Death as a Žižekian Event

When the Columbia University-based art historian and poet Subhashini Kaligotla was 40 years old, her brother, two years younger, passed away suddenly. “There was no warning, no protracted illness, just a phone call on a dull November day,” writes Kaligotla. Three years later, her 42-year-old partner succumbed to cancer “that came on quickly, killing him in less than three weeks”. The traumatic experiences of loss radically altered Kaligotla’s poetic practice and scholarly pursuits. “These circumstances are the ground of my poems, and my writing in art history,” explains Kaligotla: “Call me a poet of death. Of mourning, mourning rituals, and sudden vanishings.”

My Life Closed Twice, Subhashini Kaligotla, Copper Coin, 2025.

This is the context for her academic work-in-progress, Seeing Ghosts, an art-historical “biography of premodern, South Asian dead”, and it also informs her new collection of poems, My Life Closed Twice (Copper Coin, 2025). The collection has 36 poems, distributed unevenly across five sections. While the first section has 11 poems, the third section has 10; the second and fourth sections have one poem each. The final section of the book is the longest, with 12 poems. Besides these, the book opens with a single poem, ‘Requiem’, whose title refers to Russian poet Anna Akhmatova’s eponymous elegy for the victims of Stalin’s Great Purge, including her third husband Nikolai Punin.

Kaligotla describes loss as a devastating war, comparing it to Mauryan emperor Ashoka’s campaign against Kalinga, in 261 BCE. One of the most devastating wars of ancient India, it claimed 250,000 lives. Kaligotla writes: “the king who expressed / remorse / for the battle / in which / he destroyed, and deported / and severed / hundreds and thousands / from the beloved”. According to historical sources, the death and destruction in the war filled Ashoka with such remorse that he turned to the Buddhist principle of ahimsa (non-violence), spreading the religion through missionaries and recording his contrition on edicts, inscribed mostly on pillars erected all over the Indian subcontinent.

Referencing the edicts in her poem, Kaligotla writes: “Like the king who inscribed / his sorrow / not in the place / he had scarred / that is, / not in Kalinga / Self too / writes her sorrow / elsewhere.” Her framing of death and war as events of cataclysmic proportions, which completely alter the previous course of action, bears a similarity to Slavoj Žižek’s conceptualisation of an “event”, developed in his book, Event (2014). Žižek describes an event as the surprising emergence of something that changes the “very frame through which we perceive the world”. Kaligotla’s grief, like Ashoka’s remorse, becomes an event reshaping her perception and practice.

The first section of Kaligotla’s book describes the shocking immediacy of grief. In ‘Ransom’, the narrator offers various compensations to the gods, to reverse the event and restore life: “If I promise never to see him / Will you restore him to the living?” The desire to reclaim the beloved is intense: “What if I could offer something / something more savoury still / The couple next door for instance and their chubby child / Will you let my beloved go?” The desire to reclaim the loved one from death, at any cost, is a recurring narrative motif in poetry and art, such as Savitri in the Mahabharata, who engages Yama, the god of death, in a debate on dharma.

The second section of Kaligotla’s book comprises one prose poem, ‘Incident of His Untimely Death’, in which a 38-year-old man, who has been “dispatched to non-existence”, reflects on the suddenness of his death and his inability to sort out his affairs. Utilising a poet’s biography to critique their poetry is anathema to modern criticism, but in Kaligotla’s case, the poet herself insists on such an interpretation; it is, therefore, not very difficult to imagine this poem in the voice of her brother. Kaligotla’s poem moves like a well-constructed piece of music, opening with quotidian concerns and then rising to a crescendo.

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The narrator reveals that he was “in the habit of speaking softly” and “Known for being a good listener”, an intensely private person: “As a boy I wouldn’t bathe for fear that my sister and her friends might peek through the keyhole.” Yet, death implies making oneself physically vulnerable, at least to the medical staff: “It is an open secret among doctors that doctory is a cognate of butchery, and not known for its delicate touch.” The introduction of the non-English word “doctory” – common in some Indian languages – demonstrates rage where borders of languages are breached. The poem ends: “If a dead man is permitted anger, I might be enraged.” Rage is common in elegiac poetry, such as Dylan Thomas’s ‘Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night’; it is, almost, an antidote to the dull ubiquity of death, the sterility of bereavement.

The book’s third section opens with the titular poem, ‘My Life Closed Twice Before Its Close’. The title references American poet Emily Dickinson’s short lyric, ‘Parting’. In her typically sparse lines, Dickinson’s narrator refers to two incidents in her life that are “(s)o huge, so hopeless to conceive” that they can barely be described within the limitations of language. Kaligotla’s poem opens with recalling incidents of bereavement, and demanding answers: “Brother gone. Caleb gone. / What can I do but live / the life that should have gone / differently, but didn’t.” Yet again, the incidents of death emerge as a Žižekian event, rupturing the course of the narrator’s life.

Death has always been a ubiquitous experience, perhaps best depicted in the story of Kisa Gotami in Buddhist scriptures. Having lost her only son, Kisa is driven to desperation and seeks the intervention of the Buddha to resurrect him. The Buddha asks her to get three handfuls of mustard seeds from three households that have never experienced bereavement, as a condition to bring the child back to life. As Kisa goes from one house to the other, she realises the ubiquity of mortality. In recent years, death has been a more communal experience, with the COVID-19 pandemic, the genocide in Gaza, and conflict around the world. In this context, Kaligotla’s book demonstrates the value of poetry – in fact, all works of art – in our undeniably troubled world.

Uttaran Das Gupta is an independent writer and journalist.

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