Violent Modernities: Cultural Lives of

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 SIRCAR 2
‘Violent Modernities is an expression of love as a brawl with
law for space—the space to invoke, listen to, and perform law

VIOLENT MODERNITIES
differently—in a quest marked by grace and daring.’
– Vasuki Nesiah, professor, New York University, USA
(from the foreword)

Law and violence are thought to share an antithetical relationship

in postcolonial modernity. Violence is considered the other of
law, lawlessness is understood to produce violence, and law is
invoked and deployed to undo the violence of lawlessness. Violent
Modernities uses a critical legal perspective to show that law
and violence in the New India share a deep intimacy, where one
OISHIK SIRCAR
symbiotically feeds the other. Researched and written between
2008 and 2018, the chapters study the cultural sites of literature,
cinema, people’s movements, popular media, and the university to
illustrate how law’s promises of emancipation and performances
of violence live a life of entangled contradictions. The book
foregrounds reparative and ethical accounts where law does not
only inhabit courtrooms, legislations, and judgments, but also lives
in the quotidian and minor practices of disobediences, uncertainties,
vulnerabilities, double binds, and failures. When the lives of law are
reimagined as such, the book argues, the violence at the foundations
of modern law in the postcolony begins to unravel.

Oishik Sircar is associate professor, Jindal Global Law School,

Sonepat, India.

Cover photo: Oishik Sircar

Cover design: Siddhartha Dutta

ISBN 0-19-012792-9
9780190992149

1 eBook
available Cultural Lives of Law in the New India
9 780190 127923
www.oup.com
₹ 1595
Violent Modernities
 Violent Modernities
Cultural Lives of Law in the New India

Oishik Sircar

1
 1
Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford.
It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship,
and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trademark of
Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries.

Published in India by
Oxford University Press
22 Workspace, 2nd Floor, 1/22 Asaf Ali Road, New Delhi 110 002, India

©Oxford University Press 2021

The moral rights of the author have been asserted.

First Edition published in 2021

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in

a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the
prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted
by law, by licence, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics
rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the
above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the
address above.

You must not circulate this work in any other form

and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer.

ISBN-13 (print edition): 978-0-19-012792-3

ISBN-10 (print edition): 0-19-012792-9

ISBN-13 (eBook): 978-0-19-099214-9

ISBN-10 (eBook): 0-19-099214-X

Typeset in Adobe Garamond Pro 11/13

by The Graphics Solution, New Delhi 110 092
Printed in India by Rakmo Press Pvt. Ltd.
 For D,
fierce and tender
That life is complicated is a fact of great analytic importance. Law too
often seeks to avoid this truth by making up its own breed of nar-
rower, simpler, but hypnotically powerful rhetorical truths.
—Patricia J. Williams, The Alchemy of Race and Rights:
Diary of a Law Professor (1992)

It has long been my belief that law is the most disabling or estranged
of professions. Such at least is its most radical danger: it inculcates a
fear which finds its most prominent expression in the closure of the
legal mind, in the lawyers’ belief in a norm or rule which speaks as
‘the law’.
—Peter Goodrich, Law in the Courts of Love: Literature and
Other Minor Jurisprudences (1996)

Go back to uni, study the law. Accept the law, even when it’s unjust.
—Kamila Shamsie, Home Fire (2017)
Contents

List of Figures ix
Foreword xi
Acknowledgements xvii
Preface xxiii
List of Abbreviations xli

PART 1: … the Theoretical…

1. Spectacles of Emancipation: Reading Rights
Differently 3
2. Beyond Compassion: Children of Sex Workers and
the Politics of Suffering (with Debolina Dutta) 53
3. Bollywood’s Law: Cinema, Justice, and Collective
Memory 98
4. New Queer Politics: Notes on Failure and Stuckness
in a Negative Moment 144

Part II: … is Personal…

5. The Silence of Gulberg: Refracted Memories,
Inadequate Images 189
viii Contents

6. Professor of Pathos: Upendra Baxi’s Minor

Jurisprudence 210
7. The Conduct of Critique: Jurisdictional Account
of a Feminist Journey 232

Consolidated Bibliography 254

Index 302
About the Author
Figures

5.1 The entrance to Gulberg Society 199

5.2 Police sampatty (property) 200
5.3 A posteriori scenes of violence 1 201
5.4 A posteriori scenes of violence 2 202
5.5 Silence and foliage 203
5.6 A map with no numbers 204
5.7 ‘There is no final photograph’ 205
Foreword

