I agree with Ntina Tzouvala when she says that the book “resists easy categorisation” and, thus, an “easy review process.” Perhaps one reason for this difficulty both of us encountered was because the book, “was never meant to be” (p. xxxi). As Oishik points, this was an attempt at creating a “bricolage” (p. xxiv) of “glimpses” (p. 11) offered in past publications over different times and places, and now with the “benefit of the hindsight” (p. xxxvi) and an “afterthought” (p. 251) it is organised around ‘law’, ‘violence’, ‘modernity’, ‘culture’, and ‘New India’. These glimpses, through the seven stories, claim to only be “partial reports” (p. xxxiii) of the relationship between law and violence through a phase of “contemporary pre-history” (p. xxxiii) of the times we experience today, where state law and violence are brazenly, increasingly, and evidently intimate. The stories are not arranged with the intention to “coherently [theorise]” (p. xxvi) this relationship in the ‘New India’, or even be “atemporal and portable” (p.xxxii) — but appear to be in the spirit of (as he might say, feminist) collaboration (p. 249), something that resonates in the ideas as well as (co)authoring practices through the book. This time, however, such a collaborative gesture is directed at his readers: to add these stories, like Alice Te Punga Somerville may say, to their pre-existing “bookshelves”, taking as much (and in whatever order), and also add to the collection of these stories in return — in pursuance of our collective attempts to understand how we arrived, and sometimes to even to “live with”  (“die in” and “care for”) these times (p. xxxvii).

For this review, despite several themes that have held my attention and/or resonated deeply with me and my work — I find it hard to speak to these ideas directly. One, because it may not be possible for me to do justice in taking Oishik’s (possible) cue to collaborate by taking the conversations forward on these themes in a short review like this. Two, because my reading of the book has also made that difficult. Having found comfort in the articulations in an earlier piece on navigations on being in the neoliberal academy, and having heard students and colleagues speak so fondly of him and his classes, I first picked the book in the middle 2022 with great curiosity and excitement — only to pick it up several times after that. Acting on Oishik’s suggestion, I read (and, sometimes, re-read) chapters independently and in a self-designed order — one, in discovering (with great delight) some shared orientations and interests articulated with care that I aspire to achieve; two, charting connections with his professional journey from human rights work into academia; three, following on personal interactions with him (and some of his students), primarily in a related course (‘Violence, Memory and Justice’) he administers which had I audited (and greatly enjoyed) in 2023; or four, for even aiding in my own nascent attempts at teaching parts of this work in the course “‘Hope’ in the law classroom” (“HILC”) between August-December of 2023.

To overcome the difficulty (and here anxious to end the discussion on such difficulty which I sincerely hope has also been performing the job of the review), I find guidance in a recent piece by André Dao and Danish Sheikh who help me see the value of “pay[ing] attention to the time and place” of my encounter with the book from the time I took on the task to review it in April 2023. Unlike them, however, I do not carry an elaborate, real-time experiment alongside my reading of the text; but do find provocation enough, for the reading to “bore” (like Oishik referring Margaret Davies, p. 232-233) through my encounters with the long-standing struggles of finding and conveying meaning to study and teach law at a university that I now, like Oishik, “inhabit on an everyday basis” (p.xxxi). Such “boring” also happens to be in times of ‘crisis’ in the ‘New India’ (and even the ‘modern’ world) — or borrowing Oishik’s deployment of Giorgio Agamben, in the “negative moment” (p.177-178). In such times, must we then “care” about law? What good is theory (especially critical theory), as André, Danish and, separately, Ben Golder (in a forthcoming work) asks if it were only to confirm the “grim apocalyptic realities” in the world “as we knew it,” and must the critical project “start and end in the law classroom.” Are we just being “hopelessly theoretical”? (p. xxxvi). The questions get vastly amplified in, and in the lead upto the HILC course; and through the spectacular recent events that only go onto confirm Oishik’s imagery of the ‘New India’, defined by the “combined rise of neoliberalism and Hindutva.” (p. xxv). This also seemed a more compelling direction for a review considering the book’s “ideal reader” to Oishik, is a “young student at an Indian law school,” (p. xix), and the immense attention it places on pedagogical pursuits.

