If it be asked what such ways are; the answer is, they are already known ; (perhaps too well,) am... more If it be asked what such ways are; the answer is, they are already known ; (perhaps too well,) among Gardeners, and we do not choose to instruct mankind in the means of doing private mischief.
That the present moment ties multiple crises together—not least because each is a future of pasts... more That the present moment ties multiple crises together—not least because each is a future of pasts that wound(ed) through each other—must be factored into our intercessions and visions. If every crisis is also a call to order, then what order, old or new, does the pandemic call us to? Its literality provokes us to keep both the pan and the demos in sight, just as they are being extinguished through borders, disease, poverty, insecurity, hatred, and disposability in the global postcolony. We are asked to remember that capital and colony are inseparable, that the nation-state is too suspicious a source of comfort, that the eroding claims of citizenship across the postcolonial and post-democratic fascist failed states are instructive and prophetic, and that the assumptions of place and movement in our frames of the democratic political need revisiting.
What does love study under conditions of its unrequitedness? How can it at once cease to be an ob... more What does love study under conditions of its unrequitedness? How can it at once cease to be an object and resist inversion into an idealized subject as the only way to survive? Against the purities, scarcities, redemptions, settlements, and requitals that make it a conscript of anti-politics of various kinds, love somehow continues to profess and remain a partisan to politics and its possibility, producing the world and often disappearing from it. When so much of that love is waiting to be spoken to, or called back from disappearance, the we and the I must make room for a forgotten you to be spoken to, heard from, grieved with, and offered a world in common. Even speaking as or for oneself in these conditions requires speaking to oneself, as if one were, just for a moment, the beloved, and not the accu(r)sed. This musing's own form and tone is an invitation to that moment, to a political method that counters the shared premises of racism, misogyny, fascism, capital, and the colony, lest our theories and practices claim further casualties: not even the beloved is safe from the wrath of that which seeks the final solution or last apology, encloses in words without excess, and squares away in smug, swift action, which is its own special curse.
Skip to content. Taylor & Francis Online: Librarians; Authors & Editors; Societies. Regis... more Skip to content. Taylor & Francis Online: Librarians; Authors & Editors; Societies. Register; Sign in; Mobile. Home; Browse; Products; Redeem a voucher; Shortlist; Shopping Cart Cart. The online platform for Taylor & Francis Group content. Search. Advanced Search Within current journal Entire site. Home > List of Issues > Table of Contents > Manuscript Reviewers Acknowledgements, Volume 34. Browse journal. View all volumes and issues. Current issue. Most read articles. Most cited articles. Authors and submissions. Call for papers. Instructions for authors ...
Like all novels, Midnight's Children is a product of its moment in history, touched and shaped by... more Like all novels, Midnight's Children is a product of its moment in history, touched and shaped by its time in ways that the author cannot wholly know. I am very glad it still seems a book worth reading in this very different time. If it can pass the test of another generation or two, it may endure. (Salman Rushdie, Midnight's Children, xv-xvi) Midnight's Children have turned sixty-four, and Midnight's Children is a little over thirty-give or take a few years. These are about the same ages as my mother and I. The multiple reverberations of Midnight's Children in our lives and beings suggest an extension of Ray Bradbury's metaphor at the end of Fahrenheit 451: In dark times, redemption might lie in books themselves becoming living beings, our not taking on their lives but giving them whatever we can of ours, allowing them and other works of art and thought that make life possible to continue becoming. This act of giving and affirming life, while not necessarily or only maternal, is contrary to the spirit of today's time when distance, objectification, stultifying repetitions, and the disregard of life come so easily.
This essay examines the centrality of voice and presence in liberalism's relation to suffering, a... more This essay examines the centrality of voice and presence in liberalism's relation to suffering, and sees this manifested in proclivities of liberal politics, ethics, and aesthetics in the face of suffering in different situations and of varying magnitudes. I argue that beyond worrying about who speaks for whom in liberal and postmodern identity politics, democratic theory must address why it demands what it does from sufferers in exchange for promises of justice understood through the dominant ideal of inclusion. In the inherited negotiations between democracy and liberalism, voice in and of itself can no longer be considered a democratic haunting or trump-and we must address the liberal sensorium that renders suffering the object of its politics by designating representational imperatives to mediate its presence in the political. Given the reach of the ideals of speech and voice, liberalism's role in determining the nature, form and limits of this empowerment cannot be minimised. These "goods" must be vetted for how they ultimately shape the possibilities of democratic existence, engagement, and desire; and they must be interrogated for instituting and affirming a sensorium which, in desperate encounters with suffering, actually silences and dishonours it. I suggest a turn toward a materialist understanding of the political that holds suffering as subject of its method: constituted by, and not speaking for or about, those ordinary and ubiquitous experiences of suffering-even the experiences of subjection to an economy of representation and inclusion en route to liberal justice-that risk obliteration even by many well-meaning victim-centered politics.
