The quest for a common community endures. Yet, in the contemporary social, collective identity in... more The quest for a common community endures. Yet, in the contemporary social, collective identity in politics has taken a turn. Embedded in Ressentiment, following Wendy Brown's intonation of Nietzsche's notion as 'wounded attachments', the political now is instituted in identity. From global trends in decolonisation to local justice movements, the wounded collectives that are now forming and multiplying understand material history as the foundation for their claims to power in recognition, redistribution, and justice (following Nancy Fraser). Often, these identity collectives inhabit democracies as inviolable communities allied to political organisationsupstaging the singular citizen and instituting a democracy of communities instead. In nation-states around the world, the power of authoritarian party politics creates an imaginary society of originary communities. My question here is not aimed at any one exemplar, but rather at the strength of the symbolic that similar identity collectives summon on a planetary scale. In my arguments, this symbolic identity summons sacralised purity, authenticity, and separation. Roberto Esposito's work on immunitas bears these bio-philosophical contours of the political, where collectives arm themselves with immunising power against the threatening other-'the threat' and 'the other', of course, are defined by contingent and expedient politics. Esposito and others have shown that those immunisation effects serve more to harm the body-politic than to support onward affirmation of a common community. In augmenting immunising, my line of argument acknowledges the biological, but signals towards the power of the social which sustains that bio-political response. Following paths in sociology and social anthropology, my home orientations, and walking with some social philosophy that does not adhere to any pregiven lineages of world/continental philosophy, the following is a proposition about the contemporary political. This proposition institutes the sacred collective as emergent, a collective that claims sacralised power
Can we put a name to the world we are living in now? A few opaque terms have been set in motion –... more Can we put a name to the world we are living in now? A few opaque terms have been set in motion – ‘Corona Pandemic’ or ‘COVID-19’, as if in a race against time to name a fact in a horizon of ambiguities. This short, time-bound reflection undertakes a minor semantic exercise about naming in governmentality. I sketch how an excavation of names could lead us to uncovering what responses and responsibilities are actualised in governmentalities by a process of naming, and what remains unnamed and subdued in that process. The naming concern has nurtured many debates among semanticists, philosophers of language and, certainly, among those who study the social.1 Drawing from them, the question of what names can do in describing, asserting knowledge and limiting the course of governmental action is an intriguing one. The pandemic and its related ‘naming’ is in a domain that ranges from concrete nouns to common nouns, and this is where, by taking some liberties, I use metaphor and metonym,2 as devices with which to articulate a relation between naming and governmentality. The encounter between name, governmentality and the social in South Asia is not unknown. As Das and Copeman (2015: 5) describe
Life, Emergent advocates for an affirmative life-politic that places the social squarely in the ‘... more Life, Emergent advocates for an affirmative life-politic that places the social squarely in the ‘meaning of life’, animating contemporary theory and practice on life in unexplored terrains. It privileges the social by exploring life-worlds of mass violence and questions the ability of the bio-political paradigm to contain a politics of life in the biological. What does an inquiry into life from the ‘social’ look like? Life, as it lives or dies in conditions of violence, in its momentum after damage, inscribes an emerging, dynamic, fluid, ever-changing explosion of relationalities in the cognizable realm called society. While the making and unmaking of life unfolds through these relationalities, so does the making and unmaking of the social. In privileging the social, this book intervenes in the bio-political paradigm and questions its ability to exhaust the ‘meaning of life’.
On 29 November 2021, the Indian government repealed three 'Farm Bills' that were ... more On 29 November 2021, the Indian government repealed three 'Farm Bills' that were passed in Parliament earlier in September 2020. These bills were to have a profound liberalizing impact on Indian farming, ushering in big agrobusiness into an unregulated market. Starting from around November 2020, a protest movement grew from the agriculture-intensive states of Punjab and Haryana in Northern India and rapidly escalated into a nationwide movement, calling in worldwide support. A very striking global optic of the protest was the tens of thousands of protestors gathered at the borders of India's capital city Delhi over the many months of the movement, even when the COVID pandemic raged on. This essay reads this event against Agamben's popular opinion about social distancing as a biopolitical technique that signals the death of the political because it disables the possibility of crowds. Proposing the ascendance of the social in a biopolitical environment, the query that guides this essay is about how social collectivities surpasses the power of physical contagion, leading to another understanding of crowds, politics and governmental technique.
University of Minnesota Press eBooks, Nov 15, 2016
The second chapter explores the making of a ‘justice movement’ called Nyayagrah in the context of... more The second chapter explores the making of a ‘justice movement’ called Nyayagrah in the context of an episode of Hindu--Muslim violence in Gujarat, India. The unleashing of unprecedented violence across the state against Muslims is a well- documented occasion of “communal” violence in recent times in India. However, the afterlife that the authors visits here is the making of a justice movement that is currently gaining subterranean ground in the state but has not seen any academic reflection. Following Gandhian principles drawn from the anti-colonial movement, Satyagraha, but reincarnated in current India, Nyayagrah insists on claiming democratic citizenship through the process of legal redress.
