Books by Ananda Abeysekara
Papers by Ananda Abeysekara
pp. 1-27, 2024
This essay is an attempt to understand the differences in how “religious criticism” and “politica... more This essay is an attempt to understand the differences in how “religious criticism” and “political criticism” of politics organize forms of life in modern times. I argue that political criticism aspires to a tradition, though it cannot be anchored in a tradition. Such political criticism can be found, for example, in recent mass protests like aragalaya in Sri Lanka, where the term aragalaya has come to be translated into the universal language of "struggle," which in turn is mediated by the universal language-criticism of "political corruption." Unlike political criticism, religious criticism is anchored in a tradition and appeals to very different conceptions of power, authority, time, and hierarchy. Thinking about the differences between these two forms of criticism, I argue, has critical implications for how we evaluate our inescapable relation to modern politics and time.
Philosophy East and West, 2024
My central concern in this essay is how to think about the relation between genealogy and traditi... more My central concern in this essay is how to think about the relation between genealogy and tradition in Arvind Mandair's Sikh Philosophy: Exploring Gurmat Concepts in a Decolonizing World (London: Bloomsbury, 2022). I begin with a brief discussion of a lecture titled "A Genealogy of Liberty" delivered by Quentin Skinner at the University of California, Berkeley in 2008, which he would give again, with minor changes, in 2015 at the University of Chicago and in 2017 at Stanford University. At the outset of the lecture, joining forces with Nietzsche's Genealogy of Morals, he says, "Here I am a Nietzschean, and it is reflected in my title"-contending that "concepts [like liberty] that have histories cannot have definitions." In giving a concise history of the rival "polemical" claims made by Hobbes, Locke, Bentham, Mill, Arendt, Taylor, and others about the concept of liberty, Skinner concludes that, contrary to what Anglo-American philosophy claims, there is not one "coherent way of thinking about liberty" in its contested genealogy. And "while each of these accounts is coherent in its own terms, you cannot combine them. This is genealogy. You can't get this to be the concept of liberty. You are going to have to make some choices, because they don't fit together. So what choice should you make? As to the answer, I leave that up to you" (Skinner 2016). The puzzle of how to think about such a genealogy was palpable in the questions from the audience that followed Skinner's lecture. Noteworthy was one question, about how the thinkers-for example from Hobbes to John Stuart Mill-in the history of the debate about liberty seem to "move around," their views seeming to "bleed into one another" (Skinner 2015). That is, isn't John Stuart Mill's view of liberty-as something that one can voluntarily renounce by internalizing the external views or customs-more or less the same as Hobbes' view of liberty as something free from external interference? And hence don't these competing views after all "fit together" within a single narrative? Ultimately, the concern here boils down to a question about the definition of liberty.
Essays on History and Society, 2023
I would like to briefly take up the question of loss by way of the question of the loss of kingsh... more I would like to briefly take up the question of loss by way of the question of the loss of kingship in the aftermath of colonialism in two instances of South Asia. 1 Given the word limit, I do so with a brief reading of Gananath Obeyesekere's The Doomed King (2017) followed by some comments on Anastasia Piliavsky's Nobody's People (2020). Even though these two texts are by anthropologists, given the subject matter, they are very much interested in the question of history and power. In reading these two texts, I attempt to note briefly how the modern category of the "people" begins to raise its head in colonialism, if you will, in the wake of the
Religion and Society, Vol. 13, no. 1, pp. 31-80, 2022
Through a detailed reading of a recent study of medieval Buddhism and politics
in Sri Lanka in c... more Through a detailed reading of a recent study of medieval Buddhism and politics
in Sri Lanka in conjunction with a number of other works, this article explores the
troubling legacy of translating the historical questions of subjectivity into the modern
language of ‘agency’, ‘autonomy’, ‘innovation’, and ‘creativity’. This legacy cannot easily be
separated from the politics of white privilege in post-colonial studies of Buddhism and
South Asian religion. The problem with trying to expose creativity, so pervasive in the
studies of South Asian religion, is not merely a matter of anachronistic conceptualization
of divergent historical forms of religious practice and subjectivity. It is that the very
possibility of translating subjectivity into easily digestible aestheticized modes of being
(e.g., creativity) is predicated on an uninterrogated assumption about the self-evidence
of such concepts independent of temporal forms of power encountered in forms of life.
