Thank you for the invitation, Sylvia, and it really is a pleasure to be here today.
My talk today is drawn from a book that I hope to complete in about a year and a half.
It's tentatively titled Democracy of the Mind.
The book, I mean, and it explores how Gandhi and Ambedkar think the figures of the Nakba and the French.
The book will hopefully be the last vacation I write at length on Gandhi.
My future projects will be more working with the writings of Lot on the one hand,
and the mid-20th-century intellectual world of Gujarat on the other hand.
But one never knows. So Gandhi has a way of putting you back in anything you're done with him.
So anyway, to jump to the talk itself, you know, we as as I suspect many of you in this room are are intellectual historians.
And as you know, when describing satyagraha, which is which is his neologism for the spectrum of activities that include civil disobedience.
Gandhi draws interchangeably on the figures of the friend and the neighbour.
So one of the things that he does is in 1920, for example, during the Khilafat movement in support of the Ottoman caliphate,
he writes, The Muslim man is my neighbour, but he is in distress.
His grievance is legitimate and it is my bond and duty to help him secure redress by every legitimate means in my power.
Even to the extent of losing my life and property.
And this is the way I can build permanent friendship.
M.I.T. with Osama's uncle.
And sometime after the failure of the classic agitation, he still writes.
And I put together after we resuscitate him. Two months have sufficiently broken one another's heads.
We should recognise that vengeance was not the law we thought it would is not law, but came out, which would be perhaps maybe closer to.
I mean, it's certainly not law said we're translating. It is not easy, but not justice.
Maybe not justice, but surrender. And nothing but surrender is a law of friendship.
Unquote. Now, as you also know, God is hardly alone in this emphasis on the neighbour and the friend, his most astute critic.
All right. I'm Dr. Ambedkar.
Centres is posthumously published this time around the theme of monetary friendship.
Interestingly, neither Gandhi nor Ambedkar think they're doing something new in doing all of this.
Gandhi assumes he's only reiterating the Christian injunction to love your neighbour as yourself and the analogous traditions you despise in Hinduism.
Similarly, Ambedkar never dwells on how the figure of the friend is transformed in his invocations of the Buddha.
Still, even if they do not recognise it, something really radical happens in their writings.
They write at a time in a modern commandment, so to speak, has displaced the biblical commandment.
This new commandment is in many ways exemplified in the categorical imperative.
As we know, the injunction to treat humanity within oneself or another as an end.
This is a commandment that is not only philosophical. If God found himself sympathetic to the French Revolution, despite his antipathy to revolutions,
they surely had at least something to do with him in that event, at least a moment of this commandment of his own commandment.
But in different ways. Gandhi and Ambedkar are both critical of this new commandment.
The question is by affirming instead the old commandments around a neighbour and the friend.
But in their very questioning, they borrowed from the new commandment.
A new cocky element, the injunction to equality.
So even as a thing they are affirming the old Christian, Hindu or Buddhist injunction,
they actually inaugurate a new politics, a politics that centred around what I will describe as an equality of the mind.
And what could also be described as Democratic neighbourliness or political friendship.
Right. Now, as you know, the miner is not a new figure in critical theory.
Of course, it embodies the practices, actions or even ways of being that are in a similar bill to the norms of the majority,
as I've written elsewhere again, and the norms of the majority.
Are at work in every form of sovereignty, even in sovereign forms of democracy, such as Republican or liberal democracy.
So equality of the minor strives for liberty, equality and togetherness outside sovereignty.
Such a democracy without sovereignty is not some future utopia.
It is at work already in what we sometimes call the commons as distinct from the public in
the sociality we create outside institutional spaces and sometimes in opposition to them.
For example, in the Shaheen Bagh protests that took place in India around three or so years back,
I would even say that this new neighbourliness is what is most new and most democratic in our present.
Though it is also what is most fragile in our present right now.
You know, you may ask and I wonder about the sometimes myself at a time when sovereign forms of
democracy are under threat from both populist authoritarianism and neo liberalism,
say, the dominance of the poor today. Why should we concern ourselves with democracy?
