On March 20, Divya Dwivedi and Shaj Mohan published an article titled Trash: Evil (1) which offered a new and intriguing interpretation of the concepts of trash and evil. Dwivedi and Mohan are philosophers concerned with evil and are confronting evil (2), and this concern can be seen in nearly all their writings. They address particular evils including caste, racism, war, fascism, and technocracy, and the conceptual problematics of evil such as kakon, steresis, stasis, pandemics, criticalisation. The text under my consideration is an extension of their concern.

Mohan and Dwivedi's article was published at a time when Paris was facing mountains of trash caused by a widespread strike in various sectors in response to the French government's controversial pension bill. The protest movement against raising the pension age from 62 to 64 is the biggest domestic crisis of Emmanuel Macron’s second term. The stench of overflowing trash cans had lingered in the French capital after garbage collectors went on strike and piled up to 10,000 tons of rotting garbage on the streets. But striking sanitation workers in Paris returned to work. Associated Press reported that clean-up crews were tasked on Wednesday, March 29, to pick up piles of trash that had accumulated during the week-long strike starting March 6. “Trash mounds of up to 10,000 tons along the French capital’s streets — matching the weight of the Eiffel Tower — have become a striking visual and olfactory symbol of opposition to Marcon’s bill raising the retirement age from 62 to 64”, (3) the report continued. Well, supposedly, the streets of Paris are returning to their former state: the trash is returning to where it belonged, and the streets are once again reclaiming their iconic identity, namely a place where cleanliness reigns and can once again be used as a community. My intention is to raise points that may be generally overlooked in this immediate context in order to provide a kind of ontology of excess and our vulnerability to it.

Their article serves as the starting point for the text that follows. I will extend three points which are also indicative of a difference with their text:

1. We are a trash making species and trash is an integral part of human life which will never be removed,

2. Capitalism is a system which generates trash, but in the current era, this mechanism has turned into a kind of ethos, which, although it seems to show the environmentalist approach of the dominant system, is ultimately nothing but the new logic of late capitalism,

3. Trash is related to the sacred and therefore it should be considered as a necessary ruin of our lives, a point I will argue through Georges Bataille's notion of excess. 

Trash: Division

“Trash: Evil” begins with an apparently simple and self-evident premise: Trash is evil. So far, everything seems obvious: everything that is left-over and can no longer be used should be thrown away under the title of trash, which is evil; that is, trash is a kind of evil like many other things. But Dwivedi and Mohan invert this proposition and ask us to “try to understand it in the same way we understand evil is steresis and evil is stasis.” (4) The logic of inversion of statements is addressed by Dwivedi and Mohan in Gandhi and Philosophy while discussing the inversion of “God is Truth” to “Truth is God” in M. K. Gandhi. No inversion is the same as the other one for them, predicative logic and term logic cannot examine the peculiar system of M. K. Gandhi. As Dwivedi and Mohan show “We should not be led […] to the conclusion that God is a category predicated of Truth” and instead “even God has Truth, but he is not it”. (5) 

Uncollected garbage is piled up on a street in Paris, Monday, March 20, 2023; Image credit: Aurelien Morissard/AP

“Trash: Evil” inverts the proposition “trash is evil” to “evil is trash” through two considerations. First, the text shows that evil is always designated in relation to something which is not desirable. The older meaning of evil as “kakon” came from disgust towards excrements. Therefore, there are different historical epochs of thinking the concept of evil, in other words, evil is not an absolute concept. If yesterday evil was deformity, today evil is trash—“These components [such as excrements, peels of vegetable, rotten food], which came to be the designation for evil, and the laws which comprehend them, analogously identified evil in actions and functions which were far removed from their origins.” (6) Secondly, the relation that “trash” has to everything else in the world today is that of an accumulation which is not integrable into the system of production. So trash as evil grows in proportion to growth of wealth; for the same reason they also argue that most of the wealth produced today is trash because it has no real productive relation to the world we live in. 

Trash never loses its existence and even despite all the recent efforts to reuse it, this stubborn remnant shows us its so-called "evil" nature.

