– I still say to myself when I am depressed and find myself forced to listen to pompous and tiresome people “Well, I have done one thing you could never have done, and that is to have collaborated with Littlewood and Ramanujan on something like equal terms.”-
Hardy seemed to have been a humble man, as demonstrated above, when compared to the stature he enjoyed during his lifetime and in the after world as a mathematician. Now, compare this to the boast about philosophical companionships!
This, I hope, will be my small contribution to the politics of quotations!

This is what I wrote in the essay above:

“I hope my learned friend would understand that simply because his ideas have been discussed within an essay on Badiou does not necessarily mean that he has been placed in the company of Badiou.”.

I think it should be more than clear that Colin Wright has NOT said a word about Badiou while discussing Dayan’s ideas. Dayan seems to think that simply because thinkers like Agamben and Badiou are listed as references alongside his name, that means he has been placed in the company of all of them.

Going by the same logic, what if one were to check, to take one out of many examples, Zizek’s list of index references under the letter ‘H’ in his book “Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism”? Here is the list:

Hegel, Heidegger, Himmler (Heinrich), Hitchcock, Hitler (Adolf), Horkheimer, Hume

So Adolf Hitler has been placed by Zizek as a thinker on par with David Hume, Hegel and Heidegger?

I hope Dayan would realize that he can’t hide behind quotations and big names – one day he will have to explain how HE agrees or disagrees with Agamben.

I hope, above all, Dayan would stop make us all laugh!

I am not sure Goonetilleke, Seneviratne et al disagree with the majoritarian, triumphalist strains of your position .. they just disagree with DJ the realist – i.e. now that Sri Lanka has ‘won’ it can do what it pleases – where as DJ espouses some minimalist measures (no further than 13A) to placate India and thus keep the International Community at bay. The positions are not really that far apart.

“As Jayatilleka (2007) has argued, the vast majority of theoretical work on the ethics of political violence is on the side of just war theory, and thus on the side of established states: it is therefore incompatible with the Marxist tradition which would aim violence against the State. Moreover, all of it is further tainted both by its religious origins in the thought of Saints Augustine, Ambrose and Aquinas, and by the resurrection of these origins in the current ‘war on terror’ as a renewed doctrine of bellum justum. But the radical tradition cannot be shamed by its own bloody Jacobin history into thinking that, simply because just war theory cannot offer it an ethics of violence of its own, it must settle instead for a caricatured Gandhianism, in which unbending pacifism
somehow transforms the world through sheer moral superiority.” (p 26)

(The following footnote accompanies the paragraph: “Jayatilleka’s claim is that Fidel Castro invented a form of just war theory appropriate to guerrilla war, and that this Marxist ethics of the correct use of violence is what has allowed the Cuban revolution to survive while others imploded under the effects of internecine violence.”)

The complete set of References that accompanies Wright’s essay lists the following authors in alphabetical order: Agamben, Badiou, Balibar, Fanon, Fentham, Gandhi, Godard, Hallward, Jayatilleka, Lenin,
May, Sartre, Weber, Wright, Zizek.

Colin Wright’s publications include ‘Badiou in Jamaica: a Philosophy of Conflict’. He is lecturer in Critical Theory at the Department of Cultural Studies at the University of Nottingham and his general areas of research interest as listed in the note that accompanies the essay are French Critical Theory, Psychoanalysis and Political and Postcolonial Theory.

I too am extremely disappointed with the way this exchange ended – but such is the nature of public debate.

You are also correct about the ordinary use of the term ‘Event’, and in that respect it is certainly not
inaccurate to identify the end of the war as an event. My concern, however, was in calling it a ‘neo-BADIOUIAN-event’, which gives it a completely different and much more technical meaning.

I also agree that my focus was Dayan’s interpretation of Badiou and few other thinkers, and not so much his political positions as such. I usually try to avoid in engaging in debates about political analyses unless they have some practico-political implication. I am not denying the significance of those analyses, for I too have benefitted from them in broadening my understandings. But it is, in my opinion, futile to quarrel over these analyses, for they are always based on a combination of hypotheses, assumptions and aspirations which can never be verified. This is why, incidentally, Badiou does not use the phrase ‘political philosophy’ and prefers the word ‘metapolitics’, modeled on the Freudian word ‘metapsychology’, since ‘political philosophy’ implies that there is a superior position to the philosopher, who stands above the practical unfolding of politics but has access to the underlying truth of the latter. We all know that in politics, there is no such superior position, and that is why the question of the ‘organization’ – how to organize the youth, what is the structure of the organization, and so
on – is at the heart of the matter. To be frank, these are the questions that I am much more interested in and they require an entirely different order of work and thought, than those of the political critic.

