IntroductionThe COVID-19 pandemic was soon declared a global health threat and had significant economic and health implications. Unprecedented government measures brought massive shifts in teaching-learning pedagogy in nursing to curb the infection. The study was conducted to explore the predictors of pandemic fatigue among nursing undergraduates and mediating role of individual resilience and coping styles during the third wave in India.MethodsThis online survey included 256 undergraduate nursing students studying at Tertiary Care Teaching Hospital in North India. Lockdown/Pandemic Fatigue Questionnaire, Brief (...) Resilience Scale, and Coping Behavior Questionnaire were used to collect the information. Appropriate descriptive and inferential statistics were applied to compute the results.ResultsNursing undergraduates reported a moderate level of fatigue during the restrictions imposed at the time of the third wave. Students’ year of study, tested positive during pandemic, and post-COVID-19 hospitalization were found associated with higher fatigue status. Advanced age and higher personal resilience status were associated with lower fatigue levels. Resilience status and second year of study were reported as independent predictors of pandemic fatigue in students.ConclusionFindings suggest that lockdown-related fatigue was common in nursing undergraduates. Considering negative consequences on mental health, routine psychosocial screening of the nursing students should be conducted. Recommending stress-relieving measures should be enforced to help nursing undergraduates to combat lockdown-induced exhaustion. (shrink)

The paper presents a method for interpreting religious texts for use in psychotherapy. In particular, the paper takes the example of the pivotal character Arjuna in Bhagavad-Gita as having low frustration tolerance and uses the collective philosophy of the Bhagavad-Gita and Bhagavata-Purana through six steps of Logic-Based Therapy to overcome it. Although the paper uses Hindu religious texts, the treatment of these texts will speak to anyone interested in the possibility of integrating religious texts into psychotherapy.

This article addresses India's contemporary population control policies and practices as a form of gender violence perpetrated by the state and transnational actors against poor, Adivasi and Dalit women. It argues that rather than meeting the needs and demands of these women for access to safe contraception that they can control, the Indian state has targeted them for coercive mass sterilisations and unsafe injectable contraceptives. This is made possible by the long-term construction of particular women's lives as devalued and disposable, (...) and of their bodies as excessively fertile and therefore inimical to development and progress. It further considers how population policy is currently embedded in the neoliberal framework of development being pursued by the Indian state. In particular, it argues that the violence of population policies is being deepened as a result of three central and interrelated aspects of this framework: corporate dispossession and displacement, the intensification and extension of women's labour for global capital, and the discourses and embodied practices of far-right Hindu supremacism. At the same time, India's population policies cannot be understood in isolation from the global population control establishment, which is increasingly corporate-led, and from broader structures of racialised global capital accumulation. The violence of India's contemporary population policies and the practices they produce operate at several different scales, all of which involve the construction of certain bodies as unfit to reproduce and requiring intervention and control. (shrink)

This volume explores what phenomenology adds to the enterprise of anthropology, drawing on and contributing to a burgeoning field of social science research inspired by the phenomenological tradition in philosophy. Essays by leading scholars ground their discussions of theory and method in richly detailed ethnographic case studies. The contributors broaden the application of phenomenology in anthropology beyond the areas in which it has been most influential—studies of sensory perception, emotion, bodiliness, and intersubjectivity—into new areas of inquiry such as martial arts, (...) sports, dance, music, and political discourse. (shrink)

We are living in an algorithmic age where mathematics and computer science are coming together in powerful new ways to influence, shape and guide our behaviour and the governance of our societies. As these algorithmic governance structures proliferate, it is vital that we ensure their effectiveness and legitimacy. That is, we need to ensure that they are an effective means for achieving a legitimate policy goal that are also procedurally fair, open and unbiased. But how can we ensure that algorithmic (...) governance structures are both? This article shares the results of a collective intelligence workshop that addressed exactly this question. The workshop brought together a multidisciplinary group of scholars to consider barriers to legitimate and effective algorithmic governance and the research methods needed to address the nature and impact of specific barriers. An interactive management workshop technique was used to harness the collective intelligence of this multidisciplinary group. This method enabled participants to produce a framework and research agenda for those who are concerned about algorithmic governance. We outline this research agenda below, providing a detailed map of key research themes, questions and methods that our workshop felt ought to be pursued. This builds upon existing work on research agendas for critical algorithm studies in a unique way through the method of collective intelligence. (shrink)

First words on silence -- The secret of literary silence -- Law, "life/living," language -- Between Derrida and Agamben -- The wild child : politics and ethics of the name -- The wild child and scientific names -- HumAnimal acts : potentiality or movement as rest.

