Ambedkar’s Śūnyatā and the Impermanence of the Theologico-Political

This article engages with B. R. Ambedkar as political philosopher and key contributor to debates on global democracy and the genealogy of democratic ideas outside the West. I focus specifically on Ambedkar’s use of Buddhist philosophy and the concept of śūnyatā or emptiness/impermanence, which plays a central role in his search for a non-theological democratic politics. In order to explore the implications of such a politics, the article brings Ambedkar into conversation with Claude Lefort and his theorization of the relationships among politics, religion, and democracy. Through this reading, Ambedkar’s political philosophy becomes legible not only as a profound challenge to what Lefort has called the “permanence of the theologico-political” but also as a radical way of combining everyday political practice with an emphatic notion of negative identity.