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VII THEORY/PRAXIS COURSE

June 15 – July 11, 2009

Venue: Apostolic Oblates Secular Institute--Spirituality Centre

Manganam, Kottayam, Kerala

 

 

The Forum on Contemporary Theory has been conducting an intensive course in Theory/Praxis since 2003 for the benefit of scholars across disciplines interested in new developments in Theory and their application. The Course includes intensive textual readings in specific areas, supported by seminars and talks on broader but related issues. The Course will be held in the Apostolic Oblates Secular Institute Spirituality Centre, Kottayam, Kerala from June 15 to July 11, 2009 in collaboration with the Department of English, St. Berchmans College, Changnassery, Kerala. The topics which will be addressed in the Course relate to the Forum’s ongoing engagement with such areas as democracy; gender and cultural studies; and violence, particularly as they concern South Asia.

 

COURSE OUTLINES

 

The Course is organized around the following topics to be discussed in-depth by the core faculty, supported by public lectures and mini-seminars by the invited scholars.   

 

1)      Ideas of the Radical Enlightenment (Faculty: Akeel Bilgrami)

 

The course will explore the extent to which certain criticisms of the Enlightenment amount to what might properly be called the 'Radical Enlightenment'.  The range of Enlightenment ideas and ideals will be wide -- literary, philosophical, social and political, as well as fundamental ideas in political economy.  Gandhi's thought will be a central focus and we will look at his conception of nature, science, rationality, truth, experience, and non-violence.  His disagreements with Tagore will provide a good site for exploring the vastly different aspects of Enlightenment and anti-Enlightenment thought in India.  But the focus will by no means be entirely on India. Gandhi's ideas will be situated in genealogical affinities, traceable in  early seventeenth century dissenting ideas in England (well traversed in Christopher Hill's The World Turned Upside Down), through the Romantic traditions of England and Germany,  as well as Nietzsche,  Heidegger and the Frankfurt School (especially Horkheimer and  Adorno), and, of course, Gandhi's own avowed influences: Ruskin, Tolstoy and Thoreau.  Though the prescribed texts the course uses will be restricted to the three items (see below), plus my essays (also mentioned below), the class will be encouraged to read on their own, Nietzsche's 'Birth of Tragedy" and relevant works of the other authors mentioned in the roll-call above.   I want to stress that the course is not meant primarily to be devoted to textual exegesis at all.  Rather the aim will be to see the texts as sites for exploring on our own ideas in Gandhi and in the heterodox elements of the Enlightenment with which they have deep affinities, a source for an interesting and systematic political and philosophical radicalism.  The prescribed texts are:  Hind Swaraj by M.K. Gandhi (Cambridge University edition, edited by Anthony Parel); The Mahatma and the Poet: Letters and Debates between Gandhi and Tagore 1915-1941 (National Book Trust edition, edited by Sabyasachi Bhattacharya);

A Secular Age by Charles Taylor (Harvard, 2007); and the following  five essays with somewhat overlapping themes by Akeel Bilgrami that will be chapters in his forthcoming book “The Radical Enlightment and Gandhi”: ‘Occidentalism: The Very Idea:  An Essay on The Enlightenment and Enchantment’, ‘Democracy and Disenchantment’, ‘Gandhi, Newton, and the Enlightenment’, ‘Gandhi, The Philosopher’ and  ‘Gandhi's Unique Relativism’.

 

 2)      Law’s Imperial Fields (Faculty: Renisa Mawani)

 

Law, colonialism, and imperialism have now become vibrant and exciting fields of study in law and socio-legal studies. In particular, the study of law and colonialism has proliferated as anthropologists, historians, and socio-legal scholars among others have offered case studies and theoretical insights into customary law, legal pluralism, and the outcomes and legacies of law’s imperial reach. As many of these scholars have argued, law  was not merely a tool of the oppressors, nor was it a tactic of resistance alone. Legal imperial regimes were often multiple, overlapping, hybrid, and even incommensurable producing new knowledges, subjectivities, and legal taxonomies as well as coercive and violent conditions of possibility that have left potent residues in the present global order. Indigenous demands for legal recognition in various global contexts (including but not limited to Australia, Canada, and the US), to provide but one example, have activated law’s search for the “original” and “authentic,” colonial subjectivities that were born from the coercion and violence of the colonial encounter itself.  

More recently, geopolitical events from 2001 onwards, alongside shifting constellations of sovereignty and territoriality across the globe, have generated a renewed interest in law and empire. Charges of “lawlessness” and legal coercion have increased and intensified in our troubled global present, especially in Kashmir, Iraq, the West Bank and Gaza, but also elsewhere. Questions of law’s territoriality, law, citizenship, and state sovereignty have (re)surfaced as the “American empire” reaches new populations from Afghanistan to Guantanamo while reminding us of colonialism’s legal and lethal legacies. The newest world order, in short, raises a host of complex questions that demands urgent and continued scholarly attention. This six-day intensive course on “law’s imperial fields” will explore some of the seminal works that have informed and precipitated discussions of law, colonialism, and empire. In particular, we will read the work of scholars who have theorized law’s uneven relationships to colonialism and imperialism – both historically and in more recent moments -- and will discuss their ongoing relevance to our unsettled global present.

