The Uses of Śeṣa: Sacrificial Leftovers, Supplements and Subjects in Derrida, Jaimini and Rāmānuja

Abstract

This dissertation tracks the Sanskrit word śeṣa through a set of texts that take Vedic ritual as their starting point, one that is never wholly left behind. Given the subject matter of these texts and the semantic range of this word, attention to its shifting usage affords an oblique intellectual history of usefulness within a religious tradition. “Use,” in the resulting study, should be understood in a non-reductive way, with the relationship between ritual and thought being constantly constituted by both a self-interested economy and a non-economic relinquishment of interests. The “sacrifice of sacrifice,” as Dennis Keenan has shown, is essential to “sacrifice” as understood by a number of European theorists, including Jacques Derrida. The “uses of śeṣa” can be productively aligned with the “sacrifice of sacrifice,” given the range of gestures that both phrases can name: from the physical reuse of a leftover material to the inner act of giving up the very notion of sacrifice. Each of the three central chapters focuses on a single author’s corpus, but the corpora in question are inextricable from their intertexts: readings by and of this author. In Chapter II, “Leftovers, Carried Over,” I read and translate sections of Derrida’s « Reste – le maître ou le supplément d’infini », which responds to the work of the Indologist Charles Malamoud. Although various forms of “remains” traverse Derrida’s work, this piece represents is the first in which the word “reste” is foregrounded so explicitly. Although reste in Malamoud’s essay on remainders tends to translate ucchiṣṭa, another word from the same root, Derrida, following Malamoud, acknowledges śeṣa as naming the remainder in general. In Derrida’s reading of Malamoud’s account of “brāhmaṇism,” remainders resist the work of their conceptualization, even as they remain essential to the construction of identity and mastery. In Chapter III, “Supplements, Implemented: Applications of Śeṣa in Mīmāṃsā Ritual Theory,” I read Jaimini’s Mīmāṃsā Sūtras, the foundational text of this discipline of ritual hermeneutics, through layers of commentary. Jaimini relies on multiple terms for subordination, privileging śeṣa as the stated topic of the third of the Sūtras’ twelve books. This book characterizes the term in its broadest scope as śeṣaḥ parārthatvāt: “śeṣa because it is for an other,” and invites us to see agents, objects, and actions as useful within the sacrificial system rather than ends in themselves. In spite of this explicit redefinition of śeṣa, Jaimini continues to use it to refer to remainders (of text, of substances). Committed to all of Jaimini’s Sūtras and much of Śabara’s Bhāṣya, both the main traditions of subsequent commentators—the Bhāṭṭas and the Prābhākaras—align the language of śeṣa with their own philosophizing commitments. Even if Kumārila appears to be more outward-looking (turning to extra-scriptural reasoning, engaging with interlocutors who do not acknowledge the Veda’s authority) than Prabhākara, each in his own way articulates a logic of śeṣa that aligns the deontic and the pragmatic. In Chapter IV, “Self, Sacrificed: Rāmānuja’s Dialectical and Devotional Use of Śeṣa,” I read Rāmānuja’s main dialectical works (Vedārthasaṁgraha and Śrībhāṣya, focusing on the former for its more extended treatment of śeṣa), devotional poetry, and a manual for daily worship. Rāmānuja fleshes out the Mīmāṁsā definition of śeṣa as parārtha in keeping with his theological commitments, pushing it in an anthropomorphic direction while resisting certain anthropocentric temptations. As in Mīmāṁsā, the sense of śeṣa as remainder survives this redefinition, allowing for an interplay between the senses of “remnant”, “accessory” and “servant”. Not only does śeṣa name the ideal religious subject of Rāmānuja’s Viśiṣṭādvaita Vedānta and Śrīvaiṣṇavism, Śeṣa as the proper name of a mythical serpent dear to this tradition brings together the sense of remainder (between cycles of creation and destruction) and servant (acting as the couch on which Viṣṇu rests). Rāmānuja himself serves as the model subject of this community, to his hagiographers and commentators, some of whom further reorient śeṣatva as the service of God through the service of community. Chapter I and Chapter V frame my project with reflections on “use” and “relevance” respectively. Even where this project is not explicitly comparative, I trust that it is consistently reflexive in ways that extend its theoretical potential. Through the introduction and conclusion, I offer my limited genealogy of śeṣa as potentially useful to the intersections of literature, philosophy, and religion. This dissertation may be more “exceptional” than “exemplary” as an exercise in comparative literature. I hope it is potentially useful to a range of disciplines: comparative theology, ritual poetics, history of ideas, Indology, translation studies, and more. Śeṣa itself is neither absolutely exceptional nor absolutely exemplary with regard to the claims I have made for the relationship between its usage and usefulness. Rather, it becomes exemplary because its exceptional scope serves the needs of a religious subject in specific discursive and ritual situations, within a continuous but hardly homogeneous tradition.