1 00:00:00,840 --> 00:00:05,070 Thank you for the invitation, Sylvia, and it really is a pleasure to be here today. 2 00:00:06,390 --> 00:00:12,300 My talk today is drawn from a book that I hope to complete in about a year and a half. 3 00:00:13,470 --> 00:00:16,290 It's tentatively titled Democracy of the Mind. 4 00:00:16,450 --> 00:00:21,810 The book, I mean, and it explores how Gandhi and Ambedkar think the figures of the Nakba and the French. 5 00:00:24,030 --> 00:00:27,720 The book will hopefully be the last vacation I write at length on Gandhi. 6 00:00:28,230 --> 00:00:32,190 My future projects will be more working with the writings of Lot on the one hand, 7 00:00:32,190 --> 00:00:36,300 and the mid-20th-century intellectual world of Gujarat on the other hand. 8 00:00:37,230 --> 00:00:41,700 But one never knows. So Gandhi has a way of putting you back in anything you're done with him. 9 00:00:42,810 --> 00:00:54,450 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. 10 00:00:54,450 --> 00:01:02,070 And as you know, when describing satyagraha, which is which is his neologism for the spectrum of activities that include civil disobedience. 11 00:01:02,760 --> 00:01:07,440 Gandhi draws interchangeably on the figures of the friend and the neighbour. 12 00:01:08,730 --> 00:01:16,980 So one of the things that he does is in 1920, for example, during the Khilafat movement in support of the Ottoman caliphate, 13 00:01:16,980 --> 00:01:21,450 he writes, The Muslim man is my neighbour, but he is in distress. 14 00:01:21,690 --> 00:01:29,110 His grievance is legitimate and it is my bond and duty to help him secure redress by every legitimate means in my power. 15 00:01:29,130 --> 00:01:32,880 Even to the extent of losing my life and property. 16 00:01:33,360 --> 00:01:37,650 And this is the way I can build permanent friendship. 17 00:01:38,100 --> 00:01:41,340 M.I.T. with Osama's uncle. 18 00:01:41,940 --> 00:01:46,200 And sometime after the failure of the classic agitation, he still writes. 19 00:01:48,230 --> 00:01:54,200 And I put together after we resuscitate him. Two months have sufficiently broken one another's heads. 20 00:01:54,830 --> 00:02:02,680 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. 21 00:02:02,690 --> 00:02:08,000 I mean, it's certainly not law said we're translating. It is not easy, but not justice. 22 00:02:08,180 --> 00:02:14,270 Maybe not justice, but surrender. And nothing but surrender is a law of friendship. 23 00:02:15,810 --> 00:02:26,620 Unquote. Now, as you also know, God is hardly alone in this emphasis on the neighbour and the friend, his most astute critic. 24 00:02:26,950 --> 00:02:29,980 All right. I'm Dr. Ambedkar. 25 00:02:30,490 --> 00:02:35,590 Centres is posthumously published this time around the theme of monetary friendship. 26 00:02:37,930 --> 00:02:44,140 Interestingly, neither Gandhi nor Ambedkar think they're doing something new in doing all of this. 27 00:02:45,100 --> 00:02:53,800 Gandhi assumes he's only reiterating the Christian injunction to love your neighbour as yourself and the analogous traditions you despise in Hinduism. 28 00:02:54,520 --> 00:03:00,760 Similarly, Ambedkar never dwells on how the figure of the friend is transformed in his invocations of the Buddha. 29 00:03:01,780 --> 00:03:09,430 Still, even if they do not recognise it, something really radical happens in their writings. 30 00:03:10,180 --> 00:03:16,450 They write at a time in a modern commandment, so to speak, has displaced the biblical commandment. 31 00:03:17,230 --> 00:03:21,370 This new commandment is in many ways exemplified in the categorical imperative. 32 00:03:22,030 --> 00:03:27,430 As we know, the injunction to treat humanity within oneself or another as an end. 33 00:03:29,670 --> 00:03:37,890 This is a commandment that is not only philosophical. If God found himself sympathetic to the French Revolution, despite his antipathy to revolutions, 34 00:03:38,400 --> 00:03:45,120 they surely had at least something to do with him in that event, at least a moment of this commandment of his own commandment. 35 00:03:47,100 --> 00:03:52,530 But in different ways. Gandhi and Ambedkar are both critical of this new commandment. 36 00:03:53,340 --> 00:03:57,750 The question is by affirming instead the old commandments around a neighbour and the friend. 37 00:03:59,290 --> 00:04:02,950 But in their very questioning, they borrowed from the new commandment. 38 00:04:04,120 --> 00:04:07,930 A new cocky element, the injunction to equality. 39 00:04:08,680 --> 00:04:13,870 So even as a thing they are affirming the old Christian, Hindu or Buddhist injunction, 40 00:04:14,680 --> 00:04:22,250 they actually inaugurate a new politics, a politics that centred around what I will describe as an equality of the mind. 41 00:04:23,680 --> 00:04:27,730 And what could also be described as Democratic neighbourliness or political friendship. 42 00:04:28,120 --> 00:04:34,820 Right. Now, as you know, the miner is not a new figure in critical theory. 43 00:04:34,830 --> 00:04:46,580 Of course, it embodies the practices, actions or even ways of being that are in a similar bill to the norms of the majority, 44 00:04:46,580 --> 00:04:50,840 as I've written elsewhere again, and the norms of the majority. 45 00:04:52,140 --> 00:05:00,000 Are at work in every form of sovereignty, even in sovereign forms of democracy, such as Republican or liberal democracy. 46 00:05:01,170 --> 00:05:10,320 So equality of the minor strives for liberty, equality and togetherness outside sovereignty. 47 00:05:11,550 --> 00:05:16,380 Such a democracy without sovereignty is not some future utopia. 48 00:05:17,190 --> 00:05:23,129 It is at work already in what we sometimes call the commons as distinct from the public in 49 00:05:23,130 --> 00:05:27,570 the sociality we create outside institutional spaces and sometimes in opposition to them. 50 00:05:27,990 --> 00:05:32,280 For example, in the Shaheen Bagh protests that took place in India around three or so years back, 51 00:05:33,930 --> 00:05:40,590 I would even say that this new neighbourliness is what is most new and most democratic in our present. 52 00:05:40,980 --> 00:05:46,230 Though it is also what is most fragile in our present right now. 53 00:05:48,030 --> 00:05:55,919 You know, you may ask and I wonder about the sometimes myself at a time when sovereign forms of 54 00:05:55,920 --> 00:06:02,310 democracy are under threat from both populist authoritarianism and neo liberalism, 55 00:06:03,510 --> 00:06:08,180 say, the dominance of the poor today. Why should we concern ourselves with democracy? 