Silly Billimoria & his hilarious Hermeneutics

Is dialogue a good thing? Gadamer's hermeneutic shtick gained purchase in the Sixties coz, sure, dialogue sounds like a good thing- it's caring sharing and everybody holding hands and being deeply deeply empathetic and continually offering gratuitous rape counselling to each other. But, dialogue isn't actually a good thing. Talking to a shit-head is bad enough. Listening to him is worse. 'Limited arbitrage'- gossip- 'marking services'- is what makes Language useful. It gives you the option of saying- 'well, mustn't monopolize you. Gotta mingle. See you round shithead (unless I see you first).'

In contrast, dialogues- like the dialogues of Plato or the Upanishads or whatever- are a fucking shite-fest. Either it's all a straightforward con- a business of having a card forced on you- or it's a marriage- without the penny pinching and  nappy changing but your ass sure gets sore real fast all the same.

Still, there is something worse than dialogue and that is what Indian scholars in the Mehta, Matilal, Spivak, Billimoria tradition are guilty of. What is it? Essentially, it is shitting in everybody's shoe while pretending you were actually out burning buses or doing something else equally progressive.

This is Billimoria on the Brahman.

 'I wish to conclude this essay with a brief discussion of the possible areas of application of the creative hermeneutic of suspicion especially in the non-Western contexts. The examples I draw upon take in seriously both the hermeneutic of tradition and the critique of ideology, which becomes paradigmatic in post-colonial critiques of Western ethnocentrism and other (more indigenist) kinds of authoritarial elitism. To take up the latter first, one could argue that the impersonal, abstract, ahistorical, atemporal concept of 'Brahman' much dear to Vedanta philosophy is a 'dead' metaphor, in as much as it is grounded in eidos, logos , and ousia and therefore has its life or sustaining significance entirely within the discourse of metaphysics (as Heidegger would say of all grand metaphors of the subject). A culture or rather ideology of brahmanical hegemony and renunciative restrain bordering on the obsessive denial of the lived experience, was built or idealised on the basis of this dominant and powerful transcendental signifier. 

Its social praxis legitimated the rule of the priest, a strident and pervasive caste hierarchy, marginalisation of women, the under-class and foreigners as others. A wondrous evocation that may have arisen in the poetic musings of the Vedic (nomadic Aryan) bards, which in the altar of later Vedic sacrificial fire is transmuted into a substantive being (in the disguise of language), and which finally under the anvil of speculative philosophy ascends to assume the throne on highest rungs of metaphysics. Thus Brahman stands to be destructured, dismantled, disseminated (WTF?) , deconstructed by being subjected to the same rigours of the hermeneutic of suspicion and critical ideology as Ricoeur has suggested. It may then be possible to recover the latent and to reanimate the tradition in more creative ways than has occurred either through the revivalism of neo-Vedanta or the Romanticism of 19th century philological Indology. (Bilimoria, 1997a).

So, children, what have we learned today? The learned Professor has told us that 'the Brahman is a dead metaphor' and that it was used to shore up the power of priest-craft and to keep women and the underclass in their place. The same thing could be said about 'God', 'Allah', 'Tao', Justice, Beauty, Education, Wisdom, Democracy, Racial Purity, Communism, Capitalism, Biscuits, TV, Idli Sambar, Jennifer Aniston, Breakfast, Cars, Disco dancing, the Second Law of Thermodynamics and everything else in the Universe.
The fact is, what the Twentieth Century did was the reverse of Heidegger's 'Europeanization of the Earth'- Europe was shown up as a festering bog of deeply provincial pedants who wouldn't play nice till America and Russia divided up the continent between them and put those cunts back in their playpen.
True, some fucking assholes unfit for the Hard Sciences participated in a Credentializing Ponzi scheme under the rubric of 'Hermeneutics' or other such shite- not that J.L Mehta quite fits the bill, but then his people were illiterate dehatis so his getting the hots for Heidegger was like a return of the repressed dehati in him- the instinct to take a crap on the open highway, or Holwege, rather than use a flush loo- but, so what? Far larger numbers of people were travelling in the other direction to get their genitalia stroked by bogus Babas and pay handsomely for the privilege.
 'Limited arbitrage'- not 'grand narratives'- & 'bounded signalling'- not a totalizing hermeneutic- are the engine of Social change. Talk of 'intellectual genealogy' is foolish when considering convergent evolution. Indeed, when coupled with bogus breast beating of a emasculating Leftie sort, the whole exercise stinks to high Heaven.

