Leela Gandhi's "Affective Communities" (Book Note)

 

Gandhi's aims are dual , one historical and the other philosophical and political, The historical aspect seeks to revive the ideas of largely forgotten anti-colonial figures from late Victorian and early twentieth-century Britain. These individuals, including Edward Carpenter and C. F. Andrews, rejected imperialism and identified with victims of their country's expansionist ventures. Bhattacharya emphasizes their bold model of social justice and political action, expressed through the theme of friendship. The writings and cultural initiatives of these figures, such as vegetarian restaurants and socialist fellowships, created a space that welcomed Indian nationalists in Britain and influenced their ideas.

 

The author contends that this 'utopian' vision represented the culmination of late Victorian radicalism, marked by a rejection of individualism and possessive nationalism. Despite criticism from figures like Friedrich Engels and Sigmund Freud, Bhattacharya aims to elevate these ideas, considering them valuable in the present day.

 

Gandhi's second aim is to transform these historical ideas into philosophical gold applicable to today's conflict-ridden, post-colonial world. The ethics underpinning the 'affective communities' she explores provide an alternative to traditional forms of cultural nationalism. They present two prevailing modes of anti-imperial resistance: 'traditional but repetitive forms of cultural nationalism' and the 'quite different ethics of hybridity or contrapuntality.' In contrast, the ethics of friendship offer an improvisatory, inclusive means of 'co-belonging' with Others, including humans and animals, who retain their distinctiveness. At the core of this ethic is a profound commitment to identify and forge solidarities with marginalized groups, extending to women, spiritualists, homosexuals, and peoples of empire.

Gandhi embarks on the task of uncovering "minor narratives of cross-cultural collaboration between oppressors and oppressed," aiming to reveal a history of anti-colonialism often overlooked due to its origins in the metropolitan center. She explores how imperatives of empire were refused and alliances formed across the East-West binary. By examining a diverse group of figures, including Oscar Wilde, Oxford undergraduate Manmohan Ghose, Mirra Alfassa, and Sri Aurobindo, Gandhi elucidates historical congruities, affective bonds, and marginalization that enabled collaboration against empire.

 

In addition to highlighting these minor historical agents, Gandhi adeptly navigates numerous controversies and unresolved debates in postcolonial studies, philosophy, and critical theory. Delving into the legacies of Kant, Hegel, Marx, Foucault, and Derrida, she seamlessly intertwines theoretical exegesis and historical anecdotes to illuminate their mutual insights regarding liberatory politics. A central aim of Gandhi's project is to underscore the potential for resistance within the empire and across its territories, emphasizing contemporary urgency by linking nineteenth-century empire to current global power structures.

 

Gandhi also seeks to rescue fin-de-siècle utopian socialism, along with its connections to anticolonial thought, from historical neglect. Dismissed as "immature" by critics like Max Nordau, Engels, Lenin, and Orwell, she argues that this immaturity renders utopianism politically potent. Utopian thought, characterized by an embrace of impossibility and a refusal of the given, serves as a crucial antidote to the constraints and exclusions of "governmentality," as articulated by Foucault and Agamben.

 

To narrate the nature of fin-de-siècle utopianism and crosscultural exchange, Gandhi organizes her book around the convergence of friendships and various movements and identities. Each chapter focuses on aspects such as homosexual exceptionalism, animal welfare movements, mysticism, radicalism, and late-Victorian aestheticism, demonstrating how outsider collectivities facilitated anti-colonial thought and fostered affective bonds across diverse subject positions.

The chapter titled "Meat" stands out as one of the most enlightening and captivating studies in Gandhi's work. Drawing on Donna Haraway's "Cyborg Manifesto," Gandhi argues that ethically informed reassessments of human-animal sociality offer rich anticolonial possibilities. She explores the connections between British vegetarian and animal welfare movements and M. K. Gandhi's revolutionary ideals of ahimsa (non-violent passive resistance) and swaraj (self-rule). The chapter seamlessly weaves together narratives of Gandhi's studies in London, his engagement in vegetarian circles, and a history of Victorian animal welfare ideology. It reveals how early animal rights rhetoric, influenced by philosophers like Jeremy Bentham and J. S. Mill, aligned with the colonial imperatives of utilitarian philosophy. Dissidents at the fin-de-siècle strategically linked animal welfare to socialist and anticolonial aims, creating a platform for an enlightened model of anarchic, disobedient, and nongovernmental sociality. Gandhi contends that these radicals on the margins of late Victorian culture significantly contributed to the mature Gandhian politics that saw the partition of India as the vivisection of the continent.

 

Another noteworthy section focuses on spiritualism, offering a novel perspective on contemporary debates about the role of religion in modern political life. Gandhi identifies Immanuel Kant as the origin of a modern secular ethics that denies the moral subject access to external influences, human, physical, and divine. She argues for the ethical value of "the mongrelization of subjectivity" present in some forms of religion. Gandhi positions the openness to otherness evident in fin-de-siècle mystics' rhetoric and practices as a salutary reminder of religion's utopian potential. The connecting thread in each chapter is the willingness to risk exile or self-exile for transformative encounters with the other. The section on spiritualism, while disappointingly thin in historical details, showcases Gandhi's virtuosic interdisciplinarity. The chapter skillfully connects narratives to a rigorous critique of Kant, William James's pragmatist philosophy, the Oxbridge Society for Psychical Research, and Edward Carpenter's complex politics.

 

Despite a tendency for a balance between theory and history to favor the former, Gandhi's ability to closely intermesh them contributes to the productive indistinguishability of theory and history in her work.