Gandhi and Philosophy: On Theological Anti-Politics

Gandhi and Philosophy

Also available from Bloomsbury Comparative Philosophy without Borders, edited by Arindam Chakrabarti and Ralph Weber The Public Sphere from Outside the West, edited by Divya Dwivedi and Sanil V Landscape and Travelling East and West: A Philosophical Journey, edited by Hans-Georg Moeller and Andrew Whitehead Wisdom and Philosophy: Contemporary and Comparative Approaches, edited by Hans-Georg Moeller and Andrew Whitehead

Gandhi and Philosophy On Theological Anti-Politics Shaj Mohan and Divya Dwivedi

BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2019 Copyright ©  Shaj Mohan and Divya Dwivedi, 2019 Shaj Mohan and Divya Dwivedi have asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Authors of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgements on p. x constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover design: Catherine Wood Cover image © Animaris Percipiere Rectus 2005, beach animal © Theo Jansen. Photo: Loek van der Klis  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN: HB: 978-1-4742-2171-9 ePDF: 978-1-4742-2173-3 eBook: 978-1-4742-2172-6 Typeset by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

Dedicated to: Sunita Dwivedi Rakesh Dwivedi Meenakshy Ganesan Nataraja Pillai Ganesan

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Contents Foreword by Jean-Luc Nancy Acknowledgements Introduction 1 Hypophysics 2 Scalology: Speed 3 The Faculties I: Body 4 The Faculties II: Mind and Soul 5 Dynamics: Active and Passive 6 The Law of the Maker 7 Truth and Will 8 Violence and Resistance 9 Critical Nation 10 Conclusion: Anastasis Notes Bibliography Index

viii x 1 13 31 49 71 89 111 135 163 187 209 219 252 260

Foreword The personality of Gandhi possesses a unique character in modern times: it is all at once the emblem of the most important colonial liberation – of an entire subcontinent – and the figure of a radical spiritual exigency for asceticism and freedom from the world’s enslavements. No other guide towards emancipation or enfranchisement has united these two dimensions, the political and the spiritual, in this way – even if the desire to join the rejection of domination with the opening of a new dimension of meaning has more or less manifested itself among all the others. One could analyse indefinitely to what extent political strategy and philosophical inspiration mix or meet, for the personalities and the thinking of – randomly – Mao Zedong, Tito, Fidel Castro, Aimé Césaire, Frantz Fanon, José Carlos Mariátegui, Cheikh Anta Diop, Malcolm X, Khomeini, Osama bin Laden, for whatever reasons that are themselves strategic or spiritual. Symmetrically one could and should examine how decolonization has echoed in Western political thinking and behaviour approximately since the times of Jean-Paul Sartre to Jacques Derrida. We could thus specify how decolonization has found its resources in an awakened energy that was linked in various ways to an internal disturbance of Western energy, which is to say both a European implosion – a reshuffling of world powers – and an inward worry regarding what had considered itself to be ‘Civilization’. In this regard, Gandhi represents what we may consider the point of maximum intensity which simultaneously puts into question the domination of the West and challenges Western civilization as it proceeds towards globalization. This is why he was recognized and acknowledged by this other liberating and charismatic figure named Nelson Mandela. Indeed because of this timing and through his schooling, Gandhi resonates with several important forms of this challenge for which premises can be recognized in the work of Tolstoy, Henri Bergson or Romain Rolland, before Heidegger or Freud. This peculiar situation distinguishing Gandhi – and the emancipation of India with him – throughout the wholesale dissolution of all the colonizing regimes had early on been seen by Maurice Blanchot when he perceived in Gandhi’s

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thought, which many lauded for its nonviolence, an ambivalence linked to an ascetic diminishing of human life.1 Shaj Mohan and Divya Dwivedi cite Blanchot – without however, positioning themselves within the latter’s perspective, precisely because they do not object in Gandhi to a ‘European’ spirituality, as espoused by Blanchot. They have created an original work, it seems to me, though I am not thoroughly acquainted with the context in English of studies in this area. The originality of their investigative analysis of Gandhi’s thought has to do with their effort to bring to light the ambivalence of a thinking that risks dissolving in the ‘ocean of Truth’ the very existence of men and women whom this very ‘Truth’ should illuminate. Let me take a chance in transcribing and summing up the guiding idea of this book: what Gandhi’s liberating thought questions is all that the West has wanted to put into the word ‘humanism’. Yet what moved Gandhi was indeed the concern for a human life freed from its frenetic Western pace, attuned to a just rhythm. Above all, it is exactly this frenetic pace (this ‘speed’, as Gandhi put it) that is increasingly questioned from within the heart of the West today. And what contemporary thinkers, especially in Europe, have been concerned with for quite some time exactly is what the words ‘man’ or ‘human’ and ‘humanist’ ideas encompass, after having worried about the ‘preterhuman’ perspectives of visions designated as totalitarian – since Gandhi’s time, and to say nothing about ‘transhumanist’ oracles spreading today. This is how this book comes to our attention and contributes to orient us, if I may say so, toward a thought, and even a world, neither humanist nor reduced to suffering in the name of Truth. In the terms of this work: neither metaphysics nor hypophysics. Jean-Luc Nancy Translated by Christine Irizarry

Acknowledgements First, thank you Colleen Coalter for seeing the desire for this book within the philosophical corpus of the day; Subhashini Ali for holding Gandhi before Lenin’s eyes, for the communism of every day, and for love and care without limits; Jyotsna Dwivedi and Eklavya Dwivedi for keeping in company the difficult origins of this book and for the ‘easy does it’; Shalima Ganesan for the biologist’s notion of critique and crisis, and for the references to the strangest corners of ‘the animal’; S. Gopalakrishnan for the alternative Gandhi (and fond scolding); Jaya Indira for lessons in aetiology and for the friendship and love which are of ‘no matter what’; Theo Jansen for allowing this book to work with his ‘Beach Animals’, which hover over Gandhi in the following pages, and for letting ‘Strandbeest ’ sit on the cover; Anish Mohammed for the insistence on the technicality which is not a pharmakon and for being the brother; Henrik Skov Nielsen for being ‘the quiet friend’ who saw political lines of demarcations extending from and reticulating the consolidated academic terrains of ideology and postcolonial theory; Alok Rai for the insistence and the education on another style – ‘always another style’ – and for urging to ‘be necessary’; J. Reghu for the friendship which is based on ‘anything, anytime’, and for being one of the most dangerous thinkers of politics; Kishore Subramonian for the care which took care of everything else, for the longest drive, and for the love; Vijay Tankha for turning Plato’s Parmenides into an exercise book, reading and discussing the earliest drafts patiently within an ancient Greek milieu and for the eidetic smokes in weekly symposiums.

Introduction

But where is the need for books? M. K. Gandhi (CWMG 62, p. 225) There were many things that Gandhi was. He was the last of a kind. He was the first of his kind. Which one is it better to be? He was the first one to ask this question. Gandhi founded a new materialism which is often misinterpreted as a confused spirituality, owing to the usage of terms such as soul and spirit. Gandhi’s materialism was the theory of nature as the reification of spirit. As can be evidenced in his writings, Gandhi opposed the separation of religion as a business of the spirit and politics as the field of material relations. He conceived an international on the basis of this materiality rather than on that of a creed or ideology. The material is passive, yet this passivity is pure passion. Practice is its activation. Then, Gandhi adjourns the history of praxis and passion. This seizure, torsion, and transubstantiation of notions is of the reticulation of a fundamental concrescence of value and nature; the good is not something extra to nature, it is the adjoint of nature itself, inseparable from the variability of nature, which we call hypophysics. The current atmosphere of theoretical discourse entombs Gandhi under the assumption that he left a vast but inconsistent body of writings without a willto-system. Gandhi (as he himself said in 1946, and as some of his early critics too agreed) insisted that there was a generative order for his works, ‘for his whole life was a sort of pilgrimage in which every act was significant’ as George Orwell said.1 This book outlines the system which gathers Gandhi’s writings and practices into a corpus within which his precise conception of nature, truth, violence, resistance, and the end is clarified. Gandhi was not a philosopher – the history of philosophy was ‘Satanic’ for him. Yet, philosophers (Martin Buber, Maurice Blanchot, Hannah Arendt in the last century, and Etienne Balibar and Slavoj Ž iž ek recently) found it necessary to engage him. Such necessary engagement between philosophy and Gandhi can take place fruitfully only when we have found the distinction between his hypophysics and philosophy. This book shows that Kant’s designation of those determinations of morals as

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‘hypophysical’ that depend on ‘occult qualities’ of nature finds a highly developed articulation in Gandhi’s theory of nature where nature is value, the moral is the natural. Blanchot found this peculiar systematicity to be ‘the exotic form of a modernism’.2 Deviations from nature are measured by the scalology of speed – the quick is the evil and the slow is the good. In Gandhi’s world, earthquakes, thunderstorms, and famines carry out judgements upon the deviations from the natural and bring about corrections. Gandhi conceives a new system of limits that cures the ills of deviations from nature’s moral course, that is, the syndrome of civilization, the perils of speed, and the desire for progenies. His sexual experiments, his theoretical apparatuses to determine Truth, his resistance to democracy and women’s liberation movements, his racism towards the Africans and the untouchables of the subcontinent, and his startling political positions with respect to great events of early twentieth century such as the Nazi camps and the atomic bomb are understandable only by thus recovering the systematic unity and uniqueness of his thought. This new system sought to delineate progenesis (commonly understood as sex, desire, pleasure) from other virtues (those of Material, Moral and the sense of Finality) such that it could be rendered ‘zero’. The book aims to bring to light the teleology of Gandhi’s system and examine the fate of certain programmes that today follow his steps. It does so by developing the counter-system which hovers over his own corpus and evading its capture. The spiritualization and the materialization of nature are effected by the speeding of things away from their natural speed in the Gandhian cosmos. Heidegger remarked that the problematic of movement was the greatest challenge of Western metaphysics. However, Paul Virilio would insist that this difficult question – of speed – was also the hope of the West. In his sustained engagement with speed, Gandhi was an occidental and he sought to be the greatest of them all. Gandhi called all those ingenuities of mankind – be they the great pyramids, Euclidean geometry, the gun powder – the West, in so far as they exceeded the speeds for thoughts and things set by the Maker. The slow, understood as the holding fast to the natural, is the good. Evil is the speeding away from the natural, be it in thought or in deed. *** A book on Gandhi should follow him closely, proceed in his style and yet at a distance in the manner of a burlesque. Burlesque has two directives, one of satire which speaks to the present horizon from the custody of a secret horizon and the other of a strip tease. Dita Von Teese, the most eminent practitioner of

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this art today, writes of the two origins of burlesque: ‘One in ancient Greece … where it was a theatrical form of satire – though still bawdy at times [and] as the striptease.’3 The comedy Lysistrata by Aristophanes is the first act for Von Teese, which is a play of desire, denial, and war – ‘This play set the stage for centuries of ribald, faux Greek drama.’4 As we know, Gandhi too practised a striptease taking decades. The well-suited gentleman who played the lead in the drama of the train in South Africa stripped down to his loin cloth in India, and stripped down to his bones and shed his teeth in the ascetic observance of truth ‘as if the longest fasting and the most mortified body always produce the purest soul’.5 However, Gandhi who possessed a peculiar sense of humour which detected deviations from truth was incapable of satire. In order to gain the liminal zones of his system the distance of satire and the intimacy of denuding are both necessary. In other words, to think in the style of burlesque. This book is a philosophical study of Gandhi, his concepts, and their systematic unity; it is a philosophical treatise of a non-philosophical object, as, for example, in the case of philosophy of art. Gandhi’s system is not metaphysical but hypophysical. Morals based on nature conceived as occult were termed ‘hypophysical’ by Kant in Groundwork where he had in mind Naturbegriff and pantheism (or the danger of Spinozism). The debate on the relation between nature and value would continue even up to Bergson’s é lan vital in the twentieth century. The trace of the historical elements of such an equation between nature and value includes the pre-Socratics and Plato and also what Hegel would call ‘the eastern doctrine’. However, it is also the case that the notion of hypophysics is very much our contemporary. Gandhi’s system measures value with respect to the scalar quantity – speed. There is a science of scale within his system – scalology. However, such an evaluation of nature is not new. The scala naturae performed precisely this task of ordering nature in terms of eminence and perfection. The Gandhian scale, of speed, complicates the old schema where seeking perfections would cause an ascent in a ladder away from the Maker. He inherited the notion, as he acknowledges, from the late-nineteenth-century discourse on speed, modernity, and nostalgia; and implicitly, as it can be found in his commentaries on science, from the pre-Darwinian notion of scala naturae. Good and evil then depend upon man’s relation to this nature which he is and which he nevertheless transgresses. The concept of speed has become increasingly important in philosophy – Deleuze on the relation between forms of thought and speed, Derrida on speed and apocalypse (eschatology). ‘The Great Acceleration’ is now being studied in the journal Anthropocene which is devoted to exploring ‘the nature, scale, and extent of the influence that people have on Earth’. Gandhi’s engagement with

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speed as the measure of value is outside the ambit of metaphysics, and yet, it is all around us in the talk about technological rapidity and disengagement with roots, and about the speed of production and violence. We find that Gandhi thought in a system of proportional variations. These variations in turn generate forces which are ascensions and descensions on different scales. The increase in soul force raises man into the scale of the Maker, whereas the increase in mental force raises man in the human scale. The relations of compressions, expansions, and combustions give his system its inner thermodynamics, with whose ideas he was familiar. This system, with thermodynamic articulations and thermatological desires, would appear to be in resonance with the other great systems of his time, the last two centuries, where analogy and homology set the rules for a game of the sciences such that Freud’s corpus can be divided into the hydrodynamic and the electrodynamic. We recover a theory of human faculties – body, mind, and soul – to explain this relation within which Gandhian moral as well as political action can be understood. Passive resistance, later baptized ‘Satyagraha’, makes sense when we take into account the element of passion in it, which requires us to extract the theory of forces in Gandhi and distinguish it from the dynamic theories of Nietzsche and Freud. Gandhi’s emphasis on religion in politics is explained anew through his hypophysics wherein natural law is not apart from moral law, but the two come together in his idea of God as ‘the Maker’. This illuminates his conception of will and enables a renewed analysis of resistance and non-violence that sets these terms within Gandhi’s theory of faculties and his conception of life. What emerges through our attempt at finding Gandhi’s own system is a sophisticated idea of action as experiments with forces aimed at developing the faculties to the point where the perfect Satyagrahi – the one who resists – is established. This insight must be brought to bear on two peculiarities of Gandhian political action. First, action is guided by the inner call of a law greater than man-made laws, but also by the community of which one is a part, be it religious, racial (admitted by Gandhi), or cultural. But these categories do not have primacy for Gandhi. They are relevant only in terms of the higher ‘religion’, irreducible to any existing religion, which we try to explain through Gandhi’s hypophysics. Second, Gandhi did not think his programme – for himself and for others led or advised by him, including important phases of the subcontinental anti-colonial movement – to be political, though he definitely identified it as moral. Hence, we have attempted to isolate a distinct ‘anti-politics’ in Gandhi, both in his own words (when he calls politics ‘a snake around my neck’) and in contrast with

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other traditions of conceiving politics. At this point the limit of the Gandhian system is reached and its outside, which embattles it, becomes visible. This book is what we call a ‘criticalization’ or the development of a system to the point of its exteriority. A criticalized Gandhi is not at all of mere academic interest since the progeny of his ideas, in many shapes and guises, sometimes only tokenistic, can be illuminated by this method. *** Recently, European philosophers have initiated dialogues between Gandhi’s concept of non-violence and other Western political projects; for example, Slavoj Ž iž ek (Gandhi and Hitler) and Etienne Balibar (Gandhi and Lenin). Indeed, clarification of the concept of violence has become an urgent philosophical task today, given the concerns with animal rights, climate change, immigration, surveillance, and new forms of political protest across the world. However, without a systematic approach to the relation that non-violence has with the other concepts in Gandhi’s system such as truth and value, these dialogues risk retaining a philosophical notion of non-violence which, in fact, shows up often as the lesser degree of violence. That is, non-violence is understood as the absence of violence or less of violence. But the concept of violence has proliferated in such a way that nearly everything can be characterized as violent  – a gaze, a word, food, and as Ž iž ek has shown recently, even ‘doing nothing’. Hence, there is an intrinsic relation between the proliferation of violence and the concept of violence. Gandhi’s major contribution to political thought was to question the primacy of the concept of violence in political theory: politics as the artifice regulating the ever-present threat of the natural, or violence. While he rejected the conception of non-violence as the mere absence of violence, Gandhi also denied it the role of the initial condition for politics. For him, non-violence is indestructible and is heterogeneous to violence. Accordingly, his theory of the state posits non-violence as the state of nature and this enables him to rework the idea of natural law in an astonishing way. This Gandhian distinction presents an opportunity for philosophy to investigate the meaning of violence by staging an encounter between the Gandhian concept of non-violence and twentiethcentury philosophical thought on violence (Arendt, Benjamin, Clastres) to extract a potential for a different political praxis. Instead of serving solely and selectively as a model for political praxis, Gandhi and his hypophysical system can illuminate this potential in a more fundamental way. Hence, we insist on the rigorous system of concepts which articulated Gandhi’s life and also his political

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progenies everywhere. It enables us to witness the purposiveness of Gandhi’s entire programme rather than the relevance of his individual concepts. Gandhi’s writings and practice remain in a critical relation to technology and one has to isolate his unique thinking on this from contemporary debates. While stating that he would rather see the self-destruction of all modern technological apparatuses Gandhi also argued that the body, this ‘human machine is a wonderful thing’.6 It would be a mistake to see in him either a Heideggerian questioning of technology or a Deleuzean machinic philosophy. We find that Gandhi’s approach to technology derives from his concept of nature as value, and technology as an apocalyptic machine – for him technology is a function of the distance from value as given in nature. Gandhi’s criticism of technology is rooted in modernity. Until the nineteenth century, the most complex technical implements one would encounter were the windmill or the clock, the workings of which were understandable to most people. However, from the earlytwentieth-century people were forced to handle objects whose workings they could not completely penetrate, such as the radio. Today, electronic technology and software are embedded in every aspect of life – including a software application with the electronic device ‘Google glass’ urging people to have sex while wearing it. The rapid spread of technology appears to provide us with buoyancy in a complex and difficult geopolitical epoch. However, there are also alarms and aches concerning this event: from the comparatively mild resistances to mass surveillance, to the horror of technological apocalypse or technological singularity.7 However, Gandhi dismissed apocalypse as ephemeral: they ‘have come and gone’.8 With hypophysics, where nature is moral, a unique opening onto technology’s relation to nature, human and otherwise, is gained. Protest and Resistance exist today in confusion, their violent and non-violent forms seen in Syria, the Arab Spring, the Occupy and Femen movements, and Pussy Riot. Violent forms are sometimes legitimized by ‘the international community’, at other times called ‘terrorism’ which is equated with war. On the other hand, non-violent forms of resistance, such as the Occupy movement or Tahrir Square protests, raise questions about their efficacy and meaning. There is abundant scholarship on non-violent protest movements drawing resources from Gandhi. However, we find that Gandhi’s theory of non-violence was no mere tool to achieve political goals. It was for him the state of nature itself. There is a hypophysical dimension to the contemporary discourse on resistance, violence, and the activisms and theories of non-violence which the lines that extend from Gandhi to us, his many progeny, would trace.

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Another such line connects Gandhi’s rejection of the parliament and presentday criticisms of the parliament, illuminating the orientation of these criticisms through the guiding thread of what we term as a ‘Gandhian anti-politics’. Gandhi was opposed to parliamentary democracy, and characterized it as the evil of the West, a prostitute, and a game. The book shows that the parliament formed a special kind of machine for Gandhi, which was rather too slow – ‘It can do nothing.’9 Interestingly, this is the very criticism that business corporations have raised against the parliament at all times. Recently, there have been popular disparagements of the parliament on grounds that it is too quick, does not consult ‘the demos’, and instead works for the richest. Alain Badiou has called this scenario ‘capital-parliamentarianism’.10 It is a notion inherited from Lenin who spoke of parliamentary cretinism. Slavoj Ž iž ek has defined the parliamentary form as ‘dictatorship of the bourgeoisie’.11 The relation between power and strength (along Arendtian lines) determines these oppositions. However, Gandhi’s opposition was grounded in his notion of technology which, for him, determines the concept of parliament. The Gandhian opposition to parliament in encounter with the present oppositions to it, both the capitalist and anti-capitalist, reveals the stakes invested in the other of the concept of parliament. This book presents a hitherto unexplored, critical dimension to contemporary debates on truth and fidelity, and those on truth and secrecy, by analysing the relation between truth and will in Gandhi and his Western precedents and antecedents. Gandhi’s remarkably different uses of these two terms have not received sufficient attention. He re-interpreted the concept of passive resistance or non-violent protest in the neologism Satyagraha, literally, holding fast to truth. Gandhi was not the first thinker to posit the relation between truth and will, nor is he the last. The concept of will has recently returned to philosophy, notwithstanding Heidegger’s characterization of it as ‘the last metaphysical concept’. Badiou, for instance, conceives of a triangle between truth, will, and subject. Gandhi’s uniqueness is in circumventing the philosophical notions of truth – correspondence theory, coherence theory, aletheia – to arrive at a moral theory of truth. This theory is not ‘speaking the truth’ or ‘being truthful to moral principles’, although he would ask everyone to do so for certain other reasons. Gandhi’s truth is the immutable origin inseparable from its binding force or gravitas which is will. Falsity is the feeling of being light – civilization. His concepts of truth and will, once we grasp their specifically Gandhian interrelation, illuminate through his political actions our recent struggles with

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secrecy, surveillance, and privacy. This would be a new opportunity for the question what is the politics of truth? *** Gandhi is in recollections for reasons other than his hypophysics; the maintenance of a convenient, moderate, centrist, average Gandhi has its own systematicity. The wispiness attributed to his writings allows one to form a group of rules: (1) He did not leave a systematic expression of his ideas in any single text; (2) He did not intend such a systematic formulation; (3) Systematic is evil or colonial, as in the operation which puts to rest a set of sentiments. These rules deliver us a Gandhi with the authority of the Great Soul and at the same time a pure liquidity which can purchase a diversity of needs out of politics. There is a production of depth charges in his corpus and Gandhi was the impetus for many political currents of the last century – Martin Buber, Mandela, Petra Kelly, Sukyi, Arne Næ ss. Reference to Gandhi is ever increasing – Mont Blanc pens, the Occupy movement, the oval office, ethnocentric rallies, philosophy, religious protests, peace studies, and ecological movements. However, today Gandhi does not speak, while choruses are raised in his name. His words are selected according to needs across the political spectrum; his name is made reason sufficient-initself, to rationalize both militarization and peaceful agitations. The practice of asserting a confusion in his corpus and then of deriving selective doctrines to fulfil needs is called paternal reason.12 In the din, one cannot distinguish between Mahatma Gandhi and Mahatma Propagandi. Gandhi is in the air, as he had always been, but now he is a cerement of specks over us; his words dance about to the beat of diverse needs to somatize them. Gandhi moved in a fine line through the history of political formulations in the last century – of non-violence and the limitation of wants: From Tolstoy and Buber to Petra Kelly and Sukyi, from Neoplatonism and Esoteric Christianity to new religious movements, from Stoics to American transcendentalism to nature cure and deep ecology. Other lines cleaved his words in the last decade – necessary violence, anti-Eurocentric thinking, ‘Hindu’ Nationalism, anti-essentialism, postcolonialism. There is no doubt that these lines that are drawn out from Gandhi are virtually present in his corpus as he admitted whenever he felt ‘drawn into the political coil’.13 At the same time we hear a susurrus of recoil from the place between the two lines; there is something of an eldritch harmonics audible in Gandhi, giving rise to a very unique effect which we call the Gandhian recoil. This recoil is effected in

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those moments where a commentator comes close to the telos of the system of the great soul. Gandhi constructed a system and in accordance with it initiated an international which was to bring the human animal to its final resting place from which no more progenies would arise, rather a critical nation which will be ‘the camp’ to end all camps. It is not surprising that one of these moments of the recoil emerge at the point where his anti-Semitism became apparent; having learnt of the imminent fate of the Jewish people in Germany, including through his communications with Martin Buber, Gandhi did not intervene in any fashion using his considerable moral standing in the world. Instead, he urged them to surrender to the Nazi death machine in a sacrifice of truth. It was not the common morality and kindness that Gandhi was led by. Gandhi sought to annul the history of nihilism through the annihilation of the human animal. The end of the human animal alone could restore to the Maker’s world its truth. Although M. K. Gandhi was guilty of most of the crimes which were made impermissible in the letter of the law by the last century – antiSemitism, apartheid, caste discrimination, misogyny, exploitation of the poor – it is the systematic accommodation of these crimes through an equivocal conception of the law – man-made law and the Maker’s law – in order to open thought and practice to homo-lytic imagination that prevented a close theoretical attention from ever falling on him; the stunned eyes were always averted by the telos of his homo-lytic system. The recoil experienced by his commentators time and again keeps the questioning at a distance as if it were held in a haunted circle. It is this saccade that prevents Gandhi from getting into any flag of consequence. It is this eldritch that must speak. Then, we must raise the eldritch system of hypophysics through the cerement. In the current atmosphere of theoretical discourse and political posture which gags the Master in whose ‘native name’ there should be speech, although the Master himself shall not speak, the speech of the Master is still some other Master’s words, that ‘of western thought’ – one, the Master of authority and the other, the Master of words. This is a situation peculiar to postcolonial theory and its variants and inversions. Hence, Gandhi often speaks a gargoyle of the fashionable theory. This is excused in various ways. On the one hand, through the legitimacy of being the sufferer of colonial rule, one receives ‘Western thought’ as a rightful object with which one may do whatever; a variant approach to this is to consider ‘Western thought’ as Gift (which, of course, is a ‘Western thought’). On the other hand, the critical activism of ‘Western thought’ is used against itself as though it were a native invention, a good example of which is the critical apparatus named by the term Eurocentrism. Now, Gandhi knew that

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‘thought’ can be bought, which is what you do when you buy a book or when you go ‘shopping for theory’ or in owning a ‘think tank’. Whether one prefers theft or gift, in that case, is of little interest. Labour can be bought in the mode of a contract, can be stolen away in containers from a poor region and can be assumed to be a gift when caste is the organizing principle of a place such as the subcontinent. Thinking cannot be bought. Thinking is manual labour as Gandhi understood it. It is a manual labour for which neither occident nor orient open as designations. It is when this manual labour comes to an arrest that such designations come to be. The occidental is mapped by the reticulation enduring the dissension of thoughts. Hegel would call it history and Nietzsche would call it a quest for nihilism. A statement of the kind: the problem with Western thinking … is, in its style, occidental. The occident had always been occidentalisms. Without giving up the dissent, an attempted dissonance was sought by the occidental subject in the last century while assuming that the distinction was not the mode of the remainder of that act. Hence, the attrition expected from attacking the occident in the name of postcolonialism will lead to woe unto itself. There is a current view that the occidental is a compensation of sorts to the oriental for all its sufferings or a souvenir to the rising orient. All these poses – also of indolence – expect a St. Elmo’s fire. Sadly, postcolonialism was not a thinking yet, but a needing. It is not easy to be offensive with postcolonialism without being accused of occidental vandalism or, in the subcontinent, of opposing the Aryans. Yet, another feature frequent in much Gandhi scholarship is to locate in his ideas the instantiation of some previous philosophical or theoretical concept, whether from the Western or ancient subcontinental tradition. Although such resonances appear to grant greater acceptance and appeal to an otherwise anti-colonial, anti-Western thinker, this dims the possibility that there might be an original systematicity within his words and deeds. An even greater cost would be a clarity on what the political and political-theory implications of the different thought systems are. In addition, it is important within the study of political philosophy to discern whether a given system is metaphysical or not. Accordingly, instead of illuminating Gandhi through a previous master, we attempt here to sketch the startling originality of his thought through which we then set up comparisons between Gandhi and relevant Western thinkers. It is also to be noted that Gandhi was never put to a theoretical investigation the way the anti-colonial works of Franz Fanon were from Hannah Arendt to Robert Bernasconi. We show that bringing forth Gandhi’s thought in its unity can suggest new grounds of enquiry into both the term ‘post-colonial’ and the

Introduction

11

theory. Gandhi wished to be a bridge between the occident and orient without belonging to either, and leading both to a new horizon, ‘Hind Swaraj’ as World. Hind refers to ‘Hinduism’ and the region of the subcontinent; swaraj is literally self-rule. ‘Hindu’, we should note here, is the most recently invented ancient religion which is less than a century old and the name is borrowed from the Arabic ‘Al Hind’. Gandhi’s role in its invention, especially through the conversion of the ‘lower caste’ people into this new religion, is significant. Historically, the attempt had been to device a general principle through which Gandhi speaks in a simple unity. There are some variations within this common act. The reduction of his hypophysics to his politics is the most common place of all; so that political contingencies explain those apparent confusions and conflicts in his writings. The formula can be summed up: Gandhi was a great politician whose singular ambition was to get independence for India and he did whatever he could to get to do that. Then, there is the failed philosopher formula: Gandhi wanted to be a philosopher, but he was not the well-trained sort, so he left these fragments of thought which are to be systematized comfortably by the scholar of today. In his communications with Radhakrishnan, Gandhi himself wrote about this philosophical task left to be undertaken. However, Gandhi never claimed to be a philosopher. He was devising another style – which is the exposure of one’s indefensibility – without a parallel in history. The sources of Gandhi formula locate precedents for Gandhi, either Indian or Occidental – Gandhi got it all from these. He never acknowledged any thought-system as perfect and hence worth following, not even the religious kind. The simple unity of general principles is incapable of apprehending hypophysics; its ways are, rather, of experiment and evolution. The war of forces is the realm of life where no simple unity prevails: Life is governed by a multitude of forces. It would be smooth sailing, if one could determine the course of one’s actions only by one general principle whose application at a given moment was too obvious to need even a moment’s reflection. But I cannot recall a single act which could be so determined.14

Gandhi’s writings and transcripts of speeches run into more than a hundred volumes. This poses an apparent empirical intimidation. It also raises an important but purely formal question that Derrida raised about the systematic study of any thinker. For example, should Nietzsche’s remark ‘I forgot my umbrella’ be confined to his laundry list or be studied as a part of his exhortation to forget being? As philosophical studies of thinkers with voluminous writings (Russell on Leibniz, Deleuze on Nietzsche) have shown time and again, this

12

Gandhi and Philosophy

navigation of Gesammtausgabe is possible only by constructing an orienting star or a guiding concept. Hence, we find that it is only through attention to his reconception of nature, that is, hypophysics, introduction of a scale for value, that is, scalology, and their tension with the concept of anastasis15 that we can make of Gandhi’s writings a corpus. In religion, anastasis denotes resurrection or rising from the dead, which is a particular thought of the relation between life, death, name and body; but with Jean-Luc Nancy, this thought of resuscitation through magic/marvel or belief is criticalized to the point where ‘ “resurrection” finds a nonreligious meaning’ and departs irrevocably from religion and what in this book is called hypophysics.16 For now, anastasis names the procedures through which Gandhi’s system has been allowed its maximum articulation such that it approaches its limit and reveals its telos. Methodology had always been a problem regarding Gandhi. In this matter Gandhi himself added several complications by suggesting that one must follow his most recent writing if one encounters a conflict in the corpus and at the same time asserting that all he ever wrote since the Hind Swaraj were corollaries of it. Instead of following Gandhi’s leads which would have confined the concepts, tendencies, and desires in an island – Calypso’s island – we found it necessary to let them invent their canoes and sails. Sails are important in philosophy. Steresis or the lagging privation in a system is that which is named as evil by Aristotle. Hysteresis is the sail which leads outwards and away; in thermodynamics the graph of hysteresis reveals itself as a sail. We shall find that the liminal zones and beings of his system demand a new outside to which they can trace their chains, share their secrets, and find a release. That is, anastasis is the resurrection of the beings, concepts, desires, and tendencies in a system when that system itself has been criticalized in so far as new spans have been opened for them.

1

Hypophysics

God is Himself the Law and the Law-giver. He does not transgress the Law laid down by Himself nor does He allow others to transgress it. M. K. Gandhi (CWMG 94, p. 94) Truth in death, death in life, life in blood, blood in wine, wine in water; from the sensuous translucence of water to the pure opacity of truth runs the quest of the Passive Resister. The corporeal elusiveness of life is to be aligned with the divine certainty of death – it is the pilgrimage to the portmanteau value-thing, a movement ‘consecrated to the realization of Truth’.1 The Passive Resister is the seer who sees a thing in-its-nature, at the purest of its value. The purest of a thing’s value is when it is true; truth is good and good in turn is true. Hence, the quest for being consummated in Truth is also the assignation that beloves the Good. The ‘Maker’ – Gandhi often used this term for his God who, as we know, is Truth – made each thing in its nature and distinguished man from the brute which ‘by nature knows no self-restraint’.2 In each thing He left his tincture. Hence, knowing a thing in-its-nature is knowing the Maker himself, ‘where there is Truth, there is also knowledge which is true’.3 The pilgrimage to Truth, where value and nature are not apart, where each is found in-its-nature, is possible only when we learn to see how we are deceived in our evaluations. Only a great mind can be free from getting hooked by the floating values. Gandhi writes, ‘A mind that is once hooked to the Star of stars becomes incorruptible’.4 While practising evaluation in this sense, an arrayed set of values that are extrinsic to things are imposed upon them; the array of independent values on the one hand and on the other the array of things to which these may be hooked; to get hooked is how we know the value of a thing. It is a sign that ‘man has gone further away from his Maker’.5 Delicious is a value which is free of those things to which it might be hooked, hence in the practical determination of the value of a thing we say that someone is hooked

14

Gandhi and Philosophy

to sweetened cheese as he finds it delicious. Sexy may appear to be the practical determination for an automobile – the very sexy car. That is, separation of value may not just derive from things but from acts, such as sex. Gandhi apprehended his own age as one in which everything freed up from everything else at a breakneck pace where values were no longer intrinsic to things and things were no longer apprehensible in their value. So we can see value and nature departing in two different directions, or senses: the value of a thing as given by the maker which demands no evaluation, as opposed to the value of a thing obtained by the attribution of a value extrinsic to it, that is, evaluation. In the first sense, we can see that the nature of a thing is its value, that is, the value of a thing is said to be not even coeval with it. Were we to state that existence is coextensive with value, this would imply the assumption of a separation of existence and value in thought; it is the appearance of such a separation that Gandhi finds as the falsity called ‘civilization’, and its cure calls for a system which would will the truth in which existence and value are one. Such a system, we call hypophysics, following Kant. Value is intrinsic to a thing. How are we to understand this? It is difficult to say that ‘value is the intrinsic worth of the thing’ since we will be using another word ‘worth’ which is similar in meaning to value. It would lead us to a tautology: ‘the worth of a thing lies in its value’. This hint of a tautology is indicative of the difficulty concerning the conception of value. The etymology of value initiates us into certain everyday uses of the term and not quite the philosophical opening that often etymologies fortuitously provide. Instead, we can look at its usages to gain an understanding. We speak about the value of someone – ‘Anish is valuable for informatics’. But this implies that Anish need not be valuable for rally driving. We speak about the value of a thing in some other thing – ‘the value of garlic is in curing meat’. Here we exclude the value that garlic might have in catalysing petrol. This brings us to the first distinction that value has from things. Value is a distinct relation that a thing has with respect to some other thing or things whereby the valuable thing modifies the other desirably. The desire in this instance is without evaluation. That is, arsenic is not desirable for mankind except that it came to be such for some men when it was applied to Napoleon. It can be defined more precisely now. The value of a thing is the apprehension of the power it has in itself to introduce a distinct modification in some other thing.6 Value in this sense remains hidden in all the things around us since there are many modifications of things that are unknown to us. Or, in the Hegelian language, the desire for the evaluation of such things is not open to us since the development of the grasping spirit/mind is not ripe for them. So, we evaluate

Hypophysics

15

things on the basis of a certain codified desire. Hence we find that almonds have value since they enhance the quality of the skin and airplanes have value since they enhance the speed of travel. However, it is the case that almonds have the value of a projectile, just as airplanes. The enclosure of values is determined by the code of evaluations. The code of evaluations is not to be found identical with the theological containment of desire alone since we desire according to the plan of thought of Being. The theological containment of desire is the essence of all political forms of control of evaluation; God is the transcendent limit or the prohibited threshold of desires and the extension of this God from the heavens to matters of food is the game of political theology. We found that a certain value is not isolated to a particular or specific thing. A metal ball, an almond, and airplane are all capable of being projectiles. A sledge hammer and a shock wave are both capable of smashing things. The value that almond has with respect to dietary requirements can be found in other culinary items and it can also be isolated pharmaceutically. We do not say that the incandescent bulb alone is valuable, but that light is valuable to see and to read. From these we can come to the next determination of value. Value is the formal determination of a specific power that is constitutable under diverse conditions to derive diverse effectivities. Even though a thing is said to have values that are intrinsic to it the said values need not be in a relation of strict inherence with respect to the thing. The formal autonomy of value enables the scaling of value in many ways. For example a value can be scalar such as the length of a pole or the width of a track; or it can be intensive as in the specific density of a metal or the damage that a poison can do. We often employ a scale corresponding to the value of a thing such that it is measurable with respect to its effectivity. We do this by grading poisons and chilly. We do this by assigning numerical values for the power of automobile engines. But the most universal scale for the value of a thing is money as can be found in the statement ‘value for money’ which we use even in circumstances where no monetary transaction is involved such as a man slipping on a banana skin and raising a laugh. Value is scalable according to the code of evaluation that shares a community. For hypophysics, value is nature. Now we can begin to understand what this statement – nature is value – means; value corresponds to the determination of being as nature and evaluation concerns the scale of deviation from nature. ‘Hypo’ does not imply a physics which is inferior to physics and metaphysics. Hypophysics names the underlying science of nature according to Gandhi, from out of which physics as a discipline is derived. Indeed, physics would be a deviation from hypophysics.

16

Gandhi and Philosophy

The science of nature as value Kant understood physics as the science of nature in so far as nature is the realm of pure law while metaphysics was that which exceeds physics and grounds it. He rejected as inappropriate ground of practical philosophy a range of moral theories based on some knowledge of human nature, on God, on happiness, perfection or fear, on nature – that is natural causes of action or effects like pleasure and pain – or on the occult: But such a completely isolated metaphysics of morals, mixed with no anthropology, theology, physics, or hyperphysics and still less with occult qualities (which could be called hypophysical), is not only an indispensable substratum of all theoretical and surely determined cognition of duties; it is also a desideratum of utmost importance to the actual fulfilment of their precepts.7

Kant spares few words in defining ‘hypophysical’ other than this passing remark on disqualified grounds of action, which he based on the transcendental freedom of a rational being, particularly man. However, the list’s last item, which the parenthesis in fact categorizes, could well have been, following the logic of this series of sciences that are not pure, hypophysics. Only one example of such a science, the occult attributes moral powers to nature in so far as nature here is amenable to the volition of the sorcerer in addition to its regular efficacy (and that of the gods as the case may be). Edward Tiryakian explains the underlying relation to nature that informs the diverse activities that can be called ‘occult’ by defining them as intentional practices, techniques, or procedures which a) draw upon hidden or concealed forces in nature or the cosmos that cannot be measured or recognized by the instruments of modern science, and b) which have as their desired or intended consequences empirical results, such as either obtaining knowledge of the empirical course of events or altering them from what they would have been without this intervention.8

Nature here is not mechanical nor merely comprising regularities which would explain sudden calamities in terms of determinate causality, but incorporates divine forces whose action in distans makes equally possible their occult manipulation in bound dolls and hidden defixiones, portents, Zaubermedizine and bewitchment, but also in divine aid, purification rituals in civic cults, reliquaries and pilgrimage. In ancient Greece, for instance, where divine influence was intrinsic to nature, and ‘nature and magic could produce results that were

Hypophysics

17

indistinguishable’,9 the contemporaneous criticism of the ethic of the occult by Hippocratic authors and Plato points to a hypophysical nature as the basis of both thaumaturgy and moral philosophy, just as many centuries later Theosophy would be devastated by one of its own disciples, René Gué non, in favour of esoterism.10 From Presocratic cosmologies to the Stoa, nature in several respects  – of origin, emanation, unity, divinity, inscrutability, preservation, destruction – is a repository of values. Aristotle informs us that ‘some think that the soul pervades the whole universe, whence perhaps came Thales’ view that everything is full of gods’.11 Anaxagoras holds that nous is god, and Xenophanes, according to Galen, that god inheres in everything. Plato’s Timaeus speaks of the craftsman god who is supremely good and ‘wanted everything to be good … and so he took over all that was visible … and brought it from a state of disorder to order’.12 Marcus Aurelius exhorts a reasoned orientation with nature since ‘all things are interwoven with one another; a sacred bond unites them. … The world-order is a unity made up of a multiplicity: God is one, pervading all things; all being is one, all law is one … and all truth is one.’13 There are many ways of positing natural law as moral law, and in this Gandhian hypophysics is not without precursors. The Stoics found a double orientation in nature which makes each thing according to its law but not as an automaton, especially not men who are rational beings, and ‘entrusts’ it, in the words of Diogenes Laë rtius, to itself to act in accordance with nature by preserving what was given to them by ‘untaught nature’: nature is not just one principle and order but also end, and the alienation and decline of allotriosis is addressed by the ethical imperative of oikeiō sis or to act in accordance with nature on one’s own behalf through selfawareness or suneidesis.14 But to fulfil the goal which one’s own nature is is easier for the animal than for man, who becomes a fold within the animal and opens the space for technē .15 The stoic sage would resemble the passive resister. Gandhi held the sufferings visited by nature to be moral judgements and punishments. It is the moral that is God made, and the immoral is the manmade. The quest for truth is the quest for the Maker who made nature: ‘I gather that God is Life, Truth, Light. He is Love. He is the Supreme Good.’16 Earlier we found that values, which are indeed laws of conduct, are understood as extraneous to nature; nature on the one hand and the laws which conduct nature on the other. However, ‘within the framework of nature’s moral authority, even the disorder wrought by earthquakes and floods becomes part of a scheme of vengeance for human malfeasance’.17 Myriad are the conceptions of nature in the history of ideas, as are the derivations of ‘ought’ from ‘is’. The naturalistic fallacy, so nominated by G. E. Moore though already suggested by Hume, is

18

Gandhi and Philosophy

modern and comprises diverse manners of hooking nature and value once a wedge is driven between them, Daston reminds us.18 Long after the sermons in stones and the fable of bees, ever new fables are discovered in sociobiology and entomology. Now bonobos and beavers pale before prokaryotes and deep sea algae which maintain the moral splendour of the superorganism Earth. The former would be models of natural sociality, the latter are like vital organs. From the initial Gaia Hypothesis through Gaia theory to ecological ethics, nature becomes progressively re-enchanted. James Lovelock could proffer that the Gaia function by which biota stabilize their environment as fit for life makes it ‘warm and comfortable for those who obey the rules, but is ruthless in her destruction of those who transgress’.19 Fritjof Capra called Gaia a planetary living being and Rupert Sheldrake hailed Mother Nature ‘reasserting herself … the acknowledgement that our planet is a living organism, Gaia, Mother Earth, strikes a positive cord in millions of people; it reconnects us with both our personal, intuitive experience of nature and with the traditional understanding of nature as alive’.20 Lovelock saw Gaia’s importance in the moral vacuum bequeathed by science ‘because it gave us something to which we were accountable. … Because of that ethical significance, Gaia starts to become more than just science. It begins to veer into that area previously occupied by religion.’21 Gandhian hypophysics, however, obtains a precision which distinguishes it from both the precursors and successors, including some inheritors, of the synonymization of nature and value. Were it merely to console our nostalgia or longing for the unity of being (which we never experienced but of which, for Hö lderlin, we have an intellectual intuition premised on the only thing we have, namely the separative form of thought as judgement)22 we would miss the reality and attainability (for man) of the unity of divine nature in Gandhi, and hence his specific theological system.

Theology, value, and the law The law is itself the nature that it governs, ‘an unalterable Law governing everything and every being that exists or lives’.23 It is by knowing this nature and hence determining our conduct with respect to the determining divine law which refers itself to the Maker that we are Truthful. Hence the reversal of the maxim ‘God is Truth’ to ‘Truth is God’ is consistent with what it reversed; the predicament of God and Truth are purely identical. Theology is consistent with the equality of Truth and God, even negative theology. When Meister

Hypophysics

19

Eckhart writes, ‘May the loving and merciful God who is Truth itself ’24 this God is not. God is properly what is not and hence Truth also is known only in its absence in the mystical apprehension. Truth is that which is; it is not the designation of what is. Gandhian Maker is the God who is all that he made – ‘Truth is a word which literally means that which exists, Sat.’25 The relation between Truth and Existence is a matter of what things one presumes to be in existence. Existence pertains, in spite of all the other meanings of the term, to the earthly. In this sense the removal of man from his belonging to God, the loss of Eden (even though natural law refers to the Edenic as the lost ideal, it is structurally prohibited from returning to it as its own nature since the fall constitutes original sin or knowledge), is irrelevant in Gandhian hypophysics; there is no other world but this one. The irrelevance of Eden is obtained from another reversibility, from ‘God is Law’ to ‘The Law is God’.26 That is, man never falls from a realm governed by divine Law to that which is governed by natural law, for the only Law is God himself. Rather, if man is to fall he must do so from the realm of natural law. The unity of Truth and Existence, of nature and value, reveals itself in itself and in expressions as an axiomatic. The Satyagrahi is the axiomatic practitioner. Of this hypophysically conceived law Gandhi says: ‘It is not a blind law; for no blind law can govern the conduct of living beings, and thanks to the marvellous researches of Sir. J. C. Bose, it can now be proved that even matter is life.’27 If we do not know the Maker in our knowing the Law which conducts the made, then, the Law is arbitrary. That is, if the Laws were indifferently distributed before the Maker, then, in remaining without ground for determining reality, he would have given a world without Truth. Only a Law can choose a law that is legal. Then it follows that the Maker is irremovably present in the made – ‘Law and the Lawgiver are one’28 – God is Law. The Gandhian thesis of divine legislation resembles the determination of the Leibnizian God and the problem of arbitrariness of divine will. The problem before the modal metaphysics of Leibniz is of the choice that God makes. To choose is to choose from and the choice of possible worlds out of which one is given actuality by God follows from the distinction between necessary and contingent propositions. If all truths were necessary, since the necessary implies the non-being of its contrary, this would deny choice to God. The contingent on the other hand inclines rather than necessitates. For example the world in which Adam is the sinner inclines more than the world in which Adam does not sin. Hence, out of the possible worlds, through the wisdom of deriving the maxima with respect to a constraint, the Leibnizian God actualized this world. The Gandhian Maker is the Law itself

20

Gandhi and Philosophy

and this world that is the Law. Inclinations do not appear before the Maker who himself is the made, but only with respect to the knowledge of God which is the problem of man; man is inclined to laws other than that of which he is made such that in knowing the laws of each and every thing made he may know his Maker who is the Law. The nature of each thing includes the modal variations permissible by the law which determines each thing, or rather, which each thing is. Hence, we see that the modifications undergone by each thing are not a deviation from its nature, but its concordance with the law which it is.29 Hypophysics is the science of nature in so far as Nature is value; it is the science of morality in so far as conduct of man is in accordance with the value that is nature; it is the science of God in so far as the Maker is the Law which each thing is. Hence we understand that, when Gandhi laments often of the growing distance between man and nature – ‘Man has gone away from the maker’ – he points to a proliferation of faculties which incline deviantly from hypophysics; any science which obtains to a deviation from the Law deviates also from God. Man must practice the Truthful science, Hypophysics. How to read Gandhi – through his voluminous writings, way of life, political acts, personal relationships and the many accounts that others gave of him – is a continuing debate in Gandhi scholarship. Should we privilege his political contributions over the ‘undeveloped and unsystematised’ writings?30 Is there a ‘well-grounded ontology’?31 Does the thesis in Hind Swaraj, which Partha Chatterjee called ‘a statement of most of the fundamental elements of Gandhi’s politics’ and ‘the first and perhaps the fullest’ systematic exposition of his ideas, continue to inform his later works?32 The situation decisively changed with Akeel Bilgrami’s ‘Gandhi, The Philosopher’ establishing the integrity of Gandhi’s writings as the opening towards his moral conception of truth.33 This project was complemented by R C Pradhan’s ‘Making Sense of Gandhi’s Idea of Truth’ where a further integrity between Gandhi’s spiritual, moral, and epistemic notions of truth is revealed. However, it is John Alter’s research that brought before us, in an explicit manner, the union of nature and value in Gandhi’s political theory, nature cure, sexual experimentation, and hypophysics. Alter calls this unity of nature and value bio-morality, which defines the genius of Gandhi who found ‘morality as a problem in which Truth and biology were equally implicated’.34 Alter’s invention of Gandhian bio-morality is the distributions of a line of fire across Gandhi studies, in generative licks and in a corporeal splendour. He liberated Gandhi’s experiments from interpretations of the apologue kind.

Hypophysics

21

The corpus of Gandhi The problem of body refers to the corpus of Gandhi. But what is a corpus? Gandhi reorganized this question with respect to body, which Alter understands as praxis, and the body of his writings. He remarked regarding the state of Vedic writings: ‘Vedas to be divine must be a living word, ever growing, ever expanding and ever responding to new forces. The priest clung to the letter and missed the spirit.’35 We see that it was only with John Alter that Gandhi could leave a body in the form of Collected Works. Gandhi’s corpus is his body of work. Everyone thinks, some do it vaguely and some systematically. These thoughts are not materially present in the world, just as the soul is not a material presence. When you write your thoughts down you do so with material devices, such as ink and paper. So there is a body which holds the thought, which is made of the ink and the book. When the thoughts of a thinker are not well understood the corpus is of no one. One could say that Gandhi’s works remained an anonymous cadaver till John Alter made of it a body, a corpus, by giving it the thought which composed it, ‘the Biomoral imperative’.36 Alter involves the moral in the experimental conduct of truth and the dietary practices of Gandhi. However, we find that the moral extends beyond the engagement of the organs. In reanimating Gandhi’s corpus with the formula and appellation ‘bio-morality’, Alter proceeds, as is the case with most inaugural writings, with the suspension of the determination of bios and moral. What is life? What is moral? How are they involved in one another and how are they devolving each other? We find that Gandhian hypophysics is the extreme determination of the act volvere under the real condition of nature being the same as value. To think volvere hypophysically is to see it as a system in which ‘Truth and Goodness converge’.37 Pradhan provided the integration that has been lacking in Gandhi studies by proposing the formula Truth is the Good. Around the same time Akeel Bilgrami proposed the thesis that Gandhi’s conception of ‘the world [is] not as brute but as suffused with value’.38 He found in this regard a continuity between Gandhi, the pantheistic tendencies of the dissenting tradition in England or ‘the Radical Enlightenment’ which conceived God as sacralizing nature from within, and Spinoza who would permit Bligrami’s thesis that ‘desirabilities’ or ‘evaluative properties are contained in the world [itself] and can be perceived or apprehended as such’.39 While both Pradhan and Bilgrami present Gandhian thought in its essential hypophysics, they and many others call it a philosophy or a metaphysics.40 Gandhi had always been subject to comparisons. In the essay ‘Gandhi, the Philosopher’, Bilgrami proposed parallels between Gandhi

22

Gandhi and Philosophy

and Heidegger who has frequently served as a running commentary to Gandhi. Such comparisons have a reason beyond the usual tendencies operating within academic practices within and without India in relation to India as an academic object, be it of any discipline. Gandhi’s hypophysics is the perplexion of the norms through which any academic institutional thinking could operate – a divine perversion. There are two schemas through which he is normalized – one is to compare him with a set of current theoretical proprieties and the other to effect a recoil. Gandhi, however, should be distinguished from other discourses and authors to obtain the rarity of his thinking in which our age reflects back in a susurrant narrative and an eldritch light. Of the recent formulations of Gandhian hypophysics certain writings are ‘truthful’, in the Gandhian sense, to his writings. Unless we obtain a distinction between the activity of metaphysics and the passion of hypophysics which determines the act of the passive resister, Gandhi shall remain imprisoned by paternal reason, a ventriloquized voice, an animated corpse. Hence, we need to comprehend what hypophysics and metaphysics are to each other, without this ever being a reciprocal determination. With his concept of metaphysics, Heidegger simultaneously made a diagnosis of the history of the West and the history of metaphysic, and provided the decryption key to the encrypted destinality in that history which is derived from that which it extracts. In order to extract unspent resources from the history of metaphysics he invented an analytic procedure in the form of the concept of ontotheology. Ontology is the discipline that accomplishes the ground for everything, and theology is the discipline that gives an account of all beings with respect to the highest being. Their essential unity is metaphysics. The ontotheological essential constitution of metaphysics cannot be explained in terms of either theologic or ontologic. … For it still remains unthought by what unity ontologic and theologic belong together, what the origin of this unity is, and what the difference of the differentiated which this unity unifies.41

The problem of this difference and differentia is short circuited by Gandhi to derive his hypophysics. The metaphysical determination of a thing is in accordance with some other thing; in Aristotelian predication the what of something is determined in some other thing. That is, man is man in so far as he is accorded the specific difference rational in the genus of animal. Then, is Being the highest genus? If it is, how are all other differences determined in this highest genus? Hence, following Aristotle, metaphysics is to be understood as a science prior to the determination of Being into anything, even nature, a science of which is physics. Duns Scotus, for whom it is a science of that which is prior to

Hypophysics

23

any categories, would say, ‘This science we call “metaphysics”, from “meta” which means “beyond”, and “the science of nature”.’42 This, the question of difference and differentia, is the permanence of a crisis that has distributed the problem differently in what makes up the history of metaphysics. Heidegger’s insight had been that the historicality of this history is seized from within by the crisis which is distributed in it. Hypophysics, whereas, is the science of nature such that there is nothing transcending it nor anything transcendental immanent to it to bring about a crisis of difference. Nature is the Good, which is God – ‘But God is life. Therefore goodness and all it connotes is not an attribute. Goodness is God’.43

The anatomy of the good The relation between Being and the Good is one of the classic problems of metaphysics, or even the essential problem for metaphysics if we understand essences to be concepts corresponding to the internal milieu of a being: Being that is without any sense other than its own logic of self-distribution as opposed to the sense of the distribution of Being derived from something otherwise than Being – the Good or the God. The self-distribution of Being implies that the Sense of Being must be immanent to this distribution. The exemplary system of this kind of distribution of Being is to be found in Spinoza’s Ethics where Being does not refer its self-distribution – attributes and modes – to anything other than its infinite tributes. Spinoza’s metaphysics is the distribution of the one infinite substance whose infinite attributes express its infinite essence; modes are determinate expressions of these attributes; thought, an attribute, has modes ‘such as love, desire, or whatever emotions of the mind’. Within the Spinozist system, the attribution of modes to substance would be hypophysics, as a result of which people have ‘linked the name “god” to the images of things that they are accustomed to see’.44 Here Gandhi is opposed to Spinoza: ‘He and His Law are one. The Law is God. Anything attributed to him is not a mere attribute. He is the attribute. He is Truth, Love, Law, and a million things that human ingenuity can name.’45 Sense is what we experience in our finitude in relation to the tributaries and the difference between the tributaries to which we are ourselves disposed. Hence, quantitative relations are the better expressions of sense, and value is understood in the original sense of the term as valere, to be well or to be healthy. Health is, for all these reasons, the meaning of a complex problematic, a relation between the exigencies that life suffers and at the same time the reason we give to these exigencies by reckoning three things: the necessity to maintain

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our own self-distribution in an essential consistency or conatus, the quantitative relation between the tributaries of Being that concern us (for example, in spite of there being an infinity of attributes we are to be concerned only with two), and our derivation of the sense of being-well from our faculty of reason. When Wittgenstein had completed his first book, the nameless, Moore would suggest a name that resembled Spinoza’s treatise on politics, although what Moore found to be similar between the two texts was a matter of the axiomatic style. Axiom in the case of both philosophers is to be understood as initial assertions. For Spinoza, the foremost assertion concerns the identity of substance and the whole of being, and for Wittgenstein it was the identity between the case understood as the encasement of the distributions of beings constituting logical milieus and the world as the totality of encasements. But, beyond these assertions the two philosophers share a problematic: the distribution of Being with no reference to an exteriority, or a world in which each being has an internal milieu while the world itself is without an internal milieu. There are significant tonal differences between the two philosophers. We need to remark on only one such in order to grasp the difference Gandhi makes with his hypophysics. Spinoza condemns any speculation concerning a sense external to Being as superstition whereas Wittgenstein expresses hope and despair at their critical limits when he says ‘the sense of the world must lie outside it’. This statement is not necessary in his system.46 Hence, its presence places this criticalized hope outside it. When we say ‘there must be something else’ in those moments when we find that no activity makes us feel sufficiently contented, or when we say ‘there must be someone else’ in a period of lost or distended loves, or when we say ‘there must be a place’ when the milieu around us that we call our place is not in concordance with ourselves, instituting strangeness as a relation, we are speaking of a sense that gives us hope reserving a certainty of its existence. This is one of the directions possible for Wittgenstein. On the other hand it is a statement in the mode of declaring a law – ‘the place of the disobedient must be outside society’. Then the sense that is to be determined is indeterminable with respect to any genus, since it concerns the whole world, the use of both directions – of a criticalized hope and a law that governs what is outside the encasements – Wittgenstein’s proposition sits outside his own Tractatus. So far we have considered the problem of value in relation to Being in metaphysics with respect to systems of self-distribution of Being without reference to any exteriority. But there is another case to consider: being governed by a principle other than and greater than Being. It is for this reason that JeanLuc Nancy, while comparing the difference between Heidegger’s Being and

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Time and Spinoza’s Ethics calls the latter a book of ontology that has also to do with logic and ethics.47 However, this description is made possible by a concept of sense derived by Nancy from the teleological function of reason, sense is understood as the what-it-is-for (Dis-enclosure). One can derive other concepts of sense than the teleological in Nancy’s writings. However, for a philosopher, someone who does not hesitate to think of the world as such or of Being in the completeness of its distribution, this concept of sense is dominant in his texts. But this concept of sense abides deconstruction of sense per se without enduring it; that is, if a deconstruction of sense would be the suspension of the disappearance of sense in the directions of temporality distinct to it then Nancy affirms sense as an insistence that is tangible in the literal and the figurative and determines each and every act of making sense. This concept of sense is rare since, in the unremarkable instances common sense exacts a necessity out of us; and in those instances of thinking or acting where the limits of common sense are reached a generally termed theological function takes over and passes us over this problematic of sense invented by Nancy. From the viewpoint of hypophysics, physics and metaphysics commit a denaturing of nature. In Gandhian hypophysics, the difference in nature is not of the quantities of the good but of the quantities of speed, the quantity according to which nature is distributed. Everything is a matter of speed; the eagle and the sparrow are not differentiated by placing moral judgement upon the act of hunting whence the eagle would be the evil hunter and the sparrow the good hunted. Gandhian nature is far from Edenic. Arne Naess almost correctly recognized that ‘Gandhi did not imagine wolves and lions who became “kind” and did no wrong’.48 Everything in nature is good by being nature. It is the deviation of a thing from its nature that is evil, ‘man has gone further away from his Maker’ in the movement named civilization which arose from ‘the evil nature of man’.49 There are consequences which follow from this. No event in nature can be without significance since nature is ‘not as brute but as suffused with value’. This science is rather too contemporary and extends along deep ecology to new pantheisms.50 Naess pointed away from natural sciences to ‘Spinoza’s Natura or other broad, profound concepts of nature’ for deep ecology and for ecosophy, the ‘philosophical world-view or system’ that would ground an individual’s acceptance of deep ecology towards praxis.51 He finds a close relation between non-violence and the philosophies of wholeness and oneness in which the path goes first inwards only to lead out again to everything. The path of action (karmamā rga) leads an action-yogi (karmayogi) into contact with all creatures,

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Gandhi and Philosophy whether or not they can feel pain. This is the path followed by Gandhi. … One could perhaps say that the culture which encircles us like a buffer between man and nature will ‘destroy us in no time at all’ if it is allowed to ride freely in the industrialised countries.52

Most recently, Stuart Kauffman proposes such a science of nature infused with the sacred, which will give rise to a new creed of man; ‘all the unfolding of nature is God, a fully natural God’, and with respect to this God man will ‘find a global ethic and reinvent the sacred for our planet, for all life, and for ourselves’.53 It is in such a world that events of nature pass judgements upon man for his deviations. Cosmos is not sophrosune alone; phronein, the ‘wisdom comes by suffering … to men, whether they want it or not. Harsh … is the grace of god’54 Gandhi understood the famine of 1908 in Central India as an event which responded to avidity, a deviation from nature. We are convinced that, though this condition is undoubtedly the result of divine will, the blame lies within us. … This avidity is, to be sure, a source of evil. … Some readers may wonder what the connection is between fraudulent practice in relation to permits in the Transvaal and trading licenses in Natal on the one hand and famine on the other. That we do not perceive this connection is in itself an error.55

To perceive this connection is to possess the knowledge of hypophysics and rectify one’s conduct in accordance with it.56 Later, Gandhi held the Bihar earthquake of 1934 to be a punishment of nature for the Indian practice of untouchability: I share the belief with the whole world, civilized and uncivilized, that calamities come to mankind as chastisement for their sins. When that conviction comes from the heart, people pray, repent and purify themselves. … I have but a limited knowledge of His purpose. Such calamities are not a mere caprice of the Deity or Nature. They obey fixed laws as surely as the planets move in obedience to laws governing their movement. Only we do not know the laws governing these events and, therefore, call them calamities or disturbances.57

Gandhi’s new science did not go unopposed in his time and he anticipated these oppositions. Within his misunderstanding Tagore understood Gandhi best: ‘A mistake in geometry may make a road too long, or a foundation weak, or a bridge dangerous. But mathematical mistakes cannot be cured by moral maxims.’58

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The wound of the world Tagore understood the mathematical in the Cartesian sense, as the science of quantities independent of things from which it might be abstracted. The infinitive abstrahere is often the basis on which the science of the abstract is understood, that is, the abstract as a thing drawn out from something present. Descartes produced a concept of the abstract as independent of anything extended. Then, Tagore understands the science proper to nature to be physics, the discipline which is mathematical in the Cartesian sense; quantitative relations obeying laws which are indifferent to moral values. However, for Gandhi, beyond the restraints of ceteris paribus in experimental situations, which provide mathematicality to physics, reigns the value that is nature itself, out of which physics abstracts nature as its object. The Gandhi–Tagore debate was one of laws or of the kind of physics they endorsed. Tagore opposed the idea of a ‘Divine danger’ such as the earthquake of 1934 in Bihar which left more than 30,000 dead as a punishment, for the practice of untouchability, as Gandhi saw it. That is, the law which the Lawgiver installed is separate from him. The Lawgiver in remaining removed from that which he gave does not interfere in the working of the world.59 Tagore was embarrassed when he had to state ‘a truism in asserting that physical catastrophes have their inevitable and exclusive origin in certain combination of physical facts’.60 There are interesting consequences ‘if we associate ethical principles with cosmic phenomena’.61 Man is the creature who has been granted the ethical. If the ethical act or its contrary can have causal power over that of nature, then, nature will have two forces to reckon with: one of these is natural law and the other is human law. In an ethically charged event, especially of the unethical kind, the human force would appear to be ‘superior to Providence’; man has a far more powerful effect on nature than that of the forces of nature. Now, Gandhi responds to Tagore by agreeing with him, ‘God Himself never interferes’. However, Gandhi derives his agreement from hypophysics itself – ‘For God is the Law’. In being the Law God does not interfere; to interfere is to be other than the law, like a hand that reaches into a machine and removes a screw. In being the Law that the world is there is nothing that is exempt from Law. Both the spiritual and the physical are governed by the same God. It follows that ‘physical phenomena produce results both physical and spiritual. The converse I hold to be equally true.’62 Then Tagore’s universe is wounded. The wound cleaves the world into the moral and the physical, each having separate laws. Tagore’s God merely watches the wounded world that he set in place as it unfolds.

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The deepest wound is the pronouncement of the word; the word is the distension of nature; with the word its separation from its nature is born. Words assemble and dissemble and depart for ever-increasing distances. Finally a word is merely a word. The gain of a word as a word is the loss of its truth. A sign points to a thing; the pointing of the sign is a sign which accuses man of the deviation. We call it the accusative sign. In the word ‘conduct’ one can see a motion extending something from a hive to a manifestation, as in the good nature of his that is conducted by a man in his society. The ‘conduit’ is that through which something passes to someplace else. This logic of conductance is found in the Hegelian theory of signs,63 indeed in classical semiology as such. The sign had been a matter of signum et representatio. There is also the sacred sign, a special kind of passage to the divine – sacrum signum, for example, that which is shown by the oracle. That is, the passage towards the things of the world is to be distinguished from the passage to the divine. The divine word is not a word that is a wound of truth, the wound that reminds the wearer of the abeyance of the sense. The ordinary words eventually cleave into an abyss. In another sense they wander as coins which have lost their denomination. The denomination of the divine sign is the sign itself, no mark is made upon the sign as it might wear off. This markless sign is the Eucharist. In adhering to its truth man heals the wound of the word. However, we have seen that, for Gandhi, there is no such distinction between the divine sign and the ordinary word.64 Indeed, the divine is the mundane. The mundane is the sacred in which ‘He and His Law are one’.65 Man reads the sign that is the designation ‘to see God face to face’. The distinction between signs and designations is born when man has deviated from God and in that deviation there is born a distinction between the ordinary word and the divine word, such as the name of Rama. Rama is the wordgod. The word, when properly uttered, is the thing itself. This is the logic of the mantra; the word and the thing suffused in one another are operated by the utterer. The spell is cast in the thing by the word since the thing is infused with the word – ‘Ramanama is an alchemy such as can transform the body.’66 The word shall cure the body – ‘It was said of him that he cured himself of his leprosy, not by any medicine, but by applying to the affected parts bilva leaves which had been cast away after being offered to the image of Mahadeva in Bileshwar Temple, and by the regular repetition of Ramanama.’67 The hypophysical understanding of language is such that in it the word is the designation that is the thing. The freeword which floats about, ever ready to hook up with a designation, the language of civilization, is to be cured by Ramanama. However, the godword can arise only in proportion to the closing of the wound,

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for which Gandhi devised a system of practices. Towards the healing one must repeat the wordgod as it will remind us of the wound. Although both Nietzsche and Gandhi addressed their time, they saw the times differently. For Nietzsche the times were untimely. For Gandhi the times were imminent. Both diagnosticians, they derived different diagnoses since their concepts of health, body, and world were different. While Nietzsche proclaimed the gay science, Gandhi perfected the sombre science of hypophysics. Kathryn Tidrick’s biography of Gandhi attempts to establish that the ideas and books encountered by Gandhi during his days as a student in London where religion, occultisms, and pantheism swirled together, and the societies, missions, and cults that abound at the turn of the century left a deep impression on him, were to continuously determine his life and his politics. They included esoteric Christianity, Theosophy, Gospel of Vitality and other ideas which were considered to be fads by some of his contemporaries. Esoteric Christianity understands nature as made up of ‘spirits close to the earth and hence allied with matter’68 which grounds Gandhi’s hypophysical utterances such as that natural calamities are the effect of the moral imperfections of men. The library that Tidrick gathers from his correspondences, journalistic contributions, and engagements, and his reading programmes in Pretoria’s jail indicates a trail that went backwards from Carlyle to the German romantics and American transcendentalists, from Madame Blavatsky to eastern mysticism and Neoplatonism, and French occultists, and from Edward Maitland and Anna Kingsford of the Esoteric Christian Union to the vegetarians and anti-vivisection movements of the day.69 Gandhi’s library is neither occidental nor oriental in the strict sense, although Tidrick provides a corrective to most biographers of Gandhi who assigned sources of his inspiration in the plurality of ‘Hinduism’, the asceticism of Jainism influential in Gujarat, and ancient Indian doctrines of karmic cycle, moksha, and philosophies of anti-dualism, and she resolves for other scholars the puzzle of Gandhi’s unorthodox ‘Hinduism’. The unity of his life and thought and the thoroughbred line of his descent, be it Western or Eastern, are unintended comedies. For example, the Christianity which absorbed Gandhi was not that of the Catholic variety, nor did he harbour any fidelity to ‘Hindu’ tradition when expressing his need for moksha in this life. But then, neither is this need merely his assumption in his own person of an ambition awakened by the Theosophists’ promise of ‘real divine theurgy’ and prophesy of the ‘new torch bearer of truth’. Gandhian hypophysics attains a systematicity and practical force beyond the ‘Christ principle’, Christian renunciation and suffering, the apocalyptic revelations of Mary Alling Aber (to whose journal Gandhi subscribed), the

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centrality of India in the theosophical scheme of things, and even the idea that the soul could be perfected and that such attainment by one could bring universal redemption in a day. Gandhi did attach ‘some significance to the fact of my being born in India rather than in Europe’.70 The locality of birth and the time of birth are important in the subcontinent where the time stamps of births, birth rituals, weddings, and even the official functions of the state involve the distributions of consequences according to the mysterious divine intentions, ever since astrology entered the subcontinent once  the Ancient Greeks made it available. Astrology is poker with the divine: men read the intentions of the divine from the arrangement of the heavens and wage bets by slipping their actions on particular divine hours such that these actions are carried to speed in the flow of events divined. Astrology grounds astronomy in the subcontinent as can be seen in the practice of finding the correct divine hour for launching a rocket and breaking coconuts to open the time stamp into which the launch of the rocket is to be placed. Gandhi was opposed to astrology and other technologies of the trade with the divine that proliferates in the subcontinent. Instead, Gandhi implied that the orient is the place where his birth constituted a function, of the great soul, and the task entrusted to the great soul, as the one who brought the truth of the subcontinent as the destiny for the whole world from time immemorial. That is, everything ends up as the subcontinent had always been; even the great ancients who attained to hitherto unknown perfections had come to their ends and met the truth of the subcontinent. For Gandhi, the subcontinent is the soul, understood as the imperishable, of mankind; it is the destiny, understood as the resting place of all events, great or small; the genetic information, understood as the algorithm that determines the edges of all manmade things, including histories, and without attending to this algorithm, or else rewriting it in opposition to Gandhi, destinies would fall like dominoes of varying shapes ending at the same point. Then, what is this subcontinent, which he sought to raise up to sufficient moral power in order to convert the whole world into an image of itself, to overwhelm the West? In Chapter 2 we will find that the directions such as east–west and up–down are determined differently according to hypophysics. The orient names all that is good and all that is good is the slow, or keeping with the limits of progress that nature set for things.