Antibiotic resistance poses an urgent public health risk. High rates of ABR have been noted in all regions of the globe by the World Health Organization. ABR develops when bacteria are exposed to antibiotics either during treatments in humans or animals or through environmental sources contaminated with antibiotic residues. Spread beyond those administered antibiotics occurs through direct contact with the infected or colonized person or animal, through contact or ingestion of retail meat or agricultural products contaminated with ABR organisms, or (...) through the environment. ABR bacteria spread from individuals to populations and across countries. (shrink)

_HumAnimal_ explores the experience of dehumanization as the privation of speech. Taking up the figure of silence as the space between human and animal, it traces the potential for an alternate political and ethical way of life beyond law. Employing the resources offered by deconstruction as well as an ontological critique of biopower, Kalpana Rahita Seshadri suggests that humAnimal, as the site of impropriety opened by racism and manifested by silence, can be political and hazardous to power. Through the (...) lens of such works as Coetzee’s Foe, Chesnutt’s “The Dumb Witness,” Dr. Itard’s “wild child,” and aerialist Philippe Petit’s _Man on Wire_, Seshadri lucidly brings Derrida’s concept of the trace and his theory of sovereignty into conversation with Agamben’s investigation of the analytics of power. The task is twofold: on the one hand, to question the logocentric presumption that determines the separation between human and animal, and on the other to examine the conflation of this separation as an instrument of power in the practice of racism. Thus _HumAnimal_ details the differences and intersections between Derrida and Agamben in their respective approaches to power, claiming that to think simultaneously within the registers of deconstruction and biopolitics entails a specification of the political and ethical consequences that attends the two perspectives. When considered as the potential of language to refuse the law of signification and semantics, silence can neutralize the exercise of power through language, and Seshadri’s inquiry discloses a counterpower that does not so much oppose or destroy the politics of the subject but rather neutralizes it and renders it ineffective. (shrink)

The essay argues for a nuanced understanding of the notorious dissonance between Derrida and Agamben despite their shared interest in troubling the metaphysical separation between human and animal. I argue that a close scrutiny of their differing strategies towards the matrix of framing issues (such as sovereignty and violence) is salient for keeping the ontological question of species difference open. I suggest that the dissonance between the two thinkers is best understood in relation to systemic and rhetorical effects—namely, the encompassing (...) figure of the circle that structures sovereignty, and the rhetoric of hyperbole that disfigures the circle into an ellipse and the line. This ironic interplay appears through their mutually dissonant readings of the localization of life (human and animal) and the situation of power and violence in relation to sovereignty. (shrink)