3)      Can Learning from the Subaltern Be Helpful for Us? (Faculty: Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak)

 

We are currently rising in geopolitical power. Can learning from the subaltern be helpful for us? What is the advantage of learning to read textually in order to access this task that will be convincing outside of the specialist enclave? I have assigned readings where Indian subaltern space plays a guiding role. I hope to learn from student reaction how to approach these questions. I may assign material from Stathis Gourgouris, Dream-Nation.

 

4)      Globalization, Women, and Gender (Faculty: Esha Niyogi De)

 

Cultural theorists point out that the nature of contemporary global capitalism is double-edged.  On the one hand, we are in the midst of a flexible and multicultural capitalism which distributes opportunities both for upward mobility and for cross-border exchanges to a wider social spectrum than ever before.  Pre-existing divisions of nationality, region, gender, sexuality, race, class and caste appear to be leveling at a rapid rate.  On the other hand, with the increasing transnational mobility of jobs, capital, and people as well as of images and ideas we encounter a new and rigid international division of labor.  Transnational capitalism today utilizes diverse human, cultural, and natural resources at the same time that it reinforces sexual and racial divisions of work, ability, and reward. 

 

In this brief course, we will read representative pieces of Cultural Theory and Transnational Feminist Theory (Marxist, Poststructuralist, Critical Humanist) which account for why these contradictory processes of neoliberal global capitalism enable or exploit women as well as feminized marginal people.  Our focus will be on how large systems of governance are sexualized and racialized in the course of world market formation, and how visual images of people and cultures facilitate the sexual stereotyping because these appeal widely across linguistic regions.  Our aim overall will be to theorize what the difficulties and the possibilities are of building cross-border feminist coalitions to mobilize against imperialist capitalism in our global world. 

 

 5)    What Future for Democracy? (Faculty: Patricia I. Vieira)

 

From its inception in Ancient Greece, democracy has been a contested term to describe a political organization that places the people (demos) at the center of political life. With the rise of liberal democracy in modernity and its spread as the political system adopted by a wide variety of nations in the world, it becomes pressing to analyze the presuppositions and goals of democratic polities. In this seminar we will discuss competing views on the meaning of democracy and the challenges it faces when confronted with globalization by contemporary philosophers and political theorists. We will consider Jacques Derrida’s notion of “democracy to come,” Boaventura de Sousa Santos’ emphasis on an oppositional postmodern democracy emanating from the South, Jacques Rancière’s idea of democracy as a rare moment of political dissidence, often obscured by bureaucracy and habit, and Alain Badiou’s description of democracy as the ultimate political event, among others. In our analysis of these competing views on democracy, we will try to understand the limitations of existing democratic states, and, concomitantly, attempt to probe the boundaries and to define the challenges of democratic politics.

 

 6)       On Suffering: Probing the Limits of Thought (Faculty: Michael Marder)

 

This seminar examines the ways in which the physical experiences of intense pain and suffering have transformed and destabilized contemporary philosophy and culture. First, we read the classical attempts on behalf of Rousseau and Mill to grapple with such experiences that either culminate in romanticizing suffering, or yield an optimistic prognosis for overcoming it. Next, we turn to the functionalization of pain as a mnemonic device in Nietzsche and Freud, as well as to the exhaustion of its function in trauma theory. We consider particular examples of trauma in the testimonies of Holocaust survivors, including Jean Améry and Elie Wiesel, where torture and extreme deprivation both undermine the identities of those who undergo them and fuel the uneasy testimonial

writing process. The seminar concludes with an assessment of the problems associated with the attempts at an artistic expression of pain and suffering. Our key task will be to understand and to sharpen the sense of these problems with the help of such theorists as Theodor Adorno, Elaine Scarry, and Susan Sontag.

 

 COLLABORATION AND ORGANIZATIONAL DETAILS

 

The seventh Theory/Praxis course is jointly organized by the Forum on Contemporary Theory, Baroda and the Department of English, St. Berchmans College, Changnassery. The program will be conducted by a core faculty and invited speakers for a period of four weeks. Study material will be made available to the participants after their registration; the participants are expected to have gone through the material before the commencement of the Course.  Each participant is required to make at least one formal presentation during the course, which will be evaluated by a member of the core faculty. Both faculty and participants are expected to stay together in the same venue for greater interaction and exchange between them.

 

PARTICIPATION CRITERIA

 

Participation in the Course is mainly open to scholars in the humanities and social sciences, preferably those working toward research degrees, but post-graduate students and post-doctoral scholars in these disciplines and scholars from the disciplines outside the humanities and social sciences interested in inter-disciplinary studies can also apply. Maximum number of participants to be selected is 35.

