Trans (In) Fusion

Ranjan Ghosh is the author of a series of important books in literary and
cultural theory. With his Trans(in)fusion: Reflections for Critical Thinking, he has
perhaps reached the culmination of his years of thinking through some of the
most pressing and salient issues and problems facing the contemporary critic.
The work is a bravura exercise in post-Deleuzian thinking, with an enviable
scope and ambit. It extends Ghosh’s already existing work on the ‘aesthetic
imaginary’. Along the way, there are some quite extraordinary reflections
on key topics and concepts for our scholarship in the field of humanities:
tradition, translation, the very question of what constitutes the experience of
reading or of engagement with any and all cultural forms. Perhaps the most
impressive aspect of this work is its massive erudition. The range is extensive,
the command masterful. This is a work of outstanding originality.
—Thomas Docherty, Professor of English and of Comparative Literature,
University of Warwick, author of Political English (2019) &
Literature and Capital (2018)
Ranjan Ghosh continues his groundbreaking work on identity and trans-

national thought with Trans(in)fusion: Reflections for Critical Thinking. One of
contemporary theory’s most insightful thinkers about the vexing nature of
understanding identity in twenty-first-century life, Ghosh blazes new trails as
he posits literary aesthetics as a paradigm for mapping our way forward in our
precarious world. Trans(in)fusion: Reflections for Critical Thinking is a must-read
for anyone endeavoring to explore the place of theory in intellectual life.
—Kenneth Womack, Monmouth University, author of Sound
Pictures (2018) & Solid State: The Story of Abbey
Road and the End of the Beatles (2019)
Trans(in)fusion: Reflections for Critical Thinking, is, in a sense, the transcription

of the motions of Ranjan Ghosh’s mind. These are mental journeys in four
extended meditations upon some key themes of critical and trans-disciplinary
thinking—upon the aesthetic imaginary, tradition, language, and thought it-
self. They are thinking not so much about but within our thinking within
the literary, our criticism of the literary; and this thinking is from what at
our initial encounter appears to be Ghosh’s unique perspective, or rather his
mode or personal style. Yet, as I followed these meditations, I began to real-
ize that this method of thought, or non-method of thought, which he calls
“trans(in)fusion,”is, in fact, my own. I, at least, took these journeys personally,
discovering for myself, as I followed Ghosh’s thinking, how our, my own
thinking is “caught in formations, in deeply entangled formations, moving
across borders of thinking and discourses of specialization and epistemic con-
finements” and yet how I, we, “cannot think a thought twice in a similar way;
we can think a thought again but differently always.”
—Stephen R. Yarbrough, Department of English, The University of
North Carolina at Greensboro, author of The Levels of Ambience:
An Introduction to Integrative Rhetoric (2018) & Inventive
Intercourse: From Rhetorical Conflict to the Ethical Creation of
Novel Truth (2016)
Trans(in)fusion
Trans(in)fusion is a highly original book that tries to radicalize our ways of

‘critical thinking’ across disciplines. The book, refreshingly, brings into
play critical philosophy, literary criticism, studies in mathematics, physics,
chemistry and developmental biology, and various other disciplines and
epistemes to set up a tenure and tenor of ‘critical thinking’. The book is
an exclusive intervention in how thinking across traditions and systems
of thought can generate distinct interpretive experiences. It questions, in
a unique transcultural and transversal bind, our ways of hermeneutic and
literary-cultural thinking. Trans(in)fusion resets the dialectics between text
and theory.
Ranjan Ghosh teaches in the Department of English, University of North

Bengal. Among his many books include Thinking Literature across Conti-
nents (Duke University Press, 2016, with J Hillis Milller), Philosophy and
Poetry: Continental Perspectives (ed., Columbia University Press, 2019), and
The Plastic Turn (Cornell University Press, forthcoming). Trans(in)fusion:
Reflections for Critical Thinking is the second volume of a trilogy on
trans-philosophy that Ghosh is writing from Routledge (New York). The
first volume was Transcultural Poetics and the Concept of the Poet (New York:
Routledge, 2017) and the third volume called Transpoesis is due next. To
know more about him, you may look up: www.ranjanghosh.com
Georges Van Den Abbeele is Professor, School of Humanities, Univer

sity of California, Irvine. Among his many books include Travel as Meta-
phor: From Montaigne to Rousseau (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 1992), translations of Jean-François Lyotard, The Differend: Phrases
in Dispute (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), Postmodern
Fables (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997) and Enthusiasm:
the Kantian Critique of History (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009).
His next book is on “Sense and Singularity” in the philosophy of Jean-Luc
Nancy. He is also the recipient of Blaise Pascal Medal, European Academy
of Sciences.
Literary Criticism and Cultural Theory
Agamben’s Political Ontology of Nudity in Literature and Art

Frances Restuccia
Conceptualisation and Exposition

A Theory of Character Construction
Lina Varotsi
Knots
Post-Lacanian Psychoanalysis, Literature and Film
Jean-Michel Rabaté
Double Trouble
The Doppelgänger from Romanticism to Postmodernism
Eran Dorfman
Literary Twinship from Shakespeare to the Age of Cloning

Wieland Schwanebeck
Promiscuity in Western Literature

Peter Stoneley
(In)digestion in Literature and Film

A Transcultural Approach
Edited by Niki Kiviat and Serena J. Rivera
Trans(in)fusion
Reflections for Critical Thinking
Ranjan Ghosh
For more information about this series, please visit: https://www.routledge.

com/literature/series/LITCRITANDCULT
Trans(in)fusion
Reflections for Critical Thinking
Ranjan Ghosh
Preface by Georges Van Den Abbeele
First published 2021
by Routledge
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Contents
Preface: Of Blood and Tea xi

G E O RG E S VA N D E N A B B E E L E
1 Trans…(in)…fusion 1
Trans
2 Entangled in Stories 43
(In)
3 ‘We Only Ever Speak One Language’ 81
Fusion
4 ‘You Cannot Value Him Alone’ 111
Bibliography 139
Index 151
‘I must Create a System, or be enslav’d by another Man’s / I will not
Reason & Compare: my business is to Create’.
William Blake, Jerusalem in David V. Erdman (ed.) The Complete Poetry and
Prose of William Blake (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981), 153.
Preface
Of Blood and Tea
Georges Van Den Abbeele
Ranjan Ghosh here invites us to think along with him, to think critically
and relentlessly across every imaginable border, thus thinking not only
as transnational and transdisciplinary but also in or as every kind of trans:
translation, transition, transference, transculturation, transhabituation,
transvestitism, transsexuality, transversality, transaction, transcendence,
transmission, transformation, transection, transience, transduction, trans-
plantation, transvaluation, transgression, transposition, and so on. Other
words, like transmutation and transmigration, resonate loudly in this con-
text while appearing curiously pleonastic: a changing change or a moving
movement?
But what about ‘trans(in)fusion’, the title of this book? And what about
its implied relation to ‘critical thinking’, of which this book is said to be
a series of ‘reflections’? Or perhaps even its relation to what we continue
to call critical theory? Trans(in)fusion already urges a transformation in
our thinking to the extent that at least two words, two different concepts
are at play here: (1) transfusion, which is the transfer of some form of li-
quidity from one vessel to another, as in a blood transfusion, and (2) infu-
sion, which conjures up the image of some substance dissolving in a liquid
medium, as in the preparation of tea leaves in hot water. Fusion occurs
from the intermingling or blending of substances – be they blood cells or
aromatic leaves– into each other, but also potentially into something else en-
tirely, such as the culinary, chemical miracle that is tea. Now, mix the two
together, trans-fusion and in-fusion, and what do we get? I’m thinking
blood and tea, and how these two life-sustaining liquids play not only into
notions of bodily care but also, and quite forcefully so, into the cultural
and political registers of social identity. Not just the stereotypical blood
and soil ballyhooed by nationalists, but the cultural appropriation of com-
modities, traded transnationally, as the very sign of the nation. In the case
of tea, we need go no further than its symbolic ascendency in England as
the very core of being English despite its obvious historical expropriation
in the course of the colonization of South Asia. But just as commodities
can ebb and flow in all kinds of aleatory ways, so too can there be mul-
tiple mixing and/or spilling of blood as well as cataclysmic shiftings and
shakings of ground that leave the classic determinates of identity in uneasy
xii Georges Van Den Abbeele
and unsteady shambles, try as might the advocates of national and other
identities. We can see why Ghosh concludes, ‘trans(in)fusion, for me, then
is less a compulsion and more a campaign. It is an experience which we,
most often, cannot do without – a delectation, an allurement, a latency
and education’. Indeed, I would add that what he gives us in this book
about trans(in)fusion is less a thought or an argument per se, than a call, or
as he says, a ‘campaign’ to heed the relentlessness of thinking, of thinking
of and as ‘trans’, in all the multifarious senses of the term. Above all, the
trans of trans(in)fusion is thinking (in) migration, that is to say, thinking
migration in the very course of migrating, the literal trans of migration as
the (impossible yet inevitable) locus of thought, thinking not just of but
as migration.
Thinking (in) migration turns out to be necessary in order to avoid
missing the work of trans(in)fusion, the very blending of tiny particles
suspended in the endless swirling of a liquid environment, both a meta-
phor of critical thinking and its conceptual milieu, steeped in the swirls of
cultural and linguistic tradition (and Ghosh has a lot to say about the use
and abuse of tradition, as we shall see). Ghosh thus gives us to think the
very physics of (critical) thinking, from molecular interaction to quantum
entanglements, the universe in trans(in)fusion, which means not a world
but a perpetual worlding, or perhaps just a whirlding, the incessant swirling
of a mad Brownian movement of states in trans, or of trans as the only
state, unsettled not by exception but by its very being. Ghosh approvingly
cites Michel Serres’ poetic claim that ‘the world is a vortex of vortices,
interlacings, a maze of waves’.
Crucially, this is why there really can be no ‘world’ literature, but only
literature as worlding, as trans, not just trans-national, but ‘trans’ in every
other conceivable way. Literature emerges in and as transmigration, and
I’ll chalk my hesitation between the prepositions ‘in’ and ‘as’ up to the
very volatility of the practice we call literature. Despite countless efforts
since Goethe first coined the term, one can never arrive at a satisfactory
definition of so-called ‘world literature’ that would apply some suitably
‘global’ standard that could reliably separate the wheat of works that are
of presumed world status from the chaff of those that considered to be of
merely regional or national interest. The impossibility of such a standard
is further sealed by the limits even of the most polyglot among us, who
can rarely rise to fluency in more than a dozen languages from among the
thousands of documented tongues in which human beings have crafted
their musings for millennia. One cannot speak then of something like
‘world’ literature no matter how expansive the concept, but only of the
world of literature, literature as world, as world-becoming but also of the
world as literary, as becoming literature. Literature is the trans(in)fusion of
languages and cultures.
Preface xiii
As Ghosh elaborates,
Trans(in)fusion, builds an experience of what I have elsewhere called

aesthetic imaginary,3 molecular imaginary, plastic imaginary, trans-
ductive imaginary and transversal imaginary. It is not a calculus to
work with but a method and non-method, agentiality and pleasant
dispossession – a dynamical plasticity. Thinking precedes thinking as
much as it relishes post-thinking.
This statement serves as one example of the Ghosh critical vortex, as

we pivot from one imaginary to another until thinking itself is revealed
as ‘a dynamical plasticity’, which in turn represents another instance of
trans(in)fusion itself. Thinking (in) migration is the key to a style of criti-
cal thinking as well as to the very concept of critique. We are perpetually
in flux, literally in medias res, between and betwixt the mirage of begin-
ning and end, the illusory stability of fixed objects, concepts, borders and
conclusions. There is only ever really the middle or milieu of the world
wherein we drift, whirled in suspension. And this goes even for those
comfortable distinctions between solids and liquids, as in liquid concrete
or liquid crystal, complex (trans)iterations that question the very distinc-
tion between stable and unstable. Trans(in)fusion obliges us to think dy-
namically and well beyond what Jean-François Lyotard used to call ‘the
solace of good forms’. Let’s return to those exemplary liquids implied in
trans(in)fusion, blood and tea. Are they really simply liquid? Or does the
liquid medium provide the ambiance for the swirl of substances, tea leaves,
seeds, grains, platelets, all manner of individual cells, both red and white,
perhaps all moving in a similar direction but not for that matter exempt
from the aleatory shock of the clinamen, from unforeseen and unpre-
dictable interactions, that can lead to novel combinations and permuta-
tions, new tastes and aromas, singular senses of every kind! These can be
life-enhancing, even salutary against sickness and injury, a nourishing tea,
a restorative IV, but they can also be harmful or fatal if the wrong mix of
substances makes their way into the brew. As I write these lines during a
moment of pandemic, my very movements restricted by the regime of so-
cial distancing, I cannot but think that transfusions and infusions can just
as readily turn into transmitting infections. They can bring death as well as
life in the myriad ways the freighted particles interact, from the chemical
level of molecules down to the quantum level of spooky entanglements,
for neither blood nor tea can be presented as a ‘simple’ liquid, but at levels
below our perceptive senses, they occur as a lumpy stew of solids floating
in liquids, defying any conventional notion of saturation (or for that mat-
ter, satisfaction). These entanglements of liquid concrete or liquid crystal
defy our commonsense repartition of the world into recognizable objects
xiv Georges Van Den Abbeele
even as they make such perception possible in the first place. But Ghosh’s
adventurous metaphor of (critical) thinking as liquid-solid trans(in)fusion,
the aleatory process of hermeneutic investigation if you will, is also the ev-
er-shifting context we in fact inhabit. The metaphor is thus also a world or
world-becoming, worlding as our very impossible condition of possibility,
what Heidegger called our thrownness, but which we might here relabel
as whirldness: the wildness or wilderness of our whirling become world.
Ghosh explores this whirlding or worlding along two great axes, the
verticality of history or ‘tradition’, and the horizontality of cross-cultural
exchange, or ‘translation’. The first of these concerns our relation to time,
to the past, or specifically to time as past, without for that matter reducing
the past to what is merely past, to mere dead time. As if to gloss William
Faulkner’s famous quip that ‘the past is never dead. It’s not even past’,
Ghosh elaborates:
If history is primarily about recording the past, history is also in ex-

tending the past, escaping the past to make a separate sense of the past.
Thinking past is thinking the non-linearity and non-identity of the
past. Tradition ceases to be the grand narrative and becomes a point of
re-turn and return. The past exists because past revises: history is the
philosophy of actual becoming.
The past is non-linear, and we are constantly remaking it as we reaffirm

the very presence of its pastness, its past presence and its present past, as
‘actual becoming’. Ghosh alludes to Foucault’s archaeology of knowledge
and the history of the present, but in many respects, the closest model
would be Hayden White’s notion of the ‘practical past’, a formulation he
rechannels from Michael Oakeshott to describe the historical past that is
actually available to us at any given moment as a source of practical infor-
mation or guide to how we live the present. Of course, this is a past that
is almost unimaginably shifty and changeable with succeeding presents, a
past whose shifting and non-linear shape both informs and is informed by
current exigencies. Ghosh offers a similar formulation when he asserts that
‘historical sense then is a kind of construction which happens and is made
to happen, but is nowhere a living in empty time’.
At a social level, the practical past also rejoins what we call tradition as an
ensemble of received mores and protocols within which current practices
emerge as either following or breaking with tradition. Ghosh, though, re-
minds us with an important corollary that even the most radical break with
tradition also paradoxically reconfirms the very weight of its existence: ‘Is
tradition within the trans(in)fusionist imaginary a destruction or preser-
vation or “leaving behind”? Tradition fosters inheritance, initiates labour,
inspires transgression and is a “presence” too; it presences itself to build
its own patterns of thinking’. Tradition, as shifting repository of the past,
swirling and whirling in the hot brew of time, both ‘fosters inheritance’
Preface xv
and ‘inspires transgression’. What Ghosh then calls ‘trans-habit’ is itself a
trans(in)fusive way for ‘the permanent past making itself a part of the pres-
ent through affirmation and cultivation’. Habituation describes the process
whereby we lose consciousness of a given custom, by its becoming uncon-
scious as habit, what Ghosh terms the ‘iterative torpor’ resulting from ‘the
repetitiveness of habit and consciousness’. At the same time, though, he
adds that ‘tradition is habit and habit-shedding where the repetition is the
possibility for a new habit’: ‘Tradition moves; it transgresses and transmits;
it is the phenomenon of trans-habit. Tradition is trans-habit. It shows that
‘meaningful communication’ across cultures does not have to be a matter
of common denominators and agreed-upon terms’. The issue here comes
down to how we are to understand repetition itself, or the gesture of a
present that signals its break from the past in the very act of paying homage
to the past. No need here to re-rehearse the long philosophical tradition of
debate, from Heraclitus to Wittgenstein to Deleuze, regarding the degree
to which repetition is primarily about the same or the different. Easier
perhaps to think this conundrum from a Lucretian perspective where our
particles suspended in liquid – blood or tea – swirl in an endless repeti-
tion pumped by a beating heart or a twirling spoon only to deviate ever
so slightly from the prescribed pathway, the infinitesimal swerve that is
the clinamen, the event if you like that inaugurates the field of space-time,
the thought that signals the deviation of critique, or in Ghosh’s terms the
‘trans-habit’ that both ‘transgresses and transmits’ the past of tradition, that
energizes ‘the possibility for a new habit’. Trans-habit is the provocation of
a certain malleability, or a certain plasticity (a theme which re-joins Ghosh
to the work of Catherine Malabou while charting the direction for his
next major project on the ‘Plastic Turn’). Ghosh extrapolates:
Trans-plastic-habit sees tradition as entanglement – a state that has

an integral DNA of understanding mapped into it, but not without
a differential dwelling that is epigenetic in nature. Tradition cannot
survive without sequences and systems of thinking; but the differ-
entiation and re-contextualizations with time and the changes in
material-social milieu matter in its formation as well. Trans-plastic-
habit forms and has the capacity to receive and give form.
But if trans-plastic-habit allows us to imagine the temporality of trans(in)

fusion itself to the point that ‘it shows that “meaningful communication”
across cultures does not have to be a matter of common denominators and
agreed-upon terms’, would this not be true a fortiori for that other axis of
trans(in)fusive world-becoming, translation as movement across the space
between cultures and languages? For Ghosh, the problem of translation is
not simply that of the incommensurable rendering of one language into
another, not just the old adage of ‘traduttore traditore’ or some more ele-
giac expression of the eternal angst one feels before the impossible ‘task’
xvi Georges Van Den Abbeele
of the translator. It is not just that there always remains some residual and
perpetual ‘untranslatability’, nor even that there are ‘untranslatables’ that
circulate between languages (pace Cassin, Lezra and Apter), but something
else entirely:
But a word that fails to get translated and defies precision when ren-
dered into a different language can sometimes carry a new weight of
meaning, adduced, inducted and induced from its interactions with a
language from a different culture or community.
Words thus circulate among and between differing languages through all
kinds of sub-molecular entanglements that bear new meaning, or rather
what Ghosh terms ‘a new weight of meaning’, a semantic and pragmatic
ponderousness subject to the gravitational pulls that define and alter the
space-time they and we inhabit. And here we encounter another form of
‘trans-habit’ that is the in-habit of a habitation, the in-stallation of a home
away from home: ‘The word does not deny its parentage but learns to
build a home with greater accommodativeness and stirring power’. What
Heidegger celebrated as the ‘house of Being’ reveals a certain transiency
here, not necessarily nomadic but transmigratory, an acquiescence to its
own foreignness, to its having come from some ‘elsewhere’, as the offspring
(ursprung) of some distant ‘parentage’, just enough so that it is seen to fit
without fitting in, to belong without belonging. But whatever this home
is, it is understood as having been built ‘with greater accommodativeness
and stirring power’, although this formulation – one that very economi-
cally states the very essence of trans(in)fusion – remains ambiguous: is it
the house itself or the word that builds the house that is characterized by
increased accommodation and ‘stirring power’? The transmigrated – or
dare we say translated – word has the kind of stirring power to twirl and
whirl the linguistic elements in its environment into some other kind of
meaning structure, a conceptual tea, or soup or even a boundless ocean of
altered sense and signification. Ghosh calls this process ‘conceptual transla-
tion’: ‘Concepts generate their own productivity through such travellings’.
Akin to Derrida’s notion of ‘abusive translation’, conceptual translation
questions the very boundaries between languages as the untranslated travels
the world of concepts, trans(in)fused in the swirling eddies of meaning-
making and world-becoming: ‘Conceptual translation then becomes con-
ceptual rewriting’. This is why again, concludes Ghosh, that ‘there cannot
be a global theory of literature’, but only the trans-national, trans-lational
and trans-migratory flows of meanings and concepts, swerving unpredict-
ably into each other, serving up new and unheard-of teas and bloodlines.
Some languages/cultures/homelands may be more available than oth-
ers to such transmigratory semiosis. This is the vitality, for example, that
Edouard Glissant detects in the supreme inventiveness and creativity of
various creoles. Ghosh distinguishes such potentiality, however, from
Preface xvii
what Ricoeur calls ‘linguistic hospitality’, defined as ‘the act of inhabiting
the word of the Other paralleled by the act of receiving the word of the
Other into one’s own home, one’s own dwelling’. Such a welcoming of
the Other into the language home, no matter how generous or hospita-
ble, differs from the work of conceptual translation. There, ‘the translated
makes its own home through a creative othering, a dwelling of its own’.
So, instead of the target language welcoming the word into its own fold
as one of its own, in this case, the word here makes its own home in the
target language, inhabiting the language without belonging to it. The
result is a ‘creative othering’ that makes the language othered from itself,
hosting an alien dwelling-within that takes the form of a ‘transference of
meaning and transmobility of concepts’, in other words, the very whirld-
ing of sense that we recognize now as trans(in)fusion. The latter emerges
then as a ‘creative othering’ that marks the foreign within the native or
mother tongue, the introduction of some foreign or parasitical agency that
also transmutes into a certain flavour of the tea, a certain colour or ‘type’
of the blood. Such is the creative othering Ghosh explores, among other
examples, in Chattopadhyay’s translations of Robert Frost into Bengali,
enabling an unexpected blending of tongues, of cultures, of critical ecol-
ogies, whose interface ‘allows asymmetries as a creative-critical move in
thinking: queer as a concept is translated and not the word’. What Ghosh
calls ‘conceptual translation’ becomes ‘a kind of problematic interface with
alterity’ that surfaces in ‘silences, certain zones of insecurities of mean-
ing, some deficit in understanding and creative-cultural indulgences’. The
foreign remains foreign, the other remains other, within what only gives
itself as the native, the same, the illusion of identity but which becomes
profoundly unsettled and deeply displaced through the creative othering
and taking up of alien abode by the work of conceptual translation. The
intrusion of the other enables the trans-fusion and the in-fusion of what
can no longer be distinguished as same and other, as native and foreign.
Ghosh writes, ‘The charm of enjoying the poem in translation is the ac-
ceptance of the acts of unsettlement that translation brings’. The claim
behind this affect of ‘charm’ is both outrageous and liberatory, as it frees
us from the melancholia or shame of not being able to read the so-called
‘original’, rather than its necessarily flawed (or betrayed) translation. In-
stead, the translated text is free to be enjoyed as its own conceptual rewrit-
ing, as a certain pleasure – aesthetic of course – in the ‘unsettling’ effects
of twists and twirls a language experiences at the hands of a skilled but
appropriately abusive translation, in the abyssal realm of trans(in)fusion.
This is why Tagore, cited by Ghosh, admits that ‘one cannot quite trans-
late one’s own works’, translation requires the in-dwelling of the foreign,
the in-stance of the other. The ‘charm’ in translation stems from the magic
of its alchemy, the artfulness of the mélange that emerges from the satura-
tion of tea leaves in hot water or from the transfusion of some substance to
make the blood be the blood the body needs to live.
xviii Georges Van Den Abbeele
Finally, the specific charm of this book on trans(in)fusion comes from
the heady mix of Ghosh’s writing, which draws upon an almost unfath-
omably deep familiarity with modern critical theory (from poststructur-
alism to postcolonialism and well beyond), with the history of philosophy
and religion, with the most recondite scientific concepts from quantum
mechanics or molecular bonding, all along with Ghosh’s stunning ability
to draw upon an unparalleled breadth of literary, cultural and linguistic
traditions that truly span the world, not just his core basis in the Anglo-
phone world and South Asia, but also in surprising and delightful ways,
Latin America, the Middle East, Africa and East Asia. While correctly dis-
counting global theories of so-called world literature, he is exemplary in
navigating a truly capacious blend of transnational waters. This book can
be taken as a wondrous shot in the arm, or it can be deliciously savoured
in small amounts, injected as a beneficial transfusion, or imbibed as a rap-
turously variegated and expansive infusion, as the sustenance of blood or
the nourishment of tea. Enjoy the charm and be prepared for the critical
challenges of a thinking and questioning that knows no bounds but only
the perilous joys of every kind of trans-.
1 Trans…(in)…fusion
Alexander wept when he heard from Anaxarchus that there were an

infinite number of worlds, and his friends asking him if any accident had
befallen him, here turns this answer: ‘Do you not think it a matter of lam-
entation that when there is such a vast multitude of them, we have not yet
conquered one?’ Plutarch, On the Tranquillity of Mind1
I stand at the seashore, alone, and start to think…

There are the rushing
waves mountains of molecules
each stupidly minding its own business
trillions apart
yet forming white surf in unison….
For whom, for what?….
Deep in the sea
all molecules repeat
the pattern of one another
till complex new ones are formed.
They make others like themselves
and a new dance starts.
Growing in size and complexity
living things
masses of atoms
DNA, protein
dancing a pattern ever more intricate.
Out of the cradle
onto dry land
here it is
standing:
atoms with consciousness;
matter with curiosity.
Stands at the sea,
wonders at wondering: I
a universe of atoms
an atom in the universe. Richard P. Feynman 2
I say, dissipation is profit; percolation is gain; fusion is erotic. And what

happens when I say (in)fusion? I say, trans is momentum, movement,
particle-wave complex, curiosity and care. So what happens when I say
trans(in)fusion? This is not to say that all is in (the) movement, cease-
lessly in transit, forever in flux. Thoughts need settlement, some steady
accretion, some inevitable deposition. This builds to a point where the
constitution of a thought complains of restlessness, a restivity whose only
release and lease of life is in trans(in)fusion which, again, is not hurrying
through a change, making changelessness a bleak house for abandonment,
but acknowledging how our thinking, our experiences of life both in the
sciences and arts, our studies in the Humanities sinking deep and wide
in the sciences, are intrinsic to our existence, to what we are, our being,
our way. Trans(in)fusion is a method of ‘doing’ and ‘living’ and our non-
method too – a map with which we begin to think through issues, disci-
plines, discourses and expire at a point where the initial map remains with
a smudge, a torn, frayed end, a splotch and, also, a few more maps that
we could not help collecting down the way, we needed on our journey,
we indulged procuring to effect a more exciting finish. The purveying
and production of knowledge need such an experience. Trans(in)fusion,
for me, is less a compulsion and more a campaign. It is an experience
which we, most often, cannot do without – a delectation, an allurement,
a latency and education.
Probably, ‘anything goes’ or ‘everything is connected’ is a category
mistake that studies in the Humanities must alert themselves to. All in-
terpretation and understanding are simultaneously both connected and
not connected. This leads us to three sets of understanding: first, we as-
sume that everything is not connected because there are certain connec-
tions that come through our own fashioning, the determined; second,
an ‘ indifference’ of phenomena is the connection which is never within
our understanding – uncertainty is not indeterminacy – connections
that are entangled without being considered as one; third, connections
are formative, established, prediscursive, diffractive, indifferent, invested
and vital-ontological. Trans(in)fusion builds an experience of what I have
elsewhere called aesthetic imaginary,3 molecular imaginary, plastic imag-
inary,4 transductive imaginary and transversal imaginary. It is not a calcu-
lus to work with but a method and non-method, agentiality and pleasant
dispossession – a dynamical plasticity. Thinking precedes thinking as much
as it relishes post-thinking. I must emphasize that this space has restiveness
but not necessarily a ‘radical’ manifestation. Radicality is a good religion
when it comes with a rationale; eros is ‘ours’ when it understands its own
competence. Every cut does not bleed; every split is not favoured with a
Trans…(in)…fusion 3
promise of reunion. If cutting-together-apart is Karen Barad’s game the-
ory, trans-(in)fusion endorses it to say that cutting is as much a reality as
putting together, ontology is a reality as much as the onto-epistemological
is, togetherness is an ideal and meaning is the reality which we experience.
The cosmopolitan space created by trans(in)fusion does not begin with
the promise to connect everything, everywhere, every time; inhabiting a
space is a promise, (in)difference is our spirituality of thinking and reach-
ing a thought cannot always be the motive because being helped to reach
is also a part of the dynamics of an inhabited space – not pilgrim’s prog-
ress but the realization that how the progress contributed to one’s being a
pilgrim and how being a pilgrim is not always about making a pilgrimage.
Opposite
Complicated in its agenda and vexed in its formations, the premising of
the trans(in)fusionist or aesthetic imaginary (I have used these two con-
cepts interchangeably through the book) inaugurates around what I call
‘trans-belongings’. What we inherit is not an inheritance but possessions
in transit. What exist as our belongings remain forever in motion, appar-
ently with us but fundamentally alien. We own only to know that owning
is an elusive-illusive possession, a judgment with suspect validity. When
cultural contracts, protocols of tradition, determinate judgments over ex-
change principle and formalistic understanding of requirements of disci-
pline make for the ‘belongings’ of studies in the Humanities, knowledge
production is hurt, critical understanding is debilitated and a disciplinary
claustrophobia becomes the reality. There is a somewhat neopositivist bias
in the ways cultural belongings are shared or exchanged in that laws of
contract are clearly spelled out as much as their operative ethics. Scales
of reading in literary studies are difficult to calibrate: if matter and en-
ergy settle their ways in comprehensible and familiar patterns in classical
physics, the equation is disrupted in subatomic dynamics where things,
as Richard Feynman notes, become ‘absurd’. Literature has its own sub-
atomic settlements that are continuously grappling with ‘position’ and
‘momentum’, measurement (in the sense of understanding a meaning) and
wave-particle problematic. But a quantum understanding does not neces-
sarily mean that distractions or perturbations happen at the micro level;
it is pervasive, and impacts on a wider compass with fresh self-interiority.
The matter and energy of literature have a ‘deep down’ syndrome where
its angular momentum unveils the gap and, hence, the discontinuity in
discrete allowable meaning-units. Producing realities that are shared and
intra-active – both supersession and superposition – are obvious pointers
to ‘trans-belongings’ in comparative literary understanding. Literature’s
belongings come with continuity and macro-understanding of phenom-
ena at the cultural, social and political levels. It is with this energy – the
radiation invisible to the naked eye – of literature that trans-belonging has
its deepest connect. Literary texts across culture and tradition can surely
come with comparative procedures of understanding, the notions of con-
gruence and competence, viability and legitimacy. However, the heat of
great writing changes the glow of understanding as meanings with shorter
wavelength and, hence, higher frequencies uphold their presence. What
we often fail to understand is that all texts are black bodies and, energy
of trans-belonging can build and manifest on and from unexpected quar-
ters and positions. Trans-belongings speak of an incapacity, an unforce or
adynamism in language and other forms of socio-cultural engagement. It
is possession and an exposure to appropriations – a force and unforce that
has dynamic ontological attribute or privation and a deprivation to contest
and contend.5 Any belonging is a ‘withdrawal’, steresis, which haunts it
with a certain diffraction having as its own the force of ‘not’, a reminder
of the repression of borders. This alters the politics of aesthetics of com-
municability; trans-belongings exist as an ongoing phenomenon which is
both being and constructivism requiring certain norms of validation and
judgment.
The aesthetic imaginary begins in negativity, which is why there is no
avoiding the recurrent problematic of the ‘opposite’. In his Lectures on the
History of Philosophy, S. T. Coleridge observes:
One cannot help thinking, provided the mind is beforehand

impressed with a belief of a providence guiding this great drama of
the world to its conclusion, that, as opposites are in constant ten-
dency to union, and as it is the opposite poles of a magnet and not
the similar ones which attract each other, that a certain unity is to be
expected from the very circumstance of opposition and that these are
as it were imperfect halves which after a series of ages each maturing
and perfecting are at length to meet in some one point comprising
the excellences of both.6
Opposites exist as invisibles and do not stagnate through ages. Attraction

is natural and inbuilt. Opposites construct a life of their own, inflected
and emplotted; what succeeds is a latent momentum which overcomes
the conditions of resistance towards an imagined correspondence. If what
one has coexists with what one does not, it is also about not simply being-
with but being-with(out). The aesthetic imaginary flutters entropically on
the edges of the being-with(out); having something is having something
with a struggle that always prods it to become something else. This has
an alchemical power, the ‘matrix of all possible opposition’.7 The forma-
tions that such alchemical combination generates are rarely without some
ambiguity; very rarely, aesthetic imaginary can survive without opposites
and ambivalence of some form or other. This ambivalence is not undecid-
ability and simple dialectics but uncertainty, an anxiety, a flicker of the
irrational and the challenge to the joyful belief of repetitive living in a safe
and well-explained space. Is aesthetic imaginary a mercurial space?
The aesthetic imaginary makes greater investments in the ‘opposite’
than what Jung probably does with his synchronicity. For Jung, oppo-
sites are ‘ineradicable and indispensable preconditions of all psychic life’.8
Roderick Main argues:
Most fundamental is the opposition between consciousness and the

unconscious. Notably, too, within Jung’s typological theory, thinking
is the opposite of feeling, sensation is the opposite of intuition, the first
of these pairs (the rational functions) is the opposite of the second pair
(the irrational functions), and introversion is the opposite of extraver-
sion. Among the archetypes, the persona, which relates consciousness
to the outer world, is the opposite of the anima/animus, which relates
consciousness to the inner world. The archetype of the self is defined
largely as a synthesis and harmony of opposites.9
The notion of the opposite informs Jung’s modes of the psyche – a self-
regulating system that is expected to balance and moderate. The acausality
principle is the counterbalancing act to understanding certain phenomena.
The aesthetic imaginary does not ignore such a principle but goes a bit
further in declaring its inherent interest in ‘incommensurabilities’, some-
thing I have argued elsewhere as ‘dystopic unease’ in our reading and un-
derstanding of literature and Humanities. There is a mind within what we
call the arbitrary – a principle inherent in the random and the aberrative –
compensating our one-sided conscious attitude. For Jung, the harmony
achieved through the unity of opposites is not a well- composed one be-
cause its effectuation is around ‘individuation’ which is about becoming
‘in-dividual’ – the ‘coming to self hood’ or ‘selfrealization’.10 If concil-
ability is high on Jung’s agenda, confrontation stemming from irrecon-
cilability matters to the aesthetic imaginary, and, hence, to its entangled
form-ability.

The critical rationality of the aesthetic imaginary is both reductive and
nonreductive – relating with the other, being made to relate with the
other and staying related prior to a relationship. In an Adornian way, the
movement in the aesthetic imaginary is dialectical and transformative,
critical and yet unreduced, objective and yet with ‘possibles’. The true
remit and merit of the aesthetic imaginary is in the ‘negative’ philosophy
of knowing where an object is both objective and possible, conclusive
and prospective, determined and undermined. This is not simple incoher-
ence but a metacritique of thinking – the saturation of thought and the
state of ‘cannot not be in thinking’. The ‘exchange programme’ – primar-
ily effected through culture, epistemes, discourses and tradition – in its
formation must struggle to avoid ‘reification’ that relegates the momen-
tum and dynamics of exchange to a stasis of understanding. The aesthetic
imaginary builds as a socio-political critique as much as an internal cri-
tique of meditative discursive transformation. A significant point of con-
tact is how a critique that the aesthetic imaginary builds becomes, often
in a non-Hegelian way, its own critique. It is a kind of undercutting that
enables intensified inquiries into our exchange paradigm of both life and
intellectual experiences. The philosophy of the aesthetic imaginary entails
a critique of life, social and political experiences and our perception of
the Humanities and humanistic thinking. It is ‘dialectic as entanglement’
of the identity and non-identity of thinking. Sometimes the end point is
more a journey, not achieved in a movement that is telic or forward. There
is a failure in the evolutionary progression, but a building of an involution
which is often without the promise of a conscious finality. The aesthetic
imaginary looks for ‘contradiction’ in thinking, in thoughtful engage-
ments, as a way of revising communication.
Is the aesthetic imaginary a kind of non-philosophy, in that the notion
of difference comes to mean differently? It is both about understanding
difference as contextual, historical and formal on the one hand, and en-
gaging with difference as ahistorical and causa sui on the other – ‘amphi-
bology of creative upsurge and historical conditioning’ comes to premise
difference itself.11 The temptation here is to interpret the aesthetic imag-
inary within Francois Laruelle’s non-philosophy. All readings within the
aesthetic imaginary cannot be well-cited grounds of comparativism, and
not necessarily a critique of being in and out of tradition or modes of
reception. The aesthetic imaginary can also provoke a structure disanal-
ogously and non-referentially, building a position of difference which is
not simply different because it breaks away from the extant or radicalizes a
future of reading over the ruins of the present. The non-philosophy of the
aesthetic imaginary supports its own self-constituting structures.
Liquid concrete
When Aristotle looks at bronze in Metaphysics, Descartes into wax and
Gilbert Simondon into clay, we encounter a concept of matter – both of
geometry and of making. What we see ‘is concrete’ and exists ‘as concrete’
too; what we miss is how the
complex interior reinforcements that give it its strength disappear

from view once cast. The admixture of different sizes of aggregate,
water and cement and the traces of the reactions between them as
concrete sets can be rendered invisible through a range of techniques
and finishes. Concrete is a composite material that is in fact ‘rendered
plastic’ through complex chains of operations prior, during and often
after casting. Its matter-like properties are not pre-given or ‘natural’.
Rather, they are intentionally produced, or even simulated, through
techniques that edit and censor the variegations, behaviours and his-
torical singularities the material might otherwise exhibit.12
I am interested in the singularities of the concrete, the matterization and
the entanglements of hylomorphism. The trans(in)fusionist or aesthetic
imaginary draws on the transductive thinking of the French philosopher
Gilbert Simondon by arguing how individuation is seen as a far more
complex process than a mere atomistic producer of the individual – the
dialectic between substantialist metaphysics and the hylemorphic schema.
The aesthetic imaginary encourages thinking in entanglements which
brings together a cosmopolitan mix of issues and ideas across a variety of
experiences; there is, in fact, a serious ‘migrant’ potential in the formations
of the aesthetic imaginary, something that can be explained to a large ex-
tent through what Simondon calls ‘transduction’. David Scott argues that
traversing physics, biology, the psychic, and the social, transduction

describes an operation by which an activity of thought or being is
born from the propagation of the pre-individual reality little by little,
from one problematic region to another, each subsequent region am-
plifying the one prior to it, producing a transformation, a new phase
of reality.13
This is a migrancy that builds inside the socio-cultural-political domain

and ‘serves as principle of constitution for the next region’, the next space
and phase of experience and understanding. The process of transduction is
tensional – ‘potentially inexhaustible’ – where the individual builds a ‘rel-
ative reality’ and is part of the process of individuation. Also, by ‘transin-
dividual’, Simondon emphasizes ‘relation of relations’ where a composite
of the individuation of the collective and the individual can be envisaged.
This liveliness of matter and what he calls the ‘veiling of process’, the
material (un)layering, corresponds well with what I call ‘concrete text’.
The mobilities of the aesthetic imaginary help develop a psyche of
transindividualism. This is strictly not substantialist understanding. Crit-
ical thinking in its transformative ways generates its own bio-material-
psychic-affective tensions. It is experience in transduction:
a propagation of a structure gradually gaining space from a structural

germ, as a supersaturated solution crystallizes from a crystalline germ;
this implies that the field is in metastable equilibrium, i.e., conceals a
potential energy that can only be released by the emergence of a new
structure, which is like solving the problem.14
The aesthetic imaginary sets up its fold of problems where ‘the boundary
between the structural germ and the structurable, metastable field is a
MODULATOR; it is the energy of metastability of the field’. The trans-
ductive experience reveals in potentials that disturb the form and the matter
of the force field. Thoughts may come in parts but cannot avoid express-
ing in transductivity: every segment emerging out of our engagements
with cross-cultural discourses, traditions, ideologies, identities, historical
conditions, political and cultural upheavals and undulations is a system but
not without ‘energetic potentials’. It leaves the field exposed to disruptive
and assimilative energies – transobjectivism, as Simondon chooses to ar-
gue.14 On this line of argument, ‘thinking’ can be considered as perfor-
matively molecular in that ‘going into the mould’ (mould or template as
a kind of formal experience or understanding) releases and conceals a lot
of energy and potency of matter. The aesthetic imaginary draws on this
principle of ‘coming-together’ by staying close to Simondon’s formulation
of ‘allagmatic’ point of view. (It expresses reciprocal obligations, synallag-
matikos, from synallagma ‘a covenant, contract’, from syn, ‘together with’;
allagma, ‘thing taken in exchange’ from the stem of allassein ‘to exchange,
barter’, from allos, ‘another’.) Allagmaticism is predominantly about the
relationship between ‘operations and structures’ – a movement, a becom-
ing, that we don’t find in our principled understanding of structuralism.
Subjectivity is, therefore, infected and infused by individuations (the un-
preconceived forming); the individual is under interrogation through the
event of transindividuality. The aesthetic imaginary embeds in allagmati-
cism where the being of a concept, an episteme, a traditional paradigm of
thought, a socio-cultural reality, is considered as having a restlessness and
unease with structure and operations – a transductive interiority that sees
the structure-operation dialectic in a profound reciprocity (ex-change).
This is not the pre-individual reality that ensures a teleological judgment
and preformism; it becomes a submission to ontogenesis, a migrancy in
exchange and coming-together.
The aesthetic imaginary promotes ‘migrant thinking’ that is both about
unpacking the already entangled (individual) and the singularities, pro-
cessuality and provisionality (individuation). Simondon’s idea of the ‘field’
appropriates the properties of the magnetic field where the three magnets
in the three corners of the room are ‘introduced’ with a non-magnetic
piece of iron. This changes the ‘field’ of interaction where the structure of
the magnetic field changes and the fourth element is magnetized as well.
Allagmatically, this is where the totality (the magnetized field as a whole)
and the individuality (each of the magnets) get into the field of individ-
uation. This entangled ‘coming-together’ is potentially in character with
the aesthetic imaginary. Importantly, entanglement in thinking is ‘poten-
tialization’, but not without a complete dismissal of certain ‘moulds’ (the
formal and established structures of thought and understanding). But the
principle of allagma informs moulds, and the concretization of moulds has
its own liquidity or fluidity – I shall call this ‘liquid concrete’. This brings
us to Simondon’s understanding of brick-making that involves the mould
and the packing of clay into the mould, declaring an interesting kind of
compossibility. Couze Venn points out that there
is a process of becoming in which a potential in the system made

