Comparative Political Theory and Heterology

One of the central difficulties for practitioners of cognate disciplines like comparative political theory and comparative philosophy concerns the hermeneutic problem of understanding that which is different. The philosophical challenge, put briefly, is this: Is it possible to bring something of an entirely different order into our world of understanding without imposing our own epistemological categories and civilizational prejudices on it? This essay focuses on recent exemplary work in comparative political theory that has explicitly grappled with this issue. Examined here are three models of encountering and learning from different traditions of thought—the models of existential immersion, conversion, and pilgrimage—as exemplified in the contributions by Farah Godrej, Leigh Jenco, and J. L. Mehta. The essay shows that while the first two authors have sought to resolve the problem of the encounter with difference methodologically (Godrej) and epistemologically (Jenco), their respective solutions remain implicitly bound to a spectator theory of knowledge. This becomes especially evident when their work is contrasted with Mehta’s own. Unlike Godrej and Jenco, Mehta does not view difference as a problem to be resolved. The advantage of his approach, I argue, is that it provides liberation from the rigid subject-object dichotomy which encourages the view that the ‘objects’ of our knowledge exist prior to and wholly apart from the act of knowing. Mehta’s work, therefore, opens the possibility for redirecting our attention to a question that has thus far been thoroughly avoided in the consolidation of the subfield: the question of the very constitution of difference or heterology.