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10 - Islands of Sorrow, Ships of Despair: Nativism Resurgent and Spectacles of Terror

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 April 2023

Anindya Sekhar Purakayastha
Affiliation:
Kazi Nazrul University, West Bengal
Saswat Samay Das
Affiliation:
Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur
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Summary

What follows are four meditations in honour of the thought of Gilles Deleuze. Less a description from afar of the intellectual and political rupture in the order of everything that was the sure and certain mark of Deleuze’s lasting contribution, but something else, a form of writing that is at once faithful to thinking power in terms of the language of descent promulgated by Deleuze and, at the same time, reflecting on the question of contemporary terror as the limit experience in this time after Deleuze. Here, the bodies of abuse that are the subject of Islands of Sorrow, Ships of Despair; the bodies tortured with all the signs of vengeful cruelty that inhabit the dreams of Caliphate; the bodies of broken dreams struggling on the streets of all the Maidans of the contemporary world; and the psychically possessed bodies of Trump’s American ‘Id slipping its chain’ – all these are applications, in fact as well as in theory, of Deleuze’s primary political insight, namely that the spirit of the fascist within has now broken out of the cage of individual solitude, becoming the emblematic geist of the twenty-first century. More than most, to honour the thought of Gilles Deleuze, to really assent to Foucault’s understanding of Deleuze as the primary thinker of the current century, is to write the world anew in the spirit of Deleuze, to tell the stories attendant upon a time in which capitalism with its tangible hint of a resurgent death drive, governments gone pitiless in the their cold yet hostile indifference to asylum seekers and refugees, medieval dreams of religious fundamentalism with all their bodily terror, and the madhouse of nihilism are the centres of power. Deleuze would understand this. Telling the story of the fascist within as the essence of the language of terror, power and bodily dispossession by a form of writing that crystallises the world of terror through the optics of event-scenes, those psychically burned moments in the movement of political time, here the memory that is Gilles Deleuze precedes us, as it always has, by taking up residence deep down in the logic of all things in this unfolding century of Deleuze and terror. These are meditations, then, of a Deleuze who is in our future, not in the past.

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Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
Print publication year: 2022

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