Episódios
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If freedom is the most molecular of human desires and hope the most fragile of human capacities, then fear is an all too human anxiety—or weapon—that destroys both, in one stroke.
Whether this is the mortal fear of losing one’s own freedom, or the fear of losing power over another—the power to give oneself an unbridled freedom to rule over others—the connection between fear and freedom is more elemental than we often acknowledge. “Absolute freedom is absolute, radical evil,” says Aishwary Kumar. “The willingness to say that our freedom is boundless—or that it should have no limits—is not very distinct from our willingness to say that our excesses and cruelty towards human and nonhuman others is perfectly justified. Freedom is relentlessly tempted by tyranny; tyrants live in constant fear of freedom. Freedom and fear are connected on this mortal plane of human temptation: the temptation to be so limitlessly free that it can only end in a barbaric inequality, a cruelty without ends.”
This fear—and its counterpart, cruelty—seems disturbingly compatible with democracy. And yet, it also makes democracy wholly impossible. “Such is the enigma that Judith Shklar works through in her groundbreaking essay, “The Liberalism of Fear.” We are still to fully work out the depth of Shklar’s moral psychology, although this much is obvious: we simply cannot have a free society that is also an unequal, afraid one. And therein lies Shklar’s most profound, original insight. Inequality is the site of not just mortal fear; it is also the fuel of moral cruelty. Contra Hobbes, it is not a society of equals but a society of the afraid that is most cruel.”
Yet, to think freely of fear requires that we see in fear the sources of both an incurable inequality and our irreducible equality. “There is a kind of fear that is democratic,” Aishwary proposes, “a moral, mortal fear rooted in finitude which embraces the idea that we as human beings can feel afraid, can feel anxious about the future.”
This is why we think so closely in this episode with James Baldwin and W.E.B Du Bois, who seek to rescue fear—much like they seek to rescue freedom—from the defeatist, nihilistic rhetoric of the modern majority. “There is a way in which rejection of fear has become the most divisive, masculinist project over the last century and half,” says Aishwary. “Which is ironic, for the truth is that human beings always harbor fears that have nothing to do with their emasculation. If anything, there is the sort of fear that does not mean cowardice, that does not unleash rage, that does not compensate for itself by violence, but instead generates its own antithesis: a moral courage to be okay with solitude, with imperfection, with anxiety, with limits.”
“That is the fear James Baldwin writes of in his essay, “Nothing Personal.” That is the fear we think with in this episode, that ethics of not just ontological fear, not just existential fear, but an ethics of feeling afraid for humanity, precisely so that human freedom can be reclaimed. That ethics of embracing fear precisely so that a new freedom can be unveiled.” In Darkwater (1920), Du Bois sees in the teacher the exemplary figure of this fear (and thus of its unveiling).
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No idea in our political lexicon is as deeply mired in paradox as freedom. One is wholly alive, wholly human, we are often told, only when one is wholly free. Free to move, free from constraint, free from tyranny. And yet, also comes with this liberty from constraint—this thing the Latvian-British historian and philosopher Isaiah Berlin almost 70 years ago famously called “negative liberty”—the dangerous license to violate others, to disparage and desecrate the lives of others, to be so drawn to cruelty as to become anti-human, pure and simple.
Freedom is a desire so molecular it might have started to run through our bloodstream at birth. But perhaps its truth, its ambiguities, and its power become discernible to us only in the moment of its loss. For 2000 years, not surprisingly, says @realaishwarykumar, “absolutely no tradition of political thought has been able to truly delimit and defend what freedom is, except those thinkers who had witnessed from close quarters and in their own lives its total disappearance.”
“That’s because where there is freedom, there is force. Where there is freedom to fabricate, there is also the freedom and the will to lie. Where there is freedom to move, there is also the freedom and the will to quarantine, to segregate, sequester, and incarcerate. Where there is freedom to live and breathe, there is also the freedom and the will to make life for others unlivable, unbreathable. The freedom to breathe is not equally given. The freedom to be forgiven, to be excused, is not equally given.”
“Some will always be punished, never forgiven. Others have never faced punishment, and thus, never sought forgiveness for their crimes."
