Divya Dwivedi | |
---|---|
Alma mater | Lady Shri Ram College (BA) St. Stephen's College, Delhi (MA) Delhi University (M.Phil) IIT Delhi (PhD) |
Notable work | Gandhi and Philosophy: On Theological Anti-politics |
Era | Contemporary philosophy |
School | Deconstruction |
Institutions | Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi Delhi University St. Stephen's College, Delhi |
Thesis | Investigation into Time and Language: Towards the Ontology of the Literary |
Main interests | Deconstruction, []Ontology]], Philosophy of literature, aesthetics, philosophy of psychoanalysis, narratology, critical philosophy of caste and race, political thought of Gandhi |
Divya Dwivedi is an Indian philosopher[1] and author. She is an associate professor at the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi. Her work includes a focus on philosophy of literature, aesthetics, philosophy of psychoanalysis, narratology, critical philosophy of caste and race, and the political thought of Gandhi.[2] She is the co-author of Gandhi and Philosophy: On Theological Anti-politics.
Dwivedi is originally from Allahabad. Her mother is Sunitha Dwivedi and her father, Rakesh Dwivedi, practices as a senior lawyer for the Supreme Court of India.[3] Dwivedi’s paternal grandfather, S. N. Dwivedi was a judge at the Supreme Court of India, and her maternal grandfather Raj Mangal Pande was a minister in the union government of India.[4]
She received her Bachelor of Arts degree from Lady Shri Ram College, Delhi and her Master's degree from St. Stephen's College.[2] She pursued her M.Phil from University of Delhi and received her doctorate from Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi.[2]
Divya Dwivedi has taught as an assistant professor at St. Stephen's College, Delhi, and has been adjunct faculty in the English Department at Delhi University.[2] She is an associate professor at Department of Humanities & Social Sciences, IIT Delhi.[2][5] She teaches advanced topics in Literature and Philosophy, like the Functions of Satire, Art and Technology, Romanticism, Narratology etc. She was a visiting scholar at Centre for Fictionality Studies, Aarhus University in 2013 and 2014.[2]
Dwivedi also contributed and published several research works, mainly in the field of the philosophy of literature, the philosophy of psychoanalysis, narratives, the philosophy of criticism, political philosophy, aesthetics, and critical studies on caste and race.[2]
Dwivedi's political writings have been critical of caste oppression,[6] religious discrimination, racism, and Hindu nationalism.[7][8]
She is the editor and co-founder of the international multilingual journal Philosophy World Democracy with Zeynep Direk, Achille Mbembe, Jean-Luc Nancy, Shaj Mohan, and Mireille Delmas-Marty.[1]
The journal Episteme, produced by Rutgers University, published a special issue on the work of Dwivedi and Shaj Mohan in 2021,[9] including articles by Robert Bernasconi[10] and Marguerite La Caze.[11]
She is a member of the Theory Committee of the International Comparative Literature Association along with Robert J. C. Young, Stefan Willer and others.[12] Dwivedi is a member of the International Network of Women Philosophers.[13] Dwivedi was elected as a member of the executive council of International Society for the Study of Narrative (ISSN) in 2022.[14]
Dwivedi's philosophical standpoint departs from the school of deconstruction and it was described as deconstructive materialism.[15][16] Her philosophical research projects developed in a "community of friendship with Jean-Luc Nancy, Bernard Stiegler, Achille Mbembe, and Barbara Cassin".[17] She publishes in the areas of ontology,[4] narratology,[18] metaphysics, linguistics,[19] and deconstruction.[20]
Dwivedi’s work on Psychoanalysis is focused on the theory of drives in Sigmund Freud. Jean-Luc Nancy said that her work on Freud is "very enlightening" and she has "tied up a very important link between the texts of Freud", thereby showing the connections between Freud’s theory of drives, mass psychology and politics.[21]
Dwivedi said that philosophy is a disruptive practice following from the Socratic model.[22] Following from it there is "a necessary relation between philosophy and politics". She is opposed to treating philosophical traditions as adjectives of philosophical practice.[23]
In an introduction to the December 2017 Women Philosphers' Journal guest-edited by Dwivedi, Barbara Cassin wrote Dwivedi "is a philosopher" whose refusal to make "the post-colonial the first and the last word undoubtedly allows us to clarify with greater precision what is happening to women, philosophers and intellectuals in India today".[24]
In an interview with Mediapart Dwivedi said that postcolonial theory and Hindu nationalism are two versions of the same theory, and that they are both upper caste political projects.[25] Dwivedi noted that in the field of feminism postcolonial theory remains an upper caste theoretical standpoint which has been preventing lower caste feminists from opening their own currents in the context of the Me too movement.[26] Dwivedi wrote in her editorial introduction to the UNESCO journal La Revue des Femmes-Philosophes that postcolonial theory is continuous with Hindu nationalism.[27]
Together, postcolonialism and subaltern theory have established the paradigm of research in humanities and social sciences—in India and abroad—over the past four decades. "Eurocentrism", "historicisation", and "postcolonialism" are also the operative terms through which the Hindu nationalist discourse conserves the caste order.