However, I entirely disagree with you on one point. It is one of my strongest convictions that ‘abstract
philosophy’ and our ‘concrete social situations’ are much closer than they appear to be. Let me, very briefly, give you one example. Lot of people may find it surprising and shocking that Nalin de Silva has written one of the best defenses of the Tamil’s right to self-determination, in early 19800s. How did
such a remarkable turn of events happen? In late 1970s Nalin encounters an important branch of philosophy of science in the Analytic tradition, especially the works of Kuhn, Popper and, Paul Feyerabend. With their critique of the notion of scientific method and scientific rationality, Nalin came to question the ‘scientific’ status of Marxism, and eventually led to his resignation from Nawa Sama Samaja Party. Gradually his critique grew into include the very notion of scientific objectivity and culminated in his cult work ‘Mage Lokaya’ published in mid 1980s, where he denies the existence of an objective reality. Rejecting all claims for universality and truth as ultimately ‘Western’ influences he pursued an authentic form national thought, in tune with what he called the ‘chinthanaya’ of the Sinhalese. Embracing his ethnic identity as the only ‘realistic’ horizon of meaning, he was soon to become an ardent supporter of the Sinhala Buddhist nationalism and its historical destiny, leading him to
launch a long-lasting critique of the Tamil’s right to self-determination, which he himself had defended, a decade ago. If one looks at his book on Tamil nationalist struggle, available in English as “An Introduction to Tamil Racism in Sri Lanka”, one would see how this seemingly ‘abstract’ philosophical issues concerning the existence of an objective reality led to highly ‘concrete’ political conclusions regarding the interpretation of history and nature of political emancipations. And if one considers the fact that he has been a direct mentor for figures like Champika Ranawaka, Nishantha Sri Warnasinghe and Ven. Athuraliye Rathana, and an indirect ideologue to people like Wimal Weerawansa it is easy to understand the complexity of the situation.

These often neglected complexities are what led contemporary French philosopher Quentin Meillassoux to conclude that post-Kantian philosophy in general, with its relinquishment of the idea of the absolute reality and handing over its sole interpretation to the ethno-religious fundamentalist, has to take
responsibility for the worldwide rise in fundamentalism. In this regard, I think the significance of these questions are much more serious that they initially appear to be, and I hope ‘Groundviews’ would continue to give space for discussions, not only on ‘political’ philosophers like Agamben, Badiou and
Zizek, but also on ‘speculative’ philosophers like Meillassoux, Graham Harman, Tristan Garcia. For, far from being something that should NOT be discussed in a website dedicated to ‘journalism for citizens’, I think they are more and more becoming the most pressing problems of our era. In that sense at least, our era is closer to that of Greece, where philosophy first began – Socrates who was put
on trial before the citizens of Athens, was eventually condemned for the crime of corrupting the minds of the youth in city. Time has come again to ‘corrupt the minds’ of the youth in our cities!

Just on the point of a dedicated platform, while technically a cinch to design, create and launch, content is key and curation vital. The first requires the likes of you, DJ, Vangeesa, Kalana and others to contribute and engage regularly. The second ideally requires domain specific expertise to understand the finer points and nuances of all the debates, as well as someone web and new media savvy. My hunch is that you can find someone with one of those skills, but not both? It is however a really interesting idea, and open to helping out the establishment of the platform in any way we can – a sort of Sri Lankan variant of Harper’s Ars Philosopha blog.

Hear hear !!!!

More than anything, his recent responses on this matter have helped many of us, too, to draw that line of demarcation: between those one should debate, and those one should not. Sadly.

As for his alleged Sinhala nationalist credentials; well, those who have not read him properly and seriously in recent times (i.e. MS, SG, CR or WW, and many others) would be surprised, certainly.