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Indian Philosophy, Indian Revolution: On Caste and Politics is forthcoming from Hurst Publishers
Change the Words, Change the Worlds
This is an excerpt from a book of our published and unpublished essays, prepared over a long summer by Maël Montévil. For a book of this kind, uncertainties of the ”if and when” and of its edited form are the only certainty. For the duration of development of these certain uncertainties, the most significant question for writers, political agonists, and philosophers is raised when we insist on its appearance, as scheduled, before the elections in India—“books don’t change anything, do they?” Then, why do we publish what we write? What is the meaning of publishing, from the perspective of both authors and publishers?
Many of us write, often in our head as we walk, cook, pick up groceries, lie awake in restless nights. Some of us commit these words, which are strung in the tension of our own individual pressure of time, to the page. That is, everyone experiences time according to differing histories of experiences and wholly individual drawing power of exigency; in its extremes, as in the experiences of the likes of Simone Weil, Ghassan Kanafani, Mahesh Raut (still in prison), and Aaron Bushnell, the written and spoken words bear the responsibility to set alight the heaps of words of oppression.
Words are spoken, written, and then published. To publish is to make something written a matter for the people and of the people; it is more than printing, as printing words without the act of making them the people’s is an act of banishing.
Much has been lost in history that was swaddled and cradled in thought, on sheafs of paper, and across time and place. Descartes of frail health who travelled knowingly to the cold northern lands fell ill in the castle of Christina, and his manuscripts were lost to the world. However, through the copies made by Leibniz, his influence, perhaps unacknowledged, continued into topology and group theory.
The Jewish philosopher Salomon Maimon carried a manuscript with him, while living on the streets of Europe as a mendicant and alcoholic. Maimon, whom Kant called his greatest critic, whose interpretation of Kant through a monism that he discovered in Spinoza (and also Leibniz) would create—unacknowledged—philosophical explosions through centuries. However, in the 1780s the very existence of this unpublished manuscript resulted in his banishment from Berlin—“The Orthodox Jews look upon as something dangerous to religion and good morals […] The refusal of permission to stay in Berlin came upon me like a thunderclap” [Solomon Maimon: An Autobiography, trans. J. Clark Murray, intr. Michael Shapiro, Urabana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, pp194 – 195, ]. That book is now lost, perhaps forever. The quests continue for the lost, secret, stolen manuscripts of philosophers and writers—Aristotle, Wittgenstein, Weil, Leibniz, Maimon.
What is expected from those lost words of worlds long past by their seekers of today? A world as yet unknown, raised with the words of unhomely meanings; those words cast among the gathering of people who begin to speak in tongues; those people raising from the ruins of this world another world, a bastard world or bastard senses.
Those who write, speak and publish are the seekers of lost senses and unhomely meanings. But they forge and craft words, and worlds, in the fervor of the intuition of two orders of imminence: on the one hand, of the coming of an end appropriate to the injustices of this world; and on the other, the redemption of democracy—a people’s redemption—for what can be salvaged of this world. We write, for writing is already revolution. We must publish, for democracy and revolution only exist in so far as they are shared. That which is written in the grace of revolution belongs to those who need it.
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DEMOCRACY AND REVOLUTION
This text by Shaj Mohan was composed for publication in an Indian newspaper. However, the conditions imposed by media, in turn, due to the conditions imposed on them by the government and the mafia organisations, required that democracy itself was not a preferred subject anymore. As is often the case, the article was put in circulation among friends and colleagues.This article is a philosophical discussion of democracy and its relation to revolution with minimal technicalities and references. At the same time it is not an accessible text one finds on a news website. The basic thesis is this: Democracy is legitimate only when it creates conditions for freedoms, creates new forms of freedoms and shares them with everyone. When democracies take a turn for the worse they need corrective measures from the people, which is the responsibility of the people.The corrective measure should not be a mere overthrow of a government but a creation of a better democracy which is generous and compassionate to everyone. Previously, Mohan had called it ‘the redemption of democracy’. — Maël Montévil
Democracy, Revolution, these are imperatives which imply each other. These are imperatives without imperators, without empires.