Hanif Kureishi’s short story, ‘My Son the Fanatic’, tells the story of a
Pakistani immigrant, Parvez, and his son, Ali. Parvez invests decades
in his work as a taxi driver to create a life sustained by ambitions and
hopes for his son’s modern British future—marked for him by the
twinned ethe of tolerance and assimilation. Imagine how unnerved
he is then when he finds that as he grows up, Ali pivots towards
orthodox Islam: Turning from his accountancy exam to mosque
devotions, rejecting his cricket bat for a prayer mat, dismissing his
father’s celebration of secular moral tolerance for an authoritative
ethical compass, turning from material rewards to religious discipline,
rejecting the promise of assimilation into ‘modernity’ for the promise
of spiritual fulfilment in the afterlife, deriding his father’s debts to
white Britain, to instead embrace visions of worlding beyond those
of the West. Parvez, the mild-mannered tolerant liberal, becomes
incensed at his son’s rejection of those very promises of modernity
that provided scaffolding for his immigrant dream. He beats up his
son till Ali is on the floor, kicked, punched, and virtually insensible.
Through bloodied lips, Ali has the final word: ‘So who is the fanatic
now?’
The imbrications of the discourses and institutions of modernity
and violence have been pivotal to colonial and post-colonial histories.
This imbrication is a central dimension of our current moment from
xii Foreword

the domestic and micro-political (such as in Kureishi’s short story),

to the global and macro-political (consider the war in Afghanistan).
Oishik Sircar’s remarkable book illuminates these tangles of moder-
nity and violence with sophistication, originality, and insight. Violent
Modernities is anchored in contemporary India and that historical
context is central to the political struggles Oishik is invested in, and
the analytical arguments he advances. Indeed, vigilant about the risks
of universalizing his critical interventions, he insists that the work is
not conceived as ‘atemporal and portable’. This work invites us into
grappling with the specific histories and geographies of contemporary
India and shines a light onto the braiding of the ‘rule of law’ and vio-
lence in this pivotal moment in Indian debates about modernity and
its futures. However, I began with a story of modern Britain and its
promises to underscore how the theoretical portals Oishik opens up
have a wider purchase. That grappling with debates grounded in the
specific histories and geographies of contemporary India have much
to teach us about how violence inhabits discourses and institutions
of modernity, including the ‘rule of law’, in other spaces and places.
Central to the entanglements of ‘violent modernity’ that are the
focus of this book, is the terrain of law, its institutionalization and its
imagination. The book speaks of how laws get constituted through
processes that have far-reaching local impacts, while emerging from
transnational processes of professionalization of legal knowledge.
‘Global Economic Constitutionalism’ and ‘New Legal Order’ are
examples of these travelling knowledge regimes that Oishik describes
(drawing on Jasbir K. Puar) as ‘history vanishing’ frameworks. They
build on long-standing investments in notions of the ‘rule of law’
that have emerged as distinctive features of how modernity has come
to be defined by dominant institutions and political cultures in
India. This work tells us how law and cultures of legality interpolate
modern citizenship through what Oishik identifies as ‘spectacles of
emancipation’ that seduce faith and compliance through the mirage
of law as a conduit for justice, or even as itself a metonym of justice.
The striking achievement of the ‘spectacles of emancipation’ that
this story lays bare is that liberal legality and majoritarian violence
have moved forward as co-travelers in shaping the contours of modern
citizenship from courtroom battles to cinematic dramas. Thus, while
the Special Investigation Team exonerated Narendra Modi for his
 Foreword xiii

