Dipesh Chakrabarty

Referência para citação:
Araújo, Sara. “Recensão a The Postcolonial Orient. The Politics of Difference and the
Project of Provincialising Europe de Vasant Kaiwar.” Práticas da História, Journal on
Theory, Historiography and Uses of the Past, n.º 11 (2020); 287-296

This article interprets critiques of secularity and the related concept of history as progress in the work of Dipesh Chakrabarty and Judith Butler. At the same time, it defends their approach against the criticism voiced by Gregor McLennan. It shows that the postsecular conception of the politics of both authors is not just an attempt to open public space to a wider range of religious and cultural voices. Rather, it is a critique of the way in which political secularism and the ideology of progress are used by the modern state to legitimize the exercise of its own power. Butler and Chakrabarty's postsecular pol is thus based primarily on coalition building against these legitimization frameworks, which opens up the possibility of forming new postsecular political subjects. It illustrates the theoretical approach of both authors with an example of the church sanctuary movement in Germany.

Este es el trabajo final que escribí en 2019 para la Cátedra, Humanidad, evolución y ecología a cargo de Rolando Silla y Debora Swistun.
La consigna era escribir una especie de Ensayo relacionando algo que hayamos visto con los autores que vimos durante el cuatrimestre.
Así escribí este análisis de la Serie One strange rock ( USA) y Villefranche ( Francia) bajo la lupa de algunos autores de la Antropólogos de la mente.

Dipesh Chakrabarty has identified Immanuel Kant’s distinction between the human’s moral and animal dimensions as an underlying source of the failure of the humanities to respond to the ecological crises of the Anthropocene. Although relevant for the environmental humani- ties generally, Chakrabarty’s critique is especially germane to contemporary environmental philosophy. It shows how the reality of anthropogenic climate change renders central aspects of Kant’s influential conception of human nature untenable. While closer examination of Kant’s writings corroborates the core of Chakrabarty’s reading, there nonetheless remain positive resources in Kant’s philosophy for contemporary environmental thinking, for, although Kant does regard the human’s moral and animal dimensions as conceptually separable, he also understands them to be inextricably bound within the nature of human beings. Attending to the interplay between these Kantian commitments, a new critical insight into one of the basic tensions of the Anthropocene era can be attained.

Ważnym wkładem książki Ewy Domańskiej jest zwrócenie uwagi na te obecne w nowej humanistyce i podejmowane przez historie niekonwencjonalne awangardowe idee, które są bagatelizowane lub pomijane przez badaczy reprezentujących główny nurt rozważań historycznych. Należy jednak podkreślić, że książka ta w żaden sposób nie jest "postmodernistycznym" atakiem na tradycyjną historiografię. Jest ona raczej uważnie przestudiowaną i wrażliwą prezentacją nowego rodzaju przedmiotów (i podmiotów) badań historycznych, powołanych do życia przez nowożytność, modernizację oraz ekstremalne sytuacje.

The Anthropocene and species-being: I want to immediately confess that there is something awkward about holding these two terms together. It would seem they share little conceptual ground. The former, relatively newly minted in earth system science, designates the advent of a geological era of the human species’ own making. The latter, from the annals of Marxist theory, describes humanity’s capacity to take its own “life-activity” as its object, and thus, the historical possibilities of its own self-development. Nevertheless, in this paper I follow a hunch that this is a productive coupling. For it seems to me that it offers a new line for thinking through the relations between this novel geological era, in which the human species is now a force altering the trajectory of planetary life, and the historically specific social formation, capitalism, that has ushered in this epoch, and with it, this augmented species capacity. As a means to develop this contention I wish to explore the tensions and implications of the two contrasting formulations of the human that respectively inform these two notions: that is, as a biological species with geological agency; and as a species-being, with the capacity to consciously direct its own species’ life activity.

1) Este libro es, en principio, un intento de reconstruir la dialéctica de la ilustración estudiada por Adorno y Horkheimer desde la perspectiva de la crítica marxiana del capital.