Ideally we should follow these declarations through a critique of the concept of democracy beginning from the Greek model of democracy. This model was founded on the principle of free deliberations which occasionally drew the questions of transcendence (Plato) into the existence of the many in the polis. We should also critically approach the threats to democracy in the very name of democracy in the capitalistic model. In this model, the freedom of the market now stands in surrender before the growing absolute monopolistic exploitation which is in the process of discarding democracy, like the pulled skin of an animal, for a new form of totalitarian system adequate to absolute monopolies and monopsonies. The urgency of this situation, of the deliberate destruction of the institutions of democracy and the constitution in India, and the need to not let this imperative (which is also a wail for freedom) be kept in the vaults of books that not many read anymore, demands of us that we draw out the principles of both democracy and revolution with minimal references and allusions.
This means, we should think of the meaning of democracy and the constituting components of it urgently. In India, democracy is founded on the constitutional promise to deliver an egalitarian and just society where all are equal participants in the making of decisions; or tautologically speaking, it is founded in the production of the future, and not in the excavation of the artifice of a past, which would be our burial ground—the choice offered by Modi,‘Shamshan ya Kabristan’1—being prepared by the upper caste supremacist organisations.
The telos2 of democracy is not an impossibility nor an unattainable ideality. It is rather simple: the care for the freedom that is realisable through togetherness in this moment. The very conception of an ideal or an Idea of democracy betrays the reality of the world which develops as the unprecedented and unexpected orders of events; in other words, for each and every event reason must be given sufficiently, without lazily borrowing that reason from another order of events which we find in the political games of equivalences. If one posits the Idea of democracy, it will always be the totalitarianism of the containment of the variations that are the worlds.The realisation that there is no Idea of democracy is what prompted Plato to oppose it. In other words, democracies are opposed to Platonisms.
There is the theological conception of freedom, which is related to the absolute tyranny of the One, under which falls the concept of god. That is, a transcendence which imposes and regulates order and disorder according to itself in the world. The rigidity of the One is imitated by the totalitarianisms of history. As opposed to the theological conception, democratic freedom is the freedom to mend and to amend. Democratic freedom is kind and generous, and theological freedom is imposing and overbearing. Philosophically, and therefore politically, freedom is given by the arrangement of the components of a particular here and now.
Then, that which is not founded on the principle of transcendence, on the outside of the world or of the super-sensible, is still with a foundation.This foundation is given in the reality of the developments of newer components and relations that the world—the so called inanimate, animate, and technologised worlds—unfolds as freedoms, that there are always newer orders of freedoms created within the world. Democracy is founded on the commitment to realise the freedom which is this: the power of each moment for the sake of the demos, that is people without exception.
There is a reason in democracy and it demands that its processes are not deployed in order to destroy the possibility of democracy, or to betray the freedoms of a given arrangement of the components of the world. If critique is the science which determines the reasons, according to which conditions are obtained and sustained for the existence of something, democracy is more than critique. That is, democracy gives reasons for its conditions and, according to reasons produces and sustains the conditions for its existence with the responsibility that without democracy there is no room for critique. Critique presupposes democracy, and this is the Kantian thesis; in his political writings Kant expressed the angst of the philosopher who realised that for the praxis of critique a politics which is analogous to democracy was necessary.
The phrase ‘imperfect democracy’ to describe India in this context is wrong. Democracy is the actual practice guided by and leading towards the telos of democracy. For this, reason each moment of the democratic process has the responsibility to ensure that these very processes are not subverted to destroy a democracy and to lead it away from the democratic principle, as happened with Weimar Germany. In India, what is taking place is the betrayal of freedom for the majority lower caste people, for the retention of the ‘height’ of the minority upper castes over the whole of society. In this betrayal, the upper caste minority themselves are experiencing the depletion of freedom and peace.