up of ‘mould–hand– clay’ is actualized according to a ‘positivity’ of
the taking form (prise de forme) in which none of the components is
privileged as determining. The technical operation also depends on
learned brick-making skills, on knowledge of the right kind of clay
and how it is made ready, the efficient type of mould to use, and the
energy required in the form of an amount of work. It is because all
of these elements are conjoined in a relation of reciprocal becoming
or actualization – of the mould, the artisan, the clay – in the moment
of emergence of the brick that one can speak of the system ‘mould–
hand– clay’ as an associated milieu and grasp the constitutive action
of the relation in it. In both cases relationality relates to a process of
becoming of the elements in relation, breaking with the idea of their
pre-formation prior to the relation.15
The ‘brick-making’ nature of the aesthetic imaginary speaks of ‘relation-

ality’, which is about migrant movement, a concretization and a shared
happening among various constituents (be that cultural, political and so-
cial units that come together not always in preformations and predetermi-
native schemas).
Is the aesthetic imaginary caught in ‘metastable equilibrium’? This kind
of equilibrium is affected through the least modification of ‘system parame-
ters’, whether it be temperature or pressure or some other coordinates. The
energy in a particular system of operation (structure of thought) is active,
but changes its activity through the slightest transformation of any of its
features. This means all systems – cultural, political and epistemological –
have a ‘migrant’ potential in them where phases of experience and un-
derstanding are almost always under the anxiety of dephasing.16 It is this
dephasing that the aesthetic imaginary continually encourages and recon-
structs itself from. Discrediting hylomorphism, this ‘migrancy’ builds its
own networks through structure, process, potential and milieu (all the
chapters in the book demonstrate migrancies of various kinds, situations
and conditions). Migrant thinking, hence, is a commitment to forma-
tion, a mould and individuation and transduction, which keeps testing the
‘threshold value’ of concepts and discursive formations – thoughts in clay,
in mould, in energy, in molecules, in stability, viability and potentiality.
Every thought and discourse of thinking has a ‘milieu’: individuation,
whether social or biological or epistemological, is never without ‘relations’;
the vexed network is built through the ‘milieu’.
If signification is relation, as Simondon has argued, the relation be-
tween two relations is ‘itself a relation’. Our understanding of life- events,
thought-structures and cultural paradigms is ingrained in an affectivity
built around the preformist and the presettled, the preindividual reali-
ties or principles and also the formations that processuality brings, what
the ‘more than individual’ ushers, and what the incompatibility with the
preindividual introduces. This, again, is what Simondon calls a ‘problem-
atic disparation’ that I believe contributes to the migrant thinking in the
formation of the trans(in)fusionist imaginary. In fact, it makes good sense
here to argue entanglements in the trans(in)fusionist imaginary as mem-
branic. Anne Sauvanargues explains that
The polarity of the membrane distinguishes the favourable (which

it integrates and retains) from the unfavourable (which it avoids and
rejects) in a Spinozist manner. The functional and active polarity of
the membrane configures the external milieu as much as it consti-
tutes its internal milieu. The membrane thus defines the leap from
the chemical to the living, and promotes the emergence of this new
property: the difference between exterior and interior, the result of
its differentiating action. The fold simultaneously produces interiority
and exteriority, inside and outside, such that the inside is formed as
‘the outside of the outside’, to adapt Deleuze’s beautiful formula. The
polarized membrane therefore folds its organic pellicule and curves
around itself in order to rediscover, at the terminus of this torsion, its
own milieu of interiority. Some, but not all, external bodies can pass
into the interior, and an identical selection comes to bear on bodies
of the internal milieu, some of whose elements migrate towards the
exterior. The selective membrane is thus productive of its own interi-
ority. Now, this interiority and exteriority are not absolute but meta-
stable, dynamic, relative to each other, and their interfacing surface is
itself in becoming, in relation.17
The principle of allagma in the aesthetic imaginary connects with a mem-

branic phenomenon – paradigms of interaction do not come together read-
ily and predeterminatively always. Membrane is not porosity only; it has
its own strategic selectivity, ways of filtration and resistance. The migrant
particles of thinking, across cultures and traditions, need the ‘membranic
dynamic’: as a relation between two sides of migration and also the migra-
tion relative to the membrane separating both sides of the interactive flow.
The coming-together in the aesthetic imaginary comes with a schema, a
method and, again, as a dynamic, not-always-predetermined interfusion
that keeps the metastable character of the exchange alive. The aesthetic
imaginary membranizes the cosmopolitan mix of ideas and concepts, the
cultural, political and epistemic paradigms, to see migrancy as ‘membra-
nicity’ and the momentum for critical-creative formations.
Middle
This exposition on the membrane brings me to argue that the ‘middle’
that exists between paradigms of critical negotiation – the space that exists
between two or more coordinates of thought and subjects that come into
play and are under interrogation. The middle is where one ‘slips in’: ‘one
never commences; one never has a tabula rasa’.18 It is the ‘indefinite life’ of
the middle that is liquid concrete. Deleuze points out that
the English zero is always in the middle. Bottlenecks are always in
the middle. Being in the middle of a line is the most uncomfortable
position. One begins again through the middle. The French think in
terms of trees too much: the tree of knowledge, points of aborescence,
the alpha and omega, the roots and the pinnacle. Trees are the oppo-
site of grass. Not only does grass grow in the middle of things, but it
grows itself through the middle.19
The middle is the conjunction where we are in the ‘folds’, but a fold is
always ‘between two folds’ – ‘the between-two-folds seems to move about
everywhere’. The middle separates; it connects; it is the site of the highest
activity and is certainly the most ‘noisy’. Migrancy in critical thought
comes to appreciate this middle which is about closure on both sides of
the comparative scale of understanding, but mostly an open closure, rather
than an (en)closure, in the sense of enfoldment. Migrant thinking is po-
larized on both ends of comparison and negotiation, but it has an (un)
thought, (in)determinable and unexcludable middle: ‘an unthought which
is, as is well-known, not outside of or the outside of a thought, but as it
were its inner rhythm which has allowed it to take the high flight that it
has’.20 Migrant thinking – thinking literature across continents, thinking
disciplines across domains, thinking experiential formations across cul-
tures and geo-political situatedness – is more about unsaying the said,
finding a different rhythm of a thought in the unexcludable middle than
submitting to laws of non-contradiction. Any cosmopolitanization of
thought or thought-event is about the complexities of the ‘middle’ that
exists between thought-units in play in forms that are hard-to-negotiate,
often untranslatable, that are resisting and yet explorative.
Is the middle liquid concrete? How do the liquid and the concrete come
together to create this phenomenon? Solids shear; they cut; they limit and
hew things to shape. They are abstracted or materialized out of a total-
ity, a mass, a mess. Solids live in isolation, as separated, in separation, to
announce their solidity. They define themselves through boundaries and
remain ‘actual’ as Hegel argues within a context that joins them with
others. Likewise, thoughts or ideas are solids in clear relief, in their own
contextual boundaries or self-enclosures. It is the liquid that ‘disturbs’ the
identity when attribution becomes confusing as liquid defies shapes, runs
into others, is flux and forming. Liquid violates borders and with it the
contextual enframing. Is thought liquid or concrete or both? Or is the
state what I call ‘liquid concrete’? David Collins argues that
the language of “disparity with itself ” and “dissolution,” “inwardness

and withdrawal into itself ” and “coming-to-be,” sounds very arcane,
but Hegel’s point is that the conceptual element of experience means
that the self-identity of an object in the world is not straightforwardly
that of a self-contained identity. An object’s self-identity—its “parity-
with-itself ”—is necessarily also a “disparity with itself ” insofar as its
identity is constituted by the determinations of thought. That is why
the abstractions of thought represent the object’s “abstraction of itself
from itself.” The result of this abstraction is the dissolution of any
appearance of real self-containment on the part of the object as we
recognize that its boundaries are no longer purely external, physical
ones, but are also internal and conceptual in nature, i.e., we recognize
that there is an element of “inwardness and withdrawal” to its being.21
The self-containment of a thought is a reality that trans(in)fusion finds

difficult to accept. Thoughts are not solid and, hence, bounded, and, liq-
uid, so flowy and flexible, only. Thinking is deeply invested in the non-
contradiction between the solid and the liquid, in the unity of thought
and fragmentation and disruptions, in parity of formation and disparity
of self-closure. There is a profound diffusion here that keeps identities of
thoughts distinct and yet refuses their self-containment – the state of liquid
concrete.
Conceptual formations within the aesthetic imaginary, to borrow
Cornelius Castoriadis’s understanding of monadic structures, are loyal to
structures of contextual thinking and historical specificities. They are not
always reducible to individual creativity but acknowledge the social imag-
inary as much as the imagination that is an integral motor to the imagi-
nary. This clearly agrees with Castoriadis’s ideas on how psyche and the
‘anonymous collective’ are irreducible and stay significantly interactive to
each other. The imaginary, to go with Castoriadis, is deeply creative for
all knowing is creative; often, reality understood and explained through
connection and through the finding of content and meaning may not be
the ultimate productive idea. It is not always the nature-culture order that
determines ‘reality’ because the radical imagination is ‘the subject’s whole
creation of a world for itself ’.22
The encompassive dimension and the connective strength of monad-
ism are also those which aesthetic imaginary acknowledges. Epistemes
across cultures, the metaphors and rigour of other human thoughts and
the enframed disciplines live (in)dependently: they group, constellate, im-
plode and connect at usual places increasing the supply of wonder, the
unexpectedness of communication and correspondences. Formations are
entangled without being all-inclusive and border-oblivious. Inclusivity
is not necessarily about ignoring the exclusiveness of certain things; this
brings the dynamics of ‘magma’ and ‘ensembles’ into play. The logic of
magma holds ensembles as much as ensembles leave a magma as residue.
To qualify magma as a deficient mode of understanding, as opposed to
traditional ontology or ensidic ontology, is to miss a deeper point. The
aesthetic imaginary is never outside the symbolic and, in fact, conflates
both the undetermined and unstructured with encrypted signification and
ascriptions. This means that the fixity of ‘is’ is under challenge. The aes-
thetic imaginary manifests what Castoriadis sees as the ‘radical imaginary’
and ‘actual imaginary’ with the category of the ‘unthought’ and the
‘unperceived’ – ‘the possibility of penetrating the labyrinth of the sym-
bolisation of the imaginary’. Trans(in)fusion looks into the subtlety and
expansiveness of ‘signification’: meaning or understanding that cannot be
exclusively reduced and distilled into a permanent mode of thought or a
series of thoughts and be considered as wholly indeterminate as well.
The aesthetic imaginary is magmatic through an understanding that
supports an unconscious and unaware category of critical growth. Re-
alizing magmatic formations with judgment is missing the magma in its
potential and form-ability. It is on this note that I seek a delicate interven-
tion through Carl Jung’s notion of synchronicity both in its physics and
metaphysics. Jung’s synchronicity macerated with generous doses from
Pauli on quantum and atomic physics speaks of a psychic energy with its
investments in tension, compensation and purported unity of opposites –
the conscious and unconscious in a ‘coming together’ event which is
seriously enacted on a different plane as distinguished from Freud’s em-
phatic concern for sexuality. Within magmatic formations, the aesthetic
imaginary encounters a flicker of synchronicity – the unexpected, the
unexplained, the emergent, the failure of determinate judgment and the
paradox of strength in the unaware. The growth and the ‘massing up’ are
in an oppositional friendship with the axiomatic and what Castoriadis has
ascribed as the ensemblist-identitarian. Synchronicity is somewhat anti-
art in that it is not mystic, not naively assigned as an acausal principle but
a happening that emerges out of an emptiness, a pregnant nihility. Every
formation cannot be aestheticized for chance, as Petronius mentions, has
its reason.23 Numinosity and affectivity are parts of the synchronicity that
the aesthetic imaginary cannot fully ignore. The serious dimension that I
have always found in the aesthetic imaginary is the presence of a ‘chance
connection’ manifested through correspondences say between Tagore and
Derrida, Frost and Heidegger, Philip Sidney and Medieval Arabic poets –
intersections announcing further elaborations. Tension is not always built
through conscious opposition, networkism and simple principles of re-
lationality because ‘lucky events’ (chance connection and transgression)
matter in acts of interpretive thinking.
To qualify the middle as ‘magmatic’ is to keep alive the contribution
of the indeterminate (apeiron) in the formation of the aesthetic imaginary.
The indeterminate does not exist only in relation to or as a negation of the
determinate being (peras). Castoriadis has always found magmas difficult
to ‘define’ because magmas are difficult to configure and paradoxically are
magmatic themselves. He offers several propositions:
M1: If M is a magma, one can mark, in M, an indefinite number of

ensembles.
M2: If M is a magma, one can mark, in M, magmas other than M.
M3: If M is a magma, M cannot be partitioned into magmas.
M4: If M is a magma, every decomposition of M into ensembles leaves a
magma as residue.
M5: What is not a magma is an ensemble or is nothing.24
Magmas are difficult to determine as every magma defined becomes an

ensemble and in the process leaves a magma as residue. It is more than a
simple mix: more complicated than a ‘totality’ leaving behind an experi-
ence of incompletion. It is the ‘indeterminacy complex’ that the trans(in)
fusionist imaginary is interested in. However, this indeterminacy is not
formless, reckless and completely unpredictable, and the notion of form
does not stay confined to what is traditionally constructed or what is con-
strained by already determined boundaries. It is the ‘form’ in the middle
that interests me the most in the trans(in)fusionist imaginary. Be it literary
or social or cultural understanding, the middle of any trans(in)fusionist
imaginary formation is transitive and an event to hold together the dis-
tinct/manifest and the indistinct/the unheralded. This is magmatic in that
despite an ‘intrinsic indeterminacy’ it is not without form – we
transform or actualise these virtual singularities . . . into distinct and

definite elements, solidifying the pre-relation of referral into relation
as such, organising the holding-together, the being-in, the being-on,
the being-proximate into a system of determined and determining
relations (identity, difference, belonging, inclusion), differentiating
what they distinguish in this way into ‘entities’ and ‘properties’, using
this differentiation to constitute ‘sets’ and ‘classes’.25
The middle, as Jeff Klooger explains, drawing on Castoriadis, is ‘like

Freud’s interpretation of a dream which remains incomplete to stay alive’;
like the dream, the middle does not allow a story to find its final junc-
tion as it keeps up the emergence of meaning, events, thoughts and turns.
Klooger observes that
whatever is indeterminate is construed as transitional, a temporary dis-

order lying between one determinate form and the next. This strategy
fails, however, as soon as we accept the reality of dreams as we actually
encounter them rather than as we would wish them to be. The dream
(like representation more broadly, and like social imaginary significa-
tions) simply is this continual and interminable formation and transfor-
mation. This is its mode of being. The indefinite and indistinct forms
which emerge within—or rather, as—the dream are not the echoes of
‘full’ (that is, determinate) forms underlying a superficial confusion; they
are neither ghosts of past forms nor embryonic versions of future ones.26
So the middle, most often, forms to trans-form – forms its sets and classes
but not without the anxiety of differentiations and singularities that chal-
lenge deterministic ontologies.
To instantiate the ‘middle’, we may look into Philip Sidney’s idea of the
‘golden’ (poetic creativity), poetic ‘feigning’ and poetic meaning from his
sixteenth-century
text An Apology of Poetry. Here, the ensidic-emblematic
hermeneutic space between Philip Sidney’s ideas of poetry-poet and Re-
naissance literary criticism collapses into magmatic formations in the emer-
gence of certain concepts of Arabic poetics. This is also the transductive
middle where the unexpectedness of the connection and the allagmatism
is remarkable in that thoughts across continents, and thought-traditions
have the potenza to magnetize each other. Vicente Cantarino argues that
the concept of the poet as a liar and poetry as a lie received acceptance
in Islam on the basis of Islamic cultural Arabization and alliance with
the linguistic heritage of even pre-Islamic Arabic times. The result
was that the meaning had been changed, and the poetic lie no longer
had moral implications. Sincerity and truthfulness, or lack of it, on the
part of the poet could not be understood as the authenticity of feelings
or opinions expressed.27
Qudama ibn Ja’far of the Abbasid period believes that a poet should not
be judged by sincerity alone. In Kitab Naqd al-shi’r (Book on Poetic Crit-
icism), he emphasizes the importance of holding an idea and enframing it
creditably at a particular moment. Poetic lie and truthfulness have gener-
ated a moot ‘problematic’, and although Qudama identifies the relation-
ship between poetic creativity and the art of lying, a moralizing impact
leads him to throw his weight behind poetic sincerity that stays inscribed
in veridic experiences and discourses. Poetic ‘feigning’ that produces aes-
thetic experiences of high quality for Sidney held similar importance for
Ibn ʿAbd Rabbih, the tenth-century Moorish poet, who in his Al-ʿIqd al-
Farīd looks into perfection and the beauty of poetic expression and does
not necessarily concentrate on the truthfulness of depiction. Sincerity, for
both Sidney and Ibn ʿAbd Rabbih, does not come from mere morality
itself. Aesthetic mimesis produces the charm and delicacy of poetic con-
figuration where counterfeit becomes invention. The renowned tenth-
century Iranian scholar Abd al- Qahir al-Jurjani’s idea of lies comes close

to Sidney’s idea of poetic feigning when he observes in Asrar al-Balaghah
(The Secrets of Elucidation) that
he who claims “the one that lies most” to be the best poetry maintains
a theory that the possibilities of the art can expand and its rays spread,
its field of action broaden, and its manifold aspects branch out when
the poet relies on achieving a greater range and imaginative creativity,
and claims that to be reality which is basically an approximation and
imitation, and aims at delicate forms and interpretations.28
Sidney’s Shāʿir (poet) has the takhyil (the imaginative creativity) and the
sha’ara which is the art of knowing and perceiving.29 The poetic lie is
reconstruction and not distortion where the ethics of lying or feigning
become a part of the dialectic of delight and instruction. This puts Sidney’s
idea of mimesis – delivering the golden – in meaningful communication
with the ways in which Averroes and Avicenna problematize delight (ilti-
dhadh) through their Aristotelian understanding of mimesis. Hazim al-
Qartajanni (d. 1285) sees the right connection between muhakah (mimesis)
and the deployment of takhyil (imaginative creation). Claiming that poetry
differs from demonstration, argumentation and rhetoric, he writes:
The finest poetry is that which has beautiful mimetic representation

and form, whose repute or veracity is striking, and whose falsehood
is hidden, but its originality is evident. And the poet’s skill is credited
with the ability to propagate falsehood rapidly, to misrepresent it to
the human spirit, and to impel the latter to feel moved even before it
examines the former to see how it really is—all this is rightly attributed
to the poet and to the forcefulness of his creative imagination in pro-
ducing in the speech the power of attraction of the soul, for it is not
correct to assert that this is something attributable to the speech itself.30
Sidney’s aesthetic mimesis reemphasizes Ibn Rashiq’s observation that a

poet perceives what no other can – the ‘golden’ is connected with delight
through ‘embellishment’ and ‘defacement’. This does not declare a sever-
ance from reality; the evaluation of poetry need not confine itself to truth
or falsehood because poetry is fundamentally a creative discourse. For
Sidney and his Arabic counterparts, imaginings or mimetic projections
(mukhayyil) have their own ethics of creation, something other than mu-
saddiq (objective reality). So imagination for both Sidney and Al-Farabi,
the renowned ninth-century philosopher and jurist, motivates action – it
evokes the poetic power to move us. Nabil Matar explains that
in motivating action it [imagination] establishes a certain legitimacy for

itself. As Alfarabi states in the Treatise, reason may indicate one thing,
but if imagination indicates its opposite, the individual might still
choose to follow what his imagination dictates; so although the imag-
ination might project a falsity, there is a kind of suspension of belief as
the individual acts in accordance with that falsity and in contradiction
to reason. Such a function of imagination, however, need not set it at
the polar extreme of reason/truth; rather, and because of its causative
faculty, imagination should be seen to operate within the realm of sense

perception and reason but with its own creative-mukhayyil meaning.31
Here, Sidney’s ‘golden’ is mukhayyil – it connects imaginings with action,

reflection with craft.
This is our residency in the ‘middle’, an instance of ‘critical compara-
tivity’, as Ming Xie has argued.32 Sidney allagmatizes these Arabic writers
with the ‘shock’ of their correspondences and builds the migrant critical
consciousness. It is important for us to accept that concepts across cultures
and traditions are like living cells that expend without ceasing, and this
ceaselessness maintains their equilibrium. Expending energy keeps them
alive. This problematizes the connection between energy and attractors –
the thermopoetics between the attractors as represented in Sidney’s idea of
a poet and poetry and Arabic literary criticism.
The middle that I am trying to theorize and the Maitreyan Middle Way
that Hwa Yol Jung argues for have a likely common point to vindicate:
transversality. Jung observes that
the image of the new emerging face may be likened to the famous
rustic wooden statue of the Buddha at a Zen temple in Kyoto, Japan,
whose face marks a new dawn of awakening (satori) or signals the be-
ginning of a new global regime of ontology, culture, politics, and eth-
ics. From the crack in the middle of the old face of the Buddha, there
emerges an interstitial, liminal face that signifies a new transfiguration
and transvaluation of the existing world. The icon of the emerging
new face symbolizes the arrival of Maitreya (the future “Awakened
One”) or Middle Way—that third enabling term of transversality that
is destined to navigate the stormy waters of intercultural, interspecific,
and interdisciplinary border crossings.33
Transversality makes the middle; it is the middle that is always transver-

sal; the middle transverses multiple life-worlds. It approximates Calvin
Schrag’s transversal rationality. Schrag notes that
convergence without coincidence, unification without equivalence,

commonality without identity, assimilation without absorption, and
cooperation without uniformity—these interrelated senses define the
texture and dynamics of transversality. Clearly at work in this inter-
play of senses is the ingression of differance and the requirement for
a full recognition of the role of alterity. Transversality highlights the
integrity of otherness without, however, installing it as a first princi-
ple. Neither sameness nor otherness, neither identity nor difference,
are first principles, vying for a subordination of the one to the other.
And it is precisely transversality that provides a sheet anchor against
such a subordination. Its economy is situated between the economy of
a universalizing rationality with its heavy purchases on a metaphysics
and epistemology of identity/sameness and the economy of an antirea-
son with its rhapsody of unbounded difference/otherness.34
The trans(in)fusionist imaginary appropriates this transversal rationality by

working through the resources of rationality and difference and through
visibilities of negotiations and incommensurabilities. It is cooperation with
antagonism, stealth but within law, engagement with stress, commitment
with contradiction, love, but not without the quarrel. This is ‘dialectical
enrichment’ (in the words of Felix Guattari) and Ponty’s ‘hyperdialec-
tic’35 – an ethics without hegemony, a communicative rationality within
an unbounded ethical logic. The dialectical thinking in the middle is close
to Adornian nonidentity that challenges unitary conceptual formations;
it generates contradiction – a collision with its own boundary makes a
thought become dialectical, antagonistic with its own identity. Critical
thinking demands utmost ‘reflection’ in the middle. It goads itself to ask
wrong questions, false queries, adventurous start-ups, resisting concilia-
tion and conformity – the noise that hides the ‘tuning’ and exacerbates
alienation. So does the middle come out of the beginning if at all there is
one? Is the middle a point that leads to the end or can it possibly be reached
from the end point of a thought process? Thinking dwells in the middle
and is not the intersection of the roads coming from the end and the be-
ginning of a critical inquiry. The trans(in)fusion approach takes both the
‘dissective-cohesive mode’ [(re)constructing an accountable whole] and an
‘investigative-expansive mode’ that ‘seeks comprehension of the subject
matter’s fluid and plural relationships to its own parts and to the greater
environments of which it is a part’.36
Committed to ‘phase transitions’, the migrant membranic consciousness
builds its own perturbations in magmas and allagmas. These phase tran-
sitions are what Stuart Kauffman calls ‘supracritical behaviour’ where the
unpredictability of the middle is produced through unknown paradigms
of interventions. The ‘newness’ of the middle is not a shocking emergence
altogether for creativity is not simple unpredictability but a product of
radical imaginative intervention. This produces the ‘genuinely new’. The
aesthetic imaginary invests in this ‘new’ but does not ignore the conditions
in and with which formations of cultural, political and poetic thoughts
happen. The potentials are not always pre-formed or pre-existing but can
form new experiences of understanding and can speak outside our ratio-
nal, knowledgeable circles of understanding. I am tempted to see this as
Kostas Axelos’s ‘poe´ticite’ that places ‘poesis and techne on the same con-
tinuum of the human powers’.37 Axelos argues that productive thought
cannot be outstandingly radical because the newness of a thought lies in
making itself available for interrogation. The middle is poe´ticite in that it
encourages a kind of thought that ‘is productive because it transforms that
which is thought, but it is not technical because, unlike technique which
aims at making something new (in the case of technical thought, a new
object of thought), it is “conscious” of being questioned, too’.38
So ‘not knowing’ is not always ‘not doing’ (traditionally, doing follows
knowing) because doing and knowing are ever caught in unpredictabil-
ities and non-technical production of thinking and thoughts. The forms
of representation built between Sidney’s idea of poetic creativity and cer-
tain aspects of medieval Arabic literary criticism develop a complicated
zone of doing and knowing where a set of meaning is always an ensemble
under the possibility of magmatic transformations that leaves their own
residue. This is the deficient mode of critical understanding. The newness
has its own regenerative processes of survival. In such lines of flight, we
are not far from Deleuze’s ‘co-agencements’.39 Does the trans(in)fusionist
imaginary initiate the sense of ‘devenir-democracy’ (the democracy that
valorizes difference, diversity, multiple exchanges and ‘routes in and out
of the flux’)40 in our understanding of Sidney? Is ‘devenir-democracy’ and
migrant thinking closely connected? The minor power of Sidney emerges
through such a flow of critical thinking where flights taken are also flights
initiated and flights exchanged are flights in flux.
This again brings us to the incidence of ‘chance’ in the transductive
middle. How does chance ‘unsay’ itself? It is not about unpredictability
alone; rather, it is a kind of dephasing, a different kind of order, as the case
study on Sidney’s idea of poetic feigning and the ‘golden’ exemplifies. The
noisiness in the middle is the order – equilibrium with a difference. And
Sidney’s connection with Arabic poetics is the demonstration of ‘chance
connection’ that newness (it can also be interpreted as the indeterminate)
can bring. Chance can be an unthinking elision and has its reason; random
can be deliberate. Chance can be considered as a design or pattern which
determines our critical understanding, and critical knowledge production
involves chance as an integer where understanding – in the principle of
random sampling in statistical inference – entangles chance to formalize its
status. Trans(in)fusion works out the ‘time-reversal invariant’ from New-
tonian mechanics in that thinking is considered productive when thinking
is also in the reverse. Our understanding of transcultural philosophy of
reading works on this principle:
for every lawful trajectory through the state space, there is another
lawful trajectory which results from the first by mapping every in-
stantaneous state in the first trajectory to its image state in which the
particles have the same positions but the signs on the components of
momentum are reversed, and running the trajectory in reverse order.
These image states are those where the particles are in the same posi-
tions but moving in exactly the opposite direction. So for every lawful
process, that process running backwards is also lawful.41
It is here that trans-culturality finds a new meaning where processes in

the reverse claim some legitimacy within the poetics of incommensura-
bility. Does the middle come alive through ‘incommensurabilty’? Can we
argue that a trans(in)fusionist imaginary substantiates itself mostly out of
an incommensurability thesis where understanding a thought is an un-
derstanding made possible through some strange, apparently incongru-
ous, seemingly impossible, connection? Chance is not outside sequential
thinking; chance is embedded in finite thinking. However, the consensus
on how chance works is difficult to achieve. This reaffirms that chance has
its own ways of performance. The engagements in the ‘middle’ involve
‘trials’ – both inter- and intra-world trials to test frequencies of commen-
surability. Trans(in)fusion considers the stochastic possibility of apparent
incommensurability bringing ‘chance’ in transcultural dialogue as my cri-
tique of Sidney or understanding of Eliot’s notion of tradition in Chap-
ter 4 demonstrates. The poetics of incommensurability are always under
‘trial’ and possibilize a ‘chance’ negotiation in the form of a disruption of
thinking or a fractal embrace. Chance becomes a ‘process notion’ that has
the property to surprise the surface grammar and ascriptions of cultural
dialogue and inter-traditional epistemic meetings.
One significant paradigm that trans(in)fusion introduces is the notion
of ‘bias’ in criticism which can ‘chancily’ lead to a separate level of cross-
epistemic correspondence. Chance, as it plays out through trans(in)fusion,
can make a ‘bias’ question itself – the self-criticality of positional thinking
is what it genuinely encourages. Chance becomes an integral part of a
process-approach. Chance translates into random by not taking sequence
at face value – this is to argue that random is not always patternlessness;
for instance, algorithmic randomness develops a sequentiality of possible
outcomes – but asks, as John Earman notes, ‘whether the sequence mirrors
the probabilities of the process of which it is a product. There is a connec-
tion between this concept of randomness and the concept of disorder, but
it is not a tight one’.42 This brings us to the subject of chance as a history-
dependent phenomenon. Trans(in)fusion often looks into chance as the
product of conditions of history that are invisible – called history’s ‘hidden
variables’. This kind of chance has a complicated relationship with bias,
which is another version of agency. In our humanistic thinking, chance
is not always probabilistically independent of contingency and historical
consciousness and situatedness.43 Reading and thinking are a kind of ‘de-
terministic nonperiodic flow’.44 In the deterministic-probabilistic model,
our reading of Sidney or Eliot or Frost in this book is not without a struc-
ture and a chance-particle. Trans(in)fusion, for me, is mobilism. Marcel
Conche observes, ‘réduitl’être aux événements’, which
means that this particular system does not recognise the existence
of substances: the world as a whole is made up of events, and only
events. As a result, reality undergoes a complete overhaul: it is not
made up of ‘petits mondes’, as Cournot had it, but of a constant series
of changes: ‘l’on ne passe pas simplement d’un “état” (stable) à un au-
tre, car le changement est ininterrompu, l’étatlui-mêmeétant déjà du
changement.45
The trans(in)fusionist imaginary is the ‘event’ but not completely sucked

into the welter of flow and flux. Trans(in)fusion is ‘nontology’ because a
few substantialist paradigms are difficult to dismantle. Knowing Sidney
through Arabic literary criticism is mobilism but not without complete
sunderance from substantialism. Sidney with Arabic poetics cannot ‘run
away’ from the Sidney that belongs to the Renaissance poetics.
Where is the connection between chance and possibility? And how can
‘fabrication’ be conducted in the consequent tangle? This comes through
‘exception’ – the consequence of thinking about a ‘particular’ to effectuate
the ‘supplement’. Recalling Duchamp here can be interesting:
we picked up a new pebble there would be great probability of its

being formed of some unknown substance; all that we knew of other
pebbles would be worthless for it; before each new object we should
be as the new-born babe; like it we could only obey our caprices or
our needs. . . . In such a world there would be no science; perhaps
thought and even life would be impossible, since evolution could not
there develop the preservational instincts. Happily it is not so; like all
good fortune to which we are accustomed, this is not appreciated at
its true worth.46
It is in the middle that the ‘new object’ has the possibility of emerging as
an exception: Arabic poetics here is not the conventional, but the excep-
tional and the trans(in)fusionist imaginary responds with the freshness of
a newborn babe. Texts or subjects of critique are spaces and performatics
of chance: they survive through time by staying exposed to a chance con-
nection, emergence and correspondence. Is trans(in)fusionist intervention
also about ‘taming the chance’?47 Writing to his friend Francis Picabia,
Duchamp remarked that he has not quit ‘being a painter’; he is ‘drawing
on hazard now’.48 Production of meaning is both about the conventional
(counting pebbles), exception (a pebble as different from all the other peb-
bles, challenging the generic), reproducible (a pebble leading to another)
and the irreproducible (a pebble as unexpected emergence from a stock-
pile of known ones). Chance in migrant reading is not accident only; it is
what inheres in the very formation of the text and its possible reception.
Reading is both formal and chancy, and chanciness is the paradigm of all
conventions of understanding and acceptance (Duchamp calls the con-
ventional forms of reading as callistics). Chance is the reason for what we
call accidentalities of reading. So chance is reasonable in its presence in all
forms of migrant reading.
Erwin Schrodinger, at a different level of understanding, saw the
‘appropriate law of chance’ in atomic/molecular movements. In a close
connection with Exner who appreciated inexactitude in the laws of na-
ture, Schrodinger failed to see a consistent relation between causality, ev-
idence and statistical habit. It is not about indeterminate understanding
alone; it is also about the principle of indeterminacy that escapes human
logic and rationality, disturbing our formations of the imaginary. In a
different habitation on the role of the aesthetic, which is strictly not a
division between the causal and the acausal, the principle of acausality is
often about the collapse of the determinate judgment with which, most
often, the aesthetic imaginary is proposed to have been formed. It is fair
to remember that there is an epic silently written outside our everyday-
narratives of play and performance; the entangled issue is: ‘we know it
has happened and we will find out how it happened’ conflates with ‘but
since anything could have happened why did this happen?’ An intellectual
view of the world for Schrodinger is impossible without any mystics.49 He
argues, in the spirit of the physicist-philosopher, about how the expression
of a thought in a word that is easy to communicate and institutionalize
becomes the work of a silk worm whose effort is confined to providing
a shape to the material.50 Such materialization rigidifies and refuses any
further remoulding or revision. So the experience of a thought, caught,
as it is, in ‘self-transcension’, can never be similar on every occasion of
engagement. A thought cultivates a ‘voice’ and it is thinking, unlike the
determinate materialization of the silk worm, that facilitates the ventila-
tion. Chance, however, may not be seen as discontinuity, as Schrodinger
argues. The compelling issue involving the understanding of the princi-
ples of mystics, silk worm, chance and continuity in the Schrodingerian
programme is that ontology is as much a reality as discontinuity. Chance
may be part of a greater continuity that is outside the perimeter of human
rationality, but the apparent discontinuity that it generates in our literary
understanding, cultural and political formations leads to a separate vein of
performativity in the aesthetic imaginary.
Trans(in)fusion talks about this vitalist affectivity, a sort of membranic
thinking that interiorizes spaces of epistemes and understanding through
an existence on the edge of limits. A membrane is not only about porosity;
it also has its own strategic selectivity, ways of filtration and resistance.
Migrant particles of thinking across cultures need the ‘membranic dy-
namic’, both as a relation between two sides of migration and the migra-
tion relative to the membrane separating both sides of the interactive flow.
Membranic thinking determines the nature of the migrant consciousness.
Trans(in)fusion membranizes the cosmopolitan mix of ideas and concepts,
the cultural and epistemic paradigms to see migrancy as the momentum
for critical-creative formations.
Bracket
The rationale and philosophy of ‘bracket’ – round and curly and square – as
found in trans(in) fusion can articulate a fresh hermeneutic of migrant un-
derstanding. What does the bracket do to trans, the infusion, and fusion in
bringing about a complexity of thinking? How membranic is the bracket?
Is the bracket indicative of an inner smelting and dispersion that thinking
and concept-formation cannot override? I initiate this part of the discus-
sion by raising a few questions. Do we smell a rose or do we just merely
breathe the chemical agents that are transmitted through the air separating
the inhaler from the object? Do we depend on the olfactory senses or
the air in between or the rose? What is rose- experience then? Is the rose
fragrantly beautiful because of the air, the migrating chemical agents, the
anthocyanins, the flavanoids that make the colour and beauty of its petals,
the photo-emitting properties of the object, or one’s optico-neuro stim-
ulus? So does the rose build its identity, its appearance, its presentation,
representation, singularity, through brackets drawn as ‘local’, as finitude,
where each bracket that we draw has a Borgesian vestibule connecting one
with the other? So the ‘experience of the rose’ is both the bracketed local
effect or reason and a combination of all: this is the experience of critical
thinking where ‘nexus’ inheres in brackets; the local as parenthesis [from
ancient Greek παρένθεσις (parénthesis), from παρεντίθημι (parentíthēmi,
‘I put in beside’, mix up), and from παρά (pará, ‘beside’)] connecting with
the potenza of transcending the bracket. Bracket, as a local and specific
experience, stays as ‘beside’ and with the potential to mix. It adds, and is
additive. Mathematically speaking, brackets change the end product nu-
merically; like (2 × 3) + 4 = 10 can be different once the ‘position’ or the
‘place’ of the bracket changes: like, 2 + (3 × 4) = 14. What this implies
is that even though the numbers or integers or the identifiers (read con-
cepts, units of thought across cultures and traditions) remain the same, the
end result or eventual experience shifts or changes with the alternation in
the placement of the brackets. Brackets here come to mean the ‘engaging
cluster’ – the negotiatory space – that changes the understanding of inter-
action among concepts and ideas. Critical experience depends on how one
decides, discretionizes and develops the brackets in narratives, discourses
and understanding across cultures, traditions and thinking. Brackets are
not static as they apparently seem to be, but they are shifters, potentially
transpository, and markers that alter understanding. They change the telos
and trajectory of expectation and experiences. What potency and capital
can one draw from seeing the brackets as migrant, vibrant and dynamic?
How can one relate brackets with the world of critical thinking and also
the world of literature?
Brackets produce ‘suspension of judgment’ as much as they do judgment.
They are epochic (suspended) in that they ‘suspend’ meaning to facilitate
meaning (ataraxic). Brackets hold meaning or expression and localize their
emergence and operation, but they do not fail to connect with whatever
precedes or follows them. What this further implies is that brackets are
the judgment which qualifies as concepts and, hence, something that des-
ignates a particular event or phenomenon or certain kind of understand-
ing. They, often, non-mathematically, come between two sets of clauses
and expressions where a bracket puts forth an idea which may not be
integral to the understanding of the full sentence as a whole and yet can
remain as something that enhances the experience of meaning; a bracket
connects the two clauses that precede and follow it – the parenthesis as
etymologically understood as staying ‘next’ and beside. Meaning in a
bracket stays closed and migrates, declares its locality and transcends its
status, and is an interruption and a connector.
Migrant reading is built around such ‘localities’: local experiences of
thinking and understanding cultural, political and epistemological con-
ditions; they are units and unity, singular and singularities, are micro-
global and connected through a totality. Migrant thinking may be argued
to begin with a somewhat paradoxical intrinsic unity, an involution and
supramentalism which includes all – a view from everywhere, a conscious-
ness that is coextensive with its content (its locality) and the substances that
constitute the content (the localities that are external or global to its being
or consolidated constitution). This produces a host of ‘forming particles’
of thought – a cosmopolitan complex of thought-constituents – whose
measurements are not always probable outcomes. Each bracket of thought
hides the entropy of thinking beyond (the beside, the after), a kind of
‘process teleology’: an idea of ‘how totality hangs together in all of its
51
interactive process-moves’.
A migrant consciousness, more often, settles
in the trans-now, an intriguing engagement with the now. It operates
not merely in forms of representations and discourses – ‘closing the cir-
cle’52 – but as consciousness as well. If time passes around a concept, a
concept passes through time. Migrancy builds here as well. The migrant
consciousness believes in the ‘layering’ of the now: the now is not an
objective point of separation from yesterday or tomorrow but an event, a
moving now (coming with different time-curves), the here-now, that has
a multiple seriality to it (surface-depth), a kind of observer-independent
and observer-dependent ‘hyperplanes of simultaneity’.53
Here we may explain the bracket in trans(in)fusion by drawing on Cor-
nelius Castoriadis’s understanding of ‘leaning on’ – Freud’s Anlehnung
in German, in English ‘anaclasis’54 – which, for me, has a complexity of
meaning-volume in attachment, growth and non-determinism. Castori-
adis explains that although ‘there can be no oral instinct without mouth
and breast, no anal instinct without an anus’, the existence of the mouth
or breast or anus says nothing about what becomes of the oral and anal
instincts in general, ‘about what becomes of them in a given culture, even
less, what becomes of them in a given individual’.55 If the mouth is de-
termined, the mouth instinct is formative and largely undetermined and
non-deterministic for it does not deliver uniform results and have similar
consequences everywhere. Castoriadis argues that the institution of soci-
ety is both a product of
biological organization of the human individual as a living being and

