Hegel and C.S Pierce believed in an objective logic- a 'logic of things'- whereas Althusser and other Marxists seeking to explain why the European proletariat shunned Revolutionary Bolshevism - thought that some paranoid 'logic of late capitalism' had the power to 'constitute the subject'- i.e. everybody had been brainwashed and so- wake up sheeple!- one should murder one's wife (as Althusser did) or show one's distaste for the bourgeoisie by shitting oneself and screaming loudly or creating some other other such nuisance.
Associate Prof. Rajesh Sampat, of Brandeis, comes across as quite sane. But is what he writes about Ambedkar and Gandhi sensible? Let us take a look-
A Hegelian Reading of Derrida’s The Beast and the Sovereign, Vol. I, to Philosophically Expound Ambedkar’s Critique of Caste in his 1932 “Statement of Gandhji’s Fast” Rajesh Sampath
Abstract: This paper will attempt a Hegelian reading of Derrida’s Beast and the Sovereign Vol 1 lectures
Derrida thought that both beasts and kings were exempt from the law. He was wrong. Since Hegel was actually quite well read, his reading of Derrida would have involved saying 'dude, you got shit for brains.' Both Kings and certain animals- e.g. war-horses, guard dogs etc.- behaved as if they knew that there was a legal sanction such that they would be butchered if they took a particular course of action. In other words, there was an objective 'logic' such that Kings did not violate those laws (written or unwritten) which would cause them to be deposed or executed and war-horses and guard dogs etc did not show cowardice or lack of zeal because that would get them killed by their own handlers. One could go a step further and say, in a Lamarckian spirit, that, in Hegel's time, the Princes of Europe, just like the war-horses and attack dogs of Europe, had been bred to obey and enforce a particular type of law- one which arose from the 'Master/Slave dialectic' such that the aristos dominated the plebs by reason of their preference to die for honor rather than work hard to stay alive.
Hegel's logic was pre-scientific, being concerned with being and essence, but it's attraction was its dynamic quality. Mathematical logic has moved on a lot since Hegel's time. In the mid Seventies, 'propositional dynamic language' was developed. During the Eighties, Rohit Parikh introduced 'Game Logic', which has narrower validity but wider semantics- as a generalization of the above for determined 2 person games. It seems resort to cut free sequent calculi is required to show the completeness of this axiomatization. More generally, absent uncorrelated asymmetries- which generate 'bourgeois strategies'- it is not clear that meta-games will be concerned with rules. This is because, no resolvent may be accessible- i.e. cut elimination isn't 'baked in'. There is no deterministic method of getting 'consensus'. That's a good reason for dynamic logic, or category theory, to reject airy fairy analytical methods which can't produce a result in the life-time of the Universe.
Though many Indians- because they are employed or connected with I.T- are aware of Parikh's work, our Left academicians have refused to incorporate this type of research into their own, wholly parasitic, understanding of key Eurocentic ideological concepts they have slavishly subscribed to.
Mathematical game theory turned political science into a quantifiable, empirical, discipline five decades ago. If, as David Ellerman- who was Rohith Jinvanlal Parikh's PhD student- has suggested, morphisms are the transmissions or determinations of structure between objects, political philosophy could be thought of as seeking for 'horizontal', self-determining, 'concrete universals' of a strategic sort. This means the hermeneneutics of game theory can be Hegelian rather than purely 'Rational Choice'. In other words, Hegelianism needn't have been Kojevian or paranoid shite- at least for Lefty Indians who would naturally have known something of Parikh's work back in the Sixties. There is no reason why, following Ellerman, we might not get rid of 'subaltern' abjectness in favor of a notion of self-management arising from 'chimerical adjunction'. Indeed, one could interpret Gandhi & Ambedkar and so on in this light. But one can't interpret Sen's capability approach- which amounts to saying the poor are incapable of anything till lots and lots of Aid money is spent on their behalf by stupid bureaucrats- in this manner. This is the hole in the begging bowl of the Gandhian soul of the Secular Socialist Indian intellectual.
Chomsky, duplicating Hegel's stupidity without his excuse- viz. the math didn't exist- started positing some magical language gene which instantaneously spreads across Humanity such that 'i-language' comes immediately into existence in a perfect manner and retains its perfection till the fucking Capitalists invented TV and Radio and started 'manufacturing consent' all over the place.
William Lawvere, back when I was in short pants and Rajesh was in diapers, began to show the Left how Hegel could be rescued from paranoid nutters. Unlike Hegel, who rejected Lamarck and embraced Cuvier, we can define a universal property in terms of efficiency optimization of a particular type and give a formulaic expression, in terms of adjoint, functors ,to dynamics on the configuration space or fitness landscape. Category theory could thus be married to Kantorovich's 'objective' theory of value (based on shadow prices). There was no need to become a shitty little asshole by reading loser-loser Althusser or subscribing to an ignorant and paranoid type of antaganomia which could only result in 'identity politics', 'Grievance Studies' and 'extractive introjection'- i.e. the confiscation of the psychic pain of a 'subaltern' class for a careerist or credentialist purpose.
Sampath gives us the trifecta- a posh American dude confiscating the suffering of the genuine desi so as to gain career advancement while shitting mightily on both European philosophy which has always denied that it had any salience whatsoever with respect to India- as well on the Hindus of that country whom America has a duty to punish because....urm... Democracy? Human Rights? Fuck it. Why not just admit that America must punish uppity brown folk or if it can't, coz they have taken to fighting back, then, at the very least America can sneer at them darkies wot don't even read Derrida or Deleuze gud.
Ambedkar was smart and fearless. He made a brief statement in 1932 and followed it up with other statements. There were no fucking 'aporias'- hesitations, elisions or expressions of self-doubt- in what Ambedkar said and did. That's why he has huge statues and pilgrimage complexes dedicated to him in more and more Districts of India. Ordinary Hindus like me can now worship this Boddhisattva in a manner that will soon be superior to that in which the Americans worship at their Lincoln Memorial. Mt. Rushmore, I have to say, we haven't yet been able to emulate. Give us time. Nothing is too good for our Ambedkar.