University of Minnesota Press eBooks, Nov 15, 2016
The fifth and final chapter of Life, Emergent brings together the various strands of life and the... more The fifth and final chapter of Life, Emergent brings together the various strands of life and the social that have woven a swath of arguments that directs an excavation of life within an emphatic imagination of the social. This essay also approaches a reflection on the possible nature of a politics of and in life that the discussions so far lead to.
University of Minnesota Press eBooks, Nov 15, 2016
The introduction of Life, Emergent lays down the main theoretical anchors of how the privileging ... more The introduction of Life, Emergent lays down the main theoretical anchors of how the privileging of the social over the biological in contemporary bio--political theory is apprehended in this book. Two philosophical tropes, bios and pathos, are anchored and the query of life positioned for exploration in ethnographic and empirical contexts.
On 29 November 2021, the Indian government repealed three 'Farm Bills' that were ... more On 29 November 2021, the Indian government repealed three 'Farm Bills' that were passed in Parliament earlier in September 2020. These bills were to have a profound liberalizing impact on Indian farming, ushering in big agrobusiness into an unregulated market. Starting from around November 2020, a protest movement grew from the agriculture-intensive states of Punjab and Haryana in Northern India and rapidly escalated into a nationwide movement, calling in worldwide support. A very striking global optic of the protest was the tens of thousands of protestors gathered at the borders of India's capital city Delhi over the many months of the movement, even when the COVID pandemic raged on. This essay reads this event against Agamben's popular opinion about social distancing as a biopolitical technique that signals the death of the political because it disables the possibility of crowds. Proposing the ascendance of the social in a biopolitical environment, the query that guides this essay is about how social collectivities surpasses the power of physical contagion, leading to another understanding of crowds, politics and governmental technique.
Can we put a name to the world we are living in now? A few opaque terms have been set in motion –... more Can we put a name to the world we are living in now? A few opaque terms have been set in motion – ‘Corona Pandemic’ or ‘COVID-19’, as if in a race against time to name a fact in a horizon of ambiguities. This short, time-bound reflection undertakes a minor semantic exercise about naming in governmentality. I sketch how an excavation of names could lead us to uncovering what responses and responsibilities are actualised in governmentalities by a process of naming, and what remains unnamed and subdued in that process. The naming concern has nurtured many debates among semanticists, philosophers of language and, certainly, among those who study the social.1 Drawing from them, the question of what names can do in describing, asserting knowledge and limiting the course of governmental action is an intriguing one. The pandemic and its related ‘naming’ is in a domain that ranges from concrete nouns to common nouns, and this is where, by taking some liberties, I use metaphor and metonym,2 a...
The quest for a common community endures. Yet, in the contemporary social, collective identity in... more The quest for a common community endures. Yet, in the contemporary social, collective identity in politics has taken a turn. Embedded in Ressentiment, following Wendy Brown's intonation of Nietzsche's notion as 'wounded attachments', the political now is instituted in identity. From global trends in decolonisation to local justice movements, the wounded collectives that are now forming and multiplying understand material history as the foundation for their claims to power in recognition, redistribution, and justice (following Nancy Fraser). Often, these identity collectives inhabit democracies as inviolable communities allied to political organisationsupstaging the singular citizen and instituting a democracy of communities instead. In nation-states around the world, the power of authoritarian party politics creates an imaginary society of originary communities. My question here is not aimed at any one exemplar, but rather at the strength of the symbolic that similar identity collectives summon on a planetary scale. In my arguments, this symbolic identity summons sacralised purity, authenticity, and separation. Roberto Esposito's work on immunitas bears these bio-philosophical contours of the political, where collectives arm themselves with immunising power against the threatening other-'the threat' and 'the other', of course, are defined by contingent and expedient politics. Esposito and others have shown that those immunisation effects serve more to harm the body-politic than to support onward affirmation of a common community. In augmenting immunising, my line of argument acknowledges the biological, but signals towards the power of the social which sustains that bio-political response. Following paths in sociology and social anthropology, my home orientations, and walking with some social philosophy that does not adhere to any pregiven lineages of world/continental philosophy, the following is a proposition about the contemporary political. This proposition institutes the sacred collective as emergent, a collective that claims sacralised power
Can we put a name to the world we are living in now? A few opaque terms have been set in motion –... more Can we put a name to the world we are living in now? A few opaque terms have been set in motion – ‘Corona Pandemic’ or ‘COVID-19’, as if in a race against time to name a fact in a horizon of ambiguities. This short, time-bound reflection undertakes a minor semantic exercise about naming in governmentality. I sketch how an excavation of names could lead us to uncovering what responses and responsibilities are actualised in governmentalities by a process of naming, and what remains unnamed and subdued in that process. The naming concern has nurtured many debates among semanticists, philosophers of language and, certainly, among those who study the social.1 Drawing from them, the question of what names can do in describing, asserting knowledge and limiting the course of governmental action is an intriguing one. The pandemic and its related ‘naming’ is in a domain that ranges from concrete nouns to common nouns, and this is where, by taking some liberties, I use metaphor and metonym,2 as devices with which to articulate a relation between naming and governmentality. The encounter between name, governmentality and the social in South Asia is not unknown. As Das and Copeman (2015: 5) describe
Life, Emergent advocates for an affirmative life-politic that places the social squarely in the ‘... more Life, Emergent advocates for an affirmative life-politic that places the social squarely in the ‘meaning of life’, animating contemporary theory and practice on life in unexplored terrains. It privileges the social by exploring life-worlds of mass violence and questions the ability of the bio-political paradigm to contain a politics of life in the biological. What does an inquiry into life from the ‘social’ look like? Life, as it lives or dies in conditions of violence, in its momentum after damage, inscribes an emerging, dynamic, fluid, ever-changing explosion of relationalities in the cognizable realm called society. While the making and unmaking of life unfolds through these relationalities, so does the making and unmaking of the social. In privileging the social, this book intervenes in the bio-political paradigm and questions its ability to exhaust the ‘meaning of life’.