The essay argues for a nuanced understanding of the notorious dissonance between Derrida and Agamben despite their shared interest in troubling the metaphysical separation between human and animal. I argue that a close scrutiny of their differing strategies towards the matrix of framing issues is salient for keeping the ontological question of species difference open. I suggest that the dissonance between the two thinkers is best understood in relation to systemic and rhetorical effects—namely, the encompassing figure of the circle that (...) structures sovereignty, and the rhetoric of hyperbole that disfigures the circle into an ellipse and the line. This ironic interplay appears through their mutually dissonant readings of the localization of life and the situation of power and violence in relation to sovereignty. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Toward a Philosophical Anthropology of Nonhuman AnimalsKalpana SeshadriIn medieval iconography, the ape holds a mirror in which the man who sins must recognize himself as simian dei [ape of God]. In Linnaeus’s optical machine, whoever refuses to recognize himself in the ape, becomes one: to paraphrase Pascal, qui fait l’homme, fait le singe [he who acts the man, acts the ape].—Giorgio Agamben, Man and Animal[It is] then, not just (...) about animals. It concerns whether or not we can conceive of ethical relationships beyond either continuism or separatism, beyond identity politics or abyssal alterity.—Kelly Oliver, Animal LessonsI owe a deep debt of gratitude to the authors of the four provocative and challenging papers on HumAnimal: Race, Law, Language, not only for their thoughtful consideration of my work, but for pinpointing and interrogating an uncertain “failure” in my text, namely the absence of the animal as such. David Wood asks if it would be unfair to characterize HumAnimal as a work of “anthropocentric posthumanism.” Ellen Armour, too, wonders about animals and where they figure in my project. She suggests that HumAnimal doesn’t “quite cross the putative line between humans and animals as such,” but [End Page 197] she immediately and generously qualifies the observation as a “good thing, a productive thing.” Rebecca Tuvel, on the other hand, worries that in following Agamben, I appear to uphold “the binary logic that posits animals in opposition to humans because they lack language.” Animals, she suggests, “do seem to communicate with us in important ways, ways that are worth hearing.” These astute comments undoubtedly hit the mark; HumAnimal has nothing to say about animals as such, and despite the lure of the title, there is nary a squeak nor a snout that scuttles between the covers.Rather than explain or defend this absence, let me turn to the title of this response: Why a philosophical anthropology rather than a zoology of animals? Obviously, there is a paradox inherent in calling for an anthropology of autozoōn, instead of a philosophical zoology. The latter would perhaps entail theories of evolution and animal behavior, research areas better left to natural scientists than to philosophers and critical thinkers. The problem with zoology is the way in which the philosophical question is supplanted by biological fact. An anthropology of animals on the other hand, would mean that we focus on the question of what it means to be something. In other words, my sense is that the question of the animal in philosophy can only be raised as a question of human propriety. To lose sight of the fraught co-implication of human propriety and animal alterity is to lose sight of the contribution that philosophy can make to hum(an)animal studies. Thus, where the animal is concerned what we must think is not merely whether the animal has language, whether we are in some kind of biological or social continuity with it, or whether between the animal and human is a condition of implacable alterity, a gulf that cannot be breached. We must also think the kind of necessity charged by the animal as such for thought or for any thinking to take place, and for any interrogation of (human) being. In other words, to follow Derrida in his deconstruction of the animal as such, the animal that is only a word, (l’animot) an abstraction that refers to nothing and everything, an idea of nonhuman life predicated on the ideal of man, must we not abandon, once and for all, the natural attitude toward animals? Must we not begin with the acknowledgment that the animal as such cannot be spoken of, that animals as such do not exist, but what exists is the signifier “animal” as the necessary correlative to any thought, construction or deconstruction of human-being? And that now in our current epoch of posthumanism, the strategic concept of “the natural animal” serves as an inconceivable ideal directing our ethics and our politics? Thus, I suggest that what we must contend with today, what must be encountered not once and for all but repeatedly, is the logical non sequitur that confronts us; that is... (shrink)

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to describe some of the methodological challenges of investigating privacy and ubiquitous computing in the home, particularly among the healthy elderly.Design/methodology/approachThe paper is based on focus groups with 60 senior citizens either living independently or in an assisted living facility. Prototypes of home‐based ubiquitous computing devices were created and deployed in a home‐like living lab setting; elders were brought to the lab to interact with the prototypes, then brought together in focus groups to discuss (...) their insights and concerns.FindingsInitial analyses suggest that extant metaphors of privacy may be inadequate for understanding pervasive computing in the home. Concepts of data, affective concerns, and the creation of appropriate prototypes for eliciting privacy are considered. Considerations for future studies of the elderly and privacy are made.Research limitations/implicationsThe homogeneity of the study population in terms of socioeconomic status, location, and community networks suggests that the study needs to be repeated with wider populations.Originality/valueAlthough a number of projects and studies have examined the usability of home‐based ubiquitous computing and design for aging, there has been little integration of privacy and ethical concerns into general research discourse. (shrink)

Desiring Whiteness provides a compelling new interpretation of how we understand race. Race is often seen to be a social construction. Nevertheless, we continue to deploy race thinking in our everyday life as a way of telling people apart visually. How do subjects become raced? Is it common sense to read bodies as racially marked? Employing Lacan's theories of the subject and sexual difference, Seshadri-Crooks explores how the discourse of race parallels that of sexual difference in making racial identity a (...) fundamental component of our thinking. Through close readings of literary and film texts, Seshardi-Crooks also investigates whether race is a system of difference equally determined by Whiteness. She argues that it is in relation to Whiteness that systems of racial classification are organized, endowing it with a power to shape human difference. (shrink)

Contributed articles on the philosophy of feminism.

First words on silence -- The secret of literary silence -- Law, "life/living," language -- Between Derrida and Agamben -- The wild child : politics and ethics of the name -- The wild child and scientific names -- HumAnimal acts : potentiality or movement as rest.

