Let us first look at how Yōkai — supernatural monsters, spirits, and demons — might teach us to coexist with the world.Footnote 1 How can one coexist with the monster that is the Anthropocene? How may different forms of animismFootnote 2 — contemporary and ancient — explain concepts such as nature, world and society? Questions that arise here pertain to the different senses of coexistence (共生) and symbiosis in Enryō’s work, which are found, for example, in the relationship between Yōkai, animism, the study of Japanese folklore (民俗学), and the Shinto religion (神道). Yet, from the outset, our focus is less on adumbrating Enryō’s analysis of the role of Shinto, the national religion of Japan, in sustaining the national body or state (国体, kokutai; see Staggs, Reference Staggs1983)Footnote 3 during Japan’s fascist period in the first half of the 20th century, nor on the importance and centrality of various forms of Buddhism in Japanese philosophy, but rather on the question of how Yōkaigaku, the study of monsters (妖怪学), may function either to rid the world of superstition (meishin, 迷信) or to be complicit in the reproduction of further untruths and distortion. A critique of both traditional forms of Japanese Buddhism and Timothy Morton’s selective reading of Buddhism (Reference Morton2015) is undertaken to expose, in terms of the latter, Morton’s disingenuous sleight-of-hand of sneaking in animism sous rature.
Inoue EnryōFootnote 4 (1858–1919)
Enryō, sometimes referred to as Professor Yōkai (Yōkai Hakase) or Dr Monster, studied Chinese, Indian and Western philosophy, especially the work of Herbert Spencer, Hegel, and Kant (see Schulzer, Reference Schulzer2019). Aside from a keen interest in modern Western philosophy, he is well known also for his folklore studies or Yōkaigaku (妖怪学). For Enryō, Yōkaigaku is a study that seeks to rationally explain supernatural beliefs.Footnote 5 The remit of his monsterology is premised on verisimilitude, which is to say the systematic and scientific progress towards the truth through the discovering and falsifying of misconceptions. Through ridding mysticism from the Japanese mentality, Enryō envisaged Japan would become a modern nation-state based on Enlightenment goals and thereby capable of competing with the West on an equally intellectual footing. This would be done with Japan’s specific and unique philosophical heritage kept intact as enlightenment, it was argued, was not specific to the West (Schulzer, Reference Schulzer2019, p. 166). What he sought to extract from Western philosophy was a modernising and reformist impulse that he believed would ultimately strengthen Buddhism in Japan.
In 1919 shortly before his death, Enryō wrote a short book called The True Mystery (真怪) — see Josephson (Reference Josephson2006, Reference Josephson2012, Reference Josephson2018). The focus on the concept of true mystery present in this book can be applied to the contemporary concept of the hyperobject. As Josephson explains (Reference Josephson2018), Enryō makes a heuristic distinction between phenomenological monsters (現象的妖怪, genshō-teki yōkai) and transcendental monsters (超理的妖怪, chōri-teki yōkai). In terms of the latter, this is understood in the sense of the absolute truth or the real aspect of all things. For Enryō and in Buddhist terms, what is synonymous with true mystery is the Buddhist idea of Thusness (Tathātā). True mystery cannot be rationally explained by psychological or material causes as such. True mystery is the unfathomable, which in Buddhist terms is existence as such. As Kalmanson explains:
Inoue’s ‘true absolute’ may exceed human comprehension, but it is not contrary to either rationality or scientific inquiry since it is, after all, what is ultimately real. From this perspective, Inoue proposes that Buddhism is better than Christianity at successfully merging the projects of religion, rational philosophy, and science. (Baird Callicott & McRae, Reference Baird Callicott and McRae2016, p. 34)
Like Morton’s sense of hyperobjects, whose scale is somehow beyond human imagination, it is the sense of the monster that transcends knowledge and human rationality. Enryō believed the true monster, the unknowable or unfathomable as such, and although at first glance similar to Kant’s Ding an sich, was not translatable in terms of Western philosophical concepts. The true mystery of the world was somehow inconceivable, beyond Christianity, Hegel’s absolute knowledge and Western metaphysics. Because of this fact, it was the preserve of Buddhism to understand such absolute monsters. Monsterology was thus a form of Buddhist disenchantment, the purging of superstitions within Buddhism on the one hand, and the promotion of further disenchantment within Buddhism itself. This research paradigm had the ultimate goal of returning Buddhism to its proper preoccupation, which is the thought of existence as nothingness as such. Here, and in a precise sense, a distinction can be made between Enryō’s project and Timothy Morton’s position. Why? Despite the desire to think of the object as non-correlated with the subject, the true monster for object-oriented ontology (OOO) remains bound to a phenomenological problem and position, delimited to a phenomenological field. OOO’s description of the hyperobject as somehow cut off from the subject ultimately remains a phenomenological monster. While pure nounema, the thing in itself, lies above and beyond the limits of philosophy and scientific paradigm, and is thus inaccessible to transcendental knowledge as such, for Enryō’s Yōkaigaku the task of rationality is to differentiate phenomenological monsters from absolute monsters. In plainer words, Morton simply cannot get at the absolute monster of existence, which is the object forever withdrawing and deferring its access, and as such, his thinking remains bound and enframed within certain Western philosophical conventions.