 Prof. Billimoria says that a creative 'hermeneutic of suspicion' may help recover the latent and reanimate the (Advaitic) tradition in a different way. How? The baby was thrown out with the bathwater- what more harm is there left to do?

 The answer, of course, is that a proper Habermasian deconstruction of Ricoeur as self sodomization of the eye sockets of class enemies during an ongoing beheading with a sickle or hoe or other agricultural implement constitutes a creative re-reading of Vedas  just as fucked as stealing everything in sight, talking shite, and fondling the genitalia of all and sundry.

 However, Billimoria isn't sufficiently creative to see this. Instead he writes-  The last remark brings me the second example. The large body of texts produced and translated in Europe since around the 16th century on the cultures prevalent, literature, and peoples inhabiting the vast land mass to the east and south-east of Europe have nowadays been recognised to be suffused with "orientalism". This marks a peculiar hermeneutical act which the West ingressed upon the East. More specifically, the discourse of Orientalism underscores the wilful romantic construct of the East (the Orient or Asia) in the imagination of the West as Europe's "other", and destined to be converted, civilised and controlled by the burgeoning Western religious, economic and political might. But if we leave out any part, conscious or complicitous, involved in the formation of the text or the supplemental discourse we could be doing grave "epistemic violence" to the text. An incisive judgment along these lines has, for instance, been said of the 19th century British Raj's novel statutory judgment on sati, the Indian practice of widow burning, as constituting a legal "crime", which however failed to register the social motivations of the Hindu patriarchal order that perpetrated this culturally aberrant practice for so long. (Spivak). It is not as though such a censor was not possible within the Hindu and Pan-Indian tradition itself; indeed, there was evidence in traditional moral texts against such practices and indigenous leaders had rallied against the act on the grounds that sati violated women's rights: but is that tantamount to a criminal act under English Common Law? (see, Bilimoria, 1997b)
The story about Suttee was well understood by everybody except people like Billimoria. Essentially, wasteful status competition- burning widows rather than selling them to a brothel- was in danger of becoming normative so it was in everybody's interest to get the State to introduce a license system. This is Coasian Law & Econ 101. As for the English Common Law- it didn't ingress by a hermeneutic act but established itself by right of conquest.  To talk of epistemic violence is silly. Hitler did not do epistemic violence to the Torah- he killed Jews. The Colonial powers did not do epistemic violence to natives- they conquered them and then beat them or shot them if they got out of hand. No doubt they said unpleasant things as they were doing it but what was objectionable about this wasn't 'Orientalism' but the fact that they were beating and shooting people in a manner which turned their own Social rate of return on Capital negative.

By focussing on the discourse of Orientalism we understand better the Occidental-West, its logocentrism, and its failure to bring about genuine dialogue with the East and generate authentic methods for reading, translating and understanding the "other". The same can be said about the early British settlers judgment that the colonies of terra australis were not inhabited by any people (thus rendered as terra nullius) because the nomadic native Aborigines appeared not to have cultivated the land or invested any labour in it or asserted an instrumental interest in it. It took a Ernie Mabo to challenge this "interpretation" of another tradition in place. This massive legal and political prejudice, in the Gadamarian sense, is finally turned back on the incoming tradition for its own self-reflection, and to demonstrate that it misjudged "interest" in individualistic-utilitarian rather than in communicative-communitarian terms; and it perhaps paves the way for corrective reparation or "Reconciliation" of First and Second-Third Nations' respective claims.

