People Without Exception: An Interview With Divya Dwivedi

This backdrop is essential for comprehending the following discussion. For Dwivedi, the threats of assassination and rape, the vulgarities, and the defamatory caricatures constitute not only a personal trial but also a calculated method of suppression. This insight underscores the intricate nature of the attack: its principal objective is not to contest her ideas but to guarantee that they are never really explored. The threats serve as a crude instrument whilst the media portrayals, depicting her as a “glamorous” cinema-style celebrity as well as a perilous “Jihadi professor,” function as crude mechanisms of dicreditation. Indian liberal-left media and academia, which are usually quick to defend their own—those who accept upper caste supremacy through the Hindu category—against even minor offenses, have thus far maintained a strict silence when it comes to the threats and slander against Dwivedi.

In our interview, Dwivedi’s offers a diagnostic framework for comprehending the opposing influences she faces. She distinguishes between “bourgeois Brahminism,” which operates covertly through the media and academia, and “lumpen Brahminism,” which is typified by the street-level paramilitary organization, The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS). Despite their facial dissimilarity, she argues that they “form a unified system” working together to maintain upper-caste dominance. The American and British system, where both major electoral parties agree on wars and finances, is in fact a one-party reality, and the Indian scenario is rather similar. This united front against Dwivedi, demonstrates that her works are  not aimed at a particular political party, but rather the entrenched caste order itself.

At the core of Dwivedi’s revolutionary philosophy (articulated also in joint publications with philosopher Shaj Mohan) is her radical re-conception of the concepts of history which constitute both Europe and “the rest of the world,” which she calls “oriental-occidental difference” and which, according to her, precedes the “ontico-ontological difference” of Heidegger, determining it. She outlines the “Aryan” doctrine through a critical philology of European philosophical works, arguing that it is the core of white supremacist ideology, from its origins in Brahminism to its modern expressions in European colonialism and white nationalism. This powerful analysis exposes the shared conceptual underpinnings of seemingly disparate forms of racial oppression—caste oppression, apartheid and what is euphemistically referred to as the “west,” which is, in reality, just another name for white nationalism. Furthermore, Dwivedi deconstructs the foundational tools of the historiography which created ‘European’ racism and its canon. Her interrogation into the canon is both philological and philosophical, and shows that the “canon” concept as we know it today came about through a certain perversion of the Asian (Arabic, Persian, Indian, Turkic) uses of the canon or “quanūn”. This thorough theoretical framework is not merely an intellectual exercise; rather, it is a tool for understanding contemporary political events, including her interventions on the genocide in Palestine.

The following interview was conducted via email with Divya Dwivedi between September 2023 and 2025. The first part of the interview was originally intended to be printed in Protean Magazine in October of 2023, however due to legal concerns the interview was delayed and a report was issued in lieu thereof. The original interview appears in full below followed by a new interview on the current situation.

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Part I

Anthony Ballas and Kamran Baradaran: You and Shaj Mohan have received backlash before for your criticism of the far right in India and the caste system more generally. Has the most recent backlash been any different?

Divya Dwivedi: When one does not accept the rules of the game for participating in the conceptual discourse of a political arrangement, be it any, these kinds of attacks can appear, and can do so in any country. There are two ways in which one can reject the rules of the game, either by rejecting or projecting a component unacceptable for the political arrangement, or by showing the form of a new law which can comprehend these components differently, and thereby beginning the creation of a new system. With Shaj Mohan and other intellectuals, including J. Reghu and Hartosh Singh Bal, I have written about the unjustness of the law of these political games in India.

The caste order, which derives from the “Aryan” doctrine, is the determinant of all political and social relations in India. This fact stands against the norms which were established, through the experiences of the last century, against racism and other forms of oppression as a component which is the telos of democratic orders. For that very reason, the minority upper castes who have been ruling India over the lower caste majority by means of the denigrate-dominate function are uncomfortable or outraged when caste-based oppression is discussed, which is the case across most political parties and academic currents in the social sciences such as post-colonial theory of the Indian kind.

I had been arguing, following the tradition of many stalwarts like Jotirao Phule, Narayana Guru, Iyothee Thassar and Dr. B R Ambedkar—who have been most incisive on this question—that the “Hindu” religion was created in the early 20th century to suppress the voices of the lower caste majority and to facilitate the emergence of the upper caste minority as the representatives of India in the eyes of the world. If we correct Conrad, the world sees India under upper caste eyes, or in the retina of the “Aryan” doctrine. For these philosophical and philosophico-historical works and for the presentation of these works in the public domain as a democratic commitment of a philosopher I have faced threats, exclusions, and abuses in public.