the natural world in which it participates and with which, qua living
being, it interacts—finding in this natural stratum a series of condi-
tions, supports, and stimuli which it takes up, takes account of, uses
and transforms, but in a manner determined creatively by itself, ac-
cording to its own ends and consistent with its own self-constitution.56
Migrant thinking as trans(in)fusion announces how critical thinking
across tradition and cultures can be anaclasistic. This is what I interpret as
leaning on signification as thinking and thoughts travel across institutions
and imaginaries – series of brackets in communication and contamina-
tion. What Castoriadis sees as the transformation of the psyche and the
fragmentation of the psyche is for me the trans-thinking. It is often the
subject who does not think because significations are transfusive, historical
creations and ‘potentials’ that produce their own cross-cultural instincts.
Critical thinking is leaning; it is, often, non-deterministic; it is X. Inter-
estingly, Castoriadis tries to see the ‘leaning’ between world as ‘presen-
tation of images’ and X that lies beyond it.57 This is the trans(in)fusion
imaginary with a delicate and dispersive combination of the analytic and
anaclitic.
What trans(in)fusion, following on Castoriadis, does is to see X as not
non-representational and not conventionally informational either. Here,
the parentheses have a duality to perform: they mark the limits and yet
cannot ignore the restive corridor that all parentheses generate, and they
represent and then promote the poetic of the invisible. This, however,
does not communicate information but comes as Anstoss, the shock: this
is X with the information but as the unnamed element. However, think-
ing performed in a self-agentialization creates a representation out of an
object, lending a substance to the object as information. But X is both
representation and transformation; it is here that the shock to thinking lies
where representation is also about missing the object as ‘other’, as existing
outside the domain of information. Shock to thinking is a rearticulation of
sensorialization of the world. Thinking is often outside what we thought
it is: it is X, but not without self-assertion and self-positioning and the
possibilities and extensions beyond them. In that sense, all critique is on-
tologically and performatively migrant in nature.
I argue migrancy both as trans and as entropy: a fresh way of looking
into how brackets, being the ‘potential local’, help build the migrant
power. Brackets both compress and transcend data and concepts; they, at
once, codify and unpack. They geometricize imagination and again vary
their own geometry to accommodate more possibilities – measuring the
reading and failure of measurement, counting and losing counting as ways
of accounting. Migrancy of thinking is built around a field that totality
cannot build on its own. It is the locality and monadism of things that
impact on the totality changing it and getting changed, obfuscating the
distinctions that we often make between the local and the global. In a way,
the unit and the field are in a Deleuzian unity. Thinking with Simon-
don, I shall call this ‘spirituality of migrant thinking’ – the connectionism
among trans, the brackets, and infusion. Simondon argues that spirituality
is the signification of the coherence of the other and the same in a

superior life. . . .Spirituality is the meaning of the relation of the indi-
viduated being to the collective, and thus also the foundation of this
relation. . . .It is the respect of the relation between the individuated
being and the preindividual which is spirituality. It is essentially
affectivity and emotivity.58
The bracket here is the affectivity of the ‘local’. It implicates a ‘relation’,

signification and spirituality. It is in the bracket that we encounter the
‘noise’ (close to the meaning that Michel Serres uses through Old French
that means fury, uproar or wrangling). Migrant thinking proceeds through
brackets where each bracket gives one a sense of clear demarcation but,
in effect, it (with) holds a fury where fury classifies, form-alizes and is
relational. If a bracket is a segregation from the circumambient noise, it
ensures further noise within by staying be-side. Migrant thinking is pri-
marily about finding the form and rhythm in ‘brackets of meaningful
noise’ be it cultural, political and religious. Cultures of thought and tra-
ditions of understanding across continents, the life-world and geocriticial
spaces are brackets with ‘noise’. This makes systems of migrant thinking
emergent, molar, fractal self-organizing, aggregatory and dynamic – the
cosmopolitan consciousness as ‘nexus’.59
What physicist Abner Shimony calls the ‘passion at a distance’ comes
close to my notion of migrant reading. Our thinking and idea-formations
are steeped in passion that only distance can generate, resulting in a dy-
namical transience. The passion is the nexus which is the entanglement
(Verschränkung) of potentiality and actuality, propensity and purposiveness,
about concrescence and contamination.60 The entanglements are not mere
counterintuitive spookiness but parameterization too. It is a state of mi-
grancy, momentum and motility that raises its own unresolvable chal-
lenges in our non-local and admissible quantum state understanding. The
fundamentals of any cultural formation, paradigmatic or conceptual, are
maximally vibrated through maximal entanglements. This is the source of
entropy; trans(in)fusion becomes the heat that continues to build within
the systems and merge and melt the curves and edges that separate them.
The process tempts me to qualify this as the ‘snake phenomenon’. A Scien-
tific American article identifies four types of snake motion:
lateral undulation, rectilinear locomotion, concertina progression,

and sidewinding. However, these motion categorizations overlap, for
a snake can move in more than one way as one motion slips into the
other, as the slithering entangles into a variety of conditions and equa-
tions. This is further complicated by the fact that as the snake travels
its parts move and accelerate at different rates. The solution gains sev-
eral magnitudes of complexity when one wants to know which of the
snake’s thousands of muscles are actually exerting the forces that induce
and maintain motion. But what if we want to know how the snake is
not simply moved by itself or by its muscles but by the heat of the rocks,
the twist of its genes, or the twitching of its prey? What if the snake
itself is a kind of slithering between snakiness and nonsnakiness?61
This ‘what if ’ in the aesthetic imaginary is not imaginative or fantastical
figurations but a certain quantum of reality that does not enable us to dif-
ferentiate between motion and rest, the possible and the yet to be actual –
between the snakiness and non-snakiness. Trans(in)fusionist imaginary is
malleable and accommodative – octopusic.
Here is an animal with venom like a snake, a beak like a parrot, and ink
like an old-fashioned pen. It can weigh as much as a man and stretch
as long as a car, yet can pour its baggy, boneless body through an
opening the size of an orange … Their mouths are in their armpits …
They breathe water. Their appendages are covered with dextrous,
grasping suckers, a structure for which no mammal has an equivalent.
Living aliens; octopuses are expressions of liquid life that can touch,
taste, navigate, and camouflage themselves to such a sophisticated de-
gree that their activities are considered too complex to be entirely
centrally coordinated according to the logic of the bête machine.62
It is active in a variety of ways; it has a structure and yet a transformative

dimension to it: building a kind of multiple identities within its own mi-
lieu. They are
strange, unnerving, and magical, their disarming otherness doesn’t

end with their bodies. They extensively practice a type of genetic
alteration called RNA editing, which is very rare in the rest of the
animal kingdom, which enables them to fine-tune the information
encoded by their genes without altering the genes themselves. Their
usage of RNA editing is so much more extensive than any other an-
imal group that it is likely to be associated with their extremely de-
veloped brains.63
This makes for more spaces of understanding, accommodation and re-

editing – an octopusic plexus.
Border crossing, hence, begins when, like A. N. Whitehead, we start
to believe that the ‘passage of the cause into the effect is the cumulative
character of time’.64 Interpretive understanding embeds in the irreversibil-
ity of time and consequent ‘concresence’ and ‘conformation’.65 My point
of argument is neither against conformation nor irreversibility. It is about
an enduring ‘locality’ that can sometimes disapprove concrescence. Fur-
ther it to say that the ‘prior’ to a ‘present’ is not always chartable. It is too
deeply entangled to fall within Whiteheadian temporalogy. This makes
a concept exist with the potential that is timeless and yet not without
its existence in time and context. A concept is an energy that succeeds its
predecessors with conformity and contextualization and, again, builds its
own character synchronically through a cut in the continuity. Here lies
the vitalist ontology of migrant thinking. Concepts, I would like to ar-
gue, have stayed too confined to their ‘extrinsic’ usage, whereas migrant
consciousness accents their intrinsic evolution and diverse appropriation.
Intrinsicity is processual not just in the sense of ‘succession’ and serial-
ity. Concepts become ‘untimely’, which is why they transform ‘as’ – not
‘to’ – entanglements. They are often non-dualistic, evolutionary, unitary,
nontemporal and psycho-cultural – they are cultural, mental, ontological
and marginal events. Migrancy of thinking acknowledges the cultural and
the socio-political wrap of/around an idea but simultaneously approbates
the invariant validity of its autonomous sustenance – the work cycles of
concepts that thrive both in a structure and in anxieties of structural dis-
integration. Reading literature is vitalistic living at the edge of chaos – an
‘inverted movement’ as Henri Bergson argues, ‘a reality which is making
itself in a reality which is unmaking itself ’.66 The walls of the bracket
are membranic and reading literature is the understanding of migrant-
transference and transmission in a critical non-equilibrium. For instance,
Virginia Woolf ’s idea of literature connects with quantum physics, in-
sectology and botany; Samuel Beckett comes to be interpreted through
Hindu philosophy and ethics; Robert Frost’s theory of poetry and critical
paradigms of Sanskrit poetics come to derive new sets of meaning out of
each other.
Trans-Now
It is the planetary turn that comes home to explain the complexities of
migrancy. Christian Moraru gives a perceptive spin to the ‘turning’ of the
earth:
it turns (planā, in Ancient Greek) to gyrate, concomitantly around

other celestial objects and its own axis. But, by the same movement
quite literally, it also turns to change, turning in order to change and
thus into a changed world order itself, the earth’s revolutions bound
up with the twists and turns in human history, revolutionary or less
so. On one side, then, the earth’s whirling through space as the planet
physically revolves and evolves, and as space on earth itself stretches
out, shrinks, is redistributed, and is mapped out in step with the sys-
toles and diastoles of human civilization; on the other side, our own
pirouettes, swerves, and about–faces, marking how we shuffle around
the world, how we transform it, how we ourselves change in the wake
of worldly changes, and how the latter call on us to revisit our An-
schauungen of the spinning Welt and of ourselves in it: all these turns
matter a great deal.67
Migrant readings are consequences and heterologies of ‘turns’; it is mostly

about revising the horos, what we mean by horizons. Arguing around light,
horizon, continent, meaning and planetarity, I have argued elsewhere that
Asia is the land or a space that gets light first and loses light first:
It first gets noticed and then allows others to get noticed by withdraw-
ing from prominence. Losing light is not losing sight but about sight-
ing others and sighting oneself. Losing light, then, is not darkness but
no light, not possession but a sharing with others, a light that comes
to it only to be distributed to others. Again the light that it loses to its
others comes to it as its light and also the light of others. That light
dissolves and sublates itself. So the figure of Asia is always behind the
figure, the idea that hides to project, retraces to reaffirm. Asia demar-
cates itself from its self (light and no light, blind spots?) and also self-
demarcation (it is the host to a light and then dispossessed to become,
in the process, both the guest and the host). Like the light that goes
away and returns upon itself, Asia always has an Asia before itself.68
It is here that migrancy in thinking is built; from here, migrant thinking

flourishes. It is the shifting light and the turn of light that (un)make the
‘literary’: the trans-literary. And indeed, light shifts and turns in the ‘mid-
dle’. Turns immanentalize and ‘constitute’ too. It metanymizes and im-
plicates ‘critical thinking’, a thinking that is cosmopolitan in interests and
interested in a paradigmatic variety. This is the categorial rather than the
categorical – where migrancy of thinking and connection is mostly about
trying to understand the ‘middle’ between points of exchange and negotia-
tion. The middle within our ways of bracketing is the noisiest of all spaces.
The trans(in)fusionist imaginary makes us believe that our obsession
with ‘outlines’ can come under serious question. Emphasizing blurring
lines and the optical myths of outlines, physicist Richard Feynman notes:
The fact that there is an enhancement of contours [in the workings of

the visual systems of particular animals, including humans] has long
been known; in fact it is a remarkable thing that has been commented
on by psychologists many times. In order to draw an object, we have
only to draw its outline. How used we are to looking at pictures that
have only the outline! What is the outline? The outline is only the
edge difference between light and dark or one color and another. It
is not something definite. It is not, believe it or not, that every object
has a line around it! There is no such line. It is only in our own psy-
chological makeup that there is a line.69
Outlines do not reveal the ‘story’ always for it is diffraction that leaves
a fair part of the story untold. The aesthetic imaginary argues that ev-
ery phenomenon, literary and cultural, cannot have an Einsteinian spa-
tial separability – the ‘mutually independent existence of spatially distant
things’, the separability principle as the condition for their independence.
All texts, phenomena and events are not to be governed by this principle
as much as everything cannot begin from a Bohrian immanent wholeness.
I am greatly troubled by any thought that sees all text as textualism; what
must go into our understanding is that such a position speaks of a preju-
dice. The politics of being ‘objective’ is never easy.
The aesthetic imaginary is a complexity that has the working principle
coming from a ‘workmanship of risk’ with ‘workmanship of certainty’
where the former depends on judgment, dexterity and care, and the lat-
ter depends on preformulations, the determinations established before the
work has actually begun.70 This is what Ingold calls drawing a line free-
hand and with a ruler that goes on to demonstrate the distinctive borders
between wayfaring and transport.71 Building a thought is drawing a line
which might ‘happen’ or eventualize working through curves and joints
and dots. Extending a thought is also redrawing a line, but thinking is of-
ten performed without a ‘ruler’. Ingold makes an interesting observation:
It seems as though, as soon as the ruler is taken into use, the workman-
ship of risk intrinsic to the wayfaring pen gives way to a workmanship
of certainty that goes straight to the point. Yet in reality, things are
not that simple. Just as transport can never be perfect but always en-
tails an element of wayfaring, so no line that is ever drawn – even with
a ruler – can ever be perfectly straight. An element of risk is always
involved. For one thing, there is the constant danger that the ruler
will slip. For another, the precise distance of the line from the edge of
the rule will depend on the angle at which the pen is held, which is in-
clined to vary in following through the manual gesture. It is difficult,
too, to keep the pressure on the tip exactly constant, so that the width
and density of the line may be inconstant. Nor can one be sure that
the edge of the ruler is perfectly straight, as it is likely to have been
warped or nicked by previous wear and tear. Moreover, drawing the
line takes time. It cannot be reduced to a single instant.72
Thoughts rule, and thinking is always the risk-possibilities of the ruler.

The aesthetic imaginary, being both transport and wayfaring, appreciates
the complexity of staying with the ruler, on-line with the ruler.
The aesthetic imaginary is principled in ‘embeddedness’: thoughts, im-
ages, ideas and figures are in a state of permanence and in motion, are
belongings of culture and, simultaneously, are trans-belongings as I have
argued earlier. Embeddedness is not in fixation, the founded and the exis-
tent; it conatively sponsors disembedding where concepts age and moult,
images manifest and mould, and ideas settle and ferment. This is not al-
ways strictly performed to a method because imaginaries are not always
subservient to an understanding that is collectively sanctioned and heu-
ristically attested. The aesthetic imaginary argues how two concepts or
paradigms can come together under conditions independent of distance.
Ideas and concepts across cultures come with a ‘position’ and a ‘momen-
tum’, and the simultaneity of their phenomenon develops the ‘uncertainty
principle’ which, for me, is the impetus for trans-habit. This revindicates
the non-separability of ideas across cultures where one cannot uproot a
flower without disturbing the stars.73 The aesthetic imaginary functions,
to an extent, on ‘fuzzy thinking’,74 where an investigation into a cultural
logic of understanding is encountering two factors: one, that the parent
culture shares, and the shared part in question does not stay with the
parent culture in a way that it used to be before it got shared – the logic
of the bitten apple being both apple and not the apple. This promises
a fuzzy connection. However, such diversities of connection sponsored
and inherent in the aesthetic imaginary correspond problematically with
David Bohm’s ‘implicate order’. This order builds on the enfoldment and
unfoldment where the ‘implicate order’ contains all possible features of the
explicate order as potentialities, along with the principles determining

which of these features shall become actual. The explicate order will
in this way flow out of the implicate order through unfoldment, while
in turn it ‘flows back’ through further enfoldment.75
This implicate order, as opposed to Laplace’s demon, contains the super-

quantum potential, making it, as Bohm argues, immensely subtle and more
inclusive, ‘in the sense that not only is the actual activity of the whole field
enfolded in it, but also all its potentialities, along with the principles de-
termining which of these shall become actual’.76 The aesthetic imaginary
looks into negotiating between what Bohm calls prehensive wholeness and
underlying wholeness. In principle it questions mere ‘interaction’ which,
as Bohm rightly observes, would mean that the interacting components
exist independently of each other before they can enter into a relationship.
Individuality and complexity are intertwined paradigms of the aesthetic
imaginary. It is more than what Bohm calls the ‘implicate order’. The real
critical niggle is to see the aesthetic imaginary as a whole that is timeless,
in the sense of (en)folding all times; to assume all emerging from a pre-
conceived whole is a little too simplistic. The autonomy of socio-cultural
thought and the ‘explicate order’ of understanding are both determinis-
tic and ‘incomprehendable’. The granularity in cultural interface lends its
indeterminism to our acts of understanding. There is a shared history of
aesthetic understanding, where the quantum variables, the ‘unseen’, the
politics of the visible and the finite join to produce a ‘complexity’ in our
understanding of socio-cultural and political situatedness..
The aesthetic imaginary develops an order which does not sponsor mere
detectors realizing definite positions only but conceives of a partition or a
space that has the measure of accommodation. If the physical world does not
necessarily come with classical limits, the meditative world and form-ability
can do without the proverbial pointer needle also. Determining the posi-
tion and velocity of contrasting and contesting particles of thought-cultures
is not possible always, and inexactitude is no demerit in our generation of
thought-heat. We look into the ‘micro-globalities’ – thought-perturbations
that emerge out of entropic acts of negotiations (entropy as coming from the
Greek word ‘trope’ meaning ‘turning into’ or ‘transformation’). I would argue
that cultural entropization is an irreversible process. In fact, no energy in such
entropism is dissipated for the accumulation is continuous and secretive, lead-
ing to a thermo-dynamic experience of the trans-(in)fusion moment. Ampli-
fiers and amplitudes are interesting paradigms in humanistic thinking – the
art and sometimes the ‘happening’ of picking messages, some orderly and
some apparently so. The points of contact in our thinking on an issue can be
conflictual, bifurcative and negotiatory – fundamental stochastic disturbances.
When, for example, the flow of water is interrupted by a rock, the

water separates and flows around it, but instead of joining and provid-
ing an even flow after circling the rock, the water goes into a turbu-
lent spin, creating at least two vortices and sometimes endless eddies
within eddies. The larger vortices break into ever-smaller ones, the
actual number and intensity depending upon the velocity of the water.
As these larger vortices break down into smaller units, they may well
create a stochastic mise en abyme in which each diminishing phase or
level mirrors the larger ones. Hence, the notion of “scaling” or pat-
terns across scales. However random, these vortices and eddies will
distribute themselves over time and space, potentially creating choppy,
swirling water, in which the flow will never be as it was: a new, much
more complex pattern replaces the old in subtle and often dramatic
ways. Turbulence and its effects are, then, parts of complexity.77
The turbulence is aesthetic; the imaginary approximates a ‘butterfly at-

tractor’, a Lorenz attractor, which has the ability to stretch and fold, en-
compass and select, iterate and revise, is plastic and secular – the energy
of ‘strange attractors’. To hold it within a system complicates the sub-
ject further because it often involves ‘unpredictable initial conditions’, the
threshold complexity. It is not always the system that rationalizes the ir-
regularities. Often, the disorder – the many bodied phenomena – is the
condition for a meaningful rationale of understanding.
It is close to ‘meta-archipelago’ (in the words of Benítez-Rojo) where
the separators and connectors form intricate networks of operation. Also,
analogically we can, to an extent, mention the ‘random graph’ of Paul
Erdös and Alfréd Rényi who through an understanding of complex sys-
tems introduced the ‘small-world’ effect: ‘coined by Stanley Milgram in
1967, the term “small-world” refers to the fact that even in a network of
many thousands or millions of links, the average “path length” between
any two nodes is surprisingly short’.78 However, the clustering that the
trans(in)fusionist imaginary sponsors is not merely a kind of random that is
responsible for the connection but a random that teams with a certain logic
to make the ‘clustering’ meaningful. Herb Susman explains that ‘nodes are
added one at a time to the network. The new node picks an existing node
to attach itself to by a weighted random draw of the existing nodes. In
this implementation, the existing nodes are weighted by a power of their
degree’.79 The Barabasi-Albert model of generating network structures
with scale-free property helps my thinking on this line getting me to add
a different dimension to the trans(in)fusionist imaginary: the growth and
preferential attachment create networks of contrasting nature. The growth
attachment increases the capaciousness of the trans(in)fusionist imaginary
by developing more networks over time; the preferential attachment in-
creases the possibility of greater links by depending on the developing
nodes as they increase their number of connections. It has been argued
that the ‘random network model’ assumes a fixed number of nodes. But in
‘real networks the number of nodes continually grows’. This is a growth
process; new nodes are connected in a variety of networks evolving a dis-
tributive pattern.80 In our understanding of Sidney’s poetics, the preferen-
tial nodes include ‘feigning’, creativity and transformation as these tend to
add more connections over time resulting in ever-complicated links and
networks. Hence, ‘hubs’ are formed.
Calculative or instrumental thinking is never devoid of value which,
however, reaffirms how thinking beyond can also be valuable. Heidegger
notes:
All calculation makes the calculable “come out” in the sum so as to

use the sum for the next count. Nothing counts for calculation save
for what can be calculated. Any particular thing is only what it “adds
up to”, and any count ensures the further progress of counting. This
process is continually using up numbers and is itself a continual self-
consumption. The “coming out” of the calculation with the help of
what-is counts as the explanation of the latter’s Being. Calculation
uses every-thing that “is” as units of computation, in advance, and,
in the computation, uses up its stock of units. This consumption of
what-is reveals the consuming nature of calculation. Only because
number can be multiplied indefinitely… is it possible for the con-
suming nature of calculation to hide behind its “products” and give
calculative thought the appearance of “productivity”…. Calculative
thought places itself under compulsion to master everything in the
logical terms of its procedure.81
Computing thought and adding thought-units to a narrative of meaning

and calculating productivity can find its contraposition in ‘essential think-
ing’, where Heidegger ‘looks for the slow signs of the incalculable and sees
in this the unforeseeable coming of the ineluctable’.82 This helps create an
‘inwardness’ which is not always theoretical upstart thinking but a kind
of thinking that has its own separate evolution of thought. Essential or
meditative thinking does not try to ‘calculate’ everything but leaves room
for a thinking experience that is ‘closer to man in its enigmatic unknow-
ableness than anything that “is”, than anything he may arrange and plan’.
In fact, ‘this can sometimes put the essential man in touch with a thinking
whose truth no “logic” can grasp’. It is a kind of ‘slow thinking’, a slow
burn, that starts to reflect on the very idea of thinking. Cultural and his-
torical reality is a subject awaiting to be found and understood – both the
‘what’ and the ‘how’. They exist as a work constitutive of a reality with
a content and form. But there is always an idea behind the work, and the
formation of the aesthetic imaginary helps in grasping the content and
seeking, teasing and realizing the idea that stays withdrawn from its daily
and dour apparentness.
In a letter from January of 1968, Mary McCarthy asks Hannah Arendt:
‘Where are you? I can’t place you with the certainty I’d like… Nor have
I seen any publications of yours, which makes me feel you’re preparing a
bomb’. To this Arendt replies: ‘I am not preparing a bomb by any means.
Unless you would call preparations for writing about Thinking-Judging-
Willing (a kind of part II to The Human Condition) preparing a bomb’.83
This is the explosion of mind: the reach and reason of thinking ego. If
Heidegger submits to thinking around the ‘obvious’, Arendt cultivates the
‘out-of-order’ quality of thinking, inverting all ordinary relationships.
Thinking for her springs from both appearance and experience: on the one
hand, de-sensing the world to build a new realm of thought where one’s
self can have a communication with oneself, and, on the other, building a
withdrawal within our ordinary world to be able to make judgment of the
whole. Withdrawal is not essentially obliteration or turning away from the
world we live in. It is here that the political implication of thinking comes
into play. It projects a conversational space – participatory and accounting
for how and why one has come to hold a particular opinion. For Arendt,
communicability, in order to be authentically political, requires critical
thinking and openness on the part of everyone involved. Critical thinking,
in this respect, is not just a matter of dispelling preconceived notions and
prejudices. One ‘learns the art of critical thought’ by ‘applying critical
standards to one’s own thought’. And this is precisely how the wind of
thought liberates judging from prejudice and dogma: the political activity
of openly examining everyone’s opinions requires the application of criti-
cal standards to one’s own opinions.84 Critical thinking needs its own filters
of examination and self-doubt. It is clearly about a contesting one’s own
judgment of things or subject without staying withdrawn into a realm
free from self-doubt and the disputability of points of view. It needs ‘some
sort of isonomical publicity’ where the standpoint of one is open to the
standpoint of others, and all standpoints eventually are open to question.
A trans(in)fusionist judgment is inevitably exposed to contrarian views
and contestation. Undoxic, it takes full measure of all critiques and tries to
produce a variety of sense to get a dialectical thinking going. The trans(in)
fusionist imaginary situates all political thinking in the ‘world’, in critique
of the world that is both biotic, non-biotic, involving our being in the
world with humans, plants and the non-human. It calls for an enlarged
mutuality and mentality. This is re-appropriation of thinking grounded
in how we uncover our experiences of being in the world and recover condi-
tions and pluralities of existence stultified through conventions. Political
thinking here acknowledges the world inter-esse men and in ‘equivocal-
ity’ (position of ‘it seems to me’, dokemoi).
Arendt turns to Kaf ka to ‘locate’ the ‘thinking ego’ in time:
He has two antagonists; the first presses him from behind, from his
origin. The second blocks the road in front of him. He gives battle to
both. Actually, the first supports him in his fight with the second, for
he wants to push him forward, and in the same way the second sup-
ports him in his fight with the first, since he drives him back. But it
is only theoretically so. For it is not only the two antagonists who are
there, but he himself as well, and who really knows his intentions? His
dream, though, is that some time in an unguarded moment— and this,
it must be admitted, would require a night darker than any night has
ever been yet—he will jump out of the fighting line and be promoted,
on account of his experience in fighting, to the position of umpire
over his antagonists in their fight with each other.85
It is the thinking ego that jumps out of the lane of past and future and lo-
cates itself in the ‘now’ – the activity itself as it were. The now relives the
wrestle, the noise that jumping out of temporal corridors and spatializa-
tion of understanding across periods bring. If it is the ‘in between’ existing
amidst the ‘no-longer’ and the ‘not-yet’ is ‘present’ for Arendt, for me, it
is middle – a space where ‘two paths meet’, to borrow from Nietzche.86
However, these roads ‘contradict each other’, and they ‘offend each other
face to face’. They gateway into each other at the point of Now – be in
this Now! The trans(in)fusionist imaginary values this Now where ‘tenses’
meet and flow into each other; it declares the commerce of critical thinking.
Is trans(in)fusion about form-alization? Here Catherine Malabou’s
deep interest in form becomes a point of engagement for me. Form is
not always referential to forms that precede its beings; coming into be-
ing is not always coming through a development with a genetic origi-
nary source point. Sometimes form forms in a kind of emergence where
change is seen as immanent and not an evolutionary development or
a follow-up. Form is rest; it is restive; it arrests, wrests and is arrest-
ing. Form in-forms itself.87 The migrant reading formations involving
Philip Sidney and Arabic poetics speak about this restlessness: it is mem-
branic too in its ideational osmosis and selective cross-filtration. If time
has contextualized and conspired a thought into being, that thought, in
its emergence, develops to become epigenetic through time. Time forms
a thought and, in the process, plasticizes the ‘other’. The other is the
worlding that a particular thought exploding out of its culture and com-
munity projects and proleptizes. Literature thinks across continents and
continents of thought construct their own transformative moment – the
Wandlung (transformation) and VerWandlung (metamorphosis).88 Migrant
reading, as the exegesis on Sidney and Arabic poetics demonstrates, is also
about how a concept or thought in a culture and tradition can be vulner-
able to a ‘new wound’: the vulnus, the fragility, that most thoughts are
exposed to – Sidney’s idea of the ‘golden’ being vulnerable to mukhayyil.
However, this is not absolute bio- degradability of thought; it is impos-
sible to have such distinctive and decimative biodegradation. But being
in a thought is about being in thought- differentiations: the future of a
thought is mostly about untimely temporalities as Sidney’s idea of po-
etic feigning demonstrates. Destructive plasticity, in our understanding
of world literature, vagarizes thinking, resists easy assimilativeness, forms
zones of thought without losing touch with an identity that provoked
and initiated such form-ations. It speaks of a ‘detranscendentalization’
(in the words of Malabou)89 which makes allowance for a poetics of in-
visibility. Migrant thinking submits to planetary time, connects with the
‘unthought’ in intermeshing paradigms of interpretation and builds its
own local erogenic zones of signification, a spirituality that articulates
our inherent ‘critical citizenship’ across continents of literature, world of
literature and literary world-making.
Notes
1 Jeffrey Alan Barrett, The Quantum Mechanics of Minds and Worlds (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1999), vii.
2 Quoted from D. W. Van Krevelen & Klaaste Nijenhuis, Properties of Polymers
(Netherlands: Elsevier, 2009).
3 See my “Aesthetic Imaginary: Rethinking the ‘Comparative’” Canadian
Review of Comparative Literature / Revue Canadienne de LittératureComparée,
Vol. 44, No. 3 (September 2017), 449–67.
4 See my ‘Plastic Literature’ University of Toronto Quarterly, Vol. 88, No. 2
(Spring 2019), 277–91; also my forthcoming book The Plastic Turn (Ithaca,
NY: Cornell University Press, 2021).
5 See Kevin McLaughlin, Poetic Force: Poetry after Kant (Stanford, CA: Stanford
University Press, 2014).
6 See David Vallins, Kaz Oishi & Seamus Perry (eds.), Coleridge, Romanticism
and the Orient: Cultural Negotiations (London: Bloomsbury: 2013), 111.
7 Karen Pinkus, Alchemical Mercury: A Theory of Ambivalence (Stanford, CA:
Stanford University Press, 2010), 5.
8 C. G. Jung, Collected Works, Vol. 14, Mysterium Coniunctionis: An Inquiry into
the Separation and Synthesis of Psychic Opposites in Alchemy (London: Rout-
ledge & Kegan Paul, 1963), par. 206.
9 Roderick Main, The Rupture of Time: Synchronicity and Jung’s Critique of Modern
Western Culture (Hove: Brunner-Routledge, 2004), 20.

and Untruthfulness in Medieval Arabic Literary Criticism (Washington, DC: Three
Continents Press, 1988).
31 Nabil Matar, ‘Alfārābī on Imagination: With a Translation of His “Treatise
on Poetry”’ College Literature, Vol. 23, No. 1 (February 1996), 104.
32 See Ming Xie, Conditions of Comparison: Reflections on Comparative Intercultural
Inquiry (London and New York: Continuum/Bloomsbury, 2011).
33 Hwa Yol Jung, Transversal Rationality and Intercultural Texts Essays in Phenome-
nology and Comparative Philosophy (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2011), xii.
34 Calvin O. Schrag, Convergence Amidst Difference: Philosophical Conversations
Across National Boundaries (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2004),
77.
35 See Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible (ed.) Claude Lefort
and (trans.) Alphonso Lingis (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press,
1968), 89–95.
36 Bryan Reynolds, Transversal Subjects (London: Palgrave. 2009), 145.
37 Nathalie Karagiannis, ‘What Is to Be Thought? What Is to Be Done? The
Polyscopic Thought of Kostas Axelos and Cornelius Castoriadis’s European
Journal of Social Theory, Vol. 15, No. 3(2012), 404; also, see Kostas Axelos,
Horizons du monde (Paris: Minuit, 1974); Ce questionnement (Paris: Minuit,
2001); Re ´ponses e ńigmatiques (Paris: Minuit, 2005).
38 Karagiannis, ‘What Is to Be Thought? What Is to Be Done?’, 405.
39 Mary F. Zamberlin, Rhizosphere: Gilles Deleuze and the “Minor” American Writ-
ings of William James, W.E.B. Du Bois, Gertrude Stein, Jean Toomer, and William
Faulkner (London: Routledge, 2006), 5.
40 Ibid., 18.
41 ht t p s://st a n ford . l ibr a r y. s yd ney.edu.au /a rch ive s/spr 2 012/ent r ie s/
chance-randomness/.

42 John Earman, A Primer on Determinism (Dordrecht: D. Reidel Publishing
Company, 1986), 145.
43 See Anthony Eagle, ‘Deterministic Chance’ Noûs, Vol. 45 (2011), 269–99;
RudolfCarnap, ‘The Two Concepts of Probability’ Philosophy and Phenomeno-
logical Research, Vol. 5 (1945), 513–32. Also, see J. R. G. Williams, ‘Chances,
Counterfactuals, and Similarity’ Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, Vol.
77 (2008), 385–420.
44 Edward Lorenz, ‘Deterministic Nonperiodic Flow’ Journal of the Atmospheric
Sciences, Vol. 20 (March 1953), 130–41.
45 Denis Lejeune, The Radical Use of Chance in 20th Century Art (Amsterdam:
Rodopi, 2012), 44.
46 Herbert Molderings, Duchamp and the Aesthetics of Chance (trans.) John Brog-
den (New York: Columbia University, 2006), 21.
47 Ian Hacking, The Taming of Chance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1990).
48 Molderings, Duchamp and the Aesthetics of Chance, 128.
49 E. Schrodinger, in a letter to Franz Theodor Csokor, 10.17.1960, in: E. SchrO-
dinger, Mein Leben, meine Weltansicht, a.a.O., p. 2. Inslitutflir Philosophie
Otto-Nuschke- Straf Je 10/11, 1086 Berlin, Germany.
50 Ulrich Roseberg, ‘The Einstein-Bohn Debate’ in Erwin Schrödinger’s World
View: The Dynamics of Knowledge and Reality (ed.) Johann Götschl (Dordrecht:
Kluwer Academic Publisher, 1992), 137.
51 See Stephen T. DeBerry, Quantum Psychology: Steps to a Postmodern Ecology of
Being (Westport, CT: Praeger Publishers, 1993), 7.
52 A. Shimony, ‘Reality, Causality, and Closing the Circle’ in Search for a Natu-
ralistic World View, Vol. I (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 6.

79 https://observablehq.com/@herbps10/barabasi-albert-model.

80 http://barabasi.com/f/622.pdf.
81 See WalterKaufmann (ed.), Existentialism –From Dostoevesky to Sartre
(A Meridian Book, New American Library, 1975), 261–62; http://wwwdocs.
fce.unsw.edu.au/sistm/staff/Heidegger_calculation_essential_March08.pdf.
82 Ibid., 263.
83 Mary McCarthy and Hannah Arendt, Between Friends: The Correspondence of
Hannah Arendt and Mary Mccarthy, 1949–1975 (ed.) Carol Brightman (New
York: Harcourt Brace, 1995), 210.
84 See Amando Basurto, ‘Hannah Arendt’s Kantian Socrates: Moral and Political
Judging’ Teoria Politica. Nouva Serie, Annali VI (2016), 7–8, 315–34.
85 Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind (San Diego, CA, New York and London:
Harcourt, Inc., 1971), 202.
86 Ibid., 204.
87 Tracy Colony, ‘Transformations: Malabou on Heidegger and Change’ parrhe-
sia, Vol. 23 (2005), 103–21.
88 Catherine Malabou, The Heidegger Change: On the Fantastic in Philosophy
(Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2011), 1–3.
89 Catherine Malabou, Before Tomorrow: Epigenesis and Rationality (trans.) Carolyn
Shread (Cambridge: Polity, 2016), kindle edition.
Trans
2 Entangled in Stories
Pure and simple forms are neither that simple nor that pure; they are no
longer complete, theoretical knowns, things seen and known without
residue, but rather theoretical, objective unknowns, infinitely folded into
one another.1
Seen from the outside, the Amazonian forest seems like a mass of con-
gealed bubbles, a vertical accumulation of green swellings; it is as if some
pathological disorder had attacked the riverscape over its whole extent.
But once you break through the surface-skin and go inside, everything
changes: seen from within, the chaotic mass becomes a monumental uni-
verse. The forest ceases to be a terrestrial distemper; it could be taken for
a new planetary world, as rich as our world, and replacing it. As soon as
the eye becomes accustomed to recognizing the forest’s various closely
adjacent planes, and the mind has overcome its first impression of being
overwhelmed, a complex system can be perceived. Despite confronting
what initially appears to be structurelessness, we seem to be able eventu-
ally to discover the hidden order.2
Thinking theory is thinking energy. Is energy really a thought? Or does

it stay as ‘thinking’ in the process of uncovering a thought? Energy is, for
me, a challenge to ‘identity thinking’; it is revealed as the ‘non-identical’,
which is why, energy comes home to get interpreted as the aesthetics of
‘counter’. The principle of counter can be ideological as much as a concept-
limiting activity. Cultural conciliation is a myth, a utopian caprice, which,
fortunately, in not being wholly conciliatory, becomes a thinking in joy,
promising (en)joyment. So the conceptual connections, incorporations,
appropriations and co-optations are inexhaustible. Is energy a version of
entangled thinking, a kind of ‘moreness’ that need not always be under-
girded by thought-freighted judgment? When Edmund Husserl’s disciple
Wilhelm Schapp developed a distinctive ‘philosophy of stories’, he meant
an ‘entanglement of stories’3 and, in fact, our identities, politics, cultures
of thought and thinking owe to entangled and entanglement of stories.
Entanglements – both in thoughts and in events – in culture, cultural
thinking, in politics and religion, in our investments in diverse condi-
tions of existence and life-worlds are ‘energetic’ for they hide a strain of
stories or provoke a career of stories. What narrative does entanglement
44 Trans
produce in our understanding of the world, our times, the lived world and
our identities? How are entangled stories generated? To what extent can
they be considered as prenarrative? Is entanglement, philosophically and
metaphorically, merely about ‘seeing-things-together’ (prendre-ensemble)
with meaningful order, justifiable orientation and an intelligible contin-
gency of events?
Trans-dialectics