 Once again, it is Coasian Law & Econ which explains why and how property rights get redistributed- nowt to do with some fuckwit Professors getting all dialogic up each others' assholes.
Third World studies and feminist movements more widely have capitalised on such insights and trans-boundary critiques, which was given a heavy political emphasis by Foucault's theorising premised on the generalisation that all knowledge is inextricably linked with power (and power is invariably corrupting). They have advocated, and developed methods for a re-reading and "de-construction" therefore of much of the past history and "civilising" or literary productions, translatory enactments, etc. resulting from the basically liberal-individualistic, imperial and patriarchy-propelled intrusions into the lives of women, slaves, marginalised groups, the "other", the outcastes, and the colonised subjects, both within the history of Western-European societies but more damagingly in various countries throughout the world. History might be more authentic and closer to the truth were its voices to emerge, as it were, "from below" rather than from the pens of the privileged, the elite, the experts, and bow-tied academic researchers who have a vested interest (unwittingly perhaps) in perpetuating certain myths — "paradigm" — of the dominant cultural force in a society or tradition at large. The requisite hermeneutics for (re-)writing history from below has been technically popularised by South Asian radical social theorists as the "Subaltern" stance or voices of the submerged subject-positions.

Last but not least, cross-cultural philosophers of religion have claimed that the Western invention of the sub-discipline or discourse of philosophy of religion with its expectations of a solid, irrefutable and logically profound "proof" (or, for that matter, "disproof") of the existence of God has triggered much unnecessary anguish, mimicery, and irreparable damage among non-Western, non-Christian peoples. (Bilimoria 1996b) When directed at the "other" this trenchant discourse has in part also helped erode local traditions, folk understandings, indigenous hermeneutics, law and social wisdom developed over many centuries in non-Western religious cultures by which they have sustained themselves. Such and more sophisticated critical analyses have arisen in recent years from movements in philosophy and the human sciences, particularly from Europe and now increasingly influential in North America, India, and Australasia.
Eddie (not Ernie) Mabo was an Australian man whose deep study of Heidegger, Gadamer, Habermas et al led him to challenge the notion that native owned land was a 'terra nullius'. Thanks to great European scholars- who had already taken similar measures with respect to their own disenfranchised peoples- Australian law was changed so as to give the natives back their land. 
Actually, that's not what happened at all. The Europeans never did do anything for their own disenfranchised though once they had the shite beaten out of them they did pay some small reparation to Israel. Eddie Mabo was a gardener who got talking to some lawyers who brought a test case under Australian Common Law and that's how native land rights were vindicated. No fucking European cunts were involved at any stage. Not philosophers but lawyers and the Common Law tradition triumphed.
 Similarly in India, the Subaltern Studies gobshites & Post Colonial cunt-queefers achieved absolutely nothing. Lawyers and Accountants and Economists and good old fashioned parish pump politics, on the other hand, aren't all bollocks.

  So what is the moral of this story, children? Hermeneutics is shite . Books may or may not be shite in themselves but Hermeneutics is a turd which gets its grubby prints over all it reads. 
  Hermeneutics may claim that books are all a bunch of stupid lies and only exist to fuck over poor people but that's only because Professors have to continue to write books, and since dark skinned Professors wot are crap at thinking got to whine about how being black is so-ooo horrible, this is the sort of shite they are gonna write.

  Oddly enough this message is perfectly in conformity with Advaita. The Vyadha Gita teaches us that women and low castes should constantly tell high caste male Pundits to go fuck themselves because they are all a bunch of worthless cunts. Yet the Vyadha Gita was revealed to a King- that too one who was the incarnation of Dharma. The corollary is not far to seek. Fuck the Professors. 
  Mind it kindly.

Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation & the Black Republican

I'm not a Black Republican but, like many constipated colored people, I have recently taken to reading Hans Hermann Hoppe in the toilet.
Homosexuals and blacks and drug addicts all have high 'time preference' which is why they are shiftless beggars, slavery being too good for them. Clearly what Lincoln actually signed was an 'E-nancification' Proclamation intended to turn slaves in the Southern States into Nancy boys.  Yet Mit Romney still hasn't endorsed the full-scale restoration of Slavery in the Continental United States so as to curb the rising tide of Sodomy amongst our rank and file. This more than anything else shows his contempt for issues of concern to Black people.

Secular Equality is best secured by Learned Failure

What is Equality? Is it a state such that some market operation exists such that agents are left indifferent between their own endowment/preference set and that of other agents? If Preferences are at least partly determined by Society, clearly this definition fails because then Equality, as a Policy Objective, would be best pursued by tampering with Preferences- i.e. reconciling people to their lot. This cashes out as amor fati and Religion has already shown it is unbeatable at that gig.

 To avoid this, one might postulate some other set of Preferences that people 'ought to have' based on their meta-preferences and work backwards from there. This fails immediately because you'd have to know the whole future fitness landscape- i.e. you'd have to have access to the sort of computing power which, if it exists, would make Evolution redundant. But this would mean that your solution would be apophatic- something outside language- because collocational Language use is clearly an Evolutionary process of some sort. So this cashes out as some apophatic Tetragramaton or Mathesis Universalis and once again Religion does that shite best.

  Another approach, that of the Economist, would be to look at equality from the incentive/mechanism design p.o.v. This is just pi-jaw tarted up with some Statistical guesswork still it's good enough for the Great and the Good. Is it good enough for the rest of us? Inequality could give rise to two different Social effects
1) Tardeian 'imitation' or Girardian 'mimetic desire' whereby the agent having less of some good adopts the mores or modus operandi of the better off while from time to time requiring the sacrifice of some scapegoat to preserve Social Cohesion and prevent an envy based uprising. The problem with looking at the World like this is that you soon feel an overwhelming sense of disgust- the game is not worth the candle- and so we're back to Religion by way of Stoic dysphoria.
2) Learned Failure- agents adopt an Information assimilation model such that any new inequality gradient they notice convinces them that this is yet another chute they're going to slide down and this expectation is self-fulfilling. Actually, for me personally, this is the, Rational Choice, best in class, Solution and I'd download an app for it except I never got round to upgrading to a smartphone coz. like telephoning is so difficult? and how they have all these little buttons and I'd just probably lose it anyway or else the tough kids will take it off me along with my lunch money even though I'm 50 years old and don't actually go to the local Primary School

  Learned Failure isn't Religion but it's the best defense against it. It's also good at reducing inequality coz it encourages fucking up and goofing off- both of which disproportionately affect the yield upon the Wealth gap to the better off- i.e. their Matthew effect Rent Take an example. If low paid people think they just can't do stuff better off people do then they won't imitate them or else they will fuck up when delegated work by them. This means the return on Income disparity to the Rich turns low or negative.

  Clearly Learned Failure is what Secular Society has to push to survive. This is the true meaning of Enlightenment as Education.

Hobsbawm dies- our disputation thrives.

