Paper presented by Shri Anjan Kumar Jena at the seminar on 7-3-2001 in Bhubaneswar

The hunger is the most primal of drives, left out of psychoanalytic theory. Very little, all too little has been said about it. Man dies of hunger, without nourishment whereas he can live a little longer without the pleasures of love making. The unemployed person on the verge of collapse, who has not eaten for days, is driven to the needy place of our existence and makes it visible. In any case, sympathy with the destitute, starving people is the only widespread sympathy there is. We believe the particular miss fortune of the starving man: even the freezing, even the sick, not to mention the lovesick seems to be in luxury in comparison. Even the most hard-hearted housewife will forget her vexed stinginess when the beggar eats the soup she offers. The stomach is the first lamp into which oil must be poured. Its longing is precise; its drive is so unavoidable that it cannot be repressed long.

No matter how loud the hunger strikes, it hardly finds mention by the doctors, psycho -therapists. The unintended omission shows that it is always the better class of sufferers who are treated psychoanalytically. The problem of finding nourishment was the most groundless worries for Freud and his visitors, when Freud�s Vienna was one of poverty, starvation unemployment caused by the exploitative order of capitalism, there was a psychoanalytical bureau for attempted suicides. This was because over ninety percent of all suicides occur out of economic deprivation. It can be said therefore that the self-preservation�with hunger as its most obvious expression�is the only basic drive among the several, which consistently deserves the name. It is the drive in the last instance and concretely related to the body. Even the idealist Schiller had to teach that the world maintained its push and shove � through hunger and through love�. And he puts hunger in first place and love in second place. Such a procedure was still possible at the time of rising bourgeois order. In the late bourgeoisie to whom Freud�s psychoanalysis belongs, hunger was deleted. It became the subspecies of libido (sexual instinct), its oral phase. To preserve one�s being remains according to Spinoza the appetite of all beings. But it is to mark the fact that self-preservation is not this capitalist phase of egoism and no way seeks conservation. The self-preservation ultimately means the appetite to hold ready more authentic states for our unfolding self, unfolding only in solidarity and as solidarity.

Hunger accompanies all emotions, the emotions of rejection, those of inclination. Fear, envy, anger, contempt, generosity, trust, admiration, love are emotions of inclination. There are also emotions with contradictory feeling-content, which are pleasurably united: revenge, in which hatred discharges itself, tastes sweet. Greed even though on the side of inclination does not have the least in common with pleasure. The appetite only makes it clear for the emotions to be authentic Hunger goes on renewing itself. But if it increases uninterrupted, satisfied by no certain bread, then it suddenly changes. The body-ego then becomes rebellious. does not go out in search of food merely within the old framework. It seeks to change the situation, which has caused its empty stomach, its hanging head. The no to the bad situation, which exists, the yes to the better life that hovers ahead is incorporated by the deprived into revolutionary interest. The interest always begins with hunger; hunger transforms itself into an explosive force against the orison of deprivation. The self seeks not only to preserve it, it becomes explosive. And this overthrows what stands in the way of the rising class, intimately of the classless man. Marx has the following to say about how work primarily undertaken for satisfying needs overhauls the available world in imagination:" We are assuming work in a form in which it belongs exclusively to man. A spider carries out operations which resemble those of a weaver, a bee puts many human builders to shame with the building of its wax-cells. But what distinguishes the worst builder from the best bee from the outset, is that he has built the cell in his head before he builds it in wax, at the end of the work process there is a result which already existed in the imagination of the worker at the beginning of that process, i.e. already existed ideally. Not that he effects a formal change in the real; he also realizes his purpose in the natural world, a purpose he knows, which determines as a law his way of doing things, to which he must subordinate his will." And precisely at this point, there is formed that which stimulates the wishful element in the expectant emotions always rising from hunger, that which possibly diverts and fatigues us or which possibly also activates and galvanizes us towards the goal of a better life! The daydreams are formed. They always come from a feeling of something lacking and they want to stop it, they are all dreams of a better life. No doubt among them are base, dismal merely enervating escapist dreams full of substitution. This kind of escape from reality has the support of the status-quo, as is revealed most vividly in the empty promises of a better hereafter. We do not know, or will be able to know, that many wishful daydreams have sustained man with courage and hope, not by looking far into its horizon. What hovers ahead is rather a Not-Yet-Conscious; one that has never been conscious and has never existed in the past. It is forward dawning into the New.