2

Scalology: Speed

Names and forms matter little, they come and go. That which is permanent and therefore necessary eludes the historian of events. M. K. Gandhi (CWMG 29, p. 135) Hypophysics is the science of nature which is nothing but value in that it divides Being into the natural and the unnatural while reminding us that even the unnatural derives its sustenance from the veins it lifts away from the natural. When the decantation from nature is too distant to provide a cellular fluid the unnatural thing ceases to be, as seen in many civilizations – the Greeks, the Romans, the Persians, the Mughals – which found certain ubieties beyond the natural either through the ingenuities of their intellect or through the might of their armies. Nature is the only ubiety, and that it is not equitably given everywhere can be seen in the remnants of the wonderful ancients we dig up. Perhaps there lies much more beneath our feet unknown as yet to us as Gandhi held. Although nature is the only ubiety, it is not in the same quantity everywhere as we found earlier; there is more nature in the pebble than in a bullet, in the storm than in an airplane, in the deaths of plague than in the antiseptics. The ubiety that is nature is not a confusion since nature and value are one; it is in their distinction that a room for confusion appears. Man is a certain confusion in nature. Something is confused when the parts that make up that thing are not distinguished; and hence, in man nature and value appear to be separable and at the same there is a resistance to this separation known at each moment by man as a being out of place. A thing’s value is only in so far as it keeps its place. A place becomes unholy when the divine is out of place – ‘Money has taken the place of God’ in an unholy land.1 When women find themselves out of place in factories their own place, home, is lost and the unrest that is the Suffragette movement is created, as Gandhi explains in Hind Swaraj. Being out of place is the ubiety of man. To have fallen out of its own place – the fables of which Gandhi enjoyed in

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the Bible and in Milton – such that he finds his own place is the way the Maker had emplaced man for he was made to know his own Maker. To know his own Maker is to know each thing made by Him in its own place. However, one needs to have a certain quantity before asking questions such as ‘How far has this thing gone out of place?’ and ‘How much value has this thing lost?’ For example in the case of a dress falling out of place we follow what we were told by a certain moral code about how much a dress must conceal of a woman’s body. In the case of a fork on a dinner table falling out of its place one would ask which category of restaurant it is since its place can differ by centimetres depending on the rating system for such institutions. In the case of nature itself this matter is not so varied as the aforementioned cases which are, after all, cases of man-made laws.

The science of ladders Nature as value is defined with respect to a quantity such that it enables us to speak about things in terms of having more nature or less nature in them. That is, when we say that ‘it is wonderful that the sky is blue and not grey’ we quantify the value placed in the way the sky is cast. That is, colour is not a quality of light in this case, but a discrete quantity which is derived to correspond to a spectrum of feelings. The fact of quantification of feelings is all around us in the survey forms we fill up: ‘How does it feel to be black and poor?’ – ‘very bad, somewhat bad, neither bad nor good, somewhat good, very good’.2 The value of the sky ranges from blue through white to grey in relation to feelings; though, colours also scale the alertness of a state in the spectrum of alarm it has, such as orange alert and red alert. However, ‘feeling blue’ (describes hurt and longing) and ‘the sky is blue’ (an observation made in the context of cheerfulness) are contraries of one another – ‘feeling blue’ corresponds to a grey sky. The separation of the quantity from the specific evaluation allows quantities to define diverse values. When two distinct situations are evaluated in terms of the same quantity, the colour blue, they appear to contradict each other. However, there are no contraries in the realm of quantities; the number 1 is not the contrary of 2; 60 kilometres per hour is not the contrary of 100 kilometres per hour. Values are gauged in accordance with scales such as speed, loudness, colour, and size; values are nothing other than nature itself at its purest, and evaluation refers to the distance from nature. We call scalology the adoption of scales to gauge the value in nature. Scaling of nature has a history of varying lines. The most prominent line of this history is that of the school men who ordered nature into scales, ladders, ascending to the

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divine from matter. Scale as in a ladder shows the ascent of nature towards the divine. Nature is not equal to the divine in this case. The world of the Maker of the schoolmen is the outside of this world of the creatures; for the schoolmen it is God and His creatures whereas for Gandhi the world is the Maker.3 Hence, there are intermediary beings who are both the skin of the world and also of the divine and their mutual touch – the angels. The most influential schema of the scale was provided by the pseudo Dionysus in which God as the originary illumination hands down the light that reveals Being to those who pass it further down like a group of workers bringing down bricks in relay from the top of a building with the help of a ladder, except that, in the divine handing down the brick would diminish with each step of the relay – ‘on each level, predecessor hands on to successor whatever of the divine light he has received and this, in provisional proportion, is spread out to every being’.4 With Charles Bonnet the concept of scala naturae concerns the creatures alone and the conjunction or the disjunction with the Maker would matter little. Instead, scala naturae orders the natural entities in a ladder of perfection starting with man at the top. That is, the light leads from man to creatures revealing their distance from him. If, for the theologian, man alone is the being in nature who possesses the gift of knowledge, then, what theological purpose does it serve to have this scale of nature ascending up to man? In seeing the ascent up to himself man is opened towards the puzzle of creation, the nature that lies before man is his book. The scala naturae leads man to what lies beyond him, the divine, in that knowing the domain of the creatures will open him towards the truth of the Maker of all that is natural; in the transcendent lies the purpose of the world to which the ladder climbs. Jacques Monod ran a thought experiment centuries after the schoolmen: if we send an autonomous robotic craft to another planet to look for the signs of life, the craft will have to have certain criteria to distinguish between the non-living, the living, and the artificial. For Monod, if the craft finds objects which are distinguished by their projective functioning they will have a creator, and hence be artificial: ‘On the other hand, the program will have to register the fact that living being’s structure results from a totally different process, in that it owes almost nothing to the action of outside forces, but everything from its overall shape down to its tiniest detail, to “morphogenetic” interactions within the object itself.’5 That is, having a maker is precisely the criterion which renders a being artificial for modern biology, and the movement of living beings is characterized by an internal principle for their movement, described by the cybernetic system rather than the soul of the ancients. This very modern scientific view was found by Hannah Arendt to have been inaugurated by ‘the discovery

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of the Archimedean point’, that is ‘a way to act on the earth and within terrestrial nature as though we dispose of it from the outside’ or from somewhere in the universe which is nowhere in particular; this is the way of Galileo, Copernicus, Newton, and Descartes.6 She too closed her grand thesis on the irreducibly triadic human condition with a thought experiment, showing that the inverse of man watching the universe was the point of view of ‘the watcher from the universe’ for whom all earthly human activities … would appear not as activities of any kind, but as processes, so that, as scientists recently put it, modern motorization would appear as a biological mutation in which human bodies gradually begin to be covered by shells of steel. … no more or less than the mutation which now goes on before our eyes in those small living organisms which we fought with antibiotics and which mysteriously have developed new strains to resist us.7

Abolishing the scale that separated the earth and the sky, the modern age ushers the time of the watchers who have shed human criterion – of acting and making – and adopted the ‘natural’ criterion – of being as becoming. The Gandhian scalology is not a hierarchy such as that of the scala naturae. The ladder in philosophy has two tendencies. Either one constitutes the technical device of a ladder such that a specific function, and that function alone, is served by the ladder and one kicks it when its work is done, in the manner of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus; or the ladder is the determinable, the determinant of which is found only in the ascent after which one completes the determination in the act of descent, characterized by Plotinus. Nature does not ascend to the divine in Gandhi’s world. Nature is divine in so far as it was created by a God who is this nature itself. In Gandhi’s world all created things lie equally as the Maker had made them to be according to their respective laws and ‘the Law and the Lawgiver are one’.8 Without the diversity of speeds lying face to face there can be no world. The diversity in nature, of speeds, is such that there can be world; the world is the different speeds face to face in their concordance with respect to the divine law, which they are; the Maker is he who holds the faces against one another. In seeing the face to face of speeds in nature man is to see the Maker face to face. Each individual in the world is given by a law particularized for that individual. For example the individuals of the human species are not equal such that there can be one religion suited for all – ‘In reality there are as many religions as there are individuals.’9 This inequality is not one of a hierarchy; all are equal in so far as they maintain themselves at the speed the Maker had given them; to be

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at one’s own speed is how things befit their nature – ‘I should not therefore lose my head and believe that men with smaller responsibilities are my inferiors.’10

Speed and place Of all scales why speed? Speed, since all things are in motion, either towards themselves or towards some other thing; an amoeba in a sugar gradient moves up and down and this motion is also a motion towards itself, that is, to remain itself as a live unicellular organism. There is a motion prescribed even for the stone; it takes a fall; it rolls along the river. Rocks in themselves motion towards themselves as the hardness of the earth. They move into what they are taking millennia, either by being carried by ice sheets or by being helped along by the flow of the river or by sedimentation. Petrology in this sense is the science of the speed of rocks. There is a speed prescribed for each thing in its movement from place to place and a speed prescribed for each thing in falling into its place wherever it may be. Aristotle distinguished different kinds of motion and his theories of motion varied across his works.11 Things are inclined to motion according to their natures – fire seeks the upward direction and the wood seeks the downward direction. In those instances where a being that suffers the privation of its motion that is due to its nature through the hindrance of another realizes this nature only through the action of some other that is the cause of the removal of the privation, its motion is not self-originating.12 For example the man who removes the lid from the water kettle set to boil releases the steam to rise up, which is its nature. The complex motion of the animal is grounded in their having a soul. The soul in itself has distinct principles, the implementations of which distinguish the vegetal, animal, and man.13 For Aristotle, all speeds – be it the speed at which a thing remains itself or the speed at which it is to be some other – are distinguished by the mover of their movements; everything moves through contact and there is no action at a distance. The limit of such a theory of speed which abhors vacuum was found by him when he considered projectile motion – a javelin that is released from the hand continues unassisted, although its nature, made of wood, should be downwards to the ground.14 For Gandhi, nature actively seeks vacuum and hence the problematic of speed is configured differently in that each being is emplaced with a certain speed endowed by its maker – a seed of speed that sprouts and catches its limit. A place is different from space. Place has its own gravity: gravity in the sense of a certain distribution of heaviness and lightness of things emplaced.15 For

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this reason Aristotle considered place as a quantity in his Categories. Space is something that one abstracts from things which are emplaced and from this notion of space we can construct ever more complex spaces. Space is without the weight of place – being without weight space is brought to bear on all things. Space is without the distension of man. Kantian space is not the absolute space of Newton which is a container for all things to be in. Kant thought of space as the a priori intuition that has, ubiquitously, all the spatial differences which enable one to determine the position of anything – ‘Space is so conceived, for all parts of space, even to infinity, exist at once.’16 The intuition of space, though fecund with all the spatiality that is necessary to determine objects, was without a sufficient condition that would allow a delimitation to speak of a thing as something right here. Rather, space as pure intuition is not yet a place where we can speak of a taking place of something. Kant resolved the problem of place in Critique of Pure Reason by placing a central transcendental point which gives a place to all things in reference to it, such that the unity was provided by the centre to which everything refers: all things shall have their place. That which provides emplacements in space is the transcendental I which is not the first person pronoun in speech: ‘Our knowledge is concerned with nothing but appearances whose possibility, connection and unity (in the representation of an object) exist merely in us.’17 Hence, Heidegger would remark that, in the last instance, Kant determined beings as the posited and Being as position, where the Being of beings is the transcendental I.18 However, the place created by Kant would be already too distant from nature for Gandhi. This form of thought is the intellectual ingé nue bound for the same collapse as that of the great ancients. It is from a paradoxical description of the Maker that we can enter the Gandhian ubiety and the sense of being out of place: ‘God alone is static, but, amazing as it may sound, He is described both as motionless and full of motion.’19 Since the Maker Himself is in the made that retains its own place, nature is made up of things which are in motion, whereas the totality of nature in itself is without motion or without speed. Everything is characterized by speed. The speed of a rock and that of the river stealing it away imperceptibly are different; the former is the speed of passion and the latter is of action. The tree suffers the speed of the winds and water while erupting persistently into the active speed that is its growth and reproduction. Botanical speed is in the maintenance of the conduct of both kinds of speeds while keeping the locus – the tree holds its position in the woods while stalking the line of the canopy for light.20 These two kinds of speeds – holding one’s own place and seeking out places for nutrition – are one and the same for the animal. As it grows higher

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up, while remaining rooted to the ground, the oak-seed speeds into the oak-tree, which makes it an important object for Gandhi in his construction of politics as a model for the ideal village: ‘[The seed] works underneath the ground, is itself destroyed, and the tree which rises above the ground is alone seen.’21 The tree has its own speed as ‘it does not grow in a single day’. The animal takes both kinds of speeds independently; the speed from the lake to the den and its temporal succession towards itself. It speeds from its hiding towards its prey; it speeds from the embryo away from the hunter (when Elias Canetti discovers in ‘flight’ the ‘biological origins’ of all command – that is ‘the fact that many animals feed on other animals’ – he does so by isolating from these two only one speed, whose ‘source’, moreover, ‘is thus something alien; … something recognized as stronger than ourselves’).22 Now, the eagle resting on the same rock at that particular instance appears to have the same speed as the rock, though the eagle is capable of lifting off at a great speed. The speed of the eagle as it scans the fleeing rabbit might appear the same as that of its prey, although the eagle is capable of ascent and descent at variable speeds, which is impossible for the rabbit.23 These variations of speeds define the animal. No speeds are equal in nature. The kite and the dove are capable of similar speeds. Yet, the kite sustains the speed longer than the dove while directing the speed better. The difference in speeds in nature does not render them unequal in value; the quicker is not evil, and the slower as the good was not the only thing made by God. Things of nature are all equally good in keeping their speeds. Being good is the keeping of the speed that was received from the Maker. When Gandhi speaks of the quick and the slow he has in mind the place of an individual being and its practice of speed in relation to its assigned place. Hence, the equality of the speed of an automobile and a man running do not make them equal in nature. Indeed, the equality that man obtains with the machine by being its charioteer is his flight from nature, from the Maker. Paul Virilio asks, ‘Can we democratise ubiquity; in other words, can we democratise inertia?’24 This question can be paraphrased as can we conceive of place as that which is a beingequal and being-at-once? Such a question implies there being two kinds of places – place and space. It is an old question of the same genus as ‘this world and the other world’ as Nietzsche framed it, although the placement of this question is distinct. Being is determined as speed, to be is to speed. The science of being for Virilio is, hence, dromology; dromos, the road, is the ground of the science of speed. Being is Romani prior to the appearance of the people of the road or the people without a place. This world of places is contrasted with the other world of equitable ubiety or space. That is, place is opposed to the equal points of a space where each point,

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no matter how far, is equidistant from one another; the allegory of this space as we know is paradise. Following Milton’s tonality we can say that man was displaced from space into place, which he experiences as the lack of the former. Hence, the hero of place is ‘aloft incumbent’ waiting to raise up the whole of place which is his condemnation to space. Place offers no equality to anything that is taking place. It is the inequality of the emplaced and the incessant excretion of equality that characterizes place. As Heidegger says of one of the most magnificent places constructed in history: It or Ereignis, ‘the prespatial region which first gives any possible “where”’.25 Instead, Gandhi introduces place without another to contrast it. Place is as it is, with the unequal distribution of all beings, and the placement of each being is in accordance with speed. There is a moral equality in nature between all things, in so far as they keep to their naturally assigned speeds; nature renders them equal since they belong to their place. Gandhi was fond of the image of the equality of all the parts in a perfectly working machine which could justify the racial assignment of labour in the subcontinental societies; even if the men who performed manual labour due to their lower racial status were equal when one considered the totality of the system.26 However, when man makes machines and speeds beyond his natural locomotive limits he turns away from his place, including the places assigned to him according to his racial position. In contrast to Milton, Gandhi’s man falls into the equality of space where values are non-existent since all things are equalized. In Virilio’s words, ‘Absolute speed … with telecommunications and tele-command (the teleport following airport), will finally give rise to the latest of revolutions: the communication revolution that will abolish, along with distances, the very necessity of physical movement of whatever sort.’27 Absolute speed will be when place has been abolished for space. The abolishment of place is also the end of speed since there are no longer distances to be endured, it is the immobility of the world. For Gandhi, such a state of affairs would spell the apocalypse since ‘nothing remains static in the world’.28 Nature is the only place and it is here that man had often constructed the means to override the limits of his place, to escape the confinements of his value, and perished. Those who perished never escaped to space, that is a domain other than this world, but this world is enough to entomb all.

Taylor at the beginning We found that there were thinkers of speed before Gandhi and after him. But it is Gandhi’s resistance to speeding, which alone is resistance, which sets him

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apart. The text by Thomas F. Taylor, The Fallacy of Speed, was influential for Gandhi’s conception of nature in terms of speed. He found it important enough to order a translation: ‘Please translate Fallacy of Speed if you can. The book is commonplace, but it will serve our purpose.’29 The pamphlet by Taylor was translated into Gujarati and it was published in the Indian Opinion in 1910. Even though Gandhi considered the book to be commonplace the influence it had on his seminal work, Hind Swaraj, is rather remarkable. Taylor’s concerns in The Fallacy of Speed were of the loss of village life – characterized by a speed that is attuned to the rhythms of nature – when it was invaded by the hordes of motorized horses and monstrous machines which were marching to a rhythm impossible for nature. The strife between two rhythms is the passion of his pamphlet; we can say, between the circadian rhythms of the body in its nature and the Ricardian rhythm of rent, wages, and machinery. Taylor’s nostalgia for a rhythm that had already gone out of sync was such that he found Ralph Waldo Emerson, one of the most interesting nature mystics of his time, to be ‘in so many ways an apologist for modern conditions’.30 The notion of a place is given to us by the span of each thing in that place – a village of a hundred people and cattle span into the woods from where it turns back towards itself repelled by the predators and the dryads. The fairy tales tell us of the organization of the village as a place and its span: the taboos that hold the things, the people and their relations in place, and their outer limits haunted by the memories of those who went beyond. The movement from one village to the next had been an adventure. The world itself was an adventure with edges beyond which Hades awaited; on the way to the edges Sirens lured men away; the deceitful lotus eaters who made them forget the bounds of the world – Odyssey is the story of speed seeking to extinguish the place-ness of the world. Those were the days when ‘the sailing vessel’ adrift in the open seas was the essential place of man.31 In Taylor’s terms (and decades before Adorno and Horkheimer) Odyssey is the fantasy of mankind to conquer distances till ‘there are no more worlds to conquer’.32 The railways produced an estrangement of man for the near and a fascination for the distant. The place became distended into a gathering of villages and towns inflated by a new horde of people who did not belong anywhere. That is, a man in a village had to know each and everything around him intimately in its natural speed – the time when the seeds had to be planted, the rhythm of the mating of animals which had to be hunted, the rhythms of the tide on the beaches, the speed of the fowl, the speed of his own walks so that he could be home in time from the edges for supper. A trip to the edges was fascinating enough for it took hours to reach there by foot. ‘But for the railways … a visit to nearer places would

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be as much esteemed by the tourist or the excursionist as trips to the more distant ones now are.’33 The equality between the nearer and the distant is the effect of speed which has in fact made the nearer the most distant. Speed had made man a being of transitive neighbourhoods. The preservation of the place against the invasion of speed is not to be understood by the mere presence of machinery ‘ruining the view’. Instead when roads are built to the top of mountains, their majesty and mystery which corresponded to the human body unaided by the machines is lost. The sacred and the mysterious exist in a relation between the natural speed of man and the place – ‘A tunnel to the top of the Jungfrau or the Matterhorn is, to my thinking, a hateful, almost a sacrilegious thing.’34 Speed as a term obtained to this meaning, as the scale for the change of a thing or an event, comparatively recently. Etymologically, from the root of ‘speed’ departs the Sanskrit word ‘sphota’, the release of the word as the completion of thought, which grounds one of the theories of language from the subcontinent.35 ‘Sphota’ retains a sense of speed in ‘spotana’ or explosion. The earliest use of the term from the eleventh century refers to the progress of a thing or a venture. That is, speed was the accomplishment of a thing, of what it retained as the real generative power of that thing, as opposed to the mere possibilities, in accordance with the active intervention of someone or something on the impediments which stood between the generative and the accomplishment. In another register, speed is the energeia of a dunamis. The use of the word changed distinctly with the arrival of motorized transportation where it referred to the rate of change of motion of specific motorized units of motion. It was abstracted and released from the domain of qualitative change of events and things into the quantity of motion of locomotives where the motion was no longer a matter of advancement or progress, but a quantitative variation indifferent to the notions of progress and Godspeeds. When Gandhi uses the term speed he refers to the various senses possible. When Virilio writes, much in the Gandhian sense, that ‘speed is the hope of the West’,36 he brings together two distinct senses of speed, the qualitative and the quantitative, in the same statement; progress understood as the increase in the speed of the machineries, travel, and communication systems is the direction in which the idea of the West has a possible safe keeping.

The ascent and the descent Within the scale in which all speeds lie equally, ad valorem, man exists as a being ‘no better than an animal and perhaps worse’ or ‘much higher than the animal’.37

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Man exists as an unrest within scalology even when ‘man is so made by nature as to require him to restrict his movements as far as his hands and feet will take him’ and it is the Maker who ‘set a limit to a man’s locomotive ambition in the construction of his body’.38 Why must this be so, that the Maker who sets the limits of speeds confers the same creature with the power to override? ‘God gifted man with intellect so that he might know his Maker.’39 Since the Maker is the Law of all things made, in knowing all things made man faces the Maker. All things which are made are in their respective speeds; to know the Maker is to know all speeds. Hence, the faculty of knowledge must be one that also gives the power to override. Using override man is to know all speeds beyond the Godset limits of his locomotive ambition. However, ‘man immediately proceeded to discover means of overriding the limit’.40 Man, when he is truly man as made by the Maker, is the animal which experiences the unrest that he is in the scale and hence in Maker Himself – the discordant strum of the ladder. Hypophysics is the science through which man ‘climbs higher in the scale’.41 To ascend into the divine scale means to descend from another scale, the scale of man. The tales of Babel and the many unfinished monuments which sought great heights found across the earth are the remnants of man attempting to set another scale in the direction opposed to that of his Maker. The faculty of override which was given to man by the Maker to know the scale of speeds overspreads into another world of ever-increasing speeds endue the machinery, that of modern civilization. The world of man exists as a disarticulation of the Maker’s world. Then, there come to be two different scales – that of the Maker and that of man. To the scale of the Maker corresponds the immutable law and to that of man corresponds the mutable law – ‘There is thus a great difference between moral laws and temporal laws.’42 The machinic scale of man descends away from the divine scale – ‘Owing to them, man has gone further away from his Maker.’43 That is, as man ascends in his scale, in proportion, he descends from the divine scale. The ascent of man beyond his locomotive limits is the goal of metaphysics and poetry; the ascent determines health and sickness as Novalis found – ‘Poetry works its ends by means of hurt and titillation, pleasure and pain, error and truth, health and sickness. It mixes all in its great goal of goals – the raising of mankind above itself.’44 It is an ascent that Gandhi would find to be override. This ascent is the direction that Gandhi marks by the west, the speed beyond the limbs. Evil ones speed into the west. The good lies in the divine inertia. How far can man be allowed to rise in this new scale? The restlessness in man resonates with nature around him; the pigeons find home in the crevices of concrete and make nests with nails and copper wires, the foxes stalk the roads, even the rhythms of the

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seasons play according to human restlessness. What if lightning no longer liked the way it roared? What if the sky did not darken again? Will nature bear with the creature it made to reflect itself then? Gandhi warns time and again that all those who came before us and chased the direction opposed to the maker, Westward, have perished. Only the natural speed, or the oriental direction, remains in existence without interruptions: It is best that the cart should move with its natural speed. Can we not say now that it is no more the motor-car age but it is the aeroplane age? But all thisrushing about is only for a while. Our legs, however, will remain as long as mankind survives. Those who are content with the natural speed of their legs remaining unimpaired will win in the end.45

Before we can come to the directionality of man we need to consider the principles of direction. ‘Good travels at snail’s pace’ and ‘evil has wings’; everything is a matter of speed. Velocity is a vector; it is a quantity that has a magnitude and a direction. If someone reports that a vehicle moved to a distance of 100 kilometres this information is not sufficient to locate the vehicle, for which we need to know its direction. Displacement is the vector that tells us the magnitude by which a thing experienced a change of position from a point of origin, along with the direction of change. The length of an object is scalar and it makes no sense to speak about a negative length such as –10 metres. A negative vector tells us the change of direction, it points to the opposite direction. Speed is a scalar quantity. Speed does not tell us the direction of anything. This could be confounding since it is conventional to see a ‘binary opposition’ operating in Gandhi, namely west/ east, where west is the major term marginalizing the lower term east, and to see Gandhi’s Hind Swaraj as an attempt at overturning this opposition. That, of course, is far from the case. Even the west is defined in terms of speed, as that which speeds more than nature, east being that which maintains the good speed; one spun by machines, the other the spinner of the wheel – speed is the compass. The power of the west is its greater speed, including its power to colonize – ‘but for railways the English could not have such a hold on India as they have’. We need to bear in mind that it is not the spatial distinctions of above and below with respect to the earth and the skies that Gandhi has in mind, nor is it the directionality of the geometer and the astrolabe of the navigator. Rather, the direction corresponds to the divine directives; the direction of a thing tells us its bearings with respect to the value it has either retained or lost – a certain kind of moral compass. Then, what we find is something like a production of direction itself by the speed of things: the moral direction of a thing is virtually in the speed of that thing,

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though not sufficiently. The theoretical exploration of the moral with respect to a quantity, speed for Gandhi, is not rare. Religions and states have always quantified good and evil on the basis of quantities: ‘How many husbands should a woman have?’ according to the rules of family life; ‘How many loaves of bread should a man need?’ according to a distribution of food according to the maxim to each according to his need; ‘How many times should a family take out their car in a week?’ according to the rules of good environmental conduct. The value encoded in the quantities has concretized to such an extent that there is a universal answer to these questions – one husband, three meals, and possibly never. The world of man departs from the divine with a cumulative speed. The relations of man in this world are defined by speed. The increase and decrease of speed, the ascent and descent in its scale, in fact, make of these relations lines of descent. The quick descends from the slow, and speed inherits increments. As we will soon see, Gandhi was able to find hypophysical lines of descent in Darwin’s evolutionary theory, thus inventing a new ground upon which to stabilize old racisms including caste. Our familial relations are determined by the difference in speed, the slowness of parents relative to the quickness of children: ‘We believe that those, who are discontented with the slowness of their parents and are angry because the parents would not run with their children, are considered disrespectful to their parents. … What does it matter if they cannot run with us?’46 Gandhi also traced family trees in politics – ‘our leaders are divided into two parties … the slow party and the impatient party’. It was a result of discerning these cleaving and departing lines as those of descent that he also envisioned the gathering of demarcative lines of politics into the pax Gandhiana of trusteeship. Hind Swaraj should be read as a dialogue of speeds where the pair editor–reader articulate the relation between the predecessor and the heir. In that case, rather than seek the historical antecedents of this pair, we could see instantiated in it a pair that was still in the future of this pamphlet: the pair Gandhi–Nehru. The reader, who represents young Indian nationalists, is impatient at the slowness of the Grand Old Men and at the very discourse of the editor on such figures; that is, the battle of speeds takes place within the reader himself. The editor bids him to carry the slow ones along since treating them as ‘inimical to our growth as a nation would disable us from using that body.’47 Gandhi does not propose slowing down to their pace – the reader mistakenly ascribes this desire to the editor. This dialogue of speeds between the pair Gandhi–Nehru bristled in 1928 and then in 1934, with Gandhi now the ‘Grand Old Man of India’ and the socialists the young guns, ‘But I have found them as a body to be in a hurry. … If I cannot march quite as quick, I must ask them to halt and take me along with

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them.’48 Regarding the Congress Working Committee composed of old men, out of breath with the socialists, Gandhi writes in the same letter, ‘It is wrong to blame them for their inability to undergo the sufferings that some others have gone through.’ Clearly, it is Nehru who suffers the conflict of speeds within himself, weighed down of the slowness of his elders and his own impetuosity. Hence, it will be a mistake to consider Gandhi’s scalology to be a determination of slowness relative to the fast and the editor to be a mere conserver of slowness demanding a relative slowness in every age, when it is the reader who has this comparative scale as his operative procedure to oppose a relative slowness. Gandhi, who in a letter in 1945 confirmed to Nehru that he named Nehru ‘as my heir’ (that is to say, the quick inherits the slow, speed begets speedier progenies)49 is in the position of the editor whose proleptic dramatization, already in 1908, of this genetic relation in the reader’s breast should not be mistaken for participation. It is as with the character-narrator whose narration never coincides with but always exceeds his own being-as-past. This exceeding proceeds from a place that the speeding progenies are led to – the end, to understand which, we must go back to the beginning as conceived by Gandhi. It is religion that conserves the beginning and survives the end. It appoints the separation of the holy and unholy on the basis of the scale of speed. The speed of the pilgrimage determines the degree of devotion: the slow ardours confirm a high degree of it while helipads near shrines are the very spots from which the divinity takes flight. Speed makes many venture into those places where only a few deserve to be: When there was no rapid locomotion, traders and preachers went on foot, from one end of the country to the other, braving all the dangers, not for pleasure, not for recreating their health, (though all that followed from their tramps,) but for the sake of humanity. Then were Benares and other places of pilgrimage holy cities, whereas today they are an abomination.50

Gandhi’s objection to the railways is foremost on the ground of the holy. With railways anyone can reach the remotest places of pilgrimage: ‘Nowadays rogues visit them in order to practice their roguery.’51 The formerly prohibitive pilgrimages can no longer detect the ‘real devotees’, because of which ‘the holy places of India have become unholy’.52 Good ‘travels at snail’s pace’ and evil is that which ‘has wings’.53 A technology of speed is in itself evil – ‘the railways can become a distributing agency for the evil one only’.54 The ‘temptation to speed up production’ defines modern technology and it is to withstand this temptation that Gandhi would campaign for the rigours of the spinning-wheel.55

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The speed of their propagation distinguishes the good and evil ideas of our time: ‘to impregnate people with good requires a long time’ but with printing and modern communication systems it is evil that propagates and impregnates.56 The increase of the speed of communication has proportionately decreased the effectivity of communication; words without value or the gravity of their own place, float around and away from us.57 Within the divine world another belies it, a face that faces away from the divine – ‘We are turning away from God.’58 The world of man is one in which faces are held away from one another; in the facing away man departs from man, ever becoming a dream of his own self – ‘A man labouring under the bane of civilization is like a dreaming man.’59 The world of man hastens away from his own grasp – ‘The machine produces much too fast, and brings with it a sort of economic system which I cannot grasp.’60 Such is the experience of speed, slipping man away from his own grasp. The land of men who were slipped away from their own hands is the West. For the traveller, east and west are two directions determined by keeping the sun as the orienting star such that east and west journey with the man of the road; rather, the east–west is everywhere as long as the sun rises and sets. The political division of the orient and the occident too is a phenomenon that moves about according to the journeymen of the craft of politics. There is the Middle East in Asia, which displaced Romania as the line between the orient and the occident, and it is becoming Near East already. There is Australia, away from the shifting geographic lines, determined as the West in terms of a projective concordance with what is the geographic West. Gandhi knew that sense and directions are complicated – ‘We are creeping, whether the motion is upward or downward I do not know’61 – and he sought to reorient the world according to the immutable and the tending-to-immobility of Truth. The upward is the direction of the good, of the slow passive resister – ‘For a satyagrahi, all motion is upward.’62 As we can see, the direction of value is given by speed. Speed is the compass of the world that still wants to reckon with value. The good motion upward is towards knowledge of God who made nature such that hypophysics would be the science adequate to it. It would bestow the realization that God is first of all the Maker, and what He makes foremost is not things but things in-their nature, that is, God sets limits and nature is a set of limits. Hypophysics is the recognition by man of his own limits of which his body is the holy testimony, and proceeding from this the scalology of speed is the recognition of being as limit. For Gandhi, unlike for Heidegger, man’s limit is his body’s locomotive and digestive limit, and not the limit of mortality. But there is also in man a nature counter to nature, which transgresses the set limits – ‘Man

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immediately proceeded to discover means of overriding the limit. God gifted man with intellect so that he might know his maker. Man abused it so that he might forget his Maker.’63 Man was enabled to know the speed at which everything is in-its-nature by the Maker, and to thus come to the Maker Himself man was granted variability of speed, in other words overriding. The gift of intellect is the play with the throttle that gives speed to be experienced, but this play also makes the mind ‘a restless bird; the more it gets the more it wants, and still remains unsatisfied.’64 It exposes the two senses of nature – the god-set speed or the good speed; and human nature which is the progenitor of more than god-set speed, and which thus appropriates all speeds as natural to the intellect. Rather, nature in the second sense counter-operates nature in the first sense to make knowledge of good and evil possible by gauging the deviations between the two, that is scalologically. ‘Good travels at snail’s pace. … Evil has wings’. But nature in the first sense also counter-operates the second, as when it acts through leaks between tectonic plates or those in the night dress, to announce its judgement upon the careening bequests of man’s intellect through punishments that have the form of auto-lysis. The inverse proportion between speed and the good, and the direct proportion between speed and suffering are articulated between the two sense of nature, that is the Maker’s law and man’s ability for override. Railways, ‘a most dangerous institution’,65 are an act of override of man’s locomotive limits, which his hands and feet have themselves built. Thus, there is evil in human nature itself: ‘Railways accentuate the evil nature of man. Bad men fulfil their evil designs with greater rapidity.’66 The increase of speed or override rules the West while elsewhere religion still checks man’s ambition and his evil nature. However, nature ensures the ‘natural destruction’ of the speeding progenies, leaving behind the slow. Speeding civilizations are ‘ephemeral’.67 Many came to ruin a long time ago, not because they were primitive but because they were advancing too fast, and the same will be the fate of the West too: it will meet the end proper to all that is speeding – the apocalypse which the slow survives. Gandhi calls it the black-age, the age of the end without finality. The cure is the end, natural destruction, ‘one has only to be patient and it will be self destroyed’.68 Apocalypse is autolysis, the natural – and moral – destruction of the unnatural speed. Gandhi never was in doubt regarding the spell of apocalypse. He wrote to his ‘heir’ Nehru in the same letter of 1945, ‘It does not at all frighten me that the world seems to be going in the opposite direction. … When the moth approaches its doom it whirls round faster and faster till it is burnt up.’69 Nature takes care of all ends except that it leaves behind as a remainder of all its destructions for the men who pick up again from the ruins to erect new Babels.

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The source of Gandhi’s perspective on destruction lies in the hypophysical conception of nature which gives him confidence, as can be seen in a statement such as ‘I am not aiming at destroying railways or hospitals, though I would certainly welcome their natural destruction.’70 Gandhi gained in confidence about his hypophysics and scalology through a peculiar interpretation of Darwinism in his translation of Ethical Religion written by William MacIntyre Salter. Salter’s Society of Ethical Culture was also influential for Gandhi. However, we should be careful with Gandhi’s translations and commentaries. As we know a translation is the gift of a new milieu for a text from another milieu. The internal milieu of a text determines for it an outside, although a text, unlike an organism, has the power to construct new exteriorities as long as it finds those who can give it a new set of dispositions, either in the act of interpretations or translations. With Gandhi, it is difficult to distinguish between a translation and an interpretation as noted by his commentators concerning the Gita and other doctrines of the subcontinent; in this instance, an interpretation is best understood musically, as that act through which the performing musician changes the previous experience of a score or of a song with the addition or deletion of notes, the change of time signature, and tempo. J. T. F. Jordens notes with some pain that ‘Gandhi did not agree with all of Salter’s ideas’ but instead of an encounter or setting up an argument to distinguish between himself and Salter, Gandhi practised a peaceful translation ‘by omitting those passages from his summary’.71 Gandhi’s Darwin was the author of a hypophysical evolutionary theory or a moral-biology and the rhythms of the appearance and the vanishing of species matched that of scalology – ‘Darwin shows further that moral strength is even superior to physical and intellectual strength.’72 Darwin also is ground for arguing for the eminence of the subcontinent as the moral cradle of mankind, and for holding the occident to be the land of entombed ambitions of the species, as can be found ‘from the early history of man that races without morality have completely disappeared’.73 The species without morality are those who do not keep to their natural speed, or those for whom speed appears to be a hope. The faculties of the perished species and civilizations were disoriented by the initial experience of speed and they could not stop the juggernaut of their ingenuity due to an incomplete understanding of the very faculties which enabled them to speed on.

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3

The Faculties I: Body

The body is itself a slaughter house. M. K. Gandhi (‘Is This Humanity’, CWMG 31, p. 488) There is a convention of presenting a Gandhi who opposes the machine to the body, the body to the mind, and the mind to the soul. Gandhi called it his own caricature.1 The caricature is a machine in itself capable of generating a set of Gandhis of which one may choose according to political expediencies. Paternal reason grinds the caricature machine. On the other hand, there are genuine difficulties to be found in Gandhi’s writings where we find him divinizing, privileging, chastising, and punishing the body. Then, the mind too receives the same indices.2 The body diminishes in proportion to mechanization, it atrophies the limbs of man and a weak body houses a weak mind. The mind is often the faculty, ‘a restless bird’, leading the body astray. The soul is considered as a faculty that suffers, one of passion. However, we also find that it is very much active and produces the soul force. But the soul force appears only in relation to a body that can be called healthy in a specific sense, the body at ease. Although the increase in soul force diminishes the body – ‘as the soul advances in strength the body languishes’3 – the body itself is a machine with interactive components, which has extensions – ‘A happy working of the human machine depends upon the harmonious activity of the various component parts.’4 However, the words ‘force’ and ‘body’ have histories independent of Gandhi. The Nietzsche we find in Deleuze and Foucault expresses Will to Power according to such a local compossibility of forces in the body. The body finds itself in act through the determination of forces; body is a region of compossibility of forces and at the same time body is isolated into definitive forms for penal procedures – in Deleuze as that of which there are expressions from which it withdraws as itself; in Foucault as that which exceeds the limit conditions of each expression such that it reticulates a field of which it is the articulation. Then it is evident

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that the isolable body is never the body which is the pure areality of forces. The body for both philosophers is a region, or local per se, that is a priori. The body that is a priori, the contouring for any formal or isolable body, was submitted to the differently contoured exceptional bodies or marginal bodies in secondary discourses. The confusion about the body of philosophy led to the parade of caricature of bodies – the bodies of hermaphrodites, of eunuchs, of prostitutes, of dwarfs, of giants. There are eminent confusions of the body. Judith Butler mistook the areality of forces in Foucault for a clean white sheet.5 Upon the sheet Foucault assumed a writing that is penal in nature. The duality that Butler found in Foucault – body/text – needed some deconstruction, that is the body and writing are both to be re-understood as text. The same Deleuze–Foucault– Nietzsche axis, when applied to Gandhi, does not result in anything other than pre-existing confusion between the concept of body in their writings and the condition of exceptional bodies. The corpus callosum is severed and we have disjunctive syndrome.

Body and analogy What is a body? Joseph Alter seeks to understand Gandhi from the body itself: ‘The simple point is that by starting with the body one is better able to make sense of the Mahatma in particular and important features of the nationalist project as a whole.’6 Alter discovers Gandhian disciplinary body praxis in a Foucauldian axis that he invests with the problem of man. This man is for whom ‘the body retains a high degree of referentiality and can be said to be the point of being human in this context’, which differs from a strictly Foucauldian line of thinking body: ‘Specifically I am uncomfortable with the degree to which, in Foucault’s analysis, body discipline is thought to lead to docility on the one hand and the subjective self is regarded purely as a product of a specific genealogy of reflection on the other.’7 The difference between Alter and Foucault is more a problem of the difference between concerns of thinking rather than one of disagreement on the common objectivity. This difference is a device of manoeuvrability; it allows Alter to navigate around Gandhi and yet effect a recoil at a specific moment. This manoeuvre brings about the rigour of Alter’s discourse. Precisely due to the rigour that navigates the body of Gandhi, Alter’s effort is one of drawing out a contour for it and does not tell us what a body is. We have to take recourse to the Gandhian understanding of faculties and their interrelations within which each of the three faculties, body, mind, and soul, emerge as part of Gandhian

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hypophysics. While emphasizing the care for the body like a body guard, Gandhian education requires everyone to realize that it is man’s special privilege and pride to be gifted with the faculties of head and heart both; that he is a thinking, no less than a feeling, animal, as the very derivation of the word manushya shows, and to renounce the sovereignty of reason over the blind instincts is therefore to renounce a man’s estate. In man reason quickens and guides the feeling, in brute the soul lies over dormant. To awaken the heart is to awaken the dormant soul, to awaken reason, and to inculcate discrimination between good and evil.8

The concept of the faculties is derived analogously from the organs of the body and the machines one handles and hence it is also deployed analogously to the Congress Party, the village, the ashram, and the Indian body politic. Just as a man’s body can be weakened by a poor diet, the misguided nourishment under the British administration can ‘dwarf the Indian body, mind and soul’.9 We must pause here a while to consider the restricted and logical sense in which analogy is used in contrast to the poetic sense in Byron and Blake. … Reasonings like vast Serpents Infold around my limbs, bruising my minute articulations.10

Blake’s verse presents moral law crushing nature by rendering ‘reasonings’ as things of nature but without establishing any equivalence between them beyond that of a fleeting figure that is instantly bruised by the thought of the gulf between the likened terms. In analogy a thing that is less understood is considered in the imagination in relation to another that is well understood. The imagination performs this movement between two distinct objects by discovering a similarity. The similar, then, is the opening towards an analogy. What kind of relation is similarity? The number 1 is not similar to itself, nor is it similar to the number 11 where there are two instances of 1 in its representation. Rather, we say that 1 is equal to itself. Then, similitude as a feeling arises only when the imagination moves between the unequal. Similarity implies difference in so far as this difference does not exceed a certain limit and reach the dissimilar. However, we do not, hence, say that similarity is a species of difference since in the similar the logical category of the same too is at work. When we say that ‘A’ is more similar to ‘B’ than to ‘9’ we mean that ‘A’ and ‘B’ belong to the same, the alphabets, whereas ‘9’ belongs to Arabic numerals. Rather, the similar is found when two objects are distinct in most respects except one, that is when two distinct objects

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appear to share in the same. To use an example from the Kantian explorations of the powers of the imagination in his transcendental logic, the schema of a dinner plate is given as the circle. The geometric object of the circle, which the imagination can never obtain to in its ideality, is found in the instances of the dinner plate, the ring of fire, and even in Milan Kundera’s expression ‘the moon … is an ass hole drilled into the sky!’ which invokes Bataille’s solar anus.11 These are three distinct objects, though they share themselves in the geometric form of the circle. The similitude extends further when we consider the invocation of the sun by Bataille: The Sun exclusively loves the Night and directs its luminous violence, its ignoble shaft, toward the earth, but finds itself incapable of reaching the gaze or the night, even though the nocturnal terrestrial expanses head continuously toward the indecency of the solar ray. The solar annulus is the intact anus of her body at eighteen years to which nothing sufficiently blinding can be compared except the sun, even though the anus is night.12

Here the analogy can be seen at work. The orifice per se performs a certain function of leading something out of or into a self-consistent system – the confusion between the anus and the mouth in small children, the sink hole, the fountain, the volcano. Then, light appears to be ejected from the body of the sky by the sun and the moon.13 In biology when one speaks of the wings of the bat as analogous to the wings of birds, one perceives the similarity of the function of providing lift shared by two species with organs that are dissimilar in their origins and morphology. Once similitude is recognized one can formulate the analogy in a classical form – what A is to B is what C is to D. The analogy, for Gandhi, starts with the speed of the functions of the specific organs of animals from which one derives functional isolation as well as limits appropriate to the functions. In most vertebrates the limbs enable the function of terrestrial motion and nothing more, with the speed of motion varying as a function of the species. The cheetah runs faster than the hyena although the duration of motion sustainable by the former is less than that sustainable by the latter. That is, running as a function of the limbs isolates the limbs from the other possibilities such as clapping and knitting. Further, the functions themselves have specific isolations such as the ability to sprint for the cheetah and the ability to run a long distance for the hyena. It is more evident in the case of the eye; the eye as the camera that isolates light to derive vision is similar among all vertebrate eyes to the camera, and as Jacques Monod writes:

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And if we were to ask the machine to compare the structure and performance of the eye of a vertebrate with that of a camera, the program would have to acknowledge their profound similarities: lenses, diaphragm, shutter, lightsensitive pigments: surely, the same components could not have been introduced into both objects except with a view to getting similar performances from them.14

Even though the limbs may endow the animal with the power to clasp and grab, the eye sees and the ear listens.15 Functional isolation of definite regions of the body within a bauplan is the logic of the organs and the logic of tools; whereas it is through a poetic function, nestled in narrative moreover, that Kundera can operate a further transformation upon his previous invocation of Schreber (and Apollonaire) to propose a new statement: ‘The asshole of the sky like the eye of God’s camera.’16 The logics of the organs and of tools analogously supervenes most theories of faculties, if not all; the analogous origin of the faculties is not a problem exclusive to Gandhi at all.17 This is also evident from the etymology of the term ‘faculty’ which derives from facere meaning ‘to do’, facultatis meaning ‘the power to make’, and so on. That is to say, faculty refers to delimited powers or to functional isolates. The biologist refers to this division of faculties as the systems of the body such as the digestive system, the respiratory system, and the nervous system while stressing that the systems do not isolate the organs into externalities to each other. Rather the circulatory system and the respiratory system both function congruously. Yet, even today, the biologist too searches for the isolated algorithms of functional isolates in the form of individual genes. The notion of faculties as functional isolates is not a contribution of biology but of a certain apprehension of life forms older than but continuous with biology. This notion of functional isolation, as we remarked earlier, refers to the logic of tools or to artifice. The artifice of a knife is a piece of metal functionally isolated by the iron smith to make cutting possible and the same metal when functionally isolated into a hammer is not suitable for cutting. Functional isolation of artifices implies, as Pierre Clastres has shown, the potential for complex social forms where specializations, castes, and cults begin to appear, the ultimate isolation being the State.18 The functional isolate such as a sword for killing men requires its separation from the domain of the kitchen for the warrior to exist. The existence of chairs implies a considered sedentariness which would not otherwise exist if one were to also use the chairs as hammers and projectiles. Hence, a pure isolation of functions and artifices is the necessity of the organization of a social body. Then, do we say that the organs are themselves thought analogously to the tools used in a social body? Do we

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say that the logic of tools and even language is derivative of the organs? Derrida works through the undecidability between these two questions and finds in Heidegger’s use of the terms handling and hand ‘a system of limits within which everything he says of man’s hand takes on sense and value’: Man’s hand then will be a thing apart not as a separable organ but because it is different, dissimilar (verschieden) from all prehensile organs … far from these in an infinite way (unendlich) through the abyss of its being (durch einen Abgrund des Wesens). This abyss is speech and thought. … Man’s hand is thought ever since thought, but thought is thought ever since speaking or language … the hand’s double vocation … I use the word vocation to recall that, in its destination (Bestimmung), the hand holds on to speaking. This vocation is double, but gathered together or crossed in the same hand: to show (montrer) or point out (zeigen, Zeichen), and to give or give itself, in a word the monstrasity [monstrosité ] of the gift or of what gives itself.19

Do we say that this analogical relation is without priors in reality and discursivity but is a certain reciprocal implication?

Can machines worship? We find that Gandhi entertains a movement of thought from the opening that the machine or tool is to the concept that the organs and the body are, and hence he would often say about the body that ‘the inner working of the human machine is wonderful. The human body is the universe in miniature.’20 Mechanistic thinking of the body is evident here and the body as an isolated automaton is made a part of the world-automaton. That which cannot be found in the body is not to be found in the universe. A happy working of the human machine depends upon the harmonious activity of the various component parts. If all these work in an orderly manner, the machine runs smoothly. If even one of the essential parts is out of order, it comes to a stop. For instance, if the digestion is out of order, the whole body becomes slack.21

This line of thinking has two origins – in Galileo and in Descartes. Descartes constructed a thought experiment to demonstrate the relation between the body and the soul where he sought to construct a being just like the human in all respects. If one were to construct such a being, a being that resembles man, the method would be to conceive it in terms of moving parts – angles, chords,

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springs, gears – forming distinct units performing specialized functions. The only limit to such a being which is a replication of man by man will be that man is not God – ‘And I think you will agree that the present machine could have even more sorts of movements than I have imagined and more ingenuity than I have assigned, for our supposition that it was created by God.’22 The problematic of the self-construction of man is effected distinctly by each thinker and the vocation of the thinker – philosopher, poet, the scientist – in an act of reflection that is doubly mediated; through the understanding which gathers a parsing apparatus to determine what is not man, and also through those abstractions of the analogous functions which are constructible. The self-construction of man’s psyche in Freud is analogous to electrodynamic systems; the psyche is a system of flows, resistance capacitors, releases, and breakdowns of a psycho-electric fluid. I refer to the concept that in mental functions something is to be distinguished – a quota of affect or sum of excitation – which possesses all the characteristics of a quantity (though we have no means of measuring it), which is capable of increase, diminution, displacement and discharge, and which is spread over the memory-traces of ideas somewhat as an electric charge is spread over the surface of a body. This hypothesis which, incidentally, already underlies our theory of ‘abreaction’ in our ‘Preliminary Communication’ (1893a), can be applied in the same sense as physicists apply the hypothesis of a flow of electric fluid.23

The fluidity combined with distinct structures of containments provides the system with a certain milieu. One can see that Deleuze and Guattari do return to the grounding concepts of Freud in Anti-Oedipus, for instance in defining the task of schizoanalysis as ‘that of learning what a subject’s desiring-machines are, how they work, with what syntheses, what bursts of energy in the machine, what constituent misfires, with what flows, what chains, and what becomings in each case’.24 Cognitive science constructs man through the analogy of the abstract computing machine which is of course constructible. The Gandhian self-construction of man relies on a series of analogies with various machines, and at the same time Gandhi refused to commit to a certain species of machines such that one would derive a constructible model for man and his avoidance of a specified machinery has to do with his unique conception of speed as the variable of man, in contrast to flow as a variable for Freud. As we found earlier the good that the slow is performs the worship of the Maker and his difficulty was precisely this – can machines worship?

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Until man invented tools, which are, as we have seen earlier, the means by which he escapes the limits of speed set by nature, there was no knowledge of the body: Hence the philosopher’s formula, that the universe within reflects the universe without. It follows therefore that if our knowledge of our own body could be perfect, we would know the universe. The human soul is a part of the universal spirit of God. When all our activity is directed towards the realization of this link, the body becomes a temple worthy for the spirit to live in.25

Without the machine as an opening – towards nature in its effectivity and in thought as the light of analogy – man is blind to himself. With the machine man reflects upon himself and diffracts himself into nature through a certain mechano-lensing.26 This mechano-lensing enables him eventually to do things which were the impossibilities given to mortals; seeing in thought and action the eye that sees with the camera, the replication of sounds and their propagation to distances given earlier only to the divine. That is, with the inventiveness of man, tools appeared as those arrangements of matter and thought which determined actions performed with the tools as functions – trees are cut by the axe function into wood – and the tools analogously determined organs as those parts of body which performed specific functions. Since their invention it is evident that man’s self-conception is mediated by machines, even though the systems under which machines are conceived undergo revolutionary changes. For Gandhi these questions decisively settle in favour of a logic of organs since nature precedes man in the making of motions as we saw in the earlier chapter. That is, even if man derives the notion of faculties from the tools, to these very mechanisms he still remains the maker, and it is the Maker who made that distinction in man which allowed him to be the maker of machines. Then, the faculties are those powers of man that allow him to recognize in nature the many speeds set as limits by the maker and, as implied by these powers, the ability to override the limits by making the machines. Gandhi discusses several powers of man in his writings and these powers appear to vary in their importance; the soul is conceived as the most important faculty in Hind Swaraj whereas in Gandhi’s Health Guide the body appears to be the most important power which alone in its proper housing gives the acoustics necessary to make the soul – which Gandhi often called ‘the still small voice’ – an audible or available faculty.27 In Anasaktiyoga all the faculties are given equal importance,

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provided they function in accordance with the rule of ‘purity’, which provides them unity: Unless the mind and the body and the soul are made to work in unison, they cannot be adequately used for the service of mankind. Physical, mental, and spiritual purity is essential for their harmonious working. Therefore man should concentrate on developing, purifying, and turning to the best use all his faculties.28

Of these powers the body itself, often understood as an aggregate of powers is conceived with many variations; from Satyagraha in South Africa to Hind Swaraj the body is thought as the ground to be prepared for conceiving in it the meaning of self-rule or Swaraj; in the late 1920s he was attending to the body of individuals and collective bodies as the corpus of the nation; from the mid1930s onwards the body is experimented with as that which would provide a home for the hypophysical soul that would annihilate the body as a condition for existence and Gandhi would refer to this power of the body as brahmacharya and the homeliness as moksha. Faculties themselves are divided along the lines of the passive and the active. However, passivity and activity are terms that Gandhi deploys equivocally. Hence, we find in the scholarship on the faculties in Gandhi a certain decisionism at work where works on him appear to gain clarity by a decision that ‘X is what the body is, in the primary sense’ and work around the axiom generated by this decisionism.29 Another way follows the good advice ‘be balanced when you write about great men’ – which demands of us to find the statistical average of the negatives and the positives written of a thinker in such a way that one achieves the null in the line of research. However, we have found earlier during our discussion of speed in Gandhi that he himself never followed this rule, that is to find middle ground. Instead, we must follow Gandhi himself by way of method if we are to understand the faculties that enabled him to develop a unique conception of nature and man.

Body and freedom We will see that a body possesses degrees of reality with respect to nature which are other than conceptual, and at the same time it has a conceptual reality with respect to the mind. Yet, that does not tell us how a body can be exercised. The body is known by analogy at first and then in its constitution, which renders the specific powers of the body. Analogously, ‘our holiest temple is our body’,30 the body

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is ‘the temple of the spirit’, ‘the body has been described as a mine of dirt’,31 and ‘the body is a prison’.32 The analogy of the prison itself is a certain complex in Gandhi’s system. When Gandhi was imprisoned in the Yerwada Jail in 1932, which he frequented, he wrote letters to the disciples in the ashram explaining the faculties of man, and the collection of these writings was published under the title From Yerwada Mandir, or ‘From the Temple of Yerwada’. The meaning of the term ‘prison’ appears, under the register of the temple, to suffer what one would call a ‘deconstruction’ today. Reciprocally, the temple and the prison are themselves understood analogously. The temple confines the deity through its walls and its rituals mark the holy hours, while the prison maintains the life of the prisoner, so long as he is not a subject of the death row, as a healthy individual by regulating his diet and exercise. As with most analogies concerning artefacts, this leads to the question: ‘Is the prison the model for the temple or vice versa?’33 The temple holds the deity to accord the devotees with the holiness that wills itself in the social order and the prison holds the man who was caught outside the social order such that his will does not corrode the holiness that is ceded from the deity in the temple. These two sense find themselves in a peculiar confusion that could have only been effected by Gandhi himself since he is after all the Mahatma or the Great Soul. That is, any place that holds Gandhi is also a temple even it happens to be the prison. It is in the same sense than Gandhi terms the ‘body’ to be both a prison and a temple for the soul. However, there is another relation to the temple analogy through the idea of freedom, which operates in an uncertain exchange between political freedom and religious freedom in Gandhi’s works. It obtains in O. V. Vijayan’s prophetic novel about the Indian emergency of 1975 before which it was written and because of which its serialized publication was banned – the Great One chooses to remain in a prison, whose gates have flung open, in order to do penance for the misspent freedoms of the world.34 Body, then, is primarily the faculty of freedom. That is, the degree of freedom corresponds to the states of the body; a sick body is a prison and a healthy body is a temple. However, a sick body is not at all a bad thing, in fact, ‘it is a blessing in disguise’.35 The one who suffers from motion sickness is the most intimate with motion. When we fall sick we experience the body as something without which we could not do and also something which is not tolerant of all kinds of speeds. In Hind Swaraj Gandhi remarks that the man sick in the stomach is the one who has been blessed with the occasion for a transformation. When the sick man learns that the excess of food caused his suffering he would know the speed limits of appetites and will have an opportunity henceforth to bear his own body along the natural limits of the appetites starting with a fast until

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his body recovers: ‘if you fast for a few days, the body will be cleansed’.36 On the other hand, if he chooses to take recourse to modern medical treatment the medicines will enhance the limits of the appetites externally and at the same time the mind will become the regulator of the appetites since one knows that more can be eaten provided one takes care to swallow the pills. There are certain other opportunities as well for man to recognize the limits of his body, including experimentation with the body. The limit of endurance of the body is discovered by the runner and Gandhi himself would discover the limits of tensile strength of his teeth in his experiments with raw diet: ‘I think it was when I was carrying on a fruit-and-nut diet experiment that I damaged my teeth. I believed that I had permanently damaged two molars.’37 Certain powers of the body while exercised can incrementally negate certain other powers of the body. An example that Gandhi prefers in this regard is of the digestive power of the body, which, as we exercise it beyond certain limits negates the other powers of the body, visibly in the gain of weight, and invisibly in breathlessness. The body and the mind are born in the same act of deviation from the natural speed. Each deviation endows a different body and a different mind. The body of a man who used to travel in bullock carts but who has now tasted the speed of the automobile is no longer the same. The body of the automobile traveller refers to a mind that seeks an increment in the speed as demanded by the body. The body is the organ of demand and mind that of supply (this understanding forms the basis of Gandhian theory of economics). The soul is contemporaneous with the body and the mind. It is the mark of the deviation. Body, mind, and soul are notional entities. These notions refer to each other; they possess a reality in one another. However, these notions possess varying degrees of reality with respect to something other than themselves, that is they are real notions capable of degrees of that reality. The reality of the body in relation to nature is at the maximum when it operates at the limit of the body, the locomotive limits of the limbs. The peasant taking a walk in an Indian village has a body which possesses more reality than that of a child in a city powerbocking. The body is defined by the speed which it is capable of. In other words, any body whatsoever has a definite speed which distinguishes it from some other body.

Aggregation of powers The body has limits of different kinds – perceptual, tensile, torsional, digestive, endurance, respiratory, thermal, spatio-temporal. Rather, the body appears at

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the same time as an aggregate of powers and also of limits – ‘We can work only as much as the body which has been given us permits us to do.’38 It is in the body that man encounters the problem of aggregation; one can discern in the world through a perception of distinct objects, though the aggregation of these objects is not something given in perception and even then one is already aware without the direct perception of the aggregation that there is an aggregate of things. Whereas within his own body man experiences the aggregation of powers and limits in so far as they are limiting one another, and this exchange of powers and limits given as the experience of aggregation allows him to analogously reflect on the world itself as such an aggregation: ‘The Human body is the miniature of the world. … The universe within reflects the universe without.’39 Hence to know the world and to find the adequate disposition towards it is to gain the perfect knowledge of the aggregation that the body is. The problem of aggregation is not unique to Gandhi’s hypophysics, though the conditions under which and the representations through which the problem is conceived are singular. It is within the Kantian theory of faculties that already a certain aggregate demands unity which alone could guarantee the unity of the world. The body as the aggregation of powers which forms the ground from which we are to gain the analogical access to the Truth of the world – it is in this sense that the world, which we find as the un-surveyable and irreducible aggregation, is always evading our knowledge. Gandhi writes, ‘There is nothing so closely connected with us as our body, but there is also nothing perhaps of which our ignorance is so profound or our indifference so complete.’40 The ignorance and the indifference towards the aggregation that the body is is reflected in our disposition towards the world; man is left indifferently in the world which appears equally indifferent towards him where the reciprocal despondency generates an ever-saturating feeling that man is the destroyer of the world and the world in turn is an irrational destroyer of all that man makes.41 As the word ‘aggregate’ indicates, the body as a flock without a shepherd and the world as that which appears to be abandoned by its shepherd, the Maker, are condemned to indifference for the same reason – man must be turned into the intimate interpenetration of the distinct powers that renders the Truth or the aggregation of the body. To gain a knowledge of aggregation, which Gandhi terms ‘Truth’, is to find the essence of the aggregation that the body is ‘and if our own knowledge of the body could be perfect, we would know the universe.’ Then, the specific powers that constitute the body will have to be isolated and at the same time they will have to be introduced to one another in experiments such that their reality as the limiting powers to one another is comprehended.

