Divya Dwivedi

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Divya Dwivedi
Dwivedi speaking at the India International Centre, New Delhi
Alma mater	Lady Shri Ram College (BA) St. Stephen's College, Delhi (MA) Delhi University (M.Phil) IIT Delhi (PhD)
Notable work	Gandhi and Philosophy: On Theological Anti-politics
Era	Contemporary philosophy
School	Deconstruction
Institutions	Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi Delhi University St. Stephen's College, Delhi
Main interests	Philosophy of literature, aesthetics, philosophy of psychoanalysis, narratology, critical philosophy of caste and race, political thought of Gandhi

Divya Dwivedi is an Indian philosopher^[1] and author. She is an associate professor at the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi. Her work includes a focus on philosophy of literature, aesthetics, philosophy of psychoanalysis, narratology, critical philosophy of caste and race, and the political thought of Gandhi.^[2] She is the co-author of Gandhi and Philosophy: On Theological Anti-politics.

Early life and education[edit]

Dwivedi is originally from Allahabad.^[3][4] Her mother is Sunitha Dwivedi and her father, Rakesh Dwivedi, practices as a senior lawyer for the Supreme Court of India.^[3][4] Dwivedi's paternal grandfather, S. N. Dwivedi was a judge at the Supreme Court of India, and her maternal grandfather Raj Mangal Pande was a minister in the union government of India.^[5]

She received her Bachelor of Arts degree from Lady Shri Ram College, Delhi and her Master's degree from St. Stephen's College.^[2] She pursued her M.Phil from University of Delhi and received her doctorate from Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi.^[2] The works of Jean-Luc Nancy were an influence during her university education.^[6]

Career[edit]

Dwivedi has taught as an assistant professor at St. Stephen's College, Delhi, and has been adjunct faculty in the English Department at Delhi University and is an associate professor at Department of Humanities & Social Sciences, IIT Delhi.^[2] She teaches in the areas of philosophy and literature.^[2] She was a visiting scholar at Centre for Fictionality Studies, Aarhus University in 2013 and 2014.^[2]

The journal Episteme, produced by Rutgers University, published a special issue on the work of Dwivedi and Shaj Mohan in 2021,^[7] including articles by Robert Bernasconi^[8] and Marguerite La Caze.^[9]

She is a member of the Theory Committee of the International Comparative Literature Association along with Robert J. C. Young, Stefan Willer and others.^[10] Dwivedi is a member of the International Network of Women Philosophers.^[11] Dwivedi was elected as a member of the executive council of International Society for the Study of Narrative (ISSN) in 2022.^[12]

Philosophical works and views[edit]

Dwivedi works in the field of the philosophy of literature, the philosophy of psychoanalysis, narratives, the philosophy of criticism, political philosophy, aesthetics, and critical studies on caste and race.^[2] Her philosophical work has been described as deconstruction and continental philosophy^[4] as well as deconstructive materialism.^[13] Her philosophical research projects include a focus on narratology,^[13] and her school of thought has been described by scholars such as Étienne Balibar, Slavoj Žižek, Georges Didi-Huberman and Barbara Cassin as developing "within a community of friendship with Jean-Luc Nancy, Bernard Stiegler, Achille Mbembe, and Barbara Cassin."^[14]

In an introduction to the December 2017 Women Philosphers' Journal guest-edited by Dwivedi, Barbara Cassin wrote Dwivedi belonging to the Brahmin caste "makes her therefore “untouchable”, in a totally different sense than the dalits, the “untouchables”. Untouchable in a very relative sense, for even in the higher castes the woman intellectual is not worth the man intellectual. She is a philosopher and a literary scholar, English is her mother tongue as much as Hindi, and she found herself compelled to reflect on what postcolonial is, what it serves in the subcontinent, and what it is in the name of."^[15]

Gandhi and Philosophy: On Theological Anti-politics[edit]

In 2018, Dwivedi co-authored Gandhi and Philosophy: On Theological Anti-politics with the philosopher Shaj Mohan. The book examines different aspects of Mahatma Gandhi's thought from a new philosophical system.^[16] Jean-Luc Nancy wrote the foreword to Gandhi and Philosophy and said that it gives a new orientation to philosophy which is neither metaphysics nor hypophysics.^[17]

The Book Review said that the philosophical project of Gandhi and Philosophy is to create new evaluative categories, "the authors, in engaging with Gandhi's thought, create their categories, at once descriptive and evaluative" while pointing to the difficulty given by the rigour of a "seminal if difficult read for those with an appetite for philosophy".^[18] Robert Bernasconi writes, "It is a challenging book to read. Familiar words that you think you understand the meaning of are used incongruously and only as you read through the book and come across occurrence after occurrence of these words do you get a new understanding of what that word might now mean. Similarly, they adopt words that seem to be new words, that are certainly new to me, and then slowly as one reads the book one comes to recognise what one can do with language."^[8] According to J. Reghu in a review for The Wire, the book "often reads like a thriller, but at times it demands careful attention, which is not surprising since it is an original work in philosophy already recognised by some of the important contemporary philosophers such as Nancy, Stiegler and Bernasconi."^[19]

In a review for The Hindu, Tridip Suhrud describes the book as "subversive but deeply affectionate" and writes that the authors, "through their doubt affirm Gandhi as a serious philosopher for our times and beyond."^[20] In a review for The Indian Express, Raj Ayyar stated, "Mohan and Dwivedi have done a masterful job of avoiding the binary fork — hagiography or vituperation — as much of Gandhi and hagiography comes from a need to spiritualise Gandhi".^{[21][verification needed]} Cynthia Chandran, writing for the Deccan Chronicle noted that the "book reveals a materialist, internationalist Gandhiji who develops the ultimate revolutionary political program".^[22]

Public commentary[edit]

In addition to her authored and edited books, Dwivedi has written and co-written essays and articles, as well as spoken publicly about her scholarship.

