Reviews

This reviewer too is astonished at the fecundity

of those who cannot imagine God and Gods majesty, but can write eloquently about sin and the effects of sin. Joseph in Wuthering Heights (18456)
by Emily Bront, Arthur Dimmesdale in Nathaniel Hawthornes The Scarlet Letter (1850), and
Margaret White in Stephen Kings Carrie (1974)
are some who would have done well to have studied Erasmus. These fictional characters would not
have been mentioned here unless they are just
types for a large number of real, living people
who dream hellfire for others during the course of
their boring days. Erasmus is an antidote to morbid self-aggrandisement and apocalyptic thinking.
Anthony Graftons foreword is clear and situates Erasmus within the lineage of Lucian of Samosata. Graftons write-up proves the historically
important role which Erasmus played in affecting
Greenblatts swerve, but Graftons foreword also
necessitates the substitution of the normative Renaissance for the more accurate Early Modernism.
When men began guffawing at their own absurd
ideas about the cosmos and realised the extent of
their own psychoses; their insights into their own
selves made them realise the split between the
one, imaginary, integrated person into a persona
or mask which was public, and a lie, and their own
schizoid interior world of the grotesque and freakery, which is the reality (see Freakery: Cultural
Spectacles of the Extraordinary Body, ed. Rosemarie Garland Thomson (New York: New York
University, 1996)); then Modernism truly began.
The Reformation is the beginning of the Modernist turn within the history of ideas. Erasmus
was the first of the Modernists and this reprint
under review, will urge new readers to savour the
wit of a man who bandied words in friendliness
with Saint Thomas More (14781535). Is it not an
irony that Erasmus has to be contended with by
Catholics when they scrutinise the life of one of
their greatest Renaissance men of letters? Saint
More and Erasmus are signs of contradiction, but
together they are the best early Moderns. Both of
them overreached their mandates.
It is pass in Erasmus scholarship that folly
is a sanctifying trope and Christianity is folly
too. The Russian holy fools are all exemplars of
foolishness in as much as the ancient Hindu king
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Jadabharata is a fool. Shakespeares sages are all

fools; for instance, the wisest in King Lear is the
fool. Without the fool or folly, there can be no
self-recognition in Shakespeares dramas. These
ideas are so common that this reviewer did not
enter into the ambiguities inherent in the choice
of folly as Erasmuss protagonist, if we can at all
call folly the protagonist here. It seems that the
word which is Brahman qua wisdom is the main
presence in this text. Erasmuss concern in this
book is the techn of becoming a saint, like his
friend Thomas More. It is entirely wrong to presume that Erasmus would have ever bothered
with dunces.
Subhashis Chattopadhyay
Assistant Professor of English,
Ramananda College, Bishnupur

Pilate and Jesus

Giorgio Agamben. Trans.
Adam Kotsko
Stanford University Press, 425 Broadway St., Redwood City, CA 940633126, usa. www.sup.org. 2015. xii + 63
pp. pb. $15.95 isbn 9780804794541.

he Supreme Court of India has asked Indian

parliamentarians to consider whether chemical castration of those who rape minors should
be allowed under Indian law. The film Dead Man
Walking (1995) advocates life over the death penalty. It is within these contexts of jurisprudence,
literature (see Jainendra Kumar, The Resignation: Tyagpatra, trans. Rohini Choudhury (New
Delhi: Penguin, 2012) and Vijay Tendulkar, Silence! The Court Is in Session, trans. Priya Adarkar
(Oxford: Oxford University, 1979)), and religion
that Giorgio Agambens latest book Pilate and
Jesus becomes important for Indians. Jesus, the
Ecce homo, the archetypal Suffering Servant
mentioned separately, but with different connotations in the Qumran Caves Scrolls or The Dead
Sea Scrolls, the Gospels, and even within Hinduism
becomes important. This is because to be human
is to be abject (see Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection (New York: Columbia
University, 1980)). The Suffering Servant both as
a trope and as God incarnate has to endure pain