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We can indeed ask in the manner in which Aristotle poses the problem of categories if there is a primary faculty or power in which all other faculties are grounded in such a way that the aggregation that the body is can be given a primary sense and a single name. Gandhi even suggests such directions ‘take care of the vital thing and other things will take care of themselves. Rectify one angle of the square, and the other angles will be automatically right.’42 However, the primary faculty appears to vary from time to time; he would often say that ‘one who has not been able to control his palate, will never be able to control the other senses’,43 and he would also say that ‘the control of emissions [ejaculation of semen] gives total control of the body’ and castigate doctors and healers who ‘do not assign primary importance to indulgence and lack of self-restraint as a cause of disease’.44 However, it is not to say that the body is an equality of powers that interpenetrate without a ground. Even if we come to know the ground and the grounding proposition through the descending implications we need to know the aggregation, ‘Even when we know a proposition, its corollaries have to be worked out.’45 To begin with, we need to consider the faculties that Gandhi considers to be the constituents of the aggregation that the body is. All human activity is carried on by means of the mind aided by the ten senses. These are five senses of action, i.e., hands, feet, mouth, anus and the genitals; and the five senses of perception, i.e., the sense of touch through the skin, of smell through the nose, of taste through the tongue, of seeing through the eyes and of hearing through the ears.46

Gandhi identifies the powers of the body differently in certain other texts responding to the demands of the moment. They can be, with attendant difficulties given by the notion of reciprocal limitation of the powers, classed under perceptions, the active powers, the appetites and the powers of subsumption of matter, and the powers of ejections and emissions. That is, while we are to know the distinct faculties in terms of their functions and limits we are to remember that they form a single machine set to a definite speed according to the laws of health: ‘A Happy working of the human machine depends upon the harmonious activity of the various component parts.’47

Functional relations Perceptions enable us to recognize in the world the objects corresponding to the conditions governing the apparatuses of perception. A man who is capable of

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tonal distinction – a middle C# played on the piano will be recognized as such and not in relation to the notes that follows it – will hear them in the church bells and the horns of automobiles, whereas a tone-deaf man would never be able to perceive a note in isolation as a musical moment. A woman with a perfect geometric intuition would be able to see from the three-dimensional face of a four-dimensional object all of its other sides.48 A gluttonous man would be able to smell food under all circumstances whereas a saint would be indifferent to them. It is perceptions that initiate a difference of speed in appetites, such as when a piece of meat marked by realities of its origin from the abattoir with the smell of blood and flesh – best thought of as a source of protein and fat – is rendered through culinary modification into a new object that is visibly and olfactorily distant through certain abstract dimensions of the added colours and smells disconnected from the flesh, and the distancing or the abstraction performed culinarily sends man chasing after dishes of meat without any relation at all to the flesh since they appear from an abstract origin. Clothes which are engineered to perfection and are coloured with artificial means fall over the body after expunging the sensations of their origin such as the roughness of the vegetative matter and the smells of natural dyes, and they relay a new appetite for clothes spun from the abstract origins.49 Gandhi was most concerned with aesthetics and his was an aesthetic of origins. Beauty is the insistence of the origin in the concretion of the artifice. From the point of view of Gandhi, Rodin is more the maker of beauty than Michelangelo and the unclothed body in its natural form is the most beautiful: ‘Dress detracts from the natural beauty of the body.’50 Having a good taste would be the cultivation of relations to objects proximate to nature such as coarse khadi and an unperfumed body. We also find that it is not a kind of Platonism, derived from the middle period as a heuristic programme: the natural thing is the imitation in matter of the idea of that thing which is its reality and hence the thing is removed from its reality; the artificial thing which imitates the natural thing is twice removed from its reality. Here, man obscures his own relation to the idea in the making of artifice and leads a life disjoined from the real. That is, in the form that the heuristic of Platonism takes in Nietzsche’s writings this is a technique that turns man away from the ‘this world’ to the ‘other world’. But, for Gandhi, the artifice in its abstraction renders nature mute. The task of the passive resister is to break the miasma of the abstracted products and to point man towards the natural. The passive resister arrives in the domain of perceptions as an active sign that is a devastation of the abstracted products; and he directs perceptions through the ruins he made towards the enclosure of those artifices which are the consecration of nature and

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value – artifices that retain the sweat, smells, and coarseness of their origins. The true sense of the word ‘co-operation’ is in finding this consecration where, within the artifice, value and nature are perceived in their coordinated operation. The active faculties – ‘hands, feet, mouth, anus and the genitals’ included – are the powers of determinate directions for the whole body, into the body, away from the body, and for other bodies; for example, the mouth moves fluids into the body and the urethra moves fluids out of the body. The directionality of the active faculties is explained by the notion of functional isolation – the mouth is the organ for the mastication of food. One also spits with the mouth, for example, after chewing tobacco – ‘the chewer dirties every corner’ and ‘there is nothing becoming about blowing off smoke or keeping the mouth stuffed with tobacco and pan practically the whole day long’.51 The mouth performs sexual functions eminently. The mouth plays the harp. At the same time the tongue is also the organ for the outgoing words; ‘sphota’, the sound speeds off farther than a blob of spit could ever reach – ‘Tongue is the organ of speech as well as taste.’52 Here we find a distinction that should matter to us if we are to understand the distinct powers that form the aggregate of the body. The powers are not determined according to the kind of objects they are connected to. Instead, the powers are determined in accordance with their relation to the notion of functional isolation. The perceptive senses are subjected to greater functional isolation than the organs of activity. The function of seeing governs the eye alone and nothing else; conversely the eye performs the function of seeing and nothing else. The law that governs a function determines the passive organs completely, whereas the active organs are loci where a home can be found for almost any function whatsoever. There is no single law governing an active organ. Rather, active are those faculties which have greater freedom from functional isolation – they are characterized by polynomia. Polynomia is the truth of analogy; where polynomia reins functional isolates are impossible, and analogy is the logic of their representation. The experience of functionally free organs leaves man with a sense of abandonment – a being bereft of a determinate sense, condemned to polynomia. Polynomia is the meaning of the Un-homeliness of man – ‘Manifold is the uncanny, yet nothing uncannier than man bestirs itself ’ in Heidegger’s rendering of deinon as un-heimlich in the ‘Ode on Man’ in Sophocles’s Antigone.53 A limiting case of polynomia is discussed by Deleuze and Guattari in their Anti-Oedipus where the problem of nomos is determined or actualized in the concept of machine with plugs – ‘The breast is a machine that produces milk, and the mouth is a machine coupled to it.’54 The organs, as zones specifiable according to multiple laws in so far as they can

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be conceived to receive matter and return work as if performed by an abstract machine, are thought under analogous actions. The body as a whole, conceived as the surface that exchanges analogous actions is, then, termed ‘body without organs’; as we can see ‘organ’ refers to an arrangement or an articulation that is perfectly determined according to a law and nothing else – a functional isolate. The actualized concept of polynomia enables Deleuze and Guattari to analyse the specific system of capitalistic production. However, as Deleuze would remark later, the loss of the dimension of law, the general principle, led to the creation of a certain transcendent subject in the concept of ‘bodies without organs’: Merely so many nails piercing the flesh, so many forms of torture. In order to resist organ-machines, the body without organs presents its smooth, slippery, opaque, taut surface as a barrier. In order to resist linked, connected, and interrupted flows, it sets up a counterflow or amorphous, undifferentiated fluid. In order to resist using words composed of articulated phonetic sounds, it utters only gasps and cries that are sheer unarticulated blocks of sounds.55

The problem of polynomia, having in each active faculty possible domains for many laws, concerns, as we will see later, the conception of home, self, self-rule, and autonomy. The recognition of a certain matter as subsumable, its pursuit, and its subsumption in the body – constitutes appetite. Appetite is the faculty for the conversion of matter, and Gandhi sought to develop a counter-power within this faculty – Aversion or Vairagya or An-agraha. If a matter, be it of one’s own body or something external, is transformed by a power then this matter is an object of the power of appetites. The sense organs recognize the objects of appetite under the determination of the appetites and the powers of subsumption which transform those objects. The notion of taste based on the abstraction of values obtained through culinary techniques, as we found earlier, is the relation obtained between the two powers, the senses and the appetites. Man is characterized as a life form having ‘an ever growing independence of appetites’.56 Why should man have taste and not have natural appetitions that characterize the unicellular life forms, for example? The amoebae move in a sugar gradient oblivious to the notion of taste and their motion itself is determined by the logic of saturation – they move up when the intra-cellular environment is saturated and move down when it is less saturated. Being without taste is not too distant from that of the nearly perpetual machine obtained by the ‘magic drinking bird’ that appears to drink at regular intervals from a bowl placed in front of it; the bird system is a heat engine and it has appetite only for methylene chloride. What is taste then? Taste implies the

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determinability of the speed of the appetites. A man might be able to receive only a grain each of salt per hour. Through certain dietary impositions the speed of his appetite for salt can be modified – a diet of meat pickled in saline alone. The speed of the appetite for chilly can be changed in a man through the instruction in political correctness that he has to show towards a certain ethnic cuisine. The speed of the appetite for loudness can be changed by alcohol – very high when drunk and low when hungover. Taste implies that the appetites are regularized by many different laws. The organ of hearing is capable of receiving sounds. But sounds are conditioned as speech, noise, music, and signals of many kinds. As we know, the distinction between the kinds of sounds is a matter of taste; rap would sound as speech, heavy metal would sound as noise, Schoenberg would sound as senseless and someone tapping Morse code to you from the next room would sound as defective plumbing. That is, the appetite for sound can be determined by different laws. The palate can be conditioned by the many culinary laws – white wine with red meat or sake with salted fish. Taste is the technicality of the conditioning of the appetites and their speeds. When a man asks another to ‘change your taste in men’ the advice suggests that his faculty of appetites receives objects that the very faculty is incapable of subsuming in it. A change of taste in this instance implies that the speed of the recognition of objects and that of the subsumption of objects are not at equality; an analogy would be the mismatch between engine speed and the wheel speed to be equalized through the correct gear shift. Taste reveals the vacuum between recognition and subsumption in the faculty of appetites – ‘Nature constantly demands a vacuum. The vast space surrounding us is a standing testimony of the truth.’57 That is, taste is the technicality that concerns the correct recognition of something as the object of appetites in so far as it is subsumable. At the same time without the technicality of taste and with mere force of faith one will not be able to find the essence of the aggregates – ‘My faith is as strong as ever. It is quite possible that my technique is faulty.’58 For the same reason taste is also at a distance from the natural speeds of the appetites of the body. Man, as the being abandoned to the technicality of taste to register his appetites, can only rely on the astrolabes of tastes. Man drifts away unknowingly from the true grounds of his appetites and ‘we eat merely with a view to pleasing the palate’.59 Having a ‘good taste’ is about finding a perfect ratio of speeds within appetite. However, we do know that this definition covers only that aspect of taste which concerns the immediate circumstances of the body and its powers; mediately, taste is the extension of the body into the whole of the bodies of communities of taste. Taste determines its own common. Having a taste in good wine communalizes a man differently than it would a man if he had a taste only for beer. Having a

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taste in music only for octaves – ears attuned to whole and semi tones – would communalize a woman as ‘classical’ while her friend who is attuned to notes bending between the semi and the whole – not exhausted by the ‘blue note’ – would communalize her everywhere else. Taste for the kind of meat alone could determine one’s membership into religious communities. Gandhi found the notion of taste to be so fundamental that he was open to characterizing what had been taken to be immutable rules of religion to be a matter of taste – ‘Whether temples should contain images or not is a matter of temperament and taste.’60 Taste, then determines its practitioner as an object for the communal body and its appetites – it is a matter of finding a perfect ratio between a man’s body and his communal body. Having ‘a good taste’ is a political game – ‘Tastes differ.’61 Gandhi would often point out that taste takes a lot of work; taste determines the appetites of the individual and the national body. The exchange of one taste for another is not easy as it implies a sudden change from one speed to another; hence, a change of speed of taste is a matter of considered cultivation. Gandhi remarked on the dangerous effects of the taste for ‘Indian masalas’ as an accelerator of appetites and he pointed to its effects on other populations if they were to cultivate a taste for it: ‘Even the African Negroes dislike the taste of our masala, and refuse to eat food mixed with it. And if the Whites eat masala, their stomach gets out of order, and pimples also appear on their faces, as I have found from my experience.’62 Revolution in the speed of appetites, or taste, is capable of greater transformations than the mere exchange of a regime for another; in the context of bringing about a change in the appetite for clothes, Gandhi awaited such time as when ‘the national taste has undergone such a revolution that the general body of people would refuse to wear anything but khaddar’.63 A man or a people are free when they gain mastery over their appetites through the determination of taste under the notion of good, which as we know is defined by slowness. It was Gandhi’s mission to bring the slow taste of Truth to the whole world and obtain complete self-rule. If Indians were not able to achieve self-rule or Swaraj it was due to their relation to taste, their being adrift in the domain of tastes for the novel sensations – ‘Can it be that man alone is created to worship the palate?’64

Health and the good The body is conceived as the aggregation of all its powers; it is a dynamic system of speed limits which refers always to the political body with which it exchanges direction or essence – the healthy body refers to the notion of a healthy nation

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and a healthy nation is that which relies on healthy bodies to come to be. The aggregation of the body in Gandhi should be distinguished from the biological organ systems which conceive organs of the body on the basis of functional autonomy: the circulatory system for the function of the distribution of blood cells to all the other cells of the body, which is distinct from lymphatic circulation in terms of its speed,65 since blood travels faster than lymph; and the respiratory system for the exchange of oxygen and carbon dioxide between the body and its environment. Organs involved in a particular systematization may well be part of another systematization, for instance, the lungs which are a part of the circulatory system connected through the pulmonary vein and artery. If we are to conceive of the hypophysical aggregation that the body is for Gandhi, we must understand the biological aggregation of the body in terms of internal milieu. The inanimate body is characterized by the absence of regularities and invariant properties; an inanimate body, such as a corpse of a cow left in the open, grows cold and decomposes. Decomposition, as the word indicates, is the loss of a certain inner determination that expresses itself as the anima of a being when it is said to be alive, and in death the animal is vacant of the anima that maintains the essence or direction of the specific aggregation that it is; that is, the discontinuity between the animated body and its outside is erased in the act of death. The vacancy of the aggregation leaves the animal open to the outside with which it enjoys continuity. The dissolution of the body into what can be termed a ‘greater nature’ is the other side of mysticism – the mystic seeks a continuum with greater nature in so far as he remains animated or discontinuous with it whereas in death the continuity is enjoyed by each and every cell which is not an experience. Another way to understand the notion of this continuity is to look at the phenomenon of geological erosion or weathering where rocks acquire grand forms through their continuity with the winds and the waters – mountains carved out by flowing rivers and the wind swept inverted pyramids in the deserts. The inanimate, by being continuous with its surroundings does not have an exteriority; it is one with nature. The living is discontinuous and hence it is defined by an interior and an exterior – that which distinguishes a body as something endowed with the inside specific to it in such a way that its outside is determinable as its own is internal milieu. A rock may have a physical inside in the form of caves distinct from the crusty outer skin, but it is bereft of an internal milieu. The determination of an exterior and the maintenance of this exterior as the specific exterior of a living are together termed the ‘internal milieu of a being’. Canguilhem remarks that internal milieu was never a problem for Descartes: ‘The notion of milieu has no place in Cartesian physics.’66 For Descartes action implied contact or collision;

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action as continuity, as we found, requires no exteriority. Whereas Gandhi’s post-Newtonian system would not abhor vacuum: ‘Nature constantly demands a vacuum.’67 The internal milieu of the organism specifies in what is outside it a zone as that which is a matter to it. The maintenance of a specified outside – such as the maintenance of its own temperature within a regular range in homoeothermic animals with respect to the outside – requires a regular relation between the different powers or the organs or organelles of the animal. The sense of aggregation of all the powers that make up an animal is given by its internal milieu. It is this sense that realizes itself in the outside, or the environment, where the animal hunts, hides, mates, and divides. For Gandhi, the body aggregates under the essences of good and evil which is not the same as the distinction of healthy and unhealthy. For a philosopher like Spinoza the good is what is healthy. Whereas for Gandhi the good determines the healthy and the good as we know is the slow. Aristotle initiated the problematic of the relation between the good and the healthy in Nicomachean Ethics. We should note here the discussion of the many senses of the term ‘healthy’ on the way towards clarifying the many senses of the term ‘Being’. Health is meant as tanned in term ‘healthy skin’ and it is meant as nutritious in the term ‘healthy food’ though all these different meanings are derivative of a grounding sense of the term ‘health’ – the sense of health circulates and aggregates the many uses of it. The text titled ‘Meaning of Health’ in Gandhi’s Health Guide has a different problematic from that of Aristotle in that Gandhi seeks to find the hypophysical consecration of being-embodied, having an internal milieu, and at the same time being good; the distinction introduced by the internal milieu is, for man, a wound in nature. To be good is to find a living that is a healing of this wound; Gandhi recognized the difficulties involved in this venture: after all ‘the body is a slaughter house’.68 A man could be considered fit under the criteria of medical sciences and still be very unhealthy if the aggregation of the powers of his body does not realize the good – ‘They are under the delusion that they are healthy.’69 Indeed, the healthiest is the man enjoying the pinnacle of fasting where all his organ systems arrive at their critical limit.70 Being evil is the primary disease, and as we know, the further we are from our natural limits the more the speeds of our faculties increase since they rely on the abstractions of the artifices for orientation. Abstraction is the first step towards being unhealthy: Let us take the analogy of the rose flower. Its colour stands to its fragrance in the same way as the body to the mind or the soul. No one regards an artificial paperflower as a sufficient substitute for the natural flower, for the obvious reason that the fragrance, which forms the essence of the flower, cannot be reproduced.71

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From the flower thought can abstract its predicates – colour, texture, smell, taste – in such a way that the homologous production of these predicates through artifice forms an aggregate before us without bearing the essence which is the sense of the aggregation. That is, by the term ‘a sufficient substitute’ Gandhi asks us to think individual essence. Individual essences cannot be obtained by abstracted predicates, but they are expressed only by individual internal milieus. Men lose their relation to their own internal milieus in the abstracted notions of good health; whether these abstractions are given by modern medicines or be they ethnic traditions of medicine,72 essences are available to thought only in those men who are awakened to the persisting and yet imperceptible essences of their own internal milieu. The mind is the essence which specifies man into the animal that he is – ‘Man alone can worship God with knowledge and understanding.’73 An abstraction of what the mind would be from the analogies of understanding mediated by technologies will not give the real essence of each man, that is the essence sufficient to retain one’s faith in the good while experimenting to gain the correct techniques to effect the slowness that is good for oneself. The knowledge of individual essences will be given in one’s attunement to the faculty of the soul.

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Till my eyes of geometrical understanding had been opened, my brain was swimming, as I read and reread the twelve axioms of Euclid. After the opening of my eyes, geometry seemed the easiest science to learn. M. K. Gandhi (CWMG 62, p. 30) Gandhi would often remark on the inverse relation obtained between the powers of the body and the soul – ‘It is my firm belief that the strength of the soul grows in proportion as you subdue the flesh.’1 The soul is defined as a distance between the body and the mind: The soul voices this distance and as the distance grows the voice grows fainter. We anticipated certain powers of the mind without setting out to demarcate them in the previous chapter in our discussion on the different representations through which alone the body can be thought – analogy, functional isolation, abstraction, taste, and polynomia. We find that the faculty of mind carries out its actions in three logical modalities – analogy, proportional articulation, and homologies. The logical form of proportions in this instance is to be distinguished from analogy in our earlier discussion. Analogy reveals the relation that a being has with another with respect to the similarity that exists in the internal organization of both things; that is, analogy requires a minimum of two components in each being and hence it has the form of C is to D as A is to B. We can say that the relation that God has to his creatures is analogous to the relation that a king has to his subjects. Gandhi’s politics was to introduce a different analogy into politics in such a way that God himself could be radically reconceived as the Maker for a new logic to recompose the notions of sovereign and the people.2 By proportional articulation we are to understand the relation that obtains between two beings in so far as there appears a change in proportion to one being when there is a change in another. Whereas with analogy the relations that we obtained were a

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matter of similarity between objects which are distinct from one another, with proportional articulation we find that it is a relation that suggests the two things being components in some other thing. Analogy tells us of the shared functions in disparate objects and in proportional articulation we learn about the entreaty of parts in a function. In this sense, proportional articulation represents the actuality of what is being represented. When we discuss the relation between the body and the universe – the body is a miniature of the world – under analogy we do not imply that a change in the body involves a change in the world except in so far as the body is a constituent of this world. That is, the body is related logically to the world without it being related to the world in a direct causal relation, though the body is a constituent in the world. It becomes more evident that an analogical relation between two things is without a direct relation when we consider the sentence ‘The mind is like a magic carpet,’ or John Donne’s famous verses: Our two souls therefore, which are one, Though I must go, endure not yet A breach, but an expansion, Like gold to aery thinness beat. If they be two, they are two so As stiff twin compasses are two; Thy soul, the fix’d foot, makes no show To move, but doth, if th’ other do. And though it in the centre sit, Yet, when the other far doth roam, It leans, and hearkens after it, And grows erect, as that comes home. Such wilt thou be to me, who must, Like th’ other foot, obliquely run; Thy firmness makes my circle just And makes me end where I begun.3

However, we will soon find that the distinction between analogy and proportional articulation is defined rather differently for Gandhi; that is a change in the body may proportionately bring about a change in the world. The other aspect of proportional articulation to be noted here is the notion of limits or the parameters of articulation. When the parameter that determines a certain articulation is modified, such as our relation to certain heavenly bodies as planets, an object such as Pluto which enjoyed the status of a planet ceases to be one.

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Industrial essence and the mind A theory of the mind is implicit in Gandhi. He never set out to delineate the powers of the mind into functional isolates such as intuition and concepts. He was also careful not to demarcate a zonal limit for memory such that one may become the sentinel of memories. We can see why he would avoid these gestures and activities that metaphysics finds essential. It is a matter of taste. That is, taste as the power of the mind can abstract or peel away the values of things and put them into practice as if they were essences in a bottle. For example the vanilla essence is the only way that most children experience the plant vanilla; or our experience of exotic flowers and spices has been through perfume bottles; or our experience of wooden casks has been through alcohol. The aspect of experience extracted with respect to a particular sense performs an isolation from the thing’s individual essence in such a way that we identify the thing under this extracted bottled essence. This industrial experience of essence is how we have come to gain our exhortations such as ‘Essentialism is violence’. This experience of industrial essence is as real as metaphysical essences, although the ranges and the possible articulations of the two are distinct. The metaphysical notion of essences describes a domain inhabited by a thing in so far as it retains a span of being where the trajectories of actualization are not revealed by it. The industrial notion of essence, industrial essences, do not find the span of a being to be of concern, and, instead, they extract from the completed being a part without remainder. Industrial essence is the excretion of a being as if it were saying ‘done with this’. This difference between the notions of essence is an opening into Gandhi’s avoidance of a theory of mind; the industrial essence explains taste as a speed machine within the hypophysical system whereas metaphysical essence would explain industrial essences and expose the very hypophysical system to other exteriorities. Gandhi’s struggle in this area was to explain the acts of speed which lead men away from nature by ascribing that power of hegira to a certain conception of the mind which alone he would deploy to describe his own system of diagnosis, hypophysics. Gandhi was familiar with the theories of the mind discussed by his contemporaries, including the Darwinian theories of the mind. In certain instances he avoided a lengthy discussion of the subcontinental theories of the mind in the religious texts while giving discourses on them. Gandhi’s interpretive strategies were such that not only are we ‘not required to probe the mind of the author of the Gita’,4 but also to not probe the theory of the mind in that text – ‘The Gita

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has sung the praises of Knowledge, but it is beyond the mere intellect; it is essentially addressed to the heart and capable of being understood by the heart’5 – or any other. Many years after Gandhi, the almost Gandhian novel Perfume by Peter Sü skind examines this question – What is the essence of man? Is there a single man-essence that is extractable industrially? Is there a single state of mind which might define the mind? For Gandhi, ‘We must know our own mind. We must not have many minds on this question,’6 and hence there is a certain industrial essence that the mind itself has. The novel’s hero Jean Baptiste Brenouille is the greatest perfumist who can extract the industrial essence of all things with the exactness of a geometer and mix them to create as yet unknown splendour of fragrances which refer to subtle beings that nature could never conceive of. The perfumist beckons the world of beings that will, perhaps, never be. In this sense his is the game of an encounter between the two distinct conceptions of essence – in his proficient extraction he practises industrial essences, and in the mixture he practises in a certain domain of metaphysics. However, how is one to create the essence of a woman? In this quest the perfumist learns that death is the opening for the industrial essence of a woman and thus he is a serial murderer. However, in the mixture he invents a beckoning towards the perfect woman who will never be. In this gesture the perfumist is unlike Gandhi who refused to conduct any transaction with the perfect essences that beckoned him through the discourses he familiarized – ‘But perfection is imagined.’7 Indeed, Gandhi too would tell us that the extraction of essences is violence and deny that there is any other essence to the notions of taste, essence, abstraction, and mind, whereas he would also acknowledge that extraction is the method through which we know the essence of a thing, including texts – ‘The seeker is at liberty to extract from this treasure any meaning he likes so as to enable him to enforce in his life the central teaching.’8 The difficulty of finding an explicit theory of the mind in Gandhi’s writings and at the same time statements and practices that appear to be the corollaries of a theory of mind has been noted by the most important scholars of Gandhi. Glynn Richards remarked on the difficulty of working with a complex concept of truth with many levels governed by it without possessing a theory of the mind. Anthony Parel, one of the most astute philosophical commentators of Gandhi, shows that the practice of Truth and non-violence with reference to a theory of ‘purushartha’, or ‘the well determined ends of man’, requires a theory of the mind which he names ‘Buddhi’, while holding it to be a notion implicit in and also guiding Gandhi’s corpus.

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Polynomia The mind, just as the body is, is an aggregate of powers. Though, it needs to be borne in mind that it is the mind that has the power to form the representations and define articulations in such a manner that we have knowledge of the limits of all organs and hence we are unable to define the limits of the mind. Gandhi urged all men not to develop all the powers given to man to their limits, including those of the mind: ‘It is not man’s duty to develop all his functions to perfection; his duty is to develop all his God-ward faculties to perfection and to suppress completely those of a contrary tendency.’9 However, it is the power of the mind that enables us to see the perfections in the world in which we are to recognize the marks left by the Maker. Should not man then be the geometer, the being swaddled by pure forms? Gandhi writes, Right conduct is not like a beautiful tree, not one of those millions of leaves is like any other. Though therefore they are from one seed and belong to the same tree, there is none of the uniformity of a geometrical figure about any part of the tree. … We know too that no geometrical figure can bear comparison with a full blossomed tree in point of beauty.

Though the powers bequeathed to man by his Maker may steer him in the geometric plane, this comportment may not be God-ward. Yet, without the mind one cannot know the inner directions and the moral spoors of the world which is the condemnation of man. The thematic of the condemnation assigned by the bestowal of a faculty – the mind – whereby man is rendered into a being who ought to suffer knowledge of the withdrawal of his Maker, in contrast with the beasts who are left in the bliss of innocence of such concerns, made Gandhi fond of Milton: ‘The mind is its own place and in itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven.’10 Now, it is not the case that there is no theory of the mind, or that the mind is a faculty that exceeds the requisite capabilities that man ought to have in order to reflect the works of the Maker, which is his purpose. Instead it appears that the body as the aggregation of powers, including the senses, is no more than an expression of the mind. The senses are the points at which the impulses in the mind become manifest. Through them we come to recognize the impulses as such. And so, by destroying the senses, we do not do away with the impulses in the mind. Eunuchs, as we observe, are full of desires. Those who are such by birth are so full of them that they have been known to be guilty of unnatural acts.11

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That is, the powers of the mind remain secreted behind the activities of the senses; Considering the activities of the senses without comprehending their relation to the mind would lead one to errors since we would miss the causal grounds of their activities in such a gesture – when a computer is not starting up the way we press all its keys without checking whether it is powered up or not is an instance of such an error. Or, as Gandhi would point to the true reasons for the hold that the British had over India: it is not due to the exercise of power that the British held India, but rather, this exercise of power is only an expression of emasculation of the Indian populace. The powers of the mind insist and remain in a state of anticipation in cases where the senses are benumbed due to their excessive use or due to illness. When the senses are tired, the mind crystalizes and waits – the body is nothing other than the spores of the mind. It is in this sense of the mind being the unknown in the body that Gandhi would remark that the mind too can be understood as a sense, along with perceptions for the ‘mind is at the root of all sensuality’.12 Since ‘the relation between the body and the mind is so intimate’,13 as we find here, knowing the body and knowing the mind are not easily distinguished. There are certain statements of echo in Gandhi’s works peculiar to the polynomia that belongs to all words where one is tempted to gather his thought under the rediscovery of the body in philosophy in the twentieth century. Gilles Deleuze was fond of recalling Spinoza who stated that we do not yet know what the body can do. Gandhi wrote, ‘There is nothing closely connected with us as our body, but there is also nothing perhaps of which our ignorance is so profound or our indifference so complete.’14 In this statement ‘closely connected’ refers to a certain distance the body has with respect to ‘us’ – the body and ‘us’ are held in a conjoinment by another; body is an article in an articulation. The conjoining faculty, the mind, alone can give us our body as ours – as Gandhi would point to those instances where desire turns our body against us to create actions in a manner that is entirely contrary to the ends which define us – in such a way that the body is itself an exteriority and also that to which we are conjoined such that it is a certain us with immutable ends, for ends define organs and machines alike, and that is the soul. Thus, to know the mind is to gain a foretaste of our own tastes for it is the mind that sets up the speeds of our senses. Gandhi would often urge that ‘we must know our own mind’15 in his letters and speeches. Just as there are national bodies and village bodies there are also minds of nations, the minds of crowds, and the minds of political organizations. We are to know all these minds in our endeavours in such a way that the mind may be made up under the directions of values. However, in order to know what the mind can do and the powers it has

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at its disposal to deploy the senses we need to return to certain moments from our discussion of the body. Earlier we found that the organs such as the hands are without a definite function  – for instance, the hand is for grasping – and instead the active powers of the body lack functional isolation. The active powers of the body are governed by polynomia. The mind is an aggregate of the powers of action – ‘The mind performs greater activity than even hands and feet. Every thought is an action.’16 Polynomia refers to a specific power of the mind; the mind can legislate different regularities in the same object. Polynomia is reflected in language when the same arrangement of sounds could manifest diverse senses such that there is no single law for each word; the word ‘bank’ names different objects when preceded by ‘money’ and by ‘river’. Polynomia governs the domain meanings in that a meaning can have several determinations. Polynomia is the evidence of an unrest that propels words to great speeds and distances; at the same time, a correct apprehension of polynomia would be to acknowledge the economy of the relation between sounds and senses. The inexpressibility often experienced by man is the effect of polynomia because of which there are always more words than meanings and there are always more meanings than words: The fact is that language can never completely express human thoughts. So, the meanings of words continue to expand. It is impossible, it is unnecessary, to coin new words for every sense. When the same word is used to convey opposite ideas, there is a definite danger of ambiguity and absurdity.17

The mind is without a place and time of its own, whereas the body can always be identified under the notions of the here and the now. Our minds are capable of being at a location other than the body at a given time – when we think of the books on our desk while dining with our friends – or it can be in many places and times at once. The body has a past and a future in the sense of having passion for irreversible changes. In other words, the body bears the marks of a past which in the Gandhian system we should understand as the annotations of the natural speed of the body and its violations: Our adherence to natural speed endows us with a marker of age that refers to the natural scale whereas deviations refer to man-made scales. The body necessarily refers to the marker of a state which is past in order to transit to a future in such a way that the transition is determined according to bodily laws. The mind is without any intrinsic limit of speed. The changes suffered by the mind are not binding in its movements except those transitions determined by logic, such as, the transition from a circle to a square

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determined by the axioms of Euclidean geometry. Hence, it is said that ‘our mind travels over illimitable spaces and times while the body is at rest’.18 The power for illimitable transitions defines the mind. The polynomia that we experience with respect to our body and the objects around us where many laws govern the same thing – the chair is good to sit on, to stand on, and to throw at someone – in such a way that our body and the extensions of our body are not functionally isolated is given by the secreted power of the mind for illimitable transitions hidden beneath the senses. The mind can convert an object governed by a certain law into another governed by a different law. The mind baptizes itself infinitely even when we are unaware of its actions, for we know of the working of the mind only in those instances where we are attentive to the activities of our body. The mind being the cause of polynomiality there are more bodies to each man than he can conceive of; each man is the effervescence of illimitable bodies. That is, while the hand under the laws of grasping holds a lump of clay, the same organ under the laws of moulding turns it into an amphora. The laws combine to form newer laws analogous to polynomials in mathematics. These new laws, the way the movement of pistons are transferred into the gears and to the wheels in the case of an automobile, allow man to make brews and store them in the amphorae. The mind is the faculty of laws. Anthony Parel speaks of the implicit idea in Gandhi of the dharma that is discovered by the faculty of buddhi (intelligence and will). … [We may call it] ‘natural’ dharma. Every human being that exercises his or her buddhi in the right way can ipso facto know the first principles of natural duty (dharma).19

We must note here that the mind is that faculty which makes man-made laws and, in the distinction, comes to know the law of the Maker. The relation and the degrees of the relation that the man-made laws may or may not have with reality are a matter of constructability and experimentation where we enter the realm of individual essences.

Homology Analogy gives us the knowledge of the freedom of functions; polynomia gives us the knowledge of baptisms through which an organ may be home to more than one function; and homology gives us the knowledge of the origins of things and hence the constructability secreted in things. Homology is the way we learn

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of the kinds and degrees of articulations available in things. That is, when we learn that there is a relation between magnetism and electricity through the metaphor of the field and when we describe this relation mathematically it opens the secreted powers to convert sound to electricity and back. Homologies show us the same origin propelling distinct constructions and this knowledge is that through which polynomia realizes itself. Analogy compels us to behold a series of semblances between objects of different natures and homology intimates us of the nature common to dissimilar things such that we may construct ever new objects from the familiar. Homology leads us into two distinct fates – the homeliness of things as we gather that out of which a thing is converted into a new thing, and the same time the unhomely in so far as it leads us to the knowledge of construction of as yet unknown realities. Analogy and Homology together give us the power for variant reproduction in the absence of which we will have been condemned to the life of the animal. When a man in a village in northwestern India refers to another man of his village as his ‘village brother’, he entertains a certain analogy – home is a place where his family lives, the village is where all the families live together, and in this sense village is a home. However, the same man may share his land only with the brother he has at home where he observes homology – homologies give us bloodlines. Gandhi’s remarks on language education are meaningful once we follow the trail of homology. He was opposed to teaching a child any more than one language which had to be the language of the child’s immediate community. He was particularly opposed to education in English language, not because it was the language of the colonizers, but because a relation to it was possible only through analogies – that a word in one language is analogous to a word in another does not reveal the constructability invested in either’s origins. To know a language well is to be able to have at one’s disposal the constructible held in the roots of that language – to be able to receive the soul of the ancestors of each sound in it. The uncanny to which Gandhi led a certain language – which is neither Sanskrit nor Gujarati – is in the coinage of new words such as Satyagraha combining ‘sat’ and ‘agraha’. He would point to the dangers of leading the mind in the trail of new languages and letting the mind stray in the realm of analogies alone – ‘English education has turned our minds away from Swaraj and not just that, it has a lamentable effect of making our intellect tired for it has no relation to our land or languages.’ Hence, he would also urge men to educate and convert men only after considering their homes understood as the homologous powers given to their disposal. For example it would be futile to offer religious conversion as a way to save the Dalits from their plight of racist slavery: ‘They have certainly not

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the intelligence to distinguish between Jesus and Mohammed and Nanak and so on.’20 That is, we are to follow the bloodline in nature and culture in such a way that powers are cultivated and conversions are made only with respect to the secreted powers accorded at the origins of things – homology leads us eventually to the bloodline of the Maker which is the secreted upwelling of all things. Analogy, abstraction, and polynomia, unguided by the attentiveness to the origins characterized by homology, are modes of knowledge which propel us to construct unreal origins, ‘the falsity named civilisation’.

Proportional articulation We found that the mind, the body, and the soul are held in a proportional articulation. An articulation is the determinate relation that enjoins two or more things such that they have specific degrees of freedom so that their regularity is capable of enjoining other articulations. The bones connected by articulate surfaces control and release various functions; synarthrosis which defines the jointure of the skull is without movement although synovial joints enjoining the shoulder to the arm offer many degrees of freedom and the possibilities for disarticulation. A sentence in language is the articulation of words by words where each word is distinguished grammatically according to the position enjoyed by it in that instance of articulation. Analogously, words are the bones enjoined by the synovial fluid of tenses. In the expression ‘an articulate person’, we understand that there is someone who is capable of enjoining words without tumbles and fractures, a dancer in the domain of speech. Proportional articulation is a specific type of articulation where two or more things are enjoined in a relation of crescendos; as the moon waxes and wanes in the proportion of a lunar month it also articulates spring tides in relation to the sun. The expression ‘lunatic’ refers to a mind that is enjoined to this articulation of the moon, the earth, and the sun – a mind at one with nature. It is the power of the mind to discover proportional articulations which enables man to determine the correct courses of action in life. When we find the articulation ‘the diseases increase in proportion to the increase in the number of doctors in a place’,21 we are led to enquire into the role of medical practices. An instance from Hind Swaraj demonstrates this: I overeat, I have indigestion. I go to a doctor, he gives me medicine, I am cured. I overeat again, I take his pills again. Had I not taken the pills in the first instance, I would have suffered the punishments deserved by me and I would not have

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overeaten again. The doctor intervened and helped me to indulge myself. My body thereby certainly felt more at ease; but my mind became weakened. A continuance of a course of medicine must, therefore, result in loss of control over the mind.22

Proportional articulation is not merely correlationism. ‘Correlationism’ is the recognition that adjacent to the series A there is another series B and between them is a factor of similarity. Correlationism is the assumption that the harmony between the two series is coincidental, although, this fortuitous harmony can be thought under theories or fables. For example in a village which witnesses beef eaters there appears a correlation between the number of missing cows and the number of unfortunate deaths of human beings; a harmonious coincidence of the series can be held together under the fable of the wrath of the gods of the cow. Correlationism in that sense is the absolute faith in the absence of reason which makes room for the fables of the little faiths of apparent harmonies – faith in the cow, in the reckoning brought by earthquakes, in the prairie spirits and dryads, in the magical names of fabulous beings, in the temples. However, proportional articulation, while not yet reason, assumes that there are causal connections that are regulated by the structure of their articulations. Gandhi’s conviction in the articulated causalities extending from the spinning wheel to the faculties of man is evident in his writings. Proportional articulations allow man to intervene at the actualization of things. It is proportional articulation that allows man to know his own body in its nature and at the same time to build the complex of articulations that make up the machineries of great speeds that are augmenting the exodus of man. The ways in which articulations make up machines differ; a certain kind of articulation determines a movement that can be distinguished from another in terms of its degrees of freedom and the other movements to which it can be enjoined. The articulation of a ball socket joint generates a movement that is different from the movement generated by hinges. The similar kinds of movements are also distinguished functionally – machina mundi realizes the world-function and the difference engine realizes the computational function, though they are both mechanical devices. Movements are indifferent towards what moves them, as we know from the wrist watches. The engine for a wrist watch’s movement can be both the spring, which is the classic engine, and an electric motor. Hence it is the specific enjoinment that Gandhi attends to in order to detect the soul in such enjoinments – the engine that moves the railway carriages is of steam and the engine that moves the singer sewing machine is man, and hence the latter in

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his ‘important invention … exercised his intellect brilliantly … and deserves to be admired.23 That is, movement alone is not the criterion for distinguishing between the slow and the quick at the level of thoughts and at the level of material arrangements, but the engine, which is itself a kind of articulation – the engines of spring wound by our hands retain a relation to nature even if the movement engendered by it is complex, and hence it is slower still. Engines themselves are characterized by polynomia in that they are capable of enjoining more than one function as they transfer their motion in a proportional articulation to specific articulations – the spring engine powers the wound-up toys, the wrist watches, and the music boxes. At the level of the mind thoughts are also movements articulated by words and images and their engines can be desire or piety. As we found earlier, the ideas of prison and temple are similar in their articulations – the confinement and limiting of the movement through walls and the caring for someone. The distinction between the two ideas rely entirely on the engine of the idea: if it is piety that holds someone in confinement then even the prison is a temple. Whereas ‘the body is the temple of the Holy’24 for the man of piety, it is a veritable prison for the man of desires. However, a movement of an engine and a movement of a mechanism can be distinguished. In the engine the articulation is invariably proportional – as the spring is compressed it stores more potential energy and as the rotations per minute of an engine decreases its power also decreases. The primary power of the mind is the creation of movements: by discovering the articulations in nature, finding analogous domains in his milieu, abstracting from the articulations and movements of nature, and by detecting the homologous powers secreted in matter to build newer machines such that nature appears to double over. Man is born to mimic his Maker: What must be borne in mind is that just as all Nature’s movements and processes are mechanical and yet guided by Divine Intelligence or Will, even so man must reduce his daily conduct to mechanical regularity and precision, but he must do so intelligently. Man’s merit lies in observing divine guidance at the back of these processes and in an intelligent imitation of it rather than in emphasizing the mechanical nature thereof and reducing himself to an automation.25

Gandhi would call the winding of all engines, including those of the mind and of the people unrest – an engine is the rest-seeker or an arrangement that is ‘wanting to be zero’. A spring is wound up to unrest while a thought winds itself in desire which may be concupiscent or it may be for a union with a deity which is still not the divine slowness but ‘an idle superstition’.26 The mind is the maker of engines that are un-manifest but the workings of these engines

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are manifested in the impulses of the body – ‘the motion of the engine is but a visible manifestation [of that motive power]’.27 The artifice of taste is one of the ways in which the mind builds for itself a machine of speed; desire winds the relation between the demands of the body and the unreal beings specified by the mixture of industrial essences. The human ingenuity of contraception created new possible relations between women and men, articulated by a system of taste wound up by concupiscence where the real milieu of that relation and its speed – the regularity of sexual relations is in accordance with pregnancy and this in turn renders women ‘queens of the household’ – is disrupted and now there are more ways – more than as husbands and fathers – for women to relate to men than there are men and more ways for women to relate to themselves than as mothers and wives; and hence we are to understand ‘contraceptives as poison’.28

The soul and the span Gandhi’s conception of the soul is complex as it refers to the other faculties, the Maker, and politics which is man’s conduct of his time on earth. But it appears confusing when we see the historical precedents that Gandhi acknowledges, ranging from the Greek conceptions, the Christian notion of the soul as that which needs redemptive release, and the Indian notion of ‘atman’. We found earlier that the soul and the body are in an inverse relation – as the body weakens the soul grows in strength. This relation is similar to the Hippocratic theory of the soul: ‘But when the body is at rest the soul (psyche), being set in motion and awake, administers her own household and of herself performs all the acts of the body.’29 For Gandhi and the ancient Greeks the non-individuality of the soul determines it as community of indistinguishable members when considered apart from the faculties of the body and the mind – ‘On the whole they are witless shades who lack precisely those qualities that make up an individual.’30 Gandhi was committed to the notion of metempsychosis: Yes, I believe in the immortality of the soul. I would like to give you the analogy of the ocean. The ocean is composed of drops of water, each drop is an entity and yet it is part of the whole, ‘the one and the many’. In this ocean of life we are all little drops. My doctrine means that I must identify myself with life, with everything that lives, that I must share the majesty of life in the presence of God. The sum total of this life is God.31

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Metempsychosis is an intriguing notion inside Gandhi’s corpus for many reasons, which will be discussed in Chapter 7. Here what is to be noted is that it is through his studies of Plato that Gandhi established a certain relation between Truth and the soul, that is, soul is the faculty that has the power invested in it to recognize Truth. It is an impossibility to derive a Platonic theory of the relation between soul and Truth due to reasons of historical distance, the span between epochs constructed actively to generate movements of value for the present as done by both Nietzsche and Hegel, and also due to the inner life of the corpus of Platonic texts. Yet, as a heuristic device we can construct a certain theory of the soul by attending to two dialogues, Phaedo and Phaedrus. From here we can see that Gandhi, while remaining committed to the immortality of the soul and the indifference the soul has with respect to the body in which it is committed, was not in favour of the Truth of the world being held elsewhere. There are no two worlds and the soul changes its places in this same world between bodies. Gandhi’s adherence to the theological doctrine of immanence makes it even more difficult to situate his notion of the soul in a particular history – ‘God is not some person outside. … Being immanent in all beings, He hears everything and reads our innermost thoughts.’32 Then, the soul should have been the animating power of all things that we call living, or ‘the great dividing line between the reign of the living and the non-living’.33 Aristotle, with a certain exceptional moment in the chapter 3 of On the Soul, conceives of the soul as that which gives functional isolation to specific regions of the living body such as nutritive, reproductive, and aesthetic. With Gandhi, we found that the organs of the body are not functionally isolated and that the animation of the body is undertaken by faculties other than the soul. However, it is not the case that the soul is the animating principle that determines specific bodies: ‘Soul is apart from life. The latter is conditioned by the body, the former is not.’34 The post-Vedic doctrine of the soul in India is summarized by Gandhi in his commentary on the Gita: ‘Lord Krishna distinguishes between body (not-self) and atman (self) and shows that whilst bodies are impermanent and several, atman is permanent and one.’35 It appears that there is only one soul, indistinguishable in itself, in all men. Then, is it the case that man alone has soul? We found that machines and institutions have minds and that people are a body whether as nation or as a village. Gandhi writes, ‘The individual has a soul, but as the State is a soulless machine.’36 However, the soul of individuals can provide the voice for the institutions and ennoble them; in the absence of such ennoblement, institutions are ‘Satanic’. The soul voices itself according to the distance between the mind and the body; we found that the minds and

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bodies of men are individuals and in this sense the voice of the soul has the distinct timbre of the instrument constructed by the individuals in the same way that the set of strings will give a distinct timbre according to the body of the particular violin. Glyn Richards explains, ‘Before one claims to speak of his inner voice, or the voice of conscience, he should recognize his limitations, and discipline himself to cultivate truthfulness, humility, purity, and non-violence and embrace the twin ideals of poverty and non-possession.’37 That is, a man must sufficiently slow down before speaking the inner voice such that its timbre resonates with Truth. The soul may speak in other voices for we are strangers to our own souls. Regarding the purity and the perfection of ancient India Gandhi said, ‘I always hear divine voices telling me in my ears that such life was a matter of fact once in India.’38 The soul is the little voice of conscience from the point of view of the speed of our actions and at the same time it is also the faculty in which the Maker made his talisman.39 A perfectly harmonious functioning of the soul, the mind, and the body are needed to construct a compass towards the good which is the Maker. As we found, the speed that characterizes the body, the mind, and the two together in the artifices of taste distinguish the faculties. The soul, on the other hand, is not a power that can be enjoined either by the body or by the mind. The body’s relation to soul is primarily as the temple or the prison for the soul depending on the articulations of that particular body following the homologies. It is also the body which manifests the soul before others as either a beautiful soul, a great soul, a noble soul, or as evil; since the senses make manifest the mind, the body also makes manifest the distance between the mind and the soul – the further apart the mind and the soul are, the manifestation appears evil. We need to bear in mind that soul is purely good and that good and evil refer to the speed the faculties of the mind and the body have with respect to the soul. The further the mind seeks perfections of its own within the domain of pure intellect the more it is compelled to invent new articulations of matter to pursue the intellectual, such as the machines which provide leisure. The growing speed of the relation between ideas and the growing number of their relations is the contrary of a fecundity when we learn that it has a certain critical limit at which the soul’s voice becomes inaudible. The voice of the soul guides us to the good in the darkness of our inner world and hence it is also called the inner voice. The inaudible soul is the opening to the autolysis of each thing, be it man or civilization: ‘The ancient Greeks had greater intelligence than the Europeans of today, but when the former gave up morality, their intelligence became their enemy, and no trace of them remains today.’40

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The soul is the inner voice and the inner voice is derivative of the split within. The self in motion determined as the spanning of speed between the mind and the body converts the soul – the unity of mind and body – into a recall which is the inner voice. Good and evil call out to us depending on the distance between the mind and the body; divinity of the voice heard increases as the body and the mind grow closer – ‘The “Inner Voice” may mean a message from God or from the Devil, for both are wrestling in the human breast. Acts determine the nature of the voice.’41 However, what really is a span? The meaning of ‘span’ differs in each case according to the articulations in which it is captured, and at the same time the movement that spanning gives each of the articulations remains the same: the span of wings, the spanning of events, a span of time, the spanning of concepts – ‘Men measure time by the human span of a hundred years,’42 whereas a particular human act, such as going ‘for a night out’, has the span of an evening. The span of words and also of those things which are at a distance from words comes to reflection, as we found earlier in our discussion on language, itself spans out – the span of a word as it stretches out to other words; the span between words as they bind each other, such as in a relation of negation where slow and the quick are welded together in their reciprocal out-spanning; the spanning of the distance between the said and the what cannot be said, as Gandhi often remarked on the inadequacy of language for the welling up of sense within; the spanning of language as an articulation of all the previous arrangements. Span is the distance, or room, in space or time that a tendency must be given to realize itself. For example the span of the wings of all the flightless birds fall short of flight though they retain the tendency for flight in their bauplan – the accoutrements43 of hollow bones, feathers, aerodynamic form. There are limits to the span of things just as there are limits to the realizability of tendencies. For example there is a critical weight beyond which it would be impossible for nature to construct a bird with flight just as there is a critical intellectual accomplishment beyond which it will be impossible to construct a nation. The mind is a faculty capable of generating movements towards those things which are no longer flying and to those spaces which could welcome the span of wings. Span of a thing or thought indicates that it is not an indistinct emptiness that reigns between things but a quiet development of propulsions. When Gandhi travelled all over the vast emptiness of India upon his return from South Africa he was inspecting the land of his future action for the span that it can give him. Gandhi was concerned with the material system of each of the things that made up India and the possibilities of these systems ever having a chance to span out

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their tendencies; at times Gandhi appears to be investigating quietly whether there are tendencies active within these material systems. It is important to recall what Gandhi said about the ancient medical systems of India and their span: ‘The Vaidyas do not possess the knowledge of the human body as the doctors do. The basis of diagnosis in Ayurveda is the theory of Tridosha. They have not got to the bottom of even that.’44 That is, the span of Ayurveda, one of the ethnic medical practices in India, falls short of the span of modern medicine in the area of knowledge of the human body; the tendency which had existed in Ayurveda as its ground, the Tridosha or the theory of the three humours, has not been given its span yet by the articulations of the discourse of Ayurveda.

Unrest and the inner voice Gandhi said, ‘If you would swim on the bosom of the ocean of Truth you must reduce yourself to a zero.’45 However, this does not mean that it is the zero hero who alone gets to hear the inner voice. In fact the zero hero is not in need of that voice. Gandhi who was the experimenter of truth said at the end of his autobiography, ‘I must reduce myself to zero.’46 That is, while not being the zero hero he conducted his experiments in the candle light of his soul; he moved in accordance with the mute prayer of the soul. However, Glyn Richards understands that one must be reduced to zero to be able to hear the inner voice, ‘He is not then a human being with the defects and failings that one normally associates with a human being.’ The problem of inner voice is not one of being near partial truth or complete truth. Rather it is one of being aware of truth which is the feeling of the dismembered soul. There are criteria for being able to hear the inner voice. One must be able to slow down. However, in order to slow down one must have already heard the call. Then how is it that one comes back to the call of the soul? Only an episode of unrest can generate the distaste for the familiar movement, motion sickness, to produce restlessness which generates the conditions for the inner voice to reach the surface. Hence there must be an act of great unrest. Great unrest and ordinary unrest are distinguished. Ordinary unrest is that which augments the committed motion of the inner span – the speed that is the distancing of mind and body. Great violence is that which takes the very same motion to its limit with suddenness. Each movement is composed of a set of components and their interrelationships. Great events or great unrest is the machine reaching its limit power without the interim time and assistance

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to adjust to this limit; the machine, as it is, reaching as far as it could, makes a fully wound-up spring which can now secure the wellspring for something new. We designate by the term anastasis the activities of the theoretical system that makes machines out of engines and engines out of movements; it envelops Gandhi’s hypophysics and the exchanges of movements, engines, and death.

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Dynamics: Active and Passive

I even dream of the cow M. K. Gandhi (CWMG 62, p. 228) I did not move a muscle when I first heard that the atom bomb had wiped out Hiroshima M. K. Gandhi (CWMG 85, p. 371) Hö lderlin conceived of a proper domain for man where his essence would always be visible to him, in such a way that it presented itself as the pathmarks of the gods – ‘Once the gods walked among humans.’1 In that proper era of man, he traced the footprints of the gods with his own. A single event separated man from this past abundant with the footprints of the gods: a calamitous erasure and a sudden separation, or even a revolution of which we have no memories. Behind the revolution lies the lost essence and innocence, and before it, the revolution continues to unfurl history. History is the event that registers itself in the present, records its own memories, and narrates itself, in order to unfurl itself further ahead. The past behind the revolution of history, of which we have no memories, is not at the same time without evidence. There are ruins of this past around us in our languages, gazing up from beneath our feet as archaeological sites, and the stories of this past are called myths. Myths are the appropriate mode of recording events that are not in memory. Jean-Luc Nancy asks us to attend to the departure of gods, which is the essential act in most mythological dramas. Some gods depart to make room for new gods; some are defeated, derided, and then erased; some metamorphose into some others; and some do resurrect with new powers. But the age confronted by Hölderlin, to which Nancy orients us, is that of the departure of these dramas themselves. The remainder of the departure of the gods is the ruins and these ruins compel us to think of the moments before the revolution of history.2 Nancy

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asks us to think of fiction as that narration which has no concern with evidence and truth; if a fiction coincides accidentally with a certain reality it is not fault of its own, and that coincidence shall not be termed ‘truth’. Truth is the narration of an event that is evident somehow and the narration presents the evident event to those who are not its witness; if the narration of truth slips off from evidence, or narrates without evidence, it will be termed ‘false’. But then how do we narrate those events without memory and at the same time with ruins for evidence? Nancy would call this being of narration ‘between story and truth’. Our languages themselves are the ruins of this revolution, in the sense in which we have no memory of our acquisition of language as a historical faculty. The same goes for the concepts of our thinking too. That is, the moment before which thinking and being came into a relation, giving us philosophy and the sciences, is not in our memories, but the evidence of it having taken place once is that we are. Nietzsche introduced a gesture that was unprecedented in the history of philosophy. He conceived that our concerns with the past before the revolution of history are not merely in our engagement with myths but also in our theology, language, and concepts. Rather, our history is still determined by the mythical, since the concepts we deploy to come to understand the events narrated by history are still those received by us without the memories of their reception. For him, we are still living in the hopes of finding our feet back upon the footprints of gods. Instead, for Nietzsche the essence of man awaits ahead in a new revolution which will free man from history itself, and this event which would deliver man beyond the being-between of story and truth is termed ‘Ü bermensch’. Gandhi made a decisive intervention into the problematic of history by conceiving it in terms of a relation between two kinds of forces and he insisted that the essential domain of man was ever present.3 The essential domain of man is nature which is value, and is governed by passive forces. History is the disessentializing of man; it is the work of active forces. It is the chronicle of active forces erecting Babels, bringing Crete down into mere mythical remembrance, instituting the gods at Olympus, and building and ruining Rome as if it were a day’s work – ‘History, then, is a record of an interruption of the course of nature.’4 Rather, history can be conceived as the work of active forces which hew into nature to detach value. The separation of value from nature is the proper definition of violence. The quiet labour of the passive force or ahimsa, which grounds even the ascent and the descent of the active force or himsa, is not recorded in history: ‘Soul-force, being natural, is not noted in history.’5 That is, when we speak about a ‘natural history’ the conduct of nature is imagined in an analogous relation with that of man’s activities; nature in itself neither archives

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its activities nor does it chronicle itself. Instead, it is upon man’s objective exploration that nature offers itself as a domain of archives – the genetic material which holds the traces of its experiments, the fossils, the strata of rocks – in such a way that man may chronicle. The quiet work of the soul force, which leaves no great monuments, is rarely even archived. For Gandhi, these rare archives of the soul force are held mostly in religion. Gandhi opposed the two forces – active and passive – in the region of politics and of psychology.6 He gave many names to passive force: ‘I have variously defined it as truth-force, love-force or soul-force.’7 In the same way, active force is also termed as ‘brute force’, ‘body force’, and ‘physical force’. In these instances it is not a matter of a force by any other name is that same force, but the names signify the distinct internal relations constituted by that force in our considerations. When we think of reading light, it is the relation that the activity of reading has with the surface on which the text appears,  the light that falls on this surface and the relation they both have with the health of the eye. But when we observe that the children on the playground look wonderful under the red sun the terms and the relations are different, where the twilight’s gentleness affords enough light to allow a moment more of play unlike the harshness of the noon, and the aesthetic of the joy that this event affords. That is, the same term, light, can be the constituent of distinct relations although we may refer to all of them as light. When passive force is discussed as soul force it pertains to the internal relation between the faculty of the soul and a force that we deploy under its watch. Just as the two kinds of forces are discussed under their many aspects, force itself is discussed in relation to the origin, constitution, and effects. Hence, Gandhi would say, ‘Our strength’ means the strength of our body, our mind and our soul. From among these, on which should we depend? The answer is brief. The soul is supreme, and therefore soul-force is the foundation on which man must build. Passive resistance or satyagraha is a mode of fighting which depends on such force.8

A force, for Gandhi, is something that can introduce a change of speed in something else: to quicken it or to make it slow. Change of speed is not concerned with the relation that a thing has to its position in space. Instead, change of speed determines the relation a thing has with its nature: the quickening leads it away from its nature and by slowing it gains intimacy with its nature. The introduction of a change of speed is never desirable without ensuring that it will be towards the slow, even in matters that appear to be for the good, such as khadi – ‘it would be extremely unwise to force the pace in regard to a matter

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like khadi’.9 The good goals, too, must not be sped up. Instead, the good force, or the passive force, works until ‘the proper atmosphere has been created’10 for the transition to the slow. Khadi is a slower relation to apparels; one waits for the cotton tree to release its seeds, then to gather the fluff which gives flight to its seeds, the many hands needed to spin the cotton into a yarn, and at the end the coarse cotton which harshly touches the skin as we wear it to remind us of the cotton tree at the origin. Even when khadi in itself is a slowing down of our relation to clothing, the quickening of its advent will be the undesirable work of active forces. That is, such a quick adoption of khadi would be possible only through the enactment of a law or through other extraneous compulsions. The generation of extraneous compulsions is the work of active force. Instead, passive force seeks out the arrangements that are intrinsic to a problem or that are natural. As we found earlier, the natural is described by hypophysics, which maintains a thing in its nature, as ‘the invaluable physic[s] of satyagraha’.11 This gives us the first definition of passive force or ahimsa as that force which is at work in something in so far as a thing is maintained in its value. Then, active force is the unbinding of a thing from its value. History is the record of the separation of values from things since it is the work of active forces. This separation, of things from their value, is also the activation of a certain span between man and nature; the flight afforded by this span appears to increase with each civilization, although they return to nature, through ‘perishing’, the same way. The narration of the flights away from the regularity of nature, history, appears with the civilizational efforts of mankind which are necessitated by the irregular and the disruptive events of this betrayal of nature. For example a village in the subcontinent will have no need for history records since what takes place in it today will not be too different from a day that passed a hundred years ago. Gandhi would often remark that the villages of the subcontinent are the closest to what he conceives to be his ideal polis of mankind, or Hind Swaraj. The principle of this theoretical ideal is ceremony. A ceremonial observation is an action that is to be repeated without deviation from the original event it commemorates. A ceremonial observance this year will be the repetition of the same event the year before with the identical accoutrements, which repeated the event of the year before. Perfect observance of a ceremony involves nondeviation from the previous observances. Villages do have their ceremonies, though each day appears to be different. One cannot sow seeds every morning, nor can one hope to reap by the end of each day – one must make allowance for the seasons. A village can be conceived as a ceremony in itself, provided we consider this ceremony to extend over a year. Then, we can also conceive

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of a ceremonial society where each year is a repetition of the year before. In a ceremonial society records and instruction in history are redundant. Instead of instruction one is initiated into the year-long ceremony for which only the memory of the previous year is sufficient. For Gandhi, a ceremonial society is the very observance of the value that is nature. According to Glyn Richards, for Gandhi ‘history can be interpreted as a movement from himsa to ahimsa’,12 in other words, contrary to what we found, history is the record of the actions of the passive force – history records the making of a ceremonial society. In this instance, Glyn Richards determines history in accordance with the teleology of Gandhian political programme, which is indeed to bring about the reign of passive force, or the rule of Satya. In a letter to Jawaharlal Nehru, Gandhi makes this distinction between the enduring shrines of slowness that the villages of the subcontinent are and his ideal of a ceremonial society that would eventually overwhelm the whole world. However, Richards attributes to this teleology the characteristics of the modern ideal of history, that is as the progression from the primitive and violent form of life – ‘nomadic cannibalism’ – towards the regulated and territorialized life under the modern state, ‘an evolutionary view of history prevalent at the time’.13 This progression to non-violence has been philosophized and scienticized; for example Hegel’s quest for the perfect enclosure of being and thought in the state in philosophy, and in Steven Pinker’s positing of a statistical impulse in man to reduce the quantity of violence from the previous epoch in the case of scientism. But Richards attributes to Gandhi a certain teleology that is foreign to both Gandhi and the other two cases. Richards contrasts ‘nomadic cannibalism’ with the ideal of a worldwide village of peace. For Gandhi, the nomadic cannibal would still be a being before man, a being of innocence in whom the specific difference of the knowledge of speed – the faculty for distinguishing between the beings of nature, in their value – had never been marked by the Maker. However, there are moments in Gandhi’s corpus which can lead us to such conclusions. Between the teleology of the political programme – the movement towards the reign of Truth – and the truth of history – the unbinding of value and things – lies the reality of the concept of force.

Forces and speed Action is nothing other than speed; things maintain themselves in a speed which is natural to them and man, the being with the knowledge of speeds,

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often leads things away from their nature. Gandhi asserts that ‘there must be action where there is body. Not one embodied being is exempted from work.’14 This is a statement with many implications. We must note two. First, even inactivity is a certain kind of action, such as when a ‘Hindu’ man remains inactive while a rioting mob kills his Muslim neighbours. Second, action and work are required for the self-maintenance of each thing, for example the way that the vital organs of a man continue to be at work even when he sleeps. Existence is itself a work even when its toil is unconscious. Action involves bread labour, the labour of the mother, work, serving the poor, holding fast to truth. Above all, action corresponds to speed in Gandhi’s corpus. Action and active correspond to two different levels in Gandhi’s corpus. Action corresponds to the level of Truth and active corresponds to the level of speeding and warring. In speaking of the opposition between the adjectives of force, active and passive, we do not thereby commit to an opposition between activity and inactivity. Activity is not the opposite of passivity, the latter being understood here as the conscious dispositions of a man. The lull of an inebriated mind does not imply the passive nor does the silence observed by the fasting passive resister. Further, active and passive do not denote activity that is opposed to passivity in psychology, but the two are adjectives of forces, in the same way that good and bad are opposed to one another as adjectives in the case of a kick in a game of football. The adjectives in themselves can tell us little without an understanding of the noun that they determine, which force is; unless one knows the technicalities involved in kicking a football in a game, the distinction between a good kick and a bad kick will not be clear. Active and passive as adjectives of force qualify it with respect to the quantity of speed that is deployed as well as the quantity of speed that is obtained. A rioting mob can be brought to inaction from the frenetic pace of their destructiveness with the help of the police force with guns and batons. Then, we will have used active force to limit the speed of the mob. The pacified mob will retain the causes of their destructiveness and await another opportunity. Instead, when the same mob is confronted by the slowness of the passive resister the mob will have found an inner transformation; the actions of the passive resister will have entered the physics of the mob to produce a transformation in their tendencies. To put it plainly, it is really fighting evil by patience, not returning evil for evil. In this struggle, therefore, there can be no question of violence or Intimidation.15

Passive force brings about an internally consistent state of slowness in a situation through the means grounded in slowness. Considered in itself, slowness as the

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delay between a stimulus and a response can be misleading. The thoughtfulness which precedes a military strike to determine the strategy, no matter how ponderous, will still be the work of active forces. Action is opposed to thoughtfulness in politics and to passion in psychology. In politics the activist, the decisive statesman, the soldiers who ‘take the shot’, and the mob are contrasted with the fence sitters, the evasive politician, the soldiers with conscience, and the man who pleads with the mob to let kindness in. The thoughtful are those who need time and the passive resister is he who takes time. In the bio-logic, action takes place as a response to the changes of states within a life-form or outside of it. The animal hunts when it is hungry; hunger is a change of state within the organism which forces it to change its location and its speed in order to catch a prey. It fights when its territory is invaded; its territory coincides with the economy of its metabolism. The delay between the stimulus and the response varies between species; the more neurons there are the longer the delay possible. Passive resister demands the maximum delay. The implications of conceiving a ‘maximum delay’ are discussed in the following chapters. However, the difference in the quantity of the delay alone, or the time taken before an action, does not make the passive resister. Force is that which introduces a change of speed in another – that is that which changes the distance between a thing and its value is force. Truth and Love are interchangeable since what is obtained by love is truth. Love is the shortening of the distance between a thing and its value. In this sense love is the slowing down of things.

What is action? We have already encountered the difficulties involved in deriving a determinate sense for certain terms such as activity, action, active, passion, and passive. This apparent difficulty is grounded in polynomia, the power of the mind to legislate different regularities in the same object, which was not something unknown to Gandhi. This power is possible due to the resistance that language has to functional isolation. In being resistant to isolation, be it in the domain of meanings or in that of politics, language suffers like metal at the hands of an iron smith, and its sharpened edges are home to poems. A poet’s meaning is limitless. Like man, the meaning of great writings suffers evolution. On examining the history of languages, we notice that the meaning of important words has changed or expanded.16

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Action does not exclude activities of the mind, including its exercises in pure reason and sufferings, ‘all activity, whether mental or physical, is to be included in the term action’.17 Action is often distinguished from passion when it is one of the two modes of re-action – either being a recipient of the action from another to such an extent that it leaves oneself unrecognizable, or, to initiate action in opposition in such a way that one’s own limits are maintained as they were – to be such one must take action in a certain situation instead of being passive. However, we will find that there is a certain passion where the liminal being is left unchanged while receiving and enduring the actions of another, except in the instance of death, which defines the passive resister. In a related problematic, that of making things, action is understood to be a domain separated from the domain of passion; the action of the iron smith is suffered by the iron where the iron smith is the actor in possession of a certain determination and the iron, as the receiver without any being-towards of its own, receives according to its own given limits, such as plasticity and malleability. That is, by action in this instance, we understand the efficient work which changes the states of another thing, as that thing undergoes this change brought on by the work, such that it becomes functionally distinct from what it was. We can think of passion in this instance as the receptivity to changes of forms, but also as the resistance to functional isolation. When the actual is opposed to the possible we often have before us a perfectly actualized thing and in this thing we imagine distinction in such a way that its functional isolation is preserved. For example in a well-made car one can imagine adding GPS, a bigger turbo unit, a louder music system, and so on without changing its functionality as an automobile. Deleuze would refer to this retroactive projection of the variations over the form of a thing as ‘only a pseudo-movement, the false movement of realisation understood as abstract limitation’.18 Further, in cases where action is understood as the presentation of some other thing, it is opposed often to potentiality. The relation between potentiality and actuality has several models. We can consider one of them, closer to Aquinas: potentiality is distributed into the actual in as much as the kinesis, or the speed, leads the former into the latter. In other words, speed is the activity which leads potentiality to be actuality. In Gandhi’s sense, speed is the determinate existence of each thing, and when things deviate from their given speeds they possess lesser and lesser of reality. Gandhi used the term ‘action’ in a distinct sense: action is that which binds each thing to its nature – ‘all action binds’.19 Action can either be that which maintains this nature as it is or that which exhausts nature.20 This is a complex notion, in that it implies that the nature of each thing is the active determination

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without which it will not be. At the same time, action is needed in order for a thing to be distended with its own nature, as when a man, who must eat in order to be, overeats; or, it is action which lets a thing deviate from its own nature, such as the loss of own-rule for a people as a result of their adoption of other cultures. That is, if something takes place it has a speed. However, we find that it is not the case that Gandhi is indifferent to the origins of words, or their oldest known own-rules, and that he uses words as labels for any meaning whatsoever. Instead, he has a certain rule with regard to ‘important words’. As long as we do not tamper with a system that teaches ancient wisdom, we are at liberty to enforce new meanings to old and important words. Words are capable of homology, analogy, and polynomia in the Gandhian sense of these terms. For example the mind can introduce entirely unrelated meanings into the same word, since words are capable of suffering polynomia, as in the case of a ‘river bank’ and a ‘money bank’. At the same time, the mind is also capable of discovering the homologous element in the same case; the bank in either case refers to something which is a function of the flow of a thing, in the case of the river the flow is that of water and in the case of money the flow is that of liquid cash. In the case of analogy, the same law legislates two distinct words and returns the same value; for example ‘murdered’ and ‘neutralised’ – ‘The spelling of words will be different. The value is the same.’21 His interpretations of nature, history, and texts were guided by the attention to the laws which governed the system with the assumption that a literal, or ‘truthful’, approach will not yield the truth. These approaches led him to construct statements which are confounding for his readers, who expect simple saintliness of Gandhi, although such statements are consistent with his theory of the mind. Gandhi writes, With every age the important words will carry new and expanding meanings. But its central teaching will never vary. The seeker is at liberty to extract from this treasure any meaning he likes so as to enable him to enforce in his life the central teaching.22

It is for this reason that today ‘steam, electricity, and other great forces of Nature are all gods’.23 That is, the old important word, ‘gods’, is capable of attaining new regularities and hence homes. Unlike the gods of Hö lderlin, who took leave from the origin of history to make room for man, for Gandhi, ‘the gods’ never left the earth at all, which is their only home – the earth is the only home for gods, just as for men. Instead of a mass exodus of the gods as seen by Hö lderlin, Gandhi witnessed a clan of ‘gods’ being displaced by another. The notion of ‘gods’ is not unambiguously ‘good’. The ‘gods’ imply any set of conditions which will hold in

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equilibrium the forces which produce the regularities visible from outside it: given to man as the forms which endure in the silhouette of an epoch. Hence Gandhi noted that ‘today armed force has replaced God’.24 Indeed, in a text crafted as a thesis of action – Anasaktiyoga – which is at the outset a commentary of the Gita, Gandhi refuses to grant any divinity to the pastoral god Krishna – ‘Krishna of the Gita is perfection and right knowledge personified; but the picture is imaginary.’25 We can clearly see that ‘gods’ are not those of the theologians, for Gandhi. In the same way that the gods of an epoch are removed by another clan of gods to let in a new epoch, Gandhi conceived in ‘the important words’ of man new resident senses and hauntings. In order to arrive at the sense in which he understood action, we need to look at this concept away from the conventional oppositions within which it is often encountered so that it will have more room to play. It should be loosened up in such a way that we can hear it in the specific hypophysical system within which it is determinable. When action is understood to have its objectivity in a table of accomplishments what we gather is the common sense which enables us to make judgements on each of these actions. This concept of action as the movement towards achieving a distinct goal is that of the critic. Gandhi opposed it with the aesthetic of action – ‘The effort is a joy in itself.’26 The critic is someone with a set of criteria for a certain domain of action: the literary critic who observes in the books the accomplishment of ‘a story well told’ or the lack of it; the doctor who monitors the specific calories of an individual’s diet to find ‘the balance’ between exercise and food intake; the art critic of these times who seeks the presence of ‘bodies’ and ‘desires’ in all the works such that they are recognized as works of art. The critic is in possession of the markers for the outer limits of a domain and he has a nose for it. He is a vigilante, and he wanders the zones of a work seeking the territorial markers in the appropriate zones and when they are not found he announces either that the threshold has been breached or that it has not been found by the work. However, the lists of accomplishments to be had in the hands of the critic render action as something which is without sense in itself. The homology of action makes the concept of the critic rather difficult. Actions can be homologous in the same way as the organs of actions can be. The trunk of an elephant is homologous to the nose of a man, which reveals the constructability held at the same origin, whereas, the grasping action performed by the trunk is not analogous to the scrunching of the nose of a man. An action such as screaming performed by all the other apes is homologous to speech in the human ape. Homology reveals the realizable essences in things and actions such that new functions are discovered – ‘God set a limit to man’s locomotive

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ambition in the construction of his body. Man immediately proceeded to discover means of overriding the limits.’27 Rather, homology comports one to the power designated by the override. An action may be homologous with respect to the accomplishments; the activity of running undertaken by three men can be for losing weight, for enjoyment, and for catching a train. The same action of plucking allows one to play the strings of a guitar and to gather fruits. In propaganda literature it is not the storytelling which holds the criteria, but the idea which it delivers to the reader in a specific literary form. The nationalist cinema of Hollywood tells the tales of caped and masked superheroes in order to deliver to us the instruction that the world we are in is incapable of regulating itself with the laws and the institutions that we built for it, but it is in need of the excesses and the extra-legalities of men with might and good intentions – cinema functions as propaganda. On the other hand, someone might write a novel with a story such that there is writing. Beckett wrote his novels in order to let there be the written word. The meaning of Waiting for Godot can be delivered into the problematic of literature and its ends. Gandhi expressed this problematic in the terms of ‘media of exchange’: One rupee can purchase for us poison or nectar, but knowledge or devotion cannot buy us either salvation or bondage. They are not media of exchange. They are themselves the things we want.28

What could it mean to say that one wants a certain action without a concern for its end? Does it mean interminable action? Could it mean labour without wage? Is it a certain condemnation? For now, we have to think of it as a region of actions where the knowledge of the origin of the action need not release it from functional isolation. That is, there is at the other end action as the selfdetermining accomplishment.

