Whither the Political? Marx meets Ambedkar at Sriniketan

<strong>CENTRE FOR WOMEN'S STUDIES, JNU</strong> a Seminar on <strong>Whither the Political? Marx meets Ambedkar at Sriniketan</strong> By <strong>Dr. Anup Dhar </strong> (Associate Professor, Ambedkar University Delhi) The tendency of the mind is economical: it loves to form habits and move in grooves which save it the trouble of thinking anew at each of its steps. Ideals once formed make the mind lazy. It becomes afraid to risk its acquisitions in fresh endeavors. It tries to enjoy complete security by shutting up its belongings behind fortifications of habit. Tagore (1916) It was in 1916 that Lenin wrote Imperialism, the Highest/Higher Stage of Capitalism (1917), in Zürich, during the January–June period. Thus while Lenin was producing a critique of the imperialism of the West, Tagore was, in the same year, turning attention to the imperialism of the East (notably Japan). The irony of history, however, is the almost total amnesia of Tagore's critique. The paper asks: does Tagore's critique of imperialism lend itself to a dual reflection: reflection on capitalism and the somewhat "unpractical" reflection on, what Tagore saw to be a western ideal, nationalism (1916)? Does it lend itself to a deeper reflection: reflection on the reduction of 'anti-colonial nationalism' to Freud's "primary mass" and the consequent delinking of 'means' and 'ends' (as in Ghare Baire [The Home and the World])? Does it also lend itself to a critique of 'politics' ('politics': an English term Tagore does not translate into Bengali, thus retaining its foreign-ness) and a reflection on the 'political' (as in Char Adhyay [Four Chapters])? How would Marx (as philosopher of 'social humanity' or 'human sociality') and Ambedkar (as philosopher of Dhamma) respond to Tagore's critique of 'politics', and the invocation of 'samaj' and 'samavaya' as grounds for an (im)possible post-politics imagination of the political? How would what Lacan calls the 'University Discourse' respond to Marx, Tagore and Ambedkar's (who are all "gravel in the shoe" of the given, in their respective ways) imagining of 'ethical/alternative collectivities' and possible aesthetics of futures? <strong>Date: 29 March 2016</strong>