Through the sociopolitical diatribes in her nonfictional works such as Listening to Grasshoppers: Field Notes on Democracy, An Ordinary Person’s Guide to Empire and The Algebra of Infinite Justice, Arundhati Roy has exposed the coercive sham of today’s comprador democratic state and its neo-imperial policies. Significantly enough, Roy’s concern about the aporias of democracy and state-sponsored terrorism have striking parallels with the writings of contemporary leading European political and critical theorists such as Giorgio Agamben, Derrida and Antonio Negri. Continental philosophy in the post 9/11 age of neo-empire has taken an ethico-political turn which disparages against all forms of totalitarianism and hegemony. Roy’s apprehension is that democracy sometimes may end in lumpenocracy/corporatocracy in the aftermath of Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo Bay and global market economy. Roy’s critique of the pathologies of modern democracy may draw philosophic support from Derrida’s notion of democratie a venir or the futural democracy-to-come. Roy’s focus on state atrocities against dissidents in the name of democracy both in her fictional and nonfictional works may remind us of Agamben’s theory of Homo Sacer and Bare Life. Roy’s works may provide theoretical grounds to reformulate the existing paradigms of democracy and state power in these post-Tahrir Square times.

In his book, The State of Exception, Giorgio Agamben, the Italian philosopher, observed that politics today has suffered “a lasting eclipse because it has been contaminated by law, seeing itself, at best, as a constituent power (that is, violence that makes law) Arcana Imperii, Neocolonialism and the Dissidence of Arundhati Roy 61 …the only true political action however is to sever the nexus between violence and law” (Agamben, 2005, p. 88). Such an observation on the suturing of law with state-sponsored violence is highly significant and it does not augur well for the existing juridico-political establishments and institutions. Along with Agamben, other prominent contemporary thinkers who have expressed similar apprehensions about the pathologies and aporias of the modern absolutist states and their totalitarian power are Derrida and Antonio Negri. Earlier, Foucault’s genealogical study of history did unearth the disciplinary technologies through which the state could maintain its biopolitical control but after Foucault, contemporary critical theory has gone further to analyze the intrinsic violent nature of modern states and its doctrine of what Derrida called, lycopolitics (lukos, GK., wolf) (Willis, 2009). It is interesting to note that Arundhati Roy has incorporated these critictheoretical issues concerning state despotism, neo-empire and violation of human rights in her rich corpus of nonfictional works. Her engagement with areas of contemporary praxis has elevated her oeuvre to new ethico-political heights, expanding in the process her fictional avatar to greater horizons of literary activism and emancipatory agenda. Through the sociopolitical diatribes in her nonfictional works such as Listening to Grasshoppers: Field Notes on Democracy, An Ordinary Person’s Guide to Empire and The Algebra of Infinite Justice, Arundhati Roy has interrogated the coercive sham and draconian laws of the comprador democratic states of today which pursue neo-imperial policies.
The present paper would argue that Roy’s concern about the aporias of democracy and consequent state totalitarianism have striking parallels with the writings of contemporary leading European theorists such as Agamben, later Derrida and Antonio Negri.

English Studies, Through, sociopolitical diatribes, nonfictional, Listening, Grasshoppers, Field Notes, Democracy, An Ordinary Person’s Guide, Empire, The Algebra, Infinite Justice, Arundhati Roy, exposed, coercive, sham of today’s comprador, democratic state, neo-imperial policies.