Passive force and active force So far we found that the terms ‘active’ and ‘passive’ as the adjectives of force refer to the level of scalology – the hastening and the slowing of things with respect to their nature – and the term ‘action’ – there is nothing inactive – refers to nature itself. Active force is named as brute force, physical force, violence, the force of arms according to the relations which are constituted by the active force and its objectives. Active force directs a thing away from its nature, and in leading a thing away it sets the value of that thing in relief.29 Active force abandons values

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and things from each other, such that they mix and breed indiscriminately into monstrosities such as civilizations. Passive force, on the other hand, is that which maintains a thing as bound in its value. Civilizations collapse when the passive force in those developments is completely exhausted. Passive force is termed as love force, soul force, truth force, non-violence, Satyagraha, passive resistance; among these terms passive resistance is perhaps the most recurrent and at the same time a term to which Gandhi showed a determinate opposition, clarifying in a letter to the private secretary to the viceroy that the most effective method was ‘the method of soul force or truth force or love force which for want of a better term I have ‘described as passive resistance’.30 The relation between the two forces can be explored on the grounds of their objectivities, their relation to the hypophysical unity that is nature, the ascension and descension which they bring about on the ladder of speed. For now, we need to keep in mind a relation of priority and superiority. First, passive force is prior in its logical and temporal relation to the active force. Secondly, passive force is superior to the active force – ‘Passive resistance is always infinitely superior to physical force.’31 Active force is easier to detect amidst us, not because passive force is in a hidden realm, but due to the prominence which the active force has come to have in our lives. Active force is that which comes through the barrel of a gun, and that which gently comforts a wounded man is the passive force. Gandhi had often shown the distinction between the two forces by bringing their examples into contrast – the prince against the peasants, the gun against the sword, the train against bare feet – which does not imply that he was short of definitions. Before arriving at their distinction it will be important to notice a few such instances. When a man takes a walk to the temple he practises passive force and when the same man makes a train journey he is employing active force, and in the process the pilgrimage turns into something unholy: Railways accentuate the evil nature of man. Bad men fulfil their evil designs with greater rapidity. The holy places of India have become unholy. Formerly, people went to these places with very great difficulty. Generally, therefore, only the real devotees visited such places.32

Here, we gain another opposition – holy force and unholy force. When a man walks to a place of worship in his neighbourhood the problem of which force to deploy is not evident, since his expectation – the divinity – lies closer. In the same way, when a pilgrim uses transportation technologies to reach the remote site of pilgrimage, his expectation is rendered closer. When ‘the hearts are not set on pilgrimage’ the expectation is rendered as something within reach; the pilgrim

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never truly leaves his own home and land, and he fails to comprehend the games of the span involved in the quest for the divinity. The ‘span’ of something, or a thing made up of many things, is the range of variations in existence. The span is the opened up speeds of a being, in which it finds its regularity: the wing span of a bird is not the span of the being of this bird, and hence for Bataille ‘the wings of birds opened a more extensive space to growth.’33 The span of a motor car with a two-wheel drive system lets man go wherever he can find roads. When a motor car is altered – such as high air intake, four-wheel drive – to become a general-purpose vehicle the span extends beyond roads. With a helicopter man can reach the mountains where no other vehicle can go. The pilgrim who gets airdropped on the holy coordinates in the Himalayas, to points beyond 4,000 metres, experiences the divinity as a being within his regularity; gods are another speck within his span. This would not be pilgrimage for Gandhi, for it is not the stepping forward of the one with true valour. The pilgrim is someone who experiences the sieving of his own span in such a way that the breath of the divinity pours through his wounded wings as he falls down in surrender – a bird with shot-through wings setting itself down. When we speak of pilgrimage we think of the remoteness of the place and the unapproachability of the divinity, a long and weary way. The distance and the impediments of the way through which the pilgrim flings himself to gain on the brow of the divinity wring the span of the limbs into the form of surrender – the work of the holy force. The difference between the two forces, active and passive, is found to be given by the span of the motorized transport and that of the limbs. The span of an animal is limited by its bauplan with respect to its environment, which is the logic of the idiom ‘fish out of water’. Even the span of a species, its endurance through reproduction over generations, comes to an end once the equilibrium between the environment and the bauplan is lost. For man, the limit of locomotion was set by the Maker in ‘the construction of his body’, as for the other animals. Unlike with the other animals, the construction of the body was not the limit of the span of man. Instead, man is the maker of the overrides; he invents new wings and in opening them, uncovers the span of epochs impossible for nature. In Bataille’s terms, ‘Mankind is … a manifold opening of the possibilities of growth and an infinite capacity for wasteful consumption.’34 Active and passive forces are set in contrast in this way – against the infinite capacity of the active force we find the naturally limited force of nature, the passive force. We can define ‘passive force’ in terms of nature. Passive force is that which reigns in the span of nature. Would it be an act of the passive force when an eagle swoops down with great speed and grasps a dove with its talons? That is, this question addresses our bestiary of the

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cruel eagle and the peaceful dove. Would it be passive force which lets a man pick up a stone and throw it faster than he could ever run? Could we speak of a man hunting with spears, which are sharper than his teeth, to be in the domain of the passive force? At what moment can we say that there is a deviation from the passive to the active? Is the movement from the passive to the active a matter of quantities? Imagine a runner along the road, who returns each day with an increment in speed. Such increments are natural to the construction of her body; these changes of speed do not contradict the span of her limbs. That a woman is able to run at 6 kilometres per hour one day and 8 kilometres per hour on the next day does not imply a contradiction within her span. Except for her being a woman, the runner keeps within nature. Being a certain thing is to maintain that thing in its nature; being a woman, for Gandhi, was to be ‘the queens of the households’35 – one rarely meets a queen on the run, after all. The hawk spreads its wings and enjoys a span given to it by the Maker. The span of the hawk includes the hunt for the sparrow. In the same way, the span of the man-animal involves throwing stones over distances beyond the span of his limbs. However, all actions of man, including the man who hunts with wooden spears and pelts stones at the fruits higher up in the trees, are complicated by the span unique to him – ‘Man is the only animal who has been created in order that he may know his Maker.’36 The faculties reticulate his span with questions such as ‘Is it the same thing to lynch another man and pelt a canopy with stones for their fruits?’ and ‘Should a man hunt an animal with wooden spears even when it does not make him guilty of exceeding the limits set by his Maker?’ Man, then, is not permitted to carry out all the actions which may occur ‘naturally’ to him. In man nature is itself a confused notion, for he has access to a force beyond the capability of nature – active force. Active force is that which generates the new spans in man’s being which let him spread to new regions of being beyond the limits set by the Maker in the construction of his body. Though, we should keep in mind that the ambit of this force must have been known to his Maker. That is, within man the Maker placed two forces which are apparently in conflict with one another. The seriousness of the problem is evident when Gandhi writes: ‘Truth is that God is the force.’37 That is, all the forces of nature are derivative of the force which is the Maker himself and He appears to have set in man a force which is not given to any other being of nature. Now, this does not imply a contradiction of the kind which would warrant a theodicy. That is, if the Maker is omnipotent why he would allow the possibility of the violation of the Law of all that is made – the Law and the Maker

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are one. We understand all that there is to be the Maker’s span, and in this span all the events ought to be regulated by the Laws, which too He is. Then, in creating man, the Maker had empowered man with a force – the active – which He held in reserve for himself. Then, all that man hence made  – including penicillin and agent orange, plastic and paper bags, nuclear bombs and peace corps – are regulated by the Law and they still fall within the span of the Maker. It might even be that the Maker made man so that there are things which He could not have made Himself. That is, the Maker needed man to get his penicillin. Of course, this is not an argument Gandhi would entertain, although, the argument which he provides instead does not contradict this direction. Gandhi often wrote about the purpose of man in the Maker’s plan: ‘Man was made so that he would know his Maker.’ Within the span allotted to man, the maker of plastic and penicillin, was his capability to come face to face with his Maker. That is, man had to be a maker himself so that he would be able to know the Maker, which is the meaning of man being created in the image of his Maker. However, all that man does, his exploration of his own span, is not looked at kindly by the Maker. The ‘override’, the ability to create new speeds, was given to man so that he will also know that there can be distinct directions in the making of things, in the creation speeds, including whether to or not to. That is, for Gandhi, an animal moves with the speeds allotted to it along the only coordinates given to it by the Maker, in the construction of its body – the animal is a machine with a finite range of speeds. Even if man were to construct all the speeds possible for him it would still make him animal; an animal of infinity. Man, the maker-animal, is distinguished in nature only if he exercises restraint within his span in such a way that within the span allotted to him by the Maker he sets a range of his own, or his own span: ‘The brute by its nature knows no self-restraint. Man is man because he is capable of, and only in so far as he exercises, self-restraint.’38 The infinite-animal who must cleave into his own span in order to derive a finite milieu is man – man is the animal who prunes infinity. In cutting his own wings man gets closer to the Maker, which is his only purpose: Man is not born day after day to explore avenues for amassing riches and to explore different means of livelihood; on the contrary man is born in order that he may utilise every atom of his energy for the purpose of knowing his Maker.39

That is, the cleavage to be made into his span by the infinite-animal is directed by the form of ‘the purpose of knowing his Maker’. The form of the cleavage is approached by man as he moves closer to his Maker, although not in the sense of a proximity one may have to a house of worship, but turning into his likeness – a

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divine burlesque is to unfold as the passive resister sets out to be in the likeness of his Maker. Active forces, which we can call the necessary conditions for there being an infinite-animal, are in fact the hidden spans in nature opened by the faculties. If man were to merely follow what he could witness in nature and imitate it, there would not have been civilizations, and not even the eternal villages of the Indian subcontinent. The faculty of mind, as we found, is capable of giving new laws to organize man’s body. The hand can be home to many regularities, including grasping, picking, throwing, triggering, and writing. These manifold regularities of the body, opened by the mind, in turn are determined into functions with respect to the objects man seeks to build. The battle between the many laws on the body, opened by polynomia, is between ‘the purpose of knowing his Maker’ and the threat of forgetting his Maker, and hence ‘the human body is the battlefield where the eternal duel between Right and Wrong goes on’.40 The gesture of picking corresponds to the nit-picking function in our social activity and the picking of the strings of the guitar with a plectrum. In the example we do find the displaced use of the verb ‘to pick’; in the former case the hand is not employed at all, instead a certain attention to details in a discourse where one selects elements out from the whole in order to deride. The analogical power of the faculty allows man to deploy a function – grasping a book with one’s hands – into another region – grasping a concept. The mind opens new regions in nature by discovering analogies, homologies, and by releasing functions from their isolation. When early men found the canines and claws of the predators piercing through the skin of their prey they found that the claws are analogical to the sharpened sticks. In the sticks the early men found the origins of the claws hidden, and to open the sticks into claws meant that they had to legislate a different set of laws for those sticks; for example straightening them out and hardening them in the controlled fire, and polishing the tips into sharp points. Analogy is the abstraction of functions from their given domains in order to determine another material domain in accordance with this function, where new regularities are found. This in turn opens new spans for man. But today ‘instead of spears, they carry with them revolvers containing five or more chambers’.41 These are two distinct epochs – the epoch of the spears and that of guns. Yet, one can perceive between them the same movement of analogy; the spear is a long projectile claw made of stick, and the gun is the thrower of metallic claws. Man has gained with the increment in speed between these two spans – from the visible flight of the spear to the supersonic speed of the bullet – a greater distance with nature. Active force introduces distance between man and nature with each

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increment of speed, and hence between man and value – ‘Formerly, when people wanted to fight with one another, they measured between them their bodily strength; now it is possible to take away thousands of lives by one man working behind a gun from a hill.’42 In this instance, in the distance obtained between the bodies of men in combat, man has grown apart from the value of valour. Unclothing a man is analogous to the skinning of an animal, and hence the thick skin and furs of animals were worn by early men as second skin. The skinfunction, in its liberation from the flesh, became the ground for adornmentfunction – ‘Formerly they wore skins. … Now they wear long trousers, and, for embellishing their bodies, they wear a variety of clothing.’43 The adornmentfunction of clothing has taken the value – of the beauty of the man-animal as made by the Maker – out of the body, and set for it an autonomous domain, of fashion: ‘If our eyes were not blinded by foolish habit, we should see that the body looks most handsome only in its nakedness.’44 In a village all men know the homologous openings in nature and the tools with which they engage with nature. But in the urban domain most men are in contact with only the button: ‘Press another button, and they will have their newspaper.’45 The relation to the button has made man forget his own enslaved condition: ‘Now they are enslaved by temptation of money and of the luxuries money can buy.’46 Speed seeks more of itself, as we found earlier in our discussion of Gandhi’s scalology – ‘it whirls faster and faster’. When food is in plenty men eat more, and in order to eat more they add condiments and spices – ‘condiments have the power of artificially helping the digestion, and generating a sort of artificial hunger’.47 That is, the hunger-function is detached by man from the body and its analogous power is found by man in condiments. The artificial hunger does not help with digestion in reality. The indigestion resulting from overeating is cured by the doctor through medicines. In this way the digestive-function of man exists in a new span – the condiments, chefs, the doctors – outside his body. The autonomy of the digestive-function is the malfunction of man, for ‘his true function is to know and serve his Maker’.48 But being the infinite-animal he can indeed appropriate any function as his own, and as long as he does not know the form under which he is to cleave into the infinite according to the Maker-function, man will be without restraint. Hence, Gandhi asks, ‘Can it be that man alone is created to worship the palate?’49 This question is the obverse of the axiom that man alone was made in order that he will know his own Maker. The power to know the Maker is that from which active force is revealed. The revealed force in turn reveals the distinct speeds set in nature according to the Law, which the Maker himself is. The revelation of active force, as the mind

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opens nature, reveals the cleavage of a certain form to man, and it appears to him as the distinction between two laws – ‘Non-violence is the law of our Species, as violence is the Law of the Brute.’50 This statement is not equal to man is nonviolent and nature is violent, and, nature is full of active force and man alone is capable of passive force. Nature is indeed the domain of the passive force; that is in so far as the Maker set the speeds of all things, they exist in Truth. But, being given the faculty to make spans of his own, so that he may know the Maker as the one who set spans for all things, introduces a certain kind of difficulty for man. Man as the infinite-animal, who is opposed to the limited animals, is capable of activating an infinity of forces, and he must exercise restraint so that he may know the Maker – ‘The dignity of man requires obedience to a higher law.’51 The infinite-animal to be determined by the form of restraint prohibits man from acting the way brutes do, that is merely obeying their instincts. Hence, even if man creates ever new spans for his being, without obedience to the higher law, he will remain an infinite-brute. This is how we are to understand the term ‘brute force’, which populates Hind Swaraj – brute is that force which the infiniteanimal deploys when he is oblivious of the higher law. In turn, we can also say that the deployment of brute force delivers each time the infinite-brute.52 Forces are not inseparable from the ends obtained by them. It is even the case that passive force is an end in itself. Active force is also referred to as violence, in which case the terms which constitute the sense of violence implicate the meaning of End itself, and we will return to it in our discussion of the Law. When active force is called physical force Gandhi considers the role the faculties play in that specific employment and the coercive use of force.53 That is, when a man lifts dumbbells for exercising his arms, the force employed is physical; it introduces a change of speed with respect to the dumbbell, the muscles involved, and their metabolism. Yet, it does not constitute an instance of what is called physical force for Gandhi, since the employment of this force will have no bearing on the span of that man or his surroundings; Gandhi called out to all men, especially his passive resisters, to take up physical exercise. It is in relation to the outcomes of forces – the difference in the span of things induced by them – that we distinguish active forces from passive forces. If a group of men of an Indian village petition before their ruler, a local prince – ‘we would like to pay less taxes’ – the ruler will never yield, for nothing takes place without force. The force can be active or passive, but one must employ either, for ‘it is a fact beyond dispute that a petition, without the backing of force is useless’.54 If the force employed is physical, such as an ambush as a show of strength and intent, the ruler may yield to the demand. Yet, this gesture will lead to augmentation

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of the physical force deployed: the ruler may bring in more mercenaries from outside, the petitioners may take up lethal arms, and this could result in a bloody battle bringing to an end the lull which was given by the yielding of the demands by the ruler. Physical force augments itself, both in the actual conflicts and in their preparation. In practical terms, physical force turns away a problem from the span of its origins into a new one. For instance, the prince may form alliances with the other princes in his neighbourhood and create a larger army and the men in these territories would in turn arm themselves against their princes. The conflict could result in a bloody revolution which leaves behind no princes one way or another. The revolution can open a new span in the lives of the men who might form councils, which will hear new petitions. Such moments tear apart values from things: in the above example, land would no longer be that which belonged to the prince, the men will no longer be subjects, and the ruler will no longer be the prince. Active force is that which sets values free from things – the force which unmakes the hypophysical world of the Maker. For Gandhi, the leaving of a span for something new is always a movement towards evil. It should also be kept in mind that Gandhi was not seeking to maintain a status quo with respect to the problems of men, or even a certain ancient span of men; his noble goal was to bring in an era without problems for mankind, or an era of mankind without the spanning of man. The gesture towards sustaining a status quo has been noted in Gandhi’s reactions to the Marxist movements in India and around the world, his resistance to the abolition of the caste system, his condemnation of the native people of Australia, and even in his advisory to the Jewish people to surrender before the Nazis.

Passive force Active force was found to be that which introduced an augmentation of speed into things and epochs in order to bring in new spans into the world. Active forces dislodge values from things to create a multitude of autonomous domains for both; it can be seen in the proliferation of fashionable clothes and restaurants in the case of values and, of sciences and technologies in the case of things. When a thing is dislodged from its value completely, it is no longer in its nature, and it ceases to be. The force which directs values away from things, the unbinding force, brings down destruction; this destruction can be of objects, homes, and whole civilizations. We find that history is the record of active forces. These records are not merely the chronicles of the great wars and the empires, but are

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also made up of their ruins. The historian wanders in the lost spans of mankind, deserted by the Good, in search of those grains of sand which once belonged to Babel. Gandhi too had an interest in all things ancient, but only in so far as those things endured into the present without shedding themselves into the deserts: The world is held together by bonds of love. History does not record the day to day incidents of love and service. It only records conflicts and quarrels.55

Active force generates history and writes it. History is the interruptions in the natural span of mankind; it abandons man into the desert of freedom, where he is free to bind the values of his choice to the things of his desire. The natural span of mankind and all else gains its reciprocal binding from the passive force, which for this reason is also called Love. That is, to make a band of things is bandhana and those who are tied together are bandhu, or family. The tying together of things is Love; especially when it ties a thing to its value. The bond between things and their value is the original family. Passive force, understood as love force, is familial; it would be a violation of love force if one were to disobey one’s parents, ignore caste laws, and be uninterested in one’s nation. Without such binding ties where would the eternal villages of the subcontinent be? In terms of classical mechanics, the sun and the planets are held together in their solar family by means of love force. Without it, the cosmos itself would have been a desert unimaginable: Without the presence of the cohesive force amongst the atoms that comprise this globe of ours, it would crumble to pieces and we would cease to exist. And even as there is cohesive force in blind matter so must there be in all things animate; and the name for that cohesive force among animate beings is Love. We notice it between father and son, between brother and sister, friend and friend.56

The persistence of mankind on earth, in spite of being in possession of the active forces, is due to the superiority of love force – ‘The fact that mankind persists shows that the cohesive force is greater than the disruptive force, centripetal force greater than centrifugal.’57 These moments in Gandhi’s corpus illuminate something which we encountered earlier in our discussion of hypophysics; hypophysics is the interpretation of physics in moral terms. The infusion of morality into physics in such a way that it offers to us a parable of nature. The parables made out of science are a genre for which Gandhi was one of the precursors; as we found in the case of Gandhi’s interpretation of Salter’s book on Darwinian science titled Ethical Religion, Gandhi’s own remarks on electromagnetism and classical mechanics, and his use of Bose’s biological experiments show his resistance to a discourse which is impermeable to God,

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or the Maker.58 The discourses which have no room for theology are the works of active forces, as we found. Passive force is the unconscious ground of even these, as Gandhi would argue – ‘I believe that the sum total of the energy of mankind is not to bring us down but to lift us up, and that is the result of the definite, if unconscious, working of the law of love.’59 That is, the sciences which are ruled by pure reason are oblivious to the net energy of that which grounds them, and hence Gandhi would argue, using the nativist name for passive force, that ‘Ahimsa is a science’.60 The science of passive force, which is hypophysics, is the ‘consecration’ of value to modern science. Classical dynamics is where one ought to begin to learn about passive force: ‘Every action is resultant of a multitude of forces even of contrary nature. There is no waste of energy. So we learn in the books on mechanics.’61 Compared to the sciences, such as classical mechanics, hypophysics is a difficult discipline to master. There are several reasons listed by Gandhi in his corpus. But the most recurrent ones are of faith and of restraint. That is, while mechanical forces can be measured through the appropriate instrumentations passive force is revealed only through faith, or fidelity. While physics explores all the directions in which nature can be opened up – the gravitational, electromagnetic, and the nuclear – passive force is revealed only when man exercises restraint according to his faith in the divine law. Gandhi elaborates: The difference is that in the one case we generally know the forces at work, and when we do, we can mathematically foretell the resultant. In the case of human actions, they result from a concurrence of forces, of most of which we have no knowledge. … Rather is our ignorance a cause for greater faith. And nonviolence being the mightiest force in the world and also the most elusive in its working, it demands the greatest exercise of faith.62

There are lessons to be learnt from these words. We found earlier that there is no moment in existence without action. Now we learn that action is the work of a multitude of forces. If the number and the kinds of forces involved are sufficiently limited to constitute a set of variables and if their relationships can be expressed in terms of equations, their solution will enable us to foretell the effect of these forces – rather they yield themselves to a predictive science. On the other hand, if we do not know all the forces involved, and even when we do, if our knowledge is confused, they will not yield to a predictive apparatus. However, we can have another form of knowledge, which is faith. Faith is proportional to ignorance – the less we know the more the cause for faith. Passive force, or non-violence, is

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that of which we know the least, except that it is the ground of all cohesive forces in nature – the filial force. Passive force, being the least known, is the object of maximum faith. The cohesion maintained by passive force can be seen in nature – there being nature is the evidence of passive force understood as the cohesive force. It can be witnessed easily in the domain of man in families, clans, and the eternal villages of the subcontinent; these are instances where things and their value are well-bound. The practitioner of passive force is the passive resister, or the Satyagrahi, the one who adheres to truth; we will return to the passive resister in our discussion of truth, where his reality as the adherent will become clear. The passive resister follows the Laws of the Maker and maintains things and their relationships in their given speed. The passive resister is the conserver of the speed of all things. In his life the passive resister moves constantly to the centre of things, or that point at which the thing is its value. Active force separates the palate from food into an autonomous domain. The passive resister moves in the opposite direction by removing condiments and spices from his diet. From the insipid diet the passive resister moves to raw diet, which too is supported by science – ‘These scientists even hold that there is no need for man to cook his food.’63 For the advanced passive resister fasting will be the natural course to adopt; that is it has to be a man who is no longer tempted by the thought of food – ‘Starvation of the body when the mind thinks of a multiplicity of dishes is worse than useless.’64 In the case of clothing Gandhi’s own journey is illuminative: the many layered clothes of the Western man were slipped off by Gandhi to adopt the traditional Indian clothing, and this was replaced by the attire of the typical villager, and finally the loin cloth of the peasant. It is advisable for the advanced passive resister to discard clothing altogether – ‘The idea that the body looks unseemly in undress is absurd, for the very best pictures are those that display the naked body.’65 In his political action the passive resister’s minimum programme seeks to maintain the status quo, and, at an advanced stage, to create an ideal world village modelled after the eternal villages of India with certain modifications to ensure that active forces never emerge out of these grounds again. In his marital life he maintains perfect celibacy, to remain as he was born – ‘ideally husband and wife should be like brother and sister’.66 The ideal passive resister will travel to all locations by foot, for such a journey, irrespective of the location, would be pilgrimage. The passive resister is the pilgrim of the zero.

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I do believe that violating nature’s law is being sinful. M. K. Gandhi (CWMG 83, p. 393) Gandhi, who started his career as a lawyer, found the commonest use of the term ‘law’, its institution, its practitioners, and its underlying common sense abhorrent. Alongside doctors, parliamentarians, and technologists, the lawyer is among the worst kind of men. The principle of the legal profession is that every individual deserves the best defence, which in turn is founded on the notion of ‘fairness’. This principle cannot be practised in conformity with that of truth telling. In this sense, the lawyer is in principle opposed to the Truth force. Like the proverbial lawyer, he cares little for Truth: when a lawyer was asked the question ‘How much is 8 deducted from 12?’ he replied with ‘How much would you like it to be?’ The lawyer strives to derive a suitable verdict for his client; he is the matchmaker between the crime and the evasion of punishment. The lawyer eases the value of actions – good and evil – from the actor, in so far as the evaluation is dependent on the judgement by the institution of law. The criminal, in being judged to be so and in being subjected to the punishment for his crimes, experiences the consecration of values to actions. Instead, the lawyer introduces a new kind of marriage, that between any action whatsoever and the evasion of judgement. The capable lawyer who circumvents the maximum punishment on behalf of his client simultaneously corrupts – in the sense of cracking the bones – the relationship between actions and value. The lawyer makes everything permissible, and the institutions of the law that are the conditions under which the lawyer is able to perform his ‘sorcery’ are a sign of the decadence of the Western civilization.1 One of the reasons Gandhi would often demand the maximum prescribed punishments for his own violations of the law was his belief that to disentangle the institutional conjugation of actions and value would be wrong.2 When in South Africa, he asked the judge to give

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him the maximum punishment; the judge replied that he did not deserve it since the law functions proportionately, and is guided by the notion of fairness. Mr. Jordan: You asked for the heaviest penalty which the law authorized? Mr. Gandhi: Yes, Sir. Mr. Jordan: I must say I do not feel inclined to accede to your request of passing the heaviest sentence which is six months hard labour with a fine of pounds 500. That appears to me to be totally out of proportion to the offence you have committed.3

As we found earlier, Gandhi, the lawyer, too thinks in terms of proportions and ratios. However, there is more than one law for M. K. Gandhi. The ambiguity regarding the law before which he stood in a courtroom created around his trial the aura of the question, Can M. K. Gandhi be tried? Fitness for trial before a court of law has two limits – the limit of sanity, understood as the capability to be one’s own judge during the course of the actions which are under trial; and the limit of the law itself, understood as the conditions under which its application would put the law court itself under question. The latter is not an uncommon problem at all, indeed, it is drawn up within the problematic of the juridical architecture. Is it legal to try the judge of the highest court of the land in the same way that a street vendor can be tried? The trial of a judge often requires special procedures such as impeachment. Can a mass murderer be tried by the law courts after he had become the head of state, even though the genocide4 and its terror which obtained for him the position of the head of the state are apparent to all? Then, the event of this ascension will be beyond the purview of the legal system under him. Now, Gandhi never refused to stand before the courts, although his legal person existed outside the courts, as we shall find. The well-known moment in 1922 shows that even the judge was aware of the other half of Gandhi’s person unavailable in the courthouse: The law is no respecter of persons. Nevertheless, it will be impossible to ignore the fact that you are in a different category from any person I have ever tried or am likely to have to try … you as a man of high ideals and of noble and of even saintly life.5

The most common instances of someone not being available for trial would be of the absconder or the insane. The former can be judged in absentia, and, although the latter is available in person before the judge his fitness for trial is absent and thus the legal participant would be an absconder. The absconding of the legal person, while being present in person before a judge, in the case of the insane is due to the subject being determined by a law indecipherable by the courts.

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The laws of madness are wholly other. The complexity of this problem, which is rather close to Gandhi and the specific form of power he wielded, resonates through the discourse of the psyche.

Laws and principalities Gandhi’s comportment before the colonial law courts and the customs of the subcontinent reveals that the actions of men are governed by distinct laws, marking out several principalities in man. Man is not an empire unto himself, but a continent moulded by the accretions and the desecrations of the tides of the many laws of nature, machines, and gods upon each other. Gandhi speaks of the many kinds of laws, of which the most important ones are man-made laws and the Laws of the Maker. We are told the Laws of the Maker are unbreakable even for Him: ‘God is Himself the Law and the Law-giver. He does not transgress the Law laid down by Himself nor does He allow others to transgress it.’6 On the other hand, man-made laws can have no hold over Gandhi, for he is a subject only to the Laws of the Maker.7 But not everyone can transgress the laws since ‘only he who has mastered the art of obedience to law knows the art of disobedience to law’.8 That is, obedience is the training in the domain of man-made laws without which there cannot be knowledge. The training in law and the corresponding training in the disobedience of the law, in other words passive resistance, often resemble one another. Rather, the passive resister trains under a different set of laws in order to break the laws of the land. The relation which exists in Gandhi’s corpus between the law, training, and disobedience has invoked comparisons with Kant. We will soon find that the semblance of the silhouettes of the two problematics is misleading: for Kant, training involved the clarification of man into the obscure animal, whereas for Gandhi training involves the reduction of man to zero – ‘If you would swim on the bosom of the ocean of Truth you must reduce yourself to zero.’9 Before we can come to the meaning of training it is imperative that we look at the other principalities of law, and those which resemble the law. We speak about ‘the rules of the game’ in the case of sporting events and almost everything else. The rule of the game of playing football is to take the ball to the other goal post. The rule of the game of making bread is to get the dough to expand. In these instances too the meanings of rules differ by degrees, if we follow Wittgenstein. For Wittgenstein, the determination of an activity as something other than a game itself requires the specification of a rule by which

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one may gain a formal difference within the activity. For example we can turn arithmetic into a game with the rule that whoever performs the correct calculation first is the winner; ‘I would almost like to say: It is true that in the game there isn’t any “true” and “false” but then in arithmetic there isn’t any “winning” and “losing”.’10 The rules of a game are not a constraint on the play of the game in the usual sense; a chess game can be initiated by moving a piece or saying ‘d4’. Rules of the same game can be changed without changing the game as such. The seventeen ‘Laws of the Game’ determine a game as football, although, these rules are not immutable; for example the changes in the offside rule in 2003 allowed the evolution of new strategies, such as ‘the offside trap’, without needing to change the name of the game. Now, if one were to introduce a new rule, that there be three goalposts instead of two, the game would need to incorporate changes to existing rules, and can take another name. Rules provide us with regularity and recursivity in our activities; a recipe is a set of rules for regularly producing a perfect dish. Rules and the objects corresponding to those rules are the regulatory conditions which determine the internal milieu of an activity; an activity spans in accordance with the rules. The law too implies regularity. Do we, hence, presume that rules and laws are one and the same? Gandhi does use these terms interchangeably. But there is a prevailing distinction to be found in his corpus between the Maker’s laws and those of men. For Gandhi, the rules of cuisine, of games, and of sleep fall clearly within the Laws of the Maker, in so far as they result in either increasing proximity to the Maker or in augmenting the distance from the Maker; that is these are activities which are torn between the laws of man and that of the Maker. The law is to be distinguished from rules, in order to understand Gandhi when he says that there are ‘axioms of non-violence’.11 In the case of football, the term ‘Laws of the Game’ is indeed a legal entity, in the sense of being tended to by a juridical authority in the form of FIFA. A violation of the laws in a football match will result in it being declared illegal. The laws of traffic determine that which constitutes an event as driving on the road; if a man were to drive above the speed limits, it would constitute an illegal act of driving. There are laws which determine armed combat as war, such as the Geneva Convention of 1949; if a country were to behead the killed enemy soldiers it would be in conflict with the article 3 of the Convention, and it would constitute a war crime.12 In these cases we find that a juridical authority determines the legality of an action on the basis of the laws prescribed by it. On the other hand, there is no legality in the kitchen when a man makes bread, except that of not poisoning himself and the others with his bread. The violation of a rule in the kitchen results in a mistake, giving

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one stone-hard bread; but, the violation of a law results in an illegal action, a crime. It is not uncommon for law to enter the kitchen. Indeed, Gandhi would legislate on the kitchen, especially concerning beef. In contemporary India the police can enter any kitchen and inspect it for the presence of beef, and extralegally it is punishable by death.13 The law which determines legality in these cases implies an institution which can ensure the maintenance of the law without exception; which can be the traffic court in the cities or the International Court in Hague. Legality corresponds to what we found earlier in Gandhi, namely that a petition unaided by force is worthless; a law unaided by force cannot determine an activity as illegal.14 There is yet another sense in which Gandhi uses the term ‘law’; law as that whose violation would be inconceivable, as in the case of geometric objects. The laws of geometry determine its objects to have necessary transformations according to each change introduced in it, Imagine a rectangular frame without a slate. The slightest rough handling of the frame would turn the right angles into acute and obtuse angles and if the frame were again rightly handled at one corner the other three would automatically turn into right angles.15

The legality of mathematical objects too is not without force; they are backed by the force of reason. In the example of the wooden rectangle frame above, if a man were to try and outrun the laws of reason he would have to destroy the object. The force of reason in mathematics is such that the laws governing the objects are inseparable from the objects. Wittgenstein posed the problematic thus: ‘The associative law is really part of the nature of the number’; and he conceived its sense in terms of iterability. That is, the proof for the associative law in arithmetic is the demonstration that the law will hold in all cases. The formal proof for the associative law is the display of the force of reason and the inescapability from it for any object in so far as it is arithmetical, thus ‘making it comprehensible’.16 Gandhi too used similar procedures in order to make the laws of his science comprehensible. When he said that ‘Ahimsa is a science’ the laws of this science were to be seen as having the same formality as mathematics. Even though it may seem confounding we will soon encounter the force which backs the petitions of the science of ahimsa. When a law holds in a domain it implies iterability and constitutes a regularity visible in the silhouette of that system. We find the regularity of the solar system in the movement of the sun and the seasonal variations. In economics, we are told that the cyclical variations of the economy are the evident working of the

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tranquil system; even when we find poverty and destruction in the silhouette we are told to look at ‘the whole picture’. The regularity of pop music lies in the ‘verse-chorus-verse-chorus’ song structure with refrains composed of a small number of notes. The well-ordered society of Nazi Germany showed its silhouette in the film Triumph of the Will. It is important to consider the notion of regularity, especially when we find that Gandhi was not satisfied with just any regularity whatsoever. Earlier, in our discussion on the faculties we encountered Jacques Monod’s thought experiment on life in terms of regularity. The regular is found in space as the symmetry obtained between the sides of a figure; bilateral symmetry in the outer appearance of humans does not extend to the anatomy, for the viscera is a mess compared to the even split between the left and the right when one looks in the mirror. Regularity in time is found in the recursion of actions constituting complex cycles and seasons; seasonality is not confined to the distance to the sun, but one can see seasonality in the economy as well, operating according to rhythms independent of the sun. These two kinds of regularities are intertwined in the definition given to symmetry by the mathematician Hermann Weyl; the symmetrical is found through an operation, such as rotating the object, which takes time, and at the end of which if the operated object remains the same it is symmetrical – ‘A figure has rotational symmetry around an axis l if it is carried into itself by all rotations around l.’17 Gandhi’s engagement with law and the training in law concerns the regularities of speed.18 Temporal regularity is found to be an ideal: waking up at a fixed hour, routines separated incisively by their functional order, the selection of activities according to the form of these routines. The regularity sought by the passive resister is analogous to the laws of nature. The maxim of the laws of nature is that they are inviolable – ‘Even a rebel has to submit to the laws of nature.’19 Gandhi’s reference was not the deterministic laws of classical mechanics, with which he was familiar. Instead, Gandhi adhered to hypophysics, where nature is moral and sin lurks in every action – ‘All illness is the result of the violation of the laws of nature, in other words, the penalty of sin against Him.’20 We will find it odd to speak of ‘sin’ when men slip and fall due to their inattention to the law of friction; however, the phrase ‘he slipped’ is also used in a moral context, as in ‘he slipped when he took the bribe’. It is the failure to account for resonance, and not the reverberation of sins, which brings down bridges. Though, it is not so for Gandhi. Gandhi found that value invests causally in nature and extracts its returns; that is as opposed to classical mechanics, where causality is grounded in the deterministic laws which describe the relationship between forces, for Gandhi value is the principal ground of causality. The

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mechanical laws of nature explain the regularities in nature, such as ‘It appears that most objects tend to fall down,’ and enable the discovery of newer ones, such as the law of gravitation; ‘The fall of an apple from its branch is said to have enabled Newton’s rich mind to discover the law of gravitation.’21 The observed regularities are in turn explained in terms of quantities, expressed as variables, and their strict interconnections in terms of systems. For example Newton’s second law of motion relies on three variables for its explanation – force, mass, acceleration – and it is expressed as follows: force is directly proportional to mass times acceleration. The determination of the regularities of nature as laws, in terms of the equations obtained between quantities, could either be understood as the grounding rules for the games of nature, or, it could also be understood as the most succinct expression of the observed regularities. In nature, as in mathematics, an elegant system is that which gathers complex interrelations in terms of minimal variables and equations – to be able to show the universe in the fewest grains of letters. The regularity of nature is revealed according to the elegant laws discovered by men. We can define the regularity of a thing as that which is expressible in terms which are less than the possible instances of that thing. For example the field laws of algebra express all the possible infinite algebraic expressions, such as the equality obtained between a added to b, and b added to a. In this way, we can see that the perfectly irregular is that which takes at least as many terms of its possible instances to be expressed; that is the equality between the terms of expression and the instances of the thing of which the expressions speak about is the law of the irregular. Jorg Luis Borges wrote about the law of the irregular through the analogy of a map as large as the territory in his one-paragraph long story ‘Of Exactitude in Science’.22 Gandhi, as we know, found proportional laws of his own, such as that between the number of lawyers and crime; crimes increase in proportion to the number of lawyers available. We find biologists speak about the regulatory role that genes play in organisms. The principal laws in biology are Mendelian – the laws of inheritance.23 Mendel’s laws are not what Gandhi has in mind when he speaks of the ‘regulation of one’s life in accordance with the laws of health’.24 Instead, Gandhi refers to the moral laws which entwine life and the corpus to one another. The ignorance of the laws of life and the fading imprint of their form in one’s life is evident in the irregularities in that life, and its untimely end – ‘It is not hard work that kills a man, but irregularity or lack of system.’25 The importance Gandhi placed on regularities and laws in his writings is continuous with his assertion that passive resistance is a science. This raises certain confusions regarding the use of the word ‘law’ in his system. It will be

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helpful to gather the discussion under a provisional outline of Gandhian law. We found that the regularities in nature were formalized in terms of quantities. These quantities were found to have a strict interrelation; a mechanical force increases as the acceleration increases. As Tagore pointed out to Gandhi, the moral is not a quantity in nature; a change in the moral does not proportionately exert a change in another quantity, such as an inversely proportional relation between truthfulness and electrostatic force. In biology, there exists no relation between the honesty of a species and its survival; yet, Gandhi would insist on such a law: ‘Though Darwin did not write as a moral philosopher, he has shown how close the connection is between morality and environment.’26 Following Alter, Gandhian Darwinism can be called bio-morality. However, the converse is more apt: it is a bio-morality. That is, bio-morality implies the derivation of moral laws according to the theoretical grounds of biology. Instead, Gandhi evidently derives biological laws from the grounds of moral laws, which he posits through a paraphrase of Darwin – ‘Darwin shows further that moral strength is even superior to physical strength; and we can see in various ways that a man who has moral qualities lasts longer than the one who is devoid of them.’27 Now, we find that there exists a relation between the moral and the regular: if we borrow Gandhi’s idiom, the moral and regular are one. We found that the formal determination of the regular is given in terms of the minima of terms required to express all the possibilities of a thing. Within Gandhi, there lies the equation between the Law, the Lawgiver and the Moral. That is, the regular is grounded in Law, and the good is that which is legitimate. Hence, we have Gandhi’s assertion ‘Discard irregularity as an enemy.’28 In terms of forces, the regular belongs to passive force and the irregular to active force. Gandhi’s conception of history in Hind Swaraj was that the regularity of passive force when broken by active force gives rise to history as an ephemeral event – ‘History is really a record of every interruption of the even working of the force of love or soul.’29 Gandhi’s contemporary enemy, the merchant of the irregular, was the colonial administration as the representative of the satanic Western civilization. But, he often reminds us of the many visitations by this enemy in other avatars in the past, and his obliteration according to the Laws of Nature – ‘The people of Sodom and Gomorrah were extremely immoral and they are now therefore completely extinct.’30 Then, to persist in being is to be regular. When the law abandons a thing it is given over to the irregular which is nothing other than corrosion, disintegration, and putrefaction  – the apocalypse which awaits the abandonment of law, according to the Maker’s Law.

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Yet, there is the law of the machines, which man makes. Gandhi conceived the Maker Himself as an engineer who built man as the maker of machines of his own. If we follow this rigorously, Gandhi’s Maker is a Machine which made a special machine-maker in man. This paradigm is both classical – the legislative authority of the divine being deposited in man such that he rules the earthly, can be found in all religions – and at the same time contemporary. The ten tablets given to a man by the God of the hill, so that he will code the lives of His men accordingly, and so that His Laws are recognizable in them, are not too different from the left hand side driving rules which distinguish the British commonwealth, or the table manners which distinguish the Americans – right hand for knife and fork – from the Europeans; the law gives form to action. As we found earlier, the faculties of man allow him to invent machines which are themselves organized according to the laws given to them by man. The laws of the machine are such that as their epoch advances, the machines grow progressively remote from the regular actions and events found in nature – there is no jet propulsion in nature nor an intercontinental ballistic missile; in Grundrisse Marx writes that ‘nature builds no machines, no locomotives, railways, electric telegraphs, self-acting mules etc.’31 For Marx, the role of man in the age of machines is that of a regulator in so far as man entertains the illusion of being the maker of the law of the machines, and hence ‘What holds for machinery holds likewise for the combination of human activities and the development of human intercourse.’32 The laws of machines determine the regularities of human life. In the early part of the last century radio attuned itself to the regularity of the worker-men by broadcasting the important items at the hours when they could listen in: the news in the early hours of morning and in the evening. The radio era was regulated by the prevalent laws of those machines. Today, news arrives at all times through several devices, and men in offices and crowded spaces participate in the action of the news uninterruptedly. The laws of the machines today are intolerant to interruptions, and the notion of work too is un-interruptible. As the laws of the machines take hold, we find the laws of other kinds too remote. The ‘remoteness of the villages’ is our experience of nature mediated by the machines. This does not imply that a machine in itself is an irregular thing. Machines are intolerant to irregularity. The simple mechanism of a bicycle is intolerant to loose chains, as is the diesel engine to temperature differences. Further, the increasing complexity of machines removes their laws from the understandings of most men. The epoch of the machines is at a remove from both men and nature, and it induces men to abandon their own natural laws.

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Gandhi’s theoretical and political confrontations with the machines reflect Marx,33 with whom (and Lenin) Gandhi was familiar. The Marxist problematic of the machinery in Grundrisse can be articulated in Gandhian terms: in mechanized production system – the system where the laws of the machine determine the raw material, the end product, and the kind of labour required – man is subjected to laws other than his own and his Maker’s; instead man is objectified by the production system, or he is a ‘substratum’ of the machine, and his movements are determined according to the laws of the machine.34 Further, those men who maintain the machines by cleaning and repairing them are not directly working at making the end product – the law of a product – but they work according to the laws of the peripheries of the machines. In an automobile factory most men, apart from those who are attuned to the technological production function, are at the periphery of the laws of production. In this sense, men spend more of their time outside the essential zones of production. Gandhi was not fond of the term ‘alienation’, which would indicate a difference within man, namely the difference between the potential of mankind as the creator of his own laws and men subjected to the laws of other men. Such a distinction would imply that passive force was summoned for the sole purpose of denying the legislative rights of some men: the holy force as an instrument – in point, the colonial powers – in favour of the rights of men who were its subjects. Instead, while referring to this state of affairs of men obedient to the peripheral laws of the machines, Gandhi would observe that ‘man has grown further away from his Maker’; that is, man does not find himself before other alien men, but the Maker grows into an alien in proportion to the growing empire of the machines. In each consideration of the sense of the Law – as the Law, as the Lawmaker, as Nature’s law, and as the maker of man who makes his own laws – lurks the Maker, directing the movements of its meaning. We also found that Gandhi’s hypophysical reference to the laws of nature has overtones inaudible in the discourse of physics. The problematic of the Law extends in another direction – the privation of the force which is law in man. That is, man has the faculties to detect the laws of nature, and also to imitate and invent laws of his own. Yet, law is also a force. Gandhi directs us to the examples of geometry and arithmetic to demonstrate this inviolable force of the law; that is the force of being a twodimensional figure which is made up of points which are equidistant from the centre makes the circle the two-dimensional figure which encompasses maximum area. In the physical domain, the force of the gravity and the law of gravity are also one and the same – ‘The central experience of life will for ever remain the relationship which man has to God and it will never be superseded or

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replaced by anything else, just as human bodies will never free themselves from the law of gravitation.’35 That is, the Maker is the Law which forces men to submit to gravitation. Rather, there is yet another equation in Gandhi’s corpus: law is force, ‘Force or Law.’36 For man, the knowledge of the Law is participation in the Force. However, man – ‘imperfect beings that we are’37 – is never able to gain complete knowledge of the Law that the Maker is. The faculties which the Maker gave him do not extend his corpus over nature which the Maker Himself is. It makes man deficient in the force that is law. This privation is at the origin of sin and error, and of impossibility of finding a distinction between the two – ‘The ignorance of Nature’s Law will be accepted as no excuse when men and women of India appear before the Throne of Judgment.’38 There is another direction in which man is equally ignorant, the direction of man-made laws. Man makes laws, legislates over machines, and these laws and machines gather into a world of their own, detaching faster from the world of the Maker. The domain of man-made laws, when they are unto themselves, is referred to as civilization, rather, the kingdom of speed; the autonomy of the kingdom of speed subjects man to enslavement, of which colonialism is only a kind. The same problematic – of the extension of privation extending into the making of man and into the man-made – has an optimistic discourse in the phantasy of technological thinking. The computational theorist Irvin J. Good looked forward to a moment in the future when man would be able to legislate for the last time, such that a jurist machine could be made. Man would one day make himself a counter-Maker, and He would relieve man of the burdens set on his shoulders by the old Maker: ‘The first ultraintelligent machine is the last invention man need ever make … an ultraintelligent machine could design even better machines; there would then unquestionably be an “intelligence explosion”.’39 The existence of two confounding Makers ahead and behind renders man’s relationship to the law a wager with the apocalyptic, and hence Gandhi writes, ‘We hold that the non-beginning of a thing is supreme wisdom.’40 Non-beginning too is a relation to the law, such that man is made non-conductive of force. Gandhi’s passive resister, who reads the auguries of the Maker in nature to detect the arrival of the ‘satanic age’ or the apocalyptic, is congruent with the figure of the slave in Alexandre Kojè ve’s interpretation of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit.41 In Gandhian terms, Kojè ve sought the moment at which history, understood as the quest for the Law – or as he prefers, Wisdom – will reveal the ratio between the Origin of man and his End according to the Law of the Origin; that is the wise man will have come to be the conduit between the Origin and the End and the arrival of the wise man, the end of the quest for the Law, will also

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be the end of history – ‘Wisdom can be realised, according to Hegel, only at the end of History.’42 In this embodied circulation he ‘realises the circularity that he reveals, as contemplative Wise Man’.43 As we have seen, for Gandhi, there is no special man, even of the great soul. Instead, all men ought to be passive resisters – those who conduct the passive force, or those men who regulate their conduct adhering to the laws of nature. For Kojè ve, man is split into two figures – of the Master and the Slave – and it is the slave who, as the one who is most proximate to nature through his labour, comes to know the laws of nature, ‘thereby raising himself to thought, to science, to technique’.44 Whereas the master is that figure of the man who merely receives the end product brought to him by the slave; the enjoyment of the master is in essence the pleasure in the ignorance of the laws. The master is innocent of the sins of labour, which is fraught, as we found, with the risks of incomplete knowledge. For Gandhi, this figure of the master could be the consumer of any modern market, and for Irwin J. Good it can be all men once the machine which would build ultraintelligent machines will have been created. The symmetry between these three conceptions needs to be recapitulated. Knowing the Maker’s Laws will enable men to direct their conduct according to His intentions. But, it can also enable men to create new laws to override the laws of the Maker; after all man is also the maker of machines. The new laws enacted by man risk obtaining an autonomy confounding to man. With Kojè ve and Irwin J. Good we find that the setting free of legislation and creation to something else – the Slave for Kojè ve and the ultraintelligent machine for Good – is the destiny of man, whereas, for Gandhi, the setting free of the legislative domain will not assure enjoyment and innocence. Instead, it will be the beginning of the apocalyptic.

The scientific laws of the Maker When we hear ‘the laws of nature’ from Gandhi’s corpus we are to understand that the law refers not to what can be called a purely material principality but to nature as value. The purely material principality is a de-naturing; the making of a domain un-nurtured by the Maker, and hence bound for the apocalyptic. The difference between the enquiries into the laws of nature undertaken by the Occident and the Orient lie in the principalities of the laws which are constituted by these enquiries and also the conditions of objectivity of these enquiries. The two principalities are also distinguished in terms of their spans, that is the occident ‘whirls faster and faster’ like a moth blinded by the light of its death and

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is still drawn towards the taste of the limit of its own speed, whereas the orient spans out in accordance with the ascetic laws of the famished peasant, and like a flightless bird it endures in the lowest of its own perch. The pandemonium that is going on in Europe shows that modern civilization represents forces of evil and darkness, whereas the ancient, i.e., Indian, civilization represents in its essence the divine force. Modern civilization is chiefly materialistic, as ours is chiefly spiritual. Modern civilization occupies self in the investigation of the laws of matter, and employs human ingenuity in inventing or discovering means of production and weapons of destruction; ours is chiefly occupied in exploring spiritual laws.45

Gandhi’s compass, astrolabe, and the sextant are obedient to the spiritual or hypophysical laws, which are opposed to the purely physical. Unaware of the hypophysical laws man ‘is like a rudderless ship which is at the mercy of the gale and is broken to pieces on the rocks’.46 The laws of matter, for Gandhi, pertain to the laws of motion, of production, of reproduction, of the constitution of a country, and the laws of war. The separation of the domains of law itself is occidental for him. The occident is the progressive un-binding or a-bandhana of man from the Laws of the Maker; from the One Law that the Maker is, the occidental man cleaved discrete laws – of matter, of life, of society, of machine, of production – and in the very process instituted a false domain for the Law itself in morality: after all ‘God is ethics and morality,’47 and in His being the Law there is nothing in this world which is not safe from the partition of the Good. The need for the creation of a separate science of values is the augury which Gandhi found in the entrails of the occident, and in it he read imminence of the end in progress. Against the decadence of the occident, understood here as the separation of nature into distinct principalities of law, Gandhi holds up the oriental village where nothing spans out further from the fields and the pens. All the domains of the law in the occident tend to span away from one another. They lift off together into a flight which delivers them over to the obscure; their own distinct obscure principalities afford no view of their departed origin. For Gandhi, what we would observe as the experience of the potentiality of the sciences – the fact that there is no unifying theory of the sciences, or in other words, a univocal science of nature – will have been the certain portent of their failure to be worthy of the Maker. Gandhi’s statements regarding the laws of nature – his denial of their truthfulness and his assertion of the presence of natural laws in all domains, including the choreographed

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washing of penises48 – derive from a certain question regarding man: Why has the Maker made in man another lawmaker? It is with a view to this question that Gandhi would often invoke the laws of geometry and of mechanics. A triangle is the same as the law of the triangle; that is the regularity of the triangle is given by the rule of its construction. In the same way the regularity of the planets in their orbits are given by the laws of planetary motion. One may err in the discovery of the laws of nature, yet our errors do not effect a change in nature, and man eventually arrives at the laws which correspond best with the observed regularities. Gandhi recalls the epochal contribution of Galileo: We can therefore say that with the gaining of more knowledge he finds the previous assumption wrong. For instance, the rotation of the earth is a law of nature. We are convinced of its correctness today. Yet before Galileo, astronomers believed differently.49

However, in the domain of man-made laws there are always several regularities possible. As we found in the previous chapter, the span given to man is infinite and the task given to him by the Maker is to prune infinity in accordance with the form of the Maker. Man appears to be able to obtain the same end using diverse means and he can also obtain many ends through the same means; the faculties allow man to open nature into that which it is not, such that, in the contrast, he may glimpse into the Maker’s Law. However, man’s faculties are not sufficient to grasp the Law which Nature is. The Law of Nature and the Maker are one, in the same way that a triangle and the law of its construction are, and man’s body is still a moment in the body of Nature. Here lies the error of human faculties to assume the existence of a certain promiscuity between means and ends. Indeed, Gandhi would assert that each action, without exception, is continuous with its own end. It is impossible for the lesser souls of north Indian villages to know that their social practices – such as their practice of untouchability – are not discontinuous with nature: the greater Law which holds each means to its apportioned end delivers the calamities of nature. One of the most succinct formulations of the Law is that means and ends are convertible; indeed, their separation in thought and deed developed into epochs of their own is civilization. There is no wall of separation between means and end. Indeed the Creator has given us control (and that too very limited) over means, none over the end. Realisation of the goal is in exact proportion to that of the means. This is a proposition that admits of no exception.50

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Hence, even in the domain of man’s activities, which misleadingly shows the possibility of infinite laws to determine them, the one Law is at work. The apparent separation between the laws of nature and the laws of men would have meant that the Maker delivered two sets of laws: the laws of nature which determined all things except for man, and the laws of man which could determine nature as if it were his means. The one law which makes a bridge fall due to the immorality of the men who built it must be revealed to the lesser men by the greater souls in pointing to the strictest continuity between the calamitous ends which befall men and their immoral deeds.

Breaking the law We know that even the rebel must let the law of gravitation draw him towards the centre of the earth: that is the laws of nature and mathematics do not entertain the profligate, the rebellious, the perverts, and the resisters. They are systems where a mutiny is without sense, in the same way that the flight of a bird in vacuum was nonsensical for Kant.51 Yet, there is the divine lawbreaker in the passive resister. The laws broken by the passive resister are not natural in a certain sense. The laws of nature are perfectly obeyed by ‘the brutes’ since their ignorance of the laws, owing to the privation of the faculty of speed, renders them incapable of grasping the modal variations of which the laws of nature are capable. On the other hand, man, in being the animal which can know the speeds of nature, was so made in order that he might know the Law that the Maker is. As man sings the hymns of the Maker he pronounces His Law, and the pronouncement of Law holds the possibility of taking the Law in vain. The lawmaker in man is simultaneously the lawbreaker. In another sense, the Maker made man in order to institute a break in the Law of Nature, which remained tone deaf to the harmonies of law and mute before the Maker. The passive resister radios into the harmonies of the laws of nature and he attempts to synchronize the human disarray – our arts, profligacy, tastes, loves, quests – into a hymn for the Maker. The hymn to the Maker is perfect when it returns to him the very tones of the Law which he is; the passive resister toils to obtain for mankind the perfect feedback loop between the Law and the span of man – the looping hum in a silent night is the perfect hymn. A ritualistic presentation of the hum to the Maker is the ‘aum’ chant invented in the subcontinent. The resonance of this ‘aum’ hum is audible in the parks and fitness studios around the world today, in the name of a modern subcontinental invention: yoga.

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However, man rarely finds himself out of a certain restlessness, whereof come discontent and political unrest. The restlessness is essentially a precarious relation to the Law; the Maker is himself characterized by the restlessness of relentless action which Nature is, and the resonance between the Maker and man is the power invested in him to deliver the perfect hum – ‘This restlessness constitutes true rest.’52 The unrest is also constituted by the distance man has with respect to the Law: after all he is something still determined according to the Law, as a special case, in the same way the circle is a special case of polygons. Hence, man resorts to discovering the other special cases in the laws of nature; as we found in our discussion of faculties, when man found claws in nature, he went on to make flying claws. Restless as he is, bound for the knowledge of the Law, the earth appears before man with frayed ends, reticulating surfaces, erupting flows, and a voluptuous core – man inhabits a planet of overrides. He extracts the fuel for his flights from the voluptuous core and introduces a dance unknown to the Maker. Man’s laws are new regularities which appear to him to have no binding force other than active force. When parents and teachers introduce to children the regularity of everyday life – the harmony of all men waking up around the same time, leaving their homes for work, returning for rest – they imitate the form of the whole of society. Children are educated primarily into the social laws which regulate the hours. The traffic laws regulate the flow of the hours of men and the laws of health regulate the hours of sleep. When these laws are broken society calls it an ailment: Insomnia disrupts the laws of health and mania disrupts the laws of traffic. A society is a collection of the regularities given by little laws – of the school, the traffic, the prisons, the factories, the stables, the science labs – and the little laws are themselves gathered into a unity by the Law of laws. We shall call the little laws as the component laws and the Law of the component laws as the comprehending laws. We must also care to note that the relation between the component laws and the comprehending laws is not analogous to that which exists between the universal and the particular. A certain component law – such as the law of thermodynamics which makes an engine – is distinct from the comprehending law which organizes it with other components – such as the law of automobiles. The comprehending laws of a society may be understood differently, depending on the discourse in which one finds himself – philosophy would find them in the distribution of Being (Sense, Concept, Idea), Marxism in the fixed capital (a discourse that is singular with several points of entry), theology in the temperament of its gods. In each understandings of the Law of the little laws, men chance upon ailments: in philosophy ‘the forgetting of Being’, in

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Marxism ‘alienation’, in theology ‘sin’. The ailment under a certain determination of the Law would be the salubriousness of another. These ailments are not passive resistance. Unlike the lawbreaker Marquis de Sade, Gandhi sought the divine regularities which would carve into the man-made laws the principality of the Maker. When a man breaks a man-made law – driving faster than the speed limit – he might be doing it for the pleasure of experiencing indirectly the impossible joy of breaking the laws of nature. A man may also break a law in order to extend the threshold of his own active force, which is limited by the active force that binds the said law. Force does not produce necessity, it makes a certain regularity compelling, while giving way to the realization that without this force there could have been other regularities. The necessity induced by force tells men ‘this is the best way after all’, since the threshold of the active forces of men are bound by the punishment which awaits them at the limits of the law. For Gandhi, no law made by man is legitimate unless it is grounded in the Maker’s Law; that is the Law is ultimately the object of theology. So far, we have seen that the Law as the regulation of all things is theological, including the laws of the state. It is the feature of most societies to legislate and judge on theological grounds. However, theological grounds and the societies which are founded according to those theological laws are distinct – the old laws of the tablets delivered to one man in secrecy and the new laws of the mount delivered to men over wine and bread make two distinct regularities. The lawbreaker must be in possession of a law better than the one he attempts to break. The passive resister of Gandhi must be trained in the obedience of the theological laws and his life must reflect the regularity of the Maker. Gandhi wrote regularly about the laws which ought to regulate his passive resisters, he wrote regularly to his passive resisters, and he often urged them to ‘write regularly to me’. The training of men into the servants of the Maker, resonant with the regularities of the Law, requires that it is ‘the religious and ethical criteria that determine the way man thinks and acts’.53 The passive resister is a special machine – what man ought to be – according to the Laws of the machine that the Maker himself is. Each and every action of the passive resister is performed in obedience to the Law, even his acts of boycott – ‘We shall deem it a religious duty to use only that cloth which is entirely produced in the country and refrain from using another.’54 That is, the passive resister takes care to not disobey the component law of religion in the name of another little law; when a man, enraged by ‘capitalist mode of production’, arsons a factory in order to return the location to its previous state of a henhouse he mistakenly equates one component law with another – the law of the henhouse which was comprehended by the

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non-existent village system with that of the factory, which is comprehended by the ‘capitalist mode of production’. When Gandhi emphasized that the change for the good shall not be forced, nor its pace advanced through imposition, he had in mind the conflict between the component laws of one kind of comprehending law and the component laws of another. Instead, to bring about slowness is to find a comprehending law which will pacify unwanted component laws into mere scribbles and, eventually, into ruins. A component law, such as ‘lift up the receiver to answer the phone’ was displaced by the mobile telephones; the displacement, as we can see, took place at the level of the comprehending laws – the wired communication system with amplification replaced by the wireless system with relays. Then, the ideal lawbreaker is also the bringer of a new comprehending law – ‘A new commandment I give unto you.’55 Gandhi knew that this was easier said than done. First, the substitution of a component law for another, without interrupting the regularity of the comprehending law, would bring a distinction only in the silhouette of the system, but leave the comprehending law unchanged in reality – when the leadership of the Congress Party was given the component law, ‘Thou shalt spin and contribute to the Khadi project,’ they turned up with the yarn spun by their ‘servants’, which is the same case as the oxymoronic ‘corporate charity’. Secondly, the faculties given to man make it possible for him to uncover in the ruins of those who took flight away from the maker and in the component laws around them the seeds of the new laws. Man is the animal which makes means out of ends and vice versa, without ever being whispered to by the Maker of their true provenance; and hence, ‘In the end it will be as He wishes.’56 The two senses of the end – teleological and eschatological – are not distinguished in hypophysics, and it would be appropriate to name the laws of ends in Gandhi as calypsological. Calypsology could be the science of the concealment of a thing such that it is not open for other contenders; such a discipline would be confined to the immurement of its object away even from itself – Calypso herself immured Odysseus in her island to introduce exogenous ends to the wandering warrior being so that he became an island-being rather than a sailing-being. Calypsology is the conversion of a being into another through the exchange of one comprehending law for another such that the ends of that being are enclosed in the means. The ends of an immured being would be the exogenous spatio-temporal regularities which replace the modalities of its iterability and hence the aleatory forms of its being; the immured Bathory could only count the hours and pace about her space without encountering the lives in which she found a value to be extracted through their murders. Calypsology is a

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programme governed by the passive forces, or – which comes to the same thing – the theological project to let the Maker’s Law comprehend all. The apocalyptic imagination too is a determination of the sense of the end; it is the understanding of the end as the exhaustion of the iterations of events as determined by the law, and the end arrives as the conduit towards the comprehending law of all events, including that of the end. Apocalypse is not the programme of a religious life; when it appears to be the determining programme of a theological intervention in the life of a people, we find the pathology to be indistinct from genocides and mass murders – the apocalyptic cults of mass murderers of the later part of the last century should be sufficient reminder of what happens when the sense of the bounds of the world slips into the active determination of its end. The calypsological understanding of ends is held in the proposition ‘Means and ends are convertible terms in my philosophy of life.’57 The convertibility of means and ends, when understood as the necessary condition of the spatial form, refers to the obverse and the converse of the same mural, or ‘faces of the same coin’.58 The convertibility, the advancing relation to Maker as effected by the project of the passive resister, is to be conceived as the reciprocal immurement of means and ends – ‘There is no wall of separation between means and ends.’59

Calypsology of the great soul Means and ends are not the same as cause and effect for Gandhi. Causality as a concept would be the strict relation between two things such that without there being one the other is not obtained. Causality does not involve logical implication but rather the laws of matter which would specify the events in nature according to the strictness of the objectivity afforded by the very laws, and hence there will always be other laws to be found to gain an understanding of succession in nature; Newton assumed the relation between mass and gravitation, and proposed a law for their relation without offering a theory for the very relationship.60 However, means and ends implies that there are several ways to obtain to a thing. The faculties as we found give to us nature itself as means; for example in homology we find the possibility of more than one objectivity in the same object such that it is convertible through the exchange of one law for another, and in analogy the same functional law converts the objects which are otherwise distinct. In the experience of everyday life, the permissiveness afforded by the means–ends relationship is the span of man that lets him feel alight, with its pains and pleasures: the substitution of the ears of a

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good friend for the analyst, the persiflage in the evenings, the exchange of the organs, castling in a chess game, substitution in a football game, and the peculiar freedom given by the market through product differentiations. Exchange of a means for another, one end for another, end for a means, and means for an end are the freedoms of human principality, which are schematized in politics. Calypsology is the culling of the distributions possible within the means–ends relations to obtain an in-exchangeable principality where ends and means in their reciprocal immurement leave no room for politics. If a man pretends to the holy ends when the means are easy, he is not a resident of the reciprocal immurement – ‘Your faith is a whited sepulchre if it cannot stand against the calumny of the world.’61 Gandhi’s politics would be the island of Calypso for all men – immured by the ocean of the Maker’s love, man would be content to exchange the hum of the Maker, for which there is no other. The passive resister trains to be the very reciprocal immurement, of means– ends, so that he is comprehended by the Maker’s law, and his passion lets him sense the spindles of His reach in proportion to the conversion that he obtains between means and ends. The regulation of mankind itself in accordance with the Maker’s Law begins with the passive resister, and in his epoch the peregrinations of men will retain them in the same place since all places and all journeys will be reigns of the slow: even respiration would be pilgrimage. Gandhi’s instruction to the passive resister reveals that this moment, if it becomes the eternity of mankind, will annul the need for any lawmaking on man’s part – ‘Indeed, if all of us regulate our lives by this eternal law of satya and ahimsa, there will be no occasion for civil or other resistance.’62 That is when the earth is overwhelmed by passive resisters the Kingdom of the Slow will have arrived. The reign of the slow will be built on the ruins of the span of ‘the coiling serpent’ of politics in such a way that politics will be a darkened sepulchre, entombing the entirety of the fiery spans of man’s quests for the sense of Being. We found that this regulation is grounded in the axiom of the convertibility of means and ends, and following from it the action of the passive resister is essentially conversion. He is the converter of mankind from the tyranny of speed, which augments the distance between means and ends, into the resident lover of Calypso. The conversion of mankind is not achieved by inflicting suffering upon other, but upon oneself – ‘Suffering is the law of human beings; war is the law of the jungle. But suffering is infinitely more powerful than the law of the jungle for converting the opponent and opening his ears, which are otherwise shut, to the voice of reason.’63 The distinction between calypsology and jurisprudence, the science of man-made laws, is that of the forces which

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hold the laws in their place: passive force in the former case, and active force for the latter. Man-made laws are questioned by Gandhi according to the convertibility of means and ends. However, what ails man-made laws? The laws of mechanical forces and those forces are one, as we found; there is no need to enforce the laws of mechanics. Man-made laws do not coincide with the forces which they set out to regulate – these laws and the forces are not one. The force of a gun does not coincide with the legal restrictions on men carrying the gun around and also committing mass murders with it. Instead, the force of the gun is given regularity – such as one shall not fire the gun unless it involves self-defence and that one shall not carry it openly in order to intimidate. This requires a force external to that of the laws and the force of the guns: a greater number of guns in this case. Earlier we learnt that a petition without the accompaniment of force is without effectivity, and for Gandhi, the ideal petition would be the one backed by passive force. Gandhi knew that laws too require force in order to regulate – ‘Legislation implies coercion.’64 If we take the sense of man-made laws outside of Gandhi we will see that a law too is a petition. The law is a petition we make to each other that there be a certain regularity. The law upon which all men agree is also a promise we make to one another. The breaking of a law in this sense is the breaking of a word; the law is as fragile as a word, which the people of the subcontinent knew for a fact from before Gandhi’s arrival into the scene. When we look at the traffic lights they are pleading to us and at the same time reminding us of the promise we made; we promise each other that in order for there to be crossroads and fast cars one must stop at the red light and proceed in the safe direction of the flows opened and closed by the traffic lights like a valve. These valves of the law operate in the flow of children to schools which promise equal education, the closing and the opening of offices which ensure the flow of people between their public and private offices, the invisible valves of the penitentiary system which open and close the prison gate, and the public toilets to ensure that there is no open defecation or manual scavenging. These laws made of the words given by men to one another are fragile from the very beginning of the giving of the word – the giving of words assumes the power in each of the men to break their word, for the word and the force that binds it are not one. We found earlier that Gandhi himself was aware of the fragility of words, which he expressed in different ways, ‘I do try to speak and write a language from which only one meaning can be drawn. But language is an imperfect instrument.’65 From Gandhi’s point of view, the profession of the lawyer finds in the imperfection of language and the fragility of the word the means to conjure consecrations between action and punishment

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which are foreign to the intention of the lawmaker. In other words, the fragility of the word is also the freedom of man’s being under the law, in so far as there is a lawyer to give the letters of the law all their possible spans. Gandhi sets the lawyer, who is the span of man-made laws, against the passive resister, who then is the breaker of the wings of words. The passive resister is not the common criminal who would break a law in order to achieve an end; instead while breaking a law he brings in the reign of another comprehending law. The common criminal obeys the law because he is afraid of the force which accompanies it – the relationship between criminal acts and punishment established by the juridical system, and also the span of the lawyer. The common criminal who steals a loaf of bread to feed his hungry children would not be a passive resister for Gandhi. Gandhi distinguished ‘criminal disobedience’ from the actions of the passive resister on the basis of the dispositions of the two actors – the criminal is afraid of the force accompanying the law, and the passive resister, whose very being is the temple of suffering, is unafraid of the consequences of his disobedience: The criminal, i.e., the ordinary law-breaker, breaks the law surreptitiously and tries to avoid the penalty; not so the civil resister. He ever obeys the laws of the state to which he belongs, not out of fear of the sanctions, but because he considers them to be good for the welfare of society. But there come occasions, generally rare, when he considers certain laws to be so unjust as to render obedience to them a dishonour; he then openly and civilly breaks them and quietly suffers the penalty for their breach.66

Then, more than the force of arms of the criminal or the ordinary lawbreaker, the law must fear the passive resister. The common criminal will violate laws only in proportion to the active forces in his possession to counter the force of the legal system, which includes bribes and the lawyer’s fees; the criminal negotiates man-made laws from its own grounds. On the other hand, the passive resister is unafraid of every force and punishment which the law has to offer. Gandhi’s schema of the passive resister is the exposure of the criticality of man-made laws; the passive resister’s challenge renders the domain of man’s laws bereft of the force of their enforcement, which relied on the axiom that men prefer to reduce their own and others’ suffering – ‘There is no time-limit for Satyagrahi nor is there a limit to his capacity for suffering.’67 The limitation of time in man’s life implies the apportionment of time – for work, children, friends, learning – and the implicit promise of a project of the future which is of a longer time than that of individual men. We have already learnt that the passive resister is not a

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participant of the ongoing struggles of ordinary men and common criminals, to create a wider span, or for a few more grains for a rainy day; the passive resister is not a participant in the spans of men, but a resident. As the advocate of the Laws of the Maker, the passive resister sets up a battle between two distinct courtrooms, rather than the usual drama between the defendant and prosecutor. The Maker is the law that comprehends all other laws, including the laws of the end of things. Man lives under the illusion of the isolation of laws. Even the epochs of man are moments scribbled under the laws of the Maker.68 Man-made laws are available on the assertion that ‘obey the law and you shall not be punished’. The Maker too appears to punish mankind for its transgressions through the calamities of nature, although, in reality these are the natural movements in accordance with His Law. The Maker’s Law is available to man under a proportional articulation – ‘Realisation of the goal is in exact proportion to that of the means.’69 Truth is the theological principle for Gandhi which made him announce that Truth is God. We found earlier that each epoch has its own gods; the gods of his day were electricity and the industrial machines. The little gods of his age named the component laws, whose regulation was known intimately by men. In our time the component laws of communication systems – the smart devices and their networks – bind us and regulate us most intimately, yet we remain distant from the comprehending laws of our age. Gandhi would call the comprehending laws of our age, which would be continuous with his own since he anticipated the arrival of the news with the pressing of a button, Satanic. Satan would name the comprehending laws of all those spans which sped away from nature, and the Maker would be the name of the ever remaining reign of the comprehending laws of nature, His eastern Kingdom in the villages of the subcontinent. Satanic is also called Kali-yuga (the age of ends), and also the false age, but what remains constant is that the epochs of the comprehending laws of speed meet their apocalypse. Then, we have two principal designations for the two kinds of comprehending laws – the Maker and Satan. We shall call the latter the epoch of the false, since the former is distinguished by truth. This leads to the question of ‘false laws’ of man. That is, how do we make sense of laws in terms of true and false? We can speak about a law as something ineffective, unjust, inconsistent, irrelevant, and confusing. However, we do not discuss laws in terms of being too fragrant, too bland, too gaudy, unless we are speaking about the laws of perfuming, culinary laws, and of draping respectively. The legal system is not concerned with the truth of a law, but rather, with the truth of a case which has fallen under that law. But we found earlier that Gandhi opposed man-made

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laws from the point of view of the comprehending laws of the Maker. He stood and spoke equivocally before all the courtrooms he visited throughout his life. This equivocation does not constitute the crime of falsity in his system. After all, he does not wish to confront the enemy – the False men – with the Truth of his own, which could result at worse in an impasse, or at best total annihilation of the passive resisters. Instead, he chose to convert all men and all laws, into that grounding law which is expressed as ‘Means and ends are convertible’ or as ‘Truth and non-violence are convertible.’ His hypophysics envisions the conversion of all men into an inconvertible unity, a singular mass emitting the divine ‘hum’, living their peaceful lives as if they were the ‘non-beginning of all things’, the beings of the supreme wisdom. The sense of the difference between the two spans of men – the Truthful and the False – are held in the pluri-vocal use of the word ‘Truth’. In order to understand the supreme law expressed in a proportional articulation – that is in proportion to the means there will be ends – which ultimately concerns the relation between Truth as end and non-violence as means, we need to attend to Gandhi’s Truth.