Academia.edu
This is an interesting volume, but it is not without problems. Take an example from the chapter "... more This is an interesting volume, but it is not without problems. Take an example from the chapter "Buddhism and Constitutionalism in Precolonial Southeast Asia" by Christian Lammerts. In a supposed corrective to what he sees to be the problem with how scholars like Gokhale, Tambiah, Collins, and others in the past have misunderstood the role of vinaya in Buddhist societies, Lammerts asserts: "While vinaya texts were widely transmitted, copied, glossed, and kept in
Religion and Society, 2020
Part of the symposium "Portrait: Talal Asad"
Religious Theory: E-Supplement to the Journal for Cultural and Religious Theory, 2019
This detailed review essay is a critique of Mahayana Buddhist studies with a focus on the questi... more This detailed review essay is a critique of Mahayana Buddhist studies with a focus on the question of why the field in particular has not considered the question of power in thinking about concepts like emptiness and "mind-only," which are often reduced to mere philosophical propositions. Seen through the lens of power, what would the historical-social concept emptiness and the colonial and postcolonial legacy of Buddhist studies that continues to ghettoize the discipline within the empiricism of area studies look like? What is emphasized in the essay is a more rigorous thinking about the concept of tradition and form of life it presupposes vis-à-vis the genealogies of the practices of Mahayana concepts.
Qui Parle Vol. 28, No. 1, pp. 1-75, 2019
For almost three decades the concept of “Protestant Buddhism” has been the object of critique by ... more For almost three decades the concept of “Protestant Buddhism” has been the object of critique by numerous scholars such as John Holt, Charles Hallisey, Anne Blackburn, Erik Braun, Alicia Turner, Sven Bretfeld, Steven Kemper, and others. They claim to tell a different story about the relation between religion and modernity (“Protestantism”) in South Asia. By extension, these scholars seek to reconstruct the temporal relation between the past and the present, questioning postcolonial conceptions of history, time, and religious practice. But this story of temporality is staked on the question of “influence,” which has a genealogy that includes not just colonial, missionary, liberal politics but also contemporary legal-political questions about foreign influence on democracy and sovereignty. This article contests the ways in which the critiques of Protestant Buddhism conceptualize the so-called "local" colonial and postcolonial forms of time and tradition, translated in troubling imperious ways into universally identifiable signs of reason, agency, responsibility, etc. The article argues that the question of influence, which animates parts of the story of secular ways of inhabiting time, obscures not just how the encounter with the temporality of a tradition is an encounter with power. It obscures how even modern sensibilities of inhabiting time, ironically, require coherence even as they are repeatedly said to be constituted by "heterogeneous" forms of everyday life.
Only the quoted words have diacritics in this article.
Journal of Buddhist Ethics 25, pp. 333-71, 2018
This is a critical and detailed review essay of the edited volume Theravada Buddhist Encounters w... more This is a critical and detailed review essay of the edited volume Theravada Buddhist Encounters with Modernity, which consists of nine essays dealing Burma, Sri Lanka, Cambodia, Nepal, Thailand, and China. My essay takes up questions of tradition and temporality, discursive coherence vs. historical "continuity," colonialism, religious effects and sensibilities, form of life, body, authority and power, community, Pali Imaginaire, and "multiple modernities." The authors of the volume's essays are Juliane Schober, Steven Collins, Kate Crosby, John Holt, Anne Hansen, Christoph Emmrich, Stephen Berkwitz, Ashley Thompson, and Thomas Borchert.
Cultural Critique 98 (Winter), pp. 22-71, 2018
The article seeks to understand how a "form of life" works in a discursive-embodied tradition lik... more The article seeks to understand how a "form of life" works in a discursive-embodied tradition like Buddhism animated by questions of authority and power, and why the temporality of such a tradition cannot be easily grasped by the modern "critiques" of the problem of time; such critiques are narratives of religion's history-time in terms of origin and change representing the past and the present. The affective dispositions and sensibilities that constitute a form of life offer a renewed sense of how temporality--more specifically the temporality of the "form"-- is encountered in the coherence of a religious tradition vis-a-vis the modern practice of time.
Critical Inquiry 41 (Summer), pp. 893-94, 2015
This is a very short response to Mufti's response to Asad, with a word limit set by the journal. ... more This is a very short response to Mufti's response to Asad, with a word limit set by the journal. The emphasis is on the question of the "human" in the secular practice of critique.