The potential energy of concepts and thinking is continuously infused
with kineticism. Energy is dissipated and disseminated but not without
the event of developing a new potential energy – a conservation of energy
that is both within a law and the lawless, a happening where potency and
potentiality keep changing to make the dynamics of kineticism different.
Our world is a prison of thoughts, bricks of agreed thinking and laws of
settled quotients. Critical thinking, defying systematic exegesis, invests in
‘delight’ and revels in the ‘opposite’ – the energy of countertextuality. Our
humanistic thinking is like the ‘dark energy’, as distinguished from bary-
ons and radiation, for there is an acceleration and proliferation that do not
get clearly determined always. This has ‘negative pressure’ that counteracts
the gravitational pull of established norms of understanding and concep-
tual behaviour. It stands out in thoughtful ‘sign ins’ made possible through
inhomogeneities and irregularities that come from ‘gravitational instabil-
ity’ (challenges to hegemonic constants). Energy is always produced in the
‘opposition’, in varied dimensions of countertexts. And homogeneity is
strangely in order with a dynamical system embedded in asymmetry – the
entangled energy – and in high frequency of internal disruption.
Here, as the first initiation, I choose to think with William Blake. He is
synonymous with entangled energy which escapes the ‘apparent’ eye and
the conventional modes of attention and acceptance. My focus on Blake
is to demonstrate a kind of economy of thinking that sponsors waste, ex-
cess and contradiction. Often, meaning as expenditure of energy goes
unnoticed. Both the achieved and the achievable go unheralded. Art and
thinking have a dialectical connection built through such un-remarkable
and unmarked energy-emission. However, what interests me is the exe-
cution of form to project the energy of formlessness – the entropic and
frissive points of connection between consciousness of form and the pros-
pect and proposition to trans-form. Blake observes that ‘the unorganized
Blots & Blurs of Rubens & Titian are not Art nor can their Method ever
express Ideas or Imaginations any more than Popes Metaphysical Jargon
of Rhyming’.4 By calling Blake mad (the qualified Nebuchadnezzar), his
contemporaries and immediate posterities leave open the space that energy
allows only a few to discern and extrapolate. Thinking in entanglements is
left only to a few, and the aesthetic imaginary organizes itself, most often,
Entangled in Stories 45
through the seemingly unorganized. All sanity of thinking is grappling
with the form-ability of chaos. Tom Mitchell suggests that
the form/chaos, sanity/madness binaries are the limit of Blake’s

dialectic, the place where the difference between contraries (which
mutually coexist) and negations (which are mutually destructive) can
no longer be sustained. Unlike the contraries of good and evil, love
and hate, reason and energy, the interplay of chaos and form may not
necessarily produce “progression,” and if it is “necessary to human
existence,” it may also threaten to destroy it.5
Form and chaos, madness and sanity, in short, are incommensurable,

irreconcilable and inimical to all totality. They push the rule of dialec-
tical contrariety into the realm of what Blake calls ‘negations, dualisms
or abstract antitheses’; it is ‘the border of Blake’s art that opens onto a
void of meaninglessness, a chaos without form and a form without chaos
that comes, perhaps, to the same thing’.6 The fierce dialecticism, unmask-
ing as progression, risks self-annihilation to produce different versions
of ‘tyger’ – the tyger as expressive and symbolic of the complicated and
compelling products of energy. Critical thinking is looking for ‘tygers’,
investigating the fearful symmetries.
The entanglement of dialectical energy finds eminent expression
through the kind of structure that Blake creates in The Marriage of Heaven
and Hell: the structure itself as a kind of demonstration of the entangled
energy. The ‘Proverbs of Hell’ are innately structured within the energy
of contrariety that runs opposed to ‘the generic notion of pithy, folk-
authored formations of conventional prudence and morality’. These read
like ‘an inter-related collection of “koans” – those zen word-viruses or
instructional devices designed to cut through muddied perceptions of ev-
eryday language’.7 Perhaps, the concluding proverb – ‘Truth can never
be told so as to understood, and not be believ’d’ – is symptomatic of the
energy that constantly threatens to unpack and unleash a fresh terrain of
countertextual thinking. The structure and thought do not merely reveal
an understanding or comprehension for the ‘infernal method’ of think-
ing beyond, across, outside pithiness and well-etched graphocentrism calls
for inevitable eros. Entanglement has its own stories. The energy in the
aesthetic imaginary has an ‘outward circumference’: an energetic interior
holding a correspondence with a boundary that determines a thought or
concept. This opens the ‘doors of perception’. In plate 16 of The Marriage
of the Heaven and Hell, Blake writes:
The Giants who formed this world into its sensual existence and now
seem to live in it in chains; are in truth, the causes of its life & the
sources of all activity, but the chains are, the cunning of weak and
46 Trans
tame minds, which have the power to resist energy, according to the
proverb, the weak in courage is strong in cunning. Thus one portion
of being, is the Prolific, the other, the Devouring: to the devourer
it seems as if the producer was in his chains, but it is not so, he only
takes portions of existence and fancies that the whole. But the Prolific
would cease to be Prolific unless the Devourer as a sea received the
excess of his delights.8
It is the ‘devouring’ and the ‘prolific’ that develop a relationship in a coun-

tertextual story-telling: it is not binaric, but rather encourages the sur-
vival of both through a productive energy. One necessitates the other,
builds into the other. Critical thinking contrarises ‘desire’ (the prolific)
with the limit, the restraint (devourer). Hence, countertextuality is much
more than mere dialecticism – it is trans-dialectical. It is the reason for
a thought and the breakdown of a thought and, often, the same thought
that does not necessarily have to sublate to a resolution or synthesis always.
Dan Miller points out that ‘contrariety can be known only in the act
of missing it, going too far, then realizing the necessity of the miss, and
coming to the troubling awareness that contrariety shapes yet eludes every
act of perception’.9 Miller is right to follow this argument up by observing
that ‘contrariety entails not a rejection of all value judgments, nor a rela-
tivist ethics, nor even the elevation of contrariety itself as universal value,
but rather a strict rule of incommensurable values’: ‘The best wine is the
oldest, the best water is the newest’.10 By calling Christ an artist and prayer
as the ‘study of art’ and the Old and New Testaments as the ‘Great Code
of Art’,11 one encounters stochastic units in interpretation – the entropic
performatives in critical consciousness that have the latency of revolt. It is
the product of an imagination which is not essentially what we understand
as ‘romantic imagination’. There is an expansive tendency to encompass a
variety of things within the space of a thinking which I may quote Blake
to qualify as ‘Eternal Mind’; in my view, this is a nuanced expression
of entangled and ‘reverse’ thinking. Thinking is not mere ‘caverned’ in
senses; thinking dreams the eternity which is to dedivinize our subjects
and issues of everyday concourse and discourse. Perception varies with
individual, and hence, the aesthetic imaginary is never a settled body of
thought but something that, often, builds its own momentum – a ‘mill
with complicated wheel’.12
For Blake, the eighteenth-century idea of ‘coalescence’ was not very
welcoming for he saw the energy of creativity in the eternity: the en-
ergy, for instance, explained and complexified by a small, concentrated
and capacious unit of a poem. The entangled wholeness of the aesthetic
imaginary is for me the eternity – we agencialize and our constructions
are often agented. Not always does Blake find support when he says: ‘In
my Brain are studies & Chambers fill’d with books and pictures of old,
which I wrote and painted in ages of Eternity before my mortal life…’.13
It is not a complete Yeatsian reservoir and not the kind of ‘unity of thought’
that all of us have on earth as Blake believes. But it certainly reappropriates
Blake in that it invests ‘thinking’ beyond the limits of singular interests,
beyond juridical premises of thoughts and method, and sedate rationali-
ties of agreement that establish thought ahead of thinking – the tree not
knowing what is outside of its leaves and bark.14 As Blake observes in There
Is No Natural Religion:
The Argument. Man has no notion of moral fitness but from Edu-
cation. Naturally he is only a natural organ subject to Sense. I. Man
cannot naturally Percieve [sic throughout] but through his natural or
bodily organs. II. Man by his reasoning power can only compare &
judge of what he has already per ciev’d. III. From a perception of only
3 senses or 3 elements none could deduce a fourth or fifth. IV. None
could have other than natural or organic thoughts if he had none but
organic perceptions. V. Man’s desires are limited by his perceptions,
none can desire what he has not perciev’d. VI. The desires & per-
ceptions of man, untaught by anything but organs of sense, must be
limited to objects of sense. Conclusion: If it were not for the Poetic or
Prophetic character the Philosophic & Experimental would soon be
at the ratio of all things, & stand still, unable to do other than repeat
the same dull round over again.15
The energy of countertextual thinking is in the poetic and the prophetic –

acts that are constructive, calculative and yet not without some ‘ac-
cidents’. The ‘accident’ here is the tree thinking outside its bark. The
‘devourer’ and the ‘prolific’, the thought and thinking, are caught in a
near-irresolvable dialectic – the restive dialectic that is inherent in all
forms of critical thinking and the energy that enables meaningful produc-
tion of knowledge.
Steve Vine argues well to point out that Blake’s use of the present con-
tinuous form – ‘printing’, ‘melting’ and ‘displaying’ – insists grammat-
ically on the revelation of infinitude as an activity rather than an end.
The infinite is never finally revealed, but is always about to be revealed
or is always being revealed. The infinite is always in the process of (its)
revelation, for Blake’s corrosives designate a process and not essentially
a product; it is more about ‘displaying’ than a display. The infinite re-
sides in the corrosion and ‘melting away’ of the material, but ‘this process
is internal to the material itself ’.16 Hitting upon a subject or an idea is
about engaging with a sublime which demands judgment and transcen-
dence of understanding. Stories emerge through corrosion. Sublimity of
thought troubles because it conceals more than it reveals. Critical thinking
as transversality becomes a challenge to decode the sublime and bring it to
a certain form of understanding. This demonstrates that critical thinking
has the ‘bounding line’. Thinking for me is about finding the line: it is
48 Trans
the line that lends the energy to the mind, to thinking itself. ‘Bounding
line’ declares an espousal of ‘form’, the growing into ‘art’ and the under-
standing of sublime in reading as form, in both precision and supplement.
Interestingly, the line is not symptomatic of restriction and unchanging
determinacy; the line speaks to the critical-creative mind as a reminder of
our existence in a sea of possibilities; it points out how mere possibilities
cannot create art unless possibilities are known to be made relevant and
constructive in their relationship. It is a line that determines boundary and
extends the horos; it limits and spatializes; it restricts and possibilizes. Vine
notes that ‘Blake’s bounding line, then, goes by leaps and bounds; it is a
line in movement, in process, and in time’. Blake argues:
How do we distinguish the oak from the beech, the horse from the
ox, but by the bounding out line? How do we distinguish one face or
countenance from another, but by the bounding line and its infinite
inflexions and movements’?17
The line not only grounds identity but also the identity-in-process: it in-
stitutes a labile identity that is ceaselessly drawn and redrawn according to
the ‘infinite inflexions and movements’ of a sublime line. In this way, ‘the
bounding line not only “delimits” form but also (to pick up on Derrida’s
description of the doubleness of sublime measure in Kant) “de-limits” it.
The line becomes sublime, and the sublime becomes a line’.18 Creative
thinking demands being ‘a wretched happy ineffectual labourer of times
moments’,19 caught within a system, defined and outlined by a line that
is mostly processual, imbricated in history that is continually under chal-
lenge to change its form and manifestations. Line works and reworks in
ways where ‘Heaven, Earth & Hell, henceforth shall live in harmony’.20
Where does this connect with ‘chain’? Chain is enchainment, a form of
entanglement. Chains draw the line of movement as much as they outline
the flow and actionality of the movement. Nelson Hilton writes that a
chain is not simply a chain, but also an instance of what it refers to

and (as a word) itself participates in: historically, the image of or-
der epitomized by the great chain of being, and, more immediately
(though stretching back to Plato’s Ion [533e]), the image of the “chain
of discourse” and its “links” of signified and signifier. These key for-
mulations or assertions of the intelligibility of world and communi-
cation are bound together under the sign of the chain; this sign Blake
seizes on in order to explore its nature and unlock the reader from its
implications.21
Critical thinking encounters chains and (en)chainment too; perhaps,

thinking builds its own attraction towards chains for without enchain-
ment there is no transcendence, without slavery to a system there is no
emancipation in discourse and thought and without bondage there is no
binding. All thinking, to appropriate Blake, is annexed and annexured
by chains: systems that determine cultural, literary and political thought.
Our lives are living with ideas and concepts that are structures of un-
derstanding and allegiances, of loyalty and oppression, of conformity and
concession. Chains are realities that extend and revise our postcolonialities
and our transcultural situations and provenances; they become energies
to build activism in mind and body. So the reality of a chain is in the
entangled power it has to invite transcendence which, in a kind of trans-
mediality, forms a bridge between ideas; breaking of chains is break down
of ideas and finding spaces amidst letters of thought and constrictions and
ascriptions – C-H-A-I-N. Nelson explains that
Blake’s treatment of chains directs itself toward an apocalyptic un-

covering of language, an unchaining of thought and association:
phonetic, semantic, and historical associations are stressed past their
breaking points. From being what he beheld – a link in the chain of
being or discourse – the reader must become what he now beholds:
polysemous consciousness (Fourfold perhaps) creating and created in,
going forth and returning to language – chained still, but using one
chain to contest and transform another, and finding the validation of
freedom and imagination in the moment of transition from one to an-
other across the chain-strung void. Unchaining, like disenchantment,
is finally relative.22
Critical thinking enacts and enlivens in chains – a chain-mode that

works through transdialecticism and through a validation-invalidation-
revalidation mode.
Making asymmetries to convey sense is an energetic act. Doing poetry
for Blake is doing something aside from poetry, in symmetrical asymme-
tries; it is the energy that disrupts certain bondage to form, rhyme and
harmonies. Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell is an energetic exper-
iment which, through its mocking ways at poetic finishing, talk about a
new-found inspiration where talking in verse is speaking about producing
spaces, premising the idea of ‘measure’. Our rationalities are built through
thought-rhymes; our epistemologies are constructed through blank verses
executed with an intent and a programme. For Blake, fettering poetry is
fettering the human race; for me, it is about fettering thinking. Destruc-
tion of thought is the flourish of thinking. Susan Wolfson points to Blake’s
indisputable submission to
an intensely performative antiformalism: his subversive plays against

conventions of poetic form, his tradition- defying extravagance with
poetic and pictorial forms, his adamant opposition to all forms of en-
chaining, especially as a constraint on genius. Yet as “performance”
50 Trans
and “antiformalism” suggest, even a rebel needs forms against which
and through which to articulate a cause. Of the hundreds of words
in the Blake Concordance, “form” is thirty-fourth in frequency, and
words beginning “form-” fill eight pages (not counting the plural,
the conjugations, and morphemes such as “deformed,” “unformed,”
“transformed”). It is clear that throughout his career, Blake relied on
form for self-definition, even if by opposition. His impatience with
any “bound or outward circumference of Energy” never expels his
respect for the artistic necessity of form.23
Form is never lost in antiformalism much in the same way energy gen-
erated is not lost but translocated into a different form. If Blake teaches
us to think, he is teaching us to systematize too. This is the ambivalence
of system-formations. Systematic thinking, as can be adduced from the
Blakean thesis, is predominantly about challenging the conceptual, the
chokingly institutional and ideological closures. Contradiction is courted;
overlapping is accepted; coherence is not always a blessing. Implicating
design and desuetude, Blake writes in The Marriage (plate 14):
But first the notion that man has a body distinct from his soul, is to be
expunged; this I shall do by printing in the infernal method, by corro-
sives, which in Hell are salutary and medicinal, melting apparent surfaces
away, and displaying the infinite which was hid.24
It is the ‘infernal’ that disembeds – the debourment coming from sitting

on the demarcating margins. The ‘infernal method’ is another way of re-
figuring the dialectic between boundary and line.
Expression is not always how we express but an allowance for ‘arbi-
trary rules to determine the chance and unpredictable disposition of that
language; they let artificial systems trump organic forms; and they re-
place making with choosing, fabrication with arrangement, and produc-
tion with transcription’.25 It is a separate ergopoetics of illegibility and
illegitimacy. The work exists because the work ‘thinks’ and indeed not
all work thinks. But isn’t thinking also conducive to close reading? Isn’t
energy constructed through concept and context, style and substance? The
conceptual order is not always fixed and sequential – the congealing of
energy coming from non-hierarchical forms of thinking. Thinking has
expectation, well meaning staircases, to land on a thought. Thought is
positional and confines itself to being meaningful. Thinking disrupts and
disturbs the hierarchical import of a discourse. Thoughts, when they lose
positions, help thinking to begin. Understanding form is the energy that
tries to exceed form.
Energy enables melting and smelting of ideas and all entrenched forms
of understanding. In the Laocoön plate, Adam and Satan are seen as broth-
ers, one the conscious mind and the other as the subconscious, and hence,
the energy. What kind of power adheres with this subconscious? It is an
understanding of the living in the ‘contrary’, in deeply enmeshed states of
contrarian forces – ‘a contraction followed by expansion and rotation’.26
Blake looked at a middle ground between contraries not as a space in
compromise – well adjusted and mutually acknowledged. The middle
ground is seen as the ‘middle’ in lines, dots and chains; it is where the
action in thinking and the action of life take place. The middle is deeply
opposed to the ‘neutrals’. The neutrals create an eternal loop where all
acts require neutralization; therefore, no action can take place. Moral law
calls for retribution for sins, but it is this retribution that leads to a stagnant
state; it reinforces the work of the neutrals. Laws, penal codes and persecu-
tion are all negative acts that have come into use after the Fall. These are
not redemptive acts, as only forgiveness can lead to redemption, because
it leads man to an imaginative state from a self-righteous state. Contraries
are ‘an essential part of the “redemption” of mankind’; it is through their
clashing that they disallow negations and neutrals.27
The aesthetic imaginary embeds in this Blakean subconscious. It builds
a critique of an ability to see the anticlocked movements, the questions that
all discourses cannot avoid seeing in overhead suspension, and the libidi-
nous energy that challenges our unremitting understanding of segregatory
ways of thinking about culture, ethnicity, religion, tradition and epistemes.
Behmen’s ‘light world’ is Blake’s constricting reason that disables the trans-
figurative thinking. This brings imagination into the centrefold of our aes-
thetic imaginary formations – the Bowlahoola where ‘Los’s Anvils stand &
his Furnaces rage…The Bellows are the Animal Lungs: the Hammers the
Animal Heart: the Furnaces the Stomach for digestion’.28 The energy of
plural thinking succeeds when ‘one law for the Lion & Ox is Oppression’.29
So ‘Thought is Act’,30 and if Jesus was ‘all virtue’, he surely must have
acted predominantly from impulse and not rules. One must be cautioned
against believing that impulse is not intuitive indulgence lacking all forms
of reason and discretion: thoughts are acts when they become ‘intelligent’
to energize the reified and reductive laws of knowing and investigation.
Blake’s energy declared contradiction; interestingly, without demonstrat-
ing uncritical fealty, Blake brought about a complex appropriation through
his critique of Behmen, Paracelsus, Milton and Swedenborg. It announced
an existence of a moral world which never ruled out the virtues of under-
cutting and the paradigm of the ‘invisible’. . Blake points out that
he who does not imagine in stronger and better lineaments, and in

stronger and better light than his perishing and mortal eye can see,
does not imagine at all. The painter of this work asserts that all his
imaginations appear to him infinitely more perfect and more minutely
organized than any thing seen by his mortal eye.31
It is the mind-energy (can be read as radical imagination too) that often

blurs the demarcating lines of thoughts and understanding, resulting in a
‘plagiarized identity’ that speaks of dialectical fertility – ‘And in Melodious
52 Trans
Accents I / Will sit me down & Cry. I. I’.32 Does a trans-dialectical imag-
ination and its transversality need the encirclement of ‘noted’ references?
Is not such imagination informed by a plagiarist energy? How different
would the acts of thinking a thought and ‘noting’ a thought be? Is ‘ref-
erencing’ a way of asking the thought to walk ahead of thinking? How
much of a plagiarist is a creative genius? Energy across is energy within.
Molecularity
From the counter dialectical entanglement, we can proceed to argue
energy-entanglement as relationality. Working through Eduard Glissant,
we may argue that the interfusion among disparate entities and sense con-
nection with the world and the other are mostly built through ‘opac-
ity’ – not knowing the other and the apparent non-relationship that exists
outside us, beyond our knowledgeable world-view. This is to claim a ‘re-
lationality’ beyond relationships that directly and formally define us. I
shall argue that relationality is the ‘dynamic’ that exists within relation-
ships. The world connecting with us and the one we stay connected with
unconsciously is non-totalitarian (as Glissant has come to argue). This is
about desiring relation and staying within the flow and dynamic of desire
where our senses and intellect are affected and impinged upon without
much conscious acknowledgement. It is the Geist of physic-contemplative
life.33 It is argued that ‘Glissant’s idea of opacity is a re-thinking of the
notion of desire: at once a re-scripting of the erotic principle fueling the
drive to know, and a re-orienting of desire from its direction toward a
single object to a whole, or the whole, the Tout monde, which can never
be mastered or known in its entirety’.34
As part of the discourse of ‘vitalist ontologies’ relation is both co-
appearing and travel, oppositional dissemination, difference and dialec-
ticism. His concept of opacity leaves a ‘gap’, unseen and unexplained,
between the self and the other, between the knowing subject and unto-
talizable other – ‘Let’s say it again, opaquely: the very idea of totality is
an obstacle to totality’.35 Here we find the poetics of ‘non-knowledge’
which establishes the complexity of ‘desire’ within the understanding of
relation. I call this the energies of the relation. Vitalistic thinking is about
accepting the ‘inconclusive totality’36 – Glissant calls ‘synthese-genese
ja-
mais achevee’ – of the other and othered forms of epistemology; the failure
of understanding is the success of relational thinking. Critical thinking
performs ‘paraphilosophy’. Here ‘para’ means what comes ‘next’, ‘almost’
‘beyond’, ‘closely related to’. Philosophy does stay confined to rigor-
ous analytic and determinate judgment; philosophy is both relation and
the difference in thinking, in world-meaning, in world connection and
world-comprehension. Paraphilosophy is vitalist.
The ‘relational’ complexities lead me to argue for a ‘liquid crystal’ state
of thinking. This stems from a different understanding of liquid crystals
which speaks of a state of matter that is neither conventional liquid nor
solid as we commonly understand. It is the molecular orientation that be-
comes the central point of understanding the different kinds of liquid crys-
tal phases. Gerald Mahan and Michael Widom argue that ‘between the
crystalline solid at low temperatures and the ordinary liquid state at high
temperatures lies an intermediate state, the liquid crystal. Liquid crystals
share with liquids the ability to flow but also display symmetries inherited
from crystalline solids’.37 It is in exhibiting special symmetries, certain
behaviours and characters that liquid crystals come to represent entangled
thinking. Esther Leslie notes that ‘thinking is altered by liquid crystallin-
ity. The state of liquid crystallinity is a curious phase, in actuality and as a
mode of processing existence’.38 Leslie writes well:
What if the hard form that is crystal, in periods of its prevalence, pro-
duced thought that is crystalline? What if an abundance of liquid made
thought fluid, or if its absence made thinking desirous of fluidity to com-
bat its parchedness? Is reactionary thought always a hardening and eman-
cipation always a melting? Is liquidity a revolutionary hope – whereby
current states dissolve, political renegades are liquidated, the gush of au-
thentic sentiment overcomes the stasis of convention, and so on – or is it
a capitalist necessity, along with liquid assets, the free flow of trade and
labour power, the command to sink or swim in a modern global econ-
omy? Ours is a global economy that transmits images of itself worldwide
through the energetic powers of liquid crystal.39
It is the metallotropic phase that explains the complexity of the liquid

crystal state by being a combination of both organic and inorganic mole-
cules, depending both on temperature, concentration and the inorganic-
organic composition ratio. Also, it is the ‘ordering’ that matters where
the molecular positioning, orientation and structure determine the liquid
crystal phases. In fact, what stays of significant interest for me is the nem-
atic phase of liquid crystals. It is argued that the
word nematic comes from the Greek νήμα (Greek: nema), which means
“thread.” This term originates from the thread-like to pological de-
fects observed in nematics, which are formally called ‘disclinations’.
Nematics also exhibit so-called “hedgehog” topological defects. In a
nematic phase, the calamitic or rod-shaped organic molecules have no
positional order, but they self-align to have long-range directional or-
der with their long axes roughly parallel. Thus, the molecules are free
to flow and their center of mass positions are randomly distributed
as in a liquid, but still maintain their long-range directional order.40
This is the flow-order-pattern-motion character of the liquid crystals,

and by extension, is the ‘liquidconcrete’ in thinking (my term for critical
54 Trans
thinking where thinking is not either concrete or liquid but ‘liquidcon-
crete’) and the fluidity-positionality-crystality-direction in the aesthetic
imaginary. The smectic phase also contributes to the axis of our argument
by helping us to formulate a line of critical thinking. The word ‘smectic’
‘originates from the Latin word smecticus, meaning cleaning, or having
soap-like properties’. Here comes the possibility and reality of one layer
sliding over and into the other. It is further argued that
crystals exhibit special symmetries when they slide in certain direc-

tions or rotate through certain angles. These symmetries can be com-
pared to those encountered when walking in a straight line through
empty space. Regardless of the direction or distance of each step, the
view remains the same, as there are no landmarks by which to mea-
sure one’s progress. This is called continuous translational symmetry
because all positions look identical.41
There can be ‘discrete translational periodicity’ when symmetry works

through a molecular travel that is finite and has proper direction. So direc-
tion and distance between molecules contribute to symmetricity. Termed
‘mesophases’, liquid crystals manifest themselves between crystalline solids
and ordinary liquids – the state of the ‘middle’. It is this variable, varied
and vibrant middle that is fascinating (our well-invested and meaningful
middle in all patterns of critical thinking). Invested in mobility – in the
nematic and smectic – this middle responds to change in temperature and
we enter into the symmetry-breaking phase transitions.
Like thoughts and paradigms in the aesthetic imaginary, liquid crystals
are animated, a heap of tubular molecules sliding and vibrating and pull-
ing together and away from each other. There are substances that when
cold, or starved of energy, are rigid and their particles are arranged in
regular patterns. In this state, forces hold the particles together and there
is just the smallest amount of jiggle. The substance is a crystal. A crystal
consists of layers composed of particles, where each has an allotted place
and the molecules in neighbouring layers slot into each other’s gaps,
forming a lattice in which the position and direction of each particle is
alike. This crystal vibrates, but it is without perceptible movement as
such. If the same substance is heated, the crystal lattice melts. Some of the
weak attracting forces are overpowered by thermal motion, while others
hold fast. The neighbouring areas of mesh disperse. The molecules scat-
ter in different directions, though each remains on its layer. This means
that the substance retains something of its crystalline structure, but at the
same time the molecules slide around more or less fluidly.42
Thoughts across cultures, traditions and continents are ‘flowing crys-

tals’. The molecularity of thoughts and ideas changes and reorients itself
in response to the heat of transformative thinking; there is delayering,
d irectional alteration and positional shifts. Thoughts ‘take in nourish-
ment’ across cultures; ideas across nationalist and community borders
‘can be wounded and poisoned’: ‘they reproduce themselves. They grow.
They move. They are as if alive’.43 Ideas multiply themselves in that they
transmute translationally through time, growing in volume and mass
and adding to their positional diversity and promise. Critical thinking is
‘liquidconcrete’.
Can ‘ice’ be metaphorically considered as thoughts that stay forever
under the threat of melting from the heat of thinking? Ice is solid with
the prospect of water, but is water that is not fluid. Is H 2O water or ice or
vapour? If the chemical composition is similar why is the manifestation
different? What makes the state of existence and experience different? Ice
melts under certain conditions and then freezes under certain conditions
too, transforming in shape, states and sizes – both scalarity and molecular-
ity. Ice hides the history of its ice-ization and melting; its re-formation can
never be the same much in the same way thinking a thought can never be
the same again. We cannot think a thought twice in a similar way; we can
think a thought again but differently always. This is a pointer to a different
kind of ‘entanglement’, and this liquid crystal state of thinking makes me
rethink the connection between thinking and molecules. All thinking is
caught in formations, in deeply entangled formations, moving across bor-
ders and discourses of specialization and epistemic confinements. Is think-
ing a ‘chemo-synthetic’44 work? I see it as the poetics of the molecular: as
process, reactive to conditions of time and the influence of external factors
of synthesis and combination.
Whether it is nationalist politics, the Amazon forest in man-engineered
flames, the declining glaciers, the spectre of extinction, turbo-capitalism
and increasing economic disparities, race economy and territorial politics,
the trans(in)fusionist thinking on these issues builds around a ‘bundle’,
a molecular growth or intensification: this is where the issues entangle
and demand a ‘thinking through’ that convinces us of a structure and
symmetry and synthesis. Our postcolonialities and existential complex-
ities are never singular bonds with causality; they are interpellative and
intermeshed. For instance, the burning Amazon ‘bundles’ with the de-
clining glaciers and the colonial psychosis and economic power strategies
and p rospective human extinction.
This makes me draw on the aesthetics of chemistry to illustrate further.
Political or social or cultural thinking is a molecular occurrence. Is it
possible to segregate thinking into such categories when thinking onto-
logically is a ‘bundle’? The bundle is both a structure, the coming to
structure, a substantialist ontology and substantialization. This brings
us to think about supramolecular chemistry which is concerned ‘with
“soft bonds” that make its entities “thermodynamically less stable, ki-
netically more labile and dynamically more flexible than molecules”’.45
56 Trans
Thinking is thermodynamically active always; it comes with ‘self-assembly’,
‘self-organization’ and ‘self-recognition’. It makes us realize that criti-
cal understanding – for instance, the poverty in South Asia or economic
undergrowth or racial escalation or technological globalization or world
literature – is the supramolecular bundle but not without its points of
structural understanding, points of meaningful agreement and what we
may call an interpretive equilibrium. The bundle as entanglement is both
dissipative energy and equilibrium in thinking, both stability and vibra-
tion. However, all kinds of thinking reach a ‘steady state’ only as a limiting
paradigm before it gets stochastic; it becomes untimely and, importantly,
untidy. Understanding the Amazon fires is inscribed in ‘transformative
thinking’ as disciplinary vibrations across ecology, land politics and econ-
omy probe and perturb other areas of concern like species extinction,
animal trade, green politics and planet studies. This is a kind of molecular
synthesis of thinking where the thought reached is the ‘target molecule’.
However, a thought reached may not be the thought targeted as com-
plexity of structures never ceases to contribute to a contemplative molec-
ularity. In fact, the ‘properties’ of individual thought or concept grow a
synthetic approach: they are combinatorial and dissipative. The problem,
however, is in understanding how symmetry and thinking go together.
Thoughts come into play in symmetry but, as Joseph Earley notes, ‘the
symmetry properties of any object are not mutually independent – they
generally come in bundles’.46 For me, it comes fundamentally in bundles.
This is a part of ‘chemical symmetry’. Earley argues:
Regarding chemical combination, there is no “ontological free lunch”–

pace, Armstrong. Molecules (as well as molecular ions and related but
more complex chemical entities) are composed of fairly small num-
bers of components that have inter-relationships of just a few types.
Electrons, and nuclei of a particular kind, are indistinguishable from
each other (in isolation). All components of chemical entities partici-
pate in continual thermal motion. Values of all structural parameters
(bond lengths, angles) of each molecular entity oscillate incessantly.
The geometric structure of each chemical molecular entity is far from
a rigid arrangement of atoms in space. Stable chemical species are
those that persist in a specific pattern of internal vibratory motion so
that average distances and angles are reasonably well defined. (Vari-
eties of internal vibration that do not conform to that pattern tend to
fade away.) The identity of chemical individuals does not depend on
single fixed static structure, but rather on the fact that continual re-
turn to prior arrangements of parts occurs. This indefinitely repeated
recurrence is the effect (and signature) of the closure that establishes
the collection of spatial symmetries of that chemical individual as a
group, rather than some other kind of set. Every chemical entity, inso-
far as it persists in time, exemplifies some group theoretical structure,
corresponding to the collection of spatial symmetry properties of the
average arrangement of parts that persists through thermal motion. It
is in virtue of the closure of relationships that grounds the dynamic
stability of such spatial structures that molecules may act as units in
interactions with the rest of the world.47
This makes for the chemo-synthesis of thinking and meaning-making:

the thermodynamics of constructionism where stability is dynamic and
equilibrium is potentially disruptive. It is the wonder of observation and
consequence that reemphasize entangled manifestations. Importantly, this
points to the ability to visibilize the ‘invisible’ – the process by which
the hidden, the possible and the ‘perhaps’ are brought into an expressive
tenure of life.
Cultures are in motion; traditions are intrusive; translation hurts and
wounds. As in trans(in)fusionist understanding so in the ‘dynamic’ of the
chemical entities,
we encounter attractive forces (such as between unlike electrical

charges) that pull components together; repulsive interactions (as be-
tween like charges) drive constituents apart. As parts separate, attrac-
tive forces draw fragments together. Distances between components
change continuously, but remain within limits– due to balance of
attractive and repulsive interactions. Closure of relationships enables
each chemical entity to retain self-identity through interactions. Mol-
ecules adopt the spatial configuration with lowest potential energy
that is consistent with constraints which obtain.48
For instance, reading Virginia Woolf ’s ‘Modern Fiction’ reveals the

‘ liquid crystal approach’ to literary form-making and understanding of
art. Interestingly, her essay ‘Modern Fiction’ is a reflection – analytic and
judgmental – on ‘coming-together’, a kind of ingathering. Woolf emi-
nently invests in a supramolecular understanding of life and art in both
philosophy and poetics. Troubled as she always was by the rationalist and
substantialist philosophy of looking at life and art, Woolf declares a process
of thinking that challenges sterile and mechanistic modes of understand-
ing life and the world or life-world. Caught in the anxiety of expressing
the ‘coming-together’ – the appropriate vocabulary and motifs, the meta-
phors and concepts – Woolf laboured to ‘achieve a symmetry by means of
infinite discords, showing all the traces of the minds [sic] passage through
the world; & achieve in the end, some kind of whole made of shivering
fragments’.49 Louis Westling observes that
each of her novels was a distinct epistemological exploration of that

“semi-transparent envelope,” part of a series of experiments seek-
ing a crepuscular looseness and lightness of form that eschewed the
58 Trans
traditional scaffolding of plot and increasingly placed human am-
bitions and systems of meaning against the backdrop of enormous
geological forces and vast reaches of time. Increasingly she sought to
portray the non human, or what David Abram calls the “more than
human” world within which we are tiny and only momentary pres-
ences. Her experiments with point of view and narrative structure
absorb the epistemological lessons of relativity, wave theory, and the
interdependency of observer and phenomena observed from quantum
physics into a new fictional ontology that reaches its most radical form
in her final novel, Between the Acts.50
This is a serious and intense investment in entangled states of mind, think-

ing and existence: the entanglement is in the communication, contagion
and complicity in the non-human world, the land, the earth, the seas,
insects, plants and other soil creatures. How does such ‘coming-together’
build or unmake our life view, striate and layer up our perspectives on
living? Not to be confused with a Wordsworthian approach, it is the
co-materiality of existence that contributes to her envisioning of liter-
ary forms and narratives. How does one embody life? What perceptions
are built through our understanding of mutability and fractality of life
and life-expressions? There is a mode of existence that exists outside our
ways: a mode of being that our rationality, ratiocination and reason fail
to acknowledge and often tend to ignore. These are the buried selves that
wedge and hedge us and are often ‘impenetrable to reflection’. They call
for a ‘sympathetic’ relationship and sense-generation, urging a ‘momen-
tary law’ to be discovered.51 The flesh of experience – the self and the
non-self, the subject and the world, the inter-objectification – demands
accommodativeness and pervasiveness. This description speaks for the
chemo-poetics of literary-theoretical understanding.
Matheme
Is it possible to ‘mathematize’ entangled thinking, interactions and fluc-
tuations across phases of growth and dimensions, the correlation and pro-
cessuality involved in ‘dynamic coherence’ as we try to understand the
phenomenon of ‘coming together’ (and ‘being together’) whether in trans-
literary understanding, transcultural studies and studies in globalization or
cosmopolitanism? ‘In formal mathematics’, argues Jocelyn Rodel,
variables do not label items yet to be determined, but instead mark

that which we refuse to determine. Variables exist to mark very many
meaningful possibilities, choosing no favorites from among their ref-
erents. As such, in mathematical parlance, variables offer generality,
which implies no vagueness or imprecision, but multiplicity.52
Variables are deeply integral to entangled thinking. A concept (x) across
borders come with variables: in a particular culture of meaning and circle
of tradition, a concept builds a definiteness where x is unchanging through
time and prevalent values, but as x moves across the borders of tradition,
culture and belief systems, it changes to become a variable. This variable
can be a sign, sense and reference; it can become a different form of mani-
festation and expression: for example, 2 × 2 = 4 and 8/2 = 4 and 6 − 2 = 4.
The concept progresses as being a ‘4’, but its expression and ‘coming into
being’ change. This also builds a different sense of ‘4’ as a number or re-
ality or experience or truth or product or consequence. It demonstrates
that if ‘4’ is seen as a molecule, then its molecularity can be had in dif-
ferent forms, as results coming out of different patterns of interactions.
So achieving ‘4’ can be contentious and not necessarily universal. Cultural
meaning is produced through a molecularity that may not be similar. This
variety sponsors interactive forces, combinatory patterns and politics and
disagreements as to what must be the right and, hence, the only way to
achieve or interpret meaning (here, 4). But ‘4’ is both a definitive conse-
quence and, also, a possibility for interactive association: so ‘4’ is both fixed
and interpretive. This makes variables provide truth that comes from what
it is and what it makes out of it – truth is in the particular, the specific and
can come from ‘relation’ as well.
Critical thinking believes in the mathematics of relation: the Deleu-
zian problematics in conjunction with axiomatics. Interpreting an issue
across culture and nation – a travelling thought through continents and
centuries – will involve an ‘inner logical coherence’. However, the axis of
interpretation is about looking into the problematic of the variable and the
invariant. Certain properties of interactions or transformations effected
through the coming together of different units of thought and experiences
across multiple cultures and traditions can stay ‘unaffected’. Thinking,
ontologically, is structure and geometricization. However, walking with
Derrida, it may be argued that such thinking ‘is not confined to the sys-
tematic coherence of a geometry whose axioms are already constituted;
its unity is that of a traditional geometrical sense infinitely open to all its
own revolutions’.53 Here projective geometry gives us some clue to think
further. In comparison with the Euclidean space, projective geometry has
more points within a given dimension; it has greater geometric trans-
formation than ordered geometry. This introduces ‘perspective drawing’
and projective transformations. A geometry box is not the requirement
here – no compass constructions, no measurements and fixed angles; it
is the non-metrical form whose meaning is not based on a concept of
distance. Thinking comes through points and point-lessness, through tan-
gents and curves, through infinitesimal and differentials. Geometriciza-
tion provides ‘insight, showing the meaning of the results’. Henri Poincare
introduces
60 Trans
the geometry of the flow near critical points (equilibria) and used pro-
jection methods to clarify the structure of solution space. His geometric
ideas helped him to handle automorphic functions where he proposed
the relationship between singularities of linear differential equations,
Riemann sheets, and non-Euclidean geometry. That influence also
came out abundantly in his analysis of dynamical systems, including
conservative systems. His concept of “consequents” (Poincare map) led
him to formulate fixed-point theorems to obtain ´ periodic solutions.54
The ‘analysis situs’ leads us to the problematics and axiomatic of the

‘manifold’. A manifold stands represented by ‘a collection of simplices’.
A one-dimensional simplex is a straight line segment, a two-

dimensional simplex is a triangle, a three- dimensional simplex is a
tetrahedron, etc. The sides of a polyhedron can be split up in triangles.
How do we represent a smooth manifold by simplices? As an exam-
ple, think of a sphere covered by many small triangles. Circles on the
sphere are replaced by closed polygonal lines with one-dimensional
segments for simplices. In this way, we can study homology by trian-
gulating a manifold, producing a so-called simplicial complex.55
The ‘simplicial complex’ is another form of entanglement. Thinking can

also perform through Reimann’s ‘multiply extended magnitudes’: a calcu-
lus as measurement or experience in measurement that builds a concept
of ‘manifold (Manning faltigkeit), which denotes a domain of forms or ele-
ments organised along multiple dimensions’.56 Here we have a ‘discrete’
and ‘continuous’ manifold. Nathan Widder explains it well:
A discrete manifold comprises a collection of elements to be enumer-

ated, like leaves on a tree or animals on a farm – or, in the case of space,
if it were held to be composed of atomic units, as some of the ancients
believed, or to be constituted so as to be isomorphic with a compact,
well-ordered infinity of mathematical points, as Russell maintains.
In ‘the doctrine of discrete quantities’, mathematicians can ‘set out
without scruple from the postulate that given things are to be consid-
ered as all of one kind’. Conversely, a continuous manifold, examples
of which include ‘the positions of objects of sense, and the colors’,
involves one or more extended continua – such as length, width, and
height in the everyday conception of space – where quantity involves
measurements that determine the distance, area, or volume between
points, these points not constituting the continuum but rather mark-
ing the limits or transitions from one location to another. Quantities
within a discrete manifold are compared simply by counting – the
farm has more sheep than cattle, for example. Measurement or com-
parison in a continuous manifold, however, consists in superposition
of the magnitudes to be compared.57
Thinking is superimposition of thoughts; it is being driven to take
a ‘measure’ of an experience which then becomes a part of ‘manifolds’
whether discrete or continuous. The manifold is another interpretation of
the ‘bundle’. Ideas are, most often, in extensa, holding some magnitude and
holding the possibility of magnification and, importantly, aware of their
points of rest, continuity and constraint. Often, ideas are not simply ‘met-
ric’ but metic where understanding is not expressible by a unit always; they
are extended magnitudes caught in ‘pointless topology’. Mathematically
speaking, the routes among ideas do not always get performed through
a straight line with fixed determined local points of connect. Points are
joined by curves leading to a variety of dimensions, involving distance, ex-
perience and differentials. A number stays as a number (here, read idea) and
again has the potential to be numbered: it is a void and multiple by which I
mean that an idea across cultures remains as both a unit and trace where the
trace embosoms the ‘multiple’, the promissory reign of extended meanings.
The aesthetic imaginary is a complex manifold which like Reimann
surface becomes a
topological space, at every point of which there is a neighborhood that

is mappable onto the complex plane, i.e. it covers the complex plane
with several, and in general infinitely many, “sheets, ”which can have
very complicated structures and interconnections.58
The sheets are differently valued and possessed with different functions as
they operate together to enable different geometric surfaces. These sur-
faces are singularities that occasion thinking, analysis and reflection; they
are the surfaces determined by the ‘logic of differenciation’.
The mathematization through aesthetic imaginary is ‘minor’ – invested
in the multiple, the differential, in the ‘event’ (Latin eventus, recurrence,
accident; the evenire, come out, happen, to come). This speaks of ‘schizo-
phrenesis’ and the apostrophe ‘O schizophrenic mathematics, uncontrol-
lable and mad’.59 Entangled thinking is more interested in the Deleuzian
problematics which involves the ‘event’ that mathematization promotes
and projects. Daniel Smith points out that
for example, in the theory of conic sections (Apollonius), the ellipse,

hyperbola, parabola, straight lines, and point are all “cases” of the pro-
jection of a circle on to secant planes in relation to the apex of a cone.
Whereas in theorematics a figure is defined statically, in Platonic fash-
ion, in terms of its essence and its derived properties, in problematics a
figure is defined dynamically by its capacity to be affected– that is, by
the ideal events that befall it: sectioning, cutting, projecting, folding,
bending, stretching, reflecting, rotating.60
It is this dynamicity, the transformative topology, that critical thinking

appropriates and the imaginary is formed through the ‘minor geometry of
62 Trans
problematics’ having ‘variations, affections and events’. The entanglements
in ideas and thought-units are helped out into visibility through geometric
intuitions and the ‘trans-spatial imagination’ (in the words of Deleuze).
However, the axiomatics, the thinking in ‘sets’, in ‘groups’ remain; the
energy of entanglements sets out points of thinking, points of thought-
making and points of correspondences between contrasting paradigms
across culture, history and traditions; but, in the words of Godel, ‘sum-
ming up all points, we still do not get the line’61; the line appears, comes
into being and, often, stays unachievable. As we know, Godel’s theorem
can be stated in any one of the following alternative forms:
GT Mathematics is in exhaustible.
GT1 Any consistent formal theory of mathematics must con-
tain undecidable propositions.
GT2 No theorem proving computer (or program) can prove all
and only the true propositions of mathematics.
GT3 No formal system of mathematics can be both consistent
and complete.
GT4 Mathematics is mechanically (or algorithmically) inex-
haustible (or incompletable).62
Thinking can be accepted as non-algorithmic as well: not always in sin-
gular formulaic order, but sometimes with a unit beyond the measurable.
This is the ‘non-axiomatizable’ dimension of thinking. It is ‘ambulatory’
where conditions of operation are subordinated to ‘intuitions and
construction – following the flow of matter, drawing and linking up
smooth space’.63
Widder working through Deleuze explains well by arguing that
what the irrational and the differential quotient share, however, is

