COMPLICITY AND STRUGGLE : THEORY AND SOCIETY 21 Gandhiji but he was able to develop and sustain a dialogical relationship with his moral self as well as with the masses. Our inability to do so in the contemporary Indian situation adds to the 'crisis' of anguished rationality, which most of us have internalized through the experience of our European counterparts, especially postmodernists, without corresponding cognitive labour on our own predicament. It is strange but true that in a subcontinent full of harrowing injustices we have not been able, generally even to raise the most critical question concerning power: how is it that the power of some people becomes the fate of innumerable others? This is the problem of power generally. But in the case of the state it assumes formidable proportions. This century has elaborated diverse codes about legitimation of power which enable its conversion into authority and, therefore, also its character as destiny. We all know the theories of power, ideology and hegemony; and how these are constructed and deconstructed. But when the look at traditions of thought concerning legitimation we begin, in the present vein, to feel haunted by the feeling whether the sculpting of social theory does not also emerge as a form and force of destiny, raising all over again, but more poignantly the problematic of knowledge and power. I wish to draw, particularly, attention to the nature of the modern state as a noological entity. Noology is distinct from ideology and describes ways in which the modern state, with all its carnal and bloody nature of orders of desire which constitute the fantasy of imperium, provides and inspires the 'very images of thought' (Delezue & Guattari, 1988: 376) The relation between modern state and thought is profound and constitutive. We can perceive this linkage in the celebration of theologies of 'development' or the possibilities of the emergence of the near-universalization of earlier forms of McCarthyism, even in the land of Lenin. We also see it in theoretical accounts of authority, obligation and even the rule of law. Deleuze and Guattari demonstrate how the state constitutes and consecrates the binary distinction between the 'rebel' and the 'consenting* subject. The former is individuated as an exile and consigned to 'the state of nature', much in the same way in which earlier criteria of individuation enacted the exclusionary realms in terms of contrasts between civilized and barbarian, Christians and heathens, master and slave, capitalist and worker, colonizer and colonized, men and women. The rebel subject thus constitutes herself both in theory and power as a victim, in the real sense in which Lyotard describes a victim as a being who is 'not able to prove that one has been done a wrong... the "perfect crime" does not consist in killing the victim or witnesses. . . But rather in obtaining the silence of witnesses, the deafness of judges, and the inconsistency (insanity) of