Abstract:

Southern theory, as I understand it, is a task of anti-historical thinking. While it is made possible by historical critique, decolonial and postcolonial (without which there is no emancipation from the prison of the present), it inevitably shades off into a moment of creative play with time and chronology, bringing together pasts and possibilities in diverse counter-intuitive reassemblages, against the grain and push of historical logic.

This presentation is a modest effort in that direction. Here I discuss diverse mythologies and philosophies of time in south Asia, moving across disciplinary boundaries between the ancient, the medieval and the modern. I argue that it is not only in modernity that time becomes a political concept, under the sign of progressivism and historicism. Time was a political concept in non-modern contexts as well, which anti-colonial thinkers redeployed in the 19^th and 20^th centuries against the temporal politics of modernity.

And yet in these earlier traditions, time also came across as the limit of the political, because it forced the political subject, be it king or rebel or renouncer, to ask existential, spiritual and indeed cosmological questions of the human condition. Thinking temporally, I thus propose, opens up the concept of the political to indeterminacy, as we are forced to consider the human and the non-human, the intimate and the public, the spiritual and the worldly as part of a single and shared problematic of change.

The online lecture will take place on December 10^th at 17:00 CET via WebEx. For more information and registration click here.