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Prabuddha Bharata

and abjection: Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani? (Matthew 27:46). Gautama, the Buddha died of disease, Sri Ramakrishna died of cancer, and Christ
was slowly crucified and mocked that he was not
rescued by his own father. Jesus could be crucified because The best lack all conviction, while
the worst /Are full of passionate intensity (W B
Yeats, The Second Coming).
Pontius Pilate, the Gospels tell us, did nothing even when his wife exhorted him to prevent
the murder of Christ (Matthew 27:19). Pilate just
went along with the mob demanding the blood
of a scapegoat (see Ren Girard, The Scapegoat,
trans. Yvonne Freccero (Baltimore: John Hopkins
University, 1986)). Much later, many like Pilate
among the Nazis, the Khmer Rouge, and similar
genocidal organisations will shift their culpability to either their bosses or to society at large. We
have forgotten that Pontius Pilate, an ordinary
judge who, as representative of Caesar, had jurisdiction over the entire human race (39) inaugurated Christian soteriology within time. Agamben
shifts the academic gaze on to Pilate, which is
both laudable as well as misplaced. This has far
reaching consequences; more important than say,
the works of Noam Chomsky or Jacques Derrida.
Chomsky refuses to encounter head-on the reality of evil in the woof of history. The Shoah had
stunned philosophers into intellectual indolence.
Agambens analysis of the Jesus-Pilate dyad, if
such a monstrous binary can be conceived, is in
fact a Leibnitz monad which needs to be scrutinised if we are to study the rise of the inhuman aka
the problem of evil. It is interesting that Agamben situates Pilate before Christ in the title of the
book. As will be explained later, this is a mistake.
As literature served Sigmund Freud construct
his theories of anxiety and obsessions, and Martha Nussbaum to develop her theories of the fragility of goodness, Dante explicates jurisprudence
for Agamben. This long essay sees the Jesus event
through Dante: Why must the decisive event of
historythe passion of Christ and the redemption of humanitytake the form of a trial? Why
must Jesus deal with the law and contend with
Pilatethe vicar of Caesarin a struggle that
he ultimately does not seem to bring to a conclusion? Dante sought to answer this question, and

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not evasively, in the De monarchia, even if what he