Because our sovereignty. To which I would say that while we absolutely must defend sovereign forms of democracy,
as Gandhi, an American poet, did much, maybe everything depends on how we do so.
Both populist authoritarianism and neoliberalism are in different ways threats internally generated by sovereign forms of democracy.
And these threats are more likely to be generated when the sovereign forms of democracy become our telos, become what we cannot think beyond.
Right. So even if our immediate goal is to defend sovereign forms of democracy,
we must do so from a perspective that cherishes democracy with our sovereignty as both our horizon and a possibility in our present.
So as I mentioned at the beginning,
the book I am writing is about how they conceptualise and enact this democratic neighbourliness or political friendship.
And today's talk is drawn from the first chapter which offers a conceptual prehistory of the modern neighbour,
which explores the path by which a neighbour as a concept became available for Gandhi to think with.
In what follows. I shall be addressing two sets of questions.
Two clusters of questions. The first is a question that first clusters around the injunction.
The Gandhi encounters the injunction to love the neighbour.
So the questions are what makes injunctions 1 to 1 of neighbourliness?
How is a neighbour transformed by the injunction to love?
How does Gandhi take up this injunction? So that's the first cluster of questions.
The second cluster that I would like to take up is.
About the modern remaking of the Negro. Right.
What is a new set that emerges with the consolidation of the of modern commandments, such as the categorical imperative?
How does the new self. Obscure the older figure of the neighbour.
How does this obscurity lead to the emergence of a new neighbourliness centred around equality?
So those are the two sets of questions I would like to take up. So let's start out then with the first cluster and the first question.
The first cluster, which is what makes a relationship into one of neighbourliness.
And an initial clue is provided by quadratic phrase and means for us that in 1909
Gandhi translates as neighbour as possible on us or people residing nearby.
So neighbours are those who are nearby.
This resonates also with the etymology of the English word neighbour or night and or inhabitant old English.
But the question is near how? Yeah.
And. Here. Gandhi's insistence the word on itself provides a clue.
In our everyday parlance, we tend to reserve the term who for entities that have not just sentience but interiority.
Relatedly, we resort to the word what the term what.
For entities that do not have interiority, or at least we do not refer to the interiority even get often of what?
We also of course tend to hierarchies entities by this criterion any place of who above the what with the figure of the neighbour.
This way of distinction between who and what in terms of a criterion internal to them deposited in them comes undone.
Somebody or something is a neighbour, not because of the interiority or lack thereof, but because of their relationship to my interiority.
Right, because they are related to who I am. Yeah.
Neighbourliness, in other words, has to do with expediency.
Another entity in my interiority.
So I think it ought to be my neighbour.
If it is merely an object for me, not for that matter, can a fellow citizen be my neighbour if I do not experience them in my interiority.
But that thing can become a neighbour if I develop a relationship with it in my interiority,
as Gandhi arguably did, with the many painful stabs to which he became attached.
Right. And for one of which he made an associate notoriously or famously walked back many miles during the Malachi remarked.
And so I suppose what I'm stressing is that the figure of the neighbour is constituted by an emphasis on the whole.
Yeah. And again, you can see that there's nothing necessarily, you know, maybe one of the frightening things about the.
About 911 for Americans most precisely that the discourse are at least their neighbours they did not know that they had.
Put differently.
What I'm trying to say is within the problematic of the neighbour, when I'm speaking the language of the neighbour, I cannot ask what is my neighbour?
I cannot even ask what is the criterion of the neighbour? The neighbour is not,
or at least not primarily of what the neighbour can become or what only when viewed from
outside the problematic of neighbourliness within the problematic of neighbourliness.
The term who is crucial? Who is my your other neighbour and my considers of other other terms to really think of the friend and the guest.
You know all three figures are that friend and neighbour are inseparable from a emphasis on the right.
Now of course I don't need to stress this,
but just to stress right there is nothing at all democratic or empowering or non-violent about relationships of.
Yeah. Some of the most violence, massive violence has been directed against neighbours against those identified as in a monstrously.