2) En el pensamiento maduro de Marx, leído fundamentalmente desde Moishe Postone, encontramos toda una teoría de las formas de mediación sociales en el capitalismo. La modernidad capitalista se caracteriza por la primacía de lógicas de dominación abstractas antes que personales. Somos dominados por abstracciones reales que se mueven solas, como el propio capital que, en cuanto valor que se valoriza, constriñe las posibilidades de acción política democrática de las personas.

3) Esas dominaciones impersonales y ciegas, sin embargo, no se sostienen sin una serie de dominaciones particularistas (de clase, género y racialización) que les son co-constitutivas. Entonces, no hay dominación abstracta sin angatonismos, disputa y lucha.

4) La modernidad capitalista no es, sin embargo, solo dominación. Esta también una forma social generativa. El capital pone potencialidades emancipatorias que, de realizarse, lo negarían y superarían históricamente.

5) Esas potencialidades se encuentran en la democracia y la técnica modernas. Ambas existen bajo una forma capitalista, en la que se realizan como dominación (democracia domesticada por el mercado, tecnología que oprime trabajadorxs en la configuración material del capital fijo). Sin embargo, ambas portan las promesas incumplidas de una modernidad más allá del capital. Esas promesas nos sugieren una democracia radicalizada que se sacuda de encima el mecanismo ciego de la acumulación y una técnica nueva que profundice las posibilidades de autodeterminación colectiva a nivel de la vida material.

6) Es posible, por lo tanto, una crítica inmanente de la modernidad capitalista. Esta crítica evita las narrativas unilaterales del progreso y la decadencia. La modernidad es, como enseñan Bolívar Echeverría y Moishe Postone, ambigua: mezcla de dominación y emancipción, de opresiones terribles y aperturas de posibilidades emocionantes. El proyecto del marxismo es algo así como críticar la modernidad para realizar sus núcleos de verdad emancipatorios.

7) Sin embargo, también hay un gran potencial de catástrofe en la modernidad. Como vieron Adorno y Horkheimer, el capitalismo no configura una dominación estática con potencialidades de liberación latentes. El potencial de catástrofe de la modernidad se activa cuando, en lugar de la emancipación, triunfan movimientos que barren las libertades parciales conquistadas bajo la abstracción-valor. Los fascismos, los totalitarismos, el antisemitismo, los odios racistas, son ejemplos de este potencial de catástrofe de la modernidad. Por eso, si los proyectos emancipatorios no se realizan o quedan truncos, nos espera algo peor que un capitalismo de "business as usual". Los totalitarismos no son excepciones enloquecidas ante la política moderna, sino resultados inmanentes de su dinámica, tanto como las promesas de democracia, socialismo y libertad. Las encrucijadas de la modernidad no nos permiten, por lo tanto, descansar en la ilusión de una dominación estabilizada y esperar al futuro para realizar las promesas emancipatorias. Si la emancipación no ocurre, más temprano que tarde sobrevendrá otra vez la catástrofe.

Within the horizon of the critique of Eurocentrism, this manifesto presents methods of interpre-tation that can advance the project of decolonising human rights and creating new Third World discourses. These hermeneutical strategies include the re-contextualisation of human rights theory in the historical horizon of modernity/coloniality; the elaboration of alternative geogra-phies followed by provincialising human rights; deparochialising legal theory and constructing a cosmopolitan jurisprudence; the ‘universalisation’ and ‘globalisation’ of human rights; the trans-nationalisation of human rights; a re-writing of the history of rights; a becoming of the Other into the Self; the critique of Critical Theory; the adoption of an ethics of emotions as an ethics of human rights; and a dialogue between different traditions and rationalities of human rights. The paper also presents concepts and ideas such as empire/suffering, modernity as crisis, the colonial origins of human rights, postmodernity as an epoch of moral sensibilisation, power/epistemology, and critical dialogue

The figure of the socially-engaged detective who transcends his – a high- ly gendered agency operates here – generically-sanctioned roles as a glorified intellec- tual mercenary or “gumshoe”, solver of conundrums and “tangled skeins”, champion of the rule-of-law and keeper of the last resort, while attempting to uphold a universe of moral and ethical values that, simultaneously, do not stray too far from the high road of societal and political acceptability, is a figure to conjure within the literary history of Bengal in the twentieth century. In the present essay, the attempt will be made to study, through a comparativist’s prism, this gravitas, endowed by society, which is associated with the image of the successful private investigator in Bengal; often, his is a voice striking a blow for the spirit of rational enquiry, as with Feluda, and, in other cases, he upholds the dignity of the traditional order/s, while exposing its/their soft under- belly of moral corruption and criminal collusion, as with Byomkesh Bakshi.

