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.
All content for Mutant: Dialogues at the End of Democracy is the property of Institute for New Global Politics and is served directly from their servers
with no modification, redirects, or rehosting. The podcast is not affiliated with or endorsed by Podjoint in any way.
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.
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.
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.