Right. Where there's Jews and Nazis, Muslims and Dalits in India today.
And we could have countless other horrifying examples.
Yeah. Indeed, part of the allure of modern citizenship for many of the most marginalised is
that it enables an exit from the violence of unequal relationships of rights.
And it seems to affirm instant and equality of what?
And those who affirm the quality of the mind.
Often recognise the importance of the quality of work.
This is why they do not seek so much to reject. Or blade?
The quality of what? Somebody has to step back from it so as to pursue a more democratic politics to this
relationship with the equality of what we can get back to the community if you want.
Right. So, so much for the first question that I wanted to address.
We just don't know who is the neighbour.
Right. And the answer the question is also the answer as you saw.
Right. Let me move on to the second to second aspect of the first cluster of questions and turn to intertwined issues of
how the injunction to love transforms the figure of the neighbour and how Gandhi encounters this interaction.
Now, this is a group of South Asian, as I suspect all of you read deep autobiography and you remember, I'm sure that,
you know, Gandhi likely reads the Bible for the first time while a student in England in the early 1890.
And of that first reading of the Bible, he writes that the Old Testament, quote unquote, sent me to sleep.
And he goes on. But the New Testament produced a different impression, especially the Sermon on the Mount, which went straight to my heart.
And in later years, he often invokes a New Testament when talking of the Nakba, specifically referring to an injunction.
Love your neighbour as yourself. Right.
Now. The biblical injunctions on the neighbour have been the subject of copious commentaries and analysis,
but maybe approaching them from the prism of the who and what may still shed some fresh light on them.
If Gandhi was put to sleep by the Old Testament, then this might well be because of the way the Niebuhr is construed there in the Old
Testament version that Gandhi likely had at hand the famous passage from Leviticus.
Enjoying Jones love for the new book, but does so by constricting that figure.
Right? Neighbours are no longer every relationship of for example you know but one sort of.
They are just contrasted to other relations of, for example, enemies and strangers.
There are injunctions against mixing strangers. There is one law for the stranger and another for the native or human.
And as for enemies, hating them and wreaking destruction on them is quite acceptable, even desirable.
By contrast, neighbours are those who, even if not intimate, are of one's own people.
Right now. Did it unload somewhere.
I think in one of his interviews that the who and the what are quote unquote,
terribly reversible delivery technical injunction works this reversibility in both directions.
Sometimes all that seems to matter is who the other is.
The neighbours in a find or intimate, the enemy or stranger is potentially monstrous and so on.
At other time it accentuates reversibility in the direction of what separating neighbour enemies stranger from each other in terms of what they are,
rather than only who they are determining the who in terms of the what, so to speak.
So that's the Old Testament for you. Now, if, on the other hand, can be shaken to his heart by the New Testament.
Then this was likely because it upturns the whole hierarchy and intimates in an economy.
For example, the Sermon on the Mount, which Gandhi, as you saw, was so influenced by in the challenges the Old Testament economic criterion,
ripe for sorting neighbour from enemy and stranger, and for subordinating the whole to the world.
And you know, I. Well, I maybe I should give at least one or two brief quotes from the New Testament read and I quote, You've heard it.
It has been said. Thou shalt love thy neighbour. And he died to me.
But I say unto you, love your enemies, bless them, because you would do good,
good to them that hate you and pray for them, which, despite flee, use you and prosecute you.
The relation with the neighbour is no cost as an economic right.
I can give more quotes, but I don't think I need to. We can come back to these more later if you want.
What I want to stress for now is that when neighbourliness leans into this and economy, two aspects are particularly noteworthy.
For a start, the Niebuhr intimates a mysticism.
Right drank primarily. And I think we can distinguish between the theological and the mystical.
A compartment is till logical when it ascribes sovereignty to the sacred.
This sovereign security could be put on a transcendental being such as God, who may offer a sovereign love to all his deputies or to all.
It can also be considered an imminent criterion, as with the various human isms that provide that around the world today.