The Buddhist philosopher Enryō describes Yōkai as a technical term for all things ‘beyond the realm of explanation’. Yōkai is understood by Enryō in terms of two broad categories — kakai (false or provisional mystery) and shinkai (true mystery) or true supernatural beings (shinsei no yōkai). His philosophy aims to dispel the mythology of the false or provisional mystery as a prelude to revealing the true mystery of the world. Beyond superstition, mistaken or artificial mysteries is the true mystery of the world, the secret at the core of existence, which lies at ‘the heart of the inconceivable’.Footnote 6 The true mystery is a monster [妖怪] that transcends [超絶] human knowledge, which is to say, it is the referent to that which cannot be explained by psychological or material causes. The true mystery of the world are therefore transcendental monsters [超理的妖怪] or absolute monsters [絶対的妖怪].
What is a Hyperobject?
To be is to be monstrous. (Morton, as cited in Hörl & Burton, Reference Hörl and Burton2017)
In recent years and in numerous books, Timothy Morton (Reference Morton2014, Reference Morton2018, Reference Morton2019) has said many thought-provoking statements about the nature of objects and ecology as a discipline. His work is of seminal importance in informing a certain strand of debate about the reality of the Anthropocene that is upon us and the hyperobjects that envelop us. His thinking about the hyperobject (Morton, Reference Morton2014) is especially supplemented by an understanding of the monstrous and how it plays on the modern imagination. The hyperobject is here understood in the sense of objects that have such massive time scales as to be beyond human comprehension. And again, they are understood as ‘things that are massively distributed in time and space relative to humans’ (Morton, Reference Morton2014, p. 1). They are described further as ‘a bundle of entities massively distributed in time and space that forms an entity in its own right’ (Morton, Reference Morton2019). They are determined as having monstrous dimensions because as ‘they so massively outscale us, hyperobjects have magnified this weirdness of things for our inspection: things are themselves, but we can’t point to them directly’ (Morton, Reference Morton2014, p. 12). Examples of hyperobjects include black holes, global warming, oil deposits, mass species extinction, as well as everyday things like styrofoam cups and plastic bags. Morton insists upon the ‘monstrously gigantic’ nature of reality, that is, a reality that is inaccessible to human subjectivity. As he says: ‘We are faced with the task of thinking at temporal and spatial scales that are unfamiliar, even monstrously gigantic’ (Reference Morton2018, p. 25). Consistent with the main premises of speculative realism (Harman, Reference Harman2012; Meillassoux, Brassier, & Badiou, Reference Meillassoux, Brassier and Badiou2017)Footnote 7, which is to say the non-correlationist explanation of objects, Morton’s dark ecology thinks beyond the phenomenological explanation of reality to times and spaces whose dimensions are beyond human experience. These he describes as the ‘absolute past’ and ‘absolute future’ in and through which hyperobjects dwell (Morton, Reference Morton2014, p. 61). He speaks with monsters in mind in terms of a disorientation in thinking that confronts the vast, multiple scale of things: ‘Ecological awareness is disorienting precisely because of these multiple scales. We sense that there are monsters even if we can’t see them directly’ (Morton, Reference Morton2018, pp. 42–43).
Yet to treat the styrofoam cup as a hyperobject that will outlive the lives of many humans for hundreds of years is one thing, but the cup must be understood as manufactured somewhere on this planet by people on this planet for a particular purpose on this planet. It seems to me that a styrofoam so conceived by Morton qua hyperobject conceals a wide array of exploitative social relations. Someone has to make these cups and it is certain that the workers will not be receiving cups of gold for the price of their labour.