‘the presence of a curved element [that] acts as a cause’, this being
illustrated by the figure Dedekind himself uses of the arc drawn from
the diagonal descending onto and cutting the number line. But rather
than demonstrating the complete and well ordered nature of the
straight line, Deleuze maintains that it demonstrates its discontinu-
ity and disparateness: The irrational number implies the descent of
a circular arc on the straight line of rational points, and exposes the
latter as a false infinity, a simple undefinite that includes an infinity
of lacunae; that is why the continuous is a labyrinth that cannot be
represented by a straight line.64
It is in such ‘straight-line labyrinth’ that difference generates and is gener-

ated. Rational thinking in units requires ‘cuts’ in irrationality (the kiri, as
cut that constructs) where rational and irrational units of thoughts are not
separate though disparate; they are connected as entangled.
Turbulence
It will be wrong to assume that the trans(in)fusionist imaginary is formed
through the self-reflexive and self conscious cogitative I only. Daya
Krishna understands contrary thinking as not always subject-borne,
subject-propelled and subject-certified, but it generates from the non-self
too, the other that the subject fails to control and annihilate.65 The com-
plexity of this thinking owes to a multiple process of doing: thoughts are
expected to be either accepted or opposed or rejected. But any thinking
comes with its ‘not’ in that we cannot disregard that
one has oneself disagreed or rejected someone else’s contention after

having claimed to understand it as otherwise one would not, or could
not, have done so. The continuous and continuing refutation of views
and counterviews thus proclaims aloud the plurality of subjectivities
in inter-subjective interaction, as nothing else could.66
Are both thinking and anti-thinking creative in their own ways? And is
thinking subjective, non-subjective, intersubjective, anti-subjective in an
erotic complexity? Krishna’s understanding of eros is interesting here: eros
is not kāma, or the pleasure-seeking polymorphous, anarchic perver-

̣ ̣ ̣ā as the śrāmanya
sity as Freud saw it, or even the vāsanā or trsn ̣ or the
“world-denying” traditions of India called it, but pravrtti ̣ or the ever-
outward oriented, positive, valuational, consciousness of man which
is fascinated by the unending challenges posed to it by the incessant
demand and the resulting obligation it feels for bringing the ideals
vaguely apprehended into palpable living reality and is prepared to
endure with immense fortitude and patience the unbelievable effort
that is involved in it.67
This projects energy as a central category in our understanding of the

trans(in)fusionist imaginary.
Virginia Woolf ’s ‘falling atoms’ call for a separate level of measurement
which we may interpret as different ways of understanding, judgment,
analysis and revelation. Critical thinking figures out this equation be-
tween ‘falling atoms’ or ‘streaming/travelling’ atoms with ‘slits’ in under-
standing, ‘screen’ of revelation and ‘diaphragm’ of perspectives. To get a
clearer sense of what I intend to argue, we may focus on the ‘quantum-
mechanical’ double-slit experiment. Here Arkady Plotnitsky’s lucid
exposition is what I choose to stay close to:
The well-known arrangement consists of a source; a diaphragm with

a slit (A); at a sufficient distance from it a second diaphragm with two
slits (B and C), widely separated; and finally, at a sufficient distance
64 Trans
from the second diaphragm a screen, say, a silver bromide photo-
graphic plate. A sufficient number (say, a million) of quantum objects,
such as electrons or photons, emitted from a source, are allowed to
pass through both diaphragms and leave their traces on the screen.
Two set-ups are considered. In the first, with both slits open, we can-
not, even in principle, know through which slit each quantum object
passes. In the second we can, either in practice or, importantly, in
principle. In the case of the first set-up, a “wave-l ike” interference
pattern will emerge on the screen, in principle regardless of the dis-
tance between slits or the time interval between the emissions of the
particles. The traces, once a sufficiently large number of them are
accumulated, will “arrange” themselves in a pattern, even when the
next emission occurs after the preceding particle is destroyed after
colliding with the screen. This pattern is the actual manifestation and,
according to, at least, nonclassical interpretations, the only possible
physical manifestation of quantum-mechanical “waves.”68
Thought-particles, idea-particles, and experience-particles ‘slit’ through

the apertures of mind and body to emerge in forms that are classical, mea-
surable and non-classical that are difficult to register and curate. Inciden-
tally, experiences quantify and clarify and often leave their ‘traces’ back
as thought-collisions disturb the sequentiality and linearity of movement
and impact. For Woolf, thinking, mostly, comes in non-classical fash-
ion. Plotnitsky’s explanation provides further inspiration to think through
these issues:
If, however, in the second set-up, we install counters or other devices

that would allow us to check through which slit particles pass, the
interference pattern inevitably disappears. Merely setting up the
apparatus in a way that such knowledge would in principle be possible
would suffice. The fact that even the possibility in principle of know-
ing through which slit the particles pass would inevitably destroy the
interference pattern may be shown to be equivalent to uncertainty
relations. These facts are extraordinary and difficult to confront, even
though or because quantum mechanics rigorously predicts them, in-
cluding the particular distribution of traces on the screen defined by
the distances between different parts of the arrangement, and by the
specific placement of the slits. Accordingly, such locutions as strange,
mysterious, incomprehensible, or paradoxical are not surprising. At-
tempts to conceive of the situation in terms of physical attributes of
quantum objects themselves appear to lead to unacceptable or at least
highly undesirable consequences.69
So ‘figuring’ thought-flow or processes of thinking or the calculus of

experiences is succumbing to ‘uncertainty relations’ that do not allow
any ‘interference pattern’ on the screen of our analysing and experiencing
mind. Here the interference pattern is to be read as ‘ordered thoughts’
or comprehensible data. Somewhere, and almost as an inevitability, the
shooting-slitting movements of atoms are difficult to calibrate: the mind
registers experiences in an ‘out-of-count’ pattern, in the un-counting,
dis-counting, and mis-counting mode. This generates the non-locality of
thought-incidence and critical understanding. Thinking becomes a para-
dox as much as a reading of life-experiences. If this is undesirable, it is not
ineliminable.
Michel Serres’s image of a double cone is interesting here:
Philosophy works on a two-layered cone, occupying its apex. I see the

encyclopedia on the first layer and, on the second, nothing – learned
unknowing, the suspension of judgement, solitude, questioning,
doubt, incertitude, reconstruction starting from zero.70
It is the questioning and doubt and the starting from zero that speak of an
immanence in thinking; this accommodativeness, both through the senses
and the mind, the emotion and intellectual discretion, and understanding
and inheritance, problematizes the ‘method’. For Serres, intuition tests
the creative-critical spirit and critical thinking espouses intuition, instinct
and reason in an oppositional composite. Serres’s first layer of the cone
brings the image of the philosopher as someone who has read and stud-
ied it all, but the second layer through the image of the ‘zero’ speaks of
the possibilities of knowledge and understanding that escape a philoso-
pher’s method; this is a different challenge and a separate ‘logic of sense’.
We can cite Virginia Woolf ’s disdain for proper philosophy and her in-
vestments in the life of the senses as coming close to the second layer of
Serres’s cone. What kind of comparative life-graphy (if I may neologize)
does this produce? We are deeply entangled in a philosopher and an anti-
philosopher, fulsome and the zero, order and chaos, reason and intuition,
system and non-system, method and anti-method. Critical thinking for
both invests in entanglements such as these, where methodology meth-
odizes and knows its ways of collapse; it collapses unknowingly too. Life-
graphy works through a method but cannot prosper with a method alone.
The organization of thinking and the life-world are institutionalization of
ideas, translation of ideas, transportation of thoughts and translocation of
positions – a feud, force and fury.
Critical thinking is rhythmical: it emerges from the rhythm of life-
graphy and has a pattern in ‘noise’. Kelvin Clayton points out that ‘Serres
uses the word noise in the way it was used in Old French, to mean fury,
uproar and wrangling, as well as sound, as in the French phrase chercher
noise – to pick a quarrel with’.71 Serres sees noise, nausea, nautical and navy
as having the same etymology. There is ‘agitation’ everywhere for ‘white
noise never stops, it is limitless, continuous, perpetual, unchangeable. It
66 Trans
has no grounding [fond] itself, no opposite’.72 Serres resonantly observes
that noise
is set up in subjects as well as in objects, in hearing and in space itself,

in observers and observed, it passes through the means and tools of
observation, be they material or logical, be they channels that were
constructed or languages, it is in both the in-itself and the for-itself.73
Noise is somewhere between the known and the unknown, as Serres

has distinguished between work (oeuvre) and masterwork (chef d’oeuvre) to
point out that a work can only work into form when caught in a contin-
uous flow:
one must swim in language, dive in as if lost, for a weighty poem or

argument to arise. The work is made of forms, the masterpiece is the
unformed fount of forms; the work is made of time, the masterpiece
is the source of time; the work is in tune, the masterwork shakes with
noises. Whoever doesn’t hear this noise has never written sonatas.74
Noise, hence, is the ‘opening’; it is possibility itself – a geometricization that is

‘anarchic, clamoring, mottled, striped, streaked, variegated, mixed, crossed’.75
Noise produces the ‘philosopher’ who then watches over the ‘unforeseeable
and fragile states’ where ‘his site is unstable, mobile, suspended’; he
seeks to keep the branch-ings and forkings open, as opposed to those

who close and unite them. He goes back up the thalweg, up the chreod,
he will seek pasture where the branch-ings multiply, where the torrents
are turbulent, where the new flowers bloom in the high prairies.76
So thinking through noise is understanding form and the breaking down

of form: class, race, caste, community and communitas emerge from noise
and are noise. Both Woolf and Serres see a kind of turbulence which is
life, life-affect and life-philosophy. Understanding life as processual, as a
way of ordering and coding, is fury in the sense of form-ability. Woolf and
Serres echo each other when Serres observes that
Time does not always flow according to a line…nor according to a

plan but, rather, according to an extraordinary complex mixture, as
though it reflected stopping points, ruptures, deep wells, chimneys
of thunderous acceleration, renderings, gaps – all sown at random, at
least in a visible disorder.77
This is the ‘nexus’ in entangled thinking – entanglement as turbulence,

turbulent entanglement.
Understanding a text or working through cultural or political issues
comes with a state that maintains a high level of steady energy, something
that Ludwig van Bertalanffy calls Fliessgleichgewicht (steady state). Reading
and thinking maintain a state of ‘high order’ in the face of entropic threats.
This, again, is a kind of organicism that is multi-layered, and each level has
its own meaning and position – a ‘flow equilibrium’78 in the words of Ber-
talanffy. Critical thinking can be Bertalanffic too where random does not
have much of a place and chance is always a part of a greater law which our
anthropocentric sovereign reason fails to account. Issues whether aesthetic
or cultural or political, get thought out within a system that again houses
another system that is responsible for the ‘flow equilibrium’. This greater
system does not allow a text or an event to get mechanized and considered
as something organicist; it remains as a form of emergence. For me, the
emergent and emergences form the unsteady order, the flow equilibrium
and the ‘open system’. In the general system of thinking negative entropy
works to hold on to a structure that resists change or variation. However,
‘free energy’ binds a structure and maintains a state of ‘high order’; a
system of thinking is complex primarily because it stays alive in a state of
heightened activity to maintain its organismic status. Entanglement is a
force that provides system, energy and steady disorder, all at the same time.
To consider entanglement in thinking as ‘turbulence’ is to rethink the
order-disorder syndrome in all forms of emergence. Order is not simplis-
tically law. Edgar Morin and Frank Coppay see constraints, invariances,
constancies, regularities with chance and random coming into forming an
event of their own. Having an order in thinking or evolution is not ac-
cepting determinism as an abiding reality; ‘it is neither absolute, nor eter-
nal, nor unconditional’.79 And disorder is not mere randomness or chance
either. All happenings cannot be algorithmically compressible. Morin and
Coppay argue that
one can consider, and especially at the level of human phenomena

which are at once physical, biological, social, cultural, and historical,
that many chance occurrences are oftentimes nothing more than the
encounter of deterministic causal chains of different orders; but that
amounts to recognizing that the encounter between these determin-
isms is brought about in disorder.80
Chance is the uncertainty of critical thinking – limits of thinking – when

evolutive determinism fails to find its way. Apparently a disorder, chance
is more a process in possibilities and limitations. Noise holds chance and is
neither order nor disorder in an undifferentiated sense.
Here I am drawn to Serres’s idea of the ‘local’. Serres proposes three
models in The Birth of Physics. ‘The first model’, Serres points out ‘is local
and original. It simply simulates the look of a fluid. Atoms cascade in a
68 Trans
laminar flow down an infinite channel without banks’.81 Serres considers
that every ‘object is initially a vortex’, and the world or universe comes
to be described in ‘spirals, angles and cones, differential calculation, the
axiom, sand and floating bodies’. Serres’s second model is ‘global’: ‘it takes
the whole path into account’. It invests in the ‘slope’, the ‘descent’: ‘the law
of formation, the law of the duration of things and of the world and the
correlative law of the flow of perception are expressed as the law of the
greatest slope’.82 And as to his third model
every object, naturally, emerges like Aphrodite from a flux of elements.

By the previously mentioned models. Born from this and, as soon as
it is born, complex, twined, twisting its long thick hair, it begins to
transmit, in floods and in all directions, a star of flow: its wear and
its time. It radiates waves of different kinds: heat, odours, sounds,
simulacra, subtle atoms. In the same way or inversely, it receives the
flow emitted around it, from nearby and from the edges of the open
universe alike, whether it be rock, harvest, horse or woman. The
world, in total, flows in itself and for itself, exchanging its rivers at
the maximal thalweg, to the point where they are consumed and
return to the cataract. At birth, the singular atomic cascade is trans-
formed: no longer here and there, in and for some local object, but
integrally and for its global flow, in a multiplicity of rivers, streaming
by all paths, transverse, diagonal, intersected, complex. The sum of
the dispersed inclinations in space and time in the cataract produces,
in the maximal descent, a complex weave of flows that begins from
the unified nappe. The world is a vortex of vortices, interlacings, a
maze of waves.83
Entanglement is potentially invested in the ‘local’, ‘enveloped by an infinity

of adherences’ and in ‘differential robes’.84 It is the point that engenders
the ‘global’ without making the global look like an aggregation of locals;
a point that conceals collision and absence of relations because, as Serres
notes, this absence is what builds the potency for greater relations. It is the
entanglement that houses the order and the disorder, the clinamen which
is the minimal angle of deviation from a laminar flow required to

create turbulence, which is the condition for atoms to meet and com-
bine and thereby also for the emergence of order. From the chaotic
turba, the confused tumult of atoms, arises the turbo, the spiral, vortex
or spinning cone.85
The local ‘solid’ points of thought and knowledge are ‘turbulences’, mov-
ing fluids: ‘homeostasis is a local exception to global homeorrhesis’. It is
well argued that the clinamen
by definition concealed beneath the lowest possible threshold not only
of direct perception but also of measurement. Its angle of deviation
is indiscernible. In the same way, as an event that occurs over a time
span shorter than can be detected, it eludes any attempt to identify
it as having taken place at a given time. Indeed, given the continual
variation of form, even in relatively stable systems, there is no reason
to suppose that it is a rare event at all.86
This does not allow the local to be ‘localized’. And clinamen is no chance
or simple random but an ‘expression of an irreducible complexity in the
order of events’.87 It is an event in the sense of a happening, an accident
and something ‘to come’. The local is an order; a dislocation is a short-
lived order.
To understand how complexity is maximized and entanglement is fierce
in the ‘middle’, we work through the lucid instancing that James Crutch-
field undertakes. I quote him at length to explain the point:
Imagine we are in the crush of a horrendous storm, wild winds and

sudden downpours pelt the land, with no chance of letting up. This
weather behavior – the change in wind direction, the variation in local
temperature and humidity – is very difficult to predict. We are maxi-
mally uncertain about the weather: we keep looking out the window
for an update and are constantly surprised; the entropy rate is high. We
come to appreciate this high unpredictability very quickly, after only a
few observations. We also immediately realize that it’s not really worth
the effort to accumulate detailed observations and have our computers
(say) develop a forecast, since the conditions are so changeable. In this
case, as for the calm weather, the excess entropy is low. Independent
of the weather’s predictability, only a few observations are required
to learn its condition (highly unpredictable). In other words, highly
predictable and highly unpredictable behaviors are simple, since the
method of forecasting is so straightforward. For the calm weather we
simply report that our first observations will continue. For the stormy
whether, we make our forecasts by flipping a coin. In both cases, after
a while we don’t even bother to look out the window.
The genuinely interesting cases fall between these two extremes.
Instead of our forecasts being either exactly right or almost always
wrong, imagine weather that regularly alternates between clear skies
and cloud bursts. When it is clear, we certainly want to know this,
since for that period our forecasts will be correct.
It is also useful to know when the weather switches to being stormy.
Since our forecasts, then, will be wrong on average, we can reduce
our effort to predict and go back to simply guessing. To make optimal
forecasts in this situation, we must monitor the weather closely: Is it
70 Trans
clear or stormy? Since half our forecasts are wrong, the entropy rate
is somewhere between zero and the maximal value: there are some
elements that are predictable. But it takes a long time to appreciate
just what those elements are and the amount of effort used to take
advantage of them for optimal forecasts is quite high. The result is
that the excess entropy is large, unlike that found at the extremes
of predictability. This intermediate behavior is more “complex” than
either extreme.88
The ‘middle’, more than any point in the spectrum or flow, exhibits ‘excess
entropy’, provoking greater possibilities of thinking. Forecasting a text as
difficult or easy is staying caught in the extremes. Thinking through the
text entails the complexities of predictions and ‘casting’ (post-casting, as it
were). It would not be wrong to say that maximal thinking proceeds from
the middle and it is the middle that is always the most turbulent, ranging
across sunny weather and stormy weather, the perspicuous and the abstruse
in textual experience.
The Serresean local with its turbulent and dissipative middle (as some-
thing ‘to come’) is true for a relevant reading of Jackson Pollock and his
‘drip and splash’ art. ‘Purchasing yachting canvas from his local hardware
store’, Richard Taylor writes,
he often abandoned the European ritual of stretching the canvas. The

large canvases simply were rolled out on the floor of the barn, some-
times tacked, sometimes just held down by their own weight. Then
he would size the canvas with one or two coats of industrial quality
Rivit glue. Even the traditional painting tool – the brush – was not
used in its expected capacity: abandoning physical contact with the
canvas, he dipped a stubby, paint-encrusted brush in and out of a can
and dripped the fluid paint from the brush onto the canvas below….
Sometimes he even wouldn’t use a brush, preferring trowels, sticks, or
basting syringes.89
Jackson ‘unconventionalized’ the painter’s tool, trying to ‘think’ away

from the settled and accepted ways of painting – ways that are strange,
striking and startling. In a ‘complex weave of flows’ (in the words of
Serres), Jackson ‘splattered, splashed and hurled’ his paintings into life
where the coming into being was made possible through pouring, drip-
ping and vitalizing. It is not experiment only – as with William Baziotes,
Francis Picabia, Stanley Hayter, Marcel Duchamp and Max Ernst, each
having a different way of letting an art grow – but the experience that
matters, the experience that such colour, canvas, action, stroke, body and
movements produce in a deep entanglement. It is energy: it is thinking
that dis-counts and un-counts conservative patterns of understanding.
Toynton observes that
sometimes the impression is of fine tracery, sometimes of a raw, rough
crust; sometimes the calligraphic lines look like handwriting, some-
times they are jagged and fierce, sometimes sinuous and lyrical; some-
times the effect is of clouds or spiders’ webs, sometimes of lightning
bolts or electrical charges. The lack of explicit narrative content makes
the viewer more keenly aware of the paint itself, the sheer materiality
of the surface, even while it eliminates the sense of narrative time to
create an experience of an eternal present.90
The complexities that the apparently unadorned and rustic ways of paint-
ing bring reaffirm my thesis about the middle where a work is never al-
lowed to achieve a conclusive aesthetic status but an ‘anarchic vitality’:
art staying always in the middle – the most intense state of entangled
energy – and celebrating the middle at the same time. However, this is not
reckless manifestation, aberrant and abstruse, random and radical only.
Entanglement has its own ‘order’, most often, invisible. Pollock observes:
‘I feel nearer, more a part of the painting since this way I can walk around
it, work from the four sides, and literally be in the painting, similar to the
Indian sand painters of the West…’.91 This is not chance or random paint-
ing but a rhythm that only entangled thinking can generate; rhythm has its
own movements, layers, ways and life. This alludes to the sand paintings of
the Navajo and other Native Americans of the Southwest. The paintings
created by a tribe’s medicine man who walks around the floors chanting as
he pours ‘the sacred colored pigments – colored sand, powdered minerals,
powdered roots, crushed flowers, pollen, charcoal – onto the floor of the
ailing person’s dwelling’.92 The patient sits in the ‘middle’ of the painting
which is expected to remove the illness. Pollock’s ‘action painting’ (in
the words of Harold Rosenberg) progressed on similar ‘energetic’ lines
as he used whatever materials that ‘happened to fall on the canvas as he
worked, incorporating cigarette ash, cigarette butts, and dead insects into
the work at various junctures, as well as the broken glass and sand “and
other foreign matter” that he added deliberately’.93 The entanglement was
‘jazzy’ – both calculative and explosive ways of performing and thinking.
The reality of such energy is folded into a complex materiality and affect
that never lost sight of an order-disorder state, its metastable equilibrium.
Jackson digresses; he explodes into a middle where art begins to speak
back through unconcealedness – a revelation that is not the outcome of a
planned set of things but an experience that only an entangled diffractivity
and fractality can produce.
Stories Continue…
Is critical thinking a form of digression? How does entanglement pro-
duce the energy for digressive thinking? Life is living through digres-
sion that Chambers calls the ‘permeability of contexts’94; life is built in
72 Trans
interruptions, in sliding off the highway of thought and thinking, of
understanding and judgment. What interests me here is the entanglement
that digression produces; entanglement is digression itself. Digression is
a way to see correspondences between the centre or the proper and the
margin or the periphery; it calls for a change of axis, supposed trajectory
of the thought or discourse, builds uncertainty about the telos. It provides
the much-needed interruption to the formation of critical thinking. Di-
gressive thinking is not always about unconcealing meaning or finding the
latent signifiers in contemplative and material discourses. It can be a sup-
plement, an extension, a possibility to demonstrate the tangential power
of arguments to establish a concept or a thought. Serres and Blake do; Pol-
lock does not disappoint either. Often, writing is not axial and axiomatic;
it can be indulgent, supplementary and distractive. Distraction in thinking
cannot be bad always. Blake digressed, and reading Blake without digres-
sion is a near impossibility. Reading Blake is doing critical theory without
realizing it; understanding Blake is interruptive, often methodized, often
disruptive, aleatory and, hence, it has the right recipe for critical think-
ing. Blake’s marginalia (for instance in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell) is
digressive, having a relationship with the text in a way that is interruptive
and distractive. It is not a conventional footnote to the primary text flow
but a pictorial annotation to networks of thought and arguments. Jason
Allen Snart observes that the
marginalia are part of Blake’s composite art, in which elements that

share the same page are made to illuminate one another, though of-
ten in seemingly contradictory ways. While Blake’s marginal notes
may comment directly on particular sections of the text at hand, they
also function as textually disruptive on the page, forcing the reader’s
awareness of the degree to which formal layout mid features like pag-
ination guide our reading. The marginalia often work counter to the
control imposed by the finished, printed page.95
It is a dialectic between the hard metal and the fluid black ink. Tear-
ing apart is tearing in. Even breaking down a system is fine-tuning the
points of collapse. Ruin, is performatively, a method. Anti-systemicity is
not without a system (not to ignore system as emerging from the ‘Greek
sustēma from sun – ‘with’ and histanai ‘set up’, meaning uniting, putting
together’96). It is both about not ignoring the essence and yet going past it.
Is thinking a ‘form’ formed in the local? How uncharacteristically local
is the local when it is in and through the local that the local supersedes
itself? Working through Henri Focillon, we may argue that form ‘is a dy-
namic organization that brings into play the concrete texture of the world
as the sum of the body’s reactions to that which surrounds it. Form is not
manifested in the guise of a border separating existing objects; it engen-
ders the environment in which objects exist’.97 It talks of space which is
operatively ‘polysensory’ and non-Euclidean. Focillon argues that form is
not easily discriminated into what we commonly categorize as architec-
ture, sculpture or painting. Techniques may vary as also generic authority,
but ‘form is qualified above all else by the specific realms in which it de-
velops, and not simply by an act of reason on our part, a wish to see form
develop regardless of circumstances’.98 Form, thus,
not only does it exist in and of itself, but it also shapes its own
environment – to which it imparts a form. If we will follow the meta-
morphoses of this form, if we will study not merely its axes and its
armature, but everything else that it may include within its own par-
ticular framework, we will then see before us an entire universe that
is partitioned off into an infinite variety of blocks of space.99
So form interlocks, enfolds, entrophizes and inter- domainizes, something

that is difficult to reduce to mere ‘geometrical intelligibility’; and, in fact,
‘art is not simply a kind of fantastic geometry, or even a kind of particu-
larly complex topology. Art is bound to weight, density, light and color’.
For instance, a picture of a horse on a paper is a form up(on) a form: it
makes a difference to the form of the paper and makes the paper emerge
with a different form. The form of the horse imposed on the form of the
paper constructs a form different from what the living horse originally
imparted. The drawing conducted in charcoal or lead or ink will speak of
another kind of form-fusion or form-transmission because the ‘exchange’
growing out of the paper and the charcoal or the paper and the ink will
be different. These enfolding of form – the (in)fusion of form – speak of a
trans, a mobility, matter-active trans-formation that makes the idea of the
form inherently dynamic, something of a ‘transmetry’. It is more about
the signification of the ‘design’ than the designation. Focillon, however,
considers form as separated from signification; for him, ‘form signifies
only itself ’.
Focillon notes that Rembrandt’s sketches swarm across Rembrandt’s
paintings. The rough draft always gives vitality to the masterpiece. All
is form in the creator’s mind, including the various modalities of emo-
tional life:
I do not say that form is the allegory or the symbol of feeling, but
rather, its innermost activity. Form activates feeling. Let us say… that
art not only clothes sensibility with a form, but that art also awakens
form in sensibility.100
For the artist as for the writer, sentiment is form: If sketches swarm
the final form are we to adduce that forms – unformed and reformed –
contribute to the final one? Is entanglement a form? Is critical thinking
about a (dis)content with form? It is here that I see a disjunction between
74 Trans
form as aspired, as seen to conform to the idea of perfection in the art-
ist, with the signification that forms keep generating. The form aspired,
worked through and achieved is often without the signification that it
might generate. Entangled thinking is forming but often with a suspen-
sion of signification.
Entanglements built through trans-(in)fusion (the migrant-power) are
fundamentally five-dimensional – events that exist as particles in unreal
time, as waves across history through real time, the spatiality and temporal
relativity of their existence, the hidden variables that inflect and influence
them, and the transformative power, the implicate and conative potential,
that make certain things happen outside our spatio-temporal understand-
ing. Entanglement for me is like air: a change in vibration and force makes
air manifest as breeze, gust, storm and gale when all is fundamentally air.
If a breeze hides a storm, a storm hides a breeze as much as air conceals the
potency of all manifestations (energetic forms). Reality is this; thoughts
are like air; critical thinking is like the air in its manifestations, conceal-
ments and incarnations.
Notes
1 M. Serres, ‘Mathematics and Philosophy’ in Hermes: Literature, Science, Philos-
ophy (eds.) Joshué V. Harari and David F. Bell (Baltimore, MD and London:
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982), 96.
2 C. Levi-Strauss,
Triste Tropiques (New York: Atheneum, 1973).
3 See Wilhelm Schapp, Entanglement in Stories (Albany: State University of
New York Press, 2018).
4 David V. Erdman (ed.), The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake (Berke-
ley: University of California Press, 1981), 576.
5 W. J. T. Mitchell, ‘Chaosthetics: Blake’s Sense of Form’ Huntington Library
Quarterly, Vol. 58, No. 3/4, William Blake: Images and Texts (1995).
6 Ibid., 448.
7 Nelson Hilton, ‘Blake’s Early Works’ in Cambridge Companion to Blake (ed.)
Morris Eaves (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 203.
8 Erdman (ed.), The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake, 40.
9 Dan Miller, ‘Contrary Revelation: “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell”’
Studies in Romanticism, Vol. 24, No. 4 (Winter 1985), 507.
10 Ibid., 508.
12 Ibid., 2.
13 Ibid., 710; also see, Robert F. Gleckner, ‘Blake’s Religion of Imagination’
The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Vol. 14, No. 3 (March 1956), 359–69.
15 Ibid., 2.
16 Steve Vine, ‘Blake’s Material Sublime’ Studies in Romanticism, Vol. 41, No. 2,
The Once and Future Blake (Summer 2002), 243.
17 Ibid.
18 Ibid., 249.
19 William Blake, Complete Writings: With Variant Readings (ed.) Geoffrey
Keynes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972), 809.
20 Vine, ‘Blake’s Material Sublime’, 253.

76 Trans


(In)
3 ‘We Only Ever Speak
One Language’1
Thus, we must know that with the concepts of the sign all we can translate
is the sign. The poem is erased. But everyone knows the poem is erased.
It is precisely because we know it that we speak of the untranslatable. We
resign ourselves to it. We are used to resigning ourselves. The translator
of the sign is a used soul ….Translating the sign, it seems that we do not
know any better, means not having any voice. The sign leaves us voice-
less, all the while making us deaf. Translating the poem, everything that
is poem, including the poem of thought, supposes having some poem in
the voice. It is only then that translating is rewriting. And after, as another
toad out of the mouth, we say that translations become outdated. We
confuse the état de langue with the state of the voice. From this point of
view, no difference between the so- called original works and translations.
Most of the works presented as originals are products of their times, not
activities remaining active, no matter how old they are. They are thus
like translations which are said to become outdated. They are bygone like
their times. With their times.2
Is translation a marker, a distinguishing boundary between linguistic

cultures and ideological communities? Or is it a connector, a meaningful
communicative corridor – the middle – among differences that we live
with? I am tempted to see a resonant connection between translation and
the act of italicization. Words from other languages are usually italicized
in the parent language and italicization declares both political and aes-
thetic provenance; italicization is an evocation of cultural boundarization,
a re-marked optic posted within the flow of our understanding – a sort
of redrawing of the consciousness of an usage that demands ‘outstanding’
and hence, outsider attention. It is also an invitation to rethink translation
beyond the mere semantic-phonetic-phonemeic towards the ideational-
conceptual-performative. I choose Charles Bernstein’s radical writing-
as-translation program (in contrast to ‘translationese’), the lugubrious
sitting-on-the edge attitude to the ‘lost-in-translation’ calamity.3 We
translate as much as we are in the sway of translation; we are under trans-
lation, relentlessly, in thoughts, ideas, words and ideologies. Conceptual
82 (In)
translation begins here: the performative and the operative of any act of
translational and transactional thinking. Bernstein puts it with pregnant
ease: ‘There is no translation like the present’.4
I don’t mean there are no originals, I long ago grew sick with that
formulation. I mean the only original is the translation.
Every generation requires a revolution in poetry, needs to reinvent
poetry for itself, its times, its local impossibility. But a generation can
last a thousand years. And that reinvention is not just a matter or form
or social-political consciousness, it is also a matter of medium, in the
sense of the technologies that inscribe and deliver the work; for there
is no poetry without inscription and delivery, and that is a pair with
a parasitic relation.
The job of the poet/translator is Mental Fight with a parasite.5
Translation-as-italicization holds out a meaning that the parent text tries

to negotiate with the target text. The formations of the aesthetic imag-
inary cannot, however, overlook the ways in which a word builds its
conceptual volume and its own supplement. Words, like concepts, stay
confined to the border within which they flourish and maintain their
inherited establishment. Through translation or translational momentum,
we figure out the ways of mortality of concepts or words in one culture
by generating a meaning-volume that takes them across the borders of
understanding and cultural confinements. The immortality of words and
concepts – by which I mean their immutability of meaning over centuries
and the self-enclosed cultural recalcitrance to expose themselves to supple-
mentary understanding – within a culture is the threshold resistance that
conceptual translation is expected to overcome. Conceptual translation is
another way of mortalizing these tenures of immortality – snapping fin-
gers and poking flesh at the transit value and velocity of concepts on the
two sides (the incoming and inhouse) of a border. Concepts lose borders in
ways where their immortality comes from some mortality suffered at the
border-crossing – mortality understood in the form of a creative appro-
priation of concepts across cultures of thought and the experimentation
conducted outside the trusted zones of understanding within a particular
language and tradition. I prefer to call them ‘transition probabilities’.
Thinking Across
John Salis points out that the word ‘translation’
derives, by way of the Middle English translaten, from the Latin trans-
latus, which was used as the past participle of transfero. Composed from
the roots trans (across) and fero (carry, bear), transfero is preserved in the
‘We Only Ever Speak One Language’ 83
modern English transfer. Thus regarded, to translate is to transfer, to
carry or bear across some interval. In Latin a translator is one who
carries something over, a transferer.6
What is being ferried across? What stays preserved and produced? Goethe
looks at translation as a tolerance for particularities between cultures and a
way of building a road of communication through exchange (Vermittlung):
And thus every translator is to be regarded as a middle-man [Vermittler]

in this universal spiritual commerce [allgemein geistigen Handels], and as
making it his business [Geschafft] to promote/further this exchange
[Wechseltausch]: for say what we may of the insufficiency of translation,
yet the work is and will always be one of the weightiest and worthiest
matters [Geschaffte] in the general concerns of the world.7
It is the emphasis on ‘transference’ that makes trans(in)fusion translational:

the interest being in the incompleteness and distortion that translation pro-
vides. The distortion here is not misreading and misjudgment across cul-
tures and language domains. It is the about the principle of disjuncture as
production, as ruptures of trans-thinking. Nietzsche uses the term überset-
zen (German term for translate) ‘sixty four times throughout his published
work’.8 He uses the term predominantly in the ‘transferred sense’ and
‘enjoys and exploits the metaphorical potential of the term translation’.9
Here we notice a kind of hermeneutic obsession with meaning-in-
transit (transference), the passage that comes from restitution, reproduc-
tion and re-presentation and ‘just as a broken tool can serve to light up the
situation in which tools otherwise function normally, so can the break-
down of communication and the resulting need for translation serve to
illuminate the situation in which, otherwise, one converses with another
or reads a text’.10
The border-differentialities and the mortality-immortality program
that I am trying to argue do not implicate any falsification of meaning in-
tended by the speaker. As Gadamer notes in Truth and Method, ‘the mean-
ing is to be preserved, but, since it is to be understood in a new language
world, it must establish its validity therein in a new way’.11
Words across cultures come with their historicity, their etymological
urgency and a certain conceptual motility; they provoke a space to un-
tie the ‘unholy’ (in the sense of the unreified, the non-institutional) in
our conceptual understanding of the transcultural, the translocomotive-
ness of ideas and thought. The trans-(in)fusion ways of understanding
words in translation – both as vision, views, and visibility – argue for
the need for conceptual translation, a fact that needs more attention
than it is usually given , something that is often uncritically passed down
as ‘travelling theory’. Conceptual translation needs some etymological
84 (In)
allegiance, a proper historical reading into the cultural embeddedness of
the concept, a strong thrust on the transgressive power of the imagina-
tion and a nuanced understanding of the limits of creativity. If transla-
tion, linguistically and narratively, needs artistic sensibility, conceptual
translation demands transcreative performativity, something that makes
a concept grow around/with its cultural counterparts. This becomes the
embedded and transit politics of border- crossedness, the inflections that
reflush and reblood it proleptically preventing its relegation to a mono-
cultural phenomenon and arcaneness. It directs us towards the idea and
legitimacy of conceptual translation where the loss and gain are never
two signally opposite terms. Conceptual translation enriches our un-
derstanding of literature, for the struggle of a concept to get accurately
translated results in the sustenance and greater nourishment of the con-
cept. The struggle is, by default, certain incapacity, a disability that can
be, most often, enabling. But a word that fails to get translated and defies
precision when rendered into a different language can sometimes carry
a new weight of meaning, adduced, inducted and induced from its in-
teractions with a language from a different culture or community. The
word does not deny its parentage but learns to build a new accommoda-
tion. Concepts generate their own productivity through such travelling,
which is why there cannot be a global theory of literature. Prescribing
such a theory is like offering the same pedagogic antidote for cough and
cold irrespective of the genetic diversity, medical history and somatic
states of the patients. Conceptual translation is performatively conceptual
rewriting.
When Rabindranath Tagore says that he cannot translate because his
translations turn to rewriting, the complicated praxis of conceptual trans-
lation comes into play. Recapturing the original in some other language
and recreating it leads to questioning the premises of originality. A section
of a letter that Tagore wrote to Ajit Kumar Chakrabarty (March 13, 1913)
is instructive in this context:
Ever since I came to Urbana I have spent my mornings in writing out

my lectures in prose and the rest of the day in translating my poems…
it is the translating of my poems which pleases me most—it simply
seizes me like an intoxicant. To transfer to a different language what I
had once composed is an aesthetic enjoyment of a kind. To me it is the
reception of the bridal pair following the ceremony of marriage. The
marriage has been ritualized but the bride has to be introduced to the
larger community. When the guests accept refreshments at the hands
of the bride the union of man and wife becomes an accepted fact of
the world. When I wrote the poems originally in Bengali it marked
the union of the poet and his poetry; at that moment I had no clear
awareness of any other motive. But when I translate the same, I virtu-
ally extend an invitation to others to come and partake of something
at the bride’s hand. It is happiness of another kind…. Repeatedly, re-
petitively I am erasing and striking out, brushing up and chiseling—
acting as if in a frenzy. Nobody here would accept that these are
translations—none would hear that these were originally written in
Bengali and written better. As for myself, I, too, cannot quite dismiss
this opinion as entirely unjustified. In fact, one cannot quite translate
one’s own works. My right with regard to my own works is not of an
adventitious sort. Had it been otherwise than inherent, I would have,
unlike what I do, to account for each word I use. I intend to carry the
essential substance of my poetry into the English translation and this
means a wide divergence from the original. You may not even be able
to identify a poem of mine unless I do it for your benefit. Many of the
poems have naturally become much shorter. Usually a poem springing
into expression in Bengali comes with all the playful amplitude of lan-
guage and cannot resist a display of its patrimony in public which for
her is the bridegroom’s family. But while travelling abroad the same
ornaments would become a burden and are therefore to be left behind.
Especially while on pilgrimage the glitter and the glory of dress and
ornaments are unbecoming. I am engaged in divesting my poetry of
its adornments—it has attired itself afresh retaining only its bridal veil;
it has not turned European, however, by wiping off the essential signs
of marriage—the auspicious marks of vermilion and the iron bangle.12
The distance between the original and the target text is not always a
question of ‘loss’. It comes to some gain in that words enjoy a travelling
frequency in a different socio-c ultural premise. There is a strong place
of ‘target reception’ where the translated builds its own morphology
and topology – an interface of culture, a liminality of understanding
that may not have Tagore’s anxiety of needing to be explanatory and
understandable to the readers experiencing his poems in translation.
Although Tagore sees creative reincarnation in his translation of the
original, a ‘new quality and a new spirit’ and in a letter to Rothenstein
(April 4, 1915), he writes that ‘my translations are frankly prose, my
aim is to make them simple with just a suggestion of rhythm to give
them a touch of the lyric, avoiding all archaisms and poetical conven-
tions’13 – the spirit of his rewriting (with the penchant on lucidity,
accessibility, serious emphasis on choice of words conducive to the un-
derstanding of the Western readers) ignores what I emphasize as ‘con-
ceptual translation’ – a philosophy of creative manipulation where the
translation gets the reader closer to the poem and distances the au-
thor. Experience in translation is the provocation to enjoy the space
of conceptual collision and collusion. Concepts retain some of their
substance and essentiality and also functions in an enlarged conscious-
ness where the target culture introduces a fresh topology of experience.
Translation is both thought and thinking across.
86 (In)
Thinking Within
Shakti Chattopadhyay’s – one of the foremost modernist Bengali
poets – translation of four poems of Robert Frost into Bengali gives us
a unique opportunity to discuss the trans-force, errancy and the tur-
bulence of the cultural middle in conceptual translation. The aesthetic
imaginary is not formed by modes of cultural translation only; it is
also the conceptual translation with all its epistemological, linguistic
and expropriative complexities (implied in the Latin noun translatio
and the verb transferre) that inform the aesthetic imaginary. Perhaps
it is here that the ‘plastic principle’ in translation can be seriously
brought into play. The plasticity – the idea of the original, contextual
creativity and the poetics of untranslatability – in translation is at issue
when we read Frost’s ‘Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening’ with
Chattopadhyay’s translation of the same poem titled ‘Bon- er Dharey
Shondhaye Tusharey’: Frost with Frost in translation. Interestingly,
the Bengali title of the poem has more rhythm to it than its English
counterpart – rhyming on dhareh with tusharey. It is the f irst point of
creative rewriting beyond the original. The question that stares back
is whether there is any original and, if any, the nature of the ‘mid-
dle’ that exists between the original and the product of ‘inf idelidad
creadora’.14
Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening

Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.
My little horse must think it queer

To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.
He gives his harness bells a shake

To ask if there is some mistake.
The only other sound’s the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.
The woods are lovely, dark and deep,

But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.
Bon-er Dharey Shondhaye Tusharey15
Ey kar bone aami gobhirbhabey jani
Bariti tar chhilo gayer aekterey
Dekhtey pabey na shey, ekhaney jodi thhami –
Ebong dekhi bone tusharpatey gherey.
Aamar chhoto ghora hoyto mawja pabey

Ekhaney thhamey kyano? Kothaye golabari
Bawrophdhaka hrawd, mon-er pashey thhemey
Bawchhorey shawbshera adhar dyakha jabey.
Ghawnta mridu narey aamar chhoto ghora

Hoyto bhebechhilo, kothao achhey bhool
Kintu, tar cheye modhur dhonibhawra
Batash shawhojia, bidhur bonophool.
Bon-er taan khoobi, adhar, gobhirota …

