Dancing East and West: Charting intercultural possibilities in the thought of Gilles Deleuze and Prabhat Ranjan Sarkar

Abstract

This chapter enacts a dialogue between the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze (1925–1995) and the Indian social theorist and guru Prabhat Ranjan Sarkar (1922–1990). It is an attempt to test the creative possibilities generated through an intercivilisational dialogue. The dialogue seeks to explore the congruences and incompatibilities that such an encounter can reveal. This co-creative process gives us new insights into the world and leads to the emergence of new categories and concepts to help us negotiate it. Both Deleuze and Sarkar take their philosophical traditions and rethink them in the light of new global demands, acting as creative traditionalists who speak from the past to the future through the medium of Western and Indic philosophy respectively. At the heart of this work lies the recognition that “philosophy is the art of forming, inventing, and fabricating concepts” (Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (B. Massumi, Trans.). Continuum, 1994, p. 2).