Table Of ContentINSURGENT METAPHORS
ESSAYS ON CULTURE AND CLASS
Marxism’s cultural turn, which has been prominent in its
operation over at least the past four decades, continues to
belie the hope it had initially held out. The idea that such a
move would eventually pull Marxism out of its ‘ontological
crisis’ is on the verge of a miscarriage. That is certainly the
case in sub-continental South Asia. Unsurprisingly,
therefore, ‘culturally-turned’ Marxism survives as the sign
of the very crisis it was meant to surpass. Its canonisation
within the academia, and beyond, as a mere analytic of
culture has led to the blurring of politico-ideological lines.
The quietist impulse that this theory of the science of
revolution has, as a consequence, come to share with so-
called poststructuralism implies its complete detachment
from all notions and conceptions of class and class action.
The 13 essays that comprise this book are envisaged as a
small attempt from South Asia – where communitarian
postcolonialism and ‘Marxist’ culturalism constitute the
most respectable trend in radical theory – to remedy the
situation.
Pothik Ghosh was educated as a professional journalist in
Calcutta, Lucknow and Delhi. Active with various Left
groups, he is currently based in Delhi and is one of the
editors of Radical Notes. His monograph, Loss as Resistance:
Towards a Hermeneutic of Revolution, has also been published
by Aakar as part of the Radical Notes booklet series.
INSURGENT METAPHORS
ESSAYS ON CULTURE AND CLASS
Pothik Ghosh
First published 2023
by Routledge
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© 2023 Pothik Ghosh and Aakar Books
The right of Pothik Ghosh to be identified as author of this work has been
asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and
Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or
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infringe.
Print edition not for sale in South Asia (India, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Bangladesh,
Pakistan or Bhutan)
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A catalog record for this book has been requested
ISBN: 978-1-032-36552-7 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-032-36553-4 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-003-33262-6 (ebk)
DOI: 10.4324/9781003332626
Typeset in Palatinno
by Sakshi Computers, Delhi
To Paramita, who kept her self-expression
in check so that I could give mine
Contents
Acknowledgements 9
Epigraph 11
Introduction 13
1. In Search of Class 31
2. Fascism and a Marxist Praxis of Art 43
3. Academics, Politics and Class Struggle 76
4. The Siren Songs of Neo-traditionalism 90
5. Akhtaruzzaman Elias: Beyond the Lived Time
of Nationhood 106
6. Kafka and the Question of Revolutionary Subjectivity 150
7. Media and the Indian State: On the Draft
Broadcasting Services Regulation Bill, 2006 162
8. The Blind Art of the Concrete 174
9. In Defence of Hamas 178
10. Sri Lanka: Genocide and Other Majoritarian
Falsehoods 186
11. Fascism in its Liberal Womb 194
12. Lalgarh beyond Maoism, Maoism beyond Lalgarh 199
13. Three Fragmentary Theses on the Politico-theoretical
Problematic posed by the Current Phase of the Indian
Maoist Movement for Working Class Politics 207
Acknowledgements
Acknowledging friends, family and fellow-travellers has
become an indispensable ritual in modern publishing. It is a
device by which the writer—otherwise immersed in the self-
centred, almost arrogant, ethics of individuated production
of autographed literature—shows himself to be capable of
humility, thus bolstering, paradoxically enough, precisely the
authorial self he condescends to efface. It is a gesture of
humanisation where there can actually be none. But a work,
any work, cannot plausibly be imagined as an extraordinary
feat by an individual. More so a book such as this one that
claims to be an expression of a political ethics of non
competitive, unalienated collectivity. An individual writer
is merely the contingent agency of discourse whose locus is
always the collective. As far as this book is concerned that
has really been the case. My fidelity to the actual condition
of possibility of this book allows me to fulfil the ritual of
acknowledgements only by reanimating that ritual to
transform it into an authentic act of good faith. This book is
truly the product of a collective enterprise. That I have been
its writer is a contingent detail that gives me a sense of
happiness and pride. And it is this pride and happiness that
I wish to share with my “party of the concept”.
Comrade Ganeshan of CPI(ML)-Liberation would be the
first among them. It is to him I owe the realisation that practice
of theory for a partisan has to be much more than merely a
matter of private amateurish pursuit.