Kintu, kawtha achhey, amaye jetey hawbey
Ghoomer ageybhagey, amaye jetey hawbey
Awnek pawth baki, amaye jetey hawbey.
Following Gadamer, I am tempted to argue that all attempts to translate

poetry into a target language and understand it may not be successful.
Translating Frost comes with ‘misunderstanding’, and Chattopadhyay dis-
plays instances of non-understanding of the Aussage, the poetic text. The
limits of translatability, Gadamer argues, ‘show us exactly how far the pro-
tection in the word stretches’. The poetic word in ‘holding onto itself ’ also
‘holds itself back’, which ironically gives it its highest possibility.16 The
concepts coming through words provide the ‘sheltering’. Words move into
the other language holding within themselves a nearness to the original as
well as something that the original fails to qualify or attest. So, in transla-
tion, Frost is not completely understood and somewhat misunderstood and
is not bereft of understanding either. It is a desire of the poem to speak and
not be listened to in translation; one finds a deficit in conversation with
Chattopadhyay’s rendition, a strange act in departure and return. Frost in
translation returns: a returning in poetic word, poetic force, the postcolo-
nial experience of language and a certain creative difference which keeps
the poet alive transpoetically; it holds him in transition. If some Frost is
lost, some poetry has come to be discovered also.
Chattopadhyay’s translation bears out the nostalgia of the original and
blends with the lure of the possibility of the new: sharing space is sharing
profit, sharing space is not sharing identity with the oblivion of the other.
These trans-creations point to Borges’s cyclical process of reading and
88 (In)
rewriting. Frost loses his own centrality to the work and makes spaces for
the generation of ‘texts’. In fact,
once it is understood that language continues to function in both

translated and untranslated ways, once it is understood that new trans-
lation may always be needed, once it is understood that the way this
language lives in this culture is like how that language lives in that
culture, one may remove the compulsion to place the search for the
accuracy of translation ahead of the search for the purposes and con-
texts of translation. Translation is sometimes accurate, sometimes not,
never accurate, never not.17
This leaves room for the ‘excess’, the sustaining and enduring force around
what we may characterize as ‘living through language’. Working across
language through translation can often be the overturning of the ‘law of
noncontradiction’. Translating ‘A’ is not achieving ‘A’, could be less ‘A’ and
more ‘A’. It speaks about transparency, errancy and opacity of language.
Following Benveniste, Ricoeur points out that
despite the conflictual character which renders the task of the trans-
lator dramatic, he or she will find satisfaction in what I would like to
call linguistic hospitality. Its predicament is that of a correspondence
without complete adhesion. This is a fragile condition, which admits
of no verification other than a new translation … a sort of duplication
of the work of the translator which is possible in virtue of a mini-
mum of bilingualism: to translate afresh after the translator.18
This linguistic hospitality gives a fresh experience to ‘A’. Ricoeur notes

that
as in a narration it is always possible to tell the story in a different

way, likewise in translation it is always possible to translate otherwise,
without ever hoping to bridge the gap between equivalence and per-
fect adhesion. Linguistic hospitality, therefore, is the act of inhabiting
the word of the Other paralleled by the act of receiving the word of
the Other into one’s own home, one’s own dwelling.19
The ‘translated’ makes its own home through a creative othering, a

dwelling of its own. This dwelling comes through transference of mean-
ing and transmobility of concepts as the Frost- Chattopadhyay interface
demonstrates.
On this note of ‘dwelling’, conceptual translation promotes a kind of
critical distance from cultures and literatures in question – a distance that
invites a hard struggle and also the offer to have it conquered. Sometimes,
it does; most often, it fails. For instance, the correspondence between the
two words ‘promise’ (Frost) and ‘kawtha’ in Chattopadhyay’s translation
exhibits the ‘distance’ and the struggle; ‘kawtha’ in Bengali can mean con-
versation, ‘kawtha achhey’ means ‘something to say’ and ‘kawtha dilam’
means give someone a word, hence, make a promise. The word ‘promise’
shows up as ‘kawtha’ through its transnational journey within cultural-
linguistic borders; this creates an access to an excess, a certain dilation
of meaning-space and concomitant word-affect. Also, ‘easy wind’ when
translated as ‘Batash shawhojia’ carries a conceptual variance and valence.
The Bengali translation for easy is ‘shawhoj’. However, Frost meant a par-
ticular property of the wind and Chattopadhyay turning the word from
‘shawhoj’ to ‘shawhojia’ brings a poetic event into play which only a nu-
anced conceptual familiarity with ‘shawhoj’ and ‘shawhojia’ in the tar-
get culture can enumerate. The conceptual potency in the word ‘easy’
translates into a refigured space of different meaning and resonance with
‘shawhojia’. The breath of the concept changes, the intention is somewhat
creatively compromised, and the returning of the concept as re-narration
is brought into fuller play. Easy could not be mere ‘shawhoj’ in the sense
of an easy task or easy solution. The asymmetry in conceptual translation
introduces the word ‘shawhojia’ which combines easiness in motion with
romance, freedom and kinesthesia attached to it. Translating a word and
translating a concept can often have a separate life story of their own: a
different experiential volume. Every translation, as Gadamer argues, ‘is
already interpretation’.20 It is argued that
the translator not only must intend the meaning and keep that inten-
tion in force so that the meaning is preserved in the translation but
also must interpret the meaning so as to be able to set it in the context
of the other language, to express it in the new language world in such
a way as to establish it as a valid meaning within that world.21
The Chattopadhyay-Frost interface achieves this with success. Chattopad-

hyay’s text, to stay with Gadamer, forms a new text, eine Nachbildung. So,
has he betrayed Frost? Is untranslatability another way of succeeding in
the transition of meaning? There is both the ‘faithful renunciation’ and
‘constant renunciation’ in this transference of meaning. This is the happy
conflict zone.
The trans-force in Chattopadhyay’s poem brings home the instance of
‘active translation’. The ‘active’ here, as Jane Gallop argues,
carries all the connotations of male:female, active:passive, a configu-

ration I would call “normative male hetero sexuality.” The scenario
of invasion and insemination is also “clandestine”: some kind of co-
vert operation, unseen foreign agents infiltrating some kind of inter-
nal space. What is being invaded by this clandestine activity has the
adjective “domestic” attached to it.22
90 (In)
Since all translation is spooked by the foreign and is ‘abusive’, the metaphor
of home and displacement are relevant as well. The charm of enjoying the
poem in translation is the acceptance of the acts of unsettlement that trans-
lation brings. How can the foreign be domesticated without forsaking
its underlying foreignness? Borges’s understanding of the ‘original’ as a
‘moving event’ corresponds with what I have termed the ‘transit-value’ of
criticism – ‘visible texts’ concealing ‘an incalculable repository of shadows
[una reserva incalculable de sombra]’.23 José Garcia puts into correspondence
Borges’s ‘experimental lottery’ and ‘moving event’ with Foucault’s ‘hap-
hazard conflicts’ that constitute history. Considering the inevitability of
truth having some ‘randomness’ to it, it may be argued that
the goal of the translator, who has now become a cultural mediator
occupying a concrete subject-position, is to enable the visibility of
the contradictions within and between texts rather than naturalize
the perceived similarities. Perhaps the best way to contextualize this
utopian program for the genealogical historian qua translator and in-
terpreter of the past is to expose the lack of ethical depth shown by
those who reduced the task of the translator to little more than an
instrument of control (Borges’s complaint about the philologists).24
It is an authenticity – foreignizing familiarity and familiarizing for-

eignness – both in fidelity and fertility. Keeping with Octavio Paz, we
encounter how translation authorizes its creation of ‘originals’ – an in-
telligible wrestle with contradictions in sound-patterns, the metric, use
of words, some strategic suppression, aporetic challenges and imaginative
reconstructions, resulting in creativity of a different order. Paz argues that
translator-poets appropriate and cannibalize the source text (Chattopad-
hyay is no exception):
only poets should translate poetry; in practice, poets are rarely good
translators. They almost invariably use the foreign poem as a point of
departure toward their own [En teorfa, sdlo los poetas deberfan traducir
poesia; en la realidad, pocas veces los poetas son buenos traductores. No lo son
porque casi siempre usan el poema ajeno como un punto de partida para escribir
su poema].25
Paz further argues that the time has come to understand that translation
does not merely ‘serve to reveal the preponderance of similarities over
differences’. Translation has come to ‘illustrate the irreconcilability of dif-
ferences, whether these stem from the foreignness of the savage or of our
neighbor’.26 The translational imaginary works on the poetics of ‘foreign-
ness’ to encourage creation as a ‘moving event’ across and within cultures
and traditions – both ‘incursive and extractive’. It recontours a different
kind of ‘access’.
Through a translational semiosis, we encounter both the cultural and
conceptual alterity where the registers of correspondences are linguis-
tic, cultural, visual, performative and conceptual.27 Here I walk the
hard road of asymmetrical translations which admits the translational
deficit in meaning and accepts conceptuality as a way of negotiation
with the travelling word – both its itinerancy and iterability. Words
struggle for easy equivalents and declare the necessity of living with
both defamiliarization- effects and identity building. Words in transla-
tion bring with them their identity, which, more than an establishment,
becomes an event because there is an unabated effort to see defamil-
iarization as working on both sides of the cultural interface. It is not
always that a word carries a secret with it while travelling within cul-
tures and geopolitical borders. A word, I claim, is a nationalist without
forgetting the alloy and compoundness within which it seeds and evolves
through time. Cultural possession is, at times, fallacious to the growth
of a word because of its mixedness in semantic evolution, and the affect
it generates across cultural engagement and absorption determines the
erotics of translational power. Language creates, but language fails to
substitute what it creates, and, hence, language exists and continues to
transcreate. Chattopadhyay’s Frost is a construction in that direction. If
translation is seen as unlocking the opacity of language’s foreignness,
it is also about unlocking a secret index and power in the word when
cultures other than the word’s point of origin try to make sense of it and
investigate its inner recesses; consequently, the inner circle is threatened
at its limits. A word lying inactive in a cultural-linguistic vocabulary
is fragile – perhaps radioactive in its quiet emissive ways – in its silence
because every word within the growing complexity of thinking across
cultures and tradition can be appropriated any time and can mean some-
thing outside its predictable and widely accepted ways. Frost’s poem is
a direct communicative act and, also, a secrecy that is informed with a
desire to be expressed or conceptualized differently in a separate linguis-
tic habitation. To Frost’s lines – ‘My little horse must think it queer/To
stop without a farmhouse near’ – Chattopadhyay writes, ‘Aamar chhoto
ghora hoyto mawja pabey/Ekhaney thhamey kyano? Kothaye golabari?’
Where does the question mark come from? And ‘think it queer’ is trans-
lated as ‘mawja pabey’. This demonstrates the sacrificial ritual of trans-
lational becoming. ‘Mawja’ in Bengali means ‘fun’ and a fun that has a
feeling of pleasure and excitement attached to it. What splits up here is
the efficacy and legitimacy of translating ‘queer’ into ‘mawja’: there is a
loss and gain in the identity of the word ‘queer’ as a creative- cultural ap-
propriation alterizes it. The translational vagaries bring with it identity
growth and linguistic ability, a sense of choice with a penchant for do-
mesticating the foreignness – here, for instance, the word queer. Chat-
topadhyay is elective and allows asymmetries as a creative- critical move
in thinking: ‘queer’ is translated conceptually. Conceptual translation
92 (In)
works on silences, certain zones of insecurities of meaning, some deficit
in understanding and creative- cultural indulgences – a creative interface
with alterity.
Charles Bernstein observes:
There can’t be poetry in one country or of one nationality, which is to

say, there can’t be poetry of one ethnicity, one race, one gender, one
period, one meaning. At the heart of our present aesthetic struggle is
conceptual and asymmetrical translation, in Ghosh’s and Longinovic’s
terms, nomadics in Pierre Joris’s sense, pataquerics is my work (in con-
trast to “nepohumanism”).
Our Mental Fight not so much in as for the present. Asymmetrical
means keeping in mind that all translations are parasitic, power plays
between unequal partners. Translation, like poetry, can resist absorbing
or digesting the other into oneself (domestication, hegemony), letting
the other rend one apart, make one a part of the other. If even only in
flickers, only in that imaginary that forms the membrane of the real.28
There are several words in Chinese, Sanskrit, French and Urdu words
that can have multiple translational renderings – interpretations of words
and the deep commitment to choose words closest in meaning to the
original (for instance, my extended understanding of the Sanskrit word
sahitya loosely translated into English as literature29). This disagreement
in translational precision is not merely because of the sustained effort to
achieve proximity to the word from the parent culture. This conceals a
space where the word as concept finds itself under a ‘constructive/appro-
priate energy’, recovering, retaining and revising its identity through acts
of deep faith, experiment and perception. Translation for me is ‘compa-
triot studies’ – profound acts in comparison where maintaining identity
is as much a concern as trying to reach the identity through creativity
that involves imagination, perception and keenness of insight. This is a
kind of metaphoric transit in thinking. Rejecting what Richard Rorty
calls ‘unwobbling pivots’,30 Theo Hermans rightly observes that ‘all we
can do is constantly reconsider the language that serves as our probing
tool. This means that cross-cultural mapping, comparison and translation
can hardly avoid being self-reflexive’.31 Translinguality cannot avoid the
trans-(in)fusion space of negotiation when, most often, fixed points of
journey of a concept or a word are difficult to ascertain; this results in an
‘inadequacy’ of renderings – the politics and pragmatics of access and ac-
cessibility. These inadequacies contribute to the formation of the aesthetic
imaginary. The formations may owe to certain political commitments,
textual prejudices and certain codes of understanding. What we call as
‘missing from translation’ can, in fact, be both deliberate and strategized.
Conceptual translation is deeply involved in cultural memory and
cultural performance. Chattopadhyay’s rendition is no exception.
The aesthetic imaginary looks into the complexities that cultural memory
brings into processes of transcription – a telluric connect which makes the
journey of the words very interesting for they start getting rearticulated
with different cultural substance (orality, myth, often heresay, linguistic
natality, prejudice and what I call ‘inheritance-affect’) as they enfold into
different cultures. Often, untranslatability – the struggle for semantic sub-
stitution or transfer – speaks of what I am tempted to call ‘translational
sublime’. The failure to find the wholesome equivalent of a word in a
particular culture need not incur annoyance and easy entrenched judg-
ment. It opens onto the disruptive singularity of conceptual translation
that imports an ambivalent attitude to the formalization of translational
understanding. The ‘yet to name’ and the ‘yet to frame’ momentum is
the ‘infinite’ that eludes material inscription without declaring a chaos;
indeed, the Blakean ‘bounding line’, as discussed earlier, is alive in such
engagements with the boundary of thinking, the codes of culture, the to-
pos of traditional understanding and the limit of translingual transference.
This reminds me of the term mesticagem (hybridity) that Gilberto Freyre
uses to describe a variety of subjects ranging from football to literature to
anthropological studies to urbanization (rurbanization, used in the sense
of city-country interface). Peter Burke makes an interesting observation:
All the same, Freyre himself and other members of his circle may
be described as remarkable cultural translators. For example, around
1920, during his years abroad, when he was studying in the USA,
Freyre discovered the regional novels of Thomas Hardy. On his re-
turn to Brazil, in the early 1920s, Freyre persuaded José Lins do Rego
and other friends to read these novels. Lins in particular ‘translated’
the Wessex of Thomas Hardy into the very different Northeastern
landscape of his so-called ‘sugar-cane cycle’. Paradoxically enough,
therefore, the regionalist novels of the Northeast, in spite of being
steeped in the sights and sounds and smells of Pernambuco, owe an
important debt to foreign models. In Freyre’s own case, two of his
most famous arguments about Portugal and Brazil may be viewed as
translations into Portuguese or Brazilian of ideas that the English or
the British had already used to describe themselves.32
This, for me, is the overcoming of the ‘stained glass syndrome’. The aes-
thetic imaginary is formed through such translational force to push the
frontiers of cultural-literary specificities in a kind of experiment where
concepts start to travel, the spirit engages with a new habitation and cul-
tural understanding learns the art of horizontal thinking. It prospers on
‘how’ we extend and intensify the history of ideas. Cultural translation
will involve concepts that can be on loan from a different culture and yet
mean differently in the culture it is seen to circulate – the root and the
radicle. The infection or contamination of concepts is what enriches our
94 (In)
aesthetic imaginary of understanding – the contamination being the spur
to creativity. This makes the Brazilian debate over ‘misplaced ideas’ (idéias
fora do lugar) initiated by the literary critic Roberto Schwarz relevant.33
Through ‘dependency’ theory, one sees how the success of an idea is in
the travel – meticism – that it undertakes, how it undertakes the criticism
of entering into a different culture and struggles and improvises to find a
place and how the xenetopical status spatializes itself within the regnant
modes of understanding in the culture it has ‘moved’ in.
I would like to reinterpret Stephen Crane’s use of the word ‘stained glass
window’34 with a difference: the difference not in the ‘lack’ of viewing the
other side as an unstained glass would readily allow. Isn’t cultural transla-
tion always somewhat a ‘stained glass’ phenomenon? Do distortion, bias,
cultural conceit not become realities that understanding cannot obviate? A
stained glass refracts and does not allow unproblematic access to the other
interacting and mediating world. It raises the questions of incompetence of
translation, our deficits of understanding, the intensification of challenges,
a rethinking of the dynamics of ‘borrowing’ and a wrestle with some niggle
of dissatisfaction for having missed perspicuity. The irony is in the creative
necessity to translate. It is a romance with the threshold of cultural com-
prehension, the good inspiration to engage with a different culture and
the allure of concepts and ideas –an inspiration to work on their transit-
value. This brings us to re-engage with what Alastair Pennycook calls the
‘translingual activism’35 which is heavily pertinent to the complexities that
multilingual and transcultural realities provide. Translation is not mere
communication, ‘talking skills’ but an event and eventuality that talks about
a rare competence that is both semiotic and symbolic. I agree with Mark
Gamsa that translation cannot always be a theoretical system – modelled
and templated – because ‘some cases will fit into larger patterns of cause and
effect and some will not’. Gamsa rightly argues that ‘rather than attempt to
force translation into a system, we should be prepared to acknowledge the
random, even chaotic nature of translation as an unforeseen event— as any
cultural encounter is and not unlike the events that, in retrospect, we tie
together and call history’.36 Frost in translation, in a new ambit, and in a
culturally distinct culture, cannot be faulted as being a product of ‘transla-
tionese’; a new rush of creativity delivers Frost, re-lives the poet.
Chattopadhyay’s and Frost’s texts are caught in an en face format. John
Sturrock argues that the ‘source and translation are in apposition, but they
do not meet or mingle’. There is a ‘gutter’ between them. In an en face
translation, Sturrock argues, a
finished text confronts finished text; the translation that we are given
to read is an end product, it shows no trace of the activity of transla-
tion, in the difficult course of which the translator can be assumed to
have tried out and abandoned other versions of words and sentences
before settling on his final version.
And in the seemingly finished product which, is the turbulent middle that
never seems to end,
the translator’s fumblings show no more than do those of the author

of his source. In this respect source and translation keep their distance
from one another too decorously, as if it were no business of the reader
to be allowed to see anything of the work which requires to be done
in the turning of one text into another. The blank space of the “gut-
ter” is a little too blank.37
This blank space is, however, by no means innocent. Here the plasticity
in translation founds on three areas of reflection: did Chattopadhyay have
any objective and existent experience of how snowy and dark an evening
can get in the midst of a New England winter? Was he merely translating
a poetic experience of reading Frost? Does the translation stand to be in-
evitably informed by cultural underpinnings of Chattopadhyay in a kind
of interlinearity? Is translation a speculative event that turned the poem
into a poetic event, a ‘taking place’, where words, choice of expressions,
cultures in conversation, failures of linguistic equivalences and limitations
of understanding as projections of aesthetic-cultural creativity produce a
‘mesh’? Reading Chattopadhyay is both about reading his Frost and the
poem in its aesthetic autonomy; reading Chattopadhyay is reading Frost
without having to read Frost the American poet; reading Chattopadhyay
can often be a cultural opacity, a poem enjoyed within the domains of
aesthetic purity where, all on a sudden, both Chattopadhyay and Frost
pale out of reckoning into a mere ‘poetic’. A poem here transcends itself
in translation; translation, hedgehog like, returns to itself, to thank itself
with a fresh lease of life. Frost’s poem dies into a new life. Frost does not
necessarily need to be recalled or reminded to be born again. It is the ‘in-
stant’ that articulates; the ‘breath’ that is the ‘saying’.
Frost is embedded in Chattopadhyay: a Bengali sensibility pervades
the translation. Frost’s translocationality is built around ‘sense-making’, a
communication with and a reactivation of the source without the source
dominating the textualization. This inability to disambiguate meaning
and determine the right discourse of translation introduces the signifi-
cance of ‘sense’ in Frost’s transnational position among Bengali readers of
his work. Frost stands exposed to four categories of readers: Chattopad-
hyay with his rich (in)competent reading, bilingual readers who have read
Frost as source and Frost in translation, monolingual readers who read this
text without having the competence to read Frost in English, and readers
who know Frost and get to the English poem being abetted by the Bengali
translation. Every word builds in own conceptual world across cultures
and language as much as every sign is not a pointless iteration.
Trans(in)fusion works out the ‘black box’ syndrome. Thomas Beebee
explains that
96 (In)
we are meant to picture an actual generic box, with wires going in
one side (the inputs) and coming out the other (the outputs). The
box represents whatever processing or conversion happens in order to
transform input into output. Its blackness means that we cannot see
inside it. In engineering, then, a black box is a device with a known
function but an unknown method or algorithm.38
There is a black box phenomenon between Frost’s poem and Chattopad-

hyay’s translation: the wiring in and wiring out, the input as against the
output. Something happens in the process which becomes difficult to as-
certain and codify. Beebee explains that the ‘inputs are source-language
texts, outputs are target-language texts, and the strongest relationship in
a translation is held to exist between input and output’.39 However, the
output through Chattopadhyay’s Frost is a process and a progress through
the black box operation that keeps the translation mobilities invisible. The
output is ‘known and verifiable’, but its composition is a product whose
coordinates are not definitively explainable. Loss or gain in translation –
the problematic of ‘originality’ – is the black box effect. The target text
behaves in a way that does not upset the upholders of the source text on
conditions of loyalty and commitment, but, this acceptance strangely ig-
nores the peculiarities and differences that it brings. If the black box gen-
erates invisibility, the invisibility comes to settle on the target text with an
ease and immanence that make it largely acceptable beyond the precinct
of the source language. The input and the output are pairs that cannot stay
asunder; however, their mechanism of communication differs and read-
ability varies. And transgressions arrive in a variety of ways to make them
stand apart and develop their own autonomy and impact.
The trans-movement is interesting here because the original must die
to help the translated to evolve. If Chattopadhyay’s text goes on exile
from the original Frost, in a kind of wandering, erring, we discover the
trans-force: the poetic translation lives on with the original and yet lives
with-out too. Frost’s text attains what Benjamin has called its Nachreife, a
ripeness in expansion and extension and renewal. The trans-movement
here is negotiating the ‘burden of meaning’ both in the original and the
ripe extension of the original. This translation speaks of an after-life in
meaning, dying into a new life: ‘the translation belongs not to the life of
the original, the original is already dead, but the translation belongs to the
afterlife of the original, assuming and confirming the death of the origi-
nal’.40 Chattopadhyay’s text comes with another burden of meaning that
somehow decanonizes Frost and builds its own articulation. Eve Bannet
notes that
what Benjamin is saying in Derrida’s translation is that translation is

“a task (Aufgabe), a mission to which one is destined (always by the
other)” who has auf(ge)geben, “given, dispatched (emission, mission)
and abandoned” his emission and that, as such, translation is “engage-
ment, duty, debt, responsibility”. In Derrida’s translation, the duty of
the translator is the duty of an inheritor, the debt that of a survivor,
and the responsibility that of an agent of survival who is destined, en-
joined, or called to ensure the Iberleben (survival), the Fortleben (living
on) and the Nachreife or “post-maturation” of the original.41
Frost’s poem is already within ‘afterlife’ to find life in Chattopadhyay’s

translated version: a life that trans(in)fusion enjoys celebrating beyond
Frost, a kind of ‘living on’, as Derrida argues, that declares survival (survie)
by going beyond the ‘means of its author’.42 Edmund Chapman explains
it well:
The English word ‘afterlife’ is perhaps misleading. ‘After’-life implies

being temporally secondary to ‘life.’ The words used by Benjamin and
Derrida contain different implications. Benjamin’s Überleben and Der-
rida’s survie might be rendered in English, as calques, as ‘overlife.’ Both
the German and French words use prepositions, über and sur – over,
on, above – rather than a temporal marker, ‘after.’ Überleben and survie
both suggest the sense of following and going beyond ‘life’ that is
also implied by ‘afterlife,’ but the German and French words do not
imply being temporally secondary, as ‘afterlife’ does. These implica-
tions should be remembered when the English word ‘afterlife’ is used
here. It is worth noting the link between the German Überleben and
Übersetzen (translation), which consists of the preposition ‘over’ and
the verb ‘to put.’ Übersetzen as a separable verb (trennbare Verb) means
to ferry something across a river. Like the Latin transferre, whence
the English translate and the French traduire, the German Übersetzen
implies a movement across. Translation is lateral, not vertical, and is
not inherently hierarchical. Translation and afterlife are linked at the
level of etymology by the idea of being above, over, or beyond, but in
a non-hierarchical way. Translation and afterlife imply exceeding, but
not in the sense of achieving a ‘higher status’.43
Chattopadhyay and Frost are in a non-hierarchical relationship where

concepts crossover into a new domain with an afterlife that exceeds each
other without contesting for superiority of expression. Derrida argues that
a text exists in a survival zone between the translatable and the untrans-
latable because complete translatability is as much a death of the text as
perfect untranslatability. So any text is translatable and untranslatable at
the same time generating, in the process, a potency, an experience, which
does not stay confined to the text itself. Trans(in)fusion looks into both
the Derridean untranslatability and the Deleuzian ‘essential translatabil-
ity’ of language. When untranslatability makes language creative, it also
produces the fundamental feature of relentless translation in the realms
98 (In)
of concept. If A does not translate to B, then the translator faced with
‘untranslatability’ chooses alternatives in B or C or D; there is always a
disappointment in translation as perfection eludes the translator. How-
ever, untranslatability is no aporia, as translation, impeded by linguistic
transference, finds a parallel movement in conceptual translation: if words
resist, concepts have their own transferential meaning. So are we in trans-
lation always?44 The text celebrates its afterlife as much as afterlife is what
ensures its celebration. The trans of a text is in being in the afterlife: Frost
has always been in the possibility of emerging through Chattopadhyay.
What trans(in)fusion does with our literary-critical understanding is look-
ing into the ‘becoming other than itself ’ space that every text performa-
tively and compulsively does. Chattopadhyay ‘takes leave’ from Frost in a
Benjamin-like way, producing its life by living out of Frost. Chattopad-
hyay comes only ‘after’ Frost. In fact, all reading is under translation and
in translation: critical thinking is not giving up on a thought but revising
a thought like a text that becomes its own original for many different
versions and attempts at translating it. Translation acknowledges the value
of the original and the instability of the original too. There is a kind of
unstable equilibrium that the original promotes and sustains. Is that the
originality of the original depends on how revisionary and transplantative
it is? Is originality a growth and enlargement of its own existence and
status? Critical thinking builds a transformative negotiation with the orig-
inal which is why all thoughts cannot trigger thinking; some thoughts or
events do which also means that the acts of ‘going back’ and ‘going away’
from the original happen at the same time.
It is difficult to assess and judge (judgment is always an impossibility)
the principle of obligation and responsibility of Chattopadhyay towards
Frost if we are to accept Frost as the original source text. The politics of
the ‘tie’ leaves open the questions of ethics: the extent to which Chatto-
padhyay ‘recognizes’ Frost makes him responsible for the difference and
the reduction of the difference, for raising the possibility and right to re-
spond differently to the source text, the principles of justice and singu-
larity that are bound to language and the patterns of recognition for the
‘foreign’. The aesthetic imaginary forms around the productive blurring of
lines separating the original, derived, translated, literary and host of other
issues. So Frost and Chattopadhyay are connected and not connected at
the same time. Charles Bernstein notes:
Here’s another parasitic pair: reader and poem. The reader’s trans-
ference to the poem is a given in my aesthetic multiverse. Less ac-
knowledged is the poem’s transference to the reader and by analogy
the translated’s transference to the translation. ––But how can the
mute, passive, appropriated “source” be always/already tangled into
its future “target”? Does the carriage haul the horse? Does Trotsky
influence Marx? Is nothing pristine? Are there no originals?
It’s hazier than a hound’s tooth at a Christening.
The moralis that the purpose of verse is to make us realize, “Par ma
foi!.” as Molière’s M. Jourdin exclaims when coming to the opposite
conclusion, that we have been talking in poetry all along, without
realizing it.
If it were not the case that poetry is a purposiveless activity on
holiday.
In other words: To have a revolution in poetry is not to have a
revolution.45
Words translate; concepts transform. Words travel; concepts grow. Words

pick their substitute; concepts are potentially heterotopical. To look into
the complexity further, we may categorize three kinds of readers here,
and three different kinds of transactional poetics: the reader who reads
Frost only in English ; the reader whose prison-house of language is Ben-
gali (here, the Bengali text coming through an understanding of a reader
who also knows the English language) and the reader who is bilingual,
speaking and writing both. Frost is the former, Chattopadhyay is the latter
kind of reader for whom the techne of translation is transaction between
cultures, speaking subjects, different historical moments and milieu. ‘And
in the absence of any “proper” meaning’, writes Bannet,
when every letter is a locus of multiple possible translations and a locus

for multiple extant technes of translation, translation also becomes
something of a Rorschach test. It becomes not only, or not so much,
a matter of what is “there” to be translated in a letter, and more a
matter of what each of us sees or hears in, of, or from a letter, and of
what each of us fails to see or hear. No longer enclosed in the column
of any single tongue, and traveling in a space where multiplicity and
diversity of meaning and of technes always offer, the translator can no
longer claim to be a helpless and purely passive tool of what speaks
through her/him.46
Is confusion at the heart of transcultural conceptual translation? Confu-

sion is significant in the formation of transactional creativity and it spreads
not just through the translator and the readers reading the translated text
but through the text under translation as well. If any text is always already
in translation, then confusion is clearly the noise that sponsors our travels
across languages, metaphors, images, cultures and our backgrounds – the
noise as productive form. A text winks; translation is the victim and the
event of the winking.
What does conceptual translation do with the noise that exists between
Frost and Chattopadhyay? All translation begins in noise – the rhythms
that exist between two languages, words, images, modes of representation,
sound-images, cultures, traditions and processes of creative appropriations.
100 (In)
This is the rhythm of noise. This noise constructs the differentiations
amongst concepts that travel across cultures; each culture leaves ‘remain-
ders’ behind that make one’s engagements with language restless if not
inexhaustible. Frost in Bengali, through Chattopadhyay, is not a definitive
engagement in that Frost can have different translated versions within the
possibilities of the host language. And every incarnation built through
different modes of engagement with the language and its culture speaks
of a distinct word-concept affect and understanding. Translation disowns
neutrality of understanding and in a different axis calls for a ‘decision-
making’ on the part of the translator: choices ranging across images, words
and forms of appropriation. Cultural translation is a choice and is about
making choices within a habit of living. Perhaps, it is here that we encoun-
ter the plasticity of translation-dynamics. Conceptual translation is noisy.
With reference to Rauschberg’s paintings, titled Erased de Kooning, Vidal
Claramonte makes an interesting point:
In the autumn of 1953, Rauschenberg asked Willem De Kooning

to let him erase one of his paintings, and De Kooning agreed. For a
month Rauschenberg tried to completely erase De Kooning’s charcoal
and oil, but he could not: Rauschenberg walks in. No one home. He
paints a new painting over the old one. Is there a talent then to keep
the two, the one above, the one below? What a plight (it’s no more
serious than that) we’re in! It’s a joy in fact to begin over again. In
preparation he erases the De Kooning.47
Is the erasure possible? Or is it that all erasures leave behind the erasable?
Chattopadhyay translates Frost through an erasure of the original, but con-
tinues to haunt the original. . Images and words from Frost come with a
noise that Chattopadhyay, in a whole new context of reception, finds com-
pelling. No communication, however, is possible without noise. It is the
noise inherent in the words, the noise that words generate in their travel
across cultures and the noise that comes to be built in the target language
that make for the rhythm in translation. Chattopadhyay and Frost open up
a new rhythm for themselves where the ‘plot’ of the poem stays unvaried
but the ‘experience’ differs, where ‘equivalences’ are supplanted by the
inevitable rhythm of linguistic and cultural alterity, the specificities and
interiorities that a local culture constructs with the ‘use’ and usage of lan-
guage. The ‘mediation space’ changes.48 Noise among cultures is rhythm;
rhythm is asymmetry and possibility for symmetricization; rhythm across
linguistic cultures lends difference to our patterns of thinking.
Thinking Within
How does one read literature without translation? How can literature form
rather, transform without cultural translation? Can there be literature
without conceptual translation, experiencing and performing literature
with conceptual reinscription and reauthored premises of understanding?
How does that influence the way we understand ‘world literature’ or re-
vise our categories of understanding this rubric? David Damrosch argues
that ‘works become world literature when they gain on balance in trans-
lation, stylistic losses offset by an expansion in depth as they increase their
range’.49 So what kind of a loss (caught in the complexity of expansion and
increase) are we talking about? Loss comes from the untranslatability, con-
ceptual contamination, meaning deficit and ex-scription. What poetics of
loss does Chattopadhyay produce? Talking about the importance of each
word in literary translation, Nicholas Harrison observes
The uncertainty of intended meaning, and of imagined reference, and

the proliferation of possibilities of interpretation mean there is no firm
basis on which to correct, clarify, or improve the text. An aesthetic
criterion has started to emerge here: as readers, and more especially as
literary critics and teachers, if we have this idea of literature in mind,
we assume that every word, at least in the best texts, bears scrutiny,
and that every word was chosen for a good reason — or, to be more
precise once again about our relation to a projected literary author-
figure, could have been chosen for a good reason; and as we read, and
as we study the text closely, good literary writing will tend to reinforce
that assumption, whereas poor literary or would-be literary writing
will undermine it. Prior to any specificities of form and beauties of
language, in other words, is a fundamental convention governing
“reading as literature”, that means that not just in poetry but in liter-
ature in general, every word matters, in all its possible facets. Herein
lies another way of explaining why the task of the literary translator is
not just difficult but in some meaningful sense impossible.50
Words trouble and with it come concepts that trouble us even more. In
fact, words loaded with concepts travel with rewriting and rethinking.
Rewriting in translation does not come from careless disregard to the
context and the socio-cultural conditions that constitute a text’s existence.
The aesthetic imaginary forms around the nuances that translation im-
ports through identification, congruence, conceptual efficacy and affect,
border politics, inherited knowledge and the serious plexus of nationalist
background. Every translation of the original varies as much as every con-
cept translated across cultures varies. The complexity arises at two levels
where, on one hand, each translator from the same cultural background
will translate the parent text differently but the concept translated from
the original will more or less remain the same. This creates a quaint crisis.
Is understanding the foreign, our engagement with the extra-cultural, can
be different too? How does that problematise the exteriority that trans-
lation builds? Conceptual translation builds the politics of exteriority
102 (In)
and imports ‘suspension’ of understanding, rewriting, substantialization,
linguistic resistance and cultural holes of ambiguity. The determination of
appropriateness is countertexted by an indeterminacy, a revisionism and a
creative urgency.
For Heidegger, translation is tradition, Überlieferung, in the ‘sense of
handing-down’ (not just what is handed down, say, in the sense of the
‘content’ of tradition, but the handing-down itself, that by which the
‘content’ of tradition gets handed down from one epoch to another). As
such, translation ‘belongs to the innermost movement of history’.51 There
is a transformation and movement in thought, concept and words going
from English to Bengali: somewhere a groundlessness in transition is built
that cannot be wholly cultural or appropriative or merely communicative.
This is the space where the ‘ungrounding’ takes place too. Chattopadhyay
and his poem enter into the linguistic domain of English and allow a silent
progression of history of words, their meaning, the difficulty of under-
standing and a flow and flux that is continually challenged by errancy. It
is here that an engagement with a linguistic space generates ‘thinking’:
thinking back into the language that one wants to translate into. This
‘thinking back’ is what is tantamount to translating an alternative version
of the original (here it is English) into one’s own language domain (here
Bengali). Heidegger sees thinking as itself a ‘translating’ – it is about the
transfigurative potential and dimensions of thinking. Translation becomes
a play: Frost plays into Chattopadhyay as much as Bengali as a language
and a cultural thought process plays into English as a tradition and move-
ment of history.
Parvis Emad points out that there
is more to translation than just a transfer of words from one language

to another. To initiate the move in such a transfer is to face the differ-
ence between languages as the foreignness that rules between them.
By forcing us to see the foreignness and unfamiliarity of the languages
under translation, the activity of translation clarifies our relationship
to our own language. Thus, rather than serving as a means for trans-
porting “meanings” across the so-called language barrier, translation
invites us to return to our own language. When we, in translation,
turn back from the foreignness of another language, we discover an-
other translation, one that occurs within our own language.52
Chattopadhyay’s Bengali makes its own journey within a language –

returning to Bengali, as it were, to discover the right choice of words,
concepts and images. Conceptual translation is not only about going across
and within but working back. What made Chattopadhyay choose queer as
mawja pabey? He had an array of words to choose from but chose the one
that conceptually connected with him the most, leaving it open for con-
tradiction and difference. What makes Chattopadhyay render – ‘The only
other sound’s the sweep/Of easy wind and downy flake’ – into ‘Kintu,
tar cheye modhur dhonibhawra/Batash shawhojia, bidhur bonophool’.
‘Downy flake’ does not translate as ‘bidhur bonophool’, but, in a tran-
screation and aesthetic nuancing, he calls it so. In fact, this demonstrates
how foreignness does not exist merely between the language that Frost
and Chattopadhyay use. Foreignness can be intralingual as well, work-
ing between different strands of linguistic choices within the overarching
Bengali. Words struggle to pass the fitness test in correspondence with
the English word under translation. This is where Bengali as a language
returns to itself to choose the fittest among the seeming competitors (both
in words and concepts) – an encounter with foreignness at the root of
language’s unfolding. To translate is about translating the entire literary
tradition every single time. This is another negotiation with the ‘foreign’:
the wrestle and writhing.53
It is here that the issue of ‘listening’ (erhören; yielding to) informs the
Chattopadhyay-Frost interface. Frank Schalow’s argument of bringing
Heidegger’s ‘attunement’ to our understanding of translation can be a
good point to further my arguments. Transnationalizing Frost, and the
translinguation of Frost, truly invites a ‘thinking’ in both content and
form. It is argued that
the task of translation occurs in closest proximity to the claim of being.

