In recent days our country is hit by violence. The flames of violence in Manipur have not yet been extinguished, we have Haryana burning to ashes. The question is how are we to understand these waves of violence and hate that are afflicting our society? The issues are complex and there are curling spirals of violence. Unfortunately, violence has...
The wheels of Dialectics and the Relation of Negation
‘Every determination is a negation’ says G.W. Hegel. He borrowed this insight from Spinoza. Hegel credits the discovery of it to Spinoza but laments that Spinoza did not fully appreciate the importance of his own discovery. ‘Determination is negation’ is linked to the idealism that views finite as unreal. This view thinks that only real is the infinite and...
Coffee without cream and Indian-ness without Hinduness
The famous joke of Slavoj Zizek about coffee without cream tells us that coffee without cream and coffee with milk is the same yet are regarded as different because of what the said coffee lacks. Zizek tells us about an incident where a person went to a coffee shop and ordered coffee without cream. The waiter told him that...
The Decaf Resistance and the Missing Red Ink
We have resistance everywhere. People register their resistance in various ways. The politics of resistance is part of our life. We can see it working at several levels in our life. While we have experienced several shades of resistance and have become part of the same, may be time has come to understand what has been called following Slavoj...
Roberto Exposito and Affirmative Bio-politics
Michel Foucault teaches that control and surveillance over bodies increased in the seventeenth century with the rising tide of epidemics. This surveillance of the bodies alongside global pandemic has developed in an immunological paradigm. We can see a new immunological thinking in the work Roberto Exposito and Italian thinker. It does not see immunology as a protection from expropriation...
The Coming of the Society of Death
If we look at an individual as a self-produced subject , what is left is not community but totalitarianism that is mistaken as a humanism. If we wish to overcome the difference by the same, there can only be one all-encompassing reality. This makes the assemble a metaman and as such is a dead person. It is akin to...
Dharmic traditions and the Society of Banality of Evil
Dharmic traditions cannot be viewed through either/ or prism. Maybe the best way to view Dharmic traditions is to look at them through the lens of logic of ‘ and -and’. It is a pluralism of parallels. It posits A B, C …. can be together. It is a unity in diversity. It is not just Chinese ‘and-both’ Ing/Eng...
Society of Banality of Evil
What is happening in Manipur is telling us about what has happened to our society. It appears that we are fast losing our sense of evil. We no longer seem to have religious as well as philosophical and ethical language to address evil. Being a dharmic civilization, it appears that we have lost our dharma. We have become a...
When Speech turns Silent
Finally, our Prime Minter broke his silence on violence in Manipur. But his speech is greeted as worse than his silence. The www.scroll.in an online news portal said that by his own standards, his silence over Manipur was stunning yet his statement to the press outside the parliament was worse. When over 150 people were killed and thousands are...
Benality of Evil
When mass killing is thought to be just a number and development is reduced to mere economic growth, human struggles and tragedies remains forgotten. This is how we were bewitched by propaganda that positioned someone as a vikaspurush . Little did we realize that we were hit by what Hanah Arendt called the banality of evil. She was talking...