Sampath, American fuckwit that he is, insists that Ambedkar was a fool or a coward. There were 'aporias' and 'paradoxes' in that poor dim witted darky's statements. Ultra-racist French psilosophy alone can shed light on what that barrister and Econ double PhD (Columbia and LSE) said and did.
to unpack certain apories and paradoxes in Ambedkar’s brief 1932 statement on modern India’s founding figure, Gandhi. In that small text Ambedkar is critical of Gandhi’s seemingly saintly attempt at fasting himself to death.
Gandhi had previously tried to blackmail Nehru by making a letter he wrote public. Nehru learnt his lesson and turned the tables on Gandhi once it became clear that the poor Brahmin or 'Harijan' in the boondocks was smarter, more rational, and more committed to utilitarian Social Democracy than some silly crackpot who had learnt a little about India while in White dominated South fucking Africa.
Ambedkar diagnoses that Gandhi’s act of self-sacrifice conceals a type of subtle coercion
Subtle! Fuck off! Ambedkar says that certain castes- some 'high', some 'low'- used fasting to death in a coercive manner. Indian knew this. We also knew that 'hijras' (transgender people) turn up when a son is born and they have to be paid a lot of money to go away. We were aware of these traditional types of nuisances just as we knew there were 'Tantriks' who claimed to be able to put a curse on us and that there were mischievous people within our own sub-caste who would raise a hue and cry against us just because we had sent a son to Europe for Medical education or else decided to let our daughter get a High School Education rather than just marry her off at the age of eight.
of certain political decisions during India’s independent movement from British colonialism. In order to unpack philosophical assumptions in Ambedkar’s statement,
you'd have to know the type of philosophy Ambedkar had been taught at Columbia (where he got a PhD) by John Dewey and so forth. Pragmatism and Positivism are relevant. Some stupid Husserlian shite variegated by Heideggerian vomit is wholly irrelevant.
this paper examines Derrida’s startlingly original insights
But hopelessly wrong- both animals and Kings are punished or killed if they break the law- even if they are ignorant of it.
into animality, law, and sovereignty in confronting two of the Western tradition’s giants in political philosophy, namely Hobbes and Schmitt.
But neither Hobbes nor Schmitt have had any influence on Anglo Saxon law or politics. We have gone in the opposite direction- separation of powers and checks and balances. Ambedkar qualified as a barrister in London. He did a PhD at the LSE. He was a 'Law & Econ' maven avant la lettre.
My intuition is that Derridean deconstruction can be expanded further by deploying certain Hegelian resources.
It can become even more meaningless- sure.
My ultimate aim is to show how Western notions of man, soul, God, the sovereign, and the state begin to dissolve when examining the Hindu metaphysical cosmology of the caste system.
Yet, Western political and legal institutions- introduced to India by the Brits- had no difficulty accommodating the caste system. British tribunals, in recent years, have given perfectly sensible judgments in cases involving allegations of 'caste discrimination'. A US court will soon rule on the 'CISCO caste case'.
My thesis and concluding reflections argue that only by destroying that cosmological system of politico-metaphysical inequality can a true democratic notion of the sovereign state emerge in the Indian context.
There is no cosmological system of some stupid shite this cunt pulled out of his arse. His thesis can only demonstrate his own stupidity and ignorance.
This paper opens with a central philosophical concept in Hobbes’s Leviathan on skepticism about reliance on men to ‘mediate’ God’s speech as opposed to receiving God’s speech directly and ‘immediately.’
So this shit is only relevant to the Reformation and Counter Reformation. It is wholly irrelevant to a country without an organized, Establishment, Religion with Bishops and Cardinals and Popes etc.
It turns out that this has everything to do with what that means with regard to obedience to a sovereign in the use of reason to believe or not believe anything; this includes beliefs about authority in general and authority which commands belief.
This wasn't true in Hobbes's time- though he may not have known it. It had absolutely nothing to do with India were the Emperor was of a different Religion- and, during the Raj, lived on a different continent- to the vast majority of the people.
And of course justifying obedience to the Sovereign is the mystery and cornerstone of Hobbes’ whole undertaking. And, as we all know, Western secular modernity would not have been possible without this great Hobbessian innovation.
Horseshit! Western secular modernity arose out of globalized trade and industry. Hobbes didn't matter. Few Westerners have heard of him and most who read him thought he had shit for brains.
Carl Schmitt was a sort of spoiled Catholic who demonstrated that German political philosophy was utterly shite. Thankfully, that country was partitioned and occupied. Schmitt was fortunate in coming under American, not Soviet suzerainty. Some shite University departments awarded credentials to cretin on the basis of their writing stupid shit about that stupid shithead.
. We will then unpack this passage utilizing critical resources from Schmitt’s small text of 1938, namely The Leviathan in the State Theory of Thomas Hobbes.
Hobbes was merely saying that the masses consent to being governed so as to avoid anarchy. The problem for Germany was that the masses were consenting to being fucked over by the Fuhrer. Oddly, this turned out to be a good thing because once Germany was comprehensively defeated and occupied, it began to thrive economically.
There, Schmitt brilliantly deconstructs the repetition, difference, and othering of moments in a progression that leads from the animal nature of man in the state of nature
men remain men in a state of nature. That stupid racist cunt didn't get that indigenous people were less psychotic than Teutonic pseudo-intellectuals like himself.
to the miraculous conversion of citizens in the social contract;
Coz that's what would have enabled Ashraf Ghani to withstand the Taliban- a Social Contract! Afghans would have been miraculously converted into woke activists for transgender rights.
but this is intertwined with an original interpretation of the question of divinity and sovereignty of state in Hobbes by deconstructing the notion of the ‘mortal God’ (Schmitt 2008, 32) in Hobbes’s framework.
Why would an Indian need to deconstruct something which is not notional but real in India? We have plenty of Swamis and Babas who claim to be God. Some of them also claim to be immortal but then bits start dropping off them coz Syphilis aint no picnic.
We will try to show that Schmitt intuits a complex set of interrelations in a contorted, seemingly impenetrable event: he unearths the indiscernible epochal shift beneath the normative and empirical history of political conceptions that gave birth to secular modernity.
But Britain wasn't secular- it had an Established Church. In Germany, to this day, most people have money taken from them by the tax-man and given to the Church they are presumed to belong to.