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Very often silence is the most effective communication because silence is filled with truth. M. K. Gandhi (CWMG 85, p. 220) It is regularly assumed that Truth is the ground of Gandhi’s system. To begin with, ‘truth’ is the most preferred notion for vague theologies, autocratic rulers, and the wet nurses of power. The theologies which rely on ‘truth’ render it as the translation of a threshold the worshipper shall not cross; in Christianity this is also the sense of the cross. The autocratic rulers who are threatened by the confusing and the obscure find relief in the continuous confession of the people – today it is defined by the continuity between public life, private life, secret life, and surveillance. The primacy of truth arises from certain episodes in Gandhi’s writings, including the title of his autobiography, My Experiments with Truth. His insistence on speaking the truth at all times, which involved giving a true name to his passive resister as ‘Satyagrahi’, too serves this assumption. Satyagrahi meant for him the man whose being clenches around truth, following from the equality of the Law and the Nature which it governs, the being who clenches around and is retentive of truth, is the very immurement of truth. Then, the calypsologist is the passive resister. Although, we should remember that Truth is only one side of the coin of a proportional articulation. If one were to think of the title of the autobiography under the concept of ‘telling the truth’, it would be ‘my experiments with telling the truth’; it would involve telling ‘some truth’, ‘all truth’, and ‘no truth’ in accordance with the parameters for telling the truth. Gandhi certainly intended such a lesson in truth telling through the moments of his life recounted in parable form in the autobiography. The thesis concerning truth telling is that it involves the courage to suffer the consequences of the telling, which we found to be held in the law which binds actions to judgements. The committed action may not be the cause of

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suffering, but telling the truth about that action ensures that it is a means which is proportional to the suffering thereon. For example when a young Gandhi was prohibited by the religion of his parents to eat beef, he experimented with it. The experiment with badly cooked beef could have been the cause of his suffering indigestion, which did not befall the young Mahatma; Gandhi would often urge men to suffer these instances of indigestion, so that the experience would hold them back from the temptations of the palate. In this instance of beef eating, by reporting to the moral authorities the transgression which took place in secrecy, Gandhi converted the series of actions into a truthful means, for which there is an adequate suffering. The truth about beef eating made his parents suffer intensely, and their chastisement and suffering were in turn suffered by the young great soul. That is, the evidence of telling the truth is suffering – ‘Socrates would not refrain from preaching what he knew to be the truth to the Athenian youth, and bravely suffered the punishment of death. He was, in this case, a satyagrahi.’1 There is a proportional relation between truth and suffering – as suffering decreases truth decreases. The increase of suffering in the life of a man itself is the evidence of his yielding to the embrace of truth. Unlike Kierkegaard’s ‘knight of faith’, who appears to be nothing special in his bourgeois attires, Gandhi’s passive resister is a battlefield, always arriving at the dusk of the day’s work: Gandhi himself was this battlefield with his toothless grin and gasping speech, unyielding bowels and blown appendix. A life leathered by the suffering of truth alone can be the membrane of a drum, waiting to be beaten by the Maker to deliver the rhythm for mankind to march on.2 In the history of philosophy, until Kant’s critical philosophy of morality, the relation between concept and object, or sense and the sensed, and the consistency of the propositions in their interrelation were the locations of truth, where Truth found its span; the closer the concept was to its object the greater was the span of truth. Each concept needs to find its span within specific articulations; the concept of time finds its span in distinct systems, such as the absolute time in Newtonian mechanics and relative time in relativity theory. Despite the elusiveness of the concept of the will – as explored to its limits by Nietzsche, who certainly did not entertain a doctrine of the Will – will found a new home to rule when it entered into a strict relation with Truth in M. K. Gandhi, and later in Alain Badiou. The adherent of truth, the passive resister, is a complex notion. He is an adhesive that produces the stuck-together-being of truth, and not its discoverer, nor its inventor. He is also a being who’s address is truth, the being living off truth. The concept of fidelity in Badiou is not distinct in any significant way (signification is not merely about the language in which

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a thought is deployed, nor its terminological recipe) from Gandhi’s theory of adherence. In Badiou’s words, ‘The subjective process of a truth is one and the same thing as the love of that truth.’3 Gandhi and Badiou both share a thesis of will and truth – truth and will are the obverse and reverse of being-true-to. Being-true-to should be understood as the fidelity in high-fidelity sound – the reproduced sound which is truest to the recorded sound. We are also told that Truth is not an autonomous region, a kingdom which distends without ever coming in contact with another. Truth is in a reciprocal immurement with illimitable denomination, ‘a coin, on whose face you read love and on the reverse you read truth’ and which is ‘current everywhere and has indefinable value’.4 Love, also understood as non-violence, is the face behind Truth. Non-violence is love, in so far as it refuses to distinguish between those who respond to it with hatred and those who respond with love. Non-violence is the love which is indifferent to reciprocity.5 The law of reciprocity in love is often stated as loving your neighbour as yourself. However, loving someone when there is no reciprocity is also a crime, of intimidation. Further, loving the spouse of another is prohibited. In the subcontinent, a love which does not obey caste laws is often cured with rape, mutilation, and death. The rules of the game of love – whom to love, how much, when – are complex: the upper caste man shall not love a Dalit woman, whereas the marriage of two lovers of the same caste is blessed; one must love one’s mother, but not the same way one loves a good car; the love for one’s child is not the same as loving one’s Maker, as Abraham teaches us; the lover is not the same as the love of one’s life. But, one cannot play the games of love with the passive resister, who is a being determined by the Law of Love: This law of love is nothing but a law of truth. Without truth there is no love; without truth it may be affection, as for one’s country, to the injury of others; or infatuation, as of a young man for a girl; or love may be unreasoning and blind, as of ignorant parents for their children. Love transcends all animality and is never partial. Satyagraha has therefore been described as a coin, on whose face you read love and on the reverse you read truth. It is a coin current everywhere and has indefinable value.6

The law of love and the law of truth are one. The reciprocal immurement of these two laws, their unity, is not given by yet another law, but in the being of a certain kind of man – the Satyagrahi, or the passive resister – who is enjoined to the Maker, as opposed to the mere mortal abandoned by Him. This being is not easy to distinguish amidst the ordinary men, for ‘there is not the slightest external difference between a bound and a free man’.7 The Satyagrahi is the very conjoinment of the

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laws of love – ‘self-suffering i.e., by love’8 – and truth into a single coin, which must emit away all the traces of denomination in such a way that it is without sides – ‘to be reduced to zero’. Since, Satyagraha is ‘literally holding on to Truth and it means, therefore, Truth-force’, we see that the law of love is a special kind of binding – holding-on-to Truth or the binding of Truth. Satyagraha is also translated as Truth-force: it is made up of Truth on one side, and on the other, a force compatible with Truth, which we have found to be passive force. Satyagraha is the reciprocal immurement of the enforcement of Truth and of Truthful enforcement. Such is the taste of Gandhi’s Truth. The uses that Gandhi made of these terms do not yield well to common sense, which is the evidence of his originality. Further, we learnt earlier that he had a theoretical conception of the modes in which a thinker ought to induce a seizure into that regularity to which words had been submitted; he did not wish to submit his writings to the priests of good prose. But, we need to return to this taste of Truth, which is that of ‘indifference to taste’,9 through the distinct senses in which Gandhi distributed each of these terms – Law, Truth, Love, Adherence, and Faith – into the nexus of Truth. In his words Truth is the sovereign principle, which includes numerous other principles. This truth is not only truthfulness in word, but truthfulness in thought also, and not only the relative truth of our conception, but the Absolute Truth, the Eternal Principle, that is God.10

The Principle, which in its sovereignty threatens the little principles, is the miraculous modifier. This Sovereign orders a discharge between the moral principles of man and the physical principles of nature when they come into tension – such as immoral acts of a people – and a discharge of semen when the passive resister’s being is the site of the laws of the brute and those of the Maker. The action of the Sovereign is experienced by the passive resister as guilt. Yet, the sovereign is not addressed directly as Truth, but often named God or the Maker, such that the mediating concept of God instils in man the feeling of a sovereign will from afar, which provides the right quantity of impetus to all things that are made and that are assigned their respective speeds.11

Truth and telling The regularity of things implies the working of laws, as found in the previous chapter. But, only those laws which are of the Maker are true, and the ones made by man, in order that he may step away from his Maker, belong to the

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falsity called ‘civilization’. When we find snow descending from the crests of the mountains, the clouds setting down upon the gardens, and the cold sun in haste, the regular occurrence of this event, winter, is given by the law of seasons, which is determined by the Maker’s Law. There is truth in winter. However, no matter how complex the traffic is at an airport, the air traffic control algorithms which regulate the flow of flights are not true. The air traffic control would be a man-made abhorrence. Not all regularities are true, and there are several laws of truth. Gandhi was mindful of the many senses of the term ‘Truth’, and yet he understood these distinct senses to be distributed in the same field, as if they were iron shards sculpted into two kidneys by a magnet. When a steadily held and sighted gun is triggered several times without disturbing the relative position of the gun, its trajectory should effect a certain regularity at the space of the target; if the target picture shows a close group of marks of projectile entry, it implies that the gun is capable of shooting true. The regularity given by the target picture is a measure of precision, and, hence, a gun which is precise shoots true. Truth in this instance is given by the adherence of the projectiles to each other at their points of entry, and it is opposed to cheating, as in ‘the gun cheated’. We oppose true to false in logic – a statement is either true or false. The regularity demanded by formal logic is such that there is no grouping of statements such that one would find them distributed in groups close to one another. For example the statement ‘Gandhi was thrown out of a train in South Africa’ does not have variations which are grouped together, such as ‘Gandhi stepped out of a train in South Africa’ and ‘Gandhi considered exiting a train in South Africa’. In the sense of logic, in that instance of the said train journey, only one event could have occurred and hence only one statement can be true. The rest are termed false. When true is opposed to false in the case of statements, what we understand is the exclusion of the variants of the same. The truth value of statements is not descriptive of the quantity of truth, but represents the value assigned to the relations obtained between statements and the adequacy of a statement with that of which it states something. Hence, Nietzsche would say, ‘The entire domain of “true-false” applies only to relations, not to an “in-itself ”.’12 However, there are determinants of objectivity for such uses of truth; the truth of a statement in a mathematical theorem follows the objectivities set for it in the notions of proof checking, and the statement ‘the snow is white’ is true in so far as it adheres itself to there being white snow. Gandhi often says ‘the truth is that … ’13 in the sense of something being a fact or being the case; this sense of truth as that which is verifiable with objective criteria is also an important aspect of the life of the practitioner of Truth. The practitioner of truth shall

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not betray any of the senses of Truth except when he is the beholder of a truth which has been obtained under objectivities that are the determinants of the other objectivities he is confronted with. We have encountered this problem in relation to the law; the passive resister violates a law as long as he is commanded by a higher law – the Law of the Maker against the laws of men. Truth telling is the first experience of the Sovereign Principle, which children practice unconsciously – ‘This child is – in fact, all innocent children are – unconscious worshippers of truth and hence they go an advancing.’14 The unconscious truth telling among children is the phenomena arising from their innocence of the many objectivities of Truth – for example, not knowing that telling the truth about their mother kissing the school mistress is harmful. The objectivity in this instance is of harmful truths and pointless truths. The truth of the sky being blue is pointless most of the time, unless one seeks in it a material to mould a thought. However, to deny that the sky does not revolve around the earth but rather the other way around is a dangerous truth, even these days. Gandhi was aware of the regulation of truths – not all truths were meant for all. He expressed the upper limit of this rule in the autobiography, ‘There are some things which are known only to oneself and one’s Maker. These are clearly incommunicable.’15 The objectivity of truth telling is the belief that arises within, which is rather the feeling of certainty. The distinction between knowledge and certainty found by Wittgenstein – ‘Knowledge and certainty belong to two categories’16 – is not valid from Gandhi’s point of view. The many rules of truth form the single nexus of Sovereign Truth. For Gandhi, ‘We should do that which our heart believes to be true’17 and this deed is not protected from the other objectivities of truth. When a man’s heart tells him that he could levitate from the hill and find his way down the valley in a gentle glide, it conflicts with the truth about the relation between gravity and mass. In these instances where the heart learns of the conflicts of truths, it is termed ‘error’ – ‘We shall certainly err, but we should put up with the penalty and see to it that such error is not repeated. If we make another mistake, it does not matter; on every occasion we should suffer the penalty and go on rectifying our mistakes.’18 We found in the previous chapter that on no occasion shall man challenge the strict relation which exists between actions, evaluations, and judgements, and hence, penalty for even errors of the heart is essential. This is contrasted with those instances when the heart is aware of the existence of a law which is opposed to the certainty experienced by it; there is knowledge. When a man is in a minority in an authoritarian country ruled by the majority, his belief in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights conflicts with his

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knowledge of the consequences of exercising these rights – public assassination, imprisonment, torture, and mutilation – and he shall have to decide between the two objectivities. Now, the action which leads from belief is termed ‘fault’, which is nothing other than committing a sin – ‘In the case of a fault knowledge is presumed. Knowingly committing a wrong is both a fault as well as sin.’19 The example more suitable for Gandhi’s intentions would be of a man aware of the law of the land who yet acts in violation of it; when the traffic lights and their function of regulating the flow of vehicles are well known to a man, and if he nevertheless drives through a red light, he has followed his heart with the knowledge of the law. In these instances, when a man possesses knowledge contrary to that of the certainty given by the time signature of his heart, the punishment has to be greater, since punishment and the suffering of it are the only markers of the distinct acts of man. Just as the rules governing the appearance of truth through its telling is regulated by the relation which a man obtains between himself and the Maker, a competent passive resister too has the authority to determine for a novice passive resister the hour, the quantity, the stage, and the metre of truth telling. When Maulana Abul Kalam Azad wished to speak from his heart the truths about the transfer of power and its negotiations by the Congress Party he was taught the rules of the conduct of truth by Gandhi: the great soul informed him that the same truth may be told differently, or not be told at all, depending on the office held by its teller. In a reply to Azad, Gandhi wrote on 15 August 1945: Your letter. I think it should not be published. … Whatever you want to say about the communal problem should not be said without consulting the Working Committee. I am also of the opinion that it is better to be quiet. The party can give its opinion after consultation with you. 20

Azad, since he became the president of the Congress Party, could not speak freely without disturbing the evenness of the process of negotiations undertaken by the Congress. Gandhi let him know that he ought to bear in mind the knowledge of the consequences of his actions and weigh them against the compulsions of his heart. Gandhi discovered that gluttony for truth telling threatened truth from within. This is a lesson which Gandhi would also impart to Jawaharlal Nehru, only this time not by suppressing but by threatening to publish the letter of 11 January 1928 in which Nehru rejected Hind Swaraj and Gandhi’s espousal of ‘Rama Rajya’ (Kingdom of king-god Rama). Nehru wrote to Gandhi, ‘I entirely disagree with this viewpoint and neither think that the so called Rama Raj was

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good in the past, nor do I want it back,’21 questioned the political efficacy of the khadi programme and Gandhi’s rejection of contraceptives.22 Nehru was critical of Gandhi’s positions regarding capitalism and the relation between capital and labour, which was rather harmonious for Gandhi – ‘I believe you have stated that in your opinion there is no necessary conflict between Capital and Labour. I think that under the capitalist system this conflict is unavoidable.’23 Gandhi was quick to spot in Nehru an opponent of his theological project: I suggest a dignified way of unfurling your banner. Write to me a letter for publication showing your differences. I will print it in Young India and write a brief reply … if you do not want to take the trouble of writing another letter, I am prepared to publish the letter before me.24

In 1928 the ratio of power and truth was weighed against Nehru and any public confrontation between the two would have brought Nehru’s own secular socialist political project to an end. Gandhi’s express wish to publish the letter was effectively a threat. A very anxious Nehru wrote back after learning the important lesson in the gluttony of truth: Your letter came as a bit of shock and was a painful reading … You talk about my carrying on an ‘open warfare’ against you and of ‘unfurling my banner’. I have no particular banner to unfurl nor had I thought about the possibility of any warfare between you and me … I hope I am not rigid in mind and outlook and nothing could please me more than to be convinced by you … I would therefore suggest that for the present at least you might not publish my letter.25

When Nehru was pleading with Gandhi to regulate this truth of a difference generously, since he became willing to agree more than to disagree, he learnt of the ratio between truth and power. There is a certain obscenity of truth when it is said of dictators that ‘after all they are open about their intentions and actions’. The threat of publicity reveals who can publish – the ratio between truth and power, leaving little meaning to the proposition ‘speak truth to power’. That is, the powerful can speak all kinds of truths. This truth about power was narrated by O. V. Vijayan in his scatological allegory of power, The Saga of Dharmapuri, where the dictator broadcasts his bowel movements as ritualized spectacle. Truth is that which has consequences, and with great power comes least consequence; this is also the truth about the Great Soul’s public sexual experiments with minor girls.26

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Truth means ends The problematic of truth telling requires us to return to the sense of means and ends – for Gandhi, means and ends are convertible. We do not term the minor premise a means, and the conclusion the end, in the case of syllogisms. That is, ‘Socrates is a man’ is not the means to the end ‘Socrates is mortal.’ The form of syllogism conveys necessity. In the case of a mechanical law, such as ‘Momentum is the product of the mass of an object and its velocity,’ momentum is not the end obtained through the means of mass and velocity. The form of the mechanical law conveys that each of the terms which constitute the law has a strict relation with the others, and also that any one term can be obtained, given the other two; that is, ‘Velocity of an object is given by its momentum divided by its mass.’ For a physical law to be available for articulation under the logic of means and ends, the terms of that law will have to be substitutable, except for one term, the end; in the case of momentum, one should be able to entertain the possibility of obtaining it under more than one set of relations between terms, such as, a product of the viscosity of an object and its temperature. Gandhi’s assertion concerning means and ends, that there is no polynomia in any domain, extends the form of mechanical laws into the domain of human freedom: there is no freedom since polynomia is an illusion, and man will inevitably be punished by the Maker, His Law, for surrendering to this illusion. This convertibility of means and ends is beyond the imagination of the ordinary alchemist who seeks the convertibility of any metal into gold, whereas the Maker establishes the supreme convertibility which dissolves all the illusions of abandonment of man – ‘God is the supreme alchemist.’ The supreme alchemist converts all actions into the value zero. After all, our concerns with good and bad actions are determined according to the distinctions we entertain between means and ends; in the ratio between the given means and ends men determine the best action there is. The abandonment of mankind, for Gandhi, is effected by the illusion of polynomia. The abandonment of man is his freedom, contrary to the binding of man to the Maker’s Law – ‘Bond means bandhan.’27 The man in abandonment is the observer of the convertibility of means by other means, ends by ends, a means for an end, and an end for a means. We found that Gandhi’s exasperation with language, that one word can mean several things and the same meaning can be conveyed through several words, reflects the acknowledgement of the conflict between polynomia and calypsology. In this sense, the arts are a game of un-truth. That is, they extend polynomia to newer limits with each instance.

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Just as Gandhi would remark on the difference between absolute truth and relative truth,28 he would also practise the relative telling of truth. We found that certain truths have unwelcome consequences, even if their telling is the right means, which should ensure a right end, although it may not be apparent. Even then the passive resister, who is the adherent of Truth, shall tell it at all times – ‘A devotee of Truth cannot stop to consider if someone will not be injured by his telling the truth, for he believes that truth can never do harm.’29 We shall take an example from Kant and set it to work under distinct parameters of a man who took refuge from his pursuers in a hospital. Let’s assume that it was in Nazi Germany, the man who was seeking refuge was a Jewish activist, and the hospital was manned by ‘native German’ doctors. The imperative which commands the doctor is that he shall save all lives without discrimination. The primum mobile of imperatives for Kant was that one shall tell the truth at all times. The moral value of an imperative is established through a logical examination; if an imperative is partial, such as truth telling, it results in the conditions where one is unable to practise it – the partial telling of truth will encourage men to not trust any statement at all, and if all men were to tell the truth at all times it would establish the faith in the speech of men. The imperative to tell the truth will, then, establish a society which will require the least policing; the relation between truth by brute force – policing – and continuous and voluntary truth telling was to be one of the pillars of Gandhi’s ideal state of Hind Swaraj, to which we will return soon. The doctor in the German hospital is obliged to deliver the Jewish activist over to the Nazis, while knowing that his truthfulness will kill a man. The Jewish activist hiding in the hospital is himself obliged to tell the truth, and reveal himself before his SS pursuers. Gandhi’s own thoughts about the Jewish people in 1938 are difficult to grasp – ‘The Jews are not angels.’30 Gandhi’s advisories to the Jewish people, threatened with annihilation, are not surprising: The calculated violence of Hitler may even result in a general massacre of the Jews by way of his first answer to the declaration of such hostilities. But if the Jewish mind could be prepared for voluntary suffering, even the massacre I have imagined could be turned into a day of thanksgiving and joy that Jehovah had wrought deliverance of the race even at the hands of the tyrant. For to the godfearing, death has no terror.31

The sense of truth in this occasion concerns not merely a thought or a statement but rather the exposure of oneself to the brute force which seeks one’s own destruction. That is, when the Jewish activist tells the truth and submits himself before his captors, he identifies himself before the Nazis according to the Nazi

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criteria of being a Jew, and receives the fate reserved for the Jewish people in Nazi Germany. Gandhi appears to contradict himself in this case, since the truth to which man ought to expose himself, and the truth of man which will thus be exposed, are in accordance with the Laws of the Maker, whereas, the Nazi laws are still man-made. Yet, in another sense the calamitous exposure to the truth held by the Nazis would remain a mediate exposure of the Jewish people to the thousand suns of the Maker.32 This leads us to the tonal centre of Truth – exposure and concealment. Truth is that which remains concealed, and man ought to expose all the hidden markers of Truth, His Law. Truth is also that which brings about suffering; if one obtains truth without suffering, it is not worthy of being called by that name. We identify a proportional articulation here – in direct proportion to the exposure there is suffering, and in direct proportion to un-truth there is liveable life. This proportional articulation determines the movements of the Gandhian ascetic; he is scorched and baked in the thousand suns of Truth into the hardest terracotta figurine, which will endure forever. It is this mode of suffering, of offering the vulnerability of themselves before the Nazi machinery of genocide, which Gandhi proposed to the Jewish people – to expose oneself to annihilation in order that one is conjoined to absolute truth.33 In their own annihilation the Jewish people were to have the non-experience of Absolute Truth – ‘a joyful sleep’.

Truth and secrecy The quest of the passive resister is to remove the masks, the crypts, sepulchres, codes, and milieus which deny the exposure of man to the Truth that is God. Often that which denies Truth is enticing and alluring, and gives man a false sense of sufficiency in it. The face of truth is hidden by a golden lid. Why should we fear to speak the truth or to act truthfully? How can we catch a glimpse of truth so long as we do not remove the glittering lid of untruth?34

Hence, Gandhi wrote, ‘I detest secrecy as a sin.’35 Truth telling is related to concealment by secrecy, which is to be distinguished from truths unknown and from truths unspeakable. A truth is converted into a secret through many means – promise and pact, encryption, legislation. When a man tells another a truth and demands the promise that ‘you shall keep it a secret’, this truth is held by the promise extracted – promise is encryption and the breaking of the

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promise is decryption. The commandment ‘thou shalt not break a promise’ is expected to weigh more than the commandment to tell the truth at all times. Encryption, or keeping truth within a crypt, can be executed by writing a statement on a sheet of paper and locking it up in a safe, or using a mathematical operation to encrypt the text. The law of the state classifies truths under secret, top secret, and other categories. From the point of view of the citizen, the state is a staggered labyrinth of secrets; and, from the point of the state the citizen is the life that should be lived as if it were an open book, the ideal of the Great Soul. Gandhi’s understanding of the relation between secret and truth telling is not different, except that the Gandhian state is the Kingdom of the Maker. He wrote a text titled ‘The Sin of Secrecy’36 in Young India, where he demanded of his passive resisters to ‘avoid even thinking thoughts we would hide from the world’,37 a condition which would be the limit of a security state. That is, a state in which all men think, speak, and act the thoughts which are determined to be ‘Good’, is one which will find security measures uneconomical and redundant.38 The total security state will not distinguish between privacy and secrecy. The distinction between secrecy and privacy is to be found in the disruptive power invested in the former and the conserving power invested in the latter. That is, those thoughts and actions which would not threaten the regularities in the public and in the private domains, and also the line dividing the two, are not worthy of the name secret. Instead, a secret – such as the domestic secrets or the secrets of the rulers – is held under lock and key for the power invested in it. In this sense, often, a prohibited thought or transgressive act is the object of secrecy. In village societies, with which Gandhi was familiar, secrecy and privacy are indistinguishable. That is, a woman’s recourse to privacy in the name of shame would invite concern in all the other members, as she may act in a secret way which would be harmful for the whole village. It is the case that even today, in many Indian villages, the village councils prohibit women’s privacy in several ways, including that of having access to mobile phones. In the Gandhian scheme this state of affairs does not make a primitive place out of a village.39 The village state he envisioned for the whole world, the actual villages of India, and the absolute security state are indistinguishable, which is something that did not concern Gandhi. Instead, as we will find later, Gandhi reveals the essential relation between security, truth, and the limit of epochs. That is, how we recognize an epoch in its old age is a question which Gandhi enables us to ask. Gandhi is an aetiologist who sought the resistant depth of causes rather than the ever hastening surface of symptoms; we found that the man who overeats and suffers from indigestion is aided in the pursuit of the feast by a doctor who gives

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him a digestive, instead of seeking the cause for his suffering. For Gandhi, the security measures, the intimidating presence of the policemen, the eavesdroppers and spies with their cocked ears and alert bodies, the press restriction laws, the men on the streets huddled around each other like a single organism looking around everywhere before speaking, the self-censoring editorials in the newspapers are each the elements of the augmenting speed at which a symptom untreated gives rise to the next. The cause – the sin of secrecy – quickens the raising up of the most oppressive of states; and, paradoxically, the removal of the cause creates a state which resembles the ideal of the oppressive state: Non-co-operation is essentially a cleansing process. It deals with causes rather than symptoms. The detective department is a symptom of the secrecy which is the cause. Removal of secrecy brings about the full disappearance of the Secret Service without further effort.40

It is important to note the two senses in which Gandhi’s criticism of the relation between the state and secrecy unfolds. First, the state itself resorts to security measures, since its present form might be threatened by the thoughts and acts of its subjects; when the subjects speak the truth at all times, especially their dislike for their rulers and the rejection of the legitimacy of the rules which govern them, the state stands openly challenged. In the open challenge, as Gandhi knew very well, the state would resort to repressive measures,41 even the extremes of which were most welcome for Gandhi, as we found in his response to the Jews of Nazi Germany. Second, the equivocity of the proposal to eliminate secrecy does not reveal a state of man as Marquis de Sade would have imagined: a state where the innocence of man was given convenience and realization in the illimitable unfolding of all possible thoughts and acts, in such a way that man does not stand in a field of oppositions of possibilities. Rather, the man-made state with its man-made laws is displaced by the enclosure of the Maker’s Law. That is, man is to be conceived as the being who releases himself from the imperfect and fragile immurement of the state of man, into the absolute immurement of the Maker. Gandhi places the terms of a covenant before every state of man, and not merely the colonial administration, such that if he were to give them a state of the Maker it would render the economy of policing and patrolling redundant. The thorn of secrecy, which festers and confounds men into adopting gestures inimical to man as he was made by the Maker, can be removed to bring about the ease of truth in society only by looking up to the Maker. How is one to live in the state of the Maker? Would one ever hide a missive in a whisper? Would there be men huddled into a single organism with a dozen eyes darting from it conspiring

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about revolutionary notions? The covenant of Gandhi – which is nothing but the covenant of the Maker – is based on the assumption that it will be impossible to hide from the Maker who is all knowing. Gandhi’s questioning of secrecy is continuous with his questioning of privacy. If privacy characterizes actions as shameful – those which are not fit for exposure before the public, such as defecation – secrecy characterizes disruptive action. Indeed, when all actions are committed to the public, the need for both secrecy and privacy vanishes from society. Gandhi’s covenant seeks to bring about the elimination of the sin of secrecy by demanding of men that they lead their inner lives and outer lives as if under the watch of a judge of morals. The Maker is indeed the judge; and nothing, even a moment at which a thought, unknown to the thinker, steals away in order to enjoy the freedom of thinking which belongs to it, eludes the Maker who watches and judges: If we realized the presence of God as witness to all we say and do, we would not have anything to conceal from anybody on earth. For, we would not think unclean thoughts before our Maker, much less speak them. It is uncleanness that seeks secrecy and darkness. The tendency of human nature is to hide dirt, we do not want to see or touch dirty things: we want to put them out of sight. And so must it be with our speech. I would suggest that we should avoid even thinking thoughts we would hide from the world.42

The state in which all men think only clean thoughts succeeded upon by clean speech and act would be determined by the notion of ‘cleanliness’. Cleanliness has several determinations, including that of caste and race. Caste and race were understood to be the same by Gandhi; when he wrote about the native South African people – ‘the half-castes and Kaffirs, who are less advanced than we’ – caste and race merged into one concept, which is of a hierarchy of advancements. The least advanced were the untouchables of India and the black people of Africa, who had to be considered apart from mankind as conceived by the Maker; the essential names for the less advanced people ranged in Gandhi’s writings from ‘kaffirs’, savages, the children of god (Harijan), the Cinderellas.43 The unclean, while being racial, is also moral; such a position is consistent with the caste order in the subcontinent. The unclean has a philia for darkness and secrecy, which is where it finds its truth. Then, the dark and the unclean are the obverse and the converse of the same coin: the dark skinned untouchable’s invisible life outside the bounds of society is consistent with his truth; the coming into the light of social life of the untouchable would be his participation in un-truth. For Gandhi, the actions through which men move away from their family obligations, clan rules, and social codes are measures taken by men against the Maker, who had set

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the speeds and occupations for each man. The watchful eyes of the Maker follow each man as he steals away from the given truth of his birth. The truth of birth is discussed by Gandhi under several discourses, including in his justifications for the caste system in India: Western scientists are busy trying to prove that heredity is an illusion and that milieu is everything. The sole experience of many lands goes against the conclusion of these scientists; but even accepting their doctrine of milieu, it is easy to prove that milieu can be conserved and developed more through caste than through class.44

The Maker who gazes upon men never blinks, and he sees each violation of truth, including the transgressions of the laws of heredity encoded in the caste laws, the whispers of the revolutionaries, the stolen caress of the lovers – ‘Being immanent in all beings, He hears everything and reads our innermost thoughts.’45 Gandhi’s covenant would usher the Maker’s Kingdom in which all the senses of Truth would be practised by all men. Gandhi was consistent in his hypophysics and its use in discovering the inherited truths of each people. Hypophysicalizing Darwin, he found the ground for his racism: Some hold that Darwin taught that strength is enough; that is, those who are physically strong ultimately survive. Superficial thinkers may believe that morality is of no use. But this is not Darwin’s view at all. We will find evidence from the early history of man that races without morality have disappeared.46

He spoke of Hindus and Muslims in terms of that which is immanent to each and hence heritable: ‘My own experience but confirms the opinion that the Mussalman as a rule is a bully and the Hindu a coward. Where there are cowards there will always be bullies.’47 This very same narration of ‘the victimisation of Hindus’ is what led to the assassination of M. K. Gandhi and the pogroms against Muslims, Sikhs, Christians, and Dalits since independence in India. That is, the attempts in India which still continue to hold Gandhi as the fakir of peace between the ethnic groupings are still playing, often unwittingly, a game to bring about ‘Hindu Raj’ interpreted as secularism.

Truth and the maker We found that truth designates truth telling, being-true of a proposition, and the absence of secrecy and privacy. All that the Maker has made, and that which

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remains true to the laws of its making, is true; the law concerning truth telling is one of the ways in which men ensure that they stay true to the laws of their making. For Gandhi, the true comes out of the true, whereas, the false departs from the true; and it is from the slow that the quick germinates. Nature is full of truth, as that which is composed of beings whose speed was set by the Maker. The truth of a cheetah is its explosive acceleration and the truth of the snail is imperceptible motion. Speed is truth at work. On the other hand, the departure of a being from its given speeds is falsity. A composition of beings for the sole aim of the enhancement of the speed of those beings is civilization – ‘a falsity’. The Maker let the world convene from out of Himself, without letting it depart from Him, and in this sense, He is continuous with the world: The world is the germination of the Maker – ‘I recognise, that God manifests Himself in innumerable forms in this universe, and every such manifestation commands my spontaneous reverence.’48 As the Maker of truths He is Himself Truth, although true and false do not apply to him. Hence, ‘Truth is the right designation of God.’49 The Maker is not true in the sense in which a picture is true of its object. Rather, the Maker is Truth. Here, we are to understand that Truth does not refer to the truth value in a proposition, which could also be false. When we predicate truth – x is true – we are to employ the predication as corresponding to the degree of truth in the subject, which is in proportion to the distance the subject has to the Maker; in other words, the degree of subjection entertained by the subject to His Law, or the speed of the subject – the slower, the truer. The Truth, which lies beyond all telling, is without objectivity; if there were an objectivity that transcends Truth and discloses it to man, then that which would determine Truth would be higher and, also truer – ‘There are no objective tests of Truth.’50 Truth is that which guarantees the ascent of each being and proposition to being-true, and also that being in whose inscrutable truthfulness – a substance which is Truth – each being finds a reference for their vacillation in the game of true and false. The truth-substance is to be understood in the Gandhian case, as we found so far, to be a being which is composed of no other thing but truth itself – it is not a composite. In the proposition, true to the sciences, ‘nature is matter’, we can glimpse such a conception. If a thing is a matter, it will also be of nature; even a nano-machine is made up of material elements which are studied under the science of nature, physics. Conversely, if there is a natural thing its nature will be given by the compositions of matter. The proposition ‘Truth is the right designation of God’ refers to a Truth-being, rather than a most-true-being – ‘That which alone is, which constitutes the stuff of which all things are made, which subsists by virtue of its own power,

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which is not supported by anything else but supports everything that exists.’51 The departure from this being is to be understood as falsity, and each time we lie to one another, we depart from this Truth-being. This model of Truth, which we find to be insufficient for Gandhi, is distinct from the several philosophical groundings of truth. Often, we understand by truth the quality of conformity of a matter to its thought, a proposition to its facts, and the Idea to all its determinations. The Truth-being is not a quality. It is to be understood as similar to the Idea in Plato, where the Idea of X does not have X, but it is X; and all the other little x which participate in the X gain a qualitative ascent to X without ever coming to be it. In other words, they are little x since they are removed from X. In the Gandhian model, the logic of participation and removal is not obtained. Instead, it is the very Truth-being – which man too is – that departs from itself to gain the quality of falsity, without ever leaving it fully. One never leaves Truth fully without being extinguished and this extinguishing is also true, as the boundary event of truth. To be without any truth is to not be at all, since truth is being for Gandhi; when he translated passive resistance as Satyagraha, in order to bring it under the logic of coins, he asserted that ‘Sat’ means being and truth, in the sense of the true alone is – ‘The word Satya (Truth) is derived from Sat, which means “being”. Nothing is or exists in reality except Truth.’52 The Good and the Beautiful are the interpretations of Truth. All those who gained a relationship to Truth, the teachers of religion for Gandhi, were also artists. That is, the relation in which they held themselves to Truth apportioned beauty to their being and their deeds: Truth is the first thing to be sought for, and Beauty and Goodness will be added unto you. That is what Christ really taught in the Sermon on the Mount. Jesus was, to my mind, a supreme artist, because he saw and expressed Truth; and so  was Muhammad, the Koran being the most perfect composition in all the Arabic literature.53

Beauty is found in that experience which reveals the objects and events of nature under the thought of the Law which composes them and thus reveals the presence of the Maker in the made – ‘How also could these be beautiful, but for the Truth that is in the centre of creation? When I admire the wonder of a sunset or the beauty of the moon my soul expands in worship of the Creator.’54 When men worship trees, they are participants in the creation of a beautiful thing; that is, without the worshippers who recognize in the composition of forms which makes the tree the law that the maker is, there is no beauty, and

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hence, the worshipper is a participant in the beautiful – ‘I find in the practice of treeworship a thing instinct with a deep pathos and poetic beauty.’55 Beauty, as the experience of a thing of nature under the thought of the law of its making, is rarely given to man-made objects since they are conferred often with laws which are foreign to nature. On the other hand, when Gandhi does find a thing of man’s making to be beautiful, it need not be what one would call a work of art. He considered the Singer’s sewing machine to be a beautiful thing for the reason that its parts conjoined with man’s limbs to constitute a single being which derived its functional rules from the articulation of the limbs – ‘There is a romance about the device itself.’56 The works of literature which drew men to imagine the Law that He is were fit to be called beautiful. Since, such finds were rare in the world of literature, Gandhi did not consider it an essential aspect of education. Gandhi wrote, ‘For me all the principal religions are equal in the sense that they are all true.’57 The many conceptions of the Maker are each true in a certain sense; that is the many gods who withstand their domain in order to receive a determination of the Maker are also standing against other determinations, or they withstand other competing divinities. Each religion has been apportioned some Truth. The truth of individual religions conceived under their respective divinities – even when each of these religions may claim to the only god – subjects man to the laws of their divinities. The proliferation of laws in the name of the divinities is evidence that these are man-made laws: If there is only one Truth, then it has only one Sovereign, the Maker, and He is the Law which is the expression of this Truth; this Law ensures that there is a world in accordance with it – ‘It and the law It promulgates are one. Therefore it is not a blind law. It governs the entire universe.’58 Proliferation of gods and laws is due to the work of the faculty of mind; it deploys the powers of analogy and homology to invent multiple doctrines of Truth. The doctrines of Truth – expressed in the language of the theologies, cosmogonies, myths, prayers, and superstitions – appear in conflict, since they refuse to accept the partial relation they have to Truth. Hence, we can say that religions, understood as doctrines of Truth, imply conflict. The primary cause for the proliferation and the conflict of religions is their acceptance of language as the capable vessel to receive the truth of the Maker, despite the warning of their best teachers that ‘He transcends speech and reason’.59 But Truth as such is given only to the one who worships it without recourse to a God. The movement away from ‘God is truth’ to ‘Truth is God’ needs to be clarified. It will not help us to take recourse to a predicative logic, following the

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scholastic tradition, in order to make sense of the reversal achieved by Gandhi; although, it is rather easy to take recourse to such a logic, as he would then be found articulating a category which transcends all the others, and it is also predicated of God and of his creatures. However, predication implies something distinct in Gandhi. First, when Truth is said of a thing it indicates its adherence to or holding-fast-to the Law of its making – the nearer the truer. Secondly, that thing of which Truth is said is also a constituent of Truth; that is without the world there is no Truth, as the Maker, the Law that the He is, and all that is made are one. When Gandhi said, ‘You will see the fine distinction between the two statements, viz. that God is Truth and Truth is God,’60 he pointed towards a certain pragmatism, of the acceptance of the category of Truth by even the atheists. That is, Gandhi was openly admitting to a certain equivocity which would enable him to subvert the pursuit of truth by the atheist by equating Truth with God. For example when one names the house cat ‘God’, and announces that ‘God has come’, it would not be a lie although a religious neighbour might feel concerned at the regular comings and goings of God in an atheist household. However, the name of God or the Maker has special value, be it God or Rama or Truth, as long as the utterer refers to that which transcends all representations of the Maker. On 2 December 1929, Gandhi wrote in a letter to Prabhudas Gandhi: The significance is not of Rama the king but of the name of Rama. Have you not seen my definition of God? Usually I had been saying and writing that God is Truth. In the new manual I have deliberately improved upon that definition and I now say Truth is God.61

We should not be led from the reference to the discussion of proper name to the conclusion that God is a category which is predicated of Truth. Instead, in the same letter Gandhi provides the clarification – ‘I am here thinking of that Truth which transcends even God.’62 That is, even God has Truth, but he is not It. We find that each being has a full measure of Truth as long as it remains within the law of its making. The laws of the making of things distinguish them from one another; the cow and the pig are not made the same way, and the eagle and the sparrow possess flight differently. The Maker is Himself all that is made, and he possesses the full measure of Truth appropriate to the world for which He is the Law. We have also found that the Maker is not merely the sum total of the things which make up the world; He transcends the speech which names each and every thing. This gives us a certain hierarchy – Truth, the Maker, the world. Of these three terms ‘Truth’ alone is and it can be conceived without the other two.

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This leads us to the meaning of the ‘Maker’ and his relation to Truth. What is apparent is that without the Maker the Truth does not find itself expressed as the world, and the world does not remain regulated according to the laws of its construction in a manner as if it had taken a vow to do so. The Maker took the vow of Truth such that there is world that is regulated by Him according to the Law derived from Truth: God is the very image of the vow. God would cease to be God if He swerved from His own laws even by a hair’s breadth. The sun is a great keeper of observances; hence the possibility of measuring time and publishing almanacs.63

We are to understand that ‘a vow means unflinching determination’,64 which enables the Maker to determine the World which He is. The Maker is, as long as he observes the vow of Truth; and the cosmic machinery of stars and planets is held in observance by their Maker – God is the first Satyagrahi, the adherent of Truth. Thus, we arrive at another determination of the Law for Gandhi – the law observed in the regularity of a domain is given by the things in that domain holding fast to their Vow.65 That there is the world which endures is a sign that a Vow has been taken. On each occasion where one finds regularities fit to be explicated by a law, there is a vow being followed – the vow is interpreted by man as law. The Maker is the perfect observer of the Vow of Truth – ‘the very image of the vow’ – and the regularity of his observances is to be understood as His Law, the domain of which, for us, is Nature; the ever elusive Truth observed incompletely in nature by us is the Maker holding fast to Truth. From the Maker to man, the Vow diminishes in its perfection. It will be tempting to think of this diminishing in terms of voices and light growing fainter with distance – a quantity being spent in its journey outward. However, it is man’s proximity to the Maker which lets him override the vow; that is, in man, there lies the power of the vow, which lets him choose from among the many vows which he can either take or discard. The power of the vow is given to man so that he will ascend to be the very image of the vow, which the Maker is; man was born in order to be the Maker – ‘Man is not at peace with himself till he has become like unto God.’66 The animal is not a vow taker, and yet it appears to have a regularity, for its regularity is governed by the Law of the Maker. Man, who was made in the image of the Maker – Himself the image of the Vow – is capable of creating new regularities through his power to observe vows on his own: Man has discrimination and reason … . The brute, if he is said to worship God, does so involuntarily. The desire to worship God is inconceivable in the brute,

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while man can worship even Satan. It must therefore be, and is, man’s nature to know and find God. Young India, 24-6-1926

It is not that man is a being who does not make any vows, and that he has built a world without regularities – if such a thing could be called a world – for himself. In so far as there is a world of men, that world too is made of the vows which men took, for ‘the world endures through vows’.67 The evil of civilization sustains itself due to the vows which were taken, and which are being observed. However, all vows are not equal; the vow to kill is not the same as the vow to never kill, and the vow to speak the truth at all times is not the same as the vow to keep secrets. Rather, a vow must be taken in such a way that it leads man to become the Maker, who took his Vow of Truth.

Truth and will The notion of holding-fast-to or vow, is discussed by Gandhi under several convertible terms – faith, will, inner strength, belief, unflinching determination, love, adherence. We have also found that taking a vow displaces the law in Gandhi’s conception of politics, and the concept of penance for the sin of breaking a vow replaces that of punishment. The vow reveals the relation between manmade laws and divine laws, of which the passive resister is concerned only with the latter. First, a vow is not limited by death – ‘When we have once taken a vow, we shall not withdraw them even if we die.’68 If there is a law which may demand of one to break the vow, its disobedience can only incur death as a limit punishment. Further, in the instance of breaking a vow, or not being truthful to it, one is answerable to God, who as the image of the Vow keeps all the promises of the world – so will God refuse to accept a promissory note drawn by a man who will observe truth as far as possible.’69 That is ‘as far as possible’ refers to counterfeiting of vows, and the passive resister is opposed to the counterfeiter, and vows are opposed to his promissory notes. The flexibility of man-made laws is evident in the relaxed punishments Gandhi himself received for his breaches of the British colonial laws, and it is defined by ‘as far as possible’; that is in the domain of man-made laws, the costs of deeds are weighed against one another, such that suffering is reduced. In the domain of divine Laws, ‘To do at any cost something that one ought to do constitutes a vow.’70 We will find the notion of cost – ‘at any cost’ as against ‘as far as possible’ – to determine the polity, or the Kingdom of Truth, which Gandhi sought to usher in through his theology in the

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following chapters. Here, attention should be paid to the difference between law and vow in the constitution of regularity in the world of man. In the previous chapter we found that laws define regularities and that they have a certain relation to promises. Subsequently, we learnt that the laws of nature are themselves the manifestations of the Vow of Truth taken by its Maker. Then, man’s image of the law is to be displaced by the vow – or the Maker as the image of the Vow – or of faith. The law in nature is something that man uncovers as an elegant formulation of the regularities observed in it; we find in the history of our sciences better formulations, new problematics of the laws of nature, and new theories which apprehend as yet unknown regularities. However, in the domain of politics, the law is understood as a statement which produces regularities in the world; it regulates the affairs of men. A bad law, in this sense, is something which fails to regularize, even if it is enforced with maximum force and efficiency: ‘If the law is in conformity with public opinion it should command respect. If it is against public opinion, its enforcement will be rather slow.’71 On the other hand, a good law would be a statement which would generate a regularity which would not require the use of force. The laws, just as statements, can come to be contradictory; that is an in-apparent contradiction between the statements of two laws can come to show their conflict in the unfolding of their respective regularities. Gandhi as a lawyer knew this about legislation, and as a passive resister, or Satyagrahi, he knew this about the vows. The vow to not steal and the vow to feed all mankind are rather fine ideals to be avowed. However, their conflict in the unfolding is also evident, unless, one follows the counterfeiter’s ‘as far as possible’ as a negotiation between the two vows. As we have found, for Gandhi there is no such negotiation in the matter of the vow, where even death is not the terminal point of the vow, but in a peculiar sense, its continuance. Kant too was concerned with the contradictions involved in acting under a moral law. Gandhi’s reference to universality might even be to tempt us to make a comparison. However, for Gandhi, ‘universal’ referred to a state of regularity which was acceptable to all, or at least to noble souls of mankind; it is highly unlikely that one would find wide oppositions to maxims such as ‘be gentle towards children’, ‘lead a pious life’, and ‘love one’s country’ – Vows can be taken only on points of universally recognised principles. The possibility of sin in such a case is more or less imaginary. A devotee of Truth cannot stop to consider if someone will not be injured by his telling the truth, for he believes that truth can never do harm.72

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The emphasis is on the notion and perception of sin under the recognition of the peers of the world, or the immediate universe. It is also revealed that ‘causing no harm to others’ is a vow which cannot be taken alongside any vow worth its name; it is for no other reason that Gandhi emphasized the arrival of hardships with each assumption of vows.73 The temporary hardships are to be understood as the vow leading a certain regularity to criticality and opening us towards something new. Just as the statement of a vow may have unstated implications, the manifestation of a new regularity will inflict many others – ‘A vow to discard foreign cloth will compel us to use the spinningwheel.’74 Successions of regularities have a determinate speed. The estimations of the speed of succession of the regularities and the resultant limit order – the complete own-rule, Swaraj, or, as we will soon find, critical nation – were estimated by Gandhi rather optimistically; he would often urge his countrymen to adopt a certain vow – especially ‘take to spinning’ – such that complete ownrule would be theirs within a year.75 A law in nature describes the working of a force under a specific determination; physics is a regional discourse of the forces which are natural, and it describes the laws as if the forces are acting under it. In the case of human law too, we found that force was essential for the corresponding regularity to make appearance. In the enforcement of a law the real distinction is between the kind of force one deploys rather than the quantity of the force – passive force or active force. When we think of a vow, and the regularities brought about by a vow – such as the vow to eat a meal every 5 hours interrupting all the other activities to create a distinct rhythm – the force is not deployed from without; a vow taken under coercion is not a vow. A vow is a relation one has to oneself. Gandhi wrote in a letter on the vow, ‘The “vow” I am thinking of is a promise made by one to oneself.’76 The power within us to take a vow – the convertible terms of faith, love, will – makes us superior to the natural bodies, which too have taken the vow to stay true to their orbits – ‘I grant that we are higher than the sun, how much more necessary for us to be at least as true and faithful as the sun if not truer and more faithful?.’77 Since man was made in the image of the Maker, who is himself the image of the vow, man in his quest to know his Maker ought to be the vow taker that He is. Gandhi considered the vows taken by the natural bodies and animals to be beyond breach due to their inability to do so; the faculties granted to man gave him discretion and volition. The residence of the vow is the soul and the force which binds a vow to its matter is the soul force; the passive force, understood under the aspect of the

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vow, is designated as the force of the soul. The soul force is also discussed as Love by Gandhi. The faint voice of the soul alone is capable of singing the hymns of the Maker, and to love Him in such a way that it awakens a self-love, which shuts out the whole world. In the enclosure of the self upon the self – ‘Love does not burn others, it burns itself ’78 – the man–Maker is given to enjoy the immurement to which Truth descends; to be able to come face to face with Truth is to be the visage of the Vow. The vow is that without which there is no love. There are many misuses of the term ‘love’: I then found that the nearest approach to Truth was through Love. But I also found that love has many meanings in the English language at least and that human love in the sense of passion could become a degrading thing also.79

There are a few things to learn from Gandhi here. Just as the vow is a relation one has to oneself, its convertible term, love too is self-love. In taking a vow man partakes of the image of the Maker, and in the light of love man feels the Maker nearing. The many senses of love are set aside by Gandhi for something specific. The faculties of body and mind are capable of what can be termed love; the body which is capable of love in the sense of passion and the mind empowered to love thought are not Love worthy of its name. Love properly belongs to the faculty of the soul. The soul, as we found is the wound into which Truth descends; for the soul alone is capable of knowing the Maker’s law, which derives from the vow He took of Truth. The soul does not know Truth in the sense in which the mind knows a theorem, or the body knows a ball game. When Gandhi spoke about Love he would often refer to the soul as the heart; in the sense in which one would say that love is a matter of the heart. In the case of choosing the right courses of action ‘we should do that which our heart believes to be true’. In such scenarios heart is understood as the faculty which grants conviction. However, the heart reveals something peculiar about Truth, that it is what the heart adheres to. We learn that that which the heart holds-fast-to ascends to the status of Truth: ‘There are no objective tests of Truth. What our heart assents to is Truth. In most cases we recognize Truth; but purity of heart is essential for the correct perception of Truth.’80 That is, Truth is obtained in a relationship between a thing and the heart. At the same time, the heart as a faculty has to be trained to perceive that which is worthy of being granted the assent. In the case of taking vows we learnt that only those statements whose unfolding would not involve a conflict are worthy of being undertaken as a vow, and further, that the statements which are recognized by all as worthy maxim alone are to be avowed. The soul or the heart as a faculty, then, holds two powers with respect

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to Truth; its perception and its ascension. There are three experiences we have to Truth; first its perception, as that which is worthy of being an object of a vow; second, the experience of the will making it True; and third the experience of the unfolding of the orders which are given to the adherent of Truth. The soul is that in man which is also in the Maker. The Maker, who perceived the Truth to which He remains avowed, made man such that, with the faculty of the soul, man may come face to face with Him. In knowing the Maker as the avowed, man may be opened to Truth – He is the only conduit for man to Truth. The other faculties, of the body and the mind, are often impediments in man’s receptivity to Truth. The body disposes man towards indistinct passions which distract him from knowledge. The mind, leading man through reason, gives him a false sense that reason is itself capable of encompassing the whole of the made in order to find in the sum its Truth: The human soul herself is beyond reason. … The soul and God are not objects of knowledge. They are knowers themselves and therefore cannot be apprehended by the intellect. There are two stages to the knowledge of God, (1) faith and (2) the experience arising from faith. … We cannot perceive God by the senses or apprehend him by the intellect, just as we cannot hear with the eyes. A different faculty is needed to realise God and that faculty is unshakeable faith.81

The presence of the term ‘faith’ instead of the heart should not confuse us, as it is convertible with heart, love, belief, ahimsa, and will. From here onwards we shall refer to this series by the term ‘will’. The body too appears to have faith or will, in that it shows specific affinities; such as the preference one has for a certain wine, or the necessity one feels after each meal to have something sweet. These preferences which impose a sense of necessity and hence reveal a regularity are the bad uses of will. Without will there is no regularity. God himself maintains the regularities of the world as if they were conducted according to a law through His will. Hence, Gandhi would liken Him to machine maker – ‘The power that moves us is God … the will of the great Carpenter.’82 It is the will of men which empowers them to assign values to statements and actions such that they bear out as laws and rites, or the regularities of the human world. In this sense, man’s world is his own making, for which he is the carpenter who wills. An example of the achievement of man as technaton can be found in the caste system, which is the regularity and stability given by the will of those who maintain it: But Indians, whether Hindus or Christians, ought to be able to see that the spirit behind caste is not one of arrogant superiority; it is the classification of different

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systems of self-culture. It is the best possible adjustment of social stability and progress.83

The order which returns a social ‘milieu’ to itself in accordance with the rules of genetic purity which constitute it is given by the vow to maintain the genetic purity.84 The proposition that the will, or love, is the founding of social regularity, is neither new nor old with respect to Gandhi, who himself refers to St. Paul: ‘Ahimsa also means “Love” in the Pauline sense, and yet something more than the “Love” defined by St. Paul.’85 Gandhi understood Paul’s Love to be limited to the domain of man; that is, man alone needs love, the faculty, through which a regularity under the guidance of Christ’s truth can be constituted on earth. Whereas, for Gandhi, the Maker himself is the Lover of Truth, and hence nature is analogous to the kingdoms made by man. Alain Badiou’s interpretation of Paul is consistent with Gandhi’s theory of the will. Will is interpreted under different terms by him, including love. The establishment of Truth is impossible without love, or the vow; that is Truth is that to which one remains an adherent. The action of love in conformity with a statement returns regularity, and that is the power of love – ‘Love makes of thought a power, which is why love alone, and not faith, bears the force of salvation.’86 The force referred to in this instance is the power or the faculty that will is. Will as the power of the Maker in its vow of Truth is not clarified in man. It is, rather, a confused power. Will is confused in the affinities of the body, the tastes of the palette, and the logical ordering of matter by the mind. Often, when man imagines that he wills something he is led in the direction of desires which are speeding away from Truth; even in those instances where man wills something ‘evil’ the power deployed, which can make an adherent of him to the thing such that there is regularity, is still will. Will finds its full release only when man is capable of recognizing and at the same time willing Truth. The soul, where lies will, is the faculty that is available to man in proportion to his discipline; the mind and the body are to be prepared according to the rules of good conduct, such that in their slowness the soul reveals its own speed, understood as Godspeed or progress to Truth: If your bodies are not strong your minds would also be affected and when your minds are affected you cannot have a knowledge of God and your duty. You cannot have the will power to control yourself, you lose your vigour and energy and you become weak and slow.87

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That is, one must prepare all faculties in order to be a recipient of Truth. Gandhi knew well that merely willing something does not bring it about – the effectivity of a will is empty without the mechanics of the will. That is, man as a technaton must constitute the mechanics according to his will – ‘It seems to me that even if we have the will, we have neither the means nor yet the capacity for managing such an open armed revolution.’88 Truth as that which is given to and by willing is non-violence or ahimsa in action. We can now glimpse the relation between resistance and non-violence.

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If all lambs voluntarily lay with the lion, the lion would be compelled to give up feasting upon lambs. M. K. Gandhi (‘Satyagraha in South Africa’, CWMG 29, p. 244) The iconicity of Gandhi for non-violence is never doubted – ‘Much of the twentieth-century interest in non-violence was inspired by Gandhi’s campaign to resist British rule over India and to build a nonviolent society.’1 He is also the figure of moral and political resistance. In his terms, only those who stand against the immoral through adherence to truth are the resisters. The relation between moral resistance and non-violence, to be understood as calypsology, was invented by him. However, one must hesitate before forging ahead with these terms which have a sense of complacency about them, a certitude peculiar to un-examined concepts. In recent political incidents across the world, protesters from what is called the left and from the far right have both claimed the status of non-violence. The meaning of non-violence in these instances pertains to the use of force in the events of protest. Yet, even a silent march to commemorate the invention of the automobile would be violent as per Gandhi; and, opposing a totalitarian regime through the use of arms would not be resistance. Even when we look in philosophy for resistance, the designation of this concept varies. Foucault’s remark ‘Where there is power, there is resistance, and yet, or rather consequently, this resistance is never in a position of exteriority in relation to power’ reveals the complexity to which any problematic of resistance should submit itself.2 We will engage with this remark with an eye towards the zone out of which this notion – resistance – takes a stand, which it obscures in the act of its appearance. It will be important to return to Foucault after finding

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this zone to understand his discovery of truth in the instance of truth telling as a moment of resistance, and its relation to truth for Gandhi, who wrote: Let no one doubt that the salvation of all the exploited peoples of the earth and, therefore, of the world, lies in the strictest reliance on the coin on whose one face is written ‘truth’ and on the other ‘non-violence’ in large letters.3

Foucault’s remark which begins with ‘where there is power’ acknowledges that power is not an omnipresent quality of being, but exists in the domain of human actions in so far as it has been constituted.4 The constituting of a system of power does not imply a template of power being implemented nor do the techniques of power remain specific to a system of power: the specific technique of surveillance through following someone can be deployed differently in distinct arrangements of power; for example when the fact of being followed is deliberately revealed it comes to be intimidation. Functional isolations and homologies characterize the construction of systems of power and their history is revealed by the Foucauldian archaeologist. Further, resistance for Foucault is coextensive with power.5 Power and resistance are the obverse and reverse of the same coin. This metaphysical commitment to a conception of power – the abilities constituted by a group of men to perform a specific group of functions together – where resistance is a logical complement distinguishes Foucault’s project from Gandhi’s hypophysics. The meaning of the necessary conjunction of power and resistance is clarified thus: ‘Resistance is never in a position of exteriority in relation to power.’6 Interiority and exteriority of relations refer to propositions which are either analytical or synthetic.7 In analytic propositions, such as ‘an unmarried man is a bachelor’, the two terms, unmarried man and bachelor, are internal to one another. Another way to see the internality of relations is to follow Foucault’s own emphases: first, where there is X there is Y, and second X is never without Y, or if X then always Y. In a synthetic proposition the terms remain external to the relation which holds them together and this implies the contingency of the proposition; in the example ‘this bag is yellow’, the terms ‘yellow’ and ‘bag’ are not in a relation of necessity, for a bag can be of any colour and yellow can be the colour of anything. The insistence on the interiority of relations separates Foucault’s works from Gilles Deleuze, his contemporary and a philosopher of power. In Dialogues, Deleuze asserted the exteriority of relations – that is the absence of necessity – across being to such an extent that the term being was not needed – ‘A and B’.8 We understand that the relation between resistance and power are internal to them or that one cannot be separated from the other. As we know, for Gandhi,

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internality of relation characterizes truth and non-violence: if we imitate Foucault’s diction, where there is truth there is non-violence and non-violence is never exterior to truth. The similarity of the form of the propositions does not imply that Gandhi and Foucault designate the same object; however, in this instance they designate the same terrain – the domain of meaningful action. They differ in the meaning conferred by each to the notion of resistance.

What is resistance? Resistance is not equal to passive resistance or the adherence to truth. Gandhi would even say that the resistance of the opponents enhances Satyagraha – ‘Indeed, it shines out most when the opponent resists. It is therefore irresistible.’9 We should note Gandhi’s not-so-usual use of the word resistance in this case; in our familiar use of this word the resister designates someone who stands for something widely agreed to be the good. Resistance is a hypophysical notion – resistance is good. Satyagraha, in so far as it requires resistance to perform a certain work for it, determines the resistance of the opponent as a component of its own system. In a more trivial example of passive resistance, when the passive resisters are beaten by the police the moral response of those who were bystanders would compel them to join the side of the passive resisters. That is to say, resistance of the opponents too is a morally good action since it performs a certain work for the passive resisters. In order to enter the domain of resistance, and proceed through it towards non-violence, we need to become intimate with this often confused idea, which in itself is not confusing. Resistance implies on a minimum that for a direction tended to by an object, a force, or a system, there exists the possibility of a force or system which can produce a relation with it in order to change that direction – it takes two to resist. When a body in motion comes against another static one, the resistance slows down the former. If it is impeded in its progress and is brought to a halt by this contact we would call it impedance rather than resistance;10 when a force or a system is not merely slowed down but brought to a halt there is neither the work of resistance nor that of the progress of that which is resisted. When we speak of resistance it is always a matter of degrees, on the one end is the total compliance or conductance, and on the other is resistance which impedes – the smooth surfaces of two bodies which allow a perfect slide on the one hand and on the other the striations on the two bodies which lock them against each other. Gandhi often used the notion of passive resistance as a force which brought impedance to its opponent, although not to itself – ‘The point is that when the

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law is pricked with the thorns of passive resistance, it loses all its force.’11 Indeed, knowing fully well this power inherent in passive resistance Gandhi could negotiate for distinct outcomes with his opponents – who were most often the colonial administration and the lower caste groups – through a regulation of the resistance. He rarely favoured the impedance of the other’s system even when it was within his reach. When resistance implies the slowing down of another force or system of forces we also assume that the same system can be augmented by that which it resists. In the case of electricity – a force which can be conducted and resisted – the same material which conducts can be modified in order to regulate electricity either through the changes in the temperature of the metal or through the changes in its thickness. In the case of a factory, the less workers there are in the factory during a strike the more the resistance. The factory system too resists a larger work force from entering it as the wage expenditure can eat into the profit and prevent the process of expansions through reinvestments: that is the conductance of capital. We can see that the worker’s body itself is the conductor of the laws of capitalism. In the same way the body of a citizen is the conductor of the legal system. Without these bodies which are capable of functional variations there is neither resistance nor conductance in society. Gandhi found the laws of conductance and resistance at work in all domains of nature and he did not conceive resistance as a special activity undertaken by men on rare occasions: Where trees are in abundance, rainfall too is abundant. The foliage in a forest attracts precipitation from clouds like milk from the udder of a cow. It is a law of nature that where there are no trees there is no rainfall and the land soon becomes a desert.12

That is, the impedance of the rain is brought by men cutting down trees in the forest and the same men can aid the conductance of the rain. Then, to resist implies that one holds the power of conductance. The limit of resistance is impedance. Is there a limit to conductance? Or what is pure conductance? Physics is concerned with the notion of pure conductance as that which takes place near absolute zero temperature, which also reveals the limit of physics as a discipline itself. In Gandhi’s hypophysics there is another zero which corresponds to the absolution of the very system which is pure conductance; this pure conductance cannot be offered to any force, such as the force of a man-made law, but only to the divine; it is the irresistance to the divine. Gandhi expressed this state of pure conductance and his desire for it as ‘I must reduce myself to zero’.13 Resistance and conductance are the two ends of every

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human; that is we are able to let that which we resist also be conducted through us. Gandhi acknowledged that animals too are capable of resistance as can be seen when they resist the will of men who train them. There is resistance in the ox when it refuses to pull the cart; the Himalayan oak tree resists the strong winds pulling at its branches; a boulder resists the floods. The word ‘resistance’ can designate almost everything if we define a thing as that which resists the external determinations of its regularity. In this sense the rock is in resistance even as the winds, waters, and temperature claw at it in order to lift grains away from it. The protozoan is in resistance as it holds out within its cell walls the consistency of its intracellular fluid against the environment. We will not be wrong in yielding to the temptation to state that existence is truly resistance. This is not merely due to the two words sharing the same root, the Latin ‘sistere’, which means to take a stand, and the PIE ‘*Sta’ which denotes ‘to make firm’; we can say that to take as stand is also to define one’s own place within the place of all other things and as that which thus stands in order to distinguish oneself from all other things which have taken their own stands. Existence, ex-sistere, refers to a standing out of, or standing out from; it can designate the standing out of each thing from the crowd of all things. The metaphysical complications with this word, ‘existence’, involve precisely that from out of which that which is in existence stands out, and, the relation this act of standing out of has to the meaning of the stand – the relation between essence and existence. Of course, this is further complicated by the use of this word to translate certain Greek words, including hyparkhein, and also the question whether the Greeks ever had a notion which corresponds to the term existence. For our task what concerns us is the difference in the meaning of these two words, resistance and existence – to stand out against and to stand out from. This meaning of resistance is often present in Nietzsche’s works. Nietzsche does not ‘see’ the true meaning of a word, but summons a problematic whose specific telos fills up the vacuum that surrounds words as they grow older and tired. In the case of resistance it is freedom which offers it orientation; we are to see resistances around us if we are to gain an experience of freedom which is measured ‘by the resistance which has to be overcome’.14 This conception of freedom as that which discovers resistances for itself is explained in Nietzsche’s theory of great epochs and great men – those who arrive already too old, already past, and hardened, which lets them make of themselves the scythe which rides through the indolent growths of a time. In this way Nietzsche would be the proper exterior of Gandhi’s hypophysics; here we understand the exterior as that which makes us experience in the hypophysical a certain vacuum, which sends a

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flutter to our lungs, and renders them into a sudden realization that there must be breath. In the expression ‘the object x1 stands out from the series x1, x2, x3 … ’, the ex-sistence of x1 indicates a certain indifference with respect to the other elements. Things stand out in an indifference which shares them; rocks would be of harsh surfaces if the wind were to stand out in indifference to it. On the other hand, when one says of things that they are resistances – that they take a stand and hold out against – a certain tendency to enter the place of the stand of another is revealed; that is, things as they are make firm their standing as they are each being-drawn – as in battle and love – to one another in such a way that no thing is safe from or abandoned by one another in indifference. Resistance is the ‘holding out against’, because each thing seeks to hold on to the place of another – resistance is the holding out of each thing in the reciprocal seizure of all things. Resistance designates the world as that which is the seizure of all things in love and battle. Of course, one never says of the wind that it loves the boulder as it sculpts it over thousands of years; nor do we say of the roots of the trees that they battle the earth and tear into its flesh with their roots. Resistance holds off the many specific resistances which prompted Derrida to speak about resistances rather than resistance in the context of psychoanalysis: ‘I desired the word “resistances”, exercising the basic caution of putting it in the plural so as to keep the exit doors clear.’15 Freud found that before repression can come to be what it is there must be resistance: ‘An excitation has to overcome a resistance, and … the diminution of resistance thus effected is what lays down a permanent trace of the excitation, that is a facilitation’ and thus, ‘Protection against stimuli is an almost more important function for the living organism than the reception of stimuli.’16 In the Clark lectures on psychoanalysis, Freud used as example the classroom where the lecture was taking place in order to explain ‘repression and of its necessary relation to resistance’ and the primacy of resistance. This example has a Gandhian resonance to it. Suppose, he said, that in the lecture hall a resistant participant made distracting noises and the strongest of Freud’s students removed this participant from the room after a struggle. Once he was removed, or his resistance had been repressed, there was still a chance that he might return to the hall. In order to prevent it ‘the gentlemen who have put my will into effect place their chairs up against the door and thus establish a “resistance” after the repression has been achieved’.17 That which is resisted attempts to return to the scene from which it was repressed with greater force. Gandhi’s description of the suffragettes explains it, ‘The more they are repressed, the more the resistance they offer.’18 The analogy between the classroom and the

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psyche – the conscious as the room where one speaks and the outside of the door as the unconscious where resistance distorts what has been repressed – reveals the psychoanalytic approach to the psyche as composed of resistances in love and battle. The allusion to love and battle will become clearer as we move on to consider violence. For now, this should open the question: what about the political category of resistance if resistance defines all things? Is there a special kind of resistance, a species of resistance? If there is such a species and it has its own place where all good men ought to stand, how do we come to it? We have come to use the word resistance morally, as that action which is against something we find unacceptable. Those we call ‘terrorists’ and ‘capitalists’ are not resisters. We rarely say of the state and the corporations that they are resisters. In fact, for Gandhi the state and the protesters of state policies are equally resisters.19 In this case we mean that there is a difference of scale – big and small – where that which is at the lower end or the good end, the smaller, alone resists. In other words, resistance is a scalological category in politics; resistance is value, as the good action. This may not be so with Gandhi’s hypophysics where the faculty of override resists nature and the truth of nature resists the falsity of speed. Gandhi defines it thus: ‘“Resistance” means determined opposition to anything.’20 Gandhi would demand that even he, the Mahatma, should be resisted; as he wrote to Madeleine Slade, ‘Resist me when you must.’21 That is, resistance is not yet a good thing for him; it is indifferent to good and evil as it is the work of both ends of the scalology – the quick and the slow. That resistance does not suggest directions makes it akin to vacuum in the Aristotlean sense as that which gives no orientations.22 Further, resistance is not a matter of a thing happening to be in the way of another indifferently, but an opposition with an end known in advance. However, we have already found that Gandhi holds a certain kind of resistance – passive resistance – to be good, and its kinsmen, the passive resisters, are the soldiers of the good.