Critique of Hyperobject
At first glance and for the most part, the statement that hyperobjects — climate change, mass species extinction and radioactive plutonium and so on — those objects dispersed in time and space — are unfathomable to or inaccessible to subjectivity seems tantamount to a dereliction of critique, a relinquishing of the political and ethical tasks facing humankind. Why? Because the counter-argument here is that hyperobjects are not transcendent in the sense of some godly unknown, but precisely immanent to the world of living creatures, and to the world of materialist, capitalist production. If one entertains this thought further, what becomes clear is that hyperobjects are not beyond the understanding but rather are produced by humankind under specific historical conditions. Yet, as a commodity they take on phantasmagorical qualities.Footnote 8 Indeed, they have an animistic-like mystical aura to them, like we have seen with Yōkai, but the aura that surrounds them is explainable through Marx’s critique and concepts. Yet, while it is hard to concur that the structure of hyperobjects is necessarily inaccessible and can truly only be understood solely from a Buddhist-defined perspective, from non-Western paradigms, from indigenous cultures and mythologies, nevertheless, a monsterology of sorts is vital to disclose the limits of the explainable, the limits of ecological rationality. This is to claim that that which is explainable can be grasped through the critique of the fetish of the hyperobject itself, not through the mysticism of the hyperobject that is Morton’s preoccupation and philosophical gambit.
So, while the focus is on the pedagogical study of objects and things, this has little to do with the ontology of isolated things or objects. Interestingly, new materialism and posthuman feminist theory (Braidotti, as cited in Disch & Hawkesworth, Reference Disch and Hawkesworth2018) are also critical about this trend in object-oriented ontology (OOO) because it is claimed in OOO one finds a fetish with the object as such. On this account, OOO is mistaken in its direction; it is in reality an analysis of commodity fetishism. New materialism and posthuman feminist theory asks: What is the nature of the fetish? Does it confer animus or magic around the object? In this respect, inherent to OOO is a conservatism with respect to the organisation of objects themselves. This is to disregard the everyday lives of women and children, and the concerns of people across the planet, such as poverty, exploitation and slavery. It is an indifference to difference. In this way, OOO is deprived of a social ecological perspective and is vulnerable to the criticisms levelled at deep ecology and postmodernism (Bookchin, Reference Bookchin1995).Footnote 9 Moreover, consistent with Enryō’s distinction between phenomenal and absolute monsters, Morton’s mysticism remains bound to the phenomenal world, the life of the solipsistic mind.
How is it possible to think of the hyperobject as somehow synonymous with the Yōkaigaku of the absolute monster? To what extent does Morton invent his own Yōkai, the Yōkai as hyperobject, the monster invoked as a mystical way to explain Nature, or if you like her absence thereof? How can such an understanding of Yōkai teach humans to coexist with the world? To repeat, for Morton, the hyperobject is monstrous but, in Enryō’s sense, it remains a provisional mystery because it can be explained by science and the human sciences, by an examination of the history of the Industrial Revolution (CO2 in the atmosphere from the burning of fossil fuels). While the true mystery is a philosophical problem par excellence, the hyperobject remains a phenomenological monster [現象的妖怪].