But you are right, this moment is different.

There were two components in this recent interview with France 24 which determine this current malicious and threatening situation—even today I received a threatening email. Firstly, I spoke of caste as the “racialised oppression” and spoke of the “Aryan” determination of it in a public medium which is accessible, although I had already published longer academic texts on it. Secondly, I invoked a good way, an imminently practicable way, out of this evil: to provide proportional representation to the lower caste majority people in all spheres of life.

AB & KB: What does this backlash reveal about the state of politics and of education in India?

DD: Most of the people who oppose what I write about and speak about are the victims of the failed education system of India which has catered only to elites and middle class among the upper caste people. The older education system did posit, for the most part,, an exogenous end of rationality, equality and constitutionalism while suppressing the discussion of caste oppression. However, it imparted a picture of politics and the history of India from the perspective of upper caste supremacism, which hides behind the term “Hindu nationalism.” This supremacism then determines the ethos of the classroom. It is a horrific fact.

For this situation of impoverished education, all political parties in India are responsible, especially the Congress party which ruled India for the majority of the time since 1947. However, since the 1980s this very state of affairs was criticized from the point of view of postcolonial theory, and arguments had been made about a return to pre-colonial education, or caste-based occupation training. It is startling if one thinks about this alignment between the barely literate leaders of the upper caste supremacist organizations and hyper-cultivated post- and de-colonial academics.

The present politics has turned these victims of education into a mass which can be directed at will using the instruments of the state and which has been diluting the existing syllabi, introducing superstitions as valid academic disciplines, while also through the deployment of an acquiescing or servile media to project hate speech in order to weaponize the victims of these educational politics.

AB & KB: Are there any other comments or sentiments you’d like to express concerning this current situation?

DD: My remarks were made in my individual capacity as an academic and not on behalf of my institute which is also the case here. I am obviously hurt and disturbed by the deliberate distortions of my statements and I know that they are meant to suppress what I actually say. I also feel a deep sorrow that in my country there should be any objection to speaking of justice, of the suffering of the masses, of poverty, of descent-based oppression, of the collapse of ecosystems, of the crimes endured in enforced silence by the poor across caste and religion. I am also hopeful given that a majority of the young people of our country are able to envision an India without all these sufferings and they are striving towards it. I wander within myself between the sorrows and hopes, I would like to be “Where the mind is without fear, the head is held high, Where knowledge is free, Where the world has not been broken up into fragments, By narrow domestic walls,” to quote Rabindranath Tagore.

If we can open our eyes together and let the pneuma of our conscience see for once, in spite of it being obscured by the mounds of vitriol and cruelty produced by social media and other media, then we will behold the thousands of years of injustice at the hands of the caste system. There is inherited trauma, the stigmata of everyday humiliation, and a deep yearning to be equal among equals in the majority lower caste people of all religions in this country. Any human being with conscience in India should have this concern, that this oppression and suffering which we can bring to the end, should not persist. No human being should suffer for their birth on this earth. Then, as an academic philosopher I experience the weight of infinite responsibility. Can we live with the eyes of conscience turned away from the world?

Part II

AB & KB: We found that the online threats, including death threats, against you have become a constant. Frankly, no philosopher in ‘the west’ has to face something comparable. How does the current wave of online harassment and threats against you illustrate the unique nature of this violence and its modern character?

DD: The threats of assassination and rape, the obscenities and select quotations raise an outrage voided of content. All this is meant to prevent engagement with my work, which is not just mine but of a political gathering as yet without form, and without national boundaries. In the context of India, this work asserts the right and the duty of the oppressed lower caste majority people of all religions—more than 90%—to seize power for real democracy. The outrage is intended to muffle the sound of this coming gathering, and to render historical facts controversial. Its apparent modern character, linked to the phenomena called ‘populism’ and ‘post-truth’ the world over, should not eclipse its socio-political specificity in each context.

