Methods Devour Themselves

by Benjanun Sriduangkaew

  Come evening she is informed that the emissary has fallen ill.

  She visits them in their suite, still in that dress they like, plainly attired otherwise: she wears no jewellery. The only metal on her is Nuriya’s gun.

  They are abed, eyes dilated, chest rising and falling fast. When she touches their hand, she finds their skin hot. Their fingertips feel raw, like little cinders in her palm. For a time they lie there, between conscious and not, twisting beneath the sheets. She calls for a basin of cool water and a washcloth. She wets Crow’s brow, their bare shoulders. Even now, she thinks, they are exquisite. Is it true, deep affection to want to sit by the sickbed, and see beauty even in weakness? Or else it is perversion and she has been confounded by her upbringing, and that must apply to the Shuriam girl too. A mind that has not known love can hardly conceive of and practise it.

  When Crow wakes, they seize her hand. “I need you to know,” they say hoarsely, “that I love you, Lussadh.”

  “It’s the fever talking, emissary.”

  Their grip tightens. The strength of it startles her. “I’m of clear mind. No matter what, I love you. It is not a thing I planned, yet what can I do?”

  Has she heard this before? Did the Shuriam girl say this, or something like this? She can’t remember. Recall bends under the weight of duty, the accrued and crushing pressure of symbol. “You should try to rest,” Lussadh says. “I’ll stay here.”

  “All night?”

  “All night.”

  They fall into uneasy sleep, eventually.

  Toward midnight Zumarr knocks. She steals away, shuts the door behind her, and speaks to xer in the corridor. The queen has been seen, stumbling out of her ice palace, falling to her knees. Not dying, far from that, but vulnerable. Mortal.

  King Ihsayn’s order comes as night yields. Lussadh paces the suite on bare feet, wondering whether she should pull back the curtains and let in the dawn. No. The sun would be too harsh, and Crow is unwell. Some countries commemorate their dead in jars, in bone keepsakes. Shuriam does the latter, or rather it did, and sometimes she thinks that she should have kept the fragment of a skull or a phalanx. She has never been a stranger to the grip of a gun, yet it feels alien in hand now, eelish or serpentine. Slippery, a thing prone to falling. We all dream of falling, great prince.

  She draws the gun.

  By the bed she kneels and touches Crow’s cheek. “Crow. Are you awake?”

  They blink up at her slowly. A soft smile. “I dreamed of a future in which I can wake up to your face every morning. Can I have some water?”

  “Yes,” Lussadh whispers. She fires. There is hardly any sound, so much cushioning. Flesh, sheets, mattress. It all muffles; it all turns a moment that should be unbearably loud into one that is almost silent.

  The third time and, as she thought, she feels nothing at all.

  The white blade is light, as though it was made from something other than steel. Bird-boned, if such a thing can be said of a weapon. Pious Pledge, Lussadh thought that a peculiar name for a weapon, peculiarly elegant. Not unlike its owner.

  The ride to the old crematorium was long, solitary. Still she has made good time. Her beast is not tired, comfortable and loose-muscled in its armour. For the most part she was able to steer clear of predators, though half her carrion traps are gone, the decoys to lure the wind-lynxes and bind the chameleons. Navigating the desert without the protection of a retinue or a train is an exacting science. There are rails in the distance, black lines like a second horizon, but none of the routes come near this place. There are no reasons to. It is a relic, defunct and fading from even the memory of those who once utilized it. There are aspects of a holy place to the crematorium, the finials and naga scales of a temple winding up the spire that vented smoke. The walls stand shredded and perforated; what little remains of the stone is gouged by lynxes. Of the attached monastery there is next to nothing left.

  A quiet day, the wind stilled for now. She is safe from the lynxes, which cannot fly or perambulate on their own, dependent on the caprices of weather. Lussadh peers through her telescope in the distance. As the seers have reported, the frost that encroached upon the dunes is gone. The Winter Queen’s abode must have melted or shattered. Now you are ready to be king, Ihsayn said, and you’ll be remembered as Kemiraj’s greatest hero. Historians will never forget you.

