Abstract
Easterine Kire’s Bitter Wormwood is a proposer of unexamined possibilities in Agamben that relates to the location of the human in modern democracies. Joining issue with Agamben about the constitution of modern man as the paradox of bios/zoe, this paper alludes to thick situations in the novel to establish that a person can exist as pure bios by surpassing de-politicization, and they also might deteriorate into pure zoe irrespective of the guaranteed political rights. The uncanny is, here, explained by mapping the doubled-edged subnational discourse of secessionism and discriminatory exclusion in Bitter Wormwood. Though the nation-state attempts a forcible inclusion of the Nagas through its exclusionary practices of legal suspension and enactment of counter-insurgency laws, the novel posits that the seceding Naga communities continue to exist in their spiritual sphere of bios, which is Naga consciousness. The same novel discusses the relegation of the politically entitled North-Easterners to a mere biological animal through the portrayal of their discrimination in New Delhi, the capital of India. Thus, Kire’s novel stands in as a critique of Agamben’s overestimation of law as the constituting element of biopolitics.
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