Objectives To explore how factors relating to grades and grading affect the correctness of choices that grant-review panels make among submitted proposals. To identify interventions in panel design that may be expected to increase the correctness of choices. -/- Method Experimentation with an empirically-calibrated computer simulation model of panel review. Model parameters are set in accordance with procedures at a national science funding agency. Correctness of choices among research proposals is operationalized as agreement with the choices of an elite panel. (...) -/- Conclusions The simulation model generates several hypotheses to guide further research. Increasing the number of grades used by panel members increases the correctness of simulated choices among submitted proposals. Collective decision procedures giving panels a greater capacity for discriminating among proposals also increase correctness. Surprisingly, differences in grading standards among panel members do not appreciably decrease correctness. (shrink)

Drawing on recent feminist discussions, this collection critically reassesses ideas about agency, exploring the relationship between agency and coercion in greater depth and across a range of disciplinary perspectives and ethical contexts.

This article explores sex selective abortion as a form of structural violence within the broader notion of women's ‘protection’ in contemporary India. While SSA tends to be framed more generally within ethical and choice-based frameworks around abortion access and reproductive ‘rights’, and specifically in India around preference for sons as a discriminatory, cultural, technological misogyny, this article argues that sex selective abortion in India needs to be understood as an outcome of broader systemic economic, political and social processes. The deepening (...) of neoliberal values through state policies has impacted significantly on social relations, shaping SSA as a manifestation of structural violence. State-driven policies in India reflect a neoliberal governmentality through state patriarchy that is implicit within the neoliberal developmental, governmental and capitalist paradigm of contemporary India. This article argues that SSA is structurally produced and therefore cannot be remedied through awareness-raising strategies such as beti bachao or financial inclusion as a means to ‘protect’ or ‘save the girl child’. Indeed, it is neoliberal economic forces that actively, though seemingly inadvertently, promote anti-women, sex selective abortion as a reproductive strategy, which is then disciplined through neoliberal governmentality. This highlights SSA as a form of gendered and structural, rather than discriminatory, violence. (shrink)

Between the Psyche and the Social is the first collection that specifically features the field of psychoanalytic social theory emerging in and between psychoanalysis, feminism, postcolonial studies, and queer theory, and across the disciplines of philosophy, literary, film, and cultural studies. This collection of essays takes the psychoanalytic study of social oppression in some new directions by engaging—indeed, stirring up—unconscious fantasies and ethical tensions at the heart of social subjectivity.

Study on Hinduism; with a special reference to the world religions and science.

The philosophy of Gauḍapāda, although found in a small treatise, has remained obscure, as both the classical and contemporary approaches to reading this philosopher have overlooked his highly original contributions. This essay explores the scope of imagination in Gauḍapāda?s philosophy, with a focus on terms such as kalpanā and ābhāsa. This reading of Gauḍapāda?s philosophy tallies with some of the findings in contemporary consciousness studies.

