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In the two previous sections I looked at different ways knowledge was inflected with statist interests. Foucault (2003, 2006) famously evoked the figure of the grotesque to describe such disciplinary knowledge in which tokens of power come to stand for disciplinary authority. His corpus of work has been marshalled to suggest contestation, resistance, or struggle, as a counter to such expert knowledge. I do not underestimate the importance of being able to tell “counter-stories” or to make subjugated knowledge appear in the light of critique that is grounded in the experiences that these stories tell (Torre et al. 2001). Yet I want to touch on another register of the darkness of knowledge that is carried, endured, and worked on in the everyday.

In proposing the concept of inordinate knowledge, I readily concede that it remains to be fully developed in the philosophical and anthropological literature; yet, I find that even if some aspects of this concept remain obscure to me, I find it to be powerful in the way it goes beyond the issue of specific speech acts to that of our experience of language as a whole. The concept first emerged in an essay by Stanley Cavell (2007a) which grew into earlier and later versions (in 2007 and 2010) he wrote in conversation with Cora Diamond in response to what she called “the difficulty of reality” and the “difficulty of philosophy” (Diamond 2008, earlier version 2003). In his essay Cavell characterized the sense of woundedness that Diamond gave expression to as “inordinate knowledge,” attaching a string of attributes, not so much to define this concept as to convey its feel.⁹ For Cavell, inordinate knowledge may be characterized as knowledge that can seem “excessive in its expression, in contrast to mere or bare or pale or intellectualized or uninsistent or inattentive or distracted or filed, archived knowledge, an opposite direction of questionable, here defective, or insipid, or shallow, or indecisive expression” (Cavell 2010: 84). In order to flesh out this concept and to indicate its salience for me, I will dwell in some detail on the conversation between Cavell and Diamond and then give some examples from my ethnography to say what I hope in absorbing this idea into anthropological modes of description or analysis.

In the citation from Cavell I gave, he makes a contrast between two directions – one is the direction of excessive expression that clings to inordinate knowledge and the second is that of insipid, or shallow, expression that he thinks of in relation to archived or pale or bare knowledge. Somewhere in this contrast what seems to matter is the “touch” of words, but the only way to get to that sense of touch is to see what is at stake for Diamond to which Cavell’s essay is a response. Here it might be important to be reminded that, for Cavell, the moments of origin for a thought lie in the provocations among a circle of figures (Cavell 2005: 132); for Cavell, this circle includes Diamond and the ongoing conversations he (Cavell) has with the texts of Wittgenstein. Even if not stated explicitly, somewhere in this conversation is the idea that the touch of words might burn one, in another direction, that one may lose one’s touch with words, become a machine, use any word that could efficiently do the work regardless of whether it was a word alive within a form of life, or a frozen word deadened by meaningless repetition? With these ideas in the background, let us see what is at stake in the question of knowledge for Diamond.

A compelling way of posing the issue of violence for Cora Diamond is the issue of what we do to animals in the era of industrial production of animals as food. She takes the violence to animals as one example around what she calls the “difficulty of reality.” Diamond pairs this expression with another expression, the “difficulty of philosophy” and in pairing these two expressions she wants to point to a region of ethical, even existential, disquiet that cannot be settled by advancing arguments and counterarguments. In fact, she experiences the urge to offer arguments as itself a form of non-responsiveness, an evasion that is part of her experience of hurt. Cavell is fully attuned to the fact that the wound Diamond speaks of is not the kind of hurt and misunderstanding that arises in the give and take of life, one that we could turn away from, given the right response. Is there a right response?

There is something in certain experiences Diamond feels that is recalcitrant to thought and she can convey such experiences only by means of examples.¹⁰ Stanley Cavell, in his response to Diamond, names this relation between the difficulty of reality and difficulty of philosophy as “inordinate knowledge.” It may be worthwhile to consider the examples Diamond gives and then the connections that Cavell makes between the experience of excess, feeling of suffocation, that this kind of knowledge entails that distinguishes it from knowledge that is pale or archived. If “the difficulty of reality” poses certain kinds of problems to philosophy, are these the same kinds of problems it raises for anthropology? Allow me to slow the pace of the thinking here, for the matters raised between Diamond and Cavell are delicate and how one might absorb the problematic in anthropology calls for caution.