The act of “boring” through this period makes me more attentive to what the essays were doing “simultaneously,” through “semi-autobiographical” accounts, (p. xxxiii) in capturing Oishik’s “relationship” with modernity and its apparatuses — especially with law. Taking Alice’s, and in this case specifically, Adil Hasan Khan’s cue (here), I also read these accounts in the “order of appearance” to pay attention to the “logics of arrangement” in the “bricolage” (or should I say “rhythm” [p.xxxi] to convey the sense better?) Doing far more than just recounting the “intellectual genealogy of the author,”  the ordering reveals to me Oishik’s journey “from coherence to indeterminacy to undecidability, from reform to resistance to responsibility.” In doing so, it provides me some directions for understanding and, as Adil writes, in “cultivating” hope for navigating the long-term struggles I spoke about.

To me, like bell hooks and Karin Mickelson, I have found ‘hope’ attached to teaching and learning. While I may have “smart answers” (p. 250), it is still a (helpful) challenge interrogating and articulating such hope. Isn’t there great value, as Lisa Duggan & José Esteban Muñoz point to (a conversation that Oishik introduces me to as a suggestion for the HILC course, and also through the book), in finding generative possibilities in being “hopeless” (or even “bitchy, depressed, jaded, cranky”)? Oishik himself prefaces the book through a “statement of hopelessness and failure” (p. xxxvi) introducing the connections between essays where “experiences of hopelessness, slowness, and failure recur.” (p. xxxiv). Leave aside hopelessness, shouldn’t we be concerned about the “dangers” attached with hope — especially its seductive and misleading optimism (Lisa & José; and Terry Eagleton separately, who Karin and Adil rely on)? As Oishik also provokes, the privileged “radical-thought, liberal-conduct types” (p. 178) in neoliberal academia like us “landlocked and waterlogged” in our certainties, “overrate” (p. 178) hope’s affective, moral and material possibilities — often being among the only ones who  can afford to have hope (as Chelsea Watego compellingly shows) or  “doubt it” (as Lea Ypi says). Our obsession with hope (and passing it through our teaching), and our refusal to acknowledge “our inability to recognize it, interpret it, theorize it, articulate it” (p. 178) and engage with the “unseen”, in a way, may colonize the aspirations of many whose “miseries we write” (p. 179) and teach about. Shouldn’t then we listen to Chelsea’s call to her community, and also “fuck hope”?

To then understand and cultivate hope (better) through Violent Modernities, seems to be a counter-intuitive project. However, moving beyond my Ctrl + F tendency to search for theorised hope and hopelessness in the text, and cognisant of the subjectivities attached with hoping, I also find Oishik searching for a “normative hope” (p. xxxiv) himself in his shifts across the different essays in the journey/order I mentioned above. The journey for such hope actually starts and cements with increasing acknowledgements of the failures and shortcomings of the well-intentioned, grand, critical theories he is committed to; and recognition of his finitude/inadequacies in responding to crisis with locked “bookshelves” and “knowledge systems” (see, Shiv Visvanathan here). Take for instance, the dilemmas in navigating the memorialisation of ‘violence’ in response to the usual “contest between memory and forgetting” (p. 110, and 189-190) many working in the human rights space encounter. It is in these episodes, the author[s] find themselves challenged by the vernacular — more around “how [to] remember” than simply staging a war against potential amnesia. Through these, the author[s] often emerge realising how memorialisation while “necessary [, was also] impossible.” This idea comes up several times through the book — particularly in the documentation of the lives of the children of the sex workers (Chapter 2, with Debolina Dutta) and gets more focused through subsequent accounts such as the memorial on Gulberg twelve years after the Gujarat pogrom (Chapter 5).

Similarly, this hope to Oishik also comes with a connected acknowledgement of not just our roles in the successes, but also our complicities with the failures/limitations of these theories (and law instrumentalised towards their ends) that have also shaped fates of our political projects. Take for instance his discussion on taking responsibility for the failures (and unintended consequences) associated with queer politics and feminisms, despite his shifts and momentary “breaks” (p. 246-248) from them. The last essay (Chapter 7) on conducting feminism gives a clear indication of such tendencies. It is in these realisations now “inside the comfortable precincts of the neoliberal academy” (p. xxxvi) that Oishik finds possibilities of such “normative hope.” This hope triggers a demand for “lawful conduct”[1] which is marked prominently by an “ethic of responsibility” (p. 234). This ethic provokes demands of “constant questioning” (p. xv) so as to be able to “argue against the very position” (141) one commits to, and to even “condemn a little bit of oneself” while condemning oppression (p. 179). All of this is directed towards being more responsible for the “inheritance and futures” (p. 236) of the critical projects one cares for, and as Adil says, to respond to the “duties and responsibilities” they embody.