 

REGISTRATION FEE

 

Each participant is required to pay a registration fee of Rs.5000/ (Rupees five thousand only) to the Forum on Contemporary Theory through a bank draft on a bank in Baroda.  The registration fee is non-refundable. The fee will take care of his/her board and lodging, cost of course material and other related expenses. The participants will not be paid by the organizers for their travel.

 

 DEADLINE FOR APPLICATION

 

The last date for receiving application for participation is March 20, 2009. The application may be sent to Director, Centre for Contemporary Theory and General Semantics, Baroda. Selection for participation will be made by March 31. Selected candidates are required to send the bank draft favoring Forum on Contemporary Theory before April 20, 2009. Course material will be mailed only after receiving the registration fee.

 

CORE FACULTY

 

a)      Akeel Bilgrami is the Johnsonian Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Heyman Center for the Humanities at Columbia University, New York. He is the author of Belief and Meaning: The Unity and Locality of Mental Content (Blackwell, 1992) and Self- Knowledge and Resentment (Harvard, 2006).  

 

b)      Renisa Mawani is Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology, The University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada. Her forthcoming book is titled, Colonial Proximities: Crossracial Encounters and Juridical Truths in British Columbia, 1871-1921 (in press, 2009). Her areas of scholarly interest are Law and Society, Sociology of Empire, Legal Geography, Historical Sociology, Postcolonial Theory. 

 

c)      Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak is the University Professor and Director, Institute for Comparative Literature and Society at Columbia University, New York. Her latest publication is Other Asias (Blackwell Publishing, 2008).

 

d)      Esha Niyogi De is on the Faculty of Women’s Studies  at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). She is the Convener and Co-Facilitator of the UCLA Center for the Study of Women Multi-UC-Campus Faculty Research Unit, “Migrating Epistemologies: Feminist, Postcolonial, Transnational.” She is the co-editor of the critical volume Trans-Status Subjects:  Gender in the Globalization of South and Southeast Asia (Duke University Press, 2002). She is completing a single-author book entitled Decolonizing the Individual: Imagining Global Indias. Her research articles have been published in such journals as diacritics; Screen; Genders

.

e)Patricia I. Vieira teaches in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at Georgetown University, Washington D. C., USA. She is the author of the forthcoming book, Seeing Politics Otherwise: Representations of Vision in Latin-American and Iberian Political Fiction, which will be published by the University of Toronto Press.

 

f)        Michael Marder teaches in the Philosophy Department at Georgetown University, Washington D. C., USA. He is the author of Groundless Existence: The Political Ontology of Carl Schmitt, which will be published in 2010 by Continuum Press; The Event of the Thing: Derrida’s Post-Deconstructive Realism, published by the University of Toronto Press in 2009. He has edited the special number of the journal Telos on the topic, “Carl Schmitt and the Event.” His articles on Derrida, Foucault, Adorno, Heiddegger, Levinas are published in such journals as Philosophy Today; Research in Phenomenology; Levinas Studies; Parrhesia, Arché: A Journal of Philosophy; Mosaic; New German Critique; Postmodern Culture.

 

RESIDENCE

 

All the participants (both local and outstation) are required to stay at the venue of the course.  However, the local participants are free to visit their homes on Sundays.

 

ATTENDANCE

 

The participants are required to attend all the sessions and to stay until the end of the program in order to get the certificate of participation.

 

LOCATION

 

Apostolic Oblates Secular Institute--Spirituality Centre, Manganam, Kottayam is at a distance of 7 kms from Kottayam railway station. It can be reached by auto-rickshaw from Kottayam via Kalathipady.  The nearest airport is Cochin (Kochi) which is around 120 kms away. Alleppy beach (Allapuzha), famous for back waters, is only 30 kms away from Kottayam. Other places of interest are Kovalam Beach (125 km), Thekaddy Wild Life Sanctuary (150 km). Kerala is usually cool during the monsoon season of June-July.

 

APPLICATION FORMAT

 

The following format may be used for the application:

Name

Address (including telephone no. and email ID)

Institutional Affiliation

Date of Birth

Department

Teaching Experience (indicate number of years also)

Academic Qualifications

Areas of Research and Teaching

Publications, if any

Specific Research Topics, if any

Whether Registered for Research Degree?

Whether participated in any Course organized by the Forum? If participated, when?

A Brief Statement (150 words) about what you expect to gain from the Course

Names and Addresses of Two Referees

Signature and Date

ADDRESS FOR CORRESPONDENCE

 

Prafulla C. Kar

Director, Centre for Contemporary Theory and General Semantics

304, Siddhi Vinayak Complex

Opp. Alkapuri Side Railway Station

Faramji Road,  Off. R. C. Dutt Road

Baroda 390007

Tel: (0265) 2338067; Email: prafullakar@gmail.com                  

 

P. J. Thomas

Local Coordinator

Department of English

St. Berchmans College, Changnassery 686101, Kerala

Mobile: 09447806302; Email: thomaspathil@gmail.com

 

To:

Head of the Department

Please circulate this flyer among the teachers, research scholars and students of your Department. Thanks for your cooperation.

 

 

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