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.
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.
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.