In 2019, Dwivedi participated in a debate on NDTV about Mahatma Gandhi and politics;^[5] discussing caste, she described how — in her opinion — in the early 20th century, upper-caste Hindu leaders invented an all-encompassing Hinduism to obfuscate the numerical preponderance of lower caste people in India and construct a false majority.^[23][24] A clip of the video circulated widely, and Dwivedi received threats from the Hindu right.^[23] Krithika Varagur, writing for the Los Angeles Review of Books, noted her ideas to be inimical to the essence of Hindu nationalism which posited Hinduism as an eternal and perfect religion, beyond the constraints of history.^[4]

In January 2021, Dwivedi co-authored an essay titled "The Hindu Hoax: How upper castes invented a Hindu majority" with Shaj Mohan and academician J Reghu in The Caravan.^[5] Dwivedi and her co-authors were subject to fresh threats and harassment on social media; Jean-Luc Nancy wrote a defense of the authors and their article in the Libération,^[5] and numerous academics signed a public statement of support for the authors.^[23] Rajesh Selvaraj, a professor of Tamil literature, published a translated version of the essay as a book.^[25]

Since then, Dwivedi has been consistently targeted by the Hindu Right for her interviews.^[14][23] Other academics and writers have expressed their routine solidarities.^[23][26]

Selected works[edit]

Books[edit]

• Indian Philosophy, Indian Revolution: On Caste and Politics, Dwivedi, Divya; Mohan, Shaj; edited and annotated by Montévil, Maël, Hurst Publishers, UK, 2024.^{[27] [28]}
• Mohan, Shaj; Dwivedi, Divya (2018). Gandhi and Philosophy: On Theological Anti-politics. Bloomsbury Academic. ISBN 9781474221733.
• Dwivedi, Divya; V, Sanil, eds. (2015). The Public Sphere From Outside the West. Bloomsbury Academic. ISBN 9781472571922.
• Dwivedi, Divya; Skov Nielsen, Henrik; Walsh, Richard, eds. (2018). Narratology and ideology: negotiating context, form, and theory in postcolonial narratives. Columbus: Ohio State University Press. ISBN 9780814213698.^[29]
• Dwivedi, Divya, ed. (2022). Virality of Evil: Philosophy in the Time of a Pandemic. Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. ISBN 9781538164709.

Articles, essays, and interviews[edit]

• Dwivedi, Divya; Mohan, Shaj (1 December 2007). "Critical Nation". Economic and Political Weekly. 42 (48).^[5][30]
• Dwivedi, Divya; Mohan, Shaj (21 May 2019). "The Hoax of the Cave". The Wire.^[31][13]
• Dwivedi, Divya; Mohan, Shaj (29 September 2019). "Courage to begin". The Indian Express.^[5][32]
• Baradaran, Kamran; Dwivedi, Divya (3 May 2020). "The proletariat are all those who are denied the collective faculty of imagination; Divya Dwivedi tells ILNA". ILNA. (interview)^[13][23]
• Dwivedi, Divya; Mohan, Shaj; Reghu, J (31 December 2020). "The Hindu Hoax: How upper castes invented a Hindu majority". The Caravan.^[25][23][5]
• Mohan, Shaj; Dwivedi, Divya (28 February 2021). "The Endogenous Ends of Education (for Aaron Swartz)". European Journal of Psychoanalysis. ISSN 2284-1059.^[23]
• Divya Dwivedi (2021). "A Flight Indestinate". In Castrillón, Fernando; Marchevsky, Thomas (eds.). Coronavirus, Psychoanalysis, and Philosophy. Routledge. ISBN 9780367713669.^[33]
• Divya, Dwivedi (23 April 2021). "A Mystery of Mysteries!–" (Speech). On the Centennial of Freud’s “Massenpsychologie und Ich-analyse”, Jan 2021 - Dec 2021. European Journal of Psychoanalysis. Retrieved 8 December 2023.^[34]
• Bose, Abhish K; Dwivedi, Divya (18 October 2022). "A French-style revolution alone can help India recover from its current caste stasis, says Prof Dwivedi". Asian Lite International. Retrieved 19 November 2023. (interview)^[23]
• Dwivedi, Divya (27 January 2023). "The Evasive Racism of Caste - and the Homological Power of the "Aryan" Doctrine". Critical Philosophy of Race. 11 (1): 209–245. doi:10.5325/critphilrace.11.1.0209. S2CID 257998703.^[25]

See also[edit]

• History of India (1947–present)
• Hinduism
• Hindu nationalism
• List of women philosophers
• Women in philosophy

References[edit]

Further reading[edit]

• Jean-Luc Nancy, "La religieuse manipulation du pouvoir", in Libération
• Rex Butler, "An Other Beginning: A New Thinking of the End", Philosophy World Democracy.
• D. J. Smith "Gandhi and Philosophy:Hypophysics and the Comparison between Caste and Race", episteme, issue 4.
• R. Janardhanan, "Deconstructive Materialism: Einsteinian Revolution in Philosophy", ‘’Philosophy World Democracy’’

External links[edit]

• Divya Dwivedi Author page at Bloomsbury Publishing
• episteme issue 4: philosophy for another time; towards a collective political imagination Special issue on the philosophical work of Divya Dwivedi and Shaj Mohan