The Gift of 'Desh': Desire, Delirium, or Becoming-Liminal
W hat are the conditions under which we attribute this strange, elusive property—the uncanny visitations of desh ? How does one step into its spectral blurriness, when this privileged trope, something isomorphic with the fragmented nation, is nothing but a metaphor of the impossible, futural, and the necessarily disjointed present? This all-hasty desire for facile legibility of a national form predicated on unalterable 'difference,' exile, and errantry of various kinds is already an implicitly disenfranchised desire of the utopic other. The national longing for cartographic form as a sort of affective commitment materialized in the maternal body is, in many ways, a reactive desire that must be present for the National Thing, this new secret signifier, to achieve its ontological consistency. Yes, as we shift to the non-linear and fluid, the ephemeral moment of performance in the dysfunctional site of the Post-Partition ‘home’, we are faced with yet another question: at what poin...