We often assume that history creates freedoms, as in the theologised notion that history has been reducing the hypophysical quantity of violence.3 History does not increase freedom, although history makes us experience an increase or decrease of a quantity because it is still a theologised form of thought grounded in the One—the world as the egg which will never hatch for it is contained under the orders of the One. In reality, freedoms are to be measured only here and now for two reasons. The freedoms of those who were dead and gone cannot be lived by those who are here now.The arrangements of events and objects which make up this world have the potential for a different order of freedom compared to those of ages gone by. It is for the same reason that it is immoral to tell someone suffering from poverty in a ‘first world’ country to look at the lives of those who live in the squalid conditions of a poor country, such as most of India. Poverty is a function of the lack of power given in a particular arrangement of the world.
In the common-place thought, revolutions are opposed to democracy. Philosophers, from Kant to SimoneWeil, have cautioned us about revolutions, often correctly. However, revolutions have also founded democracies. There is a tradition that raised revolutions to the redemptive power of existence in philosophy. On the other hand, there is a peculiar poverty in the history of philosophy to conceive democracy democratically, that is, to conceive it anew, to give kinesis to it again and again, for each here and now. This poverty of philosophy is understandable since philosophy itself was concerned most of the time with transcendence. For this reason it took the last century for democracy to find its great philosopher, Jean-Luc Nancy, who found the founding principle of democracy in the ‘being-with’ of all things. That is, nothing is ever by itself, we are always with someone, with something. The ‘with’ is that which guides and is guarded by democracy from the tyranny of forms, such as the ‘Hindu’ form, or the ‘French’ form, or the Stalinist form. For Nancy, there is a ‘truth of democracy’ which is that democracy ‘is not a political form at all, or else, at the very least, it is not first of all a political form’.4
Revolution is correctly opposed to democracy when it is either an instrument to overthrow a government for some particular interest, or is guided by the thought of the One to found an order which is not grounded in the here and now.The latter was the case with the communist revolutions and we know of their effects as their rulers came to think of themselves as transcending the people, into the position of the One—the One who makes everyone one people.
Then, should we retain the word revolution? We should, since it is as polyvalent a word as any other word, and it signifies the defiance of authority, so long as those who defy it are the people who seek freedom. Further, revolution should be qualified and distinguished through the guidance of another concept, anastasis.
Democracy demands revolution from out of its very principles. When democracies are seized by those who create order in the image of either god, gods, caste, race, force, avarice, or the One, then the democratic principle calls for revolutions to restore democracy.To sit and wait for something miraculous to appear to set things aright is moral turpitude in a democratic people. The only revolutionary principle is democratic, to restore democracy, to create the conditions for the exploration of and the sharing of freedoms given by a here and now. This latter principle is properly clled anastasis,5 that is to come over stasis.
There are democracies in stasis across the world and they demand anastasis such that hierarchies are discarded; such that the ruins made by the seizure of the One are gathered in a generous embrace of revolution and are raised again as something else, something other than the past; the anastases of democracies are therefore the only redemption for our kind.
In India, such a revolution will be the annihilation of caste and the raising of the lower caste people across religions up to the stages, podiums, theatres, courts, and libraries to which they were forced to bow down to. In India, anastasis will be the creation of a democratic reality of the sharing of freedom by people without exception.The imminence of the revolution of democracy in India can now be felt like bass notes ringing in the distance, no matter where you are.♦
Maël Montévil works at Institut de Recherche et d’Innovation and in Institut de Philosophie des Sciences et des Techniques, Université Paris 1, Panthéon-Sorbonne, with a grant of the Cogito Foundation. He is a theoretical biologist working at the crossroad of experimental biology, mathematics, and philosophy He developed the framework of constraints closure and theorized biological historicity and its implications for theory and modelization with which to study current issues such as endocrine disruptors and, more generally, anthropocene’s disruptions and our response to them. Montévil is the author of more than twenty-five peer-reviewed articles and a monograph with Giuseppe Longo Perspectives on organisms.
All endnotes from this excerpt are available here in .pdf format.
