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Thinking the moment of the originary : memory and the paradoxes of re-turning
Get PDFFocusing on the paradoxes of thinking the originary, this essay attempts to explore the contingencies and ambivalences shaping the modalities of memory and turning. Examining the role time and presence play in enabling the thinking of turning, the conceptual specificities constituting time in terms of linearity are here opened up in terms of the contingent relationalities (un)tying time, memory, and presence. On this ground this essay turns towards Bergson and Heidegger’s views on time and explores the problematic turns characterising such views. Reflecting on how the thinking of turning in terms of linear, homogenous time enables the signification of originary, and foregrounding the (im)possibility of turning towards the originary, this essay gestures towards acknowledging the continuous negotiations and movements of simultaneity that constitute any attempt at turning. Here are no messianic claims to alterity, or to radically rethink time and the originary, but rather a questioning of the paradoxes of any such attempts, with the cautionary awareness, however, that any such attempt remains operative always as one of many partial, ambivalent, and contingent turns.peer-reviewe
Reading the question of nationalism with Deleuzian ‘concept’
Get PDFThe paper attempts to read together two otherwise unrelated questions – Deleuze’s views on philosophy and the question of nationalism in India – to explore what both can offer to each other without reducing the specificity of each. The paper, however, attempts to do this also keeping in mind two immediately topical concerns: the rising popularity of Deleuze studies in India and the political debates concerning nationalism. With such an attempt at reading one concept in an-other’s context, the paper thus attempts to raise broader questions concerning the conceptualisation of nationalism, philosophy and politics. Aiming to explore such concerns from the question of ‘other’, the approach can be summed in the following entangled sequences: conceptualising nationalism in relation to minoritarian perspectives, politics in relation to philosophy and western ideas in relation to non-western contexts. The paper, however, engages in such an approach as a cautionary experimentation of reading entanglements, divergences and contingencies without searching for some corrective or messianic possibilities
Caste, Reading-habits and the Incomplete Project of Indian Democracy: Bluestone Rising Scholar Honorable Mention 2021
No full textEmphasizing on the functioning of caste as embodiment, this paper attempts to show how the internalization of dominant caste-based framework(s) shapes our habits of thinking which include epistemological and pedagogical orientations as well. The paper briefly traces how such frameworks have settled through historical shifts and shaped dominant imagination of the nation’ that has appropriated caste-system as its essence. To show such making of a dominant framework of caste and Hindu-nation, the paper briefly turns towards nineteenth century Bengal, both as a reminder of the many forms of dwelling within vernacular communities and how such multiplicities came to be reduced within a hegemonic framework of majoritarian Hindu- nation. Such making, the paper submits, shapes a doubleness of the decolonial project of nation-making which finds its paradoxical settlement within the postcolonial democratic framework through the embodiment of the majoritarian (casteist) framework of Hindu-nation. The paper, therefore, examines how such problems of embodiment become an infrastructural problem that haunt one’s everyday imagination, and therefore calls for creation of infrastructures that can enable a training of imagination to unlearn such embodied frameworks of segregation. As one such small onto- epistemological possibility, the paper examines the role of aesthetic education and its suspending potentials
Why all the Fuss about Purity?:: Un/Touch-ability and the Paradox of Hygienic Bodies
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Focusing on the question of untouchability and how a discourse of hygiene comes to justify it in the recent times, the paper attempts a brief genealogy tracing the linking of caste and the concept of hygiene. Trying to open up the entanglements that enable such linking, the paper goes deeper into the issues of sedimentation and embodiement that enable such continuity of caste discrimination. With such an approach the paper presents caste as a ghost and thus engages further on the contingencies haunting any attempt to theorize a ghost. It is herein that the paper calls for the urgency to engage more critically with the idea-matter embrace (instead of seeing them as detached) that constitute the elementary aspects of practicing caste: touch, purity and body
Remembering Heterodox Pre/Colonial Oral Cultures in (Re)Organising Bengali Dalit Literary Histories
Get PDFThe paper explores what a (re)organisation of the existing histories of Bangla literature from Dalit literary perspectives can offer. Towards this end, it examines some of the early questions on the formation of literary standards and how that remained directly connected with caste hierarchies. It turns briefly towards late eighteenth and early nineteenth century Calcutta as a discursive-material site to explore symptomatically how such organising of dominant literary standards works its way through various forms of exclusion. When seen from the perspective of these exclusions, what does the question of Dalit literature offer in transforming the very idea of ‘literariness’? Also, what can the vernacular literatures offer in the reception of Dalit literatures in their multiplicity while resisting the tendencies of homogenising their volatility? Addressing such concerns, the paper turns towards a conceptualisation of Bangla Dalit literature as offering a poetics for multiple forms of dwelling
Memory and the Writing of (Un)Time: Being, Presence and the Possible
Get PDFFocusing on the philosophical puzzle of time and its relation with being and presence the paper explores the volatile relationalities un/tying them in shaping our conceptualisation of memory as re-turning. With such an approach the paper analyses the paradoxes that always haunt any attempt at thinking time, being and presence in their specificity as well as within their general embrace. It is through such play of the specific and general, the paper submits, that the thinking of memory and its acts of re-turning comes to be conceptualised in terms of linear, teleological, homogenous understanding of continuity. Turning towards Bergson and Heidegger’s approaches to the question of time, presence and being the paper attempts to open-up the layered paradoxes that not only shape any act of turning but also the thinking of possible itself as a general category for conceptualising memory as re-turning. Bringing in the question of language and its ontological and temporal concerns, the paper thus brings in the concept of “poetics” to hint at the continuous negotiation that thinking of such interstices in language demands. It is towards such contingencies of the (un)timely, the paper submits, that any attempt at thinking memory as re-turning gestures
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Get PDFThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Introduction: : New Materialism(s) and the Question of the Non-human
Get PDFThis introduction attempts to briefly trace the diverse cartographies and philosophical lineages of new materialism. It charts their multidirectional, multispecies, multidisciplinary orientations in the attempt to liberate conceptualizations of matter and materiality beyond the limits of anthropocentrism and dualistic frameworks of humanist scholarship. However, such attempts don’t remain completely free from contradictions and the introduction, therefore, simultaneously traces the dialogic and critical approaches within new materialist scholarship that accepts their limitations and urges on the necessity of continuous generation of newer ways of questioning and rethinking materiality. The introduction, therefore, attempts to remind that neither the question of matter nor the epistemological approaches of new materialism are one. With such a brief tracing of the essentially pluralistic character of new materialism, the introduction, therefore, gathers together the thematic concerns of this volume, and how the essays engage with cautious experimentations on what the doing of new materialisms in newer, non-western contexts can offer for a fresh re-examination of non-human matters as well as enabling newer ways of engaging with new materialist scholarships
Variations on the Author
Get PDF“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
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