role in the orchestration of the anti-Muslim pogrom in Gujarat,

giving him a ‘clean chit’ carrying the imprimatur of supreme legal-
ity, cinematic representations of the afterlives of Gujarat in cultural
memory represent and rationalize the constitution and ‘state-making’
practices that were the pre-histories of the pogrom. Through
analysis of the Best Bakery massacre and the Bollywood film Dev,
Oishik shows how a space is made for Islamophobic violence that is
represented in both law and cinema as ever present but with no one
responsible—indeed, it emerges as compatible with the ‘secularism,
legalism and developmentalism of the New Indian State’. Naturalized
and aestheticized as a necessary backdrop for the nation, the film
allows anti-Muslim violence to be remembered anew in ways that
re-inscribe national mythologies of heritage and heroes, reconcilia-
tion and redemption, tolerant Hindu majorities and ever outsider
Muslim minorities. Oishik describes a ‘jurisprudential–aesthetic’
narrative compact that carries subliminal cinematic cues (about
Hindi–English as the national–universal for instance) that work
alongside constitutional inheritances to shape conditions of legibility
for modern political subjectivity in ways that exclude and marginal-
ize minorities. The analysis powerfully portrays the mythic lives of
law—offering nuanced portrayals of the hyperbolically visible and
audible jurisprudential orientations of Bollywood on the big screen,
but also with an eye acutely alert to the nuances of affect in a film’s
reception, attentive to the work of ‘minor jurisprudence’ in the cin-
emagoer’s aesthetic consumption.
Critical legal theorists who speak of the social construction of
law have developed a body of work on the development of institu-
tions and traditions of judicial interpretation; equally, there has been
work on the relationship between social movements and legal devel-
opments. This book takes these conversations further into the realm
of cultural production and connects the dots between institutions
tasked with the administration of justice (including social services),
social movements making justice claims (for instance, around sex
work in one instance, and sexual rights in another) and the inter-
polation of the juridical in realms such as film (documentaries to
advertisements). For instance, in the case of children of sex workers,
the analysis (co-authored with Debolina Dutta) offers a compelling
critique of how dominant humanitarian tropes of ‘rescue’ deny
xiv Foreword

children’s agency and the complexity of their familial and social rela-
tions. It is an argument that deconstructs the affective structure of
compassion in this domain, and how it facilitates violence and abuse
against these same communities precisely by advancing narratives in
their name.
The complexity of the multiple lives of law and its disciplinary
technologies that Oishik describes is that these dynamics worked
differently for social movements seeking institutional legibility for
the sexually marginalized in struggles for the decriminalizing of
adult, consensual, and private sex. Here, the driving trope of liberal
modernity was not humanitarian compassion but the mythos of
equal rights, and how it has been invoked and deployed in ways
that domesticated the subversive thrust of queer politics. Oishik’s
argument in this discussion deconstructs the affective structure of
inclusion into neoliberal, market-friendly modernity, and how it
presses depoliticization and individualization onto queer communi-
ties precisely by advancing narratives in their name for the redemp-
tion of ‘New India’ and new markets. In both these cases, Oishik is
not just an observer but an activist and his reading of these domains
also situates his own creative interventions and solidarities in these
struggles (including, he says, in performing ‘stuckness’, following
Lauren Berlant). Thus, these are not arguments for abandoning
activism but for doing it differently by wrestling with intersecting
structures and identities to stay with the fraught political challenges
of thinking collaboratively with social movements about how to
advance justice claims but refuse ‘homonationalism’ and interrupt
neoliberal citizenship.
This a book of dazzling erudition—Oishik is in conversation
not only with other legal scholars in India and elsewhere, but also
with the theorizing of legal modernity in a range of other disci-
plines from literary theory to postcolonial studies to anthropology
to queer theory. Masterfully drawing attention to and analyzing
the assemblage of mnemohistories in the formation of a national
consciousness driven by the juridical unconscious, this work
offers a remarkable tour de force journey through battles over
the life of the law, showing the co-constitutive intimacy of con-
stitutional and cultural domains. Yet, what is most striking is the
 Foreword xv

insistent self-reflexive situating of these conversations in his own role

in academia and social movements with particular political invest-
ments. The discussion of his feminism and the vexed entanglements
of those commitments, from the personal to the professional to the
political, offers but one example of what is a running sub-narrative
that is a dialogic companion to every argument in the book.
In other words, the book’s erudition and multiple interdisciplin-
ary conversations are not channeled into the disinterested pursuit of
critique as enlightenment, but a constant questioning of the theorist as
activist, and the activist as theorist. In fact, one may situate the notion
of enlightenment here as akin to the notion of critique that Foucault
articulates in ‘What is Enlightenment?’ Foucault argues that Kant’s
essay should not be understood as a celebration of the knowledge
regimes associated with the historical moment of enlightenment but as
an interrogation of that moment—or indeed, a critical interrogation of
the moment one is in. Such an interrogation is a constant companion
to Oishik’s analysis—an alter ego, pushing at every analytical move,
grappling with hard questions about the relation of text and context
at each turn, relentlessly holding itself to account. In this sense, in this
book that gives expression to the responsibilities of critique alongside
the hope embedded in struggle, Oishik may be a worthy inheritor of
Upendra Baxi’s mantle and his simultaneously inspiring and discom-
forting presence in a wounded world.
In the Kureishi short story that I began with, Ali criticizes his
father’s investment in Britain’s promises, asking ‘Papa, how can you
love something that hates you?’ Parvez does not answer the question
but perhaps the story of Parvez’s love is that he had to fight against
the hate of injustice to create the space for his life; that fight engen-
dered the investment that Ali terms love. Oishik’s critique of the law
and the injustices it has wrought in the name of justice, also loves
wrestling the law for the space that justice struggles demand. This
comes through in the aesthetics and rhythms of this beautifully writ-
ten book that was such a pleasure to read. I lean on James Baldwin
here who speaks of love as ‘a battle; love is a war’—but love is also,
as he says in another passage, ‘a state of being, or a state of grace …
in the tough and universal sense of quest and daring and growth.’
Violent Modernities in chapter after chapter, can be seen to be just
xvi Foreword

