JESting: My "Juvenile Essay Series"

The trace of the past always returns in Derridean hauntings: inflecting echoes of what we once learned, once used, once spoke, into the radical present in ways we cannot always know. These residues are archived, yet they risk disappearing like Spivak’s Rani of Sirmur — vanishing into the folds of disciplinary silence. More often, though, they are domesticated or rehabilitated: violently made to conform to our supposedly “refined”, “grown-up”, “mature” selves, ripped from their youthful contexts and replanted in intellectual soils where they were never meant to grow — much like opium, transported from the Mediterranean to China, transformed and weaponised in transit.

In this conceptual vein, JESt emerges as an archive in Derridean play — a site where I return to my earliest theoretical gestures not to celebrate them, nor to bury them, but to listen for what they still know. Before postcoloniality became my conceptual centre of gravity, before deconstruction sedimented into habit, before theory became the water I swam in, I wrote differently: sometimes naïvely, sometimes clumsily, but often with an instinctive attentiveness I fear I have since lost. JESt is meant to chart this itinerary — an intellectual archaeology that activates one of the archive’s most overlooked virtues: its capacity for self-referential correction, operating almost like the censorship of Freud’s Cs., shaping what may surface and what remains submerged.

These early essays, then, are presented here not to perform, not to shine, not to serve as juvenilia sanctified by hindsight. They are not to be rehabilitated — I do not dare to commit that violence. For what value would there be in scrubbing away Bhuvaneswari Bhaduri’s menstrual stains only to display them, sterilised and disarmed, in a museum of subalternity as traceless trace? Instead, I offer these essays to myself as materials for rereading: to see what they attempted, what they intuited, what they could not yet know.

Most importantly, I want to understand what I have lost. As our intellectual trajectories deepen, we tend toward refinement — and refinement, pushed to its Foucauldian limit, tends toward abstraction. With abstraction comes a dwindling of sensitivity to the text’s immediate, somatic, affective dimensions. With new vocabularies comes an inattentiveness to what texts already say. These early essays thus become sites of becoming: fragments of thought before theory became method, and mines of insight eroded by the arrogance of the “mature” scholar.

“Once you were a child. Once you knew what inquiry was for. There was a time when you asked questions because you wanted answers, and were glad when you had found them. Become that child again: even now.”— C. S. Lewis, The Great Divorce (1945)

I want to learn again — not only from others, but from myself, from the other consciousnesses that, as Freud might say, have dispersed into the background of my intellectual pre-history. And in doing so, I hold fast to Lewis’s reminder, returning always to the methodological principle that underwrites all good scholarship: autocritique.

- Gurprit (21/11/25)

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1. Image: Narcissus at the Source, Carvaggio, 1597-1599.