56 00:06:08,190 --> 00:06:17,320 Because our sovereignty. To which I would say that while we absolutely must defend sovereign forms of democracy, 57 00:06:17,740 --> 00:06:24,070 as Gandhi, an American poet, did much, maybe everything depends on how we do so. 58 00:06:25,030 --> 00:06:35,320 Both populist authoritarianism and neoliberalism are in different ways threats internally generated by sovereign forms of democracy. 59 00:06:36,910 --> 00:06:46,660 And these threats are more likely to be generated when the sovereign forms of democracy become our telos, become what we cannot think beyond. 60 00:06:47,090 --> 00:06:52,540 Right. So even if our immediate goal is to defend sovereign forms of democracy, 61 00:06:52,990 --> 00:07:03,160 we must do so from a perspective that cherishes democracy with our sovereignty as both our horizon and a possibility in our present. 62 00:07:04,660 --> 00:07:07,389 So as I mentioned at the beginning, 63 00:07:07,390 --> 00:07:13,030 the book I am writing is about how they conceptualise and enact this democratic neighbourliness or political friendship. 64 00:07:13,750 --> 00:07:21,010 And today's talk is drawn from the first chapter which offers a conceptual prehistory of the modern neighbour, 65 00:07:21,910 --> 00:07:28,390 which explores the path by which a neighbour as a concept became available for Gandhi to think with. 66 00:07:30,370 --> 00:07:35,830 In what follows. I shall be addressing two sets of questions. 67 00:07:36,700 --> 00:07:45,489 Two clusters of questions. The first is a question that first clusters around the injunction. 68 00:07:45,490 --> 00:07:51,310 The Gandhi encounters the injunction to love the neighbour. 69 00:07:52,360 --> 00:07:55,780 So the questions are what makes injunctions 1 to 1 of neighbourliness? 70 00:07:56,290 --> 00:08:00,550 How is a neighbour transformed by the injunction to love? 71 00:08:01,580 --> 00:08:06,800 How does Gandhi take up this injunction? So that's the first cluster of questions. 72 00:08:08,450 --> 00:08:13,400 The second cluster that I would like to take up is. 73 00:08:14,490 --> 00:08:18,230 About the modern remaking of the Negro. Right. 74 00:08:20,060 --> 00:08:30,170 What is a new set that emerges with the consolidation of the of modern commandments, such as the categorical imperative? 75 00:08:30,680 --> 00:08:36,760 How does the new self. Obscure the older figure of the neighbour. 76 00:08:37,600 --> 00:08:43,330 How does this obscurity lead to the emergence of a new neighbourliness centred around equality? 77 00:08:46,850 --> 00:08:55,720 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. 78 00:08:55,730 --> 00:09:01,640 The first cluster, which is what makes a relationship into one of neighbourliness. 79 00:09:03,050 --> 00:09:07,610 And an initial clue is provided by quadratic phrase and means for us that in 1909 80 00:09:07,610 --> 00:09:12,770 Gandhi translates as neighbour as possible on us or people residing nearby. 81 00:09:13,670 --> 00:09:17,330 So neighbours are those who are nearby. 82 00:09:18,340 --> 00:09:27,550 This resonates also with the etymology of the English word neighbour or night and or inhabitant old English. 83 00:09:28,870 --> 00:09:32,210 But the question is near how? Yeah. 84 00:09:33,130 --> 00:09:40,570 And. Here. Gandhi's insistence the word on itself provides a clue. 85 00:09:41,350 --> 00:09:50,260 In our everyday parlance, we tend to reserve the term who for entities that have not just sentience but interiority. 86 00:09:51,700 --> 00:09:55,270 Relatedly, we resort to the word what the term what. 87 00:09:55,780 --> 00:10:03,340 For entities that do not have interiority, or at least we do not refer to the interiority even get often of what? 88 00:10:04,900 --> 00:10:14,350 We also of course tend to hierarchies entities by this criterion any place of who above the what with the figure of the neighbour. 89 00:10:15,460 --> 00:10:23,860 This way of distinction between who and what in terms of a criterion internal to them deposited in them comes undone. 90 00:10:25,760 --> 00:10:35,090 Somebody or something is a neighbour, not because of the interiority or lack thereof, but because of their relationship to my interiority. 91 00:10:36,220 --> 00:10:40,450 Right, because they are related to who I am. Yeah. 92 00:10:41,110 --> 00:10:45,340 Neighbourliness, in other words, has to do with expediency. 93 00:10:45,490 --> 00:10:49,900 Another entity in my interiority. 94 00:10:51,040 --> 00:10:52,600 So I think it ought to be my neighbour. 95 00:10:52,750 --> 00:11:01,240 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. 96 00:11:02,080 --> 00:11:09,880 But that thing can become a neighbour if I develop a relationship with it in my interiority, 97 00:11:11,320 --> 00:11:16,060 as Gandhi arguably did, with the many painful stabs to which he became attached. 98 00:11:16,240 --> 00:11:23,440 Right. And for one of which he made an associate notoriously or famously walked back many miles during the Malachi remarked. 99 00:11:25,240 --> 00:11:32,380 And so I suppose what I'm stressing is that the figure of the neighbour is constituted by an emphasis on the whole. 100 00:11:32,980 --> 00:11:41,130 Yeah. And again, you can see that there's nothing necessarily, you know, maybe one of the frightening things about the. 101 00:11:44,310 --> 00:11:50,910 About 911 for Americans most precisely that the discourse are at least their neighbours they did not know that they had. 102 00:11:53,590 --> 00:11:54,280 Put differently. 103 00:11:54,670 --> 00:12:04,000 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? 104 00:12:05,320 --> 00:12:10,690 I cannot even ask what is the criterion of the neighbour? The neighbour is not, 105 00:12:11,290 --> 00:12:17,889 or at least not primarily of what the neighbour can become or what only when viewed from 106 00:12:17,890 --> 00:12:23,140 outside the problematic of neighbourliness within the problematic of neighbourliness. 107 00:12:23,950 --> 00:12:34,390 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. 108 00:12:34,540 --> 00:12:45,910 You know all three figures are that friend and neighbour are inseparable from a emphasis on the right. 