Symposium: Philosophical Midwifery

Table of Contents:

1. Introduction
   Deepti Sachdev, Latika Vashist
2. On the Age of Hope and Fear: Affective Becoming through Politics in Practice
   Imran AminThe unconscious becomes as an opportunity for subversion amidst incomplete and discontinuous subjectivity, as ‘subject of abject’ embraces ambivalent, unresolved, and dangerous to set future of the world into a hopeful and productive uncertainty.
3. Eka Nari Sanghathan: A Journey Towards Affective Becoming
   Bhavya ChitranshiIn the dominant discourse, a woman is regarded single not because she does not have family, friends and acquaintances, but because she does not have a husband. Women who are widowed, divorced, separated, deserted, and never-married are commonly regarded as single. This ‘absence of a husband’ in a woman’s life begins to shape the nature of her other social relationships and as a result she is single(d), thereby, marking husband’s absence as a primary attribute dictating and determining her gendered identity and existence.
4. Caste Away: Recalcitrant Affects and Social Reproduction
   Deepti SachdevWhen she observed who was friends with whom, an old familiar sadness would return. All friendships around her seemed to be along the lines of caste proximity. True friendship, she said, is knowing someone’s dirt intimately and not feeling disgust.
5. Arriving at Hurt: The Political, The Legal and The Archival
   Sayori GhoshalWhereas, in the powerful hurt could immediately turn into anger and rage and demand retributive action, in the powerless hurt does not necessarily turn into or demand action but continues to be felt and experienced as a condition of existence, that might even no longer be recognizable as hurt per se.
6. Total Control: Nussbaum’s Normative Account of Anger
   Latika VashistWhat is concealed and encrypted in the destructiveness of anger is an important question to ask. Martha Nussbaum’s response to this question is, however, too simplistic and premised on a linear account of the psyche.
7. Of Closures and Beginnings: A Phenomenological Study of Familial Relationships
   Ekta OzaBeing invisibilized existentially is more painful than being hated. While hatred involves intense emotions, invisibilizing the other is devoid of emotionality. This hatred is essential for forming an identity.
8. “Too Late Have I Loved You”: On The Powerlessness of Augustine’s Confession
   Soumick DeIt is this idea of belated love which declares the impossibility of all love to come, while carrying with it the trace of this impossibility. The ‘eventness’ of confession is to capture this moment of divine love which befalls one as grace.
9. “Beauty Shines Through… As Existence In The Street”: Philosophy And Walking
   Soumyabrata ChoudhuryThe pure walk cannot be distinguished from the great cosmic street insofar they are difficult exercises in making the illegitimate and beautiful utterance, “I walk myself”, instead of assuming the free teleology of saying, “I take a walk.” From this purely functional point of view then, walking is a figure of auto-affectivity and the street a localisation of some threshold.
10. The woman who thought her husband was a ghost
    Lakshmi Arya Thathachar