Two lectures on time and ideology: January 23 and 24

By Dilip -
NB: For those interested, I am presenting two lectures next week, one on Tuesday, January 23 at IIT, Delhi; and at Sri Aurobindo Centre for Arts and Communication (SACAC), on Wednesday, January 24. The details are given below. DS

International Conference, The Present of the Day 
January 22-23, 2018; 09:30 AM to 05:30 PM
Department of Humanities & Social Sciences, IIT Delhi
in collaboration with ICSSR and Institut Français, Delhi
Event Venue: Senate Hall, First Floor, Main Building
Department of Humanities & Social Sciences, IIT Delhi
For more information visit: http://hss.iitd.ac.in/news/present-day
Those who wish to attend may register here: http://hss.iitd.ac.in/event/present-day

My presentation is on January 23. My presentation is at 10 am

The title and abstract are as follows:

In Time to Come: ideological existence as escape from the present

Abstract: The public consumption of ideology manifests three things: the secularisation of theodicy in the form of the nationalisation of God/ deification of the Party; the replacement of the supra-sensible realm by the Future; and the semantic cum moral erosion of language via radical alterity. The essence of ideologically-sustained life is a relentless attempt at mastering the past on behalf of a hoped-for glorious future. The ramifications are nothing short of the annihilation of truth, life and time. The submersion of existence into dream-like transience stabilises the universal sovereignty of capital. Ideological alchemy transmutes humans and natural life into resource material for the future, enabling capital to inhabit the present.

*********************************************************************

Moving Image: Open Form, a six month course in filmmaking (MIC)
Sri Aurobindo Centre for Arts and Communication (SACAC)
Sri Aurobindo Society, Shaheed Jeet Singh Marg, Adchini, New Delhi
24 January 2018 Wednesday 11.30am
Creative Documentary Course (CDC) classroom, ground floor

After Discourse

Abstract: The appearance of the term 'post-truth' is another step toward the ongoing dissolution of meaning. The long-standing rebellion against truth has now become a means whereby the problems confronting humanity are dismissed by resort to relativism, linguistic dodges and the conflation of knowledge with opinion. The domination of the public sphere by ideology has rendered all this acceptable to sizeable sections of the intelligentsia and public. The academic fascination with 'multiple narratives' versus 'grand narratives' has contributed to a situation wherein there are no standards of meaningful speech whatsoever. Is speech about ecological catastrophe and nuclear contamination not a 'meta-narrative'? The very ubiquity of 'narrative' (words like 'account' or 'version' have gone out of use) is a result of the popularity of 'deconstruction' in disciplines related to literature and media. 

Having politically abolished objectivity and truth in favour of 'multiple narratives', the protagonists of deconstruction are now faced with Presidents who deny climate change and Prime Ministers who speak of rhinoceri being culled to make room for Bangladeshi infiltrators. But if everything is interpretation and perspective, how may we contest anything anyone says? 

Scepticism is a necessary corrective to dogmatism, but if there are no normative foundations upon which to make moral judgements, if all we have is permanent scepticism, why and how should we act at all? Why is it desirable to resist domination rather than to accept it ? Radical alterity and exclusive identity have undermined first principles such as truth and goodness - principles that lie at the heart of human speech. If cultural, communal ethnic identity is permitted to supervene human identity, the very possibility of communication - the basis of social life - is destroyed. 

Ours is an age of ideology. Ideology is a means of escaping the present; it enables the submersion of everyday existence into dream-like transience. Ideologically-sustained life is a relentless deferral of presence on behalf of a hoped-for glorious future. If the criterion of truth is not agreement with reality, but agreement with the spirit of a nation, class or caste, we are left with neither knowledge nor wisdom, but an activist recipe for endless conflict and linguistic chaos. Ideology denies the inherent value of thought; it weaponises the mind. The preoccupation with the future and the endless dissolution into multiplicity are both expressions of contemporary nihilism. The ramifications are nothing short of the annihilation of truth and life.  

Popular posts from this blog

Third degree torture used on Maruti workers: Rights body

By Dilip -
The People’s Union for Democratic Rights on Tuesday alleged that third degree torture methods were used by the Gurgaon Criminal Investigation Agency while interrogating workers of Maruti Suzuki India Limited’s Manesar plant who are accused of involvement in the killing of an HR manager and the violent attack at the plant on July 18. The PUDR alleged that the Gurgaon CIA investigation “did not seem” to be directed at solving the crime or probing the involvement of the arrested workers in the incidents and crimes recorded in the FIR but instead was based on their involvement in trade union activities. Grave doubts  “The use of third degree torture in police custody, and the securing of arrestees’ signatures on blank papers by the police, gives rise to grave doubts regarding the ability of such an investigation in effectively identifying or arresting those guilty. The police and the State seem keener to reassure Maruti Suzuki Ltd. and ensure that production continues,” the PUDR stat
Read more