The ecological problems facing mankind are obfuscated further by Morton in his insistence that Marxism only works if it ‘weirdly’ embraces animism. What does this mean? Morton insists that Marxism can successfully decode the environment if and only if it ‘weirdly’ embraces animism and thinks the non-human as such. He writes:
Marxism doesn’t work and therefore will not survive without including nonhuman beings. And including nonhuman beings implies including spectrality. And this means tables can dance. And this means the distinction between ‘lifeform’ and ‘table’ breaks down in some sense … Marxism only works if it weirdly embraces animism. (Morton, Reference Morton2019, p. 97)
What would Marxism look like if it adopted such an analysis of animism? The objection here can be put thus: As Marxism has already adopted animism in its analysis of commodity fetishism, is it here that one can discern a form of commodity fetishism in Morton’s own ontology? Why? In order to think the ineffable, Morton looks beyond reason, beyond the brooding and isolated human, beyond the rational subject trying to make sense of the world. As he wants to get at the objects themselves, to get at the non-correlated objects themselves, the rational subject is necessarily jettisoned and mysticism embraced. Indeed, Morton insists it is a certain form of Western rationality that produces monsters. It is this which he objects to. He cites Deleuze and Guattari (Reference Deleuze and Guattari1983) in Anti-Oedipus: ‘It is not the slumber of reason that engenders monsters, but vigilant and insomniac rationality’ (p. 112). But, unlike the move by Morton to denounce the correlating subject, Deleuze and Guattari are not arguing for a new form of mysticism to replace a sleepless and obsessive form of rationality. Much like the Frankfurt school, Deleuze and Guattari are critiquing a specific and instrumental form of rationality that sustains a deadly form of mysticism. However, Morton argues that monstrousness and illusoriness are synonymous. In trying to think of Nature without the human, Morton writes: ‘What we call Nature is monstrous and mutating, strangely strange all the way down and all the way through’ (Morton, Reference Morton2010, p. 61). Nature has a ‘truly monstrous’, uncanny and non-human dimension. Our objection here is the following: that which is the absolute monster, to use Enryō’s distinction again, is the unthinkable itself, which is namely death as time-in-itself. Death as time-in-itself has monstrous, unfathomable proportions. Land, Mackay, and Brassier (Reference Land, Mackay and Brassier2018) write:
The apprehension of death as time-in-itself = intensive continuum degree-o is shared by Spinoza, Kant, Freud, Deleuze and Guattari, and Gibson (amongst others). It is nominated variously: substance, pure apperception, death-drive, body without organs, cyberspace matrix. Beyond its oedipal sense as end of the person, death is an efficient virtual object inducing convergence. (pp. 369–270)
While the hyperobject thus appears opaque and impenetrable, one must extend this further and insist that what is inconceivable is to think of a world-without-us (Harman, Reference Harman2012; Lyotard, Reference Lyotard1988; Thacker, Reference Thacker2011), of a world-in-itself without a subject to recognise it as such. This is to take nihilism to deeper pessimistic, atheistic and inhuman levels (Brassier, Reference Brassier2010). This is the logical outcome of Morton’s analysis, an outcome that he cannot countenance. On this dark logic, one must go beyond 19th century conception of nihil as found in Schopenhauer: ‘this very real world of ours, with all its suns and galaxies, is — nothing’ (Reference Schopenhauer1969, p. 412). As a thought-experiment, geo-trauma (Land, Mackay, and Brassier, Reference Land, Mackay and Brassier2018) then is to countenance the monster at the end of the world, the world-without-us. This is to begin to appreciate the true scale of the universe, the true mystery of the world, the absolute monster of the world. It is to understand that as a species humans are nowhere in the universe. As death is time-in-itself, one is always heading toward death, in death, approaching death, immersed in it. This appears a truer way to understand the absolute horror and absolute monster, which is the hyperobject as mass species extinction. If Morton wants to get at the absolute monster of the hyperobject he must push his own metaphysical misanthropy and cosmic pessimism further and perhaps even more recklessly strip his vision of the world of both the passive nihilism of Buddhism and the residual trace of phenomenology in his work (Morton, Reference Morton2015). He needs to exorcise the phenomenological monsters (a critique of Buddhism and mysticism tested for verisimilitude) to countenance the absolute monster defined as death as time-in-itself. It is true that in his work there is a sense of the ecstasy of catastrophe and thrill in the inhuman world as absolute zero, but it is underdeveloped and warped by an imported and misunderstood form of Buddhist thinking. As such, he cannot get at the absolute monster of the non-correlated object, nor can he adopt the post-anthropocentrism found in the weird realism of OOO after the human (Harman, Reference Harman2012; Thacker, Reference Thacker2011).