This article seeks to introduce a greater degree of precision into our understanding of Madhyamaka Buddhist ontological non-foundationalism, focussing specifically on the Madhyamaka founder Nāgārjuna (c. 150–250 CE). It distinguishes four senses of what the ‘foundation’ whose existence Mādhyamikas deny means; that is, (1) as ‘something that stands under or grounds things’ (a position known as generic substantialism); (2) as ‘a particular kind of basic entity’ (specific substantialism); (3) as ‘an individual essence (a haecceity or thisness of that object) by (...) means of which it is identical to that very object, to itself’ (modal essentialism); and (4) as ‘an essence in the absence of which an object could be of a radically different kind or sort of object than it in fact is’ (sortal essentialism). It then proceeds to delineate the Madhyamaka refutation of the specific substantialist position in terms of its argued denial of dharma as basic entity; of generic substantialism and modal essentialism in terms of its argued denial of svabhāva as both foundation for and essence of putative entities; and of sortal essentialism in terms of its argued denial of essentialist conceptions of conceptual thought (vikalpa), mental construction (prapañca), and in short the entire domain of ratiocination (kalpanā), by means of its notion of conceptual imputation (prajñaptir upādāya)—a denial strictly speaking ontological, but of what are putative epistemic entities. The final portion of the article explains the relationship of ontological to other forms of non-foundationalism according to Madhyamaka. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Healing Powers and Modernity: Traditional Medicine, Shamanism, and Science in Asian SocietiesE. N. AndersonHealing Powers and Modernity: Traditional Medicine, Shamanism, and Science in Asian Societies. Edited by Linda H. Connor and Geoffrey Samuel. Westport, CT: Bergin and Garvey, 2001. Pp. xiii + 283. Hardcover.Healing Powers and Modernity: Traditional Medicine, Shamanism, and Science in Asian Societies, edited by Linda H. Connor and Geoffrey Samuel, consists of an Introduction, by (...) the first editor, and eleven case studies. The latter are short ethnographic studies of particular communities or healers in East and South Asian countries. All of these are well-written, detailed accounts of particular healing contexts and behaviors. Several are by first-rate veteran ethnographers, such as Laurel Kendall (writing-as usual-on Korean shamans), Mark Nichter (India), Carol Laderman (Malaya), and Geoffrey Samuel (Tibet). Others are by younger scholars, such as Amanda Harris (the Iban of Sarawak), who are carrying on the great tradition. Other essays by Kalpana Ram (India), Marina Roseman (the Temiar of Malaya), Cynthia Hunter (Indonesia), Sydney White (the Naxi of China), Craig Janes (Tibet), and Vincanne Adams (Tibet) complete the picture. All are fine ethnographic sketches.The unifying theme is a classic anthropological one: traditional, small-scale, indigenous traditions meet international forces of change. Inevitably, the former must accommodate to the overwhelmingly greater wealth and power of the agents of the latter. In the medical arena, nations often push international biomedicine to the exclusion of other modes. In the nations under study here, things are a bit more complex; all have their own elite medical traditions, some much changed by contact with biomedicine (as in the case of China's "Traditional Chinese Medicine," with capital letters; it is a new invention, in spite of the name). So local indigenous healers have to accommodate not only to some much-altered form of biomedicine; they usually have to accommodate also to some much-altered form of their country's elite medicine. They improvise, often with striking success. The spirits of the forest are joined by the spirit of canned sardines (see Roseman's chapter), but spiritual healing practice continues.Naturally, this is confusing, and here the book begins to break down a bit. "Modernity" as a concept is taken over from the writings of Foucault, de Certeau, Homi Bhabha, and the like, which are by no means consistent or clear on its meaning. And the authors of this book are far too sophisticated to think of "modernity" as any one thing or as anything at all simple. They are, perforce, left to say that modernity-especially as written up at enormous length and vagueness in the works of the authorities cited-is too complex to address here. (Someone more irreverent might even suggest that "modernity," if indeed it cannot be tightly defined, is not a concept worthy of much attention.) This leaves the book rather undertheorized.Moreover, the authors follow the aforementioned authorities in leaving out bio-scientific considerations, even from descriptions of local modernizing discourses. One wishes for some biomedical diagnoses of cases, for example, for background data on disease incidence, infant and maternal mortality, nutrition, and other basic health concerns. [End Page 702]A reviewer usually should not complain about what is not treated in a book, but in some cases here, stories really need rounding out. Laurel Kendall speaks of Korean folkloristic interest in shamans, but does not mention the fascinating and hotly debated ideas about shamanism as the fount of Korean morality and fine art. Geoffrey Samuel puts discussion of China's brutal crushing of Tibetans and their culture "beyond the scope of this chapter" (p. 215), which deprives the reader of serious consideration of the most obtrusive force shaping Tibetan medical practice today.Such quibbles are minor. These compelling studies of local healers caught in global currents can stand on their own. [End Page 703]E. N. AndersonUniversity of California, RiversideCopyright © 2006 University of Hawai'i Press... (shrink)