“Trash: Evil” also makes a distinction between trash and all other kinds of refuses of living such as rubbish, garbage, and pollution; that is, trash is a relatively new and specific variable which is integral to the present form of capitalism. Vomit and excrements which caused disgust could be removed and returned to the earth. What came to be called pollution was with reference to the excrements of animals which pulled carts and wagons through modern cities, which could also be returned to the farm as manure. Rubbish is the remains of construction and destruction of buildings which could be reused in construction. Garbage on the other hand is related to the laws of cuisine and it refers to the animal parts which human beings do not wish to use, but these parts can be turned into animal feed. For Dwivedi and Mohan, trash is only analogous to these older types of refuse, that is, they define trash is that which cannot be reused or returned to the system of life.

Trash never loses its existence and even despite all the recent efforts to reuse it, this stubborn remnant shows us its so-called "evil" nature. The way the system of senses are distributed in regards to trash is such that it cannot be ignored: the smell and the disgusting appearance of the refuse will never be removed and we can overlook it simply by transferring it to a place beyond our sense of smell and sight, just like scandalous idea of shipping trash and toxic waste to poor countries. As Jennifer Clapp has elaborated in her “Toxic Exports” (7), for more than a decade, environmentalists and the governments of developing countries have lobbied intensively and generated public outcry in an attempt to halt hazardous transfers from Northern industrialized nations to the Third World, but the practice continues. Trash is ultimately the property of those who are on the wrong side of geography and geopolitics, those who have no choice but to carry the remnants of a civilization that has benefited the least from its positive features, but has taken the largest share of its discontents.

Trash or waste creates a significant divide, a division between the "haves" and "have-nots". In the beginning, this gap has a very common nature:  the "haves" produce trash, and the "have-nots" often have no fate other than living off these leftovers. Here, our task is not so difficult: antagonism, consumerism, etc. are among the usual suspects. But is it not possible to go beyond this usual reading? Here, a more precise focus is needed on the process and meaning of consumption in contemporary culture. Today, commodities are bought and displayed as much for their sign-value as their use-value. In our societies, when a consumer buys an object, he/she is buying into a whole new system of needs that is at once rational and hierarchical. As a rule, this version is presented as part of a wider shift towards a new holistic post-materialist spiritual paradigm. Employee cooperation and engagement, respect for the environment, transparent commercial transactions, are today the keys to success. Nowadays, marketers have found a crafty way to rework Max Weber’s "Protestant Ethic". They tell us we can achieve personal redemption not through hard work and amassing savings, but by consuming the right products. When you buy eco-friendly products, fair trade goods, or products that yield some kind of charitable dividend, you don’t have to think twice about the cost of your consumerism. Not when you’ve done some good and earned yourself some good capitalist karma.

In other words, today's capitalism is no longer a machine that is constantly producing waste, but aims to create a deeper personal experience, one that is based on a kind of "new spirit of capitalism." In this way, a new spirit of global responsibility can use capitalism as the only and the most efficient means for the common good. As Slavoj Žižek has elaborated perfectly, “the basic ideological dispositif of capitalism... is separated from its concrete socio-economic conditions (capitalist relations of production) and conceived of as an autonomous life or "existential" attitude which should (and can) be overcome by a new more "spiritual" outlook, leaving these very capitalist relations intact.” (8) Here, one is dealing with a new level of consumption: We buy commodities not for their utility or as status symbols; we buy them for the experience they provide, and we consume them to make our lives more pleasurable and meaningful. In such circumstances, blaming capitalism for consumerism is ineffective. The current crisis stems from capitalism's incorporation of a cultural dimension into its mechanism, giving the impression that existing antagonisms and contradictions can be easily overcome within the framework of market relations.

For Dwivedi and Mohan, trash is only analogous to these older types of refuse, that is, they define trash is that which cannot be reused or returned to the system of life.

This form of “conspicuous consumption”, as Thorstein Veblen argued in his “Theory of the Leisure Class” (9), creates a situation in which the entire society is organized around consumption and display of commodities through which individuals gain prestige, identity, and standing. In the realm of sign-value, commodities and their remnants take on meaning according to their place in a differential system of prestige and status. In this regard, the division between the "haves" and "have-nots" and their relation to trash takes a different meaning: The "haves" often produce less trash because they are able to consume high-quality products that leave less waste behind. They also engage in a personal culture of "recycling" to the point where they are essentially stingy in their consumption. But the "have-nots” have access only to low-quality goods that degrade over time and must be thrown away overall. An example of this seemingly contradictory distinction can also be seen in architecture: only the true wealthy class can use minimal architecture in their homes, while the poor and marginalized classes use every chance to use kitsch objects in their habitations, just so to give it a more bearable appearance. 

