Unthinking Mastery

(Rick Simeone) #1
decolonIzIng mAstery 43

himself could not claim to be a perfect brahmachari (one who practices
brahmacharya), he refused a full definition of the term. Brahmacharya
was something aspirational and radically uncertain; it could produce in-
finite possibilities, yet he could not foreclose its definition. As I argued in
the introduction of this book, where I sketched some qualities of mastery,
definitional foreclosure can itself become a practice of masterful exclusion.
Gandhi’s refusal to offer a definition of something he is still (and will always
be) learning points toward an embodied, material practice that exceeds
what conceptual thought can contain. When turned inward, mastery for
Gandhi refuses to be transparent and definable, even while for him it holds
out limitless possibilities. Unlike foreign mastery, which functions through
a logic of domination that is concrete in its aims (even while its effects may
be intangible or diffuse), brahmacharya as self- mastery aims toward the
uncertainty of its own practice and the experimental quality of its aims,
with a will to the experimental subjection of the self as opposed to the
domination of others in the pursuit of truth.


The Violence of Swaraj


Meditating on the wars of Europe, Gandhi questioned why one nation’s
cause should be considered right and another wrong, why brute force re-
peatedly governed instead of the pursuit of truth. The commitment to sa-
tyagraha as a governing practice refused outright this dynamic and insisted
that the force involved in the pursuit of truth was a force imposed by but
also toward the truth- seeker. The political pressure of the satyagrahi (one
who practices satyagraha) in action, which was always driven by a prin-
ciple of love, revealed to others their wrongdoings and urged them to cor-
rect their own actions. It also rendered powerless those in power, because
for the satyagrahi no one external to him could make him act in ways that
did not accord to his own will (1976, 16:64). The satyagrahi was one ready
to submit himself to the punitive power of the state, willfully disobeying
it when he found it to be unjust. He did penance for social injustices, and
through this form of civil disobedience he could be violently penalized but
never fundamentally governed by the state. The “complete independence”
of the satyagrahi was born therefore through this unrelenting willingness
to suffer for and in turn transform the disorders of society. Crucially, if the

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