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Gandhi
and Chauri-Chaura
A
Lacanian Reinterpretation of Gandhi Through the Chauri-Chaura Riot
By
Nishant Batsha
Columbia
University
On
February 4th, 1922 the peasant
population within the small town of Chauri Chaura, India engaged in a
protest that would eventually culminate in the burning of a police
station and the brutal murder of the 22 police officers inside the
building. Up until this event, Mahatma Gandhi and the Indian National
Congress had spearheaded a campaign for non-violent non-cooperation
that had gained enough momentum to exist as a legitimate threat
against British colonial rule. Immediately following the riot, Gandhi
denounced the actions as a crime, and by February 12th, the Indian
National Congress had halted non-cooperation on the national level. I
seek to reanalyze the “riot” that occurred at Chauri Chaura by
using a Lacanian framework. I argue that interpreting the events of
Chauri Chaura in reference to the Symbolic and Imaginary orders
provides a better understanding of the peasant behavior in the
historical moment. Gandhi is recast from a Hegelian World-Historical
figure into a nationalist leader who gained power through the
nationalist peasantry. The riot becomes not a paroxysm of violence,
as nationalist elites would want one to believe, but a natural and
planned result of politics reformulated within the peasant imaginary.
I propose a subaltern reinterpretation wherein nationalism is no
longer predicated upon the World-Historical, but rather as a function
of a tension between the leader and those “from below.”
.pdf
Schizophrenizing Lacan
Deleuze,
[Guattari], and Anti-Oedipus
By
Luke Caldwell
University
of Washington, Seattle
In
1972, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s
Anti-Oedipus
unleashed an extended polemical attack
on the foundations of Marxist and psychoanalytic orthodoxy. While the
primary target of the book was Sigmund Freud, the innovative theories
of Jacques Lacan did not emerge unscathed. Because of the brevity of
their critique, many have interpreted Deleuze and Guattari’s
relationship to Lacan as one of antagonism and rejection. This,
however, obscures many important connections that they maintained with
Lacan. Deleuze and Guattari insisted that they were actually extending
Lacan’s theories to their necessary conclusions. Through an analysis of
Anti-Oedipus in relation to core Lacanian theories, I investigate how
Deleuze and Guattari transform Lacan, both faithfully and unfaithfully,
to give support to their utopian project.
.pdf
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