Returning to Hobbes while innovating at the same time, Schmitt speaks of what one can call an interrelation between: a) the relation between man and soul in the divine structure of a primordial, preternatural, pre-modern/medieval Christian cosmology
India has no 'Christian cosmology'. Why is this brown dude so fucking Eurocentric?
that englobes any kind of foreseeable future sovereign structure that is of pure human, artificial origin and
coz White dudes got super-powers- right?
b) the relation between a transformed man and the birth of the valid, juridical sovereign through the artificial construction of what will eventually be the non-divine (not derived from the divine)
e.g the Roman Law or British Common Law tradition both of which are pre-Christian.
modern constitutional ‘covenant’ that is of human origin,
Newsflash! Religion is of human origin.
i.e. the prototypical version of the human as modern democratic ‘political citizen.’
Which is still a work in progress.
Put another way, there is a relation between the created man (as an element of the Creation) and soul relation (in the state of nature), which gives way to the birth of the leviathan; the latter itself is an intrinsic relational unity as ‘mortal God,’ or the ‘huge man’ as “machine animated by the sovereignrepresentative person.” (Schmitt 2008, 32)
But Fuhrers fuck up big time.
Something transpires in terms of this transmogrification
there has been no such transmogrification since Adam & Eve were expelled from Eden. The Bible shows that the State evolved gradually. First there are Judges, then Kings. But Kings too were subject to the law. Schmitt fucked up because he didn't get that his Fuhrer, had he not shot himself, would have had to answer for his crimes before a Judicial Commission.
of the man-soul relation, which was derived from an immaterial, a prior transcendental creation (namely the Judeo-Christian God), to this new relation of the political human and or the state as a ‘mortal God’; the latter itself is a new Being that has its own ‘animation’ (not soul) through the ‘sovereign-representative person.’ (Schmitt 2008, 32)
We can now understand why the Left has embraced that Nazi cunt. But a Stalin would give them short shrift because they are utterly useless.
We need to dissect all these elements, their relations, and interrelations, while uncovering their deeper meaning.
Only in the sense that we need to shit into our own cupped hands and spend our time examining our turds.
Once we lay out these two moments in Hobbes and Schmitt, while breaking down their parts, analyzing them, and synthesizing them into higher conceptions, we will move to Derrida’s reading of both in his intriguing and cunning lectures on the Beast and the Sovereign (2001-2002).
Rajesh studied under Derrida. But, to get a bit of intellectual affirmative action he is dragging Gandhi and Ambedkar into this apple-polishing shit.
In those last lectures towards the end of his life, we find some real gems to appropriate while appreciating some of his dazzling deconstructive moves on questions of animality, law, and sovereignty when encountering the two towering giants of modern Western political philosophy (Derrida 2009).
Western political philosophy has no towering giants. The ordinary citizen is assumed to have better judgment in these matters than a bunch of prosy pedants. Still, a guy with a good prose style- like Burke or Macaulay- could have an impact. But both were politicians, not professors.
This way we can lay down the conditions for our own reading of Ambedkar’s 1932 statement on ‘Gandji’s Fast’ (Thorat and Kumar 2009). Our hypothesis is that meta-concepts – man, soul, God, nature, sovereign, state – in Hobbes and Schmitt, from their strictly Judeo-Christian roots, require a confrontation with the absolute limits of the Derridean deconstructive attempt to decompose the Western metaphysical and onto-theological constructions of thought in general.
But that attempt failed in the West because of a little thing called 'Science'. Derrida is a joke word for what comes out of an overeducated but cretinous horse's derriere.
In the process, Derrida had to invent new terms and neologisms
the fucker's writing is nothing but a schizophrenic word-salad.
while amalgamating and distending existing terms into other variations of themselves.
He rendered everything he touched on utterly meaningless.
He tried to work within the ‘closure’ of the Western metaphysical tradition (not ‘end’) to catch a glimpse of what is other to the tradition (Derrida 1974, 4). From this perspective, we can try to experience while reflecting on the epochal passage, namely an impossible simultaneity of experience and reflection, from what is strictly within the Western metaphysical context (and its determination of its political philosophical tradition, too) to the ‘Other’ that in its infinity is irreducible to the West.
Alterity has to be studied on its own terms. Even if you change your philosophy, you still won't be able to speak Chinese unless you actually learn Chinese.
It transcends its dialectical opposition to the West if characterized as the ‘non-West’ or ‘East.’ Our aim is to expand on Ambedkar’s critique of the Indian caste system derived from an ancient Hindu metaphysical cosmology. This involves his strenuous critique of the moral failure of the early to mid-twentieth century Gandhian event of de-colonial liberation from the British Empire that culminated in the birth of an independent, liberal, secular, constitutional, pluralistic democracy in India.
Ambedkar tried but failed to create an anti-Hindu majority. It turned out that Muslims would ethnically cleanse Dalits but Hindus wouldn't.
It is that very democracy today that is presented to the rest of the world as a shining example of peace and coexistence given the sheer magnitude of its size. Our thesis is that intertwining dimensions from all three thinkers – Hobbes, Schmitt, and Derrida with Hegel always hovering on the horizon – can be illuminated and deepened to bring to fruition hidden, unarticulated philosophical assumptions in Ambedkar’s statement on a pivotal Gandhian event: one that sealed the fate of millions of oppressed Dalits or the ‘outsider caste’ (formerly known as ‘Untouchables’) prior to the birth of modern independent, secular, constitutional, legal Indian democracy.
The Hindus, in so far as they were Nationalists, wanted to get rid of caste discrimination and saw affirmative action as the best way forward. But Dalits who converted to Islam or Christianity were excluded from such benefits- in the former case, after Independence.
Our purpose is to understand how democratic theory and the phenomenological nature of caste point to skeptical issues of political epistemology that are of a unique nature in the Indian civilizational context and South Asia more broadly speaking.
This is a stupid purpose. Phenomenology is a function of education and training which in turn is a function of economic forces.
Rajesh- poor booby- believes that if some dead white dude wrote some stupid shite then that stupid shite must be true.
The following passage will serve as the point of departure of our analysis. As we read Hobbes, we can graft moments of Ambedkar’s critique of Gandhi and his act to fast himself to death while interpreting them within the margins of the Leviathan. Hobbes states: When God speaketh to man, it must be either immediately; or by the mediation of another man,
Nonsense! Either you speak to me or you don't. I'd look a fool if I believed some rando who tells me you told him to tell me you want to suck my cock.
to whom he had formerly spoken by himself immediately. How God speaketh to a man immediately, may be understood by those well enough, to whom he hath so spoken; but how the same should be understood by another is hard, if not impossible to know.
