Suchergebnisse

What can philosophy offer when we suffer from brutal acts of terror and barbarous acts of counter-terror? Is the very grammar of the network of terror and anti-terror moves locked in the same ideology of power and state-ism that demands a deeper micro-analysis of human fetish for coercion and cruelty? Do we need schizoanalysis of the neurosis of terror and counter-terror where the work of Deleuze and Guattari can offer insight? This collection of essays considers the contribution of Deleuze and Guattari's philosophical ideas in forging a critique of global terror and counter-terror. Deleuze's concept of nomadic thought provides a starting point for this fetish for coercion and terrorizing power.

Presented at the Environmental justice in the Anthropocene symposium held on April 24-25, 2017 at the Lory Student Center, Colorado State University, Fort Collins Colorado. This symposium aims to bring together academics (faculty and graduate students), independent researchers, community and movement activists, and regulatory and policy practitioners from across disciplines, research areas, perspectives, and different countries. Our overarching goal is to build on several decades of EJ research and practice to address the seemingly intractable environmental and ecological problems of this unfolding era. How can we explore EJ amongst humans and between nature and humans, within and across generations, in an age when humans dominate the landscape? How can we better understand collective human dominance without obscuring continuing power differentials and inequities within and between human societies? What institutional and governance innovations can we adopt to address existing challenges and to promote just transitions and futures?

The Indian prime minister's clarion call for a 'Swachh Bharat' or 'transparent India' officially seeks to cleanse the image of a 'squatting' nation through building 'toilets first, temples later' ('Devalaya Se Pehle Shauchalaya')—a laudable slogan that sounds bizarre when heard from the member of a nationalist 'Hindutvavadi' political group that usually prioritises hardcore religious sentiments over civic issues. Keeping in mind the traditional Hindu discourse of ritual pollution, it is hard to believe that the Hindu mindset could bear the juxtaposition of the two sites within the space of one single sentence without considering the act as straightforward blasphemy! This article seeks to understand how—and under what sort of social circumstances—this kind of ideational somersault is being attempted today. This ingenious move is polysemic too, we argue, as the virtues of transparency and cleanliness could be rhetorically employed for a variety of purposes. We would examine whether a finer version of Hindutva is on its way to replace a cruder one by enfolding a series of tropes—from Shauchalaya to Mahatma Gandhi—that have never been within its order so far!

The pathologies or aberrations of democracy demand critical analysis and the growing incidents of human rights violation and the repressive mechanisms of statecraft/marketocracy in the name of democracy call for a radical reformulation of existing democratic paradigms. Democracy in its existing avatar is flawed and it needs some restructuring or philosophic radicalisation. Continental thinkers such as Jurgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida have betrayed similar concerns about the current oppressive trends in democracy. In the post-9/11 world, Derrida had talked about the Democratie a venir or the coordinates of future democracy-to-come and the Habermasian praxis of deliberative democracy also envisions an ideal emancipatory discourse of enlightened public sphere and participatory democracy which is empowering and averse to the mechanisms of neo-capital. This article argues that Arundhati Roy's angst against the comprador nature of Indian democracy has theoretical and philosophic support from the contemporary continental ethico-political philosophy of later Derrida and Giorgio Agamben. Agamben's notion of Homo Sacer and Bare Life and Derrida's outcry against autoimmunity and absolutist totalitarian democracy are similar to Roy's concern about the 'demon-crazy'.