SYMPTOMS OF EXIT: Reflections Beyond the Political

Description

I think the most powerful yet subtle point of emergence for Soumick De’s book is its stylistic generosity leading to the figure of thought that is “environment” and the simultaneous restraint of philosophical vigour which issues the directive that even the environment must be thought, that is to say, it must be speculatively formalized in principle. — Soumyabrata Choudhury, author of Ambedkar and Other Immortals

In Symptoms of Exit: Reflections Beyond the Political, Soumick De tries to critically focus on the question of escape as a form of resistance. Assembling a whole set of studies ranging from political theology to artificial intelligence, the book explores the philosophical idea of what it means to exit pre-existent forms of knowledge and practices. The analysis moves back and forth within the history of Western thought from Carl Schmitt to St Augustine and back to Bernard Steigler and Antonio Negri (among many others) without losing track of the underlying question: how to find new and creative ways to go beyond existent modes of the political. The essays collected in this book offer a new understanding of what is meant by creative symptomatology as a process of associating a disparate group of signs, all evoking the desire to exit the world and its power through acts of creation.

Soumick De has been a guest faculty at the Department of Psycho-Social and Clinical Studies, Dr. B.R. Ambedkar University, Delhi and a post-doctoral fellow at the Indian Council of Social Science Research (ICSSR). He is the author of the book Perversion, Pedagogy and the Comic: A Survey of the Concept of Theatre in the Christian Middle Ages (Aakar, 2021 and Routledge, 2022).