Hobbes is saying, don't believe me randos who tell you I want to suck your cock. The same thing applies if they claim that God or the Devil or the Emperor of China told them you should hand over all your money so as to get super-powers.
For if a man pretended to me, that God hath spoken to him supernaturally, and immediately, and I can make doubt of it, I cannot easily perceive what argument he can produce, to oblige me to beleeve it.
He could magically produce a big bag of gold and hand it to you. That would give you an incentive to believe him. But his being able to fuck you up too creates a Kafka's toxin type situation where it pays you to believe him devoutly.
It is true, that if he be my Sovereign, he may oblige me to obedience, so, as not by act or word to declare I beleeve him not; but not to think any otherwise then my reason perswades me. But if one hath not such authority over me, shall pretend the same, there is nothing that exacteth either beleefe, or obedience. (Tuck 2008, 256)
This is silly. If you benefit by believing then- as in Newcombe's problem- you believe. Thus, if there's a guy who has a reputation for being able to convince fat cunts like me to voluntarily give up cake and bikkies, then I would have an incentive to become a true believer. But this is also true of good people who are making things better for everyone. Indeed, if the guy who finds the cure to cancer says 'I'm not smart. God chose to reveal this secret to me but I don't know why. I'm unworthy'- we will applaud his humility and become more willing to accept his advise to give up smoking etc.
There is nothing 'philosophical' in Hobbes's passage. Rajesh, cretin that he is, pretends otherwise coz he studied under Derrida and will lose his job if he confesses that the fellow was an ignorant fool.
In this passage we have the following elements we can break out: God is an entity capable of the act to speak immediately to a man and hence man has the capacity to hear God.
No. There is nothing in Hobbes which would conflict with a Spinozan or polytheistic or even an atheistic conception of God. It was merely a fact about English language pragmatics at that time that 'God speaking to me' had a variety of interpretations. Hobbes isn't choosing one interpretation over any other. That's why some thought him an atheist.
God’s speech to man can occur directly and immediately, which means man has the capability to receive this speech.
Hobbes doesn't say that. The fact is a lot of his readers thought he was saying 'don't be silly. If there really is a God who created the Universe- fuck would he be talking to some crazy dude?
But with God’s infinite will, God can also be that God who speaks to man through mediation of another man,
only in the sense that God could make somebody else urinate for you.
the latter of whom may have received that speech in an immediate way.
coz all the piss in your bladder could be magically transferred to him. The problem with this line of reasoning is that wifey can claim that the milkman was shtupping her with your dick.
But one can also doubt God’s immediate speech to a man who then transmits it to another man because man’s knowledge of God’s speech transmitted through other men is not immediate.
Hobbes hints that guys who claim God chats with them might be crazy. Their 'understanding' might be that of a shithouse rat.
At this point doubt becomes impossibility of knowledge.
Rubbish! Doubt remains doubt. It may be removed by new evidence.
From this we find that there is no obligation in the possibility to believe in mediated knowledge (God’s speech to man through another man).
There may be. There may not. Hobbes does not enter into that question. Still, it was generally agreed, that if you were a Clergyman then you were being paid to believe certain things of this sort.
Obligation to believe then has a tenuous relationship to obligation to be obedient to an authority.
No. Either there is such an obligation of a justiciable nature- e.g. an Anglican clergyman having a duty of obedience to the Archbishop- or there was no obligation whatsoever.
Hence Hobbes raises the issue of what happens when man is a Sovereign.
This was at a time when 'the Divine Right of Kings' was still a thing. After the Glorious Revolution, it was accepted that Kings have no such thing. Also a sharp blade could cut through their necks like butter.
Even if this mediated speech through a Sovereign (God speaking to Sovereign to speak to man) could oblige obedience.
then what? Rajesh won't tell us. Did he read through this shite before sending it off to the printers?
A little later Rajesh says-
The question is not whether the ‘social contract’ is a fiction;
English law has a concept of a 'legal fiction'.
the question is whether the transition to it can ever be proved as a real event in human history, which presupposes human consciousness itself as attuned to the very historicity
Which very historicity? Rajesh won't tell us. Why is he being so mean?
Human history presupposes human consciousness. A 'legal fiction' can't be proved to be a real event. Rajesh doesn't understand that Social Contract theorists have never suggested that there was a particular place and time when such a contract was drawn up.
One can easily see the relevance of Hegel’s early lectures on religion through the Phenomenology through his System to the later lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, which were so crucial for the eventual development of nineteenth and twentieth century theologies in all Christian traditions, not just the Lutheran and Protestant traditions.
This is nonsense. Hegel was influenced by theology. There were one or two Hegelians among Catholic and Anglican theologians. But they had no influence. Does this cretin really think the Evangelical Christianity of the Bible Belt has any link to Hegel? On the other hand, Tammy Faye Bakker was constantly quoting the Wissenshaft der Logik.
To be historically conscious of transcending the nature vs. history divide
requires the consumption of lots and lots of drugs.
it means that one cannot be the same being from the state of nature who then ‘leaves’ that realm and enters the realm of history (of laws, society, contracts) while remaining intact.
We all started off as babies who were in 'a state of nature'. We all left that realm and went to Skool and 'entered the realm of history'. Most of us 'remained intact'. Rajesh's brains were buggered to buggery coz he thought Derrida was a smart dude.
But if one assumes irreducible and nonrepresentable alterity even in the form of a faint trace as having been this other being (in the state of nature)
Why assume our babyishness is an 'alterity'? The fact is we cuddle and coo to our significant other in a very babyish way. I once had a Jain girl friend. I would beat my chest and say 'Me Tarzan, you Jain'. What happened next was very much about being in a state of nature. Then she dumped me for an orthodontist.
prior to being the historically conscious being of the social contract that looks back on the ‘leap,’ then one can neither conceptualize the discontinuity in the event of transformation from within history; nor can they gloss over the irreducible difference in the name of continuity and presence.
So if you assume some shit is impossible then that shit is impossible coz that was your fucking assumption.