A recurrent problem in the philosophical debates over whether there is or can be nonconceptual experience or whether all experience is conceptually structured, mediated, or dependent is the lack of a generally accepted account of what concepts are. Without a precise specification of what a concept is, the notion of nonconceptuality is equally ill defined. This problem cuts across contemporary philosophy and cognitive science as well as classical Indian philosophy, and it affects how we go about philosophically “engaging Buddhism” in (...) particular. Buddhist philosophers generally argue that our everyday experience of the world is conceptually constructed. For example, they argue that what appear to us to be stable, enduring entities possessing properties and belonging to kinds are fictions created by the imposition of concepts onto the incessant flux of momentary events. At the same time, “nonconceptual cognition” (nirvikalpa jñāna) marks the limits of conceptuality. But what precisely do “conceptual” and “nonconceptual” mean? Consider that “concept” is routinely used to translate the Sanskrit term, vikalpa; nirvikalpa is accordingly rendered as “nonconceptual.” But vikalpa has also been rendered as “imagination,” “discriminative construction,” “discursive thought,” and “discrimination.” Related terms, such as kalpanā (conceptualization/mental construction) and kalpanāpoḍha (devoid of conceptualization/mental construction), have also been rendered in various ways. Besides the question of how to translate these terms in any given Buddhist philosophical text, how should we relate them to current philosophical or cognitive scientific uses of the term “concept”? More generally, given that the relationship between the conceptual and the nonconceptual has been one of the central and recurring issues for the Buddhist philosophical tradition altogether, can Buddhist philosophy bring fresh insights to our contemporary debates about whether experience has nonconceptual content? And can contemporary philosophy and cognitive science help to illuminate or even resolve some older Buddhist philosophical controversies? (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:HumAnimality:The Silence of the AnimalDavid WoodDrawing Especially on Derrida and Agamben while looking over her shoulder at Foucault, Kalpana Seshadri’s central claim is that silence is not merely inscribed in discourse or in political life as the absence or negation of power, but can also be a site for transformation and resistance (Seshadri 2012). Derrida’s deconstruction weans us from any desire for a pure presence, whether in speech (...) or in silence, and draws us into the essential exteriorization he calls writing, which as gramme, trace, and program, opens onto the history and future of technology, and thereafter, the operations of power, in particular biopower, in the articulation of which Agamben in a way synthesizes Derrida and Foucault.Seshadri takes seriously the analogy between race discrimination and the human oppression of the animal. And yet the analogy is incomplete. Racial discrimination can be detected within unproblematically humanistic discourse and often in established legal concepts and frameworks, whereas speciesism needs to be more creative. Outcries over expressions such as “animal holocaust” show just how charged such analogical claims can be, and bring to the surface the complexities of their inscription in our political life and discourse.Seshadri focuses particularly on the paradoxes of autoimmunity (with Derrida) and sovereignty (with Agamben), the points at which the logics of life, power, and language break down, a process that can license both the reduction and curtailing of life (in slavery, in political oppression, and in factory farming), but which also allows for a different response. She writes of [End Page 193] “the possibilities that arise within regimes of domination to effectively annul, neutralize, or escape power in the very moment of its exercise” (Seshadri 2012, 19).Heidegger distinguishes between two reading strategies available to us when dealing with great thinkers, but which in effect are generalizable to anyone worth reading—first, frontal critique, going counter to the other, as he puts it, and second, going to their encounter (Heidegger 1976, 77). He adds that to take the latter path, one has to bring one’s own fundamental questions to the table. This may seem somewhat portentous, and it may seem too that one is merely using the other’s writing as a vehicle for exercising one’s own obsessions, but he is surely right. One’s own deep questions are never wholly personal, and there is no substitute for engagement with what is finally at stake.This is all to justify the line of response I am taking here. As I see it, Seshadri’s articulation of the “humAnimal” largely works on our conceptual protection and demarcation of the privilege of a certain concept of the human and the human subject, which, in the case of sovereignty, has a range of consequences that include but are far from limited to race and animal relations, and may even be distinctively applicable, as Spinoza or Deleuze might say, to what we imagine our bodies to be capable of. In this latter case what is being marked is not the plight of the animal but the impact of