Broken Men: Reading Ambedkar with Freud

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Abstract: Sawhney’s essay, “Broken Men: Reading Ambedkar with Freud,” pursues some unexpected resonances in the work of these two thinkers. Paying particular attention to the way both thinkers turn to ancient history in order to address the political concerns of the present, the essay notes a kind of repetitive impasse that appears in their writings. Sawhney suggests that the impasse signals, among other things, the impossibility of detaching oneself from the terrain of mourning, as well as of assuming an identity that would not be riven, “broken” or misplaced in some primordial sense.