Let us explore a little further Morton’s reasoning on the nature of the monster. In the concept of the ‘uncanny monster’ Morton claims he finds a way to escape a certain form of Western, dualistic logic. This is the uncanny valley of the law of non-contradiction. The transilient being of the monster, the being of the hyperobject, is explained through the law of non-contradiction. For Morton, the monster qua hyperobject can necessarily be one thing and another. It can have an abstract and concrete reality. Or, as he says:
[B]lack holes are hyperobjects; nuclear materials such as uranium and plutonium, with their deep-time half-lives, are hyperobjects; global warming and mass species extinction are hyperobjects. We know, we live with, the local effects of these phenomena, but mostly they are quite literally beyond our ken. In one sense they are abstractions; in another they are ferociously, catastrophically real. (Morton, as cited in Malone, Reference Malone2018, p. 248)
However, because Morton considers hyperobjects to be monstrous, he has a problem, because they must be seen under a philosophical analysis of animism under erasure (sous rapture). In Humankind, he describes ecological beings as ‘spectral’, as neither real nor unreal:
The more we think ecological beings — a human, a tree, an ecosystem, a cloud — the more we find ourselves obliged to think them not as alive or dead, but as spectral. The more we think them, the more we discover that such beings are not solidly ‘real’ nor completely ‘unreal’ — in this sense, too, ecological beings are spectral. Since the difference between life and non-life is neither thin nor rigid, we discover that biology and evolution theory are actually telling us that we coexist with and as ghosts, specters, zombies, undead beings and other ambiguous entities, in a thick, fuzzy middle region excluded from traditional Western logic. (Morton, Reference Morton2019)
As this ‘thick, fuzzy middle region’ is excluded from traditional Western rationality, Morton argues: ‘What we call Nature is monstrous and mutating, strangely strange all the way down and all the way through place has emerged in its truly monstrous uncanny dimension, which is to say its non-human dimension’ (Morton, Reference Morton2019). The uncanny valley undermines any rigid distinction between man and machine, human and the non-human world:
Ecological awareness takes place on the Spectral Plain, whose distortion, the Uncanny Valley, separates the human and nonhuman worlds in a rigid way that spawns the disavowed region of objects that are also subjects — because that is just what they are in an expanded nonbio-political sense. I have called this animism … but it would be better to write it with a line through it, as I commonly do: animism. A rigid and thin concept of Life is what dark ecology rejects. (Morton, Reference Morton2018, p. 137)
Conclusion
In this article, a consideration has been given to how Yōkai, Yūrei, animism and the Buddhist-oriented worldview raise important ethical and ecological issues about the present world by beckoning humans into the abyss of horror, mystification and passivity. Yet the argument has been that all too often this leaves us without a social critique of the present, without a critique of capitalism in its hyper-excrescent iteration and the prevalent nihilistic desire for gleeful, destructive jouissance. Timothy Morton’s mystification of the hyperobject, informed by his Buddhist-inflected interpretation of OOO — what I name a form of fetishism — the phantasmagorical embodiment of a supernatural power — has been found wanting, because his articulation of the hyperobject qua animism under erasure is ultimately bereft of political import. It does not assist in the remapping of environmental education. He has no political response to the crisis of the present moment aside from a relapse into mysticism, pseudo-science and pseudo-philosophy. Look, for example, at Living in the Future’s Past (Bridges et al., Reference Bridges, Kucera, Swift, Sellers, Clark, Mlodinow, Morton and Ciancia2018). In this 2018 film, Morton appears among scientists, ecologists and climate experts and speaks as a representative of the philosophical community on a variety of matters. On one occasion he speaks on the philosophical question of need and says the following incomprehensible utterance:
Need, the word, can mean, strongly desired, can’t it? Like ‘I really need a bar of chocolate’. And I’m afraid to say, that from my point of view, I’m sure Neanderthals would have totally loved Coca Cola Zero. They look really good and pure because they didn’t have it … but presumably they got the same nervous system. If it’s true that Neanderthals would have also become addicted to Angry Birds, there’s something true in contemporary society, it’s saying something true about ancient people.
Throughout the film, this sort of nonsense upon nonsense is repeated. As this makes no sense whatsoever, I am of the view that such mysticism and sophistry ultimately harms philosophy’s image and its overall response to the Anthropocene. Morton’s mystical empiricism adds little to environmental education other than a demonstration of the passive nihilism in those who have found happiness in withdrawal from the world (Haar, as cited in Allison, Reference Allison1977, p. 24).
Yet, oddly enough, it is in Enryō’s philosophy and his knowledge of Japanese folklore, and in particular the question of the monster that a demonstrative appreciation is given on how the phantasmagorical and its critique played an integral role in the production of modernity during the Japan’s modernisation. Akin to Enryō’s pedagogical move, the reassessment of Enlightenment beliefs is essential to warding off the mystification of the object in the present moment. The interesting pedagogical and heuristic pedagogical tools in Enryō’s work help to differentiate the sense of coexistence with phenomenological monsters [現象的妖怪] — which we have found in Morton’s work — with the sense of the transcendental monster (超理的妖怪) in Enryō’s own work (which he insists is the true preserve of Buddhism).