And the nearness of this proximity defines the hermeneutic situated-
ness of translation in a twofold respect, first, as a task preoriented by
the question of all questions, that is, “die Seinsfrage,” and, secondly, as
preoriented toward the same receptivity to being as thinking is, that is,
as a yielding response via an “attunement” to the creative power of the
word. As “interlingual,”translation is an endeavor that is intrinsically
responsive, an act of “reciprocation,” an “attuned” comportment. In
this way, interlingual translation occurs in tandem with thought by
heeding the same attunement, which acclimates the latter to the claim
of being and its appearance in accord with the tonality of the word.54
Attunement works with the existence and possibility of dialogue that

precedes all acts of translation. Every word put on the paper translates:
building the possibility of being linguistically interpreted differently with
inevitable inflections of culture and tradition; it is the alethic possibility
of thinking that the very presence of the word generates and the dialogue
that discloses on us with any linguistic imprint. Frost, I suggest, was al-
ready occupying a transnational space before we thought he can be trans-
nationalized. Translational fine-tuning is attunement nonetheless.
Working through Heidegger, we can argue that no translator is thrown
into absolute indeterminacy for the negotiations in language, signs and
concepts correspond with what the text shelters in its noisy silence.
Chattopadhyay’s knowledge of the original in English does not discount
104 (In)
submission to his immediate context of existence. His embeddedness
within a particular culture and thought-tradition influences the way he
sees Frost’s other-language existence. Here the materiality and culture of
words matter. Does Chattopadhyay’s reading of Frost precede his under-
standing of culture and his own understandings of cultural and linguistic
backgrounds? Chattopadhyay’s understanding of English is different from
Frost’s; his ‘thrownness’ into English determines his hermeneutic foothold
that brings culture, society, background and language to come into an
inevitably distinct ensemble. Chattopadhyay responds to Frost’s English
through his ‘ownmost’ provision of English language; he yields to Frost’s
language through the mandate and availability of his very own, disclosing
a hermeneutic responsibility – the responsibility that a non-native under-
standing of English can generate. This emphasizes how Chattopadhyay is
predisposed towards Frost’s English through conditions that he could not
have overcome or overtaken. There is the event of ‘turning’: Chattopad-
hyay’s knowledge of English reads English as used by Frost, and then the
translation into Bengali happens in the negotiations that the understand-
ing of languages brings. This is the turning of language that again brings
Chattopadhyay’s understanding of Bengali into play with Bengali as a lan-
guage with its own resources and possibilities, history and attunement.
Translation is turning with and in language, resulting in an unfamiliar-
ity of expression where in the words of Meschonnic, the ‘poem is lost’ for
the poem was meant to be lost once it became a poem. This is moment of
creative disjuncture where the ‘monotonous reign of the familiar’ disrupts
‘in order that the ring of the unfamiliar can resound’. This facilitates ‘an
acclimation to the birth of new meanings’; a fresh circulation
rather than the passive acceptance of what is already given in its fa-
miliar usages. What, qualifies as meaningful is no longer dominated
by a horizon of presence, but instead new meanings spring from the
absence of what is unsaid, from the silent reverberations of the ab-
ground. In this regard, the tonality is not the exercise of auditory
sense directed at what is audible in the present. Rather, the “intone-
ment” is the reverberating-gathering out of the future, of what has
been held in reserve in the ancestry of the words in the past, in order
that their meanings may be heard anew in the present.55
Negotiations are both intralingual and interlingual; conceptual translation

builds its own intrinsic and intricate layering across and within languages
and cultures. Transnationalizing and transnotionizing Frost, and translin-
guation of Frost, truly invites a ‘thinking’ in content, concept and form.
Frost and his poem think; Chattopadhyay thinks and thinks Frost out;
the Bengali poem thinks beyond Frost and Chattopadhyay; the ‘poetic’
becomes the ‘thinking’. Occupancy in thoughts and concepts precedes us;
trans-thinking ‘unthinks’ thought and demonstrates the continuities in
the ‘blank’ interruptions that seemingly exist between linguistic domains
and cultures and concepts. Conceptual translation, therefore, is never
without its own moments of ‘presencing’ and attunement.
Notes
1 Jacques Derrida, Monolingualism of the Other: Or the Prosthesis of Origin (Stan-
ford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998), 7.
2 Henri Meschonnic, Ethics and Politics of Translating (trans. and ed.) Pier-Pascale
Boulanger (Amsterdam and Philadelphia, PA: John Benjamins Publishing
Company, 2007), 138.
3 Marjorie Perloff, J. Hillis Miller, Charles Bernstein & Ranjan Ghosh, ‘The
CounterText Conversation: Thinking Literature …’ CounterText, Vol. 3, No.
3 (2017), 271–300.
4 Ibid., 288.
5 Ibid., 289.
6 John Sallis, On Translation (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002), 23.
7 Pheng Cheah, ‘What Is a World? On World Literature as World-Making
Activity’ Daedalus, Vol. 137, No. 3 (Summer 2008), 26–38.
8 Duncan Large, ‘Nietzsche and/in/on Translation’ Journal of Nietzsche Studies,
Vol. 43, No. 1 (Spring 2012), 61.
9 Ibid.
10 Sallis, On Translation, 71.
11 Ibid.
12 Subhas Dasgupta, ‘Tagore’s Concept of Translation: A Critical Study’ Indian
Literature, Vol. 56, No. 3 (269) (May/June 2012), 135–36.
13 See Krishna Dutta & Andrew Robinson (eds.), Selected Letters of Rabindranath
Tagore (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 162.
14 See Ana Gargatagli and Juan Gabriel López Guix, ‘Ficciones y teorías en la
traducción: Jorge Luis Borges’ Livivs, Vol. 1 (2004), 57–67; see David Bellos,
Is That a Fish in Your Ear? Translation and the Meaning of Everything (London:
Penguin, 2011).
15 Sakti Chattopadhyay, Poddyo Shomogro (Collected Poems) Vol. 2 (Kolkata:
Ananda Publishers, 2012), 222.
16 See James Risser, ‘Language and the Poetic Word in Gadamer’s Hermeneu-
tics’ in Philosophy and Poetry: Continental Perspectives (ed.) Ranjan Ghosh (New
York: Columbia University Press, 2019), 84–96.
17 See David Bleich, The Materiality of Language: Gender, Politics and the University
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013), 163.
18 Paul Ricoeur, On Translation (trans.) Eileen Brennan (London: Routledge,
2004), xvi.
19 Ibid.
21 Lawrence K. Schmidt (ed.), Language and Linguisticality in Gadamer’s Hermeneu-
tics (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2000), 69.
22 Jane Gallop, ‘The Translation of Deconstruction’ Qui Parle, Vol. 8, No. 1
(Fall/Winter 1994), 47.
23 See José María Rodríguez García, ‘Introduction: Literary into Cultural
Translation’ Diacritics, Vol. 34, No. 3/4 (Autumn–Winter 2004), 2–30.
24 Ibid.
25 Octavio Paz, ‘Translation: Literature and Letters’ (trans.) Irene del Corral in
An Anthology of Essays from Dryden to Derrida (eds.) John Biguenet and Rainer
Schulte (Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, 1992), 158.
106 (In)

Companion to Comparative Literature (eds.) A. Behdad and D. Thomas (London:
Wiley-Blackwell, 2011), 490–506.
50 Nicholas Harrison, ‘World Literature: What Gets Lost in Translation?’ Journal
of Commonwealth Literature, Vol. 49, No. 3 (2014), 411–26.
52 Parvis Emad, ‘Thinking More Deeply into the Question of Translation:
Essential Translation and the Unfolding of Language’ in Reading Heidegger:
Commemorations (ed.) John Sallis (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
1993), 326.
53 Marko Pajevic, ‘Translation and Poetic Thinking’ German Life and Letters,
Vol. 67, No. 1 ( January 2014), 6–21.
54 Frank Schalow, ‘Attunement and Translation’ in Translation, and the Task of
Thinking: Essays in Honor of Parvis Emad (ed.) F. Schalow (Dordrecht: Springer,
2011), 292.
55 Meschonnic, Ethics and Politics of Translating, 138.
Fusion
4 ‘You Cannot Value
Him Alone’1
Tradition is not the dead hand of the past but rather the hand of the
gardener, which nourishes and elicits tendencies of judgment which
would otherwise not be strong enough to emerge on their own. In this
respect tradition is an encouragement to incipient individuality rather
than its enemy. It is a stimulant to moral judgment and self-d iscipline
rather than an opiate.2
All inheritance brought by time and circumstances are not reworkable for
certain paradigms of our ethical living and thinking demand and inhere in
some form of unchangeability. But is tradition about the dead alone, about
the unprogressive, the tired and inflexible paradigms of repetitive living?
Is this the modern mentalite of being anti-traditional?3 Simon Bronner
quite rightly sees in tradition a ‘conceptual softness’:
given to emotional usage, tradition can appear imprecise, inconsistent,

and infuriatingly elusive. At the same time, therein lies its signifi-
cance, for it offers something essential in the human condition. Tra-
dition is a term we all hear and use, even if it defies crisp definition.4
If we analyse the complicated rapport between culture and tradition, we

are somehow tempted to see what makes our culture of thinking and
what makes us ‘traditional’. Whether with Marx or Freud or Max Weber,
tradition is considered as a dead lump that needs to be transcended – an
‘unreflective habit’ – something that impedes progression by shouting out
from the dead. Tradition promotes an unquestioning cycle of repetition,
an encrustation that we do not consciously seek to alter. But if tradition is
seen to declare a continuity with the past, the fact of being ‘traditional’ is
achieved through ‘critical thinking’: what comes home is the realization
that tradition conceals spaces for innovative introjections and zones of re-
figuration. This is made possible through our reconceptualization of the
social, political and other disciplinary forces. Traditions, therefore, offer
themselves to be invented, manipulated and rethought. They refuse to stay
as mere voices from the past that reaffirm their unchangeability.
112 Fusion
It is interesting to follow Josef Pieper here:
The “trans” which inheres in tradition and which is so clearly artic-

ulated in the verb “transmettre” with which the French language in-
dicates the action associated with tradition – this “trans” appears to
indicate three places: first, the place from which something is taken to
be transmitted; secondly, the place to which it is brought; thirdly, the
place where the transmitter happens to be. To “transport” something
certainly does not mean merely to convey something to a place but
rather to convey something from one place, at which the conveyor
need not be located, to another place. Strictly speaking, by an act of
tradition, of traditio, only that form of communication is meant in
which something is made known that was taken from somewhere else.5
This ‘passing on’ is meant to be ‘handed out’ and delivered to be r eceived

but the complexities of communication or transmission owe to the re-
ceiver, the place, the medium, the obligation, the imagination, the pow-
ers of acceptance (this is not ‘taking note of ’, as Pieper points out) and
revision. Receiving tradition must entertain space for staying outside
tradition. Our historicalities impart a fresh consciousness as to how we
accept, adjust, acquire and alter tradition. It is in such revision and read-
judication of tradition that we find tradition as a sort of disappearance:
tradition vanishes to emerge in the present as a fresh order of living and
thinking.
Some see tradition as an ‘assigned meaning’6. For some, it is a symbolic
activity; for others, it comes through as anti-modern – ‘tradition is the di-
ametric opposite of presentist and dynamic modernity’. The Weberian ar-
gument will consider tradition as bereft of reflectivity and a rational mode
of routinization. It is ‘a concept to think with, not to think about’.7 S. N.
Eisenstadt sees tradition and innovation in an interesting relationship: for
him, tradition is creativity – ‘ the most enduring element in the collective
social and cultural construction of reality’.8 Tradition and m odernity –
9
what we know as ‘co-existence’ theory – work into and against each
other. Most often they transform each other. Edward Shils dwells on this
conceptual and performative tension. For Shils, experienced sentiment,
‘state of sensation at a given moment’, rational judgment, an action, visual
perception, a prayer, a scientific proposition, a process of industrial pro-
duction, an act of exercise of authority are not ‘tradition’. He argues,
none of these ideas is a tradition. None of these ideas is a tradition.

None of them in itself is a tradition. But all of them can in various ways
be transmitted as traditions; they can become traditions. They nearly
always occur in forms affected or determined in varying degrees by
tradition. They recur because they are carried as traditions which are
‘You Cannot Value Him Alone’ 113
reenacted. The reenactment is not the tradition – the tradition is the
pattern which guides the reenactment.10
Tradition comes both with adaptation and reenactment. This brings us to

dwell on the issue of ‘transmission’. It is around this act or performance of
transmission that trans(in)fusion is most interested in. Traditum as ‘handed
down’ can be oral, written, constructed, rationalized, physical and cul-
tural. Often this flow – flowing down and across – is silent and anony-
mous and non-denotative. The transmission is reenactment, assimilation,
encoding, imagination and normative – all put together in a complicated
process of ‘handing down’. Shils argues further that
being handed down does not logically entail any normative, manda-
tory proposition. The presence of something from the past does not
entail any explicit expectation that it should be accepted, appreciated,
reenacted, or otherwise assimilated. Tradition – that which is handed
down – includes material objects, beliefs about all sorts of things, images
of persons and events, practices and institutions. It includes buildings,
monuments, landscapes, sculptures, paintings, books, tools, machines.
It includes all that a society of a given time possesses and which already
existed when its present possessors came upon it and which is not solely
the product of physical processes in the external world or exclusively
the result of ecological and physiological necessity.11
Tradition is thinking; it is mostly about attachment that is both reasonable

and intangible – a direct association and the understanding of the past as
it unfolds and comes as inherited. It is an ‘associative past’ which speaks
more about ‘pastness’ and spots of time than anything else. Transmission
is past and pastness; it is the tangibility of following one’s predecessors and
their thinking – the filiative. It is also what ‘retires’ into or ‘goes away’
into the stream of existence and thought – the affiliative, the amateurism.
What comes close to my concerns here is the transition of a literary text as
it journeys across traditions. Shils interprets it well:
The interpretation of the text does not remain the same equally among
all the recipients at a given time or among the recipients who succeed
each other in time A rule of conduct, explicitly articulated or implied
in a pattern of conduct, or a belief about the soul, or a philosophical
idea about the common good does not remain identical through its
career of transmissions over generations. An artistic style does not re-
main the same over its transmissions even though each of the particu-
lar paintings or statues in which it has been embodied does remain the
same. Constellations of symbols, clusters of images, are received and
modified. They change in the process of transmission as interpretations
114 Fusion
are made of the tradition presented; they change also while they are
in the possession of their recipients. This chain of transmitted variants
of a tradition is also called a tradition, as in the ‘Platonic tradition’ or
the ‘Kantian tradition’. As a temporal chain, a tradition is a sequence
of variations on received and transmitted themes.12
Tradition constellates. It challenges the ‘present’: it patternizes the accepted

and reified, provokes thinking imaginatively through the ‘received’. How-
ever, trans(in)fusion takes issue with Edward Shils’s idea of tradition on
the note of insufficient problematization of the principle of transmission.
Broadly speaking for Shils
the idea of tradition in general refers to any “precipitate” or “filament”

of past practice or past belief that is transmitted (“handed down”) by a
parent, teacher, or authority, and which is learnt and reenacted (or re-
thought) by agents through at least three consecutive “generations”.13
Although the issue of reenactment is mentioned, what it fails to spell out

are the complications of such acts. It does not explain sufficiently well
the encompassive and deeply subtle patterns of incorporation and reen-
actments that go into the formation of the tradition. Jacobs explains that
traditions for Shils
may have almost any kind of content, his examples including

languages, the skills of linguistic expression, physical artifacts
(buildings, tools and machines, books), styles of artifacts (architec-
tural designs), ideas-in-practice (liberalism and other ideologies),
images of people and of past happenings, modes of authority, and
works of art.14
However, tradition is an engagement with the past and the present in

deeply complicated ways that are normative, substantive, non-substantive
and probative. Making distinctions between what counts as tradition and
what cannot be claimed so (T. S. Eliot and Shils are both guilty of making
such discriminations) impair the delicacy and depth of the transmission
process. Shils believes that for tradition to persist it has to work: for Eliot,
tradition has to labour to function as tradition. But both the terms are
threshold concepts which circumscribe a particular kind of understanding
and discourage reenactments of a separate order. Thinking tradition is a
rationalization of understanding, an emancipation of ideas, matrices of
desire, the potency of community thinking and a critique of the public
sphere. Tradition is living – the existing – that makes the present an expe-
rience: this is an experience that must be put under interrogation without
being dismissive. Although Shils does not submit to all forms of rigid-
ity, yet his creative understanding of tradition is not capacious enough
to hold the modern-day complications of thinking, understanding and
experiences.
Tradition embeds in both the hermeneutics of suspicion and the herme-
neutics of faith. Both the ‘recollection and retrieval and interpretation as
unmasking or emancipation from mental bondage’, as Gerald Bruns ar-
gues.15 What happens to the past and the dead? Is reliving tradition a kind
of resurrection of the dead, speaking from the past, and past-soundings?
Bruns analyses Petrarch’s observations on quotation to underscore the
complicated axis of reading, remembering and transmission. Tradition
is a form of quotation where living in the present is quoting moments
from the past. Quotation mediates between world present and world past,
the world we live and the world from which our living keeps a distance.
Tradition ‘transfers’ quotations from a continuity that we understand as
inheritance; it expects us to be attentive to them in order to negotiate a di-
alogue between what we quote and what we write and do independently.
Quotation is the mediatory space between the self and the other. Bruns
explains that the dead is not dead at all:
they do not require to be disinterred and reanimated; rather it is the

other way around: it is we who require to be unearthed from the in-
terment of the present. The dead live in their texts, which constitute
an ongoing discourse in which one’s own writing can participate.
One does not insert quotations into one’s own text; rather, quotation
is a mode of inserting one’s own text into the discourse of the other,
that is, into that distant and alien text which no longer makes sense to
us, which is inscribed in a language we no longer understand, which
belongs to a world from which we are in endless exile, and which
everyone around us regards as a world well lost.16
Tradition is hermeneutical and committed to a conversation with change

and conflation. It is a break in thought: it makes sense of things that stopped
speaking to us. Petrarch’s famous letter to Boccaccio explains it well:
I have read Vergil, Horace, Livy, Cicero, not once but a thousand
times, not hastily but in repose, and I have pondered them with all the
powers of my mind. I ate in the morning what I would digest in the
evening; I swallowed as a boy what I would ruminate upon as a man.
These writings I have so thoroughly absorbed and fixed, not only in
my memory but in my very marrow, these have become so much a
part of myself, that even though I should never read them again they
would cling in my spirit, deeprooted in its inmost recesses. But mean-
while I may well forget the author, since by long usage and possession
I may adopt them and regard them as my own, and, bewildered by
their mass, I may forget whose they are and even that they are others’
work. That is what I was saying, that sometimes the most familiar
116 Fusion
things deceive us the most. They recur perhaps to memory, in their
wonted way, when the mind is busied and concentrated on something
else, and they seem to be not merely one’s own thoughts but, remark-
ably indeed, actually new and original.17
Horizons of Habit
Is the constitutive nature of tradition conflictual and transformative? Does
it not provoke us to carefully assess our ‘ability to acquire new traditions,
which are originally alien to us, our ability to translate traditions, and
the nature of the eventual mutual influence, correspondence, or conflict
between traditions’?18 The space that trans(in)fusion promotes is never
without our historically conditioned ways of existence and consciousness.
Does this consciousness bring its own ‘prejudice’, a kind of prejudgment?
No doubt it does, but not without a ‘prejudice against a prejudice’, which
leads us to investigate and experience historical otherity or otherness. Ga-
damer’s notion of the prejudice becomes a trigger for the trans(in)fusion-
ist traversing across traditions and cultures. Trans(in)infusion extends the
Gadamerian position; it radicalizes the way Gadamer looks at authority,
prejudice and reason. If history produces prejudiced knowledge, then it
certainly demands scrutiny and understanding as to its legitimacy and
sources. Prejudice, as Descartes shows from the perspective of the Enlight-
enment, can arise from ‘over-hastiness’ and reliance upon ‘authority’.19
Over-hastiness collapses into error as reason is compromised; allegiance to
authority does not allow the use of reason at all. Gadamer argues that ‘it
is constantly necessary to guard against overhastily assimilating the past to
our own expectations of meaning. Only then can we listen to the past in
a way that permits it to make its own meaning heard’.20 These configura-
tions of ‘prejudice’ make no constructive move for a productive approach
to tradition. Although all approaches to understanding and all historical
conditions are informed by prejudice – trans(in)fusion has no quarrel with
this proposition – it is difficult to see how one combines reason, authority,
experiment and judgment.
The prejudice discontinues the prevalent and regnant prejudicial modes
of understanding and thinking. This rescues tradition by embracing a differ-
ent horizon one which is about watching and exploring history differently
from what ‘prejudice as continuity’ would allow. Tradition, as Richard
Palmer argues, ‘is not over against us but something in which we stand and
through which we exist; for the most part it is so transparent a medium
that it is invisible to us— as invisible as water to a fish’.21 It is this ‘invisible’
which cultivates the relentless prejudice, and also the prejudice that ques-
tions such an existence. Tradition makes the fish-as-interpreters aware of
the water (the historical conditionalities) and, again, unaware of the me-
dium (the persistence of history as a disappearance of history) in the conti-
nuity of its undisturbed existence. Tradition in thinking is grappling with
‘fore-structure’ and projective structures as a revision of extant prejudices, a
thoughtful redoing of them and consequent meaning-generation. Trans(in)
fusion is not about a flamboyant radicality where prejudgments are targeted
to be dismantled for any kind of meaning-production; it believes in the
impossibility of being dismissive about pre-understanding for all trans(in)
fusionist premises are built through both our subjective transgressive self
and the historical self that is a continuity from the past. This is the ‘hori-
zon’ where tradition is never without judgment, historicity, rationality,
subjectivity and experiment. Michael Pickering observes that
experience requires creative disillusionment, a running counter to

expectation, for its realization. What we learn from experience is our
finitude, our historicality, the limits of the cultural horizons in which
we move. It is this which Gadamer conceives of as effective historical
consciousness in which the past is brought into an open interactive
relation with the process of interpreting and understanding it. Her-
meneutic risk involves calling into question that which we bring to
understanding in order to hear the question which historical horizons
call into being.22
Trans(in)fusion has a complicated relationship with ‘past’; it ‘transposes’

ourselves, revising our prejudices and moving us prejudicially – trans(in)
fusion as a play of prejudices.
Pickering further notes that if the horizon is
a way of figuring history, it should perhaps be emphasized that this

cannot be taken as implying that it represents a point of departure
from something other than that which is thus figured, some transpar-
ent factuality of the past that can be regained when the conception of
a historical horizon is abandoned, or that can be attained in the first
place through some unadorned, ‘neutral’ form of writing.23
It is no denying Gadamer that tradition is change and preservation. A

change of thinking brought through a change in tradition cannot fail to
observe how the past both consciously and unconsciously travels and seeps
into the present. Change is both changing what existed and the assimila-
tion and acceptance of the unchanging – the permanent past making itself
a part of the present through affirmation and cultivation. This is where the
‘fusion’ comes, and trans(in)fusion comes invested in ‘transmission’ as an
active principle. When Habermas considers that the test of rationality of a
tradition is the rejection of it, he emphasizes the notion of critical reflec-
tion that makes tradition work on its limits: the Heideggerean ‘thrown-
ness’ is always about urging a way out of its inauthenticities. Being thrown
into a world does not come with our choice as much as a fore-structure
that conditions our being in the world is beyond our historical reckoning.
118 Fusion
Paul Ricoeur’s critique of Jürgen Habermas’s hostility towards tradition
is intriguing. He takes issue with Habermas about considering tradition as
a mere ‘unreflective endorsement of the past’:
hermeneutics and critique are not opposed. On the contrary, the

hermeneutics of tradition can (and indeed must) contain a critical mo-
ment. To participate in a tradition is not to accept the past passively,
but to appropriate it critically. Just as the critique of ideology needs
hermeneutics, hermeneutics needs critique.24
Belonging to a tradition is both embeddedness and distanciation. Ricoeur

considers belonging as simultaneous with the ‘suspension’ of our ties with
tradition. We think about and through the tradition: we also learn to
think without. We labour to be ‘traditional’; we distanciate and herme-
neuticize to establish tradition. Staying in tradition is living with other
traditions. Among Ricoeur’s concepts – like traditionally, traditions
and tradition – traditionality is the way ‘in which we are connected to
the past. It concerns how we are shaped by history, how our thought
is made possible by the past’.25 This speaks of enormous content as we
continue to receive it – Ricoeur calls it ‘transcendental’. Trans(in)fusion
acknowledges such an understanding of tradition – the materiality and
fore-meanings – but encourages intercepting its linearity with pathways
and detours that construct ‘traditions’ out of tradition. Piercey observes
that for Ricoeur
thinking in the mode of tradition is similar to performing a mathe-

matical function. A function has variables – x’s and j’s that must be as-
signed values. But the function does not specify which values are to be
plugged into it. Similarly, we depend on tradition in much the same
way that a function depends on the values that can be assigned to its
variables. Both are purely formal mechanisms that need content to be
fed to them from outside. And these contents are essentially plural.26
Tradition moves; it transgresses and trespasses. Tradition, Ricoeur ar-

gues, ‘signifies that the temporal distance separating us from the past is
not a dead interval but a transmission that is generative of meaning. Be-
fore being an inert deposit, tradition is an operation that can only make
sense dialectically through the exchange between the interpreted past
and the interpreting present’.27 However, this activity is a complicated
process of movement that involves interpretation, decision, appropri-
ateness, dialecticality and compulsive inheritance. Tradition for me is
trans-habit.

Trans-habit within the ‘democracy of the dead’28 shows that ‘mean-
ingful communication’ across cultures does not have to be a matter of
common denominators and agreed-upon terms. In trying to close in on
horizons, trans-habit seeks ‘the way and mechanism to overcome the blin-
kered, absolutist, nonpluralist relativism that incommensurability legiti-
mizes’. Haun Saussy, while critiquing the idea of trans-habit, notes that the
habit of assuming the identity between the modern Western norm and
the universal cannot really be broken by protesting ethnocentrism, or
by instituting committees for the reform of critical vocabulary; it is bro-
ken by the “trans-habit” of doing the opposite thing, of not hesitating
a moment before elucidating Sidney’s poetics with takhyil, iltidhadh and
sha’ara. Readers may cry out, “But these are barbarous and unkempt
terms never introduced to us before, blank cheques drawn on mysteri-
ous banks!” ….The question trans-habit asks is, after all, whether it is
possible for us to go beyond the horizon of our known and accepted
references, whether we are free to change ourselves. This might be the
core question of liberal democracy, but one unspoken and untheorised
by those who take the person as the basis and center of rights, duties and
will. Trans-habit has to do rather with the constitution and reconstitu-
tion of persons in circuits of behavior (including linguistic behavior). Its
“inevitable momentum” is about changing the terms of knowledge.29
Tradition is habit and habit-shedding where the repetition is the possibil-

ity for a new habit. The repetitiveness of habit and consciousness against
being dulled by its iterative torpor can result in moral virtues and a sep-
arate vein of emotion; habit, in its seriality, can also be physiological in
nature and origin. Habit insensitivizes us to its own operations; we are
habituated into losing our consciousness of habit. The authority of habit
deauthorizes us. But trans-habit is a kind of ‘staging’ from establishment
to ‘projection’. Trans-habit is a complicated game of authority positions:
changing the baton of power, intent, will and creativity. It produces the
power and dynamics of ‘listening’. Tradition can trick us into sedateness
and passivity, seduce us into the comfort of familiarity, concealing its own
inbuilt impatience and restive labyrinth. Trans-habit ‘challenges our cus-
toms of thinking and thought, leaving inherited habitual attitude under
scrutiny. This is not to discredit all forms of thought and knowledge that
habits establish and generate’.30 As with prejudices, so with horizons, tra-
dition is trans-habitual in its ways and investments. An interruption in the
continuity of habit becomes an inception in thought. Habit thinks when
habit is denied. Ruptures in habits do not simply come from rational in-
terrogation into the legitimacy and validity of its continuity; they come
from impulses too – the sudden power to break free from routine codes
of acts and thoughts, a release of energy that solicits imagination and in-
dulgences. Trans-habit is the provocation to stop being deceived by the
beauty of customs and mores and being confronted instead by the sublime
of self-exceeding that reconsiders our threshold factors of existence. This
generates ‘active listening’; tradition is active listening.
120 Fusion
Trans-plastic-habit sees tradition as entanglement – a state that has an
integral DNA of understanding mapped into it, but not without a dif-
ferential dwelling that is epigenetic in nature. Tradition cannot survive
without sequences and systems of thinking; but the differentiation and
re-contextualizations with time and the changes in material-social mi-
lieu matter in its formation as well. Trans-plastic-habit forms and has the
capacity to receive and give form. But it can mean much more than this.
Following on Catherine Malabou, we see that
plasticity is also the capacity to annihilate the very form it is able to

receive or create. We should not forget that plastique, from which we
get the words Plastiquage and plastiquer, is an explosive substance made
of nitroglycerine and nitrocellulose, capable of causing violent explo-
sions. We thus note that plasticity is situated between two extremes:
on the one side the sensible image of taking form (sculpture or plastic
objects), and on the other side that of the annihilation of all form
(explosion).31
Trans-plastic-habits achieve the serious complexity of form-ability in that

it gives, sculpts, gestaltizes, imbibes, fractalizes, explodes, experiments and
maintains form – all at the same time working through different contexts
and specificities of correspondences. It has flexibility but works on the
principle of plasticity because, as Malabou notes,
to be flexible is to receive a form or impression, to be able to fold

oneself, to take the fold, not to give it. To be docile, to not explode.
Indeed, what flexibility lacks is the resource of giving form, the power
to create, to invent or even to erase an impression, the power to style.
Flexibility is plasticity is minus its genius.32
Trans(in)fusion is a system and is not without a method. With its inher-

ent plasticity, trans(in)fusion keeps working at the limits always. I see the
highest activity to mobilize and transform at the limits of thinking and
doing. Limits hide possibilities, both the poros and aporos, and help us to
rethink connection among thoughts and things – the possible (ex)change.
Limit is the libido as desire and restraint; trans(in)fusion libidinizes but
not without the limit-psychosis. It interrupts itself to develop the possi-
bilities of production and construction. Trans-plastic-habit is integral to
any trans(in)fusionist desire and it is through tradition that form and time
are brought into a deep complexity. Not all is plastic in the sense of get-
ting dissolved and becoming something in an uninterrupted process of
metamorphosis. The potential within such a trans(in)fusionist imaginary is
plastic without being a relentless plasticity; plastic here is closely in conflict
with its own limits. Limits are grounds of thinking, and yet limits are of-
ten assumed as groundless and are singularities that are genetic by nature.
Limits declare aporias without losing their awareness of plasticity. So the
struggle continues at the limits – articulation is the ‘potential perhaps’
at the limits of our thinking and understanding. I call this the push-pull
matrix where a heavy door in an apartment if instructed with a tag saying
‘push’ from outside becomes ‘pull’ from inside. It changes as the tagged
instruction from the other side changes. However, the hardness of the
instruction is often compromised with people pulling or pushing the door
from both sides – in and out with misjudgment, in careless indulgence and
indifference to instruction. The limits of thinking are similar points and
potentials of experience in law, freedom and step-carelessness. Limits end
meaning as much as they challenge the settlement in ending – the detran-
scendentalization of the limit. Limits have their own reason to end and
suspect the end too. Tradition is limit; it limitizes and tries to understand
many of its limits as provocations for revision and retelling – ‘always a
question of approaching the limit in the limit’.33
Speaking through, Speaking with

Modernist engagements with the past are deeply complicated because of
technological, socio-political and epistemological changes; interests be-
came varied and profoundly cross-cultural and cross-continental; it be-
came difficult to endorse the continuance of ‘great tradition’. In line with
T. S. Eliot, we see tradition as having manufacturing abilities, tendencies
to rewrite the thick-set inheritances. Ann Fernald observes that
when modernists worked to eschew the traditional, they sought to

avoid the genteel, the bourgeois, the predictable; they did not repu-
diate the past. In general the modernists favored a simultaneously he-
roic and ironized recovery of the socially or geographically distant
or taboo while rejecting any signs of obedience to the dictates of the
traditions and customs of the recent, local, and accepted. The notion
of literary tradition that the modernists adopted was distinctly opposi-
tional: it was not a continuation of the reader’s world, but a disruption
of it.34
It is worth our sustained argument to see here how the trans-plasticity of

the aesthetic imaginary provides a fresh understanding of Eliot’s notion
of tradition – a deeply invested dynamics in re-enchantment of thinking.
Tradition is sacred – a zealously guarded truth in its exfoliation, and
trajectory is pinned down to an immovable wholeness. The sacred of tra-
dition is common to all, breeding a community of believers, inculcating
a stability in high seriousness and sovereignizing a communitarian unity.
However, ‘the root word tradere means not only to transmit or to give
over, but also to give something to someone for safekeeping, as in giving
one a deposit’.35 The person trusted with the gift is obligated to keep
122 Fusion
the inheritance or transferred material in his safe custody – intact and
protected. The strong implications of surrender and betrayal in acts of giv-
ing over or giving up reaestheticize the nature of transmission. This stirs
a relational politics with the word traduce, which means both ‘to transfer’
and ‘to speak falsely’, ‘misrepresent’ and ‘betray’.36 The vexed parentage
and fraught epistemic establishment of the word throw the debate of sens-
ing tradition within a secular sacred – a profanization and a disruption of
organic thinking that is not a romantic indulgence. The sacred of Eliot’s
tradition has hidden curiosities – monuments that lose their charm after
the discovery but those that enable resonant manifestations beyond their
sedate and stodgy monumentality. The historical sense is the specific ar-
chaeology of the sacred. The whole idea of being ‘together’ or together-
ness is deeply problematic and indebted to an ‘unpeace’ that the sacred
inheres – the smoulders that ‘everyday’ and our encrusted thinking hide,
leaving us with the intimations of the inapprehendable, the unconceptu-
alizable, the inassimilable, the irrecuperable. It speaks at once about the
categoric and the unconditioned.
Eliot observes in ‘Was There a Scottish Literature?’:
When we assume that a literature exists we assume a great deal: we

suppose that there is one of the five or six (at most) great organic for-
mations of history. We do not suppose merely “a history,” for there
might be a history of Tamil literature; but a part of History, which for
us is the history of Europe. We suppose not merely a corpus of writ-
ings in one language, but writings and writers between whom there is
a tradition; and writers who are not merely connected by tradition in
time, but who are related so as to be in the light of eternity contempo-
raneous, from a certain point of view cells in one body, Chaucer and
Hardy. We suppose a mind which is not only the English mind of one
period with its prejudices of politics and fashions of taste, but which
is a greater, finer, more positive, more comprehensive mind than the
mind of any period. And we suppose to each writer an importance
which is not only individual, but due to his place as a constituent of
this mind. When we suppose that there is a literature, therefore, we
suppose a good deal.37
A historical sense inhabits the incommensurate – the hiatus between what

we think and what can be thought, what exists as sanctioned reality and
what awaits our subversion and sutures. The sacred of the historical sense
is ‘what makes a writer most acutely conscious of his place in time, of
his contemporaneity’.38 This implicates a betrayal of what one does not
know, a surrendering to things one does not have a precise idea of, giving
in to substances that one who is both conscious and unconscious of and
passing or transmitting gifts whose value and merit do not stay fixed and
inviolable – the
trans-belongings.

The loaded conceptual signposts in the secular ‘sacred wood’ –
simultaneous, existence, order, timeless and temporal – problematize the
‘contemporary’, approximating a Janus-faced figure:
when it turns one of its two faces toward us, it appears as a figure of
emptiness, secluded from time, endlessly or eternally circling inside
the abyss into which the tip of the present collapses again and again,
caught in an empty time that only mirrors eternity, sharing nothing
except for an insatiable hunger fed by the revulsion that the passing of
time inspires.39
This is an art of collapse, swing and vibration – Albert Einstein’s ‘relativity

of simultaneity’. The notion of tradition as hegemonic gate-keeping is re-
sisted through an understanding that rewrites its functionality as an ever-
alive transmitter of meaning. Eliot’s tradition demands labour, a search, a
possibility and often a production of sense that meaning cannot convey.
Forcing a way out of the habitus of remembering and consciousness, tra-
dition leaves a small doorway through which the past presentifies itself.
Although in the Virginia lectures, Eliot recapacitated tradition to encom-
pass ‘every sort of habitual, customary, conventional, and ritual material
which represents the blood kinship of “the same people living in the same
place”’,40 disabling, in the process, the fecund capaciousness of the con-
cept and its link with literature, his 1919 essay was more proleptic in its
impact. Armin Frank notes that Eliot repeated the idea in ‘Reflections on
Contemporary Poetry [III]’, explicitly ‘limiting it to the field of literature,
and ironically tagging it on to the British: ‘England puts her Great Writers
away securely in a Safe Deposit Vault, and curls to sleep like Fafner’.41 Eliot
signed this contribution ‘T.S. Aptéryx’, as if to dissociate himself halfway
from a view he may formerly have shared, the view that ‘Tradition is a safe
place in which to keep a country’s writers of the past, unexamined, undis-
turbed’.42 It is about seeing literature ‘steadily’ and ‘seeing’ it whole and
this is ‘eminently to see it not as consecrated by time, but to see it beyond
time; to see the best work of our time and the best work of twenty-five
hundred years ago with the same eyes’.43 In this way, the aesthetic imag-
inary of Eliot’s notion of tradition gets us to believe that tradition is not a
mere repertoire of knowledge awaiting connection and correspondence.
Tradition is J. Alfred Prufrock. The Prufrock not as a simple context,
a name with a small history, and background, it is an event of ‘sounding
through’, speaking through, a voice for, within and voice over. It is a ‘vo-
cal channelling’, a ‘way to inhabit other existences— a way to transform
oneself by becoming possessed by others’. Omri Moses argues that
Eliot sets up identity through such masks, which allow individuals to

select, appropriate, and rechannel other people’s voices, in the process
regulating how they sound to an implied audience. The voice would
124 Fusion
seem to be not an inalienable part of a person but an imitable element
that the individual commandeers for provisional ends.44
It is a tone that intones others; it is a position and relationship among

positions, understanding positionalities. Moses explains further that
no particular identity can install a fixed subject position; rather, a

position develops through a person’s own or borrowed voice, which
allows her or him to project a set of variable relations to an audience
within a dramatic or circumstantial context. We may understand the
use of personae as a feature of Eliot’s impersonal strategy—in which
he dispenses with a language of authenticity, preferring to understand
character as an intelligent amalgamator, a habitat, or a “medium” for
understanding and integrating various voices.45
Tradition is much more than what we think it is: not always wary of the
wires that interweave, for interweaving is not always a conscious activity.
Eliot’s sense of tradition is largely about naming and yet not always a fixed
territorialization of discourse and power. This is not ‘touchstoning’ the
past, a sort of adherence to monuments of immovable depth and merit.
Ellis rightly points out that while
Arnold advises us to establish connections with the future and to

study the classics, he gives no suggestion as to how these three stages,
the past, present, and future, are connected. Periclean Athens may
very well represent the peak of culture, but it is not through the mon-
uments alone that the main current of tradition flows.46
Unlike Arnold, Eliot and Paul Elmer More believed in criticism that
involved ‘a sense of growth and change’, and an ‘ever-acting memory
of things’.47 Tradition need not flow ‘invariably through the most dis-
tinguished reputations’48 but forms itself through an ordering principle
that conceals its life in the ‘muddle’ – a mix of disparities, hauntings, a
Coleridgean ‘savage mind’. This builds the across-factor in our aesthetic
imaginaries. Tradition builds its own taste.
What is the real or actual in the aesthetic imaginary? This is an inter-
esting question because reality can cease to be real and become the dy-
namic actual. Here, the Eliotian scheme of things, within the matrices of
historical sense (similar in nature to the aesthetic imaginary), comes close
to Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle. The velocity of thoughts, ideas and
accurate contextualizations – the energies of trans-habit – is clearly under
question and is, most often, a momentary stay against confusion. There is a
serious implosion of energy (acta) within such a system. For instance, Eliot’s
‘The Waste Land’ is entropic and works against the gravity of a Newtonian
world-view of fixed modes and nodes (res) of understanding, revealing its
subatomic actuality, as the ‘what it is’ and ‘is not’ combine to generate their
own activist philosophy. With an immanental tradition permeating poetic
consciousness, the ratios and proportions in creative input are often caught in
the plex of measure, calculation and claims. If historical sense is considered as
the ‘total field’, epistemes, concepts and cultural codes are particles that keep
accumulating and condensing around intense singularities – interacting,
falling off each other, and yet not external to the wholeness of tradition.
David Bohm shows us that ‘analysis’ comes from the Greek root lysis,
which is also the root of the English loosen, and which means ‘to break up’:
[A] chemist can break up a compound into its basic elementary con-
stituents, and then he can put these constituents back together again,
and thus synthesize the compound. The words “analysis” and “syn-
thesis” have, however, come to refer not merely to actual physical or
chemical operations with things, but also to similar operations carried
out in thought. Thus, it may be said that classical physics is expressed
in terms of a conceptual analysis of the world into constituent parts
(such as atoms or elementary particles) which are then conceptually
put back together to “synthesize” a total system, by considering the
interactions of these parts.49
However, Eliot’s logos of tradition is legein, which is both conative and

constitutive in fashions of measure and non-linearity. Every particle of
thought in the force-field bears a signal as observed and arbitrary parti-
cles. What Bohm calls implicate order is evident in Eliot’s understanding
of epistemology where patterns of enfolding become inevitable realities.
There is multiple folding in changes of order, a breakdown of what Eliot
calls ‘handing down’, and the inability to value a particle alone, isolated
and set apart from the greater field of activity: the creative mind, as El-
iot notes, cannot be valued alone. This enfolding cannot be without an
order – ‘the relations, proportions, values of each work of art toward the
whole are readjusted’.50 There is a mechanistic order – the word manifest
coming from the Latin manus, meaning hand, and something obvious and
visible – alongside magmas-with-residues that stand for an understanding
which says that a phenomenon precedes the instrument that measures it.
In Eliot’s historical sense, there is a mourning for moods and ideas, though
not as opportunism and casualness. Does this bring us to an aura of per-
ception, a sensitivity to historical and literary transformations? I would
interpret the aura in tradition as the points of intersection, which crys-
tallize a thought and give aleatory and entangled thinking a dignity and
meaning; auratic experiences puncture knowledge with separate events of
truth (in the words of Alain Badiou).
Walter Benjamin notes:
What is aura, actually? An extraordinary weave of space and time:

the unique appearance of a distance, however close it may be. While
resting on a summer afternoon, to trace the crest of a mountain range
126 Fusion
against the horizon or a branch that casts its shadow on the beholder,
until the moment or the hour becomes part of its appearance-that is
what it means to breathe the aura of these mountains, this branch.51
The auratic impact of tradition produces interwebbing which guarantees

