Politics · analysis
The Commissioner and the Commission
Gyanesh Kumar’s tenure asks whether a three-member election commission can keep public confidence when its rolls, its appointments and its own minutes are in dispute.
Lead essay · Politics
Who the Roll Still Names
The Special Intensive Revision decides who remains a voter before any ballot is cast, and the work of staying listed falls on ordinary people.
Arguments & inquiries
View allCulture · essay
When an Insult Becomes a Party
A courtroom comparison of young people to cockroaches became the name of a collective, and then a dispute about who is allowed to remain visible.
Political Economy · analysis
The Work of Remaining Listed
Door-to-door verification and a draft roll reduced by roughly 13 percent, read as the uneven work of staying visible to the state.
Concept lexicon
Open the lexiconSpinozist traditions
Affect
A body’s capacity to affect and be affected, not merely a private feeling with a name. Spinozist and Deleuzian traditions use the term to examine changes in collective capacity: how encounters enlarge or diminish what people can do together. Other disciplines use ‘affect’ differently, so context matters.
Deleuze and Guattari
Assemblage
A provisional arrangement of heterogeneous elements—bodies, rules, tools, utterances and spaces—whose relations produce capacities that no element holds alone. The English word translates a difficult Deleuze–Guattari vocabulary; it should identify concrete relations rather than serve as a fashionable synonym for ‘collection’.
Political theory
Civil society
The associations, institutions and practices that sit between intimate life, economic organisation and formal government, though the boundaries remain disputed. In Gramscian analysis, schools, churches, media and voluntary organisations can help organise consent while also becoming sites of counter-organisation.
Marxian critique
Commodity
A good or service produced for exchange. In Marx’s analysis, a commodity joins a useful quality to a social form in which different kinds of labour become comparable through exchange; the term is therefore more specific than simply ‘an object’. Used carefully, it asks how production is organised and for whom.
Ongoing series
View allactive series
Affects, Desire, and Politics
Careful introductions to Spinoza, Deleuze and Guattari on collective capacity, desire and political composition, grounded in texts rather than catchphrases.
Spinoza, Deleuze and Guattariplanned series
Bengal: Work, City, Culture
A planned research series on labour, urban change and cultural life in Bengal. Pieces will appear only after evidence, rights and local context receive editorial review.
Regional social researchactive series
Hegemony & Everyday Life
Essays on consent, common sense, institutions and the practical work through which political leadership becomes durable—or begins to fracture.
Gramsciactive series
Reading Capital
Slow, accessible readings of Marx’s critique of political economy, attentive to argument, historical limits and contemporary questions without turning a difficult text into slogans.
Marx and close reading