To ask “what is freedom?” therefore requires a certain kind of moral imagination about inequality today. “An imagination that transcends the easy, lazy, all-too-quick demarcations of the world into left and right, even if one is decisively worse than the other,” says Aishwary. “A spectrum of thought that does not simply reduce freedom to the clash between two or more visions of power—which it always will be—but to a new conception and measure of life as such, to a new pursuit of happiness, indomitably claimed and equally shared.”
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“We lost our home, which means the familiarity of daily life. We lost our occupation, which means the confidence that we are of some use in this world. We lost our language, which means the naturalness of reactions, the simplicity of gestures, the unaffected expression of feelings…our best friends have been killed in concentration camps, and that means the rupture of our private lives.” — Arendt, We Refugees (1943).
What of oneself is lost—dispossessed—when one is possessed, owned and abandoned at the same time, by an occupier? Few thinkers open up the abyss of alienation that sprawls under the experience of occupation like Hannah Arendt. Contrary to what modern jurisprudence hangs its understanding of occupation on, for Arendt, the loss of home to conquest and “total domination” means not only a loss of land or territory but also an evisceration of one’s most private self—one’s sense of use in the world—so profound that occupation can mean nothing less than a total rupture, a borderless crime.
Occupation is a colonial war without end, says Aishwary Kumar. “But it is not colonial only. It is a demolition of the mundane, a segregation so immovable that even the most routine acts—like Elizabeth Eckford’s resilient walk to a high school in Little Rock in her own town and country in 1957, surrounded by National Guard troops in Arkansas—feel like a crime. Were the troops that day protecting Eckford and her fellow students who became the heroic Little Rock Nine or were they reminding Black America of the sheer immovability of their old life even after the schools had been desegregated?”
This is the vaporous heart of the history of occupation. So pervasive is it as a colonial, theological, and racial phenomenon that its ubiquity obscures from us a simple truth: that occupation, despite its violence and barbarism, is profoundly ambiguous in its form, structure, and effects. In that, it mirrors violence, without which it cannot be thought.
Like violence, occupation is an anti-concept. And like violence, rather than helping us understand our political history and moral present systematically, it splinters our time—and our judgment—into a hundred pieces.
“Occupation is not simply a military paradigm that leaves boot marks,” Aishwary reminds us. “It is a bearer, as W. E. B. Du Bois would say, of our double consciousness, as if we were moving freely, earning our livelihoods and performing our duties freely, right in the middle of a colonial disaster. A hesitation that hangs on my skin and in the air around me like a militarized punctuation.”
Occupation is someone’s control given the indifferent masquerade of skill. Occupation teaches the occupied subject the skills to live and earn and survive, they say. Occupation is thus like caste, which in turn—and not by chance—is the oldest theory of occupation. “Even though caste looks simply like a practice of occupations,” Aishwary suggests, “caste is a nodal theory of occupation, because caste occupies and steals time itself. Where colonial occupation is a question of breadth and expanse, caste occupation is a question of depth and verticality, stretching generations. Where colonial occupation is a question of territoriality, caste occupation is a function of temporality.”
Our episode on Occupation is perhaps Mutant’s most primal: rather than approaching occupation as a military concept, we deconstruct its strange political stability. We ask not what makes occupying forces so barbaric but instead what makes occupation so immovable? And what might become possible were it to be harnessed as a democratic strategy, an anchor for encampment, a new politics of immovability?
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Mutant’s first episode was an archaeology of democratic anger, and as we publish our 13th, almost midway through the Roman alphabet, we return to our beginnings; to a concept that silently saturates our political condition, bubbling corrosively in the shadow of that which it is too often conflated with, even though they belong to two fundamentally different orders.
Resentment.
Silence clouds our understanding of resentment no more and no less than it defines it. Because silence is endemic to the seething, destructive force of political and civic resentment.
If anger has democratic potential, it is because, Aishwary reminds us, “anger has a language, and therefore a certain kind of epistemic clarity to it.” Resentment, on the other hand, is a concentration of an entire moral and psychological universe into the self, “where only the self and its injuries, its defeats — real or imagined, medieval or modern — matter to oneself.”
“We cannot decipher or even fully discern resentment because it does not speak in its own language. It insinuates itself into languages of dignity, into languages of merit, into languages of self-made world-making.
And from there on, indignant violence is merely a step away, including violence against one's own and one's self.” To understand resentment, then, is to probe the ambiguous place of self-injury, of self-knowledge, and thus of dignity in politics. “There's a moral impasse between the dignity of selfhood and the logic of resentment,” says Aishwary. “There’s no history of dignity without some resentful sense of defeatism in it.”
