Research interests…
“People do not riot every day, but they have rioted often enough in the past, especially since the onset of modernity. People continue to riot with alarming regularity in the present, especially in the so-called Global South, as the saga of modernity continues to unfold now in its global phase. This repeated and continued reliance on rioting as a distinctive, but historically and culturally variable, mode of collective action (if not agency) merits greater attention than it has hitherto received.”
— Dilip Gaonkar in “After the Fictions: Notes Towards a Phenomenology of the Multitude.”
Dilip Gaonkar explores the resurgence of populism across the globe in the twenty-first century, starting with a definition and then covering a wide range of political and ideological positions, from progressive to conservative. His talk is particularly relevant today, since Brexit and the election of Donald Trump demonstrated that even the most steadfast democracies are not immune to the lures of populist movements.
“Rhetoric cannot escape itself. Rhetoric cannot escape its "mereness," or to use the fashionable vocabulary of our time (here I am alluding to Derridean deconstruction), it cannot escape its status as a "supplement." Yet this simple fact that there is no exit for rhetoric, nor an exit from rhetoric, escapes many friends of rhetoric.”
— Dilip Gaonkar in “Rhetoric and Its Double: Reflections on the Rhetorical Turn in the Human Sciences”
Democratic Theory and Practice
“The idea that democracies have good days and bad days, or more accurately, good decades and bad decades, is not new. This is true of all democracies, ancient and modern alike. Their rises and falls, their comings and goings, and their eruptions and suspensions have been variously theorized and historicized. Democracy often emerges unexpectedly amidst hierarchically structured authoritarian political and cultural formations. While the coming of democracy is invariably deemed “untimely” by its detractors, the manifestations of its historically and culturally variable shape and substance in a given arrangement of institutions and through a repertoire of forms and practices, surprises even its champions.”
— Dilip Gaonkar in “Making Demos Safe for Democracy”