Right. By contrast, the neighbour of the Pauline family formulation and I realise I didn't read out the Pauline formulation,
but I suppose all of you know it. By contrast, a neighbour of the Pauline formulation has no evident relationship to a transcendent God.
You know, there's actually a repressed relationship, contrary to what Jacob dubs as use, but I can come back to that later.
In other words, the neighbour is no secret without being evidently sovereign.
Yeah, this sexuality without sovereignty is the crux of mystical traditions whose chief inability it was discovered.
His chief characteristic is the inability to conceive of the sacred as sovereign.
Yeah. Second.
And by implication this Pauline Niebuhr intimates a quasi universalism rather than universalism.
Usually the universal is inclusive because of its infinite sovereignty.
It is such a sovereignty that we ascribe to God in transcendent traditions or to the human animating traditions.
The all inclusiveness of the Polish people.
By contrast, because it does not mediate its relationship with the neighbour to God, cannot and does not belong to this order of anything.
They do rather fall in love, even if it is in finite, is by a finite being and for finite beings.
Right. So it must proceed by experiencing each and every other in one's interiority.
Read how to Enact this quasi universalism.
This is a challenge. I would say the challenge that Pauline Love wrestles with right now.
So that's the second point that I'd like to make. To move on now to the third issue, which is, you know, that is a related issue,
which is how Gandhi comes to Gandhi's objection to the quasi universalism,
quasi universal neighbourliness that he gleans from the New Testament is possibly responsible
for at least some of his anxiety that he uses in his letters to Sri Rajendra around 1894.
The anxiety about whether. The religious resources of India.
Traditions are ambitious enough to address these questions of right conduct now partially addressed in this advice.
He takes you reading the Geeta carefully. Around this time.
He also finds his way to the RAM 13 months. Right.
And. In these traditions, he comes to discern a quasi universality very similar to that which I encountered in the New Testament.
Now, as you know, the text that he often turns to, you know, is is the guitar.
Right? And the guitar begins by begins with original, you know,
basically expressing anguish at the fact that those these two battle against assuaging his own people.
Krishna and the Geeta dismisses distinguish from Krishna pronounced pronouncements.
Gandhi develops a reading that a love for the neighbour flows from the very formlessness of the divine.
This is doubtless attended just reading, but we don't need to go into that to write.
Gandhi's Association of Love and a non-Sovereign divinity might also have been reinforced by the bonhomie bhakti tradition,
which is brought up by his mother.
As Brendan Larocque notes, the founder of the tradition, Muhammad Pranab, was notable for his eclectic engagement with religious traditions,
his critique of caste and his condemnation of ritualistic orthodoxy in his own lifetime.
Brown not faced considerable opposition for his insistence about widows and lower costs be allowed to take initiation into the order.
This is again, Brendan writing,
and his writings Wear and life are marked by a peculiar combination of Vishnu white belief with Sufi mysticism and sheer millenarian ism.
Brendan also notes all of this has led in our times to charges by Hindu nationalists that run up to us a quote unquote,
a muslim who tricked in those into becoming Muslims. Equally importantly, Candy,
Candy would have found a figure to the quasi analogue to the quasi universality of the neighbour in the figure of the guest as,
for example, in the induction of kitchen table. Our guest is not.
As Simon Dasani points out, the etymology of oddity is itself suggested the one who comes in an untimely way.
Yeah. So the guest is not just the one to whom reciprocal and timely obligations are owed within an economic logic.
The guest is precisely the an economic one who arrives outside the events of reciprocity.
Right now I could multiply examples from Jainism and Buddhism, but for now, suffice to say that Gandhi can, without difficulty,
presume that the injunction love thy neighbour as thyself is something that he can also draw on as a Hindu.
Yeah. I should add here that beyond the point, the point being the degree to which the origins seeking impulse of eurocentrism must be.
Contested.
The question of whether Gandhi comes to the quasi universal level through the Bible or through Hindu texts is not particularly interesting, right?
Symptomatically, Gandhi himself is quite uninterested in it.
Indeed, on one occasion he writes, I've learned much from the West,
and I should not be surprised to find that I learn something about things I do from the West.