Trash: Ballistics

In today's world, it is not possible to deal with disposable things, in other words, what remains of the consumption cycle, without a closer examination of the nature of the ruling system, i.e. capitalism. For example, in the field of agricultural waste, the nature of mass and industrial production of the agronomics is very important. When capitalism operates according to its own most rational internal principles or deep structures, it cannot properly manage the agricultural/food system. We learned from the COVID-19 pandemic that capital-led agriculture produces hotspots in which pathogens can evolve the most virulent and infectious phenotypes. As Rob Wallace puts it, “capital is spearheading land grabs into the last of primary forest and smallholder-held farmland worldwide. These investments drive the deforestation and development leading to disease emergence.” (10) 

“Trash: Evil” differs with Marx on the concept of proletariat. Dwivedi and Mohan have been engaging with Marx in their works, but always at a distance, and often with differences. The concept of proletariat was critiqued by them in "Gandhi and Philosophy",

“Gandhi’s theoretical and political confrontations with the machines reflect Marx […] man is objectified by the production system, or he is a substratum of the machine, and his movements are determined according to the laws of the machine […] those men who maintain the machines by cleaning and repairing them are not directly working at the end product — the law of a product — but they work according to the laws of the peripheries of the machines”. (11) 

In “Trash: Evil”, they argue that even if proletarianisation—the process of creating labourers through the destruction of the independent lives of the people—is still underway, the era of the proletariat is over. The proletariat are those who are essential to the modes of production with regularity. Today labour is less essential to production and the jobs which engage people are temporary in nature as productions systems invent novelties to remove people from production. Following this, they argue for a thinking of mankind itself as a kind of trash under the present production system, pointing to an important concept: the human-trash who has been forsaken by the production systems. 

The relationship between man as a species and the rest of nature is central to Marx's thinking. I would argue that the uses the concept of metabolism in his analysis of labor is central to Marx’s thinking. Labor was a process in which man "regulates and controls the metabolism between himself and nature". (12) As shown by Marx, humans are changing the natural world on which they depend, in more ways and to a greater extent than is commonly thought. For Marx, solution lies in the end of the capitalist system and beginning a socialist society in which there is "more rational management of the metabolic interactions of the producers involved". (13) 

The word metabolism is derived from the Greek word “Metabolismos” or from the French word “métabolisme”. In Greek, metabolē means a “change” and metaballein means "to change". The combination of the words is derived from meta meaning “over” and ballein meaning “to throw” (ballistics). Therefore, "change" and "throw" are the two main axes of metabolism, and the same axes can be seen in Marx's understanding of this word. During this process, matter is changed through labor and eventually becomes something to be thrown away. During the endless process of production-consumption, there is always something left out, something that must be put aside and destroyed so that the apparatus of "progress" (the so-called most important result of the mentioned sign-value process) continues to move forward. This residue and its often unpleasant smell are in conflict with order, hygiene and progress. It is not without reason that the French word "perfume” (perfume) can be parsed to read pare/fumier or counter/manure. (14) What is thrown out, in a recursive process, becomes the enemy of the system, an obstacle that the health-based ruling system insists on removing as quickly as possible. 

In the end, this issue has little to do with protecting the environment because, within this framework, preserving the ecosystem is reduced to a personal responsibility that can only be accomplished by recycling Coca-Cola bottles and outdated newspapers, while macropolitics and significant changes to capitalism are ignored.

Here, the classic idea of Georges Bataille should be considered once again, according to which surplus is inherent in every economy and the three luxuries of nature, i.e. eating, death and sexual reproduction are intimately related examples of our basic proclivity towards excess, an exuberant dispersal of molecules and energies, without which no new life can come into being. (15) My attempt is to look at this issue beyond the difference that Dwivedi and Mohan made between trash and other forms of it, because in my opinion, the refuse and all its ancient and modern forms can ultimately be classified as "surplus", in other words, the thing that remains in the process of production and consumption. It was this unwanted excess that caused Luther to reach his special enlightenment. As Luther recalls: “In that tower (on the toilet) the Holy Spirit has revealed the Scriptures to me”. (16) From this point of view, without a material world made of dirt, there would be no sacred space. Although trash and human remains are disposed of through complex rituals and mechanisms of totem and taboo, its otherness is tied to our reactions of disgust: this means that detritus or the material produced by erosion is never fundamentally destroyed, but always bears this otherness within. Wastes and residues are often washed away and destroyed, or they are converted by humans into fertilizer for the agricultural cycle. However, despite this, their impact remains and is eerily embedded in the very system in which these objects are treated as trash. These debris are things that life rarely and hardly endures since they represent death and decay. Against them, I, as a living subject, am at the limit of my condition as a living being. The body extricates itself, as being alive, from that border. (17)