On 29 November 2021, the Indian government repealed three 'Farm Bills' that were ... more On 29 November 2021, the Indian government repealed three 'Farm Bills' that were passed in Parliament earlier in September 2020. These bills were to have a profound liberalizing impact on Indian farming, ushering in big agrobusiness into an unregulated market. Starting from around November 2020, a protest movement grew from the agriculture-intensive states of Punjab and Haryana in Northern India and rapidly escalated into a nationwide movement, calling in worldwide support. A very striking global optic of the protest was the tens of thousands of protestors gathered at the borders of India's capital city Delhi over the many months of the movement, even when the COVID pandemic raged on. This essay reads this event against Agamben's popular opinion about social distancing as a biopolitical technique that signals the death of the political because it disables the possibility of crowds. Proposing the ascendance of the social in a biopolitical environment, the query that guides this essay is about how social collectivities surpasses the power of physical contagion, leading to another understanding of crowds, politics and governmental technique.
University of Minnesota Press eBooks, Nov 15, 2016
The second chapter explores the making of a ‘justice movement’ called Nyayagrah in the context of... more The second chapter explores the making of a ‘justice movement’ called Nyayagrah in the context of an episode of Hindu--Muslim violence in Gujarat, India. The unleashing of unprecedented violence across the state against Muslims is a well- documented occasion of “communal” violence in recent times in India. However, the afterlife that the authors visits here is the making of a justice movement that is currently gaining subterranean ground in the state but has not seen any academic reflection. Following Gandhian principles drawn from the anti-colonial movement, Satyagraha, but reincarnated in current India, Nyayagrah insists on claiming democratic citizenship through the process of legal redress.
University of Minnesota Press eBooks, Nov 15, 2016
The fifth and final chapter of Life, Emergent brings together the various strands of life and the... more The fifth and final chapter of Life, Emergent brings together the various strands of life and the social that have woven a swath of arguments that directs an excavation of life within an emphatic imagination of the social. This essay also approaches a reflection on the possible nature of a politics of and in life that the discussions so far lead to.
University of Minnesota Press eBooks, Nov 15, 2016
The introduction of Life, Emergent lays down the main theoretical anchors of how the privileging ... more The introduction of Life, Emergent lays down the main theoretical anchors of how the privileging of the social over the biological in contemporary bio--political theory is apprehended in this book. Two philosophical tropes, bios and pathos, are anchored and the query of life positioned for exploration in ethnographic and empirical contexts.
On 29 November 2021, the Indian government repealed three 'Farm Bills' that were ... more On 29 November 2021, the Indian government repealed three 'Farm Bills' that were passed in Parliament earlier in September 2020. These bills were to have a profound liberalizing impact on Indian farming, ushering in big agrobusiness into an unregulated market. Starting from around November 2020, a protest movement grew from the agriculture-intensive states of Punjab and Haryana in Northern India and rapidly escalated into a nationwide movement, calling in worldwide support. A very striking global optic of the protest was the tens of thousands of protestors gathered at the borders of India's capital city Delhi over the many months of the movement, even when the COVID pandemic raged on. This essay reads this event against Agamben's popular opinion about social distancing as a biopolitical technique that signals the death of the political because it disables the possibility of crowds. Proposing the ascendance of the social in a biopolitical environment, the query that guides this essay is about how social collectivities surpasses the power of physical contagion, leading to another understanding of crowds, politics and governmental technique.
Can we put a name to the world we are living in now? A few opaque terms have been set in motion –... more Can we put a name to the world we are living in now? A few opaque terms have been set in motion – ‘Corona Pandemic’ or ‘COVID-19’, as if in a race against time to name a fact in a horizon of ambiguities. This short, time-bound reflection undertakes a minor semantic exercise about naming in governmentality. I sketch how an excavation of names could lead us to uncovering what responses and responsibilities are actualised in governmentalities by a process of naming, and what remains unnamed and subdued in that process. The naming concern has nurtured many debates among semanticists, philosophers of language and, certainly, among those who study the social.1 Drawing from them, the question of what names can do in describing, asserting knowledge and limiting the course of governmental action is an intriguing one. The pandemic and its related ‘naming’ is in a domain that ranges from concrete nouns to common nouns, and this is where, by taking some liberties, I use metaphor and metonym,2 a...
Uploads
Papers by yasmeen arif