The Gift of 'Desh': Desire, Delirium, or Becoming-Liminal

What 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 point is the empty place of the Thing, a perpetual threshold entity, filled out by the Nation? When should the history of (Bangla-)desh begin?

 It is a question that calls upon us to rethink our material and affective relations and reconceptualize the sphere of intimacy itself, from within this inherently unstable terrain of political constitution, and to do so in terms of a fluid sensuousness that exceeds the coherency of the state. The muddy materialities of the Padma, Meghna, and Sitalaksha (always a material melancholia, and never just a phantasmatic vision) extend beyond the discursive legibility of borders, geopolitical and psychic. The territorial trap of the post-partition predicament is an operative fiction with no reason to suspect that it has finished moving or settled into its final figuration. To arrive at this rather strange space for libidinal investment where desire has become unformed, we must come up with a nonteleological understanding of becoming, of learning to love transversally (an existential theatricality, for us, as and where we stand), or as Deleuze puts it, “a motionless voyage.” For subjects inhabiting the liminal ‘slip zones’ of post-partition South Asia, the schizonomadic pole of delirium becomes a matter of occupying space differently: desh is a signifier of its own lack, “a depersonalization through love rather than through subjection;” to translate, say the Chittagong hill tracts into geological time is to understand that space itself longs to ‘escape’ the virtualisation of the social. To desubjectify is to make-do with an anarchic multiple of desires, the phenomenological warping and even a miming of the death it cannot mourn: “ami nôyôn jôle bhasi-” to split, carve, cut. To situate the material-semiotic history of desh is also to recognize how materially produced national representations grip different national bodies, objects, along with a contagious desire that is not just a matter of being in love, but of being out-in love,