Over the last four decades, Dipesh Chakrabarty’s astonishingly wide-ranging scholarship has elaborated a range of important issues, especially those of modernity, identity, and politics – in dialogue with postcolonial theory and critical historiography – on global and planetary scales. All of this makes Chakrabarty among the most significant (and most cited) scholars working in the humanities and social sciences today. The present text comprises substantive yet short, academic yet accessible essays that are crafted in conversation with the critical questions raised by Chakrabarty’s writings.

Now, Chakrabarty holds the singular distinction of making key contributions
to some of the most salient shifts in understandings of the Global South that have come about in wake of subaltern studies and postcolonial perspectives, critiques of Eurocentrism together with elaborations of public pasts, and articulations of climatic histories alongside problems of the Anthropocene. Rather than exegeses and commentaries, these original, commissioned, pieces – written by a stellar cast of contributors from four continents – imaginatively engage Chakrabarty’s insights and arguments in order to incisively explore important issues of the politics of knowledge in contemporary worlds. This book will be of interest to scholars and graduate students interested in a wide variety of interdisciplinary issues across the humanities and social sciences,
especially the interplay between postcolonial perspectives and subaltern studies,
between man-made climate change and the human sciences, between history and
theory, and between modernity and globalization.

The 2013 publication of Vivek Chibber’s book Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital has reignited debates over the relative merits and demerits of Marxism and postcolonialism. This article reviews the debate and raises some critical questions about Chibber’s engagement with questions pertaining to universalism and capitalist development. Focusing on Chibber’s critique of Dipesh Chakrabarty’s Provincializing Europe, the article contends that whereas Chibber is right in arguing for a concept of universal history, the approach he offers towards this end pushes in the direction of Eurocentrism. As an alternative, the article proposes the possibility of crafting passages from Marxism to postcolonialism in order to move beyond Eurocentrism in the historical-sociological study of capitalist development.

Was sind die Bedingungen der Möglichkeit des Verstehens? Was tun wir, wenn wir verstehen? Oder ‚geschieht‘ etwas mit uns? Können wir der Tradition kritisch begegnen und diese besser verstehen als sie sich selbst oder behält sie eine fraglose Geltung jenseits aller Vernunftgründe? Fragen wie diese stehen im Zentrum der hermeneutischen Philosophie Hans Georg Gadamers, die von Jürgen Habermas einmal als Projekt der „Urbanisierung der Heideggerschen Provinz“  bezeichnet wurde. Der Heidegger-Schüler Gadamer präsentiert Grundgedanken seines Lehrers in der Tat in einer für die deutsche Nachkriegsphilosophie zeitgemäßen Form, die freilich heute schon wieder veraltet wirkt. Dennoch steht Gadamers Denken exemplarisch für eine Variante des Ineinanders von Konservatismus und Postmoderne. Viele seiner Gedanken, auch wenn sie noch in einem humanistisch behäbig daherkommenden Jargon der Eigentlichkeit verfasst wurden, sind heute nach wie vor Gemeinplätze einer akademischen Vernunftfeindlichkeit, die Hans Krämer treffend als „Interpretationismus“  bezeichnet hat.
Im Folgenden sollen Grundgedanken von Gadamers Hauptwerk Wahrheit und Methode und ihr aporetischer Charakter analysiert werden. Es wird sich zeigen, dass Gadamers Erörterungen einen Versuch darstellen, die Unterscheidungen von Subjekt und Objekt des Verstehens, von Interpret und Interpretandum, von Individuum und Überlieferung sowie von Erkennen und Anerkennen der Tradition aufzulösen. Dieser Versuch bringt ein Konglomerat von unversöhnlichen Widersprüchen hervor: Eine realistische technische Hermeneutik steht einer antirealistischen ontologischen Hermeneutik gegenüber, eine relativistische Bedeutungstheorie gegen eine traditionalistische und schließlich steht die Trennung von Erkennen und Anerkennen der Textbedeutung der These gegenüber, alles Verstehen sei ein Anwenden auf die Lebenspraxis und eine Übereinstimmung in der Sache