  Lussadh pushes her way through a rusted gate. Empty, ruinous. She thought of doing this at the sun temple, but there was no way to safe-keep Pious Pledge there without the clergy informing the king. This crematorium used to be a playground for her and Nuriya. There was appeal to a spot of absolute quiet, away from the monitoring of their retinues and caretakers.

  She climbs to the second floor, where monks once presided over funeral rites, and looks for the pot of loam she and Nuriya brought all those years ago. By miracle it remains there, though the violets are gone; they never really sprouted. Ey had laughed at her. She had argued that violets might thrive on history.

  The loam has hardened and dried. She places down hyacinths carved from imported wood, birch and cypress, and fresh anthuriums that have bruised from the journey but remain alive enough. Bright, lustrous. Then she takes out Pious Pledge and thrusts it into the soil.

  At first it seems her imagination that the air has grown tight and knifed. Then the crack, as of glass under stress. Her skin sears and a roar fills her, as if thunder has infiltrated her veins, her heart gone to lightning.

  A hand falls on her arm. She turns.

  “I did mean it,” Crow says, “when I said I would love you no matter what. Your ruthlessness. Your warmth. Your desire.”

  The same thin robe they wore on the night they first came to Lussadh’s room, the spectral shade of frost on a windowpane, the indigo hyacinths. Except––they are sparer of frame and taller, not so thick-boned, not so… “You are not Crow.”

  The Winter Queen’s head moves, side to side. That familiar gesture. “Even my strength had its limits against this killing climate. To venture as far as your city I required a vessel, and so I made Crow. My effigy, my second self. I never meant to get entangled as I did, but you worked a strange alchemy upon me.”

  “I didn’t––” Lussadh inhales. She is paralyzed. She is––something in her pulls and pulls, she can sense the limit of her tensile strength. The hour between that dawn and now she thought herself transmuted to iron within and without, that she had achieved the final transition from person to function. A thing that performs what is given to it, never faltering. “What do you want?”

  “When I left my homeland it was to create my own maps, chart my own trajectory. In our time together.” The queen’s voice lowers and then it is Crow’s. “You may not believe that I offered you my heart, but I did. Now I offer you also the chance. To leave your homeland and make your own purpose. However you decide I will leave to you Kemiraj’s fate.”

  Can it be this easy, Lussadh thinks, can anything? She looks at the flowers and the sword, and feels the heft of Nuriya’s pistol. It occurs to her that she has not brought anything on this journey that signifies her connection to the throne.

  Now you are ready to be king.

  She pulls the white blade out of the hardened loam and offers it, hilt-first, to the Winter Queen. “I suppose,” she says, “you will be wanting this back.”

  Chapter Six

  An Envelope of Futures: necessity and freedom

  J. Moufawad-Paul

  Necessity knows no law besides itself; necessity breaks iron.

  Ludwig Feuerbach

  There are a number of directions that I could take my final engagement with Sriduangkaew’s fiction, openings encouraged by That Rough-Hewn Sun: the way in which competing imperialisms carve up geography through war so that “familiar topography becomes foreign and fluid,” for example, or the various articulations of gender which demonstrate, as Anne McClintock has argued, how “[a]ll nationalisms are gendered, all are invented and all are dangerous… in the sense that they re
present relations to political power and to technologies of violence.”1 In light of the conversation that has developed thus far, however, what struck me most about this story was how it was structured around moments of historical necessity.

  Indeed, the historical trajectory of the protagonist Lussadh, prince of the Empire of Kemiraj, is informed by three brutal necessities that are intimately linked to her social position. The first happened before the story begins and concerns the murder of a lover beholden to a polity Kemiraj conquered and annexed: by order of the king, her grandaunt, it was necessary for Lussadh to execute her lover in order to consummate her destiny as imperial prince. The second, which happens in the first quarter of That Rough-Hewn Sun, is Lussadh’s murder of her cousin for treasonous abdication: her role as prince necessitates this execution, to do otherwise would itself be a betrayal of her social position. The third, which serves as both denouement and a possible opening to transformation, is Lussadh’s murder of an envoy––representing the competing hegemony of the terrible Winter Queen––that again is necessitated by her historical duty as representative of an imperial order.