Diamond places considerable weight in illustrating what she means by the difficulty of reality by forcefully evoking the cruelties entailed in how we humans treat animals, especially in the context of industrial production of animals as food. Yet she is not speaking as an animal rights advocate, but as one who is mortally wounded, haunted, or maddened by the knowledge of what we do to animals. Diamond takes the example of Mrs. Costello, the protagonist of a novel by J.M. Coetzee, who presented parts of this novel as part of his Tanner lectures on ethics. Mrs. Costello is an elderly woman novelist, a woman “haunted by the horror of what we do to animals.” The occasion where the rawness of her nerves is shown is the occasion of a distinguished lecture she has been invited to give in the university where her son teaches. The story unfolds as an unseemly confrontation between the speaker and her audience, especially by the comparison she makes between what we do to animals with the horrors of the Nazi camps. For Diamond, the way to read Coetzee’s story is to see it as outside the frame of arguments and counterarguments. Instead, she invites us to think of how Coetzee presents a woman whose every word, she claims, is a wound for there is no region of language left untouched by this experience. For many others, Diamond notes, Coetzee is making an argument through a fictional device on how we should treat animals. What is the difficulty of reality here?

Our treatment of animals, however, is not the only example Diamond takes. A second example comes from a searing poem by Ted Hughes called “Six Young Men” in which the speaker of the poem is looking at a faded photo from 1914 of these six young men, profoundly and fully alive when the photo was taken, and yet within six months all six were dead in the war. Here is Ted Hughes, saying, “To regard this photograph might well dement.” But still, as Diamond says, “It is possible to describe the photo so it does not seem boggling at all” (2008: 44).

So, what is mind boggling in the two examples? At one place in the story of Mrs. Costello, she seems to be deliberately causing offense by making a comparison between the treatment of animals in food factories and the treatment of Jews in Nazi camps. And although the comparison seems obnoxious at first hurried reading, it becomes apparent that she is comparing the claims of ignorance through which many Germans tried to exonerate themselves; and the kinds of justifications many people give of being unaware of the cruel practices carried out in animal farms and their indifference to other humans who are appalled, or wounded by this indifference to them.

Mrs. Costello’s lecture (in the novel) includes her statements on this comparison – one of these statements reads: “The crime of the Third Reich, says the voice of accusation, was to treat people like animals … by treating fellow human beings, created on the image of God, like beasts, they had themselves become beasts.” Here lies an important clue for Cavell’s statement that how we treat animals is an allegory for how we treat humans. I want to add here, though, that Coetzee is explicit that Mrs. Costello is seeing her fellow human beings as having become beastly. In taking offense at her argument, her audience completely misses the point that the slaughterhouse of the animals is seen by her as preparation for human brutality that turns from animals to other humans.

For Diamond then, the joining of the difficulty of reality to the difficulty of philosophy is that philosophy has no means of addressing the wounded speaking animal, except through arguments about rights and personhood, and the most humane ways of killing animals. This is a kind of “as if” engagement: Diamond, using an expression of Cavell’s, calls this mode of argumentation a deflection. In Coetzee’s novel, Mrs. Costello experiences this terrible rawness of nerves in the kind of questions the audience puts to her; ironically Diamond finds this deflection mirrored in the commentaries on Coetzee’s Tanner Lectures, and if one may add in many commentaries on Diamond’s essay. (If more facts were known, more humane ways of killing would surely evolve [Hacking 2008]; surely the imagination that some can experience animals to be their companions is just part of a putative reality [McDowell 2008].) Against these kinds of arguments, the question for Diamond is: how can we remain indifferent to the fact that some among us experience some animals as their companions, while others can kill and eat them without blinking an eye? This is a question of being unable to imagine an embodied sense of the extinction of another. Our knowledge of our vulnerability to death is wounding in the light of what we do to animals both in reality and as an allegory of what we do to each other, as humans.

We might want to be reminded at this point of Diamond’s observation that from some perspectives, the examples she offers would not cause any disquiet. But she feels that the entire response to her woundedness offered as erudite arguments is to deflect the issues and inflict hurt of a different order. As an example, I remember discussing with a colleague how I felt unhinged reading some articles in defense of torture after I had heard an almost primitive cry wrenched out from the mother of a torture survivor, and this colleague responding with “different people are entitled to have different views” said sympathetically, yet not connecting to my sense of what was at stake at all. But the difficulty this raises for philosophy, which is that of the impossibility of thinking itself, is of one order – I want to say that the difficulty of what this means to go on within a community, with kin and with neighbors, who have or are suspected to have engaged in killings and rape might be of a different order. I am aware of all the work on forgiveness and reconciliation but with few exceptions most scholars take this work to be that of the individual subject and not of the way the social is brought to bear on these issues or the work of time (see the remarkable work of Osanloo 2020 in this context, though; see also Das 2021).