This study rethinks Dipesh Chakrabarty's engagement with Marx and Vivek Chibber's recent critique of postcolonialism in order to offer a new reading of the state of postcolonial studies. It explores the Hegelian dimension of Chakrabarty's Provincializing Europe and interprets Chibber's critique of postcolonialism as an attempt to save the Enlightenment from capitalism. The study draws on a number of Marxist theorists to synthesize these two positions, ultimately proposing a class-oriented politics that points beyond capitalism. By accounting for the un-evenness capital produces, the article explores the possibilities for a politics of history that is oriented not toward the past but toward the future, in particular, a future beyond capitalism.

This chapter is prompted by recent calls by historians and other scholars for new understandings of history in the Anthropocene, asking what this might mean for literary realism, invested as it is in the depiction of the passing of time. History in the Anthropocene renders redundant the human-historical, individual-universal dialectic that has long been the hallmark of the realist novel. Following Baucom, this chapter looks to Walter Benjamin’s conceptualisation of history for clues to a new form of literary realism. For Benjamin, a true understanding of history demands the recognition of the ‘image’ of history, a recognition occurring in a moment of ‘arrest’ or stoppage in the flow of time and of thought. This chapter speculates on the emergence in the Anthropocene of a literary realism that performs just such an arrest, taking its reader beyond conventional understandings of (human) history and time.

Η παρούσα μελέτη επικεντρώνεται στα κείμενα του Π. Κονδύλη για την "ελληνική περίπτωση" και νεωτερικότητα. Θέτοντας τις απόψεις του Έλληνα φιλόσοφου στο πλαίσιο ορισμένων εκδοχών των modernist studies, αποπειράται την κριτική πραγμάτευσή τους.

Indian Historians discussed their diverse opinion on Buddhism but most strange commonality in their writings is that they all seem to be biased against Buddhism and there were many instances when a same charge was repeated by different historians without even referring each other. However, being authorities of Indian history their writings remained unchallenged. The purpose of this paper is to throw light on the discrepancies in the writings of mainstream Indian historians and to present a correct and true picture of Buddhism.

This is a revised version of my paper presented in the 87th International Buddhist Research Seminar, Nan Buddhist College organised during 18-20 February 2016. The original paper is available at http://www.ojs.mcu.ac.th/index.php/JIBS/article/view/1/pdf001

The designation of divisions in the geologic time scale might typically seem to be a relatively trivial matter of scientific nomenclature, but the proposal to name our current geological epoch the “Anthropocene” has generated unusually vigorous interdisciplinary debate. The controversy has focused largely on the perceived political and ideological assumptions framing the very idea of the Anthropocene, especially who counts among the “we” of Anthropos, with implications for understanding the root causes of global environmental problems, to whom responsibility should be assigned for these problems and their causes, and the role of technological and management approaches in addressing them.  Less attention has been paid to claims by proponents that the Anthropocene marks a unique historical transformation of the relation between “humans” and “nature,” a transformation in which “we” displace nature, for better or worse, as drivers of the planet’s future. Paul Crutzen, the Nobel-Prize winning scientist credited with popularizing the notion of the Anthropocene, along with journalist Christian Schwägerl, famously remarks that “We humans are becoming the dominant force for change on Earth. A long-held religious and philosophical idea---humans as masters of planet Earth---has turned into a stark reality. . . . It’s no longer us against ‘Nature.’ Instead, it’s we who decide what nature is and what it will be. . . . [I]n this new era, nature is us.”  As Jeremy Baskin notes, this rhetoric plays a double game, claiming to re-insert humans into nature while elevating them as its masters.  More importantly, such claims to our post-natural status raise central philosophical questions about the autonomy of nature, the relation between human and geological temporality, and on what basis humanity can be considered as a collective in the absence of any “nature” in common.

