Sublime

What we have here is the circulation, or rather, the circulatory nature of historical ideas and practices over a hundred years, emerging from one part of the world, India, traversing continents and visited by various transformations while still retaining recognizable connections with its sources, and then returning to India enriched and made usable

In order to develop histories that are adequate to this challenge, we have to learn to link our existing subjecthood – the I of history – in many different scales and temporalities, from natural and geological ones to those of local ecologies; from changing capitalist production cycles to rhythms of sustainable institutions, practices and modes of

the loss of these small groups, in favor of nation-level organization of atomized individuals, has had serious consequences for human welfare and human agency. We are missing a layer of organization essential for our happiness.

The third category is methodological and conceptual. My goal as a scholar is to replace the still dominant ‘national-modernization’ model with the paradigm of ‘sustainable modernity’ for the humanistic disciplines.

History as circulatory – both in the prefigured and configured versions – is a crucial missing term in the philosophical debate. Events simultaneously disperse across a variety of human and non-human borders, triggering and creating new events and processes. Historicality, narrative and power are, among other things, human modes of responding to th

Two master concepts pervade the study: circulation and transcendence. Analytically central to my project, both are highly important but neglected phenomena and categories in the field of historical inquiry.

However, the conceptualization and larger implications of foregrounding circulatory histories over linear and bounded national or civilizational histories are yet to be elaborated, and my early chapters represent a preliminary effort in this direction.