ReOrient Vol. 1, No. 1, pp. 37-42, 2015
This essay is a response to Gil Anidjar's critique of Jean Luc Nancy's deconstruction of Christia... more This essay is a response to Gil Anidjar's critique of Jean Luc Nancy's deconstruction of Christianity. At stake is the relation between religion and the "problem" of community. The essay makes a contrast between Derrida's notion of community and Talal Asad's idea of discursive tradition, with a focus on the question of the practice of specific kinds of bodily "capacity" in a communal life. References are made to the Theravada Buddhist notion of tradition to think how the practice of capacity works within the limits of the communal life of religion.
Method & Theory in the Study of Religion Vol. 23, No. 2, pp. 2011
In The Oxford Handbook of Postcolonial Studies Edited by Graham Huggan. Oxford, 2013.
This paper seeks to understand how the idea of "critique" figures in the relation between history... more This paper seeks to understand how the idea of "critique" figures in the relation between history and religion, as used in the works by several "postcolonial" thinkers with different disciplinary stakes--from Tomoko Masuzawa, Richard King, Gil Anidjar, Brian Pennington to Steven Collins (in Buddhist studies). I ask what sort of problems this critical exercise of history creates in the modern narrative of religion.
Interventions Vol. 14, No. 2, pp, 211-237, 2012
The postcolonial (anthropological) thinking about the relation/opposition between religion and po... more The postcolonial (anthropological) thinking about the relation/opposition between religion and politics, peace and violence rests on the sovereign law of ‘decision’. This postcolonial thinking is a necessary thinking about the question of what constitutes secular life/politics. The postcolonial thinking about politics is then as much decisive as it is critical in that it must always decide to separate (secular) life from violence. In a detailed reading of a historicist postcolonial text, I argue that once the possibility of decision is unavailable to the postcolonial sense of secular politics, the seeming relation/opposition between violence and life also becomes unavailable. It is where we have no recourse to such sovereign decision that a different postcolonial thinking (and writing) about ‘politics’ may have a chance.
Culture and Religion Vol. 12, No. 4, pp. 489–97, 2011
This essay engages the question of Buddhism and its relation to power. The specific interest here... more This essay engages the question of Buddhism and its relation to power. The specific interest here is in how to think about the relation between religious practice and power in modernity, and what modern assumptions about religion and time prevent us from doing so.
Method and Teory in the Study of Religion Vol. 23. pp. 257-82, 2011
Every scholarly attempt to define-and, by extension, theorize, interpret, and conceptualizereligi... more Every scholarly attempt to define-and, by extension, theorize, interpret, and conceptualizereligion is based on the sovereign "force of decision." Such theory-decision translates religion into a symbol or category, accounting for it, separating and releasing it from what Talal Asad calls the "not so easily varied" disciplinary practices that constitute life. In this separation of "religion," life becomes a spectator (theoros) to itself. Asad's argument about the impossibility of defining religion, connected to his contention that "life is essentially itself," helps us think about the un-translatability of life. Closely paralleling Nietzsche and Heidegger's reflections on existence and memory-but largely unthought by contemporary theorists of religion-Asad's thinking about religion is a refusal to historicize life.
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Books by Ananda Abeysekara
Papers by Ananda Abeysekara
in Sri Lanka in conjunction with a number of other works, this article explores the
troubling legacy of translating the historical questions of subjectivity into the modern
language of ‘agency’, ‘autonomy’, ‘innovation’, and ‘creativity’. This legacy cannot easily be
separated from the politics of white privilege in post-colonial studies of Buddhism and
South Asian religion. The problem with trying to expose creativity, so pervasive in the
studies of South Asian religion, is not merely a matter of anachronistic conceptualization
of divergent historical forms of religious practice and subjectivity. It is that the very
possibility of translating subjectivity into easily digestible aestheticized modes of being
(e.g., creativity) is predicated on an uninterrogated assumption about the self-evidence
of such concepts independent of temporal forms of power encountered in forms of life.
Only the quoted words have diacritics in this article.
in Sri Lanka in conjunction with a number of other works, this article explores the
troubling legacy of translating the historical questions of subjectivity into the modern
language of ‘agency’, ‘autonomy’, ‘innovation’, and ‘creativity’. This legacy cannot easily be
separated from the politics of white privilege in post-colonial studies of Buddhism and
South Asian religion. The problem with trying to expose creativity, so pervasive in the
studies of South Asian religion, is not merely a matter of anachronistic conceptualization
of divergent historical forms of religious practice and subjectivity. It is that the very
possibility of translating subjectivity into easily digestible aestheticized modes of being
(e.g., creativity) is predicated on an uninterrogated assumption about the self-evidence
of such concepts independent of temporal forms of power encountered in forms of life.
Only the quoted words have diacritics in this article.