Sexuality, Vulnerability, And the Oddness of the Human: Lessons from the Mahabharata (Special ISSUE: RELIGION AND Sexuality) (Essay‪)‬

This paper seeks to understand how sovereignty might be the scene of both power and vulnerability. It takes its education from the great epic poem, the Mahabharata, to forefront what I claim is a much neglected aspect of sovereignty. As a thought experiment this paper joins some recent discussions on the political-theological. As, Hent de Vries, in the Introduction to his magisterial co-edited volume, Political Theologies: Public Religion in a Post-Secular World writes: the term political theology captures religion's engagement with politics where the political might be defined equally through its conceptual analogues--viz., sovereignty, democracy, etc., as well as with the judicial and administrative apparatus with which it is institutionalized (de Vries 2006). However, while de Vries is interested in opening up the category of political-theology for its 'timeliness', given the anxieties about political Islam that haunt Europe and North America, I am interested in the untimeliness of the questions that the story of sovereignty raises. Rather than responding to the pressure put on thought by current anxieties about terrorism and spectacular violence, I want to pause and ask whether a deeper mythico-religious bedrock of ideas continues to inform our discussion on sovereignty in the social sciences. A perusal of current debates on religion and politics make it abundantly clear that despite the call for pluralization of the concept of political theology that de Vries advocates, the variations in the story of sovereignty continue to revolve around debates within Christianity as the essays in his own edited volume show. I experiment then with a counter story but one that, for the moment, I can only offer as an 'as if' story, for it would require much more scholarship than I can muster to flesh it out in full detail. I start with spelling out the issues pertaining to sovereignty and its relation to violence to which the Mahabharata, I suggest, offers a counterpoint. Much recent discussion on political theology returns to Schmitt (1985) and evokes either a direct or an indirect relation between the theological and the political. In the first case the idea of a State to which citizens owe exclusive allegiance turns out to be a secular reworking of the monotheistic notion of God in which the name of the entity changes but the predicates of God and the State remain the same. The second case is that of an indirect relation between the two terms, whereby past shadowy figures such as the Roman figure of homo sacer cast their shadow on contemporary forms in which a biopolitics of life and death is replayed through the sovereign right to declare exceptions (Agamben 1998). Interestingly, neither of these stories of sovereignty consider how sexuality is incorporated in this scene of sovereignty--the figure of the woman goes missing in both versions of political theology. Thus the question of sexual difference continues to challenge all foundational stories of sovereignty with profound implications. One of the implications of this exclusion of sexual difference is, of-course, related to the expulsion of the voice of the woman from political discourse. The other, more subtle implication, is, that it hides the connection between sovereignty and vulnerability, since it does not come to terms in any explicit way with the fact that once sovereignty is defined in secular terms, it cannot rely on divine dispensation for its continuity. The nation state must then rely on the family to draw life for itself and as Rousseau's Emile clearly recognizes, women must give life to the nation and the state through the reproduction of legitimate and 'correctly' produced children. Yet men can do nothing more than either place full faith in women's fidelity; or, ensure through complicated institutional designs that the children women bear are, indeed, 'correct' children and hence legitimate future citizens.