Haruki Murakami: On seeing the 100% perfect girl one beautiful April morning

By Dilip -
According to Murakami, “1Q84” is just an amplification of one of his most popular short stories,   which (in its English version) is five pages long. “Basically, it’s the same,” he told me. “A boy meets a girl. They have separated and are looking for each other. It’s a simple story. I just made it long.” One beautiful April morning, on a narrow side street in Tokyo's fashionable Harujuku neighborhood, I walked past the 100% perfect girl. Tell you the truth, she's not that good-looking. She doesn't stand out in any way. Her clothes are nothing special. The back of her hair is still bent out of shape from sleep. She isn't young, either - must be near thirty, not even close to a "girl," properly speaking. But still, I know from fifty yards away: She's the 100% perfect girl for me. The moment I see her, there's a rumbling in my chest, and my mouth is as dry as a desert..." read the story: http://www.youmightfindyourself.com/post/22131227
Read more

The Almond Trees by Albert Camus (1940)

By Dilip -
Image
'Do you know', Napoleon once said to Fontanes, 'what astounds me most about the world?  The impotence of force to establish anything.  There are only two powers in the world: the sword and the mind.  In the end, the sword is always conquered by the mind' Conquerors, you see, are sometimes melancholy.  They have to pay some price for so much vainglory. But what a hundred years ago was true of the sword is no longer true today of the tank. Conquerors have made progress, and the dismal silence of places without intelligence has been established for years at a time in a lacerated Europe. At the time of the hideous wars of Flanders, Dutch painters could still perhaps paint the cockerels in their farmyards. The Hundred Years War has likewise been forgotten, and yet the prayers of Silesian mystics still linger in some hearts. But today, things have changed; the painter and the monk have been drafted - we are one with the world.  The mind has lost that regal certainty which a c
Read more

Rudyard Kipling: critical essay by George Orwell (1942)

By Dilip -
Mother of Cities to me, For I was born in her gate, Between the palms and the sea, Where the world-end steamers wait  Rudyard Kipling , To the City of Bombay "Few people who have criticized England from the inside have said bitterer things about her than this gutter patriot" : George Orwell IT WAS a pity that Mr. Eliot should be so much on the defensive in the long essay with which he prefaces this selection of Kipling's poetry, but it was not to be avoided, because before one can even speak about Kipling one has to clear away a legend that has been created by two sets of people who have not read his works. Kipling is in the peculiar position of having been a byword for fifty years. During five literary generations every enlightened person has despised him, and at the end of that time nine-tenths of those enlightened persons are forgotten and Kipling is in some sense still there. Mr. Eliot never satisfactorily explains this fact, because in answering the shal
Read more

Satyagraha - An answer to modern nihilism

By Dilip -
NB: This is the text of my address to the Eighth East-West Inter-cultural Relations Conference held at Ramjas College, the University of Delhi, on March 17.  The details of the conference may be read here . A pdf file of the address is downloadable here  -  DS Satyagraha - An answer to modern nihilism Dilip Simeon Keynote address to the Eighth East-West Inter-cultural Relations Conference Ramjas College, March 17-18 2016 Zilu stopped for the night at Stone Gate. The gatekeeper said, Where are you from? Zilu said, From the household of Confucius. The gatekeeper said, The one who knows there’s nothing that can be done but keeps on trying?  -  from the Analects of Confucius (14:40) What is truth? asked jesting Pilate, and would not stay for an answer – Francis Bacon In fact it is more correct to say Truth is God than to say God is Truth – Mohandas Gandhi Introduction: The human being is the speaking animal, the discerner of good and evil. This featur
Read more

Three Versions of Judas: Jorge Luis Borges

By Dilip -
Image
In  Asia Minor or in Alexandria, in the second century of our faith (when Basilides was announcing that the cosmos was a rash and malevolent improvisation engineered by defective angels), Nils Runeberg might have directed, with a singular intellectual passion, one of the Gnostic monasteries. Dante would have destined him, perhaps, for a fiery sepulcher; his name might have augmented the catalogues of heresiarchs, between Satornibus and Carpocrates; some fragment of his preaching, embellished with invective, might have been preserved in the apocryphal Liber adversus omnes haereses  or might have perished when the firing of a monastic library consumed the last example of the  Syntagma . Instead, God assigned him to the twentieth century, and to the university city of Lund. There, in 1904, he published the first edition of  Kristus och Judas ; there, in 1909, his masterpiece  Dem hemlige Frälsaren  appeared. (Of this last mentioned work there exists a German version,  Der heimliche Heilan
Read more

Albert Camus's lecture 'The Human Crisis', New York, March 1946. 'No cause justifies the murder of innocents'

By Dilip -
The morning after a great historical crisis, you feel as sad and sick as after a heavy night. But there is no aspirin for historical hangovers .. The world is no longer divided into the just or unjust, but into masters and slaves. He who is right is he who enslaves.  Albert Camus     La crise de l'homme : THE HUMAN CRISIS   (Text read by Viggo Mortensen on March 28 2016)   Ladies and Gentlemen: when I was invited to give a series of lectures in the United States of America, I felt some doubt and hesitation. I am really not old enough to give lectures, and I am more at ease with the process of thinking than I am making categorical statements... since I don't feel I have any claim on what is generally called the truth. I shared this reservation and was very politely told that my personal opinion didn't matter. What mattered was that I'd be able to offer some facts about France so that my listeners could form their own opinions. It was then suggested that I might
Read more