If the latter were true, no leap would have ever taken place and no social contract as history itself would have ever come into being.
No 'leap' is involved in a 'legal fiction'. The thing is accepted because it is convenient to do so.
This aporia has everything to do with whether speech can be immediate or mediated,
There is no aporia here. Essentially, we can agree to act as if something we know to be fictional is actually true.
and how that affects obligation to believe in obedience
You are only obliged to believe things you are paid to believe in.
and the obedience to believe
'obedience to believe' is bad English. Rajesh's first degree was from the US. Why can't he write Inglis gud like wot I do?
in the authority of the Sovereign, not as God, but the historical construction of one human to another that would compel law, order, and peace.
Rajesh got historically constructed to compel us to laugh at him for his shitty English and inability to reason.
On Ambedkar’s Critique of the Mahatma Let us explore these relations and deductions as we unpack Ambedkar’s critique of the Gandhian fast. Let us quote some passages from Ambedkar’s “Statement on Gandhiji’s Fast”: As to the Mahatma, I do not know what he wants. (Thorat and Kumar 2009, 191)
Gandhi wanted Joint Electorates. Ambedkar wanted Separate Electorates. The Rajah-Moonje pact meant that the majority of Dalits favored the eventual solution- Joint Electorates with a bigger S.C quota.
The Mahatma is not an immortal person and Congress assuming it is not a malevolent force, is not to have an abiding existence.
So, Ambedkar wanted 'Congress mukht bharat' just like Narendra Modi.
There have been many Mahatmas in India, whose sole object was to remove untouchability and to elevate and absorb the Depressed Classes, but every one of them has failed in his mission. Mahatmas have come and Mahatmas have gone, but the Untouchables have remained Untouchables. (Thorat and Kumar 2009, 192)
Mahatmas are irrelevant. You need to punish the thing promptly and effectively. Then it disappears.
Whether he knows it or not, the Mahatma’s act will result in nothing but terrorism against the Depressed Classes all over the country. (Thorat and Kumar 2009, 192)
Unless the Brits killed or locked up the terrorists. Ambedkar didn't trust them to lift a finger.
Coercion of this sort will not win the Depressed Classes to the Hindu fold if they are determined to go out. And if the Mahatma chooses to ask the Depressed Classes to make a choice between the Hindu faith and possession of political power, I am quite sure that the Depressed Classes will choose political power and save the Mahatma from self-immolation. If Mr. Gandhi coolly reflects on the consequences of his act, I very much doubt whether he will find this victory worth having. It is still more important to note that the Mahatma is a reactionary and uncontrollable force and is fostering a spirit of hatred between the Hindu community and the Depressed Classes by resorting to this method and thereby widening the existing gulf between the two. (Thorat and Kumar 2009, 192-193)
Ambedkar was wrong. Congress discovered that more than proportionate reservations for Scheduled Castes reduced factionalism within the party and brought in clean and competent people. Affirmative action was a win, win. Dalits had always been free to leave 'the Hindu fold'. The problem was that it was the religion they had created for themselves. Their first preference was to improve their socio-economic situation while keeping their ancestral religion. The second preference- viz. to convert to some other religion so as rise up materially- simply wasn't available.
Before we get to our phenomenological analysis of the event of the ‘fast’ and what that means –
small kids who threaten to hold their breath till they die know very well what it means. The thing is a type of blackmail
a will to death as the transcendental materialization of a soul seeking release from the body
but this requires actually dying- something Gandhi didn't want to do, which is why his blackmail didn't work
– we must unpack these passages in Ambedkar through the lens of the Hobbesian deductions we just articulated.
Why? They are completely unrelated to each other. Hobbes was just saying that it's one thing to think God told you something. It's a different thing to believe a guy who says God told him you should suck his cock.
Ambedkar certainly doubts why people should be obedient to the ‘Mahatma’ who is not a Sovereign in himself because he too is a colonial subject at the time of British rule: that is, prior to the birth of the social contract known as the secular, legal, constitutional, liberal, democratic state of postIndependence India.
The answer was simple. Ambedkar himself would lose influence if he lost Gandhi as an interlocutor. Short run, Ambedkar gained influence by doing a deal with Gandhi. Long term, it was the Congress Dalits who benefited while Ambedkar- who couldn't get elected after Independence- went into the wilderness.
Ambedkar gives us a negative, unflattering sense of Mahatma because he doesn’t know who Mahatma ‘is’ and ‘what he wants.’
No. Ambedkar says Gandhi is a Manuvadi casteist who was gathering funds in the name of helping 'Harijans' but was actually spending that money on stuff that did not benefit them at all. Sadly for Ambedkar, the Congress Dalits did well while he and his pal J.N Mandal fucked up. Still, this meant Ambedkar had to turn to Religion and thus become a Boddhisattva with big statues of himself coming up all over the place.
He knows what he is not, namely an ‘immortal person.’
This is because all mortals are not immortal.
Mahatma has a strange ontological finitude, one can say,
No one can't. The Mahatma's atma may be immortal. Indeed, it may be one and the same as 'Parmatma' and thus pervade the Universe.
and, like the Congress party, is not something that should have an ‘abiding existence.’
Why not? Has this cretin discovered a reason why souls should not be immortal?
One can ask in a democracy whether any party should last forever,
One can also ask if it should jizz in Rajesh's face on Tuesday afternoons.
and perhaps the true hallmark of individual liberty and equality is that new parties should arise:
but only in the sense that it is also the false hallmark of individual jizzing in Rajesh's face
democracy by nature resists permanency.
but only in the sense that it jizzes in Rajesh's face.
Ambedkar makes the point of temporariness, which we will have to examine further, when he says that ‘Mahatmas have come and gone’ but ‘Untouchability remains.’
But Ambedkar also believed that some lineages came into and came out of Untouchability.
One can ask
what?
about the nature of the caste system and its bizarre historicity:
Rajesh won't tell us what he could ask. Maybe he doesn't know.
untouchability remains like a substrate beneath the vicissitudes of historical change,
Not in Ambedkar's view. He believed that Buddhists got downgraded after some imaginary Brahminical victory. The truth is Buddhism exported Untouchability to Japan where there are no Brahmins, but not Bali where Brahmins exist.
say the precolonial to colonial and soon to be postcolonial independent India.