I am not concerned what ideas of mine are the result of my foreign contacts.
It is enough for me to know that my views on ahimsa have become now a part and parcel of my own being unquote.
Okay, so, so much then for the first cluster of questions. Let's move on now to the second cluster, which, if you remember,
is about the new commandment that arises in the 19th century and how that transforms things.
Right. And here we start by recalling what Ivan Karamazov tells his brother Alyosha industrialists,
this classic classic and I quote, I must make an admission.
I never could understand how it's possible to allow one's neighbour, but in my opinion, it's precisely one's neighbour that one cannot possibly love.
Perhaps if the parents were lying.
If we are to come to love a man, the man himself should stay hidden because as soon as he shows his face, love vanishes.
Onward. Now, as you know, Karamazov is hardly alone in his.
Ivan Karamazov is hardly alone in his scepticism in civilisation and its discontents.
Freud systematically eviscerates the biblical injunction and describes it as a manifestation of the cultural superego.
Right. And he says,
and I'm quoting again from the commandment Love thy neighbour as yourself is
the strongest defence against human aggression and an excellent example of the
psychological manner in which the cultural superego posits It is impossible to
keep this commandment such a huge inflation of love can only lower its value,
not remove the problem. Now Freud's and Karamazov pronouncements occur against a backdrop of the rise of a new commandment,
which, as I noted earlier, was by the 19th century displacing the biblical injunction.
What is also displaced in the process was the very concept of the self that the
biblical injunction depended on a self organise around the primacy of the neighbour.
The new self was organised around man as an empirical, transcendental doublet to recall focus description.
Right. You know, we answer the biblical injunction. We are very familiar, even over familiar with descriptions of this new South.
But once again, perhaps stigmatising the self in terms of who and what and the terrible reversibility of that pair,
as you know, may yield fresh insights to proceed in that spirit.
The empirical, transcendental doublet was also marked by a new equality,
one that works for distinctive doublet and incommensurability built on comments.
Building a hall that pivots on a what?
Right. Now, as you know, the quality of what is the title of a famous essay by Amartya Sen.
Yeah. The unspoken assumption of that is in an assumption so commonsensical to send as to be not what demonising is at all.
Why is that equalities always in terms of some criteria.
Hence the quote unquote. What of the title? Right.
This. What is the crux of the new concept of equality for it makes equality abstract,
incommensurable such a common abstract equality of what is fundamentally different from the equality of,
say, warriors who are equal to each other in their fearlessness towards debt.
This common trouble in the abstract equality the what is arguably what forms the empirical part of false doublet.
At the same time, this new equality also brings into being a distinctive who the transcendental part
of what goes dominant that far is instantiated most clearly perhaps in the content,
categorical imperative or the injunction to treat humanity rather than oneself or another as never merely a means to an end,
but also an end in itself. It is this injunction, which includes the emphasis in liberal traditions on dignity,
on the incremental equality that attributed to all in all these traditions to all humans and by extension, to members of the nation state rights.
In other words, what I'm trying to say is that the content and.
Nationalist visions are premised on something paradoxical.
Incommensurable incommensurability. If I to put it this way.
Yeah. And while this new equality is organised around a secularisation of imminent rather than transcendent entities,
the main entity being man above all right, it is still theological in the sense that it treats these entities as sovereign.
Yeah. The world of this empirical, transcendental doublet is what Gandhi describes of the phrase atomic zero or modern civility,
and when he describes two violence. He observes, as you'll note that its water is.
I'd quote unquote usurp the function of Godhead would differently they make the human into a sovereign subject with limitless or in finite,
in the sense of constantly seeking mastery. Okay.
Now, the interesting thing is that with the rise of this new commandment.
The older figure of the Nebo, where the theological or quasi university is not just displeased but also obscured.
Right. This obscuring is because the epistemological frame changes so drastically as to make the figure of the Niebuhr increasingly incomprehensible.
Yeah. One might say that Iran Karamazov and the Freud of Civilisation and its discontents speak from within.