both authority and transmissionability. Historical sense is a kind of con-
struction which happens and is made to happen but is nowhere a living in
empty time. In its dialectical existence, it stays invaded by Jetztzeit (pres-
ence of the now) where flashes from the past are not merely what Marx
calls ‘world-historical necromancy’. Creativity imbibed by such historical
sense is ‘pregnant with tensions’52. It is where thinking is a happening that
has a ‘revolutionary chance in the fight for the oppressed past’.53 Tradition
builds the urge to think more or muse over a remainder because tradition
laboured over and reached out has a kind of elusive feature to its ontology.
Caught between polarities of dialecticism and organism, tradition delivers
concepts and contexts through an unrealizable gap, which is why poetic
creation has not ever considered a concept as aged, arcane and anachronic.
Riding a negative dialectics, tradition can be seen as cheating the agent
into a satisfying appropriation of object-concept ensemble without ex-
hausting its inherent possibilities – the clownization of the agency for
being denied the knowing of nonidentity and the singularities of literary-
aesthetic realizations. What I find troubling is whether tradition is being
laboured over and whether it can be considered an ‘orphaned royal throne
once occupied by the subject’.54 The difficulty that the sacred of tradi-
tion has is in the factoring of subjectivity – the vexatious formation that
owes its emergence to poetic subjectivity and, the ‘lost gods’ and dark
promises that the poet has as his unpredictable co-passengers through
the ‘assemblage’ game. Taste is in the concrete and the counterfeit – the
figuring forth that tradition builds on us. It is being-in, being-for, and
being-with tradition. The historical sense is not about losing history; it
is a ‘principle of aesthetic’, a complicated entanglement in contrast and
comparison, having a conative power whether Eliot would admit or not.
The ‘taking place’ in poetic creativity or expressive vitality of tradition
owe to authorial investment and formations that authorize themselves – a
vitalism of happening and dynamicity of doing. The ingrained trans-
habit in our understanding of aesthetic imaginary helps us to see Eliot’s
tradition as having its own impotentiality – the ‘not being able’ is con-
nected to the ‘enabling powers’. It is a vexed domain formed through a
positive capacity which connects with a lack – Agamben’s ‘I can, I cannot’
syndrome.55 Eliot’s encompassive notion of tradition (‘that the whole of
the literature of Europe from Homer and within it the whole of the liter-
ature of his own country’) has a ‘potential not to be which does not point
to an unredeemed failure but a possibility that remains as a potentiality
unactualized – the ‘luminous spiral of the possible’.56 This, therefore,
makes possible the existence of an other which thrives in its relation to
the poet’s incapacity, to his own lack.
Tradition is an ambiguity that tries to reform the violence of represen-
tation, resisting the distinction like the kind Arnold’s touchstone method
brings. Turning into an exception, tradition should keep one open to
nonsovereign possibilities – the abandonment, withdrawal and absorption
of a rhythmic movement in ‘bewilderment and lucidity, discovery and loss,
between agent and patient’.57 Eliot wanted to produce spaces of literary
experiences, and, here, space and time are entangled into an entrepreneur-
ship. The process of poetic creativity works in an instant – the conjugative
point of disparative forces or things – and through a repetition of the
principle where the suffering poet and the creative mind are sundered.
However, this repetition is always a re-presentation of new orders, a re-
doing on each occasion of literary moments. Diffractive poetic formations
are manifestations of repetition and difference and a variation of surface
and depth. Here, time is not abandoned lest historical contextualization
get decimated. Eliot insinuates a delicate and highly complex engagement
with time and time’s alliance with space in that every literary formulation
achieved in an instant through poetic acts of creation leave behind a loss,
possibilities for detours and detournements, and dissipative energy. His-
tory is in contextual linkages as much as it is in unlinked events outside
the conscious rationality of creation. Tradition is living in and out of time,
in history and staying outside history without being ahistorical; it is a
radical break and reappropriation of historical continuity. History, rather,
trans-historialization, in Eliot’s scheme of creativity both in the sense of
aujheben and uberwinden (surmonter), is deeply underwritten in a dialecti-
cism where history overcome is history surpassed is history transformed.
Eliot’s sense of tradition and the point of creativity are modalities in
‘splits’-or ‘counterparthood’.58 The creative mind is a quantum evolution
of point particles in time and history, in cultures and heritage, in episte-
mology and existence. Tradition appropriating Karen Barad’s arguments,
is not merely that the future and the past are not ‘there’ and never sit still,
but that the present is not simply here-now. The archaeology of knowl-
edge, with its living in the present through the respiration of the past, is
superseded by agential intra-activity:
multiply heterogeneous iterations all: past, present, and future, not in

a relation of linear unfolding, but threaded through one another in
a nonlinear enfolding of spacetime mattering, a topology that defies
any suggestion of a smooth continuous manifold. Time is out of joint.
Dispersed. Diffracted. Time is diffracted through itself. It is not only
the nature of time in its disjointedness that is at stake, but also disjoint-
edness itself. Indeed, the nature of “dis” and “jointedness”, of discon-
tinuity and continuity, of difference and entanglement, and their im/
possible interrelationships are at issue.59
It is when electrons jump from a higher energy state to a lower one that a
photon is emitted. This demonstrates that the electron is not caught in a
128 Fusion
relentless depletion design, and there is scarcely any possibility of an unin-
terrupted spectrum of light. The quantum leap of the atom resulting in fluc-
tuation and emission of energy is discontinuous, and photon-emission does
not come through a conventional causal chain. Barad points out that the
paradoxical nature of quantum causality derives from the very exis-

tence of a quantum dis/continuity in the cutting together/apart that
is the nature of all intra-actions. These quantum ‘leaps’ are not mere
displacements in space through time, not from here-now to there-
then, not when it is the rupture itself that helps constitute the here’s
and now’s, and not once and for all. The point is not merely that
something is here-now and there-then without every having been
anywhere in between, it’s that here-now, there-then have become
unmoored – there’s no given place or time for them to be.60
Tradition unmoors all the time to stay traditional, teetering on the cusp
of stability, relationality, possibility, tangentiality and transgression. Con-
cepts change or jump or leap levels to emit photons of thoughts, which are
never continuous, and mostly unpredictable. This disrupts the interpretive
thought spectrum in varying shades of visibility, and consequently, the
energy of poetic creativity. Settled in a predominant principle to meet the
universe of thinking and understanding halfway,61 tradition contributes to
poetic creativity through an odd game in which acausality and determin-
ism are both problematic but also productive and contributory. Reading
Eliot is reading a radioactive body: a complex phenomenon in emission,
radiation, measurement, uncertainty and spectrum formation.
In Anxiety, in Presence
If thinking about tradition is thinking about Origin, then thinking about
tradition within trans(in)fusionist imaginary is exceeding the Origin,
thinking ahead of it. It is here that tradition overcomes itself. The past, like
tradition, demands the transcendence of its essence – a building on the es-
sence which does not decimate the past as a separate category of thinking
but makes past flow into the formation and constitution of the present and
beyond.62 If history is primarily about recording the past, history is also in
extending the past, escaping the past to make a separate sense of the past.
Thinking past is thinking the non-linearity and non-identity of the past.
Tradition ceases to be the grand narrative and becomes a point of re-turn
and return. The past exists because past revises: history is the philosophy
of actual becoming. Is tradition within the trans(in)fusionist imaginary a
destruction or preservation or ‘leaving behind’? Tradition fosters inher-
itance, initiates labour, inspires transgression and is a ‘presence’ too; it
presences itself to build its own patterns of thinking.
Christopher Beach points out, that
Pound goes beyond Eliot’s sense of tradition in advocating the use of
“mutually foreign, antagonistic” influences as a means of transgress-
ing the boundaries of any single literature; further, he encourages the
writer to look for models among practitioners of all disciplines: musi-
cians, painters and sculptors, philosophers, statesmen, anthropologists,
economists, linguists, and scientists.63
Emphasizing transversality, this approach to writing and tradition encour-

ages ‘donative’ authors who can draw in resources from others for their
own thinking, examining and questioning of issues and subjects that have
been conventionally oversighted and ignored. This declares the complex-
ity of connection: the communication that comes from antagonism and
discrimination. Eliot looks into enjoining and transforming what we in-
herit; Pound considers the past as more living and inviting for a ‘discov-
ery’, the
KRINO, to pick out for oneself, choose, prefer. . . to determine, first,

the main form and main proportions of that order of extant letters,
to locate, first the greater pyramids and then, possibly, and with a de-
cently proportioned emphasis, to consider the exact measurements of
the stone-courses, layers, etc.64
Beach argues further that
Pound seeks in past poetry for the “luminous detail” that will sum up
succinctly and beautifully an entire period or culture. Pound’s method
of “luminous detail” involved a mode of seeing clearly and of dis-
criminating, so that a few facts could replace either the multitude of
facts or the “sentiment and generalization” in terms of which most
people think. These facts include not only historical data, but any in-
stance of the application of art or of the intellect that can be discerned
by a modern reader, viewer, or listener. The “luminous detail” is one
of the “few dozen facts… [which] give us the intelligence of a period”
and “a sudden insight into circumjacent conditions, their causes, their
effects, into sequence, and law”.65
Here Harold Bloom’s revisionary aesthetics lend a different though rel-

evant dimension to the concept of tradition and appropriation. How is
knowing tradition a kind of ‘revisionism’ or what Bloom in his last book
has called ‘possessed by memory’?66
The past is never dead; listening to the past has no expiration either.
When Bloom stays possessed by memory, he professes his love with ‘with’.
I am tempted to see Bloom engaging with sahitya with its Sanskritic origin
and valence that I have argued elsewhere as sahit (being with) and vidya
(knowing).67 Bloom’s ‘listening’ to the voices and narratives in and from
130 Fusion
the past is integral to the formation of his sahitya, his connect with the
inner self, his construction and conditions of knowing. Being possessed by
memory is being possessed by listening – the powers and affect of an endo-
and exotelic listening, a listening across, listening beyond. Literature reveals
spaces as much as it casts spells to help listening to continue and grow in
different proportions and degrees. Bloom is convinced that
high literature has three prime attributes: cognitive power, original-

ity, aesthetic splendor. Only by a disciplined harnessing of emotion
can any of these three come forth. What you call our “new autocracy
of emotion” is just stylized noise. It cannot touch the interdependence
of criticism and literature because it is mindless. Culture is now cut
off from fashion. Popular culture has become an oxymoron. Bad taste
is not culture. There are still many valuable writers of imaginative
works in our society. It seems to me that they prosper best when they
take a stance apart from the immediate moment. Distraction is the
enemy. I see no crisis in the reciprocity of literature and criticism be-
cause the culture industries are irrelevant to it.68
The facts of the ‘highest literature’ speaking ourselves and the poetics of
listening are as much a cultivation as they are a necessity. ‘Listening’ for
Bloom is critical attentiveness. Possession is not mere occupancy but stay-
ing occupied in and out of time, in indexes and indices of the ‘untimely’. It
is through such listening as possession and being possessed as listening that
literature begins to think.
Bloom points out that ‘deep and constant reading fully establishes and
augments an autonomous self ’.69 It is a whole fresh debate, however, on
how we configure and problematize ‘autonomous self ’. This ‘deep’ read-
ing is plastic in that sahitya reaches us in multiple ways as much as we reach
sahitya in diversely invested persuasions. The accommodativeness of sah-
itya is possible both in its usefulness and uselessness, through unexpected
wonder and ‘nexus’; it is about an experience of ‘reading’ where changes
occur on both ends of the interaction – sahitya changes our memory of it
and simultaneously our possession of sahitya alters too. This projects the
‘interiority’ of literary experiences contributing to the construction of the
‘autonomous self ’ – an aesthetic occupancy that teaches one to speak to
oneself. Perhaps Bloom’s understanding of the autonomous self is closer to
the conative and projective powers of the ‘literary’ and the ‘post-literary’.
If writing is about building a revolt against the imperative of the given
and the conventional, the quotidian and the obvious, then the struggle is
to live in the interiority of sahitya; it is here that the post-literary comes
alive as well. If I were to go by Martin Heidegger’s observation that a great
thinker keeps recurring and expanding on ‘one great thought’, Bloom’s
‘possessed by memory’ is another version of ‘anxiety’ with a difference – a
vexed sahit with the canon. ‘Literary’ gnosis is a contributory paradigm to
such formations of interiority where the ‘deep reading of a poem’ becomes
a way of knowing the ‘Real Me or self or spark’.70 Here, the endotelic
listening to the ‘spark’ generates the ‘knowing’ – the subject of poetic
possession. This irreducible aesthetic oversights the ideological and the
societal and corresponds with the spiritual. The attentiveness to writers
that Bloom confesses to having stayed possessed by keeps augmenting his
‘inner self ’.71 Can a canon be formed through an ‘inner law’ of aesthetic
judgment, a speaking to the interiority of the self that knows the divide
between knowing and distraction? Is Bloomian ‘listening’ a form of can-
onization, an exclusionary poetics of possession?
For Bloom, memory has become cognition. A poem read and a poem
remembered are different; a poem read and a poem revisited with a mem-
ory is different; a poem read and read afresh with the curiosity of trying
to rememorialize is different too. A poem once read is an occupation that
cannot be denied but whose occupancy keeps altering with time as a poem
weathers with cognition and memory; the ‘atmosphere’ changes as the
interplay between states of ‘taking hold of ’ and ‘being in possession of ’
continues unabated. Bloom’s ‘sahit’ with Coleridge’s ‘The Rhyme of the
Ancient Mariner’ is a multiple play on memory in that the Mariner dic-
tates the story that Coleridge listens to narrate and, again, which Bloom
listens to dictate back to his students. Within Bloom’s ground of argu-
ment, this act of connecting ‘listening to sahitya’ with the ‘construction
of autonomous self ’ becomes a way of reliving an anxiety at a different
level – the self as a subject of ‘misprision’, a sort of creative corrective, that
keeps seeking its own deep and imaginative constructions. The listening
self for Bloom is about a vitalist teleology, a processuality that knows its
paradigms of address and the objectives to achieve. A strong vital reading
is the power of the ‘poetic’ where re-turning to the same poet and poems
speaks of the anxiety of not being able to figure the self-interiority; it
is the struggle to address the interruption of inner canonical knowing.
This is the oddity of love where the supply of/from sahitya and the de-
mand of the self are caught in a deficit – a balance sheet of demanding
interrogation and sustained attentiveness. A certain inwardness of liter-
ary reception has not deserted Bloom, and this rewarding anxiety stems
from the time when he wrote about Coleridge within the framework of
‘anxiety of influence’. If canonization compresses, the compression opens
up spaces for visitations for deep reading that interiorizes the inner self
and effectuates a communion with the spark. This is a vexatious equation
of a pyschopoetic event. Bloom visits Coleridge as a stranger to seek a
‘knowing’ shelter before adieuing to (re)turn as a stranger again. Bloom, in
an understated way, has again executed his clinamen, tessera, apophrades
and kenosis. The visit to Coleridge’s mariner and the albatross is dae-
monic in that the sublime of reading Coleridge is deflated; the memory of
‘possessed’ lines overflows the narrative with two significant expressions:
‘daemonic influx’ and ‘Shaping Spirit’.72 If Bloom argues that the mariner
132 Fusion
has repetition-compulsion, Bloom is kenotic too, breaking free of him to
institute the autonomous self – writing himself in momentary breaks of
73

self-emptying. Bloom’s reading here is ‘spiritual’ in the sense of seeking
an underlying signification as a kind of counter-sublime, a daemoniza-
tion of him and himself towards a new space of experience beyond the
precursor – the 1972 Bloom. In a kind of askesis, the Bloom in search of
the ‘inward light of criticism’ is a demonstration of how criticism and lit-
erature are co-spaced and co-referential. This is what I would look into as
the creative-critical experience of aesthetic understanding.
Bloom’s chapter on Coleridge’s ‘Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner’ is less
description and more quotes: most of the essay, incidentally, is filled out
with quotation from the poem. Are they flowing out of his memory or
the memory of the poem when he read it on the first instance? Or lines
he is possessed by through choice and intensity? Or are the quotations the
power of dictation, a way of listening to the interiority of the poem, the
murmur of sahitya? Bloom becomes his own active reader, more solipsistic
in a self-exceeding way, where being possessed by memory is responsible
for the generative index of his poetic criticism – this inward light of criti-
cism. Bloom admits dictating out the chapters of this book to his ‘generous
assistants’; memory of sahitya is not recollection, a sort of regathering, but
an attunement, a somewhat ‘apophatic’ listening that feeds on the ‘excess’
begetted by possession. The book does not have footnotes to read with;
footnotes are a way of demonstrating the avenues and turns that a text has
or possesses. But being possessed would mean allowing sahitya to speak to
him – footloose – speak through him, making him listen, suffer the del-
icate trial of an inexhaustibility that the ‘literary’ and the imaginary can
hold forth and withhold. Sahitya, through its own ‘spots of time’, becomes
his own visionary company; it forms its own tradition.
A thought builds in loops, feeds into the variations of usage, con-
text and time. With time, change in contexts and understanding and
mechanisms of appropriations, a ‘recurrency’ is generated.74 A thought
is part of a system of networks where each node makes the concept re-
think its own existence and attached a ‘weight’. Nodes in a system – be
it cultural or political – work in weights, within the coefficient of input
and output. This is not always predictable. Thoughts exist and persist
through tradition-nets that cannot ignore connectionism, termination
conditions, structural inheritance, procedurality and process. Sahitya
as an idea flipped off into a complexity that changed the ways in which
we see the performance of a thought or a concept. Sahitya came to be
interpreted as a mode of thinking, literary performance and a dyna-
micity. The tradition of sahitya ensembled itself within change and
constancy.
If for Bloom tradition is in being possessed by memory, the anxiety
of the dead and the predecessorial, for Pound, it is about culture and
stress of the times, a vital and active correspondence with fresh ideas
and issues ‘facing the world, nation, at community at a given time’.
Trans(in)fusion promotes the critical thinking that looks to connect
with both: the belatedness of tradition as a follow-up and a nexus with
the contemporary. It is here that the situation of the past combines with
the situation of the present. Critical thinking here identifies with three
areas of connect: repression, sublime and transcendence. The ideational
fixation coming through a tradition becomes a category that has form
and again a form that struggles to break away from a preconceived
and pre- accorded form. This is when the thought hits the ‘sublimis’,
the threshold, demanding an appropriative and fecund transcendence.
These three inherent forces synergize to produce the trans(in)fusionist
space. Trans(in)fusion is not the enemy of the archive and surely and
fundamentally not inimical to history either. It, in a Nietzschean way,
has a dislike for overhistoricization that maims and mangles possibilities
and agencies of experimentation and transcendence. Archives matter,
but so do the hosts and ghosts of it as well. The historical dialecticism of
tradition lives through the fixities of understanding and suffer a ‘dwin-
dle’, a debarking that is inherent. Pound sees a dark noon in history as
he points out in his Guide to Kukhur:
We do NOT know the past in chronological sequence. It may be con-

venient to lay it out anesthetized on the table with dates pasted on here
and there, but what we know we know by ripples and spirals eddying
out from us and from our time.75
This is, as James Longenbach argues, ‘existential historicism’ (‘Provincia

Deserta’ (1915) and ‘Near Perigord’ (1916) can be considered as examples
of Pound’s existential historicism). Tradition creates the transhistorical
moments and events – the ‘contact between the historian’s mind in the
present and a given synchronic cultural complex from the past’.76 Trans(in)
fusion comes to critique tradition both through transgression and mispri-
sion (the anxiety of revealment and replenishment).
Tradition for Eliot, Pound, Bloom and the trans(in)fusionist is close to
the thesis of co-appearing. Staying close to Juan Garrido, we can argue
that ‘thinking intervenes, opposes, co-appears’:
Thought co-appears, which is to say that it constitutes itself as thought

by situating itself in relation to what it is not. Thought, like every-
thing else that exists, begins where it ends. For example, where com-
prehension of the real is not a given, where it no longer has any secrets
to reveal to the self through reflection or recollection, where, quite
simply, it remains exposed to the task of thinking. It is obvious that
thought only thinks if it has something to think about, if it envi-
sions problems, and it only envisions problems when it is affected by
something that escapes it and thereby limits it.77
134 Fusion
Tradition is both thought and thinking, and a sensibility to figure out and
believe in the co-emergence and co-occurrence.
On this note, the idea of tradition is a way of affiliating with what Stuart
Kauffman calls the ‘phase transition’:
we will see that the genomic networks that control development from
zygote to adult can exist in three major regimes: a frozen ordered
regime, a gaseous chaotic regime, and a kind of liquid regime lo-
cated in the region between order and chaos. It is a lovely hypothesis,
with considerable supporting data, that genomic systems lie in the
ordered regime near the phase transition to chaos. Were such systems
too deeply into the frozen ordered regime, they would be too rigid to
coordinate the complex sequences of genetic activities necessary for
development. Were they too far into the gaseous chaotic regime, they
would not be orderly enough. Networks in the regime near the edge
of chaos-this compromise between order and surprise-appear best able
to coordinate complex activities and best able to evolve as well.78
Our understanding of humanistic thinking is not always a ‘frozen ordered

system’ or a ‘chaotic regime’. The trans(in)fusionist imaginary forms around
our edge-of-chaos existence in all spheres and levels of humanistic un-
derstanding, whether in religion, cultural establishments, natural sciences,
technological incarnations, or literary and romantic thinking. It has an ele-
ment of spontaneity and self-growth but not always without a certain ratio-
nalization that involves self-organization. The way Kauffman complicates
the philosophy and performance of the biosphere bears out an intriguing
relationship with my line of argument in contouring this aspect of trans(in)
fusion. How far is it possible for us to prestate the biosphere and accept
Darwin’s ‘preadaptations’ for eventual selection of species? Imaginaries co-
opt the imagination to construct their own aesthetic. Kauffman notes that
biospheres expand their own dimensionality as rapidly, on average,

as they can. And the coconstructing behaviors of autonomous agents
spill over to the economy, with surprising implications for the founda-
tions of economics, for economic growth, and for the development of
adaptive firms that coevolve in corporate ecosystems whose dynamics
almost certainly express the same laws as do biological ecosystems,
with small and large gales of Schumpeterian creative destruction,
weeding out old species and technologies, ushering in the ever new
species and technologies whose nonprestatable features are expressions
of the very creativity of the universe.79
So the formations are both about f(n)orming a system of thought and allow-
ing the form-ability of thinking, the conscious and conditioned co-existing
with ‘what happens’, what emerges and defines us non-algorithmically.
This is where thinking breeds – wissen versus kônnen entanglements.
Some states of thinking and thought grow over the long term as attractors
build through complicated perturbations happening through a certain dura-
tion of time (as my exegesis on Sidney and Eliot in this book demonstrates).
Some formations owe their existence to the flexibility of ‘fitness landscapes’,
how changing situations, deformations and torques rebuild landscapes of
correspondence and negotiation. Kauffman’s example of the frog and the fly
shows how, in the fitness landscape of the aesthetic imaginary, concepts and
discourses are buckled and transformed, allowing for further possibilities of
understanding and greater substantiation of critical consciousness:
If the frog develops a sticky tongue, the fitness of the fly is altered.
But so too is the fitness landscape of the fly, what it should do next. It
should develop slippery feet, or sticky stuff dissolver or a better sense
of smell to smell sticky stuff before the frog gets too close or… So,
due to coevolution, the fitness landscape of each species heaves and
deforms as other species make their adaptive moves.80
The aesthetic imaginary created around the notion of tradition (Eliot,

Pound, Bloom and others) produces its own fitness landscape. The read-
ing and experience of things change as much as spaces of thoughts keep
altering with time. The aesthetic imaginary of Eliot’s notion of tradition
today and what it was fifty years ago cannot be similar for the ‘middle’
that separates a reading of tradition and Eliot’s historical sense is ‘noisy’
all the time. It embosoms noise and has its own way of cultivating noise
when things look apparently in silence. Kauffman, working beyond the
‘Darwinian aegis of mutation and selection’, argues for sources of energy,
which link the exergonic to endergonic reactions, ‘coconstructed by the
activities, accidents, striving, and failures of these autonomous agents,
exapting persistently into their adjacent possible’.81 At some levels, think-
ing literature and the constitution of the trans(in)fusionist imaginary work
on coconstruction and coassemblage, making allowance for phase transi-
tions and developing autonomy that evolves through the dynamic ‘edge
of chaos’. The ‘energy’ of decision in critical thinking finds its home here
when decision is about geometry, logic, spacing and then, again, as Serres
lets us know, about ‘cutting, the creation of an edge’.82 Trans(in)fusion is a
vexatious choice, a difficult decision and rhythm that set us to work – the
poetics of ‘living together’.83
Notes
1 T. S. Eliot, ‘Tradition and Individual Talent’ (1919). https://people.unica.it/

fiorenzoiuliano/files/2017/05/tradition-and-the-individual-talent.pdf.
2 Edward Shils, ‘Tradition and Liberty: Antinomy and Interdependence’ Ethics,
Vol. 6, No. 3 (1958), 156.
3 Joseph A. Scares, ‘A Reformulation of the Concept of Tradition’ International
Journal of Sociology and Social Policy 10. https://www.emerald.com/insight/
content/doi/10.1108/eb013310/full/html.
136 Fusion
4 Simon J. Bronner, Following Tradition: Folklore in the Discourse of American Cul-
ture (Utah: Utah State University Press, 1998), 10.
5 Josef Pieper, ‘The Concept of Tradition’ The Review of Politics, Vol. 20, No. 4,
Issue: I (October 1958), 471.
6 See, Richard Handler &Jocelyn Linnekin, ‘Tradition, Genuine or Spurious’
The Journal of American Folklore, Vol. 97, No. 385 ( July–September 1984), 286.
7 Dan Ben-A mos, ‘The Seven Strands of Tradition: Varieties in Its Meaning
in American Folklore Studies’ Journal of Folklore Research, Vol. 21, No. 2–3
(1984), 97.
8 S. N. Eisenstadt, ‘Intellectuals and Tradition’ Daedalus, Vol. 101, No. 2 (Spring
1972), 3.
9 See Hizky Shoham, ‘Rethinking Tradition: From Ontological Reality to As-
signed Temporal Meaning’ European Journal of Sociology / Archives Européennes
de Sociologie, Vol. 52, No. 2 (August 2011), 313–34.
10 See Edward Shils, Tradition (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 32.
11 Ibid., 13.
12 Ibid.
13 Struan Jacobs, ‘Edward Shils’ Theory of Tradition’ Philosophy of the Social Sci-
ences, Vol. 37, No. 2 (2007), 140.
14 Ibid.
15 See Gerald L. Bruns, ‘What Is Tradition?’ New Literary History, Vol. 22, No. 1,
Institutions of Interpretation (Winter 1991), 2.
16 Ibid., 5.
17 Petrarch, Letters from Petrarch, (trans.) Morris Bishop (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1966), 295–96; See Bruns, ‘What Is Tradition?’ 6.
18 See Yaacov Yadgar, Sovereign Jews: Israel, Zionism, and Judaism (Albany, NY:
SUNY Press, 2017), 62.
19 See Kim Donghyun, Reason, Tradition, and Authority: A Comparative Study of
Habermas and Gadamer, PhD thesis. 2011, http://theses.gla.ac.uk/2812/.
20 Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), 316.
21 See James Jasinski, Sourcebook on Rhetoric (London: Sage, 2001), 593.
22 Michael Pickering, ‘History as Horizon: Gadamer, Tradition and Critique’
Rethinking History, Vol. 3, No. 2 (1999), 177–95.
23 Ibid.
24 Robert Piercey, The Crisis in Continental Philosophy: History, Truth and the
Hegelian Legacy (London: Continuum, 2009), 106.
25 Ibid., 112.
26 Robert Piercey, ‘Ricoeur’s Account of Tradition and the Gadamer: Habermas
Debate’ Human Studies, Vol. 27, No. 3 (2004).
27 Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative Vol. 1 (trans.) Kathleen Mclaughlin and
David Pellauer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 219.
28 G. K Chesterton writes: ‘Tradition means giving a vote to most obscure of
all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead… Tradition refuses
to submit to the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen
to be walking about. All democrats object to men being disqualified by the
accident of birth; tradition objects to their being disqualified by the accident
of death. Democracy tells us not to neglect a good man’s opinion, even if he
is our groom; tradition asks us not to neglect a good man’s opinion, even if he
is our father.’ Orthodoxy (London: John Lane, 1909), 85.
29 Haun Saussy, ‘Forms of Habit’ in Ranjan Ghosh, Transcultural Poetics and the
Concept of the Poet (New York: Routledge, 2017), x–x i.
30 Ghosh, Transcultural Poetics, 2.
31 Catherine Malabou, What Should We Do with Our Brain (New York: Fordham
University Press, 2008), 5.
32 Ibid., 22.
33 Christian Abrahamsson, TOPOI/GRAPHEIN: Mapping the Middle in Spatial
Thought (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 2018), xxiii.
34 See Anne E. Fernald, ‘Modernism and Tradition’ in Modernism (eds.) Astradur
Eysteinsson and Vivian Liska (Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Com-
pany, 2007), 159.
35 https://www.etymonline.com/word/tradition.
36 Trevor Blank (ed.), Tradition in the Twenty-First Century: Locating the Role of the
Past in the Present (Boulder, CO: Utah State University Press, 2013), 23.
37 James Longenbach, Modernist Poetics of History Pound, Eliot, and the Sense of the
Past (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987), 176.
38 Eliot, ‘Tradition and Individual Talent’. https://people.unica.it/fiorenzoi-
uliano/files/2017/05/tradition-a nd-the-i ndividual-t alent.pdf.
39 See Alexander Garcia Düttmann, ‘For and Against the Contemporary: An
Examination’ Postmodern Culture, Vol. 21, No. 1 (2010), n. pag.
40 Armin Paul Frank, ‘T.S. Eliot’s Concept of Tradition and the American
Background’ Jahrbuch für Amerikastudien, Vol. 16 (1971), 153.
41 Ibid., 157.
42 Ibid.
43 F. O. Matthiessen, The Achievement of T.S. Eliot: An Essay on the Nature of Po-
etry (New York: Oxford University Press, 1947), 3.
44 Omri Moses, Out of Character: Modernism, Vitalism, Psychic Life (Stanford, CA:
Stanford University Press, 2014), 153.
45 Ibid., 154.
46 P. G. Ellis, ‘The Development of T.S. Eliot’s Historical Sense’ Review of En-
glish Studies, Vol. 23, No. 91 (1972), 292.
47 Ibid., 292.
48 Ibid.
49 David Bohm, Wholeness and the Implicate Order (London: Routledge, 2002),
159.
50 Eliot, ‘Tradition and Individual Talent’.
51 See John McCole, Walter Benjamin and the Antinomies of Tradition (Ithaca, NY:
Cornell University Press, 1993), 4.
52 Theodor Adorno, Negative Dialectics (trans.) E. B. Ashton (London: Contin-
uum, 1973), 14.
53 Ibid., 14.
54 Ibid., 181.
55 Giorgio Agamben, Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy (ed. and trans.)
D. Heller-Roazen (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999), 177.
56 Ibid., 257.
57 Ibid.
58 Jeremy Butterfield, ‘On Time in Quantum Physics’ in A Companion to the Phi-
losophy of Time (eds.) Heather Dyke and Adrian Bardon ( John Wiley & Sons,
2013), 224.
59 Karen Barad, ‘Quantum Entanglements and Hauntological Relations of In-
heritance: Dis/Continuities, Space-Time Enfoldings, and Justice-to-Come’
Derrida Today, Vol. 3, No. 2 (2010), 245.
6 0 Ibid., 248–49.
61 See Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the
Entanglement of Matter and Meaning (Durham, NC: Duke University Press,
2007).
62 See Wit Pietrzak, Myth, Language and Tradition: A Study of Yeats, Stevens, and
Eliot in the Context of Heidegger’s Search for Being (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cam-
bridge Scholar Publishing, 2011).
138 Fusion
63 Christopher Beach, ‘Ezra Pound and Harold Bloom: Influences, Canons, Tra-
ditions, and the Making of Modern Poetry’ ELH, Vol. 56, No. 2 (Summer
1989), 467.
64 Ibid.
65 Ibid., 468.
66 Harold Bloom, Possessed by Memory: The Inward Light of Criticism (New York:
Knopf, 2019).
67 For a detailed exemplification and theorization of my concept of sahitya see
Ranjan Ghosh & J Hillis Miller, Thinking Literature across Continents (Durham,
NC: Duke University Press, 2016).
68 https://lareviewof books.org/article/paladin-l iterary-a gon-c onversation-
harold-bloom.
69 Ibid.
70 See Harold Bloom, The American Religion: The Emergence of the Post-Christian
Nation (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1992), 15. See James S. Baumlin,
‘Reading Bloom (Or: Lessons concerning the ‘Reformation’ of the Western
Literary Canon)’ College Literature, Vol. 27, No. 3 (Fall 2000), 21.
71 Harold Bloom, The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages (New
York: Harcourt, 1994), 28.
72 Bloom, Possessed by Memory, 215.
73 Harold Bloom, ‘Coleridge: The Anxiety of Influence’ Diacritics, Vol. 2, No. 1
(Spring 1972), 36–41.
74 Paul Cilliers, Complexity and Postmodernism: Understanding Complex Systems
(London and New York: Routledge, 1998).
75 James Longenbach, Modernist Poetics of History: Pound, Eliot, and the Sense of the
Past (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987).
76 Ibid., 14.
77 Juan Manuel Garrido, ‘The Poetry of the World’ Diacritics, Vol. 43, No. 4
(2015), 54.
78 Stuart Kaufmann, At Home in the Universe (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1995), 16.
79 Stuart Kaufmann, Investigations (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000),
xi.
80 Ibid., 198.
81 Ibid., 159.
82 Michel Serres, The Natural Contract (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan
Press, 1995), 52.
83 It is Ronald Barthes’s idiorrhythmy; see Barthes, How to Live Together: Nov-
elistic Simulations of Some Everyday Spaces (trans.) Kate Briggs (New York:
Columbia University Press, 2013).
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Index
Abram, David 58 chemo-poetics 58

action painting 71 chemo-synthesis 57
Agamben, Giorgio 126 chemo-synthetic 55
allagma 8, 10, 16 Claramonte,Vidal 100
An Apology for Poetry 15 Clayton, Kelvin 65
Arabic poetics 35–36 co-existence theory 112
Arendt, Hannah 34–35 Coleridge, S T 4, 131–32
Aristotle 6, 16 Collins, David 11
Arnold, Matthew 124, 127 conceptual translation xvi–xvii, 82–85,
Averroes 16 91–93, 99–100, 102, 105
Avicenna 16 Conche, Marcel 20
Axelos, Kostas 18 concrete text 7
Coppay, Frank 67
Badiou, Alain 125 Crane, Stephen 94
Bannet, Eve 96, 99 Crutchfield, James 69
Barad, Karen 3, 127–28
Baziotes, William 70 Damrosch, David 101
Beach, Christopher 128–29 Deleuze, Gilles xv, 10, 19, 25, 59, 61–62
Beckett, Samuel 28 Derrida, Jacques xvi, 13, 48, 59, 96–97
Beebee, Thomas 95 Descartes, Rene 6, 116
Benjamin, Walter 96–98, 125 destructive plasticity 36
Bergson, Henri 28 Duchamp, Marcel 21, 70
Bernstein, Charles 81–82, 92, 98 dynamical plasticity 2
Bertalanffy, Ludwig van 67
black box 95–96 Earley, Joseph 56
Blake, William 44–51, 72, 93 Earman, John 20
Bloom, Harold 129–33, 135 Einstein, Albert 123
Boccaccio, Giovanni 115 Eisenstadt, S N 112
Bohm, David 31, 125 Eliot, T S 20, 114, 121–29, 133, 135
Borges, Jorge Luis 22, 87, 90 Erdos, Paul 32
Bronner, Simon 111 Ernst, Max 70
Bruns, Gerald 115 eternal mind 46
bundle 55–56, 61
Burke, Peter 93 Farabi, Al- 16
Faulkner, William xiv
Cantarino,Vicente 15 Fernald, Ann 121
Castoriadis, Cornelius 12–13, 24–25 Feynman, Richard P 2–3, 29
chance 19–22, 67 finite thinking 19
Chattopadhyay, Shakti xvii, 86–92, flow equilibrium 67
94–104 Focillon, Henri 72–73
152 Index
Foucault, Michel xiv Marriage of Heaven and Hell,The 45,
Frank, Armin 123 49–50, 72
Freud, Sigmund 14, 24, 111 Marx, Karl 98, 111, 126
Freyre, Gilberto 93 Matar, Nabil 16
Frost, Robert xvii, 13, 20, 28, 86–89, 91, Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 18
94–100, 102–104 mesophase 54
meta-archipelago 32
Gadamer, Hans Georg 83, 87, 89, metastable equilibrium 9
116–17 middle 51, 69–71, 86, 95, 135
Gallop, Jane 89 migrant 9–10, 22
Gamsa, Mark 94 migrant reading 28, 35
Garrido, Juan 133 migrant thinking 8–9, 11, 36
Glissant, Edouard xvi, 52 Milgram, Stanley 32
Godel, Kurt 62 Milton, John 51
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von xii, 83 Mitchell, Tom 45
Guattari, Felix 18 Moraru, Christian 28
More, Paul Elmer 124
Habermas, Jurgen 118 Morin, Edgar 67
Harrison, Nicholas 101 Moses, Omri 123–24
Hayter, Stanley 70
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 11 negativity 4
Heidegger, Martin xiv, xvi, 13, 33, Nietzsche, Friedrich 83
102–103, 117, 130 non-philosophy 6
Heraclitus xv nontology 20
Human Condition,The 34
Husserl, Edmund 43 Oakeshott, Michael xiv
hyperdialectic 18
Palmer, Richard 116
Ingold, Tim 30 Paracelsus 51
paraphilosophy 52
Ja’far, Qudama ibn 15 Paz, Octavio 90
Jung, Carl 5, 13 Pennycook, Alastair 94
Jung, Hwa Yol 17 Petrarch 115
Jurjani, Abd al-Qahir al- 15 Petronius 13
Picabia, Francis 21, 70
Kafka, Franz 35 Pickering, Michael 117
Kant, Immanuel 48, 114 Pieper, Josef 112
Kauffman, Stuart 18, 134–35 Plato 48, 114
Klooger, Jeff 14 Plotnitsky, Arkady 63–64
Krishna, Daya 63 poetic lie 15
Poincare, Henri 59–60
Laruelle, Francois 6 Pollock, Jackson 70–72
Leslie, Esther 53 Pound, Ezra 129, 132–33, 135
life-graphy 65 problematic disparation 9
liquid concrete xiii, 12, 53, 55
liquid crystal xiii, 52–55, 57 Qartajanni, Hazim al- 16
Longenbach, James 133
Lyotard, Jean-Francois xiii Rabbih, Ibn ‘Abd 15
radical imaginary 12
magma 12–14, 19 Reimann, Bernhard 60–61
Mahan, Gerald 53 Renyi, Alfred 32
Main, Roderick 5 Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner 131–32
Malabou, Catherine xv, 35–36, 120 Ricoeur, Paul xvii, 88, 118
Index 153
Rodel, Jocelyn 58 Tagore, Rabindranath xvii, 13,
Rorty, Richard 92 84–85
Rosenberg, Harold 71 Taylor, Richard 70
Rothenstein, William 85 There Is No Natural Religion 47
Russell, Bertrand 60 trans-belonging 3–4, 122
transduction 7, 15
Salis, John 82 trans-habit xv, 31, 119
Saussy, Haun 119 trans-plastic-habit 120
Sauvanargues, Anne 10 Trotsky, Leon 98
Schalow, Frank 103 Truth and Method 83
Schrag, Calvin 17
Schrodinger, Erwin 21–22 Vine, Steve 47
Schwarz, Roberto 94
Scott, David 7 Weber, Max 111
Serres, Michel xii, 26, 65–68, 70, Westling, Louis 57
72, 135 White, Hayden xiv
Shils, Edward 112–13 Whitehead, A. N. 27
Shimony, Abner 26 Widder, Nathan 60, 62
Sidney, Philip 13, 15–21, 35–36, 135 Widom, Michael 53
Simondon, Gilbert 6–9, 25 Wittgenstein, Ludwig xv
Smith, Daniel 61 Wolfson, Susan 49
Snart, Jason Allen 72 Woolf,Virginia 28, 57,
Sturrock, John 94 63–66
supracritical behavior 18 world literature xii
Swedenborg, Emanuel 51
synchronicity 13 Xie, Ming 16

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Ranjan Ghosh is the author of a series of important books in literary and

Ranjan Ghosh continues his groundbreaking work on identity and trans-

Trans(in)fusion: Reflections for Critical Thinking, is, in a sense, the transcription

Trans(in)fusion is a highly original book that tries to radicalize our ways of

Ranjan Ghosh teaches in the Department of English, University of North

Georges Van Den Abbeele is Professor, School of Humanities, Univer­

Agamben’s Political Ontology of Nudity in Literature and Art

Conceptualisation and Exposition

Literary Twinship from Shakespeare to the Age of Cloning

Promiscuity in Western Literature

(In)digestion in Literature and Film

For more information about this series, please visit: https://www.routledge.

ISBN: 9780367564087 (hbk)

Preface: Of Blood and Tea xi

3 ‘We Only Ever Speak One Language’ 81

4 ‘You Cannot Value Him Alone’ 111

Trans(in)fusion, builds an experience of what I have elsewhere called

This statement serves as one example of the Ghosh critical vortex, as

If history is primarily about recording the past, history is also in ex-

The past is non-linear, and we are constantly remaking it as we reaffirm

Trans-plastic-habit sees tradition as entanglement – a state that has

But if trans-plastic-habit allows us to imagine the temporality of trans(in)

Alexander wept when he heard from Anaxarchus that there were an

I stand at the seashore, alone, and start to think…

I say, dissipation is profit; percolation is gain; fusion is erotic. And what

One cannot help thinking, provided the mind is beforehand

Opposites exist as invisibles and do not stagnate through ages. Attraction

Most fundamental is the opposition between consciousness and the

complex interior reinforcements that give it its strength disappear

traversing physics, biology, the psychic, and the social, transduction

This is a migrancy that builds inside the socio-cultural-political domain

a propagation of a structure gradually gaining space from a structural

is a process of becoming in which a potential in the system made

The ‘brick-making’ nature of the aesthetic imaginary speaks of ‘relation-

The polarity of the membrane distinguishes the favourable (which

The principle of allagma in the aesthetic imaginary connects with a mem-

the language of “disparity with itself ” and “dissolution,” “inwardness

The self-containment of a thought is a reality that trans(in)fusion finds

M1: If M is a magma, one can mark, in M, an indefinite number of

Magmas are difficult to determine as every magma defined becomes an

transform or actualise these virtual singularities . . . into distinct and

The middle, as Jeff Klooger explains, drawing on Castoriadis, is ‘like

whatever is indeterminate is construed as transitional, a temporary dis-

The finest poetry is that which has beautiful mimetic representation

Sidney’s aesthetic mimesis reemphasizes Ibn Rashiq’s observation that a

in motivating action it [imagination] establishes a certain legitimacy for

Here, Sidney’s ‘golden’ is mukhayyil – it connects imaginings with action,

Transversality makes the middle; it is the middle that is always transver-

convergence without coincidence, unification without equivalence,

The trans(in)fusionist imaginary appropriates this transversal rationality by

It is here that trans-culturality finds a new meaning where processes in

The trans(in)fusionist imaginary is the ‘event’ but not completely sucked

we picked up a new pebble there would be great probability of its

biological organization of the human individual as a living being and

is the signification of the coherence of the other and the same in a

The bracket here is the affectivity of the ‘local’. It implicates a ‘relation’,

lateral undulation, rectilinear locomotion, concertina progression,

It is active in a variety of ways; it has a structure and yet a transformative

Georges Van Den Abbeele is Professor, School of Humanities, Univer