a certain discipline of life on the ways in which we live our own bodies. I am thinking in particular of that part of chapter 7, “HumAnimal Acts,” that deals with Philippe Petit’s high wire activity, in his particular his “agility” and, in a beautiful phrase, “exuberant body.”To be clear, this account is tied to Agamben’s rethinking of potentiality and Heidegger’s discussion of dynamis in Aristotle, each contributing to a renewed understanding of movement and life. For Seshadri, this also opens onto another kind of silence, an exuberant ethics, a politics of gesture, of “pure means,” creativity, the good life, the happy body, and so on. In the fascinating chapters 5 and 6 on the “Wild Child,” the upshot is a certain discombobulation, making the Human/Animal distinction tremble, as Derrida would say, arguably helping us live our humanity less dogmatically as well as helping us toward a more complex understanding of the various species of silence. But in each of these cases it could be said that while the shape and tenor of human animation is tweaked, critiqued, and deepened... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Border CrossingEllen T. ArmourAs a philosophical theologian deeply formed by a long apprenticeship in continental philosophy, I find more points of entry into Kalpana Seshadri's HumAnimal: Race, Law, Language than I can possibly pass through in the space available to me here. Inevitably, whichever point of entry I take will violate what I take to be a core responsibility of a respondent: to hew closely to the text (...) in question, to trace in one's own words its outline in order to open it up to those who have not had the privilege to devote time and attention (those most valuable of assets for academics, it seems) to the project in question. Such a model of a responsible response itself bespeaks the central problematic of the project: the relationship between speech and silence, language and law, ethics and politics.And so I begin with a de-cision that is, simultaneously, an in-cision; I enter this text through this opening, not that, and in doing so, I relegate to a spectral silence of not-saying what other (in/de)cisions would bring to speech and/or to the invisibility of not-writing what other (in/de)cisions would render legible. In the spirit of a Derridean supplément, I hope to productively open and extend for you, if not precisely retrace, Seshadri's project.HumAnimal: Race, Law, Language (Seshadri 2012) is a brave book in many respects, but particularly in its attempt not just to delineate but to map out certain contested yet liminal spaces. In addition to those I've already mentioned, [End Page 175] let me add those between literature and philosophy, theology and philosophy, work and play, Agamben and Derrida, deconstruction and biopolitics, human and animal. (Any one of these alone would have been plenty for one book.) I take my mark from the site where these last two (or perhaps three) liminal spaces meet. First, allow me to indulge in a bit of intellectual autobiography: I began my career as a Derridean (and may yet end it that way … that remains to be seen), but have in the last few years, taken a decidedly more Foucauldian turn. Reading HumAnimal made me keenly aware of how profound a reorientation I have undergone in the process. And yet I entered into that process of reorientation (perhaps quite naively) sensing that, for all that separated Derrida from Foucault, deconstruction from biopolitics, they were not unconnected (please note the double negative). Thus, I found myself in deep sympathy with Seshadri's project in many ways. Whatever separates projects that foreground the machinations of power (as constitutive of knowledge, and vice versa) as object of analysis and those that foreground language (as constitutive of knowledge, and vice versa) as object of analysis,1 Seshadri's detailed readings suggest they share important points of overlap (which is not to say sameness). To a degree, then, HumAnimal undoes the very delineation between these kinds of projects that I just articulated. To be sure, Seshadri is aided a great deal in this by the fact that Agamben's own work invokes (though not uncritically) both Derridean and Foucauldian antecedents framed largely though not exclusively in and through the relationship between sovereignty and (bare) life.The book's title, HumAnimal: Race, Law, Language, names both the stakes of and framework for Seshadri's incision into this shared but contested space. Her neologism humAnimal marks a boundary integral to sovereignty's exercise, that between human and animal. The subtitle marks the forces at play in sovereignty's construction and its deployment. Race has often figured as the border demarcating those served by the law and those served up by it; those granted access to language and those denied it. Consignment to the nether side of law and language entails as well consignment to the nether side of the human/animal divide. The American practice of chattel slavery serves as one constitutive exemplar of a biopolitical and legal/linguistic regime in HumAnimal, as it will in my comments. But Seshadri seeks out the possibilities for resistance from this nether side; of possibilities opened up by and in silence, the suspension of law, and even... (shrink)