The attacks and threats that I face—on social media, through emails, on the street, at work, the ostracization in Indian media and academia—reveal two distinct but related aspects of caste oppression. India has two different componential laws for the public sphere and politics, bourgeois Brahminism and lumpen Brahminism, which agree on the fundamental principle of maintaining upper-caste supremacism. The former includes upper castes from all religions and they continue to control the academia and the media (although, now losing all these terrains fast to the latter), and the so called left political organizations. The latter, primarily represented by the RSS, the paramilitary organization banned many times, controls the government, the streets and politics. The noise in social media is mostly the effect of lumpen Brahminism. Bourgeois Brahminism works more quietly, through ostracism, name calling (extreme left, too woke, communist) and gossips in the same way that the bourgeois form of power—the most insecure form—works everywhere in the world. The point is, the lumpen RSS and BJP affiliates wouldn’t have been able to do all this without the tacit support of the bourgeois upper-caste supremacists. As Rosa Luxembourg showed, the fatal error is in mistaking the bourgeois for ‘resistance’ to the lumpen since they constitute a single system; and, analogically, this applies to America and Europe too.

Revolutionary politics is the only way we can save ourselves from all these fake oppositions in politics everywhere. But it has to begin with the recognition and criticalization of the actual and specific forms of power and their global – comprador – interconnections.

AB & KB: You keep a distance from social and public spaces. Yet we found a lot of false information being spread in online about you. This goes beyond name calling, as someone called you “Jihadi professor,” while there are countless others associating you with the tropes of Islamophobia. It is dangerous for you in India. But there is elaborate fiction, someone wrote on X (formerly Twitter), “I exposed her brutally on Facebook. She threatened me with FIR [“First Information Report”, filed by the police in response to complaints]. Luckily one girl named Shilpa a right winger a facebook friend of mine, reached out to her because she knew her personally and then she cooled down”. Do you know or know about these individuals? It is concerning because the social media AI system of X and other AI often regurgitate unverified false information about you. There is a fictionalized Divya Dwivedi out there. This can be very harmful. How do you interpret these developments in the context of fascism in India?

DD: This fiction is quite amusing because here it is the aggressor who pretends to have been distressed and sought protection from the fictional version of me! Of course, no such thing ever happened, and I don’t know these individuals. But I can see how my life can become fictionalized through these little narratives with their tropes of fortune (i.e., hypophysics), shared friends (i.e., social capital) and mercurial exchanges (i.e., compromise), and the fiction can come back to challenge my existence. Name calling is not without harm either, especially since labels such as “jihadi” and “urban Maoist” have been propagated to denounce people as unworthy of humane consideration in the Indian context. The young scholar-activist Mahesh Raut is still in prison.

Simultaneously, this is a feature of fascism everywhere. Fascism creates not only alternative facts but also alternative worlds for people to inhabit, something quite different from fantasy and fan fiction and role-playing communities. People existing within these alternative worlds find it impossible to accept facts, and reality appears to provoke something like psychosis in them. In America, Trump himself is immersed in such an alternative world, in which he is the incarnation of white supremacists of the past, only meaner; in that world, he is both génocidaire and peacenik; he is simultaneously the protector of femme immigrante (his wife) and the war chief of anti-immigration.

In India, the current government and its parent fascist organization, RSS, are barely literate. Modi himself is the occupant of the alternative world that was invented for him. Some years back Shaj Mohan and I wrote, “He invented a new post-graduate degree called ‘Entire Political Science’ of which he remains the sole awardee.” All of this doesn’t mean that fascism is the cyanide-ether of our times; it just means that the fascists are better organized, and that we are not.

AB & KB: On the subject of your combined critique of upper caste and White supremacism, we must proceed chronologically, dates are important. On September 8th 2023, exactly a month before the Genocide in Palestine, when India, Israel and the ‘west’ were on friendly terms and dreaming about a geopolitical corridor through Asia at the G20 summit held in Delhi, you spoke to France 24 against capitalistic greed and false concepts of development, and caste oppression. As a result, the discussions on social media turned away from the so called ‘Middle East Corridor’ to your statements. The official newspaper of the RSS published on September 13th: “Prof. Divya Dwivedi who deliberately denigrated Sanatana Darma (Hinduism), hold sway over huge, unsuspecting masses in society”. One of us, Tony, wrote an article reporting the most severe threats and harassment that you had to face following the interview with France 24 for Protean magazine. You have written many texts on the genocide in Palestine. On November 1st 2023 you called it a genocide under the Military Alliance for Rich White Nations and anticipated “the fascistic control of the discussion of the mass murder underway in Gaza in the parliaments of the ‘most advanced’ democratic countries”. Under your editorship, the journal Philosophy World Democracy—that you co-founded with Jean-Luc Nancy, Mireille Delmas-Marty and Shaj Mohan—published several important texts on the ongoing genocide, particularly those by Étienne Balibar and Shaj Mohan. In that context, in the course of our research we found something very curious and alarming. Achin Vanaik’s lecture at IIT Bombay on Palestine was cancelled in November 2023. On November 8th,  2023, an open and anonymous letter, purportedly signed by the students, was reported and published in several media outlets. This letter, which is mostly lined with trite Islamophobia about Palestine, ends with a statement about you, “… the insinuations on Hinduism by Professor Divya Dwivedi of IIT Delhi at the sidelines of the G20 Summit.” But what is more concerning is that the following day this letter was addressed to the embassy of Israel in India through social media. Were you aware of this development?