109 00:12:46,990 --> 00:12:51,400 Now of course I don't need to stress this, 110 00:12:51,790 --> 00:13:02,140 but just to stress right there is nothing at all democratic or empowering or non-violent about relationships of. 111 00:13:03,950 --> 00:13:15,020 Yeah. Some of the most violence, massive violence has been directed against neighbours against those identified as in a monstrously. 112 00:13:16,030 --> 00:13:21,040 Right. Where there's Jews and Nazis, Muslims and Dalits in India today. 113 00:13:22,120 --> 00:13:25,600 And we could have countless other horrifying examples. 114 00:13:26,050 --> 00:13:34,990 Yeah. Indeed, part of the allure of modern citizenship for many of the most marginalised is 115 00:13:34,990 --> 00:13:41,010 that it enables an exit from the violence of unequal relationships of rights. 116 00:13:41,470 --> 00:13:45,190 And it seems to affirm instant and equality of what? 117 00:13:46,790 --> 00:13:49,930 And those who affirm the quality of the mind. 118 00:13:52,250 --> 00:13:56,480 Often recognise the importance of the quality of work. 119 00:13:57,470 --> 00:14:02,160 This is why they do not seek so much to reject. Or blade? 120 00:14:02,460 --> 00:14:11,960 The quality of what? Somebody has to step back from it so as to pursue a more democratic politics to this 121 00:14:11,960 --> 00:14:15,080 relationship with the equality of what we can get back to the community if you want. 122 00:14:15,230 --> 00:14:19,639 Right. So, so much for the first question that I wanted to address. 123 00:14:19,640 --> 00:14:23,960 We just don't know who is the neighbour. 124 00:14:24,650 --> 00:14:28,670 Right. And the answer the question is also the answer as you saw. 125 00:14:29,270 --> 00:14:38,780 Right. Let me move on to the second to second aspect of the first cluster of questions and turn to intertwined issues of 126 00:14:38,780 --> 00:14:46,490 how the injunction to love transforms the figure of the neighbour and how Gandhi encounters this interaction. 127 00:14:48,020 --> 00:14:53,930 Now, this is a group of South Asian, as I suspect all of you read deep autobiography and you remember, I'm sure that, 128 00:14:54,840 --> 00:14:59,990 you know, Gandhi likely reads the Bible for the first time while a student in England in the early 1890. 129 00:15:00,560 --> 00:15:05,720 And of that first reading of the Bible, he writes that the Old Testament, quote unquote, sent me to sleep. 130 00:15:08,420 --> 00:15:20,270 And he goes on. But the New Testament produced a different impression, especially the Sermon on the Mount, which went straight to my heart. 131 00:15:22,860 --> 00:15:31,830 And in later years, he often invokes a New Testament when talking of the Nakba, specifically referring to an injunction. 132 00:15:32,040 --> 00:15:35,410 Love your neighbour as yourself. Right. 133 00:15:36,740 --> 00:15:44,560 Now. The biblical injunctions on the neighbour have been the subject of copious commentaries and analysis, 134 00:15:45,490 --> 00:15:51,310 but maybe approaching them from the prism of the who and what may still shed some fresh light on them. 135 00:15:52,750 --> 00:16:01,569 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 136 00:16:01,570 --> 00:16:07,120 Testament version that Gandhi likely had at hand the famous passage from Leviticus. 137 00:16:08,060 --> 00:16:12,890 Enjoying Jones love for the new book, but does so by constricting that figure. 138 00:16:13,250 --> 00:16:21,410 Right? Neighbours are no longer every relationship of for example you know but one sort of. 139 00:16:22,340 --> 00:16:27,770 They are just contrasted to other relations of, for example, enemies and strangers. 140 00:16:28,520 --> 00:16:34,100 There are injunctions against mixing strangers. There is one law for the stranger and another for the native or human. 141 00:16:34,640 --> 00:16:42,560 And as for enemies, hating them and wreaking destruction on them is quite acceptable, even desirable. 142 00:16:43,940 --> 00:16:49,730 By contrast, neighbours are those who, even if not intimate, are of one's own people. 143 00:16:51,670 --> 00:16:55,340 Right now. Did it unload somewhere. 144 00:16:55,350 --> 00:17:00,179 I think in one of his interviews that the who and the what are quote unquote, 145 00:17:00,180 --> 00:17:07,740 terribly reversible delivery technical injunction works this reversibility in both directions. 146 00:17:08,460 --> 00:17:10,920 Sometimes all that seems to matter is who the other is. 147 00:17:10,920 --> 00:17:16,080 The neighbours in a find or intimate, the enemy or stranger is potentially monstrous and so on. 148 00:17:17,400 --> 00:17:28,260 At other time it accentuates reversibility in the direction of what separating neighbour enemies stranger from each other in terms of what they are, 149 00:17:29,190 --> 00:17:35,160 rather than only who they are determining the who in terms of the what, so to speak. 150 00:17:36,450 --> 00:17:43,080 So that's the Old Testament for you. Now, if, on the other hand, can be shaken to his heart by the New Testament. 151 00:17:44,650 --> 00:17:52,330 Then this was likely because it upturns the whole hierarchy and intimates in an economy. 152 00:17:53,590 --> 00:18:02,740 For example, the Sermon on the Mount, which Gandhi, as you saw, was so influenced by in the challenges the Old Testament economic criterion, 153 00:18:03,520 --> 00:18:08,710 ripe for sorting neighbour from enemy and stranger, and for subordinating the whole to the world. 154 00:18:10,930 --> 00:18:18,820 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. 155 00:18:18,850 --> 00:18:22,000 It has been said. Thou shalt love thy neighbour. And he died to me. 156 00:18:22,420 --> 00:18:26,470 But I say unto you, love your enemies, bless them, because you would do good, 157 00:18:26,710 --> 00:18:30,980 good to them that hate you and pray for them, which, despite flee, use you and prosecute you. 158 00:18:31,720 --> 00:18:35,490 The relation with the neighbour is no cost as an economic right. 159 00:18:37,120 --> 00:18:41,860 I can give more quotes, but I don't think I need to. We can come back to these more later if you want. 160 00:18:42,280 --> 00:18:51,100 What I want to stress for now is that when neighbourliness leans into this and economy, two aspects are particularly noteworthy. 161 00:18:52,180 --> 00:18:56,620 For a start, the Niebuhr intimates a mysticism. 162 00:18:57,660 --> 00:19:03,870 Right drank primarily. And I think we can distinguish between the theological and the mystical. 163 00:19:05,770 --> 00:19:11,350 A compartment is till logical when it ascribes sovereignty to the sacred. 