Why does this cretin need to specify that postcolonial means independent? How bad is his English?Very very fucking bad. He thinks 'alterior' is an English word. What does 'In mystery' mean? How can a guy who went to College in the US be so fucking illiterate?
In mystery of this alterior entity, whose Being one can say is the permanent ‘outside’ to the fourfold caste system, historicity and eternity are not naturally opposed.
This is nonsense. Every hierarchical society has some outsiders who don't fit anywhere. That which is historical is not eternal. The two concepts are naturally opposed.
This will help us bracket what the Mahatma’s Being-towards-death in the phenomenological event of the fast.
Another completely ungrammatical sentence. Remove 'what' and it is merely foolish. The fact is Heideggerian Sein-zum-Tode means 'a process of growing through the world where a certain foresight guides one to an authentic perspective. It is provided by dread of death.'
This has nothing to do with risking one's life to gain something- which is what Ambedkar says Gandhi was doing.
In a footnote, Rajesh says-
This is an obvious reference
by whom? Ambedkar? But he didn't read Heidegger. Indeed, 'Being and Time' wasn't translated into English till 1962.
to Heidegger’s ideas on time and death in division II of Being and Time. Heidegger (1963, 255) states in Chapter I of Division II: “In our preliminary existential sketch, Being-towards-the-end has been defined as Being towards one’s own most potentiality-for-Being, which is non-relational and is not to be outstripped.
Unless one believes in an immortal soul subject to rebirth.
Being towards this possibility, as a Being which exists, is brought face to face with the absolute impossibility of existence.
and it jizzes in your face
Beyond this seemingly empty characterization of Being-towards-death, there has been revealed
by whom? To whom? Did this happen before or after Being-towards-death farted in Rajesh's mouth and jizzed in his eye?
the concretion of this Being in the mode of everydayness.
of the jizzification of random Gay dudeifactions on Rajesh's faceification in the mode of every Tuesdayification.
In accordance with the tendency to falling, which is essential to everydayness,
Coz Rajesh keeps falling on his knees everyday which is how come his face keeps getting jizzed on. Seriously, dude, you may have a problem. Go easy on the drink.
Being-towards-death has turned out to be an evasion in the face of death – an evasion which conceals.
We can all guess what Rajesh is concealing. But his evasion isn't successful coz his face is dripping with cum.
While our investigation has hitherto passed from a formal sketch of the ontological structure of death
No it hasn't. Writing illiterate ignorant shite aint a 'formal sketch' of shit.
Returning to Ambedkar’s critique of the specious ‘sovereignty’ of the Mahatma,
There is no such critique. The King Emperor is sovereign. The Prime Minister should not listen to Gandhi coz the guy is seditious.
on the question of untouchability we can make the following deductions. In a way, Mahatma’s wager on his own life as ultimate proof of the transcendental nature of his sovereignty, or that the Indian masses will follow his preferences unquestionably, is no simple event.
Yes it is. Either Ambedkar could get credit for doing the deal or else Rajah and Baloo and other S.C politicians would have taken the credit. Ambedkar was tolerated by his rivals because they thought he could get a better deal from Congress. But once the Brits packed their bags and the Muslim League ditched the Dalits, Ambedkar lost salience. However, Congress Dalits continued to do well purely on merit.
But this reveals something deep in the heart of the Hindu metaphysical system of the caste.
No it doesn't.
Before expanding on Ambedkar’s critique of the Gandhian fast, let us try to analyze how Gandhi justifies morally his continuation of untouchability,
Gandhi denounced untouchability. If he hadn't, he'd have lost political salience.
while denying them a separate electorate,
which turned out to be a good thing. Everybody lost separate electorates once the Brits left.
and what that means for the justification of his peculiar selfconception as a sovereign.
Gandhi knew all about Kings. He didn't think of himself as one.
In a paradoxical sense, the Mahatma perpetuates the illusion of immortality.
No he doesn't. The dude is dead. Get over it.
He does so with the game of brinkmanship, his being-towardsdeath, because, in a way, the wager is not as risky as it would appear to another moral.
He already had a long history of giving up his fasts if death seemed likely or there was no prospect of success.
The Mahatma perpetrates
Rajesh doesn't know what the word perpetrates means.
that he could certainly go all the way and come good on his commitment to self-annihilate;
there is no reason to believe so. Still, it was convenient for Ambedkar to pretend he had been blackmailed. The fact is the Brits had withdrawn the clauses Gandhi objected to. They genuinely didn't give a shit about the Dalits. Neither did the Muslims. Hindu Nationalists, on the other hand, wanted Dalits to have equality so that Hinduism would become stronger.
but, in a way,
the same way that Rajesh is constantly on his knees with his face getting jizzed upon.
he crosses over that act of finality for any other human being, he crosses over and crosses out his death because as the ‘great Soul’ – he is a transcendental sovereign being.
while Rajesh's face is dripping with cum.
But, in the second sense, he crosses over and crosses out death (before the actual event of physical death, which never comes because he ends up suspending his fast), the ‘great Soul’ is guaranteed preservation in the general migration of souls, or the Hindu doctrine of reincarnation.
But so is the soul of an ant- or that of yours truly.
If Heidegger, for example defines death as the “possibility of impossibility”
the fucker still dies and has to be buried before he stinks up the place too much.
and therefore Dasein’s greatest possibility “to be” itself authentically is death,
death, Rajesh, not ending up with a face dripping with cum. Try it sometime.
then we have something a bit more contorted in the Gandhian event.
What if Heidi had defined death as 'the cessation of life'? In that case, there would be nothing contorted at all about Gandhi's fasts because he always called them off before any permanent damage was done to his health.
Death in the Gandhian fast is
the cessation of life not
the impossibility of both the possibility of impossibility
of Rajesh jizzing on his own face.
and the impossibility of possibility, but ultimately the impossibility of all impossibility itself because death is not a point in time
Yes it is.
it is an illusion of an event with the reality of a crossover with the promised belief of reincarnation. Death is not anticipated, rebirth is, and hence death is meaningless.
No. You get a better rebirth if you have a good death- freeing yourself of 'Moh-Maya'- delusive attachment.
But reincarnation in Hindu metaphysics is like an inverted soul,
No. The soul is not inverted. It passes from form to form.
an exteriority in the form of imprisonment which is the caste system.