DD: I was made aware of this letter by journalists. Its obsequiousness and its explicit linking of the defense of Zionism to the defense of casteism are pathetic but also malicious in view of the consequences for anyone who demonstrates for Palestine. Philosophy World Democracy had received boycotts, hate mail, and threats from the first few months of the genocide in Palestine. Its social media handles faced the usual troubles. But what took place in India cannot be understood without the relation between Zionism and the lumpen upper-caste supremacism led by the RSS. Upper-caste supremacism, both the lumpen and bourgeois kind, were closer to the Nazis in early 20th century, bound by the “Aryan” doctrine. The defeat of the Nazis in the war at the hands of the USSR and the dominance of Zionism over Europe mediated by America and the need for upper-caste supremacism to distract Indian people from caste oppression led to this new alliance between Hindu Nazis and Zionists.

That is, the fact that more than 90% of Indian people, across religions, are the lower-caste people can have revolutionary effects, which it will have, because class is subordinate to the caste order. To prevent this caste-consciousness from becoming a gathering of the revolutionary majority, the upper-castes (the so-called left, liberals, Hindu fascists) created the hoax of Hindu religion in the early 20th century, and most indigenous tribes and lower-caste peoples were forced into this religion without their knowledge, through bureaucratic maneuvers, to give it a statistical majority. Hindu is a religion without objective reality; for example, Dalits are killed even now for entering the upper-caste temples. Islamophobia and hatred of other religious minorities has been generated to provide scapegoats against whom this false Hindu majority can vituperate in order to derive a modicum of self-consciousness. As B. R. Ambedkar had explained, the feeling of being “Hindu” comes only during riots and pogroms.

AB & KB: Did this episode of 2023 affect the way you conduct your research and publications, for instance, your most recent article “Remnants of Durban: Towards a Critical Philosophy of Caste and Race” which focuses on UN anti-racism efforts in the 2001 World Conference Against Racism in Durban?

DD: No, my research is not affected by such puerile intimidations, but rather, allows me to put them in perspective through a kind of anticipatory system that philosophy should provide. I mean that investigating the role of race and racism in philosophy’s own history leads to the homologies of current racisms in past ones, which attunes us to impending mutations of future racism. It also attunes us to the analogies between variant racisms not least because racists themselves often gain their nefarious afflatus analogically as the Europeans did from their Brahmin muses when they adopted the “Aryans” as their ancestors and caste as the paradigm for cultural racism, and as did the RSS chaddiwalas (people of the knickers) when they adopted the Nazi fashion. It is tragicomic that White supremacists to this day have no other way than the borrowed “Aryan” doctrine to cogitate their own superiority. The same doctrine oppressed the lower caste peoples in the Indian subcontinent, the Jewish people in the European subcontinent, the peoples of South Africa, and the Palestine peoples who are victims of the white nationalist hunger for oil and for “lands without people” as Shaj Mohan put it. Variants of Apartheid belong to each of these scenes of racism and are interrelated, which is why in the article you mention I aimed to show that Derrida was wrong in isolating South African Apartheid as “racism’s last word.”

AB & KB: Your work criticizes the ‘West’ and traces it, too, to the “Aryan” doctrine. What are the theoretical steps needed to combat the “Aryan” doctrine, western racist politics—which Mohan called “white nationalism”—and caste oppression?

DD: The racialization of the world today is at least contiguous with the development of colonialism and capitalism in the white imperialist form. I would argue that without racialization through the “Aryan” doctrine, the latter two events would not have unfolded the way they continue to do. This doctrine denigrates a people as born-inferior to dominate them and holds its denigrate-dominate function to be the very mark of “Aryan” supremacy. The denigrate-dominate function through the “Aryan” doctrine was the invention of the Brahmins more than three millennia ago. It was borrowed by Europeans during colonial expansions to invent an antiquity for themselves and find a place in history. So, when I oppose the “Aryan” doctrine, I oppose the very foundation of white supremacism, which is criminally mis-termed ‘eurocentrism’ and ‘the west’. Until we understand the workings of the “Aryan” doctrine, the fables that make up what is called Europe, and the repressions it imposed on the so-called European people as well as the people they colonized, we will not have begun our liberations. Would you not like to see the ‘Europeans’ themselves liberated from the hoax of Europe and the “Aryan” doctrine?