We excavate the miasmic political and civic resentments lurking under the modern social contract worldwide, and explore how the Civil Rights tradition has so powerfully forced these resentments out into the open, made them speak, forced their rage into presence, and shined a light on their seething, dark view of the future.Art: Cain Slaying Abel by Jacopo Palma il Giovane
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Few words in our political lexicon are as fragile and as paradoxical as hope. Is hope a privilege of the smug? Or is it the helpless, last resort of the inconsolable? Whatever we might think of it, hope is easy to dismiss and yet impossible to fully leave. In fact, hope acquires its greatest gravity, or what B R Ambedkar might call its greatest force, precisely when the circumstances for its existence seem bleakest.
This paradox reveals a fundamental truth about the human condition: that while hope may carry an air of smug power, or exemplify the cheap talk of the disengaged charlatan, real (and material) hope is embodied in those we consider weak, those who live at the threshold of the unlivable, those we have deemed most disposable. Hope is, to quote Ambedkar again, a “weak force.”
“Hope seems like a thread you can hang by rather than change your existence with and through,” says Aishwary Kumar. “But precisely because it is a thread one hangs by, precisely because one refuses to let go of it, precisely because there is always hope even when there is not, hope becomes the oxygen of politics.” Its very fragility makes it, arguably, our greatest political and social commitment. 'Commitment' because hoping takes arduous, virtuous work; it requires the tilling of desolate lands.
“Hope is not transcendent, it does not belong to the order of the miracle. It is a political virtue, perhaps the most human, most immanent one, divorced from any sense or solace that help will come from elsewhere,” says Aishwary.
“Such hope cannot be individualistic. Hope becomes political, and politics becomes hopeful, only when there is a collective commitment to changing the world, and sometimes to simply surviving the world as we find it.”
To think the Human, as we did in our last episode, means to think of—and with—hope, that we can bring another world into existence. “Surrounded by desolation, confronted with our greatest barbarisms, to have hope is to commit ourselves to movement, to getting back up again without being apologetic about our disappointment with humanity itself.” -
What does it mean to be human? This is a question at once timeless, yet often posited as an abstraction: as though being human and living as humans in the world can be disentangled from each other.
But man's humanity is not something that exists in isolation from other species, from other human beings. “In that sense, the idea of the human rests fundamentally on the belief that to be human is to both be political and social,” says Aishwary Kumar. “If you were to be marooned in the middle of an island with absolutely no one, it would not matter whether you are human or not. In fact such a shipwreck of a solitude might blur the very boundary between the human and nonhuman, or starker still, between the human and inhuman.”
In this age of desire to transcend the human — whether through the fetishistic pursuit of artificial intelligence or extravagant plans to leave earth in pursuit of life on a new planet — the question of what it means to be human returns to us not only with powerful moral urgency but as one that inflects our planetary future.
Is there more to being human, Mutant asks, than the fact of being born human? Or have we surrendered our imagination to the idea of the human as a bare biological fact, subject to infinite mutations and yet capable of very finite morality? Enamored by artificial intelligence and dismissive of moral judgment? How do we today think about the abandonment of humans by other humans, in which technologies bring back the archaic with a new zeal — archaic because we have been here before — and yet are unprecedented in how they are fuelling a mutation of our political life, our moral capacities, and of the human itself?
This is a dialogue foundational to the very idea of Mutant. “What is more irretrievably mutant, after all, than the human condition?”
“At stake in this question,” says Aishwary, “is not only the mutating shape of our humanity — and our responsibility to it — but the forms of our coming barbarism too.”
Art: Guernica, by Pablo Picasso -
Nothing frames our thinking at Mutant — the very name we have given this dictionary of concepts — more fundamentally than the human drive for purity. After all, by its very constitution, the figure of the mutant — the bearer of our mutations, our mixing, our transgressions, our struggle with finitude — is an antidote to the violence unleashed by political and moral purists. As we begin a decisive year for democracy worldwide, Mutant turns to this pernicious antithesis of our democratic faith: purity and its army of antipolitical high priests who today ransack the corridors and seats of democratic hope.