164 00:19:13,750 --> 00:19:23,170 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. 165 00:19:24,680 --> 00:19:32,300 It can also be considered an imminent criterion, as with the various human isms that provide that around the world today. 166 00:19:32,960 --> 00:19:42,070 Right. By contrast, the neighbour of the Pauline family formulation and I realise I didn't read out the Pauline formulation, 167 00:19:42,070 --> 00:19:51,280 but I suppose all of you know it. By contrast, a neighbour of the Pauline formulation has no evident relationship to a transcendent God. 168 00:19:51,760 --> 00:19:58,090 You know, there's actually a repressed relationship, contrary to what Jacob dubs as use, but I can come back to that later. 169 00:19:58,870 --> 00:20:05,800 In other words, the neighbour is no secret without being evidently sovereign. 170 00:20:06,640 --> 00:20:17,980 Yeah, this sexuality without sovereignty is the crux of mystical traditions whose chief inability it was discovered. 171 00:20:17,980 --> 00:20:25,450 His chief characteristic is the inability to conceive of the sacred as sovereign. 172 00:20:26,780 --> 00:20:30,630 Yeah. Second. 173 00:20:30,780 --> 00:20:39,030 And by implication this Pauline Niebuhr intimates a quasi universalism rather than universalism. 174 00:20:41,340 --> 00:20:46,860 Usually the universal is inclusive because of its infinite sovereignty. 175 00:20:47,580 --> 00:20:53,900 It is such a sovereignty that we ascribe to God in transcendent traditions or to the human animating traditions. 176 00:20:54,690 --> 00:20:57,690 The all inclusiveness of the Polish people. 177 00:20:57,990 --> 00:21:05,549 By contrast, because it does not mediate its relationship with the neighbour to God, cannot and does not belong to this order of anything. 178 00:21:05,550 --> 00:21:15,510 They do rather fall in love, even if it is in finite, is by a finite being and for finite beings. 179 00:21:16,170 --> 00:21:23,100 Right. So it must proceed by experiencing each and every other in one's interiority. 180 00:21:23,990 --> 00:21:27,210 Read how to Enact this quasi universalism. 181 00:21:27,690 --> 00:21:34,350 This is a challenge. I would say the challenge that Pauline Love wrestles with right now. 182 00:21:35,100 --> 00:21:42,989 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, 183 00:21:42,990 --> 00:21:46,860 which is how Gandhi comes to Gandhi's objection to the quasi universalism, 184 00:21:47,480 --> 00:21:54,270 quasi universal neighbourliness that he gleans from the New Testament is possibly responsible 185 00:21:54,270 --> 00:21:59,700 for at least some of his anxiety that he uses in his letters to Sri Rajendra around 1894. 186 00:22:00,420 --> 00:22:05,569 The anxiety about whether. The religious resources of India. 187 00:22:05,570 --> 00:22:14,660 Traditions are ambitious enough to address these questions of right conduct now partially addressed in this advice. 188 00:22:15,500 --> 00:22:18,799 He takes you reading the Geeta carefully. Around this time. 189 00:22:18,800 --> 00:22:21,920 He also finds his way to the RAM 13 months. Right. 190 00:22:22,670 --> 00:22:34,040 And. In these traditions, he comes to discern a quasi universality very similar to that which I encountered in the New Testament. 191 00:22:36,320 --> 00:22:43,640 Now, as you know, the text that he often turns to, you know, is is the guitar. 192 00:22:43,850 --> 00:22:50,120 Right? And the guitar begins by begins with original, you know, 193 00:22:50,810 --> 00:22:58,820 basically expressing anguish at the fact that those these two battle against assuaging his own people. 194 00:23:00,110 --> 00:23:06,230 Krishna and the Geeta dismisses distinguish from Krishna pronounced pronouncements. 195 00:23:06,260 --> 00:23:11,210 Gandhi develops a reading that a love for the neighbour flows from the very formlessness of the divine. 196 00:23:11,930 --> 00:23:16,820 This is doubtless attended just reading, but we don't need to go into that to write. 197 00:23:17,660 --> 00:23:24,649 Gandhi's Association of Love and a non-Sovereign divinity might also have been reinforced by the bonhomie bhakti tradition, 198 00:23:24,650 --> 00:23:25,880 which is brought up by his mother. 199 00:23:26,900 --> 00:23:36,680 As Brendan Larocque notes, the founder of the tradition, Muhammad Pranab, was notable for his eclectic engagement with religious traditions, 200 00:23:36,680 --> 00:23:44,450 his critique of caste and his condemnation of ritualistic orthodoxy in his own lifetime. 201 00:23:44,570 --> 00:23:51,470 Brown not faced considerable opposition for his insistence about widows and lower costs be allowed to take initiation into the order. 202 00:23:52,070 --> 00:23:53,570 This is again, Brendan writing, 203 00:23:54,260 --> 00:24:04,130 and his writings Wear and life are marked by a peculiar combination of Vishnu white belief with Sufi mysticism and sheer millenarian ism. 204 00:24:05,600 --> 00:24:12,829 Brendan also notes all of this has led in our times to charges by Hindu nationalists that run up to us a quote unquote, 205 00:24:12,830 --> 00:24:19,330 a muslim who tricked in those into becoming Muslims. Equally importantly, Candy, 206 00:24:19,330 --> 00:24:27,909 Candy would have found a figure to the quasi analogue to the quasi universality of the neighbour in the figure of the guest as, 207 00:24:27,910 --> 00:24:31,840 for example, in the induction of kitchen table. Our guest is not. 208 00:24:32,560 --> 00:24:40,540 As Simon Dasani points out, the etymology of oddity is itself suggested the one who comes in an untimely way. 209 00:24:41,600 --> 00:24:50,570 Yeah. So the guest is not just the one to whom reciprocal and timely obligations are owed within an economic logic. 210 00:24:50,930 --> 00:24:56,750 The guest is precisely the an economic one who arrives outside the events of reciprocity. 211 00:24:57,700 --> 00:25:08,079 Right now I could multiply examples from Jainism and Buddhism, but for now, suffice to say that Gandhi can, without difficulty, 212 00:25:08,080 --> 00:25:16,110 presume that the injunction love thy neighbour as thyself is something that he can also draw on as a Hindu. 213 00:25:17,290 --> 00:25:28,720 Yeah. I should add here that beyond the point, the point being the degree to which the origins seeking impulse of eurocentrism must be. 214 00:25:29,880 --> 00:25:30,540 Contested. 215 00:25:32,140 --> 00:25:41,050 The question of whether Gandhi comes to the quasi universal level through the Bible or through Hindu texts is not particularly interesting, right? 