AB & KB: Your book Indian Philosophy, Indian Revolution (Hurst, 2024) implicates what you and Mohan call “the de-post-colonial” in the Indian fascists’ alternative reality of “the exorbitant idyllic a priori which they project in the hoary, even immemorable past: fantasies of being at the origin of atomic physics, relativity theory, plastic surgery, and aeronautics 3000 years or so ago.” Superficially, Trump’s America and Modi’s India appear to be persecuting the “woke” discourse which includes postcolonialism, but you have long asserted in your publications including Gandhi and Philosophy (2019) that postcolonialism enabled Hindu Nationalism, or rather upper caste supremacism. According to the psychoanalytical theorist Livio Boni, you and Mohan provide “a philosophy of resurrection as the interruption and (re)beginning of History, consistent with their radical rejection of the post-colonial paradigm, which they suspect of metaphysical continuism.”

DD: This alternative world of upper caste supremacists was fantasized in response to their progressive loss of hegemony to Mughal and various European colonial rulers. Leading up to the transfer of power in 1947, these fantasies became frenetic when their caste-based self-legitimation as the rulers of modern India was challenged by the anti-caste mobilizations of Phule, Ambedkar, Periyar and many others. They would have remained the stuff of pulp fiction, comic books and graphic novels (where the regressive genre of retelling myths is flourishing, by the way) but for the academic dignity and institutional gravity bestowed on it by the de-post-colonial paradigm. In a two-stroke action, Indian postcolonialism appropriated Derridean deconstruction to argue that the pre-colonial past was irretrievably erased by colonial epistemology, and then decoloniality came along to argue for the destruction of the colonial edifices which are all that remained after the loss of native past. Thus, a new kind of terra nullius has been obtained on which the upper caste supremacists can realize all the fantasies and alternative realities. So far, they have succeeded in renaming a few cities (including my beloved place of birth, Allahabad), streets and railway stations, rewriting school textbooks, and bulldozing or demolishing Mughal monuments and Sufi shrines. The most monstrous is their drive to erase the religions and deities, and the very habitat, of the lower caste and indigenous peoples of the subcontinent whose antiquity and perdurance contradicts the fictive archaism of the “Aryan” ancestry and its “Sanatana dharma.” I would also recommend Meera Nanda’s new book Postcolonial Theory and the Making of Hindu Nationalism which explores their connection with reference to the recently implemented educational policy of promoting “Indian Knowledge Systems” with mainly Brahmanical content.

AB & KB: America-India relations are now turning hostile. Modi, like most far right elected leaders had been very close to Trump. But now there are several signs of danger for India? How are we to understand what is unfolding as secondary sanctions on India?

DD: Let me define the principle of the fascist international. The so-called far right or the racist organizations coming to dominate the world appear to be simple contradictions of one another. But instead, they enable one another to keep the populations under their domination in total fear and dependence. The Germans fear the Russians, the Indians fear the Pakistanis, Hungarians fear Ukrainians, and so on. The reciprocal opposition implied by ethno-nationalism is the very force that reciprocally immures the people with the feeling of imminent threat. It is the simplest system for total control of the world, for the benefit of the dominant corporations.

Yes, the barely literate RSS and its most recent political arm the BJP had been subservient to the USA for decades. Let’s not forget that Modi even campaigned for Trump! Instead of opposing America and white nationalisms, starting with opposing the genocide of the Palestinians, the upper-caste supremacists have been supporting and arming Israel. It is the protectionism of a few capitalists who own the media, the ports, oil trade, mining rights, and nearly everything that this government is protecting. American government probably knows this too as they are pursuing a securities law violation investigation against the Adani corporation. And, let us not forget that the RSS served the British Raj. Do you think that the government which criminalises anti-genocide protesters in India can do well for India and the world suddenly by hugging and kissing China?

But I worry especially for the people of India. The government does not have a principled position in the world. This is not the Indian government that took the anti-colonial stand with Tito, Sukarno, and Nkruma, which supported the Palestinian struggle for liberation. If you look at India now from the outside, it appears as though it is a country of a people who are mere marionettes hanging under the fingers of the RSS and BJP, dancing with no education about politics and the world.