No. One may be reborn in a paradisal world where there is no caste or gender or death or illness.
The soul is what is punished through the body, and not a disciplining of the body to judge the soul.
No. Hinduism holds it a delusion to consider the soul to be tarnished by the body's travails. Also, bodies don't judge. Minds do.
A Hegelian Reading of Derrida’s The Beast and the Sovereign reveals about this permanency: namely untouchability in contrast to the temporary, non-immortal quality of the Mahatma.
This is foolish. Hegel didn't think caste to be a permanent aspect of any society.
That caste system could not function without a constituted ‘Other’
Yes it could. Bali has 4 castes but no 'untouchables'.
– that demonic, impure, irreducible exteriority, which cannot be conceptualized
Yes it can. The thing aint rocket science.
or reduced to the movement of the soul in time or the movement of time in the soul.
or jizz on Rajesh's face.
By trapping the Dalit/formerly known as ‘untouchable’ in their state of irreducible exteriority and social exclusion, the entire mechanism of caste can continue.
Or it could do without it, like in Bali.
And that is the Gandhian feat of the fast.
This is false. Gandhi objected to the British attempt, which Ambedkar was backing, to divide the Hindu community. He succeeded because Dalits rejected Ambedkar. They liked the religion of their ancestors which Hindu Nationalists of all stripes believed to be incompatible with such a stupid and enfeebling institution.
His sovereignty
which did not exist
in a way is derived from
cum dripping from Rajesh's face
this paradox of an illusion of the ‘immortal God’
as opposed to the mortal garden variety
but also the impossibility of being finite
if gazillions of jizz are constantly being pumped onto your face- right?
– a one-time occurrence in which all human beings literally only live once and die once regardless of Abrahamic, monotheistic conceptions of an afterlife.
or non-Abrahamic conceptions of ditto.
So now let us connect this thinking with how Gandhi justifies his sovereign act of the fast with Ambedkar’s political critique of its danger and harm, particularly to the Dalits.
Rajesh is of Indian origin. Does he really not understand that if Dalits had got separate electorates then they would have lost every type of affirmative action- just like the Muslims- after Independence?
Reading the Ambedkar passages again, we see that
the guy was worried that MC Rajah, P. Baloo and G.A Gavai etc. would be accepted by the Brits as the true representative of the Dalits.
what is actually concealed in this Gandhian movement towards a crossed out death to another rebirth is the perpetuation of a ‘terror.’
This is foolish. Dalits were too useful to be killed. Sure, Congress thugs would have run amok for a few weeks if Gandhi died just as they killed some Chitpavan and other Brahmins after Gandhi was killed but the thing would blow over.
The horror of the caste system and its outside Other is the continued demonization, chastisement, torture, oppression, seclusion and violence perpetrated
on Rajesh's face by the gazillions of cum constantly being jizzed on to it.
by both public citizens and the state, as India begins to imagine its post-Independent, post-colonial secular, liberal, legal, constitutional democracy. Ambedkar even uses the word ‘terrorism.’ (Thorat and Kumar 2009, 192) Let us in conclusion explore this question: What is the nature of this ‘terrorism’ embedded in the sovereign act of a will to self-annihilate, namely the Gandhian fast?
Lots and lots of dudes jizzing in Rajesh's face because of the impossibility of the possibility of some shite or other.
For Ambedkar, Gandhi’s attempt to preserve the caste system and the status of the Dalit as the outsider with no separate electorate forces no other choice by the Dalits but to fight for their political freedom and power.
The problem was that Ambedkar had no popular base. Still, while the Brits were around, he made the best of a weak hand.
For Ambedkar, the Gandhian threat to self-annihilate will only sow more animus and ‘hatred’ between the Hindu masses and the Dalit ‘community’ as he says.
But we know he was wrong.
For Ambedkar, Gandhi is an ‘uncontrollable force,’ and as we shall see later in Derrida’s ruminations, it turns out the sovereign as personified ‘state’ stands above the law, whereas the ‘animal’ falls below it into ‘nature.’ But this is also what binds them together in a strange way (Derrida 2009, 17).16 Who pays the price in this model? The human does.
But this model is nonsense. The Court may order an animal to be destroyed or a King to be executed. Humans pay taxes to finance this.
Boosting productivity requires getting rid of a traditional, hierarchical, systems of resource allocation. Ambedkar, as an economist, recognized this. Like many other Indians, he thought that British Imperialism would not disappear any time soon because he did not foresee that Japan could overtake the Royal Navy in the Indo-Pacific. Thus his strategy was to keep the Dalits separate from the Caste Hindus. This meant Gandhi was his enemy. But Gandhi only had salience so long as Pax Britannica was secure.
Economic and geopolitical analysis is useful to elucidate why both Gandhi and Ambedkar failed. 'Phenomenology' can only make a stupid and ignorant man more stupid and ignorant.
So in conclusion let us venture some postulates to see exactly what we are dealing with beyond what Ambedkar himself could articulate. This way we can anticipate how we may compare and contrast our phenomenological deconstruction of the Gandhian event of the fast
to do any such thing you have to look at each and every Gandhian fast. Also you'd have to specify what 'Eastern' metaphysics is and how its texts operate. Finally, the phenomenology of a celibate who fasts a lot is bound to be different from that of a guy who talks lefty bullshit for a living.
with the paradoxes, puzzles, and depths of categories, terms and relations that we find in Hobbes and Schmitt, and Derrida’s deconstructive reading of them.
Rajesh shows zero comprehension of these writers. A White dude might get in trouble for pointing this out. But I aint White.
But we need to question the inherent limits of this Western tradition too. Our thinking goes something like this. We cannot assume notions of an impersonal machine with its objective features and qualities known as the sovereign state: one that has external, physical, geographic boundaries, and is held together by political systems, bureaucratic functions in the public sector, a centralized state with branches of government, and a military and police force that upholds and enforces the laws.
Germany certainly couldn't. It was partitioned and lost a lot of territory.
Western theories of the state and punishment fail us.
No. Stupid Western theories fail us. Smart ones are useful.
But we also cannot turn to a Creator God before the first moment of time when humans, plants, and animal life were created.
Sure we can. Who will stop us? Rajesh? But his face is dripping with cum.
