ABSTRACT
Lacan foregrounds the ‘theft, abduction and stealing’ of the ‘slave’s know-how’, through the maneuvers of the Master in Plato’s dialogues; the episteme is, as if, premised on the extraction of the essence of the know-how of craftsmen, of serfs, of women working in households; theoretical knowledge or what Aristotle calls theoria in its historical function is this extraction, of the slave’s know-how, in order to obtain its transmutation first into the ‘Master’s Discourse’ (Lacan 2007) and then into what Lacan (2007[1969–1970]) in Seminar XVII designates as the ‘University Discourse’. This chapter is hence bifocal. On the one hand, it makes space for the ‘slave’s know-how’ as also ‘praxis’. praxis as the foreclosed of the University Discourse. On the other, it turns to the know-how in/of the ‘world of the third’. The chapter makes space for praxis by working through (i) the first of the eleven Theses on Feuerbach (where Marx marks the distinction between the Jewish God of Deed and the Christian God of the Word and shows how Feuerbach’s ‘materialism’ was limited because he had conceived of praxis only in its ‘dirty Jewish manifestation’), (ii) Heidegger’s turn to the Aristotelian concept (invoked in Book IV of the Nicomachean Ethics) of phronesis (as distinct from episteme), which inaugurates the question of ‘doing’ and the ‘with-which’ and (iii) ‘the gulf between philosophy and politics’, thought and action, opened historically with the trial and death of Socrates (Arendt 2005); this led to Plato’s ‘despair of polis life’ or the ‘philosopher’s life in the polis’; it came at a cost – with the death of Socrates came the death of the philosophico-political praxis of being-in-the-polis. The chapter also makes space for a cartograph different from the ones incumbent upon us: global/local, urban/rural, first world/third world. This new cartograph is marked by the dynamic boundaries between the ‘circuits of global capital’ and the world of the third. In that sense, this chapter builds on the postdevelopmentalist perspective to arrive at the world of the third, world of the third as marking contingent outsided-ness to the circuits of global capital. It also makes space for postdevelopmental praxis in the context of the world of the third. It thus moves beyond both third worldism and development studies. Postdevelopmental praxis in the world of the third contexts creates conditions for the reconstruction (not development) of the world of the third. Postdevelopmental understanding of the ‘third world’ and the ‘local’ as the world of the third creates conditions for reconstructive praxis. Praxis births the world of the third; the world of the third births postdevelopment praxis. Late Foucault’s turn to askesis, as against Christian asceticism (which brings the subject’s ‘being’ into play and which argues that truth cannot be reached without self-transformation) makes postdevelopmental praxis not just world-transformative but self-transformative. The ‘action research’ (not conventional research) work of the 110 students in the 7 batches (2012–2018) of the MPhil programme in Development Practice (which in actuality is postdevelopmental transformative social praxis in adivasi and dalit contexts) in Ambedkar University, Delhi becomes the site for the concrete-real enunciation of postdevelopmental praxis in central India.
