sports matches includes those who are generally or periodically underwhelmed or bored by such spectacles should give one ample pause, analogically at least, as to what we may find upon researching ordinary consciousnesses before which ostensibly unconscionable acts are tantamount to performances.

31 Unconscionability as a norm that forms and compromises conscience dovetails with Singh’s reflections on several ‘tragic normal[s]’ that regulate ‘government-directed mass violence and locality-specific massacres against minorities’ as ‘a necessity to win elections and retain power’ (2021, 212). Draped by banners of a thriving democracy, this autocratic norm complicitly folds the politics of right and left into the same quagmire of denialism: steeped together in bad faith, enlightened liberals and good leftists ‘selectively remember only certain kinds of pogroms, the ones in which they are sure that the perpetrator is the Hindu Right. But they don’t show a similar memory or concern for the dead and the living of November 1984. This provides an escape route to the Right, which then conveniently counterposes one pogrom with the other’ (212). In regionalist terms, the unconscionable norm of pogroms is a thread that constitutively runs through the fabric of society so that ‘it has become unnecessary to plead exceptional circumstances when people are lynched or burned alive in the course of sectarian strife; newspapers report these occurrences, sometimes in their inner pages, without special comment’ (Pandey 2006, 39).

32 Nietzsche offers ‘the most uniquely radical modern perspective on cruelty’ by challenging ‘the eighteenth-century anathematization of physical injury, arguing that all civilizational and educational projects are realized by means of cruelty’ (Toal 2016, 12–13). He shifts ‘the locus of the satisfaction of cruelty away from the occurrence of the suffering in the other (and even from my own consciousness of or belief in this suffering)’ so that we find it rather in feelings of delight in the ability to make another suffer, ‘that is, in my enjoyment of my own power’ (Soll 1994, 175). Cruelty is accordingly ‘a uniquely gratifying form of the will to power’ that, in dominating others’ wills, ‘cannot be replaced by just any experience of power’ (181; emphasis in original). These insights certainly bear on Helium: ‘One often forgets that 1984 was also a year of excessive laughter’ (2013, 259).