Invitation
Balvant Parekh Centre cordially invites you to a Lecture by
Professor R. Radhakrishnan titled “The Many and the One: Phenomenology and
Politics” on Saturday, 8 February 2014 at 4 pm at the Centre. This Lecture is part of Balvant Parekh Distinguished
Lecture Series instituted by the Centre.
Summary
of the Lecture
Aakasaath
patitham thoyam
Yatha gacchathi saagaram
Sarva deva namaskaraha
Keshavam prathigacchathi.
Yatha gacchathi saagaram
Sarva deva namaskaraha
Keshavam prathigacchathi.
So goes a Sanskrit shloka in the utopian hope that the
clamor of the many can be reconciled with the serenity of the preexisting One.
Is this aspiration theological or secular; Hindu or generically religious:
denominational or denominational; philosophical or political? My
objective in this lecture is to revisit the One-Many problematic on a double
register: phenomenology and politics. If phenomenology is solicitous of
existential differences and heterogeneity, the language of politics insists on
the production of the imprimatur of the One. The polemical question is which
One? Under what conditions is the mantra "Unity in Diversity" a
genuine article of faith and knowledge, and when does it degenerate into an
inane or virulent shibboleth? Routing my argument through the multiplicity
of languages (Derrida, Benjamin) and the precarious fate of secularism in India and elsewhere
(Tagore, Gandhi, Bharucha, Said, Connolly, Nandy, Chatterjee), I will endeavor
to rework the critical tension between Home and World, between phenomenology
and politics. My hope is to animate the "between" as a category of
ethico-political persuasion.
R.
Radhakrishnan
R. Radhakrishnan is Chancellor's Professor of
English and Comparative Literature at the University
of California , Irvine ,
and is considered one of the leading postcolonial theorists and literary
critics in the United States .
Radhakrishnan is also noted as a translator and poet of Tamil as well as a
master of English and English literary criticism. His works include History, the Human, and
the World Between, Theory
in an Uneven World, Diasporic Mediations: Between Home and Location, Between Identity
and Location: The Cultural Politics of Theory, Edward Said: A Dictionary. He
is also the editor/coeditor of Theory as
Variation, Transnational South
Asians: The Making of a Neo Diaspora (with Susan Koshy), Theory After Derrida (with Kailash
Baral), and guest editor of a special issue of Modern Fiction Studies. Author of a volume of poems in
Tamizh, Negizschhi Oru Nigazcchi Alla,
he is also the translator of contemporary Tamizh fiction into English.
Winner of a number of fellowships including the Fulbright, he has
published extensively in academic journals and collections of essays. His next
forthcoming volume is a collection of essays, When is the Political?
address : Balvant Parekh Centre for
General Semantics and Other Human Sciences
C-302
Siddhi Vinayak Complex, Behind Baroda
Railway Station (Alkapuri Side)
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