Gandhi and Philosophy: On Theological Anti-Politics

Description

Gandhi and Philosophy presents a breakthrough in philosophy by foregrounding modern and scientific elements in Gandhi's thought, animating the dazzling materialist concepts in his writings and opening philosophy to the new frontier of nihilism. This scintillating work breaks with the history of Gandhi scholarship, removing him from the postcolonial and Hindu-nationalist axis and disclosing him to be the enemy that the philosopher dreads and needs. Naming the congealing systematicity of Gandhi's thoughts with the Kantian term hypophysics, Mohan and Dwivedi develop his ideas through a process of reason that awakens the possibilities of concepts beyond the territorial determination of philosophical traditions. The creation of the new method of criticalisation - the augmentation of critique - brings Gandhi's system to its exterior and release. It shows the points of intersection and infiltration between Gandhian concepts and such issues as will, truth, violence, law, anarchy, value, politics and metaphysics and compels us to imagine Gandhi's thought anew.

Shaj Mohan is a philosopher based in the subcontinent. Divya Dwivedi is a philosopher based in the subcontinent. She is Assistant Professor in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at the Indian Institute of Technology Delhi.

This book of philosophy from the subcontinent is a new beginning for philosophy everywhere, because it liberates philosophy from metaphysical and theological thinking. It also frees philosophy from the geo-political and ethnocentric divisions of east and west. * The Wire * A unique book that endeavours to go beyond the usual study of the Mahatma, his role in the freedom struggle and his ideology of non-violence ... Gives new meanings to concepts such as resistance, power, truth and force. * Frontline Magazine * Gandhi and Philosophy: On Theological Anti-Politics is something that has been crying out to be done, but that no-one before Shaj Mohan and Divya Dwivedi seem to have thought seriously of doing. It adds a new approach and addition to the study of Gandhian thought. It is a most valuable and original contribution. * Sushil Mittal, Professor of Hindu Studies and Gandhi Studies, James Madison University. USA * Shaj Mohan and Divya Dwivedi's Gandhi and Philosophy is a profound and at crucial points critical re-examination of Gandhi's thought. But their book does much more than give us a radically new Gandhi. It is a sophisticated reflection on modernity in its own right. Drawing on a wide range of philosophical resources, Gandhi and Philosophy succeeds in expanding our horizons and in opening up new lines of thought. * Robert Bernasconi, Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of Philosophy and African American Studies, Penn State University, USA * A figure of spiritual resistance to modernity, today Gandhi draws the limits of geopolitics as we can test them in the planetary regression characteristic of the beginning of this century. Mohan and Dwivedi reveal the main lines of his thought circumscribing the limits of the East-West division as well as the ambiguities of a politics of resistance whose project would have been, ultimately, to create a Hindu nation invested with a global eschatological mission - the old schema. By reaffirming the need of critique for what they call ana-stasis, they give us to reconsider the history of nihilism in the eschatological contemporaneity and shows its ultimate limits. * Bernard Stiegler, Centre Georges-Pompidou, France * This is how this book comes to our attention and contributes to orient us, if I may say so, toward a thought, and even a world, neither humanist nor reduced to suffering in the name of Truth. In the terms of this work: neither metaphysics nor hypophysics. * Jean-Luc Nancy * Gandhi and Philosophy reclaims Gandhi as one of the great Enlightenment thinkers of "system", a philosophical identification of nature with law, morality and the good that positions him in the line of Spinoza, Newton, Wordsworth and contemporary deep ecology. With unerring tact and remorseless precision, Mohan and Dwivedi unpick the interlocking sets of principles that enabled Gandhi's controversial remediation of political, cultural, and social modernity as transgressions of humanity's maximum limits and destructions of futurity-a critique derived from the logics of a philosophical position that Mohan and Dwivedi resituate as a formidable force for our times. * Robert J. C. Young, Julius Silver Professor of English and Comparative Literature, New York University, USA *