ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author have chosen a recent short commentary, entitled "The Life of Concepts and How They Speak to Experience," that is to be published in the online journal Somatosphere. The text takes up Nayanika Mookherjee's powerful book The Spectral Wound, which the author had read and admired greatly. Mookherjee's descriptions were subtle and sensitive to the texture of life – the voices of the women had not been deadened by repeated recitals before human-rights organizations or truth commissions. Mookherjee thought of their presence in the national media and in left-liberal discourse as "spectral," locating this concept within Derrida's notion of "the trace." The chapter ends up with the tentative suggestion that amounts to accepting Mookherjee's analysis and critique of the figure of the birangona and hoping that in the future, scholars might look more closely toward concepts of aesthetic emotion as elaborated in Sanskrit or vernacular languages.