Contributing to recent discussions of temporality in relation to the concept of “world,” this essay asks how thinking “world” with “time” can rejuvenate postcolonial figurations of futurity. The theoretical texts I discuss include Pheng Cheah’s What Is a World?, Darieck Scott’s Extravagant Abjection, and Dipesh Chakrabarty’s Provincializing Europe. I retrieve the distinction in these works between the structural dislocations that “found” human being and decompose linear time, and more properly historical decenterings in which the heterotemporal is an effect of social processes of exploitation and (colonial-capitalist) domination. To honor this distinction, I place recent thinkers into dialogue with Walter Benjamin and Herbert Marcuse, suggesting that a post-poststructuralist reclamation of the latter is particularly overdue. The article culminates in an explication of Zoë Wicomb’s David’s Story—a work that asks us to live through its form that postcolonial mode of the nonsynchronous with which my argument is concerned.

This essay proposes a critique of Provincializing Europe. I argue that the project of Provincializing Europe is based upon a contradictory conception of political modernity. Modernity is defined in the text as both the ‘provincial’ product of the particular history of Europe and the universal norm of historical progress. This contradiction, I argue, is a result of the hermeneutic approach that Chakrabarty applies to the project of provincializing Europe. In this approach, abstractions like the Enlightenment notion of man are assumed to result from the denial of the particular practices in which they are embedded. Due to this opposition between practice and theoretical abstraction, Chakrabarty’s analysis is unable to grasp the abstract character of (European) political modernity as precisely the particular feature that defines it as a provincial, or culturally and historically specific, phenomenon. This failure, I argue, leads paradoxically to an affirmation of the universality of the very particular conception of modernity that Chakrabarty seeks to provincialize.

Focusing particularly on *Provincializing Europe* (PE), this essay is cast as a close and critical engagement with the work of Dipesh Chakrabarty over almost three decades. To begin with, I trace how Chakrabarty’s provocations have pointed toward post-coloniality and modernity as necessarily contradictory, contended, and contingent procedures and perspectives. Second, the essay tracks pathways that PE haltingly intimates and partially illuminate but mostly routes that the work chiefly shies of treading, in order to open up instead the different registers of historicism, the hermeneutical, and the analytical, including their mutual interplay and formidable entanglements, as formative of modern knowledges. Finally, these steps help foreground my own explorations of modernity. Braiding together analytical impulses and hermeneutic sensibilities, theory and narrative, these efforts have distinguished between historically located subjects of modernity as bearers of heterogeneous reasons/understandings, on the one hand, and routine representations of the modern subject as insinuating a singular rationality, on the other, which together carry wide implications.

How to write colonial history in the face of epistemological colonisation within the discipline of history itself? This paper tries to grapple with this fundamental question for the sub-field of colonial and imperial history, by drawing on the work of Dipesh Chakrabarty, Ashis Nandy and Homi K. Bhabha. Ultimately, it develops a figure of the hybrid historian, in close analogy with Bhabha's theory of hybridity, to enable a position of the historian of empire that responds to the difficulties of epistemological colonisation.

Si tratta della mia tesi magistrale, in cui svolgo un'indagine genealogica sul concetto di Antropocene, intendendo il suo stesso significato come un campo di battaglia. Riporto qui l'indice, se si è interessate/i, contattarmi qui o al mio indirizzo mail.

Recensione di ''La sfida del cambiamento climatico. Globalizzazione e Antropocene'' (Febbraio 2021) di Dipesh Chakrabarty, uscita sul portale online di Philosophy Kitchen - Rivista di filosofia contemporanea in data 11/05/2021.

Link: https://philosophykitchen.com/2021/05/l-uomo-come-forza-geologica/

Numero monografico dei "Quaderni di teoria sociale" dedicato a "Gramsci e la sociologia". A distanza di 20 anni dall'ultima presa di parola degli studiosi sul rapporto di Gramsci con i grandi del pensiero sociologico ("Gramsci e i classici della sociologia", a cura di Massimo Paci), questo numero monografico vuole riaprire il dibattito tra due tradizioni (studi gramsciani e studi sociologici) che si sono poco frequentate negli ultimi anni. Per fare di Gramsci un classico della sociologia, e dei temi della sociologia una chiave centrale di lettura dei Quaderni.