INTRODUCTIONtranscendence of the ‘‘general will.’’ In this, he parts ways with a central assumption of
thinkers who insist on the historically a priori status, that is to say, the ontico-empirical
conditionality, of even the most ideal or idealized concepts, and hence deconstructs the
possible grounds for distinguishing between horizontal and vertical supplementarity or
prostheses at all. Sa ́nchez suggests that, whereas the theatricality inherent in representa-
tion thrives on absence and transcendence, the religious plays a far more complicated role
in the constitution of such ‘‘monumental governmentality.’’
Far from claiming a simple ‘‘permanence of the theologico-political,’’ as Lefort had
surmised and as Laclau sometimes seems to echo, Sa ́nchez thus indicates that the histori-
cal and ethnographic study of groups, and especially crowds, peoples, and states, contri-
butes to a more grounded anthropology of religion, in a radically new guise. The task of
this type of inquiry, he demonstrates, poses itself differently in the postcolonial nineteenth
and twentieth centuries and in a present-day modernity gone haywire—but a modernity
nonetheless.
That the theatricalization of the political and of politics has effects that are unequally
distributed and affect some citizens more than others—even or especially where the vio-
lence is in an almost calculated way indiscriminate—is hard to deny. But where, how,
and why is this so? Veena Das’s contribution, concerning the figure of the abducted
woman during the 1947 Partition of India and Pakistan, analyzes not only the impact of
communal violence on citizens as gendered but also the ways in which turmoil and horror
allowed the nation-state to imagine and to portray itself as the protector of a more ratio-
nal, fundamentally purified, and by implication masculine social order. In this particular
essay, Das puts less emphasis on the silencing of women’s voices in the official and profes-
sional historiographical renderings of the Partition, which has been an important issue in
the work of feminist historians on trauma and testimony. Rather, she focuses on how
hearsay and rumor tainted subsequent government fact-finding commissions and search-
and-recovery operations, and highlights the ways in which elements of myth (dating back
to epic depictions in theRamayanaandMahabharata) and popular narrative or film
circulated in an imaginary of social and sexual disorders that ‘‘created the conditions of
possibility in which the state could be instituted as essentially a social contract between
mencharged with keeping male violence against women in abeyance’’ (p. 429). This in-
sight importantly alters a central tenet in Western contractual theories of natural right,
notably Hobbes, even as it reinstates an insight present already in Rousseau: ‘‘The figure
of the abducted woman acquires salience because it posits the origin of the state not in
the mythic state of nature but in ‘correct’ relations between communities. Indeed, the
mise-en-sce`neof nature itself is that of heads of households at war with other heads of
households over control of the sexual and reproductive powers of women, rather than
unattached ‘natural’ men at war with each other’’ (p. 440).
Das suggests that the very demand for and mutual insistence on legislation intended
to restore women to their families of origin ‘‘sanctified a sexual contract as the counter-
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