The realisations (and the demands they generate) serve a great pedagogical project, driven at “self-formation,” and an equally compelling goal of “information”; perhaps aptly described by Adil to be a “manual”/ “exercise book” for the “dark times.” But some may still ask: what “is to be done” with this imagination of staying with failure and finitude? (p.178) Is the realisation of “hopelessness” enough to “live with” (“die in” and “care for”)? In response, one may be able to also notice that Oishik’s suggestion is not about passivity — by resigning “to fate” (p. xxxvii) or “apathy” (p. 145). In fact, the idea of “law”[2] in “negative spaces” that excites him is rich with possibilities of “ordinary disobediences” (p. xxxv) in the “unremarkable quotidian” (p. 178).  This also makes one realise how hopelessness is not oppositional (unlike complacency, and apathy) but shares a “dialectical” relationship with hope — and how transformative politics and scholarship need not be the “normative aspiration of all politics” (p. xxxvii) we do.

A closer reading of the “rhythm”, as one of my students Tarusi Jain attempts in one of the assessments for HILC, may also reveal how Oishik’s failure doesn’t stop him from “coming back” to law and critique like André and Danish, but becomes an invitation to “regroup, rethink, reform, and reinvent.” Much like André and Danish, the return is laden with richer ideas of care & repair, and stronger abilities to learn or be surprised: “making different [material, yet small] cuts in the present” (as Davina Cooper, and André and Danish separately tell us relying on Karen Barad). The “what is to be done” question I asked a few paras ago is better imagined through these episodes — to now pose “what else is possible”, or “how to know differently.” Take for instance, how in Chapter 7 it’s only after encountering failures and finitude in Oishik’s feminisms, richer feminisms emerged — and the journey (for the lack of “closure” [p.233]) continues till date. This evidently also explains the emergence of the “queerfeministmarxistpostcolonial” orientation (p. xxxv-xxxvi) from the failures of the critical projects operating in silos and inchoate combinations. Perhaps this is what Lisa & José call a shift towards a more “educated” hope?

Through the book, Oishik offers us a way of collaboratively “building affective communities” (p. 145) where we “can speak about our failures fearlessly” (p. 177); forge a “healing space…for shared vulnerabilities” (p. xxxvii); and “come back” to collaboratively “[making] cuts”. As we realise, having common “good intentions” as the sole point of connection in this ‘New India’ is “not good enough.” (p. 94). Isn’t this then a lesson to not just “find our friends” in our theoretical orientations —  but be better friends, something a “professor of pathos” may want to also teach/learn better today. This reminds of Neville Longbottom who gets ten points for Gryffindor for courageously standing upto his friends — which unlike Dumbledore I feel is sometimes harder than “bravely standing up to enemies”.[3] Perhaps this too is the gesture we learn from Oishik, as Vasuki Nesiah says, to be better friends, and love with “grace and daring.” (p. xvi) — in this hopeless place.

***

Besides the HILC class, thanks to Shohini for being an as enthusiastic companion in thinking about hope. To her, for also (always) being the first reader and reviewer.

[1] Oishik relies on “jurisdictional thinking” to understand lawful conduct through critique that provides “a sense of location and the knowledge of limits that not only recognizes privilege, but also accounts for its complicities and failures” (p. 237).

[2] The attention to law in the book was less about the ‘objective’ meanings of law churned in “positivist” positive spaces (like in “courtrooms, legislations, and judgements”) but more in the “negative spaces” of “culture” (seen in the ordinary and every day in “literature, cinema, art and the practices of pedagogy”) where the ‘objective’ meanings seep into (p. xxiv).

[3] It is hard to acknowledge characters JK Rowling creates in a review of a book that attempts to enrich conversations on feminism and queer theory. I do so with some difficulty – but also cognisant of how the texts take a life more than what the authors can “own”.

The Title is the hook line from Rihanna’s song (featuring Calvin Harris): “We found love”. The sentiment the music video portrays and the context suggests (both of which I paid attention to only now) the love (though addictive) was as hopeless, and Rihanna in the song eventually decides to “let it go.” To me, however, the memory of the song is only of the repition of the hook line (accompanied by upbeat electro-house rhythms) that I would hear at parties during my undergraduate years in law school. My association with the line back then was how in the secluded outskirts of a small city, I found community and (actively) initiated my love-hate relationship with law.

Aman is a PhD candidate at the School of Global and Public Law, Faculty of Law & Justice at UNSW Sydney.