Active and passive Active resistance, or armed resistance, increases the speed of the system constituted by itself and that which it resists. When a group of demonstrators come to face off with a militarized police force, they together constitute a system of reciprocal resistance; the demonstrators do have systemic properties of their own in being entwined with one another in their objectives, slogans,

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and methods; in the same way the police force too is a system with its own regularities which are confirmed through its training regimens. However, in coming face to face with one another, the groups constitute a system which in most situations is transitory like a storm system that develops over the coast. Once action is initiated, either through the firing of gas shell or of a Molotov cocktail, the behaviour of this new system makes of each other accidental causes of the development of the system – they are walls to each other on which the balls bounce off. Gandhi would state that it constitutes a speed machine; it is a machine that whirls faster till it is extinguished. Active or armed resistance is speeding or evil, irrespective of the merit of the resisters and their intentions. The West – the principality of speeding – and its administrators are also capable of resistance. However, ‘it will come to an end as soon as the British Government attempts to resist satyagraha’ or passive resistance.23 Passive resistance, or Satyagraha, is the last remaining in all battles of resistances: resisting passive resistance would bring the opponent to his end. That is, there are things which ought not to be resisted. The West is the resistance against the set speeds of nature and by East we are to understand that arrangement of life which resists the approach of the West – there is good resistance and bad resistance. A conflict is going on at present between the East and the West: A whirlwind from the West has overwhelmed us. Either we shall be swept away in it or we may resist it firmly and turn it back. The name of that whirlwind is ‘materialism’ or the ‘ism’ which looks upon money as its God. If we do not resist it but are lured into aping its ways, we shall become materialists, shall look upon money as our God and so perish.24

Passive resistance is the good already at work in nature and it can be defined for political action as holding fast to truth, Satyagraha, or ‘“passive resistance” as firmness in a good cause.’25 Now, this can be misleading, for when someone appears to perform passive resistance against an opponent it might as well be active. Passive resistance is not a technique one deploys from among the armouries of political instruments. In fact, as early as 1907 Gandhi rejected all technical determinations of passive resistance. When it was suggested that passive resistance can be translated as a counter measure or pratyupaya Gandhi was astonished: ‘Pratyupaya means counter-measure. Opposing good to evil will then be pratyupaya, but so will be the use of force to solve a problem.’26 Thinking of passive resistance as a means misleads us from the unity of means and ends

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achieved through calypsology to the polynomia which misleads man. Passive resistance is not an instrument but a man adhering to Truth in each moment of his life, which sets this man outside the conventions and legal systems of a society – ‘The disobedient actually upholds a higher law.’27 Yet, it is possible for the state to feel threatened by such men and their apparent resistance, which in fact is their lives conforming to the laws of nature: I am perfectly aware of the danger to good government, in a country inhabited by many races unequally developed, in an honest citizen advising resistance to a law of the land. But I refuse to believe in the infallibility of legislators.28

Implicit in this statement is the threat delivered to the rulers. If the legislators fail, many suffer, and if the passive resisters are wrong in their understanding of the particular occasion which called for resistance they alone suffer. Their suffering, though, is permanent since passive resistance is not an instrument called upon when there is a corresponding problem. Further, the usual sense of resistance does not apply in the case of the passive resisters – ‘It is respectfully submitted that there can be no notion of resistance, as the word is ordinarily understood, in a body of men undergoing personal suffering.’29 We will learn that a hypophysics of irresistance is the end of the training of the passive resister. In another sense, passive resistance is the permanent state of men who adhere to the Law that is Truth, resisting the laws of men, or the reign of the West.30 At the same time we should bear in mind that passive resisters are men who train in order to bring within their individual selves and in their gathering a functional isolation: the function of adhering to the God-made laws against those made by man. Passive resisters are men who become the defenders of Truth against the occidental forces through functional isolation. There are two ways in which Gandhi uses ‘resistance’: as the opposition of men to one another, including the drawing of lines of demarcation by the passive resisters as the Western whirlwind howls from close by – ‘I have no manner of doubt that the victory of man lies in that resistance’,31 and as the non-opposition to the laws of nature, or irresistance to Truth. The deliberate mixing of these two meanings let him make cocktails more lethal than Molotovs in politics. This is also due to a subtler intuition of the function of resistance in politics. Resistance creates something else as it works, which can be put to work, just as when electricity passes through the wires it makes heat, which can perform work only so long as one knows how to set up the system which can receive this heat, such as electric heaters. In liberal democratic systems the absence of any resistance might be the real threat to the state; a liberal state without protests would appear

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to an observer to be identical to a totalitarian state. In this case resistance confers legitimacy. When protesters resist the police force with weapons, it makes a case for the militarization of the police.

Conductance, irresistance, and resistance The conductance of power, in the sense in which Foucault uses the concept, also requires that there is resistance. Foucault’s theory of power is a descendent of the relation between Being and Dasein in early Heidegger: Dasein is that which conducts and resists the giving of Being, across the difference between Being and beings – the shepherding – so that there are worlds; the conductance and the resistance correspond to the meaning of Being so long as this meaning is not a well-determined concept but a question; it has to be a question since the difference between Being and beings – that which Dasein conducts and resists – is unlike the difference between things.32 For Foucault, the conductance of the difference of Being is archived in the systems of power, which allows him to assert that it is power that is conducted. Power in itself is not a quantity which is released according to appropriate measures, although this metaphor is used in political conversations – ‘the excesses of power’. Power is the system of regularities which draw functional isolates from out of the polynomia that characterizes the social body, where the social body and the system of regularities resist one another in such a way that together they form a self-regulating system: ‘The exercise of power is a “conduct of conducts” and a management of possibilities.’33 It is another way of stating that there is nothing outside power, if power is determined as the forms of regularity which direct the conduct of everyone in such a way that the regulation of polynomia – ‘the equivocal nature of the term “conduct”’34 – leaves no conditions outside it for the realization of dreams. Foucault never accepted the theories of power which located it in a reservoir which was released in order to determine regularities on those who would have otherwise remained outside of any regularities: ‘Power is not exercised simply as an obligation or a prohibition on those who “do not have it”.’35 The myth of the existence of human groups outside regularities had come to be the necessary origin of theories of politics. However, Foucault showed through his archaeology that all that we can find in the past are the residues and survivors of forms and regularities, and at times their truths left behind for the archaeologist. Truths are to be understood as the functional isolations which have extensions across a social system re-produced through training – ‘Truth is a thing of this world; it is produced only

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by virtue of multiple forms of constraint.’36 As we know, the passive resister offers the maximum irresistance, which is also non-conductance; a man surrendering to the suffering of his own making cannot be made to work the cogs of machines. Instead, it can be seen that the powers to conduct an order – ‘fetch the water’ – in a man implies the power to resist, which is to be understood as the ability to perform variable functions, including the power to fetch nothing. Power, in Foucault’s system, is the form of regularities which seize men and it relies on the faculties in the individuals to discard and receive forms. That is to say, power presupposes polynomia. We found that polynomia is experienced as the resistance to specific regularities in language, body, and knowledge due to the restlessness given by the awareness that there are other regularities and legislations awaiting. Power is the peculiar awareness that there is always some form of regularity within which the dreams of the other forms are to be hosted. Polynomia implies two directions at the same time: that there can be many regularities shows that a particular form of regularity and a body, or a body of people, can seize one another reciprocally and endure this seizure, which can be called the conductance of power; it also implies that there is no form which is secure from the dreams of other forms of regularities which are always at work in that which is in seizure, and this can be called resistance to power. The subjection to power manifests in the regularities and these regularities are effected through functional isolation in a group of men, such as the coded behaviour which continues from schools, military barracks, and the prison cells. Further, following Althusser, we can see that it involves the reproduction of the conditions of the regularities – ‘the existence of the necessity of the material conditions of production’.37 Resistance too implies a certain functional isolation; a group of ‘resistors’ singing the same songs, chanting the same slogans and marching at equal pace isolate the function of protest within their gathered body. However, resistance in politics often implies a certain transitory regularity which is to be sustained until the demands for accommodation within the same system of power which it resists are met – for instance, ‘We have to assemble on the city square everyday in the morning until they call us in for negotiations.’ Resistance appears as an interruption of the evenness of the system which it resists, a fever of the season which must pass once the body completes its negotiations. In terms of Gandhi’s hypophysics, polynomia itself – which sends the worst dreams against which one must cultivate the ‘determination to resist all Satan’s temptations’ – calls for the greatest resistance, or irresistance. Irresistance is the powerlessness to either conduct or resist Being; the powerlessness, the absolute poverty of man, which has nothing left to offer back to ‘Satan’s temptations’. One

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becomes irresistant through a specific functional isolation; the training of the passive resister makes of his body an island which does not conduct the laws of man, but only those of nature. Irresistance is the isolation of man within the end of nature to make of him the passive resister. In this moment we have to note the difference between Gandhian irresistance and the usual conceptions of resistance in political activity. Resistance in the usual sense does not challenge the system of power – which might be misconceived as revolutionary and whose logistics are different from those of resistance – and instead it seeks to find better accommodation within it, in so far as the conductance of power does not involve an imminent transition of form. In these cases the most preferable resistance is passive, as a strategy among the others including armed resistance – ‘Then passive resistance [would be] a preparation for active and armed resistance.’38 Passive resistance is strategically preferable when the system of regularities can be tolerant to the coefficients of resistance and conductance; one would not want to bring down the factory which is willing to increase the pay and the working hours simultaneously. However, Gandhi’s Satyagrahi is not an opportunistic passive resister. Gandhian passive resistance adheres to the Truth that is nature in such a way that it surreptitiously imagines and develops a counter-system with its own telos against the systems of man-made laws; it is the parting of the world in preparation.

Violence and the non We found that resistance is not a terrible thing from any point of view. In an automobile the frictional resistance of the rubber against the road allows it to gain traction, which in turn allows manoeuvring and braking. Resistance in politics lets the system regulate the speed of its own reproduction; protests on a few Sundays are good for the self-presentation of a liberal political arrangement. That the conductance of active forces relies on resistance was known to Gandhi. In this case, resistance from two different directions ensures the conductance; polynomia ensures the modification of bodies for new regularities which resist and break through the established functional isolations, and functional isolations which set into the rhythms of new regularities resist the dreams of polynomia. We had also found that resistance as the meaning of the ‘each’ in ‘each thing’ – the holding out of each thing towards and against one another – implies the pre-formal games between things which we grasp through polynomia and functional isolations. We find resistance – as one of the disjunctive attributes of

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power, along with conductance, and as the holding out against one another of all things – dividing into violent and non-violent. Richard Bessel considers violence to be an epistemological challenge: ‘Violence is not a constant, nor are perceptions of violence.’39 When is violence? When the heart leaps as a bird feigns a fall? When a lion kills a cub? Is it in the temperament of a horse when a rider falls off it? Is it in the mouth of the cow as it chews on grass? Would it be violent to till the soil cracked by the summer sun? When a man hits back at the mob lynching him as a final stand? Is it in the harsh words spoken by an elder to a truant child? Is it in the wind which took down the oldest tree in the garden? When an empire falls40 into the abyss of its own making to leave only a few signs for those who come after to interpret? It appears that violence is everywhere, in everything we see and do – ‘The term violence is used in many ways.’41 Violence is perhaps the definitive and at the same time the most confused42 notion in politics – ‘the line between “violent” and “nonviolent” can be indeterminate’.43 Gandhi’s contribution to political thinking is that he could approach this notion at its closest without fear and bring back the implication of accepting it ‘as it is’ into his writings and his politics. It is in him that we find the law of violence, though Steven Pinker denies it: ‘There is no Law of Conservation of Violence.’44 For now we can note one of the proportional articulations to be found in Gandhi: as the distance to Truth increases so does violence, without ever reaching an absolute limit. That is, violence as the resultant of the orders of man can never reach its own absolute, that liminal zone in which it would be resolved, since the absolution of man is held in the divine principality of Truth tended to by the passive resister, who is almost irresistant, and hence outside violence. There is no ‘deliberate violence’ in nature according to Gandhi’s hypophysics. It is not in the nature of the animal, even when it shocks us the most, to commit acts of deliberated violence. However, the terror which holds men still as they watch an animal being eaten alive by another is not the error in man, but it is his nature to observe violence in acts of nature. If men were not shaken by the horrors in nature they would commit the same which would be abhorrent to the nature of man; we observe the lions in battle as we say to ourselves ‘the lions commit no wrong in this act but it is not in our nature’. Violence can be distinguished in many ways, including in terms of the faculties and speed. Ordinary violence is that which increases the span between the mind and the body; in consuming food delivered in cans, men speed away from the bodies which worked in order to produce it, and hence from their own bodies. For Gandhi, the urban children who think of meat as something produced from a factory the way biscuits are manufactured would be an instance of such

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ordinary violence. Great violence, on the other hand, takes a particular scheme of speed to its limit without interim regulations of conductance and resistance; an earthquake and the carpet bombing of a town are equally great violences. For Gandhi, resistance in politics, which secures adjustments of wages and new rights, would be ordinary violences, since they prolong the great violence towards which the system – which is that of Western civilization for him – is proceeding necessarily: ‘Modern civilization – a civilization based on violence of the blackest type, largely a negation of the Divine in man, and which is rushing headlong to its own ruin.’45 Violence is also distinguished on the basis of character. When a soldier performs the act of killing another man in battle it can be termed brave, while the performance of the same act by the same man at home would be cowardly. There is the violence of the brave and that of the cowards: If four or five men enter into a fight and die by the sword, there is violence in it but it is the violence of the brave. But when ten thousand armed men attack a village of unarmed people and slaughter them along with their wives and children it is the violence of cowards.46

Hence, Gandhi would demand of his passive resisters to first cultivate courage in their hearts, for Satyagraha is not the politics of cowards. It might even be that the Satyagrahi is the climax in the progress of man from the fearful preyed animal wielding sticks in the bushes to that animal which has come to master irresistance. This view of the history of man is complicated by the common perception that humans have become more violent and cruel due to the capabilities which they have acquired for destruction through the devices of modern civilization, especially the atom bomb.47 There are ways to find a sense of progress in the history of each object. In the case of man it can be the number of men killed per annum through human action. It can also be the number of constituencies won for passive resistance. This can also be achieved through a quantifiable notion of the ill-defined term ‘violence’; if someone finds violence to increase then our history is of a decline and if someone finds it to decrease it can be of progress.48 Gandhi sees in history the signs of the progress of Truth, or non-violence, which is the same thing – ‘All these are signs of progressive ahimsa and diminishing himsa. Had it been otherwise, the human species should have been extinct by now, even as many of the lower species have disappeared.’49 After several years, Nelson Mandela, who acknowledged his descent from Gandhi in his methods wrote in his foreword to World Report on Violence and Health that his sense of history was one of decline: ‘The twentieth century will

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be remembered as a century marked by violence. It burdens us with its legacy of mass destruction, of violence inflicted on a scale never seen and never possible before in human history.’50 Recently, Steven Pinker asserted that we are living in the most peaceful moment of the history of ‘our species’, which might, in a way unforeseen by him, align him with Gandhi.51 In Arendt, there is to be found a caution against the certainties one finds between the terms history, progress and violence and she ‘must warn against the tempting misunderstanding’ that the even working of history is interrupted by ‘violence’ alone.52 These indices and graphs of the ascent and descent of violence in our history tell us little about what violence is. Unless we know the scale we cannot produce a scalology of violence; unless we know the quality we cannot determine the hypophysical conditions in which it is given to experience. This impediment prevents us from ever setting up an adequate problematic to ask questions to and about violence. Bessel noted this early on in his book on violence, ‘What may be perceived as threatening or violent behaviour to one person may not be so to another … . Thus violence becomes that which is violence in the eye, or ear, of the beholder.’53 Gandhi himself found that violence appears in the most unexpected of places, far away from the political arena where most are content to set it as the speciation of resistance into violent and non-violent. Gandhi’s passive resister is not an operator in that field, instead he seeks to train within himself an adequate repulsion of violence in all its forms such that he comes to be ‘Zero’, where Truth settles in for a moment. For such passive resisters, violence comes to be manifest in all the actions of man and they call for his surrender to Truth, and often impossible suffering. Even a great soul such as Gandhi’s could not deflect this suffering: Living in the midst of the rush, we may not be able to shake ourselves free from all taint. Every time I get into a railway car, use a motor-bus, I know that I am doing violence to my sense of what is right. I do not fear the logical result on that basis. The visiting of England is bad, and any communication between South Africa and India by means of Ocean’s grey-hounds is also bad, and so on.54

Violence is everywhere. Often, the choices given to man force him to choose one kind of violence over another. The forcing of this choice upon him by the resistance of all things does not by any means save him from the judgement of which he knows through calypsology; man as the resident lover of Calypso, who has been given ends exogenous to the means which surrounded him, like the sea which tempted Odysseus, is led to seek the perfect immurement which will release him from the forcing of violences upon him.

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The violence of being It is important to become intimate with the violences lying hidden before us. As we know violence is no longer a juridical subject such as when someone breaks the law by assaulting a stranger on the street. According to the WHO report of 2002, it has entered all domains of life surreptitiously in recent years, which might also call for the intervention of the juridical system into every pore of the social body: ‘While violence traditionally has been the domain of the criminal justice system, the report strongly makes the case for involving all sectors of society in prevention efforts.’55 Gandhi’s own observations in this regard were anticipating these developments, this insinuation of violence into all the regularities of man, as though being itself were violence. Today, the vigilant observers reporting the alien presence of violence in newer locations and the legal system is apprehending it through incessant control measures. This process will not come to rest until the violence in the ‘violence spotting’ and ‘violence catching’ are themselves terminated – ‘I smell mental violence even from here.’56 There can be violence in the way one conducts oneself in a meeting of passive resisters. The use of language in order to assert the position either through forceful reasoning or through emotions can cause harm, and hence ‘there should be no unrestrained or violent language’.57 The violence of language is marked by its origin in the quickening of the distance between the mind and the body; the worst violences ride unbeknownst to us in thoughts as the faculties of the mind race – ‘We can succeed beyond all expectation only if we remain nonviolent in thought, word and deed.’58 The distance between the three – thought, word, and deed – are the symptoms of speeding, which is primary violence and the diminishing of illumination given by the candle of the soul. The observance of this rule is strict as even words have been known to kill men, ‘Don’t forget that the sword alone does not kill, but words can do the same. You should be violent neither in deeds nor even in words.’59 Violence of the words was admitted by Hannah Arendt as well, although she maintained a certain complicated distance from Gandhi, when she wrote ‘there stands a large minority of the Negro community behind the verbal or actual violence of the black students’.60 The term ‘violence’ is in the making of a theatre of judgement encompassing all, which has exceeded in its powers beyond the ranges of the individual and the population as was conceived by Foucault; ‘violence’ has no boundaries. Gandhi taught the lessons of hidden violences through the example of writing in a bad hand – ‘I hope you do understand that we commit violence in writing to anyone in a bad hand.’61 Writing a letter to someone by hand has become a

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distant experience with the easy mechanical writing and digital transmission through computational networks. However, in a letter written by hand there is an obligation to read it, and when one is thus obliged the illegible hand forces an overload on the mind. Writing with a device which causes the overload too is a sin, even when the handwriting is excellent – ‘Your handwriting is so good that I excuse you for writing in pencil. Otherwise writing in pencil is uncivilized. It is violence.’62 The lesson in violence is incomplete without the force of choices which are equally violent. If a man cannot find pens to write his letters in his prison cell and he is responsible for the affairs of others to whom he must communicate; then the choice is upon him to either commit the violence of the pencil or to commit the violence of non-communication. Hence, Gandhi advised that ‘of course, when writing with a pencil cannot be avoided, one is helpless’.63 The social accommodation of a bad hand is through the notion of courtesy. Discourtesy is a species of violent actions which are tolerated to a certain degree by society. Its violence might be accommodated by society but for a passive resister such an act should never have its origin in him – ‘Discourtesy in every form is violence.’64 A sense of violence is hidden within the practice and the notion of courtesy, namely that it is violence when someone is obliged to receive the action of another and this act causes hurt – ‘Anything which causes unnecessary pain to our neighbour or to any living creature is nothing but violence.’65 Then, social norms and regulations hide and accommodate several forms of violence which are being unravelled at an accelerating rate nearly a century since Gandhi discovered them. But we have also learnt a certain law concerning violence, that the causing of ‘unnecessary pain’ to any being capable of receiving pain is violence. There are two components to this law: that there are necessary and unnecessary pains, where the concept which determines necessity will be arrived at later, and that violence excludes the non-living, although we do speak of violence when men explode rocks to make a road. We should note that the problem of a bad hand can be set aside by adopting technological means which produce a uniform hand – a hand that is familiar to all by being nobody’s hand, letters which look as if they were all written by the same hand. But this too would be an instance of a special kind of violence; when one adopts a machine which removes the signature of the body from the paper there is violence in it, as it causes the speeding of writing. In the choice between the two, the toil one makes with one’s own hand is preferred. In the knowledge that a particular act may imply violence a man is released from one kind of violence to another – from the violence of ignorance to the violence of deliberation. The violence of ignorance66 is found across all

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that is living, although nature is free of the violence of deliberation. When small children act cruelly to animals, they are violent ignorantly and when the knowledge of this violence is brought to them by their elders the weight of the guilt which sinks into them is the terror of deliberation. That there is nothing that is innocent if it has come alive, is the most painful realization, which does not let off even the vegetarians, with their moral superiority, from deliberate violence; violence is committed by the meat eaters and ‘those who eat vegetables’.67 Now, is the cow grazing in the field guilty of violence? It is and it is not: in so far as violence of deliberation is concerned the cow is innocent the way Nietzsche’s cows stood in the fields without the weight of history; but their grazing is still guilty of violence of ignorance – ‘This kind of violence is inherent in all embodied life, therefore, in man too. It is in this condition, and in spite of it, that we have to practise nonviolence as a duty.’68 The animal which is without the faculty of deliberation is surrendered to its own milieu of speed, as is an eagle even as it hunts. We can now define violence in its narrow connotation. The wilful, wanton or arbitrary destruction of any living organism even smaller than an insect, is violence; not wishing, committing or abetting it is non-violence.69

However, with the knowledge of speed man can exceed his own milieus of speed and create milieus unknown in nature – man is the only animal which can invent violence. Civilization is the system of reproduction of the ideal condition for the invention of violences. Deliberate violence is at its worst when it is committed in order to prevent an act of violence; it is guilty of the moral superiority enjoyed by the enforcer with his eyes deliberately averted from the fact of life that ‘violence is inherent in all embodied life’. Such deliberate violence in the name of morality is possible only for man: Then man who coerces another not to eat fish commits more violence than he who eats it. Fishermen, fish-vendors and fish-eaters are probably unaware of any violence in their action. Even if they were, they might look upon it as unavoidable. But the man who uses coercion is guilty of deliberate violence. Coercion is inhuman.70

The coercion and enforcement of moral rules upon other men is a very human capability; that which can only be performed by man can be avoided only by him: ‘Often does good come out of evil. But that is God’s plan, not man’s plan. Man knows that only evil can come out of evil, as good out of good.’71 In terms of the conceptual pair of resistance and conductance it can be said that man is

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capable of conducting the very same thing which he can resist. The inhuman concerns all those actions which can be performed by man alone, which he can also desist from performing.

The hypophysics of force Yet, we are not certain if we have understood what violence is. The conception of resistance reveals the holding out of each thing against all else; the holding out of things is already violence in the sense of non-deliberate violence – a storm cannot help but to blow through the lives under it, and the curious dog chasing the noisy bird in the garden does not know that it is being violent. Hence, it is with deliberation and the guilt of deliberation, which is available to those who can still hear their soul speak, that violence appears. The perception of violence, thoughts of violence, deliberation, and guilt are the marks of the animal which was created so that he may know his maker. Being capable of knowing speeds and changing the milieus of speeds, this animal is also capable of inaction and irresistance. The political notion of violence is secondary, which concerns resistance as a prelude to a negotiation where violent and non-violent are modalities. What distinguishes Gandhi from the political theorists and actors of non-violent resistance is that while appearing to be one of their kind he was working towards the end of all violences unbeknownst to them; this equivocity, which we found in our discussion of law – the passive resister conforms to a greater law while laying himself for punishment before man-made laws – allowed Gandhi to enter and leave the political domain like an otherworldly being. If we approach the notion of violence through law we find that violence is related to the violation of a law, although the violation of all laws may not be termed violent. We will not term the violation of the laws of a football match violent. However, when the crowd gathered to watch the game ceremonially violates the laws at the end by smashing beer bottles we find violence. The active resister who uses arms to counter the laws he finds immoral commits violence, according to Gandhi, despite his good intentions: Violent resistance is itself non-co-operation, and it is immoral because of its violence. It becomes moral when it is non-violent. Non-co-operation with evil is a sacred duty. It is essentially spiritual because of its non-violent character.72

Resistance to an unjust law does not make any measures to counter it morally correct; non-violent resistance is superior to active resistance due to the

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commitment of the passive resister to non-violence at all times, where he conducts himself in accordance with the Laws of the Maker. Conductance of the Laws of the Maker is resistance to the laws of man, and in that sense the passive resister is in ‘non-co-operation with evil’. But why do we find it necessary to refer to law in order to derive a concept of non-violence? What more is there to the relation between non-violence and law when violence is the violation of a law? Would that not make non-violence the compliance with any law, merely the submission of oneself to the hypostasis of anything which comes one’s way? Then, non-violence would essentially be yielding at all times. But we found that yielding to the animal laws which govern man brings him into conflict with the spiritual laws, and the choice is always towards the spiritual, or in the direction of the Maker – ‘Man as animal is violent, but as spirit is nonviolent. The moment he awakes to the spirit within he cannot remain violent. Either he progresses towards ahimsa or rushes to his doom.’73 The Maker’s laws are unyielding when we attempt a determination of them to obtain a set of simple rules – ‘Non-violence is an asbtruse science.’74 For now let us recall that a law defines a regularity. Then the violation of a law is either the interruption of a regularity or the constitution of a new regularity. In this sense there is no violence in nature as its laws are inviolable – ‘Even a rebel has to submit to the laws of nature.’ A man may violate the rules of syntax to create poetic expression but nobody can violate rules of thought which found the relation between mathematical objects. Gandhi acknowledged that there are inviolables which are indifferent to the opposition between violent and non-violent. The inviolables are akin to necessary truth in the Leibnizian system; the rule that A = A cannot be violated even by the Maker. For Gandhi’s hypophysics, the ‘inviolables’ refer to a group of regularities that are indifferent to the laws of morality; and in so far as the passive resister is indifferent to them such inviolables can pose no threat to his conduct. We found in our discussion on speed that such inviolables can aid in the construction of objects which violate the laws of speed; an airplane is constructed through differential equations and geometry. It shows that it is man who can or cannot deploy the inviolables for uses which are violent. It appears now that the laws with which we are concerned are violable and the regularities constituted by them serve either good or evil. There are other conceptions of violence which hold very similar positions, especially Walter Benjamin – who is a progeny of Gandhi – for whom the arrival of divine order is awaited by each human ordering which is in principle unjust; or in Gandhi’s terms, all human action is tainted by violence. Gandhi and Benjamin agree on the hypophysics of human orders, and yet differ on the method of their

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violation in order to institute justice, which is the same thing as a moment of moral order. Further, Gandhi and Benjamin would also disagree on the position that violence is a means to intervene in a legal order. The very distinction between means and ends would be the violation of the principle of calypsology. To think in terms of ‘means and ends’ in any situation is a violation, and an incision, of Truth. Benjamin finds that ‘all violence, seen as means, is either law establishing or law upholding’.75 Violence works at the enforcement of regularities in a given legal order for Benjamin; we found earlier that this conception of regularities as something sustained by violence is opposed by Foucault and Gandhi, each in his own way. Foucault maintains that the polynomia which characterizes inventions – the perfected form of which is civilization for Gandhi – are the essence of power, which is different from the imagination which sees a set of laws and their constant implementation through violence: A relationship of violence acts upon a body or upon things; it forces, it bends, it breaks, it destroys, or it closes off all possibilities … . A power relationship, on the other hand, can only be articulated on the basis of two elements that are indispensable if it is really to be a power relationship: that ‘the other’ (the one over whom power is exercised) is recognised and maintained to the very end as subject who acts; and that, faced with a relationship of power, a whole field of responses, reactions, results, and possible inventions may open up.76

The distinction which emerges between Foucault and Benjamin is important to understand Gandhi. For Foucault the conductance of power, which entails resistance, determines the social body in such a way that the social body invests itself in the forms of regularities in order to reproduce itself; the forms of regularities reveal themselves as the condition under which alone an experience of possibilities is available so that conforming to it subjects and subjective inventions are given. Whereas, for Benjamin the regularities of power are the interests of only the few who reproduce it on those outside it through the exercise of violence. The violence that institutes a legal order works from two directions, the interruption of an existing regularity and the institution of a new one. Between these two moments violence changes qualitatively from the disruptive force to that of a suppositive force.77 Against these two secular forms of violence Benjamin places divine violence. Divine violence remains undefined in Benjamin’s essay, rather, the efforts of style have been to allude and evade. However, its form is manifest in those moments in the essay where the problematic reaches critical limits. At these limits we learn of three theses concerning violence. Secular violence is always in a relation with law; either as

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the law which leads one to destroy the orders of another, or as the law which presents its regularity through violence. The law is the ‘that for which’ and the ‘in the name of which’ of the exercise of violence. The first thesis is: man-made laws are unjust and hence violence co-exists necessarily with them. The second thesis which follows from it is: violence will exist as long as there is law. Divine is the violence which comes to set men free from the regularities which are produced through violence. Divine violence is independent of law, and for that reason it is the most irregular and is rarely revealed to mortals – ‘the expiating force of violence is not obvious so far as humanity is concerned’.78 Gandhi would have called it an instance of the ‘abstruse science’ of hypophysics. The third thesis is: divine violence is the irruption of the irregular where everything is given over to equal chance in the absence of regularities. In Gandhi’s terms divine violence is that which would render man zero so that he is closest to the Maker, or as Gandhi’s progeny, Benjamin said ‘Let divine violence … be called the disposing kind.’79 Arendt’s distinctions between the notions of power, strength, force, and violence were meant to prevent the permeation of ‘violence’ into all domains including that of history and also to warn against its absolution. For her, power refers to polynomia which allows the constitution of distinct regularities in such a way that men play together like the notes in a concert, as if they were one work; the discovery of homologies in such a concert – such as the possibilities for other resolutions in a piece of music – and determining them under new laws would be progress. Strength for Arendt is the inherent homologies in an individual which are resistant to the laws of the many; for example the Kantian genius comes to be the appearance of the irregular under the existing laws, or he will be an event against the occurrences in Arendt’s terms – ‘Events, by definition, are occurrences that interrupt routine processes and routines procedures.’80 Genius is interruption, or in Gandhi’s terms, strength belongs to the deviant who is capable of speeding up the evenness of the Maker’s world. Violence for Arendt is defined by instruments: ‘Violence – as distinct from power, force, or strength  – always needs implements.’81 Rather, that force which is mediated by instruments is violent, which can also be ‘verbal’ for her. Instrumentation is the criteria according to which the history of warfare is determined, which has already reached its critical limit with nuclear weapons. Violence in other words is the interruption – since ‘it is close to strength’ – through a specific instrumentation which cannot constitute regularities. For this reason violence as the instrumentalized interrupt which petrifies polynomia is opposed to power as that which holds its regularity without instruments – ‘Power and violence are

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opposites … to speak of nonviolent power is redundant.’82 She would have been closer to Gandhi, who identified violence with the invention of all instruments, including vaccines, except for her rejection of the notion that history is itself violent. Whereas for Gandhi all implements are violent, for Arendt there is still a distinction between ‘good’ implements and ‘bad’ implements, and the latter defines violence, even when the implement is a word. We are closer to the sense of violence as we learn that it is the laws of man that are violent. The laws which men helplessly institute in order to find regularities in order to prevent what would be called violence invent violence through these very laws, and their implementation itself is violent. For example the state appropriates violence through the responsibility of providing rule of law and thus reproduces the violence it seeks to remove in the police force. Outside of the law – whether it be the creation of a new order of law or that of maintaining an existing one – violence as a term barely makes sense. Benjamin found that the violence untainted by law, or pure violence, need not have an epistemology – ‘it is neither equally possible nor equally urgent for humanity to decide when in a specific instance pure violence was real’.83 Then we might as well call the violence which is pure of the law, or free of human taint, force. Force is that which is capable of intervening in the speed of another, or that which can either disrupt a regularity or institute a new one. That is, violence is force when we remove the notions that make it either legitimate or illegitimate, moral or immoral. We can define violence now: violence is the moralization of force. It is a hypophysical concept in all the instances in which it is found – whether in Gandhi or Benjamin – where a force is termed either divinely impermissible, criminal, or immoral. Without moral evaluation of forces and a course of action towards bringing these forces under permissible social orders there is no conception of violence possible. The hypophysics of violence is presupposed by the legal system which legitimizes its own use of force – the good force – as that which curbs violence – the bad force. The term violence in a looser schema denotes the availability of good forces and bad forces at all times when forces are exercised. If we take the schema of this hypophysical notion to its limit as Gandhi did, then we find that forces are at work everywhere in nature, and that forces – that which make a difference in the speed of another – are essentially bad; nature is violent, except that this use of force is not deliberate. The value which is coextensive with force allows us to derive degrees of it. There are greater and minor violences to be found; the profanities whispered among friends would be minor in relation to a man shouting obscenities at the passers-by from his balcony. Non-violence begins with the practice of force under the awareness of the moral value which

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all forces are, just as we found that nature itself is value. Non-violent actions do not provide its practitioner with levity. They are burdened by the problem that man can never have perfect knowledge of the effects of forces which are deployed by him, and that one is always choosing among forces, or violences. Then non-violent are actions located in the good end of the scale of forces. The height of humanity for Gandhi would be its ability to find violence in all the pores of its being and discover in the scale of forces the zone of the good if there are still forces left to access; this species would then find that living is violent, and a minimal living which consists in not killing another is the perfect village life for the minimal passive resister animal. In a way, this had been the history of the human species in the last hundred years – the discoveries and inventions of violences, and then a confused march – always marches – through confused articulations towards a ‘zero’ which remains obscure.

9

Critical Nation

In order to destroy, it is necessary to have a strong desire to do so. We shall be ready to destroy when our ideas have changed. M. K. Gandhi (CWMG 20, p. 413) Gandhi’s critical nation is the final home of the most anti-political project, which is for Arendt is death – ‘Death, whether faced in actual dying or in the inner awareness of one’s own mortality, is perhaps the most antipolitical experience there is.’1 The question answered by Gandhi’s critical nation is: Is the world well done? Be it a slab of beef or the world, it must obey the Law: ‘It is a law of nature that when a thing is not done well, it is ill done.’2 To do well for the world which has been ill done is the mission of the passive resister – ‘It is my duty to try, till my last breath, to save India and through it the world from such a fate.’3 The road to critical nation – the ultimate state of mankind outlined in Hind Swaraj – is rather straight, it may even be straighter than ‘Euclid’s line’. It is perhaps the most terrifying thought in our history, which can also be called the critical line separating philosophy as the exploration of polynomia and homology from hypophysics as the work of calypsology, the world as the invitation of unknowable spans from postcolonialism as a containment, and politics as the fight for freedom from the theological as the immurement of man into Truth. The horror of this project is such that we had been partying with its components – the little moralities and the peace flags with Gandhi’s face on them – while its desire to annul the human animal was rarely spoken of. In Maurice Blanchot’s words, ‘Ahimsa requires the being itself to be annihilated, “to be reduced to zero”, and begins by withdrawing all form and nearly all reality from what must “be identified with all that is living”.’4 We had been nearing the criticality of Gandhi’s system all along, but to even think the terror of the critical we have needed to approach it from its blindspots; instead of meandering between the set pieces of the Great Soul we have

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tarried along the edges of his eyes. We have built the counter-machines of sight – concepts – so that we are not caught in the gaze which makes of thought a stone; instead of obeying his commands to discipline the faculties to the functional isolation required to see the Maker we let these very faculties gain a span sufficient to hover over this system. Instead of speeding in the straight and the narrow we were drifting in that rigorous manner in which abandon is practised when the traction of the rear wheels of a car is exchanged for grace and speed around the bends. As we hover over Gandhi’s corpus which looms towards the critical, the eldritch light is visible in between and it illuminates the fate of mankind. A rigour which is prohibited by thinking – unless it dares to think what can be called ‘evil’ – must make its way ahead to raise from the codes of conduct, allusions, gestures, and the auguries, the eschatology of this system which is the immurement of means and ends, awaiting his world where all are passive resisters. Critical nation is not a resistance of this world from within, nor is it a counter-system resisting it from without, it is the autophagy of this world. The light of this system can only be held in the desiccated eyes of those who become perfect, those have become wounds through their surrender to Truth; the imperfect man ‘would not be able to bear its full blaze’.5 When it is, it will be the empire of death. Gandhi sought to create a non-violent state for the Indian subcontinent and then for the whole world. Gandhi’s remark about Jawaharlal Nehru, the first prime minister of independent India, could apply equally to him, ‘His nationalism is equal to internationalism.’6 Gandhi’s concept of a state without violence is perhaps the most radical notion in politics, especially since the commonest notion of the state is that it is the institution which monopolizes violence inside itself and outside it; we are to remember that violence is that force which is consecrated with a certain value, which in this instance is given by the state. The clearest outline of this state was provided by him in Hind Swaraj from which he never felt the need to deviate, as he wrote in a letter to Nehru – ‘I fully stand by the kind of governance which I have described in Hind Swaraj.’7 In the same letter Gandhi was prescient and concerned yet hopeful. He was concerned that mankind will be led to unending sorrows if it is bereft of the realization of the non-violent state and he could see the seeds of such a state in the villages of India – ‘I have not the slightest doubt that, but for the pair, truth and non-violence, mankind will be doomed. We can have the vision of that truth and non-violence only in the simplicity of the villages.’8 Truth and non-violence are immured into one another. The reciprocal immurement of means and ends is the matter of the discipline of calypsology; calypsology is the indistinguishability

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of means and ends from one another in such a way that the room for polynomia – that there can be several regularities for the same thing – is extinguished.

Calypsology and the state Calypsology is the common place of Indian villages and its reign is one of the necessary conditions for a non-violent state of men. The men observing the caste system conduct all aspects of their lives in accordance with it in such way that caste is the end of their lives. Caste laws are the means for their own reproduction, and the deviation from it often invites death. The Brahmin according to the theology of caste – which follows the one commandment of the many different gods – was born to study the Vedas, the laws of caste and, the doctrines and the procedures to please the gods. The reproduction of the caste order would follow from the birth of a son to the Brahmin who will carry on with the rote learning of the Vedas. If a Shudra who was born to serve the other three caste groups – the Brahmin, the warrior, and the trader – undertook such a study, it would confuse the caste order. Gandhi wrote, ‘The injunction against Sudras studying the Vedas is not altogether unjustified. A Sudra, in other words a person without moral education, without sense and without knowledge, would completely misread the Shastras.’9 For this reason, even Gandhi had maintained a studied observance of the most important caste rule, which is that there shall be no miscegenation. The argument given by Gandhi until the late years of his career baffled many; for him, it would be incestuous to marry outside one’s racial lines – ‘Just as it would be considered improper for a brother to marry his sister I would make it improper for a person to marry outside his or her group which may be called a caste.’10 Degrees of proximity to a bloodline can be the criterion for terming a sexual relation incestuous. But to use the same name ‘incest’ to oppose relations outside bloodlines is surprising. However, as we found hypophysics is the consecration of value and thing. The movement away from the racial lines is also a recession from value; as a thing departs from its value the movement is termed violence. Further, mixing of tastes, racial lines, and customs is bound to speed up a society to become similar to civilization: I am one of those who do not consider caste to be a harmful institution. In its origin caste was a wholesome custom and promoted national well-being. In my opinion the idea that interdining or intermarrying is necessary for national growth is a superstition borrowed from the West.11

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We should note that the technique of accusation in this statement – ‘superstition borrowed from the West’ – is a charge that the superstitious practices of the subcontinent faced during colonial rule, which brought about changes in the social order through the laws banning the practice of ‘sati’ – the immolation of the widow in the funeral pyre of her husband – and caste discrimination. Superstition is grounded in a determination of reason; Gandhi’s innovation in using this same term in a way that is outside its domain in order to refer to any form of cultural prejudice was one of the earliest gestures of postcolonial thinking. This gesture was repeated in post-independent India by postcolonial theorists to defend the very same ‘sati’.12 In this instance, Gandhi was also prohibiting interdining, which refers to the ‘reformist’ practice among the upper castes of the so-called Hindus of sharing ceremonial meals on special occasions with Dalits in order to retain them in the ‘Hindu’ order and with Muslims to prevent strife. Gandhi was not in favour of this practice either. The reason given by him for opposing the sharing of a meal by men of different religious and racial lines was privacy, which in this moment is an ancient ‘Hindu’ virtue – ‘And if mankind had not, much to its harm, made of eating a fetish and indulgence, we would have performed the operation of eating in private even as one performs the other necessary functions of life in private.’13 Gandhi would oppose privacy under other circumstances as a Western illness as privacy was opposed to Truth.14 He considered the clothed body to be shameful and the naked body to be glorious. Gandhi’s racism – his terror before the intermixing of people – is one of the reasons for opposing even the sharing of meals. His complaint about being in a prison in South Africa in 1908 was ‘I was treated worse than Kaffir prisoners’ since he held that ‘Kaffirs are as a rule uncivilized … very dirty and live almost like animals.’15 The phrase ‘as a rule’ designates the hypophysics of a people. The natives of Africa are designated as ‘Kaffirs’ and its meaning is given by ‘uncivilized’; the equivocity about two kinds of un-civil is clear. It is that the Indian villages untouched by civilization are beyond the pejorative ‘uncivilized’, not that one man’s uncivilized is another man’s civilized, since the same man decides which uncivilized have value proximate to truth. According to Gandhi’s racism the law which governs the regularity of a people is given by the Maker and the Maker’s laws are not to be violated. Hypophysical racism is the same as any other racism, including caste; racisms in their theoretical resources differ from one another, but what remains the same is the force through which miscegenation is prevented. Gandhi would deploy the passive force in his appeal to prevent incest. A state of men where calypsology is at work will not have intermixing of people. If one imagines a state where men would no longer disobey the laws of

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their regularities and hence will not practise any intermixing it would appear to be a racist paradise. However, the restriction on marrying from outside of one’s bloodline alone is not the only factor which would bring about Gandhi’s state. He goes to the root of marriage to gain access to the soil to which mankind must be returned – ‘I do not consider marriage to be a necessity in every case. From the highest standpoint it is a status lower than that of celibacy.’16 Gandhi’s was not an ordinary form of racism, but something radical.

The radical and the state We often use the phrase ‘radical politics’ without concerning ourselves with the meaning of radix and the meaning of the radix of politics. Gandhi was truly the agent of the radical in politics. He found violence at the radix of the tree of politics, and non-violence was found buried far beyond the reach of any root; neither the skies at which the trees clutch at with dry hands in autumn nor the roots which plunge through the soil ever see non-violence. Non-violence is elsewhere; this is the finding at the critical limits of politics. A state of nonviolence is the end of politics for the passive resister, it is found through the criticalization of politics. The obtainment of non-violence is also the founding of the True law of man, and the law which orders the affairs of men until then is un-lawful – ‘The only thing lawful is non-violence. Violence can never be lawful in the sense meant here, i.e., not according to man-made law but according to the law made by Nature for man.’17 The state of violence is ordered by man-made laws or the false laws. The reign on earth of the True law will see that the fear of death upon which man-made laws are founded is well removed, and hence, ‘this is no sermon on ahimsa but cold reason and the statement of a universal law’.18 Often with Gandhi we hear the homonymy of the end – it is both the telos and the eschaton of politics. Is it because politics is essentially violent? It appears to be so from so many of his remarks on the meaning of politics, and on how he tolerated and suffered politics: The politician in me has never dominated a single decision of mine, and if I seem to take part in politics, it is only because politics encircles us today like the coils of a snake from which one cannot get out, no matter how much one tries. I wish therefore to wrestle with the snake.19

So, we will have to learn what politics is for Gandhi, and of a politics that is foreign to him. State was not an instrument of great violences, but the place

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where man deposited all the violences for disposal and this violence has no place but to flow back into the domains of men, in other forms. The state is a circulatory system of violence, which it gathers under the abstract quantities of the law. It mints formalized violences of punishment and control, and keeps violence in circulation. It is also the designer and the producer of new forms of violence since it transmogrifies and recycles the violence it finds deposited at its door, keeping it in circulation. But the state is not the maker of violence; it has the greatest quantity at its disposal, which it gathers from everywhere. Gandhi’s observations regarding the state and politics led his contemporary Sir C. Shankaran Nair to accuse him of being a masked anarchist.20 Was Gandhi an anarchist? In order to answer this question we need to find the relation between anarchy, politics, state, and violence. For Walter Benjamin violence is the morally impure force instantiating and sustaining the state, and the morally pure force, divine violence, sets a moment of justice in the orders of men through the very destruction of those orders in an act of grace.21 The divine grace removes will from the hands of men to the divine, whereas for Gandhi Will is a faculty that assures man of the relation to Truth on the basis of which he may bring on earth the nation founded on the universal law. Benjamin shows us that the eruption of divine violence – eruption since it does not make divine violence correspond to pre-existing conditions through a causal schema – reveals a vision of the divine will as the externality of the worlds of men. But Benjamin’s schema, which is the closest to Gandhi’s own, is deliberately vague if we are to think through the questions of state, violence, and anarchy. We will need to make a detour through the great anarchist anthropologist himself – Pierre Clastres – in order to find the steps which will lead us unto the Gandhian temple of non-violence. Should we reach there, the sepulchre of politics will greet us. Pierre Clastres took the founding myths of the state seriously. The state is the assertion of unforgettable memories – ‘the law written on the body is an unforgettable memory’ – which are the rules governing regularities exchangeable only through a price.22 At the beginning, in the days spent without records of memory, lost behind the obscure curtain before which the state arrives, lies an epoch without functional isolations: the reign of pure polynomia which grants all possibilities with no realizations. All homologies here remain revealed as nature is pure voluptuousness without any spans to reach it. Functional isolations and ‘unforgettable memories’ are needed to determine the revealed polynomia into actions which realize new events and objects. Homologies, which reveal the common origin of the disparate, need spans, that is the production of distinct

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regularities with parameters for their range, in order to convert them into new organs and machines. The arrival of the state constitutes the new curtain of that Law – the comprehending law – which regulates the very availability of the laws that can produce regularities. In other words, the state is the decision that tells mankind that you shall make all kinds of laws – including how many minutes you take to brush your teeth and the number of times you swear in the same sentence – except the ones which determine the meaning of the law. In introducing the division between the two levels of laws the state also introduced violence. Violence is the force which leads the meaning of Law.23 With the appearance of the division of the levels of laws and the appearance of violence functional isolations arrive according to Clastres: What is the State? It is the total sign of division in society, in that it is a separate organ of political power: society is henceforth divided into those who exercise power and those who submit to it. Society is no longer an undivided We, a single totality, but a fragmented body, a heterogeneous social being. Social division and the emergence of the State are the death of the primitive society.24

When Gandhi performed the drama of the ‘salt march’ he challenged the meaning of the state, except that he performed this act within the definition of violence of the colonial administration. When a passive resister deploys passive force in order to violate the law he adheres to the primary law of the state – that the state alone has the right to use force – while he inaugurates a break with the regularity established by the state. Gandhi’s passive resister is always careful to further announce that he is in fact no violator of the law for he is the adherent of another comprehending Law, that of the Maker. Hence, violence is absent without a Law comprehending all other laws in all other domains. This state without violence is called the state of nature of man, or the reign of permanent war. We learn from Pierre Clastres that war holds off violence and that the society which forms out of itself a war machine that resists the appearance of the state is a primitive society: ‘Primitive society is society against the State in that it is societyfor-war.’25 Instead of the comprehending Law of the state the primitive society gathers itself as the war machine. That is, there exists a single functional isolation which is the dispersal of all other isolations such that the voluptuous nature of man is retained. The war machine is the inclination for war of all against all at all times – the neighbours, the chief, the husband, the neighbouring tribes, the spirits and demons of foreign forces, a rustle in the night which is out of rhythm. The war machine seizes primitive society, casts its internal milieu, and directs its gaze and cocks its ears to the threat of comprehending laws. The war machine

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exchanges the appearance of specific regularities and their comprehending law with recorded memories of their transitions for the life without archives which keeps the recording of men at a distance: The essential feature (that is, relating to the essence) is its exercise of absolute and complete power over all the elements of which it is composed; the fact that it prevents any one of the sub-groups that constitute it from becoming autonomous; that it holds all internal movements – conscious and unconscious – that maintain social life to the limits and direction prescribed by society.26

For Gandhi, history is the interruption of the even working of the passive force. Primitive society is the resistance to this interruption. In Foucault’s terms, primitive are those societies where power exercises itself from the exterior like a misshapen spectre, without formality. For this reason, primitive are ‘societies characterised by the rejection of work’ and hence production is zero in the absence of technological production functions.27 We did find with Gandhi that his theory of production exemplified by the spinning wheel is not concerned with the end product which would have a history of the changes of its form and the work which would have an increase in efficiency. In fact, labour is meant to slow us down and we perform what we must in order that we retain a relation to our limbs as the Maker had intended it. Production is the stepping away from the set speeds of the limbs to the plenitude of polynomia and the voluptuousness of homology. In this sense there is a certain anarchic tendency in Gandhi.

Pre-violence and politics The similarity between most positions which identify themselves as anarchist is the dream which tempts with visions of the obscure screen of the appearance of the state being torn by the weight of nature; this screen, as if it were woven by the threads of functional isolations and little regularities under a comprehending law, is cut through by something reaching out from behind it, the truth which consecrates man to his nature. The nightmares which terrorize those principalities which identify themselves as anarchist are those of the spectre of Ideas: ‘Idea’ is the ground of formality which is unrealizable as itself, as Plato taught us, but without it the little regularities are not comprehended; Idea is that which institutes an internal milieu for the little laws of men, without which there is no state, and hence, Platonism is the philosophical game of politics. Politics realizes a distinct set of regularities every time, while retaining in view the

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homologies held within the very same regularities and developing the polynomia which are not yet realized. It is the access to the Idea, as that which remains in principle unrealizable and non-regularizable, which envelops the level of the comprehending laws and at the same time their unrest, as there are always more than one Idea. The philosophical games of politics resonate between each Idea is One and there are Ideas, or Platonism. Clastres’s primitive societies are the places without Platonism; they are the principality of an Idea – non-State – and their paranoia haunts the jungle, reading the signs of ‘the outside’ in the rustles and whispers, fear of a clan in the making in a family, in the lovers a possible betrayal of everyone – ‘Primitive society, then, is a society from which nothing escapes, which lets nothing get outside itself, for all exits are blocked.’28 If we think this idea of a society which guards its exits in nationalistic terms, we find the nationalism to which postcolonial theory leads us. It is a theory which utilizes the resources of Gandhian hypophysics as a ‘paternal reason’ for its own ends, a descendent of Gandhi who stops short of him at the level of nationalism beyond which its imagination is still blind. Primitive societies are fragile like a film of glass stretched out in order to erase a dimension. The enemy which terrorizes them in the night never shows its form, except that it awaits outside. When it eventually arrives, a primitive society has no means of recognizing this enemy, acceleration.29 Those who employed stone axes, which take ages to cut through wood and bones, never recognize in the metal axes which arrive from outside as a foreign error the enemy who haunted them. Instead, they take to it as the speed takes them: The advantage of a metal axe over a stone axe is too obvious … with the metal axes, the violence, the force, the power which the civilized newcomers brought to bear on the Savages created havoc in the primitive Indian world.30

Foreign error is that which could never have been conceived and birthed within the milieu of a social system, like the genius of Kant it arrives as the outside. All mutations in the polity arrive as foreign error. The invasion of error or a foreign error through a few metal axes is all it takes to send the war machine into the terrain of unrecorded memories from where there is no return, except in the form of fairy tales and myths. Clastres shared the same intuition as Gandhi: it is speed that is the enemy of the anti-Platonists. Despite sharing a terrain of thought up to a certain extent the two great thinkers differ greatly. Clastres sought to teach us how to think the most obscure of questions – ‘Where does political power come from?’ – through his observations of some of the last primitive societies forgetting their war machines for the records of functional isolations – recording

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itself is a functional isolation – polynomia, and the games of Ideas; however, Gandhi sought to build for mankind, using all the records of ‘civilisation’, the perfect primitive society which will know speed – the enemy – well in advance, where man will sleep in indifference to dreams and nightmares for they will be less and less frequent as the Maker’s hum nears the critical nation. Primitive societies resemble Gandhi’s critical nation in another fashion. For a visitor from outside they will both appear the same, and yet, if this visitor were to return after a long enough time only one will remain; primitive societies are repeatable societies so long as their determining conditions are allowed to prevail and no exogenous variable or the foreign error, such as the steel axe, enters their world. While there are many primitive societies there can be only one critical nation, and just once. Primitive societies prevent the outside from torsioning its regularities and the law of their war machine – that there shall be no comprehending law – through war itself. This war is not violence, but pre-violent force. Pre-violent force is that increment of speed produced in someone by another before forces are comprehended as value. The comprehension of a force as value can be moral (soul force) or political (illegitimate force). It can also be theological – the divine force. We found that pre-violent force exists in nature for Gandhi, who understood man to be the only creature that can comprehend the value that nature itself is such that man may know his own Maker. Pre-violence is also found as we look back a few decades into the past of this world where verbal abuse of men for being born in the wrong ‘ethnic group’, the sexual abuse of children in the family, rapes of women by cinema industry and of men in police custody, canned hunting, industrial torture of animals, and condemning the gods of other men were not yet taken to be violent acts to be brought under the law.31 Pre-violence is made visible and gathered into the classes of violence once the polynomia and homology of these acts – that there can be other ways to regulate the same field and that the same field can be the domain for other laws – are understood and overcome; violence comes later than that which has already begun replacing it. For Gandhi, pre-violence is made visible everywhere, as the truth of existence, by the Laws of the Maker. The pre-violent force of primitive societies will exist as long as the forms and the comprehending law which determine their acts as violence is not allowed to appear. However, from Gandhi’s point of view a primitive society would already be violent in that it is a world of men: If you tell me that non-violence is your ultimate goal, but in order to realize it you have to make use of violent means, because in this matter-of-fact world

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there is no other way, I shall say you are labouring under a great delusion. … Once you open the flood-gates of violence, you cannot control it. You will be borne away before its onrushing tide.32

Gandhian calypsology – the convertibility of means and ends – does not allow room for the anarchist enclosure made up of pre-violence. In all the worlds of men the comprehending law of the Maker is available to the faculty of the soul. Each increment of speed – be it an arrow shot at the fleeing enemy tribesmen or the speed of the canoe – gives back to man the experience of nature as speeds set by the Maker. The difference in speeds cleaves the mind back from the body to open the wound of the soul in which the Maker’s Law descends and reveals the essential violence of life. The pre-violence which holds back the appearance of violence is still violent for Gandhi. Earlier we found that non-violence is the truth of the Maker – the good which is the force. The conception of a coin of force, the good which is the force as it is the obverse and converse of the same coin, alone can allow us to perceive violence according to Gandhi; violence is the cleaving of the coin of the Maker’s force, which is reflected in the soul of the passive resister who attempts to close this wound. The circulation of the coin of the Maker – the good that is the force – will bring about Gandhi’s critical nation. The revelation of nature as speed is comprehended under the law of non-violence of the Maker, and such men can never obey the little rules which create an anarchist order – ‘A votary of non-violence should fear God alone.’33 Among those who fear the Maker alone there prevails true fearlessness, ‘Just as in training for violence one learns to kill, similarly in adopting non-violence one should learn the art of dying. There is no place at all for fear in non-violence.’34 This moment which reveals the art of dying is the sign of the youngest day (jü ngster Tag) and in leading to the truth of the soul it is the idol of the Maker, giving us the comportment of the temple of critical nation. In a primitive society it is the fear of dying – wooden axes do not kill so many – and the fear of the appearance of violence which gives it an enduring form. In the modern world it is the fear of what Hannah Arendt called total war – ‘when the distinction between soldiers and civilians was not respected because it was inconsistent with the new weapons then used’ – that keeps war or, as of today, the fear of the nuclear annihilation of the planet at a distance.35 In this sense there is no real distinction between primitive societies and us; any society which conserves the regularities, the little laws, and its milieu through the conception of a foreign error, in which looms the possibility of a force that is too great for its inside and is often termed evil, is as fragile as sheets of glass before a steel axe in approach.

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It is not the death of individual men which is feared by the primitive societies but either the death of all the individuals of the society or the death of all their little laws or regularities.36 Then, there are two kinds of deaths feared by men who are not the practitioners of the art of dying – the death of all and the death of the rules under which men are identified as such and such men. We can call the former extinction and the latter semantic annihilation. When the state appears through the accident of the axe, what consumes the primitive society is semantic annihilation, which is dime a dozen for Gandhi. Humans continue to succeed upon the little semantic annihilations in order to build greater speed machines by referring to the archives of what has already gone past us; for Gandhi, these are the great civilizations of the past which were felled by the Maker’s Law as they approached the critical limit at which value and things were at their furthest apart from each other. Semantic annihilation can take place in two ways, either through the disappearance of the little thread running between value and things or through the displacement of the regularities of a social order by another.37 We can call the act of thinking which overcomes semantic annihilations through the fecundities of homologies, the dexterities of polynomia, and the activations analogies anastasis; anastasis originates from the analytic of criticalization itself. Semantic annihilation is often referred to as the absence of the spirit in everyday conversations. The vacation of the spirit names nothing other than semantic annihilation. However, both semantic annihilations and anastasis are founded on the analogical maps which release new functions, the homologies where new origins erupt, and polynomia which gathers the new into a comprehending law of its own. Here, it is important to make a detour on the meaning of spirit. It is tempting to cast Gandhi’s Maker as spirit. Spirit designates the shadow of the span of an era in departure as it falls on us. It is in the outline of the departing era that we often find spirits in the same way the eyes carve shapes into the clouds which linger. That which flies past us is ahead of us in a certain sense. For Nietzsche this word often meant the ability to discharge the potential difference between us and what flew past us without a directive. The directive or a command is often read the way soothsayers do while peering into the signs; that is every time we use the term ‘spirit’ there is hidden a directive in it, that we may do such and such things instead of some other things. ‘Spirit’, defined as the directed animation or a purely intelligent being without materiality, as in angels or God as the being for whom seeing and willing are the same, still remains within animality. For Gandhi, the animal is the being for whom the interval between a stimulus and a response is finite, whereas for man any stimulus can be received without response as long as the human organism remains alive. If

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seeing and willing are one and the same for a being, for instance god, then that being is the one which needs no interval: In this sense He is an animal, or God is the maximum animal.38 The maximum animal is distinct from Gandhi’s Maker. The Maker defers his response and the deferral is invested in the human soul. We found in the chapter on the faculties that the deferral of action is founded on the ability in man to detect polynomia and homology in each thing; the experience that there are several responses to the same exigency makes man a being which can commit to indefinite deferral through the extension of this knowledge. The passive resister who defers his obedience to the law of the state was born at the very same moment man was born; or, for Gandhi, the Maker created man so that he may become the ultimate passive resister.

The criticalization of thinking Comprehending laws gather all the little laws into unity while giving them a directive. Theological anti-politics is the comprehension of the affairs of men under the Law that challenges the meaning of each and every law that man may possibly make. The theological forces a revelation (revelation as that which is of the imminent), namely, that the laws of men are contingent upon objects of speed – such as the steel axe and nuclear bombs – which can bring them to their semantic annihilation. Gandhi repeatedly affirmed, ‘I am not afraid of the atom bomb’ because ‘no power on earth can wipe out’ the power of non-violence, which is a ‘mightier weapon by far than the atom bomb’; and ‘Even if the people of Hiroshima could have died in their thousands with prayer and goodwill in their hearts, the situation would have been transformed as if by a miracle.’39 He acknowledged that no man can stop violence and the suicidal catastrophe of nuclear arms race: ‘God alone can do that. Men are but instruments in His hands. … He works according to His law and, therefore, violence will be stopped in accordance with his law. Man does not and can never know God’s law fully.’40 The impermanence of the laws of men is confronted in nature with the laws of deep time. As geologists tell us, the deep time41 which is archived on the strata of the earth shows that through the simple laws of nature, layers upon layers are built taking millions of years. Gandhi, who pondered slowness in the rush hours of politics, knew this well: Twenty-five hundred years are nothing in the life of the world. If the evolution of form takes aeons, why should we expect wonders in the evolution of thought and conduct? And yet the age of miracles is not gone. As with individuals, so with

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nations. I hold it to be perfectly possible for masses to be suddenly converted and uplifted. Suddenness is only seeming. No one can say how far the leaven has been working. The most potent forces are unseen, even unfelt, for long. But they are working none the less surely.42

The human era, although brief, has strata of buried laws which attest to his anastasis. These buried laws mock at mankind, telling them that ‘this is where you will end up no matter’ and yet it rises up again. Gandhi’s critical nation is the project which would render for man a permanent home; a home governed by laws which will never be changed, a layer upon the strata of laws over which nothing more will ever settle. The apocalypses of Gandhi’s hypophysics should be understood as autolyses – self-destruction – of speed machines exposing themselves to their limits and to the eternal shimmer of deep time, of nature, of the Maker’s law. Derrida found in global nuclear warfare the logic of the imminence of absolute speed to which the history of mankind accelerates, paradoxically assured in its arms race of both the singular apocalypse and its impossibility (since no one will have survived to witness and tell of it). ‘The hypothesis of this total destruction watches over deconstruction, it guides its footsteps,’ since the nuclear apocalypse is the ‘non-event’ we will never live through; it is, thus, necessarily delayed and deferred by the indefinite time between our present and our very hypotheticalfictional certainty of it; for Derrida, the world is one trip: from the start a single revving up to the sole apocalypse that is consoling because it is to come.43 Gandhi would have mocked this ‘nuclear criticism’ of Derrida’s as the fond delusion of one who plays god if only in absolutizing his own limits, and deconstruction as the wail of Narcissus.44 For him, apocalypses come and go as interruptions of histories that are judged and punished while the critical nation slowly but surely proceeds. That is, the enemy of the Gandhian system is anastasis. For these reasons it will be disastrous to bring Nietzsche and Gandhi alongside each other. Peter Sloterdijk’s evangelical Nietzsche would be a ‘sponsor’ of human kind – ‘One could label Nietzsche the first real sponsor … After Nietzsche it is possible for anyone to become noble if he rises to the sponsors challenge’45 – in the sense of someone watching over humans when they follow the twelve steps. The term ‘critical’ is often used as a gesture of disapproval – ‘I am critical of the government.’ In this sense the critic, the one who uses the term critical, has a set of criteria according to which he judges the situation of the state. The critic in a restaurant has the list of criteria which allows her to judge the ambience, presentation, noise, colour, texture, and the taste of food in order to give it a  rank.  The critic approaches the situation with a manual. ‘Critique’, on the

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other hand, is without criteria. Critique is the process through which we gain an estimation of the potentials of a system, the limits of the potentials, the states of the internal milieu, and also the preparedness to develop new potential differences and responsiveness. Critique prescribes a new regimen for the system at the end of the assessment. Criticism refers to the criteria of the regimen possessed by the critic in advance and their maintenance. Critique is etymologically related to crisis but, says Jean-Luc Nancy, through ‘the dehiscence of a root. In general, it appears to have been rarely noticed how much crisis strays from critique. On the contrary we often critique crisis to master it.’46 Crisis is the limit condition of any system. We recognize a crisis when we find that the system will not return to the state in which it entered the crisis; when a man enters a hospital with crushed bones he can either return with a technologically augmented skeleton or he can return with weaker bones. Crisis brings in new laws and regularities, and in this sense the chrysalis of an organism is a crisis. In order to understand Gandhi’s critical nation, the nation which stands in criticism of all other nations of mankind, we had been criticalizing his own system. Criticalization is the method through which we introduced determinate changes in speed, tempo, and semantic potentials such that this system – Gandhi’s hypophysics – reaches a state of critical limit. The critical limit is also the place where the system reaches out to that which is shown by its internal milieu as the object of its essential possibility. When one criticalizes an automobile through nitromethane and superchargers, the car reveals the critical line between maximum acceleration and minimum endurance, beyond which it becomes a heap of plastic and metal. From the point of scalology, it is the specific increases in speed in the distinct parts of the system which runs the system to its critical limit. In the case of Gandhi, we need to set his system on track the way he would have wanted it – ‘There is, I fancy, a method in my inconsistencies. In my opinion there is a consistency running through my seeming inconsistencies, as in nature there is a unity running through seeming diversity.’47 Criticalization is less a method and more an adventure. When we look at the corpuses of thought signed by authorial names and left behind for us, a few statements from them settle on top as labels, or even epitaphs. Gandhi has come to be ‘a votary of non-violence’ like PETA; Derrida has come to be ‘deconstruction’ which is something even construction workers do today, and Heidegger names ontology which even computer programmers do. Criticalization surveys these corpuses without a wishful thinking that they will come to be useful or without the desire informed by a theoretical market to insert its semantics, or brands, into this corpus; criticalization surveys to determine the laws of the corpus, its fields of energies,

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the speeds of its components, the map of the journey hidden within the corpus, and the reflected image of the exterior of the work in its own retina. In order to make a work animate again one may have to give it a new engine – for instance, throw away the combustion engine for an electric motor. This book develops the outlined theory of faculties in Gandhi so that each law may know the power which gives that law. We may have to bring its hinges and articulations to their maximum rigour so that it does not rattle as it speeds to the limit; for example through detecting the rigorous connection between statements concerning the in-exchangeability of means and ends in Gandhi one may give it a name, such as calypsology, in order to set it for a greater speed. One may then begin looking at the retina of the work and read its map. In the retina of Gandhi’s corpus is the village, a certain village which has never been attempted on earth, and in the map we find the outside of mankind where pure rest awaits. Gandhi referred to the eternity of Indian villages as though his words were reflecting out of his own retinae. These villages were the places where one could see a glimpse of the critical nation of mankind. However, these villages are also vulnerable to semantic annihilation. Hence, he also said that these villages are not the real critical nation: My ideal village still exists only in my imagination. After all every human being lives in the world of his own imagination. In this village of my dreams the villager will not be dull – he will be all awareness. He will not live like an animal in filth and darkness.48

It was not the filth and darkness alone which troubled Gandhi, but the possibility that foreign errors – the railways, the telegram, printing machines – could bring new regularities and shatter the relation these villages enjoyed with eternity. Gandhi already knew the kind of programme required to bring about critical nation as early as 1909 when he wrote his Hind Swaraj, and as Partha Chatterjee notes, this text was ‘the first and perhaps the fullest’ formulation of Gandhian ideas where ‘most of the fundamental elements of Gandhi’s politics’ were established.49 Not only did Gandhi’s fundamental insight not change, but it also resonated in his political experiences, experiments, and programmes: ‘I fully stand by the kind of governance which I have described in Hind Swaraj. It is not just a way of speaking. My experience has confirmed the truth of what I wrote in 1909.’50 The doctrines outlined in Hind Swaraj point us towards matters of death rather than life. As he wrote later, ‘I have been collecting descriptions of Swaraj. One of these would be: Swaraj is the abandonment of the fear of death.’51 Societies live on through the repetition of their regularities and also the birth of its new members. They are

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threatened by two kinds of death, semantic annihilation and extinction. Even after semantic annihilation — a death of which we can say with Nancy that ‘the aspect is dissociated from the appearance’ and ‘the visage is made absent right in the face’52 — a group of men can constitute for themselves a new set of laws and their comprehending law in order to form a new social arrangement through anastasis. That is, societies can repeat either ceremonially or under new comprehending laws. Critical nation is distinct from them in that it does not repeat. In Hind Swaraj Gandhi speaks of human epochs in the mode of predator– prey equations,53 a certain rise and fall, and then the rise again of human enterprises and its population. When a predator animal group consumes the prey population to a critical limit, the prey population’s lower volume enforces a counter-pressure on the volume of the predator population; when the lions increase in number as they kill the many zebras, the zebras decline in number and this leads to the decline in the number of the lions. However, as the lions decrease in their numbers, the zebras increase in their numbers. The regularity determined by the predator–prey equations has analogy with the economics of cycles. These cycles can be found at the level of organisms and at the cellular level. If this is the regulation that would provide a ‘balanced existence’ of humanity in its habitat, the humans would have to shed nearly everything it has raised up to itself through the process we often call history, including the clothes as Gandhi exhorted. For example there has to be predators to cull the numbers as they grow beyond the parameters or else there would have to be preys whose decline would proportionally reduce the number of humans. Instead, human populations appear to reach a certain critical limit within their faculties – the mind and the body hunt each other in the stages set by distinct human epochs where epochs perish as such in order to open room and possibility for newer entrants into the game of civilizations.

