India, May 30 -- 1You move between philosophy, politics and public writing. How do you describe what you do to readers encountering your work for the first time? In a word, dancing. When you move between these worlds, the only way you can do so is by pirouetting, making sure you take the audience with you, which is very much the way we dance in the Americas. I've never liked being pigeonholed, so perhaps that's why I move between different registers. Right now, for the first time, I'm beginning to work on a novel. I've written poetry before, but the novel is something I've always felt a little fearful about. It's a very different thing to take on. But if you're a writer, there is no reason why you should remain in only one form. 2A big focus of your work is power, but power today feels strangely theatrical - constantly performed, endlessly narrated. Has power today become less real, or simply more visible? Let me be provocative. The reason people focus on power is that power has always been theatrical. In 2024, I published a fiction book which is essentially a rewriting of Popol Vuh, the oldest play-myth we know from Latin America. The protagonists, Ix and Hu, are constantly shifting, neither male nor female, neither this nor that. To me it portrays power in deeply cinematic ways. The dimension of appearance is something we still do not pay enough attention to, which is paradoxical because we live in an intensely visual age. We are constantly surrounded by images, and yet our ability to read them is arguably weaker than that of ancient peoples, such as the Maya. We need to relearn the skill of reading images and understand that our identities are not fixed; they're fluid and in a sense. performative. There is something hopeful about that. It means we can place ourselves in the role of another, which is the antidote to the forms of power that suppress dissent or erase others. 3Has the idea of the public intellectual changed or is it simply being performed on a different platform now? I think it has changed. If you look at the 1960s or 1970s, the public intellectual was more often than not an older Western white man. I love the fact that nowadays, perhaps the most powerful public intellectual is actually a Swedish girl - now a bit older - who showed us that simply walking out of school could begin to change the world. Being a father of two daughters, that really resonates with me, because I feel that [my daughters] are the public intellectuals, not me. Rather than the master who must be followed by the disciples, what we require is a gathering around the hearth, the fire. To exchange our ideas, stories and perspectives and to compose something more powerful together....