Unconditional equality : Gandhi's religion of resistance

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Bibliographic Information

Unconditional equality : Gandhi's religion of resistance

Ajay Skaria

(A cultural critique book / Cesare Casarino, John Mowitt, and Simona Sawhney, editors)

University of Minnesota Press, c2016

  • : hardback
  • : pbk

Available at  / 3 libraries

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Includes bibliographical references and index

Description and Table of Contents

Description

Unconditional Equality examines Mahatma Gandhi's critique of liberal ideas of freedom and equality and his own practice of a freedom and equality organized around religion. It reconceives satyagraha (passive resistance) as a politics that strives for the absolute equality of all beings. Liberal traditions usually affirm an abstract equality centered on some form of autonomy, the Kantian term for the everyday sovereignty that rational beings exercise by granting themselves universal law. But for Gandhi, such equality is an "equality of sword"-profoundly violent not only because it excludes those presumed to lack reason (such as animals or the colonized) but also because those included lose the power to love (which requires the surrender of autonomy or, more broadly, sovereignty). Gandhi professes instead a politics organized around dharma, or religion. For him, there can be "no politics without religion." This religion involves self-surrender, a freely offered surrender of autonomy and everyday sovereignty. For Gandhi, the "religion that stays in all religions" is satyagraha-the agraha (insistence) on or of satya (being or truth). Ajay Skaria argues that, conceptually, satyagraha insists on equality without exception of all humans, animals, and things. This cannot be understood in terms of sovereignty: it must be an equality of the minor.

Table of Contents

Contents Preface Introduction: Surrender without Subordination Part I: Before Satyagraha 1. Stumbling on Theological Secularism 2. Between Two and Three 3. The Warrior's Sovereign Gift Part II: The Aneconomies of Satyagraha 4. The Impossible Gift of Fearlessness, for Example 5. The Destruction of Conservatism 6. Daya Otherwise 7. The Sacrifice of the Gita 8. Ciphering the Satyagrahi 9. The Extreme Limit of Forgiveness Afterword: The Miracle of the Gift Acknowledgments Notes Index

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