   The Fourth Century Buddhist Logician, Priyankachopra, once observed that no truly worthwhile debate ever really ends- it is merely interrupted. Such were my own feelings when I heard of the untimely death of the great English Marxist- Eric Hobsbawm.
  My doctrinal disputation with him dates back to 1971- the year of the Srikakulam massacre- when I pointed out to Eric that not sodomizing the eye-sockets of Class Enemies before decapitating them was nothing but sloppy Left Adventurism with Trotyskyite characteristics and not, as Hobsbawm, perhaps somewhat tactlessly, averred a Right deviationist Popular Frontism of the Harry Pollit type congenial to the undeniable Bukharinist strain in the Vadadesi Vadamarxist Vulgate
   On that occasion, I regret to say, I threw Eric across the room and vowed never to play with him again. Mummy said 'without a Teddy Bear you have no chance of making it at Oxford.  Chellame, take Hobsbawm back to your bosom- otherwise we will have to send you to the L.S.E and the starving masses of Srikakulam will have to wait another generation to gain the sort of constructive leadership that will enable them to revenge themselves upon their tormentors.'
   I sternly refused and though I did drink up all my Ovaltine, after Mummy removed the skin, I never again engaged in debate with my dear old teddy, Eric Hobsbawm, with the result that I had to slum it at the LSE while all the other great liberators of the Proletariat were swanning around Oxford, hugging their battered old Hobsbawms, quaffing Chateau Petrus and drunkenly getting gay with each other.
   Still, as news reaches me of a new generation of Anti Imperialist activists procuring fatwas condoning sodomy for the devout purpose of enlarging their own rectums to permit the insertion of a larger payload of explosives- I turn back to reading Hobsbawm's obituary and realize, with misted eyes, that our debate is still very much alive, indeed, it is the epitome of all meaningful Left-wing debate- and thus, though our paths parted in an act of violence- one supervenient Death forbids me undo- yet, it is but the body that dies, the debate survives.

Is this homophobic?

In Brompton cemetery the crickets sing

& Gravestones shudder as Gays do their thing

Autumn as close as to Tashbih Thought

God alone stays His Wrath

Prashant Keshavmurthy & the Gadamerian Gestapo

N.B- this post has been revised on the basis of a negative comment.

Sanskrit poetry came into existence, so the story goes, when the Sage Valmiki witnessed the slaying of one of a pair of love birds amorously conjoined and spontaneously uttered a metrical couplet (shloka) in expression of his woe (shoka). The Grammarians maintain that this couplet is also an epitome of the Ramayana and, as such, could be said to call the events of that Epic into Being. Similarly, there is an Islamic tradition that when God asked 'am I not your Lord?', Adam and the sons of Adam replied 'Bala' which means both 'Yea!' and 'Woe' which is why Existence is full of sorrow.

Abu Mansur Maturidi, a tenth Century Turkish theologian, familiar with the doctrines of the Brahmins, passed on a story to the effect that Adam's grief at, his son, Abel's slaying- which apparently took place in India- first unsealed the fountainhead of Arabic poetry. A couple of centuries later, Awfi, perhaps the first literary theorist of Persian poetry, though residing in what is now Pakistan, mentions this legend and Dr. Prashant Keshavmurthy of McGill University has drawn our attention to it in a very well written essay-

Click here for the rest of Dr. Keshavmurthy's essay.
One passage I would like to highlight is that in which Awfi interrogates the nightingale & the rose-

   The problem here is that it is a fact of nature, not convention, that the mystic rose, so worthy of the rhapsodies of that winged and pious preacher, the nightingale must, in bloom of riper day, tear its skirts and not from wantoness for though that masculine music has stopped the ballet has still not reached its denouement.

