Toyin,
In the circles of academe I am familiar with, and especially in the dominant institutions that include not only universities, but publishing houses, journals, associations like the mla, your statement would not be accepted. Dominant enlightenment rationalism, the unified subject, were attacked from freud to Nietzsche, and gradually were supplanted in all the humanities fields by poststructuralism about 60 years ago. Since then deconstruction directly attacked that tradition, especially with derrida's notion of phallogocentrism, and simultaneously with lacanian analysis. High theory is no longer dominant, but what has replaced it? Cultural studies, ideals of diversity, material and historical studies, etc. nothing suggests a return to rationalism.
If you want to argue that all these developments are incidental to the sciences, I suggest you consider quantum theory.
Entanglement. Etc
If you want to argue that STEM is now dominant, I would agree. But the direct line from the sciences of the enlightenment ended with schroedinger. And even the historians now have had to accommodate notions of discourse theory since haydyn white and his tropes came along
ken
Kenneth Harrow
Dept of English and Film Studies
http://www.english.msu.edu/people/faculty/kenneth-harrow/
From: usaafricadialogue <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com> on behalf of Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju <toyin.adepoju@gmail.com>
Reply-To: usaafricadialogue <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com>
Date: Friday 23 February 2018 at 00:33
To: usaafricadialogue <USAAfricaDialogue@googlegroups.com>
Subject: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Pluriversalistic Dialogues between Asia and Europe:Intellectual Traditions of India in Dialogue with Mikhail Bakhtin
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: 'Sunthar Visuvalingam' suntharv@yahoo.com [dia-gnosis] <dia-gnosis@yahoogroups.com>
Date: 22 February 2018 at 20:03
Subject: [dia-gnosis] Lakshmi Bandlamudi, "Introduction: Intellectual Traditions of India in Dialogue with Mikhail Bakhtin" (Springer India, Feb 2018) - our dedications
[p.15>] Long before the arrival of Bakhtin's ideas in India, philosophies from India, particularly the discourses in philology, reached the Bakhtin Circle. One of the most prominent members of the Bakhtin Circle, Michael Tubianskii, was an Indo-Tibetan scholar who brought Hindu/Buddhist perspectives into the Circle. Craig Brandist, an intellectual historian who heads the Bakhtin Center at the University of Sheffield, traces the circuitous pathways (in Chap. 2) through which Indian philosophies reached the European soil and the complicated relationship that European intelligentsia and, in particular, the Soviet scholars, developed with the esoteric texts from India.
Carnival in all its dimensions—colorful festivities, boisterous laughter and mockery of authority—has been an integral part of cultural life in India. There is a deep regard for the wisdom of folly embodied in the vidūṣaka—the ritual clown or the wise fool in performance traditions, whose acts are blatantly anti-philosophical and anti-establishment, but whose intent is to restore the philosophical injunctions of the parent-religion. Sunthar Visuvalingam's chapter (Chap. 3) is an exposition of 'transgressive sacrality' as depicted in the Bhairava tradition. The chapter introduces the reader to Abhinavagupta's works on the aesthetics of laughter and the Tantric tradition and draws crucial distinctions from Bakhtin's discussion of the carnival. Sunthar points out that while Bakhtin saw carnival as having the liberating potential in response to the rigid Stalin era, the carnival in India is seen as part of an ever-present dialectic between order and chaos and interdiction and violation. Since the carnivalesque has been so intricately woven into the Hindu mainstream through the semiotics of transgression, Sunthar argues that the resources of tradition could be brought into the global arsenal to disrupt various forms of existing and emerging tyrannies.
As a French Indologist and philosophical anthropologist, Elizabeth Chalier-Visuvalingam (Chap. 4) engages in a deep comparative analysis between the original works of Rabelais (which she reads in French, meaning that little is lost in translation) and Bakhtin's reading of Rabelais and Abhinavagupta on transgressive laughter, which has at its core the principle of 'freedom' (svātantrya). The chapter takes the reader into the Rabelaisian world in medieval France with its bold defiance against all forms of authority. According to the author, Bakhtin's reading [<15-16>] of Rabelais is limited because it is meant to resist the Stalinist oppression; whereas, the liberating world of Kashmir Saivism sanctions freedom from compulsions that come from within and the social taboos that are imposed from outside. The author argues that the school of Kashmir Saivism is built on two seemingly contradictory movements of saṅkoca—the philosophy of ascent, contraction and abstraction— and vikāsa—the philosophy of descent, expansion, and the concrete, and that the interplay between these two exercises lead to freedom and self-realization. Elizabeth argues that the comprehensive philosophy of Abhinavagupta, unlike Rabelais and Bakhtin (whose views in comparison are somewhat limited), offers a holistic and cogent philosophy of laughter that has the liberating potential at the psychological, sociological, political, and spiritual levels. [<p.16]
Lakshmi Bandlamudi, "Introduction: Intellectual Traditions of India in Dialogue with Mikhail Bakhtin" (Springer India, Feb 2018)
[p.37, note 1>] The "transgressive sacrality" (TS) paradigm was originally, and more fully, elaborated in my seminal 1985 conference paper (Visuvalingam 2014), in relation to laughter, the clown, Abhinavagupta's esotericism, the question of ethics, and interreligious dialogue, before posing the liberating prospect of a "global spring" modeled on carnival. The semiotics of transgression, its Vedic roots, and the centrality of the consecrated (dīkṣita) brahmanical sacrificer and his tantric prolongations to the Hindu symbolic universe, were expanded in 1989 (Visuvalingam, Dīkṣita). Having vowed never to return unless formally invited to India—that I had left by April 1989 after living city-bound in Benares for 17 years—it was a pleasant surprise to receive an email in mid-August 2011 from an unknown Indian professor of psychology‚ Lakshmi Bandlamudi based in New York‚ asking me to deliver the keynote address to the "Bakhtin in India" conference (Gandhinagar, 19–21 Aug. 2013)‚ though I had not yet read this Russian theorist. Whereas my 1985 TS typescript had been widely plagiarized, esp. by American Indologists among whom it had been freely distributed‚ Lakshmi had gone through much trouble to acquire the paper and rethink Bakhtin in its light. Only subsequent to that keynote address am I being invited with all expenses paid to Abhinavagupta conferences in India. Unfathomable though the will of God, I remain grateful to his willing if unwitting instrument. [<37]
[p.46, note 9>] […] I first discovered 'transgressive sacrality' around 1980 through exposure to—then continuing collaboration in—my French wife Elizabeth's research on the brahmanicide Bhairava, Abhinavagupta's supreme divinity. Marriott's much earlier fieldwork on Holi that I discovered only at our first meeting in Chicago on my birthday in June 2009 confirmed my insights into the (Indian) carnival, for the secular American anthropologist had arrived at the same TS dialectic without coining the term. This essay is therefore appropriately dedicated to these two precious souls. [<46]
Sunthar Visuvalingam, "Carnival and Transgression in India: Towards a Global Spring?"