that, an expression of love as a brawl with law for space—the space

to invoke, listen to and perform law differently in a quest marked by
grace and daring.

Vasuki Nesiah
Professor of Practice
Gallatin School of Individualized Study
New York University
Acknowledgements

A book is not an isolated being: it is a relationship, an axis of innu-

merable relationships.
— Jorge Luis Borges, Labyrinths(1962)

The essays collected in this book document my scholarly and activist

journeys through the labyrinths of the learnings and failings of my
politics over a period of a decade. I would like to thank those whose
influences have played a foundational role in both strengthening and
questioning the praxes of my proclivities and predilections over these
years.
Ravi Nair, for initiating me into the world of human rights activism
and research. Ranabir Samaddar, for making me realize that activism
is fortified through theorizing. Hutokshi Doctor, for training me to
never underestimate the intelligence of readers and for cautioning me
against my love for jargons. Sharmila Rege, for showing me the joys
of bringing together teaching and writing for social justice. Rustom
Bharucha, for demonstrating through his writing and thinking how
to read politics into aesthetics and vice versa. Ratna Kapur, for lend-
ing me a feminist language to work through my double-binds. Brenda
Cossman, for pushing me to think of the worth of critique as scholarly
practice. Shaun McVeigh, for provoking me to think of conduct as dif-
ferent from critique. Jasbir Puar, for enlivening theory as life practice.
xviii Acknowledgements

Sundhya Pahuja, for impressing on me the political worth of scholarly

conventions. Dianne Otto, for keeping alive the flame of activism in
scholarship. Peter Rush, for showing me why style matters for scholar-
ship. Joan Nestle, for insisting on the political necessity of pleasure and
poetry. Jennifer Nedelsky, for emphasizing how material conditions of
gendered work are intrinsic to the politics of scholarship and activism.
Janet Halley, for urging me to never flinch if I want to take a break.
Ritu Birla, for teaching me history as process, not event. Flavia Agnes,
for keeping alive a faith in law’s promises in dark times. Upendra Baxi,
for practicing a scholarly life that brings alive the struggles of keeping
faith in law’s promises and learning from law’s betrayals.
Friends, mentors, comrades, colleagues, and collaborators whose
lives, work, and generosity have materially, gastronomically, emotion-
ally, and intellectually sustained and nurtured me in ways that might
be completely unknown to them: Adil Hasan Khan, Trina Nileena
Banerjee, Sakyadeb Choudhury, Shayanti Sinha, Deepti Mohan,
Saptarshi Mandal, Rohini Sen, Rajshree Chandra, Claire Opperman,
Anirban Ghosh, Garga Chatterjee, Shilpi Bhattacharya, Dipika Jain,
Samia Khatun, Carolina Ruiz Austria, Alivia Dey, Ann Genovese,
Sara Dehm, Luis Eslava, Rose Parfitt, Vik Kanwar, Julia Dehm, James
Parker, Cait Storr, Dolly Kikon, Yasmin Tambiah, Sally Engle Merry,
Kalpana Kannabiran, Saumya Uma, Bina Fernandez, Jaya Sagade,
Maria Elander, Bikram Jeet Batra, Farrah Ahmed, Mohsin Alam Bhat,
Mohsin Raza Khan, Albeena Shakil, Rahul Rao, Nikita Dhawan,
Meenakshi Gopinath, Swati Bhatt, Agyatmitra Shantanu Mehra,
Ruchira Goswami, Arun Sagar, Arpita Gupta, Rajgopal Saikumar,
Priya Gupta, Sneha Gole, Anagha Tambe, Sannoy Das, Danish Sheikh,
Prabhakar Singh, Maddy Clarke, Sagar Sanyal, Aashita Dawer, Ankita
Gandhi, Sanskriti Sanghi, Max Steuer and Anish Vanaik.
My students at Jindal Global Law School who have humoured
and tolerated my ideas in the Jurisprudence, and Violence, Memory,
and Justice courses—some of which were built on the essays in this
book and some which contributed to the essays. Thanks to Shivangi
Sud, Uday Vir Garg, Amshuman Dasarathy, Rhea Malik, Aishwarya
Koralath, Medha Kolanu, Sanjana Hooda, and Rohan Talwar for your
research assistance. Pallavi Mal, Muskaan Ahuja, Ishani Mookherjee,
and Shubhalakshmi Bhattacharya, for your assistance with teaching.
Rishabh Bajoria, Siddharth Saxena, Ayushi Saraogi, Dikshit Sarma
Bhagabati, Malini Chidambaram, Neeta Maria Stephen, Katyayani
 Acknowledgements xix

