As violence against persons and things reaches a slow, catastrophic intensity worldwide; as the political and planetary become profoundly intertwined; as the deformity in our language thwarts our very ability to think about this suicidal moment in global politics and in human affairs as such, the brilliant thinker and scholar Aishwary Kumar (in LA) and editor-interlocutor Payal Puri (in New Delhi) begin a sustained, rigorous excavation of a deceptively simple question: What is up with democracy?
Taking as our starting point the 26 letters of the Roman alphabet, we create an alphabet of global political thought; a rigorous recuperation of the words and concepts without which we cannot grasp the power and the fragility of the democratic promise. Never has a podcast attempted to compress, in just 52 words — two for every letter of the alphabet — the human condition itself.
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As violence against persons and things reaches a slow, catastrophic intensity worldwide; as the political and planetary become profoundly intertwined; as the deformity in our language thwarts our very ability to think about this suicidal moment in global politics and in human affairs as such, the brilliant thinker and scholar Aishwary Kumar (in LA) and editor-interlocutor Payal Puri (in New Delhi) begin a sustained, rigorous excavation of a deceptively simple question: What is up with democracy?
Taking as our starting point the 26 letters of the Roman alphabet, we create an alphabet of global political thought; a rigorous recuperation of the words and concepts without which we cannot grasp the power and the fragility of the democratic promise. Never has a podcast attempted to compress, in just 52 words — two for every letter of the alphabet — the human condition itself.
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
Mutant: Dialogues at the End of Democracy
As violence against persons and things reaches a slow, catastrophic intensity worldwide; as the political and planetary become profoundly intertwined; as the deformity in our language thwarts our very ability to think about this suicidal moment in global politics and in human affairs as such, the brilliant thinker and scholar Aishwary Kumar (in LA) and editor-interlocutor Payal Puri (in New Delhi) begin a sustained, rigorous excavation of a deceptively simple question: What is up with democracy?
Taking as our starting point the 26 letters of the Roman alphabet, we create an alphabet of global political thought; a rigorous recuperation of the words and concepts without which we cannot grasp the power and the fragility of the democratic promise. Never has a podcast attempted to compress, in just 52 words — two for every letter of the alphabet — the human condition itself.