The rose's full blossoming falls in a season when the nightingale- which was believed to be a purely male species- has fallen silent. This conforms to that silence beyond the music of the spheres where the mystic rose unfolds itself to itself.
The Iranian Encyclopedia has this to say-  It is only during the mating season that male bolbols sing; then they become silent, though roses may continue to bloom for some time, which provides an answer to a question posed by Ḥāfeẓ (p. 160): “O Ḥāfeẓ, who can be told about this strange circumstance that we are bolbols silent at the time of roses?” Bolbols are “physically and behaviori­ally very unobtrusive birds, thus often going unnoticed; their presence is betrayed only by their singing”; furthermore, the male and female are alike (Hüe and Étchécopar, loc. cit.). These features seem to have led Persian poets and others to consider bolbols a species without females, so that the males direct their sexual desires toward roses. Persian mystical lore thus has developed around the gol o bolbol “rose and nightin­gale” motif, comparable to thešamʿ o parvāna “candle and moth” theme. The bolbol as bīdel (a disheartened lover), ʿāšeq-e zār (a miserable lover), šeydā (maddened by love), and the like was supposed neither to sleep nor to eat. In one metaphor the bird has “in his beak a rose petal of a lovely color;” Ḥāfeẓ, p. 290); sometimes, however, he is mast“drunk” (cf. ʿAṭṭār, p. 42, “the bolbol entered [the birds’ assembly] mast-e mast(com­pletely inebriated),” not with wine but with love of the gol. In fact, according to ornithologists, bolbols do feed on insects, worms, and berries; white-eared bulbuls also eat dates, causing serious damage to the crop in southern Iran (Hüe and Étchécopar, loc. cit.). Their supposed “drunkenness” can be explained by their amatory behavior during the mating season (note that mast also means “rutting” in modern Persian).
Dr.Keshavmurthy suggests that Awfi is grounding 'an account of the psychological origin of poetic fiction' in the trope of 'hairat' (astonishment, amazement, being arrested) as arising from a simulated naivety.

Yet, this is far from naive and is actually quite witty and satirical. The mystic rose is doomed to  wither in the vase of literature except of course it is not longer that which it signifies. The 'diegetic world of the ghazal' simply does not have the property of being outside Time or free of Autumn's blighting touch or disconnected from the rhythms of the natural world or 'its burgeoning polysemy which human senses can't cope with'. The reverse is the case.
Keshavmurty thinks Awfi is 'performing or siting the psychological origin of poetry in a failed mimesis of Nature's cycle of season'. But this is patently absurd! It is the Persian carpet, not the Persian poem, whose 'diegetic universe' is outside Time and the change in the Seasons. Time is the ineluctably modality of the audible as Space is of the visible. To confuse a ghazal for a kilm is as serious an error as taking the marble of Praxiteles for the methexis of Plato

My own feeling is that the material he so ably presents is best, that is most economically, approached from the, for poetry, eternally poignant, Rose & Nightingale, tashbih/tanzih antinomy rather than the chrematistic productivity of Gadamerian 'temporal distance' as a Credentializing availability cascade in which actual living traditions are the one thing not used for 'filling in the yawning abyss' between the text and ourselves because no such gulf exists- it is a modish mise en abyme merely, unless Hermeneutics really is Hell, nor we out of it.
Indeed, what can we say about our learned hermeneut's tashbih to the texts he permits us to cherish when what comes to pass thereby is not an epistemic break- all such rupture being our rasika rapture- but an impassable tanzih with respect to himself? How else are we to read in Maturidi's knowledge of Brahmanism or speculate, in the mirroir sans tain of Keshavmurthy's text, on the similarity of Maturidi's origin story for Arab metrical verse and that of its Sanskrit counterpart which, of course, Keshavmurthy must have imbibed with his mother's milk?
Instead what we get is all the obligatory, apple polishing, linguistically tortuous and literally meaningless, genuflections to gadarening Gadamer and other such swine-  even Judith Butler gets a Hosanna!- while no attempt is made to address the blindingly obvious question that has popped into the reader's mind viz. how come this Hindu guy reading Awfi doesn't think- 'well, Valmiki's couplet is also supposed to be a sort of prophesy- it encodes the whole Ramayana- so that has bearing on the question of whether prophets are prohibited poetry, indeed this fact might have been quoted, sub rosa, to support an esoteric hermeneutic, such that a passionate or figurative tashbih type utterance itself has alethic or even self-punitive force resolving the Nightingale & the Rose tashbih/tanzih antinomy re. univocity- such as is suggested by the Adamic  'bala!'- or else pointing to its bracketing in a barzakh of the Ibn Arabi type, and all this can happen within orthodox Hanafi tradition- which is all like way cool!- so lets see if Mutaridi's kitab al Tawhid itself can be mined for anything suggestive in this context coz that's the guy famous for knowing from Brahmanism'.
  In other words, why isn't Keshavmurthy doing a, Leo Strauss, 'persecution and the art of writing' kinda Catskill shtick instead of touching base with the gormless vacuity of goddam Gadamer?
  I dunno. I'll ask him. But he's scarcely likely to confess that people with PhD's gotta watch out for the Gadamerian Gestapo otherwise they get rounded up and cattle trucked to gas chambers. You remember the Bhopal disaster? It was a cover up. Fact is the victims weren't slum dwellers at all but actually posh JNU trained Professors who forgot to quote Gadamer every second sentence.
For which I personally blame David Cameron. That boy aint right.

