Opulence of Existence: Essays on Aesthetics and Politics

Opulence of Existence: Essays on Aesthetics and Politics offers a way of reading texts and testaments by suggesting that there is no dispute between critical sceptical thinking and our intuitive grasp of the opulent, shimmering matter that lies strewn all around us. One can wonder at the large forces of existence and yet colour such wonderment with a tenor of incredulity. That is how we deal with the ineradicable vehemence of life as participants and as observers. This could be called a counter-romantic way of approaching icons and images, confessions and treatises, journeys and turbulences.

Of the twenty-four essays collated here, several are close readings of a range of arts practices including literature, film and iconography. Others are about antinomian forms of political
philosophy. Taken as a whole, the impulse of the essays is to do with the extraction of a certain utopian way of living, to weave ephemera into reality by and through which one hopes to catch the opulence of this our existence, without being overly optimistic. Since art grapples with the ridiculous and the disgusting, the zany and the deadpan, the wrathful and the tenuous, its heretic possibilities are immense. It is this that the humanities must unleash against those who want to conserve harmonious social stratification and algorithmic disinterestedness.

Prasanta Chakravarty is Associate Professor of English at the University of Delhi. He is also the editor of the web-journal humanitiesunderground. His work on early modern radical heretic culture is published as Like Parchment in the Fire: Literature and Radicalism in the English Civil War (Routledge, 2006). He has recently edited a volume on contemporary writings on humanities titled Shrapnel…