  The story’s narrative arc is driven by these three necessities, associated with each other through the Kemiraj colour of mourning (indigo), and in a sense the historical momentum of Kemiraj itself echoes the trajectory of necessity that has defined Lussadh’s life. Of course each of these three murders were as contingent as they were necessary because Lussadh could have done otherwise: her cousin, Nuriya, who has “forsake[n] dynasty and responsibility”, challenges Lussadh to be “unbeholden” to her “destiny”. Later the victim of the third murder, the envoy Crow, will echo Nuriya’s challenge by telling Lussadh that what they most value in an individual is the determination “to break free from a prescribed path.” But necessity is not destiny, though it is often confused as such, and in fact is dialectically united with contingency. Things could always be otherwise, there are always aleatory moments, but if one wants to chart a course from point x to y then certain actions and moments are necessitated. If you do not want to die of thirst then drinking water is necessary; if you want to pursue the interests of your class and national position then various duties are necessitated.

  Every historical sequence, both micro- and macro-political, admits that necessity is immanent even if it is neither telos nor destiny. Contingency persists as necessity’s dialectical double. Most importantly, though, is the fact that necessity, rather than contingency, admits freedom. Indeed, at the end of That Rough-Hewn Sun it is in fact the last act in the brutal chain of necessity that opens the possibility of Lussadh’s freedom.

  Some preliminary thoughts on necessity

  In 1936, the Canadian communist and internationalist Norman Bethune invented mobile blood transfusion. Working as a field surgeon in the struggle against fascism in the Spanish Civil War, Bethune encountered the necessity for providing blood transfusions to partisans in the midst of combat and thus a method of moving civilian donated blood to the front lines of struggle was born. As the cliché goes, mater atrium necessitas––necessity is the mother of invention: despite having become a pithy saying, it remains a simple but good definition of the concept of necessity, where human need intersects with science, history, and freedom.

  Although there is a long history of theorizing necessity according to both science and freedom––from Kant to Hegel to Marx and Engels––it has fallen out of fashion, at least in Western academia, in the past several decades. In the analytical tradition the dialectic of freedom and necessity has been replaced by the much more narrow antinomy of free will or determinism. In the continental tradition the rise of post-structuralism/post-modernism resulted in philosophical scorn for the concept of necessity since it appeared to lead to teleological explanations of history: where historical development could be explained according to grand statements of necessity, all of the aleatory moments of contingency were violently deleted according to totalizing historical narratives.

  For example, a somewhat apocryphal quote ascribed to Abimael Guzman (or “Chairman Gonzalo”) of the Communist Party of Peru speaks of the necessity of “irrigating” the fields with blood in order to bring the revolution into being.2 Apocryphal or not, regardless of what one thinks of the failed People’s War in Peru, there really isn’t anything new about revolutionary movements and theorists proclaiming the necessity of violence, tragically or triumphantly, in the pursuit of revolution. (Such pronouncements are no more or less brutal than the necessities pursued by Sriduangkaew’s Lussadh.) From the speeches of Mao Zedong and Malcolm X, to the theoretical work of Frantz Fanon, the declaration attributed to Guzman is not as anachronistic as the bourgeois press of the 1990s imagined. Hence the complaints of philosophers such as Michel Foucault: historical necessity is a concept that appears to be less about freedom and more about violent exclusion.

  Even though I plan to argue, in this extended reflection, for the importance of the concept of necessity––for the necessity of necessity––and hence side, in a qualified manner, with the statements made by the Guzmans and Maos and Fanons of the world, it is worth recognizing the value of the above criticism. There are indeed ways in which the concept of necessity can become a theoretical discourse tied to a triumphalist teleology. While my caution, here, is not the same as the complaints made by mainstream journalists, bourgeois politicians, and liberal academics (those who ignore everyday violence but are upset by the violent statements of people and movements who have attempted to oppose this everyday violence) it is still one that recognizes the importance of taking contingency into account. A proper understanding of necessity, specifically historical necessity, is one that is irrevocably bound up with its opposite: contingency. As aforementioned, if necessity is not paired with contingency then it will be conflated with the concept of destiny. Rather, necessity must be understood according to historically encountered possibilities that are also contingent.