Always sought in the abstract yet waged through sacrificial, sometimes silent practice on the body, purity is, in the words of Aishwary Kumar, “the great conceptual unsaid of the modern political tradition.”
It is also, arguably, its most malevolent. Feverishly seeking a return to a past it imagines to be pure, the drive for purity is a steady, persistent, and predatory delusion that defaces everything it touches, including the future.
This delirium for purity is not new. Instead, purity is the site of a timeless, archaic convergence between religion (which brings a theological charge to politics through its imagining of a human world that never existed and will never come to be), on the one hand, and technology, on the other, as we search for new planets on which to begin the human enterprise afresh, uncontaminated, pure. On earth meanwhile, we succumb to punishing obsessions with detoxification and purification of blood and nations, the desire to rid our bodies and our societies of ‘impurities’ brought by others.
"Purity is the refusal of mutation, which is the only truth that marks our biological existence. Mutant — this dialogue at the end of democracy — is both our ode to human mutation and a task we must undertake in order to ask why theologians and demagogues of purity — those who love purity tests — are so afraid of it," says Aishwary.
Photo: Sunderwala Mahal, 16th century mausoleum at Sunder Nursery, New Delhi, India by Payal Puri -
“There is nothing mere about symbols”, says the writer Ta-Nehisi Coates. And “there is nothing mere about the struggle for architecture, about the strife over monuments. They are arenas of war over memory itself,” says Aishwary Kumar, as we undertake an unflinching examination of the event that marked the beginning of an irreversible torsion in the world’s largest democracy: the demolition of the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya, India, on December 6, 1992. It was not just a matter of a medieval relic or a place of worship. It was the matter of political faith and its slow end. "Two defacements came in one stroke with the demolition,” Aishwary reminds us, “they desecrated the site and the date.” For December 6 is also the death anniversary of India’s majisterial constitutional architect and moral philosopher BR Ambedkar.
To think about the demolition of the Babri Masjid today is to think about the use and abuse of bodies and memory. It is to think about democracy’s symbolic and real suicides. It is to think about our pact with Brutalism. At once a name for an architectural technique and a mode of total bodily domination, Brutalism today is the very language in which majorities worldwide deface the faith in democracy.
In the unfolding history of that brutal defacement, Babri is not mere event. It is a political paradigm and parable of our time.
An urgent and timeless dialogue continues.
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Not only does violence have the capacity to become normative, we also seem to wholly lose our capacity for moral judgement in its wake. So that the moment it appears in front of us, violence immediately destroys all social and political alternatives, as if it were the only choice available to exercise, an inevitable path waiting to be taken.
This is why we fail to ever judge violence; we judge only its perpetrator. We fail to call out militarized rage; we choose instead to mourn its victims after the fact, thereby reproducing the inequality of which violence is an effect. What else explains our refusal to recognise the inviolability of all lives, our trafficking in the value of one life versus another? How else do we understand the abuse of the idea of resistance, in the name of which violence and counter-violence are waged on civic populations by governments?
“Resistance is what we bring to bear not on the enemy, but on those who rule us and those we elect,” says Aishwary Kumar. “It is the refusal of citizens to surrender to the fabrications and perjuries of their government, to refuse the economy of violence into which their government will pull them again and again. Resistance is a critique of violence. Resistance is the critique of the lethal inevitability with which we accept violence.”
We continue an electrifying dialogue on violence — and clear the ground for a radical new understanding of non-violence. -
Talking of violence in a time of war can distort rather than clarify our comprehension of it.
On the one hand are the visible and implacable barbarisms of modern conflict waged on land and air, through bombings and blockades, mobilising soldier and satellite to deliver sometimes precise cruelty, sometimes indiscriminate brutality.
On the other is violence’s vaporous history: cloaked in invisibility and silence, embedded in the law in the guise of order, intricately threaded through those civic and civil structures we call the norm and which we excuse by calling it normative.
Insidiously clinging to structures and infrastructures, this violence is not an event but a scaffolding; it is not an anomaly but the apparatus of modern life itself. What is this thing that at once constitutes us and that we cannot even wholly see?
“Violence is not a thing, it is an effect of other things,” says Aishwary Kumar. “Our task is to understand what it is that violence is an effect of. Why is it that every tool we promise ourselves to eradicate violence only compounds and multiplies its forms and effects? And why is it that we simply fail to leave violence behind? So much so that, while being an effect of other things, violence also feels like a concept. An invisible, obstinate whole. Why does it seem to us, above all, that violence alone will make us whole?”