Aradkooh Waste Processing Plant, Tehran Province.; Image credit: received

Dwivedi and Mohan elaborate that trash can be considered an endogenous variable and an exogenous variable or parameter under different formalities, “Under a different formality, trash is the endogenous variable” and under another consideration “trash grows as an exogenous variable which has to be kept apart from the system which produces it, without (so far) affecting the system of production directly.” (18) However, we may be able add another twist to this reading. Trash is both endogenous and exogenous. Residue, excrement and waste are the product of a kind of "con-plosion", a form of implosion and conspiracy. Waste is a part of the system itself, the excess that the system tries to contain and expel, but ultimately the more that effort increases, the more new methods are introduced to expel that waste, those venomous dregs return to our lives with more power. All efforts to recycle all types of waste and return it to the consumption cycle (products made from recycled garbage, etc., which of course sometimes cost more than normal goods) show that the endo-exogenous nature of trash cannot be denied. Trash is not destroyed but disappears and, like any form of disappearance, leaves behind specters and fragments, like the people of the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki who were killed after the nuclear bombing, but their shadow remained on the walls.

This is what Jean-Luc Nancy in his "Being Singular Plural" (19) called “being with”, meaning that that “I” is not prior to “we,” that existence is essentially co-existence. Our existence and being is accompanied with trash and co-existence with it. Things can only be-with, because every-single-thing exists and they all exist together. The “with” is an inherent part of being because the world is the togetherness of all things, therefore there is no neutral place where being happens. Trash and being, or to put more precisely, our being and trash take place together. The finitude of being is experienced by being in community, that is, through exposure to the death of others, whether it be the expiry of objects or the ones we love and adore.

Trash evokes a strange feeling in us; a kind of vulnerability against something that was once a part of our life and now we have to throw it away and destroy it. This stinking mass once belonged to us and now we have a burning desire to get it out of our sight as soon as possible. Our vulnerability to trash, to the stench of things we throw away, is a vulnerability to our own self. This is the catastrophic condition that Nancy so aptly characterized in “L’Intru”: "Man becomes what he is: the most terrifying and troubling technician, as Sophocles designated him twenty-five centuries ago. He who de-natures and re-fashions nature; he who re-creates creation; he who brings it out of nothing, and, perhaps, returns it to nothing. He who is capable of the origin and the end." (20)

We live in a sad apparatus of trash: we buy, we consume, and then we throw away. Each item's countdown to being thrown away begins when it is purchased. Perhaps it is true that a product's transformation into trash starts the moment it is produced. Trash surrounds us: There is no way to avoid it or forget it. Even the wealthy Brazilians who use helicopters to avoid colliding with the lower classes cannot escape this plight by focusing their attention on the horizon because the day will come when the height of the piled-up dross will be so great that it will cover the entire sky. We have to accept that we are a trash-making species, and any form of human genealogy has to deal with the genealogy of his remnants and waste. This is the code of the automatic disappearance of the world: To go beyond the end when the processes becomes erosional. Our world has turned its own disappearance, its declared self-destruction, its bastard outcome, by seeking to take over all the dimensions of visibility, to make itself extremely operational. 

This is the ballistics of our world: the calculation of how to throw our surplus, our "being with," so that it is out of sight, as quickly and forcefully as possible. The expired is closely related to the fracture. Something happens in the crack of things, in the breach, and hence in their appearance. A phenomenon in the strict sense, "phainomenon" (from phaenomenon which derives from φαινόμενον, namely something that can be seen and understood), trash is visible and exposed: all our efforts in modern times are to eliminate this phenomenon, this object exposed to light, and suffocate it in darkness. Waste is in front of our eyes, our constant companion in the endless process of consumption. And trash, when it is treated as a phenomenon and is exposed to the sunlight and becomes visible, shows its refuse-ness better than any other time: under the sunlight and in the visible world, trash stinks, and its unpleasant smell takes our breath. From this point of view, the streets of Paris, and the suburbs of big cities like Delhi and Tehran, are the manifestation of the most objective form of the phenomenon.