The monotheistic luxury of an origin to everything by one unified Being cannot be presupposed.
Why not? Most of us aren't constantly getting jizzed upon and thus can presuppose all sorts of things.
Hence the distinctions and the attempt to see the mediation between immediate opposites in a movement of differentiation, relations, and syntheses, say the sovereign as a synthesis between the anthropological and the divine, are tenuous at best.
For Rajesh coz of all the cum dripping from his face.
But the Derridean terms, or paradoxically that which is above the law or outside, which it shares with the animal too but in a different way, also tend to dissolve in the complexity we have to handle.
That's not complexity you are handling, Rajesh bhai. It's a dick. No wonder your face keeps getting jizzed upon.
The Gandhian sovereign is a social body built upon caste, which requires both the distance and enslavement of something other to the human and hence not below it in nature, like the animal, or above it, like a transcendental God, which has the power to ‘give or make the law’ as Derrida (2009, 17) says.
Rajesh is confusing Gandhi with Hitler. What's next? Will he say 'Mother Theresa was the 45th President of the USA?'
The being-towards death is not a stamp of finality and finitude
it is cum dripping off Rajesh's face.
but nor is it a type of illusory timelessness or immortality, as Ambedkar says; it is other to the finite and infinite, crossing out and preserving their difference, thus pointing to an irreducible third horizon, which cannot be spatialized. In this bizarre metaphysics, death is not a point in time but a stretched event of passage in which anticipated re-birth recapitulates and guarantees the cycle of previous births.
Rubbish! People anticipate rebirth with superior sentience till finally Liberation is attained. There is no 'recapitulation'. Is this nutter thinking of Haeckel?
One can say a being towards two ‘ends’ is
is Rajesh getting jizzed upon by two dicks
that between being-towardsbirth and being-toward-rebirth. The asymmetric irreducible other to this progression is the in-human or the carrier of human waste/excrement and the non-sacral dead body (since the purity of the migrating soul is what is at stake) and that is the Dalit/formerly known as ‘untouchable.’
Rajesh doesn't get that only a small minority of Dalits work as scavengers or undertakers.
In a footnote, Rajesh suggests-
A separate reading of Foucault’s Discipline and Punish (1975) on these issues and a creative expansion of their terms would be a fruitful project in that regard.
If by fruitful you mean stowing pineapples up your rectum.
The Gandhian fast or the wager that he will go all the way through to selfannihilation
did not exist. What worried people was that the emaciated little man might miscalculate and die by accident.
is like that false immortal Sovereign sacrificing himself in order to preserve the metaphysical-social body of caste:
Like Rajesh drowning in jizz coz of something Derrida said about Hegel
the new terrorism will then hide beneath the surface of a future, secular, legal, constitutional, liberal democracy pretending to guarantee ‘equality, liberty, and fraternity.’
No it won't. This guy probably thinks the Taliban are setting up a nice secular, liberal democracy coz of all the terrorism they've been doing.
One would have to say in this model, the sovereign turns paradoxically the state of nature into democracy,
like Rajesh turning all the cum dripping off his face into papers like this one
the idea of law becomes antithetical to individual freedom in the preservation of caste and the enslaved Outside, namely the impure Dalit, and the obligation to obedience is not one to the state or law but the myth of the highest act of Being, namely self-annihilation: the Gandhian event of the fast is the crescendo of the entire system where all can witness the truth of this Hindu metaphysical system, the crossing over, crossing out, passing through to the outside or the rebirth that cancels death.
and jizzes copiously on Rajesh's face.
Forcing the witness to the event
forcing who to witness it, or that witness to do what? Rajesh won't tell us probably coz of all that cum he is drowning in.
creates the unconscious obedience, necessary for a type of sovereignty that will then be irreducible to any future Western conception of the social contract and liberal democratic state.
Why not? A Social Contract can stipulate to any type of hierarchy. A liberal democratic state can refuse to cede any type of justiciable right to broad categories of people within its borders. We may say this would be undesirable, but it is entirely feasible.
What this witness is
who it is- not what it is
escapes the vocabulary of Western metaphysics
no it doesn't. What a witness is is well defined.
and therefore its political philosophy. To unpack the totality of this mystery requires
it not to be a mystery
a steady dismantling of what is at work in the Hobbesian and Schmittian texts but also the highly original and clever reading of them in Derrida’s lectures on the Beast and the Sovereign.
Fuck off. Derrida was fucked in the head.
The post-9/11 historical context of the early 2000s in which Derrida gave those lectures takes on an eerie significance, but for an entirely different historical context, namely the dawn of post-colonial independent India.
Derrida may have been stupid and ignorant but surely the guy saw Attenborough's 'Gandhi'?
Both contexts attempt to deal with the phenomenon of ‘terrorism.’
No. There was no 'terrorism' at the dawn of Indian independence. There was one assassination and a lot of ethnic cleansing- but that's not 9/11 type terrorism.
Through Ambedkar, we find that what appeared to be an act of a sacrificial martyr figure who promised peace, hope, and collective compassion was in fact one of a monstrous Other himself – the inhuman logic to keep certain human beings in an inhuman state precisely in the false finitude of a transcendental immortality rooted solely in myth: that death can be surpassed and hence embraced as the highest act of salvation for all precisely when it is deemed illusory.
This simply isn't true. Both Gandhi and Ambedkar and Moonje and Rajah and every other Hindu Nationalist wanted to get rid of Untouchability so as to make the Hindus stronger and more prosperous.
But this precisely is what did not happen in post-Independent Indian democracy,
This is precisely what did happen- but too slowly because Economic development was hobbled by stupid Leftist policies.
namely the creation of a non-violent, collective compassion.
Fuck compassion. Only money matters- but money depends on productivity which in turn depends on peeps studying STEM subjects or going to work in factories rather than writing stupid shit like this.
The caste system remains and therefore the Dalit role of the formerly known as ‘untouchable’ endures while yet another ‘Mahatma’ has come and gone.
But the RSS continues to do a good job uprooting the thing- unlike Rajesh upon whose face all America has jizzed because of 9/11 and Neo-Liberalism and COVID and 'fake news'. Mahatmas like Trumpji have come and gone yet Rajesh continues to drown in cum. Sad.
No comments:
Post a Comment