This essay is dedicated to Lakshmi Bandlamudi, whose invitation to present a plenary paper to our "Bakhtin in India" conference (Gandhinagar, 19–21 August 2013) has renewed my personal ties with India after a very long absence.
Elizabeth Chalier-Visuvalingam, "The Rule of Freedom: Rabelais, Bakhtin, Abhinavagupta"
Friends,
The final print version of our two chapters are now available at the original links:
http://www.svabhinava.org/abhinava/BakhtinInIndia/Bakhtin&Rabelais_ElizabethVisuvalingam-frame.php
http://www.svabhinava.org/abhinava/BakhtinInIndia/Carnival&TransgressionIndia-frame.php
Enjoy!
Sunthar
PS. I've just prepared a modular course on laughter-and-humor that offers a series of experiential workshops to explore the phenomenon and its implications from within….
[Rest of this thread at Sunthar's post (18 Feb 2018) at
From: Sunthar V.
Sent: Sunday, February 18, 2018 7:17 AM
To: Abhinavagupta@yahoogroups.com; 'WTC-911 ' <WTC-911@yahoogroups.com>; 'MeccaBenares (egroup)' <MeccaBenares@yahoogroups.com>
Cc: 'Dia-Gnosis' <dia-gnosis@yahoogroups.com>; 'Chicagoland Desis' <ChicagolandDesis@yahoogroups.com>; 'JerusalemBenares ' <JerusalemBenares@yahoogroups.com>
Subject: [Abhinavagupta] "Modi a match for Trump as he picks his own foreign policy course" (MK Bhadrakumar) - Indo-Iranian friendship, a question of (spiritual) sovereignty (svātantrya)
[p.51>] Swami Vivekananda, who stands at the fountainhead of Indian nationalism, interreligious dialogue and Hindu revivalism, burst upon the world's attention on Sep. 11, 1893 here in Chicago. He endorsed the prophetic vision of the Founding Fathers, but grounded its contingent and evolving political arrangements on the (nondual) spiritual realization of the identity of (supreme) Self and Other. That is why he deliberately chose—upon washing, Christlike, the feet of his immediate disciples—to shed his mortal coils on the Fourth of July that he had humbly celebrated with a makeshift Star-Spangled Banner in his Indian monastery, by composing an ode invoking Independence Day for all humanity. His definition of 'Hinduism' as a benevolent "tyranny of the sages" is just as applicable to the (outer forms of the) other religious traditions, which are all based on the unique realizations and revelations of the few precocious souls, who laid down the stringent law for us lesser mortals in conformity with the requirements of time, place, and other limiting factors.. The Swami was dazzled by the progress of science, the innovative spirit of enterprise, and the emancipation of women, during that narrow time-bound window of opportunity when restless Americans had begun stirring to what more might lie beyond their newfound prosperity and what the rest of the world had on offer. But the nondualism (advaita) he preached in return for their childlike inquisitiveness and unstinting generosity was not so much an exotic spiritual icing on the American Pie but the missing foundation that he felt hoary Indian wisdom could provide. [<p.51]
>
Sunthar V., "Carnival and Transgression in India Towards a Global Spring?" (Bakhtin in India, Springer India, 2018)
>
MK Bhadrakumar, "Modi a match for Trump as he picks his own foreign policy course" (Asia Times, 13 Feb 2018)
Friends,
I'm happy to announce that our collective volume on Bakhtin in India has just been published with the e-book already available and the print version following on its heels:
http://www.springer.com/us/book/9789811063121
Bakhtinian Explorations of Indian Culture: Pluralism, Dogma and Dialogue Through History
The Russian Mikhail Bakhtin could help translate Abhinavagupta's insistence on spiritual autonomy (svātantrya) into the pragmatic exercise of national sovereignty for statesmen like PM Narendra Modi.
Enjoy!
Sunthar
[Rest of this thread at Sunthar's post (28 Jan 2018) at
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