Cogut Institute for the Humanities

Arunav Jain is a fifth-year doctoral candidate in the Department of English. His dissertation, titled “Austerities,” examines the reductive influence of market metrics and logics on ethical life (the care of self as care of others), with a view towards understanding how the humanities can respond to this reduction. It takes as its starting point the rise of “austerity,” a strategy of governance in which the state responds to difficult market conditions by reducing public services and/or increasing taxes. Economists call this strategy austerity in recognition of the state’s budgetary restraint, but the name more appropriately describes the sacrificial self-conduct of working-class subjects forced to reduce their wants and needs in response to the state’s frugality. Against the ascendancy of this coercive style of austerity, Arunav wants to set off the memory of an uncoercive style of austerity, one that encourages mobilizing for justice over festering in docility. It is the practice of austerity that Gandhi fashioned under the banner of satyagraha, “truth-force”: the art of nonviolently adhering to one’s truth. The reason for the juxtaposition is fully elaborated in the dissertation, but here this non-sequitur from the man himself will suffice: “Morality is contraband in war.”