It is obscuring. Yeah. Here.
I would like to note just three aspects of this obscuring.
And you know, because in a sense is obscuring is also clarifying. That's what I want to come to eventually.
Yes. It's upskirting is what makes possible the new concept of the that Gandhi and others arrived at to befriend to.
First.
Because of the increasing separation of the transcendent and imminent, it is no longer possible to hold together love of God and love of neighbour.
Yeah. To illustrate what I mean by this.
Consider the example that Iran sets before his brother Alyosha.
You know, a mother faced with the general who has ordered her child to be torn to pieces by his homes.
Yvonne says, quote, That quote has no right to forgive the tormentor, even of the child himself, to forgive him.
And as you know, this this this emphasis on the possibility possibly of forgiveness and all of that is also there in Ursula, KG, or Milos.
Right. We can get to that later. What disturbs me does not state, but what we might infer from his example is also this,
that contrary to what Jacob Dobbs or Agamben might in different ways argue.
Even the Pauline injunction de la once neighbour as oneself is surreptitiously
underwritten by the existence of a God who can forgive what we cannot forgive.
That is, if the mother cannot forgive the tormentor.
But God can forgive the tormentor, which is what makes love thy neighbour possible.
Having lost his faith in a God.
At a time when the modern concept of the neighbour has not yet been articulated.
Ivan Karamazov conceptually has no choice but to repudiate the figure of the neighbour.
Itself. This is one sentence in which I'm saying that the neighbourhood becomes obscure, difficult to take.
Second, the self that anchored the love of the neighbour.
Each self builds away by this time. You know.
Kirkegaard says in Works of Love that in that injunction, love thy neighbour as thyself much turns on the phrase, as one says.
Right. And here in the US,
is it possible for anyone to misunderstand this as if it were Christianity's intention to proclaim self-love as a as a prescriptive right?
Indeed, on the contrary, it is Christianity's intention to wrest self-love away from US human beings.
That got her to declare this. Is itself a symptom of how much the times have changed.
Right before the consolidation of the new commandment.
The introduction on self-love and self-interest was so strong that elaborate justifications were needed to sidestep it.
Right. But by the time Kirkegaard wrote.
This background, common sense needed to be explicitly asserted against the naturalness of the self formed by the empirical, transcendental doublet.
Right. So that's a second sense in which the neighbour is obscured.
Right. To. The neighbour often appears in this new formulation to sublimated into the new injunction the category of the categorical imperative.
On the one hand, the categorical imperative falls into itself some of the an economy of the neighbour.
Thus, the emphasis on treating humanity within one's own person or another as never merely a means to an end, but an end in itself.
On the other hand, you know, just as well as you talking to common civil income integrity, it seems to institute an economic and economy.
Right. Sharing as he does with God, the assumption that man is evil.
Condemned radically stresses that he does not see the moral reformation of mankind.
Hans scorns famous argument in two words Perpetual peace in the appendix said that
the problem is one of establishing a state that will work even for a race of devils
so that everybody following their self-interest will so check one another that in
the public conduct the result is the same as if they had no such evil dispositions.
What can't any such as you. Need to see is precisely the kind of order that Republican and liberal democracies seek to put in place.
Now, the reason I stress is obscuring and displacement is that in its wake,
even those who desire to practice neighbourliness cannot do so in the old way.
Right. They must articulate a new neighbourliness.
Security guards. Works of love is an index of this.
He picks on equality as a key feature of neighbourliness and equity.
The neighbour is one who is equal. To love the neighbours equality.
He is your neighbour by being your equal before God. But this equality is due unconditionally to every man.
Everyone has it unconditionally. Yeah. No.
Grandiose, utterly not almost certainly not regular, as far as I know if you go to this,
but this was not available in English translation at the time.
But he makes a move that is not just similar, but even more radical.
For him, religion is marked by what he describes as early as 1899 by the quote unquote doctrine of equality.
That phrase becomes, along with other analogues.
Quite pervasive in his writings. In 1899.
He describes his doctrine to Christianity.