Trash: Disposable

Obsessive concern for excreta and trash is the distinguishing feature of humans from animals: Humans do not know what to do with their waste and are distressed by it, while animals do not pay much attention to this issue. The root of this difference should be found in the issue of culture (21). In other words, culture means trash, a big trash-can. Culture is always pre-existing and wants only to be respected. In culture, like a trash-can, everything has a predetermined place. But waste and excreta occupy an uncertain and troublesome space, a middle place between nature and culture that cannot be left behind. The last few decades have seen capitalism place a lot of emphasis on waste recycling, and for good reason. In the end, this issue has little to do with protecting the environment because, within this framework, preserving the ecosystem is reduced to a personal responsibility that can only be accomplished by recycling Coca-Cola bottles and outdated newspapers, while macropolitics and significant changes to capitalism are ignored.

Our world today as a whole is something unthrowable; we all know that the ruins we are living in are simply a trash-object, ready to be torn apart and thrown away, but nonetheless, we assume this old shell of the world as something impossible to be tossed away.

But there are some trashes that have become waste due to bad luck and miscalculations, trashes on which our very survival may depend. The movie “Lovely Trash” (2013) directed by Mohsen Amiryoussefi portrays a wonderful example in this regard. The movie has an interesting central idea: Following protests after the 2009 Iranian presidential election, an elderly woman has one night to clear her house of any politically troublesome belongings of her family. Left alone, the old woman (Monir) starts talking to the picture frames of her long lost family members on her windowsill. To help her out, her deceased husband, executed Marxist brother (Mansour) and two sons come back to life in their picture frames. Of the four photo frames in the house (the photo of her husband, who was a supporter of the legal government of Mohammad Mossadegh in 1953, the photo of her first son, who was killed in the Iran-Iraq war front, and the younger son, who has more or less nationalist tendencies and lives in America, and the photo of her brother), Monir decides to throw away the one that belonged to his brother: Mansour, a Marxist who was killed in prison after being tortured. Mansour objects to this decision and wonders why, of the four photos, only he should be discarded. "Right. I'm the one who always gets in the way!" In response to his sister's justifications, Mansour responds. The film's most intriguing point is when the remaining three characters, each representing a different aspect of Iran's political leanings, join forces to throw Mansour into the dumpster. 

Mansour (Shahab Hosseini) in a scene of "Lovely Trash" (2013) by Mohsen Amiryoussefi; Image Credit: Received

Finally, Mansour is cast aside, into the trash can of history, like all those lovable trash that went unmentioned and unremembered, from Julian Assange, whose only destination is the dark recess of Belmarsh Prison, to all those boys and girls, men and women who, in the words of the great Iranian poet Reza Baraheni, "knew the secret of the trench and of the star!" (22) And when Monir realizes at the end of the film that her life is not in danger and runs to save the trash of her past, she realizes it is too late and everything is forever lost. Perhaps there is no better image to describe our world. In today's pitiless and cruel world, a world where silence has been brought to court and madness has become the order of the day, only such disposables, these lovely trashes, can be a source of hope.

In the end, all of this has become part of the sad symphony we call neoliberalism or capitalism and we must shamelessly admit that all our efforts to go beyond this framework have failed miserably; our lives are surrounded by trash, and the only reason we see for our existence is to submit to the workings of the market and discard our loved ones as disposable. Or as Dwivedi and Mohan conclude: “The relations of specific orders of trash are inherently incapable of forming componential relations with each other. The chimera of this trash power progressively seizing the familiar institutions of democracy looks more and more imminent.” (23)

In conclusion, trash is an integral part of human life which will never be removed and trying to overcome this excess is beastiality at its purest, namely a self-immune force of stasis. Trash points to important parts of human life: from antagonism and division to the ballistics of life and capitalist metabolism. Therefore, understanding the existence and ways to overcome the upcoming crises may require a more accurate understanding of the nature of waste and residues that humans are involved in various dimensions. And this is exactly what Mohan and Dwivedi's article seeks to demonstrate.