Calypso’s island The nation of Calypso is the place where all men will live without the fear of foreign errors. The construction of this nation involves the taming of the faculties through the training of the passive resisters. Gandhi refers to this training in two terms; it is the training in death and it is also the training in the mastery of all the senses under the principles of brahmacharya, or asceticism. The control of the palate ensures that the mind does not deploy polynomia to generate newer tastes and discover the hidden tastes in nature through homologies, which

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when unchecked results in the explosion of civilization. The lesser one develops tastes, the greater the chances that the unity of value and things comes to be visible. In other words, the unity of means and ends will not be pried open by the operations of polynomia. This coin when realized will have truth on one side and non-violence on the other where the denomination on both sides will have been erased; the circulation of such a coin will bring about the critical nation – ‘if non-violence becomes successfully established in one place, its influence will spread everywhere’.54 As the coin of Calypso spreads in circulation a few traits will appear before mankind; of them the most important one will be that there will be no fear. It is fear, especially the fear for our own lives and that of our loved ones, which commits us to actions which are meant to save our lives and secure our futures. Once this fear ceases the social order can experience the simplicity of non-violence. The simple life of non-violence contains the seeds for the future of humanity for Gandhi. The passive resister is someone without loved ones so that even after transcending the fear of his own death he will not have to worry about the death of family and friends – ‘A satyagrahi is obliged to break away from family attachments.’55 Even if a passive resister has not shed all his attachments to his family he should remain prepared to sacrifice their lives if he were to be in a moment of test: ‘one has to develop the spirit of sacrifice to such a high degree that one would not hesitate to sacrifice one’s family, property and even one’s life’.56 Of all the temptations Gandhi found the sexual urge to be the most dangerous. His resistance to sex was not that of a typical conservative Indian who wishes to control sex in order to ensure that the racial order of caste is not disturbed. Gandhi knew that sex was separable from procreation and not only did this separation of sex from a certain function not trouble him but he even held that ‘procreation involves violence’.57 One would be troubled only when a value separates from the thing; in the case of sex there was no such value inherent to it, except the commonly accepted function of having children: ‘I cannot imagine a thing as ugly as the intercourse of man and woman. That it leads to the birth of children is due to God’s inscrutable way. … No, I must declare with all the power at my command that sensual attraction even between husband and wife is unnatural.’58 This explains his views on marriage, ‘There is in it no room for sexual satisfaction.’59 It also explains how, as David Hardiman mentions, ‘At one wedding, he blessed the couple with the words: “May you have no children.”’60 Gandhi saw in the control of sex the very end of control: ‘This success of Cupid, spectacular thought it may be, will … be short-lived and ignoble, and at long last end in inanition even like a scorpion whose venom is spent.’61 The

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expanded notion of brahmacharya or celibacy of the passive resister was, as Anthony Parel observes, not limited to sexuality but include all other aspects of life: ‘To break through its coils is no easy task. But it is a task worthy of our highest endeavour.’62 Parel sees in this a new, Gandhian version of the old theory of purusharthas or the doctrine of ends or of the purpose of existence according which there is a dynamic unity of the four ends, of the pursuit of ‘artha’ (wealth), ‘kama’ (pleasure), ‘dharma’ (morals), and ‘moksha’ (liberation): artha is the modulation of the material, dharma is the code of obligation dictated by the faculty of mind, kama is commonly and restrictedly understood as desire and sex,63 is pursuit or striving itself, and moksha is the index of effectivity of the other three in the coordination in this life. Traditionally, moksha was the end of existence as the very release from existence obtained through renunciation of the world and of the other three ends. With Gandhi they become an inseparable and co-ordinated pursuit of all four, though heterogeneous, purusharthas. Parel comes close to recognizing that the control of the four depends crucially on kama, or pursuit and striving as such – the engine of speed – when he says that ‘the idea of sexual pleasure [kama] as poison could not have been better conveyed than by the metaphor of the deadly snake’.64 Yet, Parel does not wonder how, without kama or pursuit itself, we might pursue any of the other purusharthas, including moksha. There is a reason why Gandhi found himself ‘wrestling’ with both sex and politics as the coils of the same snake, which he had failed to shake off totally. Writing to a widow in 1946 he revealed to her that having a husband and being a widow are not distinct if one is a passive resister – ‘If you have learnt anything from me, there is no difference between a wife and a widow, truly understood, for sooner or later everyone has to die.’65 It appears that all relations  – marriage, friendships, alliances – are grounded in death. The relation between death and politics is clear to him: Politics is grounded in the fear of death. Men form alliances of little rules and then succumb to the comprehending law of the state due to the fear of death. That is, state is the institution which defers extinction through the instantiation of the notion of violence at the cost of several semantic annihilations. In order to displace the original relation between death and the state Gandhi opposed politics to the Laws of the Maker. The Maker demands of us that we fear nothing but Him – ‘A votary of non-violence should fear God alone.’66 When men trade the fear of death for that of the Maker they obtain theological anti-politics in place of politics. As Gandhi said, passive resistance is not a political movement: ‘Satyagraha, as I have endeavoured to explain, is essentially a religious movement. It is a process of purification and penance.’67 This is the same question – ‘whether I have a

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right to exist’ – which occupied Levinas in his career; although it remained the question of the individual for him, it found a political expression through the implied ‘to kill or to allow oneself to be killed’ according to Robert Bernasconi. Bernasconi, the philosopher of the critical limits of ideas, recovers Levinas by finding the meaning of sacrifice in the unbearableness of the death of a loved one – ‘the death of someone I love affects me more than my own death’.68 In this way he leaves the possibility of a politics which does not ‘lose sight of both history and the world’s misery’.69 However, for Gandhi, the concern for the death of a loved one is founded on the wrong conception of love. Love is only in so far as it is on the obverse of Truth. Politics involves two principles which are inseparable: men determine the way they are to be with one another under comprehending laws which are negotiable; the polynomia of modes in which men are together and the homologies which are available in each regularity are preserved along with the possibilities of unknown comprehending laws. These two principles – the appearing together of men under negotiable comprehending laws and the promise to one another of the as yet unknown – give us the political conception of freedom. It is in this sense that politics is always the fight for freedom; in so far as there is the fight there will be freedom, or freedom is inseparable from the fight for it. Freedom as that which is to be created in the acts of men and experienced amidst men in the fight for it is given through the opening of directions by polynomia and the explosion of matter as that which is capable of forms by homologies. The morphology of matter and directions of polynomia together generate velocities. Velocity as we know is not speed; speed is a scalar quantity, whereas velocity is a vector. Politics then involves not merely changes in speeds of our actions or improvements in the efficiency of production. But politics is the creation of new directions. For example so far in the heavens of our politics we could only find directions and directives running between orient and the occident. When newer directions appear through the inventions of velocities we begin to wonder under unknown heavens, as it happened with the scientific discoveries of Galileo and the philosophical breakthroughs of Nietzsche. On the other hand, Gandhi’s reliance on the analytic of speed enabled him to gather politics under the umbrella of violence and to interpret freedom as that which sends man away from the Maker, these two gestures constitute Gandhian anti-politics. Theological anti-politics views the lives of men in the retina of the Maker for ‘Satyagraha is essentially a religious force’70. In the faculties of men, their legal systems, and their conceptions of the world, the Maker’s eyes keep watch. Being in politics with the awareness of the Maker’s eyes is Gandhi’s equivocity. He had

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been trying all along to bring politics to an end from within the arena of politics. Then we might wonder what marriage has to do with it when we see his close attention to this institution as he denounces it – ‘I have no longer any interest in marriages.’71 In order to come to it we have to approach the relation between laws and regularities again. The ideal form for an individual – such as the passive resister – should be universal. That is, we should be able to imagine a society in which all are perfect passive resisters such that a form of pure non-violence would appear. When a society adopts a rigorous form for itself it has consequences beyond the lifetime of the members who take up this form. If a society adopts strictly monogamous marriages it will produce less number of offspring than that of a social order based on polyandry and polygamy. In a society which is based on the form of incest, accumulation of wealth will quickly reach limits. Then, what if the form of the world is entirely made up of passive resisters? It will be the end of mankind. The exemplification of renunciation and asceticism is common to most societies. However, it is always balanced with the tales of lustful adventures and profligate families. Asceticism is allowed a certain room in the monk’s quarters as long as these quarters are few in number. However, Gandhi sought to create a world of passive resisters. In this direction Gandhi had the precedents of the traditions of the subcontinent, including of Buddhism and the so-called ‘Hinduism’. This tendency has had progenies other than Gandhi, including Simone Weil for whom this world is a mere between, or Metaxu, which holds men to its laws through the gravity of the flesh, and the access to the good is possible only through the release from the flesh – ‘The extinction of desire (Buddhism) – or detachment – or amor fati – or desire for the absolute good – these all amount to the same.’72 However, for Gandhi the individualistic asceticism of Weil would have been insufficient. Gandhi sought to infect politics with his critical nation in such a way that this world shall come to be the end of all worlds. Gandhi was not disturbed by the terror of death faced by the Jews in Germany, the Indians during earthquakes and famines, and the atom bombs in Japan, for he did not fear death. Instead, it was the re-appearance of humanity from each little calamity and every little apocalypse, including the supreme tragedy of the atom bomb, which disturbed him: It has been suggested … that the atom bomb will bring ahimsa (non-violence) as nothing else can. It will, if it is meant that its destructive power will so disgust the world that it will turn away from violence for the time being. This is very like a

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man glutting himself with dainties to the point of nausea and turning away from them only to return to them with redoubled zeal after the effect of nausea is over. Precisely in the same manner will the world return to violence with renewed zeal after the effect of disgust is worn out.73

The appearance of man guaranteed the violation of the Maker’s Laws despite the best efforts of mankind. The lullaby to mankind is the little book Hind Swaraj, and in it he wrote, ‘We, therefore, say that the non-beginning of a thing is supreme wisdom.’74 The non-beginning can be ensured only through the making of a critical nation where all are passive resisters. The critical nation of Gandhi would ensure that there would be no suffering in future as there would be no mankind to tear at the laws of the Maker; if there will be no man then there shall be absolution forever. The cliché d orientation of the world designates the occident as the land of the end. Gandhi found that it was the end for which the occident lacked the wisdom and the will, for it kept the beginning alive for other beginnings or anastasis; after each semantic annihilation which was turned into homologies for other ‘ephemeral’ spans and eventually their apocalypses. Perhaps, the manifold of ends is gathered under a determination which is named by the occident, which can be any place, someday even the subcontinent. The span which is other than the occident and the orient, neither the land of ends nor that of origins, but of new beginnings and new endings is at work everywhere, and it should be named by anastasis of which we are agnostic. The thought of critical nation, or Hind Swaraj, was to bring to end all apocalypses, by creating ‘the camp’ for all human animals without discrimination, in order to cure the Maker of his error. In other words Gandhi did not strive to bring to the end a mere epoch of man, but mankind itself. That man must not be is the thought that guides the little moral ostentations deriving from Gandhi should obtain for us a horizon to rethink the meaning of nihilism.

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Conclusion: Anastasis

We entered the age of critique since the eighteenth century and passed into the age of criticism in the twentieth. Now we are in the Gandhian era of criticalization. Although criticism, critique, and criticalization share the same roots – Krinnō – they name distinct articulations and designate events and practices which constitute their respective epochs. Critique refers to the investigation into the internal milieu of a system – any system whatsoever including man, machine, and stars – to gather its potentials, such as the sensible and intelligible in Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. Jean-Luc Nancy writes ‘Critique discerns, distinguishes, and allows us to remobilize both admissible and inadmissible objects of thought.’1 In this sense it is critique which finds the limits of the potentials and hence the various states which this system may be able to endure according to the correct ratio of potentials; we can call critique the labour which creates memories of the future.2 Here, we might have to step over the convention which established that memories define the past and that the future is defined as that of which memories are impossible. In this questioning we are still in the span of the notion of empirical remembrance which is distinct from the functions of memories. For example an encounter in childhood with hot coal retains in memory the limit of the skin with respect to heat, which can also be generated without coal running through the flesh. In having a limit with respect to red hot coal, the membrane is already the memory of its futures, or that which is capable of anxieties for its future encounters. Critique is also the work which develops and trains within the system the powers for future encounters; for this reason Kant demanded of the readers of his Critique ‘the good will and assistance of a co-labourer’.3 Critique is already in the as yet unrealized grounds of a system as its memories of the future. Memories of the future are also determined as wisdoms and as operating systems according to this sense. Critique reveals to us that there is no malice in the heat and the cold of nature, the cunningness of men, the gears of machines, and the velocities of

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politics; instead, malice derives from inadequate critiques. In the age of critique, we dwell within the discovered potentials by riding on them to their limits; critique prescribes regimens or rations for every domain, to be revised according to the adventures of the potentials, which is its gift to criticism; and the age of critique is at the same time characterized by the fear of the outside of the system and the denial of any such outside since all exteriorities are those prescribed by the internal milieu of the system. Without the critique the world would be ‘as idle as a painted ship upon a painted ocean’. Kant would characterize the real inside as ‘objective validity’4 which he opposed to logical possibility, which is the denial of anything real outside of the internal milieu of his critique. That is, all thoughts are valid in so far as they do not collide against the limit of thought – contradiction. Only those thoughts which have ‘real possibility’ are objective. For this reason, the Kantian version of the critique, which is not the only kind of critique, involves policing the internal milieu of a system and at the same time ‘the patient hearing and the impartiality of a judge’.5 We do not live in the age of critique, which is not due to our voluntary resignation from it, but because the critique itself needs conditions which no longer obtain today. The ethos of the critique is maintenance and progress, and it cannot hold a candle to the ethos of use and throw. This realization that critique itself needs conditions comes rather late, through the estimation of the most important faculty for Kantian critique. The slogan of the events designated by May 1968 was ‘power to the imagination’. If one stated ‘power of the imagination’ it would have referred to the faculty of imagination which all human animals are expected to possess even if none exercises it. But imagination requires conditions for its exercise, without which it is as empty a declaration as ‘all men are equal’. The events following May 1968 understood this even better and created movements where conditions to imagine and realize were made available to those outside the cities and universities. The age of criticism continues and works with the age of criticalization. Criticism is not invested in the potentials but in the criteria, or ratio, for the actualized potentials and regular actions of a system; for example a critic can measure a musical performance on the basis of the given criteria, and when the performance exceeds the regular it is interpreted as a bad performance. There is a right ratio. Criticism in this sense is non-receptive to the irregular, which it understands as that which failed the examination according to the criteria. Critique, instead, was concerned with the appearance of the exceptional and the original so long as the exception realized itself in such a way that rules could be given for its regularization; the age of the critique was also that of the witching

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hour of the genius who was understood as foreign error.6 The heart of critique stretched and fell like a bow in elastic hysteresis for the ‘genius’. It is in the notion of genius, whether in an individual or an arrangement of things, that critique sought its salvation from the ratios holding among its potentials. Criticism evaluates actions and works of men according to scales and criteria, often deriving from a ratio. Of course, it is possible to give a criterion for the driver of a car to keep above 100 kilometres per hour without also observing the ratio between speed and the bends of the road. For Nietzsche, this act of the critic would risk ‘making equal what is new’.7 Criticism often delivers judgements in the language of economics – the discipline which studies the exchange between the more and the less under the notion of constraint – although criticism differs from economics in that it does not have an essential relation with the production function of anything, including itself. The scalology of criticism can be found in statements such as ‘There is too much silence in the play’; ‘There is too much blood in the novel’; ‘There is little salt in the pudding.’ Gandhi adopted the style of a critic, particularly that of Thomas Taylor, when it came to his analysis of the effects of modern technologies in the villages of the subcontinent. However, unlike Gandhi, Taylor retained a relation to critique, and found that in India the railways were capable of depleting the grains from the villages at the same speed with which it could also deliver them during famines, where the former was found to outweigh the latter – ‘For though the grain may be carried to the affected areas, we are told at the same time that owing largely to improved communications the reserves of food grain are depleted.’8 Taylor remained attentive to the interdependence of potentials in a system and their limits – ‘But customs and relationships are affected by altered speeds; one is necessarily in some way a function of the other.’9 Gandhi too relied on functional analysis to discover the articulation of things, and yet his criticism and its criteria differed radically from that of Taylor. Taylor, as a precursor of the European theoretical politics of postcolonial theory, sought immediate decolonization, and said of the colonized, ‘They are wise enough to be our teachers.’10 Gandhi did not find the villagers of the subcontinent wise enough to be left alone according to the demands of critics. His quest was to lead the villages to their critical limit and envelop the whole world within it in order to erase the human animal. Criticalization happens to systems when their elements reach their limits, such as the heat of combustion and the heat tolerance of an engine; when the functional relationships between the elements lead to absurdities, such as the relation between gravity and information in a black hole; in the semantic annihilation of a social system where the most familiar words come to speak

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little; when the essences of a system come to be exhausted, as with the colonial enterprises; and, when the open possibility of one element meets the limit of the materiality of another as with computation and energy requirements according to the Margolus–Levitin theorem.11 Gandhi’s efforts were towards discovering the limits of politics to the point of criticalization of the human animal itself. It is easy to see his brilliance in the arena of anti-colonial agitations such as the salt march. When men disobey the laws of the state and at the same time accept the punishments, the ratio between the prison and the outside comes into play; the prison must never contain more than a fraction of what is outside it or else it fails its purpose, that is this ratio is criticalized. It is another matter that today the tolerance of this ratio has changed drastically across the world. Further, the present development of techno-politics, which has already successfully eliminated the need for the ratio between the public and the private, is beginning to eliminate the distinction between the prison and the outside through biometric identification systems and continuous tracking; when the world of each individual is going to be defined according to the access she has to different things and services, the denial of access would constitute imprisonment. The good critic relies on the ratio given by the critique to deploy the criteria in the act of criticism. The better critic prescribes with an alertness to the new tolerances and intolerances in the ratio brought about by arrivals and departures of elements. The best critic is the critique itself. When criticism becomes possible without critique and ratio, one of the ways to criticalization is opened; with a little bit of luck it might be recognized as a crisis. The risk of criticism without critique, without ratio, is that of a peculiar madness which cannot tell the difference between madness and genius. Canguilhem’s articulation of this problematic is that of a being which has no concern for light in its internal milieu, that is such a being cannot be blind. Further, ‘one loses the guiding thread that allows one to distinguish between madness and genius in the case of inadaptations to a given milieu of culture’.12 This privation of a possibility of privation is why Aquinas would say that the stone is not blind. Criticalization appears as a symptom of inadaptation while the aetiology leads us to the loss of ratios. According to Nancy, this criticalization is the return of crisis and it is symptomatized by ‘Capitalism becomes its own enemy and wars against itself. Empire becomes divided against itself. We claim to find or recover such or such normative elements … which has been critiqued or self critiqued from top to bottom’.13 When the ratio between life and moralism is lost the religiously imposed vegetarianism leads to malnutrition of children in India. Leading a whole population of desert dwellers into vegetarianism would

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be their own extinction. However, the ratio which enables these practices today in the advanced capitalist societies is the market. When a tourist – the adventurist and charity worker of our time – moves from city to city he expects to find the markets to be the same, in the same way that luxury hotels make one feel as though the whole world is the same for those who can afford this sameness. Vegetarianism and other ascetic measures are  possible as fashion statements due to the pervasion of the market. However, when one forgets the limits of adaptability of markets the ratio between death and nourishment is lost; it is another matter that these games of nirvana and moksha were played in the Indian subcontinent thousands of years ago in order to release mankind from the suffering involved in the act of living. The ratio between sexual difference and births is overcome by the possibilities of homo-culture, or the design and creation of human animals within laboratory conditions, which were more the fantasies of eugenics of an earlier time. When one seeks out high street brand clothing to avoid punishing the animals for wool the ratio between sweat shops in the unknown worlds and the market is forgotten as a new ratio is obtained between the market and theft. The demand to ban cigarettes in open spaces discards the ratio between the notion of freedom of the human animal and the conditioning of this freedom in the state. When one discards electronic devices within months for newer devices the ratio between mining and the mass murders which enable it are made insignificant. The political ratio between the private and public is converted into a production function through social media and platform technologies. Soon the ratio between movement and imprisonment will be overcome by self-driving vehicles. Criticalization is in the hands of all who can type ‘go away’, ‘make it disappear’, and ‘it hurts my feelings’ to such an extent that arts and artists could disappear suddenly like the English painter Benjamin Breeg. In this criticalized era of the human animal, where bringing everything to the end – as easy as stubbing out a cigarette – is a power within the grasp of all, we see that we have advanced beyond the levelling of all things or the making equal of all things which appeared after the era of the critique. These are the consequences of ‘the anti-political machine’ of James Ferguson, ‘depoliticising everything it touches, everywhere whisking political realities out of sight’14 in such a way that we ‘develop’ into little Calypsos. The surveillance systems of eavesdropping and neighbours reporting on each other which characterized the polities of the last century have been overcome by the semantic annihilation of the private–public distinction; that is surveillance is indistinguishable from intimacy when kisses and orgies are live streamed. Yet, surveillance is not control. Gandhi understood that control has to be more

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intimate than that. It is the control of the palette or the faculty of taste. To change the taste of oneself and others is to imitate the gesture of criticism to the point of criticalization. For example when one is asked to stub out cigarettes and to stop drinking coffee it is not the taste in these substances which is being altered, but this changes the taste in control. We are gaining the maximum taste in control. This new taste is soon going to change the ratio between the police and the military which can be seen in what is being described as the militarization of the police. That is, policing can be performed better by the citizens on one another when everyone looks suspect of one crime or the other; ‘Is she carrying a cigarette?’; ‘Did their skins touch as she sat down?’; ‘Is it a piece of meat in the refrigerator?’; ‘Was it an impermissible word that was spoken by the professor?’; ‘Is she sad enough to be reported?’; ‘Is this poem hurting my religion?’; ‘Did she look at him for more than two seconds?’; ‘Is that wool she is wearing?’; ‘Is that plastic he is wearing?’ In us little Calypsos are being born. Soon lovers will replace the police; it will be a relationship of surveillance, accounting of transgressions, investigation into excesses and judgement. What Gandhi found in the human animal was that it was the species which was incapable of living, the animal which could not justify a single moment of its existence, the violent animal which appears as an error in the Maker’s scheme which could be rectified only through its erasure by building a nation for its erasure. For Nancy, life without death would not be anastasis, that is, anastasis is existence or life in which death resurrects so that ‘Even that which appears as the end reveals itself without end.’15 The end without anastasis would be the total embrace of mankind by itself such that no light ever enters it, the embrace of erasure. Hence, perhaps, the warning or plea ‘noli me tangere’ – do not seek to touch me – which Nancy raises within the senses of anastasis throughout the eponymous book. Critiques themselves come to criticalization for they are no perpetual motion machines. It should certainly interest a historian of the critique that the two concerns – critique and perpetual motion machines – arose almost around the same time. Critiques are weathered and eroded by the very thoughts they make inadmissible, by the events they cannot anticipate, and by the exhaustion of their essences – the well-determined possibilities. They are the places ‘where man is at his limit … . At this limit, he collapses or exposes himself and, in one way or another, loses his bearings. … the place of the intolerable at the same time as that of the impossible.’16 New comprehending laws appear, gathering the components of critiques from without, leading them to anastasis. It is in this moment that a critique comes to be a chrysalis. The criticalization of a critique, or a critique in intensive care, corresponds to the thinking which is either its afterthought or

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a fore-thought which can be called a prognosis. In order to follow the formal liminality and the essential exhaustion of a critique, thought must criticalize it; or as Bataille found ‘The object of my research cannot be distinguished from the subject at its boiling point;’ that is, endure the critical limits in thought towards anastasis. It is anastasis which guides criticalization in thinking, although the bauplan of the guide is properly obscure and its game is of the tease. It is that process through which the criticalized system becomes a matter for the up-rising of something new. Criticalization under anastasis subjects the system to the thresholds of asceticism and profligacies, the simultaneity of starving and orgies. We can see in Gandhi these two tendencies, although his concern was not guided by anastasis but the annihilation of the human animal, or the total accomplishment of nihilism. Anastasis is not the repetition or resumption of anything dead or gone past. In his re-articulation of this term in Noli Me Tangere, Nancy takes care to mark – from both the tragic stance that raises the hero and the Hegelian movement that raises itself through sublation – a difference that ‘has to do with what anastasis is not or does not bring about from the self, from the subject proper, but from the other’.17 He finds it to be another stance: ‘it is to hold oneself firmly in the assurance of a stance [une tenue] before death. This “stance” is literally anastasis or “resurrection”, that is, the raising or uprising’ which is ‘Neither regeneration, reanimation, palingenesis, rebirth, revivification, or reincarnation’ nor resuscitations or even metamorphosis.18 The older notion of anastasis was the articulation of a relation between the given and the plenitude of the giving while this plenitude was comprehended in terms of ‘the familiar images’, as Spinoza would have said, of the given. Instead, anastasis designates the taking place of each moment including this moment: ‘It is always a matter of the sudden appearance of sense or of beyond-sense’.19 This fact—the seizure between sense and beyond-sense which is each moment, or “the impossible contact between day and night”, or between death and life—is both ordinary and “mysterium tremendum”, and at the same time it is something from which we find ourselves averted through the games of several kinds including the theological anti-politics which is unfolding in the subcontinent and which is a species of Gandhi’s own hypophysics. We shall term as ana-stasis that which comes over stasis. Stasis has an etymological relation to the speculative root “*sta”. We learned in our discussion of “resistance” and its relation to “existence” (in chapter 8, ‘Violence and Resistance’) that the etymology of these two terms also leads us to “*sta”, which

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suggests to “hold in place” or to “hold firm”. From *sta, the Sanskrit “sthala” (a place, a ground) is derived. The ancient Greek “histemi” (I stand) and “stasis” share the same root. Stasis referred to a specific situation in the polis where two or more groups of men either claim or seek control over the creation of the laws which would order the life of the city. Stasis could be a group which sought control, a state of inaction caused by the strife, or civil war where no laws could obtain. According to Hansen, ‘The word stasis actually means “stance”; but it underwent shifts of meaning as follows: (1) stance, (2) standpoint, (3) group of people with the same standpoint, (4) in the plural: two or more groups with opposing standpoints, (5) the split between groups, and (6) civil war.’ That is, stasis is the criticalization of the polis when what was earlier its component laws come to seek the position of comprehending laws and this competition of claimants bring the circulation of the laws to an arrest. From the 18th century onwards, “stasis” came to denote the obstruction of a flow, such as the blockage of the flow of blood in the veins. Stasis in this sense as a stone blocking the flow of a canal would be evil for Augustine. The older religious meaning of a miraculous, supernatural or phantasmagoric raising of the dead, as well magical or hypophysical senses are retained, yet thoroughly displaced, in biology where anastasis is defined as the rising to life of cells which were destroyed through the process of apoptosis. Apoptosis in Greek meant a “falling off ”, such as when leaves fall off after chlorosis; in biology it refers to the programmed death of cells. For instance, in an external milieu of water scarcity a “resurrection plant” develops strategies of desiccation tolerance through suspension of metabolism or variation of chlorophyll levels. Anastatica Hierochuntica is another name of the rose of Jericho which grays and shrivels up in the summer heat to become its own chrysalis for an interval, and to be resurrected at the moist touch, green with little white flowers. Ana-stasis is that which comes over criticalization. A criticalized system is akin to the void that astronomers have found between galactic walls where no celestial forms appear, or to a society near semantic annihilation where words and acts come to mean little. Anastasis is the seizure (keeping in mind the “prehension” of Whitehead) of that which is voided by stasis – or strife between distinct orientations – into an abandoned field at the end of war as a matter which is worth salvaging in a new beginning. That is anastasis contains two powers: the ability to see in that which no longer circulates meaning a home for a new meaning – for instance, as when Nietzsche found in man homologies to make something untimely – and the ability to be in the seizure of that which

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is not yet. It is in this sense that anastasis is to be understood: the process which can hold that which is given before it as a matter and that which is not in the given; anastasis is responsible for the new beginning that which it alone can bring about. Anastasis seizes the criticalized system in order to salvage the homologies from it, to grant to the restless analogies without functional isolations the passion for unhomeliness, and at the same time to let a horizon of disquiet reveal a range of comprehending laws for the active polynomia. Indeed, as Gandhi found, Anastasis leaves ruins; in the words of Dita Von Teese, ‘One of the consequences of time, you see, is that some elements may not translate.’20 Anastasis is not recovery of what once was or as Nancy writes “It is the other that rises and resurrects within the dead self.”21 Anastasis requires of us that we do not fall back on the idols of old in our moment’s crisis; a mistake which arises in thinking of anastasis as the reappearance of the same thing. For example colonialism was indeed a crisis which continues to criticalize the zones seized by it in manifold ways. However, postcolonial theories which phantasize about the idols of nativism to remould the matter of societies criticalized by colonialism are repeating fascisms. A crisis recovered through the images of tired idols – those which were felled by semantic annihilations – yields at best zombies. The politics of zombies unfolding in the subcontinent – ‘Hindu’ Nazi politics and Islamic fascist politics – was prepared by postcolonial theories.22 The politics of zombies originated in the various determinations of orient and occident. There are two tendencies which mark these two political directives; the tendency to pursue thoughts and acts to their ends is named by the ‘occident’ and that tendency to conserve at the origin marks the ‘orient’, which is beginning to dominate everywhere. These two tendencies do not have distinct geographical isolations as they can overwhelm any region of the earth and of thought. Anastasis is neither oriental nor occidental; it is a horizon outside the limited directives of orienting stars which asks of us to fold these directives over a dimension outside them, as when the end points of a straight line are brought into contact over the third dimension. Anastasis is the obscure beginning which would gather the occidental and the oriental in order to make of them a chrysalis and set off the imagos born with their own spans and skies; these skies and the imagos set against them will refuse to trade in orientations; and these skies will be invisible to the departed souls of Hegel who sought mercury in the darkest nights.

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Notes Foreword 1 Franson Manjali and Mike Holland – among others – have analysed these texts by Blanchot.

Introduction

1 ‘Reflections on Gandhi’, Shooting an Elephant and other Essays, London: Penguin, 2009. 2 Maurice Blachot, ‘Mahatma Gandhi’, Journal for Cultural Research 16.4 (2012), pp. 366–70. 3 Dita Von Teese, Burlesque and the Art of the Teese, New York: Harper Collins, 2006. 4 Von Teese, Burlesque and the Art of the Teese. 5 Blanchot, ‘Mahatma Gandhi’. 6 M. K. Gandhi, Harijan 25 August 1946, p. 281. 7 It is a sign of the times that an entire university is dedicated to studying the potentially imminent technological overcoming of humanity – Singularity University, California. 8 M. K. Gandhi, Hind Swaraj, p. 116. 9 Ibid., p. 30. 10 Alain Badiou, Metapolitics, London: Verso, 2005. Badiou’s other works Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil (2001) and The Communist Hypothesis (2010) contain elaborations of this view. 11 Slavoj Žižek, The Parallax View, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009, p. 57. 12 We proposed this term to point to the method whereby diverse programmes which establish themselves by putting limits to reason justify this limiting act by invoking Gandhi. He serves as a sanction to renounce the obligation to render reasons, and invoking his name and its authority become reason enough: ‘how easily the inveterate is written upon the surface of the new and the reason of needs which necessitates it. In the persisting milieu of post-modern consensus reason has died, in the manner of a failure to live up to itself and in the manner of failure before the greater reason of morality. Yet the oddment of the demise of reason persists. The oddment is the authority of reason without the travail of reason. … The authority of the name Gandhi is proper to name the new reason.’ Shaj Mohan and Divya Dwivedi, ‘The Paternal Reason’, Economic & Political Weekly 45.36 (2010) p. 43. 13 M. K. Gandhi, All Men Are Brothers, London: Continuum Press, 2007, p. 40.

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14 Gandhi, All Men Are Brothers, p. 33. 15 See Anastasis in the later chapters and the conclusion. 16 Jean-Luc Nancy, Noli Me Tangere: On the Raising of the Body, trans. Sarah Clift, Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas, New York: Fordham University Press, 2008, p. 12.

Chapter 1 1 Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi (henceforth CWMG) 3, p. 182. 2 M. K. Gandhi, An Autobiography or The Story of My Experiments with Truth, New Delhi: Penguin Books, 1982, p. 290. 3 Gandhi, Autobiography, p. 177. 4 CWMG 62, p. 212. Emphasis added. 5 Hind Swaraj, p. 51. 6 This is where the expression ‘the intrinsic value of a thing’ runs into its own difficulties if we assume that this value can be in existence even if it were the only thing in the world. 7 Immanuel Kant, ‘Groundwork for a Metaphysics of Morals’, Practical Philosophy, trans. and ed. Mary J. Gregor, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996, 4:411, p. 64; emphasis added. 8 Edward Tiryakian, ‘Toward the Sociology of Esoteric Culture’, American Journal of Sociology 78.3 (1972), p. 498. 9 Derek Collins, ‘Nature, Cause, Agency in Greek Magic’, Transactions of the American Philological Association 133.1 (2003), p. 28. 10 See Mircea Eliade, Occultism, Witchcraft, and Cultural Fashions: Essays in Comparative Religions, London: University of Chicago, 1976. 11 De Anime, 41 1a. 12 Timaeus 29a, d, 30b. 13 Markus Aurelius, Meditations 7.9, trans. Maxwell Staniforth, London: Penguin, 1964. 14 Lives of Philosophers 7.85; Brooke Holmes, ‘Greco-Roman Ethics and the Naturalistic Fantasy’, Isis 105 (2014), pp. 573–4. 15 Ibid. 16 Young India, 11 October 1928. 17 Lorraine Daston and Fernando Vidal, ‘Introduction: Doing What Comes Naturally’, The Moral Authority of Nature, ed. Daston and Vidal, University of Chicago Press, 2004, p. 14. 18 William A. Frankena calls Hume’s separation of the factual from moral a ‘bifurcationist’ ontology of ethical judgements in ‘The Naturalistic Fallacy’, Mind 48 (1939), p. 467; Lorraine Daston, ‘The Naturalistic Fallacy is Modern’, Isis 105.3 (2014), pp. 579–87.

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19 James Lovelock, The Ages of Gaia, p. 212; it is a fate that humans, unless they acknowledge themselves as ‘partners’ and ‘representatives’ of bacteria, fungi and slime moulds, ‘shall be eliminated with as little pity as would be shown by the micro-brain of an intercontinental ballistic missile in full flight to its target’, ‘Planetary Medicine: Stewards or Partners on Earth?’ Times Literary Supplement (13 September 1991), pp. 7–8. 20 See Capra, The Tao of Physics, Berkeley: Shambhala Publications, 1975; Sheldrake, The Rebirth of Nature, New York: Bantam, 1991, ch.2. Such concerns took a new life and developed in many directions and forms including deep ecology and eco-feminism; see Aldo Leopold, A Sand Country Almanac, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1949; E. Sahtouris, Gaia: The Human Journey from Chaos to Cosmos, New York: Simon and Schuster, 1989; Anne Primavesi, From Apocalypse to Genesis, London: Burns and Oates, 1991; K. Pedler, The Quest for Gaia, London: Harper Collins, 1991; Sallie McFague, The Body of God, London: SCM, 1993. Arne Naess, see Michael Northcott. 21 Lovelock in interview to David Suzuki, quoted in Michael Ruse, The Gaia Hypothesis, pp. 181–2. 22 Friedrich Hölderlin, ‘Being and Judgment’, Friedrich Hölderlin: Essays and Letters on Theory, ed. and trans. Thomas Pfau, Albany: State University of New York Press, 1988, pp. 154–6. 23 Young India, 11 October 1928, p. 340. 24 Meister Eckhart, Selected Writings, trans. Olivier Davies, Penguin, 1994. 25 For this and several other reasons that I can give you, I have come to the conclusion that the definition, ‘Truth is God’, gives me the greatest satisfaction. And when you want to find Truth as God the only inevitable means is Love, that is, non-violence, and since I believe that ultimately the means and end are convertible terms, I should not hesitate to say that God is Love. 26 Gandhi, Harijan, 16 February 1943, p. 4. 27 Young India, 11 October 1928, p. 340. 28 Ibid. 29 ‘I do dimly perceive that whilst everything around me is ever changing, ever dying, there is underlying all that change a living power that is changeless, that holds all together, that creates, dissolves and re-creates’, Ibid. 30 Bhikhu Parekh, Gandhi’s Political Philosophy, London: MacMillan, 1989, p. 6. 31 Javeed Alam, ‘Introduction’, Social Scientist 34.5/6 (2006), p. 2. 32 Partha Chatterjee, ‘Gandhi and the Critique of Civil Society’, Subaltern Studies, vol.3, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1984, p. 156. In 1947 Gandhi said, ‘I wrote a book called Hind Swaraj when I was in South Africa. That was in 1909, that is, 40 years ago. In those days I held the same views as I do now’, CWMG 87, p. 357. 33 Bilgrami, ‘Gandhi the Philosopher’, Economic and Political Weekly 38.39 (2003), p. 4159.

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34 Joseph Alter, ‘Gandhi’s Body, Gandhi’s Truth: Nonviolence and the Biomoral Imperative of Public Health’, Journal of Asian Studies 55.2 (May 1996), p. 301. 35 CWMG 24, p. 85–6. 36 Joseph Alter, Gandhi’s Body, p. 23. 37 Pradhan, ‘Making Sense of Gandhi’s Idea of Truth’, p. 37. 38 Bilgrami, ‘Gandhi, Newton, and the Enlightenment’, Philosophical Exchange 38.1 (2008), p. 65. This paper was first published in Social Scientist 34 (2006). 39 Bilgrami, ‘Gandhi, Newton, and the Enlightenment’, p. 69 and 71. 40 See Parekh, Gandhi’s Political Philosophy; Anthony Parel, Gandhi’s Philosophy and the Quest for Harmony, New Delhi: Cambridge University Press, 2006. 41 Martin Heidegger, On Time and Being, trans. Joan Stambaugh, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002, p. 60. 42 Duns Scotus, Philosophical Writings, trans. Allan Wolter, Hackett, 1987. 43 CWMG 89, p. 55. 44 Baruch Spinoza, Ethics, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000, pp. 154–5. 45 Harijan, 16 February 1943, p. 4. 46 See Max Black. 47 Jean-Luc Nancy, A Finite Thinking, Edited by Simon Sparks. Stanford: Stanford University Press (2003), p. 195. 48 Arne Naess, Ecology, Community, Lifestyle: Outline of an Ecosophy, trans. David Rothberg, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989, pp. 194–5. 49 Hind Swaraj, p. 51. 50 There are numerous cases to cite from these times, some explicit and some not. For example, Brian Massumi derives a misunderstood metaphysics of Gilles Deleuze within a hypophysical understanding: ‘For Deleuze, transcendental refers to the ontogenetic difference between emergence and the emerged. Giordano Bruno had a word for something like an incorporeal materialism that is even more troubling: magic. The distance between Bruno and our modernity (or postmodernity) is narrowed somewhat by his definition of magic as the “alloying of knowledge and the power to act”,’ 2002, pp. 257–8. 51 Naess, Ecology, Community, Lifestyle, pp. 38–9. 52 Ibid., p. 194. 53 Stuart A. Kauffman, Reinventing The Sacred, Basic Books, 2008, p. 288. 54 Aeschylus, Agamemnon in Aeschylus, trans. Herbert Weir Smith, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1926, p. 177. Kostas Papaioannou gathers that ‘the Good which acts in the universe remains precarious in the here-below and shows itself as really efficacious only in the cosmic domain, from which, moreover, all phenomena of our inferior world derive their content of reality, beauty, and value’; ‘Nature and History in the Greek Conception of the Cosmos’, Diogenes 7 (1959), p. 8. 55 CWMG 8, p. 157.

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56 It will be easy to perceive in these words an ancient wisdom or superstition. However, Gandhi was always alert to superstitious practices of India which he often called evil. ‘I am no indiscriminate, superstitious worshipper of all that goes under the name of “ancient”.’ CWMG 35, p. 305. Joseph Alter notes that ‘for Gandhi science was convincing, at least in part, because of the degree to which it made possible rethinking the problem of social scale’ though we find that Gandhi invented a science of his own which directly comprehended the problem of scale as such. Alter, p. 22. 57 Harijan, 2 February 1934, p. 1. 58 ‘If we associate ethical principles with cosmic phenomena, we shall have to admit that human nature is morally superior to Providence that preaches its lessons on good behaviour in orgies of the worst behaviour possible.’ Quoted in The Essence of Hinduism, p. 107. 59 ‘Unless we believe in inexorableness of the universal law in the working of which God himself never interferes, we find it impossible to justify His ways on occasions like the one which has sorely stricken us in an overwhelming manner and scale.’ Tagore quoted in The Essence of Hinduism, p. 105. 60 Ibid. 61 Ibid. 62 Ibid., p. 106. 63 See Hegel, Philosophy of Mind, pp. 212–13. 64 ‘Ramanama has the flavor of faith healing and Christian Science; yet, it is quite distinct from them.’ Harijan, 28 April 1946, p. 105. 65 Harijan, 24 March 1946, p. 56. 66 CWMG, p. 185. 67 Gandhi, Autobiography, p. 45. 68 Ibid., p. 33. 69 See Chapters 1 and 2 of Gandhi: A Political and Spiritual Biography, London: IB Tauris, 2008. 70 CWMG 20, p. 49.

Chapter 2 1 M. K. Gandhi, Gandhi’s Health Guide, Freedom: The Crossing Press, 2004, p. 14. 2 Stephen D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner, Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything, New York: William Morrow, p. 90. See also Sudhir Venkatesh, Gang Leader for a Day, London: Penguin, 2009. 3 See Deleuze’s discussion on the ‘and’ and conjunction in Dialogues 2, trans. Barbara Haberjam and Hugh Tomlinson, London: Contiuum, 2007.

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4 Pseudo-Dionysius: The Complete Works, trans. Colm Luibheid, New York: Paulist Press, 1987, p. 178. 5 Jacques Monod, Chance and Necessity, New York: Vintage Books, 1972, p. 10. 6 Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998, p. 262, 322. 7 Arendt, The Human Condition, pp. 322–3. 8 Young India, 11 October 1928, p. 340. 9 Hind Swaraj, p. 52. 10 CWMG 6, p. 331. 11 See Sarah Waterlow, Nature, Change and Agency in Aristotle’s Physics, Oxford: Clarendon, 1982. 12 Physics, Book VIII, 255b, 1–30 Aristotle. 13 In Two Lessons on Animal and Man, Gilbert Simondon discusses the principles according to which the various speeds of the animal are distinguished from that of the vegetal while noting the functional continuity between the two. That is, the animal and the vegetal share in certain functions, though their implementations differ. See Chapter 3 in this book for the continuation of the discussion of the relation between functions, homologues, and speed. 14 The theory of speeds assisted through contact was displaced by the theory of impetus. See Thomas Kuhn, Structure of Scientific Revolutions. 15 See Milan Kundera’s meditation of the weight of places in The Unbearable Lightness of Being. See also Simone Weil’s Gravity and Grace where she finds her proximity to Gandhi and ‘the East’ where she writes that ‘all the natural movements of the soul are controlled by laws analogous to those of physical gravity. Grace is the only exception’, trans. Emma Craufurd, Routledge and Kegan Paul Limited, London, 1952, p. 1. 16 CPR A25/B39. 17 CPR A164/B205. This ‘us’ is not a determinate us as in ‘we who stand opposed to Fascisms all kinds’ but a transcendental I that can be distributed infinitely. 18 Martin Heidegger, ‘Kant’s Thesis of Being’, Pathmarks, ed.William McNeill, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. 19 CWMG 84, p. 212. 20 ‘The means may be likened to a seed, the end to a tree; and there is just the same inviolable connection between the means and the end as there is between the seed and the tree’; Hind Swaraj, p. 81. 21 Hind Swaraj, p. 19. 22 Elias Canetti, Crowds and Power, London: Penguin, 1973, p. 353, 355, 357. 23 A notion familiar to us from nautical and aeronautical miles. 24 Paul Virilio, Desert Screen, trans. Michael Degener, London: Continuum, 2002, pp. 15–16. 25 Heidegger, On Time and Being, trans. Joan Stambaugh, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002, p. 16.

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26 We will discuss the deeply disturbing and unprecedented racism of Gandhi in Chapter 9. 27 Virilio, Desert Screen, p. 15. 28 Gandhi, Gandhi’s Health Guide, p. 15. 29 CWMG 10, p. 379. 30 Thomas F. Taylor, The Fallacy of Speed, London: A. C. Fifield, 1909, p. 18. 31 See ‘Different Spaces’, Aesthetics, Method and Epistemology: The Essential Works of Foucault, 1954-84 vol. 2, ed. J. Fabion, New York: The New York Press, 1998, p. 185. 32 Taylor, The Fallacy of Speed, p. 59. 33 Ibid., p. 51. 34 Ibid., p. 60. 35 See Gaurinath Sastri, A Study in the Dialectics of Sphota, Motilal Banarsidass, Delhi, 1980. 36 Paul Virilio, Speed and Politics, trans. Mark Polizotti, Paris: Semiotext(e), 2006, p. 70. 37 Virilio, Speed and Politics, pp. 23–4. The belonging of man to the divine is a suspension: ‘Man is an animal or imperfect.’ 38 Hind Swaraj, p. 51. 39 Ibid. 40 Ibid. 41 SWMG 3, p. 24. 42 Ibid., p. 15. 43 Hind Swaraj, p. 43. 44 Novalis, Aphorisms and Fragments, trans. Alexander Gelley. From German Romantic Criticism. Ed. A. Leslie Willson, London: Continuum, 1982. 45 CWMG 59, pp. 19–20. 46 Hind Swaraj, p. 16. 47 Ibid. p. 18. 48 Jawaharlal Nehru, A Bunch of Letters: Written Mostly to Jawaharlal Nehru and Some Written by Him, 1958, Bombay: Leaders’ Press Pvt., p. 121. 49 Ibid., p. 507. Madhu Limaye observed, ‘Many western writers have been puzzled by Gandhi’s passionately held beliefs and his naming as heir a person who was the champion of science, technology and industrialisation’; Limaye, Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru, p. 310. 50 CWMG 9, p. 481. 51 Hind Swaraj, p. 47. 52 Ibid. 53 Ibid. 54 Ibid, p. 48. 55 Village Swaraj, p. 23. 56 ‘Formerly, only a few men wrote valuable books. Now, anybody writes and prints anything he likes and poisons people’s minds’; Ibid., p. 29.

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57 ‘We are now rushing to and fro with the velocity of air, delivering speeches, writing newspaper articles, and yet we fall short of our accomplishments and the cry of despair fills the air. I for one am of opinion that, as in old days, our acts will have a more powerful influence on the public than any number of speeches and writings’; CWMG 14, p. 209. 58 Hind Swaraj., p. 42. Emphasis added. The span of man’s world is the loss of ‘the passion to see God face to face’. The warrior of this passion will be the passive resister. Gandhi, Autobiography, p. 45. 59 Ibid., p. 35. ‘With the increased velocity of modern changes we do not know what the world will be a hundred years hence.’ S. Radhakrishnan, ‘Introduction’, All Men Are Brothers, London: Bloomsbury, 2011, p. ix. 60 Village Swaraj, p. 22. 61 CWMG 15, p. 51. 62 Ibid. 63 Ibid. p. 51. 64 Ibid., p. 68. 65 Ibid., p. 51. 66 Ibid., p. 47. 67 ‘Indian civilisation is the best and that the European is a nine days wonder. Such ephemeral civilisations have come and gone and will continue to do so,’ Hind Swaraj, p. 116. 68 Hind Swaraj, p. 37. 69 Madhu Limaye, Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru: A Historic Partnership, vol. 4, Delhi: B R Publishing Corporation, 1991, p. 388. 70 Young India, 26 January 1921, p. 27. 71 J. T. F. Jordens, Gandhi’s Religion: A Homespun Shawl, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998. 72 CWMG 6, p. 317. 73 Ibid.

Chapter 3 1 Village Swaraj, p. 20. 2 Among Gandhi scholars, it is Anthony Parel who detects the significance in Gandhi of the faculty of buddhi, tracing it to ‘Indian’ tradition and proposes that ‘Gandhi’s philosophy of right started with natural dharma, which … was a dictate of buddhi’; Gandhi’s Philosophy, p. 95. 3 CWMG 24, p. 117. 4 Gandhi, Gandhi’s Health Guide, p. 23.

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5 ‘For Foucault the body has a materiality that is ontologically distinct from the power relations that take that body as a site of investments’; Judith Butler, Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of ‘Sex’. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1993, p. 33. 6 Alter, Gandhi’s Body, p. xi. 7 Ibid., pp. xvi–xvii 8 CWMG 764, pp. 61–62. 9 CWMG 20, p. 43. 10 ‘Jerusalem’ 15: 12–13 in The Complete Writings of William Blake with All the Variant Readings, ed. G. Keynes, London: Nonesuch Press, 1957. 11 Milan Kundera, Slowness, trans. Linda Asher, New York: Harper Collins, 1996, p. 96. 12 ‘Solar Anus’, Visions of Excess: Selected Writings 1927-1939, trans. Allan Stoekl et al., Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985, p. 9. 13 Compare also with Judge Daniel Paul Schreber: ‘The sun has for years spoken with me in human words and thereby reveals herself as a living being or as the organ of a still higher being behind her’; Memoirs of My Mental Illness, trans. Ida Macalpine, New York: NYRB, 2000, p. 22. Schreber’s madness did not lead towards a certain catatonic quietude that characterized Nietzsche’s, rather it was a madness that discovered its own erudition that could place a counter-argument before the maddening world. Schreber’s case hence became a seminal ground for the study of madness for Freud and Deleuze. Later, in Chapter 9 (Critical Nation) we will find that a ‘revolution of thought’ coinciding with the risks of politics creates the most dangerous thinker where analogy plays the peculiar role of leading to extraordinary distances which would be impossible to reach for a project of thinking grounded in difference. 14 Monod, Chance and Necessity, p. 8. 15 This statement is not the truth of the animal kingdom, as the nose allows complex grasping functions in elephants. 16 Kundera, Slowness, p. 98. 17 For instance, Hume’s Treatise on Human Nature. 18 ‘What is the State? It is the total sign of division in society, in that it is a separate organ of political power: society is henceforth divided into those who exercise power and those who submit to it. Society is no longer an undivided We, a single totality, but a fragmented body, a heterogeneous social being. Social division and the emergence of the State are the death of the primitive society’, Clastre, Archaeology of Violence, trans. Jeanine Herman, Paris: Semiotext(e), 2010, p. 275. 19 Jacques Derrida, Geschlecht II: Heidegger’s Hand, Deconstruction and Philosophy: The Texts of Jacques Derrida, ed. John D. Sallis, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987, pp. 161–96. 20 ‘Key to Health’, CWMG 77, p. 2.

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21 Ibid. 22 Descartes, Treatise on Man, p. 1–4. 23 ‘The Neuro-Psychoses Of Defence’, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. James Stratchey, London: Vintage, 1999, pp. 314–15 24 Deleuze, Anti-Oedipus, trans. Robert Hurley et al., London: Continuum, 2004, p. 371. 25 ‘Key to Health’, CWMG 77, p. 2. 26 Lensing is defined as the introduction of a difference to the direction of a being by another, especially light. For light lensing is produced not merely with glass but also gravity. Reason as a business of light and illumination performed the same task in the classical form of thinking which was more complicated than the simple shining of a light on a sheet of paper lying on a desk for a reader. But with the concept of dark illumination the concept of illumination itself is appropriated by thought as the operation whereby something that is obscure is made to reveal itself as the obscure. 27 Young India, 4 August 1920, p. 3; ‘The human soul is a part of the universal spirit of God. When all our activity is directed towards the realization of this link, the body becomes a temple worthy for the spirit to live in’; ‘Key to Health’, CWMG 77, p. 2. 28 CWMG 41, p. 113. 29 There are several preparations or conditioning operations before such a decisionism can be set to work in Gandhi’s corpus. For example the ‘post-modern Gandhi’ is generated by assuming a wispiness to his corpus which calls for the necessary decisions to be made about the sense of his discourse such that it stands coherently (see Douglas Allen, ed., The Philosophy of Mahatma Gandhi for the Twenty-First Century, Lanham: Lexington, 2008). The other course has been to select that which is not ‘a mistake’ in his corpus and present a suitably saintly Gandhi. 30 CWMG 549, p. 414. 31 ‘Key to Health’, CWMG 77, p. 2 and 3. 32 ‘The atman is confined in the cage of this body, held in the prison of the body like a criminal,’ ‘Discourse on the Gita’, CWMG 32, p. 194. See also, CWMG 49, p. 328. Richard Sorabji points out that this is an idea that Gandhi may have found in Plato; Gandhi and the Stoics, Modern Experiments on Ancient Values, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012, p. 19. 33 There are religious writings to be found in the subcontinent and elsewhere about the proper place for devotion without this place surreptitiously working as a prison for the deity. 34 Vijayan, The Saga of Dharmapuri, New Delhi: Penguin, 2004. 35 Harijan, 22 February 1942, p. 53. 36 CWMG 44., p. 105. 37 CWMG 6, p. 34. 38 CWMG 44, p. 141.

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39 ‘Key to Health’, CWMG 77, p. 2. 40 Gandhi, Gandhi’s Health Guide, p. 2. 41 It is to be noted that Gandhi’s apparently random remarks about natural disasters as punishments given to man by nature after sufficient reckoning are derivative of his struggle with the problem of aggregation and at the same time an effort to remind us that the world and we are not shared in a disposition of indifference even when, or especially when, the world appears to act with utmost cruelty towards us. 42 Young India, 23 January 1930, p. 2. 43 ‘Key to Health’, CWMG 77, pp. 23–24. 44 CWMG 64, p. 90; ‘And maintenance of perfect health should be considered almost an utter impossibility without the brahmacharya leading to the conservation of the sexual secretions,’ CWMG 77, p. 21; ‘Without overcoming lust man cannot hope to rule over self. And without rule over self there can be no swaraj or Ramarajya. Rule of all without rule of oneself would prove to be as deceptive and disappointing as a painted toy mango, charming to look at outwardly but hollow and empty within. No worker who has not overcome lust can hope to render any genuine service to the cause of Harijans, communal unity, khadi, cow-protection or village reconstruction. Great causes like these cannot be served by intellectual equipment alone, they call for spiritual effort or soul-force. Soulforce comes only through God’s grace, and God’s grace never descends upon a man who is a slave to lust,’ CWMG 764, p. 61. 45 Harijan, 8 June 1947, p. 180. 46 Gandhi, Gandhi’s Health Guide, p. 22. 47 ‘Key to Health’, CWMG 77, p. 2. 48 Ana Freud could do so. 49 CWMG 28, p. 337. 50 Gandhi, Gandhi’s Health Guide, p. 183. 51 ‘Key to Health’, CWMG 77, p. 19. 52 Gandhi, All Men Are Brothers, p. 106. 53 Martin Heidegger, Hölderlin’s Hymn ‘The Ister’, pp. 61–4; Introduction to Metaphysics, p. 156. 54 Deleuze, Anti-Oedipus, p. 8. 55 Ibid., p. 10. 56 These are the citations from M. Paul Bureau’s Towards Moral Bankruptcy used by Gandhi in his denunciation of contraceptives in Young India in 1926 to which Nehru’s angry letter of 1928 referred, precipitating Gandhi’s threat to publicly repudiate Nehru and end their political partnership. CWMG 31, p. 287. 57 ‘Key to Health’, CWMG 77, p. 37. 58 Gandhi, All Men Are Brothers, p. 48. 59 Gandhi, Gandhi’s Health Guide, p. 42. 60 CWMG 28, p. 432. 61 CWMG 53, p. 410.

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62 ‘Key to Health’, CWMG 77, p. 13. This is not a moment to casually pass through. The statement beginning with ‘Even’ is counter to anything that is still being told to us about Gandhi’s racism which apparently vanished with his involvement in the Boer War. We will find the grounds and also implications of this racism which never left Gandhi later. 63 CWMG 28, p. 392. 64 Gandhi, Gandhi’s Health Guide, p. 39. 65 The biological aggregation of the body itself can be conceived under the notion of differences of speed – the autonomous nervous system as quicker than the central nervous system – and its own illusions given by speed; for example someone sneaks up to you from behind and places a cube of ice on your back and your reflex action might make you shout ‘It burns!’ 66 Georges Canguilhem, Knowledge of Life, trans. Stefanos Geroulanos and Daniela Ginsburg, ed. Paola Marrati and Todd Meyers, New York: Fordham University Press, 2008, p. 99. 67 ‘Key to Health’, CWMG 77, p. 37. 68 CWMG 31, p. 488. 69 Ibid., p. 16. 70 There are several critical aggregations where health is obtained for Gandhi and we will discuss these moments later. For now, what is to be gathered is that ‘In health means body ease’, Gandhi, Gandhi’s Health Guide, p. 16; the body as an aggregation that is obtained under slowness relieves man from the drag of the artifice which tears his soul. 71 Ibid. 72 ‘The condition of indigenous medicine is truly deplorable,’ Gandhi, Gandhi’s Health Guide, p. 8. It is a common practice to attribute to Gandhi a kind of postcolonial nativism which assumes the equality of all kinds of knowledge and then weighs up the knowledge of the locality as a political gesture. One should also recall that the adjectives old, traditional, ancient, local, indigenous, and rural are not equalized under the concept of the slow in Gandhi. That is, slowness is not a notion relative to something that is quicker, it is an individual essence. 73 Gandhi, Gandhi’s Health Guide, p. 18.

Chapter 4 1 Young India, 23 October 1924, p. 354. 2 Gandhi’s theory of the unity of God and his creatures, is often discussed under the non-dualist theology of Advaita; Gier insists that even those passages in Gandhi’s writings which appear to mirror Advaita should be interpreted through analogies to remain truthful to his corpus: ‘Instead of the Advaitin model of total

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undifferentiated unity, I suggest that these passages be interpreted in terms of organic analogies,’ The Virtue of Non-violence: From Gautama to Gandhi, Nicholas F. Gier, State University of New York Press, 2004, p. 41. ‘Valediction: Forbidding Mourning’, Collected Poems and Sonnets of John Donne, pp. 257–62. Anasaktiyoga, CWMG 41, p. 99. Ibid. CWMG 25, p. 25. Anasaktiyoga, CWMG 41, p. 168. Ibid., pp. 174–5. Young India, 24 June 1926, p. 230. CWMG 31, p. 310. CWMG 12, p. 376. Gandhi, Autobiography, p. 199. Gandhi, Gandhi’s Health Guide, p. 16. Ibid, p. 2, emphasis added. CWMG 29, p. 27. CWMG 40, p. 192. CWMG 54, p. 352. Gandhi, Gandhi’s Health Guide, p. 2. Parel, Gandhi’s Philosophy, p. 92. CWMG 64, p. 35. It is here that we can find the roots of Gandhi’s racism. We will return to it in the following chapters. Gandhi, Gandhi’s Health Guide, p. 4. Hind Swaraj, p. 63. CWMG 50, p. 437. Gandhi, Gandhi’s Health Guide, p. 200. Anasaktiyoga, CWMG 41, p. 182. Young India, 14 April 1927, p. 12; Gandhi contrasts true faith with the false here. CWMG 9, p. 271. ‘Key To Health’, CWMG 77, p. 25. Jan Bremmer, The Early Greek Concept of the Soul, p. 51. Ibid., p. 124. ‘The soul is a living principle not attached to the individuality of one specific existence or another’, Simondon, Two Lessons on Animal and Man, p. 42. CWMG 48, p. 180. Ashram Observances in Action, p. 36. This difficulty with respect to Truth is complicated by Gandhi’s Thomist insistence that ‘faith transcends reason’, CWMG 37, p. 350. Simondon, Two Lessons on Man and Animal, p. 37. CWMG 42, p. 474.

232 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46

Notes CWMG 41, p. 101. Emphasis in the original. CWMG 59, p. 318. Glyn Richards, The Philosophy of Gandhi, London: Routledge Curzon, 1991, p. 10. CWMG 15, p. 200. ‘The talisman by which death itself becomes the portal to life eternal’, SWMG 3, p. 179. ‘Ethical Religion’, CWMG 6, p. 318. CWMG 42, p. 474. CWMG 49, p. 130. We use the term accoutrement in the conceptual milieu given to it by Alok Rai. Gandhi, Gandhi’s Health Guide, p. 14. Gandhi, All Men Are Brothers, p. 68. Gandhi, Autobiography, p. 454.

Chapter 5 1 Hölderlin, Poems of Friedrich Hölderlin, trans. James Mitchell. San Fransisco: Ithuriel’s Spear, 2007, p. 24. 2 Jean-Luc Nancy, ‘Between Story and Truth’. Translated by Franson Manjali, The Little Magazine 2.4 (online); Translated from Nancy, ‘Entre deux’, Magazine Littéraire, 392 (2000) 54–57. 3 Jean Gebser’s idea of an ever-present origin is an insistence on the conjoinment of the mythical and the historical simultaneously in the present where we try to see them separately; as a certain principle that is transcendent and allows for only confused ideas to be formed of it. For Gandhi, this ever-present origin is factual and the factuality of it is to be found in the endurance of the slow. 4 Hind Swaraj, p. 90. 5 Ibid. 6 This distinction does not carry over into biomechanics where muscular action is distinguished on the basis of the distinction between active and passive forces. For a discussion of muscularity, physical culture, wrestling, and masculinity in Gandhi’s work, see Joseph Alter. 7 CWMG 13, p. 442. 8 CWMG 9, p. 118. Passive resistance and Satyagraha both belong to the same problematic of forces, though they are at two different locations in the map of this problematic. 9 CWMG 94, p. 297. 10 Ibid. 11 CWMG 8, p. 61.

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12 Richards, The Philosophy of Gandhi, p. 43; this is also an interesting example of what we have marked out as the Gandhian recoil. Richards recoils from the unrecorded activities of an enduring force which is opposed to history and all the civilizational achievement held to be unchallengeable. The endurance of the soul force is, for Gandhi, the certainty that all histories must return when their span diminishes to this ground. 13 Ibid. 14 Anasaktiyoga, CWMG 41, p. 95. 15 CWMG 9, p. 125. 16 CWMG 41, p. 99. 17 Ibid., p. 97. 18 Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton, New York: Columbia University Press, 1994, p. 212; Deleuze found this projection to be a ‘defect of the possible: a defect which serves to condemn it as produced after the fact, as retroactively fabricated in the image of what resembles it’, Ibid. 19 Ibid. 20 There are too many quotes to indicate this sense. 21 Harijan, 13 July 1947, p. 232. 22 CWMG 41, p. 100. 23 Ibid. 24 CWMG 90, p. 386. 25 Anasaktiyoga, CWMG 41, p. 94. 26 ‘Key to Health’, CWMG 77, p. 24. 27 Hind Swaraj, p. 51. 28 CWMG 41, p. 96. 29 The separation from the hypophysical truth occurs often through the forces of scientific pursuit. ‘From a scientific point of view, we may know a good many properties of water, but may not make any use of our knowledge. The knowledge that it is something with which we can quench our thirst and keep our bodies clean, and its use for such purposes, are very important for us and this knowledge of the utility of water is for us the truth about it, even if, in real fact, it is a substance with other properties and uses too.’ CWMG 49, p. 314. 30 CWMG 13, p. 465. 31 CWMG 9, p. 101. ‘The sense in which we are to understand the superiority of passive force is certainly not the mechanical, but the miraculous. Passive force in this sense does not imply its capability to counter the work of active force the way a wind mill’s action is found to be inferior to that of the atomic generator’. Indeed, Gandhi stated that ‘Ahimsa is a mightier weapon by far than the atom bomb’. CWMG 90, p. 522. 32 Hind Swaraj. p. 47.

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33 The Accursed Share, vol. 1, Georges Bataille, New York: Zone Books, 1989, p. 180. 34 Ibid., p. 181. The capability of the active force is infinite for Bataille. However, for Gandhi, such infinite capability does not imply that the active force will have an eternal reign. Rather, hidden in the apparent infinite capability is the ephemerality of the active force. 35 Hind Swaraj, p. 37. Gandhi appears to suffer a certain helplessness in his writings about the nature of women. Women are constructed so that they may be passive resisters, first by being a ‘special’ member of mankind and secondly due to their specialty itself – women are more suited to suffer pain. This special power comes in conflict with the natural role – queen of the household – whenever she attempts to deploy her special power in the political field. The pathos of this suffering are often adjusted to ‘the growth of M. K. Gandhi’ into the great soul; that is, his racism and its strict relationship to his adherence to caste order are set aside in order to make room for the progressive accommodation of racial diversity in the world as the great soul matured into old age. 36 Young India, 20 October 1927, p. 355. 37 Harijan, 22 June 1947, p. 200. 38 Gandhi, Autobiography, p. 238. 39 Young India, 27 October 1927, p. 357. 40 Anasaktiyoga, CWMG 41, p. 101. 41 Hind Swaraj, p. 35. 42 Ibid., p. 36. 43 Ibid., p. 35. 44 Gandhi, Gandhi’s Health Guide, p. 183. 45 Ibid., p. 101. 46 Ibid. 47 Ibid., p. 72. 48 Ibid., p. 39. 49 Ibid. 50 Young India, 11 August 1920, p. 3. 51 Ibid. 52 Akeel Bilgrami shows that nature itself appears to the infinite-animal as brute, and only the obedience to the higher law delivers nature itself as what the Maker constituted it, ‘not as brute but suffused with value’. In ‘Gandhi, the Philosopher’, Economic and Political Weekly, 38.39. 53 The use of the body, and mind, for any purpose other than that which the Maker intended is an instance of physical force – ‘His body has been given to man as a means, self-realization’, in ‘Key To Health’, SWMG 3, p. 368. As we will find later, delivering the life of man according to the Maker’s purpose will need ‘cultivated impotency’. 54 Hind Swaraj, p. 84.

Notes 55 56 57 58

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CWMG 32, p. 497. Young India, 5 May 1920, p. 7. CWMG 84, p. 54. Fritjof Capra and the many spiritualist interpreters of the sciences, and their theological anti-politics, display their descent from Gandhi. The inheritance of Gandhi is not merely in the mandatory citations, but in a committed theologization of the sciences. See Charlene Spretnak and Fritjof Capra, The Global Promise of Green Politics, New York: E. P. Dutton, 1984. Young India 12 November 1931, p. 355. Harijan, 6 May 1939, p. 113. Harijan, 7 January 1939, p. 417. Ibid. Gandhi, Gandhi’s Health Guide, p. 84. Ibid., p. 128. Ibid., p. 183. Ibid.

Chapter 6 1 ‘If we were not under the spell of lawyers and law courts and if there were no touts to tempt us into the quagmire of the courts and to appeal to our basest passions we would be leading a much happier life than we do today’. M. K. Gandhi, The Law and the Lawyers, p. 261. 2 There is a greater reason for his persistent defiance of the laws of the land and his invitation of the maximum punishment; he found himself in each moment in another court, of the Higher Law, or the Law of the Maker. 3 M. K. Gandhi, The Law and the Lawyers, Navjivan Press, p. 81. 4 Glyn Richards, in his theological enquiry into Gandhi, seeks to find those moments where a moral duty may instruct man to obey a certain law which would be a clear violation of another moral law. The example given by Richards is ‘If it is argued that a man has a moral duty to obey the law and that to break the law of the land is a violation of one’s duty to one’s country, then one has only to point to instances of government policy where it would be clearly immoral to obey the law of the land. Genocide is one such example,’ p. 53, The Philosophy of Gandhi, Glyn Richards. We are referring to the many instances of genocide in history as a polling strategy, and specifically the scenario unfolding now in the Indian Union. 5 Gandhi, The Law and the Lawyers, p. 120–1. 6 CWMG 87, pp. 65–66.

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7 Gandhi’s relation to the norms and the codes of conducts prevalent in the subcontinent is ambiguous. That is, he preferred not to reject them – the codes written by the Vedic immigrants for their own and the Dharmasatras – but retain their authority, in so far as it gave a paternal reason for his own statements. For example ‘Nothing in the Shastras which is manifestly contrary to universal truths and morals can stand,’ CWMG 62 (Print), p. 121. 8 Gandhi, The Law and the Lawyers, p. 259. 9 Young India, 31 December 1931, p. 428. 10 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Grammar, ed. Rush Rhees, trans. Anthony Kenny, Oxford, UK: Basil Blackwell, 1974, p. 293. 11 CWMG 62, p. 29. 12 The recent Indian example shows that it is being done without a care for the law by the media and the political party in power. 13 The recent Beef murders in India have been committed by organized groups of ‘Hindu’ nationalists and mobs incited by them against Muslims and Dalits – two communities among many others whose regular diet includes beef. Unrestrained by the state, and moreover funded by state schemes for cow protection, these mobs have lynched more than 60 people in the past four years in the name of protecting cows which in the past century and a half have been aggressively adopted as a religious symbol of Hindus. Gandhi played an important role in the adoption of ‘cow protection’ as an identifiable feature of the recently invented ‘Hindu’ religion: ‘The central fact of Hinduism is however cow-protection. Cow protection to me is one of the most wonderful phenomena in human evolution. … Cow-protection is the gift of Hinduism to the word. And Hinduism will live so long as there are Hindus to protect the cow’; CWMG 21, p. 428. 14 We will soon find that it is not the particular laws which are the objects of Gandhi’s passive resister, but, the legality of these very laws. 15 Harijan, 30 November 1947, p. 447. 16 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Grammar, p. 406. The reworking of the problematics of mathematics of Wittgenstein gave rise to a new form of empiricist understanding of mathematics. See also Imre Lakatos, Proofs and Refutations: The Logic of Mathematical Discovery, ed. John Worall and Elie Zahar, Cambridge: Cambride Unversity Press, 1976. 17 Hermann Weyl, Symmetry, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1952, p. 5. Regularity is not exhausted by Symmetry, as can be seen in Weyl’s discussion on the difference between Leibniz and Kant on the essence of space. 18 We will find in the chapter ‘Critical Nation’ that the relation between speed and symmetry would involve the concept of equilibrium, which Gandhi resisted in many ways. 19 CWMG 62, p. 336. Although, this formulation of the relation between the will and the laws of nature might resemble Sartre – ‘one cannot will to levitate’ – the laws

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24 25 26

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referred to by Gandhi pertain to hypophysics. That is, even when Gandhi would advocate strict obedience to the laws of gravity, he refers to the moral laws, which are indeed the most precarious. Yet, a certain stroboscopic understanding of nature is used by him to make room for miracles and calamities through which the rebel’s wrongs are righted and nature is set aright in the last instance by the Maker, who is the Law. CWMG 89, p. 273. Harijan, 11 January 1948, p. 502. Jorge Luis Borges, Collected Fictions, trans. Andrew Hurley, London: Penguin, 1999, p. 325. There are three laws – of segregation, of independent assortment, and of dominance. The terms under which Mendel organized his discoveries – factors, forms – are today understood differently as ‘genes’ and ‘alleles’, respectively. Importantly, Mendel discovered new kinds of proportions which are statistical laws, differing from the dynamical laws of physics. Harijan, 2 June 1946, p. 165. CWMG, p. 306. ‘Ethical Religion’, CWMG 6, p. 316. Gandhi’s statements on Darwin may seem a ruse to give force to his political project of infusing all the spheres of life with religion. However, we found earlier that they are consistent with Gandhi’s theory of language and are rational with respect to ‘paternal reason’. In these remarks we see Gandhi deploying the reference to Darwin’s authority as a paternal reason. Social Darwinism is a similar exercise in the ‘interpretation’ of biology, with similar priorities. Ibid., p. 317. CWMG 95, p. 190. Emphasis ours. Hind Swaraj, p. 90. Emphasis ours. CWMG 6, p. 317. Karl Marx, Grundrisse, London: Penguin Classics, 1973, p. 706. Marx, Grundrisse, p. 705. Gandhi advised his disciples to read Marx while knowing the difficulties involved in navigating the conceptual movements in Marx, ‘Some small books have been written as an aid to the study of Das Capital. Reading them would help.’ CWMG 80, p. 326. See ‘Machinery and Surplus Labour’ in Grundrisse, ed. Karl Marx, London: Penguin Classics, 1973. CWMG 48, p. 149. Emphasis ours. CWMG 85, p. 12. CWMG 34, p. 550. Ibid., p. 125.