Let us now recall the Marx�s notion of exploitation: it is not at all opposed to justice. Marx�s point is not to stress that workers are exploited because they are not paid the full value of their work. The appropriated surplus value is that a worker is exploited when he is fully paid. The exploitation is thus not opposed to the �just� equivalent exchange. The production of excess is strictly equivalent exchange. The production of excess is strictly equivalent to the universalisation of exchange. The moment the exchangeability is universalized, the moment it becomes the structuring principle of the whole of economic life, the exception emerges. The workforce becomes a commodity to be exchanged in the market. This universality of just exchange gives rise to the constitutive exception, which undermines it. The gap/crack in the universality of bourgeois justice of equivalent exchange reveals itself as a symptom. Poverty, misery, degradation are not a functional aberration to be remedied in urge for proper functioning of the universal exchange, but a symptom of its particular hegemonic content. Bourgeois justice is the empty universal, the equivalent exchange being its Particular Content. The individual (symptomatic excess) bears witness to the gap between the Universal and the Particularto the fact that the Universal is always false in its concrete particular existence.

How to come out of thrifty consumption, i.e. consumption as thrift of sacrifice? It is the self-annulling love. Hunger in dialectical sense always and no doubt means absolute hunger of the spirit of Marxism that pays the price of our sins of our calculative exchange of equal for equal .What is poverty, misery suffering indeed in one of the radical moments in the movement of Marxism if not the fact that we are indebted to it. The proletariat who bears the burden of exploitative order in symptoms of hunger is all mercy before which we are ineffaceably guilty. Guilty not because of certain personal moral acts of omission or commission. The reconciliation of one of the radical spirits of Marx with the destitute, the proletariat, homeless citizens, the orphaned is nothing other than becoming hunger of Marxism. The soundless call of the spirit of Marxism does not emphasize the inner journey of spiritual self-purification, the return to one�s true inner self, the self�s rediscovery. The call, which does not call us to anything specific or determinate to do or perform to purge us of our guilt, calls us to be primordially guilty. In this indebtedness, we are hospitable without reserve to the other that comes in coming. It is a shock of rebirth through the encounter of the clandestine migrant that Marx was. The hunger of Marxism epitomized in the proletariat does not stop at bread, employment etc but is to rip open the old framework in which hunger is reduced to misery and search for food. The hunger, i.e. the absolute hunger is joy of weird taste of death. The unfathomable hunger, which one cannot articulate, hungers for what is sublime in man, what is beyond the calculus of exchange�a promise that promises not in the existing order of things? Its imminence is here and now, but it is not be folded in the immediacy of determinate achievement. It is never satisfied we are not prowling around for alternative Marxism, but Marxism as other to itself, sometimes that is in itself more than itself, sometimes that is in itself more than itself. It cannot be the philosophy of any party claiming to represent it, or of any cell, state but is a link of suffering and injustice irrespective of who one is, nationality, sons of the soil etc. Only when miserable man in hunger sets to revolutionize the conditions in which there are hungry stomachs he moves into the absolute hunger in Marxism itself. The hungry man is the practical weapon of Marxism in the sense that he reveals the enigma of Marxism not only to humanity but also to Marxism itself.