NOTES

1. Divya Dwivedi and Shaj Mohan, “Trash: Evil”, Philosophy World Democracy, 20 March 2023: https://www.philosophy-world-democracy.org/articles-1/trash-evil

2. I edited a special issue of the journal Episteme, on the philosophy of Dwivedi and Mohan. Consult it for the various ways in which “evil” and ethics appear in their philosophy and politics. Episteme, issue 4: Philosophy for Another Time: Towards a Collective Political Imagination, February 2021. https://positionspolitics.org/episteme-4/ 

For further reading, the publication of the texts from the Unesco conference “Confronting Evil” organised by Jean-Luc Nancy and Divya Dwivedi in Dwivedi, Divya (ed.) (2021), Virality of Evil: Philosophy in the Time of a Pandemic, Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. Also, Mohan, Shaj & Dwivedi, Divya. Gandhi and Philosophy: On Theological Anti-Politics, Bloomsbury Philosophy, UK, 2019. 

3. Thomas Adamson, "Long Paris trash strike ends, workers face daunting cleanup", Associated Press, 29 March 2023: https://apnews.com/article/france-protests-pensions-sanitation-strike-macron-b0a0dbc47e151af1a306b4cf64e5f893

4. Dwivedi and Mohan, “Trash: Evil”. 

5. Mohan, Shaj & Dwivedi, Divya, Gandhi and Philosophy: On Theological Anti-Politics, Bloomsbury Philosophy, UK, 2019, p 150 - 155.

6. Dwivedi and Mohan, “Trash: Evil”.

7. Clapp, Jennifer, Toxic Exports: The Transfer of Hazardous Wastes from Rich to Poor Countries, Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2001.

8. Žižek, Slavoj, First as Tragedy, Then as Farce, London, New York: Verso, 2009, p.35. 

9. Veblen, Thorstein, The Theory of the Leisure Class, London: Penguin Classics, 1994. 

10. Rob Wallace, Coronavirus: “Agribusiness Would Risk Millions Of Deaths”, Marx21, March 1st 2020: https://www.marx21.de/coronavirus-agribusiness-would-risk-millions-of-deaths/

11. Gandhi and Philosophy, p 119 - 122.

12. Marx, Karl, Capital, Vol. I, translated by Ben Fowkes and David Fernbach, London: Penguin, 1976, p.283.

13. Marx, Karl Capital, Vol. III, translated by David Fernbach, London: Penguin Books, 1991, p.216. 

14. See: Laporte, Dominique, History of Shit, translated by Nadia Benabid and Rodolphe el-Khoury, Cambridge: MIT Press, 2002.

15. Bataille, Georges, The Accursed Share: Volume I, translated by Robert Hurley, New York: Zone Books, 1988, p. 34.

16. https://www.ru.nl/radboudreflects/terugblik/terugblik-2017-0/terugblik-2017/17-10-31-500-jaar-maarten-luther-lezing-filosoof/info/english-report-the-reformation-started-on-the/#:~:text=But%20in%20the%20only%20heated,revealed%20the%20Scriptures%20to%20me%E2%80%9D

17. See: Kristeva, Julia, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, Translated by Leon S. Roudiez, New York: Columbia Unversity Press, 1982, p.3.

18. Dwivedi and Mohan, “Trash: Evil”.

19. Nancy, Jean-Luc, Being Singular Plural, translated by Anne O'Byrne and Robert Richardson, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000.

20. Nancy, Jean-Luc, Corpus, Trans. Richard A. Rand, New York: Fordham University Press, 2008, p.170.

21. Mohan’s position on culture is different, “A culture is a system of regularities which seek greater integration with other kinds of regularities in order to ensure endurance and range. To ensure its dominance, a particular culture – say the culture of de-postcolonialism – will eliminate other cultures. The co-existence of many cultures depends on the comprehending law of cultures. For example, the museum-art-finance-capital complex is invested in capturing as many distinct cultures as inert artefacts. The supermarket is interested in capturing as many brands as possible on display. But cultures are not inert, they jostle, struggle and battle for more room.” See Mohan, S., & Adams, R. (2022). ‘I take, and I am taken, by what belongs to philosophy’: Philosophy and the Redemption of Democracy. South African Journal of Science. https://doi.org/10.17159/sajs.2022/14926

22. Baraheni, Reza, Ishamel, translated by Poupeh Missaghi: https://www.asymptotejournal.com/poetry/reza-baraheni-ismael/

23. Dwivedi and Mohan, “Trash: Evil”.