Shaj Mohan is a philosopher based in the Subcontinent. His research interests and publications include philosophy of technology, metaphysics, reason, politics and truthness. He is the co-author with Divya Dwivedi of Gandhi and Philosophy: On Theological Anti-Politics (2018).
The Anastasis of Philosophy
What does philosophy have to offer today? It has nothing but ana-stasis to offer, which really is something more than re-surrection. Today is characterised by the crises of climate; the movement of people; technological will; the new poverties; the disquiet after the dissolution of the confused line between” orient and occident”; and the growing distance of humans from the activity of “making of their own world”. But we know that “crisis” has been the provenance of philosophy; the speculative root “Kri” of the terms “crisis” and “critique” both lead to the sense of tearing and of discernment. Critique is the apprehension of the distinct homologies of the elements of any system—be it of “pure reason” or of the star systems—and their powers under a comprehending law which allows the elements to articulate at their limits, and hence critique marks in advance the thresholds beyond which crisis awaits a system. Crisis is that event after which a system will no longer be able to return as the same (keeping Nietzsche in mind), and instead it might return as something better or worse, or something else altogether. For example, a chrysalis is a crisis in the system of the organism, with the caveat that the chrysalis is a regularised crisis (understood as a stage in the life of certain insects), akin to the many crises of the markets for capitalism. Philosophy is concerned with crises which are not yet regularised, and it has enabled philosophy to create surges through which it made itself a right again. These insurrections and resurrections are the histories of philosophy which entered a stasis named “the end of metaphysics” in the last century. Today philosophy can offer a seizure between that which has come to be its own ruins in “metaphysics” and a certain “elsewhere” which is neither occident nor orient, but is the experience of the something again; for philosophy is all we have in order to negotiate, be it through logos or as the principle of reason, between something and nothing. Only then can we come face to face with the vanishing of “the something” into the eidolon of a growing architecture of “the nothing”.
Conférence, 20 min
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