was concerned with above all was the legitimation
of the Roman Empire (55).
Strange that Agamben chooses the De monarchia over Dantes understanding of moral neutrality as a sin. Stranger still is Agambens conclusion
that Dante was bothered solely with the legitimation of the Roman Empire (ibid.). Dante surely
knew that one renders unto Caesar what is Caesars and not mix the kingdom of God with the
Roman empire (Matthew 22:21 and Mark 12:17).
It is hard to believe that Agamben has greater insight in the Christ event or justice than Dante. Be
that as it may, we now turn to Agambens treatment of the continuous elision of justice that faces
the homo sacer or the abject being in the here and
the now who has risen out of Fascist Italy and
Nazi Germany. The thesis that justice evades the
human person is nothing new. Kafka in The Trial
(19145) points out the inhuman nature of the
legal system. Agambens latest book, which is celebrated online as a fitting closure to his series on
the homo sacer, reduces the economy of salvation,
the role of a personal God, and Christ Himself to
human frailty and not to Divine fiat through the
primacy Agamben gives to Pontius Pilate. The
telos of all major religious soteriologies is the sovereignty of the good and not the victory of evil.
Reading this book one gets the impression that
human history is no longer guided by God. Agambens is the most nuanced academic attack so far
on the Hindu karma theory, though he never
mentions Hinduism. John Hick attacked karma
normatively but Agamben does it without even
mentioning karma. Yet Hindu soteriology will reject Pilate over Jesus since Jesus is the incarnation
who answers perfectly Pilates question: Quid est
veritas?, What is truth? (John 18:38). The answer
is to be found in Thomas Kempiss The Imitation
of Christ (c. 1427 ce), a book revered by Swami
Vivekananda: Jesus is the truth. Pilate is all that
masquerades as the truth. Agambens interrogation of jurisprudence and history of incarnations
vis--vis human history is flawed to the extent
that it is an irreligious structuralist assessment
of a religious event. Jesus suffered on the Cross
not merely because Pilate did nothing but solely
because Jesus freely and of his own accord chose
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Reviews
to suffer (see The Agony in the Garden of Gethsemane, Matthew 26:42) like Sri Ramakrishna
chose to suffer of his own free will. Nonetheless Agamben should now supplant Derrida et al
within the social sciences and humanities since it
is not grammatology which demands our immediate attention, but the rise of fundamentalism.
The world is teetering towards a Third World War
as Pope Francis has warned; where Yazidi women,
for instance are being sold in the bazaars of The
Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant; a non-state
which is nonetheless hell on earthDantes Inferno realised. Agambens critique of Pilate warns
us of the consequences of inaction and the futility
of asking Quid est veritas? and then doing nothing when confronted with the truth. The answer
to what the Supreme Court of India has asked, the
question with which we began this review, is that
we have to either choose harsher punishments for
perpetrators of heinous crimes or let our minors
be raped. There is no middle ground. Agamben
in the best philosophical fashion, following Frank
Kermode, opts for the morally convenient sense
of an ending rather than condemning Pilate once
for all. Agamben is himself morally ambiguous
and thus sees Pilate as not entirely morally culpable. The New Testament on the other hand is certain of Pilates complicity with evil. Dante, whom
Agamben tears apart, was convinced that a wrong
is a wrong and nothing can justify violence against
the non-violent; there are absolute evils as there is
one absolute Good. Immanuel Kant is more existentially honest than Giorgio Agamben.
Lest our intellectual honchos find this reviewer
lacking in rigorous homework, he quotes the following from a very lucid article, which naturally
finds Agamben suitable for defence of a man who
stands for the fragmentation of India:
The contemporary Italian philosopher, Giorgio
Agamben has written in a manner that is both
intellectually persuasive and ethically pressing,
about a figure found in ancient Roman law called
thehomo sacer. This is a man who is the most
vulnerable denizen of the political community,
because his absolute vulnerability is the
condition for the absolute power of the ruler.
Agamben delves deep into the political
and philosophical treatises of ancient Rome to
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understand this strange figure because he finds,

within the murderous space of the Nazi concentration camp, the same utter abandonment/banishment that does not make sense in the inclusive
framework of modern citizenship. Thus every
person in Auschwitz, according to Agamben, is
ahomo sacer: neither a criminal, nor a sacrificial victim, and yet consigned to death(Ananya
Vajpeyi, The Bare Life Of S.A.R. Geelani, Ph.D
<http://www.outlookindia.com/website/story/
the-bare-life-of-sar-geelani-phd/226458> accessed 26 February, 2016).

This homo sacer that Agamben strives to make

explicit is not the homo sacer who is Jesus, the Suffering Servant. Agamben uses sacred motifs to
deconstruct major faith traditions.
Subhasis Chattopadhyay
Assistant Professor of English,
Ramananda College, Bishnupur

One Self
Nome
Society of Abidance in Truth (sat),
1834 Ocean Street, Santa Cruz, CA
95060, usa. www.satramana.org.
2015. viii + 648 pp. pb. $24.95 isbn
9780981940977.

Another Q.: What of a situation of extreme

engagement of the senses in violence in a
concentration camp? There may be torture,
starvation, or extreme pain. Can one still
connect with this Knowledge under such violent
circumstances?
N.: The violence or injury is to the body only.
The Knowledge is intrinsically bodiless. The situation has no effect.
N.: If we want to eliminate sensory pain, an
anesthetic will do, but giving someone an anesthetic does not endow her with wisdom. Nowhere has the [Ramana] Maharshi, Sankara, or
the Buddha, recommended anesthetics as a
practice. The Wisdom, which is Self-Knowledge is not reached by the senses The idea
that you are a sensing entity or a nexus point
of all the senses is only imagined in the mind.
When you do not imagine such in the mind,
you are unaffected, just as space is unaffected by
whatever seems to coursing through it. (3123)

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