Relation between language and extra-linguistic reality is an important problem of Bhartṛhari’s linguistic philosophy. In the ‘Vākyapadīya,’ this problem is discussed several times, but in accordance with the general perspectivist trend of Bhartṛhari’s philosophy each time it is framed through different concepts and different solutions are provided. In this essay, an attempt is undertaken to summarize the variety of different and mutually exclusive views on language and extra-linguistic reality in VP and to formulate the hidden presuppositions on which the actual (...) viewpoints expressed in the kārikās are based. As a result, the following approaches are formulated: Language is coextensive with external reality. Language, designated as kalpanā/vikalpa, is distinct from reality. Language refers to the secondary/metaphorical reality. Language and reality somehow correlate, because otherwise, practical/linguistic activity would be impossible. The origin of these approaches and their affinities with different schools of Indian philosophy are examined. Approach, according to which correlation between language and reality is functional and not ontological, seems very close to Dharmakīrti’s concept of arthakriyā. This approach accords with Bhartṛhari’s perspectivist philosophical strategy. It enabled him to explain how effective linguistic activity is possible, capturing language in its dynamic aspect, without limitative static ontological constructions. (shrink)

Buddhist logicians have rejected the reality of universals on the one hand, and, on the other hand, given a substitute in the form of the doctrine of Apoha. The doctrine of apoha first appears in Dinnaga’s Pramanasamuccaya, according to which words and concepts are negative by their very nature. They proceed on thebasis of negation. They express their own meaning only by repudiating their opposite meaning. The Buddhist logicians talk of two types of knowledge, viz., pratyaksa, which is non- relational (...) and anumana, which is relational. They accept nirvikalpaka pratyaksa as a pure pratyaksa, and savikalpaka pratyaksa has been merged with anumana by them. According to them, cognition is either a direct awareness of an object, which is independent of any mentalconstructionor it is an awareness of an object which is a mentalconstruction. Further, according to the Buddhist logicians inferences are of two kinds, viz., svarthanumana and pararthanumana. But they do not accept pararthanumana as a source of knowledge. Now, since perception is devoid of kalpana, perceptual knowledge is essentially non-linguistic and does not involve any general concept or universal. Thus,Apoha has no role to play in perceptual knowledge. On the other hand, savikalpaka pratyaksa and anumana are based on kalpana, thus according to the Buddhist logicians knowledge of universal is essential for both, savikalpaka pratyaksa and anumana. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Secret Name, or the Secret of a NameAlison SuenIn HumAnimal: Race, Law, Language, Kalpana Seshadri carefully examines the secret of silence, the nonsovereign power of silence. She wants to conceive of silence as neither repressive nor transcendent; that is, on the one hand, she wants to resist the temptation to restore silence to speech, but on the other she also wants to resist the temptation to posit silence (...) in opposition to speech, as something above and beyond language. Rather, she wants to think of silence as "an empty space where the regulatory power of discourse is nullified" (Seshadri 2012, 35).Seshadri powerfully illustrates silence as an "empty space" that invalidates the power of speech through her provocative reading of Charles Chesnutt's story "Dumb Witness." In this story, about a mute slave who holds a secret, silence becomes a most unexpected secret weapon. The slave is mute because her master's nephew has brutally cut off her tongue. The irony of this story is that the nephew realized, only after cutting off her tongue, that the slave is the only person entrusted with the secret of the will—the will that the nephew needs in order to claim his right to his uncle's property, which would include the slave woman. As the story goes, the slave woman refuses to disclose the secret until after the nephew is dead. Her refusal is made possible by the wound of her tongue, by the brutal punishment inflicted by the nephew. As Seshadri points out, the secret of the slave woman's silence exceeds her knowledge of the will. This is the case because the slave woman's silence is not a simple silence, but rather "a capability of silence, which manifests as a withholding" (Seshadri 2012, 107). Indeed, it is through her silence that the law is rendered unenforceable. It is through her silence that the nephew failed to properly own her. [End Page 182]In Seshadri's reading, the silence of the slave woman is not a deprivation of speech, but rather a capability to withhold, a silent treatment designed to punish. I am fascinated by this notion of silence as an active resistance—a subversive power that confounds the law. Nonetheless, what is the political efficacy of this silence? Specifically, what can we do with this nonsovereign power, a power that seems contingent and conditional? After all, even if the slave woman was able to use her silence to outsmart her (would-be) master, at the end of the day she is still missing her tongue, and her nonsovereign "power" over the nephew may simply be a consolation prize.I am equally fascinated by the idea that silence is a "capability." Recasting silence as a kind of "capability" is noteworthy in light of contemporary debates on animal ethics, which often revolve around the kind of capacities that animals have. As is well known, Peter Singer, following Bentham, makes the capacity to suffer the ticket to the moral community, while for Tom Regan, one needs the capacity to experience life in order to become a moral patient. In other words, recasting silence as a capability actually conforms to, rather than challenges, a typical strategy in animal rights discourses.What is at stake in this story is also the power of the secret. In her chapter on literature and the secret, Seshadri articulates different ways the secret manifests itself in literature. She writes, "literature is allied to the secret because it emerges from what is suspended (for example, meaning, truth, the word, a determinate context) and therefore can only be read and interpreted as a sign" (Seshadri 2012, 46–47). Literature always harbors secrecies because its interpretation is never exhaustive. In this sense, language itself is also secretive because meaning is necessarily excessive of the sign. In a paradoxical way, every time we speak, we are necessarily withholding.I will say more about secrets and silence as a mode of resistance in the context of animal advocacy at the end of my commentary. For now, I want to turn to Seshadri's excellent discussion on "naming" and hospitality. Specifically, I want to connect it to questions of secrecy and resistance... (shrink)