Thus, we affirm Indian Catachresis---a generative method of abstraction that works within the slippages of history to produce breakage in the dominant linguistic and communicative narratives of South Asian life. That makes the affs reorientation to knowledge and language a prior question to understanding the Human, using fugitive practices to give Indians energy and hope.

If we take abstraction seriously as nonrepresentational, as a ren- dering that is nevertheless devoid of signifying content or context, how does it also operate as a practice of queering without reduc- ing or essentializing difference? Benning paradoxically approaches the specificities attributed to queerness and the particularities of a historical legacy through abstract aesthetics that would seem to render them invisible. Indeed, I take the destabilizing and obscur- ing effects of abstraction to be precisely generative for queer art practice. While direct representation would seem to assert and account for minoritarian bodies and lives left out of the picture, the politics of identification also functions to classify, categorize, and control through certain historical narratives and claims to objectivity. Abstraction, then, might productively refuse to render a subject legible. Operating as a catachresis, abstraction offers queer alternatives to representation and does so specifically through the wipe in Benning’s practice. Catachresis might describe both the abstracting and queering effects of the wipe as disruptions and exposures within processes of signification, simultaneously aesthetic, linguistic, and historical. Remobilized in queer and postcolonial theory, catachresis refers to an excessive use of language, a term intentionally misapplied or perverted in order to offer a different and potentially transformative description of life’s positions and conditions. Thus, catachresis offers alternative approaches to personal and historical narrative. Along these lines, David Eng has defined “historical catachresis” as a problematics of naming that works to dislodge a reified ver- sion of history by denying the possibility of any singular historical context.23 This opens up a space for difference and multiplicity within the inherent slippages in language and history, where every naming is also exposed as a misnaming and history is shown to be lacking and limited despite its ideals of presence and progress. The transitional space of the wipe, temporally stalled in Benning’s paintings, serves as a sliding fault line along which these disconti- nuities are both revealed and shifted. Catachresis, then, might also refer to the strained use of an existing formal language of abstraction that shows it to be already arbitrary or brings out its perversely ambiguous features. Its own catachrestic operation, abstraction constitutes matter without ref- erence, suggesting a version of catachresis that is visible but can- not be fully grasped. Benning’s abstraction operates as a queering catachrestic displacement, gesturing to specificities without direct identification. Yet reciting and altering the gestural strategies of white male modernist masters, Benning’s work both signifies and dislocates identity. As a radical disruption within the process of naming, queering paradoxically insists on specificity while troubling the defining and definitive regimes of normativity. Even as forms of historical and political naming also function as shaming mechanisms—and it would seem intuitive to avoid those forms of naming now—Benning’s work puts pressure on this difficult speci- ficity through aesthetic and linguistic excess.