In 1909, he remarks that Islam offered equality to all that came within its especially in the manner that no other religion in the world did,
when therefore, about 1000 years after Christ, his followers descended upon India.
Hinduism stood dazed. It seemed to carry everything before it.
The doctrine of equality could not but appeal to the masses where Australian unquote.
Soon after. There is the spicy doctrine of equality in the text at a conference in 1920 against untouchability In 1924,
for example, he declares this phrase and the doctrine of equality as taught by Lord Krishna in the kingdom.
Then in 1937, he derives from the first verse of the issue, punished the quote unquote, the doctrine of equality of all creatures on art,
a doctrine which you quote unquote, should satisfy the cravings of all philosophy Communists.
In between.
In 1927, he declared in Sri Lanka that the doctrine of equality amongst persons and could include that one's neighbour was as good as oneself.
No, the question is. Was equality, the key motive of Christianity or religion more broadly before the 19th century?
This seems actually very unlikely, as we as we know, right?
In fact, Tuticorin Gandhi and his 20th century interlocutors, even more are revolutionising the figure of the neighbour by infusing it with equality.
They are initiating a new neighbourliness.
Right. Perhaps you can get the old figure of the Negro by reading more critically than correctly.
Got a moment. He draws attention to the tension between the V God and never ought to be loud.
When Jesus is asked what is a great commandment in the law, he replies,
Thou shalt love that God with all their heart and with all their soul and with all their mind.
This is the first and great commandment, and the second is like unto it Thou shalt love thy neighbour.
As Dyson on these two commandments Hang all the law and the prophets.
As this double commandment suggests, gone and neighbour and not to be loved in the same way.
Right. The devout are to love God with all their soul, mind and strength.
So much so that God must be loved more than once.
Dearest ones, more than oneself. In other words, God is we love not as an equal,
but as an absolute sovereign sovereign over the devotees all being calling for adoration and obedience in God's Word.
In turn, God loves His duties as a sovereign, not as an equal.
Moreover, since God is often in finite and all pervasive,
a self subordinating love for a sovereign God must be inscribed in oneself so one can love God in obedience and adoration.
Only by having a sovereign relation with oneself or a relation in which one is not equal to that part of oneself which partakes of the divine.
That's what I mean by a sovereign relationship with oneself.
In the Christian traditions, the acceptance of inequality of the self and neighbour is ultimately used in the Augustinian neighbour as parents.
Classic study helps us recognise. Correct.
Augustine's intervention consolidates the conceptual grounding for the Bible that divides sovereign power into
two divine sovereignty with the eternal part of oneself and earthly sovereignty over the mortal part of oneself.
Love thy neighbour as thyself now becomes about loving the eternal part of the neighbour,
even as one may remain in an inimical relation with the mortal part of the neighbour.
Right. Thus does the quasi universality and economy of the neighbour come to be reined in and contained.
Because it chiefs against this containment.
Kirkegaard declaration that the neighbour is the one who is equal remains radical, even for the twisted contradictions of his times.
To illustrate what I mean in a famous narrative in 1861,
a decade and a half after God wrote How do you Jacob's quite Escape from Slavery in North Carolina.
You know, an retells a story from her early childhood about a mistress.
One described by Jacob's editor, a white abolitionist, as kind, considerate.
And now moving on to Harry Jacobs herself. After a brief period of suspense,
the will of my mistress was read and we learned that she had bequeath me to her sister's daughter, a child of five years old.
So vanished of our hopes. My mistress had taught me the precepts of God's Word.
Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself, whatever you would that men shall do unto you.
Do you so even unto them. But I was her slave.
And I suppose she did not recognise me as her neighbour. How do you Jacob's light and how did Jacob's like the discrimination?
Many places and times is drawn to the quasi universalism that the injunction seems to promise.
But Jacob's Enslaver worked with the transcendentalist figure of the neighbour, the Augustinian neighbour, so to speak.
So contrary to what Jacob's, as you currently enslaved, likely did recognise as a neighbour and even an equal,
but only as spiritually, just as mastery of the self is itself part of obedience and adoration of divine.