Most people in the urban slums I work with are not likely to find themselves in lecture halls but they do express themselves publicly. I have written in an earlier book (Das 2007) about the massive violence against members of the Sikh community in Delhi after the assassination of Mrs. Gandhi by her Sikh bodyguards. I worked with the survivors then for more than a year and faced the complete denial on the part of government officials that deaths of Sikh men had taken place at such massive scale in Delhi and elsewhere. I would like to loop back to a description of one of the streets in which killings had happened and the way women sat in silence in these streets as a gesture through which lamenting and cursing were expressed in the excess of the body.

More powerful than even the words, though, was the way that the women sat in silence outside their houses refusing to bring mourning to an end … the women were often scared to speak out, but their gestures of mourning that went on and on and on showed the deeply altered meaning of death … the women defiantly hung on to their filth and their pollution. They would not go into the houses, they would not light the cooking hearths, they would not change their clothes … the small heaps of ashes (remains of the fires on which bodies were burnt), the abandoned houses, the blood splattered walls created a funeral landscape, the sight of the women with their unwashed bodies and unbraided hair was a potent sign that mourning and protest were part of the same event. (Das 2007: 195)

These were responses carved out of ritual and mythology and embodied the notion of curses on the perpetrators, but also on a world that had allowed such grievous violence to happen. The whole of language was an accusation. I do not know if this kind of difficulty of reality, in which no one could have deciphered what was going on even as the events of murders unfolded over four days, when you could not know in advance which words might betray and which words might save you, your children, your neighbor – is a difficulty of blockages to thought or blockages to living. The response through drawing on mythology and ritual might not be “thought” in the sense that Diamond wants philosophy to respond, but perhaps at the level of the everyday, it was better than “thought.” Could mythology and ritual then manage to avoid the disappointment with the forms rational arguments take? Or in other words, could one claim that human expressiveness here finds routes to these difficulties of reality?

It is interesting to me that Diamond does not take up the other registers in Coetzee’s novel – for instance the texture of interactions within the domestic scenes when Mrs. Costello realizes that the grandchildren are eating in the playroom because they are going to have chicken soup, and their grandmother does not like meat on the table while their mother does not want to make any concessions to what she calls with obvious irony, her mother-in-law’s “delicate sensitivities.” In what way would these quotidian interactions change the feeling of abuse that pervades the lecture hall? Mrs. Costello’s disappointments are with the philosophers. At one point in the novel she says “Even Immanuel Kant of whom I would have expected better, has a failure of nerve at this point. Even Kant does not pursue, with regard to animals, the implications of his intuition that reason may be not the being of the universe but on the contrary merely the being of the human brain” (Coetzee 2003: 67).

What Diamond makes of this impulse in the novel, however, is something more than the fact that philosophers disappoint her. It is thinking itself which fails in the face of these difficulties of reality. But what if we asked, but how do people live with or endure such knowledge?

I have seen evidence that makes me put aside the faith in abstract reasoning or in thought experiments to address this particular range of issues pertaining to the moral responsibilities we have to other humans and to animals; I trust simply that, faced with such inordinate knowledge, people did what they could in the circumstances that they found themselves in. I recall the way in which the pressure generated by policemen to provide false witness against the accused arrested under terror laws was resisted (not always successfully) as families would send homemade food, a hand-knitted scarf, a letter, a picture drawn by a child, across the prison walls made up of brick and mortar, and of the thick lattice of police procedures, knowing full well that the prisoner will be mocked for these, that these gifts would be seized on one pretext or another, but willing the prisoner to know that he is loved. This is the register of words, gestures, and their physiognomy that I have tried to give expression to in this work. As an anthropologist and in fidelity to those in these urban slums I have come to know, I would say that the power of such gestures and of words as gestures is that they do not engage in the kinds of arguments Mrs. Costello was confronted with during the course of her lecture. After all, they have to live in neighborhoods in which your next-door neighbor might be a police informer; or, it may be a kinsman who gave false evidence against your husband or son in a terror trial either out of fear or because of greed; or, a child might say something that would identify a secret you were trying to hide from the police and so words have to be guarded, or perhaps covered up with euphemisms. But in the very ways in which excess of expression and concealment of it are made part of these lives, they testify to the different ways in which people learn to live with inordinate knowledge.