216 00:25:41,560 --> 00:25:44,890 Symptomatically, Gandhi himself is quite uninterested in it. 217 00:25:46,540 --> 00:25:49,179 Indeed, on one occasion he writes, I've learned much from the West, 218 00:25:49,180 --> 00:25:52,300 and I should not be surprised to find that I learn something about things I do from the West. 219 00:25:53,080 --> 00:25:58,120 I am not concerned what ideas of mine are the result of my foreign contacts. 220 00:25:58,720 --> 00:26:05,050 It is enough for me to know that my views on ahimsa have become now a part and parcel of my own being unquote. 221 00:26:06,360 --> 00:26:17,219 Okay, so, so much then for the first cluster of questions. Let's move on now to the second cluster, which, if you remember, 222 00:26:17,220 --> 00:26:22,350 is about the new commandment that arises in the 19th century and how that transforms things. 223 00:26:22,680 --> 00:26:32,780 Right. And here we start by recalling what Ivan Karamazov tells his brother Alyosha industrialists, 224 00:26:32,790 --> 00:26:37,350 this classic classic and I quote, I must make an admission. 225 00:26:37,530 --> 00:26:46,260 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. 226 00:26:47,400 --> 00:26:50,070 Perhaps if the parents were lying. 227 00:26:51,060 --> 00:26:58,110 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. 228 00:26:58,290 --> 00:27:05,010 Onward. Now, as you know, Karamazov is hardly alone in his. 229 00:27:05,040 --> 00:27:10,770 Ivan Karamazov is hardly alone in his scepticism in civilisation and its discontents. 230 00:27:11,190 --> 00:27:19,650 Freud systematically eviscerates the biblical injunction and describes it as a manifestation of the cultural superego. 231 00:27:20,410 --> 00:27:23,489 Right. And he says, 232 00:27:23,490 --> 00:27:27,809 and I'm quoting again from the commandment Love thy neighbour as yourself is 233 00:27:27,810 --> 00:27:32,640 the strongest defence against human aggression and an excellent example of the 234 00:27:32,910 --> 00:27:37,709 psychological manner in which the cultural superego posits It is impossible to 235 00:27:37,710 --> 00:27:41,700 keep this commandment such a huge inflation of love can only lower its value, 236 00:27:41,730 --> 00:27:50,100 not remove the problem. Now Freud's and Karamazov pronouncements occur against a backdrop of the rise of a new commandment, 237 00:27:50,850 --> 00:27:55,890 which, as I noted earlier, was by the 19th century displacing the biblical injunction. 238 00:27:57,210 --> 00:28:02,130 What is also displaced in the process was the very concept of the self that the 239 00:28:02,130 --> 00:28:07,230 biblical injunction depended on a self organise around the primacy of the neighbour. 240 00:28:08,160 --> 00:28:16,650 The new self was organised around man as an empirical, transcendental doublet to recall focus description. 241 00:28:17,590 --> 00:28:25,810 Right. You know, we answer the biblical injunction. We are very familiar, even over familiar with descriptions of this new South. 242 00:28:26,640 --> 00:28:35,360 But once again, perhaps stigmatising the self in terms of who and what and the terrible reversibility of that pair, 243 00:28:35,370 --> 00:28:42,180 as you know, may yield fresh insights to proceed in that spirit. 244 00:28:43,150 --> 00:28:48,220 The empirical, transcendental doublet was also marked by a new equality, 245 00:28:49,930 --> 00:28:56,830 one that works for distinctive doublet and incommensurability built on comments. 246 00:28:57,070 --> 00:29:00,340 Building a hall that pivots on a what? 247 00:29:01,350 --> 00:29:09,550 Right. Now, as you know, the quality of what is the title of a famous essay by Amartya Sen. 248 00:29:10,580 --> 00:29:20,690 Yeah. The unspoken assumption of that is in an assumption so commonsensical to send as to be not what demonising is at all. 249 00:29:20,690 --> 00:29:24,170 Why is that equalities always in terms of some criteria. 250 00:29:26,150 --> 00:29:29,400 Hence the quote unquote. What of the title? Right. 251 00:29:30,560 --> 00:29:37,910 This. What is the crux of the new concept of equality for it makes equality abstract, 252 00:29:37,910 --> 00:29:43,940 incommensurable such a common abstract equality of what is fundamentally different from the equality of, 253 00:29:43,940 --> 00:29:48,800 say, warriors who are equal to each other in their fearlessness towards debt. 254 00:29:49,640 --> 00:29:57,980 This common trouble in the abstract equality the what is arguably what forms the empirical part of false doublet. 255 00:29:59,770 --> 00:30:06,219 At the same time, this new equality also brings into being a distinctive who the transcendental part 256 00:30:06,220 --> 00:30:12,040 of what goes dominant that far is instantiated most clearly perhaps in the content, 257 00:30:12,040 --> 00:30:19,540 categorical imperative or the injunction to treat humanity rather than oneself or another as never merely a means to an end, 258 00:30:19,540 --> 00:30:29,710 but also an end in itself. It is this injunction, which includes the emphasis in liberal traditions on dignity, 259 00:30:31,080 --> 00:30:40,880 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. 260 00:30:41,620 --> 00:30:46,180 In other words, what I'm trying to say is that the content and. 261 00:30:48,030 --> 00:30:53,070 Nationalist visions are premised on something paradoxical. 262 00:30:54,450 --> 00:30:59,220 Incommensurable incommensurability. If I to put it this way. 263 00:30:59,670 --> 00:31:09,480 Yeah. And while this new equality is organised around a secularisation of imminent rather than transcendent entities, 264 00:31:10,020 --> 00:31:19,050 the main entity being man above all right, it is still theological in the sense that it treats these entities as sovereign. 265 00:31:20,370 --> 00:31:29,800 Yeah. The world of this empirical, transcendental doublet is what Gandhi describes of the phrase atomic zero or modern civility, 266 00:31:31,030 --> 00:31:37,510 and when he describes two violence. He observes, as you'll note that its water is. 267 00:31:40,970 --> 00:31:52,220 I'd quote unquote usurp the function of Godhead would differently they make the human into a sovereign subject with limitless or in finite, 268 00:31:52,220 --> 00:31:57,300 in the sense of constantly seeking mastery. Okay. 269 00:31:57,600 --> 00:32:03,270 Now, the interesting thing is that with the rise of this new commandment. 