We begin an urgent and provocative two-part deconstruction of democracy’s most intractable — and suicidal — compulsion. -
If there are twin pylons on which our democratic deformities today seem to stand, they are identity and indifference. Democracies wage war in the name of the former, but for all the rhetoric surrounding “culture wars”, they do so rarely ever in plain sight. Rather, an uncontrolled war rages on today in silence: by making majoritarian identities disappear into the structure of the ‘normative’ and by rallying masses and movements behind a sanctioned regime of pervasive indifference. An indifference that ironically rests on a profound interest: an active interest in the disregard, in the destruction even, of that in which one has no interest.
And it is in the figure of the migrant — who takes to the high seas and the baked roads in a journey of depthless peril and unbearable heat — that we see the apotheosis of this indifferent interest worldwide.
If indifference itself has become the binding agent of identity, can identity save our democratic covenant? Or does democracy today demand a new language of solidarity beyond all existing claims of identity made upon it by nationalism, by religion, by race, by caste? Why, after all, do we depend so much on those identities that never cease to leave us morally hamstrung?Photo: Dachau Concentration Camp Memorial Site, Munich, Germany by Aishwary Kumar
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At the heart of the modern democratic contract is the principle — and the faith — that the majority will decide for everyone.
But it is in fact this majority — neither simply a numerical preponderance, nor an ideology — that constitutes the greatest risk of democracy in our time; a moral swerve that is not simply mappable to a caste or economic structure. Rather, it is a complex combination of motivations and desires tethered equally to old conformisms and emerging markets that believes — if it believes in anything at all — in one primary political value. Obedience.
In this episode, Mutant travels this vanishing line between the democratic majority and this new majoritarian coalition, to deconstruct its abiding myth: that it is nonviolent.
Image courtesy: Tom Vattakuzhy
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How do ordinary citizens become the foot soldiers, the automatons, the purveyors of evil? How does barbaric cruelty become a civic norm? In her controversial classic Eichmann in Jerusalem, Hannah Arendt gives us a way to understand this pervasive degeneration of our time. She calls it the banality of evil. And it is this banality given democratic license; this turning of neglect into a legitimate doctrine of governance; this virtuosity of brutalism without bloodshed, that Aishwary Kumar identifies as a new mutation in the structure of liberal democracy. Neodemocracy is this political mutant, born at the intersection of cruelty and the constitution.
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“At the heart of law is not justice but the will to punish. And it is when this will to punish becomes a pervasive political impulse, a mass phenomenon, that we leave democracy and enter what we call neodemocracy: the idea that the law is here not to protect the vulnerable, or be responsible to those who are outnumbered. When punishment becomes the guiding force in and of law, we have left the realm of human freedom. We have entered into what liberals call the rule of law.”
What, Mutant asks, does the law yield? What does the law make of us — and what does the law break in us?
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“Some friends say I made the Constitution, but I shall burn it.” — B R Ambedkar
“Ambedkar is a Constitutionalist only because he is a Revolutionary.” — Aishwary Kumar
Why are constitutions the site of our new civil wars? How did we, who live in democracies, become at once more fanatically attached to the words of the constitution and remorselessly barbaric in compromising its very spirit?
Mutant probes the most philosophically knotty, politically charged, and violently contested nucleus of modern democracies: their founding document.
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"Annihilation is refusal of the world as it is. Annihilation is destruction of the world as it is. Annihilation is an act of faith. Annihilation, above all, is a refusal of our will to forget. Annihilation, to use B R Ambedkar's word, is "responsibility" to the world as it is."
Aishwary Kumar and Payal Puri examine one of the most morally sophisticated and philosophically complex visions of democracy ever conceived.
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It is today impossible to understand the fragility and violence of democracy’s global life without grappling with the appearance of an unprecedented political form on our horizon. It is a form of politics that marks a catastrophic, cruel perversion — a stolid mutation — in the very structure of our democratic faith. Aishwary Kumar calls this new form, poised at the intersection between constitution and cruelty, neodemocracy. Mutant is the recuperation of those words and concepts that we now need more than ever if we are to comprehend this suicidal moment in global politics, and redeem the moral arc of our universe.