Suhrud, and Amala Dasarathy for your provocations in the class-

room. I am immensely grateful to each one of you for your efforts,
engagement, and unremunerated labor. You have been my closest
readers and most thoughtful interlocutors. You are the motivation
behind bringing this book out. If I have an imagined ideal reader in
mind, it is a young student at an Indian law school like you. Thank
you for teaching me about how to make the politics of law relevant
and accessible for tomorrow’s critical lawyers.
A range of organizations and institutions supported the writ-
ing of the essays at various times for over a decade without whose
intellectual, financial, and infrastructural support I could have
possibly never written. Thanks to: Mahanirban Calcutta Research
Group, Krantijyoti Savitribai Phule Women’s Studies Centre at the
University of Pune, West Bengal National University of Juridical
Sciences, Child Rights and You, Centre for the Study of Developing
Societies, Public Service Broadcasting Trust, Centre for Studies
in Social Sciences Calcutta, Johannesburg Workshop on Theory
and Criticism at the University of Witwatersrand, Australia India
Institute at the University of Melbourne, Institute for Global Law
and Policy at Harvard Law School, Institute for International Law
and the Humanities at Melbourne Law School, and the Jindal Global
Law School (JGLS). Among these, I spent the most amount of time
in Melbourne and JGLS, Sonipat and I am especially thankful to
these institutions. I would like to particularly thank C. Raj Kumar,
my dean at JGLS for fostering a culture of critical interdisciplinary
legal research that has been most generative for me. JGLS has always
been a location of contradictions for me—one with which I have a
relationship of uneasy affinity. That is what has also made it one of
the most provocatively productive spaces to inhabit as a critical legal
academic in the New India.
I would like to acknowledge that the writing done at the Melbourne
Law School was carried out on the lands of the Wurundjeri People
of the Kulin Nation who have not ceded their sovereignty. I pay my
respects to their elders, past, present, and emerging. This acknowl-
edgement is necessary because even as a temporary migrant to the
settler colonial state of Australia, I was the beneficiary of colonialism’s
loots that allowed me to pursue my doctoral studies there.
Every expression of gratitude will fall short for Vasuki Nesiah’s
incisive and generous foreword to the book. Thank you for writing
Another random document with
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therefore, expand, and in order to regain a density a thousandfold
less the radius must expand tenfold. Energy will be required in order
to force out the material against gravity. Where is this energy to
come from? An ordinary star has not enough heat energy inside it to
be able to expand against gravitation to this extent; and the white
dwarf can scarcely be supposed to have had sufficient foresight to
make special provision for this remote demand. Thus the star may
be in an awkward predicament—it will be losing heat continually but
will not have enough energy to cool down.
One suggestion for avoiding this dilemma is like the device of a
novelist who brings his characters into such a mess that the only
solution is to kill them off. We might assume that subatomic energy
will never cease to be liberated until it has removed the whole mass
—or at least conducted the star out of the white dwarf condition. But
this scarcely meets the difficulty; the theory ought in some way to
guard automatically against an impossible predicament, and not to
rely on disconnected properties of matter to protect the actual stars
from trouble.
The whole difficulty seems, however, to have been removed in a
recent investigation by R. H. Fowler. He concludes unexpectedly that
the dense matter of the Companion of Sirius has an ample store of
energy to provide for the expansion. The interesting point is that his
solution invokes some of the most recent developments of the
quantum theory—the ‘new statistics’ of Einstein and Bose and the
wave-theory of Schrödinger. It is a curious coincidence that about
the time that this matter of transcendently high density was engaging
the attention of astronomers, the physicists were developing a new
theory of matter which specially concerns high density. According to
this theory matter has certain wave properties which barely come
into play at terrestrial densities; but they are of serious importance at
densities such as that of the Companion of Sirius. It was in
considering these properties that Fowler came upon the store of
energy that solves our difficulty; the classical theory of matter gives
no indication of it. The white dwarf appears to be a happy hunting
