Manola K. Gayatri

Towards Democracy: Ethico-Political Horizon as Chora in PaR

States that make claim to democracy employ deeply undemocratic  processes to secure hegemonic control over a people and their resources leading often to violent conflict and fractured identity and subjecthoods. The crux of the problem however appears to be the enshrining of democracy as 'static' and the inability to work with process that require reciprocal sensitivities towards the yet to be named My paper premised on the inability of legal and constitutional discourse to address the identity conflicts emerging from newly emerging subjectivities, considers the potential of Performance as Research to do so. I consider the dialogue between myself and the other across the divide of conflicting political subject locations that PaR explorations. Malati et all (2009) speak of the their postnational emerging from an ‘ethico-political horizon that can no longer take the emancipatory potential of the nation state as a political community of citizen’ for granted. The loss of a united citizenship across conflicted subject locations is one that struggles with the new to find a new language and modality to hold the experiences emerging from nascent and fraught subjectivity. My paper explores the political potential of PaR with a tactile repsponsivity that becomes the Irigarayan chora to the intersubjective encounter that will help in the journey towards a new ethico political horizon. I explore this through the experiences of two PaR projects: one that led to the making of a performance film in a militarised zone and the other a workshop called 'Spacing Together' that attempts to seek solidarity across difference.

Manola K. Gayatri

PhD, JNU, New Delhi

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