CONSTELLATIONS TO THE SOUTH

A remarkable feature of “the neodemocratic condition” is its glorification — even reverence — of what Aishwary calls “fascist competence."

Right — the question of our rights — is at the heart of what it means to be human. But the question of rights is also implicated in the catastrophic experience of dispossession and statelessness that are central to the modern political condition.

Long before the child perceives the difference of his black body, and even longer before he understands it, Baldwin writes, he has begun to react to it, he has begun to be controlled by it.

It is in the courage to break the rule and not in the complicity of obedience that democracy lives.

It is important that there be a line

Before we deem the colonized to be violent, wrote Frantz Fanon, let us ask if they can breathe.

The thinker whose voice Barack Obama found his own closest to.

The neodemocratic condition is not only partisanship. It is the weaponization of infrastructure.

"It is not that human rights are not part of a truly formidable legal innovation. It is just that human rights take as their subject a disembodied, distant figure with no protections other than that guaranteed by the state that has already abandoned them," says Aishwary.

The only thing that keeps us human is the company of other human beings.

Property and propriety. Body and sex. Snobbery and civility. Inequality and violence. There is a name we give, sometimes without being fully aware of its depth and its reach, to this nexus: caste.

India is, perhaps, the exemplary site of the human struggle with political freedom.