  Take, for example, Walter Benjamin’s Theses on the Philosophy of History that, as discussed in the fourth chapter, was intended to be a corrective for the SPD’s claims about the inevitability of a communist future. By pushing a communist future beyond the event horizon and transforming it into a teleological destiny, and thus ignoring the fascism that was developing in the present, the SPD’s future perfect conception of the revolution “made the working class forget both its hatred [of its exploiters] and its spirit of sacrifice.”3 In this sense it was a false necessity that ended up suppressing necessity itself: the historically encountered need to, if fascism was to be strangled before it could grow to fruition, break with the state of affairs. We know that such a movement, though necessitated by the time, did not fully emerge when it could have (and should have if we recognize, as we must, that the Nazi movement was a monstrosity), for those who rose to accept this moment of necessity (represented by the Spartacist Uprising) were in fact repressed by the SPD and its false necessity, and Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht were handed over to the Freikorps. What we find in this historical moment, then, is an understanding of necessity that has nothing to do with teleology and destiny––a moment that collapsed under the weight of historical contingency when history took another and more tragic path––and yet we can still understand, though it was never consummated, that the struggle to overthrow the seeds of fascism in the Germany of 1919 was a necessity.

  Hence, when we speak of necessity we are neither speaking of destiny nor denying the aleatory moment. We are also not only speaking of moments that are recognized as necessary for historical development due to hindsight (i.e. the necessity of the agrarian revolution to solve the problems encountered by hunting and gathering), though this might indeed give us some understanding of the concept.

  Necessity is immanent, “where every second of time [is] the strait gate through which the [metaphorical] Messiah might enter.”4 If it must be compared to a parent, then it is not only “the parent of invention” encountered in the history of science and struggle, that factici
ty encountered by militants such as Bethune, but the parent of freedom itself. In That Rough-Hewn Sun Lussadh recognizes and undertakes particular actions necessitated by her role as imperial scion, no more or less brutal than the necessary actions of revolutionary movements. The difference, however, is that the latter actions are aimed at opening up another dimension of human freedom rather than preserving what the state of affairs necessitates; Lussadh is acting to preserve her class position, aware of what her social role requires. But it is through such awareness that the possibility of freedom is encountered when, upon reaching the recognized limits of these brutal necessities, a transgressive “strait gate” is revealed.

  The speculative concept of necessity

  The concept of necessity receives its most notorious and speculative expression in the philosophy of Hegel. Although I believe that Feuerbach was correct in conceiving of Hegel’s system as “speculative theology”––just as it is correct to recognize Hegel’s role in the preservation of Eurocentrism––it is worth examining this conception of necessity in detail, if only to understand how we must overstep Hegel’s idealism and Eurocentrism in order to truly grasp the importance of historical necessity. On the one hand we are presented with an understanding of necessity that is immanent, connected to contingency, and intrinsically linked to freedom. On the other hand, we are also given this concept in a complex ontological system that was in many ways a “colossal miscarriage” because, regardless of its attempt to make necessity-as-freedom an immanent principle, it was ultimately a practice of a totalizing speculative system that did indeed conflate necessity with destiny.

  In the Logic Hegel claims that necessity emerges from contingency, and that any determination of necessity “consists in its containing its negation, contingency, within itself.”5 That is, those moments that are actualized/recognized as necessity are simultaneously understood according to contingency. Those circumstances that cannot be predicted with certainty lurk at the heart of the possible necessities (what Hegel calls “relative necessity”), just as they remain in retrospect within established necessities (what Hegel calls “absolute necessity”). For example, returning to the example of the Spartacist Uprising, we can say that the possible/relative necessity of succeeding in this insurrection was overwhelmed by circumstances that prevented the possibility of the necessity of ending fascism from taking shape. Similarly we can say that the defeat of fascism was an absolute necessity because it was actualized, accomplished and determined within a historical moment, but even still we recognize the possibility of this non-accomplishment which still signifies the importance of the necessity (i.e. alternate historical fictions about a different historical path where the Axis was victorious, such as Philip K. Dick’s Man in the High Castle, serve to demonstrate the importance of the established necessity).