Spivak's 'aesthetic education' as inducing Schizophrenia

Why is this fucked?

Globalisation can only happen with Capital & Data?- I see, so Gayatri Spivak is not a human being. She is a function of Capital & Data. She didn't parley a Calcutta education into a Columbia Professorship. All that really happened was a transaction involving Capital- the loan she took to go do Post Grad studies in the States- everything else is just data.
Gayatri is wrong. There is no 'Globalisation' without people- metics- moving from one place to another. Data & Capital can't do shit. An Indian Chemist working in the States in the 1930's gets a better offer from the Soviet Union. He goes there. He doesn't transfer 'Data & Capital', he fucking goes there and unlike 'Chatto'  wasn't killed but thrived and got married to a local lady and had real cute kids and was still alive when my Dad first went to Moscow.
It's a great pity that 'unanalysed projects'- like your or my life project- come into existence simply because 'the information is there'- i.e. there is a market and 'limited arbitrage' (Chichilinsky) opportunities- i.e. Life Chances- increase. But, that's just wrong coz it's like crowd sourcing as opposed to 'real' Democracy like they got in Korea- not Gangnam style Korea but the other truly Democratic Republic North of the 38th parallel.
  Why would anybody want to 'learn the double bind'- i.e fuck up kids big time- and why is a fucking Prof. at Columbia saying this is a good thing? Is Spivak fucking mental? No. She is lying. What she does next is contradict everything she said in her opening coz she's writing for A.D.D fuckwits and they won't notice.
 This is the true Globalisation- not shite about Capital and Data- but lying and cheating- i.e. the Evolutionarily Stable reason for the persistence of the Kantian aesthetic- i.e. the sublimation, by way of Gesture Politics, of a conjectural 'moral sublime'- and Gayatri is still getting away with it. Which is cool coz its opportunistic i.e. Human.
I recall a conversation with my sister back in 1977. Dad had just been posted to London and wanted my sister to switch from St.Stephens to a Brit University on the grounds that her subject- Eng Lit- was probably better covered by people who actually spoke that revolting language coz they liked it or actually knew it as opposed to just teaching it to earn a fucking living.
Sister- we can't go to London. They hate us darkies there. Paki bashing is all the rage. I read about it in the International Herald Tribune.
Me- yes, but the Brits are stupid. When they say 'die Paki scum' we can just look over our shoulder and say 'Pakis? How dreadful. Oh, I see what you mean. Chase that damn coolie down that fog filled side street why don't you my good man, or men, or whatever. Tally Ho.'
Sister- I don't think that would work.
Me- Why not?
Sister- well, you see, Globalisation is about Capital & Data. St. Stephens, Delhi, is a lot better than that Black Hole in Calcutta that fucking worthless cunt Gayatri Spivak crawled out of. She has been plagiarizing my old lecture notes from like when I was in Nursery School all these years. All her fucking royalties should belong to me only. Mind it kindly. Aiyayo.
Me- Yes. What you say is irrefragabily veracious from a post-Kristevan perspective as well as in accordance with Spiderman Comics special issue No.1442. But the true fault lies with David Cameron. That boy aint right. Mind it kindly. Aiyayo.