Some Thoughts on the "(Extra)Ordinary": Philosophy, Coloniality, and Being Otherwise. (February 2017)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Nayar, Jayan
• Is Part Of: Alternatives. Volume 42:Number 1(2017:Feb.)
• Page Start: 3
• Page End: 25
• Publication Date: 2017-02
• Subjects: the street -- event and the philosophy of rupture -- resistance and political becoming -- decoloniality and already being; Globalization -- Periodicals; Political science -- Periodicals; Sociology -- Periodicals; 306.2
• DOI: 10.1177/0304375417717171
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 0304-3754

Abstract

In this essay, I question the philosophical appropriation of the "street"; much recent critical theory fixes on the "events" of the street as portending ruptural becomings—into being—of the new in the world. I argue that such readings of the "extraordinary" are founded upon a heroic ontologic–epistemology of "abandonment–resurrection" that defines colonial–modern Eurocentric philosophy. Against this preoccupation with the extraordinary, I present a view that reads in the events of the street the ordinariness of the perceived extraordinary and the extraordinariness of the (often invisible) ordinary decoloniality of the everyday as the site of already being otherwise.