Friendship as Political Practice: Reorienting Solidarity in a Globalised World
(NWO-VENI 2024 Postdoctoral research, Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis)
Public spheres across the globe today are multiple and dynamic, but also ever more brittle and fractured. Their ability to build and re-build shared worlds is increasingly imperilled by divisive developments, including resurgent authoritarianisms, ethnonationalisms, political polarisation, war, and mass displacement. In this fraught context, critical theorists have focused on solidarity as a conceptual framework and practice to help democracies to address these challenges. Amid these discussions, an emerging line of inquiry identifies friendship as a model to conceptualise solidarity. However, the promise of friendship as a paradigm for democratic emancipatory solidarity has not, until now been realised. Common objections are that friendship is regarded as a private choice that privileges similarity—thus clashing with the difference that characterises the polis—and that its supposed benefits remain uncertain in political practice. Consequently, friendship’s reparative capacity to reorient solidarity in today’s fractured public spheres remains largely unexplored.
Friendship as Political Practice (FPP) advances a concept of political friendship to address these conceptual limitations. It does so by mobilising literary imaginations of friendship across three non-European contexts, from India, Middle East, and the Caribbean.
Can poems show us a way to be part of a many-voiced history, to be with, a part of, despite being an outsider? What complex kinds of understanding do we need to sustain solidarities across the dividing lines of race, coloniality, caste, and class, and to create processes of sharing that do not undermine social difference or the particularity of individual experience? And can we look towards poetry, towards the dynamic between poems and readers, to offer us a model for such understanding? Where instituted racial and colonial hierarchies obstruct complex understandings of some ‘others’ as who they are and not what they are, can poetry help us?
In this project, I propose an intersubjective pragmatist framework for reading poetry that takes the actualization of a decolonial and anti-identitarian political plurality as the basis of poetry’s politicality. At its core is the concept of ‘poetic understanding’: a transformative quality of understanding that is a necessarily dynamic, contingent, non-hierarchical, and anti-identitarian process of transformation and constitution, where who I am comes to be constituted in my process of understanding, as does who the other is. I develop this framework by bringing together four distinct conceptual fields: I build on Hannah Arendt’s theory of political plurality, Édouard Glissant’s concepts of relation and opacity, John Dewey’s pragmatist theory of aesthetic experience, and Sylvia Wynter’s model of decipherment to examine poetry as a site of intersubjective transformation, where a genuine plurality of relation in interaction, divested of discriminatory and hierarchizing mechanics, can be actualized. In such a conceptualization of poetic understanding, I argue, lies an as-yet-underestimated cornerstone of solidary understanding, and the crux of poetry’s political contribution.
(Winner of the ASCA Dissertation Prize 2023)
Poetic Understanding and Political Community: Actualizing Plurality through Poetry
Dissertation, University of Amsterdam 2022
