Divya Dwivedi is a philosopher based in the Subcontinent. She teaches Philosophy and Literature at the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology Delhi. Her recent work has been concerned with the formality of law, truthness, the literary, postcolonial racisms, and speed. She is the author with Shaj Mohan of Gandhi and Philosophy: On Theological Anti-Politics (forthcoming, 2018). She has co-edited Public Sphere from outside the West (2015), and Narratology and Ideology (2018).
The Indestinacy of the World
Population politics, which can be defined as the games that commence by determining men as units such that they can be identified, segregated and mobilized against each other, characterized the preceding century, although Heidegger would turn away from this diagnostic concept. A new planetary politicsbecame visible in certain places where the communities of migrants and refugees are a considerable minority in their host nation. Unprecedented migrations of populations in the context of global capital and their complex political deployment formed a problematic which did not displace the nation-state politics but has re-articulated the bond of blood and soil. But another formation is taking over and redirecting population politics. The movement of men on the earth, the making and unmaking of habitats, appears and is represented only as contagion, degradation, apocalypse. In 1950s Arendt had imagined the “watcher from the universe” to whom “earthly human activities … would appear not as activities of any kind, but as processes” devoid of human agency, as mutations in steel, much like the aliens of Monod who would encounter the machines of men. Today, the watcher would find the shifting dust of ages that men have raised to be settling down: into intangible cages, mined by intangible apparatuses, safe from ourselves, in the world at home. But if such a state were to become fully accomplished, there would be no watchers from the universe peering at earth. Instead of setting up a world and setting forth the supporting of the earth in new ways as Heidegger understood, we are preparing for the dissolution of world into earth, its final (eschaton) fixing in place (feststellen). The politics of population treats populations as an eminently formable matter – an earth that can be set forth – but the settling dust betokens the end of formability itself. The last which is held off by the little invented finalities, by the difference between means and ends, is now interconverted with the final(telos). This is calypsology, the discipline of the immurement of ends within the means. Our condition is neither destiny nor its error but the being indestinateof the world itself. It does not hold still to be formed by our will, but also does not resist us as divine disposition. In its indestinacy lies its formability and the room for contestations over the form of a world, that is, politics. Should we begin to recognize the calypsologies underway, Odysseus, whose release from Calypso’s island was destined to return him home, will not be our guide. We are both Persephone, who turns away towards unknown futures, and Hecate, by whose torch we peer into this indestinacy.
Conférence, 20 min
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