Books: The Making of the Spurious; an Interview with Shaj Mohan

What follows is an exclusive interview with Shaj Mohan, a world-known famous Indian philosopher, on the occasion of the National Book Week in Iran. Shaj Mohan is a philosopher based in India. His philosophical works are in the areas of metaphysics, reason, philosophy of technology, philosophy of politics, and secrecy. Mohan's works are based on the principle of anastasis according to which philosophy is an ever-present possibility on the basis of a reinterpretation of reason. Mohan completed his early education in Thiruvananthapuram, Kerala, and studied philosophy at St. Stephen's College, Delhi where he taught for some time. He has academic degrees in economics and philosophy. Mohan wrote the book Gandhi and Philosophy: On Theological Anti-politics published by Bloomsbury Academic, UK with the philosopher Divya Dwivedi.

In the era of digitalization of everything, what do you think of the place of books in today's society?   

Shaj Mohan: I never had to speak explicitly about books, and to define in some sense what a book is. It is not a simple species of the genus of the objects of artifice. We do not know what a book is. This fact is one of the first mysteries of books. If we try to recall our childhoods, all of us have the memory of the mystery of books as we encountered them without having the sufficient training to read all of them. It is an artifice which astonishes us as much as it seduces us through the mystery of its meaning. This mystery was never solved, but it came to fade for most of us as we began to enter libraries, playing the games of words. Yet, it remains as the noise in the background of all reading and researching. 

The received commonplace meaning of the book is both ancient and modern, but in different ways. In the ancient worlds a book as such did not exist, because compositions never came to rest. Often the authors we read from the ancient worlds, such as the proper name “Homer”, could have been a community working together, with or without rules for the composition, and then handing over the task of composition to another generation. This fact has to be kept in mind when we read Plato or Aristotle, as classificatory term “spurious” reminds us, there are always others lurking behind the names of the ancients and speaking through them. For this reason the “spurious” interests me a lot; that is, “The Problemata (Προβλήματα)” of Aristotle interests me just as much as “The Physics”. As you know “spurious” means bastard, and a bastard family of books is what propels newer fights for freedoms.  

Almost always, when compositions came to their end, with restriction imposed on any further addition to the composed material, something dangerous took place. The enforced arresting of composition was preceded by a will to control the meaning of what was composed, and through that meaning to control all the domains of signification, or the worlds of men. So, book in that ancient sense meant that doctrines and territories were already established. 

The well bound book is modern, which is coming to pass. The “coming to pass” will take too long to explain. The modern notion of the book is bound both legally and physically. The physical binding arrests further additions and the legal binding assign authorship and responsibilities. The book travels to festivals and homes while remaining a vault it itself in a peculiar sense. This vault of the book still generates compositions, it seeks responses and imitations; it prompts both literal and real attacks and wars; and, an interesting book devastates the world, at least someone, and constitutes a ruin of all the books of its concern. Then, it is up to that someone or everyone concerned to raise another world through the making of the spurious. We can call this raising anastasis. 

There is no danger as such to digitisation. I belong to a tradition which thought of the difference between “the text” and “the book” deeply. It is a tradition of the transcendental of the book, and not a tradition of the book. In that tradition, Bernard Stiegler was concerned with the digital. He was concerned with the culture we acquire of the digital screen, or the way we train children into a culture of the screen. This culture of inattention is the worry we should entertain. The internet has been wonderful for books, more people read the most inaccessible due to it. We should not worry about the “digital” as such because nothing can take the place of the politics of the binding and unbinding of compositions, which continues from the ancient worlds to the internet era. 

Can books and reading, as many say, create a better world for mankind and connect different cultures?   

Shaj Mohan: The creation of worlds or politics has components other than books. The great books of history, theory, and poetry written by the Palestinian people and their friends from around the world are read widely. Perhaps, the most militant international literary culture of my generation had been Palestinian. The intellectual insurgencies of Palestinian books define a new political ethos for us, just as the holocaust and the resistance to national socialism did for another generation. Here we should have in mind both the people living in Palestinian lands including Israel and those outside it, and that shows us that books do create an explosive form of politics betraying all national and fascistic boundaries. And yet, and this is significant, the Palestinian people are always fleeing while living and dying. They exist as the fleeing beings. Their deaths, through the denigration and refutations of the sense of their lives, are also fleeing while the majority of the world flee and flinch within as the Palestinians live and die in the reality television of a holocaust. Perhaps this is the new difference between the Jewish holocaust and the Palestinian holocaust that the latter is televised as live death.

Then, unfortunately books still seem insufficient to create new politics, especially the politics of love and fond discordances. I do not think that this book festival is the occasion to go to outside of the books, although it must be done through the written word. For now, we can propose something: if those who are the readers of, or the participants of, the intellectual insurgency of the Palestinian people can come together, speak to each other, and speak together under new digital forums, it will certainly create a new politics excluding the merchants of death.  

Do you think the idea of cultural diplomacy can bring together different countries?

Shaj Mohan: I do not want to to dwell on this question too much because the previous question already contains the components which form an answer to this one. When desire and love lead cultures to come together to create unknown cultures, and when people are able to move freely across borders with these new bastard cultures, without having the worries of passport controls, the world will be less reliant on the rusting notion of countries. 

But there is something else that we should think about, keeping in mind the previous question. The distance between India and Iran is about 600 kilometres, these two regions had been often culturally and politically continuous in the past. These two regions share very similar cuisine, words, greetings. However, how come the people of these two regions feel closer today to a writer in Germany, or a philosopher in France, or a dancer in America? What has created this estrangement of what is already shared, what is already most immediate? If there are answers please let me know. 

Source: 

https://ketab.ir/EnNews/30061