This is far from reality, of course, as the people of India are anxiously following the death dance emerging from both white nationalisms led by America and Europe on one side, and the yet to be defined possibilities of new imperialisms under Russia and China on the other, where the risk is increasing of India being reduced to a mere geopolitical tool.

AB & KB: You and Mohan had often written this warning “after Iran, India”. How concerned are you?

DD: We had expelled white nationalisms from here in 1947. They may be returning here again in the unfolding extermination wars—Palestine, Lebanon, Syria, Sudan, Somalia, Venezuela, Iran and so on. When the white nationalists come, I will be right here, waiting, with all the arms that I can gather to give their final farewell. Know this, the white nationalist moth is now whirling faster as it is approaching the flame.

AB & KB: In Gandhi and Philosophy: On Theological Anti-Politics (Bloomsbury, 2019), you and Shaj Mohan introduced the concept of “anastasis,” or the idea of philosophical and political resurrection. In a very powerful interpretation of your works, the French Philosopher Jérôme Lèbre wrote, “The revolution then takes the form of an anastasis, in other words a popular movement that puts an end to the “stasis” by changing the comprehending law, and more precisely by moving towards a comprehending democratic law.” One of us (Baradaran) has explored how the real name of revolution is anastasis—“anastasis is the true name by which alone revolution will heed our call”. In relation to the situation of the attacks against you as well as the crises that we are witnessing around the world today (the genocide in Gaza, the resurgence of the far-right virus, etc.), how can this anastasis be defined?

DD: This is a philosophical question, and an answer made simpler for the occasion can be very misleading. I will try to answer through thematics rather than concepts and a peculiar transcendental involved in it. All systems are composed, in the manner of music, by componential laws which define distinct regularities, which are then comprehended by something that is not one of the components or stoikhon in the Platonic sense. All regularities draw their materiality and force from other regularities, while the principle of these regularities acts as the comprehending law by providing a certain horizon. For example, both the system of slavery and caste oppression require the comprehending of the oppressed as the denigrated who must be dominated, so that their bodies can be functionally isolated, like that of a machine. Therefore, exterminating all the denigrated is not allowed by the comprehending law. Whereas, in the cases of both Nazi Germany and Israel-America, the comprehending law draws out the component laws—the bombs, the drones, the AI systems, media, bureaucracy—towards the total annihilation of a people. For Nazis and most of the Europeans the Romani and Jewish people. Look at the guilt free acceptance of the Shoah of the Romani people even today!

For Israel-America and also Britain and most European countries, it is the Palestinian people today, and tomorrow it will be the Iranians, and then Indians and so on. This understanding at the level of comprehending law is the reason Mohan has been calling our attention towards these American led wars as extermination campaigns. In this example, one can see the change in comprehending law from slavery and colonialism to Nazism, and now to Israel-America. But this change is not anastasis. Anastasis is the philosophical and political creation of a comprehending law that is liberating to all the components, giving each component, the people, their freedoms. One can call it the real democracy of the world, and it cannot come without revolutions. A mere overthrow of a government is not worthy of the name revolution; a revolution worthy of its name will be anastasis which will create a people without exception.

AB & KB: Is this the task of philosophy? How can it be undertaken?

DD: It really is. But in all this, philosophy should not be thought apart from politics, as if it were a theological system with the liturgy of concepts, hoping that the eucharist performed with clever formulae will create new substances in politics. Philosophy instead must have the humility to work with other disciplines and the people. Since we discussed Marxism, for me one of the most exciting works on what is no longer the capital of Marx is that of Laleh Khalili. She is an adventurer who sailed into many disciplines—chemistry, management, ethnology, economics, politics—and has created the archive of the darkest possibilities of our future, especially in Extractive Capitalism: How Commodities and Cronyism Drive the Global Economy. If she were a white male the world would have called her the successor to Byron and Alexander von Humboldt.

Simultaneously, we have to do the history of philosophy on an entirely new basis, by disassembling the concept of the ‘western’ canon, including the Heideggerian canon and problem of “End of philosophy,” and even decanonising philosophy so that it can become a place for the discovery of other problems and indeed, other canons. For this we also have to trace the effaced and suppressed histories and canons of philosophy so that the very concept of canon – and qanūn as the Ottomans and we in the subcontinent practiced it – can be given a certain lust or junūn. It is the task of philosophy to discover the archives of the future, but also to invent the distinctions and the maps of ends or teleographs, as Mohan calls them, to accompany revolutions.♦