ground for the most revolutionary developments of theoretical
physics.
 To gain some idea of the new theory of dense matter we can
begin by referring to the photograph of the Balmer Series in Fig. 9.
This shows the light radiated by a large number of hydrogen atoms
in all possible states up to No. 30 in the proportions in which they
occur naturally in the sun’s chromosphere. The old-style
electromagnetic theory predicted that electrons moving in curved
paths would radiate continuous light; and the old-style statistical
theory predicted the relative abundance of orbits of different sizes,
so that the distribution of light along this continuous spectrum could
be calculated. These predictions are wrong and do not give the
distribution of light shown in the photograph; but they become less
glaringly wrong as we draw near to the head of the series. The later
lines of the series crowd together and presently become so close as
to be practically indistinguishable from continuous light. Thus the
classical prediction of continuous spectrum is becoming
approximately true; simultaneously the classical prediction of its
intensity approaches the truth. There is a famous Correspondence
Principle enunciated by Bohr which asserts that for states of very
high number the new quantum laws merge into the old classical
laws. If we never have to consider states of low number it is
indifferent whether we calculate the radiation or statistics according
to the old laws or the new.
In high-numbered states the electron is for most of the time far
distant from the nucleus. Continuous proximity to the nucleus
indicates a low-numbered state. Must we not expect, then, that in
extremely dense matter the continuous proximity of the particles will
give rise to phenomena characteristic of low-numbered states?
There is no real discontinuity between the organization of the atom
and the organization of the star; the ties which bind the particles in
the atom, bind also more extended groups of particles and
eventually the whole star. So long as these ties are of high quantum
number, the alternative conception is sufficiently nearly valid which
represents the interactions by forces after the classical fashion and
takes no cognizance of ‘states’. For very high density there is no
alternative conception, and we must think not in terms of force,
velocity, and distribution of independent particles, but in terms of
states.
 The effect of this breakdown of the classical conception can best
be seen by passing at once to the final limit when the star becomes
a single system or molecule in state No. 1. Like an excited atom
collapsing with discontinuous jumps such as those which give the
Balmer Series, the star with a few last gasps of radiation will reach
the limiting state which has no state beyond. This does not mean
that further contraction is barred by the ultimate particles jamming in
contact, any more than collapse of the hydrogen atom is barred by
the electron jamming against the proton; progress is stopped
because the star has got back to the first of an integral series of
possible conditions of a material system. A hydrogen atom in state
No. 1 cannot radiate; nevertheless its electron is moving with high
kinetic energy. Similarly a star when it has reached state No. 1 no
longer radiates; nevertheless its particles are moving with extremely
great energy. What is its temperature? If you measure temperature
by radiating power its temperature is absolute zero, since the
radiation is nil; if you measure temperature by the average speed of
molecules its temperature is the highest attainable by matter. The
final fate of the white dwarf is to become at the same time the hottest
and the coldest matter in the universe. Our difficulty is doubly solved.
Because the star is intensely hot it has enough energy to cool down
if it wants to; because it is so intensely cold it has stopped radiating
and no longer wants to grow any colder.
We have described what is believed to be the final state of the
white dwarf and perhaps therefore of every star. The Companion of
Sirius has not yet reached this state, but it is so far on the way that
the classical treatment is already inadmissible. If any stars have
reached state No. 1 they are invisible; like atoms in the normal
(lowest) state they give no light. The binding of the atom which
defies the classical conception of forces has extended to cover the
star. I little imagined when this survey of Stars and Atoms was begun
that it would end with a glimpse of a Star-Atom.
Printed in England at the OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
by John Johnson Printer to the University
*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK STARS AND
ATOMS ***

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