ABSTRACT
In its effort to understand dislocation and resettlement in development, this work moves from the hegemonic (that is capitalocentric-orientalist development) to the foreclosed of the hegemonic (to class-world of the third). It moves from class-world of the third as repudiated signifiers, as the unspoken of the hegemonic, to a form of contingent political subjectivity premised on class-world of the third. It further encapsulates a passage from the foreclosed to an ethico-politics of the foreclosed. This work is thus trying to retrieve to an extent the very thing that is excluded-repudiated-foreclosed in the discourse of dislocation. This marks a turning of the hitherto excluded ‘into the legitimate territory of ethico-politics’ (Zupancic 2000: 3), into the legitimate territory for political subjectivity. Then, such a turning away would imply a movement from prevailing subjectivities incarcerated within the hegemonic to a certain subjectivity premised on the foreclosed. Such a movement would also need to flow from an imagination of development produced by a ‘few shepherd subjects’ to an imagination produced by the ‘flock of subjectivities’. The imagination of development produced by the entire flock of subjectivities – polymorphous, heterogeneous, conflict-ridden and contradictory – is rather apposite to what could be called the difficult task of a people-centric democracy; people-centric democracy signals a rejection of the shepherd’s perspective to development and the top-down ‘reformist-managerial’ approach to dislocation. This in turn has enormous implications for meanings of resistance, policy and resettlement.