If it be asked what such ways are; the answer is, they are already known ; (perhaps too well,) am... more If it be asked what such ways are; the answer is, they are already known ; (perhaps too well,) among Gardeners, and we do not choose to instruct mankind in the means of doing private mischief.
That the present moment ties multiple crises together—not least because each is a future of pasts... more That the present moment ties multiple crises together—not least because each is a future of pasts that wound(ed) through each other—must be factored into our intercessions and visions. If every crisis is also a call to order, then what order, old or new, does the pandemic call us to? Its literality provokes us to keep both the pan and the demos in sight, just as they are being extinguished through borders, disease, poverty, insecurity, hatred, and disposability in the global postcolony. We are asked to remember that capital and colony are inseparable, that the nation-state is too suspicious a source of comfort, that the eroding claims of citizenship across the postcolonial and post-democratic fascist failed states are instructive and prophetic, and that the assumptions of place and movement in our frames of the democratic political need revisiting.
What does love study under conditions of its unrequitedness? How can it at once cease to be an ob... more What does love study under conditions of its unrequitedness? How can it at once cease to be an object and resist inversion into an idealized subject as the only way to survive? Against the purities, scarcities, redemptions, settlements, and requitals that make it a conscript of anti-politics of various kinds, love somehow continues to profess and remain a partisan to politics and its possibility, producing the world and often disappearing from it. When so much of that love is waiting to be spoken to, or called back from disappearance, the we and the I must make room for a forgotten you to be spoken to, heard from, grieved with, and offered a world in common. Even speaking as or for oneself in these conditions requires speaking to oneself, as if one were, just for a moment, the beloved, and not the accu(r)sed. This musing's own form and tone is an invitation to that moment, to a political method that counters the shared premises of racism, misogyny, fascism, capital, and the colony, lest our theories and practices claim further casualties: not even the beloved is safe from the wrath of that which seeks the final solution or last apology, encloses in words without excess, and squares away in smug, swift action, which is its own special curse.
Skip to content. Taylor & Francis Online: Librarians; Authors & Editors; Societies. Regis... more Skip to content. Taylor & Francis Online: Librarians; Authors & Editors; Societies. Register; Sign in; Mobile. Home; Browse; Products; Redeem a voucher; Shortlist; Shopping Cart Cart. The online platform for Taylor & Francis Group content. Search. Advanced Search Within current journal Entire site. Home > List of Issues > Table of Contents > Manuscript Reviewers Acknowledgements, Volume 34. Browse journal. View all volumes and issues. Current issue. Most read articles. Most cited articles. Authors and submissions. Call for papers. Instructions for authors ...
Like all novels, Midnight's Children is a product of its moment in history, touched and shaped by... more Like all novels, Midnight's Children is a product of its moment in history, touched and shaped by its time in ways that the author cannot wholly know. I am very glad it still seems a book worth reading in this very different time. If it can pass the test of another generation or two, it may endure. (Salman Rushdie, Midnight's Children, xv-xvi) Midnight's Children have turned sixty-four, and Midnight's Children is a little over thirty-give or take a few years. These are about the same ages as my mother and I. The multiple reverberations of Midnight's Children in our lives and beings suggest an extension of Ray Bradbury's metaphor at the end of Fahrenheit 451: In dark times, redemption might lie in books themselves becoming living beings, our not taking on their lives but giving them whatever we can of ours, allowing them and other works of art and thought that make life possible to continue becoming. This act of giving and affirming life, while not necessarily or only maternal, is contrary to the spirit of today's time when distance, objectification, stultifying repetitions, and the disregard of life come so easily.
This essay examines the centrality of voice and presence in liberalism's relation to suffering, a... more This essay examines the centrality of voice and presence in liberalism's relation to suffering, and sees this manifested in proclivities of liberal politics, ethics, and aesthetics in the face of suffering in different situations and of varying magnitudes. I argue that beyond worrying about who speaks for whom in liberal and postmodern identity politics, democratic theory must address why it demands what it does from sufferers in exchange for promises of justice understood through the dominant ideal of inclusion. In the inherited negotiations between democracy and liberalism, voice in and of itself can no longer be considered a democratic haunting or trump-and we must address the liberal sensorium that renders suffering the object of its politics by designating representational imperatives to mediate its presence in the political. Given the reach of the ideals of speech and voice, liberalism's role in determining the nature, form and limits of this empowerment cannot be minimised. These "goods" must be vetted for how they ultimately shape the possibilities of democratic existence, engagement, and desire; and they must be interrogated for instituting and affirming a sensorium which, in desperate encounters with suffering, actually silences and dishonours it. I suggest a turn toward a materialist understanding of the political that holds suffering as subject of its method: constituted by, and not speaking for or about, those ordinary and ubiquitous experiences of suffering-even the experiences of subjection to an economy of representation and inclusion en route to liberal justice-that risk obliteration even by many well-meaning victim-centered politics.
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