'Atlantic
Rim': Chomsky v. Zizek The Nation - Aug 15, 2013
All Roads Lead to Jerusalem! - What
do Indians Need: A History or the Past – S.N. Balagangadhara February
16, 2012 The ideologues of the Sangh Parivar, in their haste to capture
political power, in their utter and total ignorance of the western culture, are
pushing a Christian religious theme on to the Indian culture. Reconceptualizing
India Studies by Balagangadhara – a new book How to speak for the Indian
traditions: an agenda for the future – SN Balagangadhara
What a Secularist can and
should be Proud of? - Aravindan Neelakandan Independence
Day Special: An Indian secularist should be proud of Hindutva and should be
ashamed of pseudo-secularism
- The moment of silence
- The crows and the
parasitic koel: a kavi’s take
- Big
science and grant-driven science and how discoveries are made
The
Advance of Indian Philosophy in the Work of J. N. Mohanty ... Stephen
H. Phillips
Mohanty’s
work suggests that we specialists need to think more about topics and less
about schools and individual thinkers. Mohanty draws from inter-school debates
without regard for niceties of attribution, and flushes out positions for their
intrinsic interest apart from historical setting. At the heart of philosophy
are, after all, issues, views, and arguments, not persons. Mohanty’s
vision is, instead, the revitalization of Indian philosophy through
continued work that accepts many uniquely classical Indian assumptions and
much of an interlocking scheme of categories while making improvements
and refinements. The real possibility for this is connected with, in
Mohanty’s view, thought’s ability to transcend culture, or, as he puts it,
the life-world.
Polymorphously
Perverse Nature Posted by
larvalsubjects August 17, 2013
Nature
is auto-constructing without a constructor, not designed. In short, we must
build a concept of nature as polymorphously perverse and differential. The
polymorphous, of course, refers to that which is capable of taking on a variety
of different forms. Far from being characterized by ineluctability and
necessity, life testifies to the essential plasticity and creativity of nature.
In a Freudian framework, the “perverse” refers to that which deviates
from its aim. For example, the oral drive is “perverse” in that it aims
not at sustenance, but at the pleasure of orality. The oral drive,
as it were, subverts the teleology of the mouth and tongue. In this
regard, Freud gave us a non-teleological account of sexuality. Despite
all of is problems, the novelty of Freud’s account of sexuality lies in having
decoupled the sexual and reproductive. Within a Freudian
framework, we reproduce because of sexuality– as an accidental
by-product of sexuality –we do not have sexuality for the sake
of reproduction. Sexuality, in a Freudian framework, is
inherently queer; even in heterosexual contexts.
Surprisingly,
it was Darwin Darwin
Latour
tirelessly makes exactly this point. The aim is not to erase signification– as
I quite explicitly say in this post –but to challenge that sort of linguistic
and semiotic imperialism. Obviously, as Latour points out, assemblages
involving humans involve components of power, text, and materiality. They are
hybrid. The problem with culturalism is that it only acknowledges the first
two, ignoring the third. At any rate, signification/culture is itself a
formation of nature. You might look at my work on “wilderness ontology” to see
more of what I mean by this.
I
hope that my position is nuanced on these issues. It is not a matter of
suggesting that we abandon thinkers such as Derrida. It’s a
matter of tempering their more imperialistic claims so as to make
room for other modes of analysis in addition to the sort of
work they do. Certainly I have benefited immeasurably from the thought of
Derrida, Lacan, Barthes, Baudrillard, Zizek, etc. I have learned things from
these thinkers that pervade everything I do. It’s not a question of abandoning
that work but of reworking it in a realist/materialist framework capable of
analyzing materiality without reflexively treating it as a discursive or
semiotic construction.
Freud was the
first to acknowledge the fact that it is not possible to understand the
complexities of the psyche, without resorting to multiplicity of structure. He
proposed his trinity of the Id, the Ego, and the Super-Ego. When speaking of
Eros, Thanatos or Oedipus, he was also resorting to personifying, which did in
fact contribute to the success of his theory. Everybody began to
"believe" in Oedipus' complex, in Eros and Thanatos , almost unaware
that this is a metaphoric device that gives some vitality to a concept. Yet we
should not take these personified concepts more literally than the Ancient
Greeks took their divinities.
But
Freud, although convinced of the multiplicity of the psyche, and although he
occasionally personified his concepts, never admitted that, he was
speaking metaphorically and not scientifically. By his exclusive valuing
of Science, Freud and today freudians, are heading right back to the same
monotheistic ideal that Freud himself had criticised as oppressive. First, he
wrote a remarkable analysis of the alienation that comes from rigid religious
beliefs, but then he professed an absolute faith in Science. In the name of
scientific truth, he transformed his theories into dogmas. Moreover, by
his refusal to acknowledge his own subjectivity in the formation of his
theories, he was at fault with the scientific method itself. Freud's attitude,
called "scientific monotheism” by some critics, also made him act as if he
was really the Pope of the psychoanalytic dogma. Consequently, he felt entitled
to refuse Adler, Jung and many others, the right to oppose, contradict him in
any significant fashion, if they were to stay in the club of wich he was the
only, omnipotent God…
It
seems that Freud was himself victim to the male judaic obsession with god the
father, the very obsession he had denounced. Even his idea of love, which was
after all the only domain left to women, was personified by a male divinity.
Why did Freud choose Eros, instead of its mother Aphrodite, the great Goddess
of libido? Had he chosen to personify love by Aphrodite, instead of Eros, he
would certainly not have written that libido is male. Ginette Paris
It
is helpful to look at Marx’s
notion of scientific methodology. Marx, in this sense an heir to Plato, regards
as a minimum necessary condition of any science, that it uncovers the reality
behind the veil of appearance that conceals it. He claims that without this
basic criterion science would be stripped of its legitimacy, because it would
be useless to want to get to know something which is already obvious and known
pre-scientifically. If scientists did not lift any veils to show what is
concealed behind them, they would do something absolutely different than what
science requires. They might engage in what Marx calls with reference to some
forms of economics: vulgar science. If we follow Marx in taking astrology as a
typical representative of such a "science" this idea becomes more
feasible. 2:59 AM
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