In 2018, Dwivedi co-authored Gandhi and Philosophy: On Theological Anti-politics with the philosopher Shaj Mohan. The book examines different aspects of Mahatma Gandhi's thought from a new philosophical system.[28] Jean-Luc Nancy wrote the foreword to Gandhi and Philosophy and said that it gives a new orientation to philosophy which is neither metaphysics nor hypophysics.[29]
The book proposes that in addition to the metaphysical tendency in philosophy there is a 'hypophysical tendency'; hypophysics is defined as "a conception of nature as value". As per hypophysics the distance from nature that human beings and natural objects come to have through the effects of technology lessens their value, or brings them closer to evil.[30] Gandhi's concept of passive force or nonviolence is an implication of his hypophysical commitment to nature.[31] Dwivedi made a separation between metaphysics and hypophysics in her Royal Institute of Philosophy lecture, "While both seek to diagnose the 'west', each opens on to distinct futures: metaphysics to an "other thinking" than philosophy, hypophysics to the other of thinking itself".[32]
Gandhi and Philosophy identifies racism with caste practices and ascribes a form of racism to Gandhi.[15] Dwivedi has said Gandhi "invented a new basis for racism, which is based on moral superiority".[33] In a review of the book in The Indian Express, Aakash Joshi says of the authors, "Perhaps it is because they are not tied to Gandhi’s political project - secularism of a particular kind, freedom from colonial concepts, caste without violence - that they are capable of addressing the more uncomfortable aspects of his life and politics."[33]
The Book Review said that the philosophical project of Gandhi and Philosophy is to create new evaluative categories, "the authors, in engaging with Gandhi's thought, create their categories, at once descriptive and evaluative" while pointing to the difficulty given by the rigour of a "seminal if difficult read for those with an appetite for philosophy".[34] Robert Bernasconi writes, "It is a challenging book to read. Familiar words that you think you understand the meaning of are used incongruously and only as you read through the book and come across occurrence after occurrence of these words do you get a new understanding of what that word might now mean. Similarly, they adopt words that seem to be new words, that are certainly new to me, and then slowly as one reads the book one comes to recognise what one can do with language."[10] According to J. Reghu in a review for The Wire, the book "often reads like a thriller, but at times it demands careful attention, which is not surprising since it is an original work in philosophy already recognised by some of the important contemporary philosophers such as Nancy, Stiegler and Bernasconi."[35]
In a review for The Hindu, Tridip Suhrud describes the book as "subversive but deeply affectionate" and writes that the authors, "through their doubt affirm Gandhi as a serious philosopher for our times and beyond."[36] In a review for the The Indian Express, Raj Ayyar stated, "Mohan and Dwivedi have done a masterful job of avoiding the binary fork — hagiography or vituperation — as much of Gandhi and hagiography comes from a need to spiritualise Gandhi".[15]
In addition to her authored and edited books, Dwivedi has written and co-written essays and articles, as well as spoken publicly about her scholarship.
In 2019, she co-authored an article with Shaj Mohan titled "Courage to Begin" in The Indian Express.[4] The article was described by the journalist NK Raveendran as "shattering the established wisdoms about modern India."[4] According to Raveendran, the essay included Dwivedi and Mohan describing the Hindu religion as "the invention of the 20th century political climate" and as a means for the upper caste leaders to control people from lower castes.[4]
After the Indian Express article was published, Dwivedi participated in a 2019 debate on NDTV.[4][37] During the debate about Mahatma Gandhi and politics, she discussed the annihilation of caste, and in a video clip, Dwivedi was recorded making several statements, including "Hindu Right is the corollary of the idea that India is a Hindu majority population and this is a false majority. The Hindu religion was invented in the early 20th century in order to hide the fact that the lower caste people are the real majority of India...".[4][37][38] A clip of the video circulated widely, and Dwivedi became the target of death threats.[37] She also received criticism from academics and on social media,[39] including historian S. Irfan Habib and a spokesperson for Bharatiya Janata Yuva Morcha (BJYM) Chandigarh.[38] In a statement provided by Dwivedi to ThePrint, she referred to academic studies "on this much discussed matter," including by D. N. Jha, as well as by Vasudha Dalmia and Heinrich von Stietencron, and to her co-authored work "Courage to Begin" in The Indian Express Ghandi special issue as "a lengthier statement on these matters."[38]
In January 2021, Dwivedi co-authored an essay titled "The Hindu Hoax: How upper castes invented a Hindu majority" with Shaj Mohan and academician J Reghu in The Caravan after they conducted two years of research.[4] Dwivedi and her co-authors then received threats and harassment on social media, and in 2021, Jean-Luc Nancy wrote a defense of the authors and their article in the Libération.[37][4] Academics also signed a public statement of support for the authors.[37] Rajesh Selvaraj, a professor of Tamil literature, published a translated version of the essay as a book.[40]
In 2022, Dwivedi gave an interview to Asian Lite International that was described by Anthony Ballas in Protean Magazine as "visciously attacked by the right-wing."[37] A public statement defending Dwivedi and Mohan was signed by scholars, including Etienne Balibar, Slavoj Žižek, Barbara Cassin, Antonio Negri, and Stuart Kauffman.[37][41][42]
In September 2023, Dwivedi gave an interview to France 24, which led to further threats.[37] On September 13, 2023, Mathrubhumi reported comments made by Dwivedi in the interview were "misrepresented by a group of people in cyberspace who are accusing Divya of making disparaging comments against Hinduism and India," and death threats had been made against her.[43] According to Rajesh Selvaraj in an article published in The Mooknayak on October 23, 2023, "many friends and I watched in horror as her name began to trend in social media and threats being thrown like chaff and dust into the wind, while her words were being distorted and mutilated to mislead the people by the far right media."[40]
According to Meena Dhanda in a statement of support published in October 2023, Dwivedi "is threatening to her opponents within India because she is thinking against the grain, when others are falling in line."[37] Ajay S Sekher said in an October 2023 statement of support that her work "exposes and criticizes epistemologically the violence of the caste-ridden society" and its patriarchal system.[37]
Dwivedi has also expressed public support for individuals.[44][45] In January 2023, Mathrubhumi and other media outlets reported that Dwivedi "expressed her concerns over the ongoing protest against alleged caste discrimination at KR Narayanan National Institute of Visual Science and Arts (KRNNIVSA) in Kottayam".[46]