270 00:32:06,300 --> 00:32:15,540 The older figure of the Nebo, where the theological or quasi university is not just displeased but also obscured. 271 00:32:16,870 --> 00:32:29,770 Right. This obscuring is because the epistemological frame changes so drastically as to make the figure of the Niebuhr increasingly incomprehensible. 272 00:32:30,760 --> 00:32:38,930 Yeah. One might say that Iran Karamazov and the Freud of Civilisation and its discontents speak from within. 273 00:32:38,930 --> 00:32:42,540 It is obscuring. Yeah. Here. 274 00:32:42,540 --> 00:32:48,450 I would like to note just three aspects of this obscuring. 275 00:32:51,280 --> 00:32:55,510 And you know, because in a sense is obscuring is also clarifying. That's what I want to come to eventually. 276 00:32:56,020 --> 00:33:03,130 Yes. It's upskirting is what makes possible the new concept of the that Gandhi and others arrived at to befriend to. 277 00:33:04,480 --> 00:33:04,960 First. 278 00:33:06,060 --> 00:33:15,330 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. 279 00:33:17,120 --> 00:33:20,200 Yeah. To illustrate what I mean by this. 280 00:33:20,890 --> 00:33:24,280 Consider the example that Iran sets before his brother Alyosha. 281 00:33:25,150 --> 00:33:33,070 You know, a mother faced with the general who has ordered her child to be torn to pieces by his homes. 282 00:33:33,670 --> 00:33:41,920 Yvonne says, quote, That quote has no right to forgive the tormentor, even of the child himself, to forgive him. 283 00:33:43,840 --> 00:33:54,790 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. 284 00:33:54,950 --> 00:34:03,490 Right. We can get to that later. What disturbs me does not state, but what we might infer from his example is also this, 285 00:34:04,240 --> 00:34:09,100 that contrary to what Jacob Dobbs or Agamben might in different ways argue. 286 00:34:10,450 --> 00:34:17,080 Even the Pauline injunction de la once neighbour as oneself is surreptitiously 287 00:34:17,590 --> 00:34:22,330 underwritten by the existence of a God who can forgive what we cannot forgive. 288 00:34:22,900 --> 00:34:26,670 That is, if the mother cannot forgive the tormentor. 289 00:34:26,950 --> 00:34:31,030 But God can forgive the tormentor, which is what makes love thy neighbour possible. 290 00:34:31,810 --> 00:34:36,490 Having lost his faith in a God. 291 00:34:36,580 --> 00:34:41,170 At a time when the modern concept of the neighbour has not yet been articulated. 292 00:34:42,220 --> 00:34:48,340 Ivan Karamazov conceptually has no choice but to repudiate the figure of the neighbour. 293 00:34:49,460 --> 00:34:54,920 Itself. This is one sentence in which I'm saying that the neighbourhood becomes obscure, difficult to take. 294 00:34:56,420 --> 00:35:00,620 Second, the self that anchored the love of the neighbour. 295 00:35:01,060 --> 00:35:05,290 Each self builds away by this time. You know. 296 00:35:06,360 --> 00:35:14,250 Kirkegaard says in Works of Love that in that injunction, love thy neighbour as thyself much turns on the phrase, as one says. 297 00:35:14,820 --> 00:35:16,920 Right. And here in the US, 298 00:35:16,920 --> 00:35:26,820 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? 299 00:35:27,540 --> 00:35:34,620 Indeed, on the contrary, it is Christianity's intention to wrest self-love away from US human beings. 300 00:35:36,260 --> 00:35:41,780 That got her to declare this. Is itself a symptom of how much the times have changed. 301 00:35:42,890 --> 00:35:46,430 Right before the consolidation of the new commandment. 302 00:35:47,060 --> 00:35:55,340 The introduction on self-love and self-interest was so strong that elaborate justifications were needed to sidestep it. 303 00:35:56,000 --> 00:35:59,180 Right. But by the time Kirkegaard wrote. 304 00:36:00,270 --> 00:36:11,280 This background, common sense needed to be explicitly asserted against the naturalness of the self formed by the empirical, transcendental doublet. 305 00:36:11,760 --> 00:36:15,690 Right. So that's a second sense in which the neighbour is obscured. 306 00:36:16,650 --> 00:36:27,470 Right. To. The neighbour often appears in this new formulation to sublimated into the new injunction the category of the categorical imperative. 307 00:36:28,430 --> 00:36:34,190 On the one hand, the categorical imperative falls into itself some of the an economy of the neighbour. 308 00:36:34,670 --> 00:36:41,660 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. 309 00:36:42,620 --> 00:36:53,090 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. 310 00:36:54,240 --> 00:36:59,469 Right. Sharing as he does with God, the assumption that man is evil. 311 00:36:59,470 --> 00:37:03,970 Condemned radically stresses that he does not see the moral reformation of mankind. 312 00:37:04,810 --> 00:37:11,410 Hans scorns famous argument in two words Perpetual peace in the appendix said that 313 00:37:11,410 --> 00:37:16,000 the problem is one of establishing a state that will work even for a race of devils 314 00:37:16,900 --> 00:37:21,670 so that everybody following their self-interest will so check one another that in 315 00:37:21,670 --> 00:37:25,930 the public conduct the result is the same as if they had no such evil dispositions. 316 00:37:26,830 --> 00:37:37,680 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. 317 00:37:40,760 --> 00:37:45,860 Now, the reason I stress is obscuring and displacement is that in its wake, 318 00:37:46,310 --> 00:37:53,000 even those who desire to practice neighbourliness cannot do so in the old way. 319 00:37:54,490 --> 00:37:58,530 Right. They must articulate a new neighbourliness. 320 00:38:00,710 --> 00:38:04,430 Security guards. Works of love is an index of this. 321 00:38:05,920 --> 00:38:09,730 He picks on equality as a key feature of neighbourliness and equity. 322 00:38:10,330 --> 00:38:14,480 The neighbour is one who is equal. To love the neighbours equality. 323 00:38:15,550 --> 00:38:20,750 He is your neighbour by being your equal before God. But this equality is due unconditionally to every man. 324 00:38:21,230 --> 00:38:25,130 Everyone has it unconditionally. Yeah. No. 325 00:38:26,800 --> 00:38:32,080 Grandiose, utterly not almost certainly not regular, as far as I know if you go to this, 326 00:38:32,080 --> 00:38:35,110 but this was not available in English translation at the time. 327 00:38:35,620 --> 00:38:41,320 But he makes a move that is not just similar, but even more radical. 328 00:38:43,580 --> 00:38:52,670 For him, religion is marked by what he describes as early as 1899 by the quote unquote doctrine of equality. 