The total betrayal by Marxism is the point at which the man in and of hunger becomes fully human; the point at which the radical gap between Marxism and structural misery is transposed to Marxism itself. One can say that when man is cut off from the absolute hunger of Marxism, at that very moment of the utmost abjection he is absolutely close to the Marxism. There is no direct approach to, or identification with the promise of absolute hunger. The hunger is always a hunger of the other in so far as he suffers. And the Marxian legacy, often shrouded is to -day more precious than ever. When the particular content promulgates itself as universality, it turns out to be fantasy or becomes the element of phantasmic support of the universal ideological notion. Let us take classic example of human rights. The Marxist symptomatic reading can convincingly demonstrate the particular content, which gives ideological spin to the notion of human rights. What is really in essence the universal concept of human rights? It is right to exchange freely on the market, exploit workers, women, and children and exert political domination. The identity between the particular and universal is inherently unstable. This Necessity of identity is category of veracity (adequation) while truth is inherently contingent. What is needed in to-day�s world is a subjectivization that ruptures the closure of the hegemonic ideological domain. The subjectivization is a decision, a wager on it, which is a way transcends the subject. Ideological hegemony is thus not the case of some particular content directly filling in the void of abstract universal. Rather the very form of ideological universality bears witness to the struggle between two particular contents (at least); the �popular� content expressing the secret longings of the dominated majority, and the specific content expressing the interests of forces of domination.

One is tempted to refer here to the Freudian distinction between the latent dream thought the unconscious desire articulated in the dream. The two are not the same, since unconscious desire articulates itself through the translation of the latent dream thought into the manifest text of a dream. In the same way, there is nothing Fascist in the latent dream thought of the Fascist ideology (the longing for authentic community and social solidarity). What accounts for the properly Fascist character of the Fascist ideology is the way in which this latent dream thought is transformed by the ideological dream work into the ideological text, which continues to intensify social relations of exploitation and domination.

The core of pagan wisdom (i.e. globalization which is dominance as a major force) resides in the insight into the cosmic balance of hierarchically ordered principles, more precisely, the insight into the eternal circuit of the cosmic catastrophe, derailment, and the restoration of order through just punishment. Perhaps the most exemplary case of such a cosmic order is the first Hindu cosmology first copied to the social order in the guise of system of castes, then onto the individual organism itself in the guise of harmonious hierarchy of its organs: heads, hand, abdomens, soon. To day this attitude is vigorously encouraged by the philosophy of globalize and multiculturalism. In this ideological perception, what is good is to assume one�s place properly within some global order. Christ, Buddha, Marx, I am not sure, I think it is, introduced into this global balance and harmony a principle totally foreign to it�a principle measured by the standards of the pagan cosmology, cannot but appear as monstrous distortion. It is the principle according to which each individual has access to universality, Nirvana. The idea is that I can participate in this universal dimension directly, irrespective of my specific particular place within the global order. For that reason, Buddha�s followers form a community of people who one way or other have broken with the hierarchy of global order, who started to think this hierarchical order as something fundamentally irrelevant. In his choice of disciples, Buddha categorically ignored castes and, after some hesitation, sexual difference.

Luke�s words from Bible may be quoted here: " If any one come to me and does not hate his father and his mother, his wife and children, his brothers and sisters, yes, even his own life, he cannot be my disciple." Here, of course, I claim we are not simple brutal hatred demanded by cruel by jealous God. Family relations are here a metaphor for the entire social network, for any particular ethnic substance that locates/localizes my place in global order of things. The hatred demanded or enjoined here is not the dialectical /specular opposite of love. It is love itself that enjoins me to uncouple, unplug myself from the Organic Community into which I was born Pagan wisdom basically fake platitude. The proper attitude of leftists� to day is to despise love of wisdom. What is this love of wisdom? Wisdom is that whatever happens you have good excuse. I stress here the wisdom of love: but what wisdom of love is? It is the gesture of separation, of clinging to that, which disturbs the balance of all. It is miraculous in the sense that it shocks the closed economy of revenge�tit for tat. It unsettles the apple cart of justice, which seeks repair of the wrong through revenge, punishment.

Marx called for the suspension of the social hierarchy by appealing to those at the bottom (excluded) as the privileged members of his new community. In order to specify to these communities I am tempted to risk the reference to Freud himself which in his Group Psychology provides two examples of group formation: Church and Army.

The uncoupling from the substance of ethnic community involves a symbolic death. One has to die to the law that regulates our tradition, our social substance. The forward dawning to the future signals erasing the traces of one�s past and beginning from a zero point. It is here that human rights begin. Human rights do not mean you have your proper place and dignity come to you through being identified to that place. Human rights mean precisely that you are something independent of your place.