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39 Leibniz preceded both thinkers in this phantasy by centuries with his characteristica universalis, and juridical engine. However, the problematic of the law and of God were distinct in his case. 40 Hind Swaraj, p. 109. 41 The emphasis which Gandhi places on ‘bread labour’ as the primary relation which all men are to have to nature is in contrast to Kojève’s Hegel, where the relation to nature is determined in accordance with the dynamic constitution of two figures – Master and Slave. 42 Alexandre Kojève, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, p. 95. 43 Kojève, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, p. 96. 44 Ibid., p. 49. 45 CWMG 13, p. 261. Emphasis ours. 46 CWMG 49, p. 116. 47 CWMG 26, p. 224. 48 ‘A stool should be placed on a tub of cold water so that the seat is just about the level of water in the tub. The patient should sit on the stool with his feet outside the tub and apply gentle friction to the sexual organ which just touches the surface of the water in the tub. This friction should never cause pain. On the contrary the patient should find it pleasant and feel rested and peaceful at the end of the bath’; ‘Key to Health’, CWMG 77, pp. 30–31. 49 Harijan, 4 August 1946, p. 249. 50 Young India, 17 July 1924, p. 236. 51 ‘The light dove cleaving in free flight the thin air, whose resistance it feels, might imagine that her movements would be far more free and rapid in airless space. Just in the same way did Plato, abandoning the world of sense because of the narrow limits it sets to the understanding, venture upon the wings of ideas beyond it, into the void space of pure intellect.’ CPR A4/B8. 52 M. K. Gandhi, From Yeravda Mandir (1935), Ahmedabad: Jivanji Desai, 1991, p. 69-70; SWMG 5, p. 123. 53 Richards, The Philosophy of Gandhi, p. 49. 54 CWMG 15, p. 196. Emphasis added. 55 Jn 13.34. 56 Harijan, 12 January 1947, p. 490. Emphasis added. 57 Young India, 26 December 1924, p. 424. 58 Harijan, 13 July 1947, p. 232. 59 Young India, 17 July 24, p. 236. 60 Yet, there are other laws under which mass presents itself, such as the second law of motion and the laws of chemical reactions. 61 Young India, 25 April 1929, p. 134. Gandhi echoes Mt. 23.7. 62 CWMG 17, p. 299. 63 CWMG 48, p. 189.

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64 CWMG 62 (print), p. 231. 65 Ibid., p. 244. 66 Young India, 14 January 1920, p. 5. (These statements appear with variations across other texts.) Further, we find that there is another logical answer to the question of the difference between the lawbreakers: A man cannot commit both civil and criminal disobedience at the same time even as he cannot be both temperate and furious at the same time and just as self-restraint is acquired only after one has been able to master his passions, so is the capacity for civil disobedience acquired after one has disciplined oneself in complete and voluntary obedience of the laws of the land. (CWMG 17, p. 323) 67 Young India, 19 February 1925, p. 61. 68 This is the beginning of the distinction between Leibniz and Gandhi – the principle of indiscernible extends over the whole world to erase contingency from it with respect to the modality of the substantia that God is capable of, while still remaining a monad. 69 Young India, 17 July 24, p. 236.

Chapter 7 1 CWMG 17, p. 152. 2 Akeel Bilgrami proposed that Gandhi is best understood as an exemplar. Gandhi himself explained that his life is the message he sought to convey. That is, the distinction between life as a means and messages for humanity as ends was unacceptable for him; each instance of life is the end itself. See Bilgrami ‘Gandhi, the Philosopher’, Economic and Political Weekly. 3 Alain Badiou, Saint Paul: The Foundations of Universalism, trans. Ray Brassier, California: Stanford University Press, 2003, p. 92. 4 CWMG 17, p. 153. 5 ‘It is no non-violence if we merely love those that love us. It is non-violence only when we love those that hate us. I know how difficult it is to follow this Law of Love.’ SWMG 5, pp. 132–3. 6 CWMG 17, p. 153. 7 CWMG 95, p. 179. 8 CWMG 15, p. 131. 9 ‘During my quest for truth, I saw the need for non-violence, and so, I tried to cultivate it. From that arose the need for non-possession. But I felt everything was hard without brahmacharya. This led to the discovery of satyagraha. This gave me fearlessness. I have since been practising indifference to taste.’ CWMG 95, p. 184. 10 Gandhi, Autobiography, p. 15.

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11 ‘But as we cannot do without a ruler or a general, such names of God as “King of Kings” or “The Almighty” are and will remain generally current. On deeper thinking, however, it will be realized, that Sat or Satya is the only correct and fully significant name for God.’ From Yeravda Mandir, pp. 1–2. 12 Friedrich Nietzsche, Will To Power, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale, New York: Vintage Books Edition, 1968, p. 334. 13 For example ‘It is the long history of slavery that has given us the illusion that slavery is our natural state. The truth is that it is not the natural state of any man whatever.’ CWMG 43, p. 84. 14 CWMG 42, p. 208. 15 Gandhi, Autobiography, p. 14. 16 Ludwig Wittgenstein, On Certainty. 17 CWMG 42, p. 208. 18 Ibid. 19 Ibid., p. 20. 20 CWMG 81, p. 127. 21 Selected Works of Jawaharlal Nehru Vol. 3, Delhi: B. R. Publishing Corporation, 1988. p. 14. 22 Nehru’s words in this letter were to form a sad contrast with the ones that would importune Gandhi in the very next one: ‘I have often felt how very different my ideals were from yours. And I have felt that you were very hasty in your judgements, or rather having arrived at certain conclusions you were overeager to justify them by any scrap of evidence you might get.’ He closed by saying, ‘But I must stop. I have already exceeded all limits. I hope you will forgive me.’ Ibid., p. 14–15. 23 Ibid, p. 15. 24 Nehru, A Bunch of Letters, p. 59. 25 Selected Works of Jawaharlal Nehru Vol. 3, p. 18–19 26 See Tidrick, p. 302-6. 27 CWMG 12, p. 406. 28 ‘But as long as I have not realized this Absolute Truth, so long must I hold by the relative truth as I have conceived it. That relative truth must, meanwhile, be my beacon, my shield and buckler.’ Gandhi, Autobiography, p. 15. 29 From Yeravda Mandir, p. 73. 30 CWMG 68, p. 382. 31 CWMG 68, p. 139. 32 We will return to the problematic of exposure in Chapter 9. 33 Hence the challenge of Hannah Arendt to Gandhi, ‘If Gandhi’s enormously powerful and successful strategy of nonviolent resistance had met with a different enemy – Stalin’s Russia, Hitler’s Germany, even prewar Japan, instead of England – the outcome would not have been decolonization, but massacre and submission.’ Hannah Arendt, On Violence, New York: Harcourt, Inc, 1970, p. 53. However, we

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38

39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47

48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59

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find that Arendt misunderstood Gandhi’s ends to be similar to her own which were of the possibility to identify the concept of progress with the continuation of a certain notion of man as that being which is in so far as there are always men. In Chapter 8 we will come to meet some of these differences. CWMG 36, p. 165. CWMG 18, p. 134. Young India, 22 December 1920, p. 3. Ibid. When Gandhi writes ‘satyagraha is the master-key to our innumerable hardships’ he was calling for the annulment of encryptions of all kinds, since in the being of the passive resister resides Truth, which he thinks, speaks and acts at all times. CWMG 11, p. 175. ‘Soon the Government will feel ashamed to have its Secret Service department or, if it does not, the secret police will be sick of an occupation which serves no use.’ Young India, 22 December 1920, p. 3. See Clastre, Archaeology of Violence. trans. Jeanine Herman, Paris: Semiotext(e), 2010. Young India, 22 December 1920, p. 3. ‘We may not expect this or any government to commit suicide. It must either reform or repress.’ Ibid. Ibid. ‘Untouchability has made the “depressed” classes the Cinderella of Hindu society.’ Young India, 29 December 1920, p. 3. Ibid. CWMG 50, p. 203. ‘Ethical Religion’, CWMG 6, p. 316. Quoted in H. M. Seervai, Constitutional Law of India, Bombay: N. M. Tripathi Private Ltd., 1991, p. 135. Seervai’s book contains accounts of the polynomial games of Truth played by Gandhi during the transfer of power negotiations towards the possibility of ‘the perpetual domination of a “Hindu Raj”’. Ibid., p. 145. Young India, 26 September 1929, p. 320. From Yeravda Mandir, p. 5. CWMG 42, p. 270. Ashram Observances in Action, p. 37. SWMG 5, p. 81. Gandhi, All Men Are Brothers, p. 68. SWMG 5, p. 94. Ibid. CWMG 25, p. 251. SWMG 5, p. 228. CWMG 50, p. 204. Young India, 5 March 1925, p. 81.

242 60 61 62 63 64 65

66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73

74

75

76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83

Notes Young India, 31 December 1931, p. 428. CWMG 92, p. 119–20. Ibid., p. 120. From Yeravda Mandir, p. 30. Ibid., p. 72. Implicit in the attribution of the force of a vow to nature is the Aristotlean theory of motion, which understood motion as the continuous action of a force upon a body; that is a conception motion without inertia. See Richard P. Feynman, ‘The Characteristics of Physical Law’. Young India, 6 August 1931, p. 206. CWMG 88, p. 449. CWMG 48, p. 432. From Yeravda Mandir, p. 75. Emphasis ours. Ibid., p.74. CWMG 90, p. 499. From Yeravda Mandir, pp. 72–3. It has been noted extensively that Gandhi neglected his own family and his subjects in his Ashram experiments with his vows. That is, the unfolding of the vow taken by a ‘great soul’ may compel the lesser men to adopt a new set of regularities which are destructive of their own milieus. However, ‘the great soul’s’ own advancement in the undertaking of the vow itself would redeem the lesser souls. CWMG 20, p. 344. And the economic implication is given as ‘If every person in the country – man, woman and child – takes a vow today to give some little time of his to spinning, within a very short time we may cease to depend on others for clothing our people and save sixty crores of rupees for the country’. CWMG 19, p. 204. ‘The only part of the programme which is now being carried out is that of nonviolence. But I regret to have to confess that even that is not being carried out in the spirit of the book. If it were, India would establish Swaraj in a day. If India adopted the doctrine of love as an active part of her religion and introduced it in her politics, Swaraj would descend upon India from heaven. But I am painfully aware that that event is far off as yet.’ ‘Hind Swaraj or Homre Rule’. Young India, 26, January 1921, p. 27. CWMG 44, p. 264. Ibid. Young India, 27 February 1930, p. 69. Young India, 31 December 1931, p. 428. Ibid., p. 270. Emphasis ours. CWMG 49, p. 399. Ibid., p. 291. Young India, 29 December 1920, p. 3.

Notes 84 85 86 87 88

243

Ibid. Harijan, 14 March 1936, p. 39. Badiou, Saint Paul, p. 90. CWMG 34, p. 155. CWMG 35, p. 494.

Chapter 8 1 Maria Carter and Julie M. Norman, ‘Understanding Nonviolence’, Understanding Nonviolence: Contours and Contexts, ed. Maria Carter and Julie M. Norman, Cambridge: Polity Press, 2015, p. 14. 2 Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 1, Penguin. Emphasis added. 3 CWMG 87, p. 414. 4 It is possible to argue that power as a notion need not be restricted to the human realm in Foucault’s works if one were to follow it in its rigour, which was never explored by Foucault himself. 5 For this reason resistance invites a counter force from within the same system which identifies it as illegal. Stephen D’Arcy writes, ‘In practice, militant protest is almost always illegal, if only because resistance is so often criminalized as soon as the authorities begin to fear that it might prove effective.’ Stephen D’Arcy, Languages of the Unheard: Why Militant Protest is Good for Democracy, London: Zed Books, 2014, p. 77. 6 Foucault, The History of Sexuality, The Will to Knowledge, p. 95. 7 The contrast between internality and externality and the argument for externality characterizes a form of empiricism starting from David Hume, for whom the connections between terms or their relations is never given in our impressions of events – we see a ball arriving at another ball then that ball moving without seeing ‘the because’. 8 ‘Relations are exterior to their terms. … This exteriority of relations is not a principle, it is a vital protest against principle.’ Gilles Deleuze and Claire Parnet, Dialogues 2, London: Contiuum, 2007, p. 41. 9 CWMG 17, p. 153. 10 Here we are not referring to the electrical concept of impedance; resistance in electricity is a scalar quantity and it refers to the conductance of direct current whereas impedance is a vector which refers to the conductance of alternating current which has the directions of the phases. Here to impede means the absence of any work. 11 CWMG 7, p. 461. 12 CWMG 88, p. 425. 13 Gandhi, Autobiography, p. 454.

244

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14 Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols and The Anti-Christ, trans. R. J. Hollingdale, London: Penguin Books, p. 104. 15 Derrida, Resistances to Psychoanalysis, trans. Peggy Kamuf, Pascal-Anne Brault and Michael Naas. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998, p. 25. 16 Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, trans. James Strachey, New York, W. W. Norton, 1951, p. 20 and 21. 17 Freud, Five Lectures on Psychoanalysis (1910), The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. James Stratchey, London: Vintage, 1999, p. 2213. 18 CWMG 7, p. 453. 19 ‘If the States are badly advised and they rely upon organized violence for resisting the just demands of their people, ahimsa, so far generated in the country as a means of redressing social injustice, will not protect them.’ CWMG 67, p. 350. 20 CWMG 8, p. 23, Emphasis added. 21 CWMG 33, p. 180. 22 See Aristotle, Physics, Collected Works, ed. Jonathan Barnes, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984, pp. 315–446. 23 CWMG 8, p. 419. 24 CWMG 20, p. 27. 25 CWMG 8, p. 23. 26 Ibid., p. 194. 27 D’Arcy, Languages of the Unheard, p. 83. It is to be noted that D’Arcy considers that Martin Luther King resists man-made laws in the name of higher law while Gandhi secularizes the act of resistance through indirect compliance in paying the penalty for each violations of the law – ‘Gandhi offers an alternative secular substitute for King’s natural law defence of civil disobedience.’ See Ibid., p. 84. Whereas, we found that the act of resistance is grounded in the Law of the Maker, and Gandhi’s adherence to the laws of the land were themselves in accordance with the divine principle that when one counters an unjust man-made law through an act of resistance it should not increase the speed of the system within which the act of resistance takes place. 28 CWMG 7, p. 470. 29 CWMG 9, p. 28. 30 ‘Some of the immediate and brilliant results of modern inventions are too maddening to resist. But I have no manner of doubt that the victory of man lies in that resistance.’ CWMG 33, p. 418. 31 Ibid. 32 Heidegger, ‘Letter on Humanism’, Basic Writings, p. 238. 33 Michel Foucault, ‘Power’, The Essential Foucault: Power, ed. James D. Fabion, New York: The New Press, 2000, p. 341.

Notes

245

34 Foucault, ‘Power’, p. 134. 35 Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan, London: Penguin Books, 1991, p. 27. 36 Foucault, ‘Power’, p. 131. 37 Luis Althusser, On Ideology, London: Verso Books, 2008, p. 4. 38 CWMG 88, p. 274. 39 Richard Bessel, Violence: A Modern Obsession, London: Simon & Schuster, 2015, p. 12. 40 As Gandhi said in Hind Swaraj, ‘Rome went, Greece shared the same fate; the might of the Pharaohs was broken.’ p. 66. 41 Todd May, Nonviolent Resistance: A Philosophical Introduction, Cambridge: Polity Press, 2015, p. 34. May’s task is to define violence and non-violence within the domain of our familiar political orders although he notes that there is much more to the notion of violence. Regarding non-violence he says, ‘I will often use the term nonviolence as a shorter way to refer to nonviolent political action, although the term has also been used to refer to ways of living nonviolently that do not involve politics.’ Ibid., p. 33. 42 ‘The problem of violence still remains very obscure’, said Georges Sorel, Reflections on Violence, (1912) trans. T. E. Hulme and J. Roth, Mineola New York: Dover Publications, 2012. p. 60. We should note that the confused and the obscure are not the same, for the latter offers itself distinctly, which is not the case with violence. 43 Carter and Norman, ‘Understanding Nonviolence’, p. 23. 44 Steven Pinker, Better Angels of Our Nature: A History of Violence and Humanity, Penguin, p. 45 CWMG 10, p. 200. 46 CWMG 88, p. 274. 47 We will discuss Gandhi’s position on the atom bomb, which emerged several months after the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, in Chapter 9. For now it is sufficient to note that it did not change his faith in the powers of passive resistance, rather the contrary. 48 Steven Pinker is one of the recent thinkers to assume the latter position, that violence has declined steadily through human history and that we live in a relatively golden age. 49 CWMG 79, p. 82. That the deaths, since the appearance of man in the scene, of most animal species have more to do with human prowess than with ill fated-visited upon the animals is something Gandhi often overlooked. 50 World Report on Violence and Health, 2002, p. 6. http://www.who.int/violence_ injury_prevention/violence/world_report/en/summary_en.pdf 51 See Pinker, Better Angels of Our Nature. 52 Arendt, On Violence, p. 30.

246 53 54 55 56 57 58 59

60 61 62 63 64 65 66

67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77

Notes Bessel, Violence, p. 12. CWMG 10, p. 170. World Report on Violence and Health, p. 6. CWMG 50, p. 55. Emphasis added. CWMG 19, p. 94. CWMG 23, p. 413. CWMG 19, p. 141. This awareness did force its own choices for Gandhi in his advice to his acolytes, the letters he had to write to the members of the Congress Party, and even his public speeches. The training of the passive resister would be incomplete without such complete restraint; ‘It is not enough that we merely refrain from acts of violence. We have known of murders committed by words. Therefore, just as our hands and feet should be kept under control, so should our tongue be,’ CWMG 19, p. 153. Arendt, On Violence, p. 19. CWMG 44, p. 202. CWMG 80, p. 113. CWMG 97, p. 134. Ibid., p. 309. Ibid. Non-knowledge of non-violence makes it non-existent in the actions of an individual, although it exists in nature. However, knowledge of non-violence implies the adherence to Truth-God. The faculty of the unknown is will. CWMG 83, p. 241. Ibid. Emphasis added. CWMG 56, p. 156. CWMG 83, p. 241. Emphasis added. CWMG 84, p. 393. CWMG 73, p. 54. Ibid., p. 82. CWMG 56, p. 156. Walter Benjamin, ‘On the Critique of Violence’, One-way Street and Other Writings, trans. J. A. Underwood, London: Penguin Books, 2009, p. 13. Foucault, The History of Sexuality, p. 340. ‘While this operation seeks to achieve what is established as law as its end, using violence as its means, in the moment of establishing what it is aiming at as law it does not repudiate violence but only now, strictly speaking, turns it (directly, this time) into a law establishing agency; this it does by establishing as law not an end that is free of violence and independent of it but one that is necessarily and intimately bound up with violence, calling it power’, Benjamin, ‘On the Critique of Violence’, p. 22. Violence is inherent in what is called civilized life. What Benjamin’s text emphasizes is the fact that the term violence has entered the history of

Notes

78 79 80 81 82 83

247

political practice only with the advancement of the legal system which is capable of enforcing itself everywhere. Benjamin, ‘On the Critique of Violence’, p. 28. Ibid. Arendt, On Violence, p. 7. Ibid., p. 4. Ibid., p. 56. Ibid., p. 27.

Chapter 9 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

10 11 12

13

14 15

Nancy, Critique, Crisis, Cri, p. 6 Emphasis added. CWMG 90, p. 39. CWMG 81, p. 319–20. Blachot, ‘Mahatma Gandhi’, pp. 366–70. Harijan, 12 November 1938, p. 326. CWMG 81, p. 293. Ibid., p. 319. Ibid. CWMG 28, p. 315. The term ‘Shastras’ is vague, especially today when it is being used to translate ‘modern science’; for example economics is ‘Vittha Shastra’. However, in the context of everyday life it still retains the older meaning of the hypophysical control of nature and the bringing about of desired outcomes through sounds infused with magic and rituals which act on the rhythm of cosmic order. CWMG 17, p. 534. CWMG 19, p. 417. ‘We live in a society where 3,00,000 attended the chunri ceremony of Roop Kanwar and majority of both Hin-dus and Muslims support sati, according to the only available survey on the subject done in 1987. I believe that condemning all of them as blood-thirsty and superstitious leaves no basis for creative social intervention in an open polity.’ Ashis Nandy, ‘Sati In Kaliyuga’, Economic and Political Weekly, 23.38 (1988) p. 1976. CWMG 19, p. 41; ‘Indeed the highest culture in Hinduism regards eating in that light and there are thousands of Hindus still living who will not eat their food in the presence of anybody.’ We found in the discussion of Truth that some truths are better than others, and their choice is left to the wisdom of the great soul. CWMG 9, p. 161; CWMG 8, p. 199, Emphasis added. Arundhati Roy draws attention to Gandhi’s complaint in South Africa that ‘the “Indian is being dragged

248

16 17 18 19 20

21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29

30 31

32 33 34

Notes down to the position of a raw Kaffir”. As a spokesman for the Indian community, Gandhi was always careful to distinguish – and distance – passenger Indians from indentured (bonded) workers [… who] were largely from the subordinated castes’; Roy, The Doctor and the Saint, Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2017, p. 51. Ashwin Desai and Goolam Vahed show that ‘the statements on African laziness and inferiority make Gandhi Stand out not as one of apartheid’s first opponents but as one of its first proponents’, The South African Gandhi: Stretcher-Bearer of Empire, Delhi: Navayana, 2015, p. 107. CWMG 17, p. 534. CWMG 85, p. 483. CWMG 85, p. 235. CWMG 23, p. 21; Young India, 12 May 1920, p. 2. ‘The assumption made by a few persons that Mr. Gandhi is only condemning parliamentary government for its inutility is unfounded. … He is against not only Parliamentary Government but practically against any Government in any form’. C. Shankaran Nair, Gandhi and Anarchy, Madras: Tagore & Co., 1922, p. 16. Benjamin, ‘On the Critique of Violence’. Pierre Clastre, Society Against the State, trans. Robert Hurley. New York: Zone Books, 2007, p. 188. Derrida, Resistances to Psychoanalysis. Clastre, Archaeology of Violence, p. 275. Ibid., p. 277. Clastres, Society Against State, p. 212. Ibid., p. 196. Ibid., p. 212. Clastres notes two accelerations or two great spans – ‘the movement of world history was radically affected by two accelerations in its rhythm’ – and they are the Neolithic and the Industrial. Clastre, Society Against State, p. 200. Ibid., p. 196. Gandhi was able to comprehend the violence in cigarette and alcohol in communal rooms as early as 1909 through the guidance of the Law of the Maker: ‘The fumes from the wine-glasses and the smoke from the cigars or cigarettes, smoked by nearly three hundred guests, had a most depressing effect on the mind. I then involuntarily called it “refined savagery”, and it reminded me of the scene described by poets at banquets held by Rakshasa.’ Rakshasa is the name given to the demons in the ‘Aryan’ myths, which were often referring to people of southern Indian subcontinent by this name. CWMG 87, p. 424. Ibid., p. 407. Ibid. Emphasis added.

Notes

249

35 Arendt, On Revolution, p. 14. The necessity of total war in the invention of weapons which had a larger range, such as bombs of early twentieth century and the means of delivering them at a distance through air planes, which is akin to air dropping a few metal axes into the world of primitive society. A history of foreign errors remains to be written, or the making of history through foreign errors. 36 Clastres; Society against the State, p. 215; on this occasion it is to be remembered that the State is also conceived as something which guarantees the grounding law of the living – You shall protect your own life and that of your loved ones. According to this story of the state the accord which created the state was possible through us entrusting the state with this grounding law – that we must protect ourselves – such that the State exercises this right on our behalf without failing in any instance. This fact is evident even in the constitution of the Union of India – the individual has a right to defend himself. 37 We can find the latter all around us in places where the process of gentrification takes place; the meaning of the objects, shops, street corners, memorials of the good times and bad times, and the play fields disappear suddenly in such a way that everything means almost nothing. 38 Nietzsche’s teachings regarding the will and thought are important here. If we understand by will a faculty which determines a world in advance according to a purpose ‘There is no such thing as “will”’, for ‘the purpose usually comes into the mind only after everything has been prepared for its execution’. Nietzsche, Will To Power, p. 354. 39 CWMG 83, p. 58; CWMG 90, p. 522; CWMG 84, p. 127. 40 CWMG 84, p. 127. 41 See Stephen Baxter, ‘Ages In Chaos: James Hutton and the Discovery of Deep Time’, A Forge Book, 2004. 42 CWMG 24, p. 86. 43 Derrida, ‘No Apocalypse, Not Now (full speed ahead, seven missiles, seven missives)’, trans. Catherine Porter and Phillip Lewis, Diacritics 14.2 (1984) p. 27, 23. 44 Ibid., p. 27. 45 Peter Sloterdijk, Nietzsche Apostle, transs. Steven Corcoran, Frankfurt: Semiotext(e), 2013, p. 57. This notion of a sponsor is linked with Bateson’s interpretation of Alcoholics Anonymous, which might be a certain version of nihilism from Nietzsche’s point of view. However, Gandhi, in spite of the well-established feedback mechanisms of his controlled experiments, was not seeking to be a sponsor of mankind. 46 Nancy, ‘Critique, Crisis, Cri’, Qui Parle 26.1 (2017), p. 11. 47 CWMG 42, p. 469. 48 CWMG 81, p. 320. 49 Chatterjee, ‘Gandhi and the Critique of Civil Society’, p. 156. 50 CWMG 81, p. 319. 51 CWMG 20, p. 503.

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52 Nancy, Noli Me Tangere, p. 28. 53 ‘Such ephemeral civilisations have come and gone and will continue to do so.’ Hind Swaraj, Navjivan Press, p. 116. These equations are otherwise known as Lotka– Volterra equations, which are non-linear differential equations which can be used to model the relation between two sets of variables such as predators and prey. These equations are preceded by insights which are similar in both economics and biology. 54 CWMG 68, p. 29. 55 CWMG 9, p. 226. ‘How is one to carry one's wife with one? What are her rights, and other such questions?’, Hind Swaraj, p. 97. 56 CWMG, 87, p. 407. 57 CWMG 32, p. 359. 58 Ibid., pp. 235–6. Some years later, Gandhi made some accommodations to public opinion and spoke of marriage as solely important for procreation and sex as nonshameful, which remains a puzzle to Glynn Richards: ‘how can sex be conceived as a fine and noble thing, as Gandhi maintains, in the absence of some degree of satisfaction?’; Richards, The Philosophy of Gandhi, p. 92. 59 CWMG 84, p. 478. 60 David Hardiman, Gandhi In His Time and Ours, New Delhi: Permanent Black, 2003, p. 107. ‘I should like the girls to remain unmarried, but they cannot be forced to do so’, CWMG 85, p. 169. See also CWMG 90, p. 217. 61 CWMG 64, p. 62. 62 Ibid. 63 ‘All great religions have rightly regarded kama as the arch-enemy of man, anger or hatred coming only in the second place. According to the Gita, the latter is an offspring of the former. The Gita of course uses it in its wider sense of desire. But the same holds good of the narrow sense.’ Ibid. 64 Parel, Gandhi’s Philosophy and the Quest for Harmony, p. 145. 65 CWMG 84, p. 296; Marriage is also the lowering of mankind from its higher possibilities, ‘From the highest standpoint it is a status lower than that of celibacy but I recognize it to be an absolute necessity in most cases’, CWMG 20, p. 358. 66 CWMG 87, p. 407. 67 CWMG 15, p. 145. 68 Robert Bernasconi, ‘A Love that is Stronger than Death’, Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities 7.2 (August 2002). 69 Ibid., p. 14. 70 CWMG 15, p. 158. 71 CWMG 82, p. 162. 72 Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace, trans. Emma Craufurd, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1952, p. 33. 73 CWMG 84, pp. 393 and 394. 74 Hind Swaraj, p. 58.

Notes

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Chapter 10 1 Nancy, Critique, Crisis, Cri, p. 6. 2 See Shaj Mohan, ‘The Noise of All Things’, forthcoming. 3 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Meiklejohn, ed. Vasilis Politis, Everyman London, 1993, p. 9. 4 Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, p. 19. 5 Ibid., p. 9. There are other versions of the critique, including Luis Althusser’s analytics on the basis of ‘the problematic’. 6 See Immanuel Kant, Critique of Aesthetic Judgement. 7 Nietzsche, Will To Power, p. 273. 8 Taylor, The Fallacy of Speed, p. 26. 9 Ibid., p. 27. 10 Ibid., p. 29. 11 This problem exceeds the domain of computation if one were to imagine the state transitions of the cosmos as an information processing system that is either open or closed. See Seth Lloyd ‘Programming the Universe’, New York: Vintage Books, 2006. It is possible to interpret the Transcendental Dialectic: Book 2 in Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason as an exercise in criticalization. 12 Nancy, Critique, Crisis, Cri, p. 16. 13 Canguilhem, Knowledge of Life, p. 133. 14 James Ferguson, The Anti-Politics Machine, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994, p. xv. 15 Nancy, Noli me Tangere, p. 45. 16 Ibid., p. 52. 17 Ibid., p. 18–19. 18 Ibid., p. 18. 19 Ibid., p. 9. 20 Von Teese, Burlesque and the Art of the Teese. 21 Nancy, Noli me Tangere, p. 19. 22 The Indian version is ‘Hindu’-postcolonialism and today it is searching for the technologized repetition of the dead.

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Index abandonment, of man 143 Aber, Mary Alling 29 Abraham 137 absolute absolution 166, 175, 184, 208 speed 38, 200 abstract abstraction 55, 62, 64, 68, 69, 71, 74, 80, 104 abstrahere 27 abyss 28, 54, 175 acceleration 3, 117, 118, 150, 195, 201 accoutrement 86, 92 action at a distance 16, 35 inaction 94, 181 re-action 96 active force 90–2, 94, 95, 99–110, 118, 126, 127, 132, 157, 174 activity 61, 77 harmonious 49, 54, 61 and inactivity 94 of metaphysics 22 the adherent 110, 136, 139, 144, 154, 159, 165, 193 Adorno, Theodor 39 advaita advaitin 230 n.2 non-dualist theology of 230 n.2 adventure 39, 201, 207, 210 aesthetic of origins 62 affinities 159, 160 Africa 2, 3, 57, 66, 86, 111, 139, 148, 163, 177, 190, 247–8 n.15 age of ends 133 aggregation, aggregate 57, 60, 63, 65, 68, 69, 75, 77 ahimsa, science of 90, 92, 93, 109, 115, 130, 159, 160, 161, 176, 182, 187, 191, 207, 233 n.31, 242 n.19 ailments 126, 127 alchemist 143 alchemy 28

Alcoholics Anonymous 249 n.45 algorithm 30, 53, 139 alienation 17, 120, 127 allotriosis 17 Alter, John 20, 21 Althusser, Louis 173, 245 n.37, 251 n.4 amor fati 207 an-agraha 64 analogy 4, 50–8, 63, 65, 68, 71, 72, 78–80, 83, 97, 104, 117, 129, 152, 168, 203, 227 n.13 analytic propositions 164 anarchy anarchist 192, 194, 197 relation with politics, state, and violence 192 anastasis 12, 198, 200, 203, 208–15 Anaxagoras 17 ancients 30, 31, 33, 36 animal infinite animal 103–6, 234 n.52 obscure animal 113 anthropocene 3 anti-dualism 29 anti-political 187 anti-politics Gandhian 7, 206 theological 133, 206, 234 n.56 apocalypse 3, 118, 129, 133, 208 apocalyptic 6, 29, 121 of Gandhi’s hypophysics 200 nuclear 200 Apollonaire, Guillaume 53 appetites 58, 59, 61, 62, 64–6 Aquinas 96, 212 thomist 231 n.32 archaeologist archaeology 89, 164, 172 Foucauldian 164 Archimedean point 34 Arendt, Hannah 1, 10, 33, 178, 197 Aristophanes, Lysistrata 3

Index Aristotle 12, 17, 22, 35–6, 61, 84, 169 Nicomachean Ethics 68 arithmetic 114, 115, 120 army 107 artha 205 artifice 5, 53, 62, 63, 68, 69, 83, 85, 230 n.70 art of dying 197, 198 the arts 98, 113, 143, 197, 198 Aryan 10, 248 n.31 ascension 4, 100, 112, 159 asceticism 29, 203, 207, 215 astrolabes 65 Astrology 30 atman 83, 84, 228 n.32 atomic bomb 2, 89, 176, 199, 207, 233 n.31, 245 n.47 aum 125 Aurelius, Marcus 17, 220 n.13 Australia 45, 107 authority, authoritarian 8, 9, 17, 114, 119, 136, 140, 141 automaton 17, 54 autonomous domains 105, 107, 110 autonomy 15, 64, 67, 105, 121, 122 autophagy 188 the avowed 159 axe 56, 195–9, 249 n.35 the axiomatic practitioner 19 Azad, Maulana Abul Kalam 141 Balibar, Etienne 1, 5 bandhana 108 a-bandhana 123 baptism baptize 4, 78 knowledge of 78 Bataille, Georges 52, 101, 215 solar anus 52 Bathory 128 battlefield 136 the beautiful 151, 152 beauty 62, 75, 105, 151, 152, 224 n.54 Beckett, Samuel Waiting for Godot 99 beef 115, 187 beef eaters 81, 136 beef murders 236 n.13 being being-at-once 37 being-drawn 168

261

being-equal 37 of beings 36 being-true 137, 149, 150 being-true-to 137 as position 36 stuck-together-being 136 Benjamin, Walter 182, 192, 246 n.77 Benjamin Breeg 213 Bergson, Henri 3 Bernasconi, Robert 10, 206, 250 n.67 Bessel, Richard 175, 177, 245 n.39, 246 n.53 Bible 32 Bihar earthquake 26 Bilgrami, Akeel 20, 21, 234 n.52, 239 n.2 binding 7, 77, 108, 138, 143 biology 33, 53, 250 n.52 bio-logic 95 moral-biology 47, 118 principal laws in 117 theoretical grounds of 118 biomechanics 232 n.6 biomorality 20–1 biomoral imperatives of 21, 222 n.34 bios 21 birth 30, 75, 149, 189, 195, 203, 204, 213 black-age 46 Blake, William 51 blackhole communal body 66 naked body as 110, 190 Blavatsky, Madame 29 counter-machines 188 bloodline 79, 80, 189, 191 body at ease 49 as prison 58 as slaughter house 68 social body 53, 172, 178, 183 as temple 58 Bonnet, Charles 33 Bose, J. C. 19, 108 brahmacharya 57, 203, 205 the British 51, 76, 119, 155, 170 brute, infinite-animal as 13, 21, 25, 51, 91, 99, 103, 106, 125, 138, 144, 154, 234 n.52 Buber, Martin 1, 8, 9 Buddhi 74, 78, 207 bullock carts 59

262 burlesque 2, 3, 104 Butler, Judith 50, 227 n.5 Byron, Lord 51 Calypso

12, 128, 129, 130, 135, 143, 163, 171, 177, 183, 187, 188, 189, 190, 197, 202, 203, 204, 213, 214 Calypsology 128–30, 143, 163, 171, 177, 183, 187, 188, 189, 190, 197, 202 camera 52, 53, 56 the camp 9, 208 Canetti, Elias 37 Canguilhem, Georges 67, 212 caste 9–11, 43, 53, 107, 108, 137, 148, 149, 159, 166, 189, 190, 204 catastrophe 27, 199 categories 4, 23, 36, 61, 140, 146 causality 16, 116, 129 celibacy 110, 191, 205, 250 n.64 Chatterjee, Partha 20, 202, 221 n.32 children 43, 52, 73, 91, 126, 131, 132, 137, 140, 148, 156, 175, 176, 180, 196, 204, 212 Christ 29, 151, 160 Christians 29, 83, 135, 149, 159 chrysalis 201, 214, 215 cigarettes 213, 214, 248 n.31 citizen 146, 166, 171, 214 city 59, 173 holy cities 44 civilization 2, 7, 14, 25, 28, 31, 41, 45–7, 85, 92, 100, 104, 111, 118, 121, 123, 124, 139, 150, 155, 176, 180, 183, 189, 190, 198, 203, 204 Clastres, Pierre 53, 192, 193 cleanliness 148 clothes. See dress coefficients 174 coercion 131, 157, 180 command 37, 38, 140, 150, 156, 188, 189, 198, 204 commandment 128, 146, 189 communications systems 9, 11, 38, 211 component laws 126, 127, 128, 133 comprehending laws 126, 128, 129, 132–4, 193–9, 203, 205, 206, 214, 215 computation 81, 121, 179, 212 computer programmer 201

Index conatus 24 concealment 128, 145 concupiscence 83 conditions 5, 15, 21, 26, 34, 36, 39, 49, 50, 57, 60, 61, 65, 84, 87, 97, 104, 105, 111, 112, 114, 122, 129, 144, 146, 172, 173, 177, 180, 183, 189, 192, 196, 210, 213 conductance 165, 166, 172–6, 180, 182, 183 confusion 6, 8, 11, 31, 50, 52, 58, 117 Congress Party 51, 128, 141 Congress Working Committee 44 conscious 94, 169, 194 consecration 62, 63, 68, 109, 111, 131, 189 construction 37, 41, 55, 79, 99, 101, 102, 103, 124, 154, 164, 182, 201, 203 contingency 164, 239 n.68 continuous 67, 124 contraceptives 83, 142, 229 n.56 control 15, 61, 80, 81, 104, 124, 139, 160, 178, 192, 197, 203–5, 213 conversion, religious 79 convertibility of means and ends 129–31, 143, 197 Copernicus 34 corpus 1, 2, 4, 8, 12, 21, 50, 57, 74, 84, 93, 94, 108, 109, 113, 114, 117, 121, 122, 188, 201, 202 correlationism 81 cosmology, presocratic 17 cosmos 2, 16, 26, 108 court 112, 115 cow-protection 229 n.44, 236 n.13 crime 111, 114, 115, 117, 134, 137, 214 crisis 23, 201, 212, 215 criteria 33, 68, 87, 98, 99, 127, 139, 145, 184, 200, 201, 210, 211, 212 critic 98, 200, 201, 210, 211, 212 criticality 132, 157, 187 criticalization 5, 12, 24, 88, 191, 198, 199, 201, 209–14, 210–15 criticism 6, 7, 17, 147, 200, 201, 209–13 Dalits 79, 149, 190 Darwin, Charles 3, 43, 47, 73, 108, 118, 149 Dasein 172

Index Daston, Lorraine 18, 220 n.17 death 9, 13, 31, 58, 67, 74, 81, 88, 96, 115, 122, 136, 137, 144, 155, 187, 188, 189, 191, 193, 198, 202–7, 213 decisionism 57, 228 n.29 decomposition 67 decryption 22, 146 deep time 199, 200, 249 n.41 deinon 63 Deleuze, Gilles Dialogues 164 and Guattari 55, 63, 64 schizoanalysis 55 democracy 2, 7 democratic 171 Derrida, Jacques 3, 11, 54, 168, 200–1, 227 n.19 Resistances to Psychoanalysis 244 n.15, 248 n.23 de Sade, Marquis 127, 144, 147 Descartes, Rene 27, 34, 54, 67 descent 29, 34, 37, 40–7, 90, 176, 177 determinants of objectivity 139 deviant 20, 184 deviation 2, 3, 15, 20, 25, 26, 28, 46, 59, 77, 92, 102, 189 dharma 78, 205 diagnosis 22, 73, 87 diet, spices 73, 105, 110 difference 22–5, 37, 41, 43, 50, 51, 62, 73, 81, 93, 95, 101, 106, 109, 114, 120, 122, 134, 138, 142, 144, 156, 167, 169, 172, 174, 185, 197, 198, 205, 212, 213 Diogenes Laertius 17 disarticulation 41, 80 discretion 157 disease 61, 68, 80 divine lawbreaker 125 doctors 61, 80, 81, 87, 98, 105, 111, 144, 146 Donne, John 72 dreams 45, 89, 172, 173, 174, 194, 196, 202 dress 32, 46, 62 dromology 37 dunamis 40

263

eagle 25, 37, 101, 102, 153, 180 earthquake 2, 17, 26, 27, 81, 176, 207 eastern doctrine 3 Eckhart, Meister 19, 221 n.24 economics 45, 59, 115, 203, 211 Eden 19, 25 electrodynamic systems 55 Emerson, Ralph Waldo 39 emissions 61 empiricism 241 enclosure 15, 25, 62, 93, 147, 158, 197 encryption 145, 146 end of all worlds 207 of mankind 207 means and 124, 129, 130, 131, 134, 143, 170, 183, 188, 197, 202, 204 politics 191 energeia 40 enforcement 132, 138, 156, 157, 180, 183 engine 15, 62, 64, 65, 81, 82, 83, 88, 119, 126, 202, 205, 211 equilibrium 98, 101 equivocity 147, 153, 181, 190, 206 equivocal 9, 57, 134, 172 error 26, 41, 76, 121, 124, 140, 175, 195–7, 202, 203, 208, 210, 214 eschatological eschatology 3, 128, 188 senses of the end 128 Esoterism 17 Esoteric Christian Union 29 essence dis-essentializing 90 imperceptiable essences 69 individual essences 69, 73, 78 industrial essences 73, 74, 83 eternity 130, 202 ethnic groupings 149 etiology 212 Euclid 2, 71, 78, 187 eugenics 213 Eunuchs 50, 75 evaluation 3, 13, 14, 15, 32, 111, 140, 185 evil 2, 3, 7, 8, 12, 25, 26, 37, 41–6, 51, 68, 85, 86, 94, 100, 107, 111, 123, 155, 160, 169, 170, 180, 181, 182, 188, 197

264

Index

existence 14, 19, 24, 42, 53, 57, 94, 96, 101, 109, 121, 124, 140, 167, 172, 173, 196, 203, 205, 214 exogenous variable 128, 177, 196 experiments dietary 59 sexual 2, 20, 142 truth 2, 20, 142 exposure 11, 132, 144, 145, 148 exteriorities 5, 24, 47, 67, 68, 73, 76, 163, 164 facere 53 face to face 28, 34, 103, 158, 159, 170 factories 31, 126 faculty (faculties), 4, 20, 24, 41, 47, 49, 50, 51, 53, 55–61, 63, 64, 65, 67, 69, 71, 75, 76, 78, 81, 83–7, 90, 91, 93, 104, 106, 116, 119, 120, 121, 124, 125, 126, 128, 129, 152, 157–61, 169, 173, 175, 178, 180, 188, 192, 197, 199, 202, 203, 205, 206, 210, 214 facultatis 53 God-ward faculties 75 fairy tales 39, 195 faith 65, 69, 81, 109, 110, 130, 136, 138, 144, 155, 156, 157, 159, 160 family 242 n.73 familial 43, 108 fascism 217 fault 65, 90, 141 feedback 125 Ferguson, James 213 fetish 190 fiction 90, 200 fidelity 7, 29, 109, 136, 137 finality 2, 46 flesh 62, 64, 71, 105, 168, 207, 209 flight 37, 44, 86, 92, 104, 123, 125, 126, 128, 139, 153, 221 n.19, 238 n.51 food 5, 15, 43, 58, 62, 63, 66, 68, 98, 105, 110, 175, 200, 211 football 94, 113–14, 130, 181 offside rule 114 force active force 90–2, 94, 95, 99–107, 110, 118, 127, 131, 132, 157 areality of forces 50

body force 91 brute force 91, 99, 106, 144 cohesive force 108, 110 disruptive force 108, 183 filial force 110 love force 91, 100, 108 physical force 91, 99, 100, 106, 107 pre-violent force 196 soul force 4, 49, 90, 91, 100, 157 suppositive force 183 truth force 91, 100, 111, 138 unbinding force 107 foreign error 195–7, 202, 203, 247 Foucault, Michel 49, 50, 163–5, 172, 173, 178, 183, 194 Freedom 16, 57, 58, 63, 78, 80, 81, 108, 130, 132, 143, 148, 167, 187, 206, 213 Freud, Sigmund 4, 55, 168 friction bath 238 n.48 function functional isolates 53, 63, 64, 73, 172 functional isolation 52, 53, 63, 71, 77, 84, 95, 96, 99, 164, 171, 172, 173, 174, 188, 192–6, 217 functional variations 166 Gaia function 18 hypothesis 18 Galen 17 Galileo 34, 54, 124, 206 game 4, 7, 15, 66, 74, 94, 101, 113, 114, 117, 130, 137, 143, 149, 150, 158, 174, 181, 194, 195, 196, 203, 213, 215 Gandhi, Prabhudas 153 Gandhian recoil 8 Gandhian theory of economics 59 Gandhi’s writings Anasakti Yoga 56 Autobiography (My Experiments with truth) 135 Ethical Religion 47, 108 The Health Guide 56, 68 Hind Swaraj 11, 12, 20, 31, 39, 42, 43, 56, 57, 58, 80, 92, 106, 118, 141, 144, 187, 188, 202, 203, 208 From Yerawada Mandir 58

Index genes 53, 117 genetic 30, 33, 44, 91, 160 genius 20, 184, 195, 211–12 genocide 112, 129, 145 geometry 2, 26, 71, 78, 115, 120, 124, 182 god Divine intelligence 82 God is Law 19 Leibnizian god 19 Godspeed 40, 160 good 1–3, 9, 13, 17, 21, 23, 25, 28, 30, 32, 37, 41, 42–6, 51, 55, 57, 62, 65, 66, 68, 69, 78, 85, 86, 91, 92, 94, 97, 99, 108, 111, 118, 121–3, 128, 129, 132, 137, 138, 142, 143, 146, 151, 156, 160, 165, 169, 170, 171, 174, 179–82, 185, 186, 197, 199, 207, 209, 212 the Good 1, 2, 13, 21, 23–6, 28, 37, 41, 42, 45, 46, 57, 66–9, 85, 91, 92, 108, 118, 123, 128, 151, 165, 169, 185, 186, 197, 207, 209, 212 Good, Irvin J. 121, 122 good conduct 160 Gospel of vitality 29 grace 26, 188, 192 gravity 35, 45, 120, 140, 207, 211 The Great Acceleration 3 the great soul 8, 9, 30, 58, 85, 122, 125, 129, 136, 141, 142, 146, 177, 187 Greece, Greek 3, 16 Grundrisse 119, 120 Guénon, René 17 guitar 99, 104 gun 2, 43, 94, 100, 104, 105, 131, 139 gun powder 2 half-castes 148 hand handling 54, 115 Harijan 148 health 23, 29, 41, 44, 49, 58, 61, 66, 67–9, 91, 117, 126 heart 26, 51, 74, 100, 140, 141, 158, 159, 176, 199, 211 Hegel 10, 14, 84, 93, 122, 215 Phenomenology of Spirit 121 theory of signs 28

265

hegira 73 Heideger, Martin Being of beings 36 Ereignis 38 heir 225 n.49 heredity 149 himsa 90, 93, 176 Hindu Raj 149, 241 n.47 Hippocratic theory 83 Hiroshima 89, 199, 245 n.47 Hitler 5, 144 Hölderlin, Friedrich 89 holding-fast-to the Law 153, 155 holding-on-to truth 138 Hollywood 99 holy cities 44 home 31, 39, 41, 57, 63, 64, 78, 79, 95, 97, 101, 104, 107, 126, 136, 176, 187, 200 homology 4, 78–80, 97–9, 129, 152, 187, 194, 196, 199 homonymy 191 hooked 13 hope of the west 2, 40 Horkheimer, Max 39 human animal 9, 187, 208, 210–15 Hypophysicalizing 149 Hypophysics hypophysical 2–6, 16, 17, 19, 28, 29, 43, 47, 57, 63, 68, 73, 98, 100, 107, 120, 123, 149, 165, 167, 177, 185, 190 of people 190 of violence 185 hysteresis 12, 211 idea 4, 5, 20, 27, 30, 40, 58, 62, 78, 82, 99, 110, 126, 151, 165, 189, 194, 195, 205 illusion 119, 133, 143, 149 image of the vow 154, 155, 156, 157 visage of the vow 158 imagination 9, 51, 52, 129, 143, 183, 195, 202 immanence, doctrine of 84 immanent 23, 84, 149 imminence 123, 200 immurement 158, 177 of man into Truth 187 reciprocal 129, 130, 137, 138, 188

266 impedance 165, 166 impediments 40, 101, 159, 177 inadaptation 212 incest 189, 190, 207 indiscernible, principle of 239 n.68 inertia 37, 41 inner strength 155 innocence 75, 89, 93, 122, 140, 147 instrumentation 109, 184 intellect 18, 31, 36, 41, 46, 47, 74, 79, 82, 85, 86, 159 interdining 189 intermarrying 189 international 1, 6, 9, 115, 188 interrupt 42, 64, 90, 108, 118, 119, 128, 157, 173, 182, 183, 184, 194, 200 interruption 42, 90, 108, 118, 119, 173, 182–4, 194, 200 inviolable 116, 120, 182, 222 irresistance 166, 171, 172, 173, 174, 176, 181 Jainism 29 Jews 144 in Germany 207 Jewish people 9, 107, 144, 145 Jordens, J. T. F. 47 judgement 2, 17, 18, 25, 26, 46, 98, 111, 135, 140, 177, 178, 211, 214 jüngster Tag 197 jurisprudence 130 Kaffirs 148, 190 Kali-yuga 133 kama 205 Kant, Immanuel Critique of Pure Reason 36, 209 Groundwork for Metaphysics of Morals 16 Kant’s critical philosophy 136 Kanwar, Roop 245 Karmic cycle 29 khadi, khaddar 62, 66, 91, 92, 128, 142 Kieregaard, Søren 136 kinesis 96 Kingdom of speed 121 Kingsford, Anna 29 Kojève, Alexandre 238 n.42

Index Koran 151 Krinnō 209 Krishna 84, 98 Kundera, Milan 52 Slowness 227 nn.11, 16 labour 10, 38, 45, 90, 94, 99, 112, 120, 122, 142, 194, 197, 209 ladder 3, 32, 33, 34, 41, 100 language 14, 28, 40, 54, 77, 79, 80, 86, 89, 90, 95, 131, 137, 143, 152, 158, 173, 178, 211, 235 Law component laws 126–8 compossibility 49 comprehending laws 126, 128, 129, 133, 134, 193 divine Law 19 immutable 41 lawbreaker 125, 127, 128 Lawgiver 19 Law is God 19, 23 Law of irregular 117 laws 128 matter 123, 129 origin 121 manmade (or man-made) 32, 78 multiple laws 63 mutable 41 temporal 41 legal person 12 legislation 19, 122, 131, 145, 156, 173 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm 11, 19, 182, 236 n.17, 238 n.39, 239 n.68 lensing defined 228 n.26 mechano-lensing 56 Levinas, Emanuel 206 liberal democratic systems 171 life 1, 4, 5, 6, 11, 13, 17–20, 21, 23, 26, 29, 33, 39, 43, 53, 58, 62, 64, 74, 79, 83, 84, 85, 93, 95, 97, 110, 112, 117, 119, 120, 123, 126, 127, 129, 132, 134–7, 140, 145, 146, 156, 170, 171, 178, 180, 186, 190, 194, 197, 199, 202, 204, 205, 207, 212 limit order 157

Index limits 238 n.51 critical 24, 68, 85, 183, 184, 191, 198, 201, 203, 206, 211, 215 liveable life 145 locomotive ambition 41 limits 38, 41, 46, 59 logic 16, 23, 25, 28, 52, 53, 54, 56, 63, 64, 71, 77, 95, 101, 139, 143, 151–3, 200 Lotka-Volterra equations 250 n.52 Love 17, 23, 91, 95, 100, 108, 109, 118, 130, 137, 138, 156, 157–60, 168, 169, 206 machine abstract 64 human 6, 49, 54, 61 jurist 121 machina mundi 81 machine maker 119, 159 madness 113, 212 majority 140 Maker counter-Maker 121 Law of 244 n.27 man maker-animal 103 man-made law 244 n.27 Mandela, Nelson 8, 176 mankind 2, 14, 26, 30, 39, 42, 47, 52, 57, 92, 101, 107–9, 120, 125, 130, 133, 136, 143, 148, 156, 187, 188, 190, 191, 193, 196, 200, 201, 202, 204, 207, 208, 213, 214 Margolus-Levitin theorem 212 market 122, 130, 213 marriage 111, 137, 191, 204, 205, 207 marxist movements 107 mass murder 112, 129, 131, 213 mass murderer 112, 129 Materialism 1, 170 mathematical theorem 139 matter, laws of 123, 129 maximum animal 199 meat 14, 62, 65, 66, 175, 180, 214 medicine ancient systems 87 ethnic traditions of 69

267

memories of the future 209 Mendelian laws 117 metabolism 95, 106 metaphysics 2, 3, 4, 7, 10, 15, 16, 19, 21–5, 41, 73, 74, 164, 167 metaxu 207 metempsychosis 83, 84 milieu finite 103 internal 23, 24, 47, 67, 68, 69, 114, 193, 194, 201, 209, 210, 212 Milton, John 32, 38, 75 mind 73–87, 91, 94–7, 100, 104, 105, 107, 110, 117, 128, 129, 139, 141, 142, 144, 151, 152, 158–60, 171, 178, 179, 203, 205 minority 140, 178 miscegenation 189, 190 mob lynching 175 modern civilization 41, 123, 176 moksha 29, 57, 205, 213 monad 239 n.68 Monod, Jacques 33, 52, 116 Moore, G. E. 17, 24 moral 2, 4, 6, 7, 9, 16, 17, 18, 20, 21, 26, 27, 29, 30, 32, 38, 41–3, 47, 51, 75, 108, 116, 117, 118, 136, 138, 144, 148, 156, 163, 165, 180, 181, 185 moral biology 47, 118 morphology 52, 206 motion 28, 35, 36, 40, 45, 52, 58, 64, 82, 83, 86, 87, 117, 123, 124, 150, 165, 214 motorized transportation 40 movement 2, 4, 6, 8, 13, 25, 26, 31, 33, 35, 38, 39, 51, 78, 80, 81, 82, 86, 87, 93, 96, 98, 102, 104, 107, 115, 152, 189, 205, 213 Muhammad 151 Muslims 149, 190, 234 myth 89, 90, 152, 172, 192, 195 Naess, Arne 25 Nair, C. Shankaran 192 Nancy, Jean-Luc Dis-enclosure 25 Nandy, Ashis 247 n.12 narration 44, 90, 92, 149

268

Index

natural law 4, 5, 17, 19, 27, 119, 123 Naturbegriff 3 nature 1–3, 6, 12–23, 25–39, 41, 42, 45, 46, 47, 50, 51, 56, 57, 59, 62, 65, 67, 68, 73, 74, 79, 81, 82, 86, 90–3, 96, 97, 99, 100–11, 113, 115–27, 129, 133, 138, 141, 150, 152, 154, 156, 157, 160, 166, 169–72, 174, 175, 180, 182, 185, 187, 192–7, 199, 201, 203, 209 Nazi camps 2 nazis 107, 144, 145 negotiation 141, 156, 173, 181 Nehru, Jawaharlal 28, 44, 46, 93, 141, 142, 188 neolithic 246 Newton, Isaac 34, 36, 68, 117, 129, 136 Nicholas, Gier 231 n.2 Niezsche, Friedrich 200 Will to Power 49, 240 n.12 nihilism 9, 10, 208, 215 non-beginning 121, 134, 208 non-violence 4, 5, 6, 8, 25, 74, 85, 93, 100, 106, 109, 114, 134, 137, 161, 163–5, 176, 180, 182, 185, 188, 191, 192, 196, 197, 199, 201, 204, 205, 207 Novalis 41 nuclear annihilation 197 nuclear criticism 200 nutrition 36 objectivities of Truth 140 objectivity 50, 98, 122, 129, 139, 140, 150 observance 3, 92–3, 154, 178, 189 occident 10 occidental 2, 10, 11, 29, 123, 171, 217 occult 2, 3, 16, 17, 29 Odysseus 128, 177 Odyssey 39, 128, 177 office 8, 119, 131, 141 oikeiōsis 17 ontology 20, 22, 25, 201 operating system 209 organs 18, 21, 51–6, 63, 64, 67, 68, 75–7, 84, 94, 98, 130, 193 orient 206 oriental 10, 11, 29, 30, 42, 122, 123, 206, 208, 217

orientation 7, 17, 68, 167, 208 override 38, 41, 46, 56, 99, 103, 122, 154, 169 pact 145 palate 61, 65, 66, 105, 110, 136 pantheism 3, 29 paradise 38, 191 parameter 72 paranoia 195 Parel, Anthony 74, 78, 205 passive passive force 90–4, 99, 100–2, 106–10, 118, 120, 122, 131, 138, 157, 158, 190, 193, 194 passivity 1, 57, 94 passive resistance civil resister 132 passive resister 13, 17, 22, 45, 62, 94, 95, 96, 104, 110, 113, 116, 121, 125, 127, 129, 130, 132, 133, 135, 136, 137, 138, 140, 141, 144, 145, 155, 156, 171, 173, 174, 175, 177, 179, 181, 182, 186, 187, 191, 193, 197, 199, 204, 205, 207 paternal reason 8, 22, 49, 195 Paul, Saint 160 Pauline 160 Pauline 160 penalty 112, 116, 132, 140 penance 58, 155, 205 perception 60, 61, 157–9, 176, 181 perfection 3, 16, 33, 62, 74, 75, 85, 98, 154 permanent war 193 total war 197 perpetual motion machine 214 petrology 35 Phenomenology of Spirit 121 philosophy 1, 5, 11, 20, 21, 24, 25, 50, 55, 56, 68, 118, 164, 206 philosopher 1, 5, 11, 20, 21, 24, 25, 50, 55, 56, 68, 118, 164, 206 pilgrimage 1, 13, 16, 44, 100, 101, 110, 130 place 1, 8, 9, 10, 11, 24, 27, 30–2, 35–40, 43, 44, 45, 58, 77, 79, 90, 92, 95,

Index 97, 100, 101, 106, 128, 130, 131, 136, 146, 168, 169, 189, 191, 192, 197, 198, 201, 203–5, 208

plan bauplan 53, 86, 101, 215 God’s plan 180 Man’s plan 180 Plato Phaedo 84 Phaedrus 84 Platonism 62, 194, 195 Timaeus 17 Plotinus 34 policing 144, 147, 210, 214 polis 92 politics, end of 191 polynomial 63, 64, 71, 75–80, 82, 97, 104, 143, 171–4, 183, 184, 187, 189, 192, 194, 195, 196, 198, 199, 203, 206 postcolonial nativism 228 n.72 potentiality 96, 123 powers 7, 14, 15, 16, 27, 30, 40, 41, 42, 47, 49, 52, 53, 56, 57, 59–61, 63–6, 68, 71, 73, 75–9, 80, 82, 84, 85, 87, 89, 95, 99, 103, 104, 105, 113, 120, 126, 131, 135, 141, 142, 146, 152, 154, 157, 158, 160, 163, 164, 166, 172, 173, 174, 175, 178, 183–5, 193, 194, 195, 199, 202, 204, 207, 209, 210, 213 Pradhan, R. C. 20, 21, 222 n.37 pratyupaya 170 predicates 69, 150, 153 pre-formal 174 pre-Socratics 3 pre-violence 194, 196, 197 principalities material principality 122 prison 58, 82, 85, 131, 173, 179, 190, 212 privation 12, 35, 120, 121, 125, 212 problematic 2, 23, 24, 25, 35, 55, 68, 90, 96, 99, 112, 113, 115, 120, 121, 143, 156, 163, 167, 177, 183, 212 procreation 204, 248 pro-genesis 2 progeny 5, 6, 182, 184 proliferation of gods 152

269

promise

29, 131, 132, 145, 146, 155, 156, 157, 206 proper name 153 proportion 4, 28, 33, 41, 45, 46, 49, 71, 72, 80–2, 109, 112, 117, 118, 120, 124, 130, 132–4, 135, 136, 145, 150, 160, 175, 203 proportional articulation 71, 72, 80–3, 133, 134, 135, 145, 175 propulsions 86, 119 providence 27 pseudo Dionysus 33 psyche 55, 83, 113, 169 psychoanalysis 168 public and private offices 131 purity 57, 85, 158, 160 purpose of man 103 purushartha 74, 205 quantity (quantities) 3, 23–5, 27, 31, 32, 36, 40, 42, 43, 55, 93, 94, 95, 102, 117, 118, 138, 139, 141, 154, 157, 172, 192, 206 quantified 43 racism race 44, 148, 178, 199, 200 racial 4, 38, 148, 189, 190, 204 radical 21, 188, 191–4 Radical Enlightenment 21 Rai, Alok 232 n.43 railways 39, 42, 44, 46, 47, 81, 100, 119, 177, 202, 211 Rakshasa 248 n.31 Ramanama 28, 223 n.64 Rama Rajya 141 Ratio 65, 66, 121, 142, 143, 209–13 re-beginning 208, 217 reciprocal resistance 169 reciprocal seizure 168 reciprocity 137 recognition 45, 64, 65, 81, 157 recoil 8, 9, 22, 25 recursivity 114 regular 16, 28, 64, 68, 116, 118, 139, 153, 210 irregular 92, 117, 118, 119, 184, 210 regularity 80, 82–3, 92, 101, 114–19 irregular 92, 117, 118, 119, 184, 210

270

Index

relations exteriority of 164 interiority of 164 religion 34 renunciation 29, 205, 207 repression 168 resident 98, 130, 133, 177 resistance 1, 2, 4, 6, 7, 31, 38, 55, 91, 95, 96, 100, 107, 108, 113, 117, 127, 130, 151, 163–86, 188, 194, 204, 205 respiration 130 restlessness 41, 42, 87, 126, 173 revolution 38, 56, 66, 89, 90, 107, 148, 149, 161, 174 Richards, Glynn 74, 85, 87, 93 root 4, 6, 37, 40, 76, 79, 167, 168, 191, 201 routine 116, 184 Roy, Arundhati 247 n.15 rule of the game 113, 137 home rule 64 self-rule 11, 57, 64, 66 Salter, William MacIntyre 47, 108 Satan 1, 84, 118, 121, 133, 155, 173 satanic 1, 84, 118, 121, 133 sati 190 satya 93, 130, 151, 238 Satyagraha 4, 7, 57, 79, 91, 92, 100, 137, 138, 151, 163, 165, 170, 176, 205, 206 Satyagrahi 4, 19, 110, 132, 135–8, 145, 154, 156, 174, 176, 204 scala naturae 3, 33, 34 scalar quantity 3, 42, 206 scales 3, 4, 12, 15, 32, 33, 34, 40, 41, 44, 169, 177, 186 scalological 169 Scalology 2, 3, 12, 31–47, 99, 105, 169, 177, 201, 211 Schoenberg 65 Scotus, Duns 22 secrecy 7, 8, 127, 136, 145–9 secret 2, 135, 145, 146, 147 security state 146 seed 35, 37, 75 self 6, 11, 13, 23, 24, 35, 45, 46, 50, 52, 55, 56, 57, 61, 64, 66, 84, 86,

94, 103, 119, 123, 131, 138, 147, 158, 160, 172, 174, 200, 213 semantic annihilation 198, 199, 202, 203, 205, 208, 211, 213, 216 semantic potentials 201 semen 61, 138 sense 2–4, 13, 14, 19, 20, 22, 23–5, 27–9, 35, 36, 40, 42, 45, 46, 49, 50, 51, 54, 55, 57, 58, 60, 61, 63–5, 68, 69, 72, 73–9, 81, 85, 86, 90, 95–8, 103, 106, 111, 114, 115, 120, 125, 126, 128, 129, 130, 131, 133, 134–6, 138–9, 143–6, 149–53, 156, 158, 159, 160, 163, 167, 169, 171, 172, 174, 176, 177, 179, 181, 182, 185, 189, 191, 197–201, 203, 206, 209, 210 series 16, 55, 79, 81, 136, 159, 168 sexual difference 213 sexual urge 204 shastra 189 Sheldrake, Rupert 18, 218 shepherding 172 shooting true 139 sign 13, 28, 62, 111, 154, 193, 197 signum et representatio 28 Sikhs 149 the similar 51–2 necessary truth 182 sin 19, 116, 121, 127, 141, 145, 146–8, 155, 156, 157, 179 Singer’s sewing machine 152 Slade, Madeleine 169 slavery 79 Sloterdijk, Peter 249 n.45 slowness 43, 44, 66, 69, 82, 93, 94, 128, 160, 199 socialists 43, 44 social regularity 160 society for war 193 Socrates 136, 143 Sodom and Gomorrah 118 Soldiers 95, 114, 169, 197 Sophocles’ Antigone 63 sorcery 111 soul 8–9, 17, 21, 30, 33, 35, 49, 51, 54, 56, 57, 59, 69 the still small voice 56

Index soul force 4, 49, 90, 91, 100, 157, 196 South Africa 3, 57, 86, 111, 139, 148, 163, 177, 190 sovereign 51, 71, 138, 140, 152 the sovereign principle 138, 140 sovereign will 138 space 17, 35–8, 65, 78, 86, 91, 101, 116, 119, 128, 139, 213 span 86, 104 speed absolute speed 38, 200 conflict of speeds 44 Fallacy of Speed by Thomas Taylor, The 39 practice of speed 37 speed race 44, 48, 78, 99, 200 speed machine 73, 170, 198, 200 Sphota 40, 63, 225 n.35 spinning 44, 194, 242 n.74 spinner of the wheel 42 Spinoza, Baruch Spinozism 3 Spirit 1, 14, 21, 56, 58, 121, 159, 182, 198, 204 Spirituality 1 Sponsor 200 stand standing out of 167 stand out against 167 stand out from 167 take a stand 167, 168 state nature 5, 6, 193 security 146 the state of the Maker 147 status quo 107, 110 stimuli 168 Stoa 17 strength 7, 47, 49, 59, 71, 83, 91, 105, 106, 118, 149, 155, 184 stuck-together-being 136 substratum 10, 16 subsumption 61, 64, 65 Sudra 189 suffering 26, 46, 58, 130, 132, 136, 145, 147, 155, 171, 173, 208, 213 Christian renunciation and 29 pathos of 234 n.35

271

polynomia 97 punishment and 141 self-suffering 138 voluntary 144 suffragettes 168 suneidesis 17 superstition 24, 82, 189, 190, 220 surveillance 5, 6, 8, 135, 164, 213, 214 Süskind, Peter 74 symmetry 116, 122 synarthrosis 80 synthetic propositions 164 Tagore, Rabindra Nath 26, 27, 118 taste 59, 61–6, 69, 71, 73, 74, 76, 83, 85, 87, 123, 125, 138, 160, 189, 200, 203, 214 Taylor, Thomas 38–40, 211 the tease 215 technaton 159, 161 techniques 16, 62, 64, 65, 69, 122, 164, 170, 190 technological production function 120, 194 technology 6–7, 44, 225 n.49 technological rapidity 4 techno-politics 212 telecommunications 38 teleological 25, 128 teleology 2, 93 telling the truth boundary event of truth 151 degree of truth 150 inherited truths 149 truth of birth 149 truth telling 11, 135, 140, 141, 143–6, 149, 150, 164 temporality 25 Thales 17 theodicy 102 theology 15, 16, 18, 22, 126, 127, 155, 189 theosophy 17, 29 thermodynamics 4, 12, 26 thing in-its-nature 13 throttle 46 time 4, 8, 9, 11, 12, 21, 23, 24, 26, 29, 30, 34, 39, 42, 45, 46, 47, 49, 55, 57, 59, 60, 61, 63, 65, 66, 68, 74, 77,

272

Index

79, 81, 83, 85, 86, 89, 90, 93, 95, 97, 100, 106, 116, 119, 120, 121, 126, 131, 132, 136, 140, 141, 151, 154, 158, 160, 167, 171, 173, 175, 177, 194, 196, 198–200, 207, 210–15 tobacco 63 transformation 53, 58, 94 transgression 136 tree 36, 37, 75, 92, 151, 167, 175, 191 trial 112 Triumph of the Will 116 trusteeship 43 truth absolute truth 138, 144, 145, 240 n.28 relative truth 138, 144, 240 n.28 Truth is God 18, 133, 152, 153, 221 n.25

violation

ubeity, ubeities 31 ubiquity 37 uncivilized 190 the unclean 148 unconscious 94, 109, 140, 169, 194 unforgettable memory 192 un-heimlich 63 unholy land 31 unrest 31, 41, 77, 82, 87, 126, 195 untouchables 2, 148 untouchablity 2, 26, 27, 124, 148 un-truth 143, 145, 148

war 3, 6, 111, 114, 123, 130, 193, 195–7 Weil, Simone 207 West 2, 7, 22, 30, 40–2, 45, 46, 170, 171, 189, 190 Western Metaphysics 2 Weyl, Hermann 116, 236 n.17 will 1, 135–61 wings, breaker of 132 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 24, 34, 113, 115, 140 woman 32, 43, 62, 66, 74, 102, 137, 146, 204 women’s liberation 2 word freeword 28 wordgod 28, 29 work 21, 34, 39, 51, 52, 54, 57, 60, 64, 66, 90, 91, 92, 94–6, 98, 101, 109, 117, 119, 120, 125, 126, 132, 136, 144, 150, 152, 165, 166, 169–71, 173, 184, 185, 187, 190, 194, 202, 208, 209

vacuum 18, 35, 65, 68, 125, 167, 169 valere 23 value 1–6, 12, 13–15, 17, 18, 20, 21, 24, 25, 27, 31, 32, 37, 38, 42, 45, 54, 63, 64, 76, 84, 90, 92, 93, 95, 97, 99, 105, 107, 108, 109, 110, 111, 116, 122, 123, 128, 137, 139, 143, 144, 153, 159, 169, 185, 188, 189, 190, 196, 198, 204 vector 42, 206 vegetarianism 212 velocity 42, 143, 206 Vijayan, O. V. Saga of Dharmapuri, The 142, 228 n.34 village life 39, 186

77, 102, 108, 111, 114, 115, 116, 141, 149, 181–3, 235 n.4, 244 n.27

violence deliberate 175, 180, 181 divine 183, 184, 192 innocent 180 mental 178 ordinary 175, 176 violent language 178 Virilio, Paul 2, 37, 38, 40 volition 16, 157 voluptuousness 192, 194 volvere 21 von Teese, Dita 2, 3, 217 Vow 154–8, 160 Vow of Truth 154–6, 160 adherent of truth 136, 144, 154, 159

Xenophanes 17 zero 2, 82 zero hero 87 Žižek, Slavoj 219 n.11 Zombies 217

273

274

275

276

277

278