Veena Das (Johns Hopkins University)
Reversing the Image of Time: Technologies of the Self and the Task
of Detachment
What technologies of self are brought into play in the complex interplay between attachment and detachment ? The idea of detachment was famously elaborated in the Bhagvad Gita in the dialogue between Krishna and Arjun when on the cusp of a world annihilating war and in some sense might be read as an ethics of making oneself absent from one’s actions. In this paper I try to track several different moments when the question of detachment arises in mythological, ritual and ordinary human action. I ask if such moments help us to advance a theory of relatedness that connects abstract reflection with the concrete flow of everyday life, and helps us to come to terms with the force of the impersonal as an analytical category.
