tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1674709389503889160.post1094860876394843106..comments2024-03-25T14:25:25.102+00:00Comments on Poetry as Socio-proctology: Ajay Skaria's Gandhi- apres moi le Deleuzewindwheelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18099651877551933295noreply@blogger.comBlogger1125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1674709389503889160.post-70689394357324345052016-07-05T14:06:41.206+01:002016-07-05T14:06:41.206+01:00Skaria is not guilty of making the assertions abou...Skaria is not guilty of making the assertions about Gandhi that you impute to him. He merely pointed out that Gandhi could be interpreted in a particular way IF his opposition to Liberal Institutions- e.g. Parliament, Courts of Law etc- was 'incoherent', i.e. he was just indulging in fantasy when he spoke of each village governing itself and the Indian State, as well as large scale Commerce, Industry etc, all fading away.<br />Skaria says that if we believe that Gandhi was just indulging in whimsical fantasy- and this would be obvious to anyone who reads him in Gujerati- then we can read Gandhi in any way we want because his writing is meaningless. <br /><br />Look at the article in the Wire from which you quote. What is the context of his remarks? He was asked a specific question'- 'You mention how Gandhi emphasised that the British themselves were trapped by modernity and that we must be free of both the British and Britishisms, such as parliament. How coherent was this thought? What alternative forms of governance did Gandhi realistically expect to work?'<br />That was the question he was asked. His reply is that Gandhi was just babbling meaningless nonsense which we can interpret in any way we like.<br />He says <br />'This is not a coherent thought (i.e. it is incoherent to criticize liberal institutitons because nothing else can exist for people who are coherent in their thinking- i.e. the rest of us) . When we are engaged in the task of interpretation, we are often trying to tease out a coherent argument from a text. But when as in this book we are attending to arguments that Gandhi may even explicitly oppose but that nevertheless emerge from his writing, this question of coherence is not as important. What we are attending to instead is the moment of danger when the coherence of the text may be undone. If we attend to Gandhi’s writing in this spirit, then we could say that one most unsettling (again, notice, not most evident) trope is the way it questions the equality of ‘modern civilisation’, of what we are today likely to identify as liberal equality'.<br /><br />'Gandhi is deeply disturbed by this liberal equality, describing it as an ‘equality of sword’'<br /><br />Put bluntly, Skaria is saying Gandhi was incoherent. His writing is the word-salad of the babbling schizophrenic. We can read some modish ontological anxiety into it because we are like the Psychiatrist writing a report on a drooling nutjob. We are raising up the dignity of the lunatic by pretending she is reacting at an emotional level to real problems facing us as intellectuals.<br />This is like Freud creating a theory of the origin of Christian doctrine out of the ravings of a Judge who thought God was trying to impregnate him with the Messiah. The Judge got better and resumed his duties but, since the memoirs of his mental illness included a lot of nonsensical meaning, Freud was welcome to make sense of it in any way that he liked. Had Freud decided some ruling of the Judge was impugned by reason of incoherence and thus chosen to defy that ruling, he would have been sent to jail. However, since writing nonsense about nonsense is not by itself actionable, he and we are welcome to do so. Ex falso quodlibet- from falsehood, and incoherent babbling is false, any falsehood proceeds.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.com