Yet, an aporia is left unresolved. For on the one hand there is resistance to the mysticism of the world (in Morton’s Buddhist-inflected interpretation of OOO) and on the other there is the reassertion of Enlightenment beliefs. In between these two poles, I find myself searching for a third way, a transversal, transilient, equivocal, trembling or quaking pedagogy between the two. I am caught between two positions. One that resists the mysticism of the world and one that attempts to reassert Enlightenment and scientific beliefs. However much one may sympathise with Morton on the need to respond to the climate reality at our door, his mysticism and animistic yearning undermines the overall thrust of his work.
Furthermore, it seems that Morton introduces the very idea of metanarrative back into philosophy through his idea of hyperobjects. In his work there is an incredulity toward credulity itself: ‘Our ecological devastation has summoned these Cthulhu-like hyperobjects to terrorize us’ (Morton, Reference Morton2011, p. 84). There is no attempt to overcome the incredulity and terror, no attempt to overcome the fear, fright, dread and angst in the wake of the Anthropocene. There is no attempt to overcome the absolute monster of the Anthropocene and the grave threat to human life made manifest through climate change. Left flummoxed and paralysed, incredulous towards the metanarrative of the Anthropocene, the isolated, brooding consciousness merely witnesses the withdrawal of hyperobjects from the understanding. One response to this sense of theoretical paralysis is to understand the manifold, infinite phenomenon of the object itself. This can be undertaken through Sartre’s notion of the transphenomenal (Sartre, Richmond, & Moran, Reference Sartre, Richmond and Moran2018), which grants a sense to the object that one can never be fully described or captured. However, this would be unacceptable for Morton as this would necessitate a recognition of phenomenology’s role in understanding the object as such. Morton has nowhere left to go.
Apart from the diffused sense of mysticism in his oeuvre, the main objection to Morton is found in the fetishisation of hyperobjects. His theory of hyperobjects debars analysis of social relations that are the root and branch cause of the excessive exploitation of natural resources. The task of environmental education and philosophy as such is to decode these social relations in the present and for the sake of the present. What is implicit in Morton’s discussion of OOO is therefore the unanswered question of commodity fetishism. The task of environmental education is to find a pedagogy to understand the social relations which lie behind objects. The idea of hyperobjects as a form of animism, however much under erasure, remains a mysticism; it hides the fact that there are real social relations that linger behind hyperobjects.
I remain therefore apoplectic towards hyperobjects and critical of the residual mystical form of animism in Morton’s iteration. I am apoplectic towards the idea promoted in Morton’s self-serving Buddhism that states I should overcome my animus towards animism in order to find a new nirvana and passivity vis-à-vis the withdrawn hyperobject. Morton’s bizarre point of view asks us to form a kind of detachment from hyperobjects, to withdraw from the trauma of hyperobjects, to become otherworldy, to be done with the angst regarding the object. In Morton’s work, there is a dual withdrawal. From the site of non-correlationism, there is a withdrawal of hyperobjects from a subject-centred position and from the Buddhist perspective where the traumatised subject itself withdraws from its messy, embodied world, from the world of real men and women and their fight for environmental rights and freedoms. For the latter position, it is better to think the infinite or absolute monster than the angst of the everyday. In the end, I believe it is the task of philosophy to reject mysticism and defend rationality and explanation from a growing band of detractors. While not agreeing with the ground of Enryō’s philosophy, the point is that his division between phenomenological and ontological monsters is a heuristic means to clarify the task ahead, which is to say to understand the effects of hyperobjects such as radiation and oil pollution on not only inorganic matter but also the living beings that dwell there.
Joff P.N. Bradley is associate professor in the Faculty of Foreign Languages at Teikyo University in Tokyo, Japan. He has co-authored Deleuze and Buddhism and co-written A Pedagogy of Cinema and co-edited Educational Philosophy and New French Thought and Principles of Transversality in Globalization and Education with David R. Cole. Bradley is visiting professor at Jamia Millia Islamia University in New Delhi, India and visiting fellow at the Global Center for Technology in Humanities at Kyung Hee University, in Seoul, South Korea.