So to must of the neighbour subordinating and even relating them in the imminent world can be quite compatible
with love of them as spiritual equals and a similar obscuring of equality across the Hindu traditions.
The country invokes the guitar, for example, if all are equal to the devoted,
this is because the duty is ready for absorption to drummer, which is in finite, just as the God of Christian traditions is.
In other words, the equality of all life is mediated by the divine and even the positive traditions famous for what is taken to be.
Their emphasis on equality are marked at best by an ambiguous relation between spiritual equality and what I'm calling imminent equality.
Right. As John King's pathbreaking study of the Berkeley traditions brings out similarly seminars on his essay, which I cited earlier,
is centred around Abdul Bismillah study guest is God,
which is about how the Muslim guest is anything but God to the dominant class Muslim costume design.
Yeah, in some the the good slave owner, the guy in Batman.
These figures whose violence is so evident to us are examples of the New Testament injunction Love thy neighbour as thyself rather than,
you know, violations of it. And there is examples of comparable reductive exhortations, especially in its dominant historical manifestations.
The injunction to love both the neighbour and enemy is not an inequality that does away with God.
Inequality does the domination rather paradoxical do this observation would sound it is about quote unquote
generously inhabiting profoundly unequal relationships of forms such as those involved in enslavement or caste.
This is not at all to say that Kirkegaard and Gandhi were wrong in ascribing equality to the Bible and the guitar in capital.
Marx famously notes that Aristotle falters in his analysis of the forms of value, and he falters.
Marx's Because the circumstances were not ripe.
And I'm quoting Marx now the secret of the expression of value, namely the equality and equivalence of all kinds of labour.
Because and insofar as the human labour in general could not be deciphered until the
concept of human equality had acquired the prominence of a fixed popular opinion.
This, however, becomes possible only in a society where the commodity form is a universal product of the universal form,
of the product of labour, and is the dominant social relation is a relation between men as purchasers of commodities, unquote.
Something not just analogous but related needs to be said of equality.
In the case of the premodern neighbour,
where the neighbour is taken up into theological universalism like Augustine's there the thought of any equality with a neighbour becomes difficult,
maybe impossible. And while the quasi universal tradition of the neighbour is inevitably drawn to equality,
this is an equality that does not yet know its name, that does not yet know its concept.
Right? Just as Marxists of Aristotle, it finds itself unable to accept either domination or subordination.
But like the mercury, the traditions in Western India, it does not and perhaps cannot have.
The vocabulary to articulate this inability affirmatively.
In other words, because the equality of the neighbour was organised around non-sovereign love,
it remained so untimely as to be unthinkable to the consolidation of the modern concept of equality.
Right. The consolidation, in other words, of the quality of the major or of what Gandhi calls the quality of this world.
Only after this modern concept of equality acquired what Marx calls the the prominence of a fixed popular opinion,
could its undertow the quality of the minor be thought?
You will see now why I call this part. I call the stop along the path took on this neighbour.
This is not about this neighbourhood. It's about the preconditions for thinking on this neighbour.
Yeah. And so to draw to this Dr. Clause, then Kirkegaard comes to the brink of the equality of the minor.
But he cannot articulate it.
It could only be articulated in the 20th century by do such as Gandhi or Ambedkar or MLK or similar those who affirm the spirit of liberty,
equality and fraternity, but sought to wrest it away from the empirical, transcendental double doublet from the equality of the major.
In the process, they had to conceive a purely imminent love of the neighbour.
Or more precisely, under the main and transcendent distinction,
they are to conceive a love that responded to the question of forgiveness that Dostoevsky so succinctly formulated.
How two things are they? Equality, this equality of the minor.
This democracy without sovereignty. This is a challenge that Gandhi and his fellow thinkers and actors begin to take up in the wake of the
ruination of both pre-modern traditions of the neighbour and modern sovereignty centred visions of equality.
Following along their path. Their paths really v2 are brought up to the beginning.
Where to go and how to go from this beginning. This is a question that I think we are really beginning to take up.
Thank you.