329 00:38:54,080 --> 00:38:59,030 That phrase becomes, along with other analogues. 330 00:38:59,900 --> 00:39:04,450 Quite pervasive in his writings. In 1899. 331 00:39:04,450 --> 00:39:06,490 He describes his doctrine to Christianity. 332 00:39:07,210 --> 00:39:14,440 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, 333 00:39:15,040 --> 00:39:19,870 when therefore, about 1000 years after Christ, his followers descended upon India. 334 00:39:20,410 --> 00:39:24,160 Hinduism stood dazed. It seemed to carry everything before it. 335 00:39:24,520 --> 00:39:30,880 The doctrine of equality could not but appeal to the masses where Australian unquote. 336 00:39:33,970 --> 00:39:47,450 Soon after. There is the spicy doctrine of equality in the text at a conference in 1920 against untouchability In 1924, 337 00:39:47,450 --> 00:39:53,480 for example, he declares this phrase and the doctrine of equality as taught by Lord Krishna in the kingdom. 338 00:39:54,530 --> 00:40:02,360 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, 339 00:40:02,960 --> 00:40:08,420 a doctrine which you quote unquote, should satisfy the cravings of all philosophy Communists. 340 00:40:09,710 --> 00:40:10,430 In between. 341 00:40:10,700 --> 00:40:20,530 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. 342 00:40:23,630 --> 00:40:31,750 No, the question is. Was equality, the key motive of Christianity or religion more broadly before the 19th century? 343 00:40:32,680 --> 00:40:35,830 This seems actually very unlikely, as we as we know, right? 344 00:40:36,580 --> 00:40:44,380 In fact, Tuticorin Gandhi and his 20th century interlocutors, even more are revolutionising the figure of the neighbour by infusing it with equality. 345 00:40:44,920 --> 00:40:48,160 They are initiating a new neighbourliness. 346 00:40:49,590 --> 00:40:54,799 Right. Perhaps you can get the old figure of the Negro by reading more critically than correctly. 347 00:40:54,800 --> 00:41:00,140 Got a moment. He draws attention to the tension between the V God and never ought to be loud. 348 00:41:00,890 --> 00:41:04,940 When Jesus is asked what is a great commandment in the law, he replies, 349 00:41:05,570 --> 00:41:10,820 Thou shalt love that God with all their heart and with all their soul and with all their mind. 350 00:41:10,910 --> 00:41:16,850 This is the first and great commandment, and the second is like unto it Thou shalt love thy neighbour. 351 00:41:16,850 --> 00:41:21,140 As Dyson on these two commandments Hang all the law and the prophets. 352 00:41:22,520 --> 00:41:27,550 As this double commandment suggests, gone and neighbour and not to be loved in the same way. 353 00:41:28,590 --> 00:41:32,370 Right. The devout are to love God with all their soul, mind and strength. 354 00:41:32,790 --> 00:41:35,939 So much so that God must be loved more than once. 355 00:41:35,940 --> 00:41:40,799 Dearest ones, more than oneself. In other words, God is we love not as an equal, 356 00:41:40,800 --> 00:41:47,790 but as an absolute sovereign sovereign over the devotees all being calling for adoration and obedience in God's Word. 357 00:41:48,210 --> 00:41:52,500 In turn, God loves His duties as a sovereign, not as an equal. 358 00:41:54,970 --> 00:41:58,150 Moreover, since God is often in finite and all pervasive, 359 00:41:58,810 --> 00:42:06,620 a self subordinating love for a sovereign God must be inscribed in oneself so one can love God in obedience and adoration. 360 00:42:06,670 --> 00:42:18,580 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. 361 00:42:19,450 --> 00:42:21,870 That's what I mean by a sovereign relationship with oneself. 362 00:42:25,000 --> 00:42:33,970 In the Christian traditions, the acceptance of inequality of the self and neighbour is ultimately used in the Augustinian neighbour as parents. 363 00:42:34,030 --> 00:42:37,380 Classic study helps us recognise. Correct. 364 00:42:37,890 --> 00:42:43,500 Augustine's intervention consolidates the conceptual grounding for the Bible that divides sovereign power into 365 00:42:43,500 --> 00:42:49,950 two divine sovereignty with the eternal part of oneself and earthly sovereignty over the mortal part of oneself. 366 00:42:50,790 --> 00:42:55,680 Love thy neighbour as thyself now becomes about loving the eternal part of the neighbour, 367 00:42:56,160 --> 00:43:00,380 even as one may remain in an inimical relation with the mortal part of the neighbour. 368 00:43:01,020 --> 00:43:08,100 Right. Thus does the quasi universality and economy of the neighbour come to be reined in and contained. 369 00:43:09,840 --> 00:43:13,500 Because it chiefs against this containment. 370 00:43:14,460 --> 00:43:22,230 Kirkegaard declaration that the neighbour is the one who is equal remains radical, even for the twisted contradictions of his times. 371 00:43:23,070 --> 00:43:26,610 To illustrate what I mean in a famous narrative in 1861, 372 00:43:27,210 --> 00:43:35,940 a decade and a half after God wrote How do you Jacob's quite Escape from Slavery in North Carolina. 373 00:43:36,840 --> 00:43:40,910 You know, an retells a story from her early childhood about a mistress. 374 00:43:41,360 --> 00:43:46,520 One described by Jacob's editor, a white abolitionist, as kind, considerate. 375 00:43:47,390 --> 00:43:52,760 And now moving on to Harry Jacobs herself. After a brief period of suspense, 376 00:43:52,760 --> 00:44:00,680 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. 377 00:44:01,400 --> 00:44:06,200 So vanished of our hopes. My mistress had taught me the precepts of God's Word. 378 00:44:06,380 --> 00:44:11,780 Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself, whatever you would that men shall do unto you. 379 00:44:12,080 --> 00:44:16,160 Do you so even unto them. But I was her slave. 380 00:44:16,700 --> 00:44:26,010 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? 381 00:44:26,040 --> 00:44:30,480 Many places and times is drawn to the quasi universalism that the injunction seems to promise. 382 00:44:31,350 --> 00:44:37,830 But Jacob's Enslaver worked with the transcendentalist figure of the neighbour, the Augustinian neighbour, so to speak. 383 00:44:38,400 --> 00:44:47,250 So contrary to what Jacob's, as you currently enslaved, likely did recognise as a neighbour and even an equal, 384 00:44:47,250 --> 00:44:53,700 but only as spiritually, just as mastery of the self is itself part of obedience and adoration of divine. 385 00:44:54,120 --> 00:45:00,149 So to must of the neighbour subordinating and even relating them in the imminent world can be quite compatible 386 00:45:00,150 --> 00:45:09,120 with love of them as spiritual equals and a similar obscuring of equality across the Hindu traditions. 387 00:45:09,120 --> 00:45:13,079 The country invokes the guitar, for example, if all are equal to the devoted, 388 00:45:13,080 --> 00:45:19,980 this is because the duty is ready for absorption to drummer, which is in finite, just as the God of Christian traditions is. 389 00:45:20,670 --> 00:45:28,860 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. 390 00:45:28,860 --> 00:45:38,850 Their emphasis on equality are marked at best by an ambiguous relation between spiritual equality and what I'm calling imminent equality. 391 00:45:39,480 --> 00:45:49,830 Right. As John King's pathbreaking study of the Berkeley traditions brings out similarly seminars on his essay, which I cited earlier, 392 00:45:50,490 --> 00:45:54,810 is centred around Abdul Bismillah study guest is God, 393 00:45:55,980 --> 00:46:06,170 which is about how the Muslim guest is anything but God to the dominant class Muslim costume design. 394 00:46:06,360 --> 00:46:11,520 Yeah, in some the the good slave owner, the guy in Batman. 395 00:46:13,500 --> 00:46:21,270 These figures whose violence is so evident to us are examples of the New Testament injunction Love thy neighbour as thyself rather than, 396 00:46:21,390 --> 00:46:30,510 you know, violations of it. And there is examples of comparable reductive exhortations, especially in its dominant historical manifestations. 397 00:46:30,930 --> 00:46:36,360 The injunction to love both the neighbour and enemy is not an inequality that does away with God. 398 00:46:36,390 --> 00:46:43,680 Inequality does the domination rather paradoxical do this observation would sound it is about quote unquote 399 00:46:43,680 --> 00:46:52,650 generously inhabiting profoundly unequal relationships of forms such as those involved in enslavement or caste. 400 00:46:54,980 --> 00:47:02,840 This is not at all to say that Kirkegaard and Gandhi were wrong in ascribing equality to the Bible and the guitar in capital. 401 00:47:03,770 --> 00:47:10,940 Marx famously notes that Aristotle falters in his analysis of the forms of value, and he falters. 402 00:47:10,940 --> 00:47:13,670 Marx's Because the circumstances were not ripe. 403 00:47:14,510 --> 00:47:22,249 And I'm quoting Marx now the secret of the expression of value, namely the equality and equivalence of all kinds of labour. 404 00:47:22,250 --> 00:47:27,950 Because and insofar as the human labour in general could not be deciphered until the 405 00:47:27,950 --> 00:47:32,630 concept of human equality had acquired the prominence of a fixed popular opinion. 406 00:47:33,800 --> 00:47:42,200 This, however, becomes possible only in a society where the commodity form is a universal product of the universal form, 407 00:47:42,200 --> 00:47:48,890 of the product of labour, and is the dominant social relation is a relation between men as purchasers of commodities, unquote. 408 00:47:50,290 --> 00:47:54,939 Something not just analogous but related needs to be said of equality. 409 00:47:54,940 --> 00:47:56,590 In the case of the premodern neighbour, 410 00:47:57,520 --> 00:48:07,149 where the neighbour is taken up into theological universalism like Augustine's there the thought of any equality with a neighbour becomes difficult, 411 00:48:07,150 --> 00:48:16,750 maybe impossible. And while the quasi universal tradition of the neighbour is inevitably drawn to equality, 412 00:48:17,350 --> 00:48:22,150 this is an equality that does not yet know its name, that does not yet know its concept. 413 00:48:22,530 --> 00:48:29,740 Right? Just as Marxists of Aristotle, it finds itself unable to accept either domination or subordination. 414 00:48:30,190 --> 00:48:36,730 But like the mercury, the traditions in Western India, it does not and perhaps cannot have. 415 00:48:38,810 --> 00:48:43,580 The vocabulary to articulate this inability affirmatively. 416 00:48:44,450 --> 00:48:50,750 In other words, because the equality of the neighbour was organised around non-sovereign love, 417 00:48:51,890 --> 00:48:59,570 it remained so untimely as to be unthinkable to the consolidation of the modern concept of equality. 418 00:49:00,700 --> 00:49:06,820 Right. The consolidation, in other words, of the quality of the major or of what Gandhi calls the quality of this world. 419 00:49:07,660 --> 00:49:15,250 Only after this modern concept of equality acquired what Marx calls the the prominence of a fixed popular opinion, 420 00:49:15,730 --> 00:49:20,200 could its undertow the quality of the minor be thought? 421 00:49:24,690 --> 00:49:29,610 You will see now why I call this part. I call the stop along the path took on this neighbour. 422 00:49:29,640 --> 00:49:34,320 This is not about this neighbourhood. It's about the preconditions for thinking on this neighbour. 423 00:49:35,190 --> 00:49:41,610 Yeah. And so to draw to this Dr. Clause, then Kirkegaard comes to the brink of the equality of the minor. 424 00:49:41,630 --> 00:49:42,750 But he cannot articulate it. 425 00:49:43,410 --> 00:49:53,879 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, 426 00:49:53,880 --> 00:50:01,770 equality and fraternity, but sought to wrest it away from the empirical, transcendental double doublet from the equality of the major. 427 00:50:02,580 --> 00:50:08,520 In the process, they had to conceive a purely imminent love of the neighbour. 428 00:50:09,540 --> 00:50:12,360 Or more precisely, under the main and transcendent distinction, 429 00:50:13,230 --> 00:50:21,180 they are to conceive a love that responded to the question of forgiveness that Dostoevsky so succinctly formulated. 430 00:50:22,440 --> 00:50:25,700 How two things are they? Equality, this equality of the minor. 431 00:50:25,980 --> 00:50:34,740 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 432 00:50:34,740 --> 00:50:40,650 ruination of both pre-modern traditions of the neighbour and modern sovereignty centred visions of equality. 433 00:50:41,970 --> 00:50:48,840 Following along their path. Their paths really v2 are brought up to the beginning. 434 00:50:49,710 --> 00:50:56,880 Where to go and how to go from this beginning. This is a question that I